Memoirous

As I mentioned in my last post, Peter Orner has a shtick. He’ll maybe start with a memory, an anecdote and then weave in family details that then leads to a wider context, perhaps a contemporary perspective. He’ll also tie in a book citation, a detail from something he once read—usually an author that has flown under the radar and deserves to be read or revisited. For example—every time I pass a rock, the kind left behind as glacial debris, moraine, of which there are many such random big rocks here in the Great Lakes region (I grew up in Ohio) I always remember 1) I live in a post-glacial region, we are formed by our environment, remnants left behind litter our past 2) my sister falling and chipping a tooth on our neighbor’s rock on Princewood Avenue in Kettering. I don’t know how old she was? Nine, ten, eleven but this incident followed her. Not only did the initial fall leave her with a jagged tooth (it was a permanent one, something that as a kid I always wondered about?? perma...

I was talking recently to my friend, the MFA writer struggling to complete her thesis—a draft of a novel. She complimented me on my flash (which I haven’t done much of lately). Flash is about looking, seeing things through a writers eyes. When we wear our writer’s hat we understand that EVERYTHING is fodder for the pen. We just need to be looking, alert to what is going on around us. Or not. Lately I want to turn off that hyper sensitivity—especially when the news is bad, when there’s a mass shooting less than 3 miles from my house, when the suspect is at large, when my daughter texts me when I’m in bed to be sure and lock my door. I wanted to stay under the blankets and hibernate. I want to shut out the world and squeeze my life down into a comfort zone of cycling, the baby, reading books. It doesn’t really allow for epic stories, a narrative arc, for something to happen. Peter Orner has written two books of essays, Am I Alone Here and Still No Word From You , that are highly autobio...