Michael Steinberg

Introductory Note:

This month’s guest blogger is Tarn Wilson, a first-rate memoirist, essayist, and creative writing teacher.

* I first heard Tarn’s talk “Finding Form” at last year’s NonfictionNow conference in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was part of a panel on/about structure. In fact, my last month’s post, Joe Mackall's essay, came from that same panel.

As a writer, editor, and teacher, I’ve always believed that finding the right form/structure for either a stand-alone piece or a book length-work is the writer’s most fundamental, important challenge.

Those familiar with this blog know that I’ve posted perhaps more craft/teaching essays on matters of structure, what Annie Dillard describes as “fashioning a text.” than I have on any other aspect or element of our craft.

And to my mind, one of the wisest, most accessible (and inclusive) pieces is Tarn Wilson’s “Finding Form.” In describing her own struggles to find the right form for her memoir The Slow Farm, Tarn speaks directly and with great empathy and respect to writers--novices and experienced alike--and to teachers of literary nonfiction; including high school, college (undergraduate and graduate), and adult education.

*Last winter, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies published all five essays. The link is Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies

MJS


Blog # 54 FINDING FORM BY TARN WILSON

I’m going to make an assumption. You either have pages of non-fiction material, yet to find a form—or like me, you’re a nerd obsessed with anything related to the writing process and structure. To get us started, I’ll begin with some highly simplistic and arguable definitions:

Essay - the exploration of a question or an idea, which may include personal experiences to support the thinking.

Memoir – a personal story, which may include reflection to deepen the meaning.

Of course, our nonfiction writing exists on a continuum. How, then, in our writing, do we choose the ratio of reflection to story? How do we find our form?

To help us think about these question, I’m going to share some lessons I learned in the process of writing my memoir, The Slow Farm, the story of my early years with my hippy parents, living off the land in British Columbia.

First lesson: Don’t be in a hurry. I wrote the first draft, if you could call it that, in my mid-twenties. It was autobiographical fiction. I sent it to the only writer I knew, who noted a few lines she liked, but let me down gently with this spare, wise advice. “Don’t be in a hurry.” I read between the lines: the book was not yet a book. Slowly, I realized I’d chosen to fictionalize because—while I had vivid memories of childhood—I did not yet understand their significance. I’d used fiction to force resolutions I’d not yet earned. I needed more time to listen to the material, to trust I’d discover the reasons the memories were rising in me. So I started writing and writing and writing, as honestly as I could, a new prompt almost every day, resisting the urge to settle on form too early.

Second lesson: Find some boundaries. My whole childhood had been complicated and unusual—and I was trying to write it all. The story was too big and unfocused. Since almost every writing exercise I gave myself, no matter where it began, ended with my time on Texada Island, I decided I’d focus on those years my parents were attempting their counter-culture experiment. (This required I cut the first third of my book, writing I’d labored over. It took a full day of alternatingly walking and lying on my back on my bed arguing with myself before I finally had the courage to let it go.) But I was pleased my story was now bound both geographically and by time.

The next stage taught me a number of lessons about finding form. In those early years when I was first drafting, I was reading nature writers and as well as memoirs of spiritual journeys: Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Gretel Ehrlich, Terry Tempest Williams. I started to see my story in a cosmic or mythological framework. I reflected on the fluid nature of memory. I learned about the geological history of the region and imagined the islands of the Pacific Northwest rising from the sea. I linked my story to the story of Genesis and to the nature of creativity itself – form coming from formlessness. I linked my story to the Garden of Eden: my parents’ search for a perfect wilderness, which couldn’t last. I used that as a frame and opened each chapter with a quote from Genesis or writers on the nature of creativity and story.

When I gave my new pages to my first readers, they were not interested in any of my fabulous abstract pondering. They only cared about the little moments in which I seemed to have accurately captured a child’s point of view. I seemed to have stumbled upon a voice, not the literal voice of a child, but a voice true to a child’s consciousness.

Eventually, again, and with much pain, I cut my philosophical reflection, leaving me with a spare book, brief vignettes from a hippy kid. (All those abandoned passages—more pages than made the final version—were not wasted. They just sunk underground, invisibly informing the themes and structure.)

In the process I learned this about myself: I tend to go abstract – to obsess over meaning, patterns, and making connections. In my writing (and probably in my life), I had to become more grounded, to tie my stories to place and time and specific details.

As I did, I realized I’d been using intellectual meanderings to distance myself from the difficult emotions that would arise when I was fully immersed in a scene. I had to write toward what scared me, toward the emotion in the story. Lesson learned: Notice your strategies for avoiding discomfort and work against your default tendencies.

Lesson four: Pay attention to your readers. I was exploring so many directions—and so actively trying to avoid what was painful—I couldn’t recognize when I’d hit on something true. This is where my new group of other beginning writers came in. They didn’t yet have much expertise, but they could tell me when they thought the writing was alive, and they all pointed to the same passages.

Lesson five: Voice can lead you to form. Those passages then guided the shape of the book. It evolved into short chapters, in a child’s perspective, with vivid sense detail, similar to the beautiful book House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.

But then I had a problem. A child’s point of view is, by nature, limited – especially the ages I was covering—four through six. The story seemed suffocating insular, lacking any history, cultural context, or sense of how the story had shaped me as an adult. But any time I tried to weave in context and reflection, those passages were a jarring intrusion into the child’s world.

By this time I’d enrolled in an MFA program, so with the help of my mentor Judith Kitchen, we devised a solution. Between each chapter, I included an “artifact” which reveals some context to the reader: quotes from the counter culture books my parents were reading, song lists and lyrics, historical time lines, photographs, excerpts from letters, newspaper clippings. Instead of guiding the readers to an evaluation of my parents’ choices, I asked them to actively engage. To myself, I called this absence of reflection “gaps”: space where I invite the reader to make meaning.

Of course, I made conscious decisions in how I juxtaposed the artifacts. For example I placed a line from Summerhill’s A Radical Approach to Childrearing that argues against the teaching of table manners next to a scene in which I was ashamed I didn’t know social niceties. I placed the line, “I do not think that seeing sexual intercourse would have any bad effect on a self-regulated child” next to an unsettling sexual incident.

And I do develop themes around learning, idealism, and acceptance, but in the end, I make few evaluations on my parents’ choices or how they’d shaped me. (I knew I’d achieved my goal when in the same week one reader accused my parents of being abusive and another enthused about the freedom and love they’d provide me.)

But there was a cost to the choice to cut most reflection. Most best selling memoirs are shaped like novels. They included big plot events, which lead, in the last third of the story, to a climactic turning point when a writer has a psychological insight, which leads to an improved life—or at least some hard-earned wisdom. My story had veered from that model. I knew that meant it would be difficult to find a publisher. Even worst, though, I feared that my book was boring and irreparably flawed, maybe not a book at all.

Then I stumbled upon an article by the poet and memoirist Mark Doty, published in Poets and Writers: “Bride in Beige.” He observes that people who work primarily in other genres come to memoir with a “habitual way of making meaning.” He says journalists “understand reality as something that can be corroborated: facts can and must be checked.” Essayists follow a line of inquiry. Novelists, he says, are concerned with the creation of the narrator as a character, in relationship with other characters. (I’d add that the novelists have contributed to the expectation that a memoir follow a predictable redemptive story arc.) Poets, though, are after “a representation of how it feels to live.” I realized that although I did not think of myself as poet, I was writing from that sensibility. I was aiming to capture what it felt like to be alive as a child in a place and time.

His frame gave me more confidence in my choices. Those readers who expected a journalistic or novelistic structure might be disappointed, but I was poet. Who knew! Lesson learned: Form grows from your intentions.

My meandering mess had been paired down to a tight story with minimal reflection and has been far better received by a wider audience than I’d ever hoped. In the years since, however, I’ve written nothing but essay, gorging myself on the reflection I’d denied myself. Now, I’m starting a new memoir (I think), with the familiar fear and uncertainty, wrestling again with voice and form. So, I’ve written this for you. But I’ve also written this for me, to remind myself.

Lesson seven. Begin again at the beginning. Don’t be in a hurry.

Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm. Her essays appear in Brevity, Defunct, Gulf Stream, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, Ruminate, South Loop Review, and The Sun, among others. She is a graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Read More 

Blog # 53

Of Rats, Whiskey Priests and Half-Crazed Grandfathers,
Joe Mackall, Guest Blogger


Note:

In January1999, the inaugural issue of issue of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, the literary journal I founded, came out. Some three months later, Joe Mackall and Dan Lehman, both at Ashland University, founded River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. These were the second and third literary journals devoted exclusively to the genre we’re now calling creative nonfiction. In fact, Creative Nonfiction Lee Gutkind’s journal preceded both Fourth Genre and River Teeth by some four years. And today, all three journals are still actively engaged in helping to shape an ongoing, evolving conversation about the genre.

Back in 1999, neither Joe or I could have predicted just how diverse and inclusive the genre would become. Nor could we have imagined just how many first-rate literary writers not only have made the form their own, but also have expanded its scope and possibilities.

When I was a graduate student, and during the early years of my teaching career, with few exceptions (The Paris Review comes to mind) the editors of many literary journals were as often or not, scholar/teachers and/or literary critics.

Which is not the case with many of our very best contemporary literary journals. For the past twenty-plus years, a good number of editors are first and foremost teaching writers. And to my mind, one of the very best writer/editor/teachers is Joe Mackall, who also to my great delight agreed to be this month’s guest blogger.

Joe’s bio note below gives us just a small sample of the fine books he’s written. But if you look further, you’ll find the many, many workshops and talks he’s presented as well as the impressive number of essays on/about matters of genre and craft—many of which, including this month's post, ”Of Rats, Whiskey Priests and Half-Crazed Grandfathers,” ,are of great value to those of us who write and teach this form.

This month I’m delighted to feature Joe’s The piece first appeared in Assay’s special conference issue. The piece is from a recent Nonfiction Now panel on structure and shape—an important part, maybe the most important part, of what we do. It's something we’ve discussed in previous posts. And something we'll continue to talk more about in forthcoming posts.

For a look at all five of those essays go to
Assay Journal and take a look at Hydra-Headed Memoirs & Well-Connected Essays.

MJS

Blog #53 Of Rats, Whiskey Priests and Half-Crazed Grandfathers, Joe Mackall, Guest Blogger

Whenever I’ve spent too much time wondering if what I’m writing is an essay or memoir or literary nonfiction or anything else really, bad things start to happen. First I’ll stare at the screen as if it’s a divine oracle, and what I need to do is wait patiently for the answers to all my writing problems. When that fails, I gaze out my office window, watching the squirrels, wondering how they all stay so damn busy.

But on bad days before I can move my fingers on the keyboard, my rat brain kicks in. The rats fill my mind with unpretty thoughts. They sound something like this: Oh, my god, maybe I’ve said all there is to say about the passing of time in one ten-page essay, too many writers far better than I have exhausted the terrain of family and ancestors and descendants, maybe I’m writing a collection of essays, oh, my god, the only thing worse than a memoir on how becoming a grandparent has upended my life is a collection of essays about how becoming a grandparent has upended my life. Won’t reading essays about some bald-ass middle-aged white guy becoming a grandfather be a lot like looking at pictures of an acquaintance’s grandkids? Oh, they’re so cute. Oh, he has your nose. Oh, what does she call you? Oh, who gives a shit? Maybe I can use the biggest lie in nonfiction publishing to my advantage: It’s a memoir in essays. Sure, nobody would see through that sophisticated masquerade. Maybe there’s no point in writing at all. Who’s going to be reading books in ten years anyway? Goddamn Kindle. Screens everywhere you look. iPad this. But then, just as I’m about to break down and weep, out of the dark and dank alleys populated by the rodents, the sad, disillusioned, yet kindly and often wise priest who lives in my brain turns a light on. The rats scurry, vanish. And then I hear his sonorous voice: Just write what you need to write, my son, goddamnit. It’s all about that. It always has been.

I’m beginning to believe that the worst thing about writing is publishing, or at the very least publishing too soon. Even giving a reading from a book not yet finished can be damaging, at least for me. The book I’m working on now I’m calling personal nonfiction in an attempt to stop trying to wrest essay from memoir or condense as yet unrealized sections of memoir into essays. The problem arises when I’ve tried to excerpt some of the manuscript for a reading or for publication.

At that point, I’ve tended to force the issue, fashioning essays out of what was longer and less defined material. Now I have four pieces, two have been published and two have been read in public. All four seem “complete,” as if I’ve said everything I’ve needed to say about the subjects of those similar but separate pieces. This is where I found myself a few months ago. For all my work, I could not write anything else on my book. An imaginary brain priest can only do so much. I had the four “complete” pieces at the beginning of the book and then a mass of writhing, squirming half-baked thoughts for the next two hundred pages.

So I did what every sensible nonfiction writer would do: I started work on a novel. But this didn’t solve the problem. All the unanswered questions of my nonfiction book were still unanswered. All the dread and anxiety that overtook me upon becoming a grandparent did not go away. I needed to get back to my book. I needed to move myself toward understanding, but I still could not get past the fact of these published sections.

I know the old whiskey priest is right. He and I share a working-class background. We know not a single bricklayer, for example, ever looked at a problem with a wall and said: That’s going to be too much work to fix. I’ll just have five-foot ceilings in this house. I love those other walls I’ve built. Those walls say it all. People will be sitting down reading their Kindles anyway, so what’s the point of an eight-foot ceiling. No, a bricklayer would solve the problem. She’d tear down the whole damn wall and start over if that’s what it took. Bricklayers do not truck in rats. That’s the nature of craft. "

I’ve been so busy entangling myself in the terms of art that I’ve ignored the work of craft. So I got to work. I’ll offer a couple of paragraphs from one of my “published-too- soon-essays” to give an idea of the subject matter and my attempt to get back to what Sonya Huber has called" a book-length nonfiction thing."

“I can’t exist more than a few days without seeing my granddaughters. My whole way of being wavers in their presence. My dark disposition begins to lighten up. I’ve figured out some of it. After a quarter century of loving all the same people, I’ve fallen in love with somebody new. I’ve loved my children all of their lives and my wife every day for nearly thirty years, but now there’s new love. Perhaps my heart’s tectonic shifts have shaken my psychic geography. I have two new people to love, two new people to see the world through, to share life with, to worry about, to fear for in a time when I sometimes can’t recognize my own country and when the world’s people appear easily connected electronically and so dangerously disconnected in just about every other conceivable way."

“I often feel as though I’m moving toward the edge of a foreign
land, the plains of an emotional dystopia. I know it’s connected in ways I don’t fully understand to life as a grandfather and as a man in his fifties, life as an American in a country increasingly polarized, fracked, outsourced, droned, downsized, gunned down, teetering on the dream-edge of itself. As a writer, editor, a full, tenured professor, I have work I love and am still young and coherent enough to do. I also know what’s out there waiting for me: impotence, probably; incontinence, likely; senior moments, and then, surely, no moments at all. I have a great family, a wife I cherish, three loving children, two wondrous granddaughters. My father’s alive and well and lives a couple miles from me. My granddaughters too live only minutes away. Yet just beyond all this peace and love I perceive the vague existence of foreboding or surrender or something I’ve not allowed myself to imagine. I’m gazing through paradise and seeing into the shadow of the fall.”

What I’m going to try in order to break out of my essay/memoir/literary nonfiction funk is reach into the shadow life of the words in these paragraphs. For example, how much of my anguish stems from my “dark disposition”? I need to pull out that thread and stretch it across the bolt of the bigger story. I also need to free write on the nature of familial love. What specifically is it about the world that I now fear? If it’s not a better place than it was in what ways am I implicated? What about this changing America? Is it changing or am I just getting older? How the hell did going to a movie become dangerous? If this doesn’t work, I’ll start teasing out words whose larger meanings seem to resonate. Words like “foreboding,” “surrender,” “paradise,” “the fall.” I’ll begin asking questions of my own material. Did my own grandparents feel any of this? How has grandparenting changed? What about the role of grandparents through time and in other cultures? Is anybody else as messed up as I am about this, or does everybody just whip out smart phones and finger-push faces of tiny strangers in front of people who don’t care?

Once I start taking on all of these ideas, start doing the necessary work of unpacking these essays, I can get back to the book-length thing. It will be a mess, but it will be mess worth the work.

And then just when I start to think I may just be ok after all, I recall this paragraph:

“I realize my reaction to becoming a grandfather is not typical, perhaps not even normal. A few confessions: I resisted getting new carpet in our library because my granddaughters had crawled upon the old. I’ve let Ellie, the oldest, cover every inch of my bald pate with Strawberry Shortcake stickers. I mourned the day she stopped watching the Wonder Pets. I still miss Linny, Tuck and Ming-Ming, too. I’ve tucked a small blanket into my belt and, having been transformed into a princess by Ellie, danced around our living room, spinning until dizzy, my blanket billowing around me like a jeweled ball gown on a hippo prancing and pretty in a field of poppy.”


Joe Mackall is the author of Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish and The Last Street Before Cleveland. Co-editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” He teaches at Ashland University.  Read More 

Note:

This teaching blog on/about issues of genre and craft is approaching its fifth year; and while all the contributing writers, myself included, choose to write about whatever concerns they might have on/about our teaching and writing, a basic concern is --one I've noticed that keeps coming coming up regularly--about narratives and narrators. For the most part, the larger issue is about how and why personal essayists, as well as writers of memoir, personal literary journalism, and personal/cultural criticism, decide what the right fit is between our narrator(s) and what it is we're writing.

This is a matter, I believe, that's shared by most of us who teach in the genre. In her essay below, Jessica Handler approaches it in a somewhat different way. In her essay below, she explains how, both in her own writing as well as in her teaching, she distinguishes between the "Eye" and "I," narrators that she refers to as "dual selves.""

MJS

# 52 Addressing the Dual Selves in the “Eye and the I”, Jessica Handler, Guest Blogger


If we accept the fact that in the memoir and the personal essay, the “I” pronoun represents the contemporary self, the self doing the writing and the ruminating, then for me, the “eye” is that same earlier self, the self who’s experiencing past events.

The “I” considers and makes coherent narrative of what the “eye” saw, and
for the duration of the time at the desk, the making of the art, these
dual selves have to co-exist. Sometimes that desk can be a crowded place.

I’d like to address this approach to the “Eye/I” in my own work. I’d also like to offer some examples of how/why it encouraged me to use the “Eye/I” as an area of exploration for student writers new to exploring the idea of the author’s self as both narrator/protagonist.

I teach undergraduate, graduate, and adult education classes; and I’m consistently surprised by the number of student writers at all levels who struggle with the freedom and responsibilities of using that “I” pronoun.

We’re socialized to be hyper-aware that the use of “I” and “me” are bragging, dominating a conversation, and calling undue attention to the self. But if we’re writing creative nonfiction, particularly essays and memoirs, whose story is it but mine, me, I? Of course there’s balance involved, but it’s the recognition of how to welcome and best use that working area within “freedom + responsibility” that I consider that area of exploration.

We are, as Joan Didion writes in her 1968 essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” “well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be…”

I’m an experiential learner, which makes me particularly loyal to practicing experiential teaching. Writing my first book, Invisible Sisters: A Memoir (2009), led to my first concrete engagement with the “Eye/I.”

So, the memoir: I am the oldest of three sisters, and by the time I was thirty-two, I was the only one living. My younger sister Susie died of leukemia when she was eight and I was ten. Our youngest sister Sarah was born with a rare white cell disorder called Kostmann’s Syndrome, which is, in broad strokes, the opposite of leukemia. She died at 27. Our father was a civil rights attorney in Atlanta in the 60s, so we were as a family faced with the question of how to help others when we can’t help our own.

When I was an adolescent I’d begun writing my way into my story. It was a means of verifying for myself that I was present, alive, and living through an experience or a series of experiences. I wrote in journals, recording the most ordinary moments of my family’s life and mine. How my mom and I went to the grocery store. How my sister had brain surgery and my boyfriend made a stupid joke about it. I was. in fact. creating an “I” and “eye” without realizing it.

Other parts of our family’s chronicle existed in photographs, report cards and letters-- and outside of my own resources, in newspaper articles and libraries. As an adult writer, the availability of these items led me to physically, emotionally, and in many cases, sensually re-experience the “eye” that pure memory could not provide. Example #1 is that I kept so much of those ephemera.

Another example: when I was ten, not long after my sister Susie died, my father took my mother, my sister Sarah, and me – along with another family who were his best friends - on vacation to Jamaica. When I tell this story now, people sigh with delight imagining a family healing in a Caribbean paradise. In those days, Jamaica wasn't the tourist destination it is now, and even if it had been, none of us were ready for fun.

Thirty some years later, when I wrote about my family's trip, I kept seeing myself as a child, gagging over the ackee at our Jamaican breakfast table. My “eye” came back full force. That breakfast had tasted to me like burnt motor oil, it looked like runny eggs with big black spots, and it smelled like talcum power.

Was it really as bad as I remembered? I had been in an understandably
terrible frame of mind the summer I was ten, but simply writing about a
bad taste wasn’t a narrative, or even a scene. I wanted to test the difference
between the ten-year-old me (the “eye”) and the adult me (the “I”).

So I printed a recipe from the Internet, went to an international market,
bought canned ackee (there was none fresh where I live) and cooked a
facsimile of that breakfast. I ate it. And in that act, where I compared the
“eye” and the “I,” the writer me created an experience that I could write
about not only with some depth and conflict but also with the deliberate intent of making meaning and sense out of that experience– there’s that “I” on the page, claiming what’s true for her.

I’d say that doing the research is an experiential way of entering that possibility space, re-experiencing the “eye” through the lens of the “I.”
In order to create a narrative, sometimes, while I was cooking and eating, I wrote in double-entry notebooks. On one side of the line, notes about the facts—what, for example, I had in my hand– or in my mouth at the time. And when I was researching; I wrote notes on the other side, notes that described the questions, the emotional turmoil, the joys and surprises, I was feeling--along with the free associations that arose with each item. I also collected thousands of pages of medical records; I hunted down diaries and photos; and I revisited key locations.

The “eye” of me then and the “I” of me at the time of the writing were each
deeply affected, but differently--the “eye” by living this twenty year experience in real time; and the “I” by understanding that genuine, effective, and honorable writing about the experience would require a commitment to creating a narrative about the act of self examination.

That’s the experiential aspect of the “Eye/I.” And it’s also the permission I give both to myself and to my students.

In his essay, “Looking For My Family,” Ian Frazier explains that after his parents’ deaths, he catalogued their papers and the detritus of two lifetimes; neckties, purses, postcards, into what he called “The Mom and Dad Museum.” His method in crafting “Family” was to “look for artifact that suggested narrative.”

Writers of personal essays and memoirs can take something useful from Frazier’s approach. It’s his way of acknowledging that the passage of time is less about nostalgia and, in this particular case, more of an opportunity to create friction within a plot.

“How it felt to me…” Joan Didion writes. Which me is she considering? In this case, the “eye” – the me of “then.”

How, I ask students, did “it” feel to you, that wedding, that funeral, that
Boring afternoon on the intercity bus, that time you careened down a park side hill with your brother on a red Flexible Flyer? This inquiry, along with giving them sufficient time to write, allows students to open up, look inside, and meet themselves coming round again. Still another example of how we, as writers, can develop more substantive narratives.

Writing creative nonfiction, as we know, involves much more than plot. It allows us to examine and evaluate the effects of an important subject, and in that way, it operates on two levels; a nominal level, which is the surface, or basic storyline, and a substantive level, the real pulse that runs beneath the storyline.

Knowing this can help us better understand the difference between the “Eye/I.” The “eye” shows us the nominal story, and the “I” extracts and develops the substantive story. It is in the substantive writing that the author of an essay or a memoir does most of her real work; and it’s also where the reader locates the heart of the piece.

Writing about the self means that, for the duration of the writing, you can’t really separate the two selves. Think of the Russian nesting doll, the matroyshka doll. The outer shell is the writer self, and the inner dolls are the ‘eye’ selves.

Without the inner pieces, that doll is empty.

Bio note

Jessica Handler is the author of Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief (St. Martins Press, December 2013.) Her first book, Invisible Sisters: A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2009, University of Georgia Press, 2015) is one of the “Twenty Five Books All Georgians Should Read.” Her nonfiction has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Newsweek, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, The Washington Post, and More Magazine. Honors include residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writers Center, the 2009 Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellowship, and special mention for a 2008 Pushcart Prize. Featured as one of nine contemporary Southern women writers in Vanity Fair magazine, she learned to never again wear couture. She teaches at Ogellhorpe University in Atlanta.

www.jessicahandler.com Read More 

NOTE: The craft essay below is by Anne Marie Oomen, an extraordinarily gifted writer/teacher who I've known and taught with for almost thirty years. Anne Marie's intriguing, ground- breaking essay uses guided prompts and specific exercises and examples to illustrate the various ways in which sensory recall helps shape the early stages of our composing process.Her essay will be of value to teachers at all levels as well as to inexperienced and seasoned writers alike.

MJS

BLOG # 51 SENSORY INTERROGATION, ANNE MARIE OOMEN
July 23, 2016

As a memoirist, I can muck about aimlessly in whatever memory haunts me, significant or insignificant, for so long that I lose momentum and drop the draft before I know anything about that memory other than that I have it by the tail and don’t know what to do. Meaningful, even transformative, memories float in my mind, strangely foggy, lacking a truer, writerly or crafted meaning. I want meaning; I can’t find it. Yet these fragments stay and stay, worry me like the tongue to the chipped tooth. They want to be story. If I can develop them, they will shape my page-persona, and in some cases, my very being. But I am slow. I need a process to fill out the memory, to slow me down so I’m not racing for meaning before I discover what I actually hold in that obsessive brain of mine. I need a more efficient means of focus. In this, I am not alone. Getting memory from the mind to the page is often a challenge for the developing writers in my classes as well. Early drafts tend to be flat, vaguely abstract. Of course, they are early drafts, but if we could launch a little further along in the process, if we could mine what we didn’t know that we knew, it might be like touching skin; if not, it is like touching paper. Only one is warm.

As brain science has evolved in the last decades, it has proven that some of our old school teaching practices were effective for reasons we couldn’t then articulate except in philosophical terms. One successful reclamation is sensory recall. In short, parts of the brain coordinate with sensory experience: the more engaged, the richer the recall, and often, the richer the writing. Those odd neurological patterns, those banks of brain cells that shimmer with change and replication, those encoded reports—they hold the secrets that open not just memory but initiate the journey to both meaning and narrative. When I discovered what so many writers before me have also discovered: that the senses led straight to my working memory, the memory that initiates story and enriches it enough to suggest a path to larger meaning, things got easier. The problem with this? Simply saying to myself, and to my young writers: Use sensory language. That is about as helpful as reminding a child to tie her shoes before she has learned.

Sensory Interrogation

Over the last two decades of teaching and writing memoir with both adults and young artists, I refined a particular process for getting to the senses. I gave it a dubious name: sensory interrogation. Even twenty years ago, I knew the term was politically weighted and carried more serious connotations, yet despite its darker meanings, it worked for me because of its abrasive feel. That abrasion of memory—its nervy psoriasis—kept me asking: why this memory? Why not the one my sibling has? What’s behind the thing we carry, the rub of the mind, that scabbed over identity? Initially, sensory interrogation prodded a truth I didn’t know, or more often, didn’t want to know. For me, getting the senses to the pages of memoir asked: What am I hiding from myself? And secreted in the sensory recall were the just-starting-to-be-visible answers, as well as fine ways to draw in readers. Eventually, as Steven King claims, sensory language builds a relationship with the reader because it makes it easier for them to read our minds.

Put simply, interrogation is sensory recall: simple, obvious, familiar, and addressed in many textbooks. It places the senses first. I used the word “interrogation” to describe a specific set of pointed questions for getting to the sensory experience, for producing language that leads. Before I incorporated sensory recall into my early process, I tended toward narrative summary. That places action first. It’s the synopsis of the movie, not, as Jack Kerouac would have it, the movie of the mind.

I observed in my students a similar impulse, to summarize what happened—often with admirable style or voice, but we we were miles from meaning, and the potential for metaphor and figurative language was also delayed. Even dramatic action mutes in summary, denied forward motion by our unwillingness to harness the senses immediately. Was there an efficiency I could find with sensory questions? I examined how I thought when I entered the scattered realm of memory, and over time, I developed a set of questions that were sensory specific, but also uniquely phrased to initiate deeper recall. Through this interrogation, answers for how to shape the narrator and the narrator’s intention often surfaced more quickly. This shortcut did what process should do: make it easier. Gornick, Hampl, Root and Steinberg, in more sophisticated terms, have led us in this work but I like to think I’ve added some twists.

The Logistics

First, I talk about transformative moments. I explain these are moments where something existed one way before it happened, and another way after it happened. I offer examples: first car, first kiss, childbirth(s), deaths of a loved/hated one, winning or losing, wedding, coming out, break-up, divorce, court verdict, accidents, moments of synchronicity, a car, a scar, a broken bone. The essence: an internal shift. I/You were changed. I ask them to avoid a long time period, and instead to zero in on moments of the time period. So for instance, not the entire year in the Peace Corp, but the moment when, in the village, the water bubbled up from the new well for the first time, and you saw what it would mean to the child water-carriers who had previously walked for miles in the heat.

Next, on each of three plain white (no lines) five by eight cards, participants write a phrase that suggests one of those transformative moments from their lives, a moment they want to write about because they know it carries weight, but they don’t know its secret yet. One on each card. Why three total? Because finding the one to write about raises the stakes, but as William Stafford suggests, having three lowers the stakes, takes the pressure off. If one moment doesn’t work or, as is more often the case, turns out to be too hot, then the alternative is right there, not to worry. Choose one of the others. And why a card? Because it needs to be small enough to be utterly non-threatening, and big enough to fill satisfactorily. With the card, I am saying two things to my students and to myself: Don’t be scared andLook how much you have. Most know that, but the card makes tangible the belief.

Then I ask writers to study the “moments” on the three cards, letting their minds range, and find the one they want to investigate now. I tell them that maybe they will feel some energy around this particular card. They usually know right away. I ask them to focus on that one, and to turn the others over for now. I tell them that if this one gets too hot or goes cold, just choose another. The only way to do this wrong is not to do it.

I ask them to take some quiet breaths. I tell them I am going to ask a series of questions that will help open memory of this moment. I ask them not to copy the questions I ask, but to list short answers, just fast first-come responses to the questions. I tell them to avoid complete sentences. Just list. I tell them they may fill both sides of the card, but for now to avoid prose. I set the timer on my phone to 45 seconds after each question, but I watch them, and if a question seems to be keeping heads down, I give them another fifteen or thirty seconds before I ask the next question.

Why I Ask the Questions

Lists of sensory questions exist in many fine texts—because sensory recall is not an uncommon practice. As expected, the questions cover the usual five senses. These texts help, but the problem is logistics. Too much on the desk. Too much to distract. Because when I read, a text is guiding me instead of a human voice—I don’t explore sensory recall with deep discipline. I am scanning the page. I drift among the questions, and maybe I eventually get to some breakthrough, but it is not an efficient process. (This may be my attention problem—though I see it often in my students.)

So with memory and a small pale card as tools, I loose writers from personal distractions by asking the questions aloud, in a group, in a timed setting. I use voice to release writers from interference; there’s no text, no going back to reading. They have only to think and write the response. Perhaps a quiet human voice also instills a release from the interior judgments that can halt writing. It’s just a voice, just a card, just a moment. By acting as facilitator, and freeing them from the formal page, I become more like a benevolent meditation guide—though those who know me will smile at that.

By the way, the guidance I’m offering for them, I am also offering to my own mind. I always have cards of my own. I always have a memory to play with. I don’t always get the quality they do because guiding demands attention, and I am timing. That said, I was taught to write with the class by Mike Steinberg in the eighties. He said it prevents us forgetting what it’s like to be student. It reduces the ego: I will learn memory work along with them. He was right. It has served me well.

The Questions

First, I ask writers to think of the moment’s place and to stand inside that place, wherever it was. I ask them to just be in that past place, looking around in the space. I tell them to relax about what they can no longer remember, and just feel around in the memory. It doesn’t matter if the space is interior or exterior. Emily Dickinson says, Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Since I never argue with Emily, my sensory questions assume a slant.

1. My first question is not what does it look like. That question asks too much to start and launches sentences when I want just touchstones for the mind. My first question is both more ephemeral and precise: What was the light like?

I stumbled on this first question because artist friends discuss light the way writers discuss language. Writer friends tell me it’s common in memory, but it’s such a given, it gets overlooked or automated—on a bright day in March. The light of memory is rarely mined for meaning, but what it offers is meaningful: not just time of day, but words that suggest mood, and make writers look at, ironically, something that is not quite there—thus launching discovery, a process of seeing through to something unseen. It’s a sideways question that may suggest or contradict mood, a feeling-light moment, an atmospheric translucence toward meaning.

Forty-five to sixty seconds pass. I can hear them breathe.

2 My second question goes like this: Observe that light falling on objects around you. Reach out and touch one object in the place. What is the texture of the thing? Just describe the feel of it, not the thing itself. If writers need more help with this, I tell them the thing may be anything from wall to rain, from tabletop to shoestring, from hotpot to I phone. Just list.

3 I stay with the objects, but enlarge the space. I ask them to list other things that are important to this moment. Inside or outside, small or large, it doesn’t matter; list a few things that are there. Then I add, what are the dominant colors? This question enlarges the visual in color. We often miss color in early drafts. Later, when they refer to this card, color will be one of the sensory details that sticks. Like an expressionist painting.

4 Things move more quickly now. I say, There are sounds in this moment, but one sound rises above the others and that sound is significant. This sound might define the moment. It can be quiet or loud. It can be a voice, a noise, anything from a growl to a violin. Describe its tenor. Describe it in such a way, I would want to imitate it. Again, this invites metaphor and descriptive language.  Read More 

NOTE: Mike Steinberg’s new collection--Greatest Hits and Some That Weren’t--eleven selected personal essays and memoirs on/about childhood, baseball, place, aging, travel, teaching, and writing—is now available from Amazon, or through Carmike Press/Seahorse Books (carmikepress@gmail.com)

Blog # 50, Hindrance or Help: How Repetition Can Stop (or Start) Your Writing
by Mike Steinberg

FOREWORD: I adapted this essay from a panel talk I gave at the River Teeth Writer’s Conference on June 3 in Ashland, Ohio.

The idea for the River Teeth panel grew out of a series of emails between personal essayist, Pat Madden, and myself--over the matter of duplication and repetition in our own (and in other’s) writing.

The issue that came up most frequently in our correspondence was, and I’m paraphrasing: When we recycle/rephrase/reuse our already-published ideas, thoughts, and opinions, when are we plagiarizing, from ourselves; and when does repeating ourselves become a means by which we’re looking from a different perspective? And when we dig more deeply into ideas and issues that we've already written about, does it mean we’re going back to old material; or, could it be that these are materials and ideas we haven’t yet fully explored or exhausted?

These are, I think, important concerns, especially for autobiographical writers--personal essayists and memoirists--as well as those of us that write personal journalism and/or personal/ cultural criticism--which is, I’m betting, almost everyone who might be reading this blog post. In other words, at one time or another in our writing lives, haven’t we all had to deal with this matter?

Here then, is my current take on it.

*
Mostly we authors must repeat ourselves--that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences so great and so moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anybody else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and humbled in just that way ever before...and we tell our two or three stories each time in a new disguise--maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
--Albert Einstein

I’ll begin with some brief back-story regarding my own struggles with this problem.

I’m primarily a memoirist/personal essayist who also teaches and writes essays on matters of genre and craft. A few years ago, I began to be more aware and then gradually more troubled by the realization that I seemed to be repeating myself in my writing--in both my personal essays and memoirs and in my craft essays as well.

This wasn’t the first time, though. For years, a voice in the back of my head had been nagging away, scolding me really, for having written too much about baseball. And, it’s true; baseball, in one form or another, had been part of most of my stand-alone and book length narratives.

In time, I began to feel, first, a little defensive, then, apologetic--and, finally, more self-conscious and defensive, especially when colleagues, friends and former students would ask what I was working on.

At a point, my self-consciousness turned into an almost inhibiting fear--a fear that perhaps I was destined to become a one-note writer, like those Hollywood actors who’ve played the same kinds of character roles over and over again. Worse yet, what if I’d literally written myself out?

Right around then, I started comparing myself (and with some envy, I admit) to other, more versatile, writers--writers, who, to my mind, never seemed to repeat the same subjects or same concerns in each subsequent work.

We all know how this goes, right? And it’s just what we don’t need
--that is; still another censor sitting on our shoulder, giving us one more reason to avoid our writing.

Up until then, the two other usual suspects (in my case anyway), were a version or variation of either, “I have nothing original or new to say,” or; “who’s gonn’a give a damn about the stuff I write?”

This is, of course, one of the things I make a point of telling my students not to worry about.

Those who can’t write, teach writing--right?
*
It’s way too long of a story to get into here; but, what could have turned into a debilitating writing block, evolved instead (and thankfully) into a larger inquiry on/about the reasons why some writers, like me, tend to work with persistent, recurring themes--with preoccupations and confusions—and, most especially, with obsessions--while others, as I’ve mentioned, seem more capable of pursuing multiple, sometimes contradictory ideas, themes, and subjects--and, in some instances, these same writers will even tackle other forms and genres-all -without seeming to repeat themselves.
*
My inquiry began in earnest with that email exchange with Pat Madden. I was kvetching to Pat one day, telling him that, lately, whenever I wrote about baseball, I felt like I was repeating same thing over and over again (Einstein’s definition of crazy, yes?). Pat’s response was, and I’m paraphrasing, that, according to Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace sometimes despaired that he was simply repeating himself. “And other writers” Pat went on to say, “have talked about this too (with varying emotional responses).”


I was thinking at the time that maybe this actually was a hopeful sign. If writers who were that high on the food chain had similar doubts, then perhaps I was in better company than I’d thought.

“Maybe,” Pat added, “a good idea for a panel might be about how we can repeat ourselves without losing hope; or, how and why, and to what end do we re-envision, or refashion, our main themes in different works?”

And since I’ve started this essay with an epigraph from Scott Fitzgerald, let me pick up on that.
*

While I was looking for a way into this talk, I pulled up a quote that I had stored away for a long time. And it became the epigraph I cited above, the one that reads: “Mostly we authors must repeat ourselves--that's the truth…” etc. Which then, got me to thinking.

Back when I was a graduate student, I chose to write my doctoral dissertation on Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction--the novels and short stories—all 152 of them.

While I was thrashing around looking for a central idea for the dissertation, I began to track a recurring motif, a main theme, if you will--which I referred to as “dream and disillusion.” It seemed to me that it ran through just about all of Fitzgerald’s fiction, and even a good bit of his autobiographical nonfiction.

Even now though, It’s hard to know if I came up with that recurring theme because I was looking for a unifying idea; or, if maybe, even back then, a piece of me already feared the prospect of someday repeating myself in my own writing.

But no matter; what Fitzgerald said in that epigraph seemed to support what Pat had been telling me in his emails, the ones about the other writers who worried that they too were repeating themselves in their work.

And so, I started to look for examples. It came as no surprise that I found far more than I could use in a short essay: comments, for example, by playwright’s and screenwriters; songwriters and visual artists; choreographers, directors, and critics. But because this essay is about repeating ourselves in our writing, I’ll focus on a single author.

For the past few years, I’ve found myself consistently being drawn back to P.F. Kluge’s work. Kluge, who’s primarily a novelist, has talked openly in interviews about a single fascination/attraction that he revisits in his novels.

Here’s a sampling:

About his novel The Master Blaster, Kluge says, it’s “set on Saipan. I was there in the 1960's with the Peace Corps, and I’ve returned many times since. Saipan is one of my islands, part of my life-long fascination with bounded, yet also boundless, places.”

About another novel The Edge of Paradise, Kluge writes, ‘The Peace Corps sent me to the Pacific Islands — Micronesia. The islands stayed with me and I’ve kept returning, checking on places and people I care about.”

He also says that …”my continuing interest in the love/hate relationship between America and the Philippines underlies my second novel (Macarthur’s Ghost), which spans the years from World War II to the Marcos era.”

And he describes The Day I Die, as a “ thriller set in the Pacific islands I saw as a Peace Corps volunteer.”

To which, I’d add, that Season For War, another novel, is set in the turn-of-the-century Philippines.

But that’s not all. Kluge has a produced large body of work. Three other books--Gone Tomorrow, Final Exam, and Alma Mater—a novel and two personal narratives—are not set in the islands but at Kenyon College in Gambier Ohio, where Kluge teaches.

“I love islands;” Kluge says, “Micronesia --Saipan, Palau, Pohnpei-- is full of them. Gambier, Ohio is another kind of island, a small, surrounded place where I live and teach. My alma mater, my current employer. If you live in a place,” Kluge says, “you write about it”

What I take away from his disclosures are that Kluge’s deep fascination with specific locations and geographies, more often than not, becomes the means through which his narrators are best able to explore their most insistent yearnings as well as to interrogate the questions and confusions that provoke and/or animate them most.
*
It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with this. But, and I’m speculating here, I first began to see things a little differently after two separate conversations I’d had with colleagues, essayist/memoirist Renee D’ Aoust and novelist Mick Cochrane, who, like me, are teaching writers.
The conversation with Renee came about when I was, once again, complaining about not being able to move away from writing about baseball.

“I wonder if we have a similar issue,” she said. “I 've tried to quit writing about dance. Years ago, I mentioned this in a college classroom, and a student asked, ‘but if you love it, and do it so well, why would you quit writing about the subject? "
That question, Renee maintains, triggered other thoughts:--such as; “how do we stay with the same subject, but not repeat ourselves? Or; is it okay to repeat ourselves? After all, isn’t writing a way of working things out?”

A while back I remember also asking Mick Cochrane why he writes so much about sports; in his case, it’s also baseball. His answer was, that “I felt permission to write about sports, because Thoreau writes about beans. Melville writes about whales. Poe writes about a bird. So why not me and baseball?”

When I asked him to expand on that, Cochrane said that"...all writers seek dense, complex material over which they have some authority" and that "all writers would probably be wise to engage their obsessive loves, whatever they might be."

In some ways both writers are talking about the same two things: permission and obsession.

I’ve since come around to thinking that a big reason why we repeat ourselves is that the things we write about are governed more by matters of sensibility (and intent) than they are by a predetermined design. In my own case, it means giving myself the permission to follow my obsessions, whatever those might be.

It’s another version of “follow the writing where it takes you,” something I also try to tell my students. And, at the same time, it’s advice I need to keep reminding myself about.  Read More 

6/7/16

--Mike Steinberg’s new collection--Greatest Hits and Some That Weren’t--eleven selected personal essays and memoirs on/about childhood, baseball, place, aging, travel, teaching, and writing—is now available from Amazon, or through Carmike Press/Seahorse Books (carmikepress@gmail.com)

5/26/16 #49. * I AM A CAMERA, Elyssa East

NOTE: Elyssa East’s piece grew out of an AWP panel presentation, “The I or the Eye?: The Narrator’s Role in Literary Nonfiction.”

We know that nonfiction authors—essay/memoirists and writers of personal/literary journalism and cultural criticism--often struggle with finding the right narrator to match the work. Some, for example, situate their narrators at center stage, as participants (the “I”), while others locate their narrators offstage as observers (the Eye).

Be it a piece of writing that focuses primarily on the experience of the self or on more topically based work, how does the writer decide how to craft the narrator/persona that’s the best fit best fit for the subject at hand?

In her craft essay, “I Am a Camera,” Elyssa East explains and illustrates the variety of options, from personal to objective/omniscient she needed to consider before she found the narrative match for her book Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town

MJS

I AM A CAMERA, Elyssa East

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” So wrote Christopher Isherwood in his novel, Goodbye to Berlin. “I am a camera,” the critical independent clause, became one of the most famous sentences in twentieth century literature. It also served as the title for both the play and the film based on Goodbye to Berlin, upon which the musical Cabaret is based. But I am interested in this clause because Isherwood’s narrator declares that he inhabits both the stance of a subjective agent—an “I”—and an objective one—the camera or “eye” at the same time. With my first book, Dogtown I eventually found myself wanting to do the same. But I had no idea how to pull this off.

I didn’t start with this ambition. Initially, I wanted to be all camera. In fact, I had wanted to be a photographer but somewhere along the way fell under the sway of nonfiction literature, which won me over for a documentary power that is complementary to but distinct from photography’s. And the camera that appealed to me was different from Isherwood’s “quite passive, recording, not thinking” one. I wanted to be active and critically engaged while still mostly hovering in the background. I believed this was what my subject demanded of me, but it was also what suited my temperament best.

My subject was an abandoned colonial landscape in Massachusetts called Dogtown that painter Marsden Hartley had compared to Easter Island and Stonehenge. I fell into writing about it because of Hartley’s paintings of the area. When Gertrude Stein saw Hartley’s work for the first time she declared, “at last an original American.” And when I saw Hartley’s Dogtown landscapes with their rocks like gargantuan cheese cubes, giant chewed fingernails and a whale rising from the earth I thought at last an original American setting. Like Isherwood with Berlin and Hartley with his paintings, I wanted to create a portrait of a place.

Dogtown, which is not far from Salem, Massachusetts, is known locally for its peculiar tales of colonists experiencing collective hallucinations, its supernatural events, and its post-Revolutionary War population of witches. Today it is an unpopulated wilderness, a ghost town. It should then come as no surprise that some people believed it to be haunted. In fact, I was finding more superstition than fact in my research about this place. Though I knew these beliefs were part of the story—if not the story itself— like an early 20th century photographer trying to take pictures of a ghost, I also wanted to let Dogtown speak for itself.

The story I began to write recounted my journey starting with how Hartley’s paintings leading me to Dogtown. From there I wanted to step back and let the place itself take center stage. But I was immediately challenged by trying to include all of these spirited tales about the traveler (aka me), Hartley, the colonists, the witches, supernatural events, and more; this is only a partial list, but it was already a lot. I found it impossible to make all of my disparate threads cohere.

My readers, who at the time were my fellow graduate students, all repeatedly asked, “What’s in Dogtown for you, Elyssa?” It’s a question that is often asked of writers, especially of writing students by their peers—and it’s one that tends toward the confessional, which is part of why I resisted it. I didn’t want to be an intrusion or imposition upon my subject. What I found in Dogtown was the place itself, which had fascinated me as though I had walked through a wardrobe and landed in a Narnia.

One of the writers who I emulated at the time and attempted to model my efforts after was Joseph Mitchell. If the narrator’s subjective and objective stances appear at opposite ends of the spectrum, Mitchell’s work represents the most extreme “eye.” Part of the excitement of reading his 1940 profile of Mazie, the “bossy, yellow-haired blonde” ticket collector at the Venice, “a small, seedy moving-picture theater” on the Bowery in New York City, is in deciphering how Mitchell’s eye—his alleged objectivity—reveals who he is. We learn highly particular details about the theater, whose principal clientele are “bums,” and even more when Mazie says, “Nobody ever got loused up in the Venice.” (Here, “loused up” is literal). Mitchell’s selection of dialogue captures Mazie and her era perfectly. In this same paragraph, Mitchell goes on to describe Mazie as being in “an elegant mood,” and boasting “that she never admits intoxicated persons.” It’s this juxtaposition of an “elegant mood” with “intoxicated persons” and lice that reveal both Mazie and Mitchell to us. There is plenty of “I” here, or plenty enough for me because Mitchell’s self is revealed by the subjects upon which he trains his gaze (Mazie, Mohawk “skywalker” construction workers, a bearded lady, even New York City’s rats), his juxtapositions, and his particularizing impulses. Mitchell’s narrator still largely disappears behind his subjects, but traces of his presence are palpable in the same way that the shadow of a photographer can sometimes be visible in a photograph. It’s worth noting that Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin was published in 1939, a year before Mazie appeared in The New Yorker. This proximity is not insignificant for these dates also parallel the rise of street photography and its emphasis on depicting every day urban lives.

It was much harder to be a camera or “eye” capturing the diaphanous image of a ghost town and the every day Massachusetts lives that would come to intersect it than I had thought. In literature, a character must have agency and desire and though I would argue that a landscape does possess these qualities they are best dramatized through human agents. In Dogtown, I found my Mazies, but I wanted them to be secondary to the place itself. With a cast of historic and present-day characters, I now had even more material than before. I also still wanted to be considerate of my readers by somehow addressing the question of what was in Dogtown for me.

I had no idea how to assemble this puzzle, but my gut still told me that my place was in the shadows where I could be an “eye” like Mitchell. When I learned that a woman had been murdered in Dogtown and that some people believed the place had influenced her killer, the idea of lurking in the shadows had turned haunting. It also presented a new challenge of figuring out how to include this tragic event in my book.

I knew that the amount of subjectivity or the degree to which I allowed my personal story to creep into the book would remain limited because no drama in my life came anywhere near to this horrific murder and its aftermath. Nor did any of my travails compare to the crippling physical challenges, poverty, emotional losses, and prejudices the Dogtowners faced. But every single lens reflex camera contains a small mirror in its dark interior. I was only able to be an “I” and an “eye” when I looked into Dogtown and saw my own losses reflected back to me. At the time that I was writing, September 11th had just happened and six members of my family had died in less than a year. Dogtown is a haunted place that attracts haunted people and I, in my own modest way, had joined its ranks.

Though I was now more of a presence in the narrative, I still needed a way to weave all of this together into a book, not just a collection of historical tales. I decided to structure the book into chapters that alternated between the murder and stories of Dogtown’s past. While this worked, the result was inelegant because these historical chapters did in fact have some bearing upon the present day, particularly with regards to how people felt about the murder.

A solution came to me from another visual medium: painting. There is a portrait tradition of painting an individual in front of a curtain that opens onto a landscape where various scenes, often biblical or historical, are depicted in the background. The portrait subject serves as commentator on the background scene and vice-versa. I positioned my narrator in these historical chapters by using a similar framing device. I came in at the beginning and end of each chapter to frame it around my own musings and concerns as they related to the chapter material and the central driving question that linked the murder to all of this history: how much can a place influence someone? I then stepped aside so that these individual histories were allowed to take center stage. At the chapter’s end, I returned to link this material to what was happening next. In this way, my narrator became the constant thread that connected all the stories while the stories, in turn, provided commentary on my search for an answer regarding Dogtown’s mysteries.

That is how like Isherwood’s narrator I became a camera recording the elusive spirit of a place as it moved through a painter sketching in a meadow and a witch flinging open her window to curse any man passing by and a man who picked up a rock to kill a perfect stranger one rainy Monday morning. Many drafts passed in which I either occupied too much foreground or background, but that is how my book was eventually “developed, carefully printed, fixed.”

* "I Am a Camera" first appeared in TriQuarterly

Bio note:
Elyssa East is the author of Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town, winner of the 2010 P.E.N. New England/L. L. Winship award in Nonfiction. A Boston Globe bestseller, Dogtown was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Awards. Elyssa’s writing has been published nationwide and in The Best of the Akashic Noir. She’s taught at Columbia, NYU, and Rhode Island School of Design. Read More 

5/23/16
*Note: Grist: The Journal For Writers Spring 2016 ProForma writing contest (all genres) offers a $ 750 prize for the winner. Guidelines at
Grist.

5/1/16
* Note: The literary journal Sport Literate posted an interview I did with Bill Meiners, the editor--on/about creative nonfiction. In it, I discussed some matters of genre and craft that might interest readers of this blog. If you'd like to take a look, you can find it at Sport Literate Interview.

Blog No. 48 NEW YORK STATE OF MIND: HOW “PLACE” SHAPES OUR LITERARY IDENTITIES

By Michael Steinberg

Note:
In the last few months I've posted several recent entries on/about the role of “Place” in our teaching (see Archives : # 41-45, Karen Babine’s On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers, and # 47, Robin
Mc Carthy’s What I’ve Come So Far to Tell Them). To extend that dialogue to our writing, here are some of my thoughts on/about how “Place” shapes not only our writing but also our literary identities.

MJS

NEW YORK STATE OF MIND: HOW PLACE SHAPES OUR LITERARY IDENTITIES
1
To a large extent, memoir is about exploring the past as it bears on our current sense of who we are. In my case, what, drives most of my memoirs is a nagging curiosity to try to figure out how that confused kid from New York, that kid whose preoccupation with baseball evolved into an obsession; that kid, an English major who flunked the writing placement test in college; how did he become a literature and writing teacher, then a mid life memoirist? Who and what were his shaping influences?

To examine those questions more fully, I’ve written about my family, my most influential teachers, my mentors, and my coaches—all of whom, I know, had some influence on the teacher/writer I’ve become. But when I took inventory of my autobiographical writings, the one constant in all of those pieces was the presence of New York City.

2

A while back, economic circumstances forced a former writing colleague who’d moved from her native Michigan to Manhattan only to have to move back to Michigan. I knew she loved living in the city, so I was wondering how the unplanned move home had affected her writing. And it got me to thinking.

From the time I was a kid, I’d always wanted to become a writer. But growing up in New York at the same time as when the Beat writers—Kerouac, Ginsberg, and later, Burrows--were all the rage. And frankly, that was very intimidating to the likes of me. My life style and writing weren’t nearly as rebellious and risky as theirs were. And so right away I believed that if I didn't live on the edge, like they did, it meant that I didn't have the disposition or temperament to become a writer. And that feeling was reinforced by the fact that the stories and poems I was submitting to my high school and later on, college, literary magazines were being repeatedly rejected.

In retrospect, I can see that it took more than three decades for that self-deprecating attitude to change. And the change evolved in a very unexpected way. I can say that now because I believe that moving to Michigan had a good deal (paradoxically) to do with that shift.

3

I recall how disorienting it was to always be feeling like a transplanted New Yorker in the Midwest. So, much so, that for my first two decades in Michigan, I escaped to Manhattan every chance I got. And for almost three-plus decades, I seriously considered moving back there.

Like Woody Allen, who claims that he’s “at two with nature,” from the time I moved to Michigan—to attend graduate school--I felt like a displaced New Yorker. To me, the Midwest was a different culture, an alien landscape. It's something I've written a good deal about over the last twenty-five years.

In one of those pieces though, “Living in Michigan, Dreaming Manhattan,” I dug more deeply into that New York-Michigan love/hate relationship. And what I discovered probably should have come as no surprise.

4

For the twenty-five years that I lived in New York, I’d entertained dreams, as I’ve said, of becoming a writer. But in addition to having been intimidated by the Beats, in college I convinced myself that my writing could never measure up neither to that of the writers I most admired in my college lit classes—writers like, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner--nor to those writers I was reading on my own; Roth, Updike, Malamud, Bellow, to name a few. This self-deprecating attitude pretty much convinced me that the closest I’d get to being a writer was to become a literature teacher--clearly, a surrogate, maybe even a default career. And an identity, I confess, I never fully embraced.

In graduate school, that decision continually troubled me. And so did my self-created persona; the defensive, displaced New Yorker. Largely as a way of overcompensating for both, I exaggerated and overplayed the out-of-place New Yorker role. Which, of course made it even more difficult for me to make peace with my surroundings, and, I might add, to co-exist very easily with several of my midwestern colleagues.

And who could blame them? My attitude and behavior had confirmed their initial perception of me as an effete, condescending, “New Yawker.”

5

Two midlife cornea transplants forced me to take a step back and do some re-evaluating. It was my first brush with my own mortality. If I was ever going to write, I knew it had better be right then. So despite my long-standing fears and self-doubts, that’s what I began to do.

Most of my early writings, I could see, were nostalgic sketches about my childhood and adolescent years. In all of these undeveloped works though, I discovered that New York was much, much, more than a backdrop or stage for those pieces. It was a rich, formidable force and presence; in some ways a dominant character in those personal narratives.

6

After the transplants, it began to trouble me that even though I’d lived in Michigan for some-five years, I still saw myself as a displaced New Yorker. I did the majority of my kvetching about that fact to Bob Root, a colleague who I’d collaborated with on two anthologies, Apparently, Bob gotten pretty tired of listening to me. Instead, he suggested that we co-edit still another anthology--this one, he said, would be composed of work by writers who either lived. or, at some time had lived in Michigan.

Once we got the project going, Bob conveniently dropped out. Deliberately, as I would later find out. But the ploy obviously did work. Because I came away from the project with a renewed sense of the state’s beauty, its cultural heritage, and especially, its rich literary history. I also came away with a deep appreciation for the passion that all of the writers brought to the anthology. Along with Bob Root, they’d inadvertently helped me discover a different Michigan from the one I’d been living in.

I should mention here, that around this same time, I’d bought a cottage in northern Michigan—a place I’d planned to use as a writing retreat.

7

My contribution to the collection that Bob originally proposed was the piece I mentioned earlier, “Living In Michigan, Dreaming Manhattan.” As a way of rendering (and explaining) that midlife reversal, I’ll quote some passages from the end of that piece.

”In my early fifties, just before the I bought the cottage and just before I had the first cornea transplant, my wife, Carole, and I met with Ken Klegon, a financial advisor, to discuss the possibilities of early retirement. In the back of my mind, I was actively entertaining the notion of moving back to New York.

When he finished itemizing our debts, Ken gave us two pieces of advice. One was to pay off our credit cards. Reasonable enough, I thought. But what followed wasn’t quite as easy to swallow.

‘You’re going to have to cut back on those trips to New York.’ he said. And while I was chewing that one over, Ken added, ‘Mike, you’re always complaining about not having enough time to write. I suggest that instead of going to NY, you get your ass up to the cottage and well… write.’

How, I wondered, would I ever manage to give up those trips? Ever since we’d moved here, those New York excursions were a lifeline, my way of reconnecting with my old roots, of reaffirming my sense of who I was.

I whined and kvetched some more. But in the end, I did just what Ken had asked. And seven years later, I was able to take an early retirement. When I got out, I was finishing up two books, neither of which, I’m sure, would have been written had I not had the cornea transplants, had I not built the cottage, and had I not taken my financial advisor’s advice to heart (I’d like to mention here that in college Ken Klegon was an English major).

And just as Ken had predicted, coming up north to write did indeed help temper my feelings of displacement. Yet, I was still worried that I wrote and daydreamed too frequently about my old life in New York.

Other writers, I know, have experienced a similar sense of dislocation. In her anthology, Leaving New York, Kathleen Norris writes that ‘ Willa Cather experienced her best writing years in Greenwich Village from 1912 to 1927, when the most celebrated of her Nebraska novels were published. To do fictional justice to Nebraska,’ Norris says, ‘apparently, [Cather] found it necessary to remain in New York.’ And ex-New Yorker, Leslie Brody, says in her memoir, Red Star Sister, ‘I had to leave New York in order to preserve its poetry.’

This has caused me to speculate. I’m thinking here of something that one of my Michigan coffee klatch cronies once told me. ‘New York,’ he said, ‘is that old girl friend you hope won’t show up one day and, God forbid, start hitting on you. Because just like you, she’ll be middle-aged, and not the young girl you remember.’

And when I’m thinking clearly, I am aware that locales, places, inevitably, do change. Especially a shape shifting, evolving city like New York. Part of Manhattan’s DNA, is, after all, that it’s always reinventing and redefining itself. And I’m not unaware that people can also change. Myself included.

8

“ I’ve lived in New York, in Michigan, and in an imaginary New York. Let’s say I did move back to the city; would I then become nostalgic for my not so glamorous life in East Lansing?

At some level then, I realize that this is about learning to accept the life I have, not the one I fancy. Case in point. A while back, a writer-friend was chiding me about this same conundrum.

‘Haven’t you ever had a fantasy about living in a more glamorous place?’ I asked him.

‘Sure. I’d love to have a pied-a-terre in Paris, a place I could go to whenever I wanted a taste of that life.’

‘ What’s stopping you?’

‘ Well, if I did it’ he said, ‘then it wouldn’t be a fantasy anymore, would it?’ ”

9

“ I’m at my northern Michigan cottage, standing in our living room. I look at the bookcase to my left, and see the shelves that are reserved for my writing. In that long moment, it occurs to me that my mid-life memories of New York are not unlike my early dreams of becoming a writer. And now, some thirty-plus years later, I am a writer; but I’m living in Michigan, where all of that writing got done, and not in New York.

For decades, the New York of memory and imagination has represented an excitement and wonder, the opportunity to be caught up in the whirlwind of a more stimulating, sometimes more enchanting, existence. At the same time my equally self-invented Michigan landscape offers a more grounded, meditative state of being. At different moments, in different moods and phases, I’m alternately drawn to one or the other, sometimes, simultaneously, to both.”  Read More 

Note:

In the past few months, I've been preoccupied with matters of place, especially how place influences our writing and teaching. In fact, I've inadvertently come across this notion in a three different instances and guises. In December and January, I posted Karen Babine's five part essay (# 45) on teaching place-consciousness to beginning writers. And just the other day, I finished preparing a talk on place for an upcoming AWP panel in Los Angeles (Old Neighborhoods, New Locales: How Place Shapes Our Writing and our Literary Identities). In between the two, I happened to read Robin Mc Carthy's fine essay, What I’ve Come So Far to Tell Them in Talking Writing--on/about the approach she takes in teaching place to her freshman comp students.

Robin's essay (reprinted below), is a savvy, practical, and well thought-out teaching piece that should, I believe, be of interest to those of us that teach literary/creative nonfiction to both beginning and experienced student writers.

MJS

* BLOG #. 47 WHAT I'VE COME SO FAR TO TELL THEM by ROBIN McCARTHY

I taught my first comp section in a windowless cinderblock classroom in northern Michigan. It was the fall of 2013. I’d arrived on campus two weeks earlier for an eight-day crash course for new graduate students on how to teach composition. Despite having designed my syllabus and sifted through piles of ice breakers and classroom activities, I began the semester without a vision of the teacher I would be.

I had 25 students, and on the second day of class, a quarter of them were dressed in some sort of camouflage. They were all as uncertain about me as I was about them, and I didn’t win any over when I asked them to write journal entries describing the place they were from.

“Like, where it is? Like on a map?” one asked.

“Sure,” I nodded. “And what’s it like? What’s nice about it? What’s terrible?”

No one responded. They blinked at me blankly.

“Why?” someone else finally asked.

I hadn’t anticipated this question. I had a vague sense of the importance of valuing my students’ backgrounds, but mostly, I was meeting new people and I am wired to relate to people in terms of place. I understand people through origins and destinations and the circuitous routes in between. There was no pedagogical foundation for my assignment; I didn’t really have an answer for them grander than the truth.

“Because I want to know,” I said.

I recalled my position at the front of classroom, my smart skirt and pressed blouse and the syllabus with my name at the top. I was the teacher, and this was school.

“Also, because that’s the assignment. Write about where you’re from. Twenty minutes.”

They leaned back from their tables and slid down in their chairs, dug through backpacks and pulled out laptops. They peered at me doubtfully over screens until, like robotic ants scavenging for memory crumbs on red-checked picnic clothes, they typed. And in that moment, we established the format for the semester’s course: For the next two and a half months, our labor would be writing. Our subject would be place.

• • •

I grew up in Maine and left at eighteen for college. When I left, I didn’t love my home more particularly than any other place. I spent ten years away, between school and work and travel. But when I was 29, I missed home enough to move back. I lived a couple miles from my parents’ house. I ran into my old teachers at the grocery store and complained about tourists and snowfall, cringed at botched New England accents on TV.

In a way, growing up in Maine has spoiled me. I can’t live elsewhere. Not because Maine is better than other places, but because it is so specifically itself—so specifically mine. Sea salt and paper mills and potato farms have left me self-sufficient, proud, and nostalgic for the smell of sunshine on pine. I can’t fully leave my home behind; I am always aching for it.

But when I decided to pursue an MFA in writing, it became clear I was going to have to leave again. I found my way to Northern Michigan University, where I could study in exchange for teaching. The university is located on the southern shore of Lake Superior, in the northwest region of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The nearest major cities are Detroit and Chicago, both between seven and eight driving hours away. People in the U.P. value the natural world in the same way people from Maine do; they love it, and they harvest it, and it is the land that determines their behavior, dictates their anxieties, and warrants their celebrations.

Northern Michigan University is the product of its surroundings. The academic culture reflects a deep connection to the region’s Native American population and the iron mines that brought white immigrants to the area. The school is simultaneously a two-year community college and a four-year university, which means students can earn a certificate in welding or a Ph.D in nursing, and either way, they take the basic composition course I was assigned to teach that first year.

I understood the blank stares and raw anguish when I asked those students about their homes. I got it when Mike Zyburt, who has lived two miles from the university his entire life, told me in his journal: “I’m from Marquette. There is nothing interesting to say.”

“Look harder” was the only advice I could give him. It wasn’t the advice of a teacher. A teacher would have suggested adding sensory detail or writing about a favorite memory, offered concrete stepping stones to a feasible essay topic. I was their teacher later in the semester, when I told them to develop thesis statements and consider point of view. But when I said, “Look harder at where you are from. Tell me everything,” I was not a teacher. I was not even a writer. I was a traveler, homesick for a place I couldn’t be.

• • •

The same week I began teaching that comp class, I walked into my first graduate workshop. Within the first ten minutes, I was told I’d spend the semester writing a novel. I hadn’t planned on writing a novel and didn’t think I had one in me. But I did want an A in the class, and so I started writing about the only place that felt deeply personal: my home in Maine.

I took my own advice to students, harnessing my longing and depositing it onto those pages. I didn’t write about my grandfathers or neighbors, but I wrote about men like them. I wrote about poaching and firewood and diesel engines, pie crust and bait fish and food stamps. I woke early each morning and spent an hour letting the sea spray land on my teacher clothes.

And each time I asked my students for an essay, I asked them to examine their homes. Mike Zyburt eventually wrote about the fence he and his father built around their back yard. Another student gave me the history of a local pottery business, and a third chronicled his distress when the Perkins diner changed hands. Each day, I released a little of Maine into my own work, and my students brought more of their homes into our classroom. We got each other through that first semester.

• • •

It’s been over two years since I taught my first class, and I’ve now asked my students to write about where they’re from countless times. There’s always a predictable resistance. Some of them have moved around and can’t identify a single location as their home. But the most common complaint is that the place they’re from is boring. This upsets me more than the errors that riddle their papers; it’s more dangerous than their strange relationships with cell phones and logic and reality television.

Composition instructors often say we’re teaching students how to think, not just how to write. But I want to teach them how to see, too; how to view themselves as a product of place and experience, how to find value in the quotidian. We will, all of us, spend our lives navigating the distance between the people and places we love most and the circumstances of hearts, careers, ambitions, and bank accounts that carry us away. We all need to be able to tell ourselves why.

At the start of every semester, I tell students that my goal is for them to become better writers and for me to become a better teacher. That’s only part of the truth, however. I want to prepare them for homesickness. When they’re drowning in their own displacement, when all they want is to hear a U.P. accent or know the score of a Lions game, I want them to remember the things about their homes that warrant ferocious longing.

There was that fence you built with your father. There was the time the Perkins closed.

I am preparing them for lives of missing, of longing, of hopeless remembering. I want them to be able to access the comfort of their own stories and to find a way home.

Robin McCarthy's work appears or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Sonora Review, and the Rumpus, among other journals. She is the managing editor of Passages North and today she misses Maine's ham italian sandwiches even more than Friendship sloops and whoopie pies.

*This essay first appeared in Talking Writing, Jan 26, 2016 Talking Writing
 Read More 

Before you look at Michael Down's craft essay, I would like to recommend an upcoming writer’s conference, writing contest, and writing workshop.

WRITER’S CONFERENCE: River Teeth Creative Nonfiction Writer’s Conference. June 3-5, 2016. River Teeth Creative Nonfiction Writer's Conference

WRITING CONTEST: Solstice Literary Magazine’s Creative Nonfiction Prize Solstice Literary Magazine's Creative Nonfiction Prize

WRITING WORKSHOP: OPEN THE DOORS: Nonfiction workshop with Baron Wormser and Kim Dana Kupperman, Montpelier, Vermont July 27-31, 2016.

Overview: The workshop is geared for writers at any level. The goal is to offer a chance to grow as a writer and bear witness to others’ growth. We invite each participant to start afresh with each piece of writing. Each day for five days, we will present at least two prompts. After a discussion that speaks to what is occurring in the piece, participants use that prompt as a jumping-off point. Then, after a timed writing period, the group reconvenes to read aloud what they’ve written and discuss how their piece relates to the prompt. There will be, over the course of the week, plenty of time to revise pieces.

The group will meet in our house near downtown Montpelier, a very short walk from places to stay restaurants, an art cinema, a bar with over twenty craft beers on tap, independent bookstores, and a number of bakeries and cafes. There is plenty of hiking, kayaking, and swimming nearby

Logistics: The cost for a week is $1,000. Doors open at 9:00 for breakfast; workshop begins at 9:30; and the day runs to 3:30. Participants can sit and write in our house and on the grounds or porch or sit in a nearby café and write there. We’ll be around all day to talk individually with each participant. Participation is limited to six people.

Instructors:
Baron Wormser is the co-author of two books about teaching poetry along with nine books of poetry, a memoir, a novel, and a book of short stories. He has led generative workshops for decades.
Kim Dana Kupperman is an award-winning essayist who has worked as an editor, writer, and teacher for over thirty years.

For information, or to register, please contact Baron Wormser at 802.223.2622 or baronwormser@gmail.com



____________________________

BLOG # 46, "ME, MYSELF, I: IDIOSYNCRASY AND STRUCTURE IN NONFICTION" BY MICHAEL DOWNS

Introductory Note: Whenever I talk shop with other writers, especially about works-in-progress--a personal essay or collection, a book length manuscript of literary/investigative journalism, or a memoir--the conversation invariably turns to matters of structure and shape. Experienced and inexperienced writers alike have to wrestle with things like voice and personae, subject and purpose. But at some point in the drafting process, we know that the success or failure of what we’re writing depends on whether or not we'll find the containing shape, the structure, that is, that best suits the manuscript—be it a work of narrative, lyric, and/or a hybrid form of one sort or other.

How then, does that decision come about? A conscious choice? An unexpected discovery? Maybe some combination of both? And, do we make this decision before we start? During the drafting stage? At some other point in the process?

At the AWP/Minneapolis conference last spring I was part of a panel on/about the various ways in which those of us who write and teach find the structure/shape for our works, both stand-alone pieces and full length manuscripts.

Michael Downs's fine piece below, "Me, Myself, I: Idiosyncrasy and Structure in Nonfiction,” is a reworking of his AWP panel talk. It also appeared in TriQuarterly's Fall, 2015 issue, along with the other four essays that were adapted from the panel. At some point, over the next few months, I'll try to post those on this blog.

MJS

Blog No. 46 "Me, Myself, I: Idiosyncrasy and Structure in Nonfiction" by Michael Downs


To begin, a confession: structure baffles me. This confusion proves as true in essays or books as with wood or brick. My hammer drives crooked nails; my Ikea furniture wobbles. Perhaps once in decades of writing have I found a structure in a first draft and stuck with it. Mozart, I’ve heard, could look skyward and see the construction of his scores unfold. When I look up, I see clouds – gray and indistinct.

Once, I asked a poet, a formalist, do you take pencil in hand intending to write a sonnet – or whatever form? Do you say, “Today, I will write a sonnet”? No, he answered. He wrote his first lines without thought to form, then examined what had just arrived on his page. He studied the shape of the lines, their rhythms, the logic and argument of the subject, then decided what form those lines and subject evoked. If they looked like a sonnet, he tried a sonnet. If they looked mostly like rhyming couplets, he tried rhyming couplets. Those early lines and subject matter were only his material – the sculptor’s marble block – and that material suggested the shape the poem might take.

This essay deals with structure and literary nonfiction, but the poet’s answer suggests that no matter the art or genre, material plays a role in structure. For me, who finds form befuddling, this leads to more questions. What’s the nature of that role? What’s its scope? How might it work? How might it work, especially, given that the material of nonfiction is some actual thing – a murder and a place, or five teenagers’ coming-of-age in a troubled city? This is real stuff. It has its own shape the way everything – a shoe horn, a sunrise, a street protest – has a shape.

Bruno Schulz, the Polish-Jewish art teacher and writer murdered in 1942 by a Nazi, is known best for fiction. But he has this wonderful, Bruno-Schulzian-thing-to-say about shapes and reality. It has to do with reality’s ever-changing form, and it helps explain what nonfiction writers face when considering the influence of material on structure. The material – reality (that shoe horn, the sunrise, the street protest) – isn’t static. Reality, as Schulz writes, “is in a state of constant fermentation, germination, hidden life. It contains no hard, dead, limited objects. Everything … remains in a given shape only momentarily, leaving this shape behind at the first opportunity.”(i)

Adding a Kafka reference to his vision of reality’s shape-shifting, Schultz goes on: “One person is a human, another is a cockroach, but shape does not penetrate essence, is only a role adopted for a moment, an outer skin soon to be shed.” (ii)

So, form or structure, like a snake’s skin or our own, is impermanent but essence is always the same. Consider how the essence of a person remains unchanged whether that person is hammering a nail into a wall – one form – or feeding a child – another form. What is true of people is also true of things, processes, and any reality at all. This understanding gives me, as a nonfiction writer, permission to consider a variety of shapes to explain whatever reality I see. Subject matter suggests a shape, yes, but shape matters less than essence. Shape is artifice, a way to get at essence. Shape can be a product of my mind at work.

This is not to say that shape is arbitrary or immaterial. It’s not. It matters how nonfiction writers arrange their subject matter, because that organization – that structure – is central to how we seek meaning in our subjects. Marion Winik, for example, in her tender work, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, organizes dozens of loved ones and acquaintances – all dead – into small, neat essays, a graveyard of people for whom she is often the only link, planting mums over this plot, telling jokes at another. Winik does not arrange her dead chronologically by expiration date. Rather, brothers might lie side-by-side, or a friend who was an addict gives thought to another.(iii) Glen Rock’s structure reveals Winik’s mind organizing her dead as if each is a question about living and dying, as if she might find meaning ¬– even in her own death, whenever it comes – if she just arranges her dead in a proper order.

So, structure is artifice. In nonfiction, it’s how a writer seeks meaning through arrangement of a shape-shifting reality. These conclusions make sense, I think, because they mesh with what we know is a defining element of literary nonfiction: idiosyncrasy – those qualities that make us peculiar, eccentric, unique. What makes literary nonfiction literary nonfiction is individual sensibility.

To peruse a bookshelf, though, might leave an impression that idiosyncrasy in nonfiction has to do with voice. On my shelf, I find writers praised for voices that are “unflinchingly personal,” “quirky and delightful,” and “refreshing.” But isn’t structure idiosyncratic, too? Doesn’t each mind seek meaning in a different way, arrange the living room furniture – or an essay’s paragraphs – to suit personal needs, whims, tastes? Similar material suggests one arrangement to Marion Winik, while suggesting a radically different form to Joan Didion. Winik’s meditation on dying involves four dozen or so short essays about as many deaths; Didion’s – in The Year of Magical Thinking – focuses on one.

Combine these assertions, and we can argue that how we shape our material is a defining element of our work, maybe even the most defining element.

But if structure arises out of our idiosyncratic selves, what benefit can one nonfiction writer gain by studying the oh-so-individual structures of others? If structure in your nonfiction is all about you, how can that help me? What will studying your thumbprint teach me about mine? Moreover, that material we’re arranging? In nonfiction, it’s often us: our thoughts, experiences, our journeys toward meaning: idiosyncratic subject matter piled atop idiosyncratic structure. Other writers’ works seems unlikely to be successful blueprints for our own.

An example: I love Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, D.J. Waldie’s lyrical study of the Los Angeles suburb where he grew up and lives. But the book is so idiosyncratic in structure and material, I’ll never write anything like it. Waldie, who shuns cars and walked to his day job, built his book to replicate the pattern of houses that make up his neighborhood. Reading the short numbered chapters – 316 of them over 179 pages – mirrors the act of walking past address after address. (iv) Clearly, Waldie’s singular mind is at work seeking meaning through a structural arrangement his unique material and life suggests. Would a writer who drives to work have translated those suburbs the same way?

Nevertheless, I study Waldie and others, because their idiosyncrasies reveal an astonishing array of possibilities for arranging my own material, most of which I might not use and others that might fit my purposes with slight alterations, but which I’d otherwise never consider. Perhaps the more important benefit is the reminder that when the writer and material both exert influence on structure – when neither dominates the other – the work achieves a power and grace I want in my writing.

When I began what became House of Good Hope (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), I let the material dominate the structure. My subject was the coming-of-age of five friends from my hometown, young men who wanted to escape their grit-and-broken-glass neighborhoods for college, then return to help restore them. That’s what I wrote. Nothing about me. Just them, mostly chronologically. Though the friends proved interesting subjects, the manuscript’s structure was unartful as the transcribed minutes of a city council meeting. Prodded by friendly readers, I added a section about me. That didn’t work, either, proving to be a sixty-page long diversion from the book’s main focus. Not until I threaded my story through theirs did the book’s structure gel. Not coincidentally, that’s also when I realized that the five friends and I shared a quest. The book had found its form – and it’s meaning.

Other times I’m too much in control of structure, ignoring the needs of the material. I have a friend who crafts beautiful essays in which she braids disparate ideas with associative links or emotions, lovely stuff. Recently, inspired by her work, I attempted that structure. You will never, ever read that essay. My subject, an intense morning in my neighborhood involving federal gunmen and an innocent man, didn’t lend itself to the associative, diffused logic of a braided essay. The material, to my mind, wanted another form, which in my experiment I had ignored. During a second draft, I learned that the material wanted to stay focused and tight and tense, mostly chronological with a few flashbacks. I respected that suggestion, and I’m happier with the result, which I hope, like the best nonfiction, seeks and perhaps finds through its structure the essence of some shape-shifting reality; in this case, what happened that morning – not only in my neighborhood, but within me.

______________________________
(i) Schulz, Bruno. “An Essay for S.I. Witkiewicz,” Polish Writers on Writing, edited by Adam Zagajewski. San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University Press, 2007. Essay translated by Walter Arndt and Victoria Nelson. p. 33.
(ii) ibid
(iii) Winik, Marion. Glen Rock Book of the Dead. Berkeley, California: Counterpoint, 2008.
(iv) Waldie, D. J.. Holy land: a suburban memoir. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.

________________________________

Michael Downs's books include House of Good Hope (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, and The Greatest Show (Louisiana State University Press) a collection of linked stories featuring the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944. A former newspaper reporter, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Towson University. Read More 

Note: For those who follow this blog, I have two recommendations.

1) A published anthology. AFTER MONTAIGNE: CONTEMPORARY ESSAYISTS COVER THE ESSAYS Edited by David Lazar and Patrick Madden After Montaige:Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays

After Montaigne essentially is a “greatest hits” collection of impressions and opinions on/about Montaigne’s essays--written by many of the genre’s most well known contemporary writers.

2) In December, Ander Monson’s invaluable blog, Essay Daily, Essay Daily ran a series of essays in celebration of the 30th anniversary of The Best American Essays annual anthology. The pieces, by a variety of writers, editors, and teachers, including one by Robert Atwan, the series founding editor, present opinions and commentary on/about each BAE individual issue, as well as offering an overview of the genre’s unexpected growth and evolution from 1986 up through the present issue. You can find all of the essays in Essay Daily’s November and December archives.
MJS

Blog # 45, SOME THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS ON/ABOUT WRITING AND TEACHING CREATIVE NONFICTION, PART 2 BY MICHAEL STEINBERG

This is my second blog entry on/about specific matters of genre, craft, and of writing creative nonfiction in general. You can find The Doctor Is In, Part 1: Some Thoughts About Matters of Craft (Blog # 40), in the June, 2015, Archives

In a July, AWP Spotlight Award interview, AWP Spotlight Award Interview, I was asked several questions. Below are a few answers, along with some recently added thoughts.

AWP: What is the best writing advice that you dispense to your students?

MJS: First, revision/re-seeing is the key to all good writing. At the start, give yourself permission to write badly. Write everything that comes to mind. Reread the (messy) draft, looking for patterns and repetitions. And wherever you find them, cut everything else away and start there. Even when you think a piece is finished, put it away for a few weeks--months, even--and then read it again. If you still think it’s done, send it out.

Second, Robert Frost said, “No surprises for the writer, no surprises for the reader.” Each time you write, you hope to surprise yourself. I’d like to add that, often, my most unexpected surprises, I’ve found, show up in digressions and afterthoughts. Sometimes, those surprises have led me to produce some rich, compelling passages of writing. It’s taken me some time to give myself the permission to cut away most, or even all of the writing, that’s led me to those surprises. Now, when something unexpected, something unbidden, doesn’t show up on the page, it’s a bad writing day.

AWP: What is the best career advice that you dispense to your students?

MJS: When I was a younger writer, I complained a lot to Donald Murray, my mentor, about all the rejection slips I was getting. To which he said: “The acceptances are just as irrational as the rejections.” Murray was right. But I didn’t fully understand what he was getting at until I became an editor of a literary journal.

AWP: Can writing be taught? Why does creative writing belong in the academy?

MJS: Yes, writing can be taught. And yes, it belongs in the academy. But mainly if it’s taught by practicing writers. And if aspiring writers are voracious readers as well. In addition, as teachers and writers, we all know that talent, a predisposition for writing, is important. But we also know that when it comes to our students, we can’t measure or predict the intangibles--things like desire, yearning, passion, curiosity, tenacity, persistence, sheer determination, and hard work. Possessing those qualities--with or without raw talent—is a big piece of what it takes to succeed at writing, or at anything else for that matter.

AWP: Do you feel influenced by your peers to produce a certain type of creative work, or do you feel free to follow your own interests and passions?

MJS: Both. Because I’ve written a lot of pieces where baseball, in one form or another, seems to show up. And so, when peers ask me about that, I often get self conscious and start to worry that maybe I’m destined to become just a “one note” writer,

Also, we’ve all experienced the feeling of believing that we’re neither good nor imaginative enough to become the writer we want to be. Competing and/or comparing ourselves to other writers—peers or the great writers we’ve read--that’s our internal censor talking. A colleague once gave me some advice she tells her students. I’d like to pass it on: “Stop comparing yourself to others,” she said, “you’re the only one who can write this piece.”

There’s also a quote from William Stafford that I use with my students and myself. It goes like this,

"I can imagine a person beginning to feel that he’s not able to write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that’s surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I’m meeting right now…. You should be more willing to forgive yourself. It doesn’t make any difference if you are good or bad today; the assessment of the product is something that happens after you’ve done it."

AWP: What is your favorite thing to do when you should be writing, but just can’t find the motivation?

MJS: Whenever I feel uninspired or unmotivated, I compose emails about writing (especially about matters of craft) and send them to like-minded colleagues and/or former students. I also keep reminding myself that the track record tells me that I’ve done this before and I can do it again.

AWP: What is the greatest compliment that you could ever receive about your writing?

MJS: When someone who’s read my work or heard me read tells me, “Yeah, I’ve felt exactly like that before. Until I read (or heard) your work, I believed I was the only one who thought or felt that way. Read More