Final Thoughts on Cherish This Ecstasy

What is "persona" and can you say which one you're using in your own work?

An Exclusive Writing Lab on persona, how it can build or shatter trust, and my own learning curve on this important aspect of storytelling.

In her classic teaching on creative non-fiction, The Situation and The Story, Vivian Gornick wrote that the “I” voice is a persona.

“I have created a persona who can find the story riding the tide that I, in my unmediated state, am otherwise going to drown in.”

Gornick means that all of us writing in this form are creating “selves” who tell particular stories.

If you haven’t been following our series of posts, we have been reading David James Duncan’s essay titled Cherish This Ecstasy, which I’m using to wrap this discussion.

persona

pər-sō′nə

noun

1. The character represented by the voice of the speaker in a literary work.

2. The characters in a dramatic or literary work.

3. The role that one assumes or displays in public or society; one's public image or personality, as distinguished from the inner self.

~ The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

When it comes to this question, the self Duncan created—the persona—was a man looking back at a younger version of himself when the wound of separation was the most acute. That persona is also imbued with cues that (based on the references within the essay) tell us the younger version of Duncan has grown into an older, wiser man who has had the experience, again and again, of wild birds appearing. To be clear…Duncan isn’t “that guy” all the time, but he was that guy when telling this story. He took on an “I” persona which is then a fractal of the whole man.

The right persona with the right approach to truth, or the levels of truth available to you at the time, work together to create a working relationship between yourself and your reader. All story establishes this kind of connection to be true, but with creative non-fiction, the relationship is more intimate, more “real” because the reader of your work will always assume, due to the form, that the writer is an actual person speaking directly to them. And so, trust becomes the necessary foundation of the relationship.

While many of us worry about telling the truth or proving the facts of our story, this pact with the reader is the real thing to worry about and work on.

…part of our trust in good personal essayists issues, paradoxically, from their exposure of their own betrayals, uncertainties, and self-mistrust.”

~ The Art of the Personal Essay by Philip Lopate

Without question, Duncan has earned our trust in his opening paragraphs. He’s covered, as the saying goes, all his bases.

How are you earning your reader's trust?

What persona are you wearing when telling your tale?

And how much do you think about these questions when writing your stories?

A quote by Vivian Gornick at www.quoteslyfe.com

As I was preparing this post, I had to admit that I rarely…if ever…think about persona. I’ve read about the reality of a persona, and I get it intellectually, but when I write from life, I never, not ever, think about persona. And frankly, I don’t think about “cueing the reader” either (which I wrote about last week).

Why? Why don’t I ever think about either? 🤷🏻‍♀️ I have no idea.

I suppose the truth is that both are annoying and distracting from what I consider my “creative process.” It’s like thinking about commas, semi-colons, and other pesky punctuation. Yuck! When writing, I also resist thinking about rules of grammar, spelling, and my verb choices (though these are the first things I will go at with a pencil when reading a student's writing. So…go figure).

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