Trading Stories with a Sick Friend

Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf 

I have been reporting on the salons we have been holding to honor my friend and former colleague at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Alan Paskow. Alan has an aggressive cancer that has moved into his lungs, and while the outlook is not good, he and his wife Jackie (also a former colleague) have found comfort in the periodic gatherings of St. Mary’s faculty to discuss literature, philosophy, movies, and other subjects.

Ten days ago we had our final of three session devoted to creativity. This one was headed by my colleague in the English Department Jennifer Cognard-Black. Jennifer, who teaches fiction writing as well as Victorian literature, had us read a fascinating essay by Virginia Woolf entitled “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (you can read it here).

In the work, Woolf describes leaving her home and venturing out into London to buy a pencil. But what starts off as an innocent enough expedition becomes a journey of the mind as Woolf starts imagining the stories that lurk behind windows that she passes and scraps of conversations that she overhears. Her novelist’s imagination begins to take over so that there in an increasing divergence between the outer world that she sees and the rich world that may lie behind it.

The essay served as a starting point for our own creative endeavors. Jennifer had each of us recall and write down a vivid incident that we remembered, preferably from our childhoods although it didn’t have to be. She also had us draw a map of the location where the incident happened.

Then we passed the map and story to someone else. The new writer was to take what we had composed and fill out the story from his or her imagination.

As it happened, I got Alan’s story and he got mine. By the time he had completed my account, the main character looked nothing like me but it did look a lot like Alan. I diverged even further, creating an elaborate interior drama for Alan’s roommate, who played only a bit part in Alan’s story.

What was the point of the exercise? Well, first of all it was an effective prompt to get us all writing. Many in the group are not comfortable writing creatively, but this particular exercise seems to circumvent fears.

It also dramatized for us the way that we always see others through our own lenses and are seen in turn through theirs. Yet rather than feeling my individuality violated, I was fascinated by what I saw. The exercise made my life seem a lot more malleable than I thought. A story that seemed fixed suddenly blossomed with new options and perspectives.

The story was about an incident I regretted. When I was 9 or 10 and playing with my best friend Chris Mayfield, I tore down a structure of branches and sticks that we were building (without her permission) because I thought it could be done more quickly and efficiently with boards in the yard. My alternative took the magic out of our building and she was furious.

In Alan’s version of my story, however, I was a craftsman with a vision that was uniquely my own and that I was determined to follow regardless of what others felt. I have always admired Alan both his fierce independent streak and his love of finely crafted objects, some of which he builds himself (especially furniture). The two came together in the new story. So I didn’t care that my story had been, as it were, high jacked. Instead, I loved this new amalgam of Robin and Alan that an act of the imagination had created.

The exercise captured the spirit of our salon. We have come to St. Mary’s from all over the United States and beyond, and out of these happenstance encounters has grown a powerful community with a life of its own. So here we were, creating stories made out of happenchance encounters with other stories and so, in a sense reenacting a community where we are uniquely ourselves even as we influence and are influenced by each other. When we read our creations aloud to each other, amidst laughter and enjoyment, it was as though we got to see this community formation process at work.

Influencing and being influenced has certainly marked my individual friendship with Alan. I am a WASP raised in Tennessee by Midwestern parents while Alan is a New York Jew about 10 years older. Yet because we have been thrown together for almost 30 years, our thinking has converged in some remarkable ways, especially in the way that we both think that literature can be a shaping force in one’s life. Alan has pursued this line of inquiry in his book The Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation (Cambridge University Press, 2008) whereas I do it through this blog and in a book that I am circulating at the moment. As in Jennifer’s exercise, our stories are linked yet individual, with neither subsuming the other.

Our next session is going to be more serious: we will be discussing a philosophic treatise on pain–an all too relevant subject, unfortunately (although Alan has still mercifully escaped severe suffering).  Creativity has been a good place to be for the summer, however.

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