March 2018 - Michael N. McGregor

I’ll Be Leading a Nonfiction Workshop for the Manhattanville College MFA’s Summer Writers’ Week, June 18-22

If you’re looking for a summer writing program to attend, you can’t do better than the Manhattanville College MFA’s Summer Writers’ Week. For just $650 ($750 after March 31), you get an all-morning workshop each day with a small group of fellow writers, afternoon craft presentations in all genres, and evening readings and other events. Housing for the week is just $40/night–and Manhattanville College is only a half hour away by train or car from New York City. (All workshop and events take place in the most beautiful rooms you’ll find at any writers’ week anywhere.)

Bestselling fiction writer and memoirist Dani Shapiro will be the week’s keynote speaker and lead the fiction workshop.

Poet Melissa Tuckey, a co-founder of Split This Rock, will lead the poetry workshop.

Screenwriter Sharbari Ahmed will lead the dramatic writing workshop.

And I’ll lead the nonfiction workshop.

Click here for full details and registration information.

An Ethical Starter Kit for Writing About People

When you write about other people, you make ethical decisions from beginning to end. Here’s a starter kit for making those decisions, in the form of questions to ask at each step along the way:

Choosing a subject: Why does this subject appeal to you? Is it someone you can approach fairly and open-mindedly? Do you have a bias already for or against the subject? If you know the person, are you able to get enough distance from her to go beyond your own preconceived notions of her? Are you able to be objective even if you find information that counters or even destroys your image of the person? Are you willing to disclose your bias for or against in some way to your reader?

Collecting facts: Do you have access to enough material to feel comfortable creating an image of your subject for an audience? If not, how might you mitigate this problem by the use of other contextual material? Do you have enough time and other resources (money, ability to travel to archives, contacts, etc.) to do a thorough job? Are you open to whatever material you find? Are you willing to keep researching, especially interviewing, even when your interest in your subject has flagged? What are you willing to do to secure potentially important material in the hands of someone skeptical of your project?

Interviewing: How will you select those you interview about your subject? How thorough are you willing to be? Will you include people who might have a view of that person different than yours? What are you willing to do to convince skeptical interviewees to talk to you? How far are you willing to go with flattery or intimations of friendship? Can you be honest with interviewees about your views of your subject? Are you willing to prepare thoroughly for all interviews? How will you differentiate between interview material that comes from someone you like or agree with vs. someone you don’t like or whose opinion might conflict with yours?

Gaps: How will you deal with the inevitable gaps in the story you find? Are you willing to delay moving to publication to try to find more material? Will you disclose them to your reader or try to elide them? Are you willing to be more provisional in your writing or do you feel the need to write with total conviction? How comfortable are you with using your imagination to fill some gaps? How do you decide when you have truly made a good-faith effort to fill gaps? Are you willing to abandon the project if you encounter too many gaps?

Choosing themes: How will you ensure that the themes you choose are truly demonstrable from your subject’s life? If you have a theme in mind when you start, are you flexible enough to let it go or even have it upended? How will you deal with material that doesn’t fit neatly into your themes or even counters them? How will you make sure your themes aren’t too restrictive or prescriptive? How will you determine whether your themes are fair and not the result of trendy ideas or what you think will sell?

Creating a narrative: Are you able to establish and sustain a narrative that is capacious enough to encompass all of your research? How will you deal with material that doesn’t fit neatly into story form or the sequence of stories you want to tell? How can you ensure that the pictures you create on the page comes from facts only and don’t distort the subject’s viewpoint or experience if they come from sources outside his life? How will you use stories or juicy material that comes from a single source, particularly if that source is questionable? How will you convey to your reader what sources you’ve used to construct your narrative (in-text clues, endnotes, bibliography, etc.)?

Making claims: How can you keep potentially controversial claims from being libelous? Is everything you claim about your subject based on thorough research? How will you decided what to do with material that might seem an invasion of privacy but seems important to the claims you’re making about your subject? Are you willing to be less-definitive in your claims to indicate to your reader that the claims are provisional or based on thin evidence? Have you had enough people of different viewpoints read your work to be sure your claims are broadly valid? Are your claims based on more than a single source? Are you able to get outside your own social and cultural context and evaluate your claims from a different viewpoint?

Fact checking: Have you asked those with knowledge of particular facts to read them in the context of your work? Have you had enough people read your manuscript to catch errors you might have stopped seeing? Have you checked out questionable “facts” with other sources? Have you been honest in evaluating your sources? Have you double-checked later versions of your manuscript against original sources? Have you been thorough in matching what interviewees tell you against all possible written sources (letters, diaries, official documents, published works, etc.)?

Revision and editing: Have you made sure you haven’t introduced errors by taking things out or adding things in? In making your writing more concise or trying to fit a word count, have you been careful not to be reductive or create an unintended connection through juxtapositioning? Have you been careful not to introduce gaps that weren’t there before? Have you absolutely, thoroughly and repeatedly checked and rechecked every name, place and other type of information that identifies any individual? Have you checked the work of editors and proofreaders yourself?

Publication: Have you thought about the effects of publication on your subject and yourself? How will you deal with the inevitable errors others will find in the published work? What responsibility do you have to the work after it’s out in the world? How will you deal with information that comes to you after the book or article is published? Will your writing about your subject end with publication or will you continue to write, speak and blog about her? How will you deal with the inevitable critics of your work—your researching, your interpretations, your claims, your writing or your integrity?

Again, this list is meant only to get you thinking about the many ethical decisions you’ll have to make along the way, with the hope that you’ll make them consciously and well.

Wisdom’s Cry #4: Getting to Silence

This one might be a bit overwritten, but it still holds true–maybe even truer than ever in our internet, smart phone, and 24-hour-news world:

Getting to Silence

(August 1992)

For a day, maybe two, at the end of my summer tours — three-week marathons of exposure to and care for other people — I feel a sense of panic, as though the earth has been pulled out from beneath my feet and I am suddenly falling down to the depths of an unvoiced despair — without support, without recourse, without even a self to rely upon.

For a day, maybe two, I want nothing but to be back with the people I so recently wanted to leave behind, the people who have surrounded me night and day for three weeks, who have worn me down with their needs, their wants, their insistent demands. I feel a need for them, a desperate need, as though I will expire if I’m not wrapped in their cares, their words, their presence.

For a day, maybe two, there is one person with whom I don’t want to be left alone, one person who makes me feel as though I’m nothing despite the favorable evaluations, the thank-yous, the words of praise. He says nothing but he is there, waiting–in my room, on the street, in the little cafe where I go for a rest and a cafe au lait. He promises nothing, threatens nothing, asks for nothing but my presence alone with him. Yet I am filled with fear of him, with fear of the unknown, for he is myself.

On the third or fourth day, if I have resisted the panic-driven urge to surround myself with other people, my fear recedes. If I have kept to myself, weathered the fear, the feeling of uselessness, the lack of hope, on the third or maybe the fourth day I rise again from the grave of despair and I am a changed man. I have entered a new reality, a new world, a world in which my self comes to me as the perfect companion — both pupil and teacher, playmate and partner, parent and child.

There is a still, small voice in each of us that fills us with more fear than the winds and storm with which we surround ourselves. We want more of ‘life’ — whatever ‘life’ might be — and so we try to reach out farther, to push ourselves faster, to consume more and more, all the time trying to silence this voice inside that is telling us we are lost int he void of the universe. It whispers so softly that we think we can ignore it and the import of its words but they echo loudly through the empty spaces of our souls, reverberating through the chambers of our hearts, telling us over and over again that in our search for something more we have found less, we have stretched ourselves so fine that we are about to break, spread ourselves so wide that there is no center left. No center, just a still, small voice of which we are afraid.

Then something happens. We have an accident that keeps us from working. Or we hear that a relative or good friend has died. Or one day our mind or heart gives out and we enter a period in which nothing matters at all. And because we no longer desire those things we desired, wee no longer fear those things we feared — including the still, small voice. And yet we go on ignoring it until every other voice has been stripped away, until we are left alone with hits whispers, its echoes, its words. The panic comes anew. Our impulse is to run and find someone, anyone, to be with, but we are tired of the world, tired of its ways and everyone who goes about them. So we sit with the voice, like two people who suddenly find themselves alone together on a park bench. The voice asks a question and despite ourselves we answer. The question is about us and in the timbre of the voice we sense a sincere desire to know, a desire we suddenly realize has been missing from every other voice we’ve heard for…how long?

The voice both probes and reassures; it lets us know how little we really know ourselves and at the same time makes us believe that we can know ourselves, that there is still time. It begins to pull out of us thoughts and feelings and dreams that amaze us for we never realized they were there. We are frightened of them at first — they seem unreal, like phantoms that have risen from the murky earth to mock us — but the voice assures us that they are real and comely and speak the truth. They want us to know them because they are part of us, they are us, and we see for the first time that we have always thought that the thoughts we were thinking and the feelings we were feeling — thoughts and feelings given to us by others — were ours. And dreams — why, we didn’t even realize that we had dreams. And suddenly we feel a wriggle of excitement, a sense that we have at last found a clue to what ‘life’ is all about. The solitude we once feared we now crave. We seek silence, for only when the noisy ways of the world have been filtered out can we hear what the voice is telling us.

Life presents a dilemma then, for we must work to make a living and yet we no longer have the same desires, the same wants and needs of those around us. In fact, when we re-enter their world it all seems a bit silly and wrong-headed. We crave silence, but after a few weeks away from it we find that we fear it again, too. We must pull away and live with the fear of ourselves again for a day, maybe two. We must die again tot he world, knowing that on the third day, or maybe the fourth, we will rise to a new reality, a new world — the world of our true thoughts and feelings and dreams. The world of that still, small voice that tells us who we really are and what ‘life’ — our life — is all about.