Barbara J. Hamby

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Ghost Writings

As I am attempting to arrange my memoir stories in some sort of cohesive order, I’ve discovered I don’t remember writing a few stories and some I remember writing, but can’t locate. If I can’t remember exact titles or associate them with the incidents I recall, they are hiding, incognito, in corners of my computer.

This problem has previously surfaced with poems, of which I have written hundreds. Some I may never see again. Since I’ve switched computers and operating systems and never fully mastered the indexing systems, my old brain fails me. Granted, many of my verses deserve obscurity, but there may be a pearl or two hidden among them.

Several projects I’ve started, but never finished, might have gotten a handle on the situation. At one time, I laboriously printed out copies of all my poems and filed them alphabetically. I still have the file, but rarely look at it. For a while, I entered each poem I wrote on a calendar page, so that I could flip back and find those written in a given year. More recently I have even recorded many poems on CD’s and DVD’s. Unfortunately, none of these methods have been totally successful, mostly because they were abandoned.

I’ve also separated memoir stories and articles in each operating system’s files, and tried to pull them together as much as my limited knowledge permits.

Fortunately, I probably will never become famous, thus my heirs will not have the insurmountable task of sorting through my writing to preserve anything they deem worthwhile. That thought comforts me.