I know–it's a funny question, but it first occurred to me when I was getting my MFA at Vermont College, and my beautiful friend, Alicia, with her long, wavy golden hair (I mean, she's one of the most gorgeous women I have ever met) went out on the town one night with some famous visiting poets, and when she came back, she was horrified. "The poets!" she said. "They were such creeps!" She added that she thought, after reading their work, that they would be "like angels."
I told her how, before I went to church, I thought Christians were, well, Christian. "Wow, you really are out of touch!" she laughed. "What planet did you grow up on?"
I have often wondered: how far we are from the message or story or image we send into the world? Of course, fiction writers aren't held up to the same standard as poets. We don't expect Stephen King to be a psycho-murderer. But poets are often equated with the work they create. Maybe it's a problem of the the first-person in poetry. Am I really the I in my confessional poems? Are you? Yes or no, we create a certain kind of expectation. After all, I think readers like to identify with writers in one way or another.
It's that kind of identification I wonder at. I wonder about it with cities, too. Because I think of places as stories, as personalities, and I travel to them with certain expectations.
When I was moving back to Charlottesville, the story I read about it was of a lovely, exciting, liberal University town. I was relieved to think it had changed so much from the Charlottesville I grew up in, which was a stunningly beautiful but racist, sleepy, southern town, much like the fictional Lessington, Virginia I wrote about in Miss August. But then, last summer there was that horrific White Supremacist rally in Charlottesville. And since I've moved, many have written me to ask what it's like here. Is Charlottesville a racist city? How is the town coping with what happened? Do people talk about the tragedy? I don't know the answers, but from what I have read in the Heaphy Report, the story is both beyond upsetting and it's ongoing.
In the aftermath of the event, many of the counter-protesters are being sued, and until a week ago, there were plans for another Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August of 2018. The protesters, as one friend explained it, have learned to tell a legally defensible story. They have figured out how to situate themselves on the right side of the law. And how to frame the story in their favor. And our dear President has joined them in that effort.
Is that even possible? I am still just dumbstruck by the whole thing.
But it brings me to my last point, or the last thing rambling around in my brain today . . .
In his recent article in the New Yorker, The Double Murder Case That Still Haunts Me, Nathan Heller writes about a gruesome double-murder that happened in the 1980s in Lynchburg, an hour down the road from Charlottesville. It was a murder that caught the attention of the public back in the '80's, and that the short story writer, Peter Taylor, and his wife, the poet, Eleanor Ross Taylor, talked about at length when we visited with them that year. The murderers, Elizabeth Haysom and Jen Soering, were top UVA students and talented writers, which was why the Taylors were especially stunned by their story. Now, years later, a documentary has been made about the case. Everyone is still questioning what exactly took place.
But it is the murderers' ability as writers that causes Nathan Heller to question them. He writes:
Both Haysom and Soering were writers in college, and both have become successful authors who have published from prison. That haunted me, too—partly because there’s an inherent slipperiness involved in interviewing people who know how stories are composed, and partly because the coverup itself seemed to have literary attributes. As I put it in the magazine piece: “At least one of the people implicated has been hiding the truth with a writer’s mind."