Okay, I’m so geeked out with joy that I can hardly contain myself. This is a nerd thing…but it’s my literary hero-crush, George Orwell. They are putting his diaries up online starting TODAY!!!!! The diaries began on Aug. 9, 1938.
http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com
Seventy years ago today Orwell caught a snake in his yard. Today I caught tadpoles in the Ogeechee River. There is little that connects us, but the ability to see how he lived his days is such a wonderful opportunity. I have no objectivity when it comes to this man. I just love him.

When people tell me they’ve read 1984 or Animal Farm, I can’t shut up…I end up rattling on about Homage to Catalonia (my favorite) or Down and Out in Paris and London, or his many, many essays. Sigh. What I most admire about him is his thoughtfulness, his ability to re-see his own positions, to interrogate his politics. And his sweet melancholy mixed with a dogged desire to keep seeing and creating relevant beauty in the face of the 20th Century and the horror it brought.

One of the major thrills of teaching at Ashland University’s new low-res MFA program for the past two weeks was hearing the closing reading and craft talk by Floyd Skloot, author of many books of poetry, four novels, and excellent works of nonfiction including the new “The Wink of the Zenith” and “In the Shadow of Memory” (from University of Nebraska Press).

This is the only talk on the craft of writing that’s brought me to tears. Skloot talked about the writing process for putting together his essay, “Kismet,” which dealt with the death of his brother. Twenty years ago, Skloot suffered a virus attack that resulted in brain lesions that damaged large sections of his memory and hindered his ability to process information. Despite this major obstacle he has continued a productive writing career. He spoke in this craft talk about the organic structure of the essay, a piece of seven sections that explore interlocking themes. One of his major points was the organic structure that resulted from the essay’s subject matter. He traced the evolution of the essay by guiding the audience through the insights and emotions that occurred after his brother’s death; since he had lost access to much of his childhood memories, he had to pay careful attention to any emotional triggers signaling a buried memory or association about his brother.

Although most of us don’t suffer brain damage, we confront the desire to overstructure our emotions, reactions, and memories, fitting them into a form that seems to us to make “sense.” Some of the most beautiful quotes shared by Skloot concerned his gratitude at having the process of writing nonfiction as a framework for reconstructing his sense of self:
“You get to say in the essay what you never say to others, what you never say to yourself.”
He also described writing as a “spiritual practice”: “You open yourself up and slow yourself down. Once you lose control and surrender to the material, you open the vents and other material can stream in. This requires a looser and more exploratory mode of working. It requires time and patience, a willingness to explore tangents, a willingness to be ruthless with the tangents.”

Her new book, “What It Is,” is IT. The book is indescribable and fantastic. Love. (For a bit more clarification: it’s a multi-modal collage memoir and account of her coming to be an artist. And a guide for getting art/creation into your life if you want that but have lost the way.)

From p. 81:
“The time for it is always with us though we say we do not have that kind of time. The kind of time I have is not for this but for that. I wish I had that kind of time. But if you had that kind of time, would you do it? Would you give it a try? This kind of doing both takes and gives time–makes live the dead hours inside us.”

And from p. 133 (On the evil questions inside your head, “Is it Good?” “Does this suck?”): “Give up because it’s hopeless. Make useless pictures. Waste time and materials. Have no purpose. Betray the pimps.”

Hey, here’s a link to an audio file of an interview I did with Rachael Hanel (a myspace buddy!) of the KMSU “Weekly Reader” radio show on April 3, 2008.

I talked about my book, Opa Nobody, and about research and family. And I noticed that as I talked to Rachael and heard her lovely Minnesooota accent I began to sound very Midwestern myself.

See if you can pick up on those vowels, ya know?

From a great review by Valerie Weaver-Zercher in The Christian Century Magazine (May 6, 2008): “Rather than setting documents, histories and photographs in opposition to family lore, however, Huber plumbs family stories for the truths they hold, even if they ultimately prove not to be factual. ‘Remembering is an act of the imagination,’ poet W. S. Di Piero has written, and it is precisely Huber’s play with the imaginative possibilities in the gaps between historical fact and family memory that makes her project so poetic and moving. “

I felt blessed indeed to learn on Sunday (March 23) that I’d received this review of Opa Nobody in the Los Angeles Times:

Revolutions, notoriously, devour their children: Once-beloved radicals are beheaded at the guillotine. But for the actual children of revolutionaries and activists, this idea holds a whole other dimension of meaning. For them, politics extracts a personal cost. Deep down, they suspect they come second to the cause.

For Sonya Huber, daughter of a German immigrant and author of the memoir “Opa Nobody,” this conflict gnaws at her family. Her grandfather Heina’s commitment to socialist and antifascist politics in prewar and Nazi Germany demanded sacrifices from his wife and children, even as he fought on behalf of the proletariat. For his efforts, he earned the title of the family “nobody.

Growing up, Huber heard about her grandfather’s activism, but she never knew the full story. When her own commitment to leftist politics led to emotional and physical collapse, she sought inspiration in his example. She wanted to know, “Why try to change the world?” She listened to family stories, and when those ran dry she crossed the Atlantic to search through German historical archives. In every chapter, she weaves stories of her activist life with richly imagined scenes of her grandfather, reconstructing his life from anecdotes and documentary evidence.

Huber also confronts links to Nazism in her own bloodline — in the person of a great uncle who joined the Waffen-SS. Although she has no evidence that he took part in war crimes, she imag- ines him participating in atrocities nonetheless. It would be too easy, Huber writes, not to do so, to acquit him simply because the paper trail ends. His SS status, in other words, makes him complicit, regardless of what he did or did not do. At the same time, Huber frames his decision to join the SS as fraught with nuance — perhaps as a survival strategy. And yet, she admits, such a “survival strategy” is her own invention, an expression of her hopes as opposed to the “truth.”

Huber is always careful to explain where research ends and imagination begins. Amid recent scandals about fraudulent memoirs, her honesty is profound in what it implies about storytelling and genre. Read as the saga of her quest to balance activism and motherhood, “Opa Nobody” is a memoir; read as a biography of her grandfather, it becomes speculative nonfiction. At times, it feels like a historical account. Her own label of “nonfiction novel” suits it well, but it is more than that. By connecting with history on such a personal level, she reveals how ordinary citizens can get swept up into movements of all kinds; allegiance is never as simple as a membership card.

Most radically of all for a progressive activist, Huber embraces the past. Instead of tossing it all out in search of something new, she ties a firm knot between then and now.
Karrie Higgins is a writer based in Portland, Ore.

“Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself: pedant that it is, it will have its way.

When pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised.

Beneath its dry and crackly outer skin we find another, more moist layer, that once detached, reveals a third, beneath which a fourth and a fifth wait whispering. And each skin sweats words too long muffled, and curlicue signs, as if a mystery-monger from an early age, while the onion was still germinating, had decided to encode himself.

Then ambition raises its head: this scrawl must be deciphered, that code cracked. What currently insists on truth is disproved, because Lie or her younger sister, Deception, often hands over only the most acceptable part of a memory, the part that sounds plausible on paper, and vaunts details to be as precise as a photograph…” (3)

Beautiful words and a lovely metaphor. I wanted so much to love this book. I love this author, and the subject matter of German memory, history and literature are some of my favorites. With a beginning like this, I expected a German version of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory…and somehow I am disappointed. Starts strong, finishes with no resolution.

After work, working out, and playing outside with Ivan a few days ago, I had on the following ensemble: brown work pants, orange Fig Newton T-shirt, purple cardigan, black socks, and bright orange crocs. As he’s yelling at me to come outside, I looked down and said, “Wait, how did this happen? I look insane.”

He looked me up and down and said, “You look sweet.”

We went outside to play catch and I had to stop a few times to admire my outfit. I look sweet! I felt that awesome four-year-old freedom that comes with looking like a four-year-old. I sort of have a modified version of this wardrobe anyway, but full-on color madness gave me a jolt. Or else it’s the German in me coming out, because Germans don’t get how to match colors.

About 70 folks (I think) came to hear me read and talk about Opa Nobody, which was sooooo wonderful. Yay to the Book and Cranny in Statesboro for all the help, and to Eric Nelson & his posse for the beautiful food, and to my son for drawing on my face while I was trying to sign books.

In other good news, Booklist says of Opa Nobody: “[T]houghtful discourse on political activism and the toll exacted from those dedicated to unpopular causes.”

In the wake of the Margaret Selzer fake-memoir scandal, it was discovered that the author of “Reflections in the Pond,” a meandering work of literary nonfiction, was also assuming a false identity. Dr. Arno Schwartz, the mild-mannered professor who readers knew as the author of “Reflections,” was revealed to be Shazaam Waloon Walker, former knife thrower, sword eater, and bounty hunter.

Waloon Walker published “Reflections” to little acclaim, no advance, and sold approximately 1,700 copies of the work, which was published by a now-defunct “indie” press, Seventh Jackal Books. Over time, however, the literary value of the work brought it into such demand among panelists at literary conferences that a second indie press, Nine Horned Beast Words (now also defunct), scraped together enough support for a second press run of 150 printed by hand with letterpress.

“Reflections” enjoyed modest name recognition among a handful of name-tag checkers at regional literary conferences, and might have faded into the comfortable obscurity of the indie has-beens if it hadn’t been for the industrious blogger, Snarfling Lorax. Lorax, a bedridden consumptive with an axe to grind against the literati employed as first-year composition teachers with 4-4 teaching loads at community colleges, combed through the manuscript and announced on his blog yesterday that “Reflections” was indeed an utter fabrication.

“The walks in the woods? A lie. The hazy metaphors connecting the cycle of life to the color of the birch leaves? This guy has never been more than seven feet from either a car or a pool table,” wrote Lorax on the blog post. Lorax cited the key discovery of “Reflections” as a hoax: a reference to Schwartz/Waloon Walker visiting Walden Pond on Long Island. “Jesus Christ,” wrote Lorax. Literary fans of “Reflections” had assumed the gaffe was a knowing and subtle commentary on American relationship to its literary history.

“I just wanted some respect,” said Shazaam Waloon Walker in a phone interview. “Every girl I met, it was always about the scars on my face, the questions about the decades I spent as a drug mule, and the knife throwing–especially the knife throwing. I love the alphabet…but who would have thought me capable of stringing a metaphor?”

“I wasn’t in it for the money, obviously. I can rustle that up anytime I want. I didn’t want to write about my low points and devour my own life for the sake of a huge advance…What do you think I am, some sort of corpse-eating zombie? I wanted what no money can buy. I wanted the quiet and unremunerated satisfaction of somebody who’s just into the alphabet. I guess love affair with a good story was my downfall. I’ll never be anything but a knife-throwing sword-swallowing former drug mule.”

(A little short story, a joke and a lie. The Onion wouldn’t publish it because it wasn’t funny enough. No, that’s a lie, I never submitted it to The Onion.)