ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
10.2
10.2
I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between word and image, as I fitfully attempt to move through the project that has defined the last several years of my life: a sprawling creative-nonfiction book based on an unpublished memoir by my great-grandmother. The book concerns my own female ancestors and the ideas I internalized from them about bodies and discipline and power and creativity and what it meant to be a Good (White) (Christian) Girl. I’ve explored all of this while experiencing infertility, pregnancy and the birth and infancy of my first child—deeply immersed in the messy, uncomfortable realm of the body, aware more than ever of the need to translate the body’s shadows and messy, fleshy truths into words. (But how?)
For reasons I didn’t fully understand, I found myself drawn for inspiration not only to creative nonfiction exploring similar themes (Maxine Hong Kingston, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maggie Nelson) but also, specifically, to hybrid visual-verbal memoirs (Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, Nora Krug’s Belonging, Anne Carson’s Nox, Anna Joy Springer’s The Vicious Red Relic, Love). In 2015, I took a comics class and started exploring my ancestors’ stories in this format—and was surprised to find that formal problems that had previously stymied me seemed easily resolved once I had the tools of literal image at my disposal. Visual metaphor became structurally load-bearing; more importantly, there was something about moving my hand across the page, in marking lines, that allowed the material itself to move—to unstick itself and begin to transcend the cramped conditions of its origin. It seemed so obvious, once I’d figured it out: a drawn line cannot leave the body behind. Whether it’s polished or raw, loopy or straight, a drawn line cannot ever be anything other than a mark made by a body. A graphic narrative is, among other things, a record of a body’s attempt to make sense of a story. As I continued to develop this work, I also paid more attention to my dreams and learned to practice a style of trancelike visualization called shamanic journeying. I didn’t do either of these things for the sake of my writing, but found that they made my writing deeper and richer; it was like I was developing fluency in the visual language of my subconscious, or my soul, or my body—or all of the above, intertwined and enmeshed. The part of me that imagined worlds into language was not, as I’d previously assumed, what my friend Jesslyn calls the “Little Brain” (the brain in the skull) but rather the Big Brain. The Big Brain is the body—the whole body, all the layers of it, including the energetic and emotional layers that are tricky to name. The Big Brain is a distinct yet porous entity, comprised of neuron and sinew and memory and intuition and what some of us might call spirit or soul. Tapping into the Big Brain and playing with its capacity for image, I saw how imagination is, or can be, a form of sight—a method of accessing truth. Images, conceived and stored in the body, want to emerge into art; it helps to think of art not as something we create, ex nihilo, but as something with its own independent life that comes through us. I’ve thought a lot about what this experience, and these ideas, mean for creative writing education. I’ve wondered: if I were in an MFA program now, what kind of education would actually support my process? Might all writers—not just ones working on self-consciously hybrid texts—benefit from pedagogy that takes the entirety of the Big Brain into account? How might writing education be transformed if it ventured beyond the confines of the Little Brain—if it explicitly refused to leave the rest of the body behind? I’m specifically interested in a pedagogy that includes intentional encounters with visuality, and consideration of what we might call the energetics of Images. These questions are relevant for writers and educators in all genres—but I’m particularly curious about how Image and process work in nonfiction. It takes a particular kind of writerly courage to tell the story of one’s own bodily experience; as Melissa Febos discusses in her book Body Work, such work is often dismissed as “navel-gazing,” perhaps because “the navel, as the locus of all this disdain, has something to do with its connection to birth, and body, and the female” (18). Writers need support for doing the kind of generative “navel-gazing” that Febos celebrates—an exploration of self on the page that opens up into realms beyond the self. Writing pedagogy that stays locked in the Little Brain, that limits its focus to what the Little Brain can verbally name and analyze, is unlikely to help any of us get there. What we need is attention to the phenomenology of the writing process, and curiosity about the relationship between image and word, between body and world.
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Amy Bonnaffons is the author of the story collection THE WRONG HEAVEN (2018) and the novel THE REGRETS (2020), both published by Little, Brown. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Essay Review, Kenyon Review, The Sun, and elsewhere, and has been read on NPR's This American Life. She holds a BA in Literature from Yale, an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, and a PhD in English and Women's Studies from the University of Georgia. Amy is a founding editor of 7x7.la, a literary journal devoted to collaborations between writers and visual artists. Born in New York City, she now lives in Athens, GA. She teaches at Oxford College of Emory University and offers fun, process-oriented online creative writing workshops. You can find her at amybonnaffons.com or @amybonnaffons on Instagram.
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