Writing Memoir Goes Like This
February 2, 2022 § 27 Comments
By Cassandra Hamilton
You decide to write about a topic; let’s call it orange. You embrace writing about orange. Near the end of the first draft, you realize you’re writing about rainbow.
Excited about this rainbow discovery, you begin anew, throwing yourself into the passion of writing about rainbow, the thrill of researching rainbow, of waking invigorated by rainbow dreams. You’re tickled noting rainbow synchronicities (“Oh wow! A car drove by with a rainbow sticker just as you said, ‘Fluffy crossed over the rainbow bridge!’”). Soon you’re making non sequitur rainbow references and irritating loved ones by spying rainbows where there are none (Grandma was especially cruel barking, “Enough, Dumbass! It’s impossible to see a rainbow in a drought!”).
Feeling misunderstood, you hole up in your home and fall into your writing. Between stints, you doodle rainbows on checks, bills, and grocery lists like NASA shooting recordings into outer space seeking alien connection. You long for a rainbow connection; are depressed that none materialize.
You resort to eating boxes of cereal in mixing bowls. Keep on courting this rainbow obsession until one day, without warning, you find checking your dog’s poop for worms far more interesting than rainbows. Worse, you note you’re slightly allergic to thinking of rainbows.
Daily, you smear Calamine lotion over angry hives multiplying on your chest as you struggle to press on, rough it out, cough up even the bleakest jumbled words on rainbows. You pull your hair. Stop showering. Fantasize about burning every damn page you wrote on rainbows.
You develop an ulcer. One night, popping twice the antacids your doctor recommended, you realize your piece isn’t about rainbow; it’s about crystal. No! It’s far more complex. It’s a crystal representing a quantum equation. Your mind fills with exclamation marks. You whoop, pop a cork, slug fizzy drinks—until the exhaustion from birthing this work hits you like a prize fighter’s left hook.
You fall into bed. Sleep for twenty-six hours.
While you dream, a black bear ambles onto your property, scarfs your bursting blueberry bushes. You like bears. In theory. As symbols of wild power in pictures on your phone. But this bear, belly bursting, enters your dream. Crawls into your bed. Spoons your spent limbs. Whispers in your ear, “Utter ‘rainbow’ or ‘crystal’ again and I’ll come back to eat you.”
You bolt awake! Stumble distressed into the morning, out into your yard, straight to the bushes. Seeing the branches stripped of fruit, you get goosebumps. Right then, you divorce your obsessions.
But now what else is there to write?
At your desk, you yank out fresh paper. You decide to write of the familiar: how Great Grandma smoked cigars on the porch of the log home she’d built by herself; how on the weekend when Mom got a kitten from Allen Ginsberg, Great Grandma made bear stew (the most savory meal Mom ever tasted); and how years after Mom died, you found her gnarled elbow of driftwood, nabbed the day she left Italy and said goodbye to the man she’d dated, a real, bonafide prince.
Oh! Writing’s grand! Bliss.
Well. Until…
One day while brushing your teeth and staring at the bags under your eyes, it dawns on you: you’re writing about love.
You think of a man you loved who’s phoning again after years of silence. He may/may not have the capacity to fully love you. You spit in the sink. Time for a new draft!
You write on loving this man. Conjure memories of late nights reading side-by-side in bed, comforted by the fur on his toes, his feet rocking back-and-forth like a metronome. Your heart feels soft and mushy and you nearly pick up the phone to call him, you’re so enamored of those furry symbols of home—until you remember the old scathing arguments, books snapped shut in disgust, the bookcase empty when he packed and left.
You rip into tiny pieces the last thing you wrote. Take a walk to cool off. Watch dragon shaped clouds.
Here, you feel the wind that’s carried your fire. Feel so clearly what set you ablaze through orange, rainbows, crystal, the quantum equation and, yes, even the man.
At a fresh page, you step into cracks within. Open inner doors to the universe. Write in dragon trails so hot, so true, reader’s palms will sweat holding your words.
Yes, this is where you surrender to your story. You accept the story is boss. The story decides how it wishes to be written.
___
Cassandra Hamilton is a disabled artist/writer with traumatic brain injury and central vision loss in one eye who creates from dreams, shamanic journeys, and life. Her writing has appeared in international literary magazine Beyond Words, Brevity Blog, 101 Words, The Door Opener Magazine, Rivereast News Bulletin, The Glastonbury Citizen and three Writing It Real anthologies edited by Sheila Bender. While working on a memoir, she teaches Active Dreaming (a synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism), including workshops on Dreaming and Writing.
Thankyou Cassie for making this unknown journey of writing Memoir clearer, even as we have our own unexpected (totally!) side roads and byways. I love the dejections, honesty and humour, breakthroughs and insights, that are all possible (and unavoidable) while making the stories we wish to tell meaningful to us the writer most of all – of discovering love.
Thank you, Debbie, for your confessing worries about embarking on writing your own memoir and for inspiring me to write this. May the twisted roads of writing memoir lead you to Love and may the sharing of that journey spread more love.
I feel so utterly seen. What a crashing ride through the exact territory of it. Thank you.
I see you. You are not alone. May the surrender to your story bless you and all who read your account.
Great
Thanks!
Oh my god I love this so much! So perfectly describes the process! Thank you, Cassie Hamilton!
Abigail Thomas, you slay me. I adore your work! THANK YOU.
NOBODY PINCH ME. I want to keep dreaming.
Thanks so much for this, Cassie. I hate that my story is the boss of me. But it helps to know I am not alone in the struggle.
kperrymm, you are most certainly not alone in struggling to tell your story. I wrote that the story is the boss (in matters of telling the story). –Is the story boss of how we live our life? Only if it is a very good story, our best story. Otherwise, it’s a sub-story to a turning point that helps get us to our big life story.
I will re-read this every time I convince myself I’m large and in charge of. my story! Love it!
Yay! Glad this inspires you. May consequently your deepest, most soulful writing pour forth.
I love this! You have no idea how much better this makes me feel. Onward!
Aw, Michele Dawson Haber, you made my morning! Am glad this piece made you feel better. Keep writing!
This! Is!! So!!! Amazing!!!!
Thanks.
Thank you, Neil Larkins! Glad you enjoyed it. 🙂
Thank you, Neil Larkins! Glad you enjoyed the piece.
kperrymm, you are most certainly not alone in struggling to tell your story. I wrote that the story is the boss (in matters of telling the story). –Is the story boss of how we live our life? Only if it is a very good story, our best story. Otherwise, it’s a sub-story to a turning point that helps get us to our big life story.
Oh good god, this roller coaster has been my life for four years… thank you for giving it credence!
maddielock1955, you made me smile. Am glad this piece gave credence to your process. Keep writing! Your words are necessary.
This was a wonderful journey that reminds of my daily rambling around the empty house, while fighting with all my ideas and unfinished and neglected word children.
Hello feathershal04!
Nice to meet another Ruminating Bear. I find a great gift to give such a Bear is a pen, paper and the permission to fill her cave as she wishes with fragments, lists and ramblings. At some point, Bear will want to assemble these bits (for bits want to find their place in the world, knowing there are people waiting and needing to read them). But during the process of ruminating and wrestling, these thoughts are for Bear. The more Bear caters to wrestling this process on the page, the less the work feels neglected–and the more she and the work feel fulfilled.
Perfect description of a writing obsession, and the experience of surrendering your planned sentences to chase the next golden bird that flitters in front of you!
Thanks, Donna Vitalie, for your feedback.
May your golden bird metaphor carry you into fruitful writing territories!
Thank you, Cassandra!
This was delightful! Thank you for sharing. And I love your hat.
Thanks for reading, Melissa! & it’s BEARy nice of you to notice my hat. 😀