There is a storm whereon they ride.

Carol-Anne Croker, PhD candidate. 2014

To write about trauma or not during a PhD in

Creative Writing?

And if so, which genre to employ?

Why not memoir?

“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-

it’s to imagine what is possible.”

The academy is not paradise. But

learning is a place where paradise

can be created. The classroom with

all its limitations remains a location

of possibility. In that field of

possibility we have the opportunity

to labour for freedom, to demand of

ourselves and our comrades, an

openness of mind and heart that

allows us to face reality even as we

collectively imagine ways to move

beyond boundaries, to transgress.

This is education as the practice of

freedom. (hooks 1994: 207)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bellhooks.jpg

All Creative Writing PhD students at some stage in their

candidature are expected to do a literature search not only on

methodology or writings of critical analysis ; it is also suggested

they discover where their artefact fits in the existing market.

For me this was perhaps the most annoying area of my research

across my candidature. Genres are remarkably fluid and the use

of terms such as hybrid has come in to common usage. When a

text sits uncomfortably in non-fiction students often grasp for

genre-descriptors such as creative non-fiction.

When a text does not fit comfortably as fiction in the case of a

novel drawing heavily on the authors own lived experience the

choice is often autoethnographical in style or content.

Lee Gutkind

https://www.creativenonfiction.org/what-is-creative-

nonfiction

Memoir is the personal side of creative nonfiction but there’s a public

side as well, often referred to as narrative or literary journalism—or

“big idea” stories. Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire) captures big

ideas, for example, as does Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook his

Wife for a Hat) through creative nonfiction

One distinction between the personal and the

public creative nonfiction is that the memoir is the

writer’s particular story, nobody else’s. The writer

owns it. In contrast, the public side of creative

nonfiction is mostly somebody else’s story;

anybody, potentially, owns it, anybody who wants

to go to the time and trouble to write about it.

These pieces, although narrative, focus on fact,

leading to a bigger and more universal concept.

https://brevity.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/

297453511_b52d090861.jpg

But what of memoir? Is that non-fiction or fiction?

To what extent does the story need to be crafted and gaps

covered over?

Is memory a reliable source for narrative as non-fiction?

Lastly to what extent is the text on the page a ‘true’ rendering of

the authors life? Would others tell a different story about the

same events and times?

Or me I have always strained to burst out of what I considered

the straightjacket of memoir.

The Bell Jar by Sylia Plath

Memoir? OR Fiction?

Perhaps Creative Non-fiction?

Original Cover design for Faber and Faber by Shirley Tucker 1966.

http://cdn.mhpbooks.com/uploads/2013/01/thebelljar.jpeg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/Sylvia_pl

ath.jpg

Throughout my candidature my exegetical readings have tugged

and pulled making me very attune to the shifts and flows of genre

sales in the small Australian market. What was the readership I

sought for my story?

Or in fact is it really mystory?

Is my lived experience best contained within memoir when I am

actually a highly unreliable narrator?

I am an unreliable narrator because I have a mental illness. Bipolar

Mood Disorder. Thus my memories are often clouded by the

excesses and grandiose thoughts accompanying manic mood states,

or shrouded by dark deep shadows of pain from depression.

"To approach knowledge from the side of not knowing

what it is, from the side of one who is learning, not

from that of one who already knows, is mystory.”

˗ Gregory Ulmer,

Teletheory. 2004.

http://www.full-stop.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/gregory-ulmer-2004-1.jpg

According to Ulmer’s

theory, within my

exegetical writing I

must speak from the

position of one doing

the learning.

Many of us have had changes in supervisors, and in my case there

have been three. The worst advice I ever received (at possibly the

worst moment in my candidature, ‘ eighteen month saggy middle

syndrome’) was to not speak out about my mental illness .

Initially that seemed sensible as I am indeed more than my illness but

by not speaking about it rendered me as author a fraud, claiming to

write solely from a fictional story and character construction. Rather

than utilising lived experience and insider knowledge.

On the one –hand it offered me the chance to investigate fictional

genres within the popular literature market and see how they function

within the culture. It freed me up to ‘make up’ things to cover gaps in

my remembered story. But it was never my intention with my

artefact to write a story completely about me.

Who is telling the story?

Whose story is it?

The ‘storm’ within the artefact.

http://www.writerscafe.org/uploa

ds/stories/ab7e813309171862fca3

449f754d7287.jpg

http://www.chinaoilpaintinggallery.com/oilpai

nting/Hippolyte-Camille-Delpy/Mother-and-

Child-in-the-Garden.jpg http://yeoldewitchesbrewmagazine.pre

sspublisher.us/issue/samhain-

2009/article/women-and-the-dark-

moon

Have we witnessed a rise in the number of ‘mis lit’ titles in print

since the accessibility to e-books, print on demand, and self-

publishing?

Could this be especially true for memoirs of personal trauma,

tragedy or illness? The area for my exegetical writing and theme

of my artefact.

Professor Gail Hornstein, Holyoke College, MA has put together

a the Bibliography of First Person Narratives of Madness in

English. 2014 sees the fifth edition. In it there are 581 titles of

First person narratives or memoir genre, (plus 26 titles listed as

anonymous). Another 52 are penned by family or friends and

finally there are 109 anthologies, narrative analysis and criticism.

I also planned on writing from multiple protagonist

viewpoints to allow for a type of commentary of times and

places; sometimes to render a narrator’s experience

verifiable and at other times to challenge the story being

told.

I wished my three protagonists to allow for a

contemporary construction of womanhood and narrative

role of the heroine, as examined by Warner.

It is my intention in the finished novel to develop a

recognition of the impact of social norms in the

depiction of female compliance and the isolation of

perceived social deviance.

Mystory alone could not achieve this within the submitted PhD novel. It

is my intention to look at the role of the heroine in conventional text –

based narratives found on our bookstores.

http://www.britac.ac.uk/fellowship/ele

ctions/index.cfm?member=4553

The tumultuous quest for genre: How to

bridge the gaps?

My PhD artefact is not my novel. It is the beginning of a

novel!

• It occupies a unique position in that it is published but as

yet in market terminology, unpublished.

• It remains even after my years of candidature a work in

progress with final crafting, drafting and yes more editing to

be done.

• It has truly been a time of ‘Walking With Madness’ whilst

living with madness, and examining madness.

• It visits trauma and distress but I will not confine it to the

marketable genre of ‘mis lit”. (The Bookseller, 2007)

Boyd discussion Tornado/Strange Loops

Cathartic diaryAcademic reading notes

Supervision questions

Writing Craft queriesReadings in the genre

Exegetical readings

and questions

Boyd, N., 2009. Margins and Mainstreams: Refereed Conference Papers of the 14th Annual

AAWP Conference. (Accessed Nov14, 2014)

Noske, C., 2014 TEXT Vol 18 (2) . (Accessed Nov14, 2014)

Bacon, E., 2014 TEXT Vol 18 (2) . (Accessed Nov14, 2014)

The very drive to write my story is to tell more than the lives of

three women but to allow the readers insight into precisely what it

is like to be considered ‘outside the norm’ or deviant in some way.

The deviance for all my characters is Affective Disorders. I wanted

to tell this story to contribute to breaking the silence and

misconceptions around mental illness. And of course to fight the

stigma which accompanies it still.

To stay silent about my own mental illness as author was to

perpetuate a ruse on my readers. I want readers to discover how

those with mental illness simply cope in a society which devalues

“us”. It would also reinforce that my voice must remain silent

within the Academy also.Croker (2014) Proceedings from International Conference on Bipolar Disorder and Psychosis, Athens, Greece

Croker (2012) Proceedings from International Conference on Bipolar Disorder, Nice. France

A quick Amazon search before arriving for this Conference list

another 195 titles only some older more established authors

listed on Hornstein’s bibliography of first person narratives.

As a student with Bipolar Affective Disorder it was clear that I

could write a ‘mystory’ of living with BD and find a market

place however... Carlin in TEXT special issue 6 notes (drawing

upon Laplanche in Caruth 2001:5)

The memoir is the chronicle of an obsession. It is an obsession

with what the narrator has missed, what has now and forever

gone, and can only be conjured into fragile and hallucinatory

existence through the production of memory and the work of

fantasy.

In Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction Laurie

Vickroy defines trauma as ‘events so overwhelmingly

intense that they impair normal emotional or cognitive

responses and bring lasting psychological disruption’.

(Vickroy 202:ix)

Trauma fiction for Vickroy is a ‘literary simulacrum of

oral narrative’ that seeks to create a truth effect, a

feeling of lived experience (xii), and to create empathy

amongst readers for the victims (xi)

Gandolpho (2014) TEXT Vol 18 (1)

While the reader might spend several weeks

or even a month reading a novel, the writer

will spend years with the work.

(Gandolpho 2014)

This is the paradox within which I write:

aware of the work’s fictionality, of the

process of making and shaping and

constructing, but at the same time having a

sense that this world and its characters

exist, are real, and my work is to bring them

and their world to the page.

If venturing into the dark side of our characters is part of the

writing process – how do we deal with the consequences in

our lives?

Gandolpho cites MacRobert’s Exploring an acting method

to contain the potential madness is the creative writing

process: Mental Health and writing with emotion (2012).

Drawing upon my own years of experience training,

performing and teaching in stagecraft and performance this

is not as simple as adopting a training ‘method’ used in the

Performing Arts disciplines.

Stella Adler

System or Method?

“Adler decided to de-empathize the importance Strasberg had

placed on Affective Memory; defined as the conscious attempt

on the part of the actor to remember the circumstances

surrounding an emotion-filled event from his real past in

order to simulate an emotion which he could use on stage.”

Meisner 1987:9

I propose that it is not a simple thing for a writer untrained in

performance to simply identify any particular system, method or

acting practice which can be interchangeable with the ‘debriefing’

procedures in place in many social science jobs and studied in their

respective disciplines.

It is my contention that there exist structural devices within a

completed written text which ensures the character emotionally

journeys a complete cycle from critical instigating narrative

incident, through complete crisis, then the falling action to the

eventual narrative and emotional resolution.

From my auto-ethnographical perspective, it is the incompleteness

of the creative writing trajectory where ‘dis-stress’ is to be

found.

Turbulance, Luminosity and Illumination?

http://youtu.be/PMerSm2ToFY