We’ve been fans of Gary Presley’s writing for quite some time here at Brevity, including his essay from Brevity 25 and his insightful guest blogger posts found here, so we were indeed pleased to see his contribution to the New York Times‘ Modern Love column this morning. The essay is clear, honest, smart, and well worth your time.
An excerpt:
And so it was that the man in a wheelchair, sardonic and standoffish, and the vibrant young woman who loved science and worried over how she would support her sons, developed an odd connection, a link to a place where hands might touch, but thoughts and feelings and emotions began to flicker like lightning beyond the horizon.
I was past 40, my anger and frustration over being paralyzed mostly burned away. But it never occurred to me that the friendship, the connection, between Belinda and me might also be the bridge between caution and passion, between isolation and connection.
“I really don’t see the chair,” Belinda said a few months after we met. “I see you.”
You can imagine our excitement when Brenda Miller, author of so many beautiful Brevity essays and craft pieces (see here and here and here and here) dropped by the Brevity corporate offices last week as part of her visit to Ohio University’s BA, MA, and PhD in Creative Writing Program. Brenda gave a wonderful reading from her newest collection, Blessing of the Animals.
Just today, we ran across a fine interview with Brenda in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Q: How much distance do you need from a topic to write elegantly and clearly about it?
A: It depends. For certain things, I still don’t have enough distance, even though the events may have happened thirty years ago. For others, I write about them as they’re happening. In either case, I don’t think it’s the literal time, but the mind’s perspective on the topic or event that creates enough breathing room for something literary to happen on the page. Also: form. If you find the right form, or voice, for a piece, it can provide just the “container” you need for whatever the topic might be. And some of my essays span quite a bit of time; so I might start off by writing about an image from my childhood, which leads me to something quite close in the present day; once I’m on that train I’m not going to jump off.
Announcing the 2009 New Delta Review Creative Nonfiction Contest, judged by Peggy Shinner. NDR seeks pieces that activate the compelling bits of “real” life. We welcome hybrid essays, ones that expose the insides of things to risk making language do new things. Personal essays are welcome, too. Use a slice of memoir, but use also a dose of self-awareness. Autobiographical moments which are digested and used to engage the reader, not prove something to the reader, delight us. Prize: $150 and publication in New Delta Review. Finalists will be considered for publication. $10 submission fee includes option to purchase discounted two-issue subscription to NDR for an additional $10.
The new brevity has many virtues … It may seem as if we have entered a nightmarish attention-deficit culture, but the situation is not nearly as gloomy as you have been told. Our culture of the short bit is making human minds more rather than less powerful. The arrival of virtually every new cultural medium has been greeted with the charge that it truncates attention spans and represents the beginning of cultural collapse—the novel (in the 18th century), the comic book, rock ‘n’ roll, television, and now the Web. In fact, there has never been a golden age of all-wise, all-attentive readers. But that’s not to say that nothing has changed. The mass migration of intellectual activity from print to the Web has brought one important development: We have begun paying more attention to information.
He likes to talk about his writing as a responsibility and admits that it can, at times, feel like a burden. He recalled that in 1992, when The New York Times Book Review assessed the state of American Indian literature and declared his debut, “The Business of Fancydancing,” “one of the major lyric voices of our times,” he promptly went into the bathroom and vomited.
“I’ll write whatever’s going well for a few months at a time and move around from poetry to stories to the novel to a movie script,” he said. “I’ll write 150 pages in three or four days, and maybe I’ll scrap it all because it’s terrible, or it’ll become four lines of a poem.”
The broad portfolio is another thing Mr. Alexie sees as part of his mission. “I can’t think of any younger Indian writers who are multi-genre like I am,” he said. “In fact, it seems like most of them are poets. And besides Louise Erdrich, I feel like the only one who’s not a college professor. Where are the Indian mystery writers and romance novelists?”
Brenda Miller reveals the roots of her Brevity essay “Swerve,” and offers us a writing prompt along the way:
This little essay is a testament to many things: to the power of friendship, the efficacy of assignments, the resonance of small detail, and trust in one’s own intuition.
Friendship: It’s mid-autumn, and I go to a bookstore café to meet with two women I don’t know very well yet. We’d met through a service-learning program at the university, discovered we all want more writing time, more excuses for writing. So Kim, Marion, and I gather in this café—where the service is surly and spotty—at the table next to the poetry bookshelf. This lone bookshelf is hidden away here on the top floor, almost as an afterthought, poetry relegated to the corner where it takes some effort to find it.
We’re not sure how to begin. We sip our lattes, gossip about school. My eyes wander toward the poetry bookshelf, and my hand reaches out to grab a book, Late Wife, by Claudia Emerson. I’ve heard about this book, I say. Do you want to read it together?
Assignment: So we do. And we come back together the following week, excited by her “Divorce Epistles,” by the way Emerson is able to return to the past, to pain, to loss, through directly addressing the ex-husband. We all have something in our past to address, some complexity that hasn’t been easily resolved, perhaps never will be. So we give each other an assignment. Write an apology, we say, to someone in your past. An “apology epistle.” I’m not sure why we come up with apology. It’s just the first thing to come to mind.
Detail: I sit down at home and write the first words, I’m sorry… And immediately the image of that piece of wood in the road comes into my mind. It doesn’t arrive with a blare and a bang; it just emerges there in my brain, crystal clear, as if it had been waiting all this time for me to blink it into focus. I’m sorry about that time I ran over a piece of wood in the road. I haven’t been thinking about my ex-boyfriend, a man I knew thirty years ago, a relationship that had been fraught with alcoholism and emotional abuse. I had been a young woman, very young, still a child. And so, with the image of this small piece of wood, this roadside debris, the entire relationship comes back full force, everything that had transpired between us distilled into the essence of that road trip across the desert. The essay comes out of me in one piece, in about thirty minutes, one image leading to the next.
Intuition: I bring the piece, three copies, to our meeting the following week. We’re all a little nervous, so we spend most of our time gossiping before turning to the pages in our hands. I read “Swerve” aloud, and as I’m reading I see what I’ve really written. I didn’t know it until I shared it with them; I had just been following that piece of wood. But now I see that while I truly was sorry about running over it, I was really sorry for subjecting my young self to such a harsh and terrifying experience. And behind it all was the fact that I had gotten into the relationship in the first place out of a kind of penance: guilt over something that had happened to me just before I met him. So the entire time was tied up with apology, with truly being sorry for so many things.
I could never have written the essay deliberately, trying to work with all those complex emotions head-on. I simply had to trust in that piece of wood. The second paragraph came out in one long line, because I couldn’t risk stopping: I had to keep going to see where we would all end up. I had to let my intuition guide me to that dangerous place, knowing I’d be safe in the company of newfound friends.
I had written a book of poems about being “married to the military.” When I finished, I realized that I wasn’t finished with the Navy, that there were stories left which didn’t work in rhyming couplets or as Elizabethan sonnets. They were prose. There was a story about our worst wedding gift, a plastic plaque that read “Home Is Where the Navy Sends You.” And another about my husband’s billet on a minesweeper in the Arabian Gulf. And one about my first time visiting the Captain’s house, an evening of what’s known as “mandatory fun.”
I’m not sure that I love the Navy, but I do love the slang of that strange, sharpened world: blue water, brown water, haze gray and underway, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. It is a vernacular made heavy with image and allegory. My husband’s work in “surface warfare” becomes a poem about the arguments we have, which “move / across the surfaces / of things.” I hear phrases like “secure for sea” or “wooden ships, iron men,” and I know that there is autobiography to be found in those words. Navy slang is bravado, all cocks and dicks and ass. Bluster to hide the fear. It is nothing like the please-and-thank-you language of my tenure-track job or the words I say when buying a pound of tomatoes at the farmer’s market.
Bluster to hide the fear. In my milspouse essays, I begin with the posturing of NAVSpeak and write toward the objects that frighten me: how much I am alone, how a marriage may be cracked by distance or absence, the possibility of drownings and bombings. I don’t understand my husband’s job. His work scares me. But at least I know that Vitamin M means Motrin, the Navy cure-all. In drafting my essay, I learn that Vitamin M also means those catastrophes I can’t foresee, no matter how comprehensive my to-do lists, no matter that my contact lenses give me better than 20/20 vision.
Amy Lee Scott discusses the impulse behind her Brevity 31 essay, “This is Not To Say”:
I wrote this essay in response to a prompt my writing group assigned. Though I cannot fully recall the specifics of the prompt, I remember that it was on a topic situated somewhere between Lost Things and Nostalgia.
For a long time I had wanted to write an essay for the things that I never write about, the things that are lost by merit of being unsaid. This seemed like the perfect time to think it out. I also wanted to practice writing a sharp turn, something that would wield the essay from one emotional state to another by stitching memories together in an associative manner. This is surprisingly difficult to do in a short space, so I thought I would tackle the space issue by using a catalog.
Catalogs work hard, especially in small spaces. They can collate, categorize, and narrate in a way that other forms cannot. They can pinball from here to there, create an evocation of an emotion with few strokes, and hypnotize. The rich layers they accumulate can stun and delight and send a body reeling. On the flip side, they can seem shtick-y. Lazy. A bit too hip. Worse, they can feel pointless.
But for me, I had to take the risk. Sure, it wasn’t the kind of risk that saved lives from despicable ends, but it still had me mooning about with a big ol’ grin.
Rebecca Frost discusses the genesis of her brief essay “In Case of Emergency,” in the new Brevity issue:
I’m studying rhetoric and technical communication, so a creative non-fiction class was something out of the ordinary. It was offered in Fall 2008, taught by Matt Seigel, and I thought it would be a fun (and relatively easy) class to balance out my course load. I’d taken two creative writing classes in college and basically expected this to be an extension of those. Ah, sweet ignorance.
On the first day of class Matt told us we’d be picking a single topic and working on it for the whole semester, fourteen weeks’ worth. We would share two rough drafts for workshops, and then have a final reading. The topic that kept coming to mind was my ex-fiance and the breakup, since I’d just passed the one year anniversary of the cursed event. But I didn’t want to spend the next fourteen weeks dwelling on him, not when I’d spent the past twelve months getting over him!
I tried writing about my cats and writing about my writing, but everything kept circling back to the ex. It was all very cause and effect: he did what he did, so then afterwards I reacted by doing this other thing. When I complained about this to Matt, he pointed out that I should write about my ex, since I couldn’t get away from it. I made a face, but I wrote.
I went through twenty-four distinct drafts over the next fourteen weeks. My classmates got to see three of them. The first was a choose-your-own adventure story that manipulated you into making all the decisions I made (false advertising, I know). The second was composed entirely of sentence fragments and had the word “FaceBook” in there at least a dozen times more than they wanted to see. And the third one is the draft that ended up in Brevity.
By the time the semester was drawing to a close I was sick to death of my subject. On top of it all I’d started dating one of the guys in the class, so that old “never mention your ex to your new boyfriend” was thrown out the window. I wanted to get away from the essay and get away from that stage of my life, so I didn’t even edit my essay before submitting it. That was the final step needed to get a grade in the class: submit your essay somewhere, and show Matt that you did actually send it in.
I had to laugh the other day when I saw the email saying that Brevity only publishes previously published authors. When I got my acceptance notice on April 3 (I remember the date so exactly because, earlier in the evening, I’d found out that my mom had breast cancer – we were all grateful to the timing of Dinty’s email so that we could end the night with something positive to think about) I was completely taken by surprise. I’ve had my share of rejection letters and was expecting another one, but here was an acceptance letter – and I’d clearly stated in my bio that this would be my first publication.
Yes, the email was dated 2007, but I just wanted to make this clear: Brevity publishes unpublished authors. My resume was blank as far as publication credits were concerned, and now I’ve got something to put there, all because Matt forced me to write about something I wanted to avoid, and then forced me to send it in.
In working news and feature stories I often ached to tell what was happening around the edges. Nothing long and sometimes the stories were little more than anecdotes. They were moments like watching a starving little Somali girl wait for the nurse’s verdict on whether she should go in the “salvageable” line or the hopeless, dying line; or my crazy, bullet dodging ride down “suicide alley” in Sarajevo; or when I swallowed fear while following a kid through a potentially deadly minefield in Khe Sahn, or when I tried to outlast the heat and drug-runners along the Arizona-Sonora border. On these and many other assignments I was a participant and not just an observer. In fact, I think all journalists are participants if emotions are involve.
My behind-the-scenes run with Daniel Ortega was more amusing and revealing of the man than what appeared in the published People magazine piece. I’m glad Brevity exists as an outlet for such stories. But I also found that it’s taken me a few years and a lot of dry runs to begin purging my writing of an easy reliance on all the usual rhetorical tricks of the reporter’s trade. Not easy but I believe I’m making progress.
Our Fall 2009 Issue is ready for your inspection, kind reader.
Brevity 31 offers work from Sherman Alexie, Lee Martin, Brenda Miller, Ron Arias, Amy Lee Scott, Rebecca Frost, Ann Claycomb, Jehanne Dubrow, Scott Moncrieff, and April Monroe. Some of these folks you’ve no doubt read elsewhere, others have graced our pages in the past, and at least one is publishing for her first time. That’s the sort of mix that makes us happy here in the Brevity corporate towers.
Also, strong new Craft Essays from Stephen Corey, Dinah Lenney, Jennifer Culkin, and Towles Kintz, and Book Reviews from J. Luise, Stephanie Susnjara, and Dinty W. Moore. And also, ten (count ‘em, ten) wonderful photographs from Tricia Louvar.
From Amanda Fields, whose essay appears in Brevity 30:
In “Cairo Tunnel,” I wrote about a positive experience on the Metro. Other things happened in the space of that event, so I had to make thematic decisions, removing details that still seem poignant. I had to whittle the piece even more when I decided to submit it to Brevity. This exercise helped me pinpoint what was most essential about the piece, and it is this sensation of chipping away toward the center of the piece that I enjoy most about writing nonfiction. For instance, I removed a man who harassed me that day. He had followed me to the Metro with polite, proprietary creepiness; when the doors slid shut and I looked out the window, I saw the man standing just outside. He blew me a tender kiss, as if we were sweethearts, and I got a hard feeling in my gut, and it slid up to my head, where I conjured a satisfying vision of knocking out that man’s teeth. This sort of behavior is something that women in Egypt endure daily. In the end, though, that man represented an element of Cairo beneath which the reality of women, and discussions about women, too often disappear. He had little to do with the warmth and the curiosity of those women on the Metro. The women on the Metro were what mattered in the end, and the details about sexual harassment would have overshadowed that moment. Brevity forced me to make this choice.
Christina Olson, author of Duck, North Carolina in Brevity 30, writes about her brief essay, and brevity, briefly:
“Duck, North Carolina” started as little vignettes—small impressions that I had jotted down. I was trying to arrange them in a framework, figure out what connected them all, establish a linear narrative. And as I was doing so, my boyfriend walked into the room, took a look at the table, and said simply, “What do you need more words for?”
When it was published, I sent the URL to my brother, who wrote back three lines: Surely you know there are no mountains off the coast of Carolina. What’s with the picture? But then: Like this essay. High praise, stated as succinctly as possible, from a mechanical engineer.
Sometimes fewer, not more, words are what you need.
Brevity had the great good fortune to publish Kate Petersen’s To All Those Who Say Write What You Know in our May 2008 issue, and now that essay has been reprinted in the great, good, growlin’ Best of the Web 2009 ** from the fine folks at Dzanc Books.
So here’s our shout out to Dzanc — everyone who loves web literature should order that book right now — and our ongoing appreciation to Kate Petersen, who blogs about her essay here:
When I began this piece, my river was the Avon, the part that wends through Bath on its way to the river Severn, and now it’s the Charles. (Neither of them made the list). I have known a river of two, whatever that meant, but it came first.
I like lists, a lot, so in one way, this piece was an easy exercise: Write a list of what you know. Lists within lists. Items gave way to memory which gave way to more items.
But in another way it was really hard. No matter what the proponents of write-what-you-know say, as writers of fiction, we claim for ourselves and our characters knowledge that surpasses our own. But in nonfiction, we can’t (or aren’t supposed to). I couldn’t create a scene, a landscape or experience I hadn’t had. Some of my characters have known war, but I haven’t, and so in a way, the essay became about windows – the unwatched TV, cruising altitude flying coach. How much I’ve seen and facing what direction has been, more often than not, accidental.
To that end, I suppose I was challenging those who say write what you know: Here it is. Two pages. A horse in a field. Some rivers. That’s what I can have? Which may also be a bit like a confession. Everything I know fits into less than 750 words, after editing, and when I read it now, I hear the unasked question, Is this enough?
But maybe it’s not a challenge or a confession. Perhaps I was just trying to write down the want — that gap between what we know (and therefore have), and all the rest of it, where the desire gets in.
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** Also in Best of the Web 2009, Brevity essays by Terese Svoboda and Kathrine Leone Wright
John Griswold, author of “Three Graces”, in Brevity 28, let us know that his first novel is now available for order.
Unfortunately, political violence is nothing new in America. Griswold’s book, A Democracy of Ghosts, fictionalizes the true story of the 1922 Herrin Massacre in Southern Illinois, in which seemingly average American men, women, and even children tortured and murdered nonunion workers from Chicago. Griswold has a family connection to this incident, which he writes about here: My Novel.
We like John’s writing and look forward to reading his first book. But don’t take our word for it. Ask Bob Shacochis:
“With iron and blood, it seems, and from the rich depths of the earth, John Griswold has fashioned a classic American novel, its dignified intonations of our young nation’s sweat and tears evocative of the indelible storytelling of Dos Passos, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair.”
Recent book reviewer J. Luise ponders the art of brevity:
How far can one go in cutting detail in tightly integrated and very succinct pieces of writing? And when is detail crucial for understanding the context?
First example:
In the review of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, I wrote about my son-in-law who grows thyme outside his 3rd floor apartment. My sentence about the thyme read: “While roasting tomatoes, I step outside the third floor apartment to snip a few branches of thyme from a plastic pot wired to the kitchen window. Dainty green leaves, tipped in silver, sprawl over the surface of the soil, exuding a sweet aroma.”
The editor’s suggested changes read:
“While roasting tomatoes, I stepped outside to snip a few branches of thyme: dainty green leaves, tipped in silver, exuding sweet aroma.”
The location of the thyme amplifies Pollan’s recommendation to grow something by showing modest circumstances where one can begin to establish a more direct and satisfying relationship with food. While these proposed edits conform to the spirit of Brevity magazine, they challenged my instinct as a nature writer to anchor the reader in where the thyme grows and how. The sentence was restored to its original form after I explained the reason for the details.
Second example:
Again, in the review of Pollan’s book, my original ending for this book review read:
“It is easy to feel overwhelmed by our fast food way of life.Bit it is also easy to take the first steps towards reclaiming our cultural heritage—that celebrated activity of creating something good to eat. The first step can be as modest as enjoying the sweet scent of a sprig of thyme.
“‘What would happen,’ Michael Pollan asks, ‘if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?’
“Indeed, what would happen?
“We might feel nourished.”
The editor’s suggested revision for the ending:
“It is easy to feel overwhelmed by our fast food way of life. But it is also easy to take the first step towards creating something good to eat. That first step can be with a sprig of thyme.”
The ending is much stronger because of the editor’s suggestion.
My original ending with the quote from Pollan introduced a new thought where the piece needed a clean and concise conclusion.
Imagine how finely developed an editor’s skill must be to balance the needs of a nature writer who describes where thyme is grown with the demands of readers wanting short pieces of writing!
Brevity 30 contributor Maggie McKnight writes about her essay “Tonight” and her decision to extract the text from a graphic memoir (still in progress) to compose her brief essay:
I first wrote “Tonight” several years ago as a response to an assignment in grad school—the assignment, in Robin Hemley’s “Nonfiction and the Image” class, was to take self-portrait photographs and write an essay inspired by them. My partner and I photographed the part of myself that most occupied our thoughts—and our hearts—at the time. Later, in working on a graphic memoir based on the same events, I converted the essay to graphic format (using less than half of the original text), to use as a prologue for my book.
The existing draft of the graphic essay is here; it needs revision still. (Among other things, some of the images aren’t working yet—the one at the top right of page 4, for instance, is indecipherable to most people. And I feel uncomfortable with the lead-in to my mom’s dialog, class-based assumptions that I know don’t accurately represent either my opinion or hers.)
Meanwhile, I decided to extract the text from the graphic essay to turn back into a short prose essay, with further revisions to the text. So the piece went from a 1600-word prose essay to a five-page graphic essay, and back to a 540-word prose essay. Now I have to do the graphic version again.
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NOTE: You can see the draft version of Maggie McKnight’s graphic memoir here: Mcknight Tonight PDF. Your discussion of how the graphic version differs from the prose version invited.
Richard Gilbert gives us some thoughts on his Brevity 30 essay Kathy and on the narrative choices forced by the short form:
“Kathy” begins and ends with some moments in the first meeting between my father and my future wife. How to convey enough backstory in 750 words for readers to understand their significance? In the body of the essay I showed more of Kathy’s background than my father’s, since readers must know her better to appreciate those moments. I’d decided to focus on Kathy because I knew I wanted to write toward the inscrutable image of her that closes the story.
The events and flashbacks in “Kathy” may pack more wallop than they do in my memoir’s forty pages that cover the same material. For one thing, the opening and closing scenes—my father showing her his high school yearbooks and his meeting us at the airport—appear in different chapters. I used those two related events to frame the essay, one as a hook and one as the climax. The opening depicts my father doing something uncharacteristic, seeking my girlfriend’s approval. The ending flashes back to when he spotted Kathy at the Orlando airport and what he noticed that made him conclude she was like him. I might quibble with the label my father attached to himself and Kathy, but it would take many pages to show why and to probe all subtext in their encounter. The Brevity vignette shows Kathy’s and Dad’s essential natures emerge, catches his point of view, and preserves some of their encounter’s mystery.
The old lesson “Kathy” underscored is that we can’t stop thinking about the stories most worth telling because we can’t fully understand them. They resist reduction. Such stories surely intrigue readers and stir their imaginations, reminiscent of their own enigmatic memories.
I tend to explain things to death, and “Kathy” liberated me. It thrilled me how closely to its resonant core I could pare the narrative.
Around 1994, one of my friends told me about a guy she knew who dressed all in red to tell his girlfriend he loved her. Then five years later, while I was on a writing residency at Hedgebrook Farm, one of the chefs told me about a kid–I think it was her nephew–who dressed all in red in order to lure hummingbirds. I knew these two stories fit together somehow, but they didn’t feel complete–things have to happen in threes, don’t they? So after a ten-year-wait for another story about someone dressed all in red, it occurred to me that the someone could be me.
A friend of mine suggested I write short essays dealing with the drives I make to and from the Minneapolis airport in connection with my hosting the Good Thunder Reading Series. The Stafford piece was the first of these I tried. The fact is, I forget most of the conversations I have with visiting writers on that 80-mile journey, even though I remember much of the talk as animated and interesting.
The Stafford drive was unforgettable, though, for its harrowing aspects and for Stafford’s stubborn restriction of subject matter.
Brevity contributor and nonfiction heavyweight Robin Hemley has been collecting book tour disaster stories on his blog these past few weeks, and this week he features Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore:
“I admit to a measure of dismay when the manager met me in a dirty, ill-fitting, pilled sweater at the front of an empty store and then walked me up a flight of steps to a narrow, dingy second floor. It wasn’t the small number of cheap folding chairs that caught me up short, or the rickety podium. It was the vast array of “gently used” pornographic books and magazines that lined the walls. Though the main floor of this once-thriving bookshop contained the finest contemporary and classic literature, it seems the second-story skin books were paying the electric bills.”
Just a few days ago we tooted our own Brevity horn because two of our authors — Terese Svoboda and Kathrine Leone Wright — were anthologized in Dazanc Books’ The Best of the Web 2009.
Well, some of us can’t read tables of contents as well as might be desired, and we forgot to shout out a third Brevity Best of:
Our friends and heroes at Dzanc Books tell us that The Best of the Web 2009 is now available for pre-order (it will be in stores in late June) at the Dzanc website for $18.00.
The line-up for Best of the Web 2009 includes a kettle of fine stories, flashes, poems and essays, but from Brevity, we are proud to be represented by:
[Editor's Note: The following is adapted from a presentation John Bresland gave at this year's AWP Conference in a panel on the radiophonic essay. We're very pleased to include it here so that neither the audio essay nor the wisdom gleaned from its creation are lost to all except the 80 or so people crammed into a stifling hotel conference room that winter's morning.]
Some years ago, back when Clinton still presided, I found myself in a Parisian lingerie boutique with my then-girlfriend. And I tried, as all men must, to appear harmless. As though every thought that passed through my head weren’t despicable. As though I didn’t want to roll up every Frenchwomen in sight and all this lingerie de femme into one silky Ding Dong and swallow it whole.
I was in my mid-twenties, then, living in Montmartre near the crypt where the Jesuits took their first vows of chastity. I was going to write fiction, speak French, learn to be a better man — all fantasies, but I tell you this: that lingerie was real. Expensive. And not especially comfortable for Then Girlfriend to wear. So instead of the Aubade Fleurs de Pommier bra-panty-garter ensemble, she bought pajamas. And the relationship never recovered.
When Brevity accepted “Future Ex Buys Pajamas,” an essay about that experience, I emailed the editor to ask if he might like to post the attached audio version. The editor never replied. Either Brevity didn’t take a shine to my monotonic voice — fair enough — or literary magazines, even those born online, don’t yet have a slot for literary multimedia (two exceptions, of course, being Blackbird and Ninth Letter, who issue regular calls for it).1
I wanted “Future Ex” to be experienced as audio because that’s where it belonged. It’s a confession. And I knew while writing it that when we speak of memoir in such a way, when we brand it confessional, we’re effectively shelving it among lesser art forms. But I was nonetheless drawn to the form — it worked for St. Augustine. And really, who would hesitate to lend their ear to a penitent? Part of what makes confessions seductive (and uncomfortable) is their intimacy. To try to bottle that, I wrote the essay orally, speaking the words as I typed. No sentence was set before I could say it in a way that felt whispered in the dark.
This meant, as a practical matter, that I had to write shorter sentences, fewer clauses, less decoration. And I was mindful of using a spoken idiom. A more difficult question, though, was how to create a soundscape, a radiophonic voice and texture that furthered that intimacy.
Here’s where I started. The first paragraph of “Future Ex,” spoken slowly, into a pretty good microphone, an ElectroVoice RE20:
Nothing special here. I’m no actor, and certainly no vocal performer. I tell myself this is a good thing. Radio personalities, with their practiced vocal modulations, skirt the edge of condescension. No danger of that with my flat vocal.
But how to create a sound that feels close? One way to get there, I thought, was to route the vocal through a telephone speaker. The tinny texture of telephones is, in a way, the aural equivalent of 8mm film, intimate, flawed, private, lo-fi. Here’s that same audio played back through a handset:
Nothing dramatic, but still — a decidedly lower-resolution timbre. A voice transmitted by copper wire. It’s a simple manipulation, maybe even something of a gimmick. But out of this simple distortion a persona, albeit a slightly creepy one, does begin to emerge.
I also wanted to get some music going. Even if music sometimes feels like cheating. I remember Ira Glass mentioning once, several years ago in an interview, that he wanted to stop using music in This American Life. He feared music was a crutch that concealed a story’s rough seams. But when I tuned in last week, he was still playing that same Trainspotting song. And he should. Because it works.
It works because music reaches us in places words cannot, and it reaches us at higher levels of intensity. That’s because music and sound, unlike language, are visceral. English words set in print, no matter how well written, can never be enjoyed by someone outside the language. Music, on the other hand, doesn’t care what language you speak.
Alex Ross writes that music takes a direct route to the senses. Which is why you must like — unless you’re dead inside — the song “Dancing Queen.” Intellectually and aesthetically, you may hate ABBA. But the melody bypasses our coolness filters, our various hipster-defense mechanisms, and floods the cortex with aural cracksmoke. The term “guilty pleasure” was invented to account for this disparity between music we want to like (Weezer) and music we really like (the Rocky theme).
The next step was to beat the bushes in search of a tune. I started by auditioning dozens, and then hundreds, of songs, voicing the text aloud while doing so. It’s fairly easy to find music that sounds decent. But finding music that’s perfect is difficult. Here’s that same vocal paired with a track by Aphex Twin:
I like this. Or thought I did. Until I submitted the project to the Missouri Review’s audio contest. The judges yawned. And I know one reason why. In trying to create an essay that felt intimate or overheard, I was seduced by music that sounded great, but didn’t advance the essay’s central idea. Aphex Twin, while beautifully produced and performed, is, in effect, too musical, too lush, and bends my confession toward Hollywood.
So I turned to music of another sort, a composition by the great composer and accordianist, Pauline Oliveros. Among her specialties is the drone. Here’s a clip of Oliveros and her collaborator, Stuart Dempster, from Deep Listening, a stunning track entitled “Lear”:
Pauline Oliveros makes recordings in hyper-resonant locales — caves, cathedrals, underground cisterns. And she uses all kinds of crazy instrumentation — trashcan lids, lunch boxes, whatever. One peculiar quality to her music is, after a few minutes, you almost cease to hear it. Her compositions fall away until what you hear, or think you hear, is an amplified version of your own consciousness. “Lear” is less a musical performance than an articulation of what it feels like to be alive. Which makes me think my short essay, twined with Oliveros, is moving closer to completion.
I should add, here, that the idea of drones underpinning and extending the reach of language is nothing new. The great radio artist, Joe Frank, has been layering his works with masterful drones and loops for decades, to great effect.
This is “Future Ex Buys Pajamas.”
Excerpt of ‘Lear’ courtesy of the Deep Listening Band, New Albion Records.
1 Imagine my chagrin, sitting in that hotel room between a cute girl and a wise-looking professor-type with elbow patches on his sport coat, everyone chuckling at Brevity’s possible folly! Many thanks to John for allowing us to remedy such an oversight. Hmm, blog as penance: I got dibs on that essay. —M.E.
Our friend and past Brevity contributor Robin Hemley is blogging in anticipation of the release of his (we certainly anticipate, and expect) sharp and funny new memoir Do-Over! [In which a forty-eight-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom, and other embarrassments], and to Robin’s great credit, instead of just blogging the usual “buy my book, please, or I’ll kill this puppy,” he’s offering some useful commentary on the process and context of his immersion book:
“To me, in “Immersion Memoir,” a writer creates a kind of framework to actively engage in experience and memory…
“I suppose someone could conceivably consider my book [and some similar immersion memoirs] as ‘gimmicky,’ but I would say that they’re simply structured around a theme and that they are no less ‘Authentic’ than any work in which the writer imposes a structure – which would pretty much include all novels and all memoirs. There’s certainly artifice in all art and as writers know, writing is not simply a matter of recording life but shaping it in a kind of ‘return the favor’ way.”
Brevity has seen the number of submissions double over the last two years — around on hundreds per month, or up to 400 per 12-essay issue. This means we are turning away lots of fine work.
Well, it isn’t easy, and we don’t enjoy it, this turning people down. There is no joy in saying “no.”
So to all of the writers who we have had to say “no thank you” to lately, our regrets.
Our friend Richard Gilbert notes on his blog Narrative some wonderful recently published comments from the late David Foster Wallace about the difference between (and the importance of the difference between) fiction and nonfiction.
Here is one of those comments:
“[W]e all know . . . any embellishment is dangerous, that a writer’s justifying embellishment via claiming that it actually enhances the overall ‘truth’ is exceedingly dangerous, since the claim is structurally identical to all Ends Justify the Means rationalizations. Some part of nonfiction’s special contract with the reader specifically concerns means, not just ends, and also concerns the writer’s motives . . . and maybe the ultimate honesty that good nonfiction entails, and promises, is the writer’s honesty with herself.”
“Suspended” is the latest installment of a failed book-length memoir that I hope will one day become a no-longer-failed book-length memoir. Two other pieces have been previously published: “You Shall Go Out with Joy and Be Led Forth with Peace,” in Random House’s Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, and “This Is Not That,” in the online journal Waccamaw.
The still formless book is about a hard-to-articulate something at the core of my being, where worry attaches to such matters as religion, doubt, the problem of evil, a bully I knew in middle school, my abortive attempt to be a preacher (and, more generally, an evangelical Christian), the death of a friend from leukemia, an adult acquaintance with two pedophiles, a brief sojourn in the backrooms of American grassroots right-wing political power, a girl I loved who was also my best friend’s little sister, my high school principal who died of brain cancer waiting fruitlessly for his “wayward” wife to return to him, the taste and shape of the starfruit, the trace amounts of neurotoxin in the starfruit, the cutting down of a hundred Australian pines, and the story of my fifth grade teacher, a Cold War hero who escaped East Berlin by swimming a river with elderly relatives on her back so she could make her way to West Palm Beach, Florida, and ruin the lives of fifth grade boys.
The scary thing about these riches is that they tempt me. I want to gather them together into a single memoir, but already I’ve started to peel them off, fictionalize them, turn them into short stories and novellas, publish some of them that way. I worry that process will further distort my memories until I will no longer be able to write them as memories, and they will be available to me only as myth. I wrote “Suspended” out of this fear, and sent it to be published to give it permanence. After I forget, I want to be able to remember.
Jill Kandel wrote about her late Uncle Ray in Brevity 27, and now she weighs in on an unexpected development:
______________
I’m calling it a reverse Kitchen— kind of like a reverse Nelson—in honor of the memorable Judith Kitchen, who pulls story out of photograph. I sat under Judith’s teaching this past summer, spending a week diligently wrestling with and writing around pictures dredged up from childhood.
It is sepia blotted with age. I gaze at it and see what I did not write:
A dark crop of hair sticks out the top of the bandage.
He’s propped up by a corner of a wall and tilted.
His hard working farmer hands lie white in his lap.
The vulnerability in his earnest face takes my breath away.
He’s wearing slippers.
Finding Ray’s photo struck something inside of me. I knew the accident had really happened, yet holding the picture I kept thinking over and over, “Oh. So it is true.” The picture and the story deepen each other. They add truth upon truth.
I cannot get the look of his face out of my mind. We sit and stare at each other. There’s things I will never know the depths of.
So yes, that makes us fans, and we are of course happy to hear the news that Brenda’s newest book, Blessing of the Animals, has just been released.
Says author Kim Barnes: “Brenda Miller writes with such extraordinary grace and intimacy that, despite our weariness and fears, we find ourselves falling in love with the world all over again…”
Congratulations to Brenda, and to anyone lucky enough to read her work.
Just a few weeks after I submitted“The Crab in the Stars”to Brevity and a few weeks before I received the editor’s response accepting it for inclusion in Issue 29, I got a call from my mother to tell me that my grandmother, about whom I had written in this essay, was dead.
I made my arrangements to attend the funeral, held in the same church where my grandfather’s had been held almost twenty years earlier. I sat in a pew while my cousin (the one who had been most wracked with hilarity at the minister’s misapplied lipstick, last time around) calmly delivered a eulogy extolling my grandmother’s selflessness and love of family, “practical” gifts (dickeys anyone?) and stocked cookie jars. It started out exactly the way a grandmother’s funeral should be. But when we got to the cemetery and crowded under a small tent over the open grave, while rain fell around us, a veritable plague of mosquitoes laid siege. I think my mother might have landed the first blow on my father’s head to kill one that had lighted upon his temple. Pretty soon we were all slapping them off each other and ourselves, swatting and scratching while the ceremony went on around us, trying to minimize profane utterances in light of the occasion. Not even the minister (a man, this time) could keep from smacking a mosquito on his forehead while intoning the bit about ashes and dust, leaving a smear of blood over his eye.
What struck me as troubling when I was twelve—the fact that life goes on, in all of its absurdity, even when something awful happens that ought to require us take a solemn and reflective pause—now seems like reason for delight.
I suppose there are two reasons why I wrote “The Crab in the Stars” in the first place: 1) A mystery: I was haunted for years by the image of the man in the bike helmet who came to our door, to the extent that I could not think of my grandfather’s death without thinking of this stranger as well, and it was curious to me that he should remain so persistently in my memory, even though I don’t now believe that his presence meant anything at all. 2) A regret: I did not stay with my grandmother to wait for the coroner and other family members (those more capable of consoling her, perhaps) instead of retreating into my own mind after learning of my grandfather’s death. I don’t entirely blame my twelve-year-old self, and I’m pretty sure my grandmother never held it against me either, but I do regret it all the same. Writing a vaguely self-implicating essay seemed like the only way to atone.
I wonder what she would have said if I could have showed her the essay—whether she would have been able to affirm or contradict my recollections of these events, and how she would have felt about it now. In the end, she outlived the habits of gentleness and propriety that had characterized her for most of her life; she spent her final days in nursing homes where she occasionally made inappropriate references to sex and dumped glasses of orange juice on other old ladies. Her memory had been failing for years. Part of me just wants to feel bad about it, but another part of me thinks that being able to see all of this as an interesting (and, frankly, hilarious) story is a better way to get by.
One of our favorite writers, Brian Doyle, is briefly interviewed on the Paper Cut blog today.
Just finished a lean little novel about a guy who goes looking for his foot, which was blown off in a war a while ago. It was glorious fun to write a novel. I was always terrified of fiction — I mean, I am an essayist, and proud of it, the Ancient Clan of Essayists, we are all descended from Plutarch and Montaigne, and Orwell’s our king, and it’s hard enough to grapple with this muddled confusing wild world — but it was very freeing to commit a novel like a venial sin.
We’re happy to throw up a big huzzah for Brevity contributor Lori Jakiela (Brevity 11) who pretty much stole the show in Sunday’s New York Times with her Modern Love essay:
April 13, 2008
The Plain, Unmarked Box Arrived
By LORI JAKIELA
THE night we ordered the sex chair, we’d been drinking. Not a lot, but enough to make a sex chair seem like an investment, like junk bonds or an I.R.A.
We’ve been fans of Gary Presley’s writing for quite some time here at Brevity, including his essay from Brevity 25 and his insightful guest blogger posts found here, so we were indeed pleased to see his contribution to the New York Times‘ Modern Love column this morning. The essay is clear, honest, smart, and well worth your time.
You can imagine our excitement when Brenda Miller, author of so many beautiful Brevity essays and craft pieces (see 
Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore is pleased to have published what he believes to be the shortest essay ever, in the new Mississippi Review.
Brenda Miller reveals the roots of her 
Amy Lee Scott discusses the impulse behind her Brevity 31 essay, 
Our Fall 2009 Issue is ready for your inspection, kind reader.
Christina Olson, author of 
Recent book reviewer J. Luise ponders the art of brevity:
Richard Gilbert gives us some thoughts on his Brevity 30 essay 
A. Papatya Bucak discusses the notion of threes and her Brevity 30 essay 
Rick Robbins writes about the genesis of his Brevity 30 essay, 
Brevity contributor and nonfiction heavyweight Robin Hemley has been collecting book tour disaster stories on his blog these past few weeks, and this week he features Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore:
[Editor's Note: The following is adapted from a presentation John Bresland gave at this year's AWP Conference in a panel on the radiophonic essay. We're very pleased to include it here so that neither the audio essay nor the wisdom gleaned from its creation are lost to all except the 80 or so people crammed into a stifling hotel conference room that winter's morning.]
Our friend and past Brevity contributor Robin Hemley is blogging in anticipation of the release of his (we certainly anticipate, and expect) sharp and funny new memoir 
Here is one of those comments:
“Suspended”
I’m calling it a reverse Kitchen— kind of like a reverse Nelson—in honor of the memorable Judith Kitchen, who pulls story out of photograph. I sat under Judith’s teaching this past summer, spending a week diligently wrestling with and writing around pictures dredged up from childhood.
Essayist Brenda Miller has blessed Brevity with a number of contributions over the years, including 
Just a few weeks after I submitted
The Plain, Unmarked Box Arrived
