NaNoWriMo Day 8: Confused

[15,442 / 50,000]

I have stopped writing a single project. Yep, it's already happened. I am only one week into the month long marathon and I'm jumping ships, or tracks, or running off the course -- whatever the appropriate metaphor is in this situation.

I started out counting only the words I wrote on a fiction project and have now switched all my attention back over to the memoir project (and sub-projects) I am doing for workshop. It helps that the memoir projects are probably going to reach 50,000 words by the end of semester. Now my goal is to get them drafted as quickly as possible.

There are those who would like to point out that jumping tracks mid-month goes against the "rules" of NaNo. Those people need to lighten up. If I can turn out 50,000 words total by Thanksgiving then I will be very happy and I don't particularly care how I do it.

Service to Alma Mater

It appears my number has come up and it's time to do service to the alma mater.

I've never before been asked to contribute to the files faculty put together when they apply for tenure and promotion, but in the past week I've been asked twice. Are they polling the end of the alphabet this year?

All of a sudden it's time to try and remember back to my freshman year of college and give my opinion of a professor I knew as an angsty 18 year-old, and another that I knew as a self-center but less angsty 22 year-old.

This process has lead me to wonder how much of how we describe the past is what we thought at the time and how much of it is how we understand the world at the present. Time, distance and maturity are great (important) things ... but they're not always easily applied to memory. What is truer -- and here's where these concerns start to apply to memoir writing -- the situation as it was perceived by the individual at the time that she experienced it, or the situation as seen through the lens of time and all that time implies and changes?

I need your help for a Post Secret related memoir project

(please repost and repeat the information in the following letter on your blog and to your friends. I hope to conduct as many interviews as possible over the next three months)

Dear fans of Post Secret,

I am a graduate student in an MFA writing program where I am working on a memoir project involving three months of my life and my then obsession with Post Secret. The reason I am writing is because part of my current memoir project involves conducting semi-anonymous interviews with people who have interacted with Post Secret. Not just people who have sent in secrets like I have (although that would be great) but also with people who interact with the blog, online communities, go to Post Secret events or read the books.

What I mean by “semi-anonymous” interviews: I will be conducting these interviews primarily over email. I ask those volunteers who respond to give me a name (first with last initial is fine) but it need not be his or her real name. What is important to my memoir is that people be truthful in recalling their thoughts and emotions related to Post Secret, not that they divulge their identity—it is, after all, Post Secret.

Once again, I am ONLY looking for volunteers to respond to some or all of my questions; I cannot pay people. Over the next two to three months these interviews will occur entirely by email, and there may be some follow up emails sent to certain respondents to clarify or to ask for elaboration. These interviews are for a piece of creative nonfiction relating to my life and, while I am not seeking immediate publication, the piece may eventually be published with some of the volunteers’ responses in it. Any interview or part of an interview that appears in the memoir will be attributed to the fake/real name the volunteer has offered me.

Thank you for having read this far and I hope you will take the time to answer some/all of the following questions and email your responses to eileen.postsecretmemoir AT gmail DOT com.

1. How did you become familiar with Post Secret? How long ago was that?

2. Thinking about the secrets you’ve read, which one stand out in your memory? What’s memorable about that/those secret(s)?

3. Have you ever attended a Post Secret event? Why? What was it like?

4. Have you ever sent in a secret? How many? If more than one, over how long a period of time?

5. Have you ever seen one of your secrets again (on the blog/in the books, etc)? How did that make you feel?

6. Have you ever found a postcard with a secret written on it that was tucked inside of one of the books? What was that like?

7. Have you ever put one of your own secrets inside of a book? What was your reason for doing so?

8. Has there ever been a time where you’ve written a secret on a post card but kept the post card instead of sending it? Please elaborate as much as you are comfortable as to why you’ve hung on to it.

9. Why do you think you read other people’s secrets?

10. If you’ve sent in a secret, or many secrets, why did you send it in opposed to telling someone you knew or keeping it to yourself? What was your reason for sending it off to some place where strangers were going to read it?

Note: I am NOT asking anyone to explicitly state the content of their secrets unless that is something that you want to share. Any information sent to me may eventually be published.

The Procrastinator Wins Again!

I have now officially finished the longest term paper I have ever written. Fifteen pages double spaced on the symbolism of "red" in four novels.

Yes, I have a BA in BS: I can write fifteen pages about one color.

I know I've been assigned eight or ten page papers as an undergrad (I tended to run short of ten as it was a scary two digit number), and I believe I was even assigned a twenty page paper for which I turned in ten pages and still got a B. (New professor that had just transferred from UNLV; he was just impressed that we handed in papers.) But never have I had to write a paper this long. Which is as it should be; I'm in grad school now.

The real measure of the woman though is not how many pages but how many hours. Twenty hours. That is, I had an idea and had annotated the novels when I first read them, from there I started typing those quotes into the word document at 9:00 p.m. Sunday night. I slept for seven hours and then at 5:00 pm Monday I turned the thing in.

I'm still in shock.

As I was typing I was certain I'd fall short on time or length. That I'd skip a conclusion. That I'd be doomed for sure. But twelve hours of butt-time within a twenty hour period seem to have worked just fine.

This is very bad news on the "prepare ahead of time" front. Because the more certain I am in my last minute capabilities the less likely I am to do work ahead of time.

Happy News: Melanie Haney got a very special Good Friday surprise. What a cute photo. Bet she spent more than twenty hours getting that guy ready.

Margosita wrote a nice post yesterday on blogs vs. personal essays. I particularly like the article she quotes that says the writer should start writing about something she hasn't figured out and figure it out through the course of the essay. That's what I think I've started doing with a post last week (it's the beginnings of a personal essay); I'm thinking about it, but I haven't found the the answers I need from it to make a truth just yet.

Dwelling on Coincidence

After reading Jud's post about the pre-wedding office party I was thinking of writing a post on how marriage scares the crap out of me (an often explored topic for those of you who knew me as a college student surrounded by a sorority of engaged women), it would have rambled on about how I would enjoy the stability, having someone to go to restaurants/parties/movies with as well as someone to help (godforbid) raise children, but then one of my students told me about this.

Yesterday a man walked out in front of an Amtrak train a few miles from where I live.

This town is crisscrossed with train tracks, they are the remnants of a blue collar town that can't figure out if it's future rides on the working class or on the creative class, but the Amtrak runs very close to my apartment.

The sound of train horns have never bothered me -- in Ann Arbor the train runs along the river (go figure) and I always have lived near the river -- which is good because both in Chicago and Kalamazoo I've been close to tracks. In Chicago the eL ran a block behind my building. But these people dying bother me.

Another incident happened a few months ago in this city. And then last summer/fall a woman died on the train tracks in Ann Arbor. I do not know the whys or whens of hear death, but when I think about it, I imagine it at sunset. The train rushing at her from the west. The sun gleaming off the train golden on her face. I imagine that she knows. That she's planned this. That she is calm. That she stands there like a Madonna with sad, knowing eyes, her palms faced up.

It's a silly image; one that has nothing to do with the truth. I don't know why I have these thoughts. I don't know why I only think of her when the sun has started to set. But I never, ever see the train hit her in my mind.

The horn blares; the blue, gray steel comes into view; blocks the sun; her eyes adjust to the darkness, the horn still lowing an unheeded warning. And then I see nothing.

Now there comes another instance. One delivered to me by one of the four people I spoke to today. I speak with only four people, and 25% of the people I speak to speak to me of dead men on train tracks.

Why all these people? Why all of a sudden? Why do I keep hearing about it? And why does it bother me?

Lately I have come to dwell on coincidence. Not in a sinister, horror movie sort of way. But in a what now, why now, what-can-I-make-out-of-the-chaos way. I'll keep turning this one over in my mind and I'll see what else I find buried in memory and association, for I am certain I will write about this. These past few months since I have realized that I am both able and inclined to write non-fiction essays I have let myself dwell in coincidence, and I have not been disappointed with the results. Previously, I would have tried to turn this all into a short story. And I would have been disappointed with the results. What turns into mind blowing coincidences in memoir become over worked cliches in fiction.

I do not know, yet, what will come of this, I only know that something will.

The 'Duh' Moment

Happy New Year! Seriously, is it already 2009? My blog celebrates 14 months of regular entries this January. It’s been alive since spring of 2006 but it was so sporadic that I think I checked my junk email account more than I posted to my blog. After my first trip to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in 2007 I vowed to post fiction once a week and did so through October of that year. That November I left law school in order to pursue an MFA and a life writing, teaching and hopefully publishing.

For many of you, these facts are old hat; you’ve actually been around since that November. I owe many of my original readers to Jud who took the time to read and recommend this blog to other bloggers. Quite a few of my “lurkers” are people who have met me in real life. Friends from college and high school, family members – my twin cousins stalk the blog for pictures of my kittens, here’s your prize:

and the last group would be people I met through writing related stuff: Kenyon, commenting on the MFAblog, almost going to UNH with you, or other reasons.

[BTW, we totally need to meet at the AWP Conference. Do you think we can get on the schedule as “Bloggers Cocktail Hour” – You’re followed their blogs for months, now meet and greet with your contemporaries and counterparts to discuss the experience further in person (and coordinate your blog posts for the weekend), cash bar.]

Regardless of who you are or how this blog came to your attention, I’m grateful that you’re reading my rants, recommendations, epiphanies and in general being a sucker for kitten pictures and B&W photography of snow.

All this retrospection came about after the ‘duh’ moment that gave the title to this post.

My well intentioned father, completely confused by such titles as nonfiction, memoir and essay as applied to bound books today, bought me two collections of essays for Christmas, Naked, David Sedaris and I Was Told There’d Be Cake, Sloane Crosley. The reason he did this was because I told him about my last workshop experience where two people called my short story “essayistic.” He then spent the next few weeks pressing me to answer his question if a novel could be written as a memoir.

I was completely confused.

Like Frey? I relayed the Million Little Pieces scandal to my father, but that didn’t answer his question.

Finally (after I became super frustrated and pissy) we came around to the real issue: the only difference between a memoir and a literary novel with a first person narrator is that the novel depicts fictional events. Ideally, the memoir is completely real – or at least completely the memoires of the author.

Tomorrow I’ll get into how I explained what I’m doing to my father which is worth writing out just to share his reaction. But for the time being just know that he bought these two collections of essays to help and inspire me.

The second collection, I I Was Told There’d Be Cake, certainly did inspire me. The writer is a young woman with a hillarious voice who rants on certain topics personal to her and yet sympathetic for everyone. That’s it. It is, of course, in the form of an essay.

I got one page into the fourth essay in the book and suddenly ohmigdImsoooostupid! I’ve been doing this exact same thing for the past ten years! Of course, with varying degrees of readability and knowledge of grammar, but basically with a little tweaking to fit form, any of the pieces I dubbed “comedic rants” is an essay. This is frequently what my blog is (thus the reflection earlier).

I’m going to spend some time working very hard on writing, researching and submitting essays to the appropriate markets.

Not Another One!

It would appear that as soon as I made my last post as to what memoir really was that another crock was being uncovered. This time a Ms. Margaret Seltzer writing under a pen name was outed as having made up the whole thing. From the NYTimes:

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

In her defense she claims she was writing the stories of people she knew, that her assumption of a false life was an attempt to give them a voice.

Unlike the Frey case, Ms. Seltzer's books are being recalled and her book tour has been canceled, in part because the book tour was yet to start. There will be no run in with Oprah this time around.

For crying out loud people, just write it as fiction and get on with it!

Memoir vs. Novel

People still ask me what memoir really is. Despite everyone loving to read memoirs recently, no one seems to be able to nail down the particulars of what it is they’re consuming. Then you go and add A Million Little Pieces and its “sequel” to the mix and you’ve got a big bag of WTF? So today I'm answering questions.

Memoir’s basically fiction, right?

No. Memoirs are not fiction. They are about real people and the things that actually happened in that person’s life.

But then why does it read like a novel?

In memoir the author employs all the devices and methods of a fiction writer. They deal in tone and selective description. The authors get into artistic imaginings of physical things. In factual writing an artistic description of how the wind sounded or the way the smoke swirled upward would never be printed, but memoir allows for such artistic flourishes. They build the story of the life around a theme, leaving out large parts of their lives that have nothing to do with the theme and focusing in on events that do.

The best example of theme in memoir that I know is Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, where author Nick Flynn builds the memoir around the theme of homelessness. This means that he focuses on his experience working in homeless shelters and his father’s experience being homeless. Because the father-son relationship is viewed through this lens some aspects of his life come into sharper focus and some fade out. When asked about his relationship with his mother, the author stated that his relationship with his mother was extremely important to him and that he and his mother have always gotten along; however, you would not know this from reading the memoir because he allowed the narration of the mother-son relationship to fall away from the attention of the reader.

So how’s it different from an autobiography?

Autobiographies have (thankfully) gone out of style. Pretty much the only people who wrote autobiographies were people who had somehow been deemed “important” public persons, and because they were “important” we, the public, would then want to read all about the experiences that shaped their life and the events that lead to them being “important” and famous.

Memoirs have no such notion of importance. They are the (hopefully) entertaining and moving account of everyday people who have something special to say. Read The Black Dog of Fate if you don’t believe me; the first third of it is about watching baseball on TV with his grandmother. The second third is him realizing she survived the Armenian genocide.

It's not fiction, it's not autobiograph; I still don’t get it.

Most casual readers want to view memoirs as readable autobiographies, and therein lies the problem. An autobiography is fact checked at some point, extensive interviews with witnesses are done, and usually revolves around events so large and well documented that all of this is possible. Memoir doesn’t presume to be the entire truth.

The simplest and most succinct answer did not dawn on me until I read an interview with literary agent Lynn Nesbit where she stated that the thing about memoir is that it involves an unreliable narrator. That was the moment of truth for me.

Memoir is the truth, told with literary devices to make a good, interesting, solid story, told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator. The narrator (author) is limited to only what he knows himself. He cannot know what those around him were thinking or what their reasons were, he can only assume them. He can assume reasons for actions toward him. He can assume people’s histories. He can assume events that went on with out him happened a certain way but the narrator will never know with any certainty because the narrator cannot leave his own mind.

What's an unreliable narrator look like?

Certainly you have a friend who always takes comments too critically, right down to the way someone greets her in a store. Because of this, when she tells you a story about her feeling slighted because of a store clerk you know to take it with a grain of salt. As goes that friend, so goes the memoir.

So why are people upset with this Frey guy?

I haven't read it and don't intend to. As I understand it his novels (which he sold as "memoir" after publishers didn't buy it as fiction), he dealt with a narrator who was a drug addict and overcame addiction, and a narrator who spent time in prison. Frey may have experimented with drugs but never was an addict, never went to rehab, and never spent time in prison. Addiction counselors are afraid that people will think they can deal with addiction on their own “like this guy did” when he really doesn’t know shit about rehab.

That and he made Oprah look like a fool. And you don’t mess with Oprah.

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