Friday Flash Memoir: Make a Book for Yourself
Addonizio, Saltz, a deer with a tiara// Plus: upcoming Zoom writing sessions
Sometimes keeping audience in mind can be the best way to bring a piece into focus, especially if that imagined audience is one that is interested in what you have to say and delighted by your voice. Maybe you have that one friend who you know “gets you,” and writing with that person in mind helps you create momentum.
The other side of that, though, is that sometimes we need to return to those quiet inner voices that we can only access through the stillness and play that can happen in solitude.
Below is a suggestion from Kim Addonizio from her book Ordinary Genius. I like how this touches on the commonplace book and the journal but also suggests creating something slightly crafted, something creative just for oneself.
By the way, I love this excerpt from Woolf that I just read on the Wikipedia page about commonplace books:
"[L]et us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink." Virginia Woolf, "Hours in a Library", Granite and Rainbow: Essays by Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1958), p. 25.
I have notebooks like that. The ones for which I had high expectations and in which I only filled a few pages. I love the idea of celebrating those.
Upcoming writing sessions on Zoom
Saturday 6/10 (tomorrow!), 12-2pm: A writing session for paid members of this newsletter. We’ll convene at the beginning and share what we’re working on; write for a stretch of time; then reconvene at the end! Email me for the Zoom link.
On Saturday 6/24, 12-3pm Eastern, I will hold the last 2023 Generative Writing Workshop (at least until fall!). Sign up at the link. $75. (If you want to join and price is an issue, write me.)
Also, there are still spots in our three upcoming summer courses at Muse. Grab yours today!
Last year, I was working on using some material from a journal I kept while at a residency at Vermont Studio Center in 2012. I wanted to select and arrange some of the material from that journal to use in my book draft, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to stylize it in a way that made sense for the book. Finally, after a period of being stumped, I decided to (literally) cut up the printed pages I had from that material and rearrange them into another notebook, to play around with arranging the physical material of words on paper and to add drawings and color. The effect pleased me, and I continued with making that “book” just for myself for a while. Here are a couple of those page:
(By the way, I wrote the above words in a journal a few days before I found outI was pregnant with Elias!)
Finally, here’s an idea from Jerry Saltz’s How to Be an Artist, for when you’re interested in once again bringing out the playful selection/arrangement of all those personal details and materials and showing them to an audience again. This is an idea for how to loosen up and create and then see what a viewer/reader can glean from that creation. I like the idea of “making a memory tree” from images and/or text.
Meet yourself and your creative spirit wherever it is this weekend. Maybe you write two lines, maybe you rearrange a room, maybe you sit in the sun. Follow the lead of the body/spirit. Happy weekend.