About the Author
WHEN MEMORY GIVES THE WRONG ANSWER
Debra Ann Davis, author of "Recollecting"

When Debra Davis began writing "Recollecting," she intended the essay to be about her interview with the District Attorney. The essay turned out to be about memory. "I hadn t thought of it as a memory, I thought of it more as a disturbing experience that I had been through that made me nervous, but not that it had challenged the way I remembered things." The essay ponders the hazy path of memory and in Davis' circumstances, the implications of truth and fiction are huge.

She originally wrote the essay for a class at Iowa while working on her MFA. The class was called The Form of the Essay, and this particular assignment was to write a focused essay. She was able to work on it with her professor, who suggested the ideas about memory that she ended up writing about.

Davis says that she was not overly conscious of how she structured "Recollecting." "What I was really trying to do was be faithful to what happened and I was writing it several months after the interview." She intentionally structured the essay around the recreation of the dialogue and her reactions to each part of the conversation.

"This isn't a cathartic piece about the rape, it is about the experience of the conversation. I planned to write a lot more about the attack, the way I had it structured in my mind was that one piece was about the lawyers, one about the hospital, then a lot of pieces about the rape itself." What she does instead is take the focus away from the rape and place it on memory.

Davis worked over the course of a month on the essay. "More than other things I have written, I revised it many times." She spent a lot of time going over it, "probably because there is so much dialogue. I was trying to get it right."

She is not sure how accurate the dialogue is. She may never have said any of those sentences exactly as they were. Davis makes this pretty clear at the end of the piece. "But the point is that I remember enough about the rape. He was convicted, he confessed. I feel confident that I have the dialogue right that that is what she said, even if it is not what she said exactly." How does a writer make sure he or she accurately reflects an experience, particularly when the experience itself was a murky memory?

At Iowa, Davis and her classmates constantly talked about the liability of truth and non-truth. "Most of us were concerned with some form of the recording of reality but there is a huge range of views in ethics between journalists and poets. An essay is different than a magazine article and a reader should have different expectations."

The issue of truth is something she struggles with. She has written a little journalism for school newspapers, and says her main goal in writing is to reflect what really happened. She wonders if it is an unatainable goal. "It's almost a moral issue for some people," she says. "I guess now that creative nonfiction is getting to be a bigger deal it will be something that people will write dissertations about." It s a hard issue to come up with a text-book answer to.

Davis is also a high school English and history teacher. History is just another form of creative nonfiction, she says. She finds that teaching and writing are similar mental activities. "You have to take material and eliminate things, expand on things and then you organize it and then you have to present it somehow to an audience, either as a teacher or a writer." She enjoys that process in each discipline.

At this point in her life she is "between writers, the way people are between marriages or between jobs, I think I was a certain kind of writer before I went to graduate school. Then in school I became a different kind of writer. And I think I am taking a break right now and I think I will be a third kind of a writer but I am not sure what that is right now."

The story behind Davis' MFA at Iowa is unusual. She thought that going to school would give her two years to write. "I wanted time to write, I didn t care that much about publishing. I didn t go to learn to write either. It turned out that it was like school, I don t know why I didn t know that, I thought it was a writer's retreat or something." When she entered Iowa, the program was an MA in expository writing. After three years she ended up with an MFA in nonfiction. She couldn t find any other writing program in nonfiction. She thought that maybe she would end up at a fiction writing program and have to submit her work as fiction.

Writing is secondary to teaching to Davis right now. She says she sends essays out and has collected her share of rejection letters. As far as a process or a schedule, she says that she might have an idea in the back of her head, "and eventually it will come around to the front of my head and I want to write about it. At that point there is usually other stuff that goes along with it that I would include in it. If I think I know what it will look like it doesn't end up looking like that at all. I think when I sit down I do have an idea of the beginning of it and at least the point of it, but I usually don't know what the end will be. I have a beginning goal but not necessarily an end goal."

Though Davis writes about a horrific trauma in "Recollecting," both in the nature of the subject, as well as the metaphor of her hazy memory, she does not use self-pity nor does she paint herself as a victim. Davis says she did not write the essay as a catharsis or a means of venting her rage against the world or the rapist. She talked a lot about that issue in graduate school and she made a conscious effort not to do so. She knew she wanted to write it, though she feared publishing any specifics of the time and place of the attack. The possibility of her attacker getting out on parole haunts her life.

She recommends sticking with it and added that the exact same draft that Creative Nonfiction accepted, was rejected by other journals. "Sometimes that's heartening to hear about something that's gotten published."

Corrine Platt