Mark Nepo's Thoughts on Memoir and Voice: Seven Thousand Ways to Listen
Mark Nepo and his beloved Mira.
Oprah Winfrey has said that Mark Nepo’s writing takes her breath away. His The Book of Awakening has sold steadily since its publication in 2000 and then climbed up the bestseller lists in 2011 after Oprah picked it as one of her “favorite things.” Now Mark is ready to launch a new book called Seven Thousand Ways to Listen. I’ve preordered it. If you want to do the same, I’ve included a link at the end of this post.
Mark and I have been friends for many years. Recently he took time to answer questions about memoir and voice. Hope you enjoy.
Question: Most of your books include a number of personal stories as one way to relay the underlying spiritual concepts you are trying to illustrate. Was it ever difficult for you to share your own doubts, fears, triumphs? How important to your “expert” voice is your “memoir” voice?
Response: Let me begin by admitting that I don’t believe in the cult of expertise that dominates our age, that sets one voice above others. I believe and bear witness to the mysterious fact and resource that each of us has a depth of wisdom available, when we dare to minimize what stands between us and life, and live as openly and authentically as possible.
As with most things, the original notions of expert and memoir are connected underneath their contemporary meanings, in the unity that weaves all things together. It’s interesting that the word expert traces back to the Latin expertus, meaning “to try, to test.” And so, the original notion of an expert evolved as “a person wise through experience.” Note this doesn’t say that a person wise through experience is wise about all experience. That’s a leap we’ve made over the centuries, which steers people away from the discovery of their own wisdom. And the word memoir appears in the early 15th century, as an Anglo-French word, memorie, meaning “something written to be kept in mind.” So, the teacher that is our experience is the expert we all can discover through the ongoing conversation with our very own life. Memoir is the first-hand way to keep what matters in mind.
I have always felt that the personal is the only true and honest way to discover the Universal. Again, not believing that one size, one life, fits all. But the opposite, that the shared common center of living can be discovered through the particular story we are living, when entered honestly. In this way, I’ve come to realize that everything that matters is both personal and Universal. I’ve always felt that the space of writing is the one place where I can tell the truth as I experience it, with no one over my shoulder, even when I’m wrong.
Bringing my full humanity and the experiments of my life out in the open doesn’t instruct others how to live, but the truth of such attempts helps me live and, when true, opens the space of aliveness so that anyone listening or reading can explore their own. It is this common acre that is the ground of all my work. I guess, in the beginning, I ventured into this way of writing to create my own authentic community.
Question: How has your personal voice evolved over time?
Response: Before I even knew about poetry or spirit, the world spoke to me in metaphor. As a child, solitude was anything but quiet, but rather a place where the connections inherent in things showed themselves and I would listen, feeling their company. Of course, I had no language for any of this. It was in high school that I first started writing poetry, when the first woman I fell in love with dumped me. I had many acquaintances, but no real friends till college. So I began to talk to myself and this helped heal my broken heart. I found depth and resilience in this self-conversation, which wasn’t just self-referential. I had discovered through my pain how to open the self as a portal to everything larger than me. That was the conversation that was healing. And so, I had found a way to continue my conversation with the Universe.
In my thirties, it was my cancer journey that opened and evolved my voice even further.That three-year journey, coming so close to death and even closer to life, deepened and broadened my way of exploration. When I was ill, I was blessed to have kind souls from so many different traditions offer some form of prayer and healing. Being blessed to wake on the other side, I was not wise enough to know what worked and what didn’t. I was challenged simply to believe in everything. From that point forward, for the next 25 years, I have been a student of all the spiritual traditions, devoted to the common center from which they all arise; not how we are different, but where we are the same.
Before my cancer journey, I pursued a holistic view of things, but I was a driven artist, governed by my mind. Almost dying dropped my center of living. The center of my wakefulness had melted, like snow in March, from my head into my heart. I have lived from that center ever since, my mind serving my heart.
During my forties, I continued to discover my own voice, in which the genres became, more and more, tools in a toolbox, serving one encompassing form. This feels natural and comfortable to me: to use whatever form is necessary to stay close to what is alive and true, be it poetry, scholarship, story, philosophy, history, or memoir.
During my fifties, the very nature of writing evolved for me into more of a conversation than a statement, into a journey of listening over authoring. Writing has become a process of relationship by which I discover meaning. I have always felt that writing is a matter of retrieving what is already there but out of view, rather than creating something out of nothing.
In this, all artists come alive when discovering God and are stymied when playing God. All this has affirmed that poetry is the unexpected utterance of the soul. The words are just the trail of that inquiry. Like many others, I began by wanting to write great poems. Then life humbled me into the need to discover true poems that would help me live. Now I want to be the poem, to stay as close to life as possible.
I’ve had the privilege of witnessing some of the transformation Mark speaks about. I love his idea that we come alive when discovering God and choke when we play God. If you have questions for Mark, feel free to offer them below. He might be able to spare a few minutes in the busy days right before his new book launches. Do you have thoughts of your own about coming to voice that were stimulated by reading about Mark’s journey?
Love the interview! I resonated with this statement from Mark. “Before my cancer journey, I pursued a holistic view of things, but I was a driven artist, governed by my mind. Almost dying dropped my center of living. The center of my wakefulness had melted, like snow in March, from my head into my heart. I have lived from that center ever since, my mind serving my heart.” I find that my “center of living” fluctuates within the day. But I can breathe the most, dream the most, and be most open to receiving love and wisdom of others (and from myself) when my center of living has dropped. I can almost feel it happening – a physical opening of the heart – broken open even. Brother David spoke to this recently, how gratefulness is one path to that opening of our heart. I so look forward to the book!! Thanks and much love to you both!!
I too have learned to monitor my days and my interior life to actually feel the mind “drop” into the heart. Brother David can help us do that just by his presence in a room.
Thank you, Gillian, for taking time to greet us both. I’m so grateful (get it?) that social media allows us to stay connected.
Mark has walked his talk. I too am eager to read this book.
Mark and Shirley,
Thank you both for this wonderful interview!
Mark, The Book of Awakening has been my wise and inspirational companion over the past several years and this interview further expands on that:
“Memoir is the first-hand way of keeping what matters most” and “voice evolves through life experiences”, among other things, resonated.
It’s amazing how a life experience like cancer- when we face our mortality- offers the opportunity to awaken to life. I share in that experience and am grateful for the gift of perspective that resulted.
I look forward to Seven Thousand Ways to Listen.
Kathy,
I hope you get a chance to meet Mark in person some day. The two of you do indeed have much in common. I have had the pleasure of seeing and listening (!) to Mark read his poetry and to witness how touched people are by the moments of his life that need to be remembered and shared.
Thanks for sharing tweets about this post, too.
Your generosity is obviously a gift.
I don’t believe in the cult of expertise that dominates our age either; it feels like false worship to me, like following the herd instead of the shepherd. Thank you for the etymology lesson Mark. And thank you for this wonderful interview Shirley – the best I’ve read in ages it seems. How refreshing and enlightening at the same time.
“… all artists come alive when discovering God and are stymied when playing God.” Yes!
Debra, you picked out one of my own favorite lines in this interview. And you added one of your own — following the herd instead of the shepherd. What a good image for where most of us head when we aren’t listening to the wisdom of the heart.
Thank you, Shirley and Mark. “The Book of Awakening” has been a key, grounding and uplifting, part of my mornings, and it has helped usher me through a hard, transformative year of healing and growth … one day at a time.
Now I’ve gotta’ get down to writing the (hi)story of a little boy named Jon.
Jon, thanks for sharing this comment. I know Mark has seen and appreciated it also. The best reward in writing any book is knowing that you have touched others and helped them get through their own difficult stretches.
And I’m so glad you want to write about your childhood. You will learn a lot.
I love this with its holistic emphasis rather than a writing-first approach. The health or wholeness or the simple struggle feed the writing, it seems.
Yes, Richard. Mark’s journey is a helpful one. His model of discovery and immersion into the story has helped me reduce the anxiety I feel about the need to perform or be original.
Dear Shirley and Mark,
Thank you for this interview!
Thank you for responding from your heart full of wisdom, offering words to nurture our own experiences and writing lives.
Your authentic writing speaks so deeply to me, and The Book of Awakening has been my daily companion for a number of years.
I celebrate your journey and life, Mark, with its trials and joys entered, reflected upon, set out for us to enter into.
Blessings!!
Joy, So good to have your comment and to know that you are one of the huge numbers of people who have been touched by Mark’s work. I am sure that you gain even more from The Book of Awakening by using it over and over again.
I hope you will enjoy Mark’s new book just as much. The link above takes you to the order page. Tomorrow is launch day I think!
What a lovely interview! What resonates with me is the comment about being an expert. It’s something that writers who aspire to be published wrestle with. We’re told that we need to propel ourselves to expert status to be listened to. Before I found a publisher, I remember being in a memoir workshop and the instructor (ie: expert) said that although I had a good premise for a book and a compelling story, unless I could elevate myself to being seen as an expert, it was unlikely anyone would read my book.
She continued teaching but my heart was broken. My father’s story was important; I knew that. I lost a few nights sleep trying to think of ways to make myself an expert. An expert at what? Being a daughter? Helping a father through Post-traumatic Stress Disorder? It didn’t make sense to me.
Then an author said, ‘You don’t need to be an expert. You already are one. You’re the daughter of your father.” Those words freed me up to keep doing what I already knew needed to be done – to find a publisher that believed in my work as much as I did.
Anyway – thank you! It’s important information. It really is!
Hi, Karen, so glad to meet you through your comment here and on other posts.
Yes, I have heard the same advice about claiming expert space. It was so refreshing to have Mark challenge this concept.
Your testimonial to the truth of your own experience is right on. In memoir, no one is more expert than you. I’m off to check out your website!