LINDA C. WISNIEWSKI

Category: life stories

• Only You Can Tell Your Story

  Posted at 10:59 am by lindawis, on February 15, 2021

  

  

  The Covid 19 pandemic has changed lives all over the world, and we cope in different ways. Often, we look for distraction from it. But I’m a big believer in the saying, “The only way out is through.” The isolation, lack of hugs from best friends, missing restaurant meals and movie theaters, takes a toll on our mental health. And the stories of heroism and love give us strength to carry on. You see, I believe it’s all about stories. Our history is our stories, and the stories of ordinary people are most important of all. We know about the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, but do we know how our parents and grandparents felt that day? How they coped with their fear and anxiety? Only if they told us, or wrote it down in letters and diaries.

  So here’s what I want you to do: tell your story. Better yet, write it down, so the ones who come after you have a record to go to when they wonder what 2020 was really like for people like you.

  Here are two good anthologies to show what I mean: Living on Covid Time and Alone Together. Take a look inside one or both and get inspired to jot down your own thoughts about this time in history. Your time. Because no one else can tell it like you can.

  If you’d like some company while you write, consider my memoir class starting March 3rd. I’ve been doing this for over 15 years. Sharing personal stories with others, crafting them into a work of art – for that’s what a good story is – is a great way to spend your time.

  To register or for more information, please contact Cindy Louden at 267-421-6203 or clouden@pearlsbuck.org.

  Have you started writing your pandemic story? Have you read a good one? Share it in the comments! And stay safe.

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  Posted in book, life stories, memoir, memoirs, Uncategorized, writers, writing | 2 Comments | Tagged covid-19, history, pandemic, stories, story

• Letting Go of Happy

  Posted at 12:55 pm by lindawis, on November 1, 2019

  

  The other day, I said to my husband, half-joking, “I’m going to be happy before I die, if it kills me!” For as long as I can remember, there’s been a little bit of sadness sitting in the back of my heart. I wanted it to go away. I read lots of self-help books and practiced gratitude. But then my book club scheduled a memoir I hadn’t picked up since college.

  Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, describes the harrowing years he spent in Nazi concentration camps and the loss of his entire family, including his pregnant young wife. Not an optimist by nature, he still continued to write psychiatry texts while imprisoned and came to the conclusion that a good life is not necessarily a happy one.

  In college, I learned from his book that each of us is responsible for deciding the meaning of our lives, and that it doesn’t come from outside us. This time, so many years later, I understood much more: that a meaningful life has creativity, love and appreciation of beauty, and dignity in the face of suffering. It doesn’t have to be happy.

  Imagine being okay with that: not being happy.

  Imagine a world without books and webinars and lectures on how to feel good every day. Imagine there’s nothing wrong with you if your clothes don’t spark joy or you don’t have a Vision Board. Imagine not trying to be happy but just being glad when it happens anyway.

  Driving home on a sunny fall afternoon, I thought of my kids’ school days, and the struggles they went through. As their mother, I wanted them to be happy more than anything. But what made them the compassionate, self-sufficient men they are? The tough times when they were uncomfortably sad. Given the power today, I’d still smooth their road, and take away their pain if I could. But I’m haunted by the words of a heartbroken woman at the funeral of her young son who died of a drug overdose. “Feel your pain,” she implored his friends.

  In the novel I’m writing now, the main character will struggle mightily before she learns that a good bit of heartache opens up her world. It’s been true for me. I’ve had many years of joy, love, creativity and ease. But if I’d been as happy as I wanted to be, I doubt I’d know what empathy is. I doubt I’d have compassion. And I doubt I’d be able to handle the hard stuff of life.

  How about you? Would you choose, if you could, to be happy every day?

  Comment on this post and I’ll put your name in a drawing for The Heirs by Fran Hawthorne, a novel about buried guilt and family secrets.

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  Posted in anxiety, autumn, balance, book, compassion, Cultural memoirs, life stories, memoirs, pain, peace, philosophy, sons, suffering, writers | 14 Comments

• Near Miss

  Posted at 11:54 am by lindawis, on March 27, 2019

  

  One spring morning when I was four, I had a brush with death. My mother had just walked me and my little sister to “The Butcher’s,” a corner store two blocks from our house in Amsterdam, New York.  Its real name was Partyka’s Market, after the family who owned it, but we never called it that. To me, The Butchers meant Bill and Ray, two nice men who worked behind the big white case with kielbasa, pork chops, and cold cuts inside, the men who smiled at me and gave me a slice of cheese. Many of my earliest memories are images inside and around that neighborhood store.

  Besides Bill and Ray, I knew the family who lived above the store: the tall silent father, the house-dressed white-haired mother, and the childlike middle-aged sister who tended the zinnias, snapdragons and sweet peas climbing white string in the garden behind the store. I see three cement steps to the front door, big windows with cardboard ads for Lucky Strikes, and inside, three or four aisles of canned vegetables, cellophane wrapped loaves of bread, jars of pickles and sauerkraut.

  I don’t know who gave me the Lifesaver that day. The hard candy with a hole in the middle is supposed to keep you from choking on it should it become lodged in your throat. My mother said that in a split second after she saw me choking, a salesman who happened to be in the store picked me up by my heels and while I was hanging upside down, slapped my back hard with his free hand. The candy popped out onto the hardwood floor.

  I’ve been thinking about how long I have lived since then, and of friends who have passed away, some years ago and some more recent. I see, these days, how fragile life can be.

  My mother told this story many times, so I know it made a big impact on her. But I don’t remember it actually happening to me. Decades before the Heimlich Maneuver was posted in grocery stores, supermarkets and restaurant dining rooms, how did the salesman know what to do? What if he hadn’t been there? And why don’t I remember it? Why do I remember all those details of the store and people but not the traumatic event that scared my mom and almost killed me?

  I believe we all have near misses when we might have cheated death. Do you remember yours?

  Tell me about it in the comments and I’ll put your name in the hat for a copy of The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George. No choking incidents, but a good read.

  The winner of this month’s drawing is Nancy Taylor. She wins a copy of Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, a story of espionage in WWII England. Congratulations, Nancy, and thanks for adding to the conversation!

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  Posted in Amsterdam, children, life stories, memoir, memoirs, NY, Polish American, Uncategorized | 10 Comments | Tagged 1950s, Amsterdam NY, childhood, mothers, New York State, Partyka's Market, safety

• 2019- Ready or Not!

  Posted at 2:47 pm by lindawis, on December 29, 2018

  

  As the old year ends, I feel an urge to finish what I started, as if I need a clean slate to begin 2019. And then I laugh. As if that’s ever going to happen.

  Just last month, I stopped reading a book I hated. It was for my book club. Which I’m dropping out of. I didn’t like the story or the characters or the writing. Or the members of the club. Or the hard wooden chairs we had to sit on. Can I quit now? It wasn’t worth my time, but I don’t like to leave anything unfinished. 

  I have a half-done quilt on my sewing machine, wrinkled clothes waiting on the ironing board, and a Christmas tablecloth with stains I haven’t managed to remove. And then there are all the short stories and essays in progress on my computer.

  My kids grew up before I was finished raising them. Wait, I wanted to say, I’m not done. I forgot to teach you to ice skate…or to make a pie…When they walk away, I still want to wrap my arms around their ankles.

  My parents died before I understood them. I didn’t ask my dad what his childhood was like. I forgot to ask my mom if she ever doubted her faith.

  I dropped freshman organic chem. I didn’t care about the experiments, my grades were awful, and a boy said I was taking the place of someone who had been drafted to fight in Vietnam.  

  I dropped friends who moved away. Staying in touch was too hard in our busy lives. Or maybe they dropped me.  

  It’s okay. If we hold on to everything we start, our lives would be a spaghetti-ball mess we could never untangle. Life is about choices.  

  A new year is about to begin, a turn of the calendar’s page, opening more possibilities. What will I choose to start this year? What will I finish? And what can I quit in the middle of, knowing full well that “enough is enough,” that forcing myself to complete something that is no longer important is just a waste of my precious time? Time I could use for the things that matter.

  Do you always “finish what you started?”

  Comment on this post and I’ll put your name in the drawing for a copy of The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, a practical book about inner peace and freedom.

  The winner of last month’s drawing is Susan Berrodin. She will receive a copy of Old Friend From Far Away by Natalie Goldberg. Congratulations!

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  Posted in book, life stories, memoir, memoirs, mindfulness, philosophy, Uncategorized | 14 Comments | Tagged 2019, lifestyle, new year

• When Things Were Not So Different

  Posted at 3:17 pm by lindawis, on April 5, 2017

  The following is a blog piece I wrote last year and never published. I think it’s time to let it out into the world.

  Today I went to a life celebration for one of my memoir students. Lee was 93, a sweet and gentle man who smiled at his own frailties and took seriously all my suggestions to make his writing better. The gathering was small but filled with love and laughter as his family recalled his attention to detail and his endless storytelling.

  It’s been a tough week here in the U.S. of A. Another mass shooting, angry ranting in the media, social and public, about the merits of gun control and the true tenets of a religion whose extremist members are suicidal would be killers.

  Added to that is the ever present fact that I’m not getting any younger. No moisturizer or beauty sleep will iron out the wrinkles on my face. No amount of zumba or chiropractic will stave off forever the aches in my back and knees. I feel the pressure of time. Enjoy life, now, while you can, I tell myself. Use each moment to live your best life, there may be no tomorrow.

  How can I reconcile my desire to accomplish certain things, to savor each moment, and to rewire my brain for happiness with the outside world and its horrors?

  Can I stop watching the news? Cut off my social media? I’ll know it’s there anyway.

  Hearing about Lee’s long and full life, at the funeral home this morning, at the lunch the family hosted afterward, and in his stories in my memoir class, I understand why this man was so loved. He was kind, he was gentle, he was tender. He lived through another horrific time: the Second World War, and worked as a young scientist on a secret project in the desert, far from home. And went on to establish a family and a network of friends, a home and a lifetime of useful work.

  My mother once told me of the sad and lonely wartime Christmas holidays, for three or four years in succession, when she missed her husband and three brothers, all of them in mortal danger, knowing she’d only hear from them weeks after a letter was written, hopefully always by them and even then not knowing for sure they were all right.

  We’ve been through tough times before. The world is like that. This is our time, and we can hide from that truth or use our time here to make our patch of earth and sky, the place from which our light shines forth, warm and suffused with love. A comfort. Like Lee.

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  Posted in anxiety, balance, life stories, memoir, memoirs, pain, philosophy, writing | 11 Comments | Tagged aging, anxiety, family, history, memoirs, society

• A Veterans’ Day Salute

  Posted at 3:30 pm by lindawis, on November 11, 2013

  

  My cousin Wayne rode into town with his mother on the Sunday afternoon train and arrived at Grandma’s house wrapped in a whiff of danger. My sister and I were good little girls who knew how to  behave. We sat on Grandma’s porch glider, careful to push off gently, toes to the floor, rocking slowly with just a tiny squeak on the backstroke. When Wayne arrived, things got kicked up a notch. His bottom bounced onto the seat and he pushed off the floor with both feet, the glider squeaking like a rusty gate. Wind whistled past our ears.

  The grownups said to stop it right now, but Wayne couldn’t resist temptation. A few minutes later, he’d start again, faster and faster, until we heard an awful scraping sound as metal hit wall. “If I catch you doing that again…” his mother frowned.

  “Let’s play inside,” I suggested. Wayne dumped a bag of green plastic soldiers onto Grandma’s coffee table and arranged them into battle scenes. Then he showed us his bag of war comics. For my sister and me, he was the perfect Sunday playmate, who brought us the fun kind of danger where no one got hurt.

  After high school, Wayne joined the army and was sent to Vietnam where he earned three Purple Hearts. When he came home, we watched an antiwar protest on TV. “They ought to send ’em all to Vietnam!” he said. I was a college student, against the war. I didn’t know what to say. I loved my cousin, but he wasn’t playing soldiers anymore. I wished we could all go back in time and sit on Grandma’s glider again.  Our eyes met and his grin collapsed. “Nobody should go there,” my cousin said, looking at the floor.

  Previously published in a different version in The Rocking Chair Reader, Adams Media, 2005.Image courtesy of Gualberto 107, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net.

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  Posted in life stories, memoir, memoirs, peace, Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged family, peace, war

• My Weekend as a Travel Guide

  Posted at 3:12 pm by lindawis, on June 7, 2011

  This past weekend, I got to open a window and peek into other people’s lives.

  For the memoir workshop I taught at the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference, attendees submitted pieces a few weeks in advance for critique. And as always, the stories were heartfelt, moving and inspiring.

  A little black girl and her family traveled through the 1950s South, searching for a bathroom they could use without being arrested.
  A man visited his father’s people in Ireland, people who played the violin after working a long day on the farm.
  A woman fought fiercely to preserve land threatened by development.
  A young doctor’s growing numbness in her feet led to a diagnosis of MS.
  A woman became her father’s caretaker and learned an important lesson about herself.

  So many different ways to tell a real life story: the historical context, the ecology of the land, cultural memories, the messages of illness and more.

  Memoirist Patricia Hampl said “memoir is travel writing, …notes taken along the way…”

  Last weekend, I was honored to be a guide for a small part of that journey. I am still basking in the afterglow.

  

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  Posted in Cultural memoirs, life stories, memoir, Patricia Hampl, Philadelphia Writers Conference, writing | 1 Comment

• Speaking About Writing

  Posted at 6:51 pm by lindawis, on April 20, 2009

  This afternoon, I drove through rainy Bucks and Northampton Counties to Westminster Village, a retirement center in Allentown, PA. The activities people invited me to talk to residents on National Letter Writing Day about The Healing Power of Writing.

  A small group of women had spent the morning making greeting cards with scrapbooking materials. I talked to them about the health benefits of writing their life stories, a bit about Off Kilter, and then had them do a short note-card exercise about someone they loved.

  I’m always amazed at the energy in the room when I do these talks and classes. You can almost see the words travel from their brains (or hearts) down their arms and through their pencils onto the page. People go from staring at me expectantly to becoming completely absorbed in self-reflection. Watching them continue the conversation over tea and snacks made my heart sing.

  An afternoon well spent, I drove home, through the rain, with that ‘good tired’ feeling, soft and open.

  

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  Posted in elderly, life stories, memoirs, public speaking | 0 Comments

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  • Only You Can Tell Your Story February 15, 2021
  • Eyewitness to History January 15, 2021
  • It’s Just Christmas December 10, 2020
  • The World in Rehab November 5, 2020
  • White Tube Socks and Apple Pie September 30, 2020
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