Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
My husband is a saint. He knows how tedious I am, but loves me anyway. At night, for instance, we often watch an episode of some series that’s available on Netflix: “Kingdom,” “George Gently,” “Sherlock.” It’s always a mistake, though, because all I do is judge the characters, wonder what will happen next, ask questions and solicit my husband’s opinion about whether he thinks most men behave the way the ones on TV do.
In the morning, I hunt for my husband after he’s showered and ask if we could talk about one more thing.
I constantly ask questions of people I barely know and then ask more questions about the answers they supply. I can’t go from point A to point B to point C without losing my way. I’m easily distracted, yet linger too long when something interests me. I find lists intimidating. I like being lost on trips and driving back roads. I don’t put my clothes on in the same order every day or take the same route to work. I’m extremely digressive when I talk or teach, and, O.K., when I write.
Over the past 10 years, I witnessed national and international interest in brain mapping, in reading the brain the way a cartographer would. I watched as neuroscientists were hired at Hiram College, the small school where I teach, and as the Brain Initiative of the Obama administration was announced. I began to observe my mind more deliberately during the years I cared for my mother with Alzheimer’s and saw her lose every memory she had — including who I was.
How could I, and other writers, benefit from mapping our brains, from understanding the nature of our minds? We would not necessarily profit from studying the physical organ made up of nerves and cells (though we might) but, rather, from knowing a little more about the mind that was affected by the brain. Thoughts, perceptions, memory — those things that were part of human consciousness were what I wanted to consider. Could studying the mind change the way we write?
This summer I asked a group of writers at The Twenty: A Kentucky Young Writers Advance, a wonderful program created by Nikky Finney, to describe what they knew about the way their minds worked. Wouldn’t it be instructive to writers to consider how their minds registered experience?
Emily Dickinson knew the power of the brain and wrote a poem about it, a poem that has become a touchstone of my life in recent years. I memorized it almost instantly the first time I read it, as if I needed it for my body’s very chemistry. Each stanza began with a description of the dimensions of the brain, of its cartography: “The Brain — is wider than the Sky —,” “The Brain is deeper than the sea —,” “The Brain is just the weight of God —.”But why did it take several years of reciting this poem before I set off with transit and solar compass in hand to survey my own brain and gather its data?
One student in the summer group said she could retain nothing of the substance of her dreams, but only their sensations. What a dream smelled like or tasted like was all that was left to her.
A young woman who already knew something about the darkness of the human mind said, “I am, after all, a hormonal animal with a chemical imbalance, with a body that warps shadows into monsters and friends into conspirators, half-fried, overstimulated and worn out by my own antics.”
A writer on staff tried the exercise too and told me she found it extremely telling that although she remembered all of the “business” of students when she met them (what they said, what their quirks were, the way they entered a room), she seldom could recall their names.
The person who talked about being left with only sensory residue after her dreams were over was, not surprisingly, a poet. She drifted toward sensation and imagery in an almost inevitable way.
The teacher who couldn’t remember names, but remembered all the “business” of people? A distinguished fiction writer.
And my own work? I’m reflective to a fault. And I do mean, to a fault.
So “memoirist” is the label I’ve been given by the world.
But these clues about genre may be only the simple ones. I think there are other clues that might surprise us even more. Perhaps our minds, more fully understood, will call into question the notion of genre itself and force us to think about it in a new way. In “The Invention of Solitude,” Paul Auster talks about the 16th-century heretical thinker Giordano Bruno, who believed that human thought resembled the structure of the natural world: every thought, like every speck in nature, was connected to all other things.
So I wonder: Does our current idea of genre limit us? Karen Russell said that the word “genre” made her extremely nervous and jittery, “like someone coming at you with a bit and trying to guide you into a narrow stall.”
If we’ve felt sometimes that the page is too tight for us, it may be because our minds have outgrown it. The brain that propels the mind, after all, is deeper than the sea and wider than the sky, isn’t it? The page may be forcing compromises that the brain, in such close relationship with the mind, must rightly refuse.
Last June, I participated in a Saturday workshop called Breaking Genre at Case Western Reserve University. Even though leaders of sessions were selected for their expertise in a particular genre (a small irony, I suppose), the workshop was spent breaking down borders — or as David Young, a panelist from Oberlin College, preferred to call it, “stretching” them. The important assumption of the conference was that perhaps “genre” was a label of “convenience” more than anything else. New labels were heard everywhere in the classrooms — “ekphrastic poetry,” “multimedia storytelling,” “graphic memoir,” “hybridity,” “crossover novel.”
I know in my own writing that the term “hybrid essay” helps me avoid the perilous task of trying to fit my work neatly into a single category of nonfiction: personal essay, memoir, lyric essay, meditation, braided essay, literary journalism, biography — pick just one.
No, I won’t. I can’t anymore, even if I wanted to. For too long, I’ve mistrusted this mind of mine. I let conventional organization rush in too soon, and I chased away the reflection and associative chaos particular to the way I think — traits I’ve begun to honor now. Human thought resembles the structure of the natural world, remember, and it’s all right to allow my very unruly and associative mind to jump from place to place. If I come to understand and trust its nature, I might actually land somewhere interesting.
Many writers, past and present, have formed friendships with other genres, as well as other art forms, to supply them with the extra acreage they need. As I write this piece, shortly after the reappointment of Natasha Trethewey to a second term as United States poet laureate, I think of her. Her “Beyond Katrina” is so much more than one thing. It is poetry, memoir, research, literary journalism, meditation. It contains family photographs, facsimile reproductions of letters, words on church marquees.
And then I think of my garden. In a rectangular swath of land in my backyard I have wild strawberries — farthest on the west — then a huge clump of whorled yellow loosestrife, then daisies on the east. Above this patch of ground is an elevated area with herbs, most dominantly a patch of very happy and aggressive mint. I try to keep the plants separate, but I really have to work at this.
If I’m gone for more than three days, they begin to mix. I usually impose my will and beat them back to their appropriate boundaries, but when I see them on my return, their wildness and natural blend often make me pause. The daisies, with their yellow centers, dance with yellow loosestrife, the strawberries surprise me as they poke their red faces through the leaves of taller plants, and the mint, having jumped out of the window box into the garden below, makes everything redolent.
Joyce Dyer, essayist and author of three memoirs, lives in Hudson, Ohio, where she’s at work on a book about her town’s most famous citizen — John Brown.