So it’s NaBloPoMo, and I’m caving to the peer pressure. I’ve been having a lot of trouble coming up with stuff from my current life to write about, so I’m going to go with a topic that I had originally planned on writing about back when I started this blog.
”Memory work” is a research method developed by German feminist sociologist Frigga Haug and adapted in various ways by other folks. In Haug’s version, it’s a collective practice–a group of people write individual autobiographical ”stories” on a common theme, in a relatively spontaneous and freeform way, then analyze them collectively as a way of developing new theories. (Haug and her colleagues began by focusing on Female Sexualisation.)
Having discovered recently just how freakishly eidetic my memory is, under relatively little prompting, I figured this would be an interesting thing to explore. Just to see how much and what gets unleashed once I start pushing those buttons. This obviously won’t be exactly using Haug’s method, since it’s mostly just me (although sharing stories via comments or on your own blogs would be great), and for right now I’m just going to write the stories and don’t know what I’ll do with them, but I figure I’ll give it a shot.
So, I suppose that’s enough for one post. What I need from my dear readers–what kinds of memories should I write about?
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November 1, 2007 at 9:42 pm
euphrosyne1115
Well, “caving to peer pressure” is a good one. Tomorrow I’m doing part 2 of “Puking About Boys,” if you’d like to join in. And I’ve already threatened Bansheegrrl with “People I Have Known and What I Remember About Them.”
If you come up with a topic that I can do, I’ll synchro-blog with ya.
November 2, 2007 at 11:09 am
Mary
Why not a refresher look at how your life has changed since you got to be a mom? Everything that seemed overwhelming those first weeks, how you’d do it differently or the same now, what you’d do with a do-over? Those are big topics on my mind lately, although I haven’t formed them quite well enough to blog about yet.
November 2, 2007 at 5:01 pm
texasgurl
I have memories about euphrosyne’s hill. Maybe I’ll chime in with those later. I think the point of memory “work” though, would be to write about whatever comes up–that’s part of what will make it interesting. don’t try to control it too much.