The Deer Out Here: Matt Morris in Conversation with Hea-Ream Lee

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The writer Matthew Morris was sitting at my kitchen table in Tucson, Arizona. He was in town to promote his new book of essays, The Tilling, winner of Seneca Review Books’ 2024 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. Earlier that week he had read from his book in front of a packed crowd beneath twinkling lights for the Distinguished Visitor Series in Creative Writing sponsored by the University of Arizona MFA in Creative Writing. Matt and I were graduate students in that program together, and as I listened to him read, I remembered sitting in workshop together discussing some of the essays in his new book in their earlier forms. It was strange and wonderful to be in Tucson together again, feeling time collapse, sitting at my kitchen table, with his book in front of me. 

We talked about The Tilling, which is a lyrical exploration of mixed-race identity, Blackness, and love. The book is searing and tender, and full of the kind of lines that beg to be read aloud. It was a pleasure to talk to Matt about how his book took shape, about riffing, and his thoughts on rhythm and sound. Our conversation made me feel the way his writing has always made me feel–a little less alone. —Hea-Ream Lee

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Hea-Ream Lee: This is very exciting. I'm so excited to talk about this book. How cool that you made this. When I read anyone's work, it feels kind of like walking around inside their brain a little bit. And I felt that while reading this book. Maybe it's because I know you, and I know your literal speaking voice well, but I felt like I was just kind of hanging out with you for the duration of the book. So that was a cool experience for me.

Matthew Morris: Hopefully my speaking voice sounds a little like my writing voice, yeah. There has to be some correspondence there. I think there definitely is.

HRL: Well, maybe we can start by talking about your journey towards the book, or the journey of the book. We were in workshops together, so I recognized some of the pieces. I was also remembering pieces that you had written for workshop that aren’t in the book. Could you talk a little bit about that process of getting to the published object, whether that's writing or rewriting, collecting, drafting?

MM: I think some of those essays that maybe we both remember from our time and workshop together were the pieces where I was trying to explore my family history. I remember writing a couple of pieces for Alison Deming’s class where I was trying to dig into my father's ancestry. And I bring that up because this project originally had a middle section that was called Lost Rivers. It was in three parts, and the first part was supposed to introduce the tragic mulatto trope, kind of orient readers in that way. And that was called Fucked Fable. And then there was this middle section, Lost Rivers, that had this family history stuff going on, which I later cut because it was just too much to take on in this book. I couldn't wrap my head around all of it, and there are too many silences in the historical record. And then there was this third section called Ghost Hand that was meant to sort of break out of the trope and just sort of be me living in my body as a human being apart from race. Not that you can ever completely escape that. It ended up being the case that the middle section went away, and so the book as it is is just that first section and that third section.

Only a couple of these pieces were written prior to our thesis year in the program. I'd written the first piece, Tragic Mulatto, and I think I workshopped Pardo/Ghost Hand in a class we took together. The summer before our third year I wrote Fucked Fable. So that's kind of this nucleus that I had to write around when I was working with Chris Cokinos in our last year in the program.

Having the lens of the tragic mulatto trope to write through gave direction and a trajectory to the book. Because as you probably remember, when I first got to the program, I was still writing about mixed race identity, but in a kind of looser way. I think you said at one point when we were in the program together that one of the essays I'd written was kind of doing auto theory.

So I feel like writing into the trope, the stereotype, and trying to break out of that box gave the project some momentum that it didn't have before. 

HRL: That's super interesting. To go back to the thing you said about cutting that middle section out, was there a moment when you realized that it didn't belong in this book?

MM: It was definitely a realization I had as I tried to shape the project. Maybe when I showed it to Chris for the first time. It still had some of the family history work in it. But, yeah, I think when I realized that I couldn't get my head around that stuff in the time of the MFA program, which is a very brief period in the writer’s life, right? It goes super fast. You don't even really know what you're doing for the first year and a half or two years, unless you know what you're doing coming in, which I didn't. Maybe Margo did. But I think at the start of our second year, we were in Ander’s workshop, and I turned in this long piece about a family history trip to North Carolina.

I think writing that piece was what showed me that I wasn't ready to write about that stuff yet, because that piece actually probably needed to be a lot longer, and I still don't really know how to write about family history in the context of African American history. There's just so much stuff that I don't know, and Ancestry.com can't tell me. I can only trace my predecessors on my dad's side so far back. 

You know, we were talking before we started the recording here about how nonfiction writers sometimes lean towards poetry or fiction. And I think if I had more of that fiction writer in me, which maybe you do more than I do, I’d feel more comfortable speculating on the page, and that would be a way into the family history. But it's not really my toolkit.

I'm in a PhD program now, as you know, and I've been writing a little bit about my mom's side and Mormonism, which is much more present in the genealogical record. So that's an interesting tension. You know, the Mormons keep crazy records, and there's like nothing for Black people at a certain point.

HRL: Yeah, that's super interesting. Do you think that project will someday come to be? 

MM: Yeah, I have this thought of writing a literary biography about my mom's aunt, who was this Mormon novelist named Virginia Sorensen. Some of her books are at the UA library. She was married and had a family and was living in Provo for most of her life, writing novels and children's books. But then near the end of her life, she left her family and married–you know the writer Evelyn Waugh? Yeah, she married his brother in Gibraltar, off of Spain. So anyway, she's really interesting to me, how she went away from this domestic life. But I think she didn't write after she left Utah, which is also interesting. Anyway, I kind of heard about her and my grandfather's grandfather on my dad's side, about whom I do know a decent amount, because he was a professor at an HBCU after the Civil War. So I feel like hearing about those two people's lives–that might be an interesting way to approach mixed race identity. 

HRL: Whoa yes, I can definitely see that. This makes me think about research, which I really wanted to talk to you about. 

MM: Oh, cool, yeah. 

HRL: Because this is an extremely researched book. There's so many types of research in here too. You're citing books and films and songs and poems, and you also travel to certain sites. I know from your other work that you've done a lot of archival research as well. You've also mentioned Ancestry.com. So, yeah, I wanted to know about the role of research in this book. What that looked like, how it plays into your process. Where in the writing process does research come in for you? How do you think about research generally?

MM: That's funny that you say that, because I don't think of myself as being someone who does a lot of research, but maybe I'm not thinking about research broadly enough, right? Because yeah, it is research to watch that film Imitation of Life. But I guess I think of it more like, I want to watch a movie that's about the subject matter I'm thinking about. And maybe that'll give me an entry point that I haven't found yet. The Rothko painting feels like another entry point. 

So this is probably a bad thing to say, but a lot of the research I do, like the part of Ghost Hand around the sterilization laws in Virginia—that's all from Wikipedia.

HRL: Oh yeah I love Wikipedia.

MM: To your question about, where does research enter the process, sometimes research is the beginning. It's the thing that sparks my curiosity or imagination. Like that Dallas essay really started when I looked up the difference between a bull and a steer. And then I started thinking about being on Wikipedia earlier in the day, reading about these laws. But I wasn't reading about those laws to write about them. I think I was just really interested in that stuff at that time.

Like you probably do, I have a lot of tabs open on my computer and my phone at all times. And you know, as nonfiction writers, maybe all creative writers, we kind of just throw a bunch of stuff into the mix and see what the alchemy produces. 

There's something Maddie Norris said to me when I asked her about research in her book, that it was the stuff she was already thinking about. And I think that's true for me too.

HRL: I can see that in the prose. It's so clear that we're following your train of thought or where your curiosity is taking you. It doesn't feel like these are the references that we need to have because we need to have them in the book, but rather that they come from your curiosity, or they're driving your curiosity in some way. I feel like that's really coming through in the writing itself, too.

MM: Thanks. That's a good thing, that it doesn't feel imposed on the book.

HRL: Sometimes when I’m adding in research, it's like I have to cover my ass or something like that. It does not feel interesting. It's almost out of fear, to back up what I'm saying.

MM: You're offering evidence.

HRL: Yeah, it's my comp teacher brain.

You read a newer piece at your reading, and I believe it was in that piece where you wrote about riffing. I was thinking about that as I was looking back through your book for this conversation, which led me to look up what riffing means. According to the internet, there's two meanings: a refrain or repeated phrase in music, and also, an improvised monologue. I feel like I see so many examples of both those things in this book. The motifs and repeating phrases of fucked fable, American you, or the idea of love, the cliche of the tragic mulatto. There's so many of these repeating phrases and motifs. 

There's also a lot of examples, and this maybe crosses over into the research realm too, where you're taking an Audre Lorde poem or the Rothko and you riff on that. You're taking that apart and making it your own. 

That's a huge, long intro. How do you see riffing? How do you feel like it fits in with this book, or your writing process in general?

MM: Yeah, cool. That's an awesome question. I love that question, and it's neat that you looked up what it means to riff, because that's something that I think I associate with jazz musicians and the improvisational definition more so than the repeated structure. But I can see how those two things actually go together, because within improvisation, there's still gonna be structures that you're like, calling back on, and that's part of the improvisational play. Pulling on these different elements that appeared earlier, but maybe they’re cast in a slightly new light the second or third time you do it. Yeah, it's just a creative thing that happens. 

I feel like the longer I write, the more interested I am in riffing and being kind of spontaneous. And the mind in motion, to use one of Ander's phrases about what an essay is and does, how it moves. I'm much less interested in carefully shaping thoughts, and I'm more interested in the way my mind moves over subject matter and moves through language and works with sound and rhythm. And that's not to say that in revision I would not try to sculpt the riffing that's already happened. I remember Brandon Shimoda talking about how poetry is, for him, just what comes out. That's something that I am feeling drawn to more and more. It's just like, what comes out when I sit down and I'm thinking about something, and I have this line that I want to start with. 

A couple weeks ago, I was in upstate New York, where Seneca Review is. I was with my editor, and we were driving past this state park, and he told me that there are deer in the park that are stark white. I'd never heard of that before—stark white deer.

HRL: Terrifying. 

MM: Yeah, like, what would that feel like? I wanted to see one. We didn't see any. But, yeah, I've been wanting to start something with a line about that. "The deer out here, he said, are stark white." That could be the starting point of some kind of riff on, I don't know what. On deer and whiteness and I have no clue where else that would go. But that's part of the interest for me, is that I don't know where it would go.

I don't really want to know where I'm going right now. Maybe I never really did. I feel like the second I can feel my mind mapping out what the thing is going to look like, I don't really want to write it anymore. 

HRL: Yeah, that makes total sense. That's so interesting. I love how you're saying that the riffing happens on the level of the line or even the sound or the word, as well as on a larger scale, around the subject you're writing. Some writers are very image driven. Like, their way into a piece is an image. And for you, it sounds like it is sound or rhythm.

MM: I think that's true. I don't know if you would say you're a writer who's drawn to image, but one characteristic of your writing I think about is the richness of the imagery and the carefully wrought images. And it's not that I don't want there to be nice images when I write, but I do think that I am mostly interested in the syntactical play. I'm more interested in the way that clauses are, like, accumulating and bouncing off of one another, and the ways that my voice can, like, modulate through the syntax.

HRL: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense given what's in this book. I definitely want to talk more about rhythm or sound. That feels like one of the hallmarks of your writing. To me, that's how I know I'm in a Matt Morris piece. I picked out so many examples of amazing sentences and phrases where we have this careful attention to sound, rhythm and breath. I can't read them all for time’s sake, but there's this part in the last essay. Could you read that short paragraph for me?

MM: "I’m pretty sure some of her ancestors were slaves. That some of them were enslavers. Light-skinned, mixed; white, just white. (No, not white, just white: I simplify, I do. Same cruelty dealt to Black bodies. The joining at the hip. You’s all a conglomeration. Can’t sit/drink/live here. Know your pigment, they said, and so know you. No. No, more like: Euro-white; white, once of England, Ireland.)"

HRL: Thank you. I think this paragraph is an example of something I see your writing do often. It's not rhythmic simply for the sake of rhythm. You're also using rhythm to add complexity and layers of meaning, and take apart some phrases and add in interjections, and you're kind of interrupting yourself. 

I have so many questions about rhythm. How do you think about sound during the writing process and the revising process? How do you know when to stop polishing? Or differentiate between moments to lean into musicality and when to lean out? 

MM: Well, maybe I'm getting worse at that, because I feel like I'm leaning in more and more towards musicality, maybe at the expense of the careful arrangement of thought. I don't know, or maybe that's just not how I want to think on the page right now.

One thing I do is when I'm revising something, I'm reading it out loud to myself, like every time. Then I can hear the rhythms, and I can hear the sounds, and I can feel the places where maybe I want to let the line get stretched out a little more, or make the language more compact. Or maybe I do want to do a little bit of that interjecting. Yeah, I've become obsessed with parenthetical structures in the last few years, and so I do think that there's a lot of, like, interruption that helps to produce some kind of, I don't want it to be, like, choppy, but some kind of start and stop, herky jerky rhythms in the prose. I want to sound like me on the page. I want to sound like, basically the way I sound when I'm talking to you, or someone I know and trust enough to sound like myself. Not so buttoned-up. I want there to be a level of eloquence, if I can achieve that. But I also want there to be a plain-spokenness. I remember one of my first professors saying that this piece I'd written about my family's first dog sounded like I was having a drink on the porch with a friend. And I really liked that idea, that the voice can be conversational and can be approachable in that way.

HRL: Do you listen to music while you're writing? 

MM: I don't. I'm trying to create my own rhythms on the page, and if I'm listening to something, then that makes it really hard for me to find my way into my own rhythms and cadences in my language. It’s like this pianist is developing his lines in my ear as I'm trying to write my own lines of language. At times I have written to instrumental jazz. I definitely can't write with someone singing; like, that's a non-starter for me. I can't even hear myself think at that point. But yeah, a couple of years ago, I went through this period where I was having a really hard time with my writing. It's like after we had graduated, and it was for a lot of reasons, but at that time, I did start listening to music a little bit as I wrote, and that allowed me to relax a little bit. So at that time in my life, it actually did prove useful to get me out of a mental state.

But generally, I'm a total-silence person. I share a house with a woman who teaches yoga classes. Sometimes I can hear her voice coming up through the floor. I live on the top floor. And even that is enough to make it hard for me to like, feel out the sentences. You know what I mean?

HRL: I know some people who don't like to even read much when they're writing, especially if it's something similar to the subject that they're writing about, because they feel like their thinking can be shaped by that other person's voice. 

MM: I definitely believe in reading while I'm writing, for what it's worth. I think that helps me with sentence fluency on a very basic level, breaking you out of your own sentence patterns.

HRL: I want to talk about place, because this feels like a book that's very deeply grounded in place. It’s also interested in place as a way of conveying meaning. The idea of bone home, and what home means, and where your ancestors come from, and what that means about you as a person. I was also thinking about how some of these essays are taking place during the pandemic, and so there's this longing to go places. I was wanting you to talk a little bit about how you see the importance of place in this book and maybe in your writing more generally.

MM: I used the word cadences just now too. It's a cool way to think about the play between different places. In terms of the places in here, I feel like the book is mostly bouncing between Virginia and Tucson. But North Carolina is kind of looming, and South Carolina as a shadow or a place that my father's family left and that I've gone back to. But maybe I don't really understand it in the ways that I feel like I understand Virginia just by virtue of having lived there for the first 24 years of my life. And having gone to undergrad down in Charlottesville made me understand Virginia a lot better. Central Virginia is really different than the DC area. I was just there a couple days ago with my oldest friend and we were walking around Monticello. Yeah, what a crazy place. We were reading all about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. I used to think that I needed to live in Virginia to write about it because it has this complicated history around race and Blackness and whiteness, specifically with things like Sally Hemings and TJ. Yeah, good old TJ… 

And also Mildred and Richard Loving. We were in Virginia, where the Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage or protected interracial marriage happened. Virginia, yeah, there's just a lot of stuff in Virginia. It's also in the middle of the east coast and it doesn't quite feel like the South. Sometimes it does–Charlottesville feels like the South. Arlington, where I grew up, does not but it doesn't quite feel like the North, either. You have Arlington National Cemetery where I grew up. I think Robert E. Lee is buried there, and my sister's high school was named after Robert E. Lee, although it was recently renamed Washington Liberty High School. It was supposed to be Washington Loving, but I think there's some resistance to naming the school after the Lovings. 

And then, sorry, this is all things that are actually in the book now that I think about it. But yeah, there's also ‘Virginia is for lovers,’ which is the state's motto. And that's so interesting–yeah, I need to get a bumper sticker for that. It's a really interesting idea for me. I feel like this is a book about race, but maybe what I didn't realize until I was really writing it was that it's also a book that's asking questions about what it means to love, and different kinds of love. There's an essay about my parents’ relationship—

HRL: I love that essay.

MM: Oh, thanks. That was actually a really nice essay to be able to write because it sort of took the pressure off my own story. And Tucson, well, I guess Arizona as a whole shows up in the book to the extent that obviously I'm living there partially during the pandemic, but also my dad's mom was in Phoenix at the time that I was writing the book. I really think that she became one of the most important figures in this book, like she kind of became a main character in a way. I just remember going up to visit her and she was such a complicated woman. I had a really different relationship with her than my dad did. Like I had a much easier relationship with her, which I'm grateful for. I was getting to know her as I was writing these essays. Because as I said, I was raised on the East Coast, so we wouldn't get out to Arizona very often. 

When we did, it was for a few days at Christmas, probably. And yeah, she could be a little unpredictable emotionally. So I didn't really feel like I got to know her until I was in grad school and driving up to see her and spending one-on-one time with her. 

Anyway, yeah, I do think place is important and yeah, I think I told you earlier that I'm writing about Utah right now a little bit. And also Missouri. I feel like this is a place where I could go with research, knowing that I want to write about something like the Missouri Compromise, like, an important piece of legislation that helped for a little while to maintain the balance between slave and free states. 

That's pretty interesting in the context of mixed race identity, I think. Columbia, Missouri, where I live now, is also in the middle of Missouri, which is in the middle of the country, so I feel like I'm in the middle of the middle of everything right now. So, yeah. Yeah, place, place, place. 

HRL: It sounds to me like place is so tied to history. That's the immediate jump that you made there. And I think not every writer does that, not every writer makes that move, but it feels really ingrained in this book as well. These places that have different histories and the people who have left, or stayed, or whose ancestors have been there and what that means about them.

I love that part where you're talking about how so many of your friends have lived in North Carolina. And like that is a thing that ties them together and that something of the place kind of remains on you even after you leave. 

MM: Yeah, the North Carolina thing is weird. I still feel like that's true–I get along with people who have a North Carolina connection. What is it? It's got to be history in some way, maybe. 

HRL: I love that, yeah. Maybe we'll just end with this question. This is a book that's attuned to the writing of others. You bring in lots of other voices and I wanted to ask about books or writers that you connect to, whether it's for the ideas or even their voice or their vibe. Who were your literary North stars as you were writing this book?

MM: I like that question because I've been thinking a lot about Emilio Carrero, who read here with me, and was a really important friend for me in the MFA program. He's really interested in intertextuality right now, and I've been thinking about intertextuality as a result of talking to him. Fucked Fable is obviously very intertextual. Like it's mostly other people's voices. Maybe not mostly, but there's a lot of other people's voices in there. 

I do think that other folks' voices are really important to me in the writing of these essays. I think that James Baldwin is definitely always a literary North star for me, both because his sentences are so beautiful and because he was so bracingly honest and brave on the page, no matter what he was writing about. I feel like he never shied away from saying the hard things or going to the heart of his subject matter, which is something that I find deeply moving and courageous in a writer. To not skirt the center of things, which it's surprisingly easy to do if you ask me. Yeah, so I definitely highlight him. 

When I think about prose style, I always think about Virginia Woolf. Just the play of her lines and the closeness of the looking in her work. I don't think she gets any shoutouts in here, but she's one of my favorite writers too. 

I think that part of the reason I wrote this is that I hadn't encountered that many mixed-race writers, even at the time that I was writing the book. And that might just partly be because I hadn't done a great job of seeking them out, but it's also because we don't always get assigned books by writers of color in school. I think I first got assigned a mixed-race writer when I was in my junior year of college, Danzy Senna’s Caucasia. I didn't even finish that book because I was in like four English classes and couldn't read everything. 

I wanted to put myself in conversation with other Black writers in this book. Writing is a way for me to feel more a part of the Black community, which is a community that I'm a part of, but people don't always see that. 

So there are other ways that I can still exist as a Black person that are not tied to skin tone, and writing has become probably the best way I know how to go about asserting a Black identity and a mixed-race identity. 

HRL:  I feel like we should end on that. Well said. Thank you so much for this conversation. 

MM: Yeah, thank you, Hea-Ream. It's very special to talk with you because you were always such a great reader of my work. Your stuff and the pages that other people were turning in when we were all in workshop together really spurred me as a writer to do my best because I didn't want to embarrass myself. 

HRL: The best motivator. Thank you so much.

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Matthew Morris is a writer from Virginia and author of The Tilling (Seneca Review Books), picked by Wendy S. Walters for the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. He is a graduate of the Arizona MFA program and lives in Columbia, Missouri, where he is a Ph.D. student at Mizzou.

Hea-Ream Lee’s essays have appeared in Ecotone, Shenandoah, Terrain.org, and others, and her work has been anthologized in The Lyric Essay as Resistance (2023). Hea-Ream has taught writing at the University of Arizona, where she earned her MFA. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where she teaches creative nonfiction at the Governor’s School for Arts and Humanities. 

Bea Troxel, Song of Return

Song of Return

Bea Troxel

Holding a tiny wine cup inside of a drab, gray conference room inside of a convention center in the middle of Los Angeles, I told an old coworker about my college boyfriend. He had prompted me after sharing his own college romance story. I told him my ex and I had incredible chemistry, but it didn’t feel right, and so I left him, after much consternation.  The coworker, a forty-year-old man I worked with every summer at a writing conference, looked back at me through his reddish curls and a voice dripping Louisiana and said, “Bea, you’re gonna die alone.” 

I was twenty-five, young; he looked at me with dark intensity. I stared back at him and I must have laughed or looked away to distract from the sharpness of his comment burrowing. The shame it brought up. Here was another moment of being told my leaving would end with me totally alone. His college girlfriend broke up with him, so it’s easy to now assume, eight years later, that he was projecting, but at the time I couldn't get there in my mind. Shortly before this a friend had told me, “Bea, at some point you’re going to have to commit.” Also, after dating for one month and ending things, the woman handed me a little dinner conversation card that asked, “What does it feel like to get close?” She thought I might be afraid of commitment. 

I’ve left nearly every person I’ve dated.

I’m not just someone who leaves, but I am someone who feels compelled to leave. I feel it deep in my body. Before I am conscious that it’s time, I get itchy ears, a sore throat, distant eyes. I attend to these symptoms as if they are God. As soon as they emerge, I think, “Seriously? Again?” There is a split between body and mind. I feel that the ending must happen. I can’t stop thinking about it until I leave, wishing the ending away. Because my body feels awful until I split, I’m walking around in a half daze, disoriented and sick. And once I leave, the symptoms stop. I’m done. 

*

Six months into my grad program at the U of Arizona, at the ripe age of 32, I took a Collections Class with my professor, Ander. We examined collections of stories, essays, poems. We read essays about collectors, some towards the hoarding end of the spectrum, others whose collections did not destroy their relationships. We also maintained our own physical collections. At the beginning of the semester, Ander had promised us that our collections would reveal something about our writing process and I was like, yeah, yeah, okay, I know myself already. After first thinking I might collect a series of bits (longstanding jokes) throughout the semester (such as: wearing paper watches taped to my wrist in my first week of teaching college freshmen)—this felt too laborious—I chose to collect from my favorite spot in Tucson: The Free Table. 

I’d open my sliding door, step onto the porch, hear the scrape scrape scrape of the neighbor tanning hides: I’d been observing her for months. Some days a bison, some days a sheep. I’d wave to her as she wiped sweat from her forehead and continued to scrape scrape scrape. I was headed to the Free Table. 

While first discovering the Free Table right when I moved to Tucson, I dated someone so kind, so patient, so lovely with a toothy grin and long hair. I’d liked him for so long, but as soon as we first kissed I felt my eyes slink back in my head, the fogginess emerged. I couldn’t believe my body wanted me to leave! Thrown back to choosing grad schools the previous year and feeling achy and sick when I finally got into a program I’d been long excited about, barely able to open my eyes fully. Feeling like I had to say no. Thrown back to my previous relationship when my scratchy throat emerged in the midst of feeling wildly happy, wildly attracted to my partner. Thrown back to the first time, a decade ago, when I knew I wasn’t attracted to my girlfriend, but I didn’t want to leave. The sore throat, the ache, telling me I had to leave.

*

The Free Table, started by an older couple in my neighborhood during the pandemic, is a long wooden table of constantly shifting items. Some days I’ll stroll by and just see a few frayed shirts and a box of hair dye. It rarely rains in Tucson, so the table needs no cover. Heading there, I jog through four lanes of traffic, walk one block past a Mesquite tree, turn left so I can see it at the end of the block. As I approach, I can tell if it’s full of goodies or sparsely laid baby clothes and fraying particle board. Lucky days are when there are piles of clothes, pirate-like white pants hand stitched, or boxes full of tiny objects, like the shiny white ball that opened and held miniature cassettes and film rolls. Or the day I journaled about wanting a drying rack and walked up to find one sitting at the table’s edge.

At the free table, I’ve found tomatoes, lunch, a thermos, a suitcase, first landing of the moon newspaper articles from 1969, and Sensodyne toothpaste. I met someone who runs community bike rides, a retired astronomy professor, a man dying of cancer who only had a few weeks left and told me so and as I walked home I asked myself, “What do you do with that?” 

*

I decided that I would take home one item from the free table each week for my collection. 

The first week: a mixtape titled “American Badass.” I thought, “Everybody is gonna love this.” But instead, I ridiculously found it was a scratchy version of“Cowboy” by Kid Rock recorded over and over. Wisps of outside noises cluttered the song as I listened. How disappointing.

The second week: a Chubby Checker record. Also the second week: I left my relationship. The body signals were too strong.

Grief and loneliness marked the following visits to the Free Table. I’d walk up at dusk, the sky pink and streaked with blue clouds. The moon rising behind me. I could hear my roommates calling out to each other “Moon I win!” as I left the house. I’d walk there thinking about my ex and his long hair and his toothy grin. His calm: wondering if I’d made some huge mistake. 

The third week: animal figurines. I positioned them around my room, the brown horse on my speaker, the blue dinosaur next to my reading chair, feeling them reflect back my sadness. 

The fourth week: Dvorak tape in D minor. The offerings did not feel too exciting. I would grab an item haphazardly to bring back. When choosing my collection I wanted something exciting and unique, worried a dull collection reflected on my ordinariness, but the collection felt dull even while the table felt exciting.

The fifth week: I needed a rain jacket for a trip and walked up and bam! A raincoat. The sixth week: I needed a suitcase. Bam! A suitcase. The seventh week: I hoped that goggles might appear. And all of a sudden a tinted pair was waiting there. (I didn’t even dare ask for tinted goggles.) Finally, some magic was returning to me. I was not just heaviness wandering to and from the table.

I told my class of the serendipity of the table, how it continually gave over what I hoped for. Ander jokingly said, “Now, Bea, are you also leaving stuff at the table, or do you just take, take, take.” The words “take, take, take,” echoed through my head like the words a villain hears from his childhood in an action movie. The words that form the wound that motivates the villain to live a life of crime. I just took, took, took. I just left, left, left. Before the words could cement themselves to my brain, I said, “No! I leave stuff all the time! I even rescued one-hundred books from an alleyway and left them at the table.”  When I shared this in class, my voice was so hurried, the hundreds of books numerous, that everyone looked at me like I was nuts. But I needed to make sure I wasn’t just take, take, taking. Or I needed everyone to know it. I needed to make sure I wasn’t leave, leave, leaving. 

*

At the end of the semester I had a pile of items that I did not care for as a collection: linen shirt, fanny pack, soda stream, stereo holder. The official collection did not interest me, which felt disappointing. I wanted a collection like The Last Supper Museum in Douglas, AZ that has a room full of odd versions of the Last Supper painting or the aesthetic of hundreds of aluminum can tabs. I wanted something beautiful, but as I reflected, I realized the walk to the table, the surprise of what I’d find, who I’d find was what compelled me. But as I sat down to write the manifesto of my collection, I slowly realized a theme throughout all of my writing and my life: my writing is about staying. My writing is about place. My writing is about return. 

On my wall hangs the “Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules,” by Sister Corita Kent and the first rule is: “Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.” This is my writing process. I find a place and then return time and time again. I visited a family of beavers every week for two years and wrote; I handed friends a fake phone over and over for years and wrote; I watched Magic Mike XXL with friend after friend and wrote; I’ve written about the same field over and over and over. It’s not about the collection, the writing, the piece, the idea: it’s the process. It’s returning time and again to the place, and staying, hoping to see something new. When you keep the ritual, you learn about the changes within yourself and the place. When you see the same spot over and over again, you see the strange collection of watches, the coffee maker, the same shirt never getting snatched. You gain a knowledge of the rhythms of that place, or yourself. 

The evening after writing my manifesto, I went to a going away dinner. It was the perfect air temperature: stars overhead. We sat at a long, wooden table made by one of the dinner guests. We ate chicken with lemon, rare steak, fat asparagus. And Trace, my classmate, leaned across the table unprompted and told me that it’s my sticking with a place that seems to be important. They said I sit with things. They said my obsessions are not brief but long lasting, and that I’m willing to bear situations long past the comfort level. The discomfort I had framed as leaving, and yes, I’ve left a lot, is also a feeling I’ve sat with. Even when the Free Table felt boring, I showed up. Even though staying with my ex felt uncomfortable, I sat through it to see what was really going on. Even when a topic feels exhausted, that’s usually when I find something totally new. I want to be consistent in showing up. It’s how you build trust—or at least that’s how I do it.

And then, as I write this, I think about how with the many jobs, many loves, many places, I have stayed longer than I wanted to. This is not just about staying or leaving, but it’s more about the story I tell about staying or leaving. 

I stayed with the toothy grin month after month because he was kind, loyal, loving. I stayed because I wanted to know if my urge to leave came from fear—the body, the sore throat, the tight chest. Or was my wanting to leave the true thing, and did the fear arise when I didn’t follow it? Unfortunately, it’s both. 

When I tell myself I always leave, I stay longer than I should just to prove my story wrong. When I tell myself I’m always someone who stays, I’ll try to leave so that I don’t become a stuck lady. But if I just attend, knowing that new things might arise. Or that new feelings emerge every day, then there might be some freedom. Maybe I won’t have to rely on my body to urge me to go. Maybe my body isn’t always telling me one thing. Maybe my body isn’t God. Maybe I’ll hear for myself what is going on. Maybe I can listen.

I imagine this: a field. A meadow. A bog. All in the same physical location but during different parts of the year. Imagine this, walking up to a pond’s edge and waiting, not knowing if anything will show up. But imagine. Waiting, and something does. Or something doesn’t. All of it, the collection for someone who can stay, who returns.

*

Bea Troxel is an essayist and musician from Nashville, TN and a second year MFA candidate at The University of Arizona. She writes about beavers and wave pools, but really she's just writing about longing and intimacy and connection. Her most recent record, Gettin' Where, came out in 2021, and you can catch her playing an occasional show around Tucson or spending hours on end at the Free Table. 

Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Though She be but Little, She is Fierce: Flash Nonfiction as Feminist Reclamation

 The essay is expansive. The essay meanders. To essay is to reflect, to wander, to search. The essay demands room to stretch and grow, the genre deriving power and purpose from broadening.

But some stories leave us frozen to a fixed position. Some stories tether us to trauma. Some stories are simply too big to expand any further. What do we do with what is already all-encompassing? Where do we go when painful memories already take up too much space in our imagination?

My latest essay collection, Abbreviate, is a book that examines themes that seemed “too big” to tackle in longform prose. I wanted to write about the trauma, violence, and misogyny I experienced as a child, teenage girl, and young woman, all of which marked me indefinitely, some of which left me unable to make my way freely in life. I wanted to write about how my uncle ran over his ex-wife when I was a young girl and how my middle school principal ran off with a student. I wanted to write about how my high school friend openly dated a teacher and how my first boyfriend counted my calories on a slip of paper he kept inside his pocket. I wanted to write about being sexually assaulted in college and sexually harassed in the workplace as an adult. Each of these stories was so big it became overwhelming. So I made them small.

A small collection of small essays, Abbreviate examines how the injustice and violence of girlhood leads women to accept—and even claim—small spaces and stories. Through flash, I share a girlhood shaped by neglect and abuse from adults and saved through the communal care of fierce female friends. The essays in this collection probe the girlhood play of Polly Pocket and planetariums, strobe with a sleepover blacklight illuminating teenage magic, and ricochet with the regret and rage of adult women whose lives have been constellated by harm. 

Through writing this collection, I was reminded that an essay does not have to be big in order to be expansive. An essay does not have to take up many pages in order to broaden. Many times, we equate size with intellectual rigor, but it is a feminist act of reclamation to resist male-dominated trends in literature and the world. It is an act of resistance to claim forms that others deem insignificant.

The flash essay, which can range from as little as a few hundred words to around a thousand words, is a form derived from necessity. Flash is a form that revises the traditional essay in favor of another kind of exploration and expansion. By embracing brevity, writers reflect not only on their subject matter, but on the genre of creative nonfiction itself. Often used by those for whom traditional forms are inaccessible and insufficient, flash is a stark rejection of elitist literature, a bold rebranding of the essay to create a home for those the canon has long sought to exclude. Many writers of flash are those unable to spend long hours laboring over longform prose, those whose daily lives are filled with navigating sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism, for the innovative form creates safe space unafforded by a cruel world, while also critiquing this power dynamic through an overt play on size. As such, flash is a reclamation for writers who have been told their stories—and by extension, their lives—are insignificant. 

Flash essays are particularly useful for serving as entry point to difficult subject matter. It is challenging enough to write about painful experiences in our lives, more so when we are expected to do so over many pages. The thought of tackling complex material over many hours writing can leave us feeling exposed and raw, overwhelmed by our painful pasts and sometimes unwilling to write about the subjects as a result. But flash reduces this burden considerably by distilling distressing memories into a shorter space. This does not mean that writing these essays is any easier, but rather that writers do not need to relive trauma as extensively as they would in longform prose. Instead, they can mine their memories for the strongest sets of images, the most important details, using reflection to succinctly render the experience for readers. Much like the use of second person, which puts a barrier between writers and the experiences they describe, flash can serve as a protective measure, encouraging writers to tackle subjects they might ordinarily avoid. The flash essay acts as a small container for a big story, providing the shelter and safety a writer might need to tell their story at all.

Because it subverts expectations about the essay, flash also offers writers unique ways to illustrate themes through form. Writers might use the essay size to mirror their content, calling attention to the significance of brief moments in their lives. Mirroring form and content allows writers to unify their attention, readers engaging with themes in several ways, thereby reinforcing them. In contrast, writers might juxtapose content with essay size, compressing many years into the span of a few paragraphs or tackling a weighty subject typically reserved for many pages. By juxtaposing form and content, writers create narrative tension, amplifying the stakes. Readers who engage with the form, surprised or relieved by the brevity, will undoubtedly turn their attention to the ways size signifies meaning, a deliberate command of their attention that speaks not only to the careful craft of the writer, but also to thematic weight of the work.

One example of the power of the flash essay to offer access into complex material is Jamaica Kincaid’s 1978 “Girl.” A mere 690 words, this essay examines a young girl’s relationship with her mother, community, and culture, as well as her burgeoning sense of self. It is also an essay that tackles complex subject matter, including the increasing demands of domestic labor, the subservient roles women are expected to keep for their community standing, romance and domestic violence, menstruation and abortion. “Wash the white clothes on Monday,” the essay begins, but quickly turns to advice like “Try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming” and “This is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child.” Written as a litany of instructions from a mother to her child about how to be a good group that’s a good woman, all occasionally interspersed with uncertain questions from the young girl meant to be absorbing this careful instruction, Kincaid’s essay derives power from its diminutive size. A single paragraph comprised of a single sentence, the essay falsely sets readers up for a quick, easy read, but what follows is an in-depth reflection on the ways we raise young girls and how this rewards silence and compliance but does not always guarantee safety. 

Yet while this essay is slim, it is not without substance. While it certainly details the supposed mundanity of the domestic, the essay expands just as readers have come to expect from the genre, reflecting on larger universal truths like obedience, sexuality, gender performance, and power structures. Kincaid takes readers on a meandering journey through the constructs and confines of girlhood, until both the child in question and readers themselves are left wondering what it means to be a good girl, who these many requirements reward, and if success is even possible. These complex themes are carefully threaded, layered with image and characterization, readers compelled by a clear, resonant voice. Both mother and girl are represented in this essay, dual visions of life, the mother a representation of who the girl must eventually become, similarly expected to pass on this set of burdensome guidelines for the next generation. “This is how to bully a man,” she instructs the girl who cannot yet understand, quickly followed by, “This is how a man bullies you.” While the mother is seemingly at odds with her daughter, she seeks to provide her with the things she needs to keep herself safe through both compliance and deviance, and perhaps it is the mother’s own trauma that leads to the litany, desperate to save her daughter from her own struggles through a rigid dedication to rules. Ultimately, however, it is the juxtaposition of these broader themes with the small size of the work that makes this essay successful. 

Kincaid’s work also deftly demonstrates the power of flash to unify form with content. Readers are offered Kincaid’s essay in the same fashion as adults offer advice to young girls—as a series of instructions, a list of rules girls are expected to follow without explanation or questioning, the list growing longer and longer until a child learns to live a good life, though the essay is clear to end with the girl’s failure. After reminding her daughter repeatedly to be a good girl in order to become a good woman, the mother asks in the final line, “You mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?” implying that all their work will be in vain. By presenting the essay in this form, Kincaid puts readers directly into the position of the child, overwhelmed by the litany, the increasing demands, the relentless syntax, readers desperate for relief, but finding none, growing tired and restless, burdened and breathless, as they search for a momentary pause, for a place to make sense of the guidance, which the child questions in the essay, the reader even more so, their adult perspective offering clarity on the confusing expectations adults placed on young girls. The size of the essay makes us all small children in need of instruction and constant correction, trying our best to understand the many complexities of a cruel world. 

“Girl” firmly rejects the traditional confines of the essay yet still claims space in the canon. Her use of flash reinvents the essay, commanding readers pay attention to the often overlooked subject of the domestic space, woman and girl, mother and child, firmly at the forefront. Kincaid’s work also places Caribbean culture at the center, creating a new form to reflect this experience, rather than trying to fit this experience into traditional forms that have long sought to exclude marginalized writers. It is Kincaid’s deliberate use of flash to claim space for stories and writers traditionally silenced and erased, that places this piece in textbooks alongside the lengthy works of straight white male writers. Originally published as a prose poem, but also often categorized as essay or fiction, “Girl” is a work whose hybridity resists easy definition. It is precisely this blurring of boundaries that make space for fluid lives that not easily fit into the prescriptive ways of living or writing.

Encountering “Girl” as a student years ago is what gave me permission not only to write about the small stories of my girlhood, but also to embrace the power of flash. This work was one of the few pieces I encountered that spoke of the confusing expectations society demands of girls, and the ways women are expected to dole out these instructions even as they harm their daughters and themselves. It was one of the only pieces that blurred genre in a way that felt familiar to me as a queer, disabled writer. And Kincaid’s use of flash deviated so starkly from what I encountered in textbooks and anthologies that I was immediately intrigued by the ways a writer could subvert expectation while still fulfilling the expansive exploration of the essay.

Writing Abbreviate as a very short collection of very short essays allowed me to access the large struggles of my life. Without the flash form, I might not have written about these experiences at all, so overwhelmed by the task that it overshadowed me entirely. But the flash form shrunk the burden of sharing these stories while also expanding the possibility of what they might represent for me and for readers. No longer was I consumed by the challenges of writing about the painful realities of being a woman in America—growing up pressured to conceal my queer identity, expected to tolerate being belittled by a friend’s husband, and being physically assaulted by a man in a red trucker hat just after the 2016 election. Instead, flash offered a tidy container for sprawling stories, an endpoint to the telling, which was a relief from the relentlessness of trauma. 

The flash essay also allowed me to write the stories of my life that others deemed too small to be important but that were nonetheless essential for me. Growing up, I was told girls should be seen and not heard, which made me feel small and encouraged my silence about not only my pain, but also my joy. I believed the things that were important to me did not matter, when really these were things girls are taught to ignore or conceal in favor of following adult convention and demonstrating obedience. But these were the stories that were essential to my girlhood—childhood games and school projects, teenage sleepovers and the first love of female friendships. These domestic tales were stories society deems too small, but they were able to claim metaphorical space and expand due to the genre fluidity of flash. 

If I had believed about flash what I believed about myself, I would have thought it incapable of being expansive, of searching, stretching, growing. I would have believed it incapable of taking up space in the imagination and commanding attention. But there is purpose and power in subverting expectation, in resisting conventional modes in favor of forging new ways of knowing and being. If the essay is about reflecting the reality of our lives, flash is fitting for those of us who have been made to feel small, for those of us looking to resist the traditional ways others who sought to write stories of our lives in favor of the fluid forms we might write for ourselves. 

*

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of the flash essay collection Abbreviate. She is also the author of Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice, Halfway from Home, Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.

To Make Our Little Worlds Fall Apart: a Conversation between Emilio Carrero & Thomas Dai

To Make Our Little Worlds Fall Apart

A Conversation between Emilio Carrero & Thomas Dai

*

As longtime friends, we were delighted to see that our debut nonfiction books were slated to come out around the same time. Though each wildly different in form, our books—Autobiography of the [Undead] and Take My Name but Say It Slow—were the occasion for this conversation. We talk about the obsessive overlaps in our work—the intrigue of citation, queerness and racial identity, and growing up in the South—as well the stories behind the making of the books. What are the radical possibilities of writing about the self, but in concert with others? How is the South a story (of stories)? To what extent does writing autobiographical essays or memoir demand transparency from the author? And how can we make room in these forms for experimentation, play, and intellectual inquiry? 

*

 

Emilio Carrero: So, I’m thinking about our time together at the University of Arizona, specifically Ander Monson’s class on collections. Do you remember, Ander forced us to put together a full manuscript(!)—which I was terrified by because I had just started grad school. But it was a really instructive and illuminating assignment because it made me think about my work on a scale that I’ve never done before, made me think about how the stuff I wrote fit next to each other, horizontally rather than vertically. I can't help but think about that process we went through now that I’ve finished reading your book. Many years after that class—ta-da!—we both have collections. Anyway, I offer that preamble as a way into my first question: I want to hear you talk about how you see the pieces in the book fitting together? I mean, if these pieces were hung in a gallery next to each other, what would the exhibit be called? Also, I know many of the essays were first standalone pieces, so what was the process like of assembling them into a book? 

Thomas Dai: I remember that class so well. It felt like this moment when “collection” as opposed to “book” or “essay” or even “writing a good sentence” was suddenly the only writerly goal that mattered to me. And being asked by Ander to think “horizontally,” as you say, about how all the pieces I was writing fit together really did affect me as a writer… That is: I discovered I liked building collections. Maybe this is true for everyone, but the scaling up part just wasn’t/isn’t terrifying for me. In fact, it can feel much more natural and pleasurable than the writing itself, which obviously, as a writer, I like to avoid. I do think it’s possible to get a little lost in the sauce, though. I wound up equivocating more than I (or certainly, a reader) needed me to about this collection’s arrangement, its internal resonances and echoes, the vague meta-architecture of the thing. Ultimately, this is a book about being young and adrift and down to converse with the self; it didn’t need some overly complex container (here I’m thinking of the Rube Goldberg machine inside the Port Authority bus station I was so taken by the first time I schlepped to New York for the sole purpose of making out with a boy). And yet I found it creatively energizing to keep casting about for new patterning schemes. There was a version of this book built like a memory palace, with one photograph pinning down each essay, and there was another where I tried tying each piece to a different stroke used in Chinese writing, so that the whole collection accumulated into an exotic-looking character (self-orientalization, for sure, but at the time, it seemed more fun than misguided). Where I eventually landed was somewhere in between a chronological memoir-in-essays and an imaginary, imperfect map of who I’d been in my twenties. 

I’ve probably overshot your question, but talking about how collections do or don’t come together is way up my alley. I have a pretty taxonomic mindset. I always want to name things and then allocate that thing to a category, an order. It’s a tic that helps me organize my thoughts for the hell that is writing but that I try and get away from in life, where categories rarely feel so fixed. As I read your book, I also found myself trying to describe it from on high. I produced a lot of possible labels: anti-memoir of a “sad, brown Puerto Rican life”; disemboweled contents of a failed autobiography; epistolary-essay-cum-erasure-poem-cum-annotated-critical-theory-text. All felt satisfactory, but only just. This is true of so much genre-promiscuous work, of course, but your book’s very composition seems to defeat my drive toward a clarifying wholeness. I want, as a reader, to see the book come together as something, and yet that something is maybe best described as a process: you, Emilio Carrero, the book’s named writer and reader, writing and reading. Another way of saying this is that your book reveals its own revisionary process, or rather, it performs that revision constantly—upon the self’s texts as well as those of others—in order to create a disordered, appropriated w/hole. Does that sound pretentious? Probably. Maybe that’s what I want to ask you about, then: literary “pretension,” our fear of it, our indulgence in it, what it is or isn't and what does or doesn't justify it? 

EC: I have to confess: I get perverse joy from knowing that I defeated your drive toward a clarifying wholeness. I really love this question though. And I partly love it because I know deep down that I can be very pretentious. As our mutual friend Miranda used to tell me, I can be a real literary brat sometimes (and she didn’t mean it in the cool, sexy way that Charli XCX means; she meant it in the Angelica from the Rugrats way). I’d probably need you to pin down literary pretension a bit more. I am guessing you mean writing in obtuse, difficult, challenging ways?

TD: Oh yes, I mean “pretension” as a strawman, a blanket statement that something has no substance because it’s avoiding a more standard, straightforward reading experience. 

EC: You know, it’s funny because I was primarily trained as a creative writer from undergrad all the way to PhD, and intelligibility has always been one of the primary concerns that comes up in workshops. And I think pretension was always hanging over those concerns of intelligibility (like: “Are you sure what you’re doing is really necessary?”; “How could you make this less confusing”; etc.). Students are always trying stuff with their writing in grad school—experimenting, exploring, indulging in whatever flights of fancy they’re riding at the moment. Uninspired teachers will simply diagnose these manuscripts as clear or unclear, confusing or unconfusing, promising or unpromising. More self-aware teachers will ask whether the work is “teaching you how to read it” or some variation of that. I don’t love either of those responses because they assume a monolithic, “straightforward” reading experience, as you say. That being said, I haven’t met too many teachers who are openly delighted by work that’s inscrutable. Which isn’t me taking shots at anyone, truly, because I still do these aforementioned things as a teacher all the time (I live in the glass house of academia like most writers I know), and teaching a creative writing workshop is difficult, to say the least. Still, I do wonder if what we’re really saying when we talk about intelligibility and pretension is: is this book capable of capital? Has it cleared a certain threshold of intelligibility (and likeability and “straightness”) for market consumption, whether that be niche literary consumption or large-scale popular consumption? I’m not saying anything super new here. What I’ve realized, after doing this for a while now is: we (writers and readers) want to know what the book is and we want to understand what it's saying—and there’s something maddeningly seductive about these desires. We want the book to undress for us—and not in intimate, consenting, sensuous, loving ways; but in coercive, shitty, exploitative ways. And I just say all that because I know, or at least I feel in my body, that the institutional protocols of creative writing run deep in our psyches, and often there’s this presumption, which I am guilty of as well, that the work needs to come together into an intelligible whole or even needs to surrender, implicitly or explicitly, a coda for the reader so that they can have a “straightforward” reading experience; otherwise, the book has failed. And so I wonder to what degree the question of literary pretension is tied up in those norms? I’m probably more sensitive about this than most because a lot of the feedback I’ve gotten consistently throughout my writing career is that I ask a lot of readers. I ask a lot, sure, but I think I give a lot. And so, truthfully, I think my writing is very indulgent. What I hope is that it’s not self-indulgent. I’m really not trying to do the “look, mom, no hands” thing when I write. At the end of the day, I really believe that what I’m making when I’m writing is a poethical wager, to borrow Joan Retallack’s term, on me and the reader to create and/or discover something that makes us imagine the world differently, unimaginably so. If that makes me indulgent in literary pretension, then fine. I’m fine with wanting us, writer and reader, to indulge in wild fantasies; experimenting and exploding boundaries. That’s the whole Walter Benjamin thing, right? All great works of art either dissolve a genre or create a new one. I’m not saying I’m doing that but I’m trying, I really am. 

Your question about pretension is making me think about how we greet readers on the page. In yours, the opening chapters feel almost like literary methodology, a writer thinking through the ideas, questions, events the book is concerned with, but also a meta-reflection on “how to” think through these questions. The opening two sentences of the book underscore this for me: “I am trying to envision a map. It is maybe the map of my life.” When I read this, I was immediately thrust back into our time in workshop together, and I’m like: oh, yeah, these are such Thomas sentences—lucid, desirous, cartographic, ambitious yet uncertain. I never told you this but when we were in grad school, I was always so flummoxed by the way you embraced uncertainty in your work. Reading your work, I’d throw my hands up in the air, wishing you’d come out and say the thing you’ve decided on, pick a position to hold. I mention it now because I admire the way you’re able to surf along so many currents of thought, emotions, histories without allowing yourself to be sucked into them completely, perhaps a healthy level of skepticism you maintain although that word doesn’t quite feel adequate to what I want to say. The point is, I felt my brain slowly building a muscle memory for moving through the essays, learning to stand up on the board, so to speak; or maybe what it is that I felt certain doors have been opened to welcome me into the narrator’s ways of thinking and perceiving and feeling, like intellectual hospitality has been offered. By the end of the book, rather than bringing us toward cliche affects of home and togetherness, we’re primed, almost physically, wet-bodied and toned really to tumble through these ideas in complex ways that resist resolution, that juggle multiple things at once.

I’m curious if you saw the essays as requiring readerly acclimation? And do you see your writing style as welcoming the reader into certain ways of thinking and perceiving and feeling? 

TD: Wow, I hope this doesn’t come across as glib, but your diagnosis of what’s going on in the book’s opening gestures—plus just my overall tenor as this writer who likes a lot of indecision—is much nicer than anything you could’ve said about, I don’t know, the beauty of a particular sentence. I will take full responsibility for any and all flummox, though I also can’t say my “writing style” is all that intentional. I don’t set out to “embrace” uncertainty so much as I discover, through writing, that uncertain is how I feel. You generously call this a “healthy level of skepticism,” but in my mind, most skeptics eventually show their cards, and on those cards are usually the bullet points to their own theory-of-absolutely-everything, or else glossy white blanks without any image, an empty house of nihilism to which the skeptic gratefully, if also suicidally, retreats. I’m always trying to write my way out of this double bind, to find middle ground not in the centrist, political sense but in some transitional phase that exists in between the solidcore knowledge that you feel or think one way and will feel and think that way forever and the gaseous absence of any and all such beliefs, identities, or attachments. Earlier, you answered my question about literary pretension by saying that creative writing classrooms and publishers tend to demand legibility from the author—legibility here also meaning salability—which is in large part why your book refuses to settle into any one form, one tone, or even one human being’s set of words if those words are to be rendered as property. I really admire how relentlessly you challenge the reader—“[This graveyard] is very hard to read”—because why should it be easy? This exchange of confidences among strangers? In contrast, I think I was more than happy to bring most of these pieces into the world as personal essays, to work within that familiar form, but if there was one thing I didn’t want to compromise on, it was the book’s air of uncertainty; I didn’t want to pick a position or produce a clear thesis or say exactly and indubitably what I had come to the page to say. I wanted to float down a river, which of course means occupying multiple positions in succession. Maybe that’s why there’s so much liquidity in this book (watery stool, for one, but also watery characters) and maybe you’re right in pointing out that this takes some getting used to, some acclimation, before a reader can feel included in the mental journey of these essays. Inclusivity is such a vacuous word for so many of us—included in what exactly?—but I did want this book to be welcoming, inclusive. I just didn’t know how to make a pathway into it that wasn’t also circuitous, because that’s how the experiences and thought patterns I’m writing about felt to me: routes without destinations. 

On the topic of inclusion and bringing not just the reader but other voices into one’s work, I want to ask you about the literary technique of citation. Autobiography of the [Undead] is highly referential, but not deferential, which gives its citations a different, dare-I-say transgressive, quality. This isn’t always true, but oftentimes your citations feel like acts of graverobbing and (loving?) desecration to me as much as they are a borrowing of some fancy person’s idea. (I should say, for context, that this book is composed entirely of text scavenged from other sources, including a memoir you were writing but then later abandoned.) For instance, you take an entire passage from Sebald’s The Emigrants, preserve most of the syntax while changing all of the proper nouns, so that the story—Sebald’s story—of an emigre moving to Manchester is also the story—yours—of moving to Tucson to become a writer: 

But when the time came[:] I did not want to be reminded of my origins by anything or anyone, so instead of going to New York, into the care of my uncle [best friend], I decided to move to Manchester [Tucson] on my own. Inexperienced as I was, I imagined I could begin a new life in Manchester [Tucson], from scratch; but instead, Manchester [Tucson] reminded me of everything I was trying to forget.

Can you talk about that a bit—how even in the shared act of using other writers’ language, those who cite often achieve radically different effects? 

EC: I’m smiling at your citation of the Sebald passage. Maybe because Sebald has meant a lot to me (as he has for many writers). To your questions about citations, it’s strange because I have used citations since I was in grade school. I mean, we all have, right? We all had to do the whole 5-paragraph essay thing with secondary sources, and even in college, that changes only moderately. Those formative experiences with citation turned me off from it because of how rote and insipid and uninspired citations felt in those contexts. Even during my MFA, I was sort of ideologically against using citations because I worried that it disrupted whatever “pure” experience I thought “my writing” was supposed to be creating for readers (it’s actually kind of embarrassing to admit now because of how blatantly myopic and narcissistic it was/is) wherein intertextuality and meta-moves and a critical consciousness of poetics all threatened the “vivid and continuous dream” that post-war whiteness had/has conceived of, institutionalized, and disseminated through American creative writing. In short, my disgust for citations pointed to an artistic solipsism I was mired inside of, a praxis that had no room for the embrace of other’s voices. That’s a long (though I hope helpful) prologue to my answer: citations carry a charge with them. Or maybe my encounter with them creates a charge that I then insert into whatever I’m writing. The transgression, the “graverobbing” as you call it, is a gesture that I cannot fully predict and therein, I hope, lies its creative potential, its surprise and intrigue for the reader—what José Esteban Muñoz might call “an anticipatory illumination” of the not-yet conscious, an otherwise queer world-making that, again I hope, resists saturation into neocolonial frameworks of possession, property, assimilation, and intelligibility. 

I guess the less nerdy answer is that I realized, early on, that the book couldn’t be deferential to the citations. There’s no fun in that! The fun came from embracing the strange, inappropriate, desecrating, and loving effects that can be created by citing others. My editor calls it “parrotphrasing,” which I love for all its silly, cartoonish, interspecies connotations. I guess another way to think about the effects of citation is to think about them as offering an invitation. Like when you invite someone into your home, a relative stranger so to speak—be it an acquaintance, someone you’re dating, even an estranged family member—you’re opening yourself up to so many different possibilities, and the quickest way to narrow and ruin those possibilities is to impose a bunch of rules on them, to police them into certainty. So, you can call it graverobbing, which I love, but you can also call it invitations to the graveyard, a creaking gate swung open to this fucked-up home of self that I never wanted and yet cannot let go of. The best I can do is give away this home, constantly, to steal from Fred Moten. 

All this thinking about citation is making me think about reading habits. Your book is so intellectually abundant, polymathic in the way it strides and turns through discourses. I am curious about your reading process in general—like are you one of those people who are reading a bunch of different books at the same time? Or, do you go on certain intellectual binges before switching to something else? Is reading idiosyncratic for you or guided by projects you’re working on?

TD: I’m pretty scattered with my reading habits, like some kind of biblio-tourist. I will poke around a field or genre, or maybe one specific author’s corpus, for a while, and then I’ll leave. (Relatedly, I don’t always finish books that I start, especially novels and memoirs—anything where the fuse has to burn a long time; I think that’s why essays stole my heart from the jump, because they just held my attention more than the more capacious forms.) But also like any tourist, I do collect souvenirs, or maybe landmarks is the better metaphor, these texts or authors I like returning to whenever I circle back to a region of inquiry. Kandice Chuh and Anne A. Cheng for Asian American Studies; Lauren Berlant and Eve Sedgwick for queer theory… so on and so forth. The thing about this book’s archive of references that’s maybe different from other creative nonfiction books about race, migration, and identity is that I try and dip into that stuff—the “theory” stuff—but then I also want to write alongside scientists and poets and classic American Lit writers like Mark Twain and Robert Frost. This doesn’t always make for a coherent read, but I personally just enjoy a big tent. There’s no inherent claim I’m trying to make by putting Nabokov and Tseng Kwong Chi into the same essay, but there’s also no inherent tension to them sharing that space. 

I should also mention that I wrote most of these essays as I was working on my PhD in American Studies. A lot of the reading I did back then was for class or my qualifying exams, and a lot of that reading heavily influenced this book. It wasn’t just that I wanted to cite these academics I was reading, it was that they created this ecology of ideas I wanted to spend time moving through, and to bring the reader along with me. Now that I’m out of that context, I think my writing and the extent to which citationality enters my work are both going to change. 

Before we leave this topic behind, I do want to ask if there was any specific book, figure, or image you encountered that was germinal for this project? Obviously, the figure/image of the grave repeats throughout, mostly in reference to writing and its publication. What’s the metaphorical resonance of graves for you? Why and how did that figure capture you as you were writing? This project certainly feels haunted by death, but it’s maybe not the kind of death (i.e., bodily expiration) I expect in nonfiction. To me, it felt like you were more interested in the annihilation or abdication of selfhood and also the letting go of a written kind self-making project, what you call your “mem-me.” So abstract deaths, perhaps, but enacted with such force on the page. 

EC: The figure of the grave came from my letter correspondence with the writer Brandon Shimoda during the pandemic. I had read his book The Grave on the Wall at a time in my life when I really needed to read it. His book helped me more than I can say. He was the first one to talk to me about the grave as a kind of archive that we’re constantly adding to. I became enamored, transfixed you could say, by this idea of the grave, and by extension, the graveyard as an infinitely, deathly storage space for our lived experiences. So, yes, you’re totally right that the grave is a way for me to think about death in the abstract, as a cultural concept that felt/feels abundantly present in my life in a multitude of ways. 

Maybe what I want to add to that is that although the grave/yard is very much a metaphor for me to think about self-making and self-abdication, it also has concrete purchase in the book insofar as many of the people in the book have passed away. They quite literally have graves of their own and I am writing about them from a place of grief. And a lot of that grief stems from the fact that the dead actually didn’t haunt me in the ways I expected or wanted them to, which is why I wanted—needed—to write about them. They were gone and they didn’t reach out to me, visit me, talk with me like they used to when they were alive. I missed them and this book was a way of being with them again. I am thinking about the opening to Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend” where he writes: “I have my dead, and I have let them go, / and was amazed to see them so contented, / so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful, / so unlike their reputation.” As usual, he said it better than I could. 

You mention that the book feels haunted by death. I think that’s right. I still struggle to fully articulate the texture of the haunting. Maybe the most succinct way to parse it out is via juxtaposition. If Joan Didion proclaimed that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” then my experience, as a writer and Puerto Rican, had been the opposite: stories cleared pathways to die. I mean this abstractly and literally. The stories my family had told themselves (and had been told to them) as colonizers and colonized Puerto Ricans had led them, on no uncertain terms, to die; and I was very much in danger of following that trajectory, albeit in different ways. And in the abstract, I realized, all too painfully, that many of the protocols of creative writing, this institutionalized field of storytelling that I’ve worked in for almost eight years now, hinged on these little social deaths you had to enact, to go through, for the sake of producing singular works for public consumption that adhered to neocolonial notions of originality, property, and cultural cache.. If “social deaths” feels like too much, though, we can also call them “heartbreaks” as Kiese Laymon alluded to after he published Heavy:

There’s a way to write a book like my last book that doesn’t leave you ashamed and scared and alone…Artfully tearing your heart open and selling that heartful rendering to the highest corporate bidder has consequences [deathly consequences I want to argue]. Please, please tend to your heart when creating the art our heart needs, the art that helps your family eat.

Creative writing is heart work and yet so many of its protocols deny the heart, render it ashamed, sacred, alone, and broken. I say that and I also want to say that I’m not equating my little social deaths, my heartbreaks as a poor POC writer with the social deaths and heartbreaks that Blacks, Palestinians, and/or my Caribbean ancestors have historically lived through. They’re not the same thing; however, I believe that there is a conceptual relationship between us, a varied yet commonplace familiarity with death, in all its creative grief and joy, that I continue to try to understand and explore in my writing. 

This Kiese Laymon stuff actually reminds me of something I’ve been dying to ask you about: the South. When we were at U of A, I think you were the only other writer I knew, besides myself, who was writing about the South. And it sounds terribly cliche, but it really is hard to explain what growing up in the South is like if you didn’t experience it. You write in “Southings”:

So, yes, what Asians there were in Farragut did stick out, and there were times when I thought of us, me and all the Asians I knew, as propertied squatters with no valid claim to this non-Asian place—a place I had the misfortune of loving as much as I did.

I began to think about how irreconcilable and beautiful and tragic this ongoing experiment called the South really is. It really is a peculiar kind of insanity that it inculcates in you where, as you say in the essay, you feel you “owe” these people who are prideful of a place but scarce in everything else. While reading “Southings”, I couldn’t help but think about this thing Audre Lorde writes, which I chew on in my book, in which she asks: what do we owe each other after we have told our stories? I don’t honestly know since so much of these conversations around home and identity are focused on our stories. The South, too, is a story. And of course the lives of racialized bodies in the South is a story of stories, fragmented and disjointed. And I’m going to venture to say you and I grew up similarly vexed and harassed and guilty and passionate about our very presence in the South, this place we had the “misfortune of loving”? And now, as creative nonfiction writers, we tell these stories and also, as you say, try to understand/empathize with the opposition. I’m uneasy about the word “opposition”. I want to say I try to understand whiteness’s hostility and anxiety, which I carry inside me as a mixed-race person. But basically what I’m saying is: Am I wrong to want an affirmative answer to Lorde’s question? Am I wrong to want more for creative nonfiction than the mutual sharing and understanding of our stories? Am I asking for too much to want more than that without knowing what “that” is? Sorry, I need to bring this back to you and your book. I am wondering to what degree are the stories of the South something that you are invested in sharing and understanding? 

TD: No, I don’t think you’re wrong to want more from creative nonfiction (or from me, for that matter) than the olive branches of mutual-ish “understanding,” empathy, imagined common cause, bonhomie, etc. I don’t even know if literature has successfully facilitated those things in my life, let alone the higher order consciousness-raising or material change I think you’re interested in making our shared horizon. I don’t think it’s bad to be a utopian, maybe especially when you’re stuck writing about intractable, venomous things like racism, queerphobia, or gentrification. At the same time, I just didn’t feel like it was my place to point the way to any such horizon, or to sweepingly comment on these “issues.” Insofar as I have a story of racialized subjugation to tell here, it’s a story of scary but fleeting moments—a pattern and an atmosphere, definitely, but one I’ve often been able to move past or ignore. To be clear, Asian Americans are subject to systemic and historically-entrenched racism in this country. I write about that in bits of this book, but I also write about the anodyne, totally commonplace ways in which some of us (myself the primary example) have leveraged our relative wealth and social mobility to gain access to educational and cultural institutions, creative outlets and “opportunities”—affirmation, for lack of a better word. I want to be honest about the experiences that I’m reflecting on, honest about how racialization ≠ marginalization, not always at least. One of these essays is about going on a year-long trip around China courtesy of an endowed fellowship I got from Harvard. Sure, that experience had its moments of despair and spurred a lot of tortured thinking about my “heritage,” but it was also just a gigantic fucking privilege. So no, I didn’t think too much about the discourse on anti-Asian racism as I wrote this, mostly because I wasn’t equipped to write that kind of book.

To tie this into your very perceptive questions about the South as a “story of stories,” I’ll just say that the South—or really my little part of it, the part that I know, intimately—is the site in this book where these questions of race and belonging are clearest to me, and so I feel myself writing a bit more assertively in that essay, which doesn’t mean I stake out a position on anything (I don’t), but that the map I present to the reader has less fuzziness on it. And yet, as you also point out, there’s something so “irreconcilable and beautiful and tragic” about Southern identity and that mystery and opacity attracts me as well. I started writing Southings not long after we saw each other at Sewanee, the writing conference in Tennessee, and though that was years ago, I still remember standing around with you under all those trees, talking about all of these things we’ve been talking about here, just in the presence of the South and its varying light. There was a graveyard there, a watering hole, a church we bust into one night. There was this ill-defined rawness—raw like syrup and sex, not the exposed rawness I identify with the West—that entered every conversation and interaction I had in those weeks, and that rawness carried forward into the writing of this essay, which of course quickly tamped the wound, covering it in thought. But still, that essay was the fastest to write in the entire collection, and also the one that needed the least retouching.

In your book, you are a lot more up front about the “opposition.” You know what you don’t like and you find this novel and disorienting way to write against that enemy, without abandoning—here I’m thinking of the redacted, but still piercing, personal letters you include in this book—the emotive qualities of art. The enemy, for you, is so often the self. I want to ask about that… To put it bluntly, it seems like trying to write a specific kind of autobiography ruined your life, and that it had this physical effect on you and your relationships. You call this the “torque” of autobiography. Can you expand on that? What kind of affective space did trying to write autobiographically put you in and did writing this book differently, writing it with the words of others, eventually liberate you from that space? 

EC: I really want to take time to sit with your observation that in my work: the self is the enemy. You’re right to say that, and yet it’s still a sobering and scary thing to hear. I still haven’t quite thought through the gravity (and consequences) of staking out that position against the self. I think the short answer to your questions is that writing exacerbated my lifelong depression as well as a family tradition of alcoholism. Of course, it’s not as simple as: writing a memoir caused A, B, and C to happen. The word .doc wasn’t possessed in a Tom Riddle’s diary kind of way. The memoir was a locus for so many converging histories and ongoing systemic brutalities, which are far from unique to me, and are things that so many artists labor under, especially racialized artists. Many of these brutalities are psychic, and so it can feel a bit woo-woo or overly metaphorical to talk about them (even if what I’m ultimately talking about is addiction and mental health) as if the costs of writing literary stuff is the same as being a migrant worker. It is not, full stop. The point isn’t to play oppression Olympics, as one of my students said once in class. The point, for me, is/was to think about the torque of autobiography, and the institution of creative writing by extension, as a part of a larger matrix of ongoing systemic brutality. Only by doing that could I give myself permission to write with the words of others, to reimagine Hortense Spillers’ words or Norman Mailer’s words in the context of a “sad, brown, Puerto Rican life.” The little liberation that’s achieved, if it’s even appropriate to use that word, was from the loneliness of autobiography and all its brutal protocols to a coalition of the undead that is constantly undoing, revising, reimagining, whether we like it or not; a constant wanting by refusing what’s been refused and refusing what we’ve been allowed to have, to steal and revise from Jack Halberstam. Does that coalition of the undead amount to just another version of writing with/through/about the self? Maddeningly back where we started? I don’t know. Can we write our way out of this trap? Who knows, but I’m trying. 

I feel like we’re drawing closer to the end of this so I want to circle back to the hospitality I mentioned earlier. Another way that I feel this neighborly, familial embrace coming through in your book is via the phrases and metaphors you offer up—“little semantic handles”; “silly cantering into the light”; “this voyeur come from the future”; “rendering you a charming bit of terroir”; “a geography ill at ease with itself.” They sneak up on you in a playful way. I would find myself following a line of thought, parsing the complexities of family, or love, or cultural identity, and then a string of these aforementioned words would snap me into a different rhythm. Not necessarily a jolt; a squeeze feels like a better word. Which is me saying, I think there’s a lot of playfulness and tenderness and vulnerability in the book amidst its formidable intellectual lines of inquiry about queerness and Asianness as well as its deeply emotional excavations of family history. It’s not quite winking at me but it’s squeezing my hand under the table if that makes sense? For all my reservations and complaining about autobiography and creative nonfiction, I am endlessly in love with how textured and variably intimate it is as a genre. Also, tangentially, the book has a penchant, perhaps even a love, for aphorism (e.g., “We wrote the city, and the city wrote us free”; “What are you? the man asks, but what I am is gone.”)

I suppose my question is: what appeals to you about these varying modes of delivery? And the broader question might be: in what ways did you want readers to feel close to the book and/or you? 

TD: I like how you put it—like I’m “squeezing [your] hand under the table.” Many of the lines you’re highlighting are definitely ones I wanted to stick out for the reader, possibly because they operated on this separate emotional and even semantic register for me. I don’t really know what I’m saying when I say my lover and I “wrote the city,” but it feels daring to make that claim, and to do so without providing reams and reams of evidence. Aphorisms and adages have always attracted me as a writer because they squish a monumental tone onto a rather compressed surface, and yes, I too feel like such lines change the rhythm or sound of a piece. You almost need to read them aloud because they’re formulated as “sayings,” the lines of a text that feel most repeatable, most “intoned.” I’m a very unmusical (i.e., tone deaf) person in most ways, but when it comes to writing, I always revise by reading and rereading a piece aloud to myself until it finally sounds like it’s written in my voice. The aphoristic sentences are, for me, the points in the essay when I want my voice to slow down, to tremble, to punch through the reading experience in some way. 

To go now from sound to sight, I’d love to ask you about the striking visuality of this book. You use parts of the keyboard here that I don't think I've ever touched. Brackets, clefs, triangles, blacked out blocks. I want to ask you about the process of making this book. Was it a lot of copy and pasting and then reworking? Retyping as you held open all the tabs and book spines? Did you lay everything down first before coming in with the redacting marks and brackets? Or was it something more chaotically and personally intuitive than that? I'm just interested in the procedure you used to create this textual object, to sculpt a thing from words. 

EC: I really appreciate you saying all this. The unusual keyboard strikings are the thing I am most heartened by in the book, or maybe just most attached to? The naked truth of it all was that I was just so, so tired of letters and punctuation, of the usual syntactic formations of sentences and paragraphs and chapters, and it’s so weird to say but my hands felt almost autonomously happy, relieved, energized to be landing on unfamiliar places on the keyboard. I just needed it for my own sanity. When you spend many years writing about the self, you begin to become painfully aware of its costs, both as a writer and as a family member, partner, teacher, etc. Rilke says this thing about how the only way to judge whether a work of art is good is if it has arisen out of necessity. The necessity for me was born of how exhausted and disheartened I felt about creative writing after studying it for years and trying to write a memoir. And while the content stuff of the memoir was unpleasant—the whole corralling me and my family’s suffering into a consumable narrative—it was the process of writing itself that I hated. I really hated sitting down to write, to face the blank page as writers say, this stupid keyboard and screen I felt confined to, and even when I did have a “good” day of writing, I felt relief more than excitement. I felt the need to do something else with my artwork. I didn’t want to write; I wanted to break shit. Honestly, I’m still not sure if I’ve “written” a book, which I’m fine with and probably a bit happy about. I think you capture this feeling so beautifully in your book when you talk about “negative creation”—a way of making “our little world fall apart, of turning ruination into an activity and a feat.” I wanted to make the “little world” of my memoir “fall apart.” And the question always was how do I make something of that ruination? How do I make the rubble into a sculpture? You could say that all the visual components of the book are me frantically trying to sculpt the rubble into something before it collapses on top of me.

I guess that brings me to your questions about the actual process. I’d say the process was a lot of chaos and intuition in the beginning. Like, there’s really no immediate logical reason to put the words of, say, Kid Cudi next to Mary Karr. But it’s funny and surprising. That improvisation eventually yields something akin to clarity and cohesiveness though never wholeness. I think I was also trying to figure out a writing process for writing with others’ voices. It’s very different from just sitting down to write something off the top of your head because you’re doing a lot of reading while writing, and you’re doing a lot of copying and pasting as you mentioned, and you’re doing a lot of visual work where you’re thinking about how the voices can be layered together, which sounds maybe more like music composition though I won’t pretend to know anything about that. In a way, there is something AI-generated about the process insofar as I am drawing upon many different sources in order to form a sentence, or paragraph, or poem. Again, I think we’re doing this when we write normally and we just call it writing from our own perspective or “my own voice”, which I think is imprecise and ideological, but I was just trying to be way more explicit and transparent about all this as I was making the book. The footnotes are a reminder of that, right? Each one is basically saying: no, I’m not going to sink comfortably into the illusion of a single authorial voice. No, I don't want you, the reader, to either. There are no solos, only a cacophonous orchestra. 

Slowly, patterns, themes (family, love, sex, artmaking, apologies, etc.) emerge, and I had to acknowledge these things even if I was suspicious of them, or rather suspicious of my desire to organize, taxonomize in general. I realized that I couldn’t write a book that destroys the self completely, that dispossesses “me” and the “you” I’m writing to indefinitely. What I could do is be transparent about the ways in which the book was primed to collapse. These things (the strikethroughs, brackets, redactions, playing with citations) are all divots in the seemingly monolithic structure of the book that I want to continually hack at as a writer because I want something more than “wholeness.” This desire is bound to fail, because I’m still making a book at the end of the day. My book wants to be something it can’t be. For me, this feels eerily true to how it feels to be a person most of the time.

*

Emilio Carrero is the editor of Southeast Review. Their work appears in SleepingFish, Ocean State Review, and Black Warrior Review. Autobiography of the [Undead] is their first book. They believe the truth is out there.

Thomas Dai teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho. His essays have appeared in Guernica, The Georgia Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. Take My Name but Say It Slow is his first book.