mouth. I promise you, we will not get past the barest first few moments of the anecdote.
Those of you in front of the class: I will walk you sentence by sentence through a fragment of your anecdote, demanding absolutely pure moment-to-moment through-the-senses narrative. When you vary from that, I will gently identify the way in which you vary it and have you back up. Then at some point I will even step in and make you consider certain things: What do you smell? — and so forth.
At every question, at every little fork in the road for the speaker, I want you at your desks to be making those same decisions. And if your decisions are different from the speaker's, fine; then back up, edit that, and keep going forward. I want you to be participating internally.
We're going to be utterly obsessive about moment-to-moment sensual flow of narrative here. We're not going to do any fast motion or slow motion, we're not going to allow the narrator the leeway of abstraction and generalization and interpretation that are sometimes allowable as voice — none of that tonight. The details that I'm going to be eliciting have no center of gravity to them, because we're not going to get involved with yearning; that will emerge, we hope, next week in the coached writing exercise. But tonight there's no center of gravity, so the details will be promiscuous.
Understand that what's coming out of your mouth is not the same as writing a work of literary fiction. It has a superficial similarity to literary fiction, but the purpose of the exercise is simply to make you understand what the normal mode of literary discourse is, what your normal focus and speed are in literary fiction, and to open up your sense memory and, therefore, to open you up to your unconscious. Don't be disturbed if it's frustrating and nothing comes of it. If you work your way through that, at least you'll feel what's wrong. I've seen spectacular breakthroughs a few times with people doing this exercise, but whatever happens is OK; you won't be graded, no one's judging you. It's just an exercise to help you and your colleagues.
Because I'm going to be asking these questions, and because your literal memories are not sufficient to remember the kinds of detail I'm asking for, I'm obviously not looking for your memories of the actual event. We're using the anecdote as a familiar takeoff point for you, but mostly you're going to be inventing. We're going to lead you to invent a reality for a tiny fragment of the anecdote. So if you don't remember it very well, that's fine too — probably better. The invention must come from your sense memory—not your ability to remember exactly where you smelled that thing or exactly what you heard ten years ago; but your ability to collect all the sensual impressions of your life as impressions, to break them down in the compost of your imagination, and then to recover them, reevoke them, and recombine them into these new imagined things.
Who's going to go first to tell your anecdote? Sandra— good, thanks.
I'll be taking a few notes, nothing evaluative; I just want to get it down so I'll know where to come back to.
Sandra: I don't remember how old I was, but I walked through the streets of Liverpool to visit my grandfather, who had a barbershop somewhere. It was probably nearby somewhere, but I thought it was a long way away. And I went to the shop to visit him, and he was shaving. He used an old-fashioned razor. He stopped what he was doing — I think he said something like "Hello luv" to me. And he went over to the window and he picked up a pair of earrings, which were in the window. I don't know what he was doing selling earrings, but they were in the window and he just picked them out and gave them to me and I put them on. I really loved them. My wonderful grandfather. My mother never understood why I liked him when she didn't, but I think that was one of the crucial moments forming a relationship with him.
ROB: Excellent, that's going to be very useful. That gives us a lot of good stuff to work with. Who else?
Mary Jane: This is about the day after my father died. My brother and I drove out to the funeral home to make arrangements for his funeral, and walked in the door, and it was like a movie cliche of a funeral parlor. It had this really thick carpeting on the floor and heavy curtains; it was dark inside and there was air-conditioning and it was really cold. And then the fellow who was the funeral director — you know, black mustache and a cheap suit — exactly what you would expect, I guess. We went in and sat down, my brother and I, across the table from each other, and went through the checklist of what you have to do to arrange a funeral. My father wanted to be cremated, but what we didn't realize is that by law you have to be cremated in a casket, so we had to choose a casket for him anyway. So we took a tour of the funeral parlor; we got to look at all the caskets, and my brother and I decided we would buy the cheapest thing, which was a cardboard box, which in a way is kind of shameful, but we also looked at each other and thought if we did anything else Dad would kill us if he were here because he wouldn't want to spend the money. Some weird things happened, like we sat there across from each other arranging this funeral, trying not to laugh the day after our father had died, because it was all such a cliche. And I said, "Can I pay for this with a credit card?" and I thought: this is weird, to pay for this with a credit card. And the last thing that happened was somebody had to go and identify the body, and my big, tough, army-helicopter-pilot older brother didn't want to do it, so I did it. I went in and saw my father wrapped up in a blanket, laid out in this room, and somehow I had to touch his head and he was so cold that I thought, "He's been in the refrigerator overnight." It was very strange.
ROB: Thank you, Mary Jane. Brandy?
Brandy: When I was three years old, I went on vacation to Broken Bow, Oklahoma, at Arrowhead State Park, and I was seesawing with both of my brothers, the older brother on one side of me and the next oldest on the other. The middle brother always had middle-child syndrome and couldn't stand me, and he got mad at one point and decided to get off, but he didn't realize that my legs were in the handle part of the seesaw, so when he did, it shot me up in the air and I broke my leg, and I had to drive all the way back home with a broken leg.
ROB: Thank you. That works too. Leslie?
Leslie: When I was small, I grew up in a house surrounded by hay fields and pecan orchards, and in the middle
of the fall, about this time of year, my cousin Gaines — who looked a little like Clark Kent, with big bottle glasses — would, get on his tractor, and he would mow all the hay and leave hundreds of bales of hay the size of a Volkswagen out on the edge of the pecan orchard. Then my brother and I would climb up on the hay bales and jump from bale to bale and play king of the mountain. The goal was to knock the other person off the bale. When I was very small, I couldn't get onto the hay bales because they were round, and sometimes they'd be so big that I couldn't get a grip in smooth hay without digging into it — and it's hard to dig into it because it's real dense — so I'd have to find two bales that were close together and crawl into that narrow space in between and inch away up sideways, and my brother would knock me off and sometimes it hurt really bad falling down.
ROB: Thank you, Leslie. If the four of you are serious about continuing, then that's probably all we're going to need. Who'd like to go first for the retelling? Come on, Sandra.
All right, I want you to remember that you're all in this together. I want you essentially to take on Sandra's consciousness, participate with her, really try to see this scene — a little bit ahead of her even.
Sandra, I want you to relax, clear your head. Don't consider your words. Speak in full narrative sentences, but don't worry about your grammar and syntax. Just try to keep things flowing, and just let what comes out of your mouth be simply an articulation of what's going on in that cinema of your own mind.