Jennifer Denrow’s Lyric Essay Workshop was my first class here at Lighthouse, my first writing course after my MFA, and exactly what I needed after a long workshop-hiatus. In class, the same question kept bubbling up: what makes an essay lyric? I don’t know that we were ever able come to a stable conclusion on that one, except by maybe that the exact quality that makes an essay lyric is also the thing that makes it tricky to nail down. Jennifer’s curiosity for both the form and her students’ work made that mystery an exciting, open space to empty our own ideas and obsessions into.
That same sense of curiosity is the impetus behind Jennifer’s brand new course this upcoming session here at Lighthouse, Documentary Writing: Prose and Poetic of Investigation. I spoke with Jennifer recently about her plan and purpose for this class.
First and foremost—what do you mean when you talk about “documentary writing?”
I think of documentary writing as writing that collects and arranges material (both written and visual) in an effort to tell a story about a particular person, place, or event. In documentary writing, our stories become archives. They hold not only our images, emotions, and observations, but also archival material that occurs outside of the text the writer is composing. For instance, in Sikelianos’s You Animal Machine (which we’ll look at in the workshop), she brings into the text letters, receipts, newspaper clippings, maps, etc. I’m fond of this gesture because it contextualizes, as well as adds texture to, the story being told.
What changes when you decide to document something in lyric or creative form, opposed to more traditional, journalistic forms?
A particular kind of attention takes place in the act of collecting and arranging these materials, and in the act of writing in response to, or alongside, these documents. With the knowledge that these documents will share space with fragments of poems, collections of images, and personal memories, the writer is constantly thinking about how to curate the space of the story he/she is telling.
It seems like documentary writing is growing in the literary community, with books like Citizen by Claudia Rankine and Argonauts by Maggie Nelson winning big prizes and receiving national press. What do you think makes documentary writing so hot right now?
I think we’re moving toward a more intuitive and emotional relationship with the world and the people that are in the world with us. The way we construct and evaluate truth is part of that—I think we’re more invested in emotional truth—what something feels like when it happens, as opposed to the straight facts of the event. In my mind, documentary writing is part of this somehow—it’s a way of recording and reconstructing events that allows factual and emotional material to occupy equal space in the telling. We also live in a time when we are constantly being recorded and documented, so this kind of writing feels like a natural extension of that. Documentation is no longer strictly in the hands of journalists; there is more transparency because more perspectives are being represented.
What are you working on these days? Would you consider it documentary writing?
What I'm working on right now is a book called Autocartography (it's about mapping the self). I'm really interested in place and our relationships to place, so the pieces are titled "New Orleans," "Seattle," "Bolinas," etc. I like to try and record my relationship to place. I feel like my writing has always done that--I have two long pieces about California, and I think of these as records of my emotional and psychological relationship with California. I have a pretty liberal understanding of the concept of documenting and making records. It's not strictly about fact collecting, but includes what is also immaterial--how emotional states become landmarks and how this creates interference for our experiences in the physical world.
And lastly, what would you like future students to know about your upcoming workshop?
I would like them to know how excited I am to talk about what it means to place documents next to poems and prose, how it’s done, and why it’s important. I’m excited to look at some of the work that falls under the category of documentary poetics and documentary writing and discuss what these piece do and how they do it. I just received a new journal today called ATTN. It, in the words of the people who made it, “is an event-based journal. Twice a year, we ask poets to document whatever it is that has their attention on a particular day (poems, notes, sketches, collage, reviews, screen grabs, etc).” I’m excited to talk about this and so many other things!
Jennifer Denrow is the author of California (Four Way Books, 2011). Her chapbooks include How We Know it is That (Horse Less Press, 2014) and From California, On (Brave Men Press, 2012). Her writing has appeared in journals such as Gulf Coast, jubilat, Alaska Quarterly Review, Octopus, and Poets.Org. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Denver and is the recipient of a fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Denrow's workshop, Documentary Writing: Prose and Poetics of Investigation, starts Wednesday, 10/21/2015.
