lessons in taxidermy.

- Way back when, up on Whidbey Island for my initial grad school residency, my professor described to me how such-and-such university journal renamed itself Creative Nonfiction, and then—poof—as if from the ether, we had a new genre. That’s stuck with me, because I read a lot of nonfiction, and most of the good ones are intensely creative, but never do I put down one of them and wonder if it deserves a spot in the rarified genre of creative nonfiction. On Whidbey I asked, beyond memoir, what categories of books fall under CNF—I asked around. The response was nature writing, sometimes, in some circumstances; and a couple more possibilities, similarly over-qualified. Everyone was real vague about it. Well, for someone who’s writing a 2^nd-person novel, I have historically been skeptical of memoir. When presented with a novel and a memoir by one author, even of good repute, I’ve doubted the memoir as being of equal worth; I’ve doubted it as art.

- I don’t have it with me and so will have to paraphrase, but in his stellar work The Inner Eye (which will be quoted from in upcoming pages of the theory of mind & narrative paper) Nicholas Humphrey says ~ As Plato put it, we live in a world of shadows; the point of art, then, is to reveal the solid forms.

- Lessons in Taxidermy is art. One part of the beauty of Humphrey’s language—the point of art—is that it has motion. It’s not an objective classification, as in, here is an object and it is art; rather, it’s entirely subjective: a description of the way in which a work alters your vision for the world. Bee’s book utterly lacks overt spirituality, and yet it helped me organize my gratefulness to god in a new way. Her writing voice is right there, clear as day, and exactly evocative of the disconnect and zero-response to pain she learns so young. Her dual telling of the story, present day and growing up told in a well-paced intermittence, adds a depth to her, an awareness of her human emotions, that otherwise might seem to dwindle behind the list of her life, the litany of things gone horribly fucking wrong. To paraphrase an Amazon customer review—you think nobody knows the trouble you’ve seen? Read this, and stop whining.