Writing Is a Balancing Act // Jennifer Porter

Jennifer Porter writes on authenticity, taking off our tinted lenses, and balance as part of Lauren Davis’ guest month, “Writing About the Living.”

Writers tend to be a solipsistic bunch, forever attempting to puzzle out their all-important existential mysteries through the form of the narrative. Hemingway and Fitzgerald borrowed characters straight from life, as did Virginia Woolf, but Flannery O’Connor claimed to invent hers. My guess is she cobbled her characters together using bits of her own self and those people she knew or knew about. Much like the platypus, if one believes in creation by a Higher Power. Tolkien wrote about writers being closest to understanding what it might feel like to be God in their act of creating imaginary worlds, peopled with what feel like living, breathing humans. It’s a serious weight to protect the privacy of those people that make their way into my prose, whether it be fiction or memoir. I am especially conscious of how I use my children and my husband in my work, but I also feel compelled to write about my experiences. I rationalize this invasion of people’s privacy by holding myself to a standard of the authorial objective viewpoint. While my narrator may be biased for or against certain characters within the narrative, I am obligated to consider my characters’ actions from all possible angles. What I feel is a pressing need to be truthful in my portrayal of the character borrowed from life. Being truthful often means acknowledging that I previously viewed the person’s role in whatever happened with tinted lenses and as an author, I’m obligated to be empathic in my analysis of their motives and behaviours. Like an actor, I must step into what it must be like to be that person and write from their perspective, even if they are monsters. Because I hold myself to this standard, I cannot write about events and the people creating/reacting to them until my feelings have diffused enough that I can stand back from the scene, much like an out-of-body experience. Or like a cinematic camera zooming all the way out before crawling behind someone else’s eyes. I am not one of those writers who can write about something while in the midst of the experience. Often the hardest part of this process is re-examining my own behaviours and the resultant skepticism of the opinions I had developed about the people involved, including myself. I have a terrible tendency to wash myself clean in my memories and the truth is, I’m not such a good person. Or I realize that I thought so-and-so did such and such because of this or that, and after I spend time looking out from their perspective, I had it all wrong. Sometimes to the person’s advantage, and sometimes not. In one story I’m working on about my grandfather, I cannot seem to bring myself to portray him as anything other than a hero, though I know his behaviour during this particular event was disappointing. I kept sending the story out and getting personal rejections, but rejections all the same—all the while, knowing I was not being truthful to my grandfather’s character. I stopped sending the story, and it is waiting for me to excise it and rewrite it to a painful truth. I think this is what Hemingway meant about bleeding onto the page. We must cut away at all the artificially constructed scaffolding we build to shore up a weak belief system about ourselves, our lives, and the people that exist within them. It’s painful to acknowledge that we hurt our loved ones, that we’re not always who we think we are. Often we must come to an understanding that someone who wronged us may have been doing the best they could at the time. Peeling away bitterness leaves us raw and exposed. One of the reasons I have always enjoyed Hemingway’s work is the fact that the main character is someone I usually don’t like. Someone who can be mean, self-centered, thoughtless, sexist, but also someone who feels deeply, desires love and acceptance, is heartbroken. Writing about my personal history feels similar to slicing through the layers of an onion. Even if I am only using an element of my past, such as when I lived in a mobile home in a semi-rural area with my two small children and walked next door to work at the senior citizen group home. When I began this story, I couldn’t figure out why I was suddenly obsessed with the images that arose in my mind from 25 years ago of this 700 square foot trailer, and the muskrat pond in the front yard, and the old people at the group home. As I began working with the images, I remembered others both from that time in my life and from other times. I remembered more and more details and the images became strikingly clear. Out of these images came a main character who became her own person, in her own time period, and responding to her own life circumstances. She has a lot of problems. She’s trying to be a good mother, but her behaviours are leaving negative imprints on her children. She’s lonely and she’s suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s some of me now, some of me then, and she’s some of her own person arisen from within my subconscious. Versions of my sons appear in this story, and I must be careful to be truthful to their selves as I blend characters that serve the story. William James, the psychologist brother to author Henry James, studied consciousness, and his writings were popular when Woolf and Joyce began experimenting with stream of consciousness writing. James described consciousness as a spotlight in the theatre of our lives. What we often don’t realize is that the areas of the stage not held within the spotlight are still stored in our minds. Our sensory impressions of the entire experience are captured by our brains. We can work to see the whole scene. The work for me is returning over and over to the memory and writing through the images and allowing my mind to call up more and more details. It has been astonishing to remember some of the images I have from my childhood. The way light fell through a certain window in our living room upon my mother as she sat painting. The sound of my father dropping his briefcase by the front door when he got home from work. My nine-year-old knees covered in large scabs all summer as I skinned them repeatedly. It is during the calling up of these details that I have been able to see my characters, borrowed from real persons, in all of their angles. There is something about putting our own selves aside that often allows us to get at the truth behind others. This to me, is what makes a story authentic. At The Tishman Review, we are always looking for prose that reads authentically. When I think back on the many stories and essays we have published, I believe the common thread is the level of authenticity. The author worked hard to be true to the experience of the characters within the narrative. After we read the work, we think, This is what it must be like to be this person under these circumstances and in this setting. Attaining authenticity is particularly important when we write about cultures outside of our own. When I was a young woman I read and fell in love with the book The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter. My second great-grandparents were mixed Cherokee and Shawnee, but my Ralstons and Hustons had left their tribes in the 1820s and assimilated into white culture. I have Cherokee and Shawnee ancestors, but I was raised and know only what it is to be white. I thought the book had shown me a bit about what it was like to be Cherokee. And then, not many years later, I discovered that Forrest Carter was really Asa Earl Carter, a KKK member and segregationist, and the entire story was a hoax. Carter misrepresented the Cherokee culture and belief system. I stormed into nearby libraries and demanded the book be re-shelved as fiction, as at this time most libraries shelved it as biography, as truth. And the librarians agreed with me. This betrayal has never left me. Why wouldn’t an author strive to be authentic? Just as our characters are neither all good nor all bad, nor are writers. There are white male authors who have blamed their lack of publications on the belief that publishers are only publishing voices other than white male. In order to skirt around this, they try to write from a culture not their own. This is not a bad thing when the author concerns himself with authenticity, when he concerns himself with writing from the character’s truth. That author does all of the hard work to get to that truth, and it shows in the story. We can invade another culture’s privacy just as we can invade an individual’s privacy, and both are areas of concern for thoughtful authors. At the journal, authors have requested last minute pen names. Authors have declined to proceed with the publication of short stories in which they could be accused of cultural appropriation. Authors have requested their work be pulled from the journal post-publication. It is nearly impossible to re-haul the entire layout of the journal to pull a prose piece, and as an all-volunteer staff, we aren’t willing to do that. And we’re careful with what we publish; as editors we must be mindful and concerned for others. One of the ways I calm the jitters of myself and others is to remind authors that, generally speaking, the people we know best don’t read our published works, even our writer friends. They’re just not interested, having known us as regular joes. Or they’ve already read a thing or two we’ve written, or they’re too busy. The other important concept to remember is that readers read to invade privacy. The more intimate the experience feels with the words of the author, the more engaged the reader feels. Morgan Jerkins seems especially gifted in her ability to eliminate distance between herself as narrator and her reader in her essay collection This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America. You cannot help but enjoy Jerkins’ writing, even as you feel empowered, sympathetic, disconcerted, and shocked by what she says. Jerkins lets us into her life, and we leave each essay without doubts as to where she stands. In a society where individuals struggle with feeling disconnected, Jerkins allows us an immediate connection to a transparent, authentic voice. It creates a powerful reading experience. We can hurt others with our words. We must examine the tightrope we have decided to traverse, and when we look down at the scene below, be determined not to lose our focus, get dizzy, and fall. We must take little baby steps, keep hold of our balancing rod, and believe that by getting to the other side we will create a beautiful thing—something only we can give to humanity.

Jennifer Porter is co-founder and prose editor at The Tishman Review and Route 7 Press, and her writing has appeared in Fifth Wednesday Journal, Old Northwest Review, The Dos Passos Review, Apeiron Review, drafthorse, The Ocotillo Review, and other journals and anthologies. Her novella The World Beyond can be found in an anthology with Claren Books. She is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives near East Lansing, Michigan.