Writing from memory
Readings and exercises for a self-guided workshop
On Saturday, I facilitated a workshop on writing from memory as part of Mud U, a free community “university” sponsored by Battenkill Books.
As I told the folks who registered for the class, I’m not an expert on writing from memory, but I am a student of it, someone with a serious interest in it. My interest revolves around specific texts and certain questions, some of which served as jumping off points during the workshop:
Why begin with a memory?
What is the difference between documenting a memory and, say, writing an essay?
What makes a memory vivid?
What if a memory is incomplete? (Of course a memory is incomplete.)
When I write — especially when I write fiction — I often begin with a memory because I find it a useful way to access the sensory details of a scene. The workshop attendees were working on everything from blog posts and essays to family histories and sermons. Beginning with a memory can lead many places.
I structured the workshop as four excerpts, each with a corresponding prompt. We read each excerpt and talked about what we noticed. Then we spent five minutes on the prompt.
Here are the excerpts and prompts, for those who would like to do a self-guided version of the workshop. You could do them with a friend or a group so that you can have a discussion about each excerpt that involves different perspectives. If you do them alone, spend a couple of minutes thinking about each excerpt before diving into the exercise.
Excerpt 1
My father always woke up at four o’clock in the morning. After getting out of bed, his first concern was to go and see if the mezzorado had turned out well. Mezzorado was a kind of sour milk he’d been taught how to make by shepherds in Sardinia. It was actually just yogurt. Yogurt wasn’t yet fashionable then. You couldn’t buy it in dairies and snack bars as you do nowadays. In making his own yogurt my father was, like in so many things, a pioneer. Winter sports weren’t fashionable at the time either, and my father might have been the only one in Turin to engage in them. As soon as snow fell, no matter how light, on Saturday evening he took off for Claviere with his skis on his shoulder. Neither Sestriere nor the hotels in Cervinia existed then. My father regularly slept in a mountain hut above Claviere called the Mautino Hut. He sometimes dragged along with him my siblings or a few of his assistants who shared his passion for the mountains. He used the English pronunciation “ski.” He had learned to ski as a youth while on a trip to Norway. On Sunday night when he came home he would always claim the snow had been terrible. Snow for him was always too wet or too dry, like the mezzorado, which never turned out just as it should. It always seemed to him either too watery or too thick.
— From Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee
Exercise 1: Document a memory of an adult who raised you.
Excerpt 2
The room where typing was taught at P.S. 96, the junior high school for girls I attended on Eighty-Second Street and York Avenue, was like a nineteenth-century factory floor. Identical Underwood office typewriters sat in rows on tables with stools in front of them. An intoxicating smell of ink filled the room. We sat at these machines as a large, dark woman named Mrs. Schroeder—our foreman, so to speak—moved among us and unhurriedly (the course went on for two years) turned us into expert, fast-as-hell touch typists. I also learned to cook and sew at P.S. 96. The original idea of the school in what was then a working-class neighborhood was to prepare its girl students for the real life they would enter when they graduated from ninth grade. They would get secretarial jobs or marry. By the time I attended, most of the students were going on to high school, but the curriculum remained largely unchanged. The cooking course was preceded by the sewing course: we made aprons and hats out of white cotton fabric trimmed with red binding to wear while we prepared parsleyed potatoes.
— From Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm
Exercise 2: Document a memory by beginning with a simile or metaphor. Return to your comparison two or three times to locate more similarities.
Excerpt 3
The year is 1990. The place is San Francisco, the Castro. It is Halloween night. I am in my friend John’s bathroom, alone in front of the mirror, wearing a black turtleneck and leggings. My face glows back at me from the light of twelve 100-watt bulbs.
In high school I learned to do makeup for theater. I did fake mustaches and eyelashes then, bruises, wounds, tattoos. I remember always being tempted then to do what I have just done now, and always stopping, always thinking I would do it later.
This is that day.
My face, in the makeup I have just applied, is a success. My high cheekbones, large slanting eyes, wide mouth, small chin, and rounded jaw have been restrung in base, powder, eyeliner, lipstick, eyebrow pencil. With these tools I have built another face on top of my own, unrecognizable, and yet I am already adjusting to it; somehow I have always known how to put this face together. My hands do not shake, but move with the slow assurance of routine.
I am smiling.
— From the essay “Girl” in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
Exercise 3: Document a memory in the present tense.
Excerpt 4
I didn’t keep a journal then—or if I did, it has long since vanished—so I can’t say for sure exactly how many times I went to help Susan with her letters, but I think it was only three or four. And I believe it was the second time I went that I met her mother, who was visiting from out of town: a small, delicate-looking woman (her daughter looked hulking beside her) with chin-length hair dyed hard black. She looked like an aged flapper—like an old Louise Brooks. Red lipstick, and long red fingernails. I remember some kind of jewelry—I think rings. Do I remember or do I invent a cigarette holder?
— From Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez
Exercise 4: Document the parts of a memory you remember while questioning the parts you don’t.
You’ll notice the direction is to “document” a memory. Once the memory is documented, then, if you want, comes the art — what will you do with it? Your documented memory may be the beginning of an essay. Perhaps you want to fictionalize it and turn it into a short story. Maybe it’s just what it is, a memory you’ve taken out of your brain and frozen in time using language — a form quite different from the actual experience of memory. (In fact, you might find this process changes your experience of the memory going forward.)
If you try these exercises, let me know how they go.
Love,
Shayne
p.s. If you are in PHILADELPHIA, please join me and the illustrious
at The Head & The Hand this Thursday, March 13, for the Philly launch of Leave: A Postpartum Account!