Dikkon Eberhart

Sometimes I get the question, “What was your favorite book when you were a teenager?” 

I’m way past being a teenager. 

A while ago, I received a question that is related, but which is more thought-provoking. “Name ten books that will ALWAYS be on your bookshelf, whether or not you plan to read them ever again.”

The question came from a literary journal that was interviewing me as an author.  As an author, I am writing a new memoir.  While writing a new memoir, I am involved in the flow of my time and of my ideas, and I am alert for signposts along the way.  

To a book guy involved in memoir, what would be more noticeable as a signpost than a book, so important along the way, it will ALWAYS be on my bookshelf. 

In answer, I decided to pick two books from each decade of my reading beginning with the decade of my teens. I’m in my 70s, so that makes six decades, which means I would provide the names of twelve books, not ten. 

If anyone complained about excess, I would claim the garrulous privilege of age. 

Below, I’ve added a few notes to each.  (And, just so you know, I’ve made some changes this time around—books are signposts, yes, but they have fluidity, too.)

If this exercise intrigues you, whatever your age, please write me back and tell me about the signposts of your bookish times. 

I’d be honored to know. 

One thing I noticed is that some of the books were of sufficient importance during their decades to be selected for my list, but they are so fundamentally different from the books that currently empower me, I would never read them again even though they deserve their place on the list. 

Interesting how we change over time….

Interesting (to me anyway) how I got here from there….
 


Teens
 
Childhood’s End, by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. 
     
   How human kind grew up.  How wonderful, I thought      with bright eyes, if it would!

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, by the man himself.
 
    How to write prose.  How wonderful if I could! 
 

20s
 
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
       
     The greatest novel of the 20th century.

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
     
      The second greatest novel of the 20th century. 
 

30s
 
The Masks of God (a tetralogy), by Joseph Campbell
     
     Everything you need to know as a phenomenologist          of mythology and religion.  I knew Joe; maybe I could      be like him and lead readers through myth to                  fulfillment. 

The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Montolive, Clea), by Lawrence Durrell
   
     Three slanting views on a single series of events…           plus time, the fourth view.  But note: while there is        every sort of immorality known to man, yet there is        not one single objection to any behavior, from any         character.  Great artfulness of writing, but what if          there is something greater?  
                  

40s

The European Discovery of America (Northern Voyages and Southern Voyages), by Samuel Eliot Morison.

     Central as research for writing my novel Paradise.          The truly central document was Navigatio sancti                  Brendani abbatis, the 8th century imramm (Irish story      of sacred voyage) around which I built my tale.  God        does prevail…and the stories of man coming close to        God by traveling in His direction are revelatory—             especially when I’ve written one myself. 

The Liberation Trilogy (An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light), by Rick Atkinson. 

   ​Representative of scores of large volumes on war,           ancient and modern, in the interest of understanding     history, first, and man’s struggles, second.  And note,      too, the miracles, the miracles, the miracles!
 

50s

At Home in Mitford (and the ensuing dozen or so novels related to Father Tim), by Jan Karon.

     See? Christianity can be tempting when the invitation      is fictional charm, decency, delight, and humor—and      a North Carolina world of quirky characters. 

Surprised by Oxford, by Carolyn Weber.

    See?  Christianity can be tempting when the invitation     is literary memoir—and a location still reminiscent of     C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. 
 

60s

The Holy Bible, by God, and some assistant writers. 

   Hundreds of books were read during this decade, but       they all circled the Bible.  It was their starting point. 

The Holy Bible, by God, and some assistant writers.

   Finally—after all these years—it was a matter or           reading the Bible itself and not just its circling                referrals. 
 

70s (in anticipation)

The Holy Bible, by God, and some assistant writers. 

          It’s a matter of finally coming home. 
 

Dikkon Eberhart

Below is what I wrote later that day. 

Later what day?  Later, after my first visit to Meadow’s house. 

Meadow, her husband Dana, and their children lived in an old house on the busy road heading south out of Bath, Maine, toward Phippsburg where my family lived. 

My wife and I, and two of our four children, had recently come to Christ as believers.  This had changed our lives. 

So I published a memoir that deals with our conversion-from-Judaism event and with other incidents of my life’s journey as the son in a literary family.  

Meadow and I knew one another as friends in the Maine Fellowship of Christian Writers.  I stopped at her house in order to interview her.  Meadow had asked me to read her manuscript memoir, Redeeming Ruth, and to give her any thoughts I had about it. 

I’m a slow reader.  However, I had powered through Meadow’s 60,000 words in two nights of can’t-put-it-down excitement. 

Redeeming Ruth is a wonderfully executed and fully realized memoir of godly love.  It is stunning in its literate portrayal of the wholeness of the human condition, encapsulating this within her family when they responded to the call of the Holy Spirit.  Thus called, they adopted a Ugandan orphan with cerebral palsy who just happened to appear in Bath, Maine.

(Just happened—nay: there are no just-happenings under the eye of the Lord). 

“Hello?”

Through the glass of Meadow’s door, I could see the inside of her house.  It looked like our house had looked when we had young and early teenage children all around the place.  I was looking into the living room and through it, across a low half-wall, to the dining area with the kitchen partially hidden to its left. 

“Hello?”

A bustle and then Meadow appeared from the left of the living room.  “Dikkon?”

“It’s me.”

“Come in.  Come in. Sorry about the mess.”

“Looks comfortable to me.”

“Please sit.”  She moved something off one end of the couch.  She wore comfortable looking clothes and seemed at ease with my intrusion into her home.  “Can I bring you something?”

“You’ve already brought me your book.  Meadow, it’s wonderful!”

Suddenly, we were even better friends. 

We talked for an hour.  I learned back stories, enhancing what I knew of the tale.  As she talked, Meadow exposed both her motherly emotional vulnerability and her determination as a woman to accomplish a thing she had dreamed of while a youngster and had not relinquished when she grew older. 

As adults with marriages and children, some of us put those early dreams into mothballs, deep in a back closet.  Meadow and Dana did not.  This impressed me.  But life is life, and it has its own stresses, just on its own. 

In the way of God, when an opportunity emerges that relates to the dream, often it emerges in an unexpected way, at an unexpected time, and with unexpected challenges attached.  That’s part of the opportunity’s God test.  The quandary about what to do—is this truly an opportunity from God?—is tough.     

Toughness is needed in order to address a challenge from God. 

In conversation with me that morning, Meadow reflected spiritual toughness.  She was tough in her assessment of the challenge presented and of the love that meeting the challenge would require from her family. She knew they had the capability, but she and Dana were frank with themselves about the hardships that were likely to come.  She and Dana prayed regularly about it. 
   
During our first visit, Meadow also exposed her tough-mindedness as a writer to me. Just writing a book is one thing, and it’s hard enough. Dealing successfully with the book biz is another thing entirely, and a harder thing because the writer is exposed…and not alone to her friends.   

Observing Meadow’s toughness, I determined that I would help to get her memoir into the hands of an interested agent and publisher. 

Here’s what I wrote later that day.

Dear --

I’ve just read a memoir, in manuscript, that is extraordinary. 

A colleague of mine has finished a memoir that focuses on the godly circumstance of her family’s adoption of a little Ugandan girl with cerebral palsy, on the frustrating details of that adoption, and on the girl’s sudden death several years later. 

God is so palpably shaping the “clay” of this family and of their hearts for Ruth (the girl’s name) that the reader comes away sensing those heavenly fingers on the Merrill family and its circumstances but also on his own heart as well—that is, on my heart. 

As I flashed through these lucid pages, I did my best to discount emotions that arose because I know the author, I know some of the people she mentions in the book, and I know the geography in which she lives. 

Discounting all of that, I STILL could not put the book down, nor slow down my reading—even when I already knew that the sad event of Ruth’s death was still before me. 

This is a deeply human story, written with such clarity, honesty, fullness, and attractiveness that any reader will feel she deeply knows its author, Meadow Merrill, her husband Dana, and all of their children at their various ages during the years Ruth was with them. 

Meadow is an experienced expository writer.  Her portrait of Uganda and of the plight of its orphans squeezed my heart while I read Meadow’s words about her journey to and from that country, as she fought for this adoption. 

Meadow writes lines that still shiver in my memory, godly gifts of words, so crisp they are--

“For the first time, I understood pain so deep you’d swallow razor blades to kill it.”

God is right there on Meadow’s pages.  Those whose hearts break for broken children do not need to be believers to feel their hearts break.  Break they will.  Meadow does not slam them with God language—He’s just THERE.

When I was done, I was overcome with the desire to help. 


 
That’s what I wrote. 

Powerful letter, huh? 

I thought I had a shot.   

My letter did not draw even one slight bit of good. 

But I was right that Meadow is tough.  She kept on plugging away, Meadow did. 

Several of you reading this post already know that last Monday was Redeeming Ruth’s publication day! 

Yay!

Many other admirers of the book and I announced its publication on Facebook and Twitter.  We all tried to contribute to a publication splash. 

I hope we had an effect. 

What I really want you to do, if you haven’t already, is to go out and buy a copy of Redeeming Ruth, and read it. 

Irrespective of the fact that Meadow is my friend, Redeeming Ruth is gonna be the book you have in your hand when you grab the arm of your friend and say--
 
“Oh, my goodness, you’ve gotta read this, right now!”





​https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=redeeming+ruth

Dikkon Eberhart

     Dad was prominent as a poet.  When I was young, I longed not to be a poet. 

      I’d be anything—a quarterback, an FBI agent, a ship captain.  But in my soul, I knew I would end up as a chip off Dad’s block.  Alas, I was a word-smith, too. 

        So I watched Dad, to learn how. 

         
                                   One
                             Read, read, read.

 
     Read any style, content, genre, author, date—it doesn’t matter.

       “We pour our souls into these words, Dikkon. You need to learn to identify writing that’s worth that effort and writing that’s not.”

      Once, after Dad breezed through an erotic novel I showed him, drily he responded, “Chaucer did it better.”
                                     
 

                                    Two
                                  Just Start
 
     
 "I can’t write it,” I moaned, regarding my short story assignment in high school. “It’s too hard!”

       Dad caught Mom’s urging eye, put down his pipe, and asked me, “What’s your story about?”

       “When they’re choosing up teams, the boy wants to be picked first but maybe he won’t be.”

        “And?”

     “I don’t know!  Maybe he isn’t picked first, but maybe he hits the home run.  It’s due tomorrow!”

        “Try making the story about his thoughts.”

        “About his thoughts?”

      “Yes.  Try starting with the word ‘maybe.’”  Dad grinned.  “Maybe the story is about maybe.”

       So I wrote the story and submitted it on time.  Its first sentence was “Maybe I’ll be picked first but maybe not.”  
 
 

                                    Three
                              Bring the reader in.
 

        “Do you like it?” Dad asked. 

        “It’s assigned.” 

        “Not what I asked.”

         “Then, no.  It’s boring.” 

       “Do you think maybe the author’s just writing for himself and maybe for his closest friends?”

       I hadn’t thought of that as a possibility.  The author was a major name in modernist English fiction—the focus of my college class. 
       
         Dad pressed on, “Do you think it’s important that you be drawn in?”

         “Who?  Me?”

         “You’re his reader, aren’t you?”

        I laughed.  “I wouldn’t be his reader, not if I could help it.”

       “So…that’s my point.  Yes, the reader must come to the writer, but the reader will come to the writer only when he’s drawn in, not forced in.”

         “That’s not happening here.”

         “So when you’re a writer….”

          I nodded.  “Bring ‘em in.”

          “Atta boy.”
 


       
                                    Four
       Don’t go to sleep until you know what happens next. 

 
       “No,” Dad said.  “I don’t believe in writer’s block.”

       “It’s my first novel, Dad.  I can’t get past the point where I am.  You’re a poet, not a novelist.  How could you know?”

        “What’s the last scene you wrote?”

         I told him.

        “Go back and write it again.”

        “What’s wrong with it?”

      “Doesn’t matter.  Probably nothing.  But write it again--create it over again.  Your juices will begin to flow again, and you’ll speed on.”

        Turns out he was right—I sped on.
 


                                   Five
                                Don’t let it fester. 

 
      I called Dad. 

    Two days before, I had finished my second novel, doing its last sixty pages in an eighteen-hour burst of ecstatic—almost holy—writing.  “It’s done, Dad.”

       “Congratulations!”

       “I’m exhausted.”

       “Of course. Get a rest.”

       “Tell Mom.”

       “Of course. So…what’s next?”

     “I read it over.  I think it’s good.  Gotta do some tweaks.”

       “Do that.  But then—get it off your desk.”
   
       “What do you mean?”

      “Don’t let it fester.  Get it out into the world.  If you tweak it too much, you could kill it.  Now let an editor tell you what to do. ”
 
 
 
        HERE’S A BONUS BECAUSE YOU KEPT ON READING!
 

                         A Sixth Thing I Learned
                                       Keep trying.
 

      Sitting in our garden one day, Robert Frost turned to me and remarked, “Dikkon, the work of the poet is to write at least one single poem that they can’t get rid of.  They’ll try.  But don’t let ‘em.”
 
                                           
    
                                      ***

 
                           If You are Not a Writer,        
                 God has blessed you with a different burden.
 
                          But your rules are just the same.
 
One
Steep yourself in all available wisdom.

Two
Begin, even when you are afraid to begin.

Three
Engage with those outside of yourself by understanding what they desire.

Four
When stuck, allow your spirit to be refreshed by starting over.

Five
When finished, bring the others in.
 
 
                           
​                                   And a Bonus!
 
    Keep working, work hard, but take The Longer View. 

                               You may win.

                              You may not win.

                                But you tried.
 

​Dikkon Eberhart​


                                    Part Two
 
   On the other hand, regarding my other writing project, I said my memoir is about me and about how I got this way. 

   One of the “ways” that I got to, scarcely anticipated, is the way of a Bible-believing, evangelical Christian. 

   Looking backwards in my memoir, naturally, I studied the family line which led to me and to that startling conversion. 

   The Lord was involved in my study.  As I studied, He revealed things I needed to know, to say nothing of the revelation of the fact of Himself in the first place.

   My memoir characterizes my father, who was a poet of lyric fire when it came to nature, God, mankind, death, and beauty.  I know Dad’s religion.  Dad is one generation back. 

   Dad was the middle of three children in a Minnesota family.  Dad's father was a successful businessman in the meat packing industry at the beginning of the 20th century. 

   That successful business man, my grandfather, was two generations back.  The third generation back was my great grandfather, who was a circuit-riding Methodist minister on the Great Plains during the late years of the 19th century. 
  
   As a Bible-believing, evangelical Christian writing about my family line, among other investigations, I desired to trace my family’s theological roots and its profession of Christian belief.  

   Of course, I know my father’s theological roots—one generation back—both from his talks with me and from his poetry.  Also, I know about my great-grandfather’s theological roots—three generations back—partly by inference based on his profession, but partly also by my father’s stories about him. 

   But what about my grandfather—two generations back?  The successful businessman: what was his religious awareness?  His name was A.L. Eberhart.
  
   One responsibility I had to the publisher of my memoir was to supply it with photographs, so—rather like an archivist—I pulled storage canisters from my barn in which my wife and I have placed family pictures, always with the thought that—soon enough—we should get around to the task of arranging them properly. 

   Now, if I really were my fictional archivist, instead of just feckless me, I should already have arranged the pictures properly.  I should have studied their particularities, catalogued them, ordered them, preserved them, and made them available at a moment’s notice.

   In one of the canisters, I came across a familiar item.  I knew and liked this three-fold, leather, wallet-like holder of three lovely antique photographs. 

   The wallet is about four inches wide and six inches tall.  When opened out flat, the three photographs are displayed side-by-side, each of them mounted on heavy cream-colored stock as was done in the early 20th century. 

   I have always liked the three photographs stored inside, which are skillfully done.  On the right panel is a photograph of my father’s brother at about age two.  On the left panel is a photograph of my father, also at about age two (though he is two years younger than his older brother). 

   The middle panel has the largest of the photographs.  This is a profile picture of my father’s mother—my grandmother—who is revealed as a beautiful woman of about thirty.  (It was in memory of my grandmother that my wife and I gave her name to our oldest daughter—Lena.)    

   After I had admired the photographs this one more time, I was about to put the wallet aside when I felt something odd. 

   The panel which displayed my uncle’s photograph was slightly thicker than the other two panels.  Something was stuck inside the wallet behind the picture of my uncle.  I prodded a bit, and out slid an envelope with a folded piece of paper inside. 

   I was amazed.  This was eerie.  My heart pounded.  I had handled this wallet perhaps a dozen times during the past years.  But now I was in precisely the same circumstance as my fictional archivist. 

   I examined the address on the envelope.  I recognized the handwriting.  It is the handwriting of my father’s father, of my grandfather, whose handwriting I had often seen in other documents. 

   The letter was sent from Austin, Minnesota, to my grandfather’s mother, who was at that time staying at Rosslyn Hotel in Los Angeles, on April 7, 1906…postmarked at 4:30 pm. 

   On the back of the envelope, a note is written in ink, also in my grandfather’s hand.  The note says, “For Clara, September 13, 1929, A.L. Eberhart.” 

   My grandfather, the businessman, could not have known that the financial world would be rocked by cataclysm sixteen days later. 

   On that day in 1929, I surmise that my grandfather was filled with love and with commitment when he gave his important 1906 letter to Clara.  Clara was the woman A.L. loved after he recovered from the sad death of his wife Lena, which had occurred in 1921.
 
   I do not know how A.L. came to re-possess the letter he had sent to his mother in 1906, twenty-three years after he sent it originally, but he must have perceived the letter as precious, and perhaps Clara did so as well.

  In those days, important family documents were tucked for safe keeping inside the family Bible. This important family document was similarly tucked away—though inside the icon of A.L.’s wife and his first two children and not the family Bible.

   The text of the letter is treasure, as you will see.  It is treasure to me—to A.L.’s memoir-writing, family-history imbibing, Christian grandson, into whose hand it would fall, in 2015, eighty-six years later.  

    With tender fingers, I extracted A.L.’s letter.  It is written in pencil on heavy, cream-colored stock, seven inches by twelve inches, folded in half and then folded in four, in order to allow it to fit into the small envelope. 

   My grandfather wrote the words below when my father was two years old, and then he gave to Clara the words he had written, later, when my father was twenty-five. 

   The long-lost and then providentially revealed letter is a literary devise often employed by writers, myself included, for telescoping time--as I intend in The Pirate Book.  In what is the actual way of the holy, God-filled universe in which I believe and today in which I thrive, A.L.’s words had been hidden away from view by everyone since sometime after he gave them to Clara--hidden away until it was time for them to be revealed to me, when my father would have been one hundred eleven.     
 
Austin Minn.
April 15 – 1906

Dear Father & Mother:

This is Easter Sunday and this letter will relieve my conscience of one of its heaviest loads and I trust be the means of bringing much joy and happiness to you both.  Ever since I backslid after my conversion in Chicago, I have feared that the death of one or both of you would deprive you of the joy of knowing before death that I again decided to serve Almighty God.

At a men’s meeting this afternoon Mr. Hormel and I went forward and publicly declared thereby to live a Christian life to the best of our ability in a meeting of [illegible] Sunday.  There were 3000 men there and a number followed our example.  I have attended almost every meeting for the past four weeks and have heard more sermons in that time than for the last fifteen years.  It was either 1889 or 1890 that I was converted and since the termination of my short religious life of about a year I have never opened a bible or offered a prayer but on account of the early training you gave me, eternally branding on my conscience the difference between right and wrong and because of the simple, fearless presentation of God’s messages to man by Billy Sunday the Evangelist I will read from the bible tonight and pray to God to take me as I am. 

You have waited long and patiently for me but now our family is a unit.  I am going to begin at the bottom just as I did in business.  I have been successful in business so I want you to give me some verses of scripture to read that will help me.

Lena has asked me to go forward with her and she is going tomorrow.  Don’t expect too much of me at once for I have a big battle on for a while I am sure, but I have health and an iron will and will try and hold fast this time.  Where is that verse “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ?”  You have always prayed for me to keep on don’t quit I need them now. 

With love from your son

Alpha

The children are well--
 
Ah, my goodness!

Buried treasure indeed!  Greater than pirate gold!

​...and as you see, the photographs are not of pirates!

Dikkon Eberhart
 
             
                               Part One
 
   I’ve been writing a new novel, but very slowly.  I haven’t published a novel for years.  Considering the slowness with which I am writing this new novel, it won’t be published for years, either. Most likely, I'll publish more non-fiction first.

    My working title for the new novel is The Pirate Book.
 
   The protagonist of The Pirate Book is a present-day archivist who works at a 200-year-old seminary in Connecticut.  The novel is structured as a story-within-a-story.  Much of the action occurs among pirates in the late 17th century. 

   The story is kicked into action when the archivist finds an uncatalogued document hidden inside the binding of an antique, family memoir.  The family memoir is an item stored in the seminary’s archives.  The reason the memoir is stored in the seminary’s archives is that it recounts the history of a clan of 18th and 19th century missionaries, some of whom were graduates of the seminary many, many years before the present day. 

   The hidden document which the archivist finds is electrifying.  It is electrifying because it casts a different light—and an unwelcome light—on the history of the missionary clan.  It fundamentally re-characterizes the clan’s founding father. 

   As I said, I have not published a novel for years.  On the other hand, a non-fiction book of mine—which is a memoir—was published recently. 

   In this new book of mine, obviously I am looking backward in time, it being a memoir.  The book explores what happened during the first sixty years of my life, in order to establish a context for my introspection about how to anticipate my life’s remaining years. 

   My memoir is about how I got this way.

   That being so, it does not surprise me that I began to write The Pirate Book at approximately the same time as I set down the first sentences of my memoir. 

   The two books—one fiction, one memoir—are powered by the same urgencies.  The urgencies are, first, to uncover the truth of the past, and, second, to testify to the shadow which past truth casts upon the future. 
  
   My slowness at finishing The Pirate Book is due to the fact that, while I wrote both books concurrently for a short period of time, I needed to move back-and-forth between a fictional voice and my personal voice, at least to the extent that I allowed my personal voice to appear in my memoir. 

   Going back-and-forth was hard.  In the end, I shelved The Pirate Book and finished my memoir.   
 
   Some pirates buried their treasure.  One reason they sustain our interest, today, three hundred fifty years after their heyday, is their buried treasure. 

   It’s out there, even now, their treasure.  What Caribbean beachcomber kicking up sand has not imagined the sudden glint of a doubloon, exposed after all these years by the flipping action of his toe? 

   In another iteration of the same wonder, what archivist has not imagined the corner of a lost, uncatalogued letter appearing from behind the illustrated plate in an old book, rarely taken from the shelf? 

   In me, regarding that last fantasy, the novelist’s imagination leaps into play—what does that letter say?  Why was it hidden away?  Who hid it?  It must have been precious, that letter.  Was it alarming as well?  How does it affect the archivist—now, who reads it in our later day? 

   An archivist is a person who likes to read other people’s mail…but only at a comfortable distance in time. 

   Has the discovery of this letter compressed the 19th and the 21st centuries in some way, and how?  What change of present historical understanding comes from that compression?  Who among the characters of the novel, today, is hurt by the compression, and who is relieved?  Which new walls are built up, and which old walls are torn down? Is there a revelation at hand?  

   Letters from the past affect people, down to the bone.  The Pirate Book is about how the discovered letter affects both the missionary family and the archivist—and, this being fiction, about what happened next. 

   What of my memoir?  Is there a parallel?  Is there a blessing?  Partially to quote an earlier post under the GOD heading, "Is there Someone on the other shore who will leap to fill me in?"


 
                      Learn more in Part Two.


 By the way, just who are the people in the photographs?

                          I'll give you a hint.  

                          They're not pirates!

Dikkon Eberhart
 
   To a non-writer, it might seem that writing a memoir is easy.  You know what happened—just tell the truth.

   Here’s a passage from a good writer that is on point. 

   The passage is on page thirty of the novel Lila by Marilynne Robinson. The protagonist of the novel is a young woman who scarcely ever talks, whom the reader does not yet know well.  She is sitting, virtually silent, with an elderly minister in his kitchen, drinking coffee.  He has just told her an event about angels. 

   She said, “I liked that story.”

   He looked away from her and laughed.  “It is a story, isn’t it? I’ve never really thought of it that way. And I suppose the next time I tell it, it will be a better story.  Maybe a little less true.  I might not tell it again.  I hope I won’t.  You’re right not to talk.  It’s a sort of higher honesty, I think.  Once you start talking, there’s no telling what you’ll say. 

   Read that last sentence again--Once you start talking, there’s no telling what you’ll say.  

   Most people don’t suffer under the burden of being writers.  Truth in writing is more complicated than most people understand.  Once we writers start talking—writing—there’s no telling what we’ll say. 

   What we writers say is for the good of the story we are telling.  The good of the story we are telling becomes our motivation, which is paramount.  Truth notwithstanding.

   If the need of the story is for its protagonist to step off the porch and to trip over the cat, then that is what the protagonist does—even though the truth of the incident was that it was the bottom step of the inside staircase, and it was the dog.  

   Lila is a novel.  Fiction is one thing; memoir is another.  I write memoir.  It’s harder. 

   For one thing, the people you write about in memoir are still alive, or they may be, and they have a right to privacy—which is true even if they’re dead.  For another, you yourself have a right to privacy, even when you seem deliberately to have opened yourself up to scrutiny. 

   But the main difficulty about your memoir is that your memoir is not about you.  Your memoir uses you to support its real subject.  Its real subject is your theme for writing. 

   What are you writing about?  Not you.  Frankly, no one is much interested in you except a few friends and relations.  It’s your theme that is of general interest—you hope.

   Let’s say your memoir’s theme is how pet ownership has opened up your life to greater awareness of God.  In that case, it really doesn’t matter if the accident was prompted by the porch and the cat or by the stairs and the dog.  Either is relevant to the theme.

   However, you know that it was the stairs and the dog, but you’re going to use the porch and the cat.

   That’s the truth trouble, right there. 

   Why do you use the porch and the cat?  You write that it was the porch and the cat because, later in your memoir, at the climax of your theme—when the awareness of God comes vividly upon you--that event actually did happen on the porch. 

   You decide you’ll use the porch and the cat for the accident so that your memoir, as a whole—rising as it does toward the God revelation—can occur on the porch, where it really did occur. 

   That’s the best way for the revelation scene to be literarily cohesive with the accident event.   

   Whew! 

   It’s not easy. 

   How do you balance? 

   Theme?  Truth? 

   Or do you serve each of these needs at the same time by using techniques of fiction, without stepping across the line into fiction? 

   Readers of your book want to be excited by your memoir, not because it is about you, but—because of the gift you have made to them of your theme—it is about them. 

   Yes, you are providing detail about your life and your events, but their attraction to your memoir is that you have allowed them to think about themselves in new ways.  Their lives and their events have been affirmed, or tested, or questioned, or balanced by what you have said about yours.   

   They are drawn into your memoir by this.  But they stay inside your book because of what you have revealed to them about them. 

   Each draft of your story perfects your story, while each draft is a little less true.  That’s because once you start to write your story, there’s no telling what you’ll say.    

Dikkon Eberhart 

​
   Memoir writing is dreaming backwards. 
 
   Eleven years ago, my father became one hundred years old.  When Dad turned one hundred, my wife and I had no grandchildren yet.  We hoped we might have grandchildren someday—after all, we had produced four children, so the prospect of grandchildren was bright.  However, whenever our grandchildren did come along, they would not be able to sit with this man, my father, the poet, who was one hundred years old.  Dad would be gone by then.  Our grandchildren could read his poetry, they could view him in pictures, but they would not be able to know him as I knew him. 
 
   So I sat down at my desk, and I began writing stories about my dad, and about my mom, and about how it all was.  In order to write these stories, I discovered, also I needed to write stories about Dad’s and Mom’s own parents, and about how it all was for them, too.  The more stories I wrote down, the more stories I remembered, and the more stories I remembered, the more dangerous this process became.  I was dreaming backwards, with emphasis on the word dreaming. 
 
   You see, I am a writing sort of a fellow.  In order to understand my life as I live it, I objectify it.  This is not a choice of mine; it’s the way I’m wired. My psyche places me outside my life, while I live my life fully.  From outside, I observe the themes of my life, upon which I mull.  And as I mull the themes, I order my memories so that they illustrate and they dramatize the themes.  It’s a circle—it’s what I mean by dreaming backwards. When we dream, we are both receiving something from our outside and creating something from our inside at the same time.  That’s why dreams fascinate, though they are not real. 
 
   As I wrote my stories down about my parents and about their parents, I was dreaming backwards.  My father, the poet, was called “Dreamy Dick” when he was a boy, and the apple does not fall far from the tree.

   Dreaming backwards is dangerous because it may fool the dreamer.  It may make the dreamer believe that the created story of the past is the past.  However, that is not so.  The past is ungraspable—it is past.  If you are writing a memoir, the people of the past are unable to tell you, now, if you are wrong in your memory.  The people of the past are unable to chide you when you order your memories for the purpose of dramatizing your themes…at their expense. 
 
   To the casual observer, writing a memoir probably seems easy enough.  After all, you know the stories—just write them down.  But memoir writing is a razor-edged endeavor.  The writer of a memoir has a responsibility which is weighty.   If the writer fails to balance precisely between self-enhancement and self-abnegation there is a danger of falling and of being cut.  A memoir—this is what I have concluded—a memoir should be a kind of prayer by which the writer expresses, highest among all things, humility. 
 
   As an example of my desire to live in a past which I did not possess myself, here’s a memory.  I loved my father partly because of the past he had lived in before me.  I could dream my way into his experiences when something of his experience touched mine; I was ten-years-old and a warrior. 
 
   Dad had been a naval officer during World War II.  His principle responsibility was training young gunners on navy bombers the necessary marksmanship, with their .50-caliber double-barrel machine guns, to survive strafing attacks by Japanese Zeros, and to shoot the Zeros down instead.  After the war was won, Dad kept his target kites. 
 
   Choose any summer day, when I was ten.  Maybe on that day we’d take Dad’s elegant old cabin cruiser out onto the ocean in Maine, and we’d go to Pond Island, along with a swarm of smaller craft, some fifty of our closest friends and us. We’d have a boatload of clams, lobsters, and cod fish, also corn, potatoes, salads, pies.  (I’d be especially proud if I’d caught the cod the day before while drop-lining near Saddleback Ledge.)  The hour would be early, still cool, with a light air from the south, no fog.  I’d handle the anchor at the island, following Dad’s directions.  Several trips would be needed in the launch to ferry all our equipment to the shore. 
 
   Then, on the south side of the island, we’d dig a deep clambake pit in the sand, line it with stones, fill it with drift wood, and set a bonfire ablaze to heat the rocks.  We kids would fill a dingy with fresh rockweed, torn from its roots below tide line.  When the fire burned down to glowing coals, we’d layer the pit with the seaweed—instantly bright green on the seething rocks, and popping—and we’d toss on the food, layering it with seaweed and topping the whole bake with a thicker, final layer of seaweed.  Finally, we’d cover everything with an old sail and bank the sand up around the sail’s edges to hold in the heat. 
 
   Then, finally, there’d be nothing to do but to wait while the bake baked, to stroll, to run, to explore, to lie in the strengthening sun, to philosophize vigorously—or meanderingly, as the mood suited.  Perry and Craig would lead us all in singing The Sinking of the Titanic, and we would all take a delicious, ghoulish pleasure in the line “husbands and wives, little children lost their lives….”  Beer and wine for the grown-ups; orange Nehi for us kids. 
 
   Then it would be early afternoon, and the breeze would have come up.  It would be a good, strong, summer sou’wester—good sailing weather…kite sailing. 
 
   Dad and I would rig a kite.  It was an act of shared and minute technical specificity that I adored since it was so uncharacteristic of my father; Dad was not a tool guy.  But kites, I realized at age ten, were really poems, and therefore they deserved his intensity of attention to their every nuance.  Sometimes Dad would agree to fly the huge 10-foot-high kite, but usually it would be one of the 6s or the 8s, which are plenty big enough when you are yourself about four-and-a-half feet high. 
 
   Dad and I would work for half an hour, threading the lines, re-screwing a thimble, guying the rudder straighter.  Then it would be time, and I’d carry the kite sixty or seventy feet downwind along the beach, carefully playing out the four lines it took to control these monsters, while Dad made final adjustments to his reels and his control arms and his harness.  He’d attach the controls to his chest, a “front pack” of great drums of line controlled by hurdy-gurdy handles, with arms that stuck out two-and-a-half feet from each shoulder, through which the lines ran before heading for the kite.  Distance was controlled by grinding the drums with the handles; yaw and lift and plane were controlled by the rudder, which in turn was controlled by shifting one’s shoulders backwards and forwards, thus pulling the rudder one way or the other. 
 
   It was my job to hold the kite upright, buffeted by its weightiness in the wind, and to await Dad’s command to thrust it into the sky.  Before I thrust the kite into the air, knowing the fun we were about to have, I would stare at the silhouette of a Zero that was painted on the kite with the big red target circles over the gas tanks in its wings.  So that was where to hit ‘em!  And especially I would stare at the carefully stitched .50-caliber bullet holes in the kite that riddled those very wings.  How close I was then, dreaming backwards, in that numinous moment, to the howl of the bullets themselves!
 
   “Go!”
 
   As hard as I could, I’d launch the kite up into the wind.  In a second the kite would catch the wind and zoom high. In my mind, the stream of bullets would follow it, and the thudding of the guns would buffet me, and the hot brass would rain all around. 
 
   In a steady wind, Dad could fly the kite up to three hundred feet, make it hover there for the longest time, and then make it dive straight down into the sea—straight down into the sea!—only to pull back on his controls at the very last instant so that the kite tore through the top of a wave and rose again, streaming shining droplets from its wings and from its lines, like some raptor on a string!  
 
    This was jam at a clambake. 
 
   The past was mythic.  My father was mythic.  I was mythic—and ten. 
 
   I dreamed backwards of the Golden Time—when lived the Old Ones, who fleeted among the ancient trees, and knew. 
 
​

​Dikkon Eberhart

   ​​Birthday number 100. Dad was pleased. Lots of people came to see him.

   I thought, I’d better write down my life with him now—how it was. Before we forget.

​   Tyndale House Publishers bought what I wrote, and its editors made a book of my writing, a memoir. We needed a title. They found a good one. The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told--eye catching. Everyone was happy.