It was about this time last year when
Janice and I were at the Cafe Luna in Longmont. I want to like this
little coffeehouse because it reminds me of all the little
coffeehouses in both Northwest Portland and in New Orleans in the old
days when I lived in both of those towns. It's funny though, I don't
like the place. Too loud. The clientele are Jerry Garcia
impersonators. It's not dirty enough to seem cool and it isn't clean
enough by today's standards. It does have a few big south facing
windows and a small room of books. It was one of those mornings,
late November, Janice and I started to talk about blogs and how a
blog can be good for a writer.
Not to belabor my feelings for the blog
and the writer, let me just say that we started a blog in that
moment. In that moment, we were two aging Gen Xers in a sea of
fearful Baby Boomer banter. While all the other patrons were talking
about foreign invaders and terrorists, Janice and I posted a blog
entry complete with The Dead Milkmen.
In the days that came, we thought about
what we might like to do with the blog. I had missed my days with The
Sophia Ballou Project for many reasons, but the biggest was the
deadlines and what I was able to accomplish. So, I decided to write a
lengthy piece, something like a novel.
I knew a new novel would not be a good
endeavor last November. I knew this because I know where my life had
taken me. I'm most distracted these days. And by night, when it's
quiet, I'm cashed. So, after thinking it over for a few days, I
decided I would write a sort of memoir from my days working for the
Boy Scouts.
Now, I could have picked any number of
ways to do this. I may have taken the summer camp approach, which was
the bulk of what I did while working for the Boy Scouts. I may have
picked something more dark, like how the organization functions. I
may have taken the route of the big three Gs: God, girls and gays. I
worked for the scouts from the fall of 1994 until September 2000.
I chose, simply, to write the story in
a chronological order beginning with my first day of Camp School in
May of 1995 and ending on my last day on August 15, 2000. I chose to
dig deeper into the personality and the emotions of my narrator (me)
rather than focusing of the organization or the issues of the day.
The truth is, I began to write this piece 20 years after I was first
employed with the Scouts. Twenty years is a long time. There was no
sense in taking anything but a realistic and honest approach to it. I
went more gentle on the organization itself rather than me and my
position within it.
These are the hangups I've always had
with memoir: 1)too self absorbed, 2)no universal appeal...no readers,
why write it? and 3)memoir is never interesting when it has too wide
of a focus and no real direction. This is how I got around it: a
definite beginning, middle and end. Plenty of conflict: I brought up
religion, homosexuality, PTSD from an earlier military experience. I
included love, heartbreak, and things that a Boy Scout should not do
like strippers, booze, LSD and red light districts.
What I learned from the project was
this: working sporadically because my time (writing time, emotional
time) was challenging. Writing this memoir, I had no problems staying
within the confines of the story and texture of the characters.
The most important thing was that this
was the first major project I've started and completed like this
since 2012 and the last novel I had written before my son was born.
No matter what, it took six months, and it was a gratifying project
to write. See it here:
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