Hi Crafters!

First, let me thank you for being here and apologize for being tardy with the newsletter! I got caught up at City Hall protesting an unfair tax on small businesses.

Today’s newsletter will tackle the introduction to Jane Alison’s “Meander, Spiral, Explode.” You can find the full reading schedule and date for the live Zoom convo at the bottom of this email. If you still need the book, you can use this affiliate link to grab it from Bookshop. The introduction is short, so you have some time to play catch up!

You won’t find a paywall in this week’s newsletter, but going forward there will be a partial paywall. Paid subscribers will get access to full posts, writing prompts, additional resources for understanding and making the most of the Craft Club book pick, and an invitation to the live discussion on Zoom. (Not a community member? Invest in your craft and support a writer by upgrading today!)

Without further ado… Let’s get craft-y!

<3,

Minda

This is a craft book that I read without knowing how beloved it is by so many people. It made me think differently about story arc and Jane Alison’s writing style is extremely approachable, despite her being an academic. It’s also, apparently, a craft book quite a few of you already own, but have never got around to reading… and this is your chance!

However, as a nonfiction writer and someone who focuses on introducing my students to the contemporary literary landscape by teaching pieces published within the last 20 years, I wasn’t really vibing with the more, shall we say, “classic” examples she provided (I have a friend who is a massive Sebald hater and I tried to keep it from them that this book’s inspiration has a Sebald origin story — but they already knew!).

As a Craft Club selection, I have the opportunity to expose writers to a craft book that isn’t “Bird by Bird” and provide recent writing examples that will be beneficial to emerging writers currently deep in the muck of building a writing career.

Some of the most consistent feedback I get from the writing workshops I lead is writers being appreciative of the diverse array of writers I’ve introduced them to. Because creative nonfiction borrows the tools of fiction to tell true stories, it’s an exciting challenge to translate fiction-focused craft advice into a resource for memoirists and personal essayists.

You'll receive a weekly Craft Club newsletter covering the week’s assigned readings.

June 3 - Introduction
June 10 - Ch. 1 - Ch. 3
June 17 - Ch. 4 - Ch. 6
June 24 - Ch. 7 - Ch. 9
July 1 - Ch. 10 - Epilogue

The date listed is the date the chapters will be covered in the newsletter. You can either read the newsletter and then read the chapters, if it makes you feel more confident to go into the reading with the lay of the land. Or if you want to think alongside me, you can do the reading and then read the newsletter. I’ll provide page numbers for any quotes for your ease of reference.

Either way, I encourage you to leave your thoughts and questions in the comments or reply to the email with them, if you’re on the shyer side. I also welcome you to share your responses to the writing prompts with me.

Paid subscribers will have access to the web archive of the newsletter, so don’t stress if you fall behind in the readings, you can always come back to Craft Club when you’re ready.

At some point in your writing life, you were likely taught Freytag’s triangle (or pyramid, you’re classy), which outlines a dramatic arc that peaks with a climax.

And Jane Alison is like, “[S]omething that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no?” (6) And Jane’s entire conceit behind this book is that this is not the only way and we only have to look to nature to draw on other patterns for the narrative arc in our writing to follow. Jane cribs the list of patterns she intends to cover in this book from Peter Stevens’ “Patterns in Nature”:

She’s going to cover these patterns at length across the book, so I won’t spend any time in this newsletter defining them. Reference the book — page 21.

It doesn't really come as a surprise that the cishet white men who dominated Western literature made their own orgasm the basis for narrative arcs. But this has never exclusively been the standard. We know that many Indigenous and Asian cultures developed a cyclical writing style. Or look to the oral storytelling traditions of the South that is Black folks inheritance from our African lineage. So what Jane is purposing isn’t actually all that radical aside from the insistence by The Establishment — Jane spends some time dismantling enforcement of Aristotle’s “Poetics” — that most of our writing hew close to the standards they set forth.

Fuck that noise. Says Jane.

If you are struggling with a piece that resists the typical narrative arc as set forth by Freytag, it might benefit you to experiment with other, equally established, narrative arcs. You might find Creative Nonfiction’s visual guide to the many forms a personal essay can take helpful.

If we’re straying from the typical narrative arc that peaks with climax, how do we create that forward momentum that pulls the reader through a piece? Jane argues that instead of creating forward motion in the story, you can create for the reader “inside [their] mind as [they] construct sense.” (17) This is achieved, of course, through pattern, or rather the reader’s pattern recognition capabilities. This makes me think of movie directors talking about the importance of a color when it appears throughout a film or when a closing scene is reassembling of an opening scene. This repetition, these patterns make meaning.

Jane finds inspiration in how women perform the alchemy of turning the flow of our lives into art.

It almost feels like there’s a bit of “Divine Feminine” subtext here, but I don’t know that we gotta go there (even just attempting to find a link to redirect y’all to, for those who may need this term defined, only pulled up sus sites, so that should tell you a lot of what you need to know about this concept…).

But what she says more broadly about writers is relatable.

And she finds that memoirists are particularly accustomed to seeking out these patterns.

As a memoir writer, I am obsessed with these “life echoes.” Whether it’s realizing we are reliving a certain context in our lives decades later (I was “encouraged” to leave a Corporate role in my twenties and that left me feeling powerless. I was laid off in my 40s but instead of feeling powerless, I’m reclaiming my power by working for myself.) or maybe romantic relationship mirror a familial connection (Daddy issues is a jerky term for the connection between who we date and the traumas enacted upon us from our family of origins).

Memoir doesn’t tell the entire life story, it focuses on a specific span of time or a theme. People who want to write their lives but feel overwhelmed by the largeness of the story, can pull their project into scope by looking at the patterns that have repeated across their life and sharing the feelings and experience tied to a single pattern.

Let’s take Kiese Laymon’s “Heavy” as an example. One could describe this book as a cataloging of the ways we harm ourselves and others when we don’t deal with our trauma. This is the linchpin that pulls together chapters on dating, gambling, health and family. Because, as the saying goes, “How we do one thing is how we do everything.”

If you look at Jesmyn Ward’s “The Men We Reaped,” Jesmyn structured an entire book around the pattern she saw of the Black men in her community dying too young. By honoring their lives, she also exposes the patterns of structural inequality that led to those losses.

Jane shares an example of a pattern from her own life and calls it a “Coriolis force.” This felt familiar to me. I describe my life and my mother’s life as inverses of each other. My mother’s father was stationed in the Philippines when he met her mother. He returned to the U.S. The family remained behind. My father was stationed in the Philippines when he met my mother. He returned to the U.S. We followed. One man’s decision rippling across generations. How different both our lives would look had her father brought her family to the Philippines or had she and I remained and not followed my father to Kentucky.

Jane name checks some experimental writers that made my eyes glaze over in grad school and introduces us to Ross Chambers’ term “loiterature.” (19) I did a newsletter earlier this year (last year?) on essays shaped like a digression. So, if you, like me, just can’t get into Italo Calvino, a couple of modern-day examples of this style are T Kira Madden’s “When the Squirrels are Over” and Kiese’s “The Worst Shot Ever Taken.” T Kira’s piece unfolds as if the narrator is most concerned about the squirrels that have infiltrated her home, but really it’s an essay over her anxieties about life and possibility of her and her wife having children. Kiese’s essay is presumably about sports but is really one big digression that is a series of love letters to people in his life.

I think maaaaybe (and I’m happy to be made to defend this take in the comments) Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” could be slotted into this category too. You know the dog is dying, her marriage is dead, there are squirrels where there not supposed to be here too and then, we meander our way, in the most haunting way possible, toward an aggrieved doctoral student murdering her colleagues. This form fit the function of the essay because it mirrors the volatility of our lives.

One of the things as a beginning writer that I struggled to figure out was how do I get my pieces to stop sounding like a toddler rattling off their day, “And then this happened and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened…” Fortunately, I figured it out. Jane provides another tool toward this objective.

And this leads us into our writing prompt…

Feel free to send me any thoughts or suggestions you have for Craft Club — or maybe you have relevant resources you’d like to add to the links I’ve provided throughout today’s newsletters. I can round them up and share them in the next newsletter. — this is the first iteration of an idea I’ve had for awhile and I’m open to ideas for how to make it as beneficial as possible for my readers.

June 3 - Introduction
June 10 - Ch. 1 - Ch. 3
June 17 - Ch. 4 - Ch. 6
June 24 - Ch. 7 - Ch. 9
July 1 - Ch. 10 - Epilogue

Live Chat, Sunday, July 12th @ 3P ET