Creative Nonfiction 135.302/Settling on a Syllabus

One writes a course description months ahead of teaching the course itself, and in the meantime, one inevitably reads deeper, thinks harder, disproves former standing theories, and reassesses writers they once loved.  At least that's how it is for me.

Yesterday and today, then, I'm studying the course description below and thinking about how I'll meld what seems pulsing and essential right now with the promises I've already made.  I have an idea about a particular Joan Didion essay, and I'm going to kick things off with that.  I'm going to insist on some Ander Monson and Carl Klaus to further set the stage. I'll bring some fiction in, and some poetry, too, so that I and my fifteen students might think out loud about wavering edges—about the nicks and tucks that are nonfiction and the elaborations that are not. 

I never teach to deliver what I know (what fun would that be, for any of us?, and besides, who really knows what?).  I teach for the conversations that erupt, for the work that might emerge, for the deep delve that is yearning and process. I teach because the possibilities are rich, and because there are no barricades within a classroom.

We’ll be asking questions throughout this section of Creative Nonfiction, and we’ll be writing and reading our way toward answers: What do we owe our writing, and what does it owe us? What is the role of imagination in memoir? How is the persona of our nonfiction different from the person we know ourselves to be, and how different should it be? How important is it, really, to distinguish between story and situation? We’ll be provoked and inspired by the work of such authors as Patricia Hampl, Lia Purpura, Joan Didion, Julian Barnes, Natalie Goldberg, Grace Paley, William Fiennes, Michael Ondaatje, Vivian Gornick, and Terrence Des Pres. We’ll workshop essays, memoirs, and profiles.

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Vanishing Point/Ander Monson: Reflections

"Am currently in the middle of Ander Monson's VANISHING POINT," Carl Klaus wrote to me, a few weeks ago, "and find it such a venturesome work of literary nonfiction that I think it might be of considerable interest to you and your students."  Since Klaus is himself the author of the venturesome The Made-Up Self, not to mention the founding director of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, I didn't much hesitate in making my purchase.  Yesterday and early today I've been reading Monson's essays (a Graywolf publication) through.

It's interesting stuff—quotable, inventive, daggered, asterisked, me-dominating and me-avoidant, not quite memoir, though Monson himself would be the first to count all the sentences beginning with (or featuring) that wily single letter "I."  Monson, like Klaus, like many of us teaching and writing personal pieces today, is full of rue and half-steps, full of self-disclosures that may or may not reveal the actual self.  Full, most of all, of the questions:  Can the actual self be revealed?  Can the we be known?  Is the I a reliable story? (Not a bankable story; that question, in the wake of so many bestselling memoirs, does not have to be asked.)

Monson is thinking out loud, in these pages, about truths and dares, about how the technology we write with may or may not shape what we write.  He is thinking about solipsisms and (magnificently) assembloirs, and he gets us thinking, too.  Perhaps the most powerful pages of this book are Monson's asterisk asides.  For example:

If we choose to represent our lives as story, it's no surprise that our stories converge, that we all want highs and lows, the reckonings with our pasts and flaws and loves that we are otherwise incapable of in real life.  Maybe we are the same, we are telling ourselves, no matter how much we try to invent our way out of this, and that's the thing we can't stand to hear or know.

I also like this:

The snap of art onto life is bothersome, too, a delinquent, a troubled fit.

What do we teach young writers, I kept wondering as I read, about truths and dares?  How do we talk about the flawed veracity of the assembled self without turning each and every one of them either to despair or to some version of David Foster Wallace (not that he was a bad thing, of course, but he was and should remain his own one thing)?  I want to speak honestly, want to teach truly, want to leave my students with something that means something.

Monson—playfully, insistently, self-defeatedly, self-aggrandizingly—puts even more at stake.   




 

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