I am leading my students on a chilly but sunny April afternoon through the woods of a local park.  This is a class on wild edibles, and they have one assignment today:  what is happening around you?  There is a syllabus for this class: it is provisional.   Each class meeting has an agenda:  we rarely keep it.  We are on the hunt for a particular edible plant on this day:  my students have no idea what it is.  Their only job, the true quarry of this hunt, is to notice what is happening around them.  It’s one of our first class meetings, so the students don’t so much trust me and this exercise as much they humor me.  Trust, hopefully, comes later, but at first humor is enough to get by on.

Foraging is a highly seasonal endeavor and what I am trying to accomplish by having my students look around them without knowing what they are looking for is twofold:  to foreground everything in their experience, and to break them of their attachment to a calendrical sense of time. Today’s lesson is in phenology, the ordering of time along a sliding scale of interrelated natural phenomena rather than a grid of months, weeks, and days.  Phenological time correlates the barest golden buds of cornelian cherry with the full riot of willow catkins in full bloom with chocolate-bronze pleated horse-chestnut leaves emerging from sticky bud scales.  What time is it?  Cornelian cherry buds.  When do trout lilies flower?  Willow catkins.

We are looking for ramps, but by the time we reach the pungent, oniony colonies of wild leeks spilling down the forest slopes to the flooded creek, my hope is that the students will understand that when looking for ramps they are really looking for a holistic natural moment, a precise step of an immense choreography.  The whole of the woods is this ramp.  And rather than a being having some inherent time, or even an inherent being, there is instead only relationality.

As a horticulturist, I was trained in taxonomy, to relate plants one to another within a grand schema of families and genera and species.  But what does a ramp know of these things?  It’s wide flopping green leaves bear a closer kinship to its neighbor trout lily’s speckled leaves than any garden onion, but don’t tell that to a botanist.  As a writer, I was trained in creativity (ha!), to open up my writing to the unexpected and the fresh.  But when I leaf through Poets and Writers or I click through a journal’s website and land on their Submittable page, I find myself faced with three gates in front of me: fiction, poetry, and non-fiction.  Is what I have to offer true or false?  lyric or narrative?

If I walk through the poetry portal ($3.00 toll please) must my work be beautiful or deep or sonorous, licentious or licensed?  If I try to get into the nonfiction nightclub will I get stopped at the velvet rope because my narrative is too loose, my logic too abstruse?  And I’ve never even considered trying out for the fiction team…  It’s not that I feel like I’ve been rejected or misunderstood as a writer, it’s just that I always face an existential dilemma in front of those submission categories.  I feel pressured to submit – submit to an alienating artificial scheme of reality.  I consider myself primarily a nonfiction writer.  I’ve written a number of essays and am working on a memoir – scratch that, lyric memoir.  I confess I don’t actually know what this term, “lyric,” means, but I find I have to qualify this project because when I write, my lines loop into sonorous arabesques or illogical cul-de-sacs.  My paragraphs atomize into the non-sequiturity of city blocks.  White space invades.  Apposite memories run riot.   I am not being cute.  It is just that I am trying to share with you (dear reader) how my mind works.  I am reaching out with my reality, like a ramp leaf brushing against a trout lily’s in the sweet ephemeral moment of an early spring afternoon when light still cascades down to the forest floor through the bare tree limbs above.  My nonfiction is just that:  not false.  But what if my non-falsity doesn’t meet your expectations (dear editor)?  Implicit in the idea of any genre would seem to be a judgment of reality, and the inevitable descent of misfits away from this phantom.   Is that what it means to be “lyric” essay/prose/memoir/whatever?  To mis-fit?  Does being lyric give me permission to be a lyre/liar and expand the horizons of the true?

Is this anxiety over what a piece of writing is and what “lyric” might mean merely symptomatic of some process of literary evolution?  Clearly the very presence of an anthology like Bending Genre and this blog demonstrates a community and a concern for work that mis-fits.  But given the existence of this community, how badly behaved can this work be?  Are we merely striking a pose?  The truly misfit is unintelligible.  Are we simply in the midst of a process of speciation? Among taxonomists there are the “lumpers” and the “splitters.” The splitters see speciation everywhere, naming new beings into being for each new trait that is observed.  The lumpers prefer to paint difference broadly, taking a conservative tack on innovation and a wait-and-see attitude. If genre-bending is literary speciation in action, is there a difference between adding another category to a Submittable portal, and the project of leaving “genre” as a genre of thought behind entirely?

I wonder what it might mean to stroll through the stacks of a bookstore, so many trees grown in pages if not in rings, or through the luminous pixels of a computer arranged in constellations, just like those first stories, and try to see things ecologically, so that a story or a poem or an essay or a _________________ might exist not as a species of a type but as a singular organism alive in the same moment and relating with the other organisms around it.  When do imagined memoirs grow?  Trauma cookbook.  What time is it?  Travel-theory-braided- lyric-meta-proem.

Another name for ramps is Allium tricoccum, which binds it by genus (plural, “genera”) to other Alliums – Allium cepa (onion), Allium schoenoprasum (chives), Allium sativum (garlic) to name a common few.  But these relatives are nowhere in sight in the early spring woods.  Closer are those trout lilies whose leaves, though freckled with red, are daintier look-alikes for ramps’ though they are comfortably distant on any taxonomists’ tree off in the land of Erythronium.  I worked for a number of years as a horticulturist at The Cloisters (itself a genre-bender, being a composite of five or so different monasteries and convents brought over stone by stone from France and Spain), where I learned to appreciate that naming things has everything to do with how a thing exists in your life.  Artemisia vulgaris is also “mugwort” precisely because this bitter herb was used in the middle ages as a flavoring agent of ale.  Artemisia absinthium  , its close cousin and one of the ingredients in its namesake intoxicating beverage is also “wormwood” because apart from inspiring visitations from green fairies, the plant was also used for getting rid of worms.   Botanically they are considered close relatives, but functionally they are completely different

.

I mention this because the names we give things depends on the scheme by which we are trying to understand them. D. R. Edward Wright has written about Renaissance Italian gardens and a bias in garden historical work towards aesthetic analysis.  He finds this bias rooted in historians’ reliance on top-view plans of these gardens as artifacts by which to understand them.   Primary concerns, then, have been aesthetic ones of structure, color, form.  Instead he suggests that gardens might be better understood functionally.  Not “what did they look like,” but “what did they do” and “what did people do in them.”  The garden as tool rather than the garden as spectacle.

Might this not also be a profitable reimagining of the scheme by which we understand our words.  It’s probably a fool’s errand to try and escape genre altogether, but rather than merely tack on another species to the list, could it be possible to use function as well as form (and a million other vectors too) to prism out just what it is we’re up to?  What might that look like and how would it affect our creative production if the Submittable portals for journals had buttons for “botanical exercises on ethics and joy” or “multi-directional laments” or “painstakingly delusional jeremiads on forgetfulness?”  My examples, and my first impulse in thinking about functional genres, are emotional – genre as parameters of “what my words do to you” in terms of emotional reader response – but these functions might extend in any of a number of other directions.  If these became the criteria by which work was aggregated, what kind of felicitous collisions might occur when poems and fiction and non-fiction and everything else in-between find themselves not understood as different but rather the same under the banner of some other principle.  Organizing along these lines is perhaps another way of saying: What time is trout lily? Ramps.  What are cornelian cherry buds? Horse chestnut leaves unfolding.

Marco Wilkinson’s work life bends genres.  He teaches writing at Oberlin College, where he is also managing editor at Oberlin College Press.  He also teaches in the Sustainable Agriculture program at Lorain County Community College, where he also gardens.  His work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Terrain, Seneca Review, and Taproot.

Recently I put a question to writer-types in my social spaces: what is your least favorite thing about the nonfiction reading experience (besides writers who lie)? I got close to 80 responses, mostly from poets and fictionists, very particular, very vehement: the perceived “narcissism” of memoir (of course), the classist lens of New Journalism, lyric overkill, unnecessary narrative intrusion, “ambulance chasing”—it was a stunning array of ticks that seem to piss people off in a monumental way. Some I agreed with, some I didn’t, but the one that’s stuck closest with me came from a friend I’ll call Annie, a fictionist whose stories tend to bind a humane messiness to the most tired of genre tropes, somehow fueling each with a new, strange life. “The performance of certainty around massively complicated life stuff,” Annie wrote. “The desire to simplify and explain the mysterious.”

I’ve been thinking about this concept since, the “performance of certainty.” Now is maybe the most digestible era for creative forms of nonfiction. Sharing modes have turned the genre more mobile and transferrable than it’s ever been—from #longreads curation to rapid-fire thinkpieces to the Shields-y bloom of the section-numbered, lyrical rumination. But there’s a brand of creative nonfiction that has seemed to thrive more than any other: a kind of blunt confessor’s tale, a one-thousandish-word personal story of often high, earnest stakes and utter danger, where a writer unveils a painful scenario they’ve either survived or endured or been implicated in. You’ve seen these pieces. They’ve shown up in your feeds with accompanying comments like “thank you for writing this,” or “beautiful” or “so brave” or just simply “this.” They’re very often pegged to a news item or pop culture strain but just as often stick to the deeply, deeply, personal, offering a firm, closing insight or a revelation. Its almost a genre, formed in close response to its medium—what to call these pieces? Micro-memoirs? Candids? Unburdenings?—and there are many reasons for their success. The best of them are written so skillfully, with a pitch and momentum that feels acutely visceral (and like with all genres, there are those who elevate beyond even that: Rachel Monroe’s strange, prescient and mindful pieces for The Awl. Matthew Salesses’s still, driving “Love, Recorded” column for The Good Men Project). They’re satisfying, almost addictive reads in that way: as readers, we get to lean in closely to listen to the careful voice of someone’s deeply held secret.

Though I suspect the leading reason for their popularity is the exact reason people like Annie tend to bristle. So many seem built to coax a simple, particular response in a reader upon a piece’s bandage-tear epiphany: To click a “like” button. Or a “favorite” button. So brave. This. Given the modes of consumption in which these pieces thrive, the responses make sense to the work at the heart of it. In other words, these pieces not only display the performance of certainty, but manage to transfer that performance to the reader as well.

For the modern origins of this kind of tale (or better, our responses to it) one could look to the mid-aughts success of Frank Warren’s PostSecret project, which expanded an online audience for the artful presentation of the contained confessional. But when it comes to how those tales often appear in “literary” form—and, more specifically, how they tend to conclude—This American Life’s Ira Glass might be a better origin point. While hardly the first to lean on the technique, Glass has been open for years about the anecdote/reflection building blocks of each of the show’s radio pieces, personal or not, and it’s difficult not to see that influence on storyslam culture, and then, further, on the micro-confessions that now decorate literary social feeds. And make no mistake—it’s good to be reflective. And it’s good to leave it all on the page. Every successful piece needs a negotiated harmony between both halves (situation, story, etc.). But does reflection or insight in nonfiction always have to take the form of certitude?

“Unproblematically self-assured, self-contained, self-satisfied types will not make good essayists,” Philip Lopate wrote in The Art of the Personal Essay, and I believe Lopate’s comment is directly in line with Annie’s, as well as the many who (ironically) “liked” what she had to say. So how can we infuse the performance of uncertainty into our nonfiction narratives yet still keep it digestible, sharable and affecting? How can we shape our short nonfiction with the kind insight that accommodates the similar, thrilling complexities found in the best fiction and poetry (and theater and painting and so on)? To move towards something more ethereal and probing, beyond so brave? Beyond this?

One of my favorite travelogues of the last few years, Deb Olin Unferth’s Revolution: The Year I Fell In Love and Went to Join the War, is a work of incertitude at its most confident. Haunted for years about her own motivations, as a college freshman, to follow her older, religious boyfriend to South America in order to ingrain, horribly, to the fizzling Sandinista movement—Unferth sets out on a spiritual detective mission to locate the whereabouts of her own shed self. Her tales are frightening, hilarious and wrenching, interspersed with passages from the present-day, truth-seeking Unferth, retracing her old steps as if attempting to re-enact a fugue. The insight-heavy passages don’t come often, but when they do, what you get isn’t a writer making sense of a strange, formative, and traumatic experience, but rather a writer depicting the nagging futility of that reflex. “Why would this trip mean so much,” she writes about 130 pages in, after detailing a multi-day stint of debilitating sickness, “that I’d have to keep going back to find it?”

Unferth raises the stakes—and the messiness—of her search just a few passages later. At this point in Revolution young Unferth’s trip, goals, and relationship have failed brilliantly. Unferth finds herself abandoned in a Costa Rican motel room, weak to the point of delirium, “awake or asleep or dead or dying,” her life, she’s sure, in dire jeopardy. It’s the type of bleak, high-octane writing that’s often seen in today’s online unburdenings, that knifeblade-to-the-throat pitch, one that might be used, by a different writer, to yield a thud of heartbreaking reflection, a sermon almost about what it all means, then a dropping of the mic. But rather than rely on the mere fact of her predicament to deliver the drama, what does Unferth do with that opportunity instead? She wants to talk about balls.

I was on the phone with my grandmother. She’d always been nice to me—my grandfather too—quiet and calm, giving me a bowl of sliced fruit. “You’re not cut out for this,” she said on the phone. “Let me bring you home,” as if I were a ball thrown straight up into the sky. The ball goes up, slows, and for a second it comes to a standstill in the air, torn between acceleration and gravity. There’s always the chance that it will keep going up, that the Earth will release its hold at last. Maybe that’s why we throw balls?

All I thought in that pause was, Huh? I could go home?

There are more writers who do this—who expand the reach (and transfer the power) of their personal stories by being forthright with the nebulous struggle of that story’s burden on them, less so with the exactitude of the story’s meaning. I’m thinking here of the double-backing and pained self-inquisitions of Donald Antrim’s staggered, boundless memoir The Afterlife (see: “I Bought A Bed”), or the detective-like force of Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians, which seems beyond any book I’ve read recently the most interested in posing only the perfectly-built, unanswerable question.

But we’re talking about the Internet here. I know. We’re talking scrolling and scanning and bite-sized-ness, quick hits and swift impact, not the years-long, book length perspective afforded to Unferth and Antrim and Manguso. One to twelve-hundred words—that’s likely the editor-sanctioned range one gets for one of these pieces, which is, in digestible terms, the difference between The Sopranos full series run and an episode of Jackass. Is there room for true pathos and well-built, reflective uncertainty in that frame?

But then there’s Cutter Wood, who in 2010 published the 1300-word essay “Golden Ages” in the “Readings” section of Harper’s. Like the web’s unburdenings, the piece is compact, guttural, topic-driven, yet brazen in its uncertainty, reveling in it even. Here’s just the beginning:

History does not tell us when human beings first began to keep their own urine, but we may suppose that in our younger, more nomadic years, the saving of urine, still not yet formalized, took place on a case-by-case basis. Only with the Neolithic Revolution and the ensuing shift to somewhat stationary lifestyles would the reservation of urine even have been given the opportunity to blossom into a concerted, culturally significant activity. Yet it seems that little urine was kept.

Wood goes on like this, taking his reader through the guts of history on a knowing, entrancing wave of maybe and perhaps: how the early communes of the Romanian Cucuteni “may have saved their urine,” on through to urine-saving or non-urine-saving eras of the Scythians and the Huns, to ancient Mesopotamia and how all of these people “were aware of urine” yet left no clues as to how it was first stored. The whole piece is at once a parody of academe presentation-speak, a tour of the shifting roles of our own body fluids throughout governed humanity (at one point Wood contends that the Roman Empire’s “urine conservationists” were “perhaps unrivaled in the history of the world”), and finally a speculative, moving rumination on our collective, bitter history of death-fear. But even in at its most contemplative moments, Wood rarely takes the piece toward anything reflectively definite. “And even though it was relatively customary for commoners as well as royalty to be entombed with a toilet during the Han Dynasty,” Wood writes, “this seems to indicate not a desire to save urine but a presentiment that even into the afterlife it would pursue our hapless souls.” Urine, in the essay, slyly stands in for a greater elusiveness, and it’s in the work of conjuring that grand elusiveness that Wood is able—again, in just 1300 words—to reach a fevered closure of wild, productive messiness, yet still remain allegiant to a familiar, digestible style.

But there’s no need to trace back our cultural history of urine to examine the unleashable power of uncertainty in nonfiction, the ways in which it can take a great, transformative hold on us, even when we get it in short, digital chunks. We only have to look to earlier this year, to the confounding disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 and the ensuing loop of turgid media speculation that followed in the weeks (and weeks and weeks) after; the theories that event gave birth to, the subtle desperation contained in the pockets of those theories, and what those theories taught us about us. Or, as Pico Iyer put it in the Times, “We imagine how those with loved ones on the plane must be trying to fill the absence, of knowledge as well as of their sons or wives, and how they may fear, even if at times they long for, certainty…we translate the story into our own lives, and think about how the things we don’t know haunt and possess us as the things we do seldom can.”

“I believe our best work on earth is in service of likeness. I don’t know what to call it – moments of interpenetration? To feel the exchange across borders.”  Lia Purpura “Advice”

I am not walking to arrive. I am walking with my class in the midst of debt-ravaged Athens. But I am also part of a louder and larger gathering of voices over the walls, scrawled or carefully stenciled: This is some of the language – “Hello/Hell”; “ΘΕΛΟ, ΘΕΛΕΙΣ?” (Ι WANT, YOU WANT?) the English is somehow less elegant.

Language locates us. Maybe this is why Athens is covered in tags, graffiti, continued and continuing conversations over what figuratively and literally are walling in voices that still, fabulously, speak over and across the concrete of so much hell. Hello then. “Hi,” as I say over Skype — another location in time and space. There is something beautifully subversive about this dis-locating capacity of language that re-orients the subject in its mutable subject state. I wonder, for example, how much of a subject anyone (as any one?) can be once taken over, “whelmed” (to use a friend’s phrase) by circumstance. Trauma will do that instantaneously. I think of Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” the incantatory haunting in the poem’s repetitions:

“Black milk of morning we drink you at night/ we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime/ we drink and drink/ there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta/ your ashen hair Shulamite he cultivates snakes –// “ The repeated, “your golden hair Margareta/ your ashen hair Shulamite -//”[1] which close the poem speak for the haunting as location, the wound also a point of entrance. Purpura’s word, “interpenetration,” an always elsewhere placing. The voices and stencils over the walls of Athens mark already marked intrusions. Any wounding, a violation on an assumption: one keeps walking to find the road again, an intersection where language will orient, give direction: “ΘΕΛΟ, ΘΕΛΕΙΣ?” (Ι WANT, YOU WANT?).

As in Celan, grief’s markings make a sensory haunting of time and space. I traveled to Germany at the beginning of the year where I lived for 3 months, teaching. The landscape was beautiful, the people hospitable, but I carried Athens with me. I find out, too, from Andrew E. Colarusso, poet and editor, that Celan had visited Heidegger in that town. Andrew sends me a section from his essay[2], “Having Walked Beside the Devil: An introduction to Parapoiesis”:

“III.
The eros of this space is sublime, so wide as to let in ideas and concepts the size of nations and universes of possibility. Like Paul Celan walking beside Heidegger in relative silence at Todtnauberg, hungry for some affirmation beyond the soft music of the Arnica, Eyebright, the Orchis he was certain to point out for the philosopher. Certainly they spoke on their walk, but it is unclear whether the scion of German poetry, a holocaust survivor, and the bearer of the German intellectual tradition, a passive participant in the horrors of the Third Reich, ever broached the subject of what settled in the historical space between them.

Was Celan’s life ultimately worth the silence he lived with? Had Celan and Heidegger spoken earnestly of the abyss between them, the same dense matter that drew them together, what would one or the other or both have had to sacrifice in order to propel a healing discourse?”

So what might have been the course of their walk if, in Andrew’s imagining, Celan had spoken of that “dense matter” between them: “The eros of this space is sublime, so wide as to let in ideas and concepts the size of nations and universes of possibility.” The intrusions of the walk, also a possibility for healing, the inter-course of a private desire led to unexpected destination? I don’t know what I was expecting in Germany, perhaps a kind of healing from debt-ravaged Athens. I understand the irony.

There was the regular toll of church bells very near where I lived. I bought mushrooms every day from the open market. My consciousness of place, permeated with a January melancholy for as long as January lasted. Unlike travelers of old who stamped their discoveries of place with the language they arrived with (“In the language and attitude of the conquer, Columbus promptly renamed the island he found in the Bahamas San Salvador, claiming it for the king and queen of Spain.”[3]), my arrival dis-placed ways to speak of orientation. The language was foreign, my English inconsequential. I used it to ask for a pretzel with butter in my early mornings until I could make the request in stilted German; the bonds then, when they occurred, occurred in the inter-course or interpenetration of small or larger empathies. Someone suggested I move into a collective when I spoke of financial difficulties. In the collective I learned new recipes and shared Greek ones; we nurtured each other with our different foods as much as with our stories. Lentils, such common fare in Athens, the soup of the poor really, was appreciated as if it were a gourmet offering by my fellow flat mates.

This from Susan Sontag’s “Project for a Trip to China”:

“II

Will this trip appease a longing?

        Q. [stalling for time] The longing to go to China, you mean?

        A. Any longing.

Archaeology of longings.

But it’s my whole life!”[4]

“Will this trip appease a longing?” I came with vague, indiscriminate desires. For one I was happy to be teaching a small, inspired group of students in the masters program. I also became involved in another cartography of longing; the intersection of a place and time, a personal and literary geography of emotions. “Timing is everything” apparently. It did not matter that I was in another hemisphere, the inter-course would take an altogether different course from what I might have imagined in less dis-located times. I owe something then to the ravages of upheaval and trauma as Andrew suggests in his meditation; it brings new articulations — “Was Celan’s life ultimately worth the silence he lived with?” Andrew asks. Of course it was not all silence. We have the brilliant hauntings in the poetry: “your golden hair Margareta/ your ashen hair Shulamite -//”

I left Germany wishing to take with me all I had gathered there; the images of green, the black forest’s agates and jades. I tried to pack everything. But I forgot things.  I left a pair of underwear drying over the heater. I forgot my yoga mat in the overhead baggage compartment on my connecting flight to Athens. Sontag says: “Colonialists collect.” They bring back “Trophies” as in the way Columbus wished to impress the king and queen of Spain, by naming his unknown discovery San Salvador, an island of the Bahamas. But not to blame him too much, man of his times that he was, it’s always tempting to map according to what we want to possess, our traumatized selves re-possessed in some foreign Other. The thing is, there’s no guarantee (in any post-colonial context of the deconstructed subject), that you’ll possess anything close to your assumed desire. Columbus though insisted, to the day he died, that he had discovered a part of India: “Absolutely sure that he had reached the Indies, he called the people los Indios,” (8). Sontag has a grid in her essay “Project for a Trip to China” in which she illustrates “the following Chinese equivalences:” She has five columns titled: EAST, SOUTH, CENTER, WEST, NORTH. The adjectives associated with CENTER are “earth, yellow, end of summer/beginning of autumn/ sympathy” (272). “I would like to be in the center” she says, “The center is earth, yellow…” It includes “Sympathy.”

Sympathy will de-center those ways Columbus constructed his orientation to the world; the self in sympathy is conduit rather than center, a space of interpenetrations. The Greek word for “sympathy” — Συμπάθεια, to sympathize as in to feel for — but Συμπόνια, which is more to the point, is to feel the other’s pain. It is not “The colonialism of soul” in Sontag’s words, but “a border…[where] the soul’s orchestra breaks into a loud fugue. The traveler falters, trembles. Stutters.” (285). It is a strange essay into an “Archeology of longings” — arrival is meant to be a loss of those belongings we started out with, relocation a new intrusion of language: “ΘΕΛΟ, ΘΕΛΕΙΣ?”

[1] Celan, Paul. “Death Fugue” Poets.org. 2000. Accessed May 03, 2014. doi:http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/fugue-death.

[2] http://www.broomestreetreview.blogspot.gr/2014/02/an-abridged-introduction-to-parapoiesis.html

[3] The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Third ed. Vol. 1. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 8. Print.

[4] Sontag, Susan. “Project for a Trip to China” In A Susan Sontag Reader, 268. New York: Penguin, 1983.

Bio: Adrianne Kalfopoulou lives and teaches in Athens Greece. She is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently Passion Maps. RUIN, Essays in Exilic Living, a collection of linked essays, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press September 2014. She is Associate Professor in the Language and Literature Program at Hellenic American University and on the adjunct faculty of the creative writing program at New York University.