Jennifer Niesslein: Who Are You?

My son got his driver’s license this summer. It’s a milestone that stirred up mixed emotions in me, among them the feeling of weirdness that I—me! who still occasionally freaks that she’s in charge of a machine that could kill someone!—have a child old enough to be a designated driver.

It seems to me that adulthood is seeded with these moments of feeling out new realities. I wrote my first obituary in 2010. I helped with a Match.com profile for a friend who hasn’t dated in over twenty years. I’ve watched friends start new careers in mid-life, deal with their parents’ growing dependency, and face unexpected health crises. And I edit Full Grown People, an online magazine dedicated to situations like these.

If I can get meta on you (and I think I can), my work as an editor sometimes feels a little unreal to me, too: that I—me! who never saw a bookstore proper until she was in middle school!—get to edit essays by writers whose work I admire so deeply. I don’t mean this in an Aw, shucks way. I’m quite good at my job and I have fabulous taste. But I have the heart of a reader.

When I read submissions, I do it as a reader first, editor second. I accept and solicit work that I’d want to share with my friends (you HAVE to read this, people). Obviously, great writing is the main quality I look for, but “great writing” is more easily defined by what it’s not—no frog-marching readers through events, for example, or passing off a diary entry for an essay—than what it is. 

I can tell you that I’m most drawn to work that shows who the writer is. By that, I mean voice—that barely describable literary fingerprint that links the writing to its creator—but I also mean something beyond that. I like essays that show how a particular mind works, how the life experiences of the writer affected him in ways subtle and obvious, where the writer has found herself in the context of her culture’s social pecking order, how a writer makes sense of the world.

Essays that have a strong sense of who the writer is invite a sort of collusion with the reader. Take “The Bridge” by Amy E. Robillard. She opens with:

He cuts off my bridge piece by piece and I can feel the spikes in the places where my front teeth used to be and I can’t look him in the eye and we can’t make small talk because I can’t talk but even if I could talk, what could I possibly say? With spikes in the places teeth are supposed to be, a person is not a person anymore. I’m no longer intelligent or self-confident or smart or funny or a professor or a wife or a sister or a friend. I’m someone you couldn’t bear to look at, someone whose eyes you couldn’t bear to meet.

Yep, We’re here with her because we know what she knows: In the U.S., otherwise healthy people with crappy teeth are either poor or addicted or both. Her opening is an invitation and a challenge. You might also consider yourself intelligent and funny and a friend, but you aren’t Amy E. Robillard. Your mom insisted that you brush twice a day and your dad taught you to floss. Or maybe they didn’t; maybe Amy E. Robillard could be you.

I don’t know who all of Full Grown People’s readers are, but I do know that my reading friends—those people who share my taste and enthusiasm—aren’t all like me. Which is to say they aren’t all middle-class, middle-aged, straight, married, able-bodied, white women. In 2015, it shouldn’t be some sort of political statement to publish more than one, say, writer of color, but it is. (The Canon: “I’m sorry. We’ve already appointed your generation’s appointed Woman Essayist of Color. Please be born again later.” Not that the actual appointees pretend to represent anyone other than themselves—and often champion other writers.) I’m interested in a diversity of voices and not tokens of diversity.

And the canon-makers are missing out on some great stuff. Deesha Philyaw in “How Can You Be Mad at Someone Who’s Dying of Cancer?” is uniquely herself by admitting to feelings of anger toward her mom—who has cancer—and by sharing their history, fraught with class and other issues. She’s also hitting on a universal theme of loss. An excerpt:

“The church was selling fish dinners today.”

“You shouldn’t be eating fried foods.” 

“Oh, girl. I pulled the fried part off.” 

But what about fruits and vegetables? Whole grains? But I know the answer to that. Cancer is no match for five decades of emotional and cultural eating. So I shut my mouth because the last time I tried to talk about what was broken in me-her-us, she accused me of always using “big words and psychological terms,” when in fact I had used no words larger than, “I can’t do this with you anymore. I’m calling a cab, and I’m leaving.” My college education and my intellect were apparently weapons I wielded to intimidate her. One day out of the blue when I was in my thirties, she said, “I finally found the word to describe the way you made me feel your whole life: intimidated.”

Okay. Maybe there’s a theme here. Maybe it’s that I have a soft spot for essays that are about negotiating two worlds (or more) because that’s been my own experience. Maybe the takeaway is that every editor is subject to these biases because we’re people with specific tastes and preferences and reasons why we say yes or no. Maybe it’s time we stopped pretending that the canon-makers don’t have their own tastes that are formed by lives that are privileged or not.

Please—oh good god, please—don’t think that I’m the sort of jackass who believes she invented this. I’ve learned from other editors. And none of us are probably fully accredited canon-makers. But there’s no harm in acting like I am one, and I’m glad to promote all the essays on Full Grown People. I’m happy to be able to bring readers to writing like Robillard’s and Philyaw’s—and Jody Mace’s.

Her mind and voice are singular, like all of ours. But, um, maybe even more so. An excerpt of Mace’s “The Population of Me,” an essay about reaching the end of her child-bearing years. (To appreciate this, you also need to know that when a girl is born, her ovaries hold the same number of eggs as the population of San Jose):

I know we can’t always get along. We need to argue about important things like the environment and the economy. We also need to argue about things that don’t matter, like the Oxford Comma and whether leggings are pants, because written into our blueprints are brains that want to make sense of things, that want to nail down the rules. Also written into our blueprints is the desire to have the last word. 

But still, every so often I meet someone and I’m struck by the unlikelihood that I exist and that she exists and that we’re in the same place, having a conversation, and we understand the words that the other says. And I feel a connection to her. When I read about a crime, I sometimes think about both the perpetrator and the victim and feel an almost unbearable sadness that there are perpetrators and victims, after all the work that was done behind the scenes, within the warm, dark factory of the human body, to bring them into the world. I think about my ghost San Jose, and all the other ghost San Joses, and about how we’re the ones who made it into the outside world. We should be a little gentler with each other. We should be gentler with ourselves.

As a writer myself, I know that to write an essay in which you reveal who you are isn’t easy. When I first started writing for publication in the early nineties, I mimicked the voice of MTV News’s Kurt Loder; if I could hear Loder say it, I knew it was okay. It took me years to come close to something like my own voice, and even more years before I could write an essay that I’d find publishable in Full Grown People.

But the great thing that happened when I reached that level? I realized that only I could write me. Only you can write you. Writers aren’t competing with other writers—only our own last drafts.



Jennifer Niesslein is the editor of Full Grown People as well as two anthologies: Full Grown People: Greatest Hits, Volume One (2014) and Soul Mate 101 and Other Essays on Love and Sex (2015). You can order them at the FGP site. She’s also the author of Practically Perfect in Every Way (2007). Her personal website is JenniferNiesslein.com.

Chelsey Clammer: Lying in the Lyric

I know I can make this all poetic and shit, can find some metaphor to wrap this essay up in—give it some pretty pauses and illuminating illusions. Or, hell, I can wallow in the sorrow of the story that I’m not quite sure I want to tell you yet with some soft, long sounds, avoiding words with k, with that hard c, sidestepping the cackle of the stark ch.

Instead, I can soak in the l’s and s’s, meander my way around some w’s and hit an r or two to give certain ideas and sentences more emphasis.

Right?

There.

Some one-word paragraphs.

Beautiful.

And here’s ________.

An incomplete sentence.

I know the poetic pretense here can proficiently populate the reader’s inner parenthesis with some self-deflecting linguistic tricks, can expose myself not through sentienting but swaying, as in persuading sentences, traversing into the categorical territory of “vulnerable” as I raw myself out with words such as emotive, mawkish, expostulate, lugubrious—the ones that are big hits on the GRE vocabulary test.

***Then I can throw in a triplet of asterisks***

Now, in this post-uber-lyric-ized moment, I find that to be a futile task.

Because there’s no lyric or lovely, no poetic way to say I’ve been lying to you lately.

*

According to its popular opinion-ed definition, there shouldn’t be any prescribe-able form to the lyric essay. That would defeat the purpose of a lyric essay’s elemental and unconventional innovation. Though I could tell you about the characteristics I have come across—which may at some point include the term vulnerable, or more likely brave, and how I have started to despise the exaltation of that latter concept in regards to writing nonfiction. One could say that in order to gain readership, one could take a traumatic (read: vulnerable) experience and transform it into a type of art, could dress it up with lyric language and bring poetry to the pain in order to honor it. But that’s not being vulnerable. That’s called being deflective and pretty.

*

Here, I will begin to address you, because you could be the person I’m lying to, and while you most likely are not that person—I am, after all, admitting to a lie and therefore am hoping you don’t read this—if you do read this then I’ll hope that you, like all you readers, assume I am not addressing you, but the general “you” as a literary device to bring you (the reader) more into this confessional essay.

It makes you a part of this.

Part of pain art is sharing.

You’ll be more receptive to my lying if I can find a lyrical way to admit all of this. My command of language can bring you into a more conceptual space—how I can distract you with beauty, because what I have to tell you is ugly.

So far, I think this is working.

We are now a third of the way into this essay and all I’ve really done is make a vague (yet so vulnerable!) admittance that I have been lying to you lately. The subject of said lie is still silent, because I’m still clearing my throat.

And now I’ll add in a beautiful quote in order to give you an image not of me doing that thing I’m lying about, but to ricochet away from, to delay my confession.

“I live between mountains and take my smallness, like a pill, upon waking.”—Catherine Pierce

The lie is not that I haven’t been taking my medication.

The lie is not that I wake up angry each day because I’m still alive.

The lie has nothing to do with my body.

That’s a lie.

It’s time to lay this all out for you, because if I take this any further, the suspense in this essay is going to fizzle.

If it hasn’t already started to.

*

Elements of a lyric essay: Metaphor. Research. Memoir. Pace. Poeticism. Odd concepts. Fragments. Surprising verb and/or noun-turned-verb (ie, a noun verbed). Surprising structure. Surprising imagery. Unconventional associations. Juxtaposition. A declarative and/or witty and/or telling title. Subtle humor via wordplay. Quirky way of looking at and addressing the theme(s). At least one paragraph so elusive that even the author isn’t quite sure of what she’s trying to say.

*

Mandatory elusive paragraph:

“Lie” is a word of which I’ve learned how to live, live with. With this word tucked into my pocket—into my little pocket of my lie-filled world—I’ve created a cornerstone of my life based on living myself into the corner of a liar identity, an identification with (the) (“)lying(”).

*

Actually, I’m not certain I’m anti-fizzling. Don’t I want all of this to go away? Don’t I want to keep up the lie and continue to fade into each day? Don’t I want you to think that everything’s fine, that of course I’ve been eating, and so of course isn’t it true that I don’t want you to discover that lie for as long as I can lay it down in the air between us?

We have arrived at the setup of the lie.

Yes, I’ve been eating. True story. But at thirty-two-years-old, I have yet to figure out how to not un-swallow.

Lately, each day, I’ve been puking.

Always, every second, I’ve been hating my body.

Shame prompts lies. Everything’s fine. Here, look at this beautiful line:

Tell me then what will render the body alive?

That’s not actually my line.

It’s Jorie Graham’s.

But it is my question.

*

You can’t prescribe a lyric essay. There is no take two fragments and call your asterisks in the morning of the next chunk of white space offered. Something just dawned on me. I tell my freelance clients that, when you have no clue what the hell to do next in your essay, or even if you have no idea what the hell you’re actually doing in an essay, then lyric the shit out of said essay. Get all hybrid-ish with it (which, though phonetically identical, is not the same as a European person under the influence of marijuana, a “high British” person). Scoot yourself into a hermit crab’s shell and see if thinking about your vulnerabilities (read: confessed lies) in the form of a job application brings some awesomeness to your essay.

Name: Bulimic.
Previous work history: Clinical Director of the Surplus Food Non-digestion Department.
Education: BA in Sound Muffling.

*

I could end this on an apology. I could end this with a plea. I’m going to end this quietly, sneaking off to a space where I can be alone and do my thing and hopefully you can’t hear me.

This is called muffling. Hushing. The let’s move on already-ing.

And now I need a metaphor or a statement that will tie this all together, that will circle back to the beginning, because my life is a cycle (fill empty fill empty fill empty fill) but all I can feel now, post-revealing, is the stark separation of mind and body because of my shame, because of sharing. Now I can only hear the harsh sounds of k, of c, of ch, and even of q. I question the chasm created by killer li(n)es.

*

One should mention hiding behind form. Or, to not have every essayist hate me for such a statement, one should instead mention content shaping into form. Or, complex content contemplated through an unconventional structure.

*

I must admit, I don’t know much about face-to-face confessions. I deal with the world through my words. Though I know that feel of vulnerability when letting go, when letting it all out. A laundry-drying cliché of sorts. Though perhaps a more apt word to use in this specific essay is purge.

You’ll still love me, trust me now that I’ve told you all of this?

Right?

There.

Some one-word paragraphs used for prevention and protection from facing you.

Beautiful.

And here’s ________.

THIS:

A switch in point of view and now I can hide behind you.

You admit a lie. You know you need to stop doing this. You don’t know if you’re talking about the lying you need to quit or the puking. You just know you need to stop doing something. You don’t know how to stop doing anything. You are addicted to everything. You don’t understand how you became such a hot mess, though you wonder if it has anything to do with how you dress the ugly realities of your existence with creative sentences. You refract, though hopefully not repel. You realize every sentence in this paragraph begins with you. You know that’s not okay. But (!) it works so well to hide in writing, to let the conversation curve around vulnerability and into craft. What a great point of view we have going on here. Let’s talk more about that. Let’s look at juxtaposition and pacing out a fragmented narrative arch.

Let’s get over it.

Be done with it. 

*

If this essay is published it will prove three things:

1. People understand what a lyric essay is
2. I’m holding myself accountable to my indiscretions
3. I’m counting on this confession to make this my final purge



Chelsey Clammer is an award-winning essayist who has been published in The Rumpus, Essay Daily, The Water~Stone Review and Black Warrior Review among many others. She is the Essays Editor for The Nervous Breakdown, Founding Editor of www.insideoutediting.com, and is an editorial intern for Graywolf Press. Her first collection of essays, BodyHome, was released from Hopewell Publishing in Spring 2015. Her second collection of essays, There Is Nothing Else to See Here, is forthcoming from The Lit Pub, Winter 2015. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.com.

Jason Tucker & Amy Monticello: Other Fathers, Other Rooms

We are continually finding new ways to explain the essay anthology we're putting together, Other Fathers, Other Rooms. One way is to say we’re trying to collect many different stories from many different kinds of fathers who must each do their fathering in very different circumstances. Another way is to say we’re interested in how we can all redefine what fatherhood means or can mean in an age when we’re redefining what gender means and not so firmly holding parents to the expectations of traditional gender roles. Still another way is to say we’re exploring what it means to parent, or not to parent, or to occupy that space where parents become parents—or don’t—from a place of ambivalence, uncertainty, or the collision of many big, contradictory feelings.

If this goes well, we’ll follow with a similar anthology that does similar boundary-blurring work with contemporary motherhood. We’re starting with fathers because fathers have fewer conventional narratives told about them. There aren’t as many “single stories” (to borrow a term from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) of fatherhood, and we aren’t looking for one. Right now in America, we may be in a place where no generation-defining icon of fatherhood has emerged, and we see it as a great opportunity to hear stories and voices that might otherwise be marginalized, that might not fit into easy categories and character types. We’re wondering what we’ll learn when we invite a multiplicity of stories, instead of trying to replace a single expired archetype with a single new one.

So we’re inviting everyone: fathers and not-fathers, men and not-men. When we consider social and economic factors, health and disability, the influence of place and local culture, variations in family structure, non-normative gender and sexual identities, distance from extended family, access to other support systems, race, class, education, law and public policy, negotiating the workplace as a parent, and everything else that collides in one person’s life to create an individually complex experience of fatherhood, we can begin to stop projecting our own parenting onto other people who live in rooms that are not our own. We can push the edges of the term “fatherhood” to find they places where they remain rigid, and those places where they will inevitably blur, dissolve, collapse.

Our laws and public policies are built on the narratives we tell about who we all are and how we all live. So in order for these laws and policies to account for everyone, the stories we tell must account for everyone first. Paternity leave and maternity leave, for example, are actually the same issue. And it is a feminist issue. They are only justifiably separate when we maintain moldering assumptions about gender roles, work, parenting, and many other things.

The same goes for the stories we tell about all sorts of fathers and mothers and people who are neither. We all need more stories.

We’ll consider any form or style of nonfiction, including graphic nonfiction. Essays can be brief, but we’ll accept submissions up to about 5,000 words. We’ll consider previously published work as long as the author retains the publication rights. Submit by November 1 to otherfathersotherrooms@gmail.com.

You can read more and follow our blog here.  



Jason Tucker teaches writing at Suffolk University and at GrubStreet. His essays have appeared in journals including The Southeast Review, River Teeth, Cream City Review, The Common, Waccamaw, Sweet, Prime Number, and the anthology Going Om. He received an MFA at Ohio State University, and in addition to this anthology, he is currently at work on essays dealing with his home territories in rural Alabama and other essays parsing out contemporary parenthood. He lives in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, MA with his wife, Amy Monticello, and their daughter, Benna, for whom he's been a mostly-stay-at-home parent.

Amy Monticello is the author of Close Quarters (Sweet Publications), a memoir-in-essays about divorce and family restructuring. Her essays have appeared in a wide variety of venues, including Creative Nonfiction, The Iron Horse Literary Review, Brevity, Redivider, Upstreet, Waccamaw, Salon, The Rumpus, and Role/Reboot. She is currently at work on a new memoir about grieving through early motherhood, and has served as nonfiction editor at Prime Number magazine. Amy received her MFA at The Ohio State University, and teaches creative writing and literature at Suffolk University. She lives in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, MA with her husband, fellow co-editor Jason Tucker, and their one-year-old daughter, Benna.

Dissociation Versus Distance--Nicole Walker

Sometimes, I read student essays that remind me of sitting on the bus, next to a very chatty person, who tells me about her relationship to the chair she’s sitting on (she once sat on a seat similar to this when she was visiting her friend Jane who had cancer but now she doesn’t) or  her belief about stop signs (why so many? Do we have to stop? What about those cars just running through?) the time she stopped at the store we’re passing (7-11, 99 cents for three hot dogs) or the hat of the guy sitting in front of us (is it beige? Or gray? Or beige gray?).

            I care about her story because I like my students and I care because people are generally interesting, but “thoughts while riding the bus” is not an essay yet. Until she can see me as audience, she can’t make me care about the bus situation. And, until she sees herself as a character on a bus, explaining to me why she’s talking to me, she won’t be able to see me at all.

            Writers live in their heads but that’s the problem. No one wants to be in anyone’s head for very long. Or in their hearts. They are sad. I understand. I am sad too. They are in love. So am I. They are not sure if this choice was the right one, if their parents were good or bad, if their writing reaches anyone at all. Neither am I. We are sad. We are in love. We are not sure.  But that’s not quite enough to make an essay. We want to feel it like you feel it and this means that you can’t be you, writey one, any more. You have to put yourself in a character on the page if you’re going to affect the reader in the way that you have been affected. For this to happen, you need distance between yourself narrator and yourself character on the page. It’s ironic that to get the reader closer to you, character, the narrator ‘you’  has to step away.

            I tell my students, put your body in a place. The idea that they separate the subject (themselves) from the direct object (themselves) begins the process of separation. That moving the body around like it’s a mannequin on display is the first step in getting the reader to see the narrator as a human. For some reason, telling someone you are sad does not make you seem human or make you seem sad. It makes you seem boring. Who isn’t sad? Get over it. I am sooooo sad, I can hear the junior high school boys mocking.

            You cannot feel sorry for yourself. Maybe the best thing is to lie to yourself on the page. Maybe sadness begins there, with the language.

            “I was so happy. You could tell by the way my eyes flipped up toward the ceiling. On the ceiling was the happiness, writ large, like a cupcake. All things good are ceilinged and cupcaked. You cannot tell me differently. I walked to the edge of the kitchen. There is no sadness in corners.”

            You turn yourself into two people. The straightforward talking narrator and the action-filled character.  You make space between the narrator “I” who says, “We all had so much fun making cookies” and the way you move your character “I” across the floor, “I still like to think of myself as the one everyone picked on, even though it was I, who, at four, walked over to where my two year old brother was sitting on the floor and hit him over the head with the rolling pin. Not the plastic one.”

            The reader, with the narrator, believes people want to be good. But that same reader, reading the scene, second guesses the narrator. She wants to put her hand between the narrator’s rolling pin and the brother’s head while, at the same time, remembers bonking her own little brother on the head for being too cute too. She empathizes with the narrator. She also feels sorry for the brother. She sees the narrator’s point of view. People want to be good. Sometimes, they are not. The reader, in the space between character, narrator, and brother, sees her point.  

             

            The site, as well as the sight, of the body is a catalyst for empathy. What reader doesn’t have a body? Make them feel that rolling pin in their hand, that bonk upon the head.  By putting distance in between the narrator and the character brings the reader in closer.

            But sometimes the writer, in order to get to the narrator, even before she can get to the character, must employ more drastic artifice. There are difficult things to talk about, like brothers and rolling pins, and then there are impossible things to talk about like rape and torture and murder. And for the essay, because the narrator is part of the scene, how they treat the matter is not only an aesthetic problem but an ethical one. How do you put your story on the page so that it is visible while still making sure there’s room for the reader to breathe, respond, to understand that you, writer, created this art, this artifice, gave this an affect, while still experiencing the actual pain. The reader needs space to turn around. It can’t all be aestheticized or it will read as artifice because then the lyricism is only a non-reactive spackle on the drywall of the reader—no longer active for the narrator/character/writer. And if lyricism is only catharsis for the writer, then it’s not writing, it’s therapy.

            My friend and colleague, Laura Gray-Rosendale’s book, College Girl, came out last year. The book is divided in half. The first half recounts her rape experientially, in scene. The second half situates the rape in terms of how to write about rape and what strategies she used to both convey the actual violence and the difficulty of writing about it. More than using distance, she dissociates, even on the page. The narrator/character is both in her dorm room and outside of it. She writes about the narrator/character in the third person, “The college girl gags.” She, the narrator, zooms out while the narrator/character also zooms away. How will she survive this rape? The same way she will survive writing this scene. At the end of the scene, she dissociates, nearly disappears. “The college girl’s breathings harder now. She tries to jostle her sock from her mouth. Tears are caterpillaring down the college girl’s cheeks. She sucks at the air from her mouth corners. She extends her neck toward the streetlight. Delicate spidery rainbows shimmer before her, jump rope along her lashes. And she’s sure. There’s never been anything more magnificent, more full of glorious-dazzling, fairy light magic—never been a more heavenly beautiful. Am I dead? The college girl wonders (25).

            The narrator and the writer are both up in the streetlight looking down at the body of the woman being raped. They all had to get away from her to see it. They all had to get away from her to experience it. To remember it. And to write about it. She ends the chapter writing in merely fragments: “i. am. over.” Three periods between three words. No capital letters. The narrator, character, and writer are simultaneously completely absent and completely present. Perhaps you can only get a whole experience through self-annihilating effects.

            In part two of her book, Laura, having spent years writing and revising the book, having become a professor of rhetoric, having written scholarly articles on the rhetoric of trauma, says of the experience writing the book that she had to write the rape scene 20 times before getting it right. She wrote it with standard narrative distance but that seemed stilted and over-tidy. An arm’s length narrative aestheticized the scene, thereby anesthetizing the reader. She also wrote it entirely in fragmented sentences, no capital letters, but that seemed too affected, too lyrical to actually put the body on the page.

            Finally, after 19 revisions, in her twentieth she came across combination of scene-setting, reader-orienting distance and lyrical, affected, literal, even psychotropic dissociation that made it possible for the writing to be effective, having made a place for the reader to both see and experience.

In working on this essay, I realized I have three separate essays called Dissociation. One is about owls and sex and my daughter and how weird it is that you can roll around naked on the bed with your kid and have not even a sexual thought but if you think about not having thoughts, let yourself think that it’s weird that you’re thinking about how weird it is, that you immediately have to get up from the bed and put clothes on. The minute you see yourself seeing yourself, you can begin to extrapolate some meaning. Here’s a bit from the essay:

I lie on the bed with Zoë who is asleep and smell her hair and think, it’s because I’m her mom that I can do this. I can stroke her arm. I can kiss her neck. There is a reason I can do this, I justify. I’m her mom. But that thought makes me dissociate. I hover above and see myself kissing her and it looks weird: too intimate.  I scoot over, move away. Was this moving away the beginning of the gap? Is it my own nervousness this is where there would be space enough for someone else to move in and make her body familiar? Her familiar body was mine, cultivated by me. But someone else will find it wild and want to make it theirs. I would have done anything if she would stay three years old and under the crook of my arm forever but my arm would cramp and her head would itch and we’d both start talking about our favorite foods and get hungry and have to get up. Our bodies usually win these arguments.

            In another essay, called Dissociation about how we can eat meat even after we’ve looked the cow in the eye. I write how we have to dissociate one experience from another so we can live with ourselves and eat our meat. Hypocritically, dissociatively, we can do it all. Here’s a little excerpt from that essay.

Hamburger is muscle turned to vegetable. You don’t want to think muscle. You want to chew very little. You want to swallow before you can think about the sad doe eyes. In the face of the accusing animal, you can solidly deny you knew what you were doing.

But what’s worse.?Finding joy in licking the rib clean? Of polishing the bone? Or letting the process happen behind closed doors for you by a grinder, a man in a once-white apron, by knives and forks not your own. You brought only your mouth to the table but it masticates to the same beat as mine.

And the third essay is about suicide and dissociation—how too much dissociation can lead you to see yourself as completely separate from the world and from yourself and that artists, especially one’s writing their self-portraits, have to remind themselves to stitch themselves back into the whole scene once in a while. From the essay:

             In 1948, Sir Fred Hoyle said, “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” The first astronaut to get above the earth, to look back upon it to say, that is we. We are they. The whole of humanity in his lens. He tried to hold all the humanity, to hold it perfect and steadily with his Nikon. But the earth is more fragile than that. The pictures of the earth taken in 1969 will not be the same as the pictures taken in 2014. You can see the Kennecott Copper Mine’s swath cut into space. You can see brown where the once green Amazon rain forest used to be. Where once were sheets of ice, now blues of sea.

            That ability to dissociate—to look from above. You think it would make us save ourselves but like the art of the suicides, maybe the picture postcard was just that. A postcard. A memory trapped by a stamp.

Dissociation happens at interludes, after moments of too intense, close-up emotional work. Distance comes from tone—a kind of tone that is flat throughout the piece. Dissociation can become distance if it’s practiced throughout the whole of the piece. In Brenda Miller’s short essay Swerve, she is distant at first, telling us a narrative with normal-length sentences from a detached point of view. But once the second paragraph begins and the sentences get crazy long and intense, the narrator is no longer just distant, she has changed from distant to dissociated. We read by the end of the essay how: she gained distance through repetition and over time, effected by long sentences, and now the last line of the essay takes us back to the title and first line to re-read, to re-see how the narrator had to leave, get away, re-see herself to write the first paragraph that got her to her second. She had to dissociate to see herself in between the first and second paragraph.. If she had been merely distant, she would have remained the same across the essay. Because she dissociated, she not only could see the change, she could effect the change.

            Back on the bus, we need to see that change. The chatty talker seeing herself, and then, maybe even seeing herself see herself, a meta moment where she asks, what am I doing on the bus? Why is Nicole here with me? Then there will be some distance, an expectation that I, reader, know why it matters. Until the dissociation happens, until the writer actually comes on to the page and does some writerly work, like put the character in a streetlight or put the mom naked on the bed or swirl the sentences like toilet water, the reader is not sure where we’re going. In Laura Gray-Rosendale’s book, the point of the book is dissociation. She separated from the world. She could see herself. The act of writing herself helped stitch herself back into the world. In Brenda Miller’s Swerve, the writer comes in and messes up the light bulbs and the light from the window and the light from the brakes on the car until her piled up images let her see herself.  The narrator-character is transformed because the writer broke completely, at least for a moment, from the narrator-character. Now, as she returns to the end of the essay, she’s returned herself to herself. Now, thanks to distance, less extreme than dissociation, we know how she is changed. 

            On the bus, the bus rider sees the things she passes but she doesn’t see herself sitting there talking to me. If she saw herself talking to me, she’d tell me why she’s telling me about the hot dogs. They remind her of the time when she was ten and she ate fourteen in a row. This would be distance which is the first step toward perspective. If then, she started comparing the rigors of bus-riding, all that people talking, store watching, intersection crossing with the difficulty of talking to another person on the bus while remembering the difficulty of swallowing that last hot dog and how, if you really think about it, we are all on the bus all the time, all swallowing our words and our hot dogs, waiting to get off so we can get back on and tell that story of the last bus ride to a new bus rider then the bus rider would be dissociating, and thus, be writing an essay.

Writing Your Own Truth

In this first installment of Writing The Ellipsis writer César Díaz explores a memoirist’s struggle between having a unique artistic vision while adhering to factual truth. Should one have to? And what is the reader’s role in all of this?

“Write your truth and the reader gotta figure it out.” –Ta-Nehisi Coates

Since memoir is itself a narrative art, one that relies on the shaping of the memoirists’ vantage point to show a distinct experience, then the challenge the memoirist faces is to figure out a way to have a reader’s overall trust. The construction of narrative out of one’s past, the creation of characters out of people one knows, their placement in a reimagined world, is as Michael Ondaatje refers to as an “improvisation” that contains elements of “history, fantasy, [and] fact” and thus an unreliable form. The argument that often comes up when discussing memoir and memory, its allegiance to the facts and truth, shouldn’t be about what’s factual (true) and fictionalized (untrue), but an argument about the readers’ suspension of disbelief. That’s the fiction writer’s largest task, to craft a story out of nothing and demand that readers give in. But this is our task too! Yet, the memoirist grapples with having an artistic vision and a presumed obligation to truth. Like the literary essay, the memoir not only attempts self-inquiry but also seeks a deeper meaning within a lived experience. This meaning remains selective no matter how much fact is used, therefore rendering it nearly impossible to adhere to a singular truth. This is why the memoirist must craft their own truth with an authentic honest voice and trust that readers give in to the journey.

By “crafting,” I mean that the memoirist actively manipulates past experiences, displaying them for a reader in ways that shows the author has willingly sought a deeper significance. Most readers are willing to accept an author’s intent as long as they don’t feel slighted or duped. Readers of memoirs come to them for a great story, but also seek to understand the author’s sensibility by tracking how they arrived at their truth. But as an aspiring memoirist, how does one balance honoring truth while incorporating one’s inventive narrative and still engaging a readers’ belief?

When I first began to write the very first iteration of my family’s story in graduate school, my workshop mates likened what I wrote to a sort of “myth-making,” where my life as a migrant farm-working child was elevated as a method for detaching myself from an overall reality. Since I lived inside books and in my head, my childhood perspective that told the story wasn’t actual but an imagined reality assumed in order to impart a way of life rarely shared in literature. My workshop readers never questioned my truth or its basis in an authentic reality. This shocked me because I felt what I had written was almost entirely out of improvisation that felt like fiction to me. In the writing of the narrative, I never bothered to check details with my family or check that it held to some verifiable truth. What I understood as I wrote was that my story existed within me. The memories were how I remembered them, yet I felt ashamed and confused. They were my stories and my truth after all and for me that was enough. But once it became public, despite that it was only shared within the confines of a writing workshop, I was struck with dread. I felt so indebted to upholding the truth that I felt like a hack. This anxiety struck me to the point that I stopped writing in fear that the nonfiction police were out to get me.

Years later, as I returned to complete my memoir, I felt the duty to build a narrative out of my childhood experiences that was cemented on solid fact. I sat my parents down one summer afternoon and drilled them with questions, many of which were meant to help gain a larger perspective on the situations and circumstances that I remembered as a child. What I discovered was that everything I was brought up in understanding about myself and my brothers, my mother and father, and how we elected to follow the migrant circuit across United States for the first twelve years of my life—all of it was wrong. Then when I approached my brothers, both who were far older than me at the time, with my findings, their take on what they recalled led me to more confusion. All of a sudden that life story I had been telling myself since I was a kid, that made me who I am now, was somehow now fractured and flawed.

I found myself at another impasse, but this time I embraced Ondaatje’s idea of a constructed self, one that told a narrative through improvisation, relying on the things that struck with me throughout my childhood: my imagination, the migrant fields, and books. If my memoir embraces its unreliable form, then the way I get closer to charting my personal history of how it felt for me at the time was to write it as imperfectly authentic as I could. Even if it means that my singular truth is one that recedes and melts away. Not a lie, but an alternate take. But are readers willing to accept this imagined reality?

One of the first things I wrote addressed this very impasse:

“I wonder is imagination not apt for memoir? Can [memoirists] use imagination as a way to chart experience? I did so as a child and find now doing so again. Was the alternate reality I had in my mind not valid, even when I lived and understood the world through it? Then, these pages, my words, story and life is my attempt at fusing those selves: imagination boy, the migrant boy, and later on in childhood, the scholarship boy.”

 Recently, Vivian Gornick discussed the legitimacy of the memoir as an artful form that “must be composed” to deliver on narrative drive rather than factuality. Gornick sees the memoirist as having full responsibility of shaping their experience in any way as long as the author’s intent remains genuine and everything isn’t made up. She calls on us to acknowledge the memoir as containing this crucial element. She further suggests that this genre is in need of an “educated readership,” one that understands that the author is the narrator while excitedly and willingly giving in to the world and perspective the way readers of novels do. The key is for memoirists to free themselves from that obligation to a singular truth and embrace the genre as the form that is dependent on the author’s artistic vision to arrive at a personal truth.

Thus far, changing this mindset in myself has set me free, to speculate within my imagined spaces, to find meaning within my three selves, to explore that fractured life experience, arriving somewhere between personal history, imagination, and fact. Unreliable, yes, but as the poet and memoirist Rigoberto Gonzalez once said, “[Truth in memory] has become more real—no, it is not truth, it is experience—human, imperfect, and beautiful.”

César Díaz teaches creative nonfiction at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. His essays and other think pieces have been published in Guernica and Essay Daily, where he is now a featured columnist. He is also writing a memoir about his experiences as migrant farm worker in the 1980s.

On New England Review's nonfiction and taking the long view

New England Review’s approach to nonfiction is a little unusual. When you turn to the table of contents you see headings for Fiction and Poetry, but there’s also a whole assortment of other categories, among them Provocations, Reflections, Rediscoveries, Testimonies, and Investigations. Also: Film, Art, Music. (We’ve recently added the word Nonfiction, like an umbrella above them, so readers can more quickly take in the landscape.) The reason for so many headings is that there are so many different kinds of nonfiction, with different purposes and priorities, and many of those appear in NER.

As editor of this journal for the past 1.5 years (and prior to that managing editor for 10), I’ve embraced this longstanding, rangy approach to nonfiction, while no doubt interpreting it according to my own sensibilities and in response to changes in the art of nonfiction itself. Like Stephen Donadio before me, I aim to have what we call “meaty, third-person” essays as well as “lyric,” first-person, or interpretive essays in every issue. We—that is, nonfiction editor J. M. Tyree, a small group of astute readers, and I—are always on the lookout for essays to which our immediate response is yes, we must have this!, but also for essays that have at their core something arresting, something we’ve never heard before, though it might still need to be teased out through revision and editing. When we encounter an essay whose subject matter intrigues us, whose ideas are bright and moving, we are willing to edit. We do edit. We love working with authors to fine-tune their vision for a great work of nonfiction.

What we get in nonfiction submissions (which are far fewer in number than in the other genres) tends toward the personal essay or memoir, and to balance it out we often go beyond that field, ears to the ground, to find essays on other subjects, from other worlds of expertise. In addition, we encourage writing that looks outward through our NER Digital series “Confluences,” which presents writers’ responses to other works of art (with “art” loosely interpreted) in brief essays online. Basically the guidelines say, Put yourself in the picture, but put something else in there too.

When I first considered working at New England Review, what most thrilled me about the prospect was the sense that I’d always be learning new things, and not just about the art of fiction and poetry, which are absolutely central to the magazine and to my own passions, but also about, say, Neil Young’s guitar solos, Hannah Arendt’s deep and complicated friendships, and the 19th-century practice of “bundling.” Without being an expert or an academic in the areas of philosophy, history, and music, I could still access those areas of inquiry and apply their ideas to my own growing and always-changing understanding of life on earth. And so I want reading New England Review always to give the reader a sense of discovery—who knew that certain salamanders hold an annual nuptial dance known as “Big Night,” and that our most famous Flemish painters were once considered crude? An opportunity for inquiry—how is the chambered nautilus related to the art of collage, and is age a function of time or is age what gives time a measure of reality? And possibilities for self-interpretation—what do I lose if I gain my sense of hearing, and what have I really learned from reading the “great books”? We’re not looking for a catalogue of intriguing facts that we could just as well find in a quick Google search; we’re looking for a human mind at work with those facts, deciphering patterns, probing its own responses, going out into the world and bringing back treasure.

Given the variety and abundance of material available to writers of nonfiction, and given the shifty nature of memory and reality itself, there’s still an awful lot of room for imagination in nonfiction writing. Even language that appears utterly transparent has something up its sleeve. The degree to which imagination is involved varies greatly in nonfiction, of course: very little imagination is permitted in, say, an instruction booklet; very much goes into figuring out, for example, how to best tell the story of one’s own past in relation to racial segregation or why a certain passage from Proust continues to haunt and provoke us.

Because nonfiction slides back and forth on a continuum with “just the facts” at one end and imagination at the other, and because writing itself is both a tool at the disposal of every literate person and a medium for creating art, it’s hard to draw a line at what is “literary” nonfiction vs. what is not. What distinguishes the kind of nonfiction you find in NER from reportage, from op-ed? In an attempt to define literary nonfiction for our magazine, I’d say that it must be interesting to non-specialists and beyond our current moment. Nonfiction in NER might have something to say about a specific event—current or otherwise—or about esoteric subject matter, but if it succeeds it will still be of interest to readers in 15 or 150 years, as more than just an artifact of a moment in time, and to people who haven’t given much thought to that subject before. We are all specialists in our current moment, after all, and good writing can take its readers beyond its field of specialty even as it engages it. There are plenty of outlets for news, facts, and opinion writing, which is very important writing indeed; but writing in NER takes a longer view.

While not every issue contains every category of nonfiction—we only have so much room, and a great “Letter from American Places” only comes along once a year or so—every issue does contain a ranging variety of nonfiction, sliding back and forth on that fact/imagination continuum and covering a lot of territory in terms of subject matter.

Take our current issue, just as an example.

• Marianne Boruch talks about poetry, Sherlock Holmes, a cadaver lab, and how poetry is a kind of diagnosis for what ails us.
• Camille T. Dungy visits a small town in Maine with her baby and, being the only black person for miles around, is treated with utmost civility, to the point that it takes twice as long to go from point A to point B; at the same time she examines Maine’s anti-slavery history and eats a whoopie pie.
• William Ralph Inge (who is no longer with us, as this is a “Redisovery” from the 19th century) looks at Rome under the Caesars, which is eerily like China today, or is it more like the United States?
• James Naremore hurries right past the iconic Citizen Kane to bring us news of Orson Welles’s other passions: teaching, documentaries, and Shakespeare for kids.
• Jeff Staiger, who has read and absorbed and clearly loves David Foster Wallace, tries to figure out how the late, unfinished The Pale King was to have trumped the magnum opus, Infinite Jest.
• Chinese author Wei An, by way of translation by Thomas Moran, observes the minutia of his surroundings, the bees, the sparrows, the sunrise, having absorbed Thoreau in Chinese translation and lived through an era of great environmental change.
• Wendy Willis goes to Alcatraz to check out Ai Weiwei’s show about surveillance and human rights, and in the bright blocks of Lego and the spectacle of it all recognizes the limitations of art at this scale and how it relates to the limitations of democracy.
• And finally, Eric Wilson recalls his time, years ago, as an interpreter/escort for Faeroese poet, a guest of the United States, with whom he shared no language, and who did not speak academese as expected, and who made himself far too familiar with the hotel mini-bar.

And that’s just one issue: up next, we’ve got Anglophone Indian author Mukund Belliappa on tiger-hunting in the colonial period; German-American novelist Ursula Hegi on finding the fiction in the facts; and French historian and scholar Paula Schwartz on her friendship with Fanny Dutet, a Jewish Communist activist in the French Resistance.

All of us literary magazine editors get excited about good writing that grabs us with an unusual voice or irresistible subject matter, but we also recognize that a slow burn can have just as much payoff, and often more. An article on Buzzfeed about, say, ten ways to be happy, might have an enticing immediacy and even a compelling first sentence, but it will likely have been written by an exec in search of clicks and will leave you empty-handed. In NER, we want to give our readers more than just bright and shiny objects with which to fritter away their time. We want to give them something to take away, a reading experience that rewards their attention and effort and offers an opportunity for absorption. When reading submissions, we might not immediately recognize what’s happening in a given piece, but we’ll read on to find out what the author is up to. If it fails to deliver we’ll turn it down. If it builds, we’ll shape it into the pages of NER, and if you find it there we promise it’ll be worth your time.



Carolyn Kuebler is the editor of New England Review. Before coming to NER as managing editor in 2004, she was an associate book reviews editor at Library Journal and founding editor of Rain Taxi. She has published fiction and criticism in various magazines, including the Common, Copper Nickel, and Conduit.