Demons & Doritos

I don’t use my substack like a diary because I feel you deserve more than the rambling of random observations and feelings that I usually scribble down every morning. Yes, I write in my journal every morning. I promise you, it’s boring, if you found it, you’d be disappointed. But maybe this week I will give it a try, because I’m experimenting and fuck it. Consider this more like a life update…

I met with my memoir group the other day, for the first time, in person. I’ve been in a Zoom workshop class since August, and before that I actually didn’t know I was going to write a memoir at this point in my life. But on the first day, the teacher (Erika Schickel, go read her memoir if you haven’t already) was talking about constraints. In memoir, we aren’t writing auto-biographies, we are writing through a specific lens within decided parameters. Immediately I knew what my “constraint” was, and I knew I could write it: My three years in Tennessee. A pivotal time in my life, due to the the hea…