In Search of Delight (à la Ross Gay) at the Art Museum:
A Writing Exercise with Pen in Hand
Abby Manzella
11.1
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Each day when I walk to campus the fox squirrels greet me. They are possessive of the nuts in their clutches with a confidence and determination that my 9 a.m. self lacks. I laugh and tell them out loud that I have no intention of trying to steal their acorns. As a born-and-bred East Coaster used to grey squirrels, their Midwestern fur mixed with red warms me. Seeing these rambunctious, we-rule-the-school squirrels is delightful!
I started expressing such moments of pleasure after I began teaching Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights to my Introduction to Genre: Nonfiction students at Truman State University, a small public university in northern Missouri. The course is filled with memoir, essays, and hybrid forms from before Montaigne (with authors like Seneca and Shōnagon) to the present. It is a mid-level course open to all students but required for creative writing majors; the purpose of the class is to ensure that our undergraduate creative writers are “reading as writers.” Together we search for craft within a variety of texts and respond with critical analysis. But since the goal is to help them as writers and since the students yearn to emulate some of the approaches they see, I also build in hands-on tasks to apply what they’ve learned. That’s where Gay comes in. Click here to continue reading. |
Grocery Shopping with Leonardo DiCaprio:
On Time, Routines, & Writing
Peter Wayne Moe
11.1
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I find Steinbeck fascinating for his many accounts of the daily rituals of a writer. In a series of letters he wrote to his editor while drafting East of Eden, Steinbeck reveals he begins each day by sharpening at least 60 pencils (36). He’s smitten by the Blackwing––“they really glide over the paper” (34)––so I’ve got eight Blackwings at my side now. And though Matthew Kirschenbaum calls Microsoft Word the No. 2 pencil of the digital age” (237), when writing longhand Stephen King prefers a Waterman fountain pen, the world’s finest word processor” (Dreamcatcher 868).
King writes 2,000 words a day. Anne Lamott: 300. John Krakauer: 600-700. King devotes his mornings to writing, his afternoons to reading, and the evenings to the Red Sox. Journalist Jane Kramer begins her day with juice, coffee, the crossword, and a dog walk before settling in to write. Toni Morrison wrote late into the night, after she put her kids to sleep; later in her career, she wrote in the early morning, watching the sun rise. Such accounts are readily available in books like Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals, which gathers the working routines of some 160 writers, composers, architects, and other artists. The New York Times runs a regular column on how various people spend their Sundays. In 1985, Tom Waldrep edited a collection of essays, Writers on Writing, wherein 31 college writing teachers detail their writing routines. (In 2018, Christine Tulley published a follow up, How Writing Faculty Write.) In an afterword to Waldrep’s collection, Michael Ray Taylor speaks to the appeal of these accounts of how writers spend time. He’s talking about Waldrep’s book, but his comments apply to all those collections of daily routines listed above: "The essayists show themselves as real people who ate and slept and taught and watched TV, who had to sit down and struggle with writing like the rest of us" (349-50). Click here to continue reading. |
The Case for Situating Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative
in the CNF Classroom and Canon
Gwen Niekamp
11.1
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Equiano’s Narrative problematizes genre by synthesizing conventions from across a spectrum of literary traditions and breaking from the bounds of others. Carretta, in a webinar for the National Humanities Center, lists just a few of the (sub)genres which resonate with Equiano’s work: “His Interesting Narrative is a spiritual autobiography, captivity narrative, travel book, adventure tale, slavery narrative, economic treatise, apologia, argument against the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, and perhaps in part historical fiction” (“Teaching the Slave Narrative”). While this oft-cited quote gestures to the need for an anthology about Equiano and genre, I’d like to home in on a few of the (sub)genres Carretta lists, including those of the slave and captivity narratives, which represent how Equiano simultaneously flirts with and rejects traditional nonfictional (sub)generic conventions.
To consider Equiano’s work against the conventions of the slave narrative, I should turn to James Olney, a major figure in life writing and autobiographical studies. His 1984 article for Callaloo, “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” outlines six conventions of the slave narrative genre: 1. a title page with an engraved portrait, 2. an authorship claim, 3. testimonials, 4. a poetic epigraph, 5. a narrative beginning with the assertion “I was born...” and 6. an appendix of abolitionist documents. Relying on Frederick Douglass’s autobiography as his main example, Olney then traces the evolution of these genre conventions to contemporary examples of historical fiction. While Olney doesn’t specifically cite Equiano, his article is one of the preeminent works that recognizes the slave narrative as its own genre, a (sub)genre of nonfiction. Click here to continue reading. |