We spent the weekend camping, just the four of us. A long hike through the newly green forests of Vermont’s northern mountains. A 5-mile loop to the fire tower and back, led by the 10-year-old, who finally has the stamina to do this sort of thing. She hummed along the steep trail with her walking stick and darted up the rock ledges, encouraging the dog. We ate lunch at the crumbled remains of a Civilian Conservation Corps cabin, taking in the view, which was real, alive and true.

I like to think that this is the sort of freedom the fallen had intended to protect — the fresh air, the scenery, the time and access to move freely about this place we call home and absorb all its sensory pleasures. I like to think that my duty to the deceased is to cherish what we have, so I savored the sound of water tumbling over rock, the smell of honeysuckle and balsam, the squish of moss and mud beneath my feet. I looked out over the layered ridges in the distance, admired the variations of blue and green. I listened to the crack and hiss of the evening campfire, and enjoyed a conversation between owls on the cusp of night.

Later, when the camping was done and we’d returned to cell phone range, I learned that Brian Doyle had passed away. Taken from this life by a cancer of the brain, diagnosed just last Thanksgiving.

It is not lost on me, the timing of his final act. Brian was a man of wisdom, of deep humility and faith, his body of creative work a reflection of these traits (take, for instance, his essay, “Memorial Day”). It makes sense to me, somehow, that his exit from the earth occurred during a sanctioned time of remembrance, a time when we are reminded of our debts to those who came before us, when we question what, exactly, has been sacrificed so we might continue our quest for the American dream.

I think maybe Brian was a master of that pursuit, a master of finding happiness and other phenomena of the human condition within the folds of our pockets, in the everyday moments tucked between the recesses of our minds. Even in the wake of his diagnosis last fall, when the uncertainty of illness and pain loomed before him and his family, he requested of his friends and followers, simply: “Be tender and laugh.”

This has been hard. I have been sullen and short-tempered with friends, with family, with total strangers — I guess because lately, the state of our union has felt to me like a terminal diagnosis. I have descended into the rabbit hole of internet research, obsessing over best case and worst case scenarios, grieving candidly over the serious illness I feel is plaguing my country now — a “big honkin’ brain tumor,” as Brian Doyle called his own particular affliction.

Tumors of this sort work swiftly. Over the last six months, I have watched and protested as the powerful and greedy have begun to dismantle all the systems that were put into place to protect the historically oppressed and vulnerable among us. I have contacted my elected officials and marched for the integrity of science in policy while the Trump administration denies the realities of climate change and maneuvers to hoard and squander and pollute the land and water that we’re all supposed to share. It has been like witnessing a death — an intentional death, a dirty secret back room deal to divide the entire estate while those in charge hold a pillow over the gasping mouth of our democratic ideals.

Fuck this cancer. Fuck cancer fuck Trump fuck Pence fuck McConnell fuck Ryan fuck Sessions fuck Pruitt fuck Bannon fuck Tillerson fuck Kushner fuck Spicer and DeVoes.   I am sad, I am angry — so much that I am no longer making good on my pursuit of happiness.

Last weekend, my family and I wove through patches of purple and painted trillium in the forest surrounding Lake Elmore — a park that was gifted to the State of Vermont by local citizens in 1936. This was a dark period in our history, when Americans suffered under the Great Depression and Dorothea Lange snapped her iconic photograph, Migrant Mother, to expose the poverty and exploitation of migrant laborers, and Hitler’s dictatorship in Nazi Germany was metastasizing into a global concern. A period perhaps not so unlike the one we are facing now.

And yet, within periods of despair, there are glimmers of light. A community of readers come together to celebrate a departed writer’s gorgeous words. A group of local citizens donate a tract of land, so that 80 years later, a family might take a hike together in a forest and reaffirm their definition of joy.

Jesse Owens earned four gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, disproving on a world stage Hitler’s unfounded theory of Aryan superiority. It was the very first televised Olympic Games; the world was literally watching. Remember that story? That beautiful black body exploding away from the line, pulling farther and farther away from the others in the race. A moment of human excellence, shining in an arena draped with hatred and aggression. Oh how it must have felt to be American on that day, to rise above that stain.

It must have been something else.

The post Memorial Day appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

I can remember sitting in a restaurant with my family one particular Thanksgiving, because my mother thought that changing the routine might give our holiday a little more cheer. But of course there was some disagreement between my parents that had soured the mood, so my father refused to order out of some kind of passive aggressive spite, and my mother sat across from me, spilling quiet tears into her mashed potatoes. We sat like that for the entire meal, a public display of misery: my silent, feuding parents, and my brother and I forcing ourselves to swallow all the things that we’d been served.

My father’s birthday is around the same time, so in addition to the dreaded feast, I labored to find a just-right gift that he never seemed to want, accompanied by an appropriately neutral card to convey the affection that I felt without seeming like I was lying. When I got older, I joked that I should start my own greeting card company to target others in my shoes — people for whom card-shopping was a difficult chore of expressing love to loved ones who didn’t always seem love them back. “I love you even though” was what I wanted to call it.

That’s how I feel about my country right now. America, I love you even though.

I cried hard in the shower last night, for a man I barely know, but whose bare naked soul I’ve seen glimpses of, and with whom I’ve fallen deeply and utterly in love. Brian Doyle’s writing gets me through the hard times, hard times such as these, and yesterday I learned that he has been diagnosed with brain cancer.

I met Brian at a literary festival in Bend, Oregon, and all of us who attended that festival that year will tell you that he stole the show with his humor and humility and brains. I sat in his craft lecture, eating up all of his stories about his brothers and his kids and his crooked nose — which he’d gotten from an injury playing basketball, “the greatest sport on earth.”

Later, when I asked Brian if he would write the foreword to the anthology of student writing that our literary organization was publishing, I mentioned that I, too, have a crooked nose, but that I’d instead gotten it from soccer, the greatest sport on earth. To which he replied, yes of course he would write the foreword, but that I was WRONG about soccer. Basketball is the greatest sport on earth. End of story, he was right, “because I’m the Dad, and that is that.”

—Which made me laugh and cry because it reminded me of my dad… and of love and hurt and anger and joy all mixed up together. Look, if there’s anything I’ve learned from Brian’s work, it’s that life is full of contrasts. Even within the most horrific moments of human tragedy, there is beauty and hope and grace. Like the moment he captured in his essay, “Leap,” about a man and a woman, hand-in-hand, falling from the World Trade Center to their deaths on 9-11. Of that moment, Brian wrote:

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

Let me repeat: That human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires. And that love is why we are here.

I am meditating on those words with a pen in my hand, and I think that you should, too. Stories are food, Brian says. We need them. We need your stories to survive. I will leave you with the Foreword that he wrote for our student anthology, Lost and Found. Please, as you read it, think of Brian and send him your thanks, your food, and your prayers.

(Friends interested in helping Brian and his family can also check out the Doyle Family Support Fund.)

The Nature of Words, ed. Lost and Found, 2013

Cover art by Rachel Lee-Carman

Foreword: Brian Doyle, “Food & Prayers”

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Understated as it may sound, I’m sad.  We’re all sad, even though we are lucky to have a willing recipient (the Deschutes Public Library) to take some of NOW’s creative writing programs and carry them forward within their own program structure, to align with their own strategic goals.  Even with what I truly believe is an important and beneficial consolidation, I’m still feeling sad.  Because like it or not, NOW’s closing doors say something about this community, about what is happening here.

One thing I know for sure is that within this primordial stew of needs and ideas and blood and sweat and money and tears and everything else that exists within a community of passionate people — within this primordial stew, there are usually a few things around which we can coalesce.  For a while, at least when I first moved here, I thought that one of those organizing principles in Bend was the idea that art is a basic need.  That creative self expression is as necessary to human life as air, as food, as water.   Ask the residents of The Shepherd’s House homeless shelter, for whom The Nature of Words provided creative writing residencies as part of their healing and empowerment process.  I think they might agree.

But recently, I can’t help but wonder whether people do believe that art is a basic need.  I can’t help but notice that this feels more like a stressed ecosystem — where the culture part of our habitat is being leached to such a degree that a student’s first exposure to the personal essay might be on a college application.  Or that the occasional instruction of “Art-in-a-Box” at school has become an acceptable form of art education.  This cannot be the new standard for exploring creativity.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the parent volunteers who teach it, but I have to confess: Art-in-a-Box as a concept makes me die a little inside.

Here’s the thing: art is what connects us as human beings.  The arts are the means by which we inhabit one another’s experiences.  We become more human when we share our stories — and the truth is, as Brian Doyle would say, stories are our food.  Whether they’re written stories, spoken stories, painted, sculpted, and acted stories, or stories that are musically composed.  Culture is part of our habitat.  A basic need.  Necessary for us to thrive.

These needs are provided by a great many local organizations — The Nature of Words was among them, and is again lucky to have a partner who is capable of continuing to meet that need.  But what about the others?  What would happen if they went away?  How would we all get fed?

I think it’s easy for us to become complacent about the importance of the arts — until we’ve suffered a loss that reminds us of that particular nutritional need.  Example: how many Facebook posts of Dr. Maya Angelou did you read upon her recent passing?  And what would our habitat be like if she hadn’t shared her words?

I hope the vacancy left by The Nature of Words will be felt in this community, and that it will motivate all of us to ask ourselves how much we value our arts and culture organizations.  Not just appreciate, but value.  The distinction is important.

Photo credit: World of Paris Blog, http://worldofparis.wordpress.com/tag/art-is-a-basic-need/

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I once submitted an essay to a Famous Editor with a note that read “Enclosed is a lyric essay, blah, blah, blah…,” and he sent it back saying, “Yes, good, we’ll take it, etcetera, but shouldn’t ‘lyric’ be something someone else says about your essay?”

—Which reveals a common misconception about the lyric essay: that it is merely an ornamental device, a compliment to one’s writing, a label to which one’s work aspires, like “powerful” or “poetic.”  When in fact, the lyric essay is a thing, an intended form of essay that seeks to deepen the artistic experience of creative nonfiction, just like modern art and contemporary performance art movements seek to evolve their own forms of artistic expression.

For me, the lyric essay was like opening the door to the Secret Garden.  It was a place that provided permission and space for me to play and explore so I could discover my authentic narrative voice.  All great, but here was the problem: when I would share my lyric essays in workshops and writing circles, I noticed that people were often reluctant to critique, like they didn’t know whether to eat what I had served with a fork or with a spoon.

I love this quote from Brian Doyle’s “Playfulnessless,” in Vol. 15, No. 1 issue of River Teeth:

Thesis: the essay is the widest fattest most generous open glorious honest endlessly expandable form of committing prose not only because it cheerfully steals and hones all the other tools and talents of all other forms of art, and not only because it is admirably and brilliantly closest to not only the speaking voice but the maundering salty singing voices in our heads, but also because it is the most playful of forms, liable to hilarity and free association and startlement, without the filters and mannered disguises and stiff dignity of fiction and poetry and journalism, respectively. Discuss.

What Brian Doyle is talking about is the malleability of the essay as a form, the flexibility of the structure itself.  And that, to me, is what the lyric essay is all about: bucking tradition and playing with form, so that instead of the predictable circle-and-dive structure of a more traditional personal essay, the lyric essayist’s narrative “hawk” does something different and unexpected in its pursuit of the truth.

So what are the ways in which the lyric essayist essays?  In the Fall 1997 Special Edition of Seneca Review, in which The Lyric Essay was first defined, editors John D’Agata and Deborah Tall noted that this new hybrid form “gives primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information, forsaking narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation.”  Meaning that the reader is invited into a the stream-of-consciousness view of the narrator’s essay process, rather than a constructed representation of the issue(s) they have already wrestled.

For me, the difference between a more traditional essay and a lyric essay is not unlike the difference between the realistic, still-life paintings of Norman Rockwell and the more contemporary art of Robert Rauschenberg or Jackson Pollock.  Rather than holding the reader’s hand along a guided trail of thought, the lyric essayist provides clues, using the juxtaposition of contrasting images or ideas to convey emotion or explore a theme.  The lyric essayist texturizes his or her prose with layers to convey the complexity of the content, presenting different threads, patterns of thought, and points of intersection.  It’s like walking on a path made of stepping stones — more fun than just walking on dirt.

And rather than being strictly disciplined in form and movement, formulaic in its positioning —like ballet or a 5-paragraph essay— the lyric essay is more organic in its movement, free to borrow devices and techniques from other genres and art forms to illustrate the quest for understanding.  Some traits:

1.    Experimentation with form:

•   Exclusion of linear, logical sequence — organized by themes other than chronology
•   Distilled language, use of poetic imagery and rhythmic sentences
•   Use of fragments and white space, section headings and numbers — taking shape with fragments assembled into mosaics or narrative strands woven into braids
•   Inhabiting other unexpected forms to tell a story (disguising)
•   Omission of smooth narrative transitions — movement involves associative leaps

2.    Uses the power of inference — more active reliance on reader’s intuition to complete the narrator’s thought

3.    Main craft element is the juxtaposition (or associative leaps between) language and imagery

Still, even with an understanding of its traits, many wonder how to go about critiquing the lyric essay.  And while I would no sooner advise someone on this than I would critiquing contemporary art or the mechanics of modern dance, I do think it’s fair to ask whether the piece works, whether it has succeeded in making a connection with a reader on an emotional level.  Of course, like any art form, critiquing a lyric essay is subjective, but I offer some questions to consider:

1.    What is the essay’s aesthetic appeal?  Visually? Rhythmically?
2.    Does the imagery in the piece work?
3.    Do the juxtapositions of imagery and language resonate? Do the contrasts “thrum”?
4.    Can the reader follow the organization and associative leaps between sections?
5.    Is the content best handled in lyric form, or does the construction seem “gimmicky”?
6.    Can the reader understand what the essay is about?  What issue(s) it wrestles?
7.    Is the reader left confused, or does the essay compel the reader to think or consider something new?

So.  These points may not clarify whether you should enjoy a lyric essay with a fork or a with spoon, but perhaps it will empower you to simply dive in with your heart.  Happy reading.

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