Joy Harjo: “Memory is a living being that moves in many-layered streams. It is not static. It is not a backwards look. It moves forward, sideways, and in a spiral.”

I never meant to become any kind of grief or death ambassador. I just wrote about my experience when my baby girl died, and then the deaths piled up over the years, and more and more people brought their death stories to me, so exploring the space of death has taken up a lot of my adult life and my writing. It’s true that I don’t flinch when

I emerged from that study with a fever dream that became a nontraditional memoir, as if the only way I could move forward in my life was to enter story space and weave a form.

I’ve had to repress what I feel with great force.

My job is to go to Subway to secure some sandwiches for us. I’m absolutely pretending everything is fine even though my heart feels like it is dropping out of my vagina. This is the actual cleaving. Miles is leaving home. Miles is inventing his own idea of home. Our triad is dissolving. Or that’s what it feels like.

Narrative is a shapeshifting space. Story space, if you will, carries with it the possibility of arrangement, de-arrangement, and rearrangement, as does language itself.

Not to rehash, but to reshape.

Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography, “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality…. One can’t possess reality, one can possess images—one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past.” If only the past would hold still.

They are not a series of trustworthy memories perfectly lodged in amber, but something more alive in us all, something more fluid. I want to shine a light on places in the story where meaning turns. I want to bring you with me into storytelling spaces with these questions in mind: What pieces of our being are held by the environments and stories we