Memoir akin to therapy

Writing a memoir is a bit like therapy, except you have to decipher the meanings of experiences and thoughts and feelings all by yourself.

Just like in life when you wake up one day and think, MMM? I'm not so sure this is working and you take the leap to try therapy, it can be the same for memoir writing. You write stuff down, and then it's best to let it sit a day or two and you go back to it and then think, no, that's not what I meant to say. That sounds strange. There's more there. Try again. In the end, there may not be enough time in your lifetime to get it onto the page how you ultimately and ideally wished for. But it's the process that matters.

I'm not claiming I managed to finally get at the core of it in my soon to be released memoir about my time on Salt Spring, At One with an Island: Salt Spring Revisited, but towards the end, I was feeling as if I was getting a sense of that peeling the layers of an onion experience to a much greater degree than when I started.

Instead of just retelling an experience from Point A to Point B, there was a lot more questioning about the journey. Like why is Salt Spring so important to me? Why is Ruckle Park so significant to me? What about consistency of place now matters to me and why? 

I know that some say to write an interesting memoir, you have to touch upon the universal within your particular story. That may be one of the biggest challenges. Why should anyone care about your story at all? Well, they won't. Unless you can find a way to attach to something they might also be experiencing or have experienced, to unearth some nugget of universal truth; to provide some insight.

For the longest time, I used to hang on every word that successful writers shared about their writing process. In the past few years I've stopped doing that. 

It makes sense to just accept that you are truly on your own unique journey, no matter how many hangers-on you may or may not have along for the ride. Their journey is not yours. Other writers will undoubtedly have some nuggets of wisdom to share, but in the end, it's that unique understanding of your own inner world and your own personal history, finding courage, and exploiting the version that is yours and yours alone that you must get at to tell your own story.

And then, let the consequences fall where they may.

At One with an Island - Salt Spring Revisited

I never intended to write a memoir, At One with an Island, Salt Spring Revisited, about  my time on Salt Spring Island. I mean what hasn't already been said? 

Salt Spring is one of the southern Gulf Islands in British Columbia, 35 minutes by a BC Ferry from Victoria, B.C. 

Too many years ago between not intending to write the  book and finally finishing it, (which took me forever),  I took a course at SFU's Writer's Studio program, and then another one, and I needed to write SOMETHING back then.

The first thing that came to mind then, because I'd just returned from living on the island, was to try and capture some of my island experiences. 

Then, to frame why the island has meant so much to me, I felt I had to backtrack. I had to explain some of the life stuff that had really impacted me to put me in the mindset of mid-life escape, not that it ever takes much to get me into that "escape" mindset.  

I first set foot on the island and Ruckle Provincial Park  and Ruckle Farm more than 30 years ago and my many "revisitings" have been some of the happiest times of my life. So I set out writing about some of my experiences, and some of the people I encountered while living there.

It gives me a lot of pleasure to re-read these experiences and revisit that time. I wrote it mainly for myself, to have a tangible legacy of that time in my life.

It's scary to put a book out there about a real place and real people, even if some of their names have been changed.

I thought about it for a long time, too long for sure. Gave up, went back to it and finally finished it a few months ago.

If all goes well, it will be available through Amazon.ca books one week from this posting, beginning Sept. 17, 2024 at 5pm Pacific Daylight Time.

Feel free to buy it. Because you're curious, because you're a mid-life female looking to shake things up in your own life and want to read about someone else's experience, or because you might even be in it!