Sari Fordham: Ugandan Psalm

It's a bit more memoir than essay, but who's counting, eh? Here's a beautiful piece by Sari Fordham, another grad school colleague of mine, who can do with an image what Twyla Tharp does with a pair of legs.

http://www.cerisepress.com/02/05/ugandan-psalm

You'll see how Sari pauses in a moment and makes it so rich and deep and vivid. She's patient in her story telling. Let's look at the opening paragraph of the piece for technique:

Mornings we sit on the veranda, the three of us; for my father has long vanished into the reaching branches and tangle that surround our house, despite violent spats of slashing at the underbrush. He will reappear in the evening, a stack of papers under a looping arm. This is our world, this hill. It’s early, and the air is still cool. A breeze shifts the top branches of the bougainvillea. My mother looks outward, toward her tomato garden. There is a sole survivor, a pinkish fruit she has been thinking about plucking. Today or tomorrow, she is not sure, but she has been watching it ripen all week.

One of the big problems many writers have is their reliance on adjectives. A cluster of adjectives loses its meaning, and often you can suggest much more vividly by paring down. Sari uses adjectives, "reaching branches," "violent spats," "looping arm," but if you look again you'll see that she is much more focused on movement, both literal and temporal. They are sitting, then her father disappears, he slashes things, he reappears, the breeze is blowing. Sari doesn't tell you everything about this scene, she doesnt go into every plant, and color, and smell; she gives you the general idea, and she does it largely through action.

Other points to notice:

* Languid rhythm. Longer words, lots of comma usage, which mimics ebbing and flowing rather than full stops. I'm not 100% sure what a glottal stop is, but I'm guessing there aren't many here.

* Sari is writing a memoir from childhood, and this always creates weird point of view issues. See how she gets in the head of her mother, even though she couldn't know what the mother thinks? And I think Sari is 6 or 7 here, but she doesnt talk like a little kid. I think both choices work fine because Sari is a careful writer otherwise.

Take home exercise

Next time you are describing something or telling a story, try to stay in the moment for a bit. Don't rely on adjectives, but pick interesting details---what was happening around you, what the weather was like, what you were thinking about, what you were wearing. Don't go overboard though---our brains will fill in what you leave out, the same way it can tell that "Helo m frnd" means "Hello my friend." Try also to incorporate movement (action). Try to mimic the mood with your rhythm.

The Essay That Didn't (Did?) Resolve Itself

Please excuse the long delay in posts.

Sometimes when you have an idea, you get in there to work on it and realize it's not that interesting or there isn't really that much to say. But usually when you tackle an idea that DOES prove interesting, and you generate lots of thoughts or images, or write up some nice anecdotes that fit in with it, or pontificate on some tangential thing, it all ends up in one complete package. Not a neat package maybe (more boring, usually, if it is) but a finished one that has some point or is about some bigger concept, or at least feels done.

I've been working on this essay about trains for months. It started out with the question of why I am so fascinated by certain romanticized images, and certain cliche, genre-ish stuff like Agatha Christie novels. I want familiarity in these cliches---I want to see the train snaking along the countryside, I want a narrow corridor where two youngish, attractive strangers pass each other in a strangely charged way en route to their berths in a pullman sleeper. I want dressing gowns, and Russians, and the promise of reaching Istanbul in a few days time.

It's all so canned, right? But why does it all fascinate me so much---that was the question.

Well I was going to say here that I have lots of content for the essay, but strangely couldn't find any ending. Or really what I mean is I couldn't find any larger points to make. Why do I care about trains? I didn't know---I didn't even have any ideas. And what's all these musings without some kind of insight to go along with it.

But while writing the above (like right then! During this very blog entry!) I got an idea that I think will work. So maybe the real point is that if going back to a piece of writing in your usual fashion doesn't help, try something different, like writing about your frustration. It's like cross training at the gym.

Getting Started Writing an Essay

A cousin of mine who is in tenth grade or so wrote me this: "I love writing but the idea of just starting an essay with no thesis and taking it in any direction I want to intimidates me."

I'm sure she's not alone. People have all different writing styles---some make copious notes and know exactly what they want to say before they write and others just jump in without a plan. Most successful personal essays though seem to be involve someone sitting down and kind of doodling around until the piece coalesces, and in fact this is how it usually works for me. (Is this indeed how it works for everyone? I'd love to hear input from other writers.)

If you want to write an essay, but aren't sure where to start, it helps to begin with something that interests you or bugs you or confuses you: an image, something you saw happen on the street, something like "I used to be close friends with person X and we drifted apart---why is that? What changed?" You start explaining or investigating that on paper and see where it goes.

Here are some other ideas:

* Describing an early, vivid memory (maybe your earliest) is always a good one. I was assigned this in a great course on memoir with Patricia Hampl, who talked about memory as an ocean, where you look out over this glassy surface and then dip down and grab something from underneath the water. I looked back over my childhood and grabbed this memory of a tick-covered cat that we found while living in Clemson, South Carolina, and of trying to remove the ticks and having the cat run away. That was the whole memory. So I wrote that down, and then I started writing about childhood in South Carolina, and then I realized that the cat represented a loss of innocence---the first time I could remember feeling really broken hearted, because we couldn't help this animal, and that's what the essay ended up being about.

(By the way, the difference between essay and memoir, and if there is a difference at all, is another topic.)

* Describe a map you have owned or used. This is one I made up for some class I was teaching or taking, and I just like it.

* Pick a word, maybe at random out of a dictionary, and start writing about it.

* Pick something you are good at doing and explain it. Like playing a difficult guitar chord or talking to strangers. And then think about a specific time you did it and why you are good at it, and why other people aren't good at it, etc.

* Joni Tevis, whose lyric essay I posted about, says that when she writes she likes to put two very different objects together in a piece of writing. She metaphoricially holds them next to each other and says, do they go together? No? How about these? Try that yourself---maybe I can start writing about bicycles and cats--any overlap? How about my mother's cancer and my obsession with Star Trek? My inability to pass geography in 7th grade and my love of Russian dance? One great essay that does this is "I Bought a Bed" by Donald Antrim which is unfortunately only available online to New Yorker subscribers. Antrim writes about his mother's death and his quest to buy the perfect mattress. It works beautifully.

I'd recommend avoiding the stuff like "pick a time when you overcame an obstacle" that they make you do in school, because then there is a foregone conclusion built in that can hamper you and you end up with some Aesop Fable glush. It's nice to not know the answer when you begin.


Any other favorite prompts?

Photographs Are Like Essays

This photograph was taken in Mongolia by photographer Jon Goodrich, and I posted it because of the two little guys bending over down front. Imagine if it had been merely a pretty landscape without people, or without people in such a funny position---it's the oddness of that little piece that to me transforms this from a nice photo into a great one.

You can write beautifully, and that's fine, but the best essays are the ones that surprise. That doesn't mean there is a huge twist a la E. B. White's "Once More to the Lake" (I'll address that one in an upcoming post) but it's nice when there is something unexpected or especially interesting.

When I taught freshman composition, I did an exercise where I took a cartoon of George Bush saying something funny and cut out the talk bubble. I popped it up on the overhead projector and said, OK let's think of some text for this cartoon. "George Bush has big ears!" "George Bush says nuc-u-lar!" "George Bush wishes he were a cowboy!" None of them work. For a cartoon to be funny there has to be something fresh and unexpected about it. It's usually the same with a piece of writing---otherwise why should anyone read it.

Now I just posted about Anne Fadiman's ice cream essay that really doesn't have a twist or something unexpected. But it does go off in many directions: quotes from Hippocrates, a near death experience, etc. The stuff floating around in Anne Fadiman's head and the way she collages it together is fresh enough for me to make the essay excellent, although I know not everyone agrees.

So when you are writing an essay, don't be afraid of thinking weird, tangential, interesting and unexpected thoughts. And combining things that don't usually go together, like people's backsides and a gorgeous, somewhat desolate landscape.

On another note, I'm not a photographer, but I would assume that photographers take lots and lots and lots of pictures and many of them are very good but few of them are really brilliant. That's how writing is too.

More of Jon's excellent photos can be seen here. http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?pid=3869766&id=665062370