how do we write with an empathetic imagination? thoughts in this weekend's Chicago Tribune

A few weeks ago, I built tall piles of my many essay collections (old and new) and began to ponder. Rediscovered favorite pieces by Annie Dillard, Patricia Hampl, Ander Monson, Rebecca Solnit, the World War II pilot memoirist Samuel Hynes, Elif Batuman, Megan Stielstra, Stephanie LaCava, Joanne Beard, others. Looked for insights into the empathetic imagination—how it has been managed over time, how essayists, historically, have gotten to the heart of hearts that aren't their own. I read, took notes, looked for patterns, began to write. It was a three-week process that produced just over 1,000 words.

I am blessed that the Chicago Tribune took interest in this piece. I am blessed, too, that I was able to share these thoughts at Bryn Mawr College this past Thursday, in the classroom of the very exquisite Professor Cynthia Reeves.

The essay will appear in this weekend's Printers Row. The online link is here.

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Truth or Fiction: Does it Matter When the Lines Get Blurred?

It may be entirely fuddy duddyish of me, but I continue to ponder the matter of truth on the page—the need, as I see it, to get as close as possible to the what-actually-was when endeavoring in the minefields of memoir or literary nonfiction.  Yes, it is true:  What we remember shifts and slides during the very act of remembering.  Yes, it is also true, as Ander Monson writes in "Voir Dire," that, "The unreliability, the misrememberings, the act of telling in starts and stops, the ****ups, the pockmarked surface of the I:  that's where all the good stuff is, the fair and foul, that which is rent, that which is whole, that which engages the whole reader.  Let us linger there, not rush past it."  The only interesting life, on the page, is the shaped life, the contemplated one, the one sifted for meaning and insight.  But don't we have an obligation, nonetheless, to get it all as right as we can get it—to not deliberately work beyond the ken of what we believe happened?

Having been deeply moved by "The Wave," Francisco Goldman's Personal History story in this week's issue of The New Yorker, I went on to find this audio recording of an interview conducted with Goldman in The New Yorker offices.  Goldman is talking about both the essay and the novel, Say Her Name, that Grove is releasing this April.  Both pieces—the essay and the fiction—were inspired by the tragic death of Goldman's young wife.  Just why Goldman chose to call the long work a novel and the short piece an essay is hugely instructive, and, I think, honors both his wife and the respective forms.  You can find his commentary specific to that matter starting nearly 7:45 minutes into the conversation.

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Celebrating the National Book Critics Circle Award Nominees

I never read nearly as much as I'd like to read—my multiple worlds are perpetually colliding, fracturing time. But I was so gratified to learn that, on this year's list of NBCC nominees, many of the books I'd loved best and celebrated here, on my blog, are being equally celebrated by the judges.  In Autobiography, there's Patti Smith's remarkable Just Kids, Darin Strauss's deeply moving Half a Life, and the thoughtful, provocative Hiroshima in the Morning, by my much-loved friend, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto.  In Criticism, there's Elif Batuman's The Possessed and Ander Monson's Vanishing Point.  I'd put all five books on my Penn syllabus months ago, and here they are—proven, lifted, upheld.

A huge congratulations to them all, and, especially, to my dear friend, Reiko.  I've linked to my own reflections about these books here, should you be interested in how they affected me early on.

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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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