Saturday, May 21, 2016


I would never write a memoir. This is because my novels borrow so much from my life. Fictionalized, bent to fit, but often drawing from experience. I do know that some of those memories have been ‘bent to fit’ in my own head and that my recollections are probably not accurate. All the more reason to utilize them as sources of my fiction.

My poems probably come closer to actual memoir but here, too, the experiences are material for building something else. The characters who populate my stories, my poems, are me and they are not me. They are more heroic, they are weaker, they are better, they are worse, but there is a bit of my own soul in each of them.

Imagine a broken mirror and your reflection in each shard, each a little different. So it is with those characters, and with the experiences drawn from life. I have many broken mirrors.

I attempt to reassemble them into something new. Not a memoir — they could never again be put back together in that form. Yet, they tell my story.

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