A CHILDHOOD MEMORY OF MY MOTHER EXERCISE. 


 

Recall a childhood memory from your early school days, something that you can’t get    out of your mind even though years have passed, something that’s still somewhat unresolved, something that you regret, something that changed you, something that helped shape the person you are today. An object may help you recall such a moment:

 

  1. a jar of paste,
  2.  the braids of a girl in your class,
  3.  a pair of scissors, etc.
  4.  a kashmiri shawl

 

Write some opening lines that use the object to set a narrative or a meditation into motion while at the same time beginning to create a persona on the page.

 

An example from “Chop Suey”: “My mother was a champion bowler in Thailand. This was not what I knew of her.”

2.     Write a few lines that further establish who you were at that period of your life. Begin, if you wish, with the words, “I was. . . .” Fill in the blank in a way that gives you and the readers an idea of who you were within the moment that you’re recalling. Re-read the opening of “Chop Suey” for a clear example of this.

3.      Articulate some mixed feelings relevant to what you’re writing about by completing this prompt:  “Part of me. . . . .but another part of me. . . . .”

4.     Write another few lines that return to the narrative or to the description of and meditation on the object with which you started.

 

Feel the modulation of voice and persona as you move from the what I’ll call the dramatic present to the more reflective voice and then back.

5.     Consider why you’re writing about this moment in your life by  completing the following prompt: “Maybe I can’t forget. . . . .or maybe. . . . .”

It’s important, when writing a piece of memoir or a personal essay to establish early on who’s speaking and for what purpose.

 

To refer to Kitchen and Gornick again, your reader wants to be part of the attention being paid to a situation and to the story, or the deeper subject existing beneath it.

 

We’re interested not only in what happened but more so in what the writer makes of what happened.

 

This requires a graceful movement between the person the writer was in the midst of the experience and the person the writer is now as he or she reflects on it.

 

I hope this writing activity will help you feel that movement while also generating a piece of writing that you can continue to develop in your writing room.


My mother had written a theses on the evolution of essay in Modern Hindi Literature. Three hardbound volumes in maroon rexine, with "Aadhunik Hindi Sahitya mein Nibandh" lay locked in her

 

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