I grew up in Freeland, Michigan, a small town on the banks of the Tittabawassee River. I moved away when I was nineteen years old.
I never really left.
I became a writing instructor at twenty-four. For years I taught writing even though I was not a writer. Which is like saying I taught swimming but did not swim, that I taught welding but did not weld.
Halfway through my career, I got in the water. Everything changed.
I taught the essay and began writing essays of my own. I discovered the pleasure of exploring my past life and my present one. I learned to tunnel into memory, to move from the present to the past and back again. My students did likewise. They told stories, said what they knew, sometimes discovered what they knew. I wanted them to write something they loved.
Writing becomes a way of paying attention. A scent, a scrap of overheard conversation, a piece of music, a sentence in a book — a small thing might trigger memory. Go there. Writing enlarges it.
Lately I’ve been writing micro memoir pieces: essay-like bits, only smaller. Not the story of a life, but a few moments in it. A flicker of light. Life streams past us. There is a too-muchness about it. You want to capture moments of it while they’re fresh.
If you’d like to see what I mean, visit the micro memoir project. Maybe it will become your project too.