I spent the week with Jeanette Winterson. I started reading her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? last Sunday. It took me two days to devour it, but I am still digesting it, rereading parts, copying sentences, doing paragraph by paragraph analyses of certain chapters. When I am not reading the book, I am still reading her, a quick internet search brings up dozens of newspaper articles, interviews, and reviews, and gossip. Audrey Bilger's wonderful interview, published in The Paris Review in 1997, can be found on the magazine's website. So I read and reread Jeanette Winterson talk about her books, her creative process, about the Bible, the story, love and memory. I have also been listening to her, there are podcasts free to download, and hour long talks available on YouTube. On the official Jeanette Winterson website there are audio clips of her reading from her books, and I listen to those over and over again. In the beginning of the week I was listening to her rather religiously, now I let her voice fill the room as I go about my business, I have come to know her rhythm and her accent, which as Kate Kellaway puts it in a 2006 interview, "makes everything she says sound sensible and kindly."

I spent the week with Jeanette Winterson. I started reading her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? last Sunday. It took me two days to devour it, but I am still digesting it, rereading parts, copying sentences, doing paragraph by paragraph analyses of certain chapters. When I am not reading the book, I am still reading her, a quick internet search brings up dozens of newspaper articles, interviews, and reviews, and gossip. Audrey Bilger's wonderful interview, published in The Paris Review in 1997, can be found on the magazine's website. So I read and reread Jeanette Winterson talk about her books, her creative process, about the Bible, the story, love and memory. I have also been listening to her, there are podcasts free to download, and hour long talks available on YouTube. On the official Jeanette Winterson website there are audio clips of her reading from her books, and I listen to those over and over again. In the beginning of the week I was listening to her rather religiously, now I let her voice fill the room as I go about my business, I have come to know her rhythm and her accent, which as Kate Kellaway puts it in a 2006 interview, "makes everything she says sound sensible and kindly."
          It's been a great coincidence that I read Why Be Happy this week when I was, somewhat more passively than I'd initially planned to, thinking about myself. (I was going to do fictional character sketches to get to know the narrator of my essays better, who is no other than myself, but more on that later.) Winterson reminded me what I really wanted to do, and how I wanted to do it. She took me back in time, through layers of education, and dumped me right in the middle of the unrefined storytelling energy that I have always admired in her work.
          I was 18 when I read The Passion for the first time. "I am telling you stories. Trust me," she said, and I did. I trusted her story, I trusted her unreliable narrators with their unreliable hearts, I trusted her as a writer, and I trusted the power of her book. It had grabbed me in the guts. Trust isn't enough to explain what I felt, but it was in the core of my feelings, it still is, even after ten years and many rereadings.
          But I was not as daring as Winterson, who was able to write Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit when she was 25, and The Passion when she was 27. I thought I had to read all the books that are ever published before writing something of my own. I thought I had to study reading and writing. I went to a small liberal arts college, because there I could create my own major. I was going to major in Storytelling. I wanted to write stories of love, hopeful stories even when they were dark, and I wanted to write them as a storyteller would tell them.
          My small liberal arts college thought storytelling was not a serious subject. I resisted for as long as I could, then compromised, an act that reinforced my point as I have been arguing that the deed was more important than its name. I inserted a loathsome colon in my title followed by an explanation for serious academics who seemed to be always more interested in the name than the deed itself. Then I changed my major to English in the last minute, so that I could study abroad during my last semester. When I was in France, and then back home in Turkey, I did not write regularly, and I did not write stories. I wrote short texts that were half fact half imagination. Then I got into an MFA program in nonfiction, which sounds like a storytelling haven, but we do not sit around and tell stories here. We study the craft of writing. It's a construction site: We build scenes, and we build characters, and we build narrative arcs.
          As I learned about the bits and pieces that make "good writing," in school and through my personal endeavors, I moved further and further away from the wholeness of storytelling. I do not mean to underestimate the craft of writing. When I think of this dichotomy of telling versus writing in stories, I think of Homer and Virgil; one composing his epic as a song, the other as poetry. They are both beautiful, incomparably so, and I can never say one is better than the other. Yet I turn to The Odyssey more often than I turn to The Aeneid. I think this is less of a commentary on the books than one on myself, and has less to do with geography than my interest in oral traditions and storytelling.
          Winterson tells one of her interviewers that when she is writing, typing at the computer, she says the sentences out loud. "It's a good thing I do not live in London," she says, "or else I'd been carted out as a mad person." When she reads from her book, she does not read but recites the opening. She has memorized it. She uses the orality and the song of the story both in the writing and in the telling, establishing the wholeness of storytelling as best as it can be established in the 21st century.
          She also reminded me the importance of memorizing poems. I memorized poems when I was in high school, and when I wrote my first college essay, I memorized the first paragraph, and I recited it to my friends. "I had dried pineapples. They looked like slices of sun covered with granulated sugar. . ." I went around reciting. It wasn't that I was proud of what I had written, in fact at the time I had only written half of the essay, but there was something about saying it out loud. There is something about internalizing the rhythm of writing.
          I'll leave you with Winterson and go memorize a poem. I think my insides could benefit from some Yeatsian rhythm and beauty.