The Fix

Moral Authority in Nonfiction

Recently while writing about some past issues, I rendered my family members as characters on a page.  It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever written, and writing all five-hundred words of it left me emotionally black and blue, a feeling to which one might apply the verb phrase “wallowing in self pity and disgust,” and culminating in a small mental breakdown during which I declared – since obviously nothing was wrong with me – that the entire genre of nonfiction was to blame: “Nonfiction is amoral!” I wrote to a friend.  “Nonfiction is immoral.  No one should ever write nonfiction!!”  I was ready to throw down the gauntlet to John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, as well as everyone else, all the way back to those Neanderthals who told stories about their hunts on cave walls.  “Or maybe I’m just being melodramatic,” I added, in a rushed whisper.  “Probably the latter” was the reply. 

I had just embarked on the second half of a two-week long writing course with David Shields, and couldn’t understand why I felt this way—I read Reality Hunger just a few weeks prior and agreed with it so fully that I speckled the margins with smiley faces, exclamation points, and even the occasional heart.

There are no facts, only art. Beautiful words are not true. Something can be true and untrue at the same time. Genre is a minimum-security prison. The genius of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental. All the best stories are true.  Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

Yes, I get it: the line between fiction and nonfiction is blurry (if it exists at all); memory (not to mention the initial perception) is flawed; and, anyway, what we are trying to do is make art, not a catalogue—I agree with, and feel these things, deeply.  So why, as Shields phrased it, was I feeling this objection “on [my] own nerve endings”? I’m not completely certain. But I suppose that for me, a mainly fiction writer, the moral decisions we all make in any act of writing became particularly acute when I started using people I love as characters.

D’Agata’s book About a Mountain is about the suicide of 16-year-old Las Vegas resident Levi Presley.  In his NY Times book review, Charles Bock claims that doctoring certain “facts” in the book for poetic license (such as conflating the dates of important events) “damages the moral authority of D’Agata’s voice.”  D’Agata’s counterargument, as he presented it at the April 2012 McNally Jackson Event, is that after the book was published, he received a letter from Levi’s parents. “They considered the book a gift to Levi,” said D’Agata. “That, I felt, was the only moral test I had to pass. I was in the field and was doing that work so only I know where that line is. We do have to trust writers that they will do that work, find that line. We can’t impose that line on them.”  In today’s overly litigious and information-driven society, that relationship of trust between writer and reader can easily be broken. But the discomfort with (and dialogue about) writing fact-based works is a good sign, because writing, like living, is a series of moral negotiations.  There are a lot of questions that a writer asks herself as she puts pen to paper, questions that will be asked of her later by those who read her work.  Perhaps one of the most important of these is: Am I doing the right thing?  The tricky part is that we may not always know the right answer to that; and we may sometimes be wrong. 

In “One Nation, Under the Weather,” her essay defense of illness memoir, Lauren Slater states: “I write to say, you are not the only one.” Though I still feel uneasy when I write about my family, I try to remember that I am not an outsider—I am writing as one of them.  Down to the genetic level, we are truly in this together.  Viewed through this lens, writing nonfiction could be the most compassionate form of all.  I will try to remember D’Agata’s and Slater’s poignant statements as I write.  Whether our works are fiction, nonfiction, or (more likely) something in between, they should be nothing if they are not offered as gifts, with great kindness and care.

—April Bacon

Creative Writing Genealogy

(Above) The family tree of Christoph von Waldburg-Zeil-Trauchburg.

A mathematician’s “Erdös number” indicates the degrees of collaborative separation between a mathematician and the prolific and influential Paul Erdös.  And North Dakota State University’s “Mathematics Genealogy Project” does as its name implies—it tracks the mentors and students of mathematicians.  Here, for example, is the listing for the famous German mathematician, David Hilbert, who is noted as having 75 students and 20579 descendents: http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=7298. These two examples represent concretely that mathematicians are networked across time and geographic borders.  They talk about these networks and live them each day.  Because they matter.

What is the genealogy of creative writing?  In the U.S., creative writing is officially an academic discipline (The Association of Writers & Writing Programs reports 15 MFA programs in 1975, 64 in 1994, 184 in 2010).  As the journal n +1 (perhaps solemnly) delivers in MFA vs. NYC: “We are all MFAs now.”  Regardless of whether or not we are happy with this fact, MFA programs are our lineage.  But how we draw the lines between you and mewithin this new and calcifying discipline is entirely up to us.

In part because of MFA programs, we now have a larger and more invested group of knowledgeable readers; writers are offered security to write and to live as teachers; our young writers are offered time and space inside of which to finely tune their crafts and passions.  While all of these are undoubtedly positive, I also find myself wondering: Why have we chosen GRE scores over creating our own folklore of the connections between writers—real, fleshy and inspirational writers?  Why have we decided to follow tick mark programs of study versus traveling the world to visit (and learn from) those writers who inspire us most?   Why have we chosen to wrestle with automated application procedures—and non-trivial application fees—versus just contacting writers that we admire?  And making ourselves available for that same contact?  Feeding the Masters Program cash cow in order to be able to list this or that school on our website or resume is a dirty and unfulfilling way to spend $15-$80K.  But if we focus on program rankings and test scores, we can reduce our experiences to just that.

What would a Creative Writing Genealogy look like?  Over the course of subsequent blog posts in this theme, I hope to investigate the stories of mentorship for today’s young writers.  I plan to investigate how those relationships come about and flourish, to recognize that it is community and friendship that provides necessary guidance and support to writers.  To help remember that it is out of unique and inspiring networks of really cool people that the most delicious poetry and prose are borne.

—April Bacon

Tim Gilmore: An Interview

“It’s said by people who know things that can’t be documented that when Roosevelt Boulevard, Interstate-17, was paved, a number of the graves of former slaves were paved over.” —Tim Gilmore, Ghost ZIP Code, Yukon

Tim Gilmore is the author of the upcoming “This Kind of City: Ghost Stories and Psychological Landscapes,” as well as two collections of poems, Horoscopes for Goblins: Poems, 2006-2009 and Flights of Crows: Poems, 2002-2006. He teaches literature and English, including a course called “Ghost Stories,” at Florida State College at Jacksonville. In addition to editing deadpaper.org, his writing has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Fiction Fix, 580 Split, Jack Magazine, and other publications. He has visited Panama and Mexico and England. He has driven forklifts and sold vacuum cleaners. He has grown beans and tomatoes and winter greens and herbs. He has held hatchling bluebirds in his hands. He has robbed bees. He knows the difference between the Sublime and the Beautiful. He’s bad at math. He needs to wash his car. He has horrible hay fever. 

In your work, the past is very much a part of the present.  Are these ghosts in the geography or hauntings, erasures, exorcisms?

Of course Faulkner said the past wasn’t dead, the past is not even past. Human landscapes are full of markers from the past—not just old buildings or neighborhoods, but the way neighborhoods are laid out, the way they’re named. Part of the feeling a lot of people have in suburban neighborhoods of the place being soulless may not only be cookie-cutter house design and poor building materials. It may also be the lack of an accretion of lives lived.

If you’ve been in an older place, a really old place, maybe a European city for example, you can feel that depth of history, layer upon layer. It’s as though the city you inhabit contains a city beneath and within it and that city contains a city beneath and within, like Matryoshka dolls.

I teach a “Ghost Stories” literature course every fall term, and I don’t tell most of my students that I don’t actually believe in paranormal ghosts. The kind of “ghost” I’m describing gives me a deeper sense of haunting than paranormal ghosts. This kind of ghost is a cultural ghost, a geographical ghost, a psychogeographical ghost. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Sethe talks about “rememories” and describes them as memories that live on, physically, outside of us, out in the landscape, and she says every place is haunted, that you can walk along and accidentally bump into someone else’s “rememories.”

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Notes Toward a Treatise on Genre

(Above) Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore, New York, NY.

“Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem”—Rick Moody

The other day I logged into my Netflix account to discover that the familiar genres of comedy, drama, horror, etc. had been replaced by the following: “emotional biographical tortured-genius movies,” “dark thrillers featuring a strong female lead,” and “critically-acclaimed cerebral sci-fi & fantasy.”  I LOLed.  But after I LOLed, I tried to come to terms with how accurate these hyper-genres were for me. Tortured-genius?  Strong female lead?  Cerebral sci-fi?  Yes, yes, and yes please.  But I don’t believe in genre, I thought to myself.  And then: Is this better or worse than the more general genres we are accustomed to finding in brick and mortar stores?  Is genre changing?  I can’t help but think that all the fuss about genre has been an attempt to create readers into suitably efficient purchasing machines; and there is no doubt that the drive of companies like Amazon and Netflix to make ever-more ‘intelligent’ recommendations, however participatory, is for the same purpose.  For this reason, I have serious doubts that even the reader-based recommendations of Amazon or the hyper-specific genres suggestions of Netflix are really a change for the better.

The Utopian in me begs for a society in which readers are allowed (indeed: trusted) to discover literature and art based on their own impulses by—shocking, I know—following what genuinely interests them.  And to allow writers, similarly, to write in whatever “endless forms most beautiful” (à la Darwin) their inspirations demand.  In other words, enough with pigeonholing and type-casting; enough with treating ‘the public’ as inflexible individuals who can only digest narrow topics that they’ve been trained to digest.  In fact, let’s put real power—and not just “purchasing power”—into the hands of readers.  Let’s allow readers/the online “crowd” to do the work (ahem: play) of organically forming new genres and groups, of mixing types and forms, making lists and assigning names.  What form would such a movement take?  What tools—digital and otherwise—would we need?  What would emerge, and what would destruct?  We can’t know for certain, but there’s only one way to find out.

Which new genres/categories would you like to see, Friends?

—April Bacon