Skankin'

“Skankin' at the Whiskey” is a story in the form of a “journalism” or a memoir. I wrote it in 1995 and 1996 as part of some work I was doing based on my experiences as a teacher. You can find it in my "The Stories of Dennis Littrell" Google blog. It won a “personal experience essay” prize in a literary contest conducted by the Missouri Review some years ago. To appreciate why I call this a story rather than a memoir requires a bit of explanation.

Story and memoir, novel and autobiography can be closely related genres. But as I used to tell my students “all autobiographers lie,” most by a direct misrepresentation or a “misremembering” of the facts, and all by omission of certain facts. A memoir is often an autobiographical piece.

Fiction is a deliberate and open misrepresentation (or "imagining") of the facts; indeed in much fiction the truths are “only” psychological. But sometimes psychological truths are as important or more important than factual ones, which is why I would ask my students, “What could be truer than fiction?”

In “Skankin'...” most of the facts are true, and hopefully most of the psychology.

Incidentally, memoir is now considered a form of essay, or perhaps I should say an essay can be a report of a “personal experience.”

--Dennis Littrell