So in my life as an aspiring writer, this past summer I took a writing workshop with the incredible Nancy Aronie. She’s an old hippie. Intelligent, funny, quirky, and she has an incredible life story. I’m reading her book, ‘Memoir as Medicine’. It’s excellent. The subtitle is ‘The Healing Power of Writing Your Messy and Perfect Unruly but Gorgeously Yours Life Story”. Now I’m not writing a memoir, at least I don’t think I am, but her book isn’t about how to write a memoir. It’s about storytelling. How to shape your story, how to use your language, context, placement, rewriting your stories. I love it. For example, she tells how she started her book, sharing the three different stories she crafted for the beginning of the book. They were all super well written, but they didn’t work. She goes on to share how she started her book in the final draft. Funny enough, it’s a memoir she wrote but never actually published. I’m telling you, she’s a real card and I just love her.

The story I want to tell is that I was in an intensive workshop for a week with about 15 of us. We’d start each day with a writing prompt, have quiet, and then we would go around and read what we wrote. I was in a room of perfect strangers. I knew absolutely no one. On the very first day, the first person starts reading and I’m so entirely blown away by what she wrote that I didn’t get to listen to the amazing stories that were shared thereafter because I was too busy trying to make mine perfect. I was all up in my head about my writing skills. But that was day one, and by the end of the week, I had a keen appreciation for story and language and context and what we take away from stories. How we write them, how we reshape them, how we learn from them. It was incredible.

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