annotation by Telaina Eriksen

The thing about writing an annotation when you don’t have to is that it forces you to wrestle with a book. Not only how the book coheres—its mechanics and structure—but it also forces you to wrestle with its meaning. Why and how did this book affect me? Does this book offer me something unique? What will poet Mary Ruefle have to say about poetry that I haven’t heard or read before?  I bought Madness, Rack and Honey on the recommendation of a poet friend and started reading it fairly soon after acquiring it because a) it was such a physically beautiful book and b) I had to know the origin of its wonderful title.

Ruefle begins her book with an introduction.

“I never set out to write this book. In 1994 I began to be required to deliver standing lectures to graduate students, and the requirement terrified me. I was told the students preferred spontaneous talks, but I am a rotten and unsteady extemporizer… I always looked askance at writing on writing, but I’m intelligent enough to see that writing is writing. Still, my allegiance to poetry, to art, is greater than my allegiance to knowledge and intelligence…” (VII).

It was here (at the very beginning) that the book began to sweep me off my feet.

Because the book is a series of collected lectures (much like Robert Olen Butler’s “From Where You Dream”) it is possible to read it in pretty much whatever order you would like. One of the first lectures I read was “Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World.” Again in the first few paragraphs, Ruefle seemed to be present in every word, reaching out to me:

  “When I was twenty-five I began to keep a monthly list of books I read. Over time it became obvious that although some months I didn’t read at all, and other months I read eight or nine books, on the average I read five books a month, or sixty books a year. Assuming this was more or less true from the time I was ten… I can calculate that I have probably read 2,400 books in my life… Out of those 2,400 books I probably remember 200 or 8 percent.” (183)

I too read at about Ruefle’s rate—averaging between 50 and 70 books a year—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels. I will pick up a sequel to a book I’ve enjoyed (for instance Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam’s Trilogy) and I won’t remember important plot points which at the time, I thought I would never forget. Ruefle reflects in this lecture about reading more than you can process and the value in rereading.   She says, “… I had reached a juncture in my reading life that is familiar to those who have been there: in the allotted time left to me on earth, should I read more and more new books, or should I cease with that vain consumption—vain because it is endless—and begin to reread those books that had given me the intensest pleasure in the past, books I had all but forgotten in their details, but loved in the shadows they cast over me…” (185) I think anyone who is over 40 years of age can relate to this musing—all the reading left to do before you die in these, your finite years on this planet. Reading to Ruefle (and to me) is a serious business.

Another one of my favorite essays is the lecture entitled “Twenty-two Short Lectures.” This lecture begins with “Why All of Our Literary Pursuits Are Worthless.” Ruefle says, “Eighty-five percent of all existing species are beetles and various forms of insects. English is spoken by only 5 percent of the world’s population.” (247) That’s it. That’s the whole first lecture. Both incredibly wise and incredibly funny.

And finally the lecture that gives the book its title, “Madness, Rack and Honey.” The phrase came to Ruefle in a dream. The honey is the sweetness of writing a poem. She believes it is an echo of a Persian poem, written in Farsi, which she has always loved. “I shall not finish my poem/What I have written is so sweet/The flies are beginning to torment me.” The rack is the torment, torture and pain of the poem. “And if you have never experienced the rack while working on a poem then you have never worked on a poem.” (135) The madness is perhaps the most easily explained; for what else is the result of an activity that is sweet, but so sweet you feel tortured?

This isn’t simply a how-to poetry book—it’s fiercely and ferociously engaged with life, especially living a literary life. It refuses standard narrative structure and reminds me more of a series of collage essays (ala David Shields or Maggie Nelson) rather than an expository set of lectures on the power and meaning of poetry in the modern world.  I spent the entire book jotting down names of books, poems and philosophers to read (in my limited remaining amount of reading time). Her segues into etymology of words we use every day but have profound significance (fear and secret for instance) will make even the most jaded poet and reader wonder again about the language that comprises our daily task of creating.

Ruefle has lived and read and written and offers up that wisdom to her fellow writers and fellow human beings. On page 75 she talks about hearing and listening in the womb before we are born—about the experience of sound without meaning, that our “first experience of the world is that the world is a secret, that is, it neither hides itself nor reveals itself.” You could spend a lifetime thinking about how life is a secret, the world is a secret, and poetry is a secret—always hiding and revealing in turn.

I am profoundly grateful Ruefle’s allegiance to knowledge and intelligence swayed enough in our favor to offer this book up to poets, or to anyone who likes to read and wishes to live an examined life.

book by Lee Montgomery

annotation by Chris Geraci

Of all the memoirs I have read, The Things Between Us, is one of my favorites.  Beside the fact that I did an internship with Lee Montgomery at Tin House Books, her story is engaging without being preachy and at no point does Lee ask for sympathy or forgiveness, and Lee is just an all-round amazing person.  Her writing is just like her personality, no bullshit, the truth is the truth, take it or leave it.  As a result, Lee Montgomery the person and Lee Montgomery the author is real and believable.  To me she is a bit of a rock star.

Lee is extremely gifted in her use of descriptive language and concise storytelling.  She takes a story of alcoholism and family dysfunction, doesn’t trivialize it, but finds the humor in it.  Through tragedy and loss, her family comes together and bonds over the life and death of Lee’s father.  Although, it is clear her father is her hero and that she is her father’s daughter, her mother steals the show (the book), with her gregarious personality combined with her excessive drinking.

Clearly, there is a heavy dose of admiration for Mrs. Montgomery by the people who know her.  She reminded me of a 30s Hollywood Starlet: glamorous, commands attention, is adored by those around her, and a hopeless alcoholic. What is refreshing about Lee’s tale is that she is clearly aware of her mother’s personality and flaws, but there is no anger or blame, just acceptance that this woman does love her, but is severely flawed.  Lee writes, “I will never be able to explain my mother, but I will most likely spend my life trying.  She is the rock in the road that I navigate around.”

Lee also has respect for both her parents, especially her father, Monty.  Monty is the gatekeeper of Lee’s mother.  Despite countless drunken episodes, Monty stands by her unconditionally. Even when the focus should be on Monty’s health, Lee’s mother steals the show.  But courageously, Lee writes about the truth, the pain from her point of view and acknowledges that the memories and stories are hers and vary from her siblings take on the same set of events.  Lee epitomizes what we have learned about being true to your story, your characters, and the memories; stay committed to the truth and your story will be raw, emotional, and very real.   A memory or an event can inspire a variety of interpretations, which are still true, just your version of the truth.

What Lee does so well is her attention to the visceral details, combined with her talent for lessness.  Her narrative technique is sparse, Lee chooses each word carefully, and her talent as a frank storyteller is apparent – it is also a reflection of her personality, no sugar coating the truth.  Lee’s memoir contains an excellent example of interweaving stories, guiding the reader smoothly between past and present without losing her audience.  The result is one that compels the reader to turn the pages in order to see what happens to these beautifully flawed characters.  Not only does Lee command the craft memoir writing, she creates scenes that are so clear and concrete – as she walks through the fields with her father, you can see the morning steam arise from the grass.  Her mother’s constant accessory, a crystal glass with booze is so real that you can hear the ice clink when it it is dropped into the glass.  Although the heart of this story is about a sad dysfunction, Lee creates an acceptable distance that as a reader it does not feel sappy or overdramatic, it is just sad.  Through this journey of familial decline, Lee creates a picture of her mother that is gregarious and fun.  Despite the fact that Mrs. Montgomery is an alcoholic, you still like her.  It is a masterpiece filled with flawed, but likeable characters.  The Things Between Us is quilt of memories woven together in an exceptional memoir.

book by Janet Burroway

annotation by Wendy Fontaine

The title piece in Janet Burroway’s collection of essays is an imagined discussion between the author and her deceased mother that says as much about how fiction writers strategically choose details and create dialogue as it does about how we, as human beings, process and reprocess our memories to fit the moment.

“I want to put you in a story,” Burroway writes in the opening of “Embalming Mom,” one of sixteen essays in her collection of the same name. “Apparently it’s a matter of some importance.”

The essay takes its place somewhere in the gray space between fiction and nonfiction. It is based on a real memory – Burroway watching her mother iron the puffed sleeves of a cotton dress – but it is thoroughly fictionalized in that the two women never encompassed the same space as the author describes it.

In the piece, Burroway is 45 years old, recently divorced and sitting in the breakfast nook of her childhood home. At first we think she is a grown daughter who has returned to her mother’s home after a bad breakup. As the story develops, we realize it is Burroway’s dramatization of a memory: she is watching her mother, a devoted 35-year-old housewife going through the domestic motion of ironing clothes. Burroway is imaginatively goading her mother into a mock conflict for the sake of a story she wants to write, while her mother is wrestling with an ulcer and admonishing Burroway for being indiscreet, in her life as well as in her fiction.

The author has put herself in a fictitious scene with her mother in an effort to recall and capture her as a character. As the narrative moves through time and place, Burroway sets the stage and creates dialogue between herself and her mother. She chooses the items to place in the scene, such as a fishbowl for an ash tray, and even goes so far as to chide herself when the details of the scene fall short. Burroway revises until it feels authentic. She writes:

She turns again, one eyebrow raised and a mocking smile, “What, then, am I the most unforgettable character you’ve met?” Not like her, neither the eyebrow nor the words, which have the cadence of a British education. I’m the one with the British education. I try again. She turns back like the film run backward…and turns again robotlike, profile gashed with a smile. “Honey, write for the masses. People need to escape. They need to laugh. (39)

The essay is similar to the way we replay personal conversations and experiences of the past and how we try to recast them in a more favorable light. At the end of the piece, Burroway acknowledges that the morticians have done what she was not able to do herself. “Everybody says they have done a splendid job,” she writes. “They have caught her exactly, everybody says.”

As a writer of memoir, I am fascinated by the process of how we recollect. I enjoy reading how other writers stumble across their memories, and how hard they work to pull the fragments of remembrance together to create a more cohesive picture in their mind – and then, of course, how they render that memory to the page. Each of the essays in Burroway’s collection focuses on a certain trigger of memory. Whether it is a photograph, a picture frame or the electrical stove in the first apartment she rented after her first divorce (“the paraphernalia of an ongoing life,” she calls it), Burroway allows these triggers to open the narrative to a time when she was able to make meaning of some aspect of her life. Using objects to activate memory is a good practice not only for memoir writers, but for writers of any genre. Because memories themselves are prone to distortion, the lines between genres are slightly blurred when one writes about memory – as Burroway shows us in her collection of essays.

In “Dad Scattered,” she remembers her father by going through his things – not substantial things like clothes or tools, but the seemingly insignificant things, like tie tacks, old keys and foreign coins. By swapping a photo out of a frame in “Freeze Frame,” she reflects on the ways in which we frame our lives. “We Eat the Earth” is a reminiscent piece about the English garden she never could quite manage. And in “Soldier Son,” she draws distinctions between her two children, who are very different but similar in how passionately they embrace their divergent lifestyles.

I admire Burroway’s expertise at getting under the skin of her subject, and her writing reminds me of what makes an essay great: the ability to connect the small moment (installing a pool in the backyard) to the bigger question (how do we bury our past?).  Each of her essays contains an element of doubt, followed by evidence to the reader that she is doing the difficult work of examining her life in order to find meaning in her chosen subject. Therein lies the value of memoir, and Embalming Mom is an example of why readers gravitate to the genre.

As Vivian Gornick writes in The Situation and The Story, “truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.” Burroway fully engages with her experiences. Her essays reveal confessions, convey transparencies and offer readers some wonderful surprises.

book by Bernard Cooper

annotation by Wendy Fontaine

At first glance, the thirty or so essays that appear in Bernard Cooper’s Maps to Anywhere seem to lack a common narrative thread. Upon closer read, the unifying factor of these works becomes more apparent. The essays explore the contrast between the idealism of a 1950s childhood and the disillusionment of family members struggling with medical issues, sexuality and disappointment. Through evocative prose, self-deprecating humor and the ability to see what others may not, Cooper gently places his reader at the crossroads of dream and reality, hope and fear, wonderment and grief.

Some of his essays are contemplations, or up-close studies of objects and concepts that are so ordinary they hardly warrant thought (a barber’s pole, potatoes), but Cooper manages to elevate them to the level of profundity. Others are memories, mostly of loss and heartache, such as the death of his brother and the declining health of his father. Cooper explores the relationship between everyday and profound by creating contrasts in his essays.

In “The House of the Future,” one of the collection’s longer works, Cooper describes a futuristic modular house made entirely of plastic. He compares the staged solitude of the model home with that of his actual home, which was more chaotic and less welcoming, due in part to his older brother’s struggle with leukemia and his father’s infidelities. Cooper frames his family’s losses around the fortified structure of a home that will never break down, never deteriorate  and never need repair. He writes:

One could look down through the plexiglass steps to the House of the Future and glimpse a large reflecting pool, shivering and shaped like an amoeba. It bore little resemblance to the rubber pools, rowdy children wading within, which dotted our local yards. (98)

Cooper grew up around Los Angeles, and the sights and sounds of the city are apparent in his writing. Throughout the collection, Cooper is a California boy. As a child, he watches his father dive into the backyard swimming pool, noticing the way the man’s skin hangs loose from his body. As a grownup, Cooper is still is father’s son. In “The Wind Did It,” an essay in which his father refers to him in Yiddish as “boychik” and repeatedly says “I’m just looking back,” Cooper watches his dad prepare for a trip to meet a Somoan chief named Muto Peli:

I’m sprawled on my back in the middle of the room, picking at strands of plush carpet, wishing I hadn’t eaten the cheesecake. But my father wanted to celebrate, to say good-bye with something sweet, and besides, he loves to watch me eat, especially foods his doctor forbids. I lift my head and lean on my elbow. “Say his name one more time.” (61)

Cooper’s sentences are long and leisurely with multiple clauses and commas, a style that gives his writing a dreamy, sentimental feeling. In an essay entitled “Live Wire,” Cooper takes this sentence structure to the extreme, writing the entire paragraph-length story all in one sentence. The piece captures in beautiful brevity the moment an electrical wire falls to the street. It reads more like poetry than prose.

Cooper also uses simile in a way that is both effective and efficient. With just a few words, he conveys the full meaning of a moment, or creates a vivid picture for the reader. After reading a newspaper piece about his father’s divorce from his second wife, Cooper writes, “My secret knowledge of him, acquired via the news, hangs between us like a crystal chandelier, swaying and clinking, erupting with refractions.” (48)

Personally, what I admire most about Cooper’s work is how adept he is at noticing things that others might miss, and then capturing them in words that are both simple and stunning.

For example, when he writes, “We walk downstairs and out to my car. As we hug goodbye our glasses bump,” (62) he captures the similarities between father and son, and the lovable awkwardness of a grown man hugging his father.

As writers, we often attempt to tackle the larger issues in our lives: disappointment, trauma, grief, joy and triumph, to name a few. But Maps to Anywhere inspires me to pause in the smaller moments, to take note of how these in-between instances can have their own meaning, and then to experiment with language structure and simile in order to find that connection between ordinary and profound.

annotation by Lee Stoops

“In the United States, it is very easy for me to forget that the people around me are my people. It is easy, with all our divisions, to think of myself as an outsider in my own country.”(93)

~ Eula Biss

Essay: Letter to Mexico

It’s hard for me to believe Eula Biss is on a few years older than I or that she could understand, in fewer than 40 years alive, so much about people. I cannot think of a book that has moved me, changed my mind, or affirmed more of what I believe than this collection of essays. It would be easy to gush, to spend pages singing about the remarkable presentation of such treacherous and necessary subject matter, but this annotation will focus on Biss’s writing style – her language, construction, and persona. Through her essays, Biss offers permission to think honestly and express freely. She impressed me more than any writer of this generation both in the bravery of her presentation and in the quality of her writing.

Because writers are artists, rendering shape to everything through the employment of words (language our medium), I usually spend the majority of my reading time noting other elements of writer’s work. However, with Biss, I could not get over her use of the English language. It’s such a compelling mix of conversational, educational, informal, and intellectual vocabulary and syntax. Her lexis is accessible to many, which, I believe, considering the nature of these essays, was her intention. Yet, there is nothing simple about her words. Her language forms in a way that does not seek to persuade but merely to draw attention to issues from new places of insight. She does not use words to manipulate or sell or prove. She raises questions and hopes for answers. There are times her language sounds like opinion, but, to any reader committed to the end of essays, it is clear she is not editorializing – she is hypothesizing, at times edging close to theory, but always, always inviting the reader, through conversational tones, to openly consider what has her confused, piqued, or upset.

“Being afraid of children is not, in itself, much of a crime. It is more of an indignity. But disguising the fearful things we do to children as essential elements of their education is as good as dynamiting the foundation of the classroom. The walls are bound to collapse, eventually, around that betrayal, and bring with them the roof. One of the most frightening things about children, in my experience, is their intelligence. They inevitably know more than we suspect them of knowing. They appraise us with devastating accuracy. And they are aware of injustices we have learned to ignore.” (53)

Perhaps the most interesting stylistic element of Biss’s essays is her construction. In essence, it follows the form of braiding, but it is so inventive. Traditionally, braided essays weave fluidly, more a blending of subjects than a braiding – a contriving of connection if the connection is not profound. Biss’s essays don’t do this. Yes, her writing blends from braid to braid, and her language is consistent, but her braids are also independent and defined and she ropes them together with finesse, not force. With the braiding, she does not lead the reader to conclusions, and she does not hint. There are times, as in her opening essay, that the introduction of new braids surprises. By the end, the connections, while inventive in her mixing, are clear. I found myself either informed or flip-flopped on my understanding of a topic. For example, the following are progressive snippets from braids as she interlays them in her opening essay Time and Distance Overcome:

“Mark Twain was among the first Americans to own a telephone, but he wasn’t completely taken with the device. ‘The human voice carries entirely too far as it is,’ he remarked.”(4).

“The war on telephone poles was fueled, in part, by that terribly American concern for private property, and a reluctance to surrender it for a shared utility.”(5).

“‘Time and dist. Overcome,’ read an early advertisement for the telephone…The telephone, Thomas Edison declared, ‘annihilated time and space, and brought the human family in closer touch.’ (6)

‘In 1898, in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole. And in Weir City, Kansas. And in Brookhaven, Mississippi. And … ‘(6-7).

‘Lynching, the first scholar of the subject determined, is an American tradition.’(7).

“The children’s game of telephone depends on the fact that a message passed quietly from one ear to another to another will get distorted at some point along the line.”(7).

In creative nonfiction, the word “persona” has taken a frontline position in approach and development of voice. Biss, a relatively young writer and teacher, has developed in this collection a persona as interesting and verbally dichotic as her blend of vocabulary. She presents to the reader an educated, curious, hopeful and naïve person – a person of remarkable insight and experience considering her age. But, as fascinating as her choice of personas to include is, what grabbed me as a writer are the persona options she leaves out. For example, it is not until the last quarter of the collection that the reader knows she is married, and not until the last essay that the reader knows she is pregnant (the dedication hints at that, but does not confirm). She does not replace her established personas as she introduces new ones. The introduction of new persons is calculated, and, given the subject matter of the essays the first half of the book comprises, wise. Some of her youthful, hopeful naiveté in the earlier essays might not be as powerful had she introduced herself as a wife, as a mother-to-be. She also chooses to give much away in regard to her own cultural/genetic persona. Given her name and the (intentionally) poorly lit author photo, it is impossible to tell picking up the book much about her other than she is a young-ish woman. The mystery around who she physically is gives a strange credit to her subject matter:

“Even now, at a much more wary and guarded age, what I feel when I am told that my neighborhood is dangerous is not fear but anger at the extent to which so many of us have agreed to live within a delusion – namely, that we will be spared the dangers that others suffer only if we move within certain very restricted spheres, and that insularity is a fair price to pay for safety.” (154)

While reading Notes from No Man’s Land, I realized, for the first time in a long time, it was a book I had trouble putting down. Not only that, but I thought while reading about when and how I might re-read the essays, even how I might teach them. Not just as a student of writing, but as a human being, encouraged to grow and to change and to not ignore so many things I’ve come to so easily ignore. As a writer, this is the kind of book that makes a difference in the way I write, because it makes a difference in the way I see the world, the way I see other people, and the way I see myself.

“A sense of home is, it seems, worth more than any other comfort. And one of the questions I want to answer now, for myself, is what makes a place feel like home. I know that it is not so simple as living where people speak your language and look like you and have lost what you have lost, but there is a kind of comfort in that, too.” (128)

annotation by Wendy Fontaine

The Boys of My Youth is an elegant collection of twelve narrative essays that focus on the author’s Midwestern childhood and the relationships that carried into her adulthood. To show readers how she came to be the person she is, Jo Ann Beard uses a combination of present tense narration, simple yet meaningful motifs, and a layering of scenes from childhood and adulthood to create a collage of pieces that evoke emotion without being overly sentimental.

One essay in particular illustrates this narrative structure. In the title essay, which comes last in the collection, Beard writes about the pursuit of childhood crushes. Throughout the piece, Beard shifts from her childhood neighborhood, where she prank-called boys with her best friend, Elizabeth, into her adulthood, where she is an editor in Iowa and Elizabeth is an editor in Chicago. Throughout the essay, the two share a telephone conversation discussing past relationships and they way they met.

In one paragraph they are in junior high school French class, horrified when the teacher tells a classmate she enunciates like Porky the Pig. Immediately, the narrative shifts to present time, as they are reminiscing over the phone and Elizabeth is correcting the author’s memory about the first time they met:

“That was ninth grade, not seventh,” Elizabeth says. “We were already friends when that happened.” She is at her office in downtown Chicago, talking to me on the WATS line. “You wouldn’t’ believe what my desk looks like right now.” I would because I’ve witnessed it. She’s an editor, and there are manuscripts stacked everywhere and yellow notes with Urgent scrawled across them stuck to the carpet. (156)

One of Beard’s many talents is melding the funny with the sad, and creating beautiful sentences that evoke certain feelings within the reader. Her subject matter is not particularly sentimental, since many of her essays are about the smaller moments in life, but her prose is so sparse and well crafted that it resonates with emotion.

“Cousins” is an example of this. A collage-like essay that begins with two pregnant sisters fishing from a boat, it moves into the lives of sisters’ boy-crazy, free-spirited daughters: Beard and her cousin, Wendell. The essay is comprised of nonlinear snapshots – Beard and Wendell as girls playing Dirty Barbies in the backyard or getting stoned at an Eric Clapton concert, juxtaposed with scenes of Beard’s mother lying in a hospital bed, coming in and out of consciousness because of morphine and illness.

She writes,

“They [Beard's mother and aunt] swim through her lake, gray-eyed sisters, thin-legged and mouthy. They fight and hold hands, trade shoes and dresses, marry beautiful tall men, and have daughters together, two dark-eyed cousins, thin-legged and mouthy.” (44)

Beard’s essays work together as a collection because they address similar themes and include similar descriptions or motifs. “Cousins,” which is my favorite piece in the collection, includes a motif of a silver baton in a way that is hauntingly beautiful. A few of the author’s pieces feature the same phrases and similes, such as swimming or rowing a boat as metaphor for dreaming. Several essays begin with and include short, matter-of-fact sentences that immediately place the reader into the story, such as “Here is a scene” or “This is daytime.”

Beard’s twelve essays also vary in certain ways. Some are very short. “In The Current,” which is about three teenagers who get caught in a river current, is barely two pages. Others, like “The Boys of My Youth,” are much longer. A few are written in past tense, but most are in present tense (which Beard said in an interview with The Fiddleback, an online magazine, is something she does unintentionally).

Writing in present tense closes the narrative distance between reader and writer and lends immediacy to the story. What the writer surrenders with present tense, though, is a measure of reflection, which is a key element of memoir. If the narrator is speaking in the moment, hindsight is not an option. Beard’s essays tend to run short on reflection, perhaps because of her use of present tense.

Another interesting element of this book is how Beard writes about her childhood. She seems to inhabit the space between remembering and imagining. Readers see this best in the essay, “Bulldozing the Baby,” in which Beard is a three-year-old separated for the first time from her favorite doll, Hal. The essay conveys her toddler thoughts in a humorous, adult-like manner. Since it is unlikely anyone would remember events from when they were three years old, the piece reads as though it was meant more for entertainment than for recollecting the past. If readers accept that the author has taken creative license, the effect is a funny take on what happens when Beard’s aunt decides to take away her beloved Hal.

 
I most admire Beard’s use of motif, particularly in her essay “Cousins.” The repeating images of fish, silver flashes, swimming and rowing a boat add a beautiful depth and connectivity to the work, which is something I would like to add to my own personal essays.

annotated in Ten Words by Marianne Woods Cirone

People:  Yu Hua was born in 1960, I was born in the same year.  He grew up in China, I grew up in a suburb of Chicago.   It would seem that our similarities end there, yet, Yu Hua intertwines his political and cultural narratives with stories of his childhood that I can totally relate to—boys bragging about touching breasts, children looking at books with pictures of naked people, neighbors gossiping about the sex lives of other neighbors.  Despite our differences, Yu Hua proves that people– communist, capitalist or a hybrid thereof– are all, at the core, essentially the same.

Leader:  Despite our commonalities as human beings, our cultures diverged radically.  For example, Yu Hua relays the tale of when he was a teenager in 1976, that  a thousand students his high school auditorium wailed and sobbed when they heard that their leader, Chairman Mao had died.  I could not imagine my high school peers, that same year, shedding even a tear for our leader, Gerald Ford, much less his predecessor, Richard Nixon.  Yet, while our nation vilified Nixon, his crimes appear trifling compared to the genocide of 50 to 70 million people committed by Mao.  No one wept for Nixon, yet millions mourned for Mao.

Reading:  While I relate to Yu Hua’s love of reading and quest to find good books, there the similarities end.  As a child and teen I had access to virtually any printed book, yet I interpreted most efforts to get me to read anything other than what I had specifically selected for myself as an infraction of my own human rights.  I disliked Johnny Tremain in junior high, I detested Beowulf  in high school.  Like most of my peers, then and now, I had no idea of how good I had it.  The lengths which young Yu Hua must go to read a novel are heartbreaking, and reading of them harkens me to cherish my total freedom to read a vast variety of material.

Writing:  YuaHu’s weaving of the political and the personal, of adulthood and childhood, of horrifying and hilarious, inspire me to consider using these techniques in my own writing.  A heavy-handed political tome doesn’t fare well for those not named Chairman Mao, so I am instructed to keep adding my personal voice and stories to my (sometimes dry) writing.

LuXun:  This chapter, which links China’s pre-eminent writer, LuXun and Norway’s writer, Henrik Ibsen, reminds me of the story of the Emperor’s Clothes.  Just because the experts, be they “literati” or the government say an author or a work is good, stick to your opinion and have the guts to say so.  At least in my culture, you may get heckled, but you aren’t likely to have your head blown off.

Revolution:  I think that Yu Hua is telling us that at some point, every successful revolutionary will be challenged by a counter-revolutionary.  In writing, I think this means, don’t be afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom, even if it held by those considered to be revolutionaries.

Disparity:  As in economics and politics, there is disparity also among writers.  Some of us have talent, some of us don’t.  Some of us will be published, some of us won’t.  Either way, we can each show up at the page and create.  The obstacles Yu Hua and other oppressed people overcome should encourage us to use our voices and speak the truth when we are so blessed with that opportunity.

Grassroots:  As our culture loses it connection to printed literature in exchange for all things electronic and video-related,  and writing literature seems to be increasingly be put into the  hands of the ever-growing bastions of MFAs, it remains important that the “common man,” the grass roots of the culture, continue to practice expressing themselves in writing.  My field study consisted of teaching several creative writing workshops to cancer survivors, as well as to teenagers, so I hope to continue the tradition of writing for the “grassroots” of the population.

Copycat:   I plan to copycat some of Yua Hu’s structural techniques in my own writing, such as using a device like the ten words to organize a piece, and interlacing personal reflections with research-based prose.

Bamboozle:  YuHua seems to have done a bit of bamboozling himself, as creative non-fiction writers do when they create the persona to tell their story, as he presents himself in the book more as a “common man” than a seasoned author, and may have bamboozled the government of China with “read between the lines” messages for Westerners.  Art is artifice, though, as I keep hearing over and over, even when it is authentic—and all of us as writers, need to continue that quest to keep our work authentic, while learning the craft of the artifice.

Annotation by Lee Stoops

“I knew then that we had both made the mental leap from the continental world to the island world, where anything can happen and usually does.”

~ J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals (191)

Maarten Troost makes no claims that his decision to follow his girlfriend to a remote atoll in the middle of the equatorial pacific was anything but silly; life-changing, worldview-changing, perspective-changing, sure, but still silly. And it is in his recognition of his own ridiculous circumstances that he finds travelogue/memoir gold. Some claim he might become the Bill Bryson of my (30-something) generation, and I can get behind that. I laughed the entire way through the book while at the same time coming to a deep understanding of Troost’s (and his cast’s) character(s), a passionate sympathy for the strange and fascinating culture (and enthralling and not widely-known history) of the I-Kirabati (pronounced kee-ree-bas) people, and a not strange desire to visit that part of the world and experience it as he did. The man is a wickedly talented word-smith, but even more, he crafts so compellingly a story of two years of his life – bookending those years cleanly without making it feel contrived but keeping it cinematic. His toolbox is laden, but the three most provocative devices I identified with both as a reader and a writer were humor, self-exposure, and construction (lyricism, pacing, provocation).

Humor is probably one of the most challenging elements to writing creative nonfiction, specifically personal narrative or memoir because it doesn’t work if it’s forced, but it’s hard to write humor without trying to write humor. To be fair, there are a number of times that Troost’s humor is forced, either in word choice/construction, or in the way he presents a scene. However, the times that he is just writing to the ridiculous of the experience are hysterical – the direct, well-crafted lines, the truest lines, the strangest (and, somehow, most relatable) lines. A specific example, in which Troost and his girlfriend, Sylvia, have taken in a few pets, even though, on Tarawa, the I-Kiribati people don’t regard animals as worthy of domestication (and usually just eat them), and decide that to protect them from other animals (specifically during times of “heat”), they need to fix them:

 Fortunately, the new vet finally arrived and I made arrangements to spare the other animals from the urges and consequences of their hormonal imperatives. The cat was the first to go. Each morning he returned to the house a little more battle-scarred, and though he survived kittenhood, it seemed unlikely that he would survive as a cat unless he was fixed. I picked Sam up and carried him to the pickup truck. If you have never driven a manual-shifting car alone with an uncaged cat, I recommend that you go to great lengths to avoid the experience. I deluded myself into thinking that the cat would sit quietly in the passenger seat, but in fact moments after I started the car he found his way to the top of my head, which he used as a perched to leap toward the window, which sadly for him, was closed, causing him to experience a not inconsiderable amount of panic, which he manifested by ripping me to shreds, pausing only to relieve himself. By the time we reached the vet’s office, a two-room surgery in Tanaea, I was bleeding from a number of slashes and I smelled like cat urine.

“Hi,” I said, “It’s nice to meet you. Welcome to Tarawa. I have a cat for you. He’s presently locked in the glove compartment” (188).

While I’ll address self-exposure in a minute, I think some of the most powerful humor Troost utilizes is self-effacement. In this example, Troost has overcome his fear of the possibility of sharks in the water and heads past the reef to snorkel:

“I dived in for a closer look, and as I did so I nearly blew out my sphincter. I had dived directly on top of a shark.

In my panic, I filled my lungs with water. Then I began to flail and kid and otherwise behave like weak and injured shark fodder. I was out of sorts. Jittery adrenaline bursts are not helpful when you happen to be in deep water with lungs full of seawater. I had no idea what the shark was doing. I was too busy drowning….Then I heard that little voice that has saved me so often in the past – relax, get a grip, swim up, clear your lungs, breathe, and get the hell out of the water, you twit…

Apprently I had frightened the shark. And it was no wonder. I was twice as big as he was. with my mask back on I could see it swimming rapidly away…

I was breathless by the time I entered the house…Between gasps, I shared my adventure with Tiabo…

“You are scared of te shark?” Tiabo asked with raised eyebrows.

“Yes, of course I am scared of te shark.”

“Ha, ha,” Tiabo laughed. “The I-Matang [white man] is scared of te shark. I-Kiribati people are not scared of te shark.”

“That’s because I-Kiribati people are crazy people.”

She laughed mirthfully. She had another story for the maneabe [center of the village where gossip happens] (104-105).

Self-exposure can make or break memoir or personal narrative. Writing in the form, we commit to opening up, reflecting, presenting honestly, with regard to both the narrative as a whole and to the persona in which we write. Troost has managed a book in which it seems he came to the blank page prepared to leave nothing out. An experience where the potential for cultural misunderstanding, even xenophobia, pressed, Troost shares himself – his thoughts, concerns, confusion, and frustration – openly. At one point, he interrupts himself to say he knows he’ll get hate mail for saying so, but he began to think the smell of dog roasting on a spit was pretty good. He constantly questions their sanity for moving there, only to write to experiences that affirm the decision. One effective way Troost initiates his self-exposure is with the briefs that appear before each new chapter. The mini abstracts give the chapter-focus away and introduce how the author feels and why he feels it is important to devote a whole chapter to the topic.

Chapter 1: In which the author expresses some Dissatisfaction with the State of his Life and ponders briefly prior Adventures and Misfortunes, and with the aid of his Beguiling Girlfriend, decides to Quit the Life that is known to him and make forth with all Due Haste for Parts Unknown (1).

Chapter 2: In which the Author reveals the Fruit of his Research into the Strange Island Nation he has declared his new Home (which leaves much unknown), compensates for his Ignorance with his Lively Imagination (which is inadequate, very much so), and Packs (inappropriately) (15).

And so on, and each chapter not only delivers on Troost’s abstract promises, but he opens freely – exposing himself as both brilliant and ignorant, able and pathetic, honest and scarred, optimistic and fatalistic. It’s beautiful, particularly since it’s generally so funny.

Troost’s construction, he claims at the forefront, is developed with the reader in mind: “DISCLAIMER: This book recounts the experiences of the author while he lived in Kiribati…since we’re disclaiming here, the author wishes to acknowledge that in a few incidents recounted herein, he has played a little fast and loose with the space-time continuum. He has done this for you, the reader.” Following that, the story is primarily chronological, which makes the two years flow well. It also enables Troost to develop his character/persona, and show gradual change and growth. By the end, the reader sees a different, better, more sympathetic person. Between the beginning and the end, Troost engages his enormous vocabulary, occasionally slips into didactic writing, but for the most part, sets a terrific pace and develops beautiful imagery and scenes.

I suddenly noticed how small our boat was. I remembered that it was made of plywood. Thin plywood. Thin and old plywood. Thin and old and rotting plywood. Thing and old and rotting and easily breached plywood. Imperceptibly, I moved to the middle of the boat. What were we thinking, washing fish blood off the deck in shark-infested waters? A patch of water where sharks can be confused with whales (158).

While I have not traveled as extensively as Troost, I have toyed with the idea of turning my travel journals into personal essays or even travel memoirs. Troost delivered the kind of story that anyone can read and enjoy while also presenting a model for aspiring travel writers. Humor, exposure, structure – the trifecta of entertaining and world-changing travel stories.

book by Joan Didion

Annotation by: Lee Stoops

“…I realized I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die…”

~ Joan Didion, Blue Nights (24)

It is not often a memoir writer writes a “sequel.” Normally, the stories of our lives, even broken into volumes, connect and intersect, but memoirs are usually artfully developed as isolated texts. In the case of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, sequential takes on a deeper meaning. I did not care for Didion’s “grief memoir” The Year of Magical Thinking. Somehow, The Year of Magical Thinking was also my first Didion experience. I felt frustrated that a woman so reputed as the standard of excellence could let me down. I chalked it up to the fact that she was writing about a loss so devastating that it truly changed her in a way that was so accelerated (not only was the manuscript written in fewer than eight months, but she wrote it immediately following her husband’s death). But, then I read her essay Goodbye To All That and realized that the rumors of Didion’s power might be true. Still, knowing the subject matter of Blue Nights being the death of her only daughter twenty months after the sudden death of Didion’s husband, I was pensive cracking the manuscript. My apprehension dissolved before I had finished the first page. The elements that readers and writers identify as “Didionesque” that I felt were either forced or absent in The Year of Magical Thinking showed up in what I can now confidently lable Didionesque fashion in Blue Nights. What was the difference? Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking in a flurry right after John died (and before Quintana had passed) – maybe the proximity changed her approach? Blue Nights was published in late 2011, more than five years after Quintana’s death. Didion makes no claims in the book to the speed with which she penned it. Its construction is not in the experimental, cyclical style she claimed intentional in The Year of Magical Thinking. Instead, Blue Nights is, as far as I can tell having only read these two books and one Didion essay, exactly what people are talking about when they talk about the Didion powerhouse: the poetic, strange, and thoughtful (interesting) word order; the repetition of meaningful turns; the engagement of the reader.

When constructing sentences, writers can create art. The trick is keeping the art accessible to readers as well as keeping it from feeling contrived or troublesome. When a reader can move easily through the prose, the writer has succeeded. And, when readers can experience new sentences in a way that moves them, the writer has greatly succeeded. Rarely, in my experience, has a writer of prose managed make interesting word order without frustrating my ability to move through the language. Yet, Didion does it frequently. And, interestingly, even though the reader needs to slow down, the “moving” nature of the experience seems to exacerbate. As with her repetition (which I’ll address in a moment), Didion, it seems, expects the reader to slow down, reread her lines and consider every single word.

This too would all, when it happened, make sense.

On the other hand, I told myself, it now seemed too late, not the right time.

There comes a point, I told myself, at which a family is, for better or for worse, finished (124).

Didion employs very human elements to condition her prose. Like other powerful nonfiction writers, she speaks directly, as if communicating one-on-one (which I’ll address in the next moment) with the reader. And in her communication, she does what people do: she returns to things again and again and again. In some ways, it is to justify. In some ways, it is to exemplify. In some ways, it is to clarify. In some ways, it is to remind and connect. And, interestingly, Didion uses the same phrases, the same turns, to accomplish all of the above. With context, she repeats herself methodically, using the same words time and time again to do different things. That’s exceptional art. Here is a (in no way comprehensive) list of the turns Didion repeats throughout the text (italicized because she italicizes when she uses them (a graphical device for repetition and purpose as well)):

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage.

After I became five I never ever dreamed about him.

Now, they didn’t even care anymore.

What if I fail to take care of this baby?

What if this baby fails to thrive, what if this baby fails to love me?

What if I fail to love this baby?

Que’ hermosa, que’ chula.

Daddy’s gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in.

What if you hadn’t been home when Dr. Watson called?

Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it.

Perhaps the most Didionesque quality of Didion’s writing is her direct engagement of the reader. There are times while reading I can picture her pleading with me over a table, her skeletal hands resting atop the table, her eyes wide, wanting me to understand, to know what she is trying to get me to know. Other times, she tells the reader what to do, to think, to ask. She even stops her flow at times and says something like, “Let me repeat: (144)” and then does repeat what the reader had just read. It’s more than stylistic – it’s imploring (at times, even to the point of condescension). She wants the reader to experience her life so badly that she forsakes the rules and writes directly to the reader. At times, the text reads like a letter or a conversation rather than a memoir. It’s not about what happened to Joan Didion, or to John, or to Quintana, or to anyone else about whom Didion writes. No, it’s about what these experiences can do for a reader.

Today as I walk home from the Columbia Presbyterian sports medicine facility…I find the optimism engendered by proximity to the New York Yankees fading. In fact my physical confidence seems to be reaching a new ebb. My cognitive confidence seems to have vanished altogether. Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp.

The tone needs to be direct.

I need to talk to you directly, I need to address the subject as it were, but something stops me.

Is this another kind of neuropathy, a new frailty, am I no longer able to talk directly?

Was I ever?

Did I lose it?

Or is the subject in this case a matter I wish not to address?

When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street, of what am I really afraid (116-117)?

By engaging me directly, entrusting me with her artistic presentation of words and expecting me to follow her humanity through their jumble, repetition, and cycles, Didion has won me over.

annotation by Marianne Woods Cirone

1. 1.     I remember the exact moment I stopped playing…
2. 2.     I like to say the earth shook the day I met him…
3. 3.     How can I explain to my mother that despite all her pleading with me to grow beyond my homosexuality…

No, these are not writing prompts, as inspiring as they would be.  Each of these lines begins a section of Bia Lowe’s essay, “Mothers and Others, but Also Brothers,” from her book Wild Ride: Earthquakes, Sneezes, and Other Thrills.  All of Lowe’s nineteen essays in this book stimulate the sensation centers of the reader with their tantalizing smells, sights and sounds, as she connects her personal experiences from the innocence of growing up in Northern California in the 1950s, to her years as a San Francisco hippie and finally as a writer and an Angeleno.  Each of the sections within each essay is divided by a simple three dots, and each new section grabs the reader with entry lines that introduce topics that are different enough to be intriguing, but with connecting threads that bring the reader along for a “wild ride” of illuminating associations.

“In media res” describes Lowe’s technique for drawing the reader into her essays, finding the exact point of tension in the story which she is about to tell.    With her compelling first lines–of each essay as well as of each section within the essay–Lowe draws the reader into her stories, weaving vivid worlds that crisscross like vines.  The following lines open three different essays in the book:

“The bed is too large (65).”

“It’s a mass on the left ovary,” the doctor says, “roughly the size of a grapefruit (113).”

“One summer night, a few years ago, I was awakened by a wrenching snap (35).”

Each of these lines sets up a situation describing a person, place or thing which is not quite “right.”  As such, a sense of tension and curiosity develops in the reader, who reads on to find out if or how the situation resolves.

In her simply titled essay, “Allergy,” Lowe introduces the book with another compelling opening line:  “Like orgasm, 90 percent of a sneeze is sheer anticipation (1).”  Such an introduction piques the reader’s interest and Lowe doesn’t disappoint.  After she starts the essay comparing sneezing with sex, she then weaves together facts about breathing, early memories in the hay mill on the family ranch, a description of asthma, an explanation of histamines, a report on cruelties on the ranch, musings on the Industrial Revolution, smog in Los Angeles, and body image; and, finally, the fantasy of allergy-free environment.  Each section contains poetic imagery that carry the topics to unimagined places:  “Gone are the streaming mornings, my forehead at the belly of the cud chewer, my fingers pulling her teats like a rapacious lover (4)” or  “I envy those who thrive on Twinkies and car exhaust, marching heartily into tomorrow, their eyes a deeper shade of Blue Number 2 (7).”

The opening line of Lowe’s final essay in the book, titled “About Being Awake While Driving From My High School Reunion,” starts with an economical and direct sentence:  “Interstate 5 slices California’s Central Valley headlong (171).”  She segues from the landscape to her past with lines including “I had seen my father’s tantrums detonate our kitchen like a test site in Nevada and learned not to speak of it,” to “…when I suspected I was queer—a booger on the family tea set—I was already on my way to becoming invisible (172).”  The next section of this essay opens with the vivid line “Making the drive in the winter months, when the Valley’s moisture clots into a tulle fog, your headlights bore barely a car’s length into the custard (173).”  Lowe’s metaphors and descriptions create a constant tug on the reader’s interest, in this case, the marriage of a ballerina’s tutu and a creamy dessert to paint a picture of fog.

Lowe’s sharp turns of thought and dense imagery serve as brilliant examples for writers who hope write essays that dazzle.  I intend to keep this book close at hand and refer to it often.