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
In a feature writing class at McNeese, my professor was lecturing to us about memoirs and when they were appropriate to try to get published. She said that there must be something unique about your memoir or life story. You’re book won’t sell if it’s already been published, she said. It won’t sell if what happened to you is the same exact thing that happened to someone else.
I think that because authors want to sell their memoirs, they try to sensationalize their personal experiences. Shacochis is dead on with his observation of the trend in nonfiction to sensationalize life experiences and to boast about sins and hardships. I recently read an article in Newsweek about a memoir written by Victoria Osteen, wife of pastor Joel Osteen. After reading the review and some of Osteen’s quotes, she obviously lacked self-awareness. In one instance, she said that women should submit to their husbands. This means that the husband’s say is the final answer. But what she suggested is that she continuously badger her husband until her idea becomes his idea.
Later when he speaks about Irene Vilar’s first draft, her bragging about her fifteen abortions is definitely self-serving. She hasn’t grown from the experience or even regretted it, but only gives that personal information for shock value.
When he described the “adolescent perspective” of his wife’s niece, I realized that many adults still have not grown out of this view. They feel like they are special and the world owes them something. He’s saying that she must move beyond her narcissism and examine her anger and sadness honestly so that she can truly know who she is.
I was surprised to hear Shacochis talk about a family member in such a way to hundreds of listeners and possibly thousands of readers, but perhaps his comments were meant to motivate his niece to move beyond her current perspective.
I was also shocked to read that Shacochis included his wife’s abortion in his article, and at first, I found it to be extremely offensive and inconsiderate to include such a personal thing in a widely distributed magazine. Though he did not mention how his wife felt about the abortion, many women are ashamed and many carry the guilt into their later years.
But Shacochis said he does not regret including that information because the purpose was not to draw pity from his readers but to draw attention to the time in society when women needed to be reminded that becoming pregnant after a certain age can be difficult. He distinguishes between telling such shocking information for pity, and being mature enough to tell it for the right reasons, which is why he suggests telling young writers to fictionalize their personal experiences until they are mature enough to properly relay them. Though, in that, he is assuming that all young writers are not mature enough to do just that, which I disagree with.
He says of his brother-in-law, “screw him,” but then later he says that when you write nonfiction, “their feelings, their humanity, their lives, must be taken into account for the sake of your own soul.” His brother-in-law must certainly have been included in everyone Shacochis knows. It sounds like Shacochis believes this when he wants to, and if he does not care about that person feelings, like his brother-in-law’s, then so what?
I agree with Shacochis that David Gregory was fishing for an unnecessary and heartbreakingly emotional response from Tony Snow. I believe that asking such questions only to invoke pain for the interviewee is selfish and destructive, but I realize that television news feeds off such tactics.
He makes a vivid presentation about how effective our words as writers can be. Going through high school and college, I sometimes wondered how many people actually would read an article or see a picture in the newspaper and doubted if it made a difference to anyone.
Shacochis, citing Solomon, Christopher Hitchens and William Butler Yeats, teaches us to be careful with our words. Hitchens realized too late that his words advocating the war were too strong but at the time had no idea that the same words would compel a young man to join the military, and ultimately give his life.