One who writes memoir wishes to step into that light, not to see one's own face—that is not possible—but to feel the length of shadow cast by the night.
Catalog
Patricia Hampl
Patricia Hampl (born March 12, 1946) is an American memoirist, writer, lecturer, and educator. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and is one of the founding members of the Loft Literary Center. 2Life Hampl was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Stanley and Mary Hampl. She attended the University of Minnesota, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts in 1968. Hampl earned her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa in 1970. Hampl worked as an editor of Minnesota Monthly from 1973 to 1975 and as a freelance writer and editor from 1975 to 1979. Between 1979 and 1996, she occupied the positions of visiting assistant professor, associate professor, and professor of English at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. Hampl has also served as an educator at Ball State University and West Virginia University, and as a faculty member for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 1995 and 1996. She is a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Revie
True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world.
If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory.
For meaning is not "attached" to the detail by the memoirist; meaning is revealed.
Seeking the congruence between stored image and hidden emotion—that's the real job of memoir.
My narrative self (the culprit who invented) wishes to be discovered by my reflective self, the self who wants to understand and make sense of half-remembered moment.
Memory seeks a permanent home for feeling and image, a habitation where they can live together.
Intimacy with a piece of writing, as with a person, comes from paying attention to the revelations it is capable of giving, not by imposing my own notions and agenda, no matter how well intentioned they might be.
I don't write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know.
The experience was simply there, like a book that has always been on the shelf, whether I ever read it or not, the binding and the title showing as I skim across the contents of my life.
I have wasted my life is a cry of triumph—I’m lying here in this hammock doing nothing and haha on you out there working your lives away.
Yet here’s the greater paradox: writing, though performed alone, is also the only absolutely declarative, meaning-beset art form we have. Its purpose is to communicate. With others. More than a painter, much more than a composer, a writer can never “be alone.”