Threaded Forms: Decentered Approaches to Nonfiction
SARAH MINOR is a writer and a designer from Iowa. She edits the “Visual Essays” series at Essay Daily and is working on a series of hybrid essays made of both text and thread. This fall she will begin teaching as an assistant professor of nonfiction at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
MANY MORE TIMES A DAY than I believe to be normal, I will catch something falling from my desk, mid-air. In my hand will be an object that I myself just knocked over the edge—a teacup, a pair of scissors, a can of bright pens. And in the moments immediately after making the catch, I’ll be flooded with a memory that I had otherwise lost, a snapshot of my life from a very different place and time, when I opened my elbow and snatched something out of the air. I’ve been making this motion all my life. My right arm throws something to my left.
A neurologist could probably explain both my rampant clumsiness and the relationship between reflex and synapse that sends the mind zinging haphazardly through time from one saved mug to another. But as a nonfiction writer, this snatching of lost memories reminds me that the narratives we live inside are never linear from the start. Our stories are patterns of experiences, a few knit together and the vast remainder discarded as scrap.
