When journalist and author Bob Shacochis told the Mayborn Conference audience he wanted to talk about the virtues of silence, he admitted the choice was contrary to his own nature.
By his own admission, he can’t shut up.
He began his talk by expressing surprise – the pleasant kind – at finding the literary and journalistic traditions fused at the Mayborn Conference. At best, journalists are scarce at these big writing symposiums, which are usually dominated by novelists and other fiction writers. Coming from Shacochis, this isn’t a good thing. “You can’t find anybody doing literary nonfiction,” he says, “because usually they want to write about themselves.”
Writing about oneself isn’t the problem. According to Shacochis, it becomes a problem when the author falls prey to conceit. “In nonfiction, honesty smacks of vanity to me when it comes nicely decorated with pretty ribbons of self-delusion and denial,” he says. The solution? Turn it into fiction. That way the writer is liberated. Gone is the “damned illusion of honesty in which honesty serves self rather than community.”
Shacochis learned the lesson of silence – knowing what to leave out and inversely, when to speak up – after Harper’s published his personal narrative on trying to have a child in the late 1990s. Shacochis was unprepared for the overwhelmingly vitriolic response to his piece, in which he revealed his wife had an abortion at 16. His own response ranged from anger – “all I want to do is suggest that the letter writer[s] learn to read a goddamned piece of writing before they attack me” – to one tinged with regret at overexposing his family. But Shacochis continues to believe the power of the article would have been diminished had it been transformed into a fictionalized account.
Writing that serves the community and peels away at universal truth is at the center of Shacochis’ argument. He rejects the practices of confession as catharsis for personal gain and nonfiction done for the sake of shock value. Fiction writers are often encouraged to write as if everyone they know is dead, but Shacochis wonders if nonfiction writers should do the exact opposite. He warns, “The fact remains the pen is mightier than the sword and it can just as readily kill or maim. Not just politically, as we know all too well throughout history, but spiritually, emotionally, psychologically. How much pain can you absorb? And then, as a writer, how much pain can you articulate? Or cause?” For Shacochis, it is not a rhetorical question.
He does not shy away from making himself an example. He refuses to write nonfiction about his father, the inspiration for the bad guy in his new novel, the pedophile Stephen Chambers. It is a purely artistic decision. “Fiction understands that the [perpetrator] is often more intriguing, more compelling, more morally complex and conflicted than the victim,” he says. “In nonfiction, we gaze upon the victim and think justice and redemption. In fiction our allegiance often falls on the other side of the divide.”
Honesty can be the Achilles heel of the nonfiction writer. Achieving the perfect balance is an imperfect art. Even after asking the question, “Am I revealing too much?” a writer can never be sure of the community’s response. That is the risk – and perhaps even a part of the thrill – of authorship. As Shacochis wound down the evening, he quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Shacochis fashioned King’s words into his own creed. “Sometimes there is sin in silence.” He paused briefly to let that sink in. “And sometimes grace.”
Jayme Rutledge, UNT mag prod class
