Modern American Memoirs Book

Of all the essays in Annie Dillard's and Cort Conley's Modern American Memoirs, the one I think I learned the most from was the excerpt from Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow. His original comparisons! "I watched the sky with suspicion," he writes. "Exposed as we were, it could jump on us like a leopard from a tree" (Stegner, 27). Or, "[The wind:] hits the Plains and comes across Alberta and Saskatchewan like the breath of a blowtorch" (Stegner, 34). Throughout the essay, Stegner compares flora and fauna and man and machine in fresh ways that help me understand his sensory and psychological situation.

He's an expert at rhythm. It might be the rolling polysyndeton in a gust of wind: "Before the shack was finished we lived in a tent, which the night wind constantly threatened to blow away, flapping the canvas and straining the ropes and pulling the pegs from the gravelly ground" (Stegner, 26). Or it might be the intentionally angular assonance and clunky consonance of a jalopy, a "high, square car, with its yellow spoke wheels and its brass bracing rods from windshield to mudguards and its four-eared brass radiator cap" (Stegner 25). Hear it? Brass and bracing. They sound the same. Or maybe they all end with "d": Rod, wind, shield, mud, guard, eared. Or the rambling two-beat cadence of windshield and mudguard contrasted with a series of triplets: "high square car," "yellow spoke wheels," and "brass bracing rod." Alternating cadences, Stegner makes me feel like I am in the car, a square on wheels, the floor vibrating from the various ruts and dents in the rough roads and green trails of Stegner's childhood. The sound of the sentence complements its meaning well.

It's rural life made beautiful but not sentimental. Frederick Buechner, in an excerpt from The Sacred Journey, does much the same. By my count, this one sentence evokes at least three senses: "Then back to the big shingled summer house by the canal, where ducks quacked for breadcrumbs and bees buzzed among the honeysuckle, and all through the house there were bowls of flowers - black-eyed Susans, wild roses, cat-tails - and cold crab in the ice box, cold beer, and lemonade in crockery pitchers, a mocha torte with ground almonds in it that took two days to make" (Buechner, 82). There's sight, sound, and taste, and the specificity in the final phrase about the mocha torte keeps the other phrases rooted in originality. Detail is the enemy of cliché, and the crushed almonds in the torte steer the cold beer and the jug of lemonade away from what I was expecting next: Mama fanning herself on the front porch. Other images in the essay feel suspended in space, freed from time, composite moments, lightning flashes of memory that haunt Buechner. Though the piece is retrospective and generally past tense - "I had touched.. The curtain would rise… Not a word was spoken… She had dreamed… She would never have said…" (Buechner, 83) - some of those composites are simple present: "I remember my Grandmother… She sits… She talks… (Buechner, 81). These transitions between tense feel organic; I picked up on them because I've been focusing on tense in my writing and I'm interested in how writers shift tense within pieces. As far as I can tell, the only rule about tense is that there's no rule. The needs of a story dictate where appropriate, organic, and revelatory shifts in tense should occur.

Other favorite take-away lessons from the collection:
I love how Russell Baker alternates between general description and specific anecdote. General: "Days when there were no news sensations the newsboys lived by their wits…" Specific: "She shouted at the newsboy speeding off up the street…" General: "My transition to city life was a series of agonies…" Specific: "On my first day in Newark…" (Baker, 52, 53). I like how Richard Selzer writes about river life using subtle river language. Describing a dead body: "Who could imagine that currents of warm air had ever coursed among those fingers, streamed across those translucent webs?" (Selzer, 107). I appreciate Chris Offutt's surrealistic depiction of circus life, ascending the hierarchy of jobs from stake puller to walrus impersonator. He celebrates fringe culture - a monkey acts like a human on one page, a boy acts like a walrus on the next - in ways that remind me of Hank Stuever's Off-Ramp and Dave Hickey's Air Guitar. Finally, I love, love, love this quote by James McConkey, from "Court of Memory": "Memory simplifies, for its impulse is order; in playing upon a given relationship, it can erode the irrelevant and ambiguous to leave the bones of allegory" (McConkey, 349). What a perfect reminder that creative non-fiction writers get the best of both worlds: We shed irrelevant and impertinent details to work with the "bones" of an ordered story, but we also work intentionally to acknowledge and commemorate each story's inherent complexity.