This Couldn't Have Been Made Any Other Way: A Creative Memoire

As the launch of Remembering MySelf, approaches, I find myself thinking about the physical form of this book, not as a product or something to sell, but as something that had to be made the way it is.

There were choices I had to make, and I could have made different ones.

It could have been smaller.

It could have been simplified.

It could have been printed in black and white.

It could have been shaped into something more familiar, something that fits more easily into what people expect a book to be.

But none of that would have been true.

This isn’t just writing. It’s decades of my life held in journals, in paintings, in poetry, in moments I didn’t know how to name when I was living them.

The images aren’t separate from the words and they aren’t there to illustrate them or make them more appealing.

They carry the same weight.

They are part of the same language.

To reduce them would have been to reduce the life they came from, and to separate them would have been to break something that was never separate to begin with.

So the book had to hold all of it. It had to be large enough to be entered, not just read. It had to be full color, because anything less would have flattened what the work actually is. It had to have weight, because what it carries has weight. It had to be something you feel in your hands, something that asks you to slow down and stay with it, not something you move through and set aside.

This is the form this creative memoire needed to take in order to remain true.

I understand that this is not what people expect when they hear the word “book,” and I’m not trying to meet that expectation. This was never meant to be something consumed quickly or explained easily.

It was meant to hold a life, and for me, it was something I had to make real, not in memory or in fragments, but in form.

Remembering MySelf - A Journey Through the Threads of Time, will officially enter the world on Monday.

If you feel drawn to it, you can find signed copies here.

For those who prefer to purchase through Amazon you can find it here.