1734tell-your-story/494 words
2545 SW Terwilliger Apt.
328
Tell Your Story
Harley L. Sachs
“Everybody has a story.” That’s the
word from Harley L Sachs, long time resident at Terwilliger
Plaza Portland .
“If you don’t tell yours, nobody else will be able to.” Sachs has written his
own biography in three hefty volumes and is in the process of incorporating old
photographs into volume one. He used to teach memoir writing for Oasis at Meier
and Frank, now Macy’s, and now is a co-leader of the Author’s Circle at the Terwilliger
Plaza
“It helps if you keep a diary or a
journal,” Sachs says. He began his when he was fourteen years old and writes in
it every day. “Memory is unreliable,” he says. “For instance, my bride and I
set off on old bicycles from Sweden
in 1960. Looking back I thought we had a kitty of $5000. When I went back to
the old diary, I found that we’d had only $3000, yet we had a year long honeymoon
in a Scottish castle outside Edinburgh .
“From Tent to Castle, Memoir of a
Year Long Honeymoon” is just one of the adventures Sachs has written about. In
the thirty years since his retirement from Michigan
Technological University
“My rhythm is to write a novel in
90 days, writing every morning. I realize that, like Charles Dickens, some of
my books are based on current social issues. Dickens wrote “Bleak House” about
lawyers. I wrote “Stoprape,com” about rape in the military, “White Slave” about
slaves aboard Pacific fishing boats, “”The Accidental Courier” about rare
earths mined by slaves in Africa, “Dead Men Don’t Bleed” about the difficulties
of being transgender in Portland, and most recently “The Seventh Paradigm”
about the abuse of metadata, your loss of privacy to computer marketing
systems.” His next project? Something about sex trafficking in a Portland
shopping mall.
Sachs reveals that writing, for
him, is therapy and escape, for Ulla, his wife of 56 years, is paralyzed by a
stroke and in expensive 24 hour care. “Writing a book takes up your mind and
blots out the troubles around you,” he says. “When you retire, you have to have
something to do. For me, that’s writing books. At least I have something to
show for it besides some old golf scores.”
Sachs was a freelance writer from
1957, writing trade magazine articles while living in Europe .
When he and Ulla settled down to raising their three daughters, he shifted to
newspaper columns. He did not publish a book until after he took early
retirement. He now has 43 titles available at Amazon. He now reads his published
short stories at Portland
retirement centers.
“When you die, your memory dies
with you,” Sachs, now 85 and in poor health, says. “For the sake of your grandchildren and
history, write your story before it’s too
late.”
