Word After Word

Louis Menand’s article on diaries and diarists, “Woke up This Morning,” (The New Yorker, December 10 2007) takes up the question of why we read diaires. He is so smart on blogs, reliability in writing about self/other, diaries, memoirs, and bad writing—five of my most passionate interests. I’m resisting (vaguely) the urge to copy out the entire article here, all of which has bearing on the creative writing workshop, writing from life, and how we consider our work.

“The impulse to keep a diary is to actual diaries as the impulse to go on a diet is to actual slimness.”

“It’s not that we imagine we would be happier if we kept a diary; we imagine that we would be better—that diarizing is a natural healthy thing, a sign of vigor and purpose, a statement, about life, that we care, and that non-diarizing, or worse, failed diarizing is a confession of moral inertia, an acknowledgement, eve, of the ultimate pointlessness of one’s being in the world.”

“The ego theory holds that maintaining a diary demands a level of vanity and self-importance that is simply too great for most people to sustain for long periods of time. It obliges you to believe that the stuff that happened to you is worth writing down because it happened to you. This is why so many diaries are abandoned by circa January 10^th: keeping this up, you quickly realize, means something worse than being insufferable to others; it means being insufferable to yourself. People find they just can’t take themselves seriously enough to continue. They may regret this—people capable of taking themselves seriously tend to go farther in life—but they accept it and move on to other things, such as collecting stamps.”

Do we learn more about a person reading their diary? Or does the impossibility of accurate self-representation mean we only get the feeling we know intimately who a person really is by reading about them in other people’s diaries? Menand says, “[Virginia] Woolf described from the outside by another person is likely to give us a more vivid picture of what Virginia Woolf was really like than Woolf described from the inside by herself. Introspection is not as reliable as observation. (That’s why we have shrinks.)

And, I’ll add: that’s why we have creative writing courses. Not to teach the art of introspection but to practice the science of observation of everyone else.

Inside, Menand claims, we are all pretty much the same. “It’s the outside, the way people look and the things they say, that makes them distinct.”

He notes that Woolf is “one of those writers who keep the instrument in tune: she wrote, sometimes just to be writing, whether there was anything of significance to write about or not.”

“’Never discriminate, never omit’ is one of the unstated rules of diary-keeping. The rule is perverse, because all writing is about control, and writing a diary is a way to control the day—to have, as it were, the last word. …   If it doesn’t contain a lot of dross, it’s not a diary. It’s something else—a journal, or a writer’s notebook, or a blog (blather is not the same as dross).”

“The memorializing of the mundane is part of the flattening of foreground-background contrast that makes diaries different from memoirs and other forms of historical narrative. It’s also a sign of the diary’s absolute fidelity to the present…. The just-the-facts elimination of perspective, discrimination, and reflection…”

This what we’re trying to teach our students. Yes, they must write what they know; unless they are particularly gifted. When they write further from home, they have to be careful television isn’t filtering their observation. Creative writing can’t be just-the-facts. It has to be close observation, combined with perspective, discrimination, and reflection.

An example? Menand himself on Schlesinger: “…he was a golden retriever: he like being liked much more than he disliked being disliked….”   And “…he dreamed of writing a novel…but despite a fair amount of self laceration…he never made much headway. (Not many people who have that particular dream do make much headway.)”

Writing a diary may keep us from completing our novels, and it may be the only way we get to them too. Self laceration and failure to write everything down—you are for sure not writing now.

“The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.”

John Mortimer, Clinging to the Wreckage: another part of life

I know I want to teach  my students the art of browsing but I haven’t figured out how. I want to make them be happy. I’m like a desperate mother.

The browsing assignment J and I devised isn’t going to work. We road tested it and it failed. It produced standing, not browsing, and it wasted time instead of connecting students with the pleasure of panning for gold. But it seems more important than ever that I learn how to teach this skill.

I read my poetry to a class last week and spoke to the students about why anyone would write poetry and one of the questions was, “Who were your influences?” Without thinking, I said: “Ogden Nash, Richard Brautigan, James Tate, and Emily Dickinson.”

Answering, in a flash I saw myself as a kid, reading Ogden Nash, browsed from my parents’ shelves, and Richard Brautigan—how that book got into my uncle’s study in Possum Trot, I will never know. (Perhaps my cousin’s boyfriend, the one who built a teepee in their backyard and stayed for a year, the one who got her Gypsie Rose, the raccoon she walked on a leash.). Those books fell into my lap. Literally. As did my next great influence, James Tate. I found him browsing the stacks of the library at

The students wrote down those names. And I realized: I’ve given the wrong answer.

These books found me. They weren’t my influences so much as this was: knowing how to be found by what books I needed at any given time. That process, not those people. That’s what influences a writer. 

This is what I want to go back and tell that class: Don’t write down those names. You need your books. You have to get found by your own influences. Mine won’t work for you. You have to read haphazardly and widely and in libraries and used bookstores (shiny bookstores rarely have the depth and weirdness required for real browsing—the waves just don’t break). You have to use your whole body, like an instrument, and slowly troll through the shelves. It’s harder to do this kind of surfing on a computer. It’s exactly like looking for shark’s teeth on the beach; it’s the very best kind of shopping in the world. You’re looking for a “click,” a connection. You can’t know exactly what it’s going to be until you open a page, and at random, reading the lines—boom, a part of the world comes into focus that you’ve always known about, but have never really seen, really known. 

I loved those four authors, and they shaped my work. The arrogant sweetness and plain language and philoso-cheese in Brautigan inspired me and I wrote hundreds of bad Brautigan poems. From Tate, I took oblique-clear, humor-devastation, physical shapes-lunar endings. He showed me how to go to the place where you write poems from. Just simply how to get to that place. From Nash, play!!! Language as something plastic as silly putty.

But they aren’t really my influences. Influences change constantly. Influences are whatever you in love with that day. Browsing is the way a writer works under the influence. It’s a full body collision with books; fingertips are not enough.  Anything you find yourself is better than something assigned to you.

How am I going to teach browsing?  It’s going to be like teaching  empathy or celadon.

And I want it to be like tying your shoes. Something you do every day.

Archery.

Basketball.

God.

Love.

Piano.

Salsa.

Soccer.

Writing.

Yoga.

True?  I’m not 100% sure but I’m pretty sure for all of these things, you have to have a teacher and students who are like you, trying to learn and practicing.  You learn all these things by doing them.  After you have started learning, and you know enough to articulate parts of what you can see but do not yet know how to do, then a book may be useful as augmentation, as flotation, as diversion, as icing, as food.  But you have to have a teacher. You have to go and practice the thing, supervised by someone who can tell you what you are doing (mirror) and show you what is possible (expertise).

I wonder if: you can learn cooking from a book. Until this morning, when my good planned food was so so different from what I’d expected (brave kind friend who tasted said “Definitely this would be an acquired taste”) I thought cooking could only be learned from books.

What else can only be learned not from a book and what can’t be at all, I wonder?

Memoir, our teacher, Abigail Thomas said, is all about what you leave out. Any book is. You have to write as one person in one time. A wife with a husband who is hit by a car. You leave out yourself as mother, the person you are as daughter, as a sister, your teacher self.  Mostly, when you write a book, you are leaving things out not putting things in.

A great example of this is the fabulous memoir, recommended to our class this summer by Abigail Thomas, My Family and Other Animals by Gerard Durrell (the famous naturalist). (If you are a fan of The Alexandria Quartet, you’ll especially love the portrait Gerry paints of his brother, Larry; Larry isn’t quite as interested in bugs, bats, snakes, ducks, magpies, scorpions…).  You have to read this book! It’s light and funny and wonderful. It’s called on the back cover “an idyll.” I’m not sure exactly what that means, but whatever an idyll really is, yes yes yes. This is perfection in the form of a book.

It’s rich and wise and reminded me of two things about making a good book. One.  It’s about what you leave out. By positioning his family members as “animals” under study, like his collection of turtles and fish and dogs, a young Gerry-narrator keeps the book about one thing. He’s surrounded by inexplicable but fascinating beasts—his teenage sister Margo (whose suitors parallel much in the animal world Gerry studies assiduously), his generous worrying indulgent mother, nudging her brood this way and that, etc. You get the crazy kid adventures in the animal world on a Greek island and you get the family—it’s all the same stuff to Gerry.  As beginning writers, we keep making this mistake. We keep putting in more. One idea per book.

Two. Kindness and love for flawed annoying people. We are all so in love with a variety of flawed people and literature exists to explain how that works and why. 

My students say this when they love something they read. At first, it bugged me a lot, this phrase—it seemed so lazy and self-centered. “I see my life and my concerns echoed in this work and therefore it is good work.” Then I remembered my job as teacher is to embrace their enthusiasms and fill my classroom with many relatable things.

And, my job as teacher is to show them, without judging them, that many other pieces of writing want to relate to them, want to say about them, as readers, you are so relatable, I love you.  And my job is to make afternoons where these introductions can take place.

It’s like going to the dog park. It can be kind of stressful and over-stimulating for everyone involved, all that territory to mark, everything really obviously completely up for grabs. All our little biases. Our lovely tastes. Our limited experiences.

The last time I read something that was not immediately relatable was when I lived in upstate New York and I decided I had to read Moby Dick and I started it again with very good, very relatable intentions. What are the Great Themes if not relatable? I trusted utterly that the old Mobe-ster wasn’t worried about relating to me. He knew he would.

I slipped away from him. Four nights later, I was back to lazy self centered reading. Astonishing delicious easier books. I have diminished myself. And gotten annoyed at my students, very convenient, instead of myself.

A great teaching moment is when the student says some version of “I couldn’t relate at all and this book changed me” or “I couldn’t relate, but I loved it.” The authors who did that for me in college were Nabokov, Tanazaki, O’Conner, Mailer, Updike, Bellow and Levertov.

 My friend J the librarian is helping me design an assignment for (re)introducing students to the lost art of browsing. No pop up menus! No yahoo ads. Just lost in the stacks, scrolling with your body not the pearl, unplugged, nowhere to be and all day to get there. I know the assignment is doomed to fail. It’s like insisting everyone have more fun at your party. It’s like begging someone to love you madly. But J is very, very clever and also superbly kind so it could possibly work.

Adam Elenbaas, local, MFA student at Georgia State College and University, and I did an interview for Reality Sandwich: http://www.realitysandwich.com/face_blindness .

He’s writing a good smart book about altered states; his father is a minister. You could say it’s kind of a collaboration.

While my computer did scary stuck things, I was staring at my desk, at my copy of Joan Didion’s beautiful, stunning, brilliant memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. The cover simply has her name and the title on it, and most of the letters are black, but four are a different color. It took me awhile to notice the colored letters spell J O H N.  The name of her husband. Who dies. Launching the year of magical thinking.  Whoever thought of this secret love letter–thank you. Ah. 

Delicious Highly Recommended Books Read Fall 2007

If You Lived Here I’d Know Your Name         Heather Lende

Safekeeping                                                       Abigail Thomas

Kafka Was the Rage                                         Anatole Broyard

Crashing Through                                              Robert Kurson

On the

The Last American Man                                    Elizabeth Gilbert

The Year of Magical Thinking                           Joan Didion

Mayflower                                                        Nathaniel Philbrick

Wish I Could Be There                                     Allen Shawn

Reading Writing Leaving Home                        

Boys of My Youth                                            JoAnn Beard

Dog Years                                                        Mark Doty

The Big House                                                 George Howe Colt

Waking                                                             Matthew Sanford

In the Shadow of Memory                                Floyd Skloot

The Polysyllabic

Clinging to the Wreckage                                  John Mortimer

Recollections of my Life as a Woman                Diane DiPrima

Breakable You                                                 Brian Morton

In Praise of Small Things                                   Anne Fadiman