With a merciless end of winter cold, all I could bring myself to accomplish one week this March was to finally look through a tote bag full of old photos that was gathering dust in my closet and organize them into photo albums, a project that I had started at the beginning of the pandemic which proved too emotional for me to complete once I got into my high school years.
If you’re new here or new to me maybe you don’t know that my father died when I was fifteen. Therefore my high school memories are blurry at best (thanks trauma!), and trying to reconstruct the years chronologically left me feeling a little broken. This time, feverish, cloudy-brained, and free of any social or professional obligations, I felt detached enough to watch season four of You (weird choice, I know) while I mindlessly slipped photos beneath protective plastic sheets and ruthlessly tossed out duplicate photos or pictures featuring people who represent negative memories. You could call this dissociating (thanks again trauma!), but as a Piscean writer prone to deep dives of nostalgia, this seemed like a positive kind of dissociation which finally garnered my life in images from birth to age twenty-one neatly into six photo albums.
Feeling smug having completed my task, the Tylenol starting to kick in, I found at the bottom of the tote bag the journals I kept in those same years. These, dear reader, no fever could stop me from diving into. There is hardly a time I remember not writing, but I was shocked and honestly, impressed to find that I had written nearly every single day of my four years of high school. There it all was, all the memories I thought I could never reorganize, dutifully catalogued by my own young self.
It would be wrong to say the contents of my journals weren’t sad. After that most terrible day, the subjects of my installments turn from crushes and test anxiety to big questions, hard truths, and confessions of emotions too mature for someone my age. While I found it heart-breaking in a third person kind of way (poor girl), I also witnessed something beautiful in it. I saw myself become a real writer in real time. I watched writing save me, one pencil mark after the other. I relearned what my own words had once taught me. I picked up every sentence I had written like the treasure that it was, not that I had known it was anything important at the time. Like I do after reading a thoughtfully crafted book, I found myself wiser once I finished.
One sentence has stuck with me. The day my father died I wrote: “Everything from yesterday means nothing now.”
Ouch. But so true and honest. I think I became a real writer once I wrote that single sentence down. I held nothing from the page, and so I ended up with something as brutal as it is beautiful.
Lately I’ve been thinking about those single lines from works that echo through you long after you finish reading. That feel so true that you are suddenly and gloriously seen by them. Here are a few that have seen me in just this last month of reading:
“Rape is not sex.” -Ashley C. Ford, Somebody’s Daughter
“There is no name for almost a mother.” -Maggie Nelson
“None of your ex’s are thinking about you…” -Amy Kay, (poem below)
and finally, “The best stories, evoke stories.” -Chuck Palahniuk, Consider This
Writing, or writing well, is scary, because the page demands you to be this honest. I’d argue that those single sentences with eyes that see, are what every reader is looking for, and what every long, winding story, abstract poem, or ruminating piece of memoir aims to land at or strike out from or bury within as treasure. You needn’t know what that line that could save someone might be when you sit down to write, but promise me that even if you are writing about galaxies far away or a silly encounter you had at the grocery store, you will never lie. Let your keyboard be a lie detector, and go confidently in the direction of your truth. Chances are it is someone else’s too, and seeing one reader, even if that reader is yourself in the future, is all I believe it takes to be a real writer.
News:
One spot left! Migration, a 5-week course on short memoir (personal essay or memoir chapter), will begin Wednesday, April 12th and meet in person at Fledgling HQ in Crown Heights. This intimate workshop combines craft lessons, prompt writing, and traditional manuscript critique and culminates with the completion of an original short memoir. Like all Fledgling Workshops, this is open to writers of any perceived skill level. Get all the details and register here.
📝Happy Hour, our monthly community writing workshop, is this Thursday. After receiving some feedback from our community, Happy Hour will soon be getting a makeover. For now, if you are a Nest paid subscriber, please register if you plan to come and find out more of what the future holds by scrolling below.
Tomorrow’s our last Lunch Break of the month (every Wednesday at 1 pm EST)! Sign up for a paid subscription or try a free seven day trial to join us for our midweek community writing hour!
Prompts:
Turn your phone on airplane mode. Choose a prompt. Write to it for 10 minutes. If you want to keep going, keep going. If you like what you write, reply it back to me and maybe see it in the newsletter next month...
In the present tense, write about a big shift, a moment after which everything was different for you or a character. You might even borrow the line from my sophomore year journal to begin your writing session. “Everything form yesterday means nothing now.”
In keeping with the uncomfortable pleasures of returning to my teenagedom, I read Chuck Palahniuk’s sensational craft book Consider This this month. Palahniuk’s books were my teenage obsession, so learning from him through these essays felt like a teen dream come true. I highly recommend the book and want to share a kind of prompt from its pages. Chuck says, “If I were your teacher I’d tell you to…write about something you can hardly remember…start with a scent. A taste. One tangible physical detail [will] elicit another.”
And lastly, something to read:
poem from IG poet @amykaypoetry that we let inspire us in Lunch Break this month
Find out how to join the March Happy Hour focused on Telling the Truth below!
(Thursday, March 30, 6-7:30 pm EST on Zoom)
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