Fifteen False or True Starts

Guest blog post from Tanya Paperny in response to the recent discussion regarding truth, lyric essays, and John D'Agata:

Fifteen False or True Starts

1.) Holy shit, you just blew my mind. These were the only words I managed to scribble in my pocket-sized black Moleskine. I couldn't come up with any other way to respond to the reading I'd just heard other than to indicate complete and total mind-blown-ded-ness. I just had to surrender and listen.

2.) When Amy Leach read "Memorandum" at the recent “In Praise of the Essay” symposium, I’d been taking notes all day with the expectation that I'd write some sort of straightforward review of the event. I figured the day's panels, lectures, and readings would reinforce the distinctions between fiction, nonfiction, the essay, journalism, and other forms. But then Leach read, and I was stunned. Who was she? Was she being presented to us as an essayist? And what were these works she read? Were they essays? She read two more wildly imaginative pieces, "Sail On, My Little Honey Bee" and "Comfortless." Her un-categorizable writing seemed to take a fantasy, a day dream, a digression, and write it to its charmingly logical extreme. Her pieces used these absurd and hilarious similes: like a potato that experienced one terrible, and many average, concussions; like a frozen mouse; like walruses; like birds wading or figs rumbling or the muttering of mathematicians; like a taxidermied antelope; like the trajectory of sea ducks. I wasn't sure how any of this could be categorized as an essay because it all seemed so inventive. But then again, it was loaded with facts. I didn't know you were allowed to do this, lyrical wanderings disguised as essays.

Some thoughts on the political art of CNF and John D'Agata

Photo: andrefromont

I.

Creating a work of creative nonfiction is a political act, a form of resistance. In writing we sift through experience, ideas, and factual information to discover the real story, one that rejects the easily available cultural narratives.

When writers like James Frey or Greg Mortenson (Three Cups of Tea) lie about major events, they not only betray readers, but also this call, or purpose, of CNF. Rather than engaging in the hard work of discovering their own authentic story, they change facts in order to fit into pre-packaged narratives: Frey as that individual who can overcome any obstacle entirely on his own; Mortenson as a benevolent Westerner who selflessly helps poor villagers in foreign lands.

II.

So where does the current blowup over John D'Agata and his problem with facts fall within this background of truth and lies in CNF scandals?

Confessions of a Research Addict

I admit it. I’m a research junkie. 

            I love sifting through articles and books for buried treasure, those golden nuggets that somehow amplify and deepen what I’m trying to write about. It's almost scary how easily I can delve for hours into a book or cyberspace, trying to unearth information about whatever happens to pique my interest at that moment. It's a dangerous addiction. I can lose myself in it, and come out feeling light-headed and slightly nauseated, as if I’ve eaten a dozen jelly donuts and have nothing to show for it but a box full of crumbs. 

An Interview with Carmen Giménez Smith

Barrie Jean Borich recently interviewed Carmen Giménez Smith about Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else, her lyric memoir which received a 2011 American Book Award.

Borich

Do you consider this book a lyric essay? Why or why not, and if yes, what do you mean by the term “lyric” in relation to prose?

Giménez Smith

I do consider it a lyric essay, and as I write more and more nonfiction, I realize that this form is the one I'm best suited for. I like the associative jumps and the compression this form requires. It's a more peripatetic form too, and these are the ways the form is lyric, although I also think it's interesting to consider the terms of subjectivity after Montaigne, which is the way I most like to frame the notion of lyric: how does this form privilege the speaker's subjectivity as opposed to more conventional nonfiction?

Reading Tips for the Microphone-shy

Photo: +fatman+

Sarah recently posted here on Grout about the benefits of reading one's work for an audience. Like Sarah, I find reading my work aloud for other to be incredibly helpful to my writing process. But unlike Sarah, I utterly dread public speaking and just thinking about reading my own writing for an audience can give me a near panic attack.

However, over time I've discovered a few things that have helped me reign in those panic freak-outs. I'm still not, and probably never will be, one of those dynamic speakers that can enthrall and audience, but at least I don't entirely dread getting up on a stage any more. So for the benefit of all you other microphone-shy writers, here are my top survival tips for giving readings:

1. Become a kinky librarian

OK, so you don’t actually need to become a librarian or be all that kinky, but imagining yourself as another character can do wonders to calm your nerves. And yes, my character happens to be a kinky librarian.

Reading and Writing and...

I come from a long line of storytellers.  This probably drew me to writing, the natural progression from orating to authorship.  Most of the things I write now have begun as stories I tell at parties.  I feel very fortunate that public speaking doesn’t make me want to hide in the nearest crack in the floorboards and I sympathize with people for whom public speaking ranks scarier than death on their list of biggest fears. (A large part of the population feels this way, it seems; Jerry Seinfeld once quipped that most people at a funeral would rather be in the casket than standing at the podium giving the eulogy.)  At first glance, writing appears to be a remote activity, one that allows the author to express his or her thoughts without having to leave the comforts of the couch.  Passive.  Safe.

But reading work aloud makes writing less of a lonely endeavor and more of a collective experience, a connection between the writer/reader and the audience/listener.  As someone who has participated in dozens of readings, I have discovered several benefits of reading one’s work aloud, and I encourage anyone who considers herself serious about writing to participate in at least one reading this year.  Why?

The 'I'

CNF is a lot about new angles, new perspectives. Our personal perspectives are always shifting, and they are always unique to us, to our lives. Well. Earlier this week, I reached for my iPad. I was dozing on the couch, and I had lost the iPad somewhere in the folds of the comforter I was wrapped in. When I found it, the screen was face down and the etched text on the back was wrong side up—so completely backwards. It was a great moment to reflect on one of the iPad’s ingenuities—its ability to reorient the screen to suit how you hold it. The back cover of course does not reorient, but upsidedown words can be considered as lines and shapes and not letters. And I noticed, beside the neat symmetry of the ‘P’ and ‘d’, the ‘i’ in iPad is a perfect exclamation point. I can’t claim to know why the teams over at Apple named the iPad iPad, but that first letter is another case of brilliant design. It evokes the inverted exclamation point, and it is inseparable from the word. iPad (notice how even at the beginning of a sentence, it is not IPad) comes with its own excitement, its own fervor, its own life. Just great marketing? What about our need for these devices, are they sparked by the urgency in the name? Is it really so wrong to be excited? The inverted exclamation point is unique to the Spanish language. Its expression seems almost parallel to the English exclamation point, only it comes at the beginning of a sentence. In English punctuation, the exclamation point signals commands, energetic or passionate statements, statements of disbelief, or even statements made in times of duress. All connote motion, the slant forward of iTalics (couldn’t resist), the present. The Now, never the past. The movement toward the pressing future. I find excitement, too, in how that lowercase iPad ‘i’ has come to be synonymous with ‘I’, that power player of CNF. And by extension, the i/I is also kin to the inverted exclamation point; it is a signal forward. The i/I is interesting, compelling, never at rest. Which leads to what every CNF writer must do: exclaim. Declare. Insist on your relevance, your design, how essential you are. Write your i/I into the world, and let it connote urgency, fervor, passion, life.

Tales From a Great Workshop

Workshopping. That word, I think, conjures up a visceral reaction in nearly everyone who has taken part in one, and often that reaction isn’t positive. I have been in workshops that felt petty and pointless, workshops that felt less like writers helping each another and more like crows picking apart roadkill.

When workshops are handled well, though, they can be indispensable. Because no matter how long we’ve been writing, we still can’t get enough distance from our own work to be completely objective about it. Workshopping provides that little reality check from others who are less invested, but it also can answer some BIG QUESTIONS: Is what we’re trying to say actually getting across on the page? Does our work match up with our intentions? A good workshop can show us little veins of gold shimmering in places we didn’t even know were there. But a great workshop does even more. It lets us see possibilities in our writing even when the work being discussed isn’t our own.