6.1b Sifting through the Shards: Writing Prompt for my Conversation with Victoria Bennett

Prompted by Nature

Welcome to your writing prompt for my conversation with Victoria Bennett.

Writing prompt, some news and an apology for this episodes tardiness! Thank you for your patience. <3

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When I listened back to the episode with Victoria, what I remember most is her thoughts around the use of time in writing a memoir. She describes the process as engaging three forms of time: deep time, long time and momentary time.

‘I think that that combination of deep time in the Earth and long time in our sense of humanity and momentary time, all exist together, so in memoir writing, memories from my early childhood would sit alongside memories as a mother - with my son - so experiences of present moments and then memories of my mother are in there, and then her memories of her childhood. And so all these memories would kind of interweave with each other and speak to each other. But looking back into memories was a bit like that, finding these pottery shards in a garden because I would start and I would look back and think, ‘that's a terrible memory’, and then it's like, ‘that's a wonderful bit of pottery!’ So I'd find these moments that would be as alive and as present as the one I was in, and their stories that they had would be as present and and as revealing. I suppose if I'd written it all off as being terrible I wouldn't have bothered…’

The invitation here then, is to create three pieces: one that engages with deep time, one with long time and one with momentary time. These could take the form of journal entries, be three pieces of free writing, poems on the themes or something completely different. This is the sort of thing I like to write about in my morning pages as I find that in that liminal spaces between night and day, I’m the most alert to more abstract concepts such as time.

Enjoy this one and let me know how you get on if you use it.

Happy writing!

Helen x

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