Kathleen.Caterina

Yesterday was the last session of Barbara Abercrombie's Advanced Memoir class at UCLA. It was an intense (four hours at a time), upbeat class with only a dozen people. Because of the small size and length of the class I got an idea of what everyone was working on and I could look forward to hearing a new installment each week.

As part of yesterday's work we made a schedule of what we will accomplish writing wise in the next six weeks. I'll be gone two weeks on vacation and next week is my son's high school graduation, so we'll have visitors and parties and other reasons why I won't get to my desk. So I didn't have much to write down. More or less just a promise to myself to be observant while we are away and to maybe break away a little from my usual journal-writing when I am on a trip, which is too limited to names of towns and lists of food.

Last night I had trouble sleeping. I kept waking up thinking about a project I first toyed with a few weeks ago. At that point it was an excuse to break out a new notebook to play with and a way to while away a morning. It didn't seem to have more legs than that. But now it's back, keeping me from getting my rest.

I knew it's come from reading Abigail Thomas's "Safekeeping." Barbara Abercrombie is a fan of Thomas's style of memoir and in the past month I've read "A Three Dog Life" and "On Memoir", both of which I've liked so much that I ordered multiple copies on Amazon to have something to give friends when the conversation turns to what I've been reading lately. But "Safekeeping" is an even more amazing thing to read. Short chapters, sometimes just a paragraph, some in the first person, some in the third, some cover a lifetime of narrative, others focus on a small moment in someone's life. It's given me an idea for an entirely new approach to the project I've been thinking about. And maybe something that will keep that part of my brain occupied during two long plane rides and too many croissants.