The Practice of MemoryWorks

It begins with a hint, a suspicion, or a revelation—triggered perhaps by a photo in a box, the weathered remains of a train ticket tucked between the pages of a book, a strange word dropped at the dinner table—seizing you with the urgency to search and re-search: who are my people? where did they come from? what was lost and gained in order for me to be here?

Your searching and re-searching may take you to the library or an archive, where you pore through the stacks, straining to see yourself in proximity to history.

You may return to your family home to dig through trunks in the attic or files in the basement, searching for tell-tale shards of the past—though you don’t know what you’re looking for or what you’ll do when you find it.

As your questions mount, you may seek out an elder family member to talk to. They may tell you a story you’ve heard before. Or one you haven’t. You may record this conversation, listening to it over and over for what lies unspoken between you.

You may become fixated on a photograph you are certain will fill in the holes in the stories you’ve been told. The photo may fail to elicit the memories of others, but it will likely infiltrate your own storytelling.

You may travel to a place that has haunted you. There, you will likely get waylaid or diverted by facades of the past and smokescreens of the present. You may see his/her/their/your eyes everywhere you turn. You’ll swear you have been here before.

If you’re lucky, you may trip over something you were not looking for.

You will encounter unspeakable loss.

You will find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between: present and past, here and there, fact and fiction, hero and rogue, perpetrator and survivor.

In the absence of memory, you will dream. You will record your dreams and follow them as a guide to the in-between.

You will collect: scribbled letters, blurred photographs, yellowed clippings, dog-eared maps, illegible documents, souvenirs and mementos of people, places, and events that once held meaning, mysterious remnants of something that neither your ancestors nor you can let go of.

Through all of this, you must write. You will fill up notebooks with questions, observations, quotations, facts, dates, lists, drawings, memories, dreams, speculations, ruminations.

Your writing may take the form of letters, journal entries, poems, personal essays, fiction, fables, dialogues, arguments, apologies, confessions, prayers, or prophecies—whatever forms you need to access a past that has been hiding from you.

You will learn how to trick the past into letting you in.

You will assemble these pieces in growing piles and files, will read them aloud to hear what they’re trying to tell you, will return to the archives, the attic, the basement, and your elders to find what you missed.

You will discover the limits of genre for truth telling.

You will experiment with text + image + space on the page, bending and breaking genre in order to give shape and form to the truths you have so painstakingly recovered through your memory work.

You will become, out of necessity, a hybrid storyteller.