Finding My “Almost Awe” Memoir Voice: A Craft Essay by Mary Catherine Harper
Truth be told, it is no miracle
to survive snakebite without
antivenin or amputation:
only get to the third telling
and send the story pulsing
toward misremembrance.
(final stanza of “Stories to Misremember,”
p. 18 of The Found Object Imagines a Life)
I have always been more comfortable writing poetry than creative nonfiction. Although much of the subject matter of my memoir work is the same as my poetry, when asked to relate an incident that might have prompted a verse like the one above, I tend to claim the speaker is just an imagined voice. I admit that throughout my forty-year writing career I have used a poet’s “mind of winter” persona for life’s cutting-sharp “junipers shagged with ice,” as Wallace Stevens put it.
“Memoir Map 02” by Mary Catherine Harper
Then my mother died in 2014. My mother, who had suffered bouts of anger and depression as she struggled to raise her six children in the face of extreme poverty in the 1950s and 60s. My mother, who tended toward physical abuse of some of her six children during those years but who also continually sought to change her behavior. My mother, who slowly, steadily found non-violent ways of responding to situations that triggered memories of a childhood of privation and abuse. In the final years of her life she became someone I greatly admired. She had faced her inner chaos, developed self-control, and sought me out to make amends. I came to understand how much determination it took for her to change.
And I got to know her as a person. I admired her skill with local-history writing—she compiled histories for both our local parish and the larger diocese—and enjoyed her textile creations, especially her quilts, which became the inspiration for some of my visual art pieces. When Barbara Evelyn Downey died, I had the urge to say outright, without hiding behind the poetic persona I had developed, what it meant to have such a mother.
But I didn’t have the writing skills. For four years I struggled to capture in prose my complicated, troubled, wonderful mother and the effect she’d had on me. For four years I remained dissatisfied. I was especially frustrated with the way the memoir I was trying to write had turned into an intellectual examination of the effects of generational abuse within a family. The prose style I had developed was fine for my academic articles, but not for a journey into my own past and the past of Barbara Evelyn. Only through poetry had I found a way to approach traumatic memories and stories of abuse within the Downey family.
And then it struck me. While writing poetry I had developed a pattern of “misremembering,” a way of pairing painful memories with imagined scenes. I could use that technique in my memoir. And so I gave myself permission to “misremember,” to balance actual memories of an often-violent mother with half-imagined stories of her past, stories that suggested the possible source of her behavior. Since she had only hinted at the transgressions of her alcoholic father and the effect of her mother dying when she was very young, I began writing imaginary scenes of my mother’s past and addressing her as if she were still alive, asking whether this or that scene was close to what she had experienced. I let myself fall into poetic verse at times to add emotional texture to both imagined scenes and those from my actual well-remembered childhood . . . scenes of horrific abuse, of me learning to watch quietly and move purposefully, and finally of daring to rebel. In this way I found my memoir voice.
Such misremembering unlocked a more lyrical prose style and led to the completion of a memoir with the working title of Sifting Ash, Grasping Air. In it I let the child I used to be—I call her the “child of ash and air”—describe life-shaping events, including the fire that one of her siblings set, burning down the family farmhouse in 1954. The memoir moves between the child voice and my own present voice, between imagined or “misremembered” moments and actual everyday events like in the “Almost Awe” piece published in the Fall 2025 issue of Abraxas Review.
“Memoir Map 12” by Mary Catherine Harper
The lyric poems I’ve inserted add texture to the interplay of narrative and commentary, including commentary by a third voice, a meta-persona developed to interrogate the scenes that are openly declared to be half-imagined: probable scenes of my mother’s troubled adolescence described in order to make sense of her sudden rages, which were usually followed by days or even weeks of depression. The meta-voice seeks to understand the pattern of abuse within our family and situates my mother’s sometimes-contradictory, always-complicated behavior and motives in relation to time and place. Here was a woman who was raising her children in abject poverty after WWII on a dryland wheat farm in southwest Kansas, a place with few resources and little social support for raising six children born in quick succession.
In the course of writing the memoir, the tone of which is demonstrated in “Almost Awe,” I have come to appreciate not only my mother’s determination to become a less-volatile parent but, also, her insistence on the kinds of educational opportunities that she was never offered. I am grateful for her bold assertion against the counsel of school principals that each of her children was academically able, no matter that three of us—including me—exhibited language-based learning disabilities. Though she was never able to finish high school, Barbara Evelyn modeled the self-assurance of a well-educated person. She set me on the poet’s path, which I continue to walk today, and she modeled the determination I’ve needed to develop memoir-writing skills. With the help of Barbara Evelyn, I think I am learning to tell a story well. And what better story to tell than hers.
