Gender: Profound and Mundane

Excerpt from Tomboy by Liz Prince

What I most often encourage students to write about, especially when it comes to memoir, is what is most mundane to them: daily details, describing how we even brush our teeth or wash our hair. Why? Because even if we don't wind up including that in a final memoir, the process of exploring - with curiosity - how we actually do daily mundane things can reveal more about ourselves than re-telling the most profound-seeming powerful bang-em-out dramatic trauma stories.

Small Messages and Details

Memoirists often struggle with figuring out what to include. A memoir, by definition, is not a story of your entire life. It is writing on a particular strand of your life - a recurrent theme or issue or approach - or focusing on one particular era. If you are including everything that is happening, it will not work.

However, you also need more than just the key stories. What might otherwise seem like mundane details - how you make your coffee, or did during that era, or how it has changed over time - could lend a lot of real human feeling and connection to the reader. And everything depicted in the memoir can carry the feeling of communication, the sense it was all included for a reason, even if - especially if - that reason is not explicit or overt.

How do we choose?

Entering

Entering, LA, January 2013

Sometimes, we run into what Lynda Barry calls "an image" - a deeply set, just-waiting-to-emerge story that really needs to be told. In the last of my seven week classes a few weeks ago, this popped out of my student, Nick Wiesmueller. He said that this memory has always stuck with him.

This piece so well depicts what it can be like to go back and approach these intense images in writing. What it is, what it means, what it feels like to write memoir, or, even more so, for your memoir to write itself. Overpowering, sometimes overwhelming, incredibly enriching.
 

Endings

There was a time on the bus

from camp

A time which lasted forever,

I held my heart close

lead in my feet, hands,

I felt some deep loss

of people

of place

of belonging

of community

of my first girlfriend

and more than acceptance

and love, boy it sure felt

that way

The movement away

left syrupy remains in my body

as if wind pulling at part of

myself gently giving way

piece by piece

held firmly

heavy feet

heavy heart

heavy heart

lead on bus seat

weight,

frigid emotional air as I tried not to cry.

Why, I would always wonder does this tear so deep

Why must I feel so much

I can feel like it

like here

now.

I would hold tightly to vestigials, try to tie loosely

together, contact with

people,

one,

by,

one,

with phone calls, letters

until those connections, spider thin

were taken by distance time.

Yet always my heart belonged there,

and that’s why I chose

my one experiment in the woods

for college.

I haven’t even let myself

believe in that sort of fulfillment

I had there for years.

The fire, when burning just hurt too much.

So deep down it went.

There’s so much I’ve given up and sacrificed just to stay in the groove.

Deep in the groove,

Rutted, drive over and over until every bump, pot hole

is known.

it’s notched  deep, it’s hard to know what it means to leave it,

only that it’s somewhat terrifying

letting this in is deeply unnotched.

But it’s the demon that swims circles through my brain,

as insomnia time ticks the hours the by

It’s also love, tenderness.

That which deny is goodness, turned destruction,

energy bereft of acceptance takes on many unnatural forms,

comes out strange.

So the idea is whole acceptance of past selves,

past need fulfilled.

Not desires, needs pummeled into some outlet,

which though surface beneficial like biking 25 miles at lunch,

often is violence.

A violation of myself.

I have PTSD, diagnosed by a few.

And the amalgamation of emtions,

the incongruent attribution,

the self penalization by trenchant punch of emotion

into something it’s not.

Because there is just so much energy.

All typical.

Details/Me-tails

Detail

1: extended treatment of or attention to particular items

2: a part of a whole: as

a : a small and subordinate part : particular; also : a reproduction of such a part of a work of art

b : a part considered or requiring to be considered separately from the whole 

My students are attentive to detail in their writing. As anyone who has taken writing classes has heard again and again, in so many writing euphemisms: The Devil is in the details,  Show Don't Tell, etc. While detail plays a very significant role in writing, especially in expressing versus simply revealing, too many details can bog down writing. And details in writing are not always the same thing - not just the situation, the senses, but also what Tibetan Buddhists call our sixth sense: the mind, which detects our thoughts.

I often encourage my students to be mindful of the details of their thoughts, of their minds. After all, at least in Contemplative Writing, what we are actually practicing is a more intimate and unbiased relationship with our minds. As I cover with my students: this isn't a writing class, it's a class on compassion that uses writing as a way to practice it - towards ourselves and others.

But the fact is, we are writing.

It's not that I am teaching anti-writing, anti-aesthetic. 

And, increasingly, my students are needing detailed feedback, seeking critique groups, working towards editing and finishing and possibly publishing, which takes us out of process and into the realm of critical understanding of product.

Mental detail and clarity is a significant portion of any critical writing. Lyrical writing (poetic, sensory-oriented writing) is emotionally expressive. It uses sensory details and direct experience in order to express an experience.

To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Lyrical writing is used usually to express emotional content. However, it can be fitted into cerebral content, as is often the case with lyric essays.

How to Meditate, from Seasons of the Body by Brenda Miller
Day 1
On arrival, huddle in the Volkswagen with your friends and eat all the chocolate in the car. Chocolate chips, old Kit-Kats, the tag-end of a Hershey bar--do no discriminate. Feel deprived, then light up your last Sherman, pass it around. Watch your fellow retreatants flow into the meditation hall. Note how elegant they look, even in sweatpants and black Wellingtons. You'll wonder where they got such nice sweatpants. You'll look down at your baggy jeans, your dim T-shirt and say, I'm not dressed for this, let's go home. Look beyond the meditation hall to the Navarro River, the cattails, the red-winged blackbirds. It will be raining, just a little.

In fact, Miller, who is a big part of the Lyric Essay and Creative Non-Fiction movements, says the following: "The body knows a language the mind never wholly masters." She is an advocate of working with what are purportedly facts and using experience to express them. Especially, as one can tell from the title of this essay collection, she leans into the body to let direct experience show us (that writing class word) what the mind would prefer to tell.

Sense perceptions are, in fact, a part of our mind. But we also have thoughts that blurt out, splurt out all over our writing, especially when something remains relatively less processed. Though this kind of detail can seem quite telling, it in fact details quite a bit by showing us how the mind operates. While it may not make for the kind of writing one would find eventually published in a magazine or memoir, this kind of detail - mental landscape or texture - is very significant to me as a teacher. Maybe it isn't beautiful - often it isn't. Often it's the kind of stuff we are sick of hearing, or think we are sick of hearing, or wish we didn't think. 

However, we can use poetic writing to evade these thoughts, as well, which is when writing becomes neurotic - an escape rather than real contact. A student last week wrote in one of my classes that she "wanted to write a fantastical fiction story," "didn't want to write about my family, again," and yet, she couldn't help but go back and depict her brother, father, mother - talk about some of the same stories that have been told again and again. She didn't go into any kind of traditional detail in regards to her story, but she covered a sense of the space of her ongoing stories. Without that kind of knowledge, we don't know what we are "up against" and we don't have an awareness of what is already established. She didn't understand why she was writing about it, insisted that it's not something that bugs her that much anymore. And yet, there it was. Clear as day.

In Miller's essay above, she uses her neurotic mind to humorous effect. Instead of actually telling us how to meditate, she tells her own narrative about what she experienced heading into a ten-day Vipassana retreat. She vascillates between setting the scene ("It will be raining, just a little."), revealing her naked mind ("You'll wonder where they got such nice sweatpants.") and confessing ("On arrival, huddle in the Volkswagen with your friends and eat all the chocolate in the car. Chocolate chips, old Kit-Kats, the tag-end of a Hershey bar--do no discriminate.") - all in the name of "instruction." In other words, Miller uses her mind - the mind she has, she had on that retreat, all the lurid and un-pretty details. She does not lyricize the details themselves - there's very little wordplay in the paragraph above, very few "poetic" comparisons, metaphors or the like. The lyricism comes in her structure - where she twists her "ordinary" mind and presents it as an instruction manual.

In Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, we are taught to not reject anything. All thoughts are simply that - thoughts - in fact, they are more than that. They are energy. Locked up in those thoughts are very useable (workable, in Chogyam Trungpa's language) energies. Rather than trying to replace details that reveal uncomfortable modes of thought, personal confessions or "boring" "ordinary" issues (me-tails, I call them), we can re-structure them, work with them like any other energetic experience. Turn them into poetry, humor, essay or fiction. Explore them.

As Thich Nhat Hahn says, "No mud, no lotus."