"The Site of Memory," by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s essay “The Site of Memory” reminded me of the paragraph in Ray Carver’s essay in which he defends his use of poetic license in the poem he writes about his Dad. In “The Site of Memory,” Morrison walks us through the thought process that she employs when writing fiction, tracking “an image from picture to meaning to text.” She starts off by announcing her intention to create a piece of writing that conveys the kinds of emotions and memories that stem from her idea of corn on the cob. For Morrison, corn on the cob represents something much larger than just its surface existence. She describes how corn on the cob reminds her of her childhood home, her parent’s relationship, afternoon naps and being too young to distinguish weed from crop. After walking us through these associations, she describes how she intends to write in testament to all that corn on the cob represents to her. Much as Carver did in his piece, Morrison asserts her right to convey a certain kind of truth—one that will surely evoke a strong emotional response from readers—over a more “pedestrian” kind of fact-truth. I really enjoyed reading Morrison’s ideas about writing—I think that it is the human condition to feel and experience multiple kinds of truth, but I think we are often encouraged, especially in school, to only explore and articulate straightforward, “pedestrian” fact-truths in our writing. I am excited to negotiate multiple kinds of truths and employ Morrison and Carver’s techniques when writing for this class.

"Inspired Eccentricity," by bell hooks

In bell hook’s essay “Inspired Eccentricity,” we are introduced to Sarah (“Baba”) and Gus (“Daddy Gus”) Oldham, a couple whose eccentric world had a profound impact on the person hooks was to become. In terms of craft, I particularly enjoyed paragraph three; here, hooks describes both of her grandparents and sets up a comparison between the two in relation to color. On the surface, hooks is simply describing straight facts about her grandparents’ skin tones; Baba had “skin so white…she could have easily “passed” denying all traces of blackness” while Daddy Gus’ skin “looked like the color of soot from burning coal.” When I was reading this passage, however, my mind instantly jumped to the idea of a yin-yang; two opposites that complement each other perfectly so that one does not operate to its full potential without the other (demonstrated later in the text by Daddy Gus’ death). Throughout the essay, hooks does not necessarily follow through with this metaphor; however, I liked how she began her essay by setting it up so that we as readers had a framework in which we could negotiate all of the additional information about Baba and Daddy Gus she later divulged.

Another part that stuck out to me in this essay were paragraphs 22 and 23. The process that hooks describes here—how families “chart psychic genealogies that often overlook what is right before our eyes”—was extremely familiar to me. It struck me that this familiarity and the hinting at a universality of experience are what make certain personal essays so successful. Yes—we as readers are intrigued by how different other people’s stories are from our own. However, we are also searching for similarities and looking to make connections between our personal experiences and the experiences of the writer. It was particularly neat to feel connected to hooks, someone of a different race, who had a very different relationship with her parents than I do with mine, and someone who grew up in a different time period and geographical region than I did.

Susan Allen Toth's "Boyfriends"

Susan Allen Toth opens her essay “Boyfriends” on an almost desperate note, wondering if she had “magicked” her first boyfriend Peter Stone “into existence out of sheer need” (p. 130). The essay continues on to describe her and Peter’s slowly burgeoning relationship, facilitated by her conscious and calculated efforts (“I had read enough in my Seventeen about how to attract boys to know I needed to show enthusiasm about Peter’s hobbies” p. 131). Nevertheless, amid all of the awkwardness and blatant premeditation, there is something distinctly familiar and endearing in all of the scenes that she describes. She never tries to over-romanticize her interactions with Peter or apologize for any of the awkwardness between the two of them; instead, she takes it all at face value and the effect is comical, light and honest. This is especially true when she describes how, during her almost-second kiss with Peter, she panicked and licked his face instead. This part stuck out for me, not only because it provided a funny visual, but also because she wrote it so matter-of-factly and without an air of embarrassment; when we are typically bombarded by glamorized versions of first love on TV and in movies, reading Toth was really refreshing, because she touched on how un-fabulous your first relationship can, and maybe should, be.

I especially enjoyed Toth’s interjection on page 134: “Amazing as it seems now, when courting has speeded up to a freeway pace, when I wonder if a man who doesn’t try to get me to bed immediately might possibly be gay, Peter and I gave each other hours of affection without ever crossing the invisible line.” I liked how she felt comfortable interrupting her narrative in order to use her future insights to help recall and complicate a past memory. I would definitely like to play around with this technique when writing for this class.

"My Father's Life," by Raymond Carver

Ray Carver’s essay “My Father’s Life” prompted me to think a lot about the ambiguous nature of truth, and the authority that writers have to manipulate various truths to get their points across. Throughout the essay, Carver often grasps at straws when trying to describe the holes of his father’s life that he cannot fill with his own childhood recollections; he does this by either guessing (“I don’t think he dreamed much”) or validating his mother’s thoughts and elevating them to something very close to truth (“And in just a little while, it seemed—according to my mother—everybody was better off than my dad.”) We are essentially given fragments of other people’s interpretations of Clevie Raymond Carver, and while these interpretations are undoubtedly valid, they raise questions about how and by whom a person is ultimately characterized: at the end of the day, are we defined by who we think we are or by what other people think we are?

The passage that stuck out to me the most was the one in which Carver discusses the poetic license that he claimed while writing his poem, “Photograph of My Father in His Twenty Second Year.” He explains that he changes the month in which his father dies from June to October because he felt like October was, “a month appropriate to what [he] felt at the time [he] wrote the poem—a month of short days and failing light, smoke in the air, things perishing.” To him, it was more important to accurately record the truth of his feelings rather than the truth of the straight facts of his father’s death. This tension between multiple truths is something that I would like to toy with while writing for this class. After reading this piece, I think that I have a more nuanced understanding of what it means to write from personal experience; within and surrounding each experience that we have, there exist multiple, sometimes conflicting or paradoxical, truths that we will have to prioritize and negotiate in order to create the most accurate and aesthetic account of our own realities.