Annie Penfield, "Moving Towards What is Alive: The Power of the Sentence to Transform"

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
4.2

Annie Penfield

Moving Towards What is Alive:
The Power of the Sentence to Transform

Each time a protagonist leaps a plane to an ashram in India or jumps into an affair, I lose a little faith in our ability to transform within the lives we live. Such a radical departure seems to not only forsake what is good within our lives but seems perhaps to be a shortcut to change. And not very realistic: Who has time, or money, for the plane ride, for a six-month retreat? Who even has the luxury to lay on the floor immobile in the midst of family and jobs? How then do I shift the story of my life? How do I transform within the life I am living? Slowly: transformation is organic, debated, trial and error—built on small movements, on the sentences of our lives—to a lasting change. The motivation to move to what makes us feel alive prompts different choices: we invert the simple structures of our lives to pursue change. Small actions akin to sentences reveal subtle differences in our perceptions and understanding, expanding our range to feel. A radical point of departure lacks a stable base for change, the ending thus unearned, and so the change desired not lasting. The sentence is the agent of change, not some outside force, but words sifted and honed to precise meaning, crafting incremental shifts to an enduring change.

A work of nonfiction can pivot on a single idea, formed in a single sentence that ushers in the narrator’s moment of choice. A sentence binds us to this moment of revelation, striking a chord that sings because it builds on the entire discovery, a melody laid bare in the work. Words empower the journey and animate the struggle. Powerful sentences placed throughout the work mimic the process of transformation: we gather a change bit by bit, assimilating moments to understanding. Or sometimes we have an understanding at the start of the work and we seek to know if it is true: we quest. A sentence holds within a power greater than itself, embodying hints of the larger journey, building a resonance that rises to the moment of discovery. By examining the nonfiction of several authors, I will look at the role of the single sentence within the context of the larger work. Change may strike in a moment, like an epiphany, but transformation evolves from the pieces of understanding, the sentences, that meld to the larger realization.

SENTENCE: The Sentence Itself

“Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes.”

In the first paragraph of her essay “On Self-Respect,” Joan Didion establishes her conflict. She shows tension between an awkward (“embarrassing”) past and a present more marvelous with understanding (“clarity”) and self-knowledge. She sets the reader on the course to want to understand what she has learned about herself and of course that the past moment was embarrassing and unstable is enticing, how more interesting to learn about human nature by our frailty and flaws. By lying bare her truth immediately and in this way, Didion engages the reader, establishing a shared ground. Vulnerability and self-awareness grip us. In the Art of Time in Memoir, Sven Birkerts tells us that “the conversion of private into public by the way of a narrative” engages the reader, and “assumes a shared ground” by “universalizing the specific” (23) which Didion achieves immediately in her first paragraph.

The essay takes us on Didion’s quest to understand the value of self-respect. Opening with her own discovery that the “lights will not always turn green for [her]” (143), she proposes respect comes from not merely experience but the willingness to accept the consequences, “to learn the courage of …mistakes. To know the price of things”(145). She draws on a few moments of history—Napoleon at Waterloo, Helen Keller, twelve-year-old California settler Narcissa Cornwall remarking on an Indian invasion—to show that anything worth having has a price. A meditation on respect, the essay uses little personal experience and no scene to show this journey. Her only personal involvement in this discussion comes in the first paragraph of the essay, in the sentence that launches the quest. The journey begins in this moment: “Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes” (142).

Although: an adverb. This choice of word sets us up for a contradiction, establishing tension, conflict ahead.
Now: time marker we are in a place of reflection and a matured narrator.
Some years later: Indicates that time has passed and therefore she must have detachment and this establishes her as reliable from her voice of experience.
I: all those time markers directed at her, the subject: I.
Marvel: present tense indicates the voice of experience reflecting back on an action to be revealed which presents suspense. Word choice: marvel tells it is a mystery, inspires awe, and therefore we enter a mystical realm involving her belief system. This alerts us that a major change is coming in her thinking. Marvel is also a thinking verb not a doing verb. The hint of the quest: how will she be transformed?
that: signals a modifying clause ahead: take note here comes the news of the sentence and builds on the suspense.
mind on the outs with itself: noun followed two prepositional phrases that place the mind as «on the outs» «with itself» reinterating an internal conflict and reference to her own fragile mental state she writes about in the introduction and refering to the breakdown of society at that time. Is this foreshadowing, part of the larger structure of the essay, the stepping stones within this essay compilation? This description of herself is inticing, more tension and engagement, asking: how on the outs?
Should: verb of judgment that implies this is what society wants but it really goes against what I want and therefore I feel guilty. Asks: what does she want? Expectation vs. authenticity.
Nonetheless: spliced between the verbs. This word implies that eventhough I feel guilty and that it unnecessary I do what I am told, (I accept the consequences in an adult world). This unneccesary word and therefore it must have a purpose, here perhaps it hints a personal declaration: I will do what I want, not what I should.
Made: past tense, back to that time, the action which she reflects back on
Painstaking: verb used as an adjective; indicates she has an attention to detail and thus reliable
Record: noun. Word choice reflects her profession as a writer
Of its Every tremor: prepositional phrase referencing the place of the mind which is not a stable one. Word choice tremor indicates her voice, a voice infused by her Southern California climate.
I: again with the simple sentence structure of subject, verb, predicate. The entire clause preceding modifies what will now follow and has set us up for the revelation of this sentence.
Recall: present tense verb, again the voice of experience preparing us to flashback to another moment in time, the moment of action she is reflecting back on. The verb choice of recall has a stronger rhythm, as opposed to choosing remember. It has a sentence sound similar to 'marvel'. Recall also hints at a mystery: what does she recall? And the reader is engaged in the answer to this mystery. We now join her on her quest.
With embarassing clarity: Prepositional phrase using verb as adjective. Embarassing as if she should know better, clarity she knows better now. The pairing of embarassing with clarity is the voice of innocence and the voice of experience cojoined.
Those: she writes of one particular moment. More tension: what are 'those ashes', that moment?
Particular: meaning precise, of or relating to; individual; exceptional so reflects an attention to detail, a specific action from her life
Ashes: remnants of that exeprience—as if she were a flame of pride now humble. Again word choice suffused by her voice. The harsh consonant sound of ashes provides a strong ending for the sentence to lean on.

This sentence is one of three that form the opening paragraph of her essay “On Self-Respect.” A thirty-six word sentence, it is placed between a thirty-word sentence and the concluding sentence of seven words. In this structure, the long sentences build a cadence like waves, breaking with a short sentence that arrives with a surprise at the end of the paragraph. (“It was a matter of mis-placed self-respect” (142)). Although a long sentence, Didion has cut out any unnecessary words, like the conjunctions. She has made choices in syntax to create rhythm in her sentence.

Without the use of conjunctions in the sentence, Didion uses parataxis, “the repetition of the same grammatical unit in a series of aligning clauses,” to create a rhythm, a “sentence sound” (Voigt 159). The syntax, according to Ellen Bryant Voigt in The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song, is an “expressive organization of sound” (16). The elision of the conjunctions keeps the pace of the sentence, a musical phrasing; it reads with a meter like poetry, rising with each active verb choice and falling at the end of the clause on the consonant sounds in the noun—“tremor,” “ashes”—words made stronger because indicative of her voice. Didion’s voice burns with her emotional climate, shaped by her southern California roots, such shaky and incendiary landscape piques interest. This sentence offers a whole sensory experience of sight, taste, and touch. Because of her voice, we warm to Didion even though her language is highly educated and could be distancing; her sensory word choice engages us. She seems triumphant here, rising from the ashes, ashes she has been in deep enough to taste, to rise to a discovery. Setting a discovery at the start of her essay, as David Jauss notes in his essay “Some Epiphanies about Epiphanies,” allows the epiphany to be innovative: the “story actually begins with the epiphany, then proceeds to explore, for the rest of the story, her protagonist’s intricate response to it….for it tells us what happens after the epiphany that constitutes the rebirth of the protagonist” (Jauss 141). We are curious of this journey, this rebirth, she will take to self-respect, the title of the essay.

Didion packages her college moment of rejection, rejection from Phi Beta Kappa, tidy. She succeeds in crafting suspense, and in the words of Sven Birkerts in The Art of Time in Memoir, “we feel the pressure of her desire” to achieve self-respect after rejection (36). We too want to find something for ourselves in her journey. She does not dwell on the histrionics of failure but sums it up quickly and then contemplates the journey away from that moment. Sentences that move towards the understanding, gathering change bit by bit to a moment of discovery.

RESONANCE: How the Sentence Gains Power

“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.”

In her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion uses resonance in the form of refrains to build meaning. This repetition allows her to grieve and accept the sudden death of her husband, a death not announced in the opening of her book. The memoir begins with a quote from her writer’s notebook, writing we discover is the greatest bond this couple shares. She shows “the first words [she] wrote after it happened” (3). “It” is not yet defined but the quote she supplies in the opening sentence will become a refrain to be repeated throughout the book. Didion quests to accept her husband’s death. In her denial of the permanence of his death, she adopts ‘magical thinking,’ a belief he will return, and then he would “need his shoes” (188).

Within the memoir, she moves through the stages of grief from this denial to acceptance and the refrain marks the journey, moves her along this path. The refrain from the opening: Life changes fast./ Life changes in the instant./ You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends./ The question of self-pity (3). The book shows anything but self-pity, but shows more of a journalist’s detachment (she is, as the social worker says in the hospital unit at the moment of calling the priest for last rites, “a pretty cool customer”(15)). She writes to grapple with this change, this end of her life as she knows it, the death of husband. The refrains mark her movement through grief establishing a tempo, and as Jauss states in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow, “the tempo and structural proportion of every part of a work in relation to each other and to the work as a whole” (79). According to Jauss, tempo creates a “paragraph syntax” and differing tempos “modulate the emotional response” (81), and effect flow, underscoring when some scenes “were clearly more dramatic and life-altering than others” (80). The refrain creates the story tempo. Repetition requires variety in order to not lose meaning but to gain it. This particular refrain is repeated directly eight times throughout the course of the 227-page memoir. She sets it apart through the use of italics, inserting it like a disassociated thought that always hovers in her mind and on occasion insists loudly onto the page. Linked to this ‘ordinary’ refrain is the scene that involves “I lit a fire” (86). Didion ponders their ordinary life, one in which each night she lights a fire, within the extraordinary event of his sudden death. This fire-lighting scene was a part of her ordinary life and is an indirect reference to the ordinary-refrain that “life changes fast.” The fire-lighting scene and the ordinary-refrain are linked in the opening of book because it was in the midst of this ritual that her husband dies. She repeats the indirect refrain eight times over the course of the book. Although both the direct and indirect refrain are used for a combined sixteen times, their placement through the book does not form a consistent pattern, as Jauss would propose to create a ‘flow,’ but the constant use creates an insistency.

The memoir is her struggle to assimilate her grief, to accept the new parameters of her life as now ordinary. The structure, like the unfolding story her marriage, builds to a moment of acceptance near the end of the book: “What ended was the possibility of response” (194).

What: introducing a modifying phrase. This sentence is inverted. ‘What’ often introduces a question but in this instance it introduces her answer. It implies a question: what ends? Here it implies a question to which the answer will always remain the same, there will be no response, not matter how many times she may ask the question.
Ended: past tense verb. Word choice: this is final although the pain and grief continue, here is what no longer exists, here comes what I truly grieve.
Was: past tense. Equative structure establishing ‘ended’ is equal to ‘possibility.’
Possibility: noun and with a double meaning because possible hints at hope but there is no hope here, this is final, end of potential. For this is what she mourns the unlived life, the end of the potential, there is no more possibility in a marriage where half the partnership is dead.
Of response: prepositional phrase defining the preceding noun. Response is an echo that a partnership offers. (An echo she uses throughout her memoir with repetition.) The new element comes at the end of the sentence.

This sentence ends with response, the action that really matters to the grieving widow. It ends on the word that cannot be answered creating a feeling of tragedy, of the sound unanswered. We know the importance of “response” because she tells us in the beginning of the story: “I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John. There was nothing I did not discuss with John. Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other’s voices” (16). Her discussions with her husband form part of the ordinary routine of her days. She begins to accept that in death he can no longer respond but that does not mean she stops asking. She works by habit, by an ordinary routine she underscores in the two previous sentences, linked to this one: “I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death” (194).

The Didion of Slouching would have stuck with the thirty-six-word sentence, connecting the three short sentences with commas, but this grieving Didion punctuates, breaks down the sentences, broken down by grief, easier to assimilate in smaller pieces. She relies on punctuation to establish the phrasing of her sentence, not parataxic clauses. Didion chooses not to join the sentences with clauses to create flow, but to punctuate; she stutters, mirroring her hesitation to move forward into her unpartnered future. Her shorter sentences splinter her experience echoing her broken heart. Each short sentence binds to the next: “what I needed to tell him” connects to the “impulse” and then “death” to “what ended” (194). Lines are sequenced: each looks back to the previous line and forward to the next, much in the way Didion straddles the moment, wistful for the man she lost, moving into a uncertain future alone. Her sentences move her forward, despite herself. Each short sentence slows the rhythm down: punctuation makes for extreme clarity: she wants this point to be heard.

Simple words, shorter sentences create a pattern of tension and release: “count,” “needed,” “end,” all these verbs create tension building to the final equative sentence in this linked trio: the answer to this mounting tension. The subject-verb sentence pattern creates a forward moment that empties into an inverted sentence that begins with the wysiwig clause: What ended was the possibility of response (194). As Virginia Tufte explains in Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, the wysiwig clause often “implies (or even sets forth) a question” (148) or “provides the structure for a witty observations” (150). Written in the passive voice, with “to be,” the action is static, just as Didion is static, stuck in a time of no response. It is the syntax that empowers her words, not verbs. It is the parallel structure moving to the inverted sentence, to the final disclosure. The paragraph presents what Tufte calls “circular pattern, with the end sentence suggesting an image closely related to the one at the beginning” (169). A fitting movement in a memoir that returns to refrains, for a woman revisiting her past to find some meaning in the present in order to move onto the future. Tension is established with the “need to tell” versus “the absence of response.” As Jauss explains in his essay “Lever of Transcendence”: “The way to understanding, then, is through uncertainty, and the way to leave false certainty behind and enter the realm of uncertainty, is through the use of contradiction” (187). Here, Didion enters the realm of uncertainty. She must move beyond her known world, a world now lost to her, and enter her grief in order to know how to live in the present.

Syntax is precise whereas in her earlier work, word choice was precise. These words are simple, like the effect of grief, breaking down her structure for understanding, like I would speak to a child in simple terms. Didion is in an unfamiliar terrain and the words must be digestible. She uses simple words to chart a new territory. As a writer, she now finds herself in this foreign landscape, and words fail her: “I need more than words to find the meaning” (8). So she adopts a new structure for her writing. In using simple sentences, lots of scene and refrains, we assimilate her meaning because we have witnessed and understood her journey so thoroughly. We are present with her as she mourns the loss of potential, the death of the unlived life of her marriage, and we can experience the loss more because of the resonance, the power she creates through her structure.

Refrains create insistence. Insistence, like tension, raises the question we want answered, the mystery we seek to resolve. It is the refrain that creates the power, not the language, because her sentence structure is simple, her verbs often static. Refrains allow her to repeat her inquiry, this mystery of loss of her partner, to see it from different angles, to absorb the loss just a bit more with each repetition, until she can assimilate the pieces to a pattern. First we adapt to circumstance and then we grow to accept it. Like a writer drafts and rewrites a work to hone the sentences and structure, Didion drafts her grief, sharpening words to the larger work of her life, not to a moment of completion, she cannot solve loss, but to have the ability to carry-on. As Didion assembled her grief to carry on in A Year of Magical Thinking, there is power of the memoir to restore us, give us back ourselves, even in the most difficult of times. To use our sentences to rebuild our lives is to move from pieces to a new assemblage of wholeness. To allow Didion to move through “corridors …..permeated with every association I was trying to avoid” (113). We redefine our lives and our actions; we re-negotiate around the terms of our losses. Like her husband told her, Didion writes at the conclusion of her book, “You have to go with the change” (229).

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE:
How the Sentence Fits into the Larger Structure

“The vitality of the people I was working with flushed what had become hallucinatory rawness inside of me.”

In The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich turns to the Wyoming landscape to heal her grief. In the opening of her book, Ehrlich’s partner dies while she is away filming in Wyoming. His death ushers in a grief that numbs her static and stationary so that she stays in Wyoming where “life on a sheep ranch woke me up” (4). She plunges into isolation, finding reprieve from the intensity of grief in the unpopulated state, but finds upon observation that her surrounding landscape may perhaps be scarce of people but abundant in detail: “the landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp” (7). So begins her journey to observe “keenly” her landscape to transform herself, “Keenly observed, the world is transformed” (7), to increase her range to feel and to come alive again.
Ehrlich shows through the course of her linked essays how the isolation and harshness of the landscape shapes the people around her: defines their gesture, compresses their language, forms their vocabulary. She writes, “Cowboys have learned not to waste words from not having wasted water, as if verbosity would create a thirst too extreme to bear. If voices are raspy, its because vocal cords are coated with dust” (79). It is in this landscape that Ehrlich seeks to be restored, to find the space to recover from death. An early sentence, in the eighth paragraph of the forty-four paragraph opening essay “The Solace of Open Spaces,” establishes her quest: “The vitality of the people I was working with flushed what had become hallucinatory rawness inside of me” (4).

The vitality of people: is the subject of this sentence inverting the structure by reversing the natural order of the sentence (Voigt 157). How refreshing: she opens with vitality—a word alive and exciting—an energy I want to move towards. She is in their company and I want to be in that company too. I am engaged in her story. Strong opening that grasps our attention with the strength of the noun, “vitality” modified by the following prepositional clause. Vital people are the agent of change acting on the subordinate clause to follow. She has put the attention of the sentence on that first noun.
I was working with: inverted structure modifies preceding noun; the clause describes the people and puts her in relation to them however she does not say I was working with vital people or people with vitality but her precise order shows the priority: they are up front and she is tagging along. She forms the subordinate clause: the fact she is working is secondary to the vital people.
Flushed: The first nine words are a subject clause that is followed by an active verb: flushed. Very alive word choice: “to flow and spread out suddenly and abundantly; to blush; to glow; to clean out.” Here is a verb that sets us up for the narrative transformation. These vital people (and it establishes her in relation to the people, not herself, not the land) will enliven her, the agent of her change. Flushed has two opposing meanings and so creates tension in the sentence. It implies a conflict which meaning will it be: removed or filled? Choice of word and placement provides a “sentence perspective”: the meaning changes with reference. Glancing back to the preceding clause, the verb implies filled. Forward to the next clause it means removed from the system. This perspective establishes the conflict of the sentence, the conflict of the narrator.
What: introduces the clause that defines her stasis; what needs to be flushed out? Alerts us to the tension, to her inner conflict
Hallucinatory rawness: new twist on the word in a new grammatical form and linked to noun form of an adjective. Fresh language and two worlds joined that are opposites. Hallucinatory: an illusion of perceiving something that is non-existent; an image or vision; a delusion
Rawness: definition is “uncooked, unrefined, not processed.” Will she be matured, refined by these people? She is proposing an experiment here and what will be the result? The books will then make real this hallucination, it will chart her course to this maturation.
Inside of me: a hidden inner landscape: what will be revealed? The landscape that surrounds her is real so she must qualify that she is the one illusive in the sentence. As she reiterates later: “I don’t seem to occupy my life fully.”

This sentence sets up the conflict we seek to explore in her book, her inner conflict to shake off a false vision, the hallucination, and move to what is alive, vital. The choice of “flushed” intimates contradiction. “Flushed” is what David Jauss considers a “lever of transcendence” (187-207) and a contradiction that leads us to a moment of truth: “like a lever, it allows us to lift what we otherwise could not, and the act of lifting allows us to transcend what we already know” (187). Offering conflict within its dual meaning, providing space for a new vantage point, the new perspective to heal Ehrlich’s grief. The choice demonstrates opposing forces at work—the vitality working on the rawness—to the catharsis she seeks. It prompts change: contradiction is the means to transcend what is known to move towards a new understanding. This opening and this mystery ensnares us: How to fill the empty place within, how to find solace in the open spaces. To fill herself with the vitality she experiences in the people around her, a process she sees as taking time, like a year of seasons she uses to structure her book of essays: “A person’s life is not a series of dramatic events for which he or she is applauded or exiled but a slow accumulation of days, seasons, years, fleshed out by the generational weight of one’s family and anchored by a land-bound sense of place” (5). Time matters for transformation. We build change in pieces, like sentences. We are scoured like land, slowly.

In this sentence, Ehrlich prepares us for the quest and prepares us for a moment of resolution of this quest. She establishes a great expectation, a great hope. As she moves through the seasons of her book, her seasons of change, the landscape works on her: “Winter scarified me” (43). Yet like “mountains hold their snows like a secret” (75), Ehrlich too holds her secrets tight and does not allow the movement to transformation: “The geographical vastness and the social isolation here make emotional evolution seem impossible”(52). I question her emotional evolution. Perhaps the structure of her memoir, as linked essays, turn in circles and so fails to move forward. There is a thematic connection throughout the narrative. Beginning with the first essay, “Solace of Open Spaces,” “introduces the book’s thematic conflict, the ‘issue to be resolved’; follows that with stories that complicated that conflict by questioning, redefining, modifying, or clarifying it; and then it concludes with a story that brings the thematic conflict to a climax and resolution” (Jauss,170). As Jauss clarifies in “Stacking Stones,” the essays have been arranged to develop a thematic narrative, moving the conflict along to a resolution over the collection. As Francine Prose states in Reading Like a Writer, the opening “establishes the tone but also encapsulates something essential about the remainder of the work” (46). The opening essay in Solace of Open Spaces captures the whole of the story, and serves, as Prose tells us, to “prepare us for what is to come” (46).

She concludes at the end of her book: “Placed on my tongue, it is a wholeness that has already disintegrated; placed under my tongue, it makes my heart beat strongly enough to stretch myself over the winter brilliances to come” (130). This beautiful sentence is empowered with both parallelism and tactile imagery. It indirectly refers to her “hallucinary rawness” because we feel her disintegrating “wholeness” and her “heart beat strongly” invigorated perhaps by the energy of the “winter brilliance.” We have been prepared in the opening for vitality and we find in the closing disintegration. A breakdown in her structure lets in the wildness of Wyoming. It seems the vitality of the people escapes her, and the quest is more about understanding the influence of land and how land can give us back a part of ourselves. Landscape can shape us, and transform us; it can give us back ourselves.

ACTIVE SENTENCES: Earning the Resolution of the Story

“I kneel in the grasses and hold tight.”

This short, declarative sentence concludes Terry Tempest Williams’ essay, “In the Country of Grasses.” An economy of words: it is a stripped-down sentence, no embellishments to supply meaning. The meaning is in the action alone. “Kneel” is the operative word here. The humility of her action is clear. Utah naturalist Williams writes of her visit to the Serengeti, “I chose to wander in the northern appendage of these plains, an area known as the Maasai Mara” (4), and reflects on what it is to be a naturalist in a strange landscape. She begins in observation of land: “uninterrupted country capable of capturing one’s spirit like cool water in a calabash.” (4) She observes the wildlife: wildebeest, lions, rhino and quickly reveals a desire to enter that landscape, “to read the landscape inch by inch. The grasses become Braille as I run my fingers through them” (10).

Her evocative language activates, engages us in the setting with her in the way because she is engaged. We participate in that experience because in the first paragraph of this essay she invites us in: “The light shifts, and you enter a new landscape in search of the order you know to be there” (3). And it seems she has found her place in the order as she kneels in the grass: “I kneel in the grasses and hold tight.”

I: this has been her story of her moving into an unfamiliar landscape. She is the subject of the sentence and the subject of the essay.
Kneel: active verb, present tense even though relating an event from her past. Makes it a timeless moment.
In the grasses: prepositional phrase, establishing place, her place, she is actively participating in her environment. Grass is plural because this is an abundant landscape and we are deep in the plains of it.
And: conjunction as in: wait, there’s more
Hold: active, on going moment
Tight: adverb but not tightly holding the grass thus maintaining a rhythm and a firm grip

A sentence comprised of simple syllables: grasses is the only word with two syllables so we have to slow down over that word. Even though it is placed within a subordinate prepositional clause it holds the power of the sentence. After this journey through the Mara of the essay, through wildlife and grasses, in the second to last paragraph in a single sentence scene we are at a campfire and a myth is presented in three sentences: “When a boy is beaten for an inappropriate act, the boy falls to the ground and clutches a handful of grass. His elder takes this as a sign of humility. The child remembers where his source of power lies” (12). This myth comes suddenly at the end of the essay. It connects to the essay by its geography, and the story occurs on her trip, in the Mara, and in the grass, grasses threaded throughout the entire essay. What is the thread, the power that resonates throughout this essay? According to the opening, it is the entering of the landscape. The boy in the myth subjects himself to the power of the landscape. As the epiphanic moment, this sentence holds the whole of the work.

Throughout her essay, she fleshes out this landscape. She shows us a place alive where “a wildebeest whose black flesh has been peeled back from a red scaffolding of bones” (7) and “volcanic boulders lie on the land like corpses of stone” (9). We have been invited to share her experience and like her turning herself over to her African guide, we rely on her senses to feel that place: “I trust his instincts and borrow them until I uncover my own” (5). As a naturalist and narrator, she must take possession of her scene, as Birkerts advocates in The Art of Time in Memoir that “the writer must create her identity on the page, making it persuasive and compelling…the memorist’s ‘I’ must be an inhabited character, a voice that takes possession of its account” (26). We revel in the world she describes through her instincts. Williams writes, “The burden of the newcomer is to pay attention” (5). She does pay attention and in doing so persuades us with both her authority and her description. As a naturalist, she is working in relation to the land. The scene and the language show that devotion, her reverence of the land we have come to experience through her scenes. “I kneel in the grasses and hold tight,” shows her humility for this place. Like a pilgrim humble and in prayer, I am moved to join her and place myself at her feet.

ENDURING IMAGE: Creating Power in the Resolution

“I wasn’t nearly tough enough to stay around in an emotional climate more desolate than any drought I had ever seen.”

Jill Ker Conway begins her memoir The Road from Coorain as a child on sheep station in Australia. Living on a property in Coorain with her parents and brothers, she learns how “The bush ethos which grew up from making a virtue of loneliness and hardship built on the stoic virtues of convict Australia” (8). Isolated and hardy, her parents worked hard to make a living under inexorable conditions, prompting her to question this ethos: “Might they have learned to bend a little before the harshness of fate?” (23). This question becomes the heart of her quest. By her teenage years, her mother must bend at the harshness of fate, after the death of her father and the death of the sheep, she moves her three children to Sydney. Within a new environment, Conway is able to discover new talents about herself igniting “my longing for a world of real feeling and passion” (141).

Once released from structure and intense expectations, she individuates both from her mother and from the landscape of her childhood presenting her with a conflict: how to reconcile her natural landscape, Coorain, with her inner landscape. In her craft essay, “Points of Departure,”Jill Ker Conway writes of the quest she set out to take in her memoir: “I thought it was important to relate the story of a young woman taking charge of her life in an unromantic way in which it is perfectly clear she arrives at a moment of choice” (47). She continues, she did not want to write the story of a “battle with the harsh elements” and “put blame for her tragic life on the hostile environment of the sheep station” (52) but to understand within the context of her landscape both physical and emotional and as a quest to self-discovery, her individual journey to what makes her feel more alive. Where toughness was the bush ethos, she now discovers, through excelling in academic work, as she writes in Coorain “Studying history was more important to me than the strongest infatuation. I knew this was not the way women were suppose to be, but I couldn’t change my deepest motivation”(181). She questions her identity of what it is to be an Australian woman: “Somewhere, somehow it must be possible to reconcile the conflicts of the emotions, the pains of life, the sense of beauty, in one unifying understanding”(174). Her memoir pursues this mystery; this is the understanding she seeks to know.

Her inner landscape, “her emotional life had been dominated by images of the great drought” (219) until she moved to the city and was lit by the academic world, and her mind and her emotions came alive. To be more alive is to be more sensitive—to be more sensitive and then perhaps not “tough enough” for the landscape. She discovers she is not a victim running from hostility, from a crushing landscape, but pursuing a choice: what allows her to thrive. “Going through my life gave me back all the good things I had forgotten” (55), she reveals in her essay “Points of Departure,” and there we see her as triumphant as she reaches her movement of choice near the end of her memoir: “I wasn’t nearly tough enough to stay around in an emotional climate more desolate than any drought I had ever seen” (232).

I: begins in simple sentence structure
Wasn’t: past tense, passive voice, equative, she is the metaphor in this sentence, negative, in order to equate herself to the image of the Aussie male culture, “virtue of loneliness and” with the ‘to be’ structure she establishes herself as linked to this toughness, this climate even though it does not thrive not only for the land so stricken by drought but for her as a woman. Chooses negative not, not as a means of denial, but the opposite, as acceptance of her nature. Even though it is negative, it is an assertion.
Nearly: adverb precedes the adjective so it is more important. Our attention placed on this word before the word it modifies.
Tough: the other side of the ‘to be’ equation: this is her defining moment. Tough is the essence of the bush ethos. She does not choice a positive, as E.B. White would have advised (Strunk & White, 19), such as I was too soft, but instead she claims the bush language and makes her realization, the motivation of the memoir. Tough is a chilling word as she takes what was indigenous to her culture and makes it her own.
Enough: finally the adjective arrives describing the subject. This is the end of the main fundament of the sentence: this is her main point simply stated, what follows is subordinate to this clause, secondary to the main clause, of lesser importance in her revelation.
To stay: infinitive serving as another adjective to describe her and answer what she is not tough enough to do. Use of infinitive is declarative language.
Around: adverb to describe the preceding infinitive
In an emotional climate: prepositional phrase that modifies the “tough” place, qualifies precisely which place and its not the land but the ethos. Word choice of “climate” refers not only the weather of a place but also the atmosphere, what constitutes the surrounding environment. She links emotion and climate and so shows how the ethos is so entwined with the landscape they cannot be separated or at least she is not tough enough to separate them and so raises the question: why? and she moves right to that answer:
More desolate: Desolate is inhospitable; dismal; the most powerful words of the sentence refers both to her emotional climate (the death of her father, death of her brother, departure of her other brother, the controlling mother, and the demise of the sheep) and the climate of the land (the “all-pervasive dust” and “carrion birds everywhere”). As if “desolate” is not strong enough she is going to intensify it with the following metaphor.
Than: makes the sentence a formula, if this is the way it is than this is the inevitable conclusion. “Than” is the tipping point of the sentence: it creates the suspense. Now what will she do? This word creates a relationship within the sentence.
Any drought: and we know from her scenes throughout her memoir that this is a major drought. Drought is the enduring image of the book and so the presence in the sentence creates a resonance that packs the power of this moment of understanding.
I have ever seen: she is bearing witness at the end of her sentence. And we know from the story she had told leading up to this point that she has seen it, we have seen it through her, she has succeeded in what Sven Birkerts calls “scenic evocation” and given us the “grain” of her personal experience (35).

We know the power of Conway’s drought. We know if anything this word is an understatement because she has shown how devastating the drought is on the sheep, on driving her father to ruin and suggested suicide. This statement is truly earned. She has shown us through scene which creates an enduring image for the memoir: “The smells of death and carrion birds were everywhere”(69) and as a child with her father they had to “douse them with kerosene, set them alight, to reduce the pervasive odor of rotting flesh” (76-7). Each word as stark as the landscape, as stark as the history she is recalling. The emotional drought she experiences by living within a stark landscape. Not just the desolation of the sheep station but also not getting a job appointment because although qualified she is a woman in a man’s world of intellectual achievement.

Although she has graduated with honors from university and traveled the world and so knows, “that it had taken me until I was twenty-three years old to get oriented on the globe, but I was glad that I finally knew where I was” (211). The western plains of Australia are her home, so that her decision to leave the climate she is not tough enough to reside in is a stunning revelation. From her story, we know she is tough enough and we also understand how tough is the climate. She wants to leave while she still has an emotional life in her, while she is still alive. “I just knew we had been defeated by a fury of the elements, a fury that I could not see we had earned ”(82). She has earned her right to choose.

This sentence marks the tipping point in her journey, the movement to her adulthood. The static verb choice is appropriate for this moment. It is in this tipping point, this moment of contradiction, that she best knows herself. She tips into self-realization: “in the tension between our original conception and its opposite,” which she presents in the statement that uses the negative form, she “find[s] [herself] transcending the previous limits of [her] thought and talent” (Jauss 209). She realizes she will dwindle if she remains, that life in the bush, or among the male Australian academics, is static for her. To remain within such a landscape, she will diminish like the drought. She will bend under such harshness. It is a static life she wants to leave behind, to tip into a more vital landscape. In the passive voice, she is subject, subjected to the landscape. Virginia Tufte, in Artful Sentences, observes that, “In the passive voice, the subject receives the action” (78). She seeks a proactive life.

This sentence moves her forward to her destination both in her inner landscape and outer landscape. Conway does not blame her environment; she is not victim: this is simply how it is. She does not question her parents, she accepts that was the life for them, the life they chose. Now that she clearly sees what is, she can take action and pursue the life that makes her feel more alive and her sentences come more alive. Conway has succeeded in gathering her past to completion, and she succeeds, in the words of Sven Birkerts “to capture the sensation of wakening to the world” and in doing so she is “unexpectedly gathering the past to itself and bringing with it a profound sensastion of completion.” (Birkerts 39-40). In her acceptance, she combines with the landscape of her childhood. The Conway of Coorain writes, “The unfolding of a drought of these dimensions has a slow and inexorable quality. The weather perpetually holds out hope.... barely enough to lay the dust” (53). A dust she does escape at the end of her quest when she decides to leave in order to live more fully, but a dust to which she knows she will return at the end, because it’s her home, it’s part of the core of who she is as an Australian: “Then I comforted myself with the notion that wherever on the earth was my final resting place, my body would return to the restless red dust of the western plains. I could see how it would blow about and get in people’s eyes, and I was content with that” (238). Her language, her mind, and her emotions, are all more alive. She has made peace with the all-pervasive dust and we are content with that because she has partnered us on her journey.

The enduring image, the red dust and death of the drought, “presents a kind of shorthand,” according to Francine Prose in Reading Like a Writer (145). Conway’s details evoke an atmosphere and not only set the scene but establish her authenticity. As a reliable narrator, we participate in her discovery. Sven Birkerts, in The Art of Time in Memoir, writes, “And in capturing the effect the need for accuracy is absolute. The writer must represent as faithfully as possible what memory has shaped inside—memory and feeling” (142). He adds, “False emotions have a hollow sound, and while trust is easily shaken, it is very hard to regain” (143). Credibility is created by authority: to know we are in the hands of a good writer, one who crafts strong sentences, to know we are in the hands of an authority, one who knows well her subject matter. In order to effect the tension of the scene and for the resolution to be satisfying, we not only have to trust our narrator but also believe. The details create the belief and craft the suspense. In Reading like a Writer, Francine Prose tells us the way to create tension is through “intense lyricism” (12). This is not only careful structure word by word but by deepening the subject through authority and detail. An enduring image creates an intense lyricism. This level of credibility Conway offers at the sentence level allows readers to participate in the change that is coming in the story. Credibility binds us to the moment. Feeling the sensation allows us to be moved by the transformation. Conway fashioned a metaphor within the essay with ‘drought.’ The single line evokes the whole shape of the story. Her finality succeeds because of the history related throughout the story.

CREATING PARAMETERS FOR CHANGE: The Devotion of the Writer

Word by word, the writer builds trust, voice, authenticity, suspense, in order to engage the reader to partner in the course of the discovery laid bare in the memoir. Patterns of repeated words, metaphor, images, resonate through the course of the work to deepen experience to achieve a better understanding. We become invested in the quest through syntax. The writer’s choices within the sentence create power, power that drives the story and engages us to participate in the mystery. A transformational sentence holds not just a piece of the contradiction, the tipping point, but also the whole story within its grip. Such a sentence tips back and forward: recognizing a past, moving towards a resolved future. Tension provides an opening, the space to allow new perspective to enter in; it allows for room to change. Sentences resonate the larger structure of the work. The resonance holds the thread of the story through word choice. The thread is the meaning that was missing at the time of the experience now uncovered word-by-word.

Even a beautiful sentence lessens its power if it fails to build on the resonance the story creates. The epiphany, the moment of transformation, succeeds based on the sentences that come before then we are satisfied by the revelation. Yet it is the transitions, not the transformation itself, which engages us. The transformational sentence holds our inner argument bound up tight, a tension ready to be released. The human struggling to find sense of our painful moments instructs us, informs us to our own living, not necessarily to our own epiphany but to comprehend a bit better our common struggles and this holds our fascination because there is only struggle, there are no solutions to being human. Each journey is unique, built on universal emotions; each sentence is unique, crafted by common words.

Transformation is not a grand gesture, not a radical departure, but held within the context of daily life. The point of departure is not the plane trip away but the coming home to ourselves, the internal work. The devotion of the writer is the willingness not only to delve into the stories of our lives but also to be present to craft sentences that hold the shape of this evolution. The sound and rhythm and shape of sentences sharpen sensitivity and change the parameters of our daily life. When life grows stale, I write the sentence to create a more vivid world. I stretch my reality through better verbs. To seek to be original and honest is to expand the parameters of my life. The devotion to the sentence is the way to shift my story. We need sentences, not an outside agent of change, to affect transformation and to declare an earned resolution.

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Annie Penfield has had work published in Fourth Genre, Hunger Mountain, R.K.V.R.Y, Equestrian Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner sports blog. Her essay “The Half-Life,” won Fourth Genre’s Michael Steinberg 2012 nonfiction essay prize, and was named a Notable Essay by Best American Essays. She is a graduate from the MFA in Writing Program from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives with her family, several horses and a mule on a farm in Strafford, Vermont, and is at work on a memoir based on “The Half-Life."

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