Memory Archives - Page 2 of 2

Unremember?

I just finished Wendy McClure’s really entertaining book, The Wilder Life. It chronicles the author’s attempts to access and inhabit Laura (as in Laura Ingalls Wilder) World, the world that Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose crafted in the Little House books. She includes stories about the books and the television series, traces (and troubles) the relationship between truth and fiction in Laura’s accounts, details her own adventures (and the unique individuals she encounters) visiting the various Laura historic sites sprinkled throughout the midwest and critically explores her own investments in trying to become part of Laura World.

While there are many different reasons I enjoyed this book, perhaps the biggest were: 1. McClure’s efforts to reflect on her own investments in the project (especially as those investments connected to the recent death of her mom from cancer) and 2. her willingness to push beyond searching for the Truth (what really happened) to explore the space in between fact and fiction, where we can craft stories that should have happened or that we wished had happened or that did happen, but not quite in the ways that we imagine/remember.

Towards the beginning of the book, McClure spends time researching the history of the actual Laura, scouring old records, scholarly books and popular biographies, trying to determine what events in the LHOP (Little House on the Prairie) books are real and which are imagined. But, at certain point, she realizes that this determination isn’t necessary. She writes:

I knew what was real…and what wasn’t…and there was a lot of stuff in between that I wasn’t quite sure about….But maybe those distinctions ultimately didn’t matter as long as I recognized them; maybe I didn’t need to sort truth from fiction from exaggeration in order to go further into Laura World (48).

McClure
This passage makes me think about the Puotinen farm and my own relationship to it as a real and imagined place, the Farm World. I could spend a lot of time reflecting on my own understandings of truth/fiction and real/imagined at the farm. For me, the distinctions do matter, but not in way that privileges one over the other. I keep thinking about the “stuff in between” and the possibilities it might offer for new understandings of what’s real and what’s imagined.

McClure closes the book with a chapter entitled, “Unremembered.” I’m intrigued by the concept, even as I can’t quite understand what she’s trying to say with it. Here’s how she describes unremembering:

Maybe the Little House books have always been a way to unremember–a word that I kept coming back to…I know technically it means to forget but somehow, in my mind the definition changed. To me unremembering is knowing that something once happened or existed by remembering the things around it or by putting something else in its place. Laura Ingalls Wilder unremembered being hungry by writing Farmer Boy, and Rose Wilder Lane unremembered her terrible childhood by helping her mother write about hers….You don’t deny something when you unremember it, you just give it a place to live (324).

I wonder, how does/doesn’t this idea of unremembering connect with my understandings of not forgetting and remembering?

Follow-up note: I just found an interview with McClure in which she briefly discusses “unremembering.” She suggests that it involves “making a place for something, even if it’s too difficult to remember it directly.” As I write this, I’m still not sure I understand what she means.

Ir/responsible

As I think through what kind of storyteller I want to be and how I want to craft, tell and share my stories, I’m revisiting one of my early inspirations: Trinh T. Minh-ha’s “Grandma’s Story” from Woman Native Other. In the second farm film, The Farm, part 2: The Puotinen Women, I matched four different quotations from this chapter with Puotinen storytellers: the farm, Ines Puotinen, Judy Puotinen and me (Sara Puotinen). This morning I looked over some notes for the film and discovered another quotation:

In this chain and continuum, I am but one link. The story is me, neither me nor mine. It does not really belong to me, and while I feel greatly responsible for it, I also enjoy the irresponsibility of the pleasure in the reproduction. No repetition can ever be identical, but my story carries with it their stories, their history, and our story repeats itself endlessly despite our persistence in denying it.

Trinh T. Minh-ha

I want to play with this idea of being responsible and irresponsible. I feel a responsibility to pass on the stories of past generations, but I feel (in bad and good ways) that my passing on of those stories is irresponsible. On one hand, I worry that I don’t know enough, haven’t experienced enough, am not old enough, to tell the stories. On the other hand, I feel exhilarated and inspired by the process of sifting through the accounts, interviews and photos and crafting them into new stories to share with others. I want to tell these stories. In fact, I need to tell these stories.

In thinking about how to incorporate (and hopefully) maintain the tension between being responsible and irresponsible, I want to feature some clips of my sister Anne and my mom discussing the farm and how they could take responsibility for it when it was “their time.” I wonder, is it my time? What does “my time” mean when the farm is no longer in the family and my mom is dead?

Analysis: Welcome to Pine Point, pt 2b

Yesterday, I posted part 2a of my analysis of Welcome to Pine Point. In it I focused on the introduction and chapter one (Town). In this post, I’ll continue making my way through the interactive documentary. Up first, chapter two: PinePointers

This chapter is dedicated to four people from Pine Point (why only 4? why these 4?). It’s divided into two main sections: Then, with 4 pages, one dedicated to each of the people/characters and what they did/looked like in high school, and Now, with 4 pages, one dedicated to each of the people/characters and what they do/look like now.

I like both the concept of having a separate chapter dedicated to people and the visual style that’s used in each of the pages. While the style doesn’t seem fitting for my project, I am interested in thinking through how I could do something similar. It’s helpful (and visually powerful) to have all of the pictures together instead of in a slide show that you need to click through. One thought: Instead of individuals, I could have generations?

chapter three: Ends and Odds

This chapter includes memorabilia (photos, a video, “Pine Point Memories,” artifacts/objects) and the narrator’s brief reflections on memory objects.

In their interviews and about this project page, the Googles discuss the origins of this project: they had been planning to do a book about “the death of the photo album as a way to house memory.” After visiting the Pine Point Revisited website, they decided to focus on creating a interactive documentary about Pine Point instead.

I like the subtle ways in which their interests in photo albums and ideas about memory and memory objects are woven into the Pine Point narrative in this chapter. My farm project is heavily influenced by my research and scholarly interest in identity, home, memory and belonging. I’d like to find ways to bring those theories in without it being overbearing or too jargon-y (or text heavy). This project provides a good model for how to make room for larger (deeper?) reflections that aren’t too “academic” or heavy-handed.

I also like their page about Richard’s hats. The page has a full screen video of Richard trying on each of the dozen hats that he had and wore when he lived in Pine Point. A brief explanation of the hats is offered in text which is layered over the video:

chapter four: Cosmos 954

This chapter offers the juxtaposition of the narrator’s (Michael Simon’s) hazy memories of living in Yellowknife, Canada when a Russian satellite (Cosmos 954) came crashing down with the seemingly sharper memories of Pine Pointers in fights, guest lists at their many parties, or the burning down of Pine Point’s high school.

Do I like this section? I can’t decide. I’m intrigued by the narrator’s story in this documentary. It’s wistful, nostalgic and reverent. He seems to long for the clear memories and accounts of happy experiences that the Pine Point Revisited site depicts. While this perspective makes for a compelling story, what stories and perspectives does it leave out or ignore?

design note: On one of the pages in this section, the text is layered over a full-screen slide show that mixes still photos with documents (poems, newspaper accounts) of the high school fire. I like the effect. How difficult is it to do with this treatment? Will it load too slowly on most computers?

chapter five: Here to Work

Wow, I like this section! It provides more reflections on memory and the work of shaping experiences into stories or legends. It really has me thinking about my struggles with memory, nostalgia, storytelling and our inclinations to memorialize things in ways that aren’t truthful. I especially like their comments on this page:

Grinding down the memories into raw superlatives…a memory depends on who we need to be at the moment of remembrance….These ideas resonate with me. The farm project is definitely shaped by my experiences in 2001-2001, when I started it, and 2002-2013, when I’m (hopefully) finishing it. I’d like to incorporate some discussion of my experiences into the project.

On Remembering

I just finished reading (mostly skimming) Geoffrey Batchen’s Forget Me Not: Photography & Remembrance. Pretty cool. Here’s a passage at the end that got me thinking:

the act of remembering someone is surely also about the positioning of oneself, about the affirmation of one’s own place in time and space, about establishing oneself within a social and historical network of relationships (97).

Batchen

I am certainly motivated by a desire to make sense of my own relationships with generations of Puotinens as I work on this project. How do I fit in? What qualities of character do I share with other Puotinen family members? I’m also interested in rooting myself in a history. Most of the time I feel deeply disconnected from my past selves and past connections. I imagine this project as a way to connect with others and with the chain of selves that I have once been.

For further reading: Forget Me Not: An Interview with Geoffrey Batchen