Photographs are useful prompts in themselves. They offer a useful structure for text too — short, candid snapshots of vivid recall that can sit on the page like a series of photographs or break up longer chunks of time and description.

When I work from photographs, I like to tape them to the wall above my desk for a few days or weeks. I like to live with them for a while.

The prompt this week is to select a photograph to put up on the wall for a few days. If you don’t have access to a photograph, choose a memory. Note some basic details on a small piece of paper and attach this to the wall instead. When you’re ready to sit down and write, take the photograph or the note down and spend some time looking at it, bringing the scene to mind. Set a timer for five, ten or twenty minutes — whatever the demands of your life currently allow — and write.

Write who’s there and who isn’t. Write where and when it is and how you can tell. Write what it felt like. Write what you don’t remember. Let the details of the photograph draw you deeper into the sensory experience of the memory or imagine the felt sense of it. See where the photograph or memory takes you.

If you’re writing fiction, write about the photograph but stretch, exaggerate, lie, omit — play.

I taped this photograph of my sister and me to the wall a couple of months ago. It’s from a day I don’t have a specific memory of, in a year that was significant, difficult, murky. I took the photograph down and looked at it closely, set a timer and wrote for thirty minutes by hand.

My sister and I are in the foreground of the photograph, on the beach below the farmhouse, with the length of the beach behind us and the paddock ending in a spill of dark gorse and scrub running down to the sea. The sea is out of sight. I’m eleven, my sister is a month from turning six. We’ve been in this new country six months. We don’t really have any friends yet and we aren’t really friends either. In the photograph, we’re both smiling, but I’m holding her down, my hand pressed high up on her back. She’s draped in a loose skein of semi-rotten kelp, orange and soft, maybe dried from the sun, otherwise she’d be covered in decomposing sludge. I’ve probably draped her in it, unless she volunteered, trying to amuse me.

She’s wearing bright pink gumboots and a jean jacket. I’m wearing baggy track pants and a rugby jersey in navy blue, dressed like I’m trying to disappear. I’ve grown out my bangs — my hair’s hanging over my face, the way I like it. My sister’s head is turned sideways, away from the kelp. Her hair is in her face too. Our covered faces mirror each other, our smiles peeking out. We did occasionally bond, when I let her. My sweet, scheming sister, always trying to make us laugh. I did not want to be in that country, this country.

Our dogs are in the background, one nose-down, one alert, keeping us in sight. We did have friends: the dogs and cats — we each had a kitten, a brother and sister — and the lambs we bottle-fed that first winter.

The beach is dull, in various shades of grey, shale and sandstone, wet, crusted-over sand, and driftwood. The rust-orange kelp is the brightest thing in the photo apart from my sister’s pink gumboots and is almost an exact match to the date stamp in the upper right corner that reads 12 7 ‘97.

And here the recollection fails, becomes disoriented, in perfect symmetry with the lived experience of that time, with how our lives broke into before and after. I read the date as 12 July 1997, the way the date is formatted here in Aotearoa, but in 1997, I hadn’t yet trained myself out of the date format native to the US which reads December 7, 1997. Which is it?

The date format was a big deal after we moved and came up in conversation a fair amount, in our family and with people we interacted with. The date had to be recorded correctly on school assignments and cheques and any forms we had to fill out. We did our best to make the switch but there was a period where I couldn’t remember which way was right and which was wrong.

If it’s December 7, 1997, I’m twelve and my sister is six and in one month exactly we’ll have been in New Zealand for one year. That makes it summer, not winter, the bottle-babies weaned and out to pasture. We’re still each grappling with the strange reversal of seasons anyway, July now being winter, December now being summer. The grey sky and flat colour could be any season in Dunedin, summer or winter. Which is it? It maybe isn’t possible to know. My mom might. One of the dogs, way off in the distance, the alert one, could be our black labrador Zeus, who we brought home sometime that year from the local SPCA after one of our two dogs from the US passed away. We’d need other date-stamped photographs, to know for sure. Whether July or December, home to me then is still the country we left, not yet the country we’ve landed in.

My mom’s camera was likely from the US and set to US format, but I can see her dutifully changing the date stamp to match this new country, determined to adjust and adapt, to do what needs to be done, determined to document her girls. Most of the photographs of us are from her point of view. Dad isn’t in this photograph or on the beach — I can count the times I remember him on the beach on one hand. That tracks though, the new country being defined as much by what is present as by what is absent. He and that acreage are so tightly wound now that I can’t be there without thinking of him and I can’t think of him without thinking also of that acreage. I feel his warmth and love in its remoteness.

In 1997, whether July or December, everything feels wrong to me and there is nothing to be done about it, which might explain why my hand is on my sister’s back and why I’m holding her down but also why we’re laughing. Beyond the dislocation of the seasons and the fissure of grief and the goddamned great adventure we’ve been taken on, this dream of my father’s we’ve found ourselves walking around in, with sand and rotten kelp on our hands and boots — beyond all that — a laugh escapes our small bodies, spills from our mouths from under all that hair, and is caught on camera.

This preserved, distant moment asks as many questions as it answers: My dad elsewhere, working, my mom behind the lens, my sister on the ground in a tangle of kelp and me, holding her down.

I typed the piece and worked on it quite a bit before publishing it here. I work slowly when writing about family and about this time in particular. I want to ensure to the best of my sometimes-limited ability that I’m not superimposing my experience over my loved ones’, making unwarranted assumptions, or indulging in blind spots. The writing is always better after making those cuts — what we don’t know is often more interesting than what we think we know.

See you next week.

What is Understory?

Understory is a container for exploratory writing and prompts to encourage play and experimentation at any stage of a writing practice. I’ll share a short piece of writing, followed by a related prompt and invitation to write. We’ll practice writing in conversation with memory and place, with less control and more imagination.

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Where to Begin?

Last week my friend K decided she wanted to write about a time in her life but wasn’t sure where to start or what to capture from within that period. She asked: How do you figure out what blocks of time to write about?

Because memory is associative rather than narrative, I like to start with a brainstorm, list, jumble or cloud of significant moments or events. I write down key details — the more visceral the better — and draw lines between connected ideas. One memory will lead to others, not necessarily in chronological order. Memories speak to each other across time, asking and answering questions.

I also like to sketch out a timeline, ideally on a big piece of paper. This can be linear (vertical or horizontal) or follow a metaphor: you can draw a river-line with rapids, boulders, eddies and currents[1]. I typically do this exercise a couple of times as the sketch can become crowded and messy. Embrace the chaos knowing you can create a neater version once you’ve captured what you need.

If you’re already at work on a writing project, make a list of moments or scenes you’ve been putting off or saving, or sketch out a fresh timeline.

You can brainstorm moments and sketch out timelines for a fictional story or a non-fiction narrative of any kind.

If you’re writing about an art project or artwork, sketch out the timeline of your project or write a list of key themes, places, techniques, imagery, and details.

I like to use large, blank sheets or pads of paper or blank workbooks for brainstorms and timelines, but they can be done in a notebook of any size also. If you’re able, take whatever substrate you’ve chosen to the beach, river or somewhere out of doors, anywhere with an expansive outlook to gaze at while you think. Let your attention and focus go soft.

I’m deep in the murky middle of a book-length memoir / essay project. I’ve gathered the brainstorms and timelines for this project from the various workbooks I’ve made them in, and the folded-up sheets of A3 paper tucked inside them — a beautiful mess.

I’ve included examples from a different project using the river analogy and a linear timeline.

Exploratory Writing

When you’re ready for some exploratory writing, grab a fresh notebook if you have one or your project book. Spend five, ten, thirty minutes, or an hour — whatever the demands of your life currently allow. Set a timer. Write by hand or in a note-taking app if you are caught off-guard. I use Day One. It’s free and notes are ordered by date.

Start at the beginning. Start at the end. Start in the middle at a moment of crisis. Start with a memory of a disappointment or a crushing realisation. Imagine the moment from another person’s point of view. Start when you didn’t know anything yet and everything felt possible. Start with a dream. Start with today and write where the past presses in. Start at the shoreline, describing the light. Start with the first time you saw someone or the last time.

Start where you feel a sense of urgency or excitement to proceed. Start where you don’t think you need to or don’t want to. Start with any prompt and see what rushes forward to be written.

My version of this prompt was ten minutes of timed writing by hand then typed. Its raw, messy, fluid, and unpolished.

He had given me a drawing. Handed it to me on the school bus just before we got off. The head of a tiger with its mouth open. I’ve written about the drawing, but I haven’t written about when I went looking for it a couple of years ago. I kept it in a wooden chest at my mom’s down south, full of my sentimental things from childhood and my travels, boxes of letters. I look through the chest every few years. I’ve seen the drawing on previous searches, but last time it was gone, along with letters from a friend who died. I had gone on another shame purge, purging so deeply that even the memory of doing so is blacked out.

The drawing was gone and with it the only evidence I had of the boy, or of his once having given me a drawing. Shame vanishes things, destroys evidence. What a waste after all those years of hanging onto it — twenty-five? And Kahu’s letter’s — how I wish I still had those. No doubt I’d been following some feng shui directive or Marie Kondo’s imperative to get rid of anything that doesn’t bring you joy (to be fair, I haven’t read Marie Kondo’s book, only absorbed that guidance through the wider culture). Joy isn’t the only reason to keep something. Proof for one. Proof that he existed, proof that I did. Proof that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

Panic rose in me as I rummaged through the layers of letters in an old shoe box, going deeper and deeper through time, the stack so much thinner than I remembered. Even Kahu’s funeral handout was gone — the one my parents saved for me because I was still in India when he died. How could I? Something in me was trying to survive, move on, put the past behind her, didn’t think she needed it anymore, didn’t think it mattered. She was only doing her best, doing her worst, destroying evidence. The only traces left now are in her.

I switched from first person to third again, that old part of me keen to put as much distance between the event and herself as possible. I don’t blame her.

Ten minutes, even five, is all it takes to get started, to build consistency, to play and experiment. Less control, more imagination! See you next week.

AMB

[1] My friend Kate van der Drift’s short video of using the river analogy is aimed at artists but can be applied to any subject and is a worthwhile exercise.