Author: Post Road

When the Farmer Clutches the Rake: Writing the Real
by Cheryl Strayed
from Post Road 22

The first story I ever wrote featured a talking parrot named Poncho who busted a trio of diamond thieves on a late night train. What a fantastic story! my seventh grade teacher scrawled in red ink on the top of the page. She was right. It is, literally, my most fantastic story to date — my writing in the intervening years swirling ever further from the farfetched and toward the real, if not the mundane. I write fiction. I write nonfiction. I move back and forth across that genre divide, but the real is the thread that joins the two. In my tiny literary universe of one, style supersedes genre at the root. My avian caper aside, my primary ache as a writer is to do as Robert Lowell famously suggested and simply say what happened.

It took me a while to accept this. I feared that what happened was hohum. But I’m the sort of writer who believes that writing is a calling and furthermore that when we’re called to do something we don’t get to be terribly picky about the details.

There was an actual moment during which this became perfectly clear to me. I was in graduate school, taking a fiction workshop taught by George Saunders. There were only four students in the class, so instead of meeting at school, we met in George’s living room, where we reclined in cozy chairs around a coffee table on which sat a very large book that featured reproductions of paintings various artists had made over the past several hundred years. One week George opened up the book and asked idly which of the paintings we each thought most closely represented who we were as writers. We all gathered in to look as he turned the pages, the search on for the one that was “ours,” though — at least speaking for myself — search is not precisely the word. There was nothing lost, then found. When I saw the painting that compelled me to say “that one,” the sensation was more like rounding the final bend on a far-back road and spotting at last the familiar house one knew was there all along.

The painting was a portrait of a farmer so meticulously accurate, so particular and true, it was more vivid than a photograph: the farmer’s pale level gaze, his rough hands clutching a rake, the parched yellow crops in his field. It wasn’t the prettiest picture in the book. It wasn’t the most innovative or outlandish or even, perhaps, the one I’d most like to hang on my wall. But there it was: mine. Something and everything about that image seemed to be lodged in my chest. Looking at it was like gazing into a mirror, my own intentions reflected back to me. It’s the best way I can express what I strive for in both my fiction and my nonfiction: I madly, deeply, honestly want to show you exactly how it looks when the farmer clutches the rake.

This is a long way of saying that the real is my road and the genre is my vehicle. It’s from the standpoint of content and style that I make the decision whether to write a particular story as fiction or nonfiction. The question is always how best to convey what is most true. Will it be the freedom and invention of fiction that shows readers most acutely what I hope they’ll see, or is it the constraint and wondrous specificity of how it really went down? Does the story demand that I mine a character or excavate a life?

There isn’t one answer to these questions for me. I’m often asked if it’s hard to switch back and forth between the two genres, but it would be much harder for me to limit myself to one. Like playing a piano with only one hand, it could be done, but there are keys I’d inevitably find it impossible to reach. There’s a symbiotic relationship between the two genres and also a funny paradox, in which each yearns to achieve the greatest effect of the other. When we praise fiction it’s often credibility at the core of our delight: these characters seemed like real people to me is high praise indeed. Nonfiction writers are lauded for something like the opposite. It’s only when they transcend the self, when the real person behind the prose disperses into someone more universal, that the reader feels altered by the life of another.

This isn’t to say I think the two genres are the same. Writers who assert there isn’t much of a difference between fiction and literary nonfiction baffle me. In my mind the line is clear and bright: on one side you can write whatever you want; on the other side you can write whatever you want without making shit up.

The not making up of shit is the magic dust of nonfiction. It won’t do your work for you — even if you’ve had an incredible life, your writing could easily be crap — but if you hone your craft and find your story and figure out what it means and write it well (which is to say without fear, even if you’re frankly terrified), the fact that you didn’t make this shit up is capable of blowing your readers minds into smithereens.

That power is also the reason they’ll want to sue you if they later learn you lied.

I write nonfiction when I think the story I have to tell would be best told through the thinnest possible screen. There really isn’t anything like the author standing right before the reader saying this happened to me. And there’s nothing like it’s opposite either — when the writer is free to manipulate the possibilities of action and interaction and plot, as one can do in fiction, and therefore set the intimate on the grandest possible stage. Can the self tell the biggest story? is a question I ask a lot when I’ve opted to write something as nonfiction. Sometimes the answer is no, other times yes. Sometimes it’s both.

The biggest story of my own life so far, the one that’s obsessed me as a writer, is the death of my mother at age forty-five. Turns out, my grief is more enormous than any one genre can contain. I wrote about it fictionally first, in my novel Torch, because I had a story of loss to tell that wasn’t just mine. And then I wrote it about nonfictionally, in my essays and memoir Wild, because I had things to say about love and sorrow and healing that so breathtakingly belonged to me I couldn’t possibly locate them in someone else.

I’m working for something slightly different in each genre, but in each I plow the same field. This is what I mean when I say I write the real instead of I write fiction or nonfiction. I’ll do whatever it takes to transform the paint into a guy standing in a yellow field with a rake.



Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather
by Mary Morris
from Post Road 8

I came to Willa Cather late. It was odd that she escaped me because as a girl and young woman I read books that grew out of my love of the heartland where I am from. I read Twain, Dreiser, and, of course, Laura Ingalls Wilder, but never Cather. In a sense I believe that books come to us at the right time and that’s how Willa Cather came to me. It wasn’t until I was married and living in New Mexico that I read Death Comes for the Archbishop. I was mesmerized by the gift of her storytelling, the cumulative effect of the narrative delivered with grace and ostensible simplicity.

A few years later when I was teaching at Princeton, I started talking about Cather with a friend who said, “But you haven’t read My Antonia?” It was her favorite book in the world and she told me how lucky I was—to read this book for the first time as a grown-up. I read it as one might listen to a person who is slowly coming to discover a life-long friend. Cather grew on me in that way, but it wasn’t until I caught a small squib in the newspaper that my bond was truly, irrevocably, formed.

A newspaper account said that for years Joanne Woodward had been trying to make a film out of the Cather novella Lucy Gayheart. I’d never heard of Lucy Gayheart, but I went out and got it. I opened it and read these lines:

In Haverford on the Platte, the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart. They do not talk of her a great deal, to be sure; life goes on and we live in the present. But when they do mention her name it is with a gentle glow in the face or the voice, a confidential glance which says: “Yes, you, too, remember?”

I settled into my chair with a cup of tea and my dog at my side, because I knew that someone was going to tell me a story about a person’s life filled with all the tenderness and nostalgia I felt for the Middle West and a childhood I too had left behind. From the moment I began Lucy Gayheart, which opens with a touching, but portentous skating scene and ends with one of the most poignant images in fiction, I knew I had come home.

I found myself for days, living in a parallel universe with Lucy and Harry and the town of Haverford, the corrupting Chicago. The heartbreak of disappointment and mistakes that cannot be made right. Then I read the other short Cather novellas—A Lost Lady and Alexander’s Bridge. But Lucy Gayheart was the turning point for me. I had found my American Chekhov.

I realize I am not the first to feel this way about Willa Cather and I feel somewhat naive as if I am stating the obvious. But Cather came to me at a moment when I needed her. I had forgotten what it was that I loved about writing and being a writer. Why I’d begun this in the first place.

What has drawn me into Cather is the clarity of her uncluttered prose—as vast and lonely as the places she writes about. There are no pyrotechnics of language, no tap dancing turns of phrase. It is language stripped to its essentials; everything exists for the purpose of the story. When people speak of Hemingway and Raymond Carver in terms of clean, clear sentences devoted to the telling of the story I do not know why Cather is not mentioned in the same breath.

I have long been a fan of Midwestern Writers and intrigued by their migratory patterns and by the fact that from afar what they write about most is home. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dreiser, Twain, Nathaniel West, and, more recently, Baxter, Dybek, Patricia Hampl. Writers of straightforward, no-nonsense prose whose goal is to create characters we care about who live inside a story we want to hear. It is what writers are supposed to do.

We read these writers. And by that I mean we don’t have to ponder them or explicate them or use the dictionary to understand them. We read them as if someone was stoking a fire or sitting on a front stoop and telling us something we had never heard before. We grow patient and the business of our lives comes to a halt as if we’ve got nothing but time and follow the story as if being led by the hand.

Alberto Moravio once said that life is chaos; only literature makes sense. It’s as if someone has come in and straightened up the house. And for me that someone is Willa Cather •

Kurt Vonnegut
by Sheila Heti
from Post Road 14

My friend Misha Glouberman, who is one of the smartest people I know, yet who never reads literature and knows nothing about world politics, and who has in his apartment only self-help books like Loving in Flow and feels no shame about this—he admitted to me this morning, when I went to his place to borrow his girlfriend’s copy of Bluebeard, that though he doesn’t like literature, he has always liked Kurt Vonnegut but is kind of ashamed to admit it.

In theory, I must like reading books, since I am a writer, but usually I find myself in a situation in which I’d like to read a book, but I go to my bookshelf, or I go to the bookstore, and a heavy feeling comes over me. For this pleasure I will have to be patient, is how the feeling goes. I’ll have to meet characters and accompany them into and out of their problems. I’ll have to see the world through their eyes, and what their living room looks like. Their problems I’ll have to experience as my own. And so on.

All these formal barriers! When all I want is something for the train or the plane or the bus or the day that will make me feel as though someone else feels what it’s like to be human. All I’m asking for when I pick up a book is a temporary salve for the human condition! When I am in dire need of a book, I do not want to wade through a bunch of literariness. It is in such moments of urgency that I see with horror that most books fall short of the single mark that matters to me when I step on a bus, or during nights of abject loneliness—for these books are often as self-absorbed and humourless as I am. Useless!

Then last night, don’t ask me how, I suddenly remembered: Oh my god. Kurt Vonnegut. The near hero of my teenage years! And now the near hero of my twenty-ninth year too. If I ever again forget how awesome he is, and how perfectly suited to hold my hand in moments of true desolation, then let my next lover have a virile seed that prevents us from fucking without a condom even during my period.

I know how fashionable it is for a writer today to explain how everything in society functions alongside every other thing—as though we’re not also living in society ourselves, as if the details matter so goddamn much! Oh, the author’s narcissistic desire to have every last detail of modern life reshaped by his subtle touch. But it’s not the painstaking elaborations of the MFA grad we long for in our darkest hours, or when we’re getting on a bus—but the simple help of someone who looks at the world and realises: “God never wrote a good play in his life.” Misha, I direct this at you. Isn’t it better to admit to our books, “Even the simplest things I cannot keep in my head. Even the simplest things I am too stupid to teach myself”?

Tell me, Mr. Vonnegut, that I am bound to people I don’t even like because we are doing God’s work, though we don’t know what it is. When I feel most bad, which is the only time literature matters, because for the other times there are friends—but when you feel the absolute worst, you don’t want to burden friends with your wretchedness.

At my most abject all I want in my hands is the work of a human who feels as much a stranger in this world as me, and who admits, without intensity or guile, When it comes to this unlikely planet, my guess is as good as yours is.

A Hunger So Honed
by Tracy K. Smith
from Post Road 7

Driving home late through town
He woke me for a deer in the road,
The light smudge of it fragile in the distance,

Free in a way that made me ashamed for our flesh–
His hand on my hand, even the weight
Of our voices not speaking.

I watched a long time
And a long time after we were too far to see,
Told myself I still saw it nosing the shrubs,

All phantom and shadow, so silent
It must have seemed I hadn’t wakened,
But passed into a deeper, more cogent state of dream–

The mind a dark city, a disappearing,
A handkerchief
Swallowed by a fist.

I thought of the animal’s mouth
And the hunger entrusted it. A hunger
So honed the green leaves merely maintain it.

We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves,

That unconscious roving,
The heart its own rough animal.
Unfettered.

The second time,
There were two that faced us a moment
The way deer will in their Greek perfection,

As though we were just some offering
The night had delivered.
They disappeared between two houses,

And we drove on, our own limbs
Sloppy after that, our need for one another
Greedy, weak

Dear Readers,
We’re hoping that everyone is taking care during this difficult time. While our office at Boston College was closed when classes were moved online on March 11, we’re continuing to update the website and maintain our existing production schedule. Until our staff is able to return to campus, though, we won’t be able to send out copies of Issue 36. We’re very sorry for the delay, but we’ll fill all existing orders as soon as we’re able to. In the meantime, we’ll be running new featured content here on a weekly basis. Thanks very much for your patience and understanding.