She had long hair (parted down the middle), did batik, and made us shop at the organic food store. I think we were one of 10 families that kept that store in business--for some reason, health food in a small Southern town in the early 80's was just about 20 years ahead of schedule.
She had an acoustic guitar and played a lot of James Taylor, John Denver, and some Joan Baez. We sang in the car, we sang while cooking, we picked blueberries from the backyard and made cobblers in the summer.
But this isn't really the point of this post. The point is this: I have had the song "Take Me Home, Country Roads" in my head for two days now. Songs usually last for about a week with me, so the cats will continue to hear me singing this for quite awhile. I didn't understand the appeal of John Denver when I was younger, but I think I get it now.
He sings without irony.
It's kind of beautiful.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Monday, July 7, 2008
Memoir and Trauma
When I was in grad school, I took a creative non-fiction class that my friend Laura has described as "Let's write about the most depressing thing that ever happened to us." And for the most part, that was a pretty apt description.
People wrote about struggles with depression and bipolar disorder, broken families, alcoholism. Even the most (dare I say) positive story was from a girl who wrote about her parent's divorce.
It was a great class because it taught me how to use a story arc and how to craft something other than a poem, which was the genre I chose when I was 14. But it wasn't an enjoyable task.
Last week, I read a new memoir entitled Without a Map. I originally read the first chapter of Without a Map as an essay called "Shunned" in an anthology called In Fact. The book continues where the essay began: the author's pregnancy at 16 in the 60s. Her mother sent her to live with her father (where she hid her pregnancy.) To me, the most interesting part of the memoir is not so much the author's pain at being shunned or how it affected her in the first five or six years after the event, but the 15 and 20 years later.
The second half of the book deals with the author's reunion with the son she gave up, and how the fable she comforted herself with, that her son had a 'better' life without her, was not necessarily true. The son grew up in poverty with an abusive father. The author, at the book's end, is still estranged from her father, and her mother has died without ever giving an apology or an explanation for her actions.
There is no real resolution. This will never be an Oprah book pick. But the book is beautiful--the prose is spare, the descriptions are vivid, and she shows how one conflict, one secret, ends up changing the shape of familial relationships irrevocably.
Perhaps we remember the bad events, the traumatic ones, most closely because these are the ones we remember. We play the events back in our head over and over, saying or doing a different thing. We remember trauma because these are the things we wish to fix but can't.
People wrote about struggles with depression and bipolar disorder, broken families, alcoholism. Even the most (dare I say) positive story was from a girl who wrote about her parent's divorce.
It was a great class because it taught me how to use a story arc and how to craft something other than a poem, which was the genre I chose when I was 14. But it wasn't an enjoyable task.
Last week, I read a new memoir entitled Without a Map. I originally read the first chapter of Without a Map as an essay called "Shunned" in an anthology called In Fact. The book continues where the essay began: the author's pregnancy at 16 in the 60s. Her mother sent her to live with her father (where she hid her pregnancy.) To me, the most interesting part of the memoir is not so much the author's pain at being shunned or how it affected her in the first five or six years after the event, but the 15 and 20 years later.
The second half of the book deals with the author's reunion with the son she gave up, and how the fable she comforted herself with, that her son had a 'better' life without her, was not necessarily true. The son grew up in poverty with an abusive father. The author, at the book's end, is still estranged from her father, and her mother has died without ever giving an apology or an explanation for her actions.
There is no real resolution. This will never be an Oprah book pick. But the book is beautiful--the prose is spare, the descriptions are vivid, and she shows how one conflict, one secret, ends up changing the shape of familial relationships irrevocably.
Perhaps we remember the bad events, the traumatic ones, most closely because these are the ones we remember. We play the events back in our head over and over, saying or doing a different thing. We remember trauma because these are the things we wish to fix but can't.
Getting Back to Work
It's been two years since I graduated with my MFA and I haven't done much on the writing front.
Granted, I've picked up some other useful skills in that time: how to deal with an invisible boss, how to hire 20 students in three weeks, how to move apartments, how to argue with an insurance company.
But since things have stabilized on the work and health front, it's time to get back to work. Armed with my city library card, I am giving up for the most part ordering books through the school's ILL (because their reservation system is a pain in the ass.) I'll keep using it for academic books, but for everything else, it's the Harold Washington Library, baby. The gargoyles on the top of it always make me thing of the beginning of Disney's Beauty and the Beast.
The blog will mostly be books I'm reading, or snippets of poems I'm working on. Mostly, it's a log for me, so that I can say at the end of the summer, or this time next year, that I did actually work on my craft, or at least read some good books.
Good memoirs I've read lately:
Without a Map (Meredith Hall)
Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction (David Sheff)
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes it to the Streets (Sudhir Venkatesh)
I'll post on the memoirs later, either today or tomorrow.
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