Audrey Immel

Literary Event Reflection

I sat in the back row, nestled next to recommended new works of fiction. My empty
Dayquil package in my backpack laughed at me. My plugged ears brought me back to biennial
ear infections and asking mom where the pink medicine was. More than a stuffy nose, I held the
hormone-driven premonition that “something was off”. Was it the essay due tomorrow? Was it
the overwhelming purple color scheme of the University Bookstore?
Or was it the books that loomed in front of me, from masters like Ralph Ellison,
Nabokov, and Virginia Woolf? They all told me in their own unique prose that my flippant
desire to write, and write well, would never be realized. Like a clique of middle-schoolers, I
hated them but I wanted so badly to be them.
The best and the worst advice is to write what you know.
It is the best because it is true. It is the worst because it operates under the assumption
that what you know is what others wish to read. I have always considered what I know to be
unworthy of the immortality that paper and ink can provide. Yet here were 15 upcoming writers,
all about to share just one piece of their personal lives to an appropriately intimate audience. For
my required literary event, I chose to listen to excerpts from memoirs, crafted by students in the
Memoir Certificate program through Professional and Continuing Education. The writers were
upwards of thirty years old, all but one were women, and each sat shifting their papers between
aged fingers, rubbing each other’s backs. Meanwhile, I mentally foretold how I would complete
the upcoming task of reflecting on this event, and what I would eat for dinner:
“This event made me think about Seattle literature…”
“This event really made me think about my place in today’s political climate…”
“What I liked most about the reading was—
“What I thought could use improvement was—
“Tomato soup?”

In addition to a score in the gradebook, I hoped to glean some inspiration from these
writers: at least enough to cheer me up, and maybe even enough to jumpstart a creative drive.
Throughout the following hour, my snotty sniffles turned to those of tears, often
accompanied by laughter. One woman spoke about the home she rented after her divorce and the
perfectly random orange dining room light placed in her closet. This light was strange but she
basked in it because it was hers. I thought of my mom after her divorce with my dad and her
happiness about organizing the dishes by color—they were hers.
Another woman took us through a surreal journey of psychedelic drugs, her best friend, a
man on a horse, and a divine face in the sun. I wondered if I would ever be brave enough—or
maybe stupid enough—to try psychedelic drugs with my best friend.
 Ron, the man of the group, remembered his religious upbringing and the racism
propagated by his church. Ron reminded me of my dad who grew up Christian and conservative
and now proudly wears his Judaism and liberalism like a fun tie at dinner parties.
A curly-haired woman missed her mom and wished that she was present for the birth of
her daughter. A Chinese woman recounted how accidentally breaking a porcelain figurine as a
little girl resulted in three generations of no sons in her family. I wondered how many of the
figurines I broke as a kid coincided with a baby girl’s cries in the delivery room.
After an hour of listening to shaky-voiced, bold, and teary story-telling, I now know
something about what these writers know. Maybe it’s not the worst writing advice after all.