Maggie Neal Doherty

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The Year in Memoir

In Stories that make up a life on May 15, 2013 at 11:51 pm

My first year of my graduate program is nearing its end. Next Tuesday I will turn in the last of my assignments and end this year in memoir.

In addition to working this year with the venerable and talented writer Mary Clearman Blew, I’ve had twenty-three other teachers. Mary is my mentor for the first year of my graduate program and next week, on the 22nd, to be precise, my year-long mentorship will come to a conclusion (although she and I will reunite, in the flesh, at residency in August. I’m hoping we’ll sip a bit of whiskey together). Year one will end. Sigh. A year of writing, reading, discussing, musing and pondering about my story, and about how to tell my story. While I’ve been fortunate to communicate with Mary via email and send her my work and receive her wise and insightful feedback on my creative work, I’ve also learned more than I anticipated from twenty-three different teachers, the twenty-three authors of twenty-four books I’ve read since September to now.

The requirements for the Rainier Writing Workshop with Pacific Lutheran University’s first year are eight mailings that include twenty-four readings with critical response papers and eight submissions of creative, original work. Over the weekend, I finished the last book of my selection, Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood. I am overjoyed that I’ve nearly finished my first year in graduate school, proud of the amount of creative work I’ve generated (although I’m not completely sure about its direction or form, but it’s there, yes, it’s there: over 200 pages) yet a bit awed that the year–the writing and the reading–has gone by so quickly. Yes, residency is nearing and I can’t hardly wait until August to arrive on campus, reconnect with my classmates, attend workshops and classes, and see where year two will take me. But it all happened so quickly.

Luckily, these twenty-three authors will remain with me, their names and stories arranged on my bookshelf, ready and willing to impart their wisdom and awareness into life and writing anytime I crack open the cover and await the lesson. I read all memoirs this year–and I read wide and far. A gamut of writers, subjects and styles–from graphic memoirs to hybrid memoirs to traditional autobiographies. And I admired all of them, and will cherish them. Approaching a text in this manner–examining it as a writer rather than a reader–has broadened my capacities as a writer. Each text has expanded my knowledge of how to write one’s story, how to experiment on the page, how to play and shape language, and how, ultimately, to be true to your own story. What magical, beautiful and powerful lessons.

I’ve long been drawn to books but since September, the books I’ve read for my program have touched me differently. Upon my close examination, they’ve been a marvel, and an entry-point  into the writing world. I see these books differently than if I’d come across them as just an avid reader. They’ve challenged me greatly as a writer; sometimes so much that I couldn’t write a single word because what I’d read was so beautiful and perfect I felt momentarily defeated. Mostly, though, energetically inspired. Doses of courage between sentences. Illuminated and enlightened. And honestly, made to feel a part of the collective, a part of the fabric that is writing, that is story.

Lessons on the page like these:

  • “How far do I have to go before I can say I’ve been there?” The Accidental Explorer by Sherry Simpson.
  • “This good story. This boyish heart-joy. The young man knows that no one will ever write a better story than this one. Because it’s true, and because it is his own.” Works Cited, Brandon Schrand
  • “When you have committed enough words to paper you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing you find that’s all you are, a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.”  Giving Up the Ghost,  Hilary Mantel
  • “What I am looking for, at least so I tell myself, is a set of stories to inhabit, all I can know, a place to care about.” Hole in the Sky, William Kittredge
  • “For many years I wandered through the desert in search of a narrative that was not mine. I did not feel I belonged here. I was borrowing a landscape until I found my own. But when I stopped searching and settled into the erosional peace of the redrock desert, I found myself quietly held by an immensity I could not name.” When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams
  • “We tell stories to talk about the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.
    Hole in the Sky, Kittredge
  • “A pencil can be sharpened repeatedly and then disappear in the process. Like me. In the past, my words have been born out of flames. Today my words emerge from water. A woman’s water breaks, and she goes into labor. Birth is imminent. A writer’s imagination breaks loose and she, too, goes into labor.” When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams

I humbly say thank you to these authors, and their books:

1. The Accidental Explorer, Sherry Simpson

2. Heart Earth, Ivan Doig

3. The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro

4. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and 5.  An American Childhood, Annie Dillard

6. In This Native, Annick Smith

7. The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich

8. Flicka’s Friend, Mary O’Hara

9. In the Wilderness, Kim Barnes

10. Lying, Lauren Slater

11. Wyoming Trucks, True Love and The Weather Channel, Jeffe Kennedy

12. Half in Shade, Judith Kitchen

13. Remembering the Bone House, Nancy Mairs

14. Are You My Mother? Alison Bechdel

15. The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr

16. The Days Are Gods, Liz Stephens

17. Works Cited, Brandon Schrand

18. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller

19. Hole in the Sky, William Kittredge

20. Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel

21. The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris

22. The Mountain and The Fathers, Joe Wilkins

23. When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams

24. Wild, Cheryl Strayed

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The Five Year Question

In Stories that make up a life on May 10, 2013 at 2:49 pm

Cole and I were more than delighted and honored when a journalist and blogger from Great Falls recently interviewed us for her series, “Made in Montana”. Jenn Rowell is a talented writer and a well-seasoned reporter, and her questions about us and the new brewery were well-thought and intriguing for us to answer. One question that stumped me for a bit was “Looking back five years ago, did you imagine you’d be where you are now?” At first , I had to laugh. Did I really know when I was twenty-six that I’d be married to a brewer and be starting a business together? Hardly. I barely had a savings account. Then I thought of who I was when I was twenty-six. And finally, I was a bit shocked that five years ago meant I was twenty-six. Where has the time gone?

Me at twenty-six: I was in my second year as the Program Director of the Glacier Institute’s Big Creek Outdoor Education Center in the North Fork of the Flathead Valley. I lived in an old Forest Service cabin and the whole camp was off the power grid. I wore baggy Patagonia shorts, a sun-bleached visor and carried a clipboard around camp, wrangling kids from one class to another, checking on the boisterous generator, cleaning out the exhaust on the propane refrigerators so they wouldn’t clog, shutting down the fridges and causing a week’s worth of food for the camp to spoil, scheduling staff to teach classes like fire ecology and aquatic ecology, and trying to find time to play in the river between classes, meals, evening programs, bunkhouse stories, and the administrative demands of a small non-profit. I had my lab mutt dog Reilly, a canoe and a kayak and two pairs of Chacos. I drove an old red Subaru and my hair was really long. I sure as hell loved beer, always have, but didn’t have a clue that in five years I’d be where I am today–sans Subaru, shorter hair, but still with clipboard in hand, but this time it contains notes about the brewery and thoughts on writing.

The five-year question caused me to reflect on those years, those jobs and those adventures. Sometimes I lament that I haven’t had one “career” or that I’ve had so many jobs since I first laid eyes on the shores of Flathead Lake in 2004. But as I’ve come to learn, especially in trying to compose my thoughts for the interview, that from my work at the dude ranch on Flathead Lake to tending bar in West Glacier to selling pants on the road, across America with Red Ants Pants, to organizing concerts for the Glacier Symphony and Chorale has given me a lot of experience, skills and talents that has culminated to my post as Beer Ambassador. Yes, I’ll fully admit that I’m not one who can easily settle into one position and work one job for all the days of my life (especially if it means I’m chained to a desk). First, many jobs in the Flathead Valley don’t work like that. My jobs with the Belton Chalet, Hellroaring Saloon and the Forest Service were all seasonal. To live in Big Sky country also means thinking big about the different jobs–sometimes many of them at once–that will help you carve out your livelihood under the shadows of Glacier’s peaks. From all of my jobs, I’ve gleaned so many experiences that have accumulated, much like the flakes of snow upon a building glacier, and although  my resume might be long and rambling (job here, freelance there) but I think it  demonstrates my openness and willingness to take on a new job, learn new skills (like working on a generator or managing social media accounts…which I did, way back in 2008, baby!).

Sometimes I regret, as I’m prone to do–a very bad habit–that I didn’t have more of a career in writing. That I should have looked at working for newspapers or magazines instead of Flathead Lake Lodge when I first came to the mountains. But when I was twenty-two, the only career aspirations I had at the time was how many hiking miles I’d log over the summer. Writing has always been with me, and always will. And my career in writing has evolved over time, from writing curriculum at Hope Ranch to drafting press releases for Red Ants Pants to penning my memoir. I’ve committed to writing with my graduate program and I know the experience will continue to enhance my writing skills but will also present many new opportunities, as these things to do, especially if you keep your heart open.

For Cole, he’s long known that his dream job would be opening a brewery. He admits that he didn’t know, back when he was just twenty-five, the specifics and nuances and challenges of opening a brewery, but that was knowledge he’s learned since (and will continue to). My track into the business of brewery might not be as straight as Cole’s but as I said in the interview, I’m not surprised that this is where I’ve ended up. All these paths have led to this one. It might not have been clear cut or direct and there were certainly many, many times I’d ask myself: what the hell am I doing? What is it that I want to do? But I kept myself open, even taking a chance with Ms. Sarah Calhoun with Red Ants Pants when she offered the road trip of a lifetime, peddling pants from Montana all the way down to L.A.

Where will I be in the next five years? It seems like such a daunting question, especially with the brewery about to open, but when I reach that mark, I can’t wait to see what I’ll reflect upon.

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The Light (And Fury) of Spring

In Stories that make up a life on May 1, 2013 at 10:37 am

6am and there’s light.

9pm and there are still fragments of light, casting the tops of the trees in my backyard aglow.

I no longer rise in darkness, wrapped in the thick blackness of winter. And now, my bedtime creeps later and later into the evening as I seek the light, repositioning myself around my deck and yard to catch those final streams before the cool air or dinner time calls me inside.

In the north country, daylight now works in our favor. While the spring weather has yet to settle herself fully in the Flathead Valley, the daylight hours are increasing and I couldn’t be happier. While I’m not so happy that on this first day of May I awoke to a skiff of snow on the deck and topping the trees, I relish that when I awoke around 6, the day had begun. Out of the darkness we rise and into the light. Warmer temperatures will come (July 1, usually…) and I have to admit, since I do have a penchant for drama, that I like spring’s fury.

The past two days in the Flathead Valley have been a furious cycle–mythical and legendary–of weather. From quarter-sized snowflakes blowing sideways to the gusts of wind tearing down branches to pellets of rain, and then, as if exhausted from the thrash of intense weather, sunlight appears, illuminating the dark clouds like lightening. The world looks  golden. The contrast between dark and light is so ever-present that it didn’t take me long to wonder why legends of gods were first told on awe-inspired tongues. Then, the snow would come again and bring with it the blasts of wind. Rinse, repeat. Over and over again.

For me, as I’m apt to seek out metaphors, this battle between winter and spring is much like the interior battle I tested and toyed with. Months ago, when we slid into the darkness of November, I had to cling to the hope of a snowflake. So what if I’m in bed by 7:30pm by Thanksgiving? The darkness has lulled me into hibernation, contemplation, rumination. Snow came and I was joyful. Playful again (not clinging to my covers or lost in the pages of a book for days on end).

Then I had a ski accident and spent the month of March on my back, looking at my ceiling and hoping for spring. Hoping for the ease of pain. Hoping for health and strength. I knew spring would come, just as I knew my body would heal. But it didn’t make me any less angry, sad or frustrated.

So as I’ve watched the weather surge and quarrel, it reflects my own release from winter to spring. I was so mad about my ski wreck, about my performance at the National Championships that I had enough hot air to create a windstorm. I would have blown down more than branches. I was so frozen in pain that snowflakes didn’t bother me. Give me ice.

And yet, I found meaning in lying still. In basking in the warmth of sunshine–the rays of the self that emerge in healing, if you allow them to send ribbons of light into your heart. If you allow yourself to surrender to the injury, to ask for help, and to give yourself the time to heal.

So the drama of the seasons continues and it’s with such energy that I just have to marvel at its force and determination. Winter doesn’t want to give up, I get that. Spring wants to arrive on the scene, and oh how I want that.

I catch myself when I begin to think in very black and white and either or terms. It’s either got to be one way or the other. Who wants to live like that, at such drastic ends of the spectrum? In observing the weather, I’m learning to embrace the snow and cold with the sun and warmth in the very same hour. I can feel both anger and joy in the very same hour. And I know that the anger will pass, light and heat will come and soften my ground, and give rise to new growth.

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