Echo Memoirs Blog - Echo Memoirs

“Do you know why God invented writers? Because he loves a good story. And he doesn’t give a damn about the words. Words are the curtain we’ve hung between him and our true selves. Try not to think about the words. Don’t strain for the perfect sentence. There’s no such thing. Writing is guesswork. Every sentence is an educated guess, the readers’ as much as yours.”
― “Father Amtrak” in J.R. Moehringer’s memoir, The Tender Bar

Moehringer’s memoir of growing up in a Long Island bar, where his uncle worked, is one of my favourite books I’ve read all year, full of palpable characters and pithy truths. But while Father Amtrak is brimming with pieces of wisdom for J.R., he may be wrong about writers. These past weeks at work have shown me that scribes give us more than good stories. The best ones craft the perfect sentences more often than others, spin stories that transcend good yarns. In other words, some people are really good at guessing.

Speaking of powers of prescience, Echo writer Dan Fost, said that the San Francisco Giants would win the 2012 World Series (Does he say this every year?), and what a win for the City by the Bay this past Sunday! Dan happens to be the author of Giants: Past and Present and, if his Twitter photo is any indication, a die-hard fan. For the Giants’ story up until their sixth World Series title win in 2010, Dan’s book is a super read. Sports Illustrated wrote, “Dan Fost’s book captures the whole wild history of this great team. He’s got the triumphs, the heartbreaks…and the orange-clad, beard-wearing freak-flag-flying fans.” We agree; it’s a joyful trifecta of sports, sentences and stellar stories.

I also want to highlight great work from other writers we’re working with. Recently, we’ve also had the pleasure of reading new chapters from Mickey Goodman. Mickey is an Atlanta-based freelance journalist and she can write about anything: social issues, lifestyles, design and travel. Her current Echo project has her researching and writing about pipe molding and beer making, and she makes it interesting and funny. I want to have Mickey by my side at the next cocktail party I attend.

Lastly, earlier in the month, John and I were lucky to spent a few days in Port Hope, Ontario, with Toronto writer Larry Krotz. In between photo-research sessions, we heard about Larry’s latest book, Piecing the Puzzle, which chronicles how a team of researchers, including scientists from Manitoba, identified the global AIDS/HIV epidemic in the 1980s. This groundbreaking international scientific collaboration is an important history, but Larry treats the stories behind a school approaching its sesquicentennial with equal regard. The search for the story is as important as the writing, and Larry will go—and has gone—around the world to find an engrossing narrative.

When we read a book, we are trusting the writer to take us somewhere, hopefully with sensitivity, humour, accuracy, and intelligence. We will have to travel a distance, whether it’s in time and/or place, and the words are the hints that help us make better guesses at what it might feel to be a boarding school student in a small Ontario town, or the euphoria of being a SF Giant fan outside AT&T Park last weekend.

Without skilled word smithing we just wouldn’t have the great stories.

I’ll bookend this post with another perfect quote from Moehringer on stories that gives words their proper due: “Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It’s about words.”

image: National Library NZ/Flickr Commons

Last month, John was puzzling over what to name one of the books we were about to present to a client.

“Bigger Than Ourselves”? “The Sum of Us”?

We know the client and its story well, but it proved to be a tough, sticky task. It always is. Looking for inspiration, John trolls the client’s website, interviews, and emails with the writer for something that will spark our creativity. It’s sort of like walking around a room wondering what you went there for; a kind of haphazard search. In one of my favourite New York Times columns, Draft, Andy Martin writes:

Like everything else we write, a title is a bunch of words that are arbitrary, random, largely meaningless, and yet still striving to sound as indispensable as the opening notes of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony

Writers of titles try on ideas like unsatisfactory outfits, we try them on, see how they look on the page or screen, and how they feel to say, how they sound to prospective readers. Fights over titles have permanently damaged relationships between authors and editors, I’m sure. Sometimes I wonder if a title or a headline is meant more to provoke than to describe or outline the book’s contents, or maybe it will just look nice on a cover. With one of our current projects, Cathy was drawn to one title option because it had alliteration; two capital A’s made such lovely lines on the page.

And the final title for that book John was trying to name? Which few words could sum up a history that spans over a century, covers a cast of thousands, and has influences from around the world? He settled on Heart and Mind.

***

A few weeks later, we met with the client to review the book’s manuscript. Did they like the characters? The tone? The stories? They loved it. But what they wanted to talk about, what the committee wanted to deliberate over and massage and chew over was, you guessed it, the title.

It’s the end of the summer and we wish we could hit the beach with a good book, but we’re also working hard with our clients to make some compelling reads that we hope to share with you in the coming months. In the meantime, I asked the staff, “What’s your favourite memoir?”

Here are their answers:

• Cathy Smith, senior designer: Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny. Growing up in the Shadow of Saddam by Zainab Salbi. “I read the book back in 2006, and the description of tyranny through the eyes of someone my age at the time, stayed with me.”

• Samantha Reynolds, president: “One of my favourite memoirs is My Turquoise Years by B.C. writer, M.A.C Farrant. It’s a coming-of-age story about a 14-year-old only child and I found I could relate to her in so many ways. Plus, I laughed my pants off, which is always a treat (though sometimes awkward when reading on the subway).”

• John Wellwood, creative director: “I have always been a huge fan of the film Julia, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda. Interestingly, it was based on Lillian Hellman’s memoir Pentimento, and the story of her relationship with a lifelong friend, ‘Julia,’ who fought against the Nazis in the years prior to World War II, but the filmmakers later learned that most of Hellman’s story was fictionalized. Despite all that, it’s still a riveting film and it’s the first story I think of when I think of memoirs.”

• Norma Larson, studio manager: “Two memoirs stand out for me: Arthur Miller’s and Candice Bergen’s. Timebends [by Miller] was so well written!”

• Monica Murray, VP, client relations: “A client recently recommended the documentary Senna, about Aryton Senna, the Brazilian Formula One race car driver who died in 1994. It is a beautiful movie about someone with a passion, a quiet wisdom, and a desire to make changes to improve the safety of his profession. For someone so young, it is so inspiring. The directors were able to capture so much in his eyes. On his final race, you could almost see it in his eyes that he knew he was going to die that day.”

I just finished Blood, Bones and Butter by chef Gabrielle Hamilton. I was completely enchanted from page one. The first chapter, which details the author’s memories of her father’s annual lamb roast, sets a magical scene:

We threw a party. The same party, every year, when I was a kid. It was a spring-lamb roast, and we laid out four or five whole little guys over an open fire and invited more than a hundred people. Our house was in rural Pennsylvania and was not really a house at all but a wild castle built into the ruins of a nineteenth-century silk mill. Our backyard was not a regular yard but a meandering meadow, with wild geese and a creek running through it. It was a lush setting. The beer, wine, and soda chilled in the creek, and the weeping willows bent their branches down over the water.

We hope you are enjoying a good story, be it a juicy read or a fine flick, too. Leave a comment and share your favourite memoirs with us.

On Thursday, July 19, a fire broke out on the roof at 70 East 2nd Avenue in Vancouver. The 110-year-old heritage building, originally a fabric factory where World War I uniforms were sewn, was severely damaged. The third-floor offices, including Echo’s gorgeous studio, were the hardest hit.

photo: Kate Moore

Smoke and high heat destroyed our furniture but we were blessed that no one was hurt, that all our digital data was backed up off-site, and that our clients’ precious photographs and keepsakes were 100 percent intact inside heavy-duty, water-tight storage bins.

We’re now back to business as usual, and in the coming weeks, we’ll be moving into a new home.

Inspired by SMITH Magazine, I asked Echo’s core team to write their six-word memoirs of the fire.

Cathy Smith, our senior designer, was on the scene helping to pick through the rubble the morning after:

The smell lingers…. a smoky reminder.

VP, Client Relations, Monica Murray, also worked through the day, inhaling the aftermath of the fire:

Toxins taste like a crispy reality.

I was in Montreal at the time. After a night out in la belle province, I checked my email:

There, fire. Here, je suis choquée!

In Roberts Creek, BC, Creative Director John Wellwood heard the news while on retreat:

Sitting
Miles away
Can smell smoke

Echo’s studio manager, Norma Larson, saw the studio from an artist’s perspective:

A brutal landscape, painted with ash.

Samantha Reynolds, our fearless leader, found the silver lining:

The fire knew what to spare.

Despite the gravity of the situation, we’re optimistic and forward-looking. Says Sam, “We have worked with many clients over the years whose businesses have survived major fires, and they didn’t just endure, they thrived. We will too.

“One foot in front of the other.”

Filmmaker Sarah Estacaille produced this evocative look at the work we do at Echo Memoirs. Discover what Karen Flavelle (Purdy’s), Dick Whittington (Farallon Mining), Alan Rae (Alan Rae Wealth Management Team) and others have to say about the books and experiences they created with Echo.