Tayari's Blog: Just Because You Haven't Heard Of It...
Posted by TayariJones on March 2, 2008 03:54 PM
Filed under
Writing
Rule #1 for teaching creative writing: Just because you haven't heard of it, doesn't mean it's not true.
A few years back, I taught a one-week workshop in California. One of my students, a woman in her sixties, brought in a manuscript that I found to be a little bit hard to believe. It was a strange experience. She was a beginning writer, so the work had a lot of the hallmarks of a newbie just starting out-- a lot of extra words, clunky transitions, etc. On the other hand, there was a sort of passion on the page and the author herself was nervous in workshop-- signs that point to fiction that borders on autobiography. But at the same time, the story was just sort of far-fetched. I didn't know what to make of it.
Since I could tell that the author has put her whole heart on the page, I led the class discussion with kid gloves. The story was about a young girl who was sent to a home for unwed mothers, back in the 1950s. Frankly, I couldn't get myself to believe that pregnant girls were sent to live in facilities designed to humiliate them. For example, the pregnant girls were not allowed to walk in the front door. I found the community reaction as depicted in the story to be flat. Certainly no one spit on her when she said she was pregnant?!?! The conditions reminded of the treatment of blacks in the Jim Crow south!
I know that a more experienced writer can make a reader believe what she ordinarily would not, but this was a workshop for people who are just finding thier voices. At this stage in her writing, she wasn't ready to try and convert non-believers.
Flash forward a couple years:
Last week at The Strand, I picked up Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away, a collection of oral histories from adult women who "surrendered that children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade." The stories in this book jibe perfectly with the details provided by my student. I am so glad that I never let on that I had trouble believing her story, which turns out to be the story of her life.
This then takes me to the experience of students of color, gay, or other marginalized students in an MFA program. So many times I had had my stories flat out disbelieved: "Black people don't talk like that!", "If 30 children were killed in Atlanta in the 80s, why haven't I ever heard about it?" You get the idea. I remember feeling so demoralized after such classroom sessions.
I think this is what lead me to tread carefully with my student during that session in California. Fessler's book proved me wrong. I can't tell you how glad I am that I am writing this blog post about it, and not writing a letter of apology to my student.
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There are 2 comments on "Just Because You Haven't Heard Of It...". If you'd like to leave a comment, click here to jump down to the comments entry form.
Comment #1, by Michael Fischer ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.tayarijones.com/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
I've had this happen to me a little bit, once I started writing auto-biographical fiction about being institutionalized in a state mental hospital as a teenager. There’s a whole genre of film and literature that exploits such experiences for sensationalistic purposes and people actually seemed disappointed that I hadn't written about serial killers or patients flailing around in straight jackets or sadistic nurses. Definitely demoralizing.
March 2, 2008 04:59 PM
Comment #2, by Jackie
Maybe it's generational, Tayari, that you were skeptical about the writer's story about girls who were sent away. My own best friend in 9th grade "went away" to Indianapolis to stay with her aunt very suddenly, but came back for 10th grade. Rumors swirled about her being pregnant. I thought I was her closest friend, but I was as shocked as everyone else. There have always been girls who went away, but in the black community, it was usually to a distant relative's home. Still, even as a teenager I knew about the homes for unwed mothers.
March 4, 2008 08:28 AM