Metaphor from the Physical World

A WRITER'S WIT
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They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
     They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
     And add some extra, just for you.
 
But they were fucked up in their turn
     By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
      And half at one another’s throats.
 
Man hands on misery to man.
       It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
       And don’t have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin
Born August 9, 1922

P. Larkin

My Book World

Houston, Pam. Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country. New York: Norton, 2019.

Pam Houston may be the single best teacher of writing in the U.S. today, not only by way of her classroom techniques (which I know of firsthand) but by way of example, and Deep Creek proves my case. Houston’s main tenet, always, is to begin with the concrete details—whether fiction or nonfiction—and those details will lead you to your narrative.

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“I have always believed that if I pay strict attention while I am out in the physical world—and for me that often meant the natural world—the physical world will give me everything I need to tell my stories” (78).

Having studied with Pam, I can tell you she calls one’s paying attention to these details “glimmers”: that conversation you overhear at the market, the accident you see on the way to your doctor’s appointment. Your doctor’s appointment. Everywhere you look throughout your day, if you’re alive, you should be paying attention to these glimmers. Of course, they can come from your past, as well, but something from the past can be a bit dusty, so, once again, your mind must return to the concrete details. Houston says,

​“I believe—like religion—that the glimmer, the metaphor, if you will, knows a great deal more than I do. And if I stay out of its way, it will reveal itself to me. I will become not so much its keeper as its conduit, and I will pass its wisdom on to the reader, without actually getting in its way” (79).

​And once again, as in all Houston’s stories, novels, or essays, she mines the glimmers in her life to reveal to readers her twenty-five year acquaintance with a patch of land high in the Colorado Rockies, at the headwaters of the Rio Grande, her ranch; the extreme physical, sexual, and emotional abuse her parents heaped upon her; the nanny, Martha Washington, who was more of a mother to her than anyone; obtaining the ranch property and hanging onto it by a thread at times, both financially and in terms of the physical world which, where she lives, has an extreme impact on human life whether it be the winter temperatures and snow and ice or a hundred-year fire or human encroachment. Many metaphors guide her. She lives by a purely spiritual (not religious) guide: What are the best ways for me to be kind to others and to the earth I live on, and how can I leave both better off before I leave this earth? Because of her childhood abuse, Pam grows up always on guard, always ready to leap into the future, and that is how she often lives: running literally to all four corners of our, at times, flat earth. She is invited or invites herself to some of the most strenuous and exhilarating ventures around. And in this book she makes each one of them shine, or glimmer.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-44  Alaska