Welcome to our first week of writing the personal essay. I'm Amy Bloom and I'm going to be your guide, your mentor, your teacher, and maybe your sherpa as we go up and down the valleys and the mountains of writing the personal essay, which is to memoir, it seems to me, as short story is to novel. It is the distillation of both an experience and an expression of your voice. This week we're going to focus on how we can begin and how we can continue. Our first help in this project will be this wonderful book, Old Friend from Far Away, which helps us take a look at some great personal essays and also how you begin to think about your voice, your goal, and what it is that you want to express. As Joseph Conrad once said, "You don't want to let words get in the way of what you're trying to say." In other words, you don't want to edit yourself before you begin. You don't want to come up with arguments for why what you wish to say is not of interest. Our goal is to find a way for you to tell the stories that matter to you, and create sentences and a structure that makes them of interest to your reader, because the goal here with the personal essay is the way in which it is not writing in a journal, it is writing to be read. This essay is from Old Friend from Far Away, and it's a beginning exploration of how you think about personal essay, both what you hear and what you say. Here, the opening paragraph is of an essay entitled Notes of a Native Son by the great American writer, James Baldwin. I'm going to read them out loud. If you yourself have a copy of the essay, you might want to read it out loud yourself to another person, because the act of having another human being listening tends to intensify the words. It's one of the reasons that you always want to make an opportunity for yourself after you've written a first draft to read it out loud, to see how the words hang on the air. When you're doing that, your job is not to persuade yourself that you've written something wonderful, although we all need the reassurance. Your job is to hear how the rhythm goes, to hear what's missing. My usual advice about this is if you are reluctant to read your work out loud even to yourself, it's because you know that there are things wrong with it, and you're afraid that you can't fix it. What I want to say is you can fix it, and you must listen to the rhythm and the poetry of your own words. Listen also in this essay to what is not being said. It's not just listening with your ears, which is the way we always start, but listening with your whole self, and try doing this as you listen now to me reading James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son. "On the 29th of July in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been in Detroit one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father's funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker's chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the third of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass. The day of my father's funeral had also been my 19th birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. It seemed to me that God himself had devised to mark my father's end the most sustained and brutally dissonant of all codas. And it seemed to me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his eldest son. I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had been central to my father's vision. 'Very well', life seemed to be saying, 'here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along.' And I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the condition of our lives. When his life had ended, I began to wonder about that life, and also in a new way to be apprehensive about my own." You see how we open up this world, which is not only Baldwin's feelings about his father, the most personal kind of revelation, but also the world in which these feelings are expressing themselves. Nothing is happening in a vacuum. The big, the epic, the political is completely woven in with the personal, the modest, the painful. "I had not known my father very well. We had got on badly, partly because we shared in our different fashions the vice of stubborn pride. When he was dead, I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time, I began to wish I had. It seems typical of life in America where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first. No one, including my father, seems to have known exactly how old he was, but his mother had been born during slavery. He was of the first generation of free men. He, along with thousands of other Negroes, came North after 1919, and I was part of that generation which had never seen the landscape of what Negroes sometimes call the old country. He was, I think, very handsome. I gather this from photographs and from my own memories of him dressed in his Sunday best and on his way to preach a sermon somewhere when I was little." You see how the information about the character flows into the feelings and the observation of the writer. It's not an announcement about his father's appearance. It's not an attempt to make us see him. It is the wish to draw us in more intimately in that relationship between the observer, who is our narrator, who is our first person voice, who is us telling our personal essay, and the thing that is observed, and the thing that makes the observed object or the observed person special is our voice, is our eyes.
