Aaron Alford: Fussing Over Style

Don’t go looking for wisdom here—especially not wisdom that is not earned. At Arcadia Magazine, we’re not seeking essays that deliver epiphanies, advice, or words to live by. No brilliant thoughts on everyday household objects or clever insights into the quotidian. Do not try to reveal watertight truths for the betterment of all Humanity. (Note: We probably won’t be interested in your essay if you capitalize words like Humanity.) We receive a lot of these types of essays, ones whose titles usually begin with the dreadful “On…”

“On Friendship.”

“On the Paper Cut I Got Yesterday.”

“On Toilet Paper.”

On the head of my firstborn, I swear to eat a bag of nails if we ever publish one of those essays.

We are not too terribly interested in writers working within the Montaigne vein (or vain, if you will), mostly because so few writers do it well. We respect tradition, and we recognize Montaigne as the great-grandpappy of everything we do, yes, okay, we get it—but these days, there is too much piddly writing committed in that man's name. Incoherent ramblings. Unjustified meandering. Too many writers use the "Essay As Representation Of The Mind At Work" thing as an excuse to string together as many loose associations and insights as it takes to convince themselves (but rarely their readers) that they are wonderful writers.

Several years ago, my graduate program was lucky enough to be visited by a big-time essayist, a major name in our genre. He was a wonderful man, just as everyone said he would be. He graciously stood before an auditorium packed with sleepy undergraduates and read a couple of essays. As the reading went on, the undergrads grew sleepier. I also wasn’t turned on by what I heard that night, but this guy was a big-name writer, an important figure, someone I felt pressured to admire. So when he finished reading, I headed for the back of the auditorium, elbowed my way through the crowd of students stuffing their pockets with free cookies, and bought his book of selected essays. He signed it for me, and I carried it home with plans to read it and thereby be woken up to all that is wonderful and good about personal essays—a second chance to get whatever it was I missed during his reading.

I read the introduction, just four pages, and then I read those four pages again. And that was enough for me. I was done. Five years have passed since that night, and I still can't find it in myself to read another word of that writer’s large, influential body of work. I’m still angry at one particular paragraph from his introduction, the one where he comments on his prose style. It helped me realize why a lot of very traditional personal essayists working these days (a lot of whom seem to be influenced by this writer) put me to sleep. The writer confesses that style just ain’t important to him, and as far as I can tell, he suggests that style shouldn’t be very important to any writer—it's just not something we should fuss with. He laughs at Flaubert’s notion of le mot juste. Unlike Babel, he never tries to unleash a period with the force of a bullet. We should simply end one sentence and start the next one immediately, right now, go, go. That's what works for him. He says that taking himself or the art of prose too seriously goes against the grain of his being.

Listen. Arcadia only wants to publish essays from writers who take the art of prose seriously. We do not have to take ourselves too seriously in this life—we sure as hell don’t—but we should all be serious about our sentences. We're interested in essays whose success depends on precise language, essays that feel deliberate and chock-full of purpose. Clear eyes, full hearts . . . all of that. We want essays that grip us and refuse to let go. Everything should be tight, hardly any slack (which is kind of the definition of grip, right?).

None of us nails le mot juste all the livelong day. Not all of our periods land with .45-caliber force. We break ourselves over the wheel of the sentence, and we fail all the time, all of us. But we should still try. Style is something to fuss with. Try to make your punctuation draw blood, or else why are you even doing this?

Send us something that you just had to write, something from inside your bones. No intellectual exercises and no armchair philosophizing. Don’t go looking for wisdom—just go looking. And please, do it with style.

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Aaron Alford is the nonfiction editor of Arcadia Magazine. His essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Bellingham Review, Memoir, River Teeth, Hobart, The Los Angeles Review, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. He is a doctoral candidate in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University, where he teaches literature and creative writing.

John D'Agata Breaks Rules, Windows

Why aren’t we spending more time talking about how suave John D’Agata looks in his author photos, how buff, or what nice hair he has, or how he could totally be cast as Fox Mulder’s foxy kid brother? We could be speculating about his dresser full of simple, well-fitted t-shirts, or why he’s not sporting an earring, yet, but we’re not. We’re not talking about any of these things, because apparently these are not the facts that interest us (at least not, generally, in public). No, here, we are interested in John D’Agata, writer, provocateur.

We are interested in Facts, facts, FACTS, “facts”: The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and (fact-checked by) Jim Fingal.

I’m going to assume that most people (in the world) are familiar with the ensuing controversy, and not spend a lot of time laying down the facts, such as they are. So if you haven’t already, you should probably at least check out the excerpt published in February’s Harper’s, this (pretty scathing) review from Laura Miller, a senior writer at Salon.com, this string of posts on Brevity’s blog, and if you are so inclined, I would even recommend the actual book itself. Boiled down, our essential question here is: What is sacrosanct in Nonfiction, if not the genre’s adherence to Fact? Sub-question: Is John D’Agata ruining Nonfiction as we know it, i.e. should we hate John D’Agata for fudging facts?

Answer: I don’t know. I’m still on the fence myself, am waiting to be pushed or pulled one way or the other. However, several of my Intro to Creative Nonfiction students have weighed in, and as their opinions are not yet clouded by visions of D’Agata’s (literary) musculature, they’ve managed to raise some good points that I’d like to put forth:

Discussing the Salon.com review, Eric, a junior in Interdisciplinary Studies, suggested, “The whole thing is really a faked conversation aimed at proving a point about what the lyric essay is, its purpose, and usefulness. As readers, we should probably find this more entertaining than controversial. Laura Miller is taking things way too seriously.”

Admittedly, Miller advances some sound arguments against what D’Agata has done, and she aptly describes the artistic and moral merits of proper fact-checking. But she also harps, again and again, on the (yes, inane) grandstanding being done by both D’Agata and fact-checker Fingal, and in doing so, she kind of misses the point: It’s a farce.

To be fair, Harper’s got us off on the wrong foot. Miller herself recognizes that “several of D’Agata’s most dickish replies have been cherry-picked for inclusion” and that the excerpt the magazine published “is not a fair representation of the book.” But still, it snared us all. We got so caught up in Why is Fingal so anal? and Can D’Agata possibly be such an ass? that we’ve forgotten to dig deeper, to try to discover what is really going on here. Eric is right: The Lifespan of a Fact is a two-fold defense of the lyric essay, on the surface a defense of altering facts for the sake of poetry (which you can buy or not; this is being hotly debated elsewhere), but also, underneath, it is an implicit defense of the economy of the lyric essay, and the assertion that “similitude often seems more revealing than verisimilitude.”

The boneheaded back and forth between the two is a ruse, is subterfuge, is masking the fact that the book is more than the mere document it posits itself to be. Rather it is, itself, an essay. Of course. And recognizing this, perhaps we should focus less on what the piece says, and more on how it performs.

Mid-way through the first section of the book we see that D’Agata, in paragraph 9 of the original Levi Presley article, refers to a man named Michael Gilmartin as “the public relations manager at the Stratosphere Hotel.” And Fingal, playing his role with verve, jumps on this: “Gilmartin’s official title at the Stratosphere is the ‘vice president of public relations,’ according to a press release I found, though his title could have changed since 2002. Also, this part of the essay seems to be told from the point of view of the present looking back, so maybe we should refer to him as the ‘public relations manager at the time’?” (emphasis mine). As if batting off a t-ball stand, D’Agata replies, “No, that’s ridiculously clunky. Leave it alone. And please don’t offer to do any more writing for me, thank you.”

No, that’s ridiculously clunky. That is clunky, I guess. Maybe ridiculously clunky. Maybe he/we should just tighten it up? Simplify. For clarity. Clarify. For simplicity. For better, easier ingestion and understanding. I get this, I think.

As writers of NF parsing the TOTAL NOISE of the world, we are inundated by information. And this book is a clever, clever way of giving us all of the information that research for this article dredged up—

The State of Nevada reports that there were a total of 2,762 deaths that year from cancer…887 upper respiratory cancer deaths, and 275 lower intestinal tract cancer deaths...and it should be noted that those two regions alone can include lung cancer, tracheal cancer, colon cancer, bronchial cancer, rectal cancer, and anal cancer, and that isn’t taking into account the distinct diagnoses of these cancers that are also possible…the National Cancer Institute divides “brain cancer” alone into at least nine different categories, a few of which are themselves further divided into sub-categories, like: Brain Tumor, Adult; Brain Tumor, Brain Stem Glioma, Childhood; Brain Tumor, Cerebellar Astrocytoma/Malignant Glioma, Childhood; Brain Tumor, Ependymoma, Childhood; Brain Tumor, Medulloblastoma, Childhood; Brain Tumor, Supratentorial Primitive Neuroectodermal Tumors, Childhood… … … … …

—only to emphasize just how ridiculous it would be to try to squeeze it all into an article, an essay, whatever. Honestly, I don’t think The Lifespan of a Fact is actually meant to be read. As a book, it is ridiculous. It is a farce. But it allows D’Agata to make this point: “I really don’t think that readers would be upset if they found out that I lumped Supratentorial Primitive Neuroectodermal Tumors and Childhood Medulloblatoma together under the category of ‘a few types of cancer’”—a good point, probably. And to solicit: “Please give me a break with this shit.”

This book is an argument by reductio ad absurdum, a defense of the eloquence and thrift of D’Agata’s creation, the lyric essay. And can’t we all agree that D’Agata’s way is much neater, tidier, and maybe, ultimately, more effective at conveying the meaning inherent in the situation?

The Lifespan of a Fact embodies this argument. It is itself a comment on how we parse information, how we might begin to distill and disseminate information that matters in an honest, but also an interesting and relatable, way. In a way that might help our readers get it.

Of course, really, maybe all of this is just an argument for the attack side: If there isn’t room for everything in an essay, maybe we should simply scale back and pick the facts we do include more judiciously. Maybe John D’Agata is evil. He wanted to fit a square peg into a round hole so he shaved off the peg’s unwieldy angles. And, as suggested by another of my students, a junior studying Neurology & Cognitive Science, “If you have to change 34 to 31 for the flow of a sentence, maybe it wasn’t the best sentence to begin with.” Which is to say, I think, that lacking a perfect match, rather than round the peg, maybe D’Agata should have put more into squaring the hole. Which is to say, rather than fudge the facts to fit the project, maybe he should have adapted the project to fit the facts. After all, isn’t that the trick (and the beauty) of nonfiction: finding a way to make something wonderful with what we’re given?

I don’t know. It all seems, somehow, very complicated.

Whatever the case, I am glad someone is out there in the world throwing rocks at our windows, raising these questions with bravado and forcing us to seek answers, if not for the genre, at least for ourselves.

The Nonfiction Reading List

I was just reading this post over at HTMLGIANT and it occurred to me that I've seen a lot of these lists for fiction, but I've seen very few nonfiction equivalents (and, to be honest, those lists all seemed fairly inadequate in terms of variety of styles/gender/ethinicity/nationality/etc).

Anyway, the last week of my nonfiction workshop is next week and I'm going to try and compile some type of master reading list over the next few days to give them all as a going away present. With that said, I'm not nearly as well read as some of y'all here and I'm wondering: what books you would include if you were making a list that adequately covers the entire spectrum of creative nonfiction?

Post your lists/ideas in the comments section or email me and I'll make a master list that I can share with anyone who's interested.