Vanished! Last night I lost a treasure. More than 18,000 words, 40 pages of my gestating memoir, were vaporized into the cyber clouds by a stinker called Scrivener. At this moment of profound panic, the clock had already ticked past midnight and the reminder on my wrist buzzed angrily to remind me of my other goal for 2014, to get sufficient and sound sleep every night. So on two goals, I’m busted! My husband, snoring sensibly down the hall, did not hear my keening.

There is a backstory here. I’ve talked about writing since the day I retired, almost a decade ago. Sure, I’ve done plenty …  in festivals and master classes, in groups of intense seekers, and solo with my morning pages. This memoir is different. A book is one of those things that has been in the “before I die I will…” category, right up there with writing my will. I printed it in capital letters, with conviction, on the board created by Hospice that appeared on the sea wall in Qualicum Beach, with a supply of chalk, urging passers by to reflect a little on their goals even while grooving on the beauty of “now”. “Before I die I will write a memoir”, I promised.

Finally, this month I finished all the tasks of the slightly obsessive returning snowbird. The garden patches are well enough weeded for now and I’ve picked a few hiding places with shade and a view of foxglove or clematis blooming, to place a comfortable chair for writing. I don’t feel like a hoarder any more when I open my closets or my desk. I’ve engaged with most of the friends who want to check up on me, and sampled the new restaurants in town. Since mid June, I’ve been restless. It is the kind of itch that insists I pay attention. The writer’s itch. It is time to start the memoir.

The task is daunting. I lugged dozens of wire bound notebooks to San Miguel last winter, full of trivia like the recipe for the mango salad that someone brought to book club, the word I heard in an interview on CBC, used cleverly, the notes from endless webinars, the moving moments from sermons at St. Anns. But in those books are also jottings of trips to Oregon, Dallas, Bejing, Desolation Sound, and many more adventures that touched my soul and were captured to be part of my story. My plan was simple. Read through them all in the leisure of Mexico, probably over tequila or tea, then shred them into paper mache, and create a piñata to be burst open at my funeral party, showering my friends with Werthers, perhaps. I pulled the luggage home, journals unread.

That’s not all. I have a jumbo trunk filled with years of my mother’s letters to her mother in a barely discernible scribble, stained with coffee, as she journaled her young mother’s journey through the 50’s, with me playing at her feet. Bankers boxes are stacked to the ceiling in the corner of a cupboard, holding the rest of the ephemera of my life. There are 30 years of agenda books saying who did what and when, a multitude of performance reviews saying “fully satisfactory”, and elaborating why. There are my naive musings from the diaries of my 20’s, yearbooks, baby books, albums of all description. In short, there is a mountain of memory to be tapped.

It’s intimidating. But I have not given up. This month I’ve done two things to push my project along. The first is that I bought a writer’s word processing program, called Scrivener, and the Scrivener for Dummies book to help me figure it out. It is that book that I will use to find that lost text. My second move has been to join a group of fourteen memoir writers from everywhere who will use the technology of FaceTime and Skype to work together, led by experienced memoir writers who are also in the publishing industry. Together we commit to “Write Your Memoir in Six Months”. We will mash up the formal lessons with informal partnering to egg each other on, guided by mentors who will call a spade a spade I hope, tearing our drafts to pieces ‘in a good way’. Our contract and challenge is to lay down 60,000 well chosen words by Christmas. I’ve bought right in to this dream.

So now, if only I can find those 40 pages, I’ll be on my way.

Does any other Island woman have a story inside them banging to get out?

Janet Dunnett
Email Janet

See all articles by Janet Dunnett