Michael Steinberg

9/10/15, # 42, On the Lyric Impulse: Blizzards, Bricks, and the Glaciology of Purpura by Kathryn Winograd

Note: This month’s guest writer is poet, essayist, and award winning writing teacher, Kathryn Winograd

A few years ago, Kathy and I had a mutually informative conversation about some of the what’s and how’s of the lyric essay. A few weeks ago, I saw her piece on the lyric essay on Ander Monson’s fine blog Essay Daily. It triggered some thoughts. So I asked Kathy for permission to reprint it.

Reading Kathy’s piece brought back some old history. In 1999, I founded Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. a journal of literary/creative nonfiction. At the time, the genre was just beginning to gain some legitimacy as a literary form. In those early years, the majority of essays and memoirs we saw were personal narratives. And back then, the handful of lyric pieces we read were crafted by writers who saw themselves primarily as poets. My impression then was that the best of those essays were passionate and moving works, marked by their writers’ facility with, and appreciation for, language and imagery. For the most part, their essays were more like hybrids than than the kinds of traditional (and non-traditional) narratives we were getting.

Today, the genre has evolved and expanded in ways I couldn’t have even dreamed of back then. So much so, that lyric work is now a highly-regarded sub genre on the larger spectrum of literary/creative nonfiction. Kathy’s piece then,---a lyric essay itself—is of particular value not only to writers but to veteran and inexperienced teachers both. In her piece, Kathy explores and ruminates about, among other things, the ways in which the lyric impulse becomes just the right vehicle for expressing the kinds of complex thoughts and feelings--sensations, that is, we’re unable to articulate in strictly narrative terms. In that way, "On the Lyric Impulse"shares a similar sensibility with the celebrated Emily Dickinson poem, “Tell All the Truth, But Tell It Slant.”

MJS

9/10/15 # 42 ON THE LYRIC IMPULSE: BLIZZARDS, BRICKS, AND THE
GLACIOLOGY Of PURPURA
Kathryn Winograd

Warned of, craved, the blizzard finally barrels across the ice dark street. The known world whittles down to black elm, chiseled hoar frost, and my breath against the slim windowpane steams periodic circles of clarity against a gathering snow, a white space.

“I am not a poet,” my student informs me, not by text message or email, but by phone, landline phone. My enthusiasm over the metaphoric possibilities of this student’s obsession with bricks in her narrative on building a new house with her second husband has aroused a knee-jerk reaction⎯and it’s not a good one.

Already this blizzard means something: the white exterior world beyond the cold glass I press my palm hard against. The interior world my breath inhabits, warm with its fireplace flame even as the insistent voice of the anchorwoman ticks off degrees and inches as if the world beyond the window that I cannot yet feel, and the world beyond the self I do not yet know, could be made measurable.

When I wrote Michael Steinberg about an AWP panel I was proposing on what I saw as a gap between the student who enters creative nonfiction from the prose side of the spectrum versus the poetry side, he wrote back, “Strictly speaking, I’m not a lyric essayist. But one of the things I’ve been talking and writing about for years is the connection between memoir and lyric poetry. The essay (and/or memoir) is the story of one’s thinking, the revelation of consciousness. Except for those essayists who reflexively use poetic elements and language in their work, these are missing from most of the MFA work I’m seeing⎯even the very good ones.” The lyric impulse versus the storytelling impulse. The “revelation of consciousness.”

“Back stories,” my student tells me: the neighbors’ bricks she obsesses over, the migrating birds that roost in paragraphs throughout the chronology of her house-building, and those faintest hammer taps of her new husband who “remodeled” the house my student must for now live in, the house he built for his first wife, repaired in places with baling twine.

A leftover house.
“Extra stuff,” my student says.
The real subject matter of her narrative on building a house?
Building a house.

The philologist Max Mueller said that “man, as he develops his conceptions of immaterial things, must perforce express them in terms of material things because his language lags behind his needs.” Figurative language then becomes the vehicle for greater precision of expression; exactitude grows through metaphor, not necessarily through narrative.

“Bricks,” I tell my student.

I assign to the class Lia Purpura’s Glaciology, her “deposition” on glacier and thaw, on X-ray and artifact, on the fallible body and the mind-in-waiting.

“A little shard, small bit taken out of my body and sent off for further study,” Purpura carves so lightly amidst her glacier surge and ice sheets, her “striated stone from Mauritania.” A 650 million year old backdrop to this uncertain moment, to this white space, external and internal: “Bones stacked and bent in the attitude of prayer, the edges honed and precarious.”

“Too much poetry,” my nonfiction students tell me, Purpura’s own hieroglyphics⎯ that “cache of loose details” she resolutely attends to while she awaits the medical world’s verdict⎯ abandoned, they claim, to Orpheus, strummer of the poet’s lyre, though I tell them that even the king of the dead has wept.

“Metaphor,” as the New Critics said, is “not a rhetorical device . . .but a means of perceiving and expressing moral truths radically different from that of prose or scientific statement.” Read More 

8/8/15, Blog # 41 SWITCHING GENRES MIDSTREAM By Mimi Schwartz

Note: This month's guest writer is Mimi Schwartz.

Mimi Schwartz is a teacher, writer, and scholar who’s been working in this genre for most of her professional life. To my mind, she's one of our most prolific, well respected writer/teachers. Over the years, Mimi's work has played an important role in the genre's ongoing evolution. Just a quick look at her bio note below is testimony to the depth and breadth of her writing.

SWITCHING GENRES MIDSTREAM is Mimi's second contribution to this blog. You can find her first piece, # 22, HALFWAY THROUGH THE STORY, in the Archives, under 8/27/13.

# 41 SWITCHING GENRES MIDSTREAM

When I taught a summer workshop on memoir in Vermont, one of my students was writing about her family, especially her uncle, a big shot in the Mafia. She read an excerpt full of detail, drama and “Breaking Bad” secrets, and we all said: “Forget memoir. Call it fiction!” The decision, safety-wise, was a no-brainer.

Switching genres because of practicality is usually less clear-cut—and it should be. We must weigh: What do we get and what do we give up? Say a sister threatens to sue. Is she bluffing? Say, an agent wants to sign us on if we turn our essay collection into a continuous narrative. Or an acquisitions editor calls to say she’d like to publish our memoir-- but as fiction. Hopefully, agents and editors have the story’s integrity and power at heart. But what if their advice is to satisfy a marketing department or the balance sheet? We must figure out: How much do I want to sell this work? Is the switch worth tons of extra effort? Am I resisting out of fear of killing my little darlings. Or….will I really kill them?

Practical concerns are outside/in pressures, not intrinsic to creating the best work that we can. What I’d like to focus on are the inside-out reasons for switching genres: the realization that the genre we’ve chosen is not serving the story we need to tell. Why? Because the story has changed—and the one we started is now the wrong story.

The catalyst can be a seismic shift of facts, as happened to Helen Fremont in writing After the Long Silence. It began as a novel, based on her parents’ trek across Europe on the eve of World War 11, a story of love, bravery, and adventure, she thought—until she found out the truth about her grandparents. Growing up Catholic in the Midwest, Fremont had been told that they died in an aerial bombing. But in researching the novel, Fremont learned that her grandparents had been murdered in the concentration camps—as Jews.

Making the switch from fiction to memoir was a huge decision. It meant disclosing her parents’ biggest secret and most haunting fears of the Holocasut. Yet, Fremont says, she had to do it:


"In effect, my grandparents and aunts and uncles had been wiped off the face of the earth by fascist regimes. There are no gravestones, or markers, and the generation of eyewitnesses is rapidly dwindling. Holocaust revisionists and deniers increasingly dismiss the fact of the extermination of Jews as fiction or fantasy and I felt it important to add my voice to the record. Fiction no longer served my needs: I realized that I had to write the story, finally, as memoir."



Often we switch genres because “Why am I writing this?” is elusive. We try another genre to enlarge or change our perspective, find a more authentic voice, and hopefully trick ourselves towards the truth.

Novelist Sue Miller describes how this worked for her when writing The Story of My Father, her memoir about dealing with her father’s Alzheimer’s disease. Miller, known for her fiction, wrote what she thought was a promising nonfiction draft and sent it to her agent who found “some of it fascinating, some very moving, and of the rest, she said, ‘It strikes me that it is perhaps of most interest to the writer.”

Miller, taken aback, reread the draft months later and knew she’d have to start again. But first she had an idea for a novel about a death of a parent and it became The Distinguished Guest. She then revisited the memoir and decided the problem could be voice because, as she says, “I was accustomed to using the first person only fictionally—hiding behind an imagined speaker who might be close to who I was, but who wasn’t.” So Miller wrote personal essays “to practice using a non-fictive first person voice in some shorter works that would be less difficult emotionally….” Then she wrote another novel, this one called While I Was Gone.  Read More 

6/29/15, #40, The Doctor is In: Some Thoughts about Matters of Craft

Michael Steinberg

Those who follow this blog know that, in addition to my own posts, I have, for the last few years, invited selected guests--notable writers and teachers, and accomplished former students as well--to send me mini-essays on/about whatever specific matters of craft they wanted to write about. Their contributions have not only extended the blog’s scope and range, they’ve also added a variety of voices, thoughts, and opinions--in other words, some diversity--to the mix.

Last week, as it turned out, I happened to be interviewed three times for three different reasons. It was an atypical seven days, to be sure. During that time, I answered a variety of questions on/about genre, teaching, and the craft of writing. By necessity, some (not all) of my answers were spontaneous, almost off-the-cuff, responses to things I hadn’t thought about before, and issues I want to rethink and/or explore more fully but haven’t yet gotten around to pursuing.

That’s when I came up with the idea to expand the blog--to include some questions that readers might like to ask.

But first, I want to set some boundaries. It’s not possible, of course, for me to respond to every question that’s asked. So when the questions--on/about genre and craft issues--come in, I’ll select a few that a reasonable number people seem to be asking. I’ll treat this as an informal Q and A—a kind of “The Doctor is In”column.

To start off, for this post, I’ll choose some questions and answers from the three interviews I mentioned above. Here are two from the first interview

MJS

#40 THE DOCTOR IS IN, 1

INTERNAL NARRATIVES AND THREE DIMENSIONAL NARRATORS

The following is from “Talking Creative Nonfiction,” an interview I did a few weeks ago for the Solstice Literary Magazine blog. For the full (short) interview the link is Solstice Literary Magazine blog

SOLSTICE : In “One Story, Two Narrators,” a craft essay you wrote for this journal, you talk about how many personal essays/memoirs fall short, because they fail to create an internal narrative to accompany the surface-level events. Why do you think that so many aspiring nonfiction writers struggle with this?

MY ANSWER : “As you say, ‘many writers give us only the surface level events.' That is; the story of what happened. But too often, I’ve found, they don’t comment/speculate/reflect on what those events might mean. And I think that’s partly because they don’t allow themselves permission to write as a fully present “I.” By this I mean, the thinking, feeling, three dimensional “I--” the person, in other words, who goes out into the world every day--and who, in response to specific situations, encounters, and events--reflects, speculates, imagines, analyzes, questions, projects…. I could go on.

To illustrate further, here’s an excerpt from “One Story, Two Narrators”

“I think we can agree that human beings are by nature and predisposition instinctively reactive creatures. In most any situation or encounter we probably couldn’t get through thirty seconds without experiencing and/or utilizing most or all of the reactions listed above.

And so, we need to keep reminding ourselves (as well as our students) that in writing personal narratives, it’s important to render our thoughts and reflections with the same clarity and transparency that we’re able to affect when we’re narrating the details and specifics of our own personal stories.

Because no matter how authentic and convincing the situations, people, and events of those stories are, no matter what subject they’re about, in order to connect more meaningfully with readers, narrators need to allow the reader more frequent glimpses into their thought processes, especially those ways in which they deal with their confusions, fears, doubts, exhilarations, and successes--the qualities, in short, that link us as fellow human beings.” Read More 

Note: This month’s guest is Jessica Handler. I’m pleased and delighted to have her work appear on this blog. I first met Jessica in 2005, when she was in my Writers in Paradise memoir workshop in St. Petersberg, Florida. Jessica, along with Tracy Crow, and Margaret MacGuiness, had just gotten their MFA from Queens College. And they were so well informed about literary memoir that it was like having three co-teachers in the room. When the workshop ended, it was clear to me that any or perhaps all three would go on to write first-rate literary books.

Jessica’s sensitive and perceptive memoir, Invisible Sisters, was published four years later, in 2009. The narrative is about how, following the death of her two sisters, the writer came to terms with her grief. It's a powerful literary memoir. Jessica hasn't stopped there. She has continued, with great energy and deep commitment, to write, teach, and lecture. Fittingly, her craft essay, “On Endings in Memoir, Particularly in Memoirs About ‘the Tough Stuff'"--is adapted from her recent book, Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss (St. Martins/Griffin, 2013.)

I believe that Jessica’s thoughts, opinions, and perceptions will provide additional guidance on/about the various strategies and approaches that memoirists utilize in order to create literary work out of their deepest sufferings and losses. It’s a subject that informs Meredith Hall’s piece (blog # 38). And because this is a matter I’ve also written about (see blog # 34 and 35), I decided that this was a good time to run Jessica's piece.

MJS

On Endings in Memoir, Particularly in Memoirs about “the Tough Stuff.”
By Jessica Handler

A few years ago, I was talking to friend at a party about the ending he had just written for his film. His protagonist, a little boy, meets his masked hero at last, but he’s sorely disappointed. The hero isn’t the idol he had convinced himself he would find, and after working for almost the entire plot to have his troublesome nerdiness redeemed by proximity to his hero, the little boy is at a loss.

“So that’s not really the end,” the screenwriter said.

“Yes,” I said to the screenwriter. It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes,” he agreed.

And together we said, “yes, and…”.

We were getting at a truth that’s common to all good writing; that the ending isn’t the moment when the author runs out of writing steam. A satisfying ending begins with that moment of “yes, and” in the plot. In my friend’s screenplay, the ending isn’t that the boy finds his hero, but that the boy begins to change on his own as a result of his efforts to meet his hero. For a memoirist, the ending has something to do with how she or has changed and moved forward in life?

The ‘yes and’ for my memoir, Invisible Sisters, is that, yes my sisters died and I learned to find my voice without them. For a writer, the idea of ‘yes, and’ marks the place on in the story where the renewal for the protagonist – the author- starts to become clear.

Another way to phrase this could be “yes, but,” although I prefer “and.”
“And” has a more positive, forward-moving feeling; not a contradiction, but a continuation. The very existence of a memoir proves that the author survived to tell the tale. A well-made ending is a new beginning; in a memoir about loss, it’s that place on the page when author, and later, reader, is satisfied that the protagonist telling the story can make it from here. A good ending fulfills an implicit promise made in the beginning, whether it’s to tell how the survival occurred, or how the author has grown as a result of the loss.

But no writer or reader wants a sparkling, disingenuous ending that wipes the slate clean of that life-changing sorrow. A generic story with the emotional authority of a smiley-face sticker would not only be false, but a grave injustice to the true story.  Read More 

Note: This month's guest is Meredith Hall, who, to my mind is one of our finest literary memoirists. Her emotionally powerful, beautifully rendered memoir, Without a Map, is one of the few literary books to be both a critical success as well as a New York Times best seller. Meredith's craft essay below was originally part of a recent AWP panel entitled, Confronting Our Fears: Turning Adversity into Art.

MJS

Trust the Camera: The Importance of Scene Making in Crafting Literary Memoirs
-Meredith Hall

When I give readings of my memoir, an audience member invariably comments, “This must have been such a catharsis for you! Writing this must have been so therapeutic for you! It must have felt so good to get this all out!” My response is always something like this: We cannot write memoir as catharsis, or for its therapeutic effects. Before we are writers, we are human beings living a life. Before we write, we must have worked our way to the deepest parts of our experience. All artists are guides. We are entrusted with walking one step ahead of our readers into the depths. It cannot be our first scouting. We must live inside the inquiry of past events honestly and courageously before we ever offer ourselves as guides. We do not need to be wise. But we do need to have understandings and insights sufficient to ask the most difficult questions. Without that process, which can take years before we are ready for the role of guide, we face two problems: we are writing for ourselves and not our readers; and we are not yet ready to make story of our pasts. It is this idea I would like to explore today: We all come to understanding through story. If we cannot yet control that vital line of communication, we are not yet ready to write our book.

The most dangerous territory for us when we write about intimate events is in exposition—when we say what happened and why and what we think and believe and understand. The problem is that expository writing—this summarizing and explaining and examining—tends to be our go-to place when we write. It is writing that arises from our memory, from our thinking and our feeling about memory. It is intuitive and automatic. And it is satisfying to the writer because we get to set up our story, complete with its history and place and context. We get to explain exactly what happened, and best of all, we get to say how that all felt, and what we now understand about it.

But I am going to suggest that choosing instead the strategy of using “the camera” causes us to rely on the scenes we carry in memory. If we imagine ourselves filmmakers, we find our tool box filled with the specific and demanding tools of the craft of rendering story. But we also earn great freedom from our struggle to make meaning.

We are all adept at watching a film: It opens with a scene—perhaps a young man and woman are leaning against a kitchen counter. We watch them and listen to their small conversation carefully, working at building an understanding of who they are and why we should care. And then the camera lens closes, and reopens—but now we are in a car. We don’t flinch at this. We are absolutely ready for this shift in scene, character, emotional mood. We recognize the driver—the husband we have met. The passenger is an elderly woman. This is his mother, we realize, and they are covering some old emotional territory between them. Then the camera lens closes, and reopens—and we are at a large family gathering. We are ready for this next scene. We are gathering clues. The wife is here, and the husband. There is a lot of laughter. But the camera lens watches the face of the wife, and so we do, too. Why is her expression so tight? What threatens or diminishes her here? There is another burst of laughter, they sit to their meal, and the camera lens closes.

And so the filmmaker constructs, scene by scene by careful scene, her story. And the amazing and beautiful fact is that we “get it” when a good film closes! The “camera” allows us to understand what happened, what motivated the characters, and how we might feel about the story. What an exhilarating art form! The writer can rely on the filmmaker’s camera. But luckily, we are also able to step in periodically and provide our own understandings, to reflect. To offer ourselves as guides, leading our readers to understandings and questions earned through time.

What happens when we don’t trust the camera? Imagine this: We pay our money and sit down in a theater and the film starts. But instead of that man and woman leaning against their kitchen counter, we see the filmmaker, sitting in a chair against a white field, looking directly at us. Instead of a series of scenes to convey the story, he tells us all about the story—he introduces the characters and he describes them and their physical environments and their backgrounds, the history of each character and their interactions. He summarizes—because without the tools of the camera, the ability to make scenes, he has no other option than to summarize. And then he tells us what it all means, because he has no other tool to convey meaning. There our storyteller sits, facing us, earnestly telling us ---everything.

Which film would you rather watch? And the larger question, which film leads you to a deeper and more personal understanding of this story? Read More 

Note:

This month’s guest, blogger, Kim Kupperman, is one of our most versatile, accomplished, personal essayists.

I first met Kim fourteen years ago when I was teaching in the University of Southern Maine/Stonecoast MFA Program. Since that time, I’ve followed the path of her remarkable career as a writer, teacher, and, more recently, as the founding editor/publisher of Welcome Table, an independent press devoted solely to books of/about the contemporary personal essay.
.
Because of our work together at Stonecoast, Kim would most probably claim me as a mentor of sorts. But I believe that I’ve learned at least as much, and quite possibly more from her, about writing and teaching the personal essay than she has from me.

Her piece, “In the Body of the Beholder,” is to some extent a rethinking of what all writers and teachers of personal narratives refer to as “voice.” Although it’s one of most important elements of what we call style, and although I believe that finding the right voice for a given work is essential to that work’s authenticity, still, whenever I try to describe “voice” to colleagues and/or students, I’m never quite certain that I can describe or clearly explain what I mean by the term.

Sometimes I’ll talk about “voice” as the writer’s presence and/or his/her point of view. Other times, I’ll refer to it as the sound of the person who created the work and/or the overall impression we get of the writer behind the work. To be honest, I seem to best understand “voice” as a feeling or as a sense of something palpable, something I can’t quite articulate or pin down.

If you have any of these same hesitations, I recommend that you take a look at Kim’s thoughtful, intelligent, examination of this complex, elusive, matter. Like me, hopefully you’ll come away with a new understanding about what we mean when we talk about (no pun intended) voice.

MJS

IN THE BODY OF THE BEHOLDER: SOME NOTES ON VOICE
Kim Dana Kupperman

Recently, a friend remarked that talking about voice in writing felt to her like talking about God. “We can’t define it, so we talk around it,” she observed. Perhaps this is why “voice in writing”(1) has become a metaphor we’ve used too often to signify too many meanings. As I. Hashimoto points out, voice “is something we can’t discuss and analyze but can only feel or participate in” (Landmark, 76, emphasis mine). Thus, he suggests,

"We should watch out when we slip into easy generalizations about everyone having a “voice” and about “voice” being more important than anything else in writing. We ought to be careful about using vague, metaphoric language simply because we can’t quite put our fingers on something more specific (Landmark, 82).

“Voice is produced by the body,” writes Peter Elbow, who reminds us that having a conversation about voice means that we “import connotations of the body into the discussion—and by implication, [are] interested in the role of the body in writing.”
(Landmark, xxi-xxiii).(2) To examine what voice really is, then, we might start by acknowledging the physicality of sound and that it originates in the body—where emotion is perceived, fed by all the senses and perhaps most of all by that which is heard. (3) As N. Scott Momaday reminds us: “In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken” (Way to Rainy Day Mountain, ix). Sound, as Walter Ong puts it, “situates [us] in the midst of a world” (Landmark, 29). Momaday argues that oral storytelling is one of the most powerful narrative forms; he asks that we consider which sounds are stilled and resound against silence, and which, as Adrienne Rich puts it, are weighted with “the heft of our living.” Thus, Momaday advises us to read aloud (to give sound to) the three voices he uses in The Way to Rainy Mountain so that they “remain, as they have always remained, alive at the level of the human voice. At that level their being is whole and essential” (Way to Rainy Mountain, ix).

Reading aloud—our writing and that of others—and listening to work being read (including our own) is one of the most concrete and effective ways to develop both the physical voice and the ear that hears it (reading aloud is also one of the best ways I know to catch errors in punctuation, syntax, and usage). Paying attention to what the body does when we read aloud provides valuable clues to what the words evoke: Do we sit or stand, slouch or maintain perfect posture? Do we hold our heads in a particular way? How is our weight distributed? Where does tension surface? Do we feel warm or cold? Are we blushing? Are the words clear? Do we want to sleep or go for a brisk walk? How are we breathing?  Read More 

Note: After a long, courageous struggle with cancer, Judith Kitchen, essayist, poet, literary critic, and teacher died in early November at the age of 73. I’d like to dedicate this post to her.

I’ll begin with some short email excerpts I sent to her husband, Stan Sanvel Rubin. Stan, a first-rate poet and critic in his own right, along with Judith co-founded the Pacific Lutheran/RainierWriting Workshop, one of our finest low residency MFA programs, a program that Stan directed for 10 years.

In my note, I wrote the following “I've always admired Judith's remarkable, versatile writings as well as her vitality, passion, and dedication to teaching. In the mid-90's, when creative nonfiction was just beginning to emerge as a legitimate literary genre, Judith was one of the first people who wrote, taught, and could speak with authority on/about what we’ve come to describe as ‘creative nonfiction.

I've been recommending and using her anthologies, In Short, In Brief, and Brief Takes in my undergraduate and MFA workshops since the first one came out in 1996. And it goes without saying that today, some eighteen plus years later, I consider Judith to be a pioneer and a highly regarded writer/spokesperson for the genre.”

In his reply, Stan said ‘Yes, she was an early innovator in creative nonfiction/lyric essay-- and, as you suggest, was a unique forerunner in developing a critical language to discuss it as a genre with its own purposes and dignity. She stood staunchly for the creative exploration of truth as an important task and challenge.’

Like most of the writers, teachers, and students whose lives Judith touched, I'll miss her vitality, sense of humor, directness, and her fierce honesty. May her life and work serve as an inspiration for those of us who knew her, as well as for the current and future writer/teachers who'll be encountering her work, hopefully, for many years to come.”

As a lead-in to her piece, “Mending Wall,” on/about the lyric essay (see below) I’d like to quote from an artistic statement that appears on Judith’s website Judith Kitchen

“I don't know where to draw the lines between my thinking life and my art, between one aspect of my being and another. I have published a novel, books of poetry, essays, and criticism. I regularly review the work of others; I have edited three anthologies. I teach; I write. That feels as essential as saying I am right-handed, or that I wear glasses. That I take great joy in my grandsons, I walk on the beach, I secretly sing. My books are perhaps my best statement. They announce my propensity to experiment within a genre, to push at its boundaries as well as to honor its traditions. They testify to my interest in the work of others, my ongoing curiosity about and admiration for what other writers can achieve. They go out on the limb with opinion, and they dare to speak their minds.”

Many readers of this blog, I'm sure, are familiar with Judith's work; others will encounter her writing for the first time. Below, are selected excerpts from *"Mending Wall."  Read More 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11/8/14

Note/Update

Because of deadlines and commitments (life-its-own-self, right?) for almost three months I haven't posted anything new on the blog--until today.

In addition to the post below, I've listed links to some very fine sites on/about the essay--Assay, The Humble Essayist, Modern Times, Quotidiana, The Essay Review, and Diagram (See Quick Links below right)

# 34 Confronting Demons, Staring Down Fears: Transforming Our Deepest Misfortunes into Literary Works

This is Part One of a Two Part post. I’ll post Part Two during the first week of December.

1
Prologue
When I was a beginning writer, I attended a summer writer’s conference workshop where one of the students, an undistinguished writer, so I thought at the time, presented a draft about how on a camping trip he was hit by lightening. Unlike his other work, this draft was vivid, compelling and filled with evocative details and specifics, all of which clearly described how terrifying this near death incident was. So much so that you could almost feel his confusions and fears.

The workshop leader, a somewhat acerbic writer, saw this as a teaching moment. He said something to the effect of “…you should all hope that you’ll get hit by lightning some day.” At the time, I was irritated by what seemed to be such a flip, mean spirited, response. I even thought that he was being deliberately perverse. Most of the others in the class had, as I recall, similar reactions.

That goes to show you how much I knew about writing (and teaching) back then. Now, some twenty years later, I think I understand what he was trying to teach us--about writing.

As writers (and teachers) of autobiographical works, we know that our own as well as our students’ most compelling work can (potentially) emerge from the impulse to stare down and write about our most fearsome ghosts and demons. In workshop we refer those demons and ghosts as “hot buttons.”

“Hot buttons” can range from serious misfortunes--traumas like abuse, incest, life threatening illnesses, major disabilities, and devastating losses (like the death of a child, partner, close friend, and/or parent)--to less foreboding, but still deeply painful moments of humiliation, shame, and regret.

But just as writing about emotionally upsetting experiences can generate some very powerful, absorbing work, it can also produce straightforward personal narratives that consist largely of direct confessions and disclosures.

I’ve found that when my students write about deeply unsettling misfortunes, the writing (at least at first) tends to read like a litany of “here’s what happened to me” grievances. And the group’s collective responses are almost always sympathetic with the writer’s difficulties.

It’s a humane impulse, to be sure. Given the fragile nature of the content, those kinds of responses--and understandably so--are honest expressions of compassion and concern. As a result though, sometimes the class turns into a group therapy session. Which creates a dilemma for the workshop leader and students alike.

I say this because those responses—as empathetic as they might be--aren’t really dealing with the writing itself. In that setting, the group, it seems, rarely offers the kinds of specific suggestions--approaches and strategies--that can help the writer think about how to shape his/her thoughts and feelings into the kind of a fully dimensional, well crafted narrative that most of us—novices and experienced writers alike—are (or should be) hopeful of producing.

As writers and writing teachers then, we have to keep reminding ourselves that writing about a life is a very different undertaking than living a life. And this disparity, it seems, is an ongoing problem that many of my students—undergraduate and graduate alike--have to wrestle with.

How then can we create a workshop environment in which, without sacrificing our humanity, we’re still helping fellow writers and would-be-writers to find shape and meaning in their adversities and misfortunes?  Read More 

Note:

A reprint of Mike Steinberg's blog essay (#26 in the Archives), The Role(s) of Memory and Imagination in Creative Nonfiction appears on Faye Rapport's blog,
The Roles of Memory...

You can also read an expanded version of this essay in the Solstice Literary Magazine
The Roles of Memory...


Another craft essay, Planning For Surprise: Writing and Teaching the Personal Essay was published by TriQuarterly Triquarterly

Also, One Story, Two Narrators: Reflection’s Role In Writing and Teaching Personal Narratives appears in the current issue of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices appears in One Story, Two Narrators:.......

Earlier and much different versions of both pieces appeared on my blog (# 3), Finding
the Inner Story in Literary Nonfiction and # 19 and 20, Expecting the Unexpected: The Role of Discovery and Surprise in Literary Nonfiction. You can find both in the Archives
blog



08/16/2014
INTRO--TEACHING (YOURSELF) WHAT YOU KNOW - GUEST BLOGGER, MARY ELIZABETH POPE

I've known Mary Beth Pope for many years. She's a first rate personal essayist/memoirist and a passionate, dedicated teacher. Using her own experience as a teacher and writer, in this piece, Mary Beth talks about and illustrates how important it is for students, especially beginning or inexperienced writers, to overcome their fear of disclosing their embarrassments and human flaws and instead to look at those confusions and uncertainties as rich materials for crafting their personal essays and memoirs.

MJS

Blog # 33
TEACHING (YOURSELF) WHAT YOU KNOW--MARY ELIZABETH POPE

Recently, a colleague who knows about my childhood obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder gave me Wendy McClure’s memoir “The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie,.” As a child I had read the Little House series with a fervor bordering on delusion. I didn’t just love Laura Ingalls Wilder at the age of ten. I thought I was Laura Ingalls Wilder. So when I opened Wendy McClure’s memoir, I laughed out loud at the opening line, which reads: “I was born in 1867 in a log cabin in Wisconsin and maybe you were, too. We lived with our family in the Big Woods, and then we travelled to Indian Territory, where Pa built another house, out on the high land where the prairie grasses swayed. Right?”

Right! I laughed. Oh, wow! This was completely true of me too. I had tried to sit as still as I could in church every Sunday because I knew that “Ma” would demand no less. I had secretly hoped that when I fished with my father in the Chippewa River, I’d get leeches like Laura did in On the Banks of Plum Creek. I even sent a post card to my aunt and uncle in Rhode Island saying that I’d gone “berry-picking” with “Ma and Pa” that afternoon, at which point a call was placed to my parents in Michigan, asking if I was okay. How funny, I thought, that someone else had experienced these books the same way I had.

Then I stopped laughing and got jealous, the kind of jealous only writers really know, I think, when they realize they’d had a great subject right under their nose all along and never even considered it worthwhile until someone else pounced on it successfully. I mean, that was MY childhood delusion Wendy McClure was writing about. And she did it in such a smart way, too, taking on all the politically problematic elements of the “going West” trajectory of the books, which ten-year-old girls don’t necessarily pick up on, but I had, after my graduate work in postcolonial studies. In fact, in a discussion in one of my graduate classes I’d even brought up the moment in The Long Winter in which Pa dresses up and performs in (yikes, I know) blackface. So what, I wondered, had prevented me from realizing that I could have written a book about the Little House on the Prairie series?

As a teacher of creative nonfiction, I know how to walk my 18-22 year-old-students through their own lives, identifying the subject-worthy elements they may have overlooked, especially when they tell me they are too young for anything to have “happened” to them yet. I have them make lists, do bubble charts, write about their hobbies and obsessions, no matter how small they may seem. And in general, I’m usually successful at getting them to find a subject that both they and their audience will find interesting.

So how is it that I could miss a subject that loomed so large in my childhood?

In thinking this over, I’ve realized that there are three primary barriers that prevent even seasoned writers from recognizing a topic as subject-worthy, and in my own case, it doesn’t matter that, first of all, I know what they are, and second, that I teach other people to overcome these barriers every day as a teacher. They’re still difficult barriers for me to overcome, still the reason I miss things, which makes them all the more important to drag out in the open and remind myself (and you, since you’re reading this) that you have to move past these things in order to access your best work.

The first of these barriers is embarrassment. Now, I talk about embarrassment with my students as a fertile subject for writing. But the truth is, as a human being myself, even if there are things I’m willing to talk about that embarrass me, there are other things, both new and old, that I’m just not willing to face. And if I am honest, the truth is that I’ve always been kind of embarrassed by my obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder, because that story about the postcard I sent my relatives about “berry-picking” with “Ma and Pa” has come to feature prominently in my parents’ narrative about realizing their daughter was strange. It was the kind of story I’ve shared only with my husband, a handful of other Laura Ingalls Wilder fans I’d met in graduate school, and the one friend who gave me The Wilder Life. These were the people who already knew about my insomnia, my shut-in tendencies, my awful ungenerous germ phobia, and the fact that, despite my academic credentials, I have never missed an episode of ABC’s The Bachelor in eighteen seasons, even though I know it’s a really, really, really terrible show and violates every feminist impulse I have. Read More