New Blog Address

The ~art in the heart~ blog has a new home.

It is www.heartofmemoir.com/blog.

You can also access it here.

If you're a subscriber, you should have already started receiving posts via email.

The new site offers lots about my workshops--the content and upcoming dates.
And find out everything about the workshop in Italy,
June 16--22, 2013, right here!

Making Meaning of Memory

In the woods that surrounded the main building, according to no discernible plan,

stood a bunch of cabins and outbuildings submerged in perpetual deep-green shade. Michael Chabon 

When she died last summer at 94 years old, my Auntie Sara still subscribed to and read Bon Appetit and Vanity Fair. That alone says something about the fire-cracker she was. In the cleaning out of her things, my cousin Larry forwarded her Bon Appetit subscription to me.The latest issue, featuring an expansive layout of Thanksgiving dishes ("46 for the Big Day"), reads like a luscious art book.  

It also features Michael Chabon's thoughtful, sober essay, "The Comforts of Not-Home" an unconventional look at the Thanksgiving holiday. A Berkeley writer, Chabon writes about a place that no longer stands, about people he's lost, about accepting reality. It's a sort of plea for the value of what my parents always called "catch as catch can." But it's more than that.

Chabon's 1,400-word memoir essay recalls a ten year old experience, reviving the memory to make an unusual point about family holidays. I was drawn in immediately. He opens the essay in the second person--a risky choice that works here. Right away he establishes the tone, purpose and theme of the essay--showing, rather than telling, his family's brand of the unconventional . 

He illustrates relaxation, joy, comfort, and revival. He shows how unacquainted people bond--"long walks on chilly beaches, the playing of board and card games...hazy, hot-tub-and-wine-soaked" adventures." It's a lovely essay and instructive in its economy and expansiveness. He sums up his purpose--fitting, but surprising-- toward the end:

And that, to me, is the meaning of Thanksgiving. Of all the Thanksgivings before and since, the one spent at Manka's stands out for me as the truest, even though we were far from our origins. Nothing lasts; everything changes. People die and marriages dissolve, and friendships fade, and families fall apart, whether or not we appreciate them; whether or not we give thanks every waking moment or one night a year. 

photo credit: James Baigrie

The Artist's Fears

Fears about art making fall into two families: fears about yourself and fears about your reception by others.

Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking is a great go-to book for immediate inspiration. David Bayles and Ted Orland seem to be right on, every time.

What are these fears?  

~~In many cases it's the fear of failing to create something of significance. 

~~We also fear that what we have created is, after all, meaningless. 

~~We fear we won't measure up to our ambition. 

~~We fear boring the reader or viewer. That's the one I fear the most.

~~and more

Bayles and Orland address these fears and more. They talk directly to the writer or artist who doesn't feel legitimate, who fears he or she lacks talent, who is tricked by a desire for perfectionism, who hits a dry spell, and so forth. It's a book well worth reading over and over. It's written in short sections; you can pick it up anywhere and learn about yourself as an artist, or aspiring art maker.   

A writer asked me recently about talent, saying he feared he didn't really have any. I told him talent is over-rated. I think that's true after spending so many years in the classroom observing wasted talent and rewarded effort. An artist who creates one perfect sculpture and only one never does it the first time. A writer's insightful and thoughtful essay comes after years of practice and willingness to fail. We often want immediate results, yet we aren't genuine artists unless we are willing to spend more time than most people can imagine at the desk.

Bayles and Orland reveal the bottom line on the first page: 

...fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work. 

Doing "your own work" as a memoirist means knowing yourself. We find out about ourselves as we write our life experience and, we hope, turn it into artful literature.

Composing Unequal Things

"Remington Upstrike No. 7" by Joe Carter

Just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable. Fortunately, the world is rich in the interweaving of the two, which can be found almost everywhere, and not least where one lives.                                         Mark Helprin                                                                                                                             

~gaining inspiration from objects in our homes
In his essay, "Bumping into the Characters" in Wednesday's New York Times Mark Helprin reminds us of the value found in the quotidian. He writes about "lovely accidents" which reveal the "purely serendipitous" connections in our worlds, about the accretion of knowledge that builds upon itself, the layers of revelation that can occur when we keep our eyes open, when we are actually present.

The essay is either a memoir in the guise of a how-to essay for writers or vice versa. He talks about something important to memoirists--personal objects laden with storied value. He refers to the serendipity of discovery:

It happens all the time, and where it gets quite interesting is in your own house, because what leaps out at you is so often conjoined with your preferences and your history.

Written to describe his process of creating fiction, Helprin also shows the process of crafting memories from random incidents and coincidences. He tells writers to prize their material possessions and actions, to see the worth in everyday objects and insights. 

John Ruskin's definition of composition as "the arrangement of unequal things" means much to the memoirist especially. It recognizes the importance of finding connections in the material and immaterial "things" in our lives. 

~a collection drives the narrative

Coincidentally, a book I'm reading now, The Hare with Amber Eyes, traces five generations of the author's family history with a focus on a material object. The writer, Edmund de Waal, references a collection of netsukes, one in particular, as a through-line, or thread, in the narrative. This collection and the author's search for its origin and significance drives the narrative with a meaningful purpose.

~a painting as symbol

In her complex memoir Leap, Terry Tempest Williams traces the significance of one painting, Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights." The painting, a significant leit-motif throughout the narrative, grounds Williams' memories and personal change.   

~more about the power of objects

Yesterday's New York Times Style Magazine features Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk whose 2009 book, The Museum of Innocence has spawned an actual museum of the same name to house objects that figure "in a memory Pamuk invented for the characters he imagined." Pamuk got close to his characters by inventing and valuing objects with personal meaning to each. 

 ~ ~ ~ 

I'm cognizant of the many material things in my home that await memorializing--a lock of my mother's red hair taped inside her silk-covered baby book; my paternal grandmother's wedding veil she carried from old Armenia, crossing the Atlantic in steerage on an Italian steamer and through Ellis Island; an ebony head of Buddha I brought home from Bali, an object that has gazed at me for fifteen years, patiently suggesting that I slow down, put the past in its place and grant the present its due. 

Things we love to touch, to hold gently and respectfully in our hands, blend their own antique history with ours; our attraction to their power says something about us. Finding out what that is and writing it can memorialize your life experience and give others insight.  

Writers unite unequal things with the glue of reflection, thought, insight, conclusions, and fractious memories fragile as shadows. And we "get" epiphanies if we listen closely enough to ourselves. Helprin closes his essay as a model of such composition:

Houses, rooms, our designs of all sorts and all material things will eventually vanish. Because they cannot last, their value is in the present, in memories that die with us, in things that come unbidden to the eye and in the electric, immaterial  miraculous spark that occurs when by accident and design they jump the gap and, like life itself, are propagated into something else, becoming for a moment pure spirit, thus to become everlasting. 

Helprin in the mid 1950s                       NY Times photo

Doubting in Good Company

Writing in the first person takes courage. Writers need to express an attitude (tone) that invites a reader into the the writer's world. Neither bravado nor its reverse, acute self-effacement, draws readers. The first person essayist needs to be what could be called a good interviewee--a people pleaser as well as an honest reporter of self. And not a sell-out. That's hard to do. 

Because writers are often cursed with self-doubt while composing, they are frequently told to turn off the "inner editor," to get into the zone and not think about a reader's possible reaction (write as though no one is reading, so to speak). 

In an article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, called "Junot Diaz Hates Writing Stories," Diaz is asked "how to unbraid the critical and the creative." He answers,

You've raised one of the thorniest dialectics of working, which is that you need your critical self: without it you can't write, but in fact the critical self is what's got both feet on the brakes of your process.

Writing fiction, as Diaz does, or nonfiction challenges writers to learn to jettison self-consciousness, to be unconscious of our need for others' endorsement. Even those who have full confidence in their ideas know they are writing for a reader. The work has to sell--figuratively and literally. 

Nearly all writers want to be alone in self-imposed solitude and write "for themselves." In the fall  edition of Bookforum, Gideon Lewis-Kraus reviews David Foster Wallace's recent work in "Viewer Discretion," saying that DFW "was at his best when he kept in mind that his work was doing something for himself as well as doing something for the reader." 

The review explores Wallace's obsessive exploration of the relationship between desire and resentment, pointing out that we often come to resent those whose approval we seek. Lewis-Kraus says "The real work of [DFW's] writerly life has been to overcome the dilemma of self-consciousness, of a self caught between forlorn pandering and pedantic resentment."  He says DFW believed that nonfiction writers "have to perform the overcoming of contempt." So doing something for the reader, perhaps, keeps the writing balanced and purposeful.

The more praise a writer gets, the more he or she has to figure out how to decode it. When we think any sort of praise is undeserved, we begin to dismiss it as pandering. I too find it difficult to trust the source and motivation for praise. It's often both surprising and implausible to me. Early in my teaching career I was told to ignore both the highest praise and the lowest criticism. It worked well for me and it works for reactions to one's writing. 

Similar to Ted Hughes' belief (last week's post) in honoring the attitude of the inner child, DFW talks about his admiration for David Lynch's films where "a child's ingenuous (and sociopathic) lack of self-consciousness" shows the antithesis of caring too much for others' opinions. Lynch shows disparate realities and expects his viewers to make the whole.

So a balance of caring and not caring, of writing for the self and for others, is a complete conundrum, one we each have to work through independently, in a way that enables fluency and confidence. 

Finally, toward the end of this enlightening article, Lewis-Kraus describes the paradox for David Foster Wallace:

Work like [DFW's] makes us experience the tension he felt all the time: how to be alone, how also to be together.

Displaying the True Self

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest,
how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or
humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't
live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't
 love enough. Nothing else really counts at all
                                                                      Ted Hughes

There's lots of talk about honesty in memoir writing--being true to circumstance, event, facts, experience. Write as an honorable journalist when getting down the facts, for sure. And there's talk about being honest about who we really are to our readers, about creating a narrator who discards artifice and bluff. 

How can that be done? How does a writer find that strong, original voice?

Consider the memoirist's challenge in writing herself: Which face is the original one? The one for the game--fierce and ready to attack? The one for the in-laws--cooperative, non-judgmental most of the time? The one on the phone with a good friend--profane and sharply disdainful of foolishness? The one in front of the classroom--calm, all-seeing, open? Or the one in an empty house, lying in a hot bathtub holding a glass of Syrah, murmuring to the child inside, very softly and kindly about those troubling incidents on the playground in the third grade. 

Every memoirist brings the child and the adult to the composition of memory, whether it appears as explicit or implicit in the narration. Sometimes the duality and dynamic occur in the tension between the experiences of older protagonist--a young adult and an older adult.

Here's Maria Popova in a recent Brain Pickings post: 

Four decades later, 23 years after Sylvia Plath took her own life at the age of 30, Ted Hughes (1930--1998) wrote to their 24 years old son, Nicholas. The letter, found in Letters of Ted Hughes is superb...this particular passage speaking to the beautiful vulnerability of our inner child and its longing to be seen, heard, let loose is an absolutely exquisite articulation of the human condition--don't let the length and density deter you from absorbing it, for one you do, it'll saturate every cell of your soul. 

The excerpt from the Ted Hughes letter:

When I came to Lake Victoria, it was quite obvious to me that in some of the most important ways you are much more mature than I am...But in many other ways obviously you are still childish--how could you not be, you alone among mankind? It's something people don't discuss, because it's something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet, we're likely to get a rough time, and to end up making "no contact." But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It's an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and when they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child. Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the more efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person's childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It's their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can't understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. So when you realise you've gone a few weeks and haven't felt that awful struggle of your childish self--struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence--you'll know you've gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you've gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all. 

Hughes' letter is insightful on so many levels. What interests me here is his insistence that we interact with others on a level that recognizes each person's inner child. That perspective is usually too indulgent, too full of soft psychology for me, but there is something important here. Fiction writers create characters; memoirists create narrators. The challenge for the writer/narrator is to portray the writer's true voice. And, because we have so many--we code switch all the time--how do we access that truth?

We can portray ourselves as ideal, clever people. We can write smart, competent narrators. We can write from outside our venerable impenetrable armor. We can skim the surface. We can amaze and dazzle. Do these, and experience the hollow loss of connection.

OR

We can write as adults who "let loose" the person inside, the innocent, the person once unaffected by the anticipations of our society and culture, the person who struggles daily to overcome weakness, slogs along constantly learning how to live. It takes some work to summon the genuine self as we may have buried it--during decades of disregarding realities, years lost in the seas of denial, learned indulgence in fears, disappointments, victim hood. 

Very often the memoirist's access to the genuine self is stymied by pride. If we cannot find room to forgive our parents for their inadequacies, we will not find room to forgive ourselves for ours. This one achievement--forgiving and moving on--will do more for competent and meaningful memoir writing than all the techniques of craft you may employ.

Memoirists write as adults who have made peace with the past, people who have done the homework of reflection and meaning-making, narrators who can explain a small part of this complex world to readers. And we write as children, bringing heart to a reader, showing each other how, without guile, to live boldly and to love deeply. 

Wonder, wander, write--always. 

Researching Story and Subject

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it 

till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a 

ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. 

Last week I wrote about field researching a subject before writing, before deciding what direction a narration will take. I wrote that because that's what I'm doing: I know my subject, but don't yet know the story that will drive it. In one way, the story will be illustrated by the subject, in this case a specific landscape. On the other hand, the subject will direct the story. I hope one will have the same weight as the other, that story and subject will be balanced.

So what does it look like to "see where the research takes us," to "trust our instincts"? It's the same endeavor whether you are researching the subject or the story, whether you are exploring externally or internally.

First realize that drafting/composing/researching, in whichever order it takes, requires that we consider both the subject--the physical world of the narration, and the story--the life event you are documenting.

• The subject for a book I recently recommended, Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome, was the ancient city. The story was Doerr's experience there. He exposed both subject and story--the place and his personal connection to the place. 
• In Cheryl Strayed's Wild, the subject is the Pacific Coast Trail, the story her physical, emotional and mental struggle to recover and heal. Neither would communicate without the other. 

In either case:
Look for patterns in your subject and story. Similar to the recurrent designs in wallpaper or fabric, patterns in human behavior make the person.

• Notice repetitions of action, speech, thought, dress if you are establishing a character in your memoir. Notice patterns as well in the physical world--shapes, colors, sounds, smells, flora and fauna.
• Story comes from our observation, documentation and meaning-making of these patterns. This is actually an understatement since nearly all maturation--mentally, emotionally and physically--comes from our awareness of patterns in our own behavior.

Look for a story sense in the subject, a pattern we intrinsically know--that understanding of beginning, middle and end. More than that, look for rising action, consequence, solution or resolution (sometimes acceptance of no solution). Look into the history of any subject or story--find primary sources as much as possible.

Make continual connection between the narrator's (the writer's) perspective and the story's unfolding action, between the subject's effect on the narrator and its effect on others. E. M.Forster said it, in his famous epigraph to Howards End: "only connect." If we do that, merely that, we begin to make meaning.

Wonder, wander, write--always.

Field Researching Your World

Madeleine Winch, Reverie

Keri Smith's list in my last post is all about the journey, not the destination, about the process of art, not the finished product. Many writers will say they feel most alive during the writing--completely absorbed in the messy process of research, drafting, revising, polishing.

That is my experience completely. Once something of mine is published, the result feels like an artifact, unfamiliar and clearly void of its organic, dynamic, fluid genesis.

Today's question:  At what point in the luscious organic process is the best time to perform research? My experience has been to begin writing and research the subject as I need information--background details, exact dates, historical or literary references. If a story is pushing you forward, get to it and research as needed. 

The most repeated advice for writer is probably this: Write about what you know! And you should. Use knowledge you already have to ground the telling. This works well in fiction and nonfiction.

How about this: Write about what you don't know! One thing I'm pretty sure of is that the more knowledge and life experience I gain, the less I really know. If I ask my 98-year old father, "Are you sure?" about any statement he makes, from what he wants for breakfast to the reason wood is warping, his answer ifs always the same: "I'm not sure about anything" I get it. For sure.

Kurt Vonnegut's advice: Find a subject you care about and which you feel in your heart others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

The best thing about writing, for me, is discovering new ideas as they formulate on the page. It's what makes writing rewarding and hard--allowing uncertainty its own autonomy.

Try this: Instead of getting right to the story-telling, get out and do the field work. Immerse yourself in it--look, consider, observe, document, trace, collect, uncover. 

Consider taking enough time--wandering, wondering, quiet, noisy time--looking for something that moves you enough to write for months. Maybe you need to travel to the South to meet obscure cousins or across the Atlantic to the old country to find a grandmother's childhood home. Maybe you need to read every edition of the hometown paper to find that crime story that was kept secret for your entire childhood. Maybe you need to shelf anxiety and telephone the one relative no one in the family has spoken to in decades.  

Have the courage to acknowledge the value of those subjects that are so important to you, those personally cherished ideas and interests about which you might feel "in your heart others should care about" as well. 

See where it takes you. Trust your instinct for a story worth unearthing, for unrelated details that might congeal into a new whole. Take courage along, the courage to wait for the story in the subject to reveal itself.

How to Write Your World

Look closer...document, observe, trace, use, notice, consider everything. How to find a writing project? Connect meaningfully to the world, by becoming an explorer of your world. Look closer at what you already know, what you love, who you are.

This past week, I found a book recommendation on Maria Popova's truly amazing blog, Brain Pickings. Below are the notes author Keri Smith "scribbled on a piece of paper in the middle of a sleepless night in 2007," ideas that formed the structure of her 2008 book, How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum.  

Embracing Ambiguity in the First Person

Mount Kilimanjaro
photo: Destination 360

In nearly every creative nonfiction class I've taught, at least one writer, ironically, struggles to compose in the first person. I'm not talking about those who have been writing about themselves in the second or third person; I'm referring to those whose memoir writing clearly lacks the sufficient presence of a narrator. 

I understand the challenge first hand. My editor told me, during the process of writing my first book, that the parts that are rough to write--the sections that the memoirist would rather gloss over than confront on the page--represent unresolved situations in the writer's life. Ah, I thought, spot on!  It seems that when we write about any difficult topic or, likewise, talk about one, our fluency is challenged. We stammer and parse, our language tentative, hesitant.

Ambiguity and uncertainty often lie at the root of most memories worth composing. So I understand memoirists whose eyes cloud when I suggest delving deeper into issues that lie scarcely below the surface of the narrative. These issues frequently involve the narrator's internal conflicts that, once explored, can give a story more depth of meaning. 

Yesterday, The New York Times Style Magazine featured Andrew McCarthy's essay "Cold Feat," an excerpt from his upcoming memoir, The Longest Way Home. His essay immediately establishes the presence of the narrator's ambivalence in its opening anecdote. It's worth studying the essay's style as McCarthy creates a sure rhythm of scene, summary and reflection which allows the reader to follow his story and believe its emotional impact.

In the essay, McCarthy wrestles with his "desire for independence and...[his] natural tendencies toward separation." He's unsettled that his "self-reliance has created a justification for a solitary way of living that is not useful in partnership." The narrative willingly and openly embraces a critical task for the memoirist--to wallow in ambiguity. That's where our stories lie--in the writer's struggle to make sense of the uncertainties in life experience. 

The subject of McCarthy's essay is an event--the challenge of climbing Africa's highest peak, but the essay is about his his own struggle to work through his need for independence and his desire for partnership. His memoir essay, thus, contains both a subject and a purpose as it tracks the narrator's physical and psychic journey. 

Actor Andrew McCarthy, then and now
"The further afield I went, the closer I felt to my own life."