I’ve just taken a peek at the first chapter of a ”debut” novel by a woman I used to know back in my salad days within the seemingly safe harbor of the Minnesota literary scene.
There were four writers per city block back then, and it appears, as I surf around, that there are at least eight today.
Those were golden times for me; I had real support and was part of a real community, with real friends. That’s three “real’s”— really. I was blessed with a number of good things– the attention of National Book Award winner Robert Bly, who founded the Minnesota Writers Publishing House, a collective, and edited my first chapbook, In Pursuit of the Family. I received a National Endowment for the Arts Award in Literature, as a poet. I was appointed full-time Poet in Residence for the St. Paul Schools– a job I held down for four years before returning to Colorado after my father died and I had to come home.
Together with the woman whose book I noticed last night and perused a little this morning, and other women, we organized for one another to break into what had been a male dominion for the most part. Google Women Poets of the Twin Cities and you’ll find a collector’s item.
I still remember being invited to this young writer’s apartment for dinner. I even remember that she made something with brown rice and fresh vegetables in it. I remember that I was having a very rough time, and had started to talk to her when she stopped me.
“What makes you think I want to hear about all of your problems?” she asked. ”What makes you assume that I’m even interested?”
I remember how it felt to take this in the solar plexus, and the shame that drenched me.
This is not an isolated incident in my experience. Can there be anything more painful than to take a hit from another woman? I doubt it. Many of us have had hard lessons where men are concerned, but don’t we view other women as sisters, as other mirror images of Eve herself?
And remembering this makes me feel that we should all take a long hard look at what we mean when we use the word “community” or the word “network” –and especially, the word “friend”: are we honest? Do we really value each other?
Those of us who keep on despite uphill battles, who have overcome many obstacles and are still fully clothed and in our right minds, much less engaged in a writing life, should be accorded all due respect. Period. We have not walked in each other’s moccasins.
For me there is but one overall solution: to enjoy community, and the building of platforms but not depend upon these things. To support one another with gentle honesty and sustained communication: the two biggies, but to never assume that you are making a life-long friend, even though that can and does happen.
And most of all, because people do get claimed by their own daily lives, and fallings out are part of being human, to cultivate self-love and not need anyone else to tell us that we are good writers or bad, or that our lives and work have beauty, meaning and purpose.
We have all heard this ad nauseam but perhaps that’s because it is true: without self-love and self-respect, it doesn’t matter who validates you: it could be God herself.
The Compulsion to Blurt…
Suddenly everyone is writing memoir, present company included. But this raises some questions for me:
Why? Why has this become such a popular genre. It used to be that you had to live a full life to have anything to say about it all.
Especially, your culture and era had elevated you to “interesting person” status: a figure figuring in the scheme of things.
This seems to be changing. Suddenly there is a panoply of people, principally women writers, writing “memoir”. Calling themselves “memoirists.” O.K. Now we have a canon of memoir and the mss keep on coming: ask any editor indie or not about the slush pile.
Writing memoir has been popularized in large measure, within literary communities and creative writing programs. Being around other writers triggers writers to write, but the danger is just as that peril existing in a flock of birds: if one goose heads slightly to the east, could the rest get hung up on telephone wire? Over time, do not the members of a flock begin to resemble each other, evolving into maddening similitude?
In other words, how do you protect your voice, your perspective, the history of your time as you have lived it? This goes, of course to the subject of community again. Some bloggers are going so far as to call M.F.A. programs “mills”, and I have to agree.
You can grow as a writer and fortify your technical foundation getting an M.F.A. If you want to be a teaching writer, you pretty much have to get it these days and even then, outshine everyone else with, at least, the brilliance of your oeuvre.
But the heavy guns in such programs can influence a malleable, growing writer to the detriment of developing his or her own voice. And, as happened to me, the mentors you worship can have feet of clay.
Regarding writing one’s memoirs, it seems wise to consider what the point of one’s telling of a life story is. It seems doubly wise to consider that you believe: a. that your personal history is part of a cultural and historical narrative b. that you are prepared to strive to bring that larger tapestry to life and c. that you are as gifted in the use of language as Mozart is with an “allegro ma non troppo”…
Possibly, writing memoir is crying in the cheap seats. It’s the easy way to tell a story; no need for character development; drop in the memory of a summer day in your great-aunt’s back yard, evoke it and presto; thou hast written. Thou hast produced. Call it memoir then, and it gets elevated to the status of ART. Even better, sensationalize yourself: embellish away, and write an expose’ with yourself at the center, as Andrew Young just did re John Edwards’ fall from grace.
Now. I’ve been telling people I’m writing a memoir, but I’m having second thoughts. I’m starting to feel like I’m swelling a progress here– see the poem Prufrock for that reference…or Shakespeare/Hamlet.
I think that I’m going to start saying that I am writing a series of personal vignettes. Will that set me apart? Or will it be craft. Elegant, even beautiful writing. Balancing the poignant with the hilarious, the tragic with the hopeful. Personal experience showing forth universal truths and the dilemmas of our humanity. Wow. And I thought that I’ve been suffering with the death of ambition…
2 comments | tags: Memoir-- Segments, venting, writing | posted in Politics and Commentary