Sleepless in Oakdale
Words were nagging me in my sleep last night. Especially two words: snippets and narrative.
I am having trouble writing my memoir, Love Imagined, because I am a poet at heart. But, I want to break open my poet’s heart to write a denser, more detailed, more straight forward story.
Maybe I am supposed to write in snippets, prose snippets, poetic prose snippets and not the prose of fiction? Maybe.
But when I turned eighteen, I let the secret out of the closet. A little girl’s diary locked until someone appears with the only key . My Chinese father who, unlike my Black relatives, slithered out the door instead of in, disappearing in the night as if again, taking on another identity. I didn’t know much about geography when I was little, but I did know my mother’s family could only visit at night, when it was dark, and our neighbors couldn’t see them. Whether it was my father I was looking for or my mother or myself, it was clear that I was looking for love.
Pulling the above lines randomly from my manuscript, I am reminded of the time my mentor, David Mura, took three years worth of my poems and consolidated them into one poem. I was furious! But later, as I understood what he had done, I began to like revising-making sure key words were kept and all the extraneous words were omitted. Maybe this is how I should begin to edit, Love Imagined.
Sherry Quan Lee, June 4, 2012
