Emily Pineau Reviews....DeWitt Henry Visit

“The risk of taking a jump with a chord around you is like writing.  The bungee chord is your imagination,” explains memoirist and founder of Ploughshares literary magazine DeWitt Henry.  At first Henry struggled with “taking a jump” in his literary career because his fiction “didn’t make a big dent in the world,” he explained when he did this presentation at Endicott College.  Henry established Ploughshares Literary magazine in 1971, which offered him a “social identity as a writer,” he confides in his memoir “Sweet Dreams”.  This magazine also provided him with encouragement during his process of writing his first fiction novel, which was struggle for him to write.  For me, the concept of this magazine is very inspirational because I hope to write novels one day, and find a way to establish myself.  Learning about how DeWitt Henry started out loving writing in his classrooms at school, and then struggled to finish his first novel made me feel like I can connect with him as a college student and as someone who wants to be recognized as an author.  After DeWitt Henry brought Ploughshares magazine to Emerson College, where he is currently a writing professor, he was able to successfully combine his love for reading, writing, publishing, and teaching.  Also, Henry discovered that in a lot of his writing the characters’ personalities and situations reflect his own life and his past, which lead him to write his memoir “Sweet Dreams”.   

“Memoirs are notoriously difficult to end because all lives are in progress,” DeWitt Henry points out after he read an excerpt from “Sweet Dreams”.  As Henry continued on to read fragments from his memoir, they all pulled together to sound like a story.  Even though this memoir is about Henry’s alcoholic father and his family life, the real story lies within questions like “How do you know truth?” and “How do you know you have demons?” DeWitt Henry wants his memoir to be a metaphor for others’ lives, which is a concept that I can really connect with.  It is important to write for yourself, but in the end it’s not just about pouring your guts out on paper.  When DeWitt Henry remarks, “No one is congratulating memoir writers for shaking the offered hand of clichés” he opened my eyes to the fact that writing is actually about telling a version of the truth that isn’t shared and is about experiencing “the life you live on your pulses”.  I never really thought about what was involved in writing a memoir before, because as a creative writing student I have always concentrated on short stories and poetry.  It is important, though, to reflect on the life you are living in order to discover your necessary fictions and your edited truths.   ***** Emily Pineau is a Creative Writing Major at Endicott College