AWP 2015, Minneapolis, MN

Confronting Our Fears: Turning Adversity into Art

Introduction by Jo Scott-Coe

Richard Hoffman

Richard Hoffman is author of the memoirs Love & Fury and Half the House, along with the poetry collections Without Paradise; Gold Star Road; and Emblem, as well as the short story collection Interference and Other Stories. He is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College. http://richardhoffman.org/

Michael Steinberg

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Renée E. D'Aoust

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Jo Scott-Coe

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Meredith Hall

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Richard Hoffman
Turning Adversity into Art

I read somewhere (OK, on Facebook) something Philip Pullman once said about writers' block. He said: "All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?" Now, I love this. It makes me laugh a little at our pretensions. At the same time, Pullman is not a memoirist, and writing memoir, it seems to me—as is certainly the case in the work of everyone on this panel—requires a terrifying struggle with shame and the silence it engenders and maintains.
 
So let me take a few moments to talk about shame and silence.
 
It's the genius of any oppressive hierarchy to make one ashamed, not for one's transgressions but one's being. As George Orwell put it in his masterful essay "Such, Such Were the Joys," his account of his years at a boarding school that comes to seem a microcosm of a class stratified system, "It was possible... to commit a sin without knowing that you committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to avoid it. Sin was not necessarily something that you did: it might be something that happened to you." He goes on to say, "this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good."
 
There's no escape from this kind of shame except by means of the temporary anodynes — relief for a price — that the hierarchy offers: alcohol, drugs, porn, so-called "upward" mobility, religion, aestheticist literature, the acquisition of bigger and better toys, and hatred of the "other." I am most interested in the work of memoirists and essayists who are dismantling the structures of that shame and silence in search of their own emancipation, as is the case with all of the writers on this panel.
 
I am inspired and emboldened by the example of writers like Frederick Douglass who, in his first autobiography, begins the struggle for his liberation by rejecting the lessons, the lies he was taught about his worth by his society, his status, and his religion. Or Gregory Orr, who, in The Blessing, chronicles step by painful step, his emergence from what he elsewhere, in a poem, calls "the carnal hut/ the cave of self;" or David Mura, working through the racist lessons about his selfhood in Where the Body Meets Memory; Joan Wickersham refusing the easy bromides and the conventional narrative offered her in The Suicide Index; Mikal Gilmore desperately working out the tangled skeins of family violence and dysfunction in Shot in the Heart; and others.
 
According to Tom Waits “The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”  (I think I also first encountered that on Facebook, which is a testament to the quality of my friends there.) Anyway, it's hard to disagree. But what is this bad writing? It is what it has always been: prefabricated ideas in hand-me-down language. The memoir is especially susceptible to this for a number of reasons: first of all, it is very nearly an axiom of contemporary psychology that the most common response to shame is self-idealization, an aggrandizing myth of identity which is a kind of defiant counter-lie to the abject humiliation it offsets. This may well be a necessary step for people who are trying to emerge from victimhood. But I don't think one can write a truly good memoir driven by this simple defiance. I think of such books as "Amazing Grace" narratives: you know, "I once was lost/ But now I'm sanctimonious."
 
Another reason for the susceptibility of the genre to bad writing lies with readers and their expectations. Not long ago, a friend of a friend, having heard I'd written a memoir, asked me if it was healing for me. Oh, brother, I thought. Here we go again. I find it exasperating that people who profess to be literate continually make the assumption that memoir is chiefly a therapeutic genre, one whose aim is to heal. Heal what? Experience?
 
But I hid my frustration so as not to give offense; the question had been asked in good faith. I gave her an answer designed to allow her to reinterpret the pained look on my face as a search for the right word. "I would say that it helped me integrate a number of themes in my life during the period I was writing about." She still looked a little bit stung as if I had, in fact, put her down. So I continued. "So I guess in that sense, I'd have to answer yes. Yes, it was healing for me."
 
We have a strange idea that the truth is always simple, that it is something you blurt out. No artist or scientist would ever agree with that formulation! The truth is what you arrive at after painstaking investigation, and the truth of our own lives is no exception. The story you are holding onto is probably not the story.
 
So: is the inverse of Waits's quip true as well? Does good writing have the potential to elevate our suffering? To ennoble it? Clearly I believe so, along with the others on the panel and probably all of you as well. But what is this "good writing"? I am always reluctant to buy into the idea that there is a formula or a set of skills that can help a writer to "turn adversity into art" as the title of our panel reads. (I know that was not our intention. Our intention was to get the panel accepted!) Still, it seems to me that a few criteria can be drawn up:

• A successful memoir is reflective and questioning throughout. It is neither a reinscription of the conventional narrative of shame, nor its obverse, the defiant self-idealizing myth. The memoirs that most interest me attempt to find an authentic way out of disempowerment, and they leave a trail of that search.
• In the best memoirs, the memoirist entertains multiple time-frames and accounts for the fact that both memory and meaning are subject to change.
• Good writing requires that the author continuously remind the reader —in subtle ways built into the prose itself — that what he or she is reading is a representation, a re-presentation, of reality, employing imagery, metaphor, dialogue, characterization, and rhetoric; in other words it is an impressionist genre, closer to drawing than photography, although it is a genre that is strictly circumscribed by the facts as they can be known or discovered.

 
I believe that the purpose of writing memoir, the ultimate purpose, is to illumine the life of the reader, to inspire the kind of inquiry that leads to one's personal emancipation from shame and silence and the stratified status quo that depends on it. As such, writing memoir is, or can be, a profoundly revolutionary act.

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Confronting Our Fears, Continued.

Jo Scott-Coe
Confronting Our Fears

Meredith Hall
​Trust The Camera: The Importance of Scene Making in Writing Literary Memoirs

Renée E. D'Aoust
​A Bridge from Life to the Page

Michael Steinberg
​Confronting Demons, Staring Down Fears: Transforming Our Deepest Misfortunes into in Literary Works

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