“Unlike me, my character has the opportunity to have a heart to heart with her mom before she dies.” -Kaighla Rises

                Today I’ve been teaching at a writing retreat in Allerton—a mansion, now a retreat center and park, some thirty-five minutes from my home in Illinois. I got to meet Kaighla. In the same session where I wrote down her comment, quoted above, she wrote down this from me: “I love writing for what it can make true.”
                At around the time when my grandmother was moved to hospice, I brought my laptop to the hospital bed where she’d been sleeping. I wish I’d done it sooner. I chatted with her about her childhood, about her mother, about memories I’d never asked about. She answered some questions. Evaded others. So far I haven’t “done” anything with the writing from that afternoon, but I’m so glad, looking back, that I have that moment to reflect on. To hold. To ground into as memory and connection. Today, in another session, I was talking with a writer about their family memoir, and we started talking about inviting family members to contribute—writing letters, maybe, explaining the project and asking if people wanted to respond by sharing a story. I don’t know if that writer will ever make the invitation. If they do, I don’t know if it will be taken up. And of course, writing a novel where the character gets to have a heart to heart with their mother that you never got to have with yours isn’t going back in time, isn’t changing what happened. But it is love and hope for what was and what might be, isn’t it? It is a way of saying please, and feeling, and making space to hear whoever answers.