Lit Matters: Why We Need Experimental Literature

by Emily Sinclair

Q:

A: As a (chubby, allergic, mouth-breathing) child, I found refuge in books like The Secret Garden and Mandy, stories of girls who, after escaping from homes peopled with indifferent adults, made their own homes and then were eventually adopted by kindly gamekeepers and cooks. When, at 19, I moved to New York for college, I did just that: made myself a home. I got an apartment, a cat, a cookbook, and a vase that I filled weekly with tulips.

A year into college, some line between what I was studying and the world outside the classroom windows began to dissolve. After my American history professors taught us about the progressive era, I’d go downtown and see the actual tenements where immigrants had lived in their first years in the United States. Reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, I imagined ghosted versions of that man disappearing around corners in my Harlem neighborhood, just beyond my line of sight.

No wonder then, as a student of literature and American history, that I fell in love with what I still think of as “the big social novel”: Sister Carrie, Age of Innocence, Vanity Fair, Bleak House, and so on. After my childhood (whitebread, compartmentalized) in Dallas, Texas, nothing was more exciting than the collision of worlds depicted in these novels.  These books—and New York—challenged my beliefs and prejudices, and through them, I began to think in earnest about power, inequity, and fairness. Also, these books were entertaining. I loved their chatty realism, the detailed dips into characters’ lives, the sharply observed social practices, the subtextual nods to the foolishness of all of us.

Q:

A: So, what a surprise when one of the first short stories I published was written in a kind of experimental form! That story came to me in bits, inchoate and strange, and as I wrote, I felt that I was saying for the first time, on paper, the truth of my life. Here I’d spent my whole writing career imitating and learning from the work of my favorite writers, but when I wanted to write a story with details perilously close to my own life, the voice and style and structure that emerged had nothing to do with anything I’d ever read or studied.

(My first novel, age 20: On the wall above my desk in my little studio apartment were index cards describing characters with detailed notes about what each character symbolized, for crying out loud.)

In writing a story with an experimental structure, I felt both oddly ashamed and exhilarated. Experimental stuff was for people who hadn’t done their homework, for people who wished to be obtuse, for writers who wanted attention for being edgy.

(On the other hand, I’d said what I wanted to say.)

(Save me, index cards!)

As if I had a secret love (ever-present, never acknowledged), I kept writing little notes and fragments in which the emphasis was form. I told myself they didn’t matter; they were exercises. They would lead me back to being a normal writer. A writer Harper Collins or Random House would want. A writer who wasn’t a weirdo.

(Inspired by a class with Harrison Fletcher at Lighthouse, I wrote a lyric essay—the piece I’ve most enjoyed writing, ever—but told myself that it hardly counted. It was an essay, not fiction).

But sometimes, the forms, they find you.

Q:

OffillA: In the last semester of my MFA program, my advisor, the writer Antonya Nelson, suggested I read some books: Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever, Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. On my own, I went further down the experimental rabbit hole—Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, everything by Lydia Davis, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

The astute among you may realize that all these books are written by women. Women who write, women who ask questions about what it means to be female in the world, who ask questions about not conforming, who speak the truth, who long for a life that includes, perhaps, partners and children, but who fear losing themselves in the mix and mess of others, of expectations.

(Women, properly objectified, are repositories of expectations.)

These women aren’t writing stories that comfort and (merely) entertain; instead, they are directly concerned with the truth of the unspeakable, the transgressive, the hidden. To say what you ought not requires a coaxing of a hidden self to speak. For some of us, the leap into self-conscious forms enables us to order the chaos of the truth as we know it, and so, a way to tell others, to connect, to be, for some period of time, less alone in the world.

Q:

A: Oh, there’s nothing wrong with telling stories the old way, The New Yorker way, as Jonathan Franzen calls it! My shelves are filled with the classic, the familiar, the traditional. I still read and write realistic fiction. And yet—I remember the first time I read Dept.  of Speculation, staying up late on an early spring night to finish it. The air crackled; my ears grew warm. A person who was a stranger to me had captured something of the way I understand the world—or fail to—on the page, in such a way that it confused and destabilized me, much as my actual life does:

For years I kept a Post-it note above my desk. WORK NOT LOVE! was what it said. It seemed a sturdier kind of happiness.

I found a book called Thriving not Surviving in a box on the street. I stood there, flipping through it, unwilling to commit.

You think that the mental anguish you are experiencing is a permanent condition, but for the vast majority of people it is only a temporary state.

(But what if I’m special? What if I’m in the minority?)

I had ideas about myself. Largely untested. When I was a child, I liked to write my name in giant letters made of sticks.

What Coleridge said: If I do not greatly delude myself, I have not only completely extricated the notions of time, and space…but I trust that I am about to do more—namely that I shall be able to evolve all the five senses…& in this evolvement to solve the process of life and consciousness.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

This halting, telegraphic style, these questions! The narrator’s ambition—and sense of failure!

I have never, ever spent time with another writer without talking about exactly these things. The people we meant to be, the people we are.

(The most interesting things in life are the gaps and holes that leave us imagining, hungry. Satisfaction? That’s a suburb.)

Q:

A: This form is not mine. It is a poor imitation of a form used by David Foster Wallace in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I am short on time: I steal.

Q:

A: Ben Marcus says, in an interview in Granta, "In the end I find pleasure, value, stimulation, and provocation in stories that take me closer to what it feels like to be alive. Stories that take me closer to the natural wonder and confusion I feel as a kind of baseline reaction to life." These lines soothe me; they justify the work I’m exploring.

It’s often said that there are no new stories, that there are only new ways of telling stories. This, then, is our impossible job as writers: to find a way to tell the stories that captures the way life is.

(How to render this rich three-dimensional experience of living on the two-dimensional page? There will be no workshop, no class on this. Still, try.)

But this impossibility—this business of trying to order experience—is what keeps literature alive. It is, after all, our experimental writers who have written our classics: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were, in their day, heretical and upsetting. Psychological, sexual, they told stories they ought not to tell; they revealed dangerous ways of thinking and being; they didn’t look or sound like the stories everyone knew and loved.

Now, those books are the stuff of 10th-grade English.

Q.

A. Because literature is language, the art form we all use every day, all day long, and as we change the language, it changes us, world without end. Literature is at once an archive and the immediate and dynamic record of human experience. It keeps us alive.

This is the paradox of the human experience. We have always been the same; we are always changing.

This is why literature matters.

This post is part of our annual Lit Matters series, in which writers and readers express why supporting and elevating literary arts—the mission of Lighthouse Writers Workshop— is important to them. If you agree, consider supporting Lighthouse on Colorado Gives Day. Mark your calendar for December 8 or schedule your gift now. Thank you!


Emily Sinclair is teaching an upcoming 8-week workshop, Advanced Narrative Forms—Exploring Experimental and Hybrid Structures. Her most recent publication is "Smoke,” a short story, in The Normal School