Pam and Jess Walter discuss stuff at my house. Hopefully they're not talking about the weird smell.

Pam Houston visited EWU last year for a reading and a craft talk.  I got to do the introduction at the reading, have dinner with her, and then she came to a party at my house and we got to chat about literature, my cats, and kids. I was a big fan before that, though, which was why I jumped at the chance to host.  I first read Houston’s only work marketed as creative nonfiction, A Little Bit More About Me, a book of personal essays, and I took to her right away, as they say, because she has a voice that you just don’t forget.

Houston says her fiction and nonfiction alike is around eighty percent autobiographical, and being drawn to nonfiction and still sort of unsure about where the boundaries lie, for me personally, between fiction and nonfiction, I loved listening to her read some sections of her newest novel, Contents May Have Shifted, with the narrator named Pam, who is a writing instructor and world traveler, an animal lover and an athlete, as is Houston in for reals life.

The novel is structured in 12s.  Each section is titled with a flight number, and then followed by a dozen tiny travel essays.  Wow, has she traveled.  Tibet, Spain, Mexico, Scotland, Newfoundland, Iceland, France, New Zealand, Tunisia, Laos, Argentina, Turkey.  And that’s only a dozen of the places she writes about.  Houston doesn’t give us any concrete indicators of chronology, but if you read carefully you definitely see a narrative unfolding.  It’s not a new story, certainly (Sam Ligon was known to say there are only two stories anyway—was it sex and death, Sam?), but Houston chronicles relationships and her own vulnerability.  The relationships with men change and sometimes end, but her friends stay and accumulate, and the relationships with beloved animals also provide a subnarrative.  There is camaraderie and heartbreak, love and loss.

What sets Houston apart from a lot of other folks writing about these same things is, first of all, is that her narrator doesn’t just rattle off flights and trips and terrific emotional struggles.  She lays them out carefully, reflecting on each one, sometimes drawing from an earlier story, reminding us of the movement.  Read more »

I’ve been working a ton lately, so I’ve got medical transcription on the brain.  I transcribe for a bunch of different doctors in a few different clinics, and at least once a day I have to stop and write down something that interests me.  Sometimes these things are funny:

CHIEF COMPLAINT:  The patient has been seen by me previously.  (The Chief Complaint is the reason the patient has come in for a visit.)

 She has a point on her back where if she touches that point it causes her to have nausea.  I indicated to her she should probably not push on that spot.

 It actually only happens when she gulps cold beer.  I told her to stop doing that.  (Docs really do say that!  Haha!)

 Sometimes they are poetic:

Six-two-nine-six Cedar Canyon Road.  Say it again:

Six-two-nine-six Cedar Canyon Road 

Pepcid utilized in place of Prilosec given the issues of Plavix.  

Counseling concerning cryotherapy.

 Sometimes the things I write down are things that make me think and sometimes make me angry/sad: Read more »

It’s a Friday and it’s raining when you wake up at 7:30.  You meant to get up at 5:30 to get an early start on work, but the rain sounded so nice and your bed and partner were so warm that you drifted off, thinking it’s Friday, that you’ve got all weekend to finish your work. At that gray hour you don’t remember the mound of graduate school homework you’ve got, and it seems reasonable to close your eyes again. So you sleep in, and the kids actually wake you up.  You make chocolate milk for one, coffee for yourself, and tell the oldest there’s instant oatmeal, or they can ask their father to make Malt-O-Meal when he gets off the toilet.

She wants to know can she have chocolate chips in her oatmeal.  Yes, you say, because you’re feeling indulgent after receiving some food stamps.  She wants to know how many.  You think for a moment and then say “Nine.”  You’d been down to a couple freeze pops and a few items that didn’t really make a meal of any kind when your case had finally gone through the system.  You felt like shit that you couldn’t buy your daughter any new clothes for her first day of Kindergarten, but she looked good anyway and didn’t seem to mind.  You’re glad your kids remain young enough to be comforted by a chocolatey after-school snack, that they’re too young to know what it means to live below the poverty line.  To say you are grateful for the public assistance is an understatement. Read more »

Fine, this is what it looks like.

It took me forever to get this review written.  I bought Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s latest work, in November, soon after it came out.  It’s a small book and I figured I could read it in a day and get to work. I started it pretty quickly and read 40 pages.  And then it sat on the night stand by my reading chair in my bedroom.  I took the cover off, and the back photo haunted me every time I saw it—Didion’s daughter, young, sitting on a chair, elbows on knees with towhead in hands, too serious. And I couldn’t read it.  I knew it was about mortality, and as Didion says “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.” I knew her daughter, so ill in the first memoir, was going to die, had died, and so I spent a lot of time not reading it.  And when I went back to Blue Nights in January, I opened my reading journal to see what I’d written, to remind me.

“There’s a sense of clinging about this…it’s humbling and haunting and it makes me want to stop reading it and go read a book or play a game with my kids.”

Read more »

 This past week I watched Miss Representation, a film by Jennifer Seibel Newsom.  It’s a documentary about the portrayal of women in the media and the effect on political and feminist discourse.  Despite people always saying women have come such a long way in the entertainment industry, and in politics, the glass ceiling is a myth, and blah blah blah—forget that, it’s not true.  “The media treats the women like shit,” Margaret Cho says in the film, summing it up nicely.  Cho had a sitcom in the 90s, and she was pressured into losing weight for the show, only to be replaced by The Drew Carey Show, “you know, because he’s so slim,” Cho says, laughing at the absurdity.

Disappointing, MJ.

  It’s really not funny, though. Seibel Newsom frames the movie in a personal way—she has a daughter, and she wants better than a world where female politicians are called Mrs. instead of by their earned title, where Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ankles are more important than her ideas on foreign policy, and where a photo of Michele Bachmann eating a corn dog or making “crazy eyes” is national news.  I want this, too.  I cried, in fact, because my oldest child right now is a little girl who is confident in her intelligence, her kindness, and her equality.  Right now, she believes she is both beautiful and smart, both kind and capable.  I never felt this way as a child, that I can remember, and it feels like one of my biggest successes as a parent that all of my kids seem to.  I fear the time is coming, though, those years when girls turn from confident happy people into virtual strangers who obsess about their looks and appearance, forgetting all that made them proud to be themselves as children.  Read more »

In The Writer’s Chronicle this month I found an article called “The Inner Identity of Immersion Memoir” by Suzanne Farrell Smith.  It’s a good article focused on creating some sort of set of guidelines for the immersion memoir, with some good examples (Andrew Pham’s Catfish and Mandala, Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk, and Lucinda Frank’s My Father’s Secret War, all of which are going on my reading list).  She brings up an interesting point—is there such a thing as genre nonfiction?  Read more »

See? Pretty book.

Our local library recently had a book sale, and I went on the last day, when you could get a bag full for $3.  So my family and I went down and brought our own big bag and we loaded up with 25 books.  The first one I read was Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard.  It’s a short thing, just 75 pages, and I was interested because I found it in the fiction section of the book sale, and I’d not read anything but nonfiction by Dillard, but it turns out this book’s nonfiction.  It’s a lovely little first edition with the pages that are uneven at the edges, and they are thick.  I love it.  My kids already wrote in it, but that’s really neither here nor there.   I love how on Dillard’s website she explains what genre her books are (this one’s a nonfiction narrative).   It’s great because we’re always having to label our writing, and she’s sort of funny and matter-of-fact about it.   I first read Annie Dillard a few years ago, when I was on my first memoir kick.  I read An American Childhood, or at least I read part of it.  I didn’t make it through.  This was before I’d studied writing at all, but even then I knew her sentences were gorgeous, bubbling over with beauty even, but for whatever reason the book didn’t hold my interest.  In graduate school I read an essay called “Total Eclipse,” which then led me to read a beautiful and lyrical book Dillard wrote in 1999, called For the Time Being.  It was a masterful threading of a few different narratives, historical, philosophical, scientific, and ecological, and after reading it, it immediately went on my thesis list, so that I could study it more.

Part of what makes reading Annie Dillard so interesting is that she goes on all these adventures, and we get to go with her. It’s through her own curiousity and endeavoring to put pieces together that we get to see any of this. Read more »

Part 2:  Last week I started to summarize my experience at a teleconference put on by the National Association of Memoir Writers.  The conference’s subject was truth in nonfiction, always a hot topic in the creative nonfiction arena.   This week I’m going to move on to the second conference.  It was called “Memoir:  A Hot Genre in Today’s Marketplace,” though I’m not sure that was the topic, but nonetheless  it flowed really nicely from Dinty W. Moore’s conference on truth in CNF.  He stressed the need that people have to tell their stories:  “It’s good for the world.”  The author on this second teleconference was Jennifer Lauck, author of Blackbird, Found:  A Memoir, two other memoirs, and a bunch of digital craft lesson downloads. 

                In “Why I Write,” Terry Tempest Williams says “I write to the questions that shatter my sleep.”  That seems to be the way Lauck sees things too.  Read more »

So I was on the phone with Dinty Moore yesterday…no, really, I was, and the fact that there were about 30 other people on the phone call does not diminish the aforementioned.  I attended a telesummit put on by the National Association of Memoir Writers, and hosted by its founder and president, Linda Joy Meyers.   Dr. Meyers put together the telesummit, which included five hour-long panels which I was able to access by calling in.  I wasn’t able to call in for all of the five panels, but I did listen in for about half. 

This is how you do a conference call, right?

First up was Dinty W. Moore, who answered questions from Linda and talked about truth in Creative Nonfiction.  It was a good conversation.  He jumped right in to the truthiness of it all, pointing out that fiction and nonfiction writers are both trying to get to some kind of truth, but that writers of nonfiction come to a different kind of truth, a truth arrived at by an unveiling of the self.   And writing nonfiction but calling it fiction, Moore said, is a bad way to write nonfiction.  It blurs the boundary of what you could have discovered if you’d gone ahead and mined your experience rather than changing a few details of it.  I’m not sure about that (Pam Houston comes to mind as a really good writer of autobiographical fiction), but I get his general point—it’s the digging and the honest unveiling, the metaphors you find when you’re writing nonfiction, that make it so compelling.  “It’s good for the world,” Moore said.  “People need to tell their stories.”  It’s universalizing. 

                As for truthiness, when it comes to changing the name of a neighbor or using a composite character or compressing time, Moore believes that though a writer must be honest,  emotional truth is more important than the factuality of each and every detail.  Try your best to tell the truth, but realize it’ll never be perfect, is what I got from what he said.  And I like the way he summed it up:  “I get tired of those arguments…Let the people who buy the books decide.”  Yes.  Read more »

blah blah blah blah

Sometimes, don’t you think you’re an idiot?  Like you somehow have fooled some people into thinking you’re talented?  You probably don’t, but I do, and I’m not the only one.  Mary Karr tells a story in her third memoir, Lit, that I keep thinking about.  She was teaching, I think, and struggling with life junk, and feeling inadequate.  So, clutching a mess of papers and books, about to cry (this is how I pictured the scene when I read it), she squeezes her eyes shut and shouts something like “I’ve never read (insert canonical writer here)!”   Her teaching colleagues follow suit, each hollering out some author they hadn’t studied (but probably always thought they should or would get to it).

So, in the interest of cheering myself up while I search for jobs that don’t require a stupid-specific accrual of experience…let’s hear it.  Who is an author you’ve never read, though people make annoying references to them constantly?  I’ll start.  I have never, ever, ever read anything by Walt Whitman.  I don’t want to, either, because the very words “Leaves of Grass” annoy me.  So I’ll probably never understand what it means to be “Whitmanesque,” and I’m OK with that.  Now you.  Bare your shame!