Wordle…

I’m addicted to Wordle.  I think every writer should play with it now and again… it is a surprising and effective exercise to the see the “word clouds” that are generated.

Also, it’s one of those great writing-but-not-writing time sinks… for those days when I want to feel like I’m accomplishing something but, really, I’m lucky to have managed to get out of bed and down to the computer at all.

My Pet Dead Rat…

I saw it, dying, for the first time a month ago.  It had curled itself into a ball against a neighbor’s stone wall.  The dogs and I passed within inches of it, but the animals did not pay each other any mind.  The way it looked in the rain, cowered against the wall, was more o’possum than rat.  I thought then that is what it was, but I don’t remember thinking about it much at the time.  Only seeing it, thinking that it did not belong there no matter what it was, and hoping it would be gone the next time we walked this patch of sidewalk.

I saw it again a few days later; stiff and swollen with death in the little patch of grass between sidewalk and curb in front of a neighbor’s house.  This time the dogs noticed it alright, pulling hard towards the stench so they could roll around in it.  It was an effort to drag them across the street.  We walked only on the other side for a week.

Now it comes and goes, disappearing into tall grass and dead leaves for a few days and then somehow back on the sidewalk again.  I almost always notice it before the dogs get too close, although today Max was about to chomp off its head before I realized I needed to reign him in. 

I think about this rat a lot right now.  About how it must mean something, although I can’t think of what.  The dead rat has too much physicality to disappear into language.  Maybe next month, when the last of its fur is gone and it’s only bone chip and tooth, it will give itself up to metaphor.  But for now it stubbornly insists on its own right to be literal.  Real.

I know I should go and get the corpse and throw it somewhere that the dogs can’t get at it–but where?  Not in the garbage, certainly… the smell is still too strong and the garbagemen came yesterday, so it would fester for a week.  (How can so little flesh left on such dry bones still stink that way?)  Not in the garden, because it is a rat.  Had it been the possum I first took it to be, I’d have dumped it in the compost heap weeks ago. 

Poor rat.  Too much a pariah even to be fertilizer.  Too real for metaphor.

I have named him Habakkuk.

Apparently, Today is Celebrate Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web on your Blog Day!

And, because Dzanc is indeed worth celebrating–not just, but for me perhaps particularly, when they are bringing attention to great online writing–consider this a party.  If this were Facebook, I’d send you a virtual cocktail.  If it were Second Life, I’d put out a dance-machine and hire Trinity Serpentine to be the DJ.  But it’s not.  It’s just my blog.  So here is a recipe for a great cocktail you’ll have to make for yourself if you want to toast Dzanc’s great work. 

Abrupt Realization:

• 1oz black sambuca
• 1ox vodka

I can’t speak to the taste of the drink, but don’t you just love the name?

Dinty W. Moore on Blake Butler on Literary Citizenship

Dinty Moore, nonfictionist, blogged about Blake Butler, fictionist, havng blogged ”in a most excellent fashion recently about the need to be a positive karmic force in the world of literary citizenship.”  So, in the spirit of the ethic of spreading the literary love,* I am sending you first to Brevity’s Creative Nonfiction Blog and hoping that you will go from there to Blake Bulter’s to read the original post in full.**

So, to continue the love chain even further, I’ll borrow from Bulter and post three things I’ve read in the last few days that I really enjoyed (it’s morning, I haven’t read three things yet today):

Tell Me Something by Michelle Cacho-Negrete in the latest edition of The Sun.

This Is Not Warm and Fuzzy by Noel Dunn in the latest edition of Fringe.

My Darlings by Renee K. Nicholson at The Cerebral Catalyst.

Pass it on!

 

*Yep, they are letting me teach Freshman English despite my twisty grammar and utter disregard for the conventions of rhetoric. 

**Okay, it’s also true that I am unable, as one of Lucy’s many parents, for force myself to link to Blake Butler’s blog post because of the title.  Be a good literary citizen, go there, and you’ll see why.  I know it doesn’t refer to MY Lucy, but still…

Learning to Read…

 

We were playing Hide and Seek and I was under the porch.  No one ever hid under the porch because there were spiders and roly-poly bugs and I felt very brave as I rolled myself into a little ball and crammed my body behind the cement steps.  I heard the other kids get found or make it safely back to base.  The call went out, “Olly olly ox in free!”   I had won, which never happened, and usually the other kids wouldn’t even let me play because I was only five and still, they said, pretty much a baby.  I crawled out and marched over to Home Base, triumphant.

            Jennifer, who had been It and was the oldest, coolest kid any of us knew, looked at me and shrieked, “You are covered in cat shit!”

            “In what?”  I had no idea what shit was. 

            “Cat poop.  You have cat poop all over your jeans.”  Jennifer flipped her Marsha Brady hair over her shoulder and wrinkled her nose.  “No one hides under the porch because your cats use it as a litter box, you idiot.”

            I ran crying into the house.  “Mommy, Mommy, I am covered in cat shit!”

            “What did you say, young lady?”

            “I’m covered in cat shit!”

            My mother grabbed me under the arms, holding me as far away from herself as possible, and carried me into the laundry room.  As she stripped me, she scolded, “Don’t ever say that word again.  Where in the world did you learn a word like that?”  She gave me her Scary Mom look.  “Did one of the big kids teach you that word?”

            I knew my mother didn’t like Jennifer, who was in fourth grade and wore mini-skirts and had to live with her mean old grandmother because her father was a no-good-drunken-bum-who-doesn’t-seem-to-care-about-his-children-at-all.  So I sacrificed my father, who sometimes said bad words when he was on the phone talking business and anyway she couldn’t tell me I wasn’t allowed to play with my own father any more.  “Daddy says it.”

            “Well, it’s a grown-up word and little girls shouldn’t say grown-up words.”  She tugged a clean t-shirt roughly over my head and sent me back outside. 

            The game of Hide and Seek was over and everyone was standing around a dead baby bird they had found under the big elm tree in front of Jennifer’s house, poking it with sticks.  I walked over to Jennifer and kicked her.  “You almost got me in trouble.  You didn’t tell me shit was a bad word?”

            She looked at me like I was the stupidest, littlest kid in the whole world.  “Everybody knows shit is a bad word.  If you want to say it in front of grown-ups, you have to say it Op.”

            “In what?” 

            “Op.  It’s like a code.  You spell the word instead of saying it, but you don’t say the consonants, you make their sound and add –op afterwards.”

            Jennifer then studiously set about teaching me the difference between consonants and vowels, the sounds each letter made, and the curious “tch” at the end of the word bitch. 

            My mother had positively forbidden me to learn to read because, she said, children who learned to read before first grade became bored and didn’t learn good study habits.  She read a lot of parenting books; she was really afraid of screwing us all up and being stuck with a house full of idiot children who would drive her to a nervous breakdown.  But I didn’t know I was learning to read.  I thought I was learning to cuss without getting sent to my room to wait-until-my-father-got-home.

            I memorized how to say all the best words in Op.  Sop-hop-i-top.  Fop-u-cop-kop.  Bop-i-top-cop-hop.  My favorite was the melodious a-sop-sop-hop-o-lop-e.  It sounded like jalopy, which was what my mother called my father’s little purple MGB that was only big enough for one kid at a time and was the most glamorous thing anyone in our neighborhood owned.  I practiced alone in my room at night and used my copy Richard Scarry’s The Best Word Book Ever to reverse-engineer the way letters became words became stories.  In a week, I was reading Never Tease a Weasel to myself in secret.  By the end of the summer, I had chapter books hidden under my mattress and a notebook filled with my first attempts at writing.

            I was, indeed, a bored first grader who never learned good study habits.  I sat next to Cathy Wagner, who had also taught herself to read and was also bored.  Mrs. Goheen refused to call on either of us once she realized what was up.  “Well,” she’d say if we raised our hands, “we already know you girls know the answer.  Why don’t we let the kids who are just learning to read answer this question,” and then she’d call on somebody who would just sniffle and shift around uncomfortably. 

            “A-sop-sop-hop-o-lop-e,” I would whisper to Cathy. 

“Bop-i-top-cop-hop,” she’d answer.  We’d giggle behind our Big Chief tablets and roll our eyes, already in love with the transgressive nature of language.

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?

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.