Scott Russell Sanders Reading at Murray State
Last night, and this morning, I had the honor of being in the audience for a reading and craft lecture delivered by Scott Russell Sanders. I took lots of notes–he is one of those people who speaks from a perfectly combined intellect and heart. I wanted to write down everything he said.
His reading was a series of short micro-essays on the topic of Awe–”A Personal History of Awe.” What are the moments in your life when Spirit breaks in, purely, into the most humble ordinary moments? What is required to remain open to those moments? How can we, in a culture devoted to and hamstrung by celebrity, calamity, and sensationalized experience (fame and gore), practice honoring ordinary experience? (When we get fascinated by dramatic larger than life lives that have nothing to do with our own lives, we are distracted from the lives we are actually leading, our own families and towns and nature–these falsified landscapes, and our attention to them, cause us to dangerously ignore Truth.) How can we notice how we really live? Write the simple moments of our daily life, our work life, our actual town, our place.
He read pieces about moments of awe: his first awe, in his father’s arms as lightning takes down a beloved huge tree. Hearing his (future) wife’s breath being taken away when she walks into a university library, all those books. Going 120 miles an hour, dad at the wheel, in a great car down an Indiana highway in the afternoon. Hearing Martin Luther King speak. When writing about his difficult childhood, his difficult father, Sanders says, “I don’t want an award for suffering. I just want to understand.”
During his talk this morning, Sanders talked about this: how does a writer decide what is legitimate and what is not when telling true stories? What’s the difference between fiction and nonfiction? What are the responsibilities the writer has to truth, to memory, to story? A lot of people cringe when they hear the word “memoir” — they assume it’s going to be a book of either narcissism, fraud, or both.
What I took away from the lecture was this: a memoir that tells of surface events (a celebrity’s life, a summary of a life, an invented life, etc.) isn’t worth reading, isn’t worth writing. Or, it’s a novel. A memoir must set out to record the moments that are illuminated by God, by Spirit, by grace, or in Eastern terms, by “emptiness.” (Not nothingness, but undifferentiated wholeness). Memoir writing is the spontaneous recording of small moments (the daily, the simple, the humble, the real) that are “openings”. This is the real work of writing: TO SEE WHAT WE ARE.
Flannery O Connor: do not write anything that is not of the gravest concern to you.
What among the triviality of life’s noise is of actual concern to you?
What is required (in love, faith, writing): openness to what is. Honoring ordinary experience.
We do not need to go anywhere exotic or take more classes or recite creeds or follow gurus: we need only lucid seeing–which we already know how to do–it’s not special. It’s nearby. It’s common. Ordinary people and ordinary moments.
Writing memoir, is, then, the practice of engaging with, seeing, noticing the true nature of things. Rather than piling up money and stuff, rather than getting cut off from nature, getting sucked into the Culture Of Narcisism (read Christopher Cash), and being cut off from Meaning, we notice what is. We honor where we are from, what we are given, and we put those simple words on the page.
I am so thrilled and delighted to be able to start the new year, and start back to teaching, with this compass. Pure Light.
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