Inside the Mind - Don Schofield

From the start I wanted to avoid a conventional linear structure. I felt the appropriate form for a memoir, at least my memoir, was one that allowed for moving back and forth between past and present, child and adult. Ever since I started writing poetry (in my mid-twenties) I’ve been reflecting back on my turbulent childhood and early adult years, wondering how I survived them, and what impact those years have had on my present way of doing things—both functional and dysfunctional. And as an expat I’ve been braiding cultures, American and Greek, ancient and modern, for over four decades now. So to me a braided structure just seemed natural.

One of the things that truly amazed me when I first came to Greece was how landscapes here, especially in central Greece, echoed the landscapes of my best childhood years, in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Touring Greece at 26, I was again riding buses between rows of towering eucalyptus trees, past orchards and vineyards, produce spilling out from roadside fruit and vegetable stands, whole families on tractors rumbling along the dirt shoulder. The warmth and raucousness of the Greeks reminded me of that Italian foster mother and Cherokee foster father I lived with for a few years in Fresno. In Greece I also found myself immersed in the landscapes I first encountered as a boy in Bible stories and Greek myths. “Real shepherds minding their flocks, real fishermen mending their nets,” as I write in the memoir.

For me, the Cyclops Cave was both very real and incredibly mythical. The Cyclops Cave existed, built into the rocks of an isolated cove on the eastern coast of Kythnos, a little-touristed (at that time) Cycladic island. No road. No running water, No electricity. A well for good water, another for bad. The cliff face, whitewashed, was one wall of the Cave. Sheep grazed on the slope above it. The sea lapped at the rocks below. Easy to see how a Cyclops could live there. And easy to see how that primitive hut was, for me, both real and storied. That Cave in Náoussa cove became a sanctuary of sorts, a place to write and so dive deep into myself, a place of solitude, where I could go for days without seeing or talking to anyone, just me, with the sound of the sea by day, the cloak of stars by night. As a poet, and as a loner since childhood, I longed for solitude. That’s what being in that cove, that Cave, gave me: the chance to be alone, and to immerse myself into the elementary, sun-stunned terrain of a Cycladic island. Being alone on that island also meant confronting my demons. So much tranquillity surrounding me, yet the Cyclops within me found ways to hold forth there on Kythnos. And, like it or not, I was there to at last come to terms with him. But the Cyclops Cave also meant connection—whether I wanted it or not. All but one of the about 10 or so families living in Náoussa resided in a cluster of small houses on the opposite side of the cove. Yet those neighbors, curious about the American, made a point of passing by now and then.

I first started writing in my mid-twenties, when I discovered that through poetry I could go deep into my own experience—instead of running away from it, which I’d done up until then—and make meaning out of a childhood of abuse, abandonment and fragmented emotions. Writing gave me the freedom to explore myself and others, especially those priests and nuns and parental figures who’d impacted my life so intensely. What’s more, I discovered that through writing I could play again. Writing gave me permission to frolic with language, with memories, and with the voice of that abandoned, angry boy inside me. Later, living in Greece, I discovered that writing could be a way to explore this new, modern yet ancient world I was living in. And, more recently, in writing the memoir, I discovered writing, especially narrative, could bring in more voices, and could weave them and all those earlier discoveries into a meaningful, more revealing whole.

I was lucky. I had excellent teachers both when I turned to poetry and five decades later, when I turned to memoir. My first mentor, poet Dennis Schmitz, taught me the many possibilities of poetry, the freedoms language can open up, and the need for precision. My second mentor, Richard Hugo, taught me the importance of place (mine turned out not to be Montana or California, but Greece), how meaning comes through the music of language, and how, in writing, emotional truth is far more important than literal truth.

When I turned to memoir, again I got lucky. I took two online memoir workshops through UCLA. I learned a lot from the workshop participants in both courses, and even more from both instructors. Though she wouldn’t say it like this, Liz Stephens taught me basically what Michael Jordan had to learn when, for a year, he left the NBA to play major league baseball: if I wanted to go from poetry to book-length narrative I had to change my entire writing “musculature.” And Barbara Abercrombie taught me to trust my instincts, especially regarding form, and to pay close attention to the boy in my memoir. “He’s the interesting one.”

More healing and discovery than a reckoning. I learned a long time ago (thankfully) how writing deeply and honestly about trauma can lead to healing. And, as I mention above, writing as discovery is what led me to my first attempts at poetry. Turning to memoir forced me to look at my life more expansively than poetry had allowed for. Telling a larger story forced me to bring the fragments of traumatic experience together, along with the fragments of wonder that brought me to Greece, and to shape those shards into a coherent, compelling narrative. As happens in emotionally honest writing, I did, in the end, come to see the major figures in my life—my father, stepmother, foster parents, children’s home nuns and priests, as well as teachers and friends—from a fuller, more empathetic perspective. And too I saw myself, the boy and the Cyclops within me, with greater awareness. In that sense, I guess the memoir to a kind of reckoning as well.

The most difficult: Learning how to write a coherent book-length narrative. Developing different writing muscles, as I say above. Balancing story and reflection. Shaping sentences paragraphs and entire chapters instead of lines and stanzas. Keeping dialogue crisp. Keeping the story moving. Moving clearly from one narrator to the other. And of course staying emotionally honest throughout. Oh, and rewriting, over and over—very difficult. The most liberating: Feeling the flow of prose when it works. And getting to know those characters from my life, including myself as a boy and an adult, with the kind of depth only writing a long narrative can provide.

That, in the long run, the most important value is self-awareness, no matter where you are, or what harm you’ve experienced. And that openness to wonder goes a long way.

Hang in there. Trust your instincts. And trust that love does exist. You’ll be okay.