Finding the Form with Becky Blake

When I stuck the two essays together, back to back, they didn’t fit. But I wondered what would happen if I braided them together—a common creative nonfiction technique that I enjoy reading in other people’s writing but had never tried myself. To see if it might work, I printed out my two essays and cut them into segments. Then I laid these scraps of paper on my floor and photographed them in different configurations. In the end, the braids were pretty lopsided; the two stories didn’t want to neatly alternate. But I decided to combine the essays anyway because, during the photoshoot, I had noticed one striking resemblance. Both essays had cats in them. Why am I writing about cats? I wondered. I don’t even like them! And why are these feline characters so polarized: predatory cougars in one essay and adorable pet kittens in the other? 

After a few days of thinking about the differences between wild and domesticated animals, a lightbulb went on, and “Scratch” is the essay that resulted. In final draft, it feels more like a single woven cloth than two braided strands. But working to combine these essays highlighted some resonances that I wasn’t consciously aware of. Which makes me wonder if there may be other pairs of essays in my memoir that are waiting to be placed beside each other, or even intertwined—stories that, when given the chance to interact, may begin to have a lively conversation.