Somewhere at the bottom of this stack of boxes is a stack of notebooks, detailed journals from trips to Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru. I know there are stories in them, waiting to be retrieved, rewound, reworded. Deciphered–I never won a penmanship prize. Embarrassing stories and clever observations and little aha! triumphs. I count them as warehoused material for my work-in-progress, part II, or maybe III.
For a while now, I’ve been working on what I think of as a memoir-in-stories. It’s an open-ended memoir, only partially constrained to recollection. With stories, I can blend what likely happened with things made up. No truth claims beyond the logic of the narrative itself. Sometimes it’s a matter of perspective: what’s close, what’s far away. Like shadow play against a winter-bare tree, 5 o’clock sun dropping fast. Watch the hand grow. Watch the frame recede. (Also called shadowgraph, my new word for today. Writing in shadow, with shadow–hidden, then, like the notebook contents; more outline than interior–shapes, not details. Edges often ill-defined.)
Open-ended, too, because I’m not yet sure how many stories it will take to get to where I want to go. Maybe four or five will do the trick. Maybe I’ll keep at it for years.
Two stories have appeared in Necessary Fiction. Another, “Cloud Seeding in the Andes,” will be in the spring issue of Literal Latté (coming soon!). Others are in various states of possibility or undress, shivering in the drafty vagaries of unconcluded paragraphs and lists. One in particular sits on my desk, begging for revision. But others wait–I trust, I hope–at the bottom of my study closet box stack (say that three times fast), safely stored. I regret the loss of the journal habit, one I’ve so far been unable to reinstate. But I relish the thought of the objects themselves. Less so the thought of emptying the closet in their pursuit.