Biggest Places and Memories

When we set out to write from memory, our biggest obstacle is finding the specific sense memories which anchor our work and make it credible and real to readers. At the outset we must accept that memory is malleable and changeable witness. The truth in your writing comes from your emotional certainty that rises up from your body and charges the sense memories you retrieve.

Here's a visualization to help you go back your childhood room. Participants in my workshop "Always Coming Home" at the Land Full of Stories Conference for the Story Circle Network in San Marcos, Texas, found it an effective tool.

Comfortable Places and Memories

1) Drop into your breath and come home to your body. Notice where you hold your places of tension and release them by moving your body to get comfortable and breathing into the tight place.

2) Go to the place where you feel most at home, whether this is inside or outside and at anytime in your life.

3) Now go to your childhood home. Enter the house. Look carefully at the doorway. You are on the threshold of another time, place, and way of being. What does the door handle look like. What does it feel like? What do you feel like as you enter this home?

4) Go inside and explore the rooms one by one until you come to your childhood room. What does this doorknob feel like in your hand? What does the door look like? What feelings arise as you step over the threshold? What do you see? Feel? Smell? Touch? Hear? Know?

5) Come back to this room where you are right now and write about your experience.

Places and Memories

You can adapt this visualization to retrieve memories from other places in your childhood. The key is the specific sense memory cue. Here it is the doorknob. In other spaces you'll know what to substitute to take you back in time and come back with a clearer sense of what happened there for Places and Memories.