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The scene never left him, and 45 years later he enrolled at Northwestern to write it down. After turning out 30 more stories about the camp, he hired an editor to help shape them into a book and published it himself. Several copies were sent to German groups that maintain Holocaust archives. Hausner was afraid he would run out of things to write about, but he's found support among the group members, and the exchange of ideas keeps them all writing. So far, he has produced dozens of stories about his business careers, his travels and a 55th high school reunion that will probably go into a second self-published book. He carries around a legal pad so that he can jot down ideas for more. Louise DeSalvo, who is the author of Writing as a Way of Healing and teaches memoir writing at New York City's Hunter College, urges her students to note stray thoughts that bubble up from their unconscious minds while they are doing ordinary things like household chores.
Nothing is so mundane that it can't be woven into a memoir. Maureen Murdoch teaches a course titled the Art of the Memoir through the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, one of a dozen course offerings that cover everything from novelistic memoirs to personal essays. "As long as the tale has a universal theme, drama and insight," she stresses, "no incident is too small." Exemplifying these qualities are the stories of Yvette Audet, 66, a Maine widow who writes detailed accounts of her childhood: of rising before dawn on cold mornings to pick potatoes on neighboring farms, of kneeling nightly with her family and reciting the Rosary. Before Audet, a mother of six, began taking Ledoux's workshop in Lewiston, she taught herself to type and even went back to school to get a general equivalency diploma. Audet's education was ended after eighth grade so she could care for younger siblings while their parents worked in a mill. She still uses the Smith-Corona she bought in 1990 and keeps it beside her sunny kitchen window.
Finding the truth is one of the most difficult hurdles for a memoirist. Gail Hall Howard, 52, writes memoirs and teaches memoir writing at Connecticut's University of Bridgeport. "There isn't just one version of the truth," she maintains. "We remember certain things in different ways, and our understanding changes over time." Everyone sees childhood through grownup eyes. The memoirist's task is to bring back the reality of the child's view filtered through adult perceptions and make that truth into a compelling story.
Don Anderson of San Francisco set out to write down his past as honestly as he could, but that was only one of his motives. "I wanted to write a good story, and I didn't have any other story to write, so I wrote my own," he says. To transform an ordinary life into extraordinary reading, Anderson, 64, has put in a few hours each day, five days a week, for nine years, and is now polishing a 1,200-page draft. His only brush with formal training was a class 12 years ago at San Francisco State, and he taught himself to type before retiring at age 55 from his job producing instructional material for the Social Security Administration. He studied the writing craft by reading entire shelvesful of books and points to Marcel Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, as inspiration.