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a journal |
 This book is intended as a place to blog about my life and things I'm interested in and answers to prompts from various blog prompt sites here on WDC, including "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  and "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" I'm not sure yet what it'll turn into, but I'm going to have fun figuring it out. |
| “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. |
| “Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” Plato Is Plato right? What do you think of the quote? This is complicated, mostly because I have been single practically my entire life, and I don't feel incomplete for it. That doesn't mean I don't long for someone who would complement my life, but I don't feel like I am lesser for not having found him. But I do think that I have found a song, even without that special someone. So, First statement: inaccurate. My song (as far as I know) is not imcomplete even though another heart has not whispered back. Second statement: accurate. I feel that anyone who wishes to sing will find a song. That doesn't mean that a heart who wants duets will find one, but solos work as well. Third statement: problematic: That's a poetic way of looking at things. Yes, the touch of a lover can make people want to share that love, which is what a poet does. However, romance does not necessarily lead to talent. So, the touch of a lover creates poets, mostly bad poets, and without a lover's touch, some people are poets anyway. I think this series of statements doesn't show a logical progression of ideas as well as some other of Plato's statements do. |
| Write about a family heirloom or simply an object that's been passed through the generations in your family. During the Great Depression, my mother's father's family lived in northern Ohio. Great-grandma had five children and needed money--like everyone else. One of the things that she did was weave rag rugs on a loom that was hand made. I don't know who made it, but we have it, now. It sit about three and a half feet tall and takes up half the room. It's a two heddle loom that switches as it's beaten. Right now, the loom isn't set up. It's too big for our house. I'm not sure what is going to happen next, either. I do know that eventually, the loom will go to one of my sisters. I've never really been home while it as set up. While I was overseas, Mama set it up in front of the television, and my siblings made rugs from a warp that my great grandmother had set up. We have a roll of rugs now, from our past, our leftovers, old clothes and old blankets. And one of those rugs are in every single one of my siblings homes. |
| Write a poem about Spring and April. spring is gardens and pollen gathering around, thick as ash after a volcano. the world turns green and greener. we breathe green and see it coating the ground, until we till it under into brown, and plant seeds for the water to rot and the squirrels to devour. spring is finals and graduation, marching in the sun, shivering in robes for the remnants of snow. spring is rebirth and birth, hope and death. life and pollen, mixed together into a headache and a running nose. |
| What is your most treasured work memory? I think it might be a time that came while I wasn't working. I was in the university library, using a computer and this young man came up to me. He thanked me for being his freshman English teacher and told me that I had been one of the defining teachers of his college career. It was surreal, mostly because I did remember him, vaguely. I think he was a B student, someone who I enjoyed reading. He was part of a class that was full of good students. But he remembered me, and that was just amazing. That's the only time that it's happened to me, but I think I'd love to be able to do that for some of my old teachers. |
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