A Field Guide for Immersion Writing
MEMOIR, JOURNALISM,
AND TRAVEL
Robin Hemley
Contents
Acknowledgments
An Introduction to Immersion Writing:
Its Similarities and Differences from the Traditional
Memoir and Traditional Journalism
In Defense of the Vertical Pronoun
Forms of Immersion
CHAPTER ONE
Immersion Memoir
The Reenactment
The Experiment
The Infiltration
The Investigation
The Quest
Exercises
CHAPTER TWO
Immersion Journalism
The Investigation
The Reenactment
The Quest
The Experiment
The Infiltration
Exercises
CHAPTER THREE
Travel Writing
The Infiltration
The Quest
The Reenactment
The Investigation or Forensic Journey
The Experiment
Exercises
CHAPTER FOUR
Ethical and Legal Considerations
Ethics
Writing about Family and Friends
Writing about Others
Exercises
CHAPTER FIVE
Legwork
The Proposal
Magazine Proposals
A Few Words on the Interview
The Proposal Reconsidered
Exercises
Conclusion:
Say What You See
For Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Iām grateful to the following for their wise counsel and their enthusiasm for this volume. Erika Stevens initially approached me to write this book. Iām grateful to her for her enthusiasm for the idea and for nudging me to write it. Iām also grateful to Regan Huff, to whom the baton was passed; Regan was equally enthusiastic and helped me through the editing process. Likewise, Iād like to thank Dorine Jennette for her good catches, sharp insights, and enthusiasm for the book. Iād also like to thank Nicole Mitchell at The University of Georgia Press, my colleague Bonnie Sunstein for her support and recommendations, my former classmate from the Iowa Writersā Workshop, Eileen Pollack, for her expertise, Hattie Fletcher at the magazine Creative Nonfiction for her witty insights into the form, and Kate Lee at International Creative Management. Iām grateful to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for giving me the space and time I needed to kick-start this project. Finally, Iād like to express my gratitude to those busy writers who took time out of their schedules to answer the questions I put to them about their own experiences with immersion writing: Bob Cowser, Martin Goodman, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Melissa Pritchard, Joe Mackall, and Dale Maharidge.
A FIELD GUIDE FOR
IMMERSION WRITING
An Introduction to Immersion Writing
Its Similarities and Differences from the Traditional Memoir and Traditional Journalism
In Defense of the Vertical Pronoun
Every few months I read or hear of a fresh attack on the memoir. Very little excuse is needed to trigger the righteous indignation of a reviewer in the New York Times or another media outlet. A bad nightās sleep. Indigestion, perhaps. In 2009 a New York Times reviewer for the Sunday Book Review, Judith Shulevitz, observed that āthe attack on memoir [is] now a regular editorial exercise [and] dates back to the advent of journalism itselfā (November 20, 2009). Two years later, Neil Genzlinger launched his own editorial exercise of the type to which Shulevitz referred, a humorously bilious attack on the genre in which he pined for āa time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical momentā (New York Times, January 28, 2011).
Of course, Genzlinger covers his bases by including the criterion of ābrilliance.ā That pretty much gives a get-out-of-oversharing-free card to any writer he designates ābrilliant.ā Being of a similarly wistful bent, I might indulge in longing for a time when all journalists, fiction writers, and poets were of equal measure to Edward R. Murrow, Kafka, Borges, and Lorca. And I might likewise long for a time when newspapers such as the New York Times, instead of publishing screeds against memoir, werenāt ruled by the same market forces that give rise to sensational memoirs, and reviewed books by poets or gave at least as much space to fiction as nonfiction. And letās not forget those halcyon days when journalists didnāt share their opinions. Ah, the Good Old Days.
Itās not hard to take potshots at memoir. Start by saying the word. Stretch it into a kind of English drawing room parody of pronunciation. Mem-wah! Iām off to write my Mem-wahs! But a lot of the hair-trigger enmity for the memoir that engenders such āregular editorial exercisesā as Genzlingerās seems to me akin to that old vaudeville routine, āSlowly I Turned,ā in which an otherwise reasonable and mild-mannered guy goes completely bonkers in a kind of posttraumatic meltdown every time his unwitting companion says the word Cincinnati. As soon as the dreaded word is uttered, the mild-mannered guyās face turns demonic and he chants in a kind of insane drawl, āSlowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch ā¦ā completely lunatic to the point that he doesnāt even know that heās thrashing the poor guy beside him, who is wholly innocent and ignorant of the reasons heās being attacked. Memoir Dread (known more scientifically as āGenzlingerās Afflictionā) often seems triggered by something just as private and eccentric as in the comedy routine. What else would account for the disdain of an entire form of writing?
Not ANOTHER gummy wad of autobiographical drivel! We canāt stand it. Hang us from our thumbs, but donāt subject us once again to your mediocre traumas, your whiny regrets, your tawdry victimizations. You are not the most important person on the planet! (āI am!ā we might imagine such Grand Memoir Inquisitors intoning, or at least thinking privately.) Weāre tired of the Self. Of Painful Lives. (Ostensibly, this is the waggish name of a section of one London bookstore: the Painful Lives section).
Genzlinger goes so far as to suggest that ordinary people living ordinary lives should simply shut up and let the pros do their jobs. I should add that when I was in graduate school writing fiction, I shared Genzlingerās suspicion of ordinary people. Who wants to read about ordinariness? A well-known movie at the time, called Ordinary People, revealed (drum roll, please) that ordinary people have feelings and secrets and tragedies, too. Who would have thought?! Betraying a cultural certainty that this could not truly be the case, one of the presenters, in reading the nominees for best picture that year at the Oscars, renamed the film Ordinary Movie. Ordinary or not, this film from 1980 took away four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director (Robert Redford), Best Actor (Timothy Hutton) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Alvin Sargent). And no wonder. The most persistent and sacred of lies is that any family is perfect, and families go to great lengths to preserve this myth. Thatās essentially what this film was aboutāin an affluent family, one of the sons dies in an accident and the family, especially the parents, pretends it never happened. But the son, Timothy Hutton, completely messed up as a result of his familyās dysfunction (the term was not common parlance back then) sees a psychiatrist, Judd Hirsch, who heals Timothy Hutton by urging him to speak the truth, thus allowing him to win an Oscar. Okay, not quite as simple as that. Perhaps an old bout of Genzlingerās Affliction is flaring up in me.
As it turns out, a lot of people not only wanted to watch a movie about the large tragedies of small lives, but to read about them, too. And oddly, not as fiction. Memoirs by ordinary people have been with us for a long time. But in my parentsā day, they used to be known as āfirst novels.ā In the past, what we might now call a memoir was typically the writerās first work of fiction, the kind known as a roman a clef (this, too, preferably said in a British accent), or a thinly veiled autobiographical novel. It used to be great literary sport to read a novel and try to figure out who the writer was really writing about.
To me, the film Ordinary People marks a watershed in our cultural fascination with and fear of telling our dirty little secrets. Iām not claiming that the film was responsible for the steady climb in memoirs written by ordinary people, starting around that time, but rather that the film tapped into a cultural shift thatās both positive and negative in its literary ramifications. Around this time, I started noticing an unsophisticated suspicion of anything not labeled as āfactā: āI only read true stories,ā a stranger told me more than once, betraying a certain literal-mindedness in the American psyche thatās frightening. This suspicion of anything that isnāt āfactualā is its literary manifestation. In a way we have become a nation of literary fundamentalistsāmany people only care about something if they think it really truly happened. Many only watch tv if it really happened. American fiction for many years had been moving steadily toward realism, entrenching it within the academy as the only proper form of fiction. But once ordinary people started writing memoir, the idea of realism jumped the tracks. Why read fiction when nonfiction did realism better?
This seems akin to what happened to the painting world in the nineteenth century when photography was introduced. As soon as one could point a machine at a table and create a reproducable image that was far more accurate than a painting, the need for paintings to represent the empirical world mostly vanished, and what resulted was a greater move toward abstraction in painting, though of course photography didnāt restrict itself to the literal image for long, either.
When I was the editor of The Bellingham Review, a literary magazine, I received an autobiographical essay by a then-unknown writer named Meghan Daum. The essay, titled āVariations on Grief,ā at a glance seemed to be the same kind of exercise in oversharing that Genzlinger laments in his Times piece. Iām sure I even felt a shudder of dread as I began to read Daumās essay. That dread must have left me in a flash because the sensibility at play made this unlike any other grief essay Iād ever read. At the heart of the essay was not so much grief as guilt, and a kind of determination that Daum professed, to not waste her life. Her friend Brian, the subject of the essay, had been in life a spoiled and apparently vapid man who had dropped dead in his early twenties of a mysterious illness, perhaps hantavirusāand yes, his death alarmed Daum and her friends, but it also seemed oddly justified to them. Hereās how she characterized her feelings:
When he left this planet, he left me and very few others, and if those Christian alternatives to life really exist, then he must know by now that we will never be reunited. If those opposable Hās are true, then he is in Heaven for never committing any crime, and Iāll find myself in Hell one day for the spin that I have put on his death. My spin is this: I believe that he couldnāt do anything other than die. None of us who grew up with him could imagine an alternative. And the fact that he didnāt officially kill himself was enough to make all of us believe in the supernatural, or at least some kind of devilish warden hovering over our lives, whispering in our waxy ears, āDo something, or die.ā (159)
Iād like to say that Meghan Daumās voice is honest here, but is it that? It might be better to say that it seems āauthentic.ā Authenticity is nearly as slippery a term as āhonestyā when it comes to capturing experience on the page, but note that I wrote that the voice seems authentic. It works in the readerās mind to convince him or her that what s/heās getting is The Real Deal, the author herself, the inner workings of her mind. And yes, you are, in a sense, but nothing can truly capture the workings of a human mind in all its complexity. It seems authentic is as far as Iām willing to venture.
Still, authenticity, in its myriad forms, is one of the things we strive for as writers, in the form of a compelling voice that seems honest. Weāre concerned with language here, not simply the slopping down of words. The passage Iāve quoted, for all the seeming authenticity of its commentary on matters of life and death, is highly modulated and controlled. Even the phrase āopposable Hāsā feels original, confident, and clever.
Yet the New York Times review that appeared after the publication of this essay in Meghan Daumās debut collection, My Misspent Youth, used the occasion of a positive review of Daumās book to slam the genre in general. The reviewer, Louise Jarvis, opened with a shot across every memoiristās bow: āMeghan Daum is not an eccentric exhibitionist or a self-indulgent memoiristā (April 8, 2001). Iām sure Daum was glad to read that about herself. But Daum seems as eccentric to me as they come, and reveals herself to be as much of an exhibitionist as any writer when we read the modicum of self-loathing in these words toward the end of the essay, referring to a mutual friend who visited Brianās parents:
Like a good person, he sat in the living room and spoke honestly about this horrible thing that had happened. Unlike me, he saw no reason to lie. Unlike me, he wasnāt hung up on some twisted symbolism, on some mean-spirited rationalization employed to keep fear at bay, to keep grief a thing depicted in movies rather than a loss felt in oneās own flesh. (174ā75)
Remember, I published this. I donāt really think itās self-indulgent. Iād like to say itās honest, brutally so, but really, how would I know? Instead, Iād rather state that it seems to me authentic in that it shows a version of someone else who deeply resembles a version of myself that Iād rather keep hidden. In that way itās self-indulgent. It indulges a Self, but not only Daumās. Mine as well. And most likely yours. Yet, if we use the typical standards by which we bash the memoir, I think weād have to say that Meghan Daum ticks off at least a couple of those dreaded boxes:
Ordinary person? Yes.
Eccentric exhibitionist? Afraid so.
Self-indulgent? Not really, though I can imagine someone thinking her so. Sheās self-revealing, and thatās often wrongly equated with being self-absorbed or self-indulgent.
Itās not the subject that matters. Itās the execution. Above all, Daumās use of language is precise and original, and this trumps everything. In this important way, sheās by no means ordinary.
Of course there are different ways to write about or include the Self in your writing other than memoir, and this book will discuss and examine and yes, advocate for these ways in detail. Travel writers were once attacked with the same regularity as memoirists are today. From the late eighteenth century until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, travel was curtailed for most Europeans, and it wasnāt until the upheavals ended that travelers resumed the traditional circuit of Europe known as the Grand Tour. Prior to this time, Grand Tours were largely embarked upon and written about by young male aristocrats, but the 1820s and onward saw a democratization of travel, and a large number of ordinary people writing accounts of their travels for publication. Behind this democratization followed the critics who wished the ordinary people would just shut up and let their betters write the travel books. One reviewer (though, oddly, not a New York Times reviewer) complained, āIt is certainly somewhat extraordinary that of the great number of travelers sent forth by the peace from this country, with the design of recording their adventures, so few should have deviated from the most frequent routesā (quoted by Betty Hagglund in āThe āBricolageā of travel writing: a Bakhtinian reading of nineteenth-century womenās writings about Italy,ā paper presented at āTravel Writing: Practice, Pedagogy, and Theory,ā Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, February 24, 2011).
Iām not wholly unsympathetic to such criticisms. Deviation from the most frequent routes seems to me to be a fair request to make of the travel writer, the memoirist, and even the journalist. What drew this nineteenth century criticās ire, as well as Genzlingerās, and not unfairly, is that too often writers and publishers alike rely on not deviating from the most frequent routes. Itās the faddishness of the enterprise thatās worrisomeāthat a book might be published because it fits a predetermined type of book that has little value other than its familiarity to readers who want more of the same. But this is no more true of the writings of ordinary people than of the writings of the great and accomplished. How many of those people who have accomplished something ānoteworthy or [had] an extremely unusual experienceā actually write the memoirs with their famous names on them? Not many, Iād venture. The celebrity ghost-written book is at least as common as the Misery Memoir. Having led an interesting life should no more earn you the right to pen your mem-wah as having led an outwardly boring one if the writing itself lacks vigor and originality.
Itās never the ordinariness of the person we should condemn, but the ordinariness of the writing, of the vision itself. Now, no one disputes the right of an ordinary person to write a travel book. We do not require that only aristocrats write travel memoirs (though of course travel itself is still the privilege of the relatively well-to-do).
Old-school journalists were taught to eschew that pesky I in favor of a more āobjectiveā voice. But as most of us know in this postmodern age, thereās no such thing as objectivity. Everyone has a unique perspective, and even if you think youāre being objective when you report, say, from a war zone, you have blind spots. There are things you ignore, you forget, or you donāt notice due to your own cultural baggage and belief systems. In anthropology, itās known as confirmation bias, the tendency to notice those things that confirm your beliefs and ignore those that donāt, and everyone is susceptible to it.
Of course, not all journalists express hostility toward the first personāor what I once heard waggishly referred to as āthe vertical pronounāāor even memoirs. Nearly every journalist Iāve met has a memoir in his or her drawer. While journalists are traditionally told to avoid the first person, I have met many a journalist who feels confined and oppressed by the inability to acknowledge the existence of the self while ...