Give Them Space: Memoir as a Site for Processing Readers' Grief
Ashley Anderson
10.1
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Even though doing this kind of grief work does not make the grief completely dissipate – because grief does not truly ever disappear – it does enable readers to gain confidence in themselves and in their ability to handle the difficulties that life throws everyone’s way. This boost in confidence allows us to feel that our lives are coherent instead of chaotic, that there is some way to make sense of what is beyond our control (Shafer 39). Amidst the global events of the past few years, being alive has felt incredibly chaotic, which makes the ability to make coherence out of chaos even more important as we navigate the ongoing aftermath of a time in which death is hypervisible and the conversations around how we approached this new cause of death became more and more disconcerting. By offering memoir as a space of engagement that allows readers to do the work of grieving the writer/departed, readers are not only able to make sense of what has happened in the world of the memoir, but to also translate that coherence to the world in which we continue to live. Click here to continue reading.
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Hervey Allen’s Toward the Flame, Illustration, and the
Legacy of Collective Memory of the First World War
Anne Garwig
10.1
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Toward the Flame’s tone and perspective, conscientiously straightforward with limited commentary either jingoistic or condemnatory and without a traditional narrative arc, leaves the first edition of the book a psychological artifact of the author rather than a commemorative object designed to reach out with a distinct position for readers or an exploitation of the horrors of war. The addition of Lyle Justis’s illustrations gives the book more appeal to readers beyond those who served in the conflict and transforms the book into a commemorative object of the war like those discussed in Steven Trout’s On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919-1941. The transformation is artistically similar to that which has become extraordinarily popular today in the graphic memoir; the personal narrative is transformed into something widely relatable via visual reference points. Click here to continue reading.
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All We Do Not Say: The Art of Leaving Out
Marya Hornbacher
10.1
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This is the point: somewhere along the line I seem to have made a decision about what was worth keeping and what was not; I seem to have developed some kind of coherent internal logic, a guiding principle, that allows me to know where the 1923 cloth-bound edition of Faust is at any given time, and also frees me up to neither know nor really care what ever became of husband number 2. Joan Didion wrote, "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means." The act of writing itself, of plucking a word, and then another word, out of the brackish marsh of my own head, and setting them down, and peering at them closely to see what meanings can be found or made by arranging them this way or that, is only the generative stage; it’s messy, it’s covered with wet, it tracks sand into the house and trails sea slime and strands of kelp. But that isn’t even where we begin; we begin in a place of unknowing, a place that is almost primal, certainly pre-verbal, prior to language and possibly prior to thought. We don’t set out with something to say but with a sense that something could be said, if we could just catch the scent of it, the shape of it, the faint strain of its sound; we begin without knowledge or even expectation of what the outcome will be. Click here to continue reading.
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Conveying the Grief Experience:
Joan Didion’s Use of Lists in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights
Kathryn Jones
10.1
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In The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Joan Didion uses lists to convey to the reader her personal experience of grief due to death. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion writes of the sudden and unexpected death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the hospitalization of her daughter, Quintana Roo. With the attention to detail for which she is known, Didion describes her experience of the nine months following John’s death as a period of magical thinking when she imagines he might still live while also grieving his loss. She wrote the first four lines the day or two after his death, returned to the work nine months later, and completed the book just a year after his death. Throughout much of this same period, her daughter was also critically ill. Blue Nights, written several years later when Didion was 75, not only tells the story of her daughter's death but widens the circle to include her grief around her aging, increased frailty, and inability to function as she once did. By using various types of lists, Didion does all the above as she reflects on the stages of grief she experiences, including denial, anger, avoidance, and more. She also uses lists to paint a picture of her husband and daughter, who have both died; reveal both her trustworthiness as narrator and herself as unhinged and delusional; attempt to take control as well as expose her loss of control; and examine the idea of the ordinary moment disrupted by the extraordinary event. Click here to continue reading.
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How to Write Well About Death
Erin Fogarty Owen
10.1
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Human nature celebrates good things with attention, like awards, news articles, journal articles, in-depth conversations, social media posts. The converse is true as well: We don’t typically like to talk about the bad things, the sad parts of life. We know from the Chapman University’s Fear Survey that Americans are very scared of dying and illness. We learn from Yuknavich’s writing that leaning into difficult topics – especially when they are universal – can be healing and comforting. This essay explores the craft of writing well about death; introduces the CPR Method; identifies disrupters to writing well about death; defines the death ecosystem, death factors, and the survivor’s pathway spectrum that will influence how you approach writing; the missing thematic analysis of The Chronology of Water; and craft analysis of The Chronology of Water’s using the CPR Method. The goal of this discussion is to encourage better definition of how to write well about death and to expand writing and analysis to broaden acceptance of death writing in creative nonfiction to help push the doors behind us open even further. Click here to continue reading.
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