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.

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 »

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 »

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. 

Read more »

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).