Year by year...
Hi, friends.
Welcome to 2021. I hope you are well and have set aside some writing intentions for yourself. If you want to use the comment section to commit to those commitments, please do. Whispering your commitments to the world is a good thing, even now.
(I don’t know why, but I find when I confess that I’ve failed to meet my commitments, it pushes me to tackle them. There is something in the confession. A clearing of guilt, perhaps. Knowing your tics and quirks and building a system that works for you is all part of getting the work done.)
Confession: I love New Year’s Eve. Even though it’s arbitrary, and we know that nothing really changes with the turn of the calendar, and yet, we’re so eager to close the door on the last year (especially this one) and celebrate the possibility the next one will be better. And yet, years are just containers. A way to measure time. And relationships. A way to remember.
Story.
The changing of the calendar was one of the factors in my selection of this week’s story: Lorrie Moore’s How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes) from her collection, Self Help. Go have a read and we’ll chat about what Moore is doing (and not doing) here.
Craft tidbits.
Let’s talk about form first. It’s a segmented story, arranged by years, in a reversal of chronology. Every year gets an entry. Except: 1977 gets two. (The height of the mother’s illness, when the roles are reversed.) And there a few toddler years are skipped over. In fact, the entries get smaller as Ginnie grows younger.
It’s an interesting choice, and it upends the narrative arc. Yes, there’s a beginning, middle, and end but they are imposed by time, not by a change in character.
There is no resolution. Only loss.
The hum, rush, clack of things in the kitchen. These are the sounds that organize your life. The clink of silverware inside the drawer, piled like bones in a mass grave.
As we read, we learn that loss begins well before the mother moves in, somewhere in Ginnie’s growing up. Like life itself, it’s hard to locate the exactly when this happens. Why? Partly because there are no scenes, not really. Just a collection of brief moments in a life working much like a photo album might (remember those?).
And partly because, like so much of Ginnie’s life, it’s not spelled out. The loss just accumulates, like lint, in background.
Sometimes your mother calls you by her sister’s name. Say, “No, Mom, it’s me. Virginia.” Learn to repeat things. Learn that you have a way of knowing one another which somehow slips out and beyond the ways you have of not knowing one another at all.
Can we ever really know someone? Even someone we live with? Who we’ve known all our lives? Illness or no?
Not only is Moore experimenting with form (in two different ways!), she’s also using second person. As she does in many of the stories in Self Help, she makes it look so easy. (Reader, it is not.) But one of the reasons it works so well here is that it’s descriptive rather than prescriptive.
Without her, for years now, [you] murmur at the defrosting refrigerator, “What?” “Huh?” “Shush now,” as it creaks, aches, groans until the final ice block drops from the ceiling of the freezer like something vanquished.
[You] Dream and in your dreams babies with the personalities of dachshunds, fat as Macy balloons, float by the treetops.”
The yous are withheld from the beginning. The focus appears to be on the refrigerator, dreams. Really, the focus is on absence. Of mother. Of babies.
That’s what Moore’s doing. But what is she not doing? She’s breaking the rules we’ve been taught. There’s very little characterization. (Can you imagine workshopping this piece???) We learn through repetition that Ginnie isn’t great with relationships. She’s awkward at parties. She keeps people at arms length.
There’s very little setting. There is a city. An apartment
1979. Once in a while take evening trips past the old unsold house you grew up in, that haunted rural crossroads two hours from where you now live.
It’s a ghost story. Ginnie is haunted by possibilities, of paths she did not take, could not find, perhaps. Just like that mystery room with no door.
This house is embedded in you deep, something still here you know, you think you know, a voice at the top of those stairs, perhaps, a figure on the porch, an odd apron caught high in the twigs, in the warm-for-a-fall-night breeze, something not right, that turret window still you can see from here, from outside, but which can’t be reached from within.
That sentence. There is so much lodged in there. A homesickness of memory.
There’s no sustained dialogue. The characters are not talking to each other. They aren’t sharing or laying their hearts bare through conversation. Just a line here and there.
“Aunt Ginnie, are we going to the restaurant with the others?”
And
“Sure was warm in that place.” She will seem not to hear you.
And yet, we don’t need it.
She has tears leaking out of her eyes. “There’s no food here, Ginnie.”
We feel the fear, the frustration, for both of them.
It’s the Unsaid that is the star of this story. And I think it’s why the story resonates as it does and why we don’t resist the second person here as we might otherwise.
How many times do hold our tongues, withhold our thoughts and hopes and dreams from those who know us best? From those who would love us anyway and make the necessary excuses to smooth reality into a livable truth as the mother does about the father.
At the funeral she says, “He had his problems, but he was a generous man,” though you know he was tight as a scout knot, couldn’t listen to anyone, the only time you remember loving him being that once when he got the punchline of one of your jokes before you mom did and looked up from his science journal and guffawed loud as a giant, the two of you, for one split moment, communing like angels in that warm, shared light of mind.
Sprinkled throughout the story are current events. Heart transplants, and moon walks. Wars and presidents coming and going in their various ways. A shorthand for marking time. It begins and ends with music playing somewhere.
Sparks.
Form prompt for a new piece: Have you ever written a story or essay in reverse? Why not give it a try. It doesn’t have to be a complicated narrative. It might make you (and your character) rethink cause and effect. Here’s another example: Currents by Hannah Voskuil. (Feeling really adventurous? Divide it up in days, months, years.)
Or: In Ginnie’s early years, she tries so hard to please her mother. Write about that deep, complicated desire for parental acceptance (at any age). What gets said? What remains unsaid?
Revision fix: Do you have cultural cornerstones in your work? Consider how a few sprinkled through, might give texture to the piece. They orient the reader in time and place. But, on a deeper level, how might they shape your character? Their worldview?Or: Maybe you have a short story that has a structural issue. (As I do.) Consider a reversal of chronology exercise as a way to let the story tell you the structure it needs.
Other tidbits.
Pen America is offering a series of free career and craft workshops this year. (If interested, you’ll want to sign up quickly, as they are capped at 1000 attendees.)
If you are in the market for agents and publishers, Jane Friedman has put together an overwhelmingly detailed wrap up for 2020.
If you want to continue to talk about making time more central to your work, I’m leading a generative workshop on January 10th. Otherwise, that’s all I have. Off you go with pen and paper. I’ll check in on your scribbling in a few weeks.
Make your time count ~
Marsha