The first writing exercise for the online class in memoir says: Write about something awful you’ve done in your life. Dare to be honest.
I consider this. Some categories of awful can be ruled out quickly—murder, drug trafficking, fraud, solicitation, bunko. Tax evasion. There may be a “Wanted” poster with my picture in the PTO work room at school.
Various not-proud-of-that moments come to mind. Are they awful? Worthy of 500 words? This is what comes from skipping Lent. I haven’t spent near enough time digging in the shadows, watching at minus tide to see what’s deposited on the ocean floor.
What I choose for the assignment seems fairly benign on the scale of awful: a catty remark. Friends read the exercise and shake their heads, is that really the worst you can come up with?
Perhaps they know my vices lean towards scarves, gym avoidance, good chocolate, and Dorothy Sayers. Or travel porn—tour catalogs, articles, memoir-–anything that fuels my lust for Europe. I’ve been on a Jane bender since January, when Masterpiece Theater began broadcasting Pride & Prejudice.
Because my nasty remark has bothered me for years, I suspect there is much more to it. (Emma Woodhouse knows exactly what I mean.) In the murk of “awful” is more to be found than vice or felony—there’s abuse of class, consumption, resource, power, knowledge, trust. Dare to be honest.
April 9, 2008
“There’s experience and artifact.” Participants in the manuscript workshop scramble quietly to jot these opening words from Dinty W. Moore. We’re sitting in a spare, tall-ceilinged conference room in the new Journalism building at the University of Mississippi. Some of us live within a few hours’ drive of Ole Miss, others have traveled much further to attend pre-conference writing workshops at the Mid-South Conference for creative nonfiction.
Ah, I think, I have lots of artifacts to write about. Sea glass from a Maui beach, photos from last summer’s camping trips in the mountains, my kids’ artwork, Roman-era tiles from Caesarea in Israel, the old pewter teapot from Ireland.
But this is not what Dinty means. Artifact is not stuff. It’s the so-what. In writing essay or memoir, it’s not enough to describe personal experience with craft and wit. Artifact is what is made from that experience, the switch to writing experience in a way that will benefit the reader. If experience prods the initial impulse for writing, artifact asks, Who cares?
Dinty says he’s a “bear” about revision. By draft #28 or #30 or so, he says he should be able to articulate what question he’s answering. My short pieces are critiqued at the end of the day, and by then, I’m concerned I haven’t done near enough work with the so-what. In the workshop we’ve been awash in experience, most of it beautifully written, and for me the better work that emerges from the group stands out from the others because of well-considered insight we can take with us.
For the rest of the conference, I will hear a little voice in my ear asking, What’s at stake? Who cares?, like a dogged tune, what my aunt calls an earworm. Despite the parroting repetition, this is one refrain I don’t want to chase away.
March 29, 2008
