Recently in class Category

When my husband brought the Sunday New York Times home this weekend, I was so excited to see a piece from one of my favorite teachers and mentors in its pages.

"Beach Blanket Baja," by Helena María Viramontes, begins by delineating her family's class and ethnic position:

IN our East Los Angeles working-class neighborhoods of the ’50s and ’60s, no one thought of summer vacations or sleep-away camps as a possibility. . . .  My parents grew up in one of the largest and oldest Mexican-American communities in the nation. Immigrant belief prevailed, despite the fact that both Mom and Dad were born in the United States. We were poor, but it was a poverty that we were unaware of since everyone around us was the same.

Into this mix comes the "delirium" of a childhood vacation:

. . . [I]n 1964, when I was 10, my father announced that we were all to spend a weekend in Ensenada, Mexico, with José and his family.

My mother was, at first, skeptical: It would be no easy feat to transport a total of 16 people, the majority of them children, but Tío José had worked out a plan. He would drive his Pontiac, accompanied by his wife, Tía Lola, and his children. My father would drive Joe Junior’s clunky Chevy, and my oldest brother, Gil, would be in charge of driving our father’s white Ford pickup.

Gas and food? Everything was much cheaper across the border. Lodging? Camping under the stars!

Funny, frank, and unflinching about the economic woes she sees south of the border, the piece finally becomes a story about the nerve-wracking difficulties, the "anxieties" of "monstrous proportions," even for documented U.S. citizens, of crossing the literal border from Mexico back to the United States--an important thing to make vivid for readers across the country now that, as the Pew Research Center reports, "Just over half of all Hispanic adults in the U.S. worry that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported," according to a nationwide survey of Latinos, and "Nearly two-thirds say the failure of Congress to enact an immigration reform bill has made life more difficult for all Latinos."

Thanks, Helena, for bringing it all to life.

I just read the opening whirlwind manifesto on the blog Streetheart:  Ethics of Graffiti.  The writing's good, and the anonymous author really throws down:

The new McDonalds in your city, the one running on factory farms that keep animals drugged in minuscule cages for their entire lives--were you asked if they could decorate your skyline with their golden arches? And Coca-Cola--the same Coca-Cola that has employed paramilitary groups to murder and torture Colombian workers to break up their union--did they ask you before taking up a patch of your commute bigger than your front yard with one of their advertisements?

He/she's not pulling any punches; see for yourself.  I'm curious to see what comes next.

The practice of art isn't to make a living.  It's to make your soul grow.
                                                 ~Kurt Vonnegut

I was excited to find out recently that a panel on memoir organized by UNL grad students Madeline Wiseman and Kelly Gray Carlisle has been accepted for next year's AWP conference in Chicago.  Madeline, Kelly, Sue Silverman, Lucy Ferriss, Karen McElmurray, and I will be having a conversation about memoir, truth, lies, and the workings of memory.

Here's the description Kelly and Madeline wrote:

Czeslaw Milosz said, “It is possible that there is no other memory than the memory of wounds.” Our panel investigates the role of factual accuracy in memoir, why memoirists invent to improve the facts, and the difficulty in telling traumatic memory. What if research reveals conflicting truths? What is the cost of invention to the story? How do the psychological and physiological workings of memory, the act of writing, and the influence of the world outside the writer hinder or enrich the truth?

But what's on my mind right now is, How can a professor of memoir encourage student writers to be sincere and honest when wildly successful examples of cynical, dishonest memoir writers are flourishing? 

Yesterday, I read Walter Kirn's evisceration of James Frey's new novel in the New York Times Book Review;  you'll remember Frey as the falsifying memoirist upbraided by Oprah on national TV.  Regarding his new novel, Frey told one journalist, "“I know I’m going to be slaughtered" by the critics (and Kirn didn't pull any punches), "but so be it.  I’m much more concerned with what the people who spend their money on my book think of it, rather than the people in the ivory towers of the intelligentsia.”

And that really gets at the heart of the matter.  Spinning the concept of honesty, of fidelity to facts, as a luxury of the academic elite, Frey spun his life into a tale of sensationalism and played a public hungry for gore.  He cares about the people who spend money on him, and the payoff has been huge.  Raised wealthy, Frey now owns not only a 3-bedroom condo in Soho, but a one-bedroom ($985,000) apartment next to it, along with a beach house in Amagansett.  His new novel was purchased by HarperCollins for an estimated $1.5 million. 

Frey told Vanity Fair about being affirmed by Norman Mailer.  The two self-styled bad boys
 

talked about memoirs, a genre, Mailer said, that was by definition corrupt: “That’s why a writer writes his memoir, to tell a lie and create an ideal self. Everything I’ve ever written is memoir, you know, is an inflated vision of the ideal Platonic self.”

Um.  Or not.  To me, it sounds like Norman Mailer's definition is by definition corrupt.

But how to encourage students to pursue genuine, honest, even un-sexy questions in their memoir writing, when the alternative is so lucrative?  Why grow your soul, in Vonnegut's words, when you can tour like a rock star?

"Where any view of Money exists," wrote the poet William Blake, "Art cannot be carried on, but War only." 

Any view.  So if you're a writer, stop thinking about the monetary payoff.  The true payoff comes in doing the work, and what you learn there. 

You can write for money, too.  Sure.  We all have to pay the bills.  Just don't lie to yourself (or the world) about which master you're serving when you pick up your pen.

The cover story of today's New York Times Book Review is a piece by Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate, on Kathryn Harrison's new nonfiction book, While They Slept.  He examines the paradoxical way in which literature asserts the unspeakable-ness of traumatic experience while still speaking it:

The violations that destroy human lives, or maim them, seem to demand telling.  Possibly we seek such stories as ways to understand our smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs. . . .  Raped, her tongue torn out, Philomela becomes the nightingale, singing the perpetrator's guilt.

But who is the "we" in Pinsky's second sentence?  "Possibly we seek such stories as ways to understand our smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs."  This assumed in-group troubles me, for many of us have been raped.  Or experienced incest, or been witnesses to killings (examples he goes on to mention).  Or, pressed by our nations into service as warriors, we have been the perpetrators of legally sanctioned murder.  Or we've grown up in the homes of such people, afflicted by the leftover traumas they didn't know how to cure.  Many of us would love to have suffered only the "smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs" of Pinsky's second sentence.

Pinsky quotes the chorus, speaking to Oedipus:

What madness came upon you, what daemon
Leaped on your life with heavier
Punishment than a mortal man can bear?
No: I cannot even
Look at you, poor ruined one.
And I would speak, question, ponder,
If I were able. No.
You make me shudder.

"I cannot even / Look at you, poor ruined one."

How do survivors of trauma cope with this invisibility--with knowing that they make the un-traumatized "shudder"?  How do they survive, not only the initial trauma, not only its aftereffects (which can last decades), but also the knowledge that they offend the eye and ear of the healthy civilian, that their unspeakable pain has rendered them unsightly? 

Though he gives a positive review to Harrison's book (the true story of brutally abusive, fundamentalist parents whose actions, ignored by the surrounding society, led to their murder by their son), Pinsky's attitude reinscribes the horror with which "normal" people often greet those who've traumatized.  The surviving daughter,

[a]t the age of 6 or 7, in an act of imagination that foreshadowed her achievement of surviving . . . created families of ghosts she would speak with, in the trees near where she lived.  [Author] Harrison suggests that these ghosts--creatures who are dead, yet persist--were a way for the child to mourn for herself, or for the lost selves and family that might have existed.

Different ghosts arise in an interview with Edward Tick, who counsels returning veterans, in the current issue of The Sun, "Like Wandering Ghosts:  How the U.S. Fails Its Returning Soldiers."   His attitude toward the traumatized is a more compassionate one:

Kupfer: Though you treat ptsd, you’ve said that it is not a mental illness. Why do you believe this?

Tick: We pathologize everything in this culture. We think anything that ails us must be a medical condition that can be treated. Veterans are angry or sad because they have been through horrors, but we say it’s got to be a pathology. This is exacerbated by a profound alienation between our warrior class and our civilian class, which have almost nothing to do with one another. We don’t even think we have a warrior class, and we don’t teach our service people to think of themselves as warriors, even though societies throughout history have almost all had warrior classes and reciprocal relationships between warriors and civilians. Soldiers have a responsibility to defend their country, and it is our responsibility as citizens to heal those who have put their lives on the line for us, even if they fought a war for the wrong reasons or for lies. And we’re not doing that.

Using PTSD as an inadequate but the best currently available term, Tick sees it as "an identity disorder and soul wound that has its source in moral trauma. It is also a social disorder arising from the broken relationship between our society and its veterans." 

If for "veterans," you read also "battered women," "torture victims," "abused children," "rape victims," and so on, then you'll have a sense of how potentially transformative Tick's view could be for our world, in which so many people are now traumatized by war, natural disasters, and violence. 

They need to be listened to and healed, not ignored, not invisible-ized, not disappeared. 

Tick writes:

I am still protesting the Vietnam War, and all war. There are two things we have to do as a culture to end war: One is to take full responsibility for our wounded. It’s not enough just to “bring the boys home,” because they aren’t boys anymore, and getting them home physically does not do it. We need to help them heal and help shoulder their burden. The other thing we need to do is take responsibility for the damage we have done to other countries and their people. I bring veterans to Vietnam to heal not only them but also the Vietnamese. Americans do not realize the monstrous damage we do with technological warfare. I want to bring that reality back home and educate Americans about civilian suffering in war.

Read the whole interview with Tick here. 

Malcolm X would have have turned 83 yesterday.  Melissa Harris-Lacewell writes at The Root:

. . . Malcolm's struggle to make his own authentic, political contribution reminds us that ideals are more important than personalities. Progressive political movements that engender lasting change are always bigger than the flawed human beings who lead them. . . .  He criticized the powerful rather than the powerless.  He pointed to the pathologies of the privileged instead of the failings of the oppressed. His own story of redemption was emblematic of the possibilities available to even the most disempowered, but when he pointed to solutions, they were consistently collective.

To read the rest of Harris-Lacewell's essay, go here, and many thanks to Daniel Zeno, activist and law student at University of Iowa (and my lovely former student at Wabash) for the link.

To read Veronica Chambers' new essay on the sexual wound, suffering, and shame of fistula--and how to help--go here, and go here for the New York Times story that first broke my heart about this issue.

And for my women friends who write and doubt themselves--and especially all my women writing students, who work so hard and are so talented--go here to Kore Press's blog while Gisela Telis's essay is still headlining.  You deserve to flourish with courage, confidence, and boldness.  With thanks to Tayari for the link.

Gentle Reader, there's an auction happening.  Novelist Tayari Jones, moved by the plight of the Dunbar Village gang rape survivors, decided to raise funds for the woman and her son by auctioning off such delectables as manuscript critiques, signed first editions by writers such as George Saunders and Pulitzer winner Natasha Trethewey, an author-photo session with a wonderful photographer, and other lovely perks donated by her circle of literary friends and acquaintances.

If you have a story, some poetry, a personal essay, or even an entire novel sitting in a drawer, you can get personal feedback from one of the terrific authors Tayari has lined up.  They're all gentle and respectful, so no worries about getting your hard work savaged.  I'm one of the donors, too, so if you've written a personal essay and want my feedback on the cheap--I'll provide line editing and overall comments--check it out.

The bidding started at 99 cents for many of the items, so it's a regular K-mart blue-light special right now.  The auction ends tomorrow (Sunday), so if you're interested, check it out now!  Get cool stuff and support a great cause.

Nation, I have to confide:  My husband and I were driving in the car when a radio news show sound-byted the words of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's pastor.  Prepared by the appalled newscaster's build-up for something truly horrific, we both just sort of looked at each other, like, "Yeah, so?"

But then it became a national issue, and it sparked Obama's thoughtful speech, and  I kind of forgot about my initially underwhelmed response.  So how grateful I was today to be reminded of it by Gary Kamiya in his Salon article, "Rev. Jeremiah Wright Isn't the Problem."  Kamiya first writes:

The great shock so many people claim to be feeling over Wright's sermons is preposterous. Anyone who is surprised and horrified that some black people feel anger at white people, and America, is living in a racial never-never land. Wright has called the U.S. "the United States of White America," talks about the "oppression" of black people and says, "White America got their wake-up call after 9/11." Gosh, who could have dreamed that angry racial grievances and left-wing political views are sometimes expressed in black churches?

But then he goes on to the meat of his argument: 

Wright isn't the problem.  Stupid patriotism is the problem. . . .  Today, after five years of a catastrophic war driven by patriotic vengeance, it's still not acceptable to disturb the myth of eternal American innocence.

Moving into his main points, he holds accountable not patriotism itself (though my post-nationalist friends might take issue w/that), but stupid patriotism:  knee-jerk, blind, rhetorical hails to the chief, right or wrong.  Is it more important to wear a flag pin or to value the lives of others (national others in Iraq, class others in our own military) as we do our own?  The essay is short, nicely put together, and well worth a quick read; the Susan Sontag quotation alone is worth the price of admission.

Spring has already sprung on the beautiful campus of Vanderbilt University, where the symposium "Beyond Our Beginnings:  Women Writers from Working and Lower Class Backgrounds" took place last week.  All the magnolias were blossoming, and everything's green.

Meeting Dorothy Allison and serving on a panel with her was a personal highlight for me, as a long-time admirer, but I have to say that hanging out with the lovely Karen McElmurray, the inimitably hilarious Heather Sellers (who has a great blog, by the way), and our fabulous host Lorraine López for the rest of the week turned out to be great fun.  We ate at great restaurants, drank lots of wine, and got to know each other better over stories of surprising things we have in common.  I learned so much from them all and really had a blast.  

Getting to hear Dorothy, Heather, and Karen read was wonderful.  Dorothy read my favorite section from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, the painful part about beauty (32-38) that always tears me up, and a section from her forthcoming novel.  Heather and Karen gave beautiful readings, too, and I had fun reading sections from The Truth Book, the short story "A Notion I Took," and an excerpt from my new essay "Refusing to Pass," which I'm revising for the University of Michigan collection that Lorraine is editing on the symposium's topic.  (A shout-out to Tayari Jones, who helped me revise it in its original incarnation as a conference paper for the 2007 AWP.)

Serendipitously, my old roommate from Bread Loaf, Bryn Chancellor (whom I thanked in the back of The Truth Book for being such a pal during those grueling days in the Green Mountains), is now in the MFA program at Vanderbilt, so we also got to catch up.  She has a new story in Yalobusha Review, "Wrestling Night," that's so solid.  It has all these lovely, dazzling little moments.  Congratulations, Bryn!

The knockout highlight of the symposium, for me, was the performance on the last night by spoken-word poet Minton Sparks.  Funny, touching, and savage by turns, she was a terrific performer.  (Her accompanist was pretty awesome, too--she said he played w/Dylan for seven years.)  It was a knockout performance, and Minton blew the room away.  You can check out her stuff at her website, and if you have five minutes, you can even watch a little video sampler of some of the numbers we got to see.   They're just snatches, though; you won't get the full effect, b/c the big power often comes in the turn in her last line. 

I was so excited to learn about Minton's work--she's "about brilliant," as we used to say.  I want to go back to Nashville soon to see her perform again.

Many thanks to Lorraine López for the months of planning that went into designing the symposium and her writing course on working-class women writers, and many thanks to her graduate assistants Bryn Chancellor, Meredith Gray, and Wade Ostrowski, for all the behind-the-scenes labor that made the symposium run so smoothly.  I've put conferences together before, and it is a lot of work.  These folks did a gorgeous job.

My flight leaves tomorrow at six a.m. (and I am no morning person), but I'm excited to be heading to Vanderbilt University to give a reading and serve on a cool panel on lower and working-class women writers.   (It's sort of like the anti-Margaret Seltzer symposium.) 

In honor of panelist Dorothy Allison, here's a passage from her book of essays Skin:  Talking About Sex, Class & Literature:

That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it.  I have learned with great difficulty that the vast majority of people believe that poverty is a voluntary condition.  (15)

And here's another little somethin'-somethin' from the same book:

. . . I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of the church and God.  The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.  The academy is the market--university courses in contemporary literature that never get past Faulkner, reviewers who pepper their opinions with the ideas of the great men, and editors who think something is good because it says the same thing everyone has always said.  Literature is the lie that tells the truth, that shows us human beings in pain and makes us love them, and does so in a spirit of honest revelation.  (175)

And here's a little shout-out to Firebrand Books, the folks who published Skin and a whole bunch of other great books.  Firebrand's an independent lesbian and feminist press committed to racial and ethnic diversity, and they publish some great writers.

I'm so excited to be traveling to Vanderbilt University next week to give a reading and serve on a panel with Dorothy Allison and other women writers from working-class and/or poor backgrounds (including my lovely friend Karen McElmurray, who writes beautifully about adoption as well as class). 

Dorothy Allison's work has been so important to me over the years--so deeply and profoundly encouraging--that I thought I'd dedicate a few blog posts to some of her unforgettable passages, like this one from her book of essays Skin:  Talking About Sex, Class & Literature:

I believe the secret in writing is that fiction never exceeds the reach of the writer's courage.  The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff.  I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that sweat of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.  And I know you can fake that courage when you don't think of yourself as courageous--because I have done it.  And that is not a bad thing, to fake it until you can make it.  I know that until I started pushing on my own fears, telling the stories that were hardest for me, writing about exactly the things I was most afraid of and unsure about, I wasn't writing worth a damn.  (217)

I'm so excited about meeting her.  Lorraine López, who has organized the whole thing, is editing a book titled  Beyond Our Beginnings, a collection of essays by "women writers who have grown up or lived in lower or working class homes before being vaulted by their literary gifts into the professional strata where they invariably confront feelings of guilt and unworthiness, familial betrayal and abandonment, imposture and fear of detection.  The alienation they experience often provides a unique opportunity both for identity formation and for evaluation."  I'm looking forward to reading the essays.