I know. I know. A memoir is not actually a storehouse for relics such as sacred bones or castoff pieces of clothing—the stuff of saints and the holiest of holies. A memoir is a container for a story from a life. And not necessarily a holy life, except for the belief that all life is holy, even that of a sinner such as me.
Category Archives: General
Does writing the story change the writer?
Writing has always been a two-step dance for me, an improvisational hallelujah followed by a patterned pas de deux. I’m mostly pas de deux these days, my partners a developmental editor and a couple of beta readers who have generously and kindly offered suggestions to make my memoir better.
It began in the summer of 2016, as I spilled out my story as I remembered it, aided by decades old journals, into ten sloppily filled spiral-bound notebooks in a two-year, morning after morning, dedicated practice. Those ten notebooks of 199,000-plus words became a 120,678-word Scrivener manuscript draft, which became a 103,343-word second draft, which then—change the whole damn structure—morphed into a 101,559-word third draft, and then a 96,981-word fourth draft.
Now into draft five, I’m at 93,538 words and still revising and editing. Still attempting to make it better. I toss out unfixable mistakes and hone others into “make it work” sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and sections, occasionally stepping outside the boundaries of the manuscript page and back to the notebook for a deeper dive to discover what I want to say or what I meant to say. Or what, if anything, I even know about what I am trying to say.
In the doing of all this, I travel back to the time my husband was alive and bringing up avocados from the orchard on the hillside of our Jamul home. I travel back, in memory and photographs and decades old travel books ordered from eBay, to the time after his death, that I wandered around Europe, the Soviet Union, and then India.
On this day, as I continue to revise the manuscript, I mark the date. Thirty years ago today and a few months shy of my planned year-long sojourn, the intensifying first Gulf War sent me back to America.
My journey and my story was and is a search for who I was, who I became, and who I am now. The writing changes the story and the story changes the writer. Can we ever say, “This is who I am” and be certain of what we say? Or do we forever revise our story, to make it—and ourselves—into something better?
Bibliomancy Readings for the Twelve Days of Christmas
For many centuries, fortune telling has been a part of the tradition of welcoming the New Year, which in ancient times began with the Winter Solstice. I like to consult the Oracles—from the Tarot, to the iChing, from psychics to dream interpretation, the Ouija board, and horoscopes, I’m a believer that messages can come from many sources. And because I love books, Bibliomancy to appeals to me.