Memoir as Soviet Social Realism

In truth, we think Maud Newton (the esteemed blogger and book critic) is painting memoir with too wide a brush and setting up a bit of  strawman (straw book?) argument here, but her thoughts on why she writes her life story as a novel instead of as a memoir are provocative, and here at Brevity (way up here, in our lofty penthouse office), we like provocative things.  So have a listen:

It’s hard to dispute writer Ben Yagoda’s assertion that the memoir has become the “central form” of this cultural moment. Whether it has, as he also contends, supplanted fiction remains to be seen.

But I hope he’s wrong.

Of course some escape-from-my-wretched-childhood stories are smart and candid and complex. Shalom Auslander’s “Foreskin’s Lament” flies in the face of the therapeutic model: It closes on a troubling note, as Auslander worries that the God he’s turned his back on will punish him by killing his child.

For the most part, though, the general formula is simple, and quintessentially American — miserablism to triumphalism, with the closing benediction, through sales, of capitalism.

The critic Dubravka Ugresic has likened this parade of stories depicting a downtrodden but ultimately redeemed real-life protagonist to Soviet social realism, in that they take actual events as a starting point but twist them into sanguine rags-to-riches propaganda that serves to reinforce readers’ belief that anyone can overcome difficult times. Such stories, in this analysis, are an insidious, uniquely modern incarnation of Horatio Alger’s dime novels.

Newton’s full story can be found in the LA Times.

Of Swerve: The Apology Epistle

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.

On Frank McCourt and the Memoir

The NY Times is running a nice series of tributes to Frank McCourt, as they should.  He was a sweet man and a fine writer.  Today, a few prominent writers and editors weigh in on how McCourt influenced the memoir genre.

William Zinsser offers some interesting thoughts:

Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes” turned things around, along with Mary Karr’s “The Liar’s Club,” Pete Hamill’s “A Drinking Life” and Tobias Wolff’s “This Boy’s Life.”

Those memoirs dealt with childhoods every bit as terrible as those written by the whiners and the bashers, but they were written with love and forgiveness. These writers were as hard on their younger selves as they were on their elders. They were saying, in effect, we come from a tribe of fallible people and we have survived to tell the story.

And I love this, from James Atlas:

I find it moving that it took Frank McCourt until the age of 65 to find his story and work up the nerve to write it. Asked once at a literary panel what he’d been doing all that time, he answered in his still-strong Irish brogue: “Recoverin’.”

– Dinty

Moby Dick is the most BORING book I have ever read!

The indefatigable Robin Hemley (pictured on the right), a Brevity contributor and friend, and author of the charming memoir, Do Over!, has opened two new contests on his blog(s), so here’s your chance to win money, or free books, or just have fun.

1. Robin is looking for silly reviews and dumb book blog postings at bookbelches.blogspot.com. Cash prizes!!  The first entry is in, and here’s a preview:

Moby Dick is the most BORING book I have ever read!…. We were given a list of books in English class, and I chose to read this. After a week, I was just in page 103. It was needed the next day, so I panicked and switched books, and bought War and Peace. And I finished that book in 8 hours of straight reading.

2. Also, at Robinhemley.blogspot.com, Robin (aka Mr. Red Bull) is sponsoring a contest to win free copies of Do Over. Simply email him at Robinhemley@gmail.com what you might like to do over in your life. On the same website, well-known authors (and a certain Brevity editor) share Book Tour Disaster stories.

Whew!

Now everyone, back to work.

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On Memory, Memoir, and the Ethics of Storytelling

Marion Winik, author of the brilliant memoir First Comes Love, writes thoughtfully and specifically about the difficulties of memoir, especially when the memories involve past illegal behavior.

An excerpt:

When I published my first collection of essays in 1994, lawyers marked every “actionable” sentence, every instance where I mentioned someone else’s drug use, homosexuality or criminal behavior. There were a lot of them. I have a memo dated Sept. 9, 1993, which includes the following bullet points:

p. 11 I suggest we omit a specific street address. It invites trouble from owners or landlords (called a junkie on page 13.)

p. 41 If Carolyn Mahoney is a real name I suggest a change since she appears several places and here we described her taking drugs.

p. 129, 130 Nancy and Steven. Steven is dead so no problem. Nancy’s privacy is being invaded. We should get her consent even if we change her name since as the author’s sister she will be identifiable anyway.

p. 155 Anita should be disguised completely due to heavy drinking and lesbianism.

Anita, Carolyn Mahoney and my sister Nancy all read the manuscript and signed releases. The address of the building was omitted. And Steven was dead — so no problem!

The entire essay can be found here.

On Graphic Memoir and Maggie McKnight’s “Tonight”

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.

On “Kathy” and Brevity

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.

Where Did I Leave My Truth

From Brevity contributor Gary Presley:

In the midst of reviewing Where Did I Leave My Glasses? for The Internet Review of Books, I stumbled upon a neurological star chart which might be useful for writers exploring the edge of the universe between truth and reality. Here is a sample:

” … computer remembers all or nothing. No in-between. Whereas the brain is filled with in-between. Think of it this way: What you put into the computer is an abstraction of your experience. Retrieve it, and it’s unchanged. What you remember is an abstraction of that experience, then a reconstruction of the abstraction, then a reconstruction of the reconstruction of the abstraction, and so on and on and on—every time you retrieve it. And of course, the more time that passes, the truer this becomes.”

I think regularly about the muddy mixture of objective fact and subjective truth as it applies to the art of creative nonfiction, particularly memoir. While I know a writer has the obligation to quote correctly and describe accurately, I also know that when we set out to explore the swamp of self, we often get tangled up in the jungle of emotions.

Ignore the book’s light-hearted title. Lear tackled the subject of memory by consulting psychologists and neuro-scientists of every stripe. It was especially fascinating to follow her as she explored the idea that our writing comes from the place where memory lives, which in Lear’s description is “palimpsest,” a tablet of layered text, each preceding layer imperfectly erased.

I love the art of memoir, in book form and in personal essay, but even pre-Frey, I approached the such works believing that the writer was telling only a truth rather than the truth. Lear’s work reinforces both my skepticism and my faith.

As a reader, I am forgiving, although not quite so cynical as Ambrose Bierce, who said truth is “an ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.”

But after reading Where Did I Leave My Glasses? I think I have moved away from the idea of “truths” to the point where I believe that “truths” are merely opinions about truths, but that doesn’t mean I will easily forgive you if you choose to lie to me.

–

Gary Presley’s work has appeared once in Brevity, his thoughts about writing several times here on the Brevity’s blog, and his book (Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio) from The University of Iowa Press and into bookstores.

The Memoir (and) Prizes for Memoir in Prose and Poetry/ and for Graphic Memoir

The Memoir (and) Prize for Memoir in Prose and Poetry

The Memoir (and) Prize for Graphic Memoir

Four prizes awared up to $500.

Memoir (and) reading period for Spring+Summer 2010 (Issue 6): 5/1/09 – 8/15/09.

Accepting traditional and experimental prose, poetry, graphic memoir, narrative photography, lies, and more. All submissions eligible for contest entry. Submit online or mail to: Memoir (and), P.O. Box 1398, Sausalito, CA 94966.

Guidelines at www.memoirjournal.com.

On Immersion Memoir

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.”

Read the entire entry here.

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– Dinty W. Moore

In Search of a Name: The Splor?

Here in nonfiction we have the short form and the long form, the essay and the memoir. The essay essays—it attempts—and the memoir remembers.

But then again, our essays often remember too, and our memories are often essayed into their eventual meaning. Some memoirs are boiled down to only a few pages, and essays often swell to book-length sprawls in the tradition of Montaigne’s “On a Few Verses of Virgil.” Even more complicating, certain online journals claim to be interested only in very short shorts of, say, 750 words or less, turning a blind eye to what such pieces might’ve been in a longer span: essays or memoirs or somethings-else. And then you have books like Scott Russell Sanders’ Hunting for Hope, in which a whole group of essays, any of which could stand alone, combine in a way that magnifies each. Add to that the interviews, reviews, profiles, radio essays, graphic memoirs, hybrids, experimentals, prose poems, grocery lists, and Facebook statuses that might also jostle for space in the genre, and, well, you get the idea.

I’m not really worried about small, sub-genre distinctions between essay and memoir and all their cousins, though. But I can’t get past the fact that I inevitably seem to come back to length: If you say “essay,” I think “short”; and if you say “memoir,” I think “long.”

My friend is finishing up her dissertation and it’s 90 pages long—too short to be a book, too long to be an essay. Discussing it recently in a workshop, we had trouble calling it anything except “the dissertation.” Somebody threw out the word novella, but somebody else rejected it on the grounds that the term novella was reserved for fiction. The word monograph was tried, but it rang of academia. Chapbook was similarly ill-fitting. “That-stuff-that-Essay-Press-is-publishing,” I tried: too long.

Another colleague thought a neologism was in order and suggested the portmanteau splor, a combination splurge and exploration. As in, “This started as an essay, and there’s too little here to make it into a whole book, so I’m hoping to expand it into a splor of sorts.” There were half-hearted assents and some nervous laughter, but no one championed the cause (Sorry, Dave).

So what do we call it? What term can we use for our middle-form nonfiction? “Novella-length essay”? “Short memoir”? “Book-length essay”? Splor? Messay? Brevimoir?

This isn’t really that important except for this: if they have a name, they might find more of a space. It seems to me that many excellent pieces are in publishing limbo because they are too long for the journals and too short for the houses. Often they get bowdlerized or wait around for the author to get a book deal so they can sneak in with shorter works. I’m thinking of “Tense, Present,” David Foster Wallace’s massive splor that filled 20 pages of Harper’s but 61 pages of Consider the Lobster. Or his “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub” that fills 11 scant pages at rollingstone.com, 89 pages of Consider the Lobster, and 144 pages as its own book, McCain’s Promise.¹ I just finished de Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” which only makes it to Penguin-edition glory by being packaged with two other of de Q’s works. And I can’t help but remember a piece by my mentor that sat on the editor’s desk at The American Scholar for close to a year: they seemed pleased with its quality but were nervous about its girth.

I’m not bemoaning the fact that I have an 80-page manuscript without a home. I don’t. But I wish a had more 80-page jewels on my bookshelf waiting to be read. The splor, like the brief essays we publish here, has a certain allure. It can exhibit a kind of brevity not seen elsewhere. It is the movement of a mind focused on a subject for an afternoon—not an hour, not a week. That mind ups the ante on the essay’s demand for precision and concentration, yet it eschews the sometime pretension or petulance of the full-length memoir.

If essays are episodes of Seinfeld and CSI, and memoirs are Groundhog Day and You’ve Got Mail and, sometimes, all three Lord of the Rings films, then splors are miniseries. They are made-for-TV movies. Telenovellas. Firefly. Freaks and Geeks.²

But they need a name, one we can all agree on (or at least argue about). Personally, I’d like to vote for “the monograph essay.” Sounds classy. Discuss.

~David Grover
Managing Editor

¹ In fact, DFW’s collected essays often have lines like, “Since this will undoubtedly be cut before publication,” giving one the impression that he wasn’t writing with the reader in mind at all but was instead engaging with his editors in some kind of odd game.
² Brevity, I guess, publishes commercials.

Kyle Minor on “… a hard-to-articulate something at the core of my being”

Kyle Minor discusses his Brevity 29 essay

_________________

“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.

_

A Reverse Kitchen

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.

Then I went home.

And the opposite occurred.

After I’d heard the family folklore my whole life, after I’d written it, and after “There’s Things” was published in Brevity Issue 27, my sister wrote she’d found a picture of Uncle Ray.

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.

The River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize Series

River Teeth’s editors and editorial board conduct a yearly national contest to identify the best book-length manuscript of literary nonfiction. The winner will receive $1,000 and publication by The University of Nebraska Press. Manuscripts must be between 150-400 pages long .  Deadline is March 1, 2009.

Past winners have been honored as Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers and School Library Journal Best Adult Books for High School Students, as well as finalists in the Connecticut Book Awards and Sayoran International Prize for Writing.

For more information about River Teeth and the Literary Nonfiction Book Prize, visit http://www.ashland.edu/riverteeth/guidelines.htm

Of Mystery and Regret

From Laura Sewell Matter:

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.

`

The Accidental Plagiarist

An interesting take on accidental memory-stealing, offered for those still puzzled by the confounding Neale Donald Walsch “Christ Was Love” scandal, via VQR:

The Accidental Plagiarist

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Feel-Good Nonfiction

Our friend The Ethical Exhibitionist comments provocatively and wisely on Lee Gutkind’s response to Herman Rosenblat (see entry below if you missed the set up):

It seems to me that Lee Gutkind absolutely nails it in his observation that these fraudulent memoirs couldn’t be marketed as fiction.  The one thing that James Frey, Margaret Seltzer, and Herman Rosenblat all have in common (aside from the fact that they’re frauds) is that their stories are all “affirming,” in the sense that they tell the reader, “Hey, what you want to believe is true actually IS true.”  Jamey Frey showed us that addicts can overcome their sickness through willpower alone; Margaret Seltzer showed us that even a career gangbanger can escape the streets if she really wants to; Herman Rosenblat– most nauseatingly of all– reassured us that we can find joy even in genocide, if we know where to look.  These writers comfort their readership through, to use Joan Didion’s language, “the imposition of a narrative line” that insists that there’s something reassuringly  noble about humanity, that the types of simplified endings that the world of fiction would dismiss as “contrived” or “trite” actually do happen.

That’s why, I think, defenders of these memwahists like to say “But it doesn’t matter– it’s still a good story.”  For them, “good story” doesn’t indicate aesthetic merit (because, of course, these stories are about as well-written as your typical LIFETIME ORIGINAL MOVIE or any number of Very Special Episodes of MR. BELVEDERE), but, rather, that the story made them feel good by insisting that their own intuitive optimism about complicated issues is somehow “right” in the “real world.”

~

A Million Little Apples

Meghan Daum in the LA Times offers an interesting, somewhat deeper than most, look at the subject of fictional memoirs, specifically the newest debacle on the block, Herman Rosenblat’s now-defunct Holocaust memoir.  

Along the way she talks with Lee Gutkind, who (correctly we think) debunks the idea that these fictional memoirs might easily be published as successful novels:

“I don’t think [Rosenblat's story] is a particularly terrific story compared to the fictional worlds created by most fiction writers today,” Gutkind added. “It’s a cute story … but it doesn’t have the scope and depth required of fiction. But once you say it’s true, it becomes the kind of thing a publisher can take to the bank.”

Daum’s full piece is well worth the read.

~

Odd that Oprah …

… seems always to be tied into these hoax memoirs.  I’m not questioning her honesty, but the allure of Oprah-show-endorsement riches must somehow be tied into the recurrence of this story:

(CNN) — Oprah Winfrey once dubbed it the “greatest love story” she had ever heard: a boy held at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II and a girl on the outside who tossed him apples to keep him alive. They eventually married and grew old together.

Herman Rosenblat has acknowledged his Holocaust love story is fake: “I am sorry.”

It turns out the story of Herman and Roma Rosenblat isn’t true.

The two had told their love story for years and years, inspiring a book deal, an upcoming movie, and stories across the globe on television, in papers and on the Internet. A children’s book, “Angel Girl,” was also based on their love story.

When the couple appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” more than a decade ago, the famed host called it “the single greatest love story in 22 years of doing this show.”

But over the weekend, Herman Rosenblat issued a statement through his literary agent, Andrea Hurst, acknowledging the story of how he met his wife was made up.

“Why did I do that and write the story with the girl and the apple, because I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people, and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world,” he said in the statement.

“In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”

Herman Rosenblat really was in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II — a subcamp of Buchenwald — and he really has been married to Roma for decades. Beyond that, the truth is murky.

Berkley Books immediately canceled publication of Rosenblat’s memoir, “Angel at the Fence,” which was set to be released in February.

“Berkley will demand that the author and the agent return all money that they have received for this work,” Berkley spokesman Craig Burke said in a statement.

A movie version of the Rosenblats’ story — even though now proven a hoax — remains in the works. Atlantic Overseas Pictures says the movie is a fictionalized adaptation and that “the story retains its power to grip audiences worldwide.”

Many Holocaust scholars had long cast doubt on the Rosenblats’ story.

Professor Ken Waltzer, the director of Michigan State University’s Jewish Studies program, said he began raising questions to the agent and publisher in November, suggesting that the story was fabricated. But he says his numerous queries went unanswered.

He says he told the editor that the story is “at best embellished and perhaps invented.”

“The idea of a prisoner being able autonomously to approach the fence not just once, but every day at the same time, … none of it seemed plausible,” Waltzer says. “That fence was right next to the SS barracks, so to go to the fence, which was also punishable by death, was to risk death.”

How to Write Your Memoir

Advice from Reader’s Digest:

“You don’t need to have had a hardscrabble youth in order to write a memoir. You don’t need eccentric parents. Believe it or not, you don’t need anything dramatic. And you certainly don’t have to publish it.”

and there’s more

.

Opium: 500 Words

Opium’s 500-Word Memoir Contest–judged by author and Oscar-nominee Tom Perrotta.

The rules? Write a memoir of 500 words or less. The winning memoir, along with a handful of finalists, will appear in Opium8 which will debut on May 1, 2009. For a shining example (and the rules)–a finalist from Opium5–check out Giancarlo DiTrapano’s heartaching memoir here: http://opiummagazine.com/contest.aspx

The Deadline: February 22, 2009
The Reward: $1,000, and publication in Opium8.
The Cost: $10 for a single entry; $17.50 for two (or you can now subscribe and enter for $25!)

How to Submit: Go to Opium’s new submissions system and enter!
The Judge: Tom Perrotta has written six novels, including Election, the New York Times best seller The Abstinence Teacher and Little Children. Election became an acclaimed movie directed by Alexander Payne, and Perrotta received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of Little Children. Perrotta has taught at Yale and Harvard, and lives near Boston.

Baffled, We Are

Can’t really understand why Gulf Coast’s Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose includes short fiction, the prose poem, but not brief nonfiction!  Baffled, we are.

But we are fans of Gulf Coast, and of Mr. Barthelme, and of Beckian Fritz Goldberg, so we happily pass along the details:

The Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose This year’s judge: Beckian Fritz Goldberg Guidelines: Submit up to 3 previously unpublished prose poems or short stories, each no more than 500 words in length. Your name and address should appear on the cover letter only. All entries will be eligible for publication, though only one will receive our $500 prize. Manuscripts will not be returned. Include an SASE for results. Your $15 reading fee, payable to “Gulf Coast,” will include a one-year subscription. Send Entries to: Barthelme Prize, Gulf Coast English Dept, Univ. of Houston Houston, TX 77204-3013 Deadline: December 20, 2008 Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts

On Narrators, Memoir, and the “Pretty Shabby Stuff” Inside

Author Gary Presley is an occasional contributor to both Brevity and the Brevity Blog, and author of Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio, new from the University of Iowa Press.  We recommend his memoir, and recommend his thoughts on sypathetic and unsympathetic narrators:

I help lead a group that discusses creative nonfiction. There’s about thirty of us exchanging emails, and we all profit in dissecting an essay or a book chapter every week. In fact, I’ve hit up (Brevity editor) Dinty W. Moore regarding his editing experiences, particularly about publishing a piece with an unattractive or unsympathetic narrator.

I always knew I could be a jerk, although I don’t think it really came through in my writing when I stuck to essays. What I did learn when I set out to write in a longer form, though, is interesting. It may be a tough gig to be a jerk in real life, it’s even tougher as being a jerk who wants to write a memoir.

I’m what’s referred to as a “polio quad,” most likely the result of what is now called a “vaccine accident.” That happened long ago and far away. As you might expect, it made me angry, bitter, and oftentimes frustrated with my lot. But that’s something I hide from most people most of the time, even when I wrote op/eds about disability issues.

One day, though, I was inspired to write a wry and ironic essay about one of the practicalities of using a wheelchair — the essay was entitled “A Pot to Pee in.”

Why? I think because I was in the mood to be honest, perhaps even to be honest with myself, which is a trait I urge on others but often avoid on my own. Something good came of it, though. I discovered readers like honesty. In fact, several in my critique group said, “This is good. You need to write a memoir.”

And so I did. It’s called Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio.

In writing the book, I did go beyond polio, down toward a place where I learned something about my life, about the person I had become, about living “boob-high to the world,” as my wife describes it.

What interested me, though, is more than one reader seemed puzzled over the anger and frustration and bitterness within the memoir. “That’s not the Gary I know.”

Sure enough. I was right. I am a jerk, at least sometimes, and thankfully mostly in private. I always knew there was wisdom in the novelist Peter DeVries’ observation, “Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.”

But in writing the book, I also learned I am an observer, a person honest enough to recognize that element of jerkiness, forgive himself for it, and understand that by offering something “so bitingly honest that … readers sometimes cringe before turning the page … ” that I have been able to illustrate disability is a normal aspect with the human condition and to change a few minds about what it means to live with a disability, to recognize the need for equal access, and to think hard thoughts about institutional care and end-of-life issues.

–
Gary Presley www.garypresley.com
SEVEN WHEELCHAIRS: A Life beyond Polio
Fall 2008 University of Iowa Press

Leslie F. Miller: Writing is a Piece of Cake

Leslie F. Miller author of the upcoming Let Me Eat Cake: A Celebration of Flour, Sugar, Butter, Eggs, Vanilla, Baking Powder, and a Pinch of Salt writes about writing her essay “Three Bites” in Brevity 28

What do you do?  If you’re a plumber or a life insurance salesman or a retail sales clerk, sometimes folks will ask where you work and if you like it, depending on whether they care to get to know you or are just making small talk.  If you answer that you’re a writer, though, you seem to be scrutinized.  “A writer, eh?  Well, what have you written?”

It’s not glamorous enough to write newsletters and ad copy.  “Oh, that kind of writer.”  And just watch their noses turn up, as if accosted by a foul odor, when you tell them you’re a poet.  And if you write essays for literary magazines, forget about it.  Brevity?  You might as well be speaking dog.  A writer can sometimes gain respect claiming to have written for local papers and glossies, but even then, people want to know the subject, whether they’ve read something you’ve written.  Are writers more fascinating?  Or do we have more to prove?

Until last year, that was my experience.  Now I’ve written a book!  So when people ask, I say, “I just finished a book about cake for Simon & Schuster that will be out April 14th.  It’s already on Amazon.com!”  With sound effects, you’d hear a bowling ball striking all ten pins with ferocity, the pins falling loudly and slowly.

Now, in their eyes, I’m even better than a writer.  I’m a writer who bakes cake.  I’m not going to challenge anyone’s political leanings, nor will I bore them with historical meanderings.  I will simply make their mouths water.  And in the months that follow, those people will send me emails asking me to recommend a bakery or if I have a recipe for something.   I can.  I do.  And they will often ask me to bake—for their husband’s birthday, their parents’ anniversary.  A literary acquaintance who knows me as a poet invited me to be a featured reader in her series.  The theme is: writers whose day jobs conflict with their writing lives.  When she asked me, later, if I would bake a cake for the final reading of the series, I realized she must think that I’m a baker.  But I’m a writer.  That is my day job.

All of the people I have told about the cake book—every one of them—must be under the impression that a nonfiction book about cake is a recipe book.  What else could it possibly be?  And when I turn down their offer of money to bake their fortieth birthday cakes because I kind of suck at baking for other people (my cakes taste good, but they are ugly), I see an awakening.  “Well, if it’s not about baking cake,” they say slowly, thinking, thinking.  “Then what is it about?”

My book, Let Me Eat Cake: A Celebration of Flour, Sugar, Butter, Eggs, Vanilla, Baking Powder, and a Pinch of Salt, is about eating cake.

Slowly, their lips turn upward, as if a whole new and delightful world has opened up to them.  The best reaction of all came from an exchange in Desmond’s, an Irish pub on Park Avenue in Manhattan.

“About cake?” a London native with a cockney accent asked me, his head tilted like a dog who recognized “dinner.”

Yes, cake.

“C-A-K-E cake?”

Yes.  C-A-K-E cake.

“About making it?”

No, about eating it.

There was a brief pause while this new fact underwent rumination.  “Well, all right then!” he said, even more pleased, and he bought me a Smithwick’s.  (I like beer just a tad better than cake.)

My book began with a long essay.  Its potential grew and took on many disparate layers, but eventually, with filling and frosting, it held together.

My Brevity essay is a couple of small slices, reshaped and whipped into a petit four, a taste of what’s to come.

Notes on Writing “Accident” by John Calderazzo

John Calderazzo shares some thoughts about his essay “Accident” in Brevity 28:

A funny thing happened to me a few years ago as I sat in the back row of a beginning creative writing class taught by a Colorado State University graduate student of mine. He’d invited me to observe him so that I could write a letter of recommendation that spoke to his teaching skills. So I sat in the back, in silence, taking notes and doing whatever he asked the class to do. Which on this afternoon was to write a poem that grew out of some very good sound exercises he had just run us through.

Once, in my twenties, I considered myself a poet, and I’d even published a chapbook from those intense and confused young man days. Then I decided that prose was my bag, the natural register of my writing voice. First it was fiction and then, overwhelmingly, nonfiction, and I had been writing magazine pieces, essays, and books ever since. “Ever since” meant a good twenty-five years.

So I have to say that I was shocked to see, and then feel, the poem that I dutifully started morph line by line and image by image into something that I could feel with my entire body. It was like watching a muscular stallion clop tranquilly by, then climbing on and taking off with him over the countryside, leaping ditches and flying towards the horizon, even though I barely knew how to ride. Scribbling very fast, I wrote right past the bottom of my legal pad and onto the desk top—well, maybe I put another sheet of paper down first (I’m writing nonfiction here, after all). But it sure felt like I’d flown off the page.

The next morning I was up before 5, writing more poetry. Same thing the next morning and the next . . . and now, a couple of years later, I have a poetry manuscript, culled from about 200 new poems, that I’m about to send out. I am still shocked by this.

But I’m not shocked that, along the way, a few of my poems came out sounding like narrative nonfiction. I mean especially some of the ones in which the “I” is “really” me and the facts are all verifiably true. This was almost the case with “Accident.” Based on an incident that occurred about two weeks before I sat down to write, I conceived it as poem. All the facts were true except one: the overturned, gasoline-smelling car never burst into flames. In my poem I made it do that because that was exactly what I thought might happen at the time. So if I wanted that car to burn, it would burn.

But when I decided to see what the piece looked like in paragraphs and then decided to make it nonfiction, I had to douse those poetic flames, so to speak. Thus the phrase, “In my mind’s eye . . .”

And thus this nonfiction short-short for Brevity.

From Terese Svoboda, on Writing “How Catholic”

For the next week or so, we’ll be featuring blog entries from authors found in our newest issue, Brevity 28.  The first comes from Terese Svoboda, author of How Catholic:

For maybe twenty years I have been trying to write a short story about the effect of finding two moons of green eye shadow on a towel in my youth. I have also written three poems twisting the memory around, alluding to its larger context. But what was that larger context? Was it only a “family story,” an anecdote worth repeating only once to another relative just to make sure I didn’t imagine it?

I feared nonfiction telling: that would be me. I went into poetry originally to throw the velvet cloak around that persona, or to flaunt the “I” voice in peekaboo. Publishing my memoir last year–Black Glasses Like Clark Kent–where I could skulk around as a detective and refer to myself in relation to my relatives—wasn’t too bad. But only under the duress of my uncle’s suicide and the horrific revelations of his tapes would I have attempted its writing. Yet something about the form felt familiar. Cannibal, my first novel, was called a roman a clef by Vogue.  According to Wikipedia, that’s the opportunity to portray personal, autobiographical experiences without having to expose the author as the subject. Think “thinly disguised.” The entry suggests that any material based on personal experience is a roman a clef, and used Heart of Darkness as an example. Huh?

What I do know is that all material needs the fuzziness of time until what’s important remains. Time completed How Catholic, enough to gain perspective on what those two green moons meant, and to find a voice to say what I understood about them in a larger context. To find a formal solution for this narrative in creative nonfiction worked. I’m happy.

Maybe I’ve always been happy.

Creative. Nonfiction. Nothing New.

From Gary Presley, author of the new memoir Seven Wheelchairs:

__

I’m surprised no one in my writing discussion group has quoted Oscar Wilde to me. “I may have said the same thing before…but my explanation, I am sure, will always be different.”

Too often when we discuss the art of creative nonfiction, I say that people can roll on the ground, kick their heels, and scream “No!” but creative nonfiction was a real thing long before Gay Talese wrote the inimitable “Mr. Sinatra Has a Cold” or Tom Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Take George Orwell’s “A Hanging.” Or better, read Ernie Pyle’s “The Death of Captain Waskow.”

Creative. Non. Fiction.

Both are as nuanced as Talese’s “Mr. Sinatra.” Talese doesn’t tell the reader that Sinatra is unstable, insecure, sometimes overbearing man with enormous talent, but a sophisticated reader sees all that, and more.

Ernie Pyle’s “Captain Waskow” provides art with the same layered dept, art that opens another window on the human condition, art offering up by the heart of a man worn down by war, a man telling us how hard it is sometimes to be a thinking-feeling creature on this earth.

Oh, there are differences, but those revolve more around subject than style. Talese’s essay on the Chairman of the Board pretends an intimacy that masks it’s ironic distance. Pyle’s lament for Waskow is about Waskow, but the good captain is also symbolic. Pyle substitutes empathy and compassion and stark reality for irony, but there is another deeper, more existentialist layer that allows the reader a glimpse in the mirror of mortality, a place where we each can glimpse our deaths smiling from behind the dark curtain of consciousness.

Gary Presley
http://garypresley.blogspot.com/
http://www.garypresley.net/

‘You Need to Take My Son to Jail’

Those of you who read Ann Bauer’s powerful Modern Love essay in the New York Times this past Sunday may also want to read Ann Bauer’s Brevity essay “The Nowhere Place.”

This is the second time in recent months that a Brevity veteran has landed in the Modern Love column, and that makes us smile.  If you missed Lori Jakiela’s essay on sex chairs (among other things) you missed a good one.

Both Jakiela and Bauer are veterans of the same issue — Brevity 11.  A fine vintage, it seems.

there’s the navel and then there’s the way the writer gazes at it

I’m never sure how well comments are read on this blog, so I’ll put a pointer here to the item just below, on Navel Gazing, introduced by Gary Presley.  The comments have been fast and furious, thoughtful and provocative, and are well worth reading.

Look up from your navel a moment and check it out:  http://brevity.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/from-gary-presley-navel-gazing-in-creative-nonfiction/

From Gary Presley: Navel Gazing in Creative Nonfiction

presley

A group of accomplished writers I pal around with in the virtual world recently discussed a long’ish essay about … well, about growing up under tough circumstances, which seems to be one of the primary themes within the genre. (Augusten Burroughs and A Wolfe at the Table, anyone?)

My reaction? I jumped into the fray waving the flag of anti-narcissism. So the author had a crappy childhood? As Mr Tolstoy said, “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

That she has made literature of it is good. That she has taught me to care, I’m not sure; or at least, I don’t care any more than I might about any other child growing up in similar circumstances. That she can write elegantly about the issue – granting that she may feel more deeply, feel more pain than a person less intelligent or sophisticated – surely provides some reconciliation unavailable to the less intelligent or talented.

Each time I stumble across creative nonfiction in a similar vein – and there’s millions of little pieces of that I had it tougher than you literature out there – I wonder “Is too much of our genre too centered on navel-gazing? And, the corollary question: “Is navel-gazing the antithesis of an intellectual pursuit?”

Or to put it another way, “Does the genre rely too much on memoir to be intellectually-influential in the way society perceives useful intellectualism?”

Or to put it a third way, “Are we memorists and navel-gazers getting a free ride on the coat-tails of John McPhee, Barry Lopez, Lewis Thomas, Edward Abbey, Edward Hoagland, Richard Selzer, Paul Theroux, et al?

—

Gary Presley
http://garypresley.blogspot.com/
http://www.garypresley.net/

Memoir en Mexico

Fully one-third of our editorial staff are south of the border for a few weeks, investigating the state of memoir en Mexico.  No report yet, but for now, this:

Brevity Mid-Summer / Father’s Day Bonus

If you read the excellent Modern Love essay in the New York Times this past weekend (Father’s Day), you know about Tim Elhajj’s life as a father trying to buy a Yankees cap for his 10-year-old son.

Well, Brevity is pleased to present a companion piece — Tim Elhajj writing about his own father, and his name, and many other things.
Here’s the start.  Just click the link at the end to read the entire essay:

I Am
By Tim Elhajj

Until I was well into my thirties, I didn’t realize this simple fact: Elhajj is an Arabic word that means pilgrim.

I blame Dad. He rarely said anything about our name; never talked about his father, or what it means to be an Arab.

In Islam, a pilgrimage is the sacred duty of every Muslim. If you make the trip, you earn the title, Elhajj. When Malcolm X did it, he took the name, El Hajj Malik Shabazz.

When I was a boy, I always wondered if Dad were black. No one in our small town looked like Dad. He had the thick features of an Arab. If he let his hair grow, it piled up in messy loafs on his head. Of course, I never asked Dad about any of this. I wasn’t sure how to present it.

Or maybe I didn’t want to risk the answer.

THE REST OF Tim Elhajj’s ESSAY .

Along those lines…

Curious myself, I typed the phrase, “imaginary nonfiction,” in a search engine and out popped a Japan Times article on the unsung heroes of literature: translators. (Making its point with the question, How many translators can you name?) In a nutshell, the article celebrates Japan’s tradition of celebrating its translators. http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20080518rp.html

Now, what do Japanese translators have to do with imaginary nonfiction? Not much, in terms of our discussion here. But this might be useful; the article takes a stab at defining the genre as one “in which the author takes a real down-to-earth occurrence and flies with it.” The example they give? A “story” by contemporary Japanese writer, Motoyuki Shibata, called, “Ghosts All Over.”

(Wouldn’t the label “story,” however, indicate that it’s fiction? Is imaginary nonfiction called a story, or an essay? Right; it’s probably both. Memoir, then.)

In it, “Shibata and his wife go to America and rent a house, even though they have been told that it is haunted. [. . .] Ghosts do appear; and, as it turns out, they are ghosts of themselves. Everywhere he looks he sees his wife: on the sofa, then at the dining table…”

Lately I’ve been writing about the daydreams I entertained when I was a child. They’re not “memory,” exactly, because technically, they’re not of the stuff we call experience. They’re experiences of another kind (like Shibata’s ghosts), staked in “real” desires and anxieties that I was certainly experiencing and working through in this medium of the imagination. Do these written-daydreams constitute imaginary nonfiction, then? Is this what I’ve been writing all along? Why am I still struggling to understand, exactly, what part of the “down-to-earth occurrence” is imaginary, and what part is non-fictive? And why are we continually haunted by this ratio?

Maybe I should take up translation.

–Rachael

Imaginary Nonfictions: Almost an Oxymoron

Daniel Nester is a friend to Brevity, one helluva Queen fan, a nice guy, and Assistant Web Editor for Sestinas at McSweeney’s, so we wanted to pass this along.  First though, we had to ask him “Dude, what’s an imaginary nonfiction?”

Daniel answered, “speculation, ruminations — you know, imaginary.”

Okay. We have no problem with nonfiction writers telling us what they’ve imagined, as long as they tell us it is imagined.

So, here’s the pitch:

The-Out-of Bounds Essay: Bloomsbury Review’s New Bi-Monthly Imaginary Nonfictions Feature
Editors: Reamy Jansen and Daniel Nester

We’re both looking for fresh, off-beat, non-fiction prose. No more than 300 words.
Send two copies of your entry to Reamy Jansen, 16 Homestead Ave., Highland Falls, NY 10928. Include SASE, brief bio, e-mail address, and phone number.

A Writing Workshop, By Any Other Name

And speaking of The Kenyon Review, the KR Blog makes note of yet another “withering attack” on the concept of writing workshops. The attacks just seem to come without end, from people who very often have little idea what they are talking about. Hanif Kureishi is certainly one of them.

But this latest stupid attack did force to me to reflect some on my pedagogy, and it finally hit me, like a soft mallet to the head, that I don’t teach a writing workshop – I’m not sure many of us in the academic creative writing field actually do – I teach an editing workshop.

Here’s what I mean:

A good workshop assists a young writer in seeing how a reader might encounter and experience their manuscript (with the help of some artificial readers – the workshop members.) Then, with the help of a prodding and encouraging teacher, the student is helped to see how to take what she has learned and re-vision what she has already written.

She learns how to take a muddy scene and make it clear. How to take a soggy bit of language and make it crisp. How to take a limp narrative arc and find some spine. How to take an undifferentiated character and create, well, character.

She learns, too, how voice can be altered, and how small changes can make a difference in point-of-view. This is editing that is being taught, and more specifically, self-editing. A student who learns the rigors and wonders of self-editing, before launching her work into the world, has learned quite a bit, and has greatly increased her chances of finding a publisher/audience.

We should call it an editing workshop, then, or a revision workshop, since that’s what we are teaching and modeling. If it were truly a writing workshop, those of us who teach would be standing over our students’ shoulders as they attempted their first drafts, and goodness knows I don’t do that.

So let’s call them poetry editing workshops, or creative nonfiction editing workshops, and do away with the perennial and pointless question: “Can writing be taught?”

- Dinty

To engage in hypotheticals…

I’m going to break a personal rule and respond to my last post, and yes, bother you with my own legal concern. I called The Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA) to ask “what the rules are on publishing a private email without getting consent” and after a very brief conversation (“It doesn’t do any good to engage in hypotheticals,” apparently, a big blow to the essayist’s ethos), I was told to contact the Bar Association in both my state and the state where the author of the email lives, for “the law is different in each.”

So I try a few numbers. The first person I reach wants me to describe the content in the email. Does it defame the sender? she wants to know.

It’s complicated, I say. There’s no outright defamation…but it’s not exactly flattering, in the context of my writing.

Now she wants to know what the work is about. When I tell her, she doesn’t seem impressed–she actually sounds annoyed: I don’t see what the big deal is; can’t you just paraphrase the email?

I try another number.

But the Bar Association wants to refer me to a consultation service that charges thirty dollars for a half-hour of legal advice. Now, thirty bucks isn’t much (there was this pair of sandals I really wanted…cute, strappy) to avoid possible financial and emotional damages down the road, but I’d rather try my hand at soliciting some free advice first.

My third attempt: Does anyone know the laws, in any state, for publishing a private email without consent? Bueller? Bueller? I’m going to roll-call until I get an answer.

-Rachael

Of Memory

Oddly enough, I’d bet this guy’s memoir (if he wanted to write one) would be tedious and lacking in the satisfactions we seek in personal reflection. I don’t know what that means — and I certainly don’t know if it would indeed be true — but it strikes me as an interesting counterpoint to our continual questioning of memory’s tendency to shave off the sharp edges and soften the lines:

Man’s rare ability may unlock secret of memory

LA CROSSE, Wisconsin (CNN) — Give Brad Williams a date, and he can usually tell you not only what he was doing but what world events happened that day. He can do this for almost every day of his life.

Williams is one of only three people in the world identified with this off-the-charts autobiographical memory, according to researchers at the University of California-Irvine who gave the condition its name: hyperthymestic syndrome, from the Greek words for excessive (hyper) and remembering (thymesis).

Unlike most people whose memories fade with time, much of Williams’ life is etched indelibly in his mind.

“It’s just there,” said Williams, 51, who reports the news for a family of radio stations in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

The researchers are studying Williams and the two others with hyperthymestic syndrome, a man in Ohio and woman in California, hoping to gain new insights into how a superior memory works.

– Dinty

What Else Does Dinty Know?

Hi, Dinty W. Moore here, editor of Brevity, the little magazine that could.

It seems I am doing a lot of blog interviews lately (see the blog entry two below this one), and that either means,

(a) I’m promoting the heck out of my new book, or

(b) I’m not getting nearly enough writing done, or

(c) both.

You decide.

But thanks all the same to Collected Miscellany for featuring me this week.

Here’s an excerpt

Well, the truth of Nixon is pretty spectacular – going back to the Alger Hiss case, and to so many seminal Cold War events of my parent’s generation. And he was the foe of John Kennedy, who became so important after his death. And then Watergate. This man was connected so closely to so much amazing history.

Beyond that, he has an iconic persona as well, as the angry father shaking his finger at his enemies, as the sneaky bastard who (not directly, of course) shot the college kids at Kent State, robbed the Watergate apartment building, lied about bombs in Vietnam. He represents everything we used to distrust about people over 30, and everything we now distrust about our leaders in Washington.

Oprah, vaseline, déjà vu–and writing

I’m just wondering–has it ever happened to you that you’ve been in the throes of writing and something you’re typing that very second pops up on the television screen or in a conversation peripheral to you? Like some kind of writing-deja-vu. (Even though a psychologist-friend recently debunked the idea of deja vu…what a buzz kill.) Recently I was working on an article and happened to turn on the TV for background noise, when suddenly the very thing I was writing reverberated in the voice of (who else, right?) Oprah. Now, maybe this isn’t so coincidental, considering it was Oprah, and on any given day she could be talking about everything from post-Holocaust literature to the wrinkle-fighting wonders of Vaseline. But that day she gave voice almost simultaneously to a thought I was having on the page. And I’ve had other experiences like this–just yesterday, in fact, when a librarian leaned over my shoulder and remarked, “That’s funny, someone else was just in here looking up that old article.” (That old article, in fact, covered a plane crash that happened thirty years ago, killing my grandfather and uncles.) I drilled her with questions: Who was it? A man or woman? Young or middle-aged? She couldn’t tell me much, just that it was recent-enough to feel uncanny–two people in search of the same story. (A story that meant profound horror for my family. What possible meaning did it hold for someone else, three decades later?) “You don’t forget something like that,” she said. And I imagine you don’t, in a small library in a small town. But when I’m writing, everything starts to feel uncanny, which makes me wonder if it really is–or if it’s something else… Some enigmatic aspect of the writing process itself. Joan Connor speaks to this question best in her essay, “On Writing and Telepathy,” which you can read here: http://al.gcsu.edu/connor11.htm.

At any rate, it’s fun to think about, not unlike the pleasure in swapping ghost stories. So, you got any?

- Rachael

What Dinty W. Moore Knows

Oronte Churm over at insidehighered.com has published a wide-ranging interview with Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore on subjects that include panic, desire, writing brief, John and Yoko, and the every-popular truth in memoir equation  An excerpt:

“Simply put, my belief is that a memoir writer, or creative nonfiction writer, has a pact with the reader that goes like this: ‘Memory is faulty, but I’ve done my damnedest. I’ve fact-checked where possible, wracked my brain where appropriate, sat outside my old house on Memory Avenue for a while and tried, tried, tried, to get it right, and this is what resulted. I’m not faking it, ginning it up for book sales, grinding an ax against my parents, or in any other conscious way deceiving the reader—or myself. I’ve worked hard to access my memory and get an honest version here. But yes, I admit some of it may be influenced by memory’s tricks.’  That’s all you can do, that’s all I expect of a writer.”

Best Creative Nonfiction: Redux

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: BEST CNF VOL. 3

–

For publication in the Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 3: Editors of

any publication, print or online, are invited to nominate up to 3

essays or articles from their 2007/2008 issues. Send one hard copy of

each piece to:

–

The Best Creative Nonfiction c/o Creative Nonfiction

5501 Walnut Street, suite 202

Pittsburgh, PA 15232

-

Or by email (pdf or Word attachments only):

bestcreativenonfiction@gmail.com

–

To be considered, work must be slated for publication before the end

of 2008. In the case of work not published by the nomination

deadline, please send page proofs or a Word manuscript.

–

Deadline for submissions is July 15, 2008.

The Bright Forever of Lee Martin

We don’t like to play favorites here at Brevity, but sometimes we do, and Lee Martin is one of our favorites, both for his brilliant novels and searing memoirs, and for the Brevity 17 jewel Dumber Than.

We’d really like to take credit for discovering Lee, but the Pulitzer folks placed him as a finalist a few years back, so we think he was already on the map when we found him.

In any case, he is profiled nicely in the latest Poets & Writers magazine, and he is a great guy, and a stunning writer, and we are happy to have published him.

What We Make of the Experience

Editor Stephen Corey of the Georgia Review has some thoughtful consideration of the growth of creative nonfiction as a genre in the latest Poets & Writers magazine.

And we quote:

“In the mid-1980s we received perhaps two to three hundred essays annually, but now that count has increased at least fourfold–except that most of the pieces we receive are not essays anymore, but autobiographical narratives and reminiscences that read more like sentimental journal entries than thoughtful and rigorous considerations of experience.  Everyone has experiences; we as writers must make something of them, in both language and idea.”

Whose story deserves telling?

A friend told me not too long ago that she’s volunteering an hour every week to typing and editing an elderly man’s memoir (his wife jokes that she’s going to write her memoir next). Perhaps my friend should go into business, according to a recent article on CNN.com, “Everybody has a story–but is it worth telling?”

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/04/15/memoirs/

The article weighs the value of the most recent memoirs to flood the market (from Julie Andrews’ Home to Tori Spelling’s Stori Telling) and considers the reasons for the trend (like Oprah’s ministry of hope), citing the opinions of other writers and publishing executives alike. But the question still lingers by the article’s end: Whose story deserves telling?

–Rachael

You Talking to Me?

BREVITY’S NEW MANAGING EDITOR WEIGHS IN:

Indeed, Frey’s invitation to leave him a message [See previous blog post Give Big Jim a Piece of Your Mind] is a curious move on his part, and one that deserves some consideration. Specifically, I’m interested in how this new “forum” (to speak to Frey directly) differs from, say, an invitation to blog about him. Yes, it has a ring of, “You got something to say, say it to my face” (I think it’s reasonable to acknowledge this tension is present, even to a small degree, no matter how much Frey prostrates before us). But more than that, it’s an interesting rhetorical tactic, garnering more positive reaction than not. (Raising another question: Why does support find its way to Frey’s voice mail, and the criticism, in blogs and classroom conversations? I confess, I don’t have any plans to call Frey up after I’m done typing this… Does my criticism carry any agency, then?)

Once again, Frey has subverted our expectations of the author. It’s maddening, yes. But is it not also a little exciting from a critical perspective? The author is NOT dead–not in popular literature, anyway (no matter how much we’d like to kill him). He is very much alive and taking our calls. All of this is to say, instead of criticizing Frey and, in turn, our culture, I think it’s more interesting (productive?) to critique the meaning of this subversion and, especially, our reactions to it. What better fodder for the essay?

- Rachael

Of Huge Clown Feet and Sex Chairs

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.

—–

READ the whole essay here: The Plain, Unmarked Box Arrived

or dig out your Sunday paper before the recycling truck arrives. Wonderful stuff.

..

Give Big Jim a Piece of Your Mind

I’m not sure if this is sign of mental instability or pure genius, but our friend James Frey (author of the memoirs A Million Little Totally Made-Up Pieces and Leonard: My Inspirational Best Friend from Jail Though I Wasn’t Really in Jail) has a blog and voicemail, and he is urging you to leave him a message:

Just call (917) 720-7510
(Be cool Be Nasty Say whatever you want)

Yes, he is inviting abuse, and if you wish you can even listen to what everyone says: http://bigjimindustries.com/saynow2.php

But the disturbing part is that most people are calling in to say nice things like “you are the literary voice of this century” and “despite the critics, your books rock.”

Of course, all of this underway to create a groundswell of interest in his first new third novel:

**** BUY IT HERE ****

Liked Brevity, But Found This Excessive

Sort of funny though!

On Truth in Memoir: Remembrance and Amnesia

(Another note from Gary Presley, author of the Brevity essay Proselegy and Coda)

Funny things happen on the bumpy road from life to death, and being mauled by a grizzly bear would rank far down on my list of incidents to include in a memoir. But as part of a discussion group focused on creative nonfiction piece, I did read an interesting take on a bloody confrontation with Ursus arctos horribilis.

One member of the group asked, “Why do we read this stuff?” I knew what she meant. When I was a kid, I was a worry wart, and a kindly teacher once told me “Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof,” which I learned later she borrowed from the Holy Carpenter.

But the question also made me realize that I believe reading for information and knowledge may be secondary in the human dynamic. I think we crave Story. I think we seek to fill the same need once expressed around campfires thousands of years ago – when we had nothing to protect ourselves from grizzly bears and other things intent on blood and slaughter but a flint-pointed stick.

The thing is, every person has more than one Story, and sometimes, at least for me, I write and rewrite and edit so much that I feel as I’m drifting away from those memories that comprise who I am. By that I mean the the internal narrative I relate to myself, the film strip that unwinds in memory as I subjectively reconstruct what happened.

I begin to think, “Is it a true internal narrative, at least in the sense that readers will understand as true.”

Hold on now — I’m not going to go all Peggy Seltzer on you.

The quality I am attempting to describe is more akin to remembrance. We humans are prone to back-construct a narrative, one often more dramatic than what actually occurred – primarily because we need a memory with which we can live without huddling in a corner crying.

I’m a forgiving sort, and so understanding all the foibles which plague our fragile psyches, I think most internal narratives may consist of both remembrance and amnesia, missing perhaps some things so deeply painful or guilt-inspiring or less-than-heroic that we cannot face, explain, or even understand.

Obviously then, if there is an internal narrative, there is a narrative constructed from outside perceptions.

There are people I know who look through the window into the zoo enclosure where this creature named Gary Presley lives, and they glimpse a beast far different from the one shining in its internal narrative. There are windows for my wife, for my brother, for his wife, for my one-time boss — for every person who knew me “when” and those who knew me “then.”

Like every other human being, I am a prism. No single person (call that person a “biographer,” or classify that person as yourself with the memoirist label) will ever be able to construct a complete and unbiased and entirely truthful narrative of a human life.

I suppose – no, let’s say “I have faith” – that there is be One Mystic Ultimate Truth, but there are many truths. The best we can do is to find the truest part of our own when we want to set down our world on paper.

–
Gary Presley
http://garypresley.blogspot.com/
http://www.garypresley.net/

You Call it a NOVEL!!!!!

Memoir scandals show we need a new definition of ‘truth’

By Linda S. Clare

Are memoirs and their authors bound to tell nothing but the truth? I’ve been asking this question for years and the answer, it seems, is yes. And no.

After reading about the recalled memoir “Love and Consequences,” I gasped. The author, Margaret Jones, aka Peggy Seltzer, lives only a few miles from me, near the dingy classroom in the Lane Community College Downtown Center where I teach memoir writing one evening a week. Jones has written a complex, beautiful hoax. In my mind, it doesn’t make the writing any less complex or beautiful. What I don’t know is what to call it.

So, What Exactly Are They Smoking in Eugene, Oregon?

Or, Why You Should Never, Ever Send Your Children to School in Oregon.

FROM AN EXCELLENT OPINION PIECE IN THE EUGENE REGISTER-GUARD:

While commentators elsewhere in the country were condemning [Peggy] Seltzer [and her fraudulent memoir, Love and Consequences,] for deceit and betrayal, the intellectuals of Eugene have been circling their academic wagons around her. So far, a professor of English and one of philosophy at the University of Oregon have put their prestige on the line with spirited public defenses of Seltzer’s moral right to lie. A teacher of memoir writing at Lane Community College has also been very sympathetic.

Linda S. Clare, the LCC memoir teacher, admits in a March 13 guest viewpoint that she herself advises her students to “embroider” their dull life stories with untruths.

Seltzer, she says, simply went too far. (Perhaps it should be noted here that Seltzer, who is white and was raised in middle class comfort, somehow passed herself off as a half-Native American, who was brought up by black foster parents in South Central Los Angeles where she ran drugs for the Bloods.)

“In my mind,” says Clare, “that doesn’t make the writing any less complex or beautiful. What I don’t know is what to call it.” While commentators elsewhere had no trouble in knowing what to call Seltzer’s book, Clare reluctantly concludes only that: “ ‘Love and Consequences’ probably can’t be a memoir.”

But Gordon Sayre, a professor of English at the UO, has no such ambivalence. Seltzer’s book, in his estimation, is a fine example of a memoir in the great American tradition.

“Since the early days of American literature,” writes Sayre in a March 9 guest viewpoint, “the boundaries between novel and autobiography have been indistinct, and readers have eagerly confounded them.”

Sayre’s point is that readers like to be duped by fantastic true life tales, and so what if they do? Who’s hurt by it, anyway?

Certainly not Sayre, whose Native American literature students at UO included Seltzer. The professor feels no resentment that his prized student fooled him with her memoir and snookered him with a class paper in which she fabricated a childhood on an Indian reservation.

 

VCCA: Two Weeks, Free Room and Board. Yay!

Goldfarb Family Fellowship for Nonfiction Writers /Virginia Center for the Creative Arts
A fully funded two-week residency to enable a nonfiction writer to concentrate solely on his or her creative work. This sponsored fellowship is offered each year to one nonfiction writer during the fall scheduling period (October through January). Writers will be provided a private bedroom, separate studio, and three prepared meals a day. The application process is the same as the regular VCCA application process. Deadline May 15.

What’s Up, Doc?

Call for Submissions: Becoming a Doctor

For a collection to be published by W. W. Norton, Creative Nonfiction is seeking new essays written by physicians and therapists. The essays should depict experiences of “becoming a doctor” and could explore periods of growth and enlightenment, moments of transition, or realizations that one’s maturation as a doctor had been achieved. Essays might also explore periods of doubt and struggle for clarity, or incidents of deep disappointment and disillusionment.

The objective is to capture the frustrations and triumphs of the healing art by encouraging doctors to recall and recreate the most salient and significant moments of their professional lives.

Essays must be vivid and dramatic; they should combine a strong and compelling narrative with a significant element of research or information. We’re looking for well-written prose, rich with detail and a distinctive voice.

Submissions should be approximately 3,000 – 4,000 words. Please send submissions, accompanied by a cover letter with complete contact information, to:

Creative Nonfiction
Attn: Becoming a Doctor
5501 Walnut Street, Suite 202
Pittsburgh, PA 15232

Postmark deadline May 31, 2008.

Please email questions to information@creativenonfiction.org

Fabricating Memoir Should Have Consequences

mediabistro has a nice entry on the Love and Consequences controversy, ending with:

“Seltzer probably signed a contract that said that what she was representing as fact was, indeed, fact,” comments one literary agent, preferring to remain anonymous. “Penguin should sue her for return of the advance and by doing so, scare the shit out of any fake memoirists in the future… It would be nice if a publisher with deep pockets went after one of these liars and scared away the one percent of memoirists who are fakes, so the other 99 percent can be treated fairly in the future.”

More Nonsense Memoir

Woman’s Gang Memoir Is Fake, Recalled

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) — A memoir by a white woman who claimed she was raised in poverty by a black foster mother and sold drugs for a gang in a tough Los Angeles neighborhood has turned out to be pure fiction, a newspaper report says.

In ”Love and Consequences,” published last week by Penguin Group USA imprint Riverhead Books, author Margaret B. Jones writes about growing up as a half-white, half-Native American girl in South-Central Los Angeles in the foster home of Big Mom. One of her foster brothers, she writes, was gunned down by Crips gang members outside their home.

Jones also writes of carrying illegal guns and selling drugs for the Bloods gang.

Jones’s story came apart after her older sister, Cyndi Hoffman, saw an article in The New York Times about the author and contacted Riverhead, the Times says. Hoffman questioned the publisher’s fact-checking and said the fabrication should and could have been prevented, the Times reported on its Web site Monday.

Thoughts on Finding a Memoir’s Narrative Arc

From Gary Presley, author of the Brevity essay Proselegy and Coda

I’ve been banging my head against a memoir for two or three years – a book that’s only now crossed the copy-editing stage at the University of Iowa Press on the track to Fall 2008 publication (Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio). As with most things written, the book went through more drafts than I wanted to make – from connected, related essays into a chronological narrative.

During the last state, I told a writer friend, unless you’re famous and can sell a gaggle of essays, a memoir writer may not think he is living a life with a rational, non-repetitive narrative arc, but he best find one if he wants to be published.

She replied with a question, “How would you explain narrative arc?”

She asked me that because I’ve never studied creative writing. I doubt I’ll ever be as famous as Grandma Moses – the famous folk artist painter – but I use her technique, which might be called primitive.

With that in mind, I told her I think a chronological narrative would have a “time arc.” When I wrote 100,000 words as a “memoir in essays,” I would pick a subject about disability, look at it from every direction, and write about it. I had essays about the disease; its treatment; the hospital environment; the rehabilitation environment; isolation upon my return home; about education and employment; and some discussing the nitty-gritty of disability.

The editor first said “Masterful essays, but there’s too much repetition. Try a chronological narrative arc.” I tried, but I felt too close to the material. Then the editor said “It’s lost some of its passion. Make the chapters more like the essays.”

There was the rub. It took me a long time to understand that if anger and frustration occurred when I was in the iron lung at age 17 that I did not need to re-state the origins of that anger and frustration when I brought up an anecdote later.

If I could put the effort in the Wayback Machine, I would outline anecdotes on index cards. Then before I began to write, and I would shuffle the cards around and play with their order – both in theme and in time.

Within the terminology of “narrative arc,” I think, is the idea that we build our lives around themes. My theme was living as a person with a disability in 20th USA, but the sub-themes are anger, and duality (the idea that a virus killed then-17-year-old-Gary and created crip-Gary, who is an entirely different bag of tricks) and a prosaic existentialism.

How that might translate in another writer’s life I cannot say, but I know this: we are different people to each individual we know, both because of their perceptions and because of the way we reveal ourselves to them. With that, there are an infinite number of stories to weave into any narrative arc.
___

Further discussion can be found through Google with the search words “creative nonfiction” and “narrative arc” alone or together, including A Conversation with Rebecca McClanahan in the Kenyon Review and a nidus Roundtable Discussion — The Age of Creative Nonfiction.

 

Still Time to Register for Mid-South Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Workshops

The registrations deadline for the pre-conference workshops at the

Mid-South Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Conference has been extended

through Tuesday, February 19. The workshops will focus on the art, craft,

and business of writing. Established writers looking to expand their range

as well as those just beginning to think about a career in writing will

find that these workshops provide concrete tips strengthening and

marketing their writing. Topics include structuring creative nonfiction,

writing in scenes, book proposals and query letters, writing about food,

beginning a memoir, and profiling places and people. Two manuscript

workshops are also being offered. Workshops can be attended separately or

in conjunction with the conference.

To register or for more information, please visit

www.creativenonfiction.org, or call (412) 688-0304.

Here Comes the Sun, Little Darlin’

The Sun Increases Payments for Writing and Photography

The Sun is pleased to announce an increase in our payments for writing and photography. We now pay up to $3,000 for essays and interviews, up to $2,000 for fiction, up to $500 for poetry, and up to $500 for photographs.

See our submission guidelines for details.

Modern Love, Walks Beside Me

From the hippie culture to the AIDS epidemic to the Internet revolution, love has gone from “free” to fraught to Facebook. What is love now, in this age of 24/7 communication, blurred gender roles and new attitudes about sex and dating?

The NYT invites college students nationwide to submit a personal essay of between 1,500 and 2,000 words that illustrates the current state of love and relationships. The winning author will receive $1,000 and his or her essay will be published in a special “Modern Love” column on May 4, 2008 and on nytimes.com.

Submit to the Fish: The Malahat Review

The Malahat Review, starting with its Summer 2008 issue,will publish at least one work of creative non-fiction in every issue. Submit previously unpublished works of creative nonfiction for the consideration of the Creative Nonfiction Board. No restrictions as to subject matter or approach apply; a submission may be personal essay, memoir, cultural criticism, nature writing, or literary journalism. Seeking highly original submissions that range in length from between 1,000 to 3,500 words.

Writing the Exotic: Anne Panning on “Vietnam: Four Ways”

Anne Panning discusses the background to her essay, “Vietnam: Four Ways,” in the current issue of Brevity:

It’s hard to write about “exotic” places, and having lived in my fair share of  them—Vietnam, The Philippines, Hawaii—I always go through a period  where I try desperately to use these settings in my fiction.  I’ve found, however, that creative nonfiction—in particular, brief creative nonfiction—may be the best vehicle for me.  Why?  Because it doesn’t allow me to include any “what to pack, where to stay, don’t drink the water” information but it forces me to choose a singular, off-kilter lens from which to view the place and to do it quickly.  When I was writing there were originally “five ways,” but suddenly it seemed it could just as easily be “ten ways” or “twenty ways,” when in fact my goal was to capture the small fragmentary moments that defined the experience of the place for me.  So instead of focusing on large scale noticings (the presence of Communist soldiers everywhere), I looked at the small.

What originally sparked this essay was a street vendor making my son a  bird out of shaved ice one night when the temperature was around 95 degrees. There was so much drama in the simple act of getting the ice bird home without its melting.  I was also deeply affected by the loneliness and severity of the military swimming pool where I swam laps, and knew I had to write about it in some way.

I’m currently finishing a nonfiction book about my experiences in Vietnam with my husband and two young kids called VIET*MOM, and find myself still struggling with the issue of the “exotic.”

Note on Writing “Not a Good Day for Planting Root Crops”

Marcia Aldrich discusses the background to her essay, Not a Good Day for Planting Root Crops, in the current issue of Brevity:

This lyric essay began in an exercise I did with my undergraduate creative nonfiction students. The assignment focused on two separate objectives. The first asked them to experiment formally with the shape of their essay through segmentation. At a minimum they had to include three different kinds of segments and assemble them in an aesthetically pleasing and unifying way. I gave them suggestions: meditation on a color, targeting different senses, recreating overheard dialogue, memories of other places, a found poem. These suggestions were not intended to limit or prescribe what they might consider including in their essay. I talked about different modes as well—narrative, descriptive, meditative.

The second objective focused on observation and creating a mini-portrait of a nonfiction place. Here we talked about how to define our relationship to this specific place. Since the fountain area was located on campus near frequently used classroom buildings, the students were familiar with the place. We weren’t true outsiders, yet because the place was a public space, none of us lived there and most of us just passed through on our way to somewhere else.

Unfortunately it was the middle of March in Michigan when I did this assignment.  The timing of the assignment came to play an unexpectedly large role in what the essay came to be about.

I tried this assignment with my students as a test drive since I had made it up and I didn’t know what its difficulties might be. Segmentation has not come easily for me; I’ve been working to get the hang of it. This essay was a breakthrough and gave me invaluable experience about the complicated layering and textual intersections that can be accomplished through even a brief segmented essay. The segmented approach drove my discovery of the emotional layers in my experience of this place at this specific point in time and surprised me. 

Anyone Up for an AWP Quickie?

Emerson College’s Redivider journal will be hosting an “AWP Quickie” contest for short-short fiction,  poetry, and yes Virginia, also for short-short nonfiction.  In order to participate, conference attendees just need to stop by Redivider’s table, grab a quickie card, then write a story, poem, or essay on the back and return the card by the end of the bookfair. First prize winners will receive $50.00 and publication in the fall 2008 issue of Redivider. The judges are Brock Clarke for fiction, Ravi Shankar for poetry, and Lee Martin for nonfiction.

The River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize Series

This prize series has published a few of my favorite recent books. Become one of them?

River Teeth’s editors and editorial board conduct a yearly national contest to identify the best book-length manuscript of literary nonfiction. The winner will receive $1,000 and publication by The University of Nebraska Press. Deadline March 1, 2008

Call for Love

StoryQuarterly

---

Announces the SQ Love Story Contest; open to fiction and nonfiction entries focused on love of all sorts; offering a First Prize of $2,500, a Second Prize of $1,500, a Third Prize of $750, and ten Finalists each will receive $100.

Deadline for entries: March 31, 2008. Guidelines here.

James Frey’s Obituary

Steve Almond, writing a tongue-in cheek-obituary, in the VQR’s Writers on Writers edition. Frey deserves this, and it is hilarious:

In 2028, Frey’s eldest son, Malcolm X Frey, published a searing memoir that detailed his life “as the son of America’s most notorious liar.” The younger Frey portrayed his father as a laxative-popping sexual predator who routinely made his children watch him do squats and who ate entire roasted turkeys in one sitting. Freyed at the Edges was an instant bestseller.

His other children and two of his ex-wives condemned the account. Frey himself filed a defamation suit seeking to halt publication. The case was settled out of court after his son agreed to include a disclaimer in future editions, noting that portions of the book were fictionalized.

Writing in Vanity Fair, journalist Christopher Hitchens accused the entire Frey clan of staging “an elaborate and deeply cynical publicity stunt.” A suit against Hitchens was filed and later dropped.

Read THE WHOLE OBIT

Is the Essay Dead? The Free Range Librarian Responds

K.G. Schneider, one of our favorite librarians and Free Range bloggers, continues the discussion of Christina Nehring’s bleak assessment of the essay:

Quoting Patrick Madden (see below): “As for the Best American Essays 2007, my problem with it is much the opposite of what Nehring seems to be preaching. I find that too many of the pieces in it are overtly and uninterestingly political.”

This was exactly my reaction, the key words being “overtly” and “uninterestingly.” Look at the great political essays of Orwell and yes, even seemingly mild old E.B. White. If there is a better political essay than “The Ring of Time,” march me to it. I will reread BAE 2007 soon (I’ve read all the BAEs, incidentally, most in the past two years; 1987 is sitting on my desk right now) so this statement may change, but I don’t remember a single political piece from BAE 2007 that was truly an essay. Though at least Wallace warned us: “several of this year’s Best Essays are arguably more like causeries or propos than like essays per se…” The only error there being the word “several” instead of “far too many.”

Also missing from Nehring’s argument is a clear explanation for why essays molder in library basements. One big reason having nothing to do with the quality of essays is that library classification schemes toss creative nonfiction into a vast bucket with how-to manuals, math books, and the rest of anything-that-is-not-fiction. Sometimes biography is given a reprieve and filed under “B,” instead of its Dewey number, but the rest is only findable if you are a library nerd given to browsing the 800s (or 600s, 300s, 900s, and 200s… since in many libraries there’s no logical co-location of most creative nonfiction, and a book of essays about baseball will be found next to tips about pitching). It’s all part of the general indignity accorded this genre.

Reality Check

A guest post from former Brevity intern Debbie Hagan:

 

“How do I write about my past without coming across like a jerk?” a student in my memoir class asked.

She was a sensitive, intellectual woman, who had made a foolish choice back in the 1960s. She had joined a radical student group that had planned to overthrow the government and stop the Vietnam War. Their criminal acts caused an innocent man to be killed. She had served her prison time, but continued to pay in personal remorse.

The following week, I struggled to find something to tell her. Then I found a quote that for me defined the real purpose of the personal memoir. It was from Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit:

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day…. “Does it happen all at once or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You come. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are REAL, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are REAL, you can’t be ugly, except to the people who don’t understand.”

I told my student that she had to be real. If she revealed her true self and experience to the world, then she could only be a jerk to those unwilling to understand.

— Debbie Hagan

Oxford Bound, Spring 2008

The Mid-South Creative Nonfiction Conference

February 27 to March 2, 2008

The University of Mississippi

The conference schedule features one-on-one sessions with editors and agents and panel discussions offering concrete tips about the art, craft and business of writing creative nonfiction. Presenters and speakers include Samir Husni (University of Mississippi), Virginia Morell (National Geographic), Rebecca Skloot (The New York Times Magazine, University of Memphis), June Thomas (Slate.com), Michael Rosenwald, (The New Yorker, Esquire), Webster Younce (Houghton Mifflin), Dinty W. Moore (Brevity, Ohio University), Kristen Iversen (The Pinch, University of Memphis), Ted Moncreiff (Conde Nast Traveler), Charlie Conrad (Doubleday/Broadway), Keith Bellows (National Geographic Traveler), John T. Edge (Gourmet, University of Mississippi) and conference director Lee Gutkind, the award-winning editor and founder of Creative Nonfiction.

Intensive writing workshops will also be offered before the official start of the conference. Instructors include Rebecca Skloot, Michael Rosenwald, Dinty W. Moore and Kristen Iversen. Topics include “Structure,” “How to Begin Your Memoir,” “The Art and Craft of Characterization in Memoir,” “Scenes from a Notebook,” and “Writing Book Proposals and Query Letters.”

Sukrungruang’s Malnourished Medieval Beast

First, let me say that I’ll bet no one else ever used this title for a blog entry before today.  But Ira Sukrungruang, author of What If? in Brevity 24 and Chop Suey in Brevity 19, has a new blog,  The Clever Title,  which he describes thusly: The Clever Title devours books like a malnourished medieval beast. The Clever Title is not concerned with craft or criticism. It cares not about literary elitism or academic jargon. The Clever Title reads because it knows there are mysteries of the underworld left to discover. The Clever Title loves the written word the way children love their ragged blankies. The Clever Title relishes those moments cuddled on the couch, sitting under the oak on campus, sipping a cappuccino in a cafe, the bent spine of a book in hand. The Clever Title reads to understand and discover humanity, the self, the natural world, and the mysteries that lie beneath the couch cushions.

We describe it this way: interesting book discussions.  And fun.

That’s The Clever Title, coming to a computer screen near you.

Pressure: Air

Pressure. That’s how I found myself pushing, prodding, prevailing over the keyboard to arrive at “Proselegy and Coda,” my publication in Brevity’s Fall 2007 issue.

Since 2005, I’ve been digging up a memoir. That book is tentatively set for Fall 2008 publication through the University of Iowa Press. During the revision stage, the editor said “You’re not showing much emotion when you described the death of your parents, especially considering they occurred so close together.”

That communication arrived before I signed a contract. I understood I was being challenged to show that I can convey scene, character, and emotion with words – to do, in fact, what I thought I could not: evoke the visceral subconscious remembrance of the pain of my parents’ deaths.

I read through the original memoir chapter, that recitation of facts, that grave of memories, reluctant to exhume and reexamine what cannot be changed. Need I know more? Need I grieve more? And let people watch? The questions hissed, lightly, persistently in the background – like the sleep apnea respirator that feeds me air all night.

Air. That catalyst for the fuel we consume to live. Air. That creates words that mean nothing, that are fit only to cheapen the loss upon the death of the woman and the man who made you flesh. Such a thing nearly overwhelms words, causing even the glib to descend into inarticulate gloom, at least for a time, unless you’re Didion. The best that could be had from my psyche two decades post-loss was fragments, thoughts, broken images memory-seared and gathered up from pieces of all that was shattered by death.

Thus, a prose-poem, “Proselegy and Coda,” because I have no coherent thought about love and loss that might transcend all that I think I remember.

– Gary Presley

Hunger Mountain Nonfiction Prize

Hunger Mountain, The Vermont College Journal of Arts & Letters, is pleased to announce the establishment of this new literary prize, judged by Sue William Silverman, author of Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey Through Sexual Addiction. Deadline: September 10. One $1,000 prize winner receives publication in the Spring 2008 Issue; two honorable mentions receive $100.00 each. $15 entry fee

Visit http://www.tui.edu/hungermtn/nonfiction.asp for complete guidelines.

Latte Time

A prize of $1,000 & publication is given annually for a personal essay. Submit a manuscript of up to 8,000 words with a $10 entry fee by September 15. Send an SASE or visit the Web site for complete guidelines. Materials to: Literal Latte, Ames Essay Award, 200 East 10th St., Suite 240, New York, NY 10003. (212) 260-5532. http://www.literal-latte.com

Three More (3) (More) Nonfiction Venues

Have we mentiioned that creative nonfiction, the genre, is gaining steam, still?

Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize  ($1,000)

http://www.tui.edu/hungermtn/nonfiction.asp
Judge: Sue William Silverman

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Richard Hugo House Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest

http://www.hugohouse.org/events/wartime

“With this competition we’re asking for creative nonfiction–a personal essay–on your experience with ‘iving with war.” Open to those resident in the states of Washington, Oregon, Montana, or Idaho.

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Malahat Review Creative Non-Fiction Prize  ($500 plus)

http://www..malahatreview.ca/creative_non-fiction.htm

Graywolf = Outstanding Small Press

Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize

Judge: Robert Polito

Open to any writer resident in the United States who has published no more than two books of literary nonfiction. Award confers a $12,000 advance and publication by Graywolf Press.
http://www.graywolfpress.org

MAKING MEMOIR, July, Pittsburgh, Brevity Editor

The inaugural Creative Nonfiction Writing Institute, MAKING MEMOIR, will be held in hilly Pittsburgh from July 13-14, 2007.  MAKING MEMOIR features a day-long Friday course on writing the memoir – emphasizing the basic elements of the classic memoir, such as scene-writing, description, structure, voice and tone, and ethical issues, taught by Lee Gutkind, writer, editor, and founder of Creative Nonfiction.

On Saturday, July 14, Gutkind will lead a day-long workshop for advanced writers, memoirist Floyd Skloot will offer a three-hour morning workshop entitled WORKING WITH FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY, and Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore will lead an afternoon workshop on THE ART AND CRAFT OF CHARACTERIZATION IN MEMOIR.

Scads more information right here: MAKING MEMOIR

Is 750 Words Way Too Many?

Our friends at 400 Words think so.  This is a highly interesting new magazine (both print and web) looking for true stories on a rotating theme.  Right now the theme is work.

There is a word limit.  You can probably guess?

See more on the submission process at 400 Words Submissions.

My Father’s Noose: The Reviews

Grace Talusan’s haunting “My Father’s Noose” from BREVITY 23 has been getting some nice blog reviews lately, including The Writer’s Group Blog, Kelly Spitzer’s Picks of the Week and Un-Made Up.

While the notices are nice, you really should probably spend your browsing time wisely and read Grace’s piece, if you missed it the first time:

My Father’s Noose

When my father was a boy, his mother hung him.

Enter Tondo, a Manila slum, and stand in the kitchen of his childhood home. Look up. The crusty knot is still there, tied around the light fixture.

I imagine my father, Totoy, at ten. He hasn’t graduated yet to long pants and shoes; his shorts and T-shirt are faded and soft from the wear of three older brothers….

Continue here: http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/brev23/talusan_noose.htm

BREVITY 24 Sneak Preview: Abby Frucht

“The shirt reminds me of a certain cigarette, just after I quit. I was walking along on a sidewalk. There the cigarette lay, untouched, where it had slipped from a pack. It was a test I wouldn’t pass. I knew that, the second I laid eyes on it. So I picked it up and hid it in my curled-up fingers and took it to a quiet spot and smoked it, obediently. “

an excerpt from “Blue Shirt,” Coming in the (early) summer issue of BREVITY, on or around May 5th.

The State of the Modern Memoir

Slate is offering a series of interesting articles this week, from the likes of Mary Karr and Alison Bechdel, on the state of the memoir.  We like the part where various writers discuss the difficulty of publishing a book about their lives that also includes friends, families, and others who might not be so thrilled.

Right here:  Slate Memoir Week 

Money, Time, Space, Democracy — We Need Those!

But not so much some of these other topics. Nonetheless, this seems like an interesting project:

The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar, an experimental art center, seeks proposals for short essays for a series of slim volumes we call LAB MANUALS, users guides for American life.

We invite proposals for essays on:

*MONEY
*TIME
*SPACE
*WASTE
*TRAFFIC
*ARGUMENT
*DEMOCRACY

We are interested in developing for each of these topics a slim anthology of short essays (5000 words or less) that offer vastly different viewpoints onthe experience and the meaning of each of these elements. We would like to see, for example, work that considers the experience of handling money in a bank or retail setting as well as work that considers the experiences of money unique to the blind, the young, the rich, the poor, the homeless, the lottery winners and the gamblers.

Please send proposals of no more than 500 words by e-mail (attachments OK in

MS Word or RTF) to Jake Adam York, Affiliate Curator for Education, at

Jake.York(at)cudenver.edu (replace (at) with @).
For more information on The Laboratory of Art and Ideas, visit the website

at http://www.belmarlab.org

Cancer Bitch Blog

Brevity contributor and Chicago-based writer, editor, teacher Sandi L. Wisenberg (Furniture, Rental Workers, Houston) is recovering from a masectomy, and blogging — with occasional humor, of course — about her cancer, her thoughts on health and wellness, the often bizarre world of modern medicine, and prestidigitation. We wish Sandi the fastest and easiest recovery possible, and highly recommend the blog:

Cancer Bitch

You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye bread, and you don’t have to have cancer to read Cancer Bitch

Iowa NonfictioNow 2007 Deadline Extended

If you attended the first NonfictioNow Conference in Fall 2005, you know how enjoyable and stimulating an event the fine folks in Iowa City put on. The most common response was along the lines of, “This is like the AWP, but small enough to feel as if I can talk to people.”

Robin and his merry gang are planning another event, in November 2007, and the panel deadline (just recently extended) is March 31^st. So put something together?

http://english.uiowa.edu/nonfiction/nonfictionow07/index.html

500 Words or Less / Get Paid

The 2nd Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize

Submit your prose-poem, short-short fiction, essay in-brief, etc. of 500 words or fewer. The only criterion (besides length) is that all submissions present an innovative address to the prose form.

Include a title page with your name, address, phone number, and the title of your submission(s). Your name must not appear on the manuscript(s). The reading fee is $15 for three pieces and includes a copy of Vol. 14 (spring 2008). Please make checks payable to Quarter After Eight.

Previously published material is not eligible. Manuscripts will not be returned. The contest deadline is June 15, 2007. Include a SASE for notification of contest winners. Prize money will be awarded upon publication.

first prize:
$200 and publication in volume 14 of QAE
second and third prize:
$50 and possible publication in volume 14 of QAE

Send manuscripts to:

Prose Contest
Quarter After Eight
Ellis Hall
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701

The First ANP Non-Fiction Chapbook Contest

1st Prize $1000 / Deadline: May 1, 2007

*Manuscripts should not exceed 50 pages, either as a group of essays or one long piece.

*Please include two cover sheets, one with your contact information, one with just the title

*Winner will receive $1000 and 30 copies along with standard ANP contract

Send your manuscript plus a check for $20 for each manuscript made out to
All Nations Press to

All Nations Press
Non-Chap
PO Box 689
White Marsh, VA 23183

Must be post marked by May 1, 2007, though early submission is encouraged.

Gulf Coast Prize for Nonfiction (And Some Lesser Genres)

I am a big fan of Eula Biss’ dense, clever, experimental essays, so I was pleased to see her listed as a judge here. Be sure to click through for the full guidelines if you are interested:

CONTEST GUIDELINES: Gulf Coast

http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/GCContest/gccontest2007.html

2007 Poetry, Short Story, & Nonfiction Prizes

Judges:

Terrance Hayes – Poetry
Sigrid Nunez – Fiction
Eula Biss – Nonfiction

Guidelines: Prize is $1,000 in each genre [Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction] and publication in Gulf Coast.

Brevity 23: The Special Polar Bear Issue

The Spring 2007 Global Warming issue of BREVITY, the journal of concise literary nonfiction, has poked through the ice.  Brevity 23 features ten outstanding essayists — Robin Behn, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Sandi Wisenberg, Anne Panning, Patricia O’Hara, Grace Talusan , Christopher Cocca, Joy Beshears Hagy, Mary Akers, and Leslie Stainton — exploring childbirth, urban sprawl, catachresis, candy cigarettes, and beyond.

We are also proud to announce our new Book Review section, including review essays by Lee Martin, Patrick Madden, Kim Dana Kupperman, Porter Shreve and Todd Davis.  Plus an adhesive new Craft Essay by Shane Borrowman.

BREVITY: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction

God Bless You, Mr. Buchwald

He was a brave man, a funny man, and way back when I was nine or ten, he was the reason I read the editorial page of my daily newspaper. In odd ways, I suppose he was an influence. In 1977, he bought me a steak in Pittsburgh, and gave me a stub of one of his old cigars.

I, for one, will miss him.

Dinty

Running With (or Without) the Truth

Buzz Bissinger offers a fascinating deconstruction of the lawsuit charging that “memoirist” Augusten Burroughs “falsely portrays” the Turcotte family as an “unhygienic and mentally unstable cult engaged in bizarre, and, at times, criminal activity.” Like the Frey mess, the book and subsequent controversy calls into question whether anybody in the big houses really cares about truth in nonfiction. See the article in the current Vanity Fair:

http://www.vanityfair.com/fame/features/2007/01/burroughs200701?currentPage=1

So, You Like Small Stuff?

This is not nonfiction related, but it does celebrate brevity, so here goes:

Flashquake’s new contest, Less Is More: A Celebration of Micro-Flash.

We’re looking for your best micro-flash fiction (100 words or less), mini-poems called “Fibs,” and “micro” photographs taken with your cell phone or PDA camera. There is no entry fee, and we’re giving out cash prizes. But hurry — the contest opens at 12:01 on January 1, 2007 and closes at 12:00 on January 31.

See the contest guidelines at

http://www.flashquake.org/editorial/contest.html

Memoir (and) … Whatever

The journal is called Memoir (and)

(and) what?

I’m not sure, but the Memoir (and) Prize for Nonfiction offers $500 and publication.

Details here: http://memoirjournal.squarespace.com/contest/

Do not write about the thing that annoyed your brother …

Someone over at The Mumpsimus has posted the best rules for writing I’ve ever seen, pretty much nailing every important part of the grueling process. Check them out:

Do not write about the thing that annoyed your brother the last time you wrote about it, because he’s bigger than you and he’s got a mean streak and there are plenty of other things to write about, like the weather.

Some coaches insist adverbs are stronger than nouns, but an independent panel of statisticians has proved otherwise. Despite appearances, though, statisticians don’t like nouns so much as they adore conjunctions.

And more here: http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2006/11/rules-for-writing.html

Cinderella’s Stepmom Writes Memoir

Literary Mama seeks top-notch writing for a special March 2007 issue: Stepparenting.

More info here: http://www.literarymama.com/interact/blog/

Deadline: December 31, 2006

Our guidelines vary by department. Before submitting, review individual guidelines at: http://www.literarymama.com/submissions/

FOURTH GENRE Essay/Memoir Prize $1000

The fine folks at Fourth Genre are running their Fourth Annual Editors’ Prize. The First Prize winner will receive $1,000 and publication in an upcoming issue of Fourth Genre. The Runner-Up essay will be considered for publication.  Peruse the guidelines here:

http://msupress.msu.edu/journals/fg/index.php?Page=prize