Veteran French language and literature teacher Stephanie Montgomery of Walpole has created, in www.memoircafe.com, a web site, an innovative business and a multifaceted medium for helping women tell stories about their lives in ways that foster their growth as people and writers.
Just over a year ago, Montgomery conceived the web site business as a way to share her passion for encouraging other women to write the stories of their lives just as she has done for many years. “I chronicle as best I can the era in which I grew up and the one I see before me now. I write for myself and for my children,” Montgomery says. “The process of writing memoirs allows one to savor the funny stories, to reflect on the harsh ones, and to find that one’s understanding broadens in the process. It’s a powerful tool, and the web multiplies that power!”
And it's a medium that Montgomery expects to resonate with women around the world who value their life experiences, want to express them in ways that touch others on an emotional level, and wish to grow as writers. “I hope,” she says, “to become a builder of colorful, emotional bridges. Every story in Memoir Café connects a woman with another story and another woman. Members find these connections both stimulating and reassuring. I relish process in which every woman finds her writer’s voice and explores the possibilities memoir offers. If women do not record their struggles and preoccupations, their wonders and delights, their romances and losses, then they will surely be forgotten--entirely lost. Truly, it will be as if they had not lived.”
www.memoircafe.com offers a treasury of Montgomery’s own memoir pieces—detailed accounts of childhood vacations, parental acts of wisdom and mystery, and even her experiences and lessons learned from teaching at Middlebury, The Putney School and Vermont Academy.
And the site offers much more! Women who choose to pay the nominal fee to become members of Memoir Cafe can post their stories on the site and get supportive feedback on their work from other site members. They can take the site’s writing course focusing on women’s memoirs, and they can use the site’s Daily Writing Prompts. Knowing what a challenge it can be to begin to write and to share one’s work, Montgomery offers a trial month for free.
Montgomery has been very careful to build in levels of privacy that women need and choose so that they may share their work as broadly or as narrowly as they decide.
While writing for publication may be the goal of some Memoir Cafe participants, the work itself, the outpouring of the stories and their validation as crucial parts of the writers’ lives, are at the heart of the venture. “My goal,” emphasizes Montgomery, “is to support women’s efforts to come alive to their own inner intellectual and emotional lives. I believe that writing affirms our potential and increases our connection to the world.”
“Women … possess vast and fascinating quantities of history, real history, in the form of stories only they know. A woman is not only the keeper of her own and her mother’s legacy but also, if she has children, of the rhythms and patterns of their early years, and she provides the bridge between them. What happened in school and on the playing fields,” Montgomery argues, “matters at least as much as what happens in the big world, those front page headlines. It is important to record struggles at work and in love. Food matters. Hemlines matter. Laughter and silly, tender moments matter. The life of the heart is the very heart of life.”
