Parts three and four-- Dream of the Way Autumn Felt that Day: Writing Imaginary Histories

To:Imaginary Band Collective

Re: Only Anything
From: Starmaster, curator, OA-IBC
Date: this twenty-first day of August, two thousand eight.

Come for the mosh come for the pain of the game
Come for the thrash where no one's the same
Everyone shouting and swaying and dying in time
And everyone for just one second is mine.

--Stone, Autumn, 1995

Parts three and four-- Dream of the Way Autumn Felt that Day: Writing Imaginary Histories

Dear OA-IMC collective,

I hope my last email found you well, and a bit dusty after garage and closet diving for old memorabilia. Since I missed a day yesterday due to an unfortunate transportation snafu in Effingham, I come to you again late this evening with parts three and four--squished together. The focus here is writing. Writing about one's past is always a challenge, but in a collective of such brilliant minds, the task shouldn't come as any trouble.

Part 3: We move now from digging in your closets to digging in your noggins. Start thinking about memories you have of old times. While this project focuses on the band specifically, you need not limit your memory digging to band-only moments. In fact, the band (I think) is only one aspect of a much larger "mythology" of the old Tucson bro times. The band and its artifacts are the tip of that proverbial iceberg Only Anything's long and glorious history together. Maybe you have a memory of rolling around in Mat's green bomber, or going caving with the boys (and chicks!) in John's old brown van (Ike)--those memories are fair game for centerpieces of your writing. As are, certainly, pre- and post-band OA moments, t-shirt making in Berthoud basements, reunions in Chicago, and anything else, really.

Part 4: Once you've got your memory nice and primed, write. Here's the trick with this kind of writing: it doesn't need to be perfectly accurate. 10-15 year old memories have a tendency to get a bit foggy and that is fine. Just focus on what you remember, the more details the better, but then use your less-specific memories to fill in the other gaps. The members of the collective may not remember every moment of that first show in John H's back yard, but they certainly remember some pieces of it. And, more importantly, the collective all have a more general memory of the night's feelings and of the feelings felt in the days and weeks leading up to that horribly wonderful first concert. We're shooting for essence here, not perfection. If you can't remember specific details, but have that feeling in place, the details you make up will work the same as if they were real. This is the essence of creative non-fiction. Indeed, it is in this way that our writing will become an imaginary history.

Post these histories to our blog.

No longer in Effingham,

Starmaster, Curator OA-IBC