Embroidered Life
While thinking of the various ways women’s hands have created so many beautiful things (I wrote a poem called “Women’s Hands”), I’m also exploring personal essays and their various forms. As it turns out, the two go very well together and share common threads so to speak.
Sarah Minor’s essay “What Quilting and Embroidery Can Teach us About Narrative Form” appeared first in Creative Non-Fiction Issue #64 and I found it online at Literary Hub.
Minor says, as a nonfiction writer, the 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. She mentions the “braided essay” where past and future are visited, by the reader, alternately “skipping across time and space as if following the path through a distracted mind. But the real beauty of a successful braid is how the ‘threads’ combine thematically to form a more complete and pliable piece of nonfiction.”
In a section of Minor’s essay entitled “Quilted Essays,” she describes the domestic art of quilting. “In many cultures, quilts act as historical documents that preserve narratives about place and identity. A scholar named Mara Witzling has written that quilts historically “enabled women to speak the truth about their lives”, by joining many disparate fragments. Some of the fragments sewn into the quilt could have been inherited from ancestors.
Quilters “piece” together sections of fabric with even stitches beginning in the middle as is the case with many traditional patterns. As Sarah Minor says: “As a material metaphor for nonfiction, writers interested in new forms might consider ‘piecing’ sections of text as a means of working outwards from a […]