The word itself bears weight, signifies pain, like an amputation, or a cancer diagnosis that pierces you with the fear of mortality and leaves you looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life. A trauma, I suppose, although I haven’t even been able to admit this until now.

*

Recently, my husband and I were gathered with a group of friends, drinking wine and playing a game where teams vote on the person mostly likely to fit with the scenario on a given card. Who has the worst sugar addiction, for instance, or who among us is the most judgmental person — truths revealed and discussed among friends, and usually lots of laughter.

Someone in the group pulled a card that asked us to identify who among us had the best heartbreak story. I must have flinched a little, because I could see one friend signal to another to choose another card. Though I pretended not to, I noticed her subtle hand gesture, the shake of her head, her slight glance in my direction.

These were good friends, mind you, and although I’m not in the habit of hiding things from my friends, some of them still don’t know that my father disowned me, and that even after five years I still feel the hard pounding of blood in my stomach — the kind of desperate, queasy pulse that comes before getting sick — when this fact is brought to light.  Most of my acquaintances don’t know that I live with this pain and believe myself to be responsible for its residence in my body, like a chain smoker who refused to heed the cautions on the cigarette pack.

*

“What did you expect?” my brother once asked, implying that this was a self-induced wound, a self-severing — a stupid, childish act, like jumping out of a moving bus. And maybe I even agree. But the truth is a little more complicated than that.

What did you do? you’re likely wondering. Maybe you’re already allowing your imagination to fill in the blanks. What kind of a person gets disowned by her father? It almost doesn’t matter, because the wrong I committed must have been so terrible, so egregious that expulsion was the only answer. That being banished from the family was justified, that I must have deserved my figurative death.

How else could this have been done?

*

It has been almost five years since my father disowned me. I have friends who are cancer survivors, and for them, the five year mark is a milestone — a cause for celebration, an indicator of improved chances, the increased likelihood of a bright future despite the trauma the body has endured.

The five year mark of estrangement carries no such optimism. It is a widening gap, a chasm whose chances of repair have grown too dim to even imagine. It’s a death without a death, a thunderous shout into a canyon with an eerie, unnatural silence instead of the echo you expect.

*

During that first year, I dreamt about my father. I saw him in strangers on the street — the silvery glint of the back of his head, the tall, hunched bulk of his frame. I imagined him sitting in the car ahead of me at traffic intersections, watching me in his rearview mirror, looking to see if I was still too emotional, too righteous, too affected by my youth.

Months later, while attending a writing workshop at Bread Loaf, I suffered a sudden case of vertigo while eating lunch with my group because Scott Russell Sanders, my workshop leader, has hands that look like his.

During that same writing retreat, another writer and I were chatting with Rick Bass at the final barbecue dinner, asking him how his summer was going. His college-aged daughter had an internship in Montana, and was living with him for the summer.

“I get up early to make her breakfast,” Rick said, swatting a mosquito from his head, “and then putter around all day until she comes home so I can make her dinner and have a beer with her on the porch.” That’s so sweet, we gushed, making your daughter breakfast, and then I said, Awww, Rick, I wish you were my dad.

Later though, alone in my room, I thought about all the weekend mornings my father labored over the stove, making waffles in the waffle iron, turning and turning it over until they were just-right golden-brown, then gently releasing the sections onto my plate, the waffles crisp and steaming with care. The tears came quickly, and I had to take a midnight shower in the bathroom down the hall so my sobbing didn’t wake anyone up.

*

This is what I did: I wrote and published essays that revealed unflattering moments in my childhood home. My father felt accused. I attempted to apologize; he did not accept.

To be fair, I hadn’t fully warned him about the content of my work. My attempts at conversation about our past had not been well-received. And instead of insisting on an honest exchange, I put my work into the world with the belief that my father wouldn’t read it. I was wrong.

*

To be fair, I hadn’t made anything up.

*

“What did you expect?” my brother asked.

I had hoped that my father could see I was in pain. I had hoped that he would have tried to meet me where I was. I had hoped that he could forgive my need to revisit our past just as I had worked to forgive the hurt that I’d endured.  I had hoped that we would figure out a language between us. I had hoped that my father’s capacity to love me was large enough to accommodate mistakes, even big ones such as this.

But what did I expect?  This, which is to say exactly what has happened. I expected it because I think a part of me has always lived in fear that my father would cast me away for something. —Which is why I had to write.

*

It has been almost five years since my father disowned me. I still see glimpses of him in strangers, still catch him in the corner of my eye. I see him most clearly when my youngest daughter struggles with the same difficulty with emotions.

I feel sharp pangs when my brother’s wife posts holiday pictures of him on Facebook, laughing with their kids. But the hurt is tempered by the glimmers of him I see in the everyday things: the rustle of sails at a marina dock, the splash of sunlight across a lake, the sound of walking through autumn leaves, the horn of a distant train.

*

I have come to wonder if my estrangement is less about punishment than it is about protection. Protection for him, protection from me.

The truth is, I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I was simply trying to have a conversation that I didn’t know how to have. I wanted to know why my childhood continued to press on me as a mother and a wife. I wanted to make sense of the things that had happened in our home. I wanted to understand us. Like Rebecca Solnit says in The Faraway Nearby: “Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.”

But the conversation that should have happened can never happen now. This death without a death — it was inevitable, I suppose, because things said and left unsaid can both kill a person. It would’ve killed me to continue keeping them in. But it has killed me to let them out.

The post Five Year Mark appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

We discussed the inspiration behind my latest piece, “Eulogy for an Owl,” (Creative Nonfiction, Fall 2016), and geeked out on environmental science, literary craft, and discovering the emotional core of your story.

Thanks to Brendan for a great discussion!

Listen here.

The post #CNF Podcast Episode 43 appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Thank you, Dean Tuchinsky, Justin, Annie, Robin, Stonecoast faculty and staff, friends, families, graduates and distinguished guests.  I am so honored to be standing up here tonight and especially humbled to represent my fellow and extraordinarily talented Creative Nonfiction graduates.

We have shared so much with each other and I feel so privileged to have gotten a glimpse into each of your experiences and truth-telling journeys.  I want to thank our families especially, for supporting us through the all work that comes before our literary work — be it research… or therapy… or in my case, both.  And I specifically want to thank you for providing us with good material.  For the record, all writers use their families for material — CNF writers are just more forthcoming about it.

Now, as a member of this incredible group, I feel it is my duty to clarify a common misconception that is held about the Creative Nonfiction genre and CNF workshops here at Stonecoast:  We do not — I repeat, DO NOT pass tissues around the table when we workshop.  It would have been nice, though, because — and I know this may shock some of you — I am… the CNF Crier.

I’d like to think of it as a position of honor, like a Town Crier, except that instead of wearing a fancy pirate hat and carrying a bell to deliver important proclamations, I have this ridiculous head of hair and carry snacks and actually cry.  Sometimes during workshop.  Once in front of faculty (if Deb Marquart were here, she’d be nodding her head).  I am, unfortunately that one who feeds the cliché.  You know, the image of Creative Nonfiction writers that depicts us gathered around the table, burning candles, doing deep yoga breathing, confessing our deepest sorrows.  The stereotype that sometimes saddles this genre with the unfortunate reputation of ‘therapy over craft,’ of ‘confession above literature.’

Well lucky for us, this is Stonecoast.  And at Stonecoast, nothing rises above literature. Here, literature is the medium not just for telling stories, but for challenging unfair stereotypes, for lending voice to the voice-less, for advocacy and activism.  And for creative nonfiction writers, these stories are not just true, they’re often personal, and —whether through literary journalism, or memoir or essay— wrestle difficult issues like freedom and oppression, racial and sexual discrimination, love and grief, abuse and neglect.  So yes, what we deal with stirs emotion.

Perhaps that’s why I, and undoubtedly other Creative Nonfiction writers, feel the distinct and pointed pressure to pay particular attention to our craft.  To pour all of our intellect into the rhythm of our sentences, the vibration of our imagery, the lyricism of our prose.  It has to be good, because… well, you know.  We’re telling stories that are true, and when they’re about us, we haven’t anything behind which to hide.  Not the structure of a sonnet or the made-up name of a fictional character.   This makes some of us feel a little more sensitive, a little more exposed.

Now, as the CNF Crier, I feel a certain duty to the other genres to do some nation-building around this issue — become an ambassador, if you will, to the virtues of being a Crier.  So I will share with you some of my own daily Stonecoast affirmations:

1.        Crying makes you sexy.  It’s true!  Everyone looks good when they cry, and this is especially true if you have blotchy, freckly skin like myself.
2.        Crying serves as an important function in the ranking of an academic program.  For instance, the more of us who cry after the blunt trauma delivery of Rick Bass-kicking wisdom, the more the legend lives, right?  Tough faculty = tough program = high marks, which benefits all of us.  Faculty, administration: you’re welcome.
3.        Crying serves as an excellent ice breaker between fellow students.  Better than stickers or drawings on your name tag.  Trust me, when you’re a Crier, everyone knows who you are.

But in all seriousness, what I’m talking about is vulnerability — something with which Creative Nonfiction has specific experience and particular advantage, because again, our stories are often personal.  And I think the vulnerability in our stories is what makes readers lean in.  Vulnerability is what bridges the gulf between two otherwise separate groups until they’re close enough to admit of each other’s conditions: “Hey, yeah, — me, too.”  The authenticity of our stories is what connects us, what becomes the building blocks for community, the agents of social change.  And this, my writer friends, cuts across all genres.  There are no genre boundaries around the human condition.  No mutually exclusive ownership of longing, pain, empathy and love.  — Which brings me to my final affirmation:

4. Crying reveals what a supportive and nurturing community we have here in Stonecoast.

Last residency, I stood up in front of several of you at Open Mic to read a short piece that I had written about my family.  I’d had plenty of practice in writing through what Creative Nonfiction writers call “the hard place.”  So I thought nothing of standing up in front of my peers to read something revealing about my youth.

Well, writing through the hard place and reading through the hard place are two entirely different learning curves.  And I was not nearly far enough along when I stepped behind the podium.

For those of you who weren’t there, I’ll summarize: I started to cry.  But what really happened is that I tried to restrain a surge of emotion that felt a little like stomach-pounding nausea with the urgency of childbirth.  I panicked, so when I glanced up and saw Trevor the Timekeeper doing his little dance, I gulped and said something like, “So maybe I’ll just… stop?”

But everyone in that room was listening, leaning in, urging me to finish. I looked at Trevor.  He looked at me with serious eyes and —like we were in a Rocky movie or something— gave me one pump of his fist that said, Go on.  You can do it.
— Which I did, and when I finally finished, it was for more than just myself.  That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?  That electricity between storyteller and listener, between writer and reader.  Electric moments generated by the current of vulnerability in our work.  So my parting words to you: Don’t be afraid to cry a little in your work.  There will be a family —in whatever broad sense you define— waiting to embrace you.  The first one will be your Stonecoast family.  Congratulations and thank you.  I love you all.

The post On the Virtues of Crying: A Graduation Speech appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

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.

The post On the Lyric Essay appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Mary Heather Noble is the winner of the $10,000 first-place prize for Creative Nonfiction’s The Human Face of Sustainability essay contest, sponsored by Arizona State University’s Sustainability Solutions Festival.

Mary Heather Noble’s prize-winning essay, “Acts of Courage,” uses a series of flashbacks from her youth and early scientific career to recall how cancer from contaminants intersected her life, unflinchingly using devastating statistics to show how carcinogens have so easily entered into daily life.

Noble will be honored at the Sustainability Solutions Festival in Tempe, AZ, February 17-22.  The festival is a program within the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives at the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University.

“The idea of sustainability can mean many things to different people, but it is clear through Mary Heather Noble’s brilliant essay, as well as by each of our other finalists, that there is a deep, human connection to sustainability, regardless of definition,” said Patricia Reiter, director of the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives.

Read the full announcement at creativenonfiction.org and asunews.asu.edu.

The post $10,000 Sustainability Essay Prize Awarded appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Indeed, Earth Works presents itself almost like an academic text (especially opening with an essay about ‘the essay’), the writing within clearly demonstrating Sanders to be a master of the craft.  The cadence of his prose is smooth and soothing, the vocabulary intellectual and wise without being pretentious.  The transitions between his sections are fluid, with just the right pause, like a gulp of air before swimming another gentle lap.  And yet, despite the tenderness of the tone, Sanders is still able to evoke a sense of urgency and alarm in his message — particularly about the tendency of people to impose violence against the Earth and one another, the loss of wildness and nature, the erosion of our connection to our planet.   His essays convey a seriousness without hostility, a profound disappointment in, instead of anger at, our misguided animal selves.  Rather than the high-pitched, alarmist, melodramatic environmental writing that the general readership has learned to tune out, Sanders’ work patiently and consistently reminds us: we are a part of this Earth, and this Earth is part of us.  Do you see how we are failing it?  Do you see how we’re failing ourselves?

How does Sanders do this?  How does he convey the magnitude of what we face without raising his narrative voice?  And how does he demand accountability to our surroundings without invoking an accusing tone?  This literary craft blog post examines two particular craft elements that Sanders employs to heighten his environmental message: the use of unexpected contrast to shock the reader out of complacency, and the deliberate interchanging of natural images with human gestures and conditions to illustrate our parallel needs.

Use of Contrast in “At Play in the Paradise of Bombs”

In his essay, “At Play in the Paradise of Bombs,” Sanders awakens his readers to the harrowing losses of war and environmental decay by juxtaposing dissimilar words and images in his text.  The piece itself examines Sanders’ childhood move, in 1951, from Memphis, Tennessee to the Army Arsenal in Northeastern Ohio, where he and other children of Arsenal employees and military personnel grew up playing in the shadows of a munitions plant.  The very title of this piece jars us with an array of words that are not supposed to fit together: ‘play,’ ‘paradise,’ and ‘bombs’.   Sanders carries this ‘contrast’ theme throughout the essay, peppering the prose with opposing images and words to illuminate the irony of our society’s accepted norms: neighborhood and Arsenal, children playing near ammunition, boys mimicking war, wildlife sanctuary and poison.  Of military machinery, he writes:

…On the front porch of our Memphis home I had read GI Joe Comic books, and so I knew the names and shapes of these death-dealing engines.  In the gaudy cartoons the soldiers had seemed like two-legged chunks of pure glory, muttering speeches between bursts on their machine guns, clenching the pins of grenades between their dazzling teeth. (p. 13-14)

The coupling of ‘grenades’ with ‘dazzling teeth’ underscores the glorification of war evident in Sanders’ boyhood toys, and the contrast of his innocent proficiency with the terminology of “death-dealing engines” signals the reader to pause and think: Why is it okay for a child to know so much about killing machines?

The reality of war, of course, is bone-chilling, and Sanders writes about “a needle of dread” settling in upon seeing real tanks on the compound, and driving past “guard houses manned by actual soldiers.”  Rather than the cartoon images of men and glory, Sanders learned that the Arsenal was “a fenced wilderness devoted to the building and harboring of the instruments of death.” (p. 14)

— Which brings us to another contrast: ‘wilderness’ (abundant life) and ‘instruments of death.’  Here, Sanders juxtaposes his childhood exploration of the woods within the Arsenal’s fortress against the environmental consequences of weapons production.  He recalls:

Even where the army’s poisons had been dumped, nature did not give up.  In a remote corner of the Arsenal, on land that had been used as a Boy Scout camp before the war, the ground was so filthy with the discarded makings of bombs that not even the guards would do there.  But we children went, lured on by the scarlet warning signs: DANGER.  RESTRICTED AREA.  …In my bone marrow I carry traces of the poison from that graveyard of bombs, as we all carry a smidgen of radioactivity from every atomic blast.  Perhaps at this very moment one of those alien molecules, like a grain of sand in an oyster, is irritating some cell in my body, or in your body, to fashion a pearl of cancer. (p. 16)

The opposing forces of words like ‘poisons,’ ‘Boy Scout camp,’ and ‘discarded makings of bombs’ or ‘children’ and ‘DANGER’ instill immediate concern in the reader’s mind: This was a place where children were taught to appreciate and survive in nature, how could they have allowed it to become a toxic and dangerous dumping ground?  Sanders even uses contrasting images to dramatize the health risks of the Arsenal’s chemical releases: a pearl, a rare and cherished commodity, with cancer, an ever-increasing and dreaded fatal disease.

Sanders’ successful manipulation of contrasting words and images throughout this piece allows him to maintain a consistent narrative tone while startling the reader to a new awareness.  Like the eerie coupling of childhood innocence with demonic possession in a horror movie, this technique of pairing opposing forces in an essay can foster frightening revelations.

Comparison of Human Condition to Natural Rhythms in “The Force of Spirit”

The other craft technique that Sanders uses to nurture an environmental consciousness in his reader is his subtle, yet deliberate insertion of simile and metaphor into the prose to infer connection between the human condition and the natural world.  For instance, in “The Force of Spirit,” Sanders examines the concept of spirituality, pondering the force that wills people to live, the energy that can ripple over a landscape.  He describes the way his wife’s parents have aged and approached death, drawing comparisons with natural environmental rhythms to suggest that the “spirit” which drives our love of life is also the same force that makes rivers flow and seedlings burst through soil:

Ruth’s father, still able to get around fairly well back then, had just been to see Dessa in the special care unit, where patients suffering from various forms of dementia drifted about like husks blown by an idle breeze. (p. 239)

To say that [Ruth’s father] is dying makes it sound as though he’s doing something active, like singing or dancing, but really something is being done to him.  Life is leaving him.  From one visit to the next we can see it withdrawing, inch my inch, the way the tide retreating down a beach leaves behind dry sand. (p. 240)

The way Sanders compares ailing patients to “husks blown by an idle breeze,” and his dying father-in-law to a withdrawing ocean tide, implies an inherent connection of this human condition to the natural rhythm of the Earth.  And in so doing, the reader is compelled by extension, to consider the suffering or dying of a landscape to that of a fellow human being.  This inference is subtle, but real, and Sanders confirms this intention in his analysis:

…I want a name for the force that binds me to Ruth, to her parents, to my parents, to our children, to neighbors and friends, to the land and all its creatures.

The power is larger than life, although it contains life.  It is tougher than love, although it contains love.  It is akin to the power I sense in the lambs nudging the teats of their dams to bring down milk, in the raucous tumult of crows high in trees, in the splendor of leaves gorging on sun.  I recognize this force at work in children puzzling over a new fact, in grown-ups welcoming strangers, in our capacity, young and old, for laughter and kindness, for mercy and imagination.

…Whether we call that magnificent energy Spirit or Tao, Creator or God, Allah or Atman or some other holy name, or no name at all, makes little difference, so long as we honor it.  Wherever it flows — in person or place, in animal or plant or the whole of nature — we feel the pressure of the sacred, and that alone deserves our devotion.  (p. 242-243)

This union of human and Earth is the DNA of Sanders’ essays, and his interchanging of natural images with human emotions, gestures, and conditions is one of the signature traits in his outstanding body of work.

The post Inspiring Activism with a Soft Touch: Scott Russell Sanders’ Earth Works appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Born and raised the Bronx, Gornick grew up in a tight-knit community of socialist Jewish immigrants, and spent most of her formative years in the company of the women in her tenement.  Her story is framed through her recollection of, and interactions with these characters, the bulk of which are devoted to her dominating mother and the alluring widow, Nettie Levine, who lived across the hall.  When she was thirteen, Gornick’s father died unexpectedly of a heart attack, plunging her household into the abyss of her mother’s grief, and setting the stage for the conflict that would occur between the opposing forces to Gornick’s developing feminine ideals.  This, in essence, is the Fierce Attachments story.

Though Gornick’s mother is the leading antagonist to her narrator, the character of Nettie Levine plays an important supporting role in the evolution of Gornick’s identity.  Indeed, the two characters — Nettie and Gornick’s mother — come to represent the opposing feminine ideals that act upon the narrator, maintaining tension throughout the book.  This literary craft blog post examines Gornick’s description and portrayal of these two specific characters, and how she uses them to represent broader issues of the contradictory feminine self.

The Mother
From the beginning, Gornick’s mother is introduced as a bold woman, unabashed in her quick judgment and open criticism of others.  To the neighbor waiting outside her apartment while her husband showers and readies himself for sex, Gornick’s mother utters to the woman, “Drucker, you’re a whore,” equating the woman’s obligatory sex with a husband she doesn’t love with the sexual transactions between a man and a prostitute (p. 3).  In this single introductory paragraph, Gornick has shown us, through scene and dialogue, not only her mother’s sharp edge, but the elitist attitude she carries concerning marriage and authentic love.  Gornick also captures her mother’s intellectual snobbishness with brief sound-bites of dialogue:

My mother was distinguished in the building by her unaccented English and the certainty of her manner… Her manner… was that of a superior person embarrassed by the childlike behavior of her inferiors. “Such foolishness,” Or, “That’s ridiculous,” she would rap out sharply when a tale she considered base or ignorant was repeated to her. She seemed never to be troubled by the notion that there might be two sides to a story, or more than one interpretation of an event. She knew that, compared with the women around her, she was “developed” — a person of higher thought and feeling — so what was there to think about?  “Developed” was one of her favorite words. If Mrs. Zimmerman spoke loudly in the hall on a Saturday morning,… inevitably, my mother would shake her head and pronounce, “An undeveloped woman.”  If someone make a crack about the schvartzes, my mother would carefully explain to me that such sentiments were “undeveloped.” (p. 11-12)

Gornick further describes her mother as a woman displaced, a woman with the skill and inner drive to work outside the home and contribute to a larger cause, but whose education and situation condemned her to domesticity:

So this was her condition: here in the kitchen she knew who she was, here in the kitchen she was restless and bored, here in the kitchen she functioned admirably, here in the kitchen she despised what she did.  She would become angry of the “emptiness of a woman’s life.” (p. 16)

Gornick’s words fully illustrate the paradox of her mother’s married life: a woman capable of so much more than domestic work, yet dutifully performing the tasks beneath her with precision and with skill.

It is this sense of duty that defines Gornick’s mother for the reader — a sense of marital duty that eclipses one’s personal intellectual ambition.  The marriage between Gornick’s parents is a happy one, its tranquility placed upon a pedestal for all the other women to see; yet Gornick notices — in comparison between her parents and other seemingly less functional couples — that this compatibility is more emotional than physical.  Upon an accidental glimpse of a friend’s parents having sex, Gornick observes: “So there were the Kerners, riddled with hate, secretly locked together in sexual spasm, and there were my parents, loving each other, while their bed rode chastely about in open space.” (p. 30)

Such are the feminine standards represented in the mother character: intellectual superiority, self-reliance, and dutiful service — but only in the face of true, emotional love.  Succumbing to one’s passions — whether physical or intellectual — at the expense of one’s familial duties, would be considerably “undeveloped.”

Nettie Levine
By sharp contrast, Nettie Levine, the Gentile woman living across the hall and recently widowed by her Jewish husband, is a sensual, alluring individual, whose domestic ineptitude and exclusion from the Jewish tenement cliques is tempered by her calculating sexual energy.  Unlike Gornick’s mother, whose character is largely defined by dialogue, Nettie is presented to the reader as a visual image, her physical beauty a defining element of her persona.  Gornick writes of her first encounter with Nettie, upon accidentally running into her in the hallway:

I bent, blushing, to help her retrieve the bags scattered across the landing and saw that she had bright red hair piled high on her head in a pompadour and streaming down her back and over her shoulders.  Her features were narrow and pointed (the eyes almond-shaped, the mouth and nose thin and sharp), and her shoulders were wide but she was slim.  She reminded me of the pictures of Greta Garbo. My heart began to pound. I had never before seen a beautiful woman. (p. 34)

And while Gornick’s mother is distinguished by smart tongue and superior capabilities, Nettie is alternatively defined by her relative silence and all that she can’t do:

A woman whose sexy good looks brought her darting glances of envy and curiosity, [Nettie] seemed to value inordinately the life of every respectable dowd.  She praised by mother lavishly for her housewifely skills — her ability to makes small wages go far, always have the house smelling nice and the children content to be at home — as though these skills were a treasure, a precious dowry that had been denied her, and symbolized a life from which she had been shut out. (p. 36)

This defining feature became especially apparent after Nettie becomes a mother.  Gornick writes:

Nettie, it quickly developed, had no gift for mothering… Nettie had been trained to attract, not to domesticate, and was at a permanent loss.  She could not master the art of mashed-up food, boiled diapers, baths in the kitchen sink…

… I have this memory of [the baby] in Nettie’s right arm, his diaper full of shit, his face smeared with the remnants of the last two meals, his tiny fingers clutching a strand of red hair, holding on for dear life while she whirls about in silent alarm. (p. 49)

Again, Gornick’s presentation of Nettie’s character is dominated by visual images of her physical beauty and domestic failures.  Yet, despite her intellectual emptiness, Nettie is equipped with a sexual power that permeates the room, and unsurprisingly, comes to rely on this power to survive her “outsider” status.  Here, Gornick employs gesture to develop this particular aspect of Nettie’s character:

It’s not what she wears, one would say, it’s the way she wears it. It’s not what she says so much, it’s the way she says it…

She had a way of walking up the block that had made me uncomfortable from the time I was ten years old.  She walked like no other woman in the neighborhood… Her walk was slow and deliberate… Everyone knew this woman was going nowhere, that she was walking to walk, walking to feel the effect she had on the street.  Her walk insisted on the flesh beneath the clothes. It said, “This body has the power to make you want.” There was nothing like her for a thousand miles around. (p. 98-99)

Indeed, Nettie’s ability to harness her sexual power and turn it into a commodity is the underlying premise of the feminine ideal her character represents.  With visual images and gestures, Gornick establishes through Nettie’s persona, the contrasting feminine standards to Gornick’s intellectual, dutiful mother.  Nettie’s feminine ideal emphasizes beauty over intellect, attraction over self-reliance, impulse over duty, and — above all — sex over love.

In the book, the tension between these opposing feminine forces is played out in the narrator’s mind, in her heart, in her decisions.  The reader sees her struggle with the virtues and risks of both ideals as she matures into a young woman.  But the conflict comes to a head when Nettie’s promiscuous behavior with men finally draws criticism from Gornick’s sharp-tongued mother.  “You know what they say about you on the street?” she taunts one day in the kitchen.  Nettie gets up to leave, and Gornick is compelled to stand and defend her.  In an apologetic gesture, Gornick’s mother places her hands on Nettie, when:

… Nettie brushed the fingers from her arm and with one hand on the doorknob, she hissed, “You know he always liked me.”

For a moment that lasted a hundred years we remained as we were, the three of us, grouped in the tiny foyer. No one moved. My mouth opened and stayed open.  Nettie’s hand remained on the doorknob. Mama’s fingers touched the air. The afternoon light, filled with threat and anxiety, fell on us from the distant kitchen window.

She slept with my father, I thought, and an immense excitement swept my body.

“You whore,” my mother whispered. “You filthy whore. Get out of this house.”

Nettie slammed out the door and Mama ran through the apartment. She flung herself down on the couch and wept hard, broken tears. Torn between pity and fascination, I watched her as long as she lay there. She cried for hours. (p. 119-120)

In that moment, the reader sees that everything Gornick’s mother stood for — her worship of romantic love and marriage — was not only abandoned by her husband’s early death, but was knowingly betrayed by Nettie and all she represented: meaningless sexual impulse. 

The dramatic conflict between these two characters symbolizes the ongoing tension within Gornick’s own mind, between their respective feminine ideals.  As she matures into adulthood, Gornick continues to wrestle the opposing standards of Nettie and her mother.  She is both and insider and an outsider, and intellectual and a dreamer, a believer of romantic love and an impulsive sexual creature.  She is ultimately a product of both influential women.  Gornick’s skill in uniquely developing each character (i.e., defining her intellectual mother through her sharp-witted dialogue, and crafting Nettie through images and gestures) enables the reader to fully appreciate the opposing forces acting upon the narrator, and feel the battle raging within herself as she seeks to understand her own paradoxical identity.

The post Vivian Gornick’s Use of Character in Fierce Attachments appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is an immersive journalism work that reveals the history of the first laboratory-grown human cells, the birth of a multi-billion dollar medical research industry, and the life and death of the African American woman from whom the first cells were taken.  The Immortal Life is richly informative, educating its readers about the science behind cell culturing for medical research, and discussing an array of controversial subjects that emerge from the story, including institutional racism, socioeconomic discrimination, inequities in the American health care system, bioethics, and ownership of human tissue and intellectual property.  But what has made The Immortal Life such a resounding success is not just its capacity to enlighten; rather, it is the fact that the book does so in a form traditionally reserved for fictional novels.  This literary craft blog post explores how Skloot uses elements of fiction to turn a scientific journalism piece into a provocative best seller.

Though the initial vision of The Immortal Life was to tell the story of Henrietta Lacks’s life — to put a name and a face on the cells that revolutionized modern medicine — the real plot becomes Skloot’s very pursuit of the story, and the Lacks family’s struggle to accept what happened to their mother, sister, cousin and friend.  Henrietta Lacks was a poor black woman raised on a tobacco farm in Clover, Virginia.  She was a wife and mother to five children, and at age 29, developed an aggressive form of cervical cancer.  In 1951, during the brief and ultimately unsuccessful course of her treatment, doctors harvested Henrietta’s cancerous cells without her knowledge or consent — cells that would become the foundation for vaccine development, cloning, gene mapping, and other medical breakthroughs.  Her family was unaware, until 20 years later when Henrietta’s identify and connection to the HeLa cell culture was leaked.

Skloot structures her narrative into three distinct sections correlating with the life, death, and immortality of Henrietta’s cells, but develops her storyline mirroring the “Freytag’s pyramid” structure often seen in novels and film.  She begins with an introduction to Henrietta Lacks and her desire to tell Henrietta’s story.  Skloot’s initial attempts to contact and research the family are wrought with obstacles (anger, distrust, and ignorance about the magnitude of Henrietta’s sacrifice); we are immediately hooked into the narrator’s long and dramatic journey to uncover the truth behind the HeLa cells.  Intertwined in Skloot’s detective journey, and equally if not more compelling, is the Lacks family’s story, particularly that of Henrietta’s only living daughter, Deborah.  It is a story of abandonment and longing, enlightenment of the past, and understanding and acceptance of what happened to the mother she never knew.  Interestingly, Skloot and Deborah become antagonists and heroines in each other’s plots: Deborah is both the obstacle and the key to Skloot’s successful pursuit of the HeLa story, her suspicious gatekeeping to valuable family information fueling the dramatic tension throughout the piece, until Skloot finally reaches her breaking point in the climax of her story:

Then, for the first time since we met, I lost my patience with Deborah.  I jerked free of her grip and told her to get the fuck off of me and chill the fuck out.  She stood inches from me, staring wild-eyed again for what felt like minutes. Then, suddenly, she grinned and reached up to smooth my hair, saying, “I never seen you mad before.  I was starting to wonder if you was even human cause you never cuss in front of me.” (p. 284)

Shortly after the confrontation, Deborah gives Skloot access to her mother’s medical file, unlocking secrets vital to Henrietta’s story.

In Deborah’s story, Skloot directly opposes Deborah’s self-protective desire to suppress the details about Henrietta’s life.  Skloot’s investigative persistence forces Deborah to confront painful details about her mother’s illness and death, the institutionalization and death of her mentally disabled sister, and the abuse and neglect Deborah and her siblings experienced in the wake of Henrietta’s death.  At the same time, Skloot serves as Deborah’s hero, teaching her the science and history behind Henrietta’s contribution to medicine, ultimately empowering her to retain ownership of the Lacks family heritage and protect their story from future exploitation.

The climax to Deborah’s story occurs at toward the end of the book, shortly after she has given Skloot her mother’s medical file.  Deborah has broken out into hives from the stress of the entire experience, and they return to Clover, Henrietta’s hometown, and the home of Deborah’s preacher uncle, Gary.  At Gary’s home, as Deborah careens toward an emotional breakdown, Gary intercepts with a religious healing ritual to relieve her of the emotional burden the HeLa cells carry.  With an exorcism-like passion, Deborah pleads:

“Thank you Lord for giving me this information about my mother and my sister, but please HELP ME, cause I know I can’t handle this burden myself.  Take them CELLS from me, Lord, take that BURDEN.  Get it off and LEAVE it there!  I can’t carry it no more, Lord.  You wanted me to give it to you and I just didn’t want to, but you can have it now, Lord.  You can HAVE IT!  Hallelujah, amen.” (p. 292)

The scene ends with Gary’s symbolic transfer of the burden of the HeLa cells from Deborah to Skloot, marking the resolution of both of their plots.  The reader is left breathless — not only from a behind-the-scenes tour through the murky bioethics in the history of medical research, but from the emotional punch packed into the two women’s personal stories.  Had Skloot not elected to make herself a character in The Immortal Life, and employ the elements of fiction to transport the science and social history, the book might not have ever taken flight.

The post Making Science Read Like a Thriller: Use of Fictional Plot Structure appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Kazin’s prose is dense and detailed in its narration, and the meat and bones of its themes — belonging verses finding oneself, preservation of immigrant culture verses assimilating into America — are embellished with specific images, particular characters, and well-placed dialogue.  Indeed, A Walker in the City is a study in the use of details to enhance one’s prose.  This literary craft blog post explores Kazin’s placement of details throughout his text, and how these features support the underlying themes.

One such scene, in which Kazin is describing the buildings and establishments around his old house on the block, is abundant with details:

The shoemaker is still there; the old laundry is now a printing shop.  Next to it is the twin of our old house, connected with ours below the intervening stores by a long common cellar.  As I look at the iron grillwork over the glass door, I think of the dark-faced girl who used to stand on that stoop night after night watching for her Italian boy friend.  Her widowed mother, dressed always in black, a fat meek woman with a clubfoot, was so horrified by the affair that she went to the neighbors for help.  The quarrels of mother and daughter could be heard all over the street.  “How can you go around with an Italian? How can you think of it? You’re unnatural!  You’re draining the blood straight away from my heart!”  Night after night she would sit at her window, watching the girl go off with her Italyéner — ominous word that contained all her fear of the Gentiles — and weep. (p. 80-81)

Not only does the introduction of a lovesick Jewish girl waiting on the stoop for her forbidden Italian boyfriend make the place seem more authentic, the details about her anxious Jewish mother reveal the very theme of Kazin’s memoir.  The fact that she’s a widow, has a club foot, and is always dressed in black — these details solidify the reader’s image of a traditional Jewish woman.  Taken together with the dialogue (“How can you go around with an Italian?  You’re unnatural!”), the specifics about the Jewish mother underscore the ongoing tension between generations about the boundaries of their community.  The inclusion of these details clearly illustrate for the reader, that Jewish immigrants who settled and raised families in America did so with the hopes of a better life, but dreaded the assimilation of their children and the abandonment of their own true heritage.  To them, Brownsville was Jewish, Brownsville was “us,” and the world beyond it was “them.”  But to Kazin, the girl on the stoop, and all of their peers, the world beyond held their dreams.  The world beyond was America.

The push and pull between Brownsville and Beyond, between Jewish and Gentile, and “us” verses “them” is carried throughout the book, but in no other place is this tension so beautifully illustrated as in Kazin’s discussion of Mrs. Solovey.  Mrs. Solovey is the wife of the pharmacist, a lovely Russian woman whose blonde-ness and dreamy demeanor is drawn in sharp contrast with her bitter and scornful husband.  Kazin is in love with Mrs. Solovey, “her air of not being quite related to anything around her” pleasing him most, as it distinguishes her from the dreariness that Brownsville represents.  Kazin writes, “[Their] store went to pieces, the two little girls in their foreign clothes played jacks all afternoon long on the front steps.  Mr. Solovey denounced us with his eyes, and Mrs. Solovey walked among us in her dream of a better life.” (p. 124).  In these details — Mr. Solovey’s scornful eye, his disregard for the family business, the Solovey girls contentedly playing jacks all day on the steps — Kazin illustrates the defeated nature of Brownsville life, and the way in which Mrs. Solovey is different.

Her differences are further revealed when she comes to Kazin’s home, seeking a new dress from Kazin’s seamstress mother.  As she waits, she notices the young narrator studying French, and begins a conversation with him:

“I suppose you are learning French only to read? The way you do everything! But that is a mistake, I can assure you! It is necessary to speak, to speak!  Think how you would be happy to speak French well!  To speak a foreign language is to depart from yourself.  Do you not think it is tiresome to speak the same language al the time? Their language! To feel that you are in a kind of prison, where the words you speak every day are like the walls of your cell? To know with every word that you are the same, and no other, and that it is difficult to escape? But when I speak French to you I have the sensation that for a moment I have left, and I am happy.” (p. 127)

They continue conversing in French, during which Mrs. Solovey reveals that she is from Odessa, near the Black Sea, and has lived in Russia, France, Italy, and Palestine.  Kazin, surprised by her worldliness, asks, “Why did you come here?”

She looked at me for a moment.  I could not tell what she felt, or how much I had betrayed.  But in some way my question wearied her.  She rose, made a strange stiff little bow, and went out.  (p. 130)

Kazin never spoke with her again, and some time later, learned that she had killed herself with gas from the oven. 

It was raining the day they buried her.  Because she was a suicide, the rabbi was reluctant to say the necessary prayers inside the synagogue.  But they prevailed upon him to come out on the porch, and looking down on the hearse as it waited in the street, he intoned the service over her coffin. It was wrapped in the blue and white flag with a Star of David at the head.  (p. 131)

These passages about Mrs. Solovey employ the most effective use of detail.  Not only is she a character in Kazin’s childhood home, her specific characteristics, and the nature of her death symbolize the issues central to Kazin’s theme.  Mrs. Solovey is an anomaly in Brownsville, a blonde, worldly woman who likens speaking a foreign language to escaping a prison cell.  She, too, feels trapped by her existence in Brownsville, and longs for a better life.  But Brownsville suffocates her, in life and in death.  Suicide by gas, rain at the funeral, the Star of David draped over the head of her coffin — all of these details symbolize the oppression of this place.  And through these specifics, Kazin conveys his need to walk on.

The post Tracing the DNA of a Story to the Sentence Level: Use of Symbolic Detail in Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

From the beginning, Hall’s story is about shame and loss: the loss of a child, the dissolution of a future, the rejection by one’s peers, and loss of unconditional parental love.   Yet despite the odds, Hall cobbles a life for herself, a family of her own, and eventually returns to New England to offer compassion to her aging parents.  Then, twenty-one years after her exile, her lost son finds her.  As they forge a new path together with her two younger sons, the story evolves from one of grief, to one of joy, wisdom, and understanding.

Hall’s prose in Without a Map is beautiful and lyric, evoking a sadness that won’t let go.  Her use of present tense makes the reader live her story, feel the sting of her rejection, and accompany her through the haze of her expulsion.  But her beautiful sentences — the detail, the cadence, the movement of her words — are what pierce the reader’s heart.  This literary craft blog post examines Hall’s sentence structure in certain places of the text, and how she uses repetition, rhythm, and momentum to enhance the emotional impact of her message.

The first instance occurs in the prologue of the book, “Shunned.”  Hall has introduced us to the bones of the story: she was once part of a family and a community, and then she got pregnant.  Because of this mistake, she was shunned — ripped away from everything she ever knew and loved.  The pain and shock of her rejection is underscored by its contrast against her life until then.  She had been an insider, a beloved member of a tight-knit group, as evidenced by the intimate details she knows of those who shunned her:

I still can tell you that Larry had a funny, flat head.  That fat Donny surprised us in eighth grade by whipping our a harmonica and playing country ballads.  That he also surprised us that year by flopping on the floor in an epileptic fit.  That Claudia, an only child, lived in a house as orderly and dead as a tomb.  That I coveted her closet full of clothes.  That Patty’s father had to drag out muddy, sagging dog back every few weeks from hunting in the marshes; that he apologized politely every time to my mother, as if is were his fault.  That Jay wanted to marry me in kindergarten, and that I whipped Jay a year or two later with thorny switches his father had trimmed from the hedge separating our yards.  That his father called me Meredy-my-love, and I called him Uncle Leo.  That Heather’s grandmother Mrs. Coombs taught us music once a week, the fat that hung from her arms swinging wildly just off beat as she led each song. (p. xi-xii)

Not only do these details validate her standing in the community, the words create a sort of pattern following the beginning of every sentence with the word That.  “That Patty’s father had to drag… That Jay wanted to marry… That his father called me Meredy-my-love…”  The pattern Hall creates continues for two entire paragraphs — sounding almost like a chant — and produces a rhythm and momentum that carries her readers deeper into her story.  We are invested in her story because we have seen first hand how important she once was, and know that this belonging will soon be stripped away.

Hall uses this specific sentence structure again toward the end of the book, when she has returned to New England to care for her ailing mother.  In this instance, Hall is overcome with the emotion of seeing her mother suffer from advanced multiple sclerosis, and knows that her mother’s illness eclipses her own need to reconcile their past.  For a short time, Hall’s mother improves, and there is a brief window of relief:

Mostly, maybe, of guilt — for my helplessness, for the absolute promise of my own future life, for my desire to turn away from this hideous thing, this wrecker of bodies and lives.  Guilt that I have children to raise in happiness and a living to earn and a house to paint and books to read, that I am stretched too tight and tire and breaking from the sadness of watching my mother suffer.  Guilt that I feel sorry for myself.  Guilt that I cannot fix any part of her rupturing life, that the casseroles I bring and the overnights at my house and the long days at her house with my children are easing and not a cure.  (p. 156)

Again, Hall’s repetition of the words guilt, for, and that create a poetic rhythm to the prose, a succession of melancholy waves, with each instance of the word guilt sounding like the toll of a bell.  The sound and the feeling of the sentences mirror the emotion Hall is conveying with the details of her words: the pang of her guilt that she is okay while her mother is hurting, and the pain of her own exhaustion from caring for her mother under the weight of their past.

Hall also uses this sentence structure in the end of the book, as she describes her last encounter with her aging father.  Having been banned from his house, she no longer knows her father, and recalls him in her childhood memory:

Once, as he sat in the kitchen, my father happily fed toast to our dog, Sam, placing the pieces on the dog’s nose and telling him to wait until he said, “Okay!” Once, my father took us camping at a mountain lake.  I cried when I caught a little perch.  he cooked it in a heavy black pan over the fire, and we pulled the delicate, pure white skeleton, spine and hair ribs, from the hot flesh.  Once, my father hung and skinned a deer he had shot.  We children helped scoop the lungs and liver onto newspapers on the garage floor.  (p. 196)

The sharpness of Hall’s details, in tandem with her repetitive use of the word, once, create for the reader a more vivid experience.  The paragraph reads like a slideshow of intimate family portraits, with the word once triggering each new frame.  The effect is clear: Hall’s memory of her father from childhood is sharply contrasted with a man she no longer knows.  And having just glimpsed at the family photos — the photos in which Hall was still a cherished member of her family, and her father participated in her life — the reader mourns this loss as well.

Meredith Hall’s Without a Map is an example of how sentence structure can enhance the emotional weight of a story, by creating a poetic rhythm that complements the message of its words.  Hall uses this technique to her advantage, making the quality of her prose enrich an already compelling story.

The post Using the Cadence of Prose to Heighten Emotional Impact: Meredith Hall’s Without a Map appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.