CREATIVE NONFICTION 7
vista and the great unknown. It’s a
fine place, in any case, to rest between
long days of standing before students,
promoting the benefits of taking, in
their own compositions, the long view.
This is all to say that where there’s
comfort and unencumbered feeling
and a glimpse of the infinite—of na-
ture’s determined will to “get it on”
in the face of storm and drought—
there is, too, the potential for story.
As writers, we need our room-with-
a-view to be both ref lective retreat
and motivating, sustaining base
camp, from whence we can strike
out and return to restoke the fire, or
what Rick Bass calls our “lust” for
the work—the energy that brings us
back to the keyboard. Deep writing
of the kind necessary for creative
nonfiction requires a space in which
we can go f loating off into the big
empty of the subconscious, where the
mundane, must-do zones of the brain
can go quiet and allow the hippo-
campus, that galaxy of memories and
creative connection, to snap on: Hel-
lo! Things need to get hot and jiggly
in there before the juices can f low.
This is that state of quiet arousal
in which we ignore the phone, our
bladder, the pan burning dry on the
stove. Everything and everyone gets
the same treatment: we’re not avail-
able, not in, in the expected sense.
Oh, but we are: deep in that inner
space where we step out into the
dope of the weightless atmosphere,
ready to drown. How deliciously
2 I call him a “boy,” but really Mac is the consummate “they”: I stand here, witness to the queering of the machine (or is it the machine that
stands witness to mine?).
3 Perhaps this is why men, long encouraged to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh, had, till recently, a monopoly over the literary world.
It was only when both men and women in the modern era encouraged one another to discover and enjoy their bodies without shame, and
modern thinkers began to question the ethics of dominating or possessing another individual’s body, her thinking, or manner of existence,
that women and others who resisted traditional identities began to find success in publishing, to write. How we’ve flooded, lately, the scene,
our output a reminder of the once-impeded, dammed-up expression of our libido, our gushing capacity for creative productivity released
finally in a gushing, 21st-century Ta k e th i s! torrent.
new and vast and welcoming it is in
there, all that undiscovered territory;
how readily each frontier opens up to
us and the psychic, memory-studded
cosmos reveals itself, vision upon
vision.
When we’re writing memoir, in
particular, we have to be prepared
to fall fully into the black hole of
the past, to be sucked beyond the
“event horizon” of the particular
story we’re working on, no turning
back. Risky, sometimes painful, but
often tantalizing stuff. Moreover, if
we let ourselves keep our eyes open
and gaze fully into that material,
even—and especially—when it feels
most uncomfortable, that’s when we
connect on an increasingly meaning-
ful level with both that material and
our imagined reader. It might seem
odd to equate writing and coital prac-
tice, but this is precisely what Jessica
Graham does in her guide to mindful
mating, Good Sex. Acceptance and
curiosity, she argues, are essential in
helping us achieve a fully “embodied
experience” in the bedroom, where
we most want to connect in an
“outrageously intimate” way with our
partner (think, reader) and access our
most deeply buried material. And, as
Graham notes, time flies when we’re
having this kind of Tantric, hyper-
conscious fun.
Here I am now, gazing into my
computer screen, and Mac, this fancy
bad-boy with his oh-so-responsive
keys and pixelated glow, stares back,open to anything and everything I
have to say. In Mac’s eyes, I can do no
wrong; I can be my most marvelous,
un-pin-down-able, unedited self, free
to explore without the outside world’s
tight-lipped disapproval. Mac is sexy
because he lets me say it like it is; he
doesn’t stop me or fret about what the
neighbors might say if I make a lot
of noise.^2 And just like that, a whole
morning has gone by!rising action, falling action
The author of creative nonfiction,
diving for core truths, must engage in
the writing process with this special
kind of all-in ecstatic energy, and
it’s this libidinous relationship of the
writer to her work, I think––our lust
for the fully lived and examined life,
as explored and made manifest on the
page––that informs, too, what falls
out there, the shape and substance of
the work. The arc of rising desire and
ultimate fulfillment is the same force
that drives the creation of the classic
dramatic arc, this stimulation and
energy and fearless concentration that
help us arrive at a satisfying narra-
tive and rhetorical climax: the union
of the lived story and its purpose or
ultimate meaning.^3 Hard to argue
that Freytag’s pyramid, that whole
teasing package of exposition, rising
action, climax, and resolution (or,
perhaps, some more feminine ver-
sion of that graphic, a slow-building,
crashing wave of intensity) doesn’t
mimic almost exactly the sex act: the