A Hundred Monkeys at A Hundred Typewriters

In the past few days I've been trying to write out a piece of something I've been meaning to work on for years now. I'm reading Sunday at a nonfiction storytelling series, Telegraph Stories, and I wanted to bring something new. Figured a deadline might make me finish a small piece of it. Test some things out.
Instead I've been staring at the screen, letting memories take me as far they wish to go until they're done with me. It's taking me back to my undergrad days when I made some shady trips into memoir territory. I had a professor who was convinced I should write the definitive Portuguese-American memoir. Irish was hot then. Cuban and Puerto Rican was on its way in. I could be the next Esmeralda Santiago or Frank McCourt!
The idea made me sick then and it still does today.
But there were two parts of my mind duking it out in those days and I still haven't been able to get over how I've managed to keep these two forms of writing--that overlap so nicely--so divided when all I've ever seemed to want to do is combine them.

At the time I was obsessed with autobiographical fiction. Jamaica Kincaid, Marguarite Duras and Jean Rhys were a triumverate I'd fashioned out of sparse lines and dreamy surrealism buried under a fog of booze and/or anger. Mine and theirs.
I even dreamed of a seminar I'd teach about postmodernism and postcolonialism that revolved around their work.
Jean Rhys especially killed me. She was, at once, morbid and exuberant. Horrified more by herself (everything she was incapable or cabable of) than the people surrounding her.


In the other direction, Tim Crouse's The Boys on the Bus--a document of his time on the 1972 presidential campaign trail and, essentially, the beginnings of pack journalism--had me convinced that the world would fall at the hands of shitty political coverage. I wasn't entirely wrong. I understood then that it was worthwhile to be a political reporter outside the mainstream media.
But it could come with an uncomfortable set of responsibilities.


But more than anything, Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel made me want to be a first rate storyteller. One so good that he didn't even have to make it up. Writing about New York's unsung eccentrics from the '30s through the '60s, Mitchell's voice lived and breathed inside his stories, but he hardly, if ever, used the "I."


This is all a long, boring way of saying that studying writing for so long was a help in a lot of ways, but sometimes I just feel like a trained monkey who'll never find its own way to communicate.