Ann Sexton once remarked in an interview, when asked why she wrote such dark and painful poems, that pain engraves a deeper memory. Pain engraves a deeper memory. Think of a time in your own life when you have experienced a sudden shock, a betrayal, terrible news. Perhaps you remember the weather, the quality of the breeze, a half-full ashtray, a scratch on the wooden floor, the moth-eaten sweater you were wearing, the siren in the distance. Pain carves details into us, yes. I would wager, though, that great joy does as well. Strong emotion, Virginia Woolf said, must leave its trace. Start writing, grow still and quiet, press toward that strong emotion and you will discover it anew. The Adlers were the first of a particular kind of hurt for me. And so they stayed alive inside of me. They are alive still.
These traces that live within us often lead us to our stories. Joan Didion called this a shimmer around the edges. Emerson called it a gleam. "A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within," he wrote in his great essay, "On Self Reliance." "Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his." Because it is his. That knowledge, that ping, the hair on our arms standing up, that sudden, electric sense of knowing. We must learn to watch for these moments. To not discount them. To take note: I'll have to write about this. It can happen in a split second, or as a slow dawning. It happens when our histories collide with the present. When it arrives, it's unmistakable, indelible. It comes with the certainty of its own rightness. When I first met my husband, at a Halloween party, I thought: There you are. It's a bit like that with our subject matter. We don't walk around trolling for ideas like people on beaches with those funny little machines, panning for coins; we don't go looking on the equivalent of match.com in search of Emerson's gleam. But when we stumble upon it, we know. We know because it shimmers. And if you are a writer, you will find that you won't give up that shimmer for anything. You live for it. Like falling in love, moments that announce themselves as your subject are rare, and there's a magic to them. Ignore them at your own peril.
