Was It You?

Micro Memory Project: volume 02

In my last post, I shared my plan to publish shorter fragments of writing a few times a month to take the pressure off the longer essays that just aren’t coming together. Since then, a knot somewhere in my writer brain has started to loosen.

It’s working, you guys. Or at least, something is shifting.

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Unfinished on Purpose

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Writing in smaller, self-contained bits has turned out to be exactly what I needed. Darien Gee first introduced me to a term for this type of writing: micro prose. And after being intrigued from a distance for a while, I’m finally diving headfirst into this small-but-mighty form and having so much fun seeing what wants to come out.

Darien’s guidelines for writing micro prose go something like this:

Give yourself a prompt, and set a timer for 10 minutes. Start with whatever feels easy and true, and see where it wants to go. Do not stop writing until ten minutes have passed. When your timer goes off, stop. Give your piece a title, add it to your binder, and watch as you build a body of work that starts looking suspiciously like a manuscript over time.

If this piques your curiosity, her Substack Writer-ish with Darien Gee is a wealth of helpful resources.

The piece below came out last weekend, in response to the prompt: Write about a sign you received from someone (or something) you’ve lost.

Photo by Vladyslav Tobolenko on Unsplash

📝 Micro Memory #2:

Was It You?

Mom and I turn the kitchen upside down in our search. We leaf through the fat family cookbook, rummage through the torn pink pocket folder stuffed with all the loose recipes Mom doesn’t want to lose, and still we come up empty. Eventually we give up, Mom grabs her car keys and we leave to run errands in defeat.

Years later we will both struggle to remember: Was it a chili recipe we were looking for that day? Or Grandma’s Texas beans? And why the hunt for it? Back then I turned up my nose at chili and beans of all stripes. None of this matters, of course, because this is the point: when we return to the empty house, it’s there—a single sheet of yellow lined paper, laden with stains and old coffee rings, a whisper of stale cigarette smoke and my dead grandmother’s handwriting.

The recipe sits in the center of the kitchen table with nothing else around it, like a note left on the counter in the days before cell phones. Ran out for milk, be back soon. It’s as if someone wanted to make sure we saw it.

I was thirteen when my Grandma Mary died. I knew her, but only as well as a girl can know a grandmother who dotes on her. I knew she made porcelain dolls, smoked cigarettes and drank black coffee out of white mugs. That she proudly preferred Miracle Whip over real mayonnaise. Gave the best Christmas presents. Grew gardenias in the backyard.

Time balloons in the years since her death, crowding out what memories I have with all the things I do not know. Who was she, through grown-up eyes? What would she think of the person I’ve become? Has she tried to send me answers? How many have I missed, or misunderstood? When you weren't raised to believe in haunts or holy spirits, questions become your gods.

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In the Margins

Currently Working On

• Setting up my micro prose ecosystem! I followed Darien Gee’s suggestions and got myself a binder to house my micro prose pieces, and built myself a simple little system in Tana where I can see my daily progress stack up. Your girl loves a good system.

  

• Still working on that submission for the “Letter to a Stranger” column in the literary magazine, Off Assignment. (It’s an incredible column, if you’re not familiar—I keep going back and finding new favorites, like To the Woman Who Walked Beside Me and To the Man I Believe Was Good.)

Reading

• I’ve rediscovered my love of memoir! I’ve been on an audiobook kick lately and loving it. In the past couple weeks I’ve powered through a few titles that have been on my TBR list for a long time, including Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms (spectacular!) and Liz Gilbert’s All the Way to the River (perfectly fine). Next up is Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, about which which I’ve only heard amazing things.

2026 Submission Tally

• 2 pieces submitted for publication

• 1 rejected

• 0 accepted

Muscle Memory is a newsletter about collecting and circling fragments that resonate, to find language for truths we know but cannot yet name. Thanks for being here.