What am I going to do with three (good-sized) notebooks filled with impressions of my first 18 years of life – plus a whole lotta bloggin' posts?
After I've given myself this quiet weekend to get reoriented and back into The Routine, I begin on Monday morning. All the photos need to be sorted and catalogued; the notebook material must be edited and put into digital memory form; and the outline of the book will be a beginning.
We have made a pact with one another that three hours every weekday morning will be sacred time for John and for me.... no intrusion is to be made on each other's "working territory" during that period. We rise fairly early, so there will be time at the beginning of the day for wake-up coffee and a quiet chat in the back bedroom, watching the sunlight tilt into our mountain lair as it gilds the evergreen-tips with light and then washes across the hilltops that rise above the ravine of our creek. There will be time for a good breakfast and the usual day's-beginnings routine. But the hours from 9 AM to Noon shall be sacred-time.
I have never written a book; I barely know how to begin to do something like that. I don't know whether there's a whole book in this effort, or a small essay, or something in between. What I do know is that I have a lot to tell. Being in place, where my life really began so many years ago, has really reinforced my intuition that I had a start in life that was rare and beautiful, and that has sustained me through all the long years since that time. I think that's worth critiquing, assessing and praising; I will give it my best efforts, at any rate.
I know that writing this will require "a clear eye and a cold nose" – as My Dog would put it. The honesty will be very hard to come by, for me; but there is no other reason to write a memoir than to express as objectively and honestly as you know how to do, what memory has taught.
Wish me bon voyage, my dear ones; the actual trip to Ann Arbor was only a launching upon a very wide sea.
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3 comments:
A poem (fragment) for your voyage, dear Ma:
Will you seek afar off? you surely come back at last,
In things best known to you finding the best, or as good as the best,
In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest,
Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place, not for
another hour but this hour...
Walt Whitman
Love from Teri
I read once that in interviews, women writers generally report that they tend to write novels in parts which are later edited together, while male writers generally report that they write from start to finish, then re-write/edit from start to finish.
Essentially, women quilt, men just go forward. Not a hard and fast rule, just anecdotal evidence.
So, just start the work wherever it feels right :-D
I like Goldberg's advice to write as if no one but you will ever read it. It makes it a lot easier to be honest.
very cool comments from Souffle and Teri - hear hear.
Go Mama.
We'll show that AJQ.
Leenie x
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