Michael Steinberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11/8/14

Note/Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note:

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

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


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

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

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



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

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

MJS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog # 32

On Mentors and Mentoring

Author’s Note/Disclaimer:

This post, a tribute to a pioneer/mentor woven into a short essay about my personal writing/teaching history, is a departure of sorts from what you’ve previously seen on this blog.

Recently, a friend asked me to write an essay for her blog, an essay on mentors and mentoring--something that’s been on my mind ever since I posted “The Three Stupidest Things I’ve Done as a Writer” by Donald Murray (see Blog # 30 below). In that post, I mentioned how in the 70’s and 80’s Murray became my writing/teaching mentor. What I didn’t talk about was the contribution he made to the literary genre we’re now calling “Creative Nonfiction,” and how, as a result of his work, I became instrumental in the genre’s emergence and evolution.
MJS

A version of this essay appears on www.overmyshoulderfoundation.org
Dawn Caroll's Over My Shoulder website on/about mentors and mentoring. You can find it under Mentors Come When You're Ready For them, 7/14

A Writer Teaches Writing

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We encounter our best and most influential mentors, I believe, when we’re ready to receive them. In my case, it happened shortly after I began teaching freshman composition. Back then, in the late 60’s, all comp teachers were required to plan their courses according to an outmoded, prescriptive, syllabus, a syllabus that required teachers to assign their writing students a series of what we used to call “papers:” among them, a narrative, a descriptive essay, an argument, an expository essay, a piece of literary analysis, and a final term paper based solely on library research. This method had been in place since the late nineteenth century. It was, to say the least, a narrow, wrong-headed view of what writing is all about. But back then, there was no other option.

Around that same time, I happened to come across a book, A Writer Teaches Writing, by a Donald Murray, someone, who I’d never heard of. In the book Murray was, in effect, advocating an inside/out approach to composing. I was immediately drawn to his philosophy. And it kick-started what would over time become my transformation from writing teacher to teaching writer.

Murray was one of the first writing teachers in this country to suggest that the teaching of writing (and literature) had been, for far too long, the exclusive territory of professional critics, researchers, and literature teachers--many of whom might admire writing and literature, but who themselves did not write.

We didn’t know it back then, but this was the beginning of what would evolve into both the writing process and teacher-as-writer movements, which, from the late 60’s to the early 90’s changed the way that introductory college writing was taught in this and in several other countries.

In addition, it’s my belief that Murray’s work sparked a renewed interest in the teaching of the personal essay, which, to my mind, helped foster the rise of what we’re now calling creative/literary nonfiction.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Murray’s ideas make as much sense to me now as they did back then. An aspiring writer myself, ever since I was a college freshman, I’d believed that learning to write in prescriptive forms had hindered my own growth as a writer.

I didn’t want to pass that approach on to my own students, so, with Murray’s thoughts in mind, I converted my writing classes into workshops; and, as he suggested, I began writing personal essays-- like those I was requiring from my students.  Read More 

Note: Our guest writer this month is Desirae Matherly. Shortly after I started up Fourth Genre (1999), I first read , and then published, Desirae's work . Back then, we didn't have a name to describe the lyrical, poetic essays that Desirae and a few other writers were sending us. Today, I consider her to be one of our very best writers of the subgenre we're now calling the "lyric essay."

MJS

Blog No. 31

Surprise and Subtext

There are two kinds of surprises I’ve found in the essay, both as a writer and teacher. To begin, there is the matter of finding something to write about. I’ve noticed that so much has changed from the days when I was a student writing for a workshop, to the present, when I work only if I’m inclined to. A more recent development in my writing life has been the solicitation. Being asked to write is an instant motivator. Rarely do I know when I first agree to give a reading or write an essay, what I’m going to write about. But as my deadline approaches, I become attuned to my personal experiences in ways I am normally not aware of. Conversations with friends, thoughts while driving or walking, and my reactions to the media I consume are mined for material. Everything could potentially make its way into an essay, and I am always reminded that all subjects are indeed connected, ala Montaigne.

The “aha” moment is perhaps the most exciting part of the writing process, when the originating idea for an essay presents itself. Usually I’m not in a position to write when that moment comes. I’m hiking in the woods, or commuting to and from campus where I teach. Or I’m in the throes of a discussion with a friend and have to snag spare moments to jot my thoughts down on a napkin or in a notebook if I’m sufficiently prepared to do so. Or I grab my phone and record a voice memo or compose an email to myself. Any writer can relate to the surprise of a fresh idea, or of a solution to a problem that comes at an unexpected juncture between experience and reflection.

When we, as teachers of writing, ask our students to write, we are asking them to find that process by which they are surprised by the urge to write. It’s slightly synthetic, and in the past, when I’ve asked students about the “occasion” behind particular essays, the reason I’ve been given sometimes flounders into, “I had to write something for class.” I’m not ruling out the possibility that sometimes any of us, our student writers included, sit down behind our computer screens and free associate our way into new essays. But aren’t those essays surprising too?

I’ve also noticed that whatever leads us into writing an essay may not be the ultimate subject or theme we work to resolve, once we are into the thick of the process. This leads me to that other surprise I often encounter when essaying; the matter of subtext, which for me is synonymous with the deeper reason behind a piece of writing. It is the repressed anxiety, the epiphany of realization, or the grim mortal insight that underlies whatever surface story we relate. Subtext can be the dirty secret we wish we could keep with ourselves, or it might be the anger we struggle to remove from our lives, only to discover it again unexpectedly when exploring a memory or digressing into a seemingly unrelated theme. Read More 

Blog # 24

Note: Renée E. D’Aoust will be our guest blogger for this next post.

Renée is a versatile, multitalented writer whose first book Body of a Dancer is a passionate yet clear-eyed memoir about her experiences as a modern dancer during the nineties when she studied at the Martha Graham Center in New York.

Her essay/post below, Water the Rocks: A Few Writing Ideas to Unblock Your Heart, is about a more mundane concern, one that all of us have experienced at one time or another; writer’s block.

MJS

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At our northern Idaho house, I’ve surrounded the hosta plants and Siberian Bugloss with red rocks from Montana’s Hungry Horse River. (Please set aside your concern regarding the ethics of my stealing river rocks and transporting them across state lines.) My distraction: I like to water rocks. Red rocks, gray rocks, black rocks, striped rocks, flat, small, jagged, and big.

Distraction with a hose. The green hose is a dragon’s mouth; the water, its language. I pour language over the pillars of my life. The problem expands. When sitting down to write, I become distracted. Instead of writing what I need to write, I write what I don’t need to write. Arguably, rocks don’t need watering. Plants do. Arguably, the new book needs to get written. More emails don’t need to be written. (Sorry email pals.) Oh, phooey. Does the world even need one more book? I get up, leave my desk, walk outside, pick up the hose, and water my rocks. I am dragon. Strong. I return to my desk.

Then I sit down to the new page, and I want to do everything but write the page. Take a bath. Bathe the dachshund. Walk the dachshund. Grade student papers. Prune some trees. Eat some chocolate. Water those rocks! They are dehydrated, I think. They miss the river. They need water. I pick up my dragon hose.

Distraction is familiar to all writers, and management of distraction is a skill all writers master. But what happens when distraction leads to anarchy, and the new page stays blank for months? What then?

Put as a question: how did I stop watering the rocks and return to the blank page of my new project? A memoir about trees and loss. A woman in the woods with a saw.

I’m a writer who has never looked kindly on writer’s block. To my chagrin, I thought writers who confessed to such frozen moments in their creative careers were weak, spineless specimens. Who wants to read words from a writer with no vertebrae? Although if a coelacanth wrote something called The Long Swim: Memoir of an Old Fish, I’d read it. Then I became a weak, spineless creature. No backbone. I wasn’t wise like a coelacanth, which can hide at the depths. I wasn’t strong like my imaginary dragon. I was a kleptomaniac: I had stolen rocks.

After the pages of my book project stayed white for months, and longer, closer to a year, or more, I cannot confess the length of painful time, well, I had to own the label: I have writer’s block. You have to accept that something is wrong and name it before you can move forward, right?

I tricked myself into thinking I was not stuck. Oh no, not me. I was writing book reviews, wasn’t I?! I was writing posts for the Women Owning Woodlands website, wasn’t I?! I was writing dance reviews, wasn’t I?! I was writing, for goodness sakes. But, really, I was turning in on myself, picking at my skin, eating lots of chocolate, and taking dachshund Tootsie on more walks than she needed or wanted. Oh, yes, I was watering those rocks. Faithfully.

I’d published my first book, Body of a Dancer, and as my brother put it, succinctly, in the way of siblings, “Basically, you pursued your dance dreams, and when you didn’t succeed at dance, you wrote a book about your failure, and that means you turned adversity into something lasting. Into art.” I liked thinking about those hard modern dance years in New York City. The struggle was all. I didn’t eat any chocolate then. Read More