Robert Root

 

I own all of John McPhee's thirty books published between 1965 and 2018. It may be my longest reading relationship. When I discover a writer who seems to be on my wavelength, I look forward to spending time with him. It's a kind of solitary friendship. McPhee is an accessible writer; I'd taught some of his work to grad students in Michigan along with other essayists, memoirists, and literary journalists. McPhee was the most journalistic of them, reporting on the insights he gained from people in various fields as he gained them; his readers tended to learn with him.

 

My only autographed copy of a McPhee book, Uncommon Carriers, recounts his travels with, as the dust jacket tells us, "people who drive trucks, captain ships, pilot towboats, drive coal trains, and carry lobsters through the air: people who work in freight transportation." My wife and I lived in Colorado and frequented the Tattered Cover Book Store in downtown Denver when it was published in 2006 and McPhee came through on a book tour, giving me the chance to hear him read in person. I arrived early, bought my copy, and went to the nearly empty presentation room to start reading.

 

The first essay, "A Fleet of One," recounts McPhee's experiences accompanying the driver of a sixty-five-foot long chemical tanker across country from Georgia to Oregon. Opening with reflections on learning to drive a standard auto, he begins to see the highway as the driver of an eighteen-wheeler sees it. The change in perspective is revealing, especially in regard to what the drivers of four-wheelers don't appreciate about their relationship to eighteen-wheelers and what the drivers of eighteen-wheelers have to be constantly aware of in traffic shared with four-wheelers. After mentioning the first time his trucker used his air horn, he explains:

"In the three thousand one hundred and ninety miles I rode with him he used it four times. He gave a light muted blast to thank a woman who helped us make a turn in urban traffic close to one destination, and he used it twice in the Yakima Valley, flirting with a woman who was wearing a bikini. She passed us on I-82, and must have pulled over somewhere, because she passed us again on I-90. She waved both times the horn erupted. She was riding in a convertible and her top was down."

 

I reread the last sentence twice and chuckled to myself. Soon the event started, the audience now almost filling the room. McPhee was introduced, gave a quick overview of the book, then read the opening pages of "A Fleet of One." When he read the line "She was riding in a convertible and her top was down," the audience erupted in laughter. He smiled approvingly. At the end of his reading, among a swarm of listeners, I had him autograph the book, muttered something admiring, and headed home, expecting to read further in the collection that night.

 

On my way out of Denver I remembered how closely McPhee's reading of those early pages had echoed the pace, the shifts in stress and emphasis, the tone of my silent reading of them before his talk began. Almost nothing had varied. I had subconsciously read his prose in silence just as he had read it aloud. That is, we had both "heard" the words and sentences exactly the same way, the way McPhee intended them to sound if they were spoken aloud.

 

I might have been aware that McPhee tended to read his writing aloud to his wife before submitting it to The New Yorker, where he often published. In the title essay of his collection Draft #4, he explains how a piece of writing will take four or more drafts: the first ragged draft is there simply to open the door to discovery and further reflection; near the end of the second draft, he says, "the feeling comes over me that I have something I want to show to other people, something that seems to be working and is not going to go away." He reads the second draft aloud, then he "remov[es] the tin horns and radio static that [he] heard" during the third reading, and largely copyedits the fourth draft by replacing certain words with better ones. The final draft gets the right words in the right order.

 

I took McPhee's advice about writing long ago. Writing short scripts for local public radio, I recognized how remote and academic my early ones sounded. Once I began reading them aloud as I edited and revised, I could hear myself sounding more conversational, less like a professor and more like a person. McPhee's Denver reading reconfirmed for me the wisdom of his multi-draft approach. This very post was considerably different in its first draft. As you read it you might be able to sense what it would sound like if you were reading it aloud. It won't sound like John McPhee, but, hopefully, it might sound like me.

 

 

Recently, going through books we were donating to our local library, I noticed some with dogeared pages, often more than one, and tried to straighten them. I habitually mark memorable passages that way instead of underlining them or scribbling marginal notes—which makes them unreadable for later readers –or stopping to copy them by hand and lose the expository thread. I reread Walden often, each time the same copy. Many pages have bent-back corners, at top or bottom, depending on where the passage is on the page. One reward of multiple readings of Walden is reminding myself what struck me in those passages; another is discovering unblemished pages with overlooked ideas I now need to dogear. Every page will likely have bent corners by the time I stop rereading the book.

 

If you skim my blog entries, you'll notice how a passage in a book, essay, article, newspaper column, or interview initiates my further reflections. I often type such passages into my laptop, in case I later want to compose a response or instigate a vaguely related meditation of my own. Writers have always done this kind of thing, collecting quotes in commonplace books, almost since the beginning of writing. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius kept one and later drew his published Meditations from it. Rare book archives house manuscript or print copies by such philosophers, scientists, poets, and politicians as Erasmus, da Vinci, Bacon, Milton, Newton, Jefferson, Thoreau, Emerson, Irving, Auden, and Woolf. The tradition continues to this day: on Facebook Dinty W. Moore, the founding editor of Brevity, posts an author's quote about writing almost daily: a digital commonplace site.

 

Decluttering created space on our bookshelves and, while moving different volumes off their customary shelves and onto others, I noticed dogeared pages and wondered what was in that book I wanted to recall. What follows here is (sort of) the start of a commonplace file, what Wikipedia claims works "as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts [. . .] found in other texts." Here are a few from books on my shelves:

 

"Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect those books and manuscripts and preserve them." (Susan Orlean, The Library Book, 309-310)

 

"The love of a comrade and the attention of the reader: these desires (which have no clear boundary between them) reach effortlessly across years and cities, then centuries and continents. No poet has spoken to the audiences of the future with such certainty that they are there, listening." (Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, 252)

 

"The essay poured out with such ease or rather tumbled out seemingly of its own accord. When this happens it means that the thoughts have long been gestating and writing is only a birth of what was already taking form out of sight. So much of the work of writing happens when you are seemingly not working, made by that part of yourself you may not know and do not control, and when the work shows up like that your job is to get out of its way." (Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence, 216)

 

"Throughout my life it's through attention that I've tried to tie myself to various places, through mindful recognition of my body's presence in the world of forms to memorize my own brief passage in this world. Now I try to imagine the pull of some other bond: mindless, selfless, a recombinant plein air melting in relentless solar wind. A scatter of atoms, unspecific and undifferentiated, into what happens next." (Elizabeth Dodd, Horizon's Lens: My Time on the Turning World, 123)

 

"Some feelings resist expression for years or decades. Some never submit. The sight of the peaks has long struck me as a kind of prayer I am supposed to know but cannot find the words to. They are the chorus of a hymn I want to sing but cannot finish: the mountains rise like, the mountains rise like . . . but what is it they rise like, to the sky?" (William deBuys, The Walk, 96)

 

Any one of these passages might start me pondering what it means to me, why I dogeared that page, what it meant to the author who composed it, how much we would agree about what it expresses. It might even foster a blog entry. Of course, any reader of this entry might wonder why these, among all my dogeared passages, are the ones I'm sharing as commonplace examples. You, reader, might blog about what you think is going on with me or blog about your own reaction to any or all of them or start checking dogeared pages of your own.

 

That's the way commonplace books work, fertilizing the mind by recording ideas in abundance and discovering what emerges over time. It's worked that way for writers of every kind throughout the history of writing.

 

 

Occasionally I'm astonished by what I find on Amazon. For example, I knew that my memoir, Happenstance, was published as an e-book but was surprised that other books, The Nonfictionist's Guide, Following Isabella (not the book about a sheep but the one about Colorado), and Postscripts, had also been published that way. (Note to self: read contracts before you sign them.)

 

A while back, these surprises made me check up on my older books. None had been converted into electronic format, but some offered pricing surprises. For example, E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist was available for $91.83 new, only $18.99 used, and was listed as by Robert L., Jr. Root and Robert L., Jr. Root. Difficulty figuring out what to do with a suffix like Jr. is one reason I stopped using my middle initial and suffix, but I can't guess why my name is there twice, as if I were truly identical twins. Recovering Ruth came up on the search first as merely an over- (but accurately) priced paperback; however, though the book only had one paperback edition, it's listed five more times, at somewhat staggering prices: $80.85 (three separate times), $71.37, and $134.75 (perhaps an inadvertently gold-plated copy). All these other listings are apparently for private dealers rather than Amazon's retail department, and they suggest that used book and/or private booksellers have no sense of proportion about pricing.

 

It gets worse. My second book, The Rhetorics of Popular Culture, now thirty-five years old, sells direct from Amazon for $107.95 ("Only 1 left in stock [more on the way]"—really?) and, from two other sellers, for $323.85 and $259.08. When the book was published it was overpriced for libraries so, when I taught from it, I advised students to photocopy the whole thing for around $11.00. Happily, my first book, Thomas Southerne, is only listed as used for $17.00 and the anthology Landscapes with Figures is sensibly priced at $23.95, but it starts getting wackier the longer I search the Amazon website. Working at Writing goes for $56.40; the first edition of Wordsmithery goes reasonably enough for $22.95 and $24, but the second edition, apparently a more wonderful book to judge by pricing, is variously priced, from a mere $57.52 through $132.95 used and $199.58 new to a spectacular $1,133.85 (used). (I have several new copies I'd sacrifice for half that price, with free shipping, in case anyone's tempted.) The first anthology that Mike Steinberg and I edited, Those Who Do Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching, is priced at one site at $4,999.00—that's nearly $19 a page. (I've also got a few of those in the garage; make me an offer.) All editions of The Fourth Genre were priced higher than we'd liked, as happens in the textbook market, yet the idea that the sixth edition runs $69.64 but Amazon will rent it for $53.75 is disturbing, and the offer of the fourth edition for $999.99 is ludicrous. In other entries the first edition goes for $290.21, the third for $115.56, and the fifth is priced at both $254.56 and $319.15. College bookstores who buy used copies at the end of each semester have much cheaper copies, a good many of them with no sign of ever having been used.

 

Compared to ads for rare books in The New York Times Book Review, these prices may seem like chump change, but as author/editor of the ones above they seem bizarre. Does anyone ever pay those prices? They seem symptomatic of a certain aspect of the online marketplace for books: a casual disregard for either reader or author. Not long ago, needing a newer edition of Walden, I found a host of them available for cheap as e-books. Almost none were scholarly editions or products of established trade or small press publishers; instead, they were mostly versions scanned and uploaded by people hoping to sell public domain books in the e-publishing market. All kinds of out-of-print classics and not-so-classics are subjected to this approach. Like Jane Austen or Dante? Find an uncopyrighted nineteenth century edition or translation, scan it into your computer, and start your own e-Collection of Jane Austen's works or your own Divine e-Comedy. You never have to have read a word of either author or ever have written a word about them to sell them online. Plagiarism runs rampant. Thanks to the Internet you can rip people off online without ever getting out of your pajamas.

 

I've self-published electronic and print-on-demand versions of two manuscripts with a very limited audience—for her descendants, my grandmother Betsy Root's 1937 newspaper column in How to Develop Your Personality; for anyone who remembers hearing them, my decades-old series of radio scripts in Limited sight Distance —and I appreciate the availability of these resources, which have removed part of the taint self-publishing had under the label "vanity publishing." As someone who can no longer shop at Border's and can seldom find an older book at a Barnes & Noble or ever-more remote independent booksellers, I appreciate the availability of books online. But I'd feel more comfortable each time I do these things if I didn't feel I was implicating myself in something at best sloppy and shady, something at worst crass and corrupt.

 

 

Lately—well, the last year or so—I've been involved in a project which intends to foster the editing and publishing of book-length manuscripts by relatively long-established nonfictionists. My book Lineage and Steven Harvey's Folly Beach served as the first test cases. In the coming year and perhaps later years the two of us and the poet-essayist Kathryn Winograd expect to apply what we've learned from our experiment to manuscripts by three more writers, in hopes of their books emerging in the near future. At base we're trying to give support and encouragement to people like us who, even though they find it challenging to place their recent writing with the kind of trade or university presses that published their work in the past, still keep writing personal essays and memoirs. As we're well aware, we're not the only ones this happens to.

 

As if I needed confirmation of that, I recently read an essay posted online in Kenyon Review titled "On Not Giving Up," by Laura Maylene Walter. She tells us of her decision years ago to "keep writing even if I never publish again." Writing, she says, "can be a breeding ground for loneliness, self-doubt, and self-loathing; it's rife with rejection; it's tough on both the spine and the heart; and there's pitifully little money in it, and often just as little respect." She adds, "It's not easy to stay the course through the years and decades, especially if you feel you don't have much to show for it." Later she explains her recurring struggles with "how frustrating the writing was," claiming that over the years she was "racking up hundreds—probably thousands—of rejections." In spite of that she kept writing.

 

It will come as no surprise that, despite Walter's account of her bouts with frustration and self-doubt, her refusal to simply quit writing resonates with me and, I'm certain, with most writers unable to break the habit. Something there is in writers that can't resist a blank page, that needs to scribble ideas upon it. My wife and I have been decluttering our dwelling lately and I continue to unearth ancient artifacts of my own writing life, a vast assortment of manuscripts and typescripts and printouts and publications of all kinds—columns and reviews, articles and essays, plays and poems and songs and scripts—and an overwhelming volume of handwritten journal entries dating back many decades. I'm also only too aware of how many project logs and reflective posts (which I often refer to as "whining journal entries") and the like take up bytes and kilobytes and megabytes on my succession of laptops, flashdrives, CDs, and floppy disks, not to mention various "clouds" somewhere.

 

Much of it—maybe even most of it—is overwhelming evidence of an obsession with expression. I even keep a Blog Log, to report to myself what I've been doing or have done or may possibly do to generate another entry. When I'm not specifically working on something I'll write about that in a file—the Notes entry I tend to compose every other Friday now always ends with this quote from me: "Avoiding work by writing about all the work I have to do is a standard device of mine that seems to be working." To my mind, it counts as writing. What got me into writing was not a desire to publish but a need to clarify my thinking by wrestling with the words I use to express it. It's generated a lot of sentences over the years.

 

In her essay on not giving up, Laura Maylene Walter reports that, though she finally has a debut novel, Body of Stars, coming out (and apparently an agent, since it went to auction), "that doesn't mean it's smooth sailing." She adds that "what we're all living through now—a global pandemic, a renewed and overdue call for justice for Black lives, continued political upheaval, climate change, and beyond—can make the pursuit of the writing life seem frivolous." I recently heard a writer friend express reluctance about posting something light, something lyrical, something intimate on her own blog or Facebook page, nervous about being thought to be indifferent to the terrible times we live in, as if she didn't feel the anxiety and anger and outrage that so many of us feel overwhelmed by. But I know she does feel it all, as I do, as do most of the people whose Facebook posts I "like." That doesn't mean that any of us need to entirely abandon everything else that matters to us, ignore the things that grow out of who we are. As Walters observes, "we keep going, and we continue trying to make something meaningful with our words."

 

Wherever my future writing takes me—and wherever my future editing might help other writers take their writing—I'll hope that the words end up being necessary, being honest, being meaningful. I'll hope that we won't give up.

 

 

As we struggle to cope with these troublesome, contentious, and too often tragic times, social media keeps us apprised of positive ways some people are coping. From time to time I tune in on Facebook to actors reading children's books, soloists performing from their living rooms, whole choirs harmonizing from multiple locations, whole orchestras and dance companies blending seamlessly from miles apart, and authors giving virtual readings from virtual bookstores. Just this week I read an online interview with one of my favorite authors whose latest book's publication has been delayed by months because of the pandemic.

 

Rebecca McClanahan's forthcoming In the Key of New York City, originally scheduled to come out in May, will now come out in September. I've admired her earlier books, The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings and The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change, as well as her writing in literary journals and collections like The Best American Essays. She's a writer I can count on to entertain and enlighten me and I was eager to read the interview about the book posted online by the Rainier Writers Workshop (where she also teaches writing). It made think more about the nature of memoir and essay in current creative nonfiction.

 

In answer to a question from Sydney Elliott, the managing editor of RWW Soundings, about "the process of compiling the material for this book," McClanahan discusses the challenges of connecting material that often had been published separately "over a period of many years." She began writing some of the essays when she and her husband first moved to New York—one in particular began prior to the 9/11 attack—but "only three years ago did I finally find the shape for the book and begin to revise—often with much violence." I especially appreciate her explanation of the complications of the form she writes in: "A memoir-in-essays is a tricky form. Though each essay should have a life of its own, when shaping a memoir-in-essays, the writer must consider how the essays talk to each other and build upon each other so that together they form something greater than the sum of their parts." Those are lines I keep returning to; they capture the essence of the "memoir-in-essays."

 

Notice the complications of the interactions among the materials. That "each essay should have a life of its own" suggests independent wholeness while "how the essays talk to each other and build upon each other" suggests the interrelatedness of a cohesive narrative or argument. It may seem contradictory to be pursuing both goals but if successful they can "form something greater than the sum of their parts." That's the challenge of not simply "compiling" such a book but of essentially composing it out of pre-existing parts. McClanahan tells us, "For me, this involved making tough decisions not only about which essays to include (some of my favorites don't appear in the book) but also about what final form the essays would take." Although most of them had already been published, she "rewrote parts of them, cut certain sections, and broke a few long essays into flash pieces and scattered them throughout the manuscript." For one of them, she "dismantled the line breaks to a published poem and rewrote it as prose" when she determined that "the scene described in the poem was integral to the memoir."

 

McClanahan's earlier book, The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, influenced some of the more personal books I've written. At least one of them, Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place, is essentially a collection of essays of place published over a period of years but the process of "compiling" the material was more challenging than it might seem if you look at the contents. Some essays I'd published somehow didn't fit the tone or the voice of the majority of essays I was trying to tie together and had to be discarded. Only after I'd written some new essays did I recognized the thread that bound them all together.

 

It occurs to me that I've been reading other "memoirs-in-essays" over the past few years—surely the term applies to Patricia Hampl's The Art of the Wasted Day and Scott Russell Sanders' Hunting for Hope and Peggy Shumaker's Just Breathe Normally. There's a point in certain works of narrative nonfiction where you need to read each section in order—a chapter is, after all, a section, a division, a segment of a whole (Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)—and there's a point in others where you can read divisions quite separately in any order, each virtually independent of the others (Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk). Somewhere between those points is the "memoir-in-essays," where each piece resonates with all the other pieces, harmonizes with them, accumulates awareness of the author's sensibility and outlook. That's what I'm looking forward to in Rebecca McClanahan's In the Key of New York City.

 

 

 

Note: The full interview by Sydney Elliott is "Storing What Remains: An Interview with Rebecca McClanahan" at RWW Soundings, Summer 2020. Rebecca McClanahan's other work can be found on her website.

 

I appreciate the advantages of working with a clear narrative structure, having a straightforward story to tell—"Here's how it started; here's what happened next; here's how it ended." For my first two books of creative nonfiction, Recovering Ruth and Following Isabella, the structure of earlier works determined the structures I built, even though I didn't write my portions as chronologically as Ruth Douglass and Isabella Bird wrote theirs. It's good to follow a straightforward path, the road most travelled; those of us without one can end up on a long and winding road, bushwhacking and breaking trail most of the way.

 

The subject of my memoir, Happenstance, wasn't entirely one I'd ignored. Decades earlier, I'd written vignettes for broadcast on my local Michigan public radio station based on boyhood memories triggered by adult events: renovating the hundred-year old house where my wife and I now lived brought to mind the dank cellar and stripped walls of my parents' house; watching my children play reminded me of childhood neighborhood friends; and so on. Some vignettes showed up again when I encouraged composition students to write about their childhoods—the street map I modeled to help them reconnect with memory ignited my own memories; the guided imagery exercise leading them into past places propelled me toward mine. One student's story about his mother meeting his father because of a fly ball at a summer softball game haunted me: what if the batter had bunted or struck out? What kind of happenstance brought my own parents together?

 

Curious about my own family history after researching others', I began researching a family memoir. The material invited a chronological history but didn't answer questions about my own parents and my own life; everything that surfaced seemed connected with everything else. Though I wanted to write a book that would say something to my children about how their father turned out to be who he was, I plunged deeply into genealogy. After months of research and drafting, my wife asked how it was coming. When I told her I was almost up to the birth of my grandfather, she said quietly, "You know, if this is going to be a memoir, you should probably be in it." I loved all the research, but she was right—I wasn't in the book I was writing to explain about me.

 

I discovered two different ways to focus my attention. Before I assigned students to write caption essays about their family photos, I attempted the exercise myself and was startled by what it unleashed in memory, based on my greater distance from the events. For the memoir I began interrogating family photographs, describing what I saw in them first as a viewer and then as an interpreter. Leafing through family albums, I wrote about the pictures that most interested me. To avoiding a chronological narrative, I also decided to write about the first hundred days of my life that I remembered, in the order they occurred to me. Surely, I could write one a day over the next hundred days. On the eleventh day my father died. I stopped writing but scribbled down a list of possible subjects in case I ever started up again. The list ran well over a hundred items.

 

Life, and other books, intervened. What stayed with me was the experience of the first day I had written about, a day in elementary school when I ran home from school feeling exuberant. Why had I remembered that day first? Why could I remember no other exuberant days? I soon realized this approach could help me find formative moments in my life. I'd begun teaching memoir-writing to graduate students online and felt I should revive the memoir. To the Album entries and Hundred Days entries, I added a third strand reflecting on the nature of happenstance and the nature of choice. In time I realized happenstance was the dominant theme of the memoir. It also became the title.

 

Some of the 57 completed entries in the Hundred Days series got in; many Album entries got in; items I thought of as literary remains from my father, mother and grandmother got in; reflections on the nature of happenstance got in. Some days I would lay all these entries in a circle on our dining table or in a straight line on our carpet and hover over them, trying to feel some sort of sympathetic tuning among them, weaving them together through juxtaposition and association, the reverberations one piece of writing picks up from another piece, the synchronicities ignited by experience and memory. It's a memoir but not entirely narrative; it's more the prose equivalent of a medieval polyptych, a multi-paneled altarpiece, made up of words and photographs.

 

I'm amazed at all the time, energy, false starts, missteps and perplexity this book put me through. No book ever becomes the book you intended to write, of course. When I tell students that the writing will tell you what it wants to be, this is what I mean. It was the only way I could write it—the only way this book would let me write it.

 

 

Note: A slightly different version of this entry was first published on Michael Steinberg's Blog on February 9, 2013 as "The Long and Winding Road: A Memoirist's Journey" at  http://www.mjsteinberg.net/blog/archives/2013-02.

 

Here's a familiar photo that came to mind while I was thinking about the pitcher picture. Note the similar stance, the similar era of photography (b&w), whatever immediate differences you notice.

 

You could ask yourself about this photo most of the questions you asked yourself about the earlier photo. Handily, having a second photo offers an occasion for comparison, the similarities and differences in the two helping to sharpen your perceptions and impressions of both pictures. If you had two different photos of either person, you could make similar comparisons, just as you did when you compared your possible yearbook pictures or when you have selected someone else's photo for a celebration or an obituary. Who is the person who is still there in different images of him- or her-self?

 

I've been treating these two images as if they were images of strangers, although there are occasions when most of us have to examine images of ourselves. But all images of individuals have a further dimension that could be considered. What happens when you know the person in the photo even if the photo itself is unfamiliar to you?

 

For example, my friend Mike's pitcher picture dates from 1958 but I didn't meet him until a quarter century later, when he invited me to join him in starting a writing workshop for teachers at Traverse Bay. For most of the time I knew him he was mustached and bearded—I looked through photos of the two of us across decades and, after his death last year, I posted images from 1994 to 2013—and the high school photos in Still Pitching show me someone I wouldn't have otherwise recognized. I can't always remember the exact dates of the pictures of the two of us, but I almost immediately recall the occasions and the locales. The pitcher picture deepened my sense of who my grown-up friend was all along.

 

I am the figure in the parking lot picture. I felt an affectionate amusement when I stumbled on the similarity of our poses in these two photos, taken only a few years apart. As it happens, the parking lot was next door to both my parents' house and a neighborhood park with a baseball diamond so close my father or brother or I would sometimes toss any foul balls that landed in our yard back over the park fence. I had no other contact with sport then. But thinking how Mike's adolescent image speaks to who he was throughout his life, I start to wonder what my image forecasts about me.

 

The guy in the photo is a high school graduate a year out of school who can't imagine that a year later, as a freshman, he'll begin an educational trajectory that will one day make him a published professor. He'd   always been solitary, usually closeted away to read voluminously and to write private fiction, including a post-high school novel. In that year after graduation he and his friend Dave drove cross-country from western New York to California and, to his surprise, back. I see him there, in what he thought was a fairly dramatic black and white outfit and likely assumed to be a pretty solid stance, and start to wonder if their excursion along Route 66 to Disneyland, Hollywood, San Diego, and Tijuana somehow helped form his tendency to wander and to write about wandering—the lifelong attention to place that led to many of his publications. In all the times I've seen this photo before I never realized it hinted at the man who would be looking at it in the future.

 

The writing we do in reaction to an image draws so much upon who we are, what we bring to the viewing, what the image connects to in us; journaling the image can be both revealing and rewarding. As it happens, trying to recall the dates that Mike and I ran that Traverse Bay program, I looked in Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching, the anthology we edited from material written at and about those workshops, and found that my article about my writing group is titled "Writing the Outdoors: From Journals to Essays" and my pedagogy article centers on "Popular Media in the Language Arts Classroom," both written twenty-five years ago. I seem to be still practicing what I once preached.

 

Gazing at the picture of Mike taken decades before I met him, I somehow feel more intimately connected to him than I did in life. Gazing at my own photo I somehow feel more stable, more aware that I did become whoever I once—however uncertainly—set out to be.

 

If Mike had ever seen that photo of me, would he have felt the same way today?

 

 

Note: Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching—A Sourcebook by Robert L. Root Jr. and Michael Steinberg was co-published by the National Council of Teachers of English and the National Writing Project in 1996.

 

Take a look at this photograph. Try to describe what you see in it.

 

I'm guessing that your initial attention will be drawn to the figure at the center of the image—his wide-legged stance, his uniform, the objects in his hands, to the degree you can make it out the expression on his face. As you look more closely you may try to read the word across his shirt, which will identify his team, and you probably almost immediately recognized the sport he plays. You may try to examine his hairstyle, which would help you date the picture. There's something on the ground at his feet—what do you think it is? Notice the background of the photo, which suggests where the picture was taken. So far as I know the photo was originally taken in black and white, which may also help to date it. I've labeled it "The Pitcher Picture," which I hope is accurate; if this person is a shortstop or outfielder, I'll have to search for a less alliterative title ("The Shortstop Shot"? "The Outfielder Flick"?) If you want to be thorough in your analysis of this photo, you'll write down all the things about it that capture your attention in as much objective detail as you can.

 

Once you've stood back from the image and described what you see, think about how you react to it. What impressions of this young person do you get? Is there anything you tend to assume about his attitude, his personality, his mood? What does he want the photograph to record about who he is at this moment? How would you describe the person you think you see there? What in the photo, in his expression, his pose, his context, makes you think that's what he's like? Did you ever (or do you now) know someone like him? Does he remind you of anyone—a friend, a relative, a significant other? Does he remind you of yourself?

 

All of these questions are intended to help you investigate an unfamiliar image of a person you've likely never met. When we see a photo of a stranger we tend not to examine it so closely unless something about that person or that image attracts our attention. I want to suggest that how I'm asking you to view this photo is how others may sometimes view photos of each of us. Think of your high school yearbook photo—of the two or three poses the photographer offered you, why did you pick the one you did? Who did it show to the world that the other poses didn't? If the baseball player's photo were a photo of you, how would you interpret it from the distance of perhaps decades?

 

As it happens, the baseball player himself has written a caption for the photo. He writes, "Me in the spring of 1958, wearing my high school baseball uniform—an authentic hand-me-down Brooklyn Dodger uniform donated to the high school by the Dodgers in 1951, right after they lost the playoff to the Giants. I'd wanted this uniform since my sophomore year. Getting one of these from Coach Kerchman meant that I'd finally arrived as a ball player." His remarks help us understand the significance of the photo for him—it records a moment of triumph, visual evidence of an accomplishment that has particular significance for him.

 

The photo is a high school image of my friend Mike. I didn't know him in his youth—we grew up on different ends of the same state—and I only met him when we were both college professors at two different universities in a different state. But I knew him and worked with him off and on for roughly 35 years, and my wife and I hung out with him and his wife throughout those decades. He was a writing teacher and an editor of a creative nonfiction journal and co-editor (with me) of an anthology for college writing teachers. He was also a memoirist and an essayist. The book that cemented his standing as a writer was Still Pitching, his memoir about his passion for baseball in high school, which contains this image and his caption about it. His final book collected some published essays—in the one titled "Elegy for Ebbets" he visits a host of stadiums while remembering the Brooklyn Dodgers—and some unpublished ones. His intense life-long involvement with baseball dominated his literary writing. This image was also reprinted in an obituary of him a publisher posted online. That long friendship and that thorough reading of his autobiographical writing give me a different perspective on that photograph than someone would have who never knew him or never read him or never encountered that image before. That early pitcher picture is not only about his youth but also about something essential in his nature. He was a player and a coach which, given his writing and his teaching, is what he also was in his career.

 

It may not happen in all the photos in which we appear, but I suspect that all of us have, at one time or another, posed with a special optimism about who posterity will think it sees in a certain image of us. The question, of course, will be whether any of those viewers (or readers) will see the person you hope they'll see or, indeed, whether you'll see the person you thought you were.

 

 

Note: The books by Michael Steinberg mentioned above are Still Pitching: A Memoir, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003) and Elegy for Ebbets: Baseball On and Off the Diamond (Mount Pleasant, MI: Pint-Size Publications, 2019).He was the founding editor of Fourth Genre and his website is still accessible with material on his blog by him and a host of guest writers and teachers that he gathered between April 2012 and October 2019.You can find it at  http://www.mjsteinberg.net/blog

 

 

Look closely at these two images for a few moments. What aspects of them are clearly similar? What aspects suggest to you that the photograph and the painting have identical settings? What aspects are dissimilar? The visual media certainly differ and elements of the art forms themselves will affect how you view them, but if you had to define the relationship between the two pictures, what would you emphasize? If the positions of the images were reversed, so that the painting were on the left and the photo on the right, would that alter your sense of their relationship? Is there anything in them that suggests sequence to you? Only the images themselves give you any sense of context. Could the setting of the photo have been chosen in homage to the painting, inspired by it? Or could the painting have been prompted by the photo? If we recognize these images simply as a fashion photo and an urban landscape painting apparently drawing on the same setting, we might be challenged to interpret their relationship further beyond comparing artistic elements that both connect and isolate them from one another.

 

The images were provided by Elizabeth Kadetsy, author of the prize-winning memoir The Memory Eaters, to accompany an essay posted recently online at salon.com. The photo was taken by the photographer Martin Cornel and the painting was created by Solange Langelier, Kadetsky's grandmother. In the Salon essay, Kadetsky tells us of her fondness for visiting her grandmother's house to explore her art room. She thought her grandmother was a "wonderful painter" of still lives and urban landscapes and she was inspired by her to become an art major when she went to college. Elizabeth's mother owned one of the grandmother's paintings, "a view up the hill on cobblestoned Beacon Street in Boston with a red delivery van at the end"—the painting she shows us in the essay. After the grandmother's death Elizabeth hoped to be given more of her paintings by the uncle who moved into his mother's house but, other than knitting needles and yarn, he gave her nothing, except for "a fierce look when I pressed for more."

 

The essay alludes to a family secret that may be the basis of her uncle's animosity toward her mother and may also be connected to the nature of that Beacon Street painting that Kadetsky hangs across from her bed. The secret had to do with a childhood injury that may have led to Kadetsky's aunt developing epilepsy and dying young. Kadetsky thinks the injury was the result of her grandmother's negligence and alcoholism, not her own two-year-old mother's behavior, but she is also aware that "an undercurrent of blame and shame surrounded my mother" and may have been "the source of my uncle's anger toward her."

 

In the 1960s her mother had been a successful fashion model in Boston, but eventually her Alzheimer's disease forced her into assisted living, where she died. Kadetsky began preserving many photographs of her mother's work. As she fed that fashion photo into her scanner, she had "a Eureka! moment." She recognized the connection between the photo and the painting. She tells us, "I placed the painting and the photograph side by side. They were a near exact match." She was immediately struck by the absence of her mother from the painting, an absence that she feels was deliberate: "How fitting, I thought, that my grandmother would have literally painted my mother out of the picture. Of the many abuses my grandmother seems to have afflicted upon my mother, this aggression by erasure seemed especially significant."

 

Kadetsky's essay grounds her conclusion in considerable evidence of family conflict, including her grandmother's alcoholism, the disability and death of her mother's young sister, her mother's Alzheimer's, her uncle's coldness. Here again we recognize that what we see in images very much depends upon what we bring to the viewing of them. As Kadetsky concludes, "One can read a lot into an image. If one looks carefully enough, one just might discover the ghosts of things, the traces one has always suspected of a dormant family secret, the memory of a beautiful daughter twirling in her glee and power before a camera, painted out of a picture but still there to be coaxed from the shadows." This is not what the casual viewer may see but certain viewers will feel the need to go more deeply into the images, and if they go deeply enough, they may experience a personally meaningful revelation. Certainly that happens to all of us with personal or family images of our own.

 

 

Note: You can read "A Mother's Vanishing" by Elizabeth Kadetsky here.

 

Note: What follows here is an example of an imagessay taken from "Once Upon a Tender Time," a chapter in a memoir in progress by Amanda Irene Rush, presently titled The Gathering Girl. It strikes me as a solid example of the way an image sets off the need for written expression. I thank her for letting me post the manuscript here.

 

I have no memory of the four of us, as a family, together. All I have is this photograph my sister obtained after our mother's death. The photo had been buried among many other photographs in a box my sister ended up carting from Colorado to Alaska to South Dakota and finally to Ohio. This picture, taken at Christmastime 1973, is a small but epic find. Enduring proof that once upon a tender time we were a family.

 

In the photo, we are sitting on my father's parents' hearth in their house in Norwalk, Ohio, a red felt wreath hanging above our heads. The wreath -- made by my Grandma Hoyt -- gets as much attention as we do in this throwaway. In our current digital age, it is the shot that would've been deleted straight off. Where's the good family Christmas portrait? The one where we are centered and focused, all smiling at the camera, looking like a family should look? It's nowhere that I can find. Having dug through all the boxes and emptied all the envelopes, having flipped through all the albums and searched every drawer, I have found only three photos of the four of us; and this one -- this dud dug out of a box my mother kept until her death, this dud my sister saved from the trash heap -- this is the only one remotely worthy of mention.

 

I call this picture an epic find as though I've never seen it before. But I'm sure I have. As a child, I spent hours poring over photos trying to make sense of who my family once was, where I came from. Revisiting this picture, I recognize it as I do all of us. I recognize the surroundings in which we're posed. Everything is familiar. If I concentrate, I can even conjure up the smell of my grandparents' house. The woodsmoke from the fireplace. The sour smell of my grandparents' holiday cocktails. The new fabric smell of those matching Christmas dresses.

 

And yet, everything seems so strange. Is that woman holding my sister on her lap really the woman who will leave my father with us in tow in just a few years' time? Will she really end up developing a chronic mental illness and disappear in ways I never imagined possible? Is that man holding me really the man who will, soon after our leaving, marry a woman who will make it her life's mission to turn him against us? Will he really, after this second wife dies, quietly drink himself to death? And these two girls. Are these the girls who will grow to feel that they never had either parent? That they only had each other?

 

The picture leaves me feeling as bewildered as I look in it. I find it hard to believe we were ever a family, despite the proof. I find it equally hard to imagine a time when my parents may have liked each other; they were so different. And yet, there's a sense of intimacy about the way they're positioned in this photo. Perhaps it's only a sense of familiarity I see. In the same box, I found similar pictures of two of my father's three brothers, each Hoyt boy staged the same -- on the hearth, beneath the wreath -- with his young wife and children. Although choices would be made in the years to come that would cause all these marriages to fail and the families to scatter like so many seeds, on this day, at least, everybody knew where and what they were supposed to be.

 

—Amanda Rush