Introduction to an Excerpt from Tell it Slant (Available from Powell’s and Amazon as well as your favorite bookseller).

By Brenda Miller

In 2001, when Suzanne Paola and I began talking about writing a textbook for creative nonfiction, no such book existed. We had been cobbling together our own instructional materials for years, and together we saw that we had enough knowledge and expertise between us to create an instructional text that would be useful for students, teachers, and writers at all levels of experience. We couldn’t know at the time that the resulting book, Tell it Slant, would become a foundational text in the field, now in its third edition with updated material that responds to our changing world.

But before all that, I had already been toying with an idea for a whole book called “The Body of Memory.” I had seen in my own writing and the writing of my students that we all need support in knowing how to fully “embody” our writing—that is, to literally flesh out our memories using the five senses. While this skill may seem simple, it actually takes a great deal of patience and practice to slow down enough to bring our writing to life in this way. I envisioned a book with chapters devoted to sensory detail for each bodily sense—sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste—as well as what we call the “sixth sense”: intuition.

When Suzanne and I began drafting Tell it Slant, this idea was whittled down to become Chapter One: The Body of Memory. This chapter becomes the foundation for everything that follows, because until we become practiced at effectively using the five senses, our personal writing will most likely remain abstract, skimming the surface. Whenever I teach Chapter One now, I see how we could spend several weeks here, really drilling down to excavate the smallest details to yield the richest rewards.

The excerpt that follows focuses on early memories, as these usually give us a clue to the perennial themes or topics that will come up in our writing again and again. And since early memories usually come to us in fragments and flashes, this exercise that follows provides good practice for using the imagination to fill in the five senses and see where they might lead. 

1

The Body of Memory 

Memory begins to qualify the imagination, to give it another formation, one that is peculiar to the self. . . . If I were to remember other things, I should be someone else.

—N. Scott Momaday

In my earliest memory, I’m a four-year-old girl waking slowly from anesthesia. I lift my head off the pillow and gaze blearily out the bars of my hospital crib. I can see a dim hallway with a golden light burning; somehow I know in that hallway my mother will appear any minute now, bearing ice cream and 7-Up. She told me as much before the operation: “All good girls get ice cream and 7-Up when their tonsils come out,” she said, stroking my hair. “It’s your reward for being brave.” I’m vaguely aware of another little girl screaming for her mother in the crib next to mine, but otherwise the room remains dark and hushed, buffered by the footfalls of nurses who stop a moment at the doorway and move on.

I do not turn to face my neighbor, afraid her terror will infect me; I can feel the tickling urge to cry burbling up in my wounded throat, and that might be the end of me, of all my purported bravery and the promised ice cream. I keep my gaze fixed on that hallway, but something glints in my peripheral vision, and I turn to face the bedside table. There, in a mason jar, my tonsils float. They rotate in the liquid: misshapen ovals, pink and nubbly, grotesque.

And now my mother has simply appeared, with no warning or announcement. Her head leans close to the crib, and she gently plies the spoon between the bars, places it between my lips, and holds it there while I swallow. I keep my gaze fixed on her face, and she keeps her gaze on mine, though I know we’re both aware of those tonsils floating out of reach. The nurses pad about, and one of them enters the room bearing my “Badge of Courage.” It’s a certificate with a lion in the middle surrounded by laurels, my name scripted in black ink below. My mother holds it out to me, through the bars, and I run a finger across my name, across the lion’s mane, across the dry yellowed parchment.

—Brenda

The Earliest Memory

What is your earliest memory? What is the memory that always emerges from the dim reaches of your consciousness as the first one, the beginning to this life you call your own? Some of these early memories have the vague aspect of a dream, some the vivid clarity of a photograph. In whatever form they take, they tend to fascinate us.

Memory has been called the ultimate “mythmaker,” continually seeking meaning in the random and often unfathomable events in our lives. “A myth,” writes John Kotre, author of White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory, “is not a falsehood but a comprehensive view of reality. It’s a story that speaks to the heart as well as the mind, seeking to generate conviction about what it thinks is true.”

The first memory then becomes the starting point in our own narratives of the self. “Our first memories are like the creation stories that humans have always told about the origins of the earth,” Kotre writes. “In a similar way, the individual self—knowing how the story is coming out—selects its earliest memories to say, ‘This is who I am because this is how I began.’” As writers, we naturally return again and again to these beginnings and scrutinize them. By paying attention to illogical, unexpected details, we just may light upon the odd yet precise images that help our lives make sense, at least long enough for our purposes as writers.

The prominent fiction writer and essayist David James Duncan calls such autobiographical images “river teeth.” Based on his knowledge that knots of dense wood remain in a river years after a fallen tree disintegrates, Duncan creates a metaphor of how memory, too, retains vivid moments that stay in mind long after the events that spurred them have been forgotten. He writes:

There are hard, cross-grained whorls of memory that remain inexplicably lodged in us long after the straight-grained narrative material that housed them has washed away. Most of these whorls are not stories, exactly: more often they’re self-contained moments of shock or of inordinate empathy. . . . These are our “river teeth”—the time-defying knots of experience that remain in us after most of our autobiographies are gone.

Virginia Woolf had her own term for such “shocks” of memory. She calls them “moments of being,” and they become essential to our very sense of self. “I hazard the explanation,” she writes, “that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. . . . I make it real by putting it into words.” Woolf’s early moments of being, the vivid first memories from childhood, are of the smallest, most ordinary things: the pattern of her mother’s dress, for example, or the pull cord of the window blind skittering across the floor of their beach house. The memories that can have the most emotional impact for the writer are those we don’t really understand, the images that rise intuitively in our minds.

Try It

1. First Memories

Write a scene of an early memory, perhaps your first memory. What calls out for further examination? What in this scene seems to matter to you? What are you leaving out? If you get stuck, keep repeating the phrase “I remember” to start off your sentences; allow this rhythm to take you further than you thought you could go.

• What did this memory look like? (Details of colors, clothing, objects, people, etc.)
• What did this memory sound like? (What might you have heard in the background? Music, nature sounds, city sounds, conversations, sounds of the household, etc.)
• What did this memory smell like? (Smells that might have been present: such as odors of cooking, nature, city, perfume, laundry, etc.)
• What did this memory taste like? (taste in your mouth from food or emotion, eating food, taste of the air, etc.)
• What did this memory feel like? (tactile sensations on the skin, textures of objects or nature or people, etc.)
• What kind of intuition does the character experience? (a new understanding, a sense of what is really going on with the people around her, a prediction of what will happen in the future, etc.)

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