Steven Barthelme: Talent and Fifty Cents

When you are a writer and a teacher, people, students mostly, sometimes ask you if you think that they are writers, the question, obviously, they have been asking themselves.  They want to know if they have within themselves whatever it takes, some essential, mysterious talent.  They think that makes a difference.  Some think that makes all the difference.

I have been happy to know an awful lot of people with talent, a large number of writers and painters, people who won NEA fellowships and National Book Awards and a MacArthur grant, a gifted singer, a number of skilled but minor academic politicians, not such likeable folks but undeniably talented, as well as a sports car mechanic with the perfect name of Galen Lyons, an artist of an electrician who I lucked onto after other electricians had failed, and probably the most imaginative guy I have ever known, who is a hugely successful marketing professor.  Still, when I think about talent, the first thing that comes to mind is the exquisitely talented people I have known whose work in the arts in the end was never professionally recognized or rewarded, and came to nothing, remarkable, gifted people whose talent went idle.    

Forty years ago at Boston College I went to see a play and one of the actors in a secondary role, a guy I had recently met on campus, gave a performance that you literally couldn’t take your eyes from.  The other actors struggled through the play, displaying mostly the amateurishness characteristic of college productions; while he did have a good role for it, small but showy, this guy was doing a star turn and doing it flawlessly. 

We became friends later, and later still I left Boston College and went back to the University of Texas.  I was pleased to see six or so years later that Jim got a small non-speaking part in Serpico, and then guest starred on a Kojak episode.  He probably did some stage acting, too, as he was living in New York at that time.  I thought he had it made, a career, major films, Academy Awards eventually.  But then I never saw anything else. 

Googling him now yields two or three subsequent parts in movies and TV shows listed on the IMDb, as well as his current gig—as a hypno-therapist in LA.  It’s acting of a kind, I guess.

A month ago an accident set me thinking about this.  The cat knocked over some envelopes of old photographs and negatives from film cameras, and in reshelving them I browsed through a couple.  One had a half dozen photographs of some jewelry that my one-time girlfriend had made a long time ago, maybe in the 1970s.  It was stunning stuff.  Rings, earrings, bracelets, two other pieces mostly of semi-precious stones and silver because she couldn’t afford to work in gold, they were astonishing work of the sort of brutalist style to which (I remembered) she was inclined.  I thought, Jesus Christ she was good.  I remembered cold afternoons before Christmases, trying to sell the stuff sitting on a blanket on the sidewalk in Austin. 

She gave it up later, largely I would guess because she could see no clear avenue forward, no way to turn it into a trade.  It wasn’t a lack of talent.

A few years after that I was in John Barth’s writing workshop at Johns Hopkins, with ten other prose writers chosen from a hundred or so applicants.  I was average, got in on a legacy deal, but the others were talented and at a point in their lives where they had already invested considerable time and energy in their art.

I remember looking around the room thinking, two of these people are going to be writers; one of them better be me.  They were good-looking and funny, intelligent and in some cases, well-schooled, and very good with words.  They were awash in talent, and intensely serious about their work.  One of the best writers among them, a woman with a stunning imaginative range, would have a story in Granta and a poem in the New Yorker in the two or three years after she left Hopkins. 

Cut to thirty years later and it turns out we weren’t the future of American letters.  Or so says an incomplete but telling list of publishing history.  One guy, a wonderfully droll man who grew up in Chicago, did publish a book about his hometown jazz as well as a number of essays and stories.  A woman, not the Granta woman, co-edited a book of stories by regional writers and wrote a great story herself that appeared in Missouri Review and was reprinted in the Best American Short Stories.  Another woman, not the Granta woman, has co-edited a book about mathematics and science learning.  One of the most talented among them went on to four years of another fancy graduate writing program after that one.  He is now a lawyer, in Florida. 

After Hopkins I got teaching jobs, and for twenty-five years or so I have watched with increasing (is it horror?  no, horror is too strong) sadness as young people and a few older people with genuine abilities and often a remarkably reflective quality of mind wander through my classrooms, hoping to make a go of writing.  Many win one’s private affection, for idealism that one sees or doesn’t see but believes is there anyway.  A guy who had been successful as a student a dozen years ago later wrote me a long note asking “how you keep at it when your confidence is gone?”  Blessedly he has subsequently published two novels.  Thank you, Jesus.  

Some have gone on to success in publishing their work, gotten work in journalism or become university professors.  But a hundred others, equally and often more gifted, have become librarians or salesmen or gypsy instructors.  Most just disappear.  These are people who while students have written some of the most elegant and affecting pieces I have ever read.   The stuff that takes your breath away.  The stuff one takes into the other room and reads to one’s spouse.  “Listen to this!”

Are they “writers”?   Yes.  And no.  After a while one adds to the classroom routine the suggestion that they temper their thinking by considering the high school basketball star who then goes on to college and dreams of the NBA, and the nasty mathematics of all that.

What differentiates those who stay in the business is that they stay in the business— “Talent is long patience,” Flaubert is said to have said (Maupassant said Flaubert attributed the remark to Chateaubriand).  But that’s a too simple answer.  There’s no certain way to count other factors such as drive, timing, friends in the business, chance, and luck, but those things are the larger share of the explanation. 

I didn’t start teaching until I was in my thirties, and I should’ve known better, but I was a slow boy, at first shocked and pleased by how talented the students were.  Some were amazing.  With some hard work and good luck, they were headed for glory, I was certain of it.  I entered them in competitions and routinely they won prizes.  It took me a long while to understand. 

When they ask you if they have talent, the answer is always yes, although you can vary the enthusiasm with which you say it.  Yes, you have talent.  Teachers learn, slowly but we do.  Some years after that I started writing in the margins of gifted students a note, “You have talent. You poor fuck.”  Yes, you have talent, and that matters a little.

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Steven Barthelme's most recent books are miscellaneous non-fiction from the New York Times, Texas Observer, Washington Post, L A Times, Oxford American and elsewhere collected in The Early Posthumous Work, 2010, and Hush Hush, a book of short stories issued last year.

Lee Gutkind: Launching Creative Nonfiction

Three decades ago, creative writing programs were relatively new. The University of Pittsburgh, where I was then teaching, didn’t have one. Iowa, Stanford, and a few other programs had been around for a good while, but basically, if you wanted to study creative writing—officially, that is, with a graduate degree—there weren’t a lot of options, and perhaps with good reason. Writers were like painters and composers; they followed their muse and created literature—poems, stories, plays and shared them with friends and followers through readings and informal gatherings. There were certainly apprenticeships and mentoring situations for artists and writers. But courses? Who needed courses? 

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when most writers were not affiliated with universities. They were much more a part of the world—driving taxis, selling insurance, teaching high school, thinking that you had to experience life in order to write about it.  But gradually, the establishment and growing popularity of creative writing programs became a lure and a safe haven.  Why struggle for health insurance and a certain amount of praise and prominence? Teach the craft and huddle under the protective academic umbrella, where young wannabes idolized you, for as long as possible.

During those years, the debate about creative writing—and creative nonfiction writing in particular—was intense, mean, and often nonsensical. I remember the student editor of The Pitt News once went to see the department chair, requesting that the department offer a new journalism course. In the expository writing course I was teaching, I was introducing Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, et al.—and the students, especially from the student newspaper, were turned on. The idea of immersion got them going—experiencing life and using literary techniques to make their work cinematic. They wanted more.

So the editor—his name was Bill Gormley, and today he is an author and professor of public policy at Georgetown University—made an appointment with Walter Evert, the chair of the English department, and proposed something like “Basic New Journalism 101,” which I would teach. It was actually what I was already doing clandestinely in the expository writing course I had been assigned, but this would allow me to come clean and could lead to other more advanced and challenging courses. Evert, in the spirit of free speech and openness reflected in the early 1970s, allowed Gormley to make a presentation at the next faculty meeting.

I will never forget the scene. Gormley was a little guy, bespectacled, with straight brown hair hanging in bangs down his forehead. Almost dwarfed by the podium, he stood reading from the sheaf of notes he had prepared, about the history and relevance of new journalism and its many practitioners, to a totally silent collection of Birkenstocked, ponytailed professors. There may have been a few questions—I don’t remember—but after Gormley’s presentation, a big, balding, flat-nosed guy named Don Petesch stood up, carrying one of those massive, flat-bottomed leather briefcases that fold out like an accordion so you can carry around half of your library, as well as lunch and dinner. He plopped the case on the table beside the podium and, facing Gormley, began pulling out books—Faulkner, Thurber, Fitzgerald, Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe, Welty, and on and on—holding each up in the air and providing a succinct description of its literary value and inherent brilliance and then slamming it down on the table beside his briefcase, kaboom, kaboom, until the massive briefcase was empty. And then, peering across the room and addressing Gormley, he said something to the effect of: Until you and the other Pitt News staffers read these books and learn to appreciate and understand them, this department should never support such lightweight work as what you think you are calling writing that is “new” in journalism. Like I said, I don’t remember the words—but that was the gist of the finale of his illustrious presentation.

Listening to Petesch pontificate was actually too much for the other members of the department, who all burst out in debate over the books he had selected as classics—which didn’t have anything to do with the subject at hand. Finally Evert stood up to tone down the rhetoric and move to another subject, reasoning, “After all, gentlemen, we are interested in literature here—not writing.” We few writers paused for a moment to allow that to sink in. (There were, by the way, many women in the room who snickered but also held their fire.)

So this is the atmosphere in which creative writing existed—was forced to exist. Literature professors were willing to tolerate courses in poetry and fiction writing, but to discuss journalism and literature in the same breath? How dare you?

Well, Bill Gormley dared, and the faculty backed off after a while, and the following year, I was permitted to introduce a course called “The New Nonfiction.” As bad as the term nonfiction was—according to my colleagues, “Nonfiction is a non sequitur! How can you describe what you do as something you don’t do?”  At least it was better than the J-word—journalism—which many academics likened to plumbing.

Not that those traditional journalists were in the clear here; to these folks, the contentious word was “creative.”  Essentially, journalists hated creative because to them it meant that you made stuff up—lying, exaggerating, etc. But the academics in the English department also found it threatening. “Why can’t my work be considered creative, too?” they whined and argued. Why, for God’s sake, were their essays on Milton or postmodernism referred to as “criticism” while my prose about traveling the country on a motorcycle or hanging out with major league baseball umpires was artistic and literary and creative? This didn’t seem fair.

There was also the personal aspect to the whole idea of creative nonfiction—allowing the writer to think and write about how they feel. This was clearly threatening to the popular media critics like Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott, who lambasted creative nonfiction because of its insidious “navel gazing.” Wolcott railed against writers coming clean with personal feelings. Similarly, inside the Academy students were not to be trusted with voicing what they believed about what they were reading or writing. David Bartholomae, my colleague at Pitt, a leading figure in the world of composition and the editor of a textbook, Ways of Writing, which would eventually be used in composition programs all over the world, was especially vocal and resistant.  Perhaps it was a turf issue for Bartholomae—the work in many composition programs often parallels (or competes with?) the mission of many creative nonfiction programs. Suffice it to say, creative nonfiction was not one of the “ways of writing” of which Bartholomae approved. In a 1995 article in the journal College Competition and Communication, published by the National Council of Teachers, he wrote:

Should we teach new journalism or creative nonfiction as part of the required undergraduate curriculum? That is, should all students be required to participate in a first person, narrative or expressive genre whose goal it is to reproduce the ideology of sentimental realism—where a world is made in the image of a single, authorizing point of view? A narrative that celebrates a world made up of the details of private life and whose hero is sincere? I don’t have an easy answer to this question. It is like asking, should students be allowed to talk about their feelings after reading The Color Purple? Of course, they should, but where and when and under whose authority?

Clearly, Bartholomae believed that students should not be permitted to think or feel for themselves—at least not without a professor of composition to monitor them.

The debate went on in our department for years—literally—and it got to be very bitter. The MFA in creative writing for poetry and fiction was established at Pitt in the 1980s while an MA in nonfiction—perhaps the first advanced degree in nonfiction in the world—came about in 1991. A couple of us began campaigning for an nonfiction MFA, and at that point, the nonfiction writing students were harassed, intimidated, and threatened by literature and composition professors. One woman actually resigned her teaching assistantship under the constant pressure and torment.

I didn’t like what they were saying about creative nonfiction, and how they were treating the student writers who were inspired by it.  So I found myself fighting back again, like in high school—not with my fists, but with my headstrong persistence and the originality of my idea. Not that I was telling anyone I had invented the genre—no way. Like I said, you can’t invent what already exists; you can only spin it and fight for it—and that was an opening and an opportunity made for me at home and throughout the country. During that time, I went wherever an opportunity presented itself and defended the idea that you could be literary and journalistic at the same time, that creative and nonfiction can stand together as a concept and a practice, and that you could write about yourself and how you feel and think and make it all work together without being sickeningly egocentric. Make it—the facts and the truth—vivid, passionate, beautiful, powerful, electrifying. I had found a cause to champion, in which I deeply believed.

The MFA in creative nonfiction was established at Pitt the same year as I started the journal Creative Nonfiction. They were meant to function and grow together—at least I thought they would. I had a vision for the department, the program, and the nonfiction journal, as a triple threat that would unite all writers interested in telling true stories, everywhere. It would never be realized.

But why start a creative nonfiction literary magazine in the first place?  It’s complicated. I was vaguely aware of the importance of literary magazines when I came to work in the English department. Remember, I was a working writer, a reporter. No academic background, no advanced degrees.  And I discovered that my colleagues were appreciative of these “littles,” as well—in some cases, more than I was. In fact, if you looked in the department’s library or on the shelves in the offices of literature profs, you’d see some of these publications—The Georgia Review, The Partisan Review, and others were popular at the time. Interestingly, my colleagues did not display Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper’s, or The Atlantic Monthly in their offices. Maybe these magazines were in their living rooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms at home—but not in the academic workplace. What was going on? I knew that many of my colleagues read these magazines, because we had discussions about them on a regular basis around the faculty mailboxes or over Iron City beer drafts at local pubs. I knew they appreciated the work—but it just didn’t seem to count for much in the world in which they lived. There was a definite disconnect, much of which had to do with their public persona. Back then, in English departments, you had to be “tweedy” (unless, of course, you were the token chain-smoking motorcyclist like me.)

So I began to make a plan. My colleagues appreciated literary magazines—maybe because they were called “literary” magazines—and they refused to consider new journalism as something students might want to study and write in a “literary” or literature department. But what if there was an actual literary magazine that published this stuff exclusively? Not something bold and brassy like Esquire or outrageous like Rolling Stone or Mother Jones, but something—how should I say it?  “Unpretentious,” on nice paper—not glossy—and page after page of type. No photos, no ads, just words—lots of big words. It would have to seem somewhat scholarly; the less style and personality, the better. Or so it seemed to me. Of course, I wasn’t just talking about my colleagues at Pitt; it was the whole goddamned English academy in universities everywhere. They were boring. Conservative, uninspiring—despite their Birkenstocks and ponytails. So that was one thing I was thinking about.

And I was also thinking about my role as a teacher—my impact. In the beginning, when I was first appointed at Pitt, I thought I would teach for a few years, get the feel of it, have the experience, all while writing a couple of books, then go off and do something else. But we teachers can’t easily deny the rewards of the academic life, chief among them the contact and interaction with our students. The thing was—and is—I liked teaching, liked coming into contact with smart and driven young people like Bill Gormley, from whom I could learn and for whom I could be influential. I am not saying that these incredibly bright and talented people would not have achieved what they have without my teaching—not at all. But I was privileged enough to have worked with them during their formative years. And perhaps I made a difference. They certainly made a difference in me and changed my thoughts about writing and life in general.

Somehow all of this—my colleagues’ awareness of the critical importance of literary magazines, and my own professional self-interests and desire to keep teaching—came together for me. I don’t exactly remember a day—a light-bulb moment—when idea and inspiration turned to action and mission or purpose. It just nestled in the back of my mind for a while. It really wasn’t too different from that time long ago when I had just come out of the military, seeking direction, trying to find myself, and my freshman English teacher, Mr. Meyers, casually suggested I could become a writer. It sounded cool—and I took his advice and never looked back.  Or when I decided, for my first book, that I wanted to ride around the country on a motorcycle. The plan for a creative nonfiction literary journal took shape slowly; I was only vaguely aware of it until, suddenly, one day: Commitment! This was what I was going to do—launch Creative Nonfiction, the journal—and that was that.  And it would not be boring—it would be filled with well-told true stories that were cinematic, informative and, when appropriate, personal.

To call it a “plan” might even be too much. I just got started with it—thinking at the time, I have to admit, that the journal would be an integral part of the creative writing program at Pitt, helping to launch and support the MFA and build a lasting community of nonfiction writers. Or at least, this was the way in which I might spin it in a department meeting, if ever called upon to do so.

It never came to that.  Creative Nonfiction was on its own soon after that—20 years ago.  We’ve just published our 50^th issue, and we are doing quite well.  But even though it was quite a struggle to get going, the journal (now a magazine) and the genre itself would not be so prominent in the world of publishing today without the eventual buy-in and involvement of writers in the Academy—within and way beyond English Departments and creative writing programs.  A monumental shift of attitude and acceptance has gradually occurred over the past two decades that has helped make creative nonfiction so popular—the go to way of writing for poets, fiction writers, journalists, essayists, as well as scientists, physicians, economists, et al.  There are still a few naysayers and snide critics, but they pretty much talk to themselves these days.  Eventually they will succumb to the power and influence and sheer pleasure of telling true stories, as did James Wolcott, who published a memoir in 2011.  Talk about navel gazing!

This essay is adapted from “The Fine Art of Literary Fist-fighting” which appeared in Creative Nonfiction’s 50th issue.

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Lee Gutkind, recognized by Vanity Fair as “the Godfather behind creative nonfiction,” is the author and editor of more than 30 books and founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary magazine to publish narrative nonfiction exclusively.  He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State University and a professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication

Gutkind has lectured to audiences around the world—from China to the Czech Republic, from Australia to Africa to Egypt.  He has appeared on many national radio and televisions shows, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central), Good Morning America, National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered, as well as BBC World. Gutkind is the recipient of grants and awards from many different organizations, from the National Endowment for the Arts to the National Science Foundation.

Brian Oliu on David Shoemaker

The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker

I know. I know. Bear with me here.

Professional wrestling is not pretty. At its worst, it is carnival schlock: shirtless men throwing each other around with all the grace of a Buffalo Wild Wings on a random Thursday—loud to the point of white noise, the scent of thrice-used canola oil & whatever it is we’ve decided testosterone smells like these days—men in football jerseys and jorts cursing the name of the name on their backs, all things bulbous & grotesque.

At its best, well, it’s still probably a Buffalo Wild Wings, but an extremely efficient one: the waitresses move with a beautiful quickness, the sauces are innovative enough, & even though it is incredibly predictable in its existence, at times it surprises you—there is one extra light beer on draft, or, you can make out a faint habanero flavor through the kick. There is comfort in knowing what you are going to get, & yet there is pleasure when things are unexpected.

The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker is a book of essays about professional wrestling. If you know anyone who loves or has loved professional wrestling at any moment in their life, you owe it to them to get them this book: it is filled with incredible insight into the business of professional wrestling, as well as loving nods to all of the madness that surrounds the spectacle. It is a book of beautiful nostalgia: odes to fallen wrestlers, who far too often turned to drugs & alcohol after their time in the limelight—beautiful observations that go well beyond the “whatever happened to?” questions brought up when someone who used to watch every Monday night starts reminiscing about their adolescence. There are asides to the tropes surrounding wrestling as well: a history of televised weddings, a list of “evil foreigners,” brought in to take on our all-American heroes. Trust me, if anyone you know loves wrestling, they’ll love this book.

But let’s be fair: there is disconnect between the concept of a “professional wrestling fan,” & one who reads essay collections & appreciates the concept of poetics.

Todd Kaneko, in the Superstition Review, has an amazing experiment where he demonstrates the unseen parallels between poetry & professional wrestling: “[________] is a real thing in the real world, despite what some of [________]’s biggest detractors might say.”

I kept this post in mind while reading Shoemaker’s book: that above all, this book is a treatise on how to approach an essay. In some semblance, Shoemaker is attempting to demonstrate the realness in something that is so absurd that it seems fake: the idea that grown men & women are entertained by fake fighting, despite knowing that everything unfolding in front of them is an artifice. All essays are attempts to categorize the unbelievable: to attempt to make sense of something so unfathomable that it has to be true—from the preposterous to the trite. In a collection of essays, the book itself is the final essay—Shoemaker acknowledges this in the introduction:

“History” is mostly quartered to the realm of wrestler reminiscence, which would be factually problematic on its own, but couple that with the industry’s desire to mythologize everything and to keep up with the façade of fakery that undergirds the sport and you end up with a lot of facts that contradict each other. What follows is my best effort to sift through them, organize them, break them down, and put them back together in something approaching truth. If all that follows isn’t true in the plainest sense of the word, it’s an honest effort at it. And at a minimum it’s a look at reality through the distorted lens of pro wrestling unreality. It’s the truth about a century of misdirection and lies.

What unfolds is an experiment in truth-telling: to acknowledge the world that has been crafted, but also to try to dissect the scaffolding and to figure out what holds everything upright.
To me, the beauty in essay is acknowledging the form of the essay—the most influential essays, to me, are the ones that bring the author into the work: Search for Marvin Gardens, The Glass Essay, in an attempt to talk about the difficulty in talking about the subject. Here, Shoemaker acknowledges the artifice of professional wrestling in a way that professional wrestling does not acknowledge its own falseness, & the result is tremendously entertaining & fascinating. We might not want to know where these things come from in the same way we do not want to see the chicken wings being spun, or where all of the cable wires lead to—that there is comfort in having exactly what we have. Shoemaker lets us know that it is necessary for us to know where these stories come from: that anything with that much mystery needs to be dissected.

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Brian Oliu is originally from New Jersey & currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is the author of So You Know It's Me, a series of Craigslist Missed Connections, 'Level End,' a collection of lyric essays based on videogame boss battles, & the forthcoming 'Leave Luck to Heaven,' an ode to 8-bit Nintendo Games. He is working on a series of essays about professional wrestlers.

Kristen Grayewski: The Essay, The Journal, The Why

Or: A blog post in which I link to Wayne’s World, quote C&C Music Factory, and shamelessly solicit you 

Firstly, let’s address our name. The Journal is a literary journal run by MFA students at The Ohio State University. Our search-engine challenged name pokes fun at the definite article in our university’s name, which some like to emphasize in either pride or arrogance, depending on your opinion of Buckeyes. (See also: The Best Damn Band In The Land.)

The Journal is also a publication—published four times a year, twice in print and twice online—that normally receives five times the amount of fiction or poetry submissions as it does works of nonfiction. Our publication is not alone in these proportions, but that doesn’t make them any less frustrating.

As Nonfiction Editor, writing this post today, I therefore have a motive I’d like to make plain: I’d love for readers of Essay Daily (i.e. writers who are so concerned about improving their craft and pushing boundaries and discussing what exactly The Essay can be that they check-in here regularly to add to the dialog) to finish reading this post and consider submitting to The Journal. Now that I’ve stated the obvious, some things that are less so: the personal cartography of taste, or, why we choose to publish the pieces we do.

My favorite part of an essay is almost always a transition I didn’t see coming. A zoom out or zoom in or jump to a link that might seem initially unrelated until the author makes clear this is how my brain works, see? and the reader wants to follow because she lives in a world where so much is planned ahead, pre-prepared, vacuum sealed for later, that when a writer can take a story, any story—about, say, going to the grocery store or driving to see her mom—and unveil a much larger purpose, an “I didn’t know we were going THERE” moment, we can only cheer.

In my own writing about the things that fascinate me—the Pennsylvania Turnpike or coal mining or the New Kids on the Block—of course I’m never just writing about those things. Sometimes when we start, we don’t know what our obsessions, the things we’re led to turn over on the page, the images we return to again and again like choruses we can’t shake, are really about, but the readers expect that in the course of the essay we’ll do the work to try to find out why we're fascinated.

That’s not to say that the essay should be tidy: it is home to fear and worry, after all. To so many illogical impulses, most that we can’t explain or control. It need not feign an absolute answer to “why?”, but spend sufficient time chewing its questions and end closer to answers than when it started.

I’d like to cite two pieces we published in our Autumn 2013 online issue, 37.4, as examples of this one-two aboutness—which, sure, we can also call Telling it Slant, or Situation and Story, choose your preferred CNF lingo—that caught me by surprise in ways so wonderful we couldn’t not publish them.

Meg Thompson’s “Iceland’s Bride” begins on a bumpy plane ride home from Iceland with her new fiancé. In the first few lines, there is but a glimmer of what’s to come: “I am afraid of flying, in part, because I don’t understand it.” The essay then begins a pattern of gentle back-and-forth between Iceland and other “places defined by division” (South Korea, Berlin) where she and her fiancé traveled, and her problems enacting what’s expected of a bride-to-be and, hey, how can we ever really know each other fully but isn’t it worth it to try?.

Craig Reinbold’s “Fill the Bathtub” (disclosure: Craig helps manage the Essay Daily and is the one who asked me if I'd like to write this blog post, but he had no idea I was going to choose to write about how much I enjoyed this particular essay of his) begins, “The six of us—myself, my wife, our little Black Lab, a poet friend, and two friendly gearheads—are off to a late start as the packing of effects and food and water drags on and then it’s a puzzle of how to fit our backpacks into the hatchback.” A story follows of an afternoon rock climbing, details of his fear of climbing until he falls, and then there’s a conversation he had that morning with a friend about not having time to read poetry anymore because he’s been reading a lot of nonfiction—there’s the transition—and, hey, that nonfiction, that cultural criticism and doomsday environmental literature on what-the-hell-is-happening-to-us is actually weighing on him in ways that feel very heavy indeed. Pull up a chair, he’ll tell you why.

An essay about rock climbing becomes an essay on how we keep living in the face of THE inevitable fall.
An essay about Iceland is also about THE unknowability of those we love.
In short, we seek depth, but depth revealed through the concretes of experience, places, and, to quoth C&C Music Factory, the things that make us go “hmm,” the stuff that we dream of as we grind our teeth at night that only signal the much larger abstractions we are fretting.

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Kristen Grayewski is a third year in the MFA program in creative writing at The Ohio State University and Nonfiction Editor at The Journal. She has written about pop and punk for various publications, and is currently working on her thesis, heaven help her. 

Jill Christman on Kathy Winograd's "Bathing"

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Ira Sukrungruang: Digging Beyond the Bellybutton

We live in a new America, I tell my students. A diverse America, a multicultural America, and our stories matter more now than in any part of our history. I tell them we are no longer under the thumb, but rather we are the thumb, and we are here to make an imprint on this country. I am melodramatic when I say all of this. I talk with wild hands, sermonizing in the classroom, using idioms like an idiot. Still, my speech has purpose. What I want to ingrain in my students—whether they will become writers or not, whether they will go on to write a memoir or not—is that they and their stories matter, that their tellings of their stories matter, that how they tell their stories matters most.

The truth is our stories mattered before, too—the before of the sixties and seventies, the before of women’s and civil rights, the before of religious persecution and slavery. At no time in America’s short history have the stories of the people not mattered. This is the reason for the founding of the country, a collected story of freedom and peace, a search, a journey to find happiness in place and mind. Our stories mattered, even when we told them only to each other, even when we whispered them, even when we feared what would happen if we put our thoughts on to the page.

Why then are such terms as “narcissistic” and “self-absorption” being thrown around as the umbrella elements of all memoir? Such criticisms subscribe to the keep-it-in-the-closet mentality, tell us we do not matter, let alone our stories. Such disparagements become an attack on the person and not the work. But we, creative nonfiction writers, know this. This is the risk we take. When Phillip Lopate digs into his bellybutton in his essay “Portrait of My Body” and tells us the smell of his findings—“…a very ripe, underground smell…a combination of old gym socks and stuffed derma,” Lopate finds himself in the center of the Coliseum with an audience of cringing faces, much like my students every time I teach the essay. When Ann Hodgman decides to eat dog food and describe her experiences in her essay, “No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch,” Hodgman expects the chorus of ewwwwws that will rain down on her, as it always does in my classes. Or one of my experiences during a reading at a university in the Bible Belt, when a student raised his hand and asked why I had written such a dirty book. In nonfiction, there is no surrogate narrator, and no matter how much we try, as Annie Dillard says, to “fashion the text,” the main character of nonfiction and the writer are one. 

Yes, there are bad memoirs, as there are bad novels and poems, as there are bad music and movies. The memoir as an art form is not about the subject but about the telling of a subject. The memoir as an art form is less about plot but more about the understanding of the plot. Phillip Lopate writes that “’plot’ to the skilled writer is how far one can drop past his or her psychic defenses toward deeper levels of honesty,” and here I would like to add deeper levels of humanity. What is Angela’s Ashes about, if not perseverance through poverty, if not the light in such darkness? "You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”

I used to draw Buddhas wherever I went. I was obsessed. When I was 9 or 10, I had Buddha on the mind. Not because I was the best Buddhist in the world. Far from it. I had Buddha on my mind because of his absence in my world, because I was living in a country, in a city, Chicago, surrounded by Jesus and God. As an immigrant son I wanted to locate myself. This, in many ways, is what most immigrant sons and daughters do. We spend our time locating ourselves. We watch the world and act accordingly.  My days in my Thai home were dictated by Buddha’s doctrine. But outside, Buddha seemed to evaporate, seemed to be only the comical and jolly man one saw at Chinese restaurants. Friends asked if I rubbed Buddha’s belly for good luck, and when I was younger, I didn’t have the heart to say that my Buddha was not fat; my Buddha was skinny and did not like belly rubs.

I’ve been asked on a number of occasions when I started writing my memoir Talk Thai. The truth: my memoir began when I first put pencil to paper, and it was not a word I wrote, but a hand I drew. Buddha’s hand. And then it was his lips. And his eyes. His wise and long earlobes. And the top of his head, which to me looked like an upside down ice cream cone. I drew other Buddhas. At my parents’ friend’s house, at temple, at Thai restaurants, at the Chicago Chinatown shops. Buddha looked different. In some poses, he would be standing. In some poses, reclining on his side. Buddha, my art model, never looked the same. Each time I drew, I was drawing something different. I was seeing something different. I was not a skilled artist. Not by any means. In some portraits Buddha’s eyes looked like aliens, large and uneven. In one portrait, he appeared to have an African shrunken head. Perfection was not the goal. Discovering was. Somewhere in my nine-year-old mind, I believed this act of drawing would lead me to something. And that something was big. Big and vague. And that something started with the self and became larger and larger and larger, like an inverted Chinese box. You open the smallest box, only to find a larger one.

This is what I want my students to understand. I tell my students their memoirs won’t shock me. I tell them that what happens is secondary. That behind a story is another story and another one behind that. How hard are they willing to dig? How many layers are they willing to excavate? Because in the end, the easiest part of memoir is drawing Buddha’s hand. The hardest part is finding out what’s underneath it.  

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Ira Sukrungruang is the author of Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy and In Thailand It Is Night. He teaches creative nonfiction at the University of South Florida and the low-residency MFA program at City University Hong Kong.

Steve Donoghue: Happily Reading Along

At Open Letters, we're (as beloved Boston book-dealer George Goodspeed used to say) in books. It's true that we'll happily consider pieces on the whole gamut of artistic expression - one of our most popular contributors discusses nothing but video games, for instance, and in Locke Peterseim we're lucky to have the single most talented movie reviewer working today - but from the beginning, our most passionate love and main focus has been on in-depth book criticism of the type we've all so much enjoyed in periodicals like The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books.

Not for us, then, the daunting task of running short stories - and just as well, since the editorial gauntlet we'd represent would range from the fundamental ("Why isn't this nonfiction?") to the lowbrow ("Why isn't this Edgar Rice Burroughs?") to daunting ("Why isn't this George Eliot?") to the challenging ("Why isn't this Anthony Burgess?") to the terrifying ("Why isn't this perfect?"). And likewise we usually steer clear of the explicitly personal essay, although we'll make exceptions if the contender is both excellent and, predictably, book-related (Scott Esposito's "On Packing Two Bags for Mexico" comes to mind, and there've been a few choice others).

Instead, we tend to concentrate on essays about books: reviews, appreciations, reconsiderations. And although that still presents us with a staggering variety of submitted work (so much so that we hand off entire genres to their own separate spheres - Maureen Thorson taking poetry, for instance, and our indomitable columnist Irma Heldman holding the line with mysteries), it admits of a certain focus which we do our best to sharpen. Luckily, we bring separate strengths to the job. Greg Waldmann is a first-rate scrutinizer of the nuts and bolts of prose; if a writer starts waxing about charmed magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn, that writer had better be prepared for Greg to ask "So how do these casements work? Do they actually hang over these perilous seas, or what?" Rohan Maitzen and John Cotter are our two published authors; to any essay about some writer's work, they bring not only the spiked truncheon of the editor but, crucially, the first aid kit of those who've been on the receiving end of reviews. Sam Sacks, as all the book-world knows, writes the Fiction Chronicle for The Wall Street Journal and can therefore be trusted to know a hawk from a handsaw when it comes to assessing the work of other critics. And there are persistent rumors that I went to school with James Russell Lowell.

In putting together an issue of Open Letters Monthly and dealing with the onrush of submissions, our gallant band is also helped by something my fellow Massachusetts resident (and fellow devotee of Boston's mighty Brattle Bookshop!) Sven Birkerts gently alluded to earlier in this series, in "Screening the Essay": if the writer of a submitted freelance piece is going to waste your time, he'll make that fact obvious fairly early on. Is the opening of the piece off-puttingly arrogant ("Like I used to say to Bucky Fuller...")? Is it maddeningly timid ("Bulgakov might be great - but really, how would *I* know?")? Is it choked with jargon ("The meta-structuralism of Angus McGonagle is only asymptotically eidolic")? Is it, right out of the starting gate, boring? ("I believe," Christina Thompson wrote in "Prose Matters," which also appeared earlier in this series, "that nothing should terrify a writer more than the prospect of being boring" - and she's absolutely right.)

Admittedly, good writing about books and authors is an extremely tricky balancing act. Those who haven't tried it can hardly imagine how exacting it can be, for instance, to make the requisite amount of exposition flow smoothly in the narrative of the piece, as opposed to the dreaded "info-dump." In “Second Glance: The Privy Mark of Irony,” look at how carefully Colleen Shea manages to keep her readers informed about Francis Beaumont's play (which she immediately, engagingly calls a "hilarious post-Modern, meta-theatrical romp”) The Knight of the Burning Pestle while simultaneously analyzing it; she can safely guess that 99 percent of her audience will know nothing about the work, so she must educate, examine, and exult all more or less simultaneously - and it's masterfully done.

Or consider the equally delicate task of conveying passion without pathos. Paradoxically, the central, animating joy common to all readers - the squeal of "that was great!" about a choice work by Gertrude Stein or George Meredith or Gerald of Wales - has no place in serious book criticism. Not in its raw form, anyway: the good critic must find a way to channel that bright burst of enthusiasm into prose that sends the reader irresistibly in search of the author being discussed. One of the best ways to do this is to humanize that author, as Stephen Akey does so fluidly in “Tom and Em,” writing about Thomas Hardy’s love-poetry to his late wife Emma. The opening of his piece is as starkly assured as something out of Hardy's own prose: "After taking to her bed with an indisposition on November 26, 1912, Emma Lavinia Hardy, Thomas Hardy's wife of thirty-eight years, died the following day. It was then that he fell in love with her." What do you do, Akey is smart enough to ask, "when the love of your life unexpectedly dies, leaving you no chance to explain, apologize, or redeem your mistakes?" No matter what the reader might previously have thought about Hardy's poetry, they're going to want the answers to that question.

Questions like that - pieces like these - keep us reading at Open Letters even when the hour is late and demands of our "real" jobs are piling up. In fact, one of the highest compliments we can pay to an author (unbeknownst to them, since they never see it) is to append "no edits here - just happily reading along" while working up a piece for publication. That comment invariably comes when a writer has forgotten pretension and evasion and sensation and is just passionately telling the story of some reading they love. That kind of craft is tough to achieve and even tougher to maintain, but when it happens (and we can be pretty helpful at getting it to happen!), those are the moments when we're all mighty glad to be in books.

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Steve Donoghue is a Boston-based book critic whose work has appeared in The National, The Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He's the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly and hosts one of its book-blogs, Stevereads.