For the last week and a half I've been chewing away on a non-fiction piece at the Banff Centre. Marni Jackson is the Chair of the Literary Journalism program. Last week she gave a talk about writing as "mountain climbing," and since then I've been thinking about writing metaphors and how we use them to explain the process.

Being a fiction writer, I often think of literary journalism like this: different painting, same brushes. I'm writing a short story, only everything happens to be true. Or "true." Anyway.

Yesterday I dug up a short story called "Pet Milk," by the American writer Stuart Dybek. Though officially fiction, the piece reads equally well as memoir to me. It begins with a can of evaporated milk, sideslips into memories of a grandmother, then to a cocktail called a King Alphonse. I love this story because it's so unabashedly nostalgic. So steeped in nostalgia it's a study of nostalgia itself. Sounds like squeeze cheese, I know, but the story achieves its aim in the smallest sensuous details--the faintest scents, the most mundane objects. Formally speaking, "Pet Milk" works for me because its structure mirrors the content so well, in surprisingly few words. Images form and fall away just as memories do, each one replaced by another, nudging the story towards emotional resolution. The ending somehow manages to be expansive and intimate at the same time, which lifts the story out of pure sentiment.

I couldn't find a full-text version of the piece online, but you can listen to it here in 12 minutes. I clipped this from an interview with Dybek: "The important aspect of using autobiography is not recording what actually happened so much as believing that the material is a great gift worthy of being reimagined."

I'm not wholly convinced about the "great gifts" part, but I do have in mind an old treeplanter saying: "It's not the mountain you have to climb, it's the rock inside your shoe."