Trespasses: A Memoir

Full Disclosure: I’ve had Lacy Johnson, the author of this book, as a teacher for several community writing workshops. I read Trespasses in part to better understand her approach to writing and how that influences her instruction, but what I found was a book that made me ache fiercely for its beauty and its heart. Trespasses is a meditation on memory, identity, and place - specifically the rural Midwest. The volume is a collection of 80 short pieces of prose, including history, memoir, prose-poems, historical fiction, sociology, liturgy, etymology, jokes, ethnography, criticism and mythology. If The House on Mango Street took place in Missouri, this book would be it (or very close). The book sets out with Lacy, pregnant with her first child (a girl) returning to her childhood home of Macon, Missouri, to better make peace with her past. Through a series of interviews with her family and research in the local genealogical library, Lacy constructs a mosaic of the place she chose to leave behind, weaving together the stories of her parents and grandparents as well as her own memories of Missouri. What emerges is a complex, and at times contradictory, portrait of a community and its conflicts over poverty, gender, class, race, and religion. Ultimately, Trespasses is an exercise in subversion. As a young girl from a background of poverty, with intelligence and ambition and a penchant for questioning the established order of things, Lacy couldn’t remain in her home or her hometown: “Growing up in this town, for me, was like learning to breathe underwater.” Her high school chemistry teacher delivers his prognosis for her, shortly before she is suspended: “Won’t amount to anything. Barefoot and pregnant. Poor white trash.” She returns a decade later, at the conclusion of her doctoral studies in literature and creative writing, to make sense of the injustice and violence and small-mindedness of a place that she simultaneously is compelled to love and defend: “I have an argument with a New Yorker. ‘The problem with midwesterners,’ he tells me, ‘is that you have no culture.’ He has come to this conclusion after having driven through the Midwest at some point in the past. His scalp shines through his hair in the patio light, which glints off the glasses he wears pushed far up on his nose. ‘Applebee’s,’ he says, crossing his legs at the knees, ‘is not culture.’” But after reading Trespasses, it’s hard to see the experiences of the Missourians described as any less valid or urgent than those of urban, coastal Americans. After gracefully undermining both the Midwestern notions of class and gender roles and the cultural elite’s stereotypes of rural America, the author then turns her attention to traditions regarding what constitutes “art” and “literature,” using her own life and work as a case study. She describes her high school encounters with poetry: “these poems are so far removed from my own language, my own experience, I feel small and stupid and poor.” Years later, after infiltrating the academic establishment by adopting their discourse, she wonders: “What passes as poetry? What passes as nonfiction? Where is the border between verse and prose, fact and fiction? Who has drawn it? Who polices it? And according to what aesthetic?” And by challenging those very conceptions of “legitimate” art, she creates opportunities for individuals to take on new identities. The author describes the interview in which her grandmother, who painted portraits of the people and landscapes of the country in Trespasses, and what that act of creation meant to her: “’It’s been a blessing to me,’ she tells me earnestly. ‘It gave me a personality – I’d always been my parents’ daughter, my brother’s sister, Arthur’s wife, the kids’ mom. Painting made me Wilda the artist.” And it’s hard not to feel your heart snag on everything Johnson has to say about class and gender in the Midwest, when she describes her mother, a lifelong crafter who sewed her own wedding