Prompt 155. Mapping the Mind
A prompt on mining memory from my quaran-pal Carmen Radley
Hi friend,
At times, when I’m writing, it feels like a kind of tyranny to be bound to complete sentences, following the line on the page from left to right. It demands a kind of lockstep progress that I’m sometimes not ready to make. As a very visual processor, I find myself drawn to lists and maps, to scrawling on post-it notes that I arrange and rearrange on a wall.
Today’s prompt, from my beloved friend and Isolation Journals collaborator Carmen Radley, taps into the potential of that freer, looser, more associative kind of writing—something we actually use in our work together. Last spring, when we were still dreaming up the Isolation Journals (and had been together so long we had started to dress alike, see above), we had big pieces of butcher paper on the walls of the cabin. On them we jotted everything from basic to-dos to brainstorming sessions to larger scale plans for our community that came to us during long walks in the woods of Vermont.
Carmen is the smartest person I know, and the most joyous and ebullient too. To go on a walk with her is to halt every few minutes to study some flower or plant or leaf while she shrieks ecstatically. Working together has been an unexpected delight. People always say don’t work with friends or family, but this is one of those rare exceptions where the working relationship is strengthened by the friendship and the friendship is strengthened by the work. She’s patient enough to follow my harebrained ideas down a rabbit hole, then manages to find the throughline that will pull us back out.
This prompt is so generative, and I can already tell that it’s going to be one of my go-tos when I need a boost. Here’s hoping you love it as much as I do.
Sending love,
Suleika
P.S. Last Sunday I hosted the brilliant and lovely Stephanie Danler for a Studio Visit. It was an incredible conversation—we talked about character development in fiction versus nonfiction, using notebooks and notecards as a creative tool, and the challenges of writing about ex-loves. Paid subscribers can access a replay here!
155. Mind Map by Carmen Radley
After the novelist Philip Roth died in 2018, I came across a short tribute Zadie Smith wrote to him. I’m not particularly a Roth fan, but I was charmed by the piece, especially the opening anecdote, where Smith recounted a conversation she had with Roth about swimming laps, something they both enjoyed doing. When Roth asked Smith what she thought about as she swam, she said, “I think, first length, first length, first length, and then second length, second length, second length. And so on.”
His answer was wildly different: “I choose a year. Say, 1953. Then I think about what happened in my life or within my little circle in that year. Then I move on to thinking about what happened in Newark, or New York. Then in America. And then if I’m going the distance I might start thinking about Europe, too. And so on.”
When I first read this, I couldn’t imagine having such recall. Could I give that a shot?
In 1953, Roth was twenty. On a page in my journal, I wrote out the year I was twenty. From radiating spokes, I wrote: Austin (where I was attending college), and the name of my high school boyfriend (with whom I’d reconciled that spring). I wrote Sour Lake (my hometown where I returned for the summer, in part for the boyfriend).
Each new word conjured some of its own, like from Sour Lake: Lamar University, the local college where I took summer classes; avoiding my best friend; Tropical Storm Allison, which flooded the city of Houston and my car (I’d left the windows down, and a sour smell set in, never left). With only slight pressing, I could remember outfits I loved and people I hadn’t thought of in two decades. In the course of remembering, I naturally moved to national and even world events.
All to say, this mind map helped me recover long forgotten details and took me to unexpected places.
I’ve found I can do this not only with periods of time, but also with people and places. I can do it with a favorite word, like pilfer: immediately I’m three years old, at the grocery store with my mother, caught with a balloon tucked tightly in my fist.
The experience is strange and wonderful: spatial rather than linear. It’s associative, surprising, even exhilarating. It mines the memory for things long buried—maybe to be used in fiction or memoir, maybe simply cherished as a recovering of the past.
Your prompt for the week:
Create a “mind map.” Choose a period of time, a place, a person, or a favorite word. On a page in your journal, write it down, and begin mapping out the web of associations and memories that appear in your mind. Follow it where it leads.