29 ROOFS

Last winter, one of the challenges I set for myself was to write a piece of non-fiction within a one-week deadline. To keep myself honest about the deadline, I had to submit it somewhere for publication by the end of the week, so that I couldn't make any alterations. Non-fiction is hard to write. If it's too personal, you risk alienating people you care about. The writer Ann Lamott says, "You own everything that happened to you. Tell your own stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better". I definitely find as I age that I am far less willing to "go along to get along". I speak up, emphatically, for myself when the occasion warrants it. I generally try to be courteous and respectful, but depending on one's sex and birth order, one is more, or less, likely to have one's voice heard, and one's opinion valued, in a family. Parents set the tone for how to treat one another. When they don't model respect for each other, and for their children, the children don't automatically learn to respect each other. I'd been puzzling over an incident that occurred when I was three. My father claimed it never happened, but he also marvelled that I was able to recall the exact layout of our house and its furnishings, since we moved from that house shortly after. I decided to write a story comprising vignettes from 29 places I'd lived, including the one my father denied having happened. They were just isolated incidents I remembered, but once I'd written the story, I realized they were interwoven in surprising ways. It almost wrote itself; within a week it was at a literary quarterly's offices, and the next day I'd been informed they were purchasing it. It came out this week. It's called 29 Roofs.