Friday Writing Experiment No. 3: Variations on the Form of ‘I Remember’

by Andrew | 3 Comments

Brainard

We all love ‘I Remember’ exercises. Based on the beguiling book-length memoir-poem by Joe Brainard, and popularised by teachers such as Jack Collom and Kenneth Koch, these pieces of writing simply start each line with the words ‘I remember’ then evoke some memory. Some lines selected from Joe:

I remember jumping into piles of leaves and the dust, or whatever it is, that rises.
I remember raking leaves but I don’t remember burning leaves. I don’t remember what we ‘did’ with them.
I remember ‘Indian Summer’. And for years not knowing what it meant, except that I figured it had something to do with Indians.
I remember exactly how I visualised the Pilgrims and the Indians having the first Thanksgiving dinner together. (Very jolly!)
I remember Jack Frost. Pumpkin pie. Gourds. And very blue skies.
I remember Halloween.
I remember using getting dressed up as a hobo or a ghost. One year I was a skeleton.
I remember one house that always gave you a dime and several houses that gave you five-cent candy bars.
I remember after Halloween my brother and me spreading all out loot out and doing some trading.
I remember always at the bottom of the bag lots of dirty pieces of candy corn.
I remember the smell (not very good) of burning pumpkin meat inside jack-o’-lanterns.
I remember orange and black jellybeans at Halloween. And pastel-colored ones for Easter.
I remember ‘hard’ Christmas candy. Especially the ones with flower designs. I remember not liking the ones with jelly in the middle very much.

Another extract is available from his publisher here.

I Remembers rank among my favourite forms of writing, because:

1. the writing tends to be natural and easy, unforced and uncluttered – writing from the heart, writing from the gut.

2. the writing tends to be concrete, vivid, specific, e.g., the house that gave you a dime, and elsewhere in Brainard’s poem very light faded blue jeans, ice cubes in the aquarium, giving Aunt Ruby stationery or scarves for special occasions.

3. the writing usually shows rather than tells: the contents of Brainard’s version – references to movie stars and songs, the clothes, food, hardship and simple pleasures – conjure up a whole time and place, for example.

4. they are economical – each line or section stops when it has to stop, and then on to the next …

5. I love lists (if you couldn’t tell).

6. the form is regarded as both poem and/or prose and/or either/neither, and I love writing that plays with or maybe ignores categories, and simply enjoys being good writing.

7. the process of free association often takes us to places we never expected – what arises arises. In the extract above I love how we linger in specific memories of Halloween and then zip quickly via Easter to Christmas, where we will linger a page or two before moving on again – and returning elsewhere. There are many such threads and patterns through the book.

8. the writing is uncensored, authentic. For example, I note in the example above the reference to the Pilgrims and Indians celebrating a jolly Thanksgiving. Now: I don’t think it’s stretching things very far to say that that recollection is of a romanticised association! And we could of course parse that, and discuss what it means, e.g., in terms of decolonising the historical record. But the actual writing here is simply being honest – it’s about recalling a perception, a time and place – and it is being true to that. (Even if it’s not true to the historical record, and we hope there will have been scope for future reconstruction!) Elsewhere in the poem we get gender- and race-based descriptions that are products of that time, and there is an awful lot of sexually graphic and extremely fruity content. It means I’m always careful about selecting extracts for classes! But again: this has a truth.

9. the simplest things are often the best

10. I LOVE JOE BRAINARD! I mean, he painted pansies and whippets – what more could I want?

11. and repeating myself – the writing is natural and easy, unforced and uncluttered

There is of course a risk that this sort of writing unearths deep, sad memories. Maybe that’s not a risk. Maybe we need to confront those memories from time to time? But maybe, unless that is its purpose, we also need to set limits around that sort of writing (or have a therapist to hand). I often suggest that writers focus on, e.g., happy memories. The tone in the writing often ends up being quite soft and nostalgic, anyway.

So: this week, write an ‘I Remember’. But also introduce some twists, or focuses. For example:

* Remember your schooldays, a holiday, Christmas, a wedding, a love affair

* Remember your first times

* Remember your blessings (count them, even)

* Remember your failures (but maybe limit them … and only if you next:)

* Remember your successes (unlimited, and remembered after your failures – let’s end on a high, please)

* Draw (and write) your own graphic I Remember in comic strip format.

* And maybe do ‘I remember’ for characters in your fictions? This can involve a slight shift in the writing, and perhaps a bit more thought than some of the more natural, I-centred versions, but it can also be a good way to graft some of your fictional content on to your natural, easy, remembering voice

* I don’t remember (good for surfacing secrets and lies and subtexts and regrets and all that other good story stuff)

* And invent your own rememberings too! (Give us some prompts and ideas too, if you like.)

You can probably write forever this way. You might want to set some limits (time; focuses). Or you might not.

Enjoy! These pieces really are some of the most fun in writing. And also the most rewarding, working on voice and tone, and digging into the mysterious caverns of intention. Let things arise.

 

Further viewing and reading

All credit to Joe Brainard and his I Remember, now in its own very handsome UK edition from Notting Hill Editions.

The Joe Brainard website

The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard from the Library of America

I Remember Joe Brainard

A wonderful series of films from Loewe, via Loewe celebrates the fanzines and pansies of queer artist Joe Brainard (Wallpaper, 25 January 2021):
* Joe’s brother John Brainard in conversation with lifelong friend Ron Padgett – childhood, early influences
* Paul Auster and Jim Jarmusch discuss Joe Brainard’s writings – especially the brilliance of I Remember
* Curator Constance Lewallen and poet Anne Waldman, who first published I Remember as a series of books, discuss Joe Brainard’s art – creative process, New York in the 1960s, his role as a gay artist. Anne Waldman first published I Remember as a series of books – thank you, Anne, the world is forever in your debt!

And this is the trailer for I Remember, a short documentary on Joe Brainard.

Make Your Own Brainard – an interactive celebration of Joe Brainard’s collages

Andrew H. Miller, B-Sides: Joe Brainard’s I Remember – a lovely critical overview

Cori Hutchinson, Joe Brainard’s ‘Hot Bodies’

The I Remember form that has been adapted by other writers. Georges Perec’s I Remember, published in the UK by Belgravia Books, serves as an interesting point of comparison. After reading that book I discovered that Perec added a Oulipan constraint of including only things that other people could remember too. This adds a certain emphasis on public rather than personal history that makes his version at times feel more like a list of bald facts, which perhaps explains why I felt less connected to it emotionally. Its tone feels more detached (and at times even a bit name-droppy). Forty years after it was written, I was also unfamiliar with many of those specific names and events too. I was unfamiliar with some of Brainard’s references as well, but somehow they get swept up in the warmth and wit of his tone, or are explained in context, so I never stumbled or drifted.

Also note Zeina Abirached’s graphic memoir I Remember Beirut.

Updates, 2020 and 2021: Here are others I’ve subsequently written (also see some more by others in the comments): I Remember the Library, I Remember York, I Remember Bobbie Louise Hawkins. I’ve also added further links, including those for books by Perec and Abirached, and altered the opening quotation to give a fuller illustration of the workings of Joe’s text. If you know of other examples, please add in a comment below.

Credits: The image of Joe Brainard’s mixed-media collage Blossom (1977) at the top of this page comes from http://www.joebrainard.org.

Round-up, 28 September 2012: Rejected Manuscripts, Ghosts, Britishisation, J.K. Rowling, and Indexers

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Apparently Penguin is asking some writers to return advances for manuscripts that were never delivered. Too right! (More for those who can deliver.) Some of the Guardian commentariat reveals a certain ignorance of what an advance really is. The posts by cstross usefully clarify things such as contracts and advances usually being broken down into payments on signature of contract, delivery of manuscript, hardback publication, and paperback publication. One agent quoted in the article refers to books rejected for editorial reasons, though the works referred to here seem to be books that were simply not delivered (which suggests the agent seems to be stirring things, as one comment suggests).

But it makes me think of the time when Joan Collins was taken to court for delivering an ‘unreadable’ manuscript. I remember seeing a super documentary on the trial, where ghostwriter Lucianne Goldberg, called as expert witness, wrily dismissed the manuscript’s inconsistencies as things that are fixed as a matter of course during the editorial process. (‘It’s a miracle’ was one explanation for, I think, someone returning from the dead – I thought the judge was going to say she was in contempt of court … but this was fiction, your honour.) If anyone knows where to find that documentary, let me know! But meanwhile enjoy Lucianne Goldberg discussing the trial and celebrity publishing with Judith Regan (e.g., note some fascinating arguments about fiction vs nonfiction writers using/needing ghost writers). I guess one major issue was that the perceived value of a Joan Collins novel, even if expertly rewritten/doctored, was diminished in the eyes of the publisher between the time the book was signed up and the time it was delivered. Writers: take note …

A good interview with Jeffrey Eugenides appeared in Salon this week. I enjoyed the discussion of his first sentences. It occurs to me they work as wonderful little elevator pitches.

Neologism alert! The BBC reports on the Britishisation of American English (and with an -ise ending at that).

A brief feature in Forbes on a boutique publisher using a subscription model, a form of underwriting production that’s also used successfully (to some degree or other) by, e.g., the wonderful Peirene Press and And Other Stories.

Apparently, there were some problems with the formatting of the ebook of J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy. Ow!

Following my own post earlier this week, more on the value of book bloggers in the Guardian. (You know, the more I think about it, I’m more likely to read – and trust – a books blog than a conventional book review.)

Also from the Guardian: John Sutherland on one of the great unsung heroes of publishing: the indexer. (Or should I say unsung heroines, as so often they are women. I never know whether women prefer to be heroes or heroines, actors or actresses, and whether it’s right/wrong to use either.)

And yay, the Kerouac Scroll is coming to the British Library! Next week, at that.

Final comment, amid all the coverage this week of The Casual Vacancy (which I’ve yet to read): aren’t we glad that J.K. Rowling 1. took pen to paper, and has 2. such a public profile, and 3. a voice that she uses to good purpose? I gather from those in the know that 4. she is a truly lovely person, too. Which just goes to show. (Haters: remember what Zadie said – we have to write from Love, not Envy.)

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement

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On the publication day of J.K. Rowling’s first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy (more on that another time), let’s take twenty minutes to revisit her truly charming commencement address at Harvard University in 2008. It’s one of my favourite bits of inspiration.

Overall it’s a funny and wise and heartfelt speech that contains advice for all of us at many points in our lives. And quite daringly, this modest woman in a cardigan lectures the elite of the world’s superpower about failure, which allows, among other things, ‘the stripping away of the inessential’. It also has an emphatic endorsement of the idea of imagination in its broadest sense. From what I have read in early coverage and reviews, these ideas of failure and imagination are central to the political consciousness that’s core to the new book.

But watch for yourself. (And here is a transcript of the speech, entitled ‘The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination’, too.)

 

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

 

Are bloggers killing literary criticism? (And: should critics watch films?!)

by Andrew | 1 Comment

Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS and chair of the Man Booker judges this year, talks about ‘bloggers killing literary criticism’ in the Indy.

Now, I think we can cut Peter some slack because the Man Booker judges have selected an interesting shortlist this year. But I wish this article had a bit more substance (we have observed of late that the Indy is getting a bit more like the Daily Mail in its ratio of opinion to fact).

It does make some interesting points, e.g., that criticism is about more than simply sharing one’s taste. And even if blogging is wonderfully democratic, its access for all comers can at times beg the question of how the blogger has earned the right to be heard, and who is even listening; there are a lot of trolls and blowhards in the blogosphere, and I imagine many of their opinings are mostly unread. (Thus he opineth … In creating my own blog, I’ve hoped to avoid too much of that, and my future book reviews shall mostly be a means of making specific recommendations of resources for writers – more of those to come later.)

But the lack in this article of specific examples of both critics and blogs makes me question the basis of his observations. Surely there are many blogs that have been engaged in serious criticism, and in the promotion and discussion of quality writing, e.g., off the top of my head Beatrice, Bookslut, Complete Review, Silliman’s Blog. And what about the blogging that forms an extension of established publications, e.g., the New Yorker‘s Page-Turner, the many contributors to the Guardian‘s Books blog? Okay, there are lots of blowhards in the Guardian comments … but there are great riches there too.

And a lot of books pages and sections (when they have survived) seem just as guilty of the same sorts of gushy, cliquey, and predictable conversations about books that you find in the gushiest, cliquiest, and most predictable blogs. Plus the sort of writing used by publishers to describe themselves and their wares can be worst of all; I’m thinking of the meaningless hyperbole that could be used interchangeably for whichever recent acquisition or staff appointment they are bigging up in The Bookseller this week (‘I started reading this [insert superlative] manuscript on the train home, and was so entranced/mesmerised/captivated that I only finally looked up from it at 2 a.m. to discover I was sitting in an unlit carriage in a siding in Basingstoke’).

So the professionals can’t always be held up as shining examples; their own taste-sharing can sometimes feel quite superficial, insincere, and clichéd.

As I think about this some more, I realise that I don’t always want commentary on books to be high-falutin’ criticism anyway. Sometimes simple summaries are all I need. Even a list. I love the Top Ten lists in the Guardian (from Top Ten Literary Otters one week to Top Ten Seventeenth-Century Food Books the next). Give me a few suggestions and impressions, and I’m happy to download a free sample to my Kindle so I can make up my mind for myself.

Surely blogging is just another venue for many of the best features of traditional criticism? With lots of added features on top?

Perhaps the most curious thing to me about this article is that Stothard says he has only ever seen six films! (I wonder which six films they are?)

PS As a side note, it was depressing to note how few visitors there are in fact for the major book blogs. Am sure these are the most intelligent, diligent, and discriminating readers in the whole Interweb, but the numbers still seem disappointingly low.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 2: Poison Pen Portrait

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Iago, Fagin, Cruella de Vil, Gollum. The hideous creations of Evelyn Waugh, the moneyed monstrosities of F. Scott Fitzgerald (‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy’). The White Witch, Tom Ripley, Emma Bovary (I know, I know – but I can’t bear the woman myself, yet she remains the central figure in one of my favourite novels).

Consider the great villains and unpleasant characters of literature. We are not told these characters are villainous or unpleasant, but we develop our sense of them through close observation of external details: their manners, their gestures, their actions, their desires (that Dalmatian-skin coat), in addition to dialogue and description. And these characters can become so beguiling, so compelling, that we might also come to like them.

In no more than one page, create a vignette that uses the third person and externally observed details (i.e., showing rather than telling) to introduce some vile yet compelling character.