A Different Perspective

When Writing Takes Us Outside Our Own Skins

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 28, 2007 in A Different Perspective, Fiction

The thread this month (though this may or may not be apparent) is the way that coming at things from a different perspective—a new angle—can sometimes lead to good things. And when I think about looking at things from a new angle—from a fresh perspective—one of the things that comes to mind for me is something I learned from college freshmen when I first started teaching them. When I first started teaching writing, I wanted the students in my classes to care about what they were writing. So I started out by telling them they could write about whatever they wanted. This did not go quite as well as I’d imagined it might. For the most part, the students wrote about their dormitories, their roommates, fraternities, beer. They seemed just a bit bored by their writing—and, I’ll admit, I was a bit bored by it as well. I suggested maybe they try writing about something more controversial—argument papers. They gave me papers on abortion and gun control. Lots and lots of papers on abortion and gun control. And, well—it was still boring. For them and for me. Their sentences seemed canned, as if someone else and not them had written them. They were giving me what they thought I wanted. They were giving me what they thought teachers wanted. I kept trying. Then at some point in the middle of the semester I remembered that story the teacher had told us about Sarah and her son—about writing fiction from a new point of view—and I told the students I wanted them to try stepping out of their skins. Their assignment: to write a paper from a different point of view. I invited them to imagine inhabiting some another body—animate, inanimate, I told them it made no difference. Just imagine being someone or something else, I told them. Be a different age. Be a different gender. Be a rock. And then write about it. And they wrote. John, an avid hockey player, imagined himself as a hockey player who had undergone a crippling accident and was left in a wheelchair. He wrote a story about this young man sitting in his wheel chair, watching movies, over and over, and then, one day, getting up and out of the wheelchair and travelling into the movie screen, onto a space cruiser, and then deep into the Andromeda System, to a planet called Saturn 9, which was like a place the young man used to dream about as a child. David became a police officer who got shot in the line of duty. Sam became a homeless man. Glenn became Alfred Einstein—Albert’s nephew. Chris became a white Camaro. The students leapt out of their skins in ways I had not anticipated. It was as if I’d pointed to a door and they flew through it. Actually, the five stories I’ve just described briefly here were chosen by these students as their best work of the semester, and they were in turn chosen for publication by the editors of the freshman review, a small magazine at the university of the best freshman prose and poetry. And, as it turned out, their stories accounted for half the prose pieces in the review, suggesting that I wasn’t the only person who found these new stories they’d...

Fiction Writing as a Prescription for Grief?

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 18, 2007 in A Different Perspective

Last week there was an interesting article in our local paper, the Winston Salem-Journal, entitled “Lee Smith’s Pain,” by Martha Waggoner. The article describes how Lee Smith, the novelist, now living in Hillsborough, North Carolina, found writing to be a remedy for grief. But—and I think this is the interesting part—she didn’t write directly about her grief. She found a remedy in writing fiction. Lee Smith is the author of several novels, including Black Mountain Breakdown, Family Linen, and The Last Girls. A little over three years ago now, her son Josh, only thirty-three, died of acute cardiomyopathy. Lee Smith describes herself as feeling, afterward, as if her finger was stuck in an electrical outlet, all the time. She had, before her son’s death, been working on a new book, a story of an orphan girl named Molly in post-Civil War North Carolina. After her son’s death she put the story aside. She describes herself as being unable to eat, unable to sleep. She had trouble finding the school where she’d been teaching for twenty years. She had trouble finding the grocery store. She lost thirty pounds. She began seeing a therapist. And when, after several weeks, her therapist offered to write her a prescription, she figured it would be for some kind of drug that might numb her pain—and she was ready for such. Instead, the prescription simply stated: “Write every day.” Specifically, her therapist (I suspect he was a psychiatrist if he was writing prescriptions) told her he thought she would benefit by getting back to the book she’d been working on, that she might benefit from working on a narrative other than her own. And that’s what Smith did. She went back the story of that orphan girl, Molly, that she’d put aside after her son’s death. And, in the article, she’s quoted as saying this about returning to Molly’s story: I was in a very heightened emotional state the whole time I was writing it, and it meant everything to me to have it to write. And Molly’s story became my story, or at least a receptacle of all this emotion I didn’t have anything to do with. Molly’s story became my story. That seems somehow at the crux of it. A way to write her own story without writing her own story. The kind of catharsis that can come sometimes with a bit of distance. Incidentally, that story of Molly as an orphan became a book, On Agate Hill, Lee Smith’s twelfth novel, published in 2006, and well-reviewed, including this review in the Washington Post. I’ve not read the book yet, but I plan to look for...

Wild Geese: An Image for Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 14, 2007 in A Different Perspective, Healing Images, Healing Poetry

Three times in the last month I have come across, in three different places, the poem, “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver. After the third time, I thought this might be a poem I ought to pay some attention to. The poem opens with the speaker telling us, her reader, that we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. And, then, this line: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” It’s a radical line. Maybe a radical poem. It goes against the grain of business as usual. The way the mind and the will are so often, for so many of us, yanking the body around to places it doesn’t really want to go—places even, sometimes, that can make the body a tad sick—or sicker. And sometimes maybe this is one of those silver linings of getting sick—or so people will sometimes tell me—the small good part—how a person can begin to learn to quit yanking the body around. The stakes are too high anymore to do all that yanking. Sometimes illness is the beginning, for some people, or so they tell me, of beginning to pay closer attention to what the body loves and needs—and what it doesn’t. I’ve been carrying the poem with me this month, looking at it now and then, and now, today, there’s one particular word that seems to jump off the page: meanwhile. MEANWHILE as the good part? Because after the speaker of the poem tells us we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles, repenting, we only have to let the soft animal of our body love what it loves, after that she invites us, the reader, to tell her of our despair and she will tell us hers— And then there’s this shift—this leap—and she writes: Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes. . . Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. . . It’s as if the camera had been close in—a history of despair—or a history with some despair in it–but then—a shift—the camera pulls back—a shift to a larger landscape—a leap—meanwhile—somewhere—those wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading...

Have You Gotten to the Good Part Yet?

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 3, 2007 in A Different Perspective

The theme for this month—Figuring Out the Good Part—springs from an essay, “The Good Part,” written by Dennis Covington and found in the anthology, The Healing Circle, which I’ve mentioned here before. Covington’s essay is funny and sharp. It asks excellent questions. In fact, the entire essay constitutes a kind of question in and of itself—a question that’s terribly relevant, I think, to writing and healing and to the way we try to make sense of the stories of our lives. The essay begins with a pair of Florsheim Imperial wingtips. These are, apparently, a somewhat expensive line of men’s shoes, but this particular pair was bought on sale for $5.88 by one Bunky Wolaver, a man who loves a bargain and who also happens to be married to Dennis Covington’s sister, Jeannie, a woman confined to a hospital bed with a severe flare of lupus. She’s undergoing a painful procedure—having her blood cleansed—and she passes the time with her brother and his wife, Vicki, by telling stories. So she tells about her husband, Bunky, buying these shoes in a size six, even though he’s a size nine and a half, because he does love a good bargain. He’s been trying for days to find someone to give the shoes to—no luck—and then that morning he calls, Jeannie tells him her doctor’s there making rounds, he asks her if maybe she could just lean over the bed and check and see what size the doctor’s feet are. The story goes on. Another lupus patient, a woman in Jeannie’s support group, stops by to visit. Both women have advanced disease and Covington relates that the visit is mostly a somber one, but then at one point Jeannie tells the woman about Bunky’s Florsheim Imperial wingtips and the woman starts laughing so hard that the chair she is sitting on collapses. Covington writes: Jeanie’s stories have always seemed particularly Southern to me, and on the way home from the hospital that night, Vicki and I entered a serious discussion about the nature of Southern storytelling. The good part of Jeanie’s story, I thought, was Bunky asking her to check out the size of her doctor’s feet to see if the shoes he had bought on sale might fit. Vicki thought the good part of the story was the moment when the other lupus patient’s chair collapsed. We didn’t resolve the issue, but we did conclude that every story, Southern or not, has to have a good part. “Have you gotten to the good part yet?” we often ask each other when one of us is reading a novel the other has recommended. But what exactly constitutes the good part of a story? And since our lives themselves are stories, where in this sea of misery, this vale of tears, does the good part lie? Covington proposes then that the answer to this last question can best be found in another story, and he proceeds then to tell a long and winding story which includes, among other things, his father, twelve armadillos, the loss of two of the armadillos (the father left the latch to the cage open and afterwards felt horrible about it), a stint of alcoholism, a marriage, getting sober, two daughters, his father’s death, a trip to Florida with...

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