Entry No. 2 — How I Accidentally Wrote A Memoir
HOW TO ACCIDENTALLY WRITE A MEMOIR
The chapbook started out how it was supposed to.
With words. (Check.)
And a page. (Yep.)
Sentences. (Dope.)
Semi-colons. (All the stuff.)
#1: A THEME.
Here’s an excerpt I used to pitch the book to a reviewer who-shall-remain-nameless.
“I've been writing ever since I came out to my mom, which was about eight years ago, and still somehow day-to-day living with her is a fight to stay out of the closet. The reason I'm emailing you today is because I think you're one of the most talented authors I know who might sympathize with just wanting to be. That is what A Thousand Moons Gone is about. It starts in COVID with an argument between my mother and I, and continues through protests and growing up and failed highschool relationships and all this struggle that ends with just...wanting to be. Wanting to exist as a Black queer girl in a world who wants to redefine (or take control of) all of the things I'm still trying to discover about myself.
I'm assuming you're out doing authorly things and maybe taking a chance on someone's twenty pages might be the last thing you want to do, but out of a mixture of hope and blatant audacity, I've attached a PDF of the first chapter. Feel free to reach out if you would like to read more! Any feedback or reviews from you would genuinely mean the world to me.”
I won’t get all teary-eyed and heartfelt here, but at the end of the day, A Thousand Moons Gone is probably the most personal thing I’ll ever publish in this series. It starts during COVID with an argument between my mother and I, and continues through protests and growing up and failed highschool relationships and all this struggle that ends with just...wanting to be.
That was the theme I chose. Just…being.
#2: A TITLE.
So I had a vague idea of what sort of poetry book I wanted. It’d be a compilation of everything I’d experienced in high school and written poems about. Initially, the title was “The Highschool Unrequited”. It was based on the original theme of feeling like an outcast, but when I figured out my revised theme, I knew the title had to change to match it. The two I liked the most were “Everything I Ever” and “A Thousand Moons Gone”.
The inspiration behind the title Everything I Ever was that the book consisted of everything I’d ever written — or at least, all the poems I deemed good within the past few years. It meant a lot of things: everything I’d ever experienced, everyone I’d ever been hurt by, etcetera. But I found it inaccurate once I really thought about it. This book couldn’t even begin to encapsulate everything I will end up experiencing. There is more life to live than overcoming the challenge of having a homophobic mother, and more hope than struggle. The title to me needs to speak to the body of work I am creating, and yours should, too.
I chose “A Thousand Moons Gone” — a love letter to my memories, and most importantly, hardship worked through in favor of moving on.
