Dan Chiasson, Natural History

He tried on the confessional style for a while.

If people hurt you, tell on them: perhaps you'll heal.
If language hurts you, make the damage real.

("XV. Rnadall Jarrell")


Or is poetry picking the scarcest word

("'Scared by the Smallest Shriek of a Pig, and When Wounded, Always Give Ground")

Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six in Six Million

As we all started eating dessert, she turned to me and said, But how will you tell it? Before I had a chance to answer, she told me about some friends she had in New York, people her age, whose family had stories--terrible stories, she said--about the war. Now these people had a child, Alena went on, a daughter in her early twenties, who'd just taken a degree in literature, and who had written her thesis about her grandmother, the one who'd suffered those terrible things. Alena said that this young woman had given her the thesis to read, and while reading it she had been struck by something.

She said, It was like what she was interested in was not so much the story of her grandmother but how to tell the story of her grandmother--how to be the storyteller.