I have to file tonight. That’s it. Last chance. It’s a gift to have been invited to contribute and the editor IS A SAINT. Today, she reminded me of Tom Hulce in his final scene of Amadeus, and she told me not to die. I heard her and loved the reference (the trailer alone is miraculous), but also I was like, wait is she expecting fucking Mozart?

I think I know why this assignment has been murder for me, despite it being a humor piece(!). But that is another essay (optimistic) for another time (optimistic), about knowing what kind of writer you are (derogatory).

ALL TO SAY: Jill Talbot, though. Jill Talbot has been key to my survival for keeping this damn thing pushing. Her piece “All Or Nothing, Self-Portrait at Twenty-Seven”* has been my inspiration.

It’s holding fast. It’s all keeping on.

xo Blaise

*You can also read it on Brevity.

Previously on How I Learned

If you’re alive long enough, memories become like a burlap bag of rocks you lug around, with some hunks of silver and gold occasionally glinting through the rubble. Over time, as the bag increases in weight, the fibers fray and give way and some rocks fall out, along with the occasional chunk of precious metal.

Case in point: My memory sucks so badly that I recently PM’ed a close friend from junior high, desperate for details about spending my 13th birthday at The Go-Go’s and A Flock Of Seagulls concert at the Boston Garden to write what could’ve been a moving essay about my budding adolescence, only for her to politely reply that she wasn’t invited.

What Belinda Carlisle or Charlotte Caffey wore onstage that night, the particulars of the setlist, or how the band sounded, are details that have long tumbled out of my burlap sack. I also don’t remember what I could’ve possibly said to my parents to convince them to buy me and a few of my friends tickets to this show. I clearly don’t recall who went with me, or what happened when we got there, but what did make an indelible impression on me is the rapturous joy I felt when watching the music I love so much performed live, because it’s a joy I pursue as often as humanly possible to this day.

When The Go-Go’s first got national attention in the very early ‘80s, they made jangly pop music that appealed to teen girls and young women without sanded edges and a lacquered sheen. Natives of the L.A. late ‘70s punk scene, their first album, Beauty and The Beat, was chock full of catchy, scratchy tunes about self-preservation, lust, longing, and a no-tolerance policy for bullshit held together with jangly guitars and, of course, the beat.

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To wit: The single “We Got The Beat” was a poppy anthem about the joy of music, but the album’s other major hit, “Our Lips Are Sealed,” was about a clandestine hook-up between guitarist Jane Wiedlin and Terry Hall, Brit singer of the Fun Boy Three and The Specials. A listen to the lyrics could lead one to speculate that one darker track, “This Town,” was about the underbelly of the Los Angeles punk scene; “Lust to Love” was about being dickmatized; and “Automatic,” the darkest, most hypnotic song on the record, is about mechanical, loveless sex. Vacation, subsequent to Beauty and The Beat, would be a markedly glossier effort, all punk predilections and day-glo aggression made smooth and palatable for mass and major label consumption. But, as poppy as it could be, Beauty and The Beat preserved elements of the darker, feminist edge of their grittier punk roots.

The Go-Go’s were something of an anomaly at the time — an all-female band — and despite the frothy femme image they were reluctantly shoved into by the media, they had preserved a rebellious edge and a firm resistance to patriarchal mores, ways, and means that resonated deeply with my misfit teenage spirit. That night, they showed me that women could (literally) band together and make art without giving a shit what guys thought. Being in that crowd that night felt more like being in a movement than just taking in a concert.

Meanwhile, their openers, A Flock Of Seagulls, were a British band that looked and sounded like the future. With his awesome blond skyward coif, singer Mike Score made rhythmic pop set to shimmering synths that inspired thoughts of what our lives might look and sound like as we moved toward an existence akin to an episode of The Jetsons. It felt passionate and deliberate, yet rife with possibility. This made clear that, though Led Zeppelin and other Boomer relics were intent on dominating radio, the path forward for me would be as femme-y and futuristic as a Thierry Mugler bustier.

To the male music critic in attendance that fateful night, The Go-Go’s were relegated to the inside of a pink, transparent, Bubble Yum bubble. “Whoever thought the ragamuffin Go-Go’s, who started on a wing and a prayer four years ago, would become such trendsetters?” wrote Steve Morse, the Boston Globe music critic, in a review of the show I attended (again, thank you, Internet). After describing the show as a meeting place for “flocks of teenaged girls” who were “fashion conscious” but “too young to go to a disco” and intent on invoking “bedlam pure and simple” (well, true), their music and performance were relegated to deeper paragraphs. He did accurately compare aspects of their sound to an ‘80s version of The Beach Boys in terms of planting fantasies in their listeners’ minds, but that’s all the kudos they would get. “It’s light and fluffy stuff,” he wrote, reductively, “but thoroughly entertaining.” If someone wrote that about Taylor Swift today, a large army of Swifties would assemble and doxx them within an inch of their life.

Maybe Morse didn’t get The Go-Go’s because they had no intention of placating the male gaze, and this was right up my alley. At 13, I already knew deep down that I wanted to live my life that way. When you’re 10, 11, or 12, turning 13 feels like an initiation, a first foray into the soft shadows of who you’d grow into. It was of the utmost importance to me to stray as far as I could from the objectified, indentured version of womanhood I saw all around me, at home and in the media. The womanhood I wanted to experience was closer to what The Go-Go’s represented. By sheer virtue of being an all-female band, The Go-Go’s (along with predecessors Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders and Joan Jett) gave me evidence that it was possible to make the kind of art I wanted, in the company of supportive women, without having to drape myself seductively in a bikini across a GTO to sell it. After seeing that tour, countless budding teens, such as myself, were inspired to put down the hairbrushes they sang into and instead pick up a mic or an instrument. Even if just for myself, I’ve made music, written music, written about music, and been inspired by music ever since.

Decades later, as fate would have it, The Go-Go’s and their scrappy punk rock spirit would trickle down to my 8-year-old daughter. She was dedicated to learning the drums — a pursuit I was quick to endorse despite the confines of our minuscule Brooklyn apartment. In my daily travels, I stumbled across a copy of Tom Tom magazine, a now-defunct (in print) publication that celebrated the female drummer, featuring an interview with Gina Schock from The Go-Go’s. How could I not bring that home for my daughter to check out? With only a cursory glance at its contents, I handed it to her and she ran off to her room to crack it open.

“Hey Ma!” she called out — all of 8 years old back then. “Did you know that Gina Schock moved to L.A. in a pickup truck with $2000 and a bag of cocaine?” How did she know how to pronounce ‘cocaine’?!

I had to summon a tricky age-appropriate explanation, and I had to do it fast. So I did the opposite of what Morse did, and quickly addressed it head-on, without fanfare, before shifting the conversation to how special it is to be a female drummer, because there were all too few. Schock was a solid drummer, and my innocent child would go on to play for years as she grew into an inspirational, wildly creative young woman, preternaturally aware of the power of her own self-expression.

Vivian Manning-Schaffel is an experienced, voracious New York–based culture and entertainment writer and human Shazam. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, the Los Angeles Times, Marie Claire, Cultured, and myriad other publications. Follow her at @vivtheemanningschaffel on Instagram and read her Substack, MUTHR, FCKD.

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Previously on How I Learned

I ran into my grandfather in the pool hall on Mott and Houston. I was just passing by and got the urge to play. My grandfather’s been dead over a decade now. He was by himself at one of the tables in the back.

He looked the same as I remembered and was smoking the same brand of cigars. I don’t know anything about cigars, but I recognized the smell immediately; that’s what made me look.

Funny thing: it was my other grandfather who liked pool. This one — well, I never saw him play a game of any kind, not even a card game. Aren’t grandfathers supposed to play card games? Basically all this man ever did was sit in a big black recliner and smoke cigars.

When I saw him back there, I thought that maybe I’d been mistaken about him being dead. It’s not as crazy as it seems, particularly since I don’t have much contact with that side of the family. Well, zero, I have zero contact. I guess it goes back to my dad, who calls me once a year and tells me he wants to have a relationship with me. Except he doesn’t quite say that exactly; instead he talks in this weird lingo he picked up from The Forum. Stuff like, “I want to acknowledge your willingness to put yourself out there and share your authentic truth.” I try to be nice about it, he’s a person with feelings like anyone else, but it’s hard to get around the fact that my authentic truth in this case is fuck off.

Anyway it’s my sister who keeps in touch with my dad, so it must have been through her that I learned that my grandfather had died. Oddly, though, I don’t exactly remember her telling me. Or I guess that’s not so odd, really. My memory’s not the greatest and I hardly knew this grandfather.

It was the other one I was close to. In fact he’s the one who taught me to play pool. We’d go to this place in Roosevelt Mall and play for a couple hours, but real slow and with him explaining what he was thinking on each shot. It was amazing. He’d have this whole elaborate plan in his head about where the cue ball needed to be four shots down the line.

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Given all this, it felt weird to see the other grandfather at the pool hall. Weird meaning confusing. And then on top of that, I had this awful feeling of wishing he was the other one. Because this one — well, I don’t know anything for sure, but my sister says he used to beat my father with a board or something. I don’t know how she claims to know this, but he certainly never hit me; in fact, he rarely even sat up in his recliner. Still, that’s what my sister says, and my sister usually knows what’s she talking about.

So I have to admit that this board thing entered my mind when I saw him. Not that I was worried about him attacking me with a cue stick or something. I just felt a little uneasy about starting a conversation with this person who I knew had done certain things — things I had no interest in broaching at this late date. Because what was he going to say in response? “Yeah, yeah, so I beat your father, what of it?” What would be the point? Because here he was, ten or more years past his death, playing a game of pool. Most likely he had long since forgotten all that — assuming it even happened — or even if he did remember, I couldn’t imagine him admitting it all to me and wanting to have a conversation about it.

Then I remembered this other thing my sister told me. Actually, this was the first thing. My sister says that my father used to hit me as well. I mean, as well as his father hitting him. Just not with a board or anything. Actually, I don’t remember what he hit me with, I guess with his belt. Anyway, I don’t remember it and can’t even say for certain it happened, except that my sister is pretty insistent about it.

So when I saw my grandfather again, I thought about him hitting my dad and my dad hitting me, and the whole thing just put me in a shitty mood, when just a minute before I was feeling pretty great. So I don’t know, I guess I overreacted, but after that I just decided to move on and let him play his game in peace.

On the way out, though, I had this crazy thought. My thought was that I was going to walk outside and immediately see my other grandfather coming down the street. I guess it was because I’d just seen the first one that I thought I could see this one. Well, that plus being in a pool hall, which always makes me think of him. So in my mind I constructed this cornball fantasy where I run up to him and embrace him and tell him how much I’ve missed him, although he’s always been there with me, and then he says something funny like, “Yeah, there were a few times there I kinda wished I wasn’t there with you,” and I laugh and say something funny back like, “If you only knew what I would have done if you just left me alone for a sec.”

Anyway, it was all so vivid that I started crying (I mean, in the pool hall) and then the guy at the desk said, “Hey, you alright?” so I said, “Yeah, I’m fine,” and got the hell out of there.

Needless to say, my grandfather wasn’t coming down the street when I made it outside. I didn’t have to look to know this, there are certain things you already know without having to look, but I looked anyway. He wasn’t coming.

Michael Barrish was a writer and a freelance web developer. He died in 2023 from pneumonia after being diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of early-onset dementia.

How I Learned periodically reprints select stories that appeared on Michael’s website, Oblivio, between 1999 and 2020. The about page read, “Etymology: Oblivio is Latin. Often translated as ‘forgetfulness,’ it suggests a profound lostness, something akin to the English word oblivion, but more oblivious.”

The entire Oblivio archive is available in book form on demand. Massive thanks to Mickle Maher and David Isaacson for preserving Michael’s work.

NOTE: The stories are reprinted here the way Michael wrote them, though source links may be added and some pieces may be slightly edited for clarity.

[ MORE Oblivio on How I Learned ]

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Open Call for Featured Essays

Got a good How I Learned story? Read the submission guidelines, then shoot your shot. Just do it.

Cultivate a Writing Practice

Get evergreen access to 28 x 20: Daily Prompts for Writing Super-Short Personal Essays in 20 Minutes (and other perks) with a paid subscription. Cancel anytime. It’s a steal, really.

My Next Ghost is a growing collection of mini-interviews with people I like (small pool). Just a few scattered questions. Less “what’s your creative process?” and more, “have you ever seen a man slip on a banana peel?”

Alexander Chee

Current location: Seat 19A, on a Delta flight from Boston to Baltimore for AWP.

Eight-word memoir: This should be a novel, he said repeatedly.

What was your first concert and what did you wear?

Asia. Sunday, August 21st, 1983. I found a concert archive with all of the concerts at this one arena. I was with these two brothers I played D&D with. I don’t remember what we wore. If my mom had anything to say about it, I wore a maroon polo shirt. She was relentless about dressing me in that color.

Have you ever stolen anything?

Yes. In high school. I typically shoplifted gay pornography or the novels of Gordon Merrick with lavishly colored painted covers of their promiscuous gay male protagonists in bathing suits, sold often at Waldenbooks or in grocery stores in the 1970s and 1980s. They were popular with women as well as boys like me. They would be my introduction to a number of things.

Do you get tipsy or do you go from sober straight to drunk?

Tipsy, but people often don’t realize I’ve been drinking. I hold it pretty well.

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Will you copy and paste your most recent text here?

“I just read a scene where everyone was gathering at the home of a woman who’d died, very private art collector, no children so her god child inherited, and they’re all realizing she stole things from all of them, a klepto. It’s hilarious and sad and really shrewd.”

—sent to our mutual friend the photographer Michael Sharkey,* who wanted to know what I thought of the Alan Hollinghurst novel The Sparsholt Affair.

* Blaise here. Incidentally, I spent yesterday afternoon with Michael Sharkey and his husband Jeffrey. We talked about Alex, and our old collegemate Kiran Desai’s new book (they recommend it), “The Great Muppet Caper” (I recommend it), and what our kids’ poop looks like (our kids are dogs). We probably talked about you, too.

Roller skating or ice skating?

Roller blades. Back in the 1990s in Brooklyn, you most likely saw me on them in Prospect Park or in the East Village.

What’s your desert island book?

I have novels I’ve reread so often but if I were to really just be alone for the rest of life with one book, or at least alone until rescued, it might be Baldwin: A Love Story, by Nicholas Boggs, a biography of James Baldwin, or A Great Unrecorded History, by Wendy Moffatt, her biography of Forster. Or it might be this most recent O. Henry Prize anthology, edited by Edward P. Jones. I’ve loved every story so far, which never happens.

What was your favorite toy when you were a kid?

A Gumby doll, and when we lived in Guam when I was a small child, my father would throw it in the pool, saying “Gumby’s drowning!” and then my brother and I would race to save him from the bottom of the pool. Pokey was also thrown in, but I loved Gumby.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Mariner Books. A contributing editor at The New Republic and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He was guest-editor for The Best American Essays of 2022.

He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak.

He is a full professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.

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Got a good HOW I LEARNED story? SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN: MARCH 2 - MAY 17th, 2026

Previously on My Next Ghost

Of course I sent out an UNFINISHED DRAFT on the last-last day of 28 x 20.

The truth is, the buck stops with me. All the phone lines are lit up and all 26 of my perso…

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Today, we’ve got Samantha Irby, Ross Gay, Didion again, and more. This is a prompt that might inspire you to push back the timer and sit with the writing a little longer. Go for 20 minutes first, then check in, see where you’re at. If you only (“only”) write down one sentence, that’s more than the blank page you started with.

There will be a big wrap-up post tomorrow.

Let’s do it.

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Remember when I shared seven PUPS? That was 21 days ago. Today, you get nine new ones. Brief refresher if you need it:

There’s usually a day near the end of my in-person workshops when I gather a ton of short prompts, put them on strips of paper, and place them in a coffee cup in the center of the table. I used to call it “prompts in a cup,” until someone way sharper than me said we should call it PUPS.

PUPS are miniature. There’s no accompanying reading to serve as a way into the prompt; each one is a simple directive in one succinct sentence. The stories they yield might not be so simple. That part’s really up to you. The prompts are meant to jog a memory, give you an image, but what you come up with on the page is a matter of letting the creative mind take you where it wants to go. Staying open. Being curious. Not worrying about anything. Just for right now.

Don’t waste precious time trying to decide which one you like the most. Do the one that nudges you.

Let’s get it.

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As a little baby child I had such a severe case of buckteeth that when I entered a room, my incisors walked in first. By 7th grade, I had retainers, braces, more retainers. I didn’t do well with any of it, except for the love of the absolute greatest orthodontist named Morton Speck who had Archie comic books in the waiting area and a totally unique approach, cultivating for his patients (all kids) a kind of solidarity, like an afterschool community. But barring his compassion, the trouble I got into at home every time I accidentally left my retainer in a restaurant was too traumatizing to handle. I’m no longer Bucktooth, but my teeth are as crooked, messy, and foolish as our former mayor, Eric Adams. Truly. It’s like if you had arthritic bunions and a bunch of hammertoes, but in your mouth. Bad teeth are a family curse — mostly on my mother’s side — but I made it worse as a child with my thumb-sucking habit. My denticles never fully recovered. I loathe to think Dr. Speck might have rolled over in his grave.

I weaned myself off of sucking my thumb by the time I was in first or second grade. So it could have been worse, I guess? I imagine I accomplished this feat by tucking my thumb under whenever I felt the urge to suck on it, or whenever I was urged by my mother to get my thumb out of my mouth. I didn’t even realize my thumb tucks itself under/in until maybe a decade ago. I’m like 100 years old — how I never noticed it before is anybody’s guess.

The point of the story is I was a child with a thumb-sucking habit who became an adult with a thumb-tucking habit. And that is weird, and probably all my mother’s fault. To be clear and sure, I have zero impulse to suck my thumb. But muscle memory is real. Maybe even meant to soothe.

Let’s write, bitches.

*The thumb isn’t a finger and everybody knows it.

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It’s Day 24. I am feeling very emotional about Punch, all the news is terrible, we’re having a blizzard here, and everybody’s f***ing had it. It’s been 2026 for so long. Worst of all, I forgot to give you this prompt on Valiumtimes Day — probably because of all the gd valium.

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Today’s prompt is another one I return to often in my own work, though I’m not always conscious of it. It’s a great way into writing about a real person, vitally exploring who they are in the world, and who they are to us — and, harder still, translating that onto the page with clear imagery, and in a way that reveals as much about the other person as it does about you, the narrator. It’s great too, for when you know you need to write about someone, but you’re stuck on “figuring out how.”

Got it? Let’s go.

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Hey, are you collecting all of your 28 x 20 writing in one place? Do that. And don’t look at any of it until we get to the end.

Speaking of which, in On Writing Well, William Zinsser suggests this system for daily writing and building a long-form project. Something to think about come March 1st.

But your inspiration for Day 20 is a passage from an essay by playwright Marlina González, penned for How Dare We Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse.

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Anyway, today we’re thinking about surprise sweetness.

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A quarter was the price of quelling the what-ifs. Always a quarter or two zipped into the smaller pouch of our backpacks, jingling around with an extra house key and Rain-Blo wrappers. What if our bikes got flat tires? Or we lent our key to our little sister? What if we had to walk to the Superette to use the payphone, which smelled of four decades of cigarette smoke, to call our mom at work?

In 1989, we had a mind map of all the nearby pay phones in case we had to make an emergency call: the lobbies of the library and grocery store; outside the women’s changing room at the city pool; in the vestibule at church. We also knew whose answering machine picked up on the third ring, and how to make a collect call without paying for it (MOM.PICKMEUP.LIBRARY). We sometimes invented mnemonic devices for numbers that mattered. Even if we didn’t write them down, they would stay with us.

Kids had always carried pocket change just in case, but the disappearance of Amy from this quiet hamlet along Lake Erie yanked the curtains off our bedroom windows. Our young lives, buffered by suburban comforts: nets on every basketball hoop, wood chips under every jungle gym, bikes rarely locked. But underneath the manicured lawns rumbled something more insidious.

First, the man had called Amy’s home phone. Then, he had arranged to meet her after school at an ice cream parlor. Description: White male, medium build and height, wire rimmed glasses, moppy haircut. We believed the man in the police sketch took her in broad daylight under the guise of someone who wanted to help her buy a present to celebrate her mother’s new promotion.

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After Amy, parents said, “Here’s an extra quarter for your backpack.” They said, “Don’t go anywhere with someone you don’t know—even if they say it would make us happy.” Stranger Danger was the pernicious fear, the what-ifs, the who-coulds, the where-of- all-places, the unanswerable unfathomables that every parent and every child tried not to speak aloud as the newspaper splashed new leads and theories about Amy and the man on the front page. We came of age still fearing The Stranger, rather than the strange ways a familiar relationship could turn on us, or the way a night could turn strange, or how the person in the mirror could become a stranger even to our very self.

We all looked for Amy. We memorized the details of her face, as if the horse earrings dangling from her ears in her school photo would be the same ones we would recognize out in the world. A few days after she disappeared, we set out trick-or-treating under a deep, navy sky. We walked up to the homes of strangers and willingly took the candy. But it was Amy who haunted our thoughts. Where was she? Why wasn’t she able to call her parents? If she didn’t have a quarter, didn’t she know how to make a collect call?

We looked both ways when we crossed Wolf Road on our mountain bikes. Amy walked this same pavement from her school to the shopping plaza. Nothing will ever chill our spine like the thought of her bike parked in the rack, alone under that same deep, navy sky. All the rides it would not take home, and the little girl who would not outgrow it by next summer.

The news came sudden and certain, like a call we picked up on the first ring. Our parents did not keep us home from school. We hung our backpacks on the hooks of our lockers, and settled into our desks. The news felt heavy as it settled into our laps. Amy’s body had been found, discarded in a ditch. The particulars of how Amy had been assaulted would crystallize and snap into focus only as our minds matured over many years.

Decades passed. Police chiefs retired; FBI agents came out of retirement to squint their eyes a little longer at the case. Sometimes a new lead emerged, or the hope of a DNA link streaked across the sky like a fading comet. Soon enough the case would grow cold again. Our questions abided: How did this man’s sickness prevent a child from growing up? How did he steal a childhood—while everyone was watching? We wondered: did everyone have an Amy? A girl who sent us all out retracing our steps. We looked for the last place we remembered having our innocence. We struggled to remember, as our eyes scanned the streets, and the lights grew dim.

***

The case of Amy Renee Mihaljevic remains unsolved. The FBI is offering a reward up to $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individual(s) responsible for her death.

Kendra Stanton Lee is a writer and teacher in Boston. Her essays have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, JMWW, Pangyrus, and elsewhere. For more on her work, visit www.kendrastantonlee.com.

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SILENT WRITE-IN

Come through for blocked-out creative focus time. No prompts, no chatter. Everyone on mute. Dopamine hits in the chat encouraged. Work on whatever’s calling you. Drop in anytime, stay as long as you can.

Thursday, February 19th, 5:00-7:30pm ET

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From The Archive

Come through for blocked-out creative focus time. No prompts, no chatter. Everyone on mute. Dopamine hits in the chat encouraged. Work on whatever’s calling you. Drop in anytime, stay as long as you can. [ Get the link ]

WELCOME BACK and hello new subscribers. Good to have you all here.

Day 19 is Hermit Crab Essay Day. The hermit crab essay is a form of personal narrative that folds itself into another form. Think: a story wrapped in the protective shell of a recipe, a resume, a report card, medical records, a rejection letter, a menu, an insurance claim, prescription labels… I could go on. A dictionary. It’s a slippery slope once I start making lists of things. Instructions for a board game. The hermit crab essay intrinsically unfolds into something sort of fictional, making it a hybrid form of lyrical nonfiction. Train schedule. It’s often used as a way to approach challenging stories with humor. Mad Libs. That levity emerges in an organic relationship with the structure, as long as we’re not trying to shoehorn an idea into an ill-fitting shell. As you can see, dating profile, the possibilities are pretty endless. How-To. It’s creative nonfiction told through something familiar, but unexpected. Bingo.

Read some examples below, and then write your heart out.

But first, your daily practical guidance:

1. Put your phone out of reach and/or on Do Not Disturb.

2. The 20-minute timer is key. Keeps your head in the writing and mitigates overwriting. It’s “enough time to enter the cave and come back out relatively unscathed.”

3. Aim for 150 - 800 words, but don’t let the word count derail you.

4. Start anywhere. Start with your first thought.

5. Keep your hand moving.

6. If you get stuck. Relax your shoulders. Stretch. Take a breath.

7. If you feel like you can’t go any further, keep going.

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I.

When I was three or four, a couple of years before my parents split up, we lived in a brown house with a dog named Bandito who we brought back from Mexico. Then we found two stray kittens, one black and one white (ha, symbolism), and took them in. When I was a bit older, by which I mean maybe seven, I asked whatever happened to Bandito and the kittens. My dad, or maybe my mom, told me that one day they just ran away.

For some time, I had this memory of seeing Bandito casually strolling up the driveway one afternoon, the kittens toddling alongside him. They just kept going until they disappeared into the woods, never to return. But when I say I had this memory, what I really mean is that, at some point, I remembered having had that memory, and then I wondered if it was real or a product of my vigorous inner life. It’s pretty romantic, a dog and two kittens up and deciding there had to be a better life out there somewhere. Who had the idea first?

II.

After my parents split, I had two houses that I was shuttled to and from every week. At my dad’s, I had a corner bedroom at the front on the first floor. My bed sat under the window that looked across the long gravel driveway with a full view of the street. When it was dark and I couldn’t sleep, I’d watch the way the moon drifted between the cheap plastic blinds, casting its own light across my wall. I’m not sure how old I was when I realized that the moonlight was in fact the same light that came from the streetlamp on the edge of the sidewalk at the top of the driveway. But there was a whispery comfort in the light, and it felt like the moon, so there were times where I’d forget it wasn’t. As long as you weren’t looking directly out the window, you’d never know the difference. I knew it was the streetlamp, but I decided to believe it was the moon. Even when I’d come home from college, and after I moved to Brooklyn. Even five or six years ago, before the room was made uninhabitable, and my dad was just a little less sick than he was when he died.

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In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr writes, “from the second you choose one event over another, you’re shaping the past’s meaning.” This is one of the ways we manipulate time in personal narrative. Today, instead of choosing one event over another, we’re going to explore primary and secondary events — one time, two stories.

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To lift a description by David S. Wallace in The New Yorker:

[I Remember is] a mixture of sense memory, adolescent embarrassment, nostalgic fashions and foods, daydreams, and anything else that falls through the sieve of Brainard’s disarmingly casual syntax. Some are whimsical. Many are sexual, looking back ruefully on the desires Brainard felt before he understood himself as a gay man. Many entries strike a delicate balance between naïve and philosophical (“I remember wishing I knew then what I know now”).

Wallace adds:

I Remember is both a portrait of a period — mid-century America, outwardly self-confident but roiling with sexual misgivings and racial tensions — and a self-portrait, and it’s Brainard’s receptivity that creates an open channel between the two.

Brainard's memoir sparked a generative tradition, “I remembers” penned by other authors emerged. The New Yorker calls them imitations, but I think I Remember is a living form, a conversation (it makes me think of The Golden Shovel, a form of poetry created by Terence Hayes in honor of Gwendolyn Brooks).

Enter Shane Allison, born three decades after Brainard (who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1994). He is also a poet and visual artist, and a black gay man enamored with Brainard’s body of work. Allison wrote an unflinching I Remember in 2012, followed by a chapbook called Remember Men, which follows the same structure except each memory begins with “him” or “his.”

Here’s some Brainard and some Allison for you. I bet you can guess what comes after that.

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