Since my last post, the forsythia and daffodils came into bloom and I traveled to two more places to do events to promote my new essay collection. Now, I’m home and, to be completely honest, at loose ends. I’ve watched the videos. I’ve posted about them. Now what do I do?
My sabbatical ends on June 1, which is approaching way too quickly, and while I had no specific expectations about producing work towards this project during this time, I do hope to at least have a vague sense of direction before I have to return to campus.
The only thing that seems absolutely clear to me right now is that I need to talk to some other people—my mom’s family and friends—to get a more wholistic picture of who she was. Beyond that, everything is still hazy, obscured by emotion and the flaws of memory.
During one of my last trips, a student asked me how I decide between writing about something in prose versus poetry. I get asked this pretty often and my answer is that, for me, prose is much more conducive to working stuff out whereas poetry seems more like a closed circuit. Have an idea, add metaphor + imagery and here’s your artifact. Not always, of course, but often enough. Memoir is rangier, messier, despite my first teacher’s insistence that writers need to know what their end point is before they begin to write. That’s not how it works for me most of the time. I’ve always related strongly to and trusted in the E.L. Doctorow quote about novel writing:
“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
True for memoir, too.
So I guess it’s also becoming clear to me that this will definitely be a prose project. I find myself calling it “documentary memoir” when asked lately. I’m probably mis-defining an existing genre here but I just mean that I feel a distinction should be made between writing about my mother’s life solely through the lens of my experience (memoir) and documenting her experience for its own sake. I will need to strike a balance between the two.
My mother set this project in motion with the statement, “I have some things I want to say” and now I am challenged to reflect as well: what do I want to say about my relationship to my mother? How will it interact with my relationship with my children? How large or small a story is this? Who will care about it? How can I honor her with it? How can I protect myself while writing through it? How can I make something useful, beautiful and true?
I don’t know, but my headlights are on and I’m pulling out onto the road.
I’m looking forward to the end of your journey wherever that leads you. And please continue to write about the roads you are taking to get there. XO