Introducing The Random Memoir
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
In the interest of maintaining interest around here, I thought it might be fun to detour into storytelling once in a while. It stands to reason that someone along the way might want to know, “Who is this guy Chris Preston?” and “How did he get this way?” When I’m not hawking my wares, making records or basking in the revelations and pains of my spiritual and emotional growth, I’m busy stewing in my own juices, digging ever deeper.
Recently it occurred to me that the experiences I remember most in my life probably are recallable because they’ve held some significance in the formation of my personality or at least as guidance arrows in the catacombs of my life’s decisions. I thought that it might be fun to write about them and take advantage of whatever opportunities they afforded for reflection and analysis.
I had a number of very weak writing instructors in college. Most offered no more than little writing assignments. (I had one that showed some promise. He would ask me to come outside and chat with him on class breaks. He would smoke and we would talk about meter in poetry or how my essays were superior or whatever else he brought up. A year later, he was dead. Had to be the smokes.)
Nevertheless, one of my writing instructors told us once that she was in the midst of writing a memoir. (This one loved a poem I wrote because she said it sounded like Allen Ginsberg, which I took as an affront.) I was a little confused by her announcement because I’d always thought that memoir was a marketable genre for writers who were already known for doing something else. She read our class a portion of it once. It was about her grandmother mostly. Though she had little to offer me as a writer, she did show me the value of telling your own story, regardless of who you are or what you might be known for. David Sedaris has been very successful with the idea. My old professor at the very least probably has a blog now.
I’ve chosen to name my storytelling detours Random Memoirs. Whenever they occur to me, I’ll share them. I expect to learn something in the process. If I do, I’ll try to share that too. I hope you find them entertaining. Stay with me now…
