Writing Memoir: Taber’s “To Write the Past” and Conover’s “Immersion”

BY C.M. MAYO — July 11, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

Second Mondays of every other month I devote to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. Welcome!
> For the archive of workshop posts click here.

Please note: The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately two Mondays a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, that’s for the newsletter.

Two new works for my list of recommended books on the craft of creative writing:

Sara Mansfield Taber’s superb To Write the Past: A Memoir Writer’s Companion (Musings on the Philosophical, Personal, and Artistic Questions Faced by the Autobiographical Writer) is an especially welcome addition to this list. Not only is Taber a seasoned writing teacher, but her memoirs, which I have long admired, have achieved wide acclaim, among them: Born Under an Assumed Name; Bread of Three Rivers, and Dusk on the Campo. Her latest is Black Water and Tulips— and apropos of that extraordinary memoir of her life with her also extraordinary mother, later this year I hope to get Taber’s As to some of my Qs for this blog.

“I say literary memoir-writing is not navel gazing, or conceit, or prostitution, but an offering of truth in a world gone hazy about it. I say we all have a right to our own stories, our own versions of the truth, and the more versions we have the richer we are.”

— Sara Mansfield Taber, To Write the Past

Ted Conover’s Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep is an invaluable guide for any writer who wants to go undercover (and don’t we all, at least a little bit, sometimes?) Conover is the author of several works of unsettlingly original anthropological literary reporting / memoirs of immersion, among them, Coyotes, Whiteout, and Newjack.

“A writer came up to me recently after I gave a talk and asked, ‘When you do these immersions, can you be yourself?’

“Yes, I said. Yes, because who can you be besides yourself?”

— Ted Conover, Immersion

“The best immersive researchers are probably those attentive to social cues, people who are reasonably social and reasonably self-aware. My operating philosophy is that many people are frightened of strangers, so the first thing you want to be is nonthreatening. You want to try to fit in. If you are young and have body piercings and tattoos and hope to sit in on a meeting of your great aunt’s chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, consider leaving studs and hoops at home and covering some of your skin.”
— Ted Conover, Immersion

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.