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. 

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

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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? 

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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. 

Blue Skies: a Conversation with Joshua Dewain Foster and Georgia Pearle Foster

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Joshua Dewain Foster and I go way back, intersecting at Arizona’s MFA program, where I was hired to teach nonfiction in 2009 and he was just finishing up his MFA(s: he wrote both a fiction and nonfiction MFA theses in the program, though we never worked together formally). We’ve been friends since, and have collaborated quite a bit over the past 13 years, and I’ve watched his work and life with admiration from afar.

I published Josh in DIAGRAM, Essay Daily, and in March Xness, the yearly tournament of essays about songs where he represented Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes the Hotstepper” in 2017’s March Fadness tournament with a great essay, losing in the first round but to the eventual winner, Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn." For 2020’s March Badness (a tournament about bad and so-called “bad” hits), he and his most important collaborator, Georgia Pearle Foster, cowrote an excellent essay on the excruciating (to me) Christopher Cross song “Sailing,” which went deep into that years tournament, losing in the Final Four—also to the eventual winner, which seems like it's becoming a trend. That essay even got me to grudgingly begin to maybe possibly even slightly, barely, almost unnoticeably admire (?!) the song.

The energy between the two of them on the page was awesome and extremely fun to read, as you’ll see if you check it out on the site or in The Crown Package, one of the first two books from Foster Literary.

I’m very committed to startup DIY literary projects, as you probably know if you’re a regular reader of Essay Daily. I love the energy that goes into them and what it does for the writers and the writing and the editing, but also how it ripples into the world around those writers and what they’re publishing and the communities that emerge. I particularly love how DIY project allow folks to chart their own paths outside of received and prescribed ideas about what publishing is and means, and its relationship to academia and the marketplace and prestige and gatekeeping.

So when I heard that Josh and Pearle were starting up their own new literary publishing-and-more enterprise, I was curious what this project was exactly, and how it related to books and to their lives. 

*

Ander Monson: So The Crown Package comes out shortly. It’s the first official production by Foster Literary, which is basically the two of you, right? I’d love to talk a little bit about the book, but also talk about the larger project of Foster Literary and The Loft 745, and how it all fits together. Could you talk me through what led you to start Foster Lit and how and why you found your way to DIY?

Josh: When I was teaching down in Houston in the community workshops, I would have these conversations with these community writers who would publish their own books and lead out with self-publishing and self-marketing. I just thought that there was a literary model there that someone could cultivate. As I talked about it in classes people got really excited about it, these Night Writers, the Weekend Writers. So, in part, when Pearle and I came to Idaho we did not want to leave the literary behind and so carving out a little piece of art for us was important. We're up here alone, too, and so it became this kind of back-and-forth for Pearle and I to keep the literary flame alive.

Pearle: I think originally, part of our conversation about starting Foster Literary was, do we try to stay ensconced in academia with all of the challenges to our personal and writing lives which that would require in the current marketplace? The high percentage of people adjunct teaching, the likelihood that we would have to move well outside any place we’d hoped to make our homes, high course loads and low pay, plus the challenge of a two body academic family. I had also gotten beyond exhausted at the presumption that I was less competent than my peers, or somehow less serious, less committed to my work, which I often faced as a mother in creative writing programs. So then it became this question of, you know, is the university model even going to work for us entirely? I think Josh was willing to let go of that idea of the Great Creative Writing Professorship long before I was. Once we started letting go of the tenure track idea, the question became, what would really stepping out look like? How can we continue teaching, which is something that I did not want to give up, and continue writing, which, of course, was something neither of us ever intended to give up, and hopefully build something that could sustain that literary life for us and hopefully others? How could we have a space where we could work with students, where we could still build a readership and not be dependent on the university model to do those things?

Once we decided to try, there was a lot of freedom in that, because if we're DIY-ing it and not necessarily trying to get tenure track jobs, then we can afford to publish however we want on our own timelines, and have a different kind of control. There’s that romantic association I have with, say, Virginia and Leonard Woolf starting Hogarth Press. I think there's also some inspiration coming from that 90s punk rock kid mentality. All the musicians I was listening to in my youth were all putting out their own albums, starting their own labels, not going with the big corporate record producers, and there was such an emphasis in that subculture on “not selling out,” on making sure that your voice stayed true instead of placating your audience, which part of knows is too simple a concept, but nonetheless I like the notion of controlling one’s own voice. 

One thing I had heard from so many advisors and mentors, who of course I loved and valued, was still, “you shouldn’t say that out loud.” Well, I want to say what I want to say, and if we’re doing this ourselves, I can take the consequences for being honest, and I know Josh will champion that alongside me.

Josh: If the art, if the content, if the product can matter, I think the marketplace is there. The other thing was, you know, we could have done this in Houston too, but there are lots of organizations in Houston doing this. The Loft 745 property where we live and work now has always had a big draw to local southeastern Idaho, but the whole valley has been pretty sparse as far as literary outposts go. It's a big privilege to have all of this come together miraculously, and to bring this Idaho landmark and the rural literary together. It wouldn’t have ever happened without my parents getting called on a Mormon mission to the middle of the Pacific Ocean—the Marshall Islands—and I offered to come back to Idaho to help work in the family farms, but only if we could find solid work for Pearle too. Which was going to be difficult. She was a newly minted, very decorated Doctor of Literature and Creative writing, and we have a community college that's two years old in Idaho Falls, and we have the Mormon college up the road in Rexburg, and a state college ninety miles away.

Pearle: When we moved out here, I knew there was no hope of my getting a job at any of those local colleges. Even as an adjunct, I’m sure I’d have gotten fired before I had two weeks in the classroom–some of my primary concerns as an academic have always been race, class, and gender, and Eastern Idaho has one of the most patriarchal and conservative populations I’ve ever encountered. And of course the Mormon college would never hire someone who’s not of the faith to begin with. So having the option to take over Loft 745, which is primarily a wedding venue and an old restaurant building that’s now converted to event space and classroom space, felt like this huge gift of flexibility and possibility.

Josh: But we also thought, Okay, we can go live in the basement of a wedding venue and we can be part of this population and community that doesn't get represented in literature at all, and we can have this insider look and, if we look at this as our own self-propelled fellowship, we could do something really cool up here. So we dropped in. The property and opportunity lined up, Pearle and I graduated, and us and the kids moved up in 2019, and it took a solid year to learn how to manage the wedding business.

Pearle: Definitely. I had to adjust to culture shock, launch one teenager off to college and get the other acclimated, get the wedding business figured out and streamlined, and adjust our schedules to the rhythm of the place. The yearly rhythm here is opposite the academic rhythm–we work our hardest through the summer. Things get quieter once the wedding season is over, harvest is put away, and the snow settles in. The winters are sublime for all that quietude and time to write. 

Ander: I want to pick up a thread that I heard you talking a little bit before that I think is really interesting. I feel a lot of connection to your DIY approach to things like, as you know, though I have an academic job maybe half of my energy goes to these totally unpaid DIY projects: DIAGRAM, New Michigan Press, Essay Daily, March Xness, the Assessment Matters Institute, etc.. I do these because I just like making things, which I picked up in grad school and have continued with for now more than 20 years. But also my academic job has become less rewarding in the last couple years, and I find the DIY stuff to be very rewarding—immediate and enjoyable and connective. It’s not at all lucrative, and my paying job doesn’t place much, if any, value on this work as far as I can tell, but I do like connecting to people, maybe especially so these last couple years of covid disconnection.

When I hear you talking about The Crown Package and where you’re from in Idaho, Josh, and where you’re from in Alabama, Pearle, part of what I sense this is about is representing groups that are not normally represented in literature. That ethos feels important, like reading and writing from and to the place that you are and the place that you are from, like Faulkner’s postage stamp of land. I feel that strongly in this book, and it’s an aspect that I really admire and connect to. And importantly it feels very unselfconscious. I don’t know if that's intentional or, if that is artifice, but the book hits this note very clearly for me.

Josh: I want to touch on this DIY mentality I was raised with. Idaho is completely a DIY place because you just don't have any other help, you have to be able to depend on yourself. I looked at my mom, my dad, my uncle, everybody on the farm solving their own problems, all the time, and I grew up learning that alongside them, working with them. So as a writer, I had this grandiose artistic burning. As far as I can recall, it’s always been there. Locally and at a young age, I knew many people who played the piano and organ, and I knew people who painted. Both of these expressions were tied directly to Mormon life in the West—playing accompaniment for church functions, and painting scripture scenes. Which, don’t get me wrong, I tried my hand. I was no natural at either form. Enough to know I had to keep searching out for more diverse inspirations. So any writing opportunity or challenge that I could drum up, for me it was just attempt, attempt, attempt—just like a farmer out there who has 40 acres of dirt. How do you get all the sagebrush off it? How do you make it grow corn? Potatoes? Well, you talk to the neighbors and local experts, think and study on it, then you get to work and try, try, try, try, try. All of these pieces in Crown for me were experimentation in some way, shape, or form. Attempt. Then I assembled them all for the book for some cohesion there too. Also attempt. Then I made the amalgamated Crown Package essay for the back copy. Another attempt. Maybe that's some of the unconscious feel to it. 

One of the draws, particularly for us DIYing these books is because, now that I hear myself again talking about it, my book is very hard to market. What is this book about? It's about Idaho, it's about this farm kid who takes on different forms and writes stories down. It doesn't have an overt political message; it doesn't have an angle. A lot of the pieces are my published work, so I had many great learning experiences there, and also going out into the writing programs, I had a lot of feedback, lots of editors, lots of conversation. All extremely helpful in development.

Ander: But TCP also doesn't exist within a genre either, right? I mean it's fiction and nonfiction, which is an unusual combination in terms of publishing, which tends to be suspicious of or outright hostile to these kinds of mixes. As a reader, thought, my experience was very much, knowing you and knowing or having read enough about your life, I read much of it as nonfiction. Then I kind of assume that a lot of the stuff that I don’t already know to be autobiographically true is fiction, though I’m not fully sure of that, and the book doesn’t go out of its way to label which is which. The experience is a really unstable read because, like you know you move from one piece, where I know that I is more or less equal to Josh, and then to another where I’m less sure about who that I maps to, so I assume that’s a story, but it’s a story usually about Idaho, inflected pretty obviously by the autobiographical I of the book, so I read those stories as coming out of that nonfictional I, even if the narrators of those stories are clear fictions.

Josh: I think that's definitely where I like it to land is this sticky residue, where the cover idea came from, this identity ripple, layers of self-takes, fact and tall-tale. My dad was a little worried as I told him about the book production. He feared it would be too autobiographical, I guess, too telling. I assured him that this book was as real as paint on a canvas, he had nothing to worry about. He seemed to get behind that. Then I showed him the cover and he was like, Well, how are they not going to think it’s all you now? 

That’s when I changed tack and just said it was all fake news, like everything nowadays. Accept truth as you need to accept it. 

But in reality, this back-and-forth of genre goes back to my experience at Arizona’s MFA, where I was able to enroll in both Fiction and Nonfiction tracks. I have always been a voracious reader, and in my mind as I self-selected books, I sorta just saw creative writing as two genres only, and these differentiated formally and by production design: prose and poetry. So at Arizona, as I started to really join a wider creative conversation and understand craft nuts-and-bolts of both genres, well, that experimentation is what produced a good sampling of the work featured in the book.

I think the other thing about this book is when I got to Stanford as a Stegner Fellow, I really started to encounter questions of subjectivity and authority, who has the right to tell stories. So, for practice, when I embellished a character, I just always tried to put the stories back on me-ish, or start them from my life experience-ish because then at least I had some honesty in voicing them, albeit dysfunctionally. Does that make sense?

Ander: It does. I want to shift a little bit to the larger project. So how do you describe Foster Lit to people? Like what is Foster Lit when you have to give the elevator pitch? Is it a publishing operation? A literary umbrella organization? Is it a workshop? A residency? Some combination of all of these? 

Pearle: Maybe it’s a literary cooperative? And all of these things, as we can make them happen? Right now I think we want to get the indie press side of things figured out using our own books as the sacrificial attempt, so we can work out some of the challenges that might arise without risking other people’s work, and then hopefully we can launch into championing other writers’ work, likely via publishing their book-length manuscripts. We’ve also talked about publishing shorter pieces online, journal style. We worked together as editors for Gulf Coast when we were in the PhD program at Houston–I was their digital editor after being a genre editor in nonfiction, and then in poetry, and Josh was on my nonfiction team before moving on to editing on the fiction side of things. And then, we have this beautiful space out here in Eastern Idaho. We have classroom space, we have this gorgeous garden and venue space where we now host weddings and other parties, but it would be perfect for a writers’ retreat if we got the lodging worked out. We’re not that far from West Yellowstone, from Montana, from Salt Lake City. We have this valley in the mountains with wide skies all around–there’s so much room to build something and bring people in. 

Josh: There are so many good writers that are sitting on great books but are stalled because they feel like they have to publish through the industry. I mean the marketplaces exist, the Amazon marketplace is huge and we all use it. What if we could carve out just a little niche for homegrown literary books? Turning 40 this year I just thought, Do I want to put the book into another year of review with the same presses with new editors? All these stories have been hit and addressed by many good editors. I have Pearle here in-house. I know I can make some decent pages all by myself. Once Pearle saw a solid draft of Crown and could see the book was no joke, strange and different but an actual book, it gave us both the permission to depart from the traditional and just take control of the whole process. 

Pearle: The Crown Package spans fifteen years of Josh’s writing, and then another two years of putting it all together, editing, and designing. My debut collection of poems, Refinery, which we’re putting out in September, is something I started in earnest in 2007. It could have been a book, technically, in 2014 when I finished an iteration of it as my MFA thesis, and I had mentors tell me it was a good book, but I wasn’t satisfied. I threw out or reworked something like two thirds of it after that point, and kept remaking it. There was the pressure of performing for the marketplace so I could get a job, but more intense for me was the internal pressure to live up to vision and artistry. I knew I only had one chance to write this particular book, and I would regret it if I accepted the final product in a rushed state. So now there’s this relief–I don't want to have to worry about hitting a trend, or publishing the next book before my tenure-track timeline says I’m done, and now I don’t have to concern myself with that. I don't want to have to worry about whether the industry thinks that my content or style or form is relevant right now, or whether my work is going to hit the news cycle in the right place. In doing it ourselves, we can wait to publish until we know we’ve made our books exactly what we meant them to be in the world, and we can also afford for them not to get noticed until they get noticed. There’s no window for us where we have to give up on one of our books, decide it’s a flop, and then pulp it. The sails can simply stay out until there’s wind. 

Ander: I mean you do end up in a position with a lot of freedom having opted out of academia which has its own set of value systems and weighted levers of prestige. It also feels like a good time to be opting out of academia, since I sense we’re just passing peak-creative-writing in academia, like the discipline peaked in the academic context 5-10 years ago. I’d love to be wrong about this, but I've been having this feeling, not just at Arizona, but seeing what’s happening elsewhere. Opting out was obviously a hard decision for writers and editors as talented and experienced as you two are, but then that decision comes with a new sense of freedom, so if you don’t have to care about getting published by these officially approved prestigious presses, then you don't need to play that game. Plus you can move faster; you can be quicker; as writers you can also have a hand in your own design, and that design and publishing package can have an individual aesthetic to it. I mean, I love Graywolf, and they publish me, and I’m happy with our relationship, but it was refreshing to read this book and have it feel not at all like a Graywolf book. The Crown Package retains more of its idiosyncratic nature, which is to say more of the writer and the maker. I’ve dealt with publishers—though not Graywolf; they’re usually pretty game—that are like no way, writer: you don't get to do design. Your task is to give us the word doc and we lay it out; that's what we do. You do the writing. And i'm often feeling like, no, I mean, I want to do both. 

Josh: I love a quiet night paginating almost as much as I do making pages.

Pearle: Being able to design my own cover, and then have final say in every aspect of design, is the joy of going this route. One of my best friends won a great first book prize in poetry, and then she got the proof of the cover and was mortified. She told the publisher that the cover was culturally insensitive, that her grandmother might keel over, and their response was to give her a portfolio of the same artist’s other work, with no other options. The book turned out to be beautiful, of course, but I’m glad to circumnavigate all possibility of that sort of situation. 

The other thing with poetry manuscripts in particular is that, if you’re going the prize circuit route, you get typically $1000, maybe a little more, some copies for yourself, and one invited reading at a university. But by the time you’ve submitted your manuscript to enough prizes, with fees, to win one of them? You’ve paid for that prize pot how many times over? And you’ve been in a slush pile of how many hundreds of manuscripts, being read by overtired students, how many times? And once you do get published, most publishers are relying on writers to market themselves anyway. I see writer friends of mine hiring publicists and media managers on their own even when they have major publishing houses handling their books. 

When I was going through the MFA and even the PhD, I was single parenting and often without basic necessities–I had to take time off from my MFA because the kids and I were homeless–so for years I was frankly too broke to participate in much of the publishing side of writing. At one point, one of my mentors suggested that I might have hit the book publishing side of things better if I’d had more publications for the individual poems, but I couldn’t afford to send out to slush piles with the fervor that I saw in my colleagues, and I also couldn’t afford to try land a lot of the residency gigs and attend the conferences every year, so I simply didn’t have the same network. 

Ander: And it's not hitting exactly the right undergrad screener just right—yeah, I mean, once you’re to a certain point where you're writing good work, a lot of publishing can feel like a lottery, a weighted one where the work that gets published is for sure worthy, but beyond that, so much of it feels like chance. I spent a lot of money sending my first book to poetry contests, and I got lucky there, but in the most extreme version of that world  I had a friend who spent 12 grand on entering and he was a finalist in every competition I ever saw him enter. He was always a finalist. He was a good poet, but at a certain point I imagine he felt like the world's biggest loser. He was also a dick, so I don't mind kind of saying that, but he was a good poet, and you watch that happen and it’s hard not to say there but for the grace of god go I.

Pearle: That, definitely. I also I think both of us started thinking, how much more writing time do we have if we don't have to do that anymore? How much more energy do I have for the pages themselves if I don’t have to submit the poetry manuscript to more contests, and I don’t have to flog myself for not sending the book out to contests? And if I don’t have to learn how to query agents for my nonfiction projects, either?

Josh: I've spent whole years where all my creative time was sending work out. Now all of that time goes into more creation, tinkering, getting my work that much closer to a tangible artifact. Even if I can work 10 minutes on my book for a day it feels more positive to me than blasting out that canned submission email.

When I moved back from Arizona, I went into the gas station, and I saw this cashier that I had known in high school and she says, Where have you been? I said Oh, I went and got my MFA in fiction and nonfiction writing. She looked at me all screwed up and she said, Writing, like, penmanship? Like calligraphy? I told her yes, exactly, it was just easier. 

I think our readers don't care about prestige, they want good pages. Reading a book is hard, Pearle and I try to make readable pages worth people’s time. We’re not boring. Pearle has local readers in Alabama that would read her under any imprint, and I now know that I have a ton of local support that I did not realize. If you're hanging your hat on the prizes, the credentials, the industry alone, well, I think you're missing out on a lot of just local grassroots goodness too.

Pearle: I don't know, Josh is always so much more, what's the word? Optimistic. Infinitely more optimistic than I am, especially about home. Most days I don't think I have five people in Alabama who care about what I'm doing on the page. Of course I’m happy to have an audience back home if they want to pick up my book, but I also can’t worry about what Alabama thinks about my work. 

Ander: If you talk enough trash about people that they'll at least have to buy it to figure out what you said. This is my strategy.

Pearle: Ha! Well, Other People’s Parties, the tell-all that we’re co-writing about running the wedding venue, is coming later. I’m sure that strategy can work with that one.

Josh: I’ve plunged so many toilets, and plan to write the truth about them all.

I get excited hearing Pearle talk about Other People’s Parties. That is going to be a fun, experimental, two-hander. Like Sailing. It took two years of convincing Pearle to drop in on this with me and run our own work. Sailing helped, but she’d never commit to running her book. I think in 2020 I finally asked Pearle straight up: Are you booking with me? Or are you sending it out to the contests another year?

Pearle: And I wasn’t sure, because you know the choice to publish our own work precludes us from a lot of other accolades and prizes. There's nobody submitting us to the National Book Award, the publication doesn’t count for NEA fellowships or any of those other big validating measures that you can access through the traditional route.

Letting go of that for me was definitely a little scary and a little sad. I’d love to feel more at the forefront of the conversation, but I’m accepting that continuing to make the work honestly is more important to me than that. I do think that, until the pandemic, I really was still hopeful that maybe we could go back. I was still looking for jobs on the tenure-track. When we first moved to Idaho from Houston, the thought was that this was just a three year trial run, like a three year personal residency.

Ander: That would then be interrupted by a baby, yeah—

Pearle: So we decided to get married, have the baby, and start Foster Literary all at the same time. I think I even made the birth announcement in the same post as the Foster Literary announcement on my social media channels. All those decisions were part of the same decision, which was that whatever we were building, we were going to do it together, and we were all-in on all fronts.  

Josh: Yeah, once we were all in, I mean, hell, I was all for throwing in a kid, another dog, another cat. A full flower and vegetable garden. We can make anything work—but that means all we do is work. That’s why the creative work is so important. Living layered in work, personal, family, and art like this is all a daily mess, but it's also so rich in purpose. We feel like every day we're out here pioneering it and figuring it out together. We help in the community and on the farms. We serve weddings and big events. It’s not precious work. It’s humbling, and a grind. Everyone in Idaho works damn hard, all day long. So to have the kid, the creative co-op, the books, stable employment, but also to be artists again in our quiet moments, be something different that no one can see or really understand except for the two of us, that is what all of it is all about. 

Ander: Possibly my favorite piece in the book is the collaborative one about Christopher Cross’s “Sailing,” with both of you writing back and forth to each other. I mean I'm very fond of collaborative writing, and I’ve been reading more of this recently, like Julie Marie Wade and Brenda Miller’s Telephone that just came out from Cleveland State University Poetry Center press this year. It’s really good, and Wade has been doing a lot of collaborative work, publishing these multi vocal essays. But there's something great about the Sailing piece because that essay is a moment in the book where like you've achieved in writing what you're doing with Foster Lit, and it feels like it’s being lit up from within by a different kind of electrical dynamic. And you can feel the conflict and the sparks and the way you two work. There's definitely a full book of that kind of writing in that for you two—

Josh: That’s going to be a love book. We found a kind of energy writing back and forth, an imperfect one, and that's what I'm enjoying. We don't have to make perfect pieces, we just have to attempt, and complete, and be in it together. There's enough energy there to carry. We're not interested in making the finest, most perfect piece of writing. What we're interested in is being human on the page and inviting people into that experience.

Ander: In terms of Foster Lit’s publishing plans further down the road, do you imagine trying to publish books by writers that are part of your local communities? Or are you planning on pulling from the wider communities that you've been part of and are now still connected to even as you're back in Idaho?

Pearle: The challenge with being so rural is that there are fairly few people who are even reading literature, much less writing it. I see us publishing the wider literary community in the future, but perhaps not with the traditional publishing company model. 

Josh: I think if there was a literary model where we could possibly bring people in with their books and we could help develop them for their own market, that would be cool. But that all sounds like a lot of work for other work. We’re really driven to get our books out there, that’s the priority right now.

Ander: It has a bit of a feeling almost like a cooperative?

Josh: Okay, I was gonna say if we're opening up writers workshop you could do a book making class for that local writer that wanted to publish their family genealogy— 

Pearle: I mean, I would like to keep it in the realm of the literary, ideally. 

Ander: I mean one of the things that interest me about this is that, like it feels like it's very fueled by personal relationships that you've had with all the people that you know, I mean from each of your various lit excursions into the world. I mean that feels really important. It feels like a very social project, as well as a project that is really the two of you kind of at the heart of it, and that is an unusual model, but I think one that will ring true for Essay Daily readers.

There's this book I love, The Innocence of Objects, by Orhan Pamuk, about his Museum of Innocence, an actual museum he built for his Nobel-Prize-winning novel. It’s in Istanbul, and you can just go to the museum and it's like a museum he built for the fictional characters, collecting their artifacts, so here’s this dress this character wore when she met another character, etc. The Innocence of Objects is a catalog of the museum but also a manifesto for museums.

His whole argument, which I think is a really good one, is: what we don't need is more institutional museums run by states or corporations telling the stories of states or institutions or universities or whatever. What we need is: individual museums, run by individual people telling individual stories. This anthology, and your larger project here feels like the story of a person, and of a couple, and a relationship. There feels something really urgent to me about that and I respond to it in the same way. Like it feels it has that urgency to it and that intimacy potentially to it also.

Josh: Ander, do you remember when we went to Gilgal Gardens in SLC? That backyard archive of that Mormon bishop’s scripture-inspired statues? 

Pearle: Josh dragged me to Gilgal Gardens once, when we had to drive down to Utah for an IVF cycle, and I was still coming off anesthesia, dizzy and bloated and poked through the ovaries, and meanwhile he’s taking me piece by piece through these bizarre and fantastic sculptures, explaining the backstory. 

Josh: What a brilliant and strange artistic assemblage to his faith and family devotion, in red brick and lava rock. Idiosyncratic, memorable, geographic, weird; true art in the desert. I’d just rather make that book, or a book like that, than a book that wasn’t mine. 

Ander: That feels like a great mission statement and also maybe a good ending point for the time being—

Josh: Great because Pearle has a planning meeting with a wedding in 20 minutes … [Pearle leaves] … Ander, I will say you've been hugely inspirational in my artistic journey, because you were making your own stuff the whole way. I didn't see anyone else doing that in the industry until you got to Arizona. Admittedly, the literati can be pretty stifling, right?

Ander: Yeah, big time.

Josh: Their top button gets real tight...but you and New Michigan Press and Essay Daily and March Xness, those collaborations are central to my book. You've kept inviting me to write, so I keep writing, and it's an invitation that I hope to pass down the road as a writer. That’s the right energy. I think the world of you and your books and your projects, so thanks.

Ander: Totally. And thanks, and cheers! I think you're living up to that spirit, which is what I’m definitely responding to here, and I think our readers will too, and I hope more people decide to start up their own projects like this. I need to get up your way because I also do need to see some actual growing potatoes for this chip book project at some point, and I’ve never even been to Idaho, and obviously I want to meet the kiddo, so yeah, let’s do something!

Josh: These things are happening, I hope to see a lot of my old friends a little more. Now we have good reasons for us to get out with the books, and also good reasons to bring people in. It'd be great to have a reading series up here. I mean, I think there's just blue skies, there's nothing here, so we can build it, we can make it exactly whatever we want.

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Find Foster Lit on Instagram, or on the web, or in Idaho at Loft 745. If you want to get in touch with them directly, drop them an email.

And while you're here, go ahead and buy Joshua Dewain Foster's The Crown Package now, and definitely also preorder Georgia Pearle Foster's Refinery directly from Foster Lit here. I recommend you do so promptly. —Ander