The fear of having lost the years. Of remembering only what I wrote, but did I write rightly? Writing being what you put in and all you leave out; the real word is abandon. If I wrote at length of a single afternoon, how many others were neglected? If a child learning to read from a cereal box is the central story of his reading, what other boxes, what other tales, what other minor miracles are gone, swept past memory now, lost to chosen hierarchies? The cereal box won. The cereal box is memory.
Winter. Christmas. Heavy weather. Now. I walk the neighborhood streets with my son. Tell me, I say, the story of your childhood. Preferring his fluid, untethered memories to the stasis of my own. He is my great companion. Best friends and worst teachers are recalled. Better teachers. Greatest. Soccer games. The stories he carried in his own mind, as rich as any party. London, Toulouse, Venice, and I say, more?, and he goes on, until finally he asks the question I might have warned myself against—me, the practitioner of memoir; me, his insufficient, loving mom.
Are you writing a story about my childhood?
I am startled, disturbed. No, I rush to assure him. I am not. He says he would not mind either way, but he had to wonder: Why so many questions?
Because, I say. Fumbling. Because I miss the person I can’t remember that I was. Because I miss what I abandoned. Because I wonder whether, if I never wrote just parts of it down, would I be more whole?
I had so much fun making original art for new paid subscribers in celebration of my one-year Substack anniversary that I have decided to continue that practice. Any new or renewing annual paid subscribers residing in the U.S. are now eligible for custom art—stitched monotypes or cyanotypes, approximately 6” by 9” in dimension. Just send me a message with your address, and I will get to work, with joy.
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My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press) has been shortlisted for the 2025 Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award.
Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story (Tursulowe Press, 2025) has won the Silver Medal, North American Book Awards (Historical Fiction).
Conversations with Women in Blue is the winner of the 2025 Creative Nonfiction Prize from The Porch.
“Lightning Strikes” is a finalist in the 2025 Cleaver Magazine Visual Poetics Contest.
I have written numerous books on the art of writing and of living a literary life. All can be found here.
My handmade journals, booklets, cards, and paper art are offered here, at the Bind Arts Etsy shop.
That last graph. "I miss the person I can't remember that I was." Oh so much yes.
How timely. Several friends have recently asked why I don't write about my son. I mentioned their question to another friend who said, "I've been wondering about that." There is no arc or storyline that I can see, and the absence no longer matters. Today I begin.