Left Behind in Telluride Michelle Lee Primeau University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected]
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University of Texas at El Paso DigitalCommons@UTEP Open Access Theses & Dissertations 2011-01-01 Left Behind in Telluride Michelle Lee Primeau University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, Psychiatric and Mental Health Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Primeau, Michelle Lee, "Left Behind in Telluride" (2011). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 2367. https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd/2367 This is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. LEFT BEHIND IN TELLURIDE MICHELLE LEE PRIMEAU Department of Creative Writing APPROVED: ___________________________________ Lex Williford, MFA, Chair ____________________________________ Daniel Chacon, MFA _______________________ Benjamin Flores, Ph.D. Acting Dean of the Graduate School Copyright © By Michelle Lee Primeau 2011 LEFT BEHIND IN TELLURIDE by MICHELLE LEE PRIMEAU, BAIS THESIS Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Department of Creative Writing THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO December 2011 An Experiment in Storytelling “I think anyone who spends his life working to become eligible for literary immortality is a fool.” —Harold Brodkey It’s the truth that hurts. That moment when a writer recognizes herself in another writer, all of her daydreams and ambitions of becoming known not for the sake of empathy, understanding and connecting with other human beings but to live beyond her death in print, in the literary canon. The daydreams wither and all that is left is the stark need, an almost urgency to get an individual truth out and hope that someone understands and likewise feels understood and a little less alone. The reason I started writing and will continue to write is that desire to communicate but knowing I may not always be heard. I’m writing from Upper Michigan on the shores of Lake Superior and cannot move over one-hundred miles from where I am until my eldest son turns eighteen. I wouldn’t have been able to pursue creative writing without an online MFA program. I am grounded, but Lake Superior constantly shifts from glassy calm to crashing gale-sized waves to frozen cavernous and glacial blue peaks. The Lake centers me and I feel fortunate that I didn’t have to leave my children or Superior to pursue my passion. The first drafts of my preface were compilations of various fiction and poetry writer’s statements. Beginning with how the personal is political and the personal is universal. I think I was reaching to rip-off poets like Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Benjamin Saenz, and envying the talent of writing activists like Arundhati Roy. iv I wanted to broach the topics of craft, technique, truth, memory, empathy, and the rhetoric of fear in the writing process of creative nonfiction in this preface. The difficulty remained trying to compartmentalize these topics and I found weaving storytelling throughout acted as a solvent into which the topics dissolved. But if writing essays is as Scott Russell Sanders refers to it as “a politically subversive act” shouldn’t the preface to a collection of creative nonfiction be a precursor to what follows? I can write in a critical and authoritative voice, scholarly and divorced from my own, and drop names and influences, none of which I directly think of while writing. I can fall under the academic pedagogy of controlling voice, thoughts, and language or I can risk experimenting with storytelling in critical writing like Marianna Togovnick suggests in “Experimental Critical Writing” that: “When we encourage experimental critical writing, we don’t not always know what we will get, but we stimulate the profession to grow and to change. We don’t control the future of the profession only when we give grades or make hiring or tenure decisions; we control it at the level of the sentence” (413). Not that the reference of we applies to my individual self. I am not part of any academic camp or a faculty member at a university. I am part of the controlled sample, a student, where my voice is altered at the level of the sentence. Storytelling: 9/11, Fear, and Truth “Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of v storytelling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.” —Arundhati Roy I attended a family reunion this summer. It was one of the first moments when my dad didn’t try to convince me to go back to studying chemistry, my first major, and find a cure for cancer. This year my calling in life was discovered by my eldest brother, Stacy. He told me how sometimes people’s talents are most evident when they are children and how everyone used to call me the Little Banker when I was young. He said that I had a real knack and prowess for finances and should start researching investments and get into financing. “Did you ever think that it might have been my character?” I asked. “I may have just been greedy.” Stacy looked a little surprised and then continued to tell me that it would be a great opportunity to work from home. I wouldn’t have to present myself or deal with the social stresses of a workplace. My other brother, Jesse, walked by and imagined that Stacy muttered that Jesse was an asshole. Jesse didn’t sleep for the entire week and left the reunion a day early. During his entire drive home the landscape looked like what he described as hell, he later told me on the phone, a place he now believes he’s been residing in since he was eighteen. A month after the reunion I turned the television remote to our quick guide channels. MSNBC is the middle button and I settled in to watch an hour of the Rachel Maddow Show. During a commercial break, there was an ad for a website which sounded intriguing but elusive enough that I had no idea what NewAmerica.com was going to be about. vi The screen popped up as a Stansberry and Associates Investment Research Advisory. The video filled the entire screen and there was no pause button. I could watch it or close-it-out but I was fond of black text on a white backdrop and the narrator had a soothing voice. The narrator was drawing cartoon sketches the first of which depicted the fall of America and the ensuing devaluing of the dollar, martial law, and riots that would spread across the States. One hour and a headache later the narrator was asking for viewers to invest in his subscriber pamphlets so that they could potentially make quite a lot of money in this time of upheaval and save their families by making the right investments, four of which he claimed you do not have to report to the government. After 9/11 the rhetoric of fear and trembling has become more common and lucrative beyond obvious beneficiaries like Haliburton. Stanberry and his soothing voice produced another video—The Fall of America. They made quite a bit of money with their insider email alerts, especially since their subscribers invested and dumped their stocks into what they were told was going to be a soaring market on May 22, 2008. The market plunged shortly thereafter and Porter Stansberry was convicted of SEC fraud by a California judge. Brian Deer, an investigative reporter in London, also found fraudulent practices during vaccine trails in Thailand among a company called GenVax. Stansberry was promoting GenVax as the next cash cow for investors, citing proof that the GenVax endorsed AIDS vaccine really worked. I remember coming across this bit of news online, the potential vaccine, and feeling overwhelming joy that so many lives would be saved. It didn’t occur to me to invest. After watching the financial advisory, it hit me, that not only the energy industry but pharmaceuticals are big money, and not just for corporations but for the commonplace investors. Who would have a stake in a human guinea pig on multiple drugs? Everyone. vii After 9/11, the demand for creative nonfiction increased in America. There was a sudden need for the truth of everyday lives. Within Foucault’s essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” compelling interpretations of both truth and history are explored: “Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history” (79). American citizens didn’t seem to want to wait for history to be written before they could grasp the truth. They desired to see how history was being made and in turn to be part of that process, by reading the written accounts of individual truths. Patricia Hampl explains the political role of creative nonfiction writers: “If we refuse to do the work of creating this personal version of the past someone else will do it for us.