After finishing my last book – a novel I co-wrote with my husband – I planned to get right back on the saddle and begin another novel. I mean, sure, first I’d relax for a week or two, indulge our kids with movie marathons and lazy-morning pancakes, attend to the household repairs, and catch up on correspondence, but then I’d commence a Big New Project.
The relaxing part went off without a hitch. But that reascension-to-the-saddle part was giving me pains. My brain seemed cored of the Big and New. Weeks went by and I wasn’t writing anything besides little personal jottings in my notebook. My husband tried to comfort me: You’ve just spend four years researching and writing a novel; you’re probably still processing. And I reassured myself with something my teacher Miller Williams once told me: “You can’t get pregnant when you’re pregnant.”
But when my pregnancy entered its fifth trimester, I began to get a little panicky. Maybe I should try to return to my first love, poetry. But the poems wouldn’t come out and play. The essay form, always fruitful between projects, also abandoned me. All I was writing was those scribbles in my notebook, strange little snippets of my life.
We're here to write a mini memoir which could also be called a personal essay. And the point of this workshop is Teoh begin by mining our memory and figuring out what it is that we want to share with readers moving from there to applying literary techniques and just good storytelling techniques to really life, which is messy and wonderful and most definitely not with a clear plotline, no matter what.
Yet I was enjoying those snippets. In fact, writing them was giving me the same pleasure I’d gotten from fiction, poems, and essays. I began to consider that maybe I was writing – but in a form I hadn’t recognized as writing. These little clusters of sentences: What if they weren’t supposed to “add up to something” but instead were somethings? What if they were exactly the size they were meant to be? I began to page through my jottings. Some were simply memories that seemed to hold more than themselves. Some were quirky observations. Some were tiny scenes, bits of overheard conversations that, with the surrounding noise edited out, seemed to reverberate. I called these little flash creative nonfiction pieces (the shortest were one sentence, the longest a few pages) “micro-memoirs.” Labeling them allowed me to write more of them, and relax into the joys of them. Unlike the novel, micro-memoirs were low-stakes. If one failed – well, so what? Throw it away, all 30 precious words of it, and write another. Unlike the historical novel, these required no research. And, after spending so much time in the heads of characters, my own head, my own experiences, seemed newly fresh.
- A short memoir might be an account of a single, life-changing event, or it may be reflection on a period of growth or transition.
- MINI-MEMOIR: Personal Identity Blog With all parts of the course in mind, write a MINI-MEMOIR (equivalent of 8-10 pages, typed in 10-12 pt font, double-spaced, one-inch margins) about YOU that includes ways that each of the following have had an IMPACT on the way that you SEE YOURSELF, OTHERS, and ALL THINGS.
And so now I have a book coming out in October, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W. W. Norton). When writer pals hear about my project, they’re intrigued. “It sounds fun!” they say. “I want to try one!” they say. Guess what? It is fun. Want to try one? Read on.
The moving parts of the micro-memoir
A true hybrid, the micro-memoir strives to combine the extreme abbreviation of poetry, the narrative tension of fiction, and the truth-telling of creative nonfiction. The form might be considered a subset of the larger category of “flash nonfiction,” but it’s hard to draw strict lines here, because the recent proliferation of boundary-busting work is accompanied by a proliferation of terms – Anne Carson’s “short talks,” J. Robert Lennon’s “anecdotes,” Sarah Manguso’s “aphorisms,” James Richardson’s “ten-second essays:” all of these could at times be called “micro-memoirs.”
At its most basic, a micro-memoir is written in sentences, drawn from personal experience, and strives to create a world in as few words as possible. How many words is the upper limit? That, too, isn’t uniformly agreed on. Dinty W. Moore, the energetic writer and editor who’s done more for short-form nonfiction than anyone else, accepts essay submissions of 750 words or less for his online magazine, Brevity, so that might be a helpful guideline. But some great examples of the form are much, much shorter. Amy Hempel’s “Memoir,” for example, reads in its entirety: “Just once in my life – oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?”
Before we discuss further what micro-memoirs are, it might be useful to discuss what they’re not: fragments. Micro-memoirs aren’t slivers of a bigger creation. They’re designed to stand alone; they are, as Lia Purpura writes in her Brevity craft essay “On Miniatures,” “workable things on very small scales” and therefore “radically self-sufficient.”
Nor are micro-memoirs excerpts of, or failed attempts at, longer essays. The size of the prose is the size of their thinking, perfectly realized. One doesn’t read a great micro-memoir and think, “Wow, I’d love to see the fuller version of that,” in the same way one doesn’t see a hummingbird and wish it were an eagle. What a micro-memoir doesn’t say is part of the way it makes meaning. As David Mamet writes, “Omission is a form of creation.”
Making a micro-memoir
One thing the micro-memoir is particularly suited for is an exploration of a moment, particularly a moment that seems small or unimportant, but, when viewed from the right perspective, with the right attention, reveals itself to be central to identity. What are the moments who make us who we are?
To find an idea the right size for a micro-memoir, consider your quirkiest memories. Forget about the big memories, like meeting your beloved or witnessing a tragedy. We know why those events were important to us, and how they shaped us. Telling the story of how you met your beloved, while fun, is a neatly labeled anecdote. You don’t discover something new about yourself while sharing it. So instead of the processed or oft-repeated, consider memories that you retain without understanding why.
Say you have a vivid image of your friend Kimiko driving away from your house with her green scarf rolled up in her car window, the fringe flapping. Why, given all of the things you’ve forgotten about that visit with your friend, does that idiosyncratic image linger in your hippocampus? To find out, stay in the moment. Tease out its emotional complexity. Perhaps you discover the memory carries some strange feeling of dread. Why? Because the scarf is the same color as the lime Jell-O that was sitting on Kimiko’s hospital tray, untouched, the last time you saw her? Or because her breezy wave reminded you of your son’s first bike ride after the training wheels were removed, his wave that caused his bike wreck? Or did you remember the dancer Isadora Duncan, strangled when her long silk scarf was caught in the rear hubcaps of her convertible?
If this memory leads you into a complex cause-and-effect chain – which is to say, plot – maybe you’re looking at the seeds of a short story or longer essay. But if the moment is dignified by white space – if it seems to grow in importance by not being subsumed in a larger narrative, if it doesn’t want to be welded into the upside-down check mark of the Freytag triangle, then, friends, you have the makings of a micro-memoir.
Keep reading Beth Ann’s micro-memoir series:
Beth Ann Fennelly teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She’s won grants from the N.E.A., United States Artists, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Her sixth book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, will be published by Norton on Oct. 10.
Originally Published
- Internalized Ableism and the Dichotomy of Valuable Disability - April 15, 2021
- On ASD, Courage (Cowardice, Really), and Roommates - April 10, 2021
- A Mini Memoir: Anorexia - February 14, 2021
Mini Memoir
My introductory assignment for my first class at NYU was to write a brief essay, about 1 page, that would describe a period in my life as if I were writing a mini-memoir. Here’s what I came up with. Most of you have read this story before, but it got a good grade so I figured I’d share it. TW: Anorexia.
___________________
My hair is sprawled across the rotting wooden planks as I watch the orange sky melt into the trees above me. How beautiful natural things are, I think, as I shiver. It’s below freezing, but in my own mind I’m well equipped for what I’m doing: mittens, burly snow boots, a hat with a hole for my dyed blonde ponytail. I’ve taken the hat off in order to feel the natural wood against my scalp. This exact scenario has been repeated every day for the last month, and it comes smack dab in the middle of a three hour run that will be consummated, upon my arrival back home, by a drink of water and a flurry of my prescribed medication. I’m not nearly as natural as I’d like to think.
I was anorexic. Every day, for as long as my body could take it and with absolutely zero fuel in it, I’d go on hours long runs down my local Ridgefield Rail Trail. It’s a sprawling and scenic trail that spans several miles, peppered with peripheral paths into the woods it’s wrapped in. I was running in January and February of 2018, a particularly cold Connecticut wintertime, and my boots carved deep holes into the thick layer of snow and ice that the path hosted most days. Each flighty step was a monumental task executed far too quickly to understand its weight, and I’d go many miles without stopping, but more importantly, without thinking.
Once I reached my desired pathway, I’d walk for a bit, but nothing leisurely. In my earbuds that clung to my frozen ears was blaring rap music; unknown artists performing poetry to a beat about their triumphs, hardships, riches, families (another world I could escape into). It was all escapism, really: the last surviving leaf encased in ice, the downhill stream that was only slightly faster than the dropping temperature, the lying on a makeshift wooden bridge, the standing atop boulders like a lion king. None of it was the nightmares that awaited me when I was idle, or in silence, or in bed, or worse, eating.
It became too much, as if it was ever appropriate or bearable. I lost too much (weight and spirit), and though my doctor had begged me to go into the hospital at about the midway point of my treacherous journey, my old flame of the moment had begged me to stay out of treatment: he needed me, like my abuser had needed me, like I’d need him after he abused me, long after. I didn’t have a choice anymore. I needed to enter into treatment or I’d die. Brandishing a scholarship letter and a frail frame, I begged Silver Hill Hospital to take me like I’d been begging the heavens to for many weeks. They rescued me.
Micro Memoir
In the hospital, I learned to comply. I was happy to; they were a kind, forgiving, and validating entity in my life in a time during which all three were scarce. I gained some weight, learned some recipes, nodded a lot, and was released when the money ran out.
Micro Memoir Example
Since my time at Silver Hill Hospital, I’ve gained back a lot of weight and sorrow, and have been in intensive treatment that falls just short of hospitalization. I think on my time at Silver Hill longingly, not because I need it but because I want to need it again. I’m teetering on the edge of illness again, and while I want you to know, Dr. —–, that I’m in extensive treatment and am being meticulously cared for, every day is a new and tested struggle and I’m doing the best I can.
Mini Memoir Examples For Students
Related