Writing Lessons: How to Write About A Difficult Subject, by Bette Lynch Husted
HOW TO TELL a difficult tale? It’s a topic Bette Lynch Husted, our new guest blogger, eagerly took on when she suggested writing about a very under-reported aspect of diversity — class. I was delighted. I think you will be, as well. Read to the end to find out how you can win a copy of Lessons from the Borderlands, another fine book from the ever-wonderful Plain View Press.
How to Tell The Truth About Class
By Bette Lynch Husted
Remember when Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was suspected of trying to break into a house that turned out to be his? “Why did he get so upset?” a friend asked me. I tried to explain, but it was only when I said, “He was just off the plane from China” that my friend could empathize with Gates’s frustration and anger. He had never experienced racial profiling, but he’d flown home from China himself.
Isn’t that a major reason that we read, and write, memoir? Our personal experiences—especially with gender, race and racial history, and social class—color the way each of us interprets the world. But by hearing each other’s stories, and by honestly examining our own, we grow as human beings and little by little begin to heal the cultural wounds that can divide us.
Yes, but. We all know the difficulties of telling these stories. And if it’s hard to talk about racial and gender issues, it can feel almost taboo to talk about class.
“How can you be so open?” people would ask me after Lessons from the Borderlands had been published. After all, mine wasn’t a heroic story; I wasn’t a girl from a poor family who had become a supreme court justice like Sonia Sotomayor or a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist like Rick Bragg, both of whose memoirs I admire. I had simply grown up yearning for stories other than the ones I was hearing, which were limited not only by our town’s one-room library and poorly funded school but by the culture around me—all those lessons of class and race and gender we were supposed to absorb—and had become a teacher as a way of offering other “borderlands” listeners access to more stories and more possibilities. But my teaching career, which had begun in the heady days of Martin Luther King Jr. with a sense of infinite possibility, had come to an end during the painful ironies of No Child Left Behind and the business model of education, and all too often I was still finding myself limited by what I had internalized from those early lessons, especially the ones about social class.
Yet I wanted to honor the intelligent, brave women in my family. I wanted to honor my students. ‘Here’s what we’re really like,’ I imagined myself saying. I wanted to face the clerk who had asked me, “Are your hands clean?” with words this time, not stunned silence. I wanted to break my own taboo. Like you, I had stories to tell. If I told you mine in a way you could hear and understand, maybe you’d tell me yours.
Readers might need an introduction, so I began with a scene that would lead into musing about silence and stories. (I’d been eating with friends in a restaurant; the hostess couldn’t find our reservation and had seated us only reluctantly. Earlier that day we had talked about class, and someone had said, “But after you go to college, doesn’t everything change?”)
Lessons from the Borderlands, an excerpt
By the time we have ordered wine and finished the appetizer and asked for a second one, an amazing creation of tiny delectables to wrap in grape leaves, most of our [hostess-allotted] hour has ticked away, but no one else seems to have noticed. I have decided on the salmon, so when Aaron tells me that tonight’s specialty is also a salmon dish, I say yes. The special is something they can serve quickly. The light has dimmed and by our table’s candle I can barely make out what’s on my plate when the food arrives. It’s the same salmon the people who have lived along the Columbia River for centuries skewer on willow sticks that lean toward the fire’s glowing coals, I tell myself—the kind they’ll be honoring at the longhouse on the next Salmon Feast. The fish I see on license plates on every road in Oregon. It has a slightly different flavor, but it’s very good.
Then my fork finds a mouthful of salmon touched by the dark sauce spreading over one end of the fish and onto whatever is next to it on the plate, a mysterious heap of rice or vegetables I can’t quite make out in the dimness, and something burns a cindery hole down toward my heart. My God. It’s the hottest thing I have ever tasted. I reach for my glass, a small, delicate thing holding perhaps a half-cup of water. My throat has nearly closed. Will I be able to breathe? The water dissolves against the roof of my mouth.
But I am still alive. No one has noticed my panic. I look at Brooke’s water glass. Should I? No. No. Shallow breaths; no, deep. Nothing works. Another black-and-white waiter with a water pitcher weaves through the tables, and I catch his eye. Again he comes, and again. Jan is telling a story that makes everyone laugh, then listen earnestly. I am not going to die. The pain has subsided, I tell myself, because I am bearing it. It must have become bearable.
“This is so good,” says Brooke. Jan’s halibut is wonderful, too. The young waiter returns, filling my glass for a fourth time. “I can tell who had the special tonight,” he laughs. “They’re the ones wanting all these refills!”
“May I have a bite of the salmon?” Franny asks. Sure, I say, but be careful. It’s very hot on this end. Franny takes a bite, then leaps up—napkin to her mouth, her fork clattering onto her plate. She runs for the restroom.
“I wondered why you changed your order from the regular salmon to this,” Jan will say as the story unfolds. “But I thought you knew what you were doing.” I roll my eyes; everyone laughs. Habanera peppers, Brooke explains. The hottest known variety.
No, someone will correct me later, offering as evidence a list of the twenty-five hottest peppers: habaneras are second. Not really inferior, just not quite as desirable.
Author bio
Bette Lynch Husted lives and writes in rural Eastern Oregon. Her first collection of memoir essays, Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land (OSU Press 2004), was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and WILLA Award in creative nonfiction. In addition to Lessons from the Borderlands (Plain View Press 2012), her personal and memoir essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Northwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. At This Distance (Wordcraft 2010), her first full-length poetry collection, followed the chapbook After Fire, published by Pudding House Press in 2002. A Fishtrap Fellow and recipient of a 2007 Oregon Arts Commission Award, she has just completed her first novel. You can purchase her book, Lessons from the Borderlands on the Plain View Press site.
AND THE WINNER IS…
I hope you enjoy Writing Lessons. Featuring well-published writers of our favorite genre, each installment of the series will take on one short topic that addresses how to write memoir, and will include a great big book giveaway.
It’s my way of saying thanks for coming by.
The contest for this book is now closed. Please see the next installment of Writing Lessons.
The winner of the book is Diane Heath. Congratulations, Diane! I’ll be in touch to send your book.
Help! as a white woman who had all the advantages, I have been struggling to think what this has to do with “class”. Meaning, I know my experience is vastly different from other classes. I do take every opportunity to learn about how others are treated…funny word as it never seems to be a treat! So, I want to learn what is being said here. Is the writer saying she wasn’t warned about the hot peppers because she looked different or didn’t have a reservation? It reads as though she ordered the special without asking what was in it. caveat emptor. or, is she inferring that the waiter deliberately did not tell her? He did seem to delight in the pain the special was causing his customers, but it seems like all of his customers, not just the writer. So, please help me understand this incident. Thank you.
Thanks for your question, Lynne. No, I wasn’t blaming the waiter— and as Cheryl points out in her comment, a sudden surprise of an unexpectedly hot food can happen to anyone. The excerpt wasn’t long enough to share the “reflection and resolution,” as Linda says in her comment—but in the rest of the chapter, I muse on what caused my silence and what other stories I had also not told.
The first thing I had to make clear was that not everyone who grew up in my social circumstances (or in any other social class) would have been silent — but I knew that for me, this was a story about class. Acknowledging that would give me an opportunity to ask myself why a person who is not shy (teachers can’t be!) and whose life has been spent encouraging her students to “make noise, take up space”–to open any door they want to open, and walk through it–not make some noise herself? I Why is it so difficult to share our personal experience of class? Then I could begin to do just that.
Ah, Bette, thank you for the clarification. And thank you to the other commentators for their questions. I hope I win the book so I get to see the rest of this piece! Buying not in the budget right now.
Not sure I can explain it, but I think the self-reflection and resolution part of this excerpt was left out.
I can totally relate to her expectation of someone correcting her later about which is the hottest pepper. When you publish a book, someone will find something you missed or misquoted or remembered wrong or…such is the world of memoir writing!
Thanks, Linda. (See my reply to Lynne for more on this.)
I had to smile at your “such is the world of memoir writing!”
I have no idea how this anecdote relates to class. I had an experience like that the first time I had Szechuan food. I ate the pepper and thought that my mouth, tongue, and esophagus would never recover. My mother in law had that when eating sushi for the first time – she ate a hunk of wasabi and thought she was going to die. This happens to everyone, whether you are from a migrant family or a Mayflower descendant. We don’t know everything about everything, and not necessarily warned by waiters, clerks or friends.
You’re absolutely right, Cheryl. My reply to Lynne offers a bit more explanation of what I was trying to do with this scene.
One of the challenges of writing about social class (it’s also true of race, and to a lesser extent of gender issues, I think) is the worry that readers will recoil from what at first glance might seem like self-pity, or simply an admission of some personal inadequacy. “That might not have happened to you because you’re African-American; that might have happened to anyone”–we’ve all heard such comments. It’s especially true of social issue stories because we might have internalized some shame about them. (“Once you graduate from college, doesn’t everything change?” I had to address that question directly in the rest of the chapter, too.)
I love the rich details moment to moment without wandering off on other tracks or overworking them.
Thanks, Jan.
I’m with those who don’t get the connection between the story and class. What’s up?
Thanks for your comment. I hope the replies to the earlier comments help a bit.
The entire collection of essays wrestles with, and develops, the response to this question—which means it’s a good one to ask!
i’ve also been asked the question” how can you be so open?” and not been very pleased to hear it. maybe it’s not a bad question after all.
I just came from a conference, the Eastern Oregon Word Round-Up, where I heard the Pendleton poet and novelist Pamela Steele tell her workshop participants, “It’s our job as writers to face the difficult truths.”
Bette, good morning, how do/did you slide through issues in your writing where you friends and family are concerned? When those closest to you are the focus of an issue and may also be reading it … of course from a different perspective and attitude?
Oh, M.E., you’ve asked the hard question. In “Lessons from the Borderlands” this wasn’t a problem–my students/friends and family were all heroes, at least in my mind. In my earlier memoir “Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land,” though, I grappled long and hard with this question (for years, many rewrites!). The way the mythology of the American West had played out in my family involved guns, suicides, quarrels over land and water, family separations. I asked myself, Why is this story important to tell? How can I tell it with compassion for everyone involved? The part of the story that was hardest to tell, of course, was the one closest to home–for those I showed family members the chapters and got permission.
My extended family, I learned later, had mixed reactions. But I think they understood that all memoir is one person’s interpretation of her/his experience, and they continue to love me anyway.