LJ assignment

Hey, folks-

I’ll hand this out in class on Tues, but until then, here’s the assignment for the Literary Journalism essay. Sorry I wasn’t able to get it done sooner.

-J

—–

Writing Project 2: Literary Journalism
The Short Version

Write a short work of Literary Journalism, on the topic of your choosing. Page minimum for Workshop Draft: 5. Page range for Portfolio Draft: 8-10.

The Long Version

So far in this class, we’ve begun to investigate ourselves, making meaning out of our own experiences and telling our own stories. At this point, we’ll begin to turn our attention to the outside world, seeking out the interesting, unknown parts of the world, exploring the superficial secrets—those small unknowns that aren’t secret, but that nobody bothers to ask about—of other communities, and telling the untold stories. Your assignment, then, is to go out in the wide world and find a story to tell.

What part of the world, what story, what secrets are yours to decide. It may be that some community of yours has a story that the outside world needs to hear; if so, your position as insider can be a great asset to you. But one of the qualifications of Literary Journalism (as we’re discussing it in this class) is that the story the writer tells is not about the writer. In “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” John McPhee’s experience with Monopoly was a part of the story, but it was not what the story was about—the story was about Atlantic City, and Monopoly, and capitalism. His experience and consciousness were a lens to present a story outside himself—as, no doubt, yours can be.

For many of you, though, a story might not present itself immediately—and that is why I’m asking you to go to the Fair. The Fair is, among other things, a forum. People bring their art, their livestock, their crafts, their produce—all the various and sundry things people make go on display at the Fair, and each artifact reflects a person, a culture, and a story. There are people who polish and cut rocks, people who race horses, people who operate carnival rides, people who fry things, people who make cinnamon rolls, people who breed guinea pigs. Where does one train to operate a portable bungee jumping crane? How does one organize a two-week series of concerts? What does a bonsai tree grower do for a day job? And so forth . . . So, if you are uncertain as to what you may want to write about—or even if you are not, even if you have a story in mind—go out into the Fair, and find your story.

I imagine that many of us go to the Fair every year anyway, but I ask that this time, we go differently: I ask that we go with an eye for wonder. Prepare to be fascinated. The Fair is a smörgåsbord¹ of marvel, with every booth a spectacle. Seek out these objects of fascination; look for the wonder in each exhibit; find the interesting people and places that drive this glorious machine. Look (with the perhaps unfair eye of the writer) for characters, for conflicts, for audiences, for truth. Take notes. Write about your senses. Catalog smells. Listen for voices. Make contacts. If you can, get phone numbers. It will be fun; it will be fantastic; it will be research.

The Fair will be a great starting point, but I suspect that you will leave the fair with the start of a story, or maybe a whole story, and an awful lot of questions. You will likely need to do some library research. You will just as likely need to do some followup. Who knows? You may find yourself going fertilizer shopping with an ornamental horticulturist, or attending a business meeting of a FFA chapter, or honing your own cinnamon roll recipe, or . . . or.

Find a story, and tell it is well as you can. Be a part of things, or don’t. Be a character, or don’t. Show us what you think, or don’t. But above all, find a story, and tell it as well as you can. And remember: nonfiction writers have got to wear boots.

¹This is how my spell check says you spell it. It means “sandwich table” in Swedish. See: there is wonder even in the mundane . . .

On the nature of language, and how I’m kind of a picky bastard sometimes

    In workshop on Thursday, we stumbled into a discussion of language–one I could carry on at length all by myself, let me assure you.  Specifically, about the constructions “introduction” and “conclusion,” and why I think they’re misleading as points of conversation in a creative writing workshop.  Someone asked me to discuss this at greater length, so here are some comments I made on the issue.

I certainly did not mean that we can’t talk about how a piece begins and how a piece ends in workshop–and I think you’re right, those are important spaces to talk about.  But, in my experience, using words like “introduction” and “conclusion” in talking about writing bring to mind a particular model of writing.  One step away from that is talking about the “body” of an essay–and what counts as “body” in a personal essay?  Think about “The Answer That Increasingly Appeals”–where’s the body in that?  Or the thesis statement?  (Although, I suppose, that particular essay almost does have one.)  Or the transition sentences?

Which is not to say that that’s at all how any of you are thinking about things.  But I do mean to say that there are connotations to those words.  On the simplest level, the main themes in a Personal Essay may not be “introduced” until well after the first paragraph, and a Personal Essay can work perfectly well even if it never comes to any concrete “conclusion”–or, the an essay may have many “conclusions” in the shape of a series of revelations or understandings throughout the piece.  So talking about how a work begins or ends makes perfect sense.  I just want to make sure we avoid using language that implies that writing should work in a particular way.

Does that make sense?  Discuss.  :)

Steve Almond reading

Hey, guys-

As I mentioned in class (incoherently) the other day, writer and nonfictioneer Steve Almond is coming to Fresno this month. He’ll be reading in the Alice Peters auditorium (in the UBC) this Friday, September 21, at 7:30. He’s published two book-length works of CNF, Candy Freak and Not That You Asked, which is a collection of essays that’s only just come out.

CNF MFA Eric Parker has a great interview with him up on Fresno Famous: linky.

-J

Shit shit

Heyo-

Lamottian shitty first draft ho! Unchecked and unprocessed, redundant and ugly, the birthings of an essay.

—

Bioshock
“Harvest or rescue?” This in the middle of class, and of course I have to stop and answer.
“Rescue, the first time,” I said. I’m playing through again, and this time I’m harvesting them.”
“Oh, I am so not talking to you,” Logan said.
“What’s this about?” someone asked.
“Our teacher kills little girls,” Logan said.
“But only to harvest the slug that lives inside them,” I explain. I believe this exhonerates me.
It is also important to note, I think, that these are imaginary little girls, assemblages of pixels on the screen of my TV. The choice to kill or save them comes in the form of a blue circle with an X in it on one side of the screen marked “Harvest” and a yellow circle with a Y in it on the right marked “Rescue”–telling me which button to push, boiling this choice down to two options. If I choose to harvest them, their little-girl-shaped pixels get washed over in a haze of sickish green pixels, and when the haze clears, my character’s hand-shaped pixels are holding some slug-shaped pixels, and the game informs me that I’ve gained some “Adam,” a valuable resource. If I choose to rescue them, I brush a hand across their faces, they lose their sickly pallor and the glow in their eyes, and the game informs me I have gained far less Adam. They say thank you.
In a video game, it is easy to accept the idea of the Little Sisters, young girls brainwashed with a compulsion to poke dead bodies with sticks, and just as easy to understand the pure, absurd dichotomy as completely natural: kill or save, harm or help, X or Y.
I am teaching a class on creative nonfiction, trying to talk about the writing process, bumbling through discussion of Maureen Stanton’s “Zion,” but really, inside my head, I am planning my argument for Logan after class. I have to explain why I am killing little girls.

I missed my chance after classbut we ran into each ot her in the pub later, and I had to explain myself.
“I’m plYING THROUGH A SECOND TIME,” I EXPLAIN. I AM THE TEACHER, I AM THE AUTHORITY. I DO NOT NEED TO BE PLEADING.”here’s justlittle sisters play such a huge role in the ending, I cn
“Have you finished the game,” I ask?
It’s poor frm to ruin the ending of a game–this question is iportant.
“Yeah,” he said.
“And you’re not playing again? The little sisters play such a huge role in the ending that I couldn’t imagine how it would end how it would have played out if they weren’t there.”
You’re not going to play again?”
“I don’t need to,” he said. “I made my choice already, and I’m sticking to it.

“I can’t believe you’re killing them,” he said. “Max mentioned Bioshock the other day, and I had to stop conversation to ask–harvest or rescue? He said ‘rescue,’ so I said ‘All right, we can keep talking.’”
“Well I did rescue them the first time through.”

This idea does not fit in my head. I understand taking the moral high ground the first time through, but if you don’t play through again, then how will you know what happens?
(I do not tell Logan about my cold calculations the first time through–/80 Adam per Little Sister Rescued + 200 Adam for each 3 Rescued = 146.66 Adam per Rescue, so Harvesting would have to bring >150 Adam to be worthwhile./ When I later find harvesting brings 160 Adam /~15 Adam lost per rescue across ~20 Little Sisters works out to ~300 missed Adam/–which in turn devolves into a calculation of lost power, lost opportunity . . .)
I appreciate Logan’s position, but a morality of pixels is not worth losing a good story for.

Fight Night Round 3
My roommate José shook his head at me, but
“What?” I asked, a challenge in my voice.
My roommate José just shook his head at me as I held the power button down on my XBox. A Mills Lane lookalike loomed blurrily on my screen, and my TV’s speakers shouted numbers at me–/8 . . . 9 . . . 10/, and a bell, an announcer screaming out my loss to an imaginary crowd, before the hum of the console’s fan clicked quiet and the announcer surrendered to silence.
“It’s weird to me that you play like that.”
“Why?” I asked, as the fan whirred back into action, the pixels swimming back to life on the screen.
“Because. You lost. Why’d you start over?”
“Because. I lost. Why wouldn’t I start over?”
We are at an impasse. We’ve had this conversation on more than one occasion, over more than one game. Tonight, it’s Fight Night; last night, Madden; tomorrow, who knows. That our differences on this matter are fundamental, however, does not mean that we’ll stop talking about this. Ever.
“You’re supposed to lose. It’s supposed to be hard,” José said.
“I know.”
“So why restart?”
“Because otherwise the loss gets recorded.”
“But that’s exactly the point–restarting doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
“Yeah it does. It does for the game.”
And so on, interminably, until the end of time.
If life were a game, I would restart the conversation each time, carefully crafting each word, judging the tone of my voice with a pitch pipe, tweaking and tweaking until José understood, until it was perfect.

The Sims 2
My fiancée, Megan, and I lay playing The Sims 2 in bed, each of us fiddling with little imaginary versions of ourselves. On her laptop, we have two boys: Nicholas and Baylor. (Seriously. Baylor.) On mine, we have three girls: Alex, our eldest, and the twins, Ruth and Rachel, not yet out of their little pixel cribs.
“You keep putting the baby on the floor,” she said to me. “You’re a horrible father.”
“You almost died. You were on the brink of starving to death, and instead of just–I don’t know, eating an apple or something, you decided to take the time to cook yourself an omelet. And then, instead of eating the omelet when it was done, you decided to carry it gracefully over to the kitchen table and die. I had to beg the Grim Reaper to let you live.”
“Aww, how sweet. Thanks for saving me. The nanny is putting the baby on the floor a lot, too. I guess that’s normal, then.”
Her little people jogged around the screen, doing little simmy things, going to the bathroom, painting, trying to dance with strangers. These little dramas play out in a world of odd normalcies. You learn the rules: once you take something out of the fridge, you can’t put it back; if you invite a friend over, they’re likely to wander upstairs and take a bath in your tub if you don’t keep talking to them; if you don’t recycle your old newspaper, the delivery person won’t give you a new one.
My Sims were still, the red border around my screen telling us that the game was paused while I carefully lined up actions for each Sim: Josh should use the toilet, then take a shower, then change Ruth; when Megan gets off the phone she shoud give Rachel a bottle; Alex needs to do her homework before watching TV.
“You play slow,” Megan said, clearly watching my screen. Safely paused, I turned to hers. Her Sims were running around helter-skelter. When she turned back, her Sim-self was wasting precious imaginary seconds watching television, when she could be playing chess–having much needed fun, but also improving her logic skill.
I didn’t say anything, but I let myself snort snidely inside. -I permit myself an internal snort of snide self-satisfaction. My Sims do not waste their precious imaginary-seconds on unnecessary tasks. My Sims make the most out of life, because I carefully plan each step to perfection.

Making meaning out of “meaning-making”

Fermina asked this question here: “What interests me more is the meaning making. How do we expand on that? I’m thinking more of meaning making meaning something really deep within your self and searching with in your self but yet how do you write openly without being critcal of yourself?”

This is actually a really good thing to be aware of–I’m glad to see you guys thinking like that. But the danger isn’t being self-critical, it’s being *overly* self-critical. Think about what Lopate was doing in “Portrait of My Body”–I think he did a good job of looking past his own self-deceptions (both positive and negative) and presenting himself how he was. There was vulnerability there when he was talking about fear of impotence, and pride when he was talking about his sexual successes, but it was very balanced. It was honest. The more I think about this idea of honesty the more I like it as a key facet of CNF.

For me, the hardest part of essay writing is when I realize I’m bullshitting myself. This happens with uncanny frequency. And when that happens, there’s the easy road, which is to continue bullshitting myself and my audience. This, I think, defeats the whole point of Creative Nonfiction. And then there’s the hard road, which is to try to look through the bullshit and see what I actually think about myself. And this, I think, <em>is</em> the whole point of CNF, and that’s what I mean when I say “meaning-making.”

The essay I was working on this summer was like that. I was writing about my experience in competitive speech in high school, and in my first draft I essentially made it seem like I went from being this nerdy, awkward kid to this supercharismatic adult just because of speech. And I felt okay with that to start out with, but as I was writing, I had to pick and choose what experiences to include and what to leave out, and I started getting uncomfortable about how much I was leaving out–lemme tell you, there was a lot of awkward once I got to college, too. So I knew that what I was writing wasn’t right, and to keep saying that forensics saved me from sad dorkdom wouldn’t have been honest. It would have been true, in a way, but it wouldn’t have been the whole truth.

So I decided to try to add in some of those complicating experiences. I put in a bunch of my post-speech awkwardness, and I tried to integrate it with the rest, and so that naturally meant I had to change my reflection, because I couldn’t just be “saved” anymore. Instead, I had to be . . . well, complicated. I couldn’t come to a simple conclusion. And I’m not done with this essay, and I’m not done figuring things out yet. Even as I’m blogging this, I’m trying to understand–at the moment, I’m thinking that maybe what speech did was give me a sort of safe persona to occupy in high-pressure social situations. I can be exuberant and charismatic and charming when I have to be, and that’s a part of who I am. But I also have to let that down sometimes, and just be that quiet, awkward-seeming guy in the corner, because that’s who I am, too. It gave me a counterpoint, maybe.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, in writing this essay, and being honest about my experience, I was able to see the problems with the meaning I assigned to these experiences, and use the process of writing as a way of creating a new sort of meaning. That’s what I mean by meaning making–coming to a new understanding. It is self-critical–but it’s critical in the sense of critique, rather than criticize. Self-analysis, not self-judgment.

And as always, remember: this is an essay, and therefore an attempt. We’re trying to understand. It doesn’t have to work perfectly the first time. That’s what revision is for. :)

On Genre

I’ve been thinking about this question of how to draw the lines between the subgenres we’re talking about, and I think I have a couple of ways to help us distinguish between them a little better. Of course, you guys should be cognizant of the fact that I’m aware that these lines are blurry, and I’m not going to fault you for turning in a Personal Essay that leans toward Memoir, or toward Literary Journalism—although I might say as much in workshop and encourage you to revise away from those lines. But I thought I’d share a few thoughts on genre. These aren’t answers, by any means, and you can almost certainly find stuff that violates these generalizations—remember what the intro to T4G said: CNF is characterized by experimentation with form.

I want to start off with this claim. Creative Nonfiction has two primary characteristics: storytelling and meaning making. I think all CNF will contain at last some elements of both of those things. That said, we can use those two elements as a way of understanding the different subgenres.

(Do you guys understand what I mean when I say meaning making? Is that concept something we should spend more time on?)

The easiest of these subgenres to separate is Literary Journalism. Literary Journalism differs from Personal Essay and Memoir in that Literary Journalism is not primarily about the writer. We’ll talk more about what that means in a couple of weeks when we get to LJ, but the short version is that the writer isn’t telling her own story—she’s telling someone else’s. She still participates in the story—she tells it from her perspective, and her thoughts and feelings get told as a part of the story, just like in other CNF—but it’s not her story. Probably one of the first essays I’ll ask you to read in LJ is Susan Orlean’s “Lost Dog,” which is about a couple who lost a dog, and what they did to find it. Orlean makes meaning out of the couple’s experience, and her storytelling and reflection lead the reader to different conclusions than the couple themselves probably experienced, but Orlean is not the main character in the story. Literary Journalism is tied with inquiry, investigation, interviewing, researching—looking outside the self.

The implication of this is, of course, that Personal Essay and Memoir are both about the writer. I want to lean on those two elements I talked about—storytelling and meaning making—as a way of distinguishing. Like I said, both PE and Memoir will contain both storytelling and meaning making. But I think with the Personal Essay, the focus is more on meaning making, and with Memoir, the focus is more on storytelling. As I said, writing a Personal Essay is an act of attempting to understand something—so your readers will be expecting you to end the essay at a different place from where you started. Memoir, on the other hand, can more easily be about something you already understand—some experience that you’ve had that your readers can benefit from understanding.¹

Length is another way of thinking about this. You can have an essay-length Memoir, as we’ll be doing this semester. You can tell a part of a story or focus on a specific experience, and in that way tell a short part of a long story. With Personal Essays, the essay part is intrinsic to the subgenre—because the focus is on meaning making, a shorter form makes the kind of reflection necessary easy to manage. There are book-length essays, but to my mind they often become interminable, because they don’t always have the storytelling oomph necessary to engage me for that long.

Again, let me emphasize: we still tell stories in Personal Essays and we still try to make meaning out of Memoir. But I think we tell stories in Personal Essays in order to make meaning out of them, or as an aid to making meaning of something else, and I think we make meaning in Memoir so that our readers can understand our experiences.

What do you guys think? Like I said, these are generalizations—can you think of ways to improve them?

1 This doesn’t mean that you have to be an Interesting Person (capitals intentional) to write Memoir. A lot of people think about it that way—this is why for a long time the memoirs that got published were those of famous people, political figures, and so forth. So I distinguish between Memoir and autobiography in that autobiography is a sort of straightforward recounting of events, while Memoir employs those elements—dialog, scene, sensory description, characterization, and so forth—that form the “Creative” side of CNF. Autobiographies tend to be whole lives, too, while you can write a memoir about a period, or a particular experience.

Welcome E44.

Hey, folks-

As you’ll see by my previous posts, this is my writing blog (which has to this point meant “place for mediocre poetry”). I’m coopting it as my blog for our class, now–I’ll post class updates and whatnot here, but I’ll also be writing alongside you–doing the same reflections on our readings and the same prewriting stuff that you guys are. I may also use this space to talk about some of our class discussions, or about some of the specific issues we address in class. Also, I’ll be setting up links to each of the blogs in class (probably organized by group) in the sidebar on the right, so that my blog can be a centerpoint for everybody.

So: welcome, and let’s get to work!

-J

In April, Or December

In April, Or December

When you need sleep the way you need the air,
at work you list the things you want to read,
just try (a little) to pretend you care,

doze in your car in parking lots, and wear
the same clothes every day. ‘Cause what you need,
when you need sleep the way you need the air

is not just sleep, but someone for your stare
to settle on enough to hear her plead
“just try a little to pretend you care;”

a student, or a child, to say “unfair,”
a hospitalized friend, a dog to feed.
When you need sleep the way you need the air

the danger isn’t sleeplessness, but wear,
or apathy, so people say “if he’d
just try a little to pretend he cared,”

but still you don’t, and won’t, unless they pare
away the years, your skin, until you bleed.
When you need sleep the way you need the air
just try (a little) to pretend you care.

Of Reluctance

Of Reluctance

I see you,

backs arched
leaning forward
on the edge
of red plush seats,

waiting for me.
When I fall silent,
your honeyed hands
stretch to my back.

Rotten cherries
fall from your lips.
The sugared decay
of your breath

stifles me.
What I need
is not your rank
sweetness. I need

the blood you bit
out of your lip,
the winces, laughs
you stifled into coughs,

so I can taste you as
the brown roundness
of sugar in fresh coffee
sweet bitter on the whole

of my tongue, and hear
the way the truth sounds
on blank paper, know
which tears are for the lights

and which you cry for me.

Ars Poetica (From A Non-Poet)

Ars Poetica (From A Non Poet)

Let us say that I hold my tongue to the silence of wingbeats
and keep moonlit still to watch the moss consume the tomb
of Horace, to watch its green claws tear to sullen rubble
the throne of David, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Let us say I build with all the care of Daedalus a golden temple
dedicated to the worship of synecdoche and the word “thanatotic,”
resurrect Monet and Degas to fill its halls with paint as Phidias
cuts myth in shining walls so I may carry this marvel in a paper bag.

Let us say I gather up the ash that tumbles from my senseless lips
and set each hot dry fleck with care on a sheet of white paper,
take from my mouth a razor blade and split the soft grey mound
of cinders into clean cocaine stripes I stack in neat rectangles.

Let us say that David Foster Wallace is the architect of the world’s
undoing, so I will call John D’Agata the last prophet of hope and find
salvation in the small dark divot a tear leaves in beach sand, and I will nail
the broken wing of a sparrow to the door of the Ironist church.

If I do these things for you–if I do them still, silent,
staring at starlings in the night sky, moon rising,
then can I mean?

—-

I teach freshman comp at my university, and my class is followed by an undergrad poetry workshop taught by one of our MFA faculty. My fiancée (who is in said workshop) has said before that he’s commented on seeing my notes on the whiteboard. So I decided to write an Ars Poetica for the class and leave it on the board for them to find as a part of Poetry Thursday’s “guerrilla poetry” idea.

Unfortunately, the instructor stumbled in as I was writing out the last stanza and started asking questions. Surprise-ruiner.

He said he’d leave it out for the class, though, so we’ll see what happens. [Edit: The short version of the results are as follows: "[the instructor] read it, and then wished you good luck. Everyone else just sorta looked confused.]

Pictures to follow.