Hi friends,
After embarking on the journey of memoir to continue to process my upbringing in a violent and abusive family, last month I signed up to do a flash memoir workshop with Kathy Fish. I highly recommend it and I found what it brought to the page to be very freeing and feel more immersive than the first piece I wrote and shared last time. Read that here if you missed it. If you’re a new reader, then you can find out more about my family situation here.
The messages that Kathy gave at the start of the workshop included “allow yourself to be vulnerable” and “authenticity is key for the reader to relate and connect”. Authenticity can come through the emotions it recalls and provokes, I believe, rather than it having to be a straight retelling of the incident. And this was proven later in the workshop through a prompt that she gave that urged us to bring a speculative element to the piece.
And that’s the piece I am going to share today as it is the one that really resonated with me and inspired a new way of thinking about how to tell and process these stories. As I said when I first embarked on this journey, these pieces are raw, first drafts and I would love to know what you think of them.
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