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. 

"This New Precipitate": Maddie Norris in conversation with Matthew Morris

 This New Precipitate: a Conversation with Maddie Norris

by Matthew Morris

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I got to know Maddie Norris in the spring of 2019, during my first (and her second) year as a nonfiction student in the Arizona MFA program. Back then, we were workshop-mates who each wrote essays in the lyric mode, drifting between past and present, self and world with the help of white space, where Norris, now a visiting professor at Davidson College, says much of the effort to essay truly happens. And we each rooted for an ACC college hoops titan: her UNC Tar Heels, my (and her folks’) Virginia Cavaliers. 

Norris’s first book, The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays, came out last March through Crux, the University of Georgia Press’s series in literary nonfiction. The book is about the death of her father when she was seventeen, but it is also about grief, the ways we’re taught (and not) to grieve. It lodges an argument both vital and clarion: that we should not turn away from loss but should live in mourning. And when I was asked to interview another writer for a doctoral class on the role of hope in art, I thought of her. 

We spoke about hope, yes, but much else: the engine of the essay, as compared to memoir; her (physical, visual) revision process; the (sometimes unseen) tethers between people, and so on. —Matthew Morris

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Matthew Morris: Near the end of “Childhood Eulogy,” you cite and then refute lines from Joan Didion, who said, “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” And then you write that “maybe what Didion means is that it’s harder to look at the ends of things.” I was just wondering if you could talk about the difficulty of the looking and why, across these essays, you’ve chosen to look. 

Maddie Norris: Yeah, I write about Sontag in the collection as well, and she mentions [that] when you’re looking at photographs, there’s pleasure in flinching, and I think that also goes with the looking. And I think particularly in grief, it’s pretty normalized in Western society to ignore it, to pretend that it doesn’t exist, and to give it a finite amount of time before we’re supposed to look away. I think a lot of that pressure I felt to look away was other people telling me that it was not normal to keep looking at it. 

But, first, I find discomfort productive. I think that there’s a lot of interesting growth, and when I feel uncomfortable—not unsafe, but uncomfortable—I find that there’s a lot of meaning to be created and generated just in my daily life. But I also find pain really interesting as a concept; like, I’m just fascinated by it. And I mean that in a physical and emotional way. I find it just really interesting. 

So, I think that it was a combination of things when thinking about, Do I really want to look at this thing that’s really painful? One is that it felt important for me as a person to look at this grief and deal with it. And then, as an artist, I also found it really generative and productive to look at this thing that a lot of people were saying you shouldn’t be looking at and see, Well, why are we told not to look at this thing? I think there’s interesting things to be unpacked there. 

MM: Yeah, great. And when you talk about flinching in the Sontag, like: looking produces the flinching, I suppose? What’s the relationship there for you? 

MN: I think that deep looking can produce that flinching. I think looking at pain and feeling [yourself] into it produces that flinching, because you’re really prodding at pain. And so, I think that produces the flinching, and psychologically, it is painful to look at death a lot of times and to look specifically at grief. 

The grief of death is hard to look at and painful, and so that looking creates the flinching of—you know, we’re not supposed to approach pain. Biologically, it’s not super helpful in a lot of ways, and so you just automatically flinch because of that. But I think that’s an interesting response that I also wanted to interrogate. 

MM: Going off what you were just talking about biologically with pain, turning away from it or turning toward it, something that I am really interested in [across] your essays is just the conscious attempt you make in almost all of them to integrate a research thread into the personal. I learned about so many things in reading the book, from sesamoids to skin grafts [to] hyperbaric oxygen. But not just medical stuff: there’s this wonderful passage about how all these different writers have written about rain, and I learned about Pompeii. And this is something I remember you talking about in workshop a lot, but what does the commitment to looking outward do for you as an essayist, and do you find that your work most often begins with that research thread or with the personal, or does it vary from piece to piece? 

MN: That’s a good question. I think the research threads do several things for me, and particularly in this book I wanted them to do specific things for readers. When we’re thinking about that looking, it is quite painful, and with the book I didn’t want to come away from that pain or use research to move us away. But I wanted to think about it as a way to think, Okay, instead of burrowing down, going down vertically, we can have a horizontal rest. So, part of it is giving us a beat to breathe; I think that’s part of the reader experience for the research. And I also think it can act as an absorption in that way. Like, the emotion can overflow, and it can be embedded in that research then, so then that research becomes personal for other people because it’s personal for me. I mean, the medical themes specifically are related to my dad, so that research is incredibly personal to me. So even though it’s this very scientific, clinical work, it felt emotional to me. I wanted that to also be the experience for readers. 

And then, for me, in terms of production and writing: I’m just a curious person. And so a lot of the research—that’s part of where the play comes in, I suppose, is that I get to learn new things and play in the research. I think play comes in [through] form, but it’s also just really fun to learn new things and go into them. I don’t know whether the personal or the research comes first, because I feel that they’re so intertwined in my life; that these aren’t things that I’m like, Oh, I need to research this because it’ll make for a good essay. It’s that I’m intrinsically interested in these things, and so there’s a personal connection to them as well. So, I think that they come together, and part of it has to do with the play of it. 

MM: Yeah, cool, I love that answer. I think a lot about play in my writing, too, but not in the same way, I don’t think. It’s really cool to hear you talk about, like, you’re already thinking about all of these things, and so they just kind of make their way into the writing. 

MN: Yeah, it’s very magpie-like. It’s also just a great excuse to do things that I otherwise wouldn’t have a reason to investigate. It feels like a lot of times, you need a reason to look into something—which I’m sure is related to capitalism and needing to feel productive and not have frivolous pursuits. But it’s a great excuse also to be like, Oh, I’m doing this for a reason. 

MM: Totally. And the horizontal idea is really interesting, too. I feel like, when I read your stuff, my brain just starts making all these connections between the research and personal threads. So, like, the research does soften the personal in a way, but also it helps me understand the personal on a deeper level. 

MN: Good. That’s what I wanted. 

MM: In your acknowledgments, you mention that a Monson Arts residency was where the book moved toward its final form. I was curious about what happened during that residency that gave the book its shape. Like, were you moving essays around? Were you writing new things? Yeah, can you sort of tell the story of that part of the book? 

MN: Yeah, it was some writing new things. A lot of it was macro level: moving things around and looking at the threads across the essays. I have a really physical revision process. I print everything out; I tape it to walls. I can move the essays around that way; I’ll highlight specific threads so I can see them across all the essays and see where they’re dipping in and out. A lot of that was done there—and thinking about, Okay, where does a specific thread die down? Where do I need to bring a moment back in, even if it’s a small one, to remind us that this is weaving in and out? A lot of it was thinking about the cohesion overall, and some of that came with moving different essays around so that it felt like there was an arc to it. 

I think that there’s a typical narrative arc for a lot of grief books that I really resisted and that I don’t necessarily believe in. The idea is, Oh, something happened, like, someone died; I felt bad about it, and now I’m feeling better about it at the end: I’m healed. And that is not the arc that I wanted, and I don’t think that anyone will necessarily get it from this book. I had someone come up to me after a reading and be like, I hope you’re doing better now. And I was like, Yeah, he’s alive again! He’s back. 

The arc that I wanted was to burrow deeper into that looking that we were talking about and to be more comfortable with that looking and to drop down into that as a way to look at grief and look through grief at other people. There was real disconnection at the beginning of the book in feeling like: I can’t talk about this with anyone, and I feel very isolated and alone because of that. And toward the end of the book, it’s like, No, this is something that I can reach through to touch other people. So, I think that a lot of that arc also came from that residency. 

MM: Okay, what you’re saying about the arc makes me think of just the very last lines of the last essay in here, “On the Love of Hills,” where, you know, there’s pain: “I smile as my pain aches open, Hi, Dad.” There’s pain there, but you’re also communing with your father. So, it seems like both of those things are happening. 

MN: Yeah, absolutely. And I didn’t want to pretend like it’s not painful, but I also think that’s not the only thing that it is. And I think that when we look away, we miss that nuance and complexity that can come with [looking]. 

MM: Heck yeah. So, going back to the relational elements of the book that you were just talking about a little bit in terms of being able to look through grief at other people: you’ve told me that you find hope in the ways grief alters our connection to others—you said that in one of our emails—and that it permits “deeper and truer relationships” than might otherwise be. I really feel that in “Carve Us New” with your friend Caitlin and also with Aaron, for sure, and then in “Take My Hand,” when your mom finds your hand after a UNC loss. Like, the book feels super relational; it almost seems like the relationships are an organizing feature for you: there’s an essay focused on your brother; there’s an essay focused on your mom. Anyway, I was wondering if you could talk about this idea of “deeper” and “truer” relationships, what they mean to you in relationships partially defined by grief—and anything else that feels important about the relational elements of The Wet Wound. 

MN: Thanks for that question. I think a lot of people miss that, so I’m glad that you got it and saw it. Because I think, again, with a lot of people, there’s this hesitancy to really look at it, and because of that it’s like, I can only focus on the pain. I can’t see this other thing that’s happening. And the relationality is really important to me, and it’s one of the reasons that I published the book. Like, I think that I needed to write the book for myself, but I think that publishing it is for other reasons. One is, as an art object, I think it’s important to publish. But I also think it is a connecting mechanism; it’s an object that can connect people, which feels really important to me. 

In the book, I think there’s a way that being open to grief and being honest about it can allow us to have these truer relationships with people. And more authentic, when we’re not pretending that a part of us doesn’t exist. Like, the part of us in pain—when we pretend that doesn’t exist, we’re neglecting a part of ourselves, and it means that we cannot be fully true and open and honest and authentic with people. And I think that comes through in several ways. 

I write in the book about [how] a lot of the people I connect with have also lost parents because there’s a way that you don’t have to hide yourself from that. You can kind of joke about it, but you can also be sad about it, because it is a fact of our lives. And I think that I can have that with other people, but there is often a tendency for people to be so overwhelmed by the thought of grief that they’re unable to approach it with you. To go into that place with you. And so there’s a wall that comes up, and you can have a type of connection, but it’s much more surface level when you’re unwilling to be true about your own experiences. And I also think a lot about Ross Gay and how he talks about how joy comes from “carrying sorrow together.” And I think that’s really true, and for me, it’s true that I can’t be truly joyful without acknowledging that sorrow. It feels false and a lack. I think that true joy comes from the acknowledgment of that. When the depth of that pain is so deep, carrying it together creates a very intense bond. So, I think that there is a lot of hope that comes through that. 

I think that in terms of grief, too, it’s a way to keep my father in my life, that I get to talk about him with other people and they get to know him through me. Or, if people knew him, I get to know different sides of him through them. So, I think there’s hope in several different relationships. One is that it keeps the relationship with my dad alive in a very specific way. But it also deepens the relationship with other people. 

MM: That’s a really thoughtful response and makes me think also about [how] in “The Sky Come Down,” there’s this really interesting discussion of the “dialectic” in your class on Milton and how there’s this “third, integrated state” that gets produced when these oppositional forces come together. And then, related to that, there’s this discussion around “new precipitates,” which was a phrase that I kept thinking about as I read the book. That’s when you’re talking about emotional tears. 

I guess what I’m thinking about as you’re talking is: do you feel like each of your relationships that are made possible, in a way, by the shared experiences of grief—do you feel like that’s another example of the dialectic? And like the relationship is the new precipitate? I don’t know; I’m just interested in that. 

MN: Honestly, I loved my Milton class, so I was really excited that I got to talk about it in the book. But I do think that can feel true. Yeah. And I think it’s that connection, too; like, it does take two people to have that real connection and to create that. There’s a way that, like, I can bring what I can bring to the table, but it also means that someone else has to meet it. With this book, I was really conscious of audience, and I think I knew that this book was not going to be for everyone, because some people were not going to be able to meet it where it was. But I didn’t want to compromise the integrity of what I was saying so that other people felt more comfortable. 

In workshop one time, someone told me that my writing was a “maudlin plea,” and I was like, Okay, that’s fine; you’re not my audience. But then a year later their dad died, and they came to me after a reading and were like, That was so moving and meaningful. I really connected with it. Thank you for sharing that. And so I think that is part of that dialectic and relationality, too, is recognizing that there’s only so much that my writing can do, and it’s also about who meets the writing and whether they’re in a place to be open to that. 

MM: I really respect what you’re saying about audience. Like, yeah, I feel like as writers, we just have to say what we actually feel and need to say. I don’t feel like it’s about satisfying an audience. I really like the idea that it’s okay if some readers aren’t going to engage with it because other people are, and those are the people you’re actually writing for. 

Just also on the idea of the “new precipitate,” do you feel like that speaks to the process of writing essays, too? Because you’re always setting things side by side—like, you work in this lyric mode where you’re doing all this associative thinking. 

MN: I totally do, and I think that’s absolutely true. Like, the juxtaposition is critical for that, and the writing and the essaying really comes not in either of the blocks of them but in the thing that happens between them, which is really the white space, and that’s where the essaying occurs—which is this new material, this new precipitate. For sure, I think that friction is essential for creating interesting writing, for me at least, for my kind of writing. I think, too, there has to be a tension in writing for it to move us in some way. I think that tension is essential, and I think that tension often produces something new, some new precipitate, that is not necessarily on the page but that occurs in our minds. I’m very interested in the unsayable, as someone who works with words; I’m interested in trying to get to the unsayable. 

MM: Oh, I’m so glad you said that, because something I remember you saying and writing in Alison Deming’s workshop [during the MFA] was about “arcing toward the unsayable.” That’s something that I was thinking about as I read also. 

Just another question about the process of trying to write a book, right? So, I think, personally, that trying to write requires a lot of hope and belief and calmness and time—and probably a lot of other things that are really hard. And I don’t know if you were in the program at this time, but this graduate named Howard Axelrod came in for colloquium one day, and he said that as writers, it’s our “job” to “keep faith in ourselves.” So, I just wanted to ask: did you encounter doubt in the making of these essays and in the making of the book, and if so, how did you push through toward the place of completion? 

MN: Yeah, I think I did. I mean, I think that I find the writing and the publishing process semi-separate. I didn’t have as much doubt in the writing process because it was about the process, not the product, for me, and so I felt like if I was moving through it and going through that process, then that in itself was meaningful. So, I don’t think I had a lot of doubts in that, but I think in the publishing process, for sure. It’s a weird book, so it’s like, not everyone is going to want to give me money for it. And, yeah, for part of it, it’s like, Well, maybe no one will want this book; maybe this is not a book that is super marketable, and people aren’t willing to take a risk with that. And again, I don’t think that made me want to compromise the integrity of the book. I wanted it exactly as it was, but I do understand that it’s not a Big Five book, and I’m not interested in writing for the Big Five at really any point in my life. But I recognize that you get paid to do that—so, it is a reality.

So, I think that I had doubts about whether or not someone would want the book because it is pretty weird and not everyone’s cup of tea, and I think part of the business side of being a writer is, like, at some point you become inured to rejection. And sometimes it’ll still break through, and you’re like, Oh, that one hurt, and for no particular reason other than you’ve gotten this many rejections and it’s like, Okay, this is annoying. But I think it’s just part of that process—it is a process, too, in that sense of just sending it out and being like, It’s out there; I’ve done my part; we’ll see what happens. And I think that trusting in the work and trusting in that process—that just because it didn’t work out the way that I wanted it to, it’s not a reflection on the work. 

MM: Yeah, process, not result, right? I feel like that’s something that has been drilled into me from an early age.

MN: Which can be hard. But it’s nice. And I think, honestly, teaching is helpful with that, too, because I’m with all these students who, some of them are talking about wanting to be published and things like that. But they’re mostly pretty young undergrads who are just excited about writing and sharing their writing with other people and getting feedback. And so I think that energy is really helpful to be around, too. I mean, I have friends that are publishing and doing quite well, and that’s nice, but I’m not in a community where it’s publish or perish.

MM: Nice, that sounds really healthy. 

MN: Yeah, yeah. 

MM: Like, being in a Ph.D., there are people [often] talking about that kind of stuff, just like when we were in the MFA. But I feel like I’ve always worked so hard to tune all of that crap out, because it’s not helpful. 

MN: Yeah, and it doesn’t help you make good art either. It’s like, we could be writing things that are wildly publishable by the Big Five. But I don’t want to do that. And I feel like the creative nonfiction at Arizona—that genre in particular, my experience was that there wasn’t as much pressure on publishing, which I really appreciated. But I think, yeah, inherently being in an MFA program, there are people that are really interested in it that I also found not super helpful for me. 

MM: A few more for you. I’ll hit you with this one: I was curious about which of these essays proved the hardest to write and what challenges it posed. 

MN: So, I think it’s interesting. I think people assumed that it was really emotional for me to write this [book], and it wasn’t. The publishing process was much more emotional for me. I think writing was working with an art object, and so I really didn’t feel that emotional about it as I was doing it. 

But in terms of the writing, I think the hardest one was probably the first one. 

MM: Oh, “Hyperbaric”? 

MN: Yeah, “Hyperbaric” was probably the hardest one for me to write because it was an essay that I wrote originally in workshop, and it was the one that changed the most. I wrote several iterations of it and, again, was moving things around, cutting it up, really trying to figure out what it needed to do, both as an essay and then I needed to figure out, What does it need to do to open the book? So, I think that was the hardest essay for me to write because I wrote it not knowing that it would be in a book. And I think that’s true for a lot of essays, but because this was one of the first ones, I didn’t even realize that there were multiple essays that were going to be related or connected in some way. 

There was a lot happening in the first draft, so it’s: what needs to be in this essay, and what can be better served in a different essay? And sorting that out took writing the rest of the book. It was the first physical piece of material that I had for the book, and it was also one of the last things that I revised because I needed to figure out, How does it fit into this arc? 

MM: That’s fascinating. I guess I say that because I thought that piece was one of the best in the [collection]. Like, when I read that, I was like, Damn. And at the time that I read it, I was getting ready to go to the program, the Ph.D. here, and I hadn’t been reading really very much for a year or two or writing very much, and this was one of the first pieces that I had engaged with in a long time that really moved me and felt interesting.

Anyway, that’s really interesting to hear that it was one of the earlier essays—which I guess also makes sense because it is at the front of the book. I really liked that piece. And I feel like it is setting up the book in interesting ways. The line “I’m still screaming” to close the essay seems to speak to keeping the wound wet, essentially. I think it’s a super interesting piece. 

MN: Thanks. Yeah, I wanted it to be like, No, we’re gonna go there. And so I think that ending is important, and I also think that it starts to think about that disconnection as well. That was part of what I was thinking about in the revision process, was wanting to emphasize this disconnect that I had between myself and other people. 

MM: This one might feel repetitive, but there might be something different that you think of. So, first of all, the book doesn’t shy away from heaviness, which is something I respect, and that goes to what we were just talking about with the ending of [“Hyperbaric, or How to Keep a Wound Alive.”] Like we were just saying, [the book] is committed to the wetness of the wound and feeling things. But I think it’s also gentle in places, and I think it’s also really joyful and beautiful in places. Not that the writing about grief that’s painful can’t also be beautiful. But there’s also joy and gentleness—there’s a lot of different emotions, essentially, is what I’m trying to say. I think about “On the Love of Hills,” where there’s that scene where you’re running with your dad, and he’s like, “I love hills!” It’s really funny and also made me smile. I really like that this book plays all the notes, and I’m curious about, like, does that feel important to you? To try to play all the notes, to move through all the emotions, [to] acknowledge the hard things but also the love?

MN: Yeah, like, again, I didn’t want [those moments] to take us out of that heaviness, but I wanted to look at it through that. A lot of people talk about grief as dropping into this dark hole, so I think about it kind of like that. It can be very dark and scary at first, but then your eyes start to adjust, and you start to see things. And going back to Ross Gay and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, you start to see these mycelial tethers that connect us. That’s something that you don’t see aboveground; you have to be underground to see that. That also is really beautiful and joyful, those connections that you can have with people. But if you’re not acknowledging the heaviness, then that is not a possibility. I think that the reality of grief makes those things possible. 

MM: You’ve gotta go down into the hole first. 

MN: Yeah, and, you know, you’re in a hole; it’s not great. [Laughs.] I’m not saying it’s a fun thing to happen, but it also can teach you things, and it can connect you to people in really wonderful and real ways. 

MM: For what it’s worth, that makes me think of the scene where you’re in the closet, and you’re putting your face into your dad’s shirt, batik shirt. 

The book is subtitled “An Elegy in Essays,” and I know an elegy is a song of mourning. I guess this is something I’m thinking about just because of the class I’m in, where everything we read, we talk about, Where’s the hope? What’s hope doing? And I feel like something that’s come up for my classmates and me is, Is it cheap or saccharine to try to look for the hope if the center of a piece of art—or part of what’s at the center—is devastating loss? I mean, I think the answer is no; I think it’s important to look for the hope, but thinking about elegy, hope, saccharine-ness: how do you see all of these things fitting together, I guess would be my question to you. 

MN: Well, when you say “saccharine,” I think of sentimentality, which is something that is quite often thrown at books about grief, particularly books written by women. And I think that what’s saccharine is when people are unwilling to see the hope through the heaviness. Again, I think it’s this lens that you have to have to do that. And that can also be really beautiful. 

This is taking us in a little bit of a different direction, but relatedly, I wanted it to be subtitled “An Elegy in Essays” for a few reasons. One is again having to do with being a woman, in that a lot of my writing is typically read as memoir, and I don’t feel that this book is a memoir; I don’t think that you learn a whole lot about me. You learn one specific thing that happened to me, and that’s about it. I also think that oftentimes memoirs are read for content, not for their thinking, and I was not interested in being an object to be looked at in this way. So, I wanted it to focus us on grief as the thing that we were looking at.

I think that elegy felt important, too, because I’m interested in different types of writing. I’m interested in form in a lot of ways, and I wanted to alert readers to that, which also points us back to the fact that I’m interested in the thinking of it and the ways that feeling and thinking can go together in an elegy. Again, a lot of what you’re talking about reminds me—back to Ross Gay, where people are like, How can you write about flowers in a time like this? And it’s just like, How can you not? I think if you avoid the realities of heaviness, then that can make some of that hopefulness feel false. But I think if you get the true depth of it, then I don’t think you can just look at the heaviness and ignore the hope of it. 

MM: Yeah, thank you. I’m really glad you said that about memoir versus essays: I feel like people just don’t understand what essays are, so they’re like, Oh, this is nonfictional; I’m just going to call it memoir. But, obviously, they have different engines. And your work is obviously doing the essayistic thing at all times. 

MN: I think, too, it can have memoiristic elements, but I don’t think that’s what’s driving the book. 

MM: Useful to hear you think through those words: elegy, essay. And just to be clear, I didn’t feel like the book was saccharine or anything. 

MN: [Laughs.] No, no, I didn’t think you did. 

MM: Just for clarification. [Laughs.]

MN: For the record… 

MM: Cool—so, in the present, I’m curious whose work feels energizing and stimulating to you, and what are you thinking about in your own writing and teaching these days? 

MN: I am, next semester, teaching a class on trauma writing, so I’ve been reading a lot of work for that. And I actually had not read The Other Side by Lacy M. Johnson, and it is really incredible. And I think it, again, relates to what we were talking about: she’s writing about herself, but the essayistic impulse is shot through that book. It’s everywhere in a really beautiful and moving way. So, I really enjoyed reading that book. 

I mean, I have this stack of books right beside me. One is A Human Being Died That Night by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela; one is On Complicity and Compromise by Chiara Lepora and Robert E. Goodin; and one is Askari by Jacob Dlamini. Askaris were [African National Congress] fighters who were captured and tortured and turned to work for the South African police and defense force. 

So, I’m interested in repair and, How do we deal with the aftermath of violence, and how do we care for each other through that experience? I’ve been reading a lot about that. I think it’s also related to this class on hope, because it’s recognizing the reality of violence and the world that we live in, which perpetuates violence systemically. And what do we do about that? What do we do in its aftermath? I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about that.  

MM: Got it. Yeah, thank you. Feels super relevant post-election. And that’s really interesting; I didn’t know about the askari. That’s wild. 

MN: Yeah, and I was just really interested in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; it’s just such a specific and formal way of trying to work through repair and reconciliation, and in some ways it worked, and in some ways it didn’t, but I think that it’s a really fascinating process. And it does feel particularly poignant post-election, as does your class, it sounds like. 

MM: Yeah. What a weird time. Cool, well, my last one was just kind of a fun one, hopefully. Like, as two people who’ve left Tucson, I was curious: what do you miss about the city? What do you not? 

MN: God, I really miss Tucson. There’s something about the land there, the openness of it: just being able to see everything, for your psyche, is just amazing. I don’t know: I miss the weather. I even miss the summers, which is ridiculous to say, but I do. I miss running in the summer in Sabino Canyon. I miss the food. I miss the community; I miss my friends. Yeah, Tucson feels like a very special place. 

What do you miss about Tucson? 

MM: Yeah, some of the same things. I miss the mountains. I miss the food, for sure; like, Missouri is not doing it. [Laughs.] I really miss the tennis community I had in Tucson. I was playing so much by the time I moved, and it’s been hard to make tennis friends here. 

MN: Yeah, I miss the running community there. 

MM: Cool, well, I thought that would be a fun thing to end on if it does go on Essay Daily. 

MN: Yeah, yeah. I miss Ander. [Laughs.] Yeah. 

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Maddie Norris, author of The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays (UGA Press), earned her MFA at the University of Arizona and, before that, was the Thomas Wolfe Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her essays have won the Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction from Ninth Letter and been named Notable in Best American Essays 2020 and 2022. Her work can be found in Guernica, Fourth Genre, and Territory, among others. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Davidson College.

Matthew Morris is the author of The Tilling, an essay collection exploring questions of race, identity, family history, and love. He is a Ph.D. student in the creative writing program at the University of Missouri – Columbia and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. 

A Concert of Curiosity: Amy Wright in conversation with Jenny Patton

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Amy Wright is curious.

She wants to know everything about those who surround and inspire her, even an ambitious spider that, in a feat of engineering, spins a fifteen-foot web from a backyard tree branch to the eave of the roof above the window by her writing desk. What sets Wright apart is that she doesn’t just marvel about the spider’s accomplishment to herself for a moment; she stops what she’s doing, she goes outside, she investigates, she records, she remembers. And then she integrates what she learns into her identity. 

In her most recent book, Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round, published by Sarabande Books, readers get a front-row seat to Wright’s curiosity in action as she shares portions of over fifty conversations with artists, activists, scientists, philosophers, physicians, priests, and musicians. About the people she interviews, she says “Some are famous, some will be, some should be—but all of them refract the light of the unknowable mystery of the self.” Gathered over eleven years, these conversations stem from a question she has asked herself since childhood: What am I?

As the conductor of this Paper Concert, she showcases the gifts and insights of others, including writers Dorothy Allison, Dinty W. Moore, Sejal Shah, and Ira Sukrungruang; artists Marc Gaba and Raven Jackson, scientists David Haskell and Tim Flannery, and many more.

What underlies their insights is Wright’s desire to know and understand the world around her and, of course, herself. Along the journey, the reader receives an unexpected bonus.

Wright flips the script on the traditional Q-and-A interview format. In Paper Concert, the reader doesn’t immediately know who is being asked what. 

White space—like a curtain opening and closing—separates the questions from the names of the interviewee and their answers. The unpredictable pattern of interviewees gives the reader an opportunity to pause and consider the questions first for themselves.

What’s your favorite joke? How do metaphors contribute to your mode of thinking? How do you feel about ketchup? How does time enter art? What was your first job? Have you ever seen a ghost? Do you collect anything? Why were you attracted to your first boyfriend? How does a robot become more human than humans? What justifies your optimism? If you had to set fire to something, what would you burn?

The effect is that the reader becomes part of the concerto, adding their voice to the chorus.

Within this composition, solos rise and call attention to particular interviewees via questions about their specific work: It is not a given, you write, “that the heart is lonely and so must live forever.” What is a given?; How did your identity as a Native person shape your sense of self?; You lived in a papermaking village in Japan in the late seventies. How did living there shape your aesthetic? 

Questions like these encourage the reader to pause and reflect while simultaneously boosting curiosity about the response from the yet-to-be-revealed interviewee. We’re invited to take time to slowly unwrap each gift, savoring the moment of expectation. 

As what happens in conversations, not all questions appear as questions. Some take the form of statements that spark deep responses: You demonstrate the complexities of class anger through your characters and Your first writing teacher, Bertha Harris, told you, “Literature is not made by good girls.”

As readers gain insight from others about topics such as poverty, dance, queerness, neighborliness, cancer, and racism, they also learn about themselves—a gift Wright bestows on us.

Here’s the question she asks most often: When have you felt the freest?

Wright herself answers this question through her exquisite interludes between question-and-response sections. Many of them depict scenes from her childhood and young adulthood that showcase moments of both fear and freedom—fear stemming from uncertainty (of the dairy cows who watched her, of the Jackson boys who teased her, of her college roommate Manda who broke rules Wright had been taught) and freedom often grounded in nature through scenes of her younger self on her family’s farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Her curiosity about others boosts our curiosity about her, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to ask her a few questions.

Jenny Patton: According to writer Joseph Heller, “There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.” Do you feel a sense of freedom when interviewing others? What response in the book most surprised you? 

Amy Wright: I love this question, thank you! It is indeed freeing—and a great privilege—to wonder. But we might also think of marvel as an obligation toward the communities we want to participate in and create, given that Toni Morrison said, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” Our questions grow broader, more generous, and freer, when asked with that goal in mind.
     Surprise was one of the rewards in every conversation that became this book. Everyone I spoke with, at some point, shifted my expectations. My favorite moments came when they surprised me with a story—as when Dinty W. Moore described being a zookeeper to a female gorilla who developed a crush on him. I also loved those happy chances when stories opened windows into someone’s life, as when Ander Monson describes receiving a mysterious cassette that illustrates his friendship with Michael Martone. Since Martone is another of the book’s contributors that surprise felt like kismet.

You describe your younger self as a “reticent farm girl” and share that part of your desire to learn all you could derived from fear. Now that you’ve completed this “survivor manual,” what’s your relationship with fear? What else do you still want to learn?

Finding great answers emboldened me to keep asking hard questions. I have also grown unexpectedly fearless when others ask questions of me now, since I have a storehouse of responses at the ready. But the key insight of this book is how much more important than any manual or guide is an active witness to evolve our questions using the raw material of previous answers given across time. 
     I’m curious now how different questions—and new literary forms—can change the nature of our conversations, expand access, invite new voices, and deepen intimacies over the networks that technology has created globally. 

You asked Lia Purpura if she follows any advice columnists. In some ways, Paper Concert itself serves as an advice column—not only for artists but for us as humans trying to make meaning out of our time on earth. Why do you think people seek advice? How can we most benefit from the advice of others?

It’s paradoxical, but advice seeking trains us to listen to ourselves. When you listen to someone, you feel resonant or dissonant, right? Being open to advice lends training wheels to our intuition.  Plus, we evaluate others better than ourselves because we have more perspective. When questioning another, we can take a step back or away from ourselves, and sometimes that distance brings something into focus. 
     I do not mean to suggest that we need not listen deeply to each other as well. It’s a far more conscious and invested listening that must take place before one can sense an internal response to another’s statements. In that awareness, though, is something far more valuable than advice. Through it, we connect—with each other, yes—but also with our wisest selves.

Before your brother Jeremy died of cancer at age twenty, he promised to interact with you on earth from the afterlife. And on the morning he died, a rainbow filled the sky. In what other ways have you experienced “a line of communication” with him or others who have passed on?

I’ve experienced several such instances, some of which have shown up in my writing. My essay “Specimen” details an encounter I had with Jeremy when I was involved in a near-fatal car accident after he had been dead for nearly two years. Another, titled “Circle of Willis,” finds an unexpected affinity with the fiction writer Katherine Anne Porter, who also nearly died at age 28 in Denver—though not from a car accident but from the 1918 pandemic. 

Artist Kell Black told you, “When you start looking closely at something, you see how everything is connected.” What connections leaped out as you crafted this book? 

Kell makes brilliant connections between bodies, history, art, and objects. I would argue this idea if only to connect me to minds like his, but under repeated tests it holds up.
     My favorite proof in the book comes from Wendy S. Walters, another radiant artistic mind to draw near. In her writings, she scrutinizes and challenges language, including the narratives of slavery. Reading her work, I recalled the language of climate change, which similarly deflects and denies responsibility. As we discussed this commonality, she found other ways language shapes our thinking and the physical spaces we inhabit, including her home in an asthma zone in Harlem. Acknowledging the influences of language led us to recognize the power of our stories and voices to counter myths and reimagine our characters to offer new means and models. 

For me, your book served as a meditation, as it gave me the opportunity to pause and reflect on questions that took me away from the daily grind. How do you incorporate meditation into your daily life? 

Oh, that is gratifying to hear, thank you. The book had a similar effect on me, since it inspired a daily meditation practice. The introduction mentions my longtime yoga practice, but I find myself sitting more, and confronting more, even while in movement. The process of integrating varying and often contrary viewpoints is akin to meditation in the sense that we will never harmonize all our disparate voices, but that isn’t the point! Dissonance textures the concert, too, and silence gives it depth, by containing the conflict embedded in music and in us. 

As a child, you asked yourself What am I? How have you integrated into your identity some of what you learned from the folks who populate Paper Concert? In other words, how has “the light of the unknowable mystery of the self” become less unknowable for you?

What a profound question, give me a minute. 
     Okay, I’ll say the book made me aware of something I long suspected, which is that the self is not an individual but a collective. It’s not just that “No man is an island entire of itself,” as Donne said in the days before feminism, but that every island is an ecosystem dependent on countless seen and unseen relationships. Even our eyelashes are networks of interdependent connections! My starting quest for self is clearer now that I’ve gotten to interact directly with some of the voices that shaped me and go on shaping me. What remains engaging about its unknowable mystery is the clearer it becomes, the more you find remains to be explored.

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Amy Wright is the author of Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round (Sarabande Books 2021) as well as three poetry books and six chapbooks. She has received two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.

Jenny Patton has had essays cited as notable in the 2016 and 2021 editions of The Best American Essays. She has received the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a Pushcart Prize nomination, a scholarship to the New York Summer Writers Institute, and a Peter Taylor Fellowship to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her essays have appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, Brevity, Kaleidoscope, and elsewhere.

Being Swallowed Whole and Spat Back Out: an Interview with Abby Hagler

The following is an interview with Abby Hagler, the winner of the 2020 Essay Press Chapbook Prize. The chapbook, There Was Nothing Left But Gold, dives into the landscape of Nebraska, dwelling on what it means to grow up in a small town only to leave it in order to understand forgiveness and what it means to accept one's self. Meditating on the breakdown of her relationship with her mother, Hagler reaches for Willa Cather as a fellow Nebraskan exile, Derrida's hauntology, and theories on girlhood development. These essays construct a portrait of girlhood and Nebraska as wild and hungry, full of mourning, tenderness, and rebellious figures. 

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Hannah Hicks and Tory Irmeger: Could you talk a bit about your childhood and your path to becoming a writer? 

Abby Hagler: In relation to childhood, I think about being alone quite often. My family had a farm and everyone was very busy with work, which resulted in me being by myself on a day-to-day basis. I’m really grateful for that. Periodically, I see articles like this that talk about giving children alone time and letting them get bored. I’m not trying to tell anyone how to raise their children. I’m just saying that I read these articles in reference to myself as a child. It’s helped me to realize the profound effect of a childhood spent in fields, with animals, and on dirt roads marked on no map. 

I like the way Amy Wright characterizes her rural upbringing in the introduction to her book Paper Concert. She says, “I was pretty free as a kid… I did not have to direct myself toward anyone else’s expectations for hours at a time. Those hours, too, were an essay, a foray into life’s experiment, and they taught me that research always begins and ends in the field.” That moved me because I know the prism of those hours she speaks of. 

However, I consider my time back then to be more constructed. There was expectation. My family all worked together but I am the youngest and the only girl so I didn’t do the same jobs. I never had to fix machinery or run the combine until midnight or get up at 2 am to check for newborn calves in February. From an early age, I was the one burning piles of thistles, filling the water tank for the heifers, mowing cattle pens, watering the rows of treelings that would grow into windbreaks. And also doing the grocery shopping, cooking, and housework. My parents taught me to drive around age seven. The old 4020 was my favorite tractor because it piped thick black smoke like a cartoon and the seat was sproingy. 

There was also adult responsibility in my childhood—possibly the way it is for any child who is part of their family business. There was also a noticeable transition between being an employee during the day and being a kid in the evening. Sometimes I feel like I was raised as both a hired man and little girl. But that is a false dichotomy. I was a tomboy and a reader day and night. Always with a book on me and always writing diaries out loud. Which means I was imagining myself as a character in mundane places in the past, in fantastic situations that never happened. Fay Bound Alberti writes about a similar experience growing up after her family moved to Wales in her book A Biography of Loneliness. She said, “I was isolated and alone. And yet I did not endure loneliness. I enjoyed it. A natural introvert, I spent my days in the woods, making up stories, plotting alternative lives. My community was populated by fictional characters.” And I, too, don’t remember feeling all that lonely. There’s a connection to writing in that.

Remembering what I thought about as a kid is something I treasure in adulthood. As if I know and stay true to one more thing about who I am at core. Maybe writing as a process of saying aloud the associations that have long existed in our minds is also a method of connecting to time gone, time that did not exactly exist, time that is experienced by a person uniquely. Or maybe it just means time became a room of my own built inside my brain since I was usually asked to show my practical self at home. I don’t know. Maybe, through a larger lens, freedom alongside work ethic is a metaphor for what writing really looks like in my life. I’m not shooting for a metaphor here. At the time, I was very caught up in my imagination and was most definitely an awful employee. However, I don’t remember ever feeling bad about it. The part of me interested in telling stories has always been a clear, refreshing voice to me. It’s always been a buoy.

Hannah Hicks and Tory Irmeger: We are taking a class that emphasizes the ideals of creating a lifestyle of writing, specifically not limiting ourselves to writing when there is a grade and diploma attached to it. What is your “day job” and how does this influence your writing life?

Abby Hagler: I manage research grant funding at a university. It took me several years of working multiple jobs to get this one job (in an office with so many people dedicated to kindness, no less) that can support me, which is a big deal. This job doesn’t influence the topics I write about but it does have an effect on whether or not I have the health, energy, and emotional space to get writing done or participate in the literary community. This may fall into “the work of work” conversations—what basics a person necessitates in order to show up to do anything requiring labor. So many little things go into this on a day-to-day basis. People living paycheck to paycheck will know what I’m talking about. That’s something that’s often missing from the discussion of what it’s like to make art. How does one actually arrive at the page? Sometimes I think it took me years of commuting, working through broken bones, eating cheap, choosing to pay the fines on my taxes for not having health insurance because it’s cheaper than the actual insurance, stretching my last $10 for a week before payday so I could to get to the morning I wrote the first paragraph of this chapbook. Overall, I’m fine with being a writer outside academia. As college becomes more unaffordable, I see more opportunities open up for writers without the degrees or the faculty appointments. I think it’s important for working class writers to be publishing and speaking to their experience to boost these equalizing efforts. I wouldn’t mind seeing more writing published stemming from this perspective. 

Hannah Hicks and Tory Irmeger: Right off the bat, we connected with the themes within your chapbook, particularly, “If you grew up in a small town and you got out, you deserve a medal.” For anyone who moves away, I think there is an element of growth, and often grief, inherent in becoming a person outside of the context of that small town. While this could be a rewarding experience of “finding yourself,” it’s isolating, as there is no trail to follow or step-by-step guide to finding a new place to belong. Amidst these tensions, what was your starting place when writing your chapbook? 

Abby Hagler: I love this question because it gets at the idea that perhaps growth and grief are concurrent. Like two rail lines running next to one another. I relate very much to the way you describe growth. To me, when I first left home, the yawn of what exactly all those years ahead of me could contain felt obliterating. I was so ready for it too. There were, as is common in small communities, impressions of me that people had in my hometown that I was ready to shed. But, more than that, leaving was like stepping into living that really felt alive. 

And I think Cather might have felt a little bit of that growing up knowing she was gay in Nebraska in the early 20th century. To me, her life goals were simple. She wanted to become a career artist and to find real love. And Nebraska outside the University—I mean Nebraska as a social body—was not going to easily afford those to her. So she left in pursuit of getting to the page. However, even after she’d become a writer and found a wife, Cather had to write several books before she could move on from Nebraska. That kind of return is so ingrained. Our minds are always grappling with the past, trying to wrestle it into a narrative that will, without doubt, be blown up with some new realization. Return, to me, feels inevitable, especially if there’s hurt there. It’s important work whether it is done physically or in thoughts. I think I have been writing myself into and out of Nebraska for almost 20 years.

I also don’t want to say that grief, anger, trauma, or any layered emotion ever really gives way. I’m more interested in how people co-exist with these complexities instead of the overdone narrative of trying to resolve them. I’m interested in a relationship with feelings. When I was drafting the essays that would become this chapbook, I had already been thinking a lot about holding two different people in my body in the same way we can hold two (or more!) separate, even conflicting, emotions. 

It was no mistake that I purchased Hermione’s Lee’s book on Cather titled Double Lives in the Cather Museum bookshop. “Double Lives” was also the first essay I read. Discovering that Cather characterized her childhood as being “buried alive” blew my mind. I had no idea, though her contempt is hardly disguised in the fiction. Realizing her anger was liberating to me because a lot of writing about Nebraska seeks to make it a quaint and bloodless place. Buried alive is a strong image. Both death and not-death present. A kind of Jonah and the whale. I knew the story I was telling was an act of return but I also knew it was wrong to write about it as some kind of hero’s narrative centered on healing or conquer. I wanted this narrative to be true to those of us who left for a reason. Return in this instance, whether physically or emotionally, is an akin to being swallowed whole and spat back out. 

Hannah Hicks and Tory Irmeger: You are careful in writing about your mother to acknowledge the generational trauma and context of your mother’s behavior. This speaks to a genuine struggle for many as they reach adulthood and struggle with shifting parent/child dynamics. How did you balance writing about family, knowing they might read the chapbook?

Abby Hagler: This chapbook didn’t happen in one draft. It was two other books before it reached this form of three long, meandering, grass-dense essays. The first was a book of prose poems called Everybody’s Girlhood. It’s a riff on Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Biography and used a definition of girlhood some friends and I thought up one night in my living room. The definition didn’t really have anything to do with sex or gender, just what existentially demarks girlhood from other -hoods in life. We discussed the age range of girlhood and how this time period is different from childhood, boyhood, manhood, womanhood, adulthood, etc. Age started to feel arbitrary to the characterization we were going for, as if, through descriptors, each of these periods became spaces people enter or exit. I started wondering: Is it possible to slip into girlhood even if one is not a child or a girl? And so I started writing poems out of memories of my own girlhood, then moved onto moments in my family members’ lives when they might have been experiencing a girlhood too. 

I took parts of the girlhood poems and made them into a chapbook of researched essays titled Goldenrod of the Here and Now. However, the essays were too focused on telling my mom’s story, which felt wrong. That’s her story to tell, even if things that happened to her have an effect on me in a generational sense. 

All of my anxiety in writing any of these drafts was focused on claim and how to change the ideas of claim I have inherited. My goal was to release claim where it felt necessary in order to honor someone else’s struggle. 

Letting go of any claim to my mom’s history—especially after our relationship dissolved—was what propelled me to look for other ways of writing another person into an essay that honors boundaries. Two books that were really helpful were Anne Boyer’s The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care and T. Fleischmann’s Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through. The way they each use research to shift narrative focus is fantastic. After reading these authors, my strategy became: When I felt I was going too far into territory that isn’t mine, I reflected instead on my own body, my own feelings. And from there, that smaller place of myself, I could start growing a discussion about the larger issue of a government, a history, and an economic system that imprints its brutality onto our love and relationships. 

Hannah Hicks and Tory Irmeger: When writing “To Fill the Spaces Where My Body’s Been,” you listed examples of the color gold you found in books by Willa Cather. Did you know early on that Cather’s presence in your chapbook would be so prevalent? How are you hoping your book emulates Cather’s legacy, or would you rather readers understand your relationship with Cather differently? 

Abby Hagler: I actually didn’t know that I would be writing about her starting out! She was one of several authors in the book pile. After deciding to start the essays over, I cast a pretty wide net for what I was researching. Louise Pound, who was not only Cather’s classmate in college but was also a great folklorist in her own right, was a favorite. Pound’s work led me to making a map of places where myths and legends occurred in Nebraska—or allegedly occurred anyway. A map of places that don’t necessarily exist and events that didn’t exactly happen. The slippery space of legends about land and people. But the trip was a bust. I didn’t have the energy for it after falling out with my mom. So I spent the day in Red Cloud at the Cather Museum and bought Hermione Lee’s Double Lives, a book of Cather biography and criticism that opened up the whole project. 

To me, Willa Cather has a double legacy much like Nebraska. In the classroom, her identity is never really discussed. At least, I don’t remember learning anything about her life or personality or beliefs in general education. History’s process of simplifying and forgetting. As an author, she is remembered in conjunction with Nebraska’s mythology—as bland, quaint, nature/ farm-focused. This legacy has asked us to forget that she was determined, and she was aware of oppression and inequality in America. She was not religious, was critical of Christianity, and was unabashedly queer from a young age, which is not present in her Nebraska characters. But her anger is. Anger often disguises pain. I didn’t want that to be forgotten. It was a reminder not to forget who I am in writing either. There are lots of ways we are erased even as we live and breathe, lots of ways we obfuscate or erase parts of ourselves, especially in efforts just to get by or fit a mold. I suppose I’m seeing myself in the legacy of time passing, in the legacy of a life lived American culture would like to fabricate for us all. 

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Abby Hagler lives in Chicago. She is the author of There Is Nothing Left But Gold (Essay Press, 2021). Previous work has appeared in Entropy, FANZINE, Ghost Proposal, and Deluge, among others. With Julia Cohen, she runs an interview column at Tarpaulin Sky magazine called “Original Obsessions” about writers’ childhood obsessions manifesting in their current work.

Hannah Hicks is from Atlanta and attends college in Cleveland, TN. Her work has been published in the American Poetry Library and Whale Road Review.

Tory Irmeger is from Elizabethton, Tennessee and attends college in Cleveland, TN, where she is an English writing major.