Stories We Aren't Sure We Should Share

I am running a contemplative writing retreat right now on Washington Island in Door County Wisconsin. I run this annual retreat in an old house with a football-sized field looking out over Detroit Harbor. We usually have around a dozen students for a weekend, then the group shrinks down to eight or so as we sink in to an entire week together with the wind, water, our minds, and each other.

Most of my students write memoir, or at least personal stories. Perhaps because this is my main writing form, and I attract them. Or perhaps because deep underneath, so many of us have felt our stories are not welcome in the past, not something others want to hear, are open to receiving. The act of writing our stories - for our own sake, for an immediate audience, or for publication, can be not only therapeutic but also sincerely and deeply resolve a deep rejection we received from others at the times of trauma or difficulty.

Our Varying Internal Voices

More - Austin Texas, 2012

One of the reasons why I think that approaching memoir mind-first works so well is that by becoming curious about how our mind works, we access the various natural voices already occurring deep inside our own daily self-discussions. Instead of developing voices out of mid-air, we can discover them naturally existing, then give them body.

Another benefit is finding our own natural multiplicity (taken from Rita Carter's book title of the same name), which has therapeutic benefits as well. All of us are many-faceted, and in writing memoir, we can't help but encounter all these parts of ourselves. In inviting them into the discussion, by allowing them to show us the many versions of events that occurred in the past, we can help resolve - better than resolve - accept that the conflicts about "what happened" - whether traumatic or not - aren't just external (eg your sister recalls something else than you do) but internal.

Memoir isn't about trying to nail down "the version" but finding a felt sense that is closest to "a truth" - and that means including multiple facets, and, I believe, multiple voices. Whether or not this writer keeps the voices distinct or integrates them through writing and therapy is up to her - regardless, getting to experience it first hand through her raw writing here really shows us the power of memory and mind and multiplicity.

When I speak of resistance, this is it. The deep, deep fears. What parts of us really, really don't want to share anything. If we don't give them voice, acknowledge them, we will never find a way to write with less suffering involved. 

Student writing by KA.

I don't feel like writing because I'm in a lot of physical pain. Actually, I see now it's not the physical pain that makes me not want to write, it's the voices below the physical pain. The seething pit of intestines trying to convince me, again, that…

I stopped writing…

I hear the words, I feel the words… But they hide from the page.

Is it you, the listener, the reader, that I want to hide from? Or, is it myself? Or, isn't that part of myself that does that speaking?

For years now… Again, I stopped writing.

Writing Quickly, Writing Slowly

Overcome, 2011

This piece was written by a student, Nick Weismueller. The prompt encouraged students to  describing their intentions for the New Year. His piece refers more directly to emotions and interactions with others, not necessarily his writing, but after sharing the piece, as a group we all saw how it related to him (and all of us) slowing down pace in writing, as well.

Though this piece it was also not in direct response to an inquiry about memoir, it speaks to the excruciating pace of writing memoir.

Memoir must be done slowly. While there are moments when "ripping off the bandage" is what is needed, revision and constant re-exploration require time and patience. Nick's struggle with finding that pace is one that I hear a lot from my students, especially memoir students.

Many people are afraid of writing memoir, afraid that once they start it will, as he describes,   "pick(s) up houses, trees, horses, toss(es) them about." What if you begin and can't find your way out again? What about all the triggers laying in wait?

Memoir is Cannibalizing

Annie Dillard

This is a powerful quote from Annie Dillard, from the collection of essays on memoir edited by William Zinsser called Inventing the Truth, The Art and Craft of Memoir. It is so provocative I almost have nothing to say about it.

My advice to memoir writers is to embark upon a memoir for the same reason that you would embark on any other book: to fashion a text. Don't hope in a memoir to preserve your memories. If you prize your memories as they are, by all means avoid - eschew - writing a memoir. Because it is a certain way to lose them. You can't put together a memoir without cannibalizing your own life for parts. The work battens on your memories. And it replaces them.

Such a powerful passage. She goes on to say that it is because you spend so much time crafting the text - often more time than you spent in the actual experience - that in the end, like a photograph of a situation, you recall more the text than the experience. Really, I suggest reading the whole essay, and the whole book, but at least Dillard's essay, which is linked here.

Tormented Urgency

This is an excerpt from Paul Auster's Invention of Memory, excerpted in Sven Birkert's The Art of Time in Memoir, which I simply cannot recommend enough...

Auster's own description of his feeling captures the tormented urgency that underlies this memoirist's enterprise:

 There has been a wound, and I realize now that it is very deep. Instead of healing me as I thought it would, the act of writing has kept this wound open. At times I have even felt the pain of it concentrated in my right hand, as if each time I picked up the pen and pressed it against the page, my had were being torn apart. Instead of burying my father for me, these words have kept him alive, perhaps more so than ever. I not only see him as he was, but as he is, as he will be, and each day he is there, invading my thoughts, stealing up on  me without warning: lying in the coffin underground, his body still intact, his fingernails and hair continuing to grow. A feeling that if I am to understand anything, I must penetrate this image of darkness, that I must enter the absolute darkness of the earth.

I often have written here, and on messages on Facebook, and mentioned in conversations, especially in the last year of running a critique group for memoir with some of my students, that memoir writing is hard. Just hard. Writing is hard, and big manuscripts are hard - writing a full-length memoir is both of those plus more. This is the more, what Auster says above, and something he doesn't say, but is there for me and all of the memoir writers I know - figuring out what is safe and what isn't, which darknesses will take me further away and which will get me closer to the truth.

I always tell my students - trust you will make it back. We are here for you. Go where you need to go and we will be here to welcome you back. Your mind will make its way back. But trusting that, as a writer, is harder, especially when you enter the way back machine into the past, and dig, root around in there looking for a fingernail or hair.

Birkerts describes the distinctions between therapy and memoir (the main one being the need for a narrative arc, even if the structure is lyrical - an overallness that doesn't happen at the time of digestion/cognition but through the process of writing/editing). But he also discusses where they overlap. Here's one place for sure - that tormented urgency to know the self, to figure it out, even if it changes nothing. To see, to feel, to sense for sure where the wounds are.

Vamos a Ver

Edna Taylor Conservation Prairie - Hanging On - July 2013

This is a student writing. She is an older student, and someone who has wanted to write for a long time. When she heard about my classes, she realized it was time, though not everything (including her inner critic, whom she has named "Vampira") moved out of the way for her. This was an ending prompt for a session this spring - what was she going to take with her at the end of the seven weeks of class?

I love that this is also about what it takes to take time to write memoir (which is what this student is writing). So many of my students, and myself, fight with that line that Vampira gives to some of her friends:  “You’re not doing anything for anyone else, and this is so narcissistic.” Especially for a life-long activist, that's no small feat of a belief to conquer.

The writing is unedited, just as she wrote it in class.
Enjoy.

Momentum

Belief

Courage

Energy

Clearing space

Vulnerability

A year ago I was having repeated dreams, I call them chaos dreams, waking with intense headaches in the night, in the morning.   Most nights there was a pregnancy in the dream, mine or someone else’s.   I listened, journaled and committed to connecting with Miriam to begin a writing class.

Now my dreams are less chaotic, fewer headaches or sometimes none and the repeating images are of babies and small children needing care.  My stories.

A friend commented that I seem more strong—or—not that—more deeply into my own life than she’s seen me.   I am energized, committed to this journey almost without making the commitment.  Gathering what I need for support, clearing away what distracts.

This week I let the Raging Grannies know that I’m taking a break from singing.   Vampira had used a couple of friends to speak, “You’re not doing anything for anyone else, and this is so narcissistic.”   So I took a deep breath and shared with two close friends that I’m taking the time and energy to focus on my writing.   Vampira didn’t answer.   They were very affirming and supportive.   A little part of me stands aside saying, “Yipes!   Really?  You’re sure about this?”

Finding out where to share, what to share, when.   Seeing this as an experiment.   Some things are clear, not with my sister.   Sometimes I don’t get feedback, wonder and think, “OK, that’s not where you want to share again”.   And surprises.   I shared the Ben’s Barbershop story with my son.   He like it and went on to tell me much more than I’d known about his experience there.

Belief that this matters, to me, to my kids who will have access to my life and that which we’ve shared in a new way.

And now, learning to live with a flood of memories, an intense energy that needs to be grounded, to rest.   Muddling thru organizing, keeping track of threads of stories.

For many years, I’ve joked that I hoped I’d live to be really old so I could sit in a rocking chair and make sense of it all.   Well, getting really old may or may not happen.   There’s a sense of “no time to lose” tempered with letting go of the outcome.   I’m in the river without a map being carried somewhere.   Vamos a ver.

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.

Nostalgia

I am off to Europe in just over a week, and so in lieu of sharing my own writing at the moment, I'd like to share this link to a provocative NYT opinion piece on "Social Nostalgia." Please enjoy and feel free to comment on how this relates to memoir here!

Beware Social Nostalgia by Stephanie Coontz

Single Stories

Chicago Bean, March 2013

"So, you know what I am going to ask, right?" the reader to my right asks me.
"Sure," I answer.
"Why so much animosity towards your mother and so much affection for your father?"
"Honestly? I don't know."
This is this last Sunday, at a memoir critique group I run with some of my students.

I thought I had the answer. For a long time, throughout my teens, at least. After my mom died, I was so certain of my anger, of the solidity of my struggle with her, that I never questioned it until a month-long meditation retreat in my mid-twenties made me realize I actually missed her. Was sad about her death, not just angry.

When I began writing my memoir about childhood and sexuality, about family and relationships and intimacy (Bermuda Triangles), I found it as simple as describing her physically. Ditto my father. My editor at the time said "I am not buying it. She loves her dad but I don't see any reason why."
"But doesn't every little girl adore her dad?"
"Not all of them. And that's not reason enough. You have to show us why SHE does."
That lead to a lot of unpeeling, unveiling of all kinds of mixed feelings about my father, who died when I was 12, that I didn't even know I had.

Now I am there with my mother. Last week was her 72nd birthday, or would have been, were she still alive. Her best friend from elementary school posted on my wall that she misses my mom sometimes so much she could scream. I replied that I do, too. That's a big deal - wanting to see my mom, wishing she were still alive. The older I get, the more I feel I understand her, and the less I am sure that I really disliked her that much.

This all gets filed under "the danger of a single story" - the personal aspect of a wonderful TED talk that Chimamanda Adichie gave a couple of years ago. It's a fantastic talk, and one that is easily applied to memoir writing. I am not, of course, the only person in this situation - a few of my students are struggling with the same thing: Why is it that *your* mother doesn't appear at all in your memoir?  If you didn't in fact hate *your* father your whole childhood, then what? How *did* you get to be so independent at such a young age?

I dare say that most memoirs written, published, emphasis a single story. Isn't that, after all, what we are writing the memoir for? To tell a story? *A* story? Not many stories or paradoxical feelings or exploring something answerless. And yet, that's what our stories actually are. They aren't neatly tied up or answered. Writing memoir should make us more aware that the stories we've told, while they have been our truth for a long time and therefore do have *an* effect on us, are not the "only truth".

I am not even talking about objective truth here - what "really" happened - as if any of us can really find that out thirty years later. No, I am talking about the multiple truths of how we feel about things at different eras and ages. If I believed that I hated my mom for a fair span of my adolescence, then, whether or not I actually did, that story carries a lot of weight. That single story is true, in a sense, and yet, is not the whole truth. When I look back into journals and writings, the Family Circle cartoons she left me as a way of trying to communicate humor, I see moments of affection and connection between us. I even read, from time to time, "I love my mom." Even though I seemed to block out such complexity at the time, it did exist. And that is what I want to write.

So maybe the reason why I can't explain the utter animosity in my story towards my mom - not now, now I have compassion, but in the mind of the child I am depicting - the reason why I can't explain the total boundless affection towards my father - again, not now, now tempered by reality, but of the child then - has less to do with "forgetting something" and more to do with remembering things - and realizing that the single story I am prone to telling first isn't the actual story at all.

Maybe it would make a better sale if I were to set up that dichotomy: good cop, bad cop. Dualistic. Nice and clean. But it's completely unreal. And my inability to write it that way in a believable way does not mean I am doing a bad job. It means I am so bound to the truth that I cannot tell a single story, though I told it in my mind for decades. It's time to uncover the real stories. The ones I find writing that I never realized I knew all along.

Even if this memoir never gets published, it's been a hell of a process. Hard. Very hard. And also healing beyond belief: not because I am "finally telling" stories that need telling. No. Quite the opposite. Because I realize those stories I've been hiding aren't the real story. Maybe that's why I hid them for so long - if others read them I knew they'd say "I am not buying this," in the most loving way, just as my critique group is saying now.

How Can We Write Memoir With No Self?

Without Self, Chicago, February 2013

I can't believe I haven't asked this question before.

Never.
I mean, really. I've been writing non-fiction, predominantly memoir for years now and not once has that ever entered my mind. I have thought and written about related topics: how to write stories that open us instead of solidfying us (a great blog post by Susan Piver here on that topic, that leads to others' thoughts on it on their blogs). I've certainly contemplated Natalie Goldberg's maxim "You are not the writing," and visited upon my own identifying with/investing in my writing.

But late one night about a week ago, on the toilet (hey, that's where it happens sometimes) it hit me. I had been studying a lot of Buddhist teachings in preparation for AD training (an assistant director for Shambhala Training), a further meditation instructor authorization. Lots of teachings on emptiness (which is actually fullness) and no-self (which is actually to say that we are all connected/the same, ultimately). 

And it hit me like a truck - how can I write about myself if my self doesn't exist?

The answer is multi-fold, and a crux point for this blog all around. I am a Buddhist teacher who also teaches writing, so the answers, as I hope to keep exploring them, are going to be Buddhist-bent. For me, that also means good, clear, strong writing. I certainly don't think you have to be a Buddhist to be a good writer. However, the teachings of Buddhism certainly have a lot to offer to help keep writing fresh, clear and strong.

As we write our stories, I will simply say for now, we can notice whether or not we are using them to pin us down ("THIS is who I am,") or to explore/open/lean into the groundlessness of what it means to be a person - constantly changing, never secure, never sure. Writing memoir from the POV of "all-knowing future self" is not only annoying and unskillful, it is also not truthful.

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem 

I'd say more than that - if we can really experience/direct compassion towards those "former selves" then we can truly be here in the life we are living now.

When I was younger, I sure loved looking back on my journals. I'd be like, "Oh yeah. I have matured so much since then!" Until I realized, some time in my twenties, that I'd always be able to say later that I "figured that all out," which means I never have it all figured out. I became mortified, instead, of my journals, as signs reminding me how very human I am.

Now, I try to be grateful as often as I can for that very same information. I want raw humans writing in my classes, and I want to be one myself. I want to read them.

So let's work together with this seeming paradox: 

writing the stories of the self that does not exist. 

Like an Aesop's fable. Only this one isn't fixed - it's always in progress.

The Dignity of True Self-Expression

"OP N" Chicago February 2013

I am studying to become a meditation instructor - I am one already, but one that maintains longer-term relationships with meditation students. I have a program this weekend, so I have been cramming on dharma in preparation for "exams" and other assessment tools coming up.

This morning, I read this passage in Chogyam Trungpa's guide for Shamatha instructors. While this is a limited text, this passage does not impart anything secretive, so I believe I can share it. It connects in really well with the ongoing conversation here regarding the role of "confession" in memoir:

A lot of people fall into the trap of confessionalism. You begin to tell people how bad you were, how terrible the trauma was that you have gone through..You feel the students will think you are an honest guy, and you have vomited everything you have to vomit. Somehow this seems to be very deceptive in some sense; it builds you up, showing how honest a person you are.. (This is not very dignified).. You are comparing notes between two people in jail, and somehow that doesn't seem to be the point..Obviously there should be first-hand experience exchanged, but at the same time one shouldn't indulge that particular style of winning someone's confidence. That's a double twist of some kind -- that purity and at the same time a lot of personality trips are involved.
-Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Manual for Shamatha Instructors

I like that - "the trap of confessionalism" and "you have vomited everything you have to vomit." I have spoken here before about the importance of not hiding important details - how the readers know when the writer has not shared important information, can feel the lack or the lie. And yet, if we have some idea that by sharing it all we have fulfilled a role for the reader, we have sorely missed out on nuance and respect. 

Knowing Mind

Chicago Graffiti, February 2013

Natalie Goldberg, my writing+dharma teacher, speaks frequently at retreats about the significance of reading authors' works and seeing their minds. When we read aloud raw work to one another - something that has just now been written, unedited, we really see raw mind - whether it is fiction or non-fiction. I believe this to be true. Brand new writing is especially powerful and vulnerable, even if it is written about a topic which is not particularly vulnerable or is complete fiction (as if that even exists). Published work, as I have been exploring here, is also significant in terms of knowing a writer's mind. Obviously, memoir, a non-fiction and also entirely personal/intimate form, seems to be the ultimate source of "knowing someone's mind."

But is it?

In the process of publishing memoir, a lot of editing happens. A lot of adjusting timelines, changing vulnerable personages into composite characters. Whether you are LeGuinian about this or not, nowadays the trend is certainly towards lyrical styling, or towards using "creative non-fiction"/fictional techniques to write non-fiction content. For instance, I am writing about my early sexuality and intimacy, and the style my critique group and I have found to work best is intercutting scenes from childhood with adolescence and adulthood. This is not your mother's narrative - not straightforward, not linear in time or even in mind. It is a bit how I work, but it is also how the story works best - I am adapting my writing to fit what the story needs. Perhaps this is some of the "dishonesty" that LeGuin speaks of in her essay in Wave In the Mind. It certainly adds a layer of complexity - never a bad thing, just something to take into account - to finding mind when reading memoir.

How my ordinary, daily mind works is to leap from idea to idea. I am a linker, not a cutter, though as I age I appreciate more and more the honesty of recognizing ideas as less and less "like" something else and simply appreciating them as is. When I write "naturally," off the cuff, I freely and widely associate - quotes from authors come to mind, references to other eras of my life. But this way of associating my early readers found distracting. And quite revealing. I would write a passage about spending time with my father, and slice in all kinds of oblique references or currently-unneeded info. Yes, this is how my mind works. Yes, it does show my mind to the reader. No, it doesn't make for solid reading. It took away from the intensity of the story and scattered the attention all over the place. My resistance was clear, and while that is a significant part of my story, it makes for sloppy writing and reading.

Now, in adapting the writing to just the stories, without distractions inside them, at anywhere from 2-9 pages a pop, then slicing them into each other, I am preserving some of the same quality of my mind - it's tendency to leap and associate - while creating a much more readable style. As soon as a brave member of my critique group announced that all she cared about in the chapter about my father was our story, and none of the distracting elements (this meant cutting out half the chapter as it was), I knew she was right. I wasn't sure how I was going to make up for a lot of lost words, or explain more expository elements without so many distractions, but I knew she was right. I could - I can - show my mind as is, but on the more sophisticated level where my writing needs to be in order to publish.

Natalie Goldberg often says that we are "closing the gap" between what we think we write and what we write, who we think we are and who we are, as we write this way: in Writing Practice, in Contemplative Writing. Sometimes people poo-poo this as secondary writing, journaling, practicing. However, the only way I've been able to see what is really going on and what really needs expressing is to get it all out on the page, and then to pull back. You can take it or leave it, but my writing mind isn't the same as my everyday mind. It's better. A lot better. More clear and kind, sophisticated and smooth. But it is honest and it is really me. No fakery. No pretending. And when I connect my writing mind to my ordinary mind, I give my ordinary mind the chance to "improve," to realize I can be better than I am, unify myself on a higher level. The level of understanding my ordinary mind doesn't even realize I have inside.

The level of real, true knowing mind.

When There's A Ball and Chain On Your Pen

Smiley Versus Skull, Mar Vista, LA, January 2013

I have for your reading consideration another writing by a student of mine. This was in response to my "intention prompt" for the last of our session together. This student has been writing with me for a couple of years now, and has grown, frankly, leaps and bounds. She came in ready to break open the division between her inner logical self and inner artist, and in addition to my classes has done many other courses with local folks who do complementary work to mine (dance, drawing, etc).

Her reading lead to a very important conversation - the beginning of it, anyway - about how we treat trauma in writing, when we are airing our shameful laundry and when we are simply witnessing or processing, and when airing laundry is what is needed. Anyway, without further ado, I'll simply post what she wrote. It's very good and pithy, and hopefully, a provocative addition to the conversation I started here in this blog.

Comments are welcome! And thanks again to this student for her relentless but gentle exploration of personal process. It benefits us all, even when we feel awkward about asking these questions.

“Empty” is the word that came up before Miriam finished reading the prompt.  Its a word for all years.  It’s a good word, a good place to be.  It’s positive, it’s happy, it’s a vessel to fill with joy and color.

I get the strong feeling sometimes that what I need to do is empty myself.  That this is the cure for feeling bottled up, encumbered with secrets, and that until I divest myself publicly of all my sins I’ll never be authentic, I’ll always be hiding something, I’ll always be dishonest. 

Recently, I’ve felt otherwise.  That this urge to spill all the dirty details is just shame disguised as honesty.  That it’s too easy to believe that a public confession of the gory details of my perceived failures in life will somehow be ultimately freeing.  How many days have I spent sitting in this writing class wondering when I’ll ever have the guts to spell out my particular set of lapses and addictions, losses and indulgences, mistraveled paths and roads not taken?  That it’s all about hiding is what it seems to be not about.

Why not write from the open space, the lovely EMPTINESS that has opened up like a well, deep and blue, peopled with stars of gold, with millions of silent voices urging me on to fling color, to rhyme words at odd angles, to paint over portraits with my own vision, to speak out and listen to the ringing of my own voice across vast spaces that until recently were not accessible, were out of reach behind tall fences topped with barbed and electrified guard dogs of shame and self denial and self doubt.

I’m not really that interested in the personal details of other peoples’ dark journeys -- well, okay, maybe in a voyeuristic way -- but what is illuminating about their journeys is the energy they write about them with, and where that energy takes them.  That’s where the value lies. 

So, I’m thinking NOW that this urge of several years to spill it all, describe each shard as if it had something important to reflect back, is a red herring, or WORSE, it’s a continuation, it’s the same, same old, it’s the trick where I act out of contrition, I air my smelly undies, display the embarrassing stains, describe the specific muscle weaknesses that allowed various spiritual and moral sphincters to loosen and it’s all really just prostration in public before the SAME FALSE GODS, FALSE DEMONS that I bowed down to during my secret life in the darkness.

That’s not freedom.  That’s writing with a ball and chain on this pen.  Jump into the emptiness!  I know this is right, this is true, even though it’s so slippery I can hardly keep it on this page.

Confession Versus Expression

Re-posted from Inside Space. This post truly began this blog, Memoir Mind. To follow in a couple of days will be a student piece that explores the confessional issues in writing memoir.

This is an unusually long blog post - I am letting you know because it's been a long time coming, and is in fact a draft of an essay for my book on writing in-progress called Sleight of Hand. I promise it is worth it, but it's longer than you are used to here at Inside Space.

I write memoir. It's the main genre I write, though some essays are more "essay-like" and some are more "memoir-like," depending on how you define the genres. Definitely I fall into the category of "creative non-fiction."

In my experience (reading and writing), what makes non-fiction creative is not the number of adjectives or the less-narrative-more-lyrical-structure. These are common definitions that I myself use in clarifying the distinctions of this new-ish-ly celebrated genre, which rarely finds shelf space of its own.  What really makes it "creative" is that the truth is being communicated in a less conventional manner. Instead of reporting the facts, confessing the crimes, objectively investigating the connections, creative non-fiction (especially of the memoir ilk) explores the truth through poetic form.

Naturally-occurring metaphor (situations where coincidence make you say "You couldn't MAKE that up," or "Truth IS stranger than fiction!"), universal emotional resonance despite the reader/listener having a completely different set of life experiences, allowing for non-linear descriptions that communicate an unknown fact but felt truth...these are what make creative non-fiction distinctive for me.

And in the process of writing memoir that is creative non-fiction (it IS possible to write memoir which is distinctly straight forward non-fiction, though it tends to get categorized as autobiography) has made it clear to me that there is no need for confession. It's really the process that has taught this to me - not the product. However, reading a product (for instance, just now finishing the book of "essays" - really a memoir - by Brenda Miller entitled Seasons of the Body) that clearly has a lot of tough things to communicate: uncomfortable, unfortunate and awkward things to say, makes it also clear to me that if something feels like it's a confession, it's not processed enough yet to be creative.

This is a strong statement. I realize this. Perhaps that's why I couched it at the end of a potentially run-on sentence at the end of a long paragraph. As so many say on the internet these days YMMV - your mileage may vary. However, I think it's worth considering the distinction between confession and expression - considering that I have found such a distinct difference between the two in all my writing and reading. And my students, whether they plan to or not, wind up writing a lot about confession-caliber things in my classes. There's a distinct difference, even in the rough draft, between someone who is writing something the first time and something that is coming through after many writes, or, possibly, many therapy sessions, much self-reflection, etc. I always tell people that Olga Broumas told me she wrote many poems - and published them - about her mother (after her death) until she was able to write the "real" poem - awkward, hard, but real (and, ironically, also with swimming imagery - see below).

Confessions, to me, aren't real intimacy. They are practice. Necessary, but not actual intimacy. They are too literal and not vulnerable, though they may feel more vulnerable, more exposed, than a well-written, deeply explored self truth.

I realize you need examples, so I am here to give them to you. I picked samples that actually use some of the same language in my own memoir - which is tentatively titled My Bermuda Triangle, and uses a lot of sea/water images.

Awhile back, I read a three memoirs that closely related to one of the memoir (manuscript-length) books I am writing. My memoir, in the few words, covers my early relationship to intimacy -  my parents' deaths, sexual experimentation and trauma, bisexual hilarity. I have read everything I can get my hands on (hint: you need to do this if you want to try and sell your manuscript to anyone) that at all relates. The closest (and best) books are Loose Girl by Kerry Cohen (found at Target late one night on accident) and Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water (recommended by a friend, then forgotten until it cropped up again on another friend's list). One day, at Frugal Muse books, I spied a memoir entitled Her Last Death by Susanna Sonnenberg. It's about the author's hyper-dramatic mother, her own spates with drugs and sex, and struggling with intimacy. Because the issues sounded close enough to those with my own mother, I picked it up.

Her Last Death was - is - a disappointment. Natalie Goldberg, my writing - and reading - teacher, always instructs us to read books that have sold well in order to figure out why they have sold well. I am here to tell you that I think that Her Last Death did relatively well (Scribner/Simon & Schuster bestseller) because it is confessional. All the reviews on Amazon point to this - folks call it a "tell-all," state that she tells too much, in fact, in some cases. But she says no more than any other memoir of this type - the discomfort comes with the *way* she tells her stories.
A passage from Her Last Death:
When Penelope answers she sounds like she's drowning. "Oh, sweetie," I say until she can stop sobbing and tell me what she's heard. Newly married, lucky with fun jobs that flame out fast, Penelope lives in the New York apartment where we grew up, subletting from our mother. She doesn't seem to mind being buoyed by the swells of Daphne's manic behavior.

It's a pretty good passage. Alliteration, a hallmark of creative writing ("flame out fast"), simile/metaphor - drowning versus flaming, continuity of images: buoyed and drowning. It's well-written, tight, but also strangely lacking in emotion. This is in fact one of the least "dramatic" parts of the book, but even in a more personal part, with much more at stake, you can feel her emotional distance and the clinical way she describes her trauma:
Water rose up the sides of the tub, lapping against my hips. I waited and thought about the lawn mower mowing, my mother putting a stamp on a postcard, Shelly holding the door, and then my first orgasmic flush spread up my thighs, around my ass and into my tummy, which still felt queasy from my father's interest.

A passage from Loose Girl, which I think is the second-most (or least, depending on which way you are going) personal of the three. Published by Hyperion/Random House, a major press, it got some good press attention. I had not heard of it, but found it to be pretty honest and straight-forward - not as lyrical writing as I wanted/as I write, but still "less confessional":
Before boys put their soft, eager hands on my skin, before they pull me into dark rooms and whisper promises I hold on to like rope pulling me from water, before I sink further and further into trouble, I have crushes. Most girls know what its like to long for boys in this way...overwhelmed by both my mother's need and her absence, that sensation feels like desperation.

This passage uses a lot of physical description and is incredibly precise in those descriptions, almost claustrophobically intimate. As soon as I read it, I knew that no matter "what" happened to this woman, even if our stories vary dramatically (which, it turns out, they don't) the feeling she was communicating, the fundamental truth, was closer than any I had read or heard before.

Finally, Yuknavitch's Chronology of Water, which uses water and swimming (she was a swimmer her whole school career) as central metaphor. This title came out through Hawthorne Press, a small but distinguished Pacific Northwest press. Yuknavitch is friends with Chuck Palaniuk and keeps good writer company. Her book got an unusual amount of attention for the size of the press run, and she has a cult following, but it certainly had no sales on Cohen or Sonnenberg.

Yuknavitch writes about losing a daughter in a miscarriage, something I cannot relate to at all as a story (this is significant), and yet, the emotional truth is so resonant it blew me away:
I sat on the stool and closed the little plastic curtain...I bled, I cried, I peed and vomited. I became water. Finally she (the nurse) had to come back inside me and "Save me from drowning in there." It was a joke. It made me smile. 
Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight. They swell and dive in and out between great sinkholes of the brain. It's hard to know what you think of a life when you find yourself knee-deep...
Upside down I saw the sun and sky at the surface make silver blue electricity. The rushing water and strength of current pulled my arms, rocked my head. The upsidedowness of blood in my skull made my head ache. I closed my eyes. Still smiling. The cold wet of my life. My body in deep water. Weightless. Airless. Daughterless void.

What's the distinction, or what are the distinctions here? When we are confessing, we are looking to someone else for forgiveness: demanding, pleading or simply asking. We are vulnerable - very vulnerable - showing that we need something from someone else. But that kind of vulnerability can have a lot of aggression in it. Expectation. We need the reader to sympathize, demand that they understand and ironically, it is a false intimacy. You can feel the separation that Sonnenberg puts into her writing.  In Amazon reviews people cite it as a refusal to "name names" seeing as how Sonnenberg is a society girl, but I think it's more this kind of lack of intimacy, ironically. It's as if we are asking, when we are confessing, others to do something for us (forgive us) that we cannot do for ourselves. In the New York Times review, the critic states that she doesn't do any "dime store analysis" and that both distances her in the book and also drops us into a present tense experience. Except for it doesn't; other than the book being in present tense, there's little sense of her being present at all whatsoever, as a person (if so, an accurate betrayal of dissociation) or as an author (a more disturbing state of dissociation).

We have to forgive ourselves, first, or at least have done some of the footwork. Then real intimacy can occur. The thing is, this isn't just for memoir, though clearly that is my "genre" at least for now. Real intimacy with the self, with one's own mind, is necessary for any writing. I'd argue it's necessary for real living. Dissociation, rampant in a world full of traumatic experiences (whether one writes about them directly or not!) is dangerous. Intimacy is essential. As my previous blog post explores, we can make a new normal - not a confessional normal, which is what so many "sex and drugs" memoirs are now being cast as, perhaps rightly. But a REAL normal, that allows others to directly experience - with emotional language offering lyrical resonance, a universal quality while not belying the individual experiences. At least in memoir form.

Yuknavitch's book is not without problems. I think she needed stronger editors - it wanders a bit, and it's clear the opening part is the strongest. But she took on her own narrative - with a chronology, as she says in the interview in the back - more like water than anything else, running over itself, far from linear - and dropped herself, and us, right into it.

I want to close with some words from that interview with Yuknavitch about the "confessional genre." Clearly I have a lot more to say about all of this, but this is a good beginning. Thanks to the patient students who have waited a few months for me to write this, and to my cats who woke me up this morning, realizing I was ready to give it a try.

So like the drug and alcohol monolithic narrative, there are so many stories of incest out there yet to be told. But if you don't tell the right incest narrative, you got butkus. My goal in offering my own story isn't to claim that abuse suffered from my father is any more important than anyone else's. Nor is it to "claim" the incest narrative to sell books.
My goal is to put the reader into the space of childhood and young adulthood where fear and confusion and rage get born -- like they do in all of us for different reasons. To put the reader in their body through language. Because when I teach or give readings or workshops, I meet a hundred people who know what it feels like to be shamed, or beaten, or molested, or just made small. We all move through the waters. Language helps us feel less separate.

I would say it does. I agree. However, the language that makes us feel less separate has to come from someone not separate from her own experience. It has to come from direct experience. As Yuknavitch quotes later in the interview, from the Tempest: "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine." Blame and shame are outcroppings of pain - but if we stay out at the edges where they are, we don't actually get to the human intimacy inherent in all our experiences. The writing suffers.

This is what true creativity requires - radical intimacy and honesty. 
Not confession - true expression from deep inside experience, where clear waters run.

Dust

Graffiti in a country highway tunnel, rural Vermont

 Processing our own "issues" is an invaluable part of writing memoir. It may not be true to fiction, though some would argue it is (see Alice Miller's The Body Never Lies) or non-fiction, but beyond a doubt, what we have not "worked on" will show itself in our writing in memoir.

In my blog post Confession Vs Expression, I began parsing out this distinction in published work. But published work has so many factors at play - more than I can parse out, though I plan to do so on this blog with published memoirists: editing process, the size of the press, etc.

So I want to now, and also in the future, use some very raw and fresh examples from my writing classes. Just last week, one popped up. It's a perfect piece to read and discuss, as we did in class, and as I will do here.

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."