Writing About a Place.

For this week’s blog assignment, I’m choosing to write about Ehrlich’s “The Solace of Open Spaces” because it is an essay that I can currently relate to as I live in Montana.  First, however, I want to say that the assignment this week reminds me of Anthony Bourdain’s television show called“No Reservations” that airs on the travel channel, minus all of the exotic food he samples.  It’s a show that I’ve seen many times and I’ve often wondered why he loves to write about traveling so much as I find it to seem very daunting.  Perhaps this is because I feel like, being an outsider, there is a lot of pressure to do the place that has been traveled to justice.  It would be very rude to just barge in on a place expecting welcome arms and maybe even open homes only for these locals to receive a nice, healthy dose of insults and slander simply because the place is not the writer’s “cup of tea” or, worse, because he or she misunderstood the place and/or its inhabitants.

Anyway, I enjoyed reading “The Solace of Open Spaces” and from my understanding, it’s not a travel piece – it’s a place piece.  This seems more comfortable to me.  When the writer described the drifts of snow making it difficult to decipher the foreground from the background, I understood one hundred percent.  She says “This white bulk is sometimes dizzying, even nauseating, to look at” and I’m reminded of the time my husband and I drove home from Orofino, Idaho by way of US-12 at night while it was snowing. I had to close my eyes (despite the fact that I’d taken a Dramamine) in order to calm my stomach because it was the first time I’d experienced vertigo.  Something else that I liked about this piece, very quickly, is that it reminded me a bit of a James Herriot novel.  Toward the end of the excerpt from the first chapter, she describes assisting a friend as a midwife to a cow having trouble with labor.  I distinctly remember several short stories of this nature from Herriot’s novel “All Creatures Great and Small.”  It’s a great way to tie the “I” portion of the story in with the descriptive details of the land and I’ve taken note of that, although I have no similar experiences I could use.

The text doesn’t raise any questions for me this week because the writer does an excellent job of fully explaining herself.  Furthermore, I have met a handful of people that could probably describe similar situations to me and if they have and I had questions, I’m sure they answered them for me.  For example, my father-in-law is someone who’s very familiar with land and raising sheep and horses (no cows, yet, I don’t think) and whenever I have a question I can expect a full-length educational explanation from him, so he’s my go-to guy.  I didn’t think of this assignment as a possibility of turning into a journalism article, but it does seem like something that could work.  Since I can’t think of very many ways to turn a place I’ve been to or traveled to into a journalism piece (unless some famous crime or person happened to have occurred or been there), I think it’s safe to say that I see it as more related to the personal essay style than journalism.  It’s much easier for me to think of the assignment that way because it makes me more comfortable since that’s how I’ve been writing for the past few weeks and it’s a challenge enough as it is.  I still feel like I’m practicing my writing as we move from week to week, but hopefully by the end, I’ll feel more secure with my work and become confident in my presentation for the portfolio.

On Memoirs.

Okayyyy! This week's reading was more like it!  While I found the author to be standoffish and a bit conceited last week, this week I found him to be warm and extremely helpful.  At first, when I started reading the examples he provided in chapter fourteen as ways to draw the reader into the simple story of a memoir, I thought he was going to go on and on with his name-dropping lists again.  What I found, though, was wonderful insight and helpful excerpts to refer to when thinking about my own memoir.  I actually even think I'd like to do his short exercise of writing three to five pages a day on a single memory from my life and elaborate on it.  He's made an excellent case for getting a personal story down on paper for later generations to absorb and learn from.

This week's reading really hit home for me because about two and a half years ago, I lost my grandfather with whom I was very close.  In fact, he and his mother helped raise my brother and me while my mom worked two jobs as a waitress to support us by herself.  When he was young, he got ringworm -- and the cure for that fungus was radiation.  Unfortunately, this treatment gave him brain tumors that ate away at his short-term memory and then his long-term memory...then it took his life.  I was only twenty when he passed and I realized then that I knew almost nothing about his life or his mother's (my Nana's).  They only ever made short, biting comments about the past, but they always chose their words carefully and never divulged more than a few sentences.  If I ever asked questions, they'd just shake their heads and purse their lips, then move on to talk about something on TV (the TV was always on at their house).  Shortly after my grandfather passed, I spent the holidays with my grandmother (my mother's mother and my grandfather's ex-wife).  I asked her about his and his mother's life and she said they acted the same way around her, never really sharing much.  What she had come to the conclusion of, she shared, after the few glimpses into their lives she got, was that my great-grandmother's family was probably Jewish and got caught up in the holocaust.  My father had the same assumptions based on their style of language and certain behaviors.  This now feels like something I should look into as it was such a huge part of history and possibly such a huge part of my family's history.  It might explain a lot.

After reading chapter 24, "Writing Family History and Memoir," I was inspired to get an ancestry.com account and make a family tree.  The chapter says that as a child, you tend to dismiss the stories that your elders share with you and only when a person has a child of their own, and begins to feel maturity sneaking up on them, do they become interested in those stories again.  That's why, at twenty-three, I'd like to make the most of the life and stories that my family has left.  Further, I'd like to record my memories as they're happening rather than having to dig them back up and start from scratch years later.  These chapters have inspired me to take a deeper look at myself and at my family and record everything I know because it's the closest I can get to taking photographs and I'd love for my children's children to know and understand who we are.

Nonfiction as Literature.

Hello class (and anyone else that has happened to stumble upon this blog)!

This is my first blog, so I am a bit self-conscious about coming off as boring, but I'll just quickly shake it off and begin.  While I was reading chapter 11 of Zinsser's On Writing Well, I assumed the viewpoint of a radio show audience member rather than as one of the empowered women that Zinsser was interviewing with (because I automatically identified with the listener instead of the writer -- imagine that!).  First off, I have to say that most radio personalities irritate me to the core.  Something about their obviously fake perkiness and their overt-the-top commercial voices.  I'm not interested in hearing about the parties they went to the night before and how hungover they are at the current moment or what their pet's favorite outfit is and why.  That being said, I understood Zinsser's annoyance with the "strenuous joviality" of the host's demeanor right out of the gate.  On the other hand, I didn't care for Zinsser's banning of certain words and all of the awkward silences that he could have easily prevented by simply explaining what exactly it was that he did.  It didn't seem to me that he even felt he needed to introduce himself to those listeners who had no idea who he even was.  Who does he think he is, Cher?  If I turned on the radio and heard this interview, say on NPR, I'm sure I would have changed the channel within the first minute.

It seemed to me that the rest of the chapter was mostly comprised of lists, which I felt the author was using to further parade his credentials to the reader.  Honestly, I got tired of the name drops pretty quickly.  I can't say that his underlying point isn't true, though.  At least for me, anyway.  I have always enjoyed reading and when I was younger, I always had a fiction book by my side.  Nowadays, I am starting prefer non-fiction, mostly biographies and first-hand accounts of real-life situations, to made-up stories and I can identify with those book-club members that seemed to have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge.

All-in-all, despite the lists and decidedly boring radio show story that this chapter divulged, I'm going to keep an open mind about the rest of the book (and put this single chapter behind me).  Hopefully I didn't come off as too critical or negative this week because that certainly wasn't my intention.  I'm simply coming from the perspective of an almost complete writing innocent and in this chapter, Zinsser didn't seem to be reaching out to my demographic.  Perhaps he wasn't aware that his book would be made into a textbook of sorts and thus not read in chronological order.

I look forward to future opportunities to express myself openly ...and learn a little bit along the way! ;)