Person on the Page

They combine the truthfulness of memoir, the conflict-focused tension of fiction, and the precision of poetry. They are brief, tightly woven nuggets of narrative energy.

When Beth Ann Fennelly published Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, she added another sub-category to the genre of flash nonfiction.  Micro-memoirs capture seemingly insignificant moments in a life and discover their importance. They can be a sentence or two to a page or two in length. In them, writers focus on their mundane memories and present them to readers in the most compact way.

Your own micro-memoir might be as brief as Fennelly’s “Mommy Wants a Glass of Chardonnay,” which reads, If you collected all the drops of days I’ve spent singing ‘Row, row, row your boat’ to children fighting sleep, you’d have an ocean deep enough to drown them many times over.” Or it might be considerably longer.  The point is to take a moment in your life and discover its meaning in as few words as possible.

Why should we consider crafting micro-memoirs of our own? 

1.  Choosing subjects for micro-memoirs requires us to pore over our memories to recall experiences that we might not otherwise think of.  We wouldn’t choose a big life event to write about—the death of a loved one, our divorce, a career triumph—but we might choose a seemingly trivial moment within one of those events. Or we might choose a remembered experience that seems so random that we don’t know why we remember it.  By combing through our pasts to discover those memories, we can end up with a list of possible memoir topics.  Some may be best written in micro form, while others might be expanded into longer memoirs.

2.  Writing about our experiences in micro-memoirs forces us to focus narrowly on what’s important about a life event. We have to hone in on the very crux of the matter.  If we think in terms of Freytag’s Pyramid, we must eliminate the exposition and resolution and focus solely on the climax of our story. By doing so we can create a tension so riveting that we achieve the maximum impact on our readers.

3.  Writing micro-memoirs requires us to consider and make conscious decisions about every word we write. We must eliminate all but the necessary and get the most out of each word that we choose to include. Whether we decide to develop them into longer pieces or to consider them finished works, writing micro-memoirs helps us to become better writers.

After reading Fennelly’s book, I started a list of memories that I thought might lend themselves to a micro-memoir.  I have been experimenting with writing a few and plan to share them in my next post.

I hope you’ll try writing some micro-memoirs, too.