Final.

The completed “final” piece can be found here.

I’m writing this from home, and I wouldn’t mention that except to say that setting has a significant effect on who we are as writers. Stepping off the plane today I felt the place take over the piece, and my father was closer to me than ever because…Wisconsin people are different from Vermont people. And I needed to see someone on the plane lean over and help someone else’s daughter buckle in to identify with him again. I love this place.

I’m less comfortable with this unit because I think I fall into my typical essay tendencies. I want to include parentheticals to too many things, and the qualification is important because these are details of my past. And though I could learn from the writers we’ve studied—and have—it’s…difficult to get over what I’ve done for so long. I found it important to tell you in the first draft of my long piece too many details of my father’s early past. I talked about him standing up to a teacher who slapped a girl; I talked at length about two stories involving tax collecting (a brief occupation in his life), and…at the end of it, I kept the one and abandoned the other. I still couldn’t get rid of what I thought were revealing (but possibly unnecessary) glimpses of his life.

In the 100 word drabbles I felt freer. Like our five-ten minute exercises in class, I’m constantly forced to move with the flow of a piece, and not consider what sounds stupid, or what is “hooky,” or where it’s going or what it needs to mean. I usually find that at the end of the piece, when I’ve written something substantive in the beginning and can find a common thread throughout. In the same way, I feel the 100 word drabbles let me be “not me.” To some extent, that’s what I’m going for.

I’m thinking of the drabbles right now because at the airport I wrote those interspersed, italicized monologues on moleskin paper in short bursts. I read the paragraphs preceding them, or at least where I thought they would fit, and I wrote responses to them. Essentially I wrote drabbles. In the meantime I tried to trim some fat off the piece. I removed the details of myself I found extraneous (the thread or dichotomy between my father’s relationship and mine) and only alluded to things I thought were essential for the reader to be apprised of.

There were pieces I was very happy with, that I think could almost have stood as “pieces” themselves. This piece was a second-person exploration of a relationship in my past, and I liked that I made it bodily…or imagistic. There were metaphors that extended sentences, and images made of coils of strange logic and dreamlike qualities. I don’t usually write like that. My other long piece is another of the better ones. Like the piece on my father, this one was written “lucidly,” and without consideration. It began as a thought and moved to a series of thoughts and then it was a philosophy and then a retrospective on my life.

Ultimately I was disappointed with the reception of the piece because what stood out was the “rawness” of it, and I like that—it’s important for me to know that my tone is honest and the reader is pierced by shards of something in it—but I want to know that it’s technically sound and interesting. I want to know that readers would read it without being prompted to.

Creative nonfiction requires that we speak about ourselves and our experiences, and I think I write from the mind and it’s always my mind and my tone that I’m recording. I don’t love inhabiting that place all the time. I’m looking forward to fiction because it requires elements of me and it’s obviously a part of my dreamscape, but it’s also someone else’s. Creating that persona will be liberating.

One last note: There have been countless others in this class whose work has inspired me and (at times) daunted me and shamed me. I’m trying to learn from them. One thing I’d like to do is to not make things about me strictly, but…maybe to write something that isn’t like a bowel movement, where I’m evacuating years of pent-up emotion. A little distance would go a long way. I’m looking forward to shedding my need for atonement.

A Note: I would be more categorical in this, but the connection I’m using is failing, and my access to the motherblog is limited. In any case, those pieces that were written in my “writer’s notebook” are typically categorized as “outside-class” or (sometimes) “for-class.” The 100 word drabbles are outside writings, as are a couple of my longer pieces, and some fiction spread throughout. All other writing for the unit begins where the other unit left off. Also, I forgot to post this before, but the recording can be found here.