I woke up at 3:00 am with my mind swirling around all the things the group said that I can remember (many beautiful phrases went in one ear and out the other), oceanic currents, islands, intersticial spaces, Kipling, Virginia Woolf, the dark side, how to describe what the fever bird sounds like, all the people I want to write about and what exactly my stance is. Places, themes, smells, artworks, ruins, how to organize all this. It's exhilarating and daunting. And memoir itself raises touchy questions about how to handle discussing people who are still alive, or who are well known in some circles, family uglinesses or one's own uglinesses.
I mentioned Terry Tempest Williams' 'Refuge' as one model in my mind, as is Sandra Steingraber's 'Living Downstream,' both rich braided narratives, but the fictional model that keeps echoing in my mind is Marilynne Robinson's 'Housekeeping' which I think is one of the most perfect and beautiful books ever written. There are ideas about loneliness, loss, grief, memory, liminality and place in that book that have shaped me profoundly.
As the prompt goes, "It all runs together. . ."
Now, of course, though my mind feels alive and rich with possibility, work today will be a battle against fatigue and gravity.
Emily
We should have talked! I was up at 3:00 with my mind swirling about class, and some of the same touchy questions about people who are alive. Shall I wait until everyone is dead? Oh, oops. I would have to also wait for me to die. Then Dawn would get a call from my husband so that he could cry on her shoulder.
ReplyDeleteMy mother keeps asking to read what I'm writing. Not only do I feel both protective of my fragile writing self but also competitive with her. And of course there's the problem that so much of what I write wil potentially be about her.
ReplyDeleteStill am not sleeping well. I wake up and wonder, "What if I write a chapter about. . .
Emily
Emily,
ReplyDeleteFor now, what a nice problem to have, the what ifs of creating.
ken