Writing is not an even process...

Well, that declaration is nothing new. I have struggled with a regular writing schedule for a month now. That's nothing new either. It has to do with writers needing to do something else to make a living... which is just sad. I mean, there are the lucky few, but most of us struggle along trying to do creative writing at the edges of all the things we need to do to pay our bills, right?

There are many unkind realities of the U.S. culture, and this is one of them.

Okay, but the other thing is getting to this point in the book-writing where I had to clarify for myself once again what this really is. I think I let too much come in from outside to steer me off course at times.

Part of this is my own difficulty in naming the genre (why does this culture so insist on putting things in easy-to-relate-to boxes?). I keep calling it my more-than-memoir, but the use of that genre word has tended to have others put the book in a genre-box, or for my critique group to sometimes expect something from it that was not my real intention.

Memoir-writing as cultural challenge

by Margaret Swedish

Getting back to work later today on the more-than-memoir I'm writing, chapter six, a bit of a crescendo in the narrative of the book, unlocking the secrets and shame that impacted my parents' generation, and therefore we baby-boomers, in ways that did not serve us well. It's a 'way of being' passed down from ancestors, those who left so much misery, want, and suffering behind to come to America to become something other than who they were back in the old country. And many of them suffered a whole lot when they came here - degrading work and poverty, hallmarks of early immigrant life.

Croatian ancestors

They brought with them strong identity-based cultures that became the roots of strong identity-based neighborhoods, politics, nationalism, religion, and more. But they also buried a whole lot of the suffering, shame, humiliations, exploitation, and fear that shaped them and the lives they created here. That repression left marks on their behaviors and values, on the choices they made, and, whether we descendents like it or not, that impacted who we turned out to be, the choices we, too, have made.