Pretty Lies, Difficult Truths
Some stories are hard to share, even while they demand to be told.
Writing Updates
My narrative essay on memory and mental health is now live on the CRAFT website (more on that below). Meanwhile, in case you missed it, I shared my flash memoir “The Liturgy of the Word” (originally published in Headwaters 2012) earlier this month. I’ve also been working on updating my writing website.
Pretty Lies, Difficult Truths
The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. —Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Growing up, our neighbour's garden was another world. Baba grew tulips in all colours of the rainbow, clustering irises and bushes of fagrant honeysuckle. I would often sneak into her garden through a gap in the hedges, and if Baba found me, she'd invite me into her house, feeding me fruit and stories until Mom came around to collect me.
One summer, her table was overflowing with peaches, and I feasted on them almost until I was sick. In the end, I could only half-eat the last one, and I tossed it into her compost bin without a thought. For weeks afterward, though, the peach remained -- while the leaves and apples and other things on the compost heap broke down, the half-eaten peach lingered, softening with rot, but its stone still whole and complete, its skin delicately furred.
Diane Setterfield talks about the fiction writer's life being compost — the need we have as storytellers to let the raw material of our lives break down in order to grow something new from the soil of experience, made rich and fertile by time. But some memories, some stories, can only be shared whole — they refuse to break down amongst everything else. Like my peach pit, they remain, stubbornly preserved.
Most of my writing has been firmly rooted in the fantastical; I identify as a speculative writer first and foremost. However, during my undergraduate studies at NYU and later at UNCA, I focused primarily on nonfiction narrative. It's a background that has served me well, whether collecting and structuring the memories that would become the Stejjer Imfewħa project, or doing editorial work with Miriam Mulcahy on her forthcoming memoir, This is My Sea.
And of course, every once in a while these days, I sit down, and I write a story about my life. These are the pieces of narrative that refuse to break down to feed my fiction, the stories that demand to be told.
"All the Pretty Little Lies" is one such story. It was a hard one to write, an even harder one to share. But still, now, years after the fact, it's a story that I needed to tell. I tried to write it in a straight line for so many years, but it was only when I decided to thoroughly delve into the gaps and unknowns of the event that I was able to turn it into anything more than a journal entry.
In any case, you can read "All the Pretty Little Lies" on the CRAFT website. If you do, I'd love to know what you think.
Writing Nonfiction: Exercises and Resources
If you're interested in starting to write non-fiction, it's as easy as taking up pen and paper and letting yourself freewrite, using the prompt: "I remember..." But if you'd like to explore deeper, check out these resources:
Craft Books
Writing Exercises
Roxane Gay also does a Masterclass, as well as a smaller Skillshare course on the personal essay — if you happen to have a subscription to either of those handy.
The Reading Update
The Wayward Children Series by Seanan McGuire - because every heart is a doorway | Bluets by Maggie Nelson - a collection of prose poems on blue | Crier’s War by Nina Varela - though tbh I’m not sure I’m quite convinced by the Automae yet
Read any of these? I’d love to hear your thoughts and what you’ve been reading and working on, down in the comments.