This week I read a craft book by an author I enjoy, one who writes both fiction and nonfiction, Anne Lamott.  The book’s called Bird by Bird, and though it mentions mostly fiction techniques, it’s remarkably relevant for nonfiction as well.  I’ve talked some about creating a character of yourself, which is what we do in nonfiction. In fact, when I write, I’m supposed to be creating a whole cast of characters—all of them me.  But the different characters I play are important, because just like you have to get to know a fictional character to figure out what they would do next, or how they would order their eggs cooked at a restaurant, I have to step into the character of that moment, the character I’m using to portray this one aspect.  Read more »

Ah, the age-old question: Which came first, the egg, or the lovely white box the egg is placed in?

Over the past couple of years, in the process of earning my MFA, I’ve heard a couple of books mentioned over and over:  one is Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, and the other Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett.  A friend advised me, when I spoke of my interest in reading both, to read Grealy’s book first.  I took her advice and loved that book so much I immediately added it to my thesis list and studied it.  I was struck by the way Grealy used the writer-at-the-desk (that’s WAD.  It’s going to catch on.)  Her narrator was remarkably consistent at every stage and age, which is a remarkably difficult thing for a writer.  That was a couple of months ago, and this week I finished reading Truth & Beauty.  When I finished, and even throughout, I knew what I thought, but as always I wanted to hear what other people thought about it.  So I went in search of reviews of the book.  And I found plenty, but not the kind I was looking for.  I hoped for a discussion of the craft of memoir and how Patchett went about it, since she writes mostly fiction, and I hear it’s good fiction (I plan to read State of Wondersoon, which I think is her latest novel).  I wanted to know how Patchett approached writing a memoir differently than writing fiction, or if she found it much the same. I wanted to know what other people thought about the memoir and the writing.  Because it got plenty of attention, but again, not for the reasons I would have thought. 

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Navel-gazing.  Another undeservedly dirty word.  Snooty circles all around the world are throwing this one around, right after “sentimental.”  I think all genres have been accused of narcissism, and creative nonfiction for sure.  Memoir has been branded over and over as a cry for attention:  Look at me!  Look at my crazy life/mom/dad/child/job/whatever.  Navel-gazing isn’t the same thing as exhibitionism, so let’s stop saying it is, shall we?  I think it’s more about introspection; finding something about ourselves and then applying it to the world, or at least to something larger than ourselves.  Or looking at something in an unexpected way, like Hunter S. Thompson in his essay on the Kentucky Derby, in which we see nothing of the Kentucky Derby and a lot of the author and his friend reveling in the depravity they came to record.  Here’s a really great craft essay on navel-gazing which looks at the issue literally and literarily.  Writers are narcissists, and so are readers—as writers we want to capture the human heart under stress (to steal a line from Tim O’Brien), many times our own hearts under stress, and as readers we want to know what’s in it for us, the so what factor and all that.  In fact, I think a person would be hard-pressed to find good writing that doesn’t involve some amount of introspection and application.  So can we all cross navel-gazing off our list of “literary” curse words?  Because if you’re not looking inward at all, I think you’re doing it wrong.

Hey, so a couple of months ago we were having our last nonfiction class of the quarter, a salon, and a friend and I got into a discussion about conceptual art and stuff.  I know almost nothing about anything, and my friend RHS knows a lot, so I was listening to her.  Our conversation was something like this, on what Art is, and keep in mind this is the middle of the conversation.

Me:  OK, I admit I don’t get a lot of shit that really may be art.  But, like, I remember reading this ee cummings poem in college.  And I think it was a big H made out of small Hs.  I mean…pffft!  That’s a poem?!

 

RHS: Well, (something really smart about how I should keep an open mind, and some connections are made in our heads and not on paper, etc.)

 

Me:  Yeah, I guess.  But my partner has these huge burps, these acid-reflux, he has to burp to ease his stomach, shake the house, make you want to throw up burps.  Could I put him in front of an audience and say that’s a poem, that that’s art?  I mean, there’s someone out there who could make that argument…I guess I don’t know where to draw the line.

 

RHS:  Why do we have to draw a line?

 

Me:  It’s a BURP!

 

So I came across this at Full Stop–a review of two books that could enlighten me, and I think I’m gonna have to get them someday so that I can discuss intelligently whether or not my partner’s belching is art and why or why not (sorry, sugar, but you probably aren’t going to read this anyway, and you own that your burps are nasty).

This is from oalt.net, where you can also find other funny doc names.

I’ve decided I’m going to start writing mostly craft essays, because there isn’t a lot of that available online for creative nonfiction.  Brevity has some amazing craft essays, and I find them very useful, so that’s what I’m gonna do.  But today, I’ve just started a new book and need some more time. 

So.  Some of you know that by trade I’m a medical transcriptionist.  I’ve written an essay on the subject that I think is probably my best essay ever, and I want to expand it—a lot.  Basically, my job involves being assigned work at a set number of lines per day, 1500 currently, which is considered a bit more than full-time.  The clinics I work for are all in the same town, and I transcribe for the same group of doctors on a regular basis.  As such, I have developed a unique sort of relationship with “my” doctors, in that I know much about their particularities, but they have no idea who I am.  As part of that, I’d like to ask you all a couple of questions.  Read more »

Reflect much?

Have you read Mary Karr?  If you’re a CNFer or a poet, you probably have.  As memoirs go, The Liar’s Club seems ubiquitously thought of as a staple of the canon, and with good reason.  I read that one a few years ago and just finished her second memoir, Cherry, recently.  And it was good.  It was so good I am now dying to get my hands on Lit, Karr’s most recent memoir.  So good that when I went to my office to select my next read, everything that I’d been so excited to tear into seemed lame (I did eventually decide on a Jane Smiley novel, and it’s not lame). 

Cherry picks up sort of where Liar’s Club left off, timeline-wise, though in style it’s quite distinct.  Not only does Karr present her adolescent experience in the present tense, but also in the second person.  The book describes a girl’s sexual coming of age, which sounds like something that’s been done; Karr points out that this is not entirely true, that there really aren’t many memoirs out there dealing with teenage sexuality and all the nuances and falsehoods and experiments and fantasizing that go along with it. In an interview over at the Paris Review, Karr says “It may be a problem of language.  When I started Cherry, I realized there were no words to describe an awakening female libido.  Boys have these childlike words like chubby and woody, but the parlance for female genitalia and female desires is too porno.”  So boys tease each other about wet dreams and blue balls, and girls…well, what do girls do? Read more »

Right when it was time for pictures, my sweet boy turned into a cranky butthole.

 I was the first of my siblings to have children.  My family has never been particularly child-friendly (which is not to say we hate children), and when I told my family members I was pregnant the first time, the only one to react negatively was my mother.  Second child, my older brother asked me if I knew what caused it.  My mother said (with sarcasm) “Oh, great.”  When I got pregnant a third time, I emailed my family to tell them.  My older brother now has a little girl, and my mom enjoys telling me how he used to think I spoiled my children, that he said things like “My kids will never do that.”  Now, she says with glee, he’s eating those words. 

            Which brings me to things that annoy me as a parent—specifically, the way we all judge each other as parents.  People feel free to judge you as a parent whether they have kids or not.  The blog Too Big for a Stroller is apparently gone now, but the author posted pictures that she or other people took, of children they deemed too large to ride in a stroller.  This is a person who does not have children.  Oh, but she promised she wasn’t judging us!  Just bein funny, yo.  Let me just say, I’ve allowed all THREE of my children on one three-wheeled jogging stroller.   At ages 7, 4, and 3.   It was heavy and took all my strength to steer it, sort of like the car shopping carts.  But you know what?  It was easier than listening to my oldest cry about how her feet hurt, and my boy crying because his sisters get to ride.  The blogger seems to think parents do this because they’re indolent and over-indulgent.  However, people taking pictures of someone else’s children on the down-low?   Seems fine to the blogger. 

            I came across this post on one of my favorite political/parenting blogs, The Feminist Breeder.   TFB wrote a great post in which she talked about being a stay-at-home mom (SAHM), and made her adorable boys into characters or bosses, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Michael, I think, and then proceeded to describe her day as “office manager” for the two bosses, which includes watching one pee all over the floor and another throwing a bagel at her. Read more »

I’m only posting to say that I’M GETTING MARRIED TODAY!!  At 2 o’clock.  But, you might say, it’s later than 2.  And you’d be right.  I’m all ready here and looking super cute, and up above people are still arriving and being picked up – and the wedding was supposed to begin thirty minutes ago.  My partner’s family is Native American, and they like to say they run on “Indian time,” which usually means an hour later than the regular time, at least for our Native family.  So I don’t expect my wedding to start for another half an hour, and I’m OK with that.  It used to drive me a bit mad, but over the decade I’ve been part of this family, I’ve come to expect it, and I’m as guilty as anyone, at least when we’re back home.  Anyway, I’ve got to clip my toenails, so I could use the extra time.

There’s a new website that just launched, and it’s for us CNFers, yo!  The site is Byliner.com, and it’s actually a subsidiary of Byliner Originals.  Byliner Originals is like a publishing house, sort of.  You can go there to purchase “singles,” like Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit, the book about author Greg Mortensen’s alleged misdeeds, which was apparently available free on the site for a number of days.  They’re called Byliner Originals.  Another one is William T. Vollmann’s Into the Forbidden Zone, an account of his venture into the nuclear hot zone in Japan after the earthquakes. It’s not self-publishing, though, the singles are editor-curated, as are the articles and narrative at Byliner.com.  Read more »

 I recently defended my master’s thesis, and the oral exam was comprehensive.  They wanted to know what creative nonfiction was, how it differed from regular nonfiction, what made it creative, where I draw the line, etc.  Some of the questions were hard, and I’m not gonna lie, I was nervous the whole time.  It’s the first time in my intellectual life that I’ve opened my mouth without knowing what I was going to say, or when I would find a point at which to stop.  But the one question I couldn’t answer any better in my after-defense practice was this:  What makes the reader care about your writing?  Ah, the So What Factor.  That’s a tough question to answer, and as I listened to my fellow NFers defend, I realized that’s really hard fucking question.  Then, at our last nonfiction form and theory class, Natalie Kusz hosted a salon, in which we discussed nonfiction things and sipped at our professor’s store of wine,  I brought the question up again.  And, for possibly the first time ever, Natalie didn’t have an answer.  She said it’s like the quote about pornography:  I know it when I see it.  Read more »