Lisa Zeidner teaches a graduate creative writing course on the Camden Campus where all talk is personal. Her class focuses on the craft of constructing memoir; so for about three hours each week students open up their lives to their professor and each other.
Drunken fathers, dating nightmares, the death of a loved one. Nothing is verboten. “People don’t hide because what they talk about is really happening to them – marriages, childrearing, and alcoholism. It gets real, real fast, and I find that refreshing,” said Zeidner, a prolific writer and professor of English in Camden.
This fall a group of 14 students spent the semester putting words to paper on aspects of their diverse lives. Essays ranged from a police chief’s recollections of a grisly murder that continues to haunt him to a nude model’s perception of her body to a daughter of Turkish immigrants’ defiance of her father’s expectations. Other topics included how a black man came to terms with his own racial profiling of Arabs and a gay man grappling with dating someone not fully out of the closet.
Essays are read aloud in class and “workshopped,” which means that the entire class discusses the piece of writing, with the author generally waiting until the piece has been thoroughly reviewed before speaking. Classmates point out with candor the strengths and weaknesses of each essay, regardless of how tender the topic. Is the imagery precise? Does the dialogue seem authentic? Is the vantage point consistent throughout the piece?
According to Zeidner, a personal essayist faces the same technical challenges as a fiction writer, such as pacing, voice, and characterization. “Because the material is real, it’s harder for the writer to separate from the protagonist to control the voice,” Zeidner said. “The work is harder to critique, too. This group of students was nice, but it can get ugly. With fiction it’s easy to say, ‘I don’t like the protagonist,’ but it’s hard to say, ‘you seem like a jerk in this essay.’”
Fashioning her own life into essay form is something Zeidner has done successfully. Her personal essays address more general subject matter, such as parenting or sex, through experiences that are distinctly hers, like her lecherous undergraduate professors or her prom date with a Russian spy’s son.
Because Zeidner’s work has been published so extensively she is able to offer students key tips to help them navigate the publishing process. The market for personal essays and memoir is a growing one: Popular magazines like Oprah and Ladies Home Journal will pay top dollar for creative nonfiction and a first-time author of a book of memoir will earn nearly double that of a first-time fiction writer. Some students in the essay course have ambitions for submitting their works for publication, while others are content with writing for their own pleasure.
Michele Robinson, a former nutritionist enrolled in the Camden program, had wanted to take the personal essay class for years, but feared revealing herself, having her writing criticized, and “writing about issues that took me decades to sort out emotionally.” Nevertheless, she didn’t want to miss the opportunity to study with Zeidner. In the class Robinson wrote about her husband’s cancer, family relationships, and growing up and now living in Moorestown. “I would like to publish my work, but we learned that good writing requires hard work and lots of revision,” she said.
Other students like Malikah Goss, whose forearm is tattooed with the words, “Not all who wonder are lost,” has had her fiction published in several online creative writing journals.
“In the personal essay genre you want to stay true to the facts … all the while knowing that memories are fluid and sometimes fallible, while maintaining the elements that make a story work,” Goss said. “Fiction is a much better fit for me because the freedom to create the world and characters is invaluable.”
The process of writing about one’s life came naturally to David Solomon. “I’ve been blogging every day, so writing about my life is a mode I’m already in,” he said. Through livejournal.com., Solomon posts his daily thoughts on just about anything from news happenings to the Mets to a funny youtube item.
A proposed Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) program to be offered for the first time on the campus in fall 2007 will enhance creative writing in Camden. Previously, students could opt for a creative writing track, which required four three-credit writing courses and a thesis. Creative nonfiction students would be able to enroll in an advanced personal essay course that would require them to produce book-length manuscripts.
The Camden MFA program will offer a personal essay course each semester, though Zeidner will continue teaching personal essay for both graduate and undergraduate students. In addition to poet J.T. Barbarese, an associate professor of English, and novelist Lauren Grodstein, an assistant professor of English, both of whom also publish personal essays, Camden’s MFA program also will be taught by adjunct faculty, such as Lise Funderburg, whose memoir about her family will be published next spring.
Zeidner is the author of four novels, most recently, Layover, and two books of poems, one of which, Pocket Sundial, won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, Slate, GQ, and many other publications. She directs both the annual spring and summer writers’ conferences at Camden.