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About
the Author
Megan Foss comments on Lee
Gutkind's editorial,
"The Truth and Consequences of Creative Nonfiction, in Issue
9
Megan Foss Author of Love Letters |
Your
introduction to Issue 9 struck a particular note with me and I thought
you might be interested in this.
My family comes from a little town called Concrete in Washington state.
Last year I taught creative nonfiction to two different English classes
on a volunteer basis. Essentially I was just trying to introduce them to
the personal essay. Prior to beginning, the teacher told me that for the
most part they were students who would never go anywhere. It was
a welfare town and basically they were losers. Concrete is right
at the base of the Cascade Mountains and is one of those places that has
been devastated by restrictions on logging old growth forests. People
moved away and rented their houses out cheaply and so a large part of the
population is on welfare. What was particularly intersting about
all this is that it happens to be the place and high school Tobias Wolff
wrote about in This Boy's Life. And since the movie was filmed
there I knew they would all be at least familiar with the fact that book
existed and I thought it would be a great way to show them how the small
stories of their lives could have mass appeal, that they were interesting.
And I got the shock of my life. They hated Wolff and they hated his
book. They felt that he hung them with a reputation and a stereotypical
identity that nothing could shake.
And they were very right. Throughout the rest of the county they're known
as idiot hickabillies who will never amount to anything. Now I realize
that it amounts to sacrilege to criticize Wolff or that book, but I went
back and reread it and found myself enormously conflicted over the issue.
As a writer, I believe in Wolff's right to tell that story anyway he chooses.
But it seems like communities are almost always written about by outsiders
and I seriously question how much ethnographic responsibility memoirists
have. There's not a decent human being in that entire book.
In fact he writes it as such a horrible community and place (although he
wraps the majority of that up in his stepfather -- it is an entire community
he's writing about) that we applaud him when he cheats his way out.
Here at Iowa people ask me where I'm from, and actually prior to coming
here I lived the last 10 years in that county and the last two in the Concrete
area and anytime I say that, people always ask me if it's as bad as Wolff
says. And it's not. It's nothing like that. My father
and his five brothers and sisters went to Concrete High and were all successful
human beings.
But it was interesting. Once my students began deconstructing the
stereotypes he'd created in his book, it acted as a springboard for deconstructing
the ones they believed in and youngsters who began the quarter using words
like spic and nigger were reading Richard Wright and
Zora Neale Hurston. In fact, at the end of the quarter a bunch of
them took the day off to come and watch me teach "The Revolutionary
Tradition in African American Literature" at Western Washington University.
So I thought all that was interesting in the context of what you wrote
in this issue of Creative Nonfiction. I guess for me personally it
comes down to what you label it. I would have no problem with Wolff's
book as a novel. But I wonder if we should be calling memoir nonfiction.
I wonder if they're not two different genres. At least in the case
of Wolff I wonder that. I've been playing around with an essay on the whole
thing that I've titled "Concrete Facts." It is an intriguing
issue. I know that in my writing it has been paramount to present
the community that I was a part of in the most honest light possible.
And now when I write about it, I am the outsider and I do find myself questioning
more and more, how much is personal perception and how much is "truth."
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