When I write nonfiction, it’s because my life is flying from me like sparks from flint. I only write nonfiction when I can’t help it. Every time I begin a passage of true-to-life-writing, the only way I can finish it is by reassuring myself no one will ever see it. To be honest, sometimes it does feel like CNF comes easy, but that’s only because of my warped perception of it. That’s when I know it’s time to sit back down, that I’ve allowed myself enough space to deal with life, and it’s time to write.ĭo you find that CNF comes easy to you as a writer and/or what is challenging about it? I end up sending long, extravagantly punctuated texts or writing thank yous on the back of a bar tab. Writing for me is like any emotion: if I ignore it, put it off for too long, it starts seeping out of me. Otherwise, I struggle to meet that daily word count goal, and I had to learn to be okay with that. But, to be honest, I can only have that routine when I’m stable in a few key ways-my job, my home, my non-writing routines. It’s so satisfying to look down at pages of a legal pad scribbled across or to watch that word count or page count rise as you finish scene after scene. When I’m in them, I’ll admit, is when I feel best about myself as a writer. I fall in and out of routines with writing. “Transition” describes what I expect to be the coming decades of my life, which is to say: transition is as apt a description of life itself as we’re likely to find.ĭo you have a routine for writing? If so, what is it and how has it evolved? My own view of my mother had grown stagnant before this unfortunate turn but is now in a horrible flux. Every one of us who knows her has found ourselves shifting uncomfortably in the face of this news. People who love her come to me, but so do people who were disgruntled by her very presence before her memory left her they tell me what she meant to them in the good times, what they did to each other in the bad times, and how they feel I should write her story in the future.
People whom she has not spoken to in decades have suddenly become sources of information to me, and I am a translator of that information to my family. Every relationship my mother has ever had has been excavated, examined, and altered by her dementia. When a close family member is dealing with a serious illness, no one in that circle goes untouched by it. 2021 has been a time of transition for not only me personally, but for my entire family. When I saw that “transitions” was the theme of this issue, I knew it would be unlikely to find a better-suited home for this particular piece.
‘Transitions’ is such an evocative theme, what compelled you to submit for this issue?
Their piece, ‘What Makes a Question Necessary’, is in Epoch’s Issue 4, Transitions. You can follow Blake Parrish Carpenter on Twitter.
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