August 2018
I wrote this for the first Pop-up Prose I read at. It was the tail of summer, and the event was at the Palouse Clearwater Environmental Institute, outdoors. The theme was on nature writing. I thought I'd reimagine my own memories of spending so much time in the woods in Blanchard (Idaho) as a kid. This was honestly my first real foray into Creative Nonfiction, and rereading it now I'm a little surprised by how loose and affective I was. It doesn't seem like I was too invested in being understood.
You can read the pdf here if you'd like.
To explain a little bit, My dad and I moved out of the house where I spent the most time in the woods somewhere in the middle-to-high-school time period, and I remember hearing that the new owners had filled in the hole my friend and I had dug in the woods because they thought it was unsafe for their own child. In writing I wondered if those new children might ever find all the “garbage" I left in the woods as personal worldbuilding. And then I reimagined myself through that myth-distance, as a girl I wish I could've been.