This essay & the prompts made me think of Jamie Hood’s forthcoming memoir Trauma Plot. She narrativizes her rapes in three different perspectives, modes, and timelines to get at the truth of her inherently fractured experience. Highly recommended.
Yes to all of this! Writing about what you learned from your trauma is indeed a gift to others. It's also a way to find kindred spirits who will assure you that you are not "too much". And writing about it allows you to take back power and control, something survivors need. As a rape survivor and someone who has worked with abuse survivors most of my career, I can honestly say that I've met very few survivors who aren't hesitant to talk about their abuse, let alone write about it. . . because we live in a society that would rather us forgive and forget, move on, and put what's passed in the past! Write about your trauma, tell us what you figured out, but only if.you.want.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about "implanted memories" and Rankine's idea of holding our obsessions close. I remember when I saw her give a talk years ago, someone asked about the process of writing Citizen and she replied that she originally wanted to write a book about intimacy, but ended up writing about violence because of how intertwined they are. I know that's an aside. But I'm also thinking about how this ties to your prompts and thoughts about how we might grasp onto memories in forming a (and ever-evolving) narrative (maybe even mythology!).
Immense gratitude to you. Every time I read your work, I feel like I'm listening to one of my mentors (then again, you and others (through your writing and scholarship)...are my mentors. 😊 I hope that's OK.
An amazing exercise to help me break out of my usual memory mining routine when I sit down to work on my memoir. What’s really sticking with me is the idea that these stories are often the “sublimated aggression” of the people telling them, which helped bring several examples to mind immediately. That aggression also makes this process feel scary and hard, like I’m touching my family members’ deep emotional hostility. But based on your example, it seems like the focus is on me, the subject of the memory, and understanding what I might’ve been experiencing in the moment, rather than on the feelings of the tellers of the story. Is that right?
Thanks Brenden. There’s not really a wrong way to do it and it sounds like what you describe and moving towards your feelings matters a lot here, especially if you have felt the aggression or are feeling it.
Are you saying that a protofiction is a better source for a story than the memory of your own internal feelings at the time? Or would that just be a different kind of story?
I don’t know that I’d say better exactly but I think of it this way: Usually we have built up a great deal of emotion that is waiting like a cell or battery for us to tap into, from hearing the story and thinking about it in relation to the self, as the teller wants us to do. So when we decide to tell the story finally, even greatly altered like this, there’s literal power there. Also, the exercise teaches a way to write fiction that is already with us: taking impressions of something we do not know and building an experience of it. We can also learn to take and reshape material from our lives this way and not mine our lives for it so closely. I suppose I’d argue it’s a powerful tool for learning to write with what we call emotional realism now. And for nonfiction writers you can use this story differently of course, as an anchor to an essay about the self, a memoir, etc.
Really interesting, thank you. I read that Lopez essay standing in a bookshop. I had previously read many of his books, I was a fan even, but I had no idea about this part of his life. I couldn't stop reading until I had read the whole thing.
Thank you for that great prompt! It makes me want to dive into those old stories! I am a new sign up here and would like to read your work. Where should I start?
I have been reading 'Ordinary Notes' by Christina Sharpe and listening to her interview with David Naimon on 'Between the Covers' where David asks: "You talk about Claudia Rankine’s presentation at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and her playing of one of the situation videos that she makes with her filmmaker husband which is assembled footage of murders and beatings of Black people in the United States and you talk about how Rankine, doing this in front of an audience, insists on an us and a we who needed to watch and sit in this death and violence that’s undifferentiated. She insists on an undifferentiated we, something that was unwelcome and stunned many people in the room. You include a letter from Black academics at a different event in Montreal where she shows a video and their feelings that “spliced together as a long Black death made no new revelations.”
Brilliant essay. Gave me something I needed.
Thank you, that is good news.
This essay & the prompts made me think of Jamie Hood’s forthcoming memoir Trauma Plot. She narrativizes her rapes in three different perspectives, modes, and timelines to get at the truth of her inherently fractured experience. Highly recommended.
I just saw it this week. Thanks for the recommendation, that sounds like an astonishing act of self-reclamation.
Yes to all of this! Writing about what you learned from your trauma is indeed a gift to others. It's also a way to find kindred spirits who will assure you that you are not "too much". And writing about it allows you to take back power and control, something survivors need. As a rape survivor and someone who has worked with abuse survivors most of my career, I can honestly say that I've met very few survivors who aren't hesitant to talk about their abuse, let alone write about it. . . because we live in a society that would rather us forgive and forget, move on, and put what's passed in the past! Write about your trauma, tell us what you figured out, but only if.you.want.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about "implanted memories" and Rankine's idea of holding our obsessions close. I remember when I saw her give a talk years ago, someone asked about the process of writing Citizen and she replied that she originally wanted to write a book about intimacy, but ended up writing about violence because of how intertwined they are. I know that's an aside. But I'm also thinking about how this ties to your prompts and thoughts about how we might grasp onto memories in forming a (and ever-evolving) narrative (maybe even mythology!).
Immense gratitude to you. Every time I read your work, I feel like I'm listening to one of my mentors (then again, you and others (through your writing and scholarship)...are my mentors. 😊 I hope that's OK.
Thanks so much, Dorothy. An honor and a pleasure to hear that.
I'm enjoying your posts and will look for your books now, Alexander.
Thanks, that makes me happy!
So very insightful!
Thanks Glenda!
An amazing exercise to help me break out of my usual memory mining routine when I sit down to work on my memoir. What’s really sticking with me is the idea that these stories are often the “sublimated aggression” of the people telling them, which helped bring several examples to mind immediately. That aggression also makes this process feel scary and hard, like I’m touching my family members’ deep emotional hostility. But based on your example, it seems like the focus is on me, the subject of the memory, and understanding what I might’ve been experiencing in the moment, rather than on the feelings of the tellers of the story. Is that right?
Thanks Brenden. There’s not really a wrong way to do it and it sounds like what you describe and moving towards your feelings matters a lot here, especially if you have felt the aggression or are feeling it.
Are you saying that a protofiction is a better source for a story than the memory of your own internal feelings at the time? Or would that just be a different kind of story?
I don’t know that I’d say better exactly but I think of it this way: Usually we have built up a great deal of emotion that is waiting like a cell or battery for us to tap into, from hearing the story and thinking about it in relation to the self, as the teller wants us to do. So when we decide to tell the story finally, even greatly altered like this, there’s literal power there. Also, the exercise teaches a way to write fiction that is already with us: taking impressions of something we do not know and building an experience of it. We can also learn to take and reshape material from our lives this way and not mine our lives for it so closely. I suppose I’d argue it’s a powerful tool for learning to write with what we call emotional realism now. And for nonfiction writers you can use this story differently of course, as an anchor to an essay about the self, a memoir, etc.
Really interesting, thank you. I read that Lopez essay standing in a bookshop. I had previously read many of his books, I was a fan even, but I had no idea about this part of his life. I couldn't stop reading until I had read the whole thing.
It is that kind of essay.
Thank you for that great prompt! It makes me want to dive into those old stories! I am a new sign up here and would like to read your work. Where should I start?
Thank you Alexander. Your Essay Collection is on my reading list.
Well, my first novel, Edinburgh? Or my essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Thank you.
I have been reading 'Ordinary Notes' by Christina Sharpe and listening to her interview with David Naimon on 'Between the Covers' where David asks: "You talk about Claudia Rankine’s presentation at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and her playing of one of the situation videos that she makes with her filmmaker husband which is assembled footage of murders and beatings of Black people in the United States and you talk about how Rankine, doing this in front of an audience, insists on an us and a we who needed to watch and sit in this death and violence that’s undifferentiated. She insists on an undifferentiated we, something that was unwelcome and stunned many people in the room. You include a letter from Black academics at a different event in Montreal where she shows a video and their feelings that “spliced together as a long Black death made no new revelations.”
https://tinhouse.com/podcast/christina-sharpe-ordinary-notes/
and from Note 21 'Ordinary Notes'
A question of "we"
[The last sentence] The architectures of violence fracture we; affect does not reach us in the same ways.