November 10, 2010
Wednesday

The woman . . . wasn’t beautiful, but she had on a sweater that fit a certain way, short happy hair, and a face you’d always like to see.
             — Robert Boswell, b. 1953
American fiction writer
from “The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards”

Last night, for the first time since I left for Vermont nearly three weeks ago (or maybe longer), I put on my favorite sweater (a 100% silk dry-clean only turquoise number from Coldwater Creek that someone described as “a killer,” presumably because it fits a certain way and looks nice), wielded styling gel and a hairdryer instead of letting my short hair just hang sad, and put makeup on, quite a challenge in the dim, gray, badly-angled light in the bathroom of my residence. I did this because instead of spending the whole day alone in my studio with only short breaks for meals, I was participating in the second of each session’s three Resident Readings.

Readings are important in a writer’s life. They’re a way to get your work to an audience that might otherwise not partake of it, a way to pique interest in your new work, or to promote book sales. I go to a lot of readings, but I have few opportunities to do any, since I don’t have a book published and I’m not associated with a writing center or a school that sponsors readings by participants.

I do read at Bread Loaf. The hierarchy of classifications there determines how much time a reader is allotted. Faculty and fellows are allowed about 45 minutes each, about enough time for a typical short story that might run 20 or 25 pages in a book. Tuition scholars get 20 minutes, and the waiters (work-study participants) generally give themselves 10. General contributors like me get 5 minutes in the Blue Parlor readings, the time strictly (but genially) kept by the organizer. At the Vermont Studio Center, the number of writers in residence is smaller, so by scheduling five for each reading, an individual can have up to 12 minutes.

Even with the longer time allotment, I find it difficult to choose a passage of fiction to read, so I usually explain that though I’m here as a fiction writer, I’ll be reading some nonfiction. In the past, at Bread Loaf, I’ve read about a concrete poem I wrote when I was 20, about a balloon given to Lynn by Grover and which I let fly away, and about a cobalt vase I’ve had for more than 40 years.

For last night’s event, I chose a piece that I started in the summer (and read part of at Bread Loaf) and added to this weekend. Creative Nonfiction had issued a call for submissions about food. Because of my unexpected invitation to Sewanee, I was unable to make the deadline, so the piece remains incomplete. But what I have I thought was compelling enough to read.

As I said in my brief set-up, there is an eating scene or a cooking scene or a reference to food in every piece of fiction that I write. I’ve written two stories in which a man falls in love with a woman while he watches her cook. My novel opens with a character breathing in the aroma of a bread starter, and follows with a scene of another character baking bread. Thus it seemed appropriate to read three episodes from my own life in which food is an important factor.

Michael Steinberg, the founding editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, was here at the beginning of the session. Literary nonficiton (a term I prefer over “creative nonficiton”) is made up mostly of personal essays with a strong narrative rather than expository thrust, and straight-up memoir. We write, he says, in an effort to discover the things we need to understand. He quoted novelist and memoirist Kim Barnes, who says that a memoir is not about what happened, but about why you remembered it the way you did, and Pam Houston, another versatile fiction/nonfiction writer, who says that she does not endeavor to tell the story the way it happened, but the way she remembers it happened. Writing fiction taught him to create himself as a character in memoir.

The thinking and the research and the writing I did this summer for this food piece led me to start thinking about the way food was regarded and regulated in the religious tradition I was brought up in. So I began with the episode that I consider my first sin: in 1954, a classmate offered me a piece of candy in church before Mass was over, and I ate it. I followed with a scene from 1957, in which my sister and I watched with fierce vigilance as my mother divided the seventh segment of a Tootsie Roll because since it was Lent she could not consume it herself and thus stave off arguments about who gets an extra segment this time. And finally, I outlined the moment in 1968 when, as a 21-year-old invited to a young man’s apartment for dinner on a Friday in Lent, I ate meat in total disregard of the church’s rules about abstinence.

In his talk, Michael Steinberg addressed the challenges memoirists face when reporting things that happened long ago. There is the literal truth of a recalled incident, and the artistic truth.

Of the candy in church incident I remember clearly that the variety offered was a Life Saver, but I do not really recall if it was a red one. I know that I was sitting with my classmates and other parish children up front and away from our parents, but I’m only speculating about where my sister and my grandmother and my parents were that day.

The Tootsie Roll incident is probably the most faithful to the actual facts of what happened. The gray and white Formica tabletop and the yellow and white plastic chairs are authentic, it was definitely a Tootsie Roll under scrutiny, although there is an outside possibility that it took place in 1958.

The meat on Friday incident, though the most recent, is the one where I have taken the most liberties with the literal truth. I’ve changed the young man’s name, and I don’t remember why I was with him and his roommates and their female guests that Friday afternoon. It might have been the Orson Welles festival weekend that this happened, or the weekend that some young women came from their nearby college to take the GRE, and we washed the young men’s cars out on College Avenue, though there was really too much traffic to do that easily.

The reading was well-received and, as earlier versions of the Tootsie Roll portion and the meat on Friday portion had when I read them at Bread Loaf, they triggered similar memories in others of a certain age. As Michael Steinberg said, there is wisdom in what we learn and what we remember, and in the way we tell our stories.

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