This is the first entry of this site’s participation in April 2024’s A to Z Blog Challenge. You can read about all this at my theme reveal post. Basically I am using this opportunity to write parts of a book with the working title of: Permission to Write. Each entry is intended to provide memoir writers with an open-ended prompt to elicit a complex exposition about a thing or event rather than a simple answer to prompt question.This is intended to open up the things we connect and call upon as we write.
The letter A is a thought. A dream. A thing. A memory. A point in time. We can use that single thing to recall what is connected to it, what its context is. One thing can help is to visualize the thing, concept, or memory from which you want to work as being in a bubble.
For me I put a memory in a bubble, reflective and floating, passing through the scenes of my mind’s eye. Right now, it is floating several feet above, and just beyond, the end of a pier, on the shore at a childhood friend’s lake home.
I am remembering that single memory, but connected to it is a moment of summer. It is the warmth of the sun, the coolness of the water, the awareness that there are big swimmy creatures beneath the lake surface. I also remember becoming aware that the life my friend lives that is completely different mine. I see it all from the vantage of the bubble.
If I continued on using my bubble, I might remember:
This little elicitation tool helped me connect place, fears, economic context, and connected ecological spaces.
Now you try. Questions? Ask in the comments.