Writing your life
Today I went to a free one-hour sample class at the University of Sydney Centre for Continuing Education. The only class there was room in was called A Taste of Memoir, by a woman named Patti Miller. It was only an hour long, but it's already had an impact on me.
She gave us a sample to look at, which a member of the class had written several years earlier, and the main point we were to draw from it was that you have to write from within your memory, and that pieces have emotional impact when you use detail, not just reporting of facts. Then she had us do an exercise in which we first drew a rough floor plan of our childhood house, then imagined walking in and looking around, and when we first noticed something, the first time something caught our attention in our memory, we should stop and write for 10 minutes.
So here are my two. You didn't think you were going to get away without reading them, did you? What else is a blog but a memoir?
The staircase in my house had flocked wallpaper in a fleur-de-lys pattern, hard wood and a carpet runner. One hot day my Mom was very busy cleaning, getting ready for someone to come and visit. The bathroom was all scrubbed, there was furniture pulled out of place for sweeping, the sheets were all off the beds. In the midst of all this activity, I dropped and broke a glass 7-Up bottle on the stairs. Sticky huge liquid stain, broken glass. I remember Mom's face going hot and red and her voice rising to a strangled pitch. The fact lodged itself straight into my head: "This is the only time I've ever seen my mother cry."
Another time, much later when I was old enough that I should have known better, I threw a Barbie case down the stairs for efficiency, to get it down quickly without having to carry it. Blue and white plastic tumbling, a rumbling sound. Louder that I'd expected. And Dad appearing at the bottom of the stairs, his face in pure animal panic. Like a window to a more primitive, automatic, emotional Dad. I knew I had done a bad thing - I had scared him that one of us had fallen down the stairs - and it would be followed by anger. And here I'd thought I was so clever to come up with this work-saving technique.
I realise now that what I saw was the pure raw face of his protection and love of us.
Here are some comments about these little memory snippets:
1. They are not very well written (the first drafts were especially not). Too many facts, not enough description. Not in the voice of my child self. So it might be good to take the class, I have things to learn.
2. Interestingly for therapeutic purposes, they are both occasions where what was revealed to me was my parent's personhood, aspects of their personalities that were usually hidden from me as their child. My mother as a crying person, out of control. My dad as a terrified person. They were just momentary glimpses but obviously made a big impact, because they were the first two things I remembered when I thought about those stairs.
She gave us a sample to look at, which a member of the class had written several years earlier, and the main point we were to draw from it was that you have to write from within your memory, and that pieces have emotional impact when you use detail, not just reporting of facts. Then she had us do an exercise in which we first drew a rough floor plan of our childhood house, then imagined walking in and looking around, and when we first noticed something, the first time something caught our attention in our memory, we should stop and write for 10 minutes.
So here are my two. You didn't think you were going to get away without reading them, did you? What else is a blog but a memoir?
The staircase in my house had flocked wallpaper in a fleur-de-lys pattern, hard wood and a carpet runner. One hot day my Mom was very busy cleaning, getting ready for someone to come and visit. The bathroom was all scrubbed, there was furniture pulled out of place for sweeping, the sheets were all off the beds. In the midst of all this activity, I dropped and broke a glass 7-Up bottle on the stairs. Sticky huge liquid stain, broken glass. I remember Mom's face going hot and red and her voice rising to a strangled pitch. The fact lodged itself straight into my head: "This is the only time I've ever seen my mother cry."
Another time, much later when I was old enough that I should have known better, I threw a Barbie case down the stairs for efficiency, to get it down quickly without having to carry it. Blue and white plastic tumbling, a rumbling sound. Louder that I'd expected. And Dad appearing at the bottom of the stairs, his face in pure animal panic. Like a window to a more primitive, automatic, emotional Dad. I knew I had done a bad thing - I had scared him that one of us had fallen down the stairs - and it would be followed by anger. And here I'd thought I was so clever to come up with this work-saving technique.
I realise now that what I saw was the pure raw face of his protection and love of us.
Here are some comments about these little memory snippets:
1. They are not very well written (the first drafts were especially not). Too many facts, not enough description. Not in the voice of my child self. So it might be good to take the class, I have things to learn.
2. Interestingly for therapeutic purposes, they are both occasions where what was revealed to me was my parent's personhood, aspects of their personalities that were usually hidden from me as their child. My mother as a crying person, out of control. My dad as a terrified person. They were just momentary glimpses but obviously made a big impact, because they were the first two things I remembered when I thought about those stairs.
posted by Ellen at 11:07 pm
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