Tag Archives: creative nonfiction

Catharsis and Literature

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I wanted to share this chapter from one of my favorite writing books, Views From the Loft: A Portable Writer’s Workshop (edited by imagesDaniel Slager) from The Loft Literary Center.  There’s a chapter called “Negotiating the Boundaries Between Catharsis and Literature” by Cheri Register.  It got me to thinking about my writing, working on the memoir, over and over, doubting what I’m doing and my reasons for it and why I’m writing it and what’s the point and all that jazz.  Writing about abuse and mental illness, yet making it literary–how damn tricky.  I’ve realized this is going to be a much bigger project than I’d already fathomed.  Yeah, way bigger.  I really need to think it through more.  What I’m thinking is how NOT to write it ABOUT mental illness and incest and abuse but focus on something bigger and more universal, and making the other issues just issues, adding to the theme or acting as motifs.  ?? Any thoughts, fellow writers?  Here are some citations from the chapter:

“..think hard on what makes an account of personal suffering worth reading?  Why write about suffering in the first place?…A writer who expects to transform catharsis into literature has to involve the reader in a negotiation of boundaries.  If work merely invites the reader to witness the catharsis, it may come across as a tedious display of the writer’s endurance.  …”There is no virtue in enduring hardship.” Continue reading →

Humming Birds (memoir)

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“Amy, you’re gonna get it,” Nikki tells me.  I’m hiding between the lilac bushes, Barbie’s head in my hand.  It’s our weekend at our father’s house.
“What’d you use?”
“Daddy John’s knife.”  I’m not afraid.  My father is harmless, even almost afraid of us.  It’s my stepfather I’m scared of.
“I’m telling!” And off she runs toward the farmhouse.  I fish for the knife in the pocket of my dirty overalls and slice at Barbie’s pretty blue eyes so they open.  I sit and poke little holes where her pupils are and then I saw at her ratty hair.  I lick my bottom lip, almost got it.  A pleasure fills me. Continue reading →

What’s Left (for Nikki)

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(written October 12, 2011)

It’s the anniversary today.  I debate taking your grandchild to your headstone.  She names you in the sky at night.  I don’t feel grief or loss–those were my companions long before you died.  But there is this ache.  It’s in my chest and it warns memory.  The ache is, this year, something hard to identify.

This morning the house was dark and quiet and I pictured life with you in it.  A life without alcohol.  I imagined you would have prevented me from all sorts of things-things like heartache, lost trust, guilt shame, illnesses.  You were like a big child to us, even then.  Your slowness was what sweetened you.  You made your first born, Nikki, shine.  That was the last time she let herself be loved by a parent.  Your gradual rejection left in her a big empty space, and as she got older, that space filled with self-reliance, education, but mostly with the sense of life as an orphan.  Her ache for you and loss of you shook straight through her heart–cutting it in two and then clumsily stitching it back together, leaving gaps for it all to seep through.  I imagine it steeling itself to the love of many things.

When you died we all suffered different losses.  Mine was the beginning of a broken fever.  You left me to a monster and I’m scarred in crippling ways.  For Jodie, your youngest and by far the sweetest, her loss was unnameable and filled with a deep sorrow–it served as a reminder of not knowing love and protection and sanctuary.  But for Nikki–for Nikki your death made me angry.  Why had you left her again?  Why must she lose you twice and open up old wounds that, from childhood, really never heal?  When she was younger her love for you was fierce and without limit.  She knew you had no right to abandon her, and she didn’t give up easily.  She was persistent and faithful and resilient until, as time passed, her heart broke.  She learned loss and defeat too early.  When you died, her loss was like an old companion she’d tried to forget, only this time she had more control.  But I saw her face–she looked like a little girl again, learning you were never coming back.  I suppose, on the anniversary of your death, I grieve for her.  My heart feels young and fragile and sore for her.  She is the ache in my chest.

Writing Memoir, Quotes, and Books

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Working on my memoir, I’ve turned to many, many (many many, too many) books with tips on how to get started, organized, and inspired.  I also read a lot of what other authors say about the process and will share quotes here, as well.  I’ll begin with my favorite quote, well, one of them.

image by Mandy Bryant @ Etsy

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love questions themselves like locked rooms or books written in very foreign tongues.  Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them…live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”  –Rainer Maria Rilke

So here’s a list of the books on writing creative nonfiction/memoir that I’ve found to be the most helpful.  Sadly none of them are writing my book for me.

Memoirs of Mental Illness

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Here’s a list of memoirs of mental illness that I have read and want to read.  As you all know, my aim in life is to write my memoir on Complex PTSD, Bipolar, Dissociative Disorder, and Psychosis mixed with faith and a little Mysticism and psychology.   Please feel free to add to the list in the comments, I’m always looking for more.

The Memoir Begins

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Small Parts (rough draft/excerpt Difficult Degrees)

I trick myself into a stutter every time I think I’m going to begin writing this. It’s easy to do, because after all, how can I write a memoir when my memories are clusters and boils and sighs. There are the body memories from the post-traumatic stress, there are visual flashes, elegant lights, dark corners where I whimper, peaks on which I soar, voices in my head from the psychosis, and the enchanting scents of lilacs and motor oil on rusty tractors. There’s my mother in the eighties, vacuuming the patchwork carpet she made herself in our hazy, smoke-filled low-income house where I had my favorite purple striped dress and an Oscar the Grouch pillow case. There was the opening and closing of the front door where my drunk father stood in warm light, me watching him from the old yellow couch that had green swirls in it, wrapped in my mother’s brown and orange afghan. Pinesol. Bread, The Guess Who, Cat Stevens and Carly Simon. And then the hidden tracks that my mind seems to so desperately seek these days–the long droning songs of my stepfather molesting me. I don’t know what he did. But my body does. I see snapshots and clips of his jeans, the dreaded belt, the sound of the belt, and a video of his own children in child pornography, and I can’t tell if I’m actually there with them on that tire swing somewhere by a lake, being told to touch, or if I’m being forced to watch the video he made of it, him behind me, talking softly, guiding me. I was five. Late at night, when I missed my real daddy, I organized all my stuffed animals over and over and kissed them each exactly the same, and if I showed one too much affection, I had to start over and I’d cry. Then I’d sneak into the bathroom, roll up washcloths, and try to penetrate myself with them. That was how I could fall asleep.
I was the middle child, curious and I think a little wild, and I had to be brave. I wanted the tough role. I wanted to be held like a baby. I wanted to be saved. I wanted to be super and save myself. I know these things because I still want them–an opening into some unscarred part of my heart still wants them. To be weak–he taught me what weakness was. So did my mother. I interpreted weakness as backing away from danger, holding myself, crying, and shying away from instinct and fear. Fear was my instinct, it is now more than ever, but then, being just a girl, just a statistic, just a warm body, when someone takes away from you your core, your selfhood, you find it much easier to empty yourself again and again, to be rid of yourself, to destroy what’s left, for as long as you can, until grace steps in and you break.