On November 1-4, I attended the Bedell Nonfiction Now Conference at the University of Iowa. The conference’s mission is to explore the history, present, and future of nonfiction in its myriad forms, and, as you might expect, the conference was packed with excellent panels, speakers, and readings focused on personal experience writing.

Thursday November 1, 2007

Morning
University of Iowa President Sally Mason welcomed the attendees to Iowa and the University of Iowa campus in Iowa City. New to Iowa herself, she promised us that we were in for a treat because Iowans are extremely friendly and helpful. That certainly turned out to be true, from campus baristas at the student union to the hotel concierge to the wait staff at the many fine restaurants near campus. The college community is comfortable and easy to negotiate, which is a lure to attending the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
 
After the President’s remarks, David Hamilton, editor of the prestigious Iowa Review, author of Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm, and editor of Hard Choices: An Iowa Review Reader, introduced the morning keynote speaker, Minnesota memoirist Patricia Hampl, once his student. Booklist has said Hampl’s writing defined “the memoir of discovery.” The Chicago Tribune said she links “the intellectual inquisitiveness of the essay with the narrative drive of the memoir to create nothing less than a conduit between self and culture.” Hampl herself remarked she is in the category of writers for whom, “nothing’s ever happened and you write books about it.” Her newest memoir, The Florist’s Daughter, is a tribute to a way of life in a particular area of the country in the middle of the 20th Century, and as writers we have much to learn from her deep study of first person writing.

In her keynote speech, she said that writing first person prose is hardwired into our culture with the words, “Know thyself,” and unites various genres — autobiography, the novel, and memoir. The “I” is a stylistic presence that equals a pulse, someone breathing. The first person voice, whether in a novel, which she called a faux memoir, or in lyric poetry, asks, “Who am I?” And ultimately, that voice offers transcendence, something spiritual. Memoirs are, Hampl said, just what Emily Dickenson labeled her poems, “my letter to the world that never wrote to me.”

The self, Hampl believes, is a tool for rendering the world, and the task of the self is to describe. It is not about ego, but about being at the intersection of the world and being in the world, part of the all. As with Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the self’s real subject is consciousness. Voice allows the author to be present in the material, not separate. Style is the register, she says, between consciousness and the material the writer is committed to wrestling onto the page. In this way, writing equals cognitive therapy. Describing is the most important element. As Henry James said, “Observe perpetually.” As a memoirist, you trust that the act of describing will find the voice of the writing and take hold of the narrative. Though the detail looks like a ragged peasant in the face of plot and character, Hampl said it is through the detail that the memoir does its magic: “You tell me your story and somehow I get my own.” She went on to say, “Describe, describe, describe the world you alone can bring into being,” and “the memoirist is the one left standing, the one who gets to count the corpses.”

“I” is not a frail pronoun, Hampl said; “it carries the world’s history on its back”. She quoted John Berryman on Ann Frank’s Diary: in naming her faith and the faith of the world, Ann Frank became the voice of history.

Visit Publisher’s Weekly online to read more of what Hampl has to say about memoir.

 After the keynote speech, I attended the Creative Nonfiction as Therapy panel dedicated to exploring the implications for the art of creative nonfiction raised by the idea of writing as “narrative therapy,” which many now agree offers undeniable health and psychological benefits. Panelists Ann McCutchan, Vicki Lindner and Emily Fox Gordon tried to battle it out but the score is clearly highest on the side of this, as far as I can tell: Many people who don’t usually write do so to exorcise the pain of difficult histories. They are drawn to put down previously unarticulated details and truths. When others read their work, they are often very moved, more moved than the writing teachers who are judging whether the work is art. Literature may require something more, but that fact is not an argument against writing for self-therapy. What seems most important is how to help those serious about their writing write their way through trauma stories if those are the stories they have to tell.

Especially intrigued by what panel member Vicki Linder had to say, I looked up an article she referred as she spoke, and I was happy to find it, “A Tale of Two Bethanies”, online in its entirety. In the article, Vicky Lindner writes about teaching her university students and about how she encourages them:

to write the story I have trained myself to recognize they came to my class to tell, to confide its details, and investigate its levels of meaning with me as a guide. I say what I suspect these students already know: Writing is better than talking or repressing. To transform a painful, life-threatening experience into art, an abiding, transcendent, public testimony, makes its significance available to others while obliterating its power over you.

Linder’s article is meant to inform others who teach creative writing to university students. However, it also serves to help any personal essayist or memoir writer who is feeling a pressure they can’t shake when approaching a sensitive, traumatic subject.

Hope Burwell, an attendee at this panel, raised important points about writing as therapy for the returning Iraq war soldiers showing up in her community college classroom. Burwell is no stranger to personal writing about the political. She has won awards for the writing and work she’s done to help Chernobyl residents. She told the group that Kirkwood Community College has created special composition classes since the vets’ work about trauma is hard for younger, less experienced students to feel comfortable reading. And as the teacher, Burwell feels she needs a counselor present in the room because of the difficulty of the subject and its effect on the listeners and writers. In response to Hope’s comments, a representative of Veterans Voices and the Hospitalized Veterans Writing Project mentioned his organization’s 53-year history.

Lunch
I met Dinty Moore, editor of BREVITY, an online journal that is open to all with no subscription necessary.

Here’s a description of the journal from the website:

For the past nine years, Brevity has published well-known and emerging writers working in the extremely brief (750 words or less) essay form. Though still committed to the mission of publishing new writers, Brevity has enjoyed an embarrassment of recent riches, including the work of two Pulitzer prize finalists, numerous NEA fellows, Pushcart winners, Best American authors, and writers from India, Spain, and Japan…

Visit the Brevity site and read many issues of fine short non-fiction. There are craft essays and book reviews included as well.

I also learned about an exciting project called Quotidiana. According to the website description, “Quotidiana is a collection of materials concerned with the everyday, just like essays themselves. ” It is:

an anthology of hundreds of classical essays, all published before 1923, all partakers of the ruminative, associative, idea-driven form that predates and surpasses the current “creative nonfiction” trendy stuff. Although most of these essays are available online elsewhere, some are not, and already Quotidiana is one of the biggest online anthologies of classical essays anywhere.

Early Afternoon

I attended a panel called Nonfiction Writing About Disability, in which authors Maura Brady, Dan Roche, Cassandra Kircher, Elizabeth Stuckey-French and Stephen Kuusisto read from their work and discussed the tight ropes they walk when writing about their subjects, whether the disability is their own, a relative’s or a student’s. My introduction to these authors (all but Kuusisto were new to me) was a delight.

Maura Brady teaches at Le Moyne College and is working on a memoir called Sisterbaby about being a sister to a Down syndrome sibling. Before Brady read from her memoir, she spoke about the issues for her in writing it. She knew the area of her writing meant she was risking exploitation of her sister’s life, exposing it to an uncertain audience and perhaps could also be contributing to a backlash. She feels that society’s way of looking at retardation as about being the “eternal child” who is somehow better than the rest of us implies that the mentally challenged are somehow oblivious to what is going on around them. She felt she needed what she called “a warrant” to write about the sensitive subject. As I listened to her read from her work, I felt she’d found that warrant in the way she evokes her Down syndrome sister’s need and ability to be a sister to her as much as she feels a sisterly responsibility to care of her sibling.

Dan Roche, who also teaches at Le Moyne College, wrote the memoir Love’s Labors. His newest, Some Revelation at Hand, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. His current work is about his work teaching an autistic young man from India who speaks through a facilitated communication devise. He believes that in writing about his experiences with the young man, he treads a tricky line between stealing the young man’s story and telling his own.

Cassandra Kircher teaches at Elon University. Her memoir-in-progress, Dear Marina, Dear Tess, chronicles the adoption of a daughter from Russian and a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome. For Kircher, feeling okay about writing about her daughter’s behavior and thinking patterns and living around them requires she share the material with her daughter.

Listening to the work these writers read made me circle back to the morning panel on writing as therapy and back further to Patricia Hampl’s keynote speech. Yes, I thought, listening to an author tell a life story as he or she sees it awakens my humanity and therefore awakens stories in me.

Late afternoon
Five University of Nebraska Press authors read from recently published work:

Jennifer Brice is the author of Unlearning to Fly, described on the University of Nebraska Press website (where you can download a long excerpt) as a “memoir of a bookworm growing up in Alaska—among people whose resilience, restlessness, and energy find their highest expression in winter ascents of Mount McKinley or first descents of wild rivers.” Brice is “a fearful pilot, one who admires but does not emulate the more daring exploits of her father and her friends.”

Hilda Raz read from What Becomes You, her co-authored book with son Aaron. It is about his sex change operation from female to male. You can find an informative interview with Hilda Raz called Looking at Aaron. It is about an essay from the book that she published in the journal Creative Nonfiction.

Dinah Lenney, who plays Nurse Shirley on ER, read from Bigger Than Life: A Murder, A Memoir  about her father, an entrepreneur killed in a botched kidnapping attempt. In the section she read at the conference, the family waits two weeks from the time of his disappearance to the finding of his body, and Lenney writes her memories of her father being able, up till now, to get what he wanted from situations and people.

David Shields, author of Body Politic, read an essay in which he meditates on his back problems and visits to the chiropractor. He has been dubbed the “poet” of sports writing by critic Regina Hackett of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and his reading supported that title.

Poet Peggy Shumaker read from her new lyric memoir Just Breathe Normally, written about healing from a freak bicycle accident. A review in Booklist says:

Shumaker’s account of her rehabilitation [includes] moments in which she couldn’t see, couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk, couldn’t breathe. She also ruminates upon the fate of the barely contrite 17-year-old driver who nearly killed her. Details of her upbringing are equally crushing.

But according to the Press’ website, the book’s resonance is in Shumaker’s re-evaluation of “her family’s past,” its “meditation on the meaning of justice and the role of love in the grueling process of healing.” You can read an excerpt of the memoir on the University of Nebraska Press website.

By the second day of this conference richer than a year’s worth of literary cultural events, I was pure appreciative audience, sans note taking. I remained utterly transported by panelists’ papers, Richard Rodriquez’ lunch time keynote address and Patricia Hampl’s evening reading from The Florist’s Daughter, which I bought the very next day and savor.

As far as I can tell, we cannot have enough nonfiction now; we cannot be pushed awake too many times. We cannot fail to become more of who we are the more we read others journeying on the page to describe and define what it means to be alive in relation to others.

And when the journeying is done what sticks is the vivid description, the phrase that altered the world. Patricia Hampl told us some of what was in the dying Katherine Mansfield’s last notebooks. “Gulls move like the glints in a pearl,” she wrote. May we all find the words we need to bring this life we live so very temporarily into the whole.