Writers Forum, a local group that meets monthly to hear guest speakers present on the craft and business of writing, celebrated it's 5th anniversary this month. Founder and facilitator
Marlene Cullen introduced the featured speaker,
Victoria Zackheim, author of the novel
The Bone Weaver and editor of five anthologies including the upcoming
Exit Laughing: How We Use Humor to Take the Sting Out of Death.
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| Victoria Zackheim signs her books |
Zackheim, a 2010 San Francisco Library Laureate who teaches Personal Essay through UCLA Extension, spoke about turning life events into fiction. She talked to a rapt audience of 25 about the process of researching her family history and writing her novel, an endeavor which took 16 years.
While in college, a publisher asked Zackheim to write a book about her deceased father, a Jewish educator from Compton who worked in the Black community of Los Angeles. By the time she had interviewed countless friends and family members about their memories of him, a new publisher was no longer interested in the project.
Years later she unearthed her records, typed up on parchment paper, typos and all. Intrigued by one woman's story in Israel--the only survivor of the Holocaust of 38 relatives on her father's side--Zackheim asked her grandmother for more information. "Why would you want to know about that?" was the typical response to a family history entrenched in the pain of genocide.
"What they're holding back is who we are--a major part of our psyche, our emotional ballast," Zackheim said about the importance of family stories. "Who we are is a tapestry of everyone who came before us."
