Authors discuss creative nonfiction with CELTSS

By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez Arts & Features Editor The Center for Excellence in Learning, Teaching, Scholarship, and Service (CELTSS) hosted an event for the Scholarly and Creative Showcase Series: “You Can’t Make These Things Up,” over Zoom Sept. 25. CELTSS Director Maria Alessandra Bollettino introduced the three speakers, Rachel Trousdale, Patricia Horvath, and Kelly Matthews. Each of them are professors in the English Department, she said. “Together they will lead us in an exploration of the role of imagination in telling true stories,” Bollettino said. This skill is important not just for creative writers but many others, such as journalists, scientists, criminal investigators, and more, she said. Trousdale’s poetry has appeared in several magazines and her book of poems “Five Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem” won the Cardinal Poetry Prize, Bollettino said. Her most recent scholarly book is “Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry,” she added. Trousdale said while she is a poet and thus has “poetic license,” she also believes she shouldn’t overdo it. “If you’re talking about real world subjects, if you’re talking about real world information, it can actually undermine your poem if you deviate too far from verifiable truth,” she said. She read three poems, “Optics Lab,” “Carboniferous,” and “Units of Measure.” For “Optics Lab,” she explained what a sestina is. It’s a type of poetic form with six stanzas in which each ends in a preset order of six words. She said “Carboniferous” is about the white rot fungi. Before reading “Units of Measure,” she said it’s about scientific measurements. Bollettino said Horvath is the author of the story collection “But Now Am Found” and the memoir “All the Difference.” She is also the recipient of the Goldenberg Fiction Prize, she added. Horvath said “All the Difference” is about her experience with scoliosis and spinal fusion. It delves into the connection between disability and self identity. “What happens to one sense of self when a physical disability ceases to be visible?” she asked. Before reading a passage from the memoir, she said she chose that section because it admits uncertainty in her own memory. Bollettino said Matthews is the author of the biography “Brian Friel: Beginnings” and is past president of the American Conference for Irish Studies. Matthews said the biography is unconventional because she wrote about the beginning of his career, which isn’t well known. “In Ireland, he’s a very well known writer and I knew I was writing for an Irish audience,” she said. After the readings were finished, the authors asked each other questions. Trousdale asked how they navigate the different perspectives and the uncertainties that come with it in their writing. In Horvath’s work, she gave her mother’s perspective on events, resulting in different versions of the same events, Trousdale added. Matthews’ writing also touches on different accounts despite its biographer voice. Horvath said multiple narrators help increase accuracy of events she can’t entirely remember. It’s not possible to accurately write about an event from decades ago purely on memory, she added. She also had access to her journals, giving her the perspective of her teenage self, she said. Horvath also wanted to question the concept of accuracy by providing alternative narratives in nonfiction, she said. “I think that addressing the fact that memory itself is fallible can be a way of establishing credibility on the part of the narrator,” she said. Matthews said Friel himself was focused on the interaction between memory and truth. For the biography, she kept in mind that she was writing about someone whose family is alive, she said. She had an agreement that the family would read and approve the manuscript before publication, she added. Friel wrote about how people can have conflicting memories of the same event, and his most famous plays are focused on that, Matthews said. Horvath asked Trousdale how facts and research are involved in her work as a poet. “This panel is called ‘You Can’t Make These Things Up’ but you’re a poet! So of course you make these things up,” she said. Trousdale said language has meaning, which can only happen with “some sense of shared reference.” If she said completely made up words, it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone because of this, she added. If she were to make up science for a poem, it would keep scientists who actually understand the subject from engaging with the poem, she said. Without a decent effort to get the scientific facts right, she’ll end up talking about her feelings with an ill-grounded method, Trousdale said. In personal poems, there might be more room but they should still follow real world patterns, she added. Horvath asked Matthews how she works around or with the gaps of information in the narrative, which occur due to lost diaries, uncooperative sources, and such. Matthews said the pages she read earlier were mostly an attempt to fill in a large blank. She started wanting to write about Irish writers on the radio but ended up with a lot of material about Friel before he became well known. She wanted to structure it as a narrative, which meant to her that she had to learn about his childhood, she added. Most information about that isn’t publicly available. Just photographing some letters in the library required proof from the family that she had the right to do this, she said. She used some “narrative moves” such as a decade-long timeskip because she simply didn’t know much about Friel’s childhood, she added. Matthews thought that it was important to keep “child” Friel’s perspective on his father, she said. “One of their recurring themes is father-son relationships,” she said. Being tutored and scolded by his father played into his works, she added. Matthews asked them what facts and experiences did they know when they decided to start writing their works. Horvath said she asked herself how her own experiences as a teenager shape the adult she is now. During the months she spent in a body cast, she has some specific memories but not many covering the larger picture, she said. She remembered what people wore and how they smelled. But she was heavily sedated at the time and it was decades ago, she added. This created gaps which she uses as chances to engage in conjecture. She’s always doing research, even if she isn’t aware of it, she said. Trousdale said she knew what a sestina was when writing “Optics Lab,” and how the poem doesn’t actually fit the sestina formula. Her dad is a physicist and he took her to the optics lab and showed her a hologram, she said. But as a kid, she didn’t understand what he was saying. When writing the poem, she asked her dad about holograms, but she later realized she still didn’t understand it, she added. Then she did online research to see how holograms work. The formal research is usually her last stage, when she tries to get the facts right, she said. Bollettino opened the questions to the audience. An audience member asked what motivates the authors. Matthews said she has to make herself write despite the lack of motivation. She writes for short amounts of time. “If we wait for motivation, we might not even write,” she said. Horvath said she writes when something’s bothering her. For discipline, she sometimes sets a timer for herself to do nothing other than write, or simply nothing at all, she said. Trousdale said she writes out of curiosity. As a scholarly writer, she usually writes from a pattern she’s trying to figure out. She handles complexity better in the “written word” than while driving a car, she said. Because of the nature of poetry, she can sometimes get the draft of a poem down during a free 20 minutes, she added. Matthews said sometimes the answer comes to her just by doing mundane tasks. Another audience member asked how they decide when to finish the story and be understood. Trousdale said she creates texts she would like to read. With research-based poetry, she explains she prefers to write it so that past Trousdale could understand the poem, she said. Matthews said she decided to end the biography much earlier than biographies typically do because she believes the target audience would already know the rest of his famous life. Horvath said having things laid out for you isn’t as satisfying. Endings should be satisfying, surprising, and inevitable.