My mother always read to me as a child. I really believe that bonding time between a parent and child is so important and precious. I have lasting memories of those stories because the experience was special.
As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It's usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated.
Most of my food memories are of my Nan cooking Sunday dinners - roasts of meat with lots of vegetables. I suppose I cook what's comforting and dishes that make me feel good.
I was raised on T.V. dinners because in those days, they were considered a well-balanced meal. And when I was sick, my mother fed me beef-barley soup and peanut butter sandwiches. That's about it for childhood food memories.
One of my earliest memories is walking up a muddy road into the mountains. It was raining. Behind me, my village was burning. When there was school, it was under a tree. Then the United Nations came. They fed me, my family, my community.
I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.
My childhood memories include a time when the government confiscated my family's possessions and exiled us to a camp in the B.C. Interior, just because my grandparents were from Japan.
Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don't feel like addressing in the memory hold. No neighbours can go against the monster narrative of your family.
I have really fond memories of Texas. By the time I was eight, we started to go back to Chile very regularly, and many family members came to visit us because we couldn't go visit them.
My grandfather was a newspaper publisher and his paper had all the comics in NYC, so some of my earliest memories are of reading the family paper and heading straight for the comics insert.
When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business.
When I was a child, there really weren't very many video games, but I do have memories of 'Pong.' Maybe it was 'Pong.' It was a home system in Japan, so maybe it wasn't the real 'Pong.' It was just sort of a Japanese game that was similar to 'Pong.'
The sparrow that is twittering on the edge of my balcony is calling up to me this moment a world of memories that reach over half my lifetime, and a world of hope that stretches farther than any flight of sparrows.
Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.
Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.
After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.
It was August 28th, 1963, and the greatest civil rights coalition in modern history had descended upon Washington. Hundreds of thousands of protesters trekked through the heat, stretching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.
My favorite holiday memory was sitting at home all day in my pajamas during winter break for school watching a bunch of old Christmas movies like 'Jack Frost' and 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' with my siblings and parents.
My favorite memories were with my dad, throwing a football around when he came home from work. As long as kids are having fun, that's the biggest deal at the end of the day.
My memories are of my dad taking me to football on Saturday mornings, and my mum taking me swimming. Those are the things I remember from my childhood, not sitting around the table debating capitalism and the profit squeeze.
Emotionally, I have no picture-book illustrated with memories of my first five years, but externally, I have impressions that possess a haunting vividness comparable only to the texture of dreams, when dreams are tumultuously alive.
