How to Write Memory Like It Hurts: A Workshop in Fragments, Prompts, and Brutal Honesty

This isn’t about nostalgia. This is about unearthing what memory actually does, and crafting poems that make readers flinch. Prompts included.

Memory isn’t a keepsake. It’s not cosy. It doesn’t tuck you in at night. Real memory unsettles, fractures, and refuses to play tidy. If your poetry is worth a damn, your memory shouldn’t just decorate your work, it should destabilise it.

This is the third instalment in a series I’m writing for poets who are toying with the idea of attending my writing workshops. I’ve talked about shame and transgression, and about writing flawed men. Now it’s memory’s turn. Because when memory becomes your material, not just your inspiration, it gets dangerous. And necessary.

Soon enough, I’ll be opening submissions for Fragments, another title from slimline series at The Broken Spine. So this is your heads-up: if your memory poem reads like a photo album, keep it. I’m looking for work that lives where the past buckles, bleeds, and bites back.

To show you what I mean, I’m putting four poems in the ring. Heaney’s Mid‑Term Break, Hoyt’s Memory, Chirikure’s We fought the war, and my own Snowdonia. I’m not just critiquing. I’m calling on them, and my own scars, to show you how memory can split a poem open.

Seamus Heaney – Mid‑Term Break: Memory as Fracture, Not Funeral

Heaney doesn’t recount a tragedy. He relives its aftermath, with the numb logic of someone trying not to feel too much too fast. The stanzas are clipped. Tercets. Clean on the surface, but each one carrying something jagged. We don’t even hear about the dead child until the end, and when we do, it’s with mathematical brutality:

“A four-foot box, a foot for every year.”

That’s the punch. The whole poem walks you towards it, quietly, steadily, and without flinching. What’s more powerful is what’s missing: no cause of death, no name, no mourning speech. Just broken recollections. Like memory after trauma: images not in order, but in orbit.

Snowdonia was built in that shadow. I knew I didn’t want to reconstruct place, I wanted to fracture it:

“i realise how the innocence… is far removed today.”

The ranges remain, but the eye is changed. Heaney taught me that memory isn’t chronological, it’s chemical.

Helen Hoyt – Memory: The Feeling That’s Gone

Hoyt doesn’t describe what was lost. She describes the loss of feeling itself. Two neat stanzas, yes, but that neatness is deceptive. The real ache comes in the enjambment:

“Remember well:
But I cannot remember our love.”

That pause is the poem’s rupture. The speaker lists life together, “kissed and cried,” “ate and played”, but the love has rotted beneath the rituals. There’s no metaphor to soften it. Just blankness. Precision. Dread.

That line hit me hard while writing Snowdonia. Because even if I could name the rocks and rivers of childhood, I couldn’t recover the feeling. The trees don’t whisper anymore. The waterfalls are quiet. The body returns, but the heart doesn’t recognise the terrain.

Hoyt doesn’t mourn what happened, she mourns the absence of what once made it matter. That’s memory, too.

Chirikure Chirikure – We fought the war: Memory as Weapon

Chirikure’s poem doesn’t ask to be remembered. It demands you listen.

“We, the boys in the bush, fought the war,”

Each call shouts down erasure. This isn’t just poetry for a page; it’s a gathering of ghosts and witnesses. Diaspora, guerrillas, mujibhas, peasantry, all staking claim to a war now owned by politicians. The poem builds not to pride, but to hunger:

“Let him open the granary…
See how parched their lips are?”

It’s not commemorative. It’s accusatory. Memory here isn’t a story. Rather, it’s a debt. That final image of “refugees of war” could easily be swapped for “refugees of memory.” Those of us left behind by the very narratives we helped create.

Snowdonia isn’t political like Chirikure’s. But it shares the same ache of misrecognition. I return to a place that no longer fits. That doesn’t remember me, or that I can’t remember clearly. It’s not just that things change. It’s that memory betrays us, and sometimes we let it.

Snowdonia – Memory as Distance, Dissonance, and Refusal

I wrote Snowdonia not to recall but to reckon. I wanted to test what happens when the body returns but the feeling won’t. The poem opens in reverie:

“i remember those cleft ranges – and that wet blue slate in july…”

But the joy curdles. The place is still there, but sterile:

“the white waterfalls – quiet now
and the trees whispering no more.”

What’s left isn’t nostalgia, it’s the uncanny. The speaker can’t re-enter the memory, only observe it. And that’s the rub: memory is not always a return. Sometimes it’s a reminder that you’ve been shut out.

What to Do with Your Own Memory

You don’t need a death, or a failed marriage, or a revolution to write memory well. You need nerve. You need to sit with what doesn’t resolve. If you’re writing memory, ask yourself:

• What fragments are still sharp? (Use them. Don’t dull them.)
• What’s missing? (Say that. Loudly.)
• What would you rather not admit? (Start there.)

Here’s what these poems taught me:

• Heaney: Show what trauma does to time. Fragment the narrative.
• Hoyt: Name the void. Let absence be the message.
• Chirikure: Make memory demand something. Don’t let it just linger.

Then do what I did in Snowdonia: refuse the easy return. Refuse the false comfort of nostalgia. Let memory bruise your poem until it speaks honestly.

A Note for Fragments

This isn’t just a reflection. It’s your wake-up call.

When Fragments opens, we won’t be looking for poems that reminisce, we’ll be looking for poems that reckon. That break. That rot a little. That leave the reader with a feeling that something important has been unearthed, not preserved.

So write that poem now. The one you’ve been avoiding. The one you thought you’d outgrown. The one that doesn’t tidy your past, but shows just how badly it still fits.

That’s the memory poem we want. That’s the one you need to write.

Prompt Series

This isn’t about looking back. It’s about what won’t let you go.

Memory is messy. Inexact. It doesn’t arrive in full scenes. It comes in smells, fractures, single lines of dialogue you can’t stop replaying. It mutates. It omits. It protects and betrays. And when you write from it, really write, you stop telling the story and start bleeding the wound.

This prompt series is not about clarity. It’s about damage. About what sticks when everything else fades.

This isn’t nostalgia.

Prompt One: The Line You Can’t Forget

Instruction:
Freewrite the one line that’s stuck with you, something someone said to you, or that you said, or should have said, in a moment you can’t shake. Maybe it was nothing, then. Maybe it’s everything, now.

Start with:

“I keep hearing…”

Guidelines:

• Write in first person, present tense.
• Stay with the line. Let it echo. Let it take you where it wants.
• Avoid explaining. Don’t justify. Don’t tidy.
• Write for 10–15 minutes without stopping.

Tone Check:
If it feels like you’re circling the same three words, good. That’s memory, not narrative.

Prompt Two: Where Were You?

Instruction:
Now write the scene around that line. Where were you when it was said, or left unsaid? What could you smell? Touch? What was happening in your body?

Memory doesn’t care about order. So don’t worry about logic. Just make it felt.

Anchor the writing in these senses:

• What colour was the light?
• What sound wouldn’t stop?
• What detail felt wrong? (The clean dishes during a fight. The laugh after a funeral.)

Avoid:

• Metaphors. No fogs of grief or oceans of silence. Say: “the fridge kept humming” or “my socks didn’t match.”
• Symbolism. Just describe the thing.

Your job: Make the reader stand there with you. Let them smell the room.

Prompt Three: Strip the Frame, Find the Fracture

Instruction:
Take your raw, sensory draft. Now cut it.

Step 1: Delete every line that tries to explain or interpret the moment.

Step 2: Read it aloud. Listen for the beat that stutters, the place you almost didn’t say the thing.

Step 3: Build the poem from that rupture.

Ask Yourself:

• What detail do you want to delete? (Keep it.)
• What line is too close? (Make it your title.)
• What silence is louder than the speech?

Final Task:
End the poem not with closure, but with ache. A breath withheld. A thing still unsaid. Let it land like a bruise.

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