Poetic Facts

My official writer's bio reads:

Half-American, half-Australian, Philippine-raised, Chicago-educated, Atlanta-dwelling writer Ian North lives and works with immigrants and refugees. He mentors and equips members of the international community to tell their own stories through writing, visual art, and music. He is also involved in several creative projects, including a blog of off-kilter folk stories and songs at http://ghosttownrevival.wordpress.com.

But if I were to write my story, to really write it as I'm learning to see it, it would be the story of a movement from Scotland to Australia to India to China to Indonesia to the Philippines. It would be short on memoir, long on family history. It would take years of research that I don't know how to do, and it would owe its scope to a book called Unto the Sons by Gay Talese.

Talese is the son of an Italian-American tailor named Joseph Talese, himself the son of an Italian immigrant to the United States. I'd read some of Talese's work in The Gay Talese Reader a few years back, so I was aware of his ability to make nonfiction reports resonate with narrative immediacy, a trademark common to practicioners of the "New Journalism," a writing movement spawned by reporters and nonfiction novelists like Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson.

While other writers in this movement employed a cavalier approach to phrasing, language, and self-characterization, Talese maintained a style that may have cost him the celebrity that visited many of his contemporaries: formal, immaculately structured portrayal of fact.

The reason that I find Unto the Sons so compelling is the subject: Talese turns his journalistic eye on his own family history. He sees himself as part of a massive movement, discussing Italian history, moving seamlessly from Roman Empire to World War I to the formation of the Mafia and its roots in America to his own childhood as an Italian-American during WWII.

So, where I always saw Talese as a brilliant collector of fact and a masterful essayist, I now see the roots of his talent, the development of his eye for minute but significant details, and his comfort with a formal, well-dressed approach to examining the human soul.

What does this have to do with me? It makes me want to know where I come from. I want to understand where my little life, my interests, my movements, my troubles, my talent all come from, and where they all lead.

What of my great uncle who played harmonica with the Sydney Orchestra? Has anyone upstream battled depression like me? Who left the Christian faith, and who stayed? Were the evangelists to China and India ever doubtful of their work or purpose? What drove them forward or slowed them down?

There are dozens of relatable movements in Unto the Sons, especially to someone who comes from a well-traveled line. But the main drive it leaves me with is the desire to be the Gay Talese of my own family line.

The gift given to me by God and/or genetics and/or a few encouraging teachers was to write. So when this gift turns to a profession and I have the time and resources, the North family will have its own book which looks back and finds the poetry in the facts of our heritage, and hands it forward as a legacy for our children to do with as they see fit.