An Interview with Catherine Lucille Sharpe

April Murphy: I discovered your writing when "One Thousand Kittens" was a finalist for Cutbank's Montana Nonfiction Prize in 2011, and then went on the hunt for more essays from your unpublished collection Ambition Towards Love. What I found surprised me. 

Some essays of yours, like "Proxy" and "Somewhat Organic" are what I think about as being kind of traditional memoirs, but then there are essays like "Shades of Gray" and "Another Lesbian Space Fantasy" that seem to break out of old ways of thinking about the CNF genre - blending the imagination and a sense of magic without the same authentic and honest (and charming!) voice that characterizes your longer work. Can you talk a little bit about these different forms your writing takes? 

Catherine Lucille Sharpe: I am certain that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is important, for reader and writer alike.  It must be important; people get quite upset when they discover that the writer has cheated--stepping outside the bounds of "literal truth" to copulate with fiction.  But why don't people get upset when nonfiction parades around as fiction? I am guilty of this.

The Ambition Towards Love collection deliberately flows back and forth between fiction and nonfiction.  Whatever the genre, I continue to circle the same ole boring human stuff--love, loss, more love, more loss, lies, less love, gain, a little more loss, joy, heroism, duplicity, frailty, failure, growth, shrinkage, doubt, love again, loss again, truth, etc..  The usual.  

As a writer and self-avowed nutpouch, I've clearly been trying to sort one or two things out on the page--the mere two dimensions of the page seem so much more manageable than the infinite dimensions of my head and heart. 

I know that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is important to me because I take the trouble to know the difference line by line, paragraph by paragraph.  In my nonfiction, I might forsake a perfectly good "real" detail, simply because it does not add to the meaning of the story, or what I want to emphasize in the story.  And guess what!  I might include that same detail in a short fiction because it creates ambiguity--one of the best ways to make fiction seem just as true and confusing and unknowable as real life.  

The decision to approach an idea through fiction or nonfiction profoundly affects my writing process, even when there are thematic congruities.  I've noticed how the struggle to craft readable fiction has improved my nonfiction writing, in both predictable and surprising ways.

Predictably, being forced to dredge up a believable character is good practice for bringing your Great Aunt Susan to life for the nonfiction reader.  She's the one who always sucks the knuckle of her pinky finger so that she can twirl her wedding ring.  It doesn't fit on her ring finger anymore, and anyway Uncle Frank's dead, so it doesn't much matter where she wears it.  There's something pathetic and familial about all that saliva, and now the reader gets Aunt Susan, too.

Unpredictably for me, engaging in fiction demands that I suffer a vulnerability I don't necessarily feel in the process of nonfiction.  In fiction, my judgment must fade way, way back, allowing the story to emerge from its mysterious place, a place I hardly control.  It can be frankly terrifying to tap in to my subconscious--my id whines, my ego hits, and my superego makes me write the same sentence a hundred times on the chalkboard.  The reader, even as she nods her head vigorously, agreeing that she's reading fiction, is still coming to some conclusions about the writer.  She can't help it!  If the writer goes on and on about cup size, the reader is not going to mistake the writer for a leg man.  Or a leg woman.  (Boy, I can't make that sound right.)

When you read my fiction, don't you dare tell me I'm lonely, or wimpy, or flailing, or crazy-in-love with my offspring (thus doomed to suffer), or bitterly angry, or actually quite sad at times. 

When I am writing the truth, or at least my nonfiction version of the truth, it is so much easier to control what the reader thinks about me.  The persona is deliberate, calculated, securely insecure, always ready with a deflective quip.  The reader will certainly mistake my persona for me, and thus I am safe from scrutiny.  I believe that I am in charge.  Which is, of course, a different kind of fiction, but luckily, the kind I reserve for therapy sessions.

To my dismay, all of this precision about fiction and "truth" does not ultimately prove useful to me in the real world.  Some people tell the truth only to discover later that they lied.  Others lie only to discover the truth.  Some don't even bother to lie, they just keep their mouths shut, suddenly go on diets, go to work early, come home late, and wait to be caught.

Your resumé is one big piece of creative non-fiction.

My Amibition Towards Love collection approximates the experience of a whole story--one where the reader swims through truth, both designated and actual, as well as the lies we call fiction.  Nonetheless, like me, the reader still has to figure out what really happened.

But by the time the words hit the page, it’s all true.

AJM: Do you think that queer writers are obligated to write queer nonfiction? I suppose since nonfiction is about personal experience, the subject matter is inevitable is one is queer. The writer, then, gets to figure out how their queer identity is expressed what (if any) resonance it will give to their more 'universal' life story. 

One of the things that's refreshing about your writing is that the central struggle isn't your queerness - the narratives don't get their tension from a 'coming out' plot, nor do they have a political abrasiveness despite the fact that they are about gay marriage/divorce/reproduction - instead your work exists in a world where all of this is secondary to the love you have to give your daughter and yourself. 

CS: As far as I'm concerned, nobody is obligated to write anything. Well, unless contracts are involved. I do, however, this it's Super Nice when people write about stuff they really care about. The form - fiction or nonfiction - is less important than the question at stake for the writer. When I'm reading, I'm engaged in the investigation that the writer is making into the subject matter, so it better be a real question the writer has, with some juice.

I'm totally way flattered that you find my work refreshing in its absence of Queer Identity Conflict, which I'll just call QIC for our purposes. I haven't written much specifically about QUIC because it is not a painful enough question for me - plus I already know the answer. I'm special. 

When I say I'm special, what I really mean is that I'm like everyone else. That makes me special, because not so many people realize that. And I've decided to worry less about being original and worry more about being average. And writing about that instead.

I'm really, really, really, really, really interested in what it is like to be human. More precisely, what it is like for me to be human. My current line of inquiry is how I am like so many others, not how I feel apart from these other creatures.

AJM: It seems like you really have a focus when you're creating your persona. So, how do you navigate your real lesbian identity with your lesbian narrators? 

CS: Poorly. They are all mixed up inside. Therefore, I try not to think about it too much. The idea of a continuum of truth - from lies (fiction) to truth (nonfiction) - is inept at best. Truth is a blob, a DNA strand, a froth of delicate, short-lived moments. I've had perfectly good fiction turn into nonfiction on me more than once. On the page and in real life. Freaky.

AJM: As someone who didn't enter academia after completing your MFA, can you tell us a little bit about what your writing life is like now? 

CS: Oy.  I’m scattered and slow. I’m undisciplined about my creative work. I prefer black pens and write longhand in a college-ruled spiral notebook.  Usually early in the morning. Sometimes my daughter has to borrow my notebook for drawing or math or to teach me something by diagramming.  For now, I let her because she can’t really read cursive (this is de-emphasized in school now, did you know?). Also, I like what she inserts into my ridiculous musings.

For my paid work, I write all day (or at least sit in front of a computer all day as if I’m writing) for a corporate healthcare services entity. Sexy.  Adjectives are discouraged, as are complicated sentences that involve semi-colons; apparently these are too difficult to follow. It is a constant struggle to avoid being sucked into the undertow.  I have to remind myself that writing has saved my life—connecting and re-connecting to that source is an end in itself even when progress on new creative work is slowed down to a drag-drag-crawl-sob-crawl.

Sharpe wrote mostly for live performance in San Francisco before turning her attention to gay marriage, in vitro fertilization, gay divorce, parenting, dating, fiction, and nonfiction.  Her first collection of interlocking essays and fictions Ambition Towards Love hasn't been published, but you can read some excerpts in Opium Magazine, A cappella Zoo, Word Riot and CutBank, among others. A couple of pieces have even been included in anthologies and she almost won several prizes--one from Montana and one from North Carolina. If you would like to know if she actually ever wins a prize or publishes her collection, join her email blast list by sending a note to catherinelucillesharpe@gmail.com. Put "join email blast" in the subject line.

A Quick Chat with Abigail Thomas

*Abigail Thomas will give a reading at UNT on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012, at 8 p.m. in the Silver Eagle Suite.

ALR: I loved the brevity of sections in your first memoir, Safekeeping­—the way each section seemed to pop off the page, as well as the poetic feel of the book. The sections in your second memoir, A Three Dog Life, are longer, and your voice feels more resigned. I wonder if you can talk about the trade-offs and benefits of such short sections, and why you chose to write in longer sections in your second memoir. Also, were sections orchestrated to talk to each other?

AT: Safekeeping was written after the fact (if fact is the right word). The pieces came flying out of me after my second husband, Quin, died, and I realized, as I think I wrote, that I now had a past. Something was over, there was no changing or fixing it. I needed to face it. The pieces came willy-nilly, one often spawned the next. I think the first piece might have been apple cake, but I can't remember now. I had originally believed the book, if it were to be a book, would end with the death of my old friend, but realized after a few months that although he had died, my life continued without him, and I was left with the fallout and questions and grief and guilt and rubble I found around me. Plus I was alone with it. Quin was gone. This realization dictated that the thing (whatever it was) fall into three sections and three sections are often a very useful way to look to what I'm doing, to try to order it somehow. I don't know why.

Nothing is really chronological, past and present melt into each other, but when I was done I hoped what I'd made was the portrait, messy though it was, of a girl born in the nineteen-forties, who lived through the changes of her times. It is partly as an explanation to my children, and certainly as an apology to what happened to their lives, but that wasn't all of it either. I needed to make sense of it for myself. I also needed to find a way to begin to forgive myself. The pieces were moments I vividly remembered, and writing them I hoped would finally make some kind of sense. Sort of like a constellation. The book was meant also to be an apology, in the form of an explanation, of what had made me who I was, and who I had failed to be, who I was still becoming.

A Three Dog Life was written as it happened. There was no looking back, it was all happening as I wrote it, although it took six years to write. The experience was so tragic, and so precious, and parts of it so mysterious, I didn't want to lose any of it to imperfect memory. It is far more chronological than Safekeeping, given I was describing, recording, events as they occurred. The business of guilt was huge, I had to face that as I was in the midst of it, very difficult. It was also extremely painful in Safekeeping, especially when I wrote about my son, Ralph.

Also the endings were just gifts. The last bit of A Three Dog Life, when Rich collapses time into a happy year, was a conversation I wrote down verbatim, and realized that was where I wanted to end the book. The last piece I wrote for that book, is the opening chapter. You never know.

As far as orchestrated to talk to each other, that wasn't a conscious thing. If they do, great.

ALR: I am also drawn to the ambiguity, the subtlety, in Safekeeping. Some sections veer off into strangeness or mystery, like a poem. Other sections (I’m thinking of your father swimming with a school of bluefish) ask the reader: What is this? Where does it fit? And I love that you don’t feel the need to answer these questions, or edit out memories for seeming irrelevance. I wonder what the criteria is for what material stays and goes.

AT: There is not much point to memoir if you don't surprise yourself somewhere along the way, often banging up against material you'd rather skirt. No skirting allowed. You can't really fool yourself/ it saps all your energy.  If that's what you're after, a pretty picture with angel wings and fairy dust all over you, or a picture in which you were a victim, go mow the lawn.

Of course I don't mean YOU.

As for what I put in and what I leave out, and don't explain, that is entirely a question of taste. If it interests me, it goes in. If it makes me feel whole, it goes in. Bluefish and Daddy? It was who he was. As good an example as I had.

ALR: Follow-up question: I am curious about the function of seemingly ambiguous or irrelevant details/memories. In what ways do such details help readers experience what you want them to experience? How do they work the reader’s mind? Another way to think about this question: Many sections of your books give us the whole memory, rather than only the logically relevant part (e.g. most of the section “Watching Her Father Eat Cake” details you making cake, and only at the end do we see the brief interaction with your father). Why is this?

AT: Cake. I wanted to write about making cake because it was the high point of my day back then. All that delicious batter! The miracle of cake! Making a cake! It was only after that I realized the pleasure of watching my father eat it that was the end result. (The cakes were terrible.) I don't know about [the effect of such a section] on the reader, nor am I sure, in the process of writing, that I give a shit.

ALR: Safekeeping uses first, second, and third person. Did the sections just come out this way, or was this a calculated move? It seems that the intimacy of second person is balanced out by the distanced third-person sections, and this exchange gives the narrative a different feel than one written only in first person. The variety allows us to distinguish shades that would otherwise be overlaid. I wonder if you might speak to this point—the benefits and trade-offs of using multiple voices, how you see these voices working in your book, etc.

AT: The option of first and third persons wasn't a conscious choice…to write certain things in first person made me sound either saint-like or a victim. I also wanted to see myself from time to time through what I imagined my children’s eyes had been. Some pieces were written over and over both ways to figure out how to get at what I wanted. I chose the voice that seemed to be the most honest. The third person was also necessary when I had no connection anymore to the girl I'd been. I knew who she was, but she was no familiar or part of me. I wish I had [a more] intelligent answer about using first second and third persons. Mostly it just felt right.

My memory is poor for interstitial material, long years went by with only a few vivid memories, but  those were the ones I wrote. The piece that took me longest, almost as long as the whole book, was the last one about my daughter Sarah, and the birth of her daughter Abigail. Once that first bath happened, I knew I wanted to end there, but it took months and months and months to get it right. It's helpful when you discover where you want to end, then all you have to do, besides write it, is earn it.

ALR: How do you see the title “Safekeeping” (and the section by the same name) instructing the reader on how to read the book? How did you decide on this title?

AT: My editor named the book "Safekeeping." I wanted to call it "Short Controlled Bursts" and had a little semi-military paragraph to go with it, which I've since lost. I love the title now.

ALR: On your website, you also describe painting: “I’ve been trying to make an ocean. For some reason it never works. So I make another forest which also doesn’t work, but I don’t give up on forests, so I scrape and add various blues and greens to make more trees, but it’s still not to my liking. Some days are like this. I do a little halfhearted scraping, turn it over, and presto, there is the ocean, beautiful, many colors blue, deep water, no sky. I love the way this crazy shit works. When you’ve given up, when you least expect it there it is.” Does writing (or the pursuit of truth) work like this? Do you know where you’re going when you sit down to write? What happens if when you least expect it, it is not there?

AT: I don't know where I'm going when I sit down to write. I think I know where I'm going, but often end up elsewhere, which is the thrill of it. It's just much easier to see with the paintings.

When you're writing and expect it to be there but it isn't, you take a nap. Naps are key. All kinds of stuff swims to the surface. And if it doesn't, you haven't beaten your head against a wall, although that may come next. What I try to do is make something else. A painting. A cake. A caramel sauce, something humbly creative so your mind can wander (and you can eat it at the end). But too often you have to wait years to find what you're looking for, usually when you've stopped looking.

ALR: “I think that’s what we’re all after, truth, although I’d never have said such a thing when I was young.” You say this on your website. So is this a guiding concept in your writing process? Do you use “truth” in the editing/revising process as a filter of sorts? What does “truth” look like? And why is it that you wouldn’t have said such a thing as a youth?

AT: I never talked about big concepts when I was young. Truth? Who was I to talk about truth? What did I know about anything? And it's truth in terms of honesty, I guess, that I really mean. There's no such thing as Truth, although there's good and evil, but there's scouring your dark places for the honesty you'd perhaps rather avoid. That's personal truth. Not facts, of course, that's a whole different category. We're stuck with the memories we've got, they are stored any which way, but that's what's made us who we are, don't you think? I don't use truth for much, no. When I'm stuck, I use grace as a filter. What awful means is sometimes the deliverer of grace? A little Flannery O'Connor in there, I think.

ALR: Your writing is such a pleasure to be with. Thank you for your contributions, and thank you for your thoughts here.

AT: These are marvelous questions. Thank you. If you need more, please ask me. I wrote this very quickly, as I have hideous asthmatic bronchitis, and I'm flying high on prednisone. But your intelligent questions make me look forward even more to coming down to Texas, despite which way it might go.

About the Author (from www.abigailthomas.net): Abigail Thomas, the daughter of renowned science writer Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell), is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve. Her academic education stopped when, pregnant with her oldest daughter, she was asked to leave Bryn Mawr during her first year. She’s lived most of her life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and was for a time a book editor and for another time a book agent. Then she started writing for publication. Her memoir, A Three Dog Life, was named one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. She is also author of Safekeeping, a memoir, and Thinking About Memoir.

An Interview with Suzanne Paola (Susanne Antonetta)

April Murphy: I recently read the craft book Tell It Slant, which you wrote with Brenda Miller. The book is a warm welcome for an inexperienced writer - and a handy guide for demystifying particulars of nonfiction for experienced writers. Because it reached these different audiences so well, I was wondering if you had any trouble with Tell It Slant, or with your other work, of deciding who your "ideal audience" is?

Suzanna Paola: First of all, thank you for your warm words about Tell It Slant, which is currently out in its second edition. Brenda and I had a lot of fun, and achieved a lot of insights, putting the book together, first in the initial edition, which we undertook when we barely knew each other, and in the second, when we had become—partly through the writing process—very close friends. In many ways the book has mapped our friendship, so it’s very special to me.

I think the question of audience is a tricky one, one that each particular work evolves to answer in its own way. I should mention here that I write a great deal of my prose under the name Susanne Antonetta—it is a family name, of a forgotten great-grandmother in my family; I love trying to bring this lost woman back to life by using her name. When I wrote Tell It Slant—with Brenda—I was writing, however consciously at the time, for my students. I pulled out the questions they had asked me, the discussions that helped them make some kind of sense of their struggles with the literature of reality, the prompts I had used that brought out their best selves as writers, helped them evade those awful internal censors and write strong, breathing, authentic stories.  Many times I would sit down with pages of class notes—I am a fanatical class preparer—and my notes to myself on what I wished I said, and write that book.

My other books are more complicated. I think I partly wrote Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, a book that engages very directly with environmental contamination in several counties in New Jersey, for the people in those communities, though I did not think I would reach them, and that audience was kind of a hazy ideal; I also wrote for the lost women like the woman Antonetta whose name I tried to infuse with life; and for, perhaps more than anything, my son. It was a story of place and family, of a toxicity he has not had to live, yet one that has directed the course of his life. To be honest, when I first worked on that book, I thought no one but myself would ever read it. I was a poet. I came across stories that would not fit into poems anymore—stories of chemicals dumped into the ground, of distorted bodies—but the idea of a memoir told through the environment felt so different  then that I worked on Body Toxic and threw the writing I printed out into a drawer, thinking it would stay there. So I wrote for particular people but I also wrote for that drawer. I wrote more bravely than I would have otherwise, maybe, in my confidence that no one would ever read the book!

I believe as writers grow and evolve their sense of audience collapses, growing smaller and smaller. This may sound odd but I think it’s true. At first you imagine everyone you know reading your books. Your community, everyone you run across in the elevators at the AWP conference! That changes. When I studied with poet Charles Wright, he said he had one ideal reader—a nun he had met at one of his readings—and he wrote for her, and increasingly, for himself. I think I write to make sense of what I have lived and to know what I think; if I don’t write it, my life will be only reactive, unexamined.  In that sense I suppose I write for myself. Increasingly I find myself writing for my son.  There is so much about our lives we cannot tell our children; I feel as if I am leaving him a way of understanding his life, a series of answers to questions he may never otherwise know he needs to ask.

AJM: That's such great advice - that you should let your audience get smaller. I often find myself paralyzed by trying to speak to everybody. Sometimes I think the hardest part about creative nonfiction is being unafraid. You speak about this in Tell It Slant, where you say " The narrating ‘I,’ the persona you create, is the one who has the wherewithal to rescue experience from chaos and turn it into art” (77).  Do you have any other tips for helping the ‘I’ in your writing be more authoritative than your real life self - or overcoming authorial shyness?  

 SP: Yes, overcoming that shyness can be very hard in nonfiction! I find, having very beginning students at times, along with many writer friends who have been writing a long time and whose drafts I read, that it’s the beginning students who tend to say, even during an in-class writing, “But what would my [mother, kid, spouse, etc.] think of this? How could I publish it?” And then they get stymied, just doing that impromptu freewrite. The truth is, we write what needs to be written, what announces itself and pounds on the door and won’t go away or take no for an answer. Beyond attending to that urgency, when the writing is done, we have some choices to make. We can publish now, wait to publish, even choose not to publish or publish in a contained, local way.

First you do the writing you need to do—that pounding on the door is going to give you a terrible headache if you don’t. Tell yourself the other decisions about exposure will come down the road, and you have a variety of strategies for dealing with those questions. I tell writers this when I teach, and I find they often discover, when they have a good working draft, that they’re not so worried about what so-and-so will think. The story has more compassion and nuance to it than they expected it would.

Nonfiction writers pretty much have to, at some point, decide where their own particular lines will be drawn.  I’m very protective of my husband and son, for instance. That’s my decision. But I feel strongly we have only one life we’re given, and we are entitled as writers to make sense of it and have access to it. Yes, it has other people in it, and we need to approach them with an attitude of humility and compassion. As long as we do that, we will tend to perform as ethical writers. Note that ethics does not mean covering up for others, or deciding you accept family guidelines—all families have them—for not “telling.” These participations in cover-ups are things no one has a right to expect you to do.

AJM: Another one of the moments in Tell It Slant that I found most helpful was when you explained:

“Both photography and creative nonfiction operate under the ‘sign of the real’ (a phrase coined by literary theorist Hayden White); both operate as though the medium itself were transparent ... A good photograph will mirror the inner vision of the photographer, just as the good essay will reflect the unique sensibility of the writer, whether or not that writer focuses on material interior to the self" (76).

The analogy of a nonfiction writer as photographer is also used by Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. To paraphrase, Dillard says that one can learn to see in a way that they become a camera, letting the moment leave impressions on them instead of film. I'm curious about what connections you think a nonfiction narrator has with visual artists, if any?

SP: I think we and the photographers and visual artists are all after the same thing. Words are ultimately a descriptive but also a plastic medium; we apprehend them through their appearance on the page, through their rhythms and their hardnesses and softnesses and what they make our palates do. Writing is both a visual medium, a communicative one, and a performance.  The best writing leads us through the experience of the moment, brands us with it, as if it gives us a memory—clear and concrete—that never existed before but takes its place among the mental imagery of our most true experiences. Its sounds should cause scenes to appear. I often cite memory research; if you try to implant a memory with a vague description it won’t work, but if you give enough concrete detail—do you remember being the poor governess at the house with the thorn trees and the cries of despair from the top floor—you achieve a blurring between real memory and the relived literary experience, Jane Eyre, as real as the day you fell off your bicycle in front of your best friend in the second grade. 

AJM: The university you teach at, Western Washington University, publishes Bellingham Review and sponsors the Annie Dillard prize for nonfiction. These things are kind of a big deal in the CNF world, what journals do you recommend creative nonfiction writers read or publish in?

SP: I have my favorites among magazines and journals, but I think what’s most important is to read widely and read a lot, and support literary publishing. We always have subscriptions we rotate among different publications in my household, to help everybody stay afloat.  There are very different things happening with creative nonfiction between say, Image and Orion and Seneca Review, all of which are journals I love. So I say, read, and also support.

AJM: I have a question - though I'm not quite sure how to ask it - but I'm curious to hear your point of view on anyway. There seem to be a lot of CNF writers who are (or were) poets. You, Thomas Lynch, Annie Dillard - even Wistlawa Szymborska published a book of micro-essays - and I have a gut feeling that there's got to be something to that. I don't know what it is, though. So I don't really know how to ask about it. Is it imagery? Something similar in perspective? I don't write poetry, so I can't speak from personal experience, but I'm very curious.

SP: It is true there are quite a few nonfiction writers who began life as poets, but it's equally true that there are a great number who began life as fiction writers: David Shields, Tobias Wolff, Kathryn Harrison, to name just a few. It seems that for many writers of nonfiction, another genre comes first. Of course, creative nonfiction, though it's been done forever in many forms, is experiencing a new explosion of interest along with a spasm of formal experimentation, and many of us coming to it in the past decade--or even two--simply did not have it as an option in our literary education. We neither studied the essay, nor read it, much, and may not have thought of it as a genre until discovering it later on.

That's one piece of the answer, the simpler piece. A more complex response I think has to do with a person's evolution as a writer. If you think about the movements of a human life, it makes sense we would enter the artistic arena relying more heavily on the tool of imagination for the scenes, dialogues, characters we want to inhabit. Our life experience is limited, and it's still raw. I don't know that, to use one example, many of us understand what is unique, tragic, comic, joyful, etc. in our own lives until we start nudging middle age. After a while--whether we're writers or not--we begin the job of mentally processing our own experiences, whether it's our travels, our childhoods, our parenting, whatever. We realize gradually who we are and who we've been in relation to the world. No one's born knowing that; I've had students who failed to see anything interesting in having grown up on a commune, related to one of the Watergate burglars, or, rather breathtakingly, living inside the Statue of Liberty with a park ranger parent.  This isn't to suggest all nonfiction is memoir, simply that the personal lens of nonfiction has to involve a sophisticated understanding of who's doing the looking. This realization, how I am history writ small, a microcosm of larger forces, and I am culturally shaped, is perhaps an older person's insight. Not that some of us don't write great nonfiction out of the starting gate, but I think it's understandable that it might take more time.

AJM: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that's on your mind?

SP: I did a great deal of editing in this past year. I edited a special folio for Drunken Boat, read for the Pushcart prizes, and coedited a special issue of Brevity, along with Barrie Jean Borich and Joy Castro. I am pretty hands-on with material I publish; I like to edit, thinking of it as coaching a piece to that final level of excellence. It’s a lot of work! But I am committed to doing editing work, and to working with VIDA, the grassroots, feminist organization of women in the literary arts. I believe we as artists have an obligation to the larger literary world. I always encourage writers working with me to define themselves in a way that is broader than just “writer”; we are all people of letters, members of the literary community.

Think about ways you can expand the literary world: beyond hoping to be published, what opportunities can you create for other writers? Help found a journal, start a reading series? It is essential that all of us writers think of ourselves as people who also create spaces for others to participate in the world of letters. Otherwise, in a pinched economy with limited room for literature, this little boat is going to run out of room.

Suzanne Paola (Susanne Antonetta)’s most recent book, Inventing Family, a memoir and study of adoption, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Awards for her poetry and prose include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, a Library Journal Best Science book of the year, a Lenore Marshall Award finalist, a Pushcart prize, and others. She is also coauthor of Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Orion, Seneca Review and many anthologies, including Short Takes and Lyric Postmodernisms. She is the chair of the nonfiction Genre Action Committee for VIDA, the feminist organization of women in the literary arts. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her husband and son.

Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan on memoir

On Saturday, November 5th, Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan gave a reading and Q&A at UNT. Fawzia was in Denton to give a paper at UNT’s South Asia Peace Conference. She is a University Distinguished Professor of English and the Director of Women and Gender Studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She has published poetry, plays, and books of literary and cultural criticism. Her memoir Lahore with Love Growing up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style was originally published by Syracuse University Press in 2010, and received rave reviews from both magazines and notable individuals such as Nawal el Saadawi, Bapsi Sidhwa, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Mandy Van Deven. Syracuse University Press dropped the book after a “character” threatened a lawsuit that proved inadmissible. But despite this attempted censorship—which Fawzia details on her website and in an appendix to the new edition of her book—her memoir remains in print with Insanity Ink Publications.

Fawzia’s memoir is the story of the past fifty years of Pakistan’s political, cultural, and social transformations. The book is both global and local, personal and political, and, as Carole Stone states in her introduction, it is “both a paean and rebuke to Pakistan, the country of Fawzia’s birth. It is a witness to violence against women, strictures of a patriarchal society, and narrow-minded religion, and dictorial government.” The Pakistan that Fawzia and her girlfriends inhabit is a country continually in flux, struggling to define itself in and against the increasingly homogenizing forces of globalization. The hopes, fears, triumphs, and shifting inter-relationships of this close group of female friends reveals, as Fawzia detailed in an interview, both “nostalgia for that vanished secular past and promise of Pakistan” as well as an acknowledgement of the reality of the country’s present. Yet Fawzia’s life as an international literary figure and activist diverges from the lives of her girlfriends who have remained in Pakistan, causing her to feel that she is constantly on “that rusty see-saw” remembered from childhood, a traveler both at home and abroad.

Fawzia is not the first writer to face controversy in telling the story of her life. Memoir is a genre often fraught with conflicting demands: to tell the truth, but to also acknowledge that memory can never be entirely truthful. To depict, then, these conflicting truths of memory in the most honest manner, but to also render the events of the past in a meaningful way. To give “reality” an unreal and artificial narrative structure necessarily means foregrounding some truths and letting others fall by the wayside.

In the Q&A after the lively reading which included singing, a theatrical dialogue, and “love” poetry, Fawzia discussed the role of the writer in composing memoir, stating that she was surprised and shocked that the offended character protested her depiction in the book—a depiction that Fawzia herself thought was more praise than condemnation. Many of the female characters in Lahore with Love lead lives circumscribed by oppression, struggling to exist in a patriarchal society that places little value in female narratives and voices. Madina, the offended character in what Fawzia calls “the offending chapter,” stands out for being one of the few women in the book who are able to speak without being silenced. Physically and psychologically, Madina stands out, speaks out, and carves a place for herself in the world. Controlling her public image—an image evidently upset by Fawzia’s memoir, although Fawzia told us that no one had been able to identify her character’s real-life counterpart before the scandal—seems in character with the orchestrated dramatizations that Fawzia depicts in the book. But the attempt to squelch Fawzia’s voice—her memoir—does not.

In some respects, all press is good press, and Fawzia’s memoir is now more well-known than ever. Dr. Masood Raja, a professor at UNT and editor and founder of Pakistaniaat, A Journal of Pakistan Studies, published a cluster on Lahore with Love last summer, showcasing an outpouring of support for the book. You can purchase the book directly here or on amazon.com.