nonfictioNOW

It will be too challenging for me to try to sum up the conference—there were too many thoughts stuttering through my mind during those few days in Iowa. But I’ll list a few highlights:

* Meeting so many interesting and talented writers, many of whom I’ve admired for a long time, among them Dinty Moore, Sue William Silverman, Joe Mackall, and Debra Gwartney. (If you read this blog regularly, you know how much I loved Debra’s Live Through This. You can read my interview with her here.) I was also staying at the same B & B as the wonderful Faith Adiele, author of Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun, winner of the PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir in 2005. (Her work-in-progress also sounds fascinating, so I’ll let you know when it’s out in the world. Or you can check out her website to find excerpts.) At breakfast on Saturday, I also met the novelist Laura Fish, who is participating in the Iowa International Writers Program. I have never read her writing, but her books are now also on my list. (And talking with both Faith and Laura about their work, which is multigenerational, has inspired me to get going on my next book--or to at least start thinking about it.)

* Meeting one of my wonderful and talented Mother Words students in person. Marilyn, you’re awesome. What an honor to connect. I look forward to sitting down with you at AWP.

* Alison Bechdel — Oh my God. Could this woman be more amazing? She gave the keynote address on Friday, and she was fabulous: funny, self-deprecating, brilliant. I went straight over to Prairie Lights and bought her graphic memoir, Fun Home. And I’m going to get everyone I know who hasn’t read it to read it. In her keynote she discussed how a graphic memoir allowed her to simultaneously communicate on more than one level, something she didn’t feel capable of doing in straight prose. This idea of simultaneity was echoed in several of the other sessions that I attended, and I love thinking about how you can hold multiple stories (memories and thoughts and actual lived experiences) in your writing all at once.

* I also loved the panel on manipulating time and distance in nonfiction. Especially interesting to me were the comments of David McGlynn, who talked about how using present tense in memoir necessitates careful attention to time and distance. (Since Ready for Air is in present tense, I found myself nodding my head at every other word.) I also loved what Jocelyn Bartkevicius said in that panel about how our minds and memories are in motion, while words on the pages are static. This creates a challenge for the writer who wants to tell a story the way we think. It's so fascinating to think about the narrative structures that might make this possible.

* And of course one of the best things about the conference was being able to catch up with friends. Thanks for everything, Bonnie and Jill. So great to see you, Sonya and Shannon! And so fun to meet all the wonderful folks from Ashland’s low-residency MFA program. If you’re looking for a low-residency MFA, you need to check out Ashland.) And thanks to David for the wonderful dinner at his restaurant, the Motley Cow.

Okay, now I need to catch up on all the work I missed while I was thinking about writing.

structure, structure, structure

Okay, so I’ve been avoiding posting about the memoir and the deadline because, well, the deadline passed and the memoir still isn’t finished.

There were some distractions in August, some of them lovely (my 20th high school reunion, which brought a few of my closest friends into town) and some of them not as enjoyable (proposals, house projects, etc.) But even without these, I wouldn’t have made my September 1st deadline. I realized, as I was muddling through my manuscript, that I had some structural problems later in the book. I had dropped a narrative thread. I was too tangential. I needed to condense and compress in order to maintain narrative urgency.

And I was feeling panicky because I was trying to rush through the writing, not letting the solutions emerge in the process of writing. So I slowed down a little. I fretted. I woke up thinking about The Manuscript.

Then last week with everyone back in school, I gave myself the space I needed to let the book happen. I wrote and I wrote. And yesterday as I was pulling together the new chapters to send to my wonderful writing group, I realized that I’m actually writing faster than I thought I was. I have written 64 pages in the last month. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. I’m on 296 and still going. Another two weeks to go? Maybe. I hope.

Structure is such a tricky animal, but it’s critical to a book’s success. Sometimes the necessary structure emerges in the process of writing and sometimes an author really needs to plan out a book. My friend Francine Marie Tolf has an interesting article in A View from the Loft about this very thing. Francine interviewed me and three other memoirists about how we approached structuring our memoirs. Check it out and see what Marge Barrett, Nicole Johns and Vicki Forman, who just won the PEN USA award for creative nonfiction for her wonderful memoir, This Lovely Life, have to say about structure and memoir.

And now I'm back to The Manuscript.

an exact replica

I read a lot of heartbreaking books. Not surprising, I guess, considering I read mostly motherhood literature and there’s a lot of heartbreak possible with the whole motherhood thing. Oh, I realize that there are funny books about motherhood out there, as well—I’ve actually been told that those are the only ones that sell—but those aren’t the books I usually read. Is it because funny means more to me if it’s tied to heartbreak? I’m not sure.

But even though I don’t mind reading the hard stuff, I’ll admit that some days I’m just craving a romantic comedy of a book. You know, something that will make me laugh without also making me cry. Something that will make me feel lighter. But I apparently don’t own any of those books. I’ve searched my shelves, and they're not there. I could go buy some, I guess, but I’m trying not to buy new books when there are so many on my shelves that still need reading. So I stick with the heartbreaking ones.

This is how I ended up tossing Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination in my purse last week as we were heading out the door to go up north for a wedding. I was in that craving-something-light kind of mood and didn’t really want to read about a stillbirth. But this book had been on my list for a while, and then it was on my desk for another while, and then one of my brilliant students cited it as one of her recent favorites, so I knew it was time.

Well, let me tell you: I read it in three sittings. I read it in the car while Stella and Zoë napped, and then I continued to read it (with frequent interruptions) after they woke up. When we arrived at the cabin, it was raining, so I let them watch a video as I made dinner with the book propped on the counter, reading as I chopped onions. And then the next morning I let them watch another video so I could finish the book. (D was golfing.)

I can’t even apologize for my shoddy mothering because the book is that good. And it’s heartbreaking. And it’s also very funny. (No wonder it was a New York Times Notable Book in 2008.)

McCracken’s voice certainly drives this memoir; she’s funny, smart, irreverent—someone with whom I could imagine throwing back a few glass of wine (or maybe even a few bottles). But how she’s structured the book is also brilliant.

We know from the outset that her firstborn dies. We also know that she goes on to have another baby boy a year later. We have to know these things going into the story or it would be too heartbreaking (even for me). It would be, as McCracken writes, “The happiest story in the world with the saddest ending.” And I’m sorry, but you can’t do that to readers. So McCracken lays it all out there for us: Pudding’s death, Gus’ birth.

But then what is the story? Where is the narrative urgency? When you give the end away at the beginning don’t you jeopardize these things?

No, no you don’t! (This is me jumping up and down in my office, getting very excited, people.) The urgency lies in the details of both boys’ births, details that McCracken withholds until the very end of the memoir. It's brilliant really, and sad, and hopeful. All of those things.

Who needs a romantic comedy of a novel anyway?

when the ending isn't the ending

The whole time I’ve been rewriting Ready for Air, I assumed it would end the same way my first draft ended. I mean, there is a whole narrative thread that leads to—no, demands—this particular ending to my story.

There was a problem, though. I’ve had several readers—one of them an editor who wanted the book (really wanted it—damn her editorial board!)—who suggested that this narrative thread should be cut from the book. I’ve been told that it’s distracting. I’ve been told that it needs its own book!

But I wasn’t ready to part with it. I felt it gave more texture to my character; I felt it offered necessary contrast to the claustrophobic urgency of the NICU. In the rewrite, I've pared it down a bit, but I haven’t been willing to chuck it completely. Because, well, how would the book end, then? I love the ending, and I couldn’t bear the thought of kicking its legs out from under it.

But this very morning I woke with a different ending simmering at the edges of my consciousness. A different ending!

I don’t know if it will work yet. I have to sit with it a while, let it percolate as I make my way closer and closer to the final pages. And when I get to there I hope I’ll know—I have to know, right?—which ending will best serve the book.

I would keep my fingers crossed, but then it would be difficult to type. And I still have lots of work to do. So will your cross your fingers for me? Send me perfect-ending vibes?

live through this

I am so excited to have Debra Gwartney, author of the wonderful memoir, Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, here at Mother Words today.
I first read Gwartney’s writing just over a year ago when her essay, “The Long Way Home,” appeared in The New York Times’ Modern Love column. I’m always thrilled to hear about a wonderful mother writer, so I added Live Through This to my reading list. But then, as you know sometimes happens with me, I got busy with teaching and revising and my girls. A year passed.

When I opened her book this summer, I didn’t want to put it down. I was reading it while we were up north over the 4th, and I kept trying to sneak away from the chaos of the cabin so I could finish it. (I was asked for something to eat or drink at least five times while I was closing in on the last pages. Is there anything more annoying than that?)

When I finally was able to finish Gwartney’s memoir, I had tears in my eyes. In parts, the memoir is heartbreaking and terrifying, but it’s also beautifully written—a testament to the power of love and the necessity of forgiveness.

After a contentious divorce, Gwartney moves with her four daughters across the country to Eugene, Oregon. But the upheaval is too much for her older daughters, Amanda and Stephanie, who begin to rebel, skipping school and staying out all night. Then, when Stephanie is fourteen and Amanda is sixteen, the girls hop on a freight train and leave home for good.

There is so much I’d like to say about this book, which was chosen as a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, but I don’t want to take more time away from the interview. So without further ado, I’d like to welcome Debra Gwartney to Mother Words:

KH: Debra, I think this is a tremendously brave book. You don’t sugarcoat anything and most of the blame—though your ex-husband gets some of it, certainly—is directed at yourself. I’m wondering how it felt to expose yourself in this way, to examine your actions and reactions and take responsibility for them.

DG: The early drafts of the book included most of the scenes that appear in the final version—the circumstances, the characters, the unfolding of action. Those aspects were established from the beginning. But what challenged me nearly to defeat, draft after grueling draft for eight years, was understanding the dynamic, the “why” of the situation my family was caught in. I wrote many revisions, then gave those pages to trusted readers only to hear, “you’re still coming off as a victim.” I knew I couldn’t let the manuscript go until I’d scrubbed out as much of the “victim” as possible. The reader is not interested in self-pity or in self-loathing, but instead in agency, and it was agency that I wanted to get to the heart of. As best I could. So, yes, it was definitely difficult to revisit the past—not just once or twice, but dozens of times, and each time with the intention of establishing my role in what went wrong among us. Some days I’d have to circle my computer for an hour or more, folding laundry, baking a loaf of banana bread, balancing my checkbook or whatever, all the while easing myself toward the keyboard. Sometimes I’d do the hokey thing of pretending I was putting on a big, thick cloak that made me impervious to the sorrow or pain of the past before I sat down to write. I never once thought that I should try to be brave or to write a brave book. I was just trying to be honest with myself. The fact that you call it brave is humbling and gratifying indeed.


KH: In the introduction to your memoir, you write, “I’d like to be one of those women who can confront the past’s reminders […] with nothing but compassion. But apparently, I’m not there yet. Something tangled and sore remains unsolved in me. After years of trying to decode and dissect our history, of picking over episodes with my daughter (a fight over a concert, a note found under one of their beds, the nights and nights and nights they didn’t come home), and crawling through the muck again to discover the origins and escalations of our troubles, I want to move on. I want to forgive—Amanda, Stephanie, myself, the times we lived in—so we can stop looking backward.” Memoir writing is so much about looking back and making sense of the lives we’ve lived and times we’ve lived through, and writing memoir—for me, anyway—affects my relationship with this past. I’m wondering if that was the case for you. How did writing this book affect (if it did) your relationship with this time in your life and your daughters’ lives? Did writing this story help you stop looking backward?

DG: I’ve come to believe that memoir is organized, as its name suggests, around memory—that is, not around events in the past, but instead how you remember events in the past. I guess more accurately: why you remember the event that way. When I gave up worrying so much about what we were all wearing, whether the scene happened on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, if it was rainy or clear, etc., and started pushing myself to understand why I clung to certain details in the memory and refused to acknowledge others—the version of the story I was overly-attached to, from which I derived my sense of identity for a long time—the writing became more rich, more evocative, more interesting (not only to me, but to others, I believe). I did develop a new relationship with the past because in order to write a book I had to tear down my own defenses about the past. In those years of trouble in my family, I’d become quite comfortable telling myself that my rebellious daughters were wrong and I was right. Only by giving up my posture as the “good” one could I move into the writing of the true story of this time. I produced hundreds of pages that did not make it into the book. I realize now that all of that scribbling led me to examine my self-delusion, my own tendency to cling to the story that protected and served me. As a writer, I needed to get to the story of a very complicated set of patterns that led to a family crisis. “We are in the presence of a mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows,” Vivian Gornick writes in The Situation and The Story. That was my aim: to puzzle my way out of my own shadows. Most times that didn’t feel at all nice, but instead as if my skin was being rubbed off an inch at a time. Though I didn’t begin the writing as a sort of therapy, of course it became cathartic. Once I could see myself as a player in our problems, and could admit to that agency, my daughters and I could also be more open, honest, loving in discussing this still painful time.


KH: I was struck by how careful you were in writing about the parts of your daughters’ lives that you didn’t witness. I think there could have been a lot of speculation about what they were or were not doing on the streets, but your respectfully don’t go there. Certainly there are passages in which you are worrying about their safety and wondering about where they are, etc., but for the most part, you have protected the privacy of Stephanie’s and Amanda’s relationship and their time on the streets, and I was really impressed by the way you were able to tell a full story without divulging this information.

With that said, writing about adult children can be tricky, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little about how you navigated this with her daughters. In the acknowledgments you write, “Not one word of this book would have been written if I hadn’t felt my daughters’ support behind me—behind this effort to get a complicated family story on paper.” How involved were your daughters in processing the content of this book? Did you get their feedback as you were writing or wait until you had finished a full draft? Or even later? Did they get veto power over the content of the book?

Have their feelings about the book changed since it was published?

DG: You’re so right that the single copy of the manuscript on my desk was a much different entity than the published book on a shelf in a library or bookstore. My relationship with the physical object changed hugely once it was published—the old cliché that I realized it was no longer mine alone, but now belonged to the world of readers—and I’m sure my daughters also struggled with the difference between the idea of the book and the reality of the book.

But back to your first point: In early drafts of the manuscript, I attempted to explain my daughters’ motives and actions. It was weak and uninspired writing, for sure, but I didn’t know how to make a book without filling readers in about what these primary characters, my girls, were up to. Then Amanda, Stephanie, and I did a segment for This American Life, produced by our dear friend Sandy Tolan. When the three of us sat down to listen to our voices on the radio parsing our own raw experience—oh what an hour that was!—the girls could not stop staring at each other. Absolute intensity between them. They were both very emotional, and for the first time I really got it: they have a story of their time on the streets that is not my story, that will never be my story, and that I really have no right to explore because it does not belong to me. I returned to my writing with a new goal, and that was to write only and exclusively my version of the story, and to leave their version alone. I had to divulge a little of what the girls were up to, where they were, but I was scrupulous (I hope) in not allowing myself conjecture as to their motives or emotions. If they want to write about that time, they can delineate what was going on in their own hearts and minds. My job, I felt, was to explore the angry, defensive, hurt, lost mother left behind and the ways in which I had to relearn the meaning of motherhood if I was going to have a lasting relationship with my daughters.

When I finally produced a manuscript worthy of a good agent—that is, honest enough, well written enough—and the fabulous Gail Hochman agreed to represent me, I realized I was on new ground. This book could become a reality now that an agent was going to present it to editors, and it was time to hash out that possibility with my children. I gave Amanda and Stephanie each a copy and I told them to be brutally honest with me about every word. If in the end they didn’t want me to publish the book, I wouldn’t (I certainly would have argued with them, though, I must admit). They both returned with many comments, some bitterly hard to take, but also with their mutual blessing to publish. Later, I gave the manuscript to the younger girls and we had a good talk about the contents and their mixed feelings about the story out in the public arena.

Looking back, that part was fairly easy.

What’s been hard is the publicity around the book, which the girls have considered exploitative at times, and which has caused anger/rifts between us (all healed now). They were incredibly good sports about the interviews and photos and all that, but they’re done participating, and I totally understand their need to be finished. Hardest of all for us—the truly nasty and consistently anonymous comments about our family life that have appeared on various websites, mostly by people who admit they haven’t read the book but still have a thing or two to say about what’s wrong with us. Perhaps I brought such ruthlessness on myself, but I’m terribly sorry my daughters have had to bear the brunt of public anger.


KH: I’m very interested in how authors turn short essays into memoirs, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little about the process of writing this book. I know you first wrote and published short essays that told parts of this larger story. How did you move into working on the memoir? I’d love it if you could describe the process of creating a continuous narrative from these separate pieces.

DG: When I was younger, I wanted to be a fiction writer and in fact spent most of my creative time hammering away on short stories. Then, when I was a graduate student at the University of Arizona (in journalism, not creative writing) I took several classes with Vivian Gornick, who opened this giant and magnificent door into the world of memoir. I really had no grasp of the genre back then, but after I read such books as Duke of Deception, Stop-Time, Fierce Attachments, My Father and Myself, Confessions of a Catholic Girlhood, My Mother’s House, etc., in her classes, I was certain I wanted to write personal narrative. I tried my hand at some short pieces about my childhood. But then my writing life (except for journalism, which is how I made my living) came to a grinding halt after my divorce, and into the trouble with the girls. It was only after Amanda and Stephanie were back and fairly settled that I tentatively wrote a brief piece about looking for Stephanie in San Francisco. The essay was published in Creative Nonfiction and was a notable essay that year in Best American Essays and (prematurely) got me a bit of agent attention. Around the same time, I published a piece on Salon (The Mothers Who Think column, which I sorely miss), and another in Fourth Genre. Once I had four, five, six twenty-page brief memoir pieces I thought it would be oh-so easy to line them up into a book. I had no idea what I was in for. The arc of a three-thousand-word nonfiction story is quite different that the larger, sustained arc one must discover for a book. I tried for several years and failed quite miserably in my efforts. At that point, I knew I needed help. So I returned to school. I enrolled in the low-residency program at Bennington College and within weeks was on the right track. I worked with absolutely amazing teachers: Phillip Lopate, Sven Birkerts, Bob Shacochis, and by the time I finished the program, I had a book. An honest to goodness book that made sense, had a solid structure, and held together in way that pleased me. It was an expensive decision, Bennington, but I’m convinced I wouldn’t have understood how to go from essay to book-length without that training.


KH: I was also struck by how circular the narrative felt at points. There are places where you are in a scene, then back up and explain how you got there, then you’re back in the scene, and then forward in time. My thought as I was reading was that this heightens the disorientation and the just-getting-by feeling that you seemed to be feeling at the time. I’d love if you could talk a little about the construction of the book, and whether this was a conscious choice or if it’s just how the narrative emerged in the writing process.

DG: I’m delighted by this question, actually, because the narrative was even more circular when I turned it into my brilliant editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Deanne Urmy. She and I talked a whole lot about structure and chronology—what would engage a reader and what would cause a reader to simply give up. While writing the book, I relished the idea of suspending time. For me, the layering of events, no matter the month or year those events took place, helped establish the patterns that eventually led to our troubles. Sven Birkerts writes about this kind of structuring in his marvelous book Art of Time in Memoir, and cautions (wisely I think) against the tendency to get episodic, this happened, and then this happened, and then this. . .

I was much more interested in delving into symbols, metaphors and lyricism, than adhering to chronology, and I tended to pick up on a detail—putting the tent up in our living room, or standing in the rain in the downtown square confronting my daughters, or eating at a Chinese food restaurant with Amanda—and let my writerly mind make intuitive connections with other times, other episodes. So it was a swirl—the disorientation of that period in my family life, as you say, but also the recognition of the nature of your heart and mind when you’re trying to sort out your life, or a significant portion of your life. All kinds of information and memories, and from many different times, pour in as you strive to understand how you got to this point, to this place. At least that’s how the process worked for me, and I wanted the writing to express that somehow. Deanne Urmy wisely convinced me to make the narrative more straightforward, less discombobulated, and I soon agreed that was the way to go. Still, the narrative isn’t linear, and I hope I was able to express the encounters with time, images, and emotions as I began to reconcile the past with the present.


KH: A number of readers of this blog are mother writers working on memoirs and novels. Time and again we hear that the mother memoir market is “cashed out,” that these types of books “don’t sell.” This is clearly not the case, and I’d love if you could talk a little about your journey from manuscript to book. What roadblocks did you encounter along the way?

DG: I’ve asked my agent several times (now that I’m working on a new project, and of course caught up in the anxiety of getting this one eventually published, having heard many times that it’s actually harder to publish a second book than a first) about what’s selling and what’s not, and she wisely tells me, “There’s always a market for a really good book.” Which is her way of saying: go write a really good book. I hope I can do that.


Backing up three years or so: It was not one bit easy to sell Live Through This. I’d convinced myself it would be. I’d send Gail my manuscript and within days, hours even, she’d have an offer. But the manuscript was rejected by quite a few editors and a good number of publishing houses, and I grew despondent as the no thank yous kept piling up. But then I’d force myself back into the writing, trying to make passages stronger (editors consistently complained that the narrator wasn’t “likeable,” a confounding dilemma, since that narrator was a persona made from me) and the stakes clearer. Months passed, and I was wondering if a huge rewrite was in order, and then—rather quickly and delightfully—Deanne Urmy accepted the book. I often wish I could go back to the moment when Gail called with the news. The relief, the joy, the sense of accomplishment. I’ll never forget it. Equally as gratifying and thrilling was the moment I learned the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (I replay that one a whole lot, too, when I am discouraged about the writing life).

At one point along the way in trying to sell the book, someone called it a “momoir,” which bugged the hell out of me. I’m left to sort out my strong reaction to that silly quip. Live Through This is, in my way of thinking, a book about motherhood. About my illusions of motherhood as a young woman, and the critical need to smash those illusions so I could learn to know my children as real, vibrant, capable people. But I don’t want that effort to be belittled by calling it a “momoir.” Once the book was published, I noticed the bias against “mother” narratives: they can’t be all that serious as literary ventures, they can’t hold up against the new, edgy nonfiction out there. On the contrary, I say. It seems to me that we need, more than ever, to hear from mothers who are willing to dig in to both the utter joys and the frighteningly dark side of parenting, who aren’t afraid to express fears, doubts, guilt about raising children in an extraordinarily difficult time. It would be a tragedy for a woman to stop writing because she believes there’s no market for books about mothering and motherhood—because a well-written book is going to say something profound about the human condition, and we need to hear the voices of women who can express the plight we’re all in as humans.


KH: What kinds of reactions have you received from readers?

DG: I’ve received hundreds of emails from parents—and I’m deeply grateful for each one—who’ve gone through some kind of similar difficulty with teens. Some write about teenagers who are surly and hard to deal with but are still at home; some have written me about daughters who’ve been gone for decades without a word. Heartbreaking for sure. It’s nearly impossible to talk publicly about your children who’ve run away from home, because the automatic assumption for most people is that you’re an abusive parent. I’m pleased that some parents who are suffering through this nightmarish experience have read my book and feel like they can reach out to me.

I’ve also heard from parents of young children, who’ve been hugely supportive of the story; from young people who were once out on the street and perhaps now have more compassion for the parents they left behind; from lawmakers, police, agencies who say they’re glad to know more about one mother’s point of view in all of this. Very gratifying.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve also been lambasted by some readers (and some nonreaders). I find it curious that the angriest notes come from people who admit they haven’t read the book but are angered by it anyway. Some who have read the book are infuriated by its contents and by my actions. I’m astonished at the fury this memoir has stirred up. One woman sought me out at the NBCC ceremony to tell me that the book “disgusted” her. She chewed me out about what a bad mother I am right there in the beautiful New York City literary venue—what a shocker. But such reactions come with the territory. The negative responses upset me, of course, but then I try to remember that I wanted to write a book that pushed as hard as it could against the truth, against honesty and my own terribly difficult struggle to know myself better as a woman and a mother. Of course plopping such personal and raw material out there for all to see is going to offend some readers.

***
Thanks so much for your time, Debra! I do have to chime in here at the end and say how much I also hate the term “momoir,” which I’ve blogged about here at Mother Words. I’m also discouraged that readers (and nonreaders!) would judge a mother who has bravely written about the most difficult time in her life. I am grateful to Debra for having written such a well-crafted and honest memoir. Go buy this book, people.

plot, narrative urgency, and children's lit

The other day Stella went to the library with my mom and she came home with The Boxcar Children. When she pulled it out of the library bag, I started to squeal, “Oh that was one of my favorite books growing up. I can’t wait to read it to you!”

I could tell she was pleased by my excitement, and I was excited to read the book with her, but I was secretly nervous that I wouldn’t like it as much as I had as a child. It was the first book that grabbed hold of my imagination. I remember spending hours and hours sitting in the pink beanbag in my room with it propped in my lap, thinking about where my sisters and I would hide if we became orphans and had to take to the woods to flee an unloving relative.

D and I alternate putting the girls to bed. (If I read to Zoë one night, the next night I’ll read to Stella.) So I made Stella promise that The Boxcar Children would by my book and that she would read a different book with D. (I hate it when I’ve read the first three chapters of a book to her and then I two nights later I have to pick up at the 7th or 8th chapter. I feel completely lost.)

She promised, and as we cuddled into bed with the book the other night, we were both giddy. As I began to read—“One warm night four children stood in front of a bakery. No one knew them. No one knew where they had come from.”—I was immediately swept back in time, to the excitement I felt the first time my mom read me this story.

And the book moves! Talk about narrative urgency, from that first sentence. I didn’t want to put it down, but I could tell Stella was exhausted, so I stopped after four chapters.

I remember that Julie Schumacher, a wonderful fiction writer who has been primarily writing young adult novels in recent years, said that she turned to YA fiction because she felt she needed to work on plot and structure, and that because YA novels are very plot-driven, she thought she’d try it out. You can read an interview with Julie here.

The Boxcar Children is all plot. (I remember certain plot details from when I read it, almost 30 years ago, which is extraordinary.) But as we made our way through the first chapters, I kept getting the siblings confused. I know I’ll be able to differentiate them as the book goes on, but I was surprised that we weren't given a few more character details in those first chapters. But then maybe I spend too much time thinking about character development. (I’ll admit that I’m a little obsessed lately.)

Do any of you out there write for children or young adults? I’d love it if you’d weigh in on plot and character (or really anything else that you’d like to share about writing for young people.)

In the meantime, I’m going to try to sneak away with Stella to read the next chapter of The Boxcar Children.

working, living, and a note about structuring chapters

I thought I should check in about how my writing is going since the serious truncation of my work time.

It’s, um, not going.

I was on page 156 two weeks ago and I’m still on page 156. It’s clear I’m not going to make my December 31st deadline. I go to the coffee shop on the weekends now, and that’s something, but it is much more difficult to get into the rhythm of the narrative with only two days of writing a week.

The flip side—the bright side—is that my mornings are less hectic. I have more time with the girls, and we can run errands and vacuum and play. (More playing and a cleaner house are good things, no?) On the mornings Zoë is in school, Stella and I sometimes go to the coffee shop together. She eats a doughnut and draws pictures with stories, and I can get a little work done. But not memoir work. I cannot immerse myself in a chapter when my dear girl needs me to help spell the words that make up her narrative. So I check e-mail and do class prep and update my website—all things that need to be done—and help my budding writer create fiction. It would be difficult to complain about that.

But I am anxious to get back to the memoir. I met with my writing group—my wonderful, smart writing group—last night and they got me thinking about the structure of my chapters. There is a lot of narrative urgency in my book—it’s inherent in the subject—but I’m at a point where I need to think more closely about the shape of my chapters. The book is chronological, very chronological, and I realize that this could become tiresome, plodding, in the middle of the book. (Which would, in fact, reflect the nature of having your baby in the NICU.) But still, I don’t want the reading to be so plodding that it becomes boring. God, no.

One of my lovely writing group members suggested a more thematic approach, that each chapter in the middle of the book tackle a theme. I was actually moving in that direction in later chapters, but oh, the thought of going back to these “finished” chapters and rearranging—again—and rewriting—more—makes me very tired. I’m getting so very sick of this book.

But I do love to think about structure. It is, perhaps, my favorite craft issue. What structure will best serve the subject, the story? How can structure change the way people absorb the narrative? These questions, and the care with which most nonfiction writers take as they work on the structure of their writing, make it clear—yet again—that memoir is not mere transcription. It is, like fiction, like poetry, crafted.

I can’t do anything about the structure of my chapters today, of course, or even tomorrow. But I’ll think about it—“noodle on it” as one of my wonderful students says. I’ll noodle on it as I cut out Curious George paper dolls with Stella, as I run to Target and the grocery store, as I put Zoë’s clothes back on her for the ninth time (I swear that child wants to run free), as I sauté vegetables, as I cuddle in with D to watch Mad Men (our latest series addiction). And in a few days or even a few weeks, I’ll find the time to make the changes. I will, right?

change of scene

I spent the weekend at my mom’s cabin up north (which is what we natives say when we’re talking about Northern Minnesota.) The weather was perfect: sunny and warm during the day, cool in the evening. Stella played and argued and played with her cousin, and Zoë played in the sand and ate the moldy bread intended for the sunfish. It wasn’t relaxing in the way that, pre-children, I would lie on the dock and read all afternoon, but still, there were moments of relaxation, and more than anything, it was a needed change of scene.

I didn’t check e-mail or my cell-phone for messages even once. And I was able to read most of a novel--a non-motherhood, non-reviewing novel. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and I couldn’t have picked a better book: Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, the third novel in her Regeneration trilogy. These novels are based on the real-life experiences of British army officers who were treated for shell shock during World War I at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. I’m reading the book for my book club, otherwise I probably would have begun with the first in the trilogy, and indeed, I find myself floundering a little in spots, knowing I’m not getting the full story on the characters. But still, the book stands on its own, and indeed, it won the Booker Prize in 1995.

Sometimes I become so consumed by my daily life and the juggling act of work and family (and weaning) that I lose sight of my place in history. I lose sight of the expanse of human experience. Pat Barker is an expert in capturing the complexity of human experience. Her characters in this trilogy are based on real people, true, but she brings them to life for us. The pause, the uncertainty, the lust and love, shame and confusion—it’s all there, and it’s there in the smallest gestures, in word choice, in the way a gaze lingers too long.

This book (though it is a novel) reminds me of why memoir and strong characters must go hand in hand. I’ve had more than one person ask me why I was teaching character development in a memoir class. (I’m serious.) There is an assumption that because the people in a work of creative nonfiction really exist, there is no need to be concerned about character development. But nonfiction writers need to write believable and three-dimensional characters precisely BECAUSE these characters are real people. It’s a way of honoring them. And this is exactly what Barker does: she honors these men by making them real for us on the page.

Go get this book. Hell, get the whole trilogy. She’s that good.

two masters

Just in case you’ve been worrying about my cough, wondering if I made it through Bernard Cooper’s reading on Friday night without hacking up a lung, I’ll tell you right away that I did. I *did not* begin to cough so hard and relentlessly that I threw up, as I did, say, earlier on Friday, when I cashed in on the precious pedicure portion of my Mother’s Day gift certificate, and, halfway through the foot soak and leg massage, felt that dry tickle in my throat. My water bottle was in my purse on the floor, and sadly, by the time I reached it, it was too late; the coughing had begun. The very kind pedicurist handed me some tissues, into which I promptly vomited. With dread, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to stop coughing—and if I couldn’t stop coughing, I wouldn’t stop barfing—so I jumped out of the chair, wet feet and legs dripping all over the floor, and ran to the sink along the wall, where luckily there was also a trash can. I slurped water and tried to catch my breath, but couldn’t quell the hacking. I vomited—over and over—into the trash can. Oh please let them not realize I’m throwing up, I thought desperately. (I was clearly experiencing some kind of oxygen-deprived delusion, because of course they realized I was barfing. How could they not?)

When the coughing finally subsided enough for me to stop throwing up, my face was red, my eyes bloodshot, and tears were running down my face. I returned to my chair, apologizing profusely to everyone. (I’m sure I ruined the relaxation of the poor woman next to me, but kindly she didn’t let on.) I coughed my way through the rest of the pedicure (sans vomit), and then stopped on my way home for several bags of Ricola. These things saved me this weekend, and though I’m certain I ingested more than is recommended, I don’t care. I didn’t vomit at the Memoir Festival.

I realize this may be TMI for some of you, so I’ll move on to the real subject of this post: how much Bernard Cooper and Patricia Hampl rock. Really, if you ever have the opportunity to see either of them read or talk about writing, go. They not only know their sh*t, but they are both so engaging that it is a wonderful treat to sit back and listen to them talk about memoir.

Cooper read from The Bill From My Father and from a chapter of a work in progress, which was recently published as “The Constant Gardener,” an amazing essay included in Best American Essays 2008. I’ve probably read this piece twelve times, so it was interesting to hear an un-cut version of it. I’m very interested in what comes first—an essay or a book—and how a writer is able to condense part of longer work into a manageable essay or expand an essay into a much longer work. This is very challenging for me, so I’m always in awe of someone who seems to do it effortlessly.

But though Bernard Cooper’s writing seems effortless, Cooper is very forthcoming about how challenging writing is and how sometimes even a simple sentence can take an incredible amount of energy. On Saturday morning during his keynote speech he described how, while he was working on The Bill from My Father, he sat in front of his computer for hours one day, trying to write a scene in which he was in a laundromat and saw an article in the paper about his father’s divorce. He described the clothes spinning in the drier, tried to recreate the feel of being in the laundromat, but he couldn’t find the sentence he needed to get the paper into his hands. After hours, he finally wrote: “I noticed a copy of the Herald Examiner lying on the empty chair beside me.”

Cooper is charming and funny and down-to-earth. What more could I want in one of my literary heroes?

Patricia Hampl is no less charming. On Saturday afternoon, the wonderful Brian Malloy (whose latest young adult novel, Twelve Long Months, just won the Minnesota Book Award!) interviewed Hampl, the mother of modern memoir. (I’m not sure if I’ve stolen that descriptor or not. Regardless, it’s true.) Hampl described how, when A Romantic Education was published in 1981, there wasn’t even a category for “memoir.” Can you imagine?

There are two things I want to highlight from Hampl’s conversation. The first is about form. Hampl said, “Memoir has as much to do with reticence as revelation. The one who spills the most beans does not get the prize. Form is about what you leave out.” I think this is so important for memoirists, especially beginning memoirists, to remember. You can never—and should never—try to “tell it all.” Choose the information that is important to the story you’re telling, and let the other details fall to the side.

The other thing she said that I love is this: “’Me’ is not the subject in memoir. ‘Me’ is simply an instrument. But in describing the world, you also render yourself.”

I will keep you posted about the next memoir festival. It might be worth a trip to the Twin Cities! And if you live here, you’ll have no excuse!

on narrative urgency and single parenting

I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative urgency the last couple of weeks because I recently went to see Charles Baxter talk about and read from his new novel, The Soul Thief. (I dragged both Stella and Zoe out in the cold so I could get my literary fix.) He used the term narrative urgency, which makes sense because The Soul Thief is thick with it. I didn’t want to put the book down. He, quite simply, rocks.

Then I was reading Beth Kephart’s blog, and she posted about a similar thing: the use of present tense and the need for forward movement. Or rather, how you must be sure that you continue the forward momentum of your book or your writing will become precious. (She quoted McEwan.)

It makes me want to dive back into my memoir and make sure I maintain the sense of narrative urgency until the end of the book. I think I do, but I guess I’ll have to see. And if it lags in the middle, what does one do about it?

Am I obsessing about narrative urgency in my book because my life currently seems to lack narrative urgency? Because I am definitely challenged in that department.

I know what you’re thinking: Kate, be in the moment. Enjoy these precious times. (How many people have said that to me in the last week?)

I am enjoying many moments, every day. It seems I could stare at Zoe’s sleeping face for hours, counting her expressions, each of which she inhabits for mere seconds. I can’t get enough of her chubby face when it breaks into a smile. Seriously adorable. And I love to listen to Stella singing along to her princess movies when she doesn’t think I can hear her or when she tells me stories about how the Huns are coming and she has to protect her babies. (This is after she has carried all her stuffed animals and baby dolls downstairs and lined them up on the couch under blankets.) Zoe and I, sitting in the nursing chair will, sadly, always be killed by the Huns.

What I’m not enjoying is how tired I am. Or the way Zoe screams—she’s inconsolable sometimes—even when I’ve bounced her and turned on the water in the kitchen and nothing works and my knees ache and my quads are sore from all that bouncing and carrying on. I’m exhausted. It doesn’t help that D was gone again for 5 days. Single parenthood, frankly, sucks.

I was talking to a friend on the phone the other day as I walked Zoe around the neighborhood in an effort to get her to fall asleep. (It wasn’t working.) Zoe was screaming and I started to laugh. My friend said, “Oh good. You sound relaxed.”

I don’t know if “relaxed” is the word I’d choose. Unless relaxed is a state of mind one inhabits somewhere on the path from exhausted and comatose. No, it’s not relaxed. That’s not right. It’s more like just putting your head down and doing what you have do—picking up the Barbies and stuffed animals and trying not to snap at the sassy four-year-old you love as you coo and bounce the fussy baby you love. And then, as you’re doing what you have to do, the only thing left to do is to laugh because otherwise you feel crazy.

who rocks the dialogue?

This week, one of my students wanted to talk more about dialogue because she was having trouble writing realistic, moving dialogue in her nonfiction. It's a common problem, I think, for beginning writers because their instinct is to write dialogue in a vacuum: he said, she said, he said, etc. I want my students to notice everything else that is a part of dialogue and a part of building realistic characters: gestures, thoughts, description, our presence in space and time.

I think the best way to learn how to write effective dialogue is to look at writers who do it well, so I chose the first page of a couple of essays from the Best American Essay series and handed them out to my class.

From Yusef Komunyakaa's "Blue Machinery of Summer":

"I feel like I'm part of this damn thing," Frank said. He carried himself like a large man even though he was short. A dead cigarette dangled from his half-grin. "I've worked on this machine for twenty-odd year, and now it's almost me."

Even in that first, short paragraph, we know how Frank talks and we know a little about who is--the kind of man who lets a dead cigarette dangle from his lips.


From Cheryl Strayed's "The Love of My Life":

The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week. I was in a cafe in Minneapolis watching a man. He watched me back. He was slightly pudgy, with jet black hair and skin so white it looked as if he'd powdered it. He stood and walked to my table and sat down without asking. He wanted to know if I had a cat. I folded my hands on the table, steadying myself; I was shaking, nervous at what I would do. I was raw, fragile, vicious with grief. I would do anything.

"Yes," I said.

"I thought so," he said slowly. He didn't take his eyes off me. I rolled the rings around my fingers. I was wearing two wedding bands, my own and my mother's. I'd taken hers off her hand after she died. It was nothing fancy: sterling silver, thick and braided.

"You look like the kind of girl who has a cat."

"How's that?" I asked.

He didn't answer. He just kept looking at me steadily, as if he knew everything about me, as if he owned me. I felt distinctly that he might be a murderer.


Well, as unlikable a narrator as Strayed can be, she's a talented writer, and she knows how to create real, raw dialogue and believable characters.

One thing I suggested to my students was this: think of a conversation that they’ve wanted to write. Where would this conversation take place? With whom?


Before writing any of the dialogue, describe the room: the light, the furniture, the place—what was the look, the feel? Was it hot in there? Etc.

Next, describe the person. What are his/her mannerisms? Does he run his hands through his hair? Does she twist hers in a knot or fiddle with it? Does he scratch at his eye, pick at eyelashes? One thing that would be helpful is to go home and really look at the people you live with—we don’t remember these things about people close to us because we’re so used to them that we don’t notice them anymore.

After they have the place and person details down on paper, they should write the conversation, including everything around the conversation—the physical space, their thoughts, body language, etc.

So, a question for all of you: who do you think does dialogue really, really well? (These can be fiction writers, too, but it would be great to have some first-person narrators.)


On a blog maintenance note: I'm sorry people are having to log in with a google-blogger account to leave a comment. I haven't changed my settings, and I'm not sure why this is happening. I'll try to get to the bottom of it.

On a sickness note: still sick. It feels as if I actually might be sick for the REST OF MY LIFE.

struggling with structure

No luck on Thanksgiving not gorging myself. In fact, I ate excessively all weekend. And now I have a horrible cold. (Not that these two things are related. I only wanted to point out that I’ve been uncomfortable—in slightly different ways—for many days now. With Sudafed off limits I’d actually go so far to say I’m now miserable.)

But enough complaining. On to more important things:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how successful essays are structured. I’d like to cull a couple of essays from my manuscript, but it’s such a daunting task—cutting and rearranging in an attempt to boil down 300 pages into manageable essays. I know writers who do this regularly, but it seems to be a skill I lack. How does one do it? If I had begun with essays and turned them into a book would it be easier? Or would it simply be a different struggle?

Yesterday in class we talked about structure, and I had my students read two essays: “Moonrise” by Penny Wolfson, about which I’ve already posted, and “The Sound and the Worry” by Suzanne Kamata. One of the reasons I chose these two essays was because both have taken large events that covered years and condensed them into manageable essays. “The Sound and the Worry,” published in the Summer 2004 issue of Brain, Child, is about Kamata’s daughter’s deafness (due to being born 14 weeks premature) and Kamata’s desire for her to have sound and, ultimately, find happiness. Now I know some of Kamata’s story and have referenced other essays and stories she’s written about her twins’ birth at 26 weeks. I know it’s a huge story, so what impresses me so much about “The Sound and the Worry” is Kamata’s ability to focus in on one strand of the story—her daughter Lilia’s deafness—and follow that through without getting distracted by everything else that I know was going on at that time. So impressive.

Wolfson does a similar thing in “Moonrise,” an essay about trying to come to terms with the inevitable end of her son’s life due to Duchene, a form of muscular dystrophy. It’s an essay about her son growing up and deteriorating all at once, about the fragility of life and at the same time about finding the beauty in life, even when it is fragile and finite. She is able to contain sixteen years of her son’s life in mere pages, and it blows me away every time I read it. Wolfson also has a memoir by the same name, which of course I need (and want) to read. Maybe it would help me see how one pulls an essay from a book. (Of course I don’t know if she wrote the book first and then the essay or vice versa. Maybe it doesn’t matter.)

You can’t access either of these essays online, but if you go to Brain, Child’s archives, you can order the Summer 2004 issue for “The Sound and the Worry.” You can find “Moonrise” in Best American Essays of 2002. (I guess you can access "Moonrise" online here if you are an Atlantic Monthly subscriber.) I’m also going to order Wolfson’s memoir, because I obviously need some help.

Also know that Suzanne Kamata’s first novel, Losing Kei is forthcoming in January. I’ll post about it then.

where voice resides: the allergy diaries

There are a few essays so well-written that I could use them to teach each element of craft. Jill Christman’s “The Allergy Diaries” is one of these essays.

“The Allergy Diaries” describes Christman’s infant daughter’s anaphylactic reaction to cow's milk and the aftermath of this discovery. That is the situation in the essay. The real story is much bigger, of course. It’s about worry and vigilance and chronic fear. It’s about the ways in which we justify our worrying. (Those of you who know me know I’m a first-class worrier, so of course, I can relate.)

The essay has everything: drama, foreshadowing, humor. It’s no wonder that it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

In my class (because I’m generally a more effective teacher when I stay focused), I used the essay to talk about voice. Ah, elusive voice.

I used to obsess about voice. What is it? When am I going to find mine? I imagined, and hoped, that I would be sitting at my computer one day, muddling through some essay when the voice fairy would fly in, wave her glittering magic wand at me, and voilà, I would have my writer’s voice. Alas, this never happened. And of course I realized that I actually had to write my way into my voice. You do not find your voice and then write.

I love what the wonderful writer and teacher Charles Baxter says about voice: “Voice is the way our entire being, not just the self, formulates its thoughts and feelings through syntax, word choice, and stance. Voice, like music, has both tones and overtones…” Baxter says that voice exists at the level of the sentence.

It resides in syntax and sentence structure.

I like to think about voice in two ways: there is the writer’s voice, the thing that makes you open a piece of writing and know who wrote it without looking. In Christman’s writing, her voice resides in her dry humor (which she maintains always, even in the face of disaster). It resides in her off-hand comments—“Go ahead and chuckle.”—and in her honesty.

But voice is also situation specific. Our voices change to reflect the emotional context of a scene. And for me, this is where the real crafting of voice occurs. It exists at the level of the sentence.

In the essay, after Christman and her husband, Mark, attempt to feed their daughter, Ella, a bottle of formula, and she begins to have an anaphylactic reaction, Christman (the writer) does two things: she shifts into the present tense, and her sentences alternate between very short, repetitive ones and long, run-on ones. The present tense heightens the immediacy of a scene, of course. I wrote about this in relation to Penny Wolfson’s “Moonrise.”

The repetition and long, run-on sentences increase speed and re-create panic:

“The next minutes are a blur. Mark picks her up and runs, I turn circles around the house for seconds that seem like hours—time is all fucked up when your baby is gurgling. I scream that we need to call someone. We need to call the doctor. We need someone to tell use what to do. But Mark has Ella in her car seat and somehow the dogs are locked safely in the house and I am beside Ella in the backseat, leaning over her, listening to the gurgle, watching her face, come on baby come on baby come on baby, and Mark is backing up fast.”

The whole hospital scene, until Ella gets a shot of Benadryl, is in the present and then it shifts back to the past tense. So perfect, so crafted.

So, if you are struggling with voice, or are simply interested in a great essay, please check out “The Allergy Diaries.” You will find the same skill in Christman’s memoir, Darkroom: A Family Exposure, which won the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction in 2002. In this book, Christman explores the intersection of image and memory and, with brutal honesty and humor, navigates tragedy and emerges as a true survivor. The opening chapter of this book has replayed in my mind so many times (a huge compliment), and is—honestly—the reason that our water heater is set low enough for my showers to occasionally turn tepid. Read this book.

And thanks, Jill, for an essay that makes teaching writing easy.