Week 8: Honesty, Authenticity, and Bravery, Oh My!

In “Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!”: Courage and Creative Nonfiction,” Brenda Miller demonstrates the value in “contrasting deeply interior material with a more outward persona” (104).  Miller goes on to demonstrate the value of form as a way of “translating experience into artifact” (105). By treating experience as an external “artifact,” “the writer doesn’t need courage; the essay does” (Miller 104).  In this way, the process of rendering our experience becomes a matter of how the writing of an experience contributes to the effectiveness of the chosen form. In other words, by “manipulating experience for the sake of art” a writer can approach difficult material without feeling vulnerable, or even needing courage to begin with (Miller 104).

Miller goes on to suggest that a focus on form, creates the potential for “inadvertent revelations” to arise from an essay (104). Miller defines “inadvertent revelations” as emerging insights that the essay “reveals….about the writer” (104). By focusing on form the writer directs the focus away from an “emotional center or ostensible topic,” and therefore uncovers “details that exist at an oblique slant to the center of the piece” (Miller 107). Miller uses “peripheral vision,” as a way of understanding the way this deviated focus functions. By directing the gaze away from the “emotional center” a writer can hone in on the fuzzy parts of their experience they previously never took note of, and/or expose “a truth accessed only through” an “artistic interpretation of experience (Miller 109).

Miller also examines essays that use “concrete forms” as a way of transferring the need for courage onto the essay (107). Among these forms, Miller presents the “braided essay,” and describes it as a “kind of armor” to use when writing about particularly sensitive material (106). She uses Sherry Simpson’s essay, “Fidelity” as an example of how the “braided essay” negotiates with “the strong emotions involved in dealing with sensitive, emotional material” (107). Miller notes that Simpson’s braided essay employs a “container scene,” a main image that “both bolsters and buffers the emotional material to come” (107). This use of a “container scene” also provides “narrative momentum,” and “contains” or frames the “sensitive, emotional material” being dealt with (Miller 107).

The following questions are ones that came up for me in my reading of Miller and Doerr’s essays. Feel free to answer one, some, or none of them, particularly if you have your own question about these essays that I haven’t posed here.  I look forward to your thoughts!

In reference to Miller’s essay:

1. What happens to the remembered self when we treat our experiences as “artifacts?”
2. Miller suggests that “honesty, authenticity, [and] bravery are “traits [that] emerge under cover of form, voice, metaphor [and] syntax” (109). Do you agree with this statement or no? How do you think “authenticity” comes through in your own work?
3. How do you write about “sensitive, emotional material” (107)? Do you have a tendency to use certain forms over others? How does courage play a role in your writing?
4. When you write does “momentum” ever take over, where you don’t “even know what [you’re] writing until [you’ve] written it” (103)? How do you get to this point? Is there a specific form that lends itself to this kind of momentum?

And thinking about Doerr’s Essay:

1. If we were to apply Anne Panning’s “wheel plot” to this essay, what is the “axle,” “main idea/object”? Does it align with the essay’s driving question?
2. What did you make of the titles for each of Doerr’s sections? Were they effective, or ineffective? If you were to write a braided essay, would you use headings? Why or why not?
3. How does “honesty, authenticity, [and] bravery” function in this essay?
4. How does Doerr’s essay reflect or resist Miller’s description of the “braided essay” as a “kind of armor?”

Week 7: Flash Nonfiction

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide obviously gives us a lot to parse through - we're taken through pretty much every aspect of flash nonfiction in detail. I'd like to focus mostly, though, on the most immediate distinction of flash - its form. Judith Kitchen praises digression in her piece on pg. 118, saying "it is getting a bit lost on the way out in order to make discoveries on the way back". But flash demands concision, and we don't have the luxury of multiple pages over which to explore ideas. We must, as Carol Guess says, "winnow it into a window" (18) from which to view the world. So after you've allowed yourself a bit of digression, how do you prioritize information and decide what to cut? Does the flash form really allow for the exploration of abstracts, or can we merely hint at them as we pass them by? What do we lose in flash form - and what do we gain?

There is also, as always, the question of where to begin. In the introduction, Moore says, "the reader is not a hiker but a smoke jumper, one of those brave firefighters who jump out of planes and land 30 yards from where the forest fire is burning. The writer starts the reader right at that spot, at the edge of the fire, or as close as one can get without touching the actual flame. There is no time to walk in" (XXII). This plays back into the question of digression and editing, as we're not allowed the luxuries of history or backstory, but is also a puzzle in itself. Flash has to hook the reader from the very first words because it doesn't have time to lure them in. So how do you decide what the most enticing part of a story is? As a writer, do you play with time as Kyle Minor suggests (139) before settling on a beginning, or is there some other way you find the hook? Or do you even agree that flash has to start "at the edge of the fire" at all?

Week 6: 2 Essays from Bad Feminist

Hello everyone,
It seems to me that both of these two essays are doing something significantly different than the essays we have been reading in Best American Essays 2015. “Feel Me. See Me. Hear Me. Feel Me.” is significantly more expository than the other essays we’ve read (as are most of the essays in Bad Feminist). “To Scratch, Claw, or Grope Clumsily or Frantically,” on the other hand, seems to have almost no exposition at all (can we even still call it an essay? The book’s subtitle is “Essays,” but do they defy the genre?).

Maybe Gay’s work has a different relationship to audience and purpose than we’ve seen in other essays. Some of her more narrativized writing seems at times maybe more like memoir than essay. At other times (later in Bad Feminist, not our readings for today) her writing seems more like an essayistic form of cultural criticism that relies significantly more on Gay’s analysis and response to the world around her than narrativizing her memories and experiences to explore her ideas.

So, since we have no article discussing essaying paired this week, I’m interested in how these articles relate to our previous readings. I’m particularly interested in structure, the relationship between exposition, narrative, purpose, audience and structure. So, as usual please answer a couple of questions that seem interesting and productive, or, as I tell my students but they never do, come up with your own prompt. Since we are unlikely to have time to have a conversation following this up in class, I’m going to try to respond and engage with people here in this blog post, so feel free to make multiple comments and respond to each other.

1. Describe Roxane Gay’s essays in terms of the structures and forms that we’ve read about in Prof. Ballenger’s “Narrative Nonfiction Macro-Structures” handout, Hertz’s “Where’s the Structure,” or Pollack’s “Interplay of Form and Content in Creative Nonfiction?”
2. How does the balance of exposition and narrative in an essay impact structure or how we perceive structure?
3. How might purpose, audience, and focus be influencing the structures or the balance of exposition and narrative in Gay’s essays?
4. Do both of these essays have, as Doyle says “an idea to be pushed and prodded and poked and played with?” Is there a question guiding these essays through to the end? And if not, what’s going on with that? Is it just an unfortunately subtitled book?
5. I’d like to put Ali’s medical specialist roles to work on this essay. Using the roles listed below from last week, pick 2 or 3 or however many leads to a productive discussion of a suitable length for you and tell us how that aspect of these essays is working.

Proctology/Oncology--Bullshit detector/Tumor removal (let’s cut some shit)

Neurology--intelligence of the persona

Cardiology/Neurology team--balance heart and brain of essay balance of emotion/information

Endocrinology--hormonal balance between now/then narrator

Orthopedics-- architecture of the essay, major muscle function,  transitions (joints)

Dermatology--surface/aesthetics of the essay

Plastics--augmenting the essay with mixed mediums and forms

Holistic/alternative medicine--human affect

Therapy--asking the questions you aren’t asking yourself… the right questions…

Week 5: What's the Structure?

From the section, “What are Some Structure Options” from Hertz’s “What’s the Structure?” we are offered a compilation of tried and true frameworks for cnf writing. He breaks down these ‘standard’ frameworks citing key examples to help emphasize that while the structures themselves are generic, writers can and should manipulate the structure to fit the narrative. As a developing writer who often struggles with choosing the appropriate structure, regardless of genre, I found these insights and advice regarding microstructures super valuable. In regard to structure, he quotes his role model John McPhee saying, “Every essay, every book provides a new opportunity to play with order” (123). As I was reading this, I couldn’t help but mentally perform essay autopsies of some of my favorite pieces. Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams” is one of these. I wonder, at which point in her writing process, did she begin playing with a segmented/braided structure; was the genre-bending format of some of her sections something she had experimented with from the start, or did the material show her how it wanted to be framed? In performing this autopsy, my mind wanders over to my cache of abandoned essays wondering if there may be life in them yet.

Hertz says, “The structures are as individual as the narratives” and emphasizes this by citing Biss and McPhee’s work ethic. He writes, “Each subject deserves its own individual construction” (134). What resonated with me was McPhee’s response to the Paris Review, “Structure is not a template. It’s not cookie cutter. It’s something that arises organically from the material once you have it” (134). While we might begin with a fail-safe structure as we draft, revise, expand, etc., Hertz seems to be arguing that at some point, we can rely on our material showing us which framework will best suit its needs.  But, I am somewhat anxious about putting so much responsibility on the material.

Structure is not a new topic of discussion for this group of writers; we’ve discussed which comes first, the content or the structure pretty thoroughly. As a writer, I am curious about what sort of factors one might look for within the content, as ways to determine a structure for the piece.

We, by no means, have to address all of these, but here are a few ideas to help get this week’s conversation going:

·         I want to know what things I can be looking for as cues to structural insight—what works for you?

·         What particular elements seem to lead to a ‘structural spark’ in your writing? Are you stuck in a framework rut?

·         Consider a piece you feel is ripe enough to begin playing with structure—was there a particular framework that Hertz shared that you think might work? How?

·         I am wondering if it’s possible to perform a collective ‘essay autopsy’ with Justin Cronin’s piece, “My Daughter and God” as a way to discover how content might ‘show’ writers the way it should be structured.

·         Also, I am generally curious about your thoughts on Cronin’s choice of structure—what worked well for you as a reader, etc.?

·         From a writerly perspective, what risks (if any) do you feel he could’ve taken with the content of this piece? What factors do you feel helped determine Cronin’s structural choices?