In 2018 I was a dissatisfied poet, dissatisfied with my inability to express in language how I experienced life’s events physically, as a “jumble of textures.” I was especially frustrated with the way the memoir I was trying to write had turned into an intellectual examination of the effects of generational abuse within a family. In October of that year I wrote this in my journal: “After all these years the problem remains, how to transform a vision, a gesture, a thing held by the thumb and forefinger into the words that will arrest its texture, put it on pause, flesh it out. What words might there be when a fever dream has expanded the prickly fruit of a sycamore tree into the caverns and peaks of the whole planet. What words to stand in for a silk dress—the color of sagebrush, the texture of melted butter thinning across a pan—remembered for the soft hand of it dancing across the ballroom floor at my daughter’s wedding.”

Yes, it was through poetry that I first found a way to manage traumatic memories of childhood. And through poetry that I gave myself permission to “misremember,” to balance memories of an often-violent mother with stories of—the wondrous textures of—the care and love she also exhibited toward me and my siblings. 

But words were not enough. So in the summer of 2019 I enrolled in a workshop with artist and photographer Joanne Dugan, who encouraged workshop participants to explore the ways in which words and physical materials together can reconcile competing versions of unsettling events and relationships, and capture the transformation process that one can go through over time. 

This workshop helped me identify ways of making art that I had never thought of as art production. Specifically, dyeing fabric, sewing clothes, and embroidering threadbare shirts and pants were simply practical skills I learned from my mother, my always-complicated mother who vacillated between bursts of violence and attentive parenting. These skills became the foundation for my Maps of Stories to Misremember cross-media collection. The construction of some of the twenty-two highly-textured “Memoir Map” pieces involve dyeing fabrics and clothing, like a linen kimono, then adding boro- and European-style embroidery before writing on the pieces with acrylic pens. Other pieces include eco-prints, gelli-plate prints, childhood photos, other photos that have been torn into fragments, actual leaves, and acrylic paint and lettering. 

The final step for all pieces is a digitization process in which I lay images of the pieces upon each other, modifying hue and transparency along the way. The development of the collages parallels the reworking of memory over time, from confused collisions of story and image to more harmonious mappings of the textures of a transformed lifestory. This process has allowed me to creatively express the physical and emotional turmoil of being raised by a troubled mother in an environment of extreme rural poverty. I hope each “Memoir Map” contributes to the transformation. At least each is full of the “jumble of textures” that I call my life.