Shades of Fine

University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations Dissertations and Theses 5-22-2006 Shades of Fine Nicole McClelland University of New Orleans Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td Recommended Citation McClelland, Nicole, "Shades of Fine" (2006). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 359. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/359 This Thesis is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by ScholarWorks@UNO with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Thesis in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. This Thesis has been accepted for inclusion in University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SHADES OF FINE A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Drama and Communications Creative Writing by Nicole McClelland B.A. The Ohio State University, 2002 May 2006 © 2006, Nicole McClelland ii Acknowledgements This thesis would have been of a much lower quality without the help of Randy, whose attention to detail down to the sentence level is always motivating, informative, and daunting. I’m indebted to Lauren for humoring me, Carol Gelderman for exhibiting uncharacteristic enthusiasm for my work, and John Hazlett for being an amazing teacher. Many thanks to my thoughtful fellow workshoppers, my three unequivocal number one fans – Erin, my mom, and my dad – and Dan, my teacher, cheerleader, and pal, who is the coolest husband anybody could ever hope to be married to. I would also like to thank the editors of Orion, The Dos Passos Review, and Are We Feeling Better Yet?: Women’s Encounters with Healthcare in America, in which three of the following essays have appeared or are forthcoming. iii Table of Contents Preface..................................................................................................................................1 I Fifty-Two Pickup.................................................................................................................5 Funky .................................................................................................................................16 Killing Yap.........................................................................................................................26 Toeing the Line..................................................................................................................39 Giving Up the Diamonds ...................................................................................................52 Sleigh Bed..........................................................................................................................63 II Strands of Grey ..................................................................................................................80 Finding Mandarinfish.........................................................................................................94 On Love and Leachfields.................................................................................................106 The Trouble with Taylorwood.........................................................................................119 What You Do When You’re WWOOFing.......................................................................132 Shades of Fine..................................................................................................................147 Vita...................................................................................................................................161 iv Abstract The following is a collection of personal essays that re-create and reflect on select events that occurred in my life between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. v Preface I used to think I was a fiction writer. As a child, I considered myself a writer because I relished that time each spring when my grade school participated in the Diocese of Cleveland’s Young Authors project and we were each required to write a short, self-contained book. I knew my teachers considered me a writer, too, as they sent me to represent our class in Power of the Pen writing competitions. I was consistently the best student in English class, and I loved to read, just as writers do. Reading Rainbow was my favorite show. And anyway, I sucked at math. In college, I enrolled in a succession of fiction writing classes. I wanted to write, and write creatively, with scenes, and dialogue, and that was the place to do it. I found myself workshopping stories in which the characters were people I knew, characters who encountered the same conflicts as those in my real life, stories with scenes and dialogue. I wondered how much of the content of the other students’ stories was true, whether Valerie, who always wrote in first person, was really cheating on her boyfriend with a Romanian single father, but only because I was nosy. I felt a little weird that my fiction wasn’t more, well, fictional, but I wanted to write about real life, and so I did. I made it all the way to my senior year before I took nonfiction writing. I had seen it in the course bulletin, but never considered it too seriously. I had vague notions of nonfiction as memoir, and even vaguer notions of memoir as quiet, contemplative, long-winded and low- action, very Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I didn’t feel I needed the class – I had already been writing nonfiction, after all – but took it out of curiosity, and out of a desire to write a quiet, contemplative journal about my parents’ developing divorce. 1 Little changed. I wrote the same kinds of stories, ones in which the characters were people I knew, characters who encountered the same conflicts as those in my real life, except that I left out the occasional flourish or embellishment or convenient fudging I often bestowed on my fiction submissions. The most significant difference was that I planned, if someone asked me whether the events were made up, not to lie. I liked it, owning up to the truth. I also liked the other students’ true stories, which were filled with scene and dialogue, and were often amusing and action-packed. But when I decided to apply to MFA in writing programs, I still didn’t give much thought to the nature of fiction versus nonfiction. Nobody could definitively tell the difference – who knew how accurate Pilgrim was, or Catcher in the Rye wasn’t? – and the stories were the same, stories about love, about the loss of innocence, about the struggles with and triumphs of the self. I chose grad schools based on geography and compatibility with my husband’s plans. I turned in two entirely true manuscripts with my applications to fiction programs. Only one school offered a choice between fiction and nonfiction, and I left the question blank until, after several minutes of consideration, I checked the latter box. I don’t know if I hesitated because I had been a literature major and had read almost exclusively fiction for my undergraduate coursework; I don’t know if I still in some way associated nonfiction with the place in the library I went to when I was writing history papers or completing social studies projects, if I wasn’t giving nonfiction its due as its own kind of literature. Or maybe I just didn’t think the difference was substantial enough to matter. Indeed, the University of Washington admitted me into its extremely selective program with what I knew were fictionless writing samples. But accepting the University of New Orleans’ invitation into its nonfiction program ultimately led me to recognize the important difference between the genres. I was right all along in thinking that the two fields often shared 2 much in common – thorough characterization, carefully-created prose, compelling themes – and that many works blurred the line between them. Indeed, my own influences lay as strongly in fiction, which taught me to try to be as graceful as Barbara Kingsolver and as biting as Lorrie Moore, as they did in nonfiction, where David Sedaris set the bar for funny, and Annie Dillard the one for smart. Though it was often difficult to say how many of the events in my first literary hero’s books, which I pored over on my parents’ bed when they weren’t home or weren’t looking, really happened, Anais Nin showed me that one could be outrageous and poetic at once. But as I wrote memoir, travel narratives, personal essays, and research essays throughout my graduate career, I saw that the difference was in the extra poignancy actuality lent to stories about love, about the loss of innocence, about the struggles with and triumphs of the self. Nonfiction can capture the same sentiments, only with the authenticity of actual experience, which makes it, to me, an even more remarkable art form. To construct characters and invent plot lines that ultimately reveal truths about us and our world is human. The ability to recognize those truths in our own lives and craft them into nonfiction literature seems divine. In the sixth grade, my Young Authors submission was a story about adventures with the microphones and drum sets in my parents’

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