Memory as a Great Connector

 Author’s Note

This essay continues my series Why I Chose the Salon Over the Workshop. I began with How the MFA Workshop Took Over Literary Publishing, followed by The Slow Art of Thought and The Poetic Pulse of a Novel. In In Praise of the Tangent, I defended digression as the true movement of thought.

Here, I turn to memory, not as a tool for flashback, but as the great connector, the hidden architecture of narrative itself. Memory resists efficiency insists on recurrence, and shapes the rhythms of both life and literature.

Each of these essays circles the same conviction: the novel is not a machine to be engineered, but a living conversation between time, memory, and reader.

Memory as the Great Connector

Memory is not an archive. It is not a shelf where one may pull down the box labeled “childhood” or “yesterday.” It is a web, a constellation, a nervous system of sparks. One thought touches another, and suddenly we are back in a kitchen where the light fell across a chipped porcelain cup or standing again on a street corner where we first learned the smell of rain on stone.

When I was young, struggling to read, associative learning gave me a method to think in connections rather than in isolation. The turtle led to the fable, the fable to the Greek, the Greek to numbers scratched out in a notebook. But long before any teacher instructed me, memory itself had already been shaping me in this way. A child cannot help it. The smell of chalk dust is linked to the hum of fluorescent lights, which is linked to the nervous anticipation before a test, which is linked to the face of the teacher bending over your desk.

Memory insists on connection. It refuses to stay put.

Writers trained in the MFA mode are often urged to keep the past in neat containers. Flashbacks must be efficient, short enough not to “interrupt the story.” The past must be digested and returned to the reader only as summary. But human consciousness does not obey this rule. We live with the past intruding, reshaping the present moment. A sentence today can open the wound of fifty years ago. A piece of music can collapse decades into a single breath.

In this sense, memory is not a digression from narrative. It is narrative.

The European tradition understood this. Proust is our great cartographer of memory, not because he remembered more than the rest of us, but because he honored the way memory ambushes the mind. Sebald, wandering East Anglia, allowed memory to thread together silkworms, photographs, ruins, and personal encounters until they became one fabric. W.G. Sebald’s prose does not move forward so much as radiate outward, like memory itself.

In my own writing, memory is the pulse beneath the page. It supplies depth where plot alone cannot. A war story is not simply what happened in the jungle or the desert. It is how that scene resurfaces twenty years later in a quiet room when a child’s laughter or a bird’s shadow pulls it back. Without this recurrence, without this echo, the story is flat.

The MFA workshop often warns against “indulgence,” but I would argue memory is the least indulgent force we know. It chooses what to keep alive, often against our will. The face of someone we failed, the smell of a mother’s dress, the silence after a slammed door. These return whether or not the author has scheduled them.

To follow memory in writing is to honor truth. It is to acknowledge that our minds do not respect chronology, that our stories are stitched from fragments. A novel without memory is a body without blood.

When I invite the reader into my work, I do not promise them a linear journey. I promise them a companionship through memory’s labyrinth. We may enter by way of a present scene, but soon enough the past will surface, asking to be heard. This is not an interruption. It is the true continuity of a life.

Memory is the great connector: it binds past to present, private to public, individual to history. It is not orderly, but it is faithful. It carries us across years, across silences, across the distances that would otherwise leave us stranded.

And so, when I write, I trust memory. I let it shape the page. If it carries me away from the story, I follow. Because it will always lead me back, not to where I began, but to where I am.