Corey Dressel
Creative Nonfiction Thesis Prospectus
Director: Dr. Debra Cumberland
Thesis Committee: Dr. Debra Cumberland, Dr. James Armstrong, & Dr. Gary Eddy
Thesis Title: “We Owned the Dirt”
April 2013
PROCLAMATION OF THESIS
It is my intention to write a creative nonfiction thesis as part of my master’s program in English Literature and Language. I will be writing in the sub-genre of memoir, reflecting upon observations and reminiscences. Author Lucy Calkins says, “In order to write memoir, we need to see that literature is made out of the everyday stuff of our lives” (The Art of Teaching Writing 399). In this manner, the content of my memoir will focus specifically on various moments within my childhood. The earliest part of my remembered childhood was spent on the dirty and crime ridden streets of North Minneapolis. When I was between the ages of seven and eight, my parents traded this unloving concrete world for the open arms of nature herself by buying an unchartered hill in rural Wisconsin. They scrambled to build us a home—the old fashioned way: with their hands and by the sweat on their brow. They moved us smack into the heart of the natural world—in the honor and likeness of Thoreau: in the woods, deliberately sucking the marrow from life. The tentative title of my work is “We Owned the Dirt,” which eludes to the humble beginnings from which I came.
FOCUS
I was born in Minneapolis on the unusually cold night of December 28th, 1975. I came early into this world; too excited to live to wait another two weeks to be born. Not long after my birth my father decided he didn’t want me or my sister or our mother anymore. Nearly two years later, just before Christmas, as we all waited for him to join us at my mom’s parent’s home in Sherman, Texas, he called her from Minnesota to say he wasn’t coming and that, in fact, he was never coming. My grandpa’s response was to ask my mom how she’d “managed to blow that one.” My mother looked up at age 24 and realized that she was stuck at her parents with the two of us kids, no money, no husband, and very little hope.
Two years later, strapping a mattress to the roof of her car, we found ourselves living in Minneapolis once again, my mom trying to support us by working at the Discovery Center—a daycare center. It was here that she met the man who would become my father in less than twelve months’ time. He was the son of a stiff-backed family from Hinsdale, Illinois, and the latest of a string of men in his family to graduate from Harvard; though, unlike his father, he wanted simply to be a farmer and work with children. He was living his life wading through a thick murky marsh of failure and disappointment. Their meeting, conception of my little sister, and marriage came fast into my life. Soon their struggles were united into one struggle and us kids were along for the ride.
We lived in North Minneapolis and across the street from the KFC that offered an open door to the gun man who shot 13 people who thought they were just going out for a special meal that night. All around us women were being beaten, drugs passed between hands without any effort or attempt to conceal. Alcohol kissed their lips while whispering lies and pulling the trigger of their anger, spewing out dirt and filth on the streets, yards, and back alleyways. These were the very places where I would wander as a young child. This filth is a symbolic reminder of it all. Our poverty status helped to remind us that we belonged right where we were. My soul-searching father and my empty and lost mother finally packed our car and drove us out of the dirt and grudge of the city and into a new life that offered none of our previous threats but presented a whole new set of challenges and fears. They bought a hill in Ettrick, Wisconsin, and set out to “go to the woods to live deliberately” as they felt their hearts compelled them to do. We leaped from razor’s edge to barbed wire.
Climbing over and crawling under this barbed wire, from the age of seven to ten, I grew up running through the woods, chasing fish down the creek, and wondering if anyone would ever be able to count all the stars in the endless sky. Out here the realities of North Minneapolis were invisible and only existed in our memories, like the visible moon at noon-day. For a while we lived in a small one room hut-like-house made out of asphalt-impregnated fiberboard board. We had no bathroom, other than the five-gallon bucket that stood fifty feet into the woods from the back of our little house. We had no running water and our electricity came from a single power cord that ran along the field from an electric box and into our home. We ate from the earth and when that didn’t provide enough, our neighbors offered their surplus garden produce. I played like a child while the sounds of hammers and saws competed with the natural sounds that floated in the air and came from woods. Piles of lumber, and my parents’ stressed, worn-out faces lit the backdrop interfering with the soft movement of the rolling hills and the tree lines that edged the horizon.
I grew up here: first, on the inner city streets of Minneapolis and then, in the woods—always poor, always questioning: wondering and wandering.
METAMORPHISIS
I was first inspired to write down the experiences of my childhood when I was a part of Dr. Debra Cumberland’s “Advanced Creative Nonfiction” class. It was here that I read such works as Cheri Register’s Packing House Daughter and Berry Estabrook’s Tomatoland. These pieces, alongside the various essay-length pieces of creative nonfiction that she assigned that semester, revealed the possibilities and potential that awaited should I dare to expose the radical truths of my childhood. The thought of using the rhetorical devices that are employed in the creation of creative writing as the means and method of sharing my experiences—these truths—with others was more than intriguing to me: it was inspiring. This is when I decided that I, too, had something to share that others could find comforting, informative, or simply interesting.
Herman Melville says, “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” My memoir will expose those childhood experiences that are responsible for haunting my dreams at night and flooding my conscious thoughts with memories and emotions I’ve never been able to shake. Those experiences are in part responsible for creating the person I am today. They have guided me through my life in a way that, more often than not, has eluded my understanding. Why do I linger in these memories as much as I do? Why do these memories creep through my veins and remain alive in my senses? Why did my parents make the decisions that they did, which invariably lead to a childhood lived in such extreme environments and circumstances? How do I really feel about it? And to what degree has my childhood had an impact on my adult life—for good and for bad? It is because of all these lingering questions that I have chosen to take on the challenge of writing a creative nonfiction thesis. As I learned in Dr. Cumberland’s class, the process of writing creative nonfiction can be very enlightening and lead to self-discovery in a way that I hope answers a few of the questions I carry around with me.
Writing in the genre of creative nonfiction will enable me to expose the details of my childhood’s minutia while doing so in a creative way, a way that allows me to form a common connection with my readers. I will do this through memoir’s first person narrative and by using a collage structure. Through collage, I will unfold a complex and unusual set of experiences independent of one another and yet woven together through reoccurring themes and motifs in such a way as to reveal the common psychology behind an adolescent vision, comprehension, and adaptation, as well as how that then translates to the adult psyche. Ultimately, I will attempt to uncover how one’s search for individuality and self-worth is found through the process of unscrambling experiences and understanding their purpose: such is the process of writing creative nonfiction and the purpose of reading creative nonfiction. Melville once wrote, “Life is a voyage that is homeward bound.” And in light of Melville’s words, I will be specifically attempting to discover whether I lost myself in the forests of my childhood home or whether I actually found myself there.” Thus, the content of my thesis will explore common emotions –shared by millions— which unfold out of my personal story.
IN DEFENSE OF CREATIVE NONFICTION
Creative nonfiction is a conglomerate of a truthful occurrence told in a fictional way. Creative nonfiction includes a plethora of variations as Sue William Silverman outlines in her article, “The Meandering River: An Overview of the Subgenres of Creative Nonfiction.” Herein, Silverman uses the allegory of a “long river with many moods and currents” to help us visualize the nature of creative nonfiction. Likewise she refers to the subgenres as “port of calls,” specifically naming seven: biography, autobiography, immersion, memoir, personal essay, meditative essay, and the lyric essay. Though these “ports” can be categorized, Silverman points out, “because this river is a continuum, we’ll also find that the ports of call are sometimes so close together that it’s difficult to tell where one ends and the other starts.” This blending or blurring of the edges of each category permits an artistic freedom to the writer, who is able to create collages of methods in order to present his or her story in the most effect way they would like.
Based on this definition, I feel like the genre of creative nonfiction is one of the most important genres in the literary field. The potential for personal expression and teaching for a writer of creative nonfiction seems limitless. As Dr. Cumberland says, “Writing is a way of entering into the human experience, understanding the self, and, for many, a way to heal” (“Crossing Over” 183). Additionally, the potential for entertainment and growth is endless for the reader of creative nonfiction—and, subsequently, the writer as well.
The key for bringing the author and reader together is in the existence of a question in the text that the author is attempting to answer. Silverman notes that there should be two voices: “an ‘innocent’ voice, the other an ‘experienced’ voice.” These voices come together in a dance that poses a question and then tries to answer it. As Eileen Pollack says in Creative Nonfiction, “a question implies movement. You start in ignorance and end in knowledge” (25). This “process of discovery,” Pollack continues, “with all its frustration and suspense, often provides the very backbone of the essay” (27). This question and then this process of discovery, is so important because it is the connection between the author’s personal experience, the memoir itself, and the reader, which is at the heart of creative nonfiction’s appeal and its healing power—for both writer and reader.
In her article, “Research and Creative Nonfiction: Writing So the Seams Don’t Show,” Mimi Schwartz discusses a fundamental requirement of good creative nonfiction writing. The title indicates the need to seamlessly blend researched material (such as observations, interviews, documented information, photographs, etc.) with subjective observations (memories, reflections, and imagination). By adding the subjective to the objective, Schwartz says it “complicates and expands our understanding of truth in ways that objective reportage and analysis do not” (48). Ultimately, this has the effect of letting the reader “feel the knowing –not just intellectually, but in the gut” (48).
CONCLUSION
One of the most influential texts I’ve had the privilege of reading is Dr. Cumberland’s article, “Crossing Over: Writing the Autistic Memoir.” In this article I found myself relating to women who have had and who have written about having autistic children. I don’t have an autistic child. But I am a woman, and I do have a child with OCD, and I do have a child who is severely LD in reading and writing, and I do have two other children, and I am trying to exist in a society that has in large part created a set of requirement that are quite simply impossible to adhere to.
Dr. Cumberland’s article clearly articulated the power of writing and the power of reading creative nonfiction. It is this psychology that we all respond to/respond within. As a student who feels the full growth and learning from this degree program, I have to acknowledge the driving force that sits within me and will be within me as I leave this program and move forward with my education, my career, my life. It is for this reason that I close this prospectus with Cumberland’s closing statements from her article:
It is all too easy for us to stay on our own side of the fence, trapped on our own soil, either high up in towers and ready to shoot at those who cross over, or on the other side of the fence, fearful of life on the other side. There often are no happy endings, only daily struggles. And those stories, the stories of daily, never-ending struggles, matter too, even if they do not always fit the pattern of the salvation story our society craves. Perhaps it might be better to ask why those salvation stories are so much in demand, why those are the texts so often written, when in reality those stories are the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps it would be better to focus more on our definition of what it means to be human than to create texts that all have the same endings. (196)
And I agree. I believe the answer to this question lies within the vast number of creative nonfiction texts that are out there available to us, an insight into the human condition and the human psyche. As Francois Mauriac says, “Each of us is like a desert, and a literary work is like a cry from the desert, or like a pigeon let loose with a message in its claws, or like a bottle thrown into the sea. The point is: To be heard—even if by one single person” (as qtd in Calkins 15). Creative nonfiction holds the moments and experiences that are a part of who we are, a record of the truth: our art, our skills, our suffering and struggles, and our hearts and passions. For too long my truth has sat in an unnatural silence; but now I will find the wings of my childhood-self and once again find the courage to take flight into the uncertainties of the night air, using the stars as my guide, and finding delight in the fear of flying boldly into the unknown.
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Creative Nonfiction Thesis Prospectus
Director: Dr. Debra Cumberland
Thesis Committee: Dr. Debra Cumberland, Dr. James Armstrong, & Dr. Gary Eddy
Thesis Title: “We Owned the Dirt”
April 2013
PROCLAMATION OF THESIS
It is my intention to write a creative nonfiction thesis as part of my master’s program in English Literature and Language. I will be writing in the sub-genre of memoir, reflecting upon observations and reminiscences. Author Lucy Calkins says, “In order to write memoir, we need to see that literature is made out of the everyday stuff of our lives” (The Art of Teaching Writing 399). In this manner, the content of my memoir will focus specifically on various moments within my childhood. The earliest part of my remembered childhood was spent on the dirty and crime ridden streets of North Minneapolis. When I was between the ages of seven and eight, my parents traded this unloving concrete world for the open arms of nature herself by buying an unchartered hill in rural Wisconsin. They scrambled to build us a home—the old fashioned way: with their hands and by the sweat on their brow. They moved us smack into the heart of the natural world—in the honor and likeness of Thoreau: in the woods, deliberately sucking the marrow from life. The tentative title of my work is “We Owned the Dirt,” which eludes to the humble beginnings from which I came.
FOCUS
I was born in Minneapolis on the unusually cold night of December 28th, 1975. I came early into this world; too excited to live to wait another two weeks to be born. Not long after my birth my father decided he didn’t want me or my sister or our mother anymore. Nearly two years later, just before Christmas, as we all waited for him to join us at my mom’s parent’s home in Sherman, Texas, he called her from Minnesota to say he wasn’t coming and that, in fact, he was never coming. My grandpa’s response was to ask my mom how she’d “managed to blow that one.” My mother looked up at age 24 and realized that she was stuck at her parents with the two of us kids, no money, no husband, and very little hope.
Two years later, strapping a mattress to the roof of her car, we found ourselves living in Minneapolis once again, my mom trying to support us by working at the Discovery Center—a daycare center. It was here that she met the man who would become my father in less than twelve months’ time. He was the son of a stiff-backed family from Hinsdale, Illinois, and the latest of a string of men in his family to graduate from Harvard; though, unlike his father, he wanted simply to be a farmer and work with children. He was living his life wading through a thick murky marsh of failure and disappointment. Their meeting, conception of my little sister, and marriage came fast into my life. Soon their struggles were united into one struggle and us kids were along for the ride.
We lived in North Minneapolis and across the street from the KFC that offered an open door to the gun man who shot 13 people who thought they were just going out for a special meal that night. All around us women were being beaten, drugs passed between hands without any effort or attempt to conceal. Alcohol kissed their lips while whispering lies and pulling the trigger of their anger, spewing out dirt and filth on the streets, yards, and back alleyways. These were the very places where I would wander as a young child. This filth is a symbolic reminder of it all. Our poverty status helped to remind us that we belonged right where we were. My soul-searching father and my empty and lost mother finally packed our car and drove us out of the dirt and grudge of the city and into a new life that offered none of our previous threats but presented a whole new set of challenges and fears. They bought a hill in Ettrick, Wisconsin, and set out to “go to the woods to live deliberately” as they felt their hearts compelled them to do. We leaped from razor’s edge to barbed wire.
Climbing over and crawling under this barbed wire, from the age of seven to ten, I grew up running through the woods, chasing fish down the creek, and wondering if anyone would ever be able to count all the stars in the endless sky. Out here the realities of North Minneapolis were invisible and only existed in our memories, like the visible moon at noon-day. For a while we lived in a small one room hut-like-house made out of asphalt-impregnated fiberboard board. We had no bathroom, other than the five-gallon bucket that stood fifty feet into the woods from the back of our little house. We had no running water and our electricity came from a single power cord that ran along the field from an electric box and into our home. We ate from the earth and when that didn’t provide enough, our neighbors offered their surplus garden produce. I played like a child while the sounds of hammers and saws competed with the natural sounds that floated in the air and came from woods. Piles of lumber, and my parents’ stressed, worn-out faces lit the backdrop interfering with the soft movement of the rolling hills and the tree lines that edged the horizon.
I grew up here: first, on the inner city streets of Minneapolis and then, in the woods—always poor, always questioning: wondering and wandering.
METAMORPHISIS
I was first inspired to write down the experiences of my childhood when I was a part of Dr. Debra Cumberland’s “Advanced Creative Nonfiction” class. It was here that I read such works as Cheri Register’s Packing House Daughter and Berry Estabrook’s Tomatoland. These pieces, alongside the various essay-length pieces of creative nonfiction that she assigned that semester, revealed the possibilities and potential that awaited should I dare to expose the radical truths of my childhood. The thought of using the rhetorical devices that are employed in the creation of creative writing as the means and method of sharing my experiences—these truths—with others was more than intriguing to me: it was inspiring. This is when I decided that I, too, had something to share that others could find comforting, informative, or simply interesting.
Herman Melville says, “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” My memoir will expose those childhood experiences that are responsible for haunting my dreams at night and flooding my conscious thoughts with memories and emotions I’ve never been able to shake. Those experiences are in part responsible for creating the person I am today. They have guided me through my life in a way that, more often than not, has eluded my understanding. Why do I linger in these memories as much as I do? Why do these memories creep through my veins and remain alive in my senses? Why did my parents make the decisions that they did, which invariably lead to a childhood lived in such extreme environments and circumstances? How do I really feel about it? And to what degree has my childhood had an impact on my adult life—for good and for bad? It is because of all these lingering questions that I have chosen to take on the challenge of writing a creative nonfiction thesis. As I learned in Dr. Cumberland’s class, the process of writing creative nonfiction can be very enlightening and lead to self-discovery in a way that I hope answers a few of the questions I carry around with me.
Writing in the genre of creative nonfiction will enable me to expose the details of my childhood’s minutia while doing so in a creative way, a way that allows me to form a common connection with my readers. I will do this through memoir’s first person narrative and by using a collage structure. Through collage, I will unfold a complex and unusual set of experiences independent of one another and yet woven together through reoccurring themes and motifs in such a way as to reveal the common psychology behind an adolescent vision, comprehension, and adaptation, as well as how that then translates to the adult psyche. Ultimately, I will attempt to uncover how one’s search for individuality and self-worth is found through the process of unscrambling experiences and understanding their purpose: such is the process of writing creative nonfiction and the purpose of reading creative nonfiction. Melville once wrote, “Life is a voyage that is homeward bound.” And in light of Melville’s words, I will be specifically attempting to discover whether I lost myself in the forests of my childhood home or whether I actually found myself there.” Thus, the content of my thesis will explore common emotions –shared by millions— which unfold out of my personal story.
IN DEFENSE OF CREATIVE NONFICTION
Creative nonfiction is a conglomerate of a truthful occurrence told in a fictional way. Creative nonfiction includes a plethora of variations as Sue William Silverman outlines in her article, “The Meandering River: An Overview of the Subgenres of Creative Nonfiction.” Herein, Silverman uses the allegory of a “long river with many moods and currents” to help us visualize the nature of creative nonfiction. Likewise she refers to the subgenres as “port of calls,” specifically naming seven: biography, autobiography, immersion, memoir, personal essay, meditative essay, and the lyric essay. Though these “ports” can be categorized, Silverman points out, “because this river is a continuum, we’ll also find that the ports of call are sometimes so close together that it’s difficult to tell where one ends and the other starts.” This blending or blurring of the edges of each category permits an artistic freedom to the writer, who is able to create collages of methods in order to present his or her story in the most effect way they would like.
Based on this definition, I feel like the genre of creative nonfiction is one of the most important genres in the literary field. The potential for personal expression and teaching for a writer of creative nonfiction seems limitless. As Dr. Cumberland says, “Writing is a way of entering into the human experience, understanding the self, and, for many, a way to heal” (“Crossing Over” 183). Additionally, the potential for entertainment and growth is endless for the reader of creative nonfiction—and, subsequently, the writer as well.
The key for bringing the author and reader together is in the existence of a question in the text that the author is attempting to answer. Silverman notes that there should be two voices: “an ‘innocent’ voice, the other an ‘experienced’ voice.” These voices come together in a dance that poses a question and then tries to answer it. As Eileen Pollack says in Creative Nonfiction, “a question implies movement. You start in ignorance and end in knowledge” (25). This “process of discovery,” Pollack continues, “with all its frustration and suspense, often provides the very backbone of the essay” (27). This question and then this process of discovery, is so important because it is the connection between the author’s personal experience, the memoir itself, and the reader, which is at the heart of creative nonfiction’s appeal and its healing power—for both writer and reader.
In her article, “Research and Creative Nonfiction: Writing So the Seams Don’t Show,” Mimi Schwartz discusses a fundamental requirement of good creative nonfiction writing. The title indicates the need to seamlessly blend researched material (such as observations, interviews, documented information, photographs, etc.) with subjective observations (memories, reflections, and imagination). By adding the subjective to the objective, Schwartz says it “complicates and expands our understanding of truth in ways that objective reportage and analysis do not” (48). Ultimately, this has the effect of letting the reader “feel the knowing –not just intellectually, but in the gut” (48).
CONCLUSION
One of the most influential texts I’ve had the privilege of reading is Dr. Cumberland’s article, “Crossing Over: Writing the Autistic Memoir.” In this article I found myself relating to women who have had and who have written about having autistic children. I don’t have an autistic child. But I am a woman, and I do have a child with OCD, and I do have a child who is severely LD in reading and writing, and I do have two other children, and I am trying to exist in a society that has in large part created a set of requirement that are quite simply impossible to adhere to.
Dr. Cumberland’s article clearly articulated the power of writing and the power of reading creative nonfiction. It is this psychology that we all respond to/respond within. As a student who feels the full growth and learning from this degree program, I have to acknowledge the driving force that sits within me and will be within me as I leave this program and move forward with my education, my career, my life. It is for this reason that I close this prospectus with Cumberland’s closing statements from her article:
It is all too easy for us to stay on our own side of the fence, trapped on our own soil, either high up in towers and ready to shoot at those who cross over, or on the other side of the fence, fearful of life on the other side. There often are no happy endings, only daily struggles. And those stories, the stories of daily, never-ending struggles, matter too, even if they do not always fit the pattern of the salvation story our society craves. Perhaps it might be better to ask why those salvation stories are so much in demand, why those are the texts so often written, when in reality those stories are the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps it would be better to focus more on our definition of what it means to be human than to create texts that all have the same endings. (196)
And I agree. I believe the answer to this question lies within the vast number of creative nonfiction texts that are out there available to us, an insight into the human condition and the human psyche. As Francois Mauriac says, “Each of us is like a desert, and a literary work is like a cry from the desert, or like a pigeon let loose with a message in its claws, or like a bottle thrown into the sea. The point is: To be heard—even if by one single person” (as qtd in Calkins 15). Creative nonfiction holds the moments and experiences that are a part of who we are, a record of the truth: our art, our skills, our suffering and struggles, and our hearts and passions. For too long my truth has sat in an unnatural silence; but now I will find the wings of my childhood-self and once again find the courage to take flight into the uncertainties of the night air, using the stars as my guide, and finding delight in the fear of flying boldly into the unknown.
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