I'm treating my letters to my advisor as sort of a writing journal, which I believe is allowed or even encouraged. Yesterday I was writing in it, and ended up working out some idea in real time, like "this makes me think of this other thing, which in turn reminds me of this other thing!"
During residency, a CNF teacher gave a class on memoir prologues, and how the best ones work. He said there's almost always a tension between "me at the time of this key incident" and "me with what I know now" in them. He had us try to write one in class, and I liked what I came up with - but it was something that, if I was ever going to write memoir (nooooo never) would not be my key illustrative incident. So the prologue became a kind of micro story, which I then started fictionalizing. And this gave me an idea to write a story of all prologues, interconnected or maybe even nested if I can pull that off without it getting too snarled.
So the thing of jotting down connected memories in my letter yesterday, luckily can be groundwork for what I'm about to try to actually write...but they also really brought up some Stuff for me and I was just crying a ton. Let me paste that here in case it's interesting to any of you:
[Something from the previous paragraph of the letter] made me think of “offstage” and something a high school English teacher told my class – that the word obscene comes from Greek for offstage, “ob skene,” which I just looked up and am scandalized to see is actually a FALSE etymology, but I still find it compelling to think about, because he said that in Greek tragedies, they wouldn’t show certain things, like Madea’s about to kill her kids, then the curtain goes down, and when it’s raised again the kids are lying there dead (I hope at least that part of his lecture was true!) This feels germane to both of my stories from last packet and I want to steal something from it when I revise. And thinking about that English teacher being wrong about the etymology reminds me of my fifth-grade art teacher, who would get so angry at us for starting drawings with a black outline – he’d point to blue vase and yell “LOOK AT IT! Does it have a black outline? Do you see ANY black ANYWHERE??” He would also show us important works of art and give us background, and he told us the Wyeth painting Christina’s World depicted a woman who was having an affair with the man who lived in that distant house, and she would lay in the grass, watching, until she saw his wife leave and then she’d go over…which is TOTALLY FALSE! When I (only within the last five years or so) learned the actual story behind it, I wondered if that teacher had heard his version from someone else and just accepted and repeated it, or did he purposely fabricate it for us? If so, why? And how many people did I repeat it to (I know I definitely did), who were then walking around with my accidental lie in their bodies? And if they ever found out the real story, did they feel personally betrayed by me?
Okay that's it for what's in my letter. There's more though - like, my mom told me the art teacher must be a drunk, and that she knew because of the broken capillaries in his face and the "alcoholic nose" (lumpy, red, enlarged pores)...which, I have just looked THAT up to see if it has a name, and turns out that's wrong too! It's just an advanced form of rosacea that was long said to be related to alcohol consumption, but isn't at all! Amazing! But in any case, that's a great example of the sort of "why are you telling that to your fifth grader?" shit my mom said to me allll the time. And, relatedly, even if the art teacher had been right about the context of that painting, it would still have been a weird thing to tell fifth graders!
I wonder if I can work in finding out that a bit my dad would do for me and my many cousins, about how the reason he's so funny is because each day he put pieces of baloney in his shoes, so he "feels funny all day long," was lifted from Steve Martin. When I was getting more into comedy (which I did end up writing a story about, too - the male friendship/competition between a few middle aged comedians who've had varying levels of success) I listened to one of his albums and discovered it.
Yeah, these are all gonna nest real nice - of course, refracted and defamiliarized to turn them autofiction. I do NOT write creative nonfiction, which for some reason feels like an important distinction to me!
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