Narrative and Memory

We need stories.

“Narrative, one of the brain’s key strategies, helps engrave memory,” writes Diane Ackerman in An Alchemy of Mind.

She writes about a memory study in which Cornell psychologist Ulric Neisser surveyed students in San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Atlanta. The students were asked about the earthquake in California in 1989.

He followed up with them a year and a half later and discovered the California students were better able to recall the events of the earthquake better than the others surveyed. Essential to the California students’ recall were stories — the California students talked about the quake.

Stories were essential to memory.

Booking Through Thursday: The Information

Here’s this week’s Booking Through Thursday:

What’s the most informative book you’ve read recently?

That would have to be David Michael Kaplan’s treatise on revision, simply titled Revision. It’s the most detailed approach I’ve ever read on the subject of revision. 

I’ve just started reading Diane Ackerman’s An Alchemy of Mind, which is an account of the human brain/mind and how it works. I’m pretty sure I’ll know my own mind better once I finish reading it.

Booking Through Thursday: Inspired Reading

This week’s Booking Through Thursday question:

Q: Since “Inspiration” is (or should) the theme this week . . . what is your reading inspired by?

A: For more than two years now, a large part of my reading has been inspired by Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, which inspired my own 100-novels reading project.  Many of the novels I’ve been reading are ones that Smiley read for the book.

Other novels on that list have come from other reading lists. Still others, suggestions from readers, friends and colleagues (there are quite a few Texas writers on the list because of a friend and former colleague inspiring me to read the likes of Edwin “Bud” Shrake and Stephen Harrigan; of course, my favorite Texas writer is Larry McMurtry, and he’s on the list, too).

Some of the novels I’ve read — Karen Lee Boren‘s Girls in Peril,  for instance — were finds while browsing the bookstore.

Favorite recent reads — Evacuation Plan and Janeology — were blog surfing finds.

As for nonfiction, one of my favorite relative recent reads was Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife. I read Ackerman’s A Natural History of Love a few years ago while researching a feature on Valentine’s Day, and was inspired to read more of her work because of her combination of excellent prose and great research.

But my readings in nonfiction tend to follow the same inspiration as fiction: I’ve read about it, heard about it, or it just looked interesting.

So there it is . . . my inspiration.

Book Review: In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction

In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction
Edited by Lee Gutkind
W. W. Norton, 2005
440 pages, $15.95

In my newspaper days, recorded in my reporter’s notebooks was every story’s genesis. Almost daily I set out from the newsroom, notebook in hand, ready to write stories of cross-pulling preacher-bikers, social club ladies, native plant gardeners, and an ex Hanoi Hilton POW, all people and experiences I thought I might one day weave into my grapplings with fiction.

A stack of weathered, worn notebooks, an image that evokes stories ready to be told. It’s the image on the cover of In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, a selection of 25 essays from the first 10 years of the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction founded by Lee Gutkind, the “Godfather behind creative nonfiction.”

Each piece in the collection is representative of the genre, a sort of nebulously-monikered genre that encompasses almost every form of nonfiction: personal essay, traditional reflective essays, and New Journalism or literary journalism, reportage that largely relies on narrative to get its information and ideas across.

These pieces, each in their own way, seem to capture the spirit of the journal Gutkind founded, which he reports in his introduction to the collection is a mix of “good old-fashioned reporting — facts, plus story and reflection or contemplation.” Like journalists — and some as Mark Bowden are journalists — practitioners of creative nonfiction take out their notebooks and collect interviews and gather other documentation and report their stories, but they immerse themselves in the worlds of meth addicts who stumble upon a cache of money, as Bowden does, or report and reflect upon their experience of becoming a father, as Phillip Lopate does.

These essays are not works of confessional “navel gazers,” as Gutkind reports James Wolcott infamously quipped in Vanity Fair magazine. They are explorations into the world, engaging the reader, as writers always have, seeking out, as Gutkind himself has sought as a writer,  “other lifestyles, other professions, and the patchwork of prejudices and kindness that make some people different from others.” The pieces take us deeper into the world to discover the play of language, as Diane Ackerman does, or provide insight into the workings of  the brain and mind and whether there is a separation between the concept of the “mind” and the physical brain, as Floyd Skloot does.

Fall Into Reading

There really isn’t anything like a list to make you feel as if you’re writing: Some writers make a habit of listing. (For some reason I’m thinking of Anne Beattie, but I could be wrong.) Tonight, while blog trolling, I found a link to Fall Into Reading 2008, and, so I’ve decided to participate (there’s the possibility of prizes).

My list is short — these days I tend to read slowly, and there some thick books on the list as well — and it’s apt to change, especially with the Texas Book Festival coming up in November (Nov. 1-2, to be exact). I never know what treasures I’ll wind up with there. Last year it was Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife, which was the spur that dug in the urge to write nonfiction again.

OK, so here’s the list, already:

1. Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life by Rebecca Lawton and Jordan Rosenfeld

I’m sort of cheating here because I’m in the process of reading this book now, but won’t be finished for at least a few more weeks. There are writing exercises involved so the reading is slow, but pleasant.

2. Swimming in the Volcano by Bob Shacochis

I bought this book about 3-4 years ago when, at the same time, I was encountering and reading a lot of Shacochis’s journalism, mostly in Harper’s. I also liked the title, which I thought was an allusion to the novel Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, a book I started reading but never finished. I learned about Lowry in Donald W. Goodwin’s Alcohol and the Writer, an insightful exploration of the use and abuse of alcohol by writers. Though booze wasted a lot of writer’s lives (think Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner) Goodwin isn’t necessarily condemning alcohol’s use: he’s exploring why alcoholism seems particularly prevalent in writers.

Anyhow, my interest in Shacochis was renewed after reading an essay of his in the premiere issue of Mayborn magazine. It was a powerful piece, and now I want to tackle some of his fiction. Given that this novel is 518 pages in paperback, it’ll probably take me through October to read it.

3. In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lee Gutkind

I’m sort of cheating on this, too, because I’ve been reading the essays in this collection since at least August. Again, though, it’ll be some time toward the end of October or later that I’ll finish this book.

4. Orlando by Virginia Woolf

I should probably pick this novel up some time in November. Supposedly, I read this in graduate school.

5. Writing Past Dark by Bonnie Friedman

This will be the last on my list, because I figure I’ll pick this one up by December, and even though it’s short, it may make take some time to finish. Again, this all depends on the Texas Book Festival.