I have been writing vignettes1. Vignettes about my childhood, but also about living in Pioneer Square, Seattle’s oldest neighborhood. Its prettiest yet most destitute one.
I find it so much easier to write about something I saw or heard yesterday than about an event I experienced 40 years ago. I do it to take breaks, I guess. Writing memoir is emotionally taxing.
Vignettes are a writing form, a literary device among many:
“Vignettes are sometimes confused with short stories and flash fiction, but there is one major difference between them: Short stories and flash fiction are complete works, while a vignette is a smaller part of a story.” – Masterclass
I am a designer and when teaching at MICA and UMBC in Baltimore, I used Ellen Lupton’s rhetorical device framework for teaching identity system design. Which makes total sense because graphic design is a form of communication, too. Using these devices in my own work and the work of my students allowed for more plentiful and unique ideas. I’m banking on that happening with memoir writing, too. When I get to the point where I start revising what I’ve written for my List of Memories, I’ll pull out these devices when I get stuck or when what I’m writing starts to feel / sound too repetitive.
Margaret Atwood used vignettes in her feminist essay titled The Female Body:
I get up in the morning. My topic feels like hell. I sprinkle it with water, brush parts of it, rub it with towels, powder it, add lubricant. I dump in the fuel and away goes my topic, my topical topic, my controversial topic, my capacious topic, my limping topic, my nearsighted topic, my topic with back problems, my badly-behaved topic, my vulgar topic, my outrageous topic, my aging topic, my topic that is out of the question and anyway still can’t spell, in its oversized coat and worn winter boots, scuttling along the sidewalk as if it were flesh and blood, hunting for what’s out there, an avocado, an alderman, an adjective, hungry as ever.
And many great writers write a collection of vignettes and call it a book. From Ernest Hemingway’s vignette collection, In Our Time, written as only Ernest Hemingway could:
Maera lay still, his head on his arms, his face in the sand. He felt warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each time he felt the horn coming. Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head. Once the horn went all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Maera felt everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.
Asked why she wrote her book, The House on Mango Street, as vignettes, Sandra Cisneros explains:
“I wrote it so that it would be approachable for all people, whether they were educated or not, and whether they were children or adults. My idea was to write it in a way that it would not make anyone feel intimidated, but welcome.”
So great, no? I really like the idea of a collection of vignettes as a book. That is how my memory works. I remember things as brief snippets with lots of blur and big gaps in between. Some events with crisper, clearer signature moments, but all events questionable. Because memory is fallible. Even though sometimes it isn’t.
Plodding.
Things That Nourished My Writing: April 15-April 30
BOOKS
The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson
You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe by Rebecca Brown
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson
CULTURE
The Coastal Grandmother trends on TikTok
FILM
The State of Texas vs. Melissa
FOOD
Salted pistachios with the shells on.
Straus Family Creamery Organic Strawberry Ice Cream
MUSIC
Search results for “NPR Music” in iTunes. Good stuff in there.
West End Blues by Louis Armstrong
PLACES
Benaroya Hall, where I watched a recording of The Splendid Table.
My vintage yellow dining table, a great spot for a micro dinner party.
PODCASTS
How to Write Stories Readers Will Love with Holly Bourne
Some of them may fit more readily in the categories of flash fiction or short stories.