Books are Compasses

By Shawna Kenney

My first trip outside of the United States was a month-long backpacking trip in Europe. I’d saved money from many jobs for two years so I could treat myself after graduating from college, heading out with a friend, a Eurail Pass, and the Lonely Planet’s Shoestring Guide. This was the mid-90s, so we depended on the hostel phone numbers, the suggested itineraries, the historical snippets, and the occasional tip-off to vegetarian-friendly establishments.

Of course, sometimes the information proved to be outdated, like the day we hiked up a long, steep street in Lausanne, Switzerland, to the promise of a vegan restaurant, only to find a sign on the door saying they were under renovation and “closed for 3 months.” We found a nice Italian restaurant instead—and accidentally stumbled into a “blue movie” theater, something we joke about to this day.

Two weeks into the trip, my friend chided me on the train through Italy, “Get your nose out of the book! You’re missing everything.” It was true—but I couldn’t help myself. I have always read everything I could get my eyes on. As we moved on to each new city, I lightened my load by tearing away sections of the heavy tome and throwing them away.  

My second trip to Europe was seven years later on a book tour promoting the UK edition of my memoir. This was an entirely different experience—staying in Bloomsbury, imagining Virginia Woolf walking those streets; staring in reverence at the earliest printing of Rikki Tikki Tavi in the British Library; studying cuneiform texts on 7^th Century clay tablets in the British Museum. My travel buddy—now husband—and I were whisked around by a publicist from bookstore to bookstore, where I shared my own work and signed stock, giddy and grateful for the opportunity.

When we toured the publisher’s warehouse, they invited us to take a copy of any forthcoming book. My husband chose 1421: The Year China Discovered America. It not only put our existence and experience into context, but I teased him that it weighed more than the original Shoestring Guide.

I still have a penchant for reading stories set in the places I’m traveling. It’s a heady mix of movement and mind. This transcends genre, perhaps because growing up in a household full of non-readers in a small rural town often referred to as the “middle of nowhere,” trips to the library meant books—my lifeline, my portal to the rest of the world and worlds that existed only in our minds. A good story is a good story.

Now, reading about places I’ve been or plan to visit is like a literary score for lived experience. I devoured Gioconda Belli’s The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War just after visiting Nicaragua. Before flying home to Los Angeles from Sweden years ago, a friend handed me the first English translation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I knew nothing of the author, plot or genre but inhaled all 500+ pages by the time the plane landed, easily imagining Lisbeth Salander running around Stockholm and Mikhail Blomquist’s snow-sprinkled waterfront flat.

Books create associations with locales, if not help define them. Deanne Stillman’s Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship Between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, followed by the audio version of Lakota America by Pekka Hämäläinen, accompanied me on my drive through the Black Hills of South Dakota. I read Babette’s Feast in Denmark for the first time. While others were taking the Harry Potter, C.S. Lewis or J.R. R. Tolkien walking tours in Oxford recently, a friend and I did the basic Bodleian Library tour, where I gleefully recognized The Bodleian Oath I’d just read in The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams (and yes—I bought a tea towel conveying the covenant). And once, while driving through Louisiana, I actually said out loud “this is werewolf country” while pointing to a sign for Shreveport, thanks to Charlene Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels.

I couldn’t help but see the Los Angeles of Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler or Charles Bukowski everywhere I turned over 20 years of living there, while preferring the poems of Wanda Coleman to show me “from L.A. to El Dorado” and the entire canon of Michelle Serros showing me her beloved Oxnard.

I have done a little travel writing myself through the lens of food, pop culture and outdoor activities, which has given me even greater respect for writers who can make place a character so well. I hope my words have guided someone to the places their hearts desire.

Now, whenever traveling, I trek to the local bookstore, quick to ask for a recommendation of a book set in or about the region. I ponder what I will write of my new home in southeastern North Carolina, if this setting chooses to appear in my work. Otherwise, I will just keeping looking for it in someone else’s.

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Shawna Kenney is the author of four books, most recently Live at the Safari Club: A History of Hardcore Punk in the Nation’s Capital (Rare Bird Books). Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The New York Times, Playboy, Narratively, the Brevity Blog and more.

SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan) Note for Patient 117342 BAKER, Sarah

By Sarah Baker

Chief Complaint: Writer’s Block 

Subjective: (PMHx: Past Medical History): Childhood hx severe persistent asthma requiring repeated hospital admissions, gradual resolution over adolescence, adult history of mild intermittent asthma. Also, “bunions,” early onset severe bilateral functional hallux valgus, where her hallux (big toes) nestle snugly into their neighbors. Pt denies pain, or impairment of ambulation. Reports rare anxiety-well managed. Pt’s two front teeth are fake, and she’s allergic to cats. Otherwise, Pt is a healthy, 54-year-old female.

HPI (History of present illness): Pt reports 2-day onset persistent inability to perform creative duties related to writing. Denies premonition or precursor. First onset of these symptoms for her, last Monday. Pt reports normal ADLs including: she drank her latte, scanned the headlines, meditated, did a free-write. When Pt sat down to write a Hermit Crab essay, she went blank. Totally blank. She describes a “fortified box-like structure in her brain.” It was “empty,” Pt says, “the sides were made of impenetrable steel.” “No ideas were getting in or coming out.” Pt further describes onset of increased heart rate, shallow and audible breathing, impending sense of doom. Pt denies frank wheezes, chest pain, dizziness, loss of consciousness. 

Pt self-assessment and self-care: Pt takes a deep breath and types “Hermit Crab essay” in her browser. She finds an article that mentions the book Tell it Slant, by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola. Pt calls local bookstore to see if they have a copy. No copies. She calls another local bookstore. No copies. Pt tries local library. No copies. Pt describes googling “Hermit Crab essay” again, and finding an article by Miller. Pt reads it, but her inability to perform creative duties related to writing persists. Pt then searches Brevity’s website, and finds an article about Dr. Christine Stewart-Nuñez’s Creative Nonfiction class (where students write hermit crab essays) at South Dakota State University. Virginia Tufte’s book Artful Sentences is mentioned in the article. Pt owns this book. By page 16, Pt reports underlining sentences: Tennessee Williams’s “The Nothingness Continued;” Norman Mailer’s “Harmony settled over the kitchen;” Valerie Boyd’s “John Hurston, however, ached with ambition.”  

Pt describes further reading and underlining: Lawrence Durrell’s “They peel the morning like fruit;” Wyndham Lewis’s “Two stripes ornamented the sleeve.” Pt recalls thinking about metaphors, and vows to work on them, the way she works on her net game in tennis.  

Pt continues to struggle with Writer’s Block, and wonders if exercise might help. Or maybe psychedelics? She’s been thinking of a Michael Pollen-type journey and ponders if now is the time? 

A notification flashes across Pt’s computer screen: iCloud Storage full. She recalls running down the stairs to get her credit card. She remembers turning on the electric kettle, and running to the basement to put in laundry. Pt inputs her credit card, and fixes her iCloud storage. 

Pt begins to feel an easing of her symptoms. She’s just returned from four days away: Visiting her father, who has Alzheimer’s; dinner with her estranged half-brother; and a weekend of glamping on Governor’s Island for a friend’s birthday. Though Pt loves her view of the Statue of Liberty, she hasn’t planned for the all-night party boats that circle New York harbor. Pt concludes she is exhausted physically and emotionally. Pt reports needing someone to take care of her, and to give her permission for the way she is feeling. Pt recalls feeling relief to be home, and she hadn’t had a steady home growing up, and Pt is so grateful to have one now. Pt starts to cry. And all Pt wants is what she calls “a Doctor’s Note,” one that says it is okay that she has Writer’s Block. That it is understandable given her weekend, her life story, and all the baggage she carries around with her because she lost her mother when she was eight, her father had abandoned her, and she describes herself as a Leave No Trace girl. Pt recounts often performing, and trying to always be a good listener, and trying to make everyone else feel great. And Pt says she just needs “a Doctor’s Note” because she’s putting so much pressure on herself after deciding to leave her last job. And she’s been waiting to hear about a dream job, and has had five long, and what she thinks are successful, interviews, but the director isn’t getting back to her, or returning her emails. And her friends are wondering if this is a bad sign. And Pt describes sadness because she is a new empty nester and her youngest is living in Germany, and she is worried about his safety because that’s what mothers do. And that he is skipping a soccer practice to go to Fridays for Future meetings because he is prioritizing his climate change activism over his soccer, and that he is taking a 23-hour bus to Glasgow for Cop23, and Pt frets over when she will see him next because he doesn’t want to fly anymore, and a boat ride from Germany takes forever, and he doesn’t get that much time off from soccer. And Pt misses him.

Objective: What’s objective about reacting to life, grieving, regaining one’s footing, seeing the world for what it is? Maybe nothing’s objective…

Assessment: Life attack

Plan: Regarding the above note, it seems Pt’s symptoms eased after some distractions, and went away once she lightened up. In the future, when these symptoms appear, I recommend Pt relax, chill out. She’ll be fine. No medication required. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.  

Dr. Smith

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Sarah Baker is a freelance writer, and has been published in The Christian Science Monitor, CommonHealth on WBUR, and other places. She has been a magazine editor, radio producer, and book editor. Thanks to Phebe Kiryk, MSN-CNP for help with medical terminology. You can follow her work at SarahBakerStories.com.

Just Enough Light to See: How to Keep Your Story Moving

By Michael Lewis

There is a fine line between just enough and too much information. The trouble begins with the simple urge to over-explain—just a few details here, one metaphor too many there. This slippery slope ends when the reader discovers you are not giving them credit to figure things out on their own. Once the bond of trust between you and your reader starts to decay, it’s all over. Your story loses its wheels and ends up abandoned on the side of the road.

E. L. Doctorow famously wrote: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” The analogy is meant to inspire the writer who may not know exactly where their story is headed. I think it also serves nicely as a reminder of just how much to share with the reader.

Let’s stay with the road analogy.

The reader assumes the road of our story will traverse some flat land, mountains and valleys, and hopefully encounter some hidden turns or dead ends along the way. There will be intersections in the narrative and the reader will need enough information to guess whether to turn right, left, or keep going straight. Sometimes either direction will get the reader to the same point, though one route might take less time, the other perhaps more scenic. These are our artistic choices to make and, done properly, will nudge different readers in different directions. Some will keep right on going and not even consider turning. All of these options are viable as long as everyone ends up at Point B. This is one of the joys of writing—to hint at what lies ahead so the reader has something to which they may look forward. Provide the essential information but parcel it out. Think of it as shrewd generosity.

Don’t advertise.

Let your readers make connections on their own and try not to beat them over the head with your cleverness. Be subtle. Even if your writing is delicate, delicacy is not always subtlety. Don’t advertise your prowess. In a novel, advertisements of this sort take up precious space that could otherwise be used for something interesting or useful. In Travels With Charlie: In Search of America, Steinbeck quips about the phenomenon of billboards and highways, writing, “When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” Learn to couch your cleverness. Let the reader’s light bulb go on a sentence or two after you give them the hint. If they miss the turn they can always circle back.

Another way to think about it.

Imagine the reader is in the car with you. Or better yet, give them their own car. Do that in the first chapter. Give them the keys, fill it up with gas, and make that contract with them that will become their road map. It has sketchy details at first, but the further they travel the more information they will mentally input onto their map. They may or may not know they are driving to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They only know they are heading north and west to begin with. This is enough to get them started. Maybe give them an idea how long the trip might be so they can begin to plan. Who is riding with them? Always good to know.

Considerations.

A paragraph is its own concise set of directions with opportunities to engage the reader on every page—the sentence, tighter yet. It is easy to get so caught up in the way a sentence or paragraph sounds, how they make us feel, i.e., style, tone, that we completely forget to give the reader space to interpret. Remember, our readers have brought things with them on this trip—a cooler full of ideas, preconceptions, comparisons, reasoning skills, bias, not to mention their needs and desires as a reader, their demands. And sometimes they want to reach into that cooler and be surprised. Trust your reader and be good to them. This is probably not their first time behind the wheel and they have taken road trips before.

Repetition.

One hazard to look out for is repetition. It makes the reader want to nod off and who knows where they will end up. Look over your paragraphs and sentences. Are there phrases that can be cut? Beginning writers will frequently describe something a couple different ways, often within the same sentence, simply because they like the way it sounds. I have certainly been guilty of this. The reader doesn’t need both. Choose one, then write the other one down in your notebook in a section called Analogies, or Nice Phrases, or whatever. That’s where it belongs. You can even group them by subject or character. Be creative…and organized. You can use it down the road with no strings attached.

Rules of the road.

Travel light. If you’re not sure you need it, you probably don’t.

Trust your instincts.

Act on your instincts!

Don’t get sidetracked by all the pretty little things.

Pay attention. Always.

Parting words.

Don’t leave your reader stranded for long. They will find another ride and hang with you if you are lucky, but they may just as easily turn around and go home. You have invited them on this journey and are asking them, in Doctorow’s words, to make the whole trip with you. So pay attention and for the most part, keep the car on the road.

Happy writing and don’t forget to turn your lights on.
___

Michael Lewis daydreams and writes from his home in Indiana where he finds inspiration walking the open fields and low hills of the Wabash River Valley. He is currently at work on his first novel.

A Review of Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law by Haben Girma

By M. Leona Godin

Haben Girma’s memoir, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law contains many gripping moments. For example, in the opening scene, her father is taken off the plane in Ethiopia, leaving seven-year-old Haben, with her limited vision and hearing, to puzzle out the mystery of his absence and how she will make it home to Oakland California by herself.

Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law also contains many humorous nuggets about navigating our society’s rampant ableism that creeps even into the mind of her little cousin who demands Haben make him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, while insisting that blind people cannot make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches: “You said a blind person can’t make a PB&J. So how can I make you a PB&J?” she asks him to which he responds: “But I saw you!”

“His personal observations contradict the ‘truth’ he learned from society that all blind people are incompetent,” writes Haben. “I want Yafet to reject ableism. If he says that a blind person can make a PB&J, then I’ll make him one.”

Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law strives to dismantle ableism in many ways, one of which is to confront the inspiration porn impulse head on. “Tell her she’s very inspiring,” says a man at a Harvard mentorship social. “I cringe inwardly,” writes Haben. “People with disabilities get called inspiring so often, usually for the most insignificant things, that the word now feels like a euphemism for pity.”

A tenacious and kind impulse to facilitate understanding being one of her most useful and charming traits, Haben does not let the “inspiring” bit get her down. Instead she thinks, “when a nondisabled person uses the word to describe a person with a disability, it’s a sign that they’re feeling overwhelmed or uncomfortable.”

This man, whom Haben’s interpreter had brought over at Haben’s request, refused to use the ingenious system she’d come up with to communicate with fellow students in crowded situations where her hearing impairment makes it impossible for her to participate in casual conversation. It involves a wireless keyboard and a braille computer. As the person types, Haben reads the braille on the display and responds with her voice. She explains her system and asks the man if he’d like to try.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m enjoying watching you two. This is my card. It was very inspiring meeting her. Tell her she’s beautiful. You ladies take care.”

He walks away, and Haben’s interpreter asks (via the keyboard he refused), what she thought of the encounter. Haben, like so many disabled people I know, uses humor to diffuse potentially soul-crushing encounters. She rests her chin on her hand and says, “That was…inspiring.”

I read the ebook version of Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law using my wireless braille display with my iPhone. Sort of. As someone who started life sighted, spent three decades visually-impaired and only recently became totally blind, I did not learn braille as a child, so I haven’t anything close to Haben’s skills. My go-to accessible technology is text-to-speech software. Often I go back and forth with an ebook—reading braille when I have two hands and listening to my electronic reader when I’m eating or washing dishes.

Perhaps it was because she entered the school system seventeen years after I did—in the post-ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act) era, or perhaps because she was losing hearing as well as sight, Haben learned braille at an early age. This is sadly not the norm. Many visually-impaired children are forced into using large print for as long as their eyes hold out and are then encouraged to use speech synthesizers. Often this is because many teachers of the visually impaired do not know braille themselves. The upshot is that only about ten percent of blind people read braille.

Thus I loved reading about Haben’s undergrad experience at Lewis & Clark College, where she was the first braille reader to enter their disability services center, which didn’t “phase them one bit.” With a “pioneering spirit” they embraced the challenge: “They purchased a braille embosser, purchased braille translation software, and then spent the summer learning how to produce braille. They’re not afraid of the unknown; they learn, explore, and discover for the sake of their students and the betterment of themselves.”

Haben demonstrates how her successes are made possible by a system that supports accessibility. Likewise, many of her challenges are  the same so many of us face. This is why, I think, she reminds us of the statistics behind her personal struggles: “Around seventy percent of blind people are unemployed.” Although she graduated high school as valedictorian and had an excellent college GPA, “The seventy percent unemployment rate still managed to claim me, leaving me jobless in Jobville, Alaska.”

These reflections come during a summer in Juneau, where she’d  sent out application after application to temporary jobs that open up to accommodate the heavy tourist season, and received interview after interview, with no offers: “When you do everything right and society stomps on you, over and over, it creates a piercing, gut-twisting pain. It causes you to question the conventional wisdom that a person who works hard will always overcome obstacles.”

It’s not just Haben’s considerable successes that one remembers from this extraordinary memoir, but also her many invocations of the difficulties disabled people face all the time. Haben’s story shows how necessary and beautiful it is to strive. And continue striving.

Yes, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law contains many exhilarating moments, like when she climbs up an iceberg dropped by the Mendenhall Glacier and then pushes herself down the ice slide into the unseen, unheard unknown, but it’s the quiet reminders of how success and confidence grow slowly and cumulatively, like the process of glacier formation itself, that make this book memorable.
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Leona Godin is a writer, performer, and educator who is blind. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, PLAYBOY, O Magazine, and Catapult, among others. Godin was honored to be a 2019 Logan Nonfiction Fellow. She founded Aromatica Poetica, an online magazine exploring the arts and sciences of smell and taste as a venue welcoming to, but not specifically for, blind readers and writers. Her personal and cultural history of seeing and not-seeing is forthcoming from Pantheon Books.

On Visuals in Creative Nonfiction

Rachael Hanel

By Rachael Hanel

One question I often ponder as I read creative nonfiction: Why don’t more books include visuals?

I’m a big fan of the ones that do, such as Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi, Body Geographic by Barrie Jean Borich, and Memory of Trees by Gayla Marty. I’m not talking about full-on graphic nonfiction, such as Fun Home by Alison Bechdel or March by John Lewis. I’m talking about primarily text-based books that use visuals to enhance and supplement the story.

My memoir includes a photograph to start each chapter. I was inspired by The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch, where photos at the beginning of each chapter add to the book’s evocative mood. As I was writing my memoir, I had clear images in my head of family photos I had looked at for years, which had sparked my imagination about my family. I wanted my readers to experience a spark of imagination as well.

I had always heard that it’s expensive for publishers to include photos in books, so that’s why it’s not often done. When I sat down with my editor as we talked about getting the book ready for publication, I was shy in asking about the inclusion of photos. I wanted the photos so badly; I was afraid he’d turn me down. Much to my surprise, he said: “No problem. Sounds great. Let’s do it.” He said as long as photos are black and white and printed on the same page stock as the rest of the book, there’s no added cost.

I primarily teach media writing classes at my university job, but on occasion I also teach multimedia and design classes. In my first career as a newspaper reporter, I was taught to think visually—what photos or illustrations can pair with news stories? Can a portion of the text be better expressed through a photo or infographic? Twenty years later, that thought process still guides my work, and I often require my students to include multimedia alongside their written assignments.

When I read nonfiction and visuals aren’t provided, I find myself doing Internet searches for photos. I’m sure I’m not the only one. These people are real, and I want to know what they looked like. Susan Orlean’s description of John Laroche is one of the most perfect descriptions ever written: “John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth.”

Her description only provoked curiosity—I just had to find out what this strange-looking man really looked like.

In fiction, I don’t want illustrations. The point of making up people and places is to be imaginative, and part of the fun for me is to take a written description and try to imagine it for myself. I don’t want illustrations in Lord of the Rings or Pillars of the Earth. That’s also why I want to read a book before seeing the movie—the visuals of the movie will ruin my imagination.

But if people and places are real, readers don’t have to invent them for themselves. So why not be provided visual evidence of the real thing?
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Rachael Hanel is an assistant professor of mass media at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She’s working on a narrative biography of Camilla Hall, a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army who was killed by Los Angeles police in May 1974. Find her on Twitter at @Rachael18 or Instagram at @rachael_hanel.

A Review of Lisa Romeo’s Starting with Goodbye

By Magin LaSov Gregg

I read Lisa Romeo’s Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter’s Memoir of Love after Loss while I taught Hamlet and could not stop comparing these texts, which share a few striking similarities, including father loss, a fatherly spirit who converses with the living, and head-on interruptions of cultural silences imposed on the bereaved. The first rule broken, of course, is the ban on speaking openly about the existential crisis that ensues when one confronts mortality.

Most famously, the grave-digging scene in Hamlet forefronts the image of a skull (poor Yorick!), a famous Renaissance momento mori, to remind audiences that finite borders mark life as precious. It is because we will die that life calls us to attention.

In Starting with Goodbye, Romeo includes a chapter titled “Momento Mori” in which she describes the brutal act of cleaning out possessions in her late father’s den. Each object encountered thrusts Romeo back into the moments when an object illuminated her father’s love and care. A painful realization dawns when she finds a canceled check her father wrote to cover one of her horses. She recalls “having a sense” at the time the check was written “that no matter what terrible thing might happen or threaten to happen, it was okay, because my father would be able to fix it, smooth things over, make it right.”

Therein lies the rub. After her father’s death, Romeo’s once cherished parental safety net disappears, even if this safety net had grown tenuous and complicated by geographic and emotional distance, as well as Romeo’s responsibilities for her own family. Much of Starting with Goodbye compels me, but this rumination undid me. And I suspect other children who’ve lost parents will relate.

The aftermath, the life one must live without a parent to offer guidance or protection, stings more than the initial shock of death precisely because of its relentlessness. As Eula Biss has written, “The suffering of Hell is terrifying not because of any specific torture, but because it is eternal.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I should share that I have a few things in common with Romeo, including sharing an alma mater (Syracuse University’s S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications), parent loss (although I was twenty-one when my mother died) and producing writing that is also invested in candid, public conversations about grief.

What I find most valuable about Starting with Goodbye is how this book shatters grief myths to expose bereavement experiences that often go unacknowledged within American life. For example, there’s the quiet relief a child might feel, and that Romeo confronts, when a parent dies after a long or deteriorating illness.

There’s the truth that our absent loved ones are ever-present. They are dead and never truly gone. A corpse might become a ghost, as in Hamlet, a memory, or a lingering and difficult-to-name presence who shows up to chat, as is Romeo’s experience.

Her narrator never defines these unexpected fatherly apparitions, nor does she label them as paranormal but simply notes, “We talk, my dead father and I.” And her chapter “What Happens in Vegas” contends with these unexpected father-daughter conversations, funeral ephemera, and the deaths of celebrities who remind Romeo of her father.

In turn, Romeo’s ruminations amplify the emotional complexities of early mourning, when there is no rulebook or how-to manual for how to get this right, despite American culture’s insistence on five tidy consecutive stages of grief.

At the chapter’s conclusion, Romeo remarks on the deaths of celebrity icons who remind her of her father, and whose losses trigger new experiences of grief. Her point? Grief is not a straight line with a fixed beginning or end. It’s more like a wave or a ripple, more like a surprise.

“As each one of these old men dies or fades from public life, I designate others to take their place, men slightly older than my father was at his death, older than he ever got to be,” she writes.

For me, these musings were most welcome and powerful. My mother resembled Mary Tyler Moore, and they both lived with type 1 diabetes. When the actress died last year, I felt, for a moment, like I’d lost my mother again. Romeo’s candor normalized my own reaction, and gave me a model for a grief experience where I’ve rarely found appropriate models.

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking was published following my mother’s death—and Romeo references this book, which has become a seminal grief-text of our time, comparable to C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed in the twentieth century. But I find Starting with Goodbye more helpful because of Romeo’s wry wit, which offers a much needed cultural critique.

In her chapter “Leaving Las Vegas,” she examines then discards hollow platitudes that, at the level of language, illuminate a cultural tendency to erase or project positivity onto experiences of grief and loss. Platitudes appear in italics, followed with Romeo’s plain text critiques.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” she writes. “There’s a lot you can do, but I can’t let you know. I can’t think straight, figure out whom or what to ask and risk a no.”

“You are in my thoughts and prayers,” she adds. “Great. Now, when I get home, talk to me, let me talk. Don’t be shocked.”

As I read these lines, I thought once more of ghosts—of grief as a kind of haunting where language fails to adequately capture or categorize experience. In Romeo’s story, ghosts are more symbolic, more speculative than literal. And yet, as in Hamlet, the possibility of a ghost speaks to a child’s longing. Even in adulthood, we need our parents.

Grief, from the old French grever, means “to burden.” And for children who lose their parents, grief can feel like a burden, like an intractable weight that changes in shape or size, and shifts unexpectedly. It was Carl Jung who popularized this notion when he wrote, “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”

However, I worry that “burden” has negative connotations that contribute to our cultural tendency to avoid and deny death. I prefer thinking about grief as a relationship like any relationship, a commitment borne out of love. For seventeen years, I have mourned my mother in direct proportion to my love for her. Grief keeps us connected. Death is not the end of a relationship, but a turning point, as evidenced by Romeo’s title: Starting with Goodbye.

Perhaps this is why I’ve already planned to give copies of her memoir to friends, family, and students beginning their own grief journeys.

In American culture, where talk of death is still taboo, we need more stories about the aftermath of loss, about what it means to live with candor in the face of grief. We need stories that speak with frankness about parental death. We need writers like Romeo to start a new conversation, to keep it going.
___

Magin LaSov Gregg lives, writes, and teaches in Frederick, Md. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Washington Post, Manifest Station, Literary Mama, Rumpus, Bellingham Review, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. She blogs about life after loss on her personal website, and she swears she will finish her memoir in 2018.

What I Wish I Wrote

And that’s how Becky with the good hair got started…

Yesterday, a writer I work with confessed her greatest fear–lack of originality. She felt she didn’t have anything to say that hadn’t already been said. What could she offer that was new, different, worth reading?

I’ve felt that. The sharp stab when seeing an essay gone viral, or a book about an experience I’ve had, too. The feeling of that should be mine.

In The Millions, Kaulie Lewis writes about seeing other writers’ books and essays and wishing desperately that she’d written them:

…I’m jealous of most literary essayists, especially those who write about their homes or homely yearnings. Why? The through line is just me, that I want to have written their work. And sometimes, late at night, I allow myself to think that maybe I could have, if only they hadn’t gotten there first…My jealousy was largely just a cover for my terror. How could I ever write something original when someone had already explored, written, and published all of my ideas and interests?

It’s not just us. Everyone (well, maybe not Jonathan Franzen) worries that what they want to write has already been done, probably better, by someone else.

It doesn’t matter.

There’s room for Wild and A Walk in the Woods. For Bird by Bird and On Writing and The Art of Memoir. For Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story. What matters is not the subject, but what the writer brings to the table. It’s not originality that makes an idea compelling, but the rarity of a specific expression of that idea. I went for a hike–why? I learned to write–how? My family won’t stop fighting so I can find love–guns or swords?

Lewis writes:

When we say, “all of my ideas have already been had,” what we’re expressing isn’t jealousy, it’s doubt in our own creativity, in our worthiness to write about anything at all. Never mind that originality in the broadest sense is hardly possible, and never mind that the beauty of most good essayistic writing lies in the writer’s ability to both make the specific feel universal and, paradoxically, turn the commonplace into something momentarily extraordinary. When we say “I should have written that,” what we mean is “How unjust, unfair, unkind that you were faster, smarter, and more fortunate than I. How terrible that I have nothing more to offer.”

But we do. No-one else can tell our particular, unique, specific story. It’s why showing is so much better than telling, why details are better than generalities.

It’s up to each of us to discover not just the general appeal of our work (cancer memoir! lost a parent! recovery!) but the nature of the story that is so personal, so intimate, it can only be told by one person. Here is a topic that everyone cares about, and here is a new way to think about it.

We are seldom original. But we can always be rare.

Kaulie Lewis’ essay at The Millions is well worth reading, and mentions what to do when you feel like your piece has already been written.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!

Superman on the Roof: Michael Martone with Lex Williford

Here on the Brevity blog, we limit ourselves to the world of nonfiction, except when we don’t. One of the times that we don’t is when we discuss the art of flash, and here one of the masters of that flash prose genre, Michael Martone, discusses the form (as well as tricksterism, academic idiocy, and the Texas state legislature) with his friend Lex Williford, author of the new Rose Metal Press novella-in-flash, Superman on the Roof.

Michael Martone: Are you a follower of Hermes, the thief, as are your flash fictions?  That is to say: Do you regard flash fiction now as a genre or an anti-genre, a genre that resists, by design, generic description?  Hermes could not play the lyre he invented.  What he could do is see the category of dead animal parts—tortoise shell, sheep gut, horns of cattle—and transform them into a category of musical instruments, the lyre.  Is it important that flash fiction have a fixed form or is flash fluid?

Lex Williford: I suppose I’ve been a follower of Hermes at least since 2005, when I met Lewis Hyde at MacDowell Colony.

I’d taught Hyde’s The Gift in several graduate workshops, a book that raised questions I’ve puzzled over for years about gift cultures (like the Trobrian Islanders’) and the place of art in a commodity culture (like ours). So, when I met Hyde at MacDowell, I also bought his new book, Trickster Makes This World, at the Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough, and read it cover to cover.[1]

Lex Williford

The book—about the flip side of gift cultures (givers vs. takers)—is a fascinating treatise on tricksters, who cleverly steal back the power they probably should have never been denied in the first place.[2]

In the chapter “Hermes Slips the Trap,” Hyde writes,

I read the Homeric Hymn as the story of how an outsider penetrates a group, or how marginalized insiders might alter a hierarchy that confines them.  Hermes has a method by which a stranger or underling can enter the game, change its rules, and win a piece of the action.  He knows how to slip the trap of culture. (204). . . . [With] his stealing . . . and other cunning wiles [Hermes] unravels a particular cultural artifice and weaves a new one in its stead. (205)

When I read this quotation about Hermes, the Prince of Thieves, I also think about another quotation—variously attributed to other trickster-thieves like T. S. Elliot, William Faulkner, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, et al—which goes something like this:

“Good [or mediocre] [or immature] writers borrow, and great writers steal.”

When students hear this quotation[3], they tend to hear a moral judgment, not the kind of thing Hyde writes about.  Hyde’s concern with gift cultures—the notion that art comes from an impulse to give (or to keep the gift moving) rather than to take or hold on to or grasp or make a profit—runs into serious problems in societies like ours, when a huge chasm exists between those who have power and wealth and those who don’t.

To win, to get one’s power back, the loser must somehow trick the winner (rarely a giver), and in art that trick often involves stealing a form, “a particular cultural artifice,” as Hyde puts it, then unraveling it and weaving a new one to replace it.

In many ways, tricksters are born losers.  When I talk about the history of the short story to my students, I sometimes say that modern and contemporary short stories—and many ancient ones—are about losers who lose big time, characters living on the fringes, the borders, las fronteras, of society; and telling their stories is a kind of corrective to history (always written by the winners) that allows those who have lost their humanity and dignity to have a voice about their losses and in some way take back their power.

Hermes, illegitimate son of that serial philanderer Zeus, is a loser big time, but not for long.  A bastard child, a black sheep, an enfant terrible, he lives in a cave with dear old Mom, Maia, and his prospects aren’t good, but miraculously he turns his theft of Apollo’s (the “good” legitimate half-brother’s) cattle into an advantage that humiliates Zeus in front of all Olympus; then he plays the lyre he created to seduce Apollo.  (Actually, Hermes could play the instrument he’d made. In the Homeric Hymn, he plays beautifully—a liar with a lyre; more important, he plays Apollo with his lies and his lyre, then turns the tables on him, offering the lyre to him in a kind of gift exchange for the cattle he’s already stolen.)

Elsewhere, I’ve compared flash fiction to cherries or cherry bombs,[4] to safety pins or snakes swallowing their tails (tales)[5], to wound-up strings that lead us out of labyrinths, etc., but the metaphors, mythical or otherwise, always fizzle. The form is much more fluid than that, than any other contemporary form that I know of, at least in part because so many tricksters—like Hermes, like you, Michael Martone—use the form to thumb their noses at the “rules” or constraints of traditional fiction.

Flash fiction, at least for me, is an exploration of surprise, reversals in character, power, reader expectations, etc., but anyone who tries to codify the form misses the point.  The creators of the form and the form itself are tricksters, chameleons, shapeshifters, working in a vast valley between the lyric and narrative impulse, and the form has no secret set of rules except those that each writer must invent for each new piece of flash she writes.

If there’s a trick to flash, I suppose, it’s to become a trickster, to outwit the reader, to write about powerlessness, thereby taking one’s power back and giving it to others, but it’s also based upon the writer’s ability to pose impossible questions, worrying something one has stolen and obsessed over, often for years, until the stolen thing finally becomes one’s own, a gift to pass along.

Michael Martone

Michael Martone: All very interesting but so studious, Lex.  It is curious, isn’t it, that we live and work in this historical moment where many of us who are plying the trickster trade do so in the hyper-critical, genre obsessed, super-sorting machine that is the university or college—in a program within a department within a college within a school within a university.  How does the institution “count” the making of a flash fiction or a prose poem on its annual reports?  I am lucky enough to have an option of “other” on my pull down menu.  But can the work even be “seen” by the critics?  And is it fun to hang out at the crossroads being invisible in plain sight?

Lex Williford: Yeah, give me a tough question and I’ll get studious on you every time.

If we’re required to quantify everything—as the recent obsession with “metrics” at underfunded state universities like UTEP suggests—then I suppose flash writers could argue that we have a slight advantage, at least with the bean counters: We can write a lot of really short stories and count more of them in the vita.  (At UTEP, no kidding, we upload our pubs to something called Digital Measures; I just uploaded my fall semester syllabus there today.  It’s state law!)  When you have legislators who believe god put fossils in the ground to test our faith or think that burning fossil fuels in our cars has nothing to do with global climate change—a hoax!—it’s a bit hard to have a reasonable discussion about something as immeasurable and subjective as quality.  Better to focus on quantity, counting things—at least until the bean counters start counting pages.

Being invisible to state legislators and university administrators is something to aspire to, I think.  I’m a teaching writer and a writing teacher—both gigs equally important to me. As universities have become just one more “beast” of government to starve, pushing us toward the brink of the so-called for-profit university—increasing the price of books and tuition and student loan debt—all we can hope for is to teach something useful, and there’s no more practical skill than writing a clear, readable sentence.

As long as we feed our students with a rich and nourishing fare of words and craft and give them the time to write what burns most brightly in their bellies, we’re not just doing our jobs; as far as I’m concerned, we’re doing our small part to save the world.  Albert Camus writes, “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”  That works for me. I can only remain such an idealist because of my students, who, year after year, decade after decade, continue to reveal their miraculous, original gifts.

As for critics: There’s not a stronger argument for the burgeoning and slippery flash fiction form than the hybrid writing being published by Rose Metal Press or Tara Masih’s wonderful new annual, The Best Small Fictions, 2016. I got my copy of the second edition, guest edited by Stuart Dybek, yesterday, and I’ve not been able to put it down.[6]

Michael Martone:: Here is something else to chew on.  I have never liked the category of “experimental” writing.  I like it even less when hooked up with the binary of “traditional” writing.  Often the experimental gets applied to my flash fiction work, another kind of other, I guess.  I am more comfortable with the notion of being a formalist, any form in a storm.  I saw John Barth in a reading once respond to the question, “What are you reading now?” That standard question really is asking what “good” things are you reading now so I can get a shortcut to “good”.  Barth responded by pulling out a cereal box, saying, “I read this this morning.” And then went on to produce letters and postcards; newspapers and magazines; student papers and stories; bills and adverts; freshman compositions; phonebooks; galleys and articles sent to him by his former students; ending with his own finished and published work as well as the writing he had written the day before.  He was saying, of course, that all manner of writing might be ripe for one’s writing.  Would you think about (now that we have destroyed the notion of ‘genre” when applied to flash fiction) the subspecies of the form and its application of all kinds of writing to the pliant template of the form, flash? Or to say it another way—flash fiction might be a corrosive form but is it also a formal chameleon, a voracious form that eats other forms for breakfast cereal?

Lex Williford: The category of “experimental” fiction mostly seems redundant to me. All writing is experimental—thought experiments with words—even “traditional” or “realist” fiction, which can be as innovative and as “experimental” as something more “post-modern.” I mostly ignore any impulse to quantify or categorize, but I do think that flash seems particularly amenable (amoeba-ble?) to “blended” or “hybrid” forms.  I teach a graduate course called the The Prose Poem and Short-Short Story, and when we study the varying, and sometimes contradictory, definitions and examples of both forms, we soon come to consider them as almost interchangeable, prose poems mostly written by poets, flash by fiction writers, even when poets sometimes write the most dramatic stories, and fiction writers the most lyrical.

I had two influential teachers in grad school, James Whitehead (a poet and a novelist) and William Harrison (a novelist, short story and scriptwriter).  They’re both gone now, but back in the mid-eighties, they were the Scylla and Charybdis of the writing program I went to.  Bill—Uncle Bill, we called him—said, “I don’t give a damn about language; just give me story.”  And Jim—we called him Big Jim—said, “I don’t give a damn about story; just give me language.”  Such prescriptions were common in the boot-camp workshops we had in those days, and though I tend toward a descriptive kind of critique in my own workshops, thanks to you, Michael Martone, I do think that trying to make both Jim and Bill happy on some level—they were both on my thesis committee—was an interesting experiment in finding a balance between the lyric and dramatic sensibilities.

To put it another way, some flash writers see the form as an intellectual experiment—like trying to solve a new kind of Rubik’s Cube of their own invention—while others see the form as experiments in earning emotion.  I’ve tried both, but for me writing is mostly about the latter: feeling along the edges of an intangible obsession in the dark until I can see its shape more clearly, then working hard to earn similar emotions for readers, who each may see a shape different from the one I saw, bringing the contents of their own inner lives to a completely different reading of the same story.

Of course, there’s no right or wrong way to write flash, only the way each of us can write it, some of it amoebic, swallowing and absorbing other forms, some of it corrosive, breaking the forms down into their component parts, then reconstructing something altogether new, a pastiche or a collage, like a story by Donald Barthelme. The point is, after all, to ring a bell in the reader’s head, right?

I’ll never forget the night you and I had dinner with John Barth at the Cypress Inn in Tuscaloosa, or the reading he gave later, bringing out a hotel clerk’s bell and ringing it whenever he’d reached a footnote in his fiction (some footnotes longer on the page than the actual story).  Who’d ever think of putting a footnote into a short story?  Dude, our students would say, can you even do that?  Of course!  Why the hell not?  David Foster Wallace certainly did in Infinite Jest; so did Junot Díaz in the Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, and it wouldn’t surprise me if reading Barth had given each of them—and you, Michael, since you were his student—all the permission they needed to do exactly what they wanted to do in the first place.

What was it Barth said that night, looking out over the Black Warrior River, just as it was reaching flood stage?  “Digress aggressively”?  Or was that you, Michael?

Tricksters, all of us, stealing each other’s stuff, always causing trouble.
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[1] Hyde was as generous as his books: He gave me a signed British edition of The Gift and bought me a double-dip ice cream cone at our favorite nearby dessert spot in Keene, New Hampshire, the Piazza Ice Cream Parlor—two-hundred flavors of ice cream!  An August afternoon, eating ice cream and talking about tricksters.

[2] As he discusses Hermes’ thievery and cunning, Hyde also uses excerpts from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave to illustrate Douglass’s “thievery” of literacy—and literature—from those who had enslaved him, using it as a gift to free himself and others.

[3] Clearly a plagiarized—or stolen—quotation since so many have claimed to say it first.

[4] https://medium.com/the-coil/cherries-or-cherry-bombs-balancing-risk-and-understatement-in-flash-fiction-lex-williford-9c26f4071a79#.4v7as3hxq

[5] “For the Tale to End . . .” Writers Ask, Glimmer Train Stories, Issue 73, 2016: 19.

[6] For readers: There’s a Michael Martone story in the anthology.  Read it.

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Lex Williford, winner of the 2015 10th Annual Rose Metal Flash Fiction Chapbook Award for Superman on the Roof, has taught in the writing programs at Southern Illinois University, the University of Alabama and the University of Missouri, St. Louis. His book, Macauley’s Thumb, was co-winner of the 1993 Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Literary Review, Fiction, Glimmer Train Stories, Hayen’s Ferry Review, Kansas Quarterly, Laurel Review, Natural Bridge, The Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market 2002, Poets & Writers, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Smokelong Quarterly, Southern Review, Sou’wester, StoryQuarterly, Tameme, Virginia Quarterly Review and have been widely anthologized. Coeditor, with Michael Martone, of the popular Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, now in its second edition, and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction, he is the founding director of the online MFA program and the current chair of the on-campus bilingual MFA program at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Michael Martone was born and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Little else is known of his life.

Review of Clifford Thompson’s Twin of Blackness

By Debbie Hagan

Clifford Thompson grew up in the post-civil rights era in a black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., raised by an extended, loving church-going family who made sure he made it to college.

I grew up in the post-civil rights era too, but in a white Kansas City suburb. My parents were loving church-going people who also steered me towards college.

Thompson grooved to the Jackson 5, Fifth Dimension, the Spinners, the Ohio Players, and the Temptations. He watched Mary Tyler Moore, Flip Wilson Show, Good Times and The Jeffersons.

I watched those shows too and listened to Motown, swooned to Smokey Robinson, and gyrated to Sly and the Family Stone. So for a microsecond I believe Thompson and I had more or less same childhood.

 It’s his mention of All in the Family that shakes me back to reality. His family laughed at Archie Bunker—an old-fashioned white bigoted working-class guy. My father laughed with Archie, his hero, the paradigm of working class guys like him who spoke bluntly (if not ignorantly) about race, ethnicity, and gender.

For forty years, I believed Dad was the only father in America who couldn’t see that Archie was the butt of the show’s humor. However, Thompson tells us that CBS received many letters “praising the network for finally airing a show about their kind of guy.”

Clearly Thompson and I didn’t have the same childhood, though we both grew up when pop culture crossed racial lines and prompted much-needed public debates.

Twin of Blackness refers to Thompson’s own “blackness,” which he regards as a twin of himself that he loves and defends, yet resents its “baggage.” He discovers it’s not “enough to be black, or white, or Asian, or Hispanic, or Native American, or Jewish, or whatever: you had to act the part….”

When Thompson leaves his insular Lincoln Heights neighborhood, he enters Oberlin College, where he is one of only three blacks in his dorm. In a conversation with a white girl, she tells him she’s never heard of James Brown. Stunned, Thompson thinks back to his old neighborhood where such a remark would have been like saying, “I’ve never heard of George Washington.”

Conversely at a get-acquainted party, Thompson is supposed to guess the author’s name taped to his back. After numerous tries, he gives up. It’s C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia Chronicles.

It’s no wonder, Thompson decides later, he hasn’t heard of Lewis. When he looks up his books, he decides they’re “the kind of reading done in neighborhoods where kids routinely picked up books for fun, where no one asked, while looking at you as if you had an ear growing out of your forehead, ‘Why you read?’”

Thompson’s Oberlin classmates turn out to be friendly and inclusive, but college is an academic and cultural awakening. He survives through humor, resiliency, and determination. After graduation, he becomes an editor at Doubleday, where he not only meets famous authors, but works with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. When he loses his job, due to a massive layoff, Jackie O soothes him by kissing his forehead, which he regards as a sign that everything will turn out okay. Mostly it does.

Terry McMillen accepts his short story for an anthology, Breaking Ice. He lives for a while in Italy, becomes editor of Current Biography, and publishes a novel. “Blackness” doesn’t dictate his life, but it triggers uncomfortable assumptions and expectations. For instance at Doubleday, his colleagues practically insist he date the black girl in the office. He’s baffled, wondering if his co-workers are so naïve to think that because two African-Americans work in the same office, they should date and marry. Thompson dates white women, which causes both whites and blacks to raise their eyebrows at him. Thompson says they’d ask, “What it was I had against black women anyway?”

Ultimately, this warm, humorous memoir reminds us that prejudice continues through stereotyping and broad-based assumptions based on race, gender, religion, and ethnicity. It’s only when we’re able to view people as people—not based on baggage they might be carrying—are we able to make progress in building a more peaceful, compassionate society.

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Debbie Hagan is book reviews editor for Brevity and teaches writing at New Hampshire Institute of Art. Her essays have recently appeared in Brain, Child and the anthology Dime Story.

Bridging the Inexpressible: On Music Writing

Joe Bonomo interviews Aaron Gilbreath:

For a long time I’ve admired Aaron Gilbreath’s essays and journalism, and his generosity and commitment to fellow writers. Having encountered his work over the years in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Rumpus, The Believer, Oxford American and other places, I’m amped to read his book of essays Everything We Don’t Know, coming out later this year. His terrific new collection This Is: Essays on Jazz explores jazz music and artists with affection and deep curiosity. I was happy to virtually sit down with Aaron and ask him some questions about the book and the possibilities and limits of writing about music.

Joe Bonomo: Huxley said, “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” That works for me, from blues, country, and rock and roll to jazz and classical. Do you agree? If so, as a music writer how do you bridge the inexpressible and the expressible? I guess a more interesting question is, Can you?

Aaron Gilbreath: What a great quote. I agree. Granted, I only have vague ideas about how writers bridge the inexpressible and expressible, but that is what we’re all trying to do all the time when describing sensations and feelings and exploring our interior worlds. One of Huxley’s implications is: words have limitations. Sound and images do, too. But each medium also has unique capabilities to offer, so maybe combined, the joint project of human expression can get us over that bridge.

In another sense, maybe not all we consider inexpressible is. If we can hear and feel something in music, then it’s expressed. That means it’s not inexpressible so much as unspeakable, beyond words but not sound. Who knows? I love this existential, edge-of-our-knowledge stuff, but maybe I’m not saying anything that cuts to the heart of your question. What lies beyond the beyond is fascinating and part of me likes it there. Like an essay, we can’t expect too much clarity in certain realms of human inquiry, only the opportunity to think and talk through them. I’d rather have music transmitting powerful signals in one channel while something inexpressible still lingers out there, partly concealed.

More practically, part of bridging the inexpressible and expressible involves trying to describe sound. When you write about music, readers and editors often want to know how the music sounds, what the musicians’ styles are like. Of course, you want readers to hear the music. It’s the writers’ job to provide the sensory cues necessary for people to experience it, but that’s a tough job. It’s hard describing the intangible! If you can’t get at the primary qualities of sensation with specific adjectives and phrases, then you end up leaning on comparisons: X sounds like Y; A tastes like what B would sound like if B and C had a baby. Comparisons provide guideposts since known entities conjure sensations already familiar to readers. Describe Japanese bonito fish as a smoky, briny flavor that’s meaty and carries a deeply satisfying umami and people might scratch their heads. But say bonito’s “the bacon of the sea” and people go, Oh, that makes sense. To me, sound itself verges on inexpressible. Many writers nail it. Michael Patterniti could write about anything. Ellen Willis describes it time and again. I find it challenging.

JB: In your introduction to This Is, you write, “Music isn’t a thing, some abstraction separate from the human condition. It is the human condition, and I, as a reader, writer and listener, live for the narratives of achievement, heartbreak, success, failure, struggle, disappearance, cult status, determination, emotion and innovation, music’s lifeblood and our shared existence.” Beyond providing biography and cultural and historical context, can essaying an artist’s life also tell the story of music expression itself?

Aaron Gilbreath

AG: Part of what I mean is that music is one of the few things beyond physiology that unites all people across cultures. Another part is that we live music. We don’t just listen to it. Music defines aspects of our lives. Just as Joan Didion said that we tell stories in order to live, certain albums define particular periods of time. Certain songs bring back certain feelings, remind of us people. For musicians, it is literally their condition, because they’ve built their lives around creating and playing it, and they suffer and thrive for it. The related question is why we listen to music at all.

Can essaying an artist’s life also tell the story of musical expression itself? I think it can. If music and silence express the inexpressible, then maybe the narratives of musicians’ lives can help portray and explain the complex relationship humans have with music. To me, the question isn’t just about why musicians do what they do. It’s: why do we human beings make and listen to music? What is it about this thing with sound and beats and rhythm that attracts us? This invisible force that elicits such strong physical and emotional responses in our bodies that nearly all of us ─ across the range of humanity and history (certain religions aside) ─ willingly places it in our lives? To me, Oliver Sacks tackles that in his book Musicophilia as scientifically and intelligently as anyone has, exploring the physiological response it produces in us. But the question remains unanswered. We’re a musical species. We don’t fully understand why, but we are. And essaying about musicians is one way we can try to make sense of ourselves, our relationship to music, and the drive to express the inexpressible. Music-making is one of the enduring central projects of human existence throughout time. Telling stories helps us make sense of why.

JB: Is there a piece of music or a musician you’ve tried to write about but haven’t found a way in (or out)? If so, why do you think that happened?

AG: Well, I tried to write about one of the Velvet Underground’s best live recordings (a 1967 soundboard tape from The Gymnasium in NYC) when it was still a legendary bootleg that the band hadn’t officially released, but John Cale wouldn’t return my emails, and Moe Tucker wouldn’t answer her phone! I don’t blame them. They’re probably inundated with strangers’ requests.

As for jazz, definitely, but I’ll keep it general. For a narrative writer, the tendency is to find the drama. Literature needs conflict, and jazz musicians’ lives are filled with it, from racism to drug use to financial problems, strained business relations and strained family relations, self-doubt and the frustrations of courting success. A story needs trouble, but the problem becomes one of focus: when does that trouble overshadow the rest of your “character’s” lives and skew the portrait? Conflict can tilt the frame, and as a writer of nonfiction, I don’t want to be unfair. I want my stories to be compelling reading that’s intellectually stimulating and more insightful than tawdry, but always accurate and reliable. When it comes to musicians like Ernie Henry, Frank Rosolino, Freddie Redd, Lorraine Geller and Vince Guaraldi, you have heroin overdose, obscurity, heart failure, murder-suicide and questions of squandered talent. In terms of scenes, you also have a flashpoint, a dramatic moment that maybe you want to lead an essay with, not just for titillating effect, but because that moment changed the character’s life. Maybe it ended it. That moment’s important. But you want perspective, and if you lead with the heroin overdose or the bankruptcy, you have a strong hook to grab readers, but maybe you run the risk of suggesting that that’s what readers should most know about them, or risk creating a dark first impression that’s hard for them to see past. Leading with that can oversell the tragedy’s importance. Why focus on the tragic end of a musician’s life or downside when the bulk of their life was so gloriously creative and productive that people are still talking about them half a century later? Then again, a dramatic scene is often just a compelling way in to the bigger story and bigger themes ─ that’s how narrative works. So that’s what stumps me a lot: how to write a seductive narrative while remaining accurate and fair, and focusing the readers’ eyes on different points of the musicians’ lives to represent their full humanity.

When I’m stumped, I table a musician’s story until I can polish my grimy lens enough to see the bigger picture or best way in. Sometimes so much time passes that it seems I’ve given up entirely, in which case maybe another writer will come along and write that story. But your unconscious often keeps hammering away when the rest of you has moved on, silently laboring there under the surface of your thoughts, and trying to make sense of things and find that pattern or perspective that clicks.

Joe Bonomo

JB: What challenged or surprised you as you assembled a clutch of essays into a cohesive book? Was there a strategy in choosing the musicians you write about?

AG: Cohesion is often lacking in my favorite essay collections. They’re collections in the literal sense: pieces written independently of each other with only the individual essays in mind and then later gathered between covers. Even though This Is is about jazz, that’s how it came about.

This book resulted by accumulating interest. I just found myself listening to a lot of jazz during a time in my life; it seemed to reflect my nervous system or something. Listening got me reading, which led to obsessively writing about jazz. So I didn’t choose the musicians willingly. I followed my musical tastes and found questions that arose from their lives or work. In Val Speak, my strategy is whatever. While listening to Miles Davis I thought Ooh, that’s interesting, and started making notes. When I was reading about Lee Morgan, sources kept mentioning his “tragic end on stage,” but then when I went to find more info about it, no definitive piece existed. So I tried to write it. When I stopped to look at what I’d been writing for months on end, I realized a clutch had gathered, and I went with it. The world contains so many fascinating things that I knew my attention would eventually shift from jazz to something else, even as part of it held on to the other previously fascinating things.

The more practical challenge was putting the essays in order, and overcoming the self-doubt that this small collection even amounted to a book. When does a pile of stories cross that divide? I don’t know what the tipping point is, but when you’re publishing a book yourself with no one else’s money, you can say “Okay, it’s done now” and move on.

As for surprises: I’d be surprised if many people read it!

JB: Who are your favorite music writers? Why?

AG: Ellen Willis, hands down. As a writer, I envy everything about her mind and style. As a reader, she’s a magnetic guide because she’s a curious person who writes about music, rather than a music writer, so her pieces involve cultural criticism, politics and gender, and weave the experiential with the analytical. Her narrative voice is that of a smart welcoming friend: argumentative, funny, approachable, even at its most intellectual, and ready to lead you somewhere you might not otherwise go.

For an awesome mix of the personal and critical, people should read Jessica Hopper’s book The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic. It’s formally diverse, full of style, relatable and still surprising. I love Nick Hornby’s music writing, both his fun breezy book 31 Songs and High Fidelity. Gerald Early’s One Nation Under a Groove, about Motown, takes a day to read and will linger for ages. Robert Gordon’s Stax Records book was one of the best music biographies I’ve read, so I can’t wait to read the next book he writes.

For jazz, I love old New Yorker writer William Balliett and love Stanley Crouch ─ brilliant, contentious, challenging, singular. Pianist Hampton Hawes’ memoir Raise Up off Me is one of the best jazz stories you’ll ever hear straight from the musician’s mouth, same way Art Taylor’s interviews are in his collected Notes & Tones. And even though Luc Sante’s not a music writer, his Believer piece “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say” is masterful music writing. James Baldwin’s 1965 short story “Sonny’s Blues” is essential reading for anyone, and I dig Ralph Ellison’s essays “The Charlie Christian Story” and “On Bird, Bird Watching, and Jazz.” Also, Sam Stephen’s huge photo book The Jazz Loft Project is one of a kind. That’s the short answer.

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Joe Bonomo’s books include This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began (essays), AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, and Conversations With Greil Marcus (edited). He’s the Music Columnist at The Normal School and appears online at No Such Thing As Was  and at @BonomoJoe.