{"id":13743,"date":"2025-03-30T19:16:08","date_gmt":"2025-03-31T02:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/?p=13743"},"modified":"2025-03-30T19:16:15","modified_gmt":"2025-03-31T02:16:15","slug":"perhaps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/perhaps\/","title":{"rendered":"Perhaps"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Note from Marlene:<\/strong> \u201cPerhaps\u201d is one of my favorite words. It\u2019s an easy method of offering alternative ways of thinking. If you are writing a memoir and aren\u2019t sure of the details, you could write, \u201cPerhaps it happened this way.\u201d If you are conjecturing, \u201cperhaps\u201d is a gentle way of saying, \u201cIt could have happened like this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s what Guest Blogger Lisa Knopp has to say about \u201cPerhapsing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At some point, writers of creative nonfiction come to a roadblock or dead end in our writing, where we don\u2019t have access to the facts we need to tell our story or to sustain our reflection with depth and fullness. If only it was ethical to just make something up, we might think, or to elaborate a bit on what we know. But of course, then we wouldn\u2019t be writing creative nonfiction. It might appear that our choices in such cases are to either abandon the topic or write a thinly developed scene or reflection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Woman Warrior<\/em>, Maxine Hong Kingston offers another option. In the first essay, \u201cNo Name Woman,\u201d Kingston\u2019s mother tells her a brief, cautionary tale about her father\u2019s sister in China, who became pregnant even though her husband had been away for years. On the night the baby is born, villagers raid the family\u2019s house and farm. The aunt gives birth in a pigsty, and then kills herself and her baby by jumping into the well from which the family drank. Kingston\u2019s father was so shamed by his sister\u2019s behavior that Kingston was forbidden to ever mention her in his presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to write the essay, Kingston needed a deeper, fuller understanding of her aunt\u2019s life and a clearer picture of what happened the night she drowned. Since the only information Kingston had was the bare-bones story that her mother had told her, Kingston chose to speculate an interior life for her aunt. I call this technique \u201cperhapsing.\u201d Notice in the following passage how Kingston uses perhapsing to imagine an identity for the man who impregnated her aunt (italics are mine):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPerhaps she had encountered him in the fields or on the mountain where the daughters-in-law collected fuel. Or perhaps he first noticed her in the marketplace. He was not a stranger because the village housed no strangers. She had to have dealings with him other than sex. Perhaps he worked in an adjoining field, or he sold her the cloth for the dress she sewed and wore. His demand must have surprised, then terrified her. She obeyed him; she always did as she was told.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word perhaps<\/em> cues the reader that the information Kingston is imparting is not factual but speculative. Kingston doesn\u2019t need to use perhaps<\/em> in every sentence, because we can see that one perhapsing leads to another. We can also see that when Kingston presents facts (\u201cHe was not a stranger because the village housed no strangers. She had to have dealings with him other than sex\u201d), she does not begin those sentences with perhaps<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elsewhere in the essay, Kingston uses other words and phrases to alert the reader when she\u2019s moving from fact to conjecture:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt could very well have been, however, that my aunt did not take subtle enjoyment of her friend, but, a wild woman, kept rollicking company. Imagining her free with sex doesn\u2019t fit, though.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She may have been unusually beloved, the precious only daughter, spoiled and mirror gazing because of the affection the family lavished on her.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By perhapsing, Kingston offers motives, actions, justifications, and specific details that add richness, texture, and complexity absent in her mother\u2019s account, without crossing the line into fiction. Kingston believed that by remaining silent about her desperate and defiant ancestor, she was participating in her aunt\u2019s punishment. By perhapsing, Kingston freed both herself and her aunt from the traditions that bound them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhapsing can be particularly useful when writing about childhood memories, which are often incomplete because of a child\u2019s limited understanding at the time of the event, and the loss of details and clarity due to the passage of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Susan Griffin offers a fine example of how perhapsing allows a writer to bring detail and understanding to a memory of a long-ago event. In \u201cRed Shoes,\u201d an essay in her collection The Eros of Everyday Life<\/em>, Griffin recounts a childhood memory in which her grandmother gave her a pair of red shoes that she coveted. This memory is essential to the essay because it serves as the springboard and touchstone for Griffin\u2019s musings on such dichotomies as mind versus body, domestic versus private spheres, public versus private memories, and genre (fiction versus nonfiction; detached, intellectualized essay versus intimate memoir). In the following segment, notice the various ways in which Griffin signals her uncertainty as she presents her memory of being given the red shoes \u2013 if, indeed, she was given the shoes (italics and ellipses are mine):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was, I suppose, shopping with my grandmother in the department store with the X-ray machine that made a green picture of the bones in my feet. I have the vague feeling my grandmother finds red impractical. . . . I cannot remember whether or not my grandmother let me have those shoes. . . . Perhaps she did buy me those red shoes. I can see them now in my closet which was also her second closet, the closet of the black silk robe, the place where she kept her rarer treasures, her two fur coats, worn only on the most special occasions. . . . and, am I embellishing here, her sweater with the rhinestones on it, or were they pearls?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When an author\u2019s memories of concrete details are sketchy or absent, the technique of perhapsing not only allows her to recreate the scene effectively, it also helps establish her as a reliable narrator. Because Griffin admits what she doesn\u2019t know and tells me when she\u2019s speculating, I trust her to be a reliable narrator and follow her willingly through her other memories and complex, philosophical wanderings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing Exercise<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Select a passage in one of your essays that could be made richer and fuller through the use of speculation. If your memory of the time you learned a family secret is fuzzy and incomplete, \u201cperhaps\u201d details and plausible dialogue. If the person you\u2019re profiling can\u2019t or won\u2019t say why he began playing the banjo when his wife left him, \u201cperhaps\u201d some likely motives. If you and your family don\u2019t know why your grandmother inserted such a peculiar clause into her will, \u201cperhaps\u201d plausible motives. In addition to\u00a0perhaps<\/em>, other words and phrases you can use include\u00a0maybe, suppose, if, what if, might have\/could have, possibly, imagine, wonder, perchance.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lisa Knopp<\/a> <\/strong>is the author of \u201cFrom Your Friend, Carey Dean: Letters from Nebraska\u2019s Death Row\u201d<\/a>(2022), a memoir\/biography. When Lisa visited Nebraska\u2019s death row in 1995, she couldn\u2019t have imagined that one of the inmates she met that day would become a dear friend. For the next twenty-three years, through visits, phone calls, and letters, a remarkable, platonic friendship flourished between Knopp, an English professor, and Carey Dean Moore, an inmate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lisa was born and raised in Burlington, Iowa, a Mississippi River town. She was educated at Iowa Wesleyan College, Western Illinois University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Since 2005, she\u2019s been a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Omaha where she teaches courses in creative nonfiction, including food writing, travel writing, and a seminar in experimental forms<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Knopp is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and a visiting faculty member in Goucher College\u2019s low-residency MFA in Creative Nonfiction program in Baltimore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note from Marlene: \u201cPerhaps\u201d is one of my favorite words. It\u2019s an easy method of offering alternative ways of thinking. If you are writing a memoir and aren\u2019t sure of the details, you could write, \u201cPerhaps it happened this way.\u201d If you are conjecturing, \u201cperhaps\u201d is a gentle way of saying, \u201cIt could have happened […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[104],"tags":[2052,2050],"class_list":["post-13743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-bloggers","tag-from-your-friend-carey-dean","tag-lisa-knopp"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s43Dj8-perhaps","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13743"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13747,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13743\/revisions\/13747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}