Conversation and Empathy
“For Paul, it
started with a fishing trip. For Lenny, it was an addict whose knuckles were
covered in sores. Dawn found pimples clustered around her swimming goggles.
Kendra noticed ingrown hairs. Patricia was attacked by sand flies on a Gulf
Coast beach…” —Leslie Jamison, “The Devil’s Bait”
I’ve assigned
Jamison’s 2013 essay on Morgellons disease for several semesters in an
introductory creative nonfiction workshop at the university where I teach. “The
Devil’s Bait” has much to teach any writer about language, structure, and
voice, but it also quietly highlights the importance of interviewing as a facet
of essaying and writing long-form narrative nonfiction.
As the
introductory paragraph quoted above demonstrates, Jamison’s reportage on the
phenomena of Morgellons disease included not just research of documents
(although that was part of it), but many conversations with people who attended
a Morgellons conference Jamison uses as the spine of the essay’s narrative. What
Jamison pulls off in this essay is much trickier than, say, a straight journalistic
report or purely immersive essay on a Morgellons conference. As she writes
toward the essay’s midpoint, the essay isn’t about whether or not the disease
itself is real but, rather, “about what kinds of reality are considered
prerequisites for compassion” and whether or not it’s “wrong to call it empathy
when you trust the fact of the suffering but not the source.”
The
“characters” or people with whom Jamison introduces her piece are not just
people she interviewed to gather quotes, nor are they people she interviewed in
search of anecdotal stories. Her responses to their stories and what they have
to say are no more important than the information the reader learns about
Morgellons in the essay. Jamison’s collection on empathy requires other people
in the equation—what is empathy without interaction? Although empathy is the
unifying and intellectual subject of Jamison’s work, I would argue it’s also
the unifying element of the interview practice itself. We learn about the world
from our interactions with other people, from trying to listen and understand
their lives.
Internal and External Resistance
I began
teaching after more than 15 years as a journalist and newspaper editor. My
students’ resistance to nonfiction seems rooted in antipathy born from the
five-paragraph essay (understandable) along with aversion to the outside world
(problematic). Delineations between art and fact repeatedly embedded in
taxonomical discussions of the form’s genre and subgenres create false
dichotomies regarding the interrogative internal and external maneuvers of the
form. I say false because they do not resonate with my own experiences.
As a child, I
wanted to be a detective. I blame Harriet
the Spy, and possibly Charlie’s
Angels, but mostly what appears to be a possibly cellular disposition
toward nosiness about other people. To that end, I owned, by the time I was in
grade school, a private eye kit, which included a magnifying glass and
fingerprinting materials; a lie detector, which required assembling and never seemed
to work to my satisfaction (I was nosy but not mechanically inclined); and
business cards, courtesy of my father, which read: Julia R Goldberg, Private
Eye. In grade school, I compiled dossiers on my classmates, stapling their
class pictures to index cards that included information I considered pertinent.
In college, I studied philosophy, pondering along with the Ancient Greeks the
nature of love, friendship and truth.
While I have
written stories for which interviewing was simply as a mechanism of anecdote
and information, I have also come to see it as a key factor in creating both
discourse (see Plato) and narrative.
Other People’s Lives
“Bill Bradley is what college students
nowadays call a superstar, and the thing that distinguishes him from other such
paragons is not so much that he has happened into the Ivy League as that he is
a superstar at all. For one thing, he has overcome the disadvantage of wealth.”
—John McPhee, “A
Sense of Where You Are”
I’m not
generally that interested in basketball, or road kill, or Atlantic City, but I
became interested in all of these topics, and many more, as a result of John
McPhee’s essays. Although “A Sense of Where You Are” (The New Yorker, 1965) only quotes Bradley lightly (and mostly on
the topic of basketball), the profile itself is filled with the narrative arc
of Bradley’s life—a profile of a man McPhee describes as singularly
disciplined—built on the information and stories McPhee garnered from his
subject. Moreover, it is essayistic in its author’s insistence in understanding
not just its subject but its subject’s subject: perseverance. Through his
internal exploration, McPhee pushes basketball off the court of nonfiction into
more metaphoric realms.
A master
journalist and practitioner of creative nonfiction, McPhee noted, in an April
2010 interview with the Paris Review,
that he is “interested in people who are expert at something, because they’re
going to lead me into some field, teach it to me, and then in turn I’m going to
tell others about it.” To a degree, both McPhee and Jamison’s work are a
reminder to reconsider the old adage of “write what you know.” Writing what
other people know means learning what they know and, thus, knowing it
yourself—their stories then become a part of your own storytelling.
Writer Mike Sager
has a theory “of reporting like old fashioned dating, where there’s a set of
decorum and ways of dealing with people and looking at them and paying
attention to them.” Sager says along the years he’s also added “a bit of
ministering. I feel like when you listen to them and listen well and listen
without judgment in the moment, in a way you’re providing sort of ministerial
function.”
Sager’s
approach isn’t based on its being the best way of “getting” a story or quote;
he says it’s also “as close as I can come to finding something that we’re
actually giving back to the people that we take our stories from.” Valuing his
subjects is important, Sager says, “because without our subjects we don’t have
a story, and I’m deeply cognizant of that at all times.”
Sager also
points out that unlike information in document form, people “don’t have the
obligation to tell you what’s inside of them. We have to go the extra mile to
get it, because ultimately that’s what we want to know.”
Conversation as Container
In the
classroom, students interview under false pretenses, as part of a classroom
exercise that may or may not lead to actual writing. Just as a received form
writing provides a constraint on the page, the interview process creates a
container for conversation. I watch them engage, open up, listen to one another.
I tell them to interview one another. I have them interview themselves.
In a classroom
in Mexico City, I watch from across the room as two students begin to cry
toward the end of one such exercise. I walk over and ask them what’s wrong.
They tell me they have just learned, after years of friendship, information
about one another they never knew. I restrain myself from asking them to repeat
what they’ve learned.
Others in the
room tell me they fear appearing, for lack of a better word, dumb. They think
they should already know the answers to their questions. They don’t want to
seem rude or intrusive. I speechify on the power of curiosity. I haul out my favorite stories about annoying the shit
out of Margaret Atwood during an interview and sounding like a complete moron
during a discussion with Noam Chomsky.
Finally, some students
want me to tell them what they should ask one another, what they should ask
themselves. The conversation turns quasi-Socratic.
Ask good questions, I tell them.
What is a good question? They want to know.
Wait, wait, I know this one.
A good question
is any query for which the writer authentically is interested in the answer.
They should be endless.
*
Adapted from Inside Story: Everyone’s Guide to Reportingand Writing Creative Nonfiction by Julia Goldberg, Leaf Storm Press, March
2017.
Julia Goldberg
is a full-time faculty member in the Creative Writing Department at Santa Fe
University of Art and Design. A professional journalist for more than 20 years,
she is also a former daily radio talk-show host, as well as nonfiction editor
for the literary website The Nervous
Breakdown.
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