thoughts, words, deeds

writing my memory

“We turn memories into stories, and if we don’t, we lose them. If the stories are gone, then the people are gone too,” says Amy Harmon in What the Wind Knows
To what degree do you use your memories in your writing? If you use them, do you think of preserving them or do you use them because they fit your story or poem?

All right, this is a complicated question, mostly because I write a lot of things--personal essays, poetry, short stories, other creative non-fiction (besides personal essays) and there are different ways that I use memory in each.

First off, for my fiction (short stories--the novel I'm working on) I don't consciously use my memories in them, but my memories inform them. For example, I have never, in fiction, been able to write about my nephew's death. I've written about death and babies and children, and my experiences help make those fictional things feel real, but I've never specifically sat down to write about something that happened to me. I wrote a main character who was going through dementia because I have grandparents who suffered from it. I wrote about a woman who is struggling with an unexpected pregnancy, a woman who gave up a child long ago and now is coming face to face with him as he lies dying. I've never experienced either of these things, but if I hadn't lived my own life, I couldn't have written this.

Next, for poetry, I draw from anything that I feel the need to write about in the moment. Sometimes it's my own experiences, sometimes other peoples--mostly it's from observations and emotions. A lot of my poetry doesn't tell a specific story--it may tell a part of the story, an image from a scene, an emotion. The thing about poetry is that I feel it should be focused. It's the most concise form of writing I do, and because of that, it feels like it will morph into some other form of writing if I let the whole of a story or the whole of a memory in. Because of this, I've been able to write poetry that touches on bits and pieces about my nephew's death directly from the first time that it happened, which I can't do in my fiction. For fiction, I require emotional distance from the subject in order to treat it as story, and I don't need that in poetry.

Finally, for creative non-fiction--most specifically for personal essays, I always use my own memories. Here's where I put family stories--the remember when so-and-so ate so much that he threw up kind of thing. And this is where I think that Amy Harmon was writing from. When I write an essay about my childhood or my relationships with various people or my nephew's death, I don't have to distance myself in order to make the story work. I need to open up about my emotional journey. After all, I write to be written (by myself, by my family if not by the general public), and a catalog of what Caleb looked like as he lay dying isn't as interesting as how I felt as he lay dying. And so, when I wrote that essay, it was difficult. And it's difficult to read. Because how I felt is in the pages.

As for the purpose of writing my own memories, I think I mostly write them because it fits what I need to do at that time. I don't know if that means I am writing to preserve memories. I do know that I kept a journal every day for eighteen months. One night, I wrote in that journal basically that I didn't want to remember that day. I don't remember that day, but I remember writing that. For me, writing reshapes the memory--I make connections that were not necessarily there in the original memory and they become part of how I recall the event (usually it's something I didn't know at the time but learned as someone told me their version).

It's like the stories that Mama tells about us. I know some of the Rhyssa stories by heart so that they almost feel like my memories, even though I was only six months or ten months or eighteen months at the time. So, I write a memory because it fits, not because I consciously work to preserve them. Although I have written memoir, which could be considered preservation. I don't know.