The Writing Life: In Search of the Real Story

This week, I’ve been teaching a class at the Wildbranch Writing Workshop, sponsored by Orion magazine, in a beautiful Vermont town called Craftsbury Commons. The town looks exactly like it does in Alfred Hitchcock’s film “The Trouble With Harry,” which he shot here in 1954. There is no traffic, no cell phone service, no distractions. Sitting on the porch one night, I watched a man lead two oxen down the main street of town.
Ten aspiring writers and I sit in a room all morning and we write, talk, critique, encourage. In Richard Russo’ brilliant academic satire, Straight Man, his main is also a writing teacher. At one point in the novel, he has to break off a contentious conversation with his mother because his once-a-week writing workshop is about to start. His suspicious mother replies, “Is that the one where you sit in front of the class for three hours and don’t say anything?”
I admit I do a lot of sitting and listening as well. After twenty years in the classroom—I mean the twenty years I’ve spent in the front of it—I’ve come to the conclusion that there are about six of seven lessons a writing teacher can impart to his or her students. The rest is mainly, as my friend Wyatt Mason says, cheering. I’ll do my share of cheering this week. I’ll also try to offer some suggestions on structure, pacing, character development. Hopefully I’ll send my students away with the conviction—my conviction—that in a world of so much manufactured speech, the nonfiction writer must act as the protector and the purveyor of authentic, original language. It is our pleasure and our responsibility.
This is my second year at Wildbranch. In the summer of ’07, I had just finished a book about mountaintop removal strip mining, called Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness. So I suggested to Jennifer Sahn, the editor of Orion magazine, that I lead a workshop called “Writing about Imperiled Landscapes.” The members of my workshop had, for the most part, come from various New England states. Slowly, I realized that some of them seemed puzzled by my writing prompts. And finally I began to understood why: not everyone thinks of the places where they live as imperiled. As a Kentuckian, I have grown accustomed to thinking that way. I have grown used to knowing that the forests I loved most could be clear-cut, the gorges could be flooded, the mountains could be annihilated with explosives, and the streams below those mountains could be buried or turned toxic—and it is all perfectly legal. But some Americans, Vermonters, for instance, simply expect their Green Mountains to stay put, their rivers to remain protected by law. They expect their food and milk to come from local sources. They don’t like “visual pollution,” so they outlawed billboards.
It’s all very civilized.
While I was up at Wildbranch, a few people asked if I thought I would like living in Vermont. Probably. But I doubt I’ll ever find out for sure. I’ve grown used to living around imperiled landscapes. I find that it sharpens one’s focus, something a writer needs. It also creates a sense of urgency. A writer doesn’t always need that, but sometimes it helps. It clarifies purpose.
One of my fellow-instructors at Wildbranch was Ginger Strand, author of Inventing Niagra and the novel Flight. Ginger kept posing this question to her writing group: “What is the story here?” It’s an excellent question, perhaps the only question. My fellow Kentuckian, Barbara Kingsolver, wrote recently, “Protecting the land that once provided us with our genesis may turn out to be the only real story there is for us.”
We are a culture awash in stories, of course. But getting at the real story—that seems to be becoming harder and harder. There’s too much static, too much distraction. The real grows ever more elusive, and all the more important.