{"id":491,"date":"2012-06-04T12:11:36","date_gmt":"2012-06-04T16:11:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/?p=491"},"modified":"2012-06-04T12:11:36","modified_gmt":"2012-06-04T16:11:36","slug":"sleepless-in-oakdale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/?p=491","title":{"rendered":"SLEEPLESS IN OAKDALE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sleepless in Oakdale<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Words were nagging me in my sleep last night.\u00a0 Especially two words:\u00a0 snippets and narrative.<\/p>\n

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I am having trouble writing my memoir, Love Imagined<\/em>, because I am a poet at heart.\u00a0 But, I want to break open my poet\u2019s heart to write a denser, more detailed, more straight forward story.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Maybe I am supposed to write in snippets, prose snippets, poetic prose snippets and not the prose of fiction?\u00a0 Maybe.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But when I turned eighteen, I let the secret out of the closet.\u00a0 <\/em>A little girl\u2019s diary locked until someone appears with the only key<\/em> <\/em>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0I didn\u2019t know much about geography when I was little, but I did know my mother\u2019s family could only visit at night, when it was dark, and our neighbors couldn\u2019t see them.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>Whether it was my father I was looking for or my mother or myself, it was clear that I was looking for love.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 I was furious!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Maybe this is how I should begin to edit, Love Imagined<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sherry Quan Lee, June 4, 2012<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Sleepless in Oakdale   Words were nagging me in my sleep last night.\u00a0 Especially two words:\u00a0 snippets and narrative.   I am having trouble writing my memoir, Love Imagined, because I am a poet at heart.\u00a0 But, I want to break open my poet\u2019s heart to write a denser, more …<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,7],"tags":[28,19,13],"class_list":["post-491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-love-imagined","category-the-art-of-writing","tag-memoir","tag-poetry","tag-storytelling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=491"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":494,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491\/revisions\/494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}