Week 11: A Narrative of Suspicions

"My Grandma the Poisoner" begins with a provocative title. The title itself suggests two possibilities: this could be serious or this could be fun. Reed sweeps us up in his journey, inhabiting both of these realms—the serious and the humorous—to a complicated effect. By the end of the second paragraph he has raised the stakes: "Today, when I think back on it, I don't wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer" (162). Proving this statement through "pieces of circumstantial evidence and hunches that have coalesced over the years" (165) seems to be the driving force of the essay (though I would argue the question of the piece extends beyond the proof). We are left in a gray territory of suspicion and doubt. I would love for that space to be the focus of our blog discussion.

The task: to assemble the evidence for and against John Reed's grandmother, as a poisoner/murderer.

-Please provide a piece of evidence and state its significance with respect to the case for/against Grandma.

-Also, connect this piece of evidence (or the veracity of Reed's piece as a whole) to the structure of the essay as discussed in Bascom's craft essay "Picturing the Perfect Essay: A Visual Guide."

I'm curious to see how Grandma fares.

Thank you.

Week 10: Confessions

In “Traumatized Time,” David McGlynn delves into some of the struggles writers encounter when writing creative nonfiction. Writing in present tense, he says, is one avenue writers can explore because it “allows for the author to inhabit the point of view of her younger self” (114-115). It also “exudes a timelessness” that allows for an embodiment of the traumatic experience. However, present tense is showy—it “calls even greater attention to itself as an artificial construction” (115).

McGlynn seems to point to the manipulation of time and space as a reason for the question of truth that surrounds personal narrative. He then brings up another major contention regarding memoir: confession. His brief discussion of confession is notable, I think, because it is an important element of personal writing. “Confessional” is a particular label that is applied to writing, a label that often brings with it a sense of disgust or disgrace. Yet McGlynn disagrees with one memoirist’s lack of confession, or, at least, lack of confession in the way he expects, which is not composite and generic.

Finally, McGlynn points to “experimenting with the puzzle pieces of storytelling” as a way to work through “the reservations and hang-ups that roadblock the telling of…stories” (119). This final idea ties in nicely to Sundberg’s essay, “It Will Look Like a Sunset.” Sundberg uses fragments and a braided narrative to disclose the abuse she experienced at the hands of her husband. The outcome is an essay that seems, to me at least, very much like a collection of puzzle pieces that work together to not only explore the relationship, but also to ask questions about the narrator’s role in the relationship.

There are a few questions I have regarding these readings. As usual, feel free to address any or none of them. 

1. McGlynn’s piece discusses memoir specifically. I’m interested in the way the name of the genre automatically affects our perception of writing. I read a bit about the difference between “memoir” and “personal essay”. Here, Lopate says that memoir requires people. Purdue OWL says, “While the personal essay can be about almost anything, the memoir tends to discuss past events.” Regardless of the technical difference, the names themselves seem to evoke different senses of value and respect, especially when confession gets thrown into the conversation.   

What are your feelings and ideas about confession in personal writing? How do you feel about the naming of the genres, especially “essay” or “creative nonfiction” versus “memoir”?

2. Do you think the structure of “It Will Look Like a Sunset” works well for this narrative? How might it have been different if it had used a linear, chronological structure?

3. McGlynn says, “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” (113). In addition, “[B]y inhabiting the lives of other people, memoir readers are able to discover new ways of understanding their own worlds, their own lives” (113). 

Does Sundberg’s essay leap to the immediate and universal present? Does it allow readers, even if they haven’t experienced the same trauma, a new way of understanding, a “new vocabulary” (McGlynn 113)?  

Week 9: Writing Personal Essays and Cats

In "Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character" Lopate highlights several common questions, themes, and ideas that we have found ourselves revisiting week after week in class: characterization, shame, author-reader relationships, and reconciling our experiences in writing and the infamous "I"--to name a few. 

Beginning immediately with a discussion of "I" and the ways that people and authors worry or hesitate to use the word and include themselves in any writing, Lopate turns to the ways authors of the personal essay must embrace "I" for themselves and their audiences. He highlights, "The problem with 'I' is not that it is in bad taste, but that fledgling personal essayists may think they've said or conveyed more than they actually have with that one syllable. In their minds, that 'I' is swarming with background and a lush, sticky past, and an almost too fatal specificity, whereas the reader, encountering it for the first time in a new piece, sees only a slender telephone pole standing in the sentence, trying to catch a few signals to send on" (Lopate 38). This is his launch into the ways that authors can create a character from the "I" in ways that the author is aware of (thus aiming to eliminate the angst and shame that comes with placing oneself in the open on a page by choosing certain aspects of self to highlight or downplay) as well as the audience (by writing about oneself in a way that readers are interested in and amused by enough to continue reading).

The main argument of Lopate's piece is, as indicative by the title, turning oneself into a character. While reading I took notes of the suggestions for thinking and writing (I chose to separate pondering and what seemed like more action-based suggestions as I read, but both lists are similar) a character.

Thinking about characterizing oneself:

• distance from yourself
• see yourself from the ceiling
• take inventory of yourself
• dramatize yourself
• choose a personal conflict
• "mining our quirks" (41)
• explaining identity and background
• finding self-amusement and self-curiosity
• expressing your opinions and thoughts
• showing actions and choices (along with thoughts)

Writing about oneself:

• start with quirks
• properly position oneself
• remove inessentials
• emotional preparedness
• recognize the charm of ordinary and life's mysteries
• create an author-reader relationship
• eliminate self-hatred
• give "I" something to do

For this week's prompts I have several questions about Lopate and Kreider's pieces. Feel free to answer whichever seem most immediate or interesting to you. Even though the readings were short there is a great deal of information, suggestion, opinion, and content to sort through. Because of the density if these questions don't do it for you (or if there was something extremely important to you that isn't touched upon by the below questions) please respond to a self-generated question or quote.

1. Lopate places shame as an enemy of successful personal essay writing, "I," and suggests "outgrowing shame" (44). Shame has come up in class several times, and this essay gives us an opportunity to write about it. Do you agree or disagree with Lopate? Do you feel as though shame holds no place in essay writing, or is shame a somewhat necessary aspect of writing about oneself? How does shame (or lack thereof) play a role for you as both a reader and writer of cnf?

2. "But first must come the urge to entertain the reader. From that impulse everything else follows" (Lopate 43). Surrounded by suggestions about being self-amused and curious, driven by life's mysteries, we find this quote. Do you feel as though reader entertainment fits with Lopate's message or contradicts it? If you were to look at your own writing and purposes of writing and rank purpose and goals, where does reader entertainment fit? How do you reconcile your own experiences, the way your feel and write, and audience when writing? And/or how does reader entertainment function within yourself and your "I"?

3. Do you by into Lopate's suggestions, ideas, and piece as a whole? Why or why not? What makes sense to you? What feels uncomfortable or excessive to you? Complete the sentence and elaborate: As a personal essayist, turning yourself into a character is _________.

4. Choose one or more of the bulleted suggestions. Write about it in terms of cnf, your experiences (writing, reading... living), and your opinions. Why did you choose what you did and what role does it play in your understanding of personal essay writing and cnf? Do you feel that the suggestion holds validity? Why or why not?

5. Kreider launches into his essay immediately with an "I" (as A Man, from the title, assumably) and links this sense of self to His Cat (also from the title and many people's working knowledge of "Cat Ladies," pet enthusiasts, and so on). Does this work for you as a reader either familiar or unfamiliar with him/his work? After finishing the essay does this starting place and framing work?

6. How does Krieder turn himself into a character? What methods does he use? What would his character be, if you had to explain it in a sentence or two? Do you think the character he employs is effective or not?

7. Apply one of the bulleted suggestions from Lopate's piece to Kreider's piece. Analyze his ability or inability to implement the chosen suggestion.

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?