Sarah Beth's memoir-in-essays, Shake Terribly the Earth: Stories from an Appalachian Family, published in 2013 by Ohio University Press, weaves her personal story with the lives of four generations of her family in West Virginia. Her essays and stories about Appalachia have appeared in various literary journals, including Brevity, Wigleaf, SNReview, and The Tusculum Review.

MWW committee member Janis Thornton was in contact with Sarah Beth earlier this week and asked her about her writing and her plans for the coming MWW.

MWW: When did you first realize you are a writer?

SBC: When I was seven years old, the tuning knob fell off of our ancient television set. My two-year-old sister took the lid of a toy coffeepot and put it over the hole and turned it, like she was fixing the TV. I suddenly felt an impulse to write about it, and I found a crayon and a sheet of notebook paper. After that, I wrote all the time. When my sisters and I spent the night with our grandparents, we made a town in the upstairs hallway, and I wrote a daily newspaper that mocked my sisters and their children (their Cabbage Patch Dolls).

I also got my sisters and my little brother writing. I glued folded pieces of notebook paper together to make little books. I wrote about runaway little girls, Nazis, and adults whose brains were put into the bodies of children. My sisters wrote about bears who wouldn't go to bed and a king who kept trying to get the queen to tell him what she was getting him for Christmas. My brother wrote about hobos, outlaws, pirates, twin princes, and villains who poked people with a "roast brand."

MWW: Why did you choose to write your family's stories for your first book?

SBC: My great-grandmother started losing her memory to Alzheimer's shortly before I was born. When I was little, I sat next to her on the couch, and she held my dolls and told me stories. I loved her story about jumping off the barn roof with an umbrella and trying to fly when she was a little girl, and her stories about her mother's days as a midwife in southern West Virginia in the late 19th and early 20th century. My great-grandmother's daughters were heartbroken about the Alzheimer's, both because they were losing their mother before they lost her, and because of the loss of those stories. I decided when I was very little that someday I would write about my family to try to keep our stories from disappearing.

MWW: What is the most challenging aspect of memoir writing for you?

SBC: To write memoir well, I feel that I need to write the stories that are calling me, and to write them with as little self-censorship as possible. However, since I write family stories, I also need to write with a great deal of respect for the lives of the people in my stories. For that reason, I generally write more openly about the dead, both because their stories have a clear conclusion, and because I can't hurt that person with my writing. I also often change names, though sometimes I think that changing names doesn't work. People's names say so much about them. For example, in my book Shake Terribly the Earth: Stories from an Appalachian Family, I changed most of the names on my mother's side of the family out of respect for my mother, but I wasn't able to change her father's name, Ralph. He wouldn't be himself without the name Ralph.

MWW: While a growing number of people are writing their life stories, many others find it an overwhelming undertaking. What's your advice for getting started?

SBC: Start by writing the stories you find yourself telling orally over and over, or the story you're afraid to write but can't dismiss for some reason. It also helps to focus the memoir in somehow. Just starting with birth and going chapter by chapter through a life can work great for biographies of the famous dead, but that technique gets overwhelming and hard to publish when it comes to memoir. Try focusing in on one aspect of your life, and just tell the parts that are relevant to that particular journey. For example, Abigail Thomas focused her memoir A Three Dog Life on her husband's traumatic brain injury, and Meredith Hall focused her memoir Without a Map on her story of being ostracized for an out-of-wedlock pregnancy in the 1960s. What part of your life might speak to other people? What part are you ready to write?

MWW: You'll be teaching three memoir-writing workshops at the 2014 MWW. What would you suggest your participants bring with them, and what do you plan to give them to take home?

SBC: For Writing Memoir about the Dead:If possible, bring some artifacts that remind you of an important person who has passed away. Maybe some photographs, a letter, a quilt, a T-shirt, a stuffed animal. Anything portable that might inspire you. A letter and a photograph made it possible for me to write an essay about my grandfather's work as a railroad engineer.

For Writing Memoir about Religious Background and Experiences:If there are some primary religious texts that are part of your experience (like the King James Version of the Bible, the Quran, the Book of Mormon, the Talmud, etc), bring a copy with you if possible. Also, you have some other kind of portable artifact (an Awana vest, a prayer cloth, a rosary, etc), bring that with you, too.

For Structural Options for Memoir: If possible, bring a book, essay, article, or story that has a structure that intrigued you for some reason. It can be a memoir, or it can be a novel or informational text--just anything with a structure that you found interesting and compelling. Maybe a piece that does something interesting with the way it moves around in time, or something with a creative way of breaking the material into chapters. An example for me is the novel Sabriya: Damascus Bittersweet by Ulfat Idilbi. I read this novel in undergrad, and I was inspired by the way it began with the main character's suicide and then tells the events that lead up to that suicide. At the beginning, the suicide feels tragic and hopeless, and by the end feels it like a declaration of freedom and triumph of the self.

For all three workshops, I'll send writers home with a handout of tips and some short photocopied examples from relevant published memoirs.

MWW: What authors have influenced your writing most?

SBC: Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth: I'm inspired by her humor, her sympathetic portrayal of childhood, and her imaginative recreation of events it's not possible to perfectly remember (like herself as a toddler), since really, we can never perfectly remember anything.

David James Duncan's River Teeth: My favorite essay in this book (and one of my favorite essays of all time) is "The Mickey Mantle Koan." I'm inspired by his portrayal of his brother who died at 17. He brings his brother to life on the page, and you're left at the end with a presence instead of an absence, and an understanding that brief lives can permanently affect long ones.

Brenda Miller's Season of the Body: I'm inspired by her creative structures and the way that all of the essays very much stand alone, but also work together like sections of a book-length essay.

Abigail Thomas's Safekeeping: I'm inspired by her use of lyric short sections, and the way that those short sections work together as an achronological narrative. I'm also moved by her honesty and wisdom.

MWW: What is your next project, and when do you expect it be available?

SBC: My brother committed suicide in August 2012, and after my first book came out in November 2013, all of my writing has been about him in some way. I'm working on a creative nonfiction project that uses the brief, troubled, but brilliant life of Branwell Bront�, brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, as a lens to examine my brother's brief, troubled, and brilliant life. Like the Bront�s, my siblings and I wrote together as children, and we were also isolated by both geography and religion, in a way that corresponds interestingly to the Bront�s' isolation in Yorkshire as a clergyman's children. I've recently begun this project, so I expect it to be done in 2016 or 2017.

MWW: Please feel free to add any last thoughts or comments.

SBC: I find it really helpful to block out a couple of several-hour patches of time each week for writing. And I have some writing rituals, like particular mugs for tea, a writing candle, and my cat who sits by my leg or on the back of my chair.

Sarah Beth Childers will conduct three Part II workshops at the 2014 Midwest Writers Workshop, all on memoir writing: Memoir Writing about the Dead on Friday morning, Writing Memoir about Religious Background and Experiences on Saturday morning, and Structural Options for Memoir Saturday afternoon.