Dear Jill Christman,
Nestled into the space between mountains and fields in England’s Lake District, a group of undergraduate English students from central Ohio and I sat gingerly upon metal and plastic folding chairs. We scribbled our recollections from the day’s hike around glassy Grasmere before passing our pages around, our notes spread at random to each other.
Our advisor — and this publication’s co-founder — Ira Sukrungruang, spoke first when our cohort was asked to speak on the observations we’d been given.
“This writer has a strong voice,” he said.
The writing was mine. I became worried — worried that I’d put too much of myself onto the page — in my writing of the water lapping against pebbles and waterproof sneakers, of the little boy skipping stones at the lake’s shore. Did I write myself into the bride and groom’s photography session at the lake, where the woman’s gown became stained brown with mud and silt? It appeared I did.
The pieces in your collection If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays have taught me that creative nonfiction necessitates a strong sense of self. Even if the writer is unsure of themself, they still write about this confusion in a way that describes who they believe, or question themselves to be.
I am captivated by your piece “Going Back to Plum Island,” as I have a similar feeling returning to a place in which I forged memories with someone who wound up hurting me. I see your personality clear as day in all of your writings, but especially this piece. It is as if I can hear you speak the following excerpt, like we’re sitting in the Kenyon College Bookstore on a frigid day all over again:
“I felt like I was going to throw up, and I was so mad. I thought I was done with all this. I really did… These intrusive fucking nightmares didn’t fit into the recovery narrative I’d crafted for myself” (6).
I find “voice” to be a term ripe with interpretation. Not only does it feel as though these words are being spoken aloud, but with your writing — your admission of feeling as though you don’t align with the stereotypical narrative of recovery — of moving past and through something quickly — you are vocalizing a thought that many of us who have experienced sexual violence have at the tips of our tongues, but may not be ready to say. You speak for yourself, with your own cadence, but I cannot help but feel that your latter sentences speak for many others.
As a creative nonfiction student, I find myself wondering whether I’ve written everything truthfully — if when I do “write the hard stuff,” as you once said to me, I am remembering correctly. I am taken by the following passage, of your conception of “truth”
“I thought, Actually, veritaserum extracts the truth as the teller understands it. That’s not the same thing. Truth is complicated, and we all know that facts can lie. There is always a level more true: true, truer, truest—and then something beyond that we will never reach. How true is true enough?” (11).
We can write what we know, and we can write about the things we don’t think we know yet, so what we write is true… I wonder if there will be a point in my writing where I feel one hundred percent confident that everything I write happened the way I wrote it. I assume that I will not, but I can feel comfortable with the fact that I am writing from my limited perspective… and this is, in some way, a form of truth.
While I was embarrassed at the time — soaked from the sideways rain in Northern England — to have such a strong personality on the page. I believed I had failed at the task of observing the world around me, but the fact of the matter was that I was the one perceiving the world around me. It has since become clear to me that the personality imbued in my work is not something to shy away from. After all, creative nonfiction is about the I, about the me, and the way we see it.
I wish I could go back in time and stop the beet-red blush from rising to my face from embarrassment, but I can’t. Instead, I can make sure I don’t shy away from the pen. Thank you.
Very sincerely,
Carlin Steere
