Bearing the Unbearable--Cheryl Strayed

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I just got back from Fishtrap, where this year's impressive line-up of teachers and speakers included Cheryl Strayed. I didn't much like her memoir, Wild. On the other hand, I loved her novel Torch, in which she carefully told an utterly convincing story about the effects on a family of a mother's death. 

I would have been curious about Strayed whether I'd read her books or not, fascinated as I am by her triumphal facebook posts. Over the last year these have announced the purchase of a new home, trips all over the world, and have featured endless photos of Strayed with her arm around other writers of note.

Some people collect gossip about musicians and actors and politicians. I do some of that too, I guess, but more often I follow writers, to see how they manage their lives, to guess if there's something in them deeper than the self-promotion that's so necessary now, to decide whether they're writing to understand the world or to make their name in it, to figure out all those things about myself. I have changed my mind about Cheryl Strayed's character weekly, so I looked forward to last Friday's keynote speech with no small interest.

I have rarely seen a woman with so much self-confidence. Strayed swept into a room of hiking boots and Birkenstocks wearing a black cocktail dress and holding a spiral notebook of index cards, which she flipped through inconspicuously while giving her speech. I wondered if the index cards were different when she talked to writers rather than to the general public. It seemed to me that she had some points she particularly wanted to make to us, the 150 or so people crowded together in the hall/cafeteria/common room we spend so much time in at Fishtrap. Maybe confidence helped her project that desire for a personal connection.

As far as I was concerned, she began badly. Writing, Strayed said, is a lot like hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. This metaphor seemed so forced that I was sure, after listening to Strayed for 30 seconds, that I wouldn't learn a thing from her. But I kept listening. The room was so packed that I couldn't have fought my way out of it anyway.

The PCT stretches from Mexico to Canada, and Strayed covered a lot of it. She was drawn to that long, strenuous hike in the same way she was drawn to writing. She had to exert herself to walk the PCT just as she had to write--no matter what. So she bought the correct hiking equipment and flew from Minnesota to the Mojave Desert, where she spread her stuff out on the bed of a motel room and packed all of it into a new backpack. She put on her brand new hiking boots and would have walked out the front door except that she couldn't lift the pack. She'd imagined sunsets and birdsong and a soundtrack of the kind of music you hear when you get a massage, but she met with pain and exhaustion. The first few days were hell. The whole experience was really, really hard.

One step at a time she surrendered to the discomfort of aching, bleeding feet and skin rubbed raw by the straps of her pack and kept moving ahead. When she writes, she says, she forces herself to surrender daily to her own mediocrity. She learned to write through reading--she mentioned her MFA mentor Mary Gaitskill as well as Alice Munro--but when she sat down to produce something equally fascinating, she didn't. All she could do to solve that problem was keep going. "The only thing worse than writing a novel that sucks," she decided, "is not writing a novel."

Surrender not only to your mediocrity, she said, but to the story only you can tell, your truest truth, the truth only you can offer. If you begin with what's true, you'll end with what's truer. Speak from your "burning core." Strayed's core story has been the death of her mother at 45 of cancer. Strayed has written about it in order to bear it. Her writing explores "how to bear the unbearable"--acute loss, the heaviest of all backpacks. "Art is the consciousness we bring to our lives."

From her iPad, Strayed read a letter written in 1938 by F. Scott Fitzgerald to a young writer named Frances Turnbull:

You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly . . . This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.  

Be vulnerable, Strayed also said. Your readers will love you for it. "Get used to being in the company of fear." The mail she has received from readers of Wild has been overwhelmingly positive. Only a few have objected to her episodes of sex and drug use because, she believes, she has been so honest about them.  Her friend, writer Steve Almond, said during a class I took from him in April that Strayed practices radical exposure--I think that was the phrase--and I have to admit that I sometimes welcomed Strayed's revelations and sometimes didn't. I was often uncomfortable for what I thought was no good reason. If you want to sample radical exposure a la Strayed without tackling one of her books, take a look at an essay she wrote for The Sun called "The Love of My Life."

In the end, I wondered if I could ever value my own experience enough to expose it with such missionary zeal. I'd rather bring my emotions to bear in fiction. As to Strayed's character, I think she believed every word she said. She would have written Wild just as she did if Oprah Winfrey didn't exist. I admire that. And she convinced me that writing a book about your core story is like hiking for hundreds of miles in new boots carrying a heavy pack. It's really, really hard.

100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: A Girl's Thoughts

In July, I began a yearlong workshop with writer Kim Stafford, sponsored by Fishtrap, a writing center in Eastern Oregon. I'm the only fiction writer in a group of nine students--the others are writing memoir or natural history or both--but I was sure that Kim could help me see my stories in a new light. I haven't been disappointed.

Kim's newest book, 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared (Trinity University Press), is a memoir about his older brother, Bret Stafford, who committed suicide in 1988. I read it because I wanted to journey a little deeper into the Stafford family story after reading Early Morning, Kim's hypnotic biography of his father, poet William Stafford. I read it as well because Kim described its genesis to us at Fishtrap last summer, and I wanted to see if his structure worked. I didn't expect to learn quite so much from it about maleness.

Kim takes his title from a book Bret loved as a child. The book suggested, for example, that a boy might successfully yank a tablecloth out from under tableware. Bret tried this and broke a crystal glass.

Kim wrote a table of contents first, a list of nearly 100 incidents, to be loosely framed as tricks, from his childhood with Bret, their adolescence and college years together, their increasingly separate lives as young men, and, obliquely, about Bret's death when Kim was 39. He organized the titles under four phrases he and Bret said together as kids before sleep: good night, God bless you, have sweet dreams, and see you tomorrow. It is fascinating to ponder, after reading each episode--the longest is nine pages--how the section where Kim placed it illuminates its meaning. Kim's structure also allowed him to avoid a chronological telling of Bret's life.

"It is possible . . . to write in a series of short bursts," Kim says in his 2003 book, The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening an Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft, "and let the engine of the book's idea do the work of collecting these pieces into a whole book."

I loved the motif of the trick. It hints at so much that is fine in this book. Many of Bret's pursuits are just as tricky as the tablecloth and glass, but more serious--terribly serious. As a junior in high school, he organizes a mass planting of cherry trees. He leads Kim across a glacier repeatedly testing its safety by throwing a boulder ahead of them to see if the ice will hold. During the Vietnam War, he qualifies after long effort for C.O. status, but moves with his family to Canada anyway because he doesn't want to live in a country that would fight such a war.

Kim and Bret are close in age, and inseparable as children, but gradually their differences emerge. Kim reveals a great deal about himself in this book, particularly his struggles to please parents who give him a lot of freedom but seem to expect him to use it well, to do the right thing. Kim wanders his neighborhood at night while his parents sleep, climbs a hill and takes shelter under a tree during a lightning storm, and tries to break into his boyhood church to play his clarinet for God. He marries young and tolerates years of unhappiness before divorcing, teaches at the same college his father does, although in a different way, wanders and writes and wanders some more. He both conforms to and resists his parents' hopes and society's standards.

"After my brother died," Kim writes, "I asked our father why I had survived."

"'Bret was a saint,' he said. 'You're not. That's good.'"

Readers will wish this message had been delivered earlier and more effectively--to both boys, but especially to Bret.

I read memoir to live other lives. My own life, a girl's, most of it lived indoors, postponing many risks until after I'd raised my children, has little in common with Kim's. My father was quiet and remote like Kim's dad, but for different reasons, and since my father had to leave school in the fourth grade, his legacy to me didn't include writing. My mother loved children as Kim's mother did, but my mom kept an eye on us always, told us, whenever possible, how to handle every situation, wasted no time herself and expected us to waste none. In my family, no one wandered.

What I learned from this book is that growing into manhood in this country in the second half of the twentieth century was tricky indeed. Sexual relations, from a young man's perspective--very, very tricky. Finding a career path, making a living, supporting a family while also trying to be a member of it, all tricky. You were liable to lose the best part of yourself. I knew this, but now I know it.

"Can I say it now, my brother?" Kim writes. "Maybe I can say it for you: There is something inside a boy, not yet man, that has almost no chance. To show this thing would be taken wrong, surely, cause pain, steel your resolve for utter reticence. This wordless treasure could not come forth as it is felt within. When I looked down naked on our town, when I walked the midnight rails, when I climbed the vine, and finally tried to play my heart, I was apart from the trials to come---sex, money, resume, family, and all the rest. By some language of pure light, I and the moon could send the best of the boy in safety beyond the man."