Facing the Music

by 2020 Creative Nonfiction contributor Ed Davis

Nobody I knew could play the guitar. We longed to, aching to become the next band of working-class kids to seize the world's attention as the Beatles had. So far, lip-synching was as close as we'd gotten. I wondered: should I keep on walking or sneak around back and see who was playing those magic strings? Doing so would mean I'd have to face the music in more ways than one.

The childhood scapegoating event I describe in my memoir "The Strength of Strings" in Bacopa Literary Review 2020 has lived inside me for half a century, striving to find artistic expression, first, in an unpublished novel I wrote in the early 1980s, and now as memoir. The thing about fictionalizing autobiography, I've found, is that you transform truth (facts) through the magic of fiction into Truth (significance). And though that still seems true, I've come to believe that sometimes you just need to tell the truth as accurately as you can, relying on memory rather than imagination--a real challenge for this novelist. But I had to try.

     Steve looked up.

     "Hey," he said.

     "Hey," I returned, hunched inside my army jacket at the edge of the concrete slab. The day wasn't as dark as it had been only a couple of minutes ago.

     "You gonna stand there . . . or come over?" 

      I walked over and sat down. Despite the harsh wind of almost October coming at us across the back yard, some part of what was frozen between us thawed a little while we eyeballed each other above an object whose power I felt in my chest and limbs. Maybe that no-name, sunburst electric had the power to make a nobody become visible in our junior high world. A lot remained to be seen, like: does he hate me? 

Writing memoir feels a lot more naked to me than writing fiction, so it's got to be worth it. While "Strings" required many drafts, I finally felt good about coming clean about a childhood memory bearing a lot of emotional freight--or as clean as I can at this time. It's quite possible the memory of this incident has more to teach me before I die.

As for music, though I'm not actively making it anymore, my characters are. Without Steve, without pantomiming The Beatles before we learned to play and learn, then write, our own songs, I wouldn't have felt qualified to portray the Dylanesque rock star of my latest novel The Psalms of Israel Jones. One regret about our renewed relationship at the end of my pal's life is that, although I gifted him with a copy of Psalms, he died before he could read it--or, if he did manage to read it, to tell me what he thought. But he liked "Strength of Strings" enough to let me share it with his parents in the "nana" version (sans curse words).

Many thanks to Mary Bast and Bacopa Literary Review for letting me share my memoir, and now this follow-up with you.

*   *   *

Ed Davis, a former professor of writing, literature, and humanities, served as the assistant director for the Antioch Writers' Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio. His stories and poems have appeared in journals such as Leaping Clear, Metafore, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Stoneboat. His latest novel, The Psalms of Israel Jones (West Virginia University Press 2014), won the 2010 Hackney Award for an unpublished novel.

 Read Ed Davis' "The Strength of Strings: A Memoir" on pp. 131-136,
as well as other engaging works of Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry,
Short- Short, and Humor in Bacopa Literary Review 2020

 

Write What You Know

by 2020 Associate Editor James Singer

One of the most common pieces of advice for budding writers is to “write what you know.” But what does that actually mean? Does it mean to write about events that have happened in your life? Does it mean that you should only write about subjects which you know? Does it maybe mean that you should gather inspiration from aspects of your life, be that feelings or relationships or experiences? In my experience, “write what you know” can encompass any and all of these.

You can write about your own life, in the form of a memoir or travel journals or other such creative nonfiction. By doing so, you share your experiences with others, help people going through similar trials and tribulations to what you’ve gone through. This sort of writing is also a way to memorialize your life, to be remembered and leave a legacy for future generations.

Another way to write what you know is to write about subjects you know well. For example, a truck driver writing stories about life on the road, a retired detective writing mysteries, or a historian writing historical fiction. And if you don’t know the subject, then know what you write: do research, learn about what is involved in your story. If you do this, your story will be that much more believable, and you won’t have someone who does know the subject telling you what you got wrong.

Sometimes you can go a little farther, and rather than writing directly about what you’ve experienced or centering your writing around a knowledge base, there will be some experience or feeling, some event, anything that catches your imagination, and it will be a seed that turns into a story later down the road. Oftentimes, the story that results will barely resemble the event that inspired it, but the roots can be traced back to it, back to something you know. 

No matter how you “write what you know,” in the end what matters is that you’re writing.

*    *    *

 This post appeared first in the Writers Alliance of Gainesville blog;

reprinted here with permission.

A Mouthpiece to the Sacred

by Editor in Chief Mary Bast 

The idea of human memory as a folded or patchwork process is familiar to those who read and write braided essays . . . the "threads" combine thematically to form a more complete and pliable piece of nonfiction . . . in handfuls that don't abide by chronological time. Sarah Minor, "What Quilting and Embroidery Can Teach Us About Narrative Form, Literary Hub, 9/22/17.

The best memoir has a clear focus, theme, and takeaway -- something heartfelt, universal, and true. But if recollections are forced to be linear and sequential, there's a risk of oversimplifying the complicated tapestry of life. And this is true not only of nonfiction. Contemporary novels have also left the sequential story structure behind, some by alternating points in time, some by alternating chapters by different characters, the strands then formally braided or at least implied. One fine example is Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, a tapestry woven from five voices: Orleanna, Leah, Ruth May, Rachel, and Adah.

Writing about this technique in creative nonfiction, Brenda Miller suggests braiding isn't simply a mosaic with fragmented and juxtaposed pieces:

. . . it has more of a sense of weaving about it, of interruption and continuation, like the braiding of bread . . . What I'm hoping is that by the eating of this bread together we begin to respond to a hunger unsatisfied by everyday food, unvoiced in everyday language. We'll begin to formulate a few separate strands; we'll mull them over, roll them in our hands, and bring them together in a pattern that acts as a mouthpiece to the sacred. "A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay," pp. 14-24, Writing Creative Nonfiction, Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (Eds)

Its break from traditional sequencing is one of the many attractions of Emily Hipchen's memoir, Coming Apart Together: Fragments from an Adoption. Even her title evokes an image of parting and reweaving. Readers will admire her writerly brilliance and identify with her experience even if not an adoptive parent or adopted child. One needn't have had a wild and crazy childhood in Texas to fall in love with Mary Karr's The Liar's Club or been a poverty-stricken boy in Ireland to be fascinated by Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

The following excerpts from Hipchen's memoir show what Brenda Miller describes in "A Braided Heart" as ". . . separate parts intersecting, creating the illusion of wholeness, but with the oh-so-pleasurable texture of separation."

An early strand in the book is from the author's near present:

Fifteen days ago came the call . . . What I hear is a woman's voice. I immediately think "New York." I immediately think "foreign, unknown, stranger," and tune out all but anything that might be important. The timbre of the voice is deep, it has a girlishness to it though, an under-giggle of helium, so I think "young" . . ." Your father my husband and I would like to talk to you. Will you call us? . . . "We love you very much." There are beeps almost as meaningful as what she says, a hiss of tape. Who loves me? Who. I replay and replay, working the pieces together.

Soon we read a strand from her imagined infant self, only six months after her birth:

Six months ago I was born. Six months ago I was named Mary Beth Delany by the woman who labored thirty-six hours in darkness and daylight to have me and then let me go . . . She set her face into the winter light, moved her left leg, her right leg, and found that she was walking . . .  and from the arms of a nun I stretched out my sloppy fists and smiled toothlessly, grinned and grinned and grinned as I did for every stranger, since everyone was a stranger . . . and they took me into their family, and began calling me . . . Emily. Their daughter.

Then we're back to a near-present strand:

On one of the first days I have contact with Anna and Joe, my father explains about sports . . . He unwraps his arm and stretches it across the table as if the limb were my gift . . . And says, "These are pitchers' arms." And says, "These are your arms." They are, emphatically.

Another strand from the past, when the author was in elementary school:

In fourth grade was the Mendel project. Genetics. Monks and sweet peas. The project consisted of this: a worksheet on which each student was to record all the ways in which he or she resembled his or her parents . . . I told the truth: I was adopted . . . Thus verified, I was given something else to do. I sat all week alone . . . dreaming of my birth-mother coming to gather me . . . .

And a strand that holds both present and past:

I can remember being a child and dreaming my imagined mother alive . . . a better mother than mine, not so short-tempered, not so difficult to understand, not so other-than-me . . . But this is what I struggle with now, here, since it seems paradoxical, since it violates some substratum of feeling I can't yet excavate: for all the trouble I've had and caused, for all that it's taken me to get here, to be thirty-five years old, to be what I am, I can't wish the undoing of it, of any of it. To do so would unmake me.

A later strand frames an internal braiding of the author's own story with that of her newly discovered Aunt Elizabeth:

I am the daughter Anna's sister Elizabeth never had . . . I tell her, "It is difficult, you know, seeing my face walking around everywhere else. After all these years of not knowing . . . [Joe] says Aunt Beth ran away from her family when she was eighteen. . . [her story] becomes the companion piece to my own leaving, it has motives I comprehend . . . the powerful sense of having some control over one's own destiny. . . Our stories overlap and braid . . . like mine, her father was violent and controlling . . .

As we near the end, Hipchen reflects on the various parts of her braid:

I wonder, as I sit writing this, this the story of one event's impact, how much of my understanding of what happens to me and to everyone else is really more just our seeing, through the dimness in which we sit, the shadowy outlines of things passing by rolled-up windows, too fast really to be more than blurs, too unfamiliar to be anything but what we imagine them to be? 

Bit by bit, she weaves all together, admitting that some of her braided work must be imagined:

. . . The woman who gave birth to me, the man who helped make me, and the five children they had after me became names and faces to me, exited my unconscious and became incarnate . . . The struggle is in telling a true story when there are so many different kinds of truth, so many different angles, voices, possibilities, nothing linear, nothing really straight and tellable . . . How impossible it all is . . . But you know that's the thing about telling a true story, I think. Usually, to tell it at all sensibly, actually say what's true, you have to line up the bits and pieces you can just about see distinctly and imagine the rest.

Finally, I could find no better mouthpiece to the sacred in this compelling memoir than Emily Hipchen's own words:

We are all children looking for our lost parents. Or lost parents, looking for our children.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
". . . Read this book if you want to understand and experience the tangled knot of love, anger, self-doubt, and courage at the heart of adoption memoirs. . . ." ~ Rebecca Hogan, Editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and Professor of English and Women's Studies, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

In The Time It Takes To Snap A Photo

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

What's the worst advice anyone ever gave you about writing? an interviewer for the NDR Blog asked Michael Farrell Smith (AKA Mike Smith of Albuquerque). "Kill your darlings," Mike said. "I hate it, I hate it . . . seriously, that's going to be your guiding creative metaphor, people? Baby murder? . . . what is artistic vision and creation but the process of giving life to a darling? To something only you can see and feel and understand, that you have to create in order for it to be real?"

Now you're beginning to get a feel for this one-of-a-kind writer who is both seriously trained (BS English, MFA Creative Writing) and an innovative rule-breaker whose life is devoted to "art and exploration." Mike describes his Bacopa 2016 piece, "--the Speed of Grass--the Speed of Us," as experimental nonfiction, a memoir of 1/60th of one second. A sentence fragment about a fragment of life. A memoir of the time it takes to snap a photo.

In his acceptance letter to Mike, Bacopa Literary Review 2016's Creative Nonfiction Editor Rick Sapp wrote: "Loved it, hated it, left me looking for a place to set it down, breathless and tired all at the same time. Joyce-ish in approach." Mike's memoir is indeed a lyrical, Joycean rush, well- deserving of comparison to the modernist, stream-of-consciousness genius, James Joyce, and that's why we've nominated it for a Pushcart Prize. Here's a sample; but you really want to read the original. It's quite literally breath-taking:

                                 --the Speed of Grass                                                                                                                                   --the Speed of Us

--a memoir--of a fraction of an instant--in a fraction of a place--an exploration--of something so fleeting--one sixtieth of one second--more momentary than a moment--a world of time in time--rushing--rushing--surging--flooding--from the sixtieth of a second that came before--toward--and into--the sixtieth of a second bound to follow--a progression--so inevitable--instantaneous--pure motion--whatever that is--the apparent motion of time--whatever that is--a moment--yes--a moment--make any choice within it--not consciously anyway--a moment like all moments--seemingly still--and yet made of movement--unstoppable--relentless--fast--something so small it is maybe only a description of something larger--one  sixtieth of one second--on maybe one quadrillionth of the surface of the Earth--an infinitesimal portion of all time and all space arbitrarily parceled away--held down--held close--by a piece of shining sidewalk--a trapezoid of growing lawn--a cracking concrete slab--and--along almost all that--by the front of a house--its eroding pin-orange bricks--its glistening white trim--its slumping screen door--the lawn settling up against it like a new broken wave--closing liquidly around a branching lavender bush--around greenery tangling beneath a faucet--around a snaking of garden hose--around two volcanic young elms rising uninvited from a grass-erupting flower box beside the slab--the slab a raft--and riding that raft--a family--a family of four--a woman--tall--my then-wife--then twenty-eight--legs crossed--crisscross applesauce--the kids would say--in green-strapped Teva sandals--bare legs--jean shorts--a green t-shirt--V-necked--green eyes--ponytail--hands on her legs--eyes and smile aiming up--and a man--me--taller--sitting slightly apart--my then-self--also twenty-eight--also cross-legged--also in Tevas--mine brown-strapped--in blue jeans with two fraying holes over one knee--in a soft blue shirt showing a screen-printed silhouette of power lines and two double-beamed utility poles--in rectangular wire eyeglasses--brown eyes--brown hair--sideburns--eyes and smile aiming up--and why were we smiling--did we feel anything--think anything--in that sixtieth of a second--that splinter of a splinter of the late-afternoon of August 18th--2008--and how could we have--in that emerging-evanescing--blooming--dyinginstant--thoughtless--emotionless--senseless--perspective-less--even with this persistent--unsettling--unverifiable sense that I did exist--was conscious--that everyone was--something sensed not in any sixtieth of a second but in bigger--baggier--more ill-fitting--times--in seconds--in minutes--this feeling that I was experiencing the world--that the woman--my wife--and our kids--and our cat--nearby--were experiencing the world--that all those plants were experiencing the world--shifting toward light--stretching toward water--displaying simple preferences and desires--but in this moment--only motion--hurtling--hurtling into something on our way toward . . . .

Michael Farrell Smith's work has been published in Tin House, New Delta Review ("101 Jokes for Epileptic Children"), Baltimore Review ("Notes from a Slowly Dying Suburbanite"), Booth ("Origins"), The 3288 Review ("The World Greening Wildly"), and elsewhere.

How Can a Mother?

By Bacopa Literary Review Flash Story Editor, Kaye Linden

Bacopa 2017 submissions included the genre "flash story," which could be fiction, creative nonfiction, or memoir of 750 words or less. Below, I have posted a piece of memoir that could be submitted as flash story, flash memoir, flash creative nonfiction, or as a prose poem of 748 words not counting the title This piece is character driven, with a prose poem format that leans enough towards a story with a tiny plot or series of events, that I would accept as a flash story. Note the eccentric use of language and lack of traditional grammar. I'm a nontraditional poetry and flash story editor and invite you to submit your tightly written stories or prose poems next year. (See also my 35 Tips for Writing a Brilliant Flash Story)

How Can a Mother?

A memoir in flash

748 words by Kaye Linden

The folding unfolding picnic chair, yellow, green, white striped against dark wooden legs, folding down into a canvas seat for a three-year old's little girl body to sit still, stay quiet, so the adults might converse over picnic lunch, (Kentucky fried slaughtered chicken and other innocents) on the edge, innocents on the ledge ...

Who does that?
What mother places an unfolding folding chair on the crest of a cliff?
For a three-year old in a red and white checkered dress, (lace collar and flouncy skirt, white sox and white sandals)
a larger cliff than for a mother, a large folding cliff that folds down and around and in on itself, bendy yet rigid, up and down and rocky and fashioned with tiny rocks and pebbles and hurting sticks and stones that do break bones and what mother does that?
What mother places an unfolding folding chair on the brink of a cliff?
A mother who is watching someone else,
a mother whose eyes follow a man with ginger hair,
a mother who only has eyes for the man who carries the picnic basket.

That mother doesn't see

her
                                          child
                                                                fall


The red and white checked dress with the lace collar and flounced skirt, the white sandals and white sox, so disgustingly innocent, but I can still feel the seer-sucker texture of the new skirt between my chubby fingers, the gut-stirring excitement of a trek up the winding path of the sandy hill, the sound of crashing surf over ancient rock, the anticipation of a day in the Australian sun, on an aboriginal icon where weathered carvings in moss-covered boulders spoke stories of boomerangs and kangaroos hunted. A wind blew strong that day, my fine blonde baby hair blowing around my round face.

That day, my father insisted on bringing his best friend--the ginger-haired man he encouraged my mother to see every day, his large frame shadowing the paths along which he walked. He tossed me onto his shoulders and neighed like a horse blowing beer breath, everyone laughing at his Australian humor. They told me to call him "Uncle Hank." But he wasn't a blood uncle, just a "close friend" who should be "respected" like an uncle--

a bastard with heavily freckled arms, muscled all over, a punch worthy body, huge fists, calloused knuckles, a beer bellied bastard

At the top of the hill, my parents and "Uncle Hank" laid out folding picnic chairs on the flattened, beaten down grass dirt surface, kicked away sticks and stones and other bleached half-eaten chicken bones tossed by other mindless people seeking a retreat into well-worn trails. The cleared space allowed my parents and the man to decorate the red tablecloth with silver spoons and forks and what was wrong with plastic spoons and forks except that, oh I get it now, they could have blown away in the wind, over the cliff edge.

A shadowed figure of a mother hovered over the folding unfolding stool and placed it hastily on the cliff, close enough to the edge, randomly placed, I'm sure, not a murderous intention but a thoughtless one.

More beer came out, warm and hot, Australian Lager at its best.

"Let's drink to friendship," the glass mugs clinked. Large biting ants crawled across the picnic blanket and over my legs, biting until red welts appeared. I cried.

"What's the matter?" the how- can- a- mother voice beamed, sap-filled sweetness, dripping

"Ants are biting."

"Just brush them off."

I brushed and swiped, slapped red the child skin

The folding unfolding stool rocked and rocked, unfolding in slow motion over the edge

a tumble, rocks scratching like cats' claws shredding new girl skin, jabbing, stabbing at  

the child rolling over pokey sticks and bits and pieces of wave-dumped debris.

Not a killing fall,

but a wake-up fall.

Down she fell to the rocks where surf crashed and spray sprayed the seer-sucker dress, a piece of lace collar and a sandal tossed onto rocks.

White foam. Salt air. Cuts, scratches.

Frantic adult voices from above. "Are you alright?"

"Uncle Hank's coming to get you."

The lumbering of heft and heroic strength slide down the cliff on large man buttocks, a starving soul desperate for salvation.

Where was my father?

The man picked me up and laughed. "You'll be ok" said in a croon supposed to dismiss pain.

She cried big girl tears that day and ruined a perfectly good picnic.

Oh well.

I'm sure they had many more.

~         ~           ~

Note from Editor in Chief Mary Bast: See Stephanie Dickinson's 413-word "Emily and the Bobcat;" also her "Iowa" and "Marjorie." Then get your hands on Margaret Atwood's collection The Tent -- "a collection of very short pieces, some only a paragraph long" -- plus other flash collections mentioned in LitHub's A Crash Course in Flash Fiction. Also the superb, 241-word "Esse" from Czeslaw Milosz (listed at the Nobel Prize site as a "poem" and in Flash Fiction International as "fiction"), Marco Denevi's amusingly weird flash fiction "The Lord of the Flies," "Aglaglagl" by Bruce Holland Rogers (also a Bacopa 2013 contributor), Jessica Goodfellow's "Landlocked," Tara Laskowski's "Little Girls."