Out of Balance

I'm so happy to be teaching with the practical and concise Telling True Stories for the first time this semester.  It's a collection of short advice pieces from the best of the best of our working narrative journalists, including Susan Orlean, Ted Conover, Malcolm Gladwell, Alma Guillermoprieto--you get the picture.  It also includes pieces by screenwriters like Nora Ephron and essayists like Phillip Lopate.

A passage in Anne Hull's piece "Being There" caught my eye:

If I didn't write, I can't imagine what I would do.  It is all I've ever done.  Often, we are out of balance because we write.  We don't pay enough attention to our personal lives.  We are difficult to live with because we're distracted; we want to be with our story.

This resonated with me.  I, too, am so "difficult to live with" because I get into my work.  When I'm working, I don't notice people when they walk through the room (and because my mini-office is in our apartment's living room, they do walk through), and I have trouble talking when they address me.  It's like I'm being wrenched from a lovely Otherworld into some foreign land where I don't speak the language (and don't care). 

Of course, for my family members, it's a much different experience:  it's as though they're trying politely to get the attention of a catatonic, hostile stranger.  This summer, when Grey camped out in said living room for three months, he took to positioning himself in my peripheral vision and raising his hand. 

It worked.  Sigh.

Anyway, Telling True Stories is a terrific book for anyone who wants to write creative nonfiction more oriented toward world (journalism) than self (memoir)--lots of sound, sane advice.  Co-editor Wendy Call was in our workshop this summer at Macondo, and it was great to meet and talk with her, as well as to hear her read her wonderful, sad, moving reportage piece about her participation in the protests by millions of people worldwide that took place just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.