by Jenny Boully
Although this should have happened sooner, this was toward the end:
All these art books, they say that I need to keep, at all times, a tube of Payne’s Grey. Why Payne’s Grey? this sad customer is asking me. I dream of my answer: because it is the grey of ghosts, like something haunted, a memory mixed with the blue of dusk to invoke sadness and, as always when there is sadness in memory, regret; think of every vase you could paint that way—in Payne’s Grey—dreaming of flowers to fill it.
On the EEO Genre Sheet
On interviewing
When I was on the job market, I was asked repeatedly to define nonfiction. I knew I could venture into one of two courses: I could give the traditional textbook definition, or I could say what I really felt. If I said what I really felt, then I knew I wouldn’t get a campus visit; I wouldn’t get the job. If I gave the textbook definition, it would make the interviewers feel that I was on their side, that I was a safe candidate, that I would be someone the chair and dean approved of. Because I have a natural inclination to be rebellious, I always chose to go the road of the untraditional. The interviews then became centered less on my qualifications and more on my transgressions. Some interviewers felt that I was misguided, that I needed counseling, and they would use the space of the interview to do just that. You see, they aimed to tame me, and it became their goal to do that before the next candidate arrived. It wasn’t about what I could offer but rather about what they could fix.
On former students
One of my goals as a teacher of nonfiction is to totally destroy every held belief a student has about essays and nonfiction. I expect my students to essay fiercely and obsessively. I want to see, truly, what new thing they will unleash into the universe. One student wrote quite beautifully. She wrote so poetically, but what she wrote wasn’t verse. It was essaying; it was essayistic; it was an essay. Many of my students did this over the years, but this one did it quickly and passionately. I met her later, randomly, on a street corner in the West Village. She said that she was depressed; her new teacher wouldn’t let her write; her new teacher told her she was writing poetry and the class wasn’t a poetry class. She asked her teacher if a prose poem could be nonfiction, and the teacher said no. I told her, why don’t you quite discreetly slip her a copy of Pope’s “An Essay on Man”?
I kept thinking about my former student and all her talent being crushed by a teacher who could have been in the room interviewing me, asking for my definition of nonfiction.
On being mixed
Once, when I was twenty-two, I worked in a mall in Roanoke, Virginia. I worked at several stores in the mall. I needed the money. I could go from part-time shift to part-time shift and not even have to leave the mall. One day, on break, a local came up to me and asked if I was “mixed.”
On being mixed 2
So, it seems that I am mixed. I am quite mixed. I am more mixed than many, many people I know. My father grew up knowing only that he was half Cherokee, half white. We’ve never known where his white ancestors came from; he became a ward of the state when he was eight, and so much of his history was lost. My mother is Thai, but she has curly hair, as do I, which leads me to think there must be something else lurking in there.
In terms of what I write, it seems that my writing is also mixed. I am sometimes called a poet, sometimes an essayist, sometimes a lyric essayist, sometimes a prose poet. My second book was published under the guise of fiction/poetry/essay.
I find these categorizations odd: I have never felt anything other than whole.
It seems to me that the inability to accept a mixed piece of writing is akin to literary discrimination. I think of the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) data sheets: choose the genre that you feel most accurately describes you.
Please be X, Y, or Z
I want to know why what is often “other” ends up being labeled as poetry. I think it’s equivalent to forcing me to check the ethnicity box on the EEO data sheets. Which ethnicity most accurately describes me? Does this mean to myself or to other people? Other people who meet me for the first time always ask me if I’m Spanish. When they ask me where I’m from, I always say Texas. So that confirms for them that I’m definitely of Hispanic descent. I never say that I am from Thailand. I was born there, but I can’t say I’m from there. From, to me, denotes a forming of awareness and identity and memory. Most of these happened for me in Texas.
When I was younger and when I dated, my dates were always very uneasy about asking me about my ethnicity. You could see it in their hesitating restaurant decisions, their waiting to see if I’d order in a language other than English if taken to an ethnic restaurant. And then always, inevitably, I’d be asked if I’m Spanish. When I said no, they’d invariably be disappointed. The two most disappointed dates: the Spanish analyst who worked for the government and the boy who had just broken up with his Spanish girlfriend—I don’t know what they were hoping to find in me.
Poetry as refuge
A refuge is where unwanted animals go. It is also where some of my submissions to journals end up. Some intern or graduate student has dropped my submission into the poetry pile; in a way, that person has made it possible for my submission to live. It would not have lived in the nonfiction pile. There, it would have starved to death, or it would have been eaten alive. Once, I got a rejection slip from a nonfiction editor saying, “I’m not sure how to take this. I don’t know what this is.” That particular journal was solely a nonfiction journal; my submission, therefore, had nowhere else to go.
On the EEO genre sheet
I’m not sure which genre I would select. I guess, being who I am and doing the type of work I do, I would have to choose many. Do I choose “other” (if the option is even there) and write in a selection (if there’s even a write-in space)? Isn’t having to choose, being forced to choose, also essentially an act of bias? Being told that there simply isn’t an easy category for you, you just don’t fit in, you destroy the natural order of things. The term “other” also immediately connotes an agenda: if you don’t fit into one of our predetermined categories, well, you aren’t playing the game correctly. You are an other. You will always be an other. You will get thrown into a slush pile marked “origin unknown.”
Coda
And so, in the literary world, I find that I spend a lot of time trying to keep everyone from becoming disappointed in me.
I may look like an essay, but I don’t act like one. I may look like prose, but I don’t speak like it. Or, conversely, I may move like a poem, but I don’t look like one.
Do I bend genre? Or does genre bend me? I think it’s the latter. I have always been the same person: I have always been made up of three things. My birth may be fictional; I may be from poetry; I might now be living in essays. I can-not see these three things as separate parts of my identity; rather, they form to make one being. I may be the product of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, but they come together to form one entity. To be told to choose is to be told that you disrupt the neat notion of where things belong, that you don’t belong.
The Poet’s Education
I don’t know if they were monarch butterflies or only butterflies that looked like monarch butterflies, but once a year, when they would descend upon my neighborhood in south San Antonio, I would sneak up on one sucking nectar from one of my family’s privet trees and wait for its wings to touch. I would then pluck it between my thumb and forefinger and run inside to my bedroom, where I would let it go, closing the door behind me. I thought they would stay alive forever.
The teachers never knew where to put me. In kindergarten, they put me with the green kids. Then, when they began to see something in me, they moved me to the blue kids. The blue kids had already gone oh-so-far in their studies, and to catch up, I began to fill in my worksheets; the teacher reprimanded me, and I got in trouble for not following directions. This was in kindergarten, when the families in my neighborhood were still mostly white, but not me; no one ever knew about me or what I wa
s or how I fit in. They moved me around a lot back then.
In the children’s book Color My World by Wayne Carley, the lovely white cat, so fluffy and elegant, escapes its owner’s house to have a pre-nap adventure in a world punctuated by colors. It rolls itself upon a heap of green, delicate, fingerlike ferns. That was the world in which I wanted to live. I stole the book from my second-grade classroom.
If you paid fifty cents, you got to see the circus performers at school or maybe another troop of people doing something entertaining. My sister and I would save our change so we could attend the shows, and more often than not, we would have only enough saved for one of us to go. I remember this circus-themed show so distinctly because both my sister and I had enough money to go. This was at school, where we would sometimes, but rarely, also have the thirty-five cents it cost to eat breakfast. There were multicolored poodles in the show, and they actually did jump through hoops.
In third grade, Wayne needed to go to the bathroom really bad, but Mr. Anvil would not let him. So Wayne, the very withdrawn and shy and awkward new kid from Hawaii, peed in his pants, and he grew ever-so-much-more-withdrawn-and-shy-and-awkward. The class did not laugh at Wayne; we were all of us very scared for him. Mr. Anvil was overly strict. He would pound his fist on our foreheads if we forgot our homework, and he would ask if anyone was at home in our heads. I did not think any of us, in that classroom, could be home in our heads. We held our breaths. We cast glances. We wondered who would be next. I felt so bad for Wayne; he had asked to go to the bathroom. He must have been so embarrassed and in so much pain.
I wanted to be in the classroom that had a jar of marbles, with one marble given every day for good behavior and a prize attained when the jar was full, but I never had that teacher.
In fourth grade, Mrs. Morgan made me tutor girls in math who were not doing so well. Mostly, they couldn’t subtract. I took them to the back table where the ant farms were (ant farms that we made as a class) and tried to teach them simple arithmetic, which they could not understand. I myself did not do this so well. I tried to show them how I did it, by slowly counting out dots or fingers on my hand. I ended up helping them pass by doing all the problems myself and then asking them to add or subtract the number one from another number. Christina in particular was impossible. She kept pointing to Niger on the globe and laughing.
In second grade, I wrote a poem about autumn. It was the first poem I wrote. It had, although I did not know it at the time, a refrain. The refrain was “Fall is the season for all.” It was also the season for “going to the mall” and “playing football” and “when the leaves fall.”
In fifth grade, Mrs. Lazarus let one of us go outside during fifth period to get the weather report. It was always a wonderful day for the pupil who went out to get the weather report, as we were in a school with no windows. I would note the position of the sun, the cirrus clouds, the breeze if there was one.
I don’t know why all the girls wanted to kill me, but in middle school, they all suddenly very much wanted to kill me.
I loved a boy really deeply, and I wanted him to know me, that me inside of me. I listened to the Cure and paid attention to the lyrics, because I felt as if the lyrics were me or at least could save me, and I knew that I wanted to use words that way, to save me. I stayed up late on Sunday nights to watch MTV’s 120 Minutes and to listen to other words by other bands that might also save me.
Children oftentimes disappeared for weeks, and then they came back. Or else, they disappeared for years, and then they came back. Classmates were transient, and the houses emptied and filled and emptied and filled with new friends and new classmates. The boy across the street wore the same orange underwear every day; we knew because we could see the patch of orange showing through the hole in the butt of his jeans; he wore the same pair of jeans every day, and his parents fought often, and his father’s car was sandalwood colored and smoked from the hood, and I felt bad when I squirted juice from my juice bottle at his jeans when we were playing because I had forgotten that he wore the same jeans every day and would need to wear them again the next day. He disappeared after that year and never came back.
Josafina came back; she came back although I never did want her to come back because she was one of the girls who wanted to kill me. She wanted to kill me at school and outside of school. When she came back, she had a tattoo on her chest and had changed her name to Sophie. She wanted to kill me, but she would never kill anyone that I knew of. Her brother, however, did. Her brother killed another student at our school and dumped his body in a ditch one block from my house. The helicopters swarmed all morning.
When I was fifteen, I read a poem by Lucille Clifton called “[at last we killed the roaches],” and I thought about my house and all the houses in my neighborhood and all the roaches that maybe I too could kill so as to have a sense of accomplishment and reside in a beautiful world free of roaches.
Because they never did know where to put me, or because certain teachers did not want to deal with me, sometimes I was in regular and other times I was in advanced. In ninth grade, my English teacher did not let the regular students read the same book that his advanced class was reading, so instead, he made us read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and that was the first time I knew that there were others out there, there must have been others out there, just like me, who were sad and lonely and just wanted some kind of beauty in their lives and maybe for a boy to love them.
I was not in advanced English, however, and so I did not get the flyer from the San Antonio Public Library with the guidelines for their Young Pegasus Poetry Award. I saw it on my classmate’s desk in advanced biology. I asked him if I could see it, and he said, Why? Do you actually think you can win? No, I said, I just want to see it. I wrote down the address and sent in my poems. Later in the summer, I would find out that I did win, and the school would announce it over the intercom, and the school newspaper interviewed me about it, and that boy knew that he did not think I could win and that I had won.
I knew I wanted to write, so I joined journalism in high school. I hated all that late-night work on PageMaker and all that cutting and pasting over the light board. I hated all the phone calling and note taking and blah-blahs of the interviewees, the tedious work of winding film and the shaking of canisters and the smell of the darkroom like pee. Mr. Killough knew I wanted to write more than just news stories, so he let me write the personal column and the feature stories. He said I had to draw the reader in; he said I had to begin with explosions. He taught me how, through writing, I could make something exist that wasn’t in the world before.
In my literature book, I would read the poetry section over and over again, always stopping for a long time on Donald Justice’s “Poem to Be Read at 3 a.m.” I read the poetry section on my own because we were hardly ever assigned poems to read. I would think about who had the light on at 3 a.m. and how that poem was for them and how the poet and the person with the light on were probably both lonely and sad and I was lonely and sad and wanted to have a poem and give one too.
At fifteen, I took an introduction to literature class at the city university. My professor, Steven Kellman, made us read Heart of Darkness, The Dead, Oedipus Rex, King Lear, The Metamorphosis. He spoke about symbolism while I doodled flowers into my notebook. I remember him saying always, always saying, It’s as if he’s hitting the reader over the head; he’s taking a concrete slab and hitting the reader over the head. The next summer, I took his introduction to film class. We watched Jules and Jim, Citizen Kane, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Blue Angel, North by Northwest, The Bicycle Thieves. Those two summers, I felt as if I had left the light on at 3 a.m. and someone had also left it on for me.
When I found out that I could study creative writing in college, it became an obsession of mine to do just that. I chose Hollins in Roanoke, Virginia. An alum came to interview me in San Antonio. She was interviewing lots of applicants, I think. I didn’t know what to wear. She was doing t
he interviews from an expensive hotel downtown. I didn’t know how I would get there. I think my interview went well, because two weeks later, I was invited to campus to compete for a full scholarship, even though I did not have the minimum SAT score to compete for that scholarship. My father put my plane ticket on his credit card. Not knowing better, I didn’t pack a dress or anything other than jeans. I prepared nothing. Somehow, I was given a full scholarship, and that’s where I went to study poetry. I went to a small all-girls liberal arts school in the South to study literature, physics, and philosophy, and to take a creative writing workshop each and every semester.
When I got to college, I had so much catching up to do. I hadn’t ever been taught how to think critically. In high school, our homework consisted of copying answers to questions right out of the book. I didn’t know how to come up with my own answers. But I was always a fast learner, and so I learned. I began to tutor the girls in astrophysics, but they could never get it. Brenda was useless; she kept pointing to Gemini and saying, Oh, look there’s Gemini; I’m a Gemini. But later, she taught me how to cheat on my astronomy lab reports by drawing in the bodies of things that I hadn’t even seen.
Freshman year, I took an introduction to creative writing class. My professor gave me a bad grade on my paper on Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck.” She said that it wasn’t a wedding poem or about picking up the pieces after a failed marriage and my whole thesis and explication had therefore failed. She said it was about a shipwreck. I said the shipwreck was a metaphor for a personal wreck. Several English degrees later, I can still only read that poem as a poem about a failed marriage. She circled words on my poems and told me that I could never use those words in a poem because they were abstract.
