Clinton Crockett Peters teaches creative writing at Berry College. He is the author of Pandora’s Garden (2018) and Mountain Madness (2021). His writing appears in Best American Essays 2020, Orion, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.
Clinton’s essay “Mid-slope” appears in the Fall 2020 issue of Carve, available here.
Your dad believed his late-blooming sports writer career was part of God’s express plan for his life. You write that “Chosen Ones” in other stories often get bigger, more dramatic tasks than following a football team and writing about it. There’s a contrast between your dad’s faith that his life’s journey was ordained, and your experience as your dad’s illness advanced — i.e., how you stopped believing “resurrection was possible.” How did you retain the truth of your experience while also doing justice to your dad’s belief?
I think by recognizing, on the page, my own arrogance. I’m no believer now, but I’ve mostly dispensed with fingering the falsity of religious beliefs. You have to draw the line somewhere, but for the most part I try to accept humility. No one knows who or what plays the cosmos’ music. And what’s true in my world or my Dad’s world is still true in the sense that we experience it. Ironically, I’ve lost faith in an objective universe.
So, my narrator critiques itself. I use that classic bifurcated narrator: me-then vs. me-now. Me-then experiences the fraught moment; me-now tries to make sense of it. I also held the idea in the back of my head that I was, and maybe still am, totally wrong about everything. Maybe God, whatever that is, wanted my dad to write about college football, sure, why not? Self-skepticism adds more dimensionality to writing I find. I have Michel de Montaigne to thank for that. “Que sais-je?”—his beloved motto, What do I know? If you read enough Montaigne, you learn how aesthetically pleasing and freeing self-doubt can be.
This essay was born out of my first MFA workshop in 2010 with Susan Lohafer at Iowa. She gave this prompt on the first day: “What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?” It’s a great prompt. Commonly, I think Americans read about a narrator’s suffering, which is all good and necessary. But Lohafer was trying to get us to access a less-explored side— the perpetrator, the transgressor. Most writers shy away from these stories/essays because Americans live in a Puritanical nation, and if you’ve done something wrong, you’re imprisoned, canceled, by people, often I find, who are desperately covering their own crimes and darker impulses.
There is this fantastic essay by Sarah Marshall—“The End of Evil” published in The Believer and reprinted in Sarah Weinman’s book Unspeakable Acts (2020)—about how most Americans dehumanize criminals and murderers, yet we have the seeds for horrible acts within us. Most of us are lucky enough to have the mental health, love, emotional support, and financial resources to keep ourselves in check. Those who don’t are not evil, Marshall writes, just human. By definition, there are no inhuman acts.
In 2010, I got a lot of critical feedback about my essay from my cohort, deservedly so. I was too busy trying to be defensive. I’d been struck with the Puritan bug as well. Boy, do I loathe the Puritan strain of America’s DNA. It keeps us from being honest with and about ourselves.
In this essay, you’re a writer sharing how your father (also a writer) lost his ability to write—even to compose sentences. When you excavate some of your dad’s story from his unpublished manuscript, how did you balance these two writers’ voices? How has reading and writing about your dad’s novel shaped the way you think about your own incomplete or unfinished work?
As I mentioned, this essay began in 2010 during my MFA. It then sat around on various laptops for eight years. Occasionally I would fiddle with it. When my dad died, I inherited his unfinished manuscript. It was printed at a Kinko’s, single-sided—thick and heavy, weighty in both hand and psyche. For years, I carried around a lot of guilt about my dad and his novel.
He had asked me to try and publish his novel for him. Which, now that I’m 37 and a bit farther along in the writing world, I realize is a huge ask. I was 22 and knew almost nothing about the publishing world, nor how to edit. I could barely get my own writing together. If he’d asked now, I would help him to do a fairly major rewrite of the novel and submit it to small presses, perhaps even self-publish, especially if all he wanted to do was see it in print. I don’t think back in 2006 self-publishing was as big an industry it is now. I didn’t even know about small presses. My publishing model was still Stephen King, probably the worst publishing model one could have, given his output.
As I got further along in my work and tooled and worked and revised and published, a lot of the guilt started to slide off. It’s a lot of work just to get my own writing, my own voice and vision out into the world. For me, also, getting a PhD was all-important to pinpoint where my voice was in the cacophonous conversation of literature. I had honed my expectations, away from Stephen King to pretty much where I am now: a college professor who publishes in small presses and literary journals. So, by now I could thread my voice with my dad’s because I just knew what I was doing better. There was no easier or less time-consuming way to do this. At 22, this would have been impossible. Guilt made it hard to write about my father. Once that evaporated, I could see our relationship more clearly.
I sometimes tell students to wait to write about themselves. Instead of first trying memoir, turn your narrator’s eye out onto the world and do “research.” Follow rabbit holes, explore curious places and people. Then, once that becomes a bit more comfortable, turn the narrator’s eye and “I” onto the self and memory. That helped me anyway. When I could make sense of something outside my experiences, like rabbit plagues in Australia or kudzu taking over the American South or the Texas snow monkeys, then I could see myself, my father, and our voices, in much the same way I looked at the world: creatures scavenging around for existence.
You write that reaching the mountain peak never “takes [you] away” from your self, but that it’s the mid-slope that moves you the most. You wonder about the mid-slope of your dad’s life, too, and what you didn’t learn before your dad’s illness seemingly took his self away, several years before his death. So, on the one hand, to be taken from yourself is an act of beauty; on the other, a cruel blow from God, fate, or chance. Can you say more about that tension?
Haha, so this is the tension, isn’t it? How can there can be so much beauty and so much bullshit in one handful of Earth? A guy like my dad can find his calling at age 50, center himself and then get cancer and suffer unnecessarily for eleven more years before dying. As someone who doesn’t really believe, it’s tempting to finger this as proof of a cold, uncalculating universe. And maybe this is so. But whatever it is, it is an enigma that escapes the grasp of ordering minds (I recall Gordon Grice’s essay “In Praise of the Black Widow” here, where Grice talks about how there is no scientifically logical reason for the black widow to deliver so much poison when it bites).
A beauty of essays, which is what I tend to write, the lineage I follow (Montaigne, Sei Shōnagun, Yoshida Kenko, Lia Purpura), is that chaos is meaningful. I love narratives, but the mind doesn’t work like that. Few people narrate their day. The brain doesn’t process chronologically; it’s a jumble of ideas, memories, fleeting cravings, and scattered conversations that are sometimes imagined. So that tension that you point to is, in fact, perfect for the essay form. Essays try to make sense of something baffling; they chew on an idea until it is digestible. Sometimes it doesn’t end well. Sometimes, essays fail. A mystery remains, while at the same an essay succeeds at creating resonance. There is no way I have here made sense of the chaotic aspect of existence—that nothing, ultimately, goes to plan despite what we tell ourselves. However, that feels human, doesn’t it?
Didion famously and enigmatically wrote “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Maybe, if entropy is the other side of life—the embracing of inevitable chaos—we write essays to help us die.
How do we shape our selves and the selves of others—even the dead—in our writing?
I love this question. The persona of the nonfiction writer was never anything I thought consciously about until I was pursuing an MFA. I’d simply thought the narrator was me or was whoever I was reading. A book called The Made-Up Self (2010) by Carl Klaus (the founder of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program) revealed how authors shape their narrators and how those voices/mannerisms/tones change from book to book, essay to essay. It’s not like they completely change, but certain traits are extenuated, focused on, shaded in certain essays but not others. I feel as nonfiction writers we can do the same with other people in our work as fiction writers do. Essentially, all the humans in essays are still characters; they still have to be created. No one has ever been able to walk out of an essay, fully formed and functioning. Characters are made up in words, even if the roots are back in reality and/or memory.
A great example is how Scott Russell Sanders writes about his dad. He has several essays where his dad is a character, but his debilitating alcoholism isn’t revealed until the stunner-classic “Under the Influence.” Sanders said in an interview he new that if he revealed the addiction in other essays, that fact would steal the reader’s attention, it would overwhelm the work. So the question becomes, what do I need to focus on to make my character or narrator to work the way I want her/him to in this particular writing? In this essay, I focused on my regret and I withheld certain things my dad did that would make him much more unlikeable (like throwing plates at my mother) because that would overwhelm this essay. I have other essays where I do write about that.
In another vein, I must admit, writing about my dad became so much easier once he died. In death, his life became mappable, I could hold it in my head and on the page. While alive, my dad had possibilities, could contradict what I was writing, how I thought about him. It was harder to pin him down. Not that I wouldn’t trade my writing about him for him living.
His death also gave me distance, the ability to reflect on all that he was so I could better see and focus on the parts of him I needed for a particular essay like this one. Distance is key, however I find it. Sometimes that’s moving away; sometimes, maybe, it’s waiting for the inevitable.
I don’t feel guilt for using myself or others as characters because even if I am extending certain features or omitting others, I never try to lie. Even every day, I think we generally only perceive certain sides of people. No one can wrap a single brain around the galaxy of thoughts and emotions around another. I try to think about how different I am once I’ve had a cup of coffee. I’m literally another person. And, anyway, for me, when writing my allegiance shifts to the reader not the character (including myself!). I am less important than how my narrator serves a function.