Joan Wickersham in person, Kelly Writers House as refuge

I would have preferred a sharper photo. I could blame my fatigue at the near end of that day—my hands slipping, or my eyes watering, or something. Instead, I'll declare this photograph of Joan Wickersham reading at Penn's Kelly Writers House to be infused by the light Joan carries with her. As she works. As she reads. As she considers. As she listens.

Joan was at Penn to read from three works—nonfiction (The Suicide Index), fiction (The News from Spain), and poetry (Vasa Pieces, parts of which appear in Agni 82). Her coming was, for me, a highlight of this semester—a chance to hear from a writer whose work has long inspired and thrilled me. A chance, too, thanks to Joan's invitation, to spend an hour or so alone with her over steeping, seeping cups of berry tea. We talked advertising youths, Lab Girl, place in memoir, the confounding role of adjunct teachers, Philadelphia then and now. I discovered, in Joan, that rare, wonderful thing: a person as gloriously complex and broadly thinking in person as she is on the page.

And then there she was, reading. Words I'd read twice, sometimes three times before, but delivered newly. A culminating sequence from Vasa Pieces—new work inspired by the sinking and resurrection of the Swedish warship, Vasa. Beautiful pieces made thrilling by their emergence from history and their threads of urgent now. The first poem setting the tone, revealing the "must" of this work—the role the Vasa played in the imagination of Joan's husband:

... I imagine you down there,
reading and re-reading the story of Vasa,
memorizing every picture, puzzling over the order—
the heeling ship, the sinking ship, the risen ship,
the sunken ship, the battered risen ship again—
clinging to the table leg, pretending it was a mast.

Poems continuing on through ships (and lives) gone wrong, through autobiographies redesigned by survivors, through shipworms and felt absence.

Until Joan lifted her head. And even then, her spell was not broken. The light still broke behind and through her.

I want to thank my students who attended for allowing this moment into their lives. I want to thank Jamie-Lee Josselyn, that lovely vision in green pants, for her beautiful introduction. I want to thank the Kelly Writers House for being home and hearth to both talent and soul, for being that place that students can and do turn to when the world feels raw and bright minds are the cure.

I want to thank Joan for the afternoon, and for the inspiration of her commitment to the work itself. The work, above and beyond all else.

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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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Why structure actually does matter, in memoir

This morning, on HuffPo, I'm reflecting on why structure actually does matter in memoir — how indeed it helps to define the form—to distinguish it from autobiography, essay, war reporting, journalism, because that distinction matters. I refer in the piece to some of my favorite memoirs and memoirists, though there are, of course, many more.

And, because I must, I remember my brilliant students at Penn, and one particular Spectacular.

The full link is here.

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writing in defense of memoir in Chicago Tribune

In the Chicago Tribune this weekend I am writing in defense of memoir—and in celebration of the structurally intriguing work of Terry Tempest Williams, Joan Wickersham, and Susanna Kaysen.

The piece begins like this, below, and continues here. Please share it, if you are so inclined.

She leans in and tells me a story. There are two sisters, she says, both in their 70s. Each possesses a ferociously “true” version of a shared childhood scene. All these decades later, the sisters still can't agree, still won't agree, on the scene — not on its particulars, not on its meaning. One sister has to be right, and one sister has to be wrong — the proof is controvertible. Imagine the memoirs these two sisters might separately write. Whose would you read? Whose would you finish? How would you know who is telling the truth? Which of the two stories matter?

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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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The Suicide Index/Joan Wickersham: Reflections

Every year we lose twice the number of parents, children, grandparents, friends, neighbors, colleagues to suicide than we lose to murder. "Murder attacks the future, suicide the past," a brilliant writer offered to me, just this week, in email. Yes.

When Joan Wickersham's father decided to end his own life early one morning—he had dressed, collected the paper, made a cup of coffee for his wife, sat down in a favorite chair, crossed his feet on the foot rest, and fired one shot. He left behind the unsolvable riddle, the countless mathematically imbalanced paradoxes that all suicides leave in their wake. For years the author tried to sort the facts and un-numb, tried to understand who her father really was and how to make the entirely unacceptable somehow acceptable, so that she could live not past it, but with it. Hadn't he loved her? How could he? Hadn't he himself been against suicide as a philosophical concept, a life choice? So then what happened? Didn't he know that taking his life in his house would make so much impossible for the wife, and was that the point, after all, and why, in the immediate aftermath, was there so much strange conversation among the family members, so many wrong things first noticed, a hint, even, of laughter?

Wickersham wrote her book in pieces. She wrote it as fiction, she wrote it as memoir hung on the hanger of chronology, and finally she wrote it as an index, The Suicide Index: Putting My father's Death in Order. The book was a National Book Award finalist in 2008. It wholly deserved the citation.

Chapter titles:

Suicide:
act of
attempt to imagine
bare-bones account
immediate aftermath

anger about

attitude toward
his,
mine,

belief that change of scene might unlock emotion concerning

You understand. You can image that Wickersham moves across pronouns, point of views, facts, assertions, incompatible parallels. You can trust that this book is honest and also unsparing—because a book about one person's suicide is also necessarily a book about the people who either did not anticipate or somehow caused (does anyone cause? can anyone anticipate?) the terrifying, tragic act.

There are lessons for memoirists in this book about structure and form. About lacerating honesty, as in: If you are going to be laceratingly honest, you must also be lacerating about yourself. About not making life too orderly for the pages of a book. Here is Wickersham, for example, offering instruction by way of notes to herself:

Biography, in the case of someone who commits suicide, is particularly dangerous, misleading. It looks at a life through the lens of a death. Every time a bad thing happens, the temptation is to say, "Aha!"

I have to be careful not to make it too orderly.

Here is Wickersham offering instructions on life:

I am convinced that in real life suicide can't be the backdrop, dwarfed by something else. It is the foreground: itself inevitably the thing that changes people's lives. There is no other plot, and no resolution. And while some healing does happen, it isn't a healing of redemption or epiphany. It's more like the absorption of a bruise.

For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.

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