T-Shirt Chronicles

Z Is for Zoom

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 2 Comments

The Greek alphabet goes from alpha to omega. My 2021 A to Z Challenge alphabet goes from Audience to Zoom, and yes, I can see some connections between the two. Thanks to Zoom, I’ve been in the audience for webinars and panel discussions that pre-pandemic would have been held in New York, Washington, or some other place I can’t get to.

Zoom sing with Susan Robbins (2nd row center) of Libana, November 2020. I’m top row, 2nd from left.

I’ve participated in Zoom sings (Zings?) whose leaders were in California, the Boston area, or right here on Martha’s Vineyard. Zoom sings are a little weird because you can only hear the leader — it would be total cacophony if everyone unmuted — but they’re also cool because I try out harmonies and variations that I wouldn’t dare if everyone else could hear me.

Last fall I took a six-week online seminar on the novels of Toni Morrison. I’d been hankering to read or reread all her novels in order, and this got me started with Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. I’m currently doing a nine-week seminar on three William Faulkner novels: The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! The Morrison seminar was run through a local library, the Faulkner through the professor’s home base at Swarthmore College.

When 2020 began, I’d never heard of Zoom. Who had? Now a hot topic in my circles is what we think of Zoom meetings, whether our face-to-face communication skills have atrophied, and how much some of us hate looking at ourselves onscreen.

In yet another case of old dog learning new tricks, I got a Zoom Pro account early on and have become reasonably adept at scheduling and hosting meetings and at explaining Zoom features to less-experienced users.

Writing-wise I’ve got two Zoom stories. One is about my writers’ group. In ordinary times it meets every Sunday night in the cozy parlor of one member. She provides wine, juice, water, and popcorn; the rest of us contribute baked goodies and other treats from time to time. In season there’s a fire crackling in the fireplace. When shelter-in-place orders hit in mid-March we stopped meeting. I suggested Zoom, but the other members are less tech-savvy than I am, and at 69 I’m one of the group’s younger members. It didn’t happen. Without the weekly deadline, I stopped working on my novel-then-in-progress. This may turn out to be a blessing in disguise because the current structure wasn’t working and the weekly deadline, though helpful in some ways, was making it hard to stand back and consider the thing as a whole.

Not to mention — Morrison and Faulkner have shaken up my assumptions about structure and given me some ideas, and meanwhile I’ve launched a project I’d been talking about for years: a blog/memoir based on my T-shirt collection. I’ve got at least two hundred T-shirts, and they come from all the phases of my life back to 1976. It’s now a thing, so if you’re interested, check out The T-Shirt Chronicles.

Once fall arrived in earnest and meeting outside became less pleasant, the group decided to give Zoom a try. Thanks to tech support by friends and relatives, it’s worked out fine. We’re eager to get back to wine, popcorn, and a fire in the fireplace but for now Zoom works pretty well.

My other Zoom story is short. Last May in one of my other blogs, I started a post called “Living in Zoomsville,” about the abrupt shift from in-person meetings to Zoom. I never finished it and probably never will because by midsummer living in Zoomsville had become so, well, normal that I no longer felt the urge to write about it. The moral of that story is Write it while it’s hot. Don’t put it off till you have more time. Just do it. Start now.

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M Is for Memoir

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / Leave a comment

You don’t need a dictionary to tell you that “memoir” is closely related to “memory,” and you don’t need a best-seller list to tell you that memoirs — some of them, at least — are wildly popular. Put that together with the well-worn advice to “write what you know” — what do you know better than your own life, and who knows it better than you? — and hey, why not write a memoir?

Why not indeed?

If you’ve given it a try, you’ve probably discovered that it’s harder than it looks. The challenges inherent in other kinds of writing don’t disappear when you’ve taken your own life as your subject. Structure. Focus. Transitions. Laying down one sentence after another till you get to where you’re going — wherever that is.

You’ll almost certainly discover that some significant incidents in your life didn’t happen when you thought they did, or even where you thought they did. If you consult others who were around at the time — not a bad idea, if they’re still around and if you can do it in reasonable safety both to you and to them — you might find that they didn’t happen the way you remember them either. Others may remember them differently. This doesn’t mean that you’ve got it wrong, only that your version is one of several that may duplicate, complement, or even contradict each other.

Think of what goes down in a courtroom. Witnesses see the same event from different perspectives. They hear the same words spoken but come away with different interpretations, depending on what they know of the speaker and how they remember what was said.

Writing a memoir, you’re not only the eyewitness, you’re the attorney for both prosecution and defense, as well as the judge and jury. It’s not an adversarial process exactly, but be prepared to ask yourself questions that make you uncomfortable.

I didn’t set out to write a memoir, but that seems to be what I’m doing. Memoirs are often written by people who’ve done great things, or taken part in momentous events, or had extraordinary things happen to them. None of these things apply to me.

One of my very first T-shirts, from the campaign to ratify the Massachusetts Equal Rights Amendment, 1976

Well, OK, I have taken part in momentous and otherwise interesting events but usually on the peripheries. And in 1976, the year I turned 25, I started collecting T-shirts from those events. Except that I wasn’t collecting them the way collectors collect things. I was mainly adding to my wardrobe. T-shirts were colorful and cheap. They said something about me that I was pleased to have said.

At some point, maybe when I counted my T-shirts and realized I had over a hundred of them, I said “No more T-shirts.” I said it several times more over the years. When I counted my T-shirts this past winter, I had 190 so you know how that went.

For my 50th birthday party in June 2001 I hung 25 or 30 of my shirts up in the living room. People liked them. They asked questions. I told stories about where I’d got them. That was probably where I first thought that I could do more with my T-shirts than wear them.

But it was almost 20 years before, earlier this year, I launched The T-Shirt Chronicles, a memoir disguised as a blog or maybe a blog disguised as a memoir. I’m 10 posts in and I still haven’t got out of the 1970s. Come check it out and follow if you’re so inclined.

A couple dozen T-shirts hanging on two clotheslines
A selection from the collection