Beth Ann Fennelly’s latest book, “Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs,” had been published just 10 days before Friday’s opening session of the Eudora Welty Writer’s Symposium at Poindexter Hall.
As she opened her reading, she pressed the small volume to her nose and breathed in the aroma:
“Ah,” she said smiling. “It still has that new baby head smell. There will be a time when it doesn’t have that perfume, but it still does today.”
For Fennelly, Mississippi’s poet laureate, “Heating & Cooling” might not only be new direction, it may even be a new genre. While she doesn’t claim the term “micro-memoir” as her own, the idea of approaching a memoir as a loose collection of short, personal observations first began to crystallize when the term just seemed to pop into her head.
Fennelly, whose three poetry collections had thrust her into prominence in the world of poetry, was just coming off yet another new experience, co-authoring with her husband, Tom Franklin, “The Tilted World,” a novel based on the 1927 Mississippi River flood.
That project took four years to write. When it was completed, there was the natural instinct to take up a new project.
But she couldn’t get started.
“At first, I went though this painful phase of not writing,” she told her audience. “I thought maybe I’d write another novel, but I just wasn’t writing. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.”
As she waited for an idea which she could expand into something substantial, she noticed her mind was turning in a different direction.
“All I could think of was these weird little thoughts or bits of conversation. But when I thought about the term, micro-memoir, then I realized, ‘OK, I can write a book of these.'”
The result was 52 micro-memoirs, some no more than a sentence or two, none more than a few hundred words.
Fennelly shared several of those with her audience, including the opening micro-memoir title “Married Love.”
It reads:
“In every book my husband’s written, a character named Colin suffers a horrible death. This is because my boyfriend before I met my husband was named Colin. He was Scottish and an architect. So you understand my husband’s feelings of inadequacy. My husband cannot build a tall building of many stories. He can only build a story, and then push Colin out of it.”
The opening memoir pretty much sets the tone of Fennelly’s playful prose, reflecting the poet’s precision while telling a decidedly piecemeal personal history of marriage and family and friends and neighbors, mostly funny, but some poignant, even sad.
If she is quick to reveal the quirks of those around her, she is also eager to make herself the target of her considerable wit.
One example:
Why I’m Switching Salons:
“We can put on a topcoat with glitter,” said the manicurist. “We’ve noticed you like attention.”
Then there is this tribute to motherhood from the mom of three.
Mommy wants a glass of Chardonnay.
“If you collected all the drops of days I’ve spent singing, “Row, row, row your boat” to children fighting sleep, you’d have an ocean deep enough to drown them many times over.”
And finally, a nod to her own mom.
Another Reason I Love My Mother:
“At the baby shower, she rejects the pink M&Ms because pink M&Ms are ‘unnatural.'”
Fennelly’s ability to move in yet a new direction, this time in what may well be a new genre, is a journey readers will likely find irresistible.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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