As a writer and a teacher of memoir, finding the story is the easy part. “Use your memory,” I tell my students. We hold on to memories that are important, instructive, joyful, painful. When we lean into these memories, when we explore a consequential, perhaps haunting, perhaps puzzling story, eventually a narrative begins to take shape. Part of shaping the story is finding the right details, opening to them, allowing them to tell the story on our behalf. Precise details, what TS Eliot coined the “objective correlative,” invoke precise emotion.
In her seminal essay “Memory and Imagination,” Patricia Hampl writes of the starring role such details play in narrative. She explains that “details are not merely information, not flat facts. Such details are not allowed to lounge. They must work.” But what does it mean for a detail to work? Isn’t that the job of the writer, to shape words as an artist shapes clay? If not, is the writer merely a conduit, a meditator guided into a trance that waits for an animal with a message?
Hampl writes, “Their labor,” in reference to these working details, “is the creation of symbol. But it’s more accurate to call it the recognition of symbol. For meaning is not ‘attached’ to the detail by the memoirist; meaning is revealed.” This means that the writer does not decide, not really, what power is contained in particular images. Instead, the images lodge themselves in memory, and the writer recalls them, and then the writer must attune herself. The writer’s job is to not control the narrative too tightly. So when a powerful message appears by way of a potent detail, you must not push it away. You must listen.
***
The first time I experienced a type of shamanic journey, I thought I was attending a meditation class at my yoga studio. I wanted to learn to meditate better. I wanted to gain more control over my mind, to focus more deeply, to discipline myself so that I could work more efficiently. The session was billed as “guided meditation” paired with gentle “energy balancing” provided by the facilitator. I didn’t know what the latter entailed, but it sounded relaxing.
When I arrived, I was greeted by crystals and feathers and a drum and music designed to activate a certain kind of brave wave. We sat in a circle, and Sara — I now know that she is a shaman trained in the Peruvian tradition — invited us to lie down. I sat up. I was meditating.
To bring us into meditation, Sara guided us underground and back up again, into a meadow where we waited for an animal to bring us a message. We were told to be patient, to allow animals to come and go, until one chose to stay. I found myself in a landscape embedded deep in my memory, fields that appeared between patches of hardwood forest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the place my parents grew up, a place where I’ve never lived but has always felt like home.
When my animal finally appeared, I was annoyed because it was male. Go away, I thought, I want a female animal to guide me. I had grown up without a stable mother but with a strong older sister and six maternal aunts and a father who was both paternal and maternal. The male animal, a stag, watched me with its gentle liquid eyes. It did not watch from a distance, as deer do when we see them from the road. This deer stood very close. I wanted it to move along, to make space for something else. It remained, steadfast.
There was something different about this deer, this stag. It was not the white-tailed deer of the American Midwest, my home, the place I’d lived for all but two years of my life. Its rack was grander, more branched out than the deer I’d grown up with. And that word, “stag,” kept returning.
In America, a male deer is called a buck. The word “stag,” I knew, was foreign. Despite appearing in a meadow in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, beside a wood that gave way to Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world, this animal was an Irish red deer. I had seen such a deer as a bronzed mounted trophy above a pub entrance in Dublin, and living among a nearly-tame herd in Phoenix Park, a vast urban greenspace that was once a royal hunting ground. But what was this Irish stag doing in my Midwestern landscape? And what did it have to tell me?
***
In Sonya Huber’s essay, “The Three Words that Almost Killed Me: ‘Show Don’t Tell’,” she pokes a hole in conventional writing advice that, especially for memoir, has always been incomplete. Writing scene after scene left her in a state of disassociation. Huber then discovers that “my authority comes not from details and forward motion, but from a deep place in my gut where my 48 years of experience have tangled like fishing line.” It turns out that the work of description and narration, the building blocks of creative nonfiction, are not enough. Hampl wasn’t wrong when she wrote, “We store in memory only images of value.” But the idea, or at least my understanding of it, was incomplete. Memory doesn’t live only in the mind; it also lives in our bodies. And writers must find ways to access, to listen to, and to translate this wisdom. Doing so requires untangling that fishing line.
In his book “Shamanism: The Timeless Religion,” UC-Davis professor Manvir Singh explores the parallels between modern medicine and shamanism, identifying components common between the healing modalities. “The power of the specialist is that they can change the stories we tell about ourselves,” he writes. “Much of healing, whether by Colombian shamans or Johns Hopkins physicians, boils down to assuring someone they are being healed.”
The shaman and the doctor both guide healing. This comes, no doubt, from their wisdom, their training, but it also stems from their authority. We believe they can help. But faith, it turns out, is optional. Singh explains that the placebo effect not only works, it works when patients are told they are being given a placebo; beyond that, healing works even when patients don’t believe the authority can help.
In writing, the authority is the writer’s mind. The mind reads and learns from other writers; the mind discusses in seminar rooms; the mind constructs the words on the page, employing craft skills it has been trained to execute. But the mind cannot write alone. If we think we know the story before it’s been written, if we cling too tightly to a narrative prescribed by our minds, we miss out on a deeper wisdom, on layered meaning. The writer must learn to listen to her body and to the images that glow, even, and perhaps especially, when their meaning is a mystery. In shaping a narrative, in learning to meditate, control, it turns out, was always the wrong goal.
***
But what about the stag? What did this image, this symbol mean? What story did he wish to impart? I knew he was male, I knew he was Irish. I knew I wanted to push him away, that I believed only a female animal could offer me the guidance I craved. The stag did not whisper any wisdom, it only looked on with trust and patience, standing so very near. I left the meditation session without a clear answer. But my body, after a crescendo of drumming and heat and tears, was deeply transformed. As the shaman conducted her energy healing, she extracted a well of sadness from deep within my core, something I had been carrying since before memory formed.
When I returned home that night, when I took a salt bath to ground myself back in the land of the living, the startling message of the stag finally arrived. Here it is, the wisdom of the image, a narrative my mind could never have conjured because it was far too simple, much too obvious: I am married to a man from Ireland. And his surname is Deere.
Embedded in the stag’s message is the wisdom I have known always, but that I neglect every day. That despite our petty arguments and the busyness of raising children, the ways that building a life has sometimes pulled us apart, he remains: gentle, steadfast and very close, the great companion of my life.
Tara DaPra is a teaching professor at UW-Green Bay. She writes about grief, parenthood, food, teaching, books, therapy, money, magic rocks and the process of writing on her Substack, “Everyday Epiphanies.”
Other work has appeared in such places as Creative Nonfiction, The Washington Post and on Wisconsin Public Radio. She met her husband in a Dublin pub, and they are parents to two red-haired boys.
