Tiny Frames
In her writing tutorial/memoir Bird by Bird , Anne Lamott advises her students to look through a one-inch picture frame as they write their stories. Focus in on one thing, she says, like a dimple, a calculus test, or a smell that recalls a memory, and dig into the truth behind that object or moment. Many a writer has drowned in the enormity of their scope, so Lamott reminds us to start small and go from there. She also suggests near the end of the book that her readers practice on stories from their childhoods. Because childhood is a tender time, when we're innocent and malleable and more attuned to whispers of the cosmos. And if we can manage to dig up some of those old memories, we might find embedded in them nuggets of truth. So, for kicks, I tried to sort through the files of my inner archive for my earliest memory. Unfortunately, someone made a real mess in there and forgot to clean it up, so memories from that far back proved elusive. Maybe that's how memory works ...