Signs – 3

You thought I was kidding….we spotted this sign in Glenwood Springs, on a trip to celebrate our first wedding anniversary.    Per  previous post, Signs 1, we’d reserved elsewhere.  

Winston Rand might have enjoyed this one.  He posted this funny sign on his blog last year, and this.  As they say in the creative nonfiction world, You can’t make this stuff up.    

Experience & Artifact

“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. 

Why am I…

I’m reading the first entry on the blog of a friend, Kathy Rhodes, whom I met last month at a creative nonfiction conference at Ole Miss.   

 “Why am I here,” Kathy asks, “when I’ve go so much to do elsewhere?”  

Though I don’t edit a journal or craft the Great American Southern novel, my list of obligations is nearly as long as hers:  run a business, raise a family, manage a household, volunteer, teach, care for an old dog and other arthritic family members.  Why add a blog to the mix? 

Tough question.  But at the deep-down core of things, I know I have to write.  Despite the sneaking suspicion that I might choose writing ahead of, say, running payroll or making dinner, this blog may be a good place to give that inner writer some space to play.