Archive for narrative

Half-Orphan Girl

Posted in The Blog with tags , , , , , , , on October 21, 2015 by chateaucone

I am not that girl. I am not that half-orphan girl. I am not the girl who lost her father, who has only one parent. A dying father is not part of my narrative. I am not this somehow 48-year-old woman who remembers the passing of the last generation of great aunts and great uncles and grandmothers, wakes and funerals and cemeteries in Brooklyn, being five and six and seven, wearing dresses and tights and black patent leather shoes, sitting quietly while my parents kneeled in front of caskets, praying.

I am not experiencing for myself what my mother and father and aunts and uncles experienced then. I am not one of the grown ups being introduced to that five and six and seven-year-old girl, who wasn’t quite sure who they were, or what to say to them.

I am that five and six and seven-year-old girl, safe and sound in the backseat of her parents’ old Pontiac, father driving east on the Belt Parkway, mother telling her to close her eyes and go to sleep.

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The Next Big (Lifetime Television for Women) Thing

Posted in The Blog with tags , , , , on May 20, 2013 by chateaucone

(Seriously? You did not just take me seriously.)

So my friend, the Great Poet SKG, (who you can read here) tagged me in a post a while back–Holy crap I just checked SKG’s blog and it was March. March!–for the “Next Big Thing” meme that’s been making the rounds of blogs of novelists and poets and short story writers (and now essayists and dissertaters (which word, when written out, is surprising reminiscent of “tater tots”)).

And this is a good thing to do because I need to get back to the dissertation, and at the same time stop calling it that, and start calling it “the book.”

What is your working title of your book (or story)? 

I am Not That Girl: This is Not My Narrative. This was the title of the my dissertation, or part of it, but I like it, and I’m keeping it.

Where did the idea come from for the book? 

From the dissertation.

No really. I’m not sure. It was a confluence of events and thoughts and things read and classes taken. I’d like to say it occurred quite naturally, but the very subject of the damn thing prevents me from saying that anything at all “occurs naturally,” with the possible exception of plant life, which, now that I think about it, doesn’t even occur naturally anymore. It’s all constructed, folks.  Helloooo, Truman!

Where was I? I wrote the essay that begins the dissertation proper–by which I mean, the dissertation without all the crap I was forced to add by the gatekeepers who would have preferred a five-paragraph essay dissertation–fifteen years ago in the class that introduced me to the personal essay. The epiphany class. (Thank you, Doug Hesse.) But it really took me those fifteen years, lots of reading about poststructural theory and narrative inquiry, a few boring Professional Development Days at Suffolk (for some reason those really get my brain moving, unfortunately not in appropriate, “There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’” PD directions), two sabbaticals….and so on.

The impetus for the original essay came from my cousins Adrienne and Dillon, for reasons I won’t go into here. But I thank them for giving me the start of what I think is the best writing I’ve ever done, and for just being their generally awesome selves.

The structure and format and content of the original essay I owe, indirectly, to Lifetime Television for Women (Does LTFW even still exist?), in that I was striving to not write something that would easily fit inside the national, traditional, dominant discourse about adoption, i.e. a LTFW movie script, by which I mean, “Adopted girl goes on quest, finds birth mother, realizes was never before whole.”

Likewise the Hallmark Channel, or anything that might be summarized on a Hallmark card.

I got the idea for the Dear Biographer portion of it while I was driving down Nichols Road one night listening to WNYC. Someone who had written a biography was being interviewed, and I was taking this class about biography and autobiography and I started thinking about what I’d want a biography of me to look like, and then I started talking, probably embarrassingly loud in the car, to my imaginary biographer, and then I wrote it all down. And that became what would be a literature review chapter in a more traditional dissertation–and even though I dreaded writing that part, it is one of my favorite voices in the dissertation, and is now causing me angst in terms of revising.

Similarly, I got the idea for the blog portions and voice from another WNYC interview–this one with Cheryl Strayed, who was talking about her own blog and alter-ego, “Sugar,” just as I was thinking about a way into writing what would be the analysis chapter in a more traditional dissertation. I, too, needed an alter-ego, another voice.

But the idea for the final structure of the thing, if that’s the question, came at the kitchen table of the house I was renting in Greenport last summer, which is, for some reason, a karmically good writing space. Seriously. Rent it.

What genre does your book fall under? 

It’s a poststructural autobiography.

And that will have copies flying off the shelves.

I’m actually thinking it’s not so much an autobiography but that it uses autobiographical writing as a method of inquiry, and poststructural thought as a lens. I think it’s a memoir, sort of. It maybe plays with memoir. Deconstructs memoir? It’s a memoir with some could-have-beens? It definitely messes with memory, and it definitely messes with narrative, and it definitely messes with how people tell stories, consciously and unconsciously, and how how (I’ve repeated “how” on purpose) people tell stories is effected by the language and discourses available to them when and in what context they are telling those stories.

For example: in 1967, my Irish-Catholic-family-values dad had no language or context with which to construct an adoption story that included an unmarried, young birth mother, other than, “She gave you up to give you a better life.”

(Now, though, sometimes, just for fun, I like to ask my mother if it bothers her that she stole some poor, disenfranchised, single Catholic girl’s baby. For everyone’s own good, of course. And legally. With the help of the nuns. What. Eva. (You can chuckle here. Laugh even. Don’t be all alarmed and think I’ve been irreparably emotionally harmed or something. I’m fine.))

What was the question? Oh, yeah. Genre. That’s what I need to figure out. I mean, it could go the scholarly publishing way and….and….and (add something here about how I’d revise it) or it could go the memoir way and…and…and…(add something here about the other way I’d revise it).

Anyone?

In short, I know not which way I want to go. Of course, I daydream that someone at some huge publishing house with an enormous marketing budget will read it and say, “Well, Dr. Cone (the doctor thing NEVER gets old), we’d like to publish your dissertation exactly as it is. Word for word. No revision necessary. Send us the pdf immediately. Annie Leibovitz will contact you about a headshot. And would you like to include Paris in your book tour?”

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 

Robert Redford for my dad. Seriously. Look at this photo.

wedding045

For my mom–I don’t know, but I bought this greeting card from Papyrus (love Papyrus) the other day and the woman on it looks exactly like my mother did when she was young. Maybe we can find her. Check it out.

Greeting card:

papyrus card

Mom:

25 year old029 cropped

Weird, right?

I will leave my cousins free to choose their own celebrity representatives. Below, in the comments section, please. Adge, I don’t know how you’re going to work Brad Pitt into the movie, but I’m sure you’ll find a way.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?  

I can write a damn long sentence. I can be an f’in theoryhead. (I’m actually sad to admit that.) But I will try not to. I will try to write the kind of sentence that does not make one’s eyes glaze over. I will not cut and paste from my dissertation abstract. Well, maybe a little.

This book is about family stories and how they’re never “just what happened.”

Or:

This is not the adoption story you think it is.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 

I’m just going to keep having copies printed at Staples and forcing them on people. Who’s next? Anyone? Can I entice anyone with a pdf?

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? 

I think I had Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost in mind somewhere along the line. I liked the combination of research and memoir and the narrative turns in time. But my project turned out nothing like that. I do still want to write that book. I just need to find some lost relatives.

This is not within my genre, but when I first read the description of this “book,” I freaked out and said, “This guy totally had my idea before I had it!” and checked the publication date to make sure that I had had my own idea on my own. I had. All is well. The book was Building Stories by Chris Ware, which is actually a box of stories in all kinds of cool and different formats.  And then, TC being what it is, my dissertation took a much different format than Building Stories, because Ware’s publisher is obviously much more imaginative than the Office of Doctoral Studies. But now that he did it, anyway, I think mine will have to be a regular old book.

Sort of within my genre, though, is A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and my book (no longer a dissertation, so there!) has some things in common with Eggers’. Publishers Weekly said this about Eggers’ book: “Literary self-consciousness and technical invention mix unexpectedly in this engaging memoir by Eggers, editor of the literary magazine McSweeney’s and the creator of a satiric ‘zine called Might, who subverts the conventions of the memoir by questioning his memory, motivations and interpretations so thoroughly that the form itself becomes comic.”

If you take out, “by Eggers, editor of the literary magazine McSweeney’s and the creator of a satiric ‘zine called Might,” and “comic,” you might have a description of my project. Of course, I question everyone’s memory, motivations and interpretations. No one is left unscathed. But I do it nicely. I’m a nice girl.

You might have to take out “literary” as well. But certainly leave in “self-consciousness.”

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I don’t know if this is inspiration, so much, but I always loved my dad’s stories about himself and his sisters and cousins and friends growing up in Brooklyn during the Depression and the war, and my favorite bedtime story was the one about how my dad met my mom and how they dated and broke up and got back together and got married and adopted me. (At first, I liked it because it took a long time to tell.) My dad is a storyteller. He talks in story. And I think I think in story; perhaps the combination of my adoption, then, and my dad’s story of my adoption, and all of his stories, was sort of a perfect storm of language and context for my particular subjectivity–or, this particular storm constructed my subjectivity. And I’ve always wanted to record all of those stories. And explore why they are so important to me. And Janet Miller, my favorite professor and mentor and advisor, gave me the materials and theories and methods of inquiry to do it. (Thank you, Janet!)

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Everyone loves a good adoption story. And maybe I’ll find my birth mother at the end. Who knows? That’s the end everyone’s looking for, right?

And now I get to tag someone else!

Carol McGorry, you are IT.

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Ten (Non)Principles for Teaching (Poststructural) (Auto)Biography: or, How to Avoid Malefic Generosity in the Classroom

Posted in Small Epiphanies with tags , , , , on December 22, 2012 by chateaucone

Small Epiphanies (Although this One is Rather Large): December 21

There is the infinity in which you keep going and going and going, adding on and adding on and adding on, like with numbers. And then there is the infinity between whole numbers. (I had to think about that a bit, but it’s there, and it’s rather intriguing, although alas not our subject today.) And then there is the infinity of the possible between breaking a narrative toward creating agency, and breaking a narrative and causing harm. Where could/should you stand? Here are a few spots, shaky ground though they may be on themselves:

  1.  Be aware of whether by breaking a narrative, you are about to help your students achieve agency, to change a story they tell about their lives for the better, or whether you are about to push a student toward an endeavor that might be ultimately harmful. There’s a thin line. You can determine on which side of that line you are standing by magic, perhaps, or even ESP. Either way, just like a physician, the teacher’s oath should begin with “First do no harm.”
  2. Do not begin by telling your students all about Roland Barthes and how he calls all of their basic values and beliefs “myths.” You WILL spend countless hours backtracking, explaining that you don’t, and Barthes didn’t, necessarily or exactly mean “myth” in the Zeus and Apollo, or even, my personal favorite, Poseidon, kind of way.  (Personally, though, I think the Norse Gods have better names: Odin and Njord and Saga. Much cooler.) You WILL cause a returning, adult student to write a letter to the Vice President for Academic Affairs at your school explaining that you are a Communist who is trying to indoctrinate the young, impressionable 18-year-old children in your writing class. It WILL be the semester that you are up for promotion to Full Professor;  when the VP for Academic Affairs passes this letter along to the Dean of Faculty to handle, this WILL be your very first introduction to said Dean of Faculty, who WILL be brand-new to your college. Beware: your Dean of Faculty MAY NOT handle this as well as mine did.
  3. Be aware that some students may not be emotionally/psychologically/intellectually ready to change the stories they are telling about their lives. They may be ready, only, to recognize these narratives. They may be ready, only, to recognize these narratives at work on other people in other situations. Decide early on what will count, for you, as success in this endeavor.
  4. Use this idea, perhaps, of varying stages of readiness/needing to change the stories we tell about our lives, to scaffold, slowly, gently, your introduction to this idea at all, should you choose to take this path. Be prepared for resistance, which may come in the form of name-calling (see #2 above), or in the form of an“I have nothing to write about” (see blog post, “My 18-Year-Old Self Writes Autobiography”) teacher-student conference, or any form that might exist in the infinite spaces between and around these two examples.
  5. Remember that you are the English teacher, and as such neither the parole officer, nor mother, not therapist of these students, and that as much as you might think they need to change the stories they are telling about their lives, from the ways they define themselves as developmental writers, or are defined, institutionally, as developmental students, all the way to their discourses about higher education as a means to make more money, from their Disney Princess narratives to their very real domestic abuse stories–you don’t get to choose who changes and what they change into, and if you think you do, you are right back there with Quintilian awarding grades of A to the “good man writing well.”
  6. Try not to engage in acts malefic generosity here. (Actually, this is true for any classroom activity, assignment sequence, or philosophy.) Who said “There are none so holy as the recently converted?” Just because you recently engaged in a project in which you changed, or broke, some of the narratives that were writing your life, in ways that sometimes opened up new ways of seeing for you, in ways that gave voice where voices were previously silenced, and you’re feeling pretty cool,  take as a lesson that you, ultimately, DID NOT break the metanarrative of Your Own Adoption Story, no matter how flawed, fragmented, gap-toothed, holey, contingent upon the discourses of its time, place, community, ideologically reifying (need I go on?) you realized it is. You are not in the business of creating mini-me’s.
  7. Do not create, of the words, “Breaking the Narrative,” a brand-new metanarrative for teaching/learning/living that simply replaces all the metanarratives and local narratives you are working to help students think about critically. Because then you’ll just have to break THAT narrative. Again.
  8. Walk carefully the tightrope (I know, another thin line) between teaching students to recognize and analyze and critique the ideologies, the narratives, that are writing their lives, that are inscribing their subjectivities, and teaching students the language of power, by which I mean  Lisa  Delpit, “Secret Basketball,” et al. “There are codes or rules for participating in power,” Delpit tells us in “The Silenced Dialogue;” “The rules of the culture of power are a reflection of the rules of the culture of those who have power.” It occurs to me, as I struggle to make my dissertation conform within the narrow confines of the Teachers College Columbia University Office of Doctoral Studies General Instructions for Preparing Doctor of Education Dissertations: A Manual of Style, that I can break all the narratives I want, disrupt all the genres I want, play havoc with the dissertation structure itself, all to show the arbitrariness, the  constructedness, the ideological-ness, the myth of what counts as appropriately created and presented knowledge–
  9. But I still have to graduate.
  10. Damn the gatekeepers.

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DNA vs. The Discursive Production of Identity; or, Holy Crap, Can That Be Right?

Posted in Small Epiphanies with tags , , , , , , , , , on December 16, 2012 by chateaucone

Small Epiphanies: December 15

(Although this is a rather large epiphany, as epiphanies go, and not so much an epiphany as a discovery.)

Since I was small, my parents have told me, having been told, themselves, by the adoption agency, that I am of Italian, German and Indian ethnicity. And while I guess we were never quite sure about the Indian part, we were sure enough that there was at least one Native American headdress in my childhood, which I brought to kindergarten show and tell.

Later, the adoption agency told me that my birth mother was Italian; her parents had emigrated from Italy to Canada to the US; I found her last name in the New York City birth records and it seemed to confirm her ethnicity. The alleged birth father, as the adoption agency called him, was Indian-German. Last year, I wrote to Angel Guardian to ask what they might have meant by “Indian” in 1967–because my parents assumed it was American Indian–but they never wrote back.

Meanwhile, I grew up in an Irish-Italian family, that primarily identified itself as Italian American, at least in terms of food.

Today, I got the results of an DNA ethnicity test I took recently. Turns out, my ethnicity is 83% British Isles, and 17% Middle Eastern.

My first thought was that it was a mistake–that Ancestry.com mixed up my saliva with someone else’s. But the whole thing was barcoded and registered and tagged and secure. I mean, sure, someone could have just mixed up the test tubes. Who knows?

My second thought was that I must have been, not only adopted, but switched in the nursery, because while I could see my birth mother reporting my alleged birth father’s ethnicity wrong, she seems pretty damn Italian. And how would she get that wrong? Unless she just lied. Again, who knows?

My third thought, in order both chronological and degree of outlandishness, was that it suddenly made sense that for the past nine years, ever since I first set foot in Edinburgh in 2003, I have been saying that Scotland is where I was meant to live. I must, therefore, be Scottish. My very blood was calling out to the land, my DNA recognizing itself in everyone around me.

The truth is, I have no idea what to do with this information. And before you say, “What does it matter? You are exactly the same person you were before you got this information, back when you were Italian and German and Native American,” I get that.

And that’s not what I’m talking about.

Nor am I having some sort of identity crisis.

But I am, I guess, sort of, like, “Hmm. . .”

I’ve just written 375 pages about the discursive production of subjectivity, and how we are written by narratives inscribed and reified by our nationalities, our ethnicities, our local communities, our religious beliefs, and so on and so forth.

What does it mean that I grew up believing I was Italian, in an Italian family? What does it mean that I am in fact English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh, instead? How would that have changed the stories I told about myself as I grew up? How does it change the stories I tell about myself now?

Maybe the Italian part is a bad example; being Italian in an Italian family, your various kinds of traits sort of disappear in the crowd, into naturalness. Being Native American in my family, though, was a difference, a difference that made a difference, that made me special, and interesting.

And now I’m not that anymore.

My dissertation doesn’t look specifically at ethnicity and adoption; perhaps that’s because it seemed like a non-issue. My father cheerfully called us the United Nations; of course, we were a United Nations made up entirely of European nations. How does someone of Middle Eastern descent fit into that family?

I am, though, of Middle Eastern descent much the way I was of Native American descent–in name only, in ways that I would never claim on a census form. Still, how will the discourses of the Middle East, the wide and varied discourses we Americans write and subscribe to about people of Middle Eastern descent, now begin to change my narratives?

Part of my story, the story I tell about who I am and where I come from, has shifted, if only because new historical and ethnic narratives have become relevant; new discourses have become available to me.   And that changes things.

I’m just not sure what.

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Time is a piece of wax falling on a termite who’s choking on a splinter: or, My friend B disrupts the space/time continuum

Posted in Small Epiphanies with tags , , , , , on December 5, 2012 by chateaucone

Small Epiphanies: December 4

This posting every day thing is hard. I have a bunch of unfinished fragments of posts.

This is from my friend B, and I’ll write in response to it tomorrow. Meanwhile, talk amongst yourselves.

The construction of persona is a constant negotiation between biography and autobiography and so all writing/reading involves elements of reflection (autobio) and projection (bio). We write ourselves and read others but are written on and read by others too. We are simultaneously composing and decomposing past-present-future modes as rhetorical constructs through which our own personas adapt, change, accept, and resist. Time is a series of discourses that structure both self perception and perceptions of others. We never really go back or forward but use memory and prediction to write narratives that are self fulfilling, self justifying, self accusing, or self abusing. The past is never past and the future is always beyond our grasp.

Holy crap. Still digesting this. But I love, love, love it.

Question: When I say subjectivity is discursive, am I saying it is a rhetorical construct? I think I am. Is it sometimes not a rhetorical construct?

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Memory and Other Fluids

Posted in The Blog with tags , , , , on September 16, 2012 by chateaucone

Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

–Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

It doesn’t matter who my father was. It matters who I remember he was.

–Ann Sexton

We narrate; therefore we are. And yet, we are all unreliable narrators.

The memories and stories in “Bedtime Stories,” and in all narrative, in all of this project, from all narrators, primary and secondary, are always and already interpretations of experiences. There is no pure memory, just as there is no pure self.

I am an unreliable narrator, as an essayist, as a theorist, as a graduate student, as an English professor, as a adoptee, as a daughter, as a hundred other subjectivities, relying on my always and already interpreted, perspective-laden, interested, partial, through-a-specific-lens, rhetorical, always-in-the-process-of-formation, pregnant with, infused with, negotiated with ideological and ethnic and religious and community and national values and beliefs, performed . . . memory.

Angel Guardian is an unreliable narrator. I am interpreting Helen Negri’s letter which is interpreting a file which is an interpretation of an interview which is an interpretation of a performance of a birth mother, a role that was interpreted by both my birth mother and by everyone watching that performance, each according to her own perspective, her own values and beliefs and discourses, the ideologies in which she was raised, in which her lives were transcripted and interpellated.

The voices in my mother’s adoption story: unreliable narrators; there is no center there, nothing to hold on to.

My father, in all his good will, the will-to-family, is an unreliable narrator.

My cousins: unreliable narrators.

There is no center at all. Memory, story, identity, subjectivity: molten, fluid, protean, kaleidoscopic.

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We Narrate: Therefore We Are

Posted in The Blog with tags , , , on September 14, 2012 by chateaucone

As I said in my last post:

A million other Lizs exist, subjects I have hidden from you, the reader, consciously or unconsciously, for reasons of genre, of appropriateness, of repression—

Of Just. Not. Knowing.

All these voices. And each can be called into question. None is reliable.

And they circle around the adoption story, changing constantly as they consider, reject, reconsider, consider from another perspective. But do they ever break the narrative? Do they stop short? Is there a Liz able to take it any further? And which Liz is that Liz?

I can do this, play with these narratives and narrators, but there’s a part of me that all the play can’t touch. I have set out to write something that illustrates the ways in which the center does not hold, but I can’t, because the center will always hold inside me. I can do this as an academic, but inside me there’s always a little voice saying, “But really, it’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” The stranglehold of the metanarrative wins.

Has this Liz chosen to stand in this one spot in the adoption narrative, and just not move from it? I am looking for a place to stand in Angel Guardian, on E. 2nd St., a center for the adoption story, something to  hold on to. There is nothing there. But “Hymns to the Lares” Liz resolves that too—makes it okay.

And what if I did break the narrative of the adoption story, of my identity as, at once, a Cone and a Chosen Baby? What does that do to who I am?

It unwrites me.

No. It revises me.

But first, yes, it unwrites me. And that’s scary.

The physical fact, as well as the narrative fact, of our family is working to keep the narrative alive. We are. We narrate, therefore we are.

And we narrate everything.

I sit on Jaci’s deck on a summer night and listen to five of my first cousins tell stories, one sliding seamlessly into the next, and I realize that we are a family rich in narrative. We narrate, therefore we are. I wonder how I can be the only writer, because I am certainly not the only storyteller. In fact, I am not an oral storyteller at all.  Joni, Jaci, Dave, Steve and Adrienne narrate. My father narrates. And therefore I am. And therefore I know who I am. And this is how it has always been. My father, and now my cousins.

My Aunty Ann nods toward me in the light of citronella torches and says, “Look at Elizabeth, taking it all in. Watch out–this will all be in print someday.”

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