This in from the lovely and talented Shira Richman, who previously posted about her experience reading on Monday night and her other course with Jake Adam York, Dead Letter Office as a contributor to the bark blog. Soon you'll see Shira's involvement at Lighthouse multiply as she becomes our soon-to-be-famous-and-indespensable volunteer coordinator!
The Making of: A Table of Documentary Writers
by Shira RichmanHave you ever dreamed about writing essays for the New Yorker but didn’t want to do all the research required? Or wanted to do all the research but didn’t want to figure out how to structure it into a cohesive essay? Maybe you want to arrange your research results into a poem or a piece of fiction. Attendees of Jake Adam York’s workshop, The Documentary Writer, learned how to do these things and more.
I don’t want too many people working on documentary writing because I don’t want mass competition as I try to steal York’s ideas. At the same time, I am so inspired by his workshop that it doesn’t feel right to keep it all to myself. So, here’s a little sample from The Documentary Writer.
Being the brilliant Bad Ass that he is, Jake Adam York started by compiling an anthology—book sized—so we could see examples of various techniques available to us as documentary writers. We looked at some selections from David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and York pointed out profound things that I probably missed. What I did cull from this portion of the class, though, is the great fun to be had writing fictional interviews and some techniques that create intimacy and intrigue for readers of your documentary writing:
- Disclose something right away, such as, “It’s cost me every sexual relationship I ever had” (Wallace 17).
- Begin with specific details and leave the important abstract conclusions for later (for after your reader is hooked), such as information about freaking out, calling the doctor, and what kind of American you are (Wallace 17). Then go ahead and tell the cause of all this mayhem, in this case, coprolalia.
We also looked at poems that used historical documents (real ones!) as imaginative points of departure. For instance, David Wojahn got access to Stalin’s library records and wrote a series called “Stalin’s Library” in which each sonnet is based on a book that Stalin checked out. Some of Stalin’s interests Wojahn pursues are hypnosis, syphilis, and resurrection of the dead.
For the last portion of the class we did some writing exercises that we can eventually link into longer works based on a series of imagined documents. This is how the sequence goes:
- Write in response to a photo (describe it, explore the context and potential feelings of those in the photo).
- Write interview questions and responses between someone in the photo and someone else (which could be you).
- Create additional “documents” such as descriptions of audio/video recordings, legal records, letters, newspaper articles, obituaries, you name it. Your creativity is the only limitation here. Which means there are no limitations.
The ultimate goal of documentary writing as I understand it is so postmodern—to trick the reader into being interested in something she may not think she’s interested in by “shortening the distance between her and the subject” (York); this can be done by showing a new tone or POV, by offering documents that show a new viability to the world you are describing, thereby gaining the reader’s agreement and intimacy.
Jake Adam York is a “smarty,” as a fellow classmate described him once he left the room. I’d be happy to listen to him talk for days.
--Shira Richman
