Does Anyone Still Read These?

                                               Does Anyone Still Read These?
              Journalism 4070: Biographical Writing / Fall Term 2030
                                     Tuesdays, 9:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.
                                       Newman Building, Room 280

Manuel Arenas, MFA
Contact: manuel.arenas@ucd.ie
Office: NB 416 (an office full of bookmarked books in limbo awaiting further attention)
Office hours: By appointment, or if found in the wild with a question, I’ll answer

Course description:

This is a course about preservation—and our best efforts to accomplish it. As journalists, we’re so often focused on the story that we forget about the people who live inside it. I was once one of those before I fell out of love with taking what belonged to others.

These days, I want us to think about how we treat the image with our pens and keyboards. Let us simmer on how we truly recreate someone’s life on the page. 

In this spirit, this course is about recording the smaller details of the big picture. The details are often their own story, and we’ll be leaning into that as we portray our characters this semester.

No more characters with un-ashed cigarettes hanging out of their mouths being tortured of their own volition. I want to know about a character’s shoeshine and how the scar on their leg got there. 

Remember this: We do not write writing, we are writing something.

Attendance: 

Attendance is imperative. I marvel at our synergy as writers when we gather for class discussion, and I require a good excuse for absence: illness, appointments, jury duty, writer’s block (which does not exist), flat tires, the will of God(s), food poisoning, and homework-hungry dogs.

After three months of readings and paying attention, the memories of my (our) texts will meld into your own stories. Regular attendance will help this cause.

Reading Schedule:

September 3 — Raymond Carver, My Father’s Life

Carver, like Johnson and Greene, has an astute sense of the world that he tends to stick to. For all of his moving work, I say Carver reads a bit flat sometimes. Character first, plot second, flashiness never. An old mentor of mine used to advise the same for writing news stories: “Remember to keep it simple; conservatives have to read the news, too.”

Reading My Father’s Life makes me feel like a frog in a pot of gradually boiling water. By the time I get to the last line, I’m choked up. 

I, too, was my father’s namesake, but I only knew him in infancy. This story gives me a glimpse of what having admiration for one’s father could look like. Instead, I’ve been told I inherited his cheekbones, fingernails, hairy legs, and depressive streaks. 

September 10 — Nadja Drost, “When can we really rest?”

This is the story of many, many people across time and space. People who, despite risks to their safety, are willing to chance it for the possibility of a better life. 

Pay attention to the muddied boots and the making of chapati bread.

It is stories like these that merit more space in our social fabric. On the Road and Fear and Loathing are special stories of journeys, but neither hold a candle to what it means for people to up and go through Mother Nature’s worst for greener pastures. 

I believe this because of my parents. 

I am often trapped in the stories of their arrival to the United States. They fled on a makeshift raft from Cuba on the ocean for two days before reaching the shores of Florida. My mother was pregnant with me. They packed a gallon of water, sunscreen, and saltines with cold cuts for the journey. 

Now, my mother is buried on the outskirts of Tampa, Florida, along with her wilted copy of Once Minutos and a bundle of her favourite tea leaves. 

Assignment due: A life in words. Find and interview anyone willing to discuss how their past life has led them to their present. Ask them how they got there. If they meant to. Don’t be afraid to ask the questions you least want to. 2,000 words.

September 17 — Eternity Martis, They Said This Would Be Fun

This was once a reading for a “Reporting on Diverse Communities” workshop I took some years ago. Early on, a woman in the session pointed at all three of us fair-skinned men in the room and accused us of never knowing the day-to-day of being Black. 

I had no idea what it was like. In this way, she was right. I was flustered, but I had been called a monkey and a spic too many times in sandboxes and in high school hallways to be talked down to about race. 

I snapped at her, thinking we were more alike than different. Turning race into a contest between us who were on the outskirts didn’t sit right with me.

And then I reread Martis’ book, only to realize I had gotten it wrong. It was I who was encroaching on the topic at hand, not the other way around. The next day, I explained myself. 

“Well, you’re the whitest Latino I’ve ever seen,” she giggled. 

I couldn’t help but laugh. 

Discussion: How can we portray someone else’s struggle without connecting it to our own?

September 24 — Michael Paterniti, “The Long Fall of One Eleven Heavy”

Consider the author’s use of anecdotal details throughout:

Smoke in the cockpit. Milk in the medical examiner’s fridge. Surf’n’Turf burgers for $5.52. 

This is more than just a plane crash. 

I shouldn’t have read this four days before a flight. The hubris of thinking it wouldn’t rattle me later bit me at the Vaclav Havel airport. I now wonder if the use of uppers, downers, and hash throughout that trip may have changed something in my nervous system. 

The plane is going to crash. The plane is going to crash. The plane is going to crash.

The anxiety led to the mineral water, which led to a fit of world-melting panic from the discomfort of the plastic seats at Gate C6. 

This was where I met Nina. She immediately sensed what was going on. It was then that she first taught me this great method to calm down from a fit of anxiety. 

“Can you count everything that’s blue around you?”

The seats. Vending machine. Departure screen. That suitcase. Those sunglasses. 

It brought me back from the spiral, and to this day, I still use it. 

Nina looked familiar; I had seen her long black hair before. What struck me, too, were the neon green Converse on her feet. I recognized them. We got to talking only to realize it was because we’d been staying at the same hostel in Prague that week. She, too, was flying home to the States, after a week of celebrating the end of her medical schooling. 

What waited back home seemed like pebbles compared to the kismet of meeting someone like Nina in an airport thousands of miles away. I could feel it there in the terminal. I would love her. 

We ended up spending the next three years together. 

Nina was it. This wasn’t best-you-can-do love, nor was it amped up by anything missing from my life. It was loving her gait. Her morning breath. The purse of her lips against a glass of water. Her side-eye after my snark. The care she gave to everything. 

I didn’t know I had it in me. 

Assignment due: Essay 1. Explain the use of details in a class reading. How do they construct or distract from the story? 2,500 words.

October 1 — Aatif Rashid, “Uncle Samir”

This story is the memory of a balmy August afternoon. 

Our first and only apartment had no air conditioning. Nina sat on the sofa, paperback in hand, with me on the blue chair by the window and plants. The hot sun was glaring off the TV and the cling of sweat had dampened our clothes but we read anyway. 

The slow waft of the ghormeh sabzi stewing in the kitchen was beating my stomach into a senseless hunger. It was Nina’s mother’s recipe. Brought to the United States in memory from Iran and imported with her into our Canadian kitchen at the midpoint of our relationship. 

Nina had secured her medical residency in Montreal, and I’d followed along, having found a job as a reporter at a local broadcaster. 

It is afternoons like that one that creep up on me now, years and years later. I still remember the sounds of the years we spent together. Snorts in her laughter. Furious pen scribbles. Nina Simone’s records soothing our air. Bed springs creaking every night. Wine bottles clinking against each other in the recycling. Clickets of her coat hangers brushing up against one another. Whistling steam from the frijoles softening in the pressure cooker. The shatter of the Mario and Luigi salt and pepper shakers hitting the floor. 

If only I had been more understanding, more patient, it wouldn’t have ended as it did. If only. 

I wanted to have kids. I didn’t before I’d met her, but she’d awoken something in me. 

“It’s not about me, it’s about starting a family,” I said. “What is all of this for then?”

The time felt right to me, but it takes two to tango.

Nina was in no rush. “Can we not just enjoy this without running to the finish line?”

Discussion: Why does Samir push the value of family despite being removed from his own?

October 8 — Charles Bukowski, “Raw With Love”

An excerpt from the poem: 

and I will remember your small room

the feel of you

the light in the window

your records

your books

our morning coffee

our noons our nights

our bodies spilled together

sleeping

the tiny flowing currents

immediate and forever

your leg my leg

your arm my arm

your smile and the warmth

of you

who made me laugh 

again.

Despite the best efforts of three therapists and various women friends, emotions don’t often come through my eyes, but when I read the line, your leg my leg, there were floods. 

It had been four months since Nina left. 

Discussion: Does Bukowski’s character outweigh his contributions to free verse poetry?

October 15 — Reading week

October 22 — Joan Didion, “Some Dreamers of The Golden Dream”

I read this once in a nonfiction writing class similar to this one.

Didion is the journalist’s journalist. Curious. Fervent. To the bone.

In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” the titular essay of the collection this appears in, she describes an encounter with a five-year-old girl on LSD. What would you do if you saw this with your own eyes? 

Despite the horrors of such a scenario, this scene found its way into Didion’s collection of New Journalism. No solutions or intervention. Simply the reconstruction of suffering for others. 

Are we storytellers? Or storytakers?

On a late night in October 2009, I was on assignment at the news station when we caught word of a fire having broken out in Mile End. The producer and I rushed there to find a series of plexes with dark smoke seeping out of the windows. 

We wanted a human voice that had been affected. There was a woman who was sobbing uncontrollably, begging for the safety of her cat. Having been awoken in a hurry to get out, there was no time to think. Only go.

The clip we got of her in distress aired for two days as the city learned of the gas leak that had taken four lives and eight apartments along with it. The sound of her sobs still comes around every now and then. I have yet to forget, and I’m sure she hasn’t either.

Assignment due: Essay 2. Who is qualified to report on a sensitive story? Find an example of reporting that doesn’t consider how its details represent those involved. 3,000 words.

October 29 — Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”

My reporting for the radio would greatly diminish upon coming home to a quiet apartment where the shadows of love still hung around. Career is not everything.

There was a Nina-shaped void in my life. A void that, despite my best wishes, was made worse by turning over and over thinking that she should have been the mother of my children.

To move on was to accept it as over. So I tried.

Brie and I met at a bar back when beer was just a few dollars. I think now of the kitsch of meeting in a bar, but what else were we to do in those days? She was five years my junior and had just finished a graduate degree in harpsichord composition. 

On our second outing, she made herself clear.

“I want to keep this casual,” she said, as if I would object. I needed things to be less gripping than they had been with Nina.

Brie and I began seeing each other regularly. We’d get a bite, a drink, then shake the sheets. 

Sometimes we’d skip the drink and the bite. This went on for the better part of a year. 

It was fine. Not everything needed to be so serious. 

And then it became serious in quick succession. A late period had turned into a series of positive pregnancy tests, affirmed by her doctor. 

In a matter of days, the shock had subsided into a kind of joy. A child and a family were what I had been pining for just two years before. I told myself it was serendipity.

Brie became scared of her own shadow, doubting whether she could do it. In the end, she decided to follow what was unfolding. We began planning and moving forward, together. She moved in, we quit drinking, and we started thinking of names. Chloe. Sandra. Jasmine. Amelie. Valeria.

The idea of a child is why I teach this text. I think of the lessons we need to impart on our little ones, and the ones that we should never teach them. 

Assignment: What would you teach your little ones if you had the chance? Write a 1,000 word letter to your future child with those lessons.

November 5 — Ernest Hemingway, “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” 

If it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Our daughter never made it to term. 

Brie and I parted ways not long after. 

There was little in common between us after the haze of a family went away. 

Brie leaned into composing as part of her recovery. Last I heard, she had found her way into the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. 

I slipped into the character of a gloomy bastard, and I’ve been struggling to shake the act. 

No office hours.

November 12 — Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

For all of Dunn’s twisted ideas in this book, there is much to learn from this text about biographical writing. Whereas the genetically modified children are make-believe, the strength of family, and doing what needs to be done, is as real as the sunrise every morning.

Al Binewski, the novel’s patriarch, wanted more for his family, albeit in a twisted way that we can only bear witness to. He had conceived the vision of his family while overlooking a field of genetically altered roses in a garden. Their own beauty had been crafted; why not, too, the ability for his children to draw crowds?

When I first read Geek Love as a young man, I was appalled by the horrors and tragedies of this book. In hindsight, I think of Al’s condition to provide for his family as a general sickness among parents everywhere. One that wrenches you from within to give your child everything you can so that they have good lives. That is a sickness I caught but never lived out, and now, I’ve never looked at roses the same way. 

Instead, I have only a past career as a breaking news journalist and B-level success as an author to show for my middle age. 

Discussion: Does Dunn have a positive view of family? At what point do you let go of the family you wanted to have? How do I move on? 

November 19 — Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The aftermath of Brie and the miscarriage was plenty. For months, I’d get home from the station and crawl into a bottle, spending my nights in a stupor, staring at infomercials on the television.

I was inconsolable. 

The reason I teach this text is because of a woman I became involved with about a year after my relationship with Brie came to an end. 

Miranda was nine years my senior. She, like Miss Brodie, was constantly worried about her age. Her being over 40 made no difference to me. There was goodness in her, and she could always pull a chuckle out of me. As students, you too, will find tenderness and inspiration as you come to grow in this world. There’s no use in hurrying.

In the throes of our affair, I lost sight of my work life. 

Craig, the head editor at the station, pulled me into his office on a Friday. It was a small room filled with a mottle of books, sticky notes, and old Tim Hortons cups musty with the smell of coffee. That he could tell me I had been disorganized is laughable still. 

“We’ve been expecting more from you,” he said, and that was it. 

I was let go as quickly as I was taken on. 

Group Assignment: In groups of three, produce a feature on someone’s life story. Come to class ready to discuss how your framing of the story affects how a reader would take it. Does life happen to your subject? Or are they responsible for the way things have gone?

November 26 — David Lehman, “Last Day in the City”

The opening stanza of the poem still evokes sharp memories of Nina:

Tea lemon honey rum, and I’m

in the back of a cab thinking how

much I like having you

next to me in bed

you who remain my favorite person

and pronoun.

From Miami, to Montreal, to now Dublin, one would think I’ve a fetish for port cities. Here, I’m another expat who earned an MFA and a cushy job. It’s like I’m a character in a story about wishful thinking.

It became apparent that I should leave Montreal when Miranda’s husband found us out. He was a stout Québécois of wide shoulders and a mean mug. With one swing, he broke my nose and cut me above the brow.

I still yearn for Montreal. In the years since Nina, I’ve only grown to be more lucid about my role in it all. And still, despite my impatience to settle, and what it cost me, I can still write with love about the big window in what was our apartment. How we’d sit and sketch out story ideas, the red ink from her pen always in constant motion. 

As it turns out, there is no way to write without including some vestige of yourself. Some proof that it was you who penned the words. Much like a photographer takes a picture. 

I used to write thinking I could really say something while letting go of what I was carrying inside. Turning the sadder parts of me into stories used to be a salve, used to lighten me, but, no matter how many times I turn over the story of my mother, or Nina, or Brie, or the broken nose, I still feel them as if they were gutting me today. 

This isn’t the syllabus I meant to write, but it is the one I could.