Tag: memoir

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The path to meaning: Gregory Orr’s The Blessing gets a second chance

Gregory Orr will read from The Blessing at New Dominion Bookshop on November 20 at 7pm. Publicity image.

By Cortney Phillips Meriwether

When Gregory Orr first published The Blessing in 2002, he did so after years of reluctance. The memoir, which begins with a 12-year-old Orr accidentally shooting and killing his younger brother on a hunting trip, was understandably difficult to write. Yet, through the encouragement of his wife, he did write it—and the book came out to rave reviews. But then something happened that Orr calls “an author’s nightmare”: The original publisher transitioned away from books, choosing instead to focus on manufacturing games. Promotion stopped, orders went unfilled, and the book eventually went entirely out of print.

Now, 17 years later, after Orr’s long struggle to get the rights to the book back, The Blessing is getting a second chance.

“It’s hard to get a book re-released and it’s hard to even make up your mind to do it,” Orr says. “But I believe in the book enough to want to try to share it again.”

He wasn’t the only one: Milkweed Editions agreed to republish The Blessing with the addition of a new afterward. Unlike the original version, which ends when Orr is only 18, the re-released version includes an essay about returning to the location of a terrifying kidnapping Orr experienced as a young civil rights activist. The essay grants the reader the advantage of 40 years of perspective, adding new dimension to the already deeply reflective book.

With a long career as a lyric poet, Orr has written extensively about his childhood trauma in his poems, but prose was a different challenge. As a way of sticking to his roots, Orr wrote The Blessing in brief, vignette-like chapters, distilling the darkest moments of his youth into snapshots. “The short chapters made them bearable, made them a little like poems,” he says.

The memoir takes the reader through the years following the hunting accident, with a young Orr struggling to find meaning in his life in the wake of what he has done and how it has affected his family. His parents, buried in their own grief and personal struggles, are unable to be there for him in the way he needs, and so he falls further into himself. Then, as a senior in high school soon after the sudden death of his mother, he’s placed in an honors English class led by Mrs. Irving, the school librarian.

“It would be simple to say she saved my life,” Orr says of his former teacher. “I don’t think I had enough sense or hope after my early experiences to know what to do with my life and to be able to bear it.”

Irving introduced her students to poetry and, for the first time since the accident, Orr felt like he had a thread to hold on to. He writes: “What I felt when I wrote my first, clumsy poem was that the words were creating a world, not describing a preexisting one. I had tapped into the inner world of my emotions and feelings and was trying to give them form in concrete language.”

From that very first poem, Orr knew he had found his life’s purpose. “The moment it happened, I knew this was it,” he says.

Thanks to the early influence of Irving, he would go on to live a life filled with poetry, publishing 12 collections as well as critical and instructional texts on the form. He would also follow in her footsteps with a 44-year teaching career. As the co-founder and long-time director of the University of Virginia’s M.F.A. program in creative writing, Orr has directly shaped the literary backbone of Charlottesville, teaching the same power of poetry that saved his life to countless students over four decades.

“When I think back about all the years of teaching, one of the things I most wanted to do with my students was to give them permission,” he says. “To overcome that initial inhibition or shame or uncertainty and to say yes, you have permission to put words down on the page; you have permission to turn what’s inside you into words and release it, release it onto the page.”

Throughout his teaching career, Orr often hoped to be to his students what Irving was to him. “I happen to completely believe in writing as a path to meaning,” he says.

While he’s now a newly retired professor, Orr can’t imagine the day when he’ll retire from writing poetry. His latest collection, The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write, was released this past spring and he’s currently in the process of putting together two new volumes of poems. Just as he has since he was 20 years old, Orr still writes every morning, seven days a week—releasing what’s inside him onto the page.

This daily practice is the living testament to the enduring hope in The Blessing: that a world of wonder can come from imagination, that a poem can speak the language of being. That art, even amongst the greatest pain, can be a gateway to survival.

Gregory Orr will read from The Blessing at New Dominion Bookshop on November 20 at 7pm.

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Arts

Sober perspective: Author Leslie Jamison’s new memoir goes deep on artist-addicts, AA, and recovery

“To me the most compelling stories will always be those investigating the complexity of emotional experience, what it feels like to be alive," says Leslie Jamison, who will read from The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath at New Dominion Bookshop on January 18.

Leslie Jamison writes in the beginning of The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, “I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could.” The author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection The Empathy Exams struggled with alcohol dependence throughout her undergraduate and graduate education.

Accepted into the competitive Iowa Writers’ Workshop at 21, she drank among older writers and the legends of famous writers who drank before them. After losing memories of whole nights to blackouts, she tried to stop drinking on her own and eventually sought the structure and support of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The artistic result of Jamison’s entry into recovery is more than an account of addiction and sobriety—The Recovering is an exploration of narrative itself. Interweaving her personal experience with the lives of those she meets in AA as well as deceased writers and artists who battled their own addictions, Jamison gives shape to the “ongoingness” of recovery.

While questioning the draw of the addiction story, she examines her internal narration as well. “The questions at the heart of the book,” she says, “are about storytelling. What kinds of stories we tell ourselves and what their limits are.”

Whether our culture is preoccupied in a given moment with glorifying or demonizing the artist-addict, it is generally more captivated by “that darker energy of falling apart” than the journey to wellness. But in writing her story and encountering other addicts in person and on the page, Jamison found that stories about recovery can be some of the most interesting, precisely because of the effect sobriety has on perception.

“So much of recovery is about coming into sharper, more acute, more specific emotional awareness, and getting sensitized to the things that make a story interesting in the first place,” Jamison says. “To me, the most compelling stories will always be those investigating the complexity of emotional experience, what it feels like to be alive.”

When Jamison began attending AA meetings, she was humbled to learn her experience wasn’t exceptional. Having striven most of her life to distinguish herself from others, this knowledge came as relief. She was tired of the version of herself that pursued “uniqueness at the expense of a certain kind of self-possession and self-sufficiency,” she says. And she realized that uniqueness and commonality are not mutually exclusive. ”I think everyone is unique and the same at the same time,” she says with a laugh. “Most of our emotional experience is shared, and there’s value in investigating that sharedness.”

The structure of The Recovering illustrates this by supporting a plurality of stories within it. Jamison examines the art and addictions of Raymond Carver, John Berryman, Charles R. Jackson, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, George Cain, David Foster Wallace, and Amy Winehouse. Much of the book is about how these writers and artists do and don’t function creatively through addiction and sobriety. The concept evolved from the roots of her doctoral thesis, and at one point Jamison writes about having to defend the interestingness of her subject—writers writing without the influence of alcohol or drugs—to an advisor more interested in the relationship between addiction and creativity. After the encounter, she reflects on our cultural mythology: “The lie wasn’t that addiction could yield truth; it was that addiction had a monopoly on it.”

For Jamison, sobriety has fueled her writing in many ways. On the physical level, the effects of alcohol no longer impede her daily life and work. On a deeper level, she says, “sobriety is a form of waking up” that impels her to be present for difficulty and nuance, which then shows up in her writing. Her experience has also influenced the kind of work she pursues.

“The attention recovery asks you to pay to the lives of other people was part of what started to inspire my desire to bring other people’s lives into my work” through interviewing and reportage, she says. In addition to exploring the lives of addicts, her research examines the origins of AA, U.S. drug policies, and the racism embedded in policies that determine who is a victim and who is a villain.

Yet writing The Recovering also required that she address her own life in a way she hadn’t before. “The essay provides a lot of room for lateral motion and you can land where you want to land and leave again,” she says. “Drinking was lurking around the edges of The Empathy Exams even though I didn’t label it that way. People in recovery could see recovery in it even though I never talked about it.”

While the memoir form imposed “more pressure to tell a cohesive narrative,” Jamison says, “in a way there was something liberating and exciting about reckoning directly with the subject that had been a guiding force and guiding pressure all along.”

As she writes toward the end of The Recovering, “yearning is our most powerful narrative engine.” Jamison’s desire to tell a story of recovery, and to tell it well, results in a compelling and beautifully crafted book.

Leslie Jamison will read from The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath at New Dominion Bookshop on January 18.

Categories
Arts

Sharon Harrigan puts her heart on the page

Sharon Harrigan reads from her memoir, Playing with Dynamite, at New Dominion Bookshop on October 12. She will discuss the genre with Jennifer Niesslein at WriterHouse on November 2. Publicity photo

For most of her life, Sharon Harrigan has been haunted by questions surrounding her father’s death: He died in Michigan when she was 7, and the exact cause was shrouded in a fog. Her debut memoir, Playing with Dynamite, is about finding the courage to ask questions, to question her own memory and ultimately to question the stories we tell ourselves. But as she writes in the book, “It’s harder to untell than tell a story.” But this is what her memoir does. It pulls at the threads to unstitch a story she has told herself all of her life, and then stitches together a retelling.

She began by talking to her family about her father. “The first thing I found out is that my brother and I remembered things very differently,” says Harrigan. “That was kind of the impetus for the book.” She wondered, “how does the way that we block memories, even as small children, not knowing what we’re doing—maybe as a coping mechanism—how does that change our ideas and memories?”

Given this premise, Harrigan structures the memoir as a journey of discovery as she sifts through her family’s collective memory. The reader perches like a fly on the wall as she moves from Michigan to New York to Paris to Charlottesville. She realized, she says, “I had to make my search, my quest, visible.”

This requires a certain amount of vulnerability that, perhaps, fiction does not. “I think there’s a reason that a lot of people who eventually come out with a memoir start by telling the story in a different genre,” says Harrigan. “It is very hard to be that naked on the page.” She, in fact, did first attempt to write her family’s story as a novel. But, she says, “I was still obsessed with my father’s story and I realized that to go deep enough I actually had to tell the truth.”

Piece by piece, memory by memory, she reconstructs her father on the page. The resultant man is someone who adapts to life with only one hand after a dynamite accident, who feels compelled to perpetually prove himself and remains a risk-taker, a characteristic that pushes him to drive in dense fog where his life is cut short. Yet he is not the only one in the story who takes risks. Harrigan explains that the jacket design of her book—the cursive text of the title igniting an explosion—is “supposed to show that it’s the words themselves that are the fuse. That the person playing with dynamite is not only my father but me, the writer. Writing our stories is inherently taking a big risk.”

In writing memoir, Harrigan sees the risk from potential judgment by others or causing harm to people she loves. The self-examination and introspection required also left her open to self-judgment. There is a moment in the book when she realizes that one of the stories she told herself was that her brother was the kind of kid who got bullied, rather than considering the possibility that her father could be a bully and she, herself, a victim, too. She recognizes how victimhood in our culture can be this monolithic thing that doesn’t allow for complexity, for strength. She writes, “We tell ourselves stories, sometimes, at the expense of others.”

And as much as the book is about her father, in her journey she learns more about her mother, too. “I realized at a certain point that I went looking for my father and found my mother,” she says. “I started with a lot of questions and some of them I don’t have definitive answers for, but some of them I feel like I do.” More importantly, she is no longer afraid to ask.