An Interview with William Bradley by Jill Talbot

“We are made of cells—the building blocks of life. These tiny fractals contain the information that makes us us. On a microscopic level, we’re all quite similar to each other indeed.” —“Self-Similar,” from Fractals

If William Bradley were to get a tattoo, he tells us in his debut essay collection, Fractals, it would be this quote from E. B. White’s “The Ring of Time”: “I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost."

In his essay, Bradley imagines unbuttoning his shirt and baring his chest at the bar during a future academic conference to show off his tribute. And while I like to envision a table set up at the next AWP Book Fair or NonfictioNow Conference with a donation box labeled, “William Bradley’s E.B. White Tattoo Fund,” it’s clear that William Bradley has already imprinted the influence of E.B. White’s “safekeeping” through his own essays, engaging with “worldly and unworldly enchantment,” including, but not limited to:

David Bowie

Nabokov

Frederic Nietzsche

Joan Didion

The Flash #125 (1961)

Funny Men of the Adirondacks

Wonder Woman

Andre Dubus

A Nightmare on Elm Street

All Star Family Feud on DVD

Charles Lamb

Flannery O’Connor

Friday the 13th

Superman

General Hospital

“To write, and to write about stuff that mattered to me [motivates me] even if it strikes some as silly or lowbrow. The world changes fast,” Bradley reminds us, “and life as we know it changes before we have time to register.” Bradley knows this firsthand. Diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 1998 and again in 2000, he underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatments as well as an autologous bone marrow transplant. At the age of twenty-two, Bradley’s doctor told him he had a 40% chance of living to be twenty-seven. That was over fifteen years ago, and most of those years he’s been married to his wife, Emily, who made him promise when they were dating that he would never write about her. Spoiler alert: he writes about her. A lot, but beautifully and poignantly, I might add.

William Bradley and I exchanged e-mails over the course of a week or so, thinking about empathy, essaying, his preoccupation with memory, the flash form, and the light of his work.

I’d like to begin with a feature you wrote that appeared in the Utne Reader in 2013, “Acquiring Empathy Through Essays,” in which you point out:

It’s impossible for us to live the lives of others, of course, but essays give us a record of someone else’s consciousness—the act of reading these essays and interacting with these minds on the page is the closest thing we have to telepathy in the real world.

You also note, “I do think we’d be better off if we heeded the essayist’s reminder that we can find common ground with other people.” I’m wondering if you are conscious of establishing this “common ground” for your readers and if so, what foundation you work from in these essays?

Do you think the essayist should be concerned with creating this common ground, with keeping that “Dear Reader” in mind?

When I wrote that essay, I was thinking primarily of the value of reading essays. I hadn’t given much thought to my process when writing an essay—at least, not in those terms. But yes, I do think it’s useful for the essayist to keep the “dear reader” in mind. I think that is maybe what separates essay writing from keeping a journal—that expectation of an audience. So as such, I think that my persona as an essayist is perhaps a bit different from my persona as, say, a Facebook user.

Scott Russell Sanders has this great line in "The Singular First Person" where he writes, "I choose to write about my experience not because it is mine, but because it seems to me a door through which others might pass." I liked that idea of the essay as a mode of connection, much like I appreciate the idea of self-similarity in fractal geometry, which I write about a bit in the book. You don't necessarily have to have had the experience of feeling regret over picking on your younger brother when you were kids, as I write about in one of the early essays in the book, just as you don't need to be in love with my wife to understand what I'm writing about. I think most of us have experienced regret, and probably most of us have experienced love, too. I think that's common enough ground for us to understand each other. Or at least, I hope so.

That Sanders essay knocks me out every time I read (teach) it. I have underlined and commented so extensively in the margins I need a new copy of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: I & Eye.

You write the regret of picking on your brother in “And Never Show Thy Head By Day Nor Light,” the second essay in the collection, which was originally published in Burlesque Press. I love to teach that essay—to discuss the significance of your opening line “It must have been spring or summer, but the seasons didn’t really have too much meaning back then,” (the uncertainty of memory) as well as point out how you use one childhood experience to stand as the testament to your guilt, your regret. When I teach it, I use it as a model for how we can use one moment to represent an entire relationship. Wonderful.

You perform this uncertainty-of-memory strategy in another essay my students always connect with, “Cathode,” which originally appeared in Sweet. The regret in that essay haunts them, and me, because we all carry a regrettable moment like that from our childhoods, when we turned someone away or were turned away. In the essay, you interject phrases like “I don’t know,” “Maybe,” “All I’ve got is that image” throughout to perform your hesitancy, your memory that’s “like an old television set, turned on after the show has started.”

What role does memory play in your thinking, in how you work through a memory, or pieces of a memory, on the page?

"Cathode," as I recall, was written in response to either a prompt or call for submissions specifically about memory, and I was struck by the way that some of my memories of very specific moments are incredibly vivid, even as the events and moments that surround them seem fuzzy—like the way a television image would come into focus or fade out as an old television set was turned on and off. I was also self-consciously thinking of Nabokov describing his memories being projected onto a screen with him as the sole audience member in the theater. I like that idea of our memories being like a show for us, you know? Also, I really liked that Nabokov description and wanted to try to do something like that without completely plagiarizing him.

But you know, I'm awfully preoccupied with memory, because my own is so bad, but I'm pretty sure it used to be really sharp. I tend to blame the chemotherapy. It's kind of a joke in my house that I don't remember things very well, that my wife has to remind me of people I've met or conversations we've had. When I was a kid, I was acutely aware of when other people forgot or mis-remembered things, and I feel like I had a better memory than most people right up until around the bone marrow transplant and aggressive chemotherapy treatments. This is the sort of thing that really bothers me.

Of course, I still have all the words to the Mr. Belvedere theme song tucked away, so who knows what's going on in my brain?

You know, I take the idea of telling the truth as one remembers it pretty seriously in essay writing. I mean, I like to mess around with form—my wife does not, in fact, have the same origin as Wonder Woman—but I also like to signpost when I'm veering off into speculative or unreliable territory—as in "Nana," the essay about the grandmother I didn't know very much about. So I use those phrases you point out, as well as things like "I imagine" or "I suspect," in order to signal to the reader that I'm being honest, but I'm not necessarily being correct. This is honestly what the inside of my head looks like, but I make no assurances regarding the content that's up there, you know?

“Nana” is one of my favorites in the book because of this unreliable territory, which allows you to tell the reader, “So I haven’t written an essay about my grandmother.”

“I’m being honest, but I’m not necessarily being correct.” So true. I was talking to my students yesterday about how I distinguish reality (what happened) to what I consider psychological reality (what it seemed like to me) by showing them a segment of one of my essays and telling them everything I left out of it. So I like your distinction—I’ll definitely borrow that (and give due credit).

Your work has a we’re-sitting-down-at-a-bar (or at a corner table in a coffee shop) and I’m telling you what I’ve been thinking lately quality. For readers here at Essay Daily who don’t know, you and I have sat at a bar next to each other talking and thinking, and we often noted how most of those conversations were about essaying, essayists, even ideas for our next essay. But I don’t think I ever asked how you came to be an essayist.

I love these lines about writing finding a writer from Pablo Neruda’s “Poetry”: 

And it was at that age . . . poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, not silence,
but from a street it called me,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among raging fires
or returning alone,
there it was, without a face,
and it touched me.

How (or when or where or why) did the Essay find you?
 
I suppose I first encountered the essay during a creative nonfiction workshop the fall semester of my senior year in college, shortly before I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease and had to take some time off from school. That class—taught by our mutual friend Natalia Rachel Singer—introduced me to the work of Joan Didion, which in hindsight was a pivotal moment in my development as a writer. Prior to that, I was mostly interested in fiction and screenwriting.

I wouldn't say I really got interested in the essay then, though—much of that class (and subsequent classes taken in grad school) focused more on memoirs and a little literary journalism. But I would say that my early experiences with the essay coincided with the experience of getting very, very sick when I was quite young. I'm not one for support groups or "survivor's walks" at the Relay for Life or anything like that, but the thing about going through chemotherapy in a roomful of other people who are also getting chemotherapy at the same time is that it reminds you that you are connected to other human beings just by virtue of living and eventually dying. We share a lot of the same concerns and anxieties. The differences we perceive among ourselves aren't as great as we think. I have an essay in Fractals that sort of explores how I found myself finding an unlikely connection with a rather nasty, racist old man in that chemotherapy room, precisely because I knew we both shared the fear that the cancer was going to kill us.

I found those moments of connections in the essays I was reading at roughly the same time. I'm not saying I "related" to what I was reading—I find the idea of "relating" to a work of art overrated—but there were these moments of recognition, regardless.

I was largely self-taught when it came to essay writing—as I said before, most of my classes tended to focus on literary journalism and memoir—though I did get some valuable suggestions from people like Natalia Rachel Singer, Bob Cowser, Paul Lehmberg, Maureen Stanton, and Doug Hunt (great teachers, all of them). And reading Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay from cover to cover was an education as well. In the late 90s and early years of the current century, people talked about creative nonfiction as an "emerging genre," something new and different. It was useful to read Lopate's anthology—and, later, John D'Agata's anthologies—in order to realize that, in fact, this was not the case. The essay has existed, in one form or another, for probably as long as language as existed, really. It's just that a lot of people didn't realize this.

And honestly, I liked knowing that I realized this even when others didn't. I felt like a hipster, appreciating a band that most people have never even heard of. Clever, and probably way too smug.

I feel that way as well. I consider myself a self-taught essayist because I only took one creative nonfiction workshop at the end of my graduate studies, and I’m still studying. Every time I read an essay, an essay collection, a memoir, I move beyond reading to studying. In fact, this summer I plan to attend the University of D’Agata (I have all three of his anthologies waiting for me in a stack in my living room).

You’ve been consistently publishing essays since 2005, and your essays have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and listed as Notable in Best American Essays. In the past four years, a version of Fractals was named a finalist in contests run by two presses.

After ten years of writing and publishing essays, why did you consider this the time to collect them into a book? And why these particular essays?

I suppose it goes back to my education, really. Looking back, I was probably always more attracted to essays than other forms of creative nonfiction writing, but it also seemed to me that "successful" creative nonfiction writers were writing memoirs. I liked reading essays in Brevity or The Missouri Review, and I certainly enjoyed essay collections like The White Album and One Man's Meat, but it seemed to me that to publish a book, I would need to write a book like This Boy's Life or A Heartbreaking Word of Staggering Genius. I didn't really see the essay collection as being something viable.

So I tried to write a memoir about the cancer experience. Some of it was okay, but it seemed like those were the "chapters" that also stood on their own as essays, while the chapters that functioned as "connective tissue," turning these essays into one book-length story, were quite bad. And you don't have to take my word for it—I had plenty of agents and potential publishers reject it over the years. It was sloppy and amateurish because, well, I was a sloppy amateur, but also because I was fighting against my own instincts as a writer. By that point, I was reading essays a lot more frequently than I was reading memoirs. I was much more excited by works by people like Joan Didion and E.B. White (to think of more famous, creative nonfiction "classics") and contemporaries like Steven Church, Eula Biss, and, eventually, you. But it took me way too long to realize I didn't actually want to write a memoir after all.

Of course, once I realized I wanted to write an essay collection, it took me a little while to figure out what essays I'd already written should be included, and what else I still wanted to write about. For a time, I put the book idea on the back burner and just published essays—I was teaching at a place that didn't expect a book for tenure, so I had the luxury of just doing what I wanted, essay-wise, without thought to a collection. Of course, then I left that job and felt a new pressure to publish a book if I wanted to stay in academia. I didn't wind up staying in academia (or at least, I'm not an academic at the moment), but that pressure turned out to be a good motivator. I had my most productive years, in terms of writing and publishing, between 2012 and 2015, when I was a visiting assistant professor. And it certainly helped that I met and lived next door to you, having a friend to talk to about this work, to share drafts with each other. And my good friend Michael Piafsky was just absolutely indispensable as I was finishing the manuscript after you moved away. The original version of the book had two additional essays in it, and had been rejected by a couple of places after a really long time, which suggested to me that they had been read and carefully considered. I finally had Michael read the book, then I told him I suspected these two essays weren't working, and he said, "That's absolutely right. Take them out." And that's how I came to publish a 35 page book.

Well, it's longer than that. But it's slim. But I prefer to think of it as lean—I cut the fat from it, and as a result I think it's a pretty tight 150 pages.

Part of the leanness of your book is in the abundance of flash essays. To my count, of the twenty-eight essays in the book, seventeen of them are within the 500-1000 word range. In fact, the longest essay in Fractals comes in a bit over 2,000.

I consider you one of the masters of the flash form, William. You were part of Creative Nonfiction’s roundtable discussion, “The Square Root of True,” in which you noted, “We don’t expect something told in such a short form to knock us over with truth or beauty. So when it happens, we’re sort of left breathless.” I feel this way every time I finish one of your shorter essays—why do you think you tend toward brevity as an essayist? And how much work goes into composing within such a compressed frame?

It's funny that you should point out my tendency towards brevity, because for the past couple of months, I've actually been working on this really long, book-length essay—almost the opposite of what I did in Fractals. But at the same time, this long essay is segmented into these shorter component parts (with the shortest segment being seven words long), so maybe I am still focused on flash prose in some ways.

Also, I think some of my essays are considerably longer. The stuff I've published in The Normal School, Sequart, and The Mary Sue, for example. Those are essays that are largely focused on popular culture—superhero comic books in particular. They're different from the essays in Fractals. In some ways, they're kind of cultural studies by way of the personal essay, I suppose.

But I think my best work probably does tend to be brief—or, in the case of the new project, broken up into brief sections or vignettes. I think works under a thousand words or so demand a careful attention to language— I'm not sure my longer essays are as interesting at the sentence-level as the shorter work. I mean, we tell creative writing students that every word needs to count, but I'm not sure we go back and question every word choice in a 3500 word essay the way we do in a 600 word essay. Or at least, I don't. I shouldn't presume to speak for anyone else.

I'll complete a first draft of a short essay in one sitting, maybe spending a few hours sitting at the computer, editing and second-guessing myself as I write, deleting words or phrases or rearranging paragraphs as I go along and discover what it is I'm actually writing about. Then I'll usually give it a couple of days, then come back and say, "Okay, how do I make this shorter?" I got into this habit when I was in grad school, dreaming of the day that I would write something good enough for Brevity. I think it was a good habit to develop. Usually, the first step is to go through and start eliminating adverbs. 99 percent of the time, they're not doing anything to make the essay better—they're just fat. It's like throwing an entire stick of butter on your baked potato. You think it's going to help, but you're actually ruining it.

I also have to be on the lookout for certain words and phrases I rely on too much. "Honestly" is a big one. So is "It seemed to me." And "Clearly." These are the tics that drive me crazy in my own writing.

I also horribly overuse em-dashes in first drafts—I think because I'm never quite sure where any given sentence is going to end, so I keep going, and it all becomes a jumbled mess. So I have to go back and simplify my sentences, frequently.

And look. I just used an em-dash right there, as I was explaining my addiction to them. I'm going to keep it there though. I think it works okay.

Sometimes, an essay is ready to be sent out in a matter of days. My most recent acceptance, about listening to Prince's "1999" on New Year's Eve 1998-99, a few days after being released from the hospital after the bone marrow transplant, was like that. Drafted it Wednesday, revised and sent it out on Thursday, got the acceptance Saturday morning. But that's pretty rare. It usually takes considerably longer. My essay "Brick," which is forthcoming in Pine Hills Review, is short but took a year and a half, maybe two years to get right.

This whole discussion reminds me of the time that I visited your class when we were both teaching at St. Lawrence. I think you had just taught "Julio at Large." You asked me when I made the shift towards the lyric essay, and I think I responded, "Is that what I do?" As soon as you pointed it out, I could see it, but I hadn't realized it before. I hadn't thought about my own work like that, until a smart reader and fellow writer asked me about my process and why I make some of the choices I make (even the ones I'm not always aware I'm making).

One moment I recall vividly about that time at St. Lawrence is when you texted me after reading one of my essays and wrote something like, “You’re not afraid to go to the dark places.” I was lying on my couch reading, and I sat up and asked the empty room, “Dark places?” I like when readers point to aspects or elements of the writing that writers didn’t consciously do—happens all the time.

But our work differs vastly in this regard of darkness. If my essays had a dimmer switch, that dimmer spins all the way toward dark, where there are only shadows and thin silhouettes, whereas as you, my friend, may enter a dark room but it’s always back-lit with quirkiness and humor and wit, such light.

You write, often, how you desire to be a better person, that “the knowledge that we don’t have much time is an admonishment not to waste any.” This is another distinct characteristic of your essaying—the tendency to uplift, to point to the days ahead with wonder and gratitude. Do you recognize (or conscientiously work toward) this element in your essays?

I remember sending that text—it was shortly after we met, when you published "What I Learned in Homemaking" in The Rumpus. Such a powerful essay. I've subsequently written about sometimes feeling the need to "walk off" a certain type of Jill Talbot essay, they can be so emotionally intense. That was, I think, the first time I experienced that type of power in your writing, and I felt like I needed to tell you right away that your essay had elicited such a strong reaction.

I wouldn't say I'm self-conscious about uplift or gratitude—it's probably just something that is built into my personality. I'm very much aware that as a white, heterosexual American man, I benefit from all sorts of unearned privilege. And I'm very much aware that I have been very lucky in my life—18 years ago, I was told that I probably wouldn't live for another five years, my cancer was so pernicious. So the fact that I spent last night sitting on the couch watching television with the wife and two cats who love me is pretty amazing. I try not to lose sight of that, and when I'm reflecting carefully—as I do in my essays—I inevitably return to the truth that I'm incredibly fortunate. I'd have to be a really miserable, solipsistic son of a bitch to reach any other conclusion.

Having said that, the new project is definitely dark—it's largely focused on this experience I had last summer, when I was once again hospitalized and very nearly died due to some cardiac problems that were probably related to all of the chemotherapy I received when I was in my early twenties. If my cancer essays are fundamentally about being grateful to have survived, then this essay is about coming to terms with the knowledge that any survival is, by definition, temporary. I will die someday. Odds are, I will die younger than most of my contemporaries. What does it mean to understand that, to really understand that and live with it? It seems unfair, but paradoxically I also know that I have been luckier than any person could have reasonably expected. And can a man who has experienced so much happiness and love in his life really complain about something as common as mortality?

In some ways, I'm constrained by my material. My work is not consistently dark because I don't have a whole hell of a lot to complain about. I mean, I'm not rich, and I'm still trying to get my professional life straightened out, but all the stuff that matters to me is going well. My marriage is strong. My parents are healthy. My best friends in the world still love me. I'm afraid of getting sick again. I'm afraid of dying. But that doesn't make me unique. It's not as noteworthy, I think, as the fact that my wife knows me well enough to know that the All-Star Family Feud DVD set was the best birthday present she could have bought for me.

In the video for David Bowie's song "The Stars Are Out Tonight," Bowie and Tilda Swinton play this kind of boring married couple whose lives are upended when a suspiciously-familiar looking, gender-blurring couple move in next door. But before all of the transgressive sexuality begins, there's a scene in a grocery store where Swinton's character says to Bowie's character, "We have a nice life," and Bowie repeats the line, as if the idea had never occurred to him, "We have a nice life." In the context of the video, that line is understood to be ironic. But Emily and I have sort of appropriated it in a more sincere way. Every so often, one of us will turn to the other, and marvel, "We have a nice life." Because we love Bowie, but also because it's absolutely true.

As a coda to our conversation, I’d like to include a line from the final essay in Fractals, one that points to the intersection where all essayists connect:

“While it’s dangerous to live in the past, to give in to nostalgia’s deceptive pull, I think we’re well-served by making an effort to remember the world as it existed, as we perceived it at the time. Holding onto what was real keeps us rooted to who we have been, and reminds us of the world—or perhaps, more accurately, worlds—we have lived in.”

*

William Bradley is the author of Fractals, an essay collection recently published by Lavender Ink. His work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Salon, and Utne Reader. He can be found online at www.williambradleyessayist.com and under the Twitter handle William_Bradley. He can be found in person in North Central Ohio, where he lives with his wife and two cats.

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren't: A Memoir (Soft Skull, 2015). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Brevity, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, The Paris Review Daily, Passages North, and The Pinch.

Writing the Other Half: A Conversation About Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers

Erin Murphy and Jen Hirt are the co-editors behind the nonfiction anthology, Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers, published in 2016 by SUNY Press. As the second in a series (the first was Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets), this anthology sets out to show a range of creative nonfiction techniques from contemporary writers (all essays are from 2009 or later). Short interviews after each essay reveal the craft involved in everything from graphic essays to lyrical essays to longer, narrative nonfiction. Hirt and Murphy sat down recently to discuss two contributors, Cheryl Strayed and Kristen Radtke.

Jen Hirt: I think I remember it this way: you texted me an ambitious idea along the lines of "let's invite Cheryl Strayed to contribute to the anthology!" As a newbie to anthologies, I recall thinking, "Can we really just do that? We can be a couple of professors in central Pennsylvania querying Oprah's favorite solo hiker of the Pacific Crest Trail? Isn't Strayed having tea with Reese Witherspoon right this very moment?" Turns out, however, that you were right. We can be a couple of profs cold-calling a bestselling nonfiction writer, because it turns out the bestselling author had humble writing roots like all of us. When her contribution, "Kestrel Avenue," showed up in our in-boxes, I read it right away. One of my favorite parts is just the fact of the situation, which is that Strayed's first writing job was as a journalist for a weekly hometown paper in north-central Minnesota, and she was thrown into a robbery article that had elements fit only for creative nonfiction. This leads to her conclusion: "I didn't tell the story. I didn't write the other half. This is it now. Here it is." From your side of the editing desk, why does Strayed's essay make such a good first chapter? And what is the role of a "lead essay" in an anthology like this?

Erin Murphy: I don’t remember the initial text, but I do remember receiving Cheryl’s essay. I was in the Dollar Tree store in Altoona, and a customer had just mistaken me for a store employee, asking, “Do you know where the tinfoil’s at?” I went directly from saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t work here” to opening Cheryl’s email on my phone. I leaned against the display of Mylar balloons and read it straight through. It is a great example of what creative nonfiction does best: using elements of fiction and poetry to get at a larger truth. The tension builds like a crime novel. And her imagery evokes the people and places she’s describing, from her boss’s “coarse straggles” of gray-brown hairs that he “smoothed back repeatedly with his hand” to “the darker, wilder country roads that surrounded the town like a web.” I remember getting so lost in her essay that I barely noticed having to swat away balloons that said “Happy Anniversary” and “Lordy, Lordy, look who’s 40!” And I knew that if I could be transported, other readers would be, too.

JH: I agree with that sense of feeling transported into another place and time, but also into another thought process. For me, that’s what is so intriguing about reading and writing creative nonfiction. We see the “mental journey” of the writer as she figures out what an event really meant, in the long-run. In her interview, Strayed comments that when she was just starting out as a writer, she thought that “real life was elsewhere,” meaning not in her rural hometown. She realizes, of course, that she was wrong: “One only has to look deeply inward and perceptively outward.” In her essay, she does this a number of times, and one of my favorite passages is her first morning at work. She sits down with her brand new notebook and starts listing article ideas, but “doing so filled me with gloom.” What follows is an insightful self-analysis of how she desperately wanted this job and simultaneously could not wait to get a better job and move away. She looked outward at her article ideas and then looked “deeply inward” to her true motives, and that’s what makes the essay so good. Other readers have other favorite parts – what was one of yours?

EM: Having spent several years in a newsroom myself, I could relate to Strayed’s description of that first job. One of my favorite elements of the piece is her character development. The cowboy who stays with her family is elusive, but she finds just the right details to capture him, such as his penchant for Mountain Dew and the way he alternates wearing his cowboy hat and toupee. I love the part about how he refuses to knock on the door. Instead, he stands at the bottom of the stairs and yells her mother’s name: “‘Bobbi, Bobbi, BOBBI,’ he’d call, his voice growing louder each time, until she opened the door and waved him, exasperated, inside.” Some of this development happens in what’s unsaid. He doesn’t tell them his horse has healed, for instance, and he seemed to take in stride the demand that he leave, riding off in the pouring rain. I think sometimes we take for granted that characters in a creative nonfiction essay will almost develop themselves because the story is true, as opposed to fiction where the need for development is more obvious. Yet it’s just as important to capture the habits, physical descriptions, speech patterns, etc., of characters who appear in essays as it is in fictional accounts. It’s what makes the people – and the writing – come alive.

JH: And that’s what draws people to Strayed’s writing. She’s obviously not the only creative nonfiction writer who succeeds at real-life character development neatly twined with introspection and honesty, but she might be the most well-known at the moment, given the success of Wild. Which brings me to the other element of craft she has a natural talent for—writing about place. Back in the 1990s, when I was an undergrad, writing about place seemed like the new big thing. I remember being assigned whole anthologies based on place, and one of my first-ever creative nonfiction assignments was to write about my hometown. And it was in 1995 that the young Strayed hiked the Pacific Crest Trail and kept the journal that would eventually become her bestseller. That memoir can’t exist without being grounded in place. On the same note, her contribution to our anthology has a title that maps us into a particular place: “Kestrel Avenue.” She explains that this road was known to her as County Road 27. It’s where she first met the bank robber. Many years later, the state renamed the road as Kestrel Avenue, a change Strayed criticizes because someone is trying to citify a country road. It’s these insights into our relationships with place that can turn an essay from good to great. And that takes us to our only other essay in the collection whose title directly references place: Kristen Radtke’s graphic essay, “The City of the Century,” which is about Gary, Indiana. How did you first come across her work?

EM: I had seen Radtke’s work elsewhere and reached out to see if she was interested in contributing to Creating Nonfiction. What I remember most about when she sent me “The City of the Century”—other than loving it—was that the high-resolution files were so big that she had to send them in twenty different emails. From the early stages of our project, I wanted to make sure the graphic essay was represented. I’ve admired graphic nonfiction ever since I first read Alison Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home in 2007. I have no artistic ability whatsoever, so I’m fascinated by the idea of having a medium in addition to words with which to convey your ideas. And the question of what to express in text vs. visual image intrigues me. Initially, I was convinced that one or the other would suffer. But neither does when the work is done well; instead, I find that the words and images speak to each other in a way that adds depth and meaning to the piece. How do you see that relationship working in “The City of the Century”?

JH: Honestly, I see it working in a way that gives me chills, it’s so good. I had a similar experience when I read Fun Home for the first time. I loved drawing when I was younger, but didn’t really have the talent to keep up with college art classes. So to see peers like Radtke merging writing and drawing and creative nonfiction is very exciting. I think her best panels in “The City of the Century,” the ones that let words and images speak to each other in a phenomenal way, are the panels that are heavy with black ink. The essay starts with a few like that, then carries the black-out technique through to the derelict buildings, and then employs careful use of black fill (usually in the background) in the panels that mention the peculiar death Seth Thomas, whose memorial Kristen and Andrew have unwittingly found (and taken) in a run-down building. The moments when Kristen is making an intellectual connection are also more black than white. What I see here is emphasis, like putting words in bold. In traditional text essays, editors and professors frown upon writers using bold (or even italics) to show emphasis, and I agree with that; find the best emphatic phrase instead. But in graphic creative writing, writers have the option of literally making a panel bold with thicker lines or a darker fill.

There is precedent for this; remember Tristam Shandy’s infamous “black page” in The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman? I had to read that in an 18th century Brit Lit class and I cannot tell you how much I hated it—except for that black page. That interested me because here, for the first time, was a novelist acknowledging the artificial nature of a book. Shandy was saying, “Why not explore the creative possibilities of this page size, this arbitrary font, or all these technical abilities of a printing press?” Or take, for example, writers who use extensive blank space. There is Jenny Boully’s The Body, which is only footnotes at the bottom of blank pages. Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves features a page with only brackets and one asterisk, and other pages are printed upside down, and some have to held up to a mirror to be read. I’ve veered from creative nonfiction with those examples, but the point is that writers have long been toying with the relationship between words and images and space.

Or consider woodcut artists, who know the value of negative space. An example here is the completely wordless 1919 novel Passionate Journey, by Franz Masereel. He carved 167 woodcuts to tell a story. He knew just when to cut for an effect that resulted in lots of black (an explosive or dangerous scene), and he knew how to cut the wood for white highlights. I actually have one of his panels tattooed on my arm (it’s the scene where the man finds a dog in the woods). Some of Radtke’s panels remind me of woodcuts. They merge material and emotion.

EM: A tattoo? Wow, Jen—that’s commitment! But yes, those are some excellent connections to other works. Within our own anthology, I’m thinking of Michael Martone’s essay “Footnotes & Endnotes,” which is a tribute both in content and style to David Foster Wallace. You reference editors’ and professors’ rules about the use of bold and italicized text. With its palimpsests of notes on notes, Martone’s piece would seem to break ALL the rules. If my daughter were to turn in an essay that looked like that for her high school English class, she’d flunk. And we probably drove the SUNY Press production and copy editors crazy with all the atypical formatting requirements. Yet despite the apparent unwieldiness on the page, the piece is quite poignant—perhaps even more so than if it had been structurally conventional. Poets are always making use of their poetic license, but prose writers are expected to conform when it comes to grammar, punctuation, transitions, etc. Martone’s essay—along with the contributions from Faith Adiele and Aimee Nezhukumatathil—are good examples of how creative nonfiction writers can make their own rules. After all, they are—as our title suggests—creating nonfiction.

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Erin Murphy’s essays and poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Brevity, Field, North American Review, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Ancilla (Lamar University Press, 2014), and is co-editor of two anthologies from SUNY Press: Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. She is Professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Her website is www.erin-murphy.com.

Jen Hirt's essays and poems have recently appeared in The Weeklings, FlashGlass, and Ninth Letter. She is the author of the memoir Under Glass: The Girl with a Thousand Christmas Trees (University of Akron Press, 2010) and is co-editor of Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers and Kept Secret: The Half-Truth in Nonfiction (forthcoming in 2017 from Michigan State University Press). She is an assistant Professor of English at Penn State Harrisburg.

An Anthology of One: Joseph Bradbury on Sonora Review's Essay Contest

I’m thinking a bit about the nature of writing contest, their construction, and their purpose aside from winning a little money and publication. I like working at a journal. I enjoy engaging with other staff members in debates over the implicit meaning of a couple sentences, even just a few words. For the standard issue we look for cohesiveness within the genre, something that bears the identity and ethos of Sonora Review. In this way, with each issue we build small anthologies, even if that anthology claims only a small niche on the submissions we receive, we’re able to organize them, place the works in proximity to other work, and create something else. In an interview here on Essay Daily, John D’Agata reflects on his relationship to his anthological work: “these anthologies represent my take on the essay, and nothing else. They are my own personal explorations into the history of the essay, and they shouldn’t be viewed as anything but that.” I admire and enjoy D’Agata’s collections, to see how he shakes hands with the dead (and some living). But I’m interested in the writing contest for its opposite and antithetical constructions of an anthology.

At Sonora Review, we select somewhere around ten essays from different formal constructions, reportage, memoir, biography, historical reconstruction, etc. and we send them off to a judge to select a winner. This year it’s Elena Passarello for the essay contest. I don’t know too much about Elena other than a few conversations and email exchanges. I know her book, Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande, 2012) is a brilliant demonstration of the power of the human voice. I know she performs her readings beautifully and gazes out over the audience as she recounts long and lucid sentences from memory—I saw this at a conference as she read from her newest work, a bestiary of celebrity animals. But I don’t know what she looks for in judging an essay. And even if she explained her selecting process, I don’t think I could pick out her winning essay.

Regarding this process, the contest is the anthology reverse engineered. Instead of a collection of historically significant essays slotted in specific order by one person, the writing competition organizes a group of critics around one work. Behind every winner, there is a silent crowd of readers, deeply considering the work, telling every essay, for one reason or another, yes. As all the submissions are read, discussed, vetted, and judged, the winning selection becomes representative of something. Of American publishing culture? Of the few of us on staff at Sonora Review? Perhaps. Or it’s a small sample of one person’s individual expression, which we, and Elena Passarello, really enjoyed. I don’t know what comes out the other end of a reverse engineered anthology. But I enjoy these convoluted layers of mystery, wondering who was drawn to which essay, what they demonstrate and what that means in the future of the essay. So I read winners and I read slush. I sift through language and ideas and, at times, I get giddy finding something that I know is good because I read it and thought so, not because I was directly influenced by a bound collection of pages.

Send us your work. We’re looking for an anthology of one.

The competition at Sonora Review is open in three genres until May 7. Submit now at https://sonorareview.com

Contest Guidelines:

Poetry: 4-8 pages, judged by Mathias Svalina
Fiction: 6,000 words, judged by Molly Antopol
Nonfiction:  6,000 words, judged by Elena Passarello

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Joseph Bradbury is an MFA​ candidate at the University of Arizona and the nonfiction editor at Sonora Review. He writes about identity and mythology in the American West. Follow him on Twitter @JDeeBrad.

U Better Live Now: Perspectives on Prince

Prince’s first album was released the year before I was born and his music permeated my childhood. I don’t remember ever not knowing who he was. 1999, Little Red Corvette, Purple Rain, Raspberry Beret, U Got the Look, Cream, I Feel For You, Let’s Go Crazy, When Doves Cry, I Would Die for U, Kiss. These were the backdrop of car rides with my parents to school, dancing around to the radio with friends, swimming in summer. His presence was palpable and ever-present.

Scott Woods says in his essay/eulogy “Prince and Little Weird Black Boy Gods” that “if you are, say, thirty-five years of age or older there is a 99% chance that you are no good right now. Not merely sad, but irreparably despondent. Verily, Shakespearean in your grief.”

I grew up a Catholic schoolgirl in the South. Everywhere I looked, there were strict rules about what one did and did not do. Rules about fashion, about gender, about bodies, about what one should do with one’s body (not trust it) and should do about sex (not have any), about what did and did not count as sin. As a child, I was both terrified of breaking these rules and deeply suspect of them. I spent much of my childhood being indoctrinated into rules about how I was allowed to be in the world that would take years to unbind.

I remember watching Prince’s 1991 performance of “Gett Off” at the MTV Music Awards and being completely and utterly scandalized. I was twelve. Although my parents were lax on what I watched, I can’t imagine them not turning off the television when this happened. So maybe I was not home watching. I don’t remember that detail. What I do remember is that canary yellow suit and the moment he turned his back to the screen and revealed his butt, covered only by thin sheer fabric. I gasped. Prince was wearing buttless pants! Naïve and thrown off by his wardrobe, I completely missed his nearly-naked backup dancers having what amounted to a group orgy on the stage behind him, grinding and writhing up against one another. When I watched his performance again—along with a slew of other videos, performances, and interviews—in the aftermath of his death, I found myself stunned I had not seen them. But the truth was—with or without buttless pants—when Prince was on stage, everyone else disappeared.

Early on the morning Prince died, I had checked my Facebook page and saw a news alert about an emergency at his residence Paisley Park, but not for a single moment did I suspect the emergency had to do with Prince. He seemed untouchable, immortal. Someone had partied too hard, I thought. People were always coming in and out of there, I assumed. But when I checked my Facebook after I taught my first class of the day, I saw a stream of posts referencing Prince. My response was visceral: heart sunk, stomach clenched, breath caught in my throat. It couldn’t be true. But it was. And I spent that day, like many of us, in a cloud of mourning.

For me, this was a mourning I couldn’t completely locate or understand.

Here is the thing. I wasn't a super fan. I didn't know obscure songs. I never saw him in concert. I didn’t even own any Prince albums. If someone were to ask me who were the most influential musicians in my life, I likely would have left him off the list.

I have always loved Prince’s music but when I was a kid, he confused me. I didn’t know what to make of him: his androgyny, his fashion choices, his tremendous vocal range and the way he completely possessed those notes and the power of his own voice in a way that made me both aroused and alarmed.

But some part of me deeply wanted to understand. Because I think I got, even then, that Prince had the flowchart out of a world of limited living. That by understanding him, I would understand the key to self-possession, to creativity, to boldness and necessary risk. I saw in Prince someone unapologetically himself, unconcerned that not everyone would get him. In my rule-following self flamed a tiny kernel of something that yearned to fully express and vanish my fear of being different.

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Elena Passarello read several hundred pages of Prince interviews that spanned thirty years to compose “Ceremony of the Interview of Princes" in tribute to and imitation of acclaimed essayist Montaigne who authored an essay with the same title. Montaigne’s essay is concerned with the etiquette of meeting with Princes, or actually with the etiquette of meeting with someone in higher standing than oneself. Passarello’s is, too, using a listing format to tell us what one should and should not do in interviewing Princes—i.e. all of the different Princes that made up the artist we came to know as Prince. In doing so she creates a portrait of Prince that reveals his mutability, his ability to shapeshift and also the common threads running through.

The epithets for her essay come from Montaigne and Prince respectively. Montaigne: “It is much better to offend him once than myself every day, for it would be a perpetual slavery.” And Prince: “If I can’t do what I want 2 do, what am I? When U stop a man from dreaming, he becomes a slave.”

Her list of how to proceed shows how to call on Prince or wait to be called upon. The list of instructions asks questions, regarding Prince’s demands and also the expectations of those interviewing him. The list reveals all it takes to get into a room with Prince and also all it takes to remain there in good graces, including not having your pencil confiscated for lack of eye contact and staying away from off-limit topics. The list reveals elusiveness on Prince’s part but also thoughtfulness. The list warns about accidentally upsetting him without knowing what you did or what you can do to correct it. But it also reveals an understanding that the hype about Prince is not hype.

Passarello writes: “There is something you must know before you end up alone with him. The rumor he is magical is completely true.” Later she says, “He might ask you not to report any of the words of your meeting, but to just write down the vibes.” The reporters of interviews past, she shows through her exploration, are concerned with their questions--but that is not Prince’s concern: “You might feel that your interview has ceased to be an interview and has instead become a riddle to solve. This will never be far from the truth.”

Wasn’t that what was always so compelling about Prince? The element of mystery? The way we saw so much of him and also always had lingering questions about who he was and what he was trying to tell us? Rather than being infuriating, this endless curiosity, this mystery unfolding felt like part of his offering.

One constancy throughout the instructions on the ceremony seems to be this: Prince will not let you record his voice. But the other constancy in what Passarello uncovers and writes seems to be his desire for realness in the moment. It seems his rule switching is part of a desire for an authentic experience. This is not the usual pathway of interviews. The interviewer and the interviewee come in with expectations, with things they want to ask, things they want to say. It seems in his process, as explored by Passarello, Prince refuses the notion that an interview—or anything—goes only one way.

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Since his death, much has been written about Prince. Some have discussed how he supported women artists and musicians in a misogynistic field that at the time (and to some extent now) only regarded them as backdrop or eye candy.

Reports poured in of his incredible philanthropy, which his Jehovah’s Witness faith proscribed against advertising. But I also get the sense that faith or no, Prince was more interested in doing the work in the world than recognition. Lest the work being done become about him somehow and not about the work itself.  The beneficiaries of his work included Green for All and the Black Lives Matter movement. At the 2015 Grammy’s, he said, "Albums still matter. Albums, like books and black lives, still matter."

In “Prince and the Sparkle Brains: Growing up epileptic, surviving sexual abuse,and loving Prince,” Karrie Higgins explores how Prince whose chronic pain and physical ailments informed the development of his stage presence. She quotes a 2009 interview with Tavis Smiley where he discussed his epilepsy “publicly for the first time”: “From that point on,” he said, “I’ve been having to deal with a lot of things, getting teased a lot in school. And early in my career I tried to compensate by being as flashy as I could and as noisy as I could.” Higgins explores Prince’s story in relation to her own and writes: “Prince was a walking disability poetics.”

The outpouring of grief in the week since he died has been tremendous. This feels like a cultural moment we will remember forever: Where was I when I heard the news that Prince died? More so than other musician deaths, Prince’s passing felt urgent and palpable, calling for the need for collective mourning.

And also celebration that we had him as long as we did. Vigils were held outside Paisley Park. Minneapolis Public Radio's The Current stopped their scheduled programming to broadcast Prince for nine hours and in following days ran through his catalogue from A to Z. A jazz funeral processed in my hometown New Orleans, thousands of people in purple flooding the streets with dance, voice, brass. In Tucson, where I live, I and other bicyclists sped across the city, speakers blasting from a faux-leopard-furred-bike, wheels turning violet light, the group stopping to dance to the hits at intersections. Bands and burlesquers paid tribute to His Royal Badass at the Rialto Theater. Tucson's independent movie theater The Loft hosted a sing-along screening of Purple Rain—a packed house singing at the top of our lungs as we—laced and leathered and primped and purpled—waved glow sticks through the air singing: “Life is just a party and parties weren’t meant to last.”

I am listening to Prince as I write about Prince because it only seems fitting. The epic range of his voice—from deep bass to falsetto—permeating the space between my thoughts. I’m listening to Prince as I write about him because if his music is anything, it is a sort of séance, the songs come through us and before we know it, we are bopping our heads to the rhythm, we are singing under our breath and then at full volume. We are, in a moment, up out of our chairs, which, suddenly, will no longer contain us.

An awareness of death permeated Prince’s lyrics:

Yeah everybody’s got a bomb/ We could all die any day/But before I’ll let that happen/I’ll dance my life away.  

But life is just a party/ and parties weren’t meant to last

So if I gotta die/ I’m gonna listen to my body tonight

We’re all excited/But we don’t know why/ Maybe it’s cuz/ We’re all gonna die.

And when we do (when we do)/ What’s it all 4? (What’s it all 4)?

U better live now/ Before the grim reaper comes knocking on your door.

When I read he was found in the elevator, I instantly recalled the words of “1999.” It seems altogether possible to me that Prince created out of his last moments a performance piece for all of us. That he knew he was dying. That he went to the elevator. That he wanted to say to us, even as he left us: “Are we going to let the elevator bring us down?” That he hoped for us to call back: “Oh no, let’s go!” That he wanted to remind us that we never know when our time is up.

What I realized in the time since Prince died is how his music and his presence were a constancy underneath everything. Prince was always, without a doubt, his own person. And Prince was also ours. He belonged to all of us. His presence in the world gave us permission to be ourselves. Not our polite-well-kept-and-well-mannered-fitting-everyone’s-expectations-selves but our messy-chaotic-creative-sexual-nonconforming-bursting-over-out-and-through-selves. I, for one, needed this permission. I needed to know that the freak flag I kept tucked in the furthest corner of the drawer was not only welcome but necessary. Prince told us through the way he lived to create, to work hard, to stop caring about what others think, to release obsessive thoughts of failure and start thinking about what we can do, to be as raunchy or out there or rule-breaking as we needed to, to live our lives the way he was on stage: brazenly alive.

In one undated video interview, an interviewer asks him, “And birthdays, you don’t like birthdays?”

“No,” he says. “We came here not knowing we were going to die—somebody told us that. And if we never knew we were going to die, we wouldn’t celebrate birthdays.”

She follows, “Isn’t nice to celebrate you day you were born?”

Prince says, “I’ll celebrate the day I die.”

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Lisa M. O’Neill writes and teaches writing in Tucson, Arizona. Her work has been published in Salon, Scalawag, The Feminist Wire, defunct, drunken boat, DIAGRAM, and Edible Baja Arizona, among others. She is the creator, editor, and curator of The Dictionary Project, an online constraint-based literary project. You can find her at lisamoneill.com

Those Old-Timey Essays: A Conversation with Patrick Madden

Jacob Eckrich, Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor for The Normal School, talks with essayist Patrick Madden about his new collection Sublime Physick, humor, Montaigne, and the activity we call essaying.

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Jacob Eckrich: One of the things that I noticed about the collection was that you have a really strong emphasis on the Classics. The essays seem to be a bridge of sorts between classical thought and art and contemporary life. So I’m curious as to where this interest and focus on classical humanities came from.

Patrick Madden: I do consciously try to write something that honors the tradition of the essay and participates in it. I’m in love with these old dead essayists largely because they kind of taught me how to write. A lot of people…I don’t know about you…how’d you get into creative nonfiction? Contemporary writers?

JE: It was actually mostly through humorists.

PM: Right. Like Ian Frazier, I know you like…

JE: Yeah, absolutely Ian Frazier, but more than anyone it was Woody Allen. So I actually came into—I hesitate to call what I write personally “creative nonfiction” as much as I just call them essays, because that line between fiction and nonfiction, particularly with humor and satire, is often fuzzy, and irrelevant in some cases.

PM: True.

JE: So I came in through humorists, and now, through the program, much more traditional nonfiction essayists. Definitely contemporary. It was a couple years before I read Montaigne or some of the older ones, but it was definitely through Ian Frazier, yourself, Ander Monson, and such.

PM: Me too. I didn’t have a really wide base, but I really liked certain essayists that I found in Best American Essays, all living essayists. But once I started in classes—I did a master’s degree at BYU and then a Ph.D. at Ohio—I started to read some of the older stuff, especially with The Art of the Personal Essay, and then I took classes from David Lazar, and we read tons and tons of these essayists. Primarily we read Montaigne, Hazlitt, and Lamb, but also a broad group of essayists that you don’t find much in the anthologies. I feel like that’s how I learned to write. I could do the basics before I ever read those writers, but my writing became a lot more interesting, at least to me, and I feel that it improved a lot, and that was the key for me. A lot of literary nonfiction is narrative based, it’s memoir—and there’re some great memoirs, works that are influential, and I appreciate them a lot—but I love thinking. I come to the essay wanting to have an intellectual experience as well as an aesthetic or emotional experience. If you read these old essayists, that’s what they’re all about. They do share some of their own lives, but their main focus isn’t to tell you something that happened. Like I said, my life is pretty mundane—though I do have six kids, which makes for some interesting experiences—but I didn’t have a troubled childhood that I overcame, I haven’t done anything extraordinary, so I really liked finding these essayists who likewise were just writing about regular life. Another key was discovering Scott Russell Sanders, who was doing a bunch of essays in the late 1990s and early 2000s that were just like the old essays: they had a one word titles, like “Beauty,” “Stillness,” “Silence,” “Fidelity,” etc. They were basically the same thing that the great dead had been doing. I said, “Oh, cool. You can still do that now.” So that’s when I started going full steam ahead trying to write thematic essays.

JE: That’s something that I really enjoy about your writing. Like you, that is why I really enjoy the essay, whether it’s a personal essay or more humorous/satirical essay, or whatever, but it’s idea-driven and less focused on narrative. With that said, as you mentioned, you do have narrative elements from your life in most of these essays, if not all of them. I’m curious, when you’re approaching a new essay is it a thematic idea first that you then scaffold and attach the narrative to, or do you begin with the narrative?

PM: It goes both ways. For instance, the essay “Entering and Breaking,” which is about my sons going missing for a couple of hours, that was certainly driven by an event that I wanted to write about. But I didn’t want to just write the “what happened.” I wanted to think from it. So I tried to do that and I overlaid some ideas from physics like wave/particle duality and quantum entanglement. I thought about how, in a way, I’m entangled with my children. But in other essays, the ideas take the lead. “Independent Redundancy” is an essay about originality, and that’s a question I’ve had for a very long time: what is originality? Or, why do we oversimplify the idea of originality to the point of creating a false concept? So it can go either way. If I do write something thematic, I look for experiences that speak to that theme, and even if I’m beginning from a particular event in my life, I try to add to it, so that the essay is not just a recounting from beginning to end.

JE: Right. One of the Montaignean aspects of both of your books is that you stray away from the “what happened” over and over again within a single essay.

PM: Intentionally.

JE: I love it. I remember when I read “Spit,” I got to the point where I stopped and thought, “Wait, what is the title of this essay again? Oh yeah, ‘Spit,’” and I kept going. It comes back around and moves, and your work does that a lot, which I absolutely love.

PM: Thanks. I don’t know if everybody does. Montaigne was jumping all over the place, too. For instance, “Of Cripples” doesn’t mention cripples until about nine-tenths of the way in. “Of Cruelty” doesn’t really get to speaking about cruelty until seven-eighths of the way through the essay.

JE: Yeah, well, that in itself can be considered cruel.

PM: Right? Maybe he’s demonstrating cruelty. So it could be a little bit frustrating, but once you get used to it and expect it, then it’s really pleasing. In “Of Vanity” he says, “It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I.” So he throws the blame back on the reader, humorously. I think he understood that he was a wanderer.

JE: Yes, absolutely. I’m trying to expand this train of thought. I feel that your work definitely has a strong foothold in a very classical tradition of essaying, and this book is a stark contrast to other essay collections being published recently. Yours seem very classical in form as well as content. I think you reference Montaigne and Pascal and Johnson—a lot of older writers and painters. I was thinking about D’Agata’s anthology trilogy, too. A lot of contemporary essayists are leaping off of the work in The Next American Essay. But I feel that yours would fit very much in The Lost Origins of the Essay. So I was wondering, where do you see your work fitting in today’s literary essayistic landscape?

PM: I really like a lot of contemporary essayists, and I think there’s a broad range in what people are doing, and I’m really glad that people are willing to call themselves essayists. There’s no longer really a stigma attached to it, and that’s been a change even since I was in graduate school. I remember essay collections that, whether because of the author or the publisher, wouldn’t announce that they were essays. They’d hide the fact, probably for marketing reasons. Now you can see the word essays on book covers, even on the front. I like a lot of essayists who aren’t pulling in quotes from the great dead authors, but I think they are still consciously participating in the long tradition, and they know somewhat of the past. It always feels good to me when an author acknowledges where we all come from and the debt we owe, to Montaigne especially, but to the others as well. I think I would definitely fit on the revivalist side. It’s not just me, but the authors who are trying to be a little bit anachronistic in terms of phrasings, from the sentence level to the essay level. You don’t even have to read my essays to notice this; you can just flip open the book and it looks different from what many other writers are doing, because you just see the block quotes throughout. It looks like what the old essayists were doing. I get invited to universities or conferences I think in large part because I’m doing something slightly different from a lot of others and people trust that I have, in addition to my own writing, a kind of historical and theoretical knowledge that I can teach from or speak from when I’m talking to students or other writers.

JE: Absolutely. I imagine a lot of people who might be reading this interview may have not read the book yet. So I wanted to give you the opportunity to give a condensed version of your “not official/official” introduction to the book. What is it about the sublime physical? What does that mean?

PM: Well, first of all, it’s always difficult for me to describe what my books are. I just came from the Tucson Festival of Books. This is a gigantic gathering and all sorts of writers are there, from Terry Brooks, who did The Sword of Shannara, and Jared Diamond who did Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Maureen Corrigan, the book reviewer from NPR’s Fresh Air, and there were a lot of mystery writers. Anyway, over 100,000 people came through, and there I was. So a lot of people asked what my book was about. Other essayists or people who are aware of creative nonfiction can get what I’m doing and they can decide whether they want to read it or not, but for the general audience, I find it very difficult to describe. So I’m glad to be speaking to you, going to Essay Daily because the people who read Essay Daily know what we’re talking about, which is good. In any case, to tell this story, let me go back to my first book, Quotidiana. I was researching Amedeo Avogadro, the Italian chemist from the early 19th century who’s best known for his molecular theory—he figured out that you could determine the number of molecules in a certain volume of gas—it was a constant no matter the gas—and this allowed chemists to determine atomic weights in ways that they never could before. So later chemists named Avogadro’s Number after him. That’s the 6.02 x 10^23 that most of us remember. I learned that Avogadro was appointed by the Pope to be chair of the department of Fisica Sublime at the University of Turin in Italy. I read that phrase, fisica sublime, and I thought, “What a strange oxymoronic term!” I loved it. Those words seem to be opposed because sublime is that which is beyond the realm of the real world, the abstracted, the idea, the spiritual, whereas fisica is the physical world, things that you can touch. So “fisica sublime” is kind of like a concrete abstraction. As with a lot of oxymorons, it’s not just that the words oppose and obliterate each other; they oppose and create a friction that can then give you new ideas that you may not have thought of before. I started thinking about how essays perform that oxymoronic function, they take the physical world, whether things or experiences, stuff that you’ve lived, stuff that you’ve touched, and the essay, by processing experience through the mind, sublimates or gets to the relevant idea, abstraction, spirit. So in the introduction in the book, I started thinking about all of the different ways that essays can be described by that oxymoron. I’m hoping that my essays are doing that very thing. Another particularity is that I studied physics as an undergrad, I got a degree, and I’m still very interested in the implications of physics even if I don’t do the lab experiments. I use some physics concepts in the book metaphorically as a different take on my experiences.

JE: I feel that your essays are in a way your lab experiments.

PM: That’s a good way of thinking of it.

JE: On the page you are testing these theories with personal experience, I guess you could say. Another question I had: because you present a lot of physics theory as well as some philosophy, there’s that line that’s hard to tread for a lot of essayists of how much into a complex theory or philosophy can you go and still effectively contextualize and explore what you’re wanting to without getting too heady and losing the reader. I guess what I’m asking is, when you’re composing these essays, do you find yourself adding more theory or do you find yourself weeding a lot of stuff out in the revision process?

PM: I don’t know if I’ve really found the sweet spot on that because—well, when we say “the reader” of course there are a lot of different readers and the vast majority of readers in the world will never pick up this book. That’s fine, but I want to speak to a nonexpert educated reader, someone who’s interested in a philosophy of ideas but also likes art made from language and is willing to work a little bit. In my first book I had passages of equations and things, and I got some feedback that people just skipped over those. They saw equations and their brain went to a different mode and jumped to a place where they could find some words again. In this new book there are no equations at least, so maybe I’ve learned a thing or two. And sometimes I figure that you don’t need to catch the theory all of the way to feel what it’s trying to do within the essay. I’ve been thinking about this with “Moment, Momentous, Momentum.” It’s a short essay about my daughter getting hit in the head with a swing, and in it I’m thinking about my brother-in-law who pulled a pot of boiling water on himself when he was a toddler. These were the two experiences at its core, and my great fear in the essay is that you can’t protect your children from everything, and I think that people can get that whether or not they have their own children. I’ve also overlaid on it questions of momentum and of weight versus mass. The last paragraph says, basically, that you can get along in this world with a basic knowledge of physics that you attain through your sensory experience. You can ride a bike without understanding the equations of gyroscopic motion that allow you to balance on two wheels; you can do it by feel. But people often confuse mass, which is measured in kilograms, with weight, which we measure in pounds, because our everyday experience is inextricable from gravity. Behind all this, I’m considering a story I read about exit interviews with college students who’ve taken a physics class, but they’re still confused about some basic physics concepts, like conservation of energy or the uniform acceleration of gravity. Even though they’ve learned the correct principles, they revert to an Aristotelian sensory understanding of the way the world works. But that’s not essential to the essay. I think you can still understand the way that I try to use the word gravity in its double sense: not just the force the Earth exerts on our bodies or the way any two masses exert force on each other, but the emotional gravity of a situation, which is what the essay is about. So, in general, I think I’ve scaled back a little bit and I’m not so heavy on those kinds of concepts. I’m trying to allow them to work as metaphor. Can I ask your experience reading those parts? Do you have a science background?
 
JE: I have my general education and I took advanced science classes in high school, and I enjoy the essays. I don’t know if it’s just me as an individual or me as the kind of lay educated reader that you mentioned, but I found them very accessible and enjoyable.

PM: I’m glad to hear it, because I do worry about that. I don’t worry about that enough to completely obliterate that aspect of my writing or to hide it, but I try to find a balance so that someone whose background isn’t quite my own can get what I’m saying, at least sufficiently.

JE: Something else that I feel separates your essays from most other contemporary essays is that in both of your books you include a lot of images, photos or diagrams, and I was wondering—well, in a very simplified way of asking—why? In certain essays I could make a direct connection between the images and the text. With some images, I had to think a little bit more. I was just curious as to why you choose to purposefully include not just images, but a catalog—you have the references and the source material for each image—so everything is accounted for.

PM: I have a rather uncomplicated reason that I could complicate a little bit, but the straightforward answer is that I love W. G. Sebald’s books. Are you familiar with his work?

JE: I am not.

PM: Well, then you have a treat awaiting you, because I think he’s one of the most interesting writers I’ve ever read. His books are highly essayistic but maybe not utterly nonfictional. You were talking about how you want to call your work essays because in humor there’s a kind of tall-tale exaggerative effect that fictionalizes, if you have to name it. Well Sebald is not telling tall tales, but he’s accommodating reality, I think. In any case, his books are peppered with these images that are sometimes illustrative, like when a picture shows what he’s been writing about, and sometimes they’re more enigmatic, so they create a counterpoint to the text or even challenge what the text is saying. Other times it’s not entirely clear why the image is there, what the purpose is behind it. His images are like mine—they’re black and white, there’re many photographs or clippings or things like that—and they’re just printed in line with the text. Another author who has influenced me similarly, but in a slightly different way, is Eduardo Galeano, especially The Book of Embraces, which is illustrated. He took old-timey etchings and drawings and he cut them together into strange combinations like an octopus-headed schoolboy or a gun firing a bird, things like that. I’m not doing that, though. I’m doing more the Sebaldian style. And I want the images to be counterpoints to the text the same way that the block quotes are. The block quotes are in conversation with the text; they’re not really supporting my points or anything—at least I hope they’re not. Sometimes I want them to be a challenge. For instance, there’s a picture of Gleek, the space monkey from The Wonder Twins, and on the page right around it I say something like “I’m not going to go look this up.” I have this image in my mind of an eagle carrying Gleek carrying a bucket of water but I’m not going to go check because I’m just not keen on The Wonder Twins anymore now that I’m grown up. But then there’s this picture of the exact thing I said I was not going to look up, so I hope for some readers that’s going to be like, “What a minute, what’s that doing here?” It’s intended somewhat facetiously to undermine me a little bit. There’s another where I quote from an Aries zodiac sign bookmark that I had as a kid, and then there’s a picture of that bookmark, and if you pay attention, what I quoted is not exactly what it says on the bookmark. So there again I have undermined my credibility a little bit. The fact is that I wrote it as I remembered it, and then later I found the actual bookmark. Great! So I decided I was going to put that in there but noticed that the bookmark didn’t say exactly what I had remembered, and I thought, “Well, I’ll leave this little Easter egg for readers who have time on their hands and nothing better to do. They might enjoy this.” Or now they’ll read this interview and know that it’s there. I’m always trying to be a little bit playful, trying to rub against the essays with a different mode. The thing that I would love to do that I can’t do in a book like this, but I might try to do something online, is to provide music, sound files, YouTube clips, for an essay like “Independent Redundancy,” which relies heavily on musical examples. If I get the energy I’ll get that online someday.

JE: I’m sure Ander Monson would love to help you with that.

PM: Maybe I’ll ask him for some help.

JE: I have one simple question to follow up: When you buy books or browse books on Amazon, it always gives a recommendation like, “If you like this book you might like these other books.” So if you could be Amazon and somebody is loving your work, what would books would you recommend?

PM: You know, Amazon does a pretty good job with this by tracking what people actually buy together or what they look for together. We were talking before about essayists who are directly plugged into the classical form of the essay, and of course David Lazar, whom I studied with, influenced me a ton, and he writes in a similar way. Unsurprisingly, his mentor, Phillip Lopate, too. I really love Mary Cappello, who does book-length essays on interesting topics. She’s got a book coming out this fall on moods called Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack (you can see that we share an affinity for archaic –ck spellings). I remember when I first encountered her work, about a decade ago, her website said she’d been working on a book on moods, and I remember thinking, “I can’t wait for that book!” It’s taken this long (though she published two other books in the meantime), so it’s one of the books that I’m anticipating probably more than any book ever. I’ve heard her read from it, and it’s tremendous. Chris Arthur, an Irish essayist, and I come from different backgrounds and are slightly off in generations, but we’ve kind of reached a similar place where we both love these classical-style essays. I’ve already mentioned W. G. Sebald and Eduardo Galeano, whom I love. Some essayists who aren’t so much like my writing but who I really appreciate: Elena Passarello, Joni Tevis, and Amy Leach. They’re all beautiful lyrical stylists. I mentioned Ander Monson, who’s a quirky, very cool essayist. Your own friend and advisor, Stephen Church, is doing a lot of essayistic essays, too. Essays that don’t just telling you what happened but think about it overtly. Kim Dana Kupperman and Matthew Gavin Frank, too. I love essayists who are a little weird and have a distinct personality. You could pick up a new essay and if you knew their other work, you’d recognize them based on just the writing style. As we’ve been talking about, I want to see somebody thinking on the page, and all of these writers do that. There are other writers as well. I’m certainly forgetting somebody important who I owe a great debt to, but those are a bunch there. Who are some of your favorites?

JE: Let’s see, obviously Ian Frazier, as we’ve already mentioned. Have you read Veronica Geng?

PM: No.

JE: She’s somebody you might be interested in. She was a contributor and an editor for The New Yorker for a long time. She was Philip Roth’s favorite editor. She wrote essays, though at the time, in the late ’80s and ’90s, they were called stories. She was a good friend and mentor to Ian Frazier.

PM: Oh, cool.

JE: Also, George W. S. Trow. He’s most famous for Within the Context of No Context, and My Pilgrim’s Progress. Those are both book-length cultural studies essays about the media, but he also has a collection that’s out of print, but you can get it online, titled Bullies, and again it’s one of those ones that’s called a collection of stories, but I think if it were published today it would probably be called essays. I love Dinty Moore, Elena as well. I love Elena to death. And John D’Agata.

PM: I think he’s brilliant.

JE: In one of Steven Church’s classes, he had us read Halls of Fame and I enjoyed it, but it was also very challenging. It challenged a lot of my understandings of what the essay is. On Looking by Lia Purpura did the same thing for me in terms of challenging the notions that I had of what an essay is and what it should be.

PM: Yeah. Lia Purpura’s doing these rich, poetic, lyric essays, but you feel like she’s also participating in the tradition of the essay.

JE: So many writers are essaying now, either as full-time essayists, or poets, fiction writers, and playwrights taking up the essay to explore what the mode can do. I’d be interested in your view on current the trend of essaying and the diversity of work being done with the essay. What is exciting to you about the state of the essay today?

PM: As I’ve mentioned, I’m very happy that the term essay seems now to be a badge of honor, something to shout from the rooftops instead of to hide or to hide from. Now there seem to be enough savvy readers who really know and like and purchase essay collections. I’m also very happy that more people are trying their hand at essaying, even those working primarily in other fields. I’m a little protective of the term, though, and I wish that we’d never used it to describe the five-paragraphy assignment that teachers use to test their students’ knowledge and rhetoric, and likewise I wish we’d call stories stories and essays essays, whether they’re fictional or nonfictional. In other words, if a writer tells a true autobiographical story, narratively, with no reflection or association, I don’t think that’s an essay. If it doesn’t essay anything, then it’s not an essay. I feel we owe this to the spirit of Montaigne. Still, I’m excited that writers are trying essays, and that they’re borrowing forms and experimenting with styles, pushing the genre in ways that Montaigne himself never tried, but that I imagine he’d be proud of.

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Patrick Madden is the author of two books, Sublime Physick and Quotidiana, both essay collections. He also co-edited After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays and co-translated the Selected Poems of Eduardo Milán. He teaches at Brigham Young University

Jacob Eckrich is an MFA candidate at Fresno State. He currently serves Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor for The Normal School. The manuscript for his first book, (A)musings: Essays, will be finished soon-ish.

Who You Are, Where You Are: Amy Wright on Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder, The Great Clod: Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East AsiaBerkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2016

Over dinner once, Will Hearst asked his friend Gary Snyder what attracted him to China as a young man. The question was innocent enough to prompt an answer that surprised Snyder who replied, “I got interested at an early age in East Asia. But for the wrong reasons.” The inevitable follow-up, “Wrong in what way?” went unasked except by Snyder himself who tucked his curiosity into the back of his mind where it seeded an essay, as defined by Paul Graham as something you write to try to figure out. [1]
     His book-length answer will interest longtime fans of this Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, but what gives it appeal beyond Snyder scholarship is how he traces the question of what makes any of us the way we are through Japan’s and China’s complex relationships to nature, which is to say the paradox inherent in the process of civilization.
     Dedicated to Burton Watson, the PEN-Prize-winning translator and scholar of Japanese and Chinese literature, this book is a conversation as well as a work of Montaignean self-education. A landscape in itself, Snyder sweeps at times with a broad brush across this long cultural history, drawing as it does on a variety of influences, including “the great strengths of Neolithic-type culture: village self-government networks, an adequate and equal material base, a round of festivals and ceremonies, and a deep grounding in the organic processes and cycles of the natural sphere.” [2] Other times, he paints the “plum rain” and winter storms in Japan, characterized by their unusual share of lightning superbolts, with a brush as fine as those made with mouse-whiskers. [3]
     In the process, Snyder comes to recognize and to make readers aware too that from around the Ming dynasty (1368 on), landscape paintings that were designed to propagate a love of wilderness were increasingly created by people who had “never much walked the hills, for clients who would never get a chance to see such places.” [4] In this way The Great Clod feels timely, though Snyder calls on a decade spent in Japan in the 1960s and a trip to Hokkaido in the summer of 1972. But then so is his 1990 essay collection, The Practice of the Wild, still relevant to current climate conversations, even as the wild has been subjugated out of existence. What environmental discussions may in fact need now in order to evolve is Snyder’s willingness to be wrong, paired with his close examination of the complex reasons why.
     Still, Snyder is far from prescribing a path forward. After all he ranks Daoism, a philosophy that honors the way that cannot be named, as “one of the world’s top two or three” worldviews. [5] What he offers instead is a long timeline of Far Eastern progress and its ramifications on a planetary scale. His conclusion though, ending as it does with a line of poetry, refuses to draw a hard line about what to make of these “Notes.” Again recalling the gesture of Montaigne’s Essais, he leaves readers to do the same puzzling over cause and effect he has done himself.
     Take the word “civilization,” which he points out in Chinese is wên-ming, meaning “understanding writing.” The author of twenty-two books might know something about that. Snyder is not merely playing with semantics either, since the “tool of the poet and painter, the inkstick (even more essential to the Chinese administration), was responsible for much deforestation.” [6] One of humanity’s highest accomplishments—the ability to communicate with each other and to express ideas—depended on emitting carbon.
     He follows this stream of ink forward. Those pines burned to produce soot were mixed with glue and fragrance then ground with a brush-softening stroke in what amounted to “a meditation on the qualities of rock, water, trees, air, and shrubs.” [7] To understand writing, he demonstrates here, is to understand civilization. The act and this ancient method are ennobling but want less environmentally taxing means. A scientist-humanist in the eleventh century made one such effort that Snyder relays. As an alternative to burning pines, Shen Kua experimented with using naturally occurring petroleum as ink. I can imagine that black lacquer filling reams of books instead of engines, eons-sequestered carbon remaining stable instead of going up in smoke.
     The Great Clod, though, is not a tale of what might have been. Snyder’s rue for what is has been tempered with far too much acceptance for regret. Had his reasons not been wrong for pursuing the East Asia of his imagination he would never have learned more and come to better understand a nation he made home for over a decade. His failure to write the article that commissioned his travel to Hokkaido in 1971 at last became his inspiration to do it the justice of depicting the island in its historical context. The need to correct himself led him to research the habitat of this region 45,000 years ago and to trace forward the meeting ground of the Arctic bear and the shorter-haired black bear that fostered the Gilyak, a paleo-Asiatic people. The result is a mind map of East Asia, following the trajectories of the Hsia dynasty to the Shang, Han, T’ang, and more.
  At times the history lesson can grow tedious, as when one learns, for instance:
“A decade after the fall of the Northern Sung capital K’ai-feng to the Juchen (Chin), the town of Lin-an, at the rivermouth was declared the new capital. The émigré emperor, his court, and crowds of refuges of the northern ruling class settled in. The name was changed to Hang-chou.” [8] Snyder repays one’s perseverance, though, with a poet’s penchant for often overlooked details, as when he describes the blue-glazed brick of the Thunder Point Buddhist temple pagoda or a girl’s song about “gathering fennel on top of Sunny Point” from the Shih Ching, “Classic of Songs.”
     The real strength of these notes though is what has long made Snyder the writer he is—the allegiance to “one ecosystem/ in diversity/ under the sun” he pledges in Turtle Island. Forty-one years later, he augments that celebration of difference with a studied reflection. With the saving grace of humility he demonstrates the danger of romanticizing any culture or region, for one might stop at the surface layers of dissimilarity and miss the deep underlying common ground. Or, one might leap to commonality without appreciating centuries of accrued variegation, striking as canyon walls and subtle as leaf shades. From such apologias turn the great clods of earth and matter that we cultivate and reap, depend on, and are. Naturally, resolutions and solutions are born of them.

*

NOTES

[1] Klaus, Carl H. and Ned Stuckey-French. Essayists on the Essay. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press (2012), 174.
[2] Snyder, Gary. The Great Clod.  Berkeley: Counterpoint Press (2016), 30
[3] Ibid. 11, 123.
[4] Ibid. 130.
[5] Ibid. 34.
[6] Ibid. 65.
[7] Ibid. 124
[8] Ibid. 85

*

Amy Wright is the author of the prose chapbook, Wherever the land is, published in 2016. She is also the Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press, Coordinator of Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University, and author of two forthcoming poetry collections. Her writing appears in Brevity, Kenyon Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. More information at www.awrightawright.com.