EDITOR’S NOTE: Christian Lupsa attended a Taylor Swift concert Aug. 3, 2024, in Warsaw Poland. He wrote about the experience as part of his weekly “Draft Four” Substack essay. It is republished, lightly edited, with permission.

We’re entering late-summer melancholy, so I offer something sparky: 9 things Taylor Swift taught me about storytelling in a pop-listicle format.

Yes, the singer-superstar Taylor Swift. Call me a Swiftie, but know my case is a mild one. I saw her live in Warsaw, on her third consecutive night of playing in front of about 70.000 people. She performed for more than three hours, in a show I don’t think I can accurately describe because it was all about the feels. Let’s just say I cried about three or four times and I could barely move at the end. My Fitbit clocked almost 45.000 steps that day.

For me that was just one night, and Taylor has been on this tour since last year. That is dedication. Let’s get to those take-aways:

1. Structure. 

Often the hardest job of storytelling is organizing the narrative in a coherent way. For “The Eras Tour,” Taylor drew on her 18 years of music as a frame and took us on a chronological journey: from teen-love days, to pick-your-adult-self-up moments, to modern midnights of existential questions. It works because good structure does this: It’s sufficiently predictable so you know where it’s going, and simultaneously mysterious enough to make you feel smart if you see something coming.

2. Setting. 

What distinguishes memorable longform nonfiction from the rest of journalism is a story that takes place in a certain place, at a certain time. The characters work through their dilemmas and problems on a stage the author has to set right, because it influences the narrative. Taylor knows setting, especially on stage. Each “era” of her musical tour has its own colors, costumes, dances, props and visuals. You are not just listening to the songs live; you are moving through space and time.

3. Style. 

If you are among the lucky ones, you’ll find your unique voice as a writer. I’m in the camp that believes Taylor is a pretty awesome lyricist; her bridges are the stuff of legend. She got where she is by doing this, over and over again. Find that thing that brings you pleasure when writing and do it – even overdo it – until you gain mastery over it.

4. Service.

A good story, in my kind of non-fiction at least, is in service of the reader. You are hired to lead a journey, sometimes with the destination unknown. On stage, Taylor is in service to her fans, who trade bracelets and dress up in era-specific outfits, and works extra hard to make it a special night for them. Much has been written about how strangely intimate she can make a show attended by tens of thousands of people. And she does. She is there for you, and you don’t doubt it for one minute. There were even therapy dogs on site to quell anxiety. Be there for your readers, too.

5. Surprise. 

A good structure should leave room for surprise. One of Roy Peter Clark’s pieces of wisdom I go back to is about letting your readers stumble upon gold coins, meaning unexpected information or moments in your piece. Taylor does this in many ways: Her dive into a hole in the stage was neat. But a simpler and more effective surprise involves her performing an acoustic version of two different songs at each concert, one on guitar, one on piano. Someone who saw Swift in another venue told me he wished he caught a concert where she sang “Exile.“ She did that in Warsaw, on piano.

6. Symbolism. 

In a story, there are always some elements that can stand in for the larger idea you want to put across. On stage, colors and props do that nicely. So does a visual of a snake to convey the idea of a slippery and dangerous character – that’s from Taylor’s “Reputation” era. They also set an internal rhythm and allow a narrative shift from action to reflection.

7. Simplicity. 

A young journalist once said that her desire was to write simply about complicated things. But simple is not simplistic and, in my experience, those that meander and have a muddied prose didn’t do enough reporting and don’t have clarity of purpose. It’s usually not the overload of knowledge that prevents them from being simple; it’s the lack of it. Pop is also simple, but mastering the 3-4 minute song requires time, patience and a lot of exercise.

8. Sparkle. 

When the confetti dropped at the end of the show, and everyone’s bracelets started flashing, and the performers were taking their bows, everything seemed possible for a moment, and the world was all right. I left the concert grateful for the experience — and wishing we thought of journalism more often as making people feel like they’ve been through an unforgettable experience. The daily problems will be there when you wake up; can I make you forget about them for a little while?

9.  Share.

Taylor shared the stage with Paramore, a band I’ve loved for 20 years. She recently announced different extra opening acts for every show in London. There’s a spirit of generosity that carries through, and people reciprocate. You don’t make your own dress for any artist, after all. She has made life in prison easier for some. My friend Laura Trujillo, who works for USA Today, shared this beautiful, intimate story of going to Milan to see Taylor with her 18-year-old daughter, Lucy. Taylor Swift isn’t just the world’s biggest pop star: she is also something mothers and daughters share. In Vienna, after Taylor’s shows this week were cancelled because of a terrorist warning, people gathered in the streets, played her songs, and swapped bracelets. “I’m officially a Swiftie,” a friend who was there texted me. “It’s the most wholesome thing in the world.”

Can our journalism aim to be more like this?

The post Storytelling moves from Taylor Swift appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The post Notes from a nonfiction writing workshop appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[caption id="attachment_144185" align="alignright" width="178"] Power of Storytelling 2018, Bucharest, Romania[/caption]

Below is a post offered on Facebook earlier this month as a thank you to speakers and attendees at the 8^th Edition of the Power of Storytelling conference in Bucharest, Romania. The note comes from Cristian Lupsa, founder of the conference and founder/editor of a creative and – in the lingering culture and broken economy of a former Eastern bloc nation –  defiant narrative magazine called Decat o Revista, or DoR. (You can read a bit about how the magazine and conference came to be here, in a 2014 piece Lupsa did for the nonprofit Images and Voices of Hope.)

In English, Decat o Revista translates, very roughly, to “just a magazine.” But it is far more than that, both in terms of its own birth and survival, and in terms of the stories it publishes. Last year, it was awarded the European Press Prize Special Award for a narrative reconstruction of a deadly fire at Colectiv, a popular nightclub in Bucharest.

The Power of Storytelling conference is unique in Eastern Europe. It draws some of the world’s top narrative journalists and other creative storytellers, who share the tools of their craft and their belief in the stories as a human imperative.

(Full disclosure: I have worked with Lupsa and his staff since the beginning of the magazine, and was a speaker at the first seven editions of the conference. I wasn’t able to attend this year, but felt the spark from afar. It’s like no other journalism conference I attend in expertise, creative reach and emotion.)

Storyboard has featured several of the conference talks from over the years, and this week we offer two from the 8^th Edition. But we start with Lupsa’s thank you note, which is a mini-narrative onto itself and one that summarizes the echo between the stories we tell and the lives we live. The theme of this year’s conference was “Rewrite.” Not the kind of rewriting that fixes grammar and catches typos, but the kind that asks us to reconsider a known narrative from other perspectives and, by so doing, reconsider our assumptions about the world we share.

[caption id="attachment_144184" align="alignleft" width="183"] Cristian Lupsa[/caption]

From Cristian Lupsa ~

Some of you have told us it’s been emotionally intense. That it’s been a roller-coaster. That together we were transported to new heights, and then we came down again, all the way into the belly of the beast. Such is the arc of a good story, and it’s how we try to design our two-day experiences at PoS. It’s a compressed journey, but a true one. Because it’s also how our lives go.

We soar, and then we fall.

We get up again, and then we stumble.

We decide on a narrative that seems to suit us, only to feel at some point that we have to rewrite it.

It’s up to you, all those who joined us, what you’ll do with the energy and ides you’ve gathered during these two days.

Maybe you’ll tell that story you’ve always wanted to tell.

Maybe you’ll start that project you’ve always dreamt about.

Maybe you’ll rise up and join the fight for a more inclusive society.

No matter what you choose to rewrite, we want to thank you all for trusting us to be a companion on your journey. As you navigate the arc of your life story, this is what we - the staff and speakers at DoR and The Power of Storytelling - aim to create: a safe place to take a breath, slow down, think, dream, learn, and find new ideas, maybe even new parts of yourself.

Have a great journey onward.

Postscript: In addition to the two conference presentations we’ll share this week, here are some top takeaways, in brief, from the speakers, who ranged from Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Hull to S-Town podcaster Brian Reed of This American Life to digital story guru Jonah Sachs to documentary filmmaker Nina Berman and more: Day One. Day Two.

The crew of DoR is already planning the 9^th Edition of Power of Storytelling for October 18-19, 2019.

The post Narrative in a weekend conference, and the thank-you note that followed appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The Power of Storytelling international conference in Bucharest just concluded its fifth edition in October, and thanks to conference founder Cristian Lupsa, editor of the nonfiction journal Decât o Revistă and a 2014 Nieman fellow, and his colleagues, Storyboard will bring you transcripts from some of the two-day conference’s sessions. The theme of this year’s event was: a sense of place.

Our fifth featured speaker is Esquire writer and National Magazine Award-winner Chris Jones. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of his remarks from the Cluj edition of The Power of Storytelling Conference.

I’m going to show a very brief video called Beast of Turin, a trailer for this documentary that was made by these people who restored a very old car, a Fiat S76, made in 1911. This trailer says a lot to me about the creative process and how these things work. [Plays video.]

I almost don’t have to say anything, I’m tempted not to, but the engine firing up is what people see when you build something. I’m a writer, but this applies to anything – your story, your statue, your app, your magazine, your photographs. They see the engine lighting up, but they don’t see everything else that happened before that. And that’s the process. That’s how this stuff gets done.

So we’re going to talk a bit about this, I’m going to make nine rules about creative work. Why not 10? Because I’m being creative.

Rule number 1

The first one is – and this is where I’m supposed to say there are no rules, but that’s bullshit – there are many rules and you need to follow all of them. It is nice to say there are no rules and you are completely free to create whatever it is that you wish to create. But I don’t want to lie to you; we’re all friends here. There are so many rules. There are laws of physics. For an engine to work, you need a carburetor, you need exhaust lighter, there are parts that you must use for that thing to light up.

There’s a structure to good work. Jacqui [Banaszynski] talked about the tools in the toolbox. You need those tools. You need to learn the rules so that you can break them. You need to keep the rules that are really important – they’re sacred. They’re like the laws of physics. Structure always matters. There are certain things that you must obey.

I have a friend – he’s an idiot – and when we were young, he was probably 17 or 18 and he bought a guitar and he said: “You know what, I’m not going to learn the chords, I’m going to play what sounds good.” What sounds good are the chords. You can noodle on the guitar as much as you want, but you need to learn the chords to play the guitar. That is true. For any creative art, there are laws that you cannot break.

Another thing to pay attention to is that there are many talented people who’ve come before you, who have made mistakes that you do not have to make, because they made them on your behalf. You can learn from them. You can watch them. You can see them. Part of your job absolutely as a creative person is to push the boundaries. Right, we always hear that in English? “Push the boundaries!” “Push the envelope!” The boundaries exist. They exist and if you push against them, like that red line, it’s too bad if you’ve crossed it. The boundaries exist for a reason.

Rule number 2

You will be ferocious in your appetite. The thing that you love, the thing that you want to be, you need to look at everything that anyone else who loves that thing has done before you. One, you need to know what’s possible. Can you imagine trying to make a movie having never seen a movie? And I hear from people who come to me all the time that want to be writers, but they don’t like to read. I kick them in their teeth. So the dumbest thing I can imagine is saying: “I’ve never seen a movie, but I’m going to direct one. I’ve got this really cool idea for this long shot where we’re going to walk through kitchens, follow these people.” And you’re going to say: “Well, Martin Scorsese already did that." And they’re going to say, “Wait, who?”

And that is why you have to consume everything. It teaches you what’s possible. It also teaches you sometimes what’s not possible. You read something or see a piece of art or a photograph and someone tries something and you’re going to be like “that does not work” and you’re going to have to figure out why it doesn’t work.

And then you take the things that you feel the most, the things that you love the most, the writers you love the most, the photographers you love the most, the artists you love the most, and you keep those. You make those talismans. You make those the stars in the sky that you’re guided by. You’re not stealing from those people – that is plagiarism; that is bad. You’re being influenced by those people. You need to keep all those things close to you. I have many sentences from many stories I’ve loved all around my desk, because it reminds me what I want to do. I want to do that.

Rule number 3

Having said there are rules and you have to obey certain things, number 3 is: There’s no right process to creativity. It’s the number one question I get asked when I talk to young writers: “What’s your process?” By that, they mean how do I write, and for me, my process – and I kind of almost hate that word – is that I write at night. I write in the pitch black. I write with music on. I write from 10 at night until 3 or 4 in the morning. Those are my peak hours. I write slowly. I go back after I’ve written a paragraph and I’ll read it again. I go back, and I’ll read it again. I go back, and I’ll read it again. I don’t outline. I just tell stories the best way that I can. I often start with the ending. Blah, blah. None of that matters to you. You need to find the process that works for you.

In Bucharest, Michael Paterniti, one of my favorite writers, was there, and he talked about how he starts writing at 5 in the morning. So, I’m going to bed then and Mike Paterniti is waking up. And that’s okay. If you need silence, that’s okay. If you want daylight, fine. If you’re one of those weirdos who can do their work in a coffee shop, while everyone is talking around you, you can do that.

You need to find a place that allows you to do your best work. Because the problem with being creative is – Jacqui talked about the muse – there kind of is such a thing. There are times when it works better than others. Everyone who is creative can explain that moment when everything is going and you lose track of time and you stop feeling and your legs are gone and you couldn’t give a shit if your house is burning down, you’re just going. That hardly ever happens. But you need to find the time and place that give you the best chance to be in that zone. To be open to the universe. To just flow right through.

When I watch that video with the mechanic, I think, what does a mechanic feel when he walks into that shop? I bet he walks in there and he goes, “I’m going to do some work. I’m going do some good work today.” And I feel, I don’t know this man, but I feel like he’s made that little universe perfect for him to fix that car.

Rule number 4

Rule number 4, and I will be stricter about this rule: You must be disciplined. There’s this notion that artists are crazy, and they just create. And they throw paint at things. And I’m a magician, and now I’m a wizard, and WITCHCRAFT! And I sacrifice lizards on fire.

Any good creative person I know is so disciplined you would not believe it. They are freaks about what they do. If you’re a writer, that means writing every day, that means dedicating time to write, that means dedicating time to read, that means: “If I have a deadline, I will hit that deadline. If my editor has asked for 4,000 words, I will produce 3,999 words, ten minutes before that deadline.” It is work. Jacqui again touched on this – Jacqui is also a wizard. It’s labor; it’s not magic – it’s magical.

You have to be single-minded about what you’re doing and today I fear – because there’s all this shit going on, phones, your things, your kids – you can’t focus. You need time to focus. Clean your place, sit down, and do some work. One of the reasons, one of the many reasons I’m in love with this mechanic is that he’s wearing a tie; he wears a tie to go work with that car. He’s doing his job. He’s a professional. He’s going to make something good.

A very good friend of mine said, “All writing advice, or creative advice can be boiled down to one three-word sentence: ‘Ass in chair.’ ” And then he walks off the stage.

And that’s pretty much it. You’re not going to write a freaking thing if you’re wandering the streets. No words will get written. You can pretend you’re contemplating – that’s a nice word. “I’m contemplating what I’m about to write.” No words will appear unless you’re sitting down, ass in chair.

Rule number 5

Like success, you will take your time. That mechanic – in that moment when the engine fires off, that engine hadn’t been fired in a hundred years, a century. He’d been working at that car for 10 years. That car is beautiful because he put 10 years of work into it.

When I was young, I was very stressed. I had ambitions – you know, I wanted to be good. And a bunch of my favorite people had done amazing things when they were 24 years old. Norman Mailer wrote “The Naked and the Dead” when he was 24. Bruce Springsteen wrote “Born to Run” when he was 24. Newton discovered freaking gravity when he was 24. I turned 25 and I was still in school. I hadn’t done anything. Well, I really wanted to kiss a girl.

And sometimes creativity is that lightning bolt that you read about or that you see in the movies, when someone gets struck by inspiration, and they’re sleepless for 24 hours and they create something great. Ninety percent of the time, it comes in pieces. You’re working in pieces. You create a whole. Good work takes time. Lots of time. You might do the best thing you’ve ever done when you’re 85. You’re laughing because you know I’ll be dead.

One of my favorite people I’ve ever met is this magician. Have you heard of Penn and Teller – do you know who these guys are? Penn is a giant, loud man, and Teller a very small, quiet man. And Teller does this trick called “The Red Ball.” Penn walks out on stage and says, “This trick is done with a single piece of thread.” Then Teller comes out on the stage, and this red ball that is following him across the stage. He makes it run over a park bench. He makes it jump over his head. He puts it through hoops. He throws it into the audience. The audience throws it back. This ball goes everywhere. I watched it going on and I thought, “How is he doing that?”

And I talked to a trick maker who was doing these amazing tricks (believe it or not, it is a job, making tricks) and I talked to him about that trick, and he said, “I know how they make every trick. I know every trick. I don’t know how Teller does that trick.”

Teller does that trick with a single piece of thread. It’s not a lie. He has a piece of thread tied to him and he is making that thing dance. How does he do that? He spent three years – after every single show in Las Vegas he worked on the stage. He rented a cabin in the woods to work on it some more. He went to a dance studio in Toronto with mirrors to work on it some more. He was finally ready to go. Teller told me, and this is my favorite quote that I’ve ever received, so I’m going to say it twice: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

Rule number 6

That means, rule number 6: You must be honest with yourself and you must love what you do. Because people who do love what they do will kick your ass. They will beat you every time. And if you don’t love what you’re attempting to be, if you’re not doing it because inside your chest you are driven to do this thing, you’re not going to make it. You won’t be obsessive enough. You won’t be single-minded enough. You won’t put enough time in. You won’t be good. It is so important to love the thing that you’re trying to create.

Again, going back to that video, every time I see it I see a different thing. The care that every one of those parts has been given; he painted the nuts that no one is going to see, that are buried deep inside the engine. They are bright red. He painted every one of them. What do you think? Do you think he loves cars? Do you think he loves what he’s doing? Do you think he’s obsessed with the details of combustion? Do you think he knows every molecular, chemical reaction that is going on inside that engine? I think he knows everything about cars that there is to know. And that’s how he did what he did. He loves it.

Rule number 7

The work will not always love you back. And if you’re asking that, you’re going to be disappointed. It will rarely meet your expectations of yourself. If all the other rules apply to you, if you love this and you’re putting your time and your heart into something, you will hardly ever be satisfied. It will hardly ever work out the way you think.

I’ve written hundreds of stories – thousands, if you count all my newspaper coverage. I like six of them. And that’s the matter. And I think that’s true for most of us. We’re all modest when we say, “Oh, I never do anything good.” Most of the times I’ve fallen short of what I wanted that thing to be. Because creating something is not math. I’m not good at mathematics. There isn’t necessarily a right answer. There isn’t some perfect “the answer is six – yes, perfect.” It’s not like that. You can always keep working. You can always change the sentences. You can always expose it a little less or a little more. There are a thousand things you could do and you’re never going to look at it and go, “Oh, I got that!” But very occasionally, you will.

And the other thing, and this is bad news, is good work doesn’t always win. And that is something else you also have to anticipate in this world. It wins for you, you know when you’ve done something good, you know when you’ve created something you’re proud of. But we all know, when we put something out in the world, sometimes it is not the cream that rises to the top. Sometimes that’s going to happen to you. So if you put your hope into how other people feel about what you’ve done, into how other people might react — oh, does it hurt. It hurts when you work really hard at something and it goes out there and you don’t hear anything, or you hear, “I hate that.”

You can’t let the outside world dictate how you feel about something that you’re proud of. Only you know that you did the work that you’re proud of and you’re pleased with this thing. It doesn’t matter; you did it.

Rule number 8

If you’re a creative person, you will be lonely. There will be nights when you’ll feel completely by yourself. The creative work is quiet work usually. I don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t do my best work when my kids are around.

It’s quiet work. The party comes after, when you get to launch the book, when you get to fire the engine and everybody comes over to see it. But how long has that guy spent in that freaking garage by himself?

Again, that is part of the deal. The other part of loneliness is that sometimes you feel crazy. Sometimes you will feel like you’re doing something that nobody cares about, that it doesn’t matter, because nobody is going to read it, nobody is going to look at it. And you’ll think, “God, I wish I had a normal job. I wish I’d been a plumber. I could deliver water and food to other places – it’s a very tangible and noble work. I could do that. It could be fun.” You’re going to have those conversations in your head all the time because you’ll be spending so much time alone, and it adds to that doubt and criticism of others, creeping in.

And then it’s good to be lonely. You’ll be lonely, but sometimes that’s really good, to be alone.

Can we watch the video again? Just watch it again and notice if you see anything different, as we’ve had this conversation. [Plays video.]

One of my favorite parts about that video is that after the engine fires up, 10 years after he’s been waiting for that moment and 100 years the engine has been waiting for the moment, it takes like five seconds where he’s like “Yaaay!” and then he goes and adjusts something. He goes to the top and he says, “Well, that’s not quite right.”

So when you’re sitting and asking yourself, “Why am I doing this?”– do you think he didn’t have moments of doubt when he spent 10 years working on that car? I’m suspecting he had nights when he thought, “It’s not going to start.” I’m suspecting he had times when he felt incredibly lonely, working away in his garage at night. But, deep down – deep down – I bet he knew the engine was going to start. He believed it was going to start.

Rule number 9 (and the most important)

Believe. You’re going to do this. You’ve got this. It’s going to be okay. You’re going to make something really good. Nothing good has ever been made by someone who did not believe at their core that they were going to make something good. It’s part of the deal. You need this. It’s the essential to what you do.

Sometimes I ask myself, “What is creative work?” I guess it’s very hard to define it, because the word is so big, but for me it’s like when you build an object or an experience that puts life where there wasn’t life before. It transmits emotion, makes one laugh, makes one cry, makes someone feel great about themselves, makes someone feel different about the universe, makes someone fall in love, makes someone act, and that is creative work. It puts life where there wasn’t life before.

And this conference for me is a miracle. When Cristian asked me to come here, five years ago, I said, “Hell, no, I’m not coming to Romania.” Four years ago, when I finally came, I was like: “Holy smokes, look at this place!” This conference is like a factory that manufactures belief. It’s fantastic. It’s been such a privilege to come to this conference in Bucharest over the years. Every year I need this, because it makes me feel like I can do this. It’s my little reminder that I can do it. You can do it. We can do it. Thank you.

The post 9 Rules for Creative Work from Chris Jones, Esquire Writer and National Magazine Award-winner appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The Power of Storytelling international conference in Bucharest just concluded its fifth edition this month, and thanks to conference founder Cristian Lupsa, editor of the nonfiction journal Decât o Revistă and a 2014 Nieman fellow, and his colleagues, Storyboard will bring you transcripts from some of the two-day conference’s sessions. The theme of this year’s event was: a sense of place.

Our fourth featured speaker is Pulitzer Prize-winner Jacqui Banaszynski. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of her remarks.

The first time I walked into this place four years ago, I looked up and I went, “Holy shit!” And I was a little bit intimidated. Now I walk in and it feels like home. And that’s what I want to talk with you about today to get this all started. You’ve got this incredible line-up of talent that’s going to do a lot more creative stuff than I am, but I just want to set the table for you and talk a little bit about what place means to us as storytellers and what place means to the people we tell stories about and how to weave those things together.

I want to start by asking you to just take a deep breath, and be quiet for a little bit and just listen and see if you can hear the story going on in this little clip. [Plays Anthracite Fields.] This is a piece from an hour-long choral symphony called Anthracite Fields by Julia Wolfe – this Pennsylvania woman and this piece of music won the Pulitzer for music in 2015. Her CD, which was put together with the Mendelssohn Orchestra in Pennsylvania and her own band, which is called Bang on a Can, just came out two weeks ago.

There are five movements in this piece, so if you think about structure that’s an enormously interesting story structure. The first one is called "Foundation," and it is text that's made entirely of the names of miners who worked in the coal mines in Pennsylvania—where Julia grew up—and were all injured in the mines. There were so many of them when she went into the archives that all she did was pull up the names of those whose first name was John and whose last name was in one syllable, and one entire movement is just the names of John’s. The second movement is called "Breaker Boys," and it’s that very high-energy piece you heard. It’s about the boys who went into the coal mines when they were children and worked to feed their families. The third is called "Speech," and it is the text of a speech by John Lewis, who used to be the president of the United Mine Workers — one of the most, I would say, radical unions in the United States back in the days; it tried to fight for the rights of workers. Then there’s one called "Flowers," which is based on her interviews with the women whose husbands would go into the mine and risk their lives. They lived in terrible poverty, but the women were so proud of the flowers they grew to beautify their homes. The last is called "Appliances" and it is about the everyday things we use in our lives that still rely on coal, that are made out of coal products. She [Wolfe] did an entire story about a big political issue and about history, but instead of preaching about it, she turned it into a story. And not only into a story, into a piece of music.

In an interview with NPR after she won the Pulitzer, Wolfe was asked what she hoped to accomplish with this piece, and here’s what she said: “I just wanted people to know, here’s what happened. Here’s this life and who we are in relationship to that life. We’re them and they’re us. These people working underground, under very dangerous conditions, fueled the nation. To me, that is the ultimate purpose of this work we do in whatever form we do it. We travel into other worlds, we immerse ourselves into other lives, we stand at the edge of another human experience."

Julia Wolfe grew up not far from the coal mines in Pennsylvania, but she never paid much attention as a child. These mines were not her world. She would leave her house, turn right, and go into her life. But she said if she had left her house and turned left, she would’ve ended up at coal mines. That one act, turning right versus turning left, made all the difference in lives lived just a few miles apart. But years later, as a journalist and a storyteller, who happens to do her storytelling through music, Julia Wolfe went back into those mines. She immersed herself in that other world, through all histories and documents that she found, through old letters, and by taking a trip deep, deep, deep under the earth. She didn’t just settle for distant third-hand accounts; she travelled to the heart of the lives she wanted to know. She walked where they walked, she touched the slick walls where they had chopped coal out of those walls and risked their lives, she felt the clammy air on her skin, and she breathed in a bit of the dust that has killed so many miners in so many countries for so many years. And then she takes all that and transforms what she unearthed into music. We always talk about wanting to make our writing sing—well, Julia Wolfe did exactly that. Damn it all anyway! God, talk about creative.

But here’s the even more remarkable thing to consider: She didn’t just pass along that story, and hope a few people would find it interesting, she searched for a way to make it meaningful for others, and actually make it about those others. To take a story about coal miners under the earth and make it about the rest of us. Remember that line from her NPR interview—“We’re them and they’re us.” To me, that is the ultimate purpose of this work we do in whatever form we do it. We travel into other worlds. We immerse ourselves into other lives. We stand at the edge of another human experience. We taste other people’s food and listen to their music and study their art. We do this in part to discover the novelty of difference, and to see what a wondrous thing each individual is in our society, each culture, each human being. But I think more than that we discover again and again the ways in which we’re all alike, what we share.

Several years ago, 25 years ago actually now, I was covering a dogsled expedition across Antarctica. I went to Antarctica three times. On my first trip there it was winter and so we had light only two or three hours a day, and I remember after we crash-landed the airplane that we were flying in, I was hanging out with the leader of the expedition who happened to be from my home state, and he said, “C’mon here, I want to show you something.” And he grabbed my hand and we walked out on to the runway of this island, King George Island in Antarctica. A runway in Antarctica is really just a strip of what they call "blue ice"—the ice there is so packed and so hard and so dense that the light refracts through it oddly and it turns blue and that’s where they land airplanes. So we walked out to the middle of the blue ice and he said, “Lie down.” We both laid on our backs and he said, “Look up.” And we saw the Southern Hemisphere stars, the Southern Cross. I remember getting incredibly dizzy because I was looking up at the stars and at the sky I have looked up at all my life and nothing looked familiar. Everything was out of place: I couldn’t see Orion, I couldn’t see the Big Dipper, I couldn’t see anything I was familiar with. I couldn’t see the North Star, which has always been to me a beacon in life. So I got a little bit disoriented, a little bit anxious and then I saw the moon, and I realized that the moon that goes around us is the same everywhere. Yet when you understand that the moon is the same everywhere, you also understand that people see it from a different point of view. I have a little card at home that means a lot to me, I can’t remember who the poet is, but it says, “Having seen the moon from the other side of the world, I will never be the same.”

I have lived my life as a journalist, which has been a gift; not because of a great passion or talent for writing—writing for me is like going into the coal mines, it’s just damn hard work—but writing has always been my way of paying the price for what journalism gives me, which is the license to go into other places and into other people’s lives and to get to know other people and experience other worlds. I use my notebook as a passport to cross borders. I use it as an invitation to walk in other people’s shoes for a bit. I use it as reason to sit not in judgement but to bear witness to other people’s realities, to the things that make them marvelously unique and different, but also to the things that never fail to surprise me because they are so familiar to me.

The center of this year’s conference is the exploration of sense of place in storytelling. There is of course the obvious meaning of place as geography—that’s where the news and often our stories happen, it’s in the physical world, it’s in real time and place. Seven hundred pilgrims lose their lives in the stampede on their way to Mecca. Nine people are killed by a crazy gunman in Oregon. A U.S. airstrike hits a Medicine Sans Frontiers hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. And a three-year-old boy from Syria washes up dead on a beach in Turkey as his family tries to make its desperate way to Canada. Considered that way, geography is the thing, politically, that becomes the borders between us, that divides us and makes us different, and causes us to point fingers and say, “You’re right, you’re wrong.” But I like to think of place as so much more than geography, and as geography not so much as a place on a map but as a state of mind, and at an even deeper level, a state of the soul. Mike Paterniti might consider it metaphysical, but I’ve never understood metaphysics. I understand the heart and the soul more than I do the bigger pictures in the universe. And considered that way, geography, to me, or place, is the greatest asset that we have as storytellers who want to go beyond the dateline to try to understand not just what happened, but why; to capture the moments of human spirit and togetherness that we share. Indeed, place then becomes the very essence of story.

A friend of mine who is a literary scholar told me once that there are only two storylines in all of human history, two story arcs. One is "a stranger comes to town" and the other is "a man takes a journey." Pretty interesting, right? They’re both about place—there’s a character, but that character is moving through place. Now I, of course being the contrarian that I am, said, “Well, wait a minute, what about the boy meets girl, boy falls in love with the girl, boy loses girl?” And my friend looks at me and he says, “Well, that’s a stranger comes to town and a man takes a journey.” Okay, busted. What I’m trying to get at here, and what I strive for in the kind of journalism that I think has a chance of approaching the artistic level of literature and poetry and music, and approaching the small-t truths in the world (I have issues with big-T truths because everybody has a different one) but here’s the small-t truth—no, actually here’s the big-T truth: I can’t ever be another person. I simply can’t, none of you can. But I can stand for a while in somebody else’s place, or at least I can get close to it and try to understand it and try to see their reality through their eyes and their experiences, and get past my own sense of myopic truth, my own American narrative, which is the one I was born with. It’s the place I come from and the place that shaped me, but it’s not the only truth in the world, and stories have taught me that.

I’ve been lucky enough to go to all seven continents in my career, including three times in Antarctica—and three plane crashes in Antarctica, though that’s another story for another time after a lot of wine. Some of my travels are archived into stories and clips of mine; more of them are on postcards and letters I wrote back home to family and friends. My friend Becky and I have been writing handwritten letters to each other now for 50 years; fortunately she’s kept all of them. A lot of my letters are just tucked in boxes or tossed away somewhere. More recently, my wanderings in the world are kept in little stories I try to write on Facebook. When I travel overseas I try to do a little mini-narrative every day on Facebook—it’s a really interesting way to teach yourself how to write about place and to build a story into place. But mostly, as I was thinking of talking to you about place, a few of the stories that I went back and looked at stood out for me.

They surprised me with how often they connect to the concept of home. I’m not sure why. I’m still thinking about that, because it was sort of a revelation to me. I recently read somewhere that somebody said that the most powerful force in humanity is not love, but the desire for home. Maybe that is because home is where we find our safety. It’s where we’re who we truly are. It’s where we try to protect the people we love. I’m not sure, it’s an interesting concept, though. So even though I also believe that all reporting is foreign reporting, and I mean all reporting: if I go to Romania, I’m in a foreign country; if I go next door to sit with my neighbor, who just gave birth to her second child and teaches special ed at a public school and is trying to figure out how to afford a house big enough for her family, that’s also a foreign country for me because that’s not my life. So what I’ve learned from reporting in other places has helped me report better back home, because I recognized I always need to do what you do when you’re foreign reporting, which is translate, listen, hear, experience and not judge.

I’m going to share a few of these stories, just a few snippets of them and some of the things that I’ve learned most, these little stories that sort of stood out to me most when I was looking through my work for examples of place.

My first ever trip outside of North America was in 1985 to Sudan. The Ethiopian sub-Saharan famine was going on. It was the first big televised famine in history, a nasty, nasty affair—millions of people affected, and refugees were swarming over the border from Ethiopia and Eritrea into Sudan. Photographer Jean Pieri and I, the St. Paul Pioneer Press sent us there to cover the famine along the Ethiopian border and in the refugee camps in Sudan. The big package we published eventually started with the scene of a mother collapsed on the dirt path, ripping at her clothes and keening in despair as her 10-year-old daughter was being buried in the rocky hillside down the way. Her three-year-old son had died a week earlier and her only surviving six-year-old son was now also sick with measles, which was one of the largest killers of children during that famine. At the time, what struck me was that the mother wasn’t allowed into the makeshift cemetery at the refugee camp. When I asked why, a relief worker said they wouldn’t let the women into the cemetery to grieve because there are so many dead, and there are still the living to think of, so they literally wouldn’t let the women grieve at their children’s side. I found myself thinking of all the people who won’t move from the place where their children died because they want to be there with them. That becomes home for them in an odd way.

That seemed to me like a story of a distant place and of “another,” but 10 years later, I was back in my home village in Wisconsin. My oldest brother had been killed by a distracted teenage driver—my brother was 47, had three kids who were all in college; he and his wife were just about to start their life anew and they were very excited. But now here we were after we’d shipped his body from Texas, where he was killed, back to my parents’ little village in Wisconsin to bury him in the home cemetery. I grew up in a small house, and it was crowded with people because the whole family came home for this, so I was staying with a cousin. And one morning about 6:30 the phone rang and it was my father and he said, “You have to come home right now. You need to take care of your mother.” I went home and found my sister-in-law, my brother’s widow, in the back bedroom of the house, sobbing into a pillow, so grief-stricken she couldn’t stand up. We had a little talk, and I said, “Where’s my mother?” Apparently my sister-in-law and my mother had had a little fight, or probably more than a little fight. So I went out outside to the back garage, which my father had built for his workshop, and I found my mother in there, by herself, also screaming into a pillow, unable to stand up. My mother was not someone prone to displays of emotion. She was a very strong, part-Danish woman who just was tough. And yet here she was, keening in despair because she had lost a child. The life of that woman that I remembered slumped on the dirt path in an African refugee camp suddenly didn’t seem to be about another, it was about all women who lose their children and the sheer grief they feel. The lesson I learned from that was yes, we need to marvel at what is different, and be open to it, but I think mostly we need to marvel at the things we share.

"These stories that we tell don’t necessarily end when we go away, they have a life beyond that and they affect people’s lives, and we have to remember that."

Many of you have heard me talk about "AIDS in the Heartland,"which is a story I did two years later, about two men from Northern Minnesota who met, fell in love, and together died of AIDS. I need to do a little bit of a shout out because some of you who know that story pretty well have also heard me talk about the nieces and nephews of Dick Hanson, the primary character in "AIDS in the Heartland," and how their mother was so fearful of the AIDS virus at the time that she wouldn’t let her children spend time with their uncle anymore, and how their father came out to the farmhouse one time with the kids in the car so they could say goodbye to their uncle—or, truly, he could say goodbye to them, as they were very young, one last time. And I mentioned that years later I got a letter from a young woman named Jolene Hanson, who was in that car at the time, as a little girl. She reached out to me as she had found the story and she told me, “I want to thank you and I want to know the rest of the story.” Well, Jolene is here today, and I ask you to please make her welcome and ask about her version of the story, because then again we all see things our own way. She’s become and incredible storyteller and photographer in her own right. So these stories that we tell don’t necessarily end when we go away. They have a life beyond that and they affect people’s lives, and we have to remember that. We have to remember we make a difference when we do this work.

But now I’m going to tell you one little story from "AIDS in the Heartland," which I probably haven’t told you before—a story about place. It is set in the farmhouse, just after Dick Hanson has died, and his partner Bert Henningson has come home after finishing activities for the funeral. He’s exhausted and alone. I just want to share a little passage with you.

It was already dark when Henningson arrived at the farm the next evening. He was tired and still had much to do. He had to prepare for Saturday's memorial service, last-minute visits with the minister and the florist, and a thorough cleaning to rid the house of countless medicine bottles, stained sheets, sweat-soaked bed cushions and other vestiges of terminal illness.

But those things would have to wait. Henningson went straight upstairs to the screened porch that overlooks the marshes in front of the farmhouse. He found the old pink candle, set it on the small table by the middle window and lit it, placing Hanson's Bible and the urn of ashes next to it. Henningson lay on one of the metal-frame cots, watched the candle's flame and remembered.

"We rehabbed the porch in the summer of '84 so we could use it," he said later. "The screens had been torn out by kids or whatever, so we screened it up and Dick's mother went to her auctions and got cots and a table for 50 cents or something ridiculous.

"It was dry that summer, not humid. The strawberries were especially good and I found a recipe for an old-fashioned, biscuit-type of shortcake. We would use the porch in the evenings. We'd spend all day with the hogs, then go up there and have our biscuits and strawberries and cream. There were good memories up there.

"That was an election year, and Dick was running for Congress. And often what I'd do, when Dick was out on the campaign trail, I'd light the pink candle and wait for him to come home. It was a nice signal for him to see as he drove in."

On this night, Henningson again lit the candle. But his sentimental vigil was brief, cut short by practicality. He fought sleep a while longer, but felt himself sinking into the thin mattress.

The last few months of caring for Hanson had extracted an ironic price. Stress had activated the AIDS virus, which had lain dormant in Henningson's body for so long but now was attacking his strength with a vengeful speed.

He blew out the candle, took two sleeping pills to ward off anxiety and set his alarm for 3 a.m., when he was scheduled to take his next dose of life-prolonging AZT."

The lessons that I learned from this was to go to the very center of the story—to go to the places where things happened that mattered to the people in their authentic lives, not their political lives. We use scenes to recreate and restore, but we also need to use scenes that reveal meaning, not just action or description.

Two or three years after I did "AIDS in the Heartland," I was sent to Turkey to drive across country to Iraq, just after the first Persian Gulf War. We didn’t cover the war itself—it was something of a press conference war at the time—but once the refugee crisis hit after the war and Saddam was pushing Kurds over the northern border, my editor sent me and a photographer to write about the refugee’s flight. At one point, we ended up at a refugee camp in far eastern Turkey, witnessing a food-fight, a riot. The refugees rioting over the fact that they weren’t getting proper food, that the good food was being kept by the soldiers, so what they were getting was just congealed spaghetti noodles; all the meat was being kept behind. In the middle of it, this man stood up and started speaking English, and he tried to calm things down, so I asked to interview him and I ended up going to his tent, which was his home at the time, and writing about him. Yes, I’m again at a refugee camp and again, people are dying. But this is how I started his story:

Toothpaste. And toothbrushes. Ten of them. One for himself, one for his wife and each of their eight children. “Is that so much to ask?” the man who calls himself Ali Ahmet wants to know.

“They’re trivial things but they’re important,” he says. “When I was in my home I cleaned my teeth, and my children cleaned, at least three times a day. Since one month, since I left my home, we have not cleaned. And please, tell the world we have not enough soap.

He pronounces the word "soup," but he rings his hands as if washing, and when an American visitor corrects his pronunciation, Ahmet writes the word carefully into his notebook, first in proper spelling, then phonetically. After 16 years of being a high school English teacher, some habits are hard to break.

I didn’t want to go to the stereotype of the refugee who was desperate for medicine and for food. I saw something else there—I saw a man whose greatest loss was that of his dignity and who actually was a lot like a middle-class American. This was not a guy we could just pass of as “another.” He was a high school teacher, he had an advanced degree, and by God he wanted his kids to be able to brush their teeth. Go past the easy cliché. Dare your readers to see past the stereotypes. I walked from the food fight with him (his name wasn’t Ali Ahmet, which he explains later in the story) to the tent where he and his wife and his eight children were now living after being pushed out of their home in Northern Iraq. I describe this little tent very briefly:

An infantry of rubber shoes, little and big and in-between, mingles at ease outside the flap of Ahmet’s tent. Humble as it is, this is home, and shoes stay outside. Passima Ahmet has no broom, and even the most carefully brushed of twenty bare feet track in stones and dirt from the dusty camp grounds. Each day she moves through the tent on her hands and knees, using her hands to sweep the blankets that are now her floors.

As small as the tent is and as many as the Ahmets are, the place is not crowded. No furniture gets in the way—just one box of onions, another of bread, and a large pot with a smaller pot and a tea kettle tucked neatly inside.

The lesson here is to choose details that don’t just describe, but that reveal. And to really look, look hard at what’s around you and see it. Really see it. Don’t just assume it.

There’s one other scene from that trip to Iraq that I want to share with you, from up in the mountains. We’re still in Iraq. We had hitchhiked over the border and have come into the country just as the no-fly zone was being put in place by U.S. military and UN peacekeepers. But it was still very dangerous; there were snipers everywhere. We drove up into the mountains and found a camp, just a random camp refugees had set up. We spent a day with them there. It was a very hard and emotional day and when I called my editor that night, I said, “What story do you want from me?” He says, “I don’t know, you’re the one who’s there.” And I said, “That’s a good point, but what do you want? What’s interesting for people back home?” Finally, he said, “Well, what interested you the most?” and I gasped and I said, “Oh, the children!” “What about the children?” he asked. My response: “They play!” “Well, that’s something to write about,” he said and hung up. So I sat down on a crate in a post office where I’d bribed the officials to let me use the phone. I wrote all night about coming into this camp and seeing the children. I want to read a part of that, my opening, and then I want to tell you how I closed it, because of the interesting juxtaposition.

The first toy to be built was a swing. Brazen boys hoarded the tent ropes left behind by a family that had moved on—further into the flatlands of Turkey in hopes for better food, or back to Iraq to take their chances—and found a high sturdy branch from which to swing.

Others charmed rubber gloves from the nurses. Several strong puffs later they had made funny, nippled balloons to waggle at the babies or blurt rudely at each other.

The mountain is filled with trees for climbing and, when the boys take once-forbidden machetes into the branches with them, gathering firewood becomes more adventure than chore.

The rains that eroded the bare mountains left long, steep sandy ruts for sliding. Sit on a torn cardboard box that once held blankets, or a flattened plastic water bottle, and you scoot all the faster.

Every day is a scavenger hunt, with thousands of lost shoes, blue jeans or abandoned clothes for the searching. Pockets sometimes yield coins or worry beads.

And every day brings a parade, a never-ending wheeled march of ambulances and military vehicles and supply trucks. The braver boys hang on to the backs of the trucks to be dragged along, their sandaled feet are as agile as any skateboarder’s, or stand on top for potato fights with their buddies. A favorite game among the younger ones is to squat at the edge of the road and toss water bottles under the passing wheels, watching them explode and flatten. It’s like putting pennies on a train track.

Every night sparkles with campfires, and children are warmed further by the nearness of parents and siblings and cousins and friends, with no one to make them to take a bath or get up early for school.

That part of this refugee camp I looked at and saw as magical. This place where these kids would come with unfettered imagination and just make their own world. And then I moved through the rest of the camp and talked to the relief workers who were there, about the damage this does psychologically to children and what was necessary to keep them healthy. We walked further and we talked to people about where they were getting food or where they planned to go. We talked with some of the military people trying to secure the zone.

And then we walked into the hospital, which was basically a straw hut. There were eight pallets on the floor. I met a nurse, a Dutch nurse named Willibrord Goverde, and I had him giving me a tour of the hospital, one pallet at the time.

All of the patients in the hospital were babies. We went around and he introduced me to each one and to the mothers who were sitting there with them, and he told me about their conditions. I wrote about each one very briefly: this kid has meningitis, this kid has measles, this kid is so dehydrated when you pinch his skin it doesn’t go back. We went round and round and round till we get to this scene:

[Goverde] faces the seventh pallet in silence. Nashan Gorges is 6 months old. He weighs 9 pounds. He has pneumonia, diarrhea and advanced malnutrition. When Goverde pinches the infant’s shrunken stomach, the parchment skin stays wrinkled, failing to bounce back with healthy baby fat. He is bundled in a blanket, socks and a cap, but even so his temperature stays 2 degrees below normal. Goverde finishes his rounds and gets up abruptly. What are this baby’s chances?

“None,” he says.

And if your heart is not yet broken, Goverde pauses only briefly to glance at the eighth and last pallet on the plastic covered floor. Thirty minutes earlier it had cradled a 3-month-old, Koran Skikoy. Now it was empty. The child’s mother wrapped her dead son in a blanket and carried him to the graveyard, just as Goverde was beginning his rounds. Her walk to the cemetery took her under that first swing, built by other children only a week ago.

The lessons here: be aware; pay acute attention and notice everything; use metaphor as a way to make people relatable as the humans they are; let people laugh even in places where there doesn’t seem to be any reason for joy; and always, always try to see through fresh eyes and through the eyes of another. Try to see life through the eyes that you’re writing about, not through your own.

When we finally made it to Iraq we ended up in another hospital in Zakho. It had been left abandoned by Saddam’s army for months and months and months and now some Canadian doctors were securing it. When they first arrived, they found blood and feces on the floors where patients had slept, and six corpses rotting in a room. There were hundreds of people out in the courtyard waiting to get in to see a doctor. There was one room in the hospital that the doctors had cleaned up and there were about 20 patients there, with everything from cholera to typhus to pneumonia.

In the corner, there was a bed with a young woman in it and next to it an isolette with a brand new baby in it, one day old. I sat down, and through a translator I tried to talk to the young mother, and then this happened: She tried to give me her child. She was 17 years old. There were no painkillers for her and they had had to deliver the baby through a C-section. She was in such pain that when they put the baby on her chest to nurse, she couldn’t stand it. She didn’t know whether she could go home, she didn’t know what her future was, and she literally tried to give me her child. The baby had already been named; she was called Zosan.

Now, it might seem easy to just shrug this off as a moment in a journalist’s life, but I was in my late 30's at the time. I’d always wanted a child but circumstances never sent one my way. And here’s a woman who tries to give me her beautiful child just at a time when I ached for one in every beat of my heart and every fiber of my being. I didn’t take the child, of course, but I wrote an essay about it, trying to figure out what this whole experience meant to me:

My questions about Saddam’s war are more personal and carry the uncomfortable reality of lifetimes. Because lifetimes, with all their uncertainties, are what the survivors will face tomorrow, when today’s saviors leave.

I did not accept the woman’s astonishing gift of her daughter, I did not even dare to hold the child and dream about the future, hers and mine. I held the mother's limp hand instead, and resisted the urge to take further advantage of a homeless, traumatized people by washing my own desires in the bright name of deliverance. It was not my place to decide that my life, with its material comforts and physical security, would be better than hers, with a house filled with relatives and a strong sense of religion.

And yet, I can’t help but wonder. It is America’s curse and glory to believe it can save the world. It is mine as an American to wonder if I couldn’t have saved one tiny but perfect part of it.

For me now, this war will always be named Zosan, and I will always wonder how it came out.

So, a three-year-old boy from Syria washes up dead on a beach in Turkey as his family makes a desperate attempt to make its way to Canada. That’s geography. But interestingly, as much as Zosan’s reality has stayed with me, the death of that little boy shattered geography for a moment. It turned the numbing numbers of refugees coming over the border into a story of family and home and the search for security. It made it not political anymore, but human. Like the stories of Bert lighting a pink candle as he waited for Dick to come home, of children building playgrounds in a war zone, of mothers pitched in grief on a dirt path or in a back garage, of a beautiful, beautiful infant named Zosan who was born into one war and now, if she has survived, would be 24 and perhaps trying to protect her own children from harm in another war, or get them to a new place, where they could create a new sense of home.

That’s what stories can do, they can remind us that the political is the human and that, as Julia Wolfe said, “We’re them, and they’re us.”

The post Jacqui Banaszynski: The Importance of Place appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The Power of Storytelling international conference in Bucharest just concluded its fifth edition this month, and thanks to conference founder Cristian Lupsa, editor of the nonfiction journal Decât o Revistă and a 2014 Nieman fellow, and his colleagues, Storyboard will bring you transcripts from some of the two-day conference’s sessions.

This year’s event had a theme guiding each keynote and panel: a sense of place. The speakers tackled the idea of place in a story and the way it is conveyed, depicted, researched, and understood. They shared stories of places visited for research and work (Paterniti, Banaszynski, MacNaughton), but also places they grew up in and places that changed their perspective on life (Jones, Perjovschi, Bugan). Outside the conference hall, audience members were challenged to debate the idea of space through photo exhibits, but also by drawing, illustrating, or writing about important places in their lives.

Our third speaker is Carmen Bugan, poet and author of "Burying the Typewriter," the internationally acclaimed memoir on life under the communist regime, discussing the process of creating literary work from personal testimony.

A few years ago my family and I received access to the surveillance files kept on us by Ceausescu’s Securitate from 1961 until 1989, when we left the country. They amount to a state-generated, public narrative of a deeply private family life. The two documents I will be discussing here are part of a complex story about people (those who spied, recorded, transcribed, reported, and us who formed their objects of observation); at the same time, they are examples of a specific story about language. Reading my personal "biography" in the secret-police speak of the files sends me back to a self I both recognize and don’t, creating another place of writing, which I could not have imagined before. I am caught in the conflict between the free, fluid language of memory and the shackled, impersonal language of surveillance reports. The Securitate portrayal of my youth writes over my memories and into my memory gaps, turning me into a palimpsest that combines the public voice of documents with my private experience. The "official" narrative in the records illuminates at times the past with details I had forgotten (it does not represent my own memories) and at times obfuscates the truth, or outright fictionalizes major events in my life, using a language that seems factual. In this sense it complicates the process of creating literary work out of personal testimony/history. Writing about the secret police narratives of my life in Romania started as an attempt to write the self, free, to detangle myself of this extra narrative; however, lately it is turning into a process of questioning whether memory can rescue and rebuild a sense of personal, and indeed artistic, identity out of surveillance records.

I seem to constantly define a "place of writing." This is probably due to continuous homelessness, thinking of one country in terms of another (or a succession of countries where I recently lived). To me the place of writing is a specific place (geographical, emotional, of the mind) understood from a sense of personal and artistic identity. I think of it as an originating kind of place that writers hold inside themselves, without which they cannot create—a kind of spiritual place, a soul, if you will. I imagine that all writers, whether they admit to it or not, write from a locus of certitude about who they are. This is usually the language: They belong to a language and that language belongs to them, even if absolutely everything else falls apart. By this I simply mean "native language," or "mother tongue," that the experienced writer cultivates into his or her unique voice. It’s when the native language becomes unstable, when writers are forced to abandon it, or when experience simply destroys the transaction of meaning or truth between a writer and her language, the notion of the "place of writing" itself becomes destabilized and abstracted. Over the years I have come to think of this "place of writing" more in terms of the language inside the language—the yolk inside the egg, the dialect and the mannerisms peculiar to the writer, that fundamental inner language which needs to be fiercely protected and which fuels everything.

The new place of writing where I find myself these days is at the rift between the public and private and, more fundamentally, at the rift between the memories I have kept as sacred, as a foundation of my identity and the memories brought on, or implanted by the records which re-orient me toward my native place, the people I thought I knew, and my own earlier self. In other words, the new place of writing is a fractured identity (what I knew and what I didn’t) as much as an accumulated, sometimes conflicting, and sometimes supplementary information that can best be expressed by the term "archival identity." So I have come to think of my native country, and my native language as places before and after the records.

The Romania of personal memory is simultaneously a lost paradise and a place of suffering, which I nevertheless left reluctantly. I’d like to read to you a poem called "Making the Hay Mattress" (from The House of Straw) where the language is laden with images, and my grandmother is a symbol of lost magical childhood moments. My Romania is an idealized country of the mind.

Making the Hay Mattress

The best part of all that was dancing:
In August, at the summer cleaning,
She threw away mattress and pillows

Stripping the beds to ideas on the empty floor,
Where, with hammer and nails she reinforced
The shapes of wobbly wooden frames.

Then in a new white case we stuffed fresh hay;
After she sealed it tight, she summoned us to dance
The hora on top, to even out the surface,

Soften flowers and grass.
Barefoot, we took dance lessons on the mattress case
Stomped our feet, clapped our hands and laughed.

So it came to be that till she died,
In August we danced and slept on flowers at night.

It is also a Romania of humiliations, of being dragged to the courthouse to see my parents’ divorce (which I put in the poem "The Divorce," Crossing the Carpathians), because the Securitate wanted my mother to show publicly that she disapproved of my father’s politics. It is a place recalled through memories that have remained intact:

The Divorce

Before they brought him to the courtroom, they gave him three apples:
‘Your wife sent you these.’ He cradled each apple in the cup of his hands,
The smoothness of their skin became the cheeks of each child.

Inside the courthouse there was a quiet opening and closing of doors.
A crowd of people was chanting his name under the windows.
When the door opened, I saw his bare feet in brown shoes.

His children held each other tight against the wall.
Their breaths, white with cold, were rising towards the ceiling.
They listened for the voices of their parents.

When the divorce was over, he was allowed to see them:
They kissed his chained hands, promised to be good, let their tears fall
On his prison uniform with his own, all three of them burying him.

How I wished we could hide him with our bodies and take him home!
The Securitate peeled us off him. But we were the apple seeds left to grow
In the sound of his chains on the cement floor.

I wrote these poems in English, the adoptive language being a safe place of writing which seemed honest to my condition as an immigrant to the United States, the condition of a political refugee.

This writing in English, about a life that is re-made almost entirely with memories of Romania, was self-sustaining and had its own logic. But then, in 2010, I received the first 1,500 pages of secret police files on my father, and in 2013 the rest of 3,000 pages of files on my mother arrived in a couple of carton boxes from Bucharest.

Here are two examples of the files, which I would like to discuss:

To these questions from the obj. his daughter answers that life at home is hard: they have no wood for winter, no one to help them. As for school, she said she finished the year well. Next year she will take the baccalaureate exams and prepare for the entrance exams to University to study paediatric medicine, in which she thinks she might succeed.

When I first read this file, I thought, "This is a linguistic event in itself, stronger than any poetry I ever wrote, it’s so immediate, and half-literate in such a raw, life-like way." I also thought "My God, I don’t remember this visit at all!"

Absurdly, the conversation is "transcribed from the Romanian language": what other language would have been possible in our case, and in that prison? The reader is given the name of the officer in charge of the transcript and presumably the visit. And we also know that this file is "strictly secret" and there is only one copy of it. "Secrecy" reigns. I don’t know if the numbers on the document indicate the files kept on us, or the conversations my father participated in while in prison, and I don’t know what Post no. 5 signifies unless it’s the visiting room. Post no. 5, place of interest—they are used almost euphemistically: You simply need to know their coded meanings to get around to figuring out where you are. The language that describes my visit to my father is fragmentary, exact, boring officialdom—he asked, to his questions from him she answered—it’s a complex label that was glued to that day. I wonder what the daily life of the transcriber was like, and what he thought and felt as he listened and watched my dad and me talk—if indeed he was the person who did all these things. It must take a certain strength to produce such a matter-of-fact document. I love the title of the document though: "Butnaru," which is the surname of my mother’s adoptive father (my lovely grandfather Neculai), is now a codename for my father. The subtitle indicates that my father is the main character in this transcript: he is described, monitored, observed, analyzed "at the visit with his daughter," though he is never described as an inmate, but rather as the abbreviated "obj.," the "target," or "the object of observation." The visit could have occurred any nondescript place.

According to the transcript, which mixes direct quotes from us with paraphrases of the conversation transposed into secret-police speak, I made the visit by myself. Dad showed no sign of worrying about me, he accepted the explanation that mother was ill, and went on to ask the news from home, after which he told me about his own health. For the non-experienced reader of these kind of secret police files, the only indication that this meeting took place somewhere in captivity is my father’s encouraging comment that he might return home.

There is a whole, and bigger story in here, which I have put in a poem called "Aiud" in my book Crossing the Carpathians as well as a chapter in my memoir Burying the Typewriter. They contain my memories of conglomerated prison visits, not a specific one, though there is a dialogue between my father and my brother Catalin, aged two and a half on the first prison visit, a dialogue that has remained perfect in our collective family memory and has gone into both pieces. But my writing expresses my own feelings which have given me a sense of who I was at that time in Romania: As such, it is not a document or a court testimony, but rather a moment of truth that I brought out from silence to speech, a rite of passage, a moment in time, which I recreated in order to give the reader the essence of that experience of that particular time and place. Reading this transcript makes all the other visits seem somehow less significant: During those visits I benefited from the comfort of my brother, sister, and my mother, and the physical safety of being with them. I also remember being far more scared and intimidated by being in prison. None of this is happening according to this transcript where I appear in the guise of a very self-controlled adult: I don’t cry, I don’t shake, I speak clearly, and there is no sense of grief when I say good bye to my father. The visit simply "closes." What I am left with on reading this document is my previous poem as one version of the past, my identity as a freaked out teenager as one version of myself (the private version) which are being "written over" by the official record of a visit taking place in one particular day, at one specific "place of interest," where I exchange particular information that has been recorded, transcribed, and is therefore un-deletable and true.

This is the rift—between official language and private expression; between Romanian language of the transcript and my translation of it nearly 30 years later in exile; between the first sense of the self and the second sense of the self. If I actually made this visit I don’t remember, I must have been far stronger psychologically and emotionally than I ever gave myself credit for. But why don’t I have a memory of this visit? Was it trauma? Was the whole visit an invention of the secret police to pretend that they actually allowed my father regular access to family when in fact they didn’t? Yet the dates in August correspond. After reading this document I have written the new poem about Aiud, a poem situated at the rift between languages: that of secret police-speak and that of memory.

Another files which has made an impression on me is more personal yet. Here it is:

The story here is actually in what the file doesn’t say, and the silencing of the truth in this record is a linguistic feat, as well as a display of considerable narrative skill. The purely observational language in this file carries with it the undertone of official worry over me being feared and punished by the community for being my father’s daughter. However, when I read this file, I read a report that, according to the clean facts, said: "Our plot is working well, we are isolating the family and Carmen’s friend is doing a good job right along with his parents." T. L., I know, had been generously rewarded for his job: To use their own parlance, he proved to be a good "legend," which is a fictional story created in order to compromise or to isolate someone undesirable. The communication by TELEX between the officers of high standing is rich with second meanings. Even though these meanings are accessible only to the family that is subject of this particular communication, for me, as a writer who is the main subject of this file, it is a lesson on how meaning is created, how versions of history are written. Here is a state that can violate something as private as young love, while simultaneously putting on a show of worry that the dissident father had made his own children go through hell, in a community who of course is very keen to follow the party line.

We are all versions of the past, our past and that of the others, the past of our countries and the past of our languages. I still speak the dialect of my village—I kept it as a secret, a source of strength. A source that now helps me deal with the Romanian of the secret files—which is essentially a language of betrayal and suspicion, a language of oppression. The Romanian language I spoke before the encounter with the Securitate has helped me maintain an instinctual love for language though time, whatever national language I happen to speak at the moment. But all these languages, all these different layers of Romanian, and lately all the layers of English (non-native English, American, or British English-es in which I have lived and written) reflect that as writers we often have to position ourselves toward our subject matter, rather than allowing ourselves to be swallowed by it. One of the questions I keep asking myself now is how to write about personal memory when it is part of a collective memory, a collective history?

Now I live in a different place of writing: an archival identity that incorporates the secret-police speak into the language of poetry. As I write about these files, which contain the past and the secrets of others, I wonder what are my responsibilities toward those others? I wonder how much shall I protect them and how much I shall rely on the fact that healing only comes about when we bring out to light the hard truths. Forgiving is a consequence of acknowledging the pain first, and that all of it is a linguistic concept. I wonder that maybe the beauty I try to put in my poems about Romania might return here, via translation from English which could make it possible for the past to be healed.

The transformation that the reality of the files, and their language, enact on the poetic language is profound. I decided to show the anxiety in the way I write, to show how the language of the files drowns at times my own voice, for the truth is that the life that these files represent has in no small measure influenced my own sense of self. The files draw me out of my carefully built sense of who I have become after my Romanian experience and drown me into their content, and non-emotional, devastating language.

Here is a poem based on a transcript of a conversation that brought back this times some very beautiful memories of listening to Dad, fresh from prison, telling stories to my little brother Catalin, seemingly oblivious to the microphones that we knew too well were planted all over the house. I’ve used text from the transcript inside the poem, and I’ve used the entire file as a free-standing piece too: as a raw material, as a source, not of inspiration, but provocation, to own again that part of my life. I call this a "poetics of question marks." This is an example of writing from an archival identity, and I think it summarizes what I tried to say about place of writing today.

There

The boy was five years old and he trusted
his father’s stories about ‘a life of plenty,’

‘a country with lemon and orange trees.’
It is ‘something imagined’ the records say.

‘Apples and pears and prunes are also good’
the mother countered (for the microphones?)

no doubt, tired of the ‘hard black bread’
the husband-prisoner brought to her.

But he went on imagining the blooms of
orange groves, endless summer trips

we were to take if not for real,
then in his ‘stories with the action

taking place in the West,’
itself a forbidden word

those days when we secretly cherished
his unstoppable rambling dream.

I sat in silence weighing apples, pears and plums
against mesmerizing gallops across distant prairies.

The post Carmen Bugan: Secret Police Records and The Language of Memory appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The Power of Storytelling international conference in Bucharest just concluded its fifth edition this month, and thanks to conference founder Cristian Lupsa, editor of the nonfiction journal Decât o Revistă and a 2014 Nieman fellow, and his colleagues, Storyboard will bring you transcripts from some of the two-day conference’s sessions.

This year’s event had a theme guiding each keynote and panel: a sense of place. The speakers tackled the idea of place in a story and the way it is conveyed, depicted, researched, and understood. Some shared stories of places visited for research and work (Paterniti, Banaszynski, MacNaughton), while others spoke of places they grew up in and places that changed their perspective on life (Jones, Perjovschi, Bugan). Outside the conference hall, audience members were challenged to debate the idea of space through photo exhibits, but also by drawing, illustrating, or writing about important places in their lives.

Our second speaker is Michael Paterniti, bestselling author and GQ contributor

There was a bookstore in Rangoon, Burma, when I was there many years ago. It was a pretty remarkable place, anonymous among a row of ramshackle shops on Sule Pagoda Street. Every book in that cramped shop came in some shade of green: lime green, emerald green, fern green, olive drab, veridian. The covers of all the books were green; the bindings were green. Each one looked almost exactly like THIS [shows battered book, in green]. It could have been Faulkner; it could have been Tin Tin. Who could distinguish?

And here’s the amazing thing: If you asked for George Orwell or Norman Lewis, if you wanted Keats or Virginia Woolf, the bookstore owner—a man named U Ba Kyi, who was maybe 50, with hair sprouting from a mole on his chin, which was considered a sign of good luck in Burma—would instantly pluck it from the shelf. He knew exactly where each book was in the store, could summon the location as easily as he might reach for a bedside glass of water in the dark. Inside, the books were mimeographed, on thin paper. Lost books, wrapped in anonymous robes. Disguised but still living. When you opened them, the words smelled amazing, like cut grass. Or vanilla.

This place, for me, was a true curiosity. U Ba Kyi only had one copy of each book on the shelf, and when that one sold, he went back and mimeographed a new one. So he kept a secret library of the real books somewhere that wasn’t here. As the British empire faded from Burma in the late 1940's, and democracy failed in the 1990's, as the ruling junta became more and more oppressive and isolationist, and slugged themselves with the name SLORC (like something out of Orwell itself), the bookstore also became more and more dangerous. What U Ba Kyi had the audacity to do, what he’d brought himself to do—or elevated himself to do—was to harbor all the written words that had been banned. He was the word-protector, and the story-keeper. His shop was like a black box of the human psyche, some Spiritus Mundi. If certain books had been found out in his shop, he surely would have gone to prison.

At the time, in the mid-90's, I’d come to Rangoon—renamed Yangon, as Burma had been renamed Myanmar (the fluidity of words, of names, of verbs, as Carmen said yesterday, are history itself, or the re-writing of it)—I’d come to talk to Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and pro-democracy leader who was under long-term house arrest. There was a civil war raging in the jungle (where I’d just been with the Karen troops), and the military kept the city in lockdown. Anyone suspected of subversion quietly disappeared. Repression was quick and violent. In fact, just weeks after I left one jungle village on the frontline, one whose inhabitants were primarily Muslim, I found out that the SLORC troops had taken all the men there and, one by one, lit their beards on fire. The populace, unless otherwise part of the corrupt machine, served as indentured slaves to the regime. Or were otherwise subjugated by this genocide. And yet there were pockets of resistance, pro-democracy activists spreading their whispered message in tea shops and tofu restaurants. In order to interview one, I was picked up on a street corner, driven around the city, and deposited at an empty mansion, on the edge of a cane field. His codename was Caesar… and in the second hour of our interview, in the stifling heat, he simply fell asleep. There was nothing in the instruction manual for how to deal with a sleeping interview subject, so I showed myself out, and walked back to the city.

At first, I didn’t understand anything in Burma. How could I? There was so much happening above my head, so much that seemed impenetrable, and frightening. And while I waited for my interview with Aung San Suu Kyi, the bookstore was the place I went every day, to try to find some comfort, some words that might trigger an idea, or an emotion, to define my own confusion. To see if anyone had ever felt this dislocation, caused by this country, and put it into perfect words. Every day I came through the door, U Ba Kyi looked up, eyes lifting from what he read, and, smiling, asked me in perfect British English: What is your pleasure today?

By the third day, I asked him to just give me what he thought I might like. One of the books he picked from the green wall in that green room of words was a memoir called “Elephant Bill.” As it turned out, Elephant Bill was a Brit named James Williams who went to Burma in 1920 as a forest assistant for the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation, a company using 2,000 elephants to extract teak from the jungle, after which the trees were floated downriver to Rangoon or Mandalay. Fresh from the First World War, in which he’d been charged with taking care of camels in Africa, Williams was placed in charge of 70 elephants, and their oozies. And from first sight Elephant Bill fell in love with the animals. He loved their power and intelligence. He saw them as huge, hulking mysteries to unlock. He studied their habits and idiosyncracies. He respected their sensitivity, intelligence, and senses of humor. And when he wrote about elephants and elephant trainers with such generosity and granular detail, I couldn’t help but think he was writing about stories and writers. I took his every word in that dark country as a word of advice. As if he was speaking directly to me.

Early in the book, just after Elephant Bill has first arrived in the jungle, he meets his boss, the Obi-Wan Kenobi of elephants. Except much drunker, and ornery as hell. His name is Willie—and Elephant Bill can’t get anywhere with him, not one shred of respect. Until one night when they have a drink-off, each with their own bottles of Black Label. “If I never teach you anything else, I can tell you this,” says Willie at one point, “anything to do with the jungle, elephants and your work you can only learn by experience…. You’ll draw your pay for 10 years before you earn it.”

Then, he proceeds to pawn off four misfit elephants on Elephant Bill and order him to march them through the jungle to another hill station days away. When an ancient female elephant known as Ma Oh, or “the Old Lady” dies on the journey, it’s up to Elephant Bill to perform an autopsy. Here’s what Elephant Bill writes, by way of describing how he cut open the corpse of that dear 80-year-old elephant:

Tragedy soon turned to farce. The Old Lady was scarcely cold before I was literally inside her, with her arching ribs, sheltering me from the sun. I learned a good deal about elephant construction from her. Spare parts galore had been hauled out and arranged neatly in a row before tea-time. Her carcass proved to be a cave full of strange treasures, such as the heart, the gizzard, and the lungs. The only snag was that, do what I would, I could not find any kidneys, and I was almost tempted to conclude that she died from lack of them…

For me, reading the book at a streetside food stand, among a swirl of longyis swaying in the languid heat, gold dust called thanaka on the women’s faces, I clung to this passage—what Elephant Bill called his “Jonah journey”—as a sort of touchstone. I earmarked the page, and kept coming back to it. It wasn’t just Elephant Bill’s voice, funny and enthusiastic and astute. But it was the simple metaphor that the story of Elephant Bill’s march and subsequent post-mortem presented. For people like us, gathered here today, who love and try to understand the mechanics of narrative, the story really is an elephant. The story is always an elephant. And no matter what, in the end, we have to go inside to get it…. To humble ourselves, and learn. To find the cave full of strange treasures. To enter the hull of bones and bring out the innards, in hopes of writing the post-mortem, or a unified theory. To make a beginning, middle, and end of it, if we must. Our jungle journey includes taking the bus, getting on planes, walking through doors. [Or as Jackie said yesterday, crossing the lawn to the neighbors.] We enter the house or the hovel, the tukel or the hut. We say hello to the stranger, and by being there, concentrated in that one moment, together, we begin. We scalpel our way, question by question, into the secret place—to the place where the man is contemplating his own suicide perhaps, or grieving his lost wife; to where the woman wonders where her only child has gone or how she can redeem herself in the eyes of the one she loves—and suddenly we’re lost in this otherworld, slick and glimmering. What do we see there, and what do we make of it? How do we lay it out, to make a story, to make art or literature from it? And how do we go from the experience itself to words on a page, from the sensual encounter to the insentient markings on a page that re-conjures it all again in four dimensions? What is THAT alchemy?

I wish I knew. Because here’s the thing: I’ve been doing this for awhile. I write four or five long stories annually—and books, too—and each one seems to kill me in its own little way. Each leaves me knowing less, having learned more. Each depletes me, while filling me afresh, leaving me in a dynamic state of doubt. I call myself a reporter, and I proceed to ask stupid questions. I listen back to interviews while transcribing and I sound like a blithering idiot.

In fact, I have an unofficial contest going with some writer friends, to see who can ask the stupidest question EVER without meaning to, and I think I recently won. I was interviewing the chef Yotam Ottolenghi in London, and at the risk of never being asked to go on assignment again, I’m going to quote my question, verbatim:

So I’m just—butternut! Butternut squash, broccoli polenta, pearled lemon, that idea of, and sometimes this happens at the ridiculous high-end restaurant, the prawn did this, eat the whole flower, or whatever, just get that marrow, or whatever it is, up here, on the plate, all foamy, and this is what you’re doing without having to turn it into some sort of ridiculous cooky thing in these restaurants, like, maybe you could tell me: Why are we doing this!?

Seriously, how can you answer a question like this? And you know you’re in trouble when the response is, as it was in Ottolenghi’s case, a very long silence, a polite but quizzical expression usually reserved for the platypus tank at the zoo, and then, with pity: I think I know what you’re trying to say…

Anyway—it kills me a little, when I ask stupid questions. But I know, in the end, to keep asking, however stupid, because we are stumbling together toward the secret… and it’s always the response that matters. And it’s the fine detail that the mind records as the mouth motors nonsensically. It’s the memory bank of gestures and lightfall, the tastes and smells and visions—in Port au Prince after an earthquake, in the Sudan during a famine, on the Japanese coast after a tsunami. We are human beings having an actual/sensual experience first, and storytellers second. We accept the orange spilling its juice, the rice crawling with ants, the pain and joy given to us, or visited upon us. We let it in, allow for sedimentation, until it becomes ours, too, and then, we try to translate it.

But first comes the place, and the people in it. Our interaction with it, as we go inside, cut the tough skin to bones and organs. We hear our own voice met by another. We lay out the spare parts. We keep wondering where the damn kidneys went. Where did they go? We make our rough record of it. And then we leave.

Or do we?

I’ve always had this feeling, looking out the plane or car window when leaving a place that I’m certain to return, certain to have a second life there. And soon enough it comes true, but not the way I thought.

Because soon enough you have to write the damn thing.

But, not yet. Not before the most confounding part of storymaking for me: I’ll call it the delay and obfuscation phase. What kills me a little, too, is that writers aren’t paid for, or measured by the greatness of their procrastination techniques, because mine—and perhaps many others in this room—can be of Nobel caliber. When I’m on that deadline, I want to drive the kids everywhere, show up at every game, volunteer for every field trip. I want to cook and go surfing. Do the laundry. I want to hike the White Mountains… and the Green Mountains… and the Alps. I Google elaborate itineraries for trips I’ll never take. I find out what bands are touring, just to see if they’re within 300 miles of me. I’m suddenly actually reading the jokes my dad sends via group email. Yes, I’m processing and percolating. I’m mediating and mind-sorting. But I’m also squandering time. And yet I take solace in the Emily Dickinson poem:
“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee,

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few.”

Meanwhile, I’m usually letting my editors know that “I’m on it.” That it’s going “really well.” That they should “probably expect a draft soon.” And then the clock keeps ticking, louder and louder. I sometimes wonder about this process of procrastination. Is it that I want to delay the dissatisfaction—or heartbreak—of my own impending failure? Is it that I want to sustain the illusion that it’s possible, for once, to make something ideal, that’s utterly pure of feeling, and clear of thought? Or is it that I’m prioritizing my facts and research, rummaging this body of evidence that I’m already unconsciously composing? I’m not sure—but eventually I can’t quite live with myself for all the foot-dragging. Failure seems like a better option. But that voice keeps saying: If you don’t write a word, then the story will remain infinite. By this line of thought, each word, and sentence, leads to a forking, a choice made but one more eliminated, a narrowing, a fear of finitude. But then, I know that the best stories, my favorite stories, have at their heart that reflection of the collective, the schisms that make us human, the energy of the infinite even as they get chipped to a diamond point.

So… For me, the making of a story typically moves through these three phases:

1. The cutting through and going inside and gathering up (the experiential),
2. The meditation over what’s been laid out (procrastination/percolation of all the fine, telling details), and
3. The writing, or making sense of it in narrative form, in draft after draft, until it’s been stylized to some fine point of articulation.

In logistical terms, then, I try to start by writing early in the morning, before my brain has caught up with consciousness. (Make no mistake, even when fully procrastinating on one story, I’m writing something every morning.) After the first round of work, there are children to tend to: breakfast, packed lunches, off to school. This is as important as anything—and afterward, I go to a coffee shop, where people are really friendly but cluster to do their work, as well. The white noise, the smell of coffee (though I’m not a big coffee drinker), the ritual and routine—all of it somehow helps, triggers the track switch, keeps me suspended or separated, lost in this world of my own slow construction. I’ve been known to pull up my hoodie, too, and bury my head. My friends have been known to refer to me as the Unabomber.

During these first scratchings, I think the goal is to try our hardest not to think. I’ll play loud music on my headphones if necessary. I’ll do my best to avoid texts and email. I’ll beat back the inner critic with the inner Viking wielding cudgels and war hammers. Sometimes the words come flooding, sometimes they trickle. I try not to care, but focus on where I am, inside, with the story, word to word, sentence to sentence. Hook and purl. It becomes a molecular puzzle. And while there’s a geographical place you go to get your story, there’s also a psychic place you go to make your story.

Unscientifically, I think we write from a zone somewhere above the stomach and below the heart, and maybe based on a signal from Mars. You can begin to sound a little nutty talking about this, but we go to some other green room of words waiting inside us as well, to some collective unconscious. To summon sentences out of our thoughts and feelings, we fall into a kind of trembling awareness, an underwater murkiness, not a trance, not nothingness, but a liquid engagement that allows for the freedom to make associations/connections/ allusive logic rather than linear logic. What are the powerful images, metaphors, lines of dialogue?

We move toward them.

I have a relative who works in neuroscience and also writes poetry. When I asked him how he would describe the physiology of creativity, he sent me a lengthy and amazing email, using words like “supraliminal” and “phonological loop,” “visuo-spatial scratchpad” and “episodic buffer.” But what mattered most in what he wrote had to do with the necessity of shutting down certain sectors of the brain: that being creative is more about turning the brain off, than turning it on. Writing—good writing—comes from working, sometimes thoughtlessly. It comes from remembering and forgetting at the same time. (There’s a reason bills pile up, emails go unanswered, etc.) It comes from the discipline, and patience, to find inspiration, to the exclusion of all else. There’s a rich history of creators going to unusual lengths to find this creative space, to create distraction, to turn off the monkey brain.

We’re told that Steve Jobs had his best thoughts on the toilet. Flannery O’Connor tended to her pet peacocks. And even as the composer Philip Glass made avant-garde musical happenings in his 20's and 30's, he worked as a plumber.

Said Glass in a later interview: "While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. 'But you're Philip Glass! What are you doing here?' It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. 'But you are an artist,' he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”

The take-away: You have to be workman-like to be ethereal.

And even then, you can’t count on it. That is, it also kills me a little to call myself a writer, and yet each time I begin again I seem to know nothing. And I write plenty of crap, sloppy drafts, lame sentences. But if I write enough of them, if the words begin to gather, and I forgive myself long enough to experiment and make mistakes… that’s where all the energy lives, and builds, and begins its shaping work. That’s where the true freedom of creativity orders all of this chaos of research, feeling, and thought into new structures and new ways of seeing stories, or as Leslie had it yesterday, that’s how we allow other sources of light to illuminate our experience, draw our eye, bend the words.

This is the deep mystery of what we do when we write—the how of it—that I would argue isn’t so mysterious after all. Writing is everyday work. It’s a blue collar job with white collar aspirations. It’s turning wonder into words, with the materials at hand. Hours upon hours of compulsive obsessive gerrymandering, until your head and back hurts. We lose ourselves in the jungle, then return, as if after a long quest, shaggier and perhaps wiser. Doubt and hard work, that’s partly what writing is. Risk and faith, that is, too.

So, if you’re ready, it’s a bit of a pilgrim’s leap. It’s a Jonah journey; no one else can take it for you.

Old drunk Willy, the Obi-Wan of the jungle, told Elephant Bill that he would draw his pay for 10 years before earning it in the jungles of Burma. (And it turns out that Rilke, in his “Letters to a Young Poet,” warns that the writer’s apprenticeship may last the same amount of time.) But in the pages of “Elephant Bill,” we soon find Elephant Bill himself thrown smack into it, trying to control six savage elephants, realizing the intricacies of taming each with various “tricks.”

“These tricks,” he writes, “were just the result of habitual methods employed by their riders. In some cases the approach had to be made from the near side, in other cases from the off, or from in front, or behind, or when the animal was sitting, or standing. The approach to each animal had to be learned separately.”

Each elephant is a different story, requiring separate ways of thinking, coaxing, taming. In trying to tell them, the pleasures are plenty, the mysteries vast, the compulsion deep. Steinbeck says:

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.

Eventually in Burma, I had my interview with Aung San Suu Kyi. She sat in her dead father’s empty house, its wooden bones creaking in a torrential downpour. She wore a white gardenia in her hair. Haggard and beautiful, strong and morose. That’s what I remember: the darkness of her mood, and the dripping of the water as it puddled on the teak floors.

And I remember when I left her, that I was going home, never to return to U Ba Kyi’s bookstore, or his accommodating smile again. Even now, I find myself wondering: What would possess someone to risk so much, to hide all of that literature in plain sight, mimeographed out of love and purpose, stuffed inside these handmade green bindings? And how is it that we—you, me, we—might write something so worthy as to grace those communal shelves? That U Ba Kyi would risk his life to protect all those stories still makes me believe it’s worth risking some small piece of ours to try to tell them.

The post Michael Paterniti: Projecting Stories appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The Power of Storytelling international conference in Bucharest just concluded its fifth edition this month, and thanks to conference founder Cristian Lupșa, editor of the non-fiction journal Decât o Revistă and a 2014 Nieman fellow, and his colleagues, Storyboard will bring you transcripts from some of the conference’s sessions.

This October’s two-day event boasted a stellar line up of 11 speakers, mostly from North America: Pulitzer Prize-winner Jacqui Banaszynski, two time National Magazine Award winner and Esquire writer Chris Jones, bestselling author and GQ contributor Michael Paterniti, Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich, bestselling author of The Empathy Exams Leslie Jamison, San Francisco illustrator Wendy MacNaughton, Instagram superstar and Berkley School of Journalism teacher Richard Koci Hernandez, writer and book critic John Freeman, visual artist Dan Perjovschi, Romanian-born writer Carmen Bugan and German-Romanian film producer and director Alexander Nanau. You can read more about each speaker on the official The Power of Storytelling website, as well as in the News section.

This year’s event had a theme guiding each keynote and panel: a sense of place. The speakers tackled the idea of place in a story and the way it is conveyed, depicted, researched and understood. They shared stories of places visited for research and work (Paterniti, Banaszynski, MacNaughton), but also places they grew up in and places that changed their perspective on life (Jones, Perjovschi, Bugan). Outside the conference hall, audience members were challenged to debate the idea of space through photo exhibits, but also by drawing, illustrating or writing about important places in their lives.
First up is Leslie Jamison, author of the New York Times best-selling essay collection The Empathy Exams.

When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say “all kinds,” but really I mean I don’t write any kind at all. What I write is often more like memoir and journalism and criticism woven together. I write about deeply personal experiences (getting hit in the face, getting an abortion) but I also write about reality television and Bolivian silver mines and the history of artificial sweeteners. The inside of my mind doesn’t feel like a series of fenced enclosures—with public history and private experience segregated past all hope of contact—so I don’t write that way either. Hybridity doesn’t feel like intention so much as acknowledgment. Everything feels connected; I let it stay that way.

Everything exterior to me is metabolized by my particular interiority—how can I represent that process of digestion? I don’t show up for any encounter—as a journalist or a critic or a mother or a traveler—without the baggage of myself. I bring my private “I” into other modes of writing—reportage or criticism—because I’m already there, because I’m fascinated by the ways personal experience connects to larger histories, and because I want my writing to matter to the people who read it—people who are, by definition, not me. Which raises one of the crucial questions of autobiographical writing: How can the confession of personal experience create something that resonates beyond itself?

When I talk about writing essays that resonate beyond the personal, I don’t mean that personal material isn’t sufficient. Of course it is. Or, it can be. If you honor the complexity of your own life—if you grant us entry into moments that hold shame or hurt or heat, and if you’re willing to follow that heat, to feel out where all the small fires burn, then your readers will trust you. They’ll find flashes of themselves. “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles,” Emerson wrote. “Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related.”

I believe that personal experience is infinite, but I also believe in different kinds of infinity: as mathematician Georg Cantor proved in the 1800s, there are many different infinities—there’s an infinity between zero and one, and another one that counts everything beyond. Both ranges are endless, but they map different terrains.

I’m interested in essays that follow the infinitude of a private life toward the infinitude of public experience. I’m wary of seeking this resonance by extracting some easy moral from the grit and complication of personal particularity: love hurts, time heals, always look on the bright side. Instead, I’m drawn to essays that allow the messy threads of grief or incomprehension to remain ragged, to direct our gazes outward.

In “The White Album,” Joan Didion connects her own nervous breakdown to the cultural disorder around her: the arrest of Huey Newton, the unfolding of the Manson murder trials, what she calls an “authentically senseless chain of correspondences.” She makes links but she refuses to flatten these links into an easy moral; she wants them to remain provocative but “senseless.” In “Upon This Rock,” John Jeremiah Sullivan confesses his own religious background partway through an ostensibly journalistic account of a Christian rock concert. In “No Man’s Land,” Eula Biss positions a personal account of her own Chicago neighborhood inside several larger contexts: the history of the American frontier and the troubled racial politics of urban spaces. I was on a panel with Eula last year and she offered a beautiful account of why her writing brought private experience into dialogue with more public topics. “Haven’t I lived in history?” she asked. “And hasn’t history lived in me?”

In my own essay, “The Empathy Exams,” I tell several personal stories—an abortion, a failed heart surgery—inside a broader inquiry into the terms of empathy itself: What does it consist of? Can it be taught? I write about my work as a medical actor—following diagnostic scripts to act out various disorders—and I write about falling in love and drinking too much wine and crying on the phone, these “personal” things, but I also write about a neuroscientist who uses fMRI scans to figure out which parts of our brains light up when we feel for other people. I quote scientific studies and an 18th-century moral philosopher; I don’t offer them as intellectual accessories so much as I deploy them as tools: How can these other sources of light illuminate my own story better? How can my own story specify these abstract inquiries?

This is one of the central imperatives of combining personal material with history or criticism or reportage: Each thread must do some work that isn’t being done by another; that can’t be done by another. Scientific studies show the magnetic signature of empathy; my own life shows the perpetual mess of how it plays out. Sometimes I imagine history and science and memory are puppets, and I’m pushing them onto the stage of my questions and asking them to have a conversation—to share their knowledge, to argue with each other. It’s a lab experiment: What explosions are uniquely possible in combination?

We live in an era of increasing self-exposure: We parade our babies on Facebook; we flaunt our witticisms on Twitter; we turn our pancake brunches into still lifes on Instagram. At this point, the indignant backlash has become as familiar as the exposure itself: We parade our babies on Facebook! We flaunt our witticisms on Twitter! We spare no sepia filter for our syrup!

Now that amateur autobiography and its detractors are everywhere, autobiographical writers are increasingly invested in defining and defending the value of their work. How can it escape the gravitational pull of solipsism? For a growing number of essayists, memoirists, and other wielders of the unwieldy “I,” confessional has become an unwelcome label—an implicit accusation of excessive self-absorption, of writing not just about oneself but for oneself.

“What might seem ‘confessional’ from the outside is just an arrangement of facts,” the writer Charles D’Ambrosio says of his essays about—among other things—the suicide of one brother and the attempted suicide of another. “ ‘Confessional’ is not a good descriptor of my work,” insists Chris Kraus, best known for a book, I Love Dick, about the unrequited obsession of a character named Chris Kraus. “ ‘Confessional’ of what? Personal confessions? There’s a great line from … [Gilles] Deleuze: Life is not personal.” The essayist Meghan Daum, known for her unapologetic candor, resists the term as well. “I don’t confess in my work,” she says, “because to me that implies that you’re dumping all your guilt and sins on the page and asking the reader to forgive you.” The label can also imply a failure of craft. “Confessions are not processed or analysed,” she continues, “they’re told in a moment of desperation.” Instead, Daum calls her personal revelations “events recounted in the service of ideas.”

Alissa Wilkinson proposes that we consider the word “confessional” as we think about the value of personal writing:

“In writing workshops, students … always bring up the same questions first: ‘Why should anyone care about my story? What gives me the right to write it down for someone else to read?’ In the midst of helping them find the answers, I’ve come to believe the ‘confession’ terminology, borrowed as it is from religious practice, is problematic. What is confession for, really? Why do we read it? Why do we write it? And is there a word that better captures what we’re doing?

When we say “confession,” the word can imply guilt—but personal experience isn’t something we’re guilty of—or guilty for sharing. I still remember the day my cousin—a sixth-grade teacher—taught me the sign for overshare: arms in an “O” above her head. All her students were doing it, she said. That sense of shame stuck with me—the embarrassment of exposing too much. Is it embarrassing to overshare because you are making yourself too vulnerable? Asking for too much? Too much of what? Sympathy? Attention? Forgiveness? Are you necessarily asking for anything at all?

Wilkinson writes: “Perhaps it’s not just that ‘confessional’ has taken on a bad timbre; maybe it was never the right metaphor to draw from religion at all. We sometimes receive absolution from our personal writing, but we are doing more than that.”

What are we doing, then, when we share ourselves in our work? What’s it good for?

Five years ago, in a book called Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, the writer David Shields articulated an anti-confessional notion of self-disclosure as a means of pursuing conceptual insight: “What I believe about memoir is that you just happen to be using the nuts and bolts of your own life to illustrate your vision.” His recent book—I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, co-authored with a former student, Caleb Powell—experiments with the machinery these “nuts and bolts” might build. It’s an edited transcript of an intimate argument spanning a long weekend that the pair spent together in a cabin in the woods in Washington State. As they wrestle over balancing life and work—the choice W. B. Yeats framed as “perfection of the life, or of the work”—their conversation is full of self-disclosure that feels less like confession and more like trial evidence. The dialogue is strategically literary; their plan is “to come out of this with a book.” In their project, they offer a vision of personal experience as something intellectually constructed rather than nakedly exposed; in their pages, revelation is a mode of self-scrutiny rather than a plea for absolution or attention.

Shields and Powell don’t take themselves too seriously. They constantly interrupt each other’s epiphanies: “By focusing so much on art,” Shields wonders, “have I closed myself off so completely from—” But Powell stops him before he can finish his question. Their fractured back-and-forth implies that fruitful inquiry is provisional and open-ended, that epiphanies are most useful when challenged. At the same time, the rawness of their conversation—its friction, its banter, its splay—has been carefully sculpted. Its shagginess is calculated: “We’ll cut from live moment to live moment,” Shields declares, and after confronting Powell about his drinking, he acknowledges, “I’m doing this partly to get ‘a moment.’ ” The production of such “moments” is an effect Shields anticipated in Reality Hunger. “At once desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice, I know all the moments are ‘moments’: staged and theatrical, shaped and thematized.” In calling attention to its process, their conversation offers itself as unprocessed; admitting that it’s been constructed guarantees another sort of authenticity. “It’s staged,” Powell says, “but it can’t be fake.”

The premise of the book could easily play as straight farce: two self-involved and argumentative men argue with each other about … themselves. Often in a hot tub. But what unfolds is actually quite gripping, and they’re well aware of the farcical qualities. They approach Yeats’s “forced” choice as if they are characters in a morality play: Shields, a tenured professor whose six-figure salary comes up more than once, is “Work”; Powell, a stay-at-home dad whose writing career has never gotten off the ground, is “Life.” All along, their discussion of lofty questions (What is the purpose of writing? Can art make the world better?) is punctuated by the banalities of two men on vacation. They watch My Dinner With Andre, and Powell “snore[s] through all the major epiphanies.” On a hike through the woods, they’re talking about a weeping widow in Kabul when suddenly the scenery intervenes: “Hey,” Powell says, “this is a nice waterfall.”

There’s a blunt insistence to these juxtapositions—we live in a world of widows and waterfalls, deal with it—that’s echoed by the unsentimental delivery of material that might feel decidedly confessional in another book. When these men offer personal disclosures, they aren’t atoning, or looking for pity from each other—or from us. What they’re up to is something more like D’Ambrosio’s “arrangement of facts.” They’re sniffing around for clues as they pursue their larger questions. Powell tells Shields about one of his wife’s miscarriages and her gay ex-husband; Shields discusses his daughter’s body-image issues and describes fighting with his wife about whether to have a second child. These aren’t sob stories milked for emotional impact; they’re exhibits in service of debates: What aspects of life (a bigger family, marital stability) does the artist sacrifice for his work?

Not only do we witness personal experiences conscripted into intellectual work; we witness these disclosures getting heard and processed. In the end, the form of the book is more illuminating than any resolution the authors find to their central conflict. Shields and Powell offer a different vision of how the confessional might play out: Rather than baring their psychic flesh for the sake of exposure and intimacy, they are excavating complexities inside their experiences.

“Art can serve people,” Shields declares. “Basically, the royal road to salvation, for me, lies through an artist saying very uncompromising things about himself. And through reading that relentless investigation, the reader will understand something surprising about himself.” This notion of investigation offers an alternative to confession. Its goal isn’t sympathy or forgiveness. Life is not personal. Life is evidence. It’s fodder for argument. To put the “I” to work this way invites a different intimacy—not voyeuristic communion but collaborative inquiry, author and reader facing the same questions from inside their inevitably messy lives.

When I published a collection of “confessional” essays last year, full of personal material (an abortion, heart surgery, getting punched in the face by a stranger)—my confessions elicited responses. They coaxed chorus like a brushfire. I started to feel like confession could be the opposite of solipsism. Indeed, I found myself becoming an unwitting confessor to countless strangers: I heard from a woman with chronic headaches, a man struggling with the aftermath of being circumcised at 18, a woman dealing with the death of her pet chicken, a high school senior trying to process her best friend’s eating disorder, a homeless substitute teacher in Minneapolis, a neurologist trying to stay on the career track after multiple medical leaves of absence. I heard from doctors who’d given the book to their medical students; medical students who’d given it to their professors. I heard from a preacher who’d used it in his Good Friday sermon. I heard from a girl who’d just moved her whole life out of her boyfriend’s apartment, another girl who’d decided—after reading one of my essays about gender and pain—not to sleep with a guy who didn’t love her. It secretly pleased me, imagining an army of angry men rising to accuse me of emptying their beds: You’ve got to stop writing these essays!

I loved seeing the way my words travelled beyond the pages and became about so much more than what I’d lived, or what I’d felt. My writing was like a grown up child suddenly taking up residence in all sorts of strange places and sending back photos.

If the definition of solipsism is “a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing,” then—it seemed—little could push back against solipsism more forcefully than personal writing gone public.

I’ve felt this as a reader as well, encountering personal narratives whose revelations felt more like forking paths than private cloisters. In The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit places a deeply personal narrative—reckoning with her mother’s dementia, with the longer arc of their tumultuous relationship—inside a broader constellation of stories, Inuit myths, scientific inquiries, tales of heroes, and monsters and ice. She did this in order to think about how we make sense of ourselves by turning our lives into narratives—how we think about recovering from trauma, how we damage each other and how we console that damage. When I read Solnit’s book—deeply personal, in so many ways—I didn’t feel as if it was the product of a self that didn’t know anything beyond itself—I felt as if it was the product of a self that somehow, miraculously, knew me as well, or at least knew about things that included me.

I first read Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face—a memoir about her childhood illness and subsequent disfigurement—when I was recovering from major jaw surgery, and I felt the urge to shout “Amen!” on nearly every page. Her willingness to linger inside trauma—to excavate more meaning rather than yielding to the sense that she had dwelled too long—felt less like self-involvement and more like a gift. I didn’t feel excluded; I felt my whole life summoned into the narrative. And as an author, in turn, I was summoned into the lives of those who had read me.

“The beautiful thing about testimonies at their best,” Alissa Wilkinson writes in her piece on the so-called confessional form, “is they’re not meant to establish the speaker in a power relationship with the listener. Rather, they’re an act of humility. Here is my life, the testimony-giver says. Please find in it your own path toward assurance. And please know that after today, I will go on living; this is not the end of the story.

“Writers of personal narrative do the same thing. As I tell my skeptical students, you’re here to write down what happened to you in a way that helps your reader put some words to their lives.”

I often think of the subject of an essay as something like a courtyard full of questions—questions about grief, or longing, or memory, or empathy. Writing means walking a furious labyrinthine path in order to peer at them from every possible direction. Every mode of inquiry—history, memoir, criticism—is a doorway that opens onto this courtyard from a different angle. Each glance offers some gift: the pages of a medical acting script, or the humming heart of an fMRI scanner; the grainy resolution of old photographs or the tiny time-machines of old text messages. You can gaze down on the past from the obstructed aerial view of retrospection, or you can gaze up from a hospital table, the folds of a paper gown crinkling underneath the goose bumps on your arms. That’s the thrill of pushing the personal essay beyond itself: The electricity created between erudition and flesh is something fierce. You can move from the rigors of scientific inquiry to the pale vulnerability of an IV piercing a vein. You can travel that distance in a sentence—if curiosity demands it, if the sentiment can hold it.

When you’re lying on a hospital gurney, it can feel like there is nothing else in the world—nothing but your fear, or your chill, or the promise of anesthesia, or the shadows of the surgeons who are about to cut you open. It can feel that way—and that feeling is a truth, but what it believes isn’t true at all: because you’re not the only thing in the world—the only person who has ever hurt, the only person who has ever worn a paper gown. In truth, there is a whole world beyond you, in that moment and always—a whole world of other hurting bodies, of surgeons and their training; there’s a whole world of hearts, heart anatomies and heart myths, hearts transplanted and broken. There is so much outside the false cloister of private experience; and when you write, you do the work of connecting that terrible privacy to everything beyond it.

Parts of this speech were adapted from the following pieces:
“Enough About Me,” The Atlantic
“How to Write a Personal Essay,” Publishers Weekly
“Confessional Writing Is Not Self-Indulgent,” The Guardian

The post Leslie Jamison: The Possibilities of the Personal appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The post Annotation Tuesday! Chris Jones and “The Things That Carried Him” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The post “Why’s this so good?” No. 44: Robert Kurson and the blind man appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.