The Story Spinners

Written by: Lindsay Wood

Erlene Lingle vividly recalls making teacakes with her grandmother. She can almost smell the nutmeg, and remembers how her grandmother would roll out the dough for each cake.

“Her name was Isabelle Walters Moore,” Lingle says. “We used to pick huckleberries every summer together.”

The Writing Our Lives class turns such moments into stories, memories that can soothe, bring riotous laughter, or unsettle both the memory holder and her audience.

The members of the Writing Our Lives class, part of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Auburn University, can vouch for that. This unique group of habitual, and sometimes not-so-habitual, journal and diary keepers meets in a small conference room at the Lexington Hotel on College Street each Tuesday morning to uncover memories like buried treasure. Then one by one, they share the wealth by reading aloud to the class, like a support group for the memoir addict.

Class members would be the first to say their gathering does function as a type of support group, as storytellers travel time together through moments joyous, momentous or difficult that may have happened yesterday or 50 years ago.

“Nothing is more interesting than a person’s biography,” said Helene Burkhart, a fourth-year veteran of the class. “No two are the same.”

Burkhart felt a great push to record her life experiences for her grandchildren. Her German accent thickens as she recollects her past. Her biography begins in the village of Brüchermühle in the hills near Cologne, Germany where she grew up.

It was April 1945, as World War II was ending, American soldiers occupied her family home.

“I recall vividly every detail of those most dreadful thirty-six hours,” she said.

In time, “frightening rumbling noises filled the air” and the house shook from passing armored tanks.

The soldiers ordered them to stay in the basement, “like strangers,” she wrote, “like beggars in our own house.”

Some class sessions are grueling. Difficult memories bring tears to the hearers and the teller, but this is where other stories begin.

While Burkhart’s experiences are unlike those of her mostly Southern classmates, she says the class hangs in a harmonious balance.

“New ideas trigger another idea,” Burkhart said. “We learn to open up to new possibilities by working together. Our friends in the class encourage us, and our teachers’ ideas and enthusiasm are contagious.”

Each 90-minute class opens with sharing and storytelling time: A type of show-and-tell comprised of ink on paper and a dose of courage.

Terry Ley, class coordinator, wants everyone to participate, but forces no one.

The class’s greatest benefit, he says, is “discovering the common patterns that define our lives and sharing our unique stories with others.”

Sharon Nielsen, a self-professed Wisconsin “Yankee,” who today lives in Dadeville, agreed. She finds the diversity of the class inspiring.

“I’m learning about the South,” Nielsen said. “Sharing time can get really interesting. It’s been a wonderful experience.”
Nielson’s husband of 48 years, Tom, serves on the OLLI board of directors. She began tagging along to the Writing Our Lives class two years ago.

“I never realized that I had that much in me to think about,” she said.

Her favorite story is about her mother and father. She and her family were packing her mother’s apartment shortly after placing her in a nursing home.

“We were dividing up her things, and all I wanted was her old mattress and box springs,” Nielsen recalled. “When I was a little girl, I crawled into that bed with my mom and dad during a storm. Being there made me feel cozy and safe.”
She had the bed shipped to Birmingham, where she was living at the time, and slept on it “forever.” She bed now occupies her guest bedroom.

Her next project will record her experiences during the six-day Watts riots in 1965 in Los Angeles. She saw buildings crumbling, fires, and looting as she drove through Watts daily on her way to the veteran’s affairs office where she worked.
“I look back, and didn’t seem scared,” she said. “Now I think, ‘dummy!’”

Memoir writing and short stories are not the only forms of expression in the Writing Our Lives class.
Peggy Stelpflug is a retired Auburn University English professor and co-author of a book entitled, “Home of the Infantry: A History of Fort Benning.” She is married to a former Air Force fighter pilot. She records her thoughts and memories in poetry that Nielsen says is “moving and beautiful.”

Nielsen remembers a poem Stelpflug wrote about her son, Lance Cpl. Bill Stelpflug, a Marine who was killed when a truck filled with explosives rammed into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut killing 241 Marines, soldiers and sailors. It was one of the first suicide bombings.

The words brought tears to Nielsen’s eyes, reminding her of her own two brothers who served during World War II.
Not all of the resurfaced memories are so gut-wrenching.
Stelpflug recently had one of her most celebrated poems, “Old Men,” published in the fall 2009 edition of “The LLI Review: The Annual Journal of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.” The poem also received an honorable mention in the free-verse poetry category in the 2008 Alabama Writer’s Conclave competition.

Stelpflug said “Old Men” is one of her favorite poems. “It’s taken a life of its own,” she said.

Stelpflug enjoys the writing of others as much as her own, and that’s kept her attending Writing Our Lives for several years now.

“The class has many fine writers,” she said. “It’s like a family. Cathy, the class instructor, is very inspiring and sincere.”

Cathy Buckhalt, the Writing Our Lives class leader and instructor for nearly every session since its inception in 2004, encourages the class to always keep up their writer’s notebook and write the stories that demand to be told.

Nielson credits Buckhalt, an English teacher at Opelika Middle School and this year’s acting director of Auburn University’s Sun Belt Writing Project, with getting her into the habit of writing.

In true teacher fashion, Buckhalt watches silently as members of the class share their work, then moves onto instructor mode. She reads aloud, leads the discussion on the day’s topic, and assigns “class work” for 30 minutes. Members may then share what they’ve written, and for those who haven’t finished, well, they have homework.

Lingle, another class veteran, keeps coming back for the “marvelous content” Buckhalt and Ley put together voluntarily over the past five years.

“It’s an outlet for me,” said Lingle, a southern Mississippi native and Auburn resident for four-four years. “I jot things down, but I never let a little truth get in the way of a good story.”

For other members of the Writing Our Lives class, the weekly meetings provide accountability.

Ellen Sherling, a born letter writer who says she inherited the ability to write from her mother, falls into this category. She comes each week, begins writing about the chosen prompt, but says the prompt is just a starting point, not where her mind stays.

She visited three summer sessions in 2005 before she finally decided to sign up for the Writing Our Lives class. Sherling has been writing her memories in spurts ever since, finishing each story when the perfect opportunity presents itself.
“It’s like being on a train and jumping from station to station,” Sherling said. “My mother wrote very well, but never pursued it. Every Christmas I try to send a few typed pages to friends and family with updates on my family, but my real deadline is Groundhog Day.”

Although Sherling — the mother of two grown women and married thirty-six years — says she’s never been good at keeping a journal, her annual family highlights are more like a journal than anything else.

“I use them to keep my hand in, but it’s not an occasion for bragging. You have to be yourself in your writing — warts and all.”

Sherling knows that certain stories demand to be told, and she takes it to heart.

Sharing her childhood love of horses was one of those stories. Sherling wrote her cowgirl memoir, “A Little Girl’s Passion,” during last winter’s class session, but it remains one of her most cherished pieces.

Every visit to the Carnegie Library a mile from her home in Selma sent her straight to a high, narrow shelf in the children’s reading room. It’s where the horse books were kept.

The price tags told her she’d have to learn to ride bareback “like the Indians in the Saturday morning Westerns starring the Cisco Kid, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.”

She went to the Boston Bargain — which sold farm supplies and hardware — to buy spurs. But she only had money for one.

“Undeterred, I bought it, agreeing with the salesman’s statement that if you kicked a horse on one side, both sides would go. I never intended to spur a horse anyway. They were just part of the outfit I thought I needed to be ready to be a cowgirl.

“During the years since, I’ve thought about that little tomboy and her equine dreams,” she wrote. “In my mind at least, I rode like an Indian.”

No classroom would be complete without a class clown.
Jim Warman, a professional pianist with a Cheshire cat grin, was the first to stand and share a story about his father’s pre-Jim days one Tuesday morning during the weekly class meeting.

Picture this.

Setting: A rowdy boys’ night out at a county fair some 30 miles north of their hometown, Point Marion, Pennsylvania.

Cast of Characters: Warman’s father, three of his high school buddies otherwise known as Tom, Dick and Harry, a gullible drummer, and Mrs. Elizabeth Worthington. Warman moved through the short story of the night his father and a few friends drove north to a nearby county fair in a black Model T, drank a few beers, crashed a band’s on-stage performance, and managed to offend the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The details unfolded melodiously, just as if Warman was playing the ivory keys of a grand piano — a stark contrast to the “erratic tempo” of the drum beat played by Harry, the bravest and, perhaps, drunkest high school buddy, who smooth talked his way onto stage and took up the drumsticks.

Warman read:

A smile widens across Warman’s face as he delivers the punch line to the class:

A burst of laughter filled the room — the sound of old friends sharing a joke. And they are old friends now, members of a storytelling society, knit together by shared memories.

The eight-week spring term of Writing Our Lives begins in late March. A general information meeting takes place 10 a.m., March 22, at the Lexington Hotel. For registration information, go to the OLLI website, www.olliatauburn.org, or call 844-5165.