COLLABORATION

Below is a journal entry I wrote a couple of years ago that marks the real beginning of my blob…er, blog. (Why do I keep making that typo?)

Yesterday, I was looking through old files on My Passport, the senior home of an old hard drive. When I came across A Patchwork Memoir, an autobiography I wrote many years ago, composed entirely of vignettes, out of curiosity I glanced over the first section. Actually, I could publish this, I realized—incredulously, because I’d convinced myself way back when that I couldn’t. It’s too disjointed, I’d decided—a motley assortment of material like a homely patchwork quilt. Who writes a memoir like that? But years have passed, bringing many changes. Still, the notion struck me like a bolt out of the blue that maybe it was time to take up my project again—and give A Patchwork Memoir a cohesion that only my contemporary perspective could provide. So I’ve set out to weave my past and present together—to collaborate with my younger selves—and organize my vignettes as blogs, changing the title of my autobiography to Callie’s Ragbag: Transcending Childhood Trauma.

When I woke up this morning and thought about it all, I felt a quickening—and knew exactly how I wanted to begin.