Genre-Bending: Richard McCann's “Mother of Sorrows” and the Meandering Path of Self Truth

           My brother, Davis, went to his room, where he listened to Radio Moscow on his shortwave. As for me: I cleared the table.

          “Sit with me, son,” my mother said. “Let's pretend we're sitting this dance out.”

          She told me I was her best friend. She said I had the heart to understand her. She was forty-six. I was nine.

              --Mother of Sorrows

          When I became a MFA in writing student at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I began to hear in workshops and lectures, from certain advisers, a disdain for fiction that took too directly from the author's life. I've noticed, also, that certain book jackets praise authors for creating characters wholly different from their own life experience.

          One teacher hinted that a central character in my story lacked development because it was perhaps too close to a version of myself. He said, and I am paraphrasing, when writers create themselves on the page they often forget to develop that character because they already know everything about her. Shamed, I put my story in the bottom drawer of my desk and moved on to writing characters that would not be detected as versions of me, though of course they were.

          In retrospect, when I think about my life as a writer from age 10 to present, most of my interest in writing had to do with creating a world where I could at first dump my emotions, then make them into art, make them into something with a voice and a presence in the world, into entities that existed, in time and space, apart from me.

          When I think about emotions, I note that emotions have a beginning, middle and end. They do not last. Likewise, stories carry the same characteristics as emotions. However, life, the daily process of living, or, lived experience, doesn't have such book ended neatness. We all experience life chaotically, and while we retell our experience in the trinity of the story, this isn't how it's lived. Yet, do we want our art to mimic our living so closely, or do we want to capture and define, to hold in our glass jars, emotion, other things? What is it we are trying to do as writers, as artists?

*

          In an NPR interview, Richard McCann reports that he spent 17 years working on his book Mother of Sorrows, which was always about real life until the end, when his publisher told him that it had to be published as fiction because he had left out or put in too many things for it to be memoir. I don't exactly buy that answer, there is something fishy about it to me. But, McCann had previously published most of the ten stories in the collection as fiction. The book, because its about the same characters throughout also reads like a novel.

          This is an instance I think in which fiction writers can take a page from creative nonfiction writers or memoirists. There is something magic about Mother of Sorrows. Fluid, beautifully constructed, and sparse, it's a book that sings heartbreak, while offering sorrow as a “cut-glass vase” through which its many angles offer time and again a new way of recognizing the varied, vertiginous, and ultimately always cracked self—with her/his cracked way of seeing.

          In the chapter or story, “My Mother's Clothes,” McCann writes about trying on his mother's clothes with his friend, Denny.

Like Denny, I could neither dispense with images nor take their flexibility as pleasure,

for the idea of self I had learned and was learning still was that one was constructed by

one's images—“When boys cross their legs, they cross one ankle atop the knee”—so

that one finally sought the protection of believing in one's own image and, in believing

in it as reality, condemned oneself to its poverty. (25)

          How clearly McCann articulates the experience not just of growing up gay in Suburbia 1950s and 60s, but of having a body, seeing that body as a kind of truth or “reality,” confined and condemned by cultural definitions that say, this image, yours, means this. And, believing this, what is it that we destroy? (I leave you with that question, not to be answered here, because it is the question that for years I have asked myself. The things we cannot know, perhaps, become our greatest muse)

*

Human characters, the real people of our lives, continually change and evolve in our eyes. It's not that we as people necessarily change so much in life (although some do) it's that our perspectives of each other are constantly shifting, moving further away into a tiny dot on the horizon, back into focus through a particular lens, and then bumping into each other. We see our mothers from a variety of angles, and if we are lucky or have half the brains of someone as genius as McCann, we seek out these different perspectives. Our real life characters are rounder and more complex than our fictionalized ones because they remain (even after death) on the loose, destined never to be fully captured.

          One might argue in opposition, as those lecturers and teachers I encountered, saying that in fact our real life characters are too close to us and we are too intertwined with them, entangled and attached. Our vision of our spouses, mothers, lovers, and children are bias, emotional, wildly nonobjective. Thus we fail to create whole characters on the page. Yet, McCann disproves this in spades. His self-portrait character, seems to lift to life on the page, and through these stories our nameless narrator reveals angle after angle of self, startling us at times, but always humbly, sometimes painfully, honest portrayals that dig at core emotional truths, many of which most writers wouldn't dare provoke. McCann in a recent VCFA lecture said: “You must double as both character and writer, therapist and patient.” What does this mean for us as writers of nonfiction and fiction?

          More and more the “issue” (if it is in fact even an issue) of genre and genre-blurring makes its way into our conversations as writers. For example, Kelly Nuxoll, in an online Poets & Writers post titled, “Obama's “bitter” and the Creative Nonfiction Writer: Postcard From the Campaign Trail,” says “Creative nonfiction offers a lens that is colored by voice, tone, and critical intelligence.” Nuxoll has her MFA in creative nonfiction, and she reports here, “I expect the reader to take my work for what it is—the perspective of a single individual.” And yet isn't that what writing always is, we ask? Creative nonfiction, according to Nuxoll has a specific form, with complex syntax that uses the devices of fiction to make a scene come alive.

          Referencing a specific political essay, but I believe also speaking in broader terms of creative nonficion, Nuxoll writes:

As a piece of writing, it lacks the speed and focus of a blog; the lead insofar as it has one,

is buried; the purpose is neither to advocate nor to inform but to ruminate on a theme.

           What leads in Nuxoll's piece is this highlighted quote: “As a creative nonfiction writer, I consider my first obligation to be to the truth, and the second to the integrity of the prose.”

And here, I find another tangent, what is it with our American pop-culture obsession with the truth, which prominently makes its home in reality TV?

          The point of having the category of “Creative Nonfiction” is that it's not Biography, Autobiography, or Journalism. It is about the writer's truth, whatever that may be, not about a public truth.

          Now, let me consider a different angle, not that of the interest of truth and non-truth. After reading Philip Lopate's recent essay in River Teeth, “In Defense of the Essay Collection,” I started to consider something else. Lopate defends the publication of the Essay Collection, which most publishers do not want to publish or try to get their writers to somehow squeeze their collections into other forms such as memoir.

Lopate has this to say on the vital differences between the essay and the memoir:

          The memoir tempts the memoirist to grandiose self-representation. The essay,

          with its essential modesty, discourages the impulse. The memoir tends to de-

          individuate its protagonist, enlisting him to serve as a slightly larger-than-life

          representative of the sufferings of a group or community, while the essay calls

         attention to the quirks and fallibilites we take as marks of our essential seperate-

         ness.

          These distinctions seem crucial for Lopate because he sees the importance of defining a form as vital to its reading. If we define our genres we then have a sense of what we expect when we begin to read. In terms of the essay, a form that wonders with the authors psyche, mind, imagination through any number of topics, Lopate writes, “(T)he essay form is such that—unlike the poem and the short story—it does not readily permit crystalline perfection. It is too open to the incidental, too impure, too forgiving” (23). This “shagginess” of the essay is why Lopate likes the form.

           Returning to Mother of Sorrows, I wonder if publishing the work as fiction had to do with defining what the reader can expect when entering the book, with labeling its form. The pieces are not essays, the book does not read as memoir, it feels most like a collection of stories. Still, why does McCann speak about the book as a work of nonfiction? Is it just that he wants to speak the truth about the book, or is there something else at play here? The book is known among writers as nonfiction, because that is what McCann has often called it. In fact in a recent email correspondence with writer and teacher, David Jauss, he insisted that he reads McCann's work as a collection of essays. So then, is it merely the publishers “trick” to label this work “fiction”?

         As I have said, the Truth Debate in terms of memoir and creative nonfiction writing, seems dull and boring to me. Last winter at VCFA, Robin Hemley, lectured against the push to sequester creative truth in the memoir. Some fellow(ette) students believed his speech “genius.” However, in the academic atmosphere of postmodernity (whatever that means) advocating creative truth and denying that there could ever be one truth, seems rather predictable to me. Of course, we all believe that blatant lying isn't permissible. But, most of us have undergraduate degrees from liberal arts colleges or departments where they hammered into us the merits of the Po-Mo world, a place where 'we just can't know.'

I support a letting go of our imagined capacity to define truth or what we can and can't know to a certain point. Recently I formed this statement after spending several months writing about my family and childhood: I no longer know what is true and what is imagined in my childhood relationship with my father.

          The oddity of Mother of Sorrows, perhaps its brilliance, arises from McCann's use of both genres, fiction and creative nonficion. He uses the mechanics of story-telling; he is not interested (as perhaps a memoir might be) in his own personal truths being brought out on the page. The truths of his brother and mother remain central here, and of course the title points to the books focus, his mother (we might expect the focus be McCann's experience of this mother-creature, which in many ways it is). McCann's work asks both the question of what is a self in the world and what is the art of constructing a self on the page.

          “Oh, right,” he said. “Cut glass. Your precious cut glass. But let me say this—

          what I am trying to talk to you about is not an obsession. It is me. It is who I am.

          It is my life.” (142)

         All our stories, our essays, our poems have a beginning, a middle, an end. It is to each of us to decide how we will construct the self of our pages. Even in fiction the authorial self is made present—it moves, it speaks, specific to the author. I think of bodies coming forth in bodily ways to our stories, rhythm, pressure, eruption, deflation, lying still, the deep silence that entombs and yet makes holy the radically unfamiliar marks of letters on this space of white that somehow conjure visions of light and color in our minds. I hear your voices in between the click and clack of the keys, “please, let me write one true thing.” How strange all this desire, all this longing and love for our craft, for ourselves.

-Emily Casey

Rebecca Solnit and "The Blue of Distance"

At first glance, the title of Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost might confuse. My advice to any reader: embrace the confusion. I first read this book, shortly after dislodging from the familiar confines of city life, while both relishing in the calm of the northeastern woods and bewildered by the transition. Solnit was a welcomed guide. After all, her collection of nine essays is, at its core, more than a “field guide;” it is a celebration of the origins of disorientation.

Painters and pilots, early pioneers and punk rockers, all have staked their place in Solnit’s prose, her wingspan as an essayist ranges far enough to encapsulate a grand portrait of things lost: of the lost history of her family, of 19^th century travelers lost in a desert in search of gold, of Yves Klein’s disappearance after his great leap into thin air. She offers a eulogy for lost creatures. She writes of lost objects, of lost memory, of lost love, and though she bears a sincere melancholy for the past, her stories are laced with a precious optimism.

In both form and content, A Field Guide to Getting Lost traipses over topics so vast that it almost threatens to lose readers in its tangled thread, but with a veteran spirit of adventure, Solnit exudes an assurance such that we feel safe wandering through her prose. When she strays into long anecdotal passages, she brings us back to familiar landmarks. When she dips into lengthy historical explanations, she resurfaces with an eccentric image, a classic song, a statement that leads like a riddle to points of interest, common attractions, as if guided by an invisible map.

Yet the most persistent theme throughout Solnit’s collection is not maps, geography, or epic journeys of lost souls—though they all have their place—but the color blue. “The Blue of Distance” is a term Solnit uses as arecurring title to link several of her essays and create a thread of color throughout the collection. Through Solnit’s own curiosity, we learn of artists in the 15^th century—the first generation of painters concerned with verisimilitude, with the way the world appeared before the eye—who used the color blue in their paintings to connote distance, “the color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away.”

Like an artist, Solnit utilizes the urban and cultural world around her: the architecture of San Fransisco, the stories of Nabokov, Borges’s “endless labyrinths,” Hitchcok’s Vertigo. She creates gestural portraits and surreal landscapes of how we search for, discover, and ultimately lose again and again our places in the world.

In one essay, Solnit reflects on the associative power of music as she recalls making mix-tapes for road trips, each a compilation of songs that got at “The evocation of place and its emotional resonance in that music.” For example, Geography Lessons, Mostly Tragic or “The Entirely Liquid Mr. North… a compilation about rivers and drinking, about drowning from the inside out,” which consisted mostly of southern tunes. She explains that many country singers—Patsy Cline, Bobby Gentry, Tanya Tucker among them—sang songs about anonymous protagonists, with vague descriptions of improbable loves, all filled with drama. “But the territory in which these dramas played themselves out were evoked in detail over and over again, and if they were tragic songs about the failure of human love,” she writes “they were also love songs about places.” Sometimes, landscapes, after all, offer a deeper anchor to our experiences than a melodious storyline of what occurs there. We may not turn back time, but we can return to the places of meaning to us.

And in such places, Solnit’s essays take a closer look at the natural side of things: the nature of hermit crabs, daisy chains, terra incognita—once featured on maps as a mark of “unknown land.” Which Solnit claims is no longer a legitimate label.But it oncewas. Or is it still? Might one say that all land is terra incognito to somebody? And that even when maps were labeled as such, all unknown land was in fact known, to someone?

In another essay, Solnit tells the story of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish adventurer who lost his bearings in the Mississippi Delta and was captured and enslaved by natives. After ten years learning the native customs and languages, Cabeza de Vaca “had so adapted to this new life he had fallen into that he no longer considered himself lost” until he walked west, as far as New Mexico, where he found himself back among his once-fellow conquistadores, only to struggle to regain the old customs and habits he once knew well. “He was of the first of the Europeans lost in the Americas,” Solnit writes, “and like many of them he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.” This metamorphosisis akin to that of other creatures, “The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and re-form more than once in its life cycle.”

And still, Solnit returns again and again to the concept of blue: its color, its connotations, its etymological history. “The term blue comes from an old English word for melancholy or for sadness,” she explains, “blue moods, blue devils, the blues… The world from which the blues came is largely vanished.” She tells the story of the French artist Yves Klein, whose obsession with the color blue marked many of his most prominent works: a blue that represents “the spirit, the sky, and water, the immaterial and the remote,” a blue that “however tactile and close-up it is, it is always about distance and disembodiment.”

Through her examinations, Solnit comments on the fear of not knowing where we are, which has, based on innovation in technology, become virtually impossible in modern times. Likewise, perhaps it has even grown difficult to navigate anew through our own ideas, for “Some ideas are new, but most are only recognition of what has been there all along, the mystery in the middle of the room, the secret in the mirror.” Solnit suggests, but not without a glimmer of hope, faith even, that it is in the art of exploring that “Sometimes one unexpected thought becomes the bridge that lets you traverse the country of the familiar in an unprecedented way.”

An important theme, in many ways the bloodline of Solnit’s essays, like the story of Cabeza de Vaca, is the idea that getting lost means accepting change. Yet as I read A Field Guide to Getting Lost—the same days I set off, in my own way, to navigate through the blue of distance—I quickly realized, too, that pursuing change sometimes means accepting the sense of being lost, if only for a while.

~ Jericho Parms