Patchwork. You might already know how I love it! A central theme of my life, patchwork has, first of all, gifted my  decades with the pleasurable activity of quilting. Furthermore, patchwork has become a metaphor for ever-deepening layers of meaning and insights into living.

Many years ago, I began to write brief vignettes of my life’s journey that begged for release. As I continued the practice through the years, I discovered important, unexpected gifts. Uncovering generational connections bestowed both deeper insight and healing.

One day a powerful idea struck me: what if I threaded them together into a larger story? As I gathered and stitched (with words) those experiences into chapters, the process felt similar to piecing fabric into quilts. I felt encouraged to continue on as I viewed my task through that patchwork lens. I researched quilt patterns to find if they could lend their names to my chapter themes. Happily, they could, quite easily. One after another resonated in a grand parade: One Wedding Ring, Tumbling Blocks, Kaleidoscope, Helping Hands, and many more.

Next, I perceived the quilt patterns that represented joyful experiences could accommodate being sewn with squares representing darker, difficult struggles. Those stories I didn’t want to write–as any writer well knows–were exactly the ones that needed telling. I tried threading dark and light together into one large creation (of a quilt or a memoir). The results were lovely; dark areas softened with bright ones and became integral to the overall beauty.

Mary Catherine Bateson in her lovely memoir, Composing a Life, richly and clearly articulated my patchwork/memoir challenge:

“Part of the task of composing a life is the artist’s need to find a way to take what is simply ugly and, instead of trying to deny it, to use it in the broader design.”

I look back today and reminisce how that first small life-story I penned in 2001 began a process that transformed into a memoir. Patchwork: A Memoir of Love and Loss will be published this October. It is a fact that would have been unimaginable at the onset of this journey.