Ann Patchett on Killing and Writing

 

These passages are from a Byliner mini ebook called The Getaway Car, which can be found here for $2.99. The Getaway Car is also a chapter in Ann Patchett's brand new book, This Is The Story of a Happy Marriage, which is a collection of nonfiction essays (only some about writing) recently out in hardcover. While the larger book is interesting, The Getaway Car blew my socks off so hard that no other essay in the book can even hold a candle to it. Get it. Now.

 Patchett is writing about fiction in The Getaway Car, though Happy Marriage is a book of nonfiction essays. However, what she says about writing fiction here is EXACTLY the same with especially memoir. When she speaks of that butterfly below, imagine she means, instead of the idea of a story, YOUR LIFE. How hard it is to go from YOUR LIFE to WORDS ON PAPER/MEMOIR. Absolutely killer accurate description:

 The book makes a breeze around my head like an oversize butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. The book, of which I have not yet written one word, is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight is the single perfect joy in my life…When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach into the air and pluck the butterfly up. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page…Everything that was beautiful about this living thing – all the color, the light and movement – is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s the book…The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies…Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

Natural Metaphor

Turn to Clear Vision, Dallas TX, 2013

I often refer to something in my writing classes that I call "natural metaphor." What I mean by it is what is called an objective correlative - something in the story that expresses the emotions of the characters (usually in fiction).

A great example is this: a student wrote a few weeks ago about liking sitting on the floor, but especially liking to sit on the ground outside. She described her ideal sitting circumstance: the form is comforting but not too hard or too soft, she can sit up without any effort on her own, a feeling of sitting on a cloud, able to lie down but not falling down. She described her connection to nature: sky, open fields, mountains, water.

When she was done, she laughed: "Of course, this is really about the whole of my life - not wanting to fall down, to be comfortable, to have enough open space around my emotions..." and we all laughed with her, but the description was both a) more powerful and b) more complex when she also described how these emotions/cravings manifest in a directly physical way, too.

Closets, Cocoons, Secrets and Other Obstacles

This video is about memoir, if you watch it with that in mind.
Here's what amazing - the way she talks about the dangers of comparing pain, the way she addresses shame as everyone's closet without using that word. When she talks about closets I think of Chogyam Trungpa's cocoon metaphor for the disgusting but somehow so familiar eg safe places our habits create for us in the dark recesses of our minds.

How to get to what is universal - "your shame is your gold," dorothy allison - while also respecting our individual experiences is really, really hard to do. Please watch this 11 minute video - Ash does it stunningly well.

Read this.

All I have to say is: Wow.

The same student who sent me this link also recorded Dorothy Allison giving a talk at UW Madison this last week. I am blown away. I will see if I can get permission from Allison to post her talk - not the parts where people share - here on this blog. Because that, too: Wow.

Mothering and Loneliness

This is a writing from a student a few weeks ago. I love her process of at first grounding herself in where she is - a garden in early autumn - then heading into dread about winter. Then, she really goes inside the fear, exploring what it is really about - motherhood.

Natalie Goldberg says in her latest book True Secret of Writing that weather is never a surface level thing. It is real. It is grounding. You can connect very deeply just by talking about weather, especially if youlet it open up to what is going on underneath, as Maggie did here.

Write your season right now. Go outside and write, even if it means long underwear and gloves. Write what is there, out there and inside you, then see what is inside even that.

Alice Munro and Almost-memoir

Alice Munro: "The constant happiness is curiosity."

From an NPR interview with Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, recent Nobel Prize winner in Literature:

Still, as a woman of her generation, she felt conflicted about taking time she needed to do her work, telling WHYY's Fresh Air in 1996: "There tends not to be the feeling that this is what you deserve. I still find it hard to think that I deserve this time — to this day. I can be made to feel guilty if a friend phones just to chat ... Also just about all the things that I could be doing to be a better homemaker, as I was trained to be."

A friend referenced this quote to me recently. She was blown away that such a famous writer - fourteen collections of short stories and many awards - would feel this way. Then I told her I do, too. My friend insisted - but you have to write. It's a part of your living. Yes, and? Somehow no matter what we are doing and how valued it is, there's always a doubt - maybe I am not doing enough, or not doing what I should be doing.

Munro doesn't write memoir - she writes short stories - but they are highly autobiographical. She is exactly the kind of writer - one who has lived in the same region her whole life and writes strongly of place - that Natalie Goldberg suggests for her students to read. As a person, too, she is delightful. One of my favorite quotes of hers is in this NYT article: "The constant happiness is curiosity."

Keep reading women authors, never doubting the significance of fiction, too, to enlarge our sense of empathy, as this recent NYT article says research now shows. We learn how to write everywhere, not just in our own genre.

Karinthy and Little Me

I received an email from a student with a passage from the book A Journey Round My Skull.
The book itself a sort of very early (1937) Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight. I am just now reading the book, which is good but not amazing, writing-wise. The content is interesting to me because I am interested in perception and neuroscience. As far as the writing goes, Karinthy's self-commentary is accurate, as Oliver Sacks notes in the introduction: he begins the book a bit over-analytical, and full of excess detail, so, while I enjoy the humor and insight, it often feels like he is showing off.

However, by the time he gets to the section my student sent me (3/4 way through the book), he has calmed down his narrative to a more straight-forward style, with plenty of self-awareness. This passage, in particular, is him interrupting his narrative to discuss the act of writing memoir itself. Amazing internal discussion.