Want to Keep the Music Playing?

“I wish our class didn’t have to end,” a student said the other evening as we blew out the candle at the final session of a six-week writing workshop. “I need the structure of the lessons and writing exercises to focus my writing, otherwise I’m all over the place and nothing ever really gets finished.”

She’s not the first to express this feeling at the end of a class or workshop or writing retreat. I know exactly what she’s talking about. When I’m not involved in a project or a work-in-progess, my writing rambles all over the place, too. I may continue to do a regular writing practice, making time to write almost every day, but the writing doesn’t cohese into much of anything. Practice is important, that’s for certain, but what to do with all those bits and pieces.

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More About Books … or Just More Books

Marie Kondo

Much is being said and debated about Marie Kondo’s comment (of the life-changing magic of tidying up fame) that one should have only thirty books, and those few, only if they “spark joy.” That comment has since been exposed as not at all what Marie Kondo said, but a giant social media brouhaha that lasted about thirty seconds.

Many who have visited my book-laden apartment and others who’ve heard me lament the overcrowded shelves, the stacks on most every flat surface, including the floor in front of those aforementioned shelves—know and accept that I have a love affair with books. Perhaps not a healthy, balanced relationship, but one that is slightly obsessive and has no real boundaries. In this, I am not unlike most of my writers friends.

But what are we to do?

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“I remember . . . “

“I remember…” is one of my favorite writing prompts. I have used it for my own writing, in my writing practice groups, and with students in more classes and workshops than I actually can remember.

I first discovered the prompt in Natalie Goldberg’s seminal writing book, Writing Down the Bones. More recently, I read Joe Brainard’s memoir, I Remember, a brief (only 160 pages) collection of random memories that reveal the poet, artist, and writer in a series of “I remember” fragments, some a single line, some a few sentences, none of them even a full page.

First published in 1975, the book, with its series of memories falling one upon the other, not chronologically, but through some intuitive logic is thoroughly enchanting and engrossing. Brainard concisely reveals the story of his childhood, the fifties, and the New York art scene he became part of. Each of these small “portraits” is captured in sentences beginning with the words, “I remember.” How familiar those words.

Of late, I have immersed myself in not only writing my own memoir, but studying the genre. Stacks of to-read, read, and to re-read books pile up on almost every flat surface in my apartment and my library card hasn’t been so well used since I was a kid. I’m a believer, and many of these books are proof, that memoir can take many forms, shapes, designs, and structures.  I Remember is a stunning example of that truth.

Coincidentally, or maybe serendipitously, shortly after I read I Remember, a friend sent a link to an interview with Dani Shapiro, one of my favorite writers, a memoirist as well as a novelist and teacher. In the interview with Marie Forleo, Dani tells Marie that her favorite prompt, and one she gives all her writing students, is “I remember…” and then she tells of finding it in Joe Brainard’s book.

Joe Brainard and I grew up in the same era. While he moved from Tulsa, Oklahoma to  New York where he became part of the New York School of poets and artists, my later years took me to San Diego, where I still am, still learning and remembering and writing.

You may have done it before, maybe even many times, but today devote a writing practice session to “I remember…” You never know what memory wants to be revealed.