What Do We Do With What We Remember?
Writing from Memory; on Allowance and Surrender.
Image by Sarah Isaacs.
Making sense of Memory; Memoir as Craft.
“It was a quiet, super-average-standard Saturday afternoon. I had the weekend off work for the first time in a long time. I lived alone in Woodstock. And, very-different-to-normal, even the streets outside were quiet. No shouting. No hooting. No drinking. No loud music. In amongst this sleepy environmental haze, I discovered a feeling inside myself quite alien to me at the time. Recognizable only via some distantly associated memory connected to being an only child. Pressed to give it a name, only under duress would I have called it… “boredom.”
My phone was silent. No one needed me. I scrolled through a few minutes of social media and even the infinite void of the internet appeared to offer nothing new. I sat on the couch and stared up at the ceiling. Left the couch and went upstairs to unmake my made bed. I climbed inside the covers in the broad midday summer sunlight and listened to the sound of a clock ticking. I contemplated going somewhere but nowhere pulled me distinctly or compellingly enough. So, I stared up at the ceiling some more until finally… Another feeling arrived!
It positioned and placed itself right alongside the space in my belly where the feeling I’d called “boredom” lay. This new feeling, in contrast to “boredom” however, was quite a familiar feeling and so was much easier to name. Why hello, “hunger.” Hunger was a feeling I liked because it was a feeling I could do something about. Relieved, I sprung up out of bed and went back down to the kitchen to open the fridge. Inside the fridge, I found a pair of almost-soggy green peppers and a couple of eggs. In the cupboard, I found an onion and some garlic which I chopped up alongside the peppers. I switched the stove plate on as high as possible, threw everything inside and sprinkled curry powder all over the contents. My nostrils widened with pleasure. Then I cracked open the eggs to complete my heavenly smorgasbord of leftover ingredients.
The oil in the pan sizzled happily in response as all elements of the composite endeavour colluded and conspired to present themselves to my mind as a magical entourage of sensory delight. My mouth began to water. Smell, sight, sound… Sizzle… Sizzle… Sizzle… And that’s when it happened. Right there, out of the blue, on this very quiet, super-average-standard Saturday afternoon. A memory that I was not even aware existed at that time suddenly popped up and out of my subconscious mind, cleared into conscious awareness by time, space and boredom, summoned by an association with the sound of the eggs sizzling in the pan.
Suddenly, the “I” that I had been perceiving myself as was spun into a flurry of such overwhelming sensation that I could no longer connect myself to the time and space that I was in. One moment, I was 25 years old inside a kitchen in Cape Town. The next moment, I was 13 years old inside a kitchen in Johannesburg. The only remote similarity that connected these two experiences was that the sound of eggs sizzling in a pan in Cape Town sounded no different to the sound of eggs sizzling in a pan in Johannesburg.
My body reacted. My heart rate sprang into a tachycardic rhythm. Sweat began to cascade down the skin covering my spine. My chest constricted and I began to perceive that I wasn't breathing in enough oxygen, which caused me to panic. And then it began. Images flashed through my mind at such a rapid rate that they appeared in my mind's eye like a pack of cards being shuffled. I lost control of my muscles and all sense of proprioception. The next thing I knew, I was lying starfish-style on the kitchen floor. The eggs were burning. I was no longer hungry.
Then again, quite suddenly, a quiet voice emerged from the chaos: "You're a medic, Kassie. You're trained for this. You know what to do." My right hand reached for my left pulse. I began to count the beats. My left hand reached for my chest. I began to count my breaths. Through the space created by noticing what existed between beats and breaths, I began to notice where my body sat against the earth. The kitchen tiles felt cold against my skin. The air around me was warm. I saw that there was a notepad and pen within reach. I stretched my arm towards it. I clutched the pen between opposable thumb and forefinger. I felt the smooth texture of the paper against the side of my palm. And I began to write down what I was seeing in my mind's eye, exactly as I was seeing it.”
This was the beginning of my practice as a creative writer.
Ideas about Memory.
We tend to think of memory as something stored inside the mind: a filing system of experiences, images, facts and sensations that we can retrieve when we need them. But memory is stranger than that. It is layered, associative and often profoundly sensory. There are memories from yesterday and memories from twenty years ago. Memories we can summon deliberately and memories that seem to arrive from nowhere. A smell, a sound, a texture, a particular quality of light can suddenly open a door into another time.
There are layers. Recent memories sit close to the surface; older ones are buried deeper. Some are visible. Some are dormant. Some only reveal themselves when something disturbs the status quo of our lives, or when we encounter something that reminds us of what we thought we could no longer remember.
Some memories are readily available to conscious thought. Others may be difficult to access, fragmented or simply absent from our conscious narrative. When an experience is overwhelming, our attention may become focused on getting through what is happening rather than making sense of it. Later, when we are safer, different aspects of that experience may become available to us — sometimes through dreams, sensations, emotions, images or unexpected associations.
And memory isn't only something that happens inside the individual mind.
We carry memories in the ways we respond to people, places and situations. We develop relational memories: patterns of expectation and response formed through our connections with others. We associate particular places with particular states of being. Objects, photographs, buildings, landscapes, songs and smells can all become vessels for association.
Conscious or unconscious, we are immersed in memory all the time. It is inescapable — an inevitable, rolling drum of constant affiliation and affliction, shaping our patterns, informing our experiences and continually building the reality around us as we perceive it.
Unless there is some way to become more directly aware of it.
Unless there is some way to notice what is influencing us, to interpret what is surfacing, and perhaps even to direct some of it more intentionally…
“Shapes of Stories”
Visualising the emotional movement of narrative patterns over time, inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s “Shapes of Stories.” Source: Katherine Elkins, The Shapes of Stories: Sentiment Analysis for Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Ideas about Memoir as Craft.
Whatever is happening in the mind — consciously or subconsciously — often reveals itself in our writing. What we remember and how we remember it. The stories that impose themselves on the page even when we might be trying to write about something else. The sensations and discomfort that arise while we write. Our switching between voices, styles and tenses. The parts of the story that get stuck. Our inability to finish what we start.
When we write without filtering or correcting what emerges, we are, in a sense, making the metaphysical physical: traumas. Relational wounds. Communication patterns. Beliefs. Preoccupations. Even the architectural formulas we unconsciously use to construct a narrative arc. The page becomes a kind of evidence.
Memoir sits squarely within the non-fiction category because we are writing from lived reality rather than imagined, adapted or predicted reality. And yet memory itself is unreliable. It is selective, associative, subjective and continually being reconstructed. This is part of what makes memoir so interesting.
The memoirist therefore isn't necessarily trying to reproduce factual reality perfectly. The task is more complicated — and, I think, more interesting. We are trying to communicate emotional truth while remaining anchored in what we understand to have actually happened. It takes a particular kind of bravery to confront experience in this way.
Because the moment we begin to write from memory, we are also asking the mind and body to encounter what the memory contains. Our nervous systems may resist, divert, fragment, rush, freeze or otherwise attempt to protect us from becoming overwhelmed by what we're putting on the page. And yet, there can come a moment when something shifts.
The writing moves from impulse-led, emotionally charged expression into something more deliberate. We have processed the memory to a degree that allows us to begin making choices:
What is the story when viewed through multiple lenses?
Can I hold space for contradictory or mutually exclusive truths?
Can I honour my experience without abandoning myself — or dominating the experience of another?
Can I trust the editing process enough to allow some things to remain unsaid, unexplained or unresolved?
What meaning can I make from what happened?
How would I like this story to move through the world differently?
This is the moment we step into the role of memoirist and storyteller. Not simply at the mercy of memory, but in relationship with it.
We don't have to abandon the truth of what happened. Instead, we begin to take responsibility for how we shape it, interpret it and communicate it: now we're in storytelling craft mode.
And this is what we'll explore together in our upcoming Memoir Writing: Turning Memory Into Meaning workshop: the tools, techniques and stylistic choices that can help you begin — and finish — your story with greater grace, compassion and finesse.
Bookings: Memoir Writing: Turning Memory Into Meaning — Bookings
Want to go deeper?
Our next 8-Week Creative Writing Course offers a broader exploration of storytelling craft — moving beyond one particular memory or genre and into the wider creative process of developing ideas, finding form and learning to write with greater intention.
8 September 2026 | The Bijou, Observatory
Bookings: Email tanika@hatuakali-storytelling.org
We hope to meet you. In Words and In Real Life.
