I've been
asking myself this question since starting this blog series on August 6th. Maybe
before. It's taken me a week since I returned from vacation in California to
get back into writing mode, but that's not to say I haven't been working. It's
all in the definition of work.
A writer's
work involves a whole lot of staring out the window at the trees dancing in the
wind and the gray rain falling over Seattle. Writing memoir involves revisiting
the past, retracing old paths, remembering what is forgotten. It includes lying
in the guest bedroom of a friend's home in California remembering the handful
of years in the mid-1970s when I was a UCSC student after a day of wandering
Santa Cruz and the campus. My mind was also at work while breakfasting with
friends I last saw 36 years and 6 months earlier in Mexico City.
On October
17, 1989 the 6.9 Loma Prieta Earthquake rocked California at 5:04 p.m. The news
coverage focused on the devastating damage in San Francisco, but I wasn't
acutely aware of the destruction in Santa Cruz until last week when I went in
search of my favorite two haunts from the 1970s: Cooper House and Bookshop
Santa Cruz. The first no longer exists. The second is in a new location. From
George at the new Bookshop Santa Cruz I learned that downtown Santa Cruz was
leveled and it took almost ten years to rebuild. Only a deep hole remains where
the Bookshop Santa Cruz I knew and loved once stood.
Now back in
Seattle with my journals, I'm struggling to read the scribbles of a young woman
in her mid-20s, thoughts expressed sometimes in English, others in Spanish,
sometimes a mix. I'm typing what I might choose to include in this
memoir-in-progress, as I piece together fragments of memory in hopes of
creating a whole. The memoir is there. It demands to be told. I just have to
work my way through the dust of memory: work is not done at the computer.
The series continues this Wednesday with a guest post from Elizabeth Moore. Don't want to
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upper right column.
To read the prior posts, go to the posts listing in the left side bar. If titles are no longer visible, just click on "August" to select.
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