Becoming Realer: Origins

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

My coat of arms as I envisioned my own crest in 2000

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion began “The White Album.” Her words have been on repeat in my head during the months that I have been neglecting this column while putting the finishing touches on my thesis for Saint Mary’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction. As I prepared to walk for graduation, I found myself returning to the beginning and wondering: Is that why I decided to tell stories? What exactly is the nature of telling stories?

This past January, I took a class that explored fairy tales from a comparative and cross-cultural perspective. I thought it would help me learn how to write stories since folk tales have both expository and narrative elements and follow set structural patterns. There is a hero or heroine who goes on a journey. There is a donor who helps the hero or heroine. There is a conflict, separation and ultimately a reunion. Things tend to happen in threes. In order to find the narrative arc in my own story, I decided to go back to the very beginning.

Some folklorists believe that the first stories told were tales of giant-slayers. In a Norwegian tale, seven brothers go off in search of seven brides, and the oldest six are turned to stone by a giant’s hand. Only the youngest prince and princess are able to trick the giant and destroy his heart. Or in the Portuguese version, three sisters go out into a field to pick flowers, then disappear. When the youngest brother comes of age, he goes off in search of his lost sisters and finds the first two married to the King of the Birds and the King of the Fishes respectively. But his youngest sister is being held prisoner by an evil giant that wants to force her hand in marriage, and the brother must destroy the giant’s heart. Then there’s the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey or David and Goliath. Were these stories told in order for ancient people to live or were they just stories the peasants liked to tell to pass the time?

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Becoming Realer: On Mixed Media Writing

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

Click!, oil, 24" x 28" by Shizue Seigel

Shizue Seigel, an Asian American artist I know in the Bay Area, recently introduced herself to a group of women by saying that so many of the movies she sees don’t speak to her life at all. As much fun as it is to watch Meryl Streep being chased around by Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, she can’t relate to Streep’s movies because the experiences are so far from her own. I admit I was completely baffled by this statement because Meryl Streep is one of my favorite actresses. I could understand where Shizue was coming from since there was a time in my life, not too long ago in fact, when I complained about every book I read and every movie I saw because they failed to represent me, or any Asian American perspective—but never Meryl Streep’s movies.

Dark Matter was the first film I saw at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in 2007, and I gravitated towards the sympathy her character, Joanna, showed for the Asian gunman oppressed by the school’s racism and department politics. When I went back to K College after the film fest, my Asian American studies mentor told me that after a similar shooting in the 1990s, militant students would hang pictures of their professors in crosshairs to protest oppression. At that particularly militant point in my life, Dark Matter, and Streep herself, became emblematic of me and my college experiences.

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Becoming Realer: A Conversation with the Surreal

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" cover shot by Helen McFadyen

Earlier this month, Beijing-born storyteller and essayist Yiyun Li came to Saint Mary’s for a craft talk and reading. One of the things she said is that we write to be in dialogue with writers whom we admire. Li’s words reminded me of something similar I heard in high school from a screenwriter, who said writers write because they love actors. I couldn’t agree more.

Before our summer hiatus, I wrote about feeling like I was finally a part of the Asian American movement in San Francisco after meeting Flo and Nellie Wong at an art exhibition last spring. After such a grandiose rush of historical connection, my thoughts have turned inward once again, mainly to ideas about persona and “the dialogical self.”

One of the first books of poetry recommended to me was Open House by Beth Ann Fennelly. In her long poem, “From L’hotel Terminus Notebooks,” her speaker has an internal argument with a man who represents the critic’s voice. The voice is antagonistic and imaginary, yet also a part of herself. Psychologist Hubert Hermans considers this, the relationship between all the disparate voices in our minds, to be “the dialogical self.” The self in dialogue.

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Becoming Realer: Visible

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

 

Elaine Gin Louie's "Visible" and "The Red Frame" installations, photo taken by Nicole C. Roldan

 

One of the things that my advisor likes about living in San Francisco is that there’s something for everyone. She says that no matter how weird or specific the interest seems to be, people are able to find each other. Since moving to the East Bay, I’ve joined two organizations. One is the Association of Korean Adoptees | San Francisco (AKASF) that hosted a literary reading with Lee Herrick, Jo Rankin and some authors from the new More Voices anthology in May. It’s a large group of Korean adoptees celebrating and educating others on what it means to be a KAD. The other is the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) that sponsored the A Place of Her Own art exhibition at SOMArts, also in May, with the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (APICC) for the 14th Annual United States of Asian America Festival. Twenty-three Asian American women artists responded to the question, “If you had a place of your own, what would it be?”

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Becoming Realer: Re-Claiming Asian America

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

White out
K Awareness Campaign circa 2008 | Graphics by Nina Reyes

“My [writing] is a testament to who I am and what I have lived. It is a process of becoming a student, a teacher, an activist, and an Asian American woman. I was forced to pick up the pen as a weapon and wield it in a fight against the oppression of my people, to become a voice for those of us who are unable or unwilling to speak.”

I wrote those words in the introduction to my Senior Individualized Project (SIP) at Kalamazoo College called, “Creating History and Spaces: The Making of an Asian American Woman in Zuihitsu.” That’s still what I want to do with my writing—create personal and political history , expose it, re-frame it and carve new spaces for people who have been left out or overlooked. I want my writing to make a difference in the world. It should make a statement that will reach others, even though I am ultimately writing for myself.

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Becoming Realer: “Growing Sideways”

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

Kelsay at Grandma Rothert's house in 1988

After reading Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic last semester in Contemporary Nonfiction, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of artifice in my life. Bechdel’s father spent years creating a fiction of himself as the straight, happy family man and small town English teacher, and he arranged his Gothic revivalist home into a solid, real world representation of his artifice. It’s not merely artifice in the sense of having a duplicitous nature, but also the construction and presentation of a certain image, or identity, to the world.

It’s that kind of self-construction that I relate to not only in my own identity formation, but in my writing as well. We learn early on in our writing careers that whatever “self” we put on the page is not our actual, real world self. It is a fabrication , written with specific intentions for an audience. It is, in a word, performed. But in all honesty, when I look at my actual self, I still see the artifice. In any given situation, I find myself carefully constructing my self to look or act a certain way. It’s not just vanity that causes me to never leave the house without make-up, or to sleep in pajamas that are basically clothes so I could more quickly run out in the middle of the night if I happened to get an emergency phone call saying that someone is in the hospital. Although I am vain, it goes deeper than that. It’s about actualizing the idea of myself that I have in my head (heavily influenced by pop-culture and television) every hour of every day in order to make it true.

Performance eventually becomes reality? The symbol eventually becomes truth? I readily admit that my version of symbolism comes from a conflation of the literal with the symbolic. Continue reading “Becoming Realer: “Growing Sideways”” →

Becoming Realer: Going Home

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

1854 Victorian Farmhouse – Photograph by Natalie Grumbles, Christmas 2008

The older I get, the harder it is to explain what I’m doing with my life. Thankfully, going home for the holidays is really the only time I need to. The Christmas and New Year’s parties, family friend get-togethers and annual reunions with high school and college friends are exhausting, particularly when I’m asked what I’m doing now. Getting an M.F.A. at Saint Mary’s College of California is cool but not specific enough, and writing creative nonfiction is not as self-explanatory as it sounds.

I was making Christmas gift exchanges at Caché when a colleague of my mother’s came into the store with his partner. After the general introductions and greetings, he asked what kind of writing I do. I explained that I do a cross between poetry and nonfiction. Then, he wanted to know who my favorite poet is. My answer was T.S. Eliot, though I internally debated whether to name Kimiko Hahn, Marilyn Chin, or Diane Seuss, all of whom have had a more formative impact on my writing and identity so far but are not generally well known. The brief look of bewilderment on his face or nervous silence that would inevitably follow didn’t seem worth it. For conversation’s sake, I said Eliot.

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Becoming Realer: The Spirit of the Sky

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

"The Spirit of the Earth" painting by Kristopher H (via Escape Into Life)

A few days ago, I told Rebecca Eckland that the main difference between us is that she comes from Nevadan dust and dirt, and I come from Michigander cows and cornfields. “One of my favorite teenage descriptions of myself was ‘I’m a skyscraper in a cornfield,’” I said. She laughed and told me that “I’m a star over a basin” was one of hers.

I’m a skyscraper in a cornfield struck me because of its clear imagery, though I consider myself a horrible imagist. My weakness with image is one of the major reasons I didn’t consider my poetry writing very good. When I first started taking poetry classes as an undergraduate, I struggled against, resisted and fought at every turn writing to the image rather than to the idea, as I’m an idea-oriented person. I t took me three years of writing to fully embrace the power of the image. And yet, here is an example of a much earlier self-description that captures my alienation from my environment and insatiable desire to stand out in a larger-than-life way with starkness.

Why this image has come back to me now, I have no idea. My hunch is that all of the memoirs I’ve been reading in the program have put me on my own memory excavation. And, why not? Living in the Bay Area has shown me, even more than living in Nashville, Tennessee, that we cannot escape where we are from. It comes with us.

Maybe it was reading Kristopher H’s artist statement on Escape Into Life. His paintings, like the one above, depict an imaginary place called “Iblard,” based on the work of a Japanese artist, Naohisa Inoue. He says that Iblard is “an imaginative space which everyone possesse[s] and yet [is] trying to run away from. A space about imagination and possibilities.” I wonder if we have to leave a place in order to see its possibilities, or if we create that space from our own imaginations.

Or, maybe it was the LR Blog prompt from November 12th. It asks us to describe an old pair of shoes that symbolizes death without ever saying “death” in order to explore image, metaphor and description. This prompt made me panic a little because I think that were I to attempt it, I would fail. I would write death. I would get lost in abstraction, or meditate upon the concept of death. I would probably leave out the old shoes entirely.

But, no matter what the impetus was, image and description have been on my mind since one of my first workshop meetings with my advisor. She asked what I do with an image when one comes to me.

“I try to write a poem about it, or make it into a metaphor,” I said.

“The other option is to make it into a scene,” she told me.

Scene is what I’ve been trying to work on this past semester because I’m awful at it. I panicked at my advisor’s statement too because it took me three years to grasp the power of an image. How long would it take me to get a scene? Would I ever master it? More realistically, would I ever be decent enough to pretend I’d mastered it?

My hunch is that I won’t. And yet, there was a star over a basin in Lake Tahoe. A skyscraper in the cornfields of Lowell.

Becoming Realer: Looking at the Real

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

Rainbow shoes

I can’t remember if I imagined Korea as a child. I must have. I put the rainbow-striped shoes that were sent with me from Busan when I was three-months old high on a shelf in my bedroom, in a place where I could look at them but not touch them. Sometimes, I would ask my mother to take down the shoes, wondering if that would be the day they’d finally fit on my feet. That day never came. They were too big each time. I’d fall down trying to walk in them. Eventually I forgot about wanting to wear them, and when I did remember they were up on that shelf again, they were so small that they pinched my feet. I used to think the moral of this story was that the shoes never fit just right. That, in the same way, Korea would never fit just right, but now I see even greater meaning in the fact that I was the one who put the shoes in a place where I could look at them, but not feel them.

That is the true moral of the story. I’m still afraid to feel Korea. It’s more comfortable in the abstract, or as a rainbow-colored shoe that will never fit, than as an actual thing that I can put my arms around or stick my feet in. It’s more comfortable as a symbol than a country, as a metaphor than a reality.

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Becoming Realer: Making Fungus

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

Painting by Marissa Trierweiler

Workshop has become my favorite class. Maybe because I genuinely enjoy reading other people’s work and sharing my own. Maybe because the literary critic in me likes playing with the writer, or maybe it’s because on day one, my new piece, “The Red Frame,” caused some controversy. There’s nothing like starting off by making waves! 

The piece begins:

What is my life concept? What is my story?

I need a new frame, but I don’t know the old frame.

Two students got into an argument about who the audience of the piece was, why it provided no answers, and what was going on in general. Two students argued, but the class itself was split in their views pretty evenly down the middle: one camp loved it, the other was confused. To the people who asked who the audience is and what the conclusion, or the answer, was, I didn’t respond because it doesn’t matter what my answer may be. It’s about their answers, and their answers were all valid. The piece is schizophrenic. It’s disjunctive. It wants to be dark and dwell on its darkness. It is, and I say this as objectively as possible, beautiful. Ultimately though, it is whatever the reader wants it to be. I come from the school of the Language poets . The point is to play with conventional literary structures, language and ideas to find out what the reader brings to the table.

Our instructor told me that she thinks what was really going on in workshop was that the students were discovering what was essential for them in their own writing. It’s a great question: what is essential for you in writing?

For me, it’s structure and imagination. Structure because organization is essential for framing the theme, and imagination makes it beautiful. Both create a worldview.

In college, I spent a good deal of time searching for a form that felt both: natural and imaginative, lyrical and concise, fragmented yet whole. I love essays but couldn’t find an organizing principle to make them work. I like prose poems, but thought them too suppressive at the time. I wanted to sprawl and sing across the page! Sonnets, villanelles, and iambic pentameter are all great… when written by other people. Let’s face it, I’m lazy. I’m also tone deaf. But most importantly, I needed a form that was dialectical, not just in its content, but in its very structure. I wanted organization to mirror self-expression, which required a form that uses dialogue, process and contradiction.

Why contradiction? Why dialectics? As political Asian Americans, we cringe at the East vs. West binary because our very existence (as Asian Americans) contains both. It’s an old, false construct, and yet, as a Korean adoptee, nothing else encompasses my lived experiences. By “lived experiences,” I mean the dichotomy of being born in Pusan and being raised as a white American, being told I’ve been chosen by my family and being told I’ve been given up by my family, or being told how much I am loved because one set of parents wants me so much they won’t let me go and being told how much I am loved because one set of parents loved me so much that they let me go. What sort of form allows such paradoxes to be beautiful and not messy? What sort of form allows such paradoxes to be messy and still beautiful?

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