Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction 9781501386077, 9781501386060, 9781501386107, 9781501386091

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Praise for the Second Edition “As creative nonfiction continues to break new ground, Bending Genre gives writers and readers a marvelous map to new literary terrain, as charted by some of the form’s most interesting cartographers and practitioners. By turns earnest, argumentative, lyric, playful, and provocative, the authors of these pieces explore nonfiction forms as refuge, as rebellion, as intellectual practice, as erotics and aesthetics, as mode of making, and as liberating community. Encouraging exploration and seeded with compelling readings of familiar and less familiar texts, Bending Genre is suggestive rather than scholarly, offering a mode of making and a gloss on the meanings made by this rich, shifting, wonderfully hard to define literary playground that we call creative nonfiction.” E. J. Levy, Associate Professor, Colorado State University, USA “Bending Genre is published into a landscape that has changed so much in the past ten years and will change even more in the next decades, and the essays that are the most convincing are those advocating that we cross, bend and break genre open in more disruptive ways—as writers and readers—and use our creative-critical powers to undo systems that have not been serving us. This book provides a solid anchor for thinking into genre-bending writing, and if readers supplement this text with the reading of many and diverse contemporary hybrid texts, they will experience first-hand how hot genre-bending writing can make their brains, how spacious it can make a heart.” Elizabeth Reeder, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Glasgow, UK, and author of microbursts (2021)

Praise for the First Edition “Bending Genre is an exciting anthology of contemporary nonfiction that shifts the focus from ethical questions about ‘truthtelling’ to aesthetic questions about form. The contributors make up a who’s-who of distinguished and new writers who have been enlivening the conversation about formal range in nonfiction for the past decade. What happens when writers ‘push the line,’ the editors ask, in terms of what defines genre? Oddball and exploratory, reflective and transgressive, musical and mindful, these essays brilliantly lay out the trail.” Alison Hawthorne Deming, Professor and Director of Creative Writing Program, University of Arizona, US “What a wonderful and needed anthology! The essay has always created itself by doing battle with its adjectives: formal, informal, personal, genteel, modern(ist). Now, just as we were getting comfortable—too comfortable—with lyrical, this anthology arrives to unsettle us again with a slew of new adjectives: queer, bent, bending, monstrous, hybrid, impertinent, fluid, transgressive, anarchic, faked, diabolic, misshelved, Dionysian, blissful, puzzling, vertiginous, saturated, unboxed. And then, when our heads are beginning to explode with the centrifugal force of these adjectives, Bending Genre pulls us back with an equally wondrous and innovative set of formal possibilities—creative nonfiction as video game, false document, encyclopedia, autogeography, murder mystery, sepia-tone picture, Play-Doh construction, train trip, user of white space, questionnaire, or the genre that dare not speak its name. I will adopt this book for my classes. It’s time to shake things up.” Ned Stuckey-French, Director, Program in Publishing & Editing, Florida State University, USA, and Book Review Editor for Fourth Genre “Opens up via several essays by some of the best current practitioners and theorists of the essay-writing craft . . . The essays of Part II, ‘Structures,’ offer numerous examples and ideas of shaping organizational frameworks for the essay . . . an excellent job discussing the uses of story, elements, montage, white spaces, lack of closure, etymology, and metaphor . . . I would recommend this collection to all serious writers.” Rain Taxi, Heidi Czerwiec “A wonderfully queer enterprise. Collectively, it is not entirely criticism; not entirely creative writing. Singer and Walker collate the essays to destabilize the reader’s assumptions and expectations of the text—and they do so successfully . . . Perplexing and intellectually stimulating, Bending Genre and all the questions it raises continues the discussion outside of the text.” LambdaLiterary.org, Marcie Bianco

Bending Genre

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Bending Genre Essays on Creative Nonfiction Second Edition Edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2013 This edition published 2023 Copyright © Margot Singer and Nicole Walker, 2023 Each chapter © of Contributors For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Vince Cavataio/Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Singer, Margot, editor. | Walker, Nicole, editor. Title: Bending genre : essays on creative nonfiction / Edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker. Description: Second Edition. | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022022070 (print) | LCCN 2022022071 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501386077 (HB) | ISBN 9781501386060 (PB) | ISBN 9781501386084 (eBook) | ISBN 9781501386091 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501386107 Classification: LCC PN145 .B4285 2023 (print) | LCC PN145 (ebook) | DDC 808.02–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022070 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022071 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-8607-7 PB: 978-1-5013-8606-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-8609-1 eBook: 978-1-5013-8608-4 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction  Margot Singer and Nicole Walker

1

Part I  Hybrids

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1 Why Some Hybrids Work and Others Don’t  Lia Purpura 2 Queering the Essay  David Lazar 3 The Everbent Genre  Patrick Madden 4 Don’t Let Those Damn Genres Cross You Ever Again!  Lawrence Sutin 5 Genre-Queer: Notes Against Generic Binaries  Kazim Ali 6 On the EEO Genre Sheet  Jenny Boully 7 Reading Samuel R. Delany  T Clutch Fleischmann 8 Beautiful Muddied Waters: On Genre and Veracity  Sean Prentiss 9 Listening for the Sound  Sejal Shah 10 Split Tone  Lee Martin 11 Lyrebirds in the Impasse  David Carlin 12 Headiness  Karen Brennan 13 What’s in Your Purse?: Essays through the Eyes of a Character Actor  Elena Passarello 14 Propositions; Invocations: Inventions  Mary Cappello

9 13 18 24 28 38 42 50 58 63 66 73

Part II  Structures

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15 On Scaffolding, Hermit Crabs, and the Real False Document  Margot Singer 95 16 Text Adventure  Ander Monson 100 17 Adventures in the Reference Section  Kevin Haworth 108 18 Meeting the Ancestor on the Road  Tina Makereti 112 19 Autogeographies  Barrie Jean Borich 120 20 Dissolving Genre: Writ with Water  Ingrid Horrocks 125 21 “Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!”: Courage and Creative Nonfiction  Brenda Miller 131 22 Traumatized Time  David McGlynn 138 23 Escapology  Justin Hocking 147 24 Play-Doh Fun Factory Poetics  Wayne Koestenbaum 160 25 A Sequence of Thoughts Without Any Kind of Order  Ira Sukrungruang 166 26 My Mistake  Nicole Walker 175

Contents

viii Part III  Unconventions 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

On Convention  Margot Singer Losing Language  Camille Dungy What the Bottles Know  Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas 44 Tattoos  David Shields Creative Exposition—Another Way That Nonfiction Writing Can Be Good  Dave Madden This Photograph Is Evidence of You  Lawrence Lacambra Ypil Ostrakons at Amphipolis, Postcards from Chicago: Thucydides and the Invention and Deployment of Lyric History  Michael Martone On Fragmentation  Steve Fellner Single-Mindedness and Wholeheartedness in the Essay Writing Workshop: An Essay in Many Parts  Jenn Ashworth Positively Negative  Dinty W. Moore Study Questions for the Essay at Hand: A Speculative Essay  Robin Hemley A Brief History of Disquiet, Deficit & Disbelief by 飛蚊 FeiMan  Xu Xi The Inclusivity of Metaphor  Nicole Walker

Part IV  Resistances 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

The Funk of Defiance, the Freedom of Refusal  Catina Bacote The Essay as Resistance  Aviya Kushner Prepositioning Resistance, Queerly  Francesca Rendle-Short Exposition as Resistance: Tell Me the Moon Is Shining  Matthew Batt The Lyric Essay as a Mode of Resistance  LaTanya McQueen It Is What It Is  Eula Biss How It Is: Writing Toward Wonder  Jessica Hendry Nelson On Not Being Able to Write It  Wendy Rawlings Hermes Goes to College  Michael Martone The Convex View  Karen Lloyd The Moral Map  Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Bibliography List of Contributors Index

179 181 188 195 201 211 219 224 228 233 242 248 252 257 263 265 270 277 284 289 291 296 302 306 310 317 323 336 344

Acknowledgments The following essays first appeared in other publications (at times with different titles and/or in different form): “It Is What It Is,” by Eula Biss, in the Seneca Review; “On the EEO Genre Sheet,” by Jenny Boully, in 1913; “Lyrebirds in the Impasse,” by David Carlin, in the Sydney Review of Books; “Losing Language,” by Camille Dungy, in Emergence Magazine; “What the Bottles Know,” by Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, in the Yale Review; Robin Hemley, “Study Questions for the Essay at Hand: A Speculative Essay” in Ninth Letter; Ingrid Horrocks, “Dissolving Genre: Writ with Water” in LitHub; Wayne Koestenbaum, “Play-Doh Fun Factory Poetics” in Salmagundi; “Split Tone,” by Lee Martin, in Brevity; “Hermes Goes to College,” by Michael Martone, in upstreet; “Ostrakons at Amphipolis, Postcards from Chicago: Thucydides and the Invention and Deployment of Lyric History,” by Michael Martone, in Ascent; “‘Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!’: Courage and Creative Nonfiction,” by Brenda Miller, in the Writer’s Chronicle; “Why Some Hybrids Work and Others Don’t,” by Lia Purpura, in DIAGRAM; “Listening to the Sound,” by Sejal Shah, in Poets & Writers; “44 Tattoos,” by David Shields, in the Village Voice; “On Convention,” by Margot Singer, in the Writer’s Chronicle; “A Sequence of Thoughts Without Any Kind of Order,” by Ira Sukrungruang, in Buddha’s Dog; “A Brief History of Disquiet, Deficit, and Disbelief, by 飛蚊 FeiMan,” by Xu Xi, in Speculative Nonfiction.

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An artistic movement, albeit an organic and as-yet-unstated one, is forming. What are its key components? . . . Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real. David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto With these words David Shields throws down the gauntlet in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. The novel is dead, Shields claims. Bored by the artifice of fiction, writers are “smuggling . . . larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work.”1 The literary genre of creative nonfiction—including lyric and personal essays, narrative journalism, and memoir—stands at the vanguard of this movement. Hybrid, innovative, and unconventional, creative nonfiction is the preeminent expression of our times. The blurriness of the lines between the genres, of course, has long provoked much anxiety and debate. How much “creative” license can nonfiction writers take? Is it permissible to create composite characters, consolidate events, or reconstruct details that have been forgotten or can’t be known? Can you alter the facts to protect the innocent—or to improve the rhythm of a sentence or intensify the drama of a scene? Scandals have erupted over memoirs by fraudsters like Margaret Seltzer, Greg Mortensen, and James Frey. Essayists and fact-checkers face off. Unfortunately, the fracas over the ethics of nonfiction has sidelined important questions of literary form—and these are the questions that motivate this book. We all know that something crucial happens to how we read a story when we understand that its events really occurred, that the people and places described actually exist. There’s a special intimacy that comes from recognizing the voice of an essay or memoir as the author’s, from listening to that author think and wonder, reminisce, confess, reflect. But what distinguishes creative nonfiction as a genre, we propose, is not only the truthvalue of the writing. It’s the ways in which the raw material of “reality” is shaped and transformed into literary art. Literature has long encompassed a broader field than poetry and fiction. The art of what we now call “creative nonfiction” stretches back to the confessions of St. Augustine,

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the letters of Lucius Seneca, the aphorisms of Francis Bacon, the meditations of Samuel Johnson, and the “attempts” of Michel de Montaigne. Its history can be traced from Plutarch’s consolations and Kenko’s “Essays in Idleness” to Jorge Luis Borges’s lectures, Virginia Woolf ’s reflections, the “nonfiction novels” of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, the “new journalism” of Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Gay Talese. Since the memoir heyday of the 1990s, creative nonfiction has emerged as the most vital and innovative area on the contemporary American literary scene. Best-selling authors such as Dave Eggers, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have pushed the memoir in poetic, self-reflexive directions and roamed far from the journalistic beaten path. From Sei Shōnagon’s 1,000-year-old lists to the loosely linked fragments of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, creative nonfiction continues to break new ground. It is perhaps surprising, given its long history and popularity, that creative nonfiction has garnered such scant attention from literary scholars, critics, and theorists. Early efforts by John Hellmann, Eric Heyne, Barbara Lounsberry, Chris Anderson, and others in the 1980s and 1990s have not led to sustained scholarship in this field.2 While recent work in autobiography/life writing studies, autotheory, and narratology has made important interdisciplinary contributions to our understanding of the function and meaning of storytelling, from a literary/critical perspective, creative nonfiction remains virtually unexplored. As writers and teachers of creative nonfiction, we wanted to move beyond the well-rehearsed arguments over truth-telling toward a more sophisticated conversation about this protean genre’s possibilities and forms. In formal terms, how does creative nonfiction work? In what ways does it splice together elements of other genres to create a hybrid—and which elements are uniquely its own? What do we make of essays that take on structures typically found in poetry, reference books, music, or interactive games? What meanings are made when essays are built from fragments assembled with the associative logic of collage? How do nonfiction writers negotiate narrative time, white space, lyric compression, exposition, point of view, and metaphor? In what ways does creative nonfiction resist—by subverting conventions, shifting the center, breaching boundaries, proposing counternarratives, challenging accepted truths? In short: What distinguishes creative nonfiction from other kinds of literary prose? In 2007 we invited fellow writers David Shields and Nick Flynn to join us in presenting a panel on genre-bending creative nonfiction for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Atlanta. In the years since then, we have continued to explore creative nonfiction’s hybridism, structures, techniques, and forms. This book, first published in 2013, is the result. Our contributors are experienced teachers and writers at the cutting edge of creative nonfiction. Their essays not only push our thinking but also model the innovative forms of writing they discuss. They speak to us as writers in terms that we hope will inspire, provoke, and engage. This second edition, expanded from twenty-seven to fifty essays, broadens the conversation, bringing in new voices and diverse perspectives that reflect the evolution of the field a decade on. Creative nonfiction is commonly defined as fact-based writing that uses the techniques of fiction to bring its stories to life. As Lee Gutkind puts it: “Ultimately, the primary

 Introduction 3 goal of the creative nonfiction writer is to communicate information, just like a reporter, but to shape it in a way that reads like fiction.”3 Creative nonfiction certainly shares with fiction the elements of detail, image, description, dialogue, and scene. Like fiction, creative nonfiction strives to “show, not tell,” to appeal not just to readers’ intellects but to their hearts and senses, to put the reader “there.” Yet surely the goal of creative nonfiction is not merely to “communicate information” but also to bring the reader on a journey of discovery as we explore ourselves and our experiences of the world. Gutkind’s formula is much too narrow. What about the wide range of essays whose emphasis is on theme rather than story, on meditation rather than reportage? What about creative nonfiction that feels more like poetry than fiction, relying on lyric compression rather than narrative to achieve its aims? We organize our textbooks and courses into tidy generic categories, but literary genres are notoriously difficult to theorize or define. We tend to think of genres as fixed and clearly bounded when in fact transgression is the norm. Indeed, we would argue that there is no such thing as non-hybrid genre. Certainly, poems typically have line breaks and prose does not and plays are primarily made of dialogue. But the categories are not mutually exclusive. Prose, like drama, is grounded in dialogue and scene. Poems can be narrative; essays can be lyric; novels can be written in verse. Novels and stories may in general rely more heavily on narrative, essays on exposition, poetry on the lyric, and plays on dramatization, but ultimately narration and exposition and lyricism and dramatization are rhetorical modes employed by every literary genre.4 To state, as Gutkind does, that creative nonfiction uses the techniques of fiction doesn’t tell us anything about what sets creative nonfiction apart from other literary forms. As readers, we distinguish one genre from another on the basis of formal conventions, not content alone. For example, the conventions of journalism (third-person voice, neutral tone, “inverted pyramid” structure, etc.) signal that a piece of writing is true, objective, grounded in reported facts. But a poem (with its line breaks, lyrical language, emphasis on image, etc.) may be as fact-based as any historical or newspaper account, and yet we still don’t read it as “nonfiction.” Memoirs may read like novels, as Gutkind says, but novels read like memoirs, too. Indeed, since its earliest days, the novel has created verisimilitude by appropriating nonfiction’s forms (think of Aphra Behn and Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novels, or Daniel Defoe’s faux autobiography, Robinson Crusoe). Too often we confuse form with substance as a result. Factual and figurative language are not the sole purview of any single genre. As the Israeli writer Amos Oz told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in a 2004 interview, “James Joyce took the trouble, if I am not mistaken, to measure the precise distance from Bloom’s basement entrance to the street above. In Ulysses, it is exact, and yet it is called fiction. But when a journalist writes, ‘A cloud of uncertainty hovers’ . . . this is called fact!”5 Every piece of writing must negotiate the tension between the real and the imagined, fact and truth. Genres, in sum, are not fixed categories with clear-cut boundaries but constellations of rhetorical modes and formal structures grounded in varying degrees of fact. Genres are rooted in convention. They are also shape-shifters, in a continual state of flux. In Tzvetan Todorov’s words: “A new genre is always the transformation of one of several old genres: by inversion, by displacement, by combination.”6 Creative nonfiction, perhaps

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more than any other genre, plays by no rules, resists classification. As Theodor Adorno wrote, “The essay does not permit its domain to be prescribed.” Shaped by the “force field” of subjective rumination, the essay “refuses any definition of its concepts,” challenges the precepts of philosophy and art and science, and “transgresses the orthodoxy of thought.”7 In Part I of Bending Genre, we argue that creative nonfiction does not simply borrow elements from fiction and poetry but bends and recombines them to make a hybrid that perpetually troubles and transcends generic bounds. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “hybrid” in its original usage referred to the crossbreeding of domesticated pigs with wild boar. In literature, too, hybridization infuses wild energy into familiar forms. The hybrid is transgressive, polyvalent, queer. It challenges categories and assumptions, exposing the underlying conventions of representation that often seem so “natural” we hardly notice them at all. Part II of Bending Genre moves from a discussion of the meaning and implications of hybridity to an examination of structure in creative nonfiction. Here we consider how essays make meaning through various narrative and nonnarrative forms. What happens when we abandon the linear structure of story for alternative ways of knowing, for branching tangents, digressions, and associative leaps? We examine the strange cases of essays that take the (fictional) shape of a concrete (nonfictional) form, such as a list, an outline, a contributor’s note, a computer game, a map. We look at how essays manipulate time and language to represent emotionally charged material. We explore how the essay, like a musical theme and variations, circles and probes, varies its rhythm, modulates from major to minor key. We ask what happens when essays flow like water, refuse form and order, and chafe against constraints. Part III of Bending Genre considers how creative nonfiction both breaks and builds on literary conventions to create its own, new forms. This section probes these “unconventions,” including, the ways language captures (or refuses to capture) meaning, the literary possibilities of research and exposition, the effects of fragmentation and white space, the paradoxical operation of metaphor. We explore how essay writers toggle between fact-based research and emotional reflection, how essays make wild, playful, speculative leaps. Far more than mere stylistic devices, these “unconventions” give writers of creative nonfiction fresh approaches to their material, ways to help the reader see the world anew. Part IV of Bending Genre, new to the second edition, explores creative nonfiction as a means of resistance. What happens, we ask, when essays kick sand in the face of tradition, speak truth to power, refuse to shut up? How does the rebel essay protest, challenge, defy, destabilize, disrupt? How can creative nonfiction shift our ways of seeing the world, spark wonder, prompt action, spur change? What happens when a story refuses to be written? And what do we need to do to ensure we get the story right? Written by and for writers, Bending Genre aims to serve as a guide and inspiration for teachers, students, scholars, writers, and the many others interested in creative nonfiction as a literary art. We believe it offers a useful companion to more traditional textbooks and anthologies, a way of opening new options to students and writers at

 Introduction 5 all levels, and a starting point for ongoing discussion of creative nonfiction’s evolving, innovative forms. Each contributor to this book brings a distinct approach and writerly personality. Some of the essays are analytical and theoretical; they mark the first substantive attempts to create a poetics of creative nonfiction. Other essays take a more playful or innovative form. Many model the very techniques and approaches they explore. All our contributors are acclaimed writers of creative nonfiction; most have published widely in other genres as well. They also bring deep experience teaching creative writing at leading colleges and universities around the world. The twenty-three new essays collected in the expanded second edition of Bending Genre offer a diverse array of perspectives and include authors from Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, and the UK. They offer new insights into the historical trajectory of the essay, reflections on the challenges of writing across genres, and approaches to nonfiction’s wide-ranging possibilities and genre-bending forms. As readers, we tend to take realistic narrative for granted. We treat as “natural” the linear chronology of story, the way time is dilated or compressed, the artifice of dialogue (so different from recorded speech), the highly selective filtering and reordering of the infinite details of the world. But rather than creating a transparent window onto reality, unconventional nonfiction tends to highlight the slipperiness of representation. It raises fundamental questions about the nature of memory and storytelling, “reality” and “truth.” Innovative writing about the self, reporting facts, and telling stories become an exercise in existentialism, ontology, and epistemology. But what differentiates these contemporary philosophers from Wittgenstein, Kant, and Hegel is that their philosophies are told through compelling narratives and lyric prose. What does it mean to “bend genre”? Is it true, as Walter Benjamin famously said, that “all great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one”?8 Or, as Ben Marcus hopes, that “once upon a time there will be readers who won’t care what imaginative writing is called and will read it for its passion, its force of intellect, and its formal originality”?9 Of course, once the novel was truly “novel” too. Works like Tristram Shandy and Moby Dick still feel radically innovative and new. Will blurry, hybrid lyric essays and collage memoirs hold up equally well over time? From the beginning, the project of literature has always been an attempt to “re-present” reality through language, to capture the essential truth of our experience of life in words. As writers across and between all genres, we continue to try.

Notes 1 David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010), 3. 2 See John Hellmann, Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Eric Heyne, “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 33, no. 3 (1987): 479–90; Barbara Lounsberry, The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood

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3 4

5 6 7 8 9

Bending Genre Press, 1990); Chris Anderson, ed., Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998). Lee Gutkind, ed., The Best Creative Nonfiction. Vol. 1 (New York: Norton, 2007), xi. On rhetorical modes versus genres, see Robert Scholes, Carl H. Klaus, Nancy R. Comley, and Michael Silverman, eds., Elements of Literature, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). See also Gérard Genette, The Architext, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1992), on the distinction between literary structures (such as novels or stories) and linguistic structures (such as narrative or exposition). Amos Oz, quoted in David Remnick, “The Spirit Level,” New Yorker, November 8, 2004, 86. Tzvetan Todorov, “The Origins of Genres,” New Literary History 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1976): 161. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique 32 (Spring–Summer 1984): 171. Walter Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2: Part I: 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 237. Ben Marcus, “The Genre Artist,” The Believer 4 (July 2003), https://believermag​.com​/ the​-genre​-artist/.

Part I

Hybrids At first it seemed like nonfiction eked out its existence from the bare scrap metal left behind by poetry and fiction. A queer blend, a magnetic encounter where the positive charge of poetry met the narrative charge of fiction. But at some point, the relationship becomes its own thing—a marriage—an entity unto itself. Now the marriage deserves a little understanding, a little therapy, a little ceremony of its own. Now the couple, not the individuals, gets invited to parties, hosts wine tastings, goes driving in the country. Now, when the marriage walks in to the room, no one comments on what the people were before, but the way this marriage has sustained so much, so long.

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Why Some Hybrids Work and Others Don’t Lia Purpura

The chili-chocolate gelato didn’t work because the chili numbed my mouth, as did the cold—and all that activity canceled out the chocolate. Cockapoos and Labradoodles work well for their people, but they really hack off the breeders whose business is maintaining purity. The dogs are great (what’s not to like in Labs and Poodles and big-eyed Spaniels) and the co-mingling’s right, but the names are dumb and make perfectly dignified animals sound like toddler toys. The wild orange trim on the dark red house down the street could’ve worked, but then the owners went and used a different orange on the door and now everything wobbles and clashes. The problem here is consistency—not the wild-domestic hybrid itself. Wild-domestically, satyrs work—one end is all thoughtful and conversant, the other, all rumpy animal-action. I’m not sure exactly how they work it. Nymphs would know best. But I do know, in a satyr, the wild part stays wild, the cultivated part stays cultivated. Clear lines, solid boundaries. Satyrs aren’t easy. As you may know, the most redemptive love won’t change them. You can buy a hanging indoor/outdoor fixture to serve as either a porch light or a living room light, and if you’re undecided, need both, need one temporarily then— that’s a good idea. But the halogen office lamp used on the porch, as a porch light— that doesn’t work. Many things work in new contexts but not if their initial purpose dominates. Then porches go makeshifty, start looking like scrappy undergrad rentals. The fig tree in our yard is a hybrid gesture, a combo Mediterranean and Mid-Atlantic creature. That it was given to us by our Greek friend, Constantine, an historian of all things Japanese, is even better. The tree didn’t bloom for two full years, but we kept at it, pruning and watering and mulching. We liked its biblical leaves so much. Then lo! on the third year the tree produced seven good figs. Sometimes a hybrid gesture takes a long time to find itself and settle in. Chocolate-covered potato chips worked for me, but not for my friend who likes both chocolate and chips a lot but couldn’t see them together and so didn’t even try one. “They don’t look right,” she said, “the chip is deformed by the chocolate.” I felt the chip was reformed, brought back from the edge of way-too-salty, by the good and loving hand of dark chocolate. “It looks like tree lichen,” she said. “It tastes like perfect union,” I said. “You have no idea what you’re missing.” My friend is not an “opposites attract” type.

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Bending Genre

In her memoir Seeing Through Places, Mary Gordon writes of her mother’s reverence, her love, really, for the priests in her life, and of the priests’ mutual deep regard for her mother. One might be tempted to call such love “stunted,” “unrequited,” or “sad.” Or, one might call up the term “passionate restraint.” That’s a hard one, a love tender and shared as it is, that relies on not-wording, not-naming, not-speaking-it-aloud. Christmas and Hanukkah together in the same house? Complicated. Same with Easter and Passover, though they both share a lamb. Holidays are micro-climates; they greet you at the door and waft and settle. Balsam and ham. Latkes and candle-smoke. Rituals are jealous entities: the Hanukkah bush, the tree decorated with dreidels—they seem sad and deflated when made to sit nicely next to each other and conjure small talk. But keep at it, I say. Divide up sundown, the midnights and candles, the roasts and prayers and morning festivities. Get a bigger—a much bigger—table. Some historical moments call for as-yet-unmade forms of goodwill and desire, love and release. A recent ad in the Baltimore Sun for the latest ritzy harbor-side restaurant read: “Max’s: A New Tradition.” Well, no. That doesn’t work. Tradition has just a little something to do with time. You can hope it will be, and become, and stick, but it isn’t that yet. Quit pushing. Hybrid tenses work because they help weird time. Consider the neat and quick gesture the future perfect allows: “By next year I will have done X.” Such projection and backtracking rolled into one. Such hope and certainty about the essentially unnameable far-off completion. Gutsy tense! Mules—the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse—don’t “work” in one sense. Neither do hinnies (offspring of a female donkey and male horse). I mean they don’t reproduce—which of course is a very narrow definition of “working.” Some hybrid gestures produce singular beings. One-time-onlies. Anomalies called stubborn and ornery—that is, who know their own mind. Let us figure out how to teach them as models. Zebras look like hybrids—the kid of one white and one black horse-like animal— but they aren’t. The debate rages on (black with white stripes, or white with black?), but either way, they’re just exactly what you see: a black-and-white creature. Beware the assumed hybrid. In other words, some people are amused to find they write a thing called “the lyric essay” when all along they were just doing what felt natural, simply asserting the sum total of who they are as writers. That no two zebras have the same pattern of stripes—now that’s more interesting, by far. Starbucks offers a mass of hybrid gestures. Just to start, there’s the embarrassing naming system you have to comply with, or risk irritating your barista. Why “tall” and then “grande”? Why “double” and not “doppio?” What’s with the random Italianate leanings? Then all the “have it your way” procedures that allow for such hybrid disasters of taste as the “iced, decaf, triple grande, no whip, soy, five pump Mocha-mint.” Not making that up. Here’s a scene: I am just out of college and back home in New York, working all day, and writing at night. I am in a starkly beautiful sushi bar, waiting for a friend, eating my one weekly piece of uni, and drinking my half-price Miller Light, slowly. It’s the roaring late 1980s and one of those baby millionaires sits down next to me and we get to talking.

 Why Some Hybrids Work and Others Don’t 11 “I’m going to retire at thirty and write a novel,” he tells me. He tells me he has “so many great ideas.” I was tired and righteous and on a tight budget and said something like “nice dream, dude, but if you don’t need it now, it’s not gonna happen.” Maybe I said something about novel writing as leisure sport. I meant—though I wouldn’t have said it this way at the time—“You have no drive to hybridize! If you needed to write, you’d be, right now, a banker-poet. An insurance guy-novelist. A waiter-playwright. That hyphen would be a little table where you set your work, nightly. A little bridge you crossed, after dinner, to far realms, and crossed back again, in the morning.” If hybrids fail because they produce goofy names, they succeed when they offer new, sonorous ones. The pluot, a hybrid of plum and apricot, is lovely (Ah! hints of “plié” and “Roualt”). The tangelo’s great (bite in and there’s “Tango” and “Angelo” waiting). But, well, not the papple, a too-hard, slightly mealy crossing of pear and apple, with the unfortunate echoes of “nipple” and “pimple” and “pap.” Not the peacotum, a peach/ apricot/plum hybrid, with its echoes of “cotyledon” and “scrotum.” Though it might have been worse. The peacotum’s early developer wanted to name the fruit after the nice, soft fuzz it retained (scientifically known as “pubescence”) which would have given us—I’m serious now, this was the guy’s plan—the pube-plum. The best thing at the farmer’s market in Baltimore: the apples. Apples are, a priori, hybrids—or graftings, to be precise, of spirit and body. Adam and Eve on one side, the power to keep doctors away on the other. My favorites, the Stayman-Winesap and Jonagold, have names that work. Some fruits take their essential qualities seriously. They want you to believe in them—not laugh at them. The wine descriptions on the little tags at Well’s Discount Liquors in Baltimore are fantastic, and the impulse there, to present taste at the outset as a hybridized experience, to be accurate by way of complexity, is right on: snow and shale, squid and wolf, rose and lichen . . . (A. R. Ammons slipped in here, poet of ecstatic hybrid states) but wine as “barnyard,” “forest floor,” and “volcanic”—that works. “Ginormous” works and doesn’t. Officially, it’s in the new Webster’s. Aurally, it’s euphonious (whereas the other option, as I figure it, “enormant,” sounds like a sci-fi bug. And the even more messed up “enormgi” is weirdly bacterial). But I don’t use the word “ginormous” because I’m not fifteen and in junior high. I admire its limber spliceability from afar, though. Hybrid times of day and night work, and have much spiffier names than “day” or “night.” On one end there’s “day-break,” “dawn,” “aurora.” On the other, “twilight,” “gloaming,” “crepuscular.” Such is the poetry of the hovering moment. The hybrid car works, though not without problems (battery disposal, scant charging stations). It also sidesteps the issue of overconsumption, and the fact that rationing is what we need to do, now and maybe forever. I know, rationing’s un-American. And as of yet, while hybrid cars have industry backing, there isn’t yet any real government muscle behind them. Then again, there are also no accredited programs offering degrees in the lyric essay or prose poem. Thankfully, for those clever, rogue sibs, institutionalizing hybrids is complicated. Meanwhile, let us ground the jet engines and go about reinventing flight. Now. Hybrid ways exhibit heightened forms of attention. Consider the split vision and special alertness of the sad kid laughing along with the rest, while secretly monitoring

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Bending Genre

jolly, drunk Dad for the first signs of meanness. Or the cop on a date, in line at the movies—scanning for trouble, mentally noting, annoying her partner who claims she can’t ever relax. Or those of us who have trained ourselves to hold one conversation while following a few others at nearby tables in restaurants. The language, the stories, the images: streams crossing, accents popping, inflections suggesting, all dotting my listening with color and light, locating me both here and elsewhere at once.

2

Queering the Essay David Lazar

Let me be known all at once for a queer Fellow. Richard Steele, The Spectator, No. 474 Genre and gender are indissolubly linked, etymologically intertwined. Clearly the two words emerge from an intertwined root system that speaks to typologies, distinctions, styles—and they are almost homonyms, fraternal sound twins. Turn to genre in the dictionary, and you will be pointed to gender. Early uses of genre cited in the OED refer to distinguishing types of people; the first cited, interestingly, by Lady Morgan, says, “But what is the genre of character . . . which, if in true keeping to life and manners, should not be found to resemble any body?” (1818). How queer, that one of the first uses of genre suggests a person who is impossible to characterize. Genre is a category after all. So is gender. And the gender category difficult to characterize by normative standards is queer. The genre category difficult or impossible to characterize, the essay, is also queer. The essay is the queer genre. The words have further etymological complexities when one considers that gender can be translated into genre in French, genero in Spanish, and genere in Italian—the Latin stem form of genus, kind. The Greek root of gen means to produce which gives us genesis, oxygen, gene. In Leviticus, God says, Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind; thou shall not sow thy field with a mingled seed. We can imagine the result, a genre of hybrid calves, or worse yet, queer cattle mingling all over the place. They wouldn’t know what to call them. The history of genre has evolved through Western literature as a story of creating distinctions, discrete categories for the most part, and subdivision. Poetry, Fiction, and Drama with their various subgeneric extensions, period demarcations, stylistic innovations: Romantic Poetry, The Epistolary Novel, Kitchen Sink Drama, ad infinitum. But until now, one of our major genres, The Essay, has resisted classification. Has resisted gentrification. To read through the history of essays on the essay is to a large and fascinating extent to see practitioners of the form struggling to articulate what the form is and refusing to keep the form stable, refusing to narrow

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Bending Genre

its sense of possible performative and formal dimensions, frequently inverting commonly accepted conventions (idling is good and natural, sensibility and selfawareness are virtues, intense attention to the self leads to an enlarged perspective, eros is located profoundly in friendship). Nancy Mairs, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and others have suggested a feminine affinity for the essay, feminizing Montaigne along the way, which is quite a trick when one considers how excessively women are discounted in Montaigne’s overt discourse. But Rachel Blau DuPlessis suggests in “f words: An Essay on the Essay” that the openness, distrust of systems, skepticism, and transgressive nature of the form are reasons “why the essay has been summed up by the term feminine.”1 And in “Essaying the Feminine: from Montaigne to Kristeva,” Nancy Mairs finds qualities in the “Montaignesque” essay that break or escape phallocentric discourse.2 At the end of “On Some Verses of Virgil,” Montaigne does say, shockingly, that “except for education and habit, the difference [between the sexes] is not great.”3 I’d go a step further and suggest that the essay as a genre doesn’t just resist classic gender binaries but in many ways queers them. I’ll put the statement out of the rhetorical closet: the essay is a queer genre. What do I mean? I mean this in a most specific way. In the way that queer theory defines queer as a continuing instability in gender relations that undermines the traditional binary of gender, replacing it with indeterminate, transgressive desires. The desire of the essay is to transgress genre. “Queer” and “essay” are both problematic, escapable, changeable terms. Both imply a resistance and transgression, definitional defiance. But there is also more. For example, Judith Butler’s sense of performativity and gender and its importance to the constitution of gender through reiteration speaks to the operation of persona in the essay. Much has been written about persona, but we know this: it is never fully controlled or calibrated; it is subversive, and always has been, because, like gender performance, it “is the kind of effect that resists calculation” at least to some extent.”4 The most memorable essays are formally labile and so stretch our sense of what essays might be. All essays think, come to ideas, create lasting images, seem to have some association with their personae. The elasticity of persona itself is part of the essay’s queerness. I mean this in both a metaphorical Queering the Essay sense and as it speaks to gender. Look at the queerness at the heart of the essay: Woolf and Baldwin, Rodriguez and Fisher, Barthes, Lamb. The essay is not and has never been genre normative; this is essential to the nature of the essay. Calling the essay “lyrical” or even “personal” seems to me to be putting a generic leash on it, domesticating it under the guise of setting the essay onto some untrammeled ground. However, for 430 years the (not so) simple noun “essay” has allowed us to resist the normalizing impulses that govern other genres, and led to Pascal and Sebald and M. F. K. Fisher. What is queer about the essay is its resistance to stability, categories—even the one I’m advancing in this essay. The best theories of the essay—Lukács, Adorno, Montaigne, Emerson, DuPlessis—turn in on themselves, lose argumentative coherence in the direction of passionate, expansive thinking about the essay. Essays about the essay tend to be transgressively shapely, if we think shapely and circuitous are lively and harmonious concepts, as I do.

 Queering the Essay 15 Réda Bensmaïa, perhaps the most compelling contemporary critic of the essay, writes in The Barthes Effect that Among all the terms that relate to the literary genres, the word Essay is certainly the one that has given rise to the most confusion in the history of literature; since Montaigne used the term to describe his writings, “essay” has served to designate works that are so diverse from a formal point of view, and so heterogeneous from a thematic point of view, that it has become practically impossible to subsume a single, definitive type of text under this term.5

Bensmaïa goes on to note, and pay attention to the language, that until recently, the genre of the essay, “A unique case in the annals of literature,” “is the only literary genre to have resisted integration . . . in the taxonomy of genres.”6 The language and connection to gender seem clear enough. The essay has been the queer gender, borrowing from, at times parodying other forms, constantly creating new unstable ones, but never— queerly—fully taxonomized, defined, institutionally appropriated. Perhaps until now. John Frow speaks of genre as a form of symbolic action.7 If this is the case, what have essayists enacted, symbolically spoken, by writing essays? What has it meant, “to essay”? Has this question ever really been asked, other than formally? I would argue that to essay has frequently been a generically queer behavior, writing this form that resists and undermines other categories. It is also a form that asks for secrets to be exposed, feelings to be explored, memory to be reconsidered, and gender roles to be stretched (think of the end of “Some Verses of Virgil”), for outlandish, strange, unsympathetic or merely whimsical ideas to emerge as we adapt or adopt personae, and extend the reach of our empathetic imagination. Bensmaïa argues that the essay, “born practically and aesthetically with Montaigne . . . still had to be born theoretically [unlike other genres] . . . above all with Roland Barthes, this genre judged ‘unclassifiable’ for a long time was finally able to make its ‘theoretical entrance’ into the history of literature and the theory of literary genres.”8 As theory, the essay also retains its essence as a fragmentary book of the self. Clearly, with Barthes as the theoretical impresario, the queerness of the genre, the way it signifies its refusals, its openness, its difference, becomes both obvious and, to Bensmaïa, approaches a kind of generically canonical status. If this is true, it may ironically undermine the essay’s queerness over time and also exactly explain why the taxonomy of essays is going on now. The essay, queerly, has always existed ahistorically. The development of “new” forms like the lyric essay is an attempt to usher the essay into a more conventional evolutionary pattern, with the lyric essay as the postmodern phase of the form. The irony is that it makes the essay seem more taxonomically like other forms of literature, and therefore less queer, less resistant to typologies, and also that it may appropriate the form into the more conventional genres, like poetry. Of course, essays have always indulged in hybrid behavior, transgendered. Are essayists queer? Yes, or they have been, I’d argue, because along with the great motto of the essay, Montaigne’s “Que sais-je” (which carries with it the duality of

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Bending Genre

inflection: what do I know, and what I know), I’ve always thought the other great line that speaks to the heart of the essay (and perhaps I’m giving myself away as an essayist, but I believe this is reflected in the prismatically digressive attentiveness of the essay voice) comes in fiction, in Henry James’s The Art of Fiction, when he urges us to “Try and be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”9 Essays embody sensibility and a sense of self (think of Hazlitt’s “On Gusto”), and the feeling, embodied in style, of the essayist’s difference from everyone else, even when speaking of common things. I wish James had written expansive essays, in addition to the prefaces of the New York edition. In his famous letter to Henry Adams, he writes, “I am that queer monster, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility.”10 Perhaps there is an element of queer desire in this very subject for me, my desire to be a queer essayist marking my sense of the genre itself, spilling over, if you will. But perhaps again this is my point. I want to betray my motives, want my sensibility to color the world I’m seeing, and the literary world I inhabit, and I want to lose nothing in trying to be aware of how this coloration is taking shape, even in its potential excessiveness. In the case of Charles Lamb, we see an extreme version of the essay’s queerness most vividly, as Lamb, struggling with the intensity of his discourse, the sensibility of selfprotective nostalgia in his self-maternalizing, ends up offering a series of resistances to masculinity, both directly and through ironic self-degradation: he is “beneath manhood,” refers to “my infirmity,” his “mental twist,” the “symptom of some sickly discourse,” all addressed to the male reader (“a busy man, perchance”), to whom he both seems somewhat embarrassed and threatens to “retire, impenetrable [my italics] to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia.” Time itself is feminized: the old year’s “skirts” and the new year’s birth.11 Perhaps one of the reasons Lamb has been singled out as “dear” and “saintly” as what I think are unconscious cognates for queerness is not simply because readers have given him grief points, and responded to his whimsy, but have subconsciously allowed him a resistance to conventional emotional valences they might have found excessive in most male writers, writers working in genres that were, perhaps, less performative. I think this reaches an apotheosis in Lamb in his essay “New Year’s Eve.” Whether the essay will become less queer the more it becomes typed, subcategorized, postmodernized, or avail itself of some continuing inner “heresy,” to invoke Lukács, is up for grabs. I worry about the essay’s domestication, a false sense of formal radicalization. Merely breaking up paragraphs or adding poetry to essays (Cowley did that in the mid-seventeenth century) doesn’t make an essay queer or politically resistant once that becomes one of the old bag of essay tricks that all beginning essayists must practice to construct barricades to the paragraph, within whose contours Lamb, Woolf, Baldwin, Montaigne wrote such wild, fascinating, queer words. Essays on the essay never pin the essay down. A queer theoretical essay wouldn’t even want to. But it’s worth noting that the essay has always been a site of resistance, a place where things have happened rhetorically as well as formally that haven’t happened elsewhere. Sir William Temple, anyone?

 Queering the Essay 17

Notes 1 Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “f Words: An Essay on the Essay,” American Literature 68, no. 1 (March 1996): 33, www​.jstor​.org​/pss​/2927538. 2 Nancy Mairs, “Essaying the Feminine: From Montaigne to Kristeva,” in Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 71–87. 3 Michel de Montaigne, “On Some Verses of Virgil,” in The Essays of Michael Lord of Montaigne, 1580, 1897, trans. John Florio, 1603. World’s Classics edition. Vol. 3 (London: Frowde, 1904), 284. 4 Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 1, no. 1 (1993): 25. 5 Réda Bensmaïa, The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 95. 6 Ibid., 129. 7 John Frow, Genre: The New Critical Idiom (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 2, 13, 154. 8 Bensmaïa, The Barthes Effect, 99. 9 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” published in Longman’s Magazine, September 1884. In Henry James: Literary Criticism. Vol. 1 (New York: Library of America, 1984), 53. 10 James to Henry Adams, March 21, 1914, in The Selected Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), 174. 11 Charles Lamb, “New Year’s Eve,” in Elia and the Last Essays of Elia, ed. E. V. Lucas (London: Methuen & Co, 1903), 156–63.

3

The Everbent Genre Patrick Madden

Montaigne is an immense treasure-house of observation, anticipating all the discoveries of succeeding essayists. You cannot dip in him without being struck by the aphorism, that there is nothing new under the sun. Charles Lamb, “Books with One Idea in Them” The idea Lamb recalls, the idea I want to start with—“that there is nothing new under the sun”—finds voice in a very old poetical text,1 which suggests that the idea of nothing novel is itself as old as time. To me, this assertion feels like a response to an assumption that what we’ve dreamed or done is “some new thing.” I bring this up here because it’s an attitude I find often among people thinking about recently popular forms of creative nonfiction. The idea is that the lyric essay or hermit crab essay or any sort of hybrid or bent nonfictional form is a recent development, something our generation can lay claim to (and be proud of). But I do not believe this to be the case. Instead, I’m partial to the notion that the essay has always been bent, that bentness is innate to the very concept of essaying. As Theodor Adorno claimed, well into the essay’s long and successful run, “the innermost formal law of the essay is heresy,”2 an appropriate term given the ecclesiastical wisdom that Lamb and I have invoked to open this little excursion, but I tend to see “heresy” not so much as worthy of burning at the stake as worthy of praise. It’s constant subversion we’re after, repositioning and reseeing the familiar in playful ways that lead to new insight. To wit: Montaigne’s “On the Power of the Imagination” (from way back in 1574ish), in the middle of which our forebear shifts form, genre even, into a lawyerly defense of the penis. Responding to those who “notice the unruly liberty of this member, obtruding so importunately when we have not use for it, and failing so importunately when we have the most use for it,” he mounts a defense, pleading the case for his client by diverting attention to other body parts, accusing them of “having framed this trumped-up charge out of sheer envy of the importance and pleasure of the use of him.”3 Playing to the jury, he gleefully points out the hypocrisy of these other members, noting that “They each have passions of their own which rouse them and put them to sleep without our leave.”4 “We do not command our hair to stand on end

 The Everbent Genre 19 or our skin to shiver with desire of fear,”5 he reasons. Countering his own argument, and worth noting, he digresses to recall accounts in St. Augustine and Juan Luis Vives of men who could fart on command and with musical notes, but he dispenses with any damaging conclusions by bringing up an acquaintance whose farts are so “turbulent and unruly” (and unrelenting over forty years) that they’re “taking him to his death.”6 In summation, Montaigne would say this in defense of the honorable member whom I represent: May it please the court to take into consideration that in this matter, although my client’s case is inseparably and indistinguishably linked with that of an accessory, nevertheless he alone has been brought to trial; and that the arguments and charges against him are such as cannot—in view of the status of the parties—be in any manner pertinent or relevant to the aforesaid accessory. Whereby is revealed his accusers’ manifest animosity and disrespect for law.7

Case closed, right? My point being that even in its infancy, the essay was already (and always) mingled and blended with other forms. There’s oratory and history and philosophy and theology and advice column and correspondence and exegesis and so much more, all of it overlapping toward the as-yet(-then) undocumented and unformalized “essay.” In a very real sense, Montaigne was making it up as he went, eagerly and impishly subverting the staid and certain forms that conveyed the (unearned, unwarranted) staidness and certainty of their authors. As he himself said in “Of Repentance,” “If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.”8 Here and elsewhere it seems clear that Montaigne did not see his uncertainty as a defect; quite the opposite: the certainty professed by others was (and remains) the sign of a lack of sufficient self-knowledge. They “do not consider that this certainty on which they rely is scarcely less uncertain and chancy than chance itself.”9 We could delve into the more “standard”-looking of Montaigne’s essays, the ones that appear in regular, orderly paragraphs, that consider military strategy or perform simple binary thought experiments, and still we’d find some blendedness and variation, but I suppose we ought to leave some space for a baseline essaytype, so let’s instead move on to other people, places, and times, for other (strange, unexpected) highlights. After all, an article of Pat Madden’s opinions is probably worth very little, but a brief guide to get you started discovering some cool, weird essays . . . now that’s something. Perhaps Jonathan Swift comes to mind? His “A Modest Proposal” with its satire of official government propositions, here suggesting that “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout”;10 his “Meditation on a Broomstick” borrowing from and poking fun at the pious sermons of Robert Boyle (yes, that Boyle, the chemist, the “pressure of a gas is inversely proportional to its container’s volume” guy); or even his literal book battle in “The Battle of the Books.” And look, too, at “Directions to Servants,” formatted convincingly as the document its title purports to be but subtly (or at times

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not so subtly) serving as a criticism and ridicule of eighteenth-century British high society.11 If anyone should fall into the unadventurous belief that we in the twentyfirst century have invented the hermit crab essay, they need only look to Swift for examples aplenty of this Trojan horse form. Or for inspiration, as did Jane Collier only a few years after “Directions to Servants” was published. Her contribution to the field was a kind of inverse/companion guidebook, told from the perspective of the servants themselves. “An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting” presents itself as a direct response to Swift, explaining that “by the common run of servants, it might have been presumed, that Dean Swift’s instructions to them were unnecessary: but I dare believe no one ever read over that ingenious work, without finding there some inventions for idleness, carelessness, and ill behavior, which had never happened within his own experience.”12 And what of Swift’s contemporaries and friends, who developed personas (The Tatler, The Female Tatler, The Spectator, The Female Spectator, The Rambler, The Idler, The Adventurer, and so on) through which to essay their adventures and observations both fictional and non? Take, for one example, among hundreds, Joseph Addison’s “Adventures of a Shilling,” inspired by a friend’s contention that men of business cannot “produce half the adventures that [a] twelvepenny piece has been engaged in,” which assertion leaves Addison in a swoon that grants him access to hear the “soft silver” voice of said shilling, which takes over as the essay’s first-person narrator, recounting its birth in the New World, its forging into coin, its rapid exchanges and its long imprisonments, its glories and sufferings, it times of service and times of shame.13 Its most extraordinary activity, among so many, was “being in a poet’s pocket, who was so taken with the brightness and novelty of my appearance, that it gave occasion to the finest burlesque poem in the British language, entitled from me, ‘The Splendid Shilling.’”14 Worth noting, I think: this poem (by John Philips) presents itself as a parody of Milton, returning our minds to the blended bentness of which we in this book are speaking. Everything is connected. In all, Addison’s piece is a rather clever reverie in the guise of an essay. Or, better, yet one more possibility for bending expectations about what an essay can be. I have said, and you’ve surely agreed, that we don’t want a piece full of my own ideas, so I’ve asked my dear, knowledgeable friend Lina Ferreira to share with us some of her thoughts about Margaret Cavendish’s work, particularly The Blazing World, a book that defies categorization in the boxes we’re used to using. Lina writes: In 1666 Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, published The Blazing World. An imaginative volume consisting of three sections of romance, a philosophy, fancies, and a complete disregard for any formalistic divisions of genre or categorization. On a Saturday in September, Patrick calls me up to ask if I’d write a few words on this Blazing World, and by Monday I’ve already stared at a screen for hours, imagining a pale duchess in a pale room, her ink-stained hands upon sun-soaked pages, finally writing final words. An epilogue like the snap of taut string and the ruffle of new feathers.

 The Everbent Genre 21 “If any should like the World I have made,” she writes, “and be willing to be my Subjects, they may imagine themselves such. . . . but if they cannot endure to be Subjects, they may create Worlds of their own, and Govern themselves as they please.”15 There is privilege in these sentences. Privilege and hubris and dangerous ambitions. Because, in the great Satanic year of 1666, there is also Miltonian defiance in those words. Defiance and an invitation to defy, to imagine whole as-of-yetunimagined worlds. To reimagine this one in the image of distant gods. Because the privileges of the few ought to be the rights of the many. Because it would take nearly 300 years more to earn women the right to vote, for Woolf to write that, “Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”16 Suffrage, like most revolutions, was first speculative fiction. Fantastical fiction dreaming of quotidian nonfiction. First speculative, then cross genre. Because, “though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar”; the duchess fancied, “. . . I have made [a World] of my own.”17 So as I read news coming out of this state, and that country, and that neighbor’s house, of rights being turned back into privileges, into fictions and speculations, I try to imagine a pale duchess in a pale room pressing the sharp end of her pen into the bloated side of arbitrary genres. Writing, “Some counted more Stars than others; some discovered new Stars never seen before; some fell into a great dispute with others concerning the bigness of the Stars,”18 under which nothing is new but the need to make things anew. I try to remember that the tragedy of needing to make this world bearable with imagination will always be undercut by the defiance to imagine more, and imagine better. Nearly a hundred years after The Blazing World, Mary Wollstonecraft, who did not write fiction or fancies, who could not “endure to be Subject,” declared that she did “not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”19 And what greater kingdom is there than that?

Indeed. Perhaps bent and blended essays have always sought to establish new kingdoms that subvert the old ones, even if, at times, they retain the same labels? That’s something I’ve noticed, too, that even in terms of terminology, the “new” labels we bandy about are older than we likely think. Witness John Peter Roberdeau’s 1803 “British Benevolence,” subtitled “a lyric essay,”20 perhaps the first intentional use of this term, but not the earliest instance of a thing critics have willingly called “lyric essay.” That honor may belong to Francis Bacon, barely younger than Montaigne, whose stuffy-to-us essays were labeled “lyric” by editor George Herbert Clarke in a 1905 edition, because they “seek to bring the reader into close, personal, intimate touch with the writer himself, his moods, whims, and vagaries, to express—or rather suggest—the writer’s emotion, to ‘make friends.’”21 Not quite, I recognize, characteristics that define the “lyric essay” today, but who’s to say what such terms may or may not mean? Even John D’Agata,

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vibrant proponent of the contemporary lyric essay, revisits his shifting perspective on genre and terminology in We Might as Well Call It the Lyric Essay, sharing that “as I got older and started to explore the history of the good old-fashioned essay, I began to find that everything that I loved about ‘lyric essays’ was already represented in much of the essay’s past.”22 Which, again, is the main thing I’ve come here to say. A few more examples for the readingly adventurous: Gertrude Bustill Mossell’s hybrid journalistic essays, Nelly Bly’s muckraking immersion journalism in an asylum or travel narrative of circumnavigating the globe in world-record time, Katherine Fullerton Gerould’s sports journalism or algebraic metaphors, Vernon Lee’s revisionist hagiography, Louise Imogen Guiney’s humorous adventures with Marcus Aurelius, Fanny Burney’s conversatio-ad-absurdum of “Suggested Husbands for” herself, Gail Hamilton’s horticultural meanderings, and truly so many more, examples aplenty to convince that “a great work of literature founds a genre or dissolves one,”23 as Walter Benjamin sort of said, but in German, and thus this quote itself escapes encapsulation in a specific form, too, as it is a translation and thus apt to branch and vary itself and live in other minds in fluid form. In its voraciousness, the essay gathers, potentially, all material to itself, and all forms of presenting that material, blending and bending, hybridizing as it goes, be it lines from favorite poems (or entire poems) or criticisms or researches or memories or speculations or imaginations or any of the myriad branches of human knowledge, even dendrochronology (to choose one obscure, out-there example, simply because Montaigne is said to have popularized the knowledge that a tree’s rings tell its age, though he wrote this not quite in an essay but in his travel journal, which was unpublished in his lifetime, and he rightly credits a carpenter for imparting the knowledge). There is nothing an essay cannot touch (upon). It is open to everything under the sun. Where nothing is new. All of which is to say, as we return to Montaigne, as I often do, and rightly so, that If anyone gets intoxicated with their knowledge when they look beneath them, let them turn their eyes upward toward past ages, and they will lower their horns, finding there so many thousands of minds that trample them underfoot.24

Notes 1 Eccl. 1:9. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” New German Critique 32 (Spring– Summer 1984): 171. 3 Michel de Montaigne, “On the Power of the Imagination,” in The Complete Works, trans. Donald Frame (New York: Knopf, 2003), 87. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 87–8. 7 Ibid., 88.

 The Everbent Genre 23 8 Montaigne, “Of Repentance,” in The Complete Works, 740. 9 Montaigne, “That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them,” in The Complete Works, 52. 10 Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal,” 1729, Project Gutenberg, 1997, https://www​ .gutenberg​.org​/files​/1080​/1080​-h​/1080​-h​.htm. 11 Jonathan Swift, “Directions to Servants,” 1745, Google Books, 2009, https://www​ .google​.com​/books​/edition​/Directions​_to​_Servants​_in​_General​/9tJbAAAAQAAJ​?hl​ =en. 12 Jane Collier, “An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting,” 1753, Google Books, 2018, https://books​.google​.com​/books​?id​=Y​_4zYrlDR1wC. 13 Joseph Addison, “Adventures of a Shilling,” 1710, Quotidiana, ed. Patrick Madden, http://essays​.quotidiana​.org​/addison​/adventures​_of​_a​_shilling/. 14 Ibid. 15 Margaret Cavendish, “The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World,” “Epilogue to the Reader,” 1666, Project Gutenberg, 2016, https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/ files​/51783​/51783​-h​/51783​-h​.htm. 16 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, 1929), 61. 17 Cavendish, The Blazing World, “To All Noble and Worthy Ladies.” 18 Cavendish, The Blazing World, “The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World.” 19 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: J. Johnson, 1796), 134. 20 John Peter Roberdeau, “British Benevolence,” in Fugitive Verse and Prose (Chichester: J. Seagrave, 1803), 1. 21 George Herbert Clark, introduction to The Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral of Francis Bacon (New York: MacMillan, 1905), L. 22 John D’Agata, introduction to We Might as Well Call It the Lyric Essay (Geneva, NY: Seneca Review Books, 2015), 7. 23 Walter Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2: Part I: 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 237. 24 Montaigne, “Of Practice,” in The Complete Works, 333.

4

Don’t Let Those Damn Genres Cross You Ever Again! Lawrence Sutin

While I was trying to decide what to say about crossing genres—which I like to do and enjoy reading others do—I had a weirdly literal dream. There was an outsized railroad semaphore flashing the warning “Do Not Cross” as I approached on foot. On the other side of the tracks stood a group of writers, some of whom I knew in waking life, such as Michael Martone, and others only through author photographs, such as Jenny Boully, whose book I had recently taught. I took a look to the left and to the right. No train. I ran across the tracks. It was no big deal to any of them that they or I had crossed, and I said to one of them, the poet and prose-shortist Mary Ruefle, that all of us, meaning all of humanity, had been doing this our whole lives, crossing boundaries of all kinds, and it was never going to end. She nodded and we started walking, and I don’t remember in the dream having an idea where we were going. I don’t remember in waking life having an idea about that either. Now is not a more fertile time for cross-genre writing than any other time. It has always happened. When it draws attention, it is often due to the challenge it poses to literary labeling. In the crimping way that we are sometimes influenced by names of periods, many of us alive today are aware that something called modernism supposedly died, oh, maybe sixty years ago, and something called postmodernism has been around since and needs to die, as it keeps falsely insisting that there is nowhere new left to go. What has kept PoMo on life support is the terminological difficulty of moving on from a figment that styles itself as having already happened in a vague post-future. A term I occasionally use in my head to the fascination with cross-genre explorations: “transliminal”—recurrent crossings from one distinctive state of consciousness to another. In the transliminal epoch in which I hereby declare that we are all living it is a delight to cross genres so as to underscore the everyday crossings that everyone makes from sleeping to waking, private to public, culture to culture, talking to listening, paper to screen, paying attention to not, sobriety to excess to silence, history to fantasy to

 Those Damn Genres 25 memory to dream, all the while in and out of love and hate and certainty and utter incomprehension. Here are some crossover ancestors to whom I am grateful. Bashō, who in Narrow Roads to the Deep North employed the distinctive perspectives of prose and haiku and demonstrated how such combinations excel in balancing and harmonizing inner and outer realities in the course of a journey both physical and spiritual. Dante, who in La Vita Nuova merged criticism, memoir, and poetry to reveal implicitly how he came to be the poet capable, after years of love sonneteering, to cast the Divine Comedy with his lady love Beatrice at the side of God in the heights of Heaven. Virginia Woolf, who in Orlando combined the conventions of mainstream romance and time-traveling fantasy to explore the then forbidden terrain of bisexuality in a manner that both hearkened back to Shakespeare and anticipated the more fluid concepts of sexual identity of the present day. Woolf created special illustrations for the book to portray the male and female forms of her protagonist. William Blake, the greatest of all cross-genre artists, whose masterwork in this regard, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, forged together visual engravings, poetry, and prose into one of the most profound portrayals of the human psyche ever created. Dostoevsky, who in the 1870s, in his periodical A Writer’s Diary, merged political journalism, literary essays, memoir slices, and short stories into an amalgam that readers accepted because of the brilliance and passion of the author. These days we call what Dostoevsky did blogging. Sir John Mandeville, the sixteenth-century author of The Travels, a book that is often disparaged as the work of a charlatan. But Mandeville wove together the geographical and zoological conceptions of his day, added ample doses of myth and juicy rumors, and produced a book that offered a rare vision of humanity viewed whole. Mandeville was a model of honesty and fairness. As he bluntly admonished his readers: “Let the man who will, believe it; and leave him alone who will not.”1 The French prose poets from Baudelaire to Mallarmé to Max Jacob to René Daumal to René Char and Jean Follain, all of whom combined to establish that the boundary line between poetry and prose is indiscernible when the artist’s intention is sufficiently focused. As Mallarmé put it ever so simply and truly: “Every time there is effort towards style, there is versification.”2 Zora Neale Hurston, author of Tell My Horse, who went beyond her formal training in anthropology to combine a meticulous observation of and personal response to the vodou cultures and practices of Jamaica and Haiti. Hurston’s ear for

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the speech-patterns of her informants, her eye for their movements and their passions, remain models for cross-genre explorers of the planet. Robert Walser and Jorge Luis Borges, both of whom decisively blurred, in their respective ways—the lyric and the laconic—the boundary line between the story and the essay such that it has been exceedingly difficult ever since to keep writers from jumping back and forth between them as they will. Tom Phillips, author of A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, who extended the cut-up method proposed in the 1950s by William Burroughs to the thoroughgoing alteration—linguistic and visual—of an existing book by means of language cross-outs and insertions, collage and other imagistic impositions, so as to create a radically new text. A contemporary American writer who has brilliantly taken up this method to create what she calls “erasure books” containing “new poetic texts,” is the aforementioned-inthe-dream Mary Ruefle. Thanks to Mary’s example, I’m doing erasure books myself these days, a wonderful crossing. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher and prose poet who would have, I think, vehemently disclaimed the latter title. Wittgenstein gave a portion of his inheritance to two poets, Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl, whose work he valued but could not, he claimed, understand. I believe, however, that he understood them well enough. What is of the essence in Wittgenstein is his passion for unfettered precision and playful daring in every sentence. All of these homages having been paid, what is there left for us to do in the Age of Transliminality? Oh, all sorts of things, everything really. On my own personal list of possibilities that I would like to do or see there are these three: One: the ever-increasing mutation of point of view so that several could be portrayed in even a single sentence that would be through sheer precision of perspective and detail remain nicely clear for the reader willing to enter the text. Two: a work that flows seamlessly between poetry and prose and back again, with the sense that the two forms have become lovers. Three: fact-based studies of all kinds rescued from the monopoly of academic purview. Dispassionate does not mean unbiased or intelligent. These new cross-genre studies, which are in fact already appearing, with the works Suzanne Antonetta as a stellar example, employ the roaming personal consciousness of the author as a means of more deeply exploring the subject in question. I would like to close with a brief and perhaps unnecessary comment on truth telling. As I have done the bulk of my writing in the oxymoronically named genre of “creative nonfiction”—a mathematics professor of my acquaintance burst out laughing when

 Those Damn Genres 27 he first heard the term—I am often asked about falsification in memoirs. I reply, first, that there are liars in every profession and, second, that writers, like visual artists, have discovered and our discovering myriad means to create telling and beautiful human portraits. Our inner lives, with their fantasies and self-deceits, are as much a part of memoir subject-matter as the confirmable facts of date and place. Truth is malleable, but thankfully, it is also breakable, so that we can know a liar and catch them at it when they fabricate lives and perspectives for the purpose of ensnaring the empathy and interest of readers. Having said that, I say to all writers of integrity— use every method at your disposal to astonish me, and genre boundaries be damned. As chaos theory teaches us, there is apparent chaos, then apparent pattern, then apparent chaos again, and the cycle continues infinitely so far as we know. So with genres and their crossings.

Notes 1 John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Mosely (New York: Penguin, 1984), 144. 2 Stephane Mallarmé, 1891 interview with Jules Huret, published in Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (Paris: Fasquelle, 1913), 58.

5

Genre-Queer Notes Against Generic Binaries Kazim Ali

2. If writing is a way of thinking, the poem itself offers the best form of structure. It invents its own rules under the making. Neither line, nor form, nor diction or syntax is taken for granted by the writer. It is an anarchic piece of text that lives between boundaries. This quality of the poem can be taken into prose. And fiction, the novel, the essay, memoir and critical writing—they do not look on the page like what they contain inside. (A house must have a kitchen, for example.) Forms of prose have somewhat calcified. What poetry—in its queerness of structure, language, intents, and appearance—can offer to prose is life, the same thing that queer life has always—throughout all cultures, ancient and modern—offered to heteronormativity. Drag anyone? Remember the kiss between Kitty and Laura, the 1950s suburban housewives in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours: “You didn’t mind, Kitty?” asks queer Laura in desperation. “Mind what?” Kitty asks in wide-eyed and brutal denial. Similarly, in prose, innocuous as the kiss between conspirators against the norm— Kitty’s body after all, in a certain fashion, is as queer as Laura’s: she is unable to have children. Thus unable to achieve the paragon of heterosexual bliss, she succumbs to Laura’s kiss.

 Genre-Queer 29 So, is the queering of genres just as similar a trick? A way for queer writers (poets) to join the Mainstream of prose, the way queer citizens stage their battle for equality and civil rights around the institutions of the military and marriage, both instruments of imperial state power and political and familial inheritance? Or can it be political enough to bring the resources of poetry into prose, to allow new structures for the mind in its thinking? Kimiko Hahn. Bhanu Kapil. Harryette Mullen. Eleni Sikélianòs, The California Poem. Laura Moriarty describes a reading by Norma Cole of her work Scout. Norma had recently had a stroke. Moriarty, a dear friend of Cole’s and whose book A Tonalist is dedicated to Cole, describes the stroke in one single deadly sentence: “They found her on the floor.” She goes on to describe the reading: Cole, having newly learned to speak, chose words intentionally difficult to pronounce. When she reads “violets,” Moriarty hears it differently: “Violence, I hear, thinking how physical thinking is, how the body (how life itself) makes its own violence, how sometimes things don’t change as quickly as we would like, how sometimes they change at the speed of (blood or) light.”1 The text is a body because it is made of the flesh and breath and blood of a writer. The “mind” which declares intention is a collection of senses, sense-responses, and memories. Chemically it is invented in the brain. Thought is matter. Work resists binaries between thought (theory) and action (creative work). Can the poem extend theory? When Moriarty writes “(blood or)” she makes a case for thinking two things at once, or in other words anything that could happen does happen. It’s not literary theory but actual science. So perhaps the genre-defying writer is a queer one, who understands gender and genre derive from the same classifying, categorizing impulse—the impulse not to invent but to consume, commodify, own. Said another way, genre and gender are both reading practices, resulting from “authorial intention”—the author’s desire to bracket and frame the text, control (or contribute to the control of) how the text is received, read, “understood.” Riki Wilchins writes, “Gender is a system of meanings and symbols—and the rules, privileges and punishments pertaining to their use—for power and sexuality: masculinity and femininity, strength and vulnerability, action and passivity, dominance and weakness.”2 I like that she equates the categories of gender directly to power and its various expressions. The question of genre is not aesthetic. Certain kinds of writing (bodies) are valued more, are promoted and supported and legitimized and

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that the kinds of writing that are undervalued or marginalized are precisely those which undermine (in both their form and content) traditional power structures and traditional ways of thinking. But gendered bodies and genred writing as a matter of course simplify, reduce complexities, essentialize, and “normalize.” Wilchins goes on to say, “In popular thought, men and women are considered examples of ‘real’ genders and drag, transsexuals, and butch/femme couples are considered copies” but then declares, “all gender is a reuse of familiar stereotypes according to the rules for their use. All gender is drag.”3 Transgender and transgenre space transgresses all requirements of civilization: that we—as texts—must be read and have fixed meanings. Tiresias’s seven years as a woman are invisible to us. The myths do not speak of it. Like books in print culture, we are meant to stay between our covers. In one version of the myth, no longer extant, Tiresias stays on in Thebes as a woman, Jocasta lives on and Oedipus, blinded, wanders alone in the wilderness. Ursule Molinaro, genre-bender extraordinaire, wrote it as Power Dreamers. What if genre, like gender, is fluid, constructed: by the publisher, critic, reader, even writer. Can a writer determine so strongly how a work is seen or positioned? Morton Feldman called such “the anxiety of the artist.” And maintained a zone of anarchy must exist in the first place for the work to be created. What is music: Cage, who uncaged silence and made noise into art. What is painting: Ono, who first exhibited paintings along with their instructions and then dispensed with the paintings and exhibited only the instructions. Regarding Bright Felon and The Disappearance of Seth: two texts written simultaneously, with the same voice, each moving nonlinearly with the sentence as the unit of transition rather than the paragraph. Both in prose, one fiction and the other autobiography. To take genre itself as a form of drag. That is to say, to read Bright Felon as “memoir” means with all the attention on how memory makes or fakes meaning. To read it as “poems” means language and structure become more important. To read it as “fiction” or as “essays” means what?

 Genre-Queer 31 To read Carole Maso as “fiction” rather than “prose poetry” means the silence and staccato of the sentences can be read as erotic, or in the case of Ava, the disappearing sentences and awareness are read as her dementia and eventual death. So why then, besides ease for library cataloguers or bookstore clerks or publishers’ representatives, is Maso’s book Ava considered a “novel,” her Aureole considered “short stories,” and her Beauty is Convulsive considered “prose poems”? Don’t ask Maso the question—why should she know any more definitively than you? Scalapino doing drag in her “novels”—fluid run of poetic thought unfolding in nonspatial, nonlinear decahedral shapes, flow-winged and flowing. And what then do we do with the lyrical western landscapes of Willa Cather, Cormac McCarthy, or John Steinbeck, embedded as those “prose poems” are within the form of novels? Transgenre or genre-queer? They are in a fashion “queer spaces,” Steinbeck’s alternating chapters of lyric, kept tidily apart from the main narrative of the book, separated as a border zone. Cather has a harder time handling it—her poetry suffuses the book, interrupts it—in the case of My Ántonia, fatally wounds the narrative drive and in Death Comes for the Archbishop renders it functionally obsolete. What was perhaps initially meant as a colonizing story ends up as a fabulous failure. Reading the beautiful train-wreck of narrative in the progression of Cather’s novels as they travel west from New York City is like reading the chain of Marguerite Duras novels that began with The Ravishing of Lol Stein, and continues with The Vice-Consul and ends with L’Amour, the last novel she wrote for thirteen years—a period of time in which she concentrated on filmmaking and short prose works including The Malady of Death. These books take place mostly in the liminal space of beaches, the ocean roaring just beyond, its sound mirroring the savage wailing of the madwoman—or in the case of L’Amour by which time the madwoman and Lol V. Stein herself have conflated into the body of one woman (i.e., Lol’s madness is no longer represented externally) the wailing is contrasted to the deadly silence and speechlessness of the protagonists. First Lol’s story is told and then Anne-Marie’s (in The Vice-Consul); in L’Amour both women appear, both themselves but not themselves. Duras retells the story two more times as the films La Femme du Gange and India Song. What does she intend by retelling the narrative over and over again? By the time she tells the “true” story “as it happened” in The Lover, no critic or reader knows quite what to make of it. Duras herself insisted that The Lover was not a memoir or an autobiography but a novel.

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So upset by the way the novel was being adapted to film she wrote the book one more time—as The North China Lover—intended, as a more cinematic version of the events of the earlier book, to be a treatment for a film as yet unmade. At the close of The North China Lover a body falls overboard on the voyage from Saigon to Paris. It is ambiguous whether or not this body was Paulo who we know from The Lover does not survive to return to France. In Je Nathanaël Nathalie Stephens talks through the body of Nathanaël, the shadow half of Nathalie, the other gendered soul, the essay in the novel, the novel in the poem. What fell overboard in The North China Lover is the earlier version, the nonfiction in the volume The Lover. In Nathalie’s case Nathanaël himself is the text, a fuckable text: “Who wants Nathanaël? I do I do. Only he doesn’t exist . . . I have only seen him from behind in a painting and not a very good one at that.”4 The genre-queer text can be seen only from behind? Perhaps it means we can encounter it as writers not as “readers.” “What is a fuckable text?” Stephens asks. We can’t cruise the text like we were going to pick it up and take it home; we have to be the ones lingering in flattering light, waiting to be seduced. Do you have the patience for it? It’s Barthes’s dream, the dream of the writer-centered text the one that gives pure jouissance. And once you’ve experienced the bliss of the disorienting text you have a hard time going back to novels and essays that draw from nineteenth- and eighteenth-century models. You get drunk on the real possibilities of what shapes language can make. The space between literature and life, lingers, is a wound of perception. Maso, in Break Every Rule, takes up the woundedness of language—she sets out to create a new form for thought, one that can hold both eros and death, in books like Ava and Aureole. Fragments bring silence in, the erotic moment (Aureole). Not the exploding of narrative but a nonlinear lifting out of discrete moments. After all (in Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway) “he looked over the edge of the sofa and into the sea.” Like Septimus who has lost his ability to remain in one fixed place in time (and so travels back years to the war and across hundreds of miles to the trenches), Leslie Scalapino’s fiction dissolves all boundaries and concepts of the “present moment” as discrete and “whole” in its “fragmentariness.” She brings thoughts together as threads.

 Genre-Queer 33 Experience is frayed. All things are in the mind and how the mind travels, especially hers! Remember the first time you saw Maya Deren’s film Meditation in Violence. The dancer Chao-Li Chi is inside a small room of an apartment but with one leap in the air he lands on a roof-top patio. It takes some time and repeated viewings for you to realize that at a certain point Deren started looping the film backward. Chi’s moments were so graceful and contained in themselves you didn’t even notice. We transition through genred spaces, but when we accept that texts like bodies can be genre-queer then the possibilities for both interpretation and artistic creation are boundless. If we want to think about genre like gender it means we are thinking of the book as a body. In this case maybe Duras’s chain of novels are like Cylons from the newly reimagined Battlestar Galactica, each book the same essence downloaded into a new corporeal form. The Cylons are, after all, perfectly “queer”: ageless, eternally beautiful. Their primary obsession is to learn to procreate; they are willing to exchange their immortality and embrace death in order to do so. That other human-created artificial life from, the Creature of Frankenstein, is similarly obsessed with finding a mate. His obsession with sexuality is mirrored by his obsession with textuality. He carries Frankenstein’s journal in his pocket wherever he goes and at the end of the book he leaves notes for Frankenstein, even carved into the very stones of the earth. Frankenstein and the Creature both are held in the arms of text—Robert Walton’s letters to his sister Margaret. If the monstrous and queer seem always obsessed with textuality, is it true they always seem to work against conventional memes of gender and genre? The queer seeks always to understand itself, but why? Is it because in the heteronormative world of patriarchy, economic marriage, and inheritance we must use language and forms of thought (“genres”) in order to construct ourselves at all? In the novel Dracula, the primary dramatic action is one of categorization; the vampire hunters keep meticulous records, collect newspaper clippings, interview transcripts, journals, all in order to understand what Dracula is. At a climactic moment in the novel Dracula breaks into the house and kills Lucy and then destroys all the original diaries, Seward’s Dictaphone cylinders, all of it, in the fire. But the story of the novel is the victory of technology over mystery: the vampire hunters still have records because Mina has been transcribing all of their findings on her new typewriter. Though the original material is burned, the typescript remains and it is this that receives primacy: “We ask none to believe us,” declares van Helsing in a

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statement worthy of the turn of the century about to occur. “We need no proofs.” The simulacra have become real or at very least, good enough to be. Later, of course, racing against time on the mountainous Transylvanian roads, the vampire hunters are able to beat the Count to his castle only because that original slayer, Mina, has memorized the timetables of the trains. 1. But in any case a poem is not a question of memorizing timetables (mastering form and meter) nor is a novel a question of structure or classical outlined form. Writing is—Duras knew it, Scalapino and Cather did too, and Maso—part eros, part riot. Anne Carson pointed out that eros is inherent in the distance between two bodies (between a writer and her subject, for example), but riot, the province of Bacchus, generally involves having your head torn off. By your mother. If you know what your text is “about” you are probably in trouble already. When I began as a writer I was deeply involved in multiple creative practices, writing earnest narrative poetry in adopted personas and little fractured prose pieces I had no name for—essays that evaporated and novels without characters in which nothing happened. Throughout my college years I had two poets whispering in my ear—one a poststructural critic named Helen Elam and the other a performance artist named Judy Johnson. By day I was lectured about the (crystal-clear to me at the time) connection between a Volvo and Derrida and at night I recited poetry while being menaced by a woman in a gorilla suit. In this way I learned early and quickly that there is no separation between theory and art, that ideas are everything we have, and that art in these ideas becomes physical. As gender can only restrain the primal spiritual and sexual energy of the body into boxes so too genre does to literature. If Charles Olson is right and the central fact of America is “SPACE,” then what are those spaces, one piled on top of another, each with secret other names, scrubbed clean to make the fiction of “AMERICA.” It may be that an American writer has the need—no question of desire—to write into these vexed spaces with the only techniques available: a fragmentation of narrative and multiplicity of lyric selves. In other words: is language adequate to define experience? To say nothing (yet) of: Empire.

 Genre-Queer 35 Not only new language and new characters, or new forms for the novel (thank you Fanny Howe, thank you David Mitchell. Thank you Stein, Duras, Maso, Nin, Cather, Stoker, and Moriarty) but we actually need a new brain, new shapes for thought. We’ve always already done this in poetry. A knowledge of poetic form now applied to the novel, the essay, the memoir. And genre (in the writing of Nathalie/Nathanaël) not so much evaporates—meaning is still in the air somewhere—as disappears. And who is Willa Cather, who once wore a man’s suit and called herself “William Cather,” in the midst of all this? Landscape in Cather is gendered while the people— with a handful of exceptions—seem mostly to move against traditional gendered norms (Alexandra, Father Latour, Thea, Jim, and so on). Maso: “If writing is language and language is desire . . . if syntax reflects states of desire . . . then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike’s longing . . . in the formal assumptions: what a story is, a paragraph, a character . . .?”5 Writing is a way of thinking. Maso here dreams of that space for desire, for lust, for love. Not an explosion of narrative but a new way of narration. As Maso says, she wants to “figure out how to go on after the intensity of the moment . . . to compose a life afterwards, how to conjure back a world worth living in, a world which might recall, embrace the momentary, glowing, obliterating, archetypal.”6 3. The first publisher to whom I submitted my book Bright Felon suggested I condense radically and reshape the material into poems. The first publisher to whom I submitted my novel The Disappearance of Seth suggested I reframe the book as an essay or meditation on the monument, specifically in this case, the 9/11 memorial. But even to move from one form of writing to another is not transgressive in the purest sense—you are still stuck in a sense of separation between genres, as in gender binaries. So I am not talking here about “cross-genre” or “mixed-genre” books which utilize both prose and poetry, or utilize techniques or qualities from each to make the work— examples might include The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje, Louise Glück’s Meadowlands, Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband, Jean Toomer’s Cane, or Theresa Cha’s Dictée, all books I admire very much.

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Rather I mean those books whose genre is unto themselves, whose whole texts live with bodies ungenred as genderqueer bodies, take their own gender unto themselves, neither accepting one category nor another. Books are bodies in a form. Maso wants to know how do you (in fiction) go on beyond climax—it means sexually of course, but the heart of the question (especially in Maso) is not sex but death. How do you go on beyond death? A question also asked (and answered) by Mark Doty (not known as an experimental writer really) in his most genre-queer book Still Life with Oysters and Lemon—part memoir, part art criticism, part prose-poetry, all rapture. Is any book (let’s ask Nathanaël) a completed whole—of “novel” or of poems or fiction or essays or any other category—or is it really mainly a series of related gestures? (Note: read one of Darwish’s prose books here: Journal of an Ordinary Grief, Memory for Forgetfulness, and In the Presence of Absence. Thank god these are finally all three translated into English. Palestinian literature, as a genre, arrives late on American shores. And most of Darwish’s books arrive on American shores after Darwish himself, who came for necessary heart surgery, which he did not survive.) Darwish, that whirling dervish of form, wrote prose as poetry and never wanted to know the difference. “My homeland is not a suitcase,” he declared in an early political poem, asserting the right of the Palestinian people to recognition of their sovereignty on their own land and denying it would be so easy to pack up and move across the new border into a neighboring state. But years later, after decades of wandering through the world—Moscow, Beirut, Cairo, Tunis, Paris—he would glumly amend the line in recognition of his actual lived life: “My homeland is a suitcase.” Cather, William, or Willa, whichever you like, seems always to return her rebels to the homeland social order. Her characters work themselves up to a moment of overturning the power structure and then oddly, and in somewhat deadly intent, swerve: first in O Pioneers! Alexandra visits Shimerda in prison to apologize to him; then of course there is the fabulously sudden disappearance and then odd reappearance of Antonia in the novel which bears her name; and of course the actual titularly promised death of the Archbishop, simultaneously a haunting evocation of the landscape as free and eternal from human consideration and the narrative of religious, political, and racial empire. What is literature anyway but a dream of thought into language? It is an act of lovemaking, of translation, of making the body (text) move. Genre defends itself, creates a literature for the reader to not be a writer anymore. In other words, eat what’s on your plate, it might (or might not) be good for you.

 Genre-Queer 37 But to use one’s own body. To dance—as the feel-good slogan goes—as though no one is watching. What is your movement vocabulary? How does poetic form live in your own awareness, own body, own language? So you might not know what poem, novel, or essay you can make but what writing can make of you. Genre, like gender, is not so much passé as it is boring. The future holds more and the possibilities poetic languages offer us for increasing human perception are not merely for the promise of pleasure but of planetary importance.

Notes 1 Laura Moriarty, A Tonalist (Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2010), 60. 2 Riki Wilchins, “A Certain Kind of Freedom: Power and the Truth of Bodies—Four Essays on Gender,” in Genderqueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary, ed. Joan Nestle, Riki Wilchins, and Clare Howell (New York: Alyson Books, 2002), 25. 3 Ibid., 28. 4 Nathalie Stephens, Je Nathanaël (Toronto: BookThug, 2006), 49. 5 Carole Maso, Break Every Rule (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2000), 157. 6 Ibid., 23.

6

On the EEO Genre Sheet Jenny Boully

On Interviewing A few years ago, when I was on the job market, I was asked repeatedly to define nonfiction. I knew I could venture into one of two courses: I could give the traditional textbook definition, or I could say what I really felt. If I said what I really felt, then I knew that I wouldn’t get a campus visit; I wouldn’t get the job. If I gave the textbook definition, it would make the interviewers feel as if I was on their side, that I was a safe candidate, that I would be someone that the Chair and Dean approved of. Because I have a natural inclination to be rebellious, I always chose to go the road of the untraditional. The interviews then became centered less on my qualifications and more on my transgressions. Some interviewers felt that I was misguided, that I needed counseling. You see, they aimed to tame me, and it became their goal to do that before the next candidate arrived. It wasn’t about what I could offer but rather about what they could fix. I still ask myself, quite seriously, why is it that fiction is allowed to borrow from nonfiction, but nonfiction is not allowed to borrow from fiction? And, seriously, I really want to know.

On Former Students One of my goals as a teacher of nonfiction is to totally destroy every held belief that a student has about essays and nonfiction. Essays are my thing. Essaying is very much my thing. I expect my students to essay. I expect them to essay fiercely and obsessively. I want to see, truly, what new thing they will unleash into the universe. One student wrote quite beautifully. She wrote so poetically, but what she wrote wasn’t verse. It was essaying; it was essayistic; it was an essay. Many of my students did this over the years, but this one student did it quickly and passionately. I met her later, randomly, on a street corner in the West Village. She said that she was depressed; her new teacher wouldn’t let her write; her new teacher told her that she was writing poetry and the

 On the EEO Genre Sheet 39 class wasn’t a poetry class. She asked her teacher if a prose poem could be nonfiction and the teacher said no. I told her, why don’t you, quite discreetly, slip her a copy of Pope’s “Essay on Man”? That, if anything, should give her a mind fuck, you know. When I went home at night, I realized that I was depressed. I kept thinking about my former student and all her talent being pushed on the curb by a teacher who could have been in the room interviewing me, asking me what my definition of nonfiction was.

On Being Mixed Once, when I was twenty-two, I worked in the mall in Roanoke, Virginia. I worked at several stores in the mall. I needed the money. I could go from part-time shift to parttime shift and not even have to leave the mall. One day, on break, a local came up to me and asked me if I was “mixed.”

On Being Mixed Two So, it seems that I am mixed. I am quite mixed. I am more mixed than many, many people I know. My father is half Cherokee, half white man. We’ve never known where his white ancestors came from; he became a ward of the state when he was eight, and so much of his history was lost. My mother is Thai, but she has curly hair, as do I, which leads me to think that there must be something else lurking in there. In terms of what I write, it seems that my writing too is also mixed. I am sometimes called a poet, sometimes an essayist, sometimes a lyric essayist, sometimes a prose poet. My second book was published under the guise of fiction/poetry/essay. I find these categorizations odd: I have never felt anything other than whole. It seems to me that the inability to accept a mixed piece of writing is akin to literary racism. I think of the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) data sheets. Choose the genre that you feel most accurately describes you.

Please Be X, Y, or Z I want to know, seriously, why what is often “other” ends up being labeled as poetry. I think it’s like something forcing me to check the white box or the Native American box or the Asian box. Which of these most accurately describes me? Does this mean to myself or to other people? Other people who meet me for the first time always ask me if I’m Spanish. When they ask me where I’m from, I always say Texas. So that confirms

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for them that I’m definitely of Hispanic descent. I never say that I am from Thailand. I was born there, but I can’t say I’m from there. From, to me, denotes a forming of awareness and identity and memory. Most of these happened for me in Texas. When I was younger and when I dated, my dates were always very uneasy about asking me about my ethnicity. You could see it in their hesitating restaurant decisions, their waiting to see if I’d order in a language other than English if I’m taken to an ethnic restaurant. And then always, inevitably, I’ll be asked if I’m Spanish. When I say no, they are, always, invariably disappointed. The two biggest disappointed dates: the Spanish analyst who worked for the government and the boy who had just broken up with his Spanish girlfriend—I don’t know what he was hoping to find in me.

Poetry as Refuge A refuge is where unwanted animals go. It is also where some of my submissions to journals end up. Some intern or graduate student has dropped my submission into the poetry pile; in a way, that person has made it possible for my submission to live. It would not have lived in the nonfiction pile. There, it would have starved to death, or it would have been eaten alive. Once, I got a rejection slip from a nonfiction editor saying, “I’m not sure how to take this. I don’t know what this is.” That particular journal was solely a nonfiction journal; my submission, therefore, had nowhere else to go.

On the EEO Genre Sheet I’m not sure which genre I would select. I guess, being who I am and doing the type of work I do, I would have to choose many. Do I choose “other” (if the option is even there) and fill it in (if there’s even a fill-in space there)? Isn’t having to choose, being forced to choose, also essentially racist: being told that there simply isn’t an easy category for you: you just don’t fit in; you destroy the natural order of things. The term “other” also immediately connotes an agenda: if you don’t fit into one of our predetermined categories, well, then, you aren’t playing the game correctly. You are an other. You will always be an other. You will get thrown into a slush pile marked “origin unknown.”

Coda And so, in the literary world, I find that I spend a lot of time trying to keep anyone from getting disappointed in me. I may look like an essay, but I don’t act like one. I may look like prose, but I don’t speak like it. Or, conversely, I may move like an poem, but I don’t look like one.

 On the EEO Genre Sheet 41 Do I bend genre? Or does genre bend me? I think it’s the latter. I have always been the same person: I have always been made up of three things. My birth may be fictional; I may be from poetry; I might now be living in essays. I cannot see these three things as separate parts of my identity; rather, they form to make one entity. I may be the product of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, but they too come together to form one entity. To be told to choose is to be told that you disrupt the neat notion of where things belong, that you don’t belong.

7

Reading Samuel R. Delany T Clutch Fleischmann

In her essay collection Everybody’s Autonomy, Juliana Spahr explores the ways that avant-garde texts (meaning, reader-centered, genre-bending, experimental, and shifting and odd) encourage the participation of the reader and invite a sort of liberating community. The world she sees in these texts approaches a transformative and challenging anarchy, where the reader is expected to cross borders and to explore her own limits while participating in the meaning of the text. In addition, as Spahr sees it, “avant-garde forms are not at all divorced from cultural concerns, but are actually often used to critique dominant cultures.”1 In this sense, she rejects the notion that the avant-garde is the home of rich white men, carrying out a tradition of intellectual posturing and play that began ages ago. Instead, she sees the history of marginalized2 people innovating and radicalizing texts, aesthetics and structure and politics all performing interdependent functions. This is, of course, an old and available history, even if it is one people typically refuse to acknowledge. Take, for instance, Margaret C. Anderson editing The Little Review (in an editor’s note from 1916: “Revolution is Art. You want free people just as you want the Venus that was modeled by the sea. . . . All my inadequate stammerings about Emma Goldman have been to show her as the artist she is”3), a journal which regularly included women modernists, only to have the men end up in anthologies, leaving generation after generation to find Mina Loy on their own. Or the constant “borrowing” of techniques from non-white cultures in order to innovate white literature. Likewise, the diverse ways that art by marginalized people eludes and upends dominant aesthetics have been mapped in a long critical history, whether looking at bebop, at Joyelle McSweeney’s and Johannes Görannson’s theories of disabled texts, or at countless other examples. This essay takes these realities as a given, even if they are not always taken as such by others. Instead of trying to prove the connection between innovative writing and people on the margin, then, I’m interested in taking the line of thought I first heard clearly articulated in Everybody’s Autonomy and applying it to the innovative (or lyric, or experimental, of bent and bending) essay. Going a step further, it seems that the defining qualities of the genre seem to be inherent to the type of liberating and anarchic reading that Spahr identifies.

 Reading Samuel R. Delany 43 An aside on terminology: as often as not, Deborah Tall is given credit for the term “lyric essay.” In her essay “Terrible Perfection,” discussing her relationship as a woman to the canon of literature, Tall says that she has “been inspired and consoled over the years by the voices of many women, but also by the voices of men on the margin—the poor, exiled, oppressed—those who, even if they made the canon, ill-fit their world in some revealing way.”4 Tall’s description of people who “ill-fit their world” seems especially powerful to me, the ill-fitting becoming an action and a revelatory power. The word “lyric” also has some useful history behind it. Linda Gregerson, describing lyric poetry, claims that “impediment produced the lyric voice,”5 that something had to keep the poet away from the lover in order for lyricism to come into being. If the essayist has a love, it is her topic, and Gregerson’s logic holds there, too. But, even so, maybe there’s something more interesting (more essayistic) in a clustering of terms, in redefining what we talk about by talking about it. Lyric essay, bent essay, hybrid essay: all both stabilize and occlude something that might be useful. While Spahr and many other critics have given attention to avant-garde and genrebending writing in general, the fact that some of these essays maintain a stance as essay is important. There is something about the essay as a genre that we’re holding onto rather than adapting the terminology of docupoetics, of prose poetry, of non-genred writing. It seems useful, then, to have an understanding of what a traditional essay does. Ken James, in his insightful introduction to Samuel Delany’s Longer Views, calls the type of essay for which Montaigne is known “meditations in which the sovereign self is the authoritative ground for analytical inquiry,”6 which seems about right to me. Of course, there’s a lot about that type of essay that does not sit comfortably. There’s the sense of a “sovereign” self, as though the individual could or should exist free of the influence of the other individuals. “Sovereign” also implies a power dynamic, claiming the “authoritative ground” on which truths can be declared. This is not troubling because of postmodern concerns regarding the slipperiness of meaning and the constructed nature of truth, exactly. Rather, it is troubling because it presents the “I” of the essay as someone who all alone can enter the world, equipped with analytical tools and committed to bringing some truth back to the reader, no impediment allowed between herself and her topic. “This is how it is, and here is my proof,” this type of essayist seems to say. These sovereign essays preclude many of the concerns central to Spahr’s inquiry: that writing, much like what she says of Lyn Hejinian’s foundational My Life, “points to how the question of the personal is responsible to the larger question of the collective;” that we must find a way “to be both autonomous and related;” that it is ultimately “more productive to see this writing as a dialogue that negotiates between these positions of pluralist inclusion and respectful, categorical separation.”7 Put another way, the traditional essay as James describes it is interested in convincing us of the truth (the biography, the research, the reality of a place where the writer does not live) rather than in exploring some truths together. But that authoritative tendency is not inherent to the essay, and the formal qualities of (genre-)bending essays challenge any sense of authoritarianism on the writer’s part. Take, to start, truth, the foundation on which the genre is arguably built, and the focus of much handwringing over and criticism of lyric essays. There are two political

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realities tied to truth to which the essay as a form is obligated to respond. The first is that authoritative fact, both historically and today, has been used to silence and exclude significant numbers of people, whether forcing immigrants to lie in order to stay alive and safe or perpetuating the idea that transgender people are lying when we assert our own identities and bodies (to give only two examples). The second is that the process of asserting individual truths, of “speaking your truth,” has been a powerful social and political tool in the modern world. These are realities to which the essay is always responding, not by discounting truth but by acknowledging and embracing the power of truths, by using the shifting, hidden, exposed, and expansive truths of the margin as collective tools to help us better understand the world, rather than lifting up a blunt instrument meant to convince others that our own experience is the right experience. Kevin Young’s The Grey Album, for one, offers an insightful account of Black literature and art responding to and subverting authoritative truth. Young recounts the necessity and power of what he calls storying, “both a tradition and a form” in which “the fabric of black life has often meant its very fabrication, making a way out of no way, and making it up as you go along.”8 Whether looking at slaves forging papers in order to reach freedom, at Alice Walker pretending to be Zora Neale Hurston’s niece in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, or at Danger Mouse’s mash-up of Jay-Z and the Beatles, Young reveals storying not as a type of lying, but as its own literary technique, its own truths made alongside the reality that authoritative truth is violent, oppressive, and silencing. It’s no surprise that one of the greatest and earliest writers of the contemporary essay, James Baldwin, gets considerable attention from Young, with Baldwin’s references to Bessie Smith in his own essays providing an example of successful storying. It’s also important that, while storying and the traditions charted by Young are unique to Black culture in the United States, bent truths in a broader sense are a common tool in the art of marginalized people. Gertrude Stein can write Alice B. Toklas’s autobiography, sliding a queer life into everyone’s hands; Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller places together family photographs, myth, and prose that blur any distinction between fiction and fact; and Lauren Slater’s Lying is a “slippery, impish, playful, exasperating text, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark.”9 None of these are examples of the writer lying, which is one reason that the bent essay—the essay that acts up and steps outside of the line it was supposed to stand behind—might still be called essay rather than something else. To claim truth as collective and problematized and challenging, like Stein and Young and so many others have, is to move toward the type of literature Spahr champions. What better technique than storying, than the embrace of nonfacts, to meet Spahr’s description of writing as “a dialogue that negotiates between these positions of pluralist inclusion and respectful, categorical separation?”10 What better ground than the essay to challenge ourselves to acknowledge all these truths, holding them in our head together, maybe moving somewhere new? Hybridizing forms, combining “fiction” with “nonfiction,” does not simply create a form with qualities of both, but instead results in a mode in which neither exists on familiar terms, where we’re asked to conceive notions of truth with new criteria and from new ideologies. Adhering to authoritative ideas of truth,

 Reading Samuel R. Delany 45 as many essayists want to do, either misreads or ignores those essays operating out of different traditions. Running parallel to these questions of truth are the spatial and visual qualities of bent essays (“Why all the white space?”), the urge to include images, blanks, topography, odd indents, and constellations of text. These, too, can be understood not simply as a dismantling of the authoritative text (there is not only a lack of thesis-bodyconclusion, of conventional rhetoric, of memoir-like narrative, there’s sometimes a lack of text, here). Rather, we are given accumulations of image, emotion, lie, truth, lyricism, language, dirt, and emptiness that operate out of their own, self-defined rubrics and accomplish unique means. Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, a contemporary masterpiece of the lyric essay, is a clear example. It begins in half-page blocks of text, Rankine slipping between first person and second person, residing in the space where other and self are not comfortably delineated (after recounting her grandmother’s death, the next block begins, “Or one begins asking oneself the same question differently. Am I dead?”11). As the book accumulates, images including medical scans of a friend’s breast, stills from movies, and the repeating motif of a fuzzy television all hold space. These images do not serve as the core medium of a fact-proving diagram, but as several of many accumulating realities, all with their polyvalence, the little invisible lines going in all directions. A fuzzy television does not break up the idea of a traditional essay, but unexpectedly creates beauty and community within the sense of broken connections and troubled intimacy that a traditional essay, in its authoritarian sovereignty, often has trouble performing. Again, in my reluctance to view these formal techniques as simply disrupting the authoritative essay, I do still want to insist that these are essays. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is fundamentally, in topic and in genre, about the experience of the self (Rankine’s self) in the world. It explores the loneliness that comes with living in society, that insistence on the self (our self and the selves of others) as both autonomous and obliged to community. And by combining text and image in unconventional ways, it does not simply enact this disjunction between individual and society, but rather works for new combinations and analogues of meaning that strive to create and reveal our interconnectedness. It’s similar to what happens in Barthes A Lover’s Discourse (echoed in Jenny Boully’s The Body, in Anne Carson’s Nox), where the topic is understood not by a clear narrative and rhetoric of fact, but by an acoustic collage of definitions, personal history, philosophy, culture, and subjectivity in order to address, in Barthes’s words, “the following consideration: that the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude. This discourse is spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one.”12 Thalia Field’s Bird Lovers, Backyard, Fanny Howe’s Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken, Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene—these read to me firmly as essays, just ones where the permeable, accountable self is one of several grounds for inquiry (to twist a phrase). The last formal quality I’ll mention (although there are certainly many more that could be touched on) is that resistance of the permeable essay to explain itself, to define its terms in a way that holds the audience’s hand. In the case of authoritative essays, that explaining is often the main function, the informative mode driving it forward.

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The memoir genre,13 for one, typically takes as its primary task the duty to inform others about the writer’s lived experience. And the informative role works nicely, there, married to the experiences of (in many cases) marginalized people, serving some sort of liberating function in that the traditionally silenced experiences are spoken, and those from privileged positions take the time to hear those experiences. This process is one of the foundations of contemporary feminism, and certainly, that’s a foundation much too strong to discount. There’s a common belief, however, particularly in anarchist critiques, that no one should ever be obligated to “explain” her difference. The assumption that a marginalized person should feel the duty to define, contextualize, or rationalize her own life to someone else is suspect (although certainly fine when she chooses to do so). The bent essay engages more with this understanding than with the (also wonderful, also important) tradition of consciousness raising circles. In essays such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,14 for one, the focus is on using inventive language and form not to communicate experiences of colonization and domination (among other topics), but in order to engage with the world and the language in which those experiences are born and create instead new worlds, new languages; in Spahr’s words, “that Cha pursues and presents not simply a critique of colonization on the level of content, but that she also writes her work so as to decolonize reading.” Were Cha engaging with the traditional, authoritative sense of essay and memoir, her work would document its images and quotes, translate its languages, and actively move toward a cohesive narrative with which the reader could walk away. Instead, we are given a writer who thankfully and generously refuses to give us that experience, preferring disjunction and other techniques to create an essay in which the reader, by accepting unexpected turns, will walk away challenged to continue her engagement, to stay permeable and stay involved in the inquiry. Poet Amy King, in describing queer poetry, offers a description that can be applied here as well. It is enthusiastic enough to quote at length: The focus shifts from who is what stable identity to an energetic movement, from the secure footing of “what is” to the risk and broadcast of hope in the one constant we know: that there is no there there, there is only now and then now, there is no permanence, and that knowledge encourages the exploration of what now really is beyond the false fences of security, of a center, a normal, for higher dreams and greater privileges that can be shared between us, among us, in our constant becoming, however fleeting, however impossible, for in the end, should it ever get here, the impossible of the What Else is the only thing worth pursuing.15

In Dictée, like in King’s queer poetics, the role of knowledge is not so much to inform, but to encourage exploration, especially when that exploration leads us further into the place we call the margins. The genre-bending essay is not discrediting truth or knowledge, but using them (as with all of its formal qualities) for new purposes, obligating us to enter literary, social, and political grounds with which we may

 Reading Samuel R. Delany 47 be unfamiliar. It is here where, as Gloria Anzaldúa describes it in her preface to Borderlands, “the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.”16 * * * I have a sentimental connection to Borderlands worth mentioning. I encountered it for the first time at 20 or so while studying literature as an undergraduate. Although I was happily enough reading my way through the canon of the twentieth century in the classroom, I found Borderlands not in an academic context, but through a social group. I was at the time establishing my identity as a queer feminist, and I found a group of friends eager to share our own experiences with one another and equally as eager to learn about each other’s experiences with gender, with race, with different bodies and histories and addictions. We stayed up into the evenings together, arguing and listening. This is a familiar story—many of us have been there. In this group, there were a few transformative books we were passing back and forth, among them Borderlands and Gender Outlaw and a few others that strike me now as distinctly and powerfully essays operating in the modes I’ve been describing (the same mode, maybe, as the late-night conversations). Although I previously would have called myself a poet, it was in seeing Kate Bornstein and Gloria Anzaldúa perform a bending and permeable essay that I fell into the form. I was excited about these books, for their content as well as their formal qualities. My friends and I talked about them in sustained, exacting detail, and I slowly found myself preferring to read and write essays. Yet, while these texts were foundational and formative for me and many others, I rarely (if ever) see them discussed when we look at the contemporary essay as form. They instead seem to stay in the subgenres of feminism and cultural studies. All of this is to assert one last time that it would be a dangerous mistake to ignore the history and the potential of the bent essay as a liberating as well as an artistic tool. Of all the functions of art, what is more exciting than the possibility that we might, through participation, understand ourselves and the world more deeply (and what more intimately an aspect of beauty)? The essay as genre has always been intrinsically tied to this project. But to rigidly hold the genre now to the notion that exploring the world involves authoritarian truth, straightforward lucidity, and linear thought is to ignore the shaken and shifting complexities of life. Further, to exclude from the conversation that link between marginalized people and genre-bending essays is to exclude so much of the rich history of the genre. Certainly, the hybrid essay can operate in ways that are not explicitly political, and many of the indelible qualities of the essays discussed above have at most a loose, associative link to the politics and experiences of marginalization, just as there are plenty of writers creating bent essays from dominant or un-marginalized experiences (there’s no need to list them here, you can find them elsewhere easily enough). But that is irrelevant to the fact that the essay as genre has been and continues to be a rare tool in creating fresh types of reading experiences and powerful, challenging methods for ill-fitting the world. In her introduction to I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, Laynie Browne reminds us that “it is often at the stage of anthologizing that numbers start to

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shift so that women are not adequately represented.”17 The hybrid essay has reached the point where it is becoming a point of focused study; it would be incredibly disappointing to watch it go the same route so many other genres have gone, tied only to an already established literary history rather than used to expand our understanding of literature, contemporary and past. The full potential of the form lies in texts that challenge, in not shying away from the anarchic realities of truth and self and community, and in celebrating the breadth of a genre that seems to expand more quickly than its expansion can be noted. The metaphors of marginality and white space, of unspoken truth and elision, of disjunction and community are all readily available (just as the fact that genre and gender share an etymology always remains conveniently obvious). In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel Delany celebrates the now-shuttered porn theaters of Times Square and the social contact they encouraged. His description of the relationships he formed there could serve also to describe the type of relationships that are made possible by a permeable essay: “You learned something about these people (though not necessarily their name, or where they lived, or what their job or income was) . . . The relationships were not (necessarily) consecutive. They braided. They interwove. They were simultaneous.”18 Whatever our own limitations, this seems a good direction to go.

Notes 1 Julianna Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 87. 2 I use the term “marginalized” here not to emphasize the process of oppression or exclusion but rather to point to spaces outside of dominant cultures in which other literacies thrive. 3 Margaret C. Anderson, “A Real Magazine,” The Little Review III, no. 5 (August 1916): 1. 4 Deborah Tall, “Terrible Perfection: In the Face of Tradition,” in Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition, ed. Sharon Bryan (New York: Norton, 1993), 189. 5 Linda Gregerson, “Rhetorical Contract in the Erotic Poem,” in Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry, ed. David Baker and Ann Townsend (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2007), 45. 6 Ken James, “Introduction,” in Longer Views: Extended Essays, ed. Samuel R. Delany (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), xxxvi. Importantly, James argues that both Delany and Montaigne actually worked in very different modes than this authoritarian model. 7 Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy, 71–2. 8 Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2012), 17. 9 Lauren Slater, Lying (New York: Penguin, 2001), 221. 10 Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy, 72. 11 Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2004), 7.

 Reading Samuel R. Delany 49 12 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 1. 13 Spahr offers an overview of critiques of the autobiography genre’s “bourgeois authorial self ” through innovations by Stein and others: 34–5, 68–9, 75–7, etc. 14 The entirety of Spahr’s discussion of Dictée informs my thinking here and is much more valuable than my shorthand version. Likewise, Dictée itself seems to me to be an essential essay in the contemporary tradition, and certainly deserves much more sustained attention than I am giving it. 15 Amy King, “The What Else of Queer Poetry,” Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Winter 2009), https://freeversethejournal​.org​/issue​-17​-winter​ -2010​-amy​-king./ 16 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999), 19. 17 Laynie Browne, “A Conceptual Assemblage: An Introduction,” in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, ed. Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody, and Vanessa Place (Los Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2012), 14. 18 Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 57.

8

Beautiful Muddied Waters On Genre and Veracity Sean Prentiss

I. The (Failed) Teaching of Genre and Veracity in an Illustration A stage empty except for twenty desks filled with twenty students. PROFESSOR (looking exactly like Sean Prentiss), bald, 40ish, thin, stands at the board looking at a diagram, which he has labeled “Defining Genres.”

PROFESSOR points to illustration, tries to figure out how to explain genre, looks confused. Sputters. Erases work.

II. Issues with Genre Recently, while teaching my students about genre, we all became confused about what genre is and how it works (see confusing image at the beginning of this chapter). While we often call poetry, drama, fiction, and creative nonfiction the four genres, two are based on shape (poetry uses the line break while drama uses dramatic writing techniques) and two are defined by veracity (much too simply, a focus on truth with creative nonfiction or a use of invention with fiction1). When we talk about genre (or when we try to teach it), we mix together shapes (prose, poetry, and drama) and

 Beautiful Muddied Waters 51 veracities (creative nonfiction and fiction). This confusion with what genre is and what genres do leads to a plethora of problems. As a writer, I am stuck trying to explain my writing style to editors, agents, readers, and publishers. I write micro-essays that often look like poems. What do we call something true shaped like this?

XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX

Lyric essay?

Prose-poem? Just a plain old poem? If it is a lyric essay, can it also be a poem? And what do we call what is below? Is it creative nonfiction, since it is true,2 or is it playwriting, since it uses dramatic writing techniques? SEAN SEAN standing on an empty stage. If I write using dramatic writing techniques, like I’m using here, how will readers know my stories are truths, which is what is most important to me? Genres don’t always teach us about truth, especially if we write in poetry or drama. JULIA enters stage left. SEAN mentions toward JULIA. When I ask my friend, Julia, the smartest writer I know, what she calls her weird shapes of writing that are not one thing but many things—part essay, part poem, part hybrid things—this is what she calls them. JULIA Thingamabobs. SEAN Calling them thingamabobs just highlights the problem with our current definitions.

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JULIA exits stage left. SEAN throws his hands in the air in frustration. We are writers. We work with language. How is it that we have no workable terms here? SEAN pulls a dollhouse onto the stage and tries to climb into it.3 This organizational system where we often focus only on the shape of a thing might tell us to call a house and a dollhouse the same thing since they share the same house shape. SEAN grabs Steve Coughlin’s book of poetry, Another City, from offstage. Readers often have an unclear understanding of what they will be receiving from a writer. Are Coughlin’s poems invented, true, or something else? What is the small paragraph-thing that Steve so often uses? A prose poem? A lyric essay? What is the difference? Is there a difference? Still holding Another City, SEAN, swings his arms emphatically. We can be clearer with the reader. We can tell them exactly what they are holding in their hands. SEAN stands stoically in the center of the stage Perhaps to be clearer takes no more than two words: genre and veracity. So many of us have been taught to write either creative nonfiction or fiction and that both are only written in prose. We are taught to ignore the question of truth or fiction in poetry and drama. These are artificial borders. Creative nonfiction and fiction are not just prose. Poetry is not just line breaks and drama is not just dramatic writing techniques, and both poetry and drama can be based on a foundation of truth or invention or something else entirely. This idea that genre at times implies shape and at times implies veracity chokes out some of the “creative” in creative writing. SEAN stands thigh-deep in a muddy creek, splashing about.4 We already play in these beautifully muddied waters. Now we can clarify our borders, clarify our terms5 while still splashing around. And it’s not hard at all.

III. Some Clearer Charts on Genre and Veracity: We supposedly have four genres: creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and drama. That’s pretty simple. Next, let’s see what supposedly makes a genre a genre.

 Beautiful Muddied Waters 53 Genre

What Makes It a Genre?

Creative nonfiction

Focus on truth

Fiction

Use of some invention

Poetry

Line breaks

Drama

Dramatic writing

Though this chart is simple to read, it’s confusing to understand since two of our genres (creative nonfiction and fiction) deal with veracity—truth or invention—and two deal with shape (line breaks and dramatic writing). Before we get stuck in genre, let’s examine what shape might illuminate. Shape

What Determines Shape

Poetry

Line breaks

Dramatic writing

Playwriting style

Prose

Paragraphs

Shape makes sense. It is all based on how something looks on the page. Nothing more. Nothing less. Shape tells us whether we will see line breaks, dramatic writing, or a paragraph.

IV. The Teaching of Genre and Veracity, a Re-do A stage empty except for twenty desks filled with twenty students. PROFESSOR (still looking exactly like Sean Prentiss), bald, 40ish, thin, stands at the chalkboard, looking at new diagrams (which can be seen below). He smiles confidently. PROFESSOR We need a new system that offers clear borders and removes the false limitations that have been set on our creative writing by our sloppy definitions. What is the solution to this overlapping confusion between shape and veracity? Let veracity teach us only if a piece is creative nonfiction or fiction. So each writer tells the reader their piece’s veracity. PROFESSOR points at the following veracity chart.

Veracity

What Makes a Veracity

Creative nonfiction

Focus on writing personal myths

Fiction

Focus on invented characters and/or stories

Hybrid

Inhabits space between creative nonfiction and fiction, intentionally plays with both, or does something else entirely

Bending Genre

54

And let us now simplify things by redefining “genres” as shapes alone. Genres will only teach us how a piece will look on the page. PROFESSOR points at the genre chart.

Genre

What Makes a Genre?

Prose

Paragraph form

Poetry

Line break form

Drama

Dramatic writing form

Hybrid

Multiple forms or new forms

V. A One-Act Play Where Three Writers Test Out Genre and Veracity at a Dive Bar A writer’s group, three members, meet at a dive bar called Charlie O’s. They practice this new way to view genre and veracity. JESS So what would you call Ann Carson’s The Glass Essay? JESS and JULIA in unison Hybrid creative nonfiction. JULIA What about Moby Dick? It’s got fiction and nonfiction and it is prose. SEAN, JESS, and JULIA in unison Prose fiction. JESS Catcher in the Rye is prose fiction. JULIA Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle? Prose nonfiction. SEAN T’ao Ch’ien? Creative nonfiction poetry.

 Beautiful Muddied Waters 55 JESS In Cold Blood? JULIA Creative nonfiction prose. SEAN Steve Coughlin’s Another City? JULIA Poetry with some prose. Feels like creative nonfiction.

VI. What This New System Allows Redefining genre and separating it from veracity makes our teaching lives easier. This simpler view shows that genre = shape and veracity = creative nonfiction or fiction is easy to conceptualize. Every piece of writing is: ● ●

Either creative nonfiction, fiction, or something hybrid. Either poetry, prose, drama, or something hybrid.6

No longer are we forced to lump things together that merely share a shape in the ways that we might lump our dollhouse and a real house together. And we no longer need to call things thingamabobs. But this new use of terms also affects how we write and talk about our writing. Separating genre and veracity allow writers flexibility to conceive of how they might write on the page. Writers may no longer need to feel constrained by the norms of poetry, drama, creative nonfiction, and fiction because we’ve separated veracity from shape. Or if writers already feel liberated to bend genres and veracities, they have clearer terms to explain their bending. As an example, for my book Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave, I chose prose as my genre because Finding Abbey needed long paragraphs to carry the weight of my research, quotes from Ed Abbey books, and interviews with his friends. The veracity was creative nonfiction because Finding Abbey was part memoir, part travelogue, and part biography. For Crosscut: Poems, I chose my genre to be poetry (with some micro-prose). I chose the use of line breaks because I longed to experiment with writing a non-prose memoir and because so many of the moments in this collection felt like poems as I was experiencing them during my time leading a trail crew. I experienced those trailbuilding moments as beautiful snippets of a life lived in the woods. The veracity was creative nonfiction because I was writing a memoir about my days on a trail crew.

Bending Genre

56

This essay, “Beautiful Muddy Waters,” uses prose, dramatic writing, and some poetry. I wanted to use all the major genres since this essay is about expanding how we play with genres based on defining genres more clearly. It is 100 percent creative nonfiction in idea while some of the dramatic writing actions are fiction since, as mentioned earlier, I never actually acted any of this on a stage and never tried to climb into a dollhouse. This new system instructs the reader more clearly on what they will receive. The contract is clearer between writer and reader.

VII. Manifesto as a One-Act Play SEAN Cast in light on a stage filled with hundreds or thousands of other writers.7 We are so much more than one thing. We see ourselves in the mirror of creative nonfiction and write our stories as personal mythologies. At times, we lapse into fiction when we long to dream a story into this world. Sometimes, we need to stand on the stage or orate our worlds. Other times, we breathe in deeply and speak at length. We need not line breaks and stage directions but paragraphs. But, since our oldest stories, since then, we are poets.

Regardless of how we tell our stories, let us use terms that mirror the words on the page, let us use terms that expand our options rather than lean on ill-defined terms that confuse and limit ourselves, our art, and our readers.

Notes 1 While earlier I said that the difference between the two genres is “a focus on truth with creative nonfiction or a use of invention with fiction,” the real key difference between creative nonfiction and fiction is not about the use of fact and truth in creative nonfiction versus the use of invention in fiction, since we could come up with endless examples of creative nonfiction using invention (with dialogue, character, and onward) and realistic fiction being deeply grounded in a factual world. Rather, the difference between creative nonfiction and fiction is within the intention of the writer. The creative nonfiction writer aims to write factually and truthfully. That said, achieving either fact or truth in creative nonfiction is impossible because of memoryrelated issues and because of the process of turning life into art. Instead, the creative

 Beautiful Muddied Waters 57

2 3 4 5

6 7

nonfiction writer aims to write factually and truthfully even as the reader understands that the writer must fail. This turns the creative nonfiction writer into someone who writes personal mythologies, which, just like cultural myths, are something the writer believes to be factual and truthful while the reader knows that is impossible. Okay, this dramatic scene is not completely true since there was never a real stage. I imagined one in my mind. Okay, I not only invented the stage, but I also invented the dollhouse. I also never tried to climb into a dollhouse. This, here, is complete fiction. Though I’ve splashed around in muddy waters plenty of times, I never did it while saying (or writing) these words about “beautiful muddied waters.” This desire to clarify creative nonfiction terms originated from a Writer’s Chronicle interview between Judith Kitchen and Janée J. Baugher. In “An Interview with Judith Kitchen,” Kitchen says, “We don’t quite have words for what we’re doing. And reviews of nonfiction are sorely lacking in any critical terminology, or [. . .] they borrow it from fiction and poetry. But it doesn’t quite fit. We need to be able to talk about our craft, and with ill-defined terms, craft itself becomes sloppy.” Or something else entirely. Where do video stories fit? What about web-based writing? Are all podcasts prose? Let us keep exploring and expanding our definitions. As someone who is mostly a recluse, I’m happy to say that this is also fiction. I was never on a stage in front of hundreds or thousands of other writers. That would have been terrifying.

Note: “Beautiful Muddied Waters” shares ideas with an essay originally published at bendinggenre​.c​om under the title “On Genre, On Form, On Limitations and False Borders: Offering Creative Writing New Boundaries” and with chapter 2, “Genre and Veracity,” in Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writers Guide and Anthology, eds. Sean Prentiss and Jessica Hendry Nelson (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

9

Listening for the Sound Sejal Shah

I. Like all writers, I am a combination of where I grew up, what I read, and the languages I spoke. Like all writers, I am a mixture of who my parents are, how safe it is for me to walk at night, my brain chemistry, how vast the refuge was I found in books, the number of siblings I have or had, the number of times I listened to that song, the number of countries in which my parents grew up, the number of times you told me I got the job/award/prize because I don’t look like you, the number of ways I learned to duck and weave when he blocked the door. Like all of us, I am a product of how I learned formally and informally what was what—what counts, who counts, and to whom. I’ve always been drawn to writing that grows between genres, that blurs and straddles, extends and expands. I didn’t think of my writing as hybrid until I had to describe it to someone else. I don’t accept classifications and other people’s designations. I also don’t walk around thinking of myself as hyphenated.1 I’m just me. Some of us don’t fit in the lines someone else drew. My undergraduate creative writing honors thesis consisted of both poetry and short stories. My lines grew longer in graduate school—and line breaks began to feel arbitrary. In my debut essay collection This Is One Way to Dance, five of the twentythree essays were once stories. An opening poem and a closing poem—a kind of lyrical coda—bookended my essays. For the collection, I cannibalized parts of what had once been the nonfiction introduction to my MFA fiction thesis to find the sounds to open and close the book.2 Where did my stories go? Where did my poetry go? Even as I pivoted to nonfiction, these forms were still there, buried or sometimes not buried at all.3 In an essay on invisible disability not in my book,4 fiction appeared in indented sections. When I wrote about sexual harassment, diversity work, and mental illness, I used excerpts of my short stories to offer a counternarrative and voice—what the nonfiction narrator could not say in her essay. In nonfiction, I was recounting an event. In fiction, I could render a distressing scene without having to explain it. I looked for

 Listening for the Sound 59 places where the language needed a different pitch, for example, when I was describing mania: I wanted to return to the ocean, I wanted to get cooked. I wrote on the walls in charcoal because all of the other surfaces could move and then I wouldn’t find them. I might not find you.5

Short stories allowed me to say what I could not have said otherwise, at least at the time of writing. In the period in which I wrote those stories, I could not have written, as nonfiction, about the reality of being diagnosed with manic depression, adjusting to psychiatric meds, which had the severe side effects of aphasia and cognitive dampening: They said take this pill. This one or that one, two before sleep. Take four: in the morning or at night. It’s best to avoid alcohol. . . . These things, they said, happen sometimes. There is no relief.6

There is magic in fiction, in not having everything you write be attached directly to you or your history or your public face. In my stories, I draw from a wilder field, and I’m not worried about how something sounds, if it would make my public self cringe. If you grow up in a deeply private, traditional, Hindu, and religious family as I did, fiction and poetry offer a different code, a cover. I missed that cover when I tried to move to straight nonfiction.7 So why force it? Why choose? I want whatever form allows me to speak the deepest truth. II. We are formless, but to be published you have to choose a form. In making a book, I encountered how publishing enforces limitations and expectations on writers of color, particularly with regard to genre. My original manuscript for what became This Is One Way to Dance consisted of both essays and stories, but I did not label them. Many of the stories and essays had already been published in print journals or online. They had been vetted, polished, and edited. Several agents contacted me over the years, but almost no one wanted to represent my essay collection or my story collection. I later learned some editors who considered the hybrid manuscript read the stories as nonfiction. Because I wrote either in first or second person, because my narrators were women, because they were South Asian American, because I wrote about Rochester and Brooklyn and Amherst, the unspoken assumption was that I was writing about me. I published my book without an agent. I understand now that my own struggles were directly connected to structural issues in publishing. If you are a woman, if you are a writer of color, (mostly white) publishing can only imagine you in a certain box, in a narrative that makes sense to them. There’s a lack of imagination and perspective. There’s racism. At some point I got tired of readers assuming what happens in my

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stories actually happened. (If you need to know: I don’t have a sister who killed herself; I did grow up in Rochester; I never lived in Ithaca; I did not sleep with my professor. I write essays. If I’m calling it fiction, it’s for a reason. Fiction can include elements from a life and still be imagined.) Let’s consider two American writers, both named John. John Updike and John Edgar Wideman both draw from some autobiographical material in their novels, but the market and critics accepted and reviewed their work as fiction. And yet most publishers don’t know how to market, let alone read, work by a woman of color. Our work is seen as ethnographic, transcription, not crafted nor composite, not fiction. White publishing can’t imagine that we too can create, can make a story, can make believe. Can make money. Can be of value. They don’t believe some stories are worth advances, are worth the suspension of disbelief. III. In her essay “Genre and Genre Theory,” my graduate school classmate, poet, professor, and activist Dawn Lundy Martin describes the memory of writing a poem in response to the murder of Yusef Hawkins, a Black teenager murdered by a mob of white men in 1989. She says it was one of the first times she knew she might be a poet, describing the rightness of the form: “Poetry was the genre that allowed for a manipulation of language so that it could be stretched beyond its everyday capacity to accommodate horrific realities that make up human experience. It creates an illogic, an appropriate response to the rational narratives that attempted, with little success, to provide language for Yusef Hawkins’s murder.”8 Martin goes on to argue for leaning into this “illogic”: poetry’s capacity to stretch, its capacity to defy genre, to create space for the unruly: “If we cannot communicate across a genre ‘divide,’ then perhaps we cannot communicate across a race ‘divide.’”9 In other words, how we think about writing and genre has urgent implications in real life. Martin’s words on poetry in “Genre and Genre Theory”—her belief in a language that breaks genre—are a comfort in and of themselves, but more than that, I was struck by the range of her essay—how the form and content of the essay made the case for crossing boundaries. I saw Martin connect a young Black man killed in 1989 and the newspaper account of it and academia and unsafe neighborhoods and her position as the director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. I saw her write about power and get paid. I saw the academy implicated through language. I want to do that. I am already writing in this tradition of unsettling genre, of fashioning queer texts. Ultimately, I had to choose a classification for my first book. I chose nonfiction; I chose what granted me the most space: essays. Still, even as I claim a genre, I step outside it.10 It says “essays” on the cover of This Is One Way to Dance, but this word will always contain a more complicated truth—the history and movement and genre slippage and time woven into my text and its history, which I hope offers some kind of challenge to power, to the intent to classify, to discipline.

 Listening for the Sound 61 My book was published in 2020, during a global pandemic, mass protests and mourning, executions and terror, a reckoning—enough—during some movement toward what looks like change. Language fractures—is further fractured by others—in its attempt to be spoken. I understand the difficulty and the contortion. I am speaking anyway. IV. I read my work aloud when I am working on it, when I am revising. My husband read my book aloud when I was going through proofs. The sentences have to land; the words have to reach a certain frequency to ring—to sound true. I’m thinking of when you tune a violin11—the adjacent string needs to resonate at the right frequency. The dissonance of out-of-tuneness has to be set right through resonance. To be in tune means to be in synchrony; it means to hear your voice—it means to move. That is how I work when I am most true to myself. I don’t think about labels. I don’t care about what to call it, what it will be called. We are called. I listen for the sound.

Notes 1 I had a girlhood. It was American because I was in America. On Facebook I wrote a post in response to my work being described as “Indian-American”: “I don’t hate Indian [as a qualifier] and I do use it—I just hate the assumptions that writer = white and the rest of us need to have who we are qualified. There’s a writer and then a woman writer. Or a Black writer. Or an Indian American writer. Why not just say writer?” 2 I always go by sound, which engenders its own accidental hybrid forms. I think of voice-texting and autocorrect. For years if I said my husband’s name, “Raj,” the phone wrote down “Roger.” “Saris” became “sorrows.” By opening and closing sounds, I mean poems: in This Is One Way to Dance, these are a prologue, “Prelude,” and “Voice Texting with My Mother,” a lyrical coda. 3 I began to explore these questions of genre in the original version of this essay, “Breaking Genre,” which appeared in the Craft Capsule column in Poets & Writers (June 15, 2020). Thank you to Spencer Quong for his edits and shaping of the essay. Thanks also to Wendy Call, Abbey Frederick, Nora Maynard, Kirin Makker, and Holly Wren Spaulding for feedback on later drafts. 4 Sejal Shah, “Even If You Can’t See It: Invisible Disability & Neurodiversity,” Kenyon Review Online, January 2019, https://kenyonreview​.org​/kr​-online​-issue​/2019​-janfeb​/ selections​/sejal​-shah​-656342/.

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5 Sejal Shah, “Watch Over Me; Turn a Blind Eye” in “DSM Asian American Edition,” part of “Open In Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian-American Mental Health,” Asian-American Literary Review 7, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2016). 6 Sejal Shah, “Climate, Man, Vegetation,” Drunken Boat 13 (Winter 2010–2011), https://d7​.drunkenboat​.com​/db13​/2fic​/shah/. 7 In 2011, my friends, poets Philip W. White and Lisa Williams, told me they thought “Street Scene,” an essay in my book, first published in the Kenyon Review Online, could be called a lyric essay. I looked up the definition and agreed this rang true. 8 Dawn Lundy Martin, “Genre and Genre Theory,” The Poetry Foundation blog (Harriet), April 9, 2018, https://www​.poetryfoundation​.org​/harriet​-books​/2018​/04​/ genre​-and​-genre​-theory. 9 Ibid. 10 Poet Sarah Gambito and poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong helped me launch This Is One Way to Dance in 2020. During my virtual launch, they spoke about my book not only as being composed of essays, but also claimed and named the pieces as prose poems, as meditations. I didn’t think about why I asked them to join me in conversation and not fiction writers—in my academic career, I was a fiction writer through graduate school, visiting professorships, fellowships, as well as in my tenuretrack job. However, it was a relief to be legible to and claimed by poets, who were always my first tribe. 11 I’m grateful to Nadia Ghent, writer, friend, and violinist, for answering my questions and providing more accurate language for the process of tuning a violin—something I haven’t done since high school, but which left a lasting impression.

10

Split Tone Lee Martin

One of the things I’ve always valued about creative nonfiction is the fact that it refuses to be owned by any one special interest group. The poets don’t own it, the fiction writers don’t own it, the journalists don’t own it. The genre, so supple, resists any attempt to claim and tame it, to bend it to fit anyone’s more rigid notion of what it should be and how one should go about making it so. Sassy lad or miss that it is, it reinvents itself in response to the material that calls out for its container. Let’s begin with the word “sepia,” and how I thought I knew something about it and then found out there was more to know. Isn’t that always the way? More facts to gather. More knowledge to acquire. I’ve long known about sepia photographs—of course, known them, at least, when I’ve seen them—but I had no idea about the origin of the term or what happened in the dark room to achieve that sepia effect. Brown. That’s what I knew. Brown pictures. Not black and white but shades of brown. I had no idea that the word “sepia” had anything to do with the cuttlefish and the squid, that sepia is actually a secretion extracted from their ink sacs, that the chemically inert pigment is used as a drawing ink and a watercolor. I had to go looking for those facts. Which then made me curious about exactly how a sepia photograph comes to be. More research told me more than my nonscientific brain could process, but I think I understand correctly that sepia toning is the result of three stages of chemical baths: one to bleach the metallic silver of a print to silver halide, a second to wash away excess potassium ferricyanide, and a third to convert the silver halides to silver sulfide. Incomplete bleaching creates a multitoned image with sepia highlights and gray midtones and shadows. This is called split toning. It’s this term, “split toning,” that helps me think about texture and dramatic effect in creative nonfiction. I imagine that we all expect certain things of the genre depending on how we’ve defined and are willing to adjust our aesthetics, but I’m guessing we can all agree that the genre, no matter our individual aesthetic, demands some degree of allegiance to fact. We have, then, at the start an impulse centered in the importance of something factual that brings us to the page—a replication of event, a recreation of character, a meditation on the nature of this or that; a report, in other words, from some part of the known world, even if what’s known is known only in memory.

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But once we get to the page, something factual in tow, we’re faced with all sorts of choices for how to present the facts, how to use them, how to create an experience for readers that will depend not only on the reporting of fact but also on the stylistic presentation—the coloring and shading and texture, we might say—of what the writer has come to document. This is what excites me about the genre—this expectation that fact, so styled, will create an emotional experience for the reader. To look upon a color digital photograph, I’d suggest is one thing, particularly such a photograph taken by a photographer whose only intention is to document, not interpret or style via choices in lighting, perspective, etc., what he or she sees in what we used to call the viewfinder and now in our digital era, the LCD screen. To look upon a black-and-white photograph, printed from the same shot, even if the black and white is still merely representational, is quite another thing. The use of sepia tones creates yet another experience for the viewer, and for me the difference often lies in how my emotional response is “arranged” for me by the way the print uses depth and texture and shading to create something that the representational shot isn’t able to manage. So “split toning.” That’s what I admire in creative nonfiction, no matter whether we’re talking about the memoir, the personal essay, literary journalism, or any of the other major sub-forms of the genre. I admire the way the textures and shades of a piece can make me feel something. I like the way a piece of nonfiction can feel like a poem, a story, a novel. And this is the point where I begin to wonder whether we can take a fact in a piece of nonfiction and overlay it with any one of a number of techniques to achieve an artistic and emotional effect that the fact alone might not be able to convey. I could argue, for example, that lying, imagining, or subverting might pay off in any given piece. I was thinking about all of this lately when I was going through one of my own essays, “All Those Fathers That Night,” in preparation for a reading I was about to do.1 It’s an essay about parenthood, about fathers and sons, about the fact that I have no children and the fact that when my father first found out my mother was pregnant with me he asked the doctor, “Can you get rid of it?” But before all that, it’s an essay that comes from my obsession with a story from my hometown when I was a boy, a story that didn’t involve me in its facts. An alcoholic man, the father of six children, including a set of triplets, came by the barber shop one summer evening, and, when the barber told him that a state trooper had been in earlier asking about him, the man went into the alley between the post office and barber shop, broke the Pepsi bottle from which he’d been drinking, and used the jagged end to cut his throat. This suicide became a story, so rich in mystery, I couldn’t let it go. Eventually, I wrote this essay to try to explore the questions of why the man did what he did and also what it all had to do with me. My factual source for the essay was a childhood friend whose father was in the barber shop at the time of the suicide, was one of the men, as a matter of fact, who found the man in the alley. My friend, via his mother—his father is no longer living—was able to report many of the details to me, details I used to imagine the event. I make clear that I’m speculating by early on making reference to the fact that the story was one of those stories that gets told and told again in a small town until you start to feel like you were there—right there—at the time it happened.

 Split Tone 65 The one thing I couldn’t do, though, was claim any knowledge whatsoever about the man’s motivation. That was the one thing I didn’t know. “I don’t know why the law was looking for the drunk man,” I say toward the end of the essay. “I don’t know whether that was the reason he cut his throat.” Then I admit that, if I chose, I could get in touch with the barber and ask him questions. I could get in touch with the triplets and ask them questions. I could, you see, do more research, gather more facts. I confess that I have that option, and, then, despite what the creative nonfiction police might think, I turn my back on the time-honored base of the genre. I refuse to find the fact that’s waiting for me. I discard the representational in favor of something that is, to my way of thinking, more textured and expressive. “As long as I don’t know why the drunk man did what he did,” I write, “I can fit the story to my own—the story of an only child, born to a father, who may have come to love me, but at first was willing to let me go.” By overlaying the factual with the imagined and then refusing to do the research that could have privileged the former, I allowed the form to be expressive, not only of the event itself, but how that event cast a light into my own interior as connected to this issue of parenthood in general and fathers in particular. The story of the man, then, became necessary to what I had to explore about my own father and the fact that I’ve never been a father. If I knew the facts of why the man did what he did, you see, it might very well not have fit into my own story, might not have been expressive of that story, would have only been the reportage of facts, expressive of something else in their own right, but probably not the story that mattered to what I needed to say about the self. I needed to know less, not more, to be able to honor the purpose for writing. The refusal to find all the facts flies in the face of what many expect of creative nonfiction, but I’ll argue that this refusal made possible a more layered form, one where, through the techniques of fiction and poetry, three genres converse and come to bear on one another in a way that transcends hybridity—a term, by the way, that has its origins in biology: an offspring of two animals or plants of different races, breeds, varieties, species, or genera. An offspring. Exactly. Both part of (a hybrid) and separate from (a highly evolved form) that which gave it birth.

Note 1 Lee Martin, “All Those Fathers That Night,” Gulf Coast 22, no. 2 (2010): 33–42.

11

Lyrebirds in the Impasse David Carlin

A few years ago, I spent a week at Varuna Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, Australia, working on a book of hybrid nonfiction. One of the many treats Varuna offers writers is access to the nearby bushland. Before dinner one night, I took myself off for a long walk down into the forest near the house. The land in the Blue Mountains drops away from a huge plateau into deep dramatic valleys. One-hundredyear-old paths with steps and railings descend into the depths. I couldn’t help feeling, as I followed one, that I was entering quite suddenly another realm of being, a quieter, older place or else the inside of a cut-open brain. A few steps beyond the redbrick cottage kiosk, the bitumen of the tourist road, the cricket field, the picnic tables, the new curved metal safety railings that sweep around the corner, I was into a shady nether world, trickling here or there with water, like me, drawn irresistibly down, wanting to fall but be caught, splinter but reassemble in pools of glass, faraway, where the land bottoms out. A lyrebird surprised me. It was almost within reach, on a raised ledge to one side of the path. I stopped to watch it. It had no interest in me, or fear. Humans who walk these paths must pose no threat to lyrebirds, or so it seemed to believe. It was busy scratching at the soft thick bed of forest leaves, digging beneath for the sweet and succulent worms to be found there, stooping its head every now and then to gobble one. Its long tail feathers swung in the darkening air behind it. The lyrebird went about its victuals with an observable grace and dignity. It was both sovereign and subject. It knew things I would never know. It lived a life I could not imagine. But it was as if, just by its presence, it was holding me to account. For how many centuries, or thousands of years, have the ancestors of that lyrebird enjoyed this valley as their domain, as a place to stroll along the ridges to scratch at the leaves for lunch and dinner, a place to dance, mate, shake their tail feathers; generally, for better or worse, to live the life a lyrebird gets to live? In how many short years of scudding clouds met by an increasingly impatient sun will this valley no longer accommodate lyrebirds, because of some subtle amendment of the food chain or unsubtle black earth annihilation: a fire storm racing up from below as if from a fissure in the Earth’s crust? Incineration, plague, starvation—? * * *

 Lyrebirds in the Impasse 67 Thus, the impasse. The impasse is a dead end, a cul-de-sac: a space to induce anxiety, even panic. The book I was writing had reached a kind of impasse. There is nothing uncommon or special about this; it happens to writers all the time, but my body didn’t understand that. Shortly afterward my body failed me, and I was stopped in my tracks by the (misplaced) fear of life-threatening illness. At that point, forced to stop, admit weakness, confront failure, adjust to loss—to squirm within the impasse—I started to feel vertiginous shifts in perspective. My attachment to ordinary life, my job, my family, suddenly felt very fragile. Whatever had been solid, defining, and sure became liquid. I am an academic. We sometimes have the privilege to say: My job is to think but there’s no time to think. My job is to read but there’s no time to read. My job is to write but there’s no time to write.

Depression is perhaps the quintessential engine for feeling stuck, unable to move—in other words, in an impasse. In her book Depression: A Public Feeling, feminist critic Ann Cvetkovich seeks to move discussion of depression away from the conventional focus on individual psychology and medicalized, pharmaceutical interventions toward an understanding of it as a public feeling. By this she wants to suggest that depression flows among and through individuals not simply because they—we—stray from the baseline of happy normality, but because of the cruelty, violence, and associated stupidity of the way normality itself comes to be defined. For her, the personal is the public, and vice versa. As an academic, the thick substance of her own depression is threaded with the pressures of academic success and career-progression. As a scholar, she responds by writing and by thinking, using her usual critical tools. But in facing her own impasse, she finds herself writing chunks of memoir alongside the critical essay form with which she is more accustomed. As she says, “I turned to memoir in order to track what it’s like to move through the day.”1 In order to move again. * * * The next morning I tacked across the streets, sideways, as it were, toward the neighboring village of Leura. A shrub like a giant toffee apple beamed burnt orange in the first light of the sun through the trees. Sulfur-crested cockatoos sailed in the air, wings translucent. If not for their screeching, they might have been angels. This was the better part of town. Long quiet avenues, lawns walled with hedges of chopped camellias, their squareness studded with pink and white flowers like a prize fruitcake at the Katoomba Show. I stumbled upon the road I was looking for, the one that hemmed the tidiness of the town above the fraying cliffs. I jogged past a house, its roof covered in solar panels, and I resolved not for the first time to go home and cover our own roof with solar panels. Before I knew it, I had come upon a view of almost unimaginable beauty. The land in front of me was doing its dropping-away-to-nothing thing. The valley below was occupied with clouds, a flat blanket of them half touched by the sun.

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Across the other side floated a promontory nested with windows and patios. An older man was disappearing down a path in front of me, down toward the mist. It was all I could do to stop myself from following him. I wanted to be down there in those clouds but I knew that they would burn off as the sun grew higher and I would be inconsolably sad because every mist is temporary. Coming from Western Australia, a place of flat blue skies, I am drawn to landscapes that are both vertical and indistinct. Forests, glades: exotic, storied places. Meanwhile, at Echo Point the new promenade curved and bulged like a bicep proudly flexed above the endlessly recyclable vista. From this point in 1954, Queen Elizabeth looked upon the Jamison Valley, said a plaque buried in the concrete. The young queen looked upon it. To have a view so outrageously scenic that even the Queen of England was compelled to look upon it was clearly a matter of civic pride. What is to be done with views like this? I felt the glaring lack of a camera in my pocket. To not be photographing felt like to be risking none of this existing. And if I said that the valleys stretching away to the horizon were wreathed in mist, the language feels as paltry and manufactured as the postcards lined up eagerly at the windows of the Visitors’ Center. The place called upon me to stop. Not only were the clouds, in the valley below, blue and sometimes golden where the sun already struck them, as I’d sometimes seen clouds be from airplanes; another bank of mist was forming a kind of soft casing above the ridgeline of the plateau to the west. That was a whole other type of mist. Some of it was tumbling in slow motion like a waterfall over the edge of the plateau and down into the valley. I wanted the waterfall to grow stronger and stronger and I wanted the mist rolling off the top of the plateau to flow all the way down the green slopes of the forest and merge with the other mist. In fact I wanted very much for the valley to fill with mist like a bubble bath! But the mist was fighting a losing battle against the warm rays of the rising sun, and I knew I would have to turn my back and flee because I didn’t want to be there looking when all the mist had gone. The workday had started, for some at least, and a roadside beautification team prowled the wide footpaths with a two-stroke leaf blower, a whipper snipper, and a wide-mouthed mulcher on a trailer, making petrol noises. * * * What if the impasse is something useful? What if there was a theory about impasses? What if impasse could be defined along the following lines, as Lauren Berlant has done: Impasse: “a formal term for encountering the duration of the present, and a specific term for tracking the circulation of precariousness through diverse locales and bodies.” Got that? (I added the italics.) Berlant continues: “The concept of the present as impasse opens up different ways that the interruption of norms of the reproduction of life can be adapted to, felt out and lived. The impasse is a space of time lived without a narrative genre.”2 A space of time lived without a narrative genre. A writer-friend said to me about the book I was stuck on: it feels as if you are spinning the wheels. The story wasn’t going anywhere. But looked at like this an impasse, perversely, can be viewed as an opening of creative potential. It is a blockage in the ongoing, breathless flow of life in which

 Lyrebirds in the Impasse 69 we are otherwise consumed and consuming. It is a forced interruption to normal life within which, otherwise, we occupy ourselves by attaching to objects that won’t in the end lead to the emotional satisfaction we seek. (Objects, Berlant says, like: “a scouring love, obsessive appetites, working for a living, patriotism.”3 She calls this process of attachment “cruel optimism”!) In the impasse we encounter the duration of the present. We track what it is like to move through the day. * * * I was running late the next morning, literally. I woke up fizzy, full of ideas in the middle of the night. I read Paul Theroux who was on a train trip to a leper colony in Malawi. His language calmed me down enough to doze off. By the time I woke the sun had beaten me. I scrambled off in the same direction as yesterday, with a vague idea that I would like to step into that mist. The streets had people walking dogs and backing cars out of driveways and knocking on doors like they were extras in The Truman Show. I found the place on Cliff Drive where I had determined in advance to turn left instead of right, but after that, for a long time, things became confusing. I wanted to take a path down the Leura side of the Peninsula, a little way down into the forest. The sun was too high; today’s mist had receded already into the valleys as if somewhere around the corner a plug had been let out. The paths either didn’t have signs or had signs to places I didn’t know the whereabouts of so I didn’t know if they were places I wanted to be going. I wanted to go down but not too far down. It would take too long. I didn’t have time. I needed to get back at a reasonable hour to start work. I sank into the shade of the valley. At first the path was drier than my local path, down by Witches Leap and Ferber Steps. It was more like normal, not so special Australian bush. But soon enough, zigzagging down, the sound of water grew louder, water dripping and falling onto rocks and rushing out under dark overhangs. I began to feel that I was going to run or at least clamber quickly right down to the valley floor in the place called Leura Forest, from where I knew there was a path that skated the bottom of the cliffs all the way around to where the so-called Giant Steps led back to the surface at tourist central, Echo Point. I weighed up the pros and cons of this slightly extravagant idea. A sign said that such a trip would take two-and-a-half hours, but I knew that I could hurry. I was already feeling thirsty, with all of this running water to torment me. I was in a quasi-pristine rainforest, but I knew quite well that all of this jungly aquatic exuberance had travelled, just like me, and probably this very morning too, from the none too pristine streets above. Could I make it all the way to Echo Point without a drink? Surely, on a cool morning like this in autumn, that wasn’t stretching things too far? Perhaps I could have a little sip from one of the choice range of delectably sweet looking water features presenting themselves on all sides? The grand Cascades, where a monumental head of rock was showering, naked; or here, a lacy wall of fern dripped modesty; or here, a long looping white fire hose gushing down a cleft; or here, a balanced set of gracious falls and pools such as you might see crafted at Versailles. Just as I was crossing a particularly natural and

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attractive creek, on a sturdy metal bridge, and thinking that the risk of gastroenteritis later in the day was, perhaps, after all, quite negligible, and that, having washed down the hill this far, whatever toxins there were might have had the chance to leach away, and I could see myself cupping a hand into the stream and, oh my God, finally! drinking, I spotted a small white-colored pool in an eddy between rocks. I looked closer, hoping for a moment that it might be a wedge of melting ice. Was that too far from possible? But no, it was a little conglomerate of scum, come to warn me off drinking. By this time the thought of retreating, of retracing my already arduous route, was too bleak and desolate to contemplate. I hate retracing steps. I like loops and circuits. Doesn’t everyone? I resigned myself to short-term thirst and medium-term anxiety about how long the whole enterprise was going to take, knowing that in the long term I would never regret having persevered into the Leura Forest and up the Giant Steps. That was about the time the lyrebird appeared. There was no way, realistically, it could be the same lyrebird as before, on this other side of the mountain. No matter. There it was, scratching by the path for breakfast, its long claws like rakes stroking at the leaves. It had struck a rich vein of worms, evidently, in a space between two rocks. I waited only a few meters away while it alternately scratched, sank its head and gobbled. About it flitted a blither of small round birds like bouncing punctuation. I don’t know what to call them except small round birds. They were like the lyrebird’s familiars. After it had scratched open a seam of wet mulch, eaten what it could find and stepped ahead, these little birds would hop into the opportunities unearthed in its wake. It was as if the lyrebird was a giant industrial-scale excavator and these birds were gypsies, gleaners operating in the margins. I waited for the lyrebird to walk away or walk closer or take some sort of decisive action—I amused myself by wondering if it might approach me and rub itself against my calves like a domestic pussycat. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Eventually I concluded that I was going to have to leave the scene first, since my own breakfast was waiting at the house and my day of writing too. The lyrebird was seriously ignoring me. I took a few steps and came close enough to be able to admire its sleek plump body and its bunched-up fan of quills. The feathers on its breast and back gleamed olive with good health. I took my leave and as I walked away found myself thinking: the lyrebird has finished teaching me. I wasn’t sure what that meant. Only a few steps on around a corner, I once again heard that unmistakable scratching sound. Another lyrebird! And what’s that on the other side of the path? Another one! And over there, another! Three of them, almost surrounding me. The two on the downward side of the path were on the edge of what looked like a small volcano made among the leaves, digging in unison as if part of a stately pageant or some kind of surreal ritual. This was too much. This was like lyrebird performance art. I was in a gallery in a forest, an installation conceived and choreographed by lyrebirds. Things were pretty advanced, on this side of the mountain! The other lyrebirds needed to step things up. I hurried on toward the Giant Steps, visualizing a water bubbler at Echo Point, and thinking I almost couldn’t bear to come across any further lyrebirds. Luckily all I saw

 Lyrebirds in the Impasse 71 was one or two bright red and green parrots skimming above the historic tree ferns, looking, more than anything, CGIed. * * * Maggie Nelson speaks not of a division between memoir and critical essay but instead of “auto criticism,” aka “philosophically inclined body-smeared writing.”4 The place from which she writes is from where we all write, whether we think of it like that or not: the “body in time.” The hand that holds the pen or strikes the keys is warm. There is urgency to the writing borne of the knowledge that time is limited for each and every living body. Turn sideways in the impasse. Learn from what has been called “the queer art of failure.”5 Here, we might tentatively embrace the word “creativity,” shaking it clear of its usual baggage: “creativity can be thought of as a form of movement, movement that maneuvers the mind inside or around an impasse, even if that movement sometimes seems backward or like a form of retreat.”6 Here, too, we might discover, in the words of American anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, “ways of attending to the charged atmospheres of everyday life. How they accrue, endure, fade or snap. How they build as a refrain, literally scoring over the labor of living out whatever’s happening. How they constitute a compositional present, pushing circulating forces into form, texture and density so that they can be felt, imagined, brought to bear or just born.”7 The lyrebirds and I encountered each other by accident. They imposed themselves through their poise and quiet beauty but as far as symbolic valence goes they were offduty. They neither sang virtuosically nor danced. Lyrebirds are famous for their expert mimicry of other birds. Those that grow up captive to humans have been observed to mimic human noises such as power drills and saws. In Northern New South Wales a web of stories8 has grown around a lyrebird, which may or may not have been kept for some time as a pet by a local family, where it learnt to copy the music of a human flautist. This lyrebird passed on the distinctive flute-like melodies and tones it had learnt to generations of lyrebirds in the district. Or maybe people heard the lyrebirds’ uncanny flute-like music then put together the stories they felt were needed to explain it. In any case this wasn’t what happened between the lyrebirds and me that week at Varuna. The lyrebirds and I composed our scenes together, those moments we stopped each other in our tracks, and whatever we were repeating, were also changing, turning sideways. * * * Late afternoon. Sunlit clouds brought a brief gust of raindrops, like a foreshadowing. The clouds were coming in. A dramatic winter storm was forecast to last days, which sounded good: there might be snow. I went out and harvested some kindling for the evening fire, making provision. A few snowflakes blew past in the air, about as many as you could count on both hands. They could have been insects. It was as if the sky wanted to snow but had

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forgotten how, or perhaps snow was now severely rationed. The sun was out as well; everything was meteorologically confused. I had given up on wanting or expecting snow. These insect flurries were like a consolation being offered in recognition of my having achieved a higher plane of acceptance. Small things. Collecting flowers at the edge of a void. Doors opening and closing in the distance. The sound of an aircraft, like a lawnmower in the sky. The house, creaking. Unseen birds carouse.

Notes 1 Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 18. 2 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 199. 3 Ibid., 25. 4 Wayne Koestenbaum, “The Pleasure of the Text: Hervé Guibert’s Unbridled Eroticism,” Book Forum, June/July/August 2014. https://www​.bookforum​.com​/print​/2102​/herve​ -guibert​-s​-unbridled​-eroticism​-13298. 5 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 6 Cvetkovich, Depression, 21. 7 Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Rubric 1 (2010): 1. 8 Vicki Powys, Hollis Taylor, and Carol Probets, “A Little Flute Music: Mimicry, Memory, and Narrativity,” Environmental Humanities 3, no. 1 (2013): 43–70.

12

Headiness Karen Brennan

Boundaries & the thrill of violating them would not exist were it not for each tidy box of genre, complete with rules for the performance of each. Imagine a squarish container inside of which a little creature resides. & here is the creature creeping toward the lid & here is the creature pushing the lid open & sniffing the air. Other creatures, better behaved, remain inside their boxes, lids fastened. They do their thing. They never tire of their “thing” which they perform repeatedly & excellently. We shall leave them there. This creature, however, our little creature (or creation)—I think of it as a tiny, multiheaded serpent—with her curious nose, slithers out of her enclosure & what does she encounter? More enclosures, boxes inside of boxes? Or does she encounter the sky—as limit? There is a specific physical restlessness that motivates the genre-bender. We feel it in our muscles. As ennui. As torpor. A type of pain. Truly bent, as in perverse, she inclines herself—to fit there. Or flees. Thus what we call “hybrid” writing or writing that merges genres or steals a thing to use elsewhere with another (mixing & matching, collaging, assembling)—poetry with prose, fiction with nonfiction & all permutations in between & beyond, including literary criticism with poetry or history. Or nonfiction. Fiction with whatever we can imagine—science, cooking, carpentry, TV crime, photography, painting, jazz, gardening . . . & as for our Greek referents, forget the Centaur & the mermaid, lovely as they are, perfect as they may be for our present discussion. I would rather resurrect the Hydra, a slippery metaphor for the trouble we make, we hybriders—the water serpent with poisonous breath & many heads, like our tiny box-escaping replica above. For each decapitation Hydra grew two more heads, a proliferation of heads or headiness,

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which in any era—Greek or modern—is a threat. Also she was the guardian of the Underworld. Heady with power. The opposer, therefore, of order & state. A Dionysian force (to stick with the Greeks) chaotic, bacchanalian, we who bend genre are falling-down drunk, giddy with the freedom to do what we want. Suddenly. (Or deluded.) The monological law. One head per body type-of-thing. Or: genre as capital: rewarded for our obedient containment. One reward: safety. Another few: recognition, power. Think also of “queerness.” Early feminist theory word-play: genre & gender. Always a link to behavior, the norm, the status quo, conservatism. & so to venture away is to defy nature, for some— My own hybrid proclivities are maybe a form of ADHD. Just now, I ventured into nature—to my garden to check the yellow flower plant I planted yesterday. Too shallow. I unearthed it, scooped out two more shovelfuls, the edge of the shovel digging unpleasantly into my flip-flop, than replanted. Very pleased with myself. Meanwhile my coffee was boiling over in the Bialetti &— thinking also about today’s email which announces a rally in front of Bank of America to protest— —& remembering, because how can I not, groups of us for years congregating in the living room of my 3rd Avenue house in Salt Lake City back before I fancied it up, then sold it—there is Margot & Nicole & Pam & Jeff & Derek & Katherine &, further back, Wendy & Kate & Julie & Lynn & Matt & Shira— —& Rebecca & Steve & Matthew & Rae—to protest. We dragged in the chairs from the dining room, sat on pillows in front of the fireplace, sprawled on the rug. & there we routinely dismantled the icons of our trade: point of view, dramatic structure, character, voice . . . We made artists’ books, We threw images into our fiction. We threw fiction into our poems. We wrote fake nonfiction & true fiction & poetry sprinkled with prose & pictures & music & thinking . . . To be honest, it was they, not we. I looked on, amazed most of the time, that a smatter of simple suggestions could generate such riches. Such excitement. For how long had we been confined? It felt like forever. Virginia Woolf. “I is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being,” she writes in A Room of One’s Own, already interrogating that vexed lynchpin of patriarchal culture, identity.1 You in your place, me in mine, which is leftover Renaissance thinking

 Headiness 75 when we believed that the earth was the center of the universe all the way down to the divine right of kings & extending to our fathers presiding meanly over the dinner table. I am suggesting that at the root of the genre minder (nemesis of the bender) is an old-fashioned belief in entitlement. What better justification for Bank of America’s perfidious practices, the subtext being a fierce (& greedy) attachment to the status quo? Be yourself, they used to tell us, an instruction that always baffled me because who in the world might that be? I was a disappointment to my father who had a different kind of girl in mind. More glamorous, less rancorous. I hated high heels, forgot to brush my hair, couldn’t seem to keep my voice down. In my own living room I am quieter, fascinated. We are Creative Writing Course Number 701, Section 2, a creature with many heads. Some of us further out on a limb than others. How do you fashion yourself in relation to your culture? Region? History? (Myself, a former Catholic & so always inclined to break the rules. In boarding school I pranked—rang the forbidden bell in the tower & the nuns came scurrying out. Excited, oppositional, thrilled by the looks that saddled certain faces as a result of my aberrancies. You did what? Baffled, repelled. It was all very funny to me.) Problem: how to get at the depths, beyond the sly clutches of words & boxes of words assembled in orderly categories we call genre? How to avoid being caught & stunned in another doomed category? How to give shape to the wildness & still keep moving (changing) if only to honor the moving, changing momentum of the natural world? The thinking, breathing world, but also the world on top of that one—movies & shopping malls &— Just keep taking it all in, say the Zen masters. Be mindful of it all. Mostly we read for pleasure, in Roland Barthes’ sense.2 We get cozy, turn pages, disappear into a text as into another world. What’s wrong with that? The Text of Bliss, for Barthes, is a higher form of reading/writing. We struggle with such a text; it irritates us in its—what?—refusal to play by the rules. Refusal to let us disappear into that other world, forget ourselves . . . oh how we want to dream . . . We could argue that such a text is too real—hyper-mimetic. It keeps us in the here & now, no escape which the Zen master would approve of. (But, says me, suspicious of Any Dogma, in this case, is one lopped off head replaced by two others, doubly grimacing . . .?)

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76

(I am using my metaphors against each other or to be honest they have escaped their signifying containers, they are spilling over the edges—vehicle and tenor alike are intermingling, queering themselves silly . . .) Because I think sometimes with irritation why can’t we disappear into another comfortable world? My garden offers a similar irritation. Why can’t it just be itself without me? Lovely & lush as is the wont of any garden, my dreaming spot? The garden of our imaginations, the garden of our past books, the garden here & now, its lack of oomph, needing a little more yellow over there & some blue in a pot & a lacy froth of leaves pirouetting under the Mesquite; perhaps a fountain of prose to mingle with all that fragmented lyricism . . . why must I attend & attend? Here is Beverley Nichols, famous gardener, exquisite proser: I wish that Our Rose would divert her energy exclusively to the kitchen garden. I have never yet eaten asparagus from a pinholder, but I am willing to try.3

Guy Davenport, unearthing the complexities of the still life in Objects on a Table, an essay collection I adore & return to for inspiration, digs deep, reading through layers of appropriation, associations miraculously blooming from other associations, becoming strange & beautifully far-fetched, heads abounding, proliferating . . . On van Gogh: So the still life is a permutation of a theme, with variant and more literal symbols (as how not from a painter who reads the Goncourt, Zola, and de Maupassant?). We can go further and note than onion is the same word as union by etymology, and this holds in Dutch as in English. The onions, then, functioning as analogues of the redeeming pear, are also apple and pear together, subsuming all the objects in the painting into the one complex symbol.4

Or Coleridge, digressing from his discussion of “myriad-minded” Shakespeare: The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms.5

& Derrida chiming in: The “tower of Babel” does not figure merely the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing,

 Headiness 77 of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics.6

My garden in twilight is full of shadows. The Mesquite branches stretch darkly across an expanse of pebbles, flanked by a small mountain of bougainvillea, & the hibiscus I planted two days ago, already covered with the sexy mouths of orange blooms. Into this wild array I can throw anything—more verbena or a trowel planted upright & decorated with a green rubber hose. In my living room, the Living Room of my past, with the green walls, the Victorian fireplace (1896), the window overlooking snow or spring, a mimosa tree, either stark & ice-rimed or a-glow with tiny pink blossoms with fringed tails, more like insects than . . . In my living room we honor the fragmentary, the undogmatic, the revolutionary, each other including whatever we can whatever we want whatever is around like dinner on the fly . . . & so our tiny hydra, having sprung from her box, wanders aimlessly, exhibiting incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, two heads (or tongues or idioms) emerging to replace each one lost . . . inexhaustibility in all directions: inexhaustibly she beholds, she subsumes . . . she whose identity is always shifting, like our minds. & so the possibilities are endless, heady (she collages herself, she appropriates herself). But do we wish to encourage her to divert her energy to our kitchen garden? We do.

Notes 1 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Harcourt, 1929), 3. 2 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 3–5. 3 Beverley Nichols, Garden Open Today (New York: Dutton, 1963), 126. 4 Guy Davenport, “Apple and Pear,” in Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1998), 78. 5 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare (New York: Dutton, 1937), 47. 6 Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 246.

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What’s in Your Purse? Essays through the Eyes of a Character Actor Elena Passarello

If you asked me now, fifteen years and two-and-a-half books into this whole essay racket, which aspect of the job I least anticipated, I’d respond in a heartbeat that I never imagined how often I’d get asked to speak into microphones. More accurately, I never thought I’d stand before said microphones tasked not to read from my work but to explain the act of writing. In certain respects, I’m comfortable doing this, since I spent countless hours in front of audiences before writing became my main gig. But visiting colleges and conferences (and, more recently, Zoom meetings) specifically to discuss My Process remains weird because I still feel somewhat new to the form—a stowaway aboard the SS Literary Essay. In 2005, when I was pushing thirty, I quit a spotty acting career to pursue a nonfiction MFA. I had been working in theater for nearly a decade when the artistic director of a Shakespeare festival deemed me “too old for Juliet and too young for the nurse.” According to her, this post-ingenue dry spell probably would last a decadeplus, and then I could play mothers or spinsters or maybe coma victims. Around the same time, a film agent told me that if I wanted to break into TV, I had to either lose twenty pounds or gain thirty. All this led me to quit the life and seek refuge in the essay—an art form I’d had my eye on ever since my AP English teacher assigned “The Search for Marvin Gardens.” No longer at the mercy of a casting director, essayist-me would make all the decisions herself. Take that, Thespis! I swore. Let the record show that American theater survived just fine without me. Being invited to speak into microphones about The Writing Process when I myself have only a partial awareness of said process yields a lot of half-baked ideas, but one idea that I’ve kicked around seems more fully cooked, maybe even al dente. I suspect that a creative person’s method of making—be they painter, deejay, or mime—remains rooted in whatever art form they originally immersed themselves. Even if they spend the lion’s share of their life working in a wildly different medium, that original medium forever drives their process. I’ve been calling the phenomenon a person’s First Art Language, because like a language, it dictates cognition and the acquisition of new material throughout a

 What’s in Your Purse? 79 creative career. Though it is learned, the syntax of this first language registers on a cellular level. Like a lexicon, it permeates an artist’s reasoning and influences how they solve problems. This First Art Language is a paradigm through which any subsequent languages they learn are funneled. But since “First Art Language Theory” doesn’t yield nearly as catchy an acronym as “the First Language of Art Theory,” I usually refer to it that way: as FLAT. Musing into microphones about FLAT sparks lots of fun conversations, mostly with writers who began their creative lives in non-writerly mediums and who can spot those earlier practices in their essay-making methods today. One essayist who originally studied drawing described a visual approach to writing—both a dependency on imagery and a dogged attention to the look of a piece on the page. A trained clarinetistturned-essayist said she notices the disciplined practice of running musical phrases again and again in her meticulous editing process. A writer who was reared among rural craftspeople, like metal fabricators and bricoleurs, finds that his nonfiction is dictated by the availability of concrete information and logic: making artful use of what’s at hand. I think it’s worth noting that the essay form itself, with its malleability and Wild West expansiveness, is particularly welcoming to creative people like us who first cut our art teeth at other gigs. I often joke (into microphones and elsewhere) that my twentysomething life as a busy and collaborative performer was the direct opposite of a writer’s life. As an actor (or at least the kind of actor I was—one of scripted plays produced by Equity theaters), the terms of nearly every aspect of your job are dictated by other professionals. You’re given a script, a wardrobe, a pattern for movement and a castmate to swordfight with or kiss. Varying from these controls is not recommended; you need to stay where the mounted light can reach you, remain loyal to the text that the audiences expect and memorize the path of your sword so it safely whiffs past your coactor’s face. The only variable in that tight cage is your performance, and a skilled actor works with all the dictated limitations of a scripted role to showcase the roar of her own artistic beast. That’s the game, and it’s fabulous. I loved collaborating with dramaturgs and playwrights and musical directors and castmates, solving set problems as a community and finding ways to personalize my dictated role. That said, an actor’s creative platform is also deeply dependent on the imaginations of others, which can be limiting. Writing, of course, offers a counterweight freedom: no script, no competing aesthetic visions and no restraints of real-time or budget to uphold. Rather than listening to the ideas and needs of a cadre of artists, the writer sits alone in her room, staring at a blank Word document and endless possibilities. The decisions are 100 percent hers. What a vertigo between these two art forms! I often quip into microphones. What an extreme professional shift I made, am I right? But then I consider the essays I make: intensely researched and full of performative energy, usually carried by a voice or style that I’ve filched from some fascinating source, and rarely is the same voice employed twice from essay to essay. Or I might examine my methods—the path I take to develop an idea from its audition to its opening-night best. In both, I can clearly see my FLAT at work.

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For starters, I did not leave acting to write about fantastic and fictive new worlds; I enrolled in a nonfiction program. Shoving all the tired “truth-in-nonfiction” arguments aside, my essays fixate on the parameters of concrete realities and how facts—verifiable or not—are treated within them. I also don’t create a free-form lexical space for unrestricted lyric prose. Instead, I seek nonliterary forms to structure the inquiry’s language. Further, I limit myself to short pieces, enjoying that constraint, as well. And I rarely make nonfiction that meanders conversationally—that mimics unhindered speech or solely reports from places of self-directed thought. Rather, I find collaborators in sources (books, interviews, art museums, YouTube clips) with which I can be in conversation. All these elements—facts, structures, pop-culture sounds, and polyphony—are a reconstruction of the busy theater artists with whom I once surrounded myself. I’ve managed to get re-cast (by my own hand) as that same performer, beholden to the visions of a surrogate playwright, a director, or a costar. Here again is a cage in which I willingly place my impulses. Pushing against these constraints—enjoying their boundaries and finding opportunities to bend them until they almost, but don’t quite break—constitutes most of the essay game for me, just like when I was on stage. What’s more, I now see that I’m particularly drawn not just to essays, but to the essay collection as a form. For me, collections are a deliberate space for variation, wildness, and play. I connect my vision for collections to my specific FLAT: I was not just an actor, but a character actor in regional theater. In that line of work, every three months brings a new challenge of voice, posture, and language. For Pittsburgh’s 2004 theater season, a quartet of companies cast me as, respectively: a desperate housewife, a singing gun moll, a painfully shy coal miner’s daughter, and Rachel Carson. In the Iowa Summer Repertory’s 2008 season, I played a lovesick cop in a zany family comedy for half the week, and on the remaining nights and matinees, I played sextuplets in a farce about Niagara Falls. Where leading men and ladies like Jimmy Stewart or Cher bring a relatively uniform voice and personality to every role, character actors like Sarah Paulson or LaKeith Stanfield (or my FLAT self) disappear into supporting roles, with only scant characteristics of one performance overlapping with the next. A “character woman,” even one with public notoriety, might erase her identifying traits in the service of each job. She also must present a vivid character in about one-fifth the stage time that a lead actor is given. And when she is good, she makes a whole person in that smaller performance space. The best compliment to pay a character woman who steals the show? “The minute she walked onstage, you knew exactly what she carried in her purse.” Through the lens of my FLAT, I see the ways I’ve treated the essay collection like a season of character roles, each with its own identity. I love binding disparate approaches next to one another in the same book, mirroring a busy character actor’s motley resume. My second collection stacks a journalistic piece, an oral history, a language experiment and a personal narrative—one after the other. The “dramaturgical” elements inherent to each short project help me understand exactly who the essay needs to be. If made effectively, the identity of a “character essay” becomes known to the reader lickety-split.

 What’s in Your Purse? 81 Shortly after its entrance in the book, you have a decent idea what the essay carries in its purse. But soon, of course, the collection has moved on, hopefully creating an excitement for what’s to come in the essayist’s next role. This framework might challenge a more widely understood contemporary aesthetic to expect consistency from the essay collection. But maybe there’s more to consistency than topic, a smooth narrative voice, or a formal continuity. It’s fun to spot a favorite performer beneath various wigs and lights and concepts, and a skilled thespian still shines from within the constraints of her role. Think of Sarah Paulson’s identifiable spark, which links her myriad characters across the American Horror Story franchise: Nelly Bly-esque reporter, 1970s Punk Rock ghost, conjoined twins with warring personalities. Something other than Paulson’s appearance and voice holds these roles together, and I learn more about her as an artist with each new woman she plays. I believe my FLAT taught me to demand this kinetic fun from the essay collection first and foremost, more than any other essayistic or nonfictional property. In the same way that a character actor’s feats of shape-shifting can unify her performances, the essaying mind—the ways inquiry buzzes within the set limitations of each expression— can be what unifies a book of essays, rather than one narrative persona taking the lead. But such portrayal adds a level of occlusion rarely associated with contemporary essaying (though it certainly factors into work I love by Svetlana Alexievich, Kerry Howley, and others). Arguably, the most visible books labeled “essays”—those most likely to be shelved in airports or at the houses of folks who don’t pore over Bending Genre—are the personal essays of known entities: Tina Fey, Caitlin Moran, Jenny Lawson. Readers have already connected with these women’s personae, and their essays offer extensions of it, usually while depicting lived experiences. David Sedaris wasn’t a widely known personality before Naked debuted in 1998, but a similar transaction has attached to his work over the past twenty-five years. And wonderful literary essayists like Zadie Smith or, reaching back toward our forefathers, William Hazlitt also work with known and consistent narrative personae. Of course, personal essayists like Fey, Sedaris, and Hazlitt portray characters in their writing as well, but I’d argue that they use a singular character. Perhaps they are the leading ladies and men of the essay form, adopting the same persona season after season. Many film actors work in similar ways, connecting the roles they inhabit to the public perception of them; see Walter Matthau’s late career, for example. Others maintain a fused character-as-self persona no matter the role they play, which can lead to a disingenuousness that’s ripe for impersonation: Jack Nicholson’s later career comes to mind. The singular persona narrative tradition within our genre might be what has led more than a few well-meaning classmates and editors to ask the same question of my work: where is the you in this essay, Elena? I first heard it midway through my MFA. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I’d been fumbling through prototypes of the essays I make now—first diving into researched material, spazzing out over the facts, and building a role to play with whatever I uncovered. I was submitting drafts of wild essays about birdsong and the Castrati, and these first readers wondered how I might better

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announce myself in such discussions of brood parasites and gelded eighteenth-century opera stars. “How can I know where you stand if you don’t explain how this relates to your life?” an editor once asked of my birdsong piece. “What drew you to the subject? Why not add in a paragraph or two that tells us that story?” The validity of these questions lies in their demand for an essay to have stakes— stakes that deeply connect to a writer’s motivation. The same goes for theater: we must see that the actor cares about being Hamlet in order to believe her Hamlet, just as we must understand what the stakes are for Hamlet himself from scene to scene. But an actor must cache her personal stakes into those of the character, or at least the world of the production. It would have never crossed my mind when I played Rachel Carson to take a minute of stage time and display my individual investment in her story; the “me” had to hide inside the performance itself. We see the artist in the way that she is the character, not in how she overtly attaches herself to the act of portraying them. Only her act of making can show us her perspective, her investment. Maybe it’s because I started late, already sullied by theater, but I never mastered the art of using personal content as creative vehicle. Countless essayists have mastered it, though, and now many readers understand this to be an essay’s defining feature (it’s either that or—heaven forfend—“the truth”). But even though I think no art form suits me better than the essay, I see scant creative possibility in myself as a persona. I can’t get the events of my life, or my identity within a narrative, to do much. I think the contents of my own purse—as I can conjure them, at least—hold even the most middling interest. From my perspective, only abstract things are inside it: curiosity and a mercurial love of the world. Oh, and volume. My purse definitely contains lots of unchecked screaming. This is probably what led me to acting in the first place. Onstage, I could be loud, scripted and de-personalized—jackpot! How freeing to obscure my own cognition in the vivid personalities and plots of others. And then, when I later transferred to nonfiction, what actually lured me had nothing to do with self; it was the wildness of essay form. I saw in McPhee and Cha and Weinberger and Yourcenar the same opportunities for research or play that I relished as an actor. But that trajectory meant that I never plugged into the self as the essay’s driving mechanism. Of course, this isn’t to say that my essays aren’t personal—even though I rarely show up in them as a person. I’ll bet my next paycheck that no writer’s craft essay has ever done what mine is about to do, and that’s quote Val Kilmer. In the bombastic, but undeniably skilled actor’s memoir, Kilmer describes portrayal as both escapism and self-discovery. “I was and was not the character I played,” he says. “The character went through me, and therefore was me, even as I went through the character and became him. Pieces of me and pieces of him merged.” Kilmer calls this phenomenon a “process of leaving myself to find a character who inevitably contained elements of myself.”1 I see so much of both my FLAT life and my essay life in that quote. Rather than becoming someone else (sorry, Method actors), portraying a character lets you consider yourself from inside them. I once worked through a heartbreak while playing Andromache, and I often fought with my mother by using several great mother figures

 What’s in Your Purse? 83 from theater history as proxies. Turning an essay into a role, while also refusing to present myself as an experiential identity on the page, offers similar opportunities. There was no “me” in the essay about birdsong, for example, but studying the behavioral traits of always-abandoned cuckoo chicks allowed me to upload the anxieties of being a fatherless kid into the essay’s veiled sentences. There was no “me” in that Castrati piece, but I used it to consider the ways my performing body willingly engaged in self-harm, and also what it meant to put my body before an audience who felt free to sexualize it. When I wanted to write about my relationship with my long-suffering partner, the essay I completed mentioned neither of us. Instead, I researched the Wolf of Gubbio myth and wondered if any human was ever capable of understanding St. Francis’s capacity for love. And while I’ve never written about the depression that I’ve experienced throughout adulthood, I have parsed out its consequences in an essay that links internet cat videos with Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno. In other words, if each of my essays is a character, and if each character carries a purse, then the contents that are tucked inside each and every one of those essays’ purses is me.

Note 1 Val Kilmer, I’m Your Huckleberry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 34–5.

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Propositions; Invocations: Inventions Mary Cappello

I. Definitional Terrain: Theory A Bestiary There’s a difference between cultivating a sensibility and leaving a creative writing workshop with a bag of tricks. If we only have time for short bursts, I grant you this box of pebbles. You may: (1) throw them like dice; (2) perform a shell game with them; (3) worry one in particular and see what it conjures; (4) line them up and create a Zen garden from them, with or without a water feature. On good days, I think of creative nonfiction as a vehicle for what object relations theorists call “the unthought known,” or as an egress from or easement into what Noam Chomsky calls the unspoken framework for thinkable thought. I write creative nonfiction because while many may ask how I’m feeling, no one asks how I’m thinking. Creative nonfiction releases language from its vehicular, indexical, instrumental, referential mode. It takes nothing for granted and may be the most “meta-” of all nonfiction forms. Creative nonfiction invents its reader, for anything worth writing is written for the audience that does not yet exist. Creative nonfiction exceeds training and its regulatory paths, its bracing wheels. It gives back, and it surpasses; it outstrips what you were taught; it ventures the harder thing, knowing all the while, it could fail. It approaches its subject as an enigma that it hopes to realize rather than to solve.

 Propositions; Invocations: Inventions 85 Give us this day our daily genre: a shift in life should incite a shift in practice. Try eating dinner followed by breakfast, and then, at day’s end, lunch. Creative nonfiction appreciates the power of prepositions. Instead of writing about, as in, “what is your book about?” it writes from. Or nearby, toward, under, around, through, and so on. Rather than mean, it does. It animates. A process and a set of relations more than any Thing. I wrote a book from breast cancer. I wrote an essay against the sublime. Writing about supposes that writers merely supply adjectives to life understood as noun (or predetermined, waiting in the wings, Thing). But we know that literature is of the world and creates its own worlds; performs more than reflects; moves. Creative nonfiction is anything but mimetic. Creative nonfiction wants to put forms of wandering, exploration, and play back into the plodding unfolding of each day and of each form, of each life. The operative distinctions are “transform” rather than “transcribe,” and “apposite” rather than “opposite.” Creative nonfiction remakes rather than reports. Like poetry, it relies on novel appositions that make exquisite demands: opposition cancels, apposition makes apparent; opposition negates, apposition fosters and opens. Why not call it poetry then? Because of the way it enjoins and calls upon a witness, but also an interloper, and eavesdropper: placing oneself where one is not supposed to be. Start simply by identifying key words and see where they lead: “adjudicate”—a legal word. What might the Law have to do with genre? “Code”—a relative of “codify” and “codex” (an early type of book), or, a safe in need of cracking. “Mark of belonging”: who knew that genre cared about insides and outsides, outlaws and in-laws, securities and insecurities. “Classificatory vertigines”—I don’t recognize this last word any more than you do, but I love how it takes an adjective (“vertiginous”) and makes the idea of genre into a dizzying, newly coined, noun. Genre: a container. Genre: an abyss, into which we must abandon hope if we dare enter it. The words appear in “The Law of Genre” by Jacques Derrida, and all I’m doing is playing in its fields rather than treat “theory” as a bugbear best avoided.1 “Literary hybrid” does not really do justice to creative nonfiction, though I’m as likely as the next person to fall back on such a phrase. Does creative nonfiction really mix forms and genres, or does it move between forms, investigate interstices, eke out formal un-intelligibilities? The word “hybrid” usually conjures the unthreatening beauty of a prize-winning rose. One that doesn’t quake or quiver in the wind (a literary cyborg?). It’s not an “Oh rose thou art sick” type of rose: no room for sick forms—but only reparative ones. It fails to accommodate creative nonfiction’s manipulations of time and tone (its music or rhythms); its shift of vantage point (its purposeful attention to a margin rather than a center); its testing of a limit and willingness to spill (a sax played beyond the instrument). On the other hand, hybrid could suggest a politics if we let it.

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Hybrid: the new form made possible when areas of thought and of experience sequestered in life are allowed to share a space in art. Hybrid: a broaching of impurity that results in something exquisite.

An Argument The best thing “creative nonfiction” did as a category was to incite a definitional crisis around the genre of nonfiction; the worst thing it did was to extract that quality that is essential to our being alive—“creative”—and use it as an empty signifier. “Creative” as a descriptor almost always promulgates a falsehood: that some people are creative and others not; that some acts are creative and others not. Excising an implicit characteristic of life from life and then using it as an adjective renders the life grotesque. It’s for this reason that I prefer the phrase “Literary Nonfiction” to “Creative Nonfiction,” though each category is differently problematic, and both can be proved to be equally useless. (For yet another critique of writing produced under the aegis of “creativity,” see Kenneth Goldsmith’s provocative collection of essays, Uncreative Writing.2) What would happen if we dispensed both with “creative nonfiction” and “literary nonfiction,” and instead gave each new instantiation of our nonfictive forays the name most suited to the terms of its experimentation? Mnemic collage. Detour. “Ritual in Transfigured Time.” Cabinet of Curiosity.

II. For the Love of It: Practice Lessons At the end of the first day of an undergraduate class that was an “Introduction to the Major” (English), a student came up to me and said: “I know I’m going to love this class because you think a lot like me. You think ‘outside the box.’” I had to explain to him that he would not do well in the class if he was interested in “thinking outside the box”; nor was I interested in “thinking outside the box,” a phrase I find utterly meaningless. Of course, I could also have said, if we think alike, doesn’t that contradict our thinking outside the box? What we’d be doing this semester, I explained, was attempting to— lovingly, assiduously—describe the contours of the box; to get to know the box; to find a language for the box so that we might, in the course, not of a semester, but of a lifetime, find a way to remake the box, or create a box inside the box. Liberal Humanism has given boxes a bad name, hoping to set our sights on that flailingly empty outside-thebox place of false freedom all the while maintaining the box as producer of meanings we never learned to author. Translating an imperative into an endlessly unfolding version of itself can allow student writers to get a feel for time, space, discourse, and tone. Like playing scales at different tempos, a student of creative nonfiction can practice reorienting sentences in

 Propositions; Invocations: Inventions 87 this way and, thus, become cognizant of writing as compositional range. Here are three examples of what I mean: “Eat a gummy bear.”/Draw a morsel of rubbery sugar molded in the form of a miniaturized Pooh species to your mouth and deposit accordingly so as to enable swallowing. “Sew the button on.”/Bring the plastic disk shaped like a pie and perforated to the face of cloth while drawing cotton laced through a needle into and out of each perforation. “Tell me something nice.”/Bring your lips together while pushing sound through them from the box lodged in your throat in order to articulate and transmit a rosy sentiment full of cheer and maybe praise as to what makes me lovable.

Assignments are only worthwhile if they can help make a student of this genre feel she is being sent on a type of Mission Impossible. Otherwise, I prefer to give my students “incitements.” Getting a feel for the octaves and keys inside of sentences is one thing; learning to experiment with form is another. Francis Picabia was pursing the “problem of the vibrant line.” Gertrude Stein was in the habit of improvising on the white keys only, in the evenings. Photographer Sophie Calle, feeling lost in her own city of Paris, began following people and photographing aspects of their points of arrival. She also took a job as a maid in a hotel, eavesdropped on tenants and later photographed their belongings. Glenn Gould used to sit in busy cafes and listen, not to what people were saying, but to the collective cadences that he heard in the sea of voices there, then compose a piece of music out of this. I ask my students to devise an experiment that they spend at least two weeks carrying out before translating their results into a piece of writing. But this is just one of many ways in which we interpret and pursue “experiments” and “the experimental” in the course of a semester. We do a lot of thinking together about what exactly would be entailed in inventing a form (rather than treating form as arbitrary or writing in a formal void); reappropriating a form; and, plumbing the depths of an antiquated, forgotten or lost form. Once when I was asked to become a blogger for a website devoted to all things Italian, I invited people to theorize, compose, and invent short forms with me instead. I thought I’d counter the logorrhea of the digital age with a literary short form called “cicchetti,” which are late afternoon snacks imbibed with prosecco served in tiny glasses called “ombre” (clouds) in parts of Northern Italy. Literary cicchetti would be intimate, for the moment. They’d be unnamed pleasures or flights of fancy. Neither meals in themselves, nor preludes to a meal, cicchetti would have something anticipatory about them and yet not be equivalent to antipasto. Needing nothing more or less, pitched to receive the divinations that spring from a break in the day, cicchetti would be longer and mellower than coffee breaks. Cicchetti: relative to Italian traditions of sleeping or at least drowsing, resting, meditating, or having sex after noon, the time at which people in other parts of the world and in other cultures are drinking tea, ingesting stimulants, and hoping to wake themselves up.

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Snacks have political dimensions, and why not?—they are the stuff meant to meet the unmet needs of regularly imbibed meals, but their very existence bespeaks degrees of bourgeois comfort and excess. One cicchetti collaborator, Mikhail Epstein, helped me to think about this since his own work with the (collective) short form was the effect of material conditions and an expediency. In 1980s Moscow, he had cofounded the Laboratory of Contemporary Culture, a group of thinkers from a range of disciplines who met in order to produce improvisations on the trivia of everyday life. Time was of the essence and so was the production of a counterdiscourse, so they wrote all together on the spot on topics they agreed upon then and there for 1 hour. The idea, in Epstein’s words, was to produce “a metaphysical assault on everyday things,” and from the short pieces that emerged to produce microencyclopediae of the quotidian, the mundane, and the daily. Improvisers were also invited to “become specialists in alternative, virtual or non-existent disciplines.”3 Epstein continued this tradition after emigrating to the United States but with much less frequency and intensity. Context is everything, and there is no form without an attendant politics even if its conditions of possibility are not apparent at the time. This is why I suggest we start out at least with a degree of compositional self-consciousness. At the height of the AIDS crisis, I was moved to create a two-part invention in prose, or what I called a “discursive double portrait.” Though the phrase may sound heady and abstract, it aims to unlock sentience and presence. Discursive autobiography requires that my students and I begin by studying the difference between language and discourse— that is, discourse is plural and relational; language is singular. Discourse allows for a panoply of linguistic effects over and against mere representation. Discourse makes subjects of us all; language teases us into believing that the “I” in our sentences and our selves are self-same. Discourse implicates our relationship to language in a whole host of practices, institutions, and systems of power; language enjoys a purity apart, untouched by the systems it maintains and supports. I can attach nearly any adjective to discourse and find language working in particular ways therein: try, literary; racist; popular; familial; nationalist; communal; cancer; or, Facebook for starters. To compose discursively requires that we turn in the direction of the discourses that have made us who we are rather than start from a place of what we think “happened” to us in the course of our lives. Rather than start with unmediated experience, the charge is to identify any number of discourses that shaped us but that have gone untapped, from prayers and recipes to parental injunctions; from refrains in storybooks to AA mottoes; from birth certificates to tests, from drills and songs to pledges of allegiance. My own discursive experiment was an attempt to write a Three Lives for the contemporary moment, and I started by studying other triptychs by queer writers following Gertrude Stein, like Hilton Als (The Women) and David Plante (Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three). I wanted to make a portrait of a gay friend of mine who was HIV-positive, but I also hoped to write a portrait of our friendship. My choices weren’t arbitrary: for one thing, in an age beset by loss, I didn’t want to lose my friend to the forms that were available for telling our lives at the time: to the vortex of

 Propositions; Invocations: Inventions 89 sentimentality, the flat trap of obituary, the stationary enclosure of eulogy. I sought to write a living history rather than an elegy to the dying or the dead. I was also moved by philosopher Michel Foucault’s formulation about the bases of homophobia in “Friendship as a Way of Life.”4 People’s hatred of queers wasn’t a response to what they perceived as aberrant sexual acts, he explained, but a reflex against the threat that homosexuality produces new forms of friendship, makes new forms of love possible, even restructures the meaning of kinship. What form could I invent that could be true to the dimensions of a friendship between a gay man and a lesbian? Coincidence and available prescience always helps me along, and in the course of my writing, I found myself within earshot of one of Bach’s famous “two-part inventions.” The call and response of the piano’s left hand and right, the meetings, cross-hatchings, and simultaneous individuating vectors that make the two-part invention so mobile and beautiful seemed perfect for the double portrait I hoped to create. Could language do what this music for piano was capable of? That was my charge. I made a collage of appositional discourses in which my friend and I figured: for example, leading phrases like “he dreamt,” “she dreamt,” “he believes,” “she believes,” or imagined personal ads suitable to each of us, and I held these traces together with a separate ribbon that ran like both an interruptive and returning through-line made up of the sights I had glimpsed through a train window on one of many train rides from Providence to New York. The two-part invention delivered the possibility of a conversational form; in lieu of a unidirectional portrait—from painter to painted—creative nonfiction offered the possibility of synchronous subjectivities, together and apart: discourses of the self in dialogue, meeting points where those selves coalesced, and linguistic fault lines where they disassembled.5 Yet, creative nonfiction didn’t exist in my mind as a category when I wrote my discursive double portrait, my two-part invention in prose, and to call it that now seems to retrofit and tame. Over the years, my students have invented forms they’ve called columbaria and lagniappe, indexes, and figments, tulip forms, phalansteries (following Roland Barthes), blackouts, and studies. If you’re in search of models for reinhabiting otherwise exhausted forms, try turning to Emily Dickinson for what she does with the letter, or James Schuyler and the diary, or experimental filmmaker Martin Arnold and the Hollywood melodrama, or Bill Cunningham and the fashion column: in every case, the artist reappropriates a form. But they don’t call what they’re doing creative nonfiction. I once arranged for my students and me to enjoy a special viewing of a Joseph Cornell box owned by the Rhode Island School of Design in the hope that Cornell could help us to theorize and then put into practice the idea of our writing as a plastic art (language-as-material); of the box as liberating form (if an essay is a box, what kind of box would one have it be?); and of objects as auratic bearers of memory or, because of their placement and juxtaposition inside a carefully delineated fascinational field, playful odes to the most ponderous metaphysics. Similarly audacious nonfiction forms are available daily if we care to look for them. Today, Rosamond Purcell’s Special Cases in which she writes: “This book honors the form of a slide show or an exhibition organized around associative clusters of phenomena, yielding at all times to

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gravitational attraction.”6 Tomorrow, Roland Barthes, who in his book Roland Barthes writes of disparate objects brought into view by contiguity. He describes his book as “not monumental” but as “a proposition which each will come to saturate as he likes, as he can.”7 He offers a curious image for how he expects the work to act upon a reader: “I bestow upon you a certain semantic substance to run through like a ferret.”8 In another book that pertains, in particular, to biography but that is not conventionally biographical, his strange and beautiful triptych (his own Three Lives?), Sade/Fourier/Loyola, he introduces what he calls a “biographeme.” It appears in the opening pages: “were I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say: to ‘biographemes’ whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion.”9 He closes with “Sade’s white muff, Fourier’s flowerpots, Ignatius’s Spanish eyes.”10 What would constitute your own life’s biographemes, or those of someone you love, or would love to write about?

1. Identify the absent interlocutor ever lurking in your prose, immanent in every

conversation, and write instead to someone else. 2. Gather together an uncommon archive made of home movies and Wittgenstein, your aunt’s rosary beads and father’s garden logs, the nubbly surface of memory’s grain, the Pocketbooks that shaped your early adolescence alongside a forgotten literary theorist of your choice. Incorporate a musical soundtrack as interlocutionary base and space, then write from there. 3. Ask the question no one is asking about earthquakes in Haiti or grand theft on Wall Street. Use a shift of prepositions and a counterintuitive juxtaposition to get you there. 4. If you fear that the internet flattens difference and dulls discerning faculties, identify fine distinctions and essay from there: start with “sleep” and “slumber.” 5. Rather than describe improvisatory writing as “digressive,” find the word for what it more precisely does, as in, inaugurates, celebrates, and busts; synchs, surfs, and dignifies; rushes, breaks, and breathes. All these opportunities for reinvention can happen under the aegis of creative nonfiction, but there remains the question of what’s at stake in gathering together these practices in its name. There is no writing without genre, of that we can be sure; no compositional practice that is genre-free. No grouping of words on a page that doesn’t emerge in some way or other from inside a preexisting envelope. It is only when institutional (and market) pressures make genre cave in rather than open that the whole enterprise makes me melancholy. Then, rivalries between otherwise entwined entities spring up from the need to compete for ever-dwindling resources. At my own institution, a new administration has introduced seemingly new discourses into the “mission” of what we’re supposed to provide our students, “experiential learning” and an emphasis on the

 Propositions; Invocations: Inventions 91 practical among them. Perhaps in an effort to show their allegiance to this plan, and in the process, distinguish themselves from “creative writing,” the Writing and Rhetoric program has adopted the motto: “Writing & Rhetoric is writing that gets things done; it is writing with consequences.” I can’t help but picture writing as a vacuum cleaner, Swiffer, or managerial means to an orderly end. One kind of writing cleans things up; another kind of writing (creative nonfiction) makes a mess of things. Imagine majoring in that. One kind of writing does. Another kind of writing un-does. Staking claims, each program agrees in the name of genre to territorialize the imagination, and so, to vanquish it. Thematizing not just aesthetic but institutional challenges, creative nonfiction requires its practitioners to work simultaneously inside a discipline and athwart it. Because it can’t be boiled down, it lends itself to lively theorizing, myriad types of practice, and invention. Creative nonfiction doesn’t add up, it doesn’t amount to much, it doesn’t count (in more than one sense of that word). This is one reason why it is so difficult to give an account of it. And, if, at the end of the day in which breakfast is ordered in place of lunch, if, at the end of a journey through a maze, we conclude that “we’ve gotten nothing done” and arrived nowhere, so be it. We needn’t rely on an Audenesque truism as retort to our genre’s refusal to get things done—“creative nonfiction makes nothing happen”—because we know this isn’t true. All writing is consequential, especially if by consequence we mean that something or someone is changed in its process; if, through it, our characteristic modes of perception and discourse are transformed. Creative nonfiction is without consequence only in this sense: insofar as it relies less on sequence than on synchrony, creative nonfiction is a genre sans-sequence. It’s the genre sans-sequence par excellence. It’s at its best when it stops counting, even though the desire to make it count might be one of the reasons it needed, in the first place, to be named.

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7 (Autumn 1980): 55–81. 2 Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 3 Mikhail Epstein, Emory Improvisations Home Page, Emory University, www​.emory​ .edu​/INTELNET​/impro​_home​.html. 4 Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 308–12. 5 Mary Cappello, “The Trees Are Aflame (A Two-Part Invention in Prose),” American Letters & Commentary 16 (2004): 98–107. 6 Rosamond Purcell, Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters (New York: Chronicle Books, 1997), 7.

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7 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 174–5. 8 Ibid., 175. 9 Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (1976; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 9. 10 Ibid.

Part II

Structures Hermit crabs and Harvard outlines. Sestinas and spiders’ webs. Computer games and encyclopedias and maps. Essays like to dress up as other things. We often tell our students that nonfiction has the fewest rules, but that kind of freedom can lead to unwieldy, amorphous masses of flung-out language. The most creative of the nonfiction writers look for ways to organize the amorphous, to upend received, traditional forms and fit them to their own purposes. Like the drag queen or the hermit crab, we borrow our shapes and shells to find a space our bodies fit.

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On Scaffolding, Hermit Crabs, and the Real False Document Margot Singer

There are surely as many different kinds of writers as there are personalities. There are the planners and the improvisers; there are the outline writers and there are those who plunge forward in blind faith without a plan. Most craft guides advise writers to get their ideas out onto the page as quickly as possible and mop up later. I am not that kind of writer. I am controlling, anxious, meticulous, and slow. I like to build on a firm foundation. I get unnerved by the ambiguity of a wordy mess. Back in high school and college, dutifully following Miss Post’s instructions from seventh grade, I never set forth on a writing assignment without an outline. From detailed notes, I’d create an even more detailed outline, from which I’d squeeze out one slow final draft. Of course, those were the days of index cards and legal pads and typewriters, so revising was laborious. I never revised. I loved the feeling of security I got from outlines. I liked the Roman numerals, the tidy hierarchy of indentations, the progression of capital and lower-case letters, the numbered lists. I’ve come to see that I did much of the early work of exploring my material during all those hours when I thought I was just taking notes or staring aimlessly at the typewriter keys or biting off my nails. I understood, even then, that it was important to stay flexible, to be open to changing things around if and when the outline failed, but in my memory, at least, it never did. I gave up outlines many years ago, and although I’m still a slow and tidy writer, I’ve learned that structure is best discovered in the process of drafting and revision, not in advance. I tend to begin with a nugget of an idea, an image, an interesting fact, an anecdote, a scene—and then expand, associatively, to a list. The items on the list are stepping stones. The challenge is to find the best connections, the path across the stream. You hop or put down planks. Every piece of writing creates its own trajectory, with new possibilities emerging along the way that can’t be seen at the start. I’m drawn to structures that zigzag, skip, and leap. In her 2007 essay “The Interplay of Form and Content in Creative Nonfiction,” Eileen Pollack takes issue with the way most textbooks categorize creative nonfiction by content (“memoir,” “nature writing,” “travel writing,” and so on), pointing out that it is much more useful for writers to think instead in terms of form. Pollack writes: “The

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interplay between the central question that guides a writer’s research and the form that helps the writer organize his or her findings is at the living, breathing heart of creative nonfiction.”1 The way we structure our material—that is, the edifice we build as the words and details, images and facts play out along the page—is a key part of what a piece of writing is “about.” Form and content, logos and lexis, are interdependent and synergistic. We know this, and yet, as vital as structure is to any conversation about craft, too rarely is it discussed. I’m interested in how structure affects genre. I’m interested in scaffolding, architecture, houses, shapes. Poets understand that in writing we’re not just thinking, but building, constructing stanzas—literally, in Italian, “rooms”—that the reader moves through not only chronologically, but spatially as well. But prose writers, unlike poets, tend to talk about structure in terms of time, not space. Narrative depends on time. Since Aristotle, our thinking about storytelling has focused on beginnings, middles, and ends: what happened first, and then, and then. In fiction and nonfiction, we default to structures that follow the sequential logic of the story. Even when a narrative moves back and forth in time—beginning, for example, in medias res, then skipping forward, or flashing back—the chronological order in which a story’s events and scenes took place is (or should be) clear.2 The essayist has greater freedom than the fiction writer, to some extent, at least. Narrative is only part of what we do. At any moment, we can pause the story clock to reflect, imagine, explain, digress. Even so, the tug of chronology isn’t easy to resist. “Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme,” says John McPhee, “and chronology traditionally wins.” McPhee, of course, is rooting for the underdog. “There’s nothing wrong with a chronological structure,” he concedes. “On tablets in Babylonia, most pieces were written that way, and nearly all pieces are written that way now.” But “after ten years of it at Time and The New Yorker,” McPhee says, “I felt both rutted and frustrated by always knuckling under to the sweep of chronology, and I longed for a thematically dominated structure.”3 We call essays “experimental” when they take atemporal, fragmented, or spatial forms. We borrow terms from music (“lyric”) or the visual arts (“collage”) to describe them. Compose an essay as a collage of lyric segments instead of as a conventional narrative and the reader’s expectations of genre are unsettled, too. Take McPhee’s wellknown 1972 New Yorker piece, “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” which alternates between scenes from a Monopoly tournament and sections describing Atlantic City.4 The narrative leaps from the Monopoly game, the classic game board labeled with Atlantic City’s streets, to the reality of Atlantic City in the early 1970s—a bombedout-looking ghetto, sunk in poverty and decay. There’s no need for any analysis or explanation. The meaning lies in the images—and in the gaps. The juxtaposition of the players engaging in a carefree game of capitalism with the all-too-real failures of capitalism says all the essay needs to say. The New Yorker ran “The Search for Marvin Gardens” under the banner “A Reporter at Large,” signaling that McPhee didn’t make it up. But while the reporting feels solid enough, you can’t help but wonder whether those Monopoly games were real. Did McPhee actually compete in an international singles tournament? Is he really a crack

 On Scaffolding 97 Monopoly player who can complete a game in less than fifteen minutes? (Can anyone?) His opponent (a “tall, shadowy figure” called only “my opponent”) seems to have real-world credentials (he went to Harvard Law School; worked at Millbank, Tweed; played “2,428 games of Monopoly in a single season”), but in fact, the Monopoly tournament is an invention.5 Does it matter? Not to me. What’s interesting, though, is how it changes the way we read the essay. It makes us think about the games we play unthinkingly, about how those games distort the way we perceive the world around us: the brutal realities we don’t acknowledge, the pain and suffering we don’t see. McPhee isn’t actually competing in a Monopoly tournament, but real people go directly to real jails in McPhee’s Atlantic City, while the residents of Marvin Gardens—the one street on the Monopoly board that’s not in Atlantic City, McPhee discovers, but just south of it, in Margate, NJ—remain oblivious, tucked up in their “secluded suburb within a suburb,” a “citadel and sanctuary of the middle class.” “The Search for Marvin Gardens” has a spatial structure. We move through the essay as a player moves around the Monopoly board, hopping from section to section, place to place. It’s also what you might call a “hermit crab essay,” a term coined by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their textbook Tell It Slant to describe [the] kind of essay [that] appropriates other forms as an outer covering to protect its soft underbelly. It’s an essay that deals with material that seems to have been born without its own carapace—material that’s soft, exposed, tender and must look elsewhere to find the form that will best contain it.6

Hermit crab essays can take myriad “found” forms, including a how-to guide (Brenda Miller), footnotes to a critical essay (Jenny Boully), a tarot card layout (Nancy Willard), a to-do list (Joe Wenderoth), an outline (Ander Monson), and contributors’ notes (Michael Martone), to name just a few.7 It’s an apt and appealing metaphor: the reclusive hermit crab curled up in a snail or mollusk shell, a “strange, new hybrid creature”8 wearing borrowed armor, hidden inside a borrowed home. And it’s a form that tells us something interesting about the genre of nonfiction, too. Ander Monson’s “Outline toward a Theory of the Mine Versus the Mind and the Harvard Outline” exemplifies the way the hermit crab “shell” protects and supports a certain kind of tender, personal material. In Monson’s essay, the outline becomes a literal scaffolding that protects and bolsters difficult memories of his mother’s death:

i. so maybe the outline is a kind of architecture I am trying to erect

ii. to protect myself against my family, meaninglessness, and the future    1. an artifice to get inside the past    2. like a cold and unlit hole—what family tragedy is there behind me glittering like a vein iii. perhaps it is a womb    1. and this then has to do with my mother’s death    2. a protective sheath, a comfort zone iv. or it could be a shell9

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Monson’s outline illustrates the interplay of form and content that, as Pollack says, lies at creative nonfiction’s “living, breathing heart.”10 The visual and metaphoric scaffolding supports the fragments of Monson’s thoughts and memories, holding them together, allowing meaning to emerge in the white space, armoring the essay against becoming sentimental or trite. But Monson’s outline also unsettles the text, for, of course, it’s not a proper outline at all. It proceeds not logically but associatively. It’s more poem than rationally ordered train of thought. It’s a faux outline—a critique of a real outline’s rigid, rationalistic way of ordering thought. Monson’s outline is, in fact, a fiction. In this sense, all hermit crab essay “shells” are fictions. So what are they doing in a nonfiction text? The “hermit crab essay” is a new name for an old literary device: the false document, historically used to lend a greater sense of realism to a work of fiction. The earliest novels appropriated forms of nonfiction writing—letters, diaries, memos, newspaper articles, scientific reports—as a way of creating an illusion of authenticity. Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a faux autobiography: the original frontispiece presented the text as “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner . . . Written by Himself.” Similarly, Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela (1740–1) purported to be “a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to her Parents,” and Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liasons Dangereuses (1782) “letters collected in a private society and published for the instruction of others.” The false document gave the eighteenth-century novel a new kind of verisimilitude that paved the way for the sort of realistic fiction that has long since become the norm. But if the function of the false document is to make realistic fiction feel “nonfictionlike,” or true, when it turns up in nonfiction, it works the other way. The presence of the false document, or hermit crab “shell”—Monson’s outline, McPhee’s Monopoly game, Martone’s contributor’s notes—calls attention to workings of the author’s imagination rather than to the nonfictional content of the piece. Even as we read these essays as nonfiction, we’re reminded that they aren’t simple truths, but constructed, created things. Like Duchamp’s “Readymades” and other found-object sculptures, the hermit crab essay is always both an aesthetic artifact and an ironic commentary on the thing of which it’s made. It underscores the fact that the literary text is a construction, not a transparent window onto “reality” or the “truth.” It opens out the possibilities of the genre, allowing the author’s imagination to play alongside the act of remembering and representing the real world. Said another way: the truth itself lies in the form. In the structure and the scaffolding. In the exposed ducts and pipes and beams. In space as well as time. In the fact that all writing forms an artificial shell.

Notes 1 Eileen Pollack, “The Interplay of Form and Content in Creative Nonfiction,” Writer’s Chronicle 39, no. 5 (March/April 2007), https://www​.awpwriter​.org​/magazine​_media​

 On Scaffolding 99

2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10

/writers​_chronicle​_view​/1815​/the​_interplay​_of​_form​_and​_content​_in​_creative​ _nonfiction. To put it in narrative theory terms, this is the distinction between the fabula (the chronological sequence of events in a narrative) and the syuzhet (the way the events are organized in a given narrative). John McPhee, “Structure,” The New Yorker, January 14, 2013: 49. John McPhee, “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” The New Yorker, September 9, 1972: 45–62. A quick fact check reveals that although the first Monopoly tournament, the European Championship, was held in in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1972, the first world championship didn’t take place until 1973, and the first official “international” tournament until 1975 (three years after the publication of McPhee’s piece). Also, before the rules were changed to incorporate the new speed die in 2009, games took hours; even now, the shortest recorded tournament game in world championship history took around forty-two minutes. For details, see: https://www​.monopolyland​ .com​/monopoly​-world​-championship/. Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 154. For more examples of hermit crab essays, see The Shell Game, ed. Kim Adrian (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2018). Miller and Paola, Tell It Slant, 154. Ander Monson, “Outline Toward a Theory of the Mine versus the Mind and the Harvard Outline,” in Neck Deep and Other Predicaments (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2007), 11–12. Pollack, “The Interplay of Form and Content.”

16

Text Adventure Ander Monson

A majority of sources cite Spacewar! (1962), a game in which two spaceships circle a planetary body and try to destroy each other, as the first instance of a computer game, a game played on a computer. This being a project of accuracy as well as a particular brand of supergeekery, this charting of the histories of games, though, it’s important to note that the first computer game is probably OXO (Noughts and Crosses), a simulation of Tic-Tac-Toe (which I suspect the seminal computer-hacker film Wargames later references) programmed by Alexander (Sandy) Douglas, occurring a decade earlier, in 1952. It does nothing spectacular, simulating paper and pencil, a very old technology, though for the first time you the user could play a game both on and against a computer, in this case the EDSAC, the University of Cambridge’s proprietary machine, perhaps for the novelty of it or just to assuage your brainy loneliness. Spacewar! is multiplayer, and much sexier, in that it allows the user to perform a sort of magic, to do something they could not do before, even on paper. Two spaceships are represented on the screen, real time. They move around a singularity at the screen’s center and can thrust, maneuver, and fire. If they hit the singularity, that player loses, ship destroyed, game over. If one player hits the other, ship destroyed, game over, and you’re left on the machine, wondering whether to play again, and if so, with whom. Spacewar! is still surprisingly playable (google a Java emulator for it and play in your browser). It’s fun, maybe the first killer app, reminiscent of later popular games like Asteroids (arcade or Atari) and at least the space battle portion of Star Control 2 (PC). Because it looks like a contemporary game, it gets more attention. All these games are simple now but must have seemed wondrous then: to think you could use these massive, expensive machines, made for calculation via vacuum tubes, for play! More interesting and involving from a textual standpoint are games commonly called text adventures (or sometimes more grandly called interactive fictions). This history starts with Adventure (1977), followed by Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork, and so on, often based loosely on readings of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series along with remembered actual campus features of MIT and an actual spelunkable Kentucky cave. Rising at about the same time as the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (and with some similar features), these text games initiated the idea of a created, fictional computer space that a character (the player, a protagonist, an I) could explore on her own in the darkness or the flickering light of the computer lab,

 Text Adventure 101 and gave birth to the genre of the adventure game, which remains one of the most popular types of computer games, because in our adventure-poor age we love a good adventure to remind us that there are things beyond our knowledge. These games also make more apparent claims on story (hence they’re called by some interactive fictions): they’re first person (everything is seen from the perspective of the character, via text), they build a narrative as they go, with the reader as protagonist, deciding what to do, which verb to try to use, which direction to take out of a room, whether or not to hit another character with a rock, how to solve one textual puzzle after another. Interactive fictions are notable for being some of the first games to use a natural-language parser, in which you would type in sentences what you (the player) wanted your character to do, and the computer would render the results of that action and return the results to you (in this way these games are similar to playing real-life role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, which can be thought of as a live, collaborative story experience, also accessed via language). One game in this genre, Mindwheel, bears significant note as it was developed in part by former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky: as part of the gameplay, it asks the player to assemble an original poem. One of the central pleasures of any game, graphic or textual, first person or third person, is exploration. This is a familiar trope in almost every computer game (simulations of board games and card games typically excepted, since they don’t offer much that the old-technology game form doesn’t except maybe the temporary and false relief of our near-constant lonelinesses), whether we’re moving through three-dimensional outer space via one of many sorts of spacecraft/robotic exoskeletons with many varieties of missiles, lasers, proton torpedoes, cloaking devices, and so on; or of dungeons with swords and items and cloaks and magic spells; or of other mythical landscapes, haunted houses, or simulated domestic landscapes made strange by being inside them. Though I imagine that exploration is a major element of my (and most players’) experiences, adventure games are almost always framed by an explicit or implied narrative element, a story, that contextualizes the actual play of the game and gives us a stated goal. In the absence of a narrative, we’ll build our own: we are after all on some sort of quest, moving through a space, even if we do not know what for. For the most part, though, game designers have concluded that, for motivation, the player should be provided with some narrative framework, however basic (see also the early Atari 2600 game Adventure: all we know is that we—the we in this case is a small square on a screen— need to get the chalice from the black castle and return it to our own, and that’s enough to fire us up). It is only through narrating our lives to ourselves that we are able to make any sense of events we experience, after all. We can’t not narrate our lives—that’s how memories are encoded and reencoded and reconsidered and chemically recombined. While these games are set inside stories, the pleasure we get playing is certainly not the same as the pleasure we get reading stories (or essays, or anything else). Though there are the shared pleasures of inhabiting another’s world for a while, the pleasure in story is (mostly) not in agency but in immersion inside a world, a character, a brain, to be pulled along through an arc by an author. The pleasure in play, though, is mostly in agency, the ability to control the character against or inside the narrative, to kill off

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every non-player-character we can find, to work against the narrative, to be punk rock, to dress our golfer in the finest virtual, digital bling we can find. The pleasure in play is in the manipulation of a system to explore and expose its elements, to achieve goals, level up, accomplish salient tasks and be duly rewarded with loot, additional story, or other perks. Some of the deepest pleasures of games are in letting the player’s agency get her into complicated emotional territory. What happens when given the choice to do good or evil, we do evil, as many of us will do? Usually, the game narrative doesn’t turn out all that differently: we’re still the hero, even if reluctantly. We can still chuck the ring in the volcano, slay the final dragonlord, etc. We’re just harassed by police or guards or whoever as we go. There’s pleasure in that, of course, but there’s also pleasure in real narrative agency: in a game like Atlus’s Catherine, which focuses on a romantic dilemma stemming from an indiscretion, the decisions we make change the story significantly and are designed to reflect our response to a central emotional problem: how do we handle infidelity? Bioshock offers multiple endings: which you get depends on how you acted in the game. In Mass Effect and its sequels, at points you have murky moral choices: which character will you, as commander, sacrifice? When that character’s dead, he’s out of the story—and the sequels—so your decisions echo throughout the entire gameworld. As a player I am something of a completist. Often I’ll know what’s expected of me narratively—it’s so obvious: I just defeated A with the boomerang and I have to get inside Tower B to learn another skill so I can explore Dungeon C in order to save Princess D, which I’m told is extremely urgent—but I don’t do that immediately. God, why would I? “Extremely urgent” is code for put it off as long as I can in order to explore the fishing mini-game before going to Dungeon Z, and if I can get the Ocarina to play Melody J then I can be transported to a secret, previously inaccessible place. There is pleasure in delayed gratification (the slow motion as we approach the end of a novel made apparent by the dwindling pages, the knowledge that there’s only one step left before the game’s narrative arc will be concluded), but also through the act of coming up against the limits of the system, its constraints, its rules. There is always the possibility that if I don’t get to an area on the map now it may become unavailable, a terrible thing to know and not act on. What I want is to know, to make sure. Sometimes I’ll use one of the many available online FAQ or Walkthrough documents to make sure I haven’t missed some nonobvious subquest. On some level I want to touch each boundary and know I have explored the entirety of the game’s imagined landscape before moving on. This is the instinct of the essay: we get to pause time and tool around in the world as player/writer, avoiding that objective, however base or obvious or narrative or argumentative, instead following tangent after tangent, the curlicues of this particular brain and its contours, lighting up new spaces on the map bit by bit, knowing where we’re supposed to be going and feeling the mounting tension from playing keepaway with it, delaying our return to the subject, or maybe by the time we get there we realize that wasn’t our subject at all, and we’re at the bottom of a very dark well without a flashlight, looking up. This is one reason why my book Vanishing Point has glyphs that denote words that can be typed into the website for the book, that unlock new content. In some of the new

 Text Adventure 103 content, the careful (read: obsessive) reader can click on the period from a sentence, for instance, to open up another essay. Another essay can be read fully only if you look at the HTML source code—which contains essay text in the hidden comment fields. It’s designed to destabilize the source text: to provide openings to webtext that’s mutable, updatable, and potentially multilayered, and to offer the reader another avenue of exploration. I should admit that I am not fully happy yet with the interaction between website and text: it’s clunky, but the best I could do. The way it works is something of a kludge, a hack, an attempt to make something of the technology we have working at this point. This is the problem with using recent technologies for the purpose of art: one always imagines that the technology to do the thing we really want is a few years down the road. If we were smarter and wanted to spend our time this way, we might invent it. Maybe we have invented it. But we’re human, thus impatient. We give it a run with what we have. Then we have to celebrate its eventual failures, the compromises we make for the sake of readability, of reader pleasure. We know that if it comes down to it we will sacrifice ourselves and our glorious plans for the reader, because we want to be read. This pleasure of exploration is also one of the pleasures of pre-internet Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) or any kind of node-and-networked, mainframed culture: one system leads to another, which opens up new branches, levels of security, problems to solve in whatever way we feel fit, whether hacker or social engineer, paragraph crafter or lyric essayist, and then that leads to another space, another system, ad infinitum, cue excitement. We light up sections of the map as we go deeper in. We light up sections of our brain, too, I suspect, as we go deeper into the text and into ourselves, even as we can lose ourselves to the software of the essay and the way the engineered, artificed brain makes us submit to its will. In some ways literature is like this too as one text references another, one chapter informs and illuminates another, as we discover a new, exciting author (holy shit! Selah Saterstrom, for instance! which then strangely leads to Chris Kraus’s spectacular I Love Dick, which is dirty, yes, but not as dirty as it sounds, a multilayered novel slash memoir stripping away a great deal of the safety net of novels, which then leads us somewhere else, doorway after doorway opening before us) and we explore their entire bibliography (world), perhaps culminating in a particularly difficult text, a literary problem, a boss to be defeated with whatever new tactic we just learned, before being eventually, blissfully satisfied by our binge, provided we haven’t moved onto other drugs, Amazon recommendations, if you like X then you’re really going to have your mind blown by Y, and hey, kid, try this: it’s bad for you. The reading experience is an experience of exploration of a created world. The question is, how closely do you want to control your reader? What work do you want her to do? What work are you willing to let her do? Good readers like work. We like focused work, when the writer’s made a thing meant to be interacted with, whether it’s trying to solve a crime or understanding the subtext of an evasive bit of dialogue. We like asking questions, wondering whether what this thing is that we’re reading, whether it’s what it says it is: perhaps it’s more of a novel than a collection of short stories? More of a fiction than a memoir? We like putting things together: oh, chapter 8 echoes

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chapter 1; we read pattern and motif; some assembly required is okay with us as long as the resulting toy is cool and our agency in putting it together is rewarded. Getting to these realizations is a little like leveling up. Often enough we have so little agency in what we read. We read sequentially, usually, naturally, we think, left to right, top to bottom, never mind that this is a learned behavior of the Western world. Things happen in the order they happen. Hacker culture embraces exploration: one tracks along the perimeter of a system, to try to find ways to get around security blocks, to repurpose algorithms to do other sorts of things, opening up a new port to allow connection, retraining a system daemon to do the work of opening up the shadowed/etc./passwords file or granting us a new permission. Each dead end is a problem asking to be solved. A copy-protected game is a problem requiring understanding and an ingenious solution (duplication of a disk, intentional bad sectors, and all). The first person or group to crack the copy-protection scheme on a newly released game would be feted across BBS systems or peer-to-peer networks, their name written up in .NFO files, often with ASCII art that accompanied each game, the electronic equivalent of boast, graffiti, or book jacket blurbs. This is something like colonization or conquest if not just simple exploration. It shows up too in phone phreak culture, those of us who explored new loops and PBXs, blue box tones, cellular networks, phone trunks, unsecured Wi-Fi routers, and documented our explorations with text files as evidence that we did this and here’s how. What is a poem but evidence that the poet did this, something new, she hoped, made this and left it here for you to play with, to experience, or else why bother, and maybe you can do it too, or at least run its subroutines for a while on your hardware. The somewhat clunky term ergodic literature, coined by critic Espen Aarseth, refers to texts in which “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text.”1 This nontrivial effort is more than turning pages and reading sequential words, scene after scene (though let’s all admit, when stuck in a long book, that this effort can feel nontrivial; yet it’s not of what Aarseth speaks). An example of this is B. S. Johnson’s 1969 novel The Unfortunates, which takes the form of a series of pages, some bound, some not, presented in a box. The reader is asked to read one chunk first and one chunk last, and everything else is shuffled randomly, or as the reader wishes. As a result, the reader has a bit more agency in texts like these: we know we’re involved in the making of meaning or of narrative or of whatever. The resulting interaction between reader and text in ergodic literature comes closer to approximating play, exploration, the manipulation of a system, the interaction between player and game. We have to more actively play (with) the book in order to read it at all. Some novels have begun (smartly) to incorporate game elements, for instance, Mark Z. Danielewski’s oft-cited House of Leaves. Like other novels, it wants to move us forward page by page in the book with an overarching narrative (a mystery) that frames the action. But the book also offers us a number of side-quests in the form of footnotes, which can be followed or skipped, depending on how much of a completist the reader is, how interested the reader is in touching the edge of the book’s created space. Consider each of these footnotes a door that might lead to an unlit, unexplored

 Text Adventure 105 area of a dungeon, like how in David Foster Wallace’s essays we can take the long route or the short one (and if we like DFW we’ll take the long route because we know it’s the best). We can pass these sidetracks up or take the fork. When reading this novel we are asked to physically manipulate the book (to rotate it in our hands, to read it in a mirror, and so on: reading this book feels, more often than not, like playing). As the reader is invited to play with and explore the text, one of the more memorable portions of the narrative involves the exploration of a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. (There’s an obvious analog of this particular—or maybe any suitably immersive—book as a “house of leaves,” larger on the interior, taken as a whole, as linguistic system than on its outside, taken piecemeal or as physical artifact.) Characters are literally wandering around in the dark, exploring, filming, often in spaces that feel more than a little like one of the Final Fantasy series dungeons, barely lit, confusing, occasionally terrifying, and exhilarating. So as we read the text, we are invited to traverse the book’s own physical space (on the page) and narrative space (in the story and its side-quests), even as the story frames everything, moves us inexorably forward page after page in the artifact of the book. Still, it is a novel, not a game, and unless you break the rules and skip ahead a hundred pages, it is not possible in this particular novel to experience pages completely out of the order in which they are presented (aside from these asides, some of which are still finally sequential, and some are more rewarding than others). This novel (and any novel) exerts more control over our actions than a game can or should: because reading lights us up differently, because we only experience worlds of books through the lens of language—of description, of described action and motivation. This is partly why House of Leaves is successful: it knows enough to still be a novel, no matter how much it wants to be a game. Danielewski’s second novel, Only Revolutions, takes this further, composed as it is of two narratives, one that goes forward in the book, and one that reads backward. The reader is invited to read them in alternating order, flipping the book over to continue with the other narrative, at whichever pace she prefers. It’s more difficult to play this book, partly because the manipulations we’re asked to do must be combined with the nontrivial task of parsing the book’s increasingly dense language. And there’s no mystery to motivate us: and this is a key consideration: how will we motivate our reader? What secret pleasures might we offer her to counterbalance the frustrations of a book that asks a lot from us? Only Revolutions is a more enjoyable book on the level of the sentence—which is key for this reader, but I don’t know many others who have managed to make it to the end(s). A more recent playbook is Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s Between Page and Screen,2 the text of which is a series of enigmatic glyphs that are only readable when opened in front of a webcam on a computer, at which point each glyph brings up texts that are projected real time on the video of the reader holding the book. As the reader manipulates the book, she manipulates the text onscreen: she sees herself manipulating the text onscreen. It’s cool, certainly, seeing ourselves reflected onscreen holding the book, holding projected text, moving it around, though it doesn’t think enough about what it means for us to be holding the text in our virtual hands just yet. Still, it’s a step forward in the right direction: the text is only accessible if you have the book and a

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computer and a connection to the ether. The text is involving us in a way we hadn’t expected. At the same time some games have clearly tried to mimic a novelistic or filmic narrative experience, usually to ill effect. The commercially successful arcade game Dragon’s Lair (1983), which had extremely impressive graphics for its time, resembles a full-motion, professionally animated cartoon. The game tells a story as you play it, but the player’s interaction with it is limited to periodically having to make a choice, moving the joystick in one direction or another, like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel choosing only which page to turn to, and this action selects one of a couple possible paths. The player input is extremely restricted, and the game gives top billing to the narrative (well, really it gives top billing to the graphics, which were spectacular enough to make it one of the most successful arcade games of all time; the narrative itself was always pretty thin by any standard). As such it has almost zero replay value (nor, in this writer’s opinion, did it have much actual play value; it was not really any fun at all, though it did look cool, a not unsubstantial pleasure). The notable difference between Final Fantasy XII, which had a large narrative and elaborately filmic cut scenes but plenty of freedom for you to wander around and do whatever between them, and Final Fantasy XIII, which gives the player almost no agency at all—well, the difference couldn’t be more obvious. XIII was unplayable, no matter how slick the combat mechanics and fantastic the camerawork was. Maybe it would be better watched. Other games with more obvious literary ambitions include those text adventures, particularly Zork, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (cowritten with Douglas Adams, author of the novel upon which it was based). These games, lacking graphics, deal exclusively in text, the province of prose, and their gameplay is strongly based on narrative, but combined with exploration, humor (sometimes), and problem-solving. And they focus on character, so key to our experience of literature: one of the most notable characters to come out of this or any genre of computer game is Floyd the robot, from Steve Meretsky’s Planetfall, the first game character said to have generated an emotional response from players. As the only companion of the main character on an apparently deserted planet, when he dies, giving his life (such as it is) to perform a vital action, it is unexpectedly emotional, even on replay. This game—and its sequel, Stationfall, were both subsequently adapted as novels (or novelizations—which merit a weird sidetrack that we won’t indulge here— we can’t follow every lead into the ether). Part of the success of these games lies in their reliance on textual rather than graphic representations, requiring players to engage their imagination to envision characters much in the way that literature does. The attentive reader relishes the opportunity to do some work in a text, whether it’s the imaginative act of envisioning characters and populating worlds or simply making inferences about things told to us in passing or off-camera. In the era of the touted end of reading, which deserves but won’t get (at least not from me) scare quotes, writers would do well to remember how much readers dearly want to engage with stories and essays and such, even in unofficial but intensely popular modes like fan fiction.

 Text Adventure 107 All of this is not to suggest that games are somehow going to replace or become literature, but that there are opportunities for useful overlap in both directions: that as games have started to take on substantially more complex literary elements, the writer might consider ways of importing game elements in their work, thinking of the reader’s experience as one requiring play, a fun but nontrivial effort, and carefully considering what work our texts ask or allow our readers to do, and how we motivate them to do that work. Collage starts getting us there, with the reader’s nontrivial effort required to make connections, to elide white space and fragment. When narrative happens off-screen and offstage, when we see a before and an after but not the event itself, we experience what critic and comic artist Scott McCloud terms closure, which is how we understand action happening between two static panels of a comic.3 The more challenging the project for the reader, the more we would do well to consider how we can cajole, coax, beat, or tempt readers into our evil lairs: Do we offer them hints of genre tease? Can we immerse them in action and character before setting them free in our labyrinth? Or do we start big with a formal conceit, as in Julio Cortazár’s Hopscotch, and let it bounce us around? Jenny Boully’s The Book of Beginnings and Endings requires a lot of reader effort as we are asked to parse or assemble the collection of starts and stops into some sort of larger order, but she pays that difficulty back at least partly in the pleasures of her language. Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary requires (or at least allows and encourages) linguistic transposition in order to parse the text and experience the essential doubleness—another kind of closure. The poems therein are readable and enjoyable as is, but when the reader starts to substitute words in her own mind, she activates hidden areas, bonus rooms, in the book. Texts that use received forms (the outline, the footnote, the index, etc.) also conjure that doubleness: we’re aware that we’re reading an outline, but also an essay, so the reader’s experience is a superimposition of the two, a double image. Maybe these ask more from readers, but shouldn’t we be encouraging readers to be more ambitious? Isn’t that the point of writing? And reading? What we get out of these kinds of bookplay is engagement, deeper and more complicated fun, a bigger and more immersive entertainment better suited for our age. Which is what we’re all after, right?

Notes 1 Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1. 2 Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen (Los Angeles: Siglio Press, 2012). 3 See Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Northampton: Tundra Publishing, 1993).

17

Adventures in the Reference Section Kevin Haworth

The world is one big data problem.

Gilad Elbaz, Silicon Valley investor

I was a very average child. I liked to read, sure, but who didn’t in those days? Perhaps the only noteworthy thing in my reading habits was the notebook I carried with me at all times, a composition notebook, with its recognizable speckled black-andwhite cover and its wide-spaced lines to accommodate childish handwriting. I kept this notebook with me whenever I sat down with a book. I read for story, sure, but as I did, I strained the facts. How many superheroes came equipped with wings? (Answer: more than you would think.) How many battleships did the Imperial Japanese Navy deploy in the Pacific, and, most importantly, what were their names? I dutifully documented all this information into the composition notebook until I had filled it with lists of all kinds. At first I was just annotating, compiling the facts of my limited intellectual world. But when I looked at these lists, page after page, they took on new and imaginative readings. Didn’t these winged superheroes, listed together, make their own natural and interesting team? With a headquarters, high on a mountainside, that only they could reach? In one adventure, they met up with their friends, the underwater superheroes from page 22 of the notebook, at a remote Pacific island, one team coming up from the depths, the other descending from the sky. In the distance, one feathered hero, with his eagle eyes, could see all the battleships of the Japanese navy (page 42), just bracing for a fight. This was the beginning of my creative process. It wasn’t fiction, not exactly, not to me anyway, since I built these journeys of the imagination on the facts I had compiled into my own personal reference book. I did not create new superheroes—that would be making stuff up. Rather, I rearranged. My understanding of them as facts gave them a solidity, a force, a legitimacy. (Yes, I know superheroes are not real. Thanks, Mom.) I enjoyed putting them next to each other in ways that broke down old associations and created new pathways, new meanings. This, to me, is the origin story of creative nonfiction. Lists lead to narrative. Information leads to imagination. Without information, as the book of Genesis tells us, all is tohu v’vohu, null and void, too empty for even God to make a shape.

 Adventures in the Reference Section 109 Reference books are inherently hybrid. They mix text and image, numbers and letters. They assert authority while hiding the authorial voice behind the editorial board, the anonymously written article. Their facts fool the eye. In 1979 I used some of my chore money to acquire, from one of the many yard sales my family would visit each Saturday morning, Hammond’s New Supreme World Atlas of 1954. Nothing is quite so beautiful as an outdated reference book, which shimmers in the irony of what was true and is true no longer. Even as a child I sensed the many important lessons that atlas had to teach me, lessons taught in the vocabulary of color, scale, proximity, and order. I understood that Denmark (green) had much in common with Norway (pink), Sweden (orange) and Finland (yellow), because they all appeared on the same page. Germany, their large and dangerous recent enemy, lay safely several pages away, divided forever into West and East. Israel and Jordan, with borders are marked only in the faintest of uncertain lines, share a half-page; above them is the squat half-page devoted to Poland (what a brutal and elegant choice). Alaska, not yet a state, receives only a half-page for all its vastness; on the half-page below sits the Panama Canal Zone, a red artery cutting across the map, while Panama itself lies north and south, off-white and barely in view. There is British Honduras and French Guiana; Ceylon and East Bengal; the Aden Protectorate and Trucial Oman; French West Africa, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the Belgian Congo, all names as false, and as real, as Superman’s Metropolis. Look around you. Reference forms are everywhere, and nowhere. Facebook delivers you friendship in list form. Twitter parcels your thoughts into a book of aphorisms. You know my day by my Google history. In 2013 it was announced that the Encyclopedia Britannica, which gave legitimacy to so many middle-class bookshelves, would no longer be printed, and its generations of known facts sent into the ethereal space that exists online. Despite this, writers are going back to the old, dusty reference books, to remember how we used to organize our worlds. I’m here to suggest that some of the most interesting and innovative recent work in our genre is occurring in the encounter with these kinds of books, in the noisy collision between creative and nonfiction. Separated, these two words can feel like opposites: creative on one side, nonfiction on the other. But there are writers who are developing new forms by embracing and employing that duality, melding their fluid creative ideas to the hard end of nonfiction, the reference section. See, for example, Judith Schalansky’s An Atlas of Remote Islands. Visually evocative of the standard Rand McNally, with its two-tone cover and simple cartography, it nonetheless inverts the form, drawing our attention to these islands on the outer edges of the typical map, too distant to be connected to their political home countries, at best “granted a place at a cartographical side table . . . footnotes to the mainland, expendable.”1 Like the best creative nonfiction, Schalansky’s book asks us to reevaluate what matters, what is worth our notice. It uses many of the trappings of the classic atlas: the geographic coordinates, the area in square kilometers (but what island is ever square?), and the total population of each island, here so low that it feels like a

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collection of individual people rather than a mere number in a book. Each map carries a story, a point of focus. Her ethnographic tone (“The Banabans’ most important tool is made of wild almond wood and sharpened turtle shell”2) grants authority to the details, sometimes historical, sometimes mythic or outright gothic (“The Banabans do not bury their dead. They let the bodies hang from their huts until the flesh has decomposed, then wash the skeleton in the sea”3), and asks us to take this knowledge at face value, the way that the traditional map, with its Mercator projection, once told us that Greenland is the size of Africa. Or take Encyclopedia, a collaborative enterprise in in three volumes, edited by Tisa Bryant, Miranda F. Mellis, and Kate Schatz. “Encyclopedias provide historical snapshots and are not pure,” they write, “They are about knowledge, but are also rife with erasures.”4 Their encyclopedia is not comprehensive; its entries are unstable, incorporating drawings, charts, interviews, memoir, definitions, song lyrics, more. It rejects that most bedrock, masculinist proposition of encyclopedias: that size matters. In a typical encyclopedia, length equals importance. Here, Eileen Myles’s one-sentence entry for empiricism (“Though it means practical, it sounds like ‘crown’”5) feels as weighty as Alice Notley’s eight full pages on crime fiction. Or, finally, Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City, her multilingual, polyvocal atlas/essay collection/alternative history of the City of San Francisco. “A city is a particular kind of place, perhaps best described as many worlds in one place,” Solnit writes. “It compounds many versions without reconciling them.”6 Does that not sound like the very definition of breaking genre? With the help of artists, cartographers, and fellow writers, Solnit investigates the many simultaneous worlds that exist in San Francisco, that most diverse of American spaces. The traditional atlas moves horizontally; it separates, one map connected only at the edges to the one before. Solnit’s book is vertical, transparent, nonexclusive. It is all disputed territory. Every breaking of genre is also an embrace of genre; we recognize the platform, even as the train rushes by. Because information is meaningless unless we find a structure for it. In 2002, artist and University of Maryland professor Hasan Elahi was detained by the FBI and asked to account for his activities in the days following 9/11/01. Because, you know, Muslim name. In response, he began a program of absolute self-surveillance, sending the FBI a constant stream of information—his GPS location, pictures of his whereabouts, “airports you’ve slept in . . . tacos you ate . . . toilets you used,” in the words of NPR interviewer Brooke Gladstone.7 Data camouflage, Elahi calls it: so much unmediated information that each data point becomes a black dot in a sky of black dots, a needle in a stack of needles, all meaningless, without sound or fury. Tohu v’vohu. Information as overflow; creative nonfiction of the most extreme sort. “The best place to hide a sentence,” the Bolivian novelist Edmundo Paz Soldán writes, “is in a book.”8 But give us the barest elements of structure, especially in a form we recognize, and we will find meaning. Connections emerge; a story forms between and around the facts. In every humble list there is a story waiting to be encountered. Consider the Vietnam War

 Adventures in the Reference Section 111 Memorial, where the austerity of names and dates—so simple, so plain—is almost too much to bear. Or consider Ai Weiwei, whose efforts to write down the names of the children killed in the Sichuan earthquake became a stinging rebuke of the Chinese government, for whom acknowledging that such information existed meant that those people existed, and that their government had failed to protect them. Or consider, in a different timbre, this list of the songs Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad downloaded from iTunes while his tanks and infantry attacked the city of Homs, 101 miles north of Damascus:9 “Bizarre Love Triangle,” New Order “Don’t Talk Just Kiss,” Right Said Fred “Sexy and I Know It,” LMFAO “God Gave Me You,” Blake Shelton “We Can’t Go Wrong,” The Cover Girls

Thank you for the human ability to organize, to create references for ourselves of so many kinds, and all the ways that we have found to hide or reveal our stories in these factual forms. Thank you for the OED, the story of our language masquerading as a dictionary. Thank you for the abstract and the annotated bibliography and the footnote and the endnote. Thank you for the author bio and the acknowledgments page, the secret history of every book. Thank you for the depth chart, the cold ranking system beautifully overlaid on the visual field of the baseball diamond, basketball court, gridiron. Thank you for the infographic and the wordcloud, the references of the digital age. Thank you for the instruction manual and the almanac, artifacts of the analog professions. Thank you for the birth notice, first scribblings in a blank notebook, and the obituary, which can never tell the whole story. Thank you for the scaffold that helps me reach the sky.

Notes 1 Judith Schalansky, An Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will (New York: Penguin, 2010), 13–14, 94. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Tisa Bryant, Miranda F. Mellis, and Kate Schatz, eds, Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, A-E (Providence, RI: Encyclomedia, 2006), 7. 5 Eileen Myles, in Bryant et al., Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, A-E, 241. 6 Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), vii. 7 Brooke Gladstone, “The Art of Self-Surveillance,” On the Media, NPR, November 11, 2011. 8 Edmundo Paz Soldán, The Matter of Desire, trans. Lisa Carter (New York: Mariner Books, 2003), 143. 9 Michael Hann and Matthew Taylor, “Assad’s iTunes Emails Show Music Taste from Chris Brown to Right Said Fred,” The Guardian, March 14, 2012, https://www​.guardian​ .co​.uk​/world​/2012​/mar​/14​/assad​-itunes​-emails​-chris​-brown.

18

Meeting the Ancestor on the Road Tina Makereti

When I began to write, that was the place I had to go, that’s where the information was, where the images were, that’s where the language, the color came; in these tales, folk tales, attitudes, the normal, easy acceptance of signs. And then things began to happen that were really quite startling. Toni Morrison, when asked about meeting her ancestors I have come away for the weekend to write to you from a place called Taranaki in my home country, Aotearoa. I didn’t originally plan to come here, on this weekend, to write this piece—I had, in fact, planned to go to a place called Waitangi, where some of the most profound formative moments in the inception of this country also known as New Zealand occurred, with a group of other Indigenous writers from Aotearoa and the Pacific. Our hui, or gathering, was suppressed by a Covid lockdown in the north, so in order not to waste the space in my schedule, I decided to go somewhere closer to my hometown. And I’m sorry to labor the details here, which will all become relevant to the story I wish to tell, but I also received a sudden, unexpected gift of some money to use only for a writing retreat. From the room in which I write and sleep, I can see Mount Taranaki, if he is showing himself, for he often wears a hat of clouds and sometimes cloaks himself entirely so that you wouldn’t know he was there if you didn’t already know he’s there. Taranaki is a stunning volcanic mountain whose form undeniably dominates the skyline when he allows it, cone-shaped, snowy at the peak, surrounded by fertile volcanic soils in a wide circle that extends to the ocean. Looking at a topographical map, you can imagine the eruption, just as we do as we climb over meters of large black boulders to get to the sea. Last night we ate in his company, taking our chairs outside since he was showing his face so clearly, and it was a friendly, peaceful time with him. It was the 5th of November, a date which is significant to Taranaki and his people, of which I am one. Much of the time, I am a distant, estranged daughter of the mountain, but we have a saying: E kore au e ngaro, he kākano i ruia mai i Rangiātea, meaning, “I shall never be lost, for I am a seed sown from Rangiātea,” Rangiātea being one of the names for the place of all Māori ancestral origins. The proverb has many metaphorical applications, but in this case, I hope it is a way of expressing to you, a stranger most likely from another

 Meeting the Ancestor on the Road 113 country in another hemisphere, that to be Māori means to never lose one’s connection to home places, no matter how far away you are. Another saying, ko au te mounga, ko te mounga ko au—“I am the mountain and the mountain is me,” offers a different way of understanding this belonging—there is no separation between us and our lands, waters, and mountains, but this is not just a metaphor, not just an intellectual exercise. As Māori philosopher Carl Mika explains: Landscapes have the capacity to shape how we think. Tau (2001) argues here, in line with Māori epistemology, that Māori knowledge reflected the self onto the landscape. In that act, place and self are inseparable, being immediately formed by each other. Calderon continues that “truth” is contextual and concretely formed by our embeddedness within the landscape.1

In some real, visceral, embodied way, I am that mountain. The fact that I am not always with the mountain is a story about colonization, loss of land, systemic violence and oppression, family fracture, and whakamā, which is a word most commonly translated as shame or embarrassment, but which also denotes a deep, consuming anguish that in this context is associated with the loss of identity and culture resulting from the colonial process. This is also a story about survival, migration, intermarriage, love, enormous strength and courage. We have not the many hours, days, words, and pages it would take to tell that tale, but perhaps I can give you a little piece of it. The 5th of November is known in this area as Te Rā o te Pāhua or the “Day of Plunder,” in remembrance of the 1881 date when Parihaka was invaded. Parihaka is a peaceful village at the foot of the mounga, Mount Taranaki, established in the 1860s and led by prophets Tohu Kakahi and Te Whiti o Rongomai, who guided their people under a doctrine of peace—violence was outlawed, and instead the community thrived under values of unity, faith, discipline, and resistance to land alienation and cultural assimilation. But Parihaka was on valuable land, and within fifteen years had become the largest Māori settlement in the country. This made the village a target despite its peaceful principles, and while the inhabitants of Parihaka chose nonviolence, they weren’t without strength of conviction and the will to fight in other ways. Their resistance to the imposition of colonial settlement on their land was met with fury by the government. On that spring day exactly 140 years ago, the Native Affairs Minister ordered the invasion of Parihaka by 1,500 armed forces, who had prepared themselves for violent battle. The troops arrived but did not encounter the bloody revolt they expected. Instead, they were greeted by women and children singing and offering them loaves of bread. But this did not halt the attack, in which 1,600 Māori were evicted from their homes, women and men were assaulted, men were arrested and imprisoned without trial and buildings, and crops were plundered and destroyed by troops. Tohu and Te Whiti, as well as many others, were exiled, though they returned many years later, and preached pacifist resistance until the end. Parihaka still stands on its original site, well loved and cared for by its people, and reconciliation with the present-day government has begun, but the size and great economic and political independence of the original village are gone.

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Physically and emotionally, the damage of what happened on Te Rā o te Pāhua is still with us, combined with the damage of successive assaults on our well-being. My great-great-grandparents were followers of Te Whiti and Tohu, and deeply involved with the pacifist community at Parihaka. That movement was so significant to our family that my great-grandfather (their son) and other family who migrated to Waikawa at the top of the South Island, over 443 kilometers away, took the teachings of Te Whiti and Tohu with them to their southern home, and when their descendants built a new marae—communal ancestral home and gathering place—in the 1980s, they adorned the meeting house with carvings of the Taranaki leaders, prominent among other ancestors. I booked accommodation in Taranaki belatedly, looking only for somewhere nice to write where our dog could stay. Again, I thought I was going elsewhere: hoping to find a place in the closest city, half an hour away, rather than in the rural area where we are now, so I only noted how close we’d be to the mounga in a vague way, and to Parihaka not at all—the personal and professional stresses of the last few weeks having been too overwhelming for me to be more aware of exactly where we were going, or exactly when. So being in this place in this particular moment, with Taranaki actually in sight (or in implied sight) every time I look up, feels like a small miracle, like something that wasn’t engineered by me, considering I had planned to be elsewhere entirely. Sometimes we sleepwalk through life, not out of laziness or ignorance, but out of the sheer fortitude needed to get through the next week of work, or the loved one’s illness, or the bills or the shopping or the appointments, and I have been hanging on for a moment to write, and breathe, though I didn’t know that this is where I needed to be to take that breath. But they knew. The tupuna—ancestors—and the mounga. Which brings me to Toni Morrison and the “normal, easy acceptance of signs.” We call these signs tohu (yes, the word is also the name of the Parihaka leader). A tohu can tell us when something is right, or wrong, whether to trust and move forward, or maybe to wait and listen for the next tohu. A mountain appearing on your horizon when you weren’t intentionally moving toward it is a pretty big tohu. And without this tohu, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the story of Parihaka, or the story of my mounga. And I realize as I write this, that without this guidance, I wouldn’t have known how to get to the next bit, which is harder, but these stories have offered me a way in. Mika demonstrates in philosophical terms the worldview which forms the basis of the experiences I’m relating here, but he does so while also emphasizing that according to Indigenous thought “all things, including ourselves, are participants in a thoroughly fluid and unlimited event, in which the self is never quite definite.”2 That is to say, Indigenous thought is based in a profound state of uncertainty because all things in the world are interconnected and relational and therefore able to shift and be reshaped without end. This uncertainty can also be described as unknowability—at all times, for Māori, the unknown underlies all that is known. Maori conceptualizations of the universe are most eloquently expressed in our creation whakapapa, a word that is usually translated as “genealogies,” but also demonstrates our fundamental

 Meeting the Ancestor on the Road 115 underlying connection with each other and all other things, taking us back, quite literally, to the inception of the universe. In this world view: “There [is] a real emphasis on the dual phenomenon of essence/nothingness. Thinking for Indigenous peoples hence calls for a tentative approach to a topic or concern that takes into account the interconnectedness, obscurity and imprecision of the world.”3 This might go some way toward explaining our openness to tohu, for if our personal experiences and thoughts are not the main things that form our understanding of the world and relationship with it—if we are, as Mika describes, embedded within a whole and constantly shaped and influenced by all things that occur within this whole (world)—would it not be wise to be paying attention to the way things, and our interrelationships with them, constantly shimmer in and out of focus (like a mountain on the horizon), or even shift with great physical force? When we don’t pay attention, what is the cost? As well as writing to you from a very specific time and place, I am also writing to you from an apocalypse. You are experiencing this apocalypse too, and we are hurting, but like the other apocalypses my people have suffered, like the apocalypse of colonization, of influenza, of invasion and confiscation, one of the things that the apocalypse is forcing us to do is think and behave differently. The imposition of end times is painful and violent, and the innocent are not saved from it any more than the less innocent. We are all being forced to change, and the vast majority of us are resisting that change, but there is no doubt that many of us also hear a small voice telling us that in this case, change is necessary. We are on the precipice of a much greater apocalypse, and so it feels like this one has something to tell us, and if we can just be quiet and listen, we might avert that steeper cliff ahead of us. It’s easy for me to sound philosophical about this. Our people, Māori people, Taranaki people, Moriori people, Indigenous peoples, Black peoples, migrant peoples, refugee peoples, we’ve seen the end of the world before. We may have seen it many times. The end times occur for me as a Māori person in slow motion because it is happening in the past and in the present and in the future all at once, and much of that time it has been invisible, in a larger sense, because no one is paying attention, or specific people are willfully diverting attention elsewhere, so that our slow apocalypse can continue without interference. This is what happened with Parihaka: for the longest time it was a story that was ignored or mis-told. But make no mistake, it was an ending. Sometimes I imagine what kind of lives we would have had if Parihaka, or any of the other ancestral communities I descend from, had been left to continue flourishing. The quickest answer: my whanau, my family, would be landowners. In fact, we would hold vast tracts of land, and given the industry that marked the success of Māori communities prior to the colonial land wars and confiscations, we would likely be highly educated (though in a more culturally appropriate way), healthier, bilingual and wealthy. In a wider sense, there would be fewer of us in prisons. There would be less whakamā and grief and depression. Less addiction. Fewer suicides. Less family dysfunction. And while capitalism is no answer to anything, and wealth has its own pitfalls, imagine what impact communities like Parihaka, with a bit more power, could have had on the world.

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The truth is, even those of us who come from places like Parihaka have to spend lifetimes finding out about them, lifetimes getting back to them. The truth is even a Māori child from an extremely fractured background can get quite far into the story that is her life without being touched by the apocalypse directly and catastrophically, as her ancestors were. She will experience the apocalypse only through history books that explain how it came to be, Indigenous scholars who explain things in gracious but unrelenting terms, and family stories of how bad things were for her grandparents and all the great-greats, or her cousins, and news stories of others who weren’t quite so lucky as her. These will be painful things to face, and she will feel the indignities of prejudice and ignorance both in the society around her and within her family, but she won’t touch death, she won’t really feel like she is in the midst of an ending. Not until later. Every so often there is a quickening. This is one of those times. In the last few years, I have come to know intimately how our people are dying faster than other people, and I have seen how many of my people face untimely and avoidable mortality, or simply deep existential pain of the kind that can kill, and how we have walked through the darkness together, over and over. And I have been forced to see, also, that while I have always counted myself fortunate, as far as these things go, that colonization manifested itself in my life only as family dysfunction, abandonment, stolen children, poverty, casual racism, and emotional abuse rather than more physically harmful acts, I have been forced to see how deeply embedded I was and always have been in a system that rests on the eradication of my people and our way of seeing the world, and how that system has harmed and continues to harm me and my children, in ways that clearly and horrifically create potentially mortal wounds. And yet, again, mine is a slower, softer, gentler apocalypse than others are experiencing. The privilege of a backyard, a summer trip, all my children still living, and my parents. The privilege of a roof, and food, so much food. The sweet privilege of writing these words, even while other work calls me. None of this is lost on me. I am alive. You are there, reading these words. There are people who love us. This is an essay about genre. I have taken a circuitous route because it is impossible to tell you anything about genre from a Māori perspective without giving some sense of what it is like to inhabit a Māori perspective. Note I have used the nonspecific “a” for there is no single, monolithic Māori point of view, but perhaps there are identifiable themes. And perhaps I need to share with you one more mountain story before I can explain what any of this has to do with genre. From the mounga’s own website: It is said that Taranaki Mounga was formerly known as Pukeonaki and stood near Tūrangi, with [other mountains] Ruapehu, Tongariro, and Pihanga. Pukeonaki and Tongariro both loved Pihanga and fought over her. But Tongariro was stronger and Pukeonaki (Taranaki), bearing the scars of battle, withdrew underground, carving out the bed of the Whanganui River on his journey to the sea. When he surfaced

 Meeting the Ancestor on the Road 117 he saw the beautiful Pouākai range standing inland and he was drawn towards her. Pouākai and Taranaki’s offspring became the trees, plants, birds, rocks and rivers flowing from their slopes.4

I’ve known versions of this story all my adult life, and thought of it, with all due respect to the mounga, as just a story, since even though I find it easy to see mounga as living entities, mountains clearly cannot move, no matter how angry they are. But, of course, even of this I can’t be certain, and five minutes online researching this story reveals how it’s best not to make assumptions about things that appear to be very solid and still. In 2017 New Zealand’s main news site reported that according to a geology professor: “Māori legend surrounding Mt Taranaki might explain its placement in the North Island because, scientifically, it makes no sense.”5 However, the article goes on to say, scientists have begun to find the reason why Taranaki stands out by itself on the West Coast, isolated from his central plateau family. Millions of years ago, there were “a series of unusual earthquakes that occurred in an East to West line from Ruapehu to Mt Taranaki.”6 Unusual, because they happened 52 kilometers beneath the surface when most quakes in the area don’t happen below 15 kilometers. This all sounds suspiciously like the kind of seismic activity that could forge a river or move a mountain. We can wonder at the remarkable accuracy of the tribal story even if we read it only as metaphor—how did our ancestors know that Taranaki’s presence in the West is directly related to subterranean rumblings and turmoil that began eons ago near the mountains in the center of the island? It makes sense then, that in our customary literatures, contemporary “Western” divisions of genre didn’t exist. Jane McRae, who documents and categorizes the types of Māori oral literatures that existed prior to European contact, states that while “there was no exact parallel in Māori oral tradition for the classification of fiction or nonfiction,” there were debates on the accuracy of certain accounts. “The oral texts, however, may well combine fiction and non-fiction, as these are understood in literature, by bringing the imaginative and spiritual into the explanatory or documentary. This is a mark of the thinking and reasoning of Māori in the old world.”7 Indeed, the spirit of speculation was fully alive in the literature, as were the fluidity, interconnection, and imprecision that Mika champions. How does this non-division between fiction and nonfiction and poetry work in practice? It means that at any one moment there are multiple worlds in our writing, multiple times, multiple versions of stories, that our ancestors are alive even at the same time that they are dead. As Mika points out, “Indigenous holistic thought does indeed suggest that apparently different stages of time are, in fact, co-instantaneous. Events do occur separately, but they are contained within a certain potential, and that potentiality is of utmost consequence for indigenous philosophy.”8 While writing this essay I looked up my great-great-grandfather and found a conversation he had had in his old age with a researcher that was subsequently published in the Journal of the Polynesian Society in the 1920s. When asked about albinism among Māori, he said with a confidence questioned by the researcher that such children are the result of a union between human and patupaiarehe, fair-skinned supernatural beings with blonde or

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red hair, who are described as “fairy people” in various accounts, though the term is misleading. Suddenly, my ancestor is here with me as I write this essay, and I find I am very pleased to be in his company, and his confidence in ancestral patupaiarehe seems as right as any other way of seeing the world, and who is that researcher to question it? It is the truth of the world my koro inhabits (yes, in present tense, for he is still there, and he is also here in some way), the reality of it. We can turn somersaults around the metaphysics of this worldview, and Mika can help us in those contortions, but as he shows us, to stand apart from this and judge it as if it is separate from us is a deeply colonial perspective. Positivism itself is only one way of seeing the world, and not necessarily one that allows us to see all of it, dividing as it does those things we have decided are “real” from those that we’ve decided are not. In the world I inhabit, as a writer and as a Māori at the foot of my mounga, the multiplicity of all things are present in everything I write, so that I cannot tell the story of writing this piece without telling the story of Parihaka, without showing you how I am that mountain, and how he is me, without also telling the story of the many apocalypses, particularly the one we face now, without an older story of the mounga from before he settled and we settled around him, without meeting my ancestor on the road and hearing his voice, without noticing the many tohu. All of these stories are true. Who is to say that the only time that really exists is the present moment, particularly when one exists in such an extreme state of openness to potential? Time is hence an untidy and non-constraining phenomenon in Indigenous holistic thinking, and as Mika puts it, its nebulousness would mean that parallel dimensions existed alongside the one currently being experienced. As unconventional and undesirable as this might sound to stalwarts of academic orthodoxy, it is highly plausible for indigenous metaphysics but it loses potency when explained in specialized academic language—destined, perhaps, for science fiction or new age-speak.9

Or, indeed, creative nonfiction! Me? I do divide my writing quite clearly along nonfiction and fictional lines, because the Western system raised me, and such things are deeply ingrained, but I also carry this other world, or in Mika’s terms “worlding,” with me and everything I write. And while I sound quite confident that there is a line between fiction and nonfiction, I could not define for you where that is—it is certainly a very fuzzy line, a constantly shifting line, a line that has its own way of shaping things. I turned to creative writing as a field precisely due to the inadequacy of other academic fields to encapsulate, or even allow for, the state of speculation that Mika asserts is the basis of Māori thinking, and is certainly my experience of the world. Obviously fiction, but also not-so-obviously creative nonfiction, allow space for a speculative approach. The great pleasure in creative nonfiction, for me, is the paradox I am confronted with every time I write: as I attempt to find more precision and more elegance, more accuracy about a topic, I am often frustrated in my desire to pinpoint any one true thing. To solidify it in words is only to omit that aspect of it which defies definition, the “nothingness”

 Meeting the Ancestor on the Road 119 which underlies the thingness. It is in meeting my failure on the page that I come into contact with that which underlies all creativity and creation: Te Kore, the first state in our creation whakapapa, which I think of as the nothing and the not-nothing, the field of pure potentiality. The nonfiction page therefore becomes a place where I encounter the greater mystery of creation itself.

Notes 1 Carl Mika, Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence: A Worlded Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2017), 41. 2 Ibid., 45. 3 Ibid., 41. 4 Taranaki Mounga Project, “History,” https://taranakimounga​.nz​/nga​-mounga​/history/. 5 Jeremy Wilkinson, “Geologists Inch Closer to Understanding Mt. Taranaki Mysteries,” February 17, 2017, https://www​.stuff​.co​.nz​/environment​/89510777​/geologists​-inch​ -closer​-to​-understanding​-mt​-taranakis​-mysteries. 6 Ibid. 7 Jane McRae, Maori Oral Tradition: He Korero no te Ao Tawhito, bilingual ed. (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017), 34. 8 Mika, Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence, 45. 9 Ibid.

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Autogeographies Barrie Jean Borich

One afternoon, loitering in Manhattan between the end of a conference and a plane ride home to the Midwest, I happened to walk by the Empire State Building. It was a Sunday in early February, not yet tourist season, and there wasn’t much of a line, so I decided, on a whim, to take the trek up to the legendary observation deck. I navigated banks of elevators, ticket lines, security rituals, and forced detours through souvenir shops, and even stood before an Empire State Building backdrop while a man took my picture, which I thought was some new kind of post-9/11 security procedure, but no, was just an attempt to get me to buy a souvenir portrait. (Had I purchased the photo on the way out I would have departed with an ironic keepsake, documenting the inner tourist trap corridors of the Empire State Building but leaving me no proof that I had stood on the precipice of that famous view.) Eventually, after another cramped line and another upward lurch of the elevator, I arrived on deck, a circular balcony busy with bodies, most of the visitors speaking German, everyone leaning against the fencing, peering out over the city of cities. People pointed. People peered. And below, the city spread out like an enormous jigsaw puzzle. The day was clear so I could see everything of Manhattan, sites that for me, a native Chicagoan, were equally alien and familiar. I could see the Met Life Building where my brother’s wife’s brother worked, and the Chrysler Building my spouse’s workman grandfather had helped build. To the south I could see the clustered spires of Lower Manhattan, with the missing tooth gap where the Twin Towers used to stand. I looked over the skyscraper peaks, the valley of the park, the gray-green runner of the East River, all locations I knew better from maps and movies than my own experience, but which, from this vantage point, I could see for the first time in actual relation to each other. The view offered me everyone’s story of an iconic city, and too, as a native Midwesterner, from the metropolis in the middle known as the Second City, another visual interpretation of my own story set against the purportedly premier American city. I tell this mundane tourist’s tale because it illustrates two ways geographical concepts are important in creative nonfiction. The story of any human life is a tale of quest and containment and places are both destinations and receptacles, providing interpretive context and comparison. When writers reckon with the harmonies and

 Autogeographies 121 disharmonies of their physical, emotional, and theoretical locations they often find new ways to render their life stories. In any narrative, report, or rumination, place has more than one function. The first and most obvious, in terms of fundamental narrative craft, is that of setting. In film this concept is called mis-en-scene, and refers to what the auteur chooses to contain in any single frame, the scenic characteristics and telling details that help illuminate character and do some of the visceral work of telling the story. Writers must, of course, describe rather than simply capture these details, but the role setting plays is much the same. But the function of place in any literary work is as more than just a container of action. I frequently ask my students to try to define the feeling one gets when crossing some geographical border, whether the line is as dramatic as the difference between Indiana and India or as subtle as the shift between regions of the American Midwest. Whether or not people are actively conscious of how land, landscape, architecture and other reverberations of their public and private surroundings affect them, the human sense of, and attachment to, place is—as geographers tell us—profound and deeply embedded in our stories. Inside a Reno casino or atop a desolate mountaintop, the air smoky and dense, or muggy and reeking of spilled beer, or traffic-bound and rainy, or so windy and dry the back of our throats itch, we all respond to the texture of the atmosphere. Standing at the apex of Times Square, at the center of a frozen Minnesota Lake, or in a difficult in-law’s kitchen, we respond physically and psychologically to the ways sounds, bodies, and objects move or don’t move through space. In the neighborhood where we pay rent or own a home, or passing through a strange city where we can’t make out the alphabet of the local signage, we journey between alienation and citizenship. Returning to avenues we haven’t traversed since graduating eighth grade or peering out over a metropolis we’ve only seen before in the movies, places contain meanings according to the significance we ascribe to them. Even if our nonfiction writing is not about location, the geography of actual places permeates, bringing to the sensibility of the work, and the autobiography that forms through the work, the visceral, embodied texture of involvement with living. But often, in creative nonfiction, place—particularly our autobiographical relationship to place—is not just a story element but also our subject, carrying us partway into a slippery partnership with scholarly disciplines such as history, geography, and cultural studies. This is one of the areas where the work literary artists make of our actual attachment to places operates in much the same way as actual people exist on our pages as both character and portrait. When we work in a form where our referents actually exist, our artistic purpose is not only to compose story or impression and unearth personal meaning but also to ethically bear witness to history, the actual past. The literary nonfiction writer need not mimic the work of the scholars concerned with similar questions, but neither can we avoid the fact that we’ve wandered into a realm where knowledge and studied opinion does already exist and possibly even overlaps with our own concerns. Nonfictional experience of place might also lead us to unconventional structural choices. I have taken this thinking so far as to consider some of my own essays in terms

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of what visual artists call map art and interdisciplinary scholars call the deep map— which in my work means longer ruminative prose passages visually and spatially interrupted by close-up and retitled narrative segments, set-off like the inset maps of cities in a road atlas, the arrangement of the page imitating the feel of a highway map— my own quirky attempt to use the visual space of textual fragmentation to help tell what I call my autogeography. In my book Body Geographic, for instance, writing which began as braided essays about the intersections of place and the body, most particularly the juncture of my body and the city and suburbs of the Chicago I knew in childhood, became, through visual structure and narrative shifts, an attempt to render something broader, more map-like, conveying at once the breadth and intimacy inherent to the human relationship to place. I coin this term autogeography to define the creative nonfiction project concerned with the ways we might map our bodies and places as interdependent historical strata. Such work means to be a bird’s-eye view intended to illuminate and define personal and public history, political reality, the tactile evidence of what happened at this longitude and latitude. We aim to create a particular spatial resonance, the placiness of place. An autogeography is self-portrait in the form of a panoramic map of memory, history, lyric intuition, awareness of sensory space, research, and any other object or relic we pick up along the way that offers further evidence of what does or did or will happen here. To illustrate my meaning I will tell of two other journeys up to the observation decks of skyscrapers. One of these buildings was, compared to the Empire State, not very tall at all—the 27th floor of the World Trade Center overlooking the harbor in Baltimore, Maryland, advertised as the “Top of the World.” I ventured up to this relatively unimpressive height when researching my family immigration story. My Croat grandfather, along with his parents, my great-grandmother and grandfather, arrived in America at a little known entry, the B&O Railroad’s Locust Point Immigration Piers. Part of my research was historical. Over two million Eastern and Southern European immigrants entered the United States here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many immediately boarding trains that carried them to the copper and iron mines of Michigan and Minnesota. I had come here to walk the ground of this forgotten location of history where not even a plaque commemorates the American beginnings of immigrants such as my grandfather, and I had come to better understand the threads that led into a family story in which Chicago is the nexus into which all roads lead. So first I wanted to get the history right. But I wanted to do more than understand. I wanted to connect to a story that was otherwise no more concrete than a few typed lines on copies of immigration papers. I wanted a touchable, visceral experience of my father’s Croatian identity. Of the many forays and journeys I took in order to better understand my grandfather’s story, the Top of the World was one of the most successful—silly as it was with its hyperbolic name and the loop of that old Karen Carpenter song playing endlessly on the observation deck sound system. This was because I could see from the overlook both the old pilings and the railroad tracks that ran from the harbor all the

 Autogeographies 123 way into the westward haze. I couldn’t see the railroad terminus of early-twentiethcentury Chicago from the floor-to-ceiling windows at the Top of the World, but I knew that’s where the train tracks headed, and so I was able to imagine, and later write about, a context invisible to me from ground level, the literal tracks of my family’s journey from old Europe into the steel mill plain where I was born. Speculation, the fragments of family story, and history, fused with the language I would use to bring my version of the story to my autogeographical page. The other high rise I will describe here is more impressive. The Sears Tower in Chicago, now called the Willis Tower, as of this writing still the tallest building of the Americas, locates its skydeck on the 104th floor. I had been away from Chicago for nearly twenty years before I ventured up for a look, though every time I’d traveled home to Chicago from Minneapolis by Amtrak I’d passed the entrance, and the entry line, just a block from Union Station. I had been in the skyscraper before, just once, years back when I worked in the Loop and a good friend from high school had a job in one of the glass-walled suites halfway up the tower. Tourists, not locals, queue up for skyscraper views, but I suppose I was some kind of tourist by the time my spouse Linnea and I, killing time downtown before our trip back to Minneapolis, noticed the line was short, and so why not? I had, after all, done it in Baltimore. We lined up behind extended families visiting from India or Pakistan, no one speaking English. To this day, my first visual memory of the interior of the Sears Tower is as a country where the native garb is the sari. We all waited patiently for our big experience, riding to the top of what had recently been downgraded to the second tallest skyscraper view on earth, just a year out from being trumped by new construction in Kuala Lumpur. What I experienced at the top surprised me; it was as if I had stepped into the deep map of my own body. This was a landscape more familiar to me than any other, by virtue of map travel, car travel, train travel, bus travel, foot travel. I’d seen this view in motion, from the tiny windows of planes as they took off or landed, but never like this, standing still like a map or a diorama, but wider and more resonant, both silent and alive. To the south I saw the gray industrial corridors I’d dreamt of escaping from as a girl, then did escape, though not in the direction I’d planned. I saw the curve of Lake Michigan, smoky from the East Side and into the mill fields of Indiana, the steel mill plain that drew the immigrant generations of my family to this city nearly 100 years before. I saw the gold and white granite glow to the north, the richy-rich side of the city where as a girl I wished to someday live, before I understood the relationship between profession, economics, and urban geography. I saw the complete tableau of my origins, but as one place, both highway and inset, not segments, not regions. The signage of the skydeck noted that the view from this height on a clear day stretched across a breadth of four states, and I could see all four from here, the urban upheaval into the peaks and cluster of the city, then the falling away at the outskirts, into first the detritus of heavy industry, then, at the horizon hem, the flat farmland that had once been the tallgrass prairie. My autogeographical discovery was that the industrial Midwest is actually one place, and the borders between suburbs and neighborhood were only subjective

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markers, whether my own or that of urban politicians and planners. The land itself and my ideas about history, identity, migration, the American city, and nonfiction form remapped themselves in that moment, forming a synthesis of experiential knowledge so profound within my own body that anything I ever try to write on the subject can only hope to succeed as a readable shadow.

20

Dissolving Genre Writ with Water Ingrid Horrocks

Perhaps it is raining, the river in winter roar, breaking from the spine of its straightened banks and stretching flood arms out across our paddocks. The river has been farmed for only a hundred years. I am almost a teenager. Inside our Wairarapa farmhouse my father shows me his copy of the Tao Te Ching from the 1970s. Nothing is more soft and yielding than water. / Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better.1 Outside the river rips up fence posts and wires. The next day my mother, at her most anarchic, will have us three kids out there rafting on tractor tire inner tubes. We rise and soar with the wild waters, which resemble nothing we could ever own. Three decades later, in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, a city surrounded by sea, I find my writing bending and yielding as I seek ways to evoke being part of the nonhuman world. Finding ways to do this feels increasingly urgent, an urgency at odds with my lean to the gentle and discursive. My writing becomes watery in content and form. I write a memoir shaped by immersions in different rivers and oceans and in the chilly city bays near where I live. I call it a cycle of essays. I call it Where We Swim. Oceans rise. Rivers become toxic to animals—human and nonhuman alike. My sense of family keeps rippling outward, from the uncanny of sibling relationships stretched between continents, to whales and Amazonian manatee, to elks and ibises, to rocks and waves. One essay begins with an image of my elder brother and me and our own children shining wet in the Indian Ocean of Western Australia, where he has gone to live. But the essay finds its meaning in an encounter with a pod of humpback whales, close enough for us to hear their exhalations of wet breath, and in the question of what it means to think of whales, too, and the waters they swim, as part of the fluid families we all inhabit, broad and strange. As I write about my brother’s family and my own, I watch footage of whales, seeing the way even the most enormous adult appears light as he soars through water, the way a calf sleeps on its mother’s back, and the way one whale’s long white throat grooves curve and stretch, concertina-like as, remaking grace, they leap, from water. Droplets spray out and fall.

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The whistles and grunts that make up humpback whales’ songs are the longest and most complex rhythmic syntax in the nonhuman world. One whale takes a song from another and returns it with a new rhythm of its own. Humpbacks pass song fragments across hundreds of miles. I wonder what those songs sound like when humpbacks meet again after a gap of time. What sounds do they float to acknowledge and guide one another? How does it feel to become a drop of water, and then to reenter, to dissolve back into the whole? It is now more than three years since I saw my other brother. Living in South America, he is now unable to come home. I dream of the waters pulling between. I try to write the encounter with the water and the whales in a way that their movements and stories will have at least the weight of my human narrative, no current in the writing reduced to metaphor for another. I think about the ways whales have been hunted almost to extinction, waters slicked, and of my own history as Pākehā, European New Zealander, my ancestors sailing seas to make our homes in already inhabited river mouths. I imagine the braided essay as a braided river, networks of channels flowing in and out of one another. Now this in turn helps me apprehend how river currents mix and change, finding new routes as they descend. How they spread across rocky plains, patterns of shifting gravel beds making and remaking whole ecosystems, rich with life, moving always toward the sea. By this point I am riding the upswell of all the creative nonfiction now trying to reimagine the relationship between the human and nonhuman worlds, drawn always in my own imaginings to water as a vessel of connection. Like many of us, once I did not really read what gets called “nature writing,” thinking of it as inevitably boring, elegiac, pious. But I read this new wave of bending, resistant writing, as though my life depends on it. Perhaps it does. Nature is not sectioned off in this nonfiction, not treated as though it were separate from daily lives, or as though shared survival was not the most intimate thing imaginable. I make lists of recent books—for myself and for my nonfiction students and then for the students in a new course I write with a colleague, Laura-Jean McKay, on eco-fictions and nonfiction: Joanna Pocock, Surrender: the Call of the American West (2019); Rebecca Giggs, Fathoms: the World in the Whale (2020); Nicole Walker, Sustainability: A Love Story (2018); Sophie Cunningham, City of Trees: Essays on Life, Death and the Need for a Forest (2019). I keep reading and listing Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit, whose writing in some ways brought me here. I read everything in the Sydney Review of Books New Nature series. I notice how much some fiction now sounds like creative nonfiction, as though in a novel like Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020) the fiction writer has turned to first-person nonfiction to find a voice and form adequate to our inundating reality. A form fit to weather the twenty-first century. Together, my students and I make lists of the meanings and methods of the new modes of what we are now calling eco-nonfiction. These come to include:

 Dissolving Genre 127 Close observation and attention

this kōwhai bloom, that estuary, this possum, that coal fire.

Ordinary or unpromising locations Avoids idealization of pristine wilderness areas Favors ecosystems that include humans Observes altered worlds

and sometimes lost worlds Often draws on memoir

edgelands, the flourishing of motorway burbs. fewer epiphanies in National Parks, fewer men on mountains.

more suburbs, kitchens, children, parents. . . but also gardens, rivers, oceans, oysters. eucalypts in San Francisco ice melt in Antarctica re-wildings

endling: an animal that is the last of its species.

Finds continuities between the human and nonhuman

I, sometimes we.

warm breath misting. Demands we move outside a human frame of reference “Is it possible to draw or write a forest?”2 Struggles with how to do this signed here. Searches for organic forms and structures opening out stories of confluence “What do I know but pieces, all at once?”3 Understands that in the twenty-first century “to write about nature is a political act”4 Hopes (within hopes) that a shift in attention —a yielding of consciousness to a world beyond human— will give to a shift in action. I wait impatiently for works of eco-nonfiction I know are being written at the same time as my own in the place I inhabit, Aotearoa New Zealand. Nina Mingya Powles’s Small Bodies of Water (2021) arrives just after a pandemic lockdown, on the first day in weeks when we can legally swim. I take it to the rocky shore. Powles’s background is different from my own. She is white and Malaysian Chinese. Born in Aotearoa, she partly grew up in China, and now lives in London. Her book won the 2020 Nan Shepherd Prize in the UK for Underrepresented Voices in Nature Writing. She writes as someone “whose skin, whose lineage, is split along lines of

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migration.”5 It takes me some time to remember—to see—this is also true of my own lineage, although the very fact I can forget it comes from a place far more than my white skin deep. Powles finds one home in the Māori word tauiwi, non-Māori, non-Indigenous, and the ongoing question of how to “put down roots on stolen land” in ways that are intentional, neither violent and appropriative, nor leaving one “drifting, rootless, untethered.”6 She is writing of peoples here, but I also think of our relationships with other nonhuman life of this planet and how it owns itself. And I turn over that phrase we use of “putting down roots.” How would it sound differently if rooted underwater, as in a riverbed, held in place but alive with movement? Awash. I recognize Powles’s observation that she never intended to write about “ecological loss,” “but I also don’t know how to avoid writing about it.”7 It does not seem strange that we were writing our watery books concurrently. We were both in search of forms adequate to evoke multiple coeval experiences. Our books are not so much braided as cartographic—oceanographic, drawing diverse bodies of water together, overflowing distinct embodied experiences and places into one another. From accumulation of close observations, eventually, there comes abundance, and the possibility of some kind of hope. Looking up through my goggles I see rainforest clouds, a watery rainbow. I can see the undersides of frangipani petals floating on the surface, their gold-edged shadows moving towards me. I straighten my legs and point my toes and launch myself towards the sun.8

Back at the top of the steep hill on which I live for now, Nic Low’s Uprising: Walking the Southern Alps of New Zealand (2021) arrives too. Low is of Ngāi Tahu and European descent and divides his time between Melbourne and Ōtautahi Christchurch. For Low, it is walking rather than swimming that is his mode of observation and way of knowing, but the modes share an approach of embodied immersion. Low’s writing finds its shape in nine crossings of Kā Tiritiri-o-temoana, the mountain range that forms the spread spine of the South Island of Aotearoa and of the Ngāi Tahu tribe’s territory. His ancestral maps are here, in the streaming mountains. As Low narrates his journeys with various traveling companions, he interweaves the stories of previous mountain voyages, by Māori, by early European colonists, by later human arrivals, but also by atua (Māori gods), and by the land itself. “We understand the landscape through whakapapa: complex genealogies that connect us to each other, and to the land, and to the atua,”9 he writes. Ngāi Tahu’s oldest terrestrial ancestor is Aoraki, the highest mountain in Aotearoa, who came down from the heavens with his brothers to meet his new stepmother, Papatūānuku, the Earth Mother. They became stranded, waiting for rescue on the upturned hull of their canoe, slowly turning to stone. When their rescue party found and grieved for them, they also forged gorges to the sea.10 For Low, to walk and write and address the land, with its waters and rocks and golden-brown tussock, is to inhabit a world where there is no solid line between

 Dissolving Genre 129 history and myth, human and nonhuman. “On a narrow island, all journeys begin and end with the sea.”11 In other places and in other modes, I have written about the politics of traditions of writing in Aotearoa, as in many settler-colonial countries (certainly in the United States, Canada and Australia), which prize a particular idea of wilderness areas as unpeopled and unoccupied. Writing like Low’s helps me open out further to ways of knowing and storying that show how “rather than wilderness,” even mountains are full of history “everywhere you look.”12 Rivers are ancestors, food sources, and highways. Low’s own writing is an act of map-making and re-storying, of home-coming both individual and collective. It is writing that is not about the land, so much as of the land, from the stones of the sentence to the upper strata of structure: Toitū te whenua, you often hear—translated as “leave the land undisturbed.” How could you, when you were going to be part of the land yourself? The better sentiment is “cleave to the land.” I dug into the loam, looking for bones, gathering history in dirty half-moons beneath my nails.13 The scent of brine grew stronger, and finally in the late afternoon we passed through a break in the trees to reach the shore. After so long enclosed in dense bush, the wide ocean vista was a startling relief. We hugged and splashed saltwater on our chapped faces . . . Sea haze softened the edges of the land.14

What I keep coming back to with a question is that term attack, sometimes translated as “overcoming”: Nothing is more soft and yielding than water. Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better. What I see is water flowing through rigid social structures, seeping into a seeming collective belief that we must pour concrete, raise steel to the sky, buy primary-colored Legos in bright plastic boxes, wear tailored trousers. Perhaps the very threat of water, of floods on a scale we can as yet hardly imagine, might help us instead to seek more yielding ways to live alongside and within the nonhuman world. To soften with it, from the page into the ground.

Notes 1 Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English (London: Wildwood House, 1972). 2 Sophie Cunningham, City of Trees: Essays on Life, Death and the Need for a Forest (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2019), 34. 3 Nina Mingya Powles, Small Bodies of Water (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2021), 78. 4 James Bradley, “Writing on the Precipice,” Sydney Review of Books, February 21, 2017, https://sydneyreviewofbooks​.com​/essay​/writing​-on​-the​-precipice​-climate​ -change/. 5 Powles, Small Bodies of Water, 245. 6 Ibid., 247. 7 Ibid., 45.

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8 Ibid., 2. 9 Nic Low, Uprising: Walking the Southern Alps of New Zealand (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2021), 6. 10 Ibid., 297–8. 11 Ibid., 331. 12 Ibid., 15. 13 Ibid., 28–9. 14 Ibid., 320–1.

21

“Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!” Courage and Creative Nonfiction Brenda Miller

Recently I gave a reading of a personal essay that was, well, really personal; it inadvertently revealed more about myself than I’d intended. Afterward people came up to congratulate me on the piece. Some zoomed right in and shook my hand; some hung back a little, embarrassed, whispering together. And all of them used the word “brave.” As in: you were so brave to read that essay. Or, I could never be so brave to write something like that. I thanked everyone warmly, and I really did appreciate the praise, but I went back to my seat feeling suddenly self-conscious, deflated, a fraud. Brave? I’m afraid of my own shadow. And to anoint me as brave made me feel as if I had really done something wrong, something no one in their right mind would do: risk making an ass of myself in public. Bravery implied that I had screwed up my courage to both write and read that essay, but I had simply been in my chair writing. I had been following form and language and voice to get the essay where it wanted to go; at some point momentum had taken over. I didn’t even know what I was writing until I’d written it, and I’d been chuckling the whole time, enjoying myself immensely. I’d read the piece to that audience only because I liked the form so much, loved reading that voice aloud. Brave? Uh oh, I thought, what have I done? * * * When I think about the evolution of creative nonfiction—and about the ways contemporary creative nonfiction has embraced radical new ways to express personal material—I tend to think about it in these terms: about how courage, a concept that seems to belong more on the battlefield than in the writing room, seems to have been superseded by form. I’ve come to see that at some crucial point the best autobiographical writers shift their allegiance from experience, itself, to the artifact they’re making of that experience. To do so, they mustn’t find courage; they must, instead, become keenly interested in metaphor, image, syntax, and structure: all the stuff that comprises form. We’re hammering out parallel plot lines, not plumbing the

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depths of our souls but as a collateral to that technical work the soul does indeed get tapped and gushes forth. Case in point: that really personal essay? I wrote it in the most impersonal form: a “Table of Figures,” where the personal narrative is told and embedded within the ostensibly descriptive voice of an objective table of contents. Each section of the essay is another “figure,” that is: Figure 1.1: A girl becomes aware of herself as a girl. . . . Note the mother instructing this girl that she must now wear a T-shirt while playing in the summertime with the boys on the block. Note the girl’s naked torso, her downward gaze onto an expanse of bare flesh punctuated by two flat nipples. . . .

The essay goes on to examine the narrator’s sexual history—from early childhood play, to losing her virginity, to living as a single woman in her forties—all in this list of figures, speaking of this girl (myself) in the third person. I started to really have fun with the piece when I added line graphs, tables, sidebars, and photographs. All these devices enabled me to see my material not as emotional “stuff ” for which I needed to muster courage, but only as the raw information that could now be shaped into an essay I hoped would be both entertaining and effective. By contrasting deeply interior material with a more outward persona, I mitigated any sense that I might be about to perform an act of indecent exposure in public. When creative nonfiction writers choose to write in nonlinear forms such as the short-short essay, the braided essay, or the “hermit crab” (as that Table of Figures piece demonstrates, an essay that appropriates another form as its shell), they magnify the fact that they are now manipulating experience for the sake of art. They immediately signal to the reader that their intent is not necessarily to convey information or fact— or to bravely reveal a dark past—but to create the truth of literature, of metaphor, which is not always so direct. Concrete forms allow for what I like to call “inadvertent revelations,” where the writer no longer seems in complete control. Revelation, or discovery, emerges organically from the writing; the essay now reveals information about the writer, rather than the writer revealing these things directly to the reader. So the writer doesn’t need courage; the essay does. My students understand this instinctively. In my lyric essay class, we begin our experimentations with short-short essays, where the restricted space of a single page forces my students to look for the small things, to magnify small details until they yield meaning. There’s no runway on which to build up your courage and so experience is now shaped to give precedence to image, scene, detail, subtle metaphor—not necessarily “feelings” or bare emotion. We use the online journal Brevity, edited by Dinty Moore, to seek out models for this form. Essays such as “The Sloth,” by Jill Christman, may have their impetus in deep emotion, but the writing goes far beyond that, finds the mettle to explore this emotion through keen observation, precise language, and organic metaphor. It begins:

 Courage and Creative Nonfiction 133 There is a nothingness of temperature, a point on the body’s mercury where our blood feels neither hot nor cold. I remember a morning swim on the black sand eastern coast of Costa Rica four months after my twenty-two-year-old fiancé was killed in a car accident. Walking into the water, disembodied by grief, I felt no barriers between my skin, the air, and the water. Later, standing under a trickle of water in the wooden outdoor shower, I heard a rustle, almost soundless, and looking up, expecting something small, I saw my first three-toed sloth.1

Notice how Christman’s description of grief is not so much an emotional feeling as a physical one: “no barriers between my skin, the air, and the water.” The information about the situation is given quickly—a fiancé killed—a context that lets us know our foundation, but her most effective move is that she does not start with that line. No, we start with a fact external to her own experience, a physical fact that will become the focal point for Christman’s overarching metaphor. From the very first line, Christman is translating experience into artifact, and by doing so, the writing takes on its own courage. Noticing the sloth, the narrator is taken outside of her introspection and so, in the end, this story becomes not a polemic about her own personal grief, but about new insights into the nature of grief, an articulation that does necessarily arise not from one’s own experience but from a literary perspective on the world. After watching the sloth move in his slow yet deliberate progress through the branches, Christman ends the essay with: What else is this slow? Those famous creatures of slow—the snail, the tortoise— they move faster. Much. This slow seemed impossible, not real, like a trick of my sad head. Dripping and naked in the jungle, I thought, That sloth is as slow as grief. We were numb to the speed of the world. We were one temperature.2

From a statement of fact about equilibrium of temperature, we’ve come full circle, but this fact is now imbued with much more meaning. Because the essay is so short, every image must be precise, every word must further the narrator’s discovery in a focused and measured way. The essay must move like the sloth—slowly, deliberately— opening up space for this grief to manifest. Christman didn’t need courage; she needed that sloth. She needed that sloth to carry the weight of her grief for her, and eventually for us. * * * Writing a braided essay offers a slightly different kind of armor when venturing into dangerous or risky material. In these essays strands form, disappear, and reappear at strategic moments, creating a lively, interactive structure in which one’s personal material now can interweave with material the world offers. The personal and the more “impersonal” can play off one another to create new meaning.

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In Sherry Simpson’s essay “Fidelity,” for example, she begins an emotionally wrenching piece about the complexities of marriage not with a scene of that marriage— the fights, the doubts, the ambivalence—but with a bear: I saw the bear first. I turned from the ocean’s calm edge toward the dusky blue of Reid Glacier, and there it was, striding over the spit in the honeyed evening light, stiff green stalks of beach rye parting against its flanks. The bear was coming toward us. It was looking at us. “There’s a bear,” I said. My voice was low. My husband was standing by the kayak and turned around to look. I did not know what else to say.3

In this vivid first scene, we readers do not yet know what territory we’ll be heading into (though the title gives us a good clue, plants the theme in our consciousness); we’re simply hooked to know what will happen with that bear. As the essay progresses, Simpson interrupts this scene repeatedly to play it against the narrative strand of her marriage, so that it quickly becomes clear that this one vivid, extended scene with the bear—and the way husband and wife must face this danger together, the different ways they face this danger together—becomes emblematic of marriage itself. In that first section all the themes are planted for the essay to come: the lurking presence of danger, the impossibility of words to ward off that danger, the different directions these partners face, and how eventually they reconcile those differences to work together in order to survive. The scene with the bear becomes what I like to call a “container” scene; not only does it provide narrative momentum (we want to know what physically happens), it “contains” the strong emotions involved in dealing with sensitive, emotional material. We come back to the bear four times in the narrative and in between Simpson gives us scenes from the marriage, difficult scenes rendered quickly, with just the right detail. For example: “One night in bed, thinking of all I’d been learning without him, I said, You’re a speed bump in my life. It may have been the cruelest thing I’ve ever said. He looked at me and replied, I love you with all my heart. Why isn’t that enough? I couldn’t say, but I knew the failure was in me, in wanting to make him something he was not and never would be.”4 These reflections on her own culpability, the portrayal of the husband with his vulnerabilities and flaws, and her gradual insight into the essential nature of this relationship are all subsumed in the context of this one bear who seems to keep stalking the couple on this trip through the wilderness. The bear provides the narrator with an outer, concrete image that both bolsters and buffers the emotional material to come. The narrator and her husband, once they shake the bear, end up in the last sections of the easy in camaraderie, having survived both the ordeal of bear and long marriage: Such a relief to be still and quiet, to lie there open to the world and returned to ourselves. I slept with one hand tucked into his sleeping bag, one palm pressed

 Courage and Creative Nonfiction 135 against that steady warmth. In the morning, we sat and watched the clear light fill the stormy basin, grateful that for once there was nothing more to say.5

I know it can seem a paradox: that writings imbued with qualities of what we recognize as “honest” or “brave” may actually be so strong because they focus away from that material directly. This refocus can be on form, yes, but these forms also urge us to hone in on details that exist at an oblique slant to the center of the piece. These essays employ what I call “peripheral vision”: turning the gaze to focus on something that seems peripheral to the emotional center or ostensible topic. Instead of facing your “stuff ” head-on, you turn away from it, zero in on something that has fluttered up on the side, and see what angle it gives you. Case in point: for years I tried to write about two miscarriages I’d had as a very young woman: ectopic pregnancies that left me unable to bear children. Most of that writing was tortured, anguished, and very, very brave. I wept when I wrote. I felt the pain of it all over again. But one day, after traveling to Vermont in autumn, I remembered a small detail: the needlepoint kit my mother had bought for me as I recovered from emergency surgery. So, instead of writing directly about pregnancy and miscarriages and lost love, I wrote about that needlepoint. I found myself looking not at my scarred belly, but at all those numbered squares, on the needle dipping in and out, feeling that thread moving through my fingers. While my mind was so occupied, the essay found all sorts of things to blab to the reader. And it turned out to be an essay not about pregnancy or miscarriage or infertility, but about how we keep bearing our lopsided fruits in spite of great loss and pain. I didn’t need courage. I didn’t need to be brave. I only needed that grimy piece of muslin in my hands. * * * In Bernard Cooper’s memoir Truth Serum, he describes his experiences growing up as a gay boy in Los Angeles, coming to terms with his sexuality and then living as a gay man in the era of AIDS. In the eponymous essay “Truth Serum,” a visit to his therapist’s office (where he is seeking a “cure” for his homosexuality), becomes the through-line for an essay that goes back in time to his first sexual experiences with women, up to the present moment when he is living with a woman, and into the future, when he will settle into his identity as a gay man. Throughout it all, we periodically return to the doctor’s office, where the narrator is compelled to tell the truth through the injection of truth serum. The onset of this drug leads to some pleasant physical sensations, and, “with the sudden candor of a drunk,” he writes: I wanted to tell the doctors how happy I felt, but before the words could form, I heard what I thought was a receptionist typing in another room. Her typing would quicken—faster, manic, superhuman—and invariably I would think to myself: A million words a minute! What nimble fingers! The keys must be shooting sparks from the friction! And then I’d realize it wasn’t the sound of typing after all, but

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something more miraculous—chattering watts of light showered down from a bulb on the ceiling. Stirred to the verge of tears, I wanted to shout, “Hold everything doctors. I can hear light!”6

The serum amplifies everything, sets his senses on high, and in the aftermath of the initial rush he is supposed to be able to express his essential truths. Throughout the essay, Cooper honestly explores his sexual feelings, coming to a conclusion that will disappoint his doctors but will be the launch pad for the rest of his life. The doctor’s office becomes the anchoring point of this complex narrative, a supposedly safe place where he is encouraged to plumb the inner depths; late in the essay we return to the doctor’s office, where Cooper muses: “I suppose I understood that no behavioral modification, no psychological revelation, was going to take away my desire for men, but in the end I went back to Dr. Sward’s office because—this is the hardest confession of all—I wanted to hear the light.”7 In a book full of hard confessions, this may seem like a trivial one. But I’d like to posit that the real “truth serum” in this essay is the writing itself: a prose that goes beyond the facts and gets at a truth accessed only through this artistic interpretation of experience. Truth serum activates when we find the right voice, the right form; when we’ve practiced enough so that we can tell when we’re onto something. We “hear the light.” We become candid as drunks. This truth serum loosens our lips, discretion be damned. In his essay “Marketing Memory,” Cooper expresses his befuddlement at the reaction to his memoir. Of course, he responds with pleasure at praise, but he tells us: After a reading, people would sometimes commend me for my “honesty” and “courage” in writing about sexuality . . . I thanked these people, but tried to explain that I felt neither honest nor brave when I worked with personal subjects because the rigors of shaping sentences and paragraphs overwhelmed any sense that I was dealing with risky or revealing subject matter. In the end, my history became so much raw material to temper in the forge of craft . . . Since “honesty” in writing is so often artless and indulgent, and since mere audacity so often masquerades as “courage,” I was actually a little bothered by the suggestion that these were the work’s most notable qualities. I’d hoped that the formal aspects of my autobiographical writing—its structure, language, and juxtaposition of images—were what made it worthwhile.8

I would like to propose that we—as readers, as writers, as appreciative members of an audience at a literary event—continue to appreciate more fully that “courage” often can be conveyed only when a writer is not feeling courageous at all. Honesty, authenticity, bravery: all these traits emerge under cover of form, voice, metaphor, syntax. The brave writer is the one who cares more about words, about sentences, about discovering significant detail, than about the feelings or experiences that engendered these words in the first place. The evolution of nonfiction, for me, means that we have become adept at recognizing that artifact owes a debt to experience, but that experience itself no longer has the upper hand.

 Courage and Creative Nonfiction 137

Notes 1 Jill Christman, “The Sloth,” Brevity 26 (Winter 2008), https://brevitymag​.com​/ nonfiction​/the​-sloth/. 2 Ibid. 3 Sherry Simpson, “Fidelity,” in The Accidental Explorer: Wayfinding in Alaska (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2008), 165. 4 Ibid., 166. 5 Ibid., 173–4. 6 Bernard Cooper, Truth Serum (New York: Mariner Books, 2007), 98. 7 Ibid., 106. 8 Bernard Cooper, “Marketing Memory,” in The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in the Age of Forgetting, ed. Charles Baxter (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1999), 112.

22

Traumatized Time David McGlynn

Near the end of my first year of graduate school at the University of Utah, I saw a flyer advertising a luncheon hosted by a sales representative from a textbook company. “Free food,” the flyer promised. “Free books.” My income that year, including my teaching stipend and the other various odd jobs I did around town, came out to a little more than $8,000. When an event offered free food, I went, regardless of who was throwing the party. The fact that this event promised not only free food but also free books— my favorite thing in the world—made it irresistible. I canceled my morning class and showed up fifteen minutes early. When I walked in the door, the sales representative greeted me cordially. She pointed to the banquet of sandwiches and her far more elaborate display of glossy textbooks and anthologies. She told me that if I saw a book I liked, I could take it home with me. By the end of the luncheon, I’d eaten at least fifty dollars’ worth of Subway sandwiches and carried away a hundred dollars’ worth of books—all of which, I promised myself, I was going to read. The sales representative hadn’t wasted her time and effort on me. When the weekend came, I lay on my bed with my window open and began to read. The first section of the first anthology I picked up was devoted to “memoir”—a genre I rarely ever read. Memoirs were the books politicians wrote after they’d left office. I was a fiction writer, and fiction writers considered memoir too self-indulgent, too interested in the banal and the mundane, too bereft of imagination. I believed, like a lot of naïve fiction writers, that the memoirist did little more than shine a flashlight into one ear and then write down whatever images and memories were projected from the other side. I’d even read a scathing essay about the genre by the writer William Gass, in which he says, “Why is it so exciting to say, now that everyone knows it anyway, ‘I was born . . . I was born . . . I was born’? ‘I pooped in my pants, I was betrayed, I made straight A’s.’”1 Up until that day, I’d felt duty-bound to not only avoid but scorn memoir. But I was impoverished and earnest and intent on fulfilling my promise, so I shrugged and figured, what the hell. One of the first stories in that section was “Family Album” by Mikal Gilmore, a music critic for Rolling Stone magazine. Gilmore’s story, however, wasn’t about music; it was about his brother, Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer of two young men in Provo, Utah, in the late 1970s and the first person sentenced to death in the United

 Traumatized Time 139 States after a ten-year moratorium on the death penalty. The event had made national headlines and had inspired several films and books, including Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song. The iconic Nike slogan “Just Do It” is an allusion to Gary Gilmore’s alleged last words before meeting the firing squad. Even after nine months of living in Utah, I still knew the state mainly through its clichés. The mountains were filled with ski resorts, the Great Salt Lake was . . . salty, and Salt Lake City was the headquarters of the Mormon Church. Like a lot of people, including a number of my graduate school classmates, I saw Utah as overwhelmingly homogenous, excessively wholesome, and, well, boring. But as I read Mikal Gilmore’s account of his brother Gary’s life, crime, and execution, I felt as though I was seeing Utah for the first time, and in a light far starker and more violent than I’d ever dared to imagine. I’d never read a story that struck so close to the bone, or that felt so urgent. I gasped at the final scene, then immediately turned back to the beginning and read the story straight through again. I stood up from my bed and paced about my bedroom reading whole paragraphs aloud. I lived in the attic of an old house high on a hill above downtown Salt Lake; when I at last closed the book and set it down, I crawled out my bedroom window onto the roof, where I sat for a long time staring at the valley: the copper-colored Wasatch mountains rising right out of the desert floor, the Great Salt Lake as flat and metallic as a sheet of foil, the bleached alkaline flats of the Great Basin—the sink drain of the North American continent—disappearing over the horizon. The orderly grid of Salt Lake City’s streets ran in a straight line all the way to the southern tip of the valley. Right at the point where the mountains turned out of view, I could make out the lights of the Utah State Prison, where, twenty years earlier, Gary Gilmore had faced the firing squad. Close to the end of “Family Album,” after recounting the myriad ways his brother’s crimes and infamous execution wreaked havoc in his life, all of which gets told in the past tense, Gilmore steps out from the plot in order to meditate, this time in the present tense and the plural first person, about the larger stakes of his tale. Gilmore writes: Murder has worked its way in our consciousness and our culture in the same way murder exists in our literature and film: we consume each killing until there is another, more immediate or gripping one to take its place. When this murder story is finished, there will be another to intrigue and terrify that part of the world that has survived it. And then there will be another. Each will be a story; each will be treated and reported and remembered as a unique incident. Each murder will be solved, but murder itself will never be solved. You cannot solve murder without solving the human heart or the history that has rendered that heart so dark and desolate.2

One of the magical qualities of creative nonfiction—a magic first revealed to me in this story—is its ability to travel through time, to leap without preamble or warning from the narration of particular past events to the immediate and universal present. Because the writer who pens a memoir is contiguous with both the narrator who tells it and (in most cases) the character who lives through the events, she earns the right—by her

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survival and her reflection—to teach the reader a thing or two about the world. And by inhabiting the lives of other real people, memoir readers are able to discover new ways of understanding their own worlds, their own lives. So it was with me. That Saturday in my Salt Lake City apartment, Gilmore’s “Family Album,” gave me a vocabulary for understanding my own world and life. Not only was I able to see Utah in a new and different light, I began to realize that I had my own complicated relationship to murder. When I was fifteen years old, my closest friend was shot and killed in a home invasion, along with his father and older brother, a bizarre and incomprehensible crime that has never been solved. I’d talked to my friend on the phone just twenty minutes before he died; his mother and younger sister were sitting in their car, in my driveway, when the gunmen arrived. I’d spent the decade following the murders not exactly trying to forget them, but definitely trying to convince myself that they no longer affected me, that I was, in the jargon of pop-psychology, “over it.” Sitting on my roof, I realized I wasn’t over it at all: the murders had never stopped intriguing and terrifying me. I’d long ago abandoned the hope that the killers would ever be identified or brought to justice; instead, it was the absence of motives or suspects, the utter dearth of answers, that had informed my life, fastening to my eyes the lenses through which I viewed everything from friendship and love to religion and rationality. Sudden, unforeseen disasters had informed my storytelling for years, but before that day I’d never considered the possibility that I might have something to say about murder. But now I felt a story taking shape: what was once a knotted jumble of inarticulable emotions and surreal memories was metamorphosing into language, and into a communicable order. I climbed down from the roof, back inside my window, and that night I began my first attempt at what would become, eleven years later, my own memoir, A Door in the Ocean. In the years that have elapsed since I first encountered Gilmore’s “Family Album,” I’ve learned to keep an eye out for dangerous stories lurking in unexpected places. These days I teach at a small, liberal-arts college in northeast Wisconsin, a school of about 1,500 students, smack in the center of a town of about 75,000 people. Twenty-five miles south of Green Bay, the Packers are a local religion; so are deer hunting and the Friday fish fry. When I tell my neighbors where I work, they frequently assume my students are spoiled kids from the big city suburbs who have never suffered hardship or had to work a day in their young lives. It’s true that a number of my students hail from the suburbs of Chicago or Minneapolis or Milwaukee, but nearly all of them have substantial scholarships and student loan bills. And a surprising number have been through some amazingly harrowing and traumatic ordeals. I’ve had veterans of the war in Afghanistan, cancer survivors, and political refugees. In one nonfiction workshop, I had a student whose family was persecuted in the early 1970s during the Bangladesh Revolution, a student whose sister was missing for several years, a student who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was just fourteen, and a student with an eating disorder so severe she twice dropped out of college. Each of these young writers was drawn to nonfiction because they understood, in a way more instinctive than conscious, that they had stories to tell.

 Traumatized Time 141 Yet even the students who recognize their stories’ dramatic potential struggle with the telling. In the early going, most tend toward exposition—the old, clichéd problem of telling instead of showing—a phenomenon that can be partially chalked up to inexperience and impatience, but also stems, I believe, from a deeper fear about devolving into melodrama or pimping their hard experiences for gratuitous attention. It’s an apprehension common among memoirists: Michael Ryan, author of the highly acclaimed Secret Life, says, “Any autobiographer who does not constantly torment himself with the question, ‘Is this interesting to anyone else?’ is probably going to write a book that isn’t.”3 Rarely, though sometimes, my students fret about injuring the people they’re writing about; more often, they worry that the elements from which a story is made—language, plot, character— cannot adequately capture or express the events as they were experienced. Simply telling of the story threatens to turn suffering into schmaltz. Some students circumvent these concerns by writing in the present tense. It’s a logical solution, for the present tense allows the author to inhabit the point of view of her younger self, even if the narrator’s diction and tone remain unambiguously adult, and allows the reader to ride shotgun as the action unfolds. And yet the present tense also exudes a timelessness that allows the narrator to move backward and forward in time. The narrator can be a child in one paragraph, the storytelling urgent and immediate, then in the next, a reflective and clinical adult who attempts to make sense of what the reader experienced only a moment before. The present tense’s timelessness, moreover, mirrors the traumatic experience, which often disrupts the orderly progression of chronological time and intrudes, without warning, on the victim. Psychiatrist Dori Laub notes, “Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect.”4 Perhaps the most famous, and unquestionably the most controversial, example of a trauma memoir told in the present tense is The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison’s 1997 memoir about her incestuous affair with her father. After a short preamble, the story unfolds in more or less linear time, from the author’s early childhood, to her teenage years, to her fateful reunion with her father during her freshman year of college—all told in spare, staccato-like declarative sentences. Harrison writes on the opening page: One of us flies, the other brings a car, and in it we set out for some destination. Increasingly, the places we go are unreal places: the Petrified Forest, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon—places as stark and beautiful as those revealed in satellite photographs of distant planets. Airless, burning, inhuman. Against such backdrops, my father takes my face in his hands. He tips it up and kisses my closed eyes, my throat. I feel his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck. I feel his hot breath on my eyelids.5

By comparing the locations of her rendezvous with images of distant planets, the narrator announces that her own story will take place at a great remove, through a

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wide-angled lens. In Harrison’s case, present tense is an effective device. The Kiss is a swift and haunting read. But the present tense isn’t without pitfalls. Though it seems more “immediate” than the past tense, the present tense calls even greater attention to itself as an artificial construction. No memoir—indeed, no story—is ever written in real time, as the action actually happens. Indeed, human consciousness itself unfolds in the past tense: we’re only aware of an action or a sensation after it has occurred (even if the time between the event and our comprehension of it is miniscule). The fact that the narrator of The Kiss and her father go, in the same sentence and in the present tense, to the Petrified Forest in California, Monument Valley in Utah, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona, signals the author’s deliberate efforts to manipulate time and distance, which in turn raises questions about the veracity of the narrative—whether the author is really telling the truth. Critic Leigh Gilmore points out, “The history of American autobiography strongly suggests (at least in the American tradition) that autobiographical subjects are judged in part by whether they are appropriately representative.”6 A memoir’s resonance and its truthfulness are inextricably entwined. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is a testament to how deliberately duping a reader—especially if the reader is a billionaire talk-show host—can lead to negative consequences. At this point, someone in my class usually raises her hand and asks, “What intelligent reader really forgets that she’s reading a story—a made and invented thing, a different kind of narrative than a newspaper article? Isn’t the story more important?” Perhaps the better question is: Is there anything better than forgetting? Michael Ryan again: “Without invention, he [the autobiographer] must fascinate us as much as a novelist with the endlessly interesting interactions between character (people) and plot (what happens to them), just as we are fascinated in and by our own lives.”7 Good stories, be they works of fiction or nonfiction, generate for the reader the pleasurable illusion of inhabiting a different time and place, along with all its concomitant foreign sights and sounds and smells. Good stories turn on the imagination, which is why those of us who love stories love them more than movies or television, which do our imagining for us. But The Kiss and A Million Little Pieces aren’t famous for their powers of illusion. They’re famous for their scandalous confessions, or the scandals produced by their false confessions. They’re famous for what they reveal rather than how they reveal it. It’s interesting that Kathryn Harrison describes The Kiss’ unreal locations as “airless, burning,” and “inhuman.” Over time the memoir itself starts to feel similarly airless and inhuman, the senses ignored. For example, the moment of consummation with her father—the moment the book has been building toward for 136 pages—practically sounds like a Freudian case study: The sight of him naked: at that point I fall completely asleep. I arrive at the state promised by the narcotic kiss in the airport. In years to come, I won’t be able to remember one instance of our lying together. I’ll have a composite, generic memory. I’ll know that he was always on top and that I always lay still, as if I had, in truth, fallen from a great height. . . . No matter how hard I try, pushing myself to inhabit my past, I’ll recoil from what will always seem impossible.8

 Traumatized Time 143 James Alan McPherson has argued that Harrison’s critics “tend to ignore the mystical threads that parallel the sexual theme of the book.”9 Specifically, McPherson argues, Harrison delves into her painful memories “in order to connect with what Augustine called the place ‘beyond memory.’”10 Harrison’s movement “beyond memory” is clearly evident here; memories of having sex with her father elude her. It’s possible, following McPherson’s argument, to read Kathryn Harrison as channeling Saint Catherine of Siena, and to view Kathryn’s falling asleep at the sight of her father’s body as an ecstatic vision, similar to Saint Catherine experiencing a vision of God. McPherson’s analysis is convincing and seems to bolster Laub’s argument that for the victim, the traumatic experience remains “current in every respect.” The trancelike sleep that allowed Harrison to lie down in darkness now obscures her ability, years later, to remember. But, as a reader, as a lover of stories, I must confess I’m disappointed. It’s not that I want a graphic sex scene between a middle-aged father and his teenage daughter, but I’m nevertheless bored by the author’s “composite, generic memories.” I can’t think of a single great literary work, from Augustine’s Confessions to Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, made of anything composite or generic. The composite and the generic, by definition, aren’t very memorable, nor do they help capture or mitigate the trauma at the heart of the story. Psychiatrist Judith Herman argues, “A narrative that does not include the traumatic imagery and bodily sensations is barren and incomplete.”11 Harrison’s “composite, generic memories” aren’t simply incomplete. They’re also self-conscious. The author analyzes her story as she tells it and so prevents herself, and her reader, from disappearing into the details. If a reader is to feel as fascinated by the characters and events in the story as she is with her own life, as Michael Ryan insists, she must be allowed to suspend her disbelief that the characters are the puppets of an author standing above the theater with her fingers on the strings. If the goal is to generate the illusion of immediacy and intimacy while expressing the traumatic experience as accurately as possible, manipulating time isn’t the only option. Narrative form itself might be bent. When it comes to bending form, especially where trauma is concerned, there aren’t many examples better than Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Despite the fact that O’Brien calls the book “a work of fiction,” it frequently calls attention to the problems of distinguishing “true” from “false” as well as “real” from “not-real.” The first story in The Things They Carried, which shares the book’s title, is the most famous, the most widely anthologized, the most often read, but it’s in the rest of the book that O’Brien most deliberately confounds the border between fiction and nonfiction.12 O’Brien’s confabulations of fact with fiction are both informed and expressed by narrative structure of The Things They Carried—a structure that denies a linear trajectory between a beginning and an end and instead constructs a text laid out like shrapnel from a bomb, with fragments scattered across time and geography. In the same way that a kaleidoscope twists and disperses sunlight, the individual stories in The Things They Carried bend a fragmented shard of the larger narrative, braided it into a fractured whole. O’Brien provides insight into his own narrative strategy:

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In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.13

By presenting his story through “skewed” and “exploded” angles, O’Brien allows for a conjoining of emotions that under other circumstances might be prevented from intermingling. When O’Brien tells the story of Curt Lemon stepping on a booby trap and blowing up into a tree, he writes: “I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing ‘Lemon Tree’ as we threw down the parts.”14 Curt Lemon’s death is both horrible and humorous. The horror draws its force from the humor and vice versa; as a result, the reader experiences, by way of the book’s form, the contradictions of war, the same confusions and mysteries and explosions the characters experience. The kaleidoscope disallows the disjunction between form and content, for it is the content that produces the form, while the form enriches and deepens the experience of the content—the vertigo and horror and hilarity of war. Moreover, O’Brien’s “surreal seemingness” and the kaleidoscopic narrative form that contains and expresses it mirror Judith Herman’s observations that reconstructing traumatic experiences “resembles putting together a difficult picture puzzle” and “is often based heavily . . . upon paradigmatic incidents, with the understanding that one episode stands for many.”15 Experimenting with the puzzle pieces of storytelling—time, structure, form—has helped many of my students find their way through the reservations and hang-ups that roadblock the telling of their stories. The young woman with bipolar disorder struggled to write about her time in an in-patient psychiatric facility until she devised a structure she termed “scattershot”: dramatic scenes interspersed with highly compressed moments of reverie, journal entries, and letters from her family. Though chaotic at first, she was stubborn with the form and over time worked her story into a finely tuned and lyrical narrative that captured both the experience of her condition and the eerie sensation of living outside her body, which, too, is part of the disease. Granted permission to bend the form of her story, she, like a number of her classmates, was able to set aside her worry about what her story left out instead to concentrate on the scenes she cared most about. By exploding the story’s structure and traumatizing its use of time, she found a way to not only tell but, more importantly, truthfully represent the story of her young life. I, too, felt like a puzzle worker during the many years I worked on A Door in the Ocean. Though each event in the story occurred in a specific time and place, I initially found myself unable to write the story chronologically or in a singular, uniform

 Traumatized Time 145 tone. Some sections of the memoir, such as the account of the events immediately surrounding the murders of my friend and his brother and father, felt most natural and most dramatic in the present tense, which allowed me to reimmerse into that strange, surreal, and painful time. Certain images—the police sirens flashing in my friend’s window when his house appeared on the ten o’clock news or the white September sky as I wandered listlessly around my high school courtyard the next morning—returned to my memory as vividly as if they’d just occurred, as open and unresolved as Dori Laub suggests. Yet the chapters detailing the longer-term effects of the murders, including the way the shock and confusion pushed me toward my father and stepmother’s fervent evangelical Christianity, begged for refraction through a distanced, academic, kaleidoscopic lens. As a result, the memoir’s early chapters rushed forward, heedless and headlong, while the later chapters were more essay-like, fueled more by a desire to mediate and reflect than to narrate or dramatize. It was only with the help of several readers and two editors that I managed to align the disparate sections into a cohesive whole. And it was only during the process of wrangling the different sections together that I began to truly understand just how not “over” the murders I really was. They’d haunted and informed every big event in my life since they’d happened, from my college graduation to my wedding to the day I leaned over the isolette that held my newborn son, born with weak lungs and pneumonia, and begged God to save his life. Now arranged chronologically and narrated in the past tense, A Door in the Ocean might be described as possessing a traditional structure and tone. But the memoir’s final form is only the floating peak of the berg. Beneath the waterline lurks the trauma that the story itself helped me to first face, then tell, then understand.

Notes 1 William H. Gass, “The Art of Self: Autobiography in an Age of Narcissism,” Harper’s 288, no. 1728 (May 1994): 43–52. 2 Mikal Gilmore, “Family Album,” in The Granta Book of the Family, ed. Bill Buford (New York: Granta Books, 1997), 334. 3 Michael Ryan, “Tell Me a Story,” in The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting, ed. Charles Baxter (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1999), 139. 4 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M. D., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 69. 5 Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss (New York: Random House, 1997), 3. 6 Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 49. 7 Ibid., 139. 8 Ibid., 137. 9 James Alan McPherson, “El Camino Real,” in The Business of Memory, ed. Baxter, 69. 10 Ibid. 11 Judith Herman, M. D., Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 177.

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12 Tobey Herzog’s “Tim O’Brien’s ‘True Lies’ (?),” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 4 (2000): 893–916, discusses O’Brien’s propensity for creating “literary lies”—by which Herzog means, ironically, works of fiction so convincing they seem like nonfiction. Herzog recounts a reading O’Brien gave at Wabash College in Indiana: O’Brien began his evening presentation to an audience of students, faculty, and townspeople, including some Vietnam veterans, with what he labeled a “personal war story.” As he told (not read) this story, O’Brien recalled his difficult decision to enter the United States Army despite his strongly held belief that the war in Vietnam was wrong. “Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons,” he explained, using his oft-repeated refrain. He went on to describe his summer of 1968, the time immediately after his graduation from Macalester College and subsequent receipt of a draft notice. The internal conflict surrounding his moral dilemma—avoid induction by fleeing to Canada or serve his country by entering the army—culminated in his trip to the Rainy River, which forms part of the border between Minnesota and Canada, where O’Brien was compelled to choose his future. . . . At the end of his storytelling, O’Brien paused as the Wabash audience nodded knowingly at the story’s conclusion: Tim O’Brien had chosen to enter the army, to fight, and not to flee across the river into Canada. Then, after a dramatic pause, O’Brien confessed: the story was made up; he had lied to the Wabash audience—well, sort of. Real life soldier-author Tim O’Brien had indeed considered fleeing to Canada in the summer of 1968, and the thoughts, questions, and fears of the real man did mirror those of the fictional narrator in the story. Yet the incidents on the Rainy River, so realistically described, simply did not occur in O’Brien’s own life. The result: after the reading, some audience members expressed their frustration to me about O’Brien’s seemingly unnecessary lie. For example, a few veterans, who perhaps came with unrealistic expectations, felt manipulated by O’Brien’s presentation of this “personal war story.” Wanting to bond with him, they expected their fellow veteran to share some of his actual war-related experiences. Other audience members, present to hear O’Brien read from his fiction, felt tricked without understanding the purpose for this deception. Their trust of him as a person and as an author was undermined. 13 Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway, 1990), 71. 14 Ibid., 83. 15 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 184, 187.

23

Escapology Justin Hocking

First, you slip your arms through the overlong sleeves of a brand-new white jacket. That new clothing smell: bleached cotton, crisp canvas. The discovery of curious leather straps and metal buckles, the function of which is yet unclear. The discovery—stranger still—that the sleeves are sewn shut. For argument’s sake, let’s say this jacket has a particularly tight fit. Let’s say that, straps cinched and buckles fastened, the snug garment pretzels your arms across your chest, left arm over the right, pressing your thumb knuckles into your ribs, a tight vertical belt running from your navel to your coccyx. Imagine, if you will, that you’re literally tied in a knot. Straitjacketed. Now, let’s say you’re hanging upside down on the stage of a vaudevillian theatre. Dim chandeliers sprout from the ceiling/floor like ornate stalagmites. Your head beats with blood-thrum; your hair hangs like a single, limp wing. Stage lights hot as stove tops, circles of your own sweat darkening the dusty stage floor. Picture, now, a live audience—three hundred inverted heads. You writhe and strain against the restrictive coat, thumping and wriggling, skin burning and chaffing, like a pupa tearing free from its silk casing. You have sixty seconds. 0----0 Several years ago I had coffee with an editor of a well-regarded literary journal, known mainly for publishing high-caliber literary fiction. We sat down to talk about an excerpt

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from my forthcoming memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, that I hoped he’d publish in a special-themed edition of the magazine. The excerpt describes the narrator’s emotional descent and increasing self-destructiveness after a breakup and a traumatic robbery incident. Each section of the piece is prefaced with an actual surf report, which acts as a kind of emotional barometer: as the narrator’s psychological state becomes more dire, the surf grows larger, more life-threatening. But at this editor’s request, I’d stripped the surf reports from the piece to make it more conventional, more capable of standing alone from the larger book. Because I so wanted the excerpt to appear in the magazine, I was willing to make these changes, to excise the one element that I felt makes the chapter most formally intriguing. In the small talk before we got down to business, the editor mentioned something about how he likes authors who write with a great deal of restraint. Only after the magazine rejected the revised piece, a month or so later, did I realize this comment had likely been aimed, more or less directly, at me. Not only had I wasted my time on a fruitless revision, but I’d also been relegated, apparently, to a category of writers who do not write with a great deal of restraint. I stewed over the rejection for weeks. The truth is I’m attracted to writers who use restraint, who place themselves willingly in something of a literary straitjacket. I’m thinking of Amy Hempel’s stunning self-control in “The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” an essayistic short story in which a flawed young narrator visits her terminally ill friend in the hospital.1 “Cemetery” manages to be satisfyingly emotive without a shred of sentimentality or cliché; there is zero tugging at the conventional heartstrings, but it’s also deeply felt and paradoxically generous. It’s rumored to be Hempel’s first published piece—edited by Gordon Lish, that dark emperor of restraint—and it’s as close to a perfect short story as I’ve read. 0----0 Several months after its release, I was invited to visit a friend’s book club to discuss my memoir. We had a lively conversation, at the end of which one woman asked me the following question: How do you know whether or not you’ve given too much of yourself away? She was a doctor and struggled with knowing when and how much of her own stories to share with patients. She was interested in discussing larger questions, How much do you reveal about yourself? and When do you need to maintain professional boundaries? I’m afraid, though, that I took her line of inquiry too personally, as a condemnation.

 Escapology 149 I believe firmly in making oneself vulnerable on the page; I’m a constant proselytizer of this gospel. But having released an emotionally raw memoir, these days part of me wants to write with more restraint, more camouflaging, more obliqueness. When does vulnerability become weakness, I find myself constantly wondering—and have I crossed that line? The answer is, it probably depends on who’s reading your work. There are times, like when I received an email from a 30-year-old schoolteacher in New Jersey, with the heading “Your Memoir Saved My Life,” that I’m glad I wrote what I did. There are other times—like during the book club Q&A session, or when I read certain online reviews (something I’ve since quit doing, as a strict rule), or when I think of my male in-laws reading my memoir—that I’m not so sure. 0----0 In the past couple decades, though the genre of memoir has gained wider acceptance, there’s still a lot of dissing of the confessional mode, at least in high-literary circles. Having released a candid memoir, maybe I’m just overly sensitive to it. In a recent interview, Megan Daum said something to the effect of I don’t confess, that makes it sound like I did something wrong.2 Shortly afterward, in another interview, Charles D’Ambrosio disparaged the act of writing in a goopy confessional mode.3 These are both writers whom I imagine would eschew the label memoirist in strong favor of the term essayist. I would argue that 90 percent of the time we talk about “confessional writing” we’re talking about work that reveals mental dysfunction, addiction, intense emotional states, oppression, etc. I’m thinking now of OG Confessional Poets like Robert Lowell, who wrote about his struggle with mental illness in Life Studies. The label of “confession” often also extends to admissions of having been raped, or sexually abused, or otherwise victimized. Or, in the case of St. Augustine, of lust and promiscuity. So, one could argue, the railing against “confession” is also a covert stigmatization of these issues, as not okay subjects for polite social or artistic discourse. But I tend to agree with Megan Daum that confession is maybe not the right word, that it has conservative Catholic undertones that imply “sin” and “guilt.” And as for D’Ambrosio, who is himself a Catholic, I agree that goopy confessions might be best reserved for the privacy of a confession box or a therapist’s office. Maybe what we’re going for is just plain old expression, a word I do like, with its connotation of pressing emotions away from our bodies, rather than aiming the barrel inward—the opposite of depression. 0----0

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I sort of don’t want to tell you something, though I’ve long since let the secret out of the bag. I’d kind of rather just hang here, knitted up safely in my strappy canvas jacket. In the section I was hoping the aforementioned literary magazine would publish, I admit to having a very hard time transitioning onto some antidepressant medication in the wake of having a gun shoved in my face. During my conversation with the editor, he mentioned that my revelation about the meds was maybe a bit too much, too revealing, too vulnerable. Too heavy. I suspect this was part of the reason they ultimately rejected the piece, even after asking me to revise it. I’m certainly willing to entertain the notion that the piece didn’t work outside the context of the larger memoir or that the revised version just wasn’t all that good. But I’m also left with the feeling that these things—i.e., an adult human being actually really needing some help—are not to be discussed. At least not in work that might appear in the pages of a well-regarded literary magazine. 0----0 Restraint and seclusion were often used to control the behavior of people with mental health conditions. However, in recent years, clear consensus has emerged that restraint and seclusion are safety versions of the last resort and that the use of these interventions can and should be reduced significantly.4 0----0 Straitjackets were invented in France, of all places—that bastion of liberté and egalité— by an upholsterer named Guilleret, working on contract for the Bicêtre Hospital in 1790.5 Most historians consider straitjackets a major improvement from the ropes and chains previously used to restrain the mentally disordered. Such implements included handcuffs, which have been around in some form since the Bronze Age. Across the channel, one hundred and some odd years after the invention of the straitjacket, T. S. Eliot formalized his concept of impersonality in poetry, otherwise known as the objective correlative. His proclamation decreed that a poet’s personal emotions should never be stated directly on the page, that instead the poet must find some object or image suggestive of them—e.g., a patient etherized upon a table6—and only then can they evoke the same feelings in the reader. As William Carlos Williams later put it, there should be no ideas except in things. The objective correlative, one could argue, is a kind of straitjacket designed to keep things from getting too messy, to restrict the writer from revealing too much or

 Escapology 151 embarrassing himself with vague sentiment. T. S. Eliot went so far as to wield it against Shakespeare’s character Hamlet, whom he felt was too unrestrained in his emotional outbursts. The objective correlative is absolute doctrine in most contemporary university writing departments—this device that was instituted nearly a century ago by a brilliant but repressed man from St. Louis, living in perhaps the most emotionally reserved culture on the planet. (The etymology of the word reserved traces back to England in the 1650s, meaning selfimposed restraint on freedom of words or actions; a habit of keeping back the feelings.7) Of course, the objective correlative worked exceptionally well as a device for rendering T. S. Eliot’s period of mental collapse in The Wasteland. Even with all its impenetrable literary facades and intertextuality, author Kate Zambreno calls it totally amazingly hysterical and emo.8 My question, though (and part of Zambreno’s): is the objective correlative still working for us? All the time? Is part of the reason so many of us have moved (escaped?) over to creative nonfiction because there’s (sometimes) less demand for elaborate obfuscation, for byzantine references meant to signify emotions and experiences? Because we can employ the objective correlative as an accessory, rather than a muzzle? Is the whole concept of emotional restraint a white male European thing? Or, more specifically, a British thing? (I’ll admit that almost all of my ancestry is British; I’ll also admit that a strain of Protestant gloom, seriousness, and inexpressiveness runs in my genes, and that I’m constantly both wielding and working to overcome it.) Wasn’t British colonization, with its attendant “civilizing” (which Herman Melville referred to as “snivilizing”), a way to restrain the more demonstrative, scantily clad “heathens”? (Circa 1200, the concept of a “Wild Man” was a “man lacking in self-restraint,” otherwise known as a “primitive, or savage.”9) Was the American colonization of Hawai’i—with its subsequent missionary suppressing of native pursuits like surfing and nature worship and nakedness—itself a form of restraint? Or possibly my comparisons here are strained; tethering the awful history of colonialism and patriarchy to literary aesthetics is always an ethically fraught endeavor. 0----0

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Wearing an institutional straitjacket for long periods of time can be quite painful. Blood tends to pool in the elbows, where swelling may then occur. The hands may become numb from lack of proper circulation, and due to bone and muscle stiffness the upper arms and shoulders may experience excruciating pain. Thrashing around while in a straitjacket is a common, but mostly an ineffective method of attempting to move and stretch the arms.10 0----0 I worked briefly with a creative writing student who was not doing well, mentally. His writing was completely unrestrained, nearly incoherent—a kind of unmitigated gut-spilling that was painful to read. More than painful, it was frightening: a scrum of raw emotion and clutter cribbed from an online mental health chat room, mixed with diary-like confessions but submitted as a short story. I consulted with a psychologist, who suggested I ask this student to withdraw the piece from workshop. I dreaded the conversation, but he agreed. He admitted he wasn’t taking great care of himself, that he wasn’t really in a place to have his written work parsed by others. When he stood up to leave my office, a cigarette butt that had been clinging somehow to his jeans was now stranded on the red fabric of my Ikea chair. On the other hand, I’m often most enthusiastic about student work that delves into personal darkness, that takes big emotional risks. A former MFA student is working on a lyrical, hybrid memoir about receiving electroshock therapy for bipolar disorder; she’s braiding this personal narrative with a natural history of lightning; the combination is thrilling, emotionally resonant, and often disarmingly humorous. The writing invites and encourages you to look away at regular intervals; it gives you a chance to breathe. The outward expansion balances the inward diving, the uninhibited self-revelation. 0----0 Discussing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up, Kate Zambreno writes: At the time Fitzgerald published these essays his fellow male genius contemporaries—Hemingway and Dos Passos and the rest—were like what the fuck are you doing, Scott? This sort of ripped-from-the-heart memoir wasn’t considered real writing, wasn’t manly. Wasn’t manly? Wasn’t LITERARY.11 And then there was Zelda Fitzgerald, of course, who was restricted from writing/ publishing about her own intimate experiences within the mental health system. 0----0 The first recorded mention of handcuffs: in Virgil’s telling of the myth of Proteus, the Ancient Greek shape-shifting prophet. Anytime men approached him for answers to their insipid existential questions, he shifted forms and escaped. Until Aristaeus, son of

 Escapology 153 Apollo, used handcuffs to restrain the god, because he needed desperately to learn the secret behind the colony collapse of his bees. 0----0 The Flexible The Snap Nippers The Twister La Puocette La Corde Menotte Double The Swing Cuff12 Now we have disposable cuffs, first introduced in 1960s, similar to zip ties. They’ve been described as Great for riots or other situations where officers need to secure lots of people quickly:13 wrist ties riot cuffs plasticuffs flexicuffs flex-cuffs tri-fold cuffs zapstraps zipcuffs zip-strips14 Plastic restraints, though, are believed by many to be more likely to inflict nerve or soft-tissue damage to the wearer than metal handcuffs. 0----0 In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine maintains a posture of relative distance and reserve, writing mostly in the second person about the experience of being a Black woman in America. But something shifts halfway through the book; there’s a sense of the author slipping surreptitiously and gracefully from her own self-imposed restraints, especially when writing about men in her life—men so often placed in actual physical restraints: The hearts of my/brothers are broken. If I knew/another way to be, I would call up a/brother, I would hear myself saying,/my brother, dear brother, my dearest/brothers, dear heart—15 0----0

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I don’t think I would have particularly liked Ken Kesey in the 1960s or any decade, for that matter. The way he treated women, the way the Merry Pranksters took advantage of the woman they nicknamed “Stark Naked” for 1,200 miles in the back of their hippy bus, then abandoned her, wearing nothing but a blanket, in the middle of Texas when her bad LSD trip turned into a psychotic breakdown, when they were done with her as the “star” (read: sex object) of their misguided cinéma vérité. No one stayed with her in Texas to make sure she was ok; no one so much as made a phone call during her brief hospitalization. Perhaps the only truly human moment in the entire history of the Prankster’s juvenile bus tour: Stark Naked running off the bus, literally naked, to embrace Larry McMurtry’s child, because she so missed her own toddler back in California.16 A knot of rage tightens in my stomach when I think about it, like I want go ballistic on Kesey and the Pranksters—a wrestling scrum I might lose but not without getting a few good shots in. Sometimes I want to meet masculine brutality with brutality; sometimes I lose myself. I don’t always know how, exactly, a man is supposed to behave. I often find myself fantasizing about times when I was wronged or manipulated (or when someone like Stark Naked was wronged or manipulated), and how I should have responded with fists or elbows or swift takedowns, even if I wasn’t even born yet. Maybe it’s my own history of exploitation by immature, egocentric men. Physical restraints are particularly traumatizing to people who have been victims of physical and sexual abuse.17 In Barry Lopez’s essay for Harper’s, entitled “Sliver of Sky,” he shares an emotionally candid account of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a cunning sociopath, who also happened to be a pillar of the community.18 Lopez explains that as a young adult— long after the abuse ceased—he experienced something akin to a blind rage whenever he felt he was being taken advantage of in even the smallest of ways. In other words, us survivors have a hard time restraining ourselves, and we honestly regret certain instances when we fail to do so, just as I may soon regret the previous lines about wanting to punch Ken Kesey. And what I’m trying to actually get to is this: despite how much anger he elicits in me, I also can’t help wondering, if Kesey was still alive—if he was sober—what would he say about the idea of restraint? The man who wrote the unhinged novel that helped set in motion the legislation that banned nonconsensual psychiatric hospitalization? 0----0

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1. Each use of restraint or seclusion poses an inherent danger, both physical and

psychological, to the individual who is subject to the interventions and, frequently, to the staff who administer them. 2. The decision to use restraint or seclusion nearly always is arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and generally avoidable. 3. Many inexpensive and effective alternatives to restraint and seclusion have been developed and successfully implemented across a broad range of mental health facility types.19 0----0 In 2006, a cartoonist and zinester named James Chasse died in the custody of the Portland Police Bureau as a result of being severely beaten and restrained during a mental health crisis. After spotting him apparently urinating in public, the 250-pound Officer Chris Humphries tackled the 145-pound Chasse on the pavement, breaking sixteen of his ribs. The blunt force of this trauma was likely the cause of his death, but Chasse very well might have lived had he not been placed in arm and leg restraints—had he not been essentially hog-tied—and had the police not delayed medical attention for over two hours. One uncanny detail from this terrible story: decades before, the seminal Portland punk rock band The Wipers wrote a song about James Chasse, entitled “Alien Boy,” with the following lyrics: they hurt what they don’t understand.20 0----0 Though Gordon Lish was largely responsible for establishing Raymond Carver’s early writing career, the more mature, newly sober Carver grew deeply weary of Lish’s minimalist editorial style, his violence with the red pencil. Carver could no longer abide Lish’s surgical editing of anything human or sentimental from his work; this legendary writer/editor skirmish nearly wrecked Carver’s precarious mental health. Carver eventually worked up the courage to jettison Lish; he republished his classic short story “The Bath” in the revised (or perhaps more original) form of “A Small Good Thing.” “A Small Good Thing” is the warmer, more human story—the one I’d choose if, say, I had to spend a few days in the hospital. But during my stay, I’m sure I’d notice, for the fifth or sixth time, all the places where “A Small Good Thing” could’ve used more stern editing, as when the doctor calls the female main character little mother,21 or in the highly charged final scene, when the baker says, Sweet, sweet Jesus.22 They’re slightly cringeworthy lines, just as we’ve all probably written many of our own cringeworthy lines. 0----0

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Unlike many contemporary essayists, I’m not steeped in Western philosophy. My background is in psychology. Not that I’m particularly proud of this—I mostly hated all my research-focused undergraduate courses in behavioral neuroscience. Yet, in ancient Greece, the word psyche was represented symbolically by the emergence of winged creatures from a chrysalis. Psyche, then, connotes the transubstantiation of the soul from one form to another—a process requiring a period of darkness, inversion, restraint, followed by a chewing through of the tight silk camisole. A chewing through and eventual flight. I’m interested, then, in philosophical questions about how we think and what we can know, but they rarely feel as exigent to me as the questions how are we transformed by darkness and loss and how do we heal? 0----0 But what if I told you that I camouflaged the gender of the student I mentioned from my writing workshop? Perhaps I’m just as guilty as T. S. Eliot or F. Scott Fitzgerald for “silencing the madwoman,” for restraining creativity in its messiest, most inchoate form. Perhaps I was just scared. To my credit, the mental health expert I consulted was a woman, and herself a writer. I didn’t force the student out of my class; I just brought up the idea that perhaps focusing first on their health was more important than writing, just at that moment. The student agreed. Still, years later, I wonder if I made the right choice. If writing workshops can’t accommodate work by those in heightened emotional states—during a time when close to 50 percent of college students report living with mental health conditions— then what are we really doing? 0----0 James Chasse. Eric Garner. George Floyd. Traditionally, writers who consider themselves “literary” are supposed to stay clear of overt politicking or didacticism; we don’t employ slogans unless they’re writ large on a protest sign. Under no condition should we rant. How else, though, to confront the police’s use of lethal restraints?

 Escapology 157 I’m certainly not the first to point out that literary subtlety is often a form of privilege for writers from dominant cultures. 0----0 Methods for escaping from handcuffs:

1. Slipping hands out when the hands are smaller than the wrist

2. Lock-picking 3. Releasing the pawl with a shim 4. Or simply opening the handcuffs with a duplicate key, often hidden on the body of the performer before the performance.23 0----0 Maybe what we need are occasional intense bursts of unrestrained writing, like in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, a work of semi-autobiographical fiction in which a newly sober narrator says, I was a whimpering dog inside, nothing more than that.24 It’s one of few such bald admissions in the book; maybe that’s why it works so well. 0----0 I can offer up these manicured little examples about when to exercise restraint in our writing, and when to break free, but the truth is that I don’t really know. I wonder how Whitman would weigh in, or a young Black Lives Matter protestor, both of whom might encourage us to break out of the zip strips and run amok through the halls, down the police-lined boulevards, to swarm the streets and reclaim the freeways in the name of the people, of justice. I’m equally inspired by another of student I was lucky to work with, who is also writing about mental health and addiction issues (also with a lot of humor), while honoring her literary heroine Sylvia Plath. Unlike Plath, though, she’s choosing to tell her story without spilling quite so much blood on the page. 0----0 In 2013, Sofia Romero, also known as Sof Strait, set the world record by escaping from a straitjacket forty-nine times in one hour.25 0----0 I guess at the end of our careers and lives, I don’t want us to look back and say, above all, we restrained ourselves. Or perhaps even worse, the passive tense version, we were

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restrained, implying that someone else has clicked the shackles around our wrists and ankles, removed any slack, and pocketed the key. Restraint, then, as something we employ constantly, constantly—forty-nine times in an hour—but that we slip out of just as easily—forty-nine times in an hour—and by which we’re never truly rendered helpless, motionless, silent. 0----0 It’s not actually necessary to dislocate one’s shoulder to escape from a straitjacket. This was a fictitious rumor created by Houdini, to scare off his competitors in the realm of escapology. The most common way to escape is to hoist your arms over your head and then simply peel the jacket off your torso.26 Houdini used to perform the feat behind a curtain but discovered it’s much better received with the heavy fabric pulled to the either side—spotlights trained on our slick, upside-down brows—allowing the audience to directly witness our struggle. }{

Notes 1 Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (New York: Scribner, 2007). 2 Megan Daum, interview with Joanna Scutts, The Guardian, November 18, 2014. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2014​/nov​/18​/meghan​-daum​-interview​-golden​ -age​-women​-essayists. 3 Charles D’Ambrosio, interview with Leslie Jamison, “Instead of Sobbing, You Write Sentences: An Interview with Charles D’Ambrosio,” The New Yorker, November 26, 2014, https://www​.newyorker​.com​/books​/page​-turner​/instead​-sobbing​-write​ -sentences​-interview​-charles​-dambrosio. 4 Stephan Haimowitz, Jenifer Urff, and Kevin Ann Huckshorn, Restraint and Seclusion—A Risk Management Guide (Alexandria, VA: NASMHPD Publications, 2006), i and 6. https://www​.nasmhpd​.org​/sites​/default​/files​/R​-S​%20RISK​%20MGMT​ %2010​-10​-06​.pdf. 5 Wikipedia, s.v. “Straightjacket,” https://en​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/Straitjacket. 6 T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in The Wasteland and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 3. 7 Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “Reserved,” https://www​.etymonline​.com​/word​/ reserve​#etymonline​_v​_12886. 8 Kate Zambreno, Heroines (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 239. 9 Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “Wild Man,” https://www​.etymonline​.com​/search​?q​ =wild​+man.

 Escapology 159 10 Wikipedia, “Straightjacket.” 11 Zambreno, Heroines, 239. 12 Rachel Swaby, “The Sordid History and Evolution of Handcuff Design,” Gizmodo​ .com​, October 13, 2011. https://gizmodo​.com​/the​-sordid​-history​-and​-evolution​ -of​-handcuff​-design​-5845167. See also Joseph W. Lauher, “A Collector’s Guide to Vintage Handcuffs,” http://handcuffs​.org/. 13 Swabey, “The Sordid History and Evolution of Handcuff Design.” 14 Wikipedia, s.v. “Handcuffs,” https://en​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/Handcuffs. 15 Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2014), 89. 16 Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968, repr. New York: Picador, 2008). 17 Haimowitz et al., Restraint and Seclusion, 12. 18 Barry Lopez, “Sliver of Sky: Confronting the Trauma of Sexual Abuse.” Harper’s, January 2013. 19 Haimowitz et al., Restraint and Seclusion, i. 20 Brian Lindstrom, director. Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse (Portland: Breaking Glass Pictures, 2013). 21 Raymond Carver, “A Small Good Thing,” in The Collected Works of Raymond Carver (New York: Library of the Americas, 2009), 810. 22 Ibid., 829–30. 23 Wikipedia, “Handcuffs.” 24 Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son (1992; repr. New York: Picador, 2009), 115. 25 Wikipedia, “Straightjacket.” 26 Ibid.

24

Play-Doh Fun Factory Poetics Wayne Koestenbaum

That is the way memory serves us, details return ill assorted, pell mell, in confusion. —Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska

My poetics—anal, alimentary, abstract—resembles a Play-Doh Fun Factory. I practice what Foucault called, in reference to the history of sexuality, “the care of the self.”1 I trim, slash, shape; I perform askesis. But my material is not “self.” It’s words: Play-Doh. Last night I dreamt my mother showed me her vagina: an offering. Each new paragraph interrupts the previous. Paragraphs have the privilege of parataxis. In 1913, Pound demanded: “Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective.”2 Without my sexual compulsions, my penis would sit inert in my pants and endure a dull, nonmonumental existence. Without my sexual compulsions, I would have no poetics. In a brand-new poem, I wrote: “Play-Doh Factory, / I loved your poop / ambience, extruded quadri- / laterals vast yet squat.” As a youngster, I liked the smell of Play-Doh, an odor of chalk and vanilla, enriched by cardamom and pavement. Play-Doh smelled like the Pentateuch, or the golem, or a Robert Ryman painting—abstract, blank, complex, eerie, bumpy. Difficult to remember whether it was more fun to push the Play-Doh out the Factory’s chute or to lop off the Play-Doh after it had been extruded and formed. Maybe the greatest pleasure lay in choosing the shape—the filter—through which the Play-Doh would be forced. Today, on the piano, I warmed up with a Brahms exercise (“broken arpeggio figuration in contrary motion with repeated notes”) and an etude from Czerny’s The Art of Finger Dexterity: “Changing the Fingers in Rapid Playing.” Then I worked on Albinez’s naive, forgotten “Sonata No. 3.” I love the fact that it is forgotten. Each book, poem, or paragraph I produce is a physical machine, generated by hand movements. I like to put my fingers to work. I value diligence, facture, momentum.

 Play-Doh Fun Factory Poetics 161 I write to experience inner folds. Call them psychological and spiritual contortions; or call them abject, self-debasing, self-enlarging contractions. José Saramago (in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ) describes such a contraction: “In self-abasement his soul shrinks into itself like a tunic folded three times, surrendering his defenseless body to the mercy of the mothers of Bethlehem.”3 When I write, my soul shrinks into itself like a tunic folded three times. I write longhand in a diary, for no reader, nearly every day. I have done so, daily, for thirty-three years. My diary, the longest book I’ve ever written, is a lifelong experiment in accretion—a scroll, remote from audience, coherence, or plan. In my diary, on Sunday, November 8, 2009, I wrote: Dream: I tried (energetically) to explain to my mother the gay scene in Berlin. I mentioned Taxi zum Klo. All this conversation was occasioned by a foreign film (French: Agnès Varda or her ilk?). My mother stood in the Augusta Way garage, by the front step. She momentarily concealed herself behind a curtain. Neighbors had three scrawny trees. The neighbors either praised or disapproved of our property’s shrubbery. They were working their land, we were working ours.

If this dream finds its way into a poem, I’ll probably use the words “Agnès Varda” and “Taxi zum Klo,” and maybe the neighbors’ disapproval of my property’s shrubbery. I like the musical affinity between the words “property” and “shrubbery.” And I could use the phrase “scrawny trees” and the pathetic scene of trying (with futile zeal) to describe to my mother the gay scene in Berlin, my father’s birthplace. These days, for first drafts of poems, I use a manual typewriter and colored construction paper—red, orange, yellow, beige, purple. I type quickly, without forethought, usually in quatrains. Each quatrain is a box, an arbitrary module, a friendly lump, of an accommodating size. Later, I scavenge clumps of language from these construction-paper improvisations and turn these clumps into poems—reassembled, like Frankenstein’s monster, from pilfered parts. Recently I found my first diary—from 1968. I was nine years old. Here are a few entries. “Thursday January 29. I get in a play which Brad made. I have the 4th biggest part! I am going to record it with a movie camera.” “Monday March 18. I find my long lost library card. And it was right in front of me. We have the play today.” “Wednesday March 20. Today I film it! It is very fun to film a movie. I have to memorize a poem.” “Saturday June 29. A fat girl babysits today. Mommy and Daddy go to The Odd Couple. It’s their anniversary.” Why did I say “fat girl” but not give her a name? Already I was interested in shameful singularity, in abject exemplarity. Here’s another entry: “Wednesday June 5: Robert Kennedy was shot. Not dead yet. He won the primaries. No [Cub Scout] den meeting.” A paragraph is a container for sentences—like a shadow box, a bureau drawer, a coffin, a laundry hamper, a diaper hamper, a time capsule. I put as many sentences in the box as will fit. Sometimes I keep the box relatively empty. I shake the box and let the sentences fall into different positions.

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I write for solitude’s sake, not for companionship or communication. My writing may seem chatty but its aims are inexpressive and abstract. I write to wallow—to feel a soaring upward and then a crash downward. Adjective or noun or verb or adverb can be anagnorisis and peripeteia happening simultaneously. Diction should hurt. I like to twist a word into its dirty groove. I like em-dashes, parentheses, semi-colons, line breaks—any form of stoppage or interruption. A short utterance, or an interrupted one, is a gasp rather than a statement. Short sentences—words conspicuously crammed together or omitted—remind me of a finger pointing, either to indicate or condemn. I write inside a bleak, turgid morass; I peer out from the muck, sometimes with clarity, forgiveness, or curiosity, but sometimes with recursive distaste for the selfmade muck I’m peering through. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the relation between “word” and “thing” in the early poetry and prose of Ezra Pound. The core of the thesis was a chapter on his Cathay poems: “What is the use of talking and there is no end of talking.”4 My epigraph came from Emerson’s Journal: “In good writing, words must become one with things.”5 I palpate a word’s thingness with my eyes, mouth, and fingers. Between words, I seek sonic similarities. I like chunky words, chunky adjacencies— monads crammed together, without a gap. My favorite Ezra Pound line: “Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid.”6 A death line. Chunky words, or strongly stressed words (“Quick eyes gone”), each vowel a different pitch and mouth shape, are mausoleums: the emphatic, chunky concentration of stresses is at once an elegiac sigh and a violent mimesis of war’s murderousness. A William Wordsworth line that kills me begins with a trochee: “Breathless with adoration.” “The holy time is quiet as a Nun/Breathless with adoration.”7 I love the chasm between “Nun” and “Breathless.” The stoppage. And then the reemergence, with “Breathless,” into activity. But a sliver of silence has intruded between “Nun” and “breathless.” A simple effect. But it kills me. He breaks the line because he wants to slay me, and I want to be slain: we participate together in this funeral rite. I teeter between graphomania and a laconic thwartedness—the drive toward excess is not estranged from the drive toward death. For prose, my rule is: revise nine times. Stations of the cross: the ritual practice of nine drafts is itself a temporal event—the construction of a tomb but also a paring away, a self-shedding. I stare hard at each sentence, nine times, to find the fat. Always nine times. When I write, I feel spasms of self-disgust. I try to do something productive with the self-disgust: make it bloom. Extract a nugget from it, a calcified chunk. Swimming is part of my poetics. As a child, I feared water; through practice, I overcame terror. I know only two strokes: crawl and breaststroke. I alternate strokes: one lap breast, one lap crawl, one lap breast, one lap crawl. Back and forth, breast, crawl, breast, crawl. Without variation. These repetitive movements pare away at consciousness, empty it of specificities. Schmutz and its removal are part of my poetics. Too much schmutz in my language. A trench coat has a stained collar. A pink shirt has ruined sleeves. A fuchsia shirt is

 Play-Doh Fun Factory Poetics 163 too blowsy. A favorite black shirt is now gray. A pair of boots has chipped toes. My boyfriend rips up underwear and socks when it’s time for them to die. I cook dinner every night. I spend as much time preparing food as I spend writing. (At the greenmarket today, I bought parsley, arugula, romaine, Russian potatoes, broccoli rabe, cauliflower, carrots, celery, radishes, yellow cherry tomatoes.) Cooking, swimming, piano-playing, and writing are dumb bodily necessities, exercises of PlayDoh Fun-Factory-esque mechanicity. Play-Doh, apparently nontoxic, is made from flour, salt, water, boric acid, silicone oil, and other substances. Last night I dreamt that I was a graduate student again, taking a seminar in modern poetry: this week we were reading George Oppen, but I needed to skip class because there were fatal errors in my health insurance eligibility form. I love Oppen. I once stole his Selected Poems from a bookstore in San Francisco. I also stole Anaïs Nin’s House of Incest and Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask. But the best theft was Oppen. I read him while standing on a San Francisco bus. The bus swayed: I concentrated on his line breaks, their abruptness and probity. On a different bus, I read Robert Creeley’s poems—purchased, not stolen. I loved Creeley’s omissions, his bluntness. I appreciated how much he discarded, and the interrupted lumpiness of what remained. My mother’s father grew up on the Lower East Side and from that fertile nothingness he spurred himself to get a PhD in English Literature from NYU but no college would hire a Jew, so instead he taught English and disciplined the boys at Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School. Hypercritical, he sent me vocabulary lists, so I could study for the SAT. From him I got my taste for words like “rodomontade.” In grammar school, I hated wearing hard shoes—stiff leather. I only wanted to wear soft shoes—Keds sneakers. Poems are soft shoes. Prose is a hard shoe. Once my mother caught me wearing sneakers to school. Out the kitchen window she saw me cross the street in forbidden footwear. She called me back to the house and wrote a note to the teacher. I’ll reconstruct it: “Wayne is late to school today because he refused to wear the shoes that give his feet the proper support.” My parents worried that my feet would grow deformed. Because our family doctor said that going barefoot would lead to disease, my mother’s repeated exclamation—a household mantra—was “I step on bare feet.” Five strong-stressed monosyllables. Not unlike Pound’s “Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid.” The girls across our street were pigeon-toed. My mother said, “Gail and Sharon are pigeon-toed because they go barefoot outside.” Pound wanted “words that hover above and cling close to the things they mean.”8 I grew up among orchards. Gradually, during my childhood, developers cut down the trees and built tract houses and shopping malls. I remember driving by the remaining orchards and enjoying the instant when the trees line up—when the eye can make of the arbor a parallel, uninterrupted arcade. In our backyard we had a peach tree, but I remember not the fruit but the galvanized steel bucket in which we put the fruit after it was picked. When my fingers touched the schmutzy bucket, I felt neurasthenic shivers of horror. Play-Doh smells like oranges mixed with ashes. When the Play-Doh canister’s lid closes, it locks the substance in a dark cavern. Rilke, in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids

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Brigge, described the relationship of lids to jars. The jar longs for its lid, desires the tight fit of closure and containment. Rilke: “Let us agree on one point: the lid of a can—or let us say, of a can that is in good condition, whose edge curves in the same way as its own—a lid like this should have no other wish than to find itself on top of its can.”9 Emily Dickinson knew about lids. “If ever the lid gets off my head / And lets the brain away.”10 I should summarize. My subject is lids—earth’s lid, mind’s lid, Play-Doh’s lid, the I’s lid, what holds the “I” in place. Autobiography is not a defunct practice. Please don’t prematurely put the lid on its fragrant complexities. I didn’t own a Play-Doh Factory. I encountered the toy at the house of a friend—a freckled, redheaded Mormon, whose penis was the first uncircumcised specimen I’d ever seen. I wondered why he had a deformed flap hanging from the end of his wienie. His tract-house street was infinitesimally fancier than mine. No one could accuse my street of being opulent. Sentences are Play-Doh constructions, shaped, chosen, extruded, timed, enjoyed, rejected. Sentences—or lines, or word groups—are pushed out, through a filter, or attachment, which controls the shape into which the sentence’s dough will be formed. I am a sentence factory. I look coldly upon my sentences. I expect them to please. If they don’t, I’m disgusted. I wish I could describe more luxuriantly the varieties of disgust I feel when I appraise my sentences and try to figure out which words should live and which should die. Because I’m rereading Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz (which acknowledges the impossibility of testimony), I’m moved to tell you the following story. My father’s cousin Wolfgang survived Auschwitz, though Wolfgang’s parents were gassed upon arrival. I wasn’t nice to Wolfgang. That’s part of my poetics—not being nice (not being a mensch) to Wolfgang and not being nice to his wife Luisa who also survived Auschwitz, I wasn’t nice to her, either, I wasn’t a mensch, and that is part of my poetics, not being nice to survivors of death camps, my permanent culpability and rottenness is part of my poetics, an integral part. I could go into detail about my not being nice to survivors; going into detail would be part of my poetics. (I wrote this final paragraph while eating chocolate cake at a hotel restaurant.)

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1986). 2 Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Poetry I, no. 6 (March 1913): 200–6. 3 José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (New York: Harcourt, 1991), 185. 4 Ezra Pound, “Exile’s Letter,” in Personae: Collected Shorter Poems (New York: New Directions, 1971), 134. 5 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, ed. Ronald A. Bosco (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 376.

 Play-Doh Fun Factory Poetics 165 6 Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” in Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1956), 64. 7 William Wordsworth, “It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free,” in William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 281. 8 Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” in Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 28–9. 9 Reiner Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1990), 182–3. 10 Emily Dickinson, “If Ever the Lid Gets Off My Head,” in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Ralph William Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 264.

25

A Sequence of Thoughts Without Any Kind of Order Ira Sukrungruang

Seven Lately, time seems to be all I think about on a personal and philosophical level. Perhaps it’s because I notice age slowing down the ones I love. Perhaps I discovered more gray nose hairs in my right nostril and that freaked me the hell out. Or perhaps this awareness of time comes when our sense of self gets challenged, like mine has in the last few months. When you think about time, you are really thinking about death.

Ninety-One This should not be a surprise to you: Time rules us. We do not and cannot control it. As much as I wanted to possess superhuman powers when I was a teenager, like slowing time with a snap of my fingers when my eighth-grade crush Brenna Murphy—having undergone wonderful changes of the body—ran toward me, I could not. I lived by the laws of time, subjected to a two-month relationship with Brenna that involved hand holding, park kisses, and her chasing me with a butcher’s knife. Time is an unavoidable fixture in our existence. We live by it. We sleep according to time. We arrange meetings, lectures, and classes by time. We watch our favorite shows and take our medication at certain times. How often do we check the time of the day? How often do we ask, “What time is it?” How many times do we wish for more time to write a meditation on time, a memoir about a certain time of life, or a letter to an ex-wife or a dying parent? How many times have we wished for more time to do all the things we want to do? It is not surprising then that the English lexicon is infested by clichés of time. All in due time. There’s no time like the present. Time after time. Time and again. Time flies.

 A Sequence of Thoughts 167 Nor is it surprising that writers and philosophers have been contemplating time since the dawn of time. From Plato: “And so people are all but ignorant of the fact that time is really the wanderings of the sun and the planets.”1 Sophocles: “Hide nothing, for time, which sees all and hears all, exposes all.”2 St. Augustine in his Confessions: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.”3

Twenty-Five The holiday season approaches. The landscape of America changes. The department stores are glittered in silver and gold garland. Santa is everywhere with his jolly cheeks and cotton-tipped hat. Bing Crosby croons holiday songs in the grocery stores, and bells beg for donations in a red pail. Holidays are ripe for nostalgia. They are moments to assess our lives. We move forward. We move backward. We think whether this holiday will be better than the last. We begin, as most children do, to dream of new toys Santa will sneak under the Christmas tree next year. Even as a Buddhist, I’m inundated with holiday moments, memories from years past. A mental rolodex of Christmases and New Years. My father and his new Polaroid. The shutter and flash. The seconds it takes for the picture to materialize. Aunty Sue carving the Chinatown duck, her hands and knife thick with yummy grease. My mother’s soft snores on Christmas Eve after working a double shift at the hospital.

Eight Before my mother moved back to Thailand, she gave me over two large boxes of photo albums. I went through each of them, trying to remember our former lives, stilled in photographs. What struck me most were not only the photos of our holidays but also my mother’s perfect print next to the yellowing photos. The date. The time. The place. I’ve seen this impulse to record in other photo albums. What is this need we possess to not only capture the photo but also log it in with numbers? Do the numbers mean anything? I am standing in bright neon pants that flare at the bottoms. A blue octopus is on my head. Behind me is the Christmas tree, delicate ornaments glinting from the camera’s flash. I’m smiling. Two of my front teeth are missing.

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Beside the photo, my mother’s writing: Ira, age 3, living room, Oak Lawn, Illinois, 12/25/79. He is happy.

Two Thousand Every time I see numbers in an essay, I hear Dick Clark’s voice counting down to the new year. I also think of the apocalypse. I know these two things don’t go together.

Thirty-Seven I’ve been through thirty-seven Christmases and thirty-seven New Years. After a while, it’s one big mess. A fun, festive mess, like discarded and torn wrapping paper, like bows and ribbons on your pets.

One Point Eight Every year I go to Thailand to visit my mother and Aunty Sue. They are eighty, and now time has slowed their walks, hunched their backs, clogged their ears, much to my impatient dismay. Now, I help them in and out of cars. I hold them as they walk up and down stairs. At the Chiang Mai Airport, they play with an eight-month-old baby, who smiles and gurgles and drools happiness. They make faces at him and coo. They caress the smoothness of his skin. I watch them and think, this baby is me. Both my mother and aunt are really cooing at me, or a version of me that no longer exists, but one catalogued in their memory, a moment where they have stilled time to relive, a joy that can never return. But it has. Everything they do, everything they eat, is in relationship with the past. It’s in the manner of their speech. In the moments when they begin, “Back then . . .” It’s even in how they hold me—longer, stronger, never wanting to let go.

A Gazillion The memoirist, like my aging parents, does not want to let go either. It’s as if she is in a sci-fi movie, where her memories are displayed in front of her. And she uses her hand to arrange them, moves them around, throws some out. She rewinds. Fast forwards.

 A Sequence of Thoughts 169 She does this so that she can create a narrative timeline. The first steps of telling a story. The first steps of understanding.

Forty-One I’ve become a reluctant fan of the writer David Shields, author of the controversial book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. I say reluctant because of his stance on the genre of my beloved memoir. If one were to flip through Reality Hunger one would find an array of criticism against chronology and narrative storytelling. One would find Sheilds’s championing of the lyrical structure of fragmentation and mosaic movements. One would find lines like this: “Anything processed by memory is fiction.”4 Or, “Everyone who writes about himself is a liar.”5 Reality Hunger is Sheilds’s own manifesto, his way of understanding the world—he has said as much in interviews—but part of me turned into that gruff Chicago boy from ages ago, that Chicago boy defending his turf, his little tiny patch of city green because I had just published a memoir about being raised Thai in America and it was chronological and for the past ten years I have devoted myself to this genre. I was like, what the hell, dude? You best step off. But what also lingered underneath this sentiment was a voice that said, “David’s right, you know.” He is. To a point. I didn’t completely disagree with Shields. In fact, I marveled, like him, at essays and books that have challenged the traditional structure of memoir—Lauren Slater’s Lying, for example, or Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I embrace, like him, the “collage” as structure, disagreeing, however, with his assertion that collage is “an evolution beyond narrative,” but rather another option for a writer trying to find form and function on the written page. I found that I loved the books Shields loved, like Geoffrey Wolff ’s The Duke of Deception, and loved the books he didn’t, like Tobias Wolff ’s This Boy’s Life. After reading his manifesto and hearing him speak on numerous occasions—he is quite brilliant—I wanted to see how his manifesto translated into his own work, so I picked up The Thing about Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead. Shields uses two threads to tell his story, like a braided essay—one orders the memories he has of his father, never chronological, but fragmented and scattered in no specific pattern, and one discusses how the body ages and begins to deteriorate over time. Let me warn you: If you are a hypochondriac and do not want to be aware what happens at what age, avoid this book. I found myself counting the amount of hair I was losing and gauging my libido on a daily basis.

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Despite Shields’s diatribe against chronology and memoir in Reality Hunger, The Thing about Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead is both chronological and a memoir. (David Shields’s nose is probably itchy right now.) It is not chronological in the traditional sense, nor is it a memoir in the traditional sense. In his book, Shields’s father escapes the linear because there is nothing linear about him. He is an enigma, a delicately curved question mark. Shields can’t reconcile what he feels for his father, whether it is hate or deep affection. His memories of his past jump back and forth through time, in no logical sense. But we are never lost in the book because Shields has given us chronology, has imposed order, by telling us about time in the biological sense. Our bodies—our physical presences—are about time. It is the one constant thing that makes us human.

Twenty-Three David McGlynn, “Traumatized Time”: “One of the magical qualities of creative nonfiction . . . is its ability to travel through time, to leap without preamble or warning from the narration of particular past events to the immediate and universal present.”6

One Billion Eight Hundred Thirty-Three Million Five Maybe the countdown to a new year and the countdown to the apocalypse aren’t so different. If there is a beginning then there is an end.

One I have to tell you this story. And it has to be chronological. There was once a boy so insecure with his life, he took diet pills, believing that they would magically make him better. But he did not know what better meant. Skinnier? Happier? Normal-er? He didn’t have the sense, this boy, to ask the questions necessary in understanding the self. He didn’t want to understand the self. He didn’t want to be anywhere in his head, where thoughts whirled and stabbed, where shadows sought to suffocate. He wanted a quick fix, a present-moment action. What’s easier than popping pills? What’s easier than taking a handful of them and washing it down with a swig of beer? Oh, that boy, oh how he smiled and laughed, oh how he was proud that his appetite had shrunk into nothing. It was as if a stone wall had risen up in his digestive system and turned away all thoughts of food. He snacked on one potato chip a day. He drank one bottle of water. And at night, if he was good, he allowed himself a piece of candy, which he immediately hated himself for.

 A Sequence of Thoughts 171 It did not matter that his friends began worrying about him, how shallow his cheeks became, how his moods were erratic, how he wasn’t losing weight but starving weight off of him. But look at him. He was beautiful—wasn’t he? People loved the new him—didn’t they? Look at him. He had lost fifty pounds in two months. Look at the ladder rungs of his rib cage. Look at the veins that worm through his hands. Look at his face that has become skeletal. Look. Look. Look. The story of this boy is chronological because it is a story of his body. It is a story about the changes of his body—inside and outside. Because his body was once fat, and day by day, his body expelled that fat. Time did that. His body recorded time. His body felt it. But chronology is also important because there comes a moment when the boy finally registers fault. We need that moment of redemption, of change, because when the boy decides what he is doing is detrimental, is a marker of change in his life. And then begins the process of healing, and the process of healing takes time.

Two Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses: “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”7

Seventy-Seven In Bernard Cooper’s essay “Marketing Memory,” he states that if you want to preserve memory in its purest state, do not write a memoir.8 Suddenly, your past becomes a book—shaped, contained, revised, and revisited language. Imagine memory as a big messy glob of clay. A writer then begins to work at it. Press and fold. Cut the excess. Give detail to where there was once nothing. We do this for hours, days, years. We live in our heads. And finally, by the end of it all, our messy memory is not a blob of clay. Finally we have something presentable, readable, compressed, conflated. The detritus of our clay? We throw it in the trash. We discard it because now there is no use in keeping something that doesn’t serve our narrative.

One Thousand Ten The ball dropping. The bomb dropping.

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I’m sorry I keep coming back to this. Happy holidays.

Thirteen Point Thirteen Let’s get right to it. Writing a memoir, writing chronologically, is an unnatural act. David, I agree with you. But the artist makes the unnatural seem natural. The artist, the good artist, creates her art in such a way we do not question veracity. We just live it. We just follow. We say, Take us wherever you please.

Sixty-Five Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water: Events don’t have cause and affect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common . . . All the events of my life swim in and out between each other. Without chronology. Like in dreams. So if I am thinking of a memory of a relationship, or one about riding a bike, or about my love for literature and art, or when I first touched lips to alcohol, or how much I adored my sister, or the day my father first touched me—there is no linear sense. Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory.9

Ten How does one talk about time when time loses meaning? As person who has gone through depression, I begin to notice, retrospectively, that time has no significance. You are late. You miss meetings. You don’t take the medications you should to get better. You sit in stasis, frozen, a body without a mind, a body without control. You no longer sleep. You no longer eat. Your mind—forever timeless—consumes you, but you spend every moment in this whirlwind of nonlinear thoughts. This is not reserved for the depressed. How about memoirs about abuse, addiction, illness, life-altering accidents, death? How does time affect the narrator? How does time affect the structure of a book? As writers, how can we remain faithful to chronology when our internal chronology is in so much flux? The answer: we can’t. I’m not kidding.

 A Sequence of Thoughts 173 As a writer, you are battling two things that prevent this: (1) memory and all its flaws and (2) capturing a time in life where time no longer exists. Einstein said the distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. A memoirist is creating an illusion. This is as postmodern as it gets. The writer of memoir is creating a simulacrum, like reenactments of crimes on Court TV. As Buddha said, “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present.” And it occurs to me that all memoirs are seen through this lens. Our pasts are filtered through the gaze of the present, and it is this present that begins to sift, sort, and build that narrative.

Eighteen When I was four, I peed on Santa’s lap at Ford City Mall in Chicago. Or was I five? Or three? I’m forgetting. But this is not forgotten. I peed on his lap. And he was pissed.

Ten Thousand Eight Hundred Fifty-Nine The writing of a memoir is about not letting go. It is not the Western psychological therapy of writing it down to expel thoughts and emotions. It’s just the opposite. It’s about writing it down to understand and live and relive and learn. The writing of a memoir is what Lauren Slater wrote once in an interview: “I, for one, expect my readers to be troubled; I envision my readers as depressed, guilty, or maybe mourning a medication that failed them. I write to say, ‘You are not the only one.’”10

One Half I just asked my mother to end this for me. She asked me what the topic is. I told her time and Christmas and writing. “Tell them,” she said, “that everyone dies.” Then because she is Buddhist and believes in reincarnation, she added, “But you get to be in line again to do it all over.” The memoir writer is in line again and again. The memoir writer defies time. She goes back, goes forward, stays still. She relives, recreates, reimagines. It’s a ride, you see, and

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a memoir writer can’t get sick on it. She has to get in line again and again, before what? Time runs out? Time stops. Time stands still? Impossible. Maybe we are all waiting for something to drop.

Notes 1 Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 38d and 39d. http://classics​.mit​.edu​/Plato​/ timaeus​.html. 2 Sophocles, Fragments, 284 (Hipponoos), WIST blog, https://wist​.info​/author​/ sophocles/. 3 St. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine (London: J. M. Dent, 1920), 262. 4 David Shields, Reality Hunger (New York: Knopf, 2010), 57. 5 Ibid., 43. 6 David McGlynn, “Traumatized Time,” in Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, 2nd ed., ed. Margot Singer and Nicole Walker (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 139. 7 Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (New York: Vintage, 1993), 135. 8 Bernard Cooper, “Marketing Memory,” in The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in the Age of Forgetting, ed. Charles Baxter (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1999), 106–15. 9 Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water (Portland, OR: Hawthorne Books, 2010), 28. 10 Lauren Slater, “One Nation, Under the Weather,” Salon, July 5, 2000, https://www​ .salon​.com​/2000​/07​/05​/slater/.

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My Mistake Nicole Walker

A fair number of people know that I have a serious problem with typos. It seems that my once strong typing skills are disintegrating and my never strong proofreading skills are getting worse. Even more troublesome, I feel schizophrenic: that I’m writing one thing while transcribing something entirely different through my fingers. With homophones, I write the one I don’t mean almost every time. It is an uncomfortable position to be in a writing department, teaching writing to students, and asking them to write better when every third time I spell write R-I-G-H-T. And when I’m proofreading, I end up revising, which is a very different sort of activity that relies on the invention part, not the careful detailed retooling part of my brain. And when I go to revise, I tend to mess things up more than they already were. Or I get distracted. I fall into a line of thought I did not intend. I’ll go in to change one word, possibly fixing the R-I-G-H-T to the more accurate W-R-I-T-E and begin to think—what if I, instead, talked about right as in correct rather than talking so self-obsessively about my own mistaken writing practices. I’m sure I have things to say about right: the correct and proper way to set a table, fill a dishwasher, drive a car. Propriety, rather than navel-gazing, can become my subject now. I could be known as the Proper Writer—she who details the right way to sauté spinach, eat an oyster—with horseradish and mignonette sauce, not the flavor-obliterating cocktail sauce, the right way to French an onion, the right way to sear fish—high heat, grapeseed oil. Apparently, most of my opinions about right are food-based. I think food might be my moral compass. And yet, how did I get here? Queen of etiquette. Which fork is my salad fork? Which fork in the road did I take to get here? When homophones are also homographic, it’s hard to keep a forward focus. I arrived at right R through write with a W. I arrived at hear meaning the birds followed me in my ears until I was at the place I am at now. I came to there by pointing to their special piece of writing. They are writing me back. They’re telling me, in their contraction ways, what’s wrong with the piece.

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I don’t mean to suggest, quite, that I write without volition or with some kind of Yeatsian automatic writing. But I do think creative nonfiction’s playfulness takes some of its cue from surprise and mistake. Letting the language drive the piece, letting the course of the essay turn like so many rivers, letting your flow of thought be interrupted by a question for instance: do you know why rivers curve? It is not just a matter of making it around big rocks (which is what I mistakenly thought). Factors, a number of them, including gradient, soil density, soil composition, and the characteristics of rainfall, cause a course to change. A river might turn because three pieces of sand shifted when a frog hopped out of the riverbed and onto the bank. A website called Happy News claims, “A river bends as it adjusts to disturbances, such as increases in water volume or obstacles that deflects its current. The diverted current follows a new path, bumps into a bank, encounters bank resistance, and erodes the bank—eventually carving a bend.”1 (Shouldn’t it be “obstacles that deflect its current”? Is this the way sentences run these days?) Still, the river is still the river, the course is still the course. You have to adjust for the interruption of sand, the mistake of rain, the coincidence of a bank. A course in a river. A course in semantics. If I happen to be standing in the river listening to you, I can only take my circumstance as the subject matter. Making mistakes may be a Freudian thing, or maybe just a too tiny keyboard or a too easily moved cursor, or maybe a brain whose hemispheres of between see of vision and sea of waves are starting to crash. But maybe there’s a pattern to this accident. Paul Auster in his memoir-type thing The Invention of Solitude finds a pattern in images of his son. On page 107 (unless I typed that wrong) Auster, who has just finished describing his son’s asthma attack, notes that the very moment the end of his marriage occurred was when, after trying to keep their son occupied while the boy spent three days in an oxygen-tent-covered crib, the wife made the mistake of saying, “I give up. I can’t handle him anymore. I have to get out of here.”2 Auster says that he turned against his wife then. He says he wanted to punish his wife for such selfishness. The marriage fails right at that turn. Auster doesn’t dwell on that failure just then. Instead, thanks to the catapult that is white space, he leaps to a story about Mallarmé. He talks about poems Mallarmé wrote at the side of his dying son’s bed. Auster translates these poems, publishes them in the Paris Review. About one year later, no white space leap necessary, he’s at a bar with his good friend R., a poet from Amsterdam, who remarks that he’d been reading Mallarmé in the latest issue of the Paris Review. Next to the poems was a picture of Mallarmé’s son. R. was musing about how much alike he thought the picture of Mallarmé’s son was to Auster’s son, whom R. had met many times. Auster interrupted—those poems you were reading. Those were my translations. Didn’t you notice? R. said he hadn’t noticed. He hadn’t read that far. The coincidence propelled him out of himself almost as much as his wife’s mistake had. So much, it punched him into another leap of white space. No comment necessary. Coincidence in nonfiction is the foreshadowing. It’s the narrative arc. It’s the belief in literary Gods that suggests if you study the patterns between two things, the thing

 My Mistake 177 they have in common will reveal itself to you. The patterns begin to resonate into some kind of meaning. In fiction, coincidence reads as contrived. And anyway, you have the tools of foreshadowing and recurring images, character development, and coming full circle to give the reader satisfaction. But in nonfiction, the images returning in surprise are all the pattern you have to trace. At the end of his memoir Speak, Memory, Nabokov reveals how much he believes or wants to believe in coincidence. He believes there is a pattern behind the places he visited, the people he knew. The coincidences form their pattern in images of broken shards of pottery: I do not doubt that among those slightly convex chips of majolica-ware found by our child there was one whose border of scrollwork fitted exactly, and continued, the pattern of a fragment I had found in 1903 on the same shore, and that the two tallied with a third my mother had found on that Mentone beach in 1882, and with a fourth piece of that same sort of pottery that had been found by her mother a hundred years ago—and so on, until this assortment of parts, if all had been preserved, might have been put together to make the complete, the absolutely complete, bowl, broken by some Italian child, God knows where and when, and now mended by these rivets of bronze.3

That assertion that these pieces of clay are pieces of one big puzzle is on page 308. The number 308? A coincidence? Mistake is the stuff of memoir. It’s the stuff of narrative and plot. It’s the way current nonfiction justifies itself, makes a claim to fame. But mistakes are also the stuff of sentences—the way Nabokov’s observational skills led him to see other facts, the way Auster uses his wife’s mistakes and R.’s unknowing to shift the angle of light. Mistakes are where perspective takes place. I tell my students it’s serendipity but really, being wrong can lead you to see what’s right over here, and then what’s right over there, multiplying perspective right by write by right.

Notes 1 April Holladay, “Why Do Rivers Follow Lazy Loops and Bends?” Happy News, August 25, 2007, https://www​.happynews​.com​/news​/8252007​/why​-rivers​-follow​-lazy​-loops​ -bends​.htm. 2 Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude, revised ed. (New York: Penguin, 2007), 107. 3 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1947; repr., New York: Vintage, 1989), 308–9.

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Part III

Unconventions Fiction has scene, plot, character, and narrative arc. Poetry has meter, lineation, volta, assonance, consonance, and (sometimes) rhyme. What tropes and conventions does nonfiction rely on? The most common answer is that nonfiction operates with the devices of fiction: narrative and character-driven but with an “I” for the protagonist and fact for plot. But nonfiction has its own techniques and “unconventions”: montage, juxtaposition, toggling, fragmentation, white space, etymological exegesis, the weave, the tangent, and the digression. None of these devices is exclusive to nonfiction, of course, but nonfiction propels them to the fore—continually reinventing the generic space where the writer plays.

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On Convention Margot Singer

For many years now, the conversation about creative nonfiction has focused almost exclusively on questions of definition and legitimacy. What is this thing we’re writing? We can’t even settle on a name. Tacking the word “creative” or “literary” or “narrative” in front of “nonfiction” feels defensive or pretentious or redundant or all three. “Essay” conjures the specter of the term paper, “article” connotes journalism, “belles-lettres” is lovely but no one can pronounce it, “memoir” is too limiting, and plain “nonfiction” is too big. And the trouble of nomenclature is only a symptom of a larger problem: where to draw the borders of this Thing-That-Cannot-Be-Named? Every phony-memoir scandal provokes a fresh boundary skirmish. Some of us duck behind parked cars. We love creative nonfiction, of course, because of its blurry borders, the way it toggles back and forth between fact and the imagination, between expository and lyric modes. We love its ability to blend scene, description, meditation, raw fact, speculation, and reportage. Creative nonfiction casts aside journalism’s formulaic “five W’s” and inverted pyramid structure and neutral third-person invisibility for a vast array of forms. This plasticity, of course, makes some people nervous. If a piece of nonfiction reads like fiction or poetry, how can you tell it’s true? You have to take the truth on faith—not form. Creative nonfiction, some say, is defined by a lack of established conventions.1 But I would suggest that what’s going on is more complicated than that. Creative nonfiction may be polymorphous and may resist easy categorization, but it’s rooted in convention all the same. It may be obvious, but perhaps worth repeating, that all writing is conventional. Not “conventional” in the pejorative sense of “unoriginal” or “trite,” of course, but meaning a customary way of doing things, or norms. Convention is what we talk about when we talk about craft. As every creative writing student knows, it’s conventional to fill one’s prose with sensory imagery and concrete, significant detail. It’s conventional to shape dialogue in zippy bursts, to portray scenes from a specific point of view, to “show, not tell.” We tend to talk about these elements of craft as givens— laws of nature, almost—but they’re not. They’re simply the familiar attributes of one particular type of narrative, one that is used, to varying degrees, by historians and

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scientists and journalists as well as by fiction and nonfiction writers to tell stories that feel “true” and “real.” Often misconceived as techniques “borrowed” from fiction, the conventions of narrative realism underpin any kind of writing that seeks to portray the world as it “really” is. These conventions, quite simply, help us feel, deep in our guts and in our bones, that we are “there” in a way that exposition can’t, and we feel this because of the artfulness (the artifice) of narrative, which for better or for worse operates independently of the inherent truthfulness, or lack thereof, of any given text. Creative nonfiction both builds on the conventions of narrative realism and at times bends and reinvents them, and it is the tension between these dynamics, I propose, that distinguishes creative nonfiction from other literary genres.2 As the scholar Doug Hesse has rightly pointed out, narrative feels realistic or lifelike not because it is lifelike but because it’s “storylike.”3 But realistic narrative has a way of naturalizing the operation of its conventions so that we forget they’re there. To Tsvetan Todorov, realism (what he calls the vraisembable) “is the mask which conceals the text’s own laws and which we are supposed to take for a relation with reality.”4 In other words, we forget that we’re reading a linguistic representation and imagine instead that the narrative is literally holding up a mirror to the world. This naturalizing effect is, I think, especially strong in creative nonfiction. Never mind that the dialogue presented in a memoir is obviously not a transcription of actual speech. Never mind that the order of presentation in a narrative is rarely linear, that time is dilated or compressed. Never mind that the myriad details of experience must be selected, filtered, ordered, and re-presented in a way that imposes meaning onto what would otherwise be chaos. We accept the conventions of narrative realism as indicative of the truthfulness of a piece of writing, when in fact they’re what makes it art. In shifting its emphasis from exposition to story, from summary to scenes rich in dialogue and descriptive detail, creative nonfiction creates an artful illusion of the real. Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, for example, plunges us into the murky depths of Florida’s Fakahatchee swamp, slogging away beside Orlean as she searches for elusive bromeliads. No one would mistake the following passage for a newspaper article, but nevertheless we trust that journalist Orlean’s account is true. Even more importantly, we feel that it is true—because of its vivid, sensory detail: The fact is that the swamp is so grabby that even though I was covered from neck to foot I felt stark naked. The water was freezing cold and mosquitoes sneaked in and out of my shirt by way of my collar and sleeves, and every plant with prickers snatched at my leggings, and the gritty sinkhole muck passed right through my socks and sneakers and stained my ankles and toes. I had mosquito bites on my stomach and face, and toward the end of that first hike I got so nervous and exhausted that I broke out in hives for the first time in my life.5

Orlean’s prose puts the reader “there.” The long string of coordinating conjunctions replicates the endlessness of the hike, and the repeated consonance of hard “k” sounds

 On Convention 183 (“neck,” “stark naked,” “cold,” “mosquitoes,” “sneaked,” “prickers,” “sinkhole muck,” “socks and sneakers,” “ankles,” “stomach,” “hike,” “broke”) mimics the insects’ and thorns’ relentless pricks. Do we believe that’s what it feels like to slog through the Fakahatchee swamp? You bet. Similarly, one of the most moving scenes in Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks occurs when Skoot and Lacks’s adult children visit the Johns Hopkins laboratory where the HeLa cancer cells, taken decades earlier from their deceased mother’s body, are cultured and kept: Christoph leaned over the microscope again and began moving the cells quickly around the screen until he shrieked, “Look there! See that cell?” He pointed to the center of the monitor. “See how it has a big nucleus that looks like it’s almost pinched in half in the middle? That cell is dividing into two cells right before our eyes! And both of those cells will have your mother’s DNA in them.” “Lord have mercy,” Deborah whispered, covering her mouth with her hand. . . . Deborah and Zakariyya stared at the screen like they’d gone into a trance, mouths open, cheeks sagging. It was the closest they’d come to seeing their mother alive since they were babies.6

This five-page scene, narrated in a dramatic third person (except for the first and last sentences, which subtly remind us of Skloot’s presence in the lab), puts the reader, like Skloot, in the position of bearing witness to an emotional event. Orlean’s and Skloot’s narratives may read as vividly as fiction, but we never forget that they are not fictional, and one of the reasons for that is voice. Voice, I propose, is one of the few formal conventions that distinguishes creative nonfiction from other kinds of prose. Since the heyday of the New Journalism in the 1960s and 1970s, writers of creative nonfiction have adopted an intimate, reflective, selfreflexive narrative voice, in marked contrast to the “omniscient” third person of the news story or history book. I call this point of view the “Naked I”: “Naked” because the “I” is a pronoun with a concrete referent, the living body of the author, and not just a narrative construct. (Again, I don’t mean to imply that all creative nonfiction is narrated in the first person. Even in second- or third-person narratives, as we’ll see in a moment, the identity between narrator and the author crucially influences how we read the text.) The “Naked I” places writers like Orlean and Skloot squarely on the page. They not only narrate but also participate in the stories they tell. As in science, the act of observing inevitably changes the nature of the thing observed. The Orchid Thief is as much about Orlean’s obsession with obsession as it is a profile of obsessive orchid dealer John Laroche. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks draws Skloot into the lives of Lacks’s family just as it draws them into her journalistic quest. As Skloot puts it: “Slowly, without realizing it, I’d become a character in [Deborah’s] story, and she in mine.”7 There is no pretense of objectivity here, no invisible “fourth wall.” Instead the detail-rich, descriptive scenes of narrative realism blend with the limited, one-sided, fallible, fundamentally human perspective of the “Naked I.” There are both hubris and

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honesty in this technique, which is both contemporarily postmodern and the direct legacy of Montaigne. What happens, then, in creative nonfiction when the convention of the “Naked I” is cast aside in favor of an “omniscient” third-person point of view? Truman Capote famously championed this approach as a way of heightening the vividness of the “nonfiction novel.” “My feeling,” he told George Plimpton in their famous 1966 interview, “is that . . . the author should not appear in the work. Ideally. Once the narrator does appear, he has to appear throughout, all the way down the line, and the I-I-I intrudes when it really shouldn’t.”8 The intrusive “I-I-I,” of course, is precisely what reporters and biographers and historians have long banished from the page. It’s when the hidden third-person narrator slips beyond reported fact into the realm of the imagination—for example, dramatizing scenes that the author could not possibly have witnessed, recreating dialogue that the author could not possibly have overhead, clairvoyantly representing real-life characters’ most private feelings and thoughts—that the genres really blur. Again, what interests me is not so much the ethics of invention but its effect on how we read and make meaning of the nonfiction text. Take, for example, Sebastian Junger’s reconstruction in A Perfect Storm of the unknowable last days and hours of the Andrea Gail. The book may be “completely factual,”9 as Junger insists, but it is also an act of the imagination, in Junger’s own words, “as complete an account as possible of something that can never be fully known.”10 Junger performs a deft balancing act of speculation, extrapolation, and invention in describing the ship’s last moments after it is struck by a rogue wave: Whether the Andrea Gail rolls, pitch-poles, or gets driven down, she winds up, one way or another, in a position from which she cannot recover. There’s no time to put on survival suits or grab a life vest; the boat’s moving through the most extreme motion of her life and there isn’t even time to shout. The refrigerator comes out of the wall and crashes across the galley. Dirty dishes cascade out of the sink. The T.V., the washing machine, the VCR tapes, the men, all go flying. And, seconds later, water moves in.11

Notice how quickly Junger slides away from the equivocal “or” and “one way or another,” foregoing the conditional for a vivid, present-tense description of an utterly imaginary scene. Dave Eggers, that wunderkind of postmodernist self-reflexivity, also uses an “omniscient” third-person narration in Zeitoun, his nonfiction account of an ArabAmerican family’s experience of Hurricane Katrina. In What Is the What, Eggers goes even further, using what you might call a ventriloquist’s first person as he channels the voice of the real-life Sudanese Lost Boy, Valentino Achak Deng. Sounding an awful lot like Capote, Eggers told an interviewer from Salon: “I don’t want my voice in this book. I don’t want to be a character.”12 The New York Times critic Timothy Egan called the result “an odd hybrid.”13 Eggers published What Is the What as a novel and left it at that.

 On Convention 185 Like Junger, Eggers devotes a substantial amount of energy to explaining his methodology and defending the thoroughness and credibility of his reporting and research. And we buy it. Just as we’re sold on Junger’s version of what it must have been like aboard the lost ship Andrea Gail, we’re sold on Egger’s rendition of Valentino’s experiences, feelings, and thoughts. But this use of third-person omniscience raises questions. Ethical questions, maybe, but also questions of genre. We don’t read A Perfect Storm as fiction, even though it “reads like a novel,” even though we know Junger had to speculate. We don’t read What Is the What as a novel either, even though it claims to be one, despite the oddness of Eggers writing in Valentino’s voice. The unconventionality of the narrative voice doesn’t destroy our trust in these stories’ truth. In his 1987 essay “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction,” Eric Heyne usefully distinguishes between the terms “factual status” and “factual adequacy.”14 “Factual status,” Heyne argues, is a matter of authorial intention: is the work intended to be read as fact-based or not? “Factual adequacy,” on the other hand, is a function of the reader’s judgment as to whether a “work is good or bad fact” according to the text’s own terms.15 In his analysis of In Cold Blood, Heyne rightly rejects John Hersey’s narrow dictum that “the journalist must not invent” and applauds Capote’s use of innovative form.16 He also rejects the notion that the inaccuracies in Capote’s account mean that we should read the book as fiction.17 Heyne’s reasoning rests on the book’s “factual status”—on the understanding that Capote intended his account of the Kansas killings to be read as true. In evaluating the literary merit of works of nonfiction, Heyne concludes, we must consider the nature of the specific “truth-claims” being made.18 Heyne, therefore, finds Capote guilty not of invention, or even of lying, but of “factual inadequacy”—of violating “his own rules.”19 By breaking with convention, innovative works of creative nonfiction get at “reality” in powerful, new ways. The intrusive “I-I-I” of the first-person narrator reaches for a deeper kind of truth by shattering the illusion of journalistic objectivity and putting the author’s subjective experience squarely on the page. Likewise, concealing the author’s presence behind a dramatic, third-person narration works to create a cameralike illusion of unmediated reality. Neither approach is a guarantee of factual accuracy (you still have to take that on trust). Most importantly, both approaches serve to remind us that even the most scrupulously fact-based, truthful writing is always also an imaginative act, a work of art. Much has been written about experimental fictions that break narrative convention in a way that shatters the illusion of reality. The metafictions of Robert Coover and John Barth, for example, call attention to their own fictionality and the artifice of form.20 Other anti-mimetic fictions center on a dislocated narrator (Robbe-Grillet’s Jalousie), depict a physically or logically impossible space (Danielewski’s House of Leaves), present contradictory storylines (Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Atwood’s “Happy Endings”) or illogical sequencing (Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Coover’s “The Babysitter”). But what about works of nonfiction that similarly transgress mimetic bounds? Creative nonfiction that’s not “realistic”? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?

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When creative nonfiction messes with conventions of narrative level, presents an unreliable narrator, or breaks the narrative frame, something very different happens than when fiction plays such “games.” When in Martin Amis’s novel Money, for example, a character named Martin Amis walks into a bar, it jolts us out of the seemingly realistic story world. (If you’re of a theoretical bent, you might call it a “metaleptic joke.”21) But when Michael Martone publishes a series of “Contributors’ Notes” written in the third person that present contradictory information about Martone, you get a joke that works in a completely different way. The character “Martin Amis” reveals the presence of the author, Martin Amis, pulling the puppet’s strings behind the text. In Michael Martone by Michael Martone, there are no puppet strings. Instead of reminding us that fiction writers invent imaginary characters, Martone reminds us that we are always creating and re-creating ourselves. The nonfiction text’s fictionality is a comment not on the nature of fiction-making but on the nature of the truth. When a fictional narrator is “unreliable,” we understand that the text is asking us to negotiate the gap between the world as we know it and the world as it’s presented through the narrator’s (skewed) eyes. So when a supposedly omniscient third-person narrator turns out to be unreliable, as in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, we experience a kind of shock. The shock calls attention to the subjective and provisional nature of narrative, to authorial manipulations of all kinds. But when Lauren Slater opens Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, with the statement “I exaggerate”,22 when she tells us that this is “a book in which in some cases I cannot and in other cases I will not say the facts,”23 we experience an altogether different kind of shock. With “unreliable” nonfiction narrator there’s not only a gap between perceived realities, there’s no firm ground at all. And yet Slater’s project, infuriating as it may be, compels us to confront our desire to know the “truth,” and to consider whether “[using] invention to get at the heart of things” can be more powerful than even documented fact.24 Creative nonfiction, in sum, is far more than prose that feels like fiction with a special claim to truth. It’s a genre that, at least in its more innovative forms, exposes many of the unexamined expectations we bring to the so-called realistic text. It foregrounds the slipperiness of representation. It makes us ask fundamental questions about the nature of storytelling, memory, “reality,” and “truth.” Building on the conventions of other prose forms, it bends those conventions to offer fresh literary perspectives on our experience of the world.

Notes 1 See Chris Anderson, “Introduction,” in Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy, ed. Chris Anderson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), ix–xx. 2 This is not to claim that all creative nonfiction is narrative, or even realistic, of course, but only to acknowledge that mimetic prose narrative remains creative nonfiction’s dominant mode.

 On Convention 187 3 Douglas Hesse, “Stories in Essays, Essays as Stories,” in Anderson, “Introduction,” 191. 4 Tsvetan Todorov, “Introduction,” Communications 11 (1968): 3, quoted in Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 139. 5 Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief (New York: Ballantine, 1998), 130. 6 Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (New York: Crown-Random House, 2006), 265. 7 Ibid., 7. 8 Truman Capote, interview with George Plimpton, “The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel,” New York Times, January 16, 1966, https://archive​.nytimes​.com​/www​.nytimes​ .com​/books​/97​/12​/28​/home​/capote​-interview​.html?​_r​=2. 9 Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm (New York: Norton, 1997), xi. 10 Ibid., xii. 11 Ibid., 140. 12 Dave Eggers, interview with Sara Corbett, “Lost and Found,” Salon, November 13, 2006, https://www​.salon​.com​/2006​/11​/13​/eggers​_38/. 13 Timothy Egan, “After the Deluge,” New York Times, August 13, 2009, www​.nytimes​ .com​/2009​/08​/16​/books​/review​/Egan​-t. html?pagewanted=all. 14 Eric Heyne, “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 33, no. 3 (1987): 480. 15 Ibid. 16 John Hersey, “The Legend on the License,” Yale Review 70 (Autumn 1980): 1–25. 17 Heyne, “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction,” 482. 18 Ibid., 488. 19 Ibid., 485. 20 See, for example, Coover’s “The Babysitter” and “The Magic Poker,” in Pricksongs and Descants (New York: Grove, 2000 [1969]) and Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Anchor, 1988). 21 Suzanne Keen, Narrative Form (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 110–11. 22 Lauren Slater, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2001), 3. 23 Ibid., 219. 24 Ibid.

28

Losing Language Camille Dungy

We need tear leaders, not cheer leaders. We need tear leaders to teach us how to mourn.

—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

I think of my friend’s mother, dying forty years before she imagined she was due to die. We stayed in a spacious house in the Oregon countryside, rented by my friends, so there would be room for her mother’s small herd of visiting stepchildren, relations, friends. In those days, my friend was hardly ever alone with her disappearing mother. A group of us deliberated around the dining table. These were the days of the Occupy movement, when activists renamed Frank H. Ogawa Plaza in Oakland— who remembers what that was about?—calling it Oscar Grant Plaza instead. It was necessary, some of us believed, to highlight everyday—modern-day—catastrophe: the unjust death of yet another young Black man. Others believed that erasing a survivor of US internment camps from our collective memory might, in the end, do more harm than good. What was the use of having an immediately accessible reference like Oscar Grant if we didn’t acknowledge this country’s long history of marginalizing and jeopardizing particular lives? Was it violence upon violence to memorialize Grant while disappearing Ogawa? And what will happen when we forget the history attached to Grant’s name, too? I don’t remember if there was a satisfactory conclusion to this debate. I do remember that I’d taken charge of cooking part of our lunch. I used a recollected pasta recipe that promised a delicious and easy meal for six to eight, but the red sauce I served proved bland and watery; the noodles, a mush. Possibly, no one else much remembers the quality of that afternoon’s meal, though it is a culinary failure that still nags me nearly a decade after the fact. Has such a thing ever happened to you? It had been my ambition to share a perfect bowl of pasta with the table, but it wasn’t perfect, and folks said that it didn’t matter, and I still can’t let it go. Lonely George died on New Year’s Day 2019. He was a Hawai’ian tree snail.

 Losing Language 189 His name echoes that of Lonesome George, the Pinta Island tortoise of the Galápagos Islands who died in 2012. Like Lonesome George the tortoise, Lonely George the tree snail had no one with whom to mate. These tree snails can live more than twenty years in the wild. Lonely George, part of a captive-breeding program, survived for fourteen years. He had outlived the rest of his kind by nearly the entire measure of his solitary life. Unlike Lonesome George, Lonely George wasn’t really the last male of his species. These snails are hermaphrodites. The last Achatinella apexfulva was neither completely a he nor solely a she. But we don’t have much of a way in our language to name gender fluidity. To accommodate our bias toward gender binaries, even among species for whom such binaries are misleading and perhaps patently untrue, the last representative of what was the first species of Hawai’ian tree snail described by Western science—thanks to shells in a lei presented to Captain George Dixon in 1787—we call Lonely George. I remember how heated our conversations became in the big house that weekend. As if our futures depended on everything we discussed, even when the conversation drifted to matters of little value. We argued about where in New York City you could find the best bagels, naming specific delis and bakeries and arguing over the relative chewiness of one’s bread or the creaminess of another’s schmear, until Carolyn—that is the dead woman’s name—silenced us. She would never eat a New York bagel, she said. She spoke in the matter-of-fact way a docent might name the pattern on a set of everyday dishes. She said, “There are so many things I’ll never have a chance to taste.” I shipped an express order of bagels and toppings to the house in the country later that week, after I returned home. By that time, Carolyn was hardly eating. I doubt she had a chance to enjoy any of it. In the condolence card I sent my friend, I may have used a phrase I was taken with at the time: “There are no words.” I used to write this when someone I loved had lost someone they loved, because it made a sort of sense. I don’t perceive this statement as consolation any longer. There are words—about pain and the deepest kinds of sadness, about being orphaned and lonely and feeling bereft. There are words—about the inability to hold and, by that holding, to sustain another heart. There are words—and they matter— about the erasure of one particular light, of one particular life, and, with that life, all the lives that link with it, all the darkened histories that light—that life—once revealed. These are difficult words to reach for in my language. There is no way to describe what it means to acknowledge the erasure of a life. We are likely doing the Achatinella apexfulva a disservice—even as we work to honor the memory of the species—by giving the last of its kind such an incomplete name. Maybe when we say, “There are no words,” we mean there is no way to describe what it means to acknowledge the erasure of a life around which so much language might have been created. “George,” we say, because we have little room in our language to name a being who is neither he nor she but is something larger.

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Apexfulva, the latter of George’s binomial names, speaks to the yellow tip of the snail’s shell, the coloration pattern that made the species attractive to collectors. In the days before the arrival of Europeans, George’s kind looked good in leis made for people of high standing. In later years, George’s kind looked good on souvenirs. The name “George” speaks of the first white man to hold such a creature. Or, truly, to hold the shell from which the living creature had disappeared. The name “Lonely George” speaks of another shelled being, one who was already lost before many of us found him. It was solitude and peril, their status as the last hope for their species, that made these lone survivors recognizable enough—and, therefore, important enough—to earn these English names. Oh, but why are the names we use to recognize another so often harbingers of death? Lonely George. Lonesome George. Before their near eradication, and then eradication, the Achatinella apexfulva and the Chelonoidis abingdonii were set apart— for us—by their binomial nomenclature as well as by the functional descriptions (“Hawai’ian native land snail” or “Pinta Island tortoise”) that mark their existence as life forms separate from us. Only when we’d almost lost the last did we bestow on them the familiar name “George.” Pūpū kuahiwi (mountain shell), kāhuli (land shells), kani ka nahele (“the sound of the forest”), pūpū kani oe (a phrase I’ve seen translated as “shell that sounds long,” which speaks to the whistling sound of the snails): these are some of the Hawai’ian names for members of the family Achatinellidae. Lonely, we say now, because though the forests of Oahu once resounded with the songs of tens of thousands of snails, all we have left are the rattles of empty shells. I’m not at home as I write this. My family and I have been living, since the new year, in another state. The weather is different here, and we don’t know how to describe it. “It’s cold,” we tell our friends back home. When they ask for a number and we tell them a number, they sound confused. The numbers on the thermometer don’t seem to register the truth as we feel it. I’m not sure if it’s the cold-trapping dampness of this region that keeps us shivering or that we’re acutely aware of all the familiar things that no longer surround us. We are lonely. It has taken me nearly a month to put words to the feeling, but that is it. We are lonely. We are raw and alert. The wind sounds different in this new house. The trees don’t look the same. In the big house in the country, sometimes, my friend once told me—even with all those people around, and even though she knew that on the grand scale of existence, the cause of her suffering was part of the natural order—she would go into her room to be by herself and cry because of the magnitude of all she was aware she was losing: everything, everyone, for which there is not enough time. Sometimes this is what it looks like to be lonely. As was also true for Lonesome George, the eradication of all of Lonely George’s eligible mating partners and, with them, the potential for the continuity of a species is largely the fault of human beings. We can also lay blame on the rats we carry with us. Ships that brought the attention of Western science to the Achatinella apexfulva— the yellow-

 Losing Language 191 tipped tree snails of Oahu—also brought rats, who like to eat snails. When we say “rat” and mean one who betrays us, it is perhaps with stories like this in mind. Agricultural practices that relied on goats, cattle, and pigs disrupted native ecosystems on Oahu. We can also name logging as a culprit. And plantation-based pineapple production. And the housing and resort developments that require landscaping that is not the landscape native to the island that creatures like Lonely George evolved to survive. We can name rats, goats, cattle, landscaping, pigs, but we humans are the common denominator. In 1936 some persons brought a few giant African tree snails to Hawai’i because they wanted tasty snacks for humans and livestock. Giant African tree snails are among the largest snails in the world. As a result of their size, they consume great quantities of Hawai’i’s lush island foliage, threatening native and agricultural vegetation alike. In a bid to control this voracious threat, in 1955 a new set of people introduced the carnivorous rosy wolfsnail (Euglandina rosea) to the islands. The outcome did not turn out as they intended. Is the outcome ever as intended in stories such as this? The rosy wolfsnail has done relatively little to reduce the population of giant African tree snails, preferring to devour members of the eleven families of native snails that once existed on the Hawai’ian Islands in abundance. “The extinctions have just been horrendous,” University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Professor Emeritus Michael Hadfield told CNN in a story about the death of Lonely George. Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros on the planet, left the planet in March 2018. Born wild in the Sudanese savanna some forty-five years earlier, he was captured young and spent most of his life in a Czech zoo. It can be cold in that country. Far colder than more than a million years of evolution prepared pachyderms to bear. Hoping that a more hospitable climate would support the longevity of the critically endangered species—there were only eight left in the world at the time, down from an estimated 1909 count of two to three thousand—in 2009 conservationists transferred Sudan to a Kenyan preserve. There he grazed under twenty-four-hour guard. Why the guards? Again, the names we’ve chosen to speak of Sudan’s life seem also to name his loss. The ivory that earned him the name “rhinoceros”—meaning “nose horn”—can sell on the black market for as much as $30,000 a pound, though rhino horn is built of the same stuff as human nails. As was true for both the snail and the tortoise Georges, humans (horn poachers, not shell poachers, this time) are largely to blame for the fact that the last male northern white rhino is survived by only two females: Sudan’s daughter and granddaughter—Najin and Fatu, respectively—both beyond breeding age. Think of this: though Najin and Fatu are surrounded day and night by guards set to prevent their disappearance from the Earth, every other rhinoceros who has ever been related to them has already died. That is a kind of loneliness for which we don’t have adequate language. In the Oregon house, where Carolyn was dying, the rest of us talked and talked, without really listening to one another. The Occupy movement was in full swing. I’m

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using that language intentionally. According to Dictionary​.co​m, the phrase “in full swing,” “dating from the mid-1800s, alludes to the vigorous movement of a swinging body.” There seemed to be so many people involved in the Occupy movement at the time. From our vantage points in cities like Oakland, Portland, and New York, where Occupy encampments housed hundreds of activists, it seemed that there was a vigorous movement, a swinging of the body politic in a new direction. None of us who’d gathered to say goodbye to Carolyn were particularly young, but maybe we were dumb. We were full of hope and the language that comes along with hope. We believed that substantial and sustainable global change was on the horizon. So, yeah, we must have been dumb. Was that silly of us? Maybe it was silly of us. Who of us hasn’t ever been fueled by folly? Though Carolyn’s imminent death brought us together, we didn’t consider the possibility of irrevocable loss on a national, even planetary, scale. We passed pasta around the table and continued to babble—until Carolyn reminded us of the things we could miss in this world. Rhinos are an umbrella species, by which term conservationists mean that the presence of the animals—and their protection—shelters many lives in a shared habitat. Save the rhinos and you might also save some of the birds and zebras, the invertebrates, the flora, and the fish that share the same ecosystem. Consider the oxpecker—the tick-eating bird known as the askari wa kifaru, or “rhinoceros guard,” in Swahili—who makes meals of the ticks and other parasites that burrow in rhinos’ thick-skinned hides. Consider the cattle egret, whose taxonomic name is Bubulcus ibis and who is sometimes called the rhinoceros egret because it is known to follow the huge pachyderms in order to eat the bugs and tiny critters disturbed by those enormous feet. See the rhinos go, and with them the status of these lives will be altered as well. See the rhinoceros go, and the sounds, the songs, of the savanna will change. I appreciate the word “umbrella” because I understand what the umbrella is meant to do: protect us from inhospitable weather. I also understand the umbrella’s limitations—woe betide the ones under an umbrella if a particularly windy storm sets in. Woe betide the ones too tall or too small to benefit from an umbrella claiming one size fits all. The word “umbrella” reminds me that some of us can engineer survival, but the survival of only some. Studies suggest that there were once more than 750 species of native land snails on the Hawai’ian Islands. Studies also suggest that the Hawai’ian Islands once boasted more varieties of snails than almost any other place in the world. Experts now believe that, largely as a result of several human-driven interventions, more than 90 percent of those populations are gone forever. I have no words. This is what I used to say when someone died and I didn’t want to sound insensitive, or when someone died and I didn’t want to make an insufficient gesture of condolence, or when someone died and I was so broken up by empathic grief, I didn’t know how to put my feelings into words. When I learned more about the rapidity with which human actions have driven these species to extinction, for a long while, I had no words.

 Losing Language 193 Folklore of the Hawai’ian Islands says that once, the island forests were filled with the song of snails. We have no words in our contemporary language to explain this. One researcher claims that when the people of the islands first heard a piano, they said that it sounded like the singing of snails. This tells me something about the timbre of the snail song, but not much more than that. What song did the pianist play? At what tempo and in what key? I’ve read transcriptions of some Hawai’ian songs that feature kāhuli, the tree snails. The words to these songs are lovely, but I am sad not to know their melody. Some speculate that the sound people called the song of the snails was the munching of all those snail mouths on the leaf fungus that fed them. Some speculate that the sound people called the song of the snails was the squeaking of snail mucus on the leaves of so many trees. No one has verified this, and I resist the theory. There is very little magic in the thought of all that mucus. Some think the Native Hawai’ians were simply mistaken, that what they actually heard singing in the forests were birds. This assessment is insulting to the intelligence of Native Hawai’ians. Also, if it really were the case, why don’t we hear the birdsong anymore? It is true that by 2018 the poʻouli—also called the Melamprosops phaeosoma or the black-capped honeycreeper, who eats the native snails and worms and insects on another Hawai’ian island, the island of Maui—was thought to have disappeared from the planet. With the loss of the snails, have we also lost the songs of many a bird? It is likely that Carolyn died because of the nuclear toxicity in the New Mexican desert she loved to call home, though the simple name for what killed her is “cancer.” Carolyn has been haunting this essay because I mourn the loss of her. She died nearly ten years ago. By the measure of her family’s longevity, she should still have been with us at least another thirty years. I was lucky to have known Carolyn at all. An accident of my life crossing paths with her daughter’s. I could have missed knowing that either of them existed altogether. I had never even heard of the Achatinella apexfulva or the song of the once-abundant, long-lived land snails of the Hawai’ian forests until all of them and all of their songs were already gone. Lonely George. Lonesome George. Sudan. The white rhinoceros’s solitary offspring, Najin and Fatu, too. Carolyn. My friend is lonely now, without her mother. Sometime during my weekend at the big house in Oregon, my friend and I took a long walk. I wore the barefoot shoes that keep my luggage light. In my California home, where the temperature rarely dropped below fifty-five, those shoes worked perfectly well. They gave me traction, flexibility, and protection while allowing me to stay in close touch with the feel of the earth. But the weather in Oregon was colder than I’d anticipated. As we walked, my feet grew more and more uncomfortable. The blood that should have been warming my fingers also began to rebel. Carolyn was dying inside, though, so it seemed selfish to complain about the weather. What I’m trying to say is that most of the time, I am overwhelmed by the feebleness of language. Some current experts suggest that we lose a species every five minutes.

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Earthday​.o​rg estimates that, at our present rate of extinction, each year between 10,000 and 50,000 species will disappear from the planet forever. My fancy shoes and the bulldozed path on which I wore them, and the trees cut down for the box that boxed that disappointing pasta, whose calories my walk was meant to counteract—all are partly to blame. If shame isn’t the reasonable response to all this loss—or even sadness—perhaps I ought to feel something closer to the matter-of-fact assessment Carolyn made. Maybe I need to find language to directly name how many things there are in this world I will never know. Trying to find a way to speak to all these losses feels like walking around a denuded arboretum disappointed in myself—and a little panicked—for not being able to picture the trees in full leaf. Two years before Lonely George died, researchers at the University of Hawai’i sliced two millimeters from the snail’s foot. The sterile specimen is stored in hopes that one day, by mapping Lonely George’s genome, future scientists might clone another Achatinella apexfulva. Similar laboratories protect the genetic codes of Lonesome George, the Pinta Island tortoise, and the northern white rhinoceros, or Ceratotherium simum cottoni, known familiarly as Sudan. That’s the sort of drive that found me online ordering bagels and cream cheese after returning home from Carolyn’s hospice house. A drive that pushes against the eradication of all the world could offer.

29

What the Bottles Know Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas

“I am Dr. Smith.” I say, “I am Dr. Jones.” For five hours a day, once sometimes twice a week. “I am Dr. Santos. Dr. Evans. Dr. Reddy.” I say, trying to become the words. To sand myself down to sea glass and sound. “I am: Dr. White, Dr. Rima, Dr. Beddi,” I say, though I am not. Still, “What brings you in today?” I ask a man sitting on the edge of a table, a woman lying down on a stretch of brown paper. “How have you been since I last saw you?” I say to a man holding his head between his knees, to a woman holding her shoes like a newborn. “How can I help you today?” While I stand in the corner, one hand inside the other, looking up, looking down, looking away while I say, “Where does it hurt?” Outside the exam room I sit on an orange chair, in a row of other orange chairs idling my engine beside half a dozen others idling just like me. For five hours a day, on our designated days, we sit here waiting for a resident to speed past us the words mumbling, “Spanish” or, “Polish,” or, “I need a translator.” So we can chase the white coat like a racetrack rabbit into a small room in a free clinic in Chicago. Then we fade into the words and into the background, I stand in a disinfected corner looking up, looking down, “I prefer to avoid eye contact,” my trainer once said, “I want to draw as little attention to my body as I can.” Eyes up, eyes down. “Remember,” she said, “You are not really there, you are not really you.” I am Dr. Smith, Dr. Reddy, Dr. Walsh. “Except for when you introduce yourself, just that moment, and then . . .” I am Sara, Daniel, Juan, Jose, Ortensia, “And it hurts right here.” So I say, “Buenos-días-mi-nombre-es-Lina-y-hoy-seré-su-interprete-mi-función-estraducir-todo-lo-que-la-doctora-diga-y-viceversa-si-en-algún-momento-necesitaque-repita-cualquier-frase-o-palabra-o-tiene-cualquier-pregunta-o-duda-por-favorcomuníquemelo-verbalmente-o-con-un-gesto-de-la-mano-y-yo-me-encargare-deaclarar-lo-que-sea-necesario-hablare-en-primera-persona-a-la-doctora-como-si-yofuera-usted-y-a-usted-como-si-yo-fuera-la-doctora-para-asegurarme-que-nada-sepierda-en-la-traducción-esta-bien?” And then I watch the patient—a man or woman, usually older, always tired, almost always holding a grocery store bag full of small orange bottles and pages and pages of clinic-printed instructions—nod silently. Then, “Go ahead doctor,” I say, and I hear, “Thank you, interpreter.”

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In these moments I am not the name my mother chose for me, I am not the Anglicized version of my name, I am a title and I am the word. I am copper wire and the tension of tin-can string, I am morse code tapping and the broken sentences between two people trying to find pain like buried treasure. “Good morning,” I say, “My name is Dr. Smith. How are you feeling today?” So, “I’m fine,” I say. “I think fine.” Vending machine interpreter, words like crumpled bills stuffed into my ears while my mouth fills up with change. “Things are better now,” I say, “Only, the sadness thing.” Then, “What is your current dosage?” I say, and “Do you need refills?” I say, “I don’t know,” and I catch a glimpse of hands that are not my own, one wrapped around the other while it holds a grocery store bag tight to the chest. Look up, look down, you are not really here, not really you. So, “I don’t know,” I repeat, looking up, looking down. “But, um . . . Yes,” I hear the patient sniffle, the sound of a hand going into the pocket of an old worn coat, “I think I do need a refill,” I say, and off the corner of my eye a dirty tissue being stuff back into that coat pocket. “It’s better now,” I tell the doctor, “I’m sleeping now. I don’t even have to use the headphones anymore.” So, I say, “Yes.” The doctor, eyes trained on the screen, doesn’t look up, doesn’t look down. “But what are your current dosages? I’m having trouble finding them here.” Not at the patient, not at me. “What are you taking?” “Nothing.” I say, “Not now. At State they told me that it was my potassium, that that’s why I’d fainted, and that’s why I’d gone there so that’s what they said, that it was my potassium and that I had to stop taking it, so I stopped. I’m not taking anything anymore, because of my liver, you know. But it’s better now. Only the sadness thing.” I once saw a woman get mugged while crossing a bridge over a dry canal. She wore a skirt one size too small and a sweater two sizes too big. She walked with tired purpose in old shoes. She didn’t see the man coming up behind her until it was too late. A thin man in a black jacket laying both hands on her purse, I gasped, as I saw her neck jerk back and forth with the violence of his tugging. A small woman, with a short neck holding tight to an old purse, as if it made any difference. That’s how the patient holds on to the plastic bag now. “But,” I say, “That doesn’t make sense. That is not how potassium works. You must mean sodium.” While another hand that is not my own plays with the collar of a white coat, “That shouldn’t affect your liver, though. You should still be taking everything you were prescribed, but . . .” a pause, a glance back at the doctor glancing back at the patient, “What are the dosages?” “But . . .” A voice like cotton lint that I have to pluck out of the air before it fades completely, “That’s what they told me though, that it was my potassium, that that’s why I fainted. And I can’t take all that anymore anyway, not with my liver.” Hands that are not my own clutch a plastic bag, while I insist on words that aren’t mine either, “Things though, they’re are better now.” I say, “Do you know what your dosage is?” Cutting back on the doctor’s tone, not, “Do-Do-Do YOU know?” But “Do you? Do you, know the dosages?” Because my

 What the Bottles Know 197 trainer never said anything about replicating tone, or a doctor’s short-fused sleepless hyperfocus. Because it is enough, I think, to say, “We’re not going to be able to do anything unless you tell me your dosage.” But, “I don’t know,” I say. And I don’t. I wish I did. I wish I could say, “30 units twice a day,” could say, “90 milligrams in the morning.” Make the doctor stop the sighs exasperated. But I don’t know, and it’s not my job to know, it’s my job to say, “I don’t know.” So, I say, “I don’t know,” again and again, until I watch the patient look up, look down, and I remember not to look at the patient at all. As if I were really in the room and I was myself and not the red blinking light on a transcription machine, “Would,” I say, “Would the jars know?” “Los tarros?” I say back to the patient and watch a head that is not my own nod. “The jars?” I say to myself and I almost translate my own words out of habit, then “What?” from the opposite corner. “I’m sorry, doctor,” my own words feel clunky and restless in my mouth, and I want to bite down and break their soft-shelled spines. “Not ‘jars.’” Tarros-frascos-botellas. Jars, jars, jars. Tarros. Frascos. Botellas. Bottles. Bottles. “I meant bottles, doctor.” So, I try on the patient’s words again, “Would . . .” watching hands that are not my own open a crumpled grocery store bag, “Would the bottles know?” The doctor’s eyes narrow, and a medical sigh fills the room. “I have the bottles,” I say, “I brought them with me this time,” frail hands reach into the bag and hold up little plastic bottles to the light as if examining counterfeit stones, orange diamonds, and plastic gems. “See?” Tangerine shadows on calloused hands, on the soft lines of a hard life. Look up, look down, look around. “They’ll know,” I say, “Won’t they?” And we watch the doctor roll across the floor on a wheeled stool and take the bottles back to the computer for closer inspection. “They told me not to take them anymore, though,” I say. “Because of what they did to my liver,” still clutching an empty plastic bag as if it were still of whatever the bottles know. “Because of what they did to my potassium when I fainted, that’s what they told me, so that’s why I stopped taking it all, because of what happened to my liver, since the . . .” I stutter, one hand tugging on the other, no, not me. The patient stutters, and I echo. “Well, I’m sleeping now anyway. I don’t even need the headphones anymore because things are better now. So, I guess, I just need the refills then, since the bottles got emptied, since the attempt.” I hear myself hesitate on the last word. It’s not the right word. Not “since,” I think, “No, that’s not it.” Trying to find meaning behind words that are not my own. Desde, desde, desde, since-since-since, “The attempt. So the bottles are empty now.” I was on a bus when I saw the woman being mugged. As she clutched her handbag as if she could keep it, when she clutched at the rail when he pushed her down, and then at her chest as she sat there. As I imagined her whispering words none but God and the rats beneath that bridge could hear. I didn’t jump out to help her, the bus didn’t stop, and I never told anyone about this. “A si,” I heard someone say, “That bridge is dangerous,” as I watched the shape of a woman sitting alone on a bridge disappear into

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a shallow city distance, as if no one had seen it happen, as we all pretended we hadn’t hear her scream. “I’m sorry, doctor.” I hear myself say. “I made a mistake.” For the first time making eye contact with the figure in the white coat. “It’s not ‘Since,’” I say. “But, ‘After.’ She said, ‘After the attempt.’ And she says that that’s why the bottles are empty.” I’ve broken character and I half wait for a reprimand. For my trainer to burst through the door and demand to know “Who is ‘I’ in that sentence?” But instead, the doctor stares at me, chin resting on a loose fist, “Uhu,” I hear, before eyes travel back to the screen, “The dosages here shouldn’t strain the liver, though. Shouldn’t have stopped taking them.” Words like pennies down an empty well. One hand inside the other, up down, up down. The patient mutters, then I mutter too, “I don’t even need the headphones anymore.” I’d only been back in Colombia for about a year when I saw a man yanking on a woman’s arm as if trying to start a lawnmower. Both hands on her purse and his whole weight into each motion as her head jerked back and forth, and back and forth, and forth, and forth, all the way to the down to the ground. On her hands and on her knees, and watching a man run off with purse like a wishing well full of other people’s pennies. But then, “That doesn’t make any sense,” I say again, fingers scrolling, eyes never leaving the screen. “That is not what potassium does and these dosages are fine.” I sigh again. “And I don’t see any potassium on here anyway.” The squeak of unoiled free clinic hinges and a voice insisting, “What you,” you, you, you, tu, tu, tu, “Need to tell me now is why you stopped taking it, because you need to be taking all of these and I don’t know why you stopped.” I stutter. I am not really here, and none of this really happening to me, but I—I, I, I—stutter. “Never,” my trainer said, “Never, ever, add a single word to what is said. That is not your job. Just say the words exactly as they are said.” Still, I stutter my own stuttering, “Lo . . . lo . . . lo que necesito es-es que me diga por que dejo de tomar los medicamentos.” What I need from you. You. You. You. No more, no less, up-down, up, down. And it begins again. I say, “Potassium.” I say, “Potassium.” I say, “You’re wrong,” I say, “You’re wrong, that’s not how potassium works.” Then I say it again, asking myself, answering myself, asking again, failing to answer. Then I say nothing. They say nothing. So, I say nothing, and nothing is said. The doctor types something into a screen facing the wall. The bottles are empty, no one knows the exact dosages, no one knows how potassium work, why livers stop working, or why anyone stops taking pills. Fingers type, fingers clutch, and a translator in the

 What the Bottles Know 199 corner remembers a woman in a bridge, swears she saw her mumbling something under her breath as the bus drove away. I used to hide beneath my bed when I was a child. Flat on my back, pulling at wood splinters like hangnails when I felt too full of world to be in it anymore. And I’d listened to my father walking back and forth, calling out my name while I lay there bloated and full, thinking to myself, “This is exactly what would be happening if I weren’t here at all. If I were to disappear, this is exactly what would be happening, and no one would know that it could have been any differently, that I could have been there, that I could have been.” “I’m sorry.” My own voice startles me. Nothing has been said, so I should not hear my own voice speaking, but there it is. I hear the words, that bridge is dangerous, not a single word more, not a single word less, things are better now. Up, down, up, down. And still, I say, “¿Perdón,” in my own voice, “Pero, a que intento se refiere?” “I’m sorry, but what attempt are you referring to?” Tired eyes and a steady voice, and something like shame dashing across the patient’s face. “El mio,” and I have to fight myself not to translate immediately, “Mi propio ntent.” “My own attempt.” Potassium, potassium. Headphones and bottles, That bridge is dangerous. The doctor stares at me, impatient and confused, I hear the words, “What are you saying?” But I don’t answer right away. “I’m sorry,” I say again. “But . . . an attempt to do what?” The patient does not stutter. Tempered and tired, but resigned. “An attempt against myself, Señorita.” For a moment I say nothing. The basement hum of a broken vending machine while a doctor stares at a volunteer translator standing speechless in the corner. I say, “What is it?” I repeat, “What is it?” Until I realize the words are not directed at the patient, but at me. “I need to know what the patient said, interpreter.” I imagine orange bottles being poured out on a kitchen table, aspirin white and jaundiced yellow. Pills like pieces to assemble into something hard, and flat and heavy. Life like a swarm of silverfish, delicate and articulated, crawling over shimmering egg sacks and the glint of unwanted life. So, I say, “Suicide.” Imagining the patient trying to crush a nest of silverfish with a hammer made of white and yellow pills. Hands and feet swinging at a woven basket filled with unhatched years of life left to live. And the words are heavy and hollow in my mouth, and I don’t want to say them again. But, somehow, the doctor doesn’t hear them. Eyes like cats caught in the backyard flutter of a glowing screen, “Huh? What was that, interpreter? I didn’t hear you.” So, I have to say them again, though the patient has been so careful not to look directly at it. To say, “Things are better now,” to insist on, “Attempt,” and never say, “Suicidio.” But I am making eye contact now; I am calling on angels and fat city rats. I hold the assembled thing between my fingers, and I hesitate, but I say it again. Louder. “Suicide.” And I hear the screech of a bus brought to a sudden stop, I feel the dry taste of activated powder in my tongue, and hear the doctor say, “Oh . . .”

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In another hour I will stand in a different room and tell a different patient, “I am Dr. Jones. Dr. Savage. Dr. Klein.” Wishing that I were, wishing I were something more useful than a body made of language, stuffed and bloated with voices I once pretended not to hear. And I will ask them, “What brings you here today?” And, “How may I help you?” And, “Tell me what hurts.” I will tell them to take off their shirts, their pants, their socks off, so doctors can press stethoscopes to wrinkled skin and needles into the soles of worn-down feet, to guess how many breaths and steps are left in these immigrant bodies. I will become a disembodied voice and half of me will want to stay there, to disappear into voices that are not my own, into the ringing of bells and the playing of trumpets. But before that, I will insist on existing for a few minutes more, because “Doctor. The patient means to say suicide. The bottles are empty because the attempt was on their own life, that’s why they were at the hospital, that’s what happened to their liver.” Then “Oh . . .” And, “I see, I see.” And, “that’s not in the notes.” And I will hear the patient repeat—as if they’d understood every word all along—“But things are better now, I don’t even need the headphones anymore.” “Yes then, well . . .” I hear a doctor mumble, “We better get a consult then,” And as the doctor digs through note pads and files, saying, “Ok, ok, ok . . . ok then, let me go get my attending then, just one sec, let me see . . .” I will picture hands that are not my own clutching plastic bags and plastic bottles, clutching cheap plastic purses that men rip out of my hands like ripe fruit from their own gardens. And I imagine walking through a desert to get here—days, and weeks, and months, with many, then several, then few. Clutching a clear water bottle, because things are better over there, clasping my own hands in the darkness, because there is no one left to hold them. And I will finally ask the patient in a small waiting room in a free clinic in Chicago, “What are the headphones for then?” And I will answer, “To drown out the voices.”

30

44 Tattoos David Shields

A tattoo is ink stored in scar tissue. * * * Archeologists believe, based on marks they’ve seen on mummies, that human beings had tattoos as early as 4000–2000 BC in Egypt. Around the same time or perhaps even earlier, tattooing developed in Japan and spread from there to Burma. * * * In 1998, 35 percent of NBA players had tattoos. Now, well over 80 percent have tattoos. Over 30 percent of American adults have tattoos. * * * Asked by Playboy what he’d like people to know, NBA star Allen Iverson, now retired, said, “Tell them not to believe what they read or hear. Tell them to read my body. I wear my story every day, man.” At the very end of the interview, Iverson said, “The minister at [his close friend] Rah’s funeral said to look at your life as a book and stop wasting pages complaining, worrying, and gossiping. That’s some deep shit right there.” * * * In “contact” sports, such as basketball or football, there’s a much higher percentage of tattooed players than in “cerebral” sports such as baseball, golf, or tennis. * * * In 2001, while watching a basketball game on TV, Dakkan Abbe, founder of Fifty Rubies Productions, came up with the idea of NBA players selling space on their bodies to plug products with temporary tattoos. Abbe wanted someone with “bad boy” appeal, so he approached Rasheed Wallace, who once set an NBA record for the most

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technical fouls in a season, about a candy bar tattoo. Wallace’s agent, Bill Strickland, said there’s “nothing in any basic agreement [between the players’ association and the league] that forbids advertising on the human body.” An NBA spokesman said, “We don’t allow commercial advertising on our uniforms, our coaches, or our playing floors, so there’s no reason to think we’ll allow it on our players.” Abbe said, “The NBA is defining tattoos as part of the players’ uniforms, but a player’s skin is not part of his uniform. I find it offensive that the league would not allow something on someone’s skin. Whenever the topic of tattoos comes up, the league says things like, ‘We prefer if players didn’t have tattoos’. The NBA scared people off. The very nature of tattoos is disturbing to the NBA. The league is a little bit out of touch with the players and fans. Tattoos are a very explicit example of that. They just don’t understand what tattoos are about.” Strickland said, “Being a lawyer, I thought it presented some interesting free speech issues,” but he finally decided not to press the case. Stephon Marbury, now retired from professional basketball after playing in the NBA and later in China, asked if he’d wear a tattoo advertisement, said, “Depends on how much money they’d pay. If they’re paying the right money: yeah.” Selling, say, his left shoulder to a shoe company, would Marbury be losing control over his body or exerting control over capitalism? * * * In the Tattoo magazine supplement to the New Orleans tattoo convention, an inordinately buxom but somehow slightly demure-looking blonde is on the cover, wearing a sailor hat, fishnet stockings, a short red skirt, white gloves, a bra top, and a couple of tattoos. Behind her in black shadow is a dark-haired woman dressed in a leopard costume. The function of the blonde’s tattoo is to portray her in the process of being transfigured from sailor girl to jungle cat and back again (and to portray as well the Eros of this tension between civilization and savagery; “Eros,” as Anne Carson says, “is a verb”). * * * “As for the primitive, I hark back to it because we are still very primitive. How many thousands of years of culture, think you, have rubbed and polished at our raw edges? Probably one; at the best, no more than two. And that takes us back to screaming savagery, when, gross of body and deed, we drank blood from the skulls of our enemies and hailed as highest paradise the orgies and carnage of Valhalla.”—Jack London * * * According to a third-century account of the Scythians’ defeat of the Thracians, the Scythians tattooed symbols of defeat upon the Thracians, but as a way of turning “the stamp of violence and shame into beautiful ornaments,” the Thracian women covered the rest of their bodies with tattoos. * * *

 44 Tattoos 203 On my thirtieth birthday, under my then girlfriend’s influence, I got my left ear pierced and bought a diamond earring. I wore various earrings over the next ten years, but wearing an earring never really worked for me, and on my fortieth birthday, under the influence of my daughter Natalie, who thought it made me look like a pirate, I took out the earring I was then wearing—a gold hoop—and haven’t worn an earring since. Earrings forced me to confront the nature of my style, or lack of style. I’m certainly not macho enough to wear an earring as if I were a tough guy, but neither am I effeminate enough to wear an earring in my right ear as if I were maybe gay-in-training. Instead, I’m just me, muddling through in the middle, and the earring forced me, over time, to see this, acknowledge it, and respond to it. * * * Marcus Camby’s first name is tattooed on his arm; Kirby Puckett, who died of a stroke in 2006, also had his first name tattooed on his arm. Scottie Pippen has small tattoos on his biceps and legs. Michael Jordan has a horseshoe-shaped fraternity tattoo. Dennis Rodman’s tattoos include a Harley, a shark, a cross (the loop of which encircles his pierced navel), and a photo of his daughter. Mike Tyson has tattoos of Che Guevara on his abdomen, Mao on his right hand, Arthur Ashe on his left shoulder, and a New Zealand Maori warrior on the left side of his face. Shaquille O’Neal has a Superman tattoo on his left shoulder. Ben Wallace has a tattoo of the Big Ben clock tower on his right bicep, with basketballs for clock faces; he also has two tattoos of Taz, the Tasmanian devil from Bugs Bunny. * * * “Human barcodes are hip,” declared that arbiter of hip, the Wall Street Journal. “Heavymetal band Slipknot has a barcode logo, with the stripes emblazoned across their prisonjumpsuit outfits. Barcode tattoos are also big, says New York tattoo tycoon Carlo Fodera.” * * * Who owns these words? * * * In Gal. 6:17, St. Paul says, “From this time onward let no one trouble me; for, as for me, I bear, branded on my body, the scars of Jesus as my Master.” * * * “Since a tattoo to certain levels of society is the mark of a thug, it becomes also the sign of inarticulate revolt, often producing its only possible result: violence.”—Amy Krakow

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In order to demonstrate their corporate loyalty, many Nike employees wear on their leg a tattoo of a swoosh. * * * The Greek philosopher Bion of Borysthenes (c. 300 BC) described the brutally tattooed face of his father, a former slave, as “a narrative of his master’s harshness.” * * * Now retired NBA player Jason Richardson said, “If you’re a good basketball player, you’ve got to have some tattoos to go with the package. Basketball players have tattoos; that’s the way it is. It’s a way of showing who I am.” * * * Asked what his tattoos mean, Iverson replied, “I got CRU THIK in four places—that’s my crew, that’s what we call ourselves, me and the guys I grew up with, the guys I’m loyal to. I got my kids’ names, Tiaura and Deuce [Allen II], ‘cause they’re everything to me. I got my wife’s name, Tawanna, on my stomach. A set of praying hands between my grandma’s initials—she died when I was real young—and my mom’s initials, Ethel Ann Iverson. I put shit on my body that means something to me. Here, on my left shoulder, I got a cross of daggers knitted together that says ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE, because that’s the one true thing I’ve learned in this life. On the other arm, I got a soldier’s head. I feel like my life has been a war and I’m a soldier in it. Here, on my left forearm, it says NBN—for ‘Newport Bad News.’ That’s what we call our hometown of Newport News, Virginia, because a lot of bad shit happens there. On the other arm, I got the Chinese symbol for respect, because I feel that where I come from deserves respect—being from there, surviving from there, and staying true to everybody back there. I got one that says FEAR NO ONE, a screaming skull with a red line through it—’cause you’ll never catch me looking scared.” * * * Aaron McKie, a former NBA player who is now the head coach at Temple University, said, “A lot of guys get tattoos because they think they look nice and sexy wearing them, but I don’t need them. One reason is because of my old college coach, John Chaney. He didn’t allow players to wear tattoos or earrings or stuff like that. The other reason is because I guess I’m old fashioned. I don’t see any good reason to pierce or paint my body. I’m comfortable with my natural look.” * * *

 44 Tattoos 205 “The publication of International Archives of Body Techniques would be of truly international benefit, providing an inventory of all the possibilities of the human body and of the methods of apprenticeship and training employed to build up each technique, for there is not one human group in the world that would not make an original contribution to such an enterprise. It would also be a project eminently well fitted to counteracting racial prejudices, since it would contradict the racialist conceptions which try to make out that man is a product of his body, by demonstrating that it is the other way around: man has, at all times and in all places, been able to turn his body into a product of his techniques and his representations.”—Claude LéviStrauss * * * What Lévi-Strauss means, I think, is this: Before we started, she said she needed to tell me something. She had herpes. Madly in love with her witchy bitchiness, I found occasional enforced celibacy insanely erotic, the way a chastity belt glamorizes what it locks out. We wound up living together, and as we fell out of love with each other, her herpes became a debate point between us. She suggested that we just get married and then if I got it, I got it, and who would care? I suggested she at least explore some of the possibilities of which modern medicine avails us. For a multitude of reasons, the two of us didn’t belong together, but what interests me now is what, for a lack of a better term, a free-floating signifier the virus was. When I was in love with her, it eroticized her. When I wasn’t, it repelled me. The body has no meanings. We bring meanings to it. * * * Ex-NFL fullback Brock Olivo, who has only one tattoo—an Italian flag, on his back, to honor his ancestry—said, “That’s my last tattoo. No more. I don’t want to scare my kids or affect things in the business world by having all kinds of crazy stuff on me.” * * * According to Rolling Stone, ca. 2002, Paul Booth is “the tattoo artist of choice for rock stars who love death, perversion, and torture.” His “black-and-gray tattoos of blasphemous violence echo the same nihilist madness of the metalheads he inks,” musicians from Slipknot, Mudvayne, Slayer, Pantera, and Soulfly. His East Village shop featured cobwebs, rusty meat hooks, a moose head, a mummified cat, medieval torture devices, a gynecologist’s black leather chair with silver stirrups, a human skull given to him by a Swedish gravedigger, a note from a customer written in blood. His arms are covered in tattoos, his face is studded with silver loops, and he’s enormously fat. Some of his most popular tattoos are “weeping demons, decapitated Christ figures, transvestite nuns severing their own genitals, cascading waves of melting skulls, muscled werewolves raping bare-chested women.” He has a two-year waiting list. His clients—including the “hard-core metal elite”—come to him “because they share his frustration and rage, his

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feelings of anger and alienation. He understands those emotions and brings them to the surface with his needle. His gift lies in transforming the dark side of his clients— their hurt, their torments—into flesh.” Evan Seinfeld, the ex-bassist for Biohazard, says, “We’re all trying to release our negative energy, our frustration with the world. Through our art and our music, we’re getting it all out.” Shawn Crahan of Slipknot says, “I have a lot of dark ideas in my head. Paul develops these same emotions in very powerful pieces.” Booth says, “If I woke up one day and became happy, I probably wouldn’t tattoo anymore, because I wouldn’t see a need to do it. I would lose my art if I became happy.” * * * “In Samoa there is a legend that tattooing was introduced there by the goddesses of tattooing. They swam to Samoa from Fiji, singing on the way their divine message, ‘Tattoo the women but not the men.’ With constant repetition the message became confused and twisted. When the goddesses finally arrived on the Samoan shore, they found themselves singing just the reverse, and so, says the legend, the tattoo became the undeserved prerogative of the men and not the women.”—Albert Parry * * * Who owns these paragraphs? * * * Rev. 17:5 says of the Scarlet Woman: “And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” * * * NBA veteran Jud Buechler, now retired, said Michael Jordan wanted “me and Steve Kerr [Jordan’s then-teammates, both of whom are white] to get tattoos” after the Bulls won their fourth championship in 1996. “I thought about it but didn’t do it because I knew my mom, wife, and mother-in-law would kill me.” * * * “The human body is always treated as an image of society.”—Mary Douglas * * * “By the early seventeenth century [in Japan], a generally recognized codification of tattoo marks was widely used to identify criminals and outcasts. Outcasts were tattooed on the arms: a cross might be tattooed on the inner forearm, or a straight

 44 Tattoos 207 line on the outside of the forearm or on the upper arm. Criminals were marked with a variety of symbols that designated the places where the crimes were committed. In one region, the pictograph for ‘dog’ was tattooed on the criminal’s forehead. Other marks included such patterns as bars, crosses, double lines, and circles on the face and arms. Tattooing was reserved for those who had committed serious crimes, and individuals bearing tattoo marks were ostracized by their families and denied all participation in the life of the community. For the Japanese, who valued family membership and social position above all things, tattooing was a particularly severe and terrible form of punishment. By the end of the seventeenth century, penal tattooing had been largely replaced by other forms of punishment. One reason for this is said to be that at about that time decorative tattooing became popular, and criminals covered their penal tattoos with larger decorative patterns. This is also thought to be the historical origin of the association of tattooing with organized crime in Japan. In spite of efforts by the government to suppress it, tattooing continued to flourish among firemen, laborers, and others at the lower end of the social scale. It was particularly favored by gangs of itinerant gamblers called Yakuza. Members of these gangs were recruited from the underworld of outlaws, penniless peasants, laborers, and misfits who migrated to Edo in the hope of improving their lot. Although the Yakuza engaged in a variety of semi-legal and illegal activities, they saw themselves as champions of the common people and adhered to a strict code of honor that specifically prohibited crimes against people, such as rape and theft. Like Samurai, they prided themselves on being able to endure pain and privation without flinching. And when loyalty required it, they were willing to sacrifice themselves by facing imprisonment or death to protect the gang. The Yakuza expressed these ideals in tattooing: because it was painful, it was proof of courage; because it was permanent, it was evidence of lifelong loyalty to the group; and because it was illegal, it made them forever outlaws.”—Steve Gilbert * * * “You put a tattoo on yourself with the knowledge that this body is yours to have and enjoy while you’re here. You have fun with it, and nobody else can control (supposedly) what you do with it. That’s why tattooing is such a big thing in prison: it’s an expression of freedom—one of the only expressions of freedom there. They can lock you down, control everything, but ‘I’ve got my mind, and I can tattoo my body, alter it my way as an act of personal will.’”—Don Ed Hardy * * * Didn’t American slave owners brand slaves so they could be identified like cattle? I’ve always thought there was a connection between the gold jewelry worn by rap artists and the chains of slavery—transformation of bondage into gold, escape from slavery, but not really. * * *

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During the early Roman Empire, slaves exported to Asia were tattooed with the words tax paid. Words, acronyms, sentences, and doggerel were inscribed on the bodies of slaves and convicts, both as identification and punishment. A common phrase etched on the forehead of Roman slaves was Stop me—I’m a runaway. * * * Peter Trachtenberg, the author of Seven Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh, told me, “The most obvious reason African Americans didn’t get tattooed until relatively recently was that the old inks didn’t show up on Black skin. Newer, clearer pigments didn’t come into use until the mid- to late eighties, which coincides with the introduction of tattoos into the African American community. I also wouldn’t be surprised if tattooing’s association with working-class culture—redneck culture in particular—made it unpopular with African Americans. You don’t come across many Black country music fans, either. (Charlie Pride’s fan base is entirely white.) My guess is that there were two principal routes of diffusion: the first from rap, the second from Black college fraternities (some of which also used branding as an initiation rite). Starting in the late ‘80s, a number of gangsta rappers adopted tattoos, most notably Tupac Shakur, who had THUG LIFE tattooed in block letters down his torso. It would be interesting to go back through magazines of that period and see if photos of tattooed rappers predate those of tattooed ballplayers.” They do, by a lot. “Also, to find out what percentage of NBA players belonged to Black college fraternities.” Some, but not a lot. “The tattoos mark their wearers as gangstas or gangsta-wannabes, and one of the hallmarks of Black gangsta rap is its appropriation of white organized-crime terminology, for instance, the group BLACK M.A.F.I.A. and admiring references to John Gotti in several songs.” * * * Two decades ago, Charles Barkley, explaining why NBA attendance was down, said, “White folks are not going to come see a bunch of guys with tattoos, with cornrows. I’m sorry, but anyone who thinks different, they’re stupid.” * * * In 1999, the shoe company And1 created a controversial advertisement in which Latrell Sprewell, who was suspended from the NBA for a year for choking his coach, said, “People say I’m America’s worst nightmare; I say I’m the American dream.” In the background, a blues guitar played “The Star-Spangled Banner” in imitation of Jimi Hendrix’s version of the anthem (And1 couldn’t afford the rights to the original). Seth Berger, the cofounder of the company, said that MTV created a youth market in which Blacks and whites are indifferent to color: “It’s a race-neutral culture that is open to endorsers and heroes that look different. These people are comfortable with tattoos and cornrows.” * * *

 44 Tattoos 209 Who owns these statements—the people who said them or the people who wrote them down or the person who has gathered them together here or the person who reads them? * * * Concerning the people who are featured in the book Modern Primitives and who are devoted to body modification, mutilation, scarification, and tattoos, Whole Earth Review said, “Through ‘primitive’ modifications, they are taking possession of the only thing that any of us will ever really own: our bodies.” * * * In the 1890s, socialite Ward McAllister said about tattoos, “It is certainly the most vulgar and barbarous habit the eccentric mind of fashion ever invented. It may do for an illiterate seaman, but hardly for an aristocrat.” * * * Upon being told that the NBA’s 1999–2000 issue of Hoop magazine had airbrushed his tattoos off the photograph of him on the cover of the magazine, Iverson responded, “Hey, you can’t do that. That’s not right. I am who I am. You can’t change that. Who gives them the authority to remake me? Everybody knows who Allen Iverson is. That’s wild. That’s kind of crazy. I personally am offended that somebody would do something like that. They don’t have the right to try to present me in another way to the public than the way I truly am without my permission. It’s an act of freedom and a form of self-expression. That’s why I got mine.” * * * When John Allen was a high school star in Philadelphia, he said, “I think that on the court, if I didn’t have as many tattoos as I do, people would look at me as—not being soft—but people would look at me as average. When they see me come in with my tattoos and the big name that I’ve got, before you even play a game, it’s like, ‘Whoa, this guy, he must be for real.’” * * * In the nineteenth century, Earl Roberts, Field Marshall of the British Army, said that “every officer in the British Army should be tattooed with his regimental crest. Not only does this encourage esprit de corps but also assists in the identification of casualties.” * * *

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I recently had the pin removed from my left leg, for no particularly compelling reason other than it spooked me to think of one day being buried with a “foreign object” in my body (for one thing, it’s a violation of Jewish law). Not that I’ll be buried; I’ll be cremated. Not that I’m religious; I’m an atheist. Still, leaving the pin in seemed to me some obscure violation of the order of things. As one tattoo artist has said, “The permanence really hits other people, and that is linked to mortality. And that is why skull tattoos really ice it.” * * * Who owns this body, this body of work?

31

Creative Exposition—Another Way That Nonfiction Writing Can Be Good Dave Madden

“I know this is going to make some people in this class angry,” the student said. “But I feel like nonfiction can get away with bad writing a lot more than fiction can.” We were sitting in a very tiny room talking about the book we’d all read—a debut work of nonfiction that had become in the two years since its hardcover release a force in the culture—and many of us had problems with the book’s writing. The writing wasn’t very good. The story that was being told was interesting, many of us were ready to allow, but the writing itself wasn’t very good. Examples of writing that wasn’t very good weren’t so much forthcoming as vaguely alluded to. The writer had done too little work to vary the sentence structures. The writer had been repetitive and overly cautious in informing us what time period we were in. I was more unhappy than angry. Not because I disagreed but because I could feel that amid everything we were talking about there was something fundamental that was not being talked about. “Wait, so: do we all agree?” I asked. I looked out at the rest of the class. We all seemed to agree. I want in this essay to parse out what led both my student to share this idea and the rest of us to know what it seemed to want to mean. I want to figure out how nonfiction gets away with anything that fiction cannot, what “getting away with” means in this context, and who has been doing all the policing. Just one week before the class came to this agreement, I’d posed a hypothetical question: without any informing apparatus—on the cover, say, or as a disclosure in the text itself—how could we tell a work of nonfiction from a work of fiction? One student ventured that she didn’t much care. “I don’t care,” she said. “I just want to know whether it’s good.” It was another sentiment with which we all seemed to agree. Why should it matter? Our job as people in a writing classroom is not to corral genre so much as to learn generic husbandry. To help our writing grow, whatever the genre, we need to come to a set of values—“good writing”—we can use to produce it. That identifying genre doesn’t matter and that we should aim more to discover whether a text is good seem to imply that whether writers go to fiction or whether they go to nonfiction they are using the same set of tools to get the job done.

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And in my experience of writing fiction and nonfiction this feels inaccurate. Of the many trays in my toolbox maybe there are one or two shared by these genres, but there are many—interiority, argument, the conflated I—that I save for one or the other. If this is the case, if the attempt at making fiction writing good incorporates a different methodology from the attempt at making nonfiction writing good, then it follows that we shouldn’t use the same set of tools to evaluate that writing. Or even just to read it. Just as much as we don’t reward a piece of fiction because of its nonfictional qualities, such as they might be, we ought not reward a piece of nonfiction when it starts to read like fiction. This, though, is what so much of the writing on the writing of nonfiction wants to do. (It’s what so often accounts for the frequent appearance of the word creative in front of the word nonfiction.) Forefather of the genre’s new breed, Tom Wolfe wrote essays in magazines pointing out the ways reporters were borrowing from novelists to write their New Journalism, and Lee Gutkind, now the genre’s godfather, writes in Keep it Real that creative nonfiction “presents or treats information using the tools of the fiction writer.”1 The trouble is that only sometimes does nonfiction want to be read like fiction, absorbing its readers into a narrative by recreating scenes through sensory detail. But many times it does not. Many times nonfiction has been the gone-to genre not so much because what is being told is true but because what needs to be said can benefit from the immediacy and intimacy between author and reader that nonfiction allows. If we’re to come to some understanding, then, of how to talk productively about nonfiction writing, we’re going to need to sort out these different motives. I propose we stop looking at the divide between fiction and nonfiction and start looking at the divides within nonfiction. It’s been the habit among recent writings on this genre to do this subgenerically—to carve out little niches for travel writing, memoir, the personal essay, science writing, and so on—describing how each subgenre differs on a content level. In order to get at different differences—differences of form— I’d prefer to look at how nonfiction writing divides among modal lines. Namely, I want to look at the differences between narrative nonfiction (writing that tells a true story), lyric nonfiction (writing that aims foremost for vocal and sonic effects), and expository nonfiction (writing that delivers fact-based information). It’s no less arbitrary a division, and indeed many if not all nonfiction writers work among these three modes sometimes in the same piece, but in making this division I’ve found a way to understand what happened in my classroom that day. Nonfiction “gets away with bad writing” when it goes through its expository modes. As long as we’re getting facty content, we don’t seem to mind the slovenliness, such as it may be, of the form. It’s almost like we writers of expository nonfiction never have to worry about a single word. Expository nonfiction gets a pass. Spend your creative energies elsewhere. At the risk of dating this essay, here’s a lede from a story on the front page of today’s New York Times: LOS ANGELES—Michael Jackson, among the most famous performers in pop music history, spent his final days in a sleep-deprived haze of medication and

 Creative Exposition 213 misery until finally succumbing to a fatal dose of potent drugs provided by the private physician he had hired to act as his personal pharmaceutical dispensary, a jury decided on Monday.2

Such sentences historically have been the very thing keeping straight journalism, as it’s often called, out of the big “creative nonfiction” tent. Stephen Minot opens his book, Literary Nonfiction: The Fourth Genre, with such an ousting, writing that “[j]ournalism stresses accuracy above all else,” whereas literary nonfiction “tend[s] to be more personal.”3 He comes up with an example of “how a reporter might begin a local story”: Mildred Gray of 238 Canal St. stared in disbelief as flames leapt from her apartment window three stores above her. The fire, of suspicious origin, broke out at 1:35 A.M., rousing some 23 residents, forcing them to the street. The fire department was not notified until 2:02.4

And then Minot rewrites the passage as “described by a writer of literary nonfiction”: I was stunned into silence when I first saw two dozen people on the street, some in bathrobes or wrapped in blankets, staring at flames leaping from their apartment house. My first reaction was rage: this was the very building the notorious landlord Harry Cutter had tried to burn the previous week. Why wasn’t he being held in jail? Then, like someone waking from a dream, I realized that there were no fire trucks there. Where were they? “Hey,” I cried over the crackling of flames, “[h]asn’t anyone called 911?”5

The second passage differs from the first modally. Minot’s journalist writes in an expository mode, whereas his writer of literary nonfiction writes in a narrative mode. The idea here is that “literary” or “creative” nonfiction (hereby abbreviated as CNF to indicate this hyper-corralled nonfiction subgenre of recent vintage) should at every moment tell a story with actions and sensory detail. But to limit CNF to just this narrative mode seems strange given that nonfiction is, technically, everything ever written that’s neither fiction nor poetry. Which is, probably, a lot. Minot is not the only one pointing to the personal as putting the creative in “creative nonfiction.” Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz write in their nonfiction textbook, Writing True, that “until recently [i.e. until CNF started showing up in MFA programs], ‘creative’ in writing has meant poetry, drama, and fiction.”6 This implies that the simple choice of working within one of these genres affords a piece of writing the label creative. It does not. There are wildly uncreative poems, stories, and plays written maybe every day. Creative is not a genre but a qualifier. It carries a sense of imagination, of original ideas. I like to tie it to its root word and understand creative writing—no matter the genre—as writing that forms something new in the mind of its reader. Why I like this definition is that it allows for creativity in nonfiction genres usually denied access to the big tent: journalism, scholarship, instruction manuals. How this is so is what I hope in this essay to uncover. For now I’ll point to an old complaint (referenced in

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Gutkind’s The Art of Creative Nonfiction)7 about the genre: “Creative nonfiction? Isn’t that an oxymoron?” No, should be our collective answer. It’s just redundant. Minot argues that “journalism [. . .] does not generally use literary devices such as fresh and original metaphors or prose rhythms. It rarely if ever creates symbolic suggestions. It almost never indulges in wry understatement.”8 And he’s right. Bad, flat journalism does do this. But look again at that Times lede. Here’s creativity if you allow for it. The detail and use of assonance and alliteration. The “personal pharmaceutical dispensary” metaphor. The clause tacked on at the end that saves the paper from libel while not getting in the way of the image of an ailing MJ. In a CNF workshop, this sentence would be called out as being too impersonal or not expressive enough. And perhaps by needs the prose is flatter—with a distant, more objective point of view—than when held up against poetry, say. But even if this is true, to say it’s not creative is to show a total incomprehension regarding the work reporters do once they’re back at the desk. But creativity as I’m trying to understand it involves more than stylized prose. To return to the problem, I want to try to figure out how, other than through info-delivery or a certain artful style, expository nonfiction can create something new in the reader’s head. How can this nonfiction—often impersonal, rarely expressive—be creative in form? One way is through what I’ll clunkily call productive juxtapositioning, which happens when placing two different bits of information next to each other results not just in contrast but also in creation. It’s exposition as montage. And montage in the classic Soviet sense. In the 1920s, filmmaker Lev Kuleshov became obsessed with US filmmaker D. W. Griffith’s work, screening the latter’s Intolerance so much at his cinema workshop that reportedly the print disintegrated before he was done studying it. In trying to understand how Griffith’s film (and film in general) achieved its greatness, Kuleshov ran some experiments in front of live audiences. In one, he intercut the still image of a famous actor’s face with other still images. Audiences would see the face. And then they’d see a bowl of soup, say. And then the face again. Both times: same expressionless expression. Kuleshov would ask the audience: what are you seeing? The audience would say: He is pining for some lost bowl of soup! Kuleshov intercut the face with a shot of a woman in a coffin. The audience would then say: He is distraught over the death of his beloved! This from the same face. The experiments unlocked for Kuleshov some new notion of cinematic grammar, and the birth of what some film critics call “the Kuleshov effect.” Here’s how David Cook characterizes it in his History of Narrative Film: “[T]he shot, or cinematic sign, has two distinct values: 1) that which it possesses in itself . . . and 2) that which it acquires when placed in relationship to other shots.”9 Kuleshov’s audiences made of two separate images some theretofore-unformed set of emotions, memories, and experiences. This is how cinema is creative. This is what it creates. Compare this effect to what happens in the following block of text, from the December 2011 Harper’s “Findings” column: Dutch doctors have better odds of securing organ donation if they first wait briefly, in accordance with the Hersendoodprotocol, before they discuss donation

 Creative Exposition 215 with the next of kin of catastrophic-brain-injury victims. Research into the spread of selfishness through human history found that egalitarian societies have more difficulty expanding in times of crisis than societies in which the poor suffer disproportionately. In Britain, where one sixth of cell phones were infected with fecal bacteria and gonorrhea was becoming drug-resistant, scientists noted an uncoupling of the brain’s “hate circuit” in 92 percent of depressed Chinese. Canadian psychologists concluded that “moral disengagement” leads to workplace rumor-mongering and collegial sabotage. Psychopathic Canadian murderers, when describing their crimes, more frequently use conjunctions and employ the past tense than do their non-psychopathic counterparts. Racially ambiguous janitors are more likely to be seen as black. The nose smells what it expects.10

What I love about the “Findings” column—printed always on the mag’s last page, covering conclusions made by recent scientific studies—is how almost brattily nonnarrative it is. The front-of-the-book expository field day that is Harper’s famed “Index” is always very careful to cite each figure it quotes. One can go and find the whole story, so to speak. “Findings” doesn’t bother with this. “Findings” doesn’t want the story, it wants the facts. The things done. The things observed. Each of the facts in the above text has its own distinct value (criterion no. 1 of the Kuleshov Effect), which refers to a new understanding of the world some scientists somewhere have come to. I want to look at the value acquired by each sentence in its position relative to those around it. I want to look at Kuleshov’s criterion no. 2. How much of this text is about the challenges of living in the world? And I’m not talking about shitty cell phones or sneaky gonorrhea (although I intend to come back to those). I’m talking about the sense, as we move from disparate fact to disparate fact, of interconnectivity this text creates. We move from nation to nation, sure, but as we do so we’re led through notions of courtesy, selfishness, egalitarianism, suffering, hate, rumor-mongering, and racism. “The nose smells what it expects” caps off the passage as a kind of warning. No language in the passage itself exhorts that we should take care when encountering other people. That we should withhold judgment. That regardless of nationality we should identify some shared existence. But as they continue to rub together, these sentences create a larger message than they do in sum. This notion of productive juxtapositioning involves more than the creative sequencing of factual sentences. The sentences themselves can have a kind of internal beauty and logic and creativity. Look again at this sentence in the middle: “In Britain, where one sixth of cell phones were infected with fecal bacteria and gonorrhea was becoming drug-resistant, scientists noted an uncoupling of the brain’s ‘hate circuit’ in 92 percent of depressed Chinese.” Here we have a classic case of the periodic sentence, in which the sentence’s chief element is saved for the end. To aid in the suspense and delay intrinsic in the periodic sentence, the writer throws in that long appositive, which has the extra value-added job of presenting us with a Britain we may not have been ready to consider from just the words “In Britain.” It’s a contrast, another productive juxtaposition, formed by the writer’s sense of how his or her sentences can move.

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I’ve been perhaps cheekily taking my examples thus far from traditionally uncreative nonfiction genres, but this sort of creative exposition can be found in writers that we in CNF Nation would (perhaps begrudgingly) call our own. To finish up I want to look at John D’Agata’s About a Mountain. As another arbitrary example, it’s not without its problems. In 2012, around the release of his The Lifespan of a Fact, CNF Nation went through a mild online uproar over D’Agata’s insistence that certain bits of data— for example, the number of strip clubs in Las Vegas—were amendable given the lyric, rhythmic, or otherwise associative needs of the author. To readers of this essay, his stance may render as groundless what points I hope to make. But why I’m using About a Mountain is that, invented or not, D’Agata’s “facts” operate in an expository mode. What’s more, he’s got a way of composing his expository prose such that it ends up being both lyric and narrative as well. About a Mountain looks at Las Vegas through two lines of inquiry: the Yucca Mountain project, a one-time plan to deposit the nation’s nuclear waste in a mountain outside the city; and the suicide of Levi Presley, who jumped off the top of the Stratosphere, Vegas’ tallest building. Around the middle of the book, in the midst of a discussion about the city’s unfavorable crime and quality-of-life statistics, D’Agata points to how little of the truth of Las Vegas is ever written by Las Vegas journalists, mostly because so many of those journalists have ties to casinos. In 1983, for example, when Las Vegas casino owner Steve Wynn decided to apply for a gaming license in Britain, The Independent of London reported that an investigation by Scotland Yard drew links between Wynn and the Genovese crime family, an investigation that subsequently was referred to in advertisements by the publisher of a new book about Steve Wynn, Running Scared: The Life and Treacherous Times of Las Vegas Casino King Steve Wynn. However, even though The Independent’s report was never challenged, Wynn still sued the publisher of Running Scared for what he considered “libelous statements,” winning $3 million in a Nevada state court, bankrupting the publisher of the biography in question, and somehow winning support from Las Vegas journalists, such that the allegations that initiated his suit were covered by the daily Las Vegas ReviewJournal—arguably the most influential paper in the state—for only one day, in only one article, on page 5, section B, under the quarter-inch-high headline “Wynn Sues Local Writer.”11

If we look at the form and style of the paragraph we find, foremost, long sentences. They’re not longly poetic or longly meditative; they are long and they are filled with facts. But there’s something else going on. This is not a paragraph that deploys its sentences to tell each stage of a narrative or to outline, incrementally, some argument. This is a paragraph that enlists its sentences as repositories for its fact-packed clauses. As such, the relationships between these events seem more apparent, and kind of cemented. The sentences’ grammar forms stronger links of causality. Fine, so the paragraph is composed toward certain rhythmic and interrelational strategies. What, though, does it create on its own? It’s just facts. And not only is it

 Creative Exposition 217 just facts, but it’s facts that have already been covered by the press. D’Agata attributes the facts behind this paragraph to a 2,700-word article in the November 2000 issue of Columbia Journalism Review. Here, in order of their appearance, are the passages from the original article D’Agata used in his paragraph: The Independent of London revealed that Wynn had nearly lost his license in Atlantic City “after a Mafioso called Tony Castelbuono was caught recycling the profits of heroin trafficking at the gambling tables.” The March 9, 2000, article referred specifically to a lengthy, 1983 Scotland Yard file alleging Wynn’s “links to the Genovese Cosa Nostra family.” Scotland Yard had investigated Wynn when he sought a gaming license in Great Britain, and Wynn had subsequently withdrawn the license application. ... Notably missing from local coverage of the Kerkorian-Wynn deal was the Wynn biographer John L. Smith. Smith’s 1995 biography, Running Scared: The Life and Treacherous Times of Las Vegas Casino Kind Steve Wynn, had detailed accounts of Wynn’s continuing proximity to organized crime, and promptly drew down a sweeping libel suit in which a Las Vegas jury found for Wynn in August 1997, bankrupting the publisher, Barricade Books. ... the litigation was over the wording in the publisher’s catalogue ... The Review-Journal reported the case on page 5B, under the headline wynn sues local writer. ... A Las Vegas jury initially awarded Wynn $3.1 million for punitive and compensatory damages.12

These facts are unearthed and sequenced in the service of a story about how MGM Grand owner Kirk Kerkorian’s $6.4 billion takeover, in 2000, of Wynn’s Mirage Resorts went mostly unreported in the Las Vegas press. D’Agata is also interested in this reporting failure but notices how his passage creates lines of causality that aren’t in the original. You can find these lines in such sneaky-vital clauses as “However, even though The Independent’s report was never challenged” and “somehow winning support from Las Vegas journalists.” In other words, D’Agata is using expository language to piece together a sequence of events—a narrative—that had not before been so sequenced. This is creativity, in the sense I’m getting at in this essay, not fabrication. D’Agata is not drawing connections where none exist, he is creating something new from the factual record. There’s a kind of accretive effect to the paragraph as he’s composed it. As we move between these sentences, relationships and notions of character, scandal, and

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corruption build and build to the final understatement—“Wynn Sues Local Writer”—a kind of inevitability that, as another writerly attempt at getting at the story, suddenly appears as woefully inadequate. There’s a chance I’ve just rendered this essay on nonfiction as redundant as the term “creative nonfiction” itself. For what else is a narrative made up of if not facts? And what other option for us expository-nonfiction writers than as careful an attention paid to language as that of the lyricist? As separatable as these modes may be in a craft essay, any effective piece of nonfiction is going to have to employ all three at some point. But here’s one last plea for giving each mode its rightful place. We have canonapproved literature (novels, poems) to look to as models in assessing the narrative or lyric successes of nonfiction writing. But as long as CNF continues to cling to these two modes as a way to distinguish itself from its older, dirtier expository-nonfiction siblings, any appearance of expository modes in nonfiction is going to be treated like some vestigial limb—the -ectomy of which we haven’t yet found a way to pay for.

Notes 1 Lee Gutkind, ed., Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction (New York: Norton, 2008), 12. 2 Jennifer Medina, “Doctor Is Guilty in Michael Jackson’s Death,” New York Times, November 8, 2011, A1. 3 Stephen Minot, Literary Journalism: The Fourth Genre (Upper Saddle River, NY: Pearson Education, 2003), 2. 4 Ibid., 2–3. 5 Ibid., 3. 6 Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz, Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2006), 2. 7 Lee Gutkind, The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 9. 8 Minot, Literary Journalism, 2. 9 David Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1990), 145–6. 10 Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, “Findings,” Harper’s, December 2011, 100. 11 John D’Agata, About a Mountain (New York: Norton, 2010), 139. 12 Sally Denton and Roger Morris, “Big Deal in Vegas and How the Local Press Missed It,” Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2000: 46–9.

32

This Photograph Is Evidence of You Lawrence Lacambra Ypil

Now that I have left the photographs in that other country, and I am back home in Cebu, now that I have forgotten to bring them with me and I can delude myself into thinking I am done with them and that I am not so much holding them in my hand and flipping through them, but already thinking about the memory of such a holding, in the hawker centers of Singapore, in the waiting areas of Amtrak in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest, or in one of the many Starbucks scattered across the Philippines, this one a mere ten-minute drive from my parent’s old house, where on the second floor of the café that overlooks onto a busy street, I watch a man wait for a jeep, as I deliberate whether I will write a little essayette about him or about the women in the photograph I am holding, perhaps I am finally ready to write about what it means to write about photographs. Or I’m most probably in one of those long-haul flights over the Pacific where I am flying either toward or away from home and I am thinking about which meal to order (beef or chicken, bibimbap or bread) or which two movies it will be this time, a recent release or a current release, that I must begin to watch if I am to finish both and get good sleep and arrive where I need to arrive, but not until I reach up into the upper luggage compartment, and scramble for the black-and-white photos I had stuck into that outer pocket of the carry-on bag, always that outer pocket, because I had promised to myself that at least I should get something done on one of these longest flights in the world. So I pick one out from the middle of the pile, the way I might pick one of those tarot cards and give myself a reading of the future, while I am in fact more closely reading the future of the past with these black-and-white photographs, a prophecy of history, if you will, as I pull out a pen and paper and tell myself, the way I have always told myself for the duration of this project: write until you reach the end of this page, just the end of this page, and see how far the sentence will go, if ever it will decide to go, one word after the next, before I doze off into the darkness of this cabin that is above the darkness of the dark Pacific. You see, I had been working around photographs taken from the early twentieth century during the American occupation of the Philippines. Some of them were family photographs from my Dad’s hometown in Danao, but most of them photographs from the archives collected at the Cebuano Studies Centre at the University of San Carlos

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in Cebu. Built during the 1970s, the Centre formed part of efforts in other parts of the Philippines to foster research and cultural work on regional histories that may expand the mostly nationalist discourse of the country. It was part of my attempt to engage with more local material. I also wanted to find out what it might look like to creatively engage with the archives, to write from and of fact in a way attendant to music and digression and voice, to in other words, write creative nonfiction about the history of images of the city that I grew up in. I was interested, initially, in seeing how creative writing, specifically poetry and the lyric essay, might be brought into dialogue with this archive of images that had been gathered and collected for the sake of preserving the culture and heritage of the city. I was particularly conscious of the particular form and genre of this engagement because I was interested in the ways the lyric might approach historical material in a way different from the conventions of mostly narrative historical writing. While a novelist or a historian might be interested in finding out the name of a face of a photograph, the exact month of the year that this picture of a street was drawn, what kind of architecture was popular in a period, what would a poet do? While I was initially interested in gathering such facts (and those facts did end up informing the work that I eventually did), I pretty soon figured out that a historian I wasn’t, and a builder of plot, not too much, and whatever I was initially trying to do—scope the period, gather the details—someone else entirely more capable was better left doing the work. In other words, the more I attempted to do what any proper historian would do, the less interested I became in knowing the name of the man who looked like my classmate in high school, sitting beside a vase of flowers, or the group of women that reminded of my aunts who were mostly public school teachers. I was drawn to a different kind of fact: one that would lead not to a more definitive sense of a historical period but one that, dare I say, lent itself to mystery—and perhaps not all facts are created equal. There are facts that lend themselves to scenery, and there are those that make one’s heart skip a beat, or that make one’s skin crawl with recognition, or that make one just look back, in a double take that understands something was there that was worth lingering over a little longer, that made one want to write. The French critic Roland Barthes described this “thing” of the photograph, the thing that made one do a double take and linger, as the photograph’s punctum, the part that penetrated the viewer, the part that could hurt. This was a particularly important concept for me because it encouraged me to approach those photographs in a way that made sense to me, meaning in a way that could potentially hurt. Archival photographs, in particular, are burdened with a certain kind of importance: preserved and stored in the deepest depths of the museum, they represent a kind of institutionally condoned memory. Here is what we are meant to remember. To approach these photographs as a writer, then, was to wager an otherwise to the official narrative of a place’s sense of itself. In the archive I was working with, this official narrative included street scenes and landscape shots, policemen, actors, matriarchs, the official characters that constituted any city. Many of the Centre’s collections were built from donations from the more prominent families of Cebu, so the majority of the studio photographs were taken from the wealthier part of the city: the big names, the ones who owned those

 This Photograph Is Evidence of You 221 buildings, rather than the ones that worked in them, the ones, well, that were deemed to have made history. In my attempt to write about this archive differently, it was important to reckon with the ways in which cultural memory is determined perhaps primarily by power in its multiple forms: wealth, influence, access to the material conditions of empire, the empire itself determining what it deemed worthy of its attention, what was worth photographing. And by approaching these photographs with my whims and my digressions, my presentness rather than any truly historical mindset, the way I was simultaneously looking at them either too superficially or too deeply, never exactly the way it seemed the photograph wanted me to look at, perhaps hoping that I was doing my part in undoing the work of empire. To unglove my hand and touch. To soil the photograph with my finger. To finger history. To leave it slightly unnerved because I had the audacity and recklessness to believe I had the right to write about it in a way that it neither anticipated nor perhaps permitted. Is this not what we do when we say we are writing nonfiction creatively, when we essay lyrically? The situation is obviously more complicated than that. For early-twentieth-century Filipinos, photography afforded them a space of reinvention, an opportunity for selfrepresentation that attempted to recuperate centuries of colonial erasure. “This is who we are,” these photographs proclaimed—even as those studios depicted more fantasy than reality. The history of studio photography might very well be the history of not who we were, but who we wished to be: a dream of appearances, the hope of ease. On the sheen of aspiration of photography, a family portrait becomes not a form of documentation but a space for desire. What did we want by showing what we could of our faces, of this dress? How could we not have wanted what we did given what our histories could only afford us to want? Should I not have been entirely surprised when, in the hopes that I had finally written in The Experiment of the Tropics a decent and respectable collection of poems and lyric essays on the American occupation of the Philippines (serious stuff!), many of the book’s first readers could not help but read the pieces as meditations on longing and desire? Had I actually just written erotica? And perhaps if in fact, I did, then maybe that wasn’t too bad. In the long history of photography’s innocence, it is convenient to imagine the photograph as the default accomplice to fact, the unquestionable evidence of what happened. It ain’t real if you ain’t seen it. It never happened without a photograph. In photographs, however, that may be considered colonial or postcolonial, photography is revealed to be the accomplice not just of witness but also of power. Used as part of the colonial enterprise to document, to classify, and ultimately to acquire, photography not merely documents but also simulates and anticipates the very mechanism of the acquisition and occupation of lands and peoples. To take a photograph is to own what is seen. And in this way, perhaps, photography exposes too the very presumption of the innocence of fact at the heart of nonfiction. When we work with the archives without being critical of the ways the very same documents that are meant to solidify the truth are sometimes the very same ones that legitimize exploitation, we forget the ways in which what is considered “truth” in one culture is almost always a negation of a belief in another. When I attempt to

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approach the history of my country, I remember the ways titles were used to grab lands from Indigenous communities. I think about the lists Catholic parishes made of tithes and tributes paid for by the labor of natives. I am reminded of how Spanish names were given to natives, alphabetized across towns all over a whole archipelago. If even our names are suspect, what is one to trust? What is a fact if not what we are merely willing to admit we have erased? I’ve always found the debate between truth and fiction, seemingly so integral to nonfiction discussions, to be moot and beside the point, especially when the history of fact as I know it is really a litany of erasure and subjugation, fact being merely what power is willing to reveal it has committed. If we are to write a nonfiction of the archives, then it must come from an admission of such complicity and if it is to be written not out of guilt, then it must be written out of an attempt to take this guilt into account, to hold it to task, and to liberate ourselves from it. What is a photograph evidence of? Finally, part of the challenge of working with these particular photographs, as with any set of archives, is that they can very easily lend themselves to a monolithic way of approaching this material as if there were proper and authorized ways of writing about and handling it. As with other photographs, objects, and archival material that may be defined as “postcolonial,” the virtue of engaging with this material—as evidence of injustice, as proof of occupation—can very well reinforce the challenge that comes with writing from and about the archives beyond the argument they by default appear already to be evidence of. What’s been important to me has been exploring the role that forms of creative nonfiction, such as the lyric essay, can offer to broaden the conversation and renew the ways we may engage with this material. When I have attempted to write about the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where more than one thousand Filipinos were put on display as part of the fair’s anthropological exhibit, it is difficult not to approach this event with anything but what feels like the prescribed tone of somber witness. Or when I turn to the racist writing of earlytwentieth-century anthropology, is there space to admit that as a poet, I am drawn in awe to the syntax and music of those sentences? (“No one writes so beautifully as this anymore!”) Or is this precisely where creative nonfiction and the lyric essay offer a space of possible reprieve—where tentativeness and digression, error and contradiction, apology, reversal, transformation, all the elements that allow for potential embarrassment, humor, and wisdom, may offer the origin and destination of a new kind of writing as it pursues the project of reclamation that makes space for the imagination? So when I bring the photograph into the essay, or allow the essay to flower by accretion, or by distraction, from the gesture a man made on the street from a century ago, a smile made from the corner of the mouth of a woman who may or may not be my aunt, or that bend in the street in that part of town now relegated to downtown, or no town, I do so believing that it is by bending things away from their delegated purposes—photograph, brooch, document—that we discover that from which we may rebuild structures that may have never served our liberation, and perhaps begin again a conversation we have long put off with each other, or with ourselves, or begin to write.

 This Photograph Is Evidence of You 223 When I approach the photo studio in the mall I grew up in, USB drive in hand, I tell them I just want one copy for each file, printed on 4R, black and white with white borders. What time will they be done? Come back in two hours, they say. Years later, when I leave the photographs in one of the living room cabinets in the mad rush of trying to catch a flight at the airport, and forget about them until I remember I need to write this essay, I resist the urge to look at them on the computer, even as I know that some of them are probably in the cloud and easily retrieved from it. I tell myself that it’s entirely fine. I would rather think of myself holding them in my mind. Anyway, I am back in the city that those photographs are pictures of. I am home, for now.

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Ostrakons at Amphipolis, Postcards from Chicago Thucydides and the Invention and Deployment of Lyric History Michael Martone

K-4 Pacific versus J-1 Hudson Each night at Englewood Junction on Chicago’s south side the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broadway Limited leaving from Union Station and the New York Central’s 20th Century Limited leaving from LaSalle Street Station, both bound for New York City overnight, meet to race on their paralleling rights-of-way to the Indiana line. He begins his History of the Peloponnesian War this way—“Thucydides, an Athenian wrote the history of the war . . .” but eases into the first person halfway through the paragraph.1 It is as if the tradition of invoking the muse has now transmuted to invoking the self. Is Thucydides the source or its receiver, the inspiration or the action, subject or object, the new or the news?

Time Begins in Chicago On the Chicago block bordered by Quincy, LaSalle, Clark, and Jackson stood the Grand Pacific Hotel. On October 11, 1883, sixty delegates representing the principal railways of North America met to standardize time. Up until this time each major city set its own time, often by means of a time ball—the last remaining example of such is the one used in Times Square to indicate midnight. Because of the Chicago convention, the midnight we see indicated in New York is not New York’s real midnight but Philadelphia’s midnight as Eastern Standard Time is set at noon on the 75th meridian, the meridian that runs through Philadelphia, the headquarters of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The 90th meridian in Memphis, the 105th in Denver, the 120th in Fresno are

 Ostrakons at Amphipolis, Postcards from Chicago 225 the other noons we now live by. November 18, 1883, is the day known as the day of two noons when telegraphic signals were sent to reset all the local times and time became the time we think is time. In the eleventh year of the war he writes: “The history of this period has also been written by the same Thucydides, an Athenian.” Only a few sentences later Thucydides writes: “I lived through the whole of it being of an age to comprehend events and giving attention to them in order to know the exact truth about them. It is also my fate to be an exile from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis.”2

Platonic Harvests In the back corner of the now-old new wing of the Art Institute of Chicago is the reconstructed Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room designed by Louis H. Sullivan in 1893. The elaborate stenciled applications, art glass treatments, and molded plaster capitals were preserved when the Stock Exchange was demolished in 1972. The Art Institute was able to recreate the room in 1976 using the original salvaged elements. In the corner of the trading room, hard against the coffered quarter-sawn oak woodpaneled walls, is an empty table. When the exchange was active, displayed on this table were several piles of grain—wheat, oats, corn, barley—as an illustration to the traders on the floor. The puts and calls being exchanged, the bids being bid, were connected to an actual thing, real cereal, a commodity that had not, as yet, evolved to pure algebraic abstraction. These products were, already, part of the communal imagination of the traders who traded future futures, where real futures were already bargained for in a now already existing, unreal present. The vast, severely modern bay of pits that replaced Mr. Sullivan’s Beaux-Arts guildhall was built without such a display table. There, even that slim reed of graphic connection snapped, the real real cornered now only in the tangled snapping ganglia of the shouting brokers, the synapses of their electronic devices mimicking memory. In Book Four, Thucydides narrates the action of Thucydides at Amphipolis, describing there his own defeat that precipitated his own exile. He records objectively, dispassionately, the story of General Thucydides as he rushes to defend the city against the Spartan army led by King Brasidas but arrives too late, the fall of the city sparking a regional revolt against Athens. He is ostracized. Had he won the battle, the history of the battle would have been different, of course. Had he won the battle, the history of the battle would never have been written.3

North by Northwest Is Not a Real Direction Mistaken identity. Masquerade. Camouflage. You remember. George Kaplan played by Roger Thornhill played by Cary Grant arrives on the 20th Century Limited at LaSalle

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Street Station disguised as a red cap assisted in his escape by Eve Kendall played by Eve Kendall played by Eva Marie Saint. He shaves in the station restroom using a miniature travel razor—the scene prefiguring the finale’s scramble on the cliff faces of Mount Rushmore. North by Northwest’s original title was The Man in Lincoln’s Nose. But now we are in Chicago and Roger Thornhill is sent by Eve Kendall to a cornfield in Indiana there to meet up with his nonexistent double George Kaplan, or so he thinks. You remember the rest. He do-si-dos instead with the deadly crop duster, a pas de deux in the dusty flat fields outside Prairie, Indiana. Of course the scene was shot near Bakersfield, California, which appears on film as more Indiana than Indiana or an exaggerated Indiana, an amplified Indiana. In the film, the pretend Indiana pretending to be Indiana becomes Indiana. But more striking here for our purposes is to realize this famous scene makes no sense. What machinations to lure the victim out to a remote cornfield to be killed by an admittedly ungainly and inaccurate weapon system. If you think about it, how did Martin Landau playing the evil Leonard throw such an elaborate operation together on such short notice and with what cost-benefit analysis to guarantee the desired result? The assassins themselves seem confused on the deadliest delivery device. Propeller decapitation? Automatic weapon strafing? Actual crop-dust dusting? No, the famous scene is a lark, a tour de force, is in the movie as a complete out-of-whack whack, a lyric moment in spite of, to spite, the picture’s narrative oomph. The scene is the movie’s made-up movie. North by Northwest’s theme dwells on the slippery nature of reality—I am but mad north-north-west. This crazed scene is the real movie’s madness. It makes make-believe make believe. The nineteenth year of the war. Thucydides, writing of the exhausted Athenian army’s slaughter in the Assinarus river near Syracuse, is first to use the image of a river running red with blood. “The Peloponnesians came down and butchered them . . . in the water which was thus immediately fouled but which they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most even fighting each other to have it.” Perhaps, he was not the first to write such a set piece, but his is the first to survive. The river of history inked from now on with blood.4

It’s Okay in Practice, but What about Theory He’s an undergrad upperclassman showing prospective students and their families the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park campus. His group is near the field where once the Manhattan Project ignited the first chain-reacting atomic pile when one of the kids asks what the students here do for fun. This kid has been to Northwestern to tour as well, has there heard about the dance marathon and the rock that gets painted over and over again by students who protect the rock’s topmost coat. The rock has its own website and rock cam. “A scavenger hunt,” the tour guide tells his glassy-eyed crew. “We have a scavenger hunt each spring. Last spring,” he says, “a dozen teams of students searched the campus for parts to construct an atomic reactor.” He turns and

 Ostrakons at Amphipolis, Postcards from Chicago 227 takes a step or two leading them toward the Econ building and the abstract sculpture designed to cast, on May Day, a shadow of the hammer and sickle. Perfectly timed, he stops and turns back to his following. He says, “Two of them worked.” Ostrakons were potsherds, broken pottery Athenians used to vote for exile. One’s name was scratched into the shard. The ballot cast. Thucydides. I imagine an ostrakon with his name on it on Thucydides’ table, a paperweight, a souvenir, as he writes his history and his History.

Notes 1 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (London: Penguin Books, 1954), 35. 2 Ibid., 363. 3 Ibid., 328–9. 4 Ibid., 352.

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On Fragmentation Steve Fellner

Once I developed a severe case of urticaria. I can still remember the ER nurse surveying the red splotches all over my skin. I asked her if I should be worried. “You’re still breathing. That’s always a good thing,” she said. That’s when I knew I was in trouble. What was weird about these hives was that they would move. You’d see a rash on my upper neck; if you closed your eyes for a second, they’d disappear and show up somewhere else: my lower neck, arm, or even forehead. They wouldn’t stop moving. You couldn’t trace a definite trajectory—the appearance of the hives seemed almost arbitrary. After I accepted the fact that this urticaria was going to continue indefinitely, my relation to time became different. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment when something revealed itself and then when it vanished. Everything was blurry and fragmented. * * * I never trust people who love Sappho. It seems cowardly. It’s always easy to say that you like something based on a few fragments. Or maybe I’m the coward. I always want to fill in the blanks with unambiguous solutions. I always believe that if you look hard enough, you can find something else that you see as definite, essential. * * * Four years ago, I had a nervous breakdown, culminating in a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. What bothered me the most was sleeplessness. Before I received the proper diagnosis, it turned out I was wrongly diagnosed and given an antidepressant, jettisoning me into mania. I didn’t fall asleep for three days. I lost track of time. Wakefulness never seemed to end. I needed to experience time in smaller stretches. Little fragments of eternity. * * *

 On Fragmentation 229 When I grade freshman composition essays, I sense that I always become more annoyed when I spot a sentence fragment as opposed to a run-on sentence. How American is it to assume that more is more? * * * When I was manic, I couldn’t sit down. I didn’t know what got into me. I didn’t know how I was going to continue at the rate I was going. I thought I was going to die. I decided that if I was going to die I had to write my mother a love letter. The best way I knew how to write someone a love letter was to write a book. How to begin? I sat down at the computer and typed a single quotation my mother had once said to me. I had been excessively apologizing to people for things I didn’t have any control over. She slapped me and said: “Don’t live your life like a woman. Don’t live your life as an apology.” I read my mother the quotation. “I said that?” she said, “That’s pretty damn good.” “That’s part of a new book I’m writing,” I said, “It’s the first sentence.” “Whatever happened to Once Upon a Time?” * * * It seems that more and more people are structuring their essays into piecemeal sections. Little bits. Sometimes enumerated, sometimes not. Sometimes titled, sometimes not. When you ask them why they structured the essay the way they did, they’ll say something like, “I want the reader to draw their own conclusions.” Which always sounds like a cop-out. Isn’t that why you became a writer in the first place? To draw someone else’s conclusions for them in an artful, honest way? * * * During the course of writing my memoir, I showed my mother my fragmented notes, all from childhood. We made a pact. She would write one of three things next to my scribblings. I told her to tear up the sheets of paper and place each fragment in one of three piles: one marked

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“O.K.,” one marked “You’re making things up,” one marked, “Too personal.” Without asking for explanation, I gave her back the ones she labeled “Too personal.” “You can burn those if you want,” I said. For the ones marked “You’re making things up,” we talked about them, trying to reach a compromise. We always did. I took the fragments marked “O.K.,” and “You’re making things up” and turned them into full-length scenes. It oddly didn’t take much time to add transition, descriptions of place, elaborating on characters and conversations. Before I knew it, all those fragments that were in the end finally agreed by both of us as the “acceptable raw material” for my book were transformed. My fragments had become whole. I sent them to my mother for approval. She brought them all back to me in a big disorganized pile. Now they all had the same comment: “You’re making things up.” Then she handed me back the stack of sheets she’d marked “Too Personal.” She hadn’t thrown them away. “Use these,” she said. * * * One of my creative writing teachers once said to me the digressions in a piece of writing are almost always the most interesting parts. If you create an essay-in-fragments, you never really have time to digress. You’re always looking for the end. You have no time to go anywhere other than forward. Detours aren’t acceptable. * * * What is complexity but a lot of simple things strung together? * * * Does illness always preclude form? Does illness always preclude the fact that memories needed to be forgotten? Is trying to create a coherent narrative a sickness in and of itself? * * * A memoir-in-fragments invites non sequiturs. Accepting a life as a series of non sequiturs may be the most honest way of not only writing but also living. * * * A fragment is in itself incomplete. The conundrum: no matter how many fragments you assemble you can never create the actual thing.

 On Fragmentation 231 * * * A memoir-in-fragments always encourages me not to read it from beginning to end. Once I told a friend that. “That’s not cool,” she said. “What isn’t?” “You read it from beginning to end. That’s the way the author intended it. If he meant for you to read the thirty-fifth fragment, then he would have put that first. The first is always the first. I hope you feel bad about what you’ve been doing.” “Now I do,” I say. “Good.” * * * A creative writing teacher about essays-in-fragments: “If you write the perfect fragment, you won’t need the rest of the essay. All you’ll need is the fragment.” * * * I hate jigsaw puzzles. So many little tiny pieces. So many fragments hopeful to find themselves in a completed puzzle. Once a potential boyfriend told me, “I hate jigsaw puzzles. Why would you want to create an image someone else has already created?” That’s when I knew I was in love. * * * Ever since my nervous breakdown, I’ve lost some of my short-term memory. My husband and I will be watching a TV show, and five minutes after a pivotal scene occurs, I’ll have to ask for clarification as to what happened. Our nights usually consist of him stopping the DVR, rewinding, offering a synopsis, and then replaying. I’m not just talking about shows everyone sees as intricate and complicated, like The Wire or Game of Thrones. I’m even talking about Gossip Girl. He’s a patient man, so he doesn’t get too angry. He even sort of enjoys it. Our viewing is so fragmented that it can take three hours to finish one show. Which isn’t a bad thing. Now finding our way from the beginning through the end feels like more than an experience. It feels like a feat. Like we accomplished something big. This has made us grow even closer. * * *

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A memoir-in-fragments confesses the disposability of literature. Let’s face it: there’s always something you can cut out that no one will notice. And if they do notice: they’ll just assume it’s in the white space, begging for their attention. * * * When I first started sending my mother fragments, she said, “What are you going to do with all these things?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’ll keep them the way they are.” She said, “That’s crazy. Everyone will think you’ve written a book of poetry.” “Maybe I have,” I said. “Oh no!” she said, “No one reads poetry. How am I supposed to become famous? Respect your mother. Turn me into prose. You owe me that.” * * * When you’re writing an essay-in-fragments, should each fragment be a complete thing in and of itself? Or does it need to transcend itself, existing for something larger? Should we even think of transcendence as a goal in literature? Should the goal simply be to allow? * * * I wrote an essay-in-fragments for a creative writing teacher. During the workshop, he said: “kill all your darlings.” I raised my hand and asked, “Can you be a little more specific? They’re all my darlings.”

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Single-Mindedness and Wholeheartedness in the Essay Writing Workshop An Essay in Many Parts Jenn Ashworth

Hot Material I once heard a colleague describe a piece of writing a student had submitted to their workshop as “hot material.” All creative writing teachers know what this means. When I started teaching the personal essay more students started bringing this “hot” material to my workshop. There was a writer who wanted to acknowledge her experience of being raped by her boyfriend in the context of an essay that critiqued white feminism and the #metoo movement. Another writer who wanted to articulate how it was to end a relationship with her alcoholic grandfather, the one who raised her, the one who would probably suffer once she no longer lived with him.1 I started referring to “hot material” myself and by “hot” I told myself I meant “difficult” and by “difficult” I told myself I meant “difficult for the students.” I did mean those things, but I also meant some other things too. To help, I decided that my personal essay workshops would handle this “hot material” as if it was nuclear waste. Withdrawal and containment. We’d all make sure that when we discussed hot material the workshop would be careful to separate out the figure of the writer who sat before us from any “I” conjured by the text. I was a novelist before I was an essayist and workshopping fiction makes that easy—only the most naïve workshopper confuses a first-person narrator with the writer who created it. Here’s James Wood, on the fictional “I”: “the narrator pretends to speak to us, while the author is writing to us, and we go along with the deception happily enough.”2 The personal essayist may be playful or evasive or contradictory, but she does not pretend to speak to us, she speaks, and as she does she enters much trickier territory. It might be irritating, provoking, or entertaining when David Foster Wallace interrupts his-not-self to say, “Author here. Meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona,”3 but the essayist knows there’s no “not me,” only a proliferation of multitoned “I’s” produced by the text. The relation of these

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“I’s” to the body in the room—the “living human holding the pencil” sitting right there in the workshop—is a murky one. A part of me took it upon herself to clean up the whole area. In one workshop, an essayist who had recovered from depression wanted her readers to know what a miracle it was to get up, to cook something, to look out of the window at some lavender growing in a pot in the front yard. We said, “the speaker uses the images of lavender all the way through this essay” as if that person, giddy with joy, was not sitting with us. Should we have said “we’re so happy you’re better” or “sorry you went through that”? How to be a good reader, a good student, a good teacher? I said, “let’s concentrate on the way the speaker uses repetition in the first three paragraphs,” and looked away from the writer in the room, who was scribbling notes with her real hands and her actual pencil. I don’t mean to say that there is never a difference between the experiencing-self and the remembering-self and the writing-self. Or that acknowledging these selves isn’t appropriate work for a workshop. But that is not what I was doing. By “hot material” I also meant “autobiographical content” and by “difficult for the students” I also meant “difficult for me.” Hot material burns. I put on my mittens and backed away. Handle with care. Even better: don’t touch.

Single-Mindedness in the Workshop Let’s give a workshop like this—the one focused entirely on technique where the embodied writer is an obstacle or an embarrassment if she is acknowledged at all—a name. Let’s call it the single-minded workshop. Single-mindedness is a good thing, especially in academic contexts. It’s a distraction-free, ultra-focused zone. It is a good-enough way of coercing a group of writers with different interests and abilities into a group; we agree on one thing that we are all going to set our minds to. Singlemindedness can also be a kind of attentiveness and even a devotion; it certainly attempts a fidelity to the words at hand, forsaking everything but the text. Part of me wanted all my students to feel safe and decided it would be embarrassing for them to have the subject matter of their work discussed as we would if it were fiction. I’d concentrate on technique and offer nothing—not even an acknowledgment—about the shape of the experience itself. Another part of me wanted to work ethically and avoid causing harm to my students: this part wanted to make sure that the students knew the workshop was not therapy and I was not a therapist. For these parts, developing a single-minded practice was intended as a protective act of humility and a way of acknowledging my own professional limits and competencies. These parts of me hoped that this shared single focus would also demonstrate a specific kind of respect to a writer, especially one who wrote about pain or oppression or injustice. The single-minded workshop assumed control and self-mastery on the part of the student and made this assumption into a compliment. This is what lay behind my advice to students not to choose subject material that was too present, too hot, too now. Process it first, or you won’t know what to say, I said, communicating

 Single-Mindedness and Wholeheartedness 235 confidence that no matter what had happened, one day the student would know what to say about it. (Process it first, or you will want to process it in front of me, another part of me thought, and I will have to find a way to be with you when you do not know what to say.)

We (All of Me) With all this talk of tangled writing and reading selves, you’ll notice I’ve been talking about myself not as a sovereign subject with a single mind, which is perhaps what we might expect of a teacher and an expert in her field. Instead, I’ve been foregrounding my contradictory thinking by speaking of myself as a bundle of “parts,” each part with her own opinions, beliefs, desires, ways of operating in the world, and methods of getting things done. I do this deliberately, and I’ve been taught to do it via a very practical study of Internal Family Systems (IFS), a model of the mind developed by Richard C. Schwartz. Inspired by years as a family therapist treating patients who suffered from eating disorders, Schwartz brought “systems thinking into the intrapsychic realm”4 and conceptualized the self not as a single entity but as an ecosystem. Our inner worlds, he argues, are populated with many “parts,” each with a distinct role to play. He is careful to note this is not a disorder: “multiplicity is the inherent nature of the mind. This is not a product of external influences being introjected, nor is it the consequence of a once unitary personality being fragmented by trauma”; on the contrary “multiplicity is advantageous.”5 There’s not room here to describe the nuances of a complex system Schwartz describes not only as a model of the psyche but also as a therapeutic method, a way of doing relationships and understanding group dynamics, a spiritual practice, and a means for effecting large-scale cultural change. For now, it is enough to understand that according to Schwartz, there’s no such thing as a bad part (even though some of them can behave in extreme or destructive ways), that some parts act protectively or aggressively toward other parts, hiding or exiling them for the good of the system, and that each person has access to a “Self,” a part of the mind that is not a part—that is something more than that. “Self,” in IFS context, is a misleading and tricky word. Schwartz is not referring to “ego” or transactional analysis’ adult ego state—these are most often “manager” parts attempting to run the system on behalf of Self. “Self ” is something more like “Buddha nature” or “Indwelling light”—a shared wisdom and compassion, mine and not mine, there and not there.6 This Self-led state is available to everyone, and perhaps of specific interest to writers, who might be more familiar with it, Schwartz points out, as the experience of creative “flow,” which is how Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described it. IFS is a process of inviting parts into a relationship with Self so that these parts, trusting in Self to lead the system, can relax away from their extreme roles. This model of human nature has a paradoxical relationship with embodiment. We’re not singleminded, but many-minded, though Self itself is not only mind, nor is it confined by

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the body or the heart. Our systems are enlarged by Self ’s radical hospitality toward parts, but also unchanged, given that the parts were there anyway, unacknowledged: we merely remember and embrace what was already there. IFS also has wider applications. Schwartz’s primary attention is to each individual’s “inner families,” but he is careful to remind us that what applies to individuals also applies to groups—to universities and cultures, and—for the purposes of this essay—to the single-minded writing workshops I’d been running, where the “expert teacher” and “good student” parts of the individual systems in the room had colluded to “exile”—to deny all knowledge of—the other parts and their limitations and emotions and embarrassments, their lived experiences, their hesitancy, confusion, and lack of knowing.

The Uncanny Mirror It is a strange thing to apply a fairly new and relatively eccentric theory of self to an already disreputable7 teaching method. Haven’t we been trying to establish for years that workshopping is about something more than self-improvement? The poet Philip Gross writes searchingly about the role of the “reflective” work often required by UK Creative Writing university courses. The aim is for the writer to develop a “self-aware” composition process. “What it is that the writer knows?” Gross asks. He considers all the deficits to knowing what it is we’re up to when we write in ways that draw on theories of mind from Sigmund Freud to Carl Rogers. “This is not an argument about whether writing might be ‘therapeutic’; rather its care and development, in groups especially, has an analogy with therapy.”8 I’m drawing on that analogy here too because therapy and writing have strange relationships with self-awareness. At their heart both writing and therapy rely on the encounter—by which I mean the quality of the relation between speaker/listener/ reader/writer. They both move toward the writer becoming their own reader, the speaker becoming their own listener: a kind of attentiveness to the Self of the individual that both effaces and embraces the other within and without. The single-minded workshop could be comparable to a superficial therapeutic relationship: both might focus on fixing problems, correcting behavior that gets in the way of the writer’s/client’s goals, recommending specific adjustments, and bringing the individual into line with social and cultural norms. When creative writing workshops are critiqued for creating texts that are written by committee and approved by a tribunal of amateurs, or of erasing diversity and correcting all artistic expression to the codes of the dominant culture, it is this kind of superficial, fix-the-problem, single-minded relationship that the critics have in mind. But the Self-to-Self encounter that happens sometimes in the therapy room and sometimes between reader and text and sometimes too in the writing workshop is characterized not by the exclusion or exiling of troublesome or resistant or embarrassing “parts”—the parts that take us off-topic, that speak in tones and registers unfamiliar, that aren’t interested in the teacher’s or the university’s agenda, that are ill-served by

 Single-Mindedness and Wholeheartedness 237 rubric, reading list, and mark scheme, or that outrageously ask for something we did not expect to give. Instead, this type of Self-led workshop allows for a radical, foolish hospitality. This hospitality happens when the Self-led writing teacher provides a welcome to all her parts and invites her students into a space where they can do the same. Then the workshop becomes wholehearted. There’s nothing new here. We only welcome what was with us anyway. And we do already know about this, we essayists. Philip Gross comes to this, in his uncannily articulated and strange description of what it is to reflect on your own work (to remember all of your parts.) “Both you and it are you, and other—distanced, estranged and yet, because it is you, intimate.”9

Essaying the Workshop The change in my practice from the single-minded to the wholehearted workshop happened at the same time and was intimately connected to my diversion from my work as a novelist into the hinterlands of the essay. Since I started “essaying,” wandering inexpertly through form and genre, detouring away from my expertise as a fiction writer, and falling, headlong, into what I could not say but what the essay itself—in its greater wisdom—would end up saying or performing on my behalf, or despite the best efforts of my “good writer” parts, my teaching changed too. I discovered that the form of the personal or literary or lyric essay itself seemed to be the ideal container for and expression of the kind of writer I was in the process of remembering myself to be—one of many parts. When Karen Brennan in her essay “Headiness” describes the “creature with many heads,” she is talking not only about writer herself but also of the “multiheaded” nature of the essay itself, a home for all the forms and genres we can think of.10 But then the pandemic came, I moved from the physical workshop to the virtual one, and the change in my thinking and practice accelerated. The idea of “workshop” became more obviously composed of temporal and spatial “parts.” Students would write responses to each other from their bedrooms and workplaces, across numerous time zones, and post them to a forum. Because the teaching occasion had been dislodged from a shared space and time and fractured across numerous temporal and special locations the whole thing escaped from my attempts to provide control and coherence. There’s an irony here, in that a more wholehearted, embodied, and complete encounter occurred in circumstances where the connection was entirely mediated by screens and keyboards. When we gathered—little images of their faces displayed in rows, “gallery style” on my laptop screen, the connection unstable, the sound and visuals jerky and unpredictable, the absence of presence and the presence of absence rendering the whole experience spooky. The séance-like gatherings that pandemic teaching conditions forced on my students and me—all of us there, not there, notall-there, there-in-the-wrong-ways or at the wrong times or in the wrong tone of voice—the lack of decorum, the unraveled off-topic-ness of the shared and deferred teaching moments, the derailment of lesson plans, of discussion topics, the academic

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year, my work-life balance, the world—really cracked it for us. The parts of ours that had colluded to keep the workshop a place where only “good student” and “expert teacher” parts were welcome had grown tired, been overwhelmed, and had demanded to be cared for differently.11

Wholehearted In her important book The Author Is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else, Michelene Wandor traces the development of the creative writing workshop in the UK. She carefully unpicks the unique “historical traces responsible for workshop practices” from cultural sources as various as the self-help movement, group therapy, North American models of teaching composition, the development of the study of English Literature and “Practical Criticism” as the dominant method of engagement as a subject at Cambridge University, the advent of theory, the influence of educational methods of the conservatoire, community, and amateur arts groups, and so on.12 She also notes the professional diversity of creative writing teachers—some of them career academics with PhDs in other subjects, some moonlighting from English Literary Studies, Social Studies, or the dramatic arts, and other writers transplanted into the academy and unfamiliar with its cultures, etiquettes, and pedagogical norms. The workshop is ideologically incoherent and burdened with a proliferation of histories and a legion of contemporary theories about what we’re teaching, who is qualified to teach it, whether it can actually be taught, and how to go about the task. For Wandor, these truths form a set of disadvantages that are nearly insurmountable. For me, this all sounds like an opportunity. The natural incoherence of the workshop that Wandor accurately notes, both in the sense of the “many headedness” that occurs when you get a group of selves and parts together, as well as the way the concept of the workshop method itself is a magpie-mix of pedagogical methods and influences, means it is the ideal space for expertises and authorities (or parts) of all kinds to be welcomed. The wholehearted workshop is always about connection rather than coercion, curiosity rather than control, collaboration rather than correction. The workshop forms a gentle invitation to all kinds of authority—technical, cultural, aesthetic, social, psychological, pedagogical—to dismantle themselves. Wandor also warns that because of the writing workshop’s links to other forms of group work and its interest in self-awareness and reflective development process, it can tend to “over identify the subject with the therapeutic process, transferring what should be a focus on the work and the writing to the self of each individual student.”13 The concern here is a valuable one—just what is it that we’re supposed to be workshopping? A project, not a person—right? I want to suggest that the wholehearted or Self-led workshop welcomes all of the parts each student feels like bringing into the workshop space and in so doing releases effort tied up in the exiling project. That effort can then be spent encountering their own writing and listening for the Self in the text. I’m not against the teaching of technique, only suggesting that the learning

 Single-Mindedness and Wholeheartedness 239 of compositional skills is led by a specific form of encounter. As Paisley Rekdal says in Appropriate: A Provocation: I’ve tended to treat the study of literature as the acquisition of skills: how to write clear sentences and believable characters, how to craft rich metaphors, or shape your thinking in poetic form and meter. But literature is not a collection of skills. Literature is the expression of conflicting human desires, and reading is the activation of these conflicts—the dynamic engagement with word and idea.14

Listening and Mothering It would be easy to mistake the wholehearted workshop as a noisy free for all, where anything goes. But these wholehearted workshops are not without structure or rigor. In The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, Felica Rose Chavez outlines her routines of checking in with how the students are really feeling and what’s going on in their lives, the sharing of food, the playing of music, the opportunities to free-write and to physically reconstruct the space. These are not only rituals of space-taking and forming but also of welcome. Chavez’s process is extremely structured, but those structures are Self-led because they are about building a space of invitation rather than exclusion. For all I’ve said about letting the exiled parts speak, the wholehearted workshop is not characterized by a Babel-like chorus of speaking but by a practice of listening. They can be quieter, more reflective, and gentler than the single-minded workshop, which can sometimes feel a little like a tribunal. There’s more silence, and more laughter too. When you hear the entirety of someone out, you give them a shelter: place to be. This applies not only to new ideas and to new experiences but also to new literary desires and ambitions. Richard C. Schwartz advocates for a positive view of human nature: we already have everything we need, but “elements of the systems in which we are embedded or that are embedded within us often constrain our access to our inner resources.”15 Hospitable listening invites the student into the conditions where a desire to acquire the compositional skills we most often teach can emerge, and it does this by honoring the fact that reading and writing are intensely relational acts. I’m grateful to Chavez’s work here; she reminds me that writers of color have long known what it is to listen in this way: “Writers of color are accustomed to this practice, burdened with ears so elastic we’re capable of hearing multiple, simultaneous subtexts in every exchange.”16 IFS is a model of the person that asks us to attend to the forgotten fragments of who we are by welcoming them into connection with some larger, shared source of insight, and we do this by listening. This type of listening is also uncanny—a kind of numinous or otherworldly experience; we’re home to the not-at-home parts of ourselves, and the listener becomes a kind of paradoxical presence: turning up fully in order to make a space for the other. Chavez knows this too, and pays a curious, compassionate attentiveness to this state, which she calls “mothering” and describes as “a transcendent power to multiply one-self, succeeded by the supreme humility to serve that second

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self. Listening is an extension of that humility, a tribute to the fact that none of us are alone. We are multitudes, mothered again and again in rhythm with time.”17 We do already know this, don’t we, all of what I’ve just been saying? Being a writer or a teacher does not set us apart from the world or the workshop as lone, inviolate experts. Instead, the writer and teacher claim an implicated, messy relation to the world, to their work, to their students. They experience an interconnectedness with their surroundings (they belong to the ecosystem of the workshop; they don’t hold one or run one), and so they become a shared project with their readers and their listeners in welcoming and attending to the forgotten or exiled parts of their own system (remembering the parts of themselves they forgot to know) and the larger social systems which they form and are formed by. We know that when writers listen to the Self in their own work, they hear what they need to say and know how to receive what they need to say it well. Listening makes a shelter for remembering. It’s not nothing, the way we’re expected to be with our students. It’s not nothing, the way we’re expected to love our students. The way we love our students. It’s not nothing.

Notes 1 These examples are composites drawn from experience to capture the spirit of the teaching experience without identifying any student or workshop. 2 James Wood, How Fiction Works (London: Vintage, 2009), 25. 3 David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (London: Penguin, 2012), 163. 4 Richard C. Schwartz and Martha Sweezy, Internal Family Systems Therapy, 2nd ed. (London: Guildford Press, 2019), 28. 5 Ibid., 39. 6 “Self ” is a confusing term. I think Schwartz might even mean “God.” But for clarity, when I mean “Self ” in the IFS sense, I am going to capitalize it. 7 Most criticism of the workshop method has come from within the discipline. For more, see Stephanie Vanderslice, “Workshopping the Workshop,” in Rethinking Creative Writing in Higher Education: Programs and Practices That Work (Wicken, UK: The Professional and Higher Partnership Ltd., 2011). 8 Philip Gross, “Then Again, What Do I Know: Reflections on Reflection in Creative Writing,” in The Writer in the Academy: Creative Interfrictions, ed. Richard Marggraf Turley (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2011), 53. 9 Ibid. 10 Karen Brennan, “Headiness,” in Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, 2nd ed., ed. Margot Singer and Nicole Walker (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 73. 11 It is inevitable that some parts of my students were frustrated by the lapse in standards and departure from authoritatively taught techniques and skills (some of my parts were too), and these parts were relieved when their time with me ended. I want to welcome those parts too. 12 Michelene Wandor, The Author Is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

 Single-Mindedness and Wholeheartedness 241 13 14 15 16

Ibid., 253. Paisely Rekdal, Appropriate: A Provocation (New York: Norton, 2021), 155. Schwartz, Internal Family Systems Therapy, 25. Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), 17. 17 Ibid., 49.

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Positively Negative Dinty W. Moore

Of what use, really, is white space on the page? One answer might be found by asking you, the reader, what you made of the space that separates this paragraph from the one-line paragraph above. Possibly you were annoyed or suspicious of my gimmick. That’s understandable. The answer I am hoping for, however, is that you found yourself momentarily filling in the blank, inserting your own tentative response to the opening question. Or at least giving your possible response some brief consideration before jumping down to the paragraphs you are reading now. I’m trying to better understand the ways in which a reader absorbs nonfiction prose and especially how that reader participates in the making of meaning. The writer has an enormous responsibility to shape the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, the chapters, the metaphors, the language, the texture of every written artifact, but the reader is no passive dummy. The reader, especially the reader who seeks out literary work, comes to the page with an active brain, chock-full of ideas, referents, and connections. I’m not—absolutely not—trying to reopen the deconstruction debate. Theory does not much interest me. But as a writer, it is important to think about what you are presenting to a reader, to acknowledge the simple fact that what you experience reading your own words is going to be substantively different from what someone else, someone who does not live inside of your brain, will experience. And thinking about this brings me to my main questions: How do our choices about something as simple as white space influence how readers engage with our essays? Are we making conscious decisions about our use of spacing, taking full advantage of this essential element of craft? Poets may be scratching their heads at this point, because they’ve been thinking of white space, negative space, the distance between thoughts and words, since the time they first took up the pen in a serious manner. Poets love the line Break, and they love their Enjambment And they love it for good reason.

 Positively Negative 243 There is a palpable, tactile difference to what happens in my brain when I settle in with these lines from Mary Oliver: You do not have to be good You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through a desert, repenting You only have to let the soft animal of your body Love what it loves1

Versus this: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through a desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

The difference is hard to categorize, of course, which is why poetry is art and not engineering. But in the poet’s version, with the line breaks intact, reactions rise up in my mind—like cartoon thought bubbles—after the word “good,” after “knees,” after “repenting,” and certainly after her vivid phrase “the soft animal of your body.” Because Oliver is the writer that she is, she retains full control of that back and forth—whatever I come up with is trumped by what she offers in return—but the back and forth is a significant part of the pleasure. I am already in beyond my depth where poetics is concerned, so let me turn instead to prose writers, who in my experience seldom if ever articulate how white space works in our literary realm. We use it, certainly, but I very seldom find it discussed in craft books or writing classrooms. Traditionally, each chunk of prose—anywhere from one paragraph to one thousand paragraphs—is (though the term is rapidly becoming extinct) a “crot.” Consider the crot to be our version of a stanza. Back in the typewriter days, when a writer would decide to hit the carriage return twice instead of once, she would end one crot and begin another, creating what is variously called a space break, section break, segment break, crot break, line break, line space, double drop, or line drop.2 The mere fact that an informal survey of my writer friends turned up all of those terms makes my point: this is something we seldom discuss, and, thus, we don’t even have a common language. In my fiction workshops in grad school, I learned that space breaks—that’s what we called them—most often indicate a passage of time or scene change, or both, such as a jump from the protagonist’s front lawn to a moment later that same day in the protagonist’s kitchen. Fiction writers might use the simple break for other purposes as well: change in point of view, change from scene to summary, movement into the character’s thoughts, and of course, for flashback. In every case, however, the “double drop” is not just a symbol for “scene change,” it is a moment where the reader is given a breath, and in that breath, the reader is invited to think “What did I just read, and where do I think this might all be going?”

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Nothing earth-shattering there, but it does bring the reader into the story and offers some room for participation, like the line break in a poem. Oral storytellers accomplish this same effect with a pause. Actors do it with a pause and perhaps a change of expression: what they call a beat. There is also opportunity (actually, obligation) for the writer to carefully choose what occurs on either end of the space break. The ending of one section—the word or the moment chosen—inevitably interacts with where and how you choose to begin the next section. As John McPhee points out, “ two parts of a piece of writing, merely by lying side-by-side, can comment on each other without a word spoken,”3 so whatever is happening in the protagonist’s kitchen after that brief jump should also illuminate or advance whatever was being tossed about earlier out on the lawn. Novelist and New Journalist Tom Wolfe takes it one step further, choosing “crazy leaps of logic” over comment and illumination: As each crot breaks off, it tends to make one’s mind search for some point that must have just been made—presque vu!—almost seen! In the hands of a writer who really understands the device, it will have you making crazy leaps of logic, leaps you never dreamed of before.4

In memoir or literary journalism, this rudimentary space break or section break is used much as it is in fiction: a scene change, a flashback, a switch from scene to reflection or exposition. The personal essayist might use the break to signal a fresh angle, a logical jump, or another piece of the intellectual mosaic. Montaigne did it constantly. But there are more radical examples. Consider Lawrence Sutin’s A Postcard Memoir, which uses duotone reproductions of postcards as occasions to pen 400-word memoir snippets. We readers are given a challenge: pull together the pieces of this engaging jigsaw puzzle to assemble one man’s life. Or Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay, which is nothing but white space. Boully leaves the entire text of the book blank, except for 157 footnotes which readers must use as clues to imagine what the text might have contained. In her book-length essay Bluets, Maggie Nelson demonstrates how grave personal losses can shatter us into pieces by splintering her nonfiction musings into 240 lyrical prose entries focused on grief and the color blue. And of course David Shields makes an extreme statement with his manifesto, Reality Hunger, a series of 618 very brief aphorisms, quotes, and observations on narrative and reality, reminiscent perhaps of the index cards one might collect preparatory to beginning one’s dissertation. Shields further complicates his work and demands further reader participation by refusing to acknowledge his sources of the quotes (though in the end, his publisher compelled him to put an appendix at the back of the book; an appendix he begs us to ignore). Here is the source material, Shields seems to be saying. You write the book.5 Anyone toiling in the creative nonfiction fields lately knows of the ongoing popularity of the collage essay, variously criticized as a lazy writer’s way of avoiding the need to

 Positively Negative 245 write transitions or lauded as an experimental innovation that allows for, as Wolfe suggested, “leaps of logic, leaps you never dreamed of before.” I think both are true. I’m a fan of the collage form, though I certainly see it used lackadaisically on occasion. But weak collages do not condemn the form entirely. We have, after all, plenty of weak villanelles, weak sestinas, weak novels, and weak pieces of narrative journalism. Composition theorist Peter Elbow lays out pretty well why collage is inappropriate for the academic or informative essay: I try to teach thinking, and thinking does mean figuring out hierarchy and subordination: what are your main points and what are the sub points and how do they relate? Make it all explicit. After all, the whole point of an essay is no, wait, that’s not quite right. The whole point of the school essay or academic essay is to say what you are saying, not to leave it implicit. And complex, hierarchical prose is good to learn and can be lovely.6

But Elbow does value the collage approach for the literary essay, citing reader participation as a main advantage: It is not always syntactically immature to lay out unconnected sentences or units and let them rub up against each other without connective tissue. There is more energy in unconnected sentences, more drama. They tend to be an enactment of something going on rather than a record of a past event—something conceptually finished. Let the reader feel the energy of the jump.7 The energy of the jump. The moment for the reader to absorb. And possibly add a thought of their own.

Annie Dillard, in Living by Fiction, notes that “the use of narrative collage is particularly adapted to various twentieth-century treatments of time and space. Time no longer courses in a great and widening stream passing fixed landmarks in orderly progression . . . Instead time is a flattened landscape, a land of unlinked lakes seen from the air.”8 It is now the twenty-first century, and, oddly, Dillard’s words sound like an advertisement for Facebook or Twitter. One might argue her assertion that time no longer courses “in a great and widening stream,” but information certainly does not, and the contemporary reader seems increasingly comfortable absorbing information from various blogs, news sources, and social media posts in order to form their own view. Does this mean that today’s reader is more comfortable with cutting and pasting moments from a nonlinear literary narrative and reassembling the pieces inside the brain? Probably yes. And what of the future reader? That is difficult to answer. White space has an altered connotation when reading on a Nook or Kindle. Technologies yet to be discovered will

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change the “act of reading” in ways we can only guess at, and the moment where the reader pauses, the energy of the jump, will no doubt be changed as well. But returning a moment to the present: A beginning writer, I’ve observed, often falls short of the goal by telling the reader too little, until the said reader becomes lost and annoyed and wanders off to another story. Or the beginner tells too much, hitting the reader over the head with every connection, every irony, every telling moment, until the reader feels that her intelligence has been insulted, or underestimated at least. Readers are smart. They want to participate and want the pleasure of putting two and two together themselves, of making discoveries along the way—sometimes along with the writer and sometimes a step ahead of the writer. The break, the space, the interruption, allows for that to happen. The energy of the jump. Why don’t writers talk more about the crafting of white space, space breaks, double drops? I don’t know. Like poetry, literary prose is art, not engineering, but there are things to be said, things to be learned, about how this negative space—small to large— operates on the page, and in the reader’s experience of the page. “Each word is a rock I’ve placed personally into a wall—five go in and I pick through a pile and find another, shift them all around until it’s right,” Dagoberto Gilb offers in the introduction to his essay collection Gritos. “I’ve chipped and nicked at most so they look to me like good sentences, good paragraphs.”9 Indeed. But nothing says that wall will have no gaps. As Leonard Cohen once reminded us, “There is a crack in everything.”10 Better to let the light come in.

Notes 1 Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese,” in Dream Work (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 14. 2 In Microsoft Word, the writer hits the “enter” key twice, instead of an old-fashioned carriage return, although the default formatting options in Word complicate the matter. In many student essays I see these days, Word inserts an annoying space break between each and every paragraph, meaning no distinction is made between paragraph change and a deliberate section break. But that’s a software issue. I can only hope that anyone serious about their prose has a handle on how to make the choice deliberately, not by default. 3 John McPhee, quoted in Norman Sims, “Introduction,” in Literary Journalism, ed. Norman Sims (New York: Ballantine, 1984), 13.

 Positively Negative 247 4 Tom Wolfe, “Introduction,” in The Secret Life of Our Times, ed. Gordon Lish (New York: Doubleday, 1973), xxv. 5 Here of course, the artifice of nonfiction comes into play. Shields already “wrote” the book, of course, by deciding in which order the reader encounters the 618 disparate snippets. 6 Peter Elbow, Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 309. 7 Ibid. 8 Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 20–4. 9 Dagoberto Gilb, “Introduction,” in Gritos: Essays (New York: Grove Press, 2004), xiv. 10 Leonard Cohen, “Anthem,” The Future, Columbia Studio Album, 1992.

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Study Questions for the Essay at Hand A Speculative Essay Robin Hemley

1. Is it the aim of this essay to allow wonder and speculation and not one fact? 2. Is it the aim of this essay to speculate about topics of which the essay is not expert? 3. Might the essay be overly self-conscious and coy? Does it concern this essay that it cares too much for form and has nothing to state (formerly known as “meaning”), that it actively avoids meanings, messages, interpretations, that it has no author, that it might be a trick that someone is playing on you, that you have always suspected that God was out to “get you,” and now here is your proof, that perhaps you should not follow that line of inquiry? 4. Are words measurable? Do they have a pulse? Is this essay really writing itself or is it even now being written by someone on a plane going to Turkmenistan while the essayist tries to shield what he is writing from an inquisitive seatmate? Does that mean you, buddy? 5. Will the essay work the Friday shift if the Manager calls unexpectedly? 6. Is the essay a bit of a narcissist? A solipsist? A mensch? (Circle all that apply.) 7. How did the essay do on the Essay section of the Foreign Service Exam? 8. If the essay were stranded on a desert island, would anybody notice? 9. Is the essay concerned that it might be getting too self-serious as it matures, that even the terms “essay” and “essayist” are a little overused? Does it long to have lines that don’t blend fact and fiction? 10. Do essays have feelings? Are there little starving essays on other continents? Would you sponsor an essay for as little as five cents a day?

 Study Questions for the Essay at Hand 249 11. What will the quiz cover? Fact: the Treaty of Tordesillas Fact: type B Blood Fact: from 1953 to 1975. Fact: the Tang Dynasty A Slight Digression: the essay has apparently failed in its original intention not to admit a fact. But it does not care. Because essays are full of contradictions. This is what makes the essay more essayistic. It essays onward because it feels empowered. This essay has agency. 12. What if everything is a digression? Certainly, if there is no afterlife, then our lives are a digression. But this essay believes in an afterlife, so for the time being we’re all safe. A Second Digression: this essay has been considering a topic lately though it isn’t sure it can afford one. The topic has something to do with good health, but the essay is having difficulty settling between Bernarr McFadden, a health guru of the 1920s as well as a media tycoon, and the We-di-Co Peptomist, an in-house newsletter published in the 1920s by The Western Distributing Company of Chicago, Illinois. The Western Distributing Company published health encyclopedias and its employees sold them door-to-door throughout the country. One of the features of the We-Di-Co Peptomist was a monthly column titled, “My Hardest Sale” in which various members of the sales team recounted their hardest sale. 13. Why does the essay care at all about Bernarr McFadden, a forgotten health guru from the 1920s and the We-di-Co Peptomist, an in-house publishing organ of which there are probably no extant copies remaining other than the ones to which the essay’s putative author bought in a Chicago bookstore over twenty-five years ago? This essay has no idea why it cares or why anyone else should care (what is commonly known as the “So What?” factor) except that the We-di-Co Peptomist is charming and quaint and forgotten, a misplaced shard of existence, as is the forgotten McFadden with his “lustrous” hair and the photographs of him taken thirty years apart showing a man in skin-tight unitard, the earlier photo surprisingly daring in the asslessness of his unitard. 14. Is part of the essay’s job to dip back into the dust heap of forms and people gone by, locating survivors in the wreckage of an imploded building, as it were, grasp them by the hand, and say, “Rise up, Bernarr! Rise up, you Peptomists! Live again, if only briefly. Show us your stuff?” You may use another additional sheet of paper to answer this question.

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Note: this essay will not resort to cheap tricks and it will never lie to you because this essay has signed a contract with you and has left it on your kitchen counter for you to sign and fax back. This essay would like to inform you that the contract works both ways, something that people sometimes miss. But this essay will not lie to you, and you know you can believe what this essay says because it has said it and isn’t that proof enough? This essay does not need to impress you with a litany of dubious facts gathered via a web search and then presented to you as though it has spent weeks in the musty stacks of the University of Iowa Library, bringing book after book to its study carrel where it pores over ancient tomes to find exactly the right bit of information. The library is in fact emptying itself of books and few people seem to notice or care. If, for instance, you are on an errand to locate a copy of Xavier de Maistre’s eighteenth-century classic, Journey Around My Room, you will be on a fool’s errand, as the electronic catalogue will inform you that one copy of said text exists on the fifth floor, call number HN17655.175a. But no such text can be found on the fifth floor, which is itself a ghost library—rows upon rows of metal shelving with nary a book to be seen and the lights turned low as though in some local shop in the final throes of a going-out-of-business sale and the creditors knocking when only the fixtures remain. What we are witnessing here is a great migration of thought, an upheaval, much like the brutal aftermath of the partition of India and Pakistan, but instead of people displaced and done away with in violent fashion, forms and thoughts and ways of presenting thoughts are being tossed around. 15. How can this essay make a callous analogy to such a tragic upheaval as the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the borderlines of verbal expression? Someone is sure to be offended, and this essay aims never to cause discomfort or offense. If the essay is making all this up, by the way, then kudos to it because it has a better imagination than most people, and so shouldn’t we give it props for that? Not that this essay feels comfortable with that word “props.” “Props” is not a word this essay would normally use, though it is curious about the word’s etymology. But it is not about to do a web search to find out the etymology of the word “props” as it is used colloquially in the twenty-first century. It will not resort to that trick, so in vogue, of gathering up a list of factoids and presenting them as a litany as though the simple recitation of random facts abutting one another has some literary merit. But this essay has a hunch, and if that hunch is correct then the word “props” was first used in its colloquial form in an early draft of the Moncrieff translation of Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust in which the narrator praises Eulalie for the masterful way in which she humors the hypochondriacal Aunt Leonie of the narrator, when he writes:

 Study Questions for the Essay at Hand 251 My aunt might say to her twenty times in a minute for the way in which she humored Aunt: “The end is come at last, my poor Eulalie!”, twenty times Eulalie would retort: “Knowing your illness as you do, Mme Octave, you will live to be a hundred as Mme. Sazerin said to me only yesterday.” Although Eulalie persisted in referring to Mme. Sazerat as Mme. Sazerin, I believe that my poor aunt still gave her props for never faltering once in the role in which she was cast in the daily passion play whose repeat performances were the only theater I knew for a time, peering at this scene both in memory and as a child, as if through a pair of opera glasses turned round the wrong way.1

Note: see section 2, paragraph 3, of the contract on your kitchen counter. You don’t need to read it if you don’t have time—basically, it’s a standard indemnity clause. This essay does not want to be thought of as pretentious and effete, although it wonders if simply making an allusion to the Thought Delivery System formerly known as a Novel by Marcel Proust will hopelessly brand it as such. Go ahead and try to interrogate this essay. It will not crack. It will not display recidivist narrative tendencies, or patriarchal linear structures because it eschews linearity, because linearity is not artistic and is goal oriented and this essay is not goal oriented though it is at the same time ambitious. Don’t look at this essay the wrong way. It will stick a Journalism Major up your ass. Never call this essay unambitious. It received a prestigious award for its ambition and was nominated for others. This essay practices Hot Yoga, but it’s tired and it’s bent out of shape and is blending with other essays and other forms of discourse within its personal space. Please stay out of this essay’s personal space because some essays smell when they exercise and some are lecherous and that’s why this essay would prefer to work out with essays of its own kind (Read: would management please tell literary journalists to find their own workout space?). This essay does not mind a certain amount of blending, but it prefers subversion to blending. They are not the same, you know. 16. Is it just my imagination or is this essay still driving at something? 17. Is the world spinning faster? 18. Is everything simply a digression?

Note 1 Based loosely on Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Part I: Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Holt, 1922), 92.

38

A Brief History of Disquiet, Deficit & Disbelief by 飛蚊 FeiMan Xu Xi

www.j-dd&d/mydao​.n​et as published in the academic journal World Tongue Findings in English, vol. 3, Issue 1, 2020, University of Laputa, Parts Unknown, www​ .wtf​.edu​.lap. Note: The Cantonese romanization of the author’s name looks deceptively English but is pronounced FAY-MUN, to rhyme with bun, and is likely a pen name. It literally means “Flying Mosquito(es),” Hong Kong Cantonese slang for floaters, those annoying images that flit across your vision, unstoppably, as your eyes age. The writer remains unknown. This found manuscript was on a park bench at Aberdeen Street, Hong Kong, on June 3, 2018.1 It was evening, so I left the envelope there overnight, thinking the writer would come back and collect it when he or she or they realized its loss. But there it was the next morning, so I took it to publish it, hoping the writer would eventually claim the payment and rights. Since its publication five years earlier, no one has come forward. However it’s fair to conclude that the writer is a Hong Kong native, as a Mainland Chinese would have used simplified characters飞蚊子 (Fei Wenzi) and added the diminutive子at the end as the nomenclature for mosquito. However, the writer might not be Chinese at all since the text is in English and could be a Taiwanese or Singaporean, or even a white American masquerading as Asian as one poet did, thus resulting in the inclusion of his poem in Best American Poetry, Simon & Schuster, 2015.2

2018 was the year that the journal Deficit, Disquiet & Disbelief (hereinafter “DD&D”) ceased operations for good, probably because China had become rather too difficult to ignore about Diaoyu. But for the editors (hereinafter “Anox+1”), this duo would forever after think of their journal’s home base as Senkaku, because origins being what they are, mere nomenclature will never transform anyone’s worldview. But my task is to write a brief history of the journal, rather than speculate on the reason for its demise. As a contributor to DD&D,3 the quarterly (the exception was 2006 when one editor came down with typhoid, of all diseases, and they only published two issues of vol. 4), I know enough about its origins and evolution to do so. Besides, I myself am from Feiyudao (Chinese)4 or Tobiuo-Shima (Japanese),5 aka Pinnacle Point Island of Diaoyu or Senkaku, and so am a native daughter of these islands. There is

 History of Disquiet, Deficit & Disbelief 253 some dispute as to whether or not my home island really belongs, as some argue it is actually an exclave. However, that argument is specious, as most thinking persons understand that a floating island will, by its very nature, hover around the borders of the archipelago below and occasionally will even float beyond those invisible boundaries out to the ocean. It’s rather like a child riding her rubber alligator in a swimming pool; you don’t expect her to stay in one place. To insist on pinpointing exact coordinates is as pointless as expecting the shouting of opposing facts to cease by those nations claiming ownership of these islands. However, here are other indisputable facts. Most historians agree that the manuscript “A Short Voyage to the Outer Limits of Japan”6 by Lemuel Gulliver, unearthed from the caves at the easternmost tip of Feiyudao in 1746 by Chinese speleologists, offers sufficient evidence for our uniquely mongrel origins. Despite his short voyage, Lemuel impregnated a number of Japanese and mixed-race women; these “discomfort women” were forced on him by the Emperor and he was ordered to have sexual relations with them in lieu of his having to trample upon a crucifix, which he declined to do.7 The women and he were shackled and sent to Tobiuo-Shima as it was then known and which was mostly uninhabited, and trapped there until proof of their loss of virginity was provided to armed soldiers who accompanied them. It is a disturbing history, and the manuscript records Lemuel’s helplessness and distaste at having what he termed “unclean intercourse with these strange and terrified foreign girls,” because they were mostly “young girls, some barely past puberty, the oldest being no more than twenty years of age.” The most shocking aspect of his experience was that these girls had all been willingly sacrificed by those wishing to please the Emperor, young virgins offered by families who were shunned because of the unclean intercourse of one of their own, Japanese women who had either been raped by Dutch or Chinese traders, or were prostitutes, and who had given birth to mixed-race children. Other families with members who were known to be Christian also sacrificed their girls. In other words, the mongrel caste. This was, to him, even more shocking than the further assaults he witnessed by soldiers on these girls during their imprisonment, because “some of these young women developed affection for their captors who rewarded them with extra food or other comforts.” It is a fact that several of the soldiers returned to the island later and took up residence alongside the women and their offspring who were not allowed to leave. Lemuel stated that he never wanted to return to this island—the horror was too profoundly distressing a memory— and took no interest thereafter in the numerous progeny that resulted from his “journey of deficit, disquiet and disbelief.” This is of course how DD&D got its name. It may also be the reason why he chose not to publish that book of his travels and left it behind in the cave that was his dwelling during his month-long stay. However, I digress and speculate as I really should not do in the writing of a history, especially given the editor’s instructions that I “stick to the facts for a change, if you can.” (Note to self: I don’t care for this editor’s sarcasm and may cease writing for him soon.) Yet this awful history does not appear particularly unusual when we regard the history of our world, does it? DD&D was conceived as a travel journal that sought to publish pieces about cosmopolitan life in contemporary Asia “without the least Assistance from Genius or

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Study.”8 A little study might perhaps have made for a more successful launch issue. The by-now infamous line of the editorial manifesto in vol. 1, no. 1 to “extoll the beauty and wonder of Senkaku with travel writing that will attract numerous tourists to its shores, especially from China” created, naturally, a controversial clang. What were Anox+1 thinking? The year was 2003 and to call the islands “Senkaku” guaranteed the Chinese would take umbrage, which they did. In fact, there are those who believe that the launch issue of DD&D contributed to escalating the political dispute. I should note here that neither one of Anox+1 were Japanese (I say “were” because both editors died shortly after announcing the cessation of publication in what was possibly a seppuku suicide-murder. Anox+1 owned a collection of Samurai artifacts and a bloodied sword was at the scene next to their bowels. But such speculations are better left to the Hong Kong Police who found their bodies on Fei Zyu Dou9—the floating island that hovers regularly10 over Lantau where Hong Kong’s international airport is located, much to the distress of Air Traffic Control—that much is fact, their deaths I mean). Despite its inauspicious beginnings, the journal continued to have a highly successful run for the next few years, attracting thousands of subscribers with their giveaway of a catty11 of flying fish. They also paid their writers well, in any freely convertible currency of their choice. However, for one piece that was by an unknown writer12 whom the editors wished to locate, they offered to pay “a modest fee for this contribution to our journal, in any currency except the Euro which may not last beyond this century.” I do wish to keep the facts as straight as possible. Several subscribers have confirmed that they did indeed receive their catty of flying fish which was, according to one enthusiastic gourmand, “awesomely delicious, flesh flaky enough when steamed to slice with chopsticks, I kept subscribing using each of my ten siblings’ names just to get more fish!” It was difficult to determine how Anox+1 were able to acquire such a lot of fish. Eventually I located one Mr. Tseng, a Hong Kong taxi driver13 and avid fisherman who confirmed that his many fishing trips with his brothers and buddies to Diaoyu (being Chinese he did not say Senkaku) always yielded an extraordinary catch. It was “as if the fish were flying to be caught.” What is historically less certain is how the journal obtained money to pay writers. Subscription was free so despite the huge number of readers there was no revenue, and Anox+1 were violently opposed to courting advertisers, insisting on editorial independence unsullied by commerce. This was possibly (forgive this final speculation) why the publisher finally terminated publication and fired the editors and all the staff. I can confirm that for the two short book reviews and two travel pieces I contributed, I was paid a total of £55,000, which still startles me when I recall it today (or is this yesterday?). It is so rare to have your worth as a writer rewarded handsomely, and even rarer that not a single word is changed by copy editors, intern readers, editors, publishers, or even accidentally by designers and their perpetual typos. Instead, every grammatical lapse, punctuation error, syntactical malfeasance, and literary illogic of your original text are preserved, which made it a wondrous publication to behold. So that is a brief history of DD&D, warts, blemishes, beauty marks and all.

 History of Disquiet, Deficit & Disbelief 255

Notes 1 Coincidentally, the date The Journal of Speculative Nonfiction was announced as a new publication and submissions solicited by editors Robin Hemley and Leila Philip, where this piece now reappears in the past, time being mutable in our world. 2 You cannot make this stuff up so you might as well default to fact, and suspend disbelief. 3 See vol. 11, no. 4; vol. 9, no.2; vol. 7, no. 3. 4 飛魚島, literally, the Flying Fish Island as it is indeed somewhat fish-shaped. Pomfret, not swordfish. 5 トビウオ島 6 It has never been determined why our British ancestor left his manuscript behind. This unpublished book of the account of his travels would have helped readers better understand his third book about the voyage to the floating island of Laputa, Feiyudao’s sister territory, although we came into existence earlier. The reason I use its Chinese rather than Japanese name is due to my lack of fluency in Japanese, even though I am of partial Japanese ancestry and have hardly any Chinese blood. But China has taken such a hold of all us Feiyudaoists that we cannot help acquiring at least a nodding acquaintance with their language, while Japan, alas, being the exonym that it is, has lesser claim in the twenty-first century as a land where the sun originates. This saddens me because I love traveling to Japan, probably even more than traveling around China. My acquaintance with English is similar, as Britain and subsequently the United States have made such economic and linguistic conquests of our world that even Feiyudaoists all begin studying English at the ridiculously early age of two. What has spurred us onward to master English has been none other than Mr. Ma himself, the former English teacher and founder of Alibaba who now owns the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English newspaper, a testament to English becoming so global it is virtually Chinese. Yet I am no more British than I am Chinese, although I obviously have English ancestry, but should really be conversant in Dutch, since even Lemuel G (as we refer to our ancestral Big Daddy) pretended to be Dutch when he visited Japan and was conversant in the language. 7 In Book III of Guilliver’s Travels, the author wrote “fake news” on this point, evading any clear explanation of why the Emperor did not insist he trample a crucifix as other visitors had to during Japan’s 200-year isolationist, anti-Christian phase at that time, when only Chinese and Dutch nationals were permitted entry. 8 The editorial manifesto cites this from Gulliver’s Travels Part III, Ch V “A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan,” echoing the mission of the Advancers of Speculative Learning at the Academy on Laputa, where their famous invention sought to create, among other things, “an universal Language to be understood in all civilized Nations,” something the typhoid-stricken member of Anox+1 greatly desired DD&D to achieve. 9 肥豬島, transliteration Cantonese, literally fat pig island, although locally often referred to as Siu Yuk Dou燒肉島, meaning roast meat (or pig) island as a fat piglet is ideal for roasting to make this dish. 10 Fei Zyu Dou only came into existence in 1998, the year after Hong Kong’s handover to China, at the peak of the Asian Financial Crisis. Its origins are murky, as several journalists then reported that this was undoubtedly the initiative of a cabal of the

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city’s richest property owners and developers, all seeking an offshore haven for their wealth. However, this remains unproven and was decried as “fake news” by the city’s second Chief Executive of China’s postcolonial rule, the man eventually imprisoned for graft and financial malfeasance, proving yet again that you can only make up some of the facts some of the time before they catch up to you. What is fact is that there are no offshore banks on Fei Zyu Dou, although it is where Columbarium City is located, a development by Flying Wax Death Ltd. www​.flyingwaxdeath​.net; this Hong Kong Stock Exchange–listed company has made huge profits selling expensive columbarium to the city’s population desperate to secure afterlife property for their loved ones in Hong Kong’s over-priced real-estate market, even for the dead. How the company secured any Building Authority’s approval for construction is another story as the island’s ownership is under dispute, claimed by the three cities of Hong Kong, Macau, and Guangzhou; China, curiously, has not had a dog (or pig) in this fight. 11 Chinese unit of measure for food, a little over a pound. 12 “Canine News,” vol. 13, no. 4, 2015, later republished in my book Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories, Signal 8 Press, 2018, which I considered a significant Hong Kong story for which I gave full credit to DD&D. Some critics still accused me of plagiarism but that is definitely fake news, so rampant these days even literary expression has fallen under its spell. 13 Tseng was born at sea into a family of boat people who were later resettled on land and never lost his love of fishing, often bringing home catch for dinner.

39

The Inclusivity of Metaphor Nicole Walker

One strict criterion for creative nonfiction is that one must exclude the lie, but that seems, like the Arizona Education budget cuts, a little draconian and severe. Nonfiction shouldn’t be an exclusive sport like professional football where only the strong facts can play. Nonfiction should be inclusive, like PE in fourth grade where even I was allowed on the dodge ball team, although I dropped to the ground as if a grenade had been tossed anytime that red ball came within 40 feet of me. Which meant I spent most of the class period on the ground. But, like the taste of hyperwaxed gym floor on that weak, fearful girl’s tongue, a metaphor provides flavor if not exactly accuracy. Stephen Colbert, renowned literary critic and poetry scholar, when interviewing Elizabeth Alexander on his show after she read her inauguration commemoration poem asked her, “What’s the difference between a metaphor and a lie?” He said, “I am the sun, you are the moon, that’s not true.”1 She responded the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Metaphor is a way to make a comparison to let people understand something as it relates to something else and that’s how we use the language to increase meaning. Why not just say what you mean? Colbert asks. Because sometimes a writer wants to cast a wide net. Because a writer wants to mean two things at once. Even a nonfiction writer wants to include rather than exclude. That impulse to increase meaning might be one way to think of lying—if tell a lie and know the truth—two things exist. If I tell you that you’re the compass, my sail, and my map, I may have mixed metaphors and I may have lied to you, but at least you know about me that I’m lost at sea and you could be helpful if you’d spend a little more time with me. I’ve now expanded possibility. I made something exist in the universe that hadn’t been there before—a ridiculously shaped person with a sail for a head, a hand for a compass, and a heart for a map, but you got me here, didn’t you? A metaphor applies that same lying impulse to the possibility for two things to exist simultaneously. Even straightforward, narrative memoir can’t quit the metaphor; the desire to increase and multiply is too strong even for those who resist making stuff up.

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The stuff of metaphor is the stuff of pure make-believe. Even the moral essayists lied to make their point. Death metaphors tie terrestrial to ether. Those are obviously lies, or at least speculation, but necessary, because how else can we describe the other side but in comparison? Seneca about death: “I ask you, wouldn’t you say that anyone who took the view that a lamp was worse off when it was put out than it was before it was lit was an utter idiot? We, too, are lit and put out.”2 Seneca’s lie is life is a lamp. Plutarch on death and souls receiving support from a robust body: “A great part of sorrow is blunted and relaxed, like a wave under a clear sky, when the body enjoys tranquil sailing.”3 Kenko on immortality: “If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adahino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us.”4 Death is always fleeing somewhere, busy in its evaporation, but some metaphors tie things to earth. For instance food is of the earth. Terroir. Food is metaphorical. From the time your dad buzzed an airplane-spoon full of applesauce into your hanger-mouth, food had to be translated in. And food metaphor makes equivalences of taste. For instance, Adelsheim Vineyard, a winery in Oregon, lists paragraphs about their reserve series wines. The 2005 Elizabeth’s Reserve Pinot Noir offers aromas of candied cherry, sage, lavender, clove spice, and hints of smoke and rustic cedar. On the palate, there is wellbalanced focus and intensity in the cherry flavors, creamy tannins, and mouth coating finish. The 2006 Chardonnay shows lemons, figs, and apricots—as well as spice and hazelnuts—on the nose. The lies here suggest that you don’t ever have to eat again—just drink wine and all the nutritive value will flow through the aromas of fruit and nuts. One imagines that metaphors might be the provenance of fiction and poetry and just an occasional flourish in nonfiction, but really, nonfiction traffics mainly in metaphor. It is only in the suggestion that my life, in memoir, is relevant to yours in the most parallel and associative ways. How my life signifies in any way upon yours makes itself known only in metaphorical comparison. I get myself to you through the vehicle of my story. Its tenor coats you like, well, a warm coat, or a 2005 Pinot Noir. You and I, in the memoir, move in together in the coat. We drink the Pinot. Remember that time we lay in our bed spinning after we drank too much of that wine. Remember? Or at least I reminded you well enough about the time you spun. In the way I wrote about the popcorn on the ceiling and that popcorn spiraling me right off the bed into a buttery morning mess. You still with me in this coat of mine? Metaphor signals a different kind of nonfiction ethic than the truth and nothing but the truth. This alternate ethics suggests that inclusiveness creates a bigger net into

 The Inclusivity of Metaphor 259 which more readers can tumble. Through metaphorical connections readers find entry points and invite themselves right in. Edward Hoagland is inclusive in his essay “The Courage of Turtles.”5 He includes mechanics who know about carburetors and their governing. He brings in lawyers and diners who are etiquette-challenged. He brings in the penguin and the lion, linking animal with animal, creating a kind of ecology. One metaphor leads to the next, drawing a map of connectedness that returns to the turtle and the turtle is always put in relation to the human. The turtle is known not through its essence but through its resemblance and similarity to other members of the animal kingdom, including humans. It’s this similarity that makes the turtle significant—it has invited us into this planet of connectedness. Turtles figure for everything and everyone. ● ●

“Turtles are a kind of bird with the governor turned low.” “They’re Personable Beasts. They see the same colors we do and they seem to see just as well, as one discovers in trying to sneak up on them.”

Then he contrasts them with snakes and alligators, bringing them into the field even though they’re not exactly like turtles: ●

●

“Snakes, by contrast, are dryly silent and priapic. They are smooth movers, legalistic, unblinking and they afford the humor which the humorless do.” “Alligators are sticklers too: they’re like war horses, or German shepherds, and with their bar-shaped, vertical pupils adding emphasis, they have the idée fixe of eating, eating, even when they choose to refuse all food and stubbornly die.”

And then he brings humans, not just lawyers, into the field: ●

“Turtles cough, burp, whistle, grunt and hiss and produce social judgments.”

And then far-distant members of the animal kingdom are included: ●

●

●

●

“They can stretch out their necks like a giraffe, or loom underwater like an apocryphal hippo.” “They browse on lettuce thrown on the water like a cow moose which is partly submerged.” “They have a penguin’s alertness, combined with a build like a brontosaurus when they rise up on tiptoe.” “Then they hunch and ponderously lunge like a grizzly going forward.”

He even connects turtles to plants: ●

“They’re as decorative as pansy petals,” he writes.

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And to toys: ●

“But they’re also self-directed building blocks.”

And then he returns to animals: ●

●

“If one gets a bit arrogant he will push the others off the rock and afterwards climb down into the water and cling to the back of one of those he has bullied, tickling him with his hind feet until he bucks like a bronco.” “On the other hand, when this same milder-mannered fellow isn’t exerting himself, he will stare right into the face of the sun for hours. What could be more lionlike?”

And then he returns to humans again: ●

“And he’s at home in or out of the water and does lots of metaphysical tilting. He sinks and rises, with an infinity of levels to choose from; or, elongating himself, he climbs out on the land again to perambulate, sits boxed in his box, and finally slides back in the water, submerging into dreams.”

Turtles are humanlike, giraffe-like, hippo-like, and pansy-like. Hoagland’s metaphors make a dramatic ecosystem. Everything’s interconnected. Like the ecosystem that once existed in Hoagland’s childhood backyard, this larger ecosystem is also threatened. But Hoagland doesn’t decry or exclaim or say, where’s my land, where are my turtles? Instead, he makes a larger, metaphorical case that suggests if we don’t see that interconnectedness, we too could end up metaphorically burying ourselves in the sand. Or, to continue the metaphor of the boat, if you exclude the turtle, you’re excluding yourself. It’s like throwing yourself overboard, as Hoagland implies when he’s trying to save a salt-water turtle from captivity, but when he throws it over the Morton Street Pier on the Hudson River, he writes: He was very surprised when I tossed him in; for the first time in our association, I think he was afraid. He looked afraid as he bobbed about on top of the water, looking up at me from ten feet below. Though we were both accustomed to his resistance and rigidity, seeing him still pitiful, I recognized that I must have done the wrong thing. At least the river was salty, but it was also bottomless; the waves were too rough for him, and the tide was coming in, bumping him against the pilings underneath the pier. Too late, I realized that he wouldn’t be able to swim to a peaceful inlet in New Jersey, even if he could figure out which way to swim. But since, short of diving in after him, there was nothing I could do, I walked away.6

Hoagland never makes plain the case that what we do to the turtle we do to ourselves. But at the end, in the pathetic creature of the turtle, we see ourselves. Perhaps the most lyrical essays seem to rely on metaphor, but even practical essays can find the use in them. For instance, if you were at a conference about climate change

 The Inclusivity of Metaphor 261 and your topic was the ecology of metaphor, you could provide metaphorical models for carbon sequestering—“carbon sink” is a common phrase for climate scientists, but imagine the inroads they could make if they could extend that sinking metaphor. Flush the particulates down the drain. Grow mycelia to pipe carbon underground. Trees as lungs. Ferns as carbon doctors. Antarctic ice shelf dismemberment. The emphysamitic planet. The planet with a tracheotomy and we intubating the planet by sticking a tube down its soily, sunken, wormhole. If only we’d sequestered oxygen instead, we could be smoking the ground. The failure to alert people to the calamity of climate change is a failure of the imagination to make good enough metaphors. So lie to me. Make me good enough. Tell me I’m a saxophone, a tuba, a minor, plastic recorder—tell me how the sound blows through me like so much hot air. Tell me in your Catullus-like ways that I’m a monarch butterfly felled by insistent, righter rain. Tell me I’m a Pinocchio. A Parmigianino. A Cheerio. Or lie to me better. Tell me I’m an oak of fresh air or a dam in the stream of militant nonfiction talk. Tell me I’m a turtle. Make me feel better. Tell me carbon is a sink full of dirty dishes. Scrub the pan once, leave it alone, scrub again, the little baked-on grease comes away in the trap of your sponge. Sink the sponge. Tie it to the bottom of the ocean like the Exxon Valdez. Turn sponge into coral, make now-clean pan into your turtle home. We are all in the same boat, the earth is the ark and it’s sinking. But you’re supposed to be making me feel better with these metaphors. So lie to me some more. Tell me drought is like goose liver: the particles and particulates worry you like veins and gavage but the paradigm shift from forced feeding to cherry-sauce means you can change parched mouth from dry-pity to seemly drool. Tell me, like birds, that words don’t just fly, they land. Tell me that time I ate banana splits in France that you ate banana splits in France. That the time I walked in the front door and also thought you were standing in the mirror that you came out on the front porch, smoked a cigarette, and remembered the time that you too broke the derailleur on your bicycle and you too and I too drove gear-free down the big hill and leapt off the road together and into something, or someone, else.

Notes 1 The Colbert Report, Season 5, episode 11, directed by Jim Hosiken. Written by Stephen Colbert and Rob Dahm. January 21, 2009. 2 Seneca, “Asthma,” in The Art of the Personal Essay, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Random House, 1995), 9. 3 Plutarch, “Consolation to His Wife,” in Lopate, 19. 4 Kenko, “Essays in Idleness,” in Lopate, 31. 5 Edward Hoagland, “The Courage of Turtles,” in Lopate, 657–61. All subsequent quotations are from this text. 6 Ibid., 662.

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Part IV

Resistances Genre can be like a train running right at you, your foot stuck under the heavy steel tracks of tradition, history, representations, and the notion of a unified center. Our job as writers is to stand up to the train with the strength of our million elastic bands. These bands come in the form of counternarratives, margins turned to centers, stretching genre to fit our stories, multiplying the numbers of narrative. These bands resist, they slow the train down, maybe enough that we can climb on board, make that train capacious enough to hold these millions of stories and their attendant genres.

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The Funk of Defiance, the Freedom of Refusal Catina Bacote

A Counternarrative As a Black woman, I do not exist on the margin in any genre. Neither does my family or the other Black people I hold dear. We stand at the center of our lives. We play the main characters in our stories and letters, diaries and dreams, tall tales and poems. Along with billions of other people on this earth, we are doers and disruptors, shaping this troubled and beautiful world day by day. * * * The dictionary defines marginal as not of central importance, limited in significance or stature, [an] incomplete assimilation. The label feels like a way to exclude, to solidify a boundary. Of course, it is a relational word, and I regard its opposite—the heart, the hub, the core. In literature, there’s great authority in this notion of THE CENTER because it establishes the norm and sets the parameters for everyone. Even when it encourages experimentation, it allows select groups, primarily white cisgender men, to control the landscape. I believe it’s their viewpoints and stories that help shape what Toni Morrison called the master narrative, an ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else.1 Is the idea of the “marginal” a master narrative? Often those considered on the periphery are portrayed in a singular fashion—as victims. What a small station, a deceptive enclosure. And their narratives are typically characterized as deviant or exotic. I understand that writing can act as a window into a particular culture but doesn’t every culture have distinguishing characteristics? When most people refer to the marginal, they are calling attention to a society built on unjust privileges and punishments and pointing to inequities that cause harm in countless ways. I’ve used the word in one of my old course syllabi, and I’ve been on a conference panel geared in that same direction. So, I’m calling not for a restriction on language but for a reconsideration of an idea. Those thought of as outside the mainstream usually occupy a limited space in the imagination and literature. Our intersectionality is ignored. The multitude of distinctions within our collective isn’t deemed meaningful enough to

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merit deliberation. I don’t desire to be at the center or margin of literature. I’m interested in the possibility of dismantling the framework and the practices that come with it. In 2013, when I was an MFA student, I enrolled in a fiction course with a famous white male professor. He had a reputation as a cool and brilliant artist, and the other students in the class seemed to worship him. Every week we read a different novel, and all the authors on the syllabus were white (and the vast majority male) except for one. Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven made the list. But halfway through the course, the professor announced that we were running short on time, and he’d cut the book. I wonder if he chose the one he thought could teach us the least about writing or the one he’d added at the last minute. I could have raised my hand, stirred up a ruckus about the dropping of Alexie’s novel, but it was difficult enough studying in a predominately white graduate program and living in a predominately white city, so instead of asking any questions, I left class early and didn’t return for the rest of the semester. But I know from my own experience that perfunctory inclusion is not enough. It doesn’t address what is truly valued or deemed necessary to writers, readers, teachers, students, editors, booksellers, and the public at large. An add-on doesn’t disrupt the status quo or reimagine the realms of power and belonging. It allows the center to hold. I thought of this dynamic when I read a speech by Morrison about slave autobiographies that inspired the abolition movement. She didn’t view the autobiographies as the answer to the harm they addressed: “the slaves’ own narrative, while freeing the narrator, in many ways did not destroy the master narrative. The latter narrative could accommodate many shifts, could make any number of adjustments to keep itself intact.”2 Writers often act deliberately to expose pernicious beliefs that are part of a long continuum. For example, the claims from colonial times that Black people weren’t human to the policies and practices today that suggest Black life has no value. When dangerous ideas endure and shift, we can too. There are so many people on this earth who do not have the means or privilege to impose their values and culture on others, and it makes me wonder about the numbers: 1 billion, 4 billion? Can this many people really make up the margin? If we resist the premise, it will mean we’ve shifted, and the genre of creative nonfiction can hold us all. Counternarratives are one way to interrupt the notion of the center and margin. They stand firm against traditional authority and sanctioned sources of power. They expose lies, common misbeliefs, and evasions. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments Saidiya Hartman writes “with and against the archive”3 to show us how young Black women at the turn of the twentieth century refused to submit to convention, and when possible, moved toward splendor. In “Notes on Methods,” Hartman explains that the vice investigators, judges, and jailers who punished and confined the women described them as “promiscuous, reckless, wild, and wayward.”4 This language created a difference steeped in condemnation and justified inhumane treatment. In a chapter dedicated to the word “wayward,” Hartman breaks open the marker and reshapes its meaning. She begins: “Wayward, related to the family of words: errant, fugitive, recalcitrant, anarchic, willful, reckless, troublesome, riotous, tumultuous, rebellious and wild.”5

 The Funk of Defiance, the Freedom of Refusal 267 After meditating on the desires and feats of the wayward, she explains, “Waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the ones created by smashing out, are foreclosed. It obeys no rules and abides no authorities. It is unrepentant. It traffics in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different kind of life.”6 Her deliberation on the wayward helps me reframe points of difference without ignoring or minimizing them. Instead, I recognize what Audre Lorde spoke of as “non-dominant difference,” the kind that can serve as a “creative function” in our lives.7 As writers, we can follow Hartman and enter the territory of the so-called troubled to revise and expand the ongoing narrative. At the heart of my writing are dynamic Black folks of little means and tight-knit families, and it includes those who are often absent from such visions: the drug dealer, the felon, the addict, and the people who love them. I get as close as I can to their stories to understand their choices as well as the forces bearing down on them. It means listening to them carefully and studying documents I collect from personal and public archives. What do the photographs, letters, social media posts, diaries, pay stubs, certificates, city directories, police records, medical files, maps, annual reports, and memos want to tell me? What hasn’t been seen or heard, or understood yet? Here’s an example: One evening I sat on my grandmother’s couch looking through my uncle Dean’s high school yearbook. It had been more than twenty years since he graduated, but his mother still had it. The Wilbur Cross cover blazed with the school colors—red and white—and there was an easel and paintbrush and underneath it, “Let us paint you a picture.” On its first few pages were iconic photos of the city, including an aerial view of the trees on the New Haven Green. Most of the other photos showed the students. They perched on stools smiling at typewriters or sewing machines; others repaired old cars or dissected a frog. When I got to the photos of each graduate and followed the alphabetical listing of last names, Dean wasn’t there. But my grandmother told me she fought for him to graduate and appear in the yearbook. The higher-ups in the school system had a whole host of reasons to deny him a diploma: lateness, missed work, and a record filled with suspensions and two expulsions. And they probably knew he sold drugs and had been arrested more than once. Finally, I spotted Dean’s photo, after Natasha Zadorojnyi and Anthony Zebrowski. He looked relaxed and sported a wide smile. The other graduates had a list of their school activities and a catchy slogan to accompany their photos, but there was nothing that spoke to what my uncle enjoyed or his outlook on life. The last thing listed under each students’ picture was Future Plans. Students declared they’d attend college, sign up for the marines, enroll in business school, get married, and travel the globe. There wasn’t anything about the years ahead under Dean’s photo. I read into what was missing and figured it spoke to my uncle as a lost youth, a young man without the direction he needed. But, after reading Hartman, I wondered if the blank space might be a type of refusal. In his first year of high school, he cut a class or two and then skipped a day here and there. The guys he met from other neighborhoods taught him a lot more than his

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teachers, like how to build a reputation and get paid. As the year went on, class sizes dwindled, missed deadlines piled up, and Cross became a hassle, a big waste of time, and school or no school, he figured he’d end up where he already lived and hustled—in the projects. When I spoke with my uncle about that time, he admitted he didn’t care about getting a “crummy diploma.” But he used to sneak back in the house in the early morning after selling all night. He’d shower, dress, and head off to school because he knew a diploma meant everything to his parents, who meant everything to him. The most intimate parts of our lives aren’t found in the official records. The school report card. The rap sheet. The meeting minutes. So, how do we spot acts of defiance or subversiveness? If we gain access to a person’s inner life or have enough material to offer a speculative account, we will broaden our portrayals beyond victimhood and discover the endless ways people assert their humanity even under the most trying conditions. Wayward Lives is a model for how to reclaim acts of “open rebellion” and “experiments with freedom.” In addition, Hartman uses “a mode of close narration, a style which places the voice of narrator and character in inseparable relations, so that the vision, language, and rhythms of the wayward shape and arrange the text.”8 Eva Perkins lived in Harlem, and one summer night, three detectives on the hunt for a man who lived in her building ambushed her. “Eva hated the police detectives who had forced their way into her home and arrested her simply because they could, because Shine eluded them, and she could be seized as his surrogate,” Hartman explains. “Next time, she would give them a reason. Silently, she harbored the protest and the complaint.”9 This form of writing draws attention to the consciousness of Perkins and moves her from passive victim to actor. The reader experiences her life as she did, not as the jailers and judges who exploited her. Carmen Maria Machado discusses Hartman’s approach to the official stories found in the archive and acknowledges that “sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.”10 Machado writes about her innovative memoir In the Dream House, “I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon . . . I speak into that silence.”11 As we write about ourselves and others, we can, like Machado and Hartman, pay attention to what is assumed, taken for granted, or omitted in received narratives. We can search for who is absent, secondary, or only talked about but never got a chance to speak. Because when we rewrite the story of the past, it changes the story of the present. When I read Wayward Lives, a wild feeling took hold of me. I’m a descendant of the women in the book, and their decisions felt familiar because they match my own or those of the women in my circle. In Hartman’s account, their beautiful experiments include carving family structures that fit their lives, financially supporting others, breaking the rules of a bureaucracy that seeks to determine the most intimate parts of their lives, demanding their rights, and risking everything for the people they treasure. It reminded me that we don’t have to justify our ways, defend our inclinations, apologize for our failures, explain to death our intentions, or beg for sympathy, or understanding, or acceptance. Their stories serve as a reminder of my power and worth. And they

 The Funk of Defiance, the Freedom of Refusal 269 emboldened me to take a vow: to chase the funk of defiance and the freedom of refusal with equal measure and conspire with the wayward in my midst. A counternarrative offers not only an original take on particular people or places but gives us a new way forward. The problems we face as human beings—the force of them and how they’re colliding––are terrifying. Just in the United States: the largest wildfires in California history. Oil drilling on sacred lands. The long-standing murder of Black and Indigenous people by the police. Children separated from their parents at the border. The attacks on trans women of color, school children, and Asian grandmothers and grandfathers. The horrors of the prison-industrial complex. The phones ringing at suicide and domestic abuse hotlines. The tent cities. Just as we write against injustice and collapse, we can ask ourselves, what are we writing toward? Are we acknowledging the ingenuity it takes to survive? Or complicating the notion of resilience? Are we offering a radical take on tradition, raising visibility, or launching an intervention? Are we pointing in the direction of pleasure or repair? In the summer of 2020, as Covid deaths raged, droves of people lost their jobs, and millions marched against police brutality and anti-Blackness, I read Roger Reeves’s essay “The Dancing Drum: The Importance of Joy and Anger Amid the Protests.” I’m drawn to his idea that Black people won’t wait for an equitable and just society before we experience our “ecstasy.” He tells the story of a group of folks in Atlanta who protested while dancing and uses the example to demonstrate that joy may show up even in the middle of a catastrophe. He declares, “Now, this impossibility calls out to other impossibilities.”12 I take his assertion as an invitation for us to contemplate what is to come, to push ourselves and those in our orbit to unfamiliar ground, to take leaps, to open ourselves up to boundless dreaming, and project a possible future.

Notes 1 “Toni Morrison On Love and Writing (Part One),” BillMoyers​.com​, March 11, 1990, https://billmoyers​.com​/content​/toni​-morrison​-part​-1/. 2 Toni Morrison, “Black Matters(s),” in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Knopf, 2019), 155. 3 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 12. 4 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: Norton, 2019), xiv. 5 Ibid., 5. 6 Ibid., 228. 7 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Racial Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Morago, Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1981), 9. 8 Hartman, Wayward Lives, xiv–xv. 9 Ibid., 261. 10 Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2019), 4. 11 Ibid., 5. 12 Roger Reeves, “The Dancing Drum: The Importance of Joy Amid the Anger of the Protests,” Yale Review, June 29, 2020, https://yalereview​.org​/article​/dancing​-drum.

41

The Essay as Resistance Aviya Kushner

Shortly after Donald Trump captured the presidency in 2016, I was ushered into a gleaming office high above New York’s financial district, where I found Jane Eisner, then the editor-in-chief of The Forward, the national Jewish newspaper with a storied liberal history. She was brief and frank. She knew that I was about to leave the country for a sabbatical and that I had plans to write my next book in beachfront cafés far from America. But this was a national if not international emergency, she said. “There must be a response,” she said. “There can’t be silence.” At that confusing and perilous moment, when stunned voters who had believed the polling data walked around cities in shock or tears or both, Jane’s succinct prescription would change me as a writer and a reader. It helped me believe that language could be a form of resistance. “Just don’t let there be a void,” Jane said.

The Void I could see and hear what a void looked like in my mind; it was the blackness of night. I remembered Bruce Nauman’s Violins Violence Silence (Exterior Version), the 1981–2 flickering work of art—in impossible-to-miss neon—that sat atop the Baltimore Museum of Art for more than thirty years. The fluorescent letters, repeating those three words, blared during the AIDS crisis, challenging passersby to consider how seemingly unrelated words were in fact related. Those three words, shining back and forth at every hour of the day and night, kept me company as a college student at nearby Johns Hopkins University. There was a music to silence, but also a violence to it, I sometimes thought as I rushed to class or shut the blinds at night. Those words went into me; they resisted the void. Silence, violins, continuing with life as if it were normal—these were human reactions to suffering that had to be noted and battled against. As the poet W. H. Auden pointed out in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” written in 1939 on the eve of the Second World

 The Essay as Resistance 271 War, the great painters of the past knew that humans had the tendency to look away when others suffered: About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along1

I had to avoid “just walking dully along.” We were in a new war now, with the consequences blaring at us in virtual neon, but these consequences could also be clothed in silence or drowned out by the equivalent of garish violin music, or sound that blocked words that conveyed a message, a definition of language. I found myself thinking about how Nauman had made words into both art and resistance. What American voters had accepted so far were words—the insinuation that Mexican immigrants were all “rapists”; the threat that Muslims could and should be banned from the United States; the open disdain of women and their bodies. Americans had also accepted previously unacceptable physical gestures, a form of language, such as the mocking of a disabled journalist or the threatening hovering behind Hillary Clinton. But words are never just words. I wanted to note all elements of this linguistic assault, and to explain both words and gestures, not to mention acts, for what they really meant. As The Forward’s new language columnist—and the first woman to hold the post in the newspaper’s 120-year history—I wanted to make it clear that language could lead to violence, and that language itself was a crucial battleground that could not be ceded.

The Lights How could I make the subject of language scintillating, politically relevant, and as impossible to ignore as neon lights? Right after that meeting with Jane, I contacted scholars and translators specializing in dozens of languages and cultures, asking them to write me if they noticed something. That was my first effort to combat silence and to fight violent language with both observation and explication. I wanted the widest possible lens of observation. I thought of the motto on the subway to encourage riders to be alert to terrorism— “if you see something, say something.” This was a form of terror, coming from the Oval Office, and our job was to see it, name it, and say something. I wanted to get a note if experts observed language or actions that reminded them of oppressive behaviors in the culture they knew best. And so, I was grateful when Russian scholars wrote me en masse in the summer of 2017 to say that Stephen Miller, the senior policy advisor, and speechwriter for Trump, started using the word “cosmopolitan” and that this phrase was a euphemism for Jews.

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I was inundated with links to decades-old documents. Scholars were extremely concerned about historical slurs moving into contemporary discourse without anyone saying anything. Some stayed up at night reading altright blogs, which previously used the term “globalist,” to see if they were now using “cosmopolitan”—a term from the Stalin era. I believed it was important to convey the scholarly knee-jerk response to a wide audience. But at the same time, I felt a chill. One scholar told me she could not speak on the record because she had been threatened with not being allowed to return to Russia because of her prior statements. She knew scholars there who were fearful, and she did not want to further endanger them. Throughout the past several tumultuous years, she helped me by reading Russian-language news media and updating me, fact-checking what I wrote about Russia, commenting on how Trump was portrayed in Russian-language media, and expressing a second opinion on any quote related to her area of expertise. But her name never appeared in print.

The Vermin These conversations with worried scholars and translators put me on high alert for lifts from other historical eras. Nothing was new; it had all been tried before, in other contexts. Like any other language, the vocabulary of hate traveled from country to country, from past to the present. And so much of it, they warned, had previously been linked to violence—from imprisonment to murder. I began to think in historical terms. When Trump said that immigrants would “infest” the country, I heard the echo of Nazi rhetoric. I knew my task was to quickly tie Trump’s language to a historical source that could be easily Googled, viewed, and verified—and I also wanted to call out those who framed the comments as inconsequential. I thought of Jane’s insistence that we could not allow a void, and I typed as fast as I could. I wanted to stick to my personal credo of explaining words and gestures, and I wanted to honor the impulse of all the scholars and translators I spoke with regularly who heard history in what was happening. I also used traditional language columnist’s tools by explaining the roots of a word: “When President Trump characterized immigrants as ‘animals,’ some people waved it away, claiming he was only referring to gang members,” I wrote. “But his use of ‘infest’ in connection to human beings is impossible to ignore. The president’s tweet that immigrants will ‘infest our Country’ includes an alarming verb choice for anyone with knowledge of history.” I wanted to spell out the problem of invoking the image of vermin. Characterizing people as vermin has historically been a precursor to murder and genocide. The Nazis built on centuries-old hatred of Jews as carriers of disease in a film titled Der Ewige Jude, or The Eternal Jew. As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes on its website, in a section helpfully titled “Defining the Enemy”:

 The Essay as Resistance 273 “One of the film’s most notorious sequences compares Jews to rats that carry contagion, flood the continent, and devour precious resources.”2 What is happening now is “defining the enemy.” Substitute “continent” for “Country,” capitalized, and you get the picture. The roots of the particular word “infest” are also telling. The English word comes from the French infester or Latin infestare, “assail”, from infestus, “hostile.”

The Bones I never imagined myself furiously typing twenty-minute responses to Presidential assaults on everyday people. While I had read George Orwell many times before, I suddenly understood in my bones how and why Orwell had transformed himself into a political essayist in response to the Nazi threat. It was because he desperately needed the room. The essay, as a form, reserves space to think and question, and in so doing, it is a direct challenge to authoritarianism, which is about control of all, from language and thought to the body. The road to the crucial conquest of thought, as Orwell knew, begins in the seemingly innocuous realm of making certain phrases seem both ubiquitous and inevitable—and taking advantage of the power of meaningless prose, or what Jane helped me think of as “the void.” As Orwell observed in his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” which I reread often as I became a language columnist moonlighting as an authoritarianism alert machine, “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”3 Orwell is right that language can make the unacceptable acceptable. But I also found myself thinking about other authoritarian attempts to control what we think beyond using meaningless phrases that conceal horror. There is also an overall attempt to control a society’s discourse. Dictators want people to think about the same subjects—or sound bites—all the time. If the national conversation is completely focused on a prescribed phrase like “nasty woman,” what happens is that thought is controlled. The Leader is inside our head. Worst of all, wannabe dictators want to cast doubt on sources of information and knowledge, making the truth seem suspect, until the only source of any information becomes The Leader himself. The world’s ability to resist and repel a new generation of aspiring authoritarians turbo-charged by social media and buoyed by great waves of misinformation depended on extreme attention to language. If language was the battlefield, language columnists like me were suddenly on the front lines. This war was about the country’s soul, about its insides, its muscle and bone. But was it just this country? While it was easy to obsess about America’s problems, the rise of authoritarianism and the increase in hate incidents were international issues. They were infectious diseases that spread quickly, often with the help of unexpected collaborators.

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The Sources It was scary to realize that what might seem obvious to someone sitting in Berlin or Moscow would be utterly banal to an American. Historical memory could fade, letting ostensibly objective sources of information become part of an astonishing problem. Their errors of judgment could easily be weaponized. I found myself checking and double-checking the style guides of news organizations to see how they defined terms related to historical hatreds and scouring dictionaries with a critical eye; and drilling down into encyclopedia explanations. I became a citation activist, making myself—and my students—research anyone I quoted. This practice led to students realizing they had inadvertently quoted a white supremacist, a conspiracy theorist, and a gossip columnist. Legitimacy, we all learned, was easier and easier to fake. I kept Jane’s idea of actively resisting silence and not letting there be a void in my mind as I did all of this. When I realized in late November 2016 that the Associated Press’ stylebook, widely used by journalists, had a definition of neo-Nazis that did not mention Jews at all but instead mentioned “racism and white supremacy,” and a definition of the alt-right that did not mention anti-Semitism or neo-Nazis, I knew I had to write an essay in protest. At that moment, the alt-right was an immediate threat. When men with torches screech “Jews will not replace us,” their views on Jews must be included in the journalistic definition of who they are. I had a similar reaction to the discourse on the phrase “concentration camp.” I was stunned to realize that some dictionaries and encyclopedias did not mention the extermination aspect of many of these places. My skepticism soon extended to numerical resources. As hate crimes rose in the United States, I found myself poring over the FBI’s Hate Crime Statistics to separate fact from rumor—and realized that Jews were far more likely to be attacked than Blacks. I also read official reports on hate crimes in elementary, junior, and senior high schools as well as college campuses. I realized that the youngest Americans were experiencing hate and bias crimes at an alarming and rapidly growing rate. I also wondered about the term “hate crime,” noting that some major cities reported zero. This was also a question of language and terms. What is a hate crime? What isn’t? Some police departments would report a spray-painted swastika as “vandalism.” Some coded it as a “hate crime.”

The Front Door The terms evaporated and all of language became a blur as I rushed to barricade my parents’ door with furniture as a man with a machete roamed the neighborhood; he had already hacked a rabbi in his home, and the entire town was on high alert in what was already the second violent hate attack—let’s just call it that—in a month.

 The Essay as Resistance 275 That sleepless night, I knew I had to write a letter from my hometown. I knew I had to include statistics, as well as what it felt like, to stay awake, hoping your own parents would not be the next ones slaughtered. At that moment, the personal and the political came together. I had to meld the journalistic front with the home front, and explain, line by line, that if Americans did not do anything, hate would be at their front door. I was grateful for all the writers who had been here before, who had lived with a threat at their front door. In my overcaffeinated years of writing against the void, I reread Orwell and the great Italian essayist Natalia Ginzburg, who lost her husband to Fascism and who found ways to make the moral essay into a deeply personal form. I read Joseph Roth’s short essays in The Hotel Years, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, chronicling Roth’s travels as Fascism creeped in.4 I immersed myself in Dovid Bergelson’s masterful and haunting stories, The Berlin Stories, translated from the Yiddish by Joachim Neugroschel,5 for a fiction writer’s brilliant observation of a rising acceptability of cruelty, ratcheting up. I wanted to understand America’s particular relationship with cruelty. I reread James Baldwin, James Alan McPherson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates; each of these three major American writers had found ways to document cruelty, classify it, and simultaneously make that documentation into art. Each melded the personal and the political, making a personal letter—a nephew for Baldwin, a son for Coates, and a daughter for McPherson, into a letter to the nation. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were looking at the threat of European-style authoritarianism. I spent months with two diaries by Russian writers who got caught in the web of totalitarianism—by the great poet Marina Tsvetaeva, and the fiction master Isaac Babel. Tsvetaeva’s Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries 1917-1922, translated by Jamey Gambrell,6 chronicled a descent from comfort into hunger, and intellectual life into survival, fear, and desperation. I stayed up late at night, reading her account of coming home late at night and finding guards at her house; she had been reduced to a few rooms in her own home, and had to beg for entry. Isaac Babel’s 1920 Diary, translated by H. T. Willetts,7 covers the same period as Tsvetaeva; Babel the roving reporter chronicles the ramifications of power change and collapse. He looks hard at pogrom victims in Jewish communities shaking from violence, feeling their vulnerability and making it real to me, sitting in a cold Chicago night one hundred years later.

The Sound of Non-Silence How fragile we are—as individuals and as communities, I thought as I read onehundred-year-old accounts of prior power grabs. Though I was asked, in that office meeting when the world was in shock, to avoid silence and resist the void, and to prioritize a swift response over a slower, beautifully

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worded one, I kept returning to writers who understood that non-silence was not enough; there had to be a touch of violin. I found myself admiring the music of Baldwin’s sentences, and the rhythm of Babel’s. Ancient literary techniques like alliteration and assonance—forms of music—could sway minds. Essayistic touches like compelling openings, searing endings, and elegant transitions could reveal a society for what it was. The essay could name it all. It could observe, describe, consider, and react. It could make room for anger, despair, action, and reaction. As Tsvetaeva taught me, it could use fragments and the silences between them as a source of power. The essay as resistance is something that learns as it goes along. It picks up evidence, names, numbers, terms. It takes on ideas from the great past. Occasionally it splits itself into parts, skirting near the void but never falling into it. And in times of trouble, it moves fast, becoming a neon rooftop sign, flickering in the night.

Notes 1 W. H. Auden, “Musée Des Beaux Arts,” in W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 179. 2 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Defining the Enemy,” https:// encyclopedia​.ushmm​.org​/content​/en​/article​/defining​-the​-enemy. 3 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon 13, no. 76 (1946): 252–65. 4 Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years, trans. Michael Hoffman (New York: New Directions, 2015). 5 Dovid Bergelson, The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights, 2005). 6 Marina Tsvetaeva, Earthly Signs: Moscow Diary, 1917–1922, trans. Jamey Gambrell (New York: New York Review Classics, 2015). 7 Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary, ed. Carol Avins, trans. H. T. Willets, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

42

Prepositioning Resistance, Queerly Francesca Rendle-Short

This is not EDUCATION; it is DEFILEMENT. Angel Rendle-Short, Letter to Rt. Sir Paul Hasluck, Governor General of Australia, August 7, 1971 LOVE

inside the between

“When we find each the other there is an understanding that inside the between that is turning there are the both of us. There is recognition supposing that any heart can recognise an other there is known and knowing.”1

I want to form this essay three ways as triptych. Want the three ways to speak to each other—about and because of the other—each a necessary part of the whole: (1) queer resistance found in datum from Queensland in the 1970s (literally “something given”); (2) embodied story bringing that material to life; (3) an eisegetical troubling of language, of form, of method. Want this essay on resistance to perform resistance: refusal, apposition, struggle, resilience, love. This essay is not only what it says by way of content, but also (but of course) it is how it says it, the two resisting—the what and the how with and against the other that is turning—pausing sometimes (sistere) to stare to stand. It’s because of queer too, let’s be frank, queer three-ways—subject matter, queering form, and speaking position or subjectivity. Angel Rendle-Short at a Women’s Liberation conference, 1975: “Is it not true that your liberation is nothing more nor less than a political tool of Marxism.”2

This is a story of gold leaf beading and exotic black knits. A neck and chin held firm. In position. Speaking lips. A story of unmistakable voice, resonance, cadence, tone. Materfamilias. Also, a story of shock seeing Angel large on screen holding the microphone broadcast live on ABC Monday Conference. A story of my mother being laughed at by more than 700 strong. The Women and Politics Conference in Canberra celebrating International Women’s Year, 1975.

How do you preposition complicated feeling, emotional aberrancy, mother yes, but more so the m/other in us, in ourselves, an other who is the self, to nurture, to like, desire, approach those/these unspokens and untowards? Prepositions reveal what we do not know. They are an invitation.

Bending Genre

278 “We designed it so there was no one voice.”3

This is a story of a protesting doctorhousewife from the Deep North of Australia wearing her Sunday best ready to play with feminists and lesbians and Women’s Libbers and activist foremothers in our nation’s capital and to appear on a TV talk show as a dissenter, a rabble-rouser, “anti-smut campaigner.”4

Thinking prepositions insist on a relationship—a behind, along, since. Insist on relations between subject and object—Francesca swims towards Angel—it’s predicated on a relationship being present, the move prepositionally indicates some sort of future other-than-present negotiation. When we find each the other. Anti = opposite, against, in exchange, instead, representing, rivalling, simulating. Smut in the sense of defile, corrupt, make obscene.

I want to preposition this brazen hussy who comes to us out of a film of the same name (Brazen Hussies 2020) in and of a different order, nearly fifty years later, my mother. She begins our story. She gives us subject matter, trajectory, and tone. Brazen Hussies is a documentary film revealing the history of bold women from the Women’s Liberation Movement who re-ignited the feminist revolution in Australia (1965–75). These feminists, these lesbians, and separatists, and filmmakers, journalists, writers, unionists, artists, and members of Anarcho Surrealist Insurrectionary Feminists, poets, femocrats, the world’s first advisor on women’s affairs to a head of government, dared to demand equality and change—equal pay, affordable childcare, productive rights, prevention of domestic violence and rape—they were a rabble, passionate activists, they upturned the patriarchy. Said rude things. Without what they did we wouldn’t be where we are today. They made work such as Homosexuality: A Film for Discussion (Barbara Creed, 1975), Damned Whores and God’s Police (Anne Summers, 1975), Father Daughter Rape (Biff Ward, 1984), and Mother I’m Rooted (Kate Jennings 1975). “Prevention is Better Than Cure—*** Prevent Rape and Fornication, and the problem of illicit motherhood will solve itself.”5 “Q is for Queensland where the reaction is.”6

This story is raw and gutsy, it’s not pretty, not polished. It’s radical and queer in the fullest sense of the words.

There are all sorts of resistances here to remark on—the resistance demonstrated in the first place with this story—those Brazen Hussies whose efforts and protest and work became crucial social and political feminist elements of today—the rebelliousness of my mother rising from the grave at the end of this doco, her morals protesting against the perversion of modern society, lawlessness, school violence, gay marriage, “contraceptive vending machines in schools and alternative lifestyles such as lesbianism and homosexuality,”7 and the response of this mother’s daughter watching this film screening not knowing who would turn up, the shock, the (not)surprise, the heat and discomfort, red faces, the shame of seeing her there, witnessing Angel’s very public objection, hearing everyone laugh at her then and now—there is so much to jeer at, such a lot to ridicule. O, fuck.

 Prepositioning Resistance, Queerly 279 “Mrs Angel Rendle-Short, of Brookfield, said yesterday that a book given to her daughter, Francesca, as an English textbook at school would teach her to be a permissive rebel.”8

My mother waged a guerrilla and not-so-guerrilla warfare—she was there, wasn’t she? Probably against my father’s orders.

“[B]ecause to my mind they are not educated. I say this of my own children. I hope nobody is listening or is going to take this down in writing, but a family which has a lot of privileges—they have a room to study in, they have peace and quiet in the evening, they have everything, and parents who are interested, quite a big library of books—but in my view, coming out at the other end, they are uneducated at 17 or 18.”9

“In the school situation, give a 13-year-old Catcher in the Rye and I think he is a goner, because he has nothing against which to measure it scholastically.”11

A queer space of grammar and syntax opens up—how to language familial relations? A body desiring love? A refusal to accept something might not be possible. Or to put it another way—a desire to transform, to be always in motion, in flux, in process, never arrived.

This is also the story of burning bras and consciousness raising, feminists chaining themselves to a public bar in Brisbane because women weren’t allowed to drink there, women-libbers pinching men’s bottoms going up stairs to see if they liked that, as a form of protest. A time when lesbians were thought to be anti-social: “When something is criminalised you inherit the shame” (Vera Vigner).10

This is “lesbians are lovely” written in red lipstick in the men’s toilets in Parliament House (there were only men’s toilets in this place at that time, right?) in large school cursive script on the mirror for all to see. This is those lesbians-are-lovely letters and words finding their way into the newspapers into our consciousness and our imaginary.

To preposition resistance, it brings you up against something you are in relation with, it begs the next step. Resistance has grammar and syntax. The permissive rebel knows there is queer or queerly where fluidity and heresy and danger reside—there arrives a time when cúar or quer or twerh or terkw refuses to refuse or counterbend.

T Clutch Fleischmann writes of essay and queer: “They are only what we make of them in the moment we claim them, and in the moment others encounter us, and in the moments after that, too.”12 Live on.

“A friend sent me some excerpts from the books in question. I almost wish she hadn’t. They inspired me with an urgent desire for a bath.”13

Transgression gets easier in the doing. Bodies like verbs insist on action. It’s a staged response, a sally, a comeback, or return, processual by nature. It’s called writing. The more you transgress, the more fluid you become, the process of language and languaging enables the transition, the crossing over and back and forth and over and back and over again—in the carrying out, the bringing off, in the going in and the in and in—so that any resistance you had in the beginning sloughs off and becomes less remarkable, less important, and not so insistent. What matters is what comes after, what rises up, what voices next.

280 “One thing is the disease. Our young women are rotten with disease.”14

Bending Genre This is that same woman standing her ground three years later in an educational inquiry into her children’s education. Did she wear her gold leaf knit? When you “come out” as lesbian do you be-come a lesbian at that point, or is this when you acknowledge that this is what you are and what you have been all along?

Shame is like love it needles and scars. It lives subterranean, you feel it under your skin, below your chest bones, underneath the pleura of your lungs, round the back of your throat, save your saliva, up your intestine. It tells you what you don’t want to hear, it educates you. Tessellates knowledge. It fancy fancies you and you fancy fuss it back. You learn a new lexicon by heart.

Known and knowing. “I was thoroughly aroused and anxious and inquisitive. I therefore set out on a long and laborious path of literary research. I was astonished to find that Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (PARENT HAVE YOU READ IT?) which had once been questioned, was no longer controversial and is used extensively and generally in Brisbane schools.”15

Prepositioning resistance in the end and the middle and the beginning is much like prepositioning a wound (who would have thought—there are gaping holes and voids everywhere, vulnerabilities), it becomes and is a question of ethics and care (not rising panic, shallow breaths)—riding the boundaries of conscience, pressing the limits of standards of behavior, pushing the borders of rules and conduct, interrupting rights, and wrongs, meddling with credos. What is certain is that something is happening, there is possibility; hope is stitched into the preposition’s flank: among-ness, beneath-ness, during-ness, outside-ness.

The protagonist of Lolita16 asks the reader to keep reading, asks the reader to keep imagining what’s happening on the page, to bring it to life because if we readers don’t imagine what’s on the page then the protagonists and narrators and characters of our books, no matter what and who they are, won’t exist.

Resistance allows for (it invites) this prepositional space concerning, considering, against, amid, unlike, despite on the margin, it insists on pushing into the center to cause a stir, make a fuss, illuminate promise and possibility. It gives you options. You find words. Ways of sticking things together. Resistance is scissor and glue work. Preposition muscle to move with. Through outlawed queer thinking and moral danger. Within Lolita. Via dangerous books. Regarding Angel.

 Prepositioning Resistance, Queerly 281 “Because one sin leads to another, [Lolita] ends in murder. There is no pornography in this book, moreover it is beautifully written, but it is a rotten book, and fit only to be burned.”17

“We actively discourage the presence in our homes of lewd literature and sex saturated books. This control is accepted by our children because they know it is exercised in wisdom and love.”20

For a time, I passed with my mother, she didn’t know I was lesbian, until I came out—and out and out and out and out. Girls who grow up heterosexual don’t have to “do it” to know they’re straight, right?

I w/right18 about this elsewhere. “[Prepositional thinking] is what ignites new ways of thinking, creates new neural pathways, allows for slantness, oblique and not so oblique resistances, push-through, and importantly, processual thinking. It is the on and on-ness of the thinking and creating, an immersive, looping, reflective and reflexive process, that generates the next move whether toward or alongside. That propels a going around, sliding between, running beyond, or getting near.”19 Prepositions that insist on the both of us coming closer close when in truth opposites would rather be an infinity a w a y.

Us lesbians us queers and some allies cried that day in 2017 when 7.82 million people in Australia or 61.6 percent of the voting population said YES to accept samesex marriage, equal rights—among the glitter and tinsel and rainbow and trans flags and ribbons and hand holding and pink shoes—how we very nearly didn’t make it— how it very nearly broke us—how emotion ran giddy with rubbery legs, then how still and silent we became on the state library lawn, arms around each other waiting and waiting and waiting before hearing the positive result. A crying-fuck YES.

“[Creative nonfiction] knows the power of the preposition since it eschews writing ‘about’ (descriptively) and prefers writing from, toward, nearby, athwart, around, inside or out, performatively [. . .] [it] is in this sense a queer genre.”21 “[L]anguage is our salvation.”22

Stories of this kind turn to desire to language to writing to the habitation of non-acquisitional spaces to jouissance (to borrow from Hélène Cixous’s desire of language and wanting and écriture féminine). Where change can take place when meeting the m/other (yes, I am writing a literal mother, my Angel, but any heart can recognize an other) where to be with the other you understand stand-offs and opposites and across-froms (even when internalized as phobias), how sound or utterance is impossible without silence, how in order to experience light you need it to gloom. Sometimes this desire, this languaging, this Contrapuntal: contra impiety can be uncomfortable, even painful. (against) + punctum (to prick).

A wound opens. It scars. To dare. To write.

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I can’t say I fully understand how language and grammar works or whether I really comprehend the making of phrases and sentences and rhythms or prepositional jouissance—it is in the doing that any luminescence gathers and rejoices—but this balancing-act, this move into close-proximity happens when seeking out presence, adjacency, a coming over, circling above, hovering with—how practice through writing allows a kind of prepositional ethics to linger, to loiter, to exist: that this is what writing is, this is what writing does. It is a political act. A writing act. A need. Must. Resistance is tested by that same sense of resistance you feel coming close, the aversion to opposition, the wanting-to-disappear but paradoxically enacting the very same writerly resistance you are feeling in response, appositionally, to make something be heard, side by side, close together now, very within reach. Through writing and syntaxing you cultivate a grammar of resistance of queer, prepositionally— animating the besides, the withouts, the upons, the untils, opposites, offs and ons (more than fifty different prepositions in this essay for a start, plus some). The space between is this close—“inside the between that is turning there are the both of us.”23 The order of writing it creates is a space of commitment. A not-turning away, a moving stillness, an ongoing, and yes, crying-fuck, plus some cor meaning courage meaning—some heart.

Notes 1 Quinn Eades, Rallying (Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2017), 147. Emphasis in original. 2 Angel Rendle-Short, 1975, quoted in Brazen Hussies, directed by Catherine Dwyer (Melbourne: Film Camp Pty Ltd., Brazen Hussies Film Pty Ltd., 2020). 3 Brazen Hussies, 2020. 4 Courier-Mail, “Book Ban Denies a Right—Librarian,” April 29, 1972, 7. 5 State Library of Queensland, STOP PRESS, 1 (1, 2, 3), 1972. Emphasis in original. 6 James Hall and Sandra Hall, Australian Censorship: The XYZ of Love (Sydney: Jack de Lissa, 1970), 96. 7 Courier-Mail, “Radio Plan Loud But Not Clear,” October 27, 1975, 8. 8 Courier-Mail, “School Textbooks Slated: Rebel Ideas,” February 7, 1975, 3. 9 Angel Rendle-Short, Ahern Inquiry, Day 14, September 5, 1978, Select Committee of Inquiry—Education, Queensland Legislative Assembly, Queensland Parliament, Records [ca. 1978] [manuscript]: UQFL81, Box 9 (81/12), 795-800, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, 799. 10 Brazen Hussies, 2020. 11 Angel Rendle-Short, Ahern Inquiry, 800. 12 T Clutch Fleischmann, introduction to Body Forms, Queerness and the Essay, curated by T Clutch Fleischmann, Essay Press Listening Tour #29 (Buffalo: Essay Press, 2015), vi, https://issuu​.com​/essaypress​/docs​/flieischmannlt​_pages. 13 Ken Hood, “Books and the ‘Moral Landslide,’” Courier-Mail, January 14, 1972, 2. 14 Angel Rendle-Short, Ahern Inquiry, 797. 15 Angel Rendle-Short, “Moral Pollution of Children Through Literature: Information for Christian Parents,” August 1971–June 1972, “Individuals—Requests and

 Prepositioning Resistance, Queerly 283

16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23

Complaints Received From People Within Australia—Dr A Rendle-Short,” National Archives of Australia: A2880, 2/1/3913. Emphasis in original. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (London: Penguin, 2006). Angel Rendle-Short, “Moral Pollution,” emphasis in original. Peta Murray introduced me to w/righting w/riting experiments. See her “Essayesque Dismemoir: W/rites of Elder-flowering” (PhD dissertation, RMIT University, 2017). Francesca Rendle-Short, “Preposition as Method: Creative Writing Research and Prepositional Thinking, Methodologically Speaking,” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 18, no. 1 (2021), https://www​ .tandfonline​.com​/doi​/abs​/10​.1080​/14790726​.2020​.1726967. Angel Rendle-Short, Letter to Rt. Sir Paul Hasluck, Governor General of Australia, August 7, 1971 and June 1,1972, A2880/1, 2/1/3913, from “Individuals—Requests and Complaints Received from People within Australia—Dr. A. Rendle-Short”, National Archives of Australia. Mary Cappello, “Wending Artifice: Creative Nonfiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography, ed. Maria Dibattista and Emily Wittman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 237, 237–252. Ibid. Quinn Eades, Rallying, 147.

43

Exposition as Resistance Tell Me the Moon Is Shining Matthew Batt

The old workshop saw “show don’t tell” has been plaguing creative writing—especially prose creative writing—since before the dawn of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It’s so concise, so pithy, and so muscular an adage—and so close to something Chekhov once wrote to his brother (who had likely not been seeking creative writing advice) about how he shouldn’t tell him the moon was shining but rather show him the glint of light in the broken piece of glass, well . . . it just must be true! Like the other old faithful things that can be said of any given piece of work on the chopping block without having read it—such as “I think this is really two stories” or “this feels like it wants to be a poem” or “what if you started/ended later/earlier?” or “simplify!”—likewise “show don’t tell” just feels apt and true regardless of the circumstances and induces the immediate guiltsweats in the accused writer. And, like all good truisms, it is almost as often true and appropriate as not. Except when it isn’t. Which is a long way of critiquing the premise of the statement—which we rarely do—which is that scenes and images and showing is good and, on the flipside, telling or explaining or elaborating or, to use a term with less pejorative baggage attached and far fewer additional fees, exposition is evil. But before we get to why exposition is not only not evil but can and often is the most beautiful aspect of a given piece of prose, let’s think about why showing or scene was ever thought to be the be-all end-all of creative writing in the first place. Showing, or scene, as I prefer to call it, is that which can be rendered in writing as though it were being captured on film, either still photography or a movie. It takes place in a particular moment in time, in a particular place, to, you guessed it, particular people. It’s shorthand for ACTION. Telling or exposition is, simply everything else. That which can’t be caught on film. Feeling, thought, context, tangents, musings, arguments, explanatory text, philosophy, backstory, generic modes, habits, traditions . . . In television, film, and drama, we always know exposition when we see it because it’s always a voiceover, words on the screen, or super awkward characters thinking out loud with or without the privilege of an auditor. Probably the most famous example of

 Exposition as Resistance 285 filmic exposition is, of course, from Star Wars. If there was any way we could afford it, we would here include the iconic yellow and black text crawl which opens Episode IV, A New Hope: “It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.” A lot of contemporary writers and teachers of writing cut our teeth in the creative writing boom of the 1980s and 1990s where, arguably for the last time ever, literary writers and popular writers were one in the same. And, they were celebrities! Writers like Baldwin, Didion, Wideman, Moore, Hannah, Carver, Elkin, and, one of my teachers, Lee K. Abbott. This was back in the day when publishers would put their splashy photos taken by Marion Ettlinger on the entire back cover of their books. Back in the day when writers were like gods. And for the most part, they told us, when in doubt, well, you already know. So we did what we were told. But why?! Sure, scenes are dramatic and visually compelling, but if what we want is the visual and onscreen chemistry, we’re always going to be fighting a losing battle to TV and movies. Telling, of course, has not always been verboten. Think of the massive blocks of gorgeous expository text that comprise pretty much all of Proust, much of James, a goodly part of Dickens, and, well, pretty much every writer before the rise of TV and film. So how did they do it then, and why did readers not only endure it but arguably revel in it? My wild hunch is that, at least for early American readers, turning our first pages while still in the punishing shadow of our angry, pilgrims’ God, we thought we didn’t deserve to be entertained. Or, that when we would be entertained, we had to pay for it. For instance, if we’re going to get an awesome chase scene—which, in the end, is all really Moby Dick is—we’re going to have to pay it forward by enduring some excoriating chapters of exposition, such as we get in the “Cetology” chapter on the history of whaling: Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in alloutward its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the various species, or- in this space at least- to much of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.1

The architect and not the builder indeed! And maybe that’s part of the key—part of the strange allure that exposition can actually have. When we write great exposition, we’re inventing a world and the way it spins but not worrying about all of the little incidental and accidental details that any old writer could provide. But I’m thinking there’s more to it than that. That there are ways in which writing exposition can be not just beautiful, but also as dramatic and earth-shattering as a

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great scene can be. Here I’m thinking of the opening of Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son.” Before we can even begin to apprehend the meaning and the significance of Baldwin’s own present life, he insists that we start slow and go all the way back to the circumstances of his father’s death and beyond: On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. I had not known my father very well. We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride. When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first. No one, including my father, seems to have known exactly how old he was, but his mother had been born during slavery. He was of the first generation of free men.2

A birth, a death, the “vice of stubborn pride” throughout. If Baldwin’s workshop friends had gotten their hands on this we would’ve gotten not the austere and grave terribleness of it all in its fullest expression, but rather simple and, alas, common, scenes from birthing and death beds. It reminds me of something Ben Hecht said of the blight of the daily news: “Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.”3 In so many ways we as contemporary readers have become the oglers of TikToks and ticker tapes rather than the inquisitors of time and space more broadly considered. All too often, we want to get to the juicy bits and/or the point without acclimating to the world of the poet or writer. Here I’m thinking of the opening of Sherman Alexie’s “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” in which the narrator confides right off the bat that he’s homeless and that he knows that we readers can’t wait to get to the dark details about how he got that way. But, Alexie’s narrator insists, knowing, like all good artists, that once he gives up the answer to the seemingly one-and-only big question, the reader will leave him in the dust: One day you have a home and the next you don’t, but I’m not going to tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it’s my secret story, and Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks. I’m a Spokane Indian boy, an Interior Salish, and my people have lived within a hundred-mile radius of Spokane, Washington, for at least ten thousand years. I grew up in Spokane, moved to Seattle twenty-three years ago for college, flunked out after two semesters, worked various blue- and bluer-collar jobs, married two or three times, fathered two or three kids, and then went crazy.... I’ve broken a few hearts in my time, but we’ve all done that, so I’m nothing special in that regard. I’m a boring heartbreaker, too. I never dated or married more than one woman at a time. I didn’t break hearts into pieces overnight. I broke them slowly and carefully.

 Exposition as Resistance 287 And I didn’t set any land-speed records running out the door. Piece by piece, I disappeared. I’ve been disappearing ever since.4

Like actors in the limelight, Alexie’s narrator knows that once that light clicks off, a kind of darkness overcomes you. Exposition gives writers a way of staying the inevitable execution that comes for all of us. Maybe we don’t have a big, splashy scene or a pyrotechnic way to go out. Maybe some of us and some of our stories are more whimper, less bang, but that doesn’t mean that we or our stories are or mean any less. We all disappear eventually, but by using the inherent resistance of exposition— by elaborating, by going deeper, by going sideways, by using another example, by endeavoring to continue to simply be—we disappear a little less, and a little less quickly. Finally, what happens when we lose our context? What happens when our exposition—our backstory, our history, all of the connective tissue that tethers the moments of our lives together—what happens when it’s gone and all we have is scene? Can there be a way in which the suspension of exposition is itself and expression of angst and existential despair? Consider the beginning of Jo Ann Beard’s crushing “Fourth State of Matter” where, in anticipation of losing pretty much everything—dog, job, friends, husband—she foretells this void by giving us what we supposedly want— just scene: The collie wakes me up about three times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream. She’s on the shoreline, barking. Wake up. She’s staring at me with her head slightly tipped to the side, long nose, gazing eyes, toenails clenched to get a purchase on the wood floor. We used to call her the face of love. She totters on her broomstick legs into the hallway and over the doorsill into the kitchen, makes a sharp left at the refrigerator—careful, almost went down— then a straightaway to the door. I sleep on my feet in the cold of the doorway, waiting. Here she comes. Lift her down the two steps. She pees and then stands, Lassie in a ratty coat, gazing out at the yard.5

Here Beard is, this scene insists, always here, only here, ever here—and in Iowa City no less—stranded in this existential and expository abyss where that damned second hand is jammed—where time never moves a little faster—where she can never get even a little outside of this epic moment of anticipated loss. Here, exposition would be a kindness, a mercy, but she doesn’t afford it for herself nor for her readers. Scene, in this instance, is the last thing we and she want, but it’s all we get. In the end, of course, scene is no more the bad guy than the second hand on the clock—though we can still blame TikTok for pretty much everything. Imagine, I shudder to suggest, that that was all we got, ever, from one another or from art, was the infuriating always now of SnapChat or the suicidally Sisyphean fifteen second loop of TikTok. Neither, I hope we’ve seen, is exposition the dusty old hobby horse that only our Victorian-era forebears would use to crank up their word count since they supposedly how they got paid—by the word. Like contestants adrift on an unscripted

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survival show, we will all figure out the hard way that just like the body needs fat as much as it needs protein to survive, we need exposition as much if not more than we need scene to tell the story of the unlikely way we made it through this dim but nonetheless moonlit world.

Notes 1 Herman Melville, Moby Dick (London: Richard Bentley, 1851), ch. 32, https://etc​.usf​ .edu​/lit2go​/42​/moby​-dick​/682​/chapter​-32​-cetology/. 2 James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York: Dial Press, 1963), 76. 3 Ben Hecht, quoted in “The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor,” Minnesota Public Radio, February 28, 2008, https://writersalmanac​.publicradio​.org​/index​.php​%3Fdate​ =2008​%252F02​%252F28​.html. 4 Sherman Alexie, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” The New Yorker, April 21, 2003. 5 Jo Ann Beard, “Fourth State of Matter,” The New Yorker, June 17, 1996.

44

The Lyric Essay as a Mode of Resistance LaTanya McQueen

I have never been good at speaking out. When the occasion calls for it, my instinct is to shut down. To stay quiet. Hide. I’ve never been one to speak my mind no matter what desire may lurk within me to do otherwise. I grew up with parents who believed in the politics of respectability, and they taught me that to do well in this world was to not do anything that might call attention to myself, to not disrupt or challenge but instead to keep my head down. They believed that if I worked hard and tried to get ahead that maybe, just maybe, I might have a chance in this life. Some years ago, when I was completing a graduate program at the University of Missouri, the students there spoke out about the indignities they faced on the campus— they spoke about the acts of racism that largely went ignored by administration, acts that made them fear for their lives, as well as the removal of health insurance among graduate students—and their efforts culminated in protests that made national news, further sparking protests to happen at other universities across the country. When I look back on that time, what I often think about is how afraid I was, and how my response to what I saw happening around me was to further retreat within myself. I could not be like those around me that I saw. At the time, I did not know how. In my daily life, I’ve always felt I did not have a voice, but through writing, in particular through the lyric essay, I found my way to what I thought I did not have. One of the very first essays I wrote utilized both the form of the travel guide as well as footnotes to talk about my own experiences of racism during the time I was in Missouri. I wanted to write an essay that looked at how Black voices often get erased within the context of history. With the protests, I thought of how many of the stories about why students were protesting, the stories of hate crimes and lack of support from the administration, fell by the wayside in service to issues that while tangential, made for bigger headlines— debates over why the university football players got involved, for instance, instead of a larger conversation about what led to students protesting in the first place. I wanted to write about my own experiences of being made to feel small during my time there, but I knew I would never find the directness to approach this in a traditional essay.

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What was it about the lyric essay that made me able to speak to what I felt I needed to say? What was it about this form, more than any other, that opened a possibility that other modes couldn’t? In retrospect, it makes sense I would eventually come to the lyric essay. I’ve never liked the ways in which publishing, as well as academia, categorize the work I do. It’s always felt too simple, too neat, too easy. I’m a Black writer, but that doesn’t mean everything I write solely has to deal with and spoken in connection to my racial experience. While I’ve written predominantly lyric essays within the genre of nonfiction, I’ve been told that some of them have veered toward poetry. Frequently, in discussions about my work, there are questions about my structure, because even within the confines of the lyric essays I seem to sometimes go outside the confines of expectations of the genre. I have learned over the years to write what I write and to not be bothered with the burden of how others want to see what it is that I do, and what led me to this realization was the lyric essay. It is a form that has always resisted easy classification, and as such, its very definition is an act of resistance. The lyric essay seems an apt form for Black writers to write about their experiences since the history of Black experience is one of resistance. There are the stories of the slave revolts, yes, but I also think of how slaves jumped from ships, choosing to drown rather than live the rest of their lives in servitude. I think of those slaves who feigned illness, who broke tools, who staged slowdowns to resist their work. I think of the way Black people taught themselves how to read when there were laws that prevented them from doing so. They taught themselves and taught each other, using their knowledge to write their own passes to escape from slavery. I think of the holler songs sung out on the fields, songs often encoded with secret tellings to others on how to escape their fates. In these songs were two voices—one to the master who enjoyed hearing their suffering, and another one underneath the surface, a call to the enslaved brethren, guiding them to be free. To resist often seems subtle, often unnoticeable to those accustomed to not seeing. With Black stories, there is always the desire for us to tell about our trauma, to expose our pain for the consumption of others, but if you look within these stories, within these experiences, there are also often hints of light—of laugh and joy, of resilience and triumph. It is there if you desire to look for it. To see it. For Black writers, the very act of finding space to speak to one another in a world that constantly works to suppress our voices is also an act of resistance. We also know the danger that can come when speaking out, and so we signify—we adapted to mastering the art of indirection, of subtext, to say what we need to. Why not then use the lyric essay, a form that is also often indirect in its way of speaking, to continue what we’ve always done? We are always finding ways to speak to each other, to guide each other to where we need to go, and the lyric essay is just another way for us to continue on in speaking truth to our stories, just through using another form we can make our own, and in this way, we will resist.

45

It Is What It Is Eula Biss

All living matter, and anything derived from living matter, is organic. In the slightly more specific terms of chemistry, organic compounds are those that contain the element carbon. The word organic can also be used to describe a harmonious relationship between parts of a whole. In some definitions the word lyric has something to do with feeling. In others it has something to do with musicality. When used to describe a voice, it means “characterized by a relatively high compass and a light, flexible quality.”1 As a noun, it means the words of a song or a kind of poem. “The range and variety of lyric verse is immense,” writes J. A. Cuddon, “and lyric poetry, which is to be found in most literatures, comprises the bulk of all poetry.”2 And so lyric might, when applied to the essay, seem to mean poetic. But that is an open jaw, meaning we fly into one city and out of another. Organic can refer to a natural development. Arthur Rimbaud called his prose poetry “pure prose.” James Joyce called his “epiphanies.” William Carlos Williams called his “improvisations.” In 1940, the same year that the British agriculturalist Baron Northbourne first used the term organic to describe a farming practice, the British botanist and Agricultural Advisor to India Sir Albert Howard proposed that the best new methods for growing food were old methods. He argued that rejecting the current system of scientific agriculture for the traditional techniques of Indian farmers was the only way to “safeguard the land of the Empire from the operations of finance.”3 Naming something is a way of giving it permission to exist. And this is why the term lyric essay was so important to me when I first learned it.

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Not long after I stumbled across the Seneca Review’s description of the lyric essay, I found myself, by some accident of fate, in a crowded stairwell next to Joyce Carol Oates. To make conversation, she asked me how I would classify the writing I had just read to the people who were penning us into the stairwell with little plastic cups of wine. I told her that until recently I would have called it prose poetry, but that now I was inclined to call it lyric essay. “Oh, good,” Joyce Carol Oates said to the laughter of someone who nodded knowingly next to her, “because, really, who wants to read prose poetry?” When Lord Northbourne used the term organic farming, he meant “the farm as organism.”4 Applied to any ecosystem, the metaphor of the organism reveals the danger in allowing the parts to distract from the whole. My students ask me what the difference is between prose poetry and the lyric essay. I tell them that there isn’t always a difference. I hear myself saying “artificial categories” while I try to think through all the problems with the question, and then all the problems with my answer. I suggest that not everything that falls somewhere between prose and poetry is prose poetry and that the term is associated with a particular tradition that has been developing its own conventions for 150 years. I talk about Bertrand and Baudelaire and I say “lineage,” but my heart isn’t quite in it. I suspect that genre, like gender, with which it shares a root, is mostly a collection of lies we have agreed to believe. In the decades after the atom bomb and Silent Spring, when the possibility that we might destroy our own world seemed likely, the question of sustainability defined the organic movement. Any practice that could not be sustained indefinitely—such as the massive cultivation of a single crop that would inevitably become vulnerable to diseases and pests, or the use of fossil fuels to ship produce thousands of miles from where it was grown—was to be avoided. This philosophy was in direct conflict with the conventional thinking of the time. To farm on a small scale was to disregard efficiency, and to sell produce locally was to reject the mass market. One unintended consequence of calling my writing essay instead of calling it poetry, I discovered rather quickly, was that it would be much more frequently subjected to the conventional expectations of the essay—it would be expected to operate logically, to be cohesive and thorough, to have a clearly supported argument. Holes in an essay, I tell my students, flaws in the logic, contradictions, unanswered questions, loose associations may all be necessary because of what they ultimately make possible. I believe this, but I also have my doubts. I am suspicious of gaps, of silences, of contradictions because I know how easily they hide unfinished thinking. Organic, to some, is a philosophy. To others it is a product.

 It Is What It Is 293 The USDA standards for regulating the commercial use of the word organic came into full effect in 2002. Like most organic standards, they allow for the limited use of several substances that are toxic to humans, fish, and, in one case, honeybees. And because of fees and paperwork requirements, among other things, the USDA certification process inadvertently favors large-scale producers. Under the USDA standards, Stonyfield Farm, which is majority-owned by the French dairy giant Groupe Danone, sells organic yogurt made with strawberries from China, apples from Turkey, blueberries from Canada, and bananas from Ecuador.5 This global sourcing violates, for many, the spirit of the organic movement. But the USDA is not in the habit of regulating spirit. Occasionally, I use the word organic to explain why I write the way I write—as in, “This form is organic to the way I think.” “An organic farm,” writes Wendell Berry, “properly speaking, is not one that uses certain methods and substances and avoids others; it is a farm whose structure is formed in imitation of the structure of a natural system that has the integrity, the independence and the benign dependence of an organism.”6 “Icons beget iconoclasm,” Steven Shapin writes of some critiques of the organic industry.7 And this might explain why I feel the need to resist all the current attention to the surface of the essay and to the shape of it. Empty essays that throw up formal smoke screens ought not to be celebrated any more than over-priced, mass-produced spinach. “Consumers like boutique brands,” the head of the organic unit at General Mills, which owns two major organic names, Cascadian Farm and Muir Glen, told Business Week. “There’s a feeling of authenticity.”8 A lot of euphemism and categorization and shuffling of feet goes into the project of making a clear distinction between the kind of nonfiction that deserves to be regarded as art and the kind that does not. Never mind that such a distinction cannot be made, such a project is destructive to our environment. Organic is commonly used as a synonym for healthy. By one account, 90 percent of frequent organic buyers believe they are buying “health and nutrition.” But there is very little evidence that organic food is any healthier than other food—organic produce has not been proven to offer superior nutrition, and the pesticide residues on conventional produce have not been proven to be harmful. Several studies, however, have found that organic farming uses considerably less energy and produces less waste than conventional farming.9 So, some organic food is healthier for us in its production, but as consumers we aren’t accustomed to buying process so much as we are to buying product. And we want to buy our own health, not someone else’s. Genre is not at all useful as an evaluative tool, but we seem to be tempted to try to use it that way. And we seem to be tempted to rely on just about anything but our own reading of a text to determine its value.

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“How to Avoid a Famine of Quality,” was the title of one of Sir Albert Howard’s articles. In it he suggests that we think a little bit harder about our food. The supermarket chain Whole Foods sells produce that is classified as either organic or conventional. This terminology is misleading, in that many large organic producers now use methods that could best be described as a hybrid of organic and conventional practices. Horizon organic milk, for example, is produced without the use of antibiotics or hormones, but Horizon cows are confined in large metal barns that hold 4,000 cows.10 The result is less expensive organic milk and more of it. One of the undeniable advantages of conventional agriculture is that it feeds more people. There is no reason that a work of prose cannot be both lyric and narrative. As categories, we might like to believe they are distinct, but as qualities, they are not mutually exclusive. This is the point at which my students begin to get frustrated with me. I have failed to adequately explain the difference between any number of kinds of nonfiction by now, I have failed to explain the difference between poetry and nonfiction, and I have even failed to explain the difference between fiction and nonfiction. Conventional agriculture might be better termed experimental agriculture, in that it is a radical departure from just about the entire history of agriculture and the outcome of this new approach is still entirely uncertain. A student asks me what a lyric essay is. She is holding her pen above a pad of paper and looking at me expectantly and all I can think is, “It doesn’t matter.” Experimental once meant “based on experience as opposed to authority.” The fine points of the official standards for organic produce become irrelevant if you know where your food comes from and how it was grown. This was once a slogan of the organic movement: “Know your farmer, know your food.” But that’s easier said than done. As the meaning of the term organic becomes increasingly complicated, alternative terms are emerging. Authentic food is one. “Authentic,” writes Eliot Coleman, who authored the term, “is meant to be the flexible term organic once was.”11 The word authentic, Coleman notes, is derived from the Greek authentes: one acting on one’s own authority. Old names beget new names, and genres beget subgenres. But knowing what a thing is called—how it is classified, how it is packaged, how it is marketed—is inevitably a poor substitute for knowing what it is.

 It Is What It Is 295

Notes 1 Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 4th ed., s.v. “Lyric.” 2 J. A. Cuddon, ed. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th ed. (New York: Penguin, 1982), 372. 3 Sir Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), 15. 4 Lord Northbourne, Look to the Land (London: J. M. Dent, 1940), 81, quoted in John Paull, “The Foundational Idea of Organic Agriculture,” Elementals: Journal of BioDynamics Tasmania 83 (2006): 14–18, http:// orgprints​.org​/10138​/1​/10138​​.pdf. 5 Diane Brady, “The Organic Myth,” Business Week, October 16, 2006, https://www​ .businessweek​.com​/magazine​/content​/06​_42​/b4005001​.htm. 6 Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural, 1st ed. (New York: North Point Press, 1981), 143–4. 7 Steven Shapin, “Paradise Sold,” New Yorker, May 15, 2006, 84–8. 8 Bruce Philp, “Reality Bites, No Injuries Reported,” Brand Cowboy Blog, October 15, 2006, http://brandcowboy​.blogspot​.com​/2006​_10​_01​_archive​.html. 9 Wikipedia, s.v. “Organic Food,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, http://en​.wikipedia​ .org​/wiki​/Wikipedia​:Citing​_Wikipedia (accessed May 18, 2012), https://en​.wikipedia​ .org​/wiki​/Organic​_food. 10 Rebecca Claren, “Land of Milk and Honey,” Salon, April 13, 2005, https://www. salon​ .com​/2005​/04​/13​/mi​lk​_3/. 11 Eliot Coleman, “Beyond Organic,” Mother Earth News, December/January 2001, https://www​.motherearthnews​.com​/Real​-Food​/2001–12–01/ Beyond​-Organic​.as​px.

46

How It Is Writing Toward Wonder Jessica Hendry Nelson

Wonder as Creative Imperative There was a moment in September of 2020 while the pandemic raged and my new students and I stared at one another’s faces through our different screens, in different rooms, some of us in distant cities, even, that I felt a sudden and intense sense of wonder. The sensation caught me off guard—not because I am a stranger to wonder— but because it was occasioned online, a space I typically equate with dread. Here is what provoked me: Zay, leaning earnestly into the camera lens, her purple hair wild as a tiger’s mane; Kelley, with their pink blanket draped around their shoulders, taking ferocious notes; Gabe, flat in bed from the effects of a back injury suffered years ago; Justin, and his cherub face, which I was sure had not changed much since he was a toddler. The wonder I felt looking at them, albeit mediated by the screen, was not all good vibes, as they say, but a more complicated feeling. I knew they were hurting, cut off from their friends and loved ones, stymied in their collegiate careers, prohibited from traveling or kissing their grandmas. They would not be dancing their hearts out at concerts this fall, or even inside the dark excesses of frat basements or dingy bars. There would be no soccer matches or late-night study seshes in dorm lounges. No Tinder dates or studying abroad. Most of my students were caught inside the confines of their childhood bedrooms, dated band posters hanging crookedly behind them, younger siblings shouting down the hall, caregivers quietly panicking over breakfast. Their resilience was under threat by the apocalyptic world they are inheriting, not just the global pandemic but also a catastrophic climate crisis, pervasive social injustices, and the overwhelm of technology designed to buy and sell their attention like baseball cards. This was not the college experience they had hoped for, and yet, here we were, screens be damned, bonding over Annie Dillard’s wild, poetic prose and Kiese Laymon’s rhythmic, incisive observations. I listened to their ideas and stared at their beautiful, strange faces. There was a breeze through the open window, soft as silk dressing a wound. The seltzer water was cold and slid brightly down my throat. On my desk was a photograph of my great-grandmother and grandmother, mother and child,

 How It Is 297 both long-dead. My grandmother is about eight years old in the photo, wearing braids on either side of her head and a white, ruffled blouse that matches her mother’s, who is seated in front of her on a lawn chair. Neither is smiling, in fact they are both scowling, identical blue eyes squinting meanly into the sun. The photo is colorized and must have been taken around 1941, just as the Second World War was amping up abroad and my Jewish ancestors (the other side of the family) were running for their lives. The clarity of the photograph is uncanny for one so old, and I’m struck by their air of implacability and grace. A painting by a former student hangs above the photo, swirls of dense blues and greens below which reads the caption, “Do you want to resolve this situation by living or dying?” As I stared at it, Raina read aloud from Dillard’s essay, “Total Eclipse,” a passage that perfectly describes my experience of wonder: In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.1

I care deeply for my students, and our life together here, and in that moment felt it viscerally, bodily, and not for the first time. But it was not my care that struck me so much as their care for one another, our work here, and the thoughtful, tender ways they navigated class each week while all around them the world burned. It was a welling up, a shock of joy inside a tunnel of grief. Or joy similar to how Zadie Smith describes it in her essay, “On Joy,” that we’d read just the week prior, “that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.”2 I know it well, both because I am prone to it in life, but also because I had just finished writing a book of essays about wonder, and so I was especially sensitive to the ways it cultivates meaning on the page. Wonder, let’s here call it wonder, always contains coexisting truths, and indeed cannot exist without them—it requires the recognition of joy and grief; eroticism and pain; love and apathy. Wonder, which derives from the Old English wundor, which may be cognate not only with the German wunder but also with wunde (cut, gash, wound). Wonder also means “something that causes astonishment.” In Latin, it’s attonitus (thunder struck). Wonder is emotional, intellectual, and deeply sensory. We feel wonder when surprise interrupts a repeated pattern of thought or feeling. It wakes us up; it smacks us in the face. In the best essays, wonder is often the creative imperative, subject matter (or a lens on subject matter), and the essay’s compositional directive. The essays I had been writing in that collection are each an attempt to resolve truths that I knew, deep down, could not be resolved, and yet, animating the questions brought me to unexpected planes of recognition and surprise. The essays are about other things, too, divorce and addiction and a fateful day in an Atlantic City church parking lot, but wonder is the lens through which these subjects are considered. This meant finding ways to defamiliarize the familiar, which then threatens our equilibrium and changes us in the process. It is related to the uncanny,

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in the German etymology, unheimlich, a feeling of dread, fear, and terror, with heim meaning home, so, roughly speaking, the fear of that which is most familiar. It’s also related to the sublime, certainly, and the idea that, as Ross Gay articulates in his essay, “Joy is Such a Human Madness,” “[. . .] all angels remind us that annihilation is part of the program.”3 Wonder is also the stumbling sense of profound recognition that wrecks me when I read writers like Dillard, Gay, Layman, and Smith; or when I watch an elderly father blow kisses to his adult daughter through the window of his nursing home because her body, the one he had a hand in creating, is now a threat; or when, as a less-beleaguered undergraduate than the ones I teach now (or differently beleaguered anyway), I found myself alone in an art gallery somewhere in London weeping at a series of selfportraits that showed a woman, the artist, slowly dying from cancer, and then in the last few photos, per her instructions to her assistant, dead from cancer. Plainly, it was the inexplicable and lacerating recognition that I will die. That indeed everyone I know and love will die, is dying. Not the passive, intellectual recognition of that truth— the “oh damn” kind—but the real, soul-shuddering, existential dread kind. There was time’s relentlessness in those portraits, her pinked cheeks growing sallow, lips of wilting roses, hips emptying like cracked bowls. God, how I loved her in that moment, a kind of looming love, like the love of life itself. How I mourned her and everyone else, in all our ordinary, naked vulnerability, and years later those students too, expanding inside their intractable boxes, voracious as ghosts and just as ephemeral. Beneath the terror of our current moment is the “substrate” that makes it possible: our own terrible, trembling, vital care. This is what makes writing toward wonder a political act, too, as nonfiction writing inherently always is—because when we find joy in moments of crisis we can subvert shame, insist on our own humanity, and anticipate a different future. This is also why it seems to arise again and again in moments of sociopolitical upheaval. Take Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” for example, following the Congress of Vienna; or Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, which was published in 2019 during the volatile Trump era; or here in Richmond, Virginia, the new statue by Kehinde Wiley, Rumors of War, which he made in response to a series of Confederate monuments (most of which, as of this writing, have since been removed) lining one of our city’s most notorious avenues. Each monument features a “heroic,” white, Confederate soldier atop a muscular horse, but in Wiley’s piece showcases instead an exuberant, young Black man in dreadlocks, Nikes, and ripped jeans, looking out regally across his fraught territory. Wiley says, “In these toxic times art can help us transform and give us a sense of purpose [. . .] We come from a beautiful, fractured situation. Let’s take these fractured pieces and put them back together.”4 Note the contradictions of “beautiful” and “fractured,” and trust me when I say that standing beneath this towering work in this divided city, during these divided times, generates feelings of swooning wonder enough to restart the heart. This is what we mean when we say “profound emotion” and it’s everywhere if we learn to pay attention. It occurred to me then that if I wanted my students to write with and toward their own, unique wonder, we (I include my whole self here) would

 How It Is 299 have to practice waking up to joy by reclaiming our attention from the mind suck of our screens (not just Zoom, but the more treacherous social media platforms, too) and directing it outward into our real and corporeal worlds.

Verbing the Essay I did not know all those years ago to call the images I saw in the gallery an essay, but I do now. Can we imagine that the essay is not only words on paper, but any pursuit of meaning conjured from experience? Nothing restricts the essay to prose, or even to written language (video essays are one fine example). What if the essay is instead the animating space through which meaning is contextualized and clarified? To essay is a verb, as is to wonder. I essay when I carry those self-portraits in my body across time and space, invoking them as part of my meaning-making framework, and offer them now, to you, across time and space. This is why I love essays, which in their slippery, amorphous, digressive, and changeling forms are so well-suited for wonder. Essays disrupt the status quo and defy tidy definition. As David Lazar reminds us earlier in this anthology, “the desire of the essay is to transgress genre.”5 Perhaps this is why we struggle to name the forms our creative nonfictions take. Are they flash essays or prose poems? Lyric essays or hybrid? Hermit crabs or dual genre? The essay’s verbing, however, should not be mistaken for imprecision. Part of the essayist’s agenda is one of meticulousness (read: care) and clarity, which is also, always, an embrace of ambiguity. John Berger, in Keeping a Rendezvous, clarifies the connection: “If a writer is not driven by a desire for the most demanding verbal precision, the true ambiguity of events escapes him.”6 At its heart, essay is a way of seeing, similar to the way that Emily Brontë used a deliberate misspelling of the word “watching” (“whaching”) to connote a particularly embodied way of looking, a kind of spiritual vigilance, which she kept all her life beside those icy, heart-clenched moors. Part of what I try to impress upon my students is the profundity of ordinary experience, and why it is as worthy a subject for art as suffering, which is of course also ordinary. To write toward wonder is to acknowledge that joy is as rich an emotion as sadness, and wonder needs both, needs all. I once heard the writer Garth Greenwell say in an interview, “It’s an aesthetic failing but also a moral one [. . .] to see happiness, even very ordinary happiness, as somehow less profound, variegated, interesting, less accommodating of insight, than other kinds of experience.”7 Many of my students have known trauma and hopelessness worse than even this harrowing time of plague and polemics, but unless they can also find and evoke joy through a practice of attention, their ability to cultivate wonder in their work is limited.

Wonder as Sustained Attention Before the pandemic, when my students and I shared physical spaces, I worried about the breakdown of eye contact in my classrooms and how, when I entered, every one

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of my students was bowed to their own blue light: a tiny, personalized deity. I am speaking from personal experience here, not (just) casting stones. (Did I not sneak glimpses of my Insta while they worked on writing exercises? Reader: I did.) Watching them, though, I wondered if the “aesthetic and moral failings” that Greenwell speaks of may be distinctly capitalist in nature, and nowhere more apparent than on the social media platforms that steal our most vital resource: our attention. “Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body,”8 observes literary critic Terry Eagleton, and I can’t help but think of the endless scrolling that takes up so much of our “free” time, and the ways algorithms capitalize on our innate desires in exchange for corporate profit. Of course, nothing about that time is free. In fact, as Jia Tolentino argues in Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, “Selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control.”9 I am not making an antitechnology argument here or critiquing social media users (I am one of them), but I do want to promote awareness as a way of being in the world that resists dehumanization. As September chilled into October, our Zoom classes felt less and less energizing, but Zoom was certainly not the worst of it. There is much more to be said about the ways that current forms of social media can enlighten, support, manipulate, and exploit writers, but for now I told my students, let’s put it away. The thing is, Zoom classes had started to feel like the opposite of wonder. It was the unfamiliar becoming familiar, the “new normal,” as social media repeated ad nauseum. After all, nobody, including me, could yet kiss their grandmas without risking her life, and no amount of mindless scrolling could convince us that this was okay. Like the essayists they were becoming, my students hungered for the real. In her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, the artist Jenny Odell reminds us that the stakes are cultural, as well: “What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest-destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious.”10 The essay—in all its complexity, artfulness, and wonder—moves us wildly in the other direction, clutching the manes of Dillard’s monsters into the rapture of the deep. But without the joy of sensuous experience, wonder is harder to conjure, so we went out in search of it. We did an exercise I call “Notices,” which is as simple and low-fi as it sounds—basically, “walking around, noticing stuff.” I asked my students to write down images that surprised, delighted, or terrified them, anything unsettling or lovely or odd. What they brought back to our next meeting was a cornucopia of the “way we live now”: images of dead birds, blood-stained masks, the smell of peanuts outside a busy bodega, one “inexplicable blood-curdling scream,” nursing kittens in the back seat of a car, dead roses, a faded mural of a bare breasted woman drinking a Coke, a child kneeling and tying an old man’s shoes. In other words, the ordinary/extraordinary stuff of wonder and essay. And we tried other things besides: deep listening practices; visits to familiar places during unfamiliar hours; collage-making, long minutes lying on the ground just to shake up perspective; and one awkward, rather failed experiment in which I asked them to pair up over Zoom and stare at each other’s faces for a while. It didn’t change our lives or make us famous writers. It didn’t solve the global pandemic, a catastrophic climate crisis, pervasive social injustices, and the overwhelm of

 How It Is 301 technology designed to buy and sell their attention like baseball cards. It didn’t “spark joy” in a Marie Kondo-esque fit of enthusiasm. It did, however, as my student Zay said, “remind [us] who we are and what [we] care about,” outside of an attention economy that profits from the performance of that identity instead. It forced us to step back far enough that we couldn’t quite be placated by social media’s insistence that IRL is a quaint idea. It recalled us to that innate, essayistic way of seeing, the synthetization of infinite and discrete glimpses across time and space, the “unified field.” Lest it seem I’m some Mary Poppins slash Robin Williams-in-Dead Poet’s Society mash-up wannabe, remember this: wonder is not about how life seems, but how it is.

Notes 1 Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 19–20. 2 Zadie Smith, “On Joy,” The New York Review of Books, January 10, 2013. 3 Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (New York: Algonquin Books, 2019), 47. 4 Kahinde Wiley, quoted in Araceli Cruz, “Virginia Museum Unveils Kehinde Wiley Work in Response to Confederate Statues,” The Guardian, December 10, 2019, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/us​-news​/2019​/dec​/10​/richmond​-virginia​-kehinde​ -wiley​-statue​-confederate​-monument. 5 David Lazar, “Queering the Essay,” in Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, 2nd ed., ed. Margot Singer and Nicole Walker (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 14. 6 John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous (New York: Vintage, 1991), 216. 7 Garth Greenwell, interview with Elizabeth DeMeo, Between the Covers, Tin House Live: “Writing Towards Joy.” Panel with Kelly Link, Garth Greenwell, Justin Torres, podcast audio, November 12, 2019, https://tinhouse​.com​/podcast​/tin​-house​-live​ -writing​-towards​-joy​-panel​-kelly​-link​-garth​-greenwell​-justin​-torres. 8 Terry Eagleton, quoted in George Saunders, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Preface,” Paris Review, January 2013, https://www​.theparisreview​.org​/blog​/2013​/01​/07​/ civilwarland​-in​-bad​-decline​-preface/. 9 Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (New York: Random House, 2020), 12. 10 Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (New York: Melville House, 2019), x.

47

On Not Being Able to Write It Wendy Rawlings

In 1988, fresh out of college and working at a macrobiotic deli in a health food store, I had an affair with the stock manager, a married Irishman living illegally in the United States and the father of a three-month-old daughter. In the mornings, when we met before work to make love in the back of my car, he smelled of baby powder and the beer he’d drunk the night before at what he called his local, the Dribble Inn. We flirted through the workday, French-kissed in the walk-in freezer. One day six months or so after our affair began he didn’t show up for work. Just like that, he was gone. This was in the days before cell phones; he didn’t get in touch to tell me that his wife had found out and given him an ultimatum: quit his job or she’d take his daughter away and make sure he never saw her again. Two years later I’m in graduate school in Colorado, sharing an apartment with some guy working on his MBA. At seven in the morning I get a phone call. It’s the Irishman. He and his wife have split up; he wants to see me again. In his wallet he’s been carrying a note I wrote him. He has read it so many times that it’s falling apart. He flies out to visit me. I’ve just gotten over the chicken pox and my face is still flecked with scars. We’re massively in love with each other. I have written down everything that’s happened between us, since the day we met, and in his absence I’ve imagined him and dreamed about him and probably misremembered him in a hundred thousand ways. Now we’ve found our way back to each other. I spend most of the next summer in the tiny house he rents with three other men, two of them English and living in the States illegally. For its cesspool problem the house has earned the nickname, “The Swamp,” which we have to navigate to get inside and make love on his twin bed with the trundle pull-out for when his daughter stays with him. I move to Utah to pursue a PhD. We maintain our relationship long distance. Two years later, on my birthday, my friends take me to Chili’s for dinner. I’m sitting there wondering why my friends have taken me to a shitty fast food restaurant on my birthday when a waiter steps up to the table and places an ice bucket containing a bottle of champagne in front of me. The waiter is my Irishman. He has come straight from the airport and he’s here to stay.

 On Not Being Able to Write It 303 I’m one of those writers who draws from my own life to write fiction. My first book is a collection of short stories, Come Back Irish. Versions of the Irishman appear in many of my stories. But someday, I tell myself I’ll write a memoir. That memoir. I have tried for nineteen years to write that memoir. I have not written that memoir. Why do some nonfictional stories resist being told? On a table near my writing desk sit twenty-four journals I kept during the years of my love affair with the Irishman. They’re filled with details that evoke the tenderness and difficulty and hilarity of two people from very different backgrounds falling in love. There’s the time I took him to dinner at a friend’s house in a wealthy suburb of New York City and the host presented him with a six-pack of Guinness, as if it was the birthright and duty of all Irishmen to drink six-packs of Guinness (N.B. he hates Guinness, is a fan of Budweiser). The day I first met his daughter, at the wedding of one of his roommates, and got nervous and drank so much wine, I threw up all over my green linen dress in his van after (thankfully) we had dropped off his daughter at her mother’s house. He got me undressed and into his bed, and when I awoke several hours later, I wandered barefoot down the street to the Dribble Inn and found him drinking pints with the usual gang. “Ah, barefooted like a peasant,” he exclaimed, and didn’t even mention the embarrassment I’d made of myself earlier. Or one time in Utah, when he was giving me a ride to work in the truck he bought when he moved out there with me and I noticed a black liquid sloshing around in the plastic well between our seats. “A sea of tea!” he said. He was in the habit of drinking a cup of tea on the way to work at FedEx, and over time, tea had sloshed out of his mug and into the well. He liked it and left it that way. One time, we’ve made love in the back of the van and afterward he’s hungry, so we go to the drive-thru at Taco Bell, ten in the evening, and he buys a bunch of stuff to eat and we sit in the van in the parking lot while he rests the clamshell on the steering wheel and eats messily and happily, licking his fingers. I refuse to eat anything at this late hour. At the end, folding the clamshell shut, he lets out a despairing sigh. “What?” I ask, alarmed. To which he exclaims, reaching into the paper bag beside him, “I forgot my mild and spicy sauce!” I’ve often tried to begin the memoir with one of these moments, but it falls flat. We are too ordinary; I can’t convey the charm of his accent and the unfettered pleasure he takes in his senses, without turning him into a leprechaun. Have I just not found the right form to tell this story, the right voice? Is the story of two people from different backgrounds falling in love just too played out? Do I simply lack the confidence of Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff? Or are some stories meant only to be lived, not told?

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It has been twenty years since I left the garden-level apartment with the intermittent box-elder bug infestation where we lived together. He still lives there, still pays $400 a month for rent, still has the framed Matisse poster in his living room that I forgot when I moved out and asked him to ship to me in Alabama, where I met my husband and got married eighteen years ago. Recently I visited Utah again—for an atheist convention, of all things—and met the Irishman for dinner. It was the first time I didn’t swoon when I saw him. He was an ordinary middle-aged man eating a plate of fish and chips. In a few months, he told me, he would take his Filipina girlfriend to his hometown in Ireland and marry her. Is there an algorithm that will predict the moment when a writer can begin productively to translate life experience into nonfiction? Must a certain number of years go by? Or does this impasse mean I’m supposed to give up on my desire to write the nonfiction version and write a novel instead? In order to write the memoir, must our feelings toward the experience we want to write about be utterly neutralized, as by some reverse alchemy that changes gold back into workaday metal, “massively in love” into mere material? But by the time I’ve reached neutral, will I still want to write that book? If I have to wait until I’m sixty, will I even be able to summon the intensity of those years? As the events one wants to write about recede into the past, a perhaps unwelcome guest arrives in one’s consciousness: the ability to perceive those events and the people involved in them as embedded in social systems: class, race, gender. When I was twenty-one, the man I fell in love with was a sexy Irishman. Now, I can’t help but wonder how much of my attraction stemmed from a perception that he was, for a middle-class girl like me, dangerous, out of bounds, exotic. I’d spent four years at a snooty liberal-arts college, where the men I dated were the sons of sugar traders, wore yellow cummerbunds with their expensive suits, voted for Reagan. What I couldn’t have put into words at the time was a class divide that made the Irishman mysterious and exciting to me. I thought it was charming and a little bit outré that he always carried a roll of cash in his tee shirt pocket. It didn’t occur to me that he didn’t have the means to own a credit card. When a friend remarked to me how impressed she was that he knew the meaning of the word “abattoir,” I took that as complimentary, not patronizing. For me to write the memoir about our relationship, I would have to examine my own motivations deeply, coldly, even clinically. How could that project coexist with the glorious prose I would deploy in service of describing the great love of my life? I hate most memoirs. I find them sentimental, stilted, false. Only two really pass muster: Geoffrey Wolff ’s The Duke of Deception and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. Wolff ’s memoir about his father, an alcoholic gambler, is a clear-eyed portrait of a parent who disappointed his son at every turn. Kincaid’s account of growing up in Antigua, is the best rendition of the experience of living under colonialism I’ve ever read. She eviscerates the island’s English oppressors. For me, both books illuminate the fundamental problem I encounter each time I try to write about the Irishman and me:

 On Not Being Able to Write It 305 there’s not enough of an obstruction, a villain. We were not Romeo and Juliet. Once he and his wife divorced, we were free to be together. And for a while, we were. One night, after we had broken up, we got drunk and sat and talked on the kitchen floor. I’d had a fling with a much older man who’d come from New York for a week as a visiting writer. The Irishman had gotten involved with a Native American woman we’d seen cruising back and forth late at night in front of his apartment. It was clear she sensed the Irishman and I had not achieved closure, as people say. Cross-legged, I leaned against the kitchen doorframe. “We should have gotten married.” “Are you asking me?” There was a weird, pregnant moment. I couldn’t say it. Neither could he. Is there a memoir to be written about the great love of your life whom you weren’t meant to marry? I texted him on his birthday this year. A response pinged in immediately. omg wens I’m still in love with you :) Who knows; people say a lot of things in texts. Or maybe that right there is my memoir.

48

Hermes Goes to College Michael Martone

The First Thing The very first thing the baby Hermes does is steal the cattle of Apollo his brother. Apollo figures it out, confronts his baby brother, the little thief, in his crib. Hermes hasn’t even learned to speak yet, to walk. The first thing he has to do is steal the sacred cattle of his brother Apollo, who figures it out and is about to extract terrible godly retribution for the transgression when Hermes offers up to his brother the second thing he does after he is born. He gives his older brother a little something he has been monkeying with while in the crib. He gives his brother the lyre—tortoise shell and horn and leather straps and string—so that all-seeing Apollo is charmed, calms down, can compose his great Apollonian art.

Confused on Purpose Robert Scholes, in his little book Elements of Fiction, roots out that both fact and fiction derive from the Latin “to do” or “to make.” A fact—the real thing—is a thing done. In fact, fact has no reality once it is done. It has no existence, is unreal. It leaves instead an abundance of residue, evidence, traces, the fact of its once having been done. A fiction, on the other hand, is a thing made and once it is made it comes into existence. It has a reality. It can be sensed, stored, savored even. Fictions in this way are realer than facts whose evidence of the facts’ doneness—letters, say, or reports, newspaper dispatches, diaries, etc.—can all be faked. The truth is for a very long time we have been operating as if fact and fiction were steady and distinct categories when in fact . . . And all that evidence of fact—the material of the real—can be faked, of course. We are really always already quite confused anyway.

The Genre of Genre I am worried that we don’t worry enough about the subliminal influences of the institutions in which we find ourselves housed, colleges and universities, which for me

 Hermes Goes to College 307 seem to be diabolic engines for sorting, categorizing, defining. If you think about it, the kind of writing my writing students are most engaged in is criticism, specifically the critique of fellow students’ creative writing. The institution is a critical institution and insists we act critically. We want to think of such influence as benign, but it is not. We have adapted our writing, this writing, to the academic model, to the critical turn of mind. It must be seen as serious, empirical, enlightened. Even now in this essay, in this collection of essays that is interested in blurring the lines of genre, we still must use words like genre. We are interested in the confusion of genre, the borrowing of technique between the genres, the tension that exists as one genre rubs up against the other. But still we are quite conscious and quite ready to admit to the easy use of “genre” altogether. We worry the categories of fact and fiction. Nonfiction and fiction. Prose and poetry. What we don’t worry well enough is the category of category, the genre of genre.

The Art of Inconvenience To invoke “literary” or “genre” is to create a frame where something can be made safe. It is a kind of precinct, a ghetto, even. Writers in America seem to have voluntarily committed themselves to some kind of reservation—the university—and assigned their work to very controlled publishing venues—the literary journal, the little mag, the peer-reviewed periodical. Now there are many very nice, tasteful, serious literary journals, etc., but I can’t help thinking that one thing these publishing venues are signaling the world is this: this this, this published this, is harmless, tamed, framed, controlled. And that this fiction, this nonfiction, this art, is not really a part of your life, dear reader. This is a zoo you can visit. I like art in its natural habitat, in the wild. Or if it is in the journals, it is acting like a bug, a germ, resistant to the antibiotic. Art that doesn’t know its place. Art out of place. Art that disrupts convention, corrupts expectations. I like the notion of defamiliarization, of attempting to open up received notions and categories to wonder or to, at least, satire. I like art that appears in settings not thought to be artistic, not sanctioned precincts of appreciation. At the crosswalks and the crossroads. Contested spaces. Outside the warehouses of the galleries and the tasteful storage sheds of the literary journal. The prank and the stunt. Art that is inconvenient, that disrupts, that by its nature corrupts, degrades, disturbs boundaries instead of politely sharing, tweaking, or bending them. Art not generically generic genre.

Meet John Smith I attended a massive state university where it was a widely held belief that each student there was no more than a number. So with only a made-up social security number we created a student, John Smith, and registered him by means of then current IBM punch cards acquired at the field house registration. Tuition was cheap, then, and everyone in

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my dorm, whose population was larger than most towns of the state, chipped in a buck or two. We enrolled him in large lecture classes—someone from the dorm was taking the class and shared the notes with the one who took the exam as John Smith. He was a C student. He did not attend the commencement held at the huge stadium and is now on the rolls of the alumni association where he still receives the magazine at the P. O. Box we opened for him and maintain in Oolitic, Indiana. Sure, I realize with advanced software, heightened anxiety of identity theft and terrorist breaches of security, and the cost of college now actually an arm and a leg instead of 20 bucks a semester hour, such a stunt would be impossible today. Or maybe not—one could hack the system virtually now and not have to worry about anything physical at all, but that is a thought for another day.

A Warning Warning Today I teach at a massive state university where the regulation of vehicular and pedestrian traffic captures our attention. There is a sign, a giant yellow diamond warning, that pictures the international symbol of a human walking. You know these signs alerting you to a crosswalk, and you probably know the ongoing editing of the sign, its evolving story. One day you discover a sketched-on undulating hula-hoop ovaling the waist of the stick figure. That then is erased by the DOT. Then circles are stenciled to the feet, roller skates, that are, in a day or two, painted back over. A halo or horns added to the head. Or trailing lines indicating speed or sweat or blood or comic nerves, the shakes. A cast and a sling appear and are expunged. A red reflective button nose. Wings and goggles. And all the time the maintenance crews come back to set it all back in order. The warning sign must merely warn, while art, on the other hand, warns against such maintenance.

Reader’s World All through college I worked for a bookstore called, really, Reader’s World, and Reader’s World like most bookstores divided its floor of product into categories of genre—the wall of fiction with its subdivisions of western, sci-fi, lit, and romance, and the expanse of nonfiction breaking into such groups as gardening and home repair, biography, war, psychology and therapy, self-help and how-tos, true crime and nature, travel and religion. Here is a secret of what I learned in Reader’s World. Readers are not generic in the usual sense. That is to say their cognitive maps organizing information do not correspond with the one in the store or the one in the university for that matter. The primal division for my customers was not fiction and nonfiction but story and not story. Real or not, factual or not. These were questions, certainly, but not of primary importance. Consider that the Reader’s World I worked in was located in a shopping center called Canterbury Green, the boxes of the various stores gussied up in fake timbre and wattle and asbestos tile that was meant to look like thatch. Consider too that while I worked at Reader’s World I shelved a brand-new magazine called People and I

 Hermes Goes to College 309 remember trying to figure out where to place it on the rack on the spectrum from the tabloids, enjoying their first flush of upwardly mobile success, to Time and Newsweek. The customers seemed to live comfortably in this in-between state. And the conflation of fact and fiction—one I think today is even more pronounced—was collapsing from both ends of the range. Books popular while I worked at Reader’s World included Ragtime by Doctorow, a fictional animation of history, Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, reportage expanded by fictional devices, Toomer’s Cane and Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, a book so blatantly both fiction and non and about the very subject of genre as to make it unclassifiable. And, in fact, we spent the summer moving our copies of Woman Warrior from one area of the store to another and then leaving copies, a few copies of the title, in each of several sections, salting the whole store.

Stealing Things In I have my students in both my fiction and nonfiction classes make books and distribute them as part of the semester’s project. Book is a category that is in decay here. I have had a student write a story in the form of a police report, and he filed it as a police report at the police headquarters. Another student wrote a sequence of prose poems on the subject of meat. Her book, bound in blood red wrappers with a bone white spiral spine, she then took to the Winn Dixie to have shrink-wrapped on a Styrofoam tray by the butcher there. And still another hand-printed his story, about a character who uses a 30-foot strip of sized cloth to floss his GI tract, on a 30-foot strip of sized cloth. But most do books that look like books, keeping Kinko’s busy with standard staple folds and cardstock covers. I point out to them, as they have to distribute their books as well, that libraries and bookstores have elaborate apparati to prevent you from stealing a book out of their stacks but they have nothing to guard against you stealing your work into the bookstore or the library. And that’s what they do, shelving their own work or leaving it to be shelved, allowing the librarian to affix the catalog number, enter it into inventory.

Hermes Clueless So after reading this essay, we go back to our cribs. Do we go back there knowing more? Do we return having learned something or other? I’d like to think we have come here to unlearn. That’s not to say “forget” but to return in a state of not knowing. Once the contraption of tortoise shell and horn and leather strings fell into the hands of Apollo he knew what to do with the lyre. Open up a music department and study the heck out of the thing till it reveals its secrets—its bone, its horn, its leather. Hermes had no idea what his hands created save maybe an improvised distraction, the sleight of hand, of a thief. He’s the artist, clueless, making something new out of those old received categories of bone and horn and skin, out of those old scraps and odds and ends something new in the world. Make things. Steal them into the world.

49

The Convex View Karen Lloyd

Back in 1778, in those untroubled days before the Anthropocene, when the world lay at our feet and all we had to do was look at the view and not trouble ourselves about biodiversity loss and climate change, travelling cleric Thomas West’s A Guide to the Lakes was published.1 With the French Revolution hindering the Grand Tour of Europe, West’s guide was an eighteenth-century TripAdvisor, encouraging the elevated classes to find transcendence in the English Lake District. The sublime, that intoxicating mix of beauty and terror (“the most horrid, romantic mountains in this region of wonders”), is delivered through a sequence of “viewing stations” from where West specifies the precise method of looking. Travelers are instructed to turn their backs on the landscape and instead view it through the convex lens of a Claude, or pocket “landscape” mirror. Like this, West suggests, perspective is heightened, and the capacity of the soul will greatly expand.

Station 1 In 2017 the Lake District was inscribed as a World Heritage Site (WHS) under the cultural landscapes category. UNESCO asserts that a combination of nature and human-led impacts has created a “harmonious landscape” of mountains, lakes, grand houses, archaeology, and that this was all “greatly appreciated” from the eighteenth century. An assembly of figures are cited in support: the Lake poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and illustrator-turned-sheep-farmer, Beatrix Potter, among others. The WHS inscription also justifies as cultural and enshrines the preservation of the traditional sheep-farmed landscape, a system in which hardy sheep are “hefted” to areas of upland common grazings. To be hefted means to understand the lie of the land and to know your place in it. Individual flocks of Herdwicks and Rough Fell sheep rarely stray beyond the unseen boundaries of their heft, knowledge of which is passed down from ewe to lamb through generations. Farmers, too, are hefted to the land and to the kinds of sustained graft required of them. As a young indigene, I felt personally hefted to the beauty of the Lakes, and when I walked in the mountains I believed I was walking in a wild

 The Convex View 311 place. Back then, I wasn’t able to articulate why I didn’t encounter much in the way of wildlife—just the odd corvid, a few meadow pipits, or migrant wheatears flitting among the boulders. Most of us would not have understood why the place was this bereft. These days though, we have more than enough knowledge to fill the gaps. The 2019 State of Nature report tells us that the abundance and distribution of wild species across the UK have declined by 60 percent since 1970.2 In the same year, the Glover Report exposed the culture of National Parks as one that has neither “kept pace with changes in our society nor responded with vigor to the decline in the diversity of the natural environment.”3 The UK is the most nature-depleted country among the G7 nations. In 2021, the Environmental Audit Committee accused the current Conservative administration of pursuing “toothless” policies that are failing to stem “catastrophic loss of wildlife.”4 Despite pledges made over recent decades, the declines accelerate. The term “shifting baseline syndrome” illustrates how we don’t see species dying away: the ground-nesting birds common on farmland before the big machines and sileaging got going and the worm treatments that put paid to the invertebrates. We don’t see how an ever-decreasing insect biomass means insufficiencies for the breeding outcomes of migratory warblers and swallows and swifts. Everything is connected. No one really knows when humans got going with their axes to clear the mountains of their forests, but early pastoralists introduced sheep and goats, and then there were wars to fight and wars need timber and then the demands of the Industrial Revolution. With the forests gone, sheep took center stage. But sheep graze systematically, leaving a close-cropped sward devoid of flowering plants and upland scrub habitats of hawthorn, rowan, crab apple, blackthorn, and willow. Encountered mostly now as isolated lone individuals, the specimens that do remain therefore represent loss on a colossal scale. I once met a conservationist who described each Lake District valley as “a biodiversity dead-end” because of the absence of “corridors of connectivity”—those habitats of scrub and the plants upon whose presence the existence of pollinators is predicated. Think of it like this: to the would-be pollinators and would-be birds and mammals dependent upon those pollinators, the sheep-grazed fellside is the railway platform after the last train has departed. Under the current terms of its inscription, the Lake District World Heritage biodiversity train has no destination, and even if it had, there are no engines or drivers left on the line. A quarter of UK mammals and nearly half of the bird species assessed in the State of Nature report are at risk of extinction. My eyes need to skip over that sentence; the factualness of it resists my assimilation. Resistance to those facts mean that culturally, in the Lake District, we are still to agree the relative values of and differences between a functioning, life-giving ecosystem and the aesthetic view.

Station 2 Living in the center of the Lake District, William Wordsworth’s world encompassed nature and native, land and inhabitant, and his poetry negotiated the “increasingly

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disruptive influence of man on his environment.”5 That idea of interconnectedness coheres in much of his writing, such as the poem “Resolution and Independence.” Meeting an elderly leech gatherer at an upland tarn, pleasantries having been exchanged, the poet asks, “How is it that you live, and what is it you do?” Shortly after the WHS inscription announcement, the then chair of the Lake District National Park Partnership stated that he would like to “see more local businesses and organizations use the new World Heritage brand . . . to drive new business. The inscription is not an automatic cash prize,” he said, but “an opportunity for us all.”6 Unless, of course, you happen to belong to the beleaguered communities of the natural world within the park. With the hegemony of business as the primary mode of seeing, therefore, the Lake District manifests as The Truman Show of British tourism: a clipped and tidy place where skies are continually blue and where neither the too much rain nor the dangerous loss of habitats and species are ever allowed to obscure the view. David Foster Wallace once described the essay as “an enormous eyeball floating around something, reporting what it sees.”7 In its current manifestation, under the lens of climate chaos and failing biodiversity, the Lake’s World Heritage designation manifests as an eyeball floating above the landscape but choosing not to see what is abundantly clear. And if the essay is a site of resistance, then I also must resist that reductionist way of seeing and learn to pay attention differently: to consider how it is I live, how other species live—or would if they could—and what it is I do, and what those other species do, and why that matters. And some of what I might need to do is to get myself out of the way, so that other species can inhabit the only kinds of habitat they are able to inhabit. If, as I believe is the case, the concepts of conservation and preservation are dangerously conflated under the current iteration of World Heritage, this resistance begins by asking what exactly it is that makes a landscape cultural when observed from the viewing station of the Anthropocene.

Station 3 In bio-semiotic theories, the term Umwelt describes an organism’s engagement with the world immediately around it. Innenwelt, meanwhile, refers to the mapping of self onto a world of objects. One of the ways I can map myself onto the Lake District is through the lens of climate change. On December 5, 2015, after six weeks of continuous and unprecedented amounts of rain, in a period of twenty-four hours, fifteen trillion liters of rain fell on the county of Cumbria during the weather-event known as Storm Desmond. I only know what fifteen trillion liters of rain looks like because I witnessed some of it happening. Across the Lakes and into Lancashire, 5,525 homes became uninhabitable, 557 bridges were damaged or destroyed, and over one hundred roads were washed away. During Storm Desmond the steps leading into the garden opposite our house morphed into a terrifying water-feature resembling the release of water from a too-full dam. The water smashed and bounced and leapt over itself down onto the road—and there it divided. I had not previously considered the merits of living on the apex of

 The Convex View 313 a hill, but the Umwelt of Storm Desmond helped me to see this as the floodwaters divided, one way draining north, the other downhill toward the town—toward all those other houses. It was biblical. Mercifully, the floods did not reach our door. Mostly we stayed indoors, listening to reports of this road being washed away, then that road, then a couple of miles away the Kentmere valley bridge collapsed, then Eamont Bridge collapsed, then Pooley Bridge collapsed, leaving the fractured carriageway and ramparts abandoned in the river like the remnants of a previous civilization. Which in a way, they were. And the community of Pooley Bridge remained divided until the new bridge was completed—over five years later. When you wait five years for the rebuilding of the bridge in your community, the way rain behaves becomes pivotal. Stay inside, the emergency services said. But what if the outside had got inside and inside was nowhere to be? What if you were one of the 5,500 families whose sofas were now floating? Whose kitchen cupboards were now infiltrated with floodwater— whatever that is composed of—and whose cat stares with goggle eyes from the windowsill because cats hate water and this water was rising ever closer, and our human eyes grew bigger and bigger like the dogs in the “Tinder Box” story, as our powerlessness and incredulity accelerated among the sublime terror of fifteen trillion liters of rain. In our sitting room a bulging accumulation of water inveigled its way inside, materializing as a big pregnant swag above the bay window. I fetched a bucket and a knife and stood on a chair and stabbed a hole in the paper to relieve the pressure. It was a relief to relieve the pressure. Much later, I joined the paper back together with glue and painted it over, but I know the flaw remains. Just north of Wordsworth’s home at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, a mountainside collapsed onto the main arterial road. The road remained closed while engineers shored up the mountain against further collapse. Meanwhile, workers and schoolchildren endured a 6-month, 230-kilometer daily round-trip commute—over a mountain pass. And yes, the mountainside was steep but was also able to collapse in that sublime manner because the physics of unprecedented rain is not equal to the hypotenuse of short-rooted sheep-grazed soils.

Station 4 In much the same way as Wordsworth, the Northamptonshire “peasant” poet John Clare was hefted to the Umwelt of his immediate natural world. In his autobiographical writings,8 Clare recalls when instead of collecting firewood as a young boy he’d felt compelled to walk further into Emmonsales Heath than ever before, drawn onward by the magnetizing imperative of the natural world. “I had imagined that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison and that a day’s journey was able to find it so I went on with my heart full of hopes pleasures and discoveries.”9 Clare anticipates arriving at the “brink of the world.” He believes he could “see heaven by looking into the water so I eagerly wandered on and rambled among

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the furze the whole day till I got out of my knowledge when the very wild flowers and birds seemed to forget me.”10 I assume that the word “orison” is an error of spelling and that what Clare had intended was, of course, the word “horizon.” Nevertheless, the passage stays with me. It stays with me because in the Anthropocene we stand at the brink of our world, and from this horizon, this viewing station, I understand that we have walked further out of our knowledge than ever before and have not yet stopped walking. It is not the wildflowers and birds who have forgotten us, but we who have who turned our backs on them and continued to walk far from their cultural memory.

Station 5 An orison is a prayer, an appeal, a service. I wonder what manner of service might help us walk back into our knowledge. To allow nature, natives, and land to cohere. To allow humans to resist being in thrall merely to the view and instead to become entangled in nature as culture. My friend Simon is an ecologist. He takes me walking in the Vale of Rydal, in “Wordsworth Central.” Simon says it’s all achievable, the reinstatement of habitats for pollinators whose presence—or service—is predicated upon the presence of birds and animals and therefore the whole shebang of biodiversity. The viewing stations of uncertainty (Brexit: climate: future farming payment systems) show that even though many farmers resist change, others are motivated to work toward it. In Rydal and Scandale where Simon and I are walking, under environmental payment schemes two local families have removed their sheep from extensive parts of the valleys. A bunch of contractors planted tens of thousands of native tree and scrub species and hardy cattle were introduced, cattle whose hooves excavate the kinds of untidy hollows in which seeds germinate and in turn provide food for pollinators—all before you can say cultural landscape. Rydal and Scandale are being reimagined into wild orisons through scattergun corridors of connectivity. The ecotone of proto wood-pasture rises from valley to fellside, wild and flourishing. Climbing higher, we watch a peregrine drop like a stone toward the earth, a bird that would not be there without the untidy habitats of food for peregrines. In certain places, in Haweswater and Ennerdale, in Thirlmere and on individual farms and estates, resistance is shaped through the restoration of soils, through the removal of sheep and the planting of trees and scrub.11 In this way, the rain is invited to slow itself down, the microbial bridge is rebuilt and, oh look! Biodiversity returns! Even though we can’t see them (unless of course we dig holes, which some farmers indeed do, to see how those root systems are coming along) those newly entangled roots are building a cultural landscape all of their own, one in which we humans, we natives, as facilitators, are returned to something closer to a state of grace. This reimagined landscape is a place where the orison comes increasingly into view and the horizon we don’t want to peer over is pushed further into the distance. What’s not to

 The Convex View 315 like about this? What gets in the way, other than the resistance of business or the choice not to see further? Those restored farms and estates and those reimagined hefts with their mob-grazed cattle and attendant ecosystems are Albion in all its glory: a landscape painted by Gainsborough, albeit with fences to strategically resist the ingress of sheep. Is it like waking after a long, drug-induced sleep, these acts of restoration? The drugs of finance and forgetting? Like waking among swallows and martins, peacock butterflies, thistle seeds?

Station 6 Let us return for a moment to those figures assembled in support of World Heritage. Wordsworth, we know, resisted loss of connection, and Beatrix Potter was an astute scientist, the first to correctly identify the reproduction systems of lichens. Growing fungal spores on glass plates and tracking their development under the microscope, she fundamentally understood the nature of cause and effect. I can’t be sure exactly what Ms. Potter and Wordsworth (or Thomas West for that matter) would have to say about the current state of the Lake District, but I have a strong hunch that if asked, they’d reply, “World Heritage? Like this? Not in my name.”

Station 7 What if we were to fundamentally reimagine the concept of what a view is, or could be? Grow those roots: help the rain stick around for a while. Build the microbial bridge. Communities less easily divided. Turn around, reflect ourselves to our children and to theirs in this more entangled, more culturally transcendent way where nature, native, land, and environment more usefully cohere—or at least something like. The writing of an essay is also a means of becoming entangled with the world. Its pioneering nature offers resistance to the linear, the binary, the simple aesthetic; as Adorno states, “its proper theme is the interrelation of nature and culture.”12 As a site of resistance then, it is concerned with surveying, dismantling, and reassembling whatever fragmentary narratives are released through the spores of a new taxonomy. Those upland flowering plants wait decades: the bird’s-eye primrose, the brambles, and thistles. They don’t concern themselves with lack. They have no opinion on this. And when conditions are right, when sheep as culture have been escorted down into the fields and valleys to graze but still provide food for those of us who like to eat lamb (with or without mint sauce) then back all those upland plants come, striving inexorably toward the light. I think of them as miniature Jodrell Banks, as tiny earthbound acolytes in thrall to the sun and the moon and the stars. An inflorescence. An orison. Sensors of the planet’s hum in a way that we natives can barely begin to imagine.

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Notes 1 Thomas West, A Guide to the Lakes (London: Forgotten Books, 2018). 2 UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), “The State of Nature Report,” September 2019, https://nbn​.org​.uk​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2019​/09​/ State​-of​-Nature​-2019​-UK​-full​-report​.pdf. 3 Julian Glover, “Landscapes Review: National Parks and AONB’s,” September 21, 2019, https://assets​.publishing​.service​.gov​.uk​/government​/uploads​/system​/uploads​/ attachment​_data​/file​/833726​/landscapes​-review​-final​-report​.pdf. 4 Phoebe Weston, “Tories’ ‘Toothless’ UK Policies Failing to Halt Drastic Loss of Wildlife,” The Guardian, June 29, 2021, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/environment​ /2021​/jun​/30​/toothless​-tory​-policies​-drastic​-loss​-of​-wildlife​-uk​-aoe. 5 Jonathan Bate, “The Romantic Lakes: From Wordsworth to Beatrix Potter,” lecture given at Gresham College, 1997. 6 Stephen Henwood, quoted in “Lake District Marks First Year as World Heritage Site,” English Lake District World Heritage Site blog, July 9, 2018, http://lakesworldheritage​ .co​.uk​/blog​/2018​/lake​-district​-marks​-first​-year​-as​-world​-heritage​-site/. 7 David Foster Wallace, interview with Charlie Rose, PBS, March 27, 1997, https:// www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=J3qjCvkQWvs. 8 John Clare, John Clare by Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1996). 9 Ibid., 40. 10 Ibid. 11 World Heritage has oversight of plans for planting anything more than a handful of trees. If WH believes that plans are not in keeping with the culturally preserved landscape, they resist those plans in the form of comments in planning application documents. 12 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique 32 (Spring–Summer 1984): 167. The author is grateful to Bloomsbury Wildlife for permission to include an extract from Abundance: Nature in Recovery (Bloomsbury, 2021) and to Curtis Brown for permission to use the quote from John Clare.

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The Moral Map Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Social justice has been the driving force behind the bulk of my writing for a quarter century now. All other motivations—artistry, catharsis, ambition, fulfillment, a paycheck—take a backseat to this larger mission, which is so ingrained, I can hardly pinpoint its source. Perhaps it originated in the newsroom, where I trained to be a journalist, or in my hometown in the Texas-Mexico borderlands, where inequalities ran rampant. Catholicism undoubtedly fueled it, too. (All that guilt.) Whatever the case, this pursuit has led me to nearly fifty countries and all but two of the United States, where I have interviewed upward of 800 people about the social disparities that pervade their communities. I’ve investigated the meltdown of Marxism in Russia, China, and Cuba at the end of the millennium; I’ve examined the toll of emigration and globalization in Mexico; I’ve explored the ramifications of having an international borderline split an ancestral land in two, as experienced by Akwesasne Mohawks in upstate New York and Tejana/os in South Texas. The only emotion that rivals my love for this work is the anxiety it induces. Each new project presents another ethical minefield to navigate. Narrating the lives of others is the most explosive grenade of all. What gives me the right to document so many cultures not my own? What if my reporting further marginalizes the communities that entrust me with their stories? As Janet Malcolm famously declares in the opening of her 1990 book, The Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he does is morally indefensible.”1 Several times in my career, I seriously considered chucking my notebooks and engaging in activism more directly. If I truly cared about justice, wouldn’t my efforts be better spent working for a nonprofit organization, say, or in the political realm? Shouldn’t I stop trying to describe things and start trying to change them? At each juncture, however, I ultimately realized that—for better or worse—creative nonfiction is what I am drawn to do. And so, I resolved to work even harder to advance the agency of the people I interviewed while respectfully maintaining both their boundaries and their dignity.

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Even the best of intentions are useless in a minefield, though, so I developed six tenets to guide me. I am the first to admit they are difficult to uphold—not least because they feel woefully insufficient. Yet, clutching a moral map helps steer me away from the most egregious grenades. TENET ONE: Study Their Language and Use It, No Matter How Poorly. The consequences of English’s linguistic dominance struck me early. It rendered me mute whenever my extended family gathered at the ranch. The elders had faced so much discrimination for their Mexican accents, they didn’t pass on their tongue to my generation, so that we would better assimilate at our English-only schools. Consequently, I couldn’t talk to Güelita, my great-grandmother, as she hand-rolled tortillas, or laugh at my tios’ jokes as they tended the barbacoa pit. I just sat there in silence. Then, at a journalism convention my senior year in high school, I attended a keynote by a CNN correspondent who had covered every major news event from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the collapse of the Soviet Union. His stories riveted me. When he asked for questions afterward, I raised my hand and gushed: “I want to be you! What do I do?” “Learn Russian,” he said. “Next question.” Never had I heard anyone acknowledge the value of a language besides English. I was so taken by his mandate, I devoted my undergraduate degree to it before moving to Moscow in 1996. People were so amused by my eagerness to converse—in the Metro, in line at the bakery, sitting by the fountain at the park—some invited me home afterward, to meet their families. My limited vocabulary meant I couldn’t follow every conversation that ensued, but I came to appreciate how it infantilized me, as it put everyone at ease. It also seemed to counteract the distaste that some Russians had for Americans back then. One afternoon, I saw a throng of people marching down the street and started chatting up one of the participants, an older gentleman. We talked for several blocks before I learned we were heading to a political rally for Gennady Zyuganov, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, whose platform included restoring the Soviet regime. One marcher unfurled a banner of Stalin, a sight that rattled me to the core. Yet, the divergency of our worldviews compelled us both to keep talking. When I admitted I was American, the old man seemed startled at first, but then shrugged: “You speak Russian, you’re Russian.” Such experiences convinced me that studying other languages is the single most important thing I can do as a travel writer, especially considering my native tongue is English. It helps neutralize power dynamics, which is vital given the imperialist implications of English. It also conveys respect. Failing to earnestly communicate in my subject’s language shows dismissiveness if not pretentiousness—neither of which builds the trust essential for telling their stories. TENET TWO: Stay for a Year, and Document Daily. When I arrived in Moscow, the Chechen War was raging; the ruble was falling; and the mafia had infiltrated every aspect of society, from the street buskers to the gilded ranks

 The Moral Map 319 of the Kremlin. Story ideas pulsated around me, and I was eager to write them into existence. It didn’t take more than one news conference at the Russian-American Press and Information Center, however, to realize I didn’t want to shout out questions over the din of other reporters or to chase politicians down the hall. I simply wanted to talk with Russians, preferably over vodka and a stack of salt-dried fish. Gradually, I perceived other differences between myself and the foreign correspondents I met in Moscow. They lived with their families in three-bedroom apartments near the US embassy, while I lived with roommates in a dimly lit dormitory by Gorky Park. They were driven around by chauffeurs. I either took the Metro or stood on a street corner with my palm sticking out and haggled a fare with the first vehicle to pull over. The correspondents had personal chefs who prepared their family meals. I subsisted on whatever the babushka outside the train station happened to be selling: a handful of carrots one day; a bag of mushrooms the next. These experiences didn’t reveal much in the way of “news”—at least, not the kind I’d been trained to hunt in Journalism School—but they shed insight that felt important, too. And so, I fell into a habit of retreating to my cot at the end of each day and jotting down everything I had witnessed. I always started with the senses: What had I smelled that day? Sweat and sausages. What had I tasted? Cold borscht with a dallop of sour cream and a sprig of dill. What had I heard? Two babushki in the Metro commiserating about their grandsons being sent off to fight in Grozny. What had I seen? A young woman draped in fur, traversing an icy street in spiked heels. No, this wasn’t journalism, or even ethnography, but it was a method that felt intuitive to me. Honest, even. And manageable. Russia was mired in a sociopolitical upheaval I couldn’t begin to understand, but I could at least record what I had seen— and the more I looked, the deeper I witnessed. In the year that followed, my note-taking ritual stretched from 10 minutes a day to 20 minutes, to 30 minutes, to upward of three hours. Summarizing conversations I overheard, meanwhile, evolved into conducting formal interviews, which turned quick character studies into full-blown profiles. And then I started conceiving of places as characters, too. Some days, Moscow was a nemesis; other days, it was an oracle. St. Petersburg, meanwhile, was a melancholic lover. I began documenting how these cities looked in the snow and how they felt in the rain; what melons they offered up in summer; how they got carpeted with flower petals on International Women’s Day and how they got festooned with flags on Victory Day. When I returned to the United States, I then reflected on how my own life had been impacted by these experiences. I certainly didn’t know it then, as a 21-year-old college student, but I was configuring the methodology with which I would write not only my first book, Around the Bloc, but all future work: a fusion of literary journalism, travel writing, and memoir that documented a people and a place at a specific moment in time. TENET THREE: They Are Always Right. Over the past quarter century, I have interviewed everyone from belly dancers to paramilitary soldiers to George W. Bush. Some subjects were chosen specifically because

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they had committed acts of dishonesty or cruelty. No matter how disturbing their deeds, however, I found that if I dug deeply enough into the person’s past, their actions tended to make sense given the contexts in which they had lived—if not socially, then culturally, domestically, politically, environmentally, economically, ancestrally, or even spiritually. For example, while researching All the Agents and Saints, I met a lot of people in the New York-Canada borderlands who were involved in the drug trade. Having witnessed the carnage that American drug consumption had wrought in Mexico while working on a previous book—including hundreds of thousands dead and more than 60,000 disappeared—it was hard not to resent these dealers. After conducting dozens of interviews, however, I realized how systematically these dealers had been stripped of most other forms of employment in that region, particularly those who were Mohawk. Members of their Nation had worked as trappers and fishermen since time immemorial. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, however, had drowned all the beavers and muskrats, while companies like General Motors, ALCOA, and Reynolds ruined the fishing industry by dumping toxic waste in the riverbeds and decimated farms by fouling the soil and air. I also recognized the challenges of the drug trade, from forging half-frozen rivers by snowmobile to trusting absolutely no one. By the end of my research, drug running seemed no less morally compromising than working for ALCOA. Ditto with the border patrol agents I met in South Texas. Initially, I judged them as pseudo-Gestapos who tore families apart. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would do such dream-shattering work, particularly fellow Tejana/os. However, interviews revealed how corporate buyouts of regional ranches had eliminated the cradle-tograve protective measures that generations of Tejana/os had traditionally relied upon. Decades of English-only schools and other assimilationist tactics, meanwhile, had severed the ties that some Tejana/os might have otherwise felt to migrants. Over time, I began to see how such factors (coupled with the promise of a high salary in an economically depressed area) might make the US Border Patrol seem like a desirable profession. If I have learned anything from conducting so many interviews over the years, it is that people generally play by the cosmic rules of the unique deck of cards that life has dealt them. If their story doesn’t compute, it is generally because I haven’t asked the right question yet. TENET FOUR: Share the Work Prior to Publication. This is a nerve-wracking tenet—and, many journalists would say, a compromising one. Some publications flat-out refuse to work with writers who do this. Yet no matter how diligently I take notes, no matter how carefully I re-check every fact, I always make mistakes. Generally, it is an innocuous detail that no one outside the community would notice, yet that is precisely why it is so imperative to share the work: because everyone inside the community will notice. All the Agents and Saints, for example, includes a scene of a boat ride I took with a subchief of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation who cut the engine “where the Raquette River flows into the St. Regis River.”

 The Moral Map 321 As any Mohawk will tell you, that is not just a geographical error, but a cultural one. The Raquette rushes into the St. Lawrence River, which is one of the most vitalizing forces in Mohawk cosmology. Had the subchief not caught this when I sent him the manuscript a few weeks prior to deadline, it could have delegitimized the entire project in the eyes of the community. It is unconscionable not to at least try to get things right, and the only fool-proof method I’ve found is to either read aloud a manuscript over the phone to the subject or send them a copy. Only twice, in many years of doing this, has anyone requested changes that would have altered the manuscript in a way that compromised its integrity. In both instances, I decided to remove these narratives altogether. Though painful at the time, I don’t regret either decision. In most other instances, sharing the work has enriched the project. Indeed, it is often when our real interview begins. TENET FIVE: Recognize the Privilege of This Endeavor. While working on my book Mexican Enough, I brought my roommate Fabián along with me on a research trip to Aguascalientes. (He was my Spanish-to-Spanish-I-couldunderstand translator.) There, we visited an organization that offered assistance to the families left behind by undocumented workers living in the United States. For nearly five hours, we heard one devastating testimonial after another from mothers and wives whose sons and husbands had vanished while crossing the 2,000-mile border. They wept as they spoke, as did Fabián and I. Once we had parted, however, Fabián remained upset, while I rode the writerly high of finding a powerful story. This incensed him. “What gives you the right to come here, to write about us, analyze us?” he demanded. “You pretend to care for the people you interview, but what you really want is their story. They opened their hearts to you. They cried in front of you. And you just took notes and listened!” Even worse was what I planned to do next: sell those stories to a New York publisher without sharing a penny. No writerly platitude about “giving voice to the voiceless” could assuage the fact that my actions were just as Malcolm said: morally indefensible. My mind replays that friendship-dissolving argument every time I commence a new project. What Fabián said was true: I have no right whatsoever to tell these stories. No writer does. What we wield instead is privilege. A potent one. TENET SIX: Channel Privilege into Empowerment. More and more writers are realizing that our responsibility to the communities we document does not end with the page. When Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks became a runaway success, for example, she established a foundation that assists people who have been subjected to medical experiments like the Tuskegee Syphilis Studies without their knowledge or consent. After publishing What Is the What about the Lost Boys of Sudan, Dave Eggers started a charitable foundation named after the refugee who inspired the book, Valentino Achak Deng. Even if our work does not yield sharable profits, there are still plenty of ways to lend aid with the tools of our trade. While working at the English mouthpiece of the Chinese

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Communist Party in Beijing in the late 1990s, for example, I started feeling lousy about polishing propaganda for a living, and so started volunteering at a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that advocated on behalf of Chinese women in rural areas. Factors ranging from bride-selling to the one-child policy contributed to these women having one of the highest suicide rates in the world. The NGO provided them with programming, training, and even a literary magazine. The director feared this work would be short-lived, however, since none of their grant applications had been successful. I asked for a copy and spotted the problem. The document wasn’t written in Chinese, exactly, but neither was it in English. Rather, it was “Chinglish”—a patois that months of propaganda-polishing had trained me to decipher. After accompanying the NGO on a site visit, I infused their proposal with the documentary-style reportage I had developed in Moscow. The NGO won a grant from the Ford Foundation soon afterward. There are more creative ways to be of service as well. While working on her book No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces The Global Economy, the author Wendy Call decided that the best way to write about Mexico—a nation not her own—was to invest an equal amount of time into promoting Mexican writers. She has since translated and published dozens of works by such Indigenous poets as Irma Pineda and Mikeas Sánchez. Teaching is another way to offer assistance to the communities we write about. Rather than simply recording their stories, why not hold a writing workshop so that its members can tell some of their own? Share the names of any editors who might be interested, or better yet, provide an introduction. Be a guide for the very people who have served as one for you. Social justice cannot merely be the end-goal of a writing project, after all. It must imbue every stage of the process, from the languages we use to ensuring that these voices will remain uplifted long after we have left the minefield.

Note 1 Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer (New York: Knopf, 1990), 1.

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Contributors Kazim Ali is Professor of Writing and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, United States. His many books include poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and cross-genre work. As a translator, he has produced English versions of books by Marguerite Duras, Sohrab Sepehri, and Ananda Devi. In 2004, he founded the small press Nightboat Books and served as its first publisher. Jenn Ashworth is a novelist, essayist, and Professor of Creative Writing at Lancaster University, UK. Her latest novel, Ghosted: A Love Story, was shortlisted for the 2022 Portico Prize. Her memoir-in-essays, Notes Made While Falling, is a cultural study of trauma and creativity and was shortlisted for the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize. Catina Bacote’s essays have appeared in the anthology This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home, Ploughshares, Tin House, Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast, The Common, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her work has been recognized by a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship and an American Association of University Women Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at the Flatiron Writer’s Room and at Trinity College, in Connecticut, United States. Matthew Batt is the author of the memoir Sugarhouse, and his work has been featured in Tin House, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Outside Magazine, and elsewhere. The recipient of grants from the NEA, the McKnight Foundation, and the Aspen Writers’ Institute, he is an associate professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, United States. Eula Biss is the author of four books, most recently Having and Being Had. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Paris Review, Freeman’s, The Believer, and The New Yorker. She teaches at Northwestern University in Chicago, United States. Barrie Jean Borich is the author of Apocalypse, Darling, which PopMatters said “soars and seems to live as a new form altogether; it’s poetry, a meditation on life as ‘the other,’ creative nonfiction, and abstract art.” Her memoir Body Geographic won a Lambda Literary Award and her book-length essay, My Lesbian Husband, won the Stonewall Book Award. Borich is a professor at DePaul University in Chicago, United States, where she directs the interdisciplinary LGBTQ Studies minor and edits Slag Glass City, a journal of the urban essay art.

 Contributors 337 Jenny Boully is a Guggenheim Fellow in General Nonfiction. Her most recent book is Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life (2018). She teaches at Bennington College in Vermont, United States. Karen Brennan is the author of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including her recent hybrid (bent genre) nonfiction, Television, A Memoir. She is Professor Emerita from the University of Utah, United States. Since 1992, she has served as core faculty for the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Mary Cappello’s seven books of literary nonfiction include a Los Angeles Times– bestselling detour on awkwardness; a lyric biography; the mood fantasia, Life Breaks In; and a speculative manifesto, Lecture. Her third book, the breast cancer antichronicle Called Back, was recently re-issued by Fordham University Press. A former Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, she is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island, United States. David Carlin is a writer of Scottish and English descent living in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. He has published seven books, including The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet (with Nicole Walker, 2019), The Abyssinian Contortionist (2015), and Our Father Who Wasn’t There (2010), as well as award-winning creative nonfiction. He previously worked as a writer/director in film, theater, and circus. David is Professor at RMIT University, where he cofounded the non/fictionLab and WrICE, and copresident of the NonfictioNOW Conference. Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent book is Soil: The History of a Black Mother’s Garden. Her honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and NEA Fellowships in both poetry and prose. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, United States. Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting author from the Texas/Mexico borderlands, whose books include Around the Bloc, Mexican Enough, and All the Agents and Saints. She has also written for The New York Times, Washington Post, VQR, The Believer, BBC, and Oxford American. Associate Professor of Creative Nonfiction at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, United States, she has performed on five continents in capacities ranging from a Moth storyteller to a literary ambassador for the US State Department. Steve Fellner has published two collections of poetry, a memoir, and a collection of essays titled Eating Lightbulbs. He is Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY-Brockport, United States.

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Contributors

Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas has MFAs in creative nonfiction and literary translation from the University of Iowa. The author of Drown Sever Sing and Don’t Come Back, she has published widely in journals such as LA Review of Books and Poets & Writers. A Rona Jaffe fellow, she works as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, United States. T Clutch Fleischmann is the author of Syzygy, Beauty (2011) and the book-length essay Time Is the Thing (2019). Based in the United States, they are a nonfiction editor at DIAGRAM and contributing editor at Essay Daily. Their critical and creative work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Kevin Haworth is an NEA Fellow in Creative Nonfiction and the author of two essay collections: Famous Drownings in Literary History and Far Out All My Life. His other books include the novel The Discontinuity of Small Things, the collection about writing Lit From Within (co-edited with Dinty W. Moore), and most recently, The Comics of Rutu Modan: War, Love, and Secrets, a study of Israel’s most famous comics artist. He teaches writing and literature at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, United States. Robin Hemley, former director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and founder of the international conference, NonfictioNOW, is currently Director of the George Polk School of Communication and Co-Director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing at LIU-Brooklyn, United States. He is coeditor of Speculative Nonfiction (with Leila Philip) and copresident of Authors at Large (with Xu Xi). His most recent books are Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood (2020), The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writers Guide and Anthology (with Xu Xi), and Oblivion: An After Autobiography (2022). Justin Hocking is the author of PS: The Wolves (2019) and The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld: A Memoir (2014), which won the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award for Nonfiction. His essays, fiction, and poetry have also appeared in The Normal School, Poets & Writers magazine, The Columbia Journal, The Rumpus, The Northwest Review, and elsewhere. The former executive director of the Independent Publishing Resource Center, he currently serves as faculty member in the MFA and BFA programs in Nonfiction at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, United States. Ingrid Horrocks’s books include Where We Swim, a blend of memoir, essay, travel, and nature writing; two collections of poetry; books on the history of women wanderers; and an edited collection of creative essays on imaginings of place. Her essays have appeared in Lithub, Ninth Letter, and Sydney Review of Books. She is from Aotearoa, New Zealand, and is Professor of Creative Writing and English at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.

 Contributors 339 Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, fiction writer, artist, filmmaker, performer—has published twenty-two books, including The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat. His most recent book Ultramarine, the third volume of his trance trilogy, was published in 2022 and his first feature-length film, The Collective, premiered at UnionDocs (New York) in 2021. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center, United States. Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in New York. She is The Forward’s language columnist and the author of The Grammar of God, a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and Sami Rohr Prize Finalist, and Wolf Lamb Bomb, winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry and a New & Noteworthy Poetry selection of The New York Times. She is an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, United States, where she currently directs the MFA program in creative writing. David Lazar is the author of thirteen books, most recently Celeste Hom Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age (2020). He was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in nonfiction in 2016. He is the founding editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika, in its twentieth year, and coeditor of Ohio State University’s 21st Century Essays imprint. Based in the United States, he has taught for over thirty years—at Ohio University and Columbia College Chicago—and created the nonfiction programs at those schools. Karen Lloyd is Writer in Residence with Lancaster University’s Future Places Centre, UK, and the author of Abundance: Nature in Recovery (2021), The Blackbird Diaries (2017), and The Gathering Tide (2015). She is the editor of two anthologies, Curlew Calling (2017) and North Country (2022). Dave Madden is the author of The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy. His essays have appeared in Harper’s, The Guardian, Zyzzyva, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and he directs the MFA program at the University of San Francisco, United States. Patrick Madden is the author of three essay collections: Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010). He teaches at Brigham Young University, United States, and curates the online essay resource quotidiana​.or​g. Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi Matakore) teaches a creative writing MA workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of two novels and a short story collection, and is the recipient of numerous awards including the Commonwealth

340

Contributors

Short Story Prize for the Pacific region, 2016. Her most recent collection of essays, written over fifteen years, is This Compulsion in Us. Lee Martin is the author of four memoirs; two short story collections; a craft book; and seven novels, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Bright Forever. He teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, United States. Michael Martone’s new books are Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana (2022); The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone (2020); and Brooding: Arias, Choruses, Lullabies, Follies, Dirges, and a Duet (2018). Having taught creative writing for forty years at Iowa State University, Harvard University, Syracuse University, the University of Alabama, and Warren Wilson College, he retired in 2020. He lives and writes for now below the Bug Line in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States. David McGlynn is the author of three books: One Day You’ll Thank Me, A Door in the Ocean, and The End of the Straight and Narrow. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The American Scholar, Yale Review, Creative Nonfiction, and Best American Sports Writing. He teaches at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, United States. LaTanya McQueen is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment of the Arts (2022 Fellowship in Prose) and the Elizabeth George Foundation. Based in the United States, she is the author of two books: the essay collection And It Begins Like This (2017) and the novel When the Reckoning Comes (2021). Brenda Miller’s most recent books are A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing on Form and Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, a collection of collaborative essays with Julie Marie Wade. She is the author of five more essay collections, including An Earlier Life, which received the Washington State Book Award for Memoir. She co-authored, with Suzanne Paola, the textbook Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, now in its third edition. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University, in Bellingham, Washington, United States. Ander Monson’s newest book is Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession (2022). Professor of English at the University of Arizona, United States, he edits the magazine DIAGRAM, the New Michigan Press, Essay Daily, and March Xness, among other projects. Dinty W. Moore is author of the memoirs Between Panic & Desire and To Hell with It, and the writing guides Crafting the Personal Essay and The Mindful Writer, among other books. Based in the United States, he has published essays and stories in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere.

 Contributors 341 Jessica Hendry Nelson is the author of the memoir If Only You People Could Follow Directions (2014) and co-author, with Sean Prentiss, of Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (2021). Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and on the faculty in the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at the University of Nebraska, United States. Elena Passarello is the author of two essay collections: Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses. The winner of a 2015 Whiting Award, she teaches in the MFA programs at Oregon State University and Vermont College of Fine Arts, United States. She co-hosts a podcast on the literary essay called I’ll Find Myself When I’m Dead, which appears weekly on the PRX syndicated arts and culture program Live Wire! Sean Prentiss is the author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave, which won the National Outdoor Book Award, and Crosscut: Poetry, which blends memoir and poetry. He is the author of Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. He is Associate Professor at Norwich University and lives in northern Vermont, United States, with his wife and daughter. Lia Purpura’s recent collections are All the Fierce Tethers (essays) and It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (poems). A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, she has also received Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, and five Pushcart prizes. Her poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, Emergence, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore Maryland, United States, and is Writer in Residence at UMBC. Wendy Rawlings is the author of Time for Bed, The Agnostics, and Come Back Irish. Her nonfiction has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Kenyon Review, the 2016 Pushcart Prize anthology, and other magazines. She teaches in and directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, United States. Francesca Rendle-Short is Professor of Creative Writing in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and cofounder of non/ fictionLab and WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange). Her five books include Bite Your Tongue, Imago, the anthologies The Near and the Far (2016) and The Near and the Far Vol 11 (2019) (co-edited with David Carlin), and PRESS: 100 Love Letters (co-edited with Laurel Fantauzzo). She is also the author of the artist books No Notes (This is writing) (co-authored with Martina Copley) and A little book of breathing. She is interested in a writing practice that seeks to subvert normative practices, one focused on ethical enquiry. David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty books, including Reality Hunger (recently named one of the most important books of the last

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Contributors

decade by Lit Hub), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice), and most recently, The Very Last Interview (2022). His work has been translated into two dozen languages. He teaches at the University of Washington in Seattle, United States. Margot Singer (coeditor) is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, United States. She is the author of a novel, Underground Fugue (winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and NYTBR Editors’ Choice), and a collection of linked stories, The Pale of Settlement (winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction). Her essays have appeared in the Normal School, Ninth Letter, Conjunctions, the Sun, River Teeth, and elsewhere and have been recognized as Notable in Best American Essays, and with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Sejal Shah’s writing is informed by her longtime study of dance and poetry, and she locates her work in the tradition of somatic storytelling and voice-driven embodied performance. Her books are This Is One Way to Dance: Essays (University of Georgia Press) and the forthcoming story collection How to Make Your Mother Cry (West Virginia University Press). Her recent work explores friendship, mentorship, neurodivergence, and site-specific place-based writing. Ira Sukrungruang is the author of the nonfiction books This Jade World, Buddha’s Dog and Other Meditations, Southside Buddhist, and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy. He is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, United States. Lawrence Sutin teaches creative writing at Hamline University and the Vermont College of Fine Arts, United States. He has published two memoirs (A Postcard Memoir and Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance), two biographies (on Philip K. Dick and Aleister Crowley), one historical work (on Buddhism and the West), and a novel (When to Go into the Water). Most recently, he has founded, with his wife Mab Nulty, See Double Press, which is devoted to text/image interfusions. See Double Press has published works by Mary Ruefle, Lia Purpura, and Lawrence Sutin. Nicole Walker (coeditor) is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021), Sustainability: A Love Story (2018), and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet (2019), as well as the nonfiction collections Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013), and a book of poems, This Noisy Egg (2010). The copresident of NonfictioNOW, she teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, United States.

 Contributors 343 Xu Xi 許素細 is Indonesian-Chinese from Hong Kong and author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction. She cofounded Authors at Large and is the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross. A diehard transnational, she has long split her life between the state of New York, United States, and the rest of the world. Lawrence Lacambra Ypil is the author of The Highest Hiding Place and The Experiment of the Tropics, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. He is the Creative Writing Coordinator at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

Index Abbott, Lee K.  285 Addison, Joseph  20 Adorno, Theodor  4, 14, 18, 315 Agamben, Giorgio  164 al-Assad, Bashar  111 Alexander, Elizabeth  257 Alexie, Sherman  266, 286–7 Als, Hilton  88 Amis, Martin  186 Anderson, Chris  2 Anzaldúa, Gloria  47 apple  11, 67, 76, 258, 293, 311 Arnold, Martin  89 artifact  98, 105, 111, 131, 133, 136, 242, 254 Auster, Paul  176–7 autobiography  1–3, 30–1, 44, 88, 98, 121, 142, 164. See also memoir avant-garde  42–3 Babel, Isaac  275–6 Bacon, Frances  2, 21 Baldwin, James  14, 16, 44, 275–6, 285–6 Barthes, Roland  14, 15, 32, 45, 75, 89, 90, 220 Bashō, Matsuo  25 Baudelaire, Charles  25, 292 Beard, Jo Ann  287 Benjamin, Walter  5, 22 Bensmaïa, Réda  15 Bergelson, Dovid  275 Berlant, Lauren  68–9 Blake, William  25 Bly, Nelly  22, 81 Borges, Jorge Luis  2, 26 Bornstein, Kate  47 Boully, Jenny  24, 45, 97, 107, 244 boundary (between genres)  25, 26, 181, 265 braided essay  122, 126–8, 132, 133, 143, 169

Brennan, Karen  237 Browne, Laynie  47–8 Butler, Judith  14 Call, Wendy  322 Calle, Sophie  87 Calvino, Italo  185 Capote, Truman  2, 55, 184–5 Carson, Anne  34, 35, 45, 202 Carver, Raymond  155, 285 Cather, Willa  31, 34–6 Cavendish, Margaret  20–1 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung  35, 46 Chasse, James  155, 156 Chavez, Felica Rose  239–40 Cher  81 Chi, Chao-Li  33 Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre  98 Christman, Jill  132–3 chronology  5, 96, 169–72. See also fragmented Cixous, Hélène  281 Clare, John  313–14 Clinton, Hillary  271 Coates, Ta-Nehisi  2, 275 Cohen, Leonard  246 Colbert, Stephen  257 Cole, Norma  29 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  76, 310 collage  2, 5, 26, 45, 77, 86, 89, 96, 107, 169, 244–5, 300. See also fragmented Collier, Jane  20 conventions. See also unconventions formal  3, 96, 181–6 generic  3–5, 15, 25, 96, 292–4 subverting  2, 14–16, 20–1, 33, 44–5, 67, 90, 96, 220, 266, 307 Cooper, Bernard  135–6, 171 Cornell, Joseph  89 Cortázar, Julio  107, 185

 Index 345 Coughlin, Steve  52, 55 counternarrative  2, 58, 265–9 Creeley, Robert  163 crot  243–4. See also white space Cunningham, Bill  89 Cunningham, Michael  28 Cunningham, Sophie  126 Cvetkovich, Ann  67 D’Agata  21, 216–17 D’Ambrosio, Charles  149 Danielewski, Mark Z.  104–5, 185 Darwish, Mahmoud  36 Daum, Megan  149 Defoe, Daniel  3, 98 Delany, Samuel  42–8 Deng, Valentino Achak  184, 321 Deren, Maya  33 Derrida, Jacques  34, 76, 85 Dickinson, Emily  89, 164 Didion, Joan  2, 285 digression  4, 220–2, 230, 249, 251 Dillard, Annie  245, 296–8, 300 Doctorow, E. L.  309 Doty, Mark  36 DuPlessis, Blau Rachel  14 Duras, Marguerite  31–5 eco-nonfiction  126 Eggers, Dave  2, 169, 184–5, 321 Eisner, Jane  270 Elahi, Hasan  110 Elam, Helen  34 Eliot, T. S.  150–1, 156 emotional material  4, 102, 121, 132–6, 148–56, 183, 277 response  4, 16, 64, 106, 297 Epstein, Mikhail  88 essay. See also braided essay; collage; fragmented; hermit crab essay; hybrid; lyric essay history of  13–14, 18–22, 25–6, 47–8 innovative  42, 87–9, 96, 185, 245, 294 personal  1, 64, 81, 131–2, 212, 233, 244 essaying  14, 18, 38, 81, 237

experiment  55, 80, 86–8, 132, 144, 161, 214, 265, 268, 300 exposition  2–4, 141, 182, 211–18, 244, 284–8 Facebook  61 n.1, 88, 109, 245 facts. See also truth; veracity versus fiction  3, 44, 56–7 n.1, 97–8, 143–4, 212, 248–51, 306–9 in nonfiction  1–5, 27, 63–5, 80, 108–11, 132–3, 181–6, 257 presentation of  80–1, 96, 177, 215–18, 220–2, 272–4, 311, 320 stretched  1, 108, 136, 186, 216, 250, 252–4 false document  98 Fey, Tina  81 fiction  1–5, 13, 16, 59–60, 138, 147, 155, 303 eco-fiction  126 interactive  101 versus nonfiction  1–5, 28–36, 38–41, 44, 50–6, 58–60, 63, 73–4, 117–18, 126, 143, 169, 211–22, 248, 294, 306–9 speculative  20–1, 118 techniques of  65, 177, 182, 185–6, 243, 245, 258 film making  31–2, 78–81, 106, 121, 284–5 specific examples of  31, 33, 89, 100, 139, 214, 226, 272, 278 Fitzgerald, F. Scott  152, 156 Fleischmann, T Clutch  279 Floyd, George  156 Flynn, Nick  2 Foucault, Michel  89, 160 fragmentation (technique of)  2, 4, 32–4, 76–7, 96–8, 107, 276, 315 fragmented. See also collage; narrative form  2, 15, 96, 122–3, 143–4, 169, 172, 228–32, 235, 244–6 identity  235, 239 Frey, James  1, 142 game  2, 4, 40, 79–80, 84, 96–8, 100–7, 201, 209 Garner, Eric  156 Gay, Roxane  2

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gender  47, 136, 156, 189, 265, 268, 292, 304 genre and  13–16, 29–37, 48, 74 transgender  15, 44 Gerould, Katherine Fullerton  22 Giggs, Rebecca  126 Gilmore, Gary  138–9 Gilmore, Mikal  138–40 Ginzburg, Natalia  275 Glück, Louise  35 Goldsmith, Kenneth  86 Google  100, 109, 272 Gordon, Mary  10 Gould, Glenn  87 Greek  13, 73–4, 152, 204, 294 Gregerson, Linda  43 Gross, Philip  236, 237 Guiney, Louise Imogen  22 Gulliver, Lemuel  253 Gutkind, Lee  2, 3, 212, 214 Hahn, Kimiko  29 Hamilton, Gail  22 Harrison, Kathryn  141–3 Hartman, Saidiya  266–8 Hawkins, Yusef  60 Hazlitt, William  16, 81 Hejinian, Lyn  43 Hellmann, John  2 Hempel, Amy  148 hermit crab essay  18, 20, 95–8, 132, 299 Heyne, Eric  2, 185 Hoagland, Edward  259–60 Hong Kingston, Maxine  309 Houdini, Harry  158 Hurston, Zora Neale  25, 44 hybrid essay  9–12, 18, 22, 43–4, 47–8, 66, 97, 109, 299 genre  1–5, 13, 15, 51–5, 58–61, 65, 73–4, 85–8, 184, 294 memoir  25, 30–1, 36, 71, 152 reference books  109 identity  25, 39–41, 46, 47, 74, 77, 80–3, 113, 122–4, 135–6, 268, 301, 308 image specific  12, 45–6, 63, 74, 125, 134, 145, 176–7, 214, 220, 272, 300

text and  45, 109 use of  14, 79, 95, 96, 109, 131–3, 138, 145, 150, 181, 234, 284, 299 imagery  79, 143, 181 indigenous  112, 114–18, 128, 222, 269, 322 Akwesasne Mohawk  317, 320–1 Māori  112–19, 128, 203 Internal Family Systems (IFS)  235–9. See also Schwartz, Richard C. James, Henry  16 Johnson, Denis  157 Johnson, Judy  34 Johnson, Samuel  2 journalism  1–3, 22, 25, 181, 213–14, 217, 244–5, 251 literary  64, 318–19 narrative  1, 255 New Journalism  2, 183, 212 Joyce, James  3 Junger, Sebastian  184–5 Kapil, Bhanu  29 Kenko  258 Kilmer, Val  82 Kincaid, Jamaica  304 King, Amy  46 Koestenbaum, Wayne  72 Kraus, Chris  103 Kuleshov, Lev  214 Lamb, Charles  14, 16, 18 Lawson, Jenny  81 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  205 Lounsberry, Barbara  2 Low, Nic  128–9 Lowell, Robert  149 lyrical language  3, 26, 31, 58, 76, 144, 221, 244, 260 lyric essay  11, 21–2, 39, 45, 51–2, 62 n.7, 103, 132, 220–2, 237, 260, 289–94 versus exposition  212–18 as hybrid  5, 10, 15, 18, 43, 51–2, 292, 299 as mode of resistance  289–90 lyric poetry  43, 220, 291–2

 Index 347 McCarthy, Cormac  31, 171 McCloud, Scott  107 McEwan, Ian  186 Macfarlane, Robert  126 McGlynn, David  170 Machado, Carmen Maria  268 McKay, Laura-Jean  126 McPhee, John  78, 82, 96–8, 244 McPherson, James Alan  143, 275 McSweeney, Joyelle  42 Mailer, Norman  2, 139, 309 Mairs, Nancy  14 Maistre, Xavier de  250 Malcolm, Janet  317, 321 Mallarmé, Stephane  25, 176 Mandeville, John  25 map  4, 112, 120–4, 257, 259, 267, 312 ancestral  128–9 atlas  109–10 cognitive  308 in computer games102–3 moral  318 margin  46, 70, 85, 265–6, 280 marginalized people  30, 42–8, 188, 265, 317 Martin, Dawn Lundy  60 Martone, Michael  24, 97, 98, 186 Maso, Carole  31–6 Melville, Herman  151. See also Moby Dick memoir. See autobiography fragmented  228–32, 244 fraudulent  1, 27, 142, 181 genre of  1–5, 45–6, 64, 71, 95, 138–40, 149–52, 161, 212 hybrid  25, 28, 31, 36, 55, 67, 71, 103, 110, 125, 152, 319 metaphor and  257–8 novel-like  3, 31 specific examples  10, 30, 36, 55–6, 67, 82, 88, 135–6, 138–46, 148, 169–70, 176–7, 186, 208, 244, 268, 303–5 time in  138–46, 166–73 metaphor in creative nonfiction  2, 4, 97–8, 126, 131–6, 172, 257–61 in the hybrid essay  48, 73, 76

in journalism  214 Māori proverb and  112–17 Mika, Carl  113–19 Miller, Brenda  97 Minot, Stephen  213–14 mis-en-scene  121 Mishima, Yukio  163 Moby Dick (Melville)  5, 54, 285 Monson, Ander  97–8 Montaigne, Michel de  2, 14–16, 18–23, 43, 184, 244 Moore, Dinty  132 Moran, Caitlin  81 Moriarty, Laura  29, 35 Morrison, Toni  112, 114, 265, 266 Mossell, Gertrude Bustill  22 Mullen, Harryette  29, 107 Nabokov, Vladimir  177, 280, 281 narrative. See also counternarrative; hybrid; journalism absence of  68, 101, 143, 169, 212–15, 230 arc  102, 144, 176 convention  183–6, 212, 220, 251 lyric vs.  31–6, 212, 216–18, 294 master (dominant)  265–8 nonlinear  30–2, 96, 132, 169–73, 245, 315 (see also collage) personal  80–2, 126, 132–6, 152, 254 realistic  183–6 structure  2–5, 34, 95–8, 110, 122, 131, 133, 143–5, 169, 172, 181, 229 Nauman, Bruce  270, 271 Nelson, Maggie  2, 71, 244 Nin, Anaïs  163 nonfiction. See essay Oates, Joyce Carol  292 O’Brien, Tim  143–4, 146 n.12 Odell, Jenny  300 Ondaatje, Michael  35 Oppen, George  163 Orlean, Susan  182–3 outline  4, 34, 95, 97–8, 107, 216, 239 Oz, Amos  3

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Pandemic (Covid)  61, 112, 127, 237, 269, 296, 299, 300 performance art  34, 70 performative  14, 16, 79, 281 Perkins, Eva  268 Perl, Sondra  213 Phillips, Tom  26 photograph as artifact  44, 87, 120, 132, 249, 267, 296–7 as evidence  64, 68, 167–8, 209, 219–23 process of  63–4, 284 punctum  220 sepia  63 split tone  63–4 Picabia, Francis  88 Pineda, Irma  322 Plante, David  88 Plath, Sylvia  157 Plato  167, 225 Plutarch  2, 258 Pocock, Joanna  126 poetics  5, 43, 46, 60, 160–4, 243 poetry. See also poetics genre  13, 15, 38–40, 43, 50–6, 58–60, 65, 96, 117, 213–14, 242–3, 258, 307 hybrid  11, 16, 25–6, 29, 31, 35–40, 58, 73–4, 232, 258 lyric  43, 220, 291–2 nonfiction and  1–5, 34, 85, 160–4, 181, 232 objective correlative  150, 151 prose and  28, 29, 31, 35, 213–14, 216, 242–3, 290–2, 294, 296 prose poetry  11, 25, 26, 31, 36, 39, 43, 51, 52, 291–2, 299, 309 queer  46 specific examples  11, 24–6, 29, 34, 36, 46, 52, 54, 55, 62 n.8, 101, 149, 150, 162, 163, 176, 236, 243, 270, 275, 291, 310–14, 322 Pollack, Eileen  95–6 Potter, Beatrix  310 Pound, Ezra  160, 162, 163 Powles, Nina Mingya  127–8 Proust, Marcel  250, 251, 285

queer genre  4, 13–16, 28–37, 60, 76, 277–82 identity  44, 47, 74, 89, 277–82 poetry  46 writers  88 racism  39, 59, 116, 215, 274, 289 Rankine, Claudia  45, 153 realism  5, 56 n.1, 98, 182–3, 185–6 Reality Hunger (Shields)  1, 169, 244 Reeves, Roger  269 Rekdal, Paisley  239 representation  4, 64, 65, 88, 98, 182, 205 graphic  106 self-representation  221 slipperiness of  5, 186 resistance  14–16, 176, 270–82, 284–7, 289–90, 312, 315 to climate change  311, 314–15 to colonialism  113 to explanation  45 to masculinity  16 to racism  289–90 Richardson, Samuel  3, 98 Rilke, Rainer Maria  26, 163, 164 Robbe-Grillet, Alain  185 Romero, Sofia  157 Roth, Joseph  275 Ryan, Michael  141 St. Augustine  1, 19, 143, 149, 167 Salinger, J. D.  54, 279, 280 Sánchez, Mikeas  322 Sappho  228 Scalapino, Leslie  31, 32, 34 Schalansky, Judith  109–10 Scholes, Robert  6 n.4, 306 Schuyler, James  89 Schwartz, Mimi  213 Schwartz, Richard C.  235–6. See also Internal Family Systems (IFS) Sedaris, David  81 segmented (essay). See fragmented Seneca, Lucius  2, 258 Shields, David  1, 2, 5, 169–70, 244 Shōnagon, Sei  2 Sikélianòs, Eleni  29 Simpson, Sherry  134–5

 Index 349 Skloot, Rebecca  183, 321 Slater, Lauren  44, 169, 173, 186 Solnit, Rebecca  2, 110, 126 Sophocles  167 Southey, Robert  310 Spahr, Juliana  42–4, 46 Stein, Gertrude  44, 87, 88 Steinbeck, John  31 Stephens, Nathalie  32 structure. See also collage; fragmented; narrative dramatic  74 essay  131–3, 169, 229, 290 narrative  2–5, 34, 95–8, 110, 122, 131, 133, 143–5, 169, 172, 181 nonliterary  80, 97, 122, 127–9, 133, 239, 251, 293 poetic  28–37 power  30, 36, 42, 222, 239, 268 scaffolding  95–8, 111 sentence  211 suicide  64, 115, 199–200, 216, 254, 269, 322 Sutin, Lawrence  244 Swift, Jonathan  19–20 Talese, Gay  2 Tall, Deborah  43 Te Whiti and Tohu  114 Todorov, Tzvetan  3, 182 Toomer, Jean  35, 309 Trachtenberg, Peter  208 Trakl, Georg  26 transform  1, 3, 42, 47, 85, 91, 156, 206, 207, 222, 230, 252, 279, 298 The Truman Show  69, 312 Trump, Donald  270–2, 298, 300 truth. See also veracity form and  59, 60, 98, 113, 290 malleability of  26–7, 142–4, 273 in nonfiction  1–5, 43–8, 50–6, 80, 82, 132, 181–6, 221–2, 257–8, 297–8 Truth Serum (Cooper)  135–6 Tsvetaeva, Marina  275–6 Twitter  109, 245

unconventions  1–5, 45, 118, 121, 185 Updike, John  35, 60 veracity  50–6, 142, 172. See also truth video  57, 83, 105, 299 Vives, Juan Luis  19 voice authorial  1, 109, 126, 131, 136, 195–200, 303 lyric  43, 126, 183, 220, 291 “Naked I”  183–4 narrative  3, 16, 30, 58, 74, 81, 132, 183–5, 268 performative  61, 79–81 underrepresented  2, 43, 127, 289–90, 321–2 Walker, Nicole  126 Wallace, David Foster  105, 233, 312 Walser, Robert  26 Wandor, Michelene  238 Wenderoth, Joe  97 West, Thomas  310, 315 Whakamā  113, 115 white space  2, 4, 45, 48, 98, 107, 176, 232, 242–6. See also crot; fragmented Wideman, John Edgar  60, 285 Wilchins, Ricki  29–30 Willard, Nancy  97 Williams, William Carlos  150, 291 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  5, 26, 90 Wolfe, Tom  2, 212, 244 Wolff, Geoffrey  169, 304 Woolf, Virginia  2, 14, 16, 21, 25, 32, 74 Wordsworth, William  310–15 writing workshop  84, 140, 152, 156, 214, 232–40, 243, 284–6, 322 Yoga (hot)  251 Young, Kevin  44 Yuknavitch, Lidia  172