“Parts of me are more linen than metal—why can’t I let my writing feel more wrinkled, more frayed?”
Emily Stoddard
What parts of me are more linen than metal?
Where am I wrinkled?
Some of my earliest writing memories stem from seeing my grandmother, Minnie write. There were the elusive journals from the days of my father’s growing up stacked on her closet shelf . They were detailed, full sketches of situations, settings, full of opinions, strong, and sometimes “in your face” brutal. Her handwriting, letter perfect cursive, written with blue fountain pen ink, embedded the manila fibered paper she wrote on. There were no wrinkles in her letters, no wavy lines, even on unlined paper.
As I remember reading line after line of those journals and their rigid straight lines, their tense verbiage…even now, writing this my breath freezes in my chest. I sense a hardness, metal like as Emily would say.
And, then there were her typewriter writings and her quest to be published. She would send entries off to Reader’s Digest and other places. They were typed on onion skin paper always with a carbon copy for her files. Again, rigid, tight, and controlled.
My mother was an English teacher and a good one! My memories of her impact on my love of reading and writing is deep. It did make her sigh in exasperation when I would write school term papers the weekend or the night before they were due and write my outline last.
My words wander all over the page, wander as my thoughts do, from this image to another one. They are not linear, not lined across a blank page in sequential order the way I remember their writing and writing processes to be.
I bought a new linen dress earlier in the year. It is sleeveless, loose fitting, a raspberry color and fits like my oversized nightgown, my kind of dress. I washed it to get the fold lines from shipping out of it. I put it on straight from the dryer. No, I did not iron it. Over the day it took on the wrinkled lines of my lap, of the car’s seatbelt, of chair back railings. Wrinkles telling the story of my day, illuminated in my dress.
Perhaps those wrinkles are like memory markers. Memory is never “metal like”. It is often wavy, maybe distorted, frayed around the edges. When I write I write out of the wrinkles, from the frayed edges of yesterday, last year, a decade ago. I recall snippets, pieces of stories and forget another part. They come together in patchwork like fashion….
I want this wrinkled, frayed look on the page. I like when my words form wrinkles and frayed edges. I want my words to reflect my wrinkled, frayed days, days that are always unfolding wrinkled.
This is a bit challenging as I work to get past these strong, early, formational writing memories. I’m glad for those memories, for their modeling of writing (and reading), and glad that I can write myself onto the page the way that I do it.
Reading & Writing a Life 