When I was writing my young-adult short-story collection, Killing Miss Kitty and Other Sins, I couldn’t quite decide whether I was writing memoir or fiction. Sometimes what I wrote was authentically memoir, but the longer, more shaped pieces tended toward fiction. Because I had to decide to go one way or the other, I chose to present the longer short stories as fiction and to take the authentically memoir pieces out for another collection.

I have several other projects I need to complete before I can return to the memoir pieces to decide exactly what to do with them, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share them. So I’m putting them in here, one at a time.

7. My Story

Walking home from school. In my hand, a story I wrote for class, just returned by my teacher. She’d told us to write about something that happened over the summer. I wrote about an overnight in a blanket-stretched-over-a-clothes-line tent in Betty Groll’s yard. Betty was a neighbor and the mill superintendent’s daughter. I wrote about the green monster that invaded our tent in the middle of the night. I wrote about Mrs. Groll’s dumping a bucket of cold water in my face to wake me, screaming, from my dream.