Hard Times Writing About the Past | The Cameron Journal

Much of my writing often pulls from my crazy life. However, I’m working on a project where I’m writing a story based on a lived experience, and it’s tough! There are so many emotions coming up and new revelations from friends about that time of my life. When you write about this sort of thing, emotions can run high even years after the event occurred. When you talk about it with friends, you learn new things and those new things aren’t always pleasant.

In this case, the new things can even be damaging to your current mental health. As many folks know, I worked in fashion in Denver for a few years, and I created the new Denver Fashion Week that is now operated by 303 Magazine after it passed through a few other hands. I’ve been writing about my experiences at New Culture Magazine and Denver Fashion Week in a new novel I’m calling, The Versace Man. This is the project I started when I started writing full time in 2014, and it has been on the back burner since then, mostly because I couldn’t find a working storyline that reflected this time of my life, and I needed time to get some distance from it before I could really write about it. I have the distance now, and through creating the project, I’m still discovering things about myself and about that situation. Some of those things are incredibly positive, while others continue to cause distress. That’s the trouble about writing from life: sometimes everything isn’t clear for years after it happens.