Advice for Writers: March 2024

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Writing a Memoir about Someone I Hardly Knew

I recently published the memoir Hugging My Father’s Ghost, about my dad, the writer Lee Rogow. The biggest challenge I faced in writing this book was that I hardly knew my father. Lee Rogow was a widely published fiction writer, drama critic for the Hollywood Reporter, glamorous man-about-town in Manhattan of the 1950s, captain of a submarine-chaser in World War II—and he died tragically in a plane crash when I was only three years old.

Lee Rogow at his typewriter

I have only one memory of my dad, his making what he called “mish-mosh soup” in the kitchen, a blend of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle and Campbell’s Tomato Soup. Not only did I lack recollections of my dad, but by the time I started writing my memoir, those who knew my father best had passed away long ago.

I realized that in order to assemble a three-dimensional picture of my father, I would have to create a collage of different materials, many of them not traditionally part of memoir writing. In fact, the books that provided the best template for Hugging My Father’s Ghost were not works of nonfiction at all, but literary fictions.

I borrowed liberally from two authors whose writings I love: W.G. Sebald and Manuel Puig. Puig, in books like Heartbreak Tango and Kiss of the Spider Woman, stretched the limits of the novel by inserting other kinds of text into his narratives. Puig invented newspaper articles, police reports, summaries of schlocky Hollywood flicks, diaries, and letters. All of that went into his books. W.G. Sebald also used collages in his fictions. One of my favorites is the “Ambros Adelwarth” section of Sebald’s book The Emigrants, about a star-crossed gay uncle who moved from Germany to the United States. Sebald has a way of suddenly plunking a vintage photograph or postcard down into his prose that I find absolutely haunting. Both Sebald and Puig may have been influenced by earlier experiments in fiction by John Dos Passos, including his U.S.A. trilogy of novels, which feature a mélange of newspaper headlines, vignettes, and “newsreels,” as well as more traditional narrative.

In my memoir about my dad, I used all of the techniques I borrowed (stole?) from Puig and Sebald. Instead of collaging invented material, though, I used documentary material. My memoir includes a mix of my father’s World War II diary, actual magazine clippings, old family photos, a letter my mom wrote my dad after his death, and writings by my father that he never published. Carbon copies of his typewritten manuscripts sat moldering in my sister’s basement for many, many decades before I chose many of them for this memoir. (My dad died in 1955.)

All those puzzle pieces helped create a more complete picture of my father. But while I was fitting those pieces together, voices kept appearing in my head. Most of the time, hearing voices is not a good thing. But for a writer, it’s the best thing. Writers have to pay the closest attention to those voices, and build a comfortably furnished living room in their thoughts for those voices so they will declaim, make jokes, argue with one another, and lament. My father became a character in conversations that I could hear in my head, and some of those conversations were with me. I also included those scenes in my memoir. There, I drew more on the techniques of theater.

So, Hugging My Father’s Ghost turned out to be a hybrid memoir, a memoir that mixes genres. The hybrid memoir is something of a trendy term right now. I didn’t set out to do anything experimental when I wrote this book, though. I was just trying to make something with very few ingredients to work with, like when you have to cook dinner with only what’s left in the fridge. I hope readers find this book tasty. Even though there is sharp tragedy in the memoir, my father was a very funny man, and I could not have created a true portrait of him without a lot of laugh-out-loud humor. Given the emotional charge of the material about my dad, writing this memoir was certainly the most cathartic experience I’ve ever had as a writer.

Publisher’s webpage for Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Interview with Poet Patricia Spears Jones: The Beloved Community

Poet Patricia Spears Jones published her collection The Beloved Community in 2023. Here she speaks about the book and her path as a writer.

Patricia Spears Jones, photo by Marcia E. Wilson

Zack Rogow: Many of your poems are sparked by chance encounters in an urban area, often New York City. What types of encounters are most likely to generate a poem for you?

Patricia Spears Jones: The encounters could be a phrase overheard on the sidewalk, the weather, a gallery exhibition, a movie scene, another poet’s work, the scent of the subway or a perfume counter, the taste of whiskey, music—especially live performances, a garment’s color and cut. Basically, even with my diva cane! I am a flaneuse, as the poet Scott Hightower once described me.

Q. There are several elegies in The Beloved Community: for Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, for Aretha Franklin, for pianist Geri Allen, and others. How does a poet make the loss of an individual life resonate for readers?

I think that one of the great gifts that poets give is to make the loss of an individual resonate—whether they are historic figures, or celebrities, as listed in your question, or a family member or friend. Thulani Davis said that poets sing people into this world and sing them out. Sometimes it takes very long to do so—I’ve been thinking about the life and very much the death of Fred Hampton since I was in my teens. His death is mentioned in an early poem of mine. “Glad All Over,” but I wasn’t able to write the poem about him in The Beloved Community until 2021. So finding that language took like 50 years. As for the Gerri Allen lyric, that was almost sent—I had recently seen her play in a lovely park in Sugar Hill, Harlem, and a year later she passed and I could still see her playing the piano. Each of these poems can only provide a trace of what I was feeling when I wrote them. The hardest was the one for Aretha because I was out of the U.S. when she passed, but it gave me the opportunity to see her globally.

There are also poems in the collection that are a kind of elegy for persons and the place—the persons are Lee Breuer, Steve Cannon, and Hannah Weiner—and the place, the East Village of the 1970s. Lee and the people at Mabou Mines got me to New York City, Steve Cannon introduced me to the “third whirl” poetics, as he called it from his perch on East Third Street, he lived in an actual house! And Hannah Weiner was sort of the older cool poet who seemed to have the strangest and vibrant life—I am sure she was mad, but mad for poetry. She saw WORDS and, in a way, gave all of us permission to delve ever so intensely into WORDS.

Q. The title poem is in a sense an elegy for someone the speaker did not know, the attendant or a customer in a laundromat. The poet just happens to be in the laundromat when another customer sees a flyer for a memorial and realizes someone has died. What inspired you to write about an anonymous person the speaker of the poem seemingly never met or heard of before that incident?

I was inspired by the encounter and the sense of community that the laundromat and indeed any of the laundromats in Brooklyn have. They are places you go to regularly and if you have a routine you see some of the same people maybe twice a month or weekly. People are often talkative or secretive—it’s amazing what some folks don’t want you to see in a laundromat. The workers are often immigrants, English may be their second or third language, sometimes family members join them to clean up. All the while people are washing their clothes. And the workers often post fliers for neighborhood events, so seeing one for a memorial service was a jolt. It is strange I only saw that woman in question just that time, but accidental intimacy happens in neighborhoods where you must go outside your home to do even the most mundane thing, like wash your clothes.

Q. One thing that’s always struck me about your poems is how you can move from what seems almost like a superficial level to such a deep one with just a few words. I’m thinking about the poem “First and last nights in Virginia, January and May 2020,” where you describe shopping in a chain drugstore. Suddenly the last three syllables of the poem turn it into a political manifesto. How do you switch from what seems like an everyday description to something much more significant in only a few words?

It's all in the build-up and I also want to collapse that time in as sharp a way as possible. The year 2020 was just so grim and the sham response from the business community (we need workers to go back to work even as workers were dying) and President Trump worsened the atmosphere. And one of the great things about poetry is when you want to really say it you do it with as few words as possible and each one matters.

Q. You’ve recently received well-deserved recognitions, including being named New York State Poet and the inaugural Lucille Clifton Poetry Chair at the Community of Writers; and winning the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. For many decades, though, you worked without receiving major honors, surprising for an author as accomplished as you. What kept you going all those years when your work was not widely recognized?

I made a serious decision in 1990 to complete my MFA from Vermont College and keep pushing my work because I knew that I had something to say as a poet and I am quite stubborn and proud. For my MFA I was advised by Lynda Hull and Mark Doty, and briefly by the late Belle Waring, and finally David Rivard. I read like 200-300 poetry collections, literary criticism, philosophy, history, etc. And from that I knew that what I was saying and how I was saying it could and should be part of the discourse. As stated, I am quite proud. While my work appeared to be ignored by the various versions of the poetry establishment, I have always had patrons and champions who have found my work to be important and necessary. I am glad they did. It has not been easy and there are days when I wished I had received all this 10 years ago when I was healthier, but better late than never. The Jackson Poetry Prize was a total surprise, but earlier in 1996 when I received an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) I knew that maybe just maybe my poetics was finding readers and a place in what is often called the avant-garde. I do not think of myself as that, but I got to thank Jasper Johns for the FCA funds which allowed me to: a) buy a computer, and b) take a trip to Paris. I don’t usually name drop, but you know what, if I want to I can and that is another way of saying writers, musicians, artists, journalists whom I respect and admire offered me their respect and admiration—that kept me going. And keeps me going.

Patricia Spears Jones’ poetry collection The Beloved Community is published by Copper Canyon Press. Her other books include A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems. She has taught creative writing at Hollins University, Adelphi University, Hunter College, and Barnard College. Jones leads poetry workshops for The Workroom, Hugo House, the Community of Writers, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Gemini Ink, and Brooklyn Poets. She organizes the American Poets Congress and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute.

Zack’s memoir about his father, the writer Lee Rogow: Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies