Another Writer Wrestling with Their Experiences

 I have a pile of stories dealing with my depression, with past relationships, with the crackheads of Muncie, with my family histories, of my own screw ups. "Chasing Ashes" has a reader making comparisons to Naked Lunch (I'm pretty sure he's referring to the movie) when what I am doing is a bizarro history of my life and times. I have major doubts with what I am doing and how I am doing it. Then I read Writing My Dead Sister Through Fact and Fiction; Brian Phillip Whalen on Finding Resolution in Storytelling. This particularly, with its emphasis on the creative caught my attention and I said, Yeah that's what we've got to keep doing with "Chasing Ashes."

One possible answer is this: where memoir curates, fiction creates. If not a happy ending, then the possibility, the hope, of one. Or at least of alternate endings, of an escape from a determined fate (one thinks of the final chapter, the father’s monologue, in David Benioff’s The 25th Hour). Memoir can only tell you that a door has been closed—fiction can make you believe it might open again.