Deceptive Abundance

A look into my backyard shows a deceptively verdant garden.  The apple trees are covered with fruit, but this has been a terrible year for flies, and the apples are already riddled with larval tunnels.  The tomato patch, on the left side of the picture, has the tallest plants I have ever grown, but we have yet to get a single tomato out of it.  There has been too much rain.  The ground cherries, in the right bottom corner, seem to have finally won the battle against the flea beetles, but it’s been a hard fight.  Dr. Bronner’s Pure Castille Peppermint Soap really does work wonders, but I lost four plants before I found the right mixture to save them.

Only the grapes are flourishing, and we have an obscene number of them.  Both the Concord and the unidentified white grapes that came from nowhere are doing well.  There will be juice, jelly, and maybe even wine. 

But it doesn’t feel like summer without tomatoes.  Kathy Rhodes has posted a piece from her book Pink Butterbeans about the joy of tomato sandwiches on her blog, First Draft.  It’s made me mindful of how late in the season it is not to have had a single garden-fresh Stupice or Cherokee Green.  Even the Mexico Midgets, which have always been reliable producers in the best weather, are still only putting out green fruit.  Only the Amish Paste seem able to withstand the wet; there are several tomatoes on those plants that should be ripe in the next few days.  So there will be canned sauce, but that is hardly a consolation to a woman mourning big slices of sunsets.  Thanks, Kathy, for the remembrance of summer, since it seems this year there will not be much of the real thing.

Graper Stunkle…

There was a woman at the WVWW with the improbable, wonderful, tongue-tickling name of Graper Stunkle.  I am deeply sad that she’s gone home to one of those flat states with lots of farms, because it means I can’t yell, as I am going out the door, “I’ll be home later, sweetie, I’m having coffee with Graper Stunkle!”  In theory, it means Lucy will never call down the stairs, “Hey, Lady, it’s Graper Stunkle on the phone for you!” although she does anyway, no matter who is actually on the phone, because she loves the name, too. 

We are working hard to create a poltergeist so that we can give it the name and blame every broken thing on it.  So far, we haven’t been able to conjur enough adolescent angst, even though we’re smack in the middle of summer visitation.  We’re working on it, though.  We’ve considered peace, weighed it against mischievous spirits, and decided the poltergeist would be more interesting.  We are foolish, foolish people!

Remembrance

I am still thinking about the WVWW, and about the woman whose essay caught us all so off guard with its racism.  In particular, I am thinking of her defense.  “But,” she said, “that’s exactly what happened.”  She defended the use of cartoonish vernacular by saying, “But that’s really what she said,” and even defended a different problem with racism in another person’s work–where race, poverty, and single parenting were conflated with stupidity–by asking, “But what if that’s really the way they are?”

All this thinking has, of course, got me completely muddled.  My first thought is that this seems often to be the defense of the new writer–That’s What Really Happened.  I can remember using it myself when Pinckney Benedict told me something I wrote for his class wasn’t believable.  This was, of course, before age and experience taught me to understand remembrance as subjective.  What I wrote wasn’t what really happened–it was what I, with my flawed memory and singular take on things–remember to have happened, and there is a world of difference between the two things.

I think that’s been the hardest lesson to learn (and for those of you thinking that I’m having a harder time learning to manage my commas, I mean a different sort of difficulty); that I only think things are true, I do not know they are.  Now everything I write about becomes less, not more, concrete.  This is why my husband fades into the background of my writing; I do not want to toss my love–which is, after all, made up mostly of memory and then a little of looking forward–into the washwater.  It would be a horrible thing to have our history stripped of the patina of memory and laid bare. 

And, in the end, I think we are obligated to do that, at least with the facts.  I think that before I say, “My father made Eggs in a Cloud and blueberry muffins, which he laid on a table set with the ridiculous gold-leaf china that no one has used since…” I better write him and make damned sure I’m remembering that correctly.  That the only things I can say without fact-checking them are “… by that late in the evening, I hated my date and my silly dress…” and “…I felt loved after all.”

David Carr–The Anti-Frey?

I’ve long held that those who were shocked to discover James Frey had embellished a good deal of his memoir A Million Little Pieces are either being intentionally naive or a little disingenuous.  Junkies lie for the hell of it; it’s how they bridge the gap between who they are and who they need us to believe them to be.  And so it is with great surprise that I find myself admiring the latest addiction narrative to hit the bookstands; David Carr’s The Night of the Gun.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but I have just read the wonderful piece he wrote about the book for The New York Times.  “Me and My Girls” is deep, compelling look into the process of writing a memoir of addiction; it outlines the careful research Carr undertook in order rebuild a truthful memory of himself at a time when his own memory was faulty and tenuous. 

To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs — you need, actually — to keep them at a remove. Let’s stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices. Beyond impairment, there may be no more unreliable narrator than an addict. Recovered or not, I am someone who used my mouth to constantly create one more opportunity to get high.

Carr looked up people who could not have been particularly glad to hear from him and asked them difficult questions it can not have been easy to have answered.  He collected records of all sort covering that time in his life.  He presents his own memory and then corrects it, letting the reader in on the subjectivity of rememberance rather than claiming authority over the story he tells. 

He may just be the Anti-Frey; the one junkie whose story we can trust and, in turn, use to create a reasonable sort of hope for those we love walking this same treacherous path.  Frey gave us the-junkie-as-hero.  Carr gives us the far more complicated, more true story of junkie-as-aspiring-Everyman.

Workshopping…

This weekend I joined a group of other writers–some of them fellow WVU MFA students, but most of them simply writers from around the country–at the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop.  It’s always a wonderful (and humbling) experience to get to see so much talent in one place, and it’s a real honor to participate in the work of other people as part of the workshop process.

That said, it is not always easy.

A well-meaning, myopic woman gave us an essay about a simple trip to the local courthouse that became an Odyssey into parts of town she rarely visits.  A wrong turn leads her into an economically depressed area, where she sees an unconscious woman tossed from a car into the road but–seeing the woman eventually rise and stumble into the neighborhood–does not call 911 or offer any assistance.  She asks directions from the Hispanic folk who live in this part of town and is a little put out that “no one speaks English any more.”  She finally makes it to the courthouse, and she recounts for us a long anecdote shared by another woman waiting for her hearing… and, in order to catch the “flavor” of this woman, she writes in a very Joel Chandler Harris sort of high dialect, all “axe” for ask and “dem” for them.  The anecdote eventually winds its way around to why the woman is in the courthouse; by the end of the essay, she is going to jail for a few years.  All of this, the author wants us to know, is very funny.

Only, of course, it’s not funny. 

This woman is not a bigot, although there can be no doubt at all that she is a racist.  (We tried to explain the difference, but I think by that point she’d gone past listening.)  There wasn’t any malice in her writing, only a world-view so myopic that it is impossible to imagine her functioning in the day-to-day world.

We tried, as a group, to be respectful without giving up the point.  She felt attacked, that was clear.  We were surprised when she continued to show up for the workshop, but she did, and I suppose that was brave.

But the young black woman who was also a participant, the one who said that this was the one piece she didn’t have time to read and so did not want to comment, did not return for the final session.  Maybe she had other things to do.  Or maybe she could see that, any minute, this woman was going to turn to her and say, “You don’t think I’m racist, do you?” and just didn’t want to be put in the position of mouth-piece.  Either way, it was a damned shame.  We never got to review her piece, and it was a good piece, too.  One that we could have talked about for a long time, and that had a strong voice and a story to tell that had truths in it.  One that I hope she’ll tell again to people who will be better ready to listen to it.

In Defense of Navel Gazing…

Gary Presley has recently been wondering about the state of Creative Nonfiction over at Brevity’s Creative Nonfiction Blog.  He asks, “Is too much of our genre too centered on navel-gazing?” 

First, let me confess that I am not well-versed in the exact definition of navel-gazing.  It is, in my personal lexicon, a vague slur that was hurled at Feminists back in our early the-personal-is-political days; a way of suggesting that we were self-absorbed and pointless and that, as a result, we would never be effectual. 

Where did all that navel-gazing get us?  Into the workplace, into a world in which our reproductive freedom is (precariously) guaranteed through access to birth control and abortion, through the glass ceiling, and onto the list of serious candidates for the Presidency.  Don’t dismiss the power of beginning with personal as a way to understand the universal. 

 But maybe Presley’s issue isn’t that so much memoir starts with the personal, but that it ends there.  What, if anything, is the difference between memoir and reportage?  I have heard many wonderful books (“The Glass Castle” comes immediately to mind) both praised and damned for giving the reader the events of life outside the experience of most readers without either “pre-digesting” or “reflecting on” those experiences, depending on which side of the debate you have taken.  And that, I think, is the truly interesting question.  Does the effective memoir present the individual experience to the reader and then leave her to form her own understanding, or does it look to also provide an understanding of this experience?

It’s a question I am currently struggling with in my own reading and writing.  And I am afraid the answer will have more to do with “literary fashion” than with true merit; I suspect an editor might answer this question very differently than a Creative Writing professor. 

How would you answer it?

Nasturtium Kimchi

I planted a huge barrel planter by the front walk full of nasturtiums this spring thinking that it would be nice if we could eat the flowers.  But, although I like their peppery flavor, I find that the texture of the flower becomes clingy when mixed in with salad, particularly after it’s dressed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So I am taking a page from Maybelle’s Mom, who has inspired me to think of everything as potential kimchi, and I’ve made a batch of her Pea Shoot Kimchi with a few substitutions.  I have substituted nasturtium flowers and leaves for the pea shoots, replaced half the ground Korean Pepper with paprika (I was afraid the pepper would completely overpower the flavor of the flowers), turnip for daikon (only because I had it on hand) and lime juice for amchur powder (so we’ll have to have bitters in our gin and tonics tonight).  Oh, and I added some toasted sesame seeds.

I have to say, this experiment has not been a huge success.  It has worked, but not so well that I’m planning to plant a bigger crop of nasturtiums next year so that I can make this more often. 

The kimchi flavor itself is wonderful, but the flavor of the flower is completely overwhelmed by the other tastes, and the bright colors did not survive the process so it’s not a particularly pretty condiment. 

So, a lovely and whimsical idea… and I’m glad I tried it… but if you come for lunch next week, you’ll more likely get the flowers as a layer in a creamcheese and pumpernickle sandwich.  That has, so far, been the only really wonderful use I’ve found for them.

ISBN 978-0-9797083-2-9

That, my lovelies, is the ISBN number for Whitefish Review Volume 2, Issue 1.  This is the first time my work has appeared in something that actually has an ISBN number–and I am decidedly tickled by it.  I am even more tickled to be in the same publication as Rick Bass, whose excellent piece “Threshold” closes the journal.  It’s a piece that rings just as true here in West Virginia as it does for the Yaak Valley in Montana.  (I am going to steal his line and for the rest of my life call ATVs “chain saws on Rollberblades.”)  Jennifer Robbin’s excellent “Digging in the Dirt” got me outside and on my knees to weed the tomatoes and the ground cherries, which I have been putting off for far too long.  And Clifford Garstang’s wonderful “The Nymph and the Woodsman” has made me think of structure in new–and liberating–ways.  Everything else is probably equally good, but I only got my copies yesterday and haven’t had time to read the other pieces.  I had to spend some time smelling the pages, breaking the spine of the one copy I’ll keep, listening to that satisfying “pop” when it’s first opened wide, signing the copies I’m going to send away to friends who have been forever misremembered in the essay itself.

Following, as this does, so closely on the heals of Worst Rejection Letter Ever, this has been a real boost.  I certainly don’t mean to imply that I think the pieces published in Fringe and Conte somehow count less–they don’t.  But there is something about the physicality of paper–and the authority of the ISBN number–that adds to the general sense of having accomplished something.