Susan Viguers

A record of living is simply data. By seeing repetitions, patterns, shapes, beginnings, climaxes, endings, points of view - the modes and structures of fiction - we give it meaning. In The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather defines artistic growth as "a refining of the sense of truthfulness." If the meaning I create is "truthful," it is not simply self-indulgence, but rather the form of an experience into which others can enter, in which they can see their own shape, and which can extend their understanding of their own lives. That is my goal as a writer of creative nonfiction.

At present, I am both writing texts for artists books and finishing a manuscript on which I have been working for several years. The two central characters are my mother and I, but it is about more than my life. Its subject is the relationship between old and young - between both parents and children and the old and the young self. It is about the emotional complexity of growing up, aging, separating one's self from parents and children, creating one's identity.
 

Her son's room is his work of art. If I died, he asks her, what would you do? I mean, I know you'd cry and all that, but what would youdo with my room?

I'd leave it the way it is for a long, long time.

Not for along time, he corrects her. Forever.

That moment is in amber laid.

Two years later, at fifteen -- that boy no longer exists, he cries, as he stomps on the plastic-framed picture of his six-year-old self, yanked from the kitchen wall. I don't feel anything for you. Get the message. Get the message.

in amber laid

His room -- forever changing: furniture,hangins, objects, absorbed, transformed, rejected -- stays beautiful.

Rhythmic, cluttered, brilliant. His own.

Time destorys, but is also preserves.

in amber laid

- from Portrait of a Son: Nick's Room, 1997 (text for an artist's book)