Old Acquaintance

Seventh Day of Christmas/New Year's Eve

 “'You like to tell true stories, don't you?' he asked, and I answered, 'Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.'
Then he asked, 'After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? Only then will you understand what happened and why. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.'” [Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It]

The novella I just completed and want to start sending around soon has part of its genesis in the above lines from Norman MacLean. Another part was from an NPR story about memory and its inaccuracies. Between misremembering things and the hope of understanding by telling it with made up people sent me down the road to write this novella I'm calling, simply, Cora. 

That it is based heavily on where I grew up and my own mother, anyone who knows me or our family will recognize. But as I wrote, it was interesting how Cora became not my mother and her life not my mother's life. Parallels, yes, absolutely and obviously, but by the time I got to the end of it, Cora was someone else. 

Because memory did not have all the answers to the life I wanted to explore. Memory, as important to us all as it is, could not give me a full life and more a full inner life. 

Memory was still important, though. Memory is always important. the Bible is full of commands to remember this and that. The prophets addressed God with "remember your promises to us" and God responded with "remember what I've done for you." 

To be held in the memory of God is to live forever. 

And so I remembered what I could and made up a lot to create something else. A fiction to be sure, but one that, I think, offered me some understanding and maybe offers the readers some understanding (if I did anything right at all). 

We don't create out of nothing. We may claim God does that, but we can't claim that for ourselves. Sometimes the creation is closer to actual events, sometimes there is more invention, but even when we try for the truly alien, as a sci-fi writer might, it starts somewhere in our experience. 

I don't know if I agree completely with the MacLean quote, but I know it sent me on a particular creation, one that is very close to me, so close that I worry that it will not interest anyone else. And insofar as it exercised my memory and pulled me into directions I didn't predict, I can't say that it's completely false.