On Writing “Music Lessons”

From Rita Rubin, author of “Music Lessons” in Brevity 28:

“Music Lessons” was an exercise for a graduate class in creative nonfiction. I’m one of a small minority of students in my writing program who are parents, and I frequently look to my daughters for inspiration. This time, my muse was my older daughter, Hannah, whose most recent piano recital had left her dejected. She had played her piece perfectly many times at home, but, in front of an audience of strangers, she lost her place three-quarters of the way through. For a heart-stopping second or two, she froze, her fingers spread above the keyboard, waiting for her brain to tell them what to do next. She finally finished the piece, took a bow, and returned to her seat in the audience.

Despite reassurances from her parents and her piano teacher that hardly anyone had noticed her slight slip-up, Hannah kept her head down for the rest of the recital, as though hiding her face could make her whole body invisible. My original plan was to write about how helpless I felt as I watched my child experience the most embarrassing moment of her young life and how sad I felt when I realized that I could no longer fully protect her from hurt. But Hannah’s experience got me to thinking about some of my own less-than-stellar recital performances and my own piano teacher, and I ended up setting aside my original plan for another day.

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.