‘Scrappy Quilt’ turns into fictionalised memoir

The image is metaphorical, condensing time and space into one room, as the clock ticks away silently in the background. I’ve been exploring the possibility of expanding the memoir aspects of our ‘Scrappy Quilt’ idea so that the book, as revealed, tells a story of some encompassing injustice. But also it’s to reveal the love we’ve had for the research lab. It’s hard to hold both of those concepts in our head at the same time, but that’s what I hope to do, if this new idea is sustained.

I’ve been stimulated in this vein by a tentative session with a Memoir group organised by Bardsy.com, in which our organiser/coordinator wondered whether an aspiring novelist writing a fictional memoir might mutually benefit with frank memoirists who want to tell their story. I hope my presence was somewhat useful to the memoirists, but I know their input was remarkably salient to my developing thoughts. I’m so grateful for this!

So I’m working on this concept, and will spend time with my mentor over the next few months until we can organise a regular group session, but I’ve certainly felt the benefit of an organisation that seeks to cultivate the writing of a large project, like a novel, or book-length memoir.

In the meantime, my other writing is moving along into this new year: monthly writing group stimulations, submissions and critiques share monthly poets group material in the same vein. And our other project, a concert musical that our neighbour and I had developed together (I wrote a few words, while he composed all the music) is back on the rails again, after sliding off at the beginning of the year. We hope this project will see fruition in a weekend of concerts at the beginning of November. How exciting that feels!

But the big projects, both this fictionalised memoir, and my fourth novel, ‘From Silenced Voices’ have some dedicated work ahead of them. Which, to be fair, is really what I love to be getting on with.

So head down, I’m away for the duration on my writing odyssey, for now. It’s fun and exciting, but I imagine my various other submissions, for contests, writing competitions, smaller scale publications, will languish. One result of one such competition, entered a month or so ago, however, is a daily email of a poem, for free, from a respected poetry journal, Rattle, out of California. It’s been an unexpected pleasure to read contemporary poets and to begin, I hope, to understand how poetry speaks to us, and how I can use it to speak to myself as well.