Last week we posted the first part of my interview with Tarn Wilson about her memoir The Slow Farm. Tarn and I talked about how she used artifacts to reconstruct the past and how she structured her book. This week Tarn and I discuss the art of remembering. Tarn tells us about how she finds ways to access the memories buried in what she calls “the messy filing cabinets of our brain,”  how she decided which memories to include in The Slow Farm, and explains what it was like writing from a child’s point of view as an adult.

Andrea
The majority of this book takes place from 1971, right before you turned four, to 1974. It seems like these years were really key in your development as a person and, to some extent, haunted you. Toward the end of the book you say, “I’m sure only of this: for years, I could write about nothing else but this sweet, gouged, cut abundant island. That it rose in my consciousness, over and over. Texada is, for me, that great shining, rising and disappearing back of a whale.” What beautiful language!

While it seems like this time period stayed fresh to you over the years, did you find it difficult to remember different parts because you were so young?

Tarn
Even though my sister and I were so little, we both have incredibly vivid memories of that time. I have a couple of theories about that. One, I think some people just have more memories of their early childhood. (Don’t ask me what I did last weekend, though!) Also, in teaching creative writing to highschoolers, I have noticed that students who lived in a beautiful natural place around age five tend to have vivid memories (I have students who come from all over the world.) My theory is that ages four to six is the time in which our parents begin to let us out of their sight to explore, usually in a small, bounded area. It is also an age when we are so attuned to the world, absorbing so much with our senses, looking, touching, tasting, all slowly. So if our world is full of wonders—the mango trees of my students or our own ferns and cedar trees—it imbeds brightly in memory. I also think that most of us have childhood memories buried in the messy filing cabinets of our brain, and we just need to find ways to access them.  I love working with students who say, “I don’t remember my childhood,” and watch what happens when I give them a variety of exercises, how surprised and delighted they are by what opens for them.

Andrea
I love that idea, that we have memories buried in the “messy filing cabinets of our brain” and just need a way to find that file. I know that when I try to write about childhood, I can remember certain events like sitting on my dad’s lap while he let me “drive” the car, but sensory details, like taste, smell, and touch might be missing. Yet, senses and detail are what create some of the great scenes in your story. I’m thinking of the essay “What I Learned About Love: Seaweed Mamas” where you explain the ritual of how you and your sister care for the Seaweed Mamas. You talk about “that horrible pop of a splitting head” and wiping the Mamas’ faces with washcloths made from bumpy squares of seaweed. What did you do to try and refresh your memory or add details that you felt were missing?

Tarn
When I was writing the bulk of the book, I noticed that once I started working on one memory, more memories would come rushing back, as if I had unloosed some sort of dam. Writing with sense detail, reminding myself of smells, tastes, sounds, textures, released more memories. Drawing memory maps and cartoons helped. Writing about photographs. I looked up images on the web, toys of the time, plants of the island. . . A couple times, I conferred with my sister. I revisited Texada to feel again the quality of the air, smell the smells. Also, I wrote the first version of “The First Day of School” in 8^th grade and my first story about life in Pocahontas Bay my freshman year of college when I was just 18. I started recording the bulk of the memories when I was  21 to 25. I think memories fade, alter, or solidify as we get older, so I’m grateful I started trying to write this memoir then. I was frustrated at the time because I didn’t have the skill or perspective to tell the story I wanted to tell, or as a high school teacher, the time. But in retrospect, I am so grateful for those efforts (as lost as I felt in the moment!)

Some of the moments/details are perfectly clear to me, such as the Seaweed Mama section you mentioned – or the dead bird, the chalkboard, the ineffective sweeping, and the old planks in the Schoolhouse section. In some fuzzier memories, I am sure my imagination has filled in the scenes. My dad did have an olive green velour shirt with black stripes I loved, but I don’t know if he was wearing it when he walked to town by himself and we tried to follow him. I’m not sure if all the town girls were wearing pretty dresses on my first day of school or if that is just how it felt emotionally. In the section in which Rima falls through the tarpaper roof, in actuality, neither of us is certain which one of us who fell. We can each remember it as if it were us—and the other person. So in an earlier version, I reflected on that, how we were so connected that what happened to one person’s body felt as if it happened to the others. In earlier versions of the book, I reflected on the nature of memory, what is clear, what is fuzzy, how we create our stories from our wash of impressions, but as much as I enjoyed that thinking, I realized it was not as interesting to the reader as it was to me and distracted from the experience of the story, so I had to pull out those passages and make a choice in that chapter. So as a compromise, Rima falls through the roof and I feel it on my body.

Andrea
Thinking more about revision and writing choices, I am guessing you had hundreds of childhood memories to draw from. How did you decide which memories to include in this collection?

Tarn
Yes, I wrote many more memories than ended up in this final version. Originally, I included all my earliest memories in Washington D.C., to which I had devoted much writing time, but which a wise friend told me I should cut. It was painful, but she was right. I realized this book would be more successful and unified if it had a boundary or a frame – which I eventually decided should be our time on Texada Island. The original version also included second grade in Vancouver, which I also decided to let go. I also tightened and cut memories of the time on Texada to keep the story moving.  Unfortunately, what is precious to a writer is not always meaningful to the reader, so I tried not to include too many memories that had the same message. I still think I may have included too many Pocahontas Bay memories—I think it’s a little slow in the middle—but I didn’t feel as if I had the perspective to see what should stay or go and my readers radically disagreed on which chapters they loved and which could be cut. I would advise someone writing a draft of a memoir not to decide too early in the process which memories fit a theme, as we often do not really understand what our story, or a particular section, is trying to say until late in the process.

Andrea
Yes, if you try to shape a collection too early you might end up cutting your story short or trying to make it fit a plan/theme that will feel forced to the reader.

It seems like a challenge in collecting essays into one book can be not just deciding what gets included, but figuring out how all of these life pieces fit together. I really like how you used titles to not just introduce each essay, but also to create themes throughout the book. I noticed that you repeated certain title phrases like “What I Knew,” “What I Learned,” “What I Feared,” “What I Believed,” “What I Didn’t Know, and “Still Life.” How did you choose titles for the essays and how did they help you create a cohesive story?

Tarn
Thank you for asking about the chapter titles. You ask the best questions! It’s like you have some secret trap door access to my brain!  For the majority of the life of this book, the chapter titles were very simple.  Eyes. The School House. The First Day of School. Seaweed Mamas. In the beginning of my writing process, I wrote the memories as they came to me, in no particular chronology. So I had a big mass of disorganized text. The titles were my indexing, my short hand for being able to quickly find a previous piece of writing for revision. When I assembled the book, I kept those titles. The current chapter titles came in the last revision last summer. I realized that I had been thinking for years about the meaning of my memories, the symbolic significance, my evolving understanding, but my first time reader had not. I wanted a way, without introducing the adult reflection into the text, to signal to the reader why I had included a section and to emphasize that this is a book about how children learn and make sense of the world. I had been brainstorming a future possible book or long essay in which I used titled lists and fragments, so I stole from my future project. I think most readers of traditional, bestselling memoirs expect memoirs to read like novels, so I used the titles “Still Life” to signal that the chapter was a portrait rather that a plot driven section. I liked repeating some of the beginnings of the titles, such as “What I Learned About Love,” to show how my concepts evolved over time and to create a sense of movement.

Andrea
You have mentioned a few times that your focus in this project was really to show your readers how children understand the world. You definitely convey a child’s viewpoint, yet I felt you also were able to provide adult reflection and perspective on an event. Could you share some techniques or ways of writing that you used to provide the reader with the adult/child dual perspective?

Tarn
Dual point of view.  I think finding a voice for a child’s point of view, which still includes an adult sensibility, is tricky. Although early readers wanted more reflection on how the experience of having hippy parents had shaped me as an adult, that didn’t feel the right approach for this book, for a number of reasons.  1.  I didn’t feel I could honestly sort out how I had been shaped by those early experiences vs. some of the crazy events afterwards.  2. I couldn’t think of a conclusion that wouldn’t be an unfair reduction, a false simplification of the complex forces that shape all of us.  3. But even more, I thought the energy in this book was in how it captured the experience of childhood, in a way I hoped was universal.  I wanted that to be the focus.

So, I ended up cutting many sections of adult reflection. Even toward the end of revising, I kept paring language or word choice that strayed too far from the child—broke the feeling of being in a child’s world or introduced too many questions. But I still wanted to provide the reader some guidance in making sense of the memories, illuminating patterns and meaning.  So I felt I had to keep some lines and often introduced them at the end of the section. Maybe I was influenced by Walden. When I read it in college, I was obsessed with the way Thoreau would open a passage with literal description, usually of the natural world, and then move to something metaphysical or philosophical at the end.

I originally did not include the adult chapters at the end of the book, but enough people complained that they wanted to know what happened to us all as adults, I began the very difficult work of providing some of that resolution without breaking the magic of the childhood experience, which I wanted to sit at the center, and without introducing too many questions which would just complicate the story. My mother suffered from some mental health issues, which made our later years quite chaotic, but since this story focuses on my relationship with Texada and my father, I didn’t want to introduce that new, and sad, story at the very end.

Andrea
How does point of view differ from the idea of voice in a story?

Tarn
You notice that I said I write in a child’s point of view, not in a child’s voice. If I really wrote in the literal language of a five-year-old child, I would not be able to accurately capture the rich interior world of that same child—for which she does not have language.  Again, I think House on Mango Street is an inspiring model for language that captures a child’s reality—simple and poetic and with a child’s logic and eye for detail.  I just opened the book randomly and found this: “Rosa Vargas’ kids are too many and too much. It’s not her fault, you know, except she is their mother and only one against so many . . . The kids bend trees and bounce between cars and dangle upside down from knees and almost break like fancy museum vases you can’t replace.  They think it’s funny.  They are without respect for all things living, including themselves.” I love that balance of a child’s world with a wee bit of adult wisdom thrown in! 

Andrea
Thinking more about language, several of your passages in The Slow Farm combine lyricism with an emotional honesty that is very powerful. I’m thinking of passages like “I’d overlaid perfection on imperfection, seen perfect faces where there were none. I was anxious over this for days”; “Soon we had to let her go to her death, which had already begun before we met her”; and “And then the part of me that lived all the way to the edge of my skin, to the hairs on my arms, sucked in, leaving a fleshy layer between itself and the air.” Did you come to nonfiction writing through another genre or have you always been a memoirist? Did you ever try writing this story in a different form like fiction or poetry.

Tarn
I read a wonderful essay by Mark Doty which said, if I remember correctly, that the novelist, the journalist, and the poet write very different kinds of memoir. The novelists’ memoirs are written like novels and structured around plot; the journalists include well-researched facts and historical context and are committed to literal truth; and poets are driven by attention to language. I would definitely put my impulse in writing this memoir in the third category. I wouldn’t dare call myself a poet (a wanna-be-someday poet, maybe).  But I definitely feel my impulse was lyrical.  That is, at first I was driven by the desire to capture a feeling rather than tell a story. As I first recorded the memories, they seemed to exist in little self-contained, timeless bubbles. Plot seemed a little narrow and limiting to me: as soon as we reduce an experience to the traditional shape of a story, we lose some dimensions. However, I came to realize that plot is important to human consciousness and is a way to discover structure and show movement—and it does communicate a truth. So I began the rigorous and important work of figuring out how the memories fit together as a story. I also care about rhythm and sound and read all the sentences aloud many times.

When I had just graduated from college, I did write a partially fictionalized version of parts of this story. When I had a finished manuscript (ha!), I mailed it to two writer friends who told me—in the kindest, most encouraging way possible—that it was no good. After a stretch of feeling like a no-talent failure, I realized I wasn’t trusting the material. I was trying to force the events into a story shape with poetic conclusions instead of listening to what the material was trying to tell me and being willing to be surprised. I needed to be patient and give myself the time to explore and make mistakes and discoveries.

Andrea
In the preface to your book, “In the Beginning,” you tell the reader, “This is what I didn’t know then: a year and a half after we nestled into our little coastal logging camp on Texada Island, my mother would leave my father. I wouldn’t see it coming.” This proclamation “gives away” a climaxing event up front. Why did you decide to reveal this large event at the very beginning of the book?

Tarn
Over the many versions of this book, I went back and forth on where to reveal that Janet leaves Jack. When the book included passages on the nature of memory, I experimented with the opening line: “I can’t remember the day my mother left my father.”  I thought the puzzle of that missing memory might compel the story, but I abandoned that. (I was probably inspired by The Liar’s Club, which is structured around a repressed memory.) Then, when I decided the story was really about my relationship with my father, I opened, as a prologue, with the chapter in which my sister and I wait for my dad in the ditch and I decide I won’t love him “in the open-hearted way of children.” In that version, because the reader doesn’t know Janet will leave Jack, I hope they have a sense of my stunned surprise when she does. But I never felt fully comfortable with the ditch story as an opening chapter: I didn’t think the reader had enough context, and the story seemed sad and a little dull. So then I reverted to opening with my family arriving on Texada. But I didn’t think the story had enough tension, so I added the opening chapter “In the Beginning” and the revelation that my mother will leave. Since we know the Eden will end, that introduces tension into the sweet opening memories: the reader becomes active, searching for clues for what went wrong. Since I have also been searching for clues while I have been writing, the reader gets to go on the journey with me, and details, that otherwise might be forgotten, feel more weighty.

Andrea
As reader, I felt myself searching for clues right from the very beginning of the book. Because I knew that Janet would leave Jack my anticipation for that event didn’t drive the story; rather, the questions of why and how it happened drove the story for me. I actually think a touchstone of nonfiction is that often it is more about this type of journey, the inquiry, the meditation on an event or time period, more than an actual event itself.

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This brings us to the end of our second week with Tarn. Next week we post the third part of the interview in which Tarn shares how she approaches writing about family members, gives us her thoughts and advice on publication, and explains how she makes time for writing in her busy life as a teacher.

To learn more about Tarn and how to order The Slow Farm, visit her website.