Michael Steinberg

FYI:
NonfictioNOW 2015, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff Arizona, 10/28 - 31/15 For guidelines and information, go to
www.nonfictionow.org

Note: This post is Part 2 of a two part entry. If you'd like to read Part 1, see #34 below.
MJS

# 35, Confronting Demons, Staring Down Fears: Transforming Our Deepest Misfortunes into in Literary Works ( Part 2)

If you’re thinking that this is the usual story of dysfunction and abuse, then I’m doing a poor job of telling it.
--Barbara Ehrenreich, Living With a Wild God

In her thoughtful, incisive essay, All in Favor Say I, poet/essayist
Beth Ann Fennelly maintains that “In a memoir, the author’s intentions
are to revisit an event that begs to be better understood…” In addition,
Fennelly says, “w}hen we write memoirs,{we}return to {those}
events armed with a question, often one as simple as, ‘How did this
episode shape the person I’ve become?”

I couldn’t agree more. Writing a literary memoir grows, in large part, I believe, from a writer’s need to examine more closely those influences that have led that writer to become the person he/she is today.

As an editor, writer, teacher (and a concerned reader), I’ve found
that many memoirists, for example, don’t pay enough attention
to how a particularly poignant episode, event, and/or encounter helped
to shape the person they’ve become.

“This crucial question and the writer’s need to satisfy it” Fenelley
claims…. “lie at the heart of memoir.”

How then, you’re probably wondering, does this apply to writing about our demons and fears?

******
When we write about our personal hardships and misfortunes, we do, it’s true, discover unbidden things about ourselves that might in time come bear on how we deal with painful loss and angst-ridden disappointment. But, as I’ve said in part one (#34), we don’t really solve the human problem of how to cope with those troubles just by writing about them. Nor should we expect that the writing will resolve our deepest, most difficult, psychological conflicts.

And so, no matter what we’re writing about, our charge as writers is 1) to try to discover the heart of what we’re writing about, 2) to find the shape (containing structure) that best fits the work, and 3) to arrive at some understanding of the narrative’s larger implications, both for ourselves and for the sake (hopefully) of our readers.

Those who follow this blog know that when I talk about strategies and tactics for crafting a piece of writing, most often I’ll use examples from my own work. But in this instance, I think it’ll be more useful and appropriate for me to cite pointed examples from Joy Castro’s powerful essay, “The Memoir as Psychological Thriller.”

(The essay appeared in full on this blog in July, 2012. If you’d like to read it in its entirety, and I urge you to do so, you can find it below left in the Archives).

One reason why I’m citing Joy Castro’s essay as a model is because it illustrates how the author’s extreme childhood misfortunes became significant influences, catalysts, if you will, that in the end helped her arrive at a better understanding of how she, a young girl who grew up under very harsh, cruel circumstances, became a compassionate, highly-regarded adult writer and teacher.

In addition, Joy’s essay explains how she discovered the tactics and strategies that led her to figure out, what was at the heart of her memoir; as well as uncover both the shape that became The Truth Book’s containing structure, and the compelling, imagistic narrative that allows readers to enter her story and identify with its larger implications.

At the beginning of the essay, Joy tells us that the first hurdle a memoirist often encounters is in selecting “a single narrative….a thread, an arc, a through-line…”from what she describes as “the sheer quantity of our material.” An all-too-familiar dilemma to all memoiriists is it not?

“The solution” she maintains “…..comes in the form of….urgent, unanswered questions about the self.” To which she adds that “this question “is the key, the hook that pulls us through the process of writing the text. It can lead us forward into the draft and provide an organizing principle when we revise.”

Joy goes on to explain that “the two linked questions….that drove the writing {of The Truth Book} were 1) Why did my father commit suicide? and 2) Why did a near-stranger, a new academic acquaintance, tell me that I had no personality?” Furthermore, she says that, “When I sat down to draft, I did not know the answers to both questions…., I did not know if writing would reveal any answers.” She then discloses that “I was desperate for understanding….”

That urgent search for understanding, becomes, I believe, the impetus that allows Joy Castro to “write my way into urgent questions that were, for me, matters of literal life and death…What I discovered,” she says, “is that writing your way into such questions—and leaving aside all the lived experiences that don’t answer them—automatically gives your work unity….shapeliness….” To which Joy adds, “I included only those scenes, images, and insights that spoke (directly or indirectly) to my two key questions. If an episode didn’t help answer them, I didn’t even draft it.” Read More