Brilliant

My prompt response for this month's Alameda Shorts lit night turned out to be something stellar.

This piece was written in about four (distracted) hours, so it’s still rough. But I’m posting it as just one example of the many, many different ways to handle a couple of the biggest blocks writers encounter when they sit down to pen a mini memoir — and something we play with in The Storytellers Club workshop.

1. How to write about your dysfunctional family experience without trauma dumping on your reader, compromising your truth, or taking 100,000 words to do get your point across.

2. What playing with the creative part of creative nonfiction in order to honor story structure looks like, and how it can move your reader and make your point so much more effectively than simply reporting your memories as perfectly as possible — a classic mistake of mini memoir writers everywhere (reporting is boring).

I’ll circle back to all of this at the end.

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Brilliant

My next tattoo will be a sprinkling of stars across my shoulders — Southern Hemisphere on the left, Northern Hemisphere on the right. Queensland and California. The first time I took a chance on faith, and the fantastic pay off.

As a child in Australia – ten, eleven, twelve – I tried to escape into the night whenever I could. Taking the garbage out was a nice excuse. It could buy me about a minute, maybe a minute and a half, if no one was paying attention.

Fetching something from the car was rare, but it meant I could be out there alone, under the stars, for as much as two whole minutes before the need to know where I was every. fucking. minute. of the day came to the door and bellowed my name into the night.

And back into the stifling house I’d go, skittering around his bulk at the front door, apologizing and explaining and going back to tiptoeing on eggshells.

We lived on an acre of land, with the house at the back, away from the street, away from the neighbors, squatting at the top of its own slight rise above the rest of the world, and surrounded on all sides by the lush exuberance of trees and plants and flowers that couldn’t give a flying figure eight for the carefully laid plots and plans of extensive and expensive landscape design.

Every plant jostled with every other plant, happily but aggressively growing and expanding and dancing to the music flowing through them.

It was powerful. Whimsical. Beautiful. Everything vibrated with the rhythm of life. A music festival in the yard.

Wildly exuberant tropical blooms in brilliant shades of reds, oranges, pinks, and fire yellows crowded the day with bright colors and the night with muted tones in varied hues — still somehow warm and vibrant without the sun, as if giving off color and releasing the heat of day were the same chemical reaction.

But in the absence of daylight, their shadows and silhouettes - dark against lesser dark against deeper dark - still murmured of hidden color, of wait till you see us again color. Of color in repose.

Because there was some light. Star light. And moonlight, but I remember the star light, because I think the stars might have saved me.

I snuck outside at night to stand at the end of the short path at the foot of the front door, a hair’s breadth from the first parade of plants - rosebushes in colors so familiar that I registered the scarlet, magenta, tangerine, and Barbie pink even in the dark - and I tipped my head all the way back to look at the stars.

Or I stood at the other end of the carport, at the foot of that one tree, and I positioned myself under the spot where three branches crossed to make a triangle, a triangle of branches that framed the Three Sisters Constellation, so dazzling and ladylike, right above my head.

And I would dissociate. Just for a heartbeat. Two heartbeats. Three if I could.

Gazing at the stars let me leave for a moment, to be somewhere else for a moment. And that gave me faith that there were other kinds of moments out there, somewhere.

I think I thought God was up there. In the night sky. With the stars. In that general direction. Above what was happening below, in more ways than one. Something, some loving, powerful something was up there – had to be up there – with more wisdom and more control over things than I ever had.

I went from gazing to giving. I threw my fears, my confusion, my frustration, and all the other mindfucks of growing up dysfunctional into the great expanse of stars.

The very first time I did that, the relief that swept up and down my spine made me feel about 1,000 pounds lighter.

I wanted more of that.

So that’s what I did whenever I could. I would throw all the shit up there, and the stars would catch it, hold it, and take some of the weight so I could keep going.

Because that’s why I went out there, by myself, into the scary Australian night with all those enormous plants and all those giant spiders and all that nocturnal life within all those plants adding to all that noise and all that movement — background noises that blurred and sharpened by turns.

Going outside could make things worse inside. It could trigger my father’s fuse or keep him simmering. It could make no difference at all or mean the difference between sleep and a sleepless night.

It was worth the risk.

If I found a full minute to myself, I would stand under that tree, fix my gaze on the Three Sisters and pray. Sometimes I would beg and I would plead. For relief. For understanding. For peace.

Sometimes, I would just stand still and feel safe.

Alone in a dense crowd of chaos.

If I only had a few stolen seconds alone? I would toss my freak-out up into the sky in words too fast to frame with language, words that whipped through my body so fast I just had to trust they would make sense to the stars or to God or to whoever was up there when they got them.

I didn’t even form the words in my head. I just threw feelings and screams straight from my mind to the stars, silent but desperate.

As an adult, I know what was going on in my younger self; I know what she was doing. But as a child, I believed I was making a secret pact with something bigger and better in the universe – bigger and better than me, bigger and better than my life, bigger and better than that particular wedge of time.

It took 20 years to get far enough along in life to start figuring out what kind of damage had been done in my childhood. Revelation after revelation dumped itself at my feet in my 30s. And the real work began.

Another 20 years went by. Twenty years of figuring out my disastrous marriage, divorce, and everything else. You name it, it was disastrous — and I needed to figure it out and fix it.

Therapy, coaches, discovery. I did the work.

If a person can die by 1,000 cuts, what do you call it when a person saves herself with 1,000 slivers of light? I don’t have a word for it. But I have a moment.

At the end of that 40-year rainbow of life and therapy and doing the work was a real music festival in the woods and a final night concert under the stars.

In the middle of the vibrant, dancing throng of beings – this time human – I tipped my head back to check out the stars …

… stars that were framed on three sides by tree branches …

In an instant I was gone. Dissociating with the stars again. That night, instead of sending emotion, I received. A great wave of joy hit me so hard I actually stumbled back a step.

WHAM! What an awakening. I was shown, I could see, that I was inside the life I had yearned for, all those years ago.

I was in a moment. A different, somewhere else moment. And I was happy.

The pieces – the moments – shift and reshape, run their course and ignite with new experience, but they are there, and they are mine. Love and peace and clarity. Community and family and connection. Belonging and acceptance and celebration.

Everything I asked for.

What I gave to the stars in the Southern Hemisphere were cleaned and pressed and upcycled as I grew and learned and did the work, and they were passed through the night sky to the stars of the Northern Hemisphere, just so they could show me what faith looks like on the other end.

All I had to do was look up to see it.

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Intentional Storytelling

A look at the structure of Brilliant.