This week has been interesting, as I woke to the week in shock that the talk that I have had in the diary for months, and which I kept on shoving to the back of my mind because I was convinced it was not yet happening is suddenly happening. And I hadn’t written it. It is a 15-minute talk to an audience, which will be recorded, and cannot be scripted. I had a few wakeful sleeps wondering how I was going to get through it. But then I watched a few good examples, Cathy Rentzenbrink was one, and realised I just needed to speak about something that mattered to me, and so I wrote something and now I have to become accustomed to it so that I can speak it to an audience without stumbling.
But what came out of this was a renewed conviction that memoir often comes from necessity, and possibly from a story that has been silenced; but definitely it is about finding voice. It’s about finding ways of inviting the reader into the experience as if they can feel it themselves.
This coincided with me continuing to write and rewrite my chapter on ‘Embodied Writing and Hybrid Forms’ for my forthcoming book on the craft of memoir, INTO BEING: the radical craft of memoir and its power to transform, and, thanks to my panic about the impending speech and presentation that I had been blindly ignoring, I finally found my angle.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to And a Dog to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.