This was an interesting project for me for five reasons. First, it was my second attempt at a creative project — I apologize that you have to be subjected to a writer’s early work. Having lived in the realm of academic and journalistic non-fiction through my entire writing career it was nice to venture into “creative” writing land.
Secondly, for me this project brought two separate classes, two separate areas of study, together into one thought and that thought became my short story “Comings and Goings.” When asked to think about race and autobiography, as we had all semester in ENGL 233: African-American Literature, and apply those ideas to ourselves I immediately thought of a single moment that crystallized, for me, my understanding of my racial and cultural heritage. When asked to think about partition and postcolonialism in ENGL 351: Postcolonial Studies the same series of events came to my mind and I found that the two were inseparable. I could not write a racial autobiography without also thinking about the violence of partition, borderlands and people as borderlands, and most especially hybridity. Thus, the first half of “Comings and Goings” (whose title I appropriated from Salman Rushdie’s novel Shadow Lines because, completely by coincidence, all the experiences I shared had to do with coming from or going to some place) echoes most heavily the themes of postcolonialism I mentioned above and the second half examines my feelings about race and culture.
In addition to being only my second creative work, as well as a mesh of ideas across disciplines, “Comings and Goings” was also a difficult, (even painful), self-examination that coalesced into a public presentation of the private self. It thus, felt fitting to approach the project from an Edward Said-type perspective, with a scholarly and removed approach. Since this work was an academically constructed self-reflection it seemed fitting to acknowledge this fact by allowing my adult voice to dominate my 8-year-old self who experienced this story. However, this had not been my original intention. I had wanted a more Reading in the Dark type narrator, but when I started committing words to the page the more removed, older, scholarly voice came out and it seemed right. And though this story is autobiographical, this reflection was carefully constructed. Just as Said deliberately chose the specific experiences that make up “Out of Place” I carefully selected the moments of my life that I would share.
The public component of this work was also a new and interesting experience for me, which might seem strange for a journalist who sees her name in local papers several times a week. As a journalist my audience remains nameless and faceless. They are simply the 80,000 or so people who read at an 11th grade level or above and still get some of their news from that old-fashioned thing called a newspaper. But posting “Comings and Goings” up on the ENGL 351 class blog felt somehow different. For starters, this was not some game story on some team I enjoyed watching but had little connection to. This was a story about me and people who I knew and respected were going to read it. I also had to share my story with both of my English classes as part of the prewriting and postwriting process, which was even more frightening than posting it on the blog because I had to look my colleagues in the eyes as I shared it. However, I am glad I dared to take that Jacobs- and Douglass- and Wright- and Said-like step because I think it will embolden me and encourage me to dare more in the future.
Completing this project also revealed something to me about the creative writing process — it is not like journalism or academic writing. You cannot force it as you might an essay or newspaper article and just follow a well-known formula for success. The creative writing process does not heed the urgent call of deadlines. Now I understand why James Joyce was happy when he wrote three sentences in a day. As my work on “Comings and Goings” came to a close I had an epiphany. I realized that I tend to take a J.R.R. Tolkien/Mark Twain approach to terminating a project. I never want to stop working on a piece. I want to hold on to it forever and continue to come back to it over and over again until its perfect. I have had editors delete stories from my workspace so that I couldn’t keep revising them. However, once I have released a story out into cyberspace I have released it forever. Like Twain, I do not believe in revision. Twain rarely looked at his stories in print and never took advantage of reprintings to tweak or touch up a finished product. I too almost never look at my newspaper articles in print, for which editors and colleagues alike have often chided me. As far as I am concerned, it is what it is and there’s no sense dwelling on it.
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