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Maybe it doesn’t sound allthat Ivy League or resume building to ask your students to honor the smear ofchildhood or to heed the rhythms of remembered talk. The negotiationof once with the language of right now is unquantifiable. It’s also a tad shy of rigorous to conduct a classroom full ofeased-back kids—dreamers and window watchers, scribblers and flippers of pens,dismantlers of paper clips. There’s no science to teaching creative nonfiction, and there are norules, and if one or two of the students emerge from the reminiscing haze witha sentence that feels new, don’t bet that they all enjoyed the ride.
Very slowly this time, I re-read Mark Richard's
House of Prayer No. 2, the memoir we'll be discussing in class tomorrow. We'll be talking about time—its compression, its meaningfulness and meaninglessness, the power of the future progressive tense, the seduction of the future perfect—and how Richard both elides and dwells to keep us within the frame of his memoiristic purpose. I am looking forward to that conversation.
As I read, I again and again stumbled across passages that have peculiar and particular relevance to me right now. Good books do this. Good books speak directly to you.
How about this, from the immaculate
House of Prayer No. 2?
You are also interested in how you can create tension in texts between what meanings the words are conveying on the page and what the sounds of the words themselves are evoking in a reader. Why are certain melodies sad? Melodies without words.
Cap on her head, keys in her hand, a red umbrella should the sun turn to rain, and she is ready. We love her for what she knows already and for what she's about to find out.
It's the same brand of love that I felt for my students today as they presented their memoir proposals. With the greatest care they had framed their personal quests. With the greatest possible kindness they listened one to the other—challenging, encouraging, honoring, wondering, suggesting, making room.
Humor where humor was needed. Stillness where it was earned. Simple condemnation absent among us.
Yes.
Patricia Hampl's
I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory remains, for me, the best book on the topic, even all these years later. My students are reading the first two chapters this week. They'll find passages like this one:
Maybe a reader's love of memoir is less an intrusive lust for confession than a hankering for the intimacy of this first-person voice, the deeply satisfying sense of being spoken to privately. More than a story, we want a voice speaking softly, urgently, in our ear. Which is to say, to our heart. That voice carries its implacable command, the ancient murmur that called out to me in the middle of the country in the middle of the war—remember, remember (I dare you, I tempt you).
Every Tuesday I arrive an hour early and walk in a different direction at Penn, settling my mind for the teaching ahead. This is what I saw this past Tuesday, when I walked first to the most eastern end of the campus, and then west. That's my city, shining, from the newly renovated South Street Bridge.
Bestseller alchemy is a mystery. Publishing houses spend millions of dollars on books that go nowhere. They reject, repeatedly until a final sighing yes, the books that go onto become book-club institutions and household names. J.K. Rowling, Rebecca Skloot, and Kathryn Stockett know a little something about this. Jaimy Gordon (National Book Award winner for
Lord of Misrule) and Paul Harding (Pulitzer Prize winning author of
Tinkers) would likely confess to not having seen their own fame coming.
My students are reading Vivian Gornick this week, whose
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative is a must-read for memoir writers. In her concluding pages she offers up an idea about what shapes the future for books. She offers no formula, of course—that isn't possible. But I like what she has to say about intersections.
Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of at the time that we are reading. How obvious the thought seems once it has been articulated! As with love, politics, or friendship: readiness is all. When a book of merit is trashed upon publication, or one of passing value praised to the skies, it is not that the book, in either case, is being read by the wrong or the right people, it is that the wrong or the right moment is being intersected with. This book, good or great thought it may be, sinks like a stone because what it has to say cannot be taken in at the moment; while that book, transparently ephemeral, is well received because what it is addressing is alive—now, right now—in the shared psyche.
Over the course of ten minutes yesterday, 130 photographs were taken of the Penn campus by a classroom of students and their teacher. That's 130 brand new photos—pictures that will never be taken again—not precisely, not ever. The clouds won't whip that wide again, that pedestrian won't ignore that sign so unknowingly again, that man standing in the corner watching himself be watched by a camera has already disappeared.
And that's the point, when we're writing memoir—or at least that's part of the point. No picture like this one. No day like yesterday. No one like us.
How to write it all down, then, and how to make it matter?
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 1/24/2012
Blog:
Beth Kephart Books
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I found him in Berlin. I watched him work—fearless before every single blank page. A quick idea, a suggestion—a tightrope walker, say—and the color was rolled and sliced, the painting set to dry. It was that easy.
Today the fog lifts slowly. I'll grab the train, walk 30th to 40th, meet with a student, then set off for my class. Three new young writers will be joining us this week. We'll talk diaries, Joan Didion, Chad the Minx, Dawn Powell, Judith Malina, Joyce Carol Oates. We'll wade through definitions. We'll preface Geoffrey Wolff.
And then we'll take our cameras, and we'll walk.
Thethoroughgoing first person is a demanding mode. It asks for the literary equivalent of perfect pitch. Even good writers occasionally losecontrol of their tone and let a self-congratulatory quality slip in. Eager to explain that their heart is inthe right place, they baldly state that they care deeply about matters withwhich they appear to be only marginally acquainted. Pretending to confess to their bad behavior, they revel intheir colorfulness.
TracyKidder
The worst part about teaching at Penn is the decision-making part. As in: I have to study my swollen, swaying, triple-stacked wall of memoirs and decide which few (only a few!) to put on the syllabus. Sure, we're reading all semester long—theory, excerpts, slices of things. But which memoirs will we read, cover to cover? Which books will my students carry forward, in their own libraries?
I have, just now, made at least one pairing decision:
House of Prayer No. 2 (Mark Richard) and
The Duke of Deception (Geoffrey Wolff). I cannot wait to read both these books again.
I am not a goodbye artist. I don't know the words. I get sick at the thought, and then I just plain get sick, and I was a fraction of myself today in English 135.
I'd made the students chapbooks of their work and carried them across campus in my bag. I'd run to the campus grocer's (for grapes and strawberries, cheese and bagel crisps, chips and salsa, carrot cake and chocolate) and then to Kelly Writers House (for platters and for the knife with which I'd eventually slice the tip of my index finger off). It was a muggy day, and my heart was heavy, and in the midst of it all, I stopped right here and took my camera out.
To the left is the building in which I taught my sweet sixteen. To the right is where Amy Gutmann, Penn's president, lives. The smoke in the middle is what interests me. The ephemera. The mystery. Of what gets taught, and what remembered. Of what lives, and lives.
I don't imagine that Amy Gutmann knows who I am. I can't imagine that she could imagine how much I loved her kids. These University of Pennsylvania students who were mine each Tuesday afternoon, who believed in me because (perhaps mostly) I believed in them.
"Don't go anywhere," I told them. Or, "Don't go far."
But does the smoke rise, or does it fall, and can it hold us?
Time will tell.
And so I make ready for a final day with the students I love.
It's an unbearable thought.
In class today we'll be reviewing the possibilities inherent in the first-person literary profile. How, for example, does James Baldwin both summon his father and reveal his own soul in "Notes of a Native Son"?
He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness was now mine. How much knowing lies behind Frederick Busch's words, about Terrence des Pres:
He had found what most writers searched for, consciously or otherwise, all their working lives: the subject that was metaphor for the interior strife that drove them to be writers. And what is Annie Dillard up to with "The Stunt Pilot"? How is that she reveals herself, even when her seeming purpose is to help us see this plane and its magic-making driver? The black plane dropped spinning, and flattened out spinning the other way; it began to carve the air into forms that built wildly and musically on each other and never ended. Reluctantly, I started paying attention. Rahm drew high above the world an inexhaustibly glorious line; it piled over our heads in loops and arabesques. It was like a Saul Steinberg fantasy; the plane was the pen. Like Steinberg's contracting and billowing pen line, the line Rahm spun moved to form new, punning shapes from the edges of the old. Like a Klee line, it smattered the sky with landscapes and systems.
We'll talk about all this and more, then get back to the business of critiquing student memoirs.
this--are you writing a long essay about it?
I just finished reading Ru by Kim Thuy. It's fiction that reads like memoir--and has some basis in autobiography. It makes me think about memoir as a form for me someday.
I like the idea behind this moment...the moment of teaching something that many may find an insignificant thing to remember...thanks for sharing this work in progress
Love "the smear of childhood." It cannot be Penn where these paper clip dismantlers are not hearing your words, it must be some group of underprivileged teens. Hah. It's still worth doing what you do. But you know that.