Mapping Changes in Memoir: A Q&A with Tracy Seeley

Last year at the NonfictioNow Conference, it was my great pleasure to meet author Tracy Seeley, whose work I seriously admire (and have mentioned on this blog before). 

This year in my graduate memoir workshop, I taught her stunning essay "Cartographies of Change."  Published in Prairie Schooner, it's a gorgeous example of what creative nonfiction can be.

Tracy is the author of My Ruby Slippers:  The Road Back to Kansas, published in 2011.  She teaches literature and creative nonfiction at the University of San Francisco.  There, she has held the NEH Chair in the Humanities and won both the Distinguished Teaching Award and the College Service Award.  She currently co-directs the Center for Teaching Excellence. 

She has also published scholarly essays on Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, poet and essayist Alice Meynell, and other writers, as well as literary essays in The Florida Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals.  Her essay "Cartographies of Change" was a finalist for both the Iowa Review and Brenda Ueland prizes in nonfiction.

Tracy lives in Oakland, California with her husband Frederick Marx, a filmmaker.  She is an avid if novice gardener and has raised two smart and darkly witty daughters who now live too far away.

Once my graduate students had read "Cartographies of Change," which weaves together the losses of breast cancer and a relationship's end with the story of the narrator's budding meditation practice, Tracy was kind enough to do a Q&A with them about the essay. 

Q&A

Gabriel Houck: "This essay was linguistically gorgeous, but its organization--specifically, the shaping of how you talk about coping with trauma--Is what makes it work so well for me.  My question has to do with my own struggles organizing in this way, more specifically:  was the idea of cartography (or the metaphor of mapping and all of its connected lexicon) present at the onset of the writing?  Was it something that developed as an organizing principle during the writing process, or was it something that was inserted afterwards, upon reflection, as a way of framing the language and the shape of this story?  I think it is a beautiful choice and it's done tremendously well, but you have other things in the piece that seem as if they could have equally taken the burden that 'cartography' takes on for you:  the metaphor of cancer-treatment-as-warfare, the idea of meditation and being outside of time, and the constant, mantra-like repetition of certain refrains.  Mostly, I guess the question is about organizing things (at what point the shape and the frame are clear to you), and the prioritizing of the ideas at work (choosing to use cartography in the title, in analogies and language, as a dominant refrain vs. some of the other ideas you present in the essay)."

Tracy Seeley:  Great question! For me, this piece and the experience it grew out of are about relocation, displacement, and making a place for myself both literally and figuratively. So the idea of mapping—of finding one’s place, marking it, making it meaningful—seemed far more expansive to me than any other metaphor the essay might have made available. “Cartographies of Change” as a central metaphor also seems to me more suggestive, a bit more allusive and thus richer than some of the other choices might have been.I have to say that mapping, making a place, finding a place, creating a home—they were all very much on my mind at the time, as I was also working on my book My Ruby Slippers, which is a memoir of place. And I’d done written about space in Virginia Woolf’s fiction and nonfiction. It’s a preoccupation of mine, a metaphor that works to explain a lot about me.

Having said that, I didn’t actually hit on the idea of cartography as the organizing principle or the title for a long while into the drafting process. Early drafts were much more expository, straightforward storytelling. But I wasn’t happy with the tone or the feel of the essay. In some ways, I think I was still too close to the experience and the piece sounded sentimental. So I put it away for awhile, then one day I was reading Donne and came across the poem that acts as an epigraph. And I had that aha! moment. THAT’s what I was really trying to do…write about mapping and change. Donne uses the metaphor of body as map, so it’s a bit different than what I ended up doing. But I grabbed his metaphors, since they let me do exactly what I wanted to do. Some of the mapping language was already in the essay before I found the poem—so I’d been headed in that direction intuitively—and some of it made its way in as I rewrote and revised. Once I had the idea of Cartographies, it became easy to get the emotional lightness I wanted.

Caitie Liebman: "Other characters, or players, in your life barely appear in this piece.  They are, however, briefly mentioned:  'sisters . . . daughters . . . friends' (116).  What do you think their brief mention does for the reader?  Does the reader need to know those relations exist even though they are not described as players in your life throughout the diagnosis and treatment of your disease?  Why did you choose not to acknowledge their roles (or absences)?"

Tracy Seeley:  I never know what to say about “the reader,” who is really an imaginary, impossible to locate entity. Readers are multiple, all with different sensibilities and responses, so I don’t know what my inclusion of these other characters will do for any given reader. For me, this piece is about an inward journey, not a story of my relationships with others—so that’s part of what they’re doing (or not doing) in there. One of the realities of going through treatment for cancer is that no matter how many people may be around or who they are, there’s no way for anyone else to be inside that experience with the patient. By its very nature it’s deeply private. We confront our mortality alone. So in a very real way, as much as there were other people in my life, they were not on the inside and couldn’t be. It seemed quite natural to me that they should be mentioned, since I continued to occupy a larger world of relationships, but those people are also very much on the margins in terms of what my experience was during those months. Cancer is an intense, surreal place. You go there by yourself.

Nicole Green: "Writing memoir, how do you think about organization?  Do you begin by imagining a structure you'd like the piece to take, or do you just tell your story first, and allow the organization/structure to emerge more organically through revision?  When you start, what is your process?  How do you imagine a piece at its very first conception?"

Tracy Seeley:  When I start something new I don’t think in terms of structure at all. I just jump into the soup. I usually have an image in mind, or a narrative moment that seems somehow important—and usually I don’t know why it’s important until I start writing about it. I’m a very messy writer, and have learned to live with a lot of chaos, lots of extraneous material, lots of disorderly bits and pieces. In the early stages of something, I’m just trying to generate a lot of material. But I’ve learned that eventually, the shape, purpose, focus and even subject of the piece will emerge. I will announce itself. That is, I’ll get an understanding of what it’s really about. Once I know that, I can think more clearly about how to organize it. Some of my organizational decisions are very conscious and analytical, and some are just intuitive. You know as a writer when something works, even though you might be hard pressed to explain why.

Wendy Oleson: "Were there drafts of this essay in which you speak more about the sister you woke up by 'rubbing [your head] on her cheek' or the daughter whose 'hand-tinted photographs' you admired from the couch?  (113, 115)" 

Tracy Seeley:  No.

Kathryn Samuelson: "I love the line, 'To be present, in the present, is to swim in infinity.'  Is this a learned response to life that you intend readers to apply?" 

Tracy Seeley:  Thank you. I don’t think of my writing as a set of directives for other people. All I hope for is that they’ll have a reading experience that rearranges something inside them. It’s not up to me to say what they should do with it.

Vanessa Languis: "At the very end, was it an out-of-body experience that the author was experiencing?  Did the author/narrator die momentarily?  Or was that another metaphor?"
 

Tracy Seeley:  The section I think you mean begins this way:

Sometimes on the threshold of darkness, I would forget the lessons of the meditation cushion. I too easily slipped into darkness, let it slip into me. Awake and still, I breathed the darkness in and set it loose to explore my interior rooms, long shadows trailing in its wake. I let it lead me through corridors of regret and desire, where darkness, impresario, opened the curtains on a host of dramatic restagings—quarrels and partings, the man and the woman, moments of failure and fear.

In the first sentence, “darkness” is literal. It’s evening. In the second sentence “I too easily slipped into darkness,” darkness is becoming metaphorical, referring to a mood of sadness, but the phrase “slipped into” opened up the door (so to speak) for me to make that darkness a physical space, like a house, as well as a presence in that house. So darkness becomes both spatialized and personified. And then I just ran with the metaphor and created a scene in which I am in those rooms, following darkness around, replaying scenes from the past, confronting my feared version of a future, etc. And then, eventually, I manage to I pull myself out of that wandering back to the present.

Here’s what it’s about. Think of what our minds are often prone to do: we may be sitting in a café, thinking about the past, mulling over regrets, imaginatively replaying scenes that went badly, rehearsing things we wished we’d said. Or out of fear, we spin out a whole scenario of what bad thing is going to happen in the future if we do X, or don’t do Y. That’s what I’m allowing myself to do when I “slip into darkness, let it slip into me.” I take the metaphors and make them literal. I stole that technique from the transformation scene in Woolf’s Orlando by the way. Check it out.

The minute I end that internal dark wandering, I reflect that this is how we create our own suffering: dwelling in the past, wishing things had been different, or fearing the future we imagine will come. It’s part of Buddhist teaching to understand our suffering this way. We create it ourselves. And we can end our own suffering by accepting things as they are and by living in the present. That’s what that section of the essay’s about: a moment when I create my own suffering by “slipping into” the darkness of my own thoughts…and then I’m aware enough of what I’m doing to stop it, to “wake up” to the present. That’s when the light goes on in the essay, by the way. The end of suffering is enlightenment.