"I Could Tell You Stories"

My day at the writer's conference was filled with Creative Non Fiction (CNF).  I'd not thought about Non Fiction being that...creative.  Although it is what I lean towards in my readings....sometimes leaning more towards Creative Fiction based on Non Fiction...History....Life.  I was introduced to Patricia Hampl.....not personally meeting her but instead the meeting based on respect by two of the Writers Conference speakers.

"I was just riding shotgun in my own life. I could not have imagined containing, as the farm woman slumped next to me did, the sheer narrative bulk to say, "I could tell you stories," and then drifting off with the secret heaviness of experience into the silence where stories live their real lives, crumbling into the loss we call remembrance." ~ Patricia Hampl

Those words....they are heavy with so much responsibility......"crumbling into the loss we call remembrance"....a result I fear and press insatiably forward to prevent that end.  Life stories to be told....creatively.

"For we do not, after all simply have experience; we are entrusted with it.  We must do something-make something-with it.  A story, we sense, is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing. (...)  Memoirists wish to tell their mind, not their story." ~ Patricia Hampl

Seize the Day!