Liz Harmer’s Formless Non-Fiction
Liz Harmer, published in The Malahat Review and Little BrotherThere was a phase in my short non-fiction career during which I came to believe that my main interest in writing essays was out of a fascination with language. Whereas in fiction, the fascination was with feelings, behavior, characters, what might happen to those characters, and the author as the placer of figurines on a board, in non-fiction the fascinations were different, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on them. One essay began because of slogans I had heard in my CrossFit classes, including “pain is weakness leaving the body”, which I took to be ridiculous. One essay had me fixated on the relationships between words and images we use about anger and the different meanings of the word “temper.” The interest in idiom and wordplay is there in fiction, too. I recognized its pleasures in Lorrie Moore’s latest collection of stories, for example. In “Foes”, she plays with a mispronunciation of “faux pas”—“faux” pronounced by her character as “foze” (or, of course, “foes”).During the first month of my creative writing degree, a talented young poet in our cohort asked why I wrote non-fiction. When I said I didn’t know but I thought it was a way of exploring words—etymologies and overlaps and puns—he told me that that was what poetry was for. Of course it was! An essay I’d written called “How Little” in which I tried to expose the feelings of the baby blues had taken me months and thousands of words; I later read a shortish poem by Katie Ford that did all I had tried to do in that essay, but better.I have believed the now-clichés about essay writing since before I knew they were clichés. I don’t know what I think about something until I’ve written it. An essay is an attempt. In many ways I have written nonfiction blindly and with raw inexperience; when my essays met with success I did not know how to duplicate it.***
When I wrote essays in high school, I wrote them with bombastic idealism, as though some essay I wrote might save humanity. For my Bible class, I wrote 20 pages on the Book of Jonah. For English, I tried to solve the problem of mind-body dualism. For Art History, it was 25 pages comparing medieval iconography to Pop Art, culminating in my own works of art attempting to bridge the cathedral with Warhol. For Geography, global warming. For Sociology, nature vs. nurture. I was interested in everything, and many of these essays had me up too late, over-caffeinated, shaking with the feeling that there were so many paths coming close and I had to find a way to make them converge. It felt more like a difficult manipulation of matter (pushing a rock up a steep hill) than an intellectual task. Then, as now, when I write an essay I feel like I am going out too far on deep ice: might sink, must go. I’m trying to find the right structure for the ideas as I go, because the place from which I draw all this cannot be looked at directly. My essays always end up combining unlike or unlikely things, but they never feel that way to me. They just feel exciting, and then impossible. Then they are written, and I don’t know what they are.***
In the spring of 2014, by which time I had written and published some of my creative non-fiction, I attended a festival and asked some creative non-fiction panelists about their relationship to facts. My fearlessness when it comes to asking dumb questions comes from the same place that becomes over-interested in the meanings of words. Non-fiction to me has never felt like it had anything to do with facts. Like, did you need to know facts? Did you need to believe in them? What is non-fiction anyway? Was an essay a form? That is, could you write a fictional essay the way you could make a mockumentary?When I worked at the public library shelving books as a teenager, I was shocked by how little facticity was necessary for a thing to be deemed non-fiction. Besides disproven scientific theories and defunct medical information, besides books of bad advice or invention (does Jonah Lehrer still get shelved in non-fic? Does James Frey?), there are all kinds of disputable topics. In the 130s, you’ll find paranormal phenomena, occult methods for achieving well-being, and physiognomy. An old boyfriend of mine loved to get books about the lizard kings who created us, as well as conspiracies involving the pyramids.Like most classification practices, the use of “non-fiction” as a category has to do more with practical convenience than it does with a judgment of truth. I know I can be an overthinking pain in the ass sometimes. I know it isn’t useful to quibble in most circumstances, which is why I write essays instead. A thing is non-fiction if we label it as such and if we mean it as such.***
Non-fiction can tell stories. Creative non-fiction uses scenes and summaries, showing and telling. These are all the tools of fiction writing: characters and arcs; settings and details; and metaphors and images. I know that I write a lot of aphorisms in my essays, but I do this in my fiction also. The real difference is my attitude towards the material. These were thoughts I actually had, conversations as I remember them, books I read, things I witnessed, and stuff I knew. Though of course everything is flawed and misremembered, I must believe that what I’m saying is—can we say it?—true.***
Okay. Maybe the real difference is how it feels to write them. Let’s use an Emily Dickinson style assessment. Does the top of my head come off? Poetry. Do I feel shaken by what I’ve written? Fiction. Do I feel proud and intellectually satisfied? Non-fiction. Take the case of Virginia Woolf for this difference in feeling and tone. She writes angry, biting non-fiction and lyrical fiction. She writes polemical non-fiction and painterly fiction.When I am writing fiction, when I am at my best in fiction, I enter into a sort of trance. I am not super-aware of the writing but enter a mind-space akin to that of reading something absorbing. The mechanics disappear. It’s a form of muscle memory, maybe. In non-fiction, for me, the mechanics never disappear. I’m always going out too far on the weak ice. I’m always aware of the paths I might have taken and did not, the points I’ve tried to make or those I am in the progress of making. It’s an anxiety-ridden mode of constant self-interrogation, because I don’t really know how to do it.***
I think, ultimately, that this is what I like about it. Fiction can be upsetting for me, but even more difficult is when I can’t get into that space of total absorption. Fiction can feel hard to make fresh because I’ve read all the handbooks and heard the lectures. When I began to write creative non-fiction, it felt like uncharted territory, a thing I’d have to figure out as I went, and this made it feel like a different sort of creativity. I write non-fiction naively, without having taken a class or a read a handbook, and thus it is, for me, a form without rules and an escape.Liz Harmer’s stories and essays can be found in The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Little Brother, and Grain, among others. She was the 2013 winner of the Constance Rooke Award for Creative Nonfiction, first runner-up for the 2013 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, and won the 2014 National Magazine Award for Personal Journalism.