Nicole Walker & Ander Monson on Rebecca Solnit's THE FARAWAY NEARBY

Nicole:

I have an idea for Essay Daily--as indicated by the subject line of this message.

Do you want to do a Q&A with me about Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby? I'm almost done with it and have some thoughts but also I want to know what you think. That's semi-novel, right? Interviewing each other about someone else's book?

*

Ander:

I'm sitting in on a class observation at the moment for one of our MFA's nonfiction workshops at the moment, where the class is discussing your essay "Superfluidity". That’s kind of like a seam in itself, isn’t it? You on one side of this asynchronous communication channel and your work being discussed in absentia on the other, with, I suppose, my attention being the thing that elides the two.

I like the idea of doing some kind of mutual interview about the book. Another one of our MFA students, Kati Standefer, did a lovely reverse engineering of the structure of the book in my collections class (which is what we were doing in there: looking at the structure of collections), and I've been trying to write something about The Faraway Nearby and Phillip Lopate's newest book (Portrait Inside My Head) for a little while that has to do something with distance, how each book controls and elides distance. I seem to be using “elides” a lot these days. I really do love that word. We could do this over the next whatever, and then actually schedule it to run as part of our advent calendar, maybe? [Note: we obviously did not get around to this. —Eds]

*

Nicole:

How did the reverse engineering go on the Solnit book? That's one place I want to start. I guess I'll start with my first thought. I think we can just run an email thread and then shiny it up if we need to. I like the advent idea.

My first thought is this--You and I both just finished projects that collected very short essays. In your case, the library card catalog was the organizing principle. In mine, it was the word "micro." In Solnit's Faraway Nearby the structure of the book is pretty seamless. The chapters are roughly 20 pages long--normal "I-am-a-cohesive-narrative" chapter length. She doesn't use white space to predict a turn. The book is presented as a unified treatise but although she dips a few times into some of the themes, the book, if you pull it apart into its constituent segments, would be a book more fragmented that either of ours. Essays about apricots, Frankenstein, Iceland, Buddhism, snow, the color white, her friend's cancer, her friend's baby, her mother's distance, the body, sex accumulate--but do they accrete?

2nd part of question: Is the ticker tape that runs along the bottom, although disjointed from the main text, the more cohesive of the two parts?

*

Ander:

I've been thinking a lot about very short essays, as you know, both in terms of your project and my own (I'd qualify this by saying, though, that library catalog cards really aren't what I'm going for with that--the cards I'm writing are 6x9s and I put them in books; though maybe I should have been thinking catalog cards more often), and shortness in general. There's that Patricia Vigderman essay collection I wrote about here on Essay Daily (though they're not all shorties). Aurelie Sheehan has a new short-short fiction collection that just dropped. Lucy Corin's new book consists of about 70% short shorts. So it's on my mind. Alison Deming has a new one of pretty short essays too forthcoming next fall I think. I'm not sure what's up with that all, actually.

I'm interested in talking about the ticker tape first, perhaps, since it's a more obvious formal intervention than the other stuff going on in the book (the mirroring, if you want to call it that, or the nesting, the pairing anyhow of sets of essays, made particularly obvious in the ToC). It also asks more of us as readers, because it's so obvious. We can't look at a page or a spread without being aware there's this thing going on that we can read, sort of, dipping into, but that's basically unreadable as part of our main text experience, right? That is, if we want to really read it, we need to just read that the whole way through, blowing through the book. At least I found it unreadable as part of the main text (though the eye does pick up some language), and ended up having to read it as a kind of coda to the book.

I have a couple questions about that: 1> does that feature pay off in enough pleasure/interest to make it worth the disruption of our reading experience as we read the main text? 2> is its addition to the other innovations (the pairings/ echoes/ mirrors) too much for the text to bear?

Here I'm betraying the way I think about formal innovation, in terms of frustration versus pleasure, or how much a feature makes us work (or what work it asks a reader to do), versus how it rewards that work. And I'm also suggesting a principle of formal experimentation that I think about a lot: combining formal experiments raises the difficulty (if also the ambition) of the text exponentially--not linearly. That is, reading a book with one weird/fun formal thing (like Adam Thirlwell's Kapow!) requires us to learn how to do this one sort of work, and it does it a lot and in different ways. But doing that AND asking us to also figure out this other formal component increases the difficulty (and requisite payoff) at least 4x, not 2x.

Okay, I have another question about that ticker tape feature (I'm not sure it's accurate to call it ticker tape, actually, but that's what came to mind to me first too. That or the news crawl at the bottom of cable channels.), which is, how does it ask us to think about the book as an object? And is that thinking related to what goes on in that essay?

Maybe we can come back to the first question--of its seamlessness (which I also perceived: it's certainly one of her best tricks) a bit later?

*

Nicole:

The ticker tape, which is what I also call the crawl on the bottom of the news, in this case seems to be one of co-engineering. The content of the tape is mostly absorbed with the symbiotic and sometimes parasitic relationships. Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. The yucca plant pollinated by moths. Those moths whose larva feeds on the Yucca. There are moths that live underground feeding on the roots of wallaby grass. Happiness, sorrow. Mothers daughters. Each feeding on each other or each feeding each other. They are like stories. In the ticker tape, she references Apuleius's Golden Ass, stories tucked inside other stories, a kind of Arabian Nights. At the end of the 'big text," she tells a story about a modern-day Scheherazade. You can't read them simultaneously but you can read the bottom as little cilia on the ocean floor, taking nutrients from the big washing above them. And the oceanic text, trolling the cilia for little bites of story to grow big upon. In the ticker tape, she writes, "Moths drink the tears. The word for teardrinkers is lachryphagous, and for the eater of human flesh it is anthropophagous, and the rest of us feed on sorrow all the time." There are at least three stories in there. She unpacks them, metaphorically at least, in the big text. I wonder more at the write-ability rather than the readability. To keep track, to keep going, she uses the scrolling underground as a kind of food. The one text, like the yucca and the moth, couldn't survive without the other.

In Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them deploys a similar two-text strategy. The over-ground, where one version of the Peter Pan story goes, another underground, where the more rooty, fluid-ridden, desperate story goes. Boully's book does not seem co-generative in the way that Solnit's is. Boully's book seems interested in disrupting--disrupting the narrative, the myth, the fairytale, the innocent non-sexual reading of the book, so you can read them concurrently. The narrative isn't particularly seamless in either the top or the bottom text, so it's easy to stop and read the bottom or the top. Solnit's big text reads seamlessly. To read the underlying text is to go back to the beginning to see the seeds of this book. How it got made.

*

Ander:

I like where you're thinking about the idea of food--what feeds the essay/ist, what keeps it going? That's an important question, and in terms of Solnit, I can certainly see how the ticker tape text works as a food source for the other essays. I'd be very curious as to whether it was used that way in its composition. I suppose it's probably secondary how it worked for the writer (though maybe primary on Essay Daily, where we're hosting this conversation, since it's really a resource for essayists more than anything else) to what work it does for the reader.

For a paired set of texts I feel you with Jenny's book (she's coming here next week to read so I'll hope to ask her some questions about how she dealt with the two texts at once, and how they were generative or not (I don't remember reading any interviews where she talked about it, and I've read a lot of her interviews recently). I'm thinking instead of Wayne Koestenbaum's Hotel Theory, which I don't know if you've read or not. It consists of two separate texts cohabiting, one running verso and one running recto continuously throughout the book. One's a kind of trashy novel featuring celebrities in hotels, and the other's a series of meditations/essays on hotels, hotels being the space where the two interact (and a space for separate, somewhat anonymized, unrelated, compartmentalized interactions in general, that being the appeal of hotels). It's been a while since I reread that book, but I remember the two not having too many moments of correspondence. I don't know if those moments of correspondence or resonance that I noticed were intentional (a la I want to ensure we see an image occur on both sides of the spread) or if they were coincidental (though perhaps seeded by revising and composing both texts at the same time and having some similar considerations in mind seeding both—and this is a real big aside here, but I'd also be interested in having a conversation about how writers working on two (or more) big projects at once (perhaps in different genres, probably in different genres) manage the cross-echoes and cross-pollination that happens with that kind of double thinking/double composition. That's kind of like how one book can seed another or how an essay can seed another, even if done sequentially, since it's not like we use up all our material for a given book when we write that book.

There's something here I feel we're getting at about how component parts work in a text, whether or not they shows their seams in the final version. Certainly Solnit shows her seams in the ToC with the structure she sets up both in the pairings, or maybe we want to call them nestings. How we think about them seems important, because a split doll metaphor leads us to something more like Cloud Atlas and the pairings (or maybe mirrorings, since two of the chapters/essays are themselves called "Mirrors") get us somewhere else, don't they? The visual presentation of the ToC itself makes an argument, since each essay/chapter is tabbed in from the previous one until it reaches 7. Knot and then tabs back out, so it's more like an arc—maybe more like a journey, a metaphor that's maybe too obvious to talk about since the book consists substantially of a series of journeys (but then what book doesn't?). I confess that I still am not sure what to make of the visual presentation in the table of contents. The pairing's already obvious with the title pairs.

My experience of the book itself is one of an evident seamlessness, as it often is with her work. Often the prose feels so thought-through, so lived in, and so polished that I feel at a great distance from her sentences. It's a very pleasurable effect, reading them, and not dissimilar to ASMR (do you know about this? the autonomous sensory meridian response, which I am susceptible to—I've been thinking about this a lot lately, but again, maybe too tangential for this space? but then this is freaking Essay Daily and what are we up for if not tangents?). I was working on an essay talking about both The Faraway Nearby and Phillip Lopate's Portrait Inside My Head, two essay collections that I enjoyed very much that also feel very far apart to me, thinking specifically about seams: how Solnit's work to me feels seamless, and Lopate's all about showing the seams (his argument that the thing holding the essay collection is the I in all its variousness). I mean here the seams in the I, maybe not the seams between the paragraphs.

I've also had Boully on the brain, since so much of her work seems to me to be about the seam (whether The Body, footnotes to an absent text, The Book of Beginnings and Endings with its emphasis on seam, or not merely). All of them disrupt, I think, our reading processes, and gather a lot of their energy from that disruption. Thinking here of her essay on being I don't think that Solnit is interested (at least in her pairings or seedings) in disrupting, though I found the ticker tape text to be disruptive, whether or not that was her intention. Even in "A Short Essay on Being" she's disruptive, or later asserting a disruption (even as she wouldn't have done so—in the Thai way, she'd tell us—in the moment). [See also my little riff on Boully’s work as an introduction to the Hybrid Series she read as part of here at Arizona recently. —Ander, after the fact of this co-interview.]

*

Nicole:

I thought at first that the table of contents made an image of a flock of geese, a group of birds in formation making in-roads in the shape of a V. But then, as I typed the first sentences of each of Solnit’s paragraphs in the first “Breath” chapter, I realized better what the image suggests: that of an icebreaker, cutting through the white landscape of the page.

Solnit’s landscapes are the vast, blank expanses, the big subjects (loss, grief, preservation, art, death) into which Solnit plows with her sharp paragraphs. Those paragraphs do not hang together. They veer, turn, cut. In that one chapter, called “Breath,” she moves from Marquis de Sade, story theory, bodies, decay, cooking machines, canning, back to apricots, paintings, The Netherlands, museums, the painter Abraham van Beyeren, a seventeenth century Protestant preacher, another painter named David Bailly, a contemporary of the apricot painter Jacob van Hulsdonck, bubbles, vanitas, biopsies, cancer, apricot as metaphor, “The real story of your life is always all the way from birth to death,” and they only come to you in the shape of images, returning to vanitas. “All of the images they make of you are vanitas images.”

Death is like a story or death is like an apple or mother’s are like apricots, always in decay. If each chapter, each section, even each paragraph is a veer, a “v” cutting into the great unknown white, then there’s going to be some friction. As the stories rub against each other, they begin to create heat. Solnit rubs Frankenstein against Buddhism, Marquis de Sade against breast cancer. Perhaps then, the scroll at the bottom is more of a rope, something less to hang onto for explanation than to slide down, burning your hands. Apparent seamlessness made by making you climb the seams.

*

Ander:

So the variousness in subject, and the quick shifts from idea to idea in The Faraway Nearby, create heat. I definitely feel that. That heat’s the action of the essayist mind working, placing tectonic plate by tectonic plate, and we feel something coming up in the seams between, in their adjacency (on the paragraph to paragraph, line of argument to line of argument level, and not just between the separate essays, or between the main text and the crawling text). Maybe that’s why I love a thoughtful collection more than the apparent seamlessness of the book-length essay, for the opportunities to create or let through these types of heat.

There’s a quote from Lopate’s “In Defense of the Miscellaneous Essay Collection” which opens his most recent miscellaneous essay collection: “the personal essay is uniquely suited to expose this continuous bumping up against limits, against the borders of the self—which is one good reason I cling to it.” This essay is itself a revision of an essay originally published in River Teeth in 2010, then called “In Defense of the Essay Collection,” and I'm a little curious about the addition of "miscellaneous," which seems implied to Lopate in "essay collection," but maybe his editor preferred it? It’s a nice move to use it to front-end Portrait Inside My Head, since it offers its own theory of mind and essay and then the book goes on to perform it. That bumping that we see and feel and experience in Lopate is different than the bumping we get in Solnit, I think. Solnit’s bumping is filtered through what I read as a relatively continuous and constant voice and sensibility, even as it moves from subject to subject, timeframe to timeframe. Lopate’s bumping is much more overt: “I persist in putting forth a collection that will include my musings on movies, literature, friendship, sex, urban history, city form, and the nail parings of daily life, so that the reader can enjoy the fluent play of a single consciousness, a sensibility flowing through disparate subject matters.” And Portrait offers us exactly this, except that the sensibility seems to me to vary pretty significantly from essay to essay, and this is something that Lopate makes a feature, not a flaw. It may be the same brain we see throughout the book, but Lopate leaves the edges in between one mood and another, one state of mind and another, and it feels quite craggy moving from essay to essay, and within an individual essay (there are 28 of them) it’s more continuous. So it’s like we’re stepping from big tectonic plate to big tectonic plate, but the plates are stable on their own. In Solnit, there are only thirteen, and all but one are paired with another, and it seems to me that the sensibility in each essay is pretty much continuous with the others (and feels to me more distant than in Lopate), but within the essays she’s jumping constantly between plates. I’m not so sure I’m committed to my plate tectonics metaphor here, particularly since both books feel fluid (and explicitly invoke fluidity as a way of thinking about what they do—and also use “fluid” multiple times in the text itself; Lopate: 5, Solnit: 4, if you’re keeping track; thanks, Amazon Search Inside the Book; thanks, future!).

I guess what I’m interested in here is not just the obvious form and the way it manifests itself on the page (the visual look of Solnit), but the way in which the method of movement in the text (a kind of form, right?) is related to the mind at work, and, to quote Lopate again, “the shagginess of the essay, its discontinuous forms of consciousness.”

*

Nicole:

What you say about distance intrigues me. Perhaps that is one way to appear seamless--if you hold your mother-story (and "mother" story) at arms length, you hold your Frankenstein story there, your moth story, your breast cancer story, your Buddhist story, your San Francisco story, then the transitions don't seem so much like jump cuts as links in a chain. I spend so much time with my students on the reason to zoom in, create a scene, and the reason to zoom out, have a point, claim a meaning, that I haven't fully investigated the advantages of never zooming. Perhaps Solnit's a purely literary model, shaped not at all by film or internet. We have so many multimedia skills in our writing capacity that one we may disregard too quickly is the textual strategy of maintaining objectivity. When Solnit looks at her relationship to her mother, she does it with the same critical skill she looks at Frankenstein.

The micro book I'm working on makes the opposite claim: we are all internets now. We all make movies. We might as well jump cut from one long text to a short one and back again, threatening text's signature linearity. Maybe that's what Solnit's ticker tape finally argues--that texts run forward through time. Time doesn't stop, why should the words?

*

ANDER MONSON is the author of a number of paraphernalia including a website, a decoder wheel, several chapbooks, as well as six books, including the forthcoming Letter to a Future Lover (Graywolf Press, 2015). He lives in Tucson where he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and edits the journal DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press.

NICOLE WALKER’s Quench Your Thirst with Salt won the Zone 3 Award for Creative Nonfiction and was released in June 2013. She is the author of a collection of poems, This Noisy Egg  (Barrow Street 2010) and edited, with Margot Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, (Bloomsbury, 2013) and with Rebecca Campbell—7 Artists, 7 Rings—an Artist’s Game of Telephone for the Huffington Post. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment from the Arts, she’s nonfiction editor at DIAGRAM and associate professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.

                                                                                                                         

The Essay in the Twilight Zone

 

I just got back from the AWP conference, and while I was there people kept asking me, as nonfiction editor at The Pinch, the same question: “What sort of stuff are you looking for?” This question, or some form of it comes up constantly, and I often do not have a real answer. So, I had something I was going to post here about what it is to be the nonfiction editor at the journal, but this question keeps bothering me. I keep trying to answer it and keep coming up short. For me, for this journal, I don’t think the question has a real answer.  

Because this question has no real answer, I often resort to the response, “If it’s good, we’ll publish it.” However, that is most certainly not the case. To be honest, I’m not really sure what that response means. “Good” is so subjective; and that response implies that everything that gets rejected is “bad,” which everyone knows is not true. What I mean is that I’m open to anything, so long as it is a “fit,” for us, which is another tricky thing to define. I do know that deciding whether or not something fits us is often much easier to decide than whether or not something is “good.”

There are plenty of times that I read a good essay that doesn’t fit The Pinch, for whatever reason. Or we might have stuff that some people really like and others do not. Editing a journal is a process of subjectivity, so to answer the question of what I want, I can only tell people to send me anything because, much like the famous Supreme Court definition of pornography, I don’t always know it until I see it.

For me, great essays exist in that figurative space known as the twilight zone, the space between the opening of a cave and the darkness of its interior, the same place where one would find ancient cave paintings. A great essay needs, at bare minimum, to have two meanings. It needs the meaning that stands out and the one that sneaks up and hits me in the gut. There's the meaning that is present, and obviously so, that is plain as daylight, and then there's the meaning that's not so clear. The latter exists in the ethereal realm, invisible but emotionally just as present as the former. The former represents the light at the opening of the cave; it is bright, shining, easy to see. The latter is the darkness, and not as easy to see, but just as integral. I’m not saying anything new here. In fact this all feels pretty universal. Many nonfiction editors will say the same thing in some way or another. The essay must be what it’s about and what it’s about. 

          I like to think we are a journal that is not afraid to publish anything—flash, memoir, lyric, graphic, experimental, traditional, or something in between—but I think what people want to hear is that we want what they write. We want their style or their material, but things are rarely that easy. 
          It is easy to remind yourself that an editor’s opinion is subjective, but it’s even easier to forget that fact. It’s easy to feel that tiny pang of disappointment when something gets rejection after rejection. But if something is good, I like to believe it has a home. This is where the term “good” falls into murkiness. And this is where one of the most difficult aspects of being an editor arises: judging writing. I think when I say “good” I mean, for one, the things that have the elements of good writing, things like clean prose, tight language, etc. but for another, it has to teach me in some way, or make me think about it after I'm done reading. A good essay should make me want to tell my friends about it.

Look at the Steve Adams essay, “Touch,” in our Spring 2012 issue. What we have first is a story about testicular trauma, but what we end up with is a deep appreciation for all things delicate in life. That essay continues to surprise me. To relate it to my previous point, another surprising thing about that essay is that it was rejected by18 literary journals before finding a home at The Pinch, and then it went on to win a Pushcart Prize.

“Wing Trace,” by Kathleen Blackburn, from our Spring 2014 issue does the same thing: it sticks with me and makes me think. That essay is about so many things. I could tell you it’s an essay about the flight patterns of albatrosses, which would be right. I could say that it’s about the death of her father, which would also be right. I could tell you it is about grief and loss and be right. But let’s say that piece lost one of those elements. If that were the case, it would almost positively lose its resonance. Those are just two examples of many that show my point.

Something that attracted me to The Pinch is that we welcome things that not everyone would. One of my favorite pieces we’ve recently published is the graphic memoir “Proof I Wanted,” by Kristen Radtke (Fall 2013). There is little that excites me more than form in nonfiction executed properly, and I think Kristen does that.  One of the first essays I read in The Pinch was Ander Monson’s “Solipsism” from the Fall 2007 issue. I read that essay wished I could publish things like that. Both of these exhibit the things I look for in nonfiction, they just happen to have the added benefit of experimentation with form.

Something else to consider is that a journal such as The Pinch, which is managed mostly by graduate students, is a living, changing thing that goes through its own lifecycles. Aside from a few, permanent editors all members of our staff last roughly three years. That means we are always evolving, for better or worse. We learn from those who have come before us. In that way we are able to maintain tradition without stagnation. Of course, having people on the editorial staff for three years at a time also means an inevitable fluctuation in taste and preferences. An essay that hits me will not always do the same for other editors. Also, an editorial staff that functions in this way must be open to discussion. If I were not open to the opinion of others, or they to me, some great writing would slip through the cracks.

The evolution also means just because I might fall in love with an essay does not mean everyone else will, or that my editor will want to print it. But if an essay is tenacious enough to stick with me, I can fight for its right to exist within our pages. I have the power to insist on its survival. Those heated debates about what makes for good nonfiction can be both the greatest and the worst things about being an editor.

Now, I suppose this has all been an unsuccessful attempt to answer the question of what I look for. But as I said, I have no real answer to that question, and I am sure I have not answered it here. I will say that being an editor on a literary journal takes some starry-eyed naivety that you are helping to put art into the world. It takes a willingness to fight for a piece of writing, and writing could always use more fighters. When I’m willing to fight for something, that is a surefire way to know I’ve found what I’ve been looking for. Otherwise, I have to rely on knowing it when I see it. 

Matthew Gallant is creative nonfiction editor at The Pinch. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, he now lives and studies in Memphis, Tennessee. He is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at The University of Memphis.

Sarah Minor on Visual Essayists

Call it prose that is inextricable from the form it inhabits. An idea-based means of art-communication relying equally on language and image. Visual Essays are the things I am trying to name when I engage with a piece of writing that uses visual elements to further its thinking. Elsewhere known as a graphic/video/typographic essay, a comic, an artist's book, a public art text, prose graffiti, concrete prose poetry, etc. the visual essay is not a new form, just one that we have a lot of words for naming with very little streamlining between disciplines. 

I've heard it said that the work of design is to communicate efficiently, while the work of language is to do the same effectively. If these are opposing acts it means that a visual essay, in essence, is a battle for our attentions between two very different beasts. One we are made to watch or, I think, in the best VAs, to throw down in ourselves. But I'm not convinced that art, even design, is always interested in efficiency, or that what we thought was a battle of media doesn't often prove to be a conjugal visit after all. But I'm not sure how to talk about the difference yet, how critique work that slides into slender interdisciplinary crevices or falls half-uninterrogated in writing workshops and design studios. What we seem to lack is a language of craft that explains when these combinations are working, and when they are not. How does a conceptually dense text manage the additional complicating factors of form? Is the essay best fit for multimedia works because the act of trying is grappled with visually? How much of this is just about the amount of each media displayed? In this series of interviews with essayists who incorporate visuals—graphics, design, video, comics, photographs...—I'll be prodding both sides of some brains for ideas about process, and for new language to examine the nuts and bolts behind the craft of combining media. 




The first of these conversations is with Marian Bantjes.

S: “I Wonder” is a collection of essays involving visual elements like typography, photography, hand-drawn text and illustrations. These visuals are delicate, intricate, sometimes beautiful, other times jarring, but their work is not just that of aesthetic satisfaction. In each of your essays, the design material expands upon, illustrates and mimics the conceptual work happening in the text it accompanies. Often, it seems like the designed elements are having their own private joke that elaborates on ideas in the text, enacting visual puns alongside textual. Throughout the collection, your critique and mimicry of modernism is conveyed equally through text and image. I’m especially interested in how you convey a number of tones and develop ideas using both language and design. Do you begin a piece by writing or by designing? At what point in the process of an essay do both text and visuals come into play?

M: I definitely begin by writing, although I may have visuals in mind before I write, and it may help me touch on various themes, but the words come first. However, the words will often change after I've started designing the visuals. A case in point is the chapter "1 Sign 4 All" on signs in my hometown of Saskatoon. This was one of the "essays" in the book that started out as a blog post, and was written initially in sentences and paragraphs with supporting photographs. At some point in the process of translating it to the page I had the idea of rewriting the text to both look like and be in the vernacular of signage. Thus this became the most integrated piece in the book where there is a complete crossover between text and image.

S: That was definitely the essay that I was referring to when I called some of the designs jarring. Are you ever concerned that combining prose and design might signal to a reader that the prose is secondary to the images? Or that they need not invest deeply in the ideas in the text? Do you try to push back against this inclination?

M: I think that there is a perception that illustrated text is less serious  - or not as worth paying attention to than unillustrated text, which is unfortunate. I tend not to worry what people think so much as put it in front of them and make them figure it out. 

I think that much of my approach came from a continual frustration that I have with writings about visual subjects. I always seem to be reading something that talks about - even describes - something visual and never shows it (or shows it pages later in a special section of images), it almost makes me scream with frustration. This is not the case in John Berger's book 'Ways of Seeing'. There, the visuals interrupt the text always at the point where they are mentioned. This is a welcome change, but the images are visually abrupt and awkward. I had an idea a few years back that *someone* (not me) should do a history book that integrates the writing style, the visual written style (fonts, design etc. of the era), with art and images of the era, so that as much as possible when you are reading about e.g. the turn of the last century, you are immersed in the style of that century. So that you have a full experience of the information from an immersive visual perspective. 

'I Wonder' started as a group of quirky, somewhat design-related articles that I had written for a website a few years previous. Having observed and read other people's books that were reprints from blog writings, I was surprised that nothing was made of the transition from web to book. It got me to thinking about the differences between web and book, and the possibilities that the book had to create this visual immersion that I had been thinking about. "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars" was the first one I tackled in this manner and I was thrilled with the result: it has the appearance of stars and jewels at the same time, and the integration of the source of the material (which was a display of celestial-themed jewelery at the Griffiths Observatory in LA) with my whimsical imaginings. To me this proved my point completely - how much more satisfying, more delightful the silly essay was in this manner.

S: In your introduction you write a little about the intentionality of printing these pieces in a book rather than on the web. Though, theoretically, each piece could be reproduced electronically using fewer materials. Can you talk about the importance of a reader engaging with your work in hardcopy? Why does this matter for you and for the essays?

M: While the web has many advantages I don't think the contemplation of images is one of them. The key word there is "contemplation". The web is, of course full of all sorts of wonderful, startling, beautiful images, and an RGB backlit display is a great way to see them, but we tend to look and move on. Occasionally, one or two images may cause us to pause for a while, but it lacks the ability to cause us to look at length, explore and look again. I can't imagine a book like 'I Wonder' being sustainable on the web. It might be nice on a large tablet, but I don't know of such a thing. There is something nice about a page spread (the 2 pages of a book, side by side). Even at a relatively small book size, like 'I Wonder' there's a fair amount of real estate there, and printing allows for extremely good resolution of images. A book has a sense of a whole that an e-book never has to me. When I read books on my iPad I have a feeling of isolation, as though I'm viewing the book through a pinhole. When I have a book in my hands, I have a constant sense of where I am in it, and a very easy ability to flip back to remind myself where i came from or flip forward to see where i might be going. For 'I Wonder' I made a conscious decision to use printing techniques to my advantage, to create something that felt precious and desirable in a way that could only be an analog artifact. It's printed in full colour with a metallic gold throughout, it has a rich gold foiled cover and gold page edges. Yes, it owes a lot to illuminated manuscripts: they were my original inspiration for the book. Ultimately, in the spirit of not just talking about, but *doing*, I felt it imperative that if I were going to write a book about Wonder that it had to itself be an object of wonder. To *not* make it so would seem almost hypocritical to me.

S: Let’s get to some specifics--“The Politics of Ornament” enacts visual F-yous to the critics of ornament that are tailored to individually offend each of the quotes the designs enclose. Your voice is present only in design, rather than in language there. On the other hand “Honour” arranges pasta designs in the very framed-space its text addresses—maybe the opposite move, though each goes far beyond direct illustration of ideas. In my experience many writers working today are still at a loss for a vocabulary with which to discuss and critique the craft behind multimedia texts.  I might call the craft in your essay on stars something like “ visual personification” or “the enacting of” a subject through the marriage of text and image. Do you have a word, or a way to describe what exactly is going on between the macaroni frames and the text in “Honour”? How is this different from what is happening between text + design in “Ye Olde Graphic Designer”? 

M: The word I use for what I've been doing with this is "integration" or "integration between word and text" or sometimes "a symbiotic relationship between word and text" … the point being that one is not the same or as rewarding without the other. To this end, "1 Sign 4 All" is the most integrated; "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars" is next … "Honour" does what Honour talks about, which is to honour the text with a frame - this is the same as writing a book about Wonder and making it an artifact of Wonder at the same time. To not frame the text of the chapter on "Honour" - and in a laborious way, made by hand that gives it the value of my time - as I write about in the chapter, would be hypocritical. "Ye Olde Graphic Designer" is much closer to mere illustration. The graphics illustrate the things I'm talking about in the text, but instead of putting them in boxes, they are worked into a surround. But there's no real reason for them to be, other than to work with the other chapters in the book and contribute to the style of the book.

S: Speaking of, in “Ye Olde Graphic Designer” you pose the theory that logo-designers and the companies who hire them should apply the rules of heraldry to logo making as a means of aesthetic regulation or streamlining. Do you think we could also apply these rules to the practice of combining of prose and visuals? What might this look like, for you?

M: "Ye Olde Graphic Designer" was written tounge-in-cheek (mostly), and came directly from my discovery of the graphic language that exists in heraldry. While one could conceivably create a list of rules for combining prose and visuals, I can't see the relationship to heraldry. And besides, I'm a rule-breaker.

S: It seems like maybe rule-breaking is inherently involved in or required by the combination of various media. Have you been inspired to do this by other makers of visual essays? You address this a bit in your book, but is there anyone else in the design world, currently or historically, who you feel is doing similar work with prose?

M: Well, obviously the illuminated manuscripts - I think what intrigues me about them most are that sometimes there is a direct interplay between the text and the illuminations. Characters in the margins sometimes climb the text and reach in to fix typos; there are jokes in there, and visual play. It is this interaction between the two that interests me: text and image are friends: one is not slave to the other. I find it quite difficult to find examples of this symbiosis. It's not easy to do - it really seems to require both a visual and literary mind. I'm not sure how well I could do this with someone else's text, because I imagine I would be wanting to change it in places to create the right amount of interplay. Being a writer, a visual artist and a designer allowed me to make a book that would have been very difficult to make otherwise - for instance in "Ye Olde Graphic Designer" setting text into points like that is nigh on impossible without rewriting the text to fit into corners – which is what I did.

I suppose interactive books like "Griffin & Sabine" easily fall into this category - for some reason I didn't like those books. I don't know why.

There is one book that I absolutely love called "Women's World" by Graham Rawle. It's a work of staggering genius: a novel created entirely in word collage, where all the words and short pharases are cut out of women's magazines. While this could be a gimmick remarkable only for the massive amount of work it took, in actuality the most fascinating thing is how the language of the magazines has informed the feel and the narrative of the book. Reading it, you are steeped in a world of skirts and perfume in a way that is utterly magical. And again, this book would not be the same if typeset. It's partly the visuals of the words that transports you somewhere else. And, it's a ripping good read!

S: Thanks, Marian.

Marian Bantjes is a designer, typographer, writer and illustrator working internationally from her base on a small island off the west coast of Canada, near Vancouver. She is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), and regularly speaks about her work and thoughts at conferences and events worldwide. Her 2010 book “I Wonder" (published by Thames & Hudson, 2010) is an exploration of the marriage of word and image, written and illuminated by herself. It, along with several other pieces or her work, is included in the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (Smithsonian) in New York. Her retrospective book "Pretty Pictures" (Thames & Hudson, 2013) contains about 800 full color images from a decade of work.  More at her website.

Sarah Minor is from Iowa and recently earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she is at work on one collection of visual essays and another of visual essayists. Her work can be found or is forthcoming at Word Riot, in Conjunctions 61, South Loop Review, Seneca Review, and Black Warrior Review. More here soon.