blood on my fingers

The second draft of my memoir, a high-stakes, meaning-of-life piece (at least for the author), as Jing Hidalgo called it, survived the second round of the workshop this morning. PhD classes can really make you bleed, but they are worth it. My often long and alliterative sentences, Jing added, remind one of the prose of Henry James. But I have to do something to mix up the sentence structure to vary the rhythm so the reader does not get annoyed. I have described in my memoir the houses I lived in and moved out of, with me as perpetual tag-along to my mother, who was really the one moving in and out of her mother's house, in a search for a permanent home, a unified family, some lasting kind of homely peace and comfort that alludes to Kerima Polotan's "the sounds of Sunday joy." (And that is a very long sentence, like the ones in the first paragraph of my piece.)

When Mother and I pushed the boxes deeper into the back of the truck, a neighbor asked if we were leaving that apartment, the one that looked down on the road, with its second floor roof as pointed and quiet and still as that of a church's. Mother said yes as I carried more boxes piled up on the sidewalk into the truck. Neighborly small talk was rare for us, and Mother wiped her hands on her flowery shapeless duster's sides and chatted, with a wrinkled old man with sideburns, taking a break from moving the contents of our lives into yet another anonymous vehicle. We were used to this. All this moving from house to house, but this house, I never wanted to leave this house, this two-floored oddly-placed dwelling on the elbow of nowhere.

Mother, in the piece, finds her Sunday, but even though the persona of the "I" does not, the piece ends on a note of hope. Eighteen pages of home remembered and described and a plot found and connected through scenes and sometimes, interior monologue. The narrative is told, or at least attempted to be conveyed, through understatement--a technique for which I only have this lifetime to perfect. Kerima Polotan has perfected it. So has her daughter, Kimi, who is my classmate in Jing's class. I also do not have Ricci's arsenal of imagery and mood achieved through metaphors and turns of phrase. I am not a poet like she is. (There is so much work to do. Ricci, by the way, is another classmate, and is already a teacher of creative writing. Compared to most of the people in class, I am an upstart.)

My memoir's narrative style is not straightforward but oblique, and a great deal is simply implied; left for the reader to deduce and intuit. The "episodes" themselves jump from past to present to an earlier past and shifts again to the near-present--something that signals a possible problem, Jing said, just in case the reader cannot follow the shifts in time. The story stands well enough on its own, she said and adds that maybe I should give it a year and look away from it and come back again. It is only after such a sabbatical that one can examine the portions of one's own life on the page, and see the gaps and holes. Right now, the memories and emotions dug up might be fresh. I suppose, this is what Cel went through. A two-category Palanca 2006 winner, her own memoir turned in for workshop wowed the class. Then Jing told us that Cel had been writing about it for a long time, waiting for the tranquility in her to cohere just the right aspects of her experience and come off with a lingering insight. And she did.

Writing about your own life is never easy, especially when you intend for your manuscripts to pass off as literature. Throwing facts on a page together and sequencing them in time is not enough. Facts do not have to make sense, they just are. Something has to drive the narrative. A conflict, a dislocation, a dissatisfaction, a threat. Something has to be done to signify that that conflict has been addressed, discovered to be false, or acknowledged as something one cannot resolve. The persona of autobiographer or memoirist, which functions in the same way as a character in fiction, must somehow change in relation to how the conflict is ended. If I weren't taking my masters, I would not shoulder all these burdens. But then one wants to write. And one wants to write beyond the mere facts, even if one has to bleed.