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?

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.

Random Apologies of Varying Sincerity…

I am sorry that I said I was sick when really I just wanted to lounge around on the couch, knitting and perling myself into a quiet place.

I’m sorry that there was something I could have said that would have allowed you to stay, and that I couldn’t figure out what it was, so you had to go.

I’m the one who broke the window in your mother’s garage when we were seven. I was throwing rocks at it, angry at you because you said Jewish girls couldn’t be cheerleaders. I’m sorry I didn’t fess up when your brother Kevin was getting yelled at, your mother shaking her cigarette in his face and calling him a liar.

I’m sorry for telling you I was a virgin just so you’d feel special. That being said, I was not.

My dog hasn’t been feeling well and it simply wasn’t scoopable. You have my apology.

I am sorry that I fell in love with him before I told you that I had fallen out of love with you, and even more sorry I wasn’t gracious enough to make sure you never knew that.

I’m sorry for picking the chicken out of the soup and then telling you it was vegeterian. I was broke and there wasn’t anything else in the house to offer you. Besides, the last time I saw you, you were eating a cheeseburger and smoking a Marlboro. How was I to know?

When we met, I loved to go out dancing until the wee hours of the morning. I’m sorry for getting old, and for loving the comfort of our big old bed so much I can’t force myself to go honky-tonking these days, oh my love.

I’m sorry that I took your white shirt from Mexico when we were dividing up our things, but I am not sorry that it looked better on me.

I am sorry but you can not have another treat. The vet said only three a day. Don’t give me that look. It’s not going to work. I’m not paying any attention to you.

Alright, fine, damnit… but don’t come back in fifteen minutes and ask for another one.

I’m sorry that I let my love for you turn into a needy, grasping thing.

I’m sorry. It’s too cold and early. You walk the dogs. I’ll do it tomorrow. I know I said that yesterday, but this time I really mean it. Really. Now turn off the damned light and let me go back to sleep.

Bedfellows

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scotti spent his afternoon calling people to ask them to vote for Hillary Clinton on the 13th.  The pundits say it was unnecessary; last time I looked at the polls, she was favored to take the state by twenty points.

I, on the other hand, have been a die-hard Obama fan since he first emerged on the national scene.  He talks to me like I’m an adult, and I rise to the occassion.  He says difficult things to me, and I am grateful. 

You’d think there would be arguments in the yellow farmhouse, but we are oddly able to each believe the other is completely misguided without feeling the need to bring it up. 

Of course, if one or the other of us were out rallying voters for McCain, it would be a different story.  Here is my favorite story about politics:

My parents had just eloped.  My mother was at Queen’s College in North Carolina, and engaged to someone else, when my father appeared out of the blue.  “You said to come back when I was ready to get married,” my father said from the payphone in the lobby of her dorm, “and so here I am.  Get packed and let’s go get married.”  Or something to that effect.  One hopes there was a little more romance to it, and that just gets left out of the telling for the sake of us kids.

In any event, my mother called my grandfather from the road to tell him the news, a little afraid of how he would react.

“Daddy, guess what?  I just married John Einstein!” she said.

“Well, that’s great, honey,” my grandfather replied.  “I always did like John.  He’s a good boy.”

“Now, Daddy, you know this is a mixed marriage, right?” my mother said, a little sheepishly.

My grandfather’s exact words are never reported when the story gets told, no doubt because he said some very ungrandfatherly things.  But there was some yelling, and some over-my-dead-bodying.  Finally, my mother was able to interupt with, “But, Daddy, you knew John wasn’t Jewish the whole time we were dating!”

“Jewish?” my grandfather said–and I believe this, because my mother won’t brook any lies about her father–”Who said antying about Jewish?  I thought you meant he was a goddamned Republican!”

So the little yellow house on Ridgeway Avenue can sleep peacefully behind warring Democrats, safe in the knowledge that once we finally have a nominee, we’ll both be standing behind the same person.  Everything will be fine, as long as neither one of us becomes a goddamned Republican.

Full Spring

In West Virginia, the seasons overlap… winter seeping into summer nights, summer flitting back for a warm afternoon in mid-January.  Weather, then, is not the defining element of a season.  Instead, we know them by their artificacts.  Winter is defined by skeletal, sculptural trees and dried brown grass.  Autumn by the return of the scent of woodsmoke to the air and the oft-rhapsodied colors of the dying leaves. 

 

The first artifact of spring is the algae bloom in the creek beds and drainage ditches.  Within a few weeks, these will become fetid pools, but when the first snows melt they are bright and fresh-smelling. 

Next will come to the spring onions and ramps that spring up seemingly overnight and signal the beginning of the spring planting season.  Only frost hardy plants can be put in the ground before mid-May here.  No, that isn’t true.  Only frost hardy plants SHOULD be put in the ground before mid-May.  It’s certainly possible to plan earlier.  I’ve ruined many a crop of seedlings by getting cocky and planting them early.  Killing frosts can come late in the season, long after the daffodils have bloomed and died back again and the strawberries and lettuces are producing their first crop.  Gardening is at least as much an act of faith as it is an act of creation.

Full spring is here when the ground is littered with the shells of bird’s eggs.  The shard of light blue from a robin’s nest, or deep blue from an eastern bluebird.   White with dark brown speckles for a house sparrow, or lighter brown for a white-breasted nuthatch. There is an egg broken and spilling its golden promise on our porch this morning; I guess it to be the unrealized offspring of the muthatch couple who has set up a nest in our ancient chestnut tree, but am not enough of an ornathologist to know that it is not from the house sparrows who live in the eaves ’round the back of the house.  My guess is based more on proximity to the nest than on the egg itself. 

It has been cold and rainy the last few days; the threat of frost hangs in the early morning hours when the last of the previous day’s warmth is given up to the air and the real chill sets in, but so far we have been spared.  It’s been a good spring for magnolia trees, arugala, and mint.  Already my front yard smells like a cup of herbal tea.  The lemonbalm has taken over the herb bed, crowding out the spearmint.  It’s the new bully on the block… last year, it was the spearmint crowding out the chamomile.  I suppose I will intervene; weed out big colonies of lemonbalm to give the other things room to grow.  But I am hesitant.  There is a beautiful poem, “The Stray” in the April issue of The Sun by Eric Anderson.  As I put on my gardening gloves and go out to kill off a good amount of the lemonbalm, I can’t help thinking of the lovely and haunting way it ends.  “And yet I can’t/even kill these rodents, and want/to protect them from you,/and also want you/not to starve but will no longer/feed you or let you stay./This, then, is being human./ This, then, is not being God.”

Something I’m Too Old To Do Well

I’m about to go and take the GRE in the hope of a Hail Mary entrance into WVU’s MFA program.  (I’ve also, I just noticed, casually used up a month’s supply of three-letter acronyms in writing that last sentence.)

Putt has told me to get a good night’s sleep, have a healthy breakfast, and take two sharpened number-two pencils along with me.  I think she is, perhaps, the only person less prepared to take the exam than I am.  Do they even make pencils any longer?  Surely we’ve moved beyond the graphite-on-paper thing.  Haven’t we?  (Oh, God, I’m so neurotic that now I have to go find two pencils, sharpen them, and put them in my purse.  A moment please…)

I used to test better-than-well and, as a result, have been thought better-than-bright by the people who see and take seriously these sorts of things.  So here, now, I will at last come clean with the real reason I appear smarter than I really am on standardized tests.  When I was a child, my mother was a counseling student.  The only one with a kid the right age to take the tests they had to learn to administer.  By the time she graduated, I could put the damned blocks together in the right pattern even before being shown the little card. 

I’m afraid I’m not smart as a chimpanzee, just well-practiced.  But not for the GRE.  Today, I suspect, one of my most treasured personal myths will crumble.  Because what really sucks is they tell you your score right away. 

Now, that’s just wrong.  Give me a day or two to come to terms with how badly I’ve done before you spring the news on me that, really, it’s much worse than I thought.

Effective Writing Habits

Harriet the Spy always carried a dog-eared notebook with her, jotting down notes about the people around her — often very invasive, totally inappropriate notes.  And, the young reader is told, this is what will one day make Harriet a great writer.

Like lots of tween girls who are now women my age, I loved this book.  I read it at the beginning of summer vacation between fifth and sixth grades.  Half-way through, I dug up an old spirtal bound notebook that still had most of its pages – from which we can deduce that it was probably my math notebook from the year before — and I started keeping copious notes on the grown-ups around me and sneaking into places I shouldn’t be.  I knew, from the book, not to keep notes about the other kids. 

There were lots of little girls with notebooks back then.  Harriet the Spy was up there with Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret and Jane Eyre on the reading lists of nerdy young women.  I imagine many of us discovered secrets we wouldn’t have known otherwise.  My brief foray into spying and notebook-keeping lead me to the revelation that my great-uncle’s over-attentive secretary was really his Mistress.  And, in pure Harriet form, Mary Penny Packer became the topic of my first personal essay.  An essay that I was so very proud of, I submitted it as the inevitable ”What I Did On My Summer Vacation” paper at the beginning of sixth grade. 

Thus begun my now well-established pattern of humiliating my mother by not having sense enough to know what you’re not supposed to write about.  Harriet has a lot to answer for, let me tell you!

I long ago gave up the notebook habit.  Actually, I long ago quit being able to read my own handwriting, which somehow completely fell apart once I passed the “ninety words per minute” mark as a typist. 

Once again, though, I hear a real writer suggesting that, if I too want to be a real writer, I should return to my old Harriet-inspired notekeeping ways. I was visiting Kathy Rhodes’ excellent blog, First Draft, and reading about the latest Council for the Written Word fiction workshop, lead by the novelest Darnell Arnoult.  According to Kathy’s recounting of Arnoult’s advice, writer’s should have a ”little notebook you are supposed to keep in your purse or pocket to record all the interesting and unusual details that happen during your days.”

I am certain this would make me better at my craft.  I doubt it would make the details of my life more clear, though, because the only thing less likely than my keeping a little notebook full of pithy observations is my being able to find the right little notebook when I sat down to write about an event from years, or even months — okay, my husband says three days — ago.

I have, on my computer, a list of similar writing tips from various sources.  Some are granular:  avoid the words “that,” “while,” and “since;” your first sentence needs to have a hook!, and never use the word “I” except in dialogue.  Others are about process:  make sure you write in a room set aside solely for that, and that your family knows not to disturb you, don’t revise until you’ve written an entire first draft, and never get up from your writing desk until you have at least 2,000 words. It’s a funny list.

I write in my dining room, and my family interupts me with everything from requests to get up and get them something to drink to the dire need to use my computer to check a My Space page and see what BoyX thinks about GirlY.  I have no little notebooks, and I use all the forbidden words — often.  I revise things that I haven’t even had time to sit down and write, changing them around in my head while I make dinner, and rarely have the ending to anything before the beginning is largely set.

And I don’t carry around a notebook.  Although I have been known to leave myself voice memos on my cell phone.  For months, there has been one that says “find a way to use the word ensorcelled.”   I no longer remember what ensorcelled means, or why I thought I should use it.

These lists used to depress me, pointing out all the reasons that I should quit dilly-dallying around with all these words on a page and learn something practical like animal husbandry.  Now I find them funny.  I want to write all the authors who came up with them and say, “Really?  Your family doesn’t come barging in, asking if there is any peanut butter left even though they could damn well open the cabinet and see for themselves that there is not?  That’s so sad!  Does it make you lonely?” 

Among the Garbage and the Flowers…

My daily walk takes me past the encampment of homeless folk who live under the bridge toward the trail-head on Decker’s Creek.  I know their names , or most of them, from my job at the day shelter and am not afraid of them.  The people who are a threat to me, the ones who are still angry at my because I called the cops or kicked them out of Friendship Room for selling drugs or starting fights, live in a bigger camp along the river.  The creek camp is for the older, gentler, quieter folk.  It’s smaller, and has been there longer.  The people who live there are more likely to have a bottle than a pipe, and that seems to make all the difference in the world.

This weekend, as I was walking by, I saw the first daffodils of this spring on the embankment across the trail from where they pitch their tents during the night.  (During the day, when those of us privelaged with houses – and likely to be bothered by those who aren’t –are out walking the trail to work off our over-abundant diets, the tents are broken down and hidden.  I know where, but I won’t tell.)

It was a moment before I noticed the joke of this… the broken piece of drainage pipe laid up against the daffodils like a flowerpot.  I think I know who did it.  There is a man who lives down here who doesn’t speak, and rarely came to Friendship Room.  But when he did come, he often left behind little tableaus of found objects near his seat. A dollar-store bracelette with a broken clasp, the head of a Barbie doll, and used-up lipstick once.  Another time, a pile of sticks arranged artfully into a miniature bonfire, two toy soldiers covered in grime, and the most recent body-count headline from the local paper.

I don’t know why he doesn’t speak.  He nods, and points to things he wants, but he isn’t mute.  I’ve heard him talking to the people who enhabit his own universe, but he will not talk to those of us in this one.

I see his hand in this joke.  It’s been cold, and no matter how many blankets and sleeping bags he’s given, he can’t seem to hold on to any of them and he won’t live indoors.   I’m happy to see he’s made it to another spring.