I had been reading Here She Comes Now, a collection of essays (edited by Jeff Gordinier and Marc Weingarten) that respond to the lives and works of a number of women in music. I enjoyed the reading thoroughly despite having read it only in fits and starts, most often while on the treadmill at my local gym. As I read the last few selections, slogging up a simulacrum of a hill, it occurred to me (not because it was some great revelation or deep insight on my part, but just because something popped up in my mind that ought to have done so earlier) that the book is a series of what were called “personal narratives” in the long-ago days when I had students and the longer-ago days when I trained to teach them.

Given that most of my teaching was either first-year composition or college-preparatory writing–even if, as often, under older and less kindly names–I was often asked (emphatically, with the weight of my too-small and too-needed paychecks behind the requests) to teach the genre. Given what I was taught about teaching, I tried to model the assignments for my students. Given my own experiences and the usual demands of the imposed assignment–leave it to a bunch of old English majors (not Old English majors, nor yet Olde English 800) to want literacy narratives–I struggled to do so.

That I did so, both on the specific literacy narrative and on the more general personal narrative, is a result of the kind of life I’ve led. Reading Here She Comes Now reinforced to me that the personal narrative–however focused or on whatever art it centers–relies upon a perceived or experienced pivot. That is, it has to center on a “life-changing” experience, a transformative encounter with some thing or another. For a literacy narrative, it’s often the first or most prominent formative experience of reading; for the essays in Here She Comes Now, it’s an encounter with the woman’s music that reorients the writer.

I don’t have many such experiences or encounters; my life has not been a series of sharp shifts so much as it has been a long, gentle slide, and if it is the case that I have felt myself to be jerked around on occasion, it is because I have been so accustomed to gliding along that any jostling seems rough. At this point in my life, I do not begrudge it; my skin has grown thin and my belly weak, such that upset now is as like to lead to some messy rupture as any revelation about which I might opine to some new adulation. No, for me, the staid and sedate suffice. They must; I’ve nothing else.

Such pivotal moments in my past as there are have not much been with art. Devoted as I am and have been to writing and music, engaged as I have been at times inn other arts, they have always been for me always beens. I entered into them so early I don’t remember doing so. I do have the clichés, of course: the first written death threat I received, the first time I fucked, when I realized I meant to marry my wife, the discovery of her pregnancy with our daughter, the ejection from or surrender of life in academe, that kind of thing. But of what seem so much to be common experiences not worn to cliché? Not a whole hell of a lot.

It’s honestly a good thing. My parents did well to provide me an upbringing in which it was simply a matter of course that there would be books on the shelves and in hands; that there would be music playing and instruments available on which to play it; and that I had enough food to eat and fair variety in it, as well as a stable, safe place in which to eat it. I’m not finding fault with them that I don’t have a particular, singular experience that compares with so many that I have seen reported. That said, I can’t help but wonder what I’m missing–but that’s nothing new.

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