I've been doing a memoir workshop with the Cambridge Center for Adult Ed, and it's definitely been enlightening.  The first thing it's taught me is I could actually go for a more intensive workshopping experience.  My goal was to jump-start a memoir of the year I spent back in Indiana as my dad's primary caregiver after he was diagnosed with cancer, and the workshop has helped me bang out a rough draft of a first chapter.

The class meets once a week in the evening, and my fellow workshoppers (twelve in all) vary widely in age, experience, motivation and intent, which has also added to the dynamism of the group.  Memoir is an interesting thing no matter what, of course, because you're telling your own story, usually a chapter of it that has special significance to you.  So there can be a sense of vulnerability in sharing your work that may not be as intense in other settings.



Even though I consider myself an old hand at confessional writing, it's different when you're reading it to a captive audience.  What I like about blogging is that if it engages you you read it.  No one's forcing anyone to do anything they don't want to do.  But sharing your work in a classroom setting you're bound to encounter a variety of reactions, in real-time.  This adds a performative aspect to it that can enliven and enlighten, but it can also be scary.

There are obviously a lot of transformations that go into a finished piece of work, whatever it is.  When I asked the artist Sandra Cohen what's one thing art can’t do, no matter how it tries, her answer hit the nail on the head: It can't be manifest simply by desire.  It's something to make things.  It's something to finish them.  I mean, really to finish them, not just to be finished with them.  What workshopping something teaches you is the volatility and dynamism of this process.

I've had a lot of experience teaching, so it surprised me a little that I was nervous for my first reading in class.  As anyone who's ever posted an anonymous or pseudonymous comment on the web knows, it's incredibly liberating sometimes to not be identified with your words.  There are things you may want to say that may be a little too much from the Id to just come out with.  Just because they're true doesn't mean they're socially acceptable.

My biggest challenge with the piece I'm working on now is to get at the truth of something universal without succumbing entirely to cliche (I'll allow myself a little self-conscious cliche every now and again without beating myself up for it).  But what that means is exploring the truth of things without falling back on the shorthand of socially acceptable assumptions. 

There are, of course, plenty of instances where received notions are more than adequate for the task at hand: "the keys are on the table," is one example.  But with "be here now" or "I love you" it's easy to fall back on the cliched and sentimental and leave it at that.  Because be, here, and now, and I, love, and you are all very small words for concepts of such vastness and complexity — each and every one, never mind combining them — that many spend a lifetime working them out with little to show for it in the end.

Most people grasp the difference between "the keys are on the table" and "I love you," but you'd be surprised how many don't.

Subjective experience is a kind of quantum realm which really can't be described because there is nothing it resembles.  We invent a language of metaphor for it anyway.  Sometimes the more counter-intuitive the metaphor the closer it comes to a truth, especially in times when our hubris prevents us from understanding that understanding itself is fleeting. 

Of course it's not the absolute isolation of our experience of the world that defines us, but our futile attempts to transcend it.  True empathy is obviously impossible, and yet attempting it seems necessary to us, and that is both wonderful and sad.  That we have some sense of self would seem to necessitate an awareness of the other, but that we have this sense of self and actively seek out the other is a source of mystery.  And language — in all its rich and varied forms — is, of course, a part of it.

In our last workshopping session a couple of us got into a discussion of "journaling" (that's what the cool kids call keeping a diary these days) as a writer's tool, a therapeutic activity, and an existential project.  (As for the last of these: I once rewrote as farce an entire year of my life — it was 1995 — that I had originally penned as tragedy due to a relationship I agonized over that turned out to be utterly ridiculous. Very empowering.  Highly recommend it.)  

Surprisingly few of the workshoppers actually kept a diary or "journaled" with any regularity.  To me, journaling, keeping a diary — whatever you want to call it* — is as essential to writing well as being a critical reader is.  It doesn't matter what your chosen genre, a diary sharpens your observational and reportorial skills.  And it gets that inner monologue cookin'!

But — and I mentioned this in class — keeping a diary, journaling, whatever, is different than, say, blogging.  Even confessional writing is something else entirely.  And the difference lies precisely in your intended audience.  This isn't a small thing.  Even a diary published posthumously is not an autobiography.  The nature of the truths each conveys is utterly different.  If in reading a diary we see the same self-conscious presentation we find in autobiography, we judge it differently.  It tells us something different about the author.  If we were to judge the diarist and the autobiographer by the same standard I think it'd be nearly impossible to sympathize with either. 

We recognize implicitly all sorts of different species of speech and writing, which is why we find it jarring when one is used in a context meant for another.  Knowing the difference between what's appropriate backstage as opposed to, say, on the dais, or in bed with your  mistress versus at the conference table with your colleagues is something we take for granted.  And as with all our social skills there's definitely a spectrum.  But that there can be no sense without context is indisputable, and that sense changes with context follows.

Which is why it was surprising when after joking that my diary was a repository of pure evil so profound it could destroy the world if opened one of the more skilled writers of the bunch, a fiercely intelligent Irishwoman — Molly we'll call her — an accomplished academic with a totally unconvincing false-modesty complex, made a show of her perplexity at the idea that I wrote things in my diary that I would not write on my blog.  That I thought things that I would hesitate to shout from the rooftops.

She implied my admission was evidence of a split personality at best, all manner of dastardly duplicity and scoundrelly subterfuge at worst.  But she was just being ornery.  I didn't take it personally (at least not on my blog). 

But honestly, for a wordsmith to feign shock at the notion that people don't always if ever simply say what they're thinking seems a stretch.  That a writer would think it natural that people do seems positively far-fetched.  Especially since often (when you think about it) your thoughts don't take quite the form of words anyway.  Even the simplest of them are a mix of memories, notions, subjective signs and symbols in a matrix so rich and dense it's a wonder we can even utter a word of sense at all. 

I got the feeling this was less about the topic at hand than about what I think she may have perceived as a threat to her alpha status, absurd as it is.  I realize that my suspicions about her motivations put mine into question. But those of you who have yet to sleep with me will just have to trust me on this: I'm really not obsessed with alpha status.  I have dealt with some who are, though. 

But I really knew it was on a little later in the session when we were critiquing my piece, and she went for the jugular again. Critiquing is an art, as is accepting criticism.  I know that.  And when the material is personal, you're more prone to take criticism personally.  As the critic, you have to be careful to judge the sin, not the sinner.  If you're on the receiving end, you have to remember, first and foremost, to disregard anything that's not about the writing.  And you have to realize, too, that different people bring different experiences and expectations to reading.

There are people, like this guy, who wants every movie the Coen Bros. make to be a book by Philip Roth, who can't distance themselves enough from their preconceptions of what a work must be to see what it is. The world has opened up to them as much as they will ever allow it. 

While most of the comments were constructive, and those that weren't were at least tactful, Molly was working up to something between the McCarthy hearings and The Spanish Inquisition.  She said it sweetly, as if she honestly couldn't fathom..., but she's much too sharp to be as dull as she's always protesting she is (and besides, dull people are too dull to protest their dullness).  Even her emails (she read a seven-page email she had sent about squirrels in her attic our first session) are full of incisive commentary and fiery invective. 

My piece opened with a provocative statement:

When my father emailed to tell me he had a year at most to live – naturally, I laughed.

If you stopped reading there you would think I was the biggest effin douchebag on the planet, wouldn't you? I may well be, but I go on:

I mean, please. The old man was obviously not going to die of cancer.

I continue from there, explaining that he actually dies of a heart attack. During the final moments of a World Series game.

That’s how it ends. We all agreed. We had all pictured it. So vividly in fact, that it actually seemed already to have happened once or twice.

You don’t mess with the ending. It changes everything.

Now, I don't think it's hard to get where I'm going with it, but she is entitled to her own reading.  The thing is, though, she not only feigned shock, she feigned offense, specifically at the word "naturally."

"Why, there's nothing at all natural about that reaction!" she said. "I just can't imagine..." and so on.

It seemed a little over-the-top, if you want to know the truth.  Workshopping etiquette sort of demanded that I hear her out, but the glib insinuation was a little outrageous.  Wouldn't readers think I was laughing at my father's death?  And that I thought that was a "natural" reaction?

She had read the whole thing and knew I wasn't, and didn't.  So she was playing the devil's advocate I gathered, but in an unnecessary and inappropriate way.  Unnecessary because anyone who would take offense at the first line and abandon the piece after one sentence, or didn't get after a few more lines that the intention was to communicate the level of disbelief — or denial, as one fellow workshopper put it — would obviously not be an audience for the piece in the first place.  Inappropriate because she was calling into question my character and not the character of my work. 

But I'm not going to feign outrage. Nor am I going to change the beginning to read something like "When my father emailed to tell me he had a year at most to live I just couldn't believe it."  I mean, and?  So?  You see what I'm saying here?

The rest of the piece, if you read between the lines as a couple of workshoppers did, was meant as much to be the beginnings of a meditation on unlikely and unorthodox loves as it was the chronicle of a death foretold.  The chapter ends...

Of course, I knew my father loved me in his own hapless way – and I qualify it not to be patronizing, but because all loves acquire qualifiers; they are all hyphenated, though they originate in agape. And if they are properly tended and come to fruition – which is exceedingly rare – they ultimately return to agape. It may sound flip to say that my father’s love was garden variety, but it had to be hardy to weather drought and cold snaps. It was not a prize to look upon, it eked out a tiny blossom once in a blue moon, and some may have mistaken it for a thistly weed, covered as it was in tiny thorns, but I knew, from long studying it, that it was, indeed, a species of love, and I was careful (though it may have gone unnoticed) not to trample on it or pull it out of the cracked and shallow soil in which it was rooted.

What I've got is a rough draft — it's far from finished — but I felt I could defend the choices I'd made with it, and I may have done a little too vociferously the other night.

But as I was leaving I complimented Molly on a piece she had read a couple of weeks ago that was polished enough in my sincere opinion for publishing.  Her false modesty kicked in and she protested, too much, methinks, as always.  Her talent is too fierce for her protests not to sound solicitous, and I told her as much.

She came back to my split personality.  I had argued during my critique that I was trying to present an unsentimental story. 

"But I don't understand it," she said.  "You're a sentimental chap."

Ooh!  One last jab!

"Have you been reading my diary?" I asked. 
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*And while there may be some differences in connotation, which I have discussed elsewhere, I think probably the main reason the activity has cometo be widely referred to as "journaling" is because "diarying" sounds a little too much like something else that somehow hits the mark in ways we'd rather not admit.