Because my writing focus has primarily been poetry and, more recently, flash fiction (less than 1,000 words), the writing projects I would envision were quite small. I get an idea for a poem from an observation or experience, or sometimes from a writing prompt generated by another poet. I usually submit my poems to journals for publication.
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Poem published by Storyteller Poetry Review takes up where a flash story in Scrap ends (p. 16). |
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Sometimes, I start to obsess over a particular topic. That is how my two chapbooks formed. After I wrote two dozen poems based on my genealogy research, I compiled a manuscript that became Kin Types. Our Wolves came together from my fascination with the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.”
So where does Scrap, a hybrid memoir that relies on flash nonfiction more than any other genre, come into the above process?
Eighteen years ago, I decided to write a memoir about my father and my relationship with him. I had been writing poetry most of my life and had studied the subject for my MFA degree. But I had no clue how to write a memoir. So, I decided to learn and began to take online memoir workshops through Gotham, Stanford, and Apiary Lit (which appears to be defunct).
Think of it this way, the process of writing Scrap was a different journey of my life than writing poetry. I wrote both simultaneously, but for a very long time, these two paths did not cross. I wrote at least two different versions of a traditional chaptered memoir. It might have been three. I struggled at first with the definition of memoir as “memory plus reflection,” meaning what happened and what did the writer learn from it. Reflection is far from what a poet does. Poetry is more like sketching, shaping something “slant,” to use Emily Dickinson’s expression. Reflection requires the writer to directly confront memories to learn from them.
Ten years into wrestling with Scrap, I started to write flash fiction. Flash fiction isn’t a shorter than usual short story, but its own genre. Flash fiction has as much in common with poetry as it does with short stories. After I felt comfortable with flash, I realized that flash nonfiction made more sense than chapters to me as a vehicle for my memories. And once I opened my mind to flash for memoir, I realized that a hybrid or combination of genres could also be useful. For instance, much of the reflection in Scrap is told through mini “essays” where I directly discuss certain memories and revelations.
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Photo of flash story “What Goes Into Being a Father,” published in Bull. This story references events in Scrap. |
In this way, my poetry path and my memoir path have merged into Scrap: Salvaging a Family, a book that feels true to me and my identity.
A big thank you to Luanne for sharing her writing process. I'm always interested in an author's method.
