285. Myths, Fairy Tales, and Memoir with Elisabeth Sharp McKetta

Author and professor Elisabeth Sharp McKetta discusses how to create memoir using fairy tale, why you should do it, and how to give yourself space to be creative with your truth.

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Visit Elisabeth's website:
https://elisabethsharpmcketta.com/

Grab copies of her books here:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00OI1I5BI

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https://www.instagram.com/elisabethsharpmcketta/?hl=en
https://www.facebook.com/elisabethsharpmcketta/

Transcript

Jennia: Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the podcast that takes a whole person approach to everything related to both writing and editing. Elisabeth Sharp McKetta is the author of 13 books and she teaches for the Harvard Extension School writing program and Oxford University's diploma in creative writing. She has some fascinating insights that may provide listeners with a new way of framing their memoir and she'll be sharing some of those with us today. This is "Myths, Fairy Tales, and Memoir."

Jennia: Well, first, I am so excited to have you here! I have been looking forward to this conversation immensely.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: I have been looking forward to this conversation immensely too. Thank you so much for putting your beautiful podcasts into the world, and thank you for having me on this one.

Jennia: Aww, thank you! If you'd like to start by telling people a little bit about you and maybe how you got interested in memoir, or maybe you were interested in fairy tales first, and then the two overlapped.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: Yes, I would love to. And it really came, for me, down to two incredible teachers. And when I was 18 years old, I started as an undergrad at Harvard and ended up in the fairy tales class of ten 18 year olds taught by Maria Tatar, who's one of the world's living greatest fairy tale scholars. And a really, really talk about whole-life person. Just lovely in every way. And so I spent my freshman year of college thinking about all the many layers beneath fairy tales. And I'd always loved Disney movies, and I'd always loved stories that seemed, for lack of a better word, old and democratic.

Jennia: Ahh, yes.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: Stories that even if you haven't seen, quote, an "original version" of it, you know it. You have heard of Cinderella, you've heard of Hansel and Gretel. You know there's a gingerbread house and an oven involved. I think these stories are so cool because everyone has some access point to them.

Jennia: Mhm.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: I liked them, and I never really thought about how much is in them. I never really thought about how Bluebeard is the opposite of Beauty and the Beast. That in one of them you go in and think, "Well, this is a lovely husband, but he's got a closet," whereas another one, you go in and think, "Well, you know, this is a frog. I can't marry a frog"—

Jennia: Right! (laughs)

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —you find out, he's a prince! So I just had never thought critically about these stories, and I found that they were so much fun to think critically about. And so that became my access point to pretty much everything academic I did after that is how can I bring in fairy tales that expanded later to myth? But that always felt like my sort of, even when I did a PhD in my twenties, it was always fairy tales that—it just felt like, how can I enter this? Whatever "it" is how can I enter this by thinking about the fairy tale sort of core or bone structure of it? So that was fairy tales. And then my sophomore year, I applied for and was rejected by every single, creative writing class that Harvard offered at the time.

Jennia: Oh no.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: I was an avid poet and journal keeper, but I just was not skilled, and I needed to get better. But I didn't have a teacher. And so I sort of flopped around for a little while, wondering, "How am I going to—If they're not gonna let me in, now what?" And I learned about—and here's to community education. That's—I now teach adults, and I, in my classes, are open to anybody, which I love, because adults, well, I'll tell you (both laugh). I mean, it's wonderful. Classes should, you know, everyone should have access to a teacher when they need it. And in this case—

Jennia: Agreed.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —I found a course of retired Cambridge, Massachusetts memoirists. All women—

Jennia: Oh fantastic!

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —who were so cool. The teacher was, at the time I started at age 19, she was 96.

Jennia: Oh my (laughs).

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —And the youngest student besides me was probably 51. And the oldest student besides the teacher was, I think, 91. And they met every Tuesday from one to three in the basement of this, sort of—this building near Harvard Square to write their memoirs. So I went to this class on the first day with my—I think this was even—This was the early days of personal computers. So I had my notebook and my pen (Jennia laughs), and, you know, I was 19, and I always wore, like, kind of fancy hats then. Which is funny, because and I don't—I'm not very fancy anymore. But I always had beautiful hats on. And I showed up in this basement room and looked around, and they were all old women (both laugh). And I checked the room number, and it was the correct number, and I looked at them again, and by this point, they had figured out what had happened and were sort of laughing. They had been writing together for 15 years, and I was the new student, and so they had been waiting for me and did not expect me to be as young as I was.

Jennia: I can see why. Yeah, that's one thing that comes up so often in memoir especially when it's a younger person writing their memoir; that even though they've accomplished what they set out to accomplish, it still has that unfinished flavor to it, because we haven't really seen the effects of whatever it is they're writing about on that person.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: That is such a wonderful, wonderful point. And that's so true, now that you say that, one of my most accomplished Oxford students is a 19-year-old, second-book-published memoirist—

Jennia: Oh!

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —who said—You know, who could say that the young don't have wisdom and stories? And arguably, we have all the stories we need by the time we're 18. So, anyway, these women took me in, and I felt initiated as a writer into being trusted with their stories. And every Tuesday, we would turn in a short memoir, the teacher would give us extensive comments, and then we would spend the day workshopping it. So I wrote with them until the teacher died at age almost 101.

Jennia: Ohh.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: And it was wonderful. It was—I finished two books with these women. It was an incredible way to learn how to write. And so my bias is always for the first person. I feel like, you know, we all have an "I," and we all have an "I," and we all have something that that "I" has done or has feared or has regretted. And so whenever my students asked, "First or third?" I tell them, you know, "I'm biased!" You know, like, first person is always lovely, but, you know, you do you. So memoir was how I learned to creative write, fairy tales taught me how to write critically. And so the two of them just kept intersecting this idea of life writing fairy tales and myth, life writing fairy tales and myth. And I didn't know how much they would connect until I looked back at it in my late twenties, thirties. But it now feels very obvious that both memoir and myth put someone at the edge of a woods, and they're going to go through it and they're going to become wiser. And what is that story?

Jennia: Oh I love that.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: It's cool, isn't it?

Jennia: It is One—

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: It's really cool.

Jennia: —of the things that it seems that a lot of people think this is new. But even your dissertation, where you looked at Zelda Fitzgerald, we see that this isn't new at all. It's just that we're putting this label on it as if it's some new emerging thing. But it's been around forever.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: It's been around forever! I remember one of my students, she is from a culture where they don't distinguish between different kinds of stories. Instead of saying, like, "This is memoir, this is autobiography, this is fiction, this is a novel," it's a story. If it's not a story, it's a poem. But most of them are all stories. Isn't that amazing?

Jennia: It is I mean, that also then just shows that we're taking this westernized concept of what we're defining it as or why this is new and different, and then applying it as if that is this global principle when it's not at all.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: No, it's a handy publishing label, which is useful when you go into your bookstore. But writers don't need to stay in those lines at all.

Jennia: Oh agreed. Well, in your dissertation, you also came up with your own term to refer to this type of memoir, and I'd love to have you share that and also explain what it means and how you came to that term.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: I am the daughter of a math teach—a former math teacher, and poets do math. I love math. I used to be really good at math, and now I'm pretty much a poet, a writer, a storyteller, and all of my math is very fuzzy and filtered through the lens of sort of the metaphors that I appreciate (Jennia laughs). So I (Elisabeth laughs)—So I love sort of thinking with things like absolute value or, you know, different math terms I just think are so much fun to play with. And I welcome all corrections from people who actually know math, because I'm getting—I'm sure I'm getting all them wrong. But the asymptote is this idea that I remember being quite interested in, and it's spelled like kind of "asymptomatic." But an asymptote is—sorry, mathematicians—it's picture like a line in a graph, and—a parabola—a line that swoops down toward a point on it and approaches it endlessly but never touches it.

Jennia: Yes.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: So the idea was once explained to me, as you bounce a ball against a wall, it comes halfway back. Bounce it again, but it never goes all the way, it always goes halfway back. So the idea of the asymptote, I take poetically, is the idea of an endless approach. Which is a pretty cool idea—

Jennia: Yeah!

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: because—well, kind of, like what we're talking about with genres and categories. When you sort of touch the point, you're there. When you, you know, end up in that section of the bookshelf with your label, you're there. But when you're always sort of moving towards something, you'll pass through so many interesting bands of idea, and thought, and time beforehand, and you don't have to be stuck, really, because you're just approaching. And so I took this idea—in the fuzzy poet way—to look at Zelda Fitzgerald's novel, which all people who knew her well said was basically an autobiography—

Jennia: Mhm.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —It changed the names, but told the story of her childhood and her marriage, and her illness—although it replaced her mental illness with physical illness from a ballet injury—and then her sort of recovery and acceptance at the end. So all the stages of memoir. You sort of set up, something happens, you either change or you accept it. You know, all memoirs, I think, end with either change or accept. And there's your wisdom. And in it, she uses fairy tales all over the place, both in terms of actual words like, you know, the castle, the love interest is—his last name is Knight. You know, there's all sorts of fairy tale motifs in there—

Jennia: Mhm.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —and then there also—There are plot points. There's the sort of old woman dance teacher who's the mentor. There's the sort of father who is the sort of king of the Kingdom and suspicious of the knight husband. All these things. It's such a fairy tale. And she, in fact, loved fairy tales and said that the Grimms were her favorite stories, and would often do paper dolls of the big bad wolf. She was a fairy tale woman—

Jennia: Oh how fun.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —She really liked fairy tales. And she put them in such—even her sentences. I'm going to quote you one of them because it's so beautiful. And I'll say it slowly so people can actually take it all in the. From the novel, there's the line, "In the summer, they rode through daisy fields like nursery rhymes, where dreamy cows saddled with shade nibbled the summer off of the white slopes."

Jennia: That is stunning.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: That is stunning. The book is like, surrealist, and weird, and wonderful, and it falls apart. You know, it's, like, not a coherent book. She wrote it in, like, six weeks in a mental hospital, but it's just wonderful. And so I was interested in this idea of why Zelda Fitzgerald would use fairy tales to tell the story of her life. And I had a bunch of theories, but they sort of crystallized in a few different forms, I guess. All of which have proven useful in my own writing and in my teaching. One of them is, her life was put on display, with her consent, by her husband in his books.

Jennia: Right.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —She was, you know, her journals, and her life was fodder for his novels. And when she was younger, when she was in her twenties, she thought that was great. So there's a big debate in, like, "Scott, Zelda, who ruined the other?" And I don't interphrase because I feel like their lives could not have existed without the other—

Jennia: Agreed, yes.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —But she was a public figure and her life was sort of put—you know, both for her doctors and her husband—put in sort of this case, that often showed her in ways that she outgrew and couldn't escape. And so I think that by telling her story using the language of the imaginary, she gave herself sort of a comfortable shell to tell a story that otherwise she couldn't have. And I have other theories too. But I think that's the one that gave form to what I now teach at Harvard and Oxford, which is called "Mythic Memoir." And I ask each of the writers to take a story from their lives. We'll do exercises to identify which one to tell now.

Jennia: Mmm.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: And I ask them to sort of find a little segment that's far enough back that they know the end of the story, but that feels somehow like it's nothing shuttered into grayscale yet. Something about it still feels alive and relevant to their technicolor, to their very real questions about themselves today. So the story's done, but they haven't finished processing it. So that's what we need to find. Sometimes it doesn't pass the test and that it's too recent sometimes in that it's done, but the story's flat now. You don't need to inquire into it. But once they've picked their story, then I ask them to think through what myths and fairy tales, or just very old stories, they especially have loved. And often we get a really fun list there. Some of them that, you know, don't exist, except that they were told by their Haitian grandmother. You know, so a lot of stories that we can't find the text for—

Jennia: Oh right.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —but they just were old stories. And then some of them, like, that were—people ask, "Can I do Disney's Little Mermaid?" Do whatever you want! Do the one that inspires you, and that feels like the telling of the story that you like and that feels comfortable for you. And then we sort of mesh the two together and start thinking about how does the story, does the fairy tale provide some sort of spine to their life? And so once they've sort of figured out those two, they just strike sparks. And they'll use the images of the fairy tale. They'll sometimes use the fairy tale to replace a section of life that they can't tell now. I—And there are really strategic omissions in the memoir that are then kind of carried by doing sort of interesting mosaic tile mirror work with the fairy tale. So the writing that is done in there is often some of the most potent writing that the students report ever having done. You know, they deal with stories they've never told anybody sometimes. They sort of lay to rest stories that had been bugging them in the middle of the night. And they sometimes make changes to their lives based on what they have seen as true. It's incredibly transformative.

Jennia: That sounds really powerful, yeah. I mean, this even kind of goes back to something you said about yourself when you were only 18 or 19 and when you were learning about this. And that you're taking them with these fairy tales and you're teaching them to look past the literal interpretations, to see the symbolism and metaphors when they're being used as metaphors, and how they can then extract that and tease it out so that they can apply their own life concepts and happenings to this. Because that also brings it alive. You know, it helps you see that this is some ever-moving topic and subject, and that these stories are still fresh and new because now it's your story, while it also has the elements that are familiar to you from this classic story.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: Yes, you said that so beautifully and so truly. Now it's your story. And that is exactly, I think, how these stories are meant to be written, which is—like, find me a fairy tale where we actually know what someone looks like. You know, it would never be, "Oh, she wears striped dresses a lot and she has dark eyebrows." Like, it's never that. It's always, "She, you know, was as beautiful as the sun" or, "She was as old as the hills." Like, it's always sort of insert your version of this archetypal age, beautiful. I think they're just so elastic. They're just things that you can fill in what you, as the teller, need in order to write for this era, this audience, this story. It's just so... They're so cool.

Jennia: That goes to another question I was going to ask, too, but you've already hinted at this a little bit. And that is how this type of memoir can remove the constraints from the writer that strict autobiography or memoir might have in place?

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: Yes, I think that's such an important point and goes back to exactly what we were talking about with genre. That I think we can all think of moments when publishing, doing its best, marketed something in the wrong genre.

Jennia: Mhm.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: And said, if this has some truth and some fiction you know, it's a little more interesting. If we do it as a memoir, that's close enough. But then when parts of it proved fiction, the writer has to answer for that. And that's—

Jennia: Right.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —such... I mean, it's many—it takes many people who make a book, but the writer is the face. And, you know, I think the writer bears a lot of that. Bears all of that, really. Anyway, it's—

Jennia: Oh yeah. And it's incredibly difficult to come back from that as well as soon as someone's labeled you a liar—

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: Yes.

Jennia: —when you didn't think of it in that terminology, and that wasn't your intention at all. But once a label is made and then widely spread, how do you get away from that?

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: Exactly. Exactly. It's just a scarlet letter. You know, it's really—It's horrible for the writers. And I think that as writers, we deserve to write the stories that feel like we need to write them. You know, I think that if we can grow wise through writing it, you know, in one of the fairy tale values. If we grow more forgiving, kinder. I always think I've grown a psychic inch through writing this book, then the book has been a success (both laugh). And I think that in writing it, we have to write it the way that, you know, that tells the story best, even if it doesn't fit in traditional lanes. And then when it comes to, you know, sort of connecting it a the world, which we as writers want to do, then it becomes a question of, yeah, how do we keep the story and the writer safe? And I think that's when terms like auto fiction and mythic memoir are just such gifts to the writer. They're just sort of little hermit crab shells, I think. To just let it be what it needs to be without, so—without being defined in a way that it will get shot down for failing.

Jennia: Yeah. And I think that these terms, too, are these names that we, you know, we know they're not new labels, but they're new labels for maybe the people today. But it also, I think, allows the reader to give more space to the writer, to be creative and go through that exploration. Whereas if they had these preconceived notions of "This is what a memoir does and does not do," and then as soon as you break one of those unwritten rules that they've already established applies to you and your work, then what? But, yeah, using this framework, people go in with that understanding of, "It's factual in essence, but maybe not in how it is told," or knowing even that so much of this is going to be metaphorical. And so therefore, you can push aside that belief that everything you're reading is strictly true.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: Yes, that is so beautifully said. And that feels exactly it, that the difference between truth and fact is a pretty potent difference, and often are—

Jennia: Right. And even, what is it? Because, I mean, especially memoirs, we know that the truth is not really the truth, and that our version of the truth isn't going to be the same as even, let's say, someone else who is there with us throughout this entire interaction. And yet we still are held to the standard of, are you telling the absolute truth? But what is the absolute truth?

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: What is the truth? And often an antagonist in a memoir is just someone who believes a different truth, which is why we must be compassionate to our antagonist. And it's so funny, you have kids, so you know that the facts of, you know, "How is your day?" And you get, you know, 30 minutes of every single detail (Jennia laughs). Like, a reader wouldn't tolerate that. We will, because we love our children—

Jennia: Right (laughs).

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —But the truth of the day is, like, it was exciting and there was a scuffle on the playground. Like, that's the truth.

Jennia: It is.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: That's the editing part, I think, is, what is—We want the core. That we're always going to and tell tell much more than we can use in the well-edited version that is the best shape for this particular story. That, yeah, the facts sort of distill to the truth that ideally can outlast the writer and outlast caring about the writer. You know, we don't really care that much who—I mean, I don't know, some of us do, I guess. But, like, we don't have to know who Shakespeare is to appreciate Shakespeare's stories. We don't need to know about the Grimms brothers to get a kick out of The Frog King. That at the end, the sort of the stories that have been distilled to their right versions go on.

Jennia: Right. Which I think is another benefit, really, to using the myth, the mythic—bleh—The mythic memoir storytelling method is that we are going to have these easily-applied frameworks that we're already familiar with. And so it's sort of like whenever we're doing anything new or even with fantasy and world building, well, what can you do to ground this in what the reader already knows? But when we use this sort of framework, we've already grounded you. You already know your starting point. You already have a rough idea of what will be occurring and how this will end.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: Yes! I lo—exactly. That is it!

Jennia: So for those people who have criticized this, what would you say to them when they share this opinion?

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: Oh, I would suggest that they just read (Jennia laughs). There's so many exciting books right now that are—that blend fact and fiction. And also, I think that, you know, anyone who feels sort of nervous about this idea, I would say, as a writer you know, you are the writer. You have the reins. You decide what of this needs to be what. And I've certainly had—I mean, I always try to be as faithful as possible to—

Jennia: Mhm.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —you know, what I need to tell. And I also arrange it in a way that highlights that truth. And I think we, as writers, have that responsibility. But also I think it's quite interesting that one of the—You know, all of us who go to readings of authors, wouldn't you say that two main questions asked are, number one, what's your writing routine?

Jennia: Mhm.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: And number two, what of that really happened? We're hungry to know what really happened, because where does this come from? You know, and we know as writers, it comes from a mix of what we've lived, what we've imagined, what we've read, what we feared, what we've dreamt. I mean, it's a mix of everything, you know, it's a mix. We don't—And sometimes we can't point to it and say, "I got this from there." But sometimes we can. And I think that asking a writer that question of, you know, where did—can you identify in chapter one where all this came from? It's a pretty exciting idea because, you know, it's always sort of a magpie affair.

Jennia: That's one thing, too, if we go back to what even is the truth. And one of the things that I personally love about this style of memoir is that it allows us to really dig into who we are and take that distanced approach, because it's usually when we have distance—And we see this all the time with memoirs and the advice that we're given for writing one. But if we think of ourselves as, let's say, Cinderella or Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk, we're able to really take that analytical view that we might not be able to when we view the self as the self. And that is one thing that I just think is fantastic, because you might come to realizations you might not even known that you had, or you may never have come to otherwise.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: Yes, it's so interesting. It's, you know—we have so many things that guide us on this journey through the woods. And some of them are provable. Some of them are hunches. Some of them are good, solid evidence. Some of them are advice from our parents. Some of them are advice from our non-parents. But all of them provide this sort of organizing mechanism through the woods. And that feels like exactly what memoir—and what myth can do for memoir.

Jennia: Well, for listeners who would like to see some exemplary examples of this type of memoir, do you have any recommendations?

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: Well, oh, I mean, every one of my students is the first answer. I keep thinking that at some point I would love to start a... I don't know I think my literary journal days are over, but there should be some sort of, you know, podcast, some sort of—

Jennia: Oh!

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: —mythic. I know. Hmm, (jokingly) do you want that one? (Jennia laughs). You know, a podcast, a literary journal. Like someone—I would love to—I've brought this up to my students. Somebody needs to start this and just put these in there. There's so many good ones, but they're published everywhere, so I can't really point to that. Two books ago, three books ago is called Awake with Asashoryu, and that is the one that contains my own short essays that have myth and fairy tale at the heart. So that's a fun one that I would love to recommend. And then I think...oh, there's so many. I'm not going to recommend Zelda Fitzgerald—even though I love her—because she's just too hard to read. But I think just keep your eye out and ask your bookstore owners who uses myth in interesting ways that you might recommend, because there's a lot out there.

Jennia: Great advice. Well, thank you again. This has been so fun!

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: This has been so fun. Thank you so very much. I really enjoyed this!

Jennia: Oh me too.

Jennia: Well, thank you for listening. And be sure to check out the show notes for additional information, including any links to Elisabeth's website and the books we mentioned. And then please join me next week when Patrick Barb shares how to write to a theme and also how to edit and assemble a collection of short stories around that theme. And if you enjoyed today's episode, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could rate or review this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks again!