My Subject is Everything

A few weeks ago, in the midst of a wine-tingling night, I came up with a fabulous plan I had to share with Brock right away, like Right Now: a book project. We'd compile a list of subjects/topics/ideas (starting with my thousand) and one by one I'd tackle them through prose, and Brock would write a poem on the exact same subjects. The word Brilliant kept flashing across the blackboard of my mind in neon pink, and in cursive. By the time I related the idea to Brock I was ready to throw all our collective thoughts into a hat, but when I looked over to him he was shaking his head and said, in a not unsweet manner, "No, that's not how it works. Curb your enthusiasm."

Brock had supped on a little wine, too.

It reminded me of a similar conversation we had years ago, only in this instance it was a series of my bright ideas that were shut down in a similarly not unsweet manner. See, Brock would tell me a story about something interesting that happened at the grocery store or gas station, some lack of communication between himself and the outside world (one of his finest tropes) and I would respond, "Brilliant. You have to write a poem about it." Sometimes Brock would agree and actually write it, other times he wouldn't, but eventually we discussed whether or not anything on this good earth has the possibility to be a subject for our writing.

I was on Team Yes, Brock on Team No.

Brock's position reflects the refrain we've heard from writing teachers all our lives: "Just because it happened to you, doesn't make it good, or real, or worthy." And this is admittedly hard to disagree with in a fiction workshop when a writer's defense of his story is simply, "It has to be realistic, because this really happened!" It's like Dan White's Twinkie defense in the 70s--it doesn't make right what you've done, and really it's positively laughable. In short: yes, your story happened but it still sucks.

On the other hand Brock's position is ironic because his wonderful mentor and newly minted poetry star, Mark Halliday, has made a career of writing about the minutia of his own daily life. One of my favorite poems of his is called "Muck Clump," in which he discusses how insignificant he often feels alongside his wife and daughter Devin, and how one morning he gets up to fix Devin her breakfast of shredded wheat, and as his wife glides through the kitchen she tells him he hasn't poured enough cereal for Devin, a growing girl. And then for two more pages of poem he imagines grandly, Walter Mitty-style, how wrong his wife is and how right he is, and how the profuse amount of cereal she's poured for Devin will congeal and turn into a nasty muck clump, because no one can eat as much shredded wheat as his wife has poured for his daughter. After he imagines making an extravagant show of tossing the massive muck clump down the drain he awakens to find Devin placing her empty bowl in the sink and kissing him, then skipping off to school. Classic Mark Halliday: breakfast scene, family, insecurities, hopeful-delusions of grandeur. And while part of this is the persona Halliday creates specifically for his art, he is also writing about the small events in his life worth recreating.

And I love that.

As you might be able to tell by now, I heavily depend on persistent thoughts, observations, and wishes for my subjects. More and more I'm realizing my subject is not just Lala, or my family, or my youth--my subject is everything. And even Brock would agree that if one constructs this everything artfully, there's nothing wrong with that.

My concern comes in when considering the ethics and value of certain writing scenarios. I toil, I worry, over this:

• Am I exploiting those I love in my writing? Am I depending on their strengths and weaknesses and daily actions, whatever they may be, in order for my work to work?
• If there is a line to be drawn on which subjects are off limits, where is that line? Is it what makes me uncomfortable, or what makes my subjects uncomfortable? And if I keep my toes just on the edge of that line, doesn't that make me a bit of a coward? Isn't my responsibility to the truth of the matter and not anyone's comfort levels, no matter how much I may adore these anyones? (I can tell you now the answer to the last two questions must be a resounding yes, or I might as well close down the computer now. I just realized the answer as I was typing.)
  
• If a writer must (should, whatever) establish her ethos before garnering an audience, and the foundation of my writing is all ethos, all the time (look at me: voice! voice! voice!), how will I draw anyone new into the fold? How will I convince those who don't love me to love me? Which leads to the most difficult question of all,
  
• Am I too I in my writing?
  

An admission: part of my aversion to beginning sentences with I is that I've convinced myself that if the sentence is constructed in a way that buries the I, my reader won't think me so self-involved. This is really bad, because I'm clearly trying to trick my reader, whom I love, in a not-so-subtle way, and any readers I have are certainly a lot smarter than I'm giving them credit for.

There goes that ethos again. Sheesh, I never give up.

Last semester I taught a creative nonfiction workshop in which rested the foundation that my students' subjects could (should, whatever) be everything. Many of them loathed this idea. Teri, my 60ish-year-old student who tediously reminded us of her age every other minute and thought it an interesting topic of conversation (holy shit, am I another version of Teri?!?), stated simply she could not write about herself. Fine idea, I thought, enrolling in a creative nonfiction course. Students were asked to write three pages a week--torturous, right?--and each Thursday she'd turn in barely half a page because, "That's all I could come up with." When I told them Proust wrote for fifty pages about a madeleine memory, or for three hundred tracing the history of one infidelity, and by the way, did so in some of the most stunning writing ever printed on the page, they thought I was full of shit.

Maybe pointing to Proust was too much. Most of them were about twenty, after all. So instead I gave them Bernard Cooper's two-page essay entitled "The Fine Art of Sighing." It reads much like a prose poem, really, but I wanted to show students that any obsession, observation, momentary fact of your life can be a subject as long as you've thought about it, really cared about it, make real meaning out of it. Cooper thought about sighing, about the world's daily sighs, and more specifically the sighs he heard constantly growing up, what they said about his parents and their wants and fears and how they helped to mold his own. In these tiny two pages he tried to learn the world through deliberation of sighing. There goes that neon pink Brilliant sign again, only for real this time. Let me give you a line from that essay that kills me every time:

"Where my mother sighed from ineffable sadness, my father sighed at simple things: the coldness of a drink, the softness of a pillow, or an itch that my mother, following the frantic map of his words, finally found on his back and scratched."

Delineating the people you love through their signs? And to do so in such clear, poetic language? This reading clearly had to win them over.

But the students' reactions were more varied than I expected. They conceded to the pretty phrases and perfect sentence structures, but weren't so thrilled about the subject. Teri, especially, made her views clear: "So what? It's about sighing. People do it every day. So what?" She sighed conspicuously as punctuation. I acquiesced under the weight of her obnoxiousness and moved onto the next one, not pointing out that people die and love every day too, and that these still make fine subjects for writing. I didn't remind her that one needn't scale Everest to get some exercise.

That's the thing I never got to tell my students that semester, a belief I have about writing that can't be taught and therefore that I may as well leave out of the classroom for fear of giving the Teris of the world the heart attack they're always sure is coming, and the belief is this: if you're going to write nonfiction, you've got to be at least a little cool.

By being cool I don't mean high school cool, or James Dean cool. In my entire life I could never be close to this kind of cool, and that's for the better, I think. The kind of cool I mean is closer to the definition of openmindedness: being cool is being open to whatever is before you (yes, even if that's Newt or Sarah or Teri), being genuinely fascinated by the sundry people who make up the world, seeing them and everything else on this good earth in neat, new, interesting ways.

Thing is, as we all know, you can't teach cool. So if I were to express this belief in class, my best approach might be to walk in on the first day and say, "Some of you are absolutely fucked when it comes to writing, and some of you aren't. Throughout the semester we'll discover whether or not you're fucked, but I can give you an early hint right now: if you are offended/appalled by my saying this, then you're very likely fucked. If you are confused or worried or curious as to what the hell I mean, you're very likely not."

This approach might save the Brookes and Teris of the world a lot of trouble, but would also cost me my job. So I'll continue directing my frozen smiles to the Teris and read their offensively boring work with a glass of wine to tingle my toes, since no other part of me could possibly be moved.

So for today my subject was, among other things, whether or not cool can be taught, and whether or not I should take any of this on as a subject. Through the writing you can see the answer I've come up with. And if you're still here with me you obviously agree. Kudos, you. And to ethos, for now, I'm thankful.