Red Sky in the Morning

Red Sky in the Morning is a very nicely written piece. It is very descriptive without being boring and the descriptions are not just lists of characteristics of things but musings on what they really mean. It is amazing how the author can make whole pages of a story out of a simple meeting. She also uses italics and parentheses and other things to make the piece flow in a more interesting way, keeping the reader engaged and thinking.

Her premise, that memoirs are hard to write because they tell a mind, not a story, is also interesting. She explains several times that there are more stories in us than we can communicate, simply because there are too many and too personal and we don’t always know how. She gives an example, indirectly sort of; at the time, she didn’t really think much of the farm woman and her husband, she just remembered the incident. But years later, she can weave the experience into an idea- and a story.

She also makes a subtle point that it’s not the beautiful or outwardly interesting things that stick in our memory. It’s the things that hold a mystery, that you want to know more about, that we remember. She says she has trouble remembering the husband, even though he was the better-looking of the two, but she can remember the woman almost perfectly. That’s because she held stories that, as the author repeatedly says, that she could tell.

Because I wasn’t there for Friday’s discussion, I can’t comment on it.

~!~Lizard~!~