Monday morning

Ana Maria’s craft talk

Ana Maria talked to us about writing scenes in memoirs that the writer didn’t experience. She cited her own book, which is about her father’s role in the civil rights movement, as well as two other memoirs, one about the author’s actual father and spiritual father dying at the same time and the author having to fly back and forth to visit them both; and one about the author’s father who was in the Vietnam War. (No titles, sorry—I didn’t memorize them.) She says that one still has to put oneself in the memoir, that a memoir is about you, not whoever else is in it. Our first writing exercise: Write a scene about a person you highly respect, someone you consider an elder, doing something very ordinary. Try to convey that respect without putting yourself in the scene. My scenes eventually turned out highly personal for the person I chose, so I won’t repost them. Ana Maria went on to talk about how the first sentence of her book talked about the weather and she didn’t know what the weather was, so she called up a friend who actually was there and asked, and he said, “Honey, it’s Florida.” She got us to brainstorm other ways to handle the weather:

Look up old newspapers

Google it

Leave it out

Make it up—and in Florida, she argued that it’s telling a ‘greater truth’ to make it sunny because it’s sunny most days. Even though it might not have been sunny that particular day, it’s telling a truth about the area itself and its tendency. On that note, when you’re getting down to the tiny details, how do you let your readers know whether it’s something you actually know or something you’re making up, and if the former, how you know it?

One of her authors handled this by placing a note at the beginning of the memoir to explain that she got her information from taped interviews and say that minor characters’ names were changed. Another way is to cite sources, MLA-style, but that can be clunky. A third way is to dramatize the moment in which you, the researcher, discovered the piece of information. This is also a way to put yourself back in the memoir. Ana Maria described finding out about when her father and his friends entered a mixed courtroom, and worked out from the subtle mentions that the courtroom would have been segregated in the past. Writing exercise: Return to the person in first exercise, and dramatize the way a story about them was told to you. If you don’t know the details, you can place phrases like ‘I can imagine’ ‘might have’ ‘probably’ in your paragraph to let your reader know you’re imagining. Writing exercise: Return to your person and write a scene in their life you can’t have been present for, using these phrases to mark places where you’re filling in the details from your own imagination. Finally, you can take on the mantle of the creative writer. Writing exercise: Return to your person and write a scene in their life you can’t have been present for, using no phrases to mark where you fill in details.

“Understanding is thick imagining.” ~someone Ana Maria quoted

Course Credit meeting

On the topic of the 200-word responses to craft talks, lectures, readings, and roundtables, we’re to write what interested us, struck us, troubled us, what we took away from it. Our final paper is going to be focused on how our novel interacted with outside stimuli such as our touchstone books and our workshops. To use one of my favorite made-up words, how we conversated our novel with all of these things. (I use it to mean ‘forced into conversation’ when using the metaphorical sense of conversation.) We’re not yet sure how Patricia’s class is going to do the packet responses and revised submission, but we’re getting assignments and we’re going to be able to respond to those, so we’ll work it out as we go along. At any rate, next time I make changes to QQQ, I’ll save it as a new document so I have an ‘original.’