Each day was cut from its own pattern and this day was Sunday. Here in mom’s small town in Germany most of the shops were closed. Only gas stations and bakeries were open, bakeries just in the morning. And that forced you to take it easy, which I liked. People didn’t work on their yards or houses, either; on this day work was shunned in favor of family and rest.

I’d been coming here for 20 years and writing about it since that first sabbatical in 2009, when I started this blog. It was a creative challenge to make something worthwhile out of our times here because you could write about anything but not everything was worth writing about. There was a risk of falling into the banal but that was the way of autobiographical writing, how to keep from lapsing into journaling with what was effectively that, a web log.

When we lived in France in the 90s my stepdad had a friend named Paul Mathams who was an artist, never the paid kind, but always making art. Paul and his partner Rob would come down from London in their camper with their Bassets and stay with us at our condo in Collioure and it was there that Paul found the odd-shaped piece of driftwood he gave to my mom, which she still has here in Germany, the one that looks like a human torso with arms raised in the air, the muscles of the back contorted, the “hips” twisted just so, and a pair of legs to ground the piece so it stands upright. It’s the kind of found art you don’t need to explain; it just works. Paul had an eye for that in the drawings and paintings he made, the handmade frames, and their crowded house in London was stuffed with Paul’s creations.

Eberhard, creative in his own sense but not like Paul, caught on to this idea of found art and went through a phase where he’d collect pieces of wood for my mom and present them to her as gifts but unlike Paul’s torso piece, it was hard to see the point in Eberhard’s, they just looked like wood.

And yet mom would feel obliged to display them in the window shelves by Paul’s, so her kitchen took on a cluttered look. And over time we began thinning out the Eberhard collection, discreetly returning those pieces to the yard. And I wondered, would my blogs be viewed in this realm of the banal one day and recede to the place of unseen recordings too, where all the unremarkable goes to die a quiet death? Was my work just wood? It depends on what you see in it.

And this was the process of creative nonfiction, a label I tried to describe when pressed. It wasn’t a thing I ever studied but it was definitely a thing, a category that seemed to emerge with the internet, essay writing and blogging. Even memoir had a short history I learned, with Nabokov’s considered to be one of the first, dating back to the 60s. Reading his record of growing up, the depth of genius and art in his work, is both inspiring and discouraging to consider oneself by comparison. And so I can’t, or I’ll figure why bother.

But when you connect your writing to your life you elevate both above the banal. Because there is always something worth keeping. To evoke feeling from the unseen is what we expect from art. It only exists because it makes us feel, and feeling is what makes life worth living.

Sundays were best for rest. And always began in the dark.

Categories: Memoir, travel, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, travel