Narrative Collage

I head to Penn today to sit in on a class taught by the very brilliant teacher and writer Karen Rile, and to talk with the students about FLOW: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF PHILADELPHIA'S SCHUYLKILL RIVER. Karen has positioned FLOW within a course section titled Narrative Collage, and it is from Karen that I borrow this rather exquisite definition: "Narrative collage is a compilation of small, independent pieces in which the movement between sections is abrupt and apparently transitionless. While there is no linear plot, there may be dozens of plotlets. The repetition of images builds symbols and motifs. Although a collage is comprised of small narratives, its cumulative effect is more a thesis or emotional statement than a traditional story. Narrative collage is used by writers of both fiction and nonfiction."

FLOW is a river's story, told in gasps, exclamations, declarations. It is an unfurling, in which the thru-line is not plot but shifts in mood and desire, shifts in time. The making of FLOW was a liberation, a turning point in a career that had been drenched in the personal pronoun; with FLOW I discovered how rather thrilling it could be to use the "I" to speak of the not me.

I look forward to Karen's class; I always do. To the questions she and her students will ask about a book I'm still, even all these months later, trying to define for myself.