Tag: creative nonfiction

Author’s Note: Buyers, Renters, and Belonging

Read “Buyers, Renters, and Belonging” in Irreantum 18.2 – Building Zion.

Writing this essay was like writing a eulogy. A eulogy for all the groups of women who made my years as a young mother survivable. The steady presence of these two groups of women was the thing that got me through all the experiences of parenthood that make you think you’re losing your mind. Those groups no longer exist, though I occasionally still talk to some of the women who were part of them.

people holding miniature wooden house
Photo by Kindel Media on Pexels.com

It’s also a eulogy for the suburban wards of the Pacific Northwest. You can see the slow decline of the wards in the area by looking at a ward map. Our ward had two church buildings inside its boundaries, buildings that used to house several wards each but have been hollowed out by the area’s financial success. It’s nearly impossible to find an affordable house in the area that can accommodate a typical Mormon-size family, and so the ward is filled with young renters and older couples who bought in before Microsoft happened.

This essay is also a very vulnerable one to me. The turn in the essay where I realize exactly how privileged and well-off we were is still something I am coming to terms with over and over in my everyday life. Talking about money and success is very taboo. There are different problems that come with financial success, and it’s hard to talk about them with anyone without coming across as bragging. There’s also the guilt of having money in a religion where we promise to consecrate all that we have. I often agonize over if we are giving enough to thank the Lord for his blessings.

I should note that though the ending to this essay is pretty bleak, we were actually quite happy to move to Utah. I grew up around my extended family and had wanted that for my kids for a long time. The pandemic provided the ability for us to be untethered from the Pacific Northwest. Still, the move was bittersweet like a breakup from a long-dysfunctional relationship. We already knew that it was over, but leaving made it feel so final. It meant admitting defeat in creating a community, one that we had covenanted to build. I felt bad for abandoning our ward in the state it was in, with so many in need of help and so many having to leave. In fact, in the months after we moved, several more of our remaining friends in the ward have left the area.

Missing Myself: Scattered Thoughts on Reading and Homeschooling

I’m not sure exactly what I want to write about today.

Cover of I Miss You When I Blink

I could write about the book I just read: I Miss You When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott. I don’t read personal essays as often as I should. In college, I went on a 8-week, life-changing study abroad, hiking all over England and writing personal essays. It’s the genre I still feel the most comfortable writing in. Yet I rarely turn to books of essays for pleasure. I can’t explain why this is, except that when I read, I tend to be more plot driven than I am when I write.

I picked up I Miss You When I Blink because it was recommended on Modern Mrs. Darcy’s Summer Reading Guide and I was trying to expand my reading beyond my usual non-fiction or speculative fiction.

Continue reading “Missing Myself: Scattered Thoughts on Reading and Homeschooling”

Write About Dragons: Going from Creative Non-fiction to Speculative Fiction

In college, I participated in a life changing study abroad program where we focused on writing personal essays. Our only assignment as we hiked across the Lake District and moors of England was to complete 200 pages of journal writing from which we would then construct a few finished essays. The group continued on into a class the next semester where we workshopped these essays and talked about writing.

And I loved it! I found that essay writing was merely a more structured version of what went on in my head constantly, making meaning out of everyday events, seeing patterns, telling stories. I was already leaning towards it in my first forays into blog writing (part of what got me into the program in the first place). I have continued to compose essays in my head and sometimes on paper through the years.

But then I noticed something: I almost never read creative non-fiction.

Sure, I enjoy an occasional biography. I love Bill Bryson’s work and I read a lot of popular science books. But memoir was never what I reached for, not usually in that backlog of titles sitting on my metaphorical Goodreads shelf. When I realized this, I started to force myself to read more books like what I thought I would write someday, but it never ceased to be a chore.

What did appear on my shelves, almost unbidden, perhaps summoned by magic, were science fiction and fantasy books. When I first started reading independently, I picked up A Wrinkle in Time, the Wizard of Oz series, and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading The Giver in fourth grade, I reread it almost every year until I graduated from high school. I picked up Ender’s Game and Dealing with Dragons in middle school, read everything by Tamora Piece and Anne McCaffery in high school. Not even to mention Harry Potter, which goes without saying for my generation.

Since I grew up in a family of nerds, I didn’t realize that speculative fiction was not what everyone read until I started taking my English major courses in college. When I realized the academic disdain for fantasy, I was baffled. To me, it was the default genre. Why read a mystery when you could read a mystery with dragons? Why read a romance when you could read a romance with magic?

And yet, when I thought of my own writing career, I never considered writing what I really loved reading. Well, that’s untrue to say. I wrote some fan fiction in high school, as one does, but I found writing about real things so much easier. Creative non-fiction curates real events and then gives them meaning. I did this almost without thought in my daily life, so essay writing was merely pinning down my internal dialogue and subjecting it to reason.

Fiction, on the other hand, involves the creation of the events themselves, and in speculative fiction, that goes double since you must create the whole world, its history, and sometimes new laws of physics. Coming up with characters and plots has always been difficult for me. I was always shy about acting as a kid, and though I read about fantastic worlds, I never pretended they were real, never made up imaginary friends. My childhood imaginary worlds consisted mostly of making maps and currency, two aspects that seemed much safer somehow.

Part of this was the fear of looking ridiculous, of having my ideas be derivative or simple. Yet science fiction and fantasy are the community I love, the people I’d want to meet and the things I’d want to see. So off I march into the dark, leaving what I know how to do behind and trying something else.

I’m think some of the skills that creative non-fiction taught me can transfer over, like finding the internal meaning in external events. Every story is about characters’ need to grow and change.

These ones just involve dragons.