Memoir: Under Attack

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Katherine

On New Year’s Eve Susan Shapiro, an author and college journalism teacher, wrote a piece for the New York Times’ Opinionator explaining that, over 20 years of teaching, her signature assignment has become the humiliation essay. It is her way of giving her students what they want, setting them on the path to publish essays and sell memoirs.

The piece sparked a host of debate, reigniting the well-worn argument that the personal essay is killing journalism. Punches were thrown across the web, insults typed and sides taken.

As someone who has a memoir coming out in 4 months, I read Hamilton Nolan’s Gawker response to Shapiro’s piece in a state of near numbness. My eyes stuck on the line that most people’s lives are not interesting enough for a memoir or personal essay and I gulped down his assertion that those writers who start by writing about themselves “end up like bands that used their entire lifetime’s worth of good material in their first album, and then sputtered uselessly when it came time for the follow-up.”

Used-up, finished, uninteresting – hardly a hopeful start to a writing career that has yet to hit the shelves.

And yet, it’s noise I’ve already heard, lines that have already played on repeat in my own head for years. Self-doubt is nothing new. I was never trained as a writer, barely trained as a journalist, and I never set out to write a memoir. I set out to listen to hundreds of stutterers and researchers and write something worthwhile. These people had stories, fascinating lives that made me sit forward in my seat and stay up all night transcribing their words. As I wrote their words down on paper I barely wove myself between the lines. But, in the end, I felt like I was hiding. I felt like I was asking everyone else to bare their souls while I sat safely nodding on the other side of the tape recorder.

So I kept their voices in the book but made my life the structure, made my life the line that all our stories hung from. But I was never aiming to humiliate myself, I wasn’t trying to make anyone feel sorry for me, for any of us. Rather, I was trying to unearth something that had remained taboo for far too long.

I was attempting to write in the memoir tradition of the writer’s I adored. Writers like Strayed, Karr, Walls and Flynn. Far from the inward-looking narcissists that Nolan dismisses so eagerly, these are people who write about themselves with humanity and who look outward to encompass the world we all live in. As Stephen Elliot puts it, they are the type of writers who “inhale their surroundings.”

So perhaps we shouldn’t be shaming those people who write about themselves but rather all of us should hold ourselves to the highest standards in both our writing and our lives. If we can be thoughtful in all of that then, perhaps, we can rise to meet our collective potential.

Fiercely holding on to joy

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Katherine

Saturday was a strange day. The morning and the evening were wonderful, giggling and telling stories with friends in the city, but the afternoon was quiet and teary. Neither Jeremy or I could get off the sofa. We held hands but didn’t talk much. We both felt useless, drowning quietly in horrific, imagined images.

Newtown has been covered from every perspective, gun regulation and mental disorders have been explored from every angle by every wing of the press. I won’t re-hash their arguments here. Suffice to say the situation has to change, it is not enough to simply grieve, the steady stream of gun violence has to stop. But, in the meantime, it is worth hugging the people we love a little more fiercely, remembering what others have lost and focusing on the joy in our lives.

There’s something about the holidays that, despite the stress of gift-shopping and food prepping and travelling, is inherently joyful: friends hauling a hulking fir tree down the street; Christmas carolers drowning out the crazies on the subway; mince pies baking in the oven; frosty fingers thawing on mugs of hot mulled wine; families telling stories over the crackle of a fire.

This year, despite all the sadness, I have so much to be thankful for: an amazing family, friends I love and a city that really feels like home. This Christmas we are celebrating even more than normal because…

Jeremy proposed!

He asked me while we were away on holiday up in Vermont. After a day spent walking through the evergreens and eating one of the most amazing meals of our life (at this restaurant) Jeremy got down on one knee and asked if I would marry him. I hadn’t realized how over-whelmed I would feel but I managed to get out a yes before he had even slipped the ring on to my finger (between quite a few tears).

So, on Saturday, I held the hand of the man I love and leaned towards all the joy around us and away from all the fear and blame.

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season!

Should we all be striving to live without irony?

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Katherine

Christy Wampole recently wrote an op-ed for the NY Times titled “How To Live Without Irony”.

The piece explores the idea of the hipster, her belief that Generation Y has an aversion to risk and her assertion that, ““to live ironically is to hide in public”.

True enough. We can all hide behind irony, we can choose to make fun of things rather than treat them with sincerity, we can choose to shield ourselves a little behind laughter. I agree that “irony is the most self-defensive mode”, that, when taken to an extreme, “it bespeaks cultural numbness, resignation and defeat.”

The piece was so thought-provoking that I posted it on Twitter. Minutes later I got the reply, “When you have health stuff going on, living ironically seems frivolous and a bit pathetic.”

I tried to write back but I couldn’t find quite the right words. As much as I loved the sentiment, a part of me disagreed. Irony and sarcasm can be the basis for humour and, perhaps because I’m English, I find something deeply appealing about self-deprecation. When my Godmother was dying from lung cancer and hooked up to a million tubes in her hospital bed, she was still the one with the best one-liners, the sharpest wit and the most stomach-aching jokes. She was, almost always, making fun of herself. I’ve never met anyone more loved.

I don’t agree that we have to take ourselves seriously every moment of every day. I think that there can be room for both sincerity and sarcasm. I don’t criticize myself, or anyone else, for using irony to make sense of the world.

And yet, I do think that it can be easier to treat everything ironically. I think it takes courage to be honest, to be unabashedly passionate and fully seen.

What’s your take on irony?

New York After Sandy

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Katherine

Post-apocalyptic, confused, hopeful, supportive, broken – the reactions to New York in the wake of hurricane Sandy have spanned every adjective imaginable.

It depends where you are.

The city is split between those lucky areas that escaped largely unscathed and those areas that are still in darkness, still reeling and clawing back towards normality.

Our realities could not be more different. We were incredibly lucky to be located in a part of the city that was left almost entirely untouched, save a few downed trees. We kept hot water and electricity and only lost internet and heat for a while.

We’ve had lots of Manhattan friends come to stay for hot showers, a comfy bed, WiFi and lots of home-cooked meals. They’ve come with tales of local neighbors coming together and helping each other out, of restaurants serving customers by candle-light, of grocery stores giving free food to locals, of gyms opening their doors to offer showers. There have been less rosy stories as well – stories of piles of drowned rats, of 4 inches of flooded sewerage in bedrooms, of rotten food, of dark stairwells, of restaurants asking people to pay to charge their cell phones in order to call family and friends.

It seems as if the storm has brought out the best, and the worst in everyone. In the dark zone, there’s a craziness and a loneliness. Even here, where life carries on much the same, the disorientated city seeps over the water.

The importance spontaneity

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Katherine

I’m obsessed with the word ‘spontaneous’.

In a recent article I wrote, the word made its way into at least three sentences. I was spontaneous in my speaking, in my traveling, even in my relationship. I was saying it so often that it was starting to lose its meaning. It was starting to sound foreign and meaningless, like a word you say over, and over, and over again.

What did the word really mean to me? Why did I feel the need to inject it so forcefully into my writing?

In the words of Germaine Greer, “The essence of pleasure is spontaneity”.

Greer’s words sum up how I always saw spontaneity. The ability to be natural and passionate, the joy of living life impulsively, without too many constraints. The adventure of ending up somewhere unexpected and discovering something new.

Spontaneity was something I always aspired to, something I always made a place for in my life. I impulsively left my job to write a book, set off on a quest with barely a plan, said yes to anything and everything that sounding intriguing.

But I aspired to other things too, more concrete things, like a house and a family and enough money not to worry too much. We started a business, I wrote a book and I knew the importance, and the comfort, of having a routine.

Gradually, the rituals and routines that we had created started to seem like they were taking over. Every moment in our day was accounted for, every evening planned and every weekend full. We were busy and productive and trapped.

I realized the spontaneity was not just a frivolous thing that made me feel free and unencumbered. It was necessary. It was in the moments that I didn’t have anything planned that my mind could wander and make connections. It also allowed me to see things and experience things that were unexpected, things that challenged me and changed my perceptions.

Without spontaneity I was safe, with it I was living.

Escaping the Silence: Stories from Out With It

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Katherine

It was 6 months into my year-long trip when I knew that I had been wrong, about a lot of things.

I was bumping along a dark New Mexican ridge with little idea where I was going, trying to remember my host’s quickly delivered instructions. The night had engulfed our Subaru station wagon and, with no reception on my phone, the blinking ‘check engine’ light looked more menacing than it had before.

I was on my way back to the ranch we were staying in for the night, leaving my 70th interview. I was reluctantly driving away from a man who had warily invited me into his home to ask him questions about his life, about what it meant to him to be a stutterer. Our interview had started awkwardly, both of us sitting politely on either side of his sofa with my recorder lying conspicuously between us.

He was different from any of the other 69 interviews stored on my recorder. He was the first man I had met who had never seen another stutterer before, the first person who had barely spoken about his stutter to anyone. He and I edged around the loaded word for a while. He mentioned ‘that thing I do when I talk’ and I nodded. He smiled when he ‘did it again’, I asked him to carry on.

As the hours slipped by and the sun sank into the earth, he told me how he had questioned his faith, spending many years thinking he must be possessed by the devil. He remembered reading that people had cut the ligament underneath their tongue to ‘cure’ their stutter and he held the scissors there more times than he was proud to admit. In his thick Mexican accent, he told me how he had become a teacher despite all the people who had told him that he couldn’t, or shouldn’t. He told me how honored and scared he was that his church had asked him to travel with them as an interpreter when they went to work with prison inmates in Colombia.

Gradually he started to lean towards me, he began to sound proud of all he had achieved, and he asked if his wife could join us. He started to laugh and smile and, as I sat back on the sofa, he told her things that he had never dared mention before. His daughter bounded in and he explained who I was, explained that he was talking to me about his stutter. It was the first time he had mentioned the word to her, the first time he had ‘come out’ as a stutterer. She told him that was cool and started showing me her toys, unfazed by the relief that was painted across his face.

When he walked me out to my car, his rough, weather-beaten features were backlit by the light streaming out of their kitchen door and I could barely see his face. But I heard the crack in his voice as he reached out his hand to hold mine and say thank you. I said it back and hoped he could see how grateful I was.

As I flicked on my headlights and started to drive away, I realized that I was thanking him, thanking all of the people who had allowed themselves to be interviewed, for something much more personal than I had realized. I was thanking them for finding the courage to tell me their stories, but also for holding up a mirror and showing me far more of myself than I had ever expected.

Six months ago I had left my home in England to explore stuttering. I had wanted to find out who it happened to, the ways they handled their speech and why we all stuttered. I thought that once I knew the ‘why’, I was one step closer to a fix. Although I left England keen to immerse myself in stuttering, I was looking for answers. I was looking to make my stuttering neat and tidy. I wanted to sanitize it and put it in a box so I could push it away and move on with the rest of my life.

Sitting in my car I knew that I had been wrong. As I planned the next day of driving in my head, I was excited by the thought of each interview yet to come and I was humbled by the generosity of each interview behind me. I saw that stuttering had become a password and an equalizer. It had invited me into the homes of everyone from farmers to celebrities, and it had led an intensity and an honesty to each of my conversations. It had brought me more adventure, and had made me more fearless than I had ever imagined.

I heard stories of courage, determination, heartache and painfully funny stories of miscommunication, and I realized that I was not interested in distancing myself from these people, or this condition, any more. I didn’t want my life to be polished and sanitized. I didn’t want to hide my speech. I realized that I was proud of the imperfections I had, proud of the tribe I had been born into.

I wrote this piece for the International Stuttering Awareness Day conference. Check out their website for a host of brilliant articles and stories.

Searching for Flow

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Katherine

Sometimes writing feels like a jigsaw. I’m working on a piece today and I feel as if I dropped some central piece of the puzzle down the back of my brain. I can’t get past the gaping hole that’s been left.

I’m waiting for that moment, that perfect moment, when I find the missing piece and I get into a rhythm. There’s nothing like it, nothing like the feeling of fluid writing. When words seem to come, when the structure of the piece starts to lay itself out over the page like some scribbled architect’s drawing. When I write, I find myself searching for that elegant immersion, those hours when all anxiety is replaced by joy and clarity for the task ahead. I don’t always find it, but I’m addicted to that feeling of ‘flow’.

I was introduced to the concept of flow by an amazing friend of ours who’s pursuing her doctorate in positive psychology. She explains it beautifully so I should start by apologizing to her for potentially botching and over-simplifying all that she told us.

From what I can gather, the study of flow first came about in the 1960s when Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his fellow researchers began investigating artists who would get lost in their work. He studied artists, especially painters, who got so immersed in their work that they would disregard their need for food, water and even sleep.

I would be a poor candidate for Mihaly. I am rarely so distracted. My belly whines if a few hours go past without food and I always have a cup of tea sitting on my desk. But I do know that feeling of excitement that comes with writing, the belief that, if I stop, I may not find that fragile fluidity again.

The problem is, you cannot force flow. And often it is nowhere to be found. Still, writing is a job, it is a discipline, so we cannot wait around in the hope that we will discover flow with every paragraph we compose. Sometimes, we just have to sit in front of our laptops and write. As Elizabeth Gilbert puts it in her TED talk, “sometimes you just need to show up.”

Often that writing will not be pretty and the hours may feel long and arduous. But we must carry on, we must try to put the pieces of the jigsaw together and hope that, eventually, the words will flow.

Why do you do what you do? The ExchangeMyPhone story

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Katherine

As many of you know, I’m the Creative Director of a business called ExchangeMyPhone. Jeremy is the CEO. The business buys old phones from people throughout America and gives them a second life. We founded ExchangeMyPhone together back in May 2011. Today we have a team of fantastic people working with us and we have big dreams for where we want to take the business moving forward. But how did it all begin? Why did we decide to start a phone buyback business?

It is not easy to pinpoint the genesis for anything. Jeremy had always been interested in reuse (he grew up in the bookshelves of his father’s used book business) and he’s been entrepreneurial for as long as he has been walking.

When I first met Jeremy, he told me how he saw tech reuse as the way forward. Everyone we knew had a drawer full of our cell phones that they didn’t know what to do with. He saw a solution and was excited to take all that he had learnt from the family business and put it to good use in a new field. I was pulled magnetically into his orbit.

In many ways, that was the catalyst that started ExchangeMyPhone, but there was something far more personal that kept us growing the business and kept us moving forward when times were tough.

On either side of the Atlantic, we had grown up hating the phone. On the phone our stutters were up against some pretty powerful odds. On the phone all our communication rested on our voices, and sometimes that wasn’t easy. We faced hang ups and were accused of being prank callers as we blocked on our names and sent hot, desperate breaths down the line.

When we met, we were changing the way we saw our stutters and we wanted to change the way we saw the dreaded phone. ExchangeMyPhone became a way for us to celebrate phones and turn them into vehicles for good.

Not only could customers keep their old phones out of the landfill, but they could be paid for something they no longer wanted or needed. We could turn trash into treasure and find a new home for each old cell phone.

But we wanted those old phones to do more, to really make a positive difference, so we launched our ‘checkout for charity’ option. Anyone who sold their phone through ExchangeMyPhone could choose to keep the money or donate their payout to any of the 765,000 registered non-profits in America.

Today, the phones that we once hated are being transformed into donations for charities across the country, they are arriving in new homes and making new faces smile, they are giving people a little money in their pocket to be spent on something wonderful and they are being kept out of the landfill.

Location, Location, Location: Why we moved to New York

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Katherine

Frank Bures recently wrote a fantastic article in Thirty Two magazine on the fall of the Creative Class. The article is a well-written exploration of the holes in Richard Florida’s argument that young, innovative people move to places that are open and hip and tolerant, and that they, in turn, generate economic innovation. It opens with Frank’s decision to move to Madison, Wisconsin, because it was liberal and open-minded, a college town with bike paths and coffee shops. It ends with Frank’s disillusion with both Madison and Florida, and his decision to move to Minneapolis. As he puts it, “This time, we moved as wiser, more reality-based people. We researched it carefully. We picked the place we wanted to live not because of any trendy trope, or because it was high on any particular list, but because of the cheap housing, jobs, family and friends, as well as the arts, the biking, the public transit and quality of life.”

The whole article made me think about why Jeremy and I chose to live in New York. Why we packed up our car and drove from Chicago to New York with no apartment and no jobs lined up.

I know the reasons that we gave ourselves:

It was nearer my family (and at least a couple hours closer to England)
It was a place where things ‘happened’, the heart of the publishing industry and a breeding-ground for startups.
It was somewhere that we wanted to experience, a city that we expected to be gritty and adventurous and ideal for our late 20s.

We ended up in our flat in Brooklyn because we fell in love with the mismatched original floorboards, the tree-lined streets, the sense of community and the plethora of amazing restaurants. I’m glad we did. Our place feels like home, it feels like somewhere we have put down roots.

And yet I wonder how much longer we will stay.

We both miss the access to the outdoors, we miss peacefulness and we lament our once existent bank balance. We are perpetually exhausted by the city.

I wonder if we will move to the countryside some day, or a different city, or a different country even. I expect that we will and yet, when I think of leaving, I dwell on all that I would lose in leaving New York. More than anything it is the people, the friends we have made and the family we have here, that I would miss. I balk against giving them up.

Ultimately, I do not think that any place, any city, is perfect. Everywhere is flawed in some ways and beautiful in others. As Bures puts it, “It may be wiser to try to create the place you want to live, rather than to keep trying to find it.”

From Lost to Found: Book review

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Katherine

I imagine it is rare that a book brings a New York Times reviewer to tears. In my mind the reviewers from the Grey Lady are word-weary, poker-faced readers with stiff upper lips. And yet, the NYT reviewer Dwight Garner admitted to being ‘obliterated’ by Cheryl Strayed’s most recent book, WILD. In his words, ‘I was reduced, during her book’s final third, to puddle-eyed cretinism’.

In the first couple paragraphs of his review I was hooked.

I quickly found out that Garner was not the only person to be lavishing praise on the book. Strayed was receiving the sort of attention that would make a movie star blush – Oprah had resurrected her book club to tout WILD, Reese Witherspoon had signed it for a movie deal and book signings around the country were turning into mosh pits, with standing room only for her devoted fans.

Having read the book, it is clear why. Strayed is someone we understand, someone we want to be, on our best days. Her book, WILD, tells the story of the months she hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, alone, following the death of her mother and the unraveling of her life at the age of 26. She was inexperienced and under prepared for the adventure, her body throbbing and blistering in revolt against her gargantuan backpack. She was faced with rattlesnakes, bears, swarming frogs, intense heat, record snowfalls and intense loneliness, and yet she moved forward. As she puts it in the book, “the thing that was so profound to me that summer…was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the one thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial.”

Strayed is famous, and loved, for her once-anonymous Dear Sugar columns in the Rumpus. She has written endless pieces helping others by drawing on stories and metaphors from her own life. In WILD, she has pieced some of her stories together, fiercely and honestly she has remembered herself. With beautiful hard-won sentences, WILD teaches us what it means to persist and prevail, what it means to try and heal ourselves.