pubday-Birch

 

“I considered creating you after I read Summers with Juliet by Bill Roorbach and realized how a memoir such as this could be so inspiring and magical while understated in innocence and adventure and complement to nature. I had something uplifting to express as I could communicate my own experiences, drawing connections to places and people and home, despite my disconnections, and share my story in inspirational hope for others.”

This was an opening paragraph I wrote two years ago in an essay for an anthology, The Magic of Memoir, Inspiration for the Writing Journey. When the call for submission was announced, I immediately knew what I would write. My petite, chubby fingers couldn’t keep up with the recording of the energetic conversation in my head. I had managed to get the bones down onto a blank screen and with subsequent finessing, the structure took shape. It was just me and my memoir having a dialogue.

I think back to when I started writing you. You were open to following my journey through self-discovery and together, we wished others could see themselves in our shared experiences. It was when I showed you my discovered connections, especially my first one, when you began to understand. I told you of a birch tree that instilled comfort, security and the familiar whenever I would find myself among the unfamiliar or with a desire to connect to a good place. And then you understood. You saw how my birch buddy became synonymous with home. I wrote you because I learned that day while waiting for my picture to be taken on my first day of kindergarten that life was truly good. I found meaning in you when I understood that my once eagerness to find complicated meanings became simplicity. I told you that I would find home because my birch buddy and me were synonymous.

 This day you are being released, all 70,000 plus exposing words to reveal an authentic writer. I finally get to run my finger down your spine and embrace the covers that protect your pages. In letting go of you, my wish is for others to pick you up and to learn how to discover the connections as I did, and to find home, their place to be, too.

 I now  claim you a memoir.