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, 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.  And there is a great momentum in this novel, as the narrator flies around the globe looking for a reason to live and a reason to love herself.  During a few close calls in air travel, the narrator never comes off as frightened, but being left to contemplate herself seems to terrify her.  (If you think this novel’s a simple “Why can’t I find love” story, you’re way off.  Consider the original ideas for a title:  Suicide Note and 144 Good Reasons Not To Kill Yourself).  And there’s a soft but definite turn in the novel about two-thirds of the way through, in which Pam the character seems to begin a process of understanding, after the plane she is in is struck by lightning, which takes out an engine.

“Where on the continuum I fall, when this kind of thing happens—between Oh please not how that things are finally looking up and Well this sucks but it will sure solve a great many problems—has become my mental health measuring stick in this era of exponentially increased sky traffic, airline bankruptcy and accumulating mental fatigue.  This, I understand, is not at all the same as being suicidal.”

I think Rachel will forgive me.

Aside from the writer at the desk, which us NFers might talk about too much but which nevertheless is critical to creative nonfiction, I find inspiration in Houston’s writing because holy crap, does she care about her sentences.  After not reading her work for a year, I forgot how her writing echoes, how it hits you.

“He tells me we’ve been put on earth to crack each other open, and then to stick around long enough to watch the thing that, having been cracked open, suddenly shines.  He says he knows there is only a thin wall between himself and all that shining, but sometimes he forgets how thin the wall is, because somebody came along when he wasn’t looking, and painted the damn thing black.”

That’s a pretty good description of good writing, too, I think.  Cracking ourselves open and looking for the thing that shines.

Not even counting the depth of the narrator’s insights, though, I appreciate her sentences on a very individual level.  In grad school we talked some about weighting sentences.  What word do you want to hit?  How do you want the sentence to build, or to die down, or to peak in the middle?  That takes exquisite attention to every sentence, each and every word.  “Dawn breaks over camp, rose-colored and cool on the San Juan River in southeastern Utah, twenty miles downstream from the town of Mexican Hat.”  First of all, I love the Homer reference here.  Rosy-fingered dawn, anyone?  Second, this line is so rhythmic I stopped to scan it.  I’d hit “Dawn”, “rose,” “cool,”, “San Juan,” the first syllable of “Utah,” and “twenty,” and then hit “MEXican HAT” hard right at the end.  The last line of the book fades, leaving a soft impression:  “Eventually, on that long night over the parts of the globe I’ll never see, the sun rose over Myanmar, and in Rangoon, where the Yangon River meets the Adaman Sea, the turrets and domes of the temples lit up as soft and gold in the early light as a fairly tale.”

There are stories within stories within stories, the narrator always being reminded of something, which reminded me of the way David Sedaris writes.  Houston’s not without wit, either:  “Bruce says he hopes they turn the burger barn into an exotic dance club, and he’s barely said it before I realize the exact translation of those words if you put them in a woman’s mouth is It’s such a beautiful day.  I think I’ll put on my new leggings and do some stretches in the park.”

Parts of some of the sections seem parenthetical, but it’s those parts that pack the most punch of all.  Like this one, which had me unexpectedly sobbing near the end:  “I didn’t trust it at first, the way Madison and I fell for each other.  ‘You don’t even like kids,’ she likes to say now, flirtatious as hell.”

Houston doesn’t like to draw the line between fiction and nonfiction with a thick pen, and I’m right with her.  She didn’t want to pick teams, but she had to.  No matter what she’s labeled as, though, Houston has a lot to teach me about using metaphor, about structure, about playing Operation with sentences.  My verdict:  Read it.  Read it now.

Cross-posted at Alala Mamas.

Here’s the bracket:

Fight 1: F. Scott Fitzgerald vs. Franz Kafka

Fitzgerald shows up drunk, on a butcher’s tricycle, and has to be lifted into the ring. He saunters over to the opponent’s corner where he has a conversation with the stool. He calls it Zelda, hugs it, then falls asleep. Meanwhile, Zelda Fitzgerald, his manager, is nowhere to be found. (Suddenly hip to technology, she’s back in the locker room playing the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on a Gameboy.)

Initially, Ezra Pound had informed everyone that the charity matches would be a professional-wrestling style match and told everyone to wear a costume that representative of their work. Soon thereafter, Hemingway suggests they make it a more manly sport, and suggests boxing. Pound agrees, but never gives Kafka the news that the format has been changed. Kafka, having no idea how to represent himself, let alone his work, decides to dress in a giant beetle costume like a post-metamorphosis Gregor Samsa. For added effect, he brings along his manager, a boa constrictor named Indiana.

Result: Fitzie is disqualified.

Fight 2: Edna St. Vincent Millay vs. Hemingway

Edna St. Vincent Millay starts off furiously with a flurry of quick jabs, and then she distracts Hemingway by leaning down in her low-cut blouse. The pig can’t resist leering, and she catches him with an uppercut, then another. Soon, he’s leaning into the ropes, and it looks like she might upset the self-proclaimed “best boxer in this bunch.”

Soon, however, Millay begins to tire. She heads back to her corner, where she throws in the towel saying simply, “I cannot last the fight.”

Result: Hemingway wins by default. After he’s declared the winner, Hemingway jogs around the ring triumphantly, arms raised, even though all he did was get hit in the face about fifty or sixty times.

Fight #3 Ginsberg vs. Frost

Ginsberg enters the ring at the end of a long procession of what appear to be monks of some variety. Ginsberg is playing a lute, which Frost snatches away and snaps in half. Before the referee can even start the fight (or get their gloves on), Ginsberg and Frost are swinging at each other. Soon, it turns into the equivalent of a mixed-martial event.Knees and elbows are thrown and Frost pulls on Ginsberg’s beard, before Ginsberg manages to get Frost into a rear-triangle choke, and Frost reluctantly submits.

Result: As no actual boxing occurred, the referee has to find a different way to justify a winner. He calls the match for Ginsberg because Frost was mean and broke Ginsberg’s lute.

Fight #4: Walt Whitman vs. Ezra Pound

When the match starts, Walt Whitman initially walks up to Pound and tries to shake his head. Instead of fighting, he suggests that everyone goes and “plays base-ball, the American game.”

Pound responds with a quick body blow, then an uppercut to Whitman’s chin. Whitman again tries to reiterate his desire for a non-violent sport, but Pounds repeated jabs soon goad him into a real fight. Like a rabid mountain man, Whitman lets loose with wild haymakers and bolos, and they connect—1, 2, then 3 in a row. Soon, Pound is bloodied, but Whitman doesn’t let up, soon even Whitman’s great beard is swaying like a heavy bag.

Result: The ref gives Pound a standing count and calls the fight.

Fight 5:  Ginsberg vs. Whitman

Just as Ginsberg and Whitman are about to start the fight, Ginsberg bashfully asks if Whitman would like to go out sometime, maybe they could have dinner or catch a base-ball game. He suggests that maybe they could stop at one of the local supermarkets in California to pick up grub. Whitman agrees and they depart.

Result: No match on account of love at first sight.

Fight 6: Kafka vs. Hemingway

Because of the result of the Ginsberg-Whitman match, the Kafka-Hemingway match becomes the championship bout.

Kafka enters the ring, baffled, still not sure why he’s there—or anywhere, for that matter. Kafka sets his snake/manager on the stool and waits.

Hemingway, talking smack, doesn’t care about Kafka’s confusion, and implies that Kafka is simply yellow and doesn’t want to fight. As the fight begins, Hemingway comes out swinging, landing a few good punches, but they don’t do much damage because of Kafka’s elaborate beetle costume.

Kafka doesn’t throw any punches; instead, he simply ambles around the ring in his beetle costume as Hemingway pummels him. Eventually, the audience begins to boo because of his inaction—and because Hemingway’s punches have no real effect.

To liven things up, Andre the Giant, who is in the audience because Pound had invited him to participate in the originally planned professional wrestling-style event, decides to enter the ring.

As Hemingway wails on Kafka, he climbs up the top rope and when Hemingway steps back to regroup, leaps onto Kafka, knocking him out. The ref counts out Kafka, and Hemingway, the consummate jerk, doesn’t hesitate to start punching Andre, despite the fact that Hemingway’s body blows hardly have any effect.

Andre begins to grapple with Hemingway, then hoists him and throws him into the third row of seats. Everyone applauds when this happens.

Andre raises his hands in victory, and heads over to Kafka’s corner to sit down. Then he sees the snake. Andre, reputedly deathly afraid of snakes, faints.

The referee shrugs, holds the snake in the air, and declares it the winner of the tournament.

*Williams Carlos Williams is the ringside doctor.

*Time machines would be required to make this a fair (and possible) tournament.

I read The Great Gatsby after I got tired of people bringing it up when no one had made me read it in high school. A year later, I bought The Beautiful and Damned for three Euros in Amsterdam, a beat-up old copy with yellow pages and dramatically posed figures on the cover and a note on the back that says “For copyright reasons this edition is not for sale in the U.S.A.”  Then I read This Side of Paradise and then a biography of him and then I got his collected letters. He’s the only man I could ever love who’s a terrible speller. Nowhere is his self-centeredness more obvious than in the letters, but I’ve also found them hilarious and tender and full of moments of genius. I can’t get enough. I’m just plain fascinated by him—the man and the myth.

Sometimes we just stare deeply into each other's eyes.

Maybe it’s his arcane language that I find so delightful: “tight” (aka drunk) and “soda-jerker” and all the sentences that start with “Why” (as in, “Why, I think that’s outrageous” which I can only hear spoken in Cary Grant’s voice). Maybe it’s his shrewd analysis of people, probably the best I’ve ever read. Maybe it’s his hair parted down the center and combed back in silly waves on both sides of his head. Or maybe I feel a kinship with Fitzgerald because he desperately wanted fame, wealth, and lasting idolization in return for his writing, and there is a small, shamed part of me that hopes for the same things.

I’m not sure I can convince you to love him if you don’t already. I’d just splutter and wave my arms and say, look, but he wrote this: “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (The Great Gatsby)

and this: “A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.” (The Beautiful and Damned)

and this!!: “Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.” (This Side of Paradise)

Fitzgerald created a mythology about himself that he wholly believed in. He once wrote in his notebook, “I am the last of the novelists for a long time now” and another time described himself accordingly: “Then I was drunk for many years, and then I died.” He endlessly romanticized his life and I somehow can’t help but love him for how he got away with it. And, to his credit, he wanted to be a writer and he believed in his ability before anything else.

His notebooks and letters, things he didn’t write for the purpose of being published, offer intimate glimpses of the man behind the façade. His letters to his daughter Scottie are among the most interesting. In one, sent to Scottie when she was 11, he gives her a list of “Things to worry about,” which includes courage and horsemanship. (Under the list of “Things not to worry about” are dolls, mosquitoes, flies, boys, and “failure unless it comes through your own fault.”)  In other letters, he takes advantage of the opportunity to pontificate about writing. He writes her:

Don’t be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

But even while giving his daughter (15 years old at this point) the hard facts of a writer’s life, he can’t help adding:

It is an awfully lonesome business, and as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.

Oh Scott. What a good man you are.

Growing up I never liked to read.  Neither of my parents went to college.  Neither of them took the time to peruse much more than a copy of Popular Mechanics, or maybe, the Readers Digest abridged version of Alex Haley’s Roots, which they would watch on television anyway… But I can’t blame my anxiety about reading and writing well on them.

All I can say is that I love the capacity of words to inject emotional energy into a Tuesday afternoon with the drive-through traffic at Starbucks swirling around me.  I grew to love novels, short stories and poems, but first and foremost, I was impressed with the miracle of a well-chosen word.  And sometimes, even an poorly-chosen word would suffice and set me off.  Just the sheer effort of an individual to articulate his or her experience–that’s enough to make my hair stand on end.  Hence:  my apprehension!

What if I fuck it up?

Today I heard on National Public Radio a segment with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.   It dealt with “Roots Envy,” or the inability of some folks to trace their family ancestry back generation after generation like the legendary figure of the 1970′s best-seller.  Gates, around that time, became enamored with the possibility and discovered some things about his mother and father that were remarkable.  For example, evidently one of Gates’ kin had marshaled in and out of a Revolutionary War militia between the years 1777 and 1784.  For an African-American that’s especially intriguing.  Also, during the broadcast, Neil Conan asked the author of the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader to revisit what he had written about his mother’s funeral.   (The audio of this reading, available today at 6 p.m., is worth listening to.)  He actually didn’t appreciate the stale, blue-blood service that they had back in 1997.  And so, with nothing more than a few words, he described the rowdy sermon and the swaying hymn-sings and the falling-down-in-the-aisle catharsis that would have been preferred.  It would have been a funeral like they had had for this uncle or for that aunt.  It would have been hot.  It would have gone on for hours.  It would have included those paper-fans, by which the mourners move the air about in vain…

I tell you, when I heard Gates read about this re-cast episode of his life, I wept like she were my own mother.  While driving through road construction barriers on I-90, I nearly couldn’t see that I’d be losing the left lane.  And I realized, while putting my foot on the brake, that I don’t have to be so nervous, that I’m not so much searching for that perfect word as I am searching for that intuitive trigger or that trap door that allows me to plunge into humanity’s collective subconscious.  Is there such a thing… such an ocean of dreams?

Here’s a excerpt from a chapter of Gates’ book:

Where Daddy shied from debt, Mama was intrepid, at least until the change. She could leverage Daddy’s two salaries like a Wall Street financier. But Miss Pauline wanted a house, and that was tantalizingly out of reach. She started buying house books and magazines. Dozens, for research. She and I would look at them, just as I would study the pages of the three or four mail order catalogues we’d regularly receive: Ward’s, Sears, Roebuck, General Merchandise, Mayer’s. (Almost all of our Christmas gifts came from General Merchandise.)

At one point, Mama’s plan was to build a house, on land near her mother or brothers on Erin Street. The first time I ever saw Mama really angry at my father — much angrier than when she’d accuse him of flirting with Miss Noll or Miss Mary — was on the day when he killed the deal that would have let us build a sort of family complex with two or three of Mama’s brothers. We had the plans, the land was picked out (just below Big Mom’s, near where Miss Lizzy’s dogs barked at night when the Sneakin’ Deacon made his rounds visiting his parishioners), and Mama was all excited. Radiant, in fact. She loved to dream, like all the Colemans, and she loved to make things happen, which was more Gates than Coleman. (When it came to finance and risk, Daddy was more Coleman than Gates.)

A Brave New Book

I can understand why some Germans would like it if the rest of the world’s fascination with Hitler, the Holocaust, and the rise of the Nazis would dissipate. One German woman told me the Germans find talk of all of this “boring.” I was supposed to be helping her with her English so I probably should have helped her determine if boring was the word she really meant. Another German woman told me that what happened in WWII wasn’t the fault of her generation and she wishes people could stop talking about it.

At the same time, some people are engaging with and adding to our knowledge of this particular part of history impressively. One such project is a book written by a German historian called, Mein Großvater im Krieg 1939-1945: Erinnerung und Fakten im Vergleich (My Grandfather in the War: 1939-1945: Memory and Facts Compared). In the book, Moritz Pfeiffer, who is a historian, interviews his grandfather who was in the Wehrmacht infantry.

After interviewing his grandfather and examining letters written by his grandmother, who he describes as a “committed, almost fanatical Nazi,” Pfeiffer checked the testimony of his grandparents against factual, historical documents. The result is what I would imagine is an uncomfortable confrontation with painful truths, a brave act. About the project, Pfeiffer says:

I believe that people will learn a lot if they understand how their respected and loved parents or grandparents behaved in the face of a totalitarian dictatorship and murderous racial ideology. Dealing with one’s family history in the Nazi period in an open, factual and self-critical way is an important contribution to accepting democracy and avoiding a repeat of what happened between 1933 and 1945.

Pfeiffer is encouraging others to undertake similar oral history projects, to listen to those who were involved in the war before we lose access to their testimony and perspectives.

Another piece that engages bravely with history is the film, “Eyewitness Archive of the Nuremberg Party Rallies,” made by Reiner Holzemer. The film is shown at the Documentation Center in Nuremberg, an exhibit that chronicles Hitler’s rise to power and the details of the Nazi rallies on the Nazi rally campus. There is much to criticize about the exhibit—it offers facts that have been sterilized, ironed, and starched. They are so clean one is almost able to forget the horror to which they are attached. The highlight of the museum is Holzemer’s film, which is shown in the last room of the exhibit and is comprised of interviews with Germans and Jews who lived in Nuremberg during the war.

My favorite quote from the film is that of a German, Edi Sers, who explains with impressive honesty how exciting it was to see the Nazi tanks and machine guns. He describes himself as a “fellow traveler,” in the course of Nazi history, as one who went along with things—with “enthusiasm,” even. He says a fellow traveler can’t claim to have been detached, that in going along with things, he “indirectly supported” the movement. He says now he realizes, “You had to shoot yourself in order to stay alive.”

This is perhaps the the greatest hang-up of the modern novelist — that fiction is somehow unsophisticated or inherently cliché if it is rooted in the writer’s own life, and that writers should be creative enough to invent entirely new worlds and find drama only in the unfamiliar.

This may be a familiar topic of conversation for you. It’s come up in form & theory courses or  dinner conversations or late-night debates at the bar. It’s something I find fascinating: there seems to be a prevailing attitude that knowing a work of fiction is rooted in autobiography makes it lesser than. People argue that knowing it’s autobiographical distracts the reader, prevents them from suspending disbelief and embracing the world of the novel. Knowing it’s autobiographical means it was less finely crafted, that the author has less skill, imagination, or both, and (my favorite) must mean that it was therapy for the writer.

But wait, we might say. Didn’t Hemingway advise to write what you know? Isn’t all fiction, to a degree, autobiographical? Isn’t writing fiction about exploring what it means to be human? Aren’t all fiction writers like crows, picking up the shiny, unusual things we come across in our own lives, taking them back to our nest and hoarding them until we decide what to do with them?

So what gives? Where do we draw the line between whether a work of fiction with autobiographical elements is working or not? Or, better question, why do we feel the need to draw a line at all?

In my experience, MFA students of fiction, especially, are horrified if they catch a whiff of anything seemingly autobiographical– in published work, at least. Our own seems to be another matter. Part of this seems natural: we’re at various stages of development in our writing, we’re figuring out how to do things, we draw off material in our own lives. It happens. We’re learning how to weave together the imagined aspects of the story with the shiny pieces we already have in our nest, the ones begging to be used, that are just so darn handy.

I worry about this in my own work. A project I worked on during grad school  featured a young female protagonist who had very different life experiences and goals than I’d had at her age. A large part of my initial process was trying to figure her out, trying to make a living, breathing character because I didn’t much about her life: I’d never done most of the things she was doing. But somewhere along the way, when I really needed to crank out some pages or when I felt like I had no imaginative energy left, I went to my little nest and used tiny details from my own life: maybe an observation that I’d actually make, a personality trait, or a bit of family lore.  At the time, I told myself I could always go back and change those details later. But as you may already know, though it took me a couple of months to realize: that’s not how writing a novel works. Once you use something, even if it’s small, then some important lines get blurred, and for me, at least, it’s hard to redraw them. It’s tough to go back and pinpoint where, exactly, you started making your character just a little too much like you. That’s a problem, and I still haven’t quite figured out how to fix it. I’m learning. Or trying, at least. But the fact remains: I’m defending the right of other writers to successfully incorporate their personal histories in their fiction, while at the same time, I’m adamantly opposed to writing characters who are fake-me, because that feels cheap and cliche, and I tend to hold peer work to the same standard- I get uncomfortable when I think a protagonist is fake-them. Ignoring the difference in skill level (aka I believe Dorothy Allison can do whatever she wants because she’s amazing, whereas I’m a toddler-writer and therefore maybe just don’t know how to do it the right way yet), what gives? I hate hypocrites, but maybe I’m just a giant one myself.

Those of you who teach must navigate this minefield all the time. Of course fledgling writers are going to start by drawing off their experience, and while it’s a cliche that we all start by writing thinly veiled versions of ourselves– well, maybe it’s true. But even if you can ground the conversation firmly in talking about the character, the shape of the story, and the like, at some point, both you and that student know that when you ask why the character does/says/thinks a certain thing that the writer’s answer, even though they wouldn’t admit it, would be, Because that’s what I thought/felt/wanted. This seems like dangerous ground, no matter how carefully and consistently you figure out a way to talk about the story in terms of craft.

So is learning how to weave material from our own lives into our fiction a natural part of our evolution as writers? Is it one of these things that’s different for everyone- some can make it work effectively, while others can’t or don’t like to? Is it a matter of skill or personal preference? I’m not sure. My instinct would be to say that if a piece works, it works, and it’s success or failure doesn’t rest solely on whether it’s drawing off material from the writer’s life. I think it’s more complicated than that, and that condemning a work solely because it’s autobiographical is simply an easy way to dismiss it, to tidily assign blame so a person doesn’t have to think too hard about what’s actually not working in the piece. But at the same time, I can certainly think of novels that were deeply autobiographical that I didn’t like at all, didn’t think were working, and I wonder how much we’re influenced by knowing that information before we read a book.

This post is far too long, and I have more thoughts on Hemingway and John Irving and literary snobbery. So for now: Are there novels you love that are heavily autobiographical? What are some that you didn’t think worked?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Non-Fiction’s tether to the facts has always been frayed.  And we’re just now getting nervous about it?

A federal judge in Montana has saved the non-fiction writer’s proverbial ass.  (Not really!)

He has, for the foreseeable-future, allowed the authors of memoirs, essays and sundry ‘aboutnesses’ to ostensibly do what novelists and poets do all the time.  That is, tell little fibs.  That is, craft big ones through which we can see, but the gist of which we want to believe so desperately, we pretend there are no holes.  That is, fabricate the truth.  That is, construct a world in which the center may not hold.  That is, present the narrator as the legendary hero he, or heroine she, always imagined him or herself to be.

Yes, we have Sam Haddon to thank for the barrage of mythic forays to come.  The U.S. District Gavel-Swinger has thrown out the suit filed on behalf of a million (alright, four) non-fiction readers, a suit that may have required author, Greg Mortenson, to pay damages to those who understood his Three Cups of Tea bestseller to be entirely factual (and cough up $15 per disillusioned reader), a suit initially brought to bear by another writer, Jon Krakauer in Three Cups of Deceit… (Boo!  Hiss!  What a party-pooper!).

And so, where do we go from here?

I, for one, am not going to take this lying (down).  To my credit I have an entire half of a graduate course with Natalie Kusz, and the topic of embellishing on the events and adventures of our lives has been raised every Tuesday.  Tonight we’ll do it again.   We’ll say that we can’t make stuff up.  But what puts the Creative in the genre of Creative Non-Fiction is how we beautify the gory details of our fragmented days, weeks, months and years.   Then, of course, someone will wrinkle his brow and it will be assumed that in streamlining the crap of our experience we, as writers, have made everything up.  This is as it should be.

Does every member of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club assume that Homer could comprehend the geographic peculiarities of each Aegean coastline?   Wasn’t Odysseus himself a blatant bullshitter?   And, if we dare take on the rubric of the writers of the Four Gospels–Matthew, Mark, Luke and John–isn’t it fair to say they failed to collaborate on the pertinent dialogue?  I mean, come off it!  Does the esoteric redactor expect us to believe that “I am the Bread of Life” is authentic chit-chat for a Galilean carpenter?  And why is any card-carrying Palestinian Jew doing within a five-mile radius of a herd of swine?   It’s mighty shady if you ask me, and I’m an ordained clergy-person.  Moreover, if eastern literature is more to your liking, it’s unclear whether anything Siddhartha says, or Buddha says, or Confucius says, hinges upon the historic facticity of specific life-events.   Does it matter whether the Four Noble Truths were first uttered on the road into or out of Varanasi, India?  Are Muslims more attuned to the timelessness of the Koran’s teachings or must they ferret out the temporal conditions under which the prophet received the angelic dictation?  Religiosity aside, the scientific method may be misapplied to history and to one’s experience of history; but isn’t that like using a butter knife to cut through overcooked steak?  Rene Descartes, to be sure, wanted to remove as much doubt from nearly all inquiries into truth (as we know it).  But he couldn’t stomach the possibility of truth that knows us.   And he posited the very mechanics of the soul in the pineal gland without proof at all…

No, neither folklore nor faith relies upon brute literalism we frequently foist upon them.   Likewise, neither rhyme nor reason is meant to track down supposed facts without the subjective interpretation of facts that we bring to all sensory objects and persons who are perceived.

Greg Mortenson has a response to the disputed chronology that had him stumbling and bumbling into a remote village:  “the time about our final days on K2 and ongoing journey to Korphe village and Skardu is a compressed version of events that took place in the fall of 1993.”  There you heard it…   A compressed version of events!  Mystery solved!

Case closed!   Or, shall we say, opened to wild and wondrous interpretation!

Peace!  PS–I must confess that I heard Greg Mortenson speak at Gonzaga a few years ago, prior to this scandal breaking, and remember being thoroughly impressed by his humility!   I was also totally inspired with the possibilities of educating the young women (especially) and young men of Pakistan and Afghanistan–with the notion of barrage of classrooms, rather than a shock ‘n awe bombardment.  Of course, that’s just my interpretation.  Add it to the mix.

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Haven’t heard of it? The idea is to hand out free books to people in your community, ideally those who aren’t already regular readers– essentially, to take a book you’re passionate about and put it in the hands of someone else. People could sign up as “givers” through the WBN website a while ago, and everyone who signed up as a giver received a box of 20 books that they can give out beginning today. The books themselves are special not-for-resale editions that neither the publishers or authors receive any royalties from, and the “givers” can distribute their books wherever in the community they want. When I picked up my box at Auntie’s Bookstore, one person was headed to Fairchild Airforce Base, another to a women’s shelter, one to a halfway house for teens, etc. One person said they were going to a grocery store to stand outside and distribute the books, because that way they could have a conversation with each person who came by and really talk about the book. This is the first year they’ve tried this in the US, and it seems like it’s been tough for them to get the word out with zero marketing money, but this seems like a clear win: giving out books for free. And ideally, a book that you really liked. (They have a list of titles, you pick your top 3, they award you one of those based on availability when you signed up). My box contains twenty copies of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. I already have a few places in mind to take copies to, but any suggestions, Spokanites?

Your local independent bookstore is most likely the distribution site, and Auntie’s Bookstore here in Spokane is having a WBN celebration Tuesday, 4/24, 7 p.m. at the flagship store on Main.

Poet and human rights activist Marjorie Agosín will read tonight at Gonzaga University. While she might be more wildly known for her poetry and activism, I recently read and enjoyed Agosín’s nonfiction book Of Earth and Sea: A Chilean Memoir, which I bought from the University of Arizona Press.

I was quickly absorbed by Agosín’s lyrical imagery and her unique relationship with Chile’s stunning landscape. However, what most intrigued me about the book was its unusual structure. Agosín crafts a flowing series of intimate vignettes reminiscent of Sandra Cisnero’s House on Mango Street. Beginning in the south-central city of Osorno, she travels through the country’s narrow geography, using important dates, locations, people, and objects to tell the story of her double exile–daughter of Jewish immigrants and Allende supporter. She skillfully layers her personal history with the political climate of her family’s adopted country and her own search for identity and belonging.

Tonight’s reading will be diverse in content, and its language will be rich and memorable. For more information about the event visit http://news.gonzaga.edu/2012/celebrated-human-rights-activist-gonzaga-u.

–Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town, p. 64

There’s an institution, which shall remain nameless, whose H.R. Dept. has asked for a philosophy of teaching.

I thought I’d offer the readers of Bark both the ‘Erasure’ version (followed by the thing that I submitted for the job)…

Thinking The Other

Commodities want
to know
shelter with flesh.

You ask the kind
of reward
virtually.  Through-

out we are known, feel
exposed, full of
weeds worth even more.

The what splintered

too and filth-strewn
glitz grammar

seek partners already
exhausted

and roll.

Why:

To Cultivate Critical Thinking and Imaginative Engagement with The Other

Not all questions are equal. In North America, for example, we often pursue answers like commodities, as if we’re constantly in the market for the idea or the semblance of thought that will make life easier or more convenient. Other answers are born into the marriage of curiosity and vulnerability. We want to know something that matters, that persists throughout generations, a thing that binds us to their pursuit of truth and makes it our pursuit too. Moreover, we feel exposed to the social vicissitudes of life and death without at least trying to find shelter with other flesh and blood participants. Where, you ask, do we find such shelter?

My reply (with missional theologian Lesslie Newbigin) involves the possibility of the meta-narrative. I seek it. I seek it in everything I read (poetry, fiction, non-fiction) and in everything I write (all the above, plus the occasional sermon or letter to the editor). It’s also clear to me that emerging generations of students seek a means of piecing together those cultural fragments in a meaningful whole. My reward and my challenge in teaching is giving them the tools and the courage to make the effort on a habitual basis, and to suggest that this effort is worthwhile. It is worth a great deal, I might say in class, for an individual to know what he or she thinks (and to arrive at those ideas through writing). It is worth even more, however, to believe that others, with differing ideas, may have something to say and something to hear. This kind of conversation takes place, not only literally and academically everyday, but figuratively and virtually throughout one’s existential pilgrimage.

What:

The Development of Composition Skills and An Artist’s Appreciation of Language

Parker Palmer, in his book, To Know As We Are Known, offers this summary of my starting point:

Where conventional education deals with abstract and impersonal facts and theories, an education shaped by Christian spirituality draws us toward incarnate and personal truth. In this education we come to know the world not simply as an objectified system of empirical objects in logical connection with each other, but as an organic body of personal relations and responses, a living and evolving community of creativity and compassion. Education of this sort means more than teaching the facts and learning the reasons so we can manipulate life toward our ends. It means being drawn into personal responsiveness and accountability to each other and the world of which we are a part (p. 15).

The beauty of these remarks is the way in which they place the student in a mysteriously passive position. We are “drawn into…” We are responsive and accountable. Given this framework, composition skills begin to flourish, neither out of a need to dominate nor to assert control, but to merely appreciate the giftedness of human experience. Here, it seems to me, basic grammar, point of view, voice and tone become rooted in a parabolic type of soil. Students develop and grow as they succeed in naming the nutritional elements which support their place in the dialogue or their stance in the argument. Moreover, when the wisdom that has been bequeathed to us appears well-worn, full of weeds or inundated with rocks, the what of writing becomes (and sanctifies) the ambiguity and perhaps transforms it into the very process of what Augustine called faith seeking understanding.

In this sense, I regard every person I am privileged to teach as an artist. That is, whether the man or woman will write professionally makes no difference. My pedagogical style is to invite even technical writers into that stream from which Annie Dillard emerged, describing her awe for creation as “a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for…” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek).

How:

Through Dialogue, Challenge and Compassionate, Yet Tenacious Feedback

I read something sad in an essay that I assigned my Eastern Washington University students. It was a Harper’s Magazine article, written by Mark Edmundson in September of 1997, in which the author writes as follows:

Students worry that taking too many chances with their educations will sabotage their future prospects. They’re aware of the fact that a drop that looks more and more like one wall of the Grand Canyon separates the top economic tenth from the rest of the population. There’s a sentiment currently abroad that if you step aside for a moment, to write, to travel, to fall too hard in love, you might lose position permanently. We may be on a conveyor belt, but it’s worse down there on the filth-strewn floor. So don’t sound off, don’t blow your chance.

Alas. There’s nothing more disappointing to me than a student who’s engaged in the academic dance in lockstep with the status quo. My role, as the teacher of such a young man or young woman, might be to model what it means to take risks. I might suggest, for example, that an upwardly mobile lifestyle is not all its cracked up to be, that the name of those who secretly despair in the machinery of careerism is Legion for “we are many.”

The point, I might emphasize, and have emphasized on numerous occasions, is the intersection of one’s greatest passion with the world’s greatest need (a famous line from Frederick Buechner). To not pause and ponder at this juncture… beneath this signage… amid these lights… is to miss a profound opportunity for spiritual maturity. This, of course, does not imply that an experience in my class is now or never. There is always the opportunity to double-back, to reconsider and to think anew. And yet, I would not want a student under my charge to go unchallenged into graduation. The consumer culture, with all its glitz and glitter, awaits and will descend like confetti soon enough. For now, what’s required is a self that wants to learn without the automatic reinforcements and bribes to which we’ve grown attached.

Hope:

Students Who Value Themselves/Others As Active Readers and Writers

The measurements that I use as teacher vary from classroom encounter to one-on-one conversation to the close review of the writing assignments themselves. In the end, I’d like to see a person who is incurious demonstrate curiosity that shows no signs of abating. I’d like to read essay exams, autobiographical pieces and research papers which genuinely betray the idolatrous pursuit of a good grade. I’d like to think and to feel with my students as peers who value themselves and others as energetic dialogue partners. That’s the hope.

Northrop Frye, author of Words with Power, has written prolifically on the Bible’s seemingly limitless reservoir. Western literature drinks from it daily, and perhaps hour by hour. When Wallace Stevens, however, declares the great poems of heaven and hell to have already been exhausted by previous generations, and “that the great poem of earth has still to be written,” I take up Frye’s mantle in response and encourage my students to do the same. Frye says, “a poem of earth would be an endless narrative, without the vision that looks up and down, and adds at least a suggestion of other perspectives above and below” (p. 84).

And so, let the revisions roll.

Click here to view the embedded video.