Welcome to Craft Fall 2011

So here is where you will post your reader responses. They are an essential part of preparing for the class each week. This allows us to start the conversation with points of perspective.  Your response should reflect a thoughtful examination of the elements of craft (not interpretation) of the literature. Citing specific parts of the book is useful and at least one blog will be read in class a week.
Here is a sample written by Jennifer Massoni '10

SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 2011

The Material of Our Lives

“I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster” (3), Jeannette Walls tells us with the opening line of The Glass Castle. From ‘go’ she brings us right into the symbolism of her darkest secret—her past—the details of which she hides from those she encounters as she eventually builds her journalism career in New York City. “True or not, I was convinced that if all these people found out about Mom and Dad and who I really was, it would be impossible for me to keep my job. So I avoided discussing my parents. When that was impossible, I lied” (270).

Thankfully, Walls stopped lying. Instead, she told the truth (which for argument’s sake I’m taking at face value this time around), about her past, her family, and the conditions of their lifestyle doing the ol’ “skedaddle” across the country. She reached right out to readers with a concept we might not believe or want to believe—that you can pass your homeless parent on the street and hide.

By the time we reach the end of the memoir, however, by the time this mother has hidden and consumed food while her children starve, by the time she has not said goodbye to her daughter and expressed jealousy that she is not the one set to embark on a New York adventure, by the time she scoffs at her daughter being subjected to inappropriate sexual advances, by the time she has chosen not to support the family out of a sense of artistic entitlement, and by the time she has made it clear that a life of scavenging and squatting is much preferred over living on owned property, readers may understand exactly how and why Walls would continue right past her mother.

The margins of my copy of this book are now littered with exclamation points—at these and other shocking moments in the text. There is one main reason why I can exhibit such shock at Walls as a small child rolling right out of a dilapidated car without her parents noticing, at parents who encourage her three-year-old self to get back on the hot-dog-cooking saddle after she has spent six weeks in the hospital for severe burns, at the father who attempts to run over the mother with the children in the back seat, at parents who lock their children in the back of a pitch-dark U-haul while the father brandishes a flashlight, not to mention bringing his son to hangout with one of his prostitutes, attempting to use his daughter’s adolescent sexuality to hustle a pool game, or any of the other fantastic parenting we witness throughout the book.

That reason is that Walls presents it to us straight. She doesn’t reflect where it isn’t necessary. She doesn’t point out her parents’ behavior as abusive or neglectful; in fact, she defends them to social services as much as her own siblings. When a young Walls is groped in the night by an intruder through an open window and asks her parents for the doors and windows to be closed while they slept, “they wouldn’t consider it. We needed the fresh air, they said, and it was essential that we refuse to surrender to fear” (103). There is no reflection, a cornerstone of creative nonfiction. Instead, we see Walls the journalist presenting the facts and circumstances of her childhood.

She is so strong in the face of such adversity that I wonder what her coping mechanism was. We see a workaholic forming in the Welch offices of The Maroon Wave, as a means of escaping questions about why doesn’t have a lunch to eat or friends to hang out with or why she can’t afford to participate in sports or other activities. We see her follow this passion for “the newsroom’s purposeful atmosphere” (203) all the way to Manhattan publishing because “a newspaper reporter, instead of holing up in isolation, was in touch with the rest of the world. What the reporter wrote influenced what people thought about and talked about the next day; he knew what was really going on. I decided I wanted to be one of the people who knew what was really going on” (204). Ironically, it is her time spent helping her mother proof student homework that prepares her for her editing work on the school paper and later at The Phoenix.

Throughout our readings, I have been fascinated by moments just like these—the precise moments when the subject of the memoir became a writer. In Paula, we saw it with Allende’s early magazine and broadcast journalism days. In, Places, we sat it with Santos’s first attempts to record his family history. In Lying, we saw it with Slater’s desire to emulate the power of a short story (at least we think we did). All the memoirs have this moment by virtue of the fact that they consider a writer’s life story. But we were all many things before we self-identified as writers, some of us (like Allende) write for decades before assigning that title at all. And when we have a story as captivating and eye-popping as Walls’s, we realize how much of a coping mechanism writing really is.

By finding a productive outlet through the difficult circumstances (the pricelessmaterial of our lives) we all endure, I see the ways in which challenge and creativity are linked. Similarly, when her mother advises, “Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy… You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes more,” (129), I realized how synonymous tragedy and comedy also are. The mother’s comedy (around having her family sleep in their car with garbage bags in place of windows) may be the reader’s tragedy, depending on point-of-view. But you don’t ever get the sense that it was Walls’s tragedy. Her circumstances taught her to fend for herself, save and budget money, and get her ass out of West Virginia. And thank goodness she did, armed with the moments of good advice she did receive from parents battling a potentially toxic mix of alcoholism, denial, and I would say mental instability, such as “Don’t be afraid to be smarter than they are” (137) and “be outspoken about our opinions” (143). Because after all the scars healed over, Jeannette Walls was “stronger than whatever it was that had tried to hurt” her (286).