Preface: Why I Wrote My Memoirs

The idea of writing an account of my life began during my youth and college days, especially my enjoyment in reading the accounts of other people’s lives. I read the story of Henry David Thoreau’s two years living in a cabin by Walden Pond, and I also read in his journals. I noted how he turned his journals into books and decided to keep a journal in case I would ever want to write such an account of my life—or a book. Thoreau said that he required of "every writer, first and last, a simple and sincere account of his own life." It seemed a worthy goal.  

Several years later when I was trying to escape the sixties, I read Joyce Maynard’s New York Times Magazine article of an 18-year old looking back at life, and her memoir  which she wrote while still a teen-ager: Looking Back, Growing up Old in the Sixties (1972). I enjoyed Maynard’s low-brow populist tone and decided if Joyce Maynard could write an account of her life while she was too young, I might do it before I was too old. So now that I still had some memory, time, and some sanity, I thought it was a worthy project.

Then there was the Scottdale, Pennsylvania, Edward Yoder who had died 25 years before we moved to town in 1970, but he had written the history of the Mennonites in our region which is still the standard. And his widow Este Miller Yoder cultivated a beautiful garden each Spring beside the Mennonite Publishing House parking lot, and their son Virgil was around too. I read Edward, Pilgrimage of a Mind: the Journal of Edward Yoder, 1931-1945, with great pleasure, and it again became an inspiration for keeping a journal, reflecting on life, and even mowing the Alte Menist Cemetery grass for 25 years. 

So these people were a few of the memoir writing ghosts of my life, even though as the reader may note, most of these writers did not even write in what is currently called the memoir genre. Years before leaving Mennonite publishing employment in the summer of 2009, I had decided that these memoirs would be my writing project for the next few years. But as it turned out, I could not get going because I could not figure out how to organize my life account; I was not aware of a theme, motif, much less a story, as the critics would say, a meta-narrative, around which to explain my life.

Then I revisited James Boswell’s Life of Johnson in the Fall of 2009, and I fell in love with years, rythmns, annuals, Jahre, años, and 70 seasons. Years would be a good enough basis for my life. Furthermore, beginning in the sixties, I had kept annual files and journals which I generally labeled as “notes on life.” I reviewed these files and journals and decided to sometimes mix in national and international events and themes to give some context. But even the years need a selective process, so each year I tried to describe people, events and stories which went into my education in the broadest sense of that word, a term which by the way I took directly from Henry Adams.

One other note on a memoir’s selective process: facts and truthfulness. The Scriptures say that God’s word is truth, but for the rest of us mortals, we can only approximate truth. That still does not let us off the hook in ignoring facts and not approaching truthfulness. In other words, a memoir which is 80 percent truthful is better than one which is 40 percent truthful. So even given the subjective nature of memoir, the attempt here was to be both factual and truthful. 

At this point the usual practice would be to name individuals who have helped me to be factual and truthful, but I will forgo that except as credits appear in the text. Most of my relatives, friends, professional associates, and neighbors generally had limited involvement in this project, having already given sufficiently simply to live with me. I sometimes write about events and experiences which they may want to forget and would have written about in a different way. 

I’ll not credit nor blame them for this quite personal venture. Still, I’m grateful to them, which I hope becomes evident throughout the text and credits. For institutional help, I’m indebted to Paul Kline of The Amish Library in Berlin, Ohio; Dennis Stoesz and Colleen McFarland of The Mennonite Archives in Goshen, Indiana; and John Roth and Joseph Springer of Mennonite Historical Library, also in Goshen.  

During the summer season of my seventieth year, I finish this memoir which I hope may have some meaning to future generations. My great grandfather Jacob A. Miller (1864-1911) of Charm, Ohio, wrote a brief admonition to his descendants one hundred years ago. He ended his signifying by quoting prayers, wisdom sayings and passages from the Bible of which this is the last one: “And the spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that hearth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him come take the water of life freely.”

Levi Miller

Scottdale, Pennsylvania

July 23, 2014

The Thoreau quote comes from the first chapter of Walden (1854), “Economy,” second paragraph. The Bible text is Revelation 22:17 KJV in Writing of Admonition by Jacob A. Miller, written “on the first day of June in the year of Christ 1911.” A second edition was printed and distributed by my father Andrew A. Miller in 1949.