Person on the Page

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:
it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

William Wordsworth

During the British literary Romantic Period (1780s-1830s), William Wordsworth offered a definition of lyric poetry that places memory at the center of the creative process. He suggests that the stuff of poems arises from a poet’s contemplation of the emotional impact of an experience from the past. Contemplation takes place “in tranquility,” in other words, from a temporal distance that allows the poet to derive, calmly and meditatively, a retrospective impression of the experience and its accompanying emotion.

Wordsworth’s definition of poetry applies aptly to contemporary memoir and other forms of personal nonfiction. As memoirists and personal essay writers, we explore the terrain of memory, searching for that flash from the past—a significant incident or a seemingly inconsequential momentary experience—that contains an emotional kernel.  Then from the vantage point of the present, we explore the experience and its emotional impact. We write. Then we dig deeper, beneath our initial surface-level writing, to articulate the meaning of our remembered experience.  Then we dig deeper still to discover how the meaning of our experience may be interesting or important to our readers.

As we engage in this process, we recognize the necessity of achieving temporal distance between our emotion-charged experiences and the occasion of writing about them.  When we experience something profound or traumatic, we may need to let some time pass before we can write about it. When we are in the midst of the associated emotion, words may not come to the page.

In How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, memoirist Sue William Silverman identifies three steps to what she refers to as “surviving death,” which serves as a metaphor for writing memoir.  Her thoughts echo and build upon Wordsworth’s explanation of the poetic process.  Here is my paraphrase of Silverman’s steps.

Step 1: Explore your memories.

A memoirist never lacks material about which to write.  Our memories are always there, waiting to be culled for their value. Silverman writes, “Preserve memories . . . . Once found, hoard memories . . . .  [M]emory holds the past in place like exhibits behind glass in my personal, internal museum.”

Step 2: Turn your memory into language.

Silverman writes, “Construct memory into tangible living-and-breathing sensory images, thus resulting in . . . narrative.”  When we express our memories in words, we create physical artifacts that we can examine closely, and more closely, to discover their meaning.

Step 3: Use language to examine your memory.

Here’s where things get messy, challenging, perhaps unsettling or painful, disappointing or frustrating—but the writing is worth the effort to get at the meaning of the experience.  Here is where our present self observes our past self from its temporal distance and gains insights from the vantage point of the present. To explore memory in this way, Silverman advises, “[M]ix words and memories together with a pinch of scent, a flask of taste, a kaleidoscope of sound, and allow it all to marinate . . .”

Our memories don’t occur in straight narrative lines like already-written stories. Memories are circular, dependent upon past and present and our engagement with both to make sense of our experiences. When we write about them, we do so as two narrators: our self in the past and our self in the present. Our experience made its mark on us in the past, but it bears greater significance when considered from the perspective of our present. The “I” of memoir is actually two “I”s, the past and the present selves, both of whom add their voice to our narratives.

Explore your memories. Turn a memory into language on the page.  Probe it with your words until you discover its meaning. 

Then, please, keep writing until you have created a message that you can share with readers.