How poet Beth Ann Fennelly discovered she had accidentally written a micro-memoir http://ift.tt/2z2gxJM

Author Beth Ann Fennelly never meant to write her new book, “Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs” (W.W. Norton). She had just finished a four-year collaboration with her husband, Tom Franklin, on their novel “The Tilted World.” It required tremendous amounts of research on the flood of the Mississippi River in 1927 and after it published, Fennelly says she didn’t write for a year.

At least, she didn’t think so.

“All I was doing was jotting down tiny things in my notebook, little memories or funny conversations I overheard,” Fennelly said. “I kept thinking I wasn’t writing.”

One day, it struck her how excited she was to jot down the latest quirky thought. “That excited feeling is what I feel when the writing is going well,” she said. “I recognized the feeling before I recognized the form.”

Fennelly realized she had a collection on her hands, of “small somethings” that she didn’t need to add up to a larger work. “I hit on the term ‘micro-memoirs’ and it just began to make sense, as if thinking of a term for it gave me permission to do it,” she said.

The result is 52 very short pieces of prose, anywhere from one line to several pages long, that are all true stories. The micro-memoirs showcase a range of emotions that belies their brevity — taken from another standpoint, their brevity is what gives them power.

Fennelly talked with MarketWatch about “Heating & Cooling.”

You’re a poet, novelist and memoirist. Was it liberating to write these micro-memoirs?

It was liberating because it felt low-stakes. If you’re writing something that’s one sentence and it fails, big deal. You throw it away. I didn’t have to research and get everything right about 1927 and the flood and WWI. It was just my life, my own silly memories and weirdo thoughts. I felt like I wasn’t accountable, and I could be as idiosyncratic as I wanted to be. After spending time in the head of a character in a novel, going back to my own life seemed fresh to me, looking through my own eyeballs at this crazy planet we’re all on.

Was your process of writing different here?

The process is a little mysterious to me. I began as a poet and thought all I would do is write poetry. Poetry is the Rodney Dangerfield of the literary field, it gets no respect. I thought, this is who I am. I’m happy to be in this unpopular form. Yet I started to fall in love with the sentence. The different musicality that’s allowed when you’re working with a sentence and not with the line. How it’s a little more expansive and capacious. It seemed to allow me to do some of the things I wanted to do. With the micro-memoir form, I was thinking, can I do what I love about poetry — the extreme abbreviation and compression and musicality — but can I have the narrative tension of fiction that I love? Can I also hew to the power of truth-telling and that very practical usefulness that comes from sticking to the facts? With the new book I was able to think about what I loved about every genre I’ve tried.

Some are romantic love notes to your husband, Tom.

I met my husband the first day of graduate school. I immediately started writing him love poems. Now we’ve been married 20 years come May. I’m still writing about him but they’re these middle-aged love songs that are full of a sense of aging. If they’re romantic it’s not in the way I would have imagined writing anything romantic when we were younger. Now we have these lives and kids and big jobs — It’s not like we did nothing but lie in bed all day. It’s the funny things like getting peas for his vasectomy and putting them in the pasta. Our life is so practical now, but in the practicality is the awesome familiarity that gives me comfort. I don’t think our society has provided an ethos in which maturity is an asset. When we come to movies or books about love they tend to always be about first love.

You explore some heart-wrenching subjects in your life through a few lines or paragraphs. How was it to explore them through such brief pieces?

I was dealing with some heavier information in the book. My [relationship to my] father, my mother’s breast cancer and my sister’s death. One of the things I want the book to do is to give a sense of the fullness of the human experience. Because the pieces are so short they allow the reader a small, intense experience of grief without having to read an entire book about grief. What I liked about the form was how you could switch so quickly from one emotion to another, but the overall picture would be the shape of the human heart with all the feelings one experiences in a life.

Would you ever write more on any of these micro-memoirs?

Absolutely not.The funny thing about writing micro-memoirs is they didn’t begin as long essays that I cut down. I think one of the fun things about them was finding the right size for the ideas. They’re not fragments where they need to lean on each other to make sense. Nor are they excerpts, like the best part of a longer piece. They were just always designed to be smaller things that because of their small size and the white space around them, had a compressed power.

How did you consider the endings, which often leave the reader with an unexpected thought or image?

If something is short and surrounded by white space, you can allow yourself to be weird. The reader is going to get a break and it’s set off almost like a frame around a picture. You are going to be able to absorb it as the thing it is, so you don’t necessarily have to tie things off in a manner that shows people this is the end, the end is coming. I learned from poetry that setting something off with white space allows you to put pressure on the contents. You can almost be a little more shocking or dramatic or funnier or weirder because the experience is just one short burst.