When we write a memoir, we are looking through a particular lens for each vignette or chapter. We find a way to focus that lens on the important moments, images, details,
feelings, and action–which is a kind of meditation on time, a meditation on vision, seeing, knowledge.
When you take a photograph, your image is framed, and this framing brings it to the fore, it makes you see the world in a different way than you would if you were not using that lens as a way to frame your comment on the world around you through the photograph.
Your memoir stories ask you to discover this focus, this attention to detail, so the story will have its own frame and containment. In this way, your story will be a polished jewel that shows a world only you have known, and shares it with us, the reader.
I look forward to Marion Roach Smith’s discussion on this topic and her own example of the Territory of Memoir at the member Teleseminar April 27, 2012. Now, I need to get my camera, I need to focus my story. Anyone want to join me in 1973?
–Linda Joy
