Cross-genre work

Memoir, art, poetry, and fiction writing

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I did not intend to take a prolonged hiatus from writing here, but for the past several months I found myself plunged more single-mindedly into one project—the novel—than I’ve ever been in the past. This was largely an external exposition, courtesy of a thesis deadline in an MFA program, but it felt less like an imposition and more like I’d been swimming along, and here was a wave surging up behind me, gathering force to push me the rest of the way. There was a kind of freedom in succumbing to this kind of focus, in saying no to tempting distractions in order to keep my mind in the world of the novel, in turning even my reading towards the thesis, as I reread books from the list I’d compiled for the defense.

But now the thesis is drafted, defended, and—aside from the more onerous task of formatting and proofreading it to submit to the graduate school—done. For the time being, anyway—it’s far from being actually done, but it’s in much need of a little space before the long process of rewriting begins.

And so, having laid the novel aside, I’m itching to turn, not just to other pieces of fiction writing, but to other genres entirely.

And here’s the crack, already, in my description of focused novel writing, because while I’ve let my other fiction writing this semester fall to the wayside—neglecting short stories I was working on last semester, steadfastly avoiding temptations to begin any new work—I have been writing outside the novel, just a little, thanks to a creative nonfiction class this semester, on something called the short-form memoir.

Short-form memoir

When I registered for the short-form memoir class, I did so mostly because I had no prior experience in CNF and thought it might benefit my teaching. I also enjoy reading memoir (as my reading from last year clearly shows) and figured it would be interesting to discuss it from a craft perspective. But my main encounters with memoir had been in book-length form. I had no interest in writing a book about my own life, and so I assumed the writing I’d do for the class would largely be an exercise in exploring the genre, rather than something I’d have any desire to continue doing beyond the course itself.

The short-form memoir, however, surprised me. As a genre, it feels like something between poetry and prose, story and vignette, essay and not-an-essay. We are reading pieces from the anthology Short Takes, most of which are around 2-5 pages in length, all varied in style, form, and content. The newness of the form, which was not only unlike what I’d written before but also unlike what I typically read, made it so that when I started writing my own pieces, they didn’t detract from my novel-writing in the same way that working on short stories did last semester. They tapped into a separate well than the one I draw from for fiction, pulling from memory rather than asking me to create from whole cloth. And I then I fell in love with the genre itself—I didn’t just enjoy the play of experimenting in a new form, I found myself drawn to the narrowness of these pieces, which could zoom into a single moment or scene of one’s life with precision, and then explore them with the narrative tools of prose, the imagistic and associative techniques of poetry.

The course itself is a mixtures of poets and prose writers, which contributes to the sense that we’re crossing genre boundaries in this space. This is rarety for many MFA programs, and a first for me in mine. Outside of the pedagogy classes we took in our first year, all of my classes have been siloed off: fiction writers here, poetry writers there. While the separation of genres allows us to dive deeply into the nuances of our respective genres, the crossing of our two genres in the class has been surprising and generative. There is something deeply satisfying in the range of work both types of writers produce. We are responding to the same prompts, posed by the professor, but the forms we take, and the subjects we cover, couldn’t be more different. I’ve found myself creatively opened up in ways I haven’t been in months—not just from the course readings, but from the work of my classmates too.

And so, with the novel at a resting point, I feel a desire to plunge more deeply into nonfiction, to revise the pieces I started, to read both short-form and long-form memoir.

I’m curious, too, what it will be like to return to fiction through the lens of memoir. I’ve long struggled with containing my short stories, joking that I should have the phrase It should be a novel printed on a t-shirt, as the most common workshop feedback I received during my first semester of the MFA. The short memoir form has given me not only an appreciation for brevity, but a sense of how, formally, to do obtain this in a piece—particularly with respect to character. In fiction, characters are often what take me out of the realm of short story and into the novel—I want to give them the space to develop, and I often don’t think the short story gives enough room to really know the depth of a character in the way that I want to. But in the memoir pieces this semester, I’ve started to think about character differently. Our professor is fond of referring to brief, memorable individuals as “cameo characters,” and I realized that, in life, when I tell an anecdote aloud, I’m accustomed to describing myself and people I know in short bursts. There’s a kind of pleasure in the brief and partial glance, in the knowledge that the portrait one gives is incomplete but standing in for a person with a longer history, a greater depth.

In writing the memoir pieces, this is often my favorite bit—the quick sentence of characterizing detail, paired with the narrator’s introspection. I like the way that memory and the short form forces you to be spare. And so I’m eager to try this in flash fiction, to see if I can’t characterize with the same kind of economy there, if I can’t gesture towards depth in a fictional character with the same kind of minimal detail.

The other piece that I’ve loved about memoir writing is its focus on memory, which is at the root of the genre’s name. It’s an inherently meta genre, one that reflects back on the nature of its own creation, questioning the accuracy of details, calling attention to the fuzziness of the past, acknowledging competing narratives, recognizing where the truth continues to elude you.

And so here is the second crack in my description of single-minded novel-writing these past few months: The memoir class has already made its way outside its genre bounds, into my fiction by informing how I wrote portions of the novel. I belatedly added Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir to the list of books for the thesis defense, as I found myself thinking about the role that memory played in the novel, eventually rewroting the beginning and middle and weaving in pieces that echoed Karr’s descriptions about the complicated task of excavating the past.

There are other translatable lessons from memoir that apply to fiction—on structure, form, imagery, scene—but the broader point is simply that (in my minimal experience this semester), memoir has coexisted well alongside fiction, and is already starting to flow back into it.

Ekphrastic poetry

Immediately after I turned in the thesis, I hopped over to two other genres: art and poetry. Art to look at, poetry to write. The Toledo Museum of Art runs an ekphrastic poetry contest each year, where they select works of art for people to respond to in poems. I went to listen to the award winners read last year—including one by my professor, Abigail Cloud, and another by my classmate, Mary Simmons.¹ Poetry is not my primary genre, but it is a generative one for me, often in a kind of “telephone game” kind of way. I like to go to art galleries, freewrite poems in front of paintings or sculptures, and occasionally use the poems as entry points for fiction—or simply as a way to get the creative wheels turning again after a period of stasis.

So I looked through the images in their list,² landed on Věra Lišková’s “Glass,” and spent the next several days drafting a poem, first in my notebook, then on scratch paper sitting at the host station during a slow shift at the brewery, before typing it up and continuing to edit on my computer. It had been a while since I’d really worked on a poem like this, and though I’m attentive to language in my prose, there’s a weighing of word choice that happens with a poem in a way that simply doesn’t in a story, even a short memoir or flash piece. For the sake of the prompt, I followed the museum’s guidelines and limited myself to twenty-five lines, so each word mattered quite a bit. I’d fiddle with an adjective or noun first for meaning, then for sound, then for rhythm. I’d realize I’d repeated a word, change it again.

I’m not a poet, but I like poetry—I care about getting the poem as good as I can get it, as close to what I want to say, as well-crafted as I can. But as a prose writer, I also care about what the practice of working in poetry will do for my fiction. Writing poetry is a way of attuning myself to language and image, but also to concept and association, so that when I come back to story, I can move through it differently.

I have to imagine there are similar benefits for poets spending time in the world of fiction and prose. Or for any type of writer—or creative artist—spending time in another genre. It’s a way of stepping outside the work, of leaving it for a time, but also of finding a way back into it.

1. The links go to the text of Abby and Mary’s poems, but you can see the artwork they are based on at the previous link or by clicking here: https://toledomuseum.org/learn/poetry-competition/discover-inspire-create-tma-poetry-prize-contest-winners.

2. The contest is closed, but the images are still good prompts. And if you live in Northwest Ohio or Southeast Michigan, I’d recommend checking it out next year.