Across the Table

The Arts Council asked Beth Ann Fennelly to create a community project.  The goal of Across the Table is to demonstrate the power of art to build community.  During the dinner Beth Ann will be sharing readings from her micro-memoir, The Irish Goodbye, and inviting attendees to write their own micro-memoir.

If you are unable to attend we invite you to share in the readings and submit your micro-memoir.

 

The Micro-Memoir as a Route to Self-illumination

What happens when we slow down and reflect on our life, shaping the shaggy mass of it into an arc of experience? What happens when we return to an event that shaped us and make it come alive by selecting details and using sensory images? We gain clarity on our emotions. We tend to think that understanding how we’re feeling is completely natural and intuitive, but I believe it’s actually hard work to understand how we feel and why. That hard work can be done through the art of memoir, in which we look back at our lives and see patterns, trace what experiences and people made us who we are today. 

Why do we need memoir? Because good memoir never falsifies, never beautifies, never casts the writer as the unconditional hero. We need memoir because we need the truth, which is in precious short supply in modern life. 

What I mean is this: we are so used to packaging ourselves as better than we are, cropping and filtering and Photoshopping our weaknesses. This instinct carries over into our lives, in which we’ve internalized the idea that it’s shameful to experience ugly emotions like envy or vanity or spite. We’re human, however, so we do experience these emotions, but because we never see them reflected back at us, we assume we’re alone. Now on top of whatever bad emotion we’re already experiencing, we feel lonely, too. 

We read memoir to feel less alone.  The truth is that no protagonist is blameless. I write micro-memoir to perceive my own messy humanity where it lurks in the interstices. When I’m thinking about an event or recalling a memory, if the emotional truth is hard to discern because of multiple conflicting, simultaneous emotions, or if the emotional truth is willfully ignored because it’s shameful--that’s where I want to pause, press in, like pressing on a bruise. 

It's commonly understood that we can revise our writing. Less commonly understood is that we can revise our thinking. We can return to events from our past armed with a genuine curiosity and a refusal to accept received wisdom or apply artificial intelligence or the filter that captures us in the best light. We can learn what these events have to tell us.  We can educate our emotional intelligence. And there’s nothing artificial about that.  

Social prescribing is a process through which a person moves into flourishing health through non-medical activities, often community-based. I believe in the power of memoir writing to increase our emotional intelligence and our empathy, to help us see better—and only when we see better can we think better, and only when we think better can we improve the world. Yes, to the age-old question, yes, the doctor is in. When writing memoir, the doctor is in you. 

What follows is some excerpts from my book, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs (W. W. Norton, 2/24), and a few prompts to get you started!

GENERATE

Set the timer on your phone for 10 minutes. Write for 10 minutes on each of the prompts below. Write fast, without re-reading. After you’ve completed all 3 ten-minute free writes, read them through and choose with one in which you are the most engaged. Revise to do more “showing” through sensory details, less telling the reader how to feel. Hone until your piece is polished and 750 words or fewer.  

 

 

Prompt One, based on “Lori Cornelius”

Lori Cornelius

I call Lori Cornelius, thinking I’m calling Lori Hannah. Even though I can clearly see the name on my phone, only when Lori Cornelius answers with her chipper “Hello!” do I realize I’ve called the wrong person. “How nice to hear from you!” exclaims the very nice Lori Cornelius, whom I haven’t seen in a few years. If I were less stressed, I might pretend I’m calling to catch up. Instead, I blurt that I hadn’t meant to call her. I moved my mom into her assisted living yesterday, I say, and I’ve been trying to reach her intake specialist. I explain how my mom is suffering from dementia, and how I’m worried about her, and how, every time I do something stupid like call the wrong person, I worry about my brain too, worry that I’m experiencing the so-called “early signs.” Then Lori Cornelius, whom I never intended to phone, tells me she went through the same thing with her mother some years back, and she also began questioning whether she was losing her mind—something, for that matter, she is still questioning—so I might as well get used to it. We laugh and I feel better and we hang up. And now I can relax, knowing that I really don’t have dementia, because, as it turns out, I really did call the right person. Good old Lori Cornelius. 

Prompt Two, based on “Tree Pose”

Tree Pose

“Do not get attached to your thoughts,” intones the yogi. “Observe without judgment.” I stand on one leg, my right heel wedged high on my left inner thigh, my arms spread like branches. “Trees have no ego,” she continues. I sense jittery movement off to both sides: the other trees flailing. Behind me, a clumsy tree falls. Not this tree: I root down. I pull sap to my leaves. Now the psychic yogi intones, “Stop comparing yourself to others. If you compare, you are not a tree, you cannot be a tree.” Bitch, I’m a tree. I’m just a species of competitive tree.

Prompt Three, based on“One Doesn’t Always Wish to Converse on Airplanes”

from Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, W. W. Norton, 2017.

but this tanned, fit couple--white-sweatered, like tennis pros--seemed  eager to talk, so we talked.  No, their final destination wasn’t Denver.  They’d continue to Hawaii after the layover.  How awesome, I said, Hawaii.   Is it a special occasion, an anniversary?  They grinned at each other, like You tell her.  No, you.  

Their thing, it turned out, was scuba diving with metal detectors.  They dove at popular honeymoon spots on Oahu, because, they said, the first time those rich Japanese brides hit the water, their new diamonds slid right off.  The couple said they didn’t always find a ring, but overall they’d found enough to fund their vacations.  

“That’s . . . wow,” I said.  

They grinned at each other again and took a sip from their Bloody Marys, then she gave his biceps a squeeze.  Her diamond ring broadcast sequins of light on the tray table.  I envisioned how, after netting a big rock, they’d perform exceedingly athletic hotel sex.  Their avarice was so unabashed that it was difficult to keep despising them, but I, large of righteousness and small of diamond, persevered all the way to Denver.

Here’s a clear, professional release statement you can use:

Release and Usage Agreement

By submitting written work to the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council’s community project, the submitter grants the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, publish, and distribute the submitted material in whole or in part.

This includes, but is not limited to, sharing submissions on social media platforms, incorporating them into compilations or publications, and presenting them in print, digital, or other formats now known or developed in the future.

By submitting, the contributor affirms that they are the original creator of the work and have the authority to grant these rights. The contributor understands and agrees that no compensation will be provided for the use of the submitted material.