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MEMOIR #2: REFLECTION Vs DOCUMENTATION
TO WRITE ABOUT OUR "UNRULY PAST" (as Laura Kalpakian names her own delicious memoir!) is by necessity a distortion of "fact" in order to name "truth." Away back when, we didn't have the words needed to name our experience. It's only time, education, and perspective that gives us the articulation we now need to make sense of what was. A memoirist therefore revisits her past with tools to reflect truth rather than document it. Except we run into a few dilemmas.
A first is . . .
Entries below appear in order of publication.
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For specific topics, please see Blog Subjects in the sidebar.
Family
Orchid and Dandelion
by Brenda Wilbee
—THAT I WAS AFRAID OF MY MOTHER is no secret, but I understood her struggles. Her life had been fraught with abandonment issues, unresolved and deeply buried. I seem to have been a lightning rod for her frustation. So how do I handle this in a memoir? When I don't wish to hurt her?
Memoir #2: Reflection vs Documentation
by Brenda Wilbee
MEMOIR #2: REFLECTION Vs DOCUMENTATION
TO WRITE ABOUT OUR "UNRULY PAST" (as Laura Kalpakian names her own delicious memoir!) is by necessity a distortion of "fact" in order to name "truth." Away back when, we didn't have the words needed to name our experience. It's only time, education, and perspective that gives us the articulation we now need to make sense of what was. A memoirist therefore revisits her past with tools to reflect truth rather than document it. Except we run into a few dilemmas.
A first is . . .
Taming the Dragons: Christine Wilbee
by Brenda Wilbee
MY COUSINS WERE ALMOST HOME, pushing their bikes up the last of the hill. It was a winter evening early in the new year of 1974, and a slight drizzle hurried them along: Patty, thirteen, Christine, eleven. Lights from the kitchen window could be seen through the trees. Suddenly, a car driven by a young man blinded by the setting sun came gunning up over the ridge. Patty ran the half block home screaming. Uncle Stan, the town doctor, was paged. Christine had been in an accident.
And We Nearly Burned the House Down
by Brenda Wilbee
DURING THE SUMMERS and because of my health, my sister Tresa and I were sent from the Midwest to live with our aunt and uncle and five younger cousins at Boundary Bay, BC. They lived in Tsawwassen, a town that sits on the ridge. On the beach below was the family cabin, built by my father when I was born. My happy place. When Auntie Anne couldn't take the two of us getting under her Brer-Fox skin one more minute!, Uncle Stan took us Brer Rabbits down to the "briar patch" of the cozy cabin on the beach. He left us surrounded by sand and prickly burrs, seagulls wheeling and the tide slapping the seashore twice a day. I was fourteen, Tresa thirteen.