Letters From Kelly

It’s graduation season, and you know what that means: For the next six weeks, high school and college campuses will be clogged with people stopping in inconvenient places, staring off into the middle distance, misty-eyed.

They’re only sort-of present in those moments—part of them is visiting the past. It’s involuntary, likely to happen when you return to a place where you did some of your most important growing up, (an alma mater, for example), or you find yourself gazing out on a sea of young people ending a big chapter of their lives and beginning a new one. These are moments almost guaranteed to clobber us with nostalgia.

Nostalgia, and the stories it inspires, get a bad reputation, because so often they don’t have much point to them. It’s your mom driving you around her hometown, pointing to a house that looks exactly like every other house, and saying “That’s where your grandma grew up.”

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about how nostalgia is actually really useful to writers, because the magazine of my own alma mater asked me to write an advice story on how to turn your college memories into actual stories.

Basically, they paid me to indulge my own nostalgia while advising writers on how to make it matter.

Along the way, I learned some things about nostalgia that are downright fascinating:

• Humans are (as far as we know) the only species that can feel nostalgia for the future.
• Nostalgia is contagious — you can spread yours to people, even if they don’t share the memory.
• It cultivates empathy.
• It makes us likely to seek out connections to other people. We are even more likely to ask for help.

Most importantly for writers, when we sink into nostalgia, far from being a self-indulgent waste of time, we’re making meaning of our past.

And all of that—the warm fuzzies, the vivid details of memory, the empathy, the reaching out to old friends, the meaning—all of it can be used to create more vivid, more emotional, more meaningful stories.

“Nostalgia is a valid, honorable, ancient human emotion,” wrote the novelist Michael Chabon. “Most truly and most meaningfully, [it] is the emotional experience—always momentary, always fragile—of having what you lost or never had, … of sipping coffee in the storied cafés that are now hot-yoga studios.”

Most of the memories that flood us with nostalgia involve other people, according to researchers. Which means that when you explore why some memories carry you away while others don’t, you can better understand your relationships at the time, both to the people in your immediate orbit, as well as to humanity more widely.

Take this nostalgia-inflected story, “You Still Wouldn’t Trade It For Another Lap Around” by Abby Alten Schwartz. Graf after graf reads a lot like this one, memories of her childhood interwoven with the experiences of others her age.

At a party the summer after you graduated, you got high and turned to your friends and said, “Do you ever think about nuclear war?” and then you all busted out laughing and for years after that someone would bring it up and it still cracked you up in an embarrassing way. But really, the threat of being wiped out suddenly (or worse, surviving) was the biggest danger you faced next to strangers or hitchhiking or Ouija boards at slumber parties.

Alten Schwartz shares that moment with her friends at that graduation party, but the vulnerability in it, when she shared her fear, connects her memory and her story to many others in her generation, it makes the story more meaningful, because it’s no longer a “do-you-remember?” but a story of growing up under a shadow, and surviving.

OK, writers, your turn. I’ve put together an exercise for you to stir and hopefully harness your nostalgia. Don’t be afraid to indulge in it. Remember it not only gives you grist for stories, it can help make you a better person.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

“Beginnings, I think of them as like holograms. If you cut any piece of a hologram, it contains all the information of the whole. And so I think the beginning of a piece should also contain all the information of the whole.”

That was the author Nick Flynn, speaking to my Memoir 2 class recently about  Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. A student asked why he chose to open his book with a scene that some readers find off-putting:

(1989) Please, she whispers, how may I help you? The screen lights up with her voice. A room you enter, numbers you finger, heated, sterile almost. The phone beside her never rings, like a toy, like a prop. My father lifts the receiver in the night, speaks into it, asks Where’s the money? asks, Why can’t I sleep? asks, Who left me outside? The phone rings on a desk when he lifts it, the desk somewhere in Texas, someone is always supposed to be at that desk but no one ever is, not at night. A machine speaks while my father tries to speak, it doesn’t listen, it only speaks, my father’s face reflected dimly on the screen.

Suck City recounts what happened when Nick was working at a homeless shelter, and the father he’d only met once before in his life showed up as a client. His beginning does contain important pieces of the larger story — Nick’s father, his homelessness. It puts the reader into the nightly struggles of unhoused people, as it shows them trying to stay warm in an ATM vestibule. 

But also, Nick said, it was representative of the larger story because some readers would find it off-putting. 

“Yeah, there were sections I could’ve started with where you definitely would have had an easier time,” Nick said. “But then, I would have been selling you a false bill of goods because the rest of the book would confuse you anyway. So why not just confuse you right at the beginning so you know what you’re getting into?”

OK, he’s kidding there. But only kind of. Because the beginning is a bit disorienting, just like Nick’s father. 

“You’re getting introduced to his character, not from my point of view, but from his point of view. You’re in his life, in his mind.”

But the author is not wholly absent from that beginning. Because it challenges the reader, which is how Nick likes to write a story.

“There’s a difference between passive art and active art, and for literature, I think you want to be actively engaged. I really wanted the scene at the beginning to feel like the reader is now complicit. Anyone who’s been in a city has gone into an ATM, and there’s been a homeless person there. And what is your experience of that? I just wanted the reader to have that experience, be part of it, and to consider the other side of it while you’re in it.”

Each of these aspects, they really do sound like they could drive readers away right? But they didn’t.  When it came out, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City won a PEN Award, made the New York Times Bestsellers list for a hot minute, and has stayed in print for 20 years. In fact, Norton just released a new edition to mark the book’s 20^th anniversary. What some might call off-putting are actually the story’s strengths.

OK writers, your turn: Open your work in progress, and look at your beginning. Does it, like a hologram, contain the information of the whole? Does it engage the reader the way you will engage the reader for the entire story? Is it as daring as you are?

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

A thing I like to say to my students, maybe too often, is expectations ruin everything.

That’s the good news.

Also, the bad news.

It’s good news when we are trying to build adversity—or in memoir, when we’re puzzling out why everything went wrong—because expectations are a great place to look.

I interviewed a marriage therapist once who said that unspoken expectations were the chief cause of strife among her married patients. They carried beliefs into their marriages—sometimes subconsciously, sometimes acutely aware of them—about how they’d celebrate Thanksgiving, or who’d be responsible for cooking dinner. But they never talked about them. When their new spouse failed to live up to those expectations? Disaster.

So when things are going off the rails for your characters, and you’re not sure why, look to their expectations. Are the characters even aware of them? In my memoir classes, students often discover that they’d held unarticulated hopes and beliefs. That they were secret from everyone, including themselves, created anguish and chaos, often for everyone involved.

But there are other expectations working on us when we write — those we anticipate our readers will hold. Those can sometimes be helpful, when they’re things like, “Don’t bore your reader.” Or, “Readers expect the beginning of the story to grab their attention.”

More often, though, what we think our readers expect from us, or what they actually do expect, can be unhelpful, to say the least.

Author Brit Bennett said of her debut novel, The Mothers, that, after it came out, readers seemed to think her characters would adhere more to stereotypes.

“It’s a book about Black characters, but I think there’s a way in which people are reacting to the characters — and their not conforming to what is expected — which has been very telling of what people think or expect about Black narratives,” Bennett told Electric Literature. “Black people are as diverse as any group of people, which should go without saying! But it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that that’s shocking or surprising to people in a way that I just didn’t think it was.”

You want to resist falling into that trap, unless of course, you’re going to use it to surprise the reader. [Spoiler ahead!] Think of the ending of the movie Frozen, when it seemed like the movie’s happy ending would be the same as most other Disney princess movie happy endings, with Anna marrying her paramour, Kristoff. Instead, the ending of the movie reveals that the love of Anna’s life is her sister, Elsa, and vice versa.

For writers, I think the most insidious way expectations ruin everything is when we set them for our own stories, creating in our minds the idea of how a story will resonate, or read, or succeed.

I wrote about that expectation recently, so I won’t repeat myself, except to quote, again, Gotham teacher Teresa Wong:

“To exist, [your story] has to be a little bit flawed,” Teresa said. “But then at least it can be shared, right?”

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty