LifeWriters Talk About LifeWriting

In 1997, Susan Wittig Albert founded the Story Circle Network. In the three short years since, the Network has grown to a sizable national organization which includes two chapters, a major grant project, and an extensive web site. For 30+ years, Susan has kept a journal, taught journaling and memoir writing, and committed herself to exploring her own life through writing. She’s also the editor of the Story Circle Journal, so for this article, Sarah Silvus, a member of the Story Circle board of directors, asked the questions!

Story Circle Journal: What would you like us to know about you, Susan? What's important in your life?

Susan Wittig Albert: Besides Story Circle? Is there time for anything else? (laughter) Well, I'd like you to know that I'm a mother (of three), grandmother (of six), and wife (of nearly 14 years, to my writing partner Bill Albert). I write for a living: two mystery series, several bi-monthly magazine columns, a bi-weekly radio show, and other odds and ends of writing projects. My work is important to me, and my family, and Story Circle. I cherish the place where Bill and I live, and my gardens, and our dog Zach.

SCJ: Lots of people are curious about the writing life. What's it like to be a writer?

SWA: I write two novels a year (one of them with Bill). Each one takes about four months to complete. When I'm writing, it's like any other job: I show up in the office by nine, knock off for an hour at noon, and turn off the computer around 4:30. Of course, there are phone calls and email (what was life like before email?) and the dog to walk and the laundry and so forth—all kinds of wonderful distractions. But I'm a fairly disciplined person, and I know that the book won't get written if I don't show up at the computer. And if the book doesn't get written, Bill and I don't eat and Zach doesn't get any puppy biscuits. That's a pretty powerful motivation, wouldn't you say?

SCJ: So you work at a computer? Have you always done it that way?

SWA: Omigosh, Sarah, I've just had my 60th birthday! I'm old enough to remember writing on yellow tablets! Seriously, though: I like to write by hand, and my journal (which I've kept for over 30 years) is handwritten, in a cheap spiral-bound notebook with narrow-ruled lines, with a black-ink pen. Writing by hand forces me to write more slowly and to feel the words as they come out of my pen. But since the early 80s I've used a computer/word processor for all other kinds of writing. The computer is a wonderful tool which encourages me to write faster and better. It gives me the ability to revise infinitely, and every revision (I hope) makes the text livelier and denser and cleaner. For a period in the middle 80s, when my life was changing faster than I was, I kept my journal on the computer too. That way, I wrote more—and I needed to write lots, just to try to understand what was going on.

SCJ: Why do you keep a journal?

SWA: I journal because I want to remember who I have been, know who I am now, and imagine who I'm going to be when I grow up! If I don't write down what's happened, I'll forget it—and I want to remember my life, even the bad parts. So journal and memoir writing, for me, are ways to collect memories before they've faded, to keep them from vanishing forever into the flood of day-to-day experience. But I also write to discover myself, and to try to understand out why I'm doing what I'm doing. And I'm always exploring new scenarios for the future, thinking out what I might want to do, how I might change some aspect or another of my life. My journal is the real story of my life—or at least, as it seems to me, living it.

SCJ: Do you see a difference between journaling and memoir writing?

SWA: Well, we're working with life experience, so in that sense it's the same. But when I journal, I'm primarily dealing with my daily life, making a few side trips into the past and detours into the future. When I'm writing memoir, I'm reconstructing the past, trying to create a coherent picture of some important (to me) event. Also, when I'm writing memoir, I often visualize an audience, someone to whom I'm telling my story. When I'm journaling, my audience is me, and it's very private. I'm fascinated by this boundary between public and private. Where is our real story? Is it what we tell to ourselves? Or what we tell to others?

SCJ: But you've put your journal up on the Internet. That's not private at all!

SWA: That's true—I do write a garden journal that goes onto the MysteryPartners website that I share with my husband Bill. But I intentionally write that journal for publication, with an audience in mind. I write about gardening in my fiction and in garden magazines, so my garden journal is an extension of my work. But writing a journal for publication is very different than writing for yourself. When I'm writing for publication, I'm always thinking of how a reader is going to respond to what I've written. When I write for myself, I'm the only reader. I think I'm more truthful, more honest, when I'm writing for myself. I enjoy reading published journals, like those by May Sarton—but these are the public version of private stories. There's more to it than that!

SCJ: Let's talk about the Story Circle Network. Why did you begin it?

SWA: I taught journal writing at the Jung Society in Austin for some years, and also taught writing workshops. Most of the participants were women, and they were all eager to write and share something of their lives. As I listened to them, I realized how rare it is for women to come together to write about their lives and how hungry we all are for that powerful and empowering experience. It was as if we had these stories inside of us, bottled up, and we were just waiting for someone to be willing to listen. I realized that many of us were voice-less, that we desperately need to be heard, and as time went along, I began to see how our lives might be transformed by the telling and sharing of our stories. I wrote Writing From Life: Telling Your Soul's Story, to encourage women to do, on their own, what we were doing in our classes and workshops.

But when the book was published, I began to feel that it wasn't enough just to put it out there and hope that women would discover and benefit from it. Other "self-help" authors encouraged me to start giving workshops and go on what they called the "lecture circuit"—apparently there's a lot of money to be made from that sort of thing! But I felt that I wanted to create something more enduring, and that an organization (which would outlive my involvement in it) would offer a more substantial empowerment to more women.

That's a long answer to a short question. I can sum it up by saying that Story Circle began with the three ideas. First, that women's stories are both valuable and vital—important to our families, to our communities, and to ourselves. Second, that we need encouragement to believe this and keep believing it. And third, that we need support to act on this belief—to write and keep on writing. We need to be connected to other women who believe, as we do, that telling our stories is one of the most important, life-enhancing things we can do for ourselves.

SCJ: So in your mind, Story Circle Network is really a support network?

SWA: Exactly! The Story Circle Journal is designed to carry the message that telling our stories is important to our psychological and to our physical health, and important to our families and communities as well. The Story Circles themselves, in various communities, help to motivate and encourage women, and to keep them connected with one another. In Austin, we also do this through the activities of our Austin Chapter—writing circles, reading circles, storytelling circles—and we hope that women in other communities will copy these ideas and start their own chapters. And there's the new Internet Chapter, which we hope will help women to stay connected and help one another stay true to the belief that telling and sharing our stories is vitally important.

SCJ: Well, then, can you tell us a little more of your own story—the real story?

SWA: I can tell you some of it—but of course, there's more, all muddled up, and with a great many contradictions! Like many women who were children in the middle of this century, I was born in one generation and grew up in another, and I have spent my life in meeting challenges and trying to take advantage of opportunities. It's been a chaotic 60 years!

I was born in 1940 and spent my childhood in a rural area of east-central Illinois, where I learned to love open fields and animals and gardens. It wasn't an altogether happy childhood, because my father was an alcoholic (although in those days, we didn't have a vocabulary for this—we just called it a "drinking problem"). I married at 18 and had three children before I was 22. In 1963, when my children were aged 2, 3, and 4, I decided to enroll at the University of Illinois, in Urbana, where my husband and I were living.

Choosing to go to college is an unremarkable thing today, but four decades ago it was an unusual decision for a young mother. At 23, I belonged to an organization called SOTA— Students Older Than Average—and I was the only mother in the entire freshman class of 1200! I had no women college professors during my undergraduate years, so there wasn't anyone I could talk to about my dream of becoming an English professor. But Betty Friedan had just written The Feminine Mystique, women were beginning to enter the career culture, and there was a powerful electricity in the air—a sense of high hopes and wonderful dreams. When I entered graduate school at Berkley in 1968, two other mothers entered at the same time, and we even had a tenured woman faculty member (but just one) to encourage our professional ambitions. I began keeping my journal in that year, so I can go back and reread my hopes and despairs, my weariness, my joys. Those were extraordinary times, and I'm glad to have kept a record of them.

By 1972, I had a Ph.D. in English and a new job (at the University of Texas), but no husband—we divorced along the way. In 1974, I remarried, and for the next 13 years I taught English and held administrative positions in several universities in Texas and Louisiana.

SCJ: You worked hard to create a successful academic career, but you left it in 1985. Why?

SWA: I left because the stress of my work (I was a university vice-president) was making me physically ill and because I no longer wanted to pursue my ambition of becoming a university president. I'd just gone through my third divorce and was beginning to realize that I had followed an essentially male career model, sacrificing my relationship life to my professional life. After journaling about it for two years, writing out my fears and anger and frustrations and dreams, I decided to leave the university and become a full-time writer. I married Bill Albert in 1986, and we moved to his five-acre property 60 miles from Austin. Now we have 25 acres, and I have room to garden, time to write, and Story Circle to keep me connected with women who care about women’s stories. It’s a wonderful life.

SCJ: We've been looking back—what do you see for yourself when you look into the future?

SWA: To tell the truth, I have no idea what lies ahead, and I'm at a time in my life when I'm very comfortable with that uncertainty. I want to continue writing and gardening and living in the country. I want to stay involved with Story Circle, although I hope very much that other women will want to assume leadership roles in the organization. And as long as I have my journal, I'll be able to keep in touch with what my "Continuous Self" wants and needs Whatever comes along, I'll look forward to the experience of new chapters in my life!

You can keep in touch with Susan by reading her web journal. Go to www.mysterypartners.com and click on "Susan's Meadow Knoll Journal." She and her husband/writing partner Bill also publish an occasional free newsletter. For a copy, write to Partners in Crime, PO Drawer M, Bertram TX 78605.

Last updated: 05/13/04