Michael Steinberg

# 86  How You State the Obvious: Encouraging Reflectiveness in Students and Their Writing by guest blogger Ioanna Opidee

 

Note:

 

In Ioanna Opidee's essay on "How You State the Obvious: Encouraging Reflectiveness in Student and Their Writing" Ioanna talks about the value and importance of teaching the informal, reflective essay, especially to young writers. It's a problem all nonfiction writers will at one time or another face.

MJS

 

 

I have not watched the show, nor read the book, but I've heard enough about the (to some circles) notorious Marie Kondo to know that she believes in holding an object long enough to determine if it brings you joy, and removing it from your life if it does not. She is particularly infamous for her stance on books: that one does not need more than thirty.

 

As a high school English teacher, at the end of the school year, I employ a Kondo-like strategy as I shuffle through materials that have accumulated on classroom shelves and tables, in particular with books that either need to be stored or carried home. Some I immediately and thoughtlessly shove into cabinets, while others I hold in my hands for a few moments as I consider the next couple months without them. Will I suddenly want to reach for this text on some sweltering afternoon in July while my kids are running under the sprinkler in the front yard? Is that risk strong, or consequential, enough to make the effort to carry the book home worthwhile? I'll flip to a random page and read a couple lines, hoping it holds the answers.

 

This past June, one such book I performed this trick with was Stephen King's On Writing, and its answers were yes and yes. The paragraph I flipped to reads:

 

Informal essays are, by and large, silly and insubstantial things; unless you get a job as a columnist at your local newspaper, writing such fluffery is a skill you'll never use in the actual mall-and-filling-station world. Teachers assign them when they can't think of any    other way to waste your time.

 

The irony—or serendipity—of my encountering these lines was that I had been contemplating all morning the value of the reflective writing—essentially, "informal essays"—I'd asked my students to undertake in the past year, and I was thinking of new ways to formalize the process and add more opportunities in the one to come.

 

King's book, I know, is rich with useful insight from one of the most prolific and admired American writers. This paragraph, though, gave me pause; actually, it made me want to drop the book onto the badly-in-need-of-a-deep-cleaning floor, but then it made me smile, because it reminded me of all that I am up against when I ask students to bring their own experiences, ideas, questions, and memories to bear in writing,  expecting that I—but, more importantly, they—will find gems. When I ask my students every year to write about what King calls the "most notorious subject, of course" (emphasis added)—"How I Spent My Summer Vacation"—the last thing I'm thinking is, "What a great way to waste my students' time!" What I am primarily thinking is, "Good thing they have a place to reflect on this. Good thing I'm able to give them the opportunity."

 

The type of reflective writing I ask students to complete regularly in my classes are inherently essayistic in the spirit of the essay as "attempt." When I ask my students, in the first week of class, what they did and learned in the past summer, I am asking them to try to parse out the significance of their experiences; to take stock so they can retain and utilize what matters most. I want them to look back on and list the things they've done, and then see what that list adds up to, or dive deeper into a specific moment or observation that rises immediately to the surface of their memory, and then ask themselves why it did so. It is our first exercise in what I hope will become a regular practice, which will eventually lead to a skill, and to what my former colleague and mentor Cinthia Gannett likes to call a reflective "habit of mind"—the type that can lead them to deliberately choose to limit their technology use after recognizing the benefits of their month at summer camp; the type that can lead a student to draw a line between a conversation they had with an employee at the vacation resort they visited with their family, their reading of George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant," and their studies of the residual effects of imperialism in the Caribbean.

 

The essay, ideally, is—as Phillip Lopate writes in his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay—a "mode of inquiry" in which the writer "attempts to surround a something—a subject, a mood, a problematic irritation—by coming at it from all angles . . . taking us closer to the heart of the matter . . . eliminating false hypotheses, narrowing its emotional target and zeroing in on it" (xxxviii). There is, in Lopate's words, a "vertical dimension" to the form; a tendency to "delve further underneath" (xxv). The formal, thesis-driven, analytical essays I—and, I'd guess, many other teachers—often receive exhibit the opposite: an anxiousness to preserve the initial hypothesis by polishing it up, keeping it air-tight, and sequestering any potentially disruptive elements. This, I've come to believe, is because we don't consistently offer enough formal space and time for reflection. Or, what King might call "informal essay" writing.

 

Valuable informal essay "freewrites" (as I like to call them in classes, for simplicity purposes) move well beyond the initial "what did you do this summer?" prompts and are not always related to personal experience; they might stem, instead, from observation, knowledge, opinion, information, or, most potently, questions—likely, from a combination of all of the above. These "freewrites" can reach into and across the personal, social, cultural, and political all at once because the objective is to remain open to digression, whose chief goal, Lopate explains, is to "amass all the dimensions of understanding that the essayist can accumulate by bringing in as many contexts as a problem or insight can sustain without overburdening it" (xl). The prompt might be a quote, or a fact, or a snippet from a podcast. Sometimes the prompt is directed by a question; other times, it is intentionally left open. With practice, students become more skilled and comfortable with the digressive mode, which allows them to synthesize what they know, think, and feel with what they've learned, are learning, or are still in need of learning. When students are invited to digress, to linger, to pursue a line of questioning, and to (as Lopate puts it) "scoop up subordinate themes" along the way, they learn to open up their subjects through inquiry, analysis, interpretation, application, and all the other strategies that move them toward critical response, and away from superficial assumptions and arguments.

 

I encourage students to identify the essayistic process of writing these reflections as something other than the tightly-packed, thesis-driven product called an essay that I am inclined and obliged to assign and assess at the end of almost every unit—even though it is not completely other than it; even though, in the end, I want them to see it as fundamental to it. The "trick" might be to not tell them this at the start, but rather to show them. (I believe even King could agree with that "show, don't tell" method.) I try to show them this systematically, rather than by chance, by asking them consistently to stop at the end of a freewrite, reread what they wrote, underline what stood out the most, and then save that freewrite for later. Often, I will collect all the freewrites they've done during a unit and hand them back toward the end. When they review those freewrites, they can reannotate them and recognize the progression of their thinking, rediscovering and building on their earlier ideas in a more formalized manner. They don't need to start from scratch, and ideally, they'll realize that they never actually do.

 

Reflective writing has a place beyond process, though, and can be skillfully incorporated into formal analytical essays when students learn how to do this well. Most commonly (and perhaps effectively), reflection is found in the introduction and conclusion. As teachers, we sometimes joke (or complain) that student essays open with obvious, lofty reflections, such as, "Every person in the world has his or her own point of view." We might roll their eyes at statements like this and encourage students to leave such claims out. We might encourage them to skip reflection all together and "get to the point." But it is easy for us to forget that we are often teaching the same readings continuously. We are encountering, in our careers, countless students at roughly the same point in their educational development, writing about many of the same topics. So yes, while we may have heard an idea reiterated hundreds of times before, it might be the first time that student has ever articulated the point in writing. The truth that every person has his or her own point of view is indeed a profound concept that we might fail to consciously recognize in our daily lives. If a student wrote a sentence like that as an opening, it might be worth writing in the margin: "Yes. And why is this significant? What are the implications and effects of this fact? What conflicts can this create?" Their answers to these questions might just teach us something new about this "obvious" truth.

 

A few years ago, I overheard a student in the hallway memorizing facts from flashcards for a test, saying, "The death penalty is related to issues of…" She flipped the card over: "Race and class." I was stopped in my tracks. "Yes, the death penalty is related to issues of race and class!" I wanted to call. "Do you realize what you're saying? Do you realize what you're memorizing? To what extent is the death penalty related to issues of race and class? How so? How has this played out in cases throughout history? What do you think of this fact? Does it surprises you? Upset you?" All of these questions could be addressed essayistically, by engaging with what, to so many of us, seems obvious.

 

As a graduate student working toward a Master's in English, I took a Great American Novels class because I had been focusing mostly on nonfiction and so-called "alternatives" such as Holocaust and Caribbean literature. I hadn't tackled the "big," canonical works since my undergraduate days, so novels by Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Fitzgerald became my "gaps"—a term the professor defined as the essential areas of English studies that we lack in our own training. My most vivid memory of the course relates to a paper I wrote about Henry James's The Ambassadors. While reading the book, I was struck by what, apparently, "everyone" who reads James is struck by: the deliberateness with which he crafted his narrative, the way each sentence in the five-hundred-plus page novel pulsates with significance, meaning, and provocation for the reader. I wrote an elaborate paper describing the experience of reading James's prose, and it was returned to me with a comment at the top, written largely, in red marker: "How you state the obvious!"

 

How I state the obvious. At some level, it gonged against one of my greatest intellectual fears: that my ideas were nothing more than cliché reiterations of what has been said by others, and for the first time so long ago that their restatement becomes utterly trivial. At some other more remote and mysterious level, I took this as a compliment. It wasn't that I'd stated the obvious that seemed remarkable to my professor; it was how.

 

After all, it was how Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior stated the obvious that made him the catalyst for positive change. In the introduction to the 1997 edition of Best American Essays, Ian Frazier calls King his favorite essayist and describes the experience of watching a video of King speaking. Earlier in the piece, he compares an essay to a golf swing, admitting that the outcome is often like hitting balls at a driving range, where even the best results can get lost in a mass of others. Of King, Frazier writes:

 

 

                  What he has to say is so simple: I have a dream that white people

                  and black people can live together in peace. But the purity of his

                  swing—its sweetness and the manifest fact that his whole life

                  and a people's history are in it—causes every syllable he speaks

                  to hit bone . . . The world is a little different after each sentence

                  than it was before . . . I watch the video every so often to remind

                  myself that the swing we work on when we write has the power

                   to do such a thing. (xix)

 

 

While "swings" such as Kings are rare indeed, Frazier reminds us that the "simple" truths are not always so simple for us, as a collective society, to understand; they are not always so obvious. And it is "how" we state and call attention to them that will bring them to that all-important light.

 

The problem with labeling anything as "obvious" is a matter of perception at best and prejudice at worst; what is obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to me, and what's obvious to you is not necessarily more valid or valuable than what is obvious to me, and vice versa. Also, what is obvious today may not be so obvious tomorrow. Assuming something is obvious conjures myths of "common knowledge" and "common sense" that have oppressive implications when value and other judgments are made according to them.

 

But perhaps that's an essayist's point of view—the point of view of someone who believes, as Vivian Gornick puts it, that "penetrating the familiar is by no means a given" but, rather, "hard, hard work" (Truth in Nonfiction 9); and that, as Sydney Lea reminds us, with respect to Robert Frost, by writing with a sense of spontaneity and discovery, "we discover what we didn't know we knew" (336). That's also my conviction as a teacher—that we learn by writing, sometimes about those things that seem most obvious to us, and by challenging our notions of obvious, in order to empower our individual existences and perspectives.

 

As a teacher and writer, I try not to fear the obvious, often branded as cliché; instead, I fear silence. Or worse, I fear the reality of voices being drowned out by those that are louder or more well-endowed (with status, power, and other forms of privilege). Because of this, I encourage my students to not just state the obvious, but to get inside of it, interrogate and challenge it, destabilize the very notion of it, by essaying their lives and what they see.  Like Montaigne, they should ask, "What do I know?" challenging the oft-heard lament of some of their disillusioned elders, "What do they know?"

 

King's On Writing was published almost twenty years ago, and I believe much—if not enormous—progress has been made since then in terms of the academic value attributed to nonfiction writing, both literary and informal. Still, there is more work to be done; more potential to activate; and more of a need to value and foster student's voices and reflective capacities. We can do this by sharpening our own.

 

Frazier, Ian. "Introduction." Best American Essays 1997. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Print.

Lea, Sydney. "What We Didn't Know We Knew." The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on

Creative Nonfiction. Eds. Michael Steinberg and Robert Root. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon,

1998. Print.

Lopate, Phillip. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present.

Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1997. Print.

 

Ioanna Opidee is the author of the novel Waking Slow (PFP, 2018), which was named a finalist in the multicultural category of the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Awards and called an "arresting, timely" take on sexual assault by the Boston Globe. She has worked as a freelance journalist, taught writing and literature at various universities, and is currenty a high school English teacher in Connecticut. Her other creative work has been published in The Huffington Post, Talking Writing, Lumina, and Spry literary journal, among other venues.

#84 Stories and Stars by Guest Blogger Beth Richards

 

Intro

 

 "Stories and Stars" depicts how Beth Richards' late night meditation on the stars leads to her discovery about the importance in writing of "the give and take of associating and shaping."

 

"Neither action is more important than the other" Beth says.  "Both are essential for writing the accurate, but most especially for writing the true."

 

MJS

 

 

I am standing in the brisk night air on the western flank of Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland. Most days I begrudge the shift from daylight to darkness but this day, at nearly 11 pm, I am willing a persistent patch of twilight blue to be gone. It is a rare clear night on the island, and I am waiting for the stars to come out. At 10:30 pm I can see the moon and a few faint points of the Dipper. At nearly 11:30 I mutter, "Oh, I give up" to the still-light sky and go inside.

 

When I step back outside, around 3 am, I look up and reflexively duck. The stars seem so close I'm afraid I'll bump my head on them. The blue twilight is gone and the velvety night is a tapestry of planets and constellations. The Milky Way is slathered across the dome of the sky. The resident cuckoo, who has migrated from Africa under these same stars, plucks her two notes. She and I seem to be the only ones up.

 

I think that I expected to stand under the stars and commune with the Celtic druids and the Christian anchorites who for centuries inhabited the nearby stone huts. We share the wonder of this brilliant sky, after all. But what I think about, as my eyes dart back and forth trying to capture the twinkling of uncountable stars, is driving home drunk.

 

Not recently, thank you. I was about 19. My cousin and I had been hanging out in a local South Florida bar, and we were headed back to her house because we'd spent all our money drinking Chivas on the rocks. I disliked Scotch then (still do) but the words "Chivas on the rocks" were such a pleasure to roll off the tongue, and the smoky-sweet liquid helped me forget myself for a while.

 

That night, as we slowly turned down a side street, two starry blazes of light crossed our path. They belonged not to the sky but to a leopard. Full grown, at least six feet from nose to switching tip of tail, it stalked at the end of its leash, which was held by its owner, a wealthy socialite who amused herself by keeping exotic animals. She walked the leopard between 2 and 3 am. I'm guessing she figured that if someone like me said, "I saw a lady walking a leopard," people would say, "Sure…and how much Chivas did you drink?"

 

That night, I ducked when I saw the big cat's eyes. Why? Perhaps the same reason I ducked when I saw the stars above Inis Mór: A recognition of the immensity of everything surrounding me. An acknowledgment of my small place in the cosmos. My lot is less likely predator and more likely prey.

 

Ah, the places our minds lead us and the speed with which we travel through time and space. When my students tell me that they are "free associating," they mean that they're writing down a bunch of things that don't make sense, ideas that don't have an obvious narrative thread or purpose.

 

"Not yet," I tell them. But I encourage them to trust that part of their brain, those neurons always knitting a web of meaning between two seemingly disparate memories or events. Let your brain and your heart and your memory do their work, I tell them. Then use your craft. First you'll make sense for yourself—although you may never uncover all the mysteries. And then you'll use your tools so that the associations make sense for others, as well.

 

I'm sure I've told my students any number of useless things, but I do know that I've never told them this process is easy. I've been writing a while now, and I still don't completely understand how this happens—how I move from that flash of deep emotion or recognition to slowly build and shape the sinews that will connect what and how and why I feel. I've also never told my students that this process is certain. I'm not yet sure where my craft will lead me as I try to connect my instinctive, primeval response to two such different events, more than 40 years apart. I know that my first inclination is to make a list of similarities. Certainly many sparkling things—close by and far away—have drawn my attention over the years. But that would be obvious, and too easy. So I will try to move beyond the path of least resistance to something more, leading myself into memory and the webs of time, and into the emotions always lying underneath. Ultimately, the stars I saw may slide under a bank of clouds. That leopard may disappear into the bougainvillea. But what will make the writing—whatever that writing becomes—come together is the practice of craft: shaping a narrative, asking probing questions, challenging assumptions, always asking not just "how?" but "why?"

 

An island man I walked with said that all stories are true; some are perhaps a bit more accurate than others. I join that ancient storytelling dance, the give and take of associating and shaping, which lives through this ancient island, and in all of us. Neither action is more important than the other. Both are essential for writing the accurate, but most especially, for writing the true.

 

 

Beth Richards is a north Florida native who lives and works in Connecticut. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Solstice Literary Magazine: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, the Crooked Letter anthology, Coming Out in the South, and the Talking Writing anthology Into Sanity. She is a graduate of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College and teaches at the University of Hartford.

Note:

I heard Nicole's talk a few years ago at AWP. Halfway through, I was thinking about how little we really know about who our audiences are. And as Nicole says, knowing who our audience is can be a tricky business--something that all writers and writing teachers have to think about. Those that read this blog then, stand to learn something useful from Nicole's wisdom and insights on this somewhat thorny matter.

MJS

Who Reads Us? by Nicole Walker

When I first started teaching composition, we had been given some training that told us to remind the students of audience. When I went to college, writing lessons were more trial by fire—the Humanities capital H would make you write four good papers a semester. “Org” which stood, I think for organization and “awk” which stood for awkward were the primary pedagogical notes. But in university land, I was supposed to explain how to make essays less awkward and more organized. I was supposed to drill into students the importance of an audience. In some ways, this was easier in business writing than in composition. In business writing, there were imaginary customers—people who might be interested in the student’s resume or in brochures about wastewater. In composition, as in Humanities, the teacher was the primary audience and what did anyone know about the teacher? Did they like to read papers about marijuana legalization? Did they smoke marijuana? Had they read forty-seven hundred papers about the legalization of marijuana and, even if they had been for it once, the quality of the affirmative papers made them change their positions? In Humanities classes at Reed, philosophy profs, lit profs, history profs, even science profs held sections of small classes. If I was writing a paper about the Iliad for my conference leader, a psych prof, should I bring in Freud or Jung?

The audience idea was tricky too even when I began writing essays in MFA school. Am I writing to an editor of a literary magazine? To my professors? I think, at least at first, I was writing to my MFA colleagues, which is pretty much how MFA written lit gets read and published. We like each other and thus we read each other and the lit mags are read by grad students and published by grad students and that, for the most part, seems to be a good, socialist economy. I like to write for that hyper-literary crowd. When I allude to Kathy Acker, I’m so happy that someone in the world knows what I’m talking about.

But in 2005, I started a blog and, it was sort of geared to the same people—my friends in Salt Lake with whom I’d gone to grad school. Some of them had started a blog. We were essentially blogging to each other. But then, I moved away from Salt Lake and away from my mom and sisters. The blog turned to a different audience that included some non-grad school bloggers and my mom and sisters. Maybe my husband’s mom too. I updated about the job and the job market but also my daughter and the newness of Michigan. Moving was a good way to jar me out of my regular expectations for audience. Orienting my reader, be it my sister or my friend Lynn, to Michigan required good skill at paying attention to small details—the way the birds were different and snow removal was different and the way it stayed light until almost 11:00 p.m. at solstice because of how far north we were and the fact we were at the western edge of the eastern time zone. The weird left turns called “Michigan lefts" that were mainly Utah U-turns.

I tried to adapt a blog post for an essay and found that it didn’t work very well. The blog was more conversational. It didn’t have that extra layer of significance that one gets from an essay published in Triquarterly or Black Warrior Review. It was a time thing, primarily. I imagined people on the internet read fast. They don’t need the underlying significance of Michiganian climate systems and how that relates to deprivation. No. Blog readers seemed to want to know if my daughter Zoe was still eating onions and if the snow would ever melt. I could answer them fast and maybe put up a picture of Zoe eating an onion and the five feet of snow in the front of the house.

“A leisurely amount of time” is a hallmark of literary magazines and click speed click is the hallmark for the internet which is how my friend Rebecca Campbell and I decided to put the 7 Rings project for the Huffington Post. This project was built for speed.

On the first day, someone posted/sent us an image. Then we sent that image to a writer. The writer responded and the very next day, we posted that response. Then, rinse repeat with the writer’s work being sent to a painter. We kept it up for almost fifty days and although we were worn out, Rebecca and I found new audiences in both our painter friends, our writer friends, and our Huffington Post friends. That was in 2010 and we’re still building on that project. Jenny Colville began Prompt Press right after we finished. Kimberly Brooks wants to help us publish the Rings in book borm. Michael Steinberg emailed me the other day to remind me how much fun he thought the rings were. Maybe wide but shallow is the hallmark of the world wide web.

This was a friendly place, connecting more of us, with great speed. Or so I thought until March 7, 2015 when the Arizona governor cut funding to higher ed by 90 million dollars. The cut to my small university was 17 million alone. I started writing letters on my blog—the same blog with the baby who ate onions and the Michigan snow. I wrote a letter a day. I wrote about onions. I wrote about garbage. I wrote about snow all as a way to take whatever angle I could to see if I could penetrate the fortress of hands-over-ears politicians who believe that less education is better for the world. I could make whatever metaphors I wanted. No one was reading. Or, so I thought until the Capital Times came up from Phoenix to interview me about the letters, shocked and surprised I’d written 52 letters with no response from the governor. By the time I’d written 60 letters, the local weekly had picked up the blog as a column and even though the essays are drenched in metaphor and maybe even a Kathy Acker allusion or two, the people who are reading these are primarily not my MFA grad friends although a couple of them do read them which is good because they are my audience and so is the weekly reader and so one day, I hope, is the governor who reads the letter about pennies and thinks, you know, I think we could spare an extra penny on the dollar to get people to go to the university and to write essays for composition and for business writing so they can keep writing until they get to AWP and into the Huffington post and into Flag Live so they can see who their audience is and thank them.

NICOLE WALKER’s is the author of three forthcoming books Sustainability: A Love Story, Microcosm, and Canning Peaches for the Apocalypse. Her previous books include Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. She also edited Bending Genre with Margot Singer. She’s nonfiction editor at Diagram and Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona where it rains like the Pacific Northwest, but only in July.  Read More 

August 28, 2017

Blog #62 “Love How You Handled My Indecent Exposure Trial, but I’d Never Wear a Pink Shirt to Court.” : On Including/Changing Real Names in Memoirs

Michael Steinberg

Note: The last two essays, # 60, and 61, “I Didn’t Ask to be in Your Memoir,” by Richard Hoffman and “ What’s in a Name, Really,” by Mimi Schwartz were converted AWP (Washington DC) panel talks about how and why memoirists decide to use and/or change real names in their works. Both Richard and Mimi had very specific ethical and moral reasons/rationales that guided their decisions. My piece, # 62, is also from that same panel. I must admit though, that my own reasons for including and/or changing names are not quite as consistent or certain as are Richard’s or Mimi’s. But, like them, I believe that this is an important concern, one that all mindful memoirists must wrestle with.

MJS

1

Often after reading from a memoir, I’ll get audience questions like: when you’re writing about personal relationships, especially about family members, how do you decide whether to use real or made up names? And do you ever create composite characters?

In response to similar questions, here are some of author Maggie Nelson’s thoughts.


"It’s important that you say everything you need to say first. All the concerns about who’s going to feel affected can come a very far distance down the line when you’ve actually decided what your book is going to contain. Often you need to write out all kinds of crazy stuff so that at the end you’ve got it out of your system. If I didn’t burn through that, then I wouldn’t know what was next, what was underneath."


Good advice, as I learned years ago when I was struggling with that issue in my first memoir, Still Pitching.

My original intent was to write about the various roles that baseball had played (no pun intended) in my development as a teacher and writer. And so, during the early stages I included everything I could recall. The rough draft naturally was a sprawling mess; and it covered far too much time--several decades, in fact.

It was only many drafts later that I discovered the memoir I finally ended up writing. The book, to my initial surprise, covered some ten years of my childhood/ adolescence. And it didn’t turn out to be about writing or teaching.

The narrative, for the most part, focused on a turbulent relationship between myself, the young narrator, and a hard-ass, punitive, high school baseball coach--a Jew, who, for a time, I thought might have been an anti-Semite.

It was a coming-of-age memoir, something, that I never imagined I’d write. Because, in my early fifties--when I began to work on it--I’d already convinced myself that I wanted to write an “adult” memoir.

As it turned out though, all those rough drafts—the major cuts and revisions--led to the realization that this coming-of-age narrative was the memoir I needed to write, not the one I thought I’d wanted to write. Just as Maggie Nelson had suggested, if I didn’t burn through all of that material, I’m sure I wouldn’t have discovered what was “underneath.” Because it was only after I’d written everything out, that I found the memoir’s narrative center and time frame, what Nelson refers to as “the moment of reckoning when you know what you want to do.”

That's when I knew it was time to decide which names to keep, which to change, and which to turn into composite characters. These were, of course, the names of all the people who didn’t ask to be in my book.

Still I postponed that decision until just after I’d signed a contract. Until then, I left all the real names in because they helped me to visualize specific encounters and to recall singular characteristics and specific details--some of which, I thought, I might need to make use of in the memoir.

It was only after I realized that the book would be published (and that some people in it might actually read it), did I seriously start to think about which names I’d keep and which ones I’d change.

2

Though I didn’t make any of those decisions for frivolous reasons, even today I can’t claim that my reasons for including and/or changing names were the result of a firm rationale or even a consciously ethical or moral purpose.

Here then, are a few selected scenarios that illustrate how those decisions came about.

Like a lot of coming-of-age memoirs, the narrative had to include the young narrator’s relationships with those people that had a deep and lasting influence on him--both positive and negative. That is: specific family members, teachers, coaches, his closest friends, a few adolescent girlfriends; and, as it turned out, some classmates he had an active dislike for.

Choosing to keep in the real names of family members was easy. I’d written nothing accusatory or negative about them. In fact, I credit my grandfather (my mother’s father) as being a powerful, positive, influence throughout my childhood/adolescence. I also kept the names of those teachers who I thought had inspired me to keep writing. And I didn’t change the names of my closest childhood/adolescent friends.

I did, however, make-up names for a few teen-age girls who appeared in a couple of pretty awkward sex scenes. And I changed the name of an arrogant, adversarial, high school teammate--a rival who deliberately harassed and subverted me for the years when we both pitched for the high school team. He was an irritating, sometimes maddening obstacle; but I changed his name because, on the off chance that he might ever read or hear about the book, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing just how much he got under my skin.

Many years later, at a high school reunion, someone I’d also disliked intensely as a kid
--and whose name I changed—made it a point to track me down. And in an angry, accusatory tone, he asked me why I’d hated him so much.

In the book I’d made it clear that back then, I’d resented him for ignoring me and for deliberately excluding me (or so I believed at the time) from the pickup basketball games he hosted at his backyard court. But now, some thirty-five years later, my reasons for disliking him seemed petty and insignificant. So I figured I’d take the high ground. I told him that he was a composite character (not true), one of three neighborhood guys who had backyard basketball courts, and who all thought I wasn’t good enough to play. I could tell right away that he didn’t buy my explanation. Nor did he feel any less anger toward me. Before I'd even finished my explanation, he made up a phony excuse and just pivoted and walked away. But, damn it, he’d asked me hadn’t he? And I think I let him off pretty easily, don’t you?

Why then, you might be wondering, didn’t I change the name of my perverse, mean-spirited, high school coach? It’s true; Coach Kerchman, a Jew himself, had pushed me harder than the other Jewish players. I can still recall how painful and small his public humiliations made me feel.

Sill, I remain ambivalent about him. Was he deliberately punishing me? Or, was he raising the bar, trying in his strangely cruel way to help an insecure kid become a more a more confident, competitive pitcher?

Another reason I didn’t change his name is because everyone at the high school knew (and feared) him. Whatever name I might have made up, they’d have recognized him anyway.

3

If my own reasons for changing/not changing names had no real consistency or moral purpose, neither then did most of the responses I received from readers--especially those readers that knew the coach.

When the book came out, they were split when it came to my portrayal of him. What I’d originally (and naively) expected was a version of: “What a jackass, what a mean -spirited bastard. Why did you let him intimidate and humiliate you ?”

And yes, several who’d once played for him and/or knew him by reputation, did indeed respond that way. But what surprised me was that the majority who knew Kerchman saw him as a coach who’d used a “tough love” approach to motivate an average athlete to get the most out of his limited abilities.

A more unexpected surprise though, was coach Kerchman’s own response. In a letter to the local newspaper, he wrote


"I am writing this letter to let all of Rockaway know that I have bought Mike Steinberg's book, 'Still Pitching.' I have also introduced this book to my children Karen and Barbara, both students at Far Rockaway High School. They loved the book and Mike did a great job."


Well, I thought at the time, maybe it was a good thing to keep his real name in, right?

And few paragraphs later, he added


"In his book, {Mike} placed me in Europe freeing some of the Jewish people at Auschwitz. I served in China/Burma/India (CBI) flying the hump (the Himalayas) as all aerial engineers."


Touché. Still the same old coach. And I deserved it too. Lazy fact checking on my part.

4

A final note: When a reader of Bill Roorbach and Dave Gessner’s blog, Cocktails With Bill and Dave, raised the question of using real or made up names in his memoir, Bill or Dave--I’m not certain which--wrote,


"I find that people loved the stuff I was most afraid to say about them, and took offense at the most minor, surprising things. ‘Love how you handled my indecent exposure trial, but I’d never wear a pink shirt to court.’ "

So, so, true. Because in his letter, Kerchman also wrote,

"….. my name is spelled Kerchman, not Kirschman, If Steinberg was in one of my World History classes, I showed them a map of the Baltic Sea, with the Kerch Strait, Kerch Peninsula and the city of Kerch. My father came from there as an eight year old with his uncle, and at Ellis Island they gave him the name Kerchman. He had no other identification."


Just for the record, in the book I spelled his name correctly, “Kerchman.” So you can draw your own conclusions about that one.

And finally, as I also discovered at the high school reunion, the people I encountered who were most disappointed, most upset, were those that I’d left out of the book. And they made certain to let me know it too. Big time.

So, go figure?  Read More 

Introductory Note

This month's guest blogger is (once again) Mimi Schwartz. Like Richard Hoffman's June/July post, Mimi's essay, "What's in a Name, Really" is adapted from the same March, 2017 AWP conference panel. Readers might want to take a look at both pieces.

Though Mimi offers a somewhat different point of view, her essay deals with a similar issue: how and why memoirists and personal essayists decide whether to use real or made-up names in their work.

Interested readers might want also want to read Mimi's personal essay/memoir, "Lesson From a Last Day"." The piece, about the circumstances surrounding her husband's death, raises very specific questions about the use of real and/or made-up names. Here's the link. Pangyrus.

"Lesson From a Last Day" also appears in her forthcoming collection When History is Personal. University of Nebraska Press, 2018.

MJS


# 61, What’s in a Name, Really? by Mimi Schwartz

A man I know, let’s call him Harry, told me recently what others have said over the years: “I’m worried about you being a writer. I’ll end up in your book!” I laughed. His intuition was good. That morning, in fact, I began writing about a being a widow and he, a.k.a. Harry, appeared in paragraph two. “Don’t worry! I haven’t lost a friend yet!” I assured him—and, mostly, that’s true, because I often avoid real names and change identifying details as needed. I once changed my sister Ruth, always litigious, to Cousin Dora in my book, Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, and the first time I mentioned Dora, I added this footnote:


"To protect the privacy of friends and relatives I’ve changed names and some locations, but the rest is true, as I see it."


Ruth called me when the book came out, delighted that “I got our family just right.” She was certain that Cousin Dora was really Cousin Anne; I did not correct her.

Most of my readers, I’ve found, don’t care about real names as long as I signal name changes--either with “Let’s call him (or her) XX ” Or with a footnote or with initials. I did get one indignant phone call from my friend, J.L. after she read my essay about having lunch with a close friend Anna, who announces her divorce. “I’ve known you for thirty years,” J.L. said, “and you never once mentioned any friend named Anna!”

“You’re Anna!” I said, “At least part of you.” This was the 1970s when marriages were breaking up left and right. I’d had almost the same conversation with three friends that year, so I combined them for privacy’s sake—and said so in a footnote. “That story was less about Anna and more about me and my marriage.” I said, “ And besides I figured otherwise I’d have no friends left to talk to.” She laughed, saw the light—and we made a date for lunch.

When I write about my immediate family, I use real names because, in memoir, they are my story—and identifiably so. Therefore, I ask those involved to read what I wrote before publication, giving up some editorial power for family peace with those I want to keep in my life. My daughter Julie has corrected her dress size. My late husband Stu once requested that I cut a sentence about his eating Corn Flakes at midnight with a not-to-be-named syrup. All doable requests; in part, because they are reasonable people; in part, because I hear Annie Dillard’s warning in my head as I write: “While literature is an art, it’s not a martial art.” That plus one other rule of thumb has served me well over the years: that whenever I needed to call my husband an idiot, I let him call me a moron, usually through dialogue. Fair is fair.

In Katharine Graham’s Personal History, the rich and powerful sit at her dining room table, people like John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Warren Buffet—all named. We read her book, even fifteen years later, to have a seat at that table, an inside scoop on what these public leaders thought and said off the record.

Memoirs about the infamous should also use real names. In Richard Hoffman’s Half the House, for example, he names the coach, Tom Feifel, who sexually abused him and other boys on Feifel’s soccer team in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The memoir broke the silence of shame; the boys, as grown men, stepped forward, and Feifel went to jail. His real name mattered to bear witness, to expose—and also, as Richard has pointed out to me, to protect the reputations of the other coaches in Allentown at that time.

But using names should not be the default, I realized when one of my students read an essay in class about her gay roommate-- who had not come out. I started to encourage students to ask themselves: Why use a name when it is harmful and there is no good reason? I urged them to change a name and identifying details as needed, and if that undercuts the story’s authenticity, they should share the draft and get permission. Or switch to fiction which creates a “what if” world that let’s you say: “That’s not you. I made it up!”

My friend, a former journalist for The Washington Post, told me he would never invent names or disguise identifying details. He was writing a book about his Amish neighbors at the same time that I was writing a book, Good Neighbors, Bad Times, about Christians and Jews in my father’s German village before, during and after Nazi times. I had decided to rename the village and the people, and he argued against that. “Truth is truth,” he said. ”Names matter.”

“But if there were no great betrayals and no heroics, why not preserve privacy?” I countered, especially when people, often strangers, trust you. That was my concern, and in my book’s introduction, I said this:

“I realized that my subjects, who were in their seventies or older, kept thinking my book was only about the facts: the who, what, when, where and how of their lives. What they didn’t realize, no matter how often I explained, is that I wanted their personalities to come alive on the page so that readers would meet them and discover as I did: who they were in their memories, who they are now, and how they struggled between those old and new selves.”

Closer to his publication date, my journalist friend had second thoughts. He realized that he might cause trouble for his neighbors in the Amish community and decided to give them anonymity. The book is Plain Secrets; the author is Joe Mackall—and I checked with him before using his name. He read the draft, made two small corrections, and said fine, adding that he also changed all the horses’ names “because everyone knew everyone’s horses.”

I didn’t need Joe’s name for this anecdote. ‘My journalist friend’ would have sufficed for me, so I left the decision to Joe. I don’t always do that. If I need that name to tell my story, I do so. I decide case-by-case each time I write.

I wonder how journalists, and their editors, go through this struggle, especially when quoting everyday people who live in dangerous neighborhoods like Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. First and last names are often given (I assume they are real); and even if only the first name is used, some identifying detail is often added: he works in a bakery, she teaches school. Sometimes there is a photo. Why put these people at risk? They are not heads of state; they wield no power; their quotes add local opinion and flavor, but do not shape events.

Take the Afghani resident who was quoted in the New York Times about life under the lawless local militias after the American troops pulled out:


“We are shivering with fear,” said one resident, Abdul Ahad. Then he explained: He and his neighbors did not fear the Taliban nearly as much as they did their protectors, Rahimulmah’s militiamen, who have turned to kidnappings and extortion. - “After U.S. Exit, Rough Justice of Afghan Militias”-March 17, 2015.


It was a front-page news story. What if someone in this militia has a cousin in the U.S. who sends him this article, translated? I would have been content with a quotation from an Abdul or even from “a veteran farmer,” or “a grim-faced student.” I didn’t need the full name to trust what he said, especially when there was no consequence for others. His remarks could hurt no one except himself.

I called a friend, John Timpane, Features Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer to check on the criteria for journalists using real names. Do they worry about people like Abdul Ahad?


“It’s a moral dilemma,” John said, “but we can’t be seen as protecting folks. Our policy is to use real names at all times with a rare humanitarian exception. Otherwise newspapers would lose credibility. If we protect one, why not all?”


Besides, as John pointed out, journalists don’t know these people. Maybe Abdul is a good guy, maybe not. “We don’t know someone’s backstory, and we have a deadline in two hours.” That, I realized, is a big difference between journalists and those of us writing memoir, essays, and narrative nonfiction. We do have time to retrieve and assess the backstory.

The other big difference is that memoir and personal essay focus less on the moment and more on the universality of people and events: to recreate rather than to report, blame or accuse. That’s why in my Pangyrus essay “Lessons from a Last Day” (see link below), I didn’t name the hospital where my husband died, identifying it only as “a small New England hospital south of a big one 30 miles to the north.” (Pangyrus) -
Lessons from a Last Day

There were legal concerns, but more important, I felt that naming one hospital would have cleared the others: “That’s X, but we are Y,” other hospitals could say.

My friend, aka Harry, told me recently that the movie “Whiplash,” is based on the band teacher at the high school my kids attended. The writer, Damien Chazelle, played the drums in the band class and the teacher did have a reputation for being severe and tough; but he was not the sadist in the movie. Chazelle calls his script fiction, making no claim that the real story happened that way. But if the real teacher was as mean and terrifying as portrayed, then I say call it nonfiction, and yes, name him.

It matters, not like the name of my friend—who may be Harry, Bernie or Rob.

Bio:

Mimi Schwartz’s books include Good Neighbors, Bad Times - Echoes of My Father’s German Village, Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed; and Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (with Sondra Perl). A longer version of this essay appears in Schwartz’s forthcoming book of essays, When History Is Personal (University of Nebraska Press, Spring 2018) that explores the way memoir—i.e. 25 key moments of her life—reveals the history, politics, and culture of the world she lives in.  Read More 

Blog # 60

Introductory Note:

This month's guest is Richard Hoffman, one of our finest, most versatile writers of poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction.

Richard’s craft essay “I Didn’t Ask to Be in Your Memoir”: When Real Names Matter and When They Don’t, is adapted from a panel talk he gave at the recent AWP conference in DC.

This is an issue, we all know, that both aspiring and practicing memoirists, as well as teachers of memoir, continually wrestle with. Each panelist from “I Didn’t Ask to Be in Your Memoir”: When Real Names Matter and When They Don’t, talked about how, when, and why they decided to use real and/or made-up names in their memoirs. Together, they offered a variety of ethical and writerly reasons and approaches to this issue. In the upcoming months then, I'll post a few more essays adapted from that panel.

Below is Richard Hoffman's thoughtful, honest, take.

MJS

Richard Hoffman,“I Didn’t Ask to Be in Your Memoir”: When Real Names Matter and When They Don’t

In 1995 I published a book I had been working on for nearly two decades, the memoir Half the House. After much consideration, which I will describe in a moment, I chose to begin that book not with the usual disclaimer one finds in the front of novels, but with what might be called a reclaimer, since it was my purpose to reclaim all manner of lost things, among them the right to be the protagonist of my own story. It spells out the kind of not-fiction it is and sets forth the rules I followed.


“This is not a work of fiction. It contains no composite characters, no invented scenes. I have, in most instances, altered the names of persons outside my family. In one instance, on principle, I have not.”


Now I believe that in a memoir, memory is largely imagination in service to the facts as far as they can be known, so what does it mean to place a real toad in an imaginary garden, to borrow an arresting emblem from Marianne Moore?

Well — and some of you know this — the man I named in that book, a youth sports coach named Tom Feifel, was a serial child rapist who, largely because of the book, was brought to trial, convicted, and some months later, murdered in prison. It was determined that he had had over 400 victims during his long career in my sports-obsessed hometown.

But here’s the thing: I had never intended to use his real name, not during all the years of working on that book. I was not writing for some cathartic or vengeful purpose; in fact, the book, set in an industrial town in Pennsylvania, is about my boyhood in a Catholic blue-collar family with two of my brothers afflicted with a deadly form of Muscular Dystrophy; the account of the sexual assault takes up five pages of the book.

Five pages. It wasn’t important in some sensational way, it was important because it is a secret feature of that kind of boyhood. But as the book moved toward publication, certain ethical questions arose, and they weren’t the ones you might expect.

Right before I turned in the book, I reinserted the coach’s real name; again, with no incendiary motive, but with a growing sense from my few readers, my agent, my editor, of how explosive such an accusation might be. And it occurred to me that there were many, many men volunteering their time with kids, mentoring boys growing up in a pretty brutal place, and I didn’t want to start a witch-hunt, didn’t want to cast a pall of suspicion on the lot of them. Besides, he was simply undeserving of protection, and I determined that I did not owe him silence, did not have to keep his secret. I also came to understand that it was not him I was protecting: I wanted to hide in the realm of art, I wanted to say it, but say it in a way that would not leak out of the book and into the real world, into my real life. I was scared. Every time I thought about it unmediated by some kind of literary aura, I felt 10 years old again. And so, “the reclaimer.”

Ah, but then came the lawyers, the publisher’s lawyers. About a month before publication, I received a letter from Harcourt Brace’s attorneys with a list of names of certain persons mentioned in the memoir from whom I would have to get releases. They included my father, my brother Joe, my aunt — and coach Feifel.

I left for Pennsylvania with the releases in hand. I made them up—three options and a place for a signature:

o “I have read the manuscript of Richard Hoffman’s memoir, Half the House, and I have no objection to its publication.”
o “I have been given the opportunity to read the manuscript of Richard Hoffman’s memoir, Half the House, and I have declined. Nevertheless, I have no objection to its publication.”
o “I do not consent to the use of my name or other identifying characteristics in Richard Hoffman’s memoir, Half the House.”


My brother had read an earlier draft of the manuscript and was helpful in setting me straight about a few dates and other details I’d gotten wrong. He checked the first box and signed. My father and my aunt didn’t want to read it and checked the second box. Both of them read the book after its publication. I was not going to be able to ask the coach, Tom Feifel, to sign such a document, no way, no how, even if he was alive. I knew, however, that he had been arrested twice before for molesting young boys, so I went to the local newspaper looking for records, hoping that would satisfy the publisher’s lawyers. There was a file with his name on it, but whatever had been in there had been removed. I resigned myself to looking for records at the public library the next day, and if I failed, the courthouse.

When I got back to the house, my father handed me a piece of paper with a couple of phone numbers on it. Both were men he knew who had coached with Feifel. “Why don’t you try calling these guys and see what they know?”

The first call was all I needed. I was able to get the year of one of Feifel’s prior arrests, along with the name of the arresting officer. I called him as well. Although retired, he remembered the case well. Both men were angry that Feifel had been sentenced to probation and were willing to put their recollections in writing. The retired officer agreed to send me a copy of the police report.

It was enough to allow the book to go forward, as long as I was willing to amend the contract to indemnify Harcourt Brace, which I did.

And so, this question is not a simple one — it turns out that there are multiple stakeholders if you will; there’s of course you the author, there’s the person you have drawn as a character, that person’s family and loved ones, the real-world community you are both a part of, the record, the public record, and others whom you don’t yet know, like the 400 boys and men who came forward after the arrest, like the literally thousands of men on 5 continents I have spoken to since the book’s publication who told me the book helped heal them of shame and encouraged them to speak up.


So I am suggesting to you NOT that I was so big and brave, I’m suggesting that what happened contains a lesson and that lesson is this: most of our concern about naming names, a concern which we couch in ethical terms, is rationalization and the result of a shaming injunction, a sneering gaslighting, that serves to protect people who do not deserve protection: why make hoods for nightriders? Why pixelate the faces of hatred? Naming atrocities and the people who commit them is the beginning of justice.

*
In the second memoir (and there will soon be another to complete the trilogy) Love & Fury, I explored the story of my current family, including my wife and grown children and then infant grandson, all of whom are represented undisguised.

This offered a different set of issues, and I chose to adhere to a hard line between writing and publishing. In fact, if there’s any advice I have to give, it is to keep those two processes as separate as possible. I wrote with little concern for how my wife, and my kids, would react; at least I tried to. What made that possible was the deal I had struck with all of them, that when I was finished — not while I was writing — I would allow them to read and respond and that I would take their concerns to heart. I did not promise them veto power.

These are people I love and who love me, so I felt on pretty solid ground, even writing about dark moments, failures, mistakes. At the eleventh hour, my family became my collaborators, arguing their differing versions of events, wondering if I might just shift the emphasis a bit in one of the scenes, if I could just choose a different adjective here and perhaps include a mitigating circumstance they felt I’d omitted. It was not easy conversation, but it was built on trust, and in fact the process strengthened that trust. By the time the book was published the conversation was all about who would play who in the movie!

So, it’s a question of tact relative to your own continuing friendships, alliances, and family relationships, tact and trust, and in fact this respect for how the people in the story see themselves, makes for a more emotionally truthful book. What’s more, most people, in my experience, object to things they construe as assaults on their vanity, things that make them wince or smart, and not, surprisingly, to their failures so long as those failures are part of a story that honors their struggle.

To portray someone trying to do right, to stay afloat, to ride out the storm, grants that person dignity, agency, character. People want their struggles to be seen. People want to be visible, and not only in studio portraits with a row of fake books and a flag in the background, they want to be visible and appreciated for their struggle. They want to be respected: look at that word’s entymology! They want to be seen, given a second look, appreciated.


RICHARD HOFFMAN is author, most recently, of the memoir Love & Fury, which was a finalist for the New England Book Award from the New England Independent Booksellers Association. He is also author of the celebrated Half the House: A Memoir, just reissued in a new 20th Anniversary Edition in 2015, with an introduction by Louise DeSalvo. His poetry collections are Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club; and Emblem. A fiction writer as well, his Interference & Other Stories was published in 2009. A past Chair of PEN New England, he is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College

signature-reads.com/2014/06/rebreaking-the-bone-of-ones-life-story-richard-hoffman-on-love-fury

assayjournal.com/confronting-our-fears--richard-hoffman

mjsteinberg.net/blog.htm?post=948001

masspoetry.org/richardhoffman

solsticelitmag.org/content/richard-hoffman-interview

solsticelitmag.org/interview-with-richard-hoffman

masspoetry.org/pwwp/#pwwphoffman

masspoetry.org/stateofpoetry/#sophoffman

richardhoffman.org/category/interviews

ourmaninboston.wordpress.com/2015/12/21/a-man-for-all-seasons-richard-hoffman

olsticelitmag.org/five-questions-for-richard-hoffman-on-memory-race-and-family  Read More 

Note: This month's guest is writer/teacher Lad Tobin.

Lad's craft/teaching essay, "The Third I: Character, Narrator, Author in the Personal Narrative" grew out of a 2015 NonfictionNow panel entitled "The I and the EYE: How Writers of Literary Nonfiction Choose Their Narrators."

Writers of literary nonfiction all know that choosing the right narrator/persona is a crucial decision. It's an issue that several contributors to this blog have written about. That decision is an important concern as well to those of us that teach classes in literary/creative nonfiction.

Some writers, we know, will place their narrator(s) at center-stage, (the internal, autobiographical "I"); others, whose narrators are witnesses, observers and/or reporters, tend to favor more distant vantage points (the "Eye").

Lad's essay describes how he discovered the right fit, the "multidimensional I," the narrator, as Lad describes it toward the end of the essay, that is "... most able to both tell and interpret the evolving narrative."


MJS


The Third I: Character, Narrator, Author in the Personal Narrative

Lad Tobin

Years ago I published a personal essay, “You Virtually Can’t Get There from Here,” about the problems I have trying to reconcile my expectations of travel with my actual experiences. Here’s how the essay started:

I am at a writer’s conference in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Looking around the room at the opening session, I suddenly realize I do not know a single soul and I have made a terrible mistake coming here. I had looked forward to the trip for months, had imagined it would be a turning point in my career, had fantasized about meeting people who had read—and loved!—my work. But now it hits me: I have been as naive as a schoolboy, as naive in fact as the schoolboy in the James Joyce story who spends his week waiting to go to a fair to buy a gift for a girl who, he suddenly realizes, doesn’t even know he exists.

In this one moment, I see it all: I will be lonely and miserable for the whole conference. Determined to prove that prophecy correct, I talk to no one for the first days, eat every meal on my own, and spend my time resenting all the people who seem to be having a hilariously good time.

Looking back at that essay now, I find myself wondering who exactly is that “I” sitting in that room acting so neurotically self absorbed. Of course, in a very real sense, he is me: I did attend that conference and did feel those embarrassing emotions. But I find myself wanting to say that he is only me at a particular point in time and from a particular point of view and in the role of performing a particular service in a particular essay. That’s a lot of qualifiers, I know, but to try to sort out the ongoing confusion about the nature and trustworthiness of first-person narrators, we are going to have to go beyond the usual binary categories, such as reliable/unreliable, now-narrator/then-narrator, person/persona.

Some of that confusion is built in: as writers of personal essays, we want our readers to trust that the “I” on the page is a real person writing about real events, but we also want to be granted the poetic license to craft a coherent and satisfying text. Given the inherent difference between the randomness and banality of life, and the need for dramatic tension and coherence in a well-made essay, a certain amount of selective editing is inevitable. (Joan Didion calls this process “the imposition of a narrative line on disparate events.”) My sense, though, is that we do little to help explain this tension when we as writers bristle at readers who question the accuracy or trustworthiness of our narratives, but bristle just as hard when those same readers assume there is no gap between the “I” in the essay and the “I” who crafted the essay.

Meghan Daum, for example, bemoans “The Joni Mitchell Problem,” the assumption by readers and critics that they know what a writer or musician is really like based on her first-person confessions. This assumption, according to Daum, equates the self on the page with the self who created the work and, thus, “speaks to the inability of most people to tell the difference between putting yourself out there and letting it all hang out.” Speaking on Mitchell’s behalf, as well as on her own, Daum seems exasperated that readers could ignore the art of the confessional essay and the constructedness of the confessional self. The revelations she offers in her essays, she says, “are not confessions. Not even close. They’re events recounted in the service of ideas. My aim was to judiciously choose and arrange episodes that might build upon one another and add up to something interesting enough to warrant the time it takes to read about them.”

I certainly understand and share much of Daum’s frustration: I have often felt the urge to remind readers that the neurotic, self-absorbed “I” in my essays is not exactly the same “I” who wakes up in my bed and in my body each morning. To be sure, I share plenty with that first-person narrator: I also am an anxious over-thinker who has complicated relationships with his parents, who has spent lots of time in therapy, who loves New Orleans music, Indian food, sports statistics. At the same time, since I’m aware that no real person is coherent enough to hold an essay together or compelling enough to hold a reader’s attention, I am always amping up some parts of my personality while tamping down other parts. As Philip Lopate explains, for a personal essay to work, a writer has to be willing and able to turn him- or herself into a “literary character.”

Most writers and teachers of personal narrative have long relied on binary categories—author/literary character, person/persona, then-narrator/now-narrator—to make clear the distinction between the “I” who is essentially the character in the action of the narrative and the “I” who is the essayist reflecting on that action. It’s a helpful distinction because it reminds readers and writing students that it’s not enough to just write down what happened: a writer of personal essays needs to construct an “I” capable of playing, moving between, and ultimately integrating the narrative of action she is constructing and the narrative of thinking about those actions.

However, in trying to clarify that distinction, we often overlook the equally real and important third “I” of the personal essay: the one who has created both of the other two. It may be tempting to think that, while the acting “I” is a literary character, the reflecting self is the writer’s true or present self, but the truth is that the reflecting self on the page is no less a construction than the acting self (we might also call these the narrating and narrated selves). That is, both are representations of the self that we as authors employ to play particular roles for particular purposes.

The problem, then, in describing the first-person speaker in a successful essay—and particularly in a segmented essay that moves between times and perspectives—is that the seemingly simple “I” is standing in for so many different parts of the self. Fortunately, though, creating and embodying a multidimensional “I” (and reading and making sense of someone else’s multidimensionality) is less complicated in practice than in theory, since we are all used to embodying different roles and perspectives throughout the day. In other words, we are all expert at moving back and forth between our past and present selves, our professional and personal selves, our more heartfelt and more ironic selves.

It is this expertise that allows readers to understand that the “I” in a personal narrative represents someone making a truth claim (“What I am telling you now actually happened to me”) and putting on a performance (“But I’m telling you about this experience in a way that amps up its entertainment and/or its polemical value”). What allows these potentially conflicting roles to successfully coexist is, first, a strategic moving back and forth between showing and telling, between scenes in which the narrated “I” is in the action and scenes in which the narrating “I” stands to reflect on the action or sometimes even to reflect on the reflection. In the essay about my travel experiences, for example, I move between confessions about my neurotic, self-absorbed emotions to reflections about the absurdity, significance, and implications of those emotions. It’s clear, of course, that the “I” in the action knows less than the reflecting self, but it’s equally clear that the reflecting self, who seems only to be figuring things out on the page, knows less than the author who created “him.” By juxtaposing one with the other, I am able to both tell and interpret the evolving narrative. Similarly, if an essay is well constructed and the various “I”s are well developed and successfully integrated, a reader is able to accept the essay as both a truth claim and a work of art.

This, too, sounds more complicated in explanation than it is in practice. We all grow up expert at knowing that the “I” who is telling us a story both is and isn’t the literal person who is speaking to us or whose name is on the title page. In The Uses of Enchantment, his book about how classic fairy tales can help young children make sense of the world, Bruno Bettelheim explains that from a very early age children experience certain magical elements of a story as symbolically rather than literally true. He gives an example from “The Three Little Pigs,” in which the pigs who build the houses out of sticks and straw are eaten (at least in the traditional version) while the brick-building pig survives. Bettelheim argues that, while this story may seem overly violent or traumatic to be appropriate for children, even a very young child understands on an unconscious level that the three pigs are actually three stages of the same pig. Given this understanding, Bettelheim, argues, the child can simultaneously experience the fear and sadness of the loss of the first two pigs and then the joy and relief of their ultimate survival as parts of the third pig.

I’m suggesting that readers of personal essays experience a multidimensional “I” who is simultaneously character, narrator, and author in this same way—as different roles or stages of a single person. For this reason, I think we ought to be less critical of readers who assume that the “I” on the page is also the “I” who authored the essay. After all, we have asked our readers to trust and believe us, to suspend disbelief when we amp up or tamp down parts of ourselves. It seems a little mean-spirited then to turn around and say, “Oh, you thought that ‘I’ on the page was actually me? How naive!”

Again, I am not exempting myself from any this. As I reread that introduction about my narcissistic fantasies at the writer’s conference, I feel an urge to add a footnote: “I am not quite—or always—this neurotic in my everyday life.” But I realize that a footnote of that sort not only would make my essay less entertaining, it would also make it more pedantic. Readers who are willing and able to enter into our essays and accept the multidimensional “I” that we have constructed on the page as real should not be chastised for their naivete, they should be thanked for their trust.

* This essay originally appeared in TriQuarterly (May 2016)

Lad Tobin’s personal essays have appeared in The Sun, The Rumpus, Fourth Genre, New Orleans Review, Full-Grown People, and The Norton Reader. He is the author of two books of creative nonfiction about teaching creative nonfiction: Reading Student Writing: Confessions, Meditations, and Rants and Writing Relationships. He teaches at Boston College. Read More 

Note:

I take some special pride and pleasure from the fact that this month's guest, Tom McGohey, is a former student that showed up in an introductory writing class I taught several decades ago.

Tom's craft essay, "Who's Minding Your Inner Loudmouth?" addresses a concern that, over time, has become something of a running motif on this blog. The matter I'm referring to is what Tom describes below as "the relationship between a writer’s persona and his or her personality in real life." In other words, the question he's raising is this: "...are we our words?"

In the piece, McGohey offer us several different examples of what he means: excerpts from the works of journalist Joe Flaherty, a columnist for The Village Voice, in the 70s, as well as illustrations and commentary from both himself and other writers. Tom considers all of this in relation to what he refers to as the larger connection “between a writer’s persona and the cultural context in which that persona is formed or operates."

MJS

#58 Who's Minding Your Inner Loudmouth? by Tom McGohey

It’s 11p.m., do you know what your inner loudmouth is doing? Is he popping off again? Is he making you look good or is he embarrassing you? Should he be encouraged, celebrated, awarded a prize for his convictions, his swaggering voice, or should he be stifled, silenced, erased from the pulpit of his page, or if preserved, stashed in a folder and buried beneath a pile of embarrassing pronouncements at the bottom of a drawer labeled, “False Starts & Other Obnoxious Railings That Once Sounded Like a Good Idea”?

“Inner loudmouth” is a term Ben Yagoda uses in his splendid book on style, The Sound on the Page, to describe the persona writers create (release? unchain? de-gag?) when they compose. The term evokes image of an overly precocious imp confined in your chest, kicking at your sternum, demanding entrance to your esophagus, and access to your tongue, where he will perform a buffoon’s ballet, reciting outrageous lines you wouldn’t dare utter yourself in polite society. He can be useful that way, offering candid, sometimes provocative, even offensive opinions and images, swirling and looping across the page like graffiti that, in some circles, could be considered great art, and in others, juvenile scrawlings that deface the landscape.

Yagoda explores the relationship between a writer’s persona and his or her personality in real life: are we our words? Would we acknowledge, much less embrace, our inner loudmouth outside the privacy of our homes, beyond the door of our writing rooms?

For example, consider the case of Joe Flaherty, a columnist for The Village Voice, in the 70s, where, upon the death of former heavyweight boxing champ, Sonny Liston, he published a journalistic eulogy titled “Amen to Sonny.” While readily conceding the seedier side of Liston’s life – former mafia thug, ex-con – Flaherty also expresses sympathy for a man used and abused by a corrupt sport and in a larger cultural conflict over the evolving role and image of a black man during the Civil Rights Movement. Flaherty loves to skewer what he considers the pious and often hypocritical pronouncement of self-righteous guardians of liberalism. That attitude is on full display in the following passage describing the leadup to Liston’s title fight with then champion Floyd Patterson:

“He [Liston] arrived at a time when hopes of integration were high in the air, and Patterson and Ralph Bunche were everybody’s prototypical black men. I can’t recall anyone I know (with the exception of the Philadelphia-based writer Jack McKinney) who publicly wanted Liston to beat Patterson for the heavyweight championship. In Patterson’s corner were clustered Jimmy Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Pete Hamill, and the NAACP (which didn’t even want Patterson to give Liston the fight because of what Liston would do to the ‘Negro image’). As Ali murdered the myth of the sixties, so Liston was the pallbearer of the fifties’ liberalism. He embodied what they didn’t want to recognize – that our streets spawn a sea of Sonnys. Like the song, ‘Night Train,’ to which he jumped rope, he was that underground fear we wouldn’t face – the menacing black man who invaded the subway of our souls at four in the morning. In short, Sonny was a badass nigger.”

That last line about knocked me out of my chair. Man oh man, you couldn’t get away with that today, I thought. Hell, I can’t believe he got away with it then!

In the preface to his collected columns, Chez Joey, Flaherty writes, “A lesson for young journalists: in your early rounds forget the body and go for the head.” A pugilistic metaphor that sums up Flaherty’s persona in writing and in life; a perfect match of form and content, style and personality, Yagoda would probably say. Not much difference, if any, between, style and personality of Flaherty, who was a NYC dockworker and who as a reporter for “Village Voice” sometimes brawled, in print and with fists, with subjects, and who managed the mayoral candidacy of Norman Mailer, another brawler in word and deed. Flaherty certainly goes for the head in “Amen to Sonny,” not Liston’s head or Patterson’s, though he bloodies the latter’s nose with sarcastic jabs, but the collective head of boxing and liberals, white and black, who saw the match as a Manichaean bout between “good” and “bad” Negroes.

But what are we to make of that line about “badass nigger[s]”? Strictly in terms of structure, it’s a well-crafted paragraph, suggesting Flaherty knows exactly where’s he’s headed and he can’t wait to get there and smack pious hypocrites and his readers with such a provocative, if not outright offensive line. But you also get the sense of a writer overly pleased with his own sarcasm, a loud-mouth show-off seduced by his own persona who likes to pontificate himself. In this case, has the bravado of the persona exceeded the judgement of the craftsman?

To answer that question some historical and sociological context in matters of race is required. Unbeknownst to me, the term “bad / badass nigger” has had a fairly long and complicated history in America, particularly in sports, stretching back to days of Jack Johnson, the black heavyweight boxing champ in early 1900s who infuriated whites with his mocking, defiant attitude. Scholars such as John Hoberman, author of Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race, and Gerald Early, author of The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, have written extensively about the term. James Baldwin uses it in his powerful essay “A Report from Occupied Territory.”

So, “bad / badass nigger” is an acknowledged trope by both black and white writers, though with different connotations depending on context. In general, though, the term refers to a fearsome black man who threatens or intimidates or diminishes white authority. Does this semantic precedent justify or excuse a white sports writer using it? Do we assume that Flaherty is consciously employing a sociological term, or even subconsciously using it, as if the term were a fairly common one, at least for those who spend a lot of time thinking and writing about black people, whether athletes or intellectuals or average citizens being rousted and beaten by racist cops? Does Flaherty assume his readers will recognize this trope? If so, is he assuming too much knowledge in his audience? Would Village Voice readers of 70s have recognized the term, much less its complex connotations?

Let’s give Flaherty the benefit of doubt and say he was familiar with progressive criticism of race relations in America, may have even read Baldwin, whose essay was first published in The Nation in 1966. As a native New Yorker and a reporter he was certainly aware, on some level, probably more detailed than typical urban dweller, of grim conditions in “occupied” Harlem. Even a casual reading of a handful of Flaherty columns quickly reveals that, for all his graphic and smartass outrage and mockery, he was a very well-read man. His pieces are littered with high-brow literary references and metaphors. Regardless. Let’s grant him a higher intention than shock or knee-jerk, juvenile banter / taunting. Does he go too far? Is it enough to assume, or hope, that audience will hear the ironic quotation marks around inflammatory language? Whatever his persona – satiric and highly literate, cultural commentator or rude-crude, blunt troublemaker – when does a writer’s persona go too far? When should a writer stifle his “inner loudmouth” clean up his ethos for the sake of a less offensive pathos or logos?

My purpose here is not to defend or condemn Flaherty for offensive language, but to consider the connection between a writer’s persona and the cultural context in which that persona is formed or operates.

Indulging one’s inner loudmouth is seductive, at times even addictive, potentially leading to offensive or just plain obnoxious prose that undermines content. I need look no farther than my own writing for evidence of this mercurial “condition,” shall we call it, for it does suggest a disorder one might find in the official Psychiatric DSM. Admittedly I often write first and foremost to entertain myself, not for rhetorical effect or for “meaning” or message. I’m ethos first and logos last; hell, at times I’m all ethos, and what little logos I consciously craft is swallowed up by my loudmouth ethos: my style, caterer of my persona (or vice versa?) devours my content. The inner loudmouth thinks that most anything that tumbles out of its oral cavity is by default endlessly witty and a benefit, socially and morally, to anyone who reads it. (I’ve been living in the South for 30 years, and have lost track of the number of times my partner, God love her country-girl soul, has made excuses on my behalf for bewildered folks unsure of how to take some snarky comment: Don’t mind him, that’s just his smartass Yankee sense of humor. Email correspondence, I find, is particularly problematic for me, as I refuse to use emoji’s to explain my intentions; such reading aids strike me as a sniffy kind of post-traumatic trigger-warning: Too little, too late. )

I’ve had this problem with editors of literary journals, as well. In response to a personal essay I wrote about a guy so protective of his cat that he mounts a mission to destroy a neighborhood cat bullying his precious pet, one editor wrote that though they liked the piece, they weren’t sure how to take the tone: Was it supposed to be absurdist? Hell yes, I wanted to shout. Isn’t it obvious? Apparently not. An editor at another journal said the essay had provoked a contentious debate among the staff: some found it poignant, others found it offensive. To which I thought, Can’t it be both? A tension between tones of sympathetic and disturbing was the effect I was working for. Frankly, I thought it was the strength of the piece. So far no editor has embraced my hybrid-aesthetic of sincerity and sarcasm. The piece remains, sadly, unpublished. And I’m left to consider the distinct possibility that what I lack in my writing at times is a deft sense of touch and proportion. You can do anything, as long as it works, right? Right?

To my knowledge, there’s no template for touch in writing. It’s kind of like phrasing for a singer: you either got it or you don’t. I recognize it in other writers, and I’ve gotten to a point that what I admire most in any writer is the ability to modulate tone or, as Yagoda says, “the sound on the page.” But Yagoda does offer a pretty good taxonomy of style in the Chapter “Tendencies of Style”: “Competence, Iconoclasm, Extroversion, Feeling, Single-mindedness, Tension, and Solicitousness.” I would argue that any number of these qualities, separately and in combination, apply to Flaherty. When he calls Liston a “badass nigger,” he’s exhibiting iconoclasm, extroversion, and feeling. Solicitousness, however, does not seem high on his list of concerns, although he does make concerted efforts throughout the column to generate sympathy for Sonny, arguing that “he should be judged in context. He was better than the sport he practiced and the men who rule it. In fact, he was one of boxing’s most legitimate sons. When greed, hypocrisy, and corruption complete their ménage a trois, a Sonny Liston will always be plucked from the breach.” So the tension for Flaherty is that between iconoclasm and solicitousness. His sense of touch, stinging though it may be, lies within that tension.

Yagoda states, “Beware ‘Biographical Fallacy’: the assumption that you know a person when you know only his or her writing.” And illustrates the point with Adam Gopnik’s “Law of the Mental Mirror Image: we write what we are not. It is not merely that we fail to live up to our best ideas, but that our best ideas, and the tone that goes with them, tend to be the opposite of our natural temperament.”

Sounds good to me. Except according to Wilfred Sheed, writing in the introduction to Chez Joey, such laws did not apply to Flaherty:

“The man you meet on the page is precisely the one you meet in real life, and not some literary persona cooked up for the occasion. … When Joe does strike a pose, it is strictly for laughs or some other esthetic effect. His major distinction, in a field where showing off is mandatory and where marginal idiosyncrasies are cultivated like sick plants, is that he is always himself. … Joe’s contribution to New Journalism is a strict emotional precision, based on a lacerating self-awareness. … All this could be pretty painful if it wasn’t so funny. Joe may be cursed with the liverish eye of a satirist, but he is twiced blessed with the heart of a clown. … He isn’t mad at anybody, only operatically outraged, and this is the great strength in his writing. Yet his laughter can be as merciless as another man’s rage.”

So where does that leave us? I’ve raised more questions than I’ve answered. In the matter of giving voice to one’s inner loudmouth, I prefer to defer to the wisdom of Virginia Woolf, in her essay “The Modern Essay”: “Never to be yourself and yet always – that is the problem.”

Bio note

Despite flunking two of three required freshmen writing courses, Tom McGohey went on to earn an MFA in Creative Writing at UNC-Greensboro, and to teach Composition and direct the Writing Center for twenty years at Wake Forest University. He is retired now, living in Southwest Virginia. His work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Thread, and Sport Literate, and has been selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is pleased to have the opportunity to submit another assignment, forty years later, for the old mentor who inspired him to write while making up one of those F’s. Read More 

Note: Nicole Walker's short piece on/about the differences between how journalists and writers of creative nonfiction use facts is particularly timely, especially in light of the current dispute about what distinguishes "alternative" facts from "real" facts.

Actual Facts is an essay that should appeal to the genre's teachers, writers, and editors.

MJS

#57, Actual Facts, Nicole Walker

I just got back from a quick trip to see my family over President’s Day Weekend. We sold our car to my nephew and drove it up to him. As usual, it was super fun to see my family although they are much better at having fun than I am, so I came back exhausted. Plus, traveling on the weekends during the semester is plain impossible. I had to work both of the days I was there, finishing some revisions to an essay coming out in March. The essay is actually about my sisters and how they are politically like-minded but go about persuading people in different ways. My sister Paige teaches AP Environmental Biology at the public school in Salt Lake and persuades her students to pay attention to gametes. My other sister, Valerie, is the National Sales Manager for a TV Station in Boise. She persuades people by reminding them they are beautiful. Neither of them has a huge agenda, but I’d argue that paying attention to the world around you and to be kind would be their combined philosophies, although they advocate for those ideas in different ways.

I was writing about their similarities and differences for this essay that I asked them to read and they were like, “No, that’s not true! I did not teach 8th grade for four years, I taught it for one year.” And “No, I didn’t say that your boobs remind me of turtles. Frogs. It was frogger boobs.” So I emailed the editor and asked him to change those details and my sisters rolled their eyes as they usually do when I say I write “creative nonfiction” because they tease me that “creative” means I can make up anything I want.

I tell them no, that’s why I had them check the essay. They don’t like it when I lecture so I didn’t tell them the deeper definition of creative nonfiction. I tell my students the nonfiction uses facts as a springboard to creativity. I also tell them, we’re not journalists. We aren’t going for objectivity. We’re actually going for subjectivity. The difference between creative nonfiction and journalism is that you want bias in your creative nonfiction. That said, it’s your responsibility to define and be clear with your bias. You can do that several ways. You can begin with a disclaimer. You can write in short, poetic, syncopated lines. You can use research and cite your sources in a regular font and then imagine the effects of that research in an italicized font. You can use the word “perhaps” or “maybe” or the subjunctive or conditional tense. You can, like John D’Agata, begin your book About a Mountain by listing a numbers that the senators used on C-SPAN to show how truly unfacty numbers can be. Senators pull any number out of the air to suit their agenda to argue about transporting nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain: “Yucca’s projected total cost of $24 billion” and “$27 billion” and “$38 billion” and $46 billion” and $59 billion” and “at least 60 billion” and “100 billion” and “too much” and “we have no other choice.” The whole book is about the facile way people use numbers and statistics as if numbers emblematize the purist meaning so when John D’Agata uses numbers fast and loose, he’s doing it within an established context of fast and loose.

I steer my students away from writing fast and loose with the facts not only because they lose credibility but also because there is something very empowering about facts. You can rely on facts to provide you the biggest bounce to your creativity. I just wrote an essay on the difference between Australia’s possums and the United States’ opossum. What is more exciting than the difference between that O?

In the media, we have descended into ‘alternative facts’ which means now I have to go around and defend my genre all over again. Creative nonfiction isn’t alternative facts. It isn’t even using facts creatively. It is using facts to spur imagination. That imagination is saturated in bias but that bias is noted in every word choice, font, disclaimer, verb, and voice. All people have biases. Here are mine, we say. Alternative facts pretend there are no biases. Alternative facts claim real journalism. But real journalism doesn’t use the I. It weighs and investigates. It informs and substantiates. It is the foundation and to build or create or make anything from it, it has to be stable.

NICOLE WALKER is the author of three forthcoming books Sustainability: A Love Story, Microcosm, and Canning Peaches for the Apocalypse. Her previous books include Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. She also edited Bending Genre with Margot Singer. She’s nonfiction editor at Diagram and Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona where it rains like the Pacific Northwest, but only in July. Read More 

Note: This month’s guest, Ana Maria Spagna, is a wonderful writer and teacher of literary nonfiction.

At the River Teeth Writer’s Conference last spring, Ana Maria, myself, Pat Madden, and Hope Edelman were on a panel entitled “When Writers Repeat Themselves: New Disguises or Fresh Approaches?” Several months ago, I posted my panel talk-turned-essay ( Archives, June 2016) on this blog. And this month, I wanted to run Ana Maria’s piece--also from that same panel.

In one way or another, the notion of repeating ourselves is something that most writers-- especially we autobiographical writers—must contend with. When, for example, are we recycling old materials and when are we re-seeing with fresh eyes? When are we self-plagiarizing and when are we digging more deeply into issues and ideas we’ve covered but haven’t yet fully explored?

In her essay, Ana Maria writes about how, in the process of working on what she calls “a kid’s novel,” she discovered that she was writing about the same material she’d already covered in her previous book Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus--a work of literary journalism/personal-cultural criticism.

Once you’ve read the piece, you’ll understand why Ana Maria says that she was initially embarrassed by that discovery; and why, by the end of her essay, she is able to write: “So what have I learned? In a nutshell: Repeating ourselves? I’m for it. Writing the same material in different forms or genres? I’m for it.”

MJS

On Secret Engines, Cross-pollination, and Repeating Ourselves Again

Essayist Steven Church likes to say that each of us has a “secret engine” in our writing, the burning question or experience that pops up again and again in our work. Even when we think we’ll never write about it, we do. Even when we think we’re done writing about it, we’re not.

My dad died when I was 11 years-old. The event shattered my world, of course, but I very rarely spoke of it. By the time I turned thirty I’ll bet I’d only told a handful of people, and I’d told even fewer how he died: he went out jogging one night, had a heart attack, and fell on the sidewalk. I certainly had no intention of writing about it.

Then, one day, I did. Without knowing it. I started writing about a crush I had on a running coach when I was a very little girl. The opening of the piece—one of the few I’ve ever written that kept its original opening from first draft on—has a playful near-fictional feel. Only it wasn’t fiction, and as I wrote, my dad kept creeping in: how he quit smoking to start jogging with me, how when I quit running, he built me a high jump pit. Each time he appeared on the page, I’d get freaked out and put the essay back in the proverbial drawer, so it took me over a year before I was able to let to the story unfold. Here’s a passage from the near the end. During the medal ceremony at the high jump state championship for fifth grade girls, I’m once again thinking about my old running coach.

"There, I thought, I did it without you. See! See! I did all by myself. I thought this even though it was patently untrue. And while I was thinking this, right in the middle of it, my dad jumped over the railing. He vaulted actually, like a younger more agile version of himself, and he sprinted across the track nearly interrupting a race in progress. He lifted me in his arms and spun me around as if I’d scored the winning touchdown I remember it clearly and I remember it with something like regret, something like shame, for the way that memory, like love, sometimes clings to all the wrong things."

In the end, of all the essays in my first book, Now Go Home, “Long Distance” is the one that holds up best, and after writing it, I had this self-satisfied feeling like: Well, I never need to write about that again.

I didn’t understand how secret engines work.

Fast forward a few years. I stumbled upon a short blurb online about my dad’s involvement in the Tallahassee Bus Boycott, a little-known event in the early civil rights movement. He’d never spoken about it, so if I wanted to learn more, I’d have to find people who knew him. Now, the important part of the story at this point is that I could never have started this research if I hadn’t written “Long Distance.” I had crafted the experience and my feelings about it into something that felt whole and right, and doing so freed me up to think about him in new ways. As, for instance, a young activist, maybe even a hero.

I had no intention of including myself in what eventually became Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus. I wanted to write history, or maybe biography, but the more I researched, the more my own skepticism got in the way. For one thing, when my dad was arrested, he jumped bail. Even though blacks from the movement told me over and over that as a white guy in the white jail he’d have been killed as a so-called “nigger lover,” I refused to believe. I was too angry at him. Why? Clearly not because of what happened in 1957, but because of what happened in 1979. So I’d have to go there. Again. I’d have to meld my story with his story, memoir with history, and this time I’d have to include more details from the night he died. We were home alone together, and he told me he was going running against doctor’s orders, and I tried to stop him but could not. He said, “Don’t tell Mom.” So I didn’t. I hadn’t. For thirty years, I carried a staggering burden of guilt. Writing it down alleviated it, healed me in a way. And here’s the thing: I couldn’t have done it without the research. Doing the historical research opened up the possibility of writing the personal scene, and writing the personal scene offered new understanding of the history. Neither would be half as good without the other. I told myself I had learned the value of cross-pollination.

But even that is not the end.

Writing Test Ride was hard, excruciating at times. So sometimes, when I needed a break, I worked on a novel about a 14 year-old girl snowboarder. I told everyone the novel was a fun diversion, something completely different. I’d work on Test Ride, then work on the kid’s book, then go back to Test Ride. After Test Ride was published, I pulled out the novel to polish it up and to my utter shock—how had I not seen this?—it was all about a girl and her activist father. In other words this was the exact same story. Again. I was mortified. I shoved the manuscript back in the proverbial drawer. People asked about it, and I said just didn’t work out.

Last winter I started missing those characters, so I went looking for permission to repeat myself. Again. It didn’t take long perusing the bookshelf to find Cheryl Strayed writing about her mother’s death in the fine novel Torch (2006) a decade before writing about it again in Wild (2013) or to reread Mary Karr’s poetry collection Viper Rum (1998) and see that it covered much the same ground—finding sobriety and religious faith—as her memoir Lit (2009). If writers that good could do it, I decided, I could, too.

So I went back to the kids’ novel, and here’s what I found. First, the fictional father is a surprisingly rich and three-dimensional character, flaky but funny, obsessed but also loving, someone a reader can care about. Why? Because in fiction, I wasn’t mired in the myopic “I”—the real scarred-up me—I had to give him a back story and motivation, which unlocked a door to imagination, and as a result, to empathy. But there was an even bigger discovery. The novel’s climactic scene finds the main character out snowboarding with her dad when he falls and has a heart attack (honest to god, how had I believed I was writing a different story?) but – spoiler alert! – she saves him. She drags him off the mountain and he lives.

Any amateur psychologist can explain the value of writing that scene. I rewrote my past! For a long time, I believed writing the real scene (“Don’t tell Mom”) is what freed me to write Test Ride, but maybe writing this fictional scene did. Certainly the opposite is true, writing Test Ride gave me the burning motivation that drives the rescue scene in the novel. And “burning” is the key. The energy of that scene, the energy of the entire book—The Luckiest Scar on Earth to be published by Torrey House Press on February 14—comes from the deepest place in me.

I’m still not entirely over the embarrassing fact that, all these years later, I still apparently need to write about my father’s death again and again, but I’m in awe of the writing process, the healing it spurs in all of us, writers and readers alike. So what have I learned? In a nutshell: Repeating ourselves? I’m for it. Writing the same material in different forms or genres? I’m for it. Allegiance to the secret engine? I don’t think we have a choice.
#

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of five award-winning nonfiction books including Now Go Home, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, and Reclaimers. She lives and writes in the North Cascades and teaches in the low residency MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. www.anamaliaspagna.com. Read More