Illuminate - July 2021 - Follow Your Senses
Welcome to the July's Illuminate, a letter of encouragement to writers (and readers) on the craft of writing. Adding light to your creative day. This month's topic is memory.
Follow Your Senses
My earliest memory is mostly visual. Bright sun, green grass, the bliss of bare feet. There was a warning; “don’t go out in bare feet! You know what happens.” Mom. But I am two or three and can’t resist the call of that yellowness, greenness, my toes are greedy. And so I run.
As thrilling as the moment we let go of hands, furniture, walls and walk independently, nothing quite beats the moment of running, using all that hard-earned balance to propel breezily through the world. Running! My first-born walked at 9 months and ran at 10. Once on his feet, he never strolled. Ran, hopped, fled. One of his favorite activities was running back and forth over steel doors in the sidewalk in front of a local bar. B-bang, b-bang, over and over. Mid-day drunks inside never complained to me, but I imagine the clang of small feet on steel did little to soothe their morning hang-overs.
But I digress. My first memory. Sun, grass, bare feet. And bees. I don’t know if this memory is a composite, certainly this is where the warning comes from. But in the midst of all that joy, and I can stop it, stop the memory here, a tow-headed girl child running gleefully amid tall grass, music swells, roll credits. I can stop here. But the next thing might be why this memory is so clear. I am stung! That aspect of the memory is blurry. I know there was pain, I know what beestings feel like, but I don’t remember that. Instead I remember Mom racing across the yard to pick up sobbing me, and she’s angry. This is the contrast I remember; bliss and anger.
Memory is strange. The mechanism behind it guarantees its faulty nature. Our senses are impressed, literally, by sights, sounds, smells, touch, taste of any given occurrence. Then, later, one of those senses sparks the rest of that earlier impression, Proust’s madeleine. The feeling of grass under bare feet. And then we re-live the memory in our mind. Except it isn’t the actual event this time. This time, our mind travels back using those stimulated synapses to reconstruct the event.
In my memory, my mother tells me, “don’t go out barefoot!” but I go anyway. Did it happen this way? Or do I remember Mom picking me up from the grass and scolding me, “I told you!” so I added the earlier memory? Or, as I suspect, is the entire memory not one, but several occasions in which I ran barefoot through bee-full grass and got stung? Sometimes my siblings are in this memory, laughing at me. But was this because they often played tricks on me? Am I again creating a collage around what I like to think is a single memory?
Writing is all about memory. Memoir writers recall childhood traumas and joys; journalists recall interviews and supporting material; even fiction writers use memories of actual people, places, things as building blocks for their imaginary worlds. So how best can we, as writers, use memory to inspire us?
Think senses. Not merely sight, but scent, touch, taste and sound. Where one goes others follow; scent of lilacs leads to a profusion of purple, maybe a bird singing, the outline of a well-loved house. The taste of a perfectly ripe peach leads to wet sticky juice on lips and chin, the sound of laughter, bleating goats, the smell of manure. Follow your senses, and they will lead you to a richer, truer writing place.
Writing Prompt
Go around smelling things. Go on. It’s summer, go outside, catch a whiff of honeysuckle, wild roses, sun-dried grass, chlorine. Look up and let the blue of the sky fill your eyes and take you back. Feel the sun or breeze or rain on the skin of your face and arms and breathe. Bite into a really ripe peach.
Write about your earliest memory involving summer and sensations. Doesn’t have to be actual earliest memory, just something when you were very young, and words were few. Now you have the words you lacked back then, so write the way it felt, if you were happy or sad or content. When you can’t remember something, write that, “I can’t remember, but I think I would have…” and fill in the blank. Most of all, enjoy.
NEWS
Remembering 9/11: As of today there are a few spots left in this writing workshop via Zoom starting 7/13/21. Join us for a deep but gentle dive into our memories around the tragedies of 9/11/01, and its influences on us in the twenty years since. Hosted by White Plains Public Library via Zoom. Eight Tuesday evenings starting 7/13.
This month I've added two new sections: Calls for Submission, and What Am I Reading. Hoping I can inspire you to send your work out into the world, and to read. Always be reading!
CALL FOR SUBMISSION
It is so important to send your writing out into the world. Check out this one coming up:
Writershed Stories: Second Thoughts. Call for submission: fiction, creative fiction, poetry. Max. 2000 words. Deadline 7/15/21.
https://writershedpress.com/submissions/
What Am I Reading?
On audio; recently finished “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. Charming, weird, made me cry. What more could you ask for? Highly recommend!
Currently listening to “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig. Gorgeous writing. Fascinating premise. Made me cry already and I have a lot to go. Can’t wait.
On paper: recently finished “Lighthousekeeping” by Jeanette Winterson. Charming and sad with quite beautiful writing.
Currently reading “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston (yeah, I know, it’s about time.) Wonderful!
Next up: “The City We Became” by N.K. Jemisin. For all you NYC lovers.
Coming Attractions
And then comes August... Is it just me or does the summer seem to fly by? August coming up, with more talk about craft, places to send your writing, what I'm reading, and more!
It was a pleasure sharing my thoughts with you all. If you’ve enjoyed this email and know of someone who might also enjoy it, please share.
May all your writing feel Illuminated!