In Fall 2024, memoirist and novelist Sylvia Brownrigg led an intensive weekend Art of Writing undergraduate workshop on memoir-writing. Kennedy Wright participated in the workshop, and produced the following novel excerpt during that weekend.
In keeping with the Art of Writing ethos of writing as a teachable art, below the excerpt Kennedy also reflects on how she would approach reworking her piece in the next draft.
My mom and I couldn’t live together. It had gotten volatile, physical, and I wasn’t afraid of her. I had a fearlessness that would allow me to do anything and she couldn’t handle it anymore. I wouldn’t act this way with my dad, surely. I wouldn’t sneak out with his keys in the middle of the night to steal his car.
I’m heating up canned soup on the stove when my dad walks through the front door, setting his briefcase and jacket down, walking around his beige, leather furniture and into the kitchen.
“Hey Kenny,” He says.
“Hey dad. How was your day?,” I say.
“It was fine . . . So, listen, I want to talk to you about something.”
Suddenly everything feels off and I reevaluate everything that has happened since he walked through the door. Now I realize how slowly and mechanically his movements were while he set down his things, like he had pulled a muscle. He sulked past the furniture, rather than his usual confident, intentional stroll. Was I in trouble? I review everything I’ve done wrong in the past month. How did he know?
“What’s up?”
“You’ve probably noticed that, you’ve probably noticed I haven’t been doing too well lately.” He has one hand on the kitchen counter and he’s sunken his entire body weight onto it when his voice cracks, “And that I started drinking again.”
I’m speechless. I reach my hand out and pat his arm, quickly realizing it’s very much a “there, there” gesture, so I pull myself into his chest and hug him.
“It’s okay. I’m here.”
This is my first heartbreak. My first moment of true powerlessness. And I feel like a piece of shit. While all the signs were there, I had been choosing to ignore them. I didn’t want to see him this way, so I didn’t. As much as I loved my dad, I was a very selfish teenager. I was consumed with getting the kids at school to like me. At home, I invested so much energy in hiding hickies or the fact that I was high out of my mind, that I missed something crucial — he was drowning.
This is my first heartbreak. My first moment of true powerlessness.
I dressed up for Halloween that day in a half-assed manner. A flannel, cowboy boots, and a rancher hat, to feel a part of, but nothing over the top just in case nobody dressed up. No one did, really. It was another shitty day being a 9th grader at a new school, arriving two months into the start of the school year. I walked home alone on a path through a field, carved out by the feet of teenagers keen on a shortcut. My feet drudged on heavy as I gave into the voices of self pity. Their clamor nearly silenced upon realizing that I forgot my house key, meaning I was locked out until my dad got home from work. I sat there on our front step of the little house he rented so that I could go to the same school as some kids I attended elementary school with. They weren’t interested in me, but the gesture was very him.
Hours passed and I was pissed. Rehearsing all the ways I was about to cuss him out, he pulls up to the house with the front of his truck mangled. I start in on him anyways, and when he opens his mouth to retort, he starts to cry. This was the second time I’d seen him cry within the two months I went to live with him, and something was very wrong about that. Between the two of us, we knew that if either one of us were crying, it meant it was serious.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t do anything. I just stood there, stiff. Following him to the front door. I wanted to be there for him, but I didn’t know how. I was so limited. With his bitch ex-wife, his too-young-to-understand child son, and his family — all possessing such a limited set of tools, I’m all he has. But I don’t have the knowledge or the experience to know what to say in this situation, so I just go to my room.
Thank you for reading this blurb from my prospective autofiction novel Where’s Ray? — a true story based on the disappearance of my father. In accordance with Art of Writing’s ethos of writing being a teachable and practicable art, I’d like to use this space as an opportunity to discuss ways in which I plan to elevate this piece. For the most part, I felt the process of memoir writing to be fairly intuitive, as I was able to coast on my recollection of events. These memories do transpire into a more literary format fairly easily, as I feel most writers just experience life through that sort of lens. Though, I began to get a little funky with my shifting from present tense to past tense.
Workshops are great because they allow for peer reviewing. However, workshops are also excruciating — because they allow for peer reviewing. But something my workshop and Sylvia were able to bring to my attention was the sporadic distance between the narratorial voice and the character’s experience in real time, and to aim to be more intentional about that—to consider which areas are strongest when shown through the eyes of the naivety of the character removed from hindsight, and where the narratorial hindsight/ analytics is useful. There are other areas of the story that are more fully-fleshed out, but the workshop seemed to really enjoy my description of the “path through a field, carved out by the feet of teenagers keen on a shortcut.” and this portion does serve as a snapshot of the story at large and the areas that need work.
— Kennedy Wright
