My memoir rose from the ashes.  This is not a metaphor, by the way. My entire neighborhood was destroyed by a devastating firestorm in 1991. My book would not exist had my home and my neighborhood not been reduced to ashes. At the time, I didn’t know that this life-changing event would be the inspiration for a book. I was living through a nightmare and wasn’t taking notes.

But the story of the fire and the way our lives were changed wouldn’t leave me alone or let me forget. This was the story I needed to tell.

I started by writing short essays about a few of the things I’d lost, and the aftermath of the fire—the events that were seared into my memory. Just a few short pieces here and there.

And then, in 2009, not quite twenty years later, I left my job and entered an MFA program. As part of the program I wrote more of the story while looking for ways to connect the pieces into a coherent whole. One of the requirements for the degree was to produce a manuscript of at least one hundred pages. I didn’t think I could do it, but I did.

 My thesis would eventually evolve into my memoir, There Was a Fire Here. Once I decided to proceed with the book after graduation, writing my memoir in earnest drew me back into the days and weeks following the loss of my home and possessions. I worked hard to piece together all my feelings and memories from that time. The writing, finally, allowed me to get out from under their weight.

 At the outset, I had a vision in mind: my memoir would not follow a strict timeline that began with the first smell of smoke and ended with the day my family moved into our rebuilt home. I patterned my memoir after others I’d read—by Abigail Thomas, for example— which had a similar nonlinear construction. Anne Lamott calls this way of piecing stories together a “quilted memoir.” One chapter of my memoir is about a quilt, so I especially like this description. This structure would be true to my voice and the way I like to tell stories.

I spent hours looking through my photo albums (which I had thought to grab before we evacuated) for ideas. Gathering inspiration from the pictures taken before the fire, I was surprised to see little things, often in the background, that I wanted to write about: a funny pillow, a small box of buttons, a special T-shirt. I made a list of these things, and wrote a short chapter about each of them.

 Once I got my degree, I was on my own with the manuscript. There were months, maybe even a year, when I didn’t touch it. After an intense two years of writing, I needed to have some distance. But then the story started to inch its way back into my life, and I began working on it again with writing coach Brooke Warner guiding me through the writing process. She showed me how I could integrate the narrative chapters with the short, interstitial remembrances of the objects I call “artifacts” in the book.

I’ve always been a writer of few words; I often leave it to the reader to connect the dots. I’ll typically use broad strokes instead of adding words to contour and create dimension. What I learned in writing my memoir is that sometimes more is more. I had to go over and over what I’d written to flesh out the parts that needed more detail, more color. In order to do this, to put myself back in the moment, even when the moment was decades ago, required concentration and focus. Although I never doubted I could reach back and feel those feelings again, the reaching was harder than I expected.

As someone who self-published a book several years ago—after going through the agonizing submission/rejection dance for about a year—I had mixed feelings about following that path to publication again. So it was my good fortune to have an instant connection to someone who could tell me what She Writes Press was all about. For me, this meant having my book cared for and nurtured all along the way. And while it may not be the first thing an author thinks about, having the best cover design I could imagine still gives me goosebumps when I look at it! People do judge a book by its cover, and everyone seems to love mine. The interior design of the book, complete with little “flame” icons to designate each artifact chapter, looks terrific too.

My hope in writing my memoir was that readers who have suffered a similar loss, or know someone who has—either due to fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake or some other all-too-common disaster these days—would find some solace in reading an unflinching look at the best and the worst in a situation like mine. Although the details in my story are specific to my experience, the process of surviving a monumental loss and all that goes with it emotionally, will, I hope, be general enough to resonate with readers. The message is one of resilience, and it may offer hope to those who need it.

 When I tell someone I’ve written a book, they will inevitably ask me how long it took to write it. And my answer is this: Looking at it one way, it took me five years to write my memoir. Looking at it another way, it took me twenty-five years. I believe the story that must be told will be told, no matter how long it takes. The story of the fire was mine to tell; it wouldn’t let me go. And now it’s out in the world.