"Memoir as Bewilderment," or "I Hate That F**king Object!"

My five day workshop at the Omega Institute, "Memoir as Bewilderment," led by Nick Flynn, ended yesterday. It was on the whole a good experience, one I would consider repeating for its content (although probably ultimately not -- certain things in my feelings about men were triggered that I would choose not to reexperience, and I may not be going to more memoir workshops soon, as I explain below.). I definitely expect to come to Omega again in the future, and I wish I lived closer so I could go there more easily, although I constantly vibrated between loving it there and thinking oh my god some of this stuff is so totally weird. Ours was one of several workshops on campus; the others were a retreat for male veterans, and the largest was a training in past-life regression with someone named Brian Weiss who is apparently a huge guy in that field. Yikes. Pema Chödrön arrived to lead a weekend meditation retreat the day ours ended.

Front lawn of the Omega Institute

It was a generative workshop, designed to help us get beneath the surface of our story and in touch with our subconscious, unseen connections, etc. That is clearly very much how Nick composes (he talked about his process a fair bit, which was very interesting, and his works show it). In the first days we did lots of prompted writing, typically seven minutes of writing after sort of spiritual movement exercises led by JoJo Keane who was an attender (and the wife of a musician Nick collaborates with) and seven minutes of meditation. The prompts involved things like pulling a resonant sentence about writing we had brought in to start with, a sentence out of some material Nick randomly gave us (like a page from a 1981 encyclopedia on parapsychology, or a science article -- we each had to bring in one page of a science article we found bewildering/intriguing) and then having to write our way from the first sentence to the last. A lot of exercises involved responding to/interacting with a black and white mysterious postcard image we had been randomly assigned.

At any rate, for three days we generated material with these prompts designed to push us beyond what we might think, and then on the fourth day we had to mark off all the passages in our writing that felt "alive"; cut it out and sort it into categories; then figure out how to experiment with and sequence our cut up passages until they began to form a sequential piece, eventually adding in some "connective tissue" sentences or other writing as needed. At the end we had a very rough version of a piece, which we have been instructed to keep working on the for the next week (but he wants us to keep working on the white paper we finally were allowed to tape our cut passages to, working in longhand, before we transcribe them onto a computer -- alas, my water bottle leaked onto my pages as I was leaving and they're all ripply, so I may transcribe a little sooner!).

The cabin our workshop was mostly held in is the building to the left. This is across the large field at the center of the campus; there are many more buildings than appear here.

One of the movement exercises involved finding a spot in the room that represented the location we were born in, and then we had to move around the room towards a spot that represented a place in our adult life we were writing about. In that place, we had to find an object in our mind and bring it back to the present with us. We had to give it to a partner to carry and they gave us theirs. Then all of this had to make it into our writing. 

Well. The problem was that the spot I had gone to was Promontory Point, sticking into Lake Michigan off Hyde Park in Chicago. So other people were in meaningful houses or something and were able to pick up resonant objects out of their lives, or ones related to their families. But I was outdoors in a public place. What was I going to find, a discarded sandwich wrapper? A stick? So I had to very quickly invent an imaginary object to pick up. I imagined a gold heart pendant someone had left behind on the concrete blocks that lead down to the water, where I used to sit and sometimes to swim from when I felt daring. Okay, whatever.

I stayed in one of these dorms. They were up quite a hill!

The problem was that then for numerous exercises we had to keep writing and writing about that object in various ways. I had already been struggling that what I was trying to write about was more emotion than concrete memory -- more evocative than a story. I was noticing that I gravitate towards the lyric and symbolic, what Nick called the "sublime," and not to the concrete, what we called the "grounded," the world of image. And here I was with an unreal, symbolic, painfully allegorical object, that I had no grounded story about. Of course I knew that the heart was my heart, lost and hopefully found, but it seemed so corny, not the basis for good writing. Promontory Point was already more of an evocative, symbolic location to start with; I'm writing about Lake Michigan because of how it embodies feelings from that era of my life, not because anything much happened on the shore of it. It was just what I saw, what I looked out on when I wanted to look at space and nature. And even the postcard image I was randomly given seemed allegorical and overdetermined with relation to my core emotional issues. I was so frustrated and pissed. In a time of feedback after several of these exercises I burst out "I hate my fucking object!" and of course a number of the other students later told me they loved that honesty. 

Omega Institute garden entrance. Yes, those are Buddha heads.

What is pretty cool is that shortly after that -- and after a brief conversation with the partner I'd exchanged objects with earlier -- I had a kind of breakthrough. She said something that made me realize that hating the object might be all right, might be part of the point. I started to rewrite my last exercise while the rest of the group was talking about a passage by James Agee -- writing my way into my rejection of the heart. Over the rest of the afternoon, I began to realize what my week's writing was actually about, beyond the memories of loss that were my subject. I realized that my compulsion towards the sublime was part of the point. And then it hit me that a gold heart necklace was classically a keepsake, a sentimental object, and the meaning of keepsakes in the sentimental tradition, in nineteenth-century women's writing and culture, just roared into focus -- and I saw how that was immediately and profoundly related to the part of my life I was writing about. I had been separated from the person who meant everything to me, and I had longed for a keepsake, but hadn't had one -- or rather, I had been given one, but it was a book, not an object (and what book I was given was relevant to all of the meanings too).

Group photo on the last morning.

The tentative title for my draft piece is "The Keepsake." Go figure. It's about the time of grief in my twenties after the separation from a mother figure I could not get over. It's about looking at Lake Michigan then, or remembering it now. It's about the abstraction of water-gazing, and through that about Moby-Dick. It's about the gold heart and the keepsake tradition as classically embodied in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Topsy's grief over Eva's death. It's about the professor of the class I was a TA for in grad school who praised Melville and disparaged Stowe's sentimentality. It's about lyricism and the sickness of the sublime. It's about queer temporality and being stuck in the past. It's about a postcard photo image of a boy (whom I made into a girl) sitting alone in a chair in a poor house, with a life-size advertising cutout of a mother holding a baby on the wall, which I imagined as being in a house down by Gary, also looking out on the lake. It's about loss and maybe even the Buddhist teaching of the universality of suffering. 

Part of the entrance to the Sanctuary (meditation room). The inside was so beautiful but I never got there when it was empty and we weren't supposed to take pictures of other people without permission.

Here's what I realized by the end, though, and also had affirmed for me by one of the participants who read the short complete piece I wrote out of the ruins of the main Mary Dyer material: I don't think I'm a memoir writer at all, although yes, I want to write about parts of my life and experience. But I don't, at this point anyway, want to tell stories of my past and people I knew; I have a lousy memory for detail. What I am trying to get at is inner experience, the truth of feelings, the patterns of meaning. And the writing has to be beautiful and lyrical or I'm just not interested; my gift is beauty, not storytelling. My form in prose is that new, hard-to-pin-down genre that I am just trying to get a handle on, the lyric essay. In which you can do pretty much anything. And in which fragmentation is almost part of the norm. 

Well, stay tuned for more. There's a lyric essay workshop in Iowa City in July and I'm going to sign up. And meanwhile I have a lot of work ahead on "The Keepsake."

From Memoir to Lyric

As I have been sharing in previous blog posts, I have started writing poetry again within the past two months. It feels fairly accurate if over-dramatic to say that poetry has been pouring out of me. And while it's hard to judge one's own work I think it's good -- or at least not bad, even if it probably needs more revision than I am aware of without workshopping.

Most immediately crafting poems feel absolutely wonderful, like better-than-anything-else-I-can-think-of wonderful, and it makes me amazed that I lost or gave it up for so long. The satisfactions of academic writing have been only the palest echo of this pleasure.

But what is happening is also confounding in ways: I wanted to be writing creative nonfiction, which lots of people read now, not poetry, which mostly only other poetry types read, and my desire has truly been to communicate about my life and perceptions to a potentially wider audience. I don't want to give up one overly limited readership (people who actually read literary scholarship) only to tie myself to another. And I wanted to be writing something solid, a book.

I haven't given up writing prose -- I am actively working on creating some shorter pieces out of what I've been drafting -- but I am also trying to attend to my authentic creative impulses, since that was the whole point in the first place. I struggle with some frustration over my writing plan having derailed, but then try to accept that a plan is one thing but what I am really engaged in is a deep journey, something that cannot be mapped in advance. My therapist keeps telling me that, and I hang on to it.

The two forms aren't separate, of course. Leaving aside any abstract literary reflections on their relationship (I'm sure they're out there, but I haven't looked for them so far), here are some thoughts I've been having recently:

• Working on the memoir/Mary Dyer project, I wrote my way into regaining a sense of my voice, and that voice gravitates towards poetry. And I recognize that the passages in the project where I was writing most lyrically felt the most alive to me. I write so much out of rhythm and sound, always. The parts that were more narrative/expository always felt a bit heavy and dull.

• Working on the project, I wrote deeply into key emotional areas of my past. I wrote the images that resonate for me. Some how that woke me up, reconnected me to my authentic self. And that self was a serious poet once, and seems to be announcing that she wants to be one again. I feel like I need to listen to her. And none of the writing I did is wasted: it just might turn into something else. 

• Many of my poems (now and earlier in my life) have an element of memoir -- they are about my past, as intertwined with the present. I don't consciously want to write autobiographical or confessional poetry (although, admittedly, I read it avidly from others), but I am also not especially drawn to poetry that is too abstract, divorced from recognizable lived experience -- just as, I realize, I am also now choosing to reject the disembodied quality of literary/cultural/gender theory. So I am still doing memoir, I see, just in a different way. 

• My relation to memory lends itself better to poetry than memoir: what stays with me are emotions, shards of scenes, resonant images, things that can be put together and built out through imagination in a lyric way. "These fragments have I shored against my ruins." I do not tend to remember larger scenes (what happened sequentially, who said what, what the setting was fully like, etc.), and I feel numb and blocked at the idea of recreating them imaginatively. When I read normal memoir and step back to think about the craft of it, the novelistic detail writers are able to recall or fabricate so that it sounds recalled amazes me. For better or worse I don't have that talent. I was never going to write a traditional memoir; I knew I couldn't.

I wrote a new poem yesterday that is the most complex one that has come since I re-started this. Although it is grounded in the present and recent past (a short visit to the Adirondacks a few weeks ago, echoing one last summer), it dives back into past memories I wrote about as part of the project this winter while I was in Mexico, excavating my emotional/relational life. With the associative freedom of lyric, I pulled in other things as well -- past and present juxtaposed in the historical/political realm. (My Dyer project was very much about that too.) I'm putting it in below.

Here is one image (not mine) of Fort Crown Point, the immediate setting of the poem below. The historic site is a much more expansive area with more structures than this limited view suggests. It is not far from Fort Ticonderoga, but in some ways more compelling because so untouched. Very Tintern Abbey -- I felt like I was in Britain or Europe more than in New York.

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[poem taken down during submission for publication]

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And one more photo, from the actual experience: my Cocoa (DC Chocolatedrop) and her famous daddy Cracker (Flupascrackerbox) in 2017.