Because you should read more of this beautiful essay, here’s another excerpt from “That Father Lost,” by Dave Lucas:
12
For years I have not thought of sitting out behind the shed with my father, he on the old stump and me on the log he’d felled from it. Years even since they each began to sink into themselves, soft with rot and the long becoming something else.My father, of course, is dead, and now I clear years of logs he’d split and stacked here, and I want to tell myself that art is more than the grief of what was and what is, that some days I am filled with joy beyond my capacity to know, so that those days, Father, I am full within myself, I am shooting forth into leaf.
13
I write, In this world, Father, I am what is left of you.No. A lie. A self-aggrandizement. So much more is left behind. And less.
14
You would have known the name for the rude stink the rain dredges from the soil. You would have known the origins of the word. Petrichor, I can hear you say, from stone and ichor, blood of the gods. That it bleeds from dry plants into the soil and then, in a time of rain, into the air. You would have been satisfied to tell me how the heat of a day such as this rises, cools, condenses and falls. You would have known the reason why just before the storm the leaves turn their backs as if in farewell.15
When they see me, they ask how my mother is doing to ask how I am doing.16
You taught me the names of clouds – cumulus, status, cirrus, cumulonimbus. Equinox and solstice. The phases of the moon. None of it is any use in these long nights, awake listening to the hiss of the rain.
When it was decided (When was that again, and by whom?) that we were all supposed to choose between fiction and nonfiction, what was not taken into account was that for some of us truth can never be an absolute, that there can (at best) be only less true and more true and sometimes those two collapse inside each other like a Turducken. Given the failure of memory. Given the failure of language to mean. Given metaphor. Given metonymy. Given the ever-shifting junction of code and context. Given the twenty-five people who saw the same car accident. Given our denial. Given our longings.
…
Who cares really, if she hung herself or slit her wrists when what really matters is that James Fry is secretly afraid that he’s the one who killed her. Dear Random House Refund Department: If they were moved, then they got their twenty-four dollars worth.
I was workshopped today
and nobody likes workshops - no matter how long they’ve been writing, no matter how good they are - because there aren’t many people who enjoy opening themselves up to the possibility that something they have created and loved and nourished might look shitty and sloppy to someone else. But: you open yourself up to that risk anyway and sometimes you land in the middle of a group of people that take workshops and writing and words seriously and tack an extra forty-five minutes onto a three hour class on a Monday because they find it important to study and argue about the merit of this sentence for fifteen minutes:
Takes a swig of Listerine, pauses, and then swallows.
and argue about the “and then,” part. Should it be there? Should ‘and’ be omitted, but ‘then’ left untouched? Or, should the sentence read: Takes a swig of Listerine, pauses, swallows.
And the best best best part of this whole thing is not the fact that they stayed late on a Monday, and it’s not the fact that my professor - who, I think, is the best professor I’ve ever had - barely had to ask them to stay late, and it’s not the fact that some of them even liked my essay.
It is this: not one of them looked at the sentence, the “and then,” and said, “Does this question actually matter?” Or, “Who cares?”
Look at a toddler. Toddlers are boring - they run around, you have to watch them, you know - so we put them in high chairs. And we give them Cheerios. And then the toddler throws the Cheerios and eats the Cheerios and the Cheerios are exhausted. So, then we give them our keys. And you know what they do with our keys - after they put them in their mouth, of course? Toss them on the ground. And then they look at them, and we pick them up. And they toss them on the ground again. And we look at them like they’re crazy, because we know what’s going to happen with the keys. When they let go of them, they’re going to fall on the ground. But toddlers haven’t figured out gravity yet. And that’s the childlike wonder I’m talking about. For toddlers, there’s always a chance that those keys aren’t going to hit the ground. There’s a chance that they’ll go up.
I’ve always said: if you’ve got a kid under the age of four and you need to throw him a birthday party, don’t hire a magician. He could be the best magician on earth - he could levitate, could light himself on fire. Don’t do it. Because toddlers are thinking: big deal. I expect to burst into flames at any minute.
- Michael Martone, on writing.
It’s baffling to me that there’s any uncertainty over how that truth spectrum exists through an artistic medium. It’s hard for me to grasp because it seems like this spectrum of what we accept and won’t accept as truth in art already exits and is already understood. It seems universally acceptable to dress a suburban family in head to toe denim, arrange them into a strange dog-pile, force smiles, call that photo a family portrait and place it on a mantle as a sort of representation of the subjects. It’s universally agreed upon that it’s unacceptable to dress a man in a spacesuit, construct a studio set to look like Mars, ask him to take a step, plant a flag, then print this photo in a newspaper and call it a representation of truth or history. There’s middle ground between the falsity of what we present and the falsity of perception. This is where artists and redheads fall. This is where a jazz musician is allowed to take liberties in a performance, where a painter manipulates color, where a filmmaker manipulates time, and where a writer connects experiences through their own filter. A perceived truth is being presented, but not under any claims of objectivity.
[…]
Art is not real or truth. It can only act as a representative of subjective reality. In between manipulation and blatant falsities is interpretation and memory. To remember my grandfather’s funeral as grey is accurate to my experience whether the rest of Wintersville, Ohio could attest to the color outside of the Lutheran church that day or not. Creative nonfiction is kind of like painting, music, fashion, photography, cooking, film. It’s about making distinctions, selections, filtering experiences, and individual expression. Creative nonfiction is also unlike any other medium. It is a scientific study of memory, sentimentality, sensation, interpretation, and narrative. For as long as it took photography to stop being compared to paintings and film to moving photographs, I’ll wait for creative nonfiction to stop being compared to jumbo shrimp.
