What can be a paragraph on Embroidered Quilt???
Answers
Answer:
Many more times a day than I believe to be normal, I will catch something falling from my desk, mid-air.
In my hand will be an object that I myself just knocked over the edge—a teacup, a pair of scissors, a can of bright pens. And in the moments immediately after making the catch, I’ll be flooded with a memory that I had otherwise lost, a snapshot of my life from a very different place and time, when I opened my elbow and snatched something out of the air. I’ve been making this motion all my life. My right arm throws something to my left.
A neurologist could probably explain both my rampant clumsiness and the relationship between reflex and synapse that sends the mind zinging haphazardly through time from one saved mug to another. But as a nonfiction writer, this snatching of lost memories reminds me that the narratives we live inside are never linear from the start. Our stories are patterns of experiences, a few knit together and the vast remainder discarded as scrap.
The idea of human memory as a folded or patchwork process is familiar to those who read and write braided essays. Each narrative “thread” in a literary braid interrupts other narratives in a pattern that recalls the winding of three strings. In a braided essay, the reader can visit the past and future alternately, skipping across time and space as if following the path through a distracted mind. But the real beauty of a successful braid is how the “threads” combine thematically to form a more complete and pliable piece of nonfiction. A literary braid also makes the quiet argument that all stories are perhaps bound this way, in handfuls that don’t abide by chronological time. For me, the braided form is also dropping hints that some stories can only be written this way.
Of course, this type of thinking goes against what most of us learned, at small, kidney-shaped desks, about how good writing is built from the ground up, like a skyscraper. Now that I find myself at the front of classrooms much more often than in desks, I’m surprised to see how writers of all levels feel compelled to follow those linear blueprints that our first English teachers passed on, often to the detriment of their creative work.
In a recent article in the LSE Review of Books, the writer Katie Collins describes how writers in the social sciences often use the language of buildings to describe a piece of writing. Arguments must have “frameworks and foundations” or they might be “shaky and even fall down.” Collins says that academics use this language to bring a sense of order and rationality to their naturally rambling thoughts. Lately though, I’ve noticed that the language of text-as-building is also permeating my writing groups and nonfiction classrooms. In workshop, we tell each other that narratives “might need to be shored up with facts,” that an essay “could be buttressed with scene,” or even that a memoir might use “a stronger foundation through backstory.” (My italics.) So it seems that we creative writers, too, are comforted in thinking that, like a new hotel, our progress is moving in a straight line, from one floor to the next, in a shape that is already recognizable to the public. But what if in forcing our stories into a linear, sequential form, we risk oversimplifying the richness of human experience?
When I was ten, I was gifted a book called Subversive Stitches. I went straight to my mother’s dictionary, which stood on a literal pedestal beside her desk, to figure out what subversive meant. Afterwards, fanning the pages of my new crafting book—full of patterns for embroidering shoes and cats and the phrase Girl Power! with daisies in the O—I thought I had misunderstood the definition. But it turns out that stitching does, in fact, have a long history of subversion. And lately, because embroidery hoops and balls of wool are falling from my desktop as often as pens and pencils, I’ve been thinking about how stitches might help writers break from the traditions of built texts. Talking about texts in terms of thread pushes the braided essay further in favor of other nonlinear and decentered models of creative nonfiction—forms that seem exceptionally relevant today.
Answer:
sorry mate ldk