“The gum cost a dollar, but the story was free”

I think the person I’d most like the students in my Creative Nonfiction courses to write like is Sarah Vowell. I’ve just finished her Assassination Vacation—a tour of various sites connected with the murders of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. (Not Dallas, I’m not sure why.) And last summer I read The Wordy Shipmates, her study of the Puritans as writers and intellectuals. They’re both unusually fun, smart books—written by someone who seems a natural scholar, who simply can’t resist finding out more about what she’s looking at.

Vowell is fascinated by odd coincidences and unexpected links between figures of different eras, but she’s not a mystic or a conspiracy theorist. Her favorite prose form is the aside, the digression, and yet her writings have a clear sense both of focus and direction. Her style is flip and irreverent, but grounded in an impressive amount of reading, travel, and listening. She is almost always a character in her stories—the two books I’ve read essentially follow her trips from one place to the next, chatting and arguing with the tour guides, docents, re-enactors, and fellow visitors she encounters—but her writing never seems just about her. Instead she’s always hooked, like a magpie, on the next new glittering object or person or story. So while she has a remarkable voice as a writer, her work is refreshingly centered on others.

Here’s a passage from Assassination Vacation that hints at some of her characteristic methods, hobbyhorses, and charms. Vowell has just been lamenting that there is no plaque to mark the spot in Washington, DC, where Charles Guiteau shot James Garfield. She writes:

I am pro-plaque. New York is lousy with them, and I love how spotting a plaque can jazz even the most mundane errand. Once I stepped out of a deli on Third Avenue and turned the corner to learn that I had just purchased gum near the former site of Peter Stuyvesant’s pear tree. For a split second I had fallen through a trapdoor that dumped me out in New Amsterdam, where in 1647 the peg-legged Dutch governor planted a tree he brought over from Holland; until a fatal wagon accident, it bore fruit for more than two hundred years. To me, every plaque, no matter what words are inscribed on it, says the same magic transformative thing: Something happened! The gum cost a dollar, but the story was free. (159)

I’m going to try to resist over-interpreting here, but . . . I really like the idea of the writer as a plaque-maker, as someone who makes small notes about the meanings of things, who creates “trapdoors” for others to fall through. And I really like the idea that all this writing—both by the plaque-maker and Vowell—is grounded in research. The gum costs a dollar. As a writer, you’ve got to put in some time, some effort, to get the story—even if for the reader it seems free.

References

Vowell, Sarah. 2005. Assassination vacation. New York: Simon & Schuster.

———.  2009. The wordy shipmates. New York: Riverhead.