The recent announcement that the University of Missouri is closing its academic press has led me to revisit some of the books published by the press over the years. This morning, I’m re-reading parts of Joe David Bellamy’s excellent book Literary Luxuries: American Writing at the End of the Millennium. Bellamy was one of my very first creative writing professors—he taught a fiction workshop at St. Lawrence University. Every Wednesday night from 7 until 10, a group of 12 to 15 students would get together to discuss craft with a man who had once directed the literature program of the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m not sure I recognized what a unique opportunity this was while I was experiencing it.
At the time, I believe Bellamy was most well-known for his fiction, but Literary Luxuries is a great nonfiction book that I think any writer—regardless of genre—would do well to check out. It is equal parts memoir, personal essay, craft guide, and survey of the literary landscape of the late twentieth century.
One of the chapters in the book—a craft essay titled “The Autobiographical Trap”—should be of particular interest to nonfiction writers. The essay’s target audience is fiction writers, but I think the lessons he imparts are important for nonfiction writers to hear as well.
“When one writes from life and memory,” Bellamy writes, “there is always a tendency to become so involved emotionally with the material that the work becomes ‘too thin’ or anorexic. The least suggestion (the slimmest outline or reminder) of the traumatic events you wish to write about causes the floodgates of emotion to open up for you … So it is not difficult at all to persuade yourself that the floodgates will open up for the reader as well.” There’s danger in making such an assumption, though—our readers don’t have our experiences, haven’t perceived the world as we have, and those suggestions, outlines, and reminders that resonate so much with us need to be developed and described in more detail if they are to resonate with the reader. As Bellamy explains, “This means a careful and full rendering of the action, the motivations, and the expository details that are so familiar to the writer that they are easy to overlook.” Continue reading “Ensnared by Memory”