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?

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.

Someplace Far Away and Long Ago

Sometimes when I think of my younger self, it is as if I am thinking of a person I knew long ago and have lost touch with.  An old friend, but not the kind one keeps.  The kind who fades into memory, whose path isn’t reported in emails or chatty phone calls.  The sort who sporadically sends a Christmas letter full of news about people you don’t know.  A husband you never met, children you did not know had been born to her. 

This self is nineteen, still wearing her grandfather’s old shirts, although he has been dead for seven years by the time this picture is taken.  His initials, ASP, are embroidered on the pocket.  This earned her the nickname Cleopatra in High School history class, but it is not a nickname that she could ever carry off, and so did not bring it with her. 

She is standing near the piano in the drawing room at Mallet–the men’s honor’s assembly–at the University of Alabama.  In the end, it will prove tragic for her to have made the choice to come to school here… a choice she made first because she had family there, and then later made again for boy, and still later than that, for a man.

I can barely remember her, and when I do, I blush for her brazenness and her selfishness.  I imagine that the others who remember her–at least, those who aren’t Jimmy, who has always been kind before all else, and Putt, who is the one enduring friend–think of her as a destructive force that blew through their lives for a moment or two and then went on, leaving only wreckage of one sort or another in her wake.

I do not like her, though I envy her the slim shoulders, the way her collar bones peak through her collar.  I can not envy her youth, which was difficult.  More for others, even, than for herself. 

I have no urge to look her up, to see how she is doing.  I do not think of her often.  When I am nostalgic for that time, she is not one of the people who comes to mind. 

Forty-two is not a glamorous age.  But I would not be nineteen again for all the world.

Bruhaha: Miley Cyrus and James Frey

Vanity Fair is getting on my nerves.  First, they write a long apologia for the literary dickhead of the decade, James Frey.  At the same time, they are oddly silent about the photos of Miley Cyrus taken by Annie Leibowitz and, while the whole world clucks their collective tongue at the teenager and her father, they can’t seem to find anything worth adding to the conversation.

I am tired of bruhaha.

First, let’s all just go ahead and admit that Frey doesn’t matter, and never has.  The reason he’s gotten so much play has nothing to do with his book or it’s lack of veracity.  Show me one person who is genuinely shocked that a junkie lied for money.  Seriously.  We aren’t shocked or appalled, and we certainly aren’t more shocked or appalled than we are at Misha Defonseca, Margaret Seltzer, and Ishmael Beah.  I mean, they lied about important lives–Frey just lied about the extent to which he was a bad ass.  Which, it turns out, is easy to do because he’s not one.  So let’s all fess up folks.  We’re still talking about James Frey because it gives folk who like to think of themselves as above-all-that a chance to pick on Oprah. 

Vanity Fair wrote a shameful piece about Frey in this month’s issue.  The author attempts to turn him into an everyman, a victim of the New York publishing world and, even more bizarrely, of Oprah.  They seem to credit his account that he was tricked into his second appearance on the show, and that afterwards that he was told by Oprah, “I know it was rough, but it’s just business.”  Are you kidding?  When did Frey become a credible witness?  So let’s call the fray over Frey what it really is–the chance to engage in a little back-biting gossip about Oprah because, well, she isn’t Vanity Fair’s kind of person. 

And then there is the fresher, and even more ridiculous, bruhaha over Miley Cyrus’ pictures in this month’s edition.  Really, give me a break.  Everyone keeps asking this teenager and her father–who happens to be the same sort of hill trash as me, from the same part of Appalachia–what they were thinking.  I can tell you what they were thinking.  “Annie Leibovitz is one hell of a photographer.”  They were thinking, “When you get an offer to do a photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz, you rely on her judgement, because she’s a frigging genius.”  Isn’t that what you’d be thinking?  Would you have the balls to edit Annie Leibovitz mid-shoot, to question her choices? 

I didn’t think so.

Vanity Fair has gotten old.  These silly contraversies have gotten old.  I’ve bought my last copy.  I can no longer pretend that this is anything but “The National Enquirer” for people who like their gossip to have glossy photos and big words. 

From now on, I’m sticking to The Sun. 

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.”

The Old Gray Sedan with the Tragic Blue Door…

It’s summer weather today, though there may be snow by Monday.  I am thinking a lot about love and nostalgia and seasons passing this morning, which probably means that I shouldn’t have had that second martini last night.  A slight hangover is indistinguishable from melancholy.

It was this time last year that I first met Mot.  I was still reeling from the attempted rape in the hallway of Friendship Room and my horrified surprise that, rather than rallying around me, the participants became increasingly violent towards me.  After the attack, they knew how to keep me from getting my footing again and that meant a kind of freedom for them, I suppose.  But what a miracle it was, amid the threats and violence, to suddenly have this kind and sheltering friend.  A gentleman, maybe of a kind we won’t see again when his generation is gone.   Someone who recited poetry and talked about sitting on the beach in France flirting with the pretty young girls who brought him wine and books in English.  Someone who came by on a Sunday to help scrub the floors instead knocking over a coffee cup and leaving the spill for me to find later. 

I watched on the news today as a homeless man robbed a young soldier who was having a seizure.  Only moment before, the soldier had given this man money from his own pocket.  The newscaster said, “I hope everyone realizes this is just an isolated incident.  I hope this won’t stop anyone from helping the next homeless person who asks for assistance.”  I do, too, but only because you never know whether the person asking is Mot or some street junkie.  It’s hard to tell the two apart, and too easy to assume one or the other, depending on your bent.

It’s more than strange to me to know that Mot is afraid of me now, thinks I’m in league with the voices in his head, and that he can’t even tolerate receiving emails from me.  Crazy fights hard and it doesn’t fight fair.  The sun is out and there is a breeze from the west.  All I want to do is hop in the car and head for Texas.  But he and the old gray sedan with the tragic blue door aren’t there any more.  I don’t know where he is now, and probably never will again.  The car was abandoned near an a reservation in Oklahoma, the keys given to a kid at the auto parts store who probably sold it for scrap.

Whatever kind of love this is, it is more constant than I would have imagined, and some days, more so than I can bear. 

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?”