Faculty Voices: Anne Ursu

Look At Me

Our residency this summer will be focused around point of view, and I’m giving the kickoff lecture, which means it falls on me to somehow synthesize POV issues into a coherent talk, which is rather like trying to clear out a hoarder’s living room so you can have dinner party there. Either way, you’re going to end up losing your faith in the omniscient narrator.

So, when lecture time starts approaching, I find myself reading with post-it flags nearby; and every once in a while a book proves so interesting that it starts looking like this:

Anne's copy with Post-its.

One Crazy Summer is brilliant for a lot of reasons, but my post-it flags came out because of the way Rita Williams-Garcia uses the idea of gaze to construct her protagonist’s world. In first person narration, we see the world as the protagonist sees it, and that’s revelatory—but we also learn a lot from the way the protagonist feels when the world gazes back at her. We see this all the time with romance plot-lines—where the hot boy looks at the narrator-girl, and suddenly the girl catalogues her perceived physical flaws for us. (Actually, I dare say we’ve seen that so much that we don’t need to see it any more.) But in Williams-Garcia’s hands, the use of gaze is far more complex.

One Crazy Summer is about eleven-year-old Delphine and her two younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, who travel to Oakland in the summer of 1968 to see the mother who’d abandoned them years before. With Delphine as your guide, you realize that to be an African- American girl in 1968 you are constantly aware of the white people who are or might be looking at you, and what they see when they do. When they go to their gate at the airport in the beginning of the book, Delphine notices, “There weren’t too many of ‘us’ in the wait area, and too many of ‘them’ were staring.” On the plane, Delphine tries to keep her sisters in line, telling us, “The last thing Pa and Big Ma wanted to hear was how we made a grand Negro spectacle of ourselves thirty thousand feet up in the air around all these white people.”

Delphine’s job is to watch over her sisters, and in the scenes her eyes are constantly on them. In her narration, she barely focuses on herself; it makes sense, as the eldest, she’s valued for being a surrogate parent to the other girls. Their mother Cecile doesn’t take any of this burden away from Delphine; she barely looks at the girls, and certainly doesn’t ever see them for who they are. The only time she looks at Delphine is to intimidate her; when Delphine rebels against the nightly greasy Chinese take-out by bringing home food to cook, her mother stares at her, long and hard. “If that was supposed to make me feel afraid, stupid, and small,” Delphine tells us, “It worked.”

Whenever the sisters venture out, they have to deal with the gaze of others, whether it’s the white people with cameras who want to take the girls’ picture because they are “adorable dolls” and “so well-behaved.” Or the shop keeper who sets his eyes on them as soon as they walk into his shop; at first, Delphine thinks it’s because they are kids alone in his store, but then she realizes, “His hard stare was for the other reasons store clerks’ eyes never let up. We were black kids, and he expected us to steal.”

When the book begins, Delphine’s voice feels child-like and immediate; when the girls are on the plane to Oakland she’s terrified, and she tells us, “It was bad enough my insides squeezed in and stretched out like a monkey grinder’s accordion.” She refuses to show her fear, for the sake of her sisters. Through the book, Delphine is conscious of the image she’s projecting for everyone else to see; only we can see the scared little girl underneath it.

But as the book goes on, the voice grows a little more mature, and the narration a little more distant, as if the narrator-Delphine is now an older girl looking back on these events. You feel the separation between the two Delphines—as kid-Delphine lives through the story you become more and more aware of the older girl remembering them. Somehow this makes you love Delphine even more; now you have a sense of the girl she will become, the one who lived through this summer and grew from it. Or maybe it’s just because the narrator gives kid-Delphine what you're longing for for her--finally, someone sees her. Though the girl in the scenes doesn't know it, her older self is with her the entire time, promising her that she’s understood, that she’s seen.

And, we learn, it isn’t just by her older self. At the end of the summer, Cecile sits Delphine down and haltingly tells her her own life story. "I wasn't used to having her attention," Delphine tells us. "Having her look at me and talk. All the while she spoke, she didn't lift her eyes from me.”

When she takes the girls back to the airport, a white man stops them and tries to take their picture, cooing “Pretty girls, smile pretty!” Cecile puts a stop to it, standing in front of the girls and snapping at the man, ”They’re not monkeys on display.” Delphine tells us, “I felt bad for him, but I knew Cecile had to step in. Any mother would have at least done that.”

When they leave to board the plane, Delphine says, “I expected Cecile to walk away. To cut through the terminal in man-sized strides as soon as we got up and stood on-line. When I turned to see if she had gone, she was standing only a few feet away, looking straight at me. It was a strange, wonderful feeling. To discover eyes upon you when you expected no one to notice you at all.”

This is a fabulous book, one of the best middle grades in recent memory. It’s constructed so delicately and carefully, with voice and narration acting as a complex mediator between the reader, the girl living through this summer, and the girl she will become. Take a look.

Narratology

Ever since January residency  the term Narratology has been sneaking into conversations around the house. Like this one that took place the other day. Marsha: "This is a really good article." Dave: "What's it about?" Marsha: "Narratology." Dave: "I think I'll warm up the lentil soup for supper."

I find the subject of narratology interesting. And that is why  a person blogs, of course, to talk about the stuff that in most situations drives other people to talking about lentil soup.

Kittens are relevant to every topic

I'd never heard the term  before Marsha Chall used it during a post mortem of the session Jackie Briggs Martin and I did during residency on the sidekick narrator, and I bow down to her in gratitude. I primarily studied history during my college years, you see, and never encountered literary theory except once, in an elective class on the films of Ingmar Bergman. (A class that, BTW,  launched my relationship with the soup-lover mentioned above. From Bergman to lentil soup--ah, marriage. But I digress).

Narratology is the study of, well, narratives, especially the point of view used for those narratives. Importantly, however, it is a study done primarily from the POV (Ha!) of theorists and not writers. Still, diving into narratology is is great for learning the arcane names given to various POVs, names that go way beyond "limited third."

All this is a long-winded way of getting around to sharing a snippet of the article that drove my man to lentil soup. The snippet is taken from “What every Novelist Needs to Know About Narrators,” that was published recently by the Chicago Manual of Style in its Chicago Shorts series. In it the author, Wayne C. Booth, says, In dealing with point of view the novelist must always deal with the individual work: which particular character shall tell this particular story, or part of a story, with what precise degree of reliability, privilege, freedom to comment, and so on. ... Even if the novelist has decided on a narrator who will fit one of the critic’s classifications—“omniscient,” “first person,” “limited omniscient,” “objective,” “roving,” “effaced,” or whatever—his troubles have just begun. He simply cannot find answers to his immediate, precise, practical problems by referring to statements such as that the “omniscient is the most flexible method,” or that “the objective is the most rapid or vivid.” Even the soundest of generalizations at this level will be of little use to him in his page-by-page progress through his novel.

I especially love that line, "his troubles have just begun."

And a good day to you.

FAQ

My friend Rob Reid is a children’s lit maven, author, and performer. He also teaches at the university here in Eau Claire and every semester kindly invites me to speak to his adolescent literature class. The students are primarily undergraduate education majors, and a few grad students working on a media specialist degree (such optimism!). It’s always a fun Q &A.

Rob had put my novel Thin Ice on the required reading list, and the students were prepared to grill the author. One woman tossed out an especially pointed question: Why didn’t I include much in the way of Wisconsin culture in the book, which is set in northern Wisconsin? She specifically mentioned German influence.

More pertinent than no German influence, I thought as I prepared my answer, was that though the book is set in an area of the state where many Native Americans live, you wouldn’t know it from reading the novel. And this in fact may have been the unspoken point the student was really making.

Her question was a really a very specific form of a frequently asked question authors get: Why didn’t you talk about…?

Because my main character wouldn’t. Thin Ice is a first-person narrative, which by definition means there’s a narrow world view. In that situation, an author’s only obligation when it comes to world-building is to show the world in which the viewpoint character lives and/or sees and thinks about at the present moment. Therefore, certain people and things and lifestyles that one person takes for granted might not be part of another person’s story and should not be introduced into the story.

In my longwinded answer (I can really get going during a Q & A), I contrasted Arden with the protagonist of another of my novels, Cory Knutson (Revolutions of the Heart). The two novels are set in the same area of Wisconsin, but Cory’s story includes several Ojibwa characters and a plot line affected by race relations. The difference isn’t because I did a better job depicting the culture and people of the area in that book, but because the protagonist’s worldview during the timeframe of the story is a wider one.

Another version of this “Why?” question is often found in complaints about portraits of adults in YA novels. Well, same answer: My obligation as a writer is to create the character’s world, not the world a concerned adult reader prefers a child/teen sees.

First Person

Last week we had a pretty good chat here at the Inkpot about third person (3P) narratives and "telling." So, I guess it's time to talk about first person (1P). The thing about 1P narratives, of course, is that they are all telling; the form is pretty much a monologue. Even when dialogue is included, it's there under the umbrella of "This is what we said, according to me."

I'm revising a novel now and am switching it from 1P to 3P. Who knows where it will end up. For many reasons I think it's wicked hard to write in 1P, the primary one being it's so easy to mess up point of view as you try to tell the whole story. That's not the reason I'm backing off from it now. Why am I switching to 3P? I guess because I think 1P works best when the story calls for tunnel vision. Perhaps this is why it's such a popular match with YA fiction and the me-me-me of adolescence. I've used a 1P narrator in 3.5 of my books. Discount the .5--I used it that time to vary things in a dual-narrator book. But the other books starred girls who were obsessed, blinded to the larger picture because of one thing or another.
My current protagonist is not so focused; to the contrary, she's very much an observer of things. And the scope of a 3P narration feels better. For now.

Some readers hate 1P narratives. Some writers never work in anything else. Thoughts?

MQ

Resolution

I go to Canada at least once a year to visit my oldest child, and I always love finding new (to me) Canadian writers. This year it was Marina Endicott, whose (adult) novel Good to a Fault is now a finalist for Canada Reads, the national everybody-reads-the-same-novel thing they've got going there. Good to a Fault was not only delightful reading, it was also a marvelous study in POV. I often reread passages just to admire how the narrative moved from character to character without a hitch, like a relay baton going from runner to runner and never getting dropped.

Kathleen Duey's Skin Hunger, one of the common books for the upcoming Hamline residency, has a dual narrative structure, and it's a book I've been recommending lately for writers trying to work with multiple story threads. We're studying it for setting (I think it was your pick, Mary Logue? Thank you!) but it also provides a marvelous study in structure.

I suppose one reason I was taken with the multiple narrators in Good to a Fault and with Skin Hunger's structure is that I have always stuck to a single narrator and vantage in my novels (Well, okay, there was one a long time ago, Come in from the Cold, that was split between two kids, but the split was so broadly defined that it felt like separate stories as I was doing it). With New Year's coming up, I think it's time for some writing resolutions, and whadya say we listen to Ron and make those resolutions risky ones?

So here I go: In 2010 I will break it open and try a multiple (but a closely-woven) thread/voice story.

And you?

S.E. Hinton

I spent Saturday teaching an all-day workshop on writing YA fiction. Fun, but exhausting. At some point during that day we were talking about S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders, a book which continues to echo in so much contemporary YA fiction. A couple of years ago Hinton published a collection of stories for adults and was interviewed at that time by Vanity Fair. In the interview she uses the term "first-person narrative once removed," which I suspect means a peripheral narrator. She also talks about the importance of endings; like our Mary Logue, Hinton savors that final image. I think I'll rustle up a copy of the story collection, Some of Tim's Stories, and acquaint myself with that once-removed first person.

Sequels

I find myself the proud owner of two sequels: Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs and Further Adventures of Stoner & Spaz. The former is a done deal (ARCs are out and about) and the latter will be fine. He said optimistically.

I only mention this because I've heard myself say that sequels don't interest me. And they didn't until, apparently, they did. I can explain the urge to find out what happens to Kevin, the narrator of the Shakespeare books. Mostly I just wanted to write poems-in-forms and have that pay off in real money instead of contributor's copies, the standard payment for literary magazines.

But for the other sequel, it wasn't Ben who called to me. It was Colleen. Potty-mouthed, difficult, intransigent Colleen. Ben is still the narrator of the sequel, but Colleen is the star. Every time she'd step onto the page, the book lit up. I heard her voice everywhere, telling me where to put her and Ben next and what they should say. Until, a hundred and forty-five pages later, she was through with me.

Now I feel like the guy who woke up with a new tattoo in a strange room. And like that guy, I miss the person who led me there.

RK

First Person

Ah, writing in first. Writing in third. I go back and forth. I just completed another first-person novel, but took time to do a draft of it in third. Sometime the narcissism and narrow view of first is exactly what's called for. What did I learn by revising in third? Not sure, but I came up with some lovely writing (lovely to me) for a scene that takes place on the banks of the Mississippi; unfortunately my first person protag would never have those lovely Mississippi-inspired thoughts, so it all gets cut.

Me, Myself, and Her

I mentioned the other day that I've been struggling with finding a voice for my new book, which feels like trying to make a soup with no stock*. Everything I've written has been in a revolving third person, most with some kind of narrative voice on top of that. I thought I might try first this time--it seemed like the best choice for the book. And I've been struggling and staring at empty pages and considering other careers . This morning, I switched to third--with a narrator--and suddenly could mange to string words together for the first time in awhile. My first person is precious, narcissistic, rambling, dull. My fellows-in-blogginess all do it so well, and it isn't until I try it that I realize how hard it is.

Do you all feel like you can do one better than another?

*I'm assuming, as I can't actually cook.