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Discarded 'ordinary' writing more accurately reveals everyday life, says USU English professor
Scraps of paper. A shopping list, an ordering of tomorrow's tasks, a doodle in the margin. Bits of writing inscribing our lives, bits routinely discarded. "Ordinary writing, perhaps more than memoir or autobiography, shows how we construct ourselves, how we get through the day," says Utah State University professor of English Jennifer Sinor. Sinor will discuss the importance of everyday writing at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Utah State Haight Alumni Center, when she discusses work from her forthcoming book, The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray's Diary. The public is invited to this free event, during which a light lunch will be served. Sinor maintains that "our world is filled with writing that we never really pay attention to, until something remarkable happens." For Sinor, something remarkable happened when she encountered a surviving diary of her great-great-great aunt Annie Ray. "Most of what she'd written had been thrown out, burned," says Sinor. "Annie's writing is very bare-boned, sparse. It took me a while to realize that what was compelling about her writing was not the few moments of story, but all the ordinary moments she's able to capture." Annie Ray, according to Sinor, homesteaded in the Dakotas in the late 1800s with her husband Charley, who was largely absent and frequently unfaithful. Annie used her diary, which Sinor notes is actually a ledger book, "to contain everything in tight order. She doesn't have much control over her situation, so she tries to impose it rhetorically." What Sinor finds fascinating is how an ordinary diary "shows us how the layers of dailiness look on the page." As evidence, Sinor refers to a page of Annie's diary that she describes as a "hybrid entry." "It's not even certain when things get put on this page," says Sinor. "Here's a list of the terribly expensive tools they buy for her husband's blacksmith business, alongside her personal entries which are consumed with the weather and baking and washing and things like that. Neither the financial constraints from the tool purchase nor the weather are experienced separately by Annie," says Sinor. "They work together; they're interlaced." And this, argues Sinor is what makes ordinary writing extraordinary. It's not "hugely shaped," notes Sinor, in the way that memoir and autobiography are. "In addition to those forms," she maintains, "we should consider the bits of writing we have been taught to discard, like Annie's diary, as models of life writing. If we dismiss ordinary writing, we're missing out on what it's like to document dailiness. And that is what's truly fascinating." Sinor's forthcoming book, The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray's Diary, includes excerpts of Annie's diary, and is scheduled for release fall of 2002. Sinor concludes that "what we're missing is that ordinary people are every day inscribing ordinary writing like Annie's, writing that was supposed to be thrown out, but that survives to provide readers with fascinating possibilities for exploration."
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