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The Real McCoy: Essay — Renee Giovarelli

Feb 262011

Tomb near Chong-Alai, Kyrgyzstan

Here’s a delightful essay, a character study, a study in cross-cultural (mis)communication, and a travel story by Renee Giovarelli. Some of you may have read her “What it’s like living here” piece published earlier on NC, also set in Kyrgyzstan, where Renee often travels for her work. Renee travels the world for an NGO involved in reforming land and property rights. But she also writes urgent, passionate essays about the places she visits. Her essay “The Bad Malaria Shot,” which she presented at her graduate reading in the summer, was a finalist for the Wasafiri 2010 New Writing Prize.

The Real McCoy

By Renee Giovarelli

When I arrived in Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan at that time, and three hours by car from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, my final destination, Sergei Sergeivich Kuzmin stood pressed against the glass window watching me come into customs. Hundreds of people, also searching the deplaning passengers for the first signs that their loved ones had arrived safely, stood behind him. He was a master at pushing himself and me to the front of any crowd. Seeing him, I relaxed.

Sergei

Sergei had been flying into Central Asia from Moscow to interpret for me for five years, ever since I first started working in Kyrgyzstan, which he called Kyrgyzia, the name of the territory when it was part of the Soviet Union and not an independent country. Broad and short with a large belly and a Charlie Brown head, he brushed his thinning white hair straight back so that his forehead and bushy eyebrows were prominently featured, as was his sizable nose and enormous smile. Over the past five years, Sergei and I had established a routine, which seldom varied. Actually, Sergei established the routine and I complied. I let Sergei guide me around and take charge of everything on my first trip to Kyrgyzstan, the first country stamped in my passport, and it had been impossible to wrestle any control back since.

But this was going to be our last trip–I had to fire him.

It used to be that every country in the former Soviet Union smelled the same when you stepped off the plane—a faint odor of sewage mixed with cooked cabbage and chilled sweat, and clothes that had been worn for several days but don’t exactly smell yet of body odor, burning leaves and dried cow dung. For me, the differentiation of the Soviet republics was first signaled by the change in smells in the air at night.

On this, my fifteenth trip, it was cool at three in the morning but would soon be hot enough for a sleeveless silk blouse. I filed out of the plane behind the oil men and World Bank consultants, in front of the missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers–not fitting in with either crowd. I wasn’t a middle-aged male in a white shirt and not an eager, young zealot with a backpack either, but somewhere between the two and slightly disdainful of both.

Introduction: Nature Writing in America — Adam Regn Arvidson

Feb 212011

Have you heard of the “Environmental Solutions Agency?” Newt Gingrich introduced this idea in a speech back on January 25, 2011, as something that would replace the Environmental Protection Agency and be “first of all, limited.” Then, about a month later, a couple of U.S. House committees set hearings on the “Energy Tax Prevention Act,” which would strip the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. Also in January, western Congressmen introduced a bill to remove the wolf from the endangered species list. It passed: the first time that legislation, rather than science, has determined a species’ inclusion or exclusion.

In all this, there are two items of literary merit. First, look at the words they use: “Environmental Solutions Agency” and “Energy Tax Prevention Act.” Verbal backflips, if you ask me. And the wolf bill, in a way, proves the power of the sentence: the bill has only one sentence, which puts an entire species at risk. When the Endangered Species Act (ESA) came into effect in 1973, it was partly because of the wolf. At that time, there were only 300 left in the entire nation.

The ESA can also be credited, in large part, to writers (there’s the second literary reason, if you’re keeping track—and the more important one). In 1959, Peter Matthiessen published Wildlife in America, essentially a call for protection of endangered species. Three years later, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring became a best seller. Concurrent to these works, Joseph Wood Krutch, Loren Eiseley, and Aldo Leopold were putting out nature writing that pushed a nascent environmental movement forward.

These writers were different than their predecessors, like Thoreau and Muir, who wrote in many ways as conqueror naturalists. This earlier wave of writers wanted to understand nature on a technical level, strove to set certain bits of it aside for posterity, and always looked at it from a place slightly above and to the side. Humans, they said, should protect and love nature, but not probably become a part of it (remember, Thoreau regularly went into town to dine with friends while living hermit-style at Walden, and ultimately gave up early on the experiment).

The mid-century writers, on the other hand, saw humans as part of nature. They sought the passion and emotion that nature brings through personal immersion in it. They spurred another round of legislation and regulation, this time not centered on large chunks of land set aside as preserves (like the National Parks), but on everyday nature: the air, the water, the plants and animals around us.

The late 60s were a time of upheaval in many arenas, and the environment was no different. Between 1968 and 1971, the world saw seminal works produced by Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Loren Eiseley, John Hay, and two by Edward Hoagland. Between 1970 and 1973, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Policy Act (which created the EPA), the Clean Water Act, and the ESA. Coincidence?

So, because so many of these environmental advances are under attack right now (and because the perhaps ironically named Newt is trying to redefine the EPA), I thought it might be interesting to look back on that mid-century eco-literary boom.

Included here are life and work profiles of six of these masters: Carson, Krutch, Eiseley, Abbey, Berry, and Hoagland. I am sure there are other favorites (Peter Matthiessen? Gary Snyder? John Hay?), but let me rule out a few that might be assumed to be part of this group. Everyone on this list was born between 1893 and 1934 and reached the peak of their writing between the 50s and 70s. They all experienced the Great Depression in some form, and all saw most of this environmental legislation passed (except Carson, who died rather prematurely in 1964). Aldo Leopold was too early, Barry Lopez and Annie Dillard too late. The last two are omitted simply because they probably didn’t affect this particular wave of environmentalism; they were affected BY it.

This group of writers took a diverse approach to the environment. From Eiseley’s mysticism and anthropology to Abbey’s radicalism to Krutch’s childlike curiosity, they manage to touch nearly every taste and temperament. They have certainly touched me, so on the following pages you will see both an analytical as well as a personal journey. This is the origin of today’s “green” thinking, and we are about 50 years farther along (Silent Spring, in fact, turns 50 in 2012). I think its time for another reading.

Proceed to the first essay, on Loren Eiseley, or return to the Table of Contents.

–Adam Regn Arvidson

Childhood — Michelle Berry

Feb 192011

Michelle & her brother in the Badlands

Here is Michelle Berry’s “Childhood,” the third in Numéro Cinq‘s new essay series (click on the “NC Childhood Series” tag to see the others), a gorgeous, lively, poignant tale of a nomadic youth and the bond between a writer and her brother growing up. Very human, achingly real. For the truth is these essays are also about what they do not tell—growing older, looking back through the haze of memory and the struggles of adulthood. Most of you are already familiar with Michelle through her “What it’s like living here” essay earlier published here. I put an hilarious Michelle Berry story in Best Canadian Stories in the days when I still edited that annual anthology. She’s energetic, comic and prolific. A new novel This Book Will Not Save Your Life and a new story collection I Still Don’t Even Know You were both just published last year.

Childhood

By Michelle Berry

Robin Hood

A Robin Hood record with a book attached to the sleeve. My brother remembers I coloured all over the record book, red and blue crayon. He still doesn’t believe me when I tell him I have no recollection of it.

“Why,” I ask him, “would I have done that?”

“You were always doing things like that,” he replies.

Like the time he got a Swiss Army knife for a present and, sneaking into a barn in Virginia, climbing the huge bales of hay and jumping down to the floor, my brother tossed me his Swiss Army knife for safe-keeping. I can still see the glint of the metal as it twisted through the air – slow motion – and disappeared in huge mounds of hay.

“I was six years old,” I say. “You should have known better than to throw it to me.”

“Still,” he says. “It was a great knife. We never found it.”

I thought my father rented a metal detector but he has no memory of this. I think we did apologize to the farmer for sneaking into his barn.

I worried for a while that a cow might have eaten the knife in a mouthful of hay, and then I would imagine someone cutting into a steak one day and finding it.

In England

Road Trips

The long road trip of my childhood.

Moving, traveling. There was a lot of both.

I was born in San Francisco, spent my first year in Claygate, England – first word: “hoss,” because they clip-clopped down the street carrying young girls going for a ride – lived in Virgina until I was seven, then Victoria, B.C.. We traveled across the country in a huge moving van, my mother driving the car behind us with our cat, Sassafras. I sang, “Leaving on a jet plane,” with my hand surfing wind out the van because my teenage cousin from New Jersey had taught it to me while she played the guitar. Every day in the van or car we had a new gift to keep us busy – colouring books, puzzles, snacks, mazes. We saw Prairie Dogs in the Badlands standing on their little back feet watching us watching them. Every motel we stayed in had a roadside pool. Once the gas in our U-Haul moving van was siphoned out of the van somewhere in Pennsylvania. Super Bowl this year my husband and father made silly jokes about the Steelers misspelling their name.

Childhood — Brad Green

Feb 112011

Here’s a splendid, gritty Texas “Childhood” essay from Brad Green in Denton. You all know what Denton, TX, is like because Brad also contributed a gorgeous “What it’s like living here” essay in December. Brad Green is a prolific author and editor, a uniquely rich, harsh, dry and despairing voice on NC, and he’s about to be a father again as dg types these words.

Childhood

By Brad Green

Sloth and Envy

When I was twelve, I had the world’s meanest boil on my ass. Picture the swollen eye of a pissed-off bull, Aztec red and glaring. I’d run my palm with wonder over the furuncle’s tender heat and trace the rising, tight flesh to a pale tip that when brushed made my arms stiffen and toes clench. The day that boil popped was one of the worst of my life.

Hours were spent face down on my bed while the attic fan in our small elbow of a house droned, culling the scent of honeysuckle through my bedroom window. Those bushes were my favorite place in the world at that time. They’d inched up through the clay-cobbled dirt around our trailer in Argyle, Texas, and as they unfurled in the sun, I retreated to their shadow. That crosswork thatch of limbs laid sun-dappled shade under my window and I’d sit on the cool, damp earth, full of breath and light.

Butterflies flooded the air around the vines. The honeysuckle attracted clouds of them, each a fluttering thumbsmear of color. Flying in and around the bushes, the butterflies landed on my arms, tickled paths across my scalp. There was an immediacy to that experience that lifted one beyond the gravity of the skin.

But of course, my hidebound father tolerated none of that woolgathering. One day he thumped his Bible down on my bedside table, opened to Job, his mophandle finger stabbing at the verse. “Unlike him, I believe you done something wrong,” he said. Then he flicked his finger against the back of my thigh near the boil and I bucked on the bed. “You think about what sins brought this upon you.”

The Problem With Memoirs – NYTimes.com

Feb 052011

Guidelines for not-writing your memoir. This should provoke some R & D (rage and derision). Noticed via Frank Tempone’s Facebook reference.

A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.

There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.

But then came our current age of oversharing, and all heck broke loose. These days, if you’re planning to browse the “memoir” listings on Amazon, make sure you’re in a comfortable chair, because that search term produces about 40,000 hits, or 60,000, or 160,000, depending on how you execute it.

via The Problem With Memoirs – NYTimes.com.

What It’s Like Living Here — Anna Maria Johnson and Steven David Johnson in Cootes Store, Virginia

Feb 022011

photo by Eliza Grace Johnson

Here’s a gorgeous “What it’s like living here” essay from NC contributor Anna Maria Johnson and her husband, the photographer Steven David Johnson. Anna Maria Johnson is a writer, Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA student, and a lovely artist in her own right. She was a co-winner of the NC Rondeau Writing Contest last year, and who can ever forget her amazing Novel-in-a-Box Contest entry? This essay is Anna Maria’s first post on Numéro Cinq as an official Contributor—we hope for many more like it. And it’s also the first time we’ve had a husband and wife team work together. It’s a wonderful addition to the growing Numéro Cinq “What it’s like living here” series.

What It’s Like Living Here–Cootes Store, Virginia

Text by Anna Maria Johnson, photos by Steven David Johnson

(Author’s Note: The locals pronounce this place “Cootes’s Store,” though the green road sign omits the possessive.)

At home on the Shenandoah River, North Fork

Home. What’s it mean? By age twenty-one, I’d lived in twenty-one places and thought home was a place I’d never find.

John Denver’s song “Country Roads” refers to western Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River. This northwest corner of Virginia is where I now live, along the river’s North Fork, which runs parallel to Route 259, my road. When I travel alone, I sing the old folksong, “O Shenandoah,” and ache to be home.

Home, for me, is family: a husband and two daughters. But increasingly, “home” is becoming a specific 2.3-acre plot of land with dilapidated sheds, gardens, woods, meadow, and a white farmhouse with a front porch.

Our farmhouse. Its wood plank bedroom ceilings, steep stairs, foot-thick walls, and hand-made plank doors with old-fashioned latches hint at the log cabin our house used to be—and still is, beneath its vinyl-sided exterior and dry-walled interior. The bathroom, an aging plumber told us, was installed only in the late 1960s or 70s; he remembers doing it. The back kitchen was probably added then.

My husband, Steven, wanders down to the river nearly every day to photograph his friends—mink, herons, deer, cattle, water snakes, starlings, swallows, kingfisher, and once, three otters.

Childhood — Steven Axelrod

Jan 202011

Here is the first in a new series of Numéro Cinq essays called “Childhood.” The idea is for writers to evoke the place, time and ethos of their childhood in words and pictures, not childhood in general but a particular childhood, not their children’s childhood but their own. Steven Axelrod has been writing on and for NC almost from the beginning. He’s a very witty and loquacious participant in NC contests and a fine observer of the world in his own Open Salon.com column. He wrote a lovely “What it’s like living here” piece about Nantucket. I had often heard him talking about his father, and so it seemed appropriate to ask someone like Steve, for whom childhood was so important, to write about his childhood. As a point of entry, it’s helpful to know that Steve’s father was George Axelrod who wrote the play The Seven Year Itch and the screenplays for such movies as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Manchurian Candidate, and How to Murder your Wife.

Childhood

By Steven Axelrod

Dog Days

For years I wanted a dog desperately. Wandering the stacks of the New York Society Library on 79^th street, I discovered the works of Albert Payson Terhune, and with a boyish, single- minded passion, shared his love for a succession of collies and hunting dogs in books like Lad: a Dog, Buff: a Collie and Lochinvar Luck. Terhune is largely forgotten now, possibly because he really didn’t seem to like people very much. His works introduced me to a number of racial epithets which my Mom used as teaching tools, to explore the fascinating world of human bigotry. “’Chink’ is what people call the Chinese, so they can feel superior to them,” she informed me. “It’s fun to feel superior to other people, especially when you’re not.”

She was stubborn on the subject of dogs, though, knowing full well that the bulk of the care and feeding of any pet would fall on her. And of course we lived in an apartment, not the ideal environment for a herding animal; but Central Park was just three blocks away.

I actually found my dog in the park during a dreary Sunday softball game with a bunch of kids I didn’t like, a group I didn’t want to be part of, the uncool group at school. But during a long, dreamy session in the outfield (even in this crowd, I played deep left), I struck up a conversation with a lady walking a collie. Someone scored a homerun during our conversation, but the dog was due to have pups in a few months, and the lady took my number. She called me when the litter arrived. Even at age nine, I was much better at chatting up interesting strangers than I was at baseball, where I achieved a rare incompetence trifecta: I couldn’t hit, throw or catch. I could run all right, but I preferred not to.

The images release themselves, out of order, seemingly at random: my collie darting back and forth ecstatic in his first Central Park snowfall, taking a bite from a drift and leaping away, barking loud enough to wake up all of Fifth Avenue; and his snout, pressed to the rear window of the car that took him away two years later, when my allergies made keeping him impossible. And the counselor at camp that summer, who built a splendid impossible tower of tooth-picks and threw it into the final bonfire, the flames torching it all at once, the sudden light blinding, the heat intense, the crackle deafening and the column of smoke rising like a cobra from a basket, its hood dispersing against the high clear stars.

Wendell Berry’s Use of But-Constructions in Nature Writing: Craft Essay — Adam Arvidson

Oct 312010

Institute for Southern Studies, www.southernstudies.org

Ah, you useful little “but.” You have been discussed at length in craft books, lectures, advisor phone calls, and, of course, critical essays. So much is embodied in your unassuming three letters. You can almost stand alone (and in French you often do: “Oui, mais…” [insert pursed-lip ‘pfffssst’ here]). You are king among conjunctions. You are worthy of an ode:

Oh, but, inherent contradiction,
You give my work such pleasing friction….

I won’t go on.

Recently, I looked at how but-constructions operate not just poetically or grammatically, but functionally, through the course of entire essays. I examined : Wendell Berry’s “An Entrance to the Woods,” which is about a two-day hiking trip into Kentucky’s Red River Gorge.

In “Entrance to the Woods,” Wendell Berry uses but-constructions to bring himself and his own thought patterns into the narrative. Out of necessity, he spends a great deal of time describing the landscape through which he hikes, but that landscape triggers his own musings on the interface between civilization and wildness. The essay, therefore, moves back and forth between rote descriptions of nature, such as, in the 2^nd paragraph:

It is nearly five o’clock when I start walking. The afternoon is brilliant and warm, absolutely still, not enough air stirring to move a leaf. There is only the steady somnolent trilling of insects, and now and again in the woods below me the cry of a pileated woodpecker. Those, and my footsteps on the path, are the only sounds.

And more inward-looking sections that are essentially philosophical, such as, midway through the 2^nd section:

Wilderness is the element in which we live encased in civilization, as a mollusk lives in his shell in the sea. It is a wilderness that is beautiful, dangerous, abundant, oblivious of us, mysterious, never to be conquered or controlled or second-guessed, or known more than a little. It is a wilderness that for most of us most of the time is kept out of sight, camouflaged, by the edifices and the busyness and the bothers of human society.

Thirteen times, however, Berry explicitly uses the word ‘but’ in very close conjunction with the personal pronoun. These could be considered “But-I” constructions. Some examples:

That sense of the past is probably one reason for the melancholy that I feel. But I know that there are other reasons.

And now, here at my camping place, I have stopped altogether. But my mind is still keyed to seventy miles an hour.

Perhaps the most difficult labor for my species is to accept its limits, its weakness and ignorance. But here I am.

And so I have come here to enact – not because I want to but because, once here, I cannot help it – the loneliness and the humbleness of my kind.

Notably, most of these thirteen instances even have sentences that begin with ‘but’. (There are two other instances that fall into this same “but-I” category but use ‘though’ as their contrast word.)

Berry uses “But-I” constructions to introduce a questioning, a lack of assurance, into the essay as a whole. It seems Berry is puzzling out the answer as he writes. Though he may be on sure footing with the calls of the woodpecker, he is communicating that he is less sure about the broader questions of wilderness in the context of human culture. In the above examples, note the use of ‘probably’ and ‘perhaps’ and ‘I cannot help it.’ These words note a less clear-cut view of reality and they appear in nearly every “But-I” circumstance. The use of “But-I,” therefore, especially when ‘but’ originates a sentence, signals an entry into Berry’s mind’s eye, where the answers are less sure.

In one interesting dual contradiction, Berry uses the “But-I” (in the 8^th paragraph) to suggest confidence in his knowledge: But here it has a quality that I recognize as peculiar to the narrow hollows of the Red River Gorge. Several pages later, however, he introduces the construction again, to essentially contradict that confidence: But I am in this hollow for the first time in my life. I see nothing that I recognize. He even repeats the word ‘hollow’ in both passages. The second example introduces a philosophical section about the transience of his presence and doubt about the importance of his very existence: the lack of assurance, again.

There are, however, four instances where the ‘but’ is not accompanied by the first person. These happen in two pairs – one pair near the beginning of the piece, and the other about two-thirds of the way through. Both pairs deal with nature, but in different ways. Here is the first:

I pass a ledge overhanging a sheer drop of rock, where in a wetter time there would be a waterfall. The ledge is dry and mute now, but on the face of the rock below are the characteristic mosses, ferns, liverwort, meadow rue.

Five following sentences further describe the ravine into which Berry is hiking, concluding the paragraph. Then:

Finally from the crease of the ravine I am following there begins to come the trickling and splashing of water. There is a great restfulness in the sounds these small streams make; they are going down as fast as they can, but their sounds seem leisurely and idle, as if produced like gemstones with the greatest patience and care.

In contrast to the “But-I” constructions described earlier, these are far simpler. They include point and counterpoint within the same sentence. They further describe the natural elements at hand by establishing the contrasts inherent in them. What seems to be one thing is in fact another.

But there is another message to this pair (to use a but-construction of my own). These two passages signal the two inherent contrasts that Berry discusses throughout the entire essay. They introduce the two key themes of the piece. The first (about the ravine) references the passage of time. The ledge is dry, BUT was once wet. Berry deals with this theme in addressing the changing landscape. He begins four paragraphs later by saying the landscape he is in is “haunted” by the ghosts of “ancient tribesmen,” “white hunters,” and “seekers of quick wealth in timber.” Later, while on the high ridge the next day, Berry sees an inscription on the rock from 1903 and begins to imagine the history of the view he sees. He addresses the change (over time) in wilderness from being dominant to subservient in relation to human culture.

The second ‘but’ in the first pair (about the stream) references the pace of life. The streams move quickly, BUT they sound leisurely. Berry regularly brings up the contrast between the expressway and the woods, for the first time just six paragraphs later. Through the essay, Berry gradually transitions from the high-speed world of his office and the highway to the slower world of the wilderness, and he thinks at length about that transition.

The second pair of nature-centered but-constructions bring the discussion of the passage of time, the pace of the world, and the interaction between humans and wilderness together, thereby forming the crux of the essay (even though there are still pages to go). The text reads:

On a day like this, at the end of September, there would have been only the sounds of a few faint crickets, a woodpecker now and then, now and then the wind. But today, two-thirds of a century later, the continent is covered by an ocean of engine noise, in which silences occur only sporadically and at wide intervals.

From where I am sitting in the midst of this island of wilderness, it is as though I am listening to the machine of human history – a huge flywheel building speed until finally the force of its whirling will break it in pieces, and the world with it. That is not an attractive thought, and yet I find it impossible to escape, for it has seemed to me for years now that the doings of men no longer occur within nature, but that the natural places which the human economy has so far spared now survive almost accidentally within the doings of men.

There are a few things of note here. Though the first person appears in this passage, it does not appear in direct relation to the ‘buts.’ The contradiction refers to culture and nature, not Berry’s mind’s eye. There are specific mentions of time (“the end of September” and “two-thirds of a century later”) and speed. These, of course, refer back to the initial pair of nature-centered but-constructions.

Following this passage, Berry concludes a long paragraph with what can justifiably be called a rant. This is the height of the essay’s anti-civilization, pro-wilderness rhetoric, even concluding with the unusual (for this piece) mention of specific human evils: “the poison spray, the hugging fire of napalm, the cloud of Hiroshima.” The ‘buts’ that introduce this section are used to describe today’s wilderness by contrasting their former glory with their current demise. Long ago there would have been only crickets, BUT now there is engine noise. Once, man was enveloped by nature, BUT today it is, sadly, the other way around.

Interestingly, just as this rant is about to spiral out of control (at Hiroshima), Berry reins it in by using another but-construction – even though he employs a ‘though/still’ combination here instead of ‘but.’ After Hiroshima there is a section break, then Berry returns to the “But-I” technique to, as he has done throughout the essay, cast doubt on his own train of thought. That passage reads:

Though from the high vantage point of this stony ridge I see little hope that I will ever live a day as an optimist, still I am not desperate. In fact, with the sun warming me now, and with the whole day before me to wander in this beautiful country, I am happy.

Where the preceding paragraph was nearly devoid of the first person, instead delivering a treatise on the ills of civilization, the introduction to the next section, in which Berry returns to the pure happiness of being in the woods, presents the ‘I’ several times in rapid succession. And, to mesh with the dismal viewpoint right before, the contrast moves from pessimism to optimism, low to high. I am a pessimist, BUT I am still happy. From this point to the end of the essay, the mind’s eye grows silent, perhaps exhausted, perhaps indicating the author’s final transition to the wilderness. There is only one “But-I” construction left, and it deals with Berry being physically tired at the end of the hike.

In essence, then, the two pairs of nature centered but-constructions open and close the philosophical section (the opening two-thirds) of the essay. Within this section are numerous “But-I” constructions that explore both sides of the nature/civilization discussion. After the 2^nd pair of nature ‘buts’ is a long denouement during which Berry simply revels in being in the wilderness. He lets his mind rest, seeing only nature as it is. He puts the ‘buts’ away.

—By Adam Arvidson

Picking Brains and Giving Proper Credit: Craft Essay — Adam Arvidson

Oct 132010

I wrote here previously about the introduction of characters, a topic that figures prominently in my own writing. I meet a lot of people. I’m (gradually) working on a book that involves significant scientific research, travel around the Midwest talking to farmers and land managers, and – just last night – hours in the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society poring through 150-year-old land survey notes. When I sent my first chapter to dg way back in packet #2 (are we almost to #4 already??), he raised the question of sources.

One of my sources (at left): Patrick Ceas of St. Olaf College

To quote briefly from dg’s packet letter: “This brings up a larger issue nudging away at me as I read through this chapter. How do you properly credit and integrate primary research and sources? I wonder about this reading Barry Lopez on wolves and John McPhee on shad and Mathiessen on snow leopards. How does one ensure that the descriptions one writes from the research become one’s own words and not just summaries or synopses of other people’s work?”

Hmmm. Good question. And I suppose you all know what’s coming next. “This might bear contemplating as a critical essay,” wrote dg.

A Kayaker, a Fisherman, and a Scientist Walk Into a Story: Craft Essay — Adam Arvidson

Aug 312010

It has been said that creative nonfiction authors like to write about themselves: I had a tumultuous childhood, I went a year without eating anything brown, I find gems of wisdom in the ingredient lists of common foodstuffs. That’s nice, but the real world isn’t populated solely with various iterations of the first person. Though all the “others” out there might interrupt our self-indulgent reveries, they often have something very important to say. So how can we carefully and strategically let them into our personal essays and our memoirs.

McPhee’s “Founding Fish,” page one.

I am, generally speaking, a science and nature writer. Therefore, so-called “experts” (actual scientists and naturalists) always poke their heads into my essays. In an effort to learn how to organize and orchestrate their entrances, I decided to look at the opening chapters of two books that are rich with interlopers: Founding Fish, by John McPhee, and Hell or High Water, by Peter Heller. (You’re gathering by now this is a critical essay DG asked me to tweak and post here. I, sadly, do not have the lucrative publication deal Mr. Farrell enjoys.)

McPhee’s book is an all-angles examination of one species of fish: the American shad. In the opening chapter, McPhee spends more than two hours reeling in one of these anadromites from the Delaware River. Woven into this primary narrative are segments about the landscape, the life history of the fish, and the key characters that will figure prominently in the remainder of the book. Heller follows a kayak expedition down Tibet’s Tsangpo River, which has never been successfully run. The author, a kayaker himself commissioned by Outside Magazine to follow the trek, doesn’t ever get into the river, but instead walks the shore with the “ground team” supporting the seven boaters. In the prologue and first chapter, Heller juggles the entrances of all seven kayakers and nearly a dozen other major and minor characters.

Heller’s “Hell or High Water,” page one.

In these two books, the authors use a variety of methods to introduce the large number of characters. This essay will examine the structures and triggers employed in introducing these characters. An introduction structure refers to how a character is brought into the story over time, and appears in these books in four types: continuous, suspended, stuttering, and brief. An introduction trigger refers to the immediate reason the character is introduced, and appears here in five types: by the story, by association, by background, by others, and by needed expertise.

Types of Character Introduction Structures:

Continuous: A continuous introduction includes a lengthy introduction and description of a character the very first time the character is encountered. McPhee uses this structure to introduce the three expert fishermen, Buddy Grucela, Erwin Dietz, and Gerald Hartzel. On page 5, these three men are mentioned for the first time: “[Cervone] knew he wasn’t fishing with Buddy Grucela. He knew he wasn’t fishing with Erwin Dietz or Gerald Hartzel – living figures in the Cooperstown of shad.” There is a short paragraph, and then McPhee begins a more than two-page description of Dietz and Hartzel, in sequence, before entering and even lengthier description of Grucela. At no point during the introduction and description of these three men does McPhee return to the present story (that of him fishing with the Cervones in the Delaware River). The three expert fishermen are called by name, then brought into the book with lengthy descriptions.

Suspended: A suspended introduction includes an initial mention of a character, by name or “profession,” then a later lengthy introduction after other action or discussion has occurred. McPhee uses this structure to introduce the other two fishermen that appear in the opening chapter: the Cervones, who are in the boat with him. On page 5 the men are mentioned by name: “Three of us were in the boat, close and tandem. I was in the middle, fishing over the shoulder of the skipper, Ed Cervone. Fishing over my shoulder was Ed’s son, Edmund Cervone.” No further information is shared about these men (except for Ed’s psychology degree, which is used for humor, not introduction) until page 12, after having left the present action to introduce the three expert fishermen and relate some natural history elements. Then the Cervones return to the story: “Edmund Cervone, behind me, said nothing. Edmund was an instinctive, natural absolute river fisherman. On various outings, fish had come to his line while avoiding his father’s and mine” and “Ed Cervone is the sort of person who, when he is fishing, might as well be chained among the shadows in a cave. No nuance of depth or color is too subtle to prevent his frequent adjustments of style.” Until this point, though McPhee has divulged his companions’ names, there has been no other information shared. Notable also is the reiteration of physical location in the boat (“Edmund Cervone, behind me”), to tie the two portions of the introduction together.

Stuttering: A stuttering introduction is composed of several initial mentions of a character, sometimes not even by name, then a later lengthy introduction. Heller uses this technique to introduce the expedition kayakers. Though each of the seven (including the expedition leader Scott Lindgren) is dealt with similarly, the technique is illustrated here through Willie Kern. Kern first appears on page 1, in the second paragraph of the book, though not by name. He is an undifferentiated member of a group: “The kayakers moved quickly, pulling on life vests and helmets, and didn’t speak. It was already afternoon. After 10 years of planning, there wasn’t much to say. They were seven of the best expeditionary paddlers in the world, from four countries, led by Scott Lindgren of Auburn, California.” On page three he reappears, again without being named: “If anyone could get it done, though, it would be these seven. Most of them had been kayaking since they were children, and in recent years each had paddled close to 300 days a year.” On page 4 he begins to emerge individually, and is at last named, at the conclusion of a list of all the kayakers: “Twin brothers Johnnie and Willie Kern, 29, from Stowe, Vermont, have a reputation for fearlessness – for years in the States, a truism went: ‘If the Kern brothers won’t run it, nobody will.’” Much later, on page 15, he is mentioned once again by name: “For the past two weeks, Scott, Dustin, Willie and Johnnie Kern, and Dustin Knapp had been working 22 hours a day editing footage of their latest video.” Three sentences later, in what constitutes the fifth time Willie Kern is brought up with the other kayakers or mentioned by name, he is finally described in full, beginning with: “The first person I met was Willie Kern. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and bulky, with a goatee and wide-set, intelligent eyes, and he had shades propped on the brim of a baseball cap.” An ensuing paragraph continues the physical and skill-set description

Brief: A brief introduction reveals a character by name or with a brief description without a follow-up appearance by the character. This technique is used by both McPhee and Heller when the character is minor or introduced for a very specific purpose. On page 23 of “Founding Fish,” in the second to last paragraph of the chapter, McPhee introduces an expert briefly: “Soon after that evening in Lambertville, I told this story to Richard St. Pierre, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Headquartered in Harrisburg, on the Susquehanna River, he is a shad specialist, who has worked as a shad consultant on the Hudson River, the Columbia River, and the Yangtze.” Mc Phee then uses just two sentences to conclude the chapter – in essence using St. Pierre only to deliver the chapter’s punch line.

Types of Character Introduction Triggers:

The Story: When the story is the trigger, the character is physically encountered by the narrator during the primary action of the story. On page 5, McPhee uses this trigger technique to introduce the Cervones by describing the “lay of the land” of the fishing expedition he is on: “Three of us were in the boat, close and tandem. I was in the middle, fishing over the shoulder of the skipper, Ed Cervone. Fishing over my shoulder was Ed’s son, Edmund Cervone.”

In “Hell or High Water,” this is the dominant introduction trigger, and is often used repeatedly with the same character, such as in the introduction of Willie Kern and the other kayakers. On page 1, when Heller first describes the kayakers entering the water, he is standing on the bank watching them. When Willie Kern is finally introduced in detail, Heller begins with: “The first person I met was Willie Kern.” Similarly: “Steve Fisher ambled out of a video editing room.”

Association: When an introduction is triggered by association, the character is introduced when real-time action or thought makes the narrator think of the character. This association can be to illustrate contrast or similarity, or as an example or proof of the real-time action or thought. McPhee uses this trigger to introduce the three expert fishermen. On pages 5 and 6, he moves from the initial mention of the Cervones to the continuous introduction of the experts. He uses contrast to shift from characters he is physically near to characters that are in his mind: “Cervone the Elder, who has a doctorate in psychology, seemed unimpressed – seemed to be suggesting, through a light shrug, that he knew bullshit by its cover. He knew he wasn’t fishing with Buddy Grucela. He knew he wasn’t fishing with Erwin Dietz or Gerald Hartzel – living figures in the Cooperstown of shad. He knew that in my seven years as a shad fisherman I had risen steadily into a zone of terminal mediocrity.”

Heller uses this trigger technique to introduce the late kayaker Doug Gordon and to offer proof of the danger of the expedition. He does this twice for Gordon, once on page 3: “There was no guarantee that any of them would come back alive. The last team to make a serious attempt on the Tsangpo – an American group led by Wickliffe Walker in 1998 – made only 27 miles before seasoned kayaker Doug Gordon drowned.” And again on page 6: “’Have you heard of the Tsangpo Gorge?’ It may have been the breath of the down-valley night wind, but I don’t think so: A wave of goose bumps spread over my shoulders. ‘Yes,’ I said. Three years before, I had attended a memorial service for 42-year-old Doug Gordon.” A short description of Gordon and the circumstances of his death follows.

Background: When an introduction is triggered by background, the character appears in a secondary story to the main story, such as in an anecdote from the past or something the narrator heard second-hand. Heller uses this technique with several other kayakers, including Doug Gordon again, who are peripheral to the main story but provide context. On page 9, Heller is describing the expedition’s leader Scott Lindgren, and begins to relate the story of another expedition down the same river: “…but [Lindgren had] already backed off once when other teams were clamoring at the gates. In the spring of 1998, when [Scott Lindgren] and [Charlie] Munsey were there the first time, a race was on. An old Special Forces Vietnam vet and expeditioner, Wickliffe Walker, and Tom McEwan were putting together a team of former whitewater racers and Olympians – including the ill-fated Doug Gordon – for a run in the fall.”

Others: When an introduction is triggered by others, the character is mentioned in the story by someone other than the narrator, which leads to an introduction of the character. McPhee uses this technique to introduce the two wives, Marian Cervone and Yolanda Whitman, beginning on page 20:

“Well,” the cop continued, with the slightest pause. “Your wife called. She wants you home. She thinks you’re dead.”

Laughter on the bridge – 9:50 PM

It was not true that Marian Cervone was concerned about her husband. By her own account, the man is too unpredictable to worry about. She wasn’t worried about Edmund, either. It was my wife, Yolanda Whitman, whose mind had been crossed by the ultimate possibility.

Heller also uses this trigger technique to introduce one of the expedition kayakers who was not apparently present in the office where he met the others. Johnnie Kern appears in detail (after a stuttered introduction) on page 15-16: “I pointed to a Liquid Lifestyles poster of a kayak midway down monstrous 80-foot falls and asked if the paddler was Willie. ‘That’s Johnnie, dang him,’ [Willie] said. ‘My stunt double. I’ll be using him a lot on the Tsangpo.’ Johnnie was Willie’s fraternal twin and looked like him, with a long, trimmed moustache and soul patch.” A lengthy description of Johnnie follows.

Expertise: When an introduction is triggered by the need for expertise, the character is introduced for the purpose of adding credibility to a statement made by the author/narrator, and usually includes a reference to the character’s credentials. McPhee introduces Richard St. Pierre this way, but also Willy Bemis, who figures more prominently in the book but appears on page 14 of the first chapter for his expertise: “One look at that forked tail and you know that the fish is active in the middle of the water column and not sitting around on the bottom like a bullhead catfish, whose tail is so rounded it looks like a coin. A trout has a rounded tail, as well, and, as a swimmer, is one notch up from a catfish. I am indebted for these descriptions primarily to Willy Bemis, an anatomist of fishes, who is a professor of ichthyology at the University of Massachusetts.” McPhee introduces Bemis to give him credit for his knowledge, essentially citing a source.

Both authors use a wide variety of introduction structures and triggers, and tend to group their characters together with similar techniques. McPhee uses continuous structure for the expert fishermen, but suspended structure for his companions. Heller uses stuttered structure for the seven expedition kayakers, but either brief or continuous structure for everyone else. Dare I say there is probably another essay here about how to establish the importance (or not) of characters through the choice of introduction structures and triggers….

PS: If you’ve recently read something with plenty of characters introduced early on, I’d love to hear about it.

—Adam Arvidson

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