“记忆的边缘：温特森和伍尔夫”工作坊作品回顾 ｜三明治

今年4月26日至5月17日，总共四周的时间里，四十位写作者在三明治线上英文阅读写作课程中，与土耳其作家Nazli共同探索“记忆的边缘”，这节课程延续了Nazli上一期三明治课程“都市、记忆与欲望”的主题，以“记忆”为起点，鼓励写作者们通过非虚构文学对记忆的真实性提出疑问，并对已被遗忘的内容产生好奇在春季的尾声和夏季的序曲中，我们共同阅读了弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫（Virginia Woolf）和珍尼特·温特森（Jeanette Winterson）的作品，共同挖掘那些逃逸于主流论述之外的事物与现象，试图通过写作过程重新理解记忆，解构并重构属于自我的真相。

写作者们在课堂上讨论的文本包括伍尔夫的回忆录和她讨论写作技巧的散文，从理论和实践的多层次探索非虚构写作的无限可能性。另外，温特森在26岁时写就的半自传体小说《橘子不是唯一的水果》与26年后出版的回忆录《我要快乐，不必正常》都讲述了她与养父母的故事。两本文本的比较阅读启发我们思考相同的记忆在写作与生命历程中如何产生转变，展现更多的面向与书写的可能性。

在提交结课写作之前，作者们在四周内分别进行了关于开头、场景、对话和角色的练习。这些充满启发性的写作练习选自丹内尔·琼斯（Danell Jones）的创意写作书籍《弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫写作工作坊》。Nazli为每一个练习都提供了更加具体的指引和要求，写作者们在每一次动笔时都能获得灵感与成就感，甚至愿意超额完成。在完成练习之后，导师为每一位写作者提供了细致的反馈。学习写作技法也因此成为了充满乐趣的互动过程和对自我的探索。

Coco说：

在这堂课上我学到了如何以写作者的身份阅读英文作品和完成自己第一篇英文作品。之前从未读完过伍尔芙的作品，因为其生僻的用词和复杂的长句，通过Naz的解读终于能够欣赏伍尔芙高超的写作手法和精美的用词和行文。其次是完成了自己第一篇英文作品，其写作过程也是发现自己的过程，非常感谢Naz的耐心与真诚回馈；用英语描述中文语境中熟悉的场景和人物总有挑战，Naz来自非中文背景的阅读视角才发现自己写作中有太多的‘想当然’，其实并未能清楚表达自己的意图。

Yuxi说：

我不明白Nazli的魔力是什么，但她把reread，rewrite，revision变得美妙，变成一件令人激动的工作。当我开始学着重新排布我的段落，重新检阅和组合隐喻，我感受到身为作家对于文字的掌控和自信——这些是我的文字，听命于我的力量。……我怀念这一切。我感觉好像小学之后我就再也没上过这么纯粹的语文课，可以关注文学，关注故事，经历，情感。每节课我拿到阅读材料和问题时，我感到我重回十岁的课堂，回到纯粹的阅读和写作的激情中。

Oasis说：

上Nazli的课程最快乐的事情，是我在这里，减轻了孤独。这是个视频远比文字热闹的年代，写中文的人越来越少，在中文世界写英文的人更是凤毛麟角——Nazli的课就把这样一群少数派聚集在了一起。和同学一起阅读、一起赶稿、一起在课堂上提问，让我知道原来我仍旧有人同行，让写作这条孤独的荆棘路，好走了一些。但这种孤独的消解，更大程度是因为老师Nazli给我的共鸣。她在课堂上说，她精读文章是为了更好地模仿，她会分析字词的排列以表达最强烈的情感，她只教打动自己的文章——这些我都无比认同，因为这些都是写作者才有的思维方式。我一直在寻找有这样思维方式的人，最终在Nazli的课堂上，我找到了那种期盼已久的默契和懂得。……她会提出我从未想过的见解，我期待她予我惊喜。……Nazli是我见过最热情、最负责、最乐于帮助学生的老师，她的善意和耐心让学习写作这件事，变得更温暖、更快乐了一些。

我们有幸得以分享以上三位写作者的结课文章片段，并在三明治的文章平台上发表，同时附上了Nazli的点评，希望将写作及成为写作者的快乐与更多人分享和见证。希望在未来的相聚中，能够遇到同样渴望探索自我的你。Nazli的“都市、记忆、欲望”系列课程第三部分将以“欲望”为主题，让我们期待下一次充满惊喜的阅读与写作体验，共同探索“欲望”的多重层面。

For Love, We Traverse Mountains and Cross Seas

By Oasis Hu

Laying on the bed, I found myself immobilized, like a creature without bones, unable  to open my eyes, hear sounds, or form words, as though all my energy had drained. My six senses — eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind — gradually detached themselves from my physical body. Like layers unraveling, finally, they left me and suspended me in a disorienting realm where the boundaries of perception dissolved.

I had plunged into a dark tunnel and kept dropping. There finally came a moment when I reached the bottom of the endless descent, and just that second, a white and bright light emerged, bringing me into a different dimension with no time and space.

I followed the light forward and saw a young girl. She seemed about seven years old. As I approached closer, to my surprise, I recognized that she was none other than the younger me.

The girl bought a dress, surreptitiously, but her secret was found by her mother. Overwhelmed by anger, the mother seized a long stick and held it to whip her daughter. “You’re too ugly to wear such a dress!” the mother screamed. Before the girl’s tear-filled eyes, she grabbed a pair of scissors and severed the dress, discarding it into the rubbish bin.

“Stop! Please stop!” I shouted at the mom.

She could not hear me. She kept striking the girl. Once, and then again.

“Stop it!” I begged, “Please…”

The mother ignored me. With anger reaching its pinnacle, she dropped the clothesline pole onto the floor, grabbed her suitcase, and walked out home. She abandoned the girl forever.

The seven-year-old burst into tears.

“Cry it out, all of it, just cry it out,” I said to the seven-year-old me.

The girl cried louder and louder, finally releasing herself completely from her tears. I walked close to her and embraced her. In my arms, her sobs subsided, growing softer and softer until she found complete calm.

Just that moment, the girl vanished.

Only the white light was left.

Nazli点评：

“I also marked certain places, mainly descriptions, in your essay where I suggested the language to be simpler, less elevated, less embellished. Descriptions are powerful because they help the reader recreate the event in their mind and in witnessing it alongside the narrator, they are likewise affected by it. If the language gets in our way, and it does so most often by making us remember we are reading written text, not witnessing an event, the awareness of language dilutes the emotion that the writer aims to convey. I couldn’t help but think of how Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind ends: “Nothing exists but momentarily in its present form and color. One thing flows into another and cannot be grasped. Before the rain stops we hear a bird. Even under the heavy snow we see snowdrops and some new growth. In the East I saw rhubarb already. In Japan in the spring we eat cucumbers.” The simplicity takes the reader into the writer’s body.”

我还标记了你文章中某些段落，主要是描述部分，建议使用更简单的语言，避免修饰过多的表达。描述之所以强大，是因为它们帮助读者在脑海中重现事件，并与叙述者一同感受。如果语言让我们觉得在阅读文字而不是亲身经历事件，这种意识会稀释作者想要传达的情感。我不禁想到了鈴木俊隆在《禅者的初心》中的结尾：“除刹那生灭的显现于目前的色相以外，别无一物存在，一物会流转为另一物，让人无法抓住。雨停之前，我们就可以听得到鸟鸣声。哪怕是下着大雪，我们一样可以看到雪花莲和一些新长出的植物。在东方，我们会看得见大黄。在日本，我们春天就吃得到黄瓜。”这种简洁性将读者带入了作者的身体。

How Could I Tell You That?

By Coco扣子

During his last days, my father no longer had much appetite. He only liked drinking Lulu (a brand of sweet almond milk) and lying on bed but his mind was still clear. I felt the urge to tell him that I got a boyfriend, to let him know whom his daughter was in love with.

I’ve never told him anything about my relationships. In his mind, being attractive was a sin. Falling in love was something shameful. He could not picture me being together with any man or think about my sexuality. In his mind, I would always be an innocent, naïve, little girl. Or he always wanted me to be a boy. As I was always told growing up, if I was a boy, they would not have my brother. But unfortunately, I am a girl and now a grown-up woman, a woman with sexual desires, a woman who loves and is loved by another man. The love that I never got enough growing up.

I scrolled through my photo album and found a decent photo of my boyfriend, who is a white Dutchman. I hesitated, not sure if my father could face me having a relationship, let alone with a foreign man. I had my boyfriend’s photo ready and locked my screen. I walked to his room but stopped at doorstep. He looked at me and said he wanted to sit up. I helped him to sit and gave him a can of Lulu. He had a sip.

Silence. I could not tell him.

He seemed to be relaxed. I asked him, ‘Do you need anything else?’

‘No,’ he replied quickly.

I retreated to the living room.

The words were boiling in my chest. I tried to suppress them but they were about to erupt. It felt like making the biggest decision in my life. It was a big decision. It was the moment that I finally decided to let him see more of me and to know my life outside this apartment, away from the disappeared alley and beyond the village that I always wanted to escape. I was uncertain if he was willing to come into my world. I was also scared he would judge me and smash things that I built with effort into pieces.

But I did it. Eruption took place calmly.

‘I have a boyfriend. He is Dutch. This is a picture of him.’

He took over my phone and had a careful look.

‘He seems to be a nice guy,’ he replied in a relaxed tone. There was no judgement, no smashing. He accepted it like accepting a can of Lulu. I wasn't sure he really accepted it or he simply didn’t care anymore.

My mom came in and asked, ‘He’s a foreigner. Can you bear your daughter married and live that far away?’

‘It’s her choice. He seems to be reliable.’

I felt relieved. I was and am glad still today that I finally told him that.

Nazli点评：

“How Could I Tell You That?” is an essay about your father and your relationship with him, it is a remembering and celebration at once, necessitated unfortunately by his passing at such an early age. I loved the village section and was very impressed by the power of your writing when you described family scenes. I was deeply touched by your honest writing of the silences, the sentences you wished to say but couldn’t. I am sure he felt the same way, and the sentences you both wanted to hear and speak were exchanged in another way.

The essay has ten sections, and you take the reader to different times and places with little effort. The first section takes place in the hospital, and the reader learns about Father’s diagnosis, and that it was kept a secret from him. People do the same thing in Turkey, too, and I disagree with every step of the secrecy and its justification. If you wish, you may think about adding a few sentences about your thoughts about keeping the diagnosis from him, or your thoughts about what if it were done to you, or your observations of other family members and what they said, and what they went through and felt. We may not agree with them, but in the end, hiding a cancer diagnosis is not a decision taken lightly.

《我该如何告诉你？》是一篇关于父亲和叙事者与父亲关系的文章。由于父亲的去世，这篇文章同时成为了是纪念和庆祝。我很喜欢关于村庄的描写，当你描述家庭场景时，我深受你的文字力量的打动。你坦诚地描写沉默的时刻和那些想说却无法表达的内容，这些都让我深感触动。我相信他（父亲）也有相同的感受。你们想倾听和表达的语言以另一种方式在你们之间传递了。

这篇文章分为十个部分，你自如地带领读者穿梭于不同的时空。第一部分发生在医院，我们了解到对父亲所隐瞒的诊断结果。在土耳其，人们也有类似的做法。我个人并不赞同这种隐瞒及对它的合理化。你可以考虑添加一些内容来说明你对隐瞒诊断的看法，或者如果这种情况发生在你身上你的想法，或你对其他家庭成员的观察，他们说了什么，经历了什么，以及他们的感受。我们可能不同意他们的做法，但最终，隐瞒癌症诊断并不是一个轻率的决定。

Pain In The Throes

By Yuxi

I've written countless different beginnings for this memoir. When I first started writing my memoir, in the first draft, I used Jeanette Winterson's style: "I can't count how many times I sat in his car, just after it started or just as it stopped, and he asked, ‘Will you hate me? I'm just worried that one day you'll hate me.’" For the second draft, I adopted Virginia Woolf's approach, attempting to tell a story about my continual amnesia, using the interplay of memory and forgetting as a structural device. However, these openings contained too much interpretation and imagination, overlaying too many filters, making the memories disjointed. They ultimately faded away like a dissolving film scene.

When I first made an art short film, I spent a lot of time on post-production. Part of the reason was my inexperience, but another part was to compensate for the inadequacies during shooting. All the bloopers had to be cleverly photoshopped out, the colors deepened until the folds in the backdrop completely merged into the darkness, creating a sense of space. The red associated with blood had to be painted frame by frame, contrasting sharply with other props. Compared to the selected segments, the original 17GB of footage would appear dull afterward, until you could no longer handle more images or make additional cuts. The final product was decided upon, and art was born—a five-minute and eight-second video from 17 hours of shooting, along with a complete separation from the work and life that preceded it.

My gynecologist, a middle-aged woman with red cat-eye glasses who looked older than my mother, once privately told me she suspected my gout was related to my polycystic ovary syndrome, stemming from hormonal imbalances, although both conditions have a family history influence. After my initial diagnosis, I took estrogen for two months before stopping on my own and not returning for follow-ups. At that time, I decided to be a woman who would never menstruate or have children, thinking it was an act of rebellion. But the pain did not stop.

I am painful.

These are the gray truths, the raw materials of my life. I must return to this basic fact to begin the narration. I am even powerless to add any more processing, so I let this sentence stand naked. Although I regretted it the moment I typed these three words, because they seemed too frivolous.

Nazli点评：

I appreciated your metaphors, which came with a collection of strong images, although some of them I found hard to enter and understand, and some others I thought could be stronger with very small fixes. The solution to hard-to-understand metaphors lies in the internal logic of the metaphor. The logic of the metaphor must be solid. It cannot be vague or ambiguous. If it is an ocean, the reader should know why it’s an ocean, if it’s a bird, the reader should know why it’s a bird. The associative interpretations and deep emotions spring from this knowledge, which is based on the logic of the metaphor. The solution to the weak metaphors often lies in cutting the extra images. You may have five very strong images, but when they are placed side by side none of them can shine. In those cases, I recommend picking one image and making sure it has a strong and solid internal logic. 

我喜欢你的隐喻，它们创造了许多强烈的意象，尽管有些我觉得很难理解，有些则可以通过非常小的改动变得更为有力。理解难度大的隐喻在于其内部逻辑。隐喻的逻辑必须是扎实的，不能模糊或含糊。如果它是大海，读者应该知道为什么是大海；如果它是鸟，读者也应该知道为什么是鸟。这种知识基于隐喻的逻辑，进而引发联想和深层情感。弱隐喻的解决办法往往在于删减多余的意象。你可能有五个非常强烈的意象，但当它们并排放置时，任何一个都无法突显。在这种情况下，我建议选择一个意象，并确保它具有强大而扎实的内部逻辑。

导 师 介 绍

Nazli，土耳其作家，美国爱荷华大学非虚构写作项目MFA硕士毕业，曾在中国中山大学英语系任教2年，教授莎士比亚戏剧课、英语写作课。本科在美国Gettysburg College主修英语与创意写作，毕业后前往法国进修艺术史和油画。曾翻译出版了三部青少年作品，并担任文学杂志The Iowa Review的编辑。

以自由职业的身份，一边开设线上写作与阅读工作坊，一边写作。过去四年中，她开设了线上的虚构和非虚构写作课程，主题涵盖爱伦坡、博尔赫斯、契诃夫、伍尔夫，以及爱尔兰作家、五感写作、外语写作、当代短篇小说和记忆等。在写作工作坊中，她指导了超过500篇学生作品。Wechat Platform：waysofblackink。

阅读三明治过去对Nazli的采访：土耳其、美国、中国……一个国际作家的“流浪”与学习

（由sanshui整理）