Writing people: lessons from Charles D'Ambrosio

Yeah. I'm bowled over by Charles D'Ambrosio's Loitering: New and Collected Essays. One. Hundred. Percent. I mentioned this yesterday. I may well mention it again. Read the book, and learn.

Lesson of the day. How to write a person. I don't know that I've ever seen it done any better than this. From the essay "Winning":

Al tended the bar at night. He'd been in the merchant marine and ate with a fat clunky thumb holding down his plate, as if he were afraid the whole place might pitch and yaw and send his dinner flying. He was dwarfish and looked like an abandoned sculpture, a forgotten intention. His upper body was a a slablike mass, a plinth upon which his head rested; he had a chiseled nose and jaw, a hack-job scar of a mouth; his hands were thick and stubby, more like paws than anything prehensile. Sitting back behind the bar, smoking Pall Malls, he seemed petrified, the current shape of his body achieved by erosion, his face cut by clumsy strokes and blows. His eyes, though, were soft and blue, always wet and weepy with rheum, and when you looked at Al, you had the disorienting sense of something trapped, something fluid and human caught inside the gray stone vessel of his gargoyle body, gazing out through those eyes.

Abandoned sculpture: fantastic. A forgotten intention: genius. Something fluid caught inside a gargoyle body: are you kidding me?

I, for one, have some work to do before I can ever be fully satisfied with anything I write. The bar has been D'Ambrosio raised.

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my "advice to writers" and Charles D'Ambrosio

It is perhaps fitting that today, as I set off to Penn for the inaugural spring 2015 memoir class, Jon Winokur is posting my contribution to his "Advice to Writers" series, found here.

Six questions, six quick responses. Here, for example, my thoughts on writer's block:

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
I suffer from a lost faith in my ability to solve hard literary problems. And then I chip away at them.


But really, always, my advice comes down to reading more than you write and living more than anything else, and so may I amplify today's post by encouraging, nay, insisting, that those of you who want to write memoir or essays or memoristic essays and have not read Charles D'Ambrosio's essays get a copy of Loitering: New and Collected Essays, newly out from the fabulous Tin House Books. D'Ambrosio is a supreme master of the form—witty, willing to fail, eager to digress, self referent while avoiding self-absorption (see my thoughts on Rachel Cusk's Outline, here), devoted, in his words, to capturing "the conflicted mind in motion."

Buy this collection, watch him work.

Off to teach failure and mistakes at Penn. Things at which I'm expertly good.

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Mentor: A Memoir/Tom Grimes: Reflections

I have the very dear and very thoughtful Leslie Pietrzyk (we met at Bread Loaf years ago, I caught a glimpse of her once, a fleeting moment, in Alexandria, and we are in touch again, thanks to Facebook) to thank for suggesting Mentor.  This is Tom Grimes's authoritative, unfancy, and bracingly honest memoir about his relationship with Frank Conroy, who was, of course, the author of the classic and important memoir Stop-Time and the long-time director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.  Grimes came into Conroy's orbit as a student—as a man waiting tables and writing at night, a man desperate to make a literary life.  Grimes becomes, quite quickly, someone more—someone Conroy can drink with, talk to, and selflessly encourage.  And oh, does Conroy selflessly encourage.  He urges Grimes on, he connects him to possibilities, he celebrates Grimes good moments and is there to buffer the bad.  Many writers—too many writers—focus only on themselves, their own work, their own fame.  Conroy clearly was not that sort, and Grimes's portrait of him is not just illuminating, it is restorative.

Yesterday in class we were talking about the difference between self-conscious writing and self-confident writing.  We were talking about the risks that get taken when certain lines are crossed.  Grimes crosses no lines here.  With remarkable quietude he parses his own career—his great ambitions, his successes, his failures, his coming-to-terms.  He sets this against and within the writers' workshop, giving us Conroy as teacher, friend, agent, and enthusiastic reader, reminding us of the power of memoirs that look beyond the author's immediate self.

"Frank read great writers without any fear," Grimes wrote, for Conroy's eulogy.  "He didn't worry about imitating them; he didn't worry about being overwhelmed by them.  Instead he took pleasure in them and learned from them, and by doing so he elevated reading to the level of art..."

Selflessness.  Enthusiasm.  A love for books, even those not one's own.  This is clear, unmuddied water.  This is spring, after winter.

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