Process Narrative

Outline Transcript.

My first question was what do I want to evoke? That could mean anything. Emotions, memories, images? Then how do I best express this? After some reflection, I decided to write about vivid memories that had some common thread between them. They had to be the most clear in my memory for being moments of clarity, horror, beauty, etcetera and all in some way came back to the ambivalence that I felt about the south and growing up there. 

I began to map out the memories that stuck out in my mind as being quintessential about what it meant to live in Georgia as a queer person and a liberal while still surrounded by the grotesque and disturbing day-to day images and memories that perhaps weren’t necessarily all that odd in the moment. The goal was just to offer pictures. The reader only needed to see what was in that frame and nothing else. The reader could then interpret what that memory meant as someone who didn’t experience it but would also absorb the intellectual and mental arguments that I am attempting to make about my own childhood. I narrowed down my list from 7 to 5 with a visit to a Cherokee fortune teller and watching my grandmother gut a catfish being removed from the list. 

I next attempted to write short narratives. However, the effect was not what I intended. These seemed broken and longwinded. They offered too much beyond the boundaries of the frame to allude to my previous cliche. I couldn’t remove the opportunity for a reader’s interpretation of the image and implied emotional response on my end in a narrative format. It came across as reductive of Virginia Woolf or Joyce and failed to evoke anything but my own frustration. 

After some reflection, I decided to go with poetry since this is a style of writing that I felt most comfortable with. I also felt this would best allow me to evoke the desired images and memories from my reader since it would offer less of my personal insight and instead would give them a more objective view that could still somehow remain cryptic. 

My first read through with my colleague Addie Davis left me with several good suggestions for improvement. First, the previous prefaces to each poem were removed. These simply stated my age at the time of the incident. However, Ms. Davis pointed out that this got confusing in the non-linear “How I Learned to Drink Beer” poem. It also seemed to be a bit forced when natural themes existed throughout the poems. 

I debated next removing two poems. How I Learned to Drink Beer and How I Learned to Swim seemed out of place frankly because they were broader in memory and seemed to be less concrete in their images. However, after discussions with Ms. Davis and my other esteemed colleague Lauren Slater, I decided to keep the poems as they still possessed threads that I felt kept the collection cohesive. 

The final reviews of my writing process included reading the poems out of order, reading them out loud and attempting to draw illustrations of them based exclusively on the words on the paper. This allowed me to refine and tighten what I had written into something that also flowed well and had decent poetic voice. 

I doubt I have seen the end of my days with these poems as other readers may offer ideas or I may find more issues I wish to address on my own. For now, however, the writing process has been hit with the pause button.