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Tag: Memory

Kept by Jane Marcellus

By | Flash CNF, CNF | March 23, 2022

alt text: image is a color photograph of white church doors; title card for Jane Marcellus's flash nonfiction piece "Kept"

  Moores lived next door. He worked construction; she stayed home. I don’t know how old he was, but I remember that on her birthday, she turned twenty-two. It seemed old. I was twelve. Moores had a baby, Sidney. Their…

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Gun Case by Charlie Geer

By | Flash CNF, CNF | November 3, 2021

  Later, after my uncle’s suicide, the gun cabinet would be moved into the attic, but in the early eighties it still stood in the upstairs hall, just outside my bedroom door. An unassuming wooden display case with twin glass-paned…

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Father/Figure by Andrea Avery

By | Longform CNF, CNF | August 25, 2021

  1. Ambigram In isolation, I mark time by the movement of sunlight across my walls and floors. I awake each morning to the desert sun blazing through the east-facing back door. The sun conspires with the automatic pool cleaner…

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Author’s Note

This essay was born from a writing exercise—to translate a poetic form into prose. I had never attempted a sestina as a poem before, but I found that the form lent itself remarkably well to nonfiction.

The rules of the sestina transfer fairly simply. Instead of six stanzas and an envoi, you have six paragraphs plus a shorter conclusion. Instead of six lines per stanza, you have six sentences per paragraph, except for the final paragraph (envoi), which has only three. There are six words that repeat in different orders throughout each paragraph, though they always appear as the last word in the sentence. The last word to appear in a paragraph always ends the first sentence of the next paragraph. In the final paragraph, three of the repeated words end the sentences like normal, but the remaining three words are used somewhere in the middle of the sentence.

In sestina poems, the order and coupling of the final repeating words across the final three lines matters, but can also vary. In strict sestinas, line 1 pairs words 2 and 5; line 2 pairs 5 and 3; and line 3 pairs 6 and 1. For the sake of my ending, this is the only order or rule of the form I chose to break.

This essay began by more or less randomly selecting words from a page of already existing text. The six words I chose and that repeat throughout this sestina are burn, death, break, me, body, and already. Sometimes the words change in tense or variation, but they do reoccur in each paragraph. As I began to make connections between the words and map my associations with them, the narrative of the sestina seemed to offer itself up on its own. It’s one of the only things I’ve ever written that did not change significantly from the first draft.

I had tried several times before to write about this experience, but never felt I’d found the right entry point. The beauty of the form is that it offers a container to that which doesn’t quite feel solid—a structure to something that struggles to stand on its own. For subject matter as sensitive and elusive as this, the form provided me the first words when I’d continually struggled to find the right language.

The sestina grounds me in a rhythm I can rely on and return to. It’s less interested in what happened than the way in which it is remembered, a kind of cyclical memory revisited over and over. The form is able to sustain the gaps, the inconclusiveness, the not knowing. It requires you to not only read between lines but between words and pattern, and it’s the pattern that ultimately offers a closure for which there is none, that provides not only a way in but an end.

 

EMMA KAISER is the winner of the Norton Writers Prize. Her work is featured in River Teeth, Great River Review, Rock & Sling, Stoneboat, and elsewhere, and she is the author of two children’s nonfiction books. She is a creative nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota.