I remember

A simple prompt to work with memories

First of all, excuse my long silence here. I did almost nothing worky or writing-related over the holidays. I threw a birthday party and a solstice dinner. We had many family Christmases. I had a delightful virus that made me do nothing but sleep and read. I waded through a cold shin high river in the dark on the beach while the Pacific Ocean rolled and hissed. I saw a lot of rainbows. It was a great and very needed holiday and now somehow it’s mid-January, and I’m excited to be writing to you all!

Thank you also to you paid subscribers. Your generosity really helps me be able to spend the time writing this newsletter, and I appreciate it!

OK: some thoughts on working with memories, before I forget!

As my longtime Young Writers Workshop students know, I like to read an essay from Natalie Goldberg’s book on writing, WRITING DOWN THE BONES, called “The Power of Detail.” Really, I’d like to read the whole book to them, and I should probably just offer a class called “Reading and Writing Writing Down the Bones” where I read these essays written when I was five to modern thirteen-year-olds and then we write things. I don’t know if teens would sign up for that, so instead I sneak it in, like putting avocados in their milkshakes or something.

But anyway, every few months (I try to just do it once a year, but I’m not sure I’m actually successful in that restraint), I read them some of “The Power of Detail.” The gist of it is perhaps the lines “We are here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.” But it’s better and juicier than that and you should read it.

Joe Brainard was an artist and writer working in New York around the time Goldberg was writing this. He’s famous, among other things, for his “I Remember” writings: whole books of litanies of memories, each beginning, “I remember….” He wrote this work during the AIDS epidemic, as he watched his friends die, and before he also died of AIDS-related pneumonia. His work says he was there, a human being. He lived and his details were important.

Even seemingly boring details matter, and are of a time and place and life. Brainard wrote about remembering when you had to massage the yellow dye into margarine. Some of my students didn’t even know what margarine was.

I read Goldberg’s essay to my students. I read some of Brainard’s work. Then I have my students write. The prompt is so simple. Begin with “I remember….” and write whatever comes to mind. Come back to “I remember” whenever you hit a lull. Your memories can be scattered, or on a theme. They can be a paragraph or a word. Go for ten minutes.

We read ours aloud, one “I remember” per person around the circle, three or four times. Some people passed and that was OK. The lines students read were vivid, cryptic, detailed, powerful. There were tiny memories, like “I remember lichen” and big ones, hinted and spoken.

Homework was the same prompt. I asked students to do it three more times throughout the week. Back in class, we read them again.

Then, because this is a fascinating question too, we wrote for ten minutes on the prompt “I don’t remember….” Some kids got semantic, but this one probed the edges, the legends. It showed where we don’t put our attention, which is worth noticing too.

So then we had all this material, maybe pages of it. By itself, it was fragmentary and powerful and enough, but I figured we’d play with it further. So we spent a while talking about poetry tools, things like rhythm, repetition, image, comparison, sound, line breaks. We looked at a poem in meter (Afternoon on a Hill by Edna St Vincent Millay) to see how the poet used these tools. Then we looked at a fragment of a friend’s free verse poem to explore what a line is when it isn’t a metered measurement. (Lots to geek out on here, but it’s a unit of meaning, and a unit of pacing and)

Then I sent the class off again to write a poem drawn from their own memories, maybe a memory that was in their “I remember” work, and maybe not.

I’m excited to see where the class takes this! Already I see students using this space to write about intense, real things, like being inside a panic attack or watching a fatal accident, as well as weird specific details, like a brother who got away with smearing boogers on his car seat for three years.

But most of all, I saw students feel the power of claiming their own experiences. It’s powerful to say, “I’ve lived and it matters, and here is what it is like.” It’s the antithesis of death machines and apathy. It is, as Goldberg tells us, how writers must think, and live.