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Peg Murray
"Writing Herstory resembles nothing so much as the science of archeology. You travel to a vast expanse of nothingness with only the small comb of intelligent curiosity and begin to scratch the surface of memory.
“With patience and perseverance, valuing every fragment and bone without qualification, you collect, strain and dust off what the past yields. Above all, you respect every find. Some edges fit, bits of color match and one day, a skeleton with shreds of satisfying evidence and shards of brittle truth lies before you. A whole person who lived a whole life is revealed.
“You polish the pieces and cry with joy and relief. You have discovered the source of light for your life.
“I came to Erika Duncan’s class to write about my Broadway and TV experience. But she asked the same perceptive questions she asked us all, and I found myself writing about my family when I was three. I had forgotten I ever was three.
“I thought my life began with Ethel Merman in Gypsy and reached its high points with Tennessee Williams and Burt Reynolds.
“In Herstory, I began to realize and appreciate that I was once a child, then a girl, then a woman in the satisfying progression of a full life.
“If ‘the unexamined life is not worth living,’ then Herstory increases life’s value a hundredfold and what’s more, it’s fun."
Peg Murray appeared in 15 Broadway productions, including “the mama” in Fiddler onthe Roof, Gypsy with Ethel Merman and She Loves Me with Barbara Cook. She won a Tony Award for her performance in Cabaret and starred in an NBC primetime series and as “Olga” in “All My Children” for 14 years.
Pat Gorman
"The Herstory Writers Workshop is more than a wonderful place to learn how to write our stories well: for me, it is instrumental in saving my life.
“I came to the workshop to write about my experience in coming to terms with a life-threatening illness of Native American origin in my blood.
“What I got was much more: by being encouraged to seek the truth in the details of the experience, I began to unravel the seeds of the disease: my mixed Native American/ Irish Catholic background; my father’s telling me that I must hide the Native American rituals and wisdom he was teaching me; my mother’s complete denial of my mixed blood. It was only when I was given ways to go into more detail in my writing that experiences that previously were buried came back to me: secretly learning Sioux practices like the rain dance in the backyard in Queens while hiding from my mother and the rest of the world; the physical violence that spilled over from the pressure of denial.
“These workshop experiences have led me much deeper into the concept of auto-immunity, where one is the perpetrator as well as the victim of violence within oneself. And in my particular case, the analogy goes even further: the Native American antigen I carry in my blood looks like or “mimics” Salmonella. In an ironic playing out of history, even since I was exposed to food poisoning six years ago, the white cells in my body have continued to attack the red cells carrying the Native American antigen.
“This level of understanding has come out of my work in the Herstory project, and as each of these realizations emerged, something startling happened: I would physically feel some of the pain and debility lift from my body, bit by bit, as though facing the ugly secrets and hatreds was actually changing the nature of the illness.”
Hazel Weiser
LOVING BUDDHA MAMA - A Daughter's Memoir
"A year after my mother died and just a week after my nine-year-old daughter left for overnight summer camp for the first time, I joined the then-Wednesday night West Babylon Herstory Writers Workshop. I had known about Herstory through the Long Island Fund for Women & Girls, and knew that the women who came weekly were often recovering from traumas in their lives. ‘My mother's death was sad, but hardly a tragedy,’ I explained. I am an attorney, a legal writer actually; when in practice, I was the brief writer for my office, and later as a law professor, I taught legal writing for 10 years. I wanted to tell the story of how I cared for my mother as she died, but I came to my first Herstory session hesitantly. After all, I hadn't suffered a trauma, merely the sadness of losing my mother when she was already 80-years-old. How could I come to this group and tell my story when the other women's lives were so overwhelmingly sad, filled as they were with catastrophe, cruelty and devastation so that my own story seemed inconsequential and ordinary?
“When I arrived that first night, it appeared that our stories would be very different. We were an assortment of women – African and Caribbean American, Puerto Rican, Jewish, Italian and Muslim – some raised with more or less, some working or not, some very public and others very private. Immediately I learned that although our voices were different, as were the details of our stories, the themes of our books were the same: love, betrayal, loss, reconciliation, forgiveness and hope.
“I learned to love these women, to share the intimacies of our lives, to see the world through each of their eyes, all the while my capacity for empathy evolving so I could go deeper inside to find my own authentic voice. I rarely missed a weekly meeting. I tried to write everyday. My work and family life had to conform to Wednesday evenings at Herstory. The support and love I received from the group motivated me to continue writing when my current life became distracting or laziness cast over me, because the Herstory women wanted me to tell my tale. And after 19 months, I completed a crafted, first draft and then spent over a year editing and polishing.
“The story I would have written is very different from the story I ended up writing in Herstory. Erika's insights bore through my defenses and histrionics. She saw through my gimmicks and embellishments. She slowed me down, she helped me remember the details, she pushed me to places I was afraid to venture to. All the while I felt love and appreciation from the women in my group.
“I am a writer by nature. I narrate my life as it goes along. I've had writing teachers before, but no one like Erika Duncan, and none like the women in the West Babylon Wednesday night group. They taught me how to translate an episode in my life into a story that a stranger might want to read. And hopefully, some day soon, you, too, can read LOVING BUDDHA MAMA."
Linda Coleman
“I am one of the original Herstory participants. My story is about a 22-year-old woman (me) who, in 1974, has turned her back on her family of origin, a family of wealth and privilege and whose avowed social conscience seems to exist in stark contradiction to their extravagant life style. Finding these contradictions intolerable in light of the events of this time of societal upheaval, I have chosen to join a family of revolutionaries, men and women from working class backgrounds, ex-convicts and Vietnam veterans, who have apparently devoted their lives to actualizing the values of true justice and equality that I believe in. As the only member of the group with any money to spend, I quickly get drawn into circumstances that present hugely difficult and dangerous choices.
“I have been struggling through the writing of this memoir for almost six years. It is definitely the most challenging creative project I have ever undertaken, and now thkat I look back on the 390 pages of the final manuscript, I wonder who could have written all of that!
“I'd like to posit that Erika's to blame that it took so long. I'm going to explain in a roundabout way what I mean by that.
“Herstory isn't a writing class. We aren't taught structure, plot, how to write dialogue. Everyone is expected to learn these skills, sort of in the same way a child learns to roll over, to sit up to walk and then to talk. We learn as we go along, partly by trial and error, partly by imitating others more experienced in the group who help to guide us. But all along we're learning how to write mainly through the process of uncovering who we are as narrators of this story we want to tell, and how to tell the truth, the whole experiential truth about it.
“Vivian Gormick, a teacher and writer of memoir, wrote in her book The Situation and the Story: ‘Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand . . .The question clearly being asked in an exemplary memoir is ‘Who am I?’ Who exactly is this ‘I’ upon whom turns the significance of this story-taken-directly-from-life? On that question the writer of memoir must deliver. Not with an answer but with depth of inquiry.’
“Gormick goes on to say that as memoir writers, we have to make the reader feel that we're ‘actively working to strip down our anxiety till we can get to something hard and true beneath the smooth surface of our sentimental self-regard.’
“Now, that’s tough. The smooth surface of our sentimental self-regard. You want to get down there but the way has many detours, many obstacles – it’s more difficult than you thought to get to very “truth” and then to let the narrative unfold. It can take years and years to write a book that way. Six years. That's what I mean about it being Erika's fault. But that's her magic as a teacher. She is fiercely dedicated to the truth in a most loving and humorous way, and she doesn't let us, or herself, get away with one moment, one sentence of that ‘smooth surface.’
“It now seems a very natural evolution on my own journey through this life to have become a Herstory facilitator. In many ways, I am deeply devoted to “the truth,” however it can be experienced – through the written word, through an intimate encounter or experience of sight, sound or silence. And I have always loved to work with people who appreciate that same investigation. There is never a Herstory workshop that fails to deliver many such moments. And for that I will be forever grateful to have found this work.”
Lonnie Mathis
“I came to Herstory Writers Workshop knowing I wanted to write a book. I knew there was a story to be told, that somehow I had something to teach, that my life experiences could perhaps help someone else. I just didn’t know what I wanted to write, how I would write it, what exactly I had to teach.
“On each member’s first day with the Herstory Writers’ Workshop, a single question is asked: “Where would you want to start? What scene of your life would you open with on page one?” I didn’t have to search my memory for very long. My answer came quickly, weighing heavily on my mind, speeding my heart rate, halting my breathing, churning in the pit of my stomach, making it difficult for me to sit still as I waited for my turn to share. My turn finally came. ‘I would start on the day my life ended and the day my life began.’ As soon as the words were spoken I knew I would have to explain. For some reason I hadn’t thought of that while I waited for everyone else to share their starting points. So I repeated it: ‘I would start on the day my life ended and the day my life began.’ It was the day I got my first memory of childhood abuse and life as I had known it changed forever.
“The events of childhood forgotten out of necessity are unearthed in my first memoir, Childhood is a Relative Experience. While my participation in the Herstory Writers Workshop has taught me a lot about the writing process, it has more importantly been a vehicle for healing some of the wounds of abuse. ‘You just can’t tell a reader how bad a person is and the bad things he/she did. You have to let the reader see the character. You have to bring the reader into the experience of the character.’ Erika Duncan only had to tell me that one time. Suddenly the scene I had written about one of my abusers turned into a chapter. Bringing the reader into my experience of that person awakened in me, for the very first time since my recovery, the true impact of the betrayal I had experienced. You see, before I could tell of the abuse, I had to tell the story of the relationship and of how very much I depended on this person. This was just one hurdle of writing that had to be conquered. Every new scene, every new character brought with it a new hurdle and a new technique or treatment to be explored.”
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