the moving spectacle of nonfiction, in Phillip Lopate's words, as the semester nears its end

This past Wednesday afternoon and evening I had the distinct pleasure of spending time in the company of the great essayist and Columbia University professor (and head of the graduate nonfiction program), Phillip Lopate, his wife, his daughter, and members of the Bryn Mawr University creative writing program.

(Thank you, Cyndi Reeves and Daniel Torday, for allowing me to crash the party.)

Between the cracks of many deadlines here, I've been reading from the books I bought that evening. I have, of course, read Lopate through the years; who can teach nonfiction without owning Lopate volumes? But I did not own, until this Wednesday night, To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, which is, in a word, a glory. Perhaps it is because I agree so steadily with Lopate's many helpful assertions, perhaps it is because I, in my own way, attempt to teach and, in books like Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, carry forward these ideals about the rounded I, the obligation to the universal, the curious mind, the trace-able pursuit of questions, that I sometimes read with tears in my eyes passages like this one, from "Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story:"

In attempting any autobiographical prose, the writer knows what has happened—that is the great relief, one is given the story to begin with—but not necessarily what to make of it. It is like being handed a text in cuneiform: you have to translate, at first awkwardly, inexpertly, slowly, and uncertainly. To think on the page, retrospectively or otherwise, is, in the last analysis, difficult. But the writer's struggle to master that which initially may appear too hard to do, that which only the dead and the great seem to have pulled off with ease, is a moving spectacle in itself, and well worth the undertaking. 

There are just two more weeks left in this semester at Penn. My beautiful honors thesis students are finalizing their work and, soon, will not just hold their glorious books in their hands, but have the time to reflect back on all the lessons learned. My Creative Nonfiction students are writing letters, Coates and Parker and Rilke style, to those they feel must hear them, while also working on 600-word portraits of one another. Joan Wickersham, the extraordinary writer of both nonfiction and fiction is headed to our campus, Tuesday evening, 6 PM, Kelly Writers House—and if you are anywhere near, I strongly suggest you make the time. She is a national treasure.

Teaching is exhausting, exhilarating, necessary, confounding, essential. I learn that again, year upon year. I stagger away—made smarter, in so many ways, by the students I teach.

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The News from Spain: 7 Variations on a Love Story/Joan Wickersham: Reflections

I'd wanted to read this intermingling collection of short stories for a long time. It has sat here, a tease—bought when I bought Elizabeth Graver (The End of the Point) and Jessica Keener (Night Swim). Set aside for a special time.

I was already familiar with the power and inventiveness of Joan Wickersham's voice. Her The Suicide Index would have been included as a stellar example of the memoir form in Handling the Truth had I read it in time (as it is, I list the book on my additional recommended reading list here, on the blog). I had, in addition, read the reviews of the story collection. And yet I was utterly unprepared for the impact The News from Spain would have on me. I was staggered after reading these seven stories through, each story (brilliantly) called "The News from Spain." I sat there on the couch, unable to will myself to stand. Arrows through my soul. Ache for the world and the women of the world, who love and want and hurt and try and wound and are left wounded.

The News from Spain is a sandblasting of the heart.

Readers comment on Wickersham's precision. That is the word, in a nutshell. Nothing escapes Wickersham's eye. No small detail. No minor hurt that becomes a remembered hurt that becomes the defining truth in a marriage, or in a mother-daughter relationship, or in an unrequited affair. Love is so beautiful, some of the time, and love is so brutal, much of the time. It is the war that wants only peace but keeps finding reasons to war. It is the thing that saves us. Wickersham understands it all. Her readers fall to their knees.

How twisted and smart Wickersham is, christening each short story with the same name. Makes it kind of impossible to pull them apart, to speak of them individually, and that is part of Wickersham's point. So I will just say that there's a story in this book about a dancer who has fallen ill, paralyzed. She is cared for by a young man in love with another young man, and their relationship deepens while her husband, still key in the dance company, is away, having an affair with a young dancer. The dancer tries to live on, tries to be smart, tries to be witty, even, and the caretaker tries to be whom he thinks she wants him to be—available and invisible by turns. This story devastated me. It has one of the most unforeseen and sensational endings of any story I have read.

And it is matched by the other stories in this work of art.

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