Robert Root

 

As we struggle to cope with these troublesome, contentious, and too often tragic times, social media keeps us apprised of positive ways some people are coping. From time to time I tune in on Facebook to actors reading children's books, soloists performing from their living rooms, whole choirs harmonizing from multiple locations, whole orchestras and dance companies blending seamlessly from miles apart, and authors giving virtual readings from virtual bookstores. Just this week I read an online interview with one of my favorite authors whose latest book's publication has been delayed by months because of the pandemic.

 

Rebecca McClanahan's forthcoming In the Key of New York City, originally scheduled to come out in May, will now come out in September. I've admired her earlier books, The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings and The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change, as well as her writing in literary journals and collections like The Best American Essays. She's a writer I can count on to entertain and enlighten me and I was eager to read the interview about the book posted online by the Rainier Writers Workshop (where she also teaches writing). It made think more about the nature of memoir and essay in current creative nonfiction.

 

In answer to a question from Sydney Elliott, the managing editor of RWW Soundings, about "the process of compiling the material for this book," McClanahan discusses the challenges of connecting material that often had been published separately "over a period of many years." She began writing some of the essays when she and her husband first moved to New York—one in particular began prior to the 9/11 attack—but "only three years ago did I finally find the shape for the book and begin to revise—often with much violence." I especially appreciate her explanation of the complications of the form she writes in: "A memoir-in-essays is a tricky form. Though each essay should have a life of its own, when shaping a memoir-in-essays, the writer must consider how the essays talk to each other and build upon each other so that together they form something greater than the sum of their parts." Those are lines I keep returning to; they capture the essence of the "memoir-in-essays."

 

Notice the complications of the interactions among the materials. That "each essay should have a life of its own" suggests independent wholeness while "how the essays talk to each other and build upon each other" suggests the interrelatedness of a cohesive narrative or argument. It may seem contradictory to be pursuing both goals but if successful they can "form something greater than the sum of their parts." That's the challenge of not simply "compiling" such a book but of essentially composing it out of pre-existing parts. McClanahan tells us, "For me, this involved making tough decisions not only about which essays to include (some of my favorites don't appear in the book) but also about what final form the essays would take." Although most of them had already been published, she "rewrote parts of them, cut certain sections, and broke a few long essays into flash pieces and scattered them throughout the manuscript." For one of them, she "dismantled the line breaks to a published poem and rewrote it as prose" when she determined that "the scene described in the poem was integral to the memoir."

 

McClanahan's earlier book, The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, influenced some of the more personal books I've written. At least one of them, Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place, is essentially a collection of essays of place published over a period of years but the process of "compiling" the material was more challenging than it might seem if you look at the contents. Some essays I'd published somehow didn't fit the tone or the voice of the majority of essays I was trying to tie together and had to be discarded. Only after I'd written some new essays did I recognized the thread that bound them all together.

 

It occurs to me that I've been reading other "memoirs-in-essays" over the past few years—surely the term applies to Patricia Hampl's The Art of the Wasted Day and Scott Russell Sanders' Hunting for Hope and Peggy Shumaker's Just Breathe Normally. There's a point in certain works of narrative nonfiction where you need to read each section in order—a chapter is, after all, a section, a division, a segment of a whole (Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)—and there's a point in others where you can read divisions quite separately in any order, each virtually independent of the others (Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk). Somewhere between those points is the "memoir-in-essays," where each piece resonates with all the other pieces, harmonizes with them, accumulates awareness of the author's sensibility and outlook. That's what I'm looking forward to in Rebecca McClanahan's In the Key of New York City.

 

 

 

Note: The full interview by Sydney Elliott is "Storing What Remains: An Interview with Rebecca McClanahan" at RWW Soundings, Summer 2020. Rebecca McClanahan's other work can be found on her website.

 

I appreciate the advantages of working with a clear narrative structure, having a straightforward story to tell—"Here's how it started; here's what happened next; here's how it ended." For my first two books of creative nonfiction, Recovering Ruth and Following Isabella, the structure of earlier works determined the structures I built, even though I didn't write my portions as chronologically as Ruth Douglass and Isabella Bird wrote theirs. It's good to follow a straightforward path, the road most travelled; those of us without one can end up on a long and winding road, bushwhacking and breaking trail most of the way.

 

The subject of my memoir, Happenstance, wasn't entirely one I'd ignored. Decades earlier, I'd written vignettes for broadcast on my local Michigan public radio station based on boyhood memories triggered by adult events: renovating the hundred-year old house where my wife and I now lived brought to mind the dank cellar and stripped walls of my parents' house; watching my children play reminded me of childhood neighborhood friends; and so on. Some vignettes showed up again when I encouraged composition students to write about their childhoods—the street map I modeled to help them reconnect with memory ignited my own memories; the guided imagery exercise leading them into past places propelled me toward mine. One student's story about his mother meeting his father because of a fly ball at a summer softball game haunted me: what if the batter had bunted or struck out? What kind of happenstance brought my own parents together?

 

Curious about my own family history after researching others', I began researching a family memoir. The material invited a chronological history but didn't answer questions about my own parents and my own life; everything that surfaced seemed connected with everything else. Though I wanted to write a book that would say something to my children about how their father turned out to be who he was, I plunged deeply into genealogy. After months of research and drafting, my wife asked how it was coming. When I told her I was almost up to the birth of my grandfather, she said quietly, "You know, if this is going to be a memoir, you should probably be in it." I loved all the research, but she was right—I wasn't in the book I was writing to explain about me.

 

I discovered two different ways to focus my attention. Before I assigned students to write caption essays about their family photos, I attempted the exercise myself and was startled by what it unleashed in memory, based on my greater distance from the events. For the memoir I began interrogating family photographs, describing what I saw in them first as a viewer and then as an interpreter. Leafing through family albums, I wrote about the pictures that most interested me. To avoiding a chronological narrative, I also decided to write about the first hundred days of my life that I remembered, in the order they occurred to me. Surely, I could write one a day over the next hundred days. On the eleventh day my father died. I stopped writing but scribbled down a list of possible subjects in case I ever started up again. The list ran well over a hundred items.

 

Life, and other books, intervened. What stayed with me was the experience of the first day I had written about, a day in elementary school when I ran home from school feeling exuberant. Why had I remembered that day first? Why could I remember no other exuberant days? I soon realized this approach could help me find formative moments in my life. I'd begun teaching memoir-writing to graduate students online and felt I should revive the memoir. To the Album entries and Hundred Days entries, I added a third strand reflecting on the nature of happenstance and the nature of choice. In time I realized happenstance was the dominant theme of the memoir. It also became the title.

 

Some of the 57 completed entries in the Hundred Days series got in; many Album entries got in; items I thought of as literary remains from my father, mother and grandmother got in; reflections on the nature of happenstance got in. Some days I would lay all these entries in a circle on our dining table or in a straight line on our carpet and hover over them, trying to feel some sort of sympathetic tuning among them, weaving them together through juxtaposition and association, the reverberations one piece of writing picks up from another piece, the synchronicities ignited by experience and memory. It's a memoir but not entirely narrative; it's more the prose equivalent of a medieval polyptych, a multi-paneled altarpiece, made up of words and photographs.

 

I'm amazed at all the time, energy, false starts, missteps and perplexity this book put me through. No book ever becomes the book you intended to write, of course. When I tell students that the writing will tell you what it wants to be, this is what I mean. It was the only way I could write it—the only way this book would let me write it.

 

 

Note: A slightly different version of this entry was first published on Michael Steinberg's Blog on February 9, 2013 as "The Long and Winding Road: A Memoirist's Journey" at  http://www.mjsteinberg.net/blog/archives/2013-02.

 

Here's a familiar photo that came to mind while I was thinking about the pitcher picture. Note the similar stance, the similar era of photography (b&w), whatever immediate differences you notice.

 

You could ask yourself about this photo most of the questions you asked yourself about the earlier photo. Handily, having a second photo offers an occasion for comparison, the similarities and differences in the two helping to sharpen your perceptions and impressions of both pictures. If you had two different photos of either person, you could make similar comparisons, just as you did when you compared your possible yearbook pictures or when you have selected someone else's photo for a celebration or an obituary. Who is the person who is still there in different images of him- or her-self?

 

I've been treating these two images as if they were images of strangers, although there are occasions when most of us have to examine images of ourselves. But all images of individuals have a further dimension that could be considered. What happens when you know the person in the photo even if the photo itself is unfamiliar to you?

 

For example, my friend Mike's pitcher picture dates from 1958 but I didn't meet him until a quarter century later, when he invited me to join him in starting a writing workshop for teachers at Traverse Bay. For most of the time I knew him he was mustached and bearded—I looked through photos of the two of us across decades and, after his death last year, I posted images from 1994 to 2013—and the high school photos in Still Pitching show me someone I wouldn't have otherwise recognized. I can't always remember the exact dates of the pictures of the two of us, but I almost immediately recall the occasions and the locales. The pitcher picture deepened my sense of who my grown-up friend was all along.

 

I am the figure in the parking lot picture. I felt an affectionate amusement when I stumbled on the similarity of our poses in these two photos, taken only a few years apart. As it happens, the parking lot was next door to both my parents' house and a neighborhood park with a baseball diamond so close my father or brother or I would sometimes toss any foul balls that landed in our yard back over the park fence. I had no other contact with sport then. But thinking how Mike's adolescent image speaks to who he was throughout his life, I start to wonder what my image forecasts about me.

 

The guy in the photo is a high school graduate a year out of school who can't imagine that a year later, as a freshman, he'll begin an educational trajectory that will one day make him a published professor. He'd   always been solitary, usually closeted away to read voluminously and to write private fiction, including a post-high school novel. In that year after graduation he and his friend Dave drove cross-country from western New York to California and, to his surprise, back. I see him there, in what he thought was a fairly dramatic black and white outfit and likely assumed to be a pretty solid stance, and start to wonder if their excursion along Route 66 to Disneyland, Hollywood, San Diego, and Tijuana somehow helped form his tendency to wander and to write about wandering—the lifelong attention to place that led to many of his publications. In all the times I've seen this photo before I never realized it hinted at the man who would be looking at it in the future.

 

The writing we do in reaction to an image draws so much upon who we are, what we bring to the viewing, what the image connects to in us; journaling the image can be both revealing and rewarding. As it happens, trying to recall the dates that Mike and I ran that Traverse Bay program, I looked in Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching, the anthology we edited from material written at and about those workshops, and found that my article about my writing group is titled "Writing the Outdoors: From Journals to Essays" and my pedagogy article centers on "Popular Media in the Language Arts Classroom," both written twenty-five years ago. I seem to be still practicing what I once preached.

 

Gazing at the picture of Mike taken decades before I met him, I somehow feel more intimately connected to him than I did in life. Gazing at my own photo I somehow feel more stable, more aware that I did become whoever I once—however uncertainly—set out to be.

 

If Mike had ever seen that photo of me, would he have felt the same way today?

 

 

Note: Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching—A Sourcebook by Robert L. Root Jr. and Michael Steinberg was co-published by the National Council of Teachers of English and the National Writing Project in 1996.

 

Take a look at this photograph. Try to describe what you see in it.

 

I'm guessing that your initial attention will be drawn to the figure at the center of the image—his wide-legged stance, his uniform, the objects in his hands, to the degree you can make it out the expression on his face. As you look more closely you may try to read the word across his shirt, which will identify his team, and you probably almost immediately recognized the sport he plays. You may try to examine his hairstyle, which would help you date the picture. There's something on the ground at his feet—what do you think it is? Notice the background of the photo, which suggests where the picture was taken. So far as I know the photo was originally taken in black and white, which may also help to date it. I've labeled it "The Pitcher Picture," which I hope is accurate; if this person is a shortstop or outfielder, I'll have to search for a less alliterative title ("The Shortstop Shot"? "The Outfielder Flick"?) If you want to be thorough in your analysis of this photo, you'll write down all the things about it that capture your attention in as much objective detail as you can.

 

Once you've stood back from the image and described what you see, think about how you react to it. What impressions of this young person do you get? Is there anything you tend to assume about his attitude, his personality, his mood? What does he want the photograph to record about who he is at this moment? How would you describe the person you think you see there? What in the photo, in his expression, his pose, his context, makes you think that's what he's like? Did you ever (or do you now) know someone like him? Does he remind you of anyone—a friend, a relative, a significant other? Does he remind you of yourself?

 

All of these questions are intended to help you investigate an unfamiliar image of a person you've likely never met. When we see a photo of a stranger we tend not to examine it so closely unless something about that person or that image attracts our attention. I want to suggest that how I'm asking you to view this photo is how others may sometimes view photos of each of us. Think of your high school yearbook photo—of the two or three poses the photographer offered you, why did you pick the one you did? Who did it show to the world that the other poses didn't? If the baseball player's photo were a photo of you, how would you interpret it from the distance of perhaps decades?

 

As it happens, the baseball player himself has written a caption for the photo. He writes, "Me in the spring of 1958, wearing my high school baseball uniform—an authentic hand-me-down Brooklyn Dodger uniform donated to the high school by the Dodgers in 1951, right after they lost the playoff to the Giants. I'd wanted this uniform since my sophomore year. Getting one of these from Coach Kerchman meant that I'd finally arrived as a ball player." His remarks help us understand the significance of the photo for him—it records a moment of triumph, visual evidence of an accomplishment that has particular significance for him.

 

The photo is a high school image of my friend Mike. I didn't know him in his youth—we grew up on different ends of the same state—and I only met him when we were both college professors at two different universities in a different state. But I knew him and worked with him off and on for roughly 35 years, and my wife and I hung out with him and his wife throughout those decades. He was a writing teacher and an editor of a creative nonfiction journal and co-editor (with me) of an anthology for college writing teachers. He was also a memoirist and an essayist. The book that cemented his standing as a writer was Still Pitching, his memoir about his passion for baseball in high school, which contains this image and his caption about it. His final book collected some published essays—in the one titled "Elegy for Ebbets" he visits a host of stadiums while remembering the Brooklyn Dodgers—and some unpublished ones. His intense life-long involvement with baseball dominated his literary writing. This image was also reprinted in an obituary of him a publisher posted online. That long friendship and that thorough reading of his autobiographical writing give me a different perspective on that photograph than someone would have who never knew him or never read him or never encountered that image before. That early pitcher picture is not only about his youth but also about something essential in his nature. He was a player and a coach which, given his writing and his teaching, is what he also was in his career.

 

It may not happen in all the photos in which we appear, but I suspect that all of us have, at one time or another, posed with a special optimism about who posterity will think it sees in a certain image of us. The question, of course, will be whether any of those viewers (or readers) will see the person you hope they'll see or, indeed, whether you'll see the person you thought you were.

 

 

Note: The books by Michael Steinberg mentioned above are Still Pitching: A Memoir, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003) and Elegy for Ebbets: Baseball On and Off the Diamond (Mount Pleasant, MI: Pint-Size Publications, 2019).He was the founding editor of Fourth Genre and his website is still accessible with material on his blog by him and a host of guest writers and teachers that he gathered between April 2012 and October 2019.You can find it at  http://www.mjsteinberg.net/blog

 

 

Look closely at these two images for a few moments. What aspects of them are clearly similar? What aspects suggest to you that the photograph and the painting have identical settings? What aspects are dissimilar? The visual media certainly differ and elements of the art forms themselves will affect how you view them, but if you had to define the relationship between the two pictures, what would you emphasize? If the positions of the images were reversed, so that the painting were on the left and the photo on the right, would that alter your sense of their relationship? Is there anything in them that suggests sequence to you? Only the images themselves give you any sense of context. Could the setting of the photo have been chosen in homage to the painting, inspired by it? Or could the painting have been prompted by the photo? If we recognize these images simply as a fashion photo and an urban landscape painting apparently drawing on the same setting, we might be challenged to interpret their relationship further beyond comparing artistic elements that both connect and isolate them from one another.

 

The images were provided by Elizabeth Kadetsy, author of the prize-winning memoir The Memory Eaters, to accompany an essay posted recently online at salon.com. The photo was taken by the photographer Martin Cornel and the painting was created by Solange Langelier, Kadetsky's grandmother. In the Salon essay, Kadetsky tells us of her fondness for visiting her grandmother's house to explore her art room. She thought her grandmother was a "wonderful painter" of still lives and urban landscapes and she was inspired by her to become an art major when she went to college. Elizabeth's mother owned one of the grandmother's paintings, "a view up the hill on cobblestoned Beacon Street in Boston with a red delivery van at the end"—the painting she shows us in the essay. After the grandmother's death Elizabeth hoped to be given more of her paintings by the uncle who moved into his mother's house but, other than knitting needles and yarn, he gave her nothing, except for "a fierce look when I pressed for more."

 

The essay alludes to a family secret that may be the basis of her uncle's animosity toward her mother and may also be connected to the nature of that Beacon Street painting that Kadetsky hangs across from her bed. The secret had to do with a childhood injury that may have led to Kadetsky's aunt developing epilepsy and dying young. Kadetsky thinks the injury was the result of her grandmother's negligence and alcoholism, not her own two-year-old mother's behavior, but she is also aware that "an undercurrent of blame and shame surrounded my mother" and may have been "the source of my uncle's anger toward her."

 

In the 1960s her mother had been a successful fashion model in Boston, but eventually her Alzheimer's disease forced her into assisted living, where she died. Kadetsky began preserving many photographs of her mother's work. As she fed that fashion photo into her scanner, she had "a Eureka! moment." She recognized the connection between the photo and the painting. She tells us, "I placed the painting and the photograph side by side. They were a near exact match." She was immediately struck by the absence of her mother from the painting, an absence that she feels was deliberate: "How fitting, I thought, that my grandmother would have literally painted my mother out of the picture. Of the many abuses my grandmother seems to have afflicted upon my mother, this aggression by erasure seemed especially significant."

 

Kadetsky's essay grounds her conclusion in considerable evidence of family conflict, including her grandmother's alcoholism, the disability and death of her mother's young sister, her mother's Alzheimer's, her uncle's coldness. Here again we recognize that what we see in images very much depends upon what we bring to the viewing of them. As Kadetsky concludes, "One can read a lot into an image. If one looks carefully enough, one just might discover the ghosts of things, the traces one has always suspected of a dormant family secret, the memory of a beautiful daughter twirling in her glee and power before a camera, painted out of a picture but still there to be coaxed from the shadows." This is not what the casual viewer may see but certain viewers will feel the need to go more deeply into the images, and if they go deeply enough, they may experience a personally meaningful revelation. Certainly that happens to all of us with personal or family images of our own.

 

 

Note: You can read "A Mother's Vanishing" by Elizabeth Kadetsky here.