| Writer's Statement by Luanne Armstrong As a child, and still, as an adult, I am drawn to sit still beside water, stare at eye-holed patterns of water in motion, colours shifting and fading under the wind, bits of fractured light flashing indecipherable messages. As an adult memoirist, I juxtapose multifaceted shapes of language to reconstruct the meaning of experience. To choose scenes clipped from a life means to stop, to step through and into time, to freeze what happened, as a photograph fixes the pattern of water into a design. What happened, what did I think happened, how do I grasp memories which are slippery as water? Each time I approach this material, it runs away, twists into illusion, the truth of memory always elusive. It's important to get the tone right – to let the memories and events speak for themselves. Because what I am writing carries an emotional load, for both the writer and the reader, we need to trust each other. I wish not to be not manipulative, not sentimental, not self pitying,not judgemental, to be not so many things. I leave myself a slender thread to walk. What is left under my feet? Just this, the task, the joy, the honed craft of placing words one at a time, like notes of music, both freeing and bending my heart and mind into a compact; get it down, get it clear, get as close as I can to the unsayable, shape language into a form in which meaning becomes re/cognition.
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