Literature Without Labels
Background Image of the Orion nebula, located in the constellation Orion by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Background image of red leaf trees by the road via Pixabay.
Image of Moon Phase for Dec. 1, 2023, by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
As we enter the season of contradiction—decked halls and joyful noise limned by dirty ice and a vicious wind—I’m thinking a lot about memory. It’s my current nonfiction project that’s making me go there; the memoir elements of the book demand an awful lot of digging around in my past. Sometimes I have to prove to myself something really did happen the way I think it did. Sometimes I can’t prove it.
I chatted with a few fellow writers this week about the challenge of writing into and through holes in memory. Very soon we were sighing over the contradiction of memoir, that compulsion to tell the truth of a personal story while being wholly unable ever to tell it full, tell it complete. Then we talked about how uncertain memory might prevent us from being fair to our characters, and by characters we mean our mothers and fathers and first loves and broken friends. It is vital that we are fair to those who betrayed us, we said, and we meant it, all the while never doubting the betrayal.
Does all good writing—good art—rest in contradiction? In our best efforts to resolve it?
I miss my short fiction, I told my friends. I miss being the kingmaker, worldbuilder, puppet-master. I don’t like knowing I might be wrong. In fiction there is no wrong. There is poor, of course. There is boring. But despite what the editor might tell you, there is no moral right and wrong in the story you conceived (and if she tells you there is, get another editor). Fiction just works or it doesn’t. I took for granted that single, simple measuring stick.
For now I try to make friends with contradiction. I say when I don’t remember. I try to balance the betrayal with the revelation. It’s December and midwinter is coming. Seems like exactly the right time to summon that still, small voice. The one that tells the truth.
Whatever kind of truth you’re telling in whatever form, stay with it. We’re not getting any younger, writer friends. Every minute counts.
—Claire Guyton
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. —Joan Didion
Issue 31 comes in the month of winter solstice—the shortest day of the year, followed by deepest night. Even as the holiday season takes over, midwinter insists on its quiet still moment; a moment to look into the abyss. Look with Jason Ranek and his “Triptych for the Dead,” but not without a hold on at least one thought for the sublime: the memory, perhaps, of “a wild currant, its little nova on my tongue.” The narrator of Abigail George’s “Not Goodbye,” a lover on borrowed time, doesn’t want to acknowledge the loss and grief that’s coming. Don’t look, then. Just keep to the sublime—“Touch the story on her lips.” Or try looking past the abyss. Look at the moon. “When moon passes overhead, there is a tide that heaves stones up,” says Talley Kayser in “Moonsight,” a woman who sits in borrowed light, watching for shadowplay.
—Claire, Suzanne, Cheryl
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