The challenge of Creative Nonfiction is taking the truth that you have, the truth as you know it, and making a story from it. You have to be so fascinated and yet detached from it so that you don’t mind the story the truth becomes. I use the word “detached” because I think in order for a story to have urgency, you must be willing to knock that truth around a little (or, a lot). That’s difficult to do when you’re attached to the truth.
For example, I like to tell a story about something I did in college that has a great punchline. However, on paper, the story as I tell it in all its truth, never worked. That is, until I wrote the story in third person. This allowed me to make a character of myself, and consequently, find more layers of truth that I hadn’t seen when I was telling the story in first person. When I wrote about myself using “she,” I was free to both put her through the wash, and also give her grace I rarely allow myself. In this instance, writing a story from the truth opened up new possibilities. I suppose the story I wrote broke the glass ceiling I’d assumed was unbreakable.
No matter what or who I am writing about, I am always after the story. It is the way I present the truth, but in doing so, I always learn more than when I first began. This week Coffee+Crumbs, and Art House America will run a chapter from The Teacher Diaries called, “Where’s My Daughter? Call Her Forth.” In it, I write about some of my mom’s friends and how they nurtured and shaped who I am and how I live. The star of the chapter is Mrs. Carlson.
Mrs. Carlson has some of the best one-liners that ever existed. My mom would come home from hanging out with her and attempt to repeat what she’d said, and it would take a good five minutes because my mom was laughing so hard. It would be worth it to wait it out while my mom gasped for air between guffaws. Mrs. Carlson’s remarks and observations are the equivalent of fresh out of the oven chocolate chip cookies, or the first sip of brewed coffee before it’s had time to get all burned in the carafe, or a cake donut with rainbow sprinkles, or pulling on your favorite jeans straight from the dryer. That is, they are perfection.
Part of what makes her one-liners funny is the fact that Mrs. Carlson is beautiful. She is stylish and confident, and I guess in my teenage, “I know everything about everything” years, I figured a woman couldn’t be both hilarious and beautiful. I was a donkey, I realize this, but this is a chapter about some of the women who brought me forth, who helped find me, who broke the glass ceiling I’d assumed was unbreakable, and who gave me the imagination to believe I could continue breaking glass. Mrs. Carlson is one of those people.
I tried to capture that in this chapter by combining the beautiful and the profane together. That’s why I chose to use the word, “dainty” in the same line as the word, “ass.” Someone pulling her gloves off daintily while asking if we are ready to laugh our assess off on a cold, quiet, Christmas evening, is hilarious.
I was a mama two months in. I was exhausted and overwhelmed. I felt like a shadow of myself but here comes Mrs. Carlson, and here is my mom collaborating with her, and I am between these two pillars gaining strength from their effervescence and humor.
My mom and her friends taught me so much just be being themselves. Their laughter, their storytelling, their decisions and actions to move toward what they love: books and rollerblading, and piling into a caravan on a Tuesday night to drive downtown to hear the Chicago Symphony, and casually walking to the boutique shoe store next to Tilly’s in Lincoln Park to see about a red pair of cowboy boots. (“Because, why not?”)
My mom and her friends were wild and they were sophisticated. They were ridiculous and they were intelligent. They worked under glass ceilings, but they had no problems shattering them, either. It was their ability to resist definition of what a woman is or should be; what she should or shouldn’t feel that I wanted to express in this chapter.
That is the truth, and I have no problem with the story it has become.
Donna says
Great piece, Callie! Switching to the third person can feel like downing a magic potion, or donning a fabulous invisibility cloak!
sonya says
oh my gosh. Even how you tell the story of the story inspires me.