Tag: inspiration

Finding the “I” in Creative Nonfiction: Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story

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Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story examines what makes a good piece of nonfiction. She writes, “Every work of literature has a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say” (p. 13). Gornick examines several essays and memoirs to explore how the situation and the story work in creative nonfiction. She stresses that we cannot just tell the situation, but must also know what the story is that we are trying to tell.

Finding out what the story is in the piece then allows the writer to organize their writing around this insight. We can then look at the narrative line of the work and tie this to the wisdom that compels it. Gornick pushes us to ask: “Who is speaking? What is being said? What is the relation between the two?” How does the insight gained come to bear on the structure of the narrative? Is the reader along for the same journey of discovery as the speaker? Or does the reader know the outcome at the beginning and watch the narrator struggle with it?

She looks especially at the narrator of these nonfiction pieces to see what they can tell us about how we can coax the story out of our own experiences. We don’t always have to know who we are, she says, but we have to know who we are at the moment of writing. This is an important insight. It is easy to think of the nonfiction self as a given. We could assume that we are cohesive selves with only one voice and when we write nonfiction, we use that voice. But this is far from true. Our voice and perspective change with different situations and with time. Which aspect of yourself is telling the story? Gornick suggests crafting a persona based on the insight that drives the piece. What is the story of this situation? Which aspect of yourself is best suited to tell that story? Answering these questions will allow us to know who we are at the moment of writing.

One aspect of The Situation and the Story that really stuck with me was Gornick’s discussion of how to treat subjects. She insists that writers of nonfiction must treat their subjects, including themselves, with empathy and dimension. Is it true that you are completely innocent and your foe is all monster? Gornick pushes us as writers to make things more complicated, more dynamic than that. She asks us to look at situations from multiple perspectives to get at the stories. This includes looking at ourselves from multiple perspectives. We can’t just rely on being the hero or heroine of our own story, fighting the forces of evil. That story’s been told and doesn’t resonate as honest. After all, we’re all more complicated than that, aren’t we?

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices so that we as writers can make better decisions in our own writing. May contain affiliate links.

Eschewing Genre in Creative Nonfiction: Richard K. Nelson’s Make Prayers to the Raven

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Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest by Richard K. Nelson is a documentation of the plants and animals that frequent the forests of interior Alaska. It’s true that this book is about a place I am currently enthralled with. It’s also true that there’s a soft spot in my heart for any book about plants and wildlife. However, what makes this book really interesting is the ways in which Nelson eschews nonfiction genres to come up with something all his own.

This book could have been a narrative of his experiences living in a Koyukon village in the 1970s. It wasn’t. It doesn’t occur in chronological order and doesn’t have much of a narrative arc. Instead, the book is structured in chapters such as “The Birds” and “Ecological Patterns and Conservation Practices” with subheadings for individual species and phenomena. This sets the tone for the work feeling like a guidebook to the forest.

Instead of listing facts about animals and plants, however, Nelson draws on a multitude of sources in order to give a greater picture of how the Koyukon people view and interact with the world around them. He uses the research of anthropologists who have come before him, anecdotes from his experiences of living in the village, and excerpts from his own journal. The effects of these sources are interesting. What is structured and presented as a catalog of facts about the forest becomes a little less black-and-white. This is apropos given the nature of Koyukon beliefs and knowledge about the forest, which is up for interpretation and change based on personal experience. It is also appropriate given Nelson’s awareness of his own status as an outsider, which makes him wary of speaking for the Koyukon people. By using this variety of resources including his own experiences and journal entries, he can give his readers the same impressions that he had without putting words in other people’s mouths.

Nelson as the writer is interestingly placed in this book. For a book that uses anecdotal evidence and journal entries for much of its information, the narrator is surprisingly absent. This is because all of the personal writing and experience that Nelson uses is always about something other than himself. His journal is only used to further give information and rarely gives his own ideas or thoughts. Nelson very consciously positions himself as an outsider in the village and the culture about which he is writing, and he does a good job of keeping himself an outsider in the book that he writes.

The end result is that Make Prayers to the Raven is not an anthropological study of the Koyukon people, or a wildlife guide to the forest of Interior Alaska, or a narrative about Nelson’s experiences there. Instead, there’s a melding of these possibilities. For me as a writer, it made me think a little more broadly about the ways that I can structure and inform my nonfiction. Nelson shows that the structure, the sources used, and the position of the I do not need to all line up to one traditional standard genre. Instead, using these things in unconventional ways can allow us as writers to come to greater truths than following convention alone.

 

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices so that we as writers can make better decisions in our own writing. May contain affiliate links.

Using Fiction in Memoir: Maxine Hong Kinston’s The Woman Warrior

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Maxine Hong Kingston uses fiction to heighten the poignancy and power of her memoir, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts.  Throughout the book, Kingston uses not only her own memories, but also the stories she’s been told to form for the reader a picture of her formative years and the tension she feels as she creates an identity for herself.  She uses fictional elements to speculate, draw meaning, and show her reader the effects that stories (whether they be true or not) come to bear on one’s identity.

Kingston opens her book with “No Name Woman,” a story about her aunt.  But this isn’t just any family story.  It’s one that is shrouded in mystery and silence.  Because of this secrecy, Kingston must resort to speculating to fill in the details of this story.  It’s important that she understand the details because this story is one that her mother uses as a cautionary tale.  In ruminating about the details of this story, Kingston comes up with several possible variations even ones that she admits are improbable and don’t fit.  She wrestles with understanding the details of the story so that she can find “ancestral help” (8).  However, this speculation has come to bear on Kingston’s understanding of herself as a Chinese-American woman.  Kingston shows us through these variations of the story how this family narrative has shaped her understanding of many things.  It shaped the way she understood her relationship with her parents, and with her extended family.  It shaped the way Kingston understands what it means to be Chinese and what it means to be a woman.  It shaped her relationships with men and her ideas about differing standards of beauty.  Ultimately, it shaped how Kingston came to understand her own identity.  In sharing these different versions of the story, Kingston shares with her readers her process for dealing with the story and shows the reader the impact that both the story and the silence surrounding the story have had on her.

In “Shaman” Kingston takes her storytelling even further from anything that could be seen as the “objective reality” that we normally associate with the genre of nonfiction.  The chapter starts with a ghost story from the point of view of Kingston’s mother as a schoolgirl.  In it, her mother actually wrestles with a ghost before exorcising it from the school.  In a genre bent on “honesty” and “truth,” stories like this one can be difficult for a reader to swallow.  But Kingston uses the story to show how she came to see herself living in a world full of ghosts. She says that “America has been so full of machines and ghosts — Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts. Once upon a time the world was so thick with ghosts, I could hardly breathe; I could hardly walk, limping my way around the White Ghosts and their cars” (96-97). This discussion of ghosts shows the importance of Kingston’s childhood understanding of being “other” in America and allows the reader to feel the otherworldliness of that experience.  Describing that feeling and the day-to-day happenings in her life alone would not have given the same emotional impact to the reader.  By using these fictional elements, Kingston lets her reader feel along with her the supernatural, the fear, the separateness that comes with understanding herself in relation to her surroundings that way.

Kingston’s fictional storytelling reaches its apex in “White Tigers,” in which she spends nearly twenty pages telling the story of Fa Mu Lan.  However, she does not tell the story in a detached, here’s-a-story-from-my-childhood sort of way.  Nor does she tell it in a let-me-tell-you-a-historical-story-of-my heritage way.  Instead, she tells the story in first person, as she experienced it herself when she “couldn’t tell where the stories left off and dreams began” (19).  In telling this story in first person, the reader can begin to understand the impact of this story on a young Kingston and can feel the expectations and potential that Kingston would have felt as a child.  It also brings home her point when she says, “My American life has been such a disappointment” (45).  Because the reader has seen the story of Fa Mu Lan from the eyes of Kingston herself, the reader can understand on a deeper level the sense of disappointment that the author must have felt.  Finally, Kingston shows how important this story and stories in general have been in her life when she compares herself to Fa Mu Lan, “What we have in common are the words at our backs” (53).  Here she suggests that while they do not have the shared experience of going to war in ancient China, the stories that they have in common unite them.  Because of this, Kingston can use Fa Mu Lan’s story to come to a deeper understanding of herself, her experiences, and her expectations.

Throughout the book, Kingston tells her reader about listening to the talk-story of her family and the ways in which these talk-stories came to bear on her understanding of herself. She writes, “When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves” (19). More than just telling her reader the importance of these stories on her life and memories, she shows us by telling us the stories, too. They have more weight than we usually give fictional stories because we can see how Kingston was influenced by these stories. Because we are told the stories as well, we as readers can also be influenced by them and therefore relate to Kingston and her experiences.

Though it may seem that including these non-factual stories in Woman Warrior undermines the validity of the truth of Kingston’s memories, it actually has the effect of giving a fuller picture of her dreams, expectations, disappointments, and fears.  Without these stories, it would be more difficult for readers to understand the complexities of Kingston’s experience growing up between cultures.  These stories allow the reader to feel the dissonance between Kingston’s Chinese upbringing and her American existence.  In the same way, when writing nonfiction, we can use fictional elements and stories to give the reader a fuller picture of our experiences.  Fictional stories often hold weight in the factual world, coming to bear on the ways that people understand themselves, the places around them, and their relationships with society at large.  Using these fictional stories to give a fuller picture is especially useful in memoirs.  If we are trying to understand and to help our readers understand our experiences, the stories we tell ourselves can give more insight into how we’ve developed and come to understand ourselves.

 

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices so that we as writers can make better decisions in our own writing. May contain affiliate links.

 

 

Books for Writers: The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston Memoir Writing Tips from Maxine Hong Kinston's The Woman Warrior How to Write Speculative Nonfiction: Lessons from The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Maxine Hong Kinston's memoir The Woman Warrior. This is a book every writer should read. Learn how to write speculative nonfiction. In this book, we can find useful advice for writers about writing a memoir with fictional elements. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #inspiration #mustread #writing #memoir #nonfiction #speculative
Books for Writers: The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston Memoir Writing Tips from Maxine Hong Kinston's The Woman Warrior How to Write Speculative Nonfiction: Lessons from The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Maxine Hong Kinston's memoir The Woman Warrior. This is a book every writer should read. Learn how to write speculative nonfiction. In this book, we can find useful advice for writers about writing a memoir with fictional elements. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #inspiration #mustread #writing #memoir #nonfiction #speculative

How to Make Memoir Meaningful: Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell You Stories

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Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell You Stories: A Sojourn into Memory is a thoughtful, compelling book. Twice as I was reading it, I felt an overwhelming urge to put down the book and write. Both times the writing and feelings were so moving that I was brought to tears. It is a gathering of thoughts and questions on memory and memoir.

I will admit, I am skeptical of memory and wary of memoir. To me, memories are so malleable, so constructed (See Radio Lab’s episode on Memory and Forgetting.) that I’ve never felt that I could trust them as a source of truth in writing. And as much as I’ve been wanting to write more nonfiction, I cringe at the idea of writing memoir. Isn’t it just navel-gazing? Aren’t there some truths that are better portrayed through fiction?

Hampl’s Stories addresses both these points directly. In fact, these are the themes that the essays in the book pivot around. The book opens with an iteration of one of her childhood memories, which Hampl then examines for accuracy. In doing so, she points out the several lies in her story and allows herself to explore why her memory would make such deceptions. This sets the tone for her essays, which do not claim a factual, historical truth but instead dig for something deeper.

She follows this up with ruminations about why people write memoirs and the importance of memory. She presents the possibility for memoir as a political act, a witness to the world in which it takes place. Instead of memoir as a focus on the self within a larger picture, Hampl offers the option to think of memoir as a focus on the larger picture through the lens of the self. She uses the Vietnam War, communist Czechoslovakia, St. Augustine’s Confessions, and Anne Frank’s diary to illuminate the different ways that constructing memories can be political acts. This connection of the personal to the political is one way that memoirs can rise above navel-gazing and become relevant throughout history.

She also addresses one of the biggest problems that memoir writers have: how to fold people you know and love into your stories. In her poignant last essay of the book, she leaves her readers with a question mark. She examines the ways that she has dealt with this issue especially in regards to her mother.  In the end, the reader leaves feeling that Hampl is still wrestling with how to understand the tension that exists between her relationships and her writing.

One of the most compelling things about I Could Tell You Stories is Hampl’s stunning honesty. One might think that a memoir about memoir (a meta-memoir, even) might be the consummate act of navel-gazing. But Hampl’s honesty keeps the book from veering off into that realm. She points out the lies in her own memories, examines herself under glaring light, and writes openly about her struggles with various topics. It is this honesty that allows her to connect her own stories with the larger world.

 

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices so that we as writers can make better decisions in our own writing. May contain affiliate links.

 

 

Books for Writers: I Could Tell You Stories by Particia Hampl Memoir Writing Tips from Patricia Hampl's I Could Tell You Stories How to Write Meaningful Memoir: Lessons from I Could Tell You Stories by Particia Hampl Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Patricia Hampl's craft book, I Could Tell You Stories. A book every writer should read! Learn how to write compelling nonfiction and get useful advice for writers about how to write a meaningful memoir. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #mustread #writing #nonfiction #books #tbr #amwriting #tipsforwriters #inspiration #memoir
Books for Writers: I Could Tell You Stories by Particia Hampl Memoir Writing Tips from Patricia Hampl's I Could Tell You Stories How to Write Meaningful Memoir: Lessons from I Could Tell You Stories by Particia Hampl Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Patricia Hampl's craft book, I Could Tell You Stories. A book every writer should read! Learn how to write compelling nonfiction and get useful advice for writers about how to write a meaningful memoir. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #mustread #writing #nonfiction #books #tbr #amwriting #tipsforwriters #inspiration #memoir
Books for Writers: I Could Tell You Stories by Particia Hampl Memoir Writing Tips from Patricia Hampl's I Could Tell You Stories How to Write Meaningful Memoir: Lessons from I Could Tell You Stories by Particia Hampl Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Patricia Hampl's craft book, I Could Tell You Stories. A book every writer should read! Learn how to write compelling nonfiction and get useful advice for writers about how to write a meaningful memoir. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #mustread #writing #nonfiction #books #tbr #amwriting #tipsforwriters #inspiration #memoir

Call for Submissions: The Litragger

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Are you looking for a place to re-publish works that have already appeared in print?  The Litragger is the place!  Check out their submission guidelines below:

 

Dear Writers,

We are republishing work that has previously appeared in print, exists in back issues, but does not have an online presence. We believe firmly in the benefit of publishing in print. But we also believe that writers deserve the opportunity to place their work online in a well-designed reading environment, following the print publication cycle, so that they may find new readers and build an audience on the web.

So if you have a piece, send it to us!

Email a word document or PDF to submissions@litragger.com.

Just let us know where it appeared originally and when it was published, and we’ll read it and let you know if we think it’s a good fit.

– Adam and Landon

 

Reading for Writers: Dino Campana’s “The Night”

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There were a lot of interesting things happening in Dino Campana’s essay “The Night.” There were some incredible metaphors and exquisite language which made me wonder about the expectations that we usually have for nonfiction in terms of style and language. Another stylistic component of note is that Campana does not use any names to refer to the characters in this essay. Instead, the only names that he uses are those of famous artists and writers. Campana also has a really arresting way of changing the pronouns that he uses for the characters, including himself, in his work. The effect of this is jarring but also captivating.

The first thing I noticed about this essay was the language being used. It is incredibly poetic and lyrical. There are a number of really striking metaphors, for example, “broken hovels like old bruises, dead windows.” Or, even more gripping: “the white Mediterranean night joked with the huge shapes of the women while the flame’s bizarre death-attempts went on and on in the streetlamp’s cave.” Language like this, though interesting and beautiful may be jarring for a reader who is looking for a straightforward account of Campana’s escapades. It made me think about the expectations that readers bring to nonfiction and whether essays have an obligation to live up to these expectation. Is it factually true that the night was joking (Or, put another way, can that be fact checked?)? How does metaphor come into play in essays? Or, more directly, what is the place of metaphor and lyrical, poetic language in nonfiction? If the reader is coming to the piece looking for truth and accuracy, how far can the writer go with metaphors and poetic language? In general, I think that if it is clear that the writer is using metaphor and clear what the writer is intending to express, this kind of language can greatly enhance creative nonfiction pieces. However, in this piece the metaphors were so dense and thick that it may have obscured some of the reader’s understanding of the truths behind the language. It made me question whether that was intentional. Perhaps Campana’s experience was so dreamlike that he wanted to convey that to the reader. Or maybe he did not want his reader to have a clear sense of what was going on. Perhaps he wanted his reader to experience the feel of the situation more than the events surrounding it. Is this authorial prerogative?

The esoteric, dreamlike quality of this narrative is pushed further by Campana’s refusal to use the names of characters populating his essay. It’s interesting that he doesn’t ever refer to anyone in the narrative by their name, only by their physical description. This can make it difficult for the reader to follow at times, but it also is especially interesting given the subject matter. Perhaps Campana did not know the name of anyone with whom he interacted that night. This is made even more peculiar by the constant name-dropping that he does with famous writers and artists. The lack of character names in the essay is even more stark next to the names of Faust, Dante, Leonardo, and Michelangelo and the names of saints. It’s as if he is drawing the distinction between these exalted, nameable people and the people in his narrative.

In addition to not giving his characters names, he also switches the pronoun that he uses to refer to them. In one section of the essay, he refers to the amber-bodied girl as “she” and later he seems to be addressing her as”you.” The most striking instance in which he does this is when he goes from using a first-person perspective of his experience to speaking about himself in the third person briefly. He refers to “the person I had once been” as “he” for two sections. This gives an interesting effect of distancing himself from the events of the night, making it his former self and not him who had these experiences. However, he only can keep this distance for a short time before going back to “I” and owning the experiences again.

All of these things made this essay difficult to decipher, as if the reader were decoding the text instead of reading it. The use of metaphors and lyrical language obscured some of the concreteness of the experiences that he was ruminating on.   The failure to use names of characters often made who he was actually talking about ambiguous. Even his pronouns when talking about these people (including himself!) were not consistent. The combination of these things gave the essay a dreamlike, nearly impenetrable quality. However, for me personally, these things added an interesting depth and dimension to the essay as well as giving a peak into the possible obfuscation that Campana was attempting. It made me ask a lot of questions, mostly unresolved, but also very interesting.

 

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices.

Call for Submissions: The Great American Lit Mag

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The Great American Lit Mag is open for submissions!  Check them out!

 

 

The Great American Lit Mag welcomes general submissions of prose and poetry. Our reading periods run for two months at a time with a month off in between for our editors to construct each issue. Our current reading period will run from August 1st-September 30th.

We are happy to consider simultaneous submissions, so long as you withdraw your work from consideration within ten minutes of it being accepted elsewhere.

Unlike most other publications, we are happy to consider previously published work. However, it is unlikely that we will republish any work that is not INCREDIBLE. If you choose to submit previously published work, please note it in your cover letter and include the following sentence: This work has been previously published at (fill in appropriate time and place); however, all publishing rights have been reverted to me, the author, and I am knowledgeably and willfully submitting it for republication under the expectation that my original publishers will be acknowledged. Our response time is typically less than 3 weeks. We want you to be able to get your work into as many hands as quickly and with the least amount of reluctance as possible if it doesn’t find a home here, so we aim to respond quickly.

We do not pay contributors for any work published in The Great American Literary Magazine.

 

Fiction

Prose should be no more than 3,000 words.

Please send your submission via email to thegreatamericanlitmag@gmail.com with a cover letter and a subject line including your last name and the word “fiction”. For example: Smith Fiction Submission.

Poetry

For poetry, please submit no more than 5 poems.

Please send your submission via email to thegreatamericanlitmag@gmail.com with a cover letter and a subject line including your last name and the word “poetry”. For example: Smith Poetry Submission.

Reading for Writers: Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays by Joan Didion, all based on the theme of things coming undone. She looks at this theme from a variety of angles, both personally reflective and also commenting on society at large. In this collection, Didion makes very interesting use of narrative structure when retelling events, adding to the feeling that “the center cannot hold” (xi).

Didion begins her book with the famous poem by Yeats in which he examines things coming undone. She also titles her book after the last line of this poem, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” In her Preface, which is quite strange, Didion explains her collection. In rather defeatist, pessimistic terms, she presents us her work. She says that it is representative of her coming to terms with “the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart” (xiii). Throughout the book, the reader can feel this sense of crumbling and a loss of groundedness or centeredness. We see it in the way that her rock-like ideal of John Wayne falls apart with cancer and the way that she struggles with ethics in “On Morality.” Didion wrestles with ideas of a world coming undone, both the larger society and on a more personal, individual level.

However, this effect is most interesting when it comes out in the structure of her writing. This is apparent from her very first essay. In “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” Didion does, in fact begin at the beginning of the story. “This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country” (3). However, after a bit of background about the place and the history of the place, the linearity of the essay begins to fall apart. Like the falconer losing hold of the falcon, the essay almost seems to get away from Didion. She jumps from the background of the land to the death of the husband, to the funeral. She starts a new section with the birth of Lucille Miller through to her unhappy marriage and then brings her lens in close on the day in question before recounting Lucille’s arrest, jumping back to the night of the accident and then to the building of the case. The next section recounts her affair starting with a generalization and jumping straight to the end, before explaining more. Then Didion recounts a litany of events that happened the same day as the Miller trial began before recounting the trial and bringing us up to the present day at the time of writing. In this present day, she focuses in on the house left behind, the child of Lucille, and the inmates that Lucille is surrounded by instead of focusing in on the main character of the essay itself. The essay then returns to the past, ending at Arthwell Hayton’s second marriage. This jumping and twisting of time, structure and focus mirrors Didion’s words of things falling apart. Not only is the time not linear, but the lens of the narration moves too, sometimes focused on Lucille, sometimes the place, sometimes those whose lives mirror hers, such as her fellow inmates, others in the news the same day, or Arthwell Hayton’s new wife. This poignantly gives the reader the effect that the center, cannot, in fact hold. We can feel the way that Lucille must feel, that her world is unravelling, and also the way that those watching the story must feel: what is becoming of our society?

This is most powerfully shown in her essay after which the collection is named. In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion gives us a picture of San Francisco in the 1960s. However, she does not explain it to use as much as she makes a pastiche of vignettes to give us a picture of the chaos and disorder of that place and time. She tells us from the get-go what she is getting at: “The center was not holding” (84). She tells us what is missing and how the reality is not meeting expectations. She gives us an array of sources to show us the disparate voices: a sign trying to find a missing person (almost perversely in verse), communiques from Chester Anderson, song lyrics, an excerpt from a newspaper, questions asked to her by other people, fliers. The weaves these throughout vignettes of stories of people she’s met in her time in the Bay Area. Even when telling the stories of these people, she jumps: from Deadeye to Max to little girls to runaways to Debbie to Officer Gerrans, back to Max. And that is just the first quarter of the essay. It’s not even clear that the vignettes are arranged chronologically. This cut-and-paste of the stories she experiences in San Francisco serve to further the feeling that things are coming apart: people are not acting as they should, time is not moving as it should, the narrator is not recounting as she should. Instead, the people are out of control, time is set spinning, and the narrator’s hold on the gyre is slipping.

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices. May contain affiliate links.

 

 

Books for Writers: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Essay Writing Tips from Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem How to Structure Nonfiction: Lessons from Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Joan Didion's collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This is a book every writer should read. Learn how to write narrative nonfiction. In this book, we can find useful advice for writers about how to structure personal essays. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #inspiration #mustread #writing #memoir #nonfiction #essay #books
Books for Writers: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Essay Writing Tips from Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem How to Structure Nonfiction: Lessons from Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Joan Didion's collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This is a book every writer should read. Learn how to write narrative nonfiction. In this book, we can find useful advice for writers about how to structure personal essays. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #inspiration #mustread #writing #memoir #nonfiction #essay #books
Books for Writers: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Essay Writing Tips from Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem How to Structure Nonfiction: Lessons from Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Joan Didion's collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This is a book every writer should read. Learn how to write narrative nonfiction. In this book, we can find useful advice for writers about how to structure personal essays. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #inspiration #mustread #writing #memoir #nonfiction #essay #books

Sharing: Suburban Ecology I by TheCartographe

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I found this amazing bit of writing the other day on TheCartographe and just needed to share it with you!  As a lover of place and environment and the way that spaces effect us, I adore what’s happening on this blog: “TheCartographe is about the curation of the environment: the selection of images, texts, and ideas that is the formation of a landscape. Topography is physical, but landscape is always psychic.”

This blog is not to be missed. Enjoy!

 

Suburban Ecology I

July 9, 2014.

 

Some millennia before the present, when the sea was in places it currently is not, it might have been that Anne Barton’s yard was a natural beach of smooth-hewn stones — perfect and round, themselves looking for all the world like fat droplets of water thrown up and clinging on the grassy shore.  The blue velvet easy chair stood primly on the rocks, taking the sea air like one who — feinting — is afraid of the ocean.  But Anne’s yard was not really a beach, of course, and the chair moreover took no solace from the pretend game of seaside release and introspection.  It did not appreciate the scene before it: the crisp break of sidewalk and swell of asphalt.  It was aware only of the thing it could not see — the blockish, secluded bungalow beyond the beachhead, where in the downstairs sitting room there was a precisely chair-shaped depression in a blanched shag carpet the colour of a watermelon where the meat comes to the rind.

I was in this house once, seven or eight years ago, when for one or another reason I  was collecting a size-adjustable mannequin from the Vietnam-era parlor upstairs, located at one end of a hallway encased exclusively by mirrors which, when shoved with some force, would open to reveal narrow closets stuffed with outerwear, shoes, and unlabelled boxes.  The front door, up a half-flight of steps from the lawn and partly concealed by an globular rhododendron, opened onto this hallway, and pointed inside toward the kitchen at the house’s rear.  There, I remember, Ms. Barton, an elderly woman who — to me — has never visibly aged, remained sitting at a card table while she asked me, standing against the entrance to the hall, if I would consider volunteering for her Sunday School.  I can’t recall answering the question.  Instead, I remember leafing through the records — none of which I recognized — contained in a cardboard box which sat on a brass-framed, stackable chair in the parlor, across the way from the kitchen.  I waited until Anne’s granddaughter, my associate, reappeared with a small plastic container filled with a multitude of compartments for pins, all heads different colours, and we departed with the rattling mannequin in parts under our free arms.

At that time, Anne’s garden was not half-covered in rocks.  In fact, it was a serene, if somewhat weedy glade, set apart from the street by the low boughs of a blue-needled pine tree which I did not recognize and now assume was originally decorative.  I lived — still live — in the house beside Anne’s; somewhat newer, somewhat more modish, my father would exasperatedly but quietly rake pinecones and long, browned needles off our lawn from September to Christmas.  At that time, Anne’s glade had real seating: a chipped, white wooden loveseat over-thrown by a modified trellis, and an elaborate swing — also wood — which reminded me always of my brother’s books on medieval implements of war.

It was one summer when I returned from university that the pine tree had been felled — its little ecosystem of sputtering grass and shed needles replaced by a neatly edged bed of lava rock.  Two ceramic pots had been placed off-centre on the wide stump, and in them the plastic-coated cardboard tags that identify greenhouse plants sprouted up like tombstones behind small, flowering stalks.  It was just last summer when the first five metres of Anne’s lawn had been dug up and replaced with the round stones.  At the same time, things began appearing on her driveway.  First the loveseat and swing, which soon disappeared, and then boxes of clothes, which would likewise appear in the morning and have vanished upon my return home in the afternoon.  Then, a tarpaulin tent appeared over a metal pole frame in the middle of the driveway, and a 1995 red Ford mustang would regularly pull in and out of it, as if on the tide.  This largely concealed the garage door, which remained closed during all this time.  I did not see Anne, though my father told me she continued to live there, and the cars that came and went (I noticed only the red convertible) were the vehicles of family and friends — or of the tenants downstairs who had moved in to the bungalow’s expansive basement.

The chair knew very little of this, being limited to the influence of the downstairs tenants and its sidelong views of sporadic children’s play in the tenants’ backyard daycare, a business Anne surely appreciated because of her attachment to children and their ideal upbringing.  When it was removed, I think, its first logical concern must have been the expected weather, and secondly the simple sign hung across its back — “FREE” — which would surely give anyone’s self-esteem a miserable pummeling.  It was, I doubt, hardly troubled by the premise that in millennia to come, it could be considered a distracting embellishment on the ecology of the house — a throwaway decoration not unlike the faking of a shoreline in a time of changing seas.

-tC

Reading for Writers: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

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In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot takes us on the incredibly interesting and moving journey of her attempt to understand the issues surrounding the life of Henrietta Lacks, her family, and the science and politics of HeLa cells.  She weaves these things together to give a more captivating, more complete picture of each of them.  The structure of the book is one that makes the stories that Skloot tells much more intriguing. It may seem that a book about history, science, and social issues could be dry and unexciting, informative but a chore to trudge through.  Instead, Skloot gives the reader a page-turner, a book that is difficult to put down.  She does this by doing two very effective things.  One has to do with the way she structures the book.  She weaves the history, science, and politics together so that you are never reading any one of those things for long enough to get bored.  The other thing that she does incredibly effectively is personalize the history and science.  Not only does she make the story of Henrietta Lacks and her family personal, but she also tells the personal stories of  the doctors, scientists, and others involved in the history that she describes.

The structure that Rebecca Skloot uses in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is very interesting.  One might think that she would tell a story like this chronologically or by subject.  It is, after all, about science and history and a family past.  She could have chosen to divide it into parts dealing with each of those subjects.  She also could have chosen to structure the book chronologically.  But she doesn’t do that either. Instead, she intertwines the chronology and the subjects.  She begins and ends the book in the present time that she is writing.  The prologue starts with a photograph that is on her wall and then moves back to Skloot’s college years.  It then jumps to the voice of Deborah, Henrietta’s daughter, during the time that Skloot was researching and writing the book. From this prologue, we move quickly to  1951, when Henrietta became ill.  From the very beginning of the book, we know that we are not going to read a straight-forward chronology or a book about just the science or history involved in culture cells.  Skloot explores times as far back as the antebellum South.  The book ends with a “Where They Are Now” chapter and closes with an Afterword that discusses the current state of ethical issues surrounding culture cell research, even extending a bit into the future possibilities of how to deal with these difficult questions.  The way that Skloot weaves these things together not only keeps the reader interested, but also shows the ways in which the personal lives, medical science, and history are all intertwined.  Though this skipping around and intertwining could be confusing, Skloot does a good job of keeping things clear. At the start of each chapter, she has a timeline to show the dates that she is writing about.  In the back of the book, she gives a timeline and a cast of characters to make sure that her reader can always be on the same page as the story.

Skloot does something else that is unexpected in a nonfiction book about medical science.  She make each facet that she talks about highly personal.  As we can see from the way she starts the book, with her own personal experience, Deborah’s personal words, and a retelling of Henrietta’s personal experience, this is not going to be a book about impersonal facts.  Skloot doesn’t just tell her own personal story or the story of the Lacks family, however.  She extends this mode of storytelling into the personal stories surrounding the doctors, scientists, and many of the people involved in the ethical debates.  This helps to draw the reader in to the story and the issues surrounding the story.  Instead of a cold, clinical account of scientific discoveries and ethical debates, Skloot gives us the stories of the people behind the debates.  Not only that, she also extends this to telling her readers about her research.  Instead of only giving her findings and what she dug up regarding her research, she allows her readers to see how she did her research and the personal interactions that she has with people as she delves further and further into the story of Henrietta Lacks and her cells.  She gives backgrounds and descriptions of people that she meets and conversations that she has.  All of this adds life and dimension to the science and history that Skloot is exploring, making it more interesting and pulling the reader deeper into the story.  Because of this, the doctors and scientists, Lacks family members and people that Skloot meets while doing research become not just historical figures, but characters in a rich story that becomes The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

 

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices so that we as writers can make better decisions in our own writing. May contain affiliate links.

 

 

Books for Writers: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Science Writing Tips from Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks How to Write Compelling Nonfiction: Lessons from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Rebecca Skloot’s nonfiction book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A book every writer should read! Learn how to write compelling nonfiction and get useful advice for writers about how to structure nonfiction about science and history. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #mustread #writing #nonfiction #books #sciencewriting #tbr
Books for Writers: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Science Writing Tips from Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks How to Write Compelling Nonfiction: Lessons from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Rebecca Skloot’s nonfiction book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A book every writer should read! Learn how to write compelling nonfiction and get useful advice for writers about how to structure nonfiction about science and history. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #mustread #writing #nonfiction #books #sciencewriting #tbr
Books for Writers: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Science Writing Tips from Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks How to Write Compelling Nonfiction: Lessons from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Rebecca Skloot’s nonfiction book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A book every writer should read! Learn how to write compelling nonfiction and get useful advice for writers about how to structure nonfiction about science and history. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #mustread #writing #nonfiction #books #sciencewriting #tbr