3/10/21
I struggled in my writing this term to strike a balance between telling a story and creating sensation. I approached most of my stories with an open mind, which led me to write too many plots in one piece. I think toward the end of the term I improved on filtering my story and adding speculation to my writing. I’d like to further improve upon this skill of meditating and ruminating between the lines of plot, while immersing myself further in the stories of others.
I see creative nonfiction as a space for the rearrangement of images to produce revelation, as in Kushner’s mutual dream scene. In dreams you can’t reinvent; you can only rearrange. As Harper says in Angels in America: “It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions.” Dreams ride the same line between truth and fiction as the mutant genre. What is complicated isn’t always solved. Sometimes the dream further complicates. Harper adds: “Don’t you think it’s depressing?” Sometimes the truths stated through creative nonfiction leave the reader in a state of sadness. To feel what is real is the impetus of the genre. Since dreams are the mind’s way of revisiting, reflection, and reconstruction — they solidify certain perceptions into memories and discard others. Dreams are the mind’s way of nimbly approaching traumas, fears, and pain in a calmed state. Such is the method of creative nonfiction.
As with the dreaming mind, the genre ruminates, speculates, and pieces together the fragments of thoughts, experiences and observations, to try to make sense of things, or make peace with things. Creative nonfiction provides a vehicle for us to explore the unbearable ordinariness of life. As does Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, it revels in the mundane details of life which make up the fabric of the time, the place, and the energy of the city.
Kushner says: “So when we think we’ve escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, un untruthfulness of our lives, it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth.” Telling the stories of others enters the realm of shared dreams. The writer enters a mutual dream with her subject for the purpose of not only understanding but reimagining through means of rearrangement.
As with any good dream or piece of creative nonfiction, the dreamer is awoken in fear or confusion from some deeply disturbing revelation. Revelation. “Reve” is the French word for dream. Sometimes the level of disturbance is correlated to the reality of the revelation. When fiction bleeds into what’s real, it can be bewildering. Dreams are a universally shared experience made up of very real memories, though they are fictional.
I began this class very inspired by Tom Wolfe’s immersive journalistic writing. I started the term writing about myself. I hoped to refine my writing and interview skills while focusing on the beauty in the mundane. For my first narrative realization piece I focused on the anxieties I had about approaching people for the purposes of recording their stories. I wrote about myself again for the next few assignments, creating second and third drafts of pieces I believed had potential for development. By the middle of the term, I explored the idea of reaching out to people for stories – I interviewed walkers in Woodstock for my “short piece,” and I reached out to a peripheral neighborhood man for his story in “microscope & telescope.” I explored free-form writing in short pieces as I tried to capture the aesthetic feeling of the pandemic as well as my classmates had. My portfolio is organized into folders of each assignment, with drafts included.
For my final project, I decided to profile Carey, a custodian in the building I am living in this term. My goal was to investigate and illuminate the perspective of the person whose job requires her to seek out the virus, as a means to kill it, from someone like me who is told to avoid it at all costs. The project developed into a polarization, between a profile of Carey and the state of the pandemic, from the perspective of a college student but also through the lens of a custodian. I wanted to tackle a mixed-media project to capture the story from all angles and in fragments.
My reading journal starts as a collection of thought-out responses to reading from the term, but it evolves to scraps and fragments of quotes I found to be powerful and words I found moving. My focus toward the end of the term shifted to descriptions of the other – I found myself drawn to writers who were telling the stories of others and blending them into their own. As Myerhoff says, “A needle goes in and out. You hold a thread in your fingers. It goes to the garment, to the fingers, to the one who wears the garment, all connected. This is what meters, not whether you are paid for what you do.”