Christine Hemp offers us her thinking about how we may find our prose and poetry’s true subjects followed by a writing exercise for practice and two sample poems. [This article and exercise were originally published in Now Write! Nonfiction: Memoir, Journalism and Creative Nonfiction Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers, from Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, edited by Sherry Ellis. Reprinted here by permission of the author.]

Writing Your Way in the Back Door: The Painting as Entry
by Christine Hemp

William Carlos William’s dictum about things being the life of poetry holds true in creative nonfiction as well. The essay teeming with “stuff” is much more memorable than one that floats in abstraction. A piece about love doesn’t end up in our cells unless it is grounded in the softness of your lover’s neck as it disappears into the collar of his sweatshirt. Or what about the scab you picked while you were crying  on the phone to the man you knew would leave you by spring? Just like the strong poem, the strong piece of prose is rife with metaphorical power  — from  your mother’s out-of-tune piano to the orphan sock that keeps showing up in your tangled underwear drawer. When we turn to things, the truth comes at us through the back door, and we are surprised by ideas and emotions we didn’t know we possessed.

To take it a step further, disparate things  — unlikely juxtapositions  — help us to write our wayour way into new and unexpected “aha” moments. For example, in her essay called “Seeing,” Annie Dillard sits on the bank of Tinker Creek watching a tremor near a muskrat burrow, and then she sees a ripple in the water that suggests an underwater creature. We follow her gaze, but in the middle of her nature reverie, she introduces something else:

The ripples continued to fan upstream with a steady, powerful thrust. Night was knitting over my face an eyeless mask, and I still sat transfixed. A distant airplane, a delta wing out of a nightmare, made a gliding shadow on the creek’s bottom that looked like a stingray cruising upstream. At once a black fin slit the pink cloud on the water, shearing it in two.

The jet’s shadow is the last thing we’d expect in a meditative piece about what it means to see, but it pushes the essay toward another level of understanding, a different perception of creature in nature. It’s like a black diagonal slash through an otherwise pastoral landscape painting. These disparate things thump against one anther, so that a third and unforeseen insight reveals itself in the process.

One of the assignments my nonfiction students love best involves art. I take them to the art museum and ask them to choose one painting in the collection that they are attracted to, but also makes them feel uncomfortable. We sit and look at our respective paintings for ten minutes or so. Then we write. For fifteen minutes  — nonstop. Not as an exercise in art criticism, but as a kind of “climbing in” to the painting  — exploring its colors, its objects, its creator, anything that comes to mind. These are often the shiniest essays of the week, and I believe it is because the disparate “thins” in the paintings  — the color orange, a dead cow in a tree, a man in a blue coat  — smack against one another.

When we concentrate on the thing, rather than the mere emotion or idea, we enter through the back door, stumbling into the fecund pantry rather than the tidy, acceptable ideas of the front foyer. In fact, not only is the writing stronger, we also discover that what poet Richard Hugo calls the “triggering subject” is rarely the true subject. The things — the shadow of the plan on Tinker Creek, the angled bar, the blue horse — lead us into a larger meditation. They help us write our way into the true subject, something much more compelling than we could have predicted.

Exercise
Embark on a private field trip to your local art museum, or go on-line to t he Museum of Modern Art  — or the Louvre — and choose an unfamiliar painting that makes you mildly uncomfortable. Look at it — really look at it — for ten minutes without doing anything else. Then write for fifteen minutes without stopping. Be sure to include the painter’s name, the date, the title of the painting, and the medium. “Richard Diebenkorn,” “1975,” and “oil on canvas” can prove invaluable, and they place the work in space and time. Discuss the scene, the colors, the textures, the shapes, the composition, and maybe even speculate about the painter, letting your own associative synapses go wild.

Take a break. Then pull a sentence of your freewrite that includes a specific element of the painting: a triangle, a shade of green, or a nude figure, and start there. Now compose an essay that tangles with the notion of relationship  — with a house, a person, a tree, a city, an animal, an idea. Use the components of the painting to illuminate our won arguments with yourself and your exploration of this relationship. See if you can fasten several disparate things together in your piece of create an adhesive for a larger epiphany. Allow the work to surprise you, as if anew you had walked in your own back door.

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Here are two poems by Christine Hemp. You will recognize her trust in “things” and  “disparate” images.

SURRENDER

Just like that truck on the exit ramp, I see
the S-curve too late and my load inside begins
to shift: A slumber party of fresh pears falling
over themselves in the dark, their ambrosial scent
the first hint of ruin. It’s not the pedal
but momentum that pitches me up and over
the guardrail. The bay below rises like a Baptism.
All those pears in concert roll forward and the whole
rig aches between the fruit’s amber blushing
and the whitecaps chanting. Who’s to say
what timeless words are spoken in that instant
between “Yes!” and “Oh no”? Perched in such
a silent space an ocean opens up.  I plunge
into the drink, pear juice dripping into salt.

(Published in Taos Journal of Poetry and Art )

And here is the title poem from her collection That Fall:

THAT FALL

That fall when the leaves blazed a sinful yellow,
I climbed the ladder to the roof.  I pulled

my hammer from my belt, lay the two-by-fours flat
across the rafters, pounded sixteen-penny nails

into purlins one by one.  Hammering has a rhythm
if you get it right, holding both the wood

and nails in one hand – swinging the hammer
with the other.  There’s something clean and true

about a square strike, to watch the shank
sink into fragrant fir.  And from that height

I saw a bigger plan, one in which I measured
up, made my mark. Something built to last.

When Rob Davies fell from the gable end, we heard
the tool belt hit the ground with a chink-thud.

Then silence.  He never had seemed happy
on the scaffold or even with the saw. Some days he’d linger

at the bottom of the ladder, as if debating whether to make
a run for it and drive away.  He fell because he had to.

I leaned over the edge of the plate and looked below.
Rob’s chisel and his chalk-line lay scattered by his hip.

Something sticky and unholy made me glad
it was he and not I crumpled there for us to see.  His fear

repelled the other guys and, like dogs who shun
the weakest, they’d given him no reprieve.  The pity

I felt for Rob was diluted by disgust.  After all, I was
a girl and could no more fall than shake the ladder

when the foreman shinnied up.  I needed to be
one of the guys and had to show them daily

I could do the work.  Though I’d never taunted Rob,
I never came to his defense.  When they bundled him away

I hung on to what I’d built, swore I’d never fall,
thinking a New England barn would make me good

and strong. Like dovetail joints that disappear.
I prayed my ladder would extend beyond Rob’s failure

and my own.  The boys just shook their heads, got back
to work.   Soon the sound of a skill-saw screaming.

You can see more of Christine Hemp’s poems excerpted from That Fall here.