Joyce Dyer | September 2013

NOTES

Brock Clarke was a risky person to bring to Hiram College, where I work. Risky to me, at least. An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (Algonquin, 2007) was his novel that had attracted my attention—a darkly comic book that I admired, even though a wickedly funny parody of memoir and memoirists ran through it like a sulfurous stream. I was teaching a class in memoir the month he said he could visit our school, and I knew my timing couldn’t have been worse. A class full of budding memoirists, and a host who wrote memoir. Knowing that’s what awaited him, it’s surprising that Brock Clarke boarded the plane for Ohio, but he did.

I found a way to disguise my anxiety, though, a way to fool our guest writer into thinking that his parody had not unsettled me the way it had. I would do something to demonstrate how amused I was by his attacks on the genre. My husband, a book reviewer, had read the galley of Arsonist’s and then passed it on to me, with a word of caution. He had also given me a colored poster that he found tucked inside the book. On it was the text of Clarke’s most vicious page of parody, along with an illustration in the bottom right-hand corner of a small woman in a ruffled green dress with pantalettes exposed at her ankles, and a brooch at her neck, a woman who, with arms raised, was running straight toward the reader, propelled by flames of orange and yellow that were sprouting from her back like the frill of a dinosaur. (She subsequently appeared on the orange cover of the novel between the words GUIDE and TO.) I had the poster dry mounted before Clarke’s visit and then hung it between portraits of Lorrie Moore and Mark Doty that were already displayed on a wall of the room where Clarke would be meeting my class. John Sokol, an artist who lives nearby in Akron, drew the portraits of Moore and Doty exclusively out of words from their texts (a short story for Moore, a poem for Doty). Even lips and eyebrows and strands of hair are formed only from the words the writers wrote.

I couldn’t help wonder what kind of half smile or scowl John Sokol might give to Brock Clarke if he were to create a Word Portrait of him from the text on the poster. The passage records the thoughts of Sam Pulsifer, the novel’s first-person narrator, as he wanders through a bookstore and discovers the memoir section. Clarke’s bumbling narrator, who has recently been released from prison for accidentally burning down Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts (and burning up two people who were in the house at the time), is full of amazement for a genre I was pretty sure his real-life creator despised.

I moved on to the memoir section. After browsing for a while, I knew why it had to be so big: who knew there was so much truth to be told, so much advice to give, so many lessons to teach and learn? Who knew that there were so many people with so many necessary things to say about themselves? I flipped through the sexual abuse memoirs, sexual conquest memoirs, sexual inadequacy memoirs, alternative sexual memoirs. I perused travel memoirs, ghostwritten professional athlete memoirs, remorseful hedonist rock star memoirs, twelve-step memoirs, memoirs about reading (A Reading Life: Book by Book). There were five memoirs by one author, a woman who had written a memoir about her troubled relationship with her famous fiction-writer father; a memoir about her troubled relationship with her mother; a memoir about her troubled relationship with her children; a memoir about her troubled relationship with the bottle; and finally a memoir about her more loving relationship with herself. There were several memoirs about the difficulty of writing memoirs, and even a handful of how-to-write-a-memoir memoirs: A Memoirist’s Guide to Writing Your Memoir and the like. All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me—without my even having to read them—that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was.1

When Sam asks a woman in the store why she likes memoir, she answers, “It’s so useful.”2 To her, memoir is not necessarily beautiful or well-crafted or enduring. Those aren’t the words that come out of her mouth. The genre provides for her, and for her friends, practical solutions to real problems, not unlike a First Aid kit or a degree from an ad hoc university. A quick, temporary fix. The implication? Readers of memoir are just about as needy as people who write them.

All the tongue-in-cheek humor in Clarke’s book made me feel as if I didn’t have a chance of pleasing him. I certainly didn’t think of myself as the kind of memoirist he was attacking, but I was afraid that he would. I could already picture him sitting beside me in my memoir class, trying hard to prevent his little pointed tongue from poking through his cheek, right at me.

But it turned out that his aversion to memoir was not absolute. As usual, I had overreacted and planned for the worst. It was the neon-colored memoirs that received his gibes, the ones that publishers were paying bookstores a lot of money to display prominently near their front doors to gorgonize customers. The ones with unrelentingly sensational plots and prescriptions for sugar pills and generics (no original remedies inside these books). “Look at me! Look at me!” the covers say.

If I had any doubt that Clarke believed a more serious version of memoir existed, it would have been quelled by my later encounter with a short essay of his called “Very,” contained in the collection One Word: Contemporary Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe (Sarabande, 2010). I read it the fall after Clarke’s spring visit while preparing for the arrival of another writer at the Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature at Hiram—Molly McQuade, the collection’s editor. I was surprised to find that Clarke was a contributor, but what surprised me even more was that halfway through his short essay about the overuse of the word “very”—parody again—he suddenly veered toward memoir. Brock Clarke writing memoir?! How could this be?

The second half of the essay was extremely personal and intimate—private, almost. It was so revealing that it made me uncomfortable—almost as if the person I thought I had known during his visit to Hiram College had turned out to be someone else.

Here was Brock Clarke, free of sarcasm, no posturing that I could detect. In one paragraph especially, he drops his guard (well, as much as a writer ever can, since even the most porous words function as screens). We suddenly feel like eavesdroppers. He recalls having stood in a doorway a few days before he wrote his essay, staring at his young son, who was reading a Hardy Boys book—No. 41. He begins to question why he felt such intense love for his seven-year-old at that moment. He just thinks and thinks about it, without any rush, with no sense that he must hurry back to the word he was asked to investigate (though he does eventually return). We don’t know what he’s doing in the paragraph, but we don’t care. We lose ourselves, as Brock Clarke has allowed himself to be lost. What we do know as we listen in is that we don’t belong here, but the author’s intimacy is irresistible, and so we stay. The scene stands still. There is no dialogue. It’s a room we’re in, but not really a place at all. There’s no furniture, no decoration. It’s the inside of a brain, and we are watching it work. We think we hear someone breathing, and suddenly we realize why this is: The paragraph is as natural as breath. It is breath on the page.

I must have stood there for five minutes, watching him read, watching him and watching him and falling deeper and deeper in love. What is it about seeing your children read that makes you love them so much, love them as much as you should love them all the time? I don’t think it’s only writers who feel this way. I don’t think it’s only readers who feel this way, either. I don’t think it has anything to do with reading at all—after all, as far as spectator sports go, watching someone read is only slightly more exciting than watching someone play golf. Maybe it’s easier to love a child at rest than a child in motion. Or maybe to watch a child reading is to watch a child not in any danger, a child you haven’t put in peril, a child you haven’t screwed up, or screwed up yet, or screwed up totally. Or maybe to watch a child who is unaware of you watching them is to watch something so perfect and unself-conscious that it is impossible to do anything but love them.3

The memoirists I like best write this way.

Write what way?

It has very little to do with subject, remember, even though story and narrative are components a memoirist can rarely do without. We need material—particular and original material—to chew on. Without it, any thoughts we might have will be bare—hackneyed or mundane. But the size of the story—the number of celebrities or crimes or macabre details on the pages—is not relevant. We shouldn’t have to be related to the Pope or raised by chipmunks in order to have a story to tell. Ben Yagoda in his book Memoir: A History (Riverhead, 2009) uses the phrase “a self-absorbed poseur”4 for memoirists who pump violence and melodrama into their stories so that publishers and readers notice them.

Lee Martin’s essay “Colander” is about his memory of confusing the words calendar and colander as a boy. Nikky Finney’s essay “Inquisitor and Insurgent: Black Woman with Pencil, Sharpened” is, well, about a #1 lead pencil. David Brendan Hopes’s “The Anniversary” is about a hike on a Palm Sunday through a North Carolina forest and about his memory of some ants. I fully recognize what an unmarketable piece of advice this is that I’m giving—not to inflate our experience or to feel we must wait for something enormously important or thrilling to happen before we can write. And I don’t mean to discourage writers from using the wild or odd details of their own lives—life is wild and odd, sometimes. It is also perverse and violent, and, once in a while, just plain creepy. Paul Auster’s paternal grandmother murdered his paternal grandfather in Wisconsin in 1919, and Auster tells the tale in the first part of The Invention of Solitude (Sun, 1982). Rebecca McClanahan’s great-great uncle Charlie murdered his son Stanley and then killed himself, a story she tells in her memoir The Tribal Knot (Indiana, 2013). But these writers have many other things to talk about in their books besides murders. It’s only small memories that we need, those haunting songs from our lives that return uninvited to find us, hoping we will give them words.

The real work of memoirists is to think about the memories that arrive—whatever they are—and to consider what they’ve meant, and to welcome the associations they invite. To live their lives over again on the page, but this time with both greater scrutiny and greater sympathy. Memoirists are people who get a second chance. Groundhog Day people. But the price of such a gift? They can never be attached to the memory the way they were when the experience was first lived. They must look at the person they once were with older eyes, give up innocence, abandon the temptation for nostalgia, rip themselves apart. They must age as they write. And why would it be otherwise? They have to leave their naiveté behind and admit complications that were invisible before. When they finish a manuscript, their eyes have new wrinkles, and their skin has sagged a little from the burden they must now bear. They don’t reach the end of an essay or a book unscathed. But that extra light in their eyes? Yes, that’s there too. If these things fail to happen, memoirists have stopped too soon.

It’s a particular kind of thinking memoirists concern themselves with. Reflective thought. The word reflection is one a memoirist must contend with. I won’t make the argument that memoir is impossible without it. Yes, we can write memoir the way Hemingway wrote fiction—coding our scenes so that when a story ends, it all adds up in a careful reader’s head. We can write in a way that makes us writers feel clever and makes our readers feel they are clever too. Or we can use images and metaphors to house the meaning that we’re after and echo it. We can use parody, too, making fun of ourselves at earlier times in our lives when we played the fool.

But there really is nothing that can take the place of reflection or do what it can. Phillip Lopate, a writer I’ll talk further about, thinks that writing instruction has not served memoirists well by indoctrinating them with the principle of “Show, Don’t Tell” (what he calls a “nefarious taboo”5) and with a strong bias against a narrator “looking forward or backward”6—a practice that teachers have for years equated with outdated techniques. His new book To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (Free Press, 2013) is a wonderful and necessary corrective.

The kind of reflection memoirists engage in is perhaps not well enough understood, suffering from its association with words like exposition and explicit. It is not these things. It is not telling or spelling things out, not old-fashioned or prescriptive or preachy in any way. It is not these things at all.

It is the most artful feature of memoir. The place of greatest loveliness. The thing itself. It is the brain at work. And when I read passages like that—passages like Clarke’s, let’s say—Emily Dickinson sometimes comes to mind. The brain is just the weight of God—/For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—/And they will differ—if they do—/As Syllable from Sound—.7 Just a Syllable, perhaps, is all a memoirist will ever be able to manage, but it is still glorious.

Reflection involves intense mental activity and scrutiny of one’s life. It starts early in an essay or a book, and doesn’t end until the writing is over. Here are just a few of the things memoirists often do as they reflect: They select the most perplexing memories and pieces of their lives. They study how memory works and what it’s brought to them, including its oblique clues. They slowly come to understand how these clues are adding up, and begin to see patterns surface on the cloth of the page. They encounter (and resist, if it’s possible, but sometimes it’s not) the persistent human tendency to be deceived. They imagine scenes and motives that memory and research will never give to them, but they are hungry for, and need. They consider hundreds of alternatives to meaning and interpretation, and then dismiss them all and start over again. They ask questions until they find the ones that are unanswerable and then, and only then, do they stop. They resist neatness, final answers, clear resolutions, and epiphanies, and end with uncertainty.

The goal of a memoirist is not to tell a whopper of a story without interruption. Stories hold great value for them, but their greatest value is that they can be mined. Chapter by chapter of racing and unrelenting narrative is not what is best for the writer or reader of memoir—even though they perhaps both desire it. No, memoirists tell stories in part for the sake of interrupting them. To find the places in a story where the strangeness lies. You take off your hat and behave respectfully when you discover that, and you slow way down. Clarke halts the movement of his essay and switches direction the instant he thinks of his son reading, because he knows this is what he has to do. I am not sure it was easy for him (easy for any writer?), but he stops anyway, taking the extreme risk a writer does when a story is interrupted. There he is in the 21st century, as exposed as Montaigne in the 16th. His quaking flesh is visible to us, but there is still comfort in what he says, because he lets us stand with him, right by his side, as he names his fear that love of a child is really unfathomable.

There he is right in the midst of the tradition of personal writing, where nothing much seems to happen, but the world is going to change.

Sven Birkerts, in his essay “Then, Again” in Poets & Writers (May/June 2005), talks very openly (very reflectively) about what he thinks was once a regrettable tendency in his own writing to allow traditional narrative to have its way with the fluid material of memory, material that works associatively. He writes, “But no matter how decisively I pledged to stay with the found detail and to hold fast to what I felt was the true scale of mattering, the logic of the conventional narrative kept asserting itself.”8 Most memoirists have made the same error, and so Birkerts speaks for many of us in that line. We are lazy and easily tempted, and organization often seems an overwhelming obstacle to us, and to the progress we badly wish to make. So we opt for a neatly framed story told chronologically, a story with chapters and a traditional arc, rather than wait for the memories to show us what they’d like to become. We don’t think the shape is part of the meaning, but it is.

We memoirists need to grow less certain about almost everything. In “Then, Again,” Birkerts calls literary memoir “an account of detection, a realized effort to solve the mystery of what happened in the light of subsequent realization.”9 Effort, not necessarily achievement. He is softly warning us against expecting clear results. It’s interesting that when he later absorbs part of this essay into his book The Art of Time in Memoir (Graywolf, 2008), the only words in the line above that he changed were “solve the mystery.” They become, instead, “assemble the puzzle.”10 The word “solve” has now been expunged. There will not be final answers, in other words—not even in theory—but there will be some things along the way that we hadn’t considered or known before. A few more missing pieces in the great puzzle of our lives will have been found.

You would think we memoirists would never neglect reflection or let it atrophy, given its potential to bring us to the edge of clarity, authenticate our voices, invigorate our prose. You would think we would work to find new ways to nourish it, and we often do. But it is a grueling technique, and doesn’t always respond to us as we wish it would. It has to be coaxed, flirted with, pampered, adored a little, entreated, summoned, invited in. Even then, even after all that, reflection is often a reluctant guest.

And so we are back with Phillip Lopate, because no one has talked so well about this reluctance as he has. A few years ago, he published in Fourth Genre one of the most influential essays about memoir that I’d ever read, titled “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story” (Spring, 2005). It has recently been included, lightly revised, in his new collection To Show and To Tell, and it’s that second version I’ll be alluding to. I don’t think my writing and my teaching have been the same since the day I encountered it.

The first time I read it, I read it for its pedagogical content. He was writing about the issue of reluctance, the reluctance of his own students to reflect in personal writing, and I thought that what he said to them I could also say to my students. Why, he asks throughout the essay, are students backing away? What are they afraid of?

The second time I read Lopate’s essay, I understood more clearly that his piece was also meant for me, not just the students I taught. Why was I sometimes fearful of reflection myself, either consciously or unconsciously avoiding it?

As I examined my own work more closely, I had to admit that I was often spending too much time telling stories about the past and remembering myself as the younger person I once was. I was not spending enough time thinking about what had really happened to me and the questions that were raised.

Lopate was reprimanding many of us who think of ourselves as writers trying to do the serious business of the genre. It wasn’t just the sensation seekers and I-Am-a-Victim memoirists. It wasn’t those people he was accusing. He proposes that even serious writers aren’t reflecting enough. Not nearly enough. He names names. Frank McCourt is one of them. Frank McCourt? Angela’s Ashes had always bothered me, yet, I had never had the courage to say what Lopate does in his essay: “Angela’s Ashes… stays within the child’s point of view throughout, conveying with considerable gusto, through dramatic scenes and vignettes, the hurly-burly of that upbringing, with nary a single pullback to retrospection.”11 Child’s point of view, indeed. That was it. That was exactly the source of my initial discomfort. He compliments McCourt for ’Tis and Teacher Man, later more reflective works, but then proceeds to take other writers to task. He objects to the “deep-image hush”12 of memoirists who, in his opinion, rely too heavily on image when they end short sentences.

Some of the fears he identifies seem particular to younger writers, but not all do. Few of us, I would guess, embrace reflection easily, finding it uncomfortable and unsettling. We memoirists know that although our stories are fun to tell, nothing is more difficult than the task of examining and analyzing our lives in a slow and patient way. The task of introducing an older voice that will disassemble the narrative we have worked so hard to construct. Lopate insists that writers of memoir use “a double perspective”13 (Birkerts would talk about the same thing as the “then” and “again”; Sue William Silverman, the Voice of Innocence and the Voice of Experience14) and that they assert the older voice immediately. But as I thought about this requirement, I realized that too often the narrator and her younger self were little more than twins in the memoirs I was writing, or in those I was encountering in the writing of my students: one seemingly born just a few minutes (seconds?) before the other. The narrator was not a much older sibling at all, the way she ought to be.

What were my students afraid of? What did other writers fear? What was I afraid of? Why are we afraid to claim what is uniquely ours? Afraid to trust the reflective voice that is capable of pushing us into the deep crevices of our brains toward the electricity that might ignite everything? Why do we fear the spark? Are we afraid of being on fire, or lighting up? Are we worried that along the way we might burn up everything we thought we had?

Lopate names a myriad of reasons, and most of us can find ourselves in his list. Did we learn “Show, Don’t Tell” so absolutely that it stills our pens and becomes the very first thing we say to our students when they walk into our classrooms and to ourselves, when we sit down to write? Do we have, he wonders, “a narcissistic attachment to that ignorant younger self”?15 Do we like being victims, and fear that we’ll lose the reader’s sympathy if we give that posture up? Are we afraid that if we become too cerebral we’ll compromise the emotion of a piece? Do we fear what we’ll find—the flaws and all the quirks and imperfections that are part of us? Or maybe we’re afraid of discovering that we mainly speak in banalities and have very little to say, that we can only produce “pat sermons” from a “self-help culture” (keep writing, Lopate says, until you surprise yourself; that’s all you need, not “Big Ideas”16). He scrutinizes that culture—a culture of sound bites and shortcuts, a culture that makes us timid by telling us not to judge or generalize (Lopate believes both are important exercises that start the reflective wheel turning). Lopate asks us to spend time trying to learn how to be amused by our past foolishness, and to laugh at ourselves. I wonder, as I think about what he says, if our capacity for self-amusement might be the only thing that permits us to forgive ourselves and maybe others.

He looks hard at memoir’s tendency for “cross-pollination”—its freedom to use creative tools from other genres: metaphor and image from poetry, dialogue and scene from fiction. He likes this about it, but he thinks that perhaps memoir has grown a little too fond of its close relationship to fiction and poetry, and, in the process, become too much like them. Too many scenes with dialogue, in his opinion, too much reliance on “concrete sensory descriptions.” He refers to this over-reliance on techniques from other genres as “colonization”17—clearly a political word.

New versions of hybridity may very soon offer writers artful ways to solve the problem that Lopate identifies. It’s already happening, in fact. So I’m not as worried about colonization by other genres as he seems to be. Nor do I feel threatened. For even as memoir absorbs as other genres into its system—and other art forms—forming something we can’t altogether anticipate right now, the reflective mechanism seems to me the sturdy motor that will process all of it. It will make forms possible that we cannot yet imagine. Reflection has the capacity to blend, associatively, rich combinations of seemingly unrelated material. The history of what we now call memoir began with reflection, and it’s in its genes. Reflection is memoir’s DNA. It’s just that essential.

We humans reflect. That’s what we do.

When I make a short list of the memoirists I love best, they are not the narrative ones who devote themselves to telling their stories in a chronological fashion with lots of embellishment and suspense at the end of every chapter, but the reflective ones. The presence of a powerful and often surprising reflective voice is what I love about Donald Antrim’s The Afterlife, about the writing of St. Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, James Alan McPherson, Patricia Hampl, Phillip Lopate, Lucy Grealy, Lauren Slater, Alice Walker, Terry Tempest Williams, and Paul Auster just to name a few. They are not always the cheerful ones, the optimists. But they are the ones who nevertheless give me the greatest hope, because they hold out the promise that our species can become a little more self-aware. That if we take time to think about our lives, those lives will somehow matter more. Not be better, necessarily, but matter more.

∞

Great memoirists are ruminants. Like the Ruminantia they are named for—like cattle, sheep, giraffes, deer, antelope—memoirists seem to have no choice but to behave this way. It’s how they’re designed, assembled. Can’t you see and hear them now, chewing endlessly, the way cows do in Midwestern fields and giraffes do in the wooded savannahs of Africa? Can’t you see the grass and acacia leaves in their great jaws sliding across their teeth? Listen as you walk down any sidewalk of a city street when windows are open, and you will hear them in their rooms. They chew in front of computer screens or in their beds where they toss at night. They try so hard to digest, but they have four stomachs, poor things, and it’s nearly impossible for them to keep food down. It’s astonishing that they can find time for anything except to chew. Down it goes, up it comes, down it goes again.

Should we be surprised that the Ruminantia are hooved and often horned?

They take in the stuff of their stories—of their lives—and wait for reflection to begin. How will they digest it? They know the stories, they’ve met the characters, but they have no idea how to process anything. Not at first, at least. Their saliva begins the mix. They keep returning to the stories and memories and questions that matter most, and they wait. They grasp between their teeth the resistant details of their lives, the ones that keep coming up, and chew again. There are always bitter parts here, and it’s tempting to spit them out. But they won’t. Food will pass from stomach to stomach until all the liquid has been removed (leaving the cud, the solid stuff), until fermentation is complete, until all the nutrients (vitamins and acids alike) have been synthesized.

This is the way that ruminants digest what farmers call roughages—the indigestible parts of plants. It’s what they eat. The roughages. They have no upper incisors, but their teeth continuously grow in order to make this hard task possible. There are no other creatures like them. They chew on material that is coarse and abrasive—material other animals don’t desire and can’t keep down or digest—but there’s compensation. Their teeth just keep growing and never wear out.

Animals with only one stomach can’t do what ruminants can.

∞

Who would choose such a life? Such a fate as this? Choice? Maybe it is no choice at all. Many good thinkers have said as much recently, trying to explain why we make the aesthetic decisions that we do. Terry Castle, American literary scholar in the Stanford English Department, was recently asked in the New York Times Magazine about the state of literary theory in academia. “The smartest literary scholars right now,” she said, “are interested in evolutionary psychology and brain science—how we may be hard-wired for fiction-making, aesthetic appreciation and the like.”18

Hard-wired, perhaps, for memoir, too? Do memoirists chew because they are wired that way?

Frankly, I don’t know enough about the brain, so I’m hardly the one to settle this. I sometimes even get confused about the color coding on the wires of electrical appliances, fearful that I’ll electrocute myself if I reach inside too far, so how can I decipher something as intricate as a brain, that marvelous part of us that Emily Dickinson ironically says is “just the weight of God”? I’ve seen students make great strides in reflection, over the course of many months or many years, as other teachers have. You can learn how to dot a text with “looking backs” and “perhapses and maybes” and “nows”; how to catch yourself in a lie, and confess it on the page; how to imagine the day your parents met or why they fell in love; how to shift tense to signal a complementary shift in perspective; how to do riffs on words that seem mysterious; how to study old photographs for the meaning they hold (now you see something you didn’t see then, but wish you had); how to execute pronoun shifts to softly flag for the reader the universal considerations that will slowly announce themselves as you write (from “I” to “you” or “we”); how to write about yourself in second person (you) or first person plural (we) or third (he or she)—devices that give a writer physical distance from the overpowering I (Zach, a student of mine this year, fell in love with Paul Auster’s Winter Journal (Henry Holt, 2012), written completely in second person, because, Zach wrote, “it allows Auster the distance to fully delve into his own psyche”—exactly what Zach was looking for himself); how to ask questions and then, one by one, dismiss the answers that come to you, because difficult questions never have simple answers—seldom have answers at all.

I have watched my own work gain reflective dimension over time by focusing deliberately on craft. But I have also wondered about the role a person’s environment plays in fostering reflective intelligence. My father, who worked in a rubber factory in Akron for forty years, was not formally educated, but he reminded me constantly that there was no question too insignificant to ask. Our home was the neighborhood Q & A Center. Tom Coyne never grew tired of my silly questions, nor I of his, though I know other people in our family certainly may have. We memoirists are tedious and probing people who never tire of thinking things through. We are curious (sometimes to a fault), digressive, unfocused, indecisive, restless, prone to insomnia and indigestion, annoying, full of self-doubt, nervous, susceptible to any promising current in the air, fond of mumbling, capricious, untidy, and as persistent about drilling into the interior as carpenter bees.

I am reluctant to believe (or believe completely) that you either have an instinct to reflect or you do not. Maybe I feel this way because I like the students who happen to be in the rooms where I teach. If I believed that reflection has a genetic fact, wouldn’t I need to order a brain scan for students before I admitted them to class? Wouldn’t I have to measure their natural propensity for reflection somehow before I advised them to step inside with me?

But maybe I shouldn’t be facetious. Maybe the techniques that can be taught will never be able to replace, or fully replace, the impulse to reflect, which might be genetic. Wired. Perhaps we are.

Whether nurtured, learned, or inherited—I can’t decide this issue today, or any day soon—the capacity for reflection must be seen as something of great value that writers need not apologize for anymore. Memoirists use reflection the way a dancer uses space, a juggler uses air, a farmer uses land. It’s their medium.

∞

Just imagine what it took for Brock Clarke to construct his little paragraph. The constant turning in, then the turning in again; the repetition of simple words; the willingness to stand vulnerable before us; the inclusion of his young son on the page (his real son, not someone else’s, or a character’s, not a made-up boy); the maybes and perhapses that are proposed and then dismissed because he can’t get anything right; the listing of small and great inadequacies; the perfect pressure of the paragraph as the writer’s heart beats and relaxes, pushing blood into each line; the dispelling of one mask, and then another, and then the last; and the fumbling search for the words of a restless heart (maybe brain). It’s the most difficult thing in town, to just stand still for a little while, hear your heart in your empty chest, and try to understand what in the world you’re going to do.

A child you haven’t screwed up. Think harder. Or screwed up yet. Now, say it all. Say what you actually mean, or what you really are afraid of. Or screwed up totally.

I can only begin to guess what it took from Brock Clarke to write lines like those and then give them to you and me. In that moment on the page, he turned into a ruminant—lost his incisors, but grew new teeth right in front of us. 

Joyce Dyer is an essayist, as well as the author of three memoirs, In a Tangled Wood, Gum-Dipped, and Goosetown. She teaches creative writing at Hiram College, in Hiram, Ohio.

Notes

1. Brock Clarke, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2007), p. 88.
2. Ibid., p. 87.
3. Brock Clarke, “Very,” in One Word: Contemporary Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe, ed. Molly McQuade (Louisville: Sarabande, 2010), p. 236.
4. Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History (New York: Riverhead, 2009), p. 269.
5. Phillip Lopate, “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story,” in To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (New York: Free Press, 2013), p. 29.
6. Ibid., p. 33.
7. Emily Dickinson, “The Brain—is wider than the Sky—,” in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R.W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap, 1999), p. 269.
8. Sven Birkerts, “Then, Again,” Poets & Writers (May/June 2005), p. 24.
9. Ibid., p. 22.
10. Sven Birkerts, The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2008),p. 8.
11. Lopate, “Reflection and Retrospection,” p. 40.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., p. 26.
14. Sue William Silverman, Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2009), pp. 50-67.
15. Lopate, “Reflection and Retrospection,” p. 34.
16. Ibid., p. 43.
17. Ibid., p. 40.
18. Terry Castle, “Questions for Terry Castle: The Reader,” interview by Deborah Solomon, New York Times Magazine, January 15, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/magazine/17fob-q4-t.html?_r=0