memoir

I’m thrilled to share the good news that my short story, “The Lola Channel,” won an honorable mention in the International Literary Seminar (ILS)-Fiction Contest Fellowship, with a tuition discount to their residency in Kenya this December as the prize. Very exciting!

However, after going back and forth for an entire week (and pulling lots of tarot cards for guidance), I’ve decided not to attend. It’s still out of my price range even with the discount, but more so, my beloved dog Basil is terminally ill, and I want to be here with him for his final months after so many years (15!) together.

I’ve also been moving into more of a homebody vibe these days, and while the idea of a writing residency in Kenya got me all amped up, I felt an internal friction when I envisioned getting on a plane, staying in a room, meeting new people. Winter is coming and I love the idea of nesting at home with my creatures and our art. I want to finish a draft of my memoir. I want to record two new songs I’ve been working on. I want to meditate and rest and take care of this body I’ve so often neglected in favor of going out on adventures. Dave and I also dream of opening our own art house one day down here in Brooklyn by the Sea and have been engaging in exciting conversations about art as community nourishment. I’m realizing that right now, I’d rather put my time and energy into my home and my neighborhood than into traveling.

Does this mean I’ve lost my adventurous side, that I no longer have a traveler’s spirit? Of course not! There will be future opportunities. It just means now isn’t the time for me to go.

Still, I wanted to be extra sure before emailing the organizers my declination, and so I returned to my tarot deck last night. The Queen of Pentacles greeted me. Do you know what she represents? Caring, nurturing, homebody.

I am on the right path for me at the moment. It has taken a long time to be able to even hear my instinct, much less trust it. I’m grateful to be in tune with myself now.

And I’m also grateful for this win! Declining the fellowship doesn’t mean I’m not celebrating. Cheers to me, and cheers to all my writer siblings out there!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the micro memoir. I’m a wordy writer (and person in general), and I typically fall victim to over-explaining my ideas in an effort to be extra sure that I am understood. This often results in clunky sentences and unnecessary repetition, not to mention how time-consuming it is. When I edit both my fiction and nonfiction, I try hard to channel my inner Hemingway and delete, delete, delete. Focus on the power of what is left unsaid. Except I’m bad at leaving things unsaid.

I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about the choices we make when it comes to the mood and tone of our stories, the language we use silently in our minds versus the language we share with our mouths and our fingers. So much of how we see the world, our place in it, ourselves in general, is our own choice, and this is so deeply affected by the way we frame our own stories. Yet how much of this framing really is our choice? How much of our personal narrative comes from our parents, their parents, and their parents? How much comes from early childhood memories we don’t remember but feel like we remember because our family has remembered them for us? From our genetic makeup, from the makeup of our neighborhoods, from the makeup we put on before we go out into the world?

Last year, Lew loved the ocean water. He would run into it and shout with glee, jump, splash, run away, run back. This summer he is two-years-old and has developed the capacity to fear. Now when he goes close to the water, he freezes and screams, partly playful, mostly afraid. He loves it when I carry him in, he’ll beg me to go deep enough that the waves splash against his delicious round belly, yet he clings to me so tightly that I can let go of him and he doesn’t even slip down my torso. The other day, as he and I were digging holes in the sand and filling them up again, my friend asked me if Lew liked the water and I said, “Oh he loves it but he’s also scared of it. It’s a new development this year. I hope it doesn’t last long.” Later that afternoon, Lew and I walked to the shore hand-in-hand and then right when we approached the ocean’s edge, he stopped, scrunched his nose and eyes together, reached his arms to me and cried, “Mommy, up, up, I scared of ocean water!” He had never used the word scared before.

In thinking about my story, Lew’s story, the story of my family, and the tiny pieces that come together to make up these stories, I am deeply grateful for all the things I get to experience. Yet at the same time, I am deeply exhausted. An editor might say that my story is going in too many directions.

Leave more unsaid.

I’m reminded of Rivka Galchen’s book Little Labors, a beautiful, unique collection of short essays about new motherhood. I feel like these snippets, these micro memoirs, capture the reality of our existence so well. In the end, isn’t life really just little pieces of memory put together and called a whole?