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I can honestly say now that I have confidence in myself. I think for the longest time I would confuse arrogance with confidence. I think a lot of people do.
I have been overweight since I was seven years old. Since my dad brought home the first Little Caesars pizza I devoured. I remembered ripping the paper it was wrapped in and going to town. I liked the crazy bread as well. The only thing that was crazy about it was there was never enough,
When you are overweight for that long you become successful in some diets. When I was 14 I lost 50 pounds on my own. Then when I was 18 I lost 70 pounds and right before I met my wife I lost 80 pounds.
Every time I lost weight I became arrogant. I could not understand why others could not lose weight as well. When I lost weight I wondered what the big deal was about people whining about how hard it was. JUST EAT LESS!! That is all…..
Then I would gain back the weight. I would feel isolated in life. I would wonder why I thought it was so easy to lose weight.
I gained and lost a lot. Once I hit 400 pounds, all confidence in myself was gone.
I felt worthless. More like a burden to others. I would look at my wife and know she could do better. I would go to work wondering when I would be fired. Any compliment I would get about anything was not what I wanted to hear. I did not live at that point. I breathed. Barely.
Losing over 200 pounds changed me. I learned that there is no perfect way to lose weight. I learned that the "Are you really eating that!" person is the most annoying person ever. I learned that I am not here to change the world. I am here to change myself. To make my life better. To make me better. To make the people around me better.
I am not arrogant. I know what arrogance is. Arrogance is not saying "I look good!". Arrogance is saying "I look better than you ever will!".
But that is not me. There are better bloggers and weight loss success stories. There are better restaurant managers than me. There are better people than me.
But I am a damn good blogger and weight loss story. I work real hard as a restaurant manager and I am a good person.
I am confident. I worked real hard over the last few years to get it. The scale will not ever make me lose it again. I know that I am not ugly. I know that if I put my mind to things, I can accomplish anything. I also know I will never be over 400 pounds again.
I think that is why I am blogging more often now. I think that I did not put 100% into it before. I enjoy it for me but I love when others read me as well.
Someone asked me if losing weight changes your life. I will admit, when I lost 221 pounds I thought the world should look at me differently. I thought my story should be up in lights and that people owed me something.
Losing weight does not always change your life. Losing 221 pounds changed my view on one thing.
I have the confidence to know I can do anything.


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Two parents in Tacoma, Washington are facing decades in prison after allegedly injecting their three young children with heroin.
Ashlee Hutt and Mac Leroy McIver (pictured above) have been charged with unlawful delivery of a controlled substance to a minor, criminal mistreatment, and assault of a child.
Related: Donald Trump's Party Pals Spill Dish On His Coke Days!
Police say the 24-year-old Hutt and 25-year-old McIver kept their three kids in a home filled with rat droppings and drug needles.
A Pierce County Sheriff's Department spokesperson told The Washington Post:
"The kids lived in deplorable conditions. It wasn't a good living situation even without the issue of heroin. We unfortunately find kids living in deplorable conditions all too often, but we don't see parents intentionally putting drugs into kids."
Last year, Child Protective Services began investigating the couple's alleged mistreatment of their 6-year-old boy and his two younger sisters — aged 2 and 4.
The boy told a CPS worker his parents would inject all three children with "feel good medicine," which was a white powder mixed with water filled inside a needle.
Related: Aaron Carter Says DWTS Helped Save Him From Addiction!
The parents admitted to using heroin when interviewed by the CPS, but blamed the other adults they were living with for injecting the children, telling authorities "the babysitter may be responsible."
The three children have been put into protective custody, and both parents are prohibited from contacting their children or being within 1,000 feet of their residences or schools.
Both Hutt and McIver are in police custody while they await their trials — Hutt is due in court on December 20 and McIver has a trial date set for February 16, 2017.
This is so devastating, and sadly reflects just how bad America's opioid epidemic is — and the damage it can cause.

subset: commoncrawl


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This Mom Was Confused When The Waiter Got Her Order Wrong. Until She Turned Around!
This family was enjoying a quiet dinner when they got a BIG surprise. This mom's reaction to having her Marine home had EVERYONE in tears!
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Well balanced colt for sale - Priced to sell quickly - email soon. ================================================================== email Frank at…$10,000


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Hello everyone. Hopefully I have a simple question. Currently I keep my violin in the case in between practices. But lately I haven't practiced in a while due to extreme work load. So is it OK to hang it on the wall on one of those violin hooks? Maybe I'm just being lazy, but I'm getting tired of pulling it out of the case every time and I'd actually like to see it hanging on the wall. I do have a humidifier in my room due to winter dryness with electric heat so I'm thinking this also might be better for the wood to be out in the open. I'm not worried about damage either I have a safe place to hang it. Thanks for any advice.
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This part will fit the following vehicles:
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Other identifiers for this part: PerfectFit #: C730125, Eagle Eyes #: GM277-B000R, TYC #: 11-5851-01-1.
Fits Years: 2003 GMC Sierra Rear Tail Light Assembly Replacement / Lens / Cover
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Parts ordered were received when promised. Parts were new and packaged well to prevent damage. Website was easy to use and find the correct parts. You wont find a better place to deal with.
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The major idea behind this work was to express certain psychological content, a deeper universal meening through human figure. I chose to present it suspended in pitch black space; with a few veiwing perspectives and optical distortions combined the feeling conveyed is of a certain inner dynamic process. One could even say dramatic, in mythological kind of way. A very important work for me.Mixed media techinque combining oil, arylic paint and tinted indian ink on streched canvasThe work comes framed in ornate wooden frameShips insured and carefully packed.
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The state of being an unpaid servant, whether through forcible subjection or voluntary submission. Slavery was common in biblical times, and Scripture lays down strict guidelines as to how slaves are to be treated by their masters, stressing the new status that slaves have as a result of being believers in Jesus Christ. The image of slavery is also used to describe the state of sinful human beings.
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Rachel Nelson BardLive Music and Productions email@example.com 651.353.3370
I'm My Own Grandma
Latham & Jaffe
Many many years ago, when I was 23
I was married to a widower who fell in love with me
That widower had a growed-up daughter who had hair of red
My father fell in love with her, and soon those two were wed.
This made may dad my son-in-law, which changed my very life
My daughter was my mother, 'cause she was my father's wife.
To complicate the matter, even though it brought me joy
I soon became the mother of a bouncing baby boy. Oh,
I'm my own Grandma,
I'm my own Grandma.
Well, it's crazy I know, but it really is so:
I'm my own Grandma.
My little baby then became a brother-in-law to dad,
And so he was my uncle, though it made me very sad.
For if he is my uncle, then that also makes him brother
To the widower's lovely daughter, who of course is my stepmother!
Father's wife then had a child, which kept them on the run,
And he became my grandchild, 'cause he was my daughter's son.
My husband is my mother's father, and it makes me blue,
For though he is my husband, he's my grandfather too!
Now, if he's my grandfather, well, then I am his grandchild,
And every time I think of it, it nearly drives me wild,
For now I have become the strangest case you ever saw:
As wife to my grandfather, I AM MY OWN GRANDMA, Oh,
08/28/2012 Copyright BardLive Music 2012


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Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Late night news & current affairs
LOCATION: abc.net.au > Lateline > Archives
URL: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/s250626.htm
Broadcast: 22/2/2001
ABC investigation yields "insufficient evidence"
The Australian Federal Police have announced there's insufficient evidence to prosecute any ABC staff over the leak of a sensitive document. The ABC's auditor called in the AFP several weeks ago after confidential internal details about salaries and staff numbers were leaked to a newspaper. The police statement comes as ABC managing director Jonathan Shier appears before a Senate estimates committee in Canberra.
Compere: Tony Jones
Reporter: Leigh Sales
LEIGH SALES: As Jonathan Shier faced a grilling on the hows and whys of the Federal Police inquiry, the police themselves were announcing their investigation was over.
A statement issued earlier this evening says there's insufficient evidence to prosecute any ABC staff member over the leak of a sensitive document published in two Sydney newspapers last month.
The document alleged a blow out in executive salaries and numbers under Jonathan Shier, statistics management, has consistently disputed.
The managing director was today painstakingly questioned by the Labor contingent of a Senate estimates committee about the Federal Police investigation.
Mr Shier hasn't ruled out a further internal investigation, to be considered when the audit subcommittee of the ABC board next meets.
JONATHAN SHIER, ABC MANAGING DIRECTOR: Maybe, the chairman or the subcommittee will have had more information from the Australian Federal Police than I'm privy too.
I don't know what will be at that that meeting in terms of information.
LEIGH SALES: But Labor Senator Chris Schacht says it should be the end.
SENATOR CHRIS SCHACHT, LABOR FRONTBENCHER: All I can say is we look forward to hearing whatever the outcome is.
But I would have thought this would be a wonderful opportunity for the ABC to say, "Thank goodness we're off the hook.
There doesn't have to be any more investigation."
Because I suspect you were going to be severely embarrassed.
LEIGH SALES: Labor committee members today queried whether ABC auditor David Hodgkinson was pressured by senior staff to call in the police over the leak.
SENATOR CHRIS SCHACHT: Mr Hodgkinson could extrapolate that, if he's been called in for a special meeting, warned that he was to discuss the leak, that maybe this was an indication that senior management wanted something done?
MR BALDING: Whether one can form that opinion, it's an individual judgment.
LEIGH SALES: Mr Balding denied any pressure or influence was used.
While today's hearing focused heavily on the Federal Police inquiry, Jonathan Shier was also quizzed about perceptions of the ABC's left-wing bias.
The managing director said he'd like to a see a broader range of opinion on the national broadcaster to stem such allegations.
Leigh Sales, Lateline.


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40 terms
Glencoe American Republic Since 1877 Chapters 11-13 Vocabulary
another name for the spoils system, in which government jobs or favors are given out to political allies and friends
a partial refund to lower the rate of a good or commodity
political movement founded in the 1890s representing mainly farmers, favoring free coinage of silver and government control of railroads and other large industries
a piece of U.S. paper money first issued by the North during the Civil War
the loss of value of money
a decline in the volume of available money or credit that results in lower prices, and, therefore, increases the buying power of money
store where farmers bought products from each other; an enterprise owned and operated by those who use its services
graduated income tax
tax based on the net income of an individual or businsss and which taxes different income levels at different rates
a person who believes that American currency should be based on a gold standard
person who believes that coining silver currency in unlimited quantities will eliminate economic crisis
farmer who works land for an owner who provides eqiupment and seed and receives a share of the crop
poll tax
a tax of a fixed amount per person that had to be paid before the person could vote
grandfather clause
a clause that allowed individuals who did not pass the literacy test to vote if their fathers or grandfathers had voted before Reconstruction began; an exception to a law based on preexisting circumstances
the separation or isolation of a race, class, or group
Jim Crow laws
statutes or laws created to enforce segregation
an execution performed without lawful approval
the actions used by one nation to exercise political or economic control over a smaller or weaker nation
a country that is technically independent but is actually under control of another country
yellow journalism
type of sensational, biased, and often false reporting for the sake of attracting readers
extreme nationalism marked by aggressive foreign policy
sphere of influence
section of a countrty where one foreign nation enjoys special rights and powers
Open Door policy
a policy that allowed each foreign nation in China to trade freely in the other nations' spheres of influence
dollar diplomacy
a policy of joining the business interests of a country with its diplomatic interests abroad
a political movement that crossed party lines which believed that industrialism and urbanization had created many social problems and that government should take a more active role in dealing with these problems
commission plan
a plan in which a city's government is divided into different departments with different functions, each placed under the control of a commissioner
direct primary
a vote held by all members of a political party to decide their candidate for public office
the right of citizens to place a measure or issue before the voters or the legislature for approval
the practice of letting voters accept or reject measures proposed by the legislature
the right that enables voters to remove unsatisfactory elected officials from office
the right to vote
moderation in or abstinence from alcohol
laws banning the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages
belief that business should be publicly owned and run by the government
Square Deal
Theodore Roosevelt's promise of fair and equal treatment for all
settling a dispute by agreeing to accept the decision of an impartial outsider
a business group
income tax
a tax based on the net income of a person or business
unfair trade practices
trading practices which derive a gain at the expense of the competition
a journalist who uncovers abuses and corruption in a society


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Smashing Old Stories to Create Something New: An Interview with Melissa Febos
March 20, 2017 § 1 Comment
By Zoe Zolbrod
Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip-Smart and a new essay collection Abandon Me, which is about, among other things, meeting her birth father, an all-consuming love affair, and the way we tell our own life stories to ourselves. In this interview, she talks about the process of writing her new book to Zoe Zolbrod, author of The Telling.
Zolbrod: I've been a fan of your work since Whip Smart, and after I read it I gobbled up any interviews I could find. I recall you talking in one—I believe it was the Otherppl podcast with Brad Listi—about working on a novel, discussing it with your agent. Now here you are with Abandon Me. When did you know that you were writing another book of nonfiction? Did you leap toward it, or did you have to convince yourself?
Febos: Neither, really. Nonfiction has never been something I leapt toward, nor something I had to convince myself of per se. It has always come for me, and with a force that precludes argument. Here is what I knew: the essays that were occupying me required that I reinvent my process. I also knew that I was going to write a book about meeting my birth father and this love affair that had consumed me for two years. I knew little else. But once I had written about four of these essays, it occurred to me that they were the book. That I was working my way into those subjects in an unprecedented way, through sound and image.
Zolbrod: Please talk about the structure of the book, which is unusual. The initial seven essays are followed by a section, "Abandon Me" that at 170-some pages long could be a book in itself. I'm interested in how you made this choice. What input did your agent or editor give, if any? What factors played into the decision?
Febos: While there were many choices later on, these essays knew their own forms before I did. It was much more a process of discovery than invention. Although later on, in revision, I had to devise some creative ways to figure out how to make those structures within each essay crack open to reveal the content, if that makes sense. I made maps and mobiles; I chopped them up with scissors; I taped them to the walls. I had to uncover a new way of building a piece of writing, which was both terrifying and wonderful, because my process before that had been so circumscribed and functional.
When I started the final, title essay, I didn't know that it would become so long. I estimated that it would be about forty or fifty pages. When I crossed the hundred-page mark, I knew I was dealing with a very different kind of animal.
I made a decision to completely finish the book before I showed it to any editor or agent, and that was one of the smartest decisions I've ever made, in respect to these things. I didn't know what it would look like, but I knew it would look better than it would sound if I tried to describe it beforehand. And I am very lucky to have found both an agent and an editor that recognized the strange form as its true one. They didn't ask me to change it at all. I know many editors and agents would have wanted to reshape it into something more conventional.
Zolbrod: In many of the early essays, you cover the ground of early childhood and coming of age, but you also include "Leave Marks," "Wunderkammer" and "All of Me," which explore aspects of the central romantic relationship that is traced from start to finish in the long title piece. They're written from a close perspective within the love affair. How did you think about chronology as you were organizing your material, and its relationship to your themes of exploring love and loss? How did you think about perspective?
Febos: I actually wrote those essays while I was in the love affair. I wrote the majority of the long one during its final phase, too. I went back and made some revisions, but I was writing and living my way through the book simultaneously for most of it. I would not have recommended this to anyone, but I think it's the way I had to write it. The writing process was how I made sense of living the experience; it was a way that I processed it. And so, it is both a record and a reflection. I think that you can feel that in the essays, to some degree. There is an immediacy that reflects it, and a mythology to them that marked the ways I build stories inside of that love as it was happening.
Zolbrod: There's a section in "Abandon Me" that I love. You describe your wide sexual experience, which can make you sound like an uninhibited wild child by standard measures. Then you write, in the context of becoming lovers with the woman who's about to shake you to your core, "I discovered at nearly thirty years old that I was shy." There's much in the book about being seen—the desire we have for someone to see us, the shame we feel about it, the way lovers both can and can't see us clearly, or can cloud as well as sharpen our view. There's another line, in "Labyrinths," that resonated with me: "I have replaced my instinct for secrecy with an instinct for confession." How does writing personal nonfiction play into this dynamic, the tension between the desire to be and shame of being seen?
Febos: Writing is my solution to that tension. I know I'm not alone in this, and maybe your interest in those passages is proof of that. I think we all eventually come to understand what Winnicott meant when he said "It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found." In writing, I can reveal myself while still alone. I can try out different ways to name the things I am afraid to name, and then, when I get it right (or as right as I am capable of), I can show it to someone. It's self-exposure one step removed, and with a privacy we don't have when just relating or talking to other people.
In many ways, this book is one about the stories we create in love: about ourselves, our lovers, and our love. Writing is also the way I smash those, and the way I build new ones when I'm able to let the early ones go.
Zolbrod: The book covers your meetings with a sister, aunt, and biological father you've seldom or never met. The lonely intensity of encountering strangers with whom you share blood and lineage is so well drawn. As you mention, you were coming into these meetings with the fact of Whip Smart and your other writing out in the world. I love the part where your aunt apologizes for not having read the book, and you're like: That's okay! But your sister had read the book before she met you.
Is there any way that having such personal material out there made meeting new-to-you relatives easier, and not only more awkward? In general, what can be the silver linings for nonfiction writers who cover intimate ground and who then have to go to job interviews and family reunions and so forth knowing that the kind of juicy personal details most people keep under tight wraps are available on Amazon for $5 off the retail price or used for 99 cents?
Febos: When I talk about it being easier in some ways to write myself down and give that to others, I mostly mean the people who already know me. And the strangers who might identify with my experiences. In job interviews, or meeting my family for the first time, I generally tried not to think about it. It doesn't feel like my business what they make of those stories, if they find them. When I actually want to get to know a new person, I try to act as if that information isn't out there, because I can only get to know someone by participating in the interaction, if that makes sense. It also feels like modeling the kind of interaction I want to have, which is distinct from the interaction they might have had with the text. People often don't know what to do with it. By people, I mean my colleagues, students, et al. They don't know if reading my work counts as an intimacy between us. So I find ways to show them that it isn't. As a memoirist, I've had to teach people in this (mostly) gentle way how to separate me from the text, and our relationship from the one they've had with my work.
Zolbrod: You express several times an explicitly non-judgmental view towards what could be labeled as failure or weakness in others. Your perspective has been broadened by what you've confronted in your own life: addiction, the mental illness of loved ones, imperatives of the body that defy common sense. I was struck by these beautiful lines you wrote on the subject: "We are all broken. And repair often hurts. And the ways we find to fix ourselves do not always look like fixing." It's something I recognize.
This kind of compassion and open-mindedness is so helpful in building relationships. Specifically, in "Abandon Me," when you're encountering relatives who live lives different from your urbane urban one.
But sometimes in my own life I've wondered about the downsides of a rigorously non-judgmental view. For example, there's the moment in the book when you confess to your mother that you almost want your girlfriend to do something awful so you're justified in leaving her, and your mom tenderly tells you that she already has, which is clear to the reader.
When does a value of open-mindedness conflict with the need for self-protection, or actually interfere with self perception? And how does this play out in nonfiction when we're writing about people who have not just hurt us, but done something morally wrong?
Febos: This is such a good question. It is a complex thing, having empathy for the sometimes hurtful ways that humans pursue healing, or security, or relief. I mean, the empathy is not complicated; it is precious. But the ways that we express it, or respond to it can be. It feels easy for me to see the ways that cruelty comes out of woundedness. It always does. But that doesn't erase an adult person's accountability for their actions, their treatment of others. In the past I've excused treatment that I shouldn't have, because I could see the wounded place it came from. And I've used my own woundedness, or the world's flaws, to rationalize my own wreckage. I want to be able to hold empathy and accountability at the same time. Compassion does not require that we receive any kind of treatment or justify any behavior—our own or others'. Being an adult means accepting what we've been given, unfair though it may be. We often have to overcome a lot to be kind, to be generous in love and to ourselves. But that is our work. To linger in lament or blame just slows that process, slows our movement toward a more generous way of loving.
Zolbrod: Here's another line that holds so much. "I had come here looking for something and found nothing but these broken people, who were my people." Your paternal grandfather was from the Wampanoag tribe. You mention the study of epigenetics, that massive cultural trauma can be passed through the generations. You'd always known you had native blood, and describe being taken to a powwow at nine by your adoptive father, and feeling a distance. How do you view this aspect of your lineage now? Was there anything about writing this book that affected your relationship to it?
Febos: This book included a process of negotiating the difference between claiming a "native identity," which I have never felt entitled to (and still don't), and claiming the private thing that that ancestry has meant to me. From childhood, I understood my identity as comprised of many pieces of things: I was half-adopted, had a Puerto Rican father, was queer, had this other father who was a stranger and also part Native. I didn't feel enough of anything to claim it, so I decided that I was nothing. But a decision does not erase what made you, or what you are made of. In order to write this book, I had to retrieve those exiled parts and draw them together in my self-conception. That was one purpose of this book. And it did bring me back together.
I had also felt estranged, and ashamed, of the compulsive parts of my personality, which had governed so much of my young adulthood. No one else in my immediate family, the family that raised me, was an addict. There were parts of me that weren't mirrored in them. Physical aspects, tendencies—not all "dark" ones like addiction, but my aloneness in them felt like a kind of darkness. It is part of what drove me to find my birth father and his family. And did confirm that I was not alone, not defective. Those parts came from somewhere, and I don't only mean the genetics, but the historical and familial legacy as well.
Zolbrod: You open the book by writing about your story-rich childhood, and you draw on your rich knowledge of story and poetry throughout, from Greek and Egyptian to Rilke to stories in popular culture. I'm curious about how you organized this material during the writing process, or just the role it played in the creation of the book. What was the chicken and what was the egg? Like, did you dip into touchstone texts as you were wrestling with your material and come out with metaphors, or did you go looking for metaphors, with a good sense of where to find them?
Febos: Definitely the former. The personal narrative and driving questions of the book were the chicken, and as I worked my way into them, I looked to the texts I knew and trusted to help me along. And the conversations I had with those texts made their way into the book. In many ways, I think of the essay as a thought process, or an artful transcription of a thought process, and so it seemed natural to let them in as I was articulating my own inquiry.
The book also takes for its subject the nature of narrative, how we build it, how it builds us, and so I went to the most fundamental examples of this in my own life: the books I loved as a child, the stories I've come back to again and again.
I spent less time looking for metaphors in this book than anything else I've ever written, which may sound strange because it's so thick with metaphor. But it is also an excavation of the metaphors I've carried with me the longest, the ones I always have with me. The films, the books, the places of my upbringing—the images and stories that first defined me, and so carry parts of me.
Zolbrod: You've talked and written so articulately about how powerful personal writing can be, how far outward it can reach, even as we dive deeper inward into what some call belly-button gazing. The essays and talks I'm referring to (not that there aren't others), as well as this book, were written in pre-Trump era. Have any of your views on personal writing changed in the face of this regime? Have any of your writing inclinations or habits?
Febos: Belly-button gazing! That sounds adorable. That sounds like something I'm interested in.
My views on personal writing have not changed post-election. There is an increased urgency in me, to be more explicit in the activism inherent to how I teach and write, and perhaps a different sense of economy in my subject choices. That is, I am more inclined to prioritize those subjects that speak to this particular moment, but that still includes the personal. It is through personal stories that we encourage empathy, and that we record the lived experiences that our institutions hope to erase or define or ignore or rewrite.
Zoe Zolbrod is the author of the memoir The Telling and the novel Currency. Her essays have appeared in places such as Salon, The Guardian, Lit Hub, the Manifest Station, and The Rumpus, where she served as the Sunday co-editor.
Three Reasons I Could Stop Writing Memoir But Won't
March 15, 2017 § 20 Comments
By Ronit Feinglass Plank
I had been writing fiction and wanted to try nonfiction, so I began with personal essays. I didn't think memoir was for me; in fact I was deliberately avoiding it. I didn't see a reason to revisit the facts of my confusing childhood and thought memoir wouldn't be as challenging as creating a world from scratch and putting characters in it. To tell my own story, the story I knew by heart, seemed almost too easy.
I could not have been more wrong. I was about to discover that looking at something you think you know pretty well with fresh eyes and trying to understand it in a new way is definitely not easy. I did try writing several personal essays but the history of how I grew up kept barging in, taking up more and more space. It seemed part of me really wanted to tell the story of my childhood. And this story, which I thought I knew so well, was becoming something else, different than I had always understood it.
I was beginning to learn for myself how the memoirist's relationship to their narrative is ever-changing, revealing itself page by page, sometimes moment to moment, the way motor oil and water mingle in a puddle, colors swirling together in endless combinations. Just when you think you see how the colors and patterns are playing off each other, the light changes, or your vantage point shifts and you notice something new. Memoir is like that.
I continued excavating my past on the page, yet, even as I accumulated chapters, I was hesitant about this new genre. When friends asked what I was working on I'd practically apologize before confessing it was memoir. I had this idea nobody would want to read it. My self-talk went like this:
-Other memoirists might have had more painful experiences, what do I have to contribute?
-Don't people think memoir is whiny?
-There are more important things happening in the world, who has time for a personal narrative?
But, the longer I worked on my project the more confident I felt. I read a ton of memoirs and finished the first draft of mine. While I did I learned how to push past my misgivings with a kind of pep talk about memoir that goes like this:
1) My story isn't as painful as other memoirists.
Writing memoir is not a competition for the worst or saddest story. Memoirists are charged with looking at their lives to find pattern and achieve some kind of understanding, not to out-pain other memoirists. People read memoir to understand a mind at work, hard at work in most cases, trying to piece apart what happened during a period of time and why the memoirist is still thinking about it now.
No one but you knows what it was like to be you and no one knows what it is like to be you looking back beginning to understand what you didn't understand then. That's why no two memoirs are the same even if they are both about mothers who leave or marriages that break up or the ravages of chronic illness, whatever your story might be.
It's a memoirist's response to their experience that is interesting. When faced with trouble in their lives, why does one person leave, while another digs in? Why does one person blame herself, and another blames others?
It is the memoirist's unique insight that creates the point of view and voice that can make memoirs captivating.
2) Memoir is whiny.
I used to think memoir was navel-gazing, the writing equivalent of pouting or, worse, blaming others. I may have gotten this idea from the way I lived my life, thinking that I was supposed to be "strong" at all times. I believed I should suck it up, should handle hardships on my own. I worried that it was weak to dwell on events of the past, which is what I thought memoir was. But memoir is not for finger-pointing or for self-pity. Just like healthy relationships get built with honesty and improve with accountability, so does memoir.
It is courageous to look at the story you have told yourself for years and pick it apart to understand it more, to recognize your own habits and tendencies. Vulnerability is not a liability; it is a form of strength. It takes guts to see how you have played a part in what has occurred in your life.
The power of a memoir lies in the ability of a memoirist to see herself clearly, to see the part she played. It is the opposite of woe is me or why me? It's more of a how come and what next? Now that you see more of the truth, what will you do with it? This is the momentum that drives the narrative forward, the tension the reader feels witnessing a dynamic mind at work.
3) There are bigger problems in the world than my lower middle class American story.
Sometimes it feels like pain is everywhere. And, for me at least, when I see how much hardship there is close to me, around me, very far from me, I feel overwhelmed. So why should I add my voice to the chorus of sadness?
My answer is the more room we make within ourselves, the more room we have. When a child gets hurt we take care of the child, we don't push them away and tell them other kids have it worse. That would only teach them not to have empathy for others or for themselves.
Readers of literature care about people, they are interested in their experience. Writers give them that experience. People might read a memoirist's story and see that they are not alone, or feel it as a call to action, to pay attention and look for meaning within themselves, try to understand the people they are close to.
Learning about other people's lives is a way to see what you think about your own. Can you feel for others as you feel for yourself? Can you feel for yourself as you feel for others? I believe there's no limit to the compassion in the world. There's room for us all.
These days when people ask me what I am working on I tell them, "the second draft of my memoir". I definitely still have doubts, but I know I'll never finish if I let fear take over. And I don't want to stop writing my story. I really want to see how it turns out.
Ronit Feinglass Plank's work is forthcoming in Proximity Magazine and has appeared in The American Literary Review, Salon, Best New Writing 2015, and The Iowa Review (runner up, The 2013 Iowa Review Award for Fiction), among others. Her story "Gibbous" won the Eric Hoffer Award for Short Prose and her story "The Plan" won Sequestrum's 2016 New Writer Award and will appear in their summer 2017 issue. She earned her MFA at Pacific University and is currently working on a coming-of-age memoir. More about her and links to her work at http://www.ronitfeinglassplank.com
New Ohio Review Seeks Lopatian Essays for Annual Contest, While Wondering What That Means . . .
March 9, 2017 § Leave a comment
A guest post from New Ohio Review editor David Wanczyk:
Last year, I wrote a post for Brevity about what I seek in Creative Nonfiction as the editor of New Ohio Review. It was 605 words, but it could have been three: Intensity, Ambivalence, Nostalgia.
Essentially, is there a conflict in the essay/memoir? Is there hard thinking and debate with oneself? And are there detail-rich descriptions that enliven a scene (potentially from 1986)?
I thought I'd been somewhat clever, laying out a writing schema that was not quite as general as a daily horoscope or as specific as an Ikea manual.
But it turns out that these three key concepts were only the product of cleverness inasmuch as they were basically cribbed from Phillip Lopate, one of my favorite writers, and New Ohio Review's 2017 Nonfiction Contest judge.
On intensity/conflict, he writes, "I was always waiting for life to become tragic, so that I would merely have to record it to become a powerful, universal writer," and in that recognition of a desire for dramatic struggle, which he plays as partially naive, he reveals that it isn't necessarily conflict that makes a good piece of nonfiction.
On ambivalence, he writes, "Personal essayists converse with the reader because they are already having dialogues and disputes with themselves," and there he teaches me that self-debate helps us communicate; but at the same time, Lopate writes with absolute directness, refusing to dwell in any muddle. He's not speaking from a place of ambivalence for the sake of it; the thing he's chewing on is what's important, not necessarily the mode of chewing.
On nostalgia, he writes, "One has to guard against the tendency to think of one's youth as a time when the conversations were brighter, the friends truer, and the movies better." With this, he would seem to pooh-pooh my suggestion that essayists should infuse their work with a sense of wonder about the past, and yet he consistently writes, in a lovely way, as though he were a documentary filmmaker of his own memory, even admitting that he occasionally felt like a cameraman when he was young: "I wanted life to have the economy and double meaning of art," he admits. "But more often I simply felt torn by a harsh, banal pain that had no cinematic equivalent."
Lopate's work—searching, funny, and sometimes uncomfortable—stays in that space between artistry and banality, and because of that, we feel like we're with a friend on his smartest day, a friend who, like us, doesn't quite fit in.
"I believe in the aesthetically impure as an accurate reflection of reality," he wrote in his book Getting Personal, and, as I look back at Lopate's work I'm happy to go along with that idea, too. For this year.
Intensity, Ambivalence, and Nostalgia? Eh, maybe.
But for all you Scorpios and Tauri out there in the Brevity community, maybe we should shoot for an impure reflection of something true, first and foremost?
If this sounds intriguing, please send New Ohio Review and Phillip Lopate your brightest impurities, your canniest reflections, your things-that-don't-fit.
Deadline: April 15th
Prize: $1000 and publication in NOR 22.
All submissions will be considered even if they don't win, and the entry fee—$20—gets you a one-year subscription to the magazine. We've also got fiction and poetry contests, and we're at https://newohioreview.submittable.com/submit
Avoidance and Writing: The Roberta Mickel Method
March 3, 2017 § 21 Comments
By Judith Sornberger
You would not believe how many things I've done today to avoid beginning this essay. (Except, if you're a writer, you probably would.) I say writing means more to me than just about anything, but I would do almost anything some days to postpone putting pen to paper (including going shopping for a new, magic pen), especially when it comes to breaking the ice on a new writing project. This morning, for instance, I called a friend to commiserate on how little we've been writing. Then I scrubbed a pan that had soaked overnight in the sink, grocery shopped, stopped in at my local bookstore to check on a book I'd ordered (knowing full well it couldn't have arrived yet) and, of course, had to browse. Then I went through my closet, wondering if it might be time to donate everything below size sixteen, my current size, which caused me to go for a power walk.
Usually, I procrastinate until the need to write becomes stronger than my fear and consequent resistance, which can take days or even weeks. But today I suddenly remembered the Roberta Mickel Method, named—by my sister and me—after our mother, its first practitioner.
Mom worked half-time as a bookkeeper, a job she loved. One reason she enjoyed it was that working outside the home two-and-a half days made the other two-and-a-half weekdays at home especially precious. Nevertheless, on those at-home days, there were plenty of at-home tasks she didn't particularly enjoy. That was where her genius came in. After making her to-do list, she would choose the least appealing task, let's say cleaning bathrooms, and tell herself she only had to work on it for half an hour. Then she could do whatever she pleased for half—or sometimes even a whole—hour. In summer that might mean sitting on the patio with a cigarette and a Diet Pepsi, tilting her head back so the sun bathed her face. In winter it might be tucking her feet beneath her as she read on her gold velvet couch.
Before retirement, I delighted in almost every aspect of college teaching—dreaming up exciting new courses, choosing textbooks, planning class sessions, and especially interacting with students in the classroom. But I constantly bemoaned my lack of writing time. And I hated grading papers, putting off starting to read a batch until the students began timidly asking when I might return them. I usually claimed to be reading them very closely, when the truth was that I hadn't been able to bear removing them from my briefcase.
Wish I could say that I was writing instead of grading. But mostly I was puttering around the house, cruising Facebook, or deciding tonight was the perfect time to try that new and complicated recipe for paella, necessitating a two-hour round trip to a store that carried fresh mussels. At least I later wrote a poem about making that paella.
Then I would agonize on the phone to my sister who would remind me of the Roberta Mickel Method. By that time, I'd have collected so many papers that thirty minutes of grading wouldn't have made a dent. So I'd set a timer for an hour, grade like a madwoman, and, when it buzzed, I'd go for a walk, read, or maybe even begin a poem. Since writing wasn't my most loathsome chore, it rose to the category of reward.
Yet it feels wrong that I would use the same method to get going on a piece of writing that I've used for grading, especially since, once I get started, I love to write (some days more than others). Mom's method provides a doorway into the place where writing can become absolute bliss. I tell myself all I have to do is buckle myself into my writing chair and work for half an hour, and, most days, I'm still spreading ink across the page an hour or two later. For to begin, whether you're cleaning bathrooms or writing, is always the hardest part. As Goethe (second only to my mother in the wisdom department) famously wrote: "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."
Take now, for instance. I began scribbling away on this essay at 1pm, telling myself I'd work for half an hour. Now it's 2:30, and I've written, relatively painlessly, and somewhat joyously, an hour longer than planned. If Roberta Mickel were still alive, I think she might be cheering.
Judith Sornberger's newest poetry book, Practicing the World without You is forthcoming from Cavan Kerry Press in 2018. She's the author of one full-length poetry collection Open Heart (Calyx Books) and five chapbooks, most recently Wal-Mart Orchid, winner of the 2012 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize. Her memoir The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany was published by Shanti Arts Publications in 2015.
Mapping as Metaphor: Part Two
March 1, 2017 § 3 Comments
Part two of Brevity assistant editor Alexis Paige's consideration of place, grief, and the river as metaphor, talking with Angela Palm, author of Riverine: A Memoir From Anywhere But Here, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. [Part One can be found here]:
PAIGE: There's a powerful depiction of sexual assault in the book. The scene struck me most for its brevity and omissions, for what did and didn't make the page. Can you talk about how you approached writing the scene and why? Can you describe your decisions about what to include and what not to include, and how you came to approach the moment tonally?
PALM: I didn't want the narrative to become about that particular violence, but instead wanted the incident to appear in the book as one link in a chain of violence, wherein accumulation would be more powerful than individual acts. Because that was my experience: a slow boil of not-quite-right exposures to violence in a culture where such experiences were not questioned, had no language with which to be questioned. The sexual assault didn't fit my then understanding of what rape was. It didn't fit anywhere and so I tucked it away along with everything else, but my body remembered, the way a body remembers what's been done to it at unexpected times. My mind remembered it more spatially, in flashes. Emotionally, I was numb. So I wanted to write it the same way—emotionless, just the quick flash of bodies in space. That window I looked out of, what a body too big to move feels like. A sensation that said wait—what just happened? is what I wanted to convey to the reader because that was how it felt. The scene focuses on how the experience connects to where it happened, too—the window's symbolic meaning transforming from excitement and promise to pain and escape. That inextricable linking of place and experience at the book's heart.
PAIGE: Here, I want to present a few sections of text to show how you seed certain ideas and to show the spectacular weaving you do so deftly and deeply—different modes of writing, others' writing both scholarly and literary, various epistemological primers, and of course, your own musings and felt experiences.
On the first page, in the first chapter called "Map of Home," you write, "Where did one town start and the other end? Was there an unnamed part between the two that was up for grabs? I wanted to conquer that yellow land and write myself all over it: this part, this swath of land right here, belongs to a girl."
Later, after having left Indiana for Vermont, and regarding efforts for you and your husband Mike to claim your own place/ identity, you write about the "One Square Inch" project and about your own search for silence, the silence you find in the mountains:
I believe I fear actual silence—the far edge of quietude. In Annie Dillard's essay 'Total Eclipse,' she describes leaving the site of an eclipse viewing before it is over because the experience is too all-consuming. She plunges into a meditation on existence, barely emerging before the eclipse's shadow sweeps her under and away for good: 'It is now that the temptation is strongest to leave these regions. We have seen enough; let's go. Why burn our hands any more than we have to? But two years have passed; the price of gold had risen. I return to the same buried alluvial beds and pick through the Strata again.' Silence strikes me as a kind of total eclipse, and this lawn of Frost's may be just as risky. It could overtake me if I let it. Pure silence, pure freedom, would somehow reveal me to myself too starkly, too soon. The lighting would be wrong, the picture unsettling, distorted further than I expected in every direction. I want only to see a little bit more at a time, to mine very carefully through the layers of sediment below my feet. To lose water by drops and not by gushes. To fly and return. I want some sense of clarity about the buried alluvial beds, to hold as precious goods the names of its materials, to walk across them and experience the malleability of the middle, before it's pressed so hard from above and below that it metalizes. (197-198)
Both of these passages illustrate not only of the artistry of the book, but also, its larger themes—especially the searching the narrator undertakes and the friction she seems to crave between safety and risk, between self-determination and self-immolation, between a desire for something-ness and nothingness. The narrator is drawn to risk—to the "far edges" in many instances, most notably in her relationship with Corey, which is both completely natural and somehow also taboo; he is just a boy and she just a girl, but he is also a convict, and she a writer, a mom, a wife. There are so many triumphs of this book, but one I especially admire is your navigation of larger cultural tropes, the way you push into and through, and ultimately beyond, the ready-made clichés of bad boy and good girl, for example. The twin portraits that anchor the book– both you and Corey—are utterly human and empathetic and raw and whole. What did you learn about yourself and your relationship with Corey—and perhaps your relationships with danger and desire while writing this? What did you learn, ultimately, about the thorny business of being a girl, then woman, in late 20th Century and early 21st Century America?
PALM: My relationship with Corey allowed me to do that rare thing—openly consider the alternate routes my life might have taken. It taught me a great deal about compassion and forgiveness and the confounding paradoxes of being human. It also taught me that I can't predict where I'll find support, or a friend, or something true about the world or myself. Being a girl, then woman, in the rural Midwest in my particular family very much asked me to do and be what was expected of me, which had a pretty narrow definition. All the attendant clichés. Be smart, but cross your legs at the ankle. Have opinions, but only if they're like ours. Go to college, but marry the nice guy with the good job. Mind your manners, don't speak up. A kind of half-assed, half-informed feminism that rendered much of what felt natural to me—those edges toward the fringe, that desire to engage with the questions or longings in the back of my head fraught with tension and discord. Just being me became an act of rebellion. In some ways, decisions about what to do with my life, my body, my mind, were hardly decisions at all but a fulfilling of other people's expectations, I now realize. The truest thing about being female–in the life I've had–is everyone has a different idea about what that ought to look like and you're constantly preserving or negotiating yourself in situations in which your being female is a factor in how you're treated or thought of. And worst of all, sometimes that can get uncomfortable and even unsafe. What I say to myself now, as a mantra, is I'm not at your disposal. Not my kindness, not my smile, not my compliance, not my time, not my body. I decide when to offer these things now. And I no longer value other people's ideas of how I should act or who I should love or what kind of mother I should be and so forth. As for edges, Dillard's scene in "Total Eclipse"—getting out of dodge before the total darkness overtakes her—is how I feel when I look at pictures of Earth, or think of the galaxy, or even in fleeting moments of human freedom that I happen to find on the fringe. There's a danger in that darkness, in the shucking away of every manmade thing, but a thrilling pureness too.
PAIGE: Vivan Gornick's landmark craft book, The Situation and The Story, distinguishes the situation, the events of the narrative, from the story, "the thing one has come to say." I don't quite want to ask what you think your story is (though you're welcome to answer!) for fear of sounding like an agent who has trapped you in an elevator, but I do wonder if there's one place in the book that you would identify as especially emblematic of your story—that thing you came to say? If you had to star or circle just one section—perhaps a scene or a series of paragraphs or one metaphor or thread that runs through the book—what would that moment be?
PALM: There's a paragraph early in the book, page 20, that begins, "Like rivers, people are always folding back on themselves, and then straightening again. Contradicting themselves. Pulling off a bluff even as they try to begin anew, and then collapsing back onto the past." That paragraph anchors the river as metaphor and holds every truth about this book. It contains the meanings behind the different narrative events selected to tell the story: the pull of the past on the present, the bittersweet experience of leaving and returning home, the power of nature's natural course nurture's fight against it, the tug of our public selves on our private selves, the impact a single person or event can have on the course of a life. It holds all of that, as the banks of a river might hold water, and more.
PAIGE: : In the process of revision or editing, can you describe a particular challenge—whether in terms of craft or in terms of steeling yourself emotionally for the task? And what did you learn from dealing with the challenge?
PALM: Right away we decided to restructure the book chronologically and add focus to my relationship with Corey, which was originally a more minor thread. A cohesive narrative arc was stitched across what were originally self-contained essays, and then the book shifted into memoir territory. So, adding anecdotes and memories to essays where they weren't already organically occurring was a challenge. There was, for me, risk in implying that my whole life could be defined by this person. Which of course isn't true. Yes, I thought of him and considered reaching out over the years, but the book could easily suggest, by virtue of its balance of inclusion and exclusion of experiences, that I was perhaps obsessed with him or dwelling constantly on the past. I am an obsessive thinker, but I didn't want to be boxed in by that. I came to terms with this risk by reframing my idea of how modern memoir handles time and subject matter: it's not one's whole life, told blow by blow. There are a hundred ways to tell the stories of a single life. This isn't the only version I get to tell. It's one version. It's my thoughts about a certain series of events.
PAIGE: Here's an obligatory memoir question: what has the response been from those people who are subjects in the book and/ or from your hometown? Has any of the response surprised you? And how and in what ways did you consider your subjects and how they might react as you were writing?
PALM: I thought my family would be less accepting, but they've been wonderful, supportive champions. I suppose that was the biggest surprise. Corey has been gracious, and is proud of me. For him, it matters that someone remembered him as having good qualities, not just as a monster. It's encouraged him to do good works from prison, in the small ways that he can. Most other folks have been enthusiastic and some have told me they're glad someone else saw life in this small town the way they did. Only a few have complained vocally about how certain people or aspects of the area are portrayed. A few people were put off by my depiction of rural Indiana—they feel it doesn't represent their experience—the 4H clubs, the fairs, the values of their rural Midwest while others said it is spot on. Many folks have had a privileged experienced of Indiana. And I think it's a mistake to privilege that experience over another. I didn't set out to write what is already known. I intended to portray the fringe—those are my people. And let me tell you—there are far more troubling scenes in Indiana than all this. I wanted to bring as much humanity to my portrayal of place and of the people in this book as I could while still preserving its difficult truths. The earlier drafts were tinged with attitude. As I drafted, the attitude fell away and the nuggets of human complexity remained. I suppose my biggest worry about its reception was that no one would understand my compassion for a person who is rather indefensible. Not a single person has failed to see that. It gives me great hope for this world.
PAIGE: What are you working on now, and how does it draw from and/ or depart from the work you did in Riverine?
PALM: I'm working on two new manuscripts—an essay collection and a novel. The essay collection springs from the final chapter of Riverine in that it looks more closely at how I continue to shape my idea of family, and contemplate the utility of the nuclear family in our modern era—its shifting purposes, its commercialization, and so forth. It's not as narratively focused on my personal life as Riverine, though, and instead draws on political and social and historical and environmental contexts here in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. The novel deals with that core human truth of our not ever being able to really know another person, but it looks at it through the lens of how our internet habits distort our relationships and our legacies of self. I confess that I've found it very difficult to write since the election, since the ongoing trauma occurring in Aleppo. It's hard to find a reason to prioritize one's own stories or thoughts with so much else that requires our attention and our energy and our care. Still, art is necessary. Still, the smaller wrinkles in the vast cloth of human experience are worth ironing out.
Angela Palm is the author of Riverine: A Memoir From Anywhere But Here, an Indie Next selection, winner of the 2014 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, and a Kirkus Best Book of 2016. Palm was awarded the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Axinn Foundation Fellowship in Narrative Nonfiction. Her work has been published in Ecotone, Creative Nonfiction, At Length Magazine, Brevity, Paper Darts, Post Road, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She lives in Vermont, where she works as an editor.
Alexis Paige is the author of Not A Place on Any Map, winner of the 2016 Vine Leaves Press Vignette Collection Award. Paige's work appears in Hippocampus, New Madrid Journal, Fourth Genre, The Pinch, Pithead Chapel, and on Brevity's blog. Her essay "The Right to Remain" was named a Notable in the 2016 Best American Essays, nominated by The Rumpus for a Pushcart Prize, and featured on Longform. Winner of the New Millennium Nonfiction Prize, Paige holds an MFA in nonfiction. She lives in Vermont and can be found online at alexispaigewrites.com
Mapping as Metaphor: Angela Palm's Riverine
February 28, 2017 § 3 Comments
Brevity assistant editor Alexis Paige discusses the art of writing place and grief with Angela Palm, author of Riverine: A Memoir From Anywhere But Here, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize:
PAIGE: First, I have to say that I admire this book so much—for its technical and emotional acumen. Kafka famously said, "We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." I favor such grievous reading. I want to be moved, I want blunt-force trauma to the head and heart. Riverine accomplishes both; it made me puzzle over and admire technical and formal maneuvers and also made me swoon at its beauty and keen pathos. Did you set out to reach the reader on both fronts concertedly? Were you conscious about achieving certain effects with readers, and if so, how did you conceive of those effects?
PALM: Alexis, thank you! That's the highest compliment. It was part instinct on the front end and part crafty planning on the back end—lurching into the magic that's generated while writing, then trying to make editorial sense of what I was drafting. Early in these chapters, I wanted to bring together my tendency to think peripatetically, my curiosity and loneliness which have followed me everywhere, my sense of longing and loss, and my love of language. Topically I wanted to investigate the way places shapes us, the marks we leave on each other through both love and violence. I wanted to show the way I think—amused at the way that physics and biology and nature play out in everyday life. I needed a way to tell what is, aside from the event of the crime and my relationship with the boy who committed it, an otherwise ordinary tale. And so the way that I wrote about the ordinary became very important. Nothing around us is ordinary, I found, looking closer. Everywhere, the land is not ours. Everywhere, the past has a dark underbelly. Everywhere, what appears to be one thing is something else. What I lack in narrative impulse—sometimes sidestepping intense, revealing scenes in favor of the quiet image or the extended metaphor, I try to make up in intellectual inquiry. Writing this way began to take on a swirling quality, and I wanted the reader to feel that with me. This vortex of thinking through experience. Sometimes I wonder if it isn't just a love letter to the world that says, is anyone out there who experiences life the way I do?
PAIGE: What were the origins of this book? Did you have the concept in mind before you wrote it, or did the concept emerge as you wrote?
PALM: Avoidance was its origin, then a gradual acceptance of my own truth. I wrote around the heart of the narrative—around the crime, around the boy. The earliest essays are located in the middle of the book. I couldn't untangle my life in this river home, so I broke it down into smaller "maps" I could tackle, as if cutting cross-sections from experience and flattening them in order to see them. I mapped the bar I grew up, I wrote an essay that toured the different churches and religions I tried, another that takes apart the cornfields I worked in and looks at them politically, socioeconomically, and so forth. When I read what became the epigraph—"Every map is a fiction" by D.J. Waldie—the rest clicked into place. The mapping became an organizing principle, as well as a method of thinking about experience. A gigantic metaphor for life. A map, after all, never stays the same and contains a hundred misrepresentations, summaries, erasures in every iteration. Maps are a kind of precise lie.
PAIGE: Riverine: A Memoir From Anywhere But Here is rich with place identity, from your hardscrabble Indiana hometown to the menacing pastoral of Vermont. (Thank you for resisting the romantic portrait here, by the way.) The book's central river, the Kankakee, figures as a literal, metaphorical, and even stylistic force. How did place identity, and the rendering of micro- and macro- portraits of place, shape the book's structure?
PALM: I began writing with flashes of scenes—writing those important moments that define a life. In those scenes I discovered the personal set of symbols that visually represent the same stories, the places I've inhabited. So in the book, place—the window, the mapped cell, the river, all appear as images, which become story, which become metaphor, and unfold again as images in a different location. The mapping recurs, the window watching recurs, the jails, fishing, abandoned structures recur. Vacancies recur in the forced vacation of the Potawatomi, in Corey's absence, in the loss of life inflicted by his crimes, in the aftermath of a hurricane, in the one square inch of silence, in my thinking of the children never born to the sterilized Abenaki of Vermont. The river works the same way, even stylistically as you say—story meandering, then forced by my own hand to run elsewhere, then spilling over itself to where it naturally wants to be, flooding a map, rendering it false. All the while leaving stories in its wake. All of this is to say out loud what I most feel about place: something happened here. It changed people. It changed you. Don't forget. Notice the linkage across time. Notice everything still alive in a single moment, a single vista.
PAIGE: In addition to the book's focus on maps and mapping, the narrator/ writer seems driven to map not only places but also individual subjects and how they fit together. You deliciously and obsessively catalogue and map subjects ranging from sex offender registries to entropy to cultural violence to desire to eminent domain. So many ranging curiosities and events come together, as if the narrator understands the larger world through the act of putting it together fragment by fragment. The book's identity too seems to emerge out of the narrator's impulse to suture fragments and to impose order upon them, beautifully, I would add. Can you describe your process of managing such a range of subjects with depth, and with such a varied approach formally–from cinematic scenes to philosophical musings to research-driven expositions to lush, lyrical passages? There's so much to talk about regarding the relationship of form and content in this book. How did you navigate all of it?
PALM: I realized about halfway through compiling the narrative stories that I didn't want to write a straightforward narrative. It pained me and bored me to be in just my own past for as long as it would take to finish a book. I had just read Maggie Nelson's Bluets and David Shields's Reality Hunger and John D'Agata's edited anthology The Next American Essay and Wendy Walters's Multiply/Divide and Matthew Gavin Frank's Preparing the Ghost. These books excited me formally and gave me permission, somehow, to pursue this more Frankenstein-like narrative that stitched together and wove together the narrative with my ideas about the world and with the external world itself—other books, films, history, physics, notes from a congressional committee's findings, and so forth. There was little order, almost not at all until the last edit when I arranged the pieces into a chronology and stitched through them a connected narrative. Writing this way was like Pac-Man. Consuming all of those things outside of my own story and digesting them. The book is a little wild, it's not as restrained or held together as you might expect of a memoir. I took some satisfaction in preserving this wildness and letting the accumulation do work I couldn't plan for—I wholeheartedly believe in Judith Kitchen's admonishment to writers to follow digressions to see where they lead—both in writing and in life. To do it again, I might exercise a bit more control. But I don't know—it's a record of my intellectual excitement, a record of what I felt after reading those works that moved me to try what felt natural to me—this piling on of seemingly unrelated things until every last one became inextricable from the rest. It was a risk and there was definitely some push to be slightly more focused, or clearer about how certain things connected, but I think we found a compromise that everyone was happy with. Sometimes you read a memoir full of characters and situations that entertain but still come away not knowing its author. I didn't want that. I think the form and content of this book reflect exactly who I am, in all of its human messiness.
PAIGE: You won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for this book. What was it like when you heard the news, and what has the larger experience been like? Any advice for aspiring contest entrants?
PALM: I already was in talks with Graywolf about a book deal when I received the call from Fiona that Brigid Hughes had selected Riverine as the prize winner. Because I wasn't expecting a phone call from the press, I immediately thought they were calling to drop me. Silly—and certainly evidence of my feeling like an imposter. But it was good news! I was shocked, I cried. It was way better than what I imagined winning the Publishers Clearing House scam that I bought into as a kid would feel like. I remember telling Fiona that this would change my life. The book has a narrative hook to be sure—my relationship with a man convicted of murder and my thoughts about class in white, rural Indiana and its attendant issues. But the formally peculiar approach to telling that story was another part of why it was chosen. That meant everything to me because when I was experimenting with that Frankenstein-like approach I was discouraged from it by my writing peers—those same peers who admired the unexpected styles and forms we see in Maggie Nelson or Eula Biss or Leslie Jamison. But I pressed on privately, certain I was on to something, even if I wasn't executing it very well yet. To other writers I would say don't let everyone else tell you how to write. Trust your ideas, follow your own digressions, read work that informs your work in some way, and assume you will get to where you want to go. Assume you are able to endure rejection and various other roadblocks. You are. I never assumed failure. I assumed if I kept working hard, looked at each step as an opportunity to learn, kept reading and writing with my whole heart and head, I would succeed. The prize has opened doors for other opportunities but as yet, I haven't had the time or mind to sit and write something worthwhile. So what I take away from the prize, in addition to the great honor of being published with an extraordinary press, is an endorsement from people I admire and respect that enables me to keep trying my ideas—some people will like them. Try your story in an unexpected form, try it in a dozen different structures and see what happens. Maybe nothing, but maybe something.
Read Part Two of the Interview Here.
Angela Palm is the author of Riverine: A Memoir From Anywhere But Here, an Indie Next selection, winner of the 2014 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, and a Kirkus Best Book of 2016. Palm was awarded the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Axinn Foundation Fellowship in Narrative Nonfiction. Her work has been published in Ecotone, Creative Nonfiction, At Length Magazine, Brevity, Paper Darts, Post Road, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She lives in Vermont, where she works as an editor.
Alexis Paige is the author of Not A Place on Any Map, winner of the 2016 Vine Leaves Press Vignette Collection Award. Paige's work appears in Hippocampus, New Madrid Journal, Fourth Genre, The Pinch, Pithead Chapel, and on Brevity's blog. Her essay "The Right to Remain" was named a Notable in the 2016 Best American Essays, nominated by The Rumpus for a Pushcart Prize, and featured on Longform. Winner of the New Millennium Nonfiction Prize, Paige holds an MFA in nonfiction. She lives in Vermont and can be found online at alexispaigewrites.com
Writing the Pain: Memoirists on Trauma and Memory
February 27, 2017 § 94 Comments
Brevity's founding editor Dinty W. Moore interviews Melanie Brooks, author of the recently released Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma, featuring Brooks' conversations with Andre Dubus III, Sue William Silverman, Kyoko Mori, Richard Hoffman, Suzanne Strempek Shea, Abigail Thomas, Mark Doty, Edwidge Danticat, Jessica Handler, Richard Blanco, and others about how they tackle the most painful subjects:
MOORE: Many folks, thinking about a project like yours, would assemble an anthology, with various authors all writing essays on the theme. What inspired you to instead hop in your car and interview these writers?
BROOKS: It wasn't so much inspiration as it was desperation. I didn't start this project thinking I was writing a book. I started because I was paralyzed by the process of trying to tell my own hard story – so paralyzed that I wasn't necessarily convinced I'd survive. I used the excuse of a semester project for my MFA to get the ball rolling because I knew I needed to see for myself that, despite having written through their really hard stories, all of these writers were still breathing. I needed them to look me in the eye and tell me that I'd keep breathing, too. In reading their memoirs, I'd felt a personal connection to each one of them, and I hoped for that same intimacy in our conversations. Intuitively, I recognized that in order to foster that, it would necessitate face-to-face contact when possible. I wanted these writers to know I was sincere and to trust that I'd take good care of the generous words they offered me. Then, once I started meeting up with them in really cool and diverse environments, I was hooked. I just wanted to keep doing it. When I began to transcribe the interviews, I realized how much the atmosphere of the conversations played into the conversations themselves. Writing them in narrative scene versus Q&A just felt right and it gave a natural shape to the project that I knew I wanted to build on when I understood it was becoming a book.
MOORE: Your book is as much about writing and memory as it is about writing and trauma. Would you agree with that?
BROOKS: Absolutely. Whether our past is traumatic or not, writing about it still requires the writer to re-enter moments of lived experience and uncover the stories those moments hold. Andre Dubus III points out in our interview that "the opposite of the word remember is not forget, it's dismember. Chop, chop, chop. Remember means to put back together again." Putting our stories back together is the basic challenge of memoir writing. We have to pull out the memories and hold them close to the light so that we can see what's really present in those moments. That close examination can expose stories we didn't know we had and can also cause us to completely reevaluate the way we've always told ourselves the stories. There's an underlying responsibility to be as true to those stories as we can, even though memory is, by nature, subjective. Carrying that burden of responsibility can feel lonely at times. I wanted to hear about those lonely treks into memory from each one of these authors because then I might feel less lonely on my own trek.
MOORE: What surprised you in the answers you received?
BROOKS: I honestly believed at the beginning of my memoir journey that writing my story would enable me to let it go. Leave it behind me somewhere. I was secretly hoping these writers would confirm this belief. They didn't. Again and again, I heard that writing about the trauma doesn't erase the trauma. Marianne Leone confronted my misconception head on: "I think what you're hoping I'm going to tell you is that I had this great pain and that writing this book took the great pain away. I wish I could tell you that there's a lessening of the pain. It's just different." Mark Doty's words reiterated her perspective. "A rupture in your life of that kind remains a hole, a tear. Despite the fact that it doesn't repair, doesn't make the rupture in your life go away, it's a very satisfying thing to give shape to your story. To concretize it. To have something you can give people and say, 'I made this. This stands for me.'" And Richard Hoffman said, "You can never entirely redeem the experience. You can't make it not hurt anymore. But you can make it beautiful enough so that there's something to balance it in the other scale." I listened to them, and I began to understand that my story is not something I can let go. It's no longer something I even want to let go. I can, though, lighten the burden so it's not quite so heavy to carry and maybe carry it differently. Putting its weight into words on the page is helping me to do that.
MOORE: What advice do you, or the writers you interview in Writing Hard Stories, have for beginning writers who feel the trauma in their lives is too hard to write, too impossible to explain, or too difficult to explore?
BROOKS: First, be kind to yourselves. It is hard to write about the trauma in our lives. It does often feel impossible to explain or too difficult to explore. So, afford yourselves some grace when those feelings surface and try not to minimize them. But also take heart, as I did, from the insights of others who have journeyed through their stories (and cried and felt paralyzed and often side-swiped by grief) and have made it to the other side. As Kyoko Mori says, "These things already happened." We are survivors already because we are here now and the trauma is somewhere behind us. Find strength in that reality to take that first step into writing your stories. And, as Abigail Thomas told me when we spoke, "Don't forget, it's scarier not to do it than to do it."
Melanie Brooks is a freelance writer, college professor, and mother living in Nashua, New Hampshire with her husband, two children and yellow Lab. She received an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast program. She teaches at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, Merrimack College in Andover, Massachusetts, and Nashua Community College in New Hampshire. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Bustle, The Manifest-Station, Hippocampus, the Huffington Post, Modern Loss, Solstice Literary Magazine, the Recollectors, the Stonecoast Review and Word Riot. Her almost-completed memoir explores the lasting impact of living with the ten-year secret of her father's HIV disease before his death in 1995. Her writing is the vehicle through which she's learning to understand that impact.


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How did you spend this weekend of unseasonably cold weather? Potentially staying wrapped up indoors I bet! But those who did brave the conditions were rewared on Saturday as the Manchester Museum Youth Board and the Friends of Whitworth park organised a festival in Whitworth Park called the 'Wonderful Whitworth Wildlife Big Saturday'. This was in association with the city council; and involved everyone pulling together in trying to create a wildlife park that the whole community can enjoy. There was lots of ways to help out on the day; from helping to put up the tents; to encouraging the children to try and do some collecting. We had lots of experts on the day to help with our Bioblitz and collecting, including Dmitri– curator of arthropods at the museum, and Rachel curator of Botany. There were craft events with the Museum Youth Board; including making model bees and planting 'Turing's sunflowers'. There was also archaeology and local park history with the friends of Whitworth Park. We were participating through carrying out our own 'Bioblitz' in association with the Greater Manchester Local Records Centre. This was in addition to generally enthusing people about nature and providing information about how people can get involved in museum events. There were also other 'attractions' including an ice cream van (despite the cold!); a dj (who had to stop whilst a wedding took place in the gallery!) and a bee man and lady who entertained and informed people about the value of bees. The police and a fire engine turned up, but pleasingly no one hurt themselves on the bouncy castle; nor got stuck up a tree! Overall, it was a great day to pass on to the public some information about biodiversity; of the good work that is happening in the museum; and Dmitri managed to find some spiders that hadn't previously been recorded in the park. Plus everyone had a great deal of fun; so not a bad way to spend a windy, cold April afternoon after all!
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51 Lime Street - Lord Foster's ?425 million scheme received planning permission following a positive report by Cabe.
Stratford City - one of the biggest planning applications ever submitted in the UK. Plans for the 180-acre site include a 50-storey skyscraper and 4,500 new homes. No fewer than six Cabe commissioners have links with this scheme through Stanhope. It is still under consideration.
Selfridges redevelopment - a senior Cabe commissioner worked with Stanhope on the plans for the redesign of the Oxford Street landmark. The new owners have shelved the scheme.
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text: The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Shows Great Progress As Research and Development Continues Trevor Rush July 29, 2016 0 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Share on Reddit Share on Pinterest Share on Linkedin Share on Tumblr A U.S. Marine Corps F-35 Lightning II aircraft assigned to Naval Air Station Pensacola flies over the northwest coast of Florida May 15, 2013. In the fiscal year of 2011 the Department of Defense Financial Management Regulation (DoDFMR) wrote a document of appropriations for the Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation program (RDT&E) in order to secure a budget of $77.2 billion U.S. dollars. The budget would be used to provide necessary research and development into several programs vital to the continued technological advancements and national security that the United States Military is highly respected for. These programs included the in-development Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, a multi-role strategic stealth fighter intended to replace the esteemed Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor currently being used in the battle against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The DoDFMR's documents detailing the need for the budget appropriations provides clear insight into the Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation program and explains exactly how they intend to spend the budget in the form of six listed Budget Activities [pages 2-3]. Budget Activity 1, Basic Research. Basic research is systematic study directed toward greater knowledge or understanding of the fundamental aspects of phenomena and of observable facts without specific applications towards processes or products in mind. It includes all scientific study and experimentation directed toward increasing fundamental knowledge and understanding in those fields of the physical, engineering, environmental, and life sciences related to long-term national security needs. It is farsighted high payoff research that provides the basis for technological progress. Basic research may lead to: (a) subsequent applied research and advanced technology developments in Defense-related technologies, and (b) new and improved military functional capabilities in areas such as communications, detection, tracking, surveillance, propulsion, mobility, guidance and control, navigation, energy conversion, materials and structures, and personnel support. Program elements in this category involve pre-Milestone A efforts. There are six other Budget Activities that the Department of Defense detailed, Under Budget Activity 1 the areas in which they want to conduct research are all apart of development of the F-35; communications, detection, tracking, surveillance, propulsion, mobility, guidance and control, navigation, energy conversion, materials and structures, and personnel support. Meaning that the research being conducted on the F-35 is not only for the aircraft itself, but can be later be applied to other technologies in the future. Budget Activity 1 proves to hold great significance in the development of the F-35 as the bold listed desired improvements show up in scattered documentation related to the aircraft's systems developed in a joint effort between defense contractors and military of multiple governments. Northrop Gunman developed the Communications, Navigation, and Identification system on board the F-35. According to their datasheet, they have been developing "The Communications, Navigation and Identification (CNI) system, designed and developed exclusively by Northrop Grumman for the Lockheed Martin F-35, is the most advanced integrated avionics system ever engineered. seamless low-latency transition from one mission phase to the next. The current configuration consists of 10 channels with more than 40 waveforms and 30 conformal antennas, supports multilevel security and is JTRS compatible. Combat-Ready on Command Northrop Grumman's fully integrated, simultaneous CNI avionics suite includes such advanced capabilities as Ultra High Frequency (UHF)/Very High Frequency (VHF) transmit and receive, Identification Friend-or-Foe (IFF) transponder, Link 16, Joint Precision and Approach Landing System (JPALS), wireless communications and the cutting-edge Multifunction Advanced Data Link (MADL) for low-observable platforms." The datasheet also lightly mentions its capabilities in Identification and Surveillance. Pratt & Whitney designed the F-35's propulsion system and states on their website here: "The F-35 includes three variants to meet the unique needs of the three branches of the U.S. armed forces as well as the international participants—the Conventional Takeoff and Landing (CTOL), the Carrier Variant (CV) and the Short Takeoff and Vertical Landing" They also built the propulsion system for the F22 Raptor which has a great track record. The propulsion system categorically falls under mobility in Budget Activity 1. The Air Mobility Command wrote an article "Eglin units save thousands with F-35 innovations" which states: Technicians also designed and fabricated sets of stiffeners, throttle quadrant covers and a bullet-style axle thread protector, which keep parts in the jet protected during post-flight inspections and maintenance. In total, these parts saved the Air Force nearly $67,000 in manufacturer repairs as they are used throughout the F-35 enterprise." and "This is brand new stuff, no one's ever done this before — and you're helping write the technical data and troubleshooting procedures that hundreds of people down the road are going to be using," Miller said. "Something I do today — in two months — will end up at Luke (AFB in Arizona), and they'll be able to read exactly what I came up with (to) make the same job easier." which falls under the category of materials, structures, and personnel support listed in Budget Activity 1. As for the F-35 it is not currently finished yet and won't be until 2037, the Military is confident in the F-35 program after seeing benefits from their advanced design and simulation tools which managed to give the research team a much better design earlier than they expected. They knew that there would be economic risks and began low-rate production along side development of the F-35 in order to test the aircraft understanding that the need to rework the development of it would be modest. There is concurrency cost; the average time it takes to implement changes into product ranges from 18 – 24 months, meaning that the programs they use in development are also suffering from decomposition. The average amount spent on the F-35 is $11.4 billion per year, it's expected to be $55.1 billion by the end of its RDT&E cycle. The plane itself was only 30% complete when these issues came up conveniently in time for the discussion of the Military's budget; it might as well still have been in Alpha seeing as they expected a modest amount of issues during development. The majority of the funds not associated with RDT&E have not been provided yet and it won't affect the budget at this time. The complete cost of the plane will come in 2037 when the US plans to spend $319 billion on them, nearly 2 decades before this affects the Military in a major financial way. An AirForce document recently revealed in an article that the F-35 managed to out preform and shoot down 8 the F-15E's with no losses on their side; despite all the claims in 2015 that the F-35 was inferior, showing that progress has been made on the F-35, Source. The project itself is a long-term investment by the Military and joint companies; as the research goes forward we will continue to see major improvements for the F-35, but as of right now the jet remains decades away from completion.