Mythmaking
Amanda Leduc“[M]emory itself can be called its own bit of creative nonfiction. We continually—often unconsciously—renovate our memories, shaping them into stories that bring coherence to chaos. Memory has been called the ultimate ‘mythmaker’ … ”—Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, Tell It SlantWhen I was growing up, it was my job to wash the dishes after dinner. I didn’t particularly like doing the dishes, but I also didn’t like to disobey my parents, and so there I’d be, every evening around six pm, elbow-deep in suds and floating bits of food detritus, scrubbing pots and pans and thinking about how unfair it was that my sister, whose job it was to dry the dishes, could abandon her post halfway through the gig and leave the dishes all stacked in the tray. They’d dry eventually, regardless of whether she was at the helm or not. Whereas the only Dishwashing Fairy in the house, it seemed, was me.Years later, at a family function, I was telling the story of my dishwashing woes when my sister interrupted and flat-out told me I was wrong.“I washed the dishes,” she said. “I remember! I always got so mad because you could leave in the middle of drying and I had to stand at the sink for hours.” ***
I didn’t believe her, then or now. (Neither, for the record, did my parents.) But whenever I talk to people about creative non-fiction—as a writer, as an editor, as a fervent admirer of the form—I inevitably come back to this story. Memory, as anyone can tell you—especially anyone with siblings!—is a slippery fish. And the act of building a narrative out of memories, whether they’re your own or someone else’s or a combination of the two, is like standing elbow-deep in murky water with all manner of junk floating by your fingers. That bit of something that just slipped by your hand—it could be the tool your story needs to become polished and wrenching. It could also be a bit of soggy bread that’s better left untouched. Will it contribute to your story, this bit of soggy bread, despite the fact that it’s a fraction of what it used to be, what you remember it being? How do you know? How, as the writer, can you tell?And if you find it, this fraction, and build it into what you and others might remember as a whole—how much of that is truth, and how much of it story, and if it resonates with someone far away who has never known you, do the questions themselves even matter at all?***
Amanda Leduc is the non-fiction editor at Big TruthsWhen someone asks me why I find myself writing more creative non-fiction these days, when for a long time I’d thought of myself mostly as a novelist, my answers usually have something to do with plot. With creative non-fiction, I say, I already know what has happened. So instead of wondering “what the hell happens now?” I get to piece a story together, to fashion a narrative out of bits and pieces that already exist. It’s fun. It’s like found poetry, except with lots more words. Of course, the answer isn’t that simple, because the “piecing together” of creative non-fiction is also the most challenging aspect of the genre. How do you write about memory—either your own or someone else’s—when chances are those memories are flawed? How do you factor scene and dialogue and the techniques of fiction-writing into the writing of a true story when in most cases it’s impossible to remember things—or to get other people to remember things—exactly as they were? How do you tell a story that seems true to you as you remember it but might, in fact, seem like something else entirely to someone who shared the experience with you? Does the simple act of writing about an event after the fact—and the interweaving of said events with some larger idea, some larger part of a nebulous whole—in some way eliminate the truth right from the very beginning? By shaping memory into something larger than itself, do you give voice to something that would otherwise just be forgotten?How do you, as a writer, muster the courage to lay yourself flat and bare in the way that non-fiction sometimes requires?It’s a question that I have no answer for, except to say that somehow you do—somehow, in the excavation of self and family and history and memory, you find the thing that keeps you going as a writer and a reader of the form. Most of what I read now—personal essays, memoir, literary journalism, the list goes on—is creative non-fiction. I have become obsessed with the true stories that we tell, and how we remember them, and how our memories get in the way of truth, how they illuminate the truth, or how they create some mixture of the two. I’m eating the words of Maggie Nelson like they’ll sustain me for the rest of my life. I’m getting lost in the narratives of Eula Biss, contemplating the words and the white spaces of Sarah Manguso, and thinking about the tricky areas between art and fact and the moral complexities explored therein (or, depending on how you look at it, flagrantly disregarded) by John D’Agata.This month, The Town Crier is all about creative non-fiction—the writing of it, the reading of it, the considering of it, and even, in some cases, the crying over it. We’ll hear from Liz Windhorst Harmer, the winner of the 2013 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, on how she navigates the differences between writing fiction and non-fiction. Angela Palm—winner of the 2016 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize—will tell us all about carpenter gothic, and how it relates to her own writing. (Hint: there may be turrets involved.) Trevor Corkum will talk to us about vulnerability in non-fiction writing. We’ll also hear from Mensah Demary, Kim McCullough, Cindy Matthews, Julienne Isaacs, Teri Vlassopoulos, and Julia Zarankin—writers who all dabble in fiction, fact, and the spaces in between. Tell all the truth, Emily Dickinson says, but tell it slant. In other words: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—except in a hundred different ways.
