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It’s Day 23, and in the incredibly eloquent words of my friend Carmen today: UGH. 

We’ve hit the point of cabin fever—in our case, it's ramping up in a literal log cabin. What felt novel and surreal not long ago has come to feel constricted, in some moments even claustrophobic. Time feels featureless; the clock a stagnant lake.

I remember this feeling from when I was sick and confined to the hospital for weeks at a time. After a month of being stuck in the same room, I’d get to a point where I’d fixate on a crevice in the popcorn ceiling. Sometimes, when it felt like the walls were collapsing, I'd try to jimmy the window open, desperate to get out—even though I knew it was impossible.

We’re all having to reorient our sense of time and space and geography, finding new means of “travel.” In many ways, your gorgeous journal entries have been just that—glimpses into other places, other lives—for me and for each other. 

Our prompt today, from the New York Times bestselling novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter Stephanie Danler, offers us a new portal through which to travel, revisiting the places we’ve been and how they’ve shaped the way we’re going.

Bon voyage, mes amis—
Suleika

 

DAY 23 - STEPHANIE DANLER

Long before I could admit to myself that I was writing a memoir, I was collecting places. I would often recall the first chapter of Thoreau’s Walden, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” and think of how inextricable location and motive are from each other. Joan Didion, of course, is a master at this, echoing the psychological landscape with a physical one. In her case, those landscapes are often threatening. I would also think of Roland Barthes, who said in “Lover’s Discourse,” “where there’s a wound, there’s a story.” As I remembered places from my youth, I found wounds that had been untended for decades. 
 
In the case of my memoir, Stray, I would take an index card, and on the front, I’d write a place—“Laurel Canyon,” for example. Then on the back, I’d write any details that came to mind: landslides, traffic, Lily’s coffee cart, squirrels stealing pomelos, care and threat, Fleetwood Mac, loneliness, losing the daylight. Another was “Owens Lake”—dust, a scab, my father, rattlesnakes, amnesia, mistrust of love, parched, the crime that created Los Angeles. 
 
I had eighty of these cards, and most of them didn’t make it into Stray. But some of them were shockingly complete scenes and became cornerstones of the book. I only had to go back and ask, Why do you remember the rattlesnakes? Why is Owens Lake a scab? Why does loving Los Angeles, or loving my father, seem to depend on having amnesia? In answering those questions, I wrote a book. And I later realized that with those cards I had made myself a map. 

Your prompt for today:
Meditate on places. If you’re working on fiction, perhaps choose places from that fictional world. The easiest might be your childhood home, but it could be: a restaurant, a street, a parking lot, a ferry station, a borrowed home in the Catskills where it rained for three days or a stranger’s glass penthouse where you once did too many drugs. Write down any images, details, or words that come to mind. Don’t worry about complete sentences. Don’t worry about describing the place as much as describing what it felt like.

This isn’t research, or even a place to collect lines of dialogue or turns of story. It is simply to remember, to feel out for a tender spot, search your own memories for the surprising detail, the “punctum,” which Barthes defined as, “the accident which pricks me.”



Learn more about today’s prompt contributor, Stephanie Danler, and her memoir Stray, out on May 19.

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