And so—reading of each other, to each other—we said goodbye today at Penn. These are my mighty fourteen who dared to take on the memoir beast...and won. The mighty fourteen who provoked my tears—and allowed me to cry them.
And that, above, is Cole Bauer, our Mr. Music Man, whose guitar work accompanied the gorgeous
Beltran audio recording on home. Cole is a singer-songwriter who packs in the crowds at a local bar on Monday nights. Cole is the guy who wrote, throughout our time together, with hope-restoring heart. It's uber cool to love those who love you. Cole reminded us of that every time we met.
Listen.
Then go ahead and buy your copy of "Small Town,"
here.
we tried to stop the afternoon from ticking to a close.
we held on.
tight.
Yesterday Kelly and I walked Longwood Gardens where the tulips were like new crayons in tight boxes and the rose grapes hung from ceilings as if waiting to be pressed toward wine and the trees were actually flowers and the treehouse mirror turned us into a 17th century painting with 21st century iPhones. It was spring, crisp, crowded.
The hours served as punctuation. A period, perhaps a colon marking the end of a long winter of talks and workshops, essays and reviews, teaching and papers, intense client work and client revisions, the quiet launch of a novel and the heart-ish completion of a collection of essays. Tomorrow is my last class with the Spectaculars at Penn. We have worked hard together, grown together, hurt together, soared together, and on this day I sit reading their final work—the profiles they have written about people who matter to them. I believe that writing can serve no greater purpose than to awaken the writer to the world itself—the things that matter—and to, in that way, force love (or call it attention) onto the page. I believe that teaching craft is teaching soul. I believe in the quiet things that happen in the margins. I believe.
It's the kind of belief that won't make a person famous. The kind that simmers just off to the left, that urges with wet eyes, that suggests and does not demand, that says,
Maybe. The kind that is noticed by a few but rarely by many. Am I, I am asked often and ever more frequently, okay with that? Don't I, after all these quiet books, all these quiet years, all these words living in the shadows, want
more?
There are crayon tulips. There are decorated trees. There are steps leading up to the sky. There are moments. There are students. There are friends; there is family. There is a husband and a son. There are books on my shelves written by authors with far greater talent, wisdom, seeing, stretch—and I see that talent, I am grateful for that talent, I am instructed by it, happy for it, elevated and poem-ed by it.
This is my more. This is my life.
David Grossman's elegiac
Falling Out of Time is not a memoir. It is not a memoir even though it comes from such a deeply personal place—the loss of the author's own son, an inconsolable grief. The book is, instead, a Greek chorus of a book—a concussion of voices, of grieving parents, of thoughts that wander through the dark night of loss. A Town Chronicler and a Centaur, a Duke and a Midwife, a Woman in the Belfry, an Elderly Math Teacher, a Woman in Net—each character spiraling down upon the empty place where a child no longer is. The "noneness."
They walk the night. They look for signs. They ask their wives or their husbands how they will ever again love each other "when/in deep love/he was/conceived."
They rehearse their history:
Two human specks,
a mother and her child,
we glided through the world
for six whole years,
which were unto me
but a few days
and we were
a nursery rhyme
threaded with tales
and miracles–
Until ever so lightly
a breeze
a breath
a flutter
a zephyr
rustled
the leaves—
And sealed our fates:
you here
he there
over and done with,
shattered
to pieces.
I read the book late last night and this morning, in preparation for my Tuesday class at Penn, where I will be talking about (among many other things) the various forms of memoir. The graphic memoir. The second person memoir. The third person memoir. The photographic memoir. The poem as memoir.
Grossman's book is not a memoir, as I have said. But it is a suggestion of a form that memoirists might use—a place where truth might be put and rallied after. I'm exploring that idea as I prepare for Tuesday. I put it here, to share with you.
And in the meantime, I step away from my studies today and prepare for a bit of a party in New York. We have been celebrating, this week, my father's special birthday. May the festivities continue.
Memoir. There are no rules. There are only the books that we learn from, the writing that shapes us, the mistakes we are willing to make, the unmasking. Each semester, I teach memoir new because it is always new, because there is always more to read, to try, to consider.
And then I sit, as my students head off for their spring break, their memoirs in my lap. And I am stunned by the hard work, the right risks, the bold tangents, the questions raised and sometimes answered. They are off. I am here. Their lives on paper.
How they have walked deep among the trees. How they have honored the form, themselves, one another. How deeply privileged I am. Always.
This rare teaching life.
These vast and lovely spring semesters.
Them.
