Life Stories #10: Cris Beam

photo: CrisBeam.com

In this installment of Life Stories, a Beatrice podcast series of interviews with memoirists about their lives and the art of memoir writing, I chat with Cris Beam, the author of Mother, Stranger, a long essay published digitally by The Atavist, which specializes in long-form narrative nonfiction. As such, some time in our conversation is spent talking about the technological innovations available to Beam in presenting her autobiographical story—from supplementary audio and video to a timeline which puts the events she writes about, after learning from a stranger about her mother’s death spurred her to revisit the memories of her childhood years, into a chronological order, allowing readers to absorb the material from another perspective.

But we also discuss things that all memoir writers have to face, such as telling the story of your relationships when the other people involved make it clear they don’t want to be included, how to communicate a memory or an experience when you don’t have the vocabulary to articulate what has happened, and the fact that finding the answers to questions about your past doesn’t always bring closure and healing…

Cris Beam is the author of Transparent, a journalistic portrait of the transgendered teens she worked with at a Los Angeles support center, and the YA novel I Am J. Her next book, Falls The Shadow: The Crisis of American Foster Care, will be published in 2013.

Listen to Life Stories #10: Cris Beam (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

(On a technical note: This is my first “field recording” for Life Stories, in that we conducted the interview in the back corner of a downtown restaurant. I was quite pleased to learn, through trial and error, that the Audacity sound editing software was able to strip away the greater portion of the background noise, but you will still hear the occasional clang or other such noises—yet not so many, I hope, as to distract from Beam’s personal and professional revelations.)

9 July 2012 | life stories |

Mark Strand, “With Only the Stars to Guide Us”

photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Whenever the giants turned in for the night, taking their huge toys with them, we were left nothing to play with, and slept under sofas and chairs. The gift of bigness would never be ours. This was a truth against which we had tried again and again to turn our tiny backs, and each time had failed. Undone by sorrow, some of us found solace in prayer, and others, like ourselves, chose to follow wild dogs through the dark, moose-crowded woods of the northland, nursing our hurt until we dropped.

Almost Invisible is a collection of short prose poems by former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand published at the beginning of 2012. It collects works from, among other publications, Slate (“The Engima of the Infinitesimal” and “Every So Many Hundred Years Hence“), LIttle Star (“The Students of the Ineffable” and “The Triumph of the Infinite”), and Poetry (“Futility in Key West,” “Mystery and Solitude in Topeka,” “No Words Can Describe It,” “The Minister of Culture Gets His Wish,” and “The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter“).

Oh, and five poems in Boston Review, where Nicholas Christopher praises Strand for his “clean lines, taut narratives, and carefully framed mise-en-scènes.” I’d add only that they have for me the surreal specificity of dream images—sharp, distinct tableaux of things that shouldn’t quite fit together yet somehow do, and in doing so impress themselves upon your memory.

5 July 2012 | poetry |