6
Writing the Arts
Culture is like a magnetic field, a patterned energy shaping history. It is invisible, even unsuspected, until a receiver sensitive enough to pick up its messages can give it a voice.
—GUY DAVENPORT
I’ve put up a new picture, a photograph bought for me at an Edward Weston exhibit last April. The composition shows a young woman, all in black, posed against a high, white fence. She half turns toward the camera; her right hand lies tentatively across her heart. The shadow of a leafless tree (I imagine it to be a young oak) curves up and over this slight figure. Actually, it does more than curve; the shadow arches behind her in a gesture of protection. Almost a bow of respect.
Why do I like this picture so much? I glance at it every day, and every day it puzzles me. What draws me to those dark, shaded eyes? What holds me transfixed by the movement of gray shadows over the straight white planks, the drape of the black coat, the white hand raised to the breast in a stunned gesture of surprise?
These questions led me to write the first essay I ever published, titled “Prologue to a Sad Spring,” after Weston’s own title of the photograph I describe. In this essay, the photograph’s mysterious title becomes a meditation on what it means to have a “sad spring,” on how our lives are full of losses never memorialized in photographs. It’s a short essay, with a circular design that leads the reader back to the appeal of black-and-white photography and to this particular photograph that started the rumination in the first place. Though it’s a simple piece, with simple ambitions, it remains a favorite essay in my repertoire. It feels almost like a gift, an ephemeral connection between myself and the woman in this photograph, a distant communiqué between a writer and a photographer who would never meet.
—BRENDA
The Visual Arts
With old glass-plate daguerreotypes—the earliest form of photography—if you tilt the plate just slightly, the image disappears and the photograph becomes a mirror, an apt metaphor for how the creative nonfiction writer can approach art. Through a close observation of particular paintings, sculptures, or photographs, you can reveal your own take on the world or find metaphors in line with your obsessions. At the same time, you will elucidate that artwork in such a way that the piece will forever after have a greater significance for your reader.
For example, in the essay “Inventing Peace,” art historian and journalist Lawrence Weschler closely analyzes a Vermeer painting to understand what is happening during the Bosnian war crimes tribunal in The Hague. He compares the serene, almost dreamlike settings of Vermeer with the atrocities the judges in The Hague, just minutes from the Vermeer exhibit, hear about every day. One particular painting, The Head of a Young Girl (popularly known as Girl with a Pearl Earring), intrigues him. He explicates this painting for us:
Has the girl just turned toward us or is she just about to turn away? . . . The answer is that she’s actually doing both. This is a woman who has just turned toward us and is already about to look away: and the melancholy of the moment, with its impending sense of loss, is transferred from her eyes to the tearlike pearl dangling from her ear. . . . The girl’s lips are parted in a sudden intake of breath—much, we suddenly notice, as are our own as we gaze back upon her.
Weschler closely studies this painting, interpreting the details as he unfolds them for us one by one. He creates a speculative narrative that brings this painting to life. In a speculative narrative, the writer infuses a painting or any situation with a story that arises from both fact and imagination. For instance, it is clear in Weschler’s description that the facts of the painting exist as he relates them—the parted lips, the pearl earring—but he allows himself to speculate on the meaning of those details. He brings his own frame of mind to bear on the portrait; this interpretation sets up the themes for his piece.
In Jericho Parms’s essay “On Touching Ground” (see Anthology), she begins by describing an Edgar Degas bronze sculpture housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Horse Trotting, Feet Not Touching Ground”:
Deep within the galleries of the Metropolitan, a glass wall case barely contains the wild form of a racehorse. Veiny grooves mark the horse’s flank and haunches, its powerful shoulders, crest, the forelock of its mane. The tail extends like a petticoat train in its cantering wake. Head high, the horse is poised, proud.
The specific, vivid, and active details in this description bring the artwork to life on the page, and they also provide the writer a foundation for several associative leaps. The essay will travel beyond the gallery to memories of working with her grandfather on the family ranch, to researched material about wild mustangs, to other artwork about horses, and other bronzes by Degas. It becomes a richly textured braided essay that relies on visual art as the grounding thread. Parms said in an interview with the magazine The Normal School: “For me, viewing art is an exercise of attention, a process of giving myself over to observation and allowing new ideas and meditations to surface as a result of the simple act of looking.”
Another way of working with art is to allow the viewer to gaze on the images with you. In A Postcard Memoir, Lawrence Sutin pairs his personal writing with images from old postcards. He looks for small, unexpected details that give rise to his own memories and meditations. (See Chapter 10, “Mixed Media, Cross-Genre, Hybrid, and Digital Works,” for further discussion on using other media in your creative nonfiction.)
The Moving Image Arts
The moving image arts—such as film, television, YouTube videos, music videos, even video games—create a vital and visible part of our cultural expression.
Remember Paisley Rekdal’s “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee” (see Anthology) from Chapter 2, “Writing the Family”? The essay invokes pop culture images of the Chinese and the Chinese-American, particularly the narrator’s mother, whose school guidance counselor advises her not to go to Smith, “hinting at some limitation my mother would prefer to ignore.” At the same time, a cook in the restaurant where the mother works tells her he comes from Hong Kong and hence is “real Chinese.” Rekdal embeds that sense of cultural limbo—appearing Chinese to a white guidance counselor but an assimilated American to a recent immigrant—in the artifice of kung fu movies.
In the essay, mother and daughter bond watching the martial arts film Enter the Dragon:
Bruce Lee narrows his eyes, ripples his chest muscles under his white turtleneck.
“I knew him,” my mother tells me. “I worked with him in a restaurant when I was in high school.”
“Really?” This is now officially the only cool thing about her. “What was he like?”
“I don’t remember. No one liked him, though. All that kung fu stuff; it looked ridiculous. Like a parody.”
Rekdal pays close attention to the film itself in this piece; her prose follows the film’s use of lighting—the way Lee’s chest “seemed outlined in silver,” mirroring the way Rekdal’s mother’s face “twists into something I do not recognize in the television light.” It’s as if the cultural distortion created by the movie and movies like it distorts the mother even in the eyes of her daughter. Note that Rekdal has been careful to look at the techniques of the films in question and use them throughout her essay—not just the kung fu itself, which becomes picked up by the restaurant chef, but kung fu films’ visual style of bright color and exaggerated gesture.
You can also take a more analytical approach to television and film, exploring what they mean in terms of culture and society. For example, Bill McKibben, in his book The Age of Missing Information, performs an experiment in which he has friends record every channel on a Virginia cable network for twenty-four hours, then he goes about analyzing what he sees to create a portrait of the American mindset: what we learn—and more important, what we don’t learn—from what surrounds us on TV. McKibben, who doesn’t own a television himself, spends several months watching these videotapes of a single day’s television programming:
I began spending eight- or ten-hour days in front of the VCR—I watched it all, more or less. A few programs repeat endlessly, with half-hour “infomercials” for DiDi 7 spot remover and Liquid Luster car wax leading the list at more than a dozen appearances apiece. Having decided that once or twice was enough to mine their meanings, I would fast-forward through them, though I always slowed down to enjoy the part where the car-wax guy sets fire to the hood of his car.
McKibben contrasts what one can learn from a day of television to what one can learn from a day in the woods, providing specific examples of each mode, and revealing his own personality at the same time.
All the moving image arts, especially in this age of digital delivery, can comment on our own lives and on the history surrounding them. They can also capture a cultural moment. Think of how at times movies such as Thelma and Louise or TV shows such as “Seinfeld” seem to speak for the feelings of large numbers of people in our society, generating catchphrases and images that become embedded in our collective consciousness.
Think about the moving image arts that form a backdrop to your own lives. For example, are there certain music videos that capture the emotion of your generation? Are there video games that contain the intricacies of visual art and storytelling for you and your peers? Are there television shows or films that become common meeting grounds for you and your friends? How can these arts add not only details and texture to your own personal story, but also help it become a more communal one?
Music
As we mentioned in Chapter 1, “The Body of Memory,” music can key us into powerful memories that define the self. And music can also serve as a medium to channel some of the most vital issues of our time. We still look back at the 1960s antiwar movement by looking at the music that sprang out of it. Music is a vessel that holds the emotions of its time.
As an example, let’s consider David Margolick and Hilton Als’ book Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song. “Strange Fruit,” a song written for blues singer Billie Holiday, tells the horrendous story of Southern lynchings. Through the lens of this song Margolick and Als weave together the tales of Holiday’s short, difficult, and heroin-addicted life, the white communist sympathizer who wrote the song, the struggle for civil rights, New York café society, even the history of lynching. This single song contains within it a story that branches out and out to speak of two extraordinary human beings as well as the thorniest problem in American history—race.
Another approach is to consider a type of music or a particular musician who has been influential to you at key moments in your life. For example, in her essay “The Pat Boone Fan Club,” Sue William Silverman uses the occasion of the iconic musician Pat Boone coming to town for a concert to describe what this singer meant to her as a child and as a young woman. She remembers lying on her bed, magnifying glass in hand, as she studied his picture in Life magazine:
I was particularly drawn to the whiteness in the photos. Pat Boone’s white-white teeth beamed at me, his white bucks spotless. I savored each cell of his being as I traced my finger across his magnified image. . . . I fantasized living inside this black-and-white print, unreachable. This immaculate universe was safe, far away from my father’s all-too-real hands, hands that hurt me at night.
The essay then travels through time to give us other memories of Pat Boone and meditations on the inherent contradictions at play in the narrator’s life and that of Pat Boone’s, always using that present-day concert as an anchoring thread.
Literature: The “Reading Narrative”
A “reading narrative” shows the author reading another piece of literature and using it as a springboard for actions and reflections. Like writers who use the visual arts, authors of reading narratives are somehow grappling with another artist’s aesthetics as a means of probing deeper into their own. Phyllis Rose’s book The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time is an excellent example, as the author reads all of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past while using it as a means to chronicle her own life, comparing her Key West to Proust’s Balbec, the characters inhabiting her life to those in his.
Another fascinating example of a reading narrative is Jennifer Sinor’s Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe. This book focuses on the artist O’Keeffe’s letters, primarily the nearly two thousand letters she wrote to her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Sinor uses O’Keeffe’s letters to meditate on the artist’s life and work, and on her own. Sinor is personally present in the book, telling stories of relationships in her life defined by letters, giving us glimpses into her history and her family. Sinor also probes the nature of letters themselves: letters “give us something more than information . . . they most especially document a self who is becoming—a self stitching together, word by word, a version of who she thinks she is.”
As Sinor reads O’Keeffe’s letters, she notices how much both the content of the letters and their appearance, with exuberant “waves” of handwriting, reflect O’Keeffe’s art. O’Keeffe’s artistic habits, including her practice of returning to a subject again and again looking for its emotional center, become the book’s aesthetic. Sinor describes her book as “nine essays that attempt to push words on the page as O’Keeffe pushed paint on her canvas.”
Most of us can remember at least one “eureka” reading moment. That moment may give us permission to do things differently in our own work: use a new voice, dig deeper, or consider new subject matter as potentially ours. These “eureka” writers are our literary mentors, whether we realize that or not. And what we read may spur us on in many different ways—other authors inspire us, give us permission, and also irritate us in ways that stimulate us to try something new.
TRY IT
1. For each of the Arts categories described in this chapter—Visual Arts, Moving Image Arts, Music, and Literature—brainstorm a list of the works that have been part of your own life. Spend about three minutes with each category, not worrying about whether something fits or not. You can expand beyond what we have identified in each category; for example, is fashion, for you, a visual art? or Instagram? Allow your mind to roam widely.
Go back and look over your complete list. How do these works, on their own, form a picture of your life and the life of your generation? You can use this list as a resource for future writing.
For now, choose just one item on your list and write a scene of your interaction or encounter with this artwork. What themes arise? How does the artwork enable you to access certain memories or issues?
2. Begin an essay by describing a piece of visual art that has always intrigued you. Feel free to interpret the details, creating a speculative narrative about what is happening in the painting or what was going through the painter’s mind. Find other interpretations from art scholars and begin to create an essay that approaches this artwork from several different angles.
3. Begin an essay by describing a particular artwork in vivid, active detail. Allow your mind to then make associations to personal memories.
VARIATION: Parallel your interpretation of a particular artwork or artist with events going on in the world around you or with events unfolding in your own life.
4. Think about a film that you love, or a YouTube video, or a music video, that you could watch any number of times. Look closely at the conventions and physical experience of film or video, and question your obsession. Can you borrow the visual style of the work in question? Can you write an essay that you model on scenes in the work you’ve viewed? Where did you first see the film or video, and what has it represented to the larger culture?
5. Think about television commercials that stick with you. How do they define the eras they appear in? How have they shaped you, perhaps in terms of social relationships, signs of status, body image?
6. Write an essay that uses popular television or radio shows to establish the time and place of your piece. What were the shows you watched as a child? How did they establish the routine of your day? Why do you think those particular shows hooked you?
7. Are you into video games? Do you play them or watch others play them? Try to describe a particular video game for its aesthetic appeal. Why do you think you and others are drawn to it? What does it reflect about your lives?
8. This prompt expands on uses of music presented in Chapter 1. Identify the piece of music that’s been most important to you in your life. First, try to write down why it means so much to you, and when and where you can remember hearing it. If there are lyrics, write down all you can remember, and list adjectives that describe the melody.
Now try tracing all of the cultural connections of the song, as the authors of Strange Fruit did. This may or may not take a little bit of research.
9. Try to imagine your way into the head of a musician you love. Create a speculative narrative that combines fact and fiction to bring that person’s music to life on the page.
10. Think about your reading life. What piece of writing has “taken the top of your head off,” to use Emily Dickinson’s phrase? Write a reading narrative in which you enter into dialogue with this writing—feel free to quote it. How has this reading experience changed you and helped you redefine your life and your mission as a writer?
11. Write a history of your life through the books you’ve read. What was your favorite book at age five? Age ten? Age sixteen? Age twenty? Write these out in sections, rendering in specific, sensory detail the memories these books inspire in you.
FOR FURTHER READING
In Our Anthology
• “On Touching Ground” by Jericho Parms
• “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee” by Paisley Rekdal
RESOURCES AVAILABLE ONLINE
• “Inventing Peace” by Lawrence Wechsler
Print Resources
• Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song by David Margolick and Hilton Als
• The Age of Missing Information by Bill McKibben
• The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time by Phyllis Rose
• The Pat Boone Fan Club by Sue William Silverman
• Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe by Jennifer Sinor
• A Postcard Memoir by Lawrence Sutin