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.”

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A few days back, Kristina wrote a nice post about titles in which she says, “There’s a power in naming things.” I like this idea, especially as it pertains to written work (and perhaps it explains why I still struggle to work on my former-thesis manuscript; the title is dead awful). I used to read for Willow Springs and currently read for Hayden’s Ferry Review, and there are times, have been times, when I wished I could read the piece without noticing the title, because bad titles instantly put me in a bad mood toward the piece (for instance, I read a piece yesterday that had a word I didn’t recognize as the title, and when I looked it up in the dictionary and then on Google, I realized that it was a made up word).

So naming things is good. But on the other hand, I think it can sometimes be problematic, if not simply bad.

A few days ago, I met a writer friend of mine in a coffee shop near campus. We had decided to dodge the stress of Black Friday by writing together instead. Only, we didn’t end up doing much writing. It was so nice to be able to talk writing with someone else, that was all we ended up doing. It came out that he, like me, has a soft spot for genre writing—or for certain genres anyway—and has been given grief over the years for such a leaning. We both talked about writing classes where we weren’t allowed to write genre, and we talked about what that means.

You see, we distinguish different types of writing because bookstores like us to do so. But so many pieces don’t fit squarely into one genre or another. I think most writers agree that you can have literary work with genre elements (say, elements of magical realism, which is itself a problematic label to some), but less often do we recognize genre work with literary elements, which is what my friend feels like he is writing.

I guess I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Matt Bell posted about it on Facebook the other day, too, wondering how we can apply the label of literary fiction to his work as well as to novels like The Help. The label here does us a disservice; it doesn’t actually tell us anything about a writer’s skills or a readers preferences.

My friend and I tried to define literary work, tossing parts of definitions back and forth for a few minutes before remembering that it’s a pointless discussion to have. “Character focused” some might say, but I’ve read genre work that focused on character development just as much as plot. It doesn’t help, not even to say that, like pornography, you know it when you see it, because, as Matt Bell pointed out, it depends on who is doing the looking.

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 »

How are we on time?   You know, chronological, nanosecond by nanosecond, always, always, running, time…  Before you answer, please note the following:   it’s been about 48 years since the death of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (and that’s roughly my own age… he added, self-consciously).   And more to the point –

Stephen King has written a new novel (released on Nov. 8, 2011), depicting events leading up to and beyond “11/22/63″…  In fact, this is the title of the 849 page tome of fiction, in which the protagonist, Jake Epping, travels back in time to 11:58 a.m., September 9, 1958, and accepts the mission of preventing the assassination.  The 35-year-old school teacher therefore has a good five years to move to Texas, get close to Lee Harvey Oswald and otherwise unravel layer upon layer of  elusive history.

What he discovers, of course, is that history’s not like a tangled string of Christmas lights.  It doesn’t even resemble an onion.

History, it seems, has been wrapped and rewrapped, inserted and re-inserted, into and out of the autonomous individual’s psyche — an individual who is embedded in peculiar communities from which we, upon “pain” of non-existence, may never detach ourselves.   There is no such thing as objective history.  Here’s the quote from the main character, favored by a New York Times Critic:

“For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. . . . A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”

Poetic, eh?   Or maybe a hybrid of Soren Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death and Rogers & Hammerstein’s The Music Man (King’s novel even goes the extra mile and includes a librarian-love-interest)…

At any rate, I’m thinking you can either read this epic, suspense-filled revision of history — something I plan to do over the holiday season.  Or, you and I may delve into the John Hodgen poem, “Teachers,” from his collection, Heaven & Earth Holding Company.

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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 »

There’s cronyism and there are the cronies themselves and the question is how to discern the difference.

Cronies are simply long-standing friends, chums, sidekicks, supporting cast-members, fat-fingered Facebook acquaintances, sycophants with low-credit scores, groupies, posse, a shared-history contingent, homies, neighbors with good fences… etcetera.

Cronyism, like most “ism’s,” allows those time-honored relationships to morph into something else.  Something with its own peculiar ring of Dante’s Hell.  That is, unfair advantage, favoritism, the old-boys network, the ya ya sisterhood… Think of George W. Bush telling the former F.E.M.A. director, Michael Brown, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of job!”   And now consider that statement in light of the fact that Brownie, the one-time city manager in Edmund, Oklahoma, had absolutely no experience in dealing with disaster when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

I mention this because I wonder, perhaps cynically, about cronyism when it comes to literary achievement and writing gigs.   I wonder about articles, stories, poems and whole books being published as a result of the networks one has carefully crafted rather than the inspired or hard-won words on the proverbial page. Read more »

So, I’m helping to teach a class of undergraduate students, and on the book list for the series of lectures are both Moby-Dick and The Vagina Monologues, back to back, one week after the other… This, it seems, is the nature of survey courses in literature.   When we’re dominated with male writers and want to throw in a token female, among a series of classics, the 10th anniversary edition of Eve Ensler‘s screenplay works well…

Then, of course, comes the snickering and the under-your-breath, sneaky asides, those remarks that play on the title-images.  ”Moby Dick,” as you may know, is a whale.   But when the proper name for a man’s phallus isn’t readily available, there’s always some dick nearby to get the word on the public record.

By contrast, it’s nice to hear a woman’s bare essential characterized with a little decorum on a book cover.   (When my younger six-year-old son, however, first heard the word in casual conversation, he thought my wife and I said “China,” and proudly blessed his parents with this health education ditty:  ”Boys have Penis.  Girls have China.”) 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 »

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 »