Sarah Vowell and Creative Nonfiction

The topic of my only senior-level English course this semester was Creative Nonfiction (as opposed to the dreaded semester-long study of Milton’s Paradise Lost). Creative Nonfiction (or CNF as I will call it for the duration of this post) is characterized by the use of literary techniques to tell compelling stories that are factually sound. Think Fitzgerald/ Orwell/ Huxley/ Bronte/ Austen/ etc. meets journalism meets the funnies. CNF is a really awesome genre, and one that seems to be overlooked quite a bit by the average reader, including myself.

My personal copies of Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes and Take the Cannoli.

In the class we covered two authors: David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell. I do not care for David Sedaris’ writing. It makes me sad. Which is very distressing, seeing as his stories are “funny.” Apparently. I don’t see it. However, he is one of the most famous CNF authors, and so some form of homage must be paid to his writing. You can find out more about David Sedaris at the Barclay Agency’s Bio of Mr. Sedaris and you can find his books at David Sedaris Books. Rather than give you all a survey of the three books we covered- Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Take the Cannoli, and Unfamiliar Fishes– I am just going to talk about the last two, because in my opinion, they’re much better than the first.

First, a little background on Sarah Vowell. From what I’ve gathered from her writing, she grew up in Oklahoma and Montana, has a twin sister, loves music, hates guns, and is an all around nerd (I am almost completely certain she and I would be friends if we ever had the chance). She’s done lots of radio journalism for NPR, has written a fair bit, and oh yeah- she was the voice of Violet Incredible in Pixar’s The Incredibles.

Could Sarah Vowell be the epitome of nerdy writers everywhere? I think it’s very possible. Is she one of the most awesome writers ever? Sort of, yeah.

There are a bunch of things that make Vowell’s writing fantabulous. A lot of the short stories in Take the Cannoli are hilarious. In fact, my favorite funny piece in the book is the very first one, called “Shooting Dad.” (When I read the essay, I was sorely tempted to call my parents–who spent at least an hour last Christmas telling me I was silly for not liking guns–and read the story aloud to them. Alas, I did not.) Mixed in with the funnies are some truly sobering tales such as “What I See When I Look at the Face on the $20 Bill,” which explains the Trail of Tears. And it is in this story, as well as in “Michigan and Wacker” and the longer, Unfamiliar Fishes, that Vowell’s love of history emerges.

The way Sarah Vowell discusses history is the way I think of history- in a web. For ease of communication and argument, most will draw history as a line, where one event leads to another to another to another. But the truth of the matter is that history has so many such lines that to describe it as one is a great disservice to the entire field. The beauty of Vowell’s writing is that she successfully portrays the web-version of history without making it confusing. For instance, in Unfamiliar Fishes, which is a CNF history of Hawaii, she goes on a pages-long aside about the nineteenth century whaling business in order to add context to the missionaries’ tasks in the islands. She references an early twenty first century supreme court hearing in the same page that she discusses a property dispute during the 1850s (that resulted from capitalism making its way to the island) and the tendency of lawyers to use the word “repugnant.” And despite how random some of the asides may seem, she always discusses pertinent information, and she always shows the connection between events.

A lot of Vowell’s success at weaving these timelines can be accredited to the CNF genre. Because of its hybrid nature of portraying truly factual information in a literary manner, creative nonfiction is open to a melding of worlds between rhetoric and pretty much any other topic you can think of. So while Vowell’s writing is entertaining, it is also informative, especially when discussing historical matters. There are other CNF pieces out there that have more to do with science (The Hot Zone, for instance, follows the progression of the ebola virus). I’m sure there are some that have to do with music, others with art, and so on.

All of these wonderful reasons aside, Vowell is one of my favorite writers because her nerdiness brought out a bit of my own…

This is a time-web I drew as part of my presentation on Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes. It shows a half dozen or so events, representing how the histories of France (line beginning on far left), England (second line beginning on far left), and the United States (third line) intersected with and influenced the history of Hawaii.

It Stops Here

Wendell Berry is a curmudgeonly tobacco farmer from Kentucky, and an essayist, a poet, and a novelist. His book, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, is one of the required readings for my Ethics class. The book contains a collection of essays as its chapters, covering topics such as conservation, preservation of local economies, “The Problem of Tobacco,” and pacifism. I’m actually not done with the book, yet, because of the reading schedule for my class (I tried once doing most of the reading for all of my classes before mid-semester; to say that experiment was a failure would be a severe understatement). But the book asserts its invaluable worth before the first chapter, in the preface entitled “The Joy of Sales Resistance.” In this preface, Berry highlights a few “truths.” Here are my favorites:

VI. The so-called humanities probably do not exist. But if they do, they are useless. But whether that exist or not or are useful or not, they can sometimes be made to support a career.

VII. Literacy does not involve knowing the meanings of words, or learning grammar, or reading books.

VIII. The sign of exceptionally smart people is that they speak a language that is intelligible only to other people in their “field” or only to themselves. This is very impressive and is known as “professionalism.”

One of the reasons I love Mr. Berry’s writing is his ability to talk about problems without doing too much fingerpointing, which I consider an immense and impressive accomplishment. Why? Because there’s an underlying chastisement in every chapter, expressly for American society. But Berry somehow manages to lead his readers to ideas, rather than smacking us upside the head with his assertions. He avoids complete alienation through his rather frequent use of irony, which can be seen above in the three truths I included. Berry seems to favor a particular form of irony in which a clearly untrue statement is made in order to draw attention to its counterpart. For example, the seventh truth which directly contradicts the definition of “literacy” brings more attention to the true definition of literacy by making the reader ask questions such as “Why does literacy not involve these things?” and “What is literacy, if not these things?” Some writers hand us information on a silver platter; Berry helps us search out his points.

Berry makes lots of overt points, like the seventh truth about literacy. But he also makes several buried points that serve as themes for the collection. The overarching theme that most resonates with me is the idea of accountability, which is defined as being “an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or account for one’s actions.” Mr. Berry approaches accountability as a farmer. He discusses how the idea of a “global” economy only helps big business, and how it harms local farmers and third world farmers by pitching them against each other, robbing local farmers of a market and third world farmers of a product. And after explaining this problem, he explains how normal people like you and me can oppose such a system by refusing to buy anything that isn’t grown locally (find out more about where your food comes from at the USDA’s overview of imported items). The idea isn’t that we’re directly stealing food off people’s plates, but rather that we can assume responsibility for stopping such theft through being conscientious consumers. Kind of like Truman’s “The Buck Stops Here” but instead… “The Mango Stops Here.”

About the same time that I was really getting into Berry’s writing, I was also reading Sarah Vowell’s Take the Cannoli. I came across this quote in her essay “What I See When I Look at the Face on the $20 Bill:”

World history has been a bloody business from the get-go, but the nausea we’re suffering standing on the broken promises at Ross’s Landing is peculiar to a democracy. Because in a democracy, we’re all responsible for our government’s actions, because we’re responsible for electing the government. Even if we, the people, don’t do anything wrong, we put the wrongdoers in power.

Vowell, in a moment of perfect brevity, states what Berry discusses, hints at, and dances around in his entire book. Because we’re in a “democracy” (yes, I know, our government is closer to being a republic because of the presence of a senate, house of representatives, and so on), we’re responsible for all of the mishaps that occur. When everything falls apart, we have a responsibility to say that It Stops Here. But in my experience, most Americans are more comfortable pointing fingers at the Senate, or President Obama, or the Tea Party, or the Democrats, or the Republicans.

I think we can all agree that the government shutdown was ridiculous. But rather than complaining about how our government is broken, or how politicians are acting immaturely, it may be time for us to take a second look at how we act. Because, like Ms. Vowell said, we put these people in charge. They didn’t storm the capitol. They were elected in by us.

It’s about time we assume some responsibility for where our country is headed. It’s about time we become accountable.