The Origin of Wemoir: The (non-needed) Permission

“We live in a time where we can’t afford to not give ourselves permission.”

“Fuck permission. Just do it.” -from my notes on the closing day of CSU Summer Arts

My time at CSU Summer Arts at Monterey Bay was cloudy. The mist hung over every day in such a way that I forgot for the majority of the time that it was even July. It made it easy to surrender my mornings to some of the wisest people I have ever met in my life, the Wemoirists.

I’m not sure at what point that term came up, but I know it was in Week Two. I also couldn’t tell you who said it. The important part isn’t the who, but rather the what.

Wemoirist (as defined by the students of Kimberly Dark’s memoir class at CSU Summer Arts): a person who writes their story, the story of the people around them, the stories of our lives so different from one another and does so, not for themselves, but for the person sitting next to them (or maybe across the room) that needs to know that they aren’t alone. A tribe.

We were young, old, female, male, hetero, not so or so not sure. We were all beautiful. We had Lidia Yuknavich, Nick Flynn, Jimmy Santiago Baca and Ivan Coyote as our Yodas and Yogis. We cried, oh how the FUCK we cried. Probably every day. And then we laughed and ate bad cafeteria food that Jimmy loved. We made a band of misfits, an army of stories, a stronghold to our pasts. A family.

In my short life, I’ve had watershed moments (moments that cause ripples and affect the rest of our life) and I’ve had life-altering moments. Monterey was life changing, matching up evenly to the one experience I hold most dear: studying abroad. I felt similarly after it was over, that suddenly nothing was the same even though everything seemed to have remained unchanged. Toward the end of my journey abroad, a good friend of mine said, “Yes, but we can’t be sad it’s over because if it there was no end, we couldn’t have lived it the way we did.” My conclusion: this applies to all things that will alter the way I see the world.

During our visit to Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House, I watched Jimmy read a poem about Robin’s granddaughter. I thought about how much I knew, even after only two days with him, how much he loved his own daughter. How I knew he lives his life for her. How he said, practically the first thing he said, was that he can’t separate his life from his poetry and that to write you must be completely in love with something. Advice like this spewed from him, from Lidia, from Nick, from Ivan, from Kimberly, from all of us.

I just tried to write it all down. I am trying to use it all. I get right up to those edges, those thresholds we talked about, put my head over the railing and look down. I am now ready to jump. I am a Wemoirist.

Thank you all.

Published in the CSU Summer Arts Fall 2013 Newsletter