Tuesday, August 9, 2011

On Truth and Creative Nonfiction

I went to Pitt, allegedly the birthplace of creative nonfiction, for a semester for graduate school. Something that got paid a lot of lip-service was the role of truth in Creative Nonfiction. Here's where I've landed on the matter. Just today actually. First some back story:

I want to write a novel about my grandma. Baptized Florence, but Flossie, Flo, Sarge, or any other of a slew of nicknames to her friends and family. Florence Ella Leib died long about 2005, when my baby was just a wee baby. She was an ahead-of-her-time feminist pragmatist. At least that's the truth that matters to me.

Here are the other truths that matter to me: She served in WWII. She had a baby at age 17 to a guy who didn't marry her. She had 4 more babies with another guy who also didn't marry her, but who at least lived with her and pretended until he became a PTSD drunk and she worked 3 jobs to support her 4 kids, one of whom was my dad.

Recently, I was at some family thing--right, it was a family reunion with about 6 of the not-dead people from my grandma's generation, most of whom are now dying off. It was the other side of the family, but one of Flossie's cousins or something married one of my mom's mom's brothers or something. In any case, the two sides of my family are connected somehow via marriage (but not via blood thank the lucky constellations). Anyhow, all the folks in my mom's generation, who've started losing parents now, were all ruminating over how it's important to ask these questions we have about our parents' parents. Because before we know it, they'll be gone and there won't be any more asking.

Since then, I've been in minor panic mode trying to figure out how to get one-on-one with a couple of Flossie's living siblings who're cogent enough to converse. And it occurred to me today, as I read this disaster of a short story I wrote, that the important truth in fiction is the emotional truth. Whatever my grandma's youth was like, what I make up will be at least as cool and, as far as anybody who's alive can remember, as accurate!

Boy-oh was that a liberating epiphany. The stuff I know is enough. And unless there's some political or social or moral reason for the whole journalistic integrity thing, creative nonfiction can be fiction as far as I'm concerned. Arguably, all realist fiction is creative nonfiction. The only stuff that's really fiction would be dystopian sci fi and those sorts of things. But to a schizophrenic, even those things could seem real.

The notion that perception is reality has been hitting my home base pretty hard of late.

Monday, August 8, 2011

Book Group: Read the Free Short Story, "Cliff Hanging" first, okay?

So like if we were really a book group, there are spoilers in here, so if you didn't note the title of this here blog post, go read the story first, m'kay? It lives Here.

I put this in a separate post because I didn't want those of you, friends of mine, who will read this story just because I wrote it, to bring my neuroses to the story. Of course, I want you to all wildly disagree with me, but I don't think you will.

Here's how I see "Cliff Hanging": It is a massive pile of bullocks. Not, of course, because it is poorly written. No, I'd say the writing is just about all it has going for it--except for some weirdness because I decided to go against my gut and not have 3 tense changes in the story, so the opening few paragraphs, which used to be past tense, are now present. Also, it's heavy-handed when in scene, and uninteresting when not.

I told myself I could do tense changes now because I'm not a student of fiction writing. I am now an expert, and I know what I am doing. You all know what a pile of BS that is, because we get almost all of the cool stuff we get by accident. But after the story was finished, I thought to leave the three tense sections as kind of a verse, chorus, refrain structure. Like it would somehow greater explain the narrator's lack of self-awareness and her autocide. (shut up, spell check. it is, too, a word. OED online says so!)

So I think I've lost it. I have read too many romance novels. My mind is now too addled to write literary fiction. At least I'm writing, right? That's swell. If there's any money in fiction at all these days, it's in genre fiction anyhow.

OK. Good things: it's only 1500 words. I think the bit at the end about the pink shoes and shirt that she doesn't remember buying is funny. I like the interaction with her boss, but I think the dialogue is potentially overwritten.

Anyhow. Since I don't live in a town with any of my writing friends anymore, I want you all to email me or call me or facebook message me and play e-workshop with me. I'll gleefully return the favor, and link to your blog from mine, and buy you chocolate when I see you. Or coffee.

Free Short Story: Cliff Hanging

My lover leaves in one of those spectaularly dramatic, painful flurries of shouting and loving and self-loathing. Takes my intestines and pleasure along for the ride. I used to doubt that people really “didn’t see it coming.” I didn’t. That morning we cuddle before work, nuzzle and say love yous. And no joke, two hours after the door snicks shut behind him, my sister calls to say our mom died. It feels like a hangover: I don’t know where I am, and my head throbs in waves, as though my brain literally grows inside my skull. Things aren’t going too well.

I go to work at the greenhouse. It is the day we let loose the Sterlings to eat the Japanese beetles that came in during a fresh air cycle. I am certain to go home with bird shit in my hair, stomping and clutching my fists in organic hatred.

My boss, Geri the Hippie, rolls up on his Vespa and eyes my Subaru.

“When are you going to lose the gas hog?”

“When it quits running.”

He smirks, “I’ll buy you a Prius if you come to dinner with me.”

“Let it never be said that organic farmers are as evolved as their pesticide practices.”

“So that’s a yes?”

“That’s an aphid eating no, Geri.”

“Why do you want to work here if you hate Earth?”

“I hate everything.”

“No you don’t. You love your car.”

“My car does not talk or demand anything from me.” I say, and think a minute, “Also, my car goes harder than it really should after 250,000 miles.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Pig.”

“You’re lucky I’m a forward-thinking feminist. No other boss would let his environmental savages of employees talk to him like that.”

“No other boss would call himself a feminist, then call a woman who works for him an environmental savage.”

I always liked the idea of killing myself. I thought it would be really hard. I never really thought too much about trying, because it seemed certain to fail. I thought that the human spirit would always well up to buoyancy or vomit at the last minute. That the soul would not be snuffed so easily. I liked thinking about the bits of me—the bits that want to die and to live—warring over this cause of life.

I imagined them personified in spandex unitards. Death wore orange, Life wore blue. They pushed each other and wrestled across wood planks by water. A deck, maybe? A pier? I never panned out in my imaginings, only went in for the detail shots, like the way Death’s spandex bunched up in the space where his hip met his thigh as he wrapped one leg around Life to hold her still, squeezing her neck with both his bony, veined hands. And the fine hairs on Life’s cheek as she ground her blushing jaw against the strangling.

I always gave Death the masculine body and Life the feminine. Obvious, but still. Shouldn’t life and death be genderless?

I wake up that morning and look up at the water stains on the ceiling above my bed. One of them looks like a pig blowing smoke out of his face. Maybe, though, it is his silhouette, and he is bleeding from his mouth. A pig death by bludgeoning.

Could I bludgeon myself? It seems unlikely. What if I make a machine? There’s that movie, Taxidermia, where a guy partially Taxidermies himself, then sets up a machine to remove his head at a certain point.

It never occurs to me that feeling nothing is bad. I suspect people who are suicidal must feel the hell out of their feelings. The sadness preceding suicide must be physically painful. It must feel like appendicitis or a urinary tract infection. It must feel unbearably.

I feel nothing. I feel nothing so hard that I think it won’t be possible for me to feel it if my lover returns and my mom comes back to life. I feel superfluous. I am not especially good at my job or especially interesting, and when my mom lived, at least I felt like I provided some joy to her, and at least my lover got half our rent and some orgasms.

So without any real ceremony, I decide to end it. I choose a day that is bleak and gray and humid. I decide that I’ll take a drive after work and find a place, and then I will do it. I will throw myself into traffic, or into the misted river.

There is a bridge that separates north and south halves of the town. The top of the bridge is probably 50 feet from water. The water is gray and choppy. I was never fond of heights, but since I haven’t felt anything in several months, climbing up lacks some of the usual gut churning. I get halfway up, and the hem of my khakis snags at the vee of the wire lattice I’m climbing, I recall that this is a truss bridge from my environmental design course in college. I think fuck it and I let go.

I instantly regret my choice. For the first moment I feel like I’m not going to fall, like gravity is going to just give me this one back. The water below me is this hyper plane of bobbing, cotton clusters. The wind pushes into my sinuses and in the second moment I get that ear flood of roller coaster adrenaline excitement. I feel my skin flush and my hair lift at the exact same moment.

I crack a smile, or maybe a grimace, and that is when the fall starts in earnest. I am high enough up, though, that I have time to remember how to fall into water at high speed without hurting myself.

I point my toes and imagine myself as a pencil. Suddenly I am erect and getting sucked into water that is much colder than I expect in late June. The water’s surface scrapes my cheeks, but I don’t make it to the bottom of the river. I curse my mom’s ghost for insisting on swimming lessons. This totally would’ve worked if I hadn’t had swimming lessons.

I do the crawl stroke to the bank that’s only about 10 yards away and hope I don’t trouble any eels, and I get on the bank and suddenly I have this crystal chill of aliveness. It starts at my toes and radiates up to my forehead and I can’t stop grinning. I laugh. I laugh so hard my right ribs feel like they’re under compression. I look down and notice I’m wearing a pink shirt and shoes and I can’t remember buying them, and I hate pink, so I laugh some more.

A girl on roller skates stops for a second and says, “Fall in?”

I contain my guffaws enough to give her a palsied nod. My chest is full and I feel large and I want to go have a beer with a stranger, apologize to the guy who loved me in college who I didn’t love back, then go get a new lover.

Of those things the most feasible is a beer with a stranger, so I escort myself and my swollen soul and my wet, pink clothes to my favorite dive. I order a Newcastle draft and I scan the bar for strangers.

I notice my pants are so wet they’re dripping onto the floor and there’s this tiny puddle beneath me, and so I don’t start to laugh again, I try to imagine a tiny war hostage undergoing drip torture beneath my pink shoe. That sobers up my mood, and I suck down my Newcastle and order another.

There’s a guy a few seats down who I don’t recognize, so I slide off the stool with a wet-clothes-on-varnish groan and move over next to him.

“Fall in?” he asks.

“Yup.”

“On purpose?”

I blink. I didn’t anticipate that question. “No. Yes. Whatever.”

“I survived one, too.”

“You what? Seriously? What are the odds, man? I mean, I got this Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas feeling right now, and I just wanted to have a beer with a stranger. You’re the stranger and you’re telling me you lived through this, too?”

“Weird”

“Yeah.”

So then I think maybe this guy is just expressing empathy the way some people do, and he’s actually a lunatic, and I think how I need no lunatics or psychopaths, and I pay for my second beer which I suck down to generate some beer warmth for my dripping self, and I slide off my second stool and head for the door.

“Hey wait!” he calls.

I hold up my hand like I’m signaling a cab, and I hit the street.

When I get home, I Google “how to overdose.”

(c) 2011 April Line, April Line Writing

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Counter Culture Dancing

Couple things happened in my head while I was dancing my hypothetical balls off at Club Z in Williamsport last night with some of my girlfriends and our DD/supervisor/agent, Tom.

First, I was missing a whole lot during my crippled-by-self-consciousness 20s. Dancing at a gay bar is awesome. I did go dancing at a gay bar once in my 20s, with some gay temporary roommates. I got felt up (and not in a nice way) by some straight dude.

Which is a total quandary. What are the straight people doing at the gay bar? I know, I know. It's a bar, a club, there's dancing and the air is thick with poorly mixed DJ beats and cigarette smoke. The energy is contagious and it's totally counter culture. I guess there're some straight folks (like myself) who get a kick out of being someplace where different is normal. In Williamsport, if you don't want to hang out with the 20-23 set at Cell Block, it's the only place to go dancing.

But what was with the posturing straight men trying to grab my (luscious) bootie, and feeling up Amber, this drag queen who danced with us, and trying to dance with the irrepressible Hillary? What were they posturing? Were they pretend gay or pretend straight? Were they trying to feel us up so as to discern our sex? I feel like mine is fairly obvious. And Amber's was, too, but her girl parts done comparatively well. And Hillary is a feminine, shimmering pixie. Do their weasely minds believe genitals grabbing is more acceptable at a gay bar?

That was what I told myself the first time. But I'm older now and wiser and angrier and more aware of the very real way in which women (and very similarly homosexuals) are second class citizens, even now--in the future! I sincerely believe that most straight men are utter pigs and not to be trusted. And I follow @MsMagazine on twitter, so I get all these news feeds about the high sex-discrimination crimes that happen the world over. Now. In the future!

And when I got home last night and I was a sweaty, vaguely drunk, cigarette stinking mess in bed with my lover, and my body still ticked with energy and glee, when I thought about way in which the fun was kind of marinated in this palpable cultural dischord; I almost wept.

There is no minority for which I have greater sympathy than the transgendered/transvestites. I can't think of a worse affliction than looking in the mirror and seeing the wrong thing. Feeling like your skin got mis-sewn at the factory.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Summer Garden Tomato Soup


First, a little on the choices for this soup. I think that milk in tomato soup is gross. I also think that recipes that fake it with soft bread for thickening are wrong. The texture of soaked bread is godawful.

I used a coarse cheese grater to shred the zucchini and the onion. You could probably also just chop the stuff and then stick blend it, or use a regular blender. I just hate the heck out of cleaning the stick blender and the regular blender. Also, the texture that's missing from a lot of tomato soups is present in spades with the cheese grater method.

Vidalia onions sweeten up beautifully when they're sauteed long time over medium heat. The sweetness of the onions and the queer starchiness of the zucchini do a beautiful job of giving this soup some texture and thickening, without the grodie slime of the soft bread, or the abomination that is just tossing in some milk or cream. There's no roux, and there's only a skosh of oil, so this is actually vegan, and contains almost NO fat, but is still really satisfying & filling.

Recipe: Summer Garden Tomato Soup

1 T olive oil
1 medium vidalia onion
2 large cloves of garlic
2 medium zucchini
1/4 c. fresh sage
1/4 c. fresh basil
2 T fresh oregano
1 t. salt
8 tomatoes from your garden, boiled and peeled, or a big can of san marzano tomatoes
1 bay leaf
1 pinch of tumeric

Heat the olive oil in the bottom of a dutch oven over medium high heat.

Grate the onion, zucchini, and crush the garlic into the oil. Cook, stirring often, until the zucchini has sweated off all its moisture and softened, and the onions are sweet. Stir in the herbs and salt and let it cook for a minute of two until the herbs smell nice.

Crush the tomatoes into the mixture and stir. Add all the juices from the tomatoes or can, and some extra water, too.

Throw in the bay leaf and the tumeric and allow to simmer, uncovered, over medium-low heat for an hour, or until it's reduced a bit. Reduce heat to low and cover to hold until serving.

Remove bay leaf. Makes about 8 servings.

I made some orzo that I stirred in just before serving, which was my original conception, but it was utterly superfluous.

Does blogging seem vain to anybody else?

Hey--it's neat that you're here reading this. This is an interesting village. I mean, the one I'm making up here. You'll be bored sometimes, sure. But where's the fun in being interesting ALL of the time??

I think it should go without saying, but I have felt the need to say it recently:

All the stuff in this blog, except where otherwise noted, is my intellectual property, and if you'd like to use anything here, kindly seek my approval.