Memoir, The Art of (The living of)

Well hey there, stranger. Nine months into 2015 and here I am, out of nowhere. I had not been missing the blog at all most of this year, but in the last few weeks, I've had the urge again. The urge to both journal, and share, and I'm not on Twitter, and Instagram doesn't favor those long comments, and then, hey, forehead slap, what about MY BLOG?

Duh.

These posts, whenever they come, will likely be short little microbursts rather than Big Deep Posts.

And so:

I'm reading The Art of Memoir, by one of my literary heroes, Mary Karr. (I wrote a big gushy post about Karr awhile back in this post.)  Suffice it to say that though she's from East Texas and I'm from Southern California, her people are my people in fundamental ways.

The book is a fast read, but I'm purposely reading it in short ten or fifteen minute bursts. My current morning ritual is to get the kids off to school, make coffee & breakfast, read a writing/craft book while eating, then write until I have to go to work -- which only gives me about half an hour of writing time, most days. But routine is a topic for another time.

Last Tuesday wasn't a great day, or evening. I pissed off a friend by bailing out on a reading I'd said I'd attend in OC. I attended another reading, in much closer Fallbrook. Sometimes stepping out my insular bubble is a good thing, but that night I felt raw, pointless, and very alone in my weird writer-head.

And I had this thought, ringing through me, that sometimes the writing is not about charging my laptop, the daily word count, the submissions, the rejections, the research, the reaching out for community.

Some days, the writing is all about the hard things, the brokenness, the sadness, the isolation, the swirl of shit that makes me feel I need to write a memoir in the first place.

That was Tuesday.