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Difference in the start of my nonfiction

These are the very first draft and my final draft’s starting points.

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Writing the familiar

These are notes from class discussion from the reading ‘teaching artistry thought reflection-in-action’ by Schon, in August

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Writing the familiar.

The ‘truths’ of our narratives can hinder looking at it critically.

We devalue our knowledge of work if we have done it for so long we tend to do it easily and without thinking too hard. If it doesn’t appear to have monetary value, it has no value.

Good vibes and bad vibes are informed without us consciously knowing.

Reflection as a part of action

Enact similar behaviour in different context or situation

 Knowing in action – things you do you don’t need to think about

Reflection in action – correcting  a typical habitual behaviour

Knowledge in action - Consider action as a whole and how you enact it and what informs that behaviour. Value judgements

 Constructionist framework

Consider what we write and what story we tell and how they’re influenced by the world around us. The way we learnt language, internalised hierarchies etc. What we write always reflects a world view. Influenced by our upbringing. Keep revisiting pieces of past work to see how our values are creeping through, or are started to be treated objectively, rather than the construction that they are.

Objectionist framework

Everything is fact

 Psychogeography – playful relationships to urban spaces. Counter narrative to the working space. It reclaims the human aspects of the area.

The situationists

The history of the place and how they interact.

Using something not for its intended use. Eg. Skateboarding on stairs, walking off a designated path at a park.

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Mindfullness task we did in class in August

We did this task in order to pay attention to the world around us, and also our internal world. To be a listener to those worlds.(department of noticing and listening)

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Hear:

Scrapping of paper turning

The rapid typing of a laptop

Something in the roof is tapping, as if someone is up there bouncing their leg as they sit

Distant doors closing

Blowing of an AC or a whirring of a machine that I do not know

See:

Part of my reflection in my laptop screen

The chipped nail polish on my fingers

My slender fingers and their long nails

My boyfriend’s jacket that I’m wearing that is too big for me, the sleeves come up to my palms and it is great.

Feel:

The softness of his Jacket on my palms as I type.

The smoothness of the laptop keys

I feel my eyes are heavy and dry and tired

My ulcer that goes between my teeth

Smell:

A peculiar smell on the rim of my jacket’s sleeves. Not necessarily bad but weird

Taste:

The remnants of a cookie

 Reflective questions: on above task

·         Who else made an appearance in your writing and why

o   My boyfriend made an appearance because I am wearing his jacket. Every time I move my jacket or look at it I think of him.

·         When you write about your body, do you tend to write it in relation to other people

o   In this instance no I do not. My body in that moment belonged to me.

·         Any neg or pos observations. Were you aware that they were neg or pos when you were making them

o   All of my boyfriend’s jacket observations were positive, and some part of me was aware of that because he intrinsically makes me happy to think about.

·         How do those judgments reflect your feelings in that moment

o   That when I was thinking about my boyfriend, I was happy. But thinking about my tired eyes or sore mouth (have an ulcer) had the opposite effect.

·         How does that compare to your feelings now?

o   These feelings reoccur when I think about those specifics stuff. I will always hate that my ulcer hurts and that my eyes are still tired. But I will always enjoy thinking about my boyfriend.

·         How do those judgements reflect the way you relate to the world?

o   That most of the time to hear/see/feel certain nuances of what is around you, of your day, you need to be looking for it. That is true to how I live in the world, although I will be aware of a ton of things, there will be a lot of things that are missed because we are not looking or paying attention to them.

·         How are you directing your feelings?

o   At myself or at my boyfriend. Because of the jacket, I relate my feelings of him towards him even if he is not here right now.

·         Was there something you’re avoiding here?

o   I wrote what came to mind. So no.

·         Was there something else you wanted to write?

o   Once I started to talk about my boyfriend I did want to start to go on a tangent about him. Stemming from his jacket.

·         Do you feel embarrassed by anything on the page?

o   If someone were to read it, maybe a little. But to myself it is not embarrassing.

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Future work

I have recently thought about the possibilities of transforming my nonfiction into a comic. I read a lot of graphic novels so i understand possible layout structures and how to indicate to the audience if something is in the past or not (which would be important since my nonfiction has two narratives--one past and one present. I can imagine how I might use light and dark/shadows to convey meaning, such as linking it with happiness and sadness. I learnt about the use of negative space in art, and that that itself can create meaning just as much as other things that take up space in a picture. I love that comics communicate through picture and words (just like how my dual narratives link and bounce off each other), and it is definitely something I want to try out, even if it isn’t with my nonfiction.

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Email correspondence

Here are just two email correspondence between my editor and I.

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Class notes about the Braided Essay style

Notes I took during class discussion.

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Passive writer ship, where the writer holds the reader’s hand. However the braided essay, the reader has to engage with it, why is it presented like this? Think about it more so that the themes link.

Braided essay can have ethical implications. It can recontextualise story or event, draw attention. “Two sides of the same coin”

How the two ideas interact, like cinema, what comes before a scene, sets up expectations of what the next scene means.

What can this “unrelated thing” change how you read this? What comes after or before it.

Form as a conscious choice. It makes you think of the context of your writing a lot more. It is generative.

Exercise for your brain, think more laterally. That’s what makes it more interesting to read or write.

Highly edited technique. Easy to mistake a well written braided essay as train of thought. It demands intense self-reflection and creative reflection.

Be critical of natural parallels that you find yourself drawing.

Feels more comfortable and honest while it is veiled behind that metaphorical paragraph. Slipping on a mask, or another layer of yourself, that is underneath a guise.

What you say is just as important as what you don’t say.

Revealing what you want to write about, writing two topics can show what you really want to talk about.

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Copy edits

Just an idea of how many little copy edits were done the first time around.

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Question 8

Something that surprised you about the editorial process.

I guess the ease in which I allowed the feedback and face to face communication about the piece. I thought I would have been more nervous and closed off, but I wasn’t really. Maybe it was because I told myself that it needed to be edited and to just go with it; everything the editor is doing is to help. I was also a little surprised about how much of it wasn’t changed too much, and that even the first draft made enough sense to receive positive feedback. One last thing, is that they were quite understanding of things (generally little things) that they thought needed to be changed, but which I didn’t want to change because I thought it changed the meaning. Such as, they wanted to change the word ‘home’ to ‘house’, but to me, home carries the connotation of family, whereas house does not. House sounds less sentimental whereas home carries more emotion. Just little things like that, they were find at keeping as it was because I wanted it so.

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Notes from editor about structure - linked to question 7

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Question 7!

What was your most challenging moment in the editorial process?

The most challenging was fixing the structure. What I wanted in the end was to have each two paragraphs (one about mum, the other about my relationship) to be linked by a theme, or an object, or an experience. So what I first had to do was make sure that each pair of paragraphs had that link to the dictionary definition that came before it. Although I no longer have the version that showed the working for it, I will instead describe it. First, I gave the dictionary definition a colour, e.g, ‘remember’ was red, ‘forget’ was blue, ‘forever’ was yellow and etc. Then I would colour code sentences of the paragraphs that linked to that theme to see if the paragraph was in the right place, or if the content matched the theme enough. I found that I needed to swap paragraphs and dictionary definitions around, and tweak certain paragraphs so that they fit (but I didn’t change the whole paragraph, just enough). A tough one was a paragraph I had to completely remove and rewrite (I posted this near the start of my blog); thinking up something new and suitable was a challenge, but I got there. In my next post I will post some screen shots of editor comments about the structure.

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Question 6

What was the most rewarding moment in the editorial process?

There were many things that I was grateful for and were rewarding in the sense that it made my piece better. The obvious one is hearing that your overall piece is good and is a joy to read. There were 2 very important pieces of feedback. One being the ending. It was far too short so my editor told me it definitely needed to be longer. It used to be:

“With all my heart I don’t want to forget a single moment or remember incorrectly even a small detail of what his smile looks like. I’m thankful that photographs exist. Because of that I remember exactly what mum’s smiling face looks like. I’ll never have to forget her face especially now that I need to remember it.

For me and those who don’t remember. Accept the fact that you won’t. Not all the sweet, good, or important things can be remembered. Sometimes your brain can never live up to the here and now. Sometimes you will have to guess how tight his hug was, or construct what she would have said on your birthday. You will have to lift your hands and try and get your muscle memory to tell you which cheek his dimple is on.

Acceptance. That what you remember will never be enough.

But now I know there are more universes. There can be more homes than just one.”

And so I then sculptured a more fitting ending that intertwined the two narratives better:

“...

For me and those who don’t remember: accept the fact that you won’t. Not all the sweet, good, or important things can be remembered. Sometimes your brain can’t live up to the here and now. Sometimes you will have to guess how tight his hug was, or construct what she would have said on your birthday. You will have to lift your hands and try and get your muscle memory to tell you which cheek his dimple is on when he’s not here.

...

ACCEPTANCE. Noun: the act of taking or receiving something offered. The act of assenting or believing.

 Right now, everyone sits at home. Our memory, however, sits on the sofa, is lying in bed, is walking hand-in-hand towards the station, and at the same time, is opening the door to arrive home. Again and again, things that feel unforgettable in the moment stumble to the back when I leave the place it occurred. I arrive home but my siblings didn’t expect me today. And yet, despite it being surprising for a moment, my presence slips into the normal and everything is remembered. Even how I forgot that ‘dad’s room’ used to be interchangeable with ‘mum’s room’. When I am with him, I travel 40km and he says welcome back; it feels like I never left, despite that half of this feeling stays at his door when I leave. Acceptance. That what is remembered will never be enough. But for now, I am content in believing that there are more universes. That there can be more homes than just one.”

I am thankful that the ending needed to be changed, because I am really happy with the ending as it is now.

The second important piece of feedback was to do with the structure. My first draft in hindsight lacked a neat structure. I wasn’t using my dictionary definition aspect consistently and not in a place that made the most sense, and these were key in figuring out the structure. So I needed to fix this. But I will go into the structure change in the next question.

To summarise, knowing that your work is actually good, and feedback that resulted in really good changes, were the most rewarding aspect. Along with being able to talk to someone face to face!

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Question 5

Which reading had an influence on your practice, and how?

Since I’ve already talked about Blossom, I am going to about Nicole Walker’s piece, and my own piece. Since I think it fits well, this is also an excerpt from my critical essay.

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Walker’s piece, The Braided Essay as Social Justice Action (2017), starts about the place she grew up, Salt Lake City, and how it ‘defines’ (2017, p. 1) the pronoun, I, in which she writes. In other words, her sense of self. By providing history on the City and her childhood, she sets up some context for the reader before introducing three paragraphs of one of her braided essays. The first paragraph talks about her lived reality—her as a child and the strange lump she had on her body. Following this is a paragraph about dry land being overflown with water from underground when the metaphorical lid ‘was no longer tight enough and the cup no longer big enough’ (2017, p. 2). And the third paragraph ties these two together more directly; she introduces the concept that her body holds other life forms like bacteria, yeast, mite, and possibly other humans, just like how the earth harbours millions of species. The human body and planet earth are the same in these paragraphs—‘See how a body repairs itself. See how a planet does’ (2017, p. 2). But even before we get to the third paragraph, the first two starts with the word ‘symptom’ (2017, p. 2). It is this single word that allows the reader to start to make connections (even subconsciously) between the two seemingly different paragraphs.

Continuing on from this point, my own nonfiction piece titled ‘Dear You, My Memory’, does something similar. Walker uses the word symptom to connect the two paragraphs, while I use dictionary definitions prior to every two paragraphs (with a few exceptions at the start and end of the story). Besides using this technique to try and be more experimental, I did it to create that link between the memory of my late mother, and my current relationship. By comparing the two narratives and adding in the themes of memory and home to the content of my piece, my ‘personal story is reshaped’ (2017, p. 2); I think about things I hadn’t before, and therefore learn small, but important things. My piece is also a bit different to Walker’s, in the sense that I do not switch between a reality and a narrative following a very different line, like ‘apples, or condoms, or chickens’ (2017, p. 2) as Walker says. I am not contrasting and comparing two very different ideas. Instead, I parallel two personal realities; two very different people but connecting them to the themes of memory, home, and love. Each couplet of paragraphs follows its own mini theme according to the dictionary definition prior to it.

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Question 4

Was there a reading that helped change your perspective? If so, how? Was it an argument or theory that the piece posed, or the form or structure of the piece that influenced your writing?

One reading that really stuck with me was Leah Jing’s ‘Blossom’. I loved the braided style of it; the way she tells two narratives that are also linked the entire time. It’s has managed to accomplish a light hearted tone while simultaneously tackling an important racial issue. Jing’s first three mini paragraphs set up the entire story by introducing the love interest character, H, and the theme of bodies: ‘over coffee, H says, i hate poems about bodies. they are sitting across from me, one leg neatly draped over the other.’

I hadn’t really read braided essay styles before, so reading this one really helped change my perspective of how the braided essay worked in practise. And although I didn’t take anything directly that influenced my writing nor my nonfiction piece, it was the feeling as a whole that influenced me.

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Some work and notes on Lee Lai’s comic

When writing, it is easy to get side tracked by trying to justify yourself, to defend your writing, to comply with expectations of others.

·         Central theme

o   Asking question about the representation of coloured people in the world of writing.

o   “This comic is an exercise in asking questions”. Pg. 1

o   “The balance between self-representation and commodification. The balance between exposure and tokenization” p. 4

o   Asks why people request drawings of people from diverse backgrounds together.

o   “That in these jobs, minorities were purely representative and interchangeable” p. 6

·         Intertextual reference  - makes reference to theory and other writers

o   To the writing community: “fake it til you make it” p. 1

o   Tania Canas p. 7

o   Devyn Springer p. 9

·         Reflection – what relationships does this piece have to Lee Lai’s body of work? How’d she position herself as a writer and an authority in this piece. Any ways she talks about herself as a writer, and writing about writing.

o   “As a young freelance artist embedded with the standard attitude of ‘fake it til you make it’. This is not something I’m used to doing on the regular.” P. 1

o   Asking questions to “myself and to my community—seems to be at the core of maintaining integrity”. P. 2

o   “the balance between drawing that I want and drawing what they want”. P. 3

o   Talks about her conflicted feelings about doing this kind of work. “As I published more, it felt increasingly like the figures I was drawing were conveniently ticking a box for the institutions that were paying for them.” P. 6

·         Form – creative form, why this? What formal decisions that made this work possible. Why comic? Why predominantly dialogue? Why wouldn’t this work as an essay? Or if it does, what would need to change for it to be an essay?

o   Comic – add subtle hints to back up what the text is saying. “The balance between concealing and revealing” p. 3. The panel shows different parts of the fish: an underbelly, a tail, and half a head. Showing only what they can?

o   Trudging through water, subtle way to show trudging through all these questions. Struggling against the entire issue (the line) between representation and tokenization.

o   Pg. 8 left panel has the sea coloured in, but the right panel does it, it looks rather empty of colour, just outlines, coinciding with the text about not taking responsibility of supporting the people they show (minorities)

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Discussion questions by Rose about ‘truth’

What is the relationship with truth in your writing, and what influences this relationship?

I feel for me, that I can only write certain truths depending on who will read it. If I am writing something just for me, I can be more truthful, but if I know friends or family will read it, I feel less inclined to tell the truth; not so much as to lie, but to omit certain truths. So writing truth can be very hard, harder than we thought.

What makes the work you write and read feel authentic?

I feel that work I read feels more authentic when it talks about truths and honesty that usually you don’t read. That the topics tend to be looked down on, taboo, socially unaccepted, etc (like mental health, although that is slowly changing). So I find that when topics such as those, and if the writing really delves deep into the personal emotions of the character—a vulnerable truth—I find it more authentic. In my own writing, I hate to admit that I am not as authentic as I want to be, or even as I intend to be. I think to be more authentic, the writing needs to look at something from many angles, and I think that my own writing tends to only look at something from one angle, such as, to put simply, from a happy angle, from a sad angle. And that’s what I mainly did for my nonfiction. The two narratives tended to focus on one emotion, without looking at the other side of the coin. But to be less harsh on myself, I did write from the point of view that I felt at the time; what’s wrong about writing just about happiness if that was what you felt at the time?

What is your truth compared to academic truth?

Academic truth for me, is something that can be proved to be true; numbers and averages. Academic seems to be on a large scale, so that individuals are most likely ignored in favour of the larger number. But personal truth—my truth—may not appear as much of a truth since it is much more fallible to memory, opinion, and the influence of time. So maybe the difference is that academic truth is more likely to have evidence to back up, but my truth is less likely. Someone in class said that writing truth is not to write an answer, but to find an answer. So maybe to find truth—the truth that lives in us—we need simply write and keep on going, even if it starts out that what we thought was the truth, is no longer as true.

Can you think you have any strategies to remove the biases and beliefs you bring?

This is a hard question. I think it would be a conscious effort when re-reading your work (as doing it before or during could easily leave you stumped). It would equally be identifying the biases you bring, and also finding a way to fix them. Like they say in therapy, the first step is admitting you have a problem. So I think that is where you need to start. Maybe compare it to things you read that you find authentic; find the differences or at least identify the feeling you get from another piece, and your own. But as of the current moment, I do not have strategies for removing biases, because everyone writes from their own brain, their own personality and past. It would be a very difficult thing to accomplish.

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Handwritten notes for my class presentation.

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My computer notes for my class presentation

Summary of the reading:

·         Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the ghost gum (https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/snugglepot-and-cuddlepie-in-the-ghost-gum-evelyn-araluen/ )has multiple narratives over the 10 pages. Overall, it feels like it is a personal account of the author about her Indigenous culture, land, memory, and Australia’s cruel treatment of the Indigenous through history.

·         The first part, the ghost gum sequence, has the character travelling the land via roads to Sydney. It goes into detail the characters connection and consideration to the land. It very quickly takes a turn into the government’s control of the land, where they ‘close off every path to leave without paying’ (p. 2), and then into the Stolen Generation, where ‘Governor Macquarie gathered up the precious children … to teach them God and Civilisation’ (p. 2).

·         There’s a very succinct passage that demonstrates how the Indigenous and white Australians see the land very differently. ‘Why don’t they build something there, a sunset profile picture asks on the community Facebook where we gather to buy and sell and complain. There’s nothing in that field but a tree’ (p. 2).

·         Afterwards, she touches on memory and childhood, through the characters from the childhood book Snugglepot and cuddlepie. She then considers, ‘they want me to write about them—or maybe they don’t, and they just want to be left where they are’ (p. 2). This line almost speaks to me to say that she wasn’t sure if she should write about this content.

·         The last paragraphs touches on the history of Australia. “The Cumberland Plains of Blacktown and the Hawkesbury are drenched in a history of settler violence and forgetting that goes unspoken when we squabble over heritage”. But despite this, without having to be taught, they know the land. “In the way I know all times are capable of being, Tench’s gaze is still there – but so is ours, staring back”

A nest of auspoes:

·         She appears to be telling a metaphorical story from the point of view of animals. The Auspoes are white Australians who are ‘an invasive species’ that ‘suffocate the native species’ (2019, p. 2). The entire paragraph points to this conclusion, but it is through reading the previous paragraph where the themes were introduced, that allows us to think this way. As Walker states about the braided essay: it ‘lets [her] pop in and out of different realties—not so much manipulating the facts but instead to pace them out, allowing [her] to digest reality in drops’ (2017, p. 3). And I think that’s what the rest of the other piece is doing by separating them into sections. It’s like everything is too much to deal with all at once, so separating them helps.

·         And another link to do with this paragraph, is that she talks about the children’s book snugglpot and cuddelpie. And maybe, for some reason, she is taking the approach as if writing a story for kids.

Playing in the pastorals:

·         This paragraph talks about peoples view of the Australian bush from what seems is a bit more academic approach.

·         “The environmental conditions of the land being incompatible with European modes of agricultural practice, nineteenth-century poets such as Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall necessarily emphasised Gothic-Romantic themes of hostility and hardship in early Australian pastoral poetics, while Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton staged forbidding prose tales of estrangement and annihilation against the backdrop of a land fundamentally opposed to humanity and civilisation”

·         “Hodge and Mishra have explored this double premise as the ‘Aboriginal archipelago’ of simultaneously refusing to acknowledge Aboriginal presence in social space while conjuring up emblematic tropes of Aboriginal spiritual presence in disembodied forms”

·         She also touches on how the eucalyptus was misused in settler text; how settlers wrote about it however they saw fit. These all highlight how settlers had no connection to the land and used and abused it along with the Indigenous people.

·         About children’s literature. “Affrica Taylor extends this notion in her argument that for the white children of this literature, native animals functioned as guides or mentors through their ‘journey towards indigenisation’, naturalising their claim to the land as both entitlement and inheritance”

·         She talks about a native/settler binary towards children is that they are only ever safe at the homestead. And that the books cast out Aboriginal people through negative representation.

To the poets

·         This section is different yet again. It seems more emotional and passionate. Summing up, the narrator talks to the white settlers; about the differences between them and the Indigenous. How they are “puppeting your hands through ancestors, through relations”

·         “But I want to know what it means to lose the world you’re still standing in.”

To the parents

·         Is more of a straight talk about settler views and control of the land. As well as the influence of children’s literature depicting Australian lands.

·         It changes back to the first narrative where it seems like it’s present day narrator. They talk about land and animals and we can feel their connection. They ‘write poetry here, and about here’

·         “I can name the colonial complexes and impulses which structure these texts but it doesn’t change the fact that I was raised on these books too. They tell me they never chose them to hurt us, and I never thought they did. They both grew up surrounded by the bush in country New South Wales towns”. They can’t change the fact that they’re part of the ‘new’ world as well.

·         Shen then talks about her parents and how hard they worked to just afford books to read.

·         Her dad however read to them with “salt grains and disputations”. To say to scrutinise everything, don’t just believe off the bat. He told his own stories, but let them join in too.

·         She then describes that it was too easy to see Indigenous Australians as victims, but this disregards all their hard work and effort.

·         To finish that paragraph, she arrives home, where everything belongs.

The dropbears poetic

This appears to be a narrative that combines all of the settler myths that were mentioned throughout the story.

Why did you choose it?

·         Besides it being one of the last ones to choose from. But because the structure of the piece was different, and after having read it, I just found it very interesting. It’s hard though.

Discuss what practical applications this reading had--what did you gain from reading it that will inform your writing practice going forward? What do you disagree with, and why?

·         I’m looking at this piece in a braided essay lens. By switching between different narratives that detail the same story, it lets you look at it from different angles. The writer uses a few different narratives. Like through the personal, through the influence of children’s literature, in a metaphorical sense, through a parent generation. However by including so many different perspectives, I lose the sense of the specific thing she is talking about. I feel that there are so many elements that I get a little lost. Although I feel I got the bigger picture, I lost the nuances she was telling.

Question: Do you think that the use of subheadings and separate sections added additional meaning? Or perhaps do you think it is too much? They lose the sense of what’s happening? Has anyone does something like this before?

 Discuss the reading in relation to the piece/s of writing you have chosen from the ‘Community of Practice’ folder--why did you choose to discuss these pieces together? Do these pieces demonstrate lessons that the piece of theory has to offer?

https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2019/2/28/blossom-by-leah-jing?rq=leah%20jing

·         I’m looking at Blossom from a braided essay lens, as well. I found Blossom was easier to understand because it just uses two narratives and it’s clear what she is talking about. They both write about personal narratives overarched with a wider concern.

·         jing switches between concern for writers of colour and how their bodies are perceived, then abruptly to a personal love story between her and H. She flips between these two narratives, yet it is still about bodies. Her body and how her lover treats it, and as a wider concern, bodies of coloured people, particularly how people view hers, and how she views it herself. By having two different narratives of the body, adds a deeper meaning when the reader is engaged in the text.

·         Although they both look very different in structure they both have an interweaved narrative that lets us see multiple sides of the writer.

Last question:

·         I’ve been looking at this from a braided essay point of view. Is this a limiting view? Or perhaps not a quite right way to look at it? How did other’s read it?