Shining a Light on the Particulars of Experience: Spotlight on Nancy McCabe's "Shapes of Stories"
Plus: Sale extended though Friday! And new dates for "Writer as Researcher"
***BACK TO SCHOOL SALE EXTENDED: Receive 10% off all offerings through September 8th with the code NOTEBOOK10 at checkout.***
Hello, writers!
Thank you for being here, and a hearty welcome to all my new followers!
I am writing with a quick email to let you know that the Back to School Sale on Muse courses is open through tomorrow (Friday September 8th) and that there are still seats available in Nancy McCabe’s 10-week course on personal essay forms, Shapes of Stories. You can learn more about the class at the link, and there are also payment plans available at checkout.
In honor of Nancy’s second time teaching this course for Muse, I wanted to share a portion of the interview I did with her in April. You can read the excerpt below, and you can read the full interview here.
A couple other announcement:
The Writer as Researcher, our new course designed and taught by Megan Baxter, has been postponed until December. The class will now run December 11, 2023-January 20, 2024, with no new lesson the week of December 25th. (So, five weeks of lessons spread out over six weeks.) If you were interested, but September wasn’t the right time for you, consider the new dates!
Stay tuned also for a couple new course listings in the next couple weeks: a self-guided version of Writing the Lyric Essay, to start in late October, and a special Halloween-themed generative writing workshop over Zoom!
Finally, if you don’t want to receive these sales emails but do want to receive all the other Muse with JPC posts, you can hit “unsubscribe” at the bottom of this post and uncheck the box for “Muse Offerings.” Or if you only want to receive the sales emails, you can uncheck everything else! I generally send only two sales emails a month, at most.
Many thanks to all the Muse readers, followers, and clients over these past few years. We are excited to keep growing and offering you useful courses, creative inspiration, and community!
Joanna
Excerpt from April 2023 interview with Nancy McCabe
Nancy McCabe is the author of the connected hermit crab and narrative essays Can This Marriage Be Saved? and the memoir From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood, in addition to four previous books. Her debut YA novel Vaulting through Time is forthcoming from CatCat Books, and her debut middle-grade novel Fires Burning Underground is forthcoming from Fitzroy/Regal House. Her work has appeared in Salon, Prairie Schooner, LARB, Newsweek, Writer's Digest, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, and many others. Her work has received a Pushcart and made nine appearances on notable lists of Best American anthologies. She directs the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford and teaches in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.
JPC: Thank you for agreeing to this short interview, Nancy! I’m so happy that you’ll be teaching your ten-week course Shapes of Stories through Muse this [fall]. We are lucky to have you! I’ve been reading your memoir Can This Marriage Be Saved?, which combines hermit crab essays and more traditional narrative essays. The effect you create by approaching life material about two early relationships through these different lenses– it’s really marvelous. Deep and textured and wonderfully human. Can you discuss your experience of coming to the hermit crab essay as a way into this material?
NM: Thanks so much for doing this interview, Joanna, and for hosting my upcoming course through Muse. And thank you for your kind comments about my book. I didn't set out to write hermit crab essays. In fact, while there were examples of the form that I loved, I was worried that any I wrote would feel gimmicky. But it also seemed to me that the heart of some of my essays was the absurdity and humor of sometimes painful experience, and the hermit crab essay is a perfect container for that combination. At their best, I think hermit crab essays create a chiaroscuro effect, using contrast to bring out both the dark and the light. Borrowing other forms, like a women's magazine quiz, an instruction manual, and a school curriculum guide, gave me humorous frameworks and the opportunity to detach a little from the material—and thus to also probe and navigate the more difficult aspects of those experiences.
JPC: One essay in Can This Marriage Be Saved? describes how the crimes of the BTK killer hung over your hometown of Wichita as you were coming of age, and you interweave that discussion with some harrowing material about being sexually harassed by a group of boys when you were in 8th grade and how you had no language for what was happening and really no recourse, as the adults around you either didn’t comprehend or didn’t care about what was happening to you.
I really connected with something you said about how even in the Me Too era, some people don’t take seriously these kinds of traumatic experiences if they don’t involve rape. What was the process of writing this essay like for you? Did you have to wait until a certain point in your life before you felt you were ready to approach the subject?
NM: This was a difficult essay to figure out how to write. It was about an experience that according to our culture at the time, at least, should not have been a big deal, and yet it profoundly influenced me. Still, it was a few years before I could really tackle it.
When I was in my late twenties, a man broke into my bedroom in the middle of the night and shone a flashlight in my eyes until I woke. I screamed, he ran, and others' reaction was relief that I hadn't been "hurt." Sure, it could have been worse—yet being awakened in the night like that felt like such a violation. I've written about this experience elsewhere (most recently ACM). Writing about that experience, and working for two rape crisis centers, and talking to lots of women showed me that unfortunately my own stories—including the ones about my teenage years--were not unique. Everyone had stories. They were often tinged with embarrassment and shame, things we didn't really talk about because for some reason we felt responsible for our own victimization. It felt like telling my own stories was a radical act, a way of refusing these cultural conceptions of experience.
So many women have commented on the essay you mention, "Facts about the Moon," about the kinds of violations we take seriously (a serial killer on the loose) and those we don't (that small daily prevalence and acceptance of this sort of harassment in school). So many readers have said things like, "Something like this happened to me, but I didn't know what to call it." There are people out there inclined to downplay such experiences, but ultimately, those people aren't the audience I was writing for. I was more interested in connecting to those who are sorting through the impact of their own. I was more interested in the way we offer each other permission when we talk openly. We shine a light on the particulars of our experience as a way to shine a light on the things that connect us, that reassure us that we're not alone.
I think we know when we're ready to write about those difficult experiences. We might put our toe in the water and then yank it right back out—or we might discover that we're ready to immerse ourselves. I think we have to be attuned to our bodies' signals and honor those. But what my students and mentees have shown me over and over is that people are often very ready to do the writing, but tend to be more nervous about sharing that writing with an audience. I think it's important to just write what we need to write, understanding that we don't have to ever show it to anyone, we don't have to publish it, we don't have to do anything with it. But sometimes in the process we work through the material enough that we discover we're ready to share it with others.