Chain: 7

7: Memoir/Anti-Memoir
Guest Editor's Notes

Let us not forget, says Jabes, that if we say "I," we already say different.
--Rosmarie Waldrop, "Lavish Absence: Reading and Recalling Edmond Jabes"

I am not I; pity the tale of me.
--Sir Philip Sidney, "Astrophil and Stella"

[W]hat I was really trying to do was re-center the self because I was tired of hearing about the de-centered self. And when you hear a phrase too many times, if you're me, you think, "Ha, ha, I think I'll do the opposite."
--Alice Notley

How I grew. When I pick up a book and it is not me. The book is a suit that fits I think another someone. I say. It is this book that limits me. Or if I open it, did I write it womehow? I look at the pages. How can I enter it? Tell me the topic, please, and I will write the story of my life.
But which I found its way into print? What was the mystery, and who wolved it.

This issue of Chain grew out of a conversation I had with Jena Osman last year at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia. I described to Jena some of the work I'd been hearing from writers who'd been coming through the House, work that seemed to address the motives of memoir without bowing to its generic conventions or ideological assumptions. Juliana Spahr joined the conversation, then co-editors Dorothy Wang, Nzadi Keita and Marina Budhos, and we began to imagine a collection. There were poets whose work was autobiographical yet defied confessionalism's ahistorical identifications, its solipsism. There were prose writers whose memoirs took as their subjects the constructedness of the selves. There were writers whose work addressed their own political and social minority and the ways that representing the self can both articulate and challenge one's inscription into a marginal position. One could see a kind of conversation taking place among contemporary writers about how to understand and represent subjectivity--whether or not and how to locate it, name it, cohere it, identify with it.

Hey! I am going to make up an I that will stick to the pages of a book. I'm out there now where you all are. Oh, you say I am already entered into your book. But you wrote yours in a different language. Different story. For a different set of eyes. Can you tell me my sections. It's like a boat floating; it needs a map.

Chain 7: memoir/anti-memoir presents new texts that show the expanse and range of contemporary memoir. The works gathered here reveal memoir as re-invention, as generic interplay, as a conversation among texts, as travel back and forth and across times and states of mind. One can see in these texts the political and psychic stakes involved in self-representation and the ongoing negotiations of subjects, in dreams and particular material histories, making their way. Across the differences, there is a consciousness of language as the inter-me-diary.

Thrown from a boat, a boy nearly drowns but doesn't. Who is his father? George Washington wants him to have all of the opportunities our VCR has. What does an I have to do with an E? Headings in the same world book.

Many thanks to our contributors for the work. Thanks also to Chain's editors Jena Osman, Juliana Spahr, and Janet Zweig, and to this particular issue's co-editors, Marina Budhos, Nzadi Keita, Dorothy Wang.

Now always I was swimming. The waves. The terrible waves. How do I dare not identify. Warm, dry skin of the book.

--Kerry Sherin