Beginner's Luck

On Bibliomancy and implanted memories, together, in writing exercises. And the muse as a kind of protector.

I have been thinking of something Claudia Rankine said when she gave a presentation at Dartmouth last fall on new approaches to autobiography. Someone in the audience asked her about how she could continue writing through the violence the culture imposes on her. “I stay close to my obsessions,” is what she said, an answer that on its face isn’t so terrifically different from what many writers say, but the context—as an answer to the question—was interesting to me. This idea that one’s obsessions could protect one from that violence in any way, if only to protect your attention, to keep you on your course, that is a very different way to think about them.

Something like an imaginary friend but as a bouncer also. If your muse was also your bodyguard. The cool older friend who looks out for you.

“Portrait of the imperial guard Zhanyinbao,” from The Metropolitan Museum Open Access Collection. Artist unidentified, dated to 1760. The text above him is a poem about his exploits.

All these years later I am still having conversations with students who tell me they are afraid of writing about trauma, who use the phrase “trauma-dumping,” who seem afraid of being forced to do something they don’t want to do. As if I will require it of them. I reassure them that I do not. That is not my role. In my beginner classes I am there to teach them the difference between writing what they think a story is and writing a story they actually would want to tell. Whether or not that engages with trauma, that is up to them. But typically what they are in the grip of is a projection. They feel the need to write about trauma and project that onto me as a way of displacing their power and authority.

That said, as someone who has experienced trauma and who has written about it, and who has written about recuperating from it, I have been thinking, as we exit a year of astonishing pain and genocide and enter another that seems prepared to offer more of the same, starting with the shocking fires in Los Angeles, that if you have learned any wisdom from experiencing trauma, it is a tremendous gift to offer that to others in writing. And to eschew it on principle, to act as if trauma is forbidden as a topic, well, isn’t that just a silencing, which operates in complicity with the status quo, which typically has created the conditions for that trauma? And any lack of accountability?

I would say that for me the writing that interests me on the subject of trauma is that which is able to look at the systemic nature of it. I am thinking of Barry Lopez, for example, who in “A Sliver of Sky” investigated the reason why the doctor who raped him as a child was able to do so. The essay was an attempt at holding his mother and his stepfather accountable, and the police too. Or Bastard Out Of Carolina, by the late Dorothy Allison. In memory of her, in honor of her, I could never, will never, accept rote silence.

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It’s the first week of classes here and I’ve been enjoying them. Enjoying, that is, the start of classes, seeing students and colleagues and getting the term started in general. I’ve also just been writing in my new novel scenes set during the start of classes and the first class writing exercises that work as icebreakers of a kind—not all of them can be that but some work well to introduce students to each other and to the teacher.

I have a few of my own design I use frequently but that I am not going to use in the novel—my narrator has invented his own. One that I used this week is well-known to readers of this newsletter, though new subscribers may not have seen it, the Bibliomancy exercise. Good for beginning projects and classes, I think.

The second, described below, is a writing exercise I made up after seeing the film Bladerunner about once a year between 1985 and 2007. Longtime readers of my blogs would have seen a version of this exercise in 2008.

To explain: In Bladerunner, there are androids made to believe they're human through memories that are implanted into their minds. For whatever reason, this led me to think of the ways a memory might be implanted into the mind of a human. Like for example, the people you know, your family or friends, repeating a story about you in front of you, insisting that it happened, even though you had no memory of it, again and again until something forms in your imagination that is like a memory but not a memory. The memory, if you examine it, is typically suspect—a fiction you've created using images from old photo albums from that time, and you can tell it's false because the image of you in the memory is in the Third Person.

Our memories are usually from inside our head, not memories in which we observe ourselves walking through our own field of vision. We make these fictions to have a relationship to the story they are telling, because the story is alienating to us---it is told usually to embarrass us, and is a way the family shows it knows you in some way you don't know yourself, and thus you belong to the family. It's an act of both affection and sublimated aggression, and it's done in the presence of a newcomer because that tells the newcomer where they stand. Even as telling them admits them, a little, to the family.

I call it a protofiction, and if you look at yours, after you do it, you may realize that this is what you are already writing about in the work you're doing. In any case, here’s a way to work with it.

1. Make a list of say three stories your family or your friends tells about you when you bring a friend to meet them. Usually these stories are set in the first three to six years of life, when you can't remember very much, if you are dealing with your family. If you are dealing with friends you may be older.

2. Choose one. Examine your memory of it. Describe it in writing, but in a paragraph or three.

3. In my case, the memory I use as an example is of how I used to hide behind furniture in my family's house in Seoul, and then from there I would imitate the voices of the people in the room. The story is about how one time my grandmother and an aunt of mine were having an argument, and then in a pause in the fight, they heard a small voice say what my grandmother had just said. This caused my grandmother to laugh explosively, but my aunt felt insulted, and hated me.

4. Now: figure out what the story is about. In my example, the story is about how a child's talent for imitation inserts him into the center of a conflict that is not his, and gets him into trouble.

5. Now figure out if you can take that situation and move it through time and space, repopulating it with different figures.

6. And, if you like, this is a great time to do the Bibliomancy exercise, as I did with my students. After the quotes are assembled, take the most resonant line and use it to begin a freewrite for 15 minutes.

7. Once that is done, see if you can the world that has emerged in the freewrite. And see if you can populate it with the situation from the story told about you, using the bibliomancy as a portal to this other world.

This is for example how I came up with what I call the story engine of my second novel, The Queen of the Night. This would be the personality trait that makes a character engage in the same reflexive or instinctive behavior in crisis, and that in turn creates what we might call their fate.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee