Rockstar pt. 2

September 16, 2008

So the other wonderful thing that happened as a result of being the guest speaker last week in my friend Sydney’s Creative Writing class was that I was introduced to two incredible new (for me) writers:

Lidia Yuknavitch

and

Stanton Michaels

These are two writers whose names have been on my radar but who, for some reason, i’ve never read before.

As I posted last week, Sydney’s lessons that day were about writing Creative Nonfiction/memoir, but with the themes of Sex and Coming of Age.

The piece the class read (and discussed) by Lidia Yuknavitch was called “The Chronology of Water,” from the book Her Other Mouths (1997, House of Bones Press). Wow. Read a review of the book here. The story is a series of fragments, scenes of her life, her sex, her childhood, her father; with dates preceding each ‘section’ and the motif of water ‘running’ through each:

1990

Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight. They swell, cluster and swim in and out between one another, collect and pool in sinkholes of the brain. It’s hard to know what to think of a life when you find yourself knee-deep, hard to hold it in your mind. You want to climb out, you want to explain how there must be some mistake. And then you see the waves without pattern, scooping up everyone, throwing them around like so many plankton, and you can only laugh at all the silly bobbings. Laughter can shake you out of deliriums. You need some hilarious vision to save you: once when I was standing naked murderous hate for man with no memory. When memory does flash up it is sweet and kind. He recalls those few incomprehensibly small moments of joy: the breath of a woman, the design of a building, the sound of steel music from a year spent in Trinidad, kissing his daughters good night. Of all pain there is nothing.

1969

I competed at age six. you know those little plastic wind-up bathtub things–contraptions with small flippers or limbs attached to internal rubber bands which rotate at alarming speeds? This is what six year old racers look like. Small arms spinning, little bodies springing forth with furious thrashing. Pictures of a group of us sporting bronze, silver and gold medals larger than our hands reveal tanned arms and legs, metallic sheened hair, muscles that dip and curve like Greek statues shrunken into dolls. Intense, hungry eyes, for what it is impossible to tell. We were competitors–once freed in water, we grew dangerously alive. Little girls.

The story, to me, is so beautiful and lyrical, but also painful, powerful– shards of poetry.

I was so moved by the story (and in the subsequent discussion of it in Sydney’s class) and felt honored to be in such amazing company. Lidia Yuknavitch has a blog, with equally stunning writing (and a recent, heartbreaking tribute to David Foster Wallace; another tribute to DFW is on my friend, writer Aaron Hamburger’s blog).

The other piece, by Stanton Michaels, was called “How To Write A Personal Essay,” <–you can read it here (courtesy of Utne Reader website, but originally published in The Georgia Review; and from the anthology, The Art of Truth). It’s a memoir, about sex, death, growing up, but written in the form/structure of an English Composition 5 Paragraph Essay– a hilarious, smart, fresh conflict between form and content.

I loved it. An excerpt:

The easiest way to write a personal essay is to use the standard form taught in Composition 101: an introductory paragraph followed by three paragraphs outlining three main points and a final summary paragraph. But instead of just blathering about yourself, describe vivid scenes and what they mean to you, such as when your 2-year-old son, Jordan, solemnly declares from the bathtub ‘I can’t swim–my penis is hard’ and you tell him it’s OK, it’s normal, knowing it’ll subside and he’ll be able to swim soon, but you don’t tell him that teeny little weenie he’s holding will be the source of the most intense worries, sorrows, and pleasures he’ll ever experience, and you wonder if you’ll ever be able to tell him the truth. You could follow this thought with the trials and tribulations of your own penis, unless you’re a woman–but of course females are involved with love, sex, and life built around their own body parts, which can provide many interesting topics. The key to maintaining reader interest is to be open and honest, displaying your concerns and fears through specific, true-life examples rather than abstract concepts about how you think sex education is important because you learned the hard way on your own and you doubt you’ll explain things any better than your own father did. Follow this format and, while you may not become a world-renowned author, you will be able to complete a personal essay.

Use five sentences in each paragraph. Some authors, like Faulkner, write immensely long sentences that drift into nooks and crannies of life, enlightening the reader about how, at age 16, you were tricked by a girl into trying on ring sets from her mom’s jewelry-making equipment to find your ring size and later presented with a black onyx and silver ring you were too scared to wear because it implied going steady, which leads to sex, and Dad had just given you and your brother a box of Trojans the week before when Mom and Brooke had gone shopping at Sears for dresses and you were as uncomfortable as Dad when he grunted out his heart-to-heart ‘Use these to be safe,’ especially since you’d recently calculated and realized he’d knocked Mom up with you when she was 16 and he was out of the army after a four-year hitch and you figured it must have happened by accident since their meeting was accidental, him picking her and her sisters up at a railroad crossing in the rain on Halloween and giving them a ride home, coming later to visit, finally getting down in April without a condom or maybe with one that broke and there you are in December but at least they’d gotten married over the summer and you realize it’s April now and you stare at the ring and finally throw it away and tell her later you don’t wear jewelry. Tough guys like Hemingway write short, straightforward sentences, such as: ‘The author stopped typing. His thick fingers lay bare on the keyboard. Although he’s been married for eight years, his ring finger is naked. His wife knows he doesn’t wear jewelry. Ever.’ Yet other writers like to mix up the lengths of their sentences, using long, compound run-ons that begin with one thought then drive on to others but eventually circle back for completion, then follow with a short, crisp, prissy sentence that would satisfy an eighth-grade grammar teacher. Not me.

I love the riffs on Faulkner and Hemingway, and if you notice– the paragraph directly above advises: Use five sentences in each paragraph. And what do you know? Each paragraph DOES have five sentences in it. In fact, in the entire essay there are only 25 sentences total. Brilliant.

Who is this Stanton Michaels? Where did he come from? I couldn’t find anything about him online except this essay. Does anyone know where I can find out more about him and/or more of his work?