Juncture Workshops has a new web site to accommodate our growing number of offerings. (We've added a Cape May, NJ, workshop; we'll be conducting a one-day workshop in a major garden next fall; and we'll be offering videos and online instruction by year's end. The new site makes room for all of this.)
I share the link
here.And: Those of you interested in joining the conversation are welcome to sign up for our newsletter (through the Juncture web site). The fourth edition features thoughts on the place of poetry in life stories, brilliant commentary by poet/memoirist Brian Turner, new "homework," a reader response, and memoir commentary and critique.
It's free. Existing subscribers, please look for the next issue within the coming 24 hours.
It was Margo Jefferson, the great cultural critic, who first put my name in the
New York Times. In a review of another's book, in a closing paragraph, she made mention of something I'd penned in solitude and put forward with innocence and didn't even understand as well as she seemed to.
She looked up and saw me, and I, discovering her snatch of words quite by accident, never felt such gratitude.
When I read earlier this year that Margo had written a memoir called
Negroland, I wanted it at once, bought it when I could, and put it on the top of a pile called (in my mind), "the books you'll be allowed to read once you have completed your tour of duty with all known responsibilities."
Yesterday I was done with all known (until next week) responsibilities. I picked up
Negroland. I read.
And oh my, oh now: this. Like
H is for Hawk, like
M Train, like
My Life as a Foreign Country, Negroland is the kind of book that elevates not just its readers but the capital M Memoir itself. It's personal—and otherwise. It's I, You, We. It's inquiry, declaration, admission, confusion—the story of the impossible ideals, hurtful expectations, pleasant privileges, and chaotic undertows that have been all bound up with being a member of the black elite. It's a book by an esteemed critic who was "taught to distinguish (her)self through presentation, not declaration, to excel through deeds and manners, not showing off" and who then (but always judiciously, always for a higher purpose) allows us in.
In a book of anecdote, history, cultural expose, and yearning, we encounter, on almost every page paragraphs as searing as this:
Privilege is provisional. Privilege can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly, and summarily withdrawn. Entitlement is impervious to the kinds of verbs that modify privilege. Our people had to work, scrape for privilege, gobble it down when those who would snatch it away weren't looking.
And this:
Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you. That's your first education. Then comes the second. Call it your social and intellectual change. The world outside you gets reconfigured, and inside too. Patterns deviate and fracture. Hierarchies disperse. Now you can imagine yourself as central. It feels grand. But don't stop there. Let that self extend into other narratives and truths.
This year, when my beautiful son goes into bookstores he goes straight (his mother's child) to the memoir shelves. He, like me, views memoir as one of the best chances we have of broadening our vision, breaking down our walls, stepping out of our recklessly limited world view.
I have been taught by Margo Jefferson with her gorgeous
Negroland. I have seen a little further. I have hurt a little more. I have been made grateful for both the seeing and the hurting.
Brian Turner's immaculate memoir,
My Life as a Foreign Country, is reviewed today in the
New York Times Book Review by Jen Percy.
The book itself is so well worth reading. (My thoughts about it are
here.)
But the review is also a glory, opening with this paragraph about the importance of the empathetic imagination in memoir. Empathy may be nearly impossible to teach. But it does differentiate the great memoirs from the merely articulate ones, the we stories from the me tales. It's what should matter most to the makers and readers of memoir.
Jen Percy speaks of all this with bright, crisp words. Her entire review can be found
here.
There’s a persistent idea in our culture that what we experience is “true,” while what we imagine is “untrue.” But without exploring the possibility of imagination in nonfiction, we leave out a fundamental part of the human experience — digressive wanderings, the chaotic interior self and, most important, our empathy. Empathy, after all, starts as an act of fiction. We must think ourselves into the lives of others.
A lot is made of the romance of bookstores. The smell of paper! The joy of discovery! The ancient, cracking leather bindings of books with dated inscriptions! And it's true that bookstores are magical places to browse and linger — just maybe not in the two days before Christmas. Because in the swirling mad hum [...]
I published three books with Alane Salierno Mason and W.W. Norton years ago, and every now and then, Alane returns—her words on a page, that page slipped inside a book she's been working on.
A few weeks ago,
My Life as a Foreign Country showed up at my door—a new war memoir by
the poet Brian Turner. I had been living a long, solid stretch of distracting diminishings. I had been finding it nearly impossible to read—no time for it, or no energy when the hour was to be had. I had a mile-high stack of other books that had been sent my way, of requests I couldn't get to, of requests I was meeting instead of reading, but something about this one book commanded my attention. I kept clawing my way back to it, read it by half page and full page, by train ride, in a room brightened at 3 AM by a lamp.
Because
My Life breaks the rules, I liked it. Because it reads more like a hallucination than a life. Because Turner doesn't set aside his poetry in writing prose.
Turner's memoir tells us something of his Sergeant years in Iraq, something of the wars his grandfather, father, and uncle fought. He slides in and out of what he remembers and what he conjures—taking the powers of the empathetic imagination to an entirely new realm. He sees the thoughts of the suicide bomber, sings the song of the bomb builder, lives for and maybe beyond the enemy. The dreams are feral and the details are specific, and Sgt Turner is dead, too, but he is writing his death down, he is writing himself into the final page and "there is nothing strange" in all of that.
Earlier this morning (it seems a year ago now) I was finishing a book of my own, responding to final manuscript queries. I was asking myself how one authentically renders shock.
My Life authentically renders shock. It reveals how the terror lives on, how it knocks on the door, how it enters the room, how it watches you sleep with your wife. Years on, the shock does that. The war, Turner tells us, is never done.
The language smears and catches. It sounds like this:
This is part of the intoxication, part of the pathology of it all. This is part of what I was learning, from early childhood on—that to journey into the wild spaces where profound questions are given a violent and inexorable response, that to travail through fire and return again—these are the experiences which determine the making of a man. To be a man, I would need to walk into the thunder and hail of a world stripped of its reason, just as others in my family had done before me. And if I were strong enough, and capable enough, and god-damned lucky enough, I might one day return clothed in an unshakable silence. Back to the world, as they say.
This spring, my creative nonfiction students at Penn will assess and learn from the poetry of Sgt. Turner.
