truth in memoir and in life

The big thing that I have been learning lately—in both my writing and my day-to-day life—is to be completely truthful and honest. It is so hard to be completely truthful about how I feel sometimes. Especially when I talk face-to-face with people. There are things I wonder: Do they really want to know? Is now a good time to be vulnerable? Am I too confessional around this person? Sometimes I just need time to evaluate where I am at. In my journals, I get pretty close to honesty once I pause and dig deeply to try to figure out why I feel a certain way.

I was reading Writing the Memoir by Judith Barrington. She talks about truth and says this about it: “I feel honor bound to capture the essence of the interaction in the events as I order them and in the dialogue as I recreate it. Memoir is, after all, supposed to be a true story (one that represents as closely as possible the experience); you have an obligation to the reader to make it that.”

She then goes on to say that she does restructure the story sometimes and change the order of the events so they fit the narrative better, but she wants to stay true to the heart of the story. “Perhaps our task, then, is to decide where, in each story, the integrity—the honest heart of the story—rests.” That’s what I want to get at in life, is the honest heart of the story. What happened? What did I experience? How did I really feel in that situation, and what have I felt about it since then? Where am I now? As I write my memoirs for capstone, I am really working on figuring out how to put myself and my emotions into the story in a truthful and believable way. I can write from my memory because I, after all, am the one who knows my own memory best. And as Elizabeth Alexander said, “Are we not of interest to each other?”

So some questions: Is it easier to be completely honest verbally with people or on paper? And how big a difference do you think it makes whether you know someone will read what you've written or hear what you would say? Should we always be the same degree of honest/vulnerable wherever we are?

Titles

Titles. My nemesis. It is rare to be head over heals in love with a title. After all, what could encapsulate a lyrical poem? A tender memoir? A sassy fictional essay? I would like to talk to the pros about this, to ask how they found peace with their titles. Or if they cared at all.

I have been doing a Researched Critical Essay on The Sound and the Fury. The book is a stream narrative. Faulkner is a confusing genius. He wove a tale of the demise of an influential family in the south. His antagonist was not one of his three narrators. Seriously, once you can have this fun this summer and have an interesting read, pick up Faulkner's novel and try it on for size.

 I would like to see how many titles he burned through before settling on one so beautiful as the SOUND and the FURY. Because behind the scenes, that sound of fury is exactly what backdrops the narrative. While writing his manuscripts did he leave the top blank? Was that unsettling to Faulkner?

Various anthologies capture me with titles such as Robert Olen Butler's "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain." Heck, I want to know what's going on in that story! Count me in. Others, like Amy Bloom's "Silver Water" and Lorrie Moore's "Your Ugly Too" are so fun you want to know more. However I don't think that I will ever read "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx or "Pet Milk" by Stuart Dybek (sorry, Hougen. I know you suggested that one.)

Have you ever "judged a book by it's cover" by avoiding a story due to it's title? Have you ever been pleasantly surprised by a gem of a book hidden under a garish title? How do your title your capstone pieces, and are you pleased with what you decided on?    

Writing the Unknown

As I sit here the night before my capstone presentation, I'm thinking about how I don't want to be blogging because I need to do more revisions on what I'm going to read tomorrow. Even though I'm on my fifth draft of this particular piece. Even though I've already spent two hours with it today. Even though I think I've decided which section I'm going to read. Even though I've practiced reading that section several times.

I write, like most of us do, to hopefully portray some amount of truth through my stories and essays. But when it comes time to reveal that story and that truth to an audience (for me personally, especially an audience made up of very close friends or family), it's suddenly not so easy. I've never quite been able to pin down what it was that made me so uneasy about sharing my writing with those closest to me. And at the Festival of Faith and Writing last weekend, I think I found my answer.

In our early writing classes, we were told to write what we know. In our later writing classes, we were told to write until we know. So I was very intrigued by a session at FFW titled "Writing What We Don't Know." Author Debra Dean spoke of writing not one, but two books set in Russia and revolving around Russian history. She read aloud some of her detailed descriptions of the Hermitage Museum. And then she told us that she has never been to Russia. She did much of her research through online virtual tours. And when she was told her book was accepted for publication, she was afraid of being discovered as a fraud, someone who relays vast amounts of knowledge of a place without having any sort of authority, without ever even having been there. She wrote what she didn't know.

To some extent, I think all of us "become" someone else for a little while when we're writing. We get into our characters' heads, we envelope ourselves in different atmospheres, we speak in ways we don't usually in real life. This is true of the piece I plan to read tomorrow. And I'm afraid that those closest to me will look at me and say, "that's not Ashley. That's not something she'd write. That's not something she knows." And I'll be called a fraud. It's a frightening prospect for me. But I also know that it's something I need to push through because if I go into a story knowing too much, being too safe, I know that I will never be able to get to the truth.

What are your biggest writing fears? How do you get over them? Do you agree that it's ok to write what you don't know? Or does writing what you don't know only last for so long, and then it becomes writing until you know?

Hunting The Muse

Lately I feel as though I’ve been “hunting the muse.” Trying to force inspiration into my work, grabbing it when it’s there, and making it work as much as possible. And when it’s not going the way I want, I avoid my writing at all costs. And, with the end of Capstone coming up, that is not helping.

(Who knows? Maybe he's hunting a muse, too.)

It’s not an official part of my reading, but my favorite book on writing, The Writer’s Little Helper by James V. Smith, has some interesting thoughts about writer’s block. One particular paragraph I’m thinking about goes something like this:

…Writing does not occur by thinking about it. Writing only happens when you do it, so plant your butt in a chair and get busy. Keep busy…. If you’ve worked heard at learning from your experiences along the way, you’ll probably be a creative writer. That’s how it all works. (225)

I’ve noticed that this is especially true for capstone. On those rare occasions when I can make myself write without inspiration, it does actually come out. Maybe it’s not my best writing, and maybe my work’s not at its peak, but it is work. The revisions I make in those times are revisions, and they do improve the work from what it had been.

I guess the philosophy that I’m coming to is that if the muse doesn’t come, start without her. Maybe she’ll show up, maybe she won’t. So why do I still procrastinate? Why do I still act like it’s impossible for me to write unless I’m in the properly inspired mood? The past few weeks have been especially bad for me. On some days, it seems I’ll do anything—spend extra time helping friends, do more homework for other classes, go on walks when it’s uncomfortably chilly—to avoid facing my poems.

How do I work around that? Is it a matter of simple but intense self control in making myself sit down and look at the poems? Or has my senioritis really gone to my head? Can it get easier? Maybe these are silly questions to ask, and I think I know the answer well enough. Sometimes you’ve just got to sit in the chair and write. My question is… how do I get myself to sit in the chair?

A Heap

I just made myself a spinach, pesto, and pepperjack cheese panini which is a nice thing to have by my side as I sit down to write this. Just thought you'd want to know all my little details.

Anyways. Robert Haas. What a guy. The first poem in his book, Time and Materials, is so short, one could argue that it isn't even a poem. This is all that is on the big, blank page:



IOWA, JANUARY


In the long winter nights, a farmer's dreams are narrow.
Over and over, he enters the furrow. 



That's it. There's a lot of nice white space underneath this little blurb which adds to the flavor of loneliness and winter. I like thinking of writing outside the box. The next poem in the series is a bit larger, but still simple.



AFTER TRAKL


October night, the sun going down,
Evening with its brown and blue
(Music from another room),
Evening with its blue and brown.
October night, the sun going down. 


What the heck is a trakl? I asked myself. I bet you're wondering too. I looked it up. Georg Trakl (I did not forget the e, he simply does not have an e on the end of his first name. Who knows what's going on with his last name) was an Austrian poet who was considered one of the most important Austrian Expressionists. I suppose Haas must have truly liked him.

It's not until Haas' third poem in the collection that things start to get a bit more complicated, both in diction and length. I started reading a heap of poems by Yusef Komunyakaa also (I'll share one at the end of this post - just because it's wonderful), and it all made me think of what goes into making a collection of poems. Why did Haas start simple and get more complicated with his poetry? What effect does that have on me, the reader? It's easy for me to think that a poet can just slap his or her poems all together and choose a common thread without putting much work into it. But I think if I assume that, I'm not reading deeply enough.

A book of poems is such an art form. I want to know what goes in to the structure and design of one. Besides a common thread of theme, what else makes up a collection of poems? Do poems lose their stark beauty when placed in a heap, a book, of many rather than by themselves?

Okay, while you're dwelling on that, enjoy this poem by Yusef Komuyahkaa (his name is fun to say). It's deep and sad, I think, but a good one to string meaning out of.

POETICS

Beauty, I’ve seen you

pressed hard against the windowpane.   

But the ugliness was unsolved

in the heart & mouth.

I’ve seen the quick-draw artist

crouch among the chrysanthemums.   

Do I need to say more?

Everything isn’t ha-ha

in this valley. The striptease   

on stage at the Blue Movie   

is your sweet little Sara Lee.   

An argument of eyes

cut through the metaphor,   

& I hear someone crying   

among crystal trees & confetti.

The sack of bones in the magnolia,   

What’s more true than that?   

Before you can see

her long pretty legs,

look into her unlit eyes.   

A song of B-flat breath   

staggers on death row. Real

men, voices that limp

behind the one-way glass wall.   

I’ve seen the legless beggar   

chopped down to his four wheels.

Bird by Silenced Bird

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but I somehow managed to make it almost to graduation without reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I feel somehow like that oversight in my education just had to remedied before I could accept my diploma. (Is it just me, or does absolutely everyone seem to have read [and loved] that book?)

Admittedly, I am only about a third of the way through at this point, but what I’ve read so far has been just the breath of fresh air that I needed after burying myself in other writer’s work (which made me feel inspired at some times and flat out defeated at others…how am I ever going to compare to these people?). It’s been fun just to leisurely make my way through Lamott’s advice and criticisms.

            Because I was running out of creativity and energy for my final piece of Capstone writing, I allowed myself to write a really “shitty first draft” as Lamott puts it. She says, “What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.”

It wasn’t easy. I kept getting up from my computer to pace the room, feed the cat, put away a few dishes, because could this draft really be worth it? Really?

But with the voices silenced I now have that first draft written. I now have something to work with, and I suppose that’s better than nothing. Only now it’s time to turn that draft into something I actually like and something that those voices will chatter at a little less.

It’s hard to find the balance of how much to let those outside voices speak in to your project. When do you let them in? Or do you? Is it better sometimes to pave your own trail and let them say what they will? 

For whom are you writing?

Warning: This is not a commentary on what I’ve been reading for capstone (though I have finally gotten back into reading, honestly!). It’s thoughts about a poem. I still think it's relevant.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down for lunch next to a girl I know and saw the book next to her lunch tray. It was a side-by-side Spanish and English edition of the poetry of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who lived in the last century. I’ve read a few of his poems in Spanish before, so I flipped through the book while I ate. When I left, I had the title written in my notebook and the name of a poem that I wanted to remember.

Of course, I promptly forgot about it.

Looking back at my notebook today, I found the words “Ode to Criticism” scrawled across the page. I reread the poem, and fell in love all over again.

In English, the poem begins:

I wrote five poems:

0ne was green,

another a round wheaten loaf,

the third was a house, abuilding,

the fourth a ring,

and the fifth was

brief as a lightning flash,

and as I wrote it, it branded my reason.

Note: Yes, that is supposed to say “abuilding,” not “a building.” There is no “real” English word for the Spanish word he uses.

He continues to tell how people took these poems and lived with them until the critics showed up, captured and tortured his poetry, and almost killed it because it wasn’t popular enough and lacked shadows. In the end, though,

They left,

all of them,

and then,

once again,

men and women

came to live

with my poetry […]

And now,

gentlemen, if you will excuse me

for interrupting this story

I’m telling,

I am leaving to live

forever

with simple people.

Wow. I left out a lot of detailed parts of his poem-story, but even just these parts made me think about how big and creative and magical and exciting writing is, whether it is poetry, essay, or my capstone genre of fiction. His descriptions of his poems at the beginning of the piece doesn’t even try to be a properly parallel list—he definitely is not in the comp teacher’s lap—but that inconsistency allows him to get all the closer to the heart of what his writing is. When we write, it can be anything at all, whether it is green, bread, or brief.

Even bigger, this magic doesn’t have to be some mysterious thing. Neruda writes a poem about writing for the common people—simple ones. If the narrator had written his poems in a way that would have pleased the critics, he would have lost his true audience. In this scenario, he has lost the approval of the critics, but they are the ones who kill his poetry, not the ones who live with it and can use it.

So whom are you writing to? What is excellence?

Is your work good because you got an A in class, made it into Inkstone? Will it be proven good later, when you’ve been published or accepted into a top grad school? Are you afraid it’s bad because none of the above has happened?

Let’s pretend that the excellence of writing depends on whether or not it meets its goals. In that case, yes, if the above are your goals, you are good or bad at writing depending on whether you succeed.

But maybe you’re writing to show hurting people that they are not alone.

Maybe you‘re writing to show people that some Christians DO understand how the world really works.

Maybe you’re writing to shine a light into a dark place.

If that’s true, take a point from Pablo Neruda—take your simple gifts to a simple people, and let them live with your words. Don’t stress too much about critics. Your poem, your story, is not for them.

Do you agree? Disagree? Do you have different goals or perhaps a defense of popular criticism?

Turning Abstract to Concrete

For my Capstone reading, I’ve been working through Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, a collection of short stories about a Native American family and all their dysfunctions. One story that caught me today though was a section on a short scene without much dialogue and a lot of space for abstraction. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I read a section where a woman is looking at her adopted daughter, trying to understand what she is thinking:

I turned her head toward me and looked in her sorrowful black eyes. I look a long time, as if I was falling down a hill. She blinked gravely and returned my stare. There was a sadness I couldn't touch there. It was a hurt place, it was deep, it was with her all the time like a broke rib that stabbed when she breathed.

I love how she combines thoughts with tangible feelings. I know what it feels like to tumble down hills, where gravity doesn't seem to make up his mind. And while I've never had a broken rib, I can still imagine what it might feel like to have a sharp sticking sensation in my side (I have had side-aches from running... think they're similar?). Just saying that the child is sad, particularly on certain subjects doesn't cover it for me.

It even happens when I'm talking with people in real life. When trying to describe how they feel, all they can say is that they're "sick of talking about it," for instance. Whenever I try that one on my mom, she thinks it means that I'm just not in the mood to discuss something, or I'm too lazy to come up with a resolution at the moment. I remember once telling her about my physical reactions (stomach- and head-ache) to a problem I was having, and she was better able to understand how I really was doing.

I think in writing too, I feel disconnected with them if I am told how they are feeling and don't receive physical side-effects. I know that I react to certain emotions or situations in ways that are palpable, and if I don't see that in writing, I can't get inside the character either. One thing that Erdrich does very well all throughout her stories is to include so much concrete, touchable detail that the reader can live and breathe the character, not just stare at them in vague terms.

Do you all tend to write more from an abstract stance or a concrete one? Especially in personal essay and such, I push into abstraction. What do you do to make sure you are including more than musing to make the world come alive in your writing? Do your feelings have textures?

Lately I've been reading Billy Collins, that poet who is so widely read and who is slightly snubbed by those higher up in the poetry realms as "common poetry". I'm not just making this up; once I heard that phrase used on him.

I like Billy Collins. He's smart, interesting, and a sharp writer. His popularity, I would venture, is largely due to his engaging and funny reading style, but his writing lasts because his poetry lives on the page, too. I admire lots of things about him--his images are lucid and effortless, his voice is clever and engaging, and he's not afraid to use a little space to lead up to where he's going. I especially think it's interesting that he regularly uses quotes from other readings, and doesn't just use them as a side quote, but interacts with them. Here's one of my favorites.

The Four-Moon Planet by Billy Collins

               I have envied the four-moon planet. --The Notebooks of Robert Frost


Maybe he was thinking of the song
"What a Little Moonlight Can Do"
and became curious about
what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.

But wouldn't this be too much of a good thing?
and what if you couldn't tell them apart
and they always rose together
like pale quadruplets entering a living room?

Yes, there would be enough light
to read a book or write a letter at midnight,
and if you drank enough tequila
you might see eight of them roving brightly above.

But think of the two lovers on a beach,
his arm around her bare shoulder,
thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight
while he gazed at one moon and she another.


from Ballistics: Poems (2008)


Here are the things I think when I read this (for the fourth or fifth time):

What could a lot of moonlight be capable of? How very clever. Now I'm thinking about something totally new.

"Pale quadruplets entering a living room" is so odd and simply fabulous. I can just see it, can't you?

Seeing double on a whole new level--eight moons would be great, and is a funny image.

And then we get to the last stanza, and it's sort of funny, and sort of sad--the difficulty having four moons can bring. Collins ties in the two threads of four moons and romance in each stanza, without feeling like he's working at it.


I appreciate Billy Collins because his poetry lets me into what he's thinking--I don't have to slave over it or pretend to appreciate it academically. He's speaking my language, and I genuinely like it. I think this is the place of poetry, not to the exclusion of other kinds of "higher" poetry, but in its own place, as a concise and lovely art that most people can enjoy.


If I may be so bold. And, frankly, I think Billy Collins would agree with me; he's the one imagining that the book of a certain fellow poet (of whom he is not fond) being shot with a high-speed bullet into smithereens. I'm feeling pretty tame after that particular poem ("Ballistics", p. 31-32).

How can less be more?

It’s pretty short, so I’ll just give you the full poem. This is “Married,” by Jack Gilbert.

I came back from the funeral and crawled

around the apartment, crying hard,

searching for my wife’s hair.

For two months got them from the drain,

from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,

and off the clothes in the closet.

But after other Japanese women came,

there was no way to be sure which were

hers, and I stopped. A year later,

repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find

a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

Read it again if you can.

What fascinates me about this poem is how present his emotion is, yet how unspoken. It’s like he’s screaming without words. Everything is action; “crying” is the closest we get to an emotional word. 

And there is a scene to the storyline, but the objects are ordinary. He doesn’t use a plain ole adjective (though I’m no grammarian) until the last line. We finally get a particular object—a potted plant, and in the dirt we find “a long black hair.” And the most fluorescent thing in the whole poem is his wife’s fruit plant. (

Gilbert varies our vision throughout, too. Our lens focuses in on his writhing at first, clouds up in the middle as time carries on, and sharpens at the end. 

Why is everything so plain? Why does he simply title the poem “Married”? Why is the most elaborate description that the hair in the dirt is a “long black” one?

Understatement—less is more. Gilbert says as much as he does by saying as little as he does. The first line(break) grabbed me, and I felt where he was without his having to say so. If the poem ended at the first line, which it does for a moment, all we would know is that he “crawled.” Why did he crawl? Maybe he didn’t know what else to do.

He tells us why he’s crawling, a few lines down—just to find his wife’s hair. As if this is all that remains of her, he is crawling around his apartment, for at least two months (and maybe more, if “two months” refers to each of the places where he finds her hair). A year later, it means something to him that he had found a hair of hers that just could not have been another woman’s.

Why is understatement so effective? Why is the smallest breath can exhale such feeling? And when do you find understatement most helpful? Are there times where you feel the need, in your poem or essay or story, to overstate?

~david d

questioning reality in my writing

I’ve been reading The White Album by Joan Didion. I think her writing is wonderful because she questions why we write stories. In her book, she says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and then she gives all these examples of bizarre stories that people come up with to tell each other. Yet she questions the authenticity of these stories that we tell ourselves or that we believe are real. She writes, “I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself…” (11).

I’ve been experiencing that as well when I’ve been writing my memoirs. I haven’t doubted that my stories are true. I know these events actually happened, and I try to recount the stories with as much proper detail as I can remember from pictures that I look at. But I’ve been beginning to feel that my stories are not quite right somehow. How can they be truly accurate unless they are completely objective? If they are completely objective, where am <I> in the story? Where is my personality, and do my opinions matter? And if I AM in the story as completely as I should be, what is my perspective? It is what my view is of the situation at the time that the event happened.

…But as time passes, I see how much I have grown, and I realize that my interpretations of various events that happened in the past should be called into question because I did not know as much then as I do now. One example of this is my negative judgments of the kids that sniffed glue in Kenya. At the time, I thought they were just doing it because they were dumb, because they were addicted, or because they were poor. I don’t even know what I thought. But some years passed, and I read in a book one time that they do it because sniffing glue dulls the hunger pangs… See how much we change in our understanding? How much we mature as we get older, and how we place value on different things, on the things that are MORE valuable (as compared to what we thought was valuable when were younger).

Yes, these are a lot of things for my mind to think about. Sorry if there is not a lot of sense or structure or order to my thoughts. I am still processing. And these thoughts don’t seem like something I could order very easily anyway. It’s a twilight area, a gray in-between, a space between what is real and what is not… like how we don’t always remember things clearly, or how we may not have noticed them as we should have in the first place.

May I Borrow That?

Because of the new hobbit movie coming out in December, I decided to read the book again (I’ve already read it multiple times), but as I got home to pick up the book, I decided to reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy instead. I haven’t read them since I was thirteen, and from the mind of a thirteen-year-old who was reading them only for the sake of seeing the movies, the books weren’t very good.

I read The Fellowship of the Ring before spring break, took a break to blaze through the Hunger Games trilogy, and have now started reading The Two Towers.  The thing was, because of my first experience with the books, I was braced for the worst, but I got quite the opposite. I found books rich in character, story, description, etc. Yes, they aren’t short stories or books about the writing process, so they don’t really pertain to my capstone projects, but the books were written by one of the best. I couldn’t put them down.

My favorite thing so far? Finding all of the little nuggets hidden throughout. Tolkien has these moments with descriptions that just make you catch your breath. Some like, “The sun crawled over the shoulders of the earth.” Shoulders. Wow, I’ve been writing for how long and have tried to find a fresh way to describe the horizon, but man, he nailed it.

This brings me to the thing I have taken to heart as a writer: imitating other writers. I mean, that’s why we read other writers, right? To learn from them, learn how to craft a memoir, story, poem. In fact, we’re encouraged to imitate them, and we can even use a small tidbit or phrase here and there. To me, that’s one of the highest compliments if another writer decides to use the same word you used to describe something. That means you were great. It would be like me using the word “shoulder” to describe the horizon like Tolkien did (which, in fact, I do plan on doing eventually). That’s not plagiarism. That’s flattery. Granted, if you take whole sentences or paragraphs, yes, that is plagiarism, and I am not condoning it. Do not do it! But, we can still imitate. Use other writer’s styles. Try out some of their wordplay.

As I work my way through the trilogy, I am constantly amazed at how well-crafted the books are. Again, it may not be a short story, but it has given me a lesson on how to use description, dialogue, and summary scene. I should be keeping a notebook full of the brilliant descriptions and phrases that I find, but so far, it's in my mental notebook, and I'm thoroughly enjoying the books!

So what do you all think? How much should we be imitating, and do you think it’s okay to borrow short descriptions or great word combinations? Thoughts?