“Does your story have a beginning or an end?” my mom asks. “Or is it all this middle?”
I’ve just read her the story I’m working on for a fiction class I’m taking. It’s nonfiction, to be honest. The fiction is that it’s not really about my family, and she’s right that it’s all middle, a prose poem that arcs only in the sense of a concentric circle, layers of worry, sadness, tenderness.
I signed up for the class last month, just a week before it started, when the instructor, a writer I admire (who is also mixed-race Japanese), posted the reading list on Instagram: T Kira Madden, Rachel Khong, Tove Jansson… I wanted to read these writers’ stories and talk about them in her class.
The class is one in a string of online classes I’ve taken since the start of the pandemic. Thanks to events moving to Zoom, I can take classes from home that would have been taught in New York or Portland or, in this case, London. It’s been fun to choose the classes one by one, taking the opportunity to learn from writers whose voices particularly resonate with me, about genres and craft techniques that sound interesting and fun to try.
So far, in the past year, I’ve taken classes on documentary poetry; “sensory roadmaps”; and zuihitsu, a Japanese form somewhere between poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction. This latest class has the broadest focus (short story), but it’s shaped by the instructor’s interests, which in this case are what I really wanted to learn anyway. What stories do the writers I admire, admire, and how do they talk about them?
I’d heard of people approaching graduate writing programs like this—seeking out instructors they wanted to work with and reading their work ahead of class—but I didn’t do that. I chose the program closest to where I lived that offered the best funding and got to know and appreciate the faculty as I went along. A Japanese major in college, I hadn’t read enough contemporary literature or learned my taste enough to know that I could seek out specific instructors or classes, or that I could find writers close to me in cultural background or style. To me, basically all working writers, like my English teachers, were equal authority figures, sources of knowledge and potential validation.
It’s felt good, then, slowly, over a period of years, to realize that I have preferences and they’re valid and I can follow them, from one book to the next, from one class to the next, down a trail to figure out what else I might like to read, what else I might like to write. The whole trail is a KonMari-like exercise in listening to my intuition, letting it grow a little stronger with practice.
In this most recent class, where I am one of two Americans in a class of sixteen at a British adult school, I’m trying new ways of telling a story. I write a draft of a family story, about a topic I’ve intentionally avoided for years, and read it to my mom over the phone, not knowing what will happen.
“So sad,” she says, and then pauses. I wonder if she’ll ask me to drop this story and write about something else, but instead, she talks about the shape—all middle—and asks how I’ll expand it. She talks about the people in it, our family, as characters: “the sister character,” “the mother character.” It feels like she gets something I haven’t fully gotten yet, and I’m grateful. I tell her I haven’t really figured out how to leap out of my own experience and try writing “actual” fiction. She launches into what is basically a craft talk about the blurry boundaries between genres.
“I’m pretty sure all the fictions I’ve read come from something real,” she says.
The conversation is a gift, and it encourages me to try again. I have an idea about how to shape the story without forcing an ending. It’s a whim that seems fun to experiment with, and I try it. When I write this time, I’m not agonizing over the sentences and combing them out one at a time. My voice changes, at least it seems changed to me, and takes on a playful confidence I’m relieved and excited to see. By the end of the new draft, the story is still pretty true to life, but the style has opened into something unexpected. I’m amazed, not just that I like the product but that I liked the process.
At the same time that I’m trying new ways of writing, I’m also trying new ways of living. Or, in both cases, it’s more like I’m trying things I’ve tried countless times before, but now—humbled by age, past failures, and global catastrophe—I’m trying to approach the whole effort more experimentally rather than striving for perfection, going toward what feels good rather than hiding from what could potentially feel bad. I’m in therapy, I’m meditating, I’m taking time away from social media until the primary voice I hear in my head is mine again.
I don’t know where all of this will lead, in my writing or in the rest of my life. I’m in the middle still. But I am feeling subtle changes. I notice more easily when something interests me—a book, an idea, an opportunity—and act on it more quickly. Most recently, I’m interested in memoir that is fragmented or somewhat obscured by genre or style—like Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, which is about her diaries but doesn’t include a single excerpt from them, or Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which is billed as a novel but is kind of memoir and kind of poetry. I’m thinking about how to write about my family with enough closeness for honesty and enough distance for respect. I have a tenuous, growing faith that I can build something, one story, one question, one idea at a time.
This quote from Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing has inspired me through my social media break:
“[W]e need distance and time to be functional enough to do or think anything meaningful at all. William Deresiewicz warns of this in ‘Solitude and Leadership,’ a speech to an audience of college students in 2010. By spending too much time on social media and chained to the news cycle, he says, ‘[y]ou are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.’”
I was on a podcast for the first time! Exposition Review, which published my essay “Kokoro Yasume” in 2019, had me on its podcast, Transposition, along with writer/editor Chris Gonzalez, hosted by Mellinda Hensley. You can check it out here.