ʻAuhea wale ʻoe?

Where are you? Iʻm going off in search of my lost voice.

I suspect not many of you got up this morning and noticed that there was no Sunday installment of They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir. But if you did, my apologies, and thanks for your patience.

So where am I?

Whereʻs my post?

I take a disciplined approach to this writing work. I start a “bad first draft” a week in advance, using a spare block of time on the weekend. I grab five or fifteen minutes out of most weekdays to polish it before allowing it to hit your inbox and publish on Substack on Sunday morning. But this has been an unusually jam-packed time for me. Unusually because there is normally a seasonality to my regular real estate business, which means it winds down after the tourist season ends around Easter. Not this year. And I am onboarding (wherever did that word come from?) for two new substantial volunteer positions aligned with my ʻāīna conservation work. And after a year and a half of waiting, the remodel on my no-longer-so-new house has begun. And thatʻs just a little bit of it.

All excuses, and there is no excuse for excuses, but the bottom line is I did not begin the rough draft until yesterday and it stayed (excuse my momentary lack of filter) shitty.

Oh I know, most people would still consider it a pretty decent, cogent piece of writing. But it felt tired and pedantic and I was not proud enough of my work to share it with you.

Especially because over on Memoir Monday, another Substack I read and recommend, Sari Botton interviewed Laurie Stone. The short interview inspired, informed, and shamed me in equal parts.

For one thing, I have been struggling to label what I am writing and the interview gave me a laundry list of labels I had no idea existed.

You see, at first my elevator pitch was easy. Year 1 of They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir was, well, memoir. I occasionally drifted into an essay, but mostly I stuck with telling my stories in order, from the beginning of 1992 through the end of 1997. From my trip to Tibet to my trip to Switzerland. From over the top synchronicity to even more unbelievable coincidence. From teacher to teacher sharing various tents and continents and homes.

After a bit of a shaky start, in Year 2 I ostensibly settled on sharing my adventures with equine teachers, beginning with my master teacher and faithful friend Zara. But memoir is not quite it exactly. It is more like I keep coming back to certain ideas from various perspectives, with stories thrown in. In the interview I read this week (here is the link again) Sari asks Laurie: How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why? And Laurie responds: I write dramatic narrative.

I get it now. What unifies her work across genre - fiction, memoir, essay - is her distinctive, dramatic, narrative voice. What you call it, how you structure the writing, could be anything.

That is a big clue for me. I am either illustrating an idea I think is important to you today with stories of my past, or I am telling stories of my past that have meaning for today. But either way they are my stories and I have a particular way of telling them. Still donʻt know what to call it, but at least I feel less alone, more like “writers do this and even get published.”

And then there is the second part, the corollary thought. Laurie Stone adds “Fall in love with the way I talk on the page, or read someone else.”

That was when my face started burning with shame. Damn. To be honest, I want to write that honestly. I do not mean I am lying. I mean I do not want to worry about whether I am writing what you want as an audience, with meeting your expectations. Fall in love with me (my writing, that is) or go fall in love with someone elseʻs writing.

It is hard for me to put this on the page, it seems somehow so narcissistic to make this about me instead of about you, just when I am writing about making offers of value, a process I said starts with listening to what others value. Gulp. As if writing memoir is not an narcissistic endeavor to start with? But yeah, if you arenʻt enamored of the way I talk on the page, there have got to be dozens of other writers out their making similar, even identical points. Go read them instead.

Actually you donʻt have to fall in love with my writing. I would be happy if it made you so upset you had to read everything I write just to argue with it. I would be even happier if people could read a paragraph and immediately recognize that it was me that wrote it, whether they loved it or hated it. I want to have that strong a voice.

What was wrong with what I wrote for today was not that it was technically inept. It just felt flat, lacking a dramatic twist, missing my distinctive voice. If I didnʻt want to read it, why would you?

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I hope there is fire out there calling me, somewhere over a roller coaster road.

I wrote a prescription for myself today. I am going to wander off in search of my lost voice. For the second year in a row, I am going to participate in the brilliant, collective Thousand Words of Summer exercise. I am committed to write 1,000 words a day for 14 days, starting next Saturday, June 1.

I need to gallop into a wildly different topic, find passion and playfulness in the act of writing, explore new technique, stretch the limits of my skill, discover mental muscles that have gone weak from disuse and do reps until the soreness turns into strength.

That means I will not publish anything here until Sunday, June 23rd.

If you get bored in the meantime, I have all my past posts nicely categorized by topic now, so feel free to explore and get caught up. Please also feel free to let me know in the comments which posts and topics meant something to you. I might follow those breadcrumbs, as long as you are willing to drop them. Or I might just call up a wind with my magical voice and blow them all away.