imagination || craft: Finding useful distance
Fairy tales, speculative nonfiction, and finding your way in by creating distance
I’ve been reading Sabrina Orah Mark’s excellent book of essays, Happily, and thinking about what she’s able to do by virtue of her main strategy in the book— weaving discussion of fairy tales into autobiographical essays. (Read Mark’s viral essay “Fuck the Bread, the Bread is Over” at The Paris Review for a sample piece.) In general, I think that rewriting the available stories is what we’re all doing all the time, both in writing and in life. But what can consciously creating a stylized, tale-like story from a personal narrative allow us to do? How can it provide a way in to sensitive material, for example?
I’d like to provide a short excerpt from my course “Writing Beyond the Known: Exploring the Possible through Speculative Nonfiction,” to further consider the effect of this strategy. (Note: I’m offering a self-guided group version of “Writing Beyond the Known” in January!)
From the course:
Rewriting the "received narratives"
One way of speculating on the meaning of our personal and cultural narratives is to recast them from a new perspective. In this approach, you might consciously think about what stories are told about you, your family, your region/race/gender/culture, and then creatively examine how you might retell that story and to what effect. For example, I could write with this general overarching idea in mind: "Many people think being southern means X, but in my experience, it has meant X +Y." Then I could think about the scenes or memories associated with these ideas and begin putting together a piece from there.
An approach related to telling family/cultural stories from a fresh perspective is to rewrite or reexamine a well-known fairy tale or myth as a way into your own material. Kate Bernheimer's essay "Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy Tale" provides an excellent discussion of how fairy tales can inform our writing. Bernheimer, a writer and a scholar of fairy tales, observes that the four qualities of fairy tales that can usefully inform our work are "flatness, abstraction, intuitive logic, and normalized magic." The notion of "flatness" is an interesting one. As she notes, we are usually taught that characters in literature should have psychological depth. Bernheimer discusses how this quality of flatness functions:
Fairy-tale characters are silhouettes, mentioned simply because they are there. They are not given many emotions—perhaps one, such as happy or sad—and they are not in psychological conflict. In a traditional fairy tale, a child who has escaped an incestuous advance does not become a grown-up neurotic. This absence of depth, this flatness, violates a technical rule writers are often taught in beginning writing classes: that a character’s psychological depth is crucial to a story. In a fairy tale, however, this flatness functions beautifully; it allows depth of response in the reader.
In making a personal narrative into a tale that has a certain quality of remove, we give readers room to respond. We give both ourselves and our readers a "way in."
There are other ways of creating useful distance (which, by the way, reminds me of Kim Addonizio’s idea of “necessary coldness” that I wrote about here). Even outside of the fairy tale form, you can find ways of writing about yourself in the third-person; experiment with a flatness of voice/diction; or even find other forms to give your essays “remove”— as in the hermit crab essay, in which an author disguises personal essay inside another form, such as an official document, a letter, or a list.
Below is an example of a hermit crab flash memoir piece that uses third person and a degree of “flatness,” from my chapbook of flash memoir and prompts, Wild Apples. (There’s also a prompt below!)
Your weekend writing assignment, should you want one: Try out the prompt above, or write a personal narrative as (or in relation to) a fairy tale!
Below are the available courses we have coming up in December. You can read more about all December/January courses here.
The Writer as Researcher , 5-week course on Wet Ink platform
Instructor: Megan Baxter
December 11th-January 20th
A five-week introduction to the techniques, tools, and use of research in creative writing, open to all genres. Through weekly lessons which include written lectures, reading, research activities, and writing prompts, this course is designed to help any writer who is embarking on a research journey.
Fall Drop-In Generative Writing Workshops (Happening TODAY— Saturday— at 1PM Eastern, if you want to jump in!)
Saturday December 2nd, 1-3PM ET (Final generative workshop of the season!)
This series of drop-in Zoom workshops wraps up with one more session on Saturday 12/2. The two-hour workshop is suitable for anyone writing short, autobiographical work (primarily poets and essayists).
$40 each, $25 for paid subscribers to this newsletter (write me for the code!)
Additionally, I am offering a course through Writers.com in December:
Write into Mystery: Writing Flash Memoir about Wonder and the Unexplained
Opens December 6, 2023 | 4 Weeks
Join me to write short passages of prose that explore the mystery woven through all of our lives: the mysterious, unexpected, or wondrous that exists in our everyday experience. Learn how to share what is strangest and most alive from your own life, and how your life-based writing can explore the connections between disparate experiences. This class runs on the Wet Ink platform. [Note: This class is similar to Approaching Mystery, which I have offered through Muse and CNF.]
$295
I love that Mark essay, I read it a couple weeks ago, but it was definitely worth a reread! And I found your "Author Bio" piece fantastic, so I think I will use that as inspiration to write my own "Author Bio" off of your prompt. Thank you for this!