This week I’m preparing for the Zoom class I’ll teach April 19-23 (thanks to the Carnegie Center in Lexington, KY and the Kentucky Women Writers annual workshop) with the anxiety and the care that always fuel my passion to pass on a bit, at least, of what I’ve learned during my forty-plus years as a writer.
This workshop draws men and women from all across the country, of different levels of experience and talent; my focus is still as always on encouraging writers to trust their own voices, their own vision, unique and invaluable. Of course to express that voice and that vision in writing means using all the tools of the English language—and reading widely and seriously.
I believe that writing memoir is actually writing history from often neglected or ignored points of view—and this means the writer must take seriously her commitment to learning the political and social history of the time that frames her subject.
That’s my general aim, but within it are many specifics. Perhaps most important, I want to persuade writers to use all five senses in their writing, instead of just the visual—and to sharpen visual descriptions with fresh, unexpected adjectives.
We seldom turn to the sense of smell when writing, perhaps because many smells are objectionable. But smell opens a path to the past: when I sniff the orange oblong rubber eraser (long unused) that lies on my desk, I am immediately carried back to my grade school classroom and to the sensation of rubbing so hard to erase a mistake on a math homework paper that I rubbed through the paper itself.
As for taste—it is immensely evocative. Marcel Proust writes in A Remembrance of Things Past that “the past is hidden…beyond the reach of the intellect in some material object we do not suspect.” As an example, he calls up a memory associated with the little cookie the French call a madeleine: tasting it as an adult, he finds himself back on a Sunday morning when “Aunt Leonie used to give me a bit of madeleine, dipping it first into her cup of real or lime-flower tea.” Immediately Proust finds again her grey house, the garden, the flowers, the streets, the people he met there—none of which he had been able to remember.
As for touch, we writers are as numb to it as everyone else in this culture. The French writers seem to have more access to touch than we of the old Puritan tradition, and so I often turn to Colette for touch—as for smell and taste.
Finally, there is hearing. How seldom writers remember to describe how a crucial scene sounded: not the screams of a murder but the ticking of a clock, the dim roar of the washing machine, the subtle muttering of a boiling kettle.
If I can help my students to use all five senses, their writing will be enriched—and so will their lives. Much of the boredom we blame on the isolation of the pandemic could be relieved if we used all five senses to experience our ordinary moments.
That’s what I want to teach my students. Not a small ambition, but achievable.
You have inspired me to get back to writing my memoir. Thanks for the suggestion to include the senses.