Chelsea Biondolillo : On Long Winters, Short Essays, and a Sky that Stretches Forever

We suffer from snow blindness, selecting what we see and feel while our pain whites itself out. But where there is suffocation and self-imposed ignorance, there is also refreshment—snow on flushed cheeks and a pristine kind of thinking. All winter we skate the small ponds—places that in summer are water holes for cattle and sheep—and here a reflection of mind appears, sharp, vigilant, precise. —Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

As I write this, April is in sight and the long Wyoming winter is only now showing signs of breaking. I spent the last few months far from any town center, surrounded by cows and mule deer and only a small handful of neighbors, thinking incorrectly that the isolation would be conducive to writing. It was something else entirely: in the great expanse that surrounded me, I found myself longing for smallness. In a harsh winter climate, one way to survive the elements, if you find yourself at their mercy, is to carve out a space in the snow and ice, just big enough for yourself. This is how you stay warm.

Gretel Ehrlich, in her novella-length collection of essays on Wyoming, The Solace of Open Spaces, writes, “Winter is smooth-skulled, and all our skids on black ice are cerebral.” She’s right; this stuck of mine is all in my mind. I like to say it’s something about the snow, the shut-in-ness, the screaming wind, that has inhibited rather than encouraged my writing, but I’ve been the one fighting myself, not the fields that stretch forever or the boundless ice-blue sky.

Mark Spragg’s “In Wyoming” from Wind, asserts,

This place is violent, and it is raw. Wyoming is not a land that lends itself to nakedness, or leniency. There is an edge here, living is accomplished on that edge. Most birds migrate. Hibernation is viewed as necessary, not stolid. The crippled, old, the inattentive perish.

When I’m being honest, I have to admit that I’m afraid of that edge. All winter I’ve been hanging back, playing it too safe to get any real work done. I’ve been lenient with myself—staying warm instead of sharp—afraid of the despair that I sense out there in my own cerebral snow fields.

*

Judith Kitchen in Short Takes defines an essay as “the building of a process of thought through a singular contemplative voice—to show how we see the same world differently.”

If that’s an essay, then my Facebook feed has been an essay about winter ever since November. All over the country, everyone has spoken in a singular, if choir-like, voice of Instagram filters and weather.com screenshots. Sometimes the voice is awed, “It’s actually sunny today!” And sometimes the voice can’t believe it is snowing again. Today, in Ucross, Wyoming, it’s over 50° but another snowstorm is predicted to hit this weekend. Winter has been too long over me, an endless avalanche of words: cold, snow, ice, more, still.

*

Ehrlich’s book is not long. Weighing in between feather- and lightweight, she has nonetheless crafted as notable a “Wyoming” book as heavyweights, McPhee’s Rising from the Plains and Owen Wister’s The Virginian. Even in a compressed collection though, “The Smooth Skull of Winter” stands out as the shortest essay in the book. In my paperback edition, it’s just over three pages long.

Buried in the exact middle of six months of winter, I was angry the first time I read it. Or tripped across it, as I may have described it at the time. Would anyone write a book about California, or Florida, and give only three and a half pages to the ocean? This is not a book for residents (at less than half a million people in the state, that would be a very targeted and limiting demographic)—so how can anyone else understand the gravity of this thing I’m in, I thought, if it can be shrunk down into the same space as a preface?

But Ehrlich, in three pages, gets the better of winter. She turns the January wind into an opportunity. Ehrlich is not trapped by her three small pages, but distilled to clear purpose. She carves her shape into winter, not to hide, but to be carried forward, like a standard. This is easier to see in winter’s wake.

I was recently on a panel discussing some finer points of short form nonfiction. One of the panel members, the managing editor of a respected journal, said (and I’m paraphrasing) “Please, no more funerals and hospital rooms.”

She said between 10-15% of the submissions she receives take place in either a hospital room, or at someone’s funeral. I began to wonder what it is about the form that lends itself so well to pain, loss, and melancholy.

Bret Lott, seems to speak to this drive in “Writing in Place” from the Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, when he says “every time I put a word down … I am inside a moment in which I had better be attempting to wrestle with a matter of life and death.”

Too often, the editor in the above example might say, the problem is that submitters confuse a matter of life and death with the moment between them. The real loss might come later, trying to match all the saucers to the teacups for the estate sale, or worrying about what hieroglyphic notations in an old field guide meant, the intrepid explorer, now gone.

In Larry Woiwode’s “Winter,” an essay collected in Kitchen’s Short Takes, he recounts his struggle to re-fire an outdoor furnace that has gone out on a night when the temperature, including wind chill, is -85°. He fights the snow and wind to the furnace and then struggles with a blowtorch to melt thick ice that is preventing the damper from opening. As he starts to fade from clear thinking into hypothermia, he lists loved ones, and thinks to them,

…it may be by a row of words you remember me, or maybe not. Or images, once my body is gone. You’ll have to resolve the distinctions between the two for yourselves, if I can’t keep the torch on target, get us heat, undo the miscues that brought us to this, so you’ll know it wasn’t my interior and its revolving search for words that held me here, but you.

It’s a startling moment, and comes one sentence before the dénouement (this is nonfiction, so I don’t think I’m spoiling it when I reveal that he lives). He manages, by keeping the moment singular (torch, heat, the day’s miscues) and the language neutral (body, distinctions, interior), to avoid what could have been an easy slip into over-sentimentality. He literally stops short of the happy ending, and lets the reader float in the interstitial white space at the end of the essay, assuming the best or worst of his narrator/self’s struggle back to the house from the re-started furnace.

Woiwode takes us to the exact minute when he thought his life might end, but the feeling that resonates is not sadness—it helps that he lives, I’ll grant—it’s something warm, even in all that snow. In less-skilled hands, this essay may have read like a Chicken Soup for the Soul: all lesson, no learning. Instead the reader is on the same edge as the narrator, all along, until this last moment of exhale, out of nowhere comes this idea—we are the sum of our love.

In a short essay (unlike a long winter), there is no time to get maudlin. The form itself asserts a shape of stolidity in the form of brevity. There won’t be room for gnashing teeth, rending garments, Fourth of July fried chicken and all of grandma’s teacups—something will have to go. The craftsperson can see beyond the glissando of the stalling EKG—to the moment when her deeply personal sorrow breaks away from the “self-imposed ignorance” of the solo voice to join a whole choir of humanity.

*

In Wyoming, the sky is very big (at least as big as Montana’s, but not on record as such). This can create a sense of freedom—and Ehrlich, along with many a cowboy poet, found her song in its open spaces.

But it can be a discomfort, too, all this unbound landscape.

I remember lying in summer grass at the Brooklyn botanical garden, listening in disbelief as a friend tried to explain her childhood fear of stars. It was after she learned in science class that the universe was endless, she said, that the night sky became terrifying. Vastness is like ecstasy in this way (the state of consciousness, not the drug).

Smallness, then—as distillate rather than cage—can be its own solace: a way to refine some of the more difficult feelings for the writer, while opening the ideas up for the reader.

I suspect this is why some stories seem ripe for condensation: any more than 500 words and they might swallow you whole. But it isn’t the word count or formal considerations of an essay that protect (the reader, the writer); it’s what the constraint requires you to discard.

It is fair to say that what I am still stuck in is the moment of winter—and I may not grasp the matter of it for some time.

Ehrlich and Spragg’s Wyoming has laid down lenient cowboys, lazy ranchers, and lesser writers. It’s the edge they are talking about, not the space stretching away from it. And it is their focus on that icy line, their characterization of the line as a threat and a comfort, that allow them to reach past state boundaries, past definitions of rancher or pioneer to the place where the elements bend a person. There, you are changed or you are broken.

*

Mary Cappello, in her essay “Propositions; Provocations: Inventions,” in Bending Genre, attempts to define creative nonfiction:

The operative distinctions are “transform” rather than “transcribe,” and “apposite” rather than “opposite.” Creative nonfiction remakes rather than reports. Like poetry, it relies on novel appositions that make exquisite demands: opposition cancels, apposition makes apparent… Why not call it poetry then? Because of the way it enjoins and calls upon a witness, but also an interloper, and eavesdropper: placing oneself where one is not supposed to be.

Spragg knows too well the transformative power of a Wyoming winter. If you grow upright, the wind will cant you; if you sprawl like a rangeland, the weight of the snow will press into you, until you remember it all year: a thawed and muddy water hole after years of winters becomes a summer pond.

Ehrlich, too, is concerned, in “Smooth Skull” not with winter’s length—though it is acknowledged—but in its oppositions. A snow wall threatens, but also protects. “The deep ache of this audacious Arctic air is also the ache in our lives made physical.” But this ache makes personal connections all the more urgent, as friends and lovers check in, help out, warm one another up with words or food or a fire.

The right short essay offers a view of where-we-shouldn’t-be as a single day, one storm, or a small lake we can skate. The beauty of concision is that all you need is the hint of the grinding squeal that signals cracking ice and the reader will fill in the dark, cold water, the struggling for purchase and air, for long moments after you, the writer, have left the page.

*

A recent study by researchers from the University of California, San Diego found that social media posts about crummy weather in one part of the country were more likely to put people in other parts of the country in bad moods.

And yet, a 2008 neurological study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to prove that sad music tends to make listeners happy.

I recently asked my own social media circle for recommendations of good “divorce songs” to inspire an essay I’m writing—and within a couple of hours, I had over 100 suggestions. Did thinking about divorce make my friends sad, or did listening to their favorite sad songs cheer them up?

If I had to read 130 pages about the torture that half the year inflicts upon the landscape between the Big Horn and Snowy Mountains—if I had to write each moment as it had happened, status update by status update—would I pack right up for some proverbial summer beach, instead of learning anything from these last few months?

*

Yet, if I were to try and write 500 words about the life and death matters that this winter has asked me to consider, I might still fail before I even begin, because I could not make the sky smaller, or the staggering weight of the snow on the fields lighter. It is useful as an exercise to begin with the fence in sight, but not as a practice.

Instead, I must write and write and write until I have wrung all the ache of this damn unending winter from me. Only then can I start to prune—and in pruning, learn the shape of the thing. One makes a mistake in thinking that the antidote for fear of edges is a fence. The antidote is to learn the exact shape and degree of the edge. You can only do that right up next to it.

Spragg says that in Wyoming, “There is the wind.” Because here, the wind is a constant. It is vast and it demands attention. The wind is huge. But he also says, “The winds wail a hymn of transience.” Because even this, the wind, the cold, even winter, passes.

When talking about the value of writing in place, Lott says first to find a sacred place, “in which the world seems to present itself in its mystery and beauty, its sorrow and grief, its vast breadth and its ultimate intimacy.” It’s here, he argues, that you are most yourself. Where else “are you more you—are you more a partaker in the whole of man’s estate—than in that place where you are alone, and you are simply and complexly and utterly you?”

This is the place—this middle of nowhere—and the season—the sharpest, longest—where we can get past the moment to the matter. This is where to fire up the blow torch, where to carve a figure-8 in the ice.

*

Chelsea Biondolillo (@devakali) received a dual MFA in creative nonfiction and environmental studies from the University of Wyoming, where she reported on local flora and fauna for Wyoming Public Radio, and prepared bird skins for the vertebrate museum. Her nonfiction has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, Passages North, River Teeth, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Fourth River, and others. She blogs intermittently at http://roamingcowgirl.com.

TaraShea Nesbit: The True and the Vulnerable

I don’t mind calling essays stories, or calling stories essays. There is a reason why we make this slip: essays have an arc, stories have embedded questions. Writer Maggie Stiefvater: "[A novel is] a paper where your thesis is that these people are real, and you have to prove it." The same can be said for nonfiction, where the proof of character can be replaced with a proof of emotion or primary circulating consciousness or question. While nonfiction is often defined by fidelity to fact and logical cohesion, the genre has a companion history of texts that use the fragmentary, suggestive, and inconclusive. There are texts that destabilize unwavering narration, logical progression, and rhetorical coherence; this is an exciting time for contemporary nonfiction.

Creative nonfiction, though not exactly a new genre, is an elastic one. If we agree with John D’Agata, it begins with the Sumerian king Ziusudra, and leads into the form zuihitsu (“to follow the brush”) from the Heian period, made known to many by Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book. Creative nonfiction, to me, is marked now by multimodal collaborations like Claudia Rankine’s “Provenance of Beauty” performance and poet Matthea Harvey’s audio walking tour of Staten Island.



THE PROVENANCE OF BEAUTY. from Sunder Ganglani on Vimeo.


As the nonfiction editor at Better, I look to shelter nonfiction from whatever troubled past an author may have come from: the poet turned essayist, the journalist pushing form to length, the fictive addict looking to a fact or two for a new thrill. When I open a submission, I’m on a first date. I read looking to fall in love. I consider what politics the essay supports. If there is a point on this date, during ice cream, maybe, and rarely after PBRs, where I ask myself, “Is it me or the essay?” I know this probably isn’t going to work out. But occasionally it does. Reading is subjective, we all know, but it is also sometimes mean-spirited. It is also context-driven. My kid died so I’m more open to your grief essay, for example—or I’m bored and I want something light. 

What holds a person’s attention in a first sentence and why? Reader-response theory has something to say about this, and affect theory, and my therapist, probably, and what I know is I’m a subjective, temperamental reader who tries to be empathic, and is thankful she has other editors to talk with. I love what I love and yet I watch this loving, too, from a distance. What plagues me as an editor is that I’m just one reader. I ask myself, “Am I not liking this because I haven’t napped? Because I have a preference for language? Because it is raining? Because I hate the smell in the coffee shop’s cleaning products?” When I first heard Johanna Stoberock's audio essay, I was in the shared experience of listening with my mother-in-law—we put it on and my living room filled with corn mazes and the prison system and a daughter who was losing weight and trying to find work and the landscape of eastern Washington. It was an essay that became loved by two women separated by two generations and I knew I had to publish it.

Not all the readers on staff have preferences like mine, thankfully, so where I have a long leash for language, others may prefer more narrative structure. We discuss. We all are looking to push against things, I’d say, and that is partly why we loved Joy Katz’s essay in Issue 4, how she explores racism via one interaction with a home security salesmen, in an essay that complicates the idea of knowing and of conclusiveness. And it is why I love how an essay can rove and wander, complicating the false idea of truth, such as in Shena McAuliffe’s “This Human Skin” in Issue 4.

Better came about because a group of us, led by Sean Bishop, had a desire to use online media in more versatile ways than we saw happening in the world of literary journals. We have a real weakness for audio essays, video essays, essays using images in complicated ways, like Sebald’s photographs that defy meaning rather than support it, and wilder forms that conceive essays as experiences you take on with your whole body. The essay that comes to me in printed words feels very different than the essay that comes to me through the voice of the author, or the video of the author reading and singing and performing their work: watch Elena Passarello’s performance in Issue 1. There is an intimacy that can be formed, or a distance, really, with these audio essays, these digital essays, these centaurian essays. Better is inclusive, Better is post-page.

Bonine Nadzam asks in “A Simple, Declarative Sentence”: “What is the one thing in there you cannot, or dare not, say?” What does it say that, if I were the author, I might do or think but dare not utter? I want that essay in Better. 

And Better got it with the humorous confession of David S. MacLean in “That You Ever Saw” from Issue 2:

One morning I was walking the dog, yakking on the phone with a girlfriend with whom my relationship was flailing, and I saw this gorgeous couple canoodling on a bench. I sat down on the bench opposite from them, continued yakking on my cell phone and because I thought it would be funny, I held my middle finger up at them for a good three minutes. In my brain, I thought it’d be seen as a sort of ridiculous act of obscenity and taken as absurd. The woman’s face, though, immediately went into a kind of twisted up surprise look, which gradually unraveled to one of offense, finally unspooling completely into one of disgust. I kept my finger up through all her expressions. To this day, she still looks past me at parties. Part of me says, ‘fuck her, fuck everyone who can’t take a damn joke’ and the other part of me knows that she knew I kind of meant it.

Sometimes it can be shocking, but it could also be mundane. Consider Perec’s infraordinary:

What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist.

Perec argues for the ordinary, for lists of what you ate for a whole year’s time, for a catalog of what you see while sitting at a park. The essay that does this is vulnerable because it might be extremely boring, and it knows it. I want that essay in Better, too.  Not truth, exactly, but pursuing truth. This can imply confession, but I think what it has to do with is vulnerability. What makes us vulnerable? And when looking at essays I do often ask, How is this text vulnerable? How am “I”?



TaraShea Nesbit is the nonfiction at Better: Culture & Lit. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian, Quarterly West, The Los Angeles Review of Books, on NPR, and elsewhere. Her first book, The Wives of Los Alamos, was an Indies Next Pick and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist. She lives in Colorado and teaches at the University of Denver.

Lynn Kilpatrick: Your Body is an Essay

Write yourself. Your body must be heard.

            Helene Cixous “Laugh of the Medusa”

What is an essay? I ask myself this when I begin to write one. Also, why? Why essay?

I understand the essay in a few ways, all of which have to do with the fact that I am:  A Feminist. A Brain. A Traveller.

I was thinking about this essay and about embodiment when I went to AWP and my friend Nicole Walker said during the panel “Navigating Emptiness: Benefits and Drawbacks of Teaching the Lyric Essay,” “Put your body in a place.” This is an imperative she uses with her students and it might be the most succinct statement of my aesthetic that has been spoken aloud.

I like Nicole and I like her body. I can say that without it being weird because I am a woman and she is a woman and we are both involved with other people and we each have children. Also I can kiss her on the cheek and tell her I love her and no one gets jealous or thinks we are going to run off together, though if we did it would be so that we could write without having to make anyone a sandwich for just five minutes.

Put your body in a place.

Our bodies are already in places, we just have to conceive of them as such. To feel our embodiment, to embody our thoughts.

First: The way I understand the essay is the way I understand feminism which is the way I understand the world: through my body. I remember reading Helene Cixous for the first time. Her book is titled Sorties, which is translated into English as Ways Out. Ways Out? Escape Routes? Theoretical mechanisms which allow the socially constructed  “body” to circumvent designated behaviors via language; ways the intellect can supercede the physical. These “ways out” seemed so linguistic. How are we to get out of this dilemma, the singular language, the multiple body? Only with more language, I thought. Language is the “way out.”

Until after graduate school.

I went to France with a friend and when we got off the train I looked around for an exit and when I saw one it said “Sorties/Ways Out.”

I suddenly got it. Ways Out were not just mental contortions to think our way out of the straightjacket of language. Ways Out were literal. Exits. Stairways that would bring our bodies out of subterranean confinement and up into the sunlight of Paris.

A Way to get Out of the train station and into the street. We get out of this dilemma with language by getting our body out into the street. Letting it rain on our body and walking until our legs ache and then all we can do is lay on the hotel bed and close our eyes and watch Michelle Pfieffer enact gender atop a piano (yes, this actually is what I watched on my hotel TV in Paris).

So language is a body and the essay is a map. A way not only out but in. Around. A try. Let’s walk around and see what we see, feel what we feel.

Second: How do I understand what I feel? Because when I walk around, blood flows to my brain. My point is that writers have bodies, though we like to forget this in our rush to use words like dialectic and hermeneutics. I like to use long words and I like to walk down the streets of Seattle with my friends, walking so much that my legs hurt and the idea of a bed is like a distant dream someone once told me about using words. And I like to walk around at night in a city with bars looking for that one just right bar in which to have a whiskey or a bourbon or a scotch, even though, despite his best efforts, my husband has been unable to make me understand the difference. I like to sit with other writers who make me laugh until my stomach hurts which reminds me I have a body in which my brain, which may or may not be my mind, resides.

All this walking and eating and laughing puts my body in a place. I am in Seattle walking around in the dark and there are white lights wrapped around tree trunks and there are friends who are closer to or further away from me in proximity but all of whom I love with fierce loyalty, which seems very much to be embedded in a part of my body, say my chest, which is the same part of me that aches when I think about the way my son screamed that one time I had to say goodbye to him at the Detroit airport.

But who cares, asks Nicole, back in that panel several hours earlier.  She doesn’t just want to walk around the city with me (though she does, who wouldn’t?), she wants there to be an organizing principle. A body in a place is the aesthetic but the tell me why I care is the reason for existence. It’s the soul. You need a body and you need a soul. But who am I kidding? I mean I. I need a soul. The laughter is the soul, the joke you wouldn’t understand if I inserted it here, but you would, because the body gets a joke before the mind. The body laughs and then the mind says, oh yes.

This is the relationship between the body and the essay, between the brain and the exit sign. Put your body in a place. Get into the street. Walk around. Drink some whiskey. Laugh.

It’s the laughter, perhaps, that provides the rationale for the body. Also: the ridiculous food, and the whiskey, and the pleasure of liquids and language on the tongue.

Why are we walking around the city? I want to see the bar where part of the ceiling is the old underground sidewalk, squares of glass surrounded by cement. I want to have the whiskey, where the idea of having the whiskey is sometimes superior to the drink itself. It is a way of being in my husband’s presence when he is absent. I want to extend the time I spend in the presence of my friends who understand who I am without language. I want to be a body that understands language in the presence of silence.

This, then, is the way we get our bodies out into the street.

Third: I don’t want to remain in one place. Take me somewhere. Isn’t this the promise of great language? It is also the promise of the body. The body is just a mechanism for moving my brain around. The body is the essay, with its demands and desires. With its polymorphous perversions. Cixous says that the female writer is multiple, but I haven’t met a writer I respect, male, female, neither/both, who isn’t multiple. We are multiple in our tongues, that want to speak and eat and drink and describe.

Put your body in a place. This place.

Lynn Kilpatrick’s essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Ninth Letter and Brevity. Her short story collection, In the House, was published by FC2. She earned a PhD from the University of Utah, and teaches at Salt Lake Community College. She lives in Salt Lake City with her husband and son.

Wonders interviews Mazza: On hybrid nonfiction, feminism, and independent presses.

Indie-lit author Cris Mazza’s seventeenth book, Something Wrong with Her (Jaded Ibis Press 2014), is a memoir of anorgasmia, but it’s also a book about writing a life rather than living it.  Mazza refuses the constraints of chronologic narration, juxtaposing diary fragments, email excerpts, and samples of her award-winning fiction to create a pastiche that mimics the rhythms and structures of jazz.  Exposing a deep-seated fear in all of us, Something Wrong with Her explores what it means to consider oneself worthy of love.

Mazza’s previous work includes Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, Waterbaby, Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?, and a collection of personal essays, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. Her first novel, How to Leave a Country, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction. Mazza has co-edited three anthologies, most recently Men Undressed: Women Writers on the Male Sexual Experience. She is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and will be a guest-lecturer in the fall of 2014 at The Johns Hopkins University.

Brooke Wonders: There are many ways in which your latest book replicates the form of jazz. One of the ways is in its repetition: for instance, there’s a section in the beginning that exactly matches three paragraphs that appear toward the end of the book.  How did you approach the challenge of invoking an auditory form on the page?

Cris Mazza: Partially this happened instinctively.  In jazz, the initial melody of a tune is called the head.  Then when the musicians improvise on the chord changes, it is within the style or mood of that original head, although they experiment with other emotions or even other related themes.  When the tune is getting ready to end, the musicians return to the head.  The listeners then know that the musicians have brought the tune full circle, have developed the changes and said what they have to say.  How could that form not be attractive for a memoirist who is not just telling a story she already knows but investigating a story she’s not sure she does remember all of (or remember correctly, or understand), and thus must invent or improvise or re-tell from another perspective, all while keeping that original storyline (melody) in mind.  Then it was so fitting that Mark -- who started as a character and ended up being a book contributor -- was the one talking about jazz, how it works; he was the one thinking like a musician while he read portions of the book and reacted to them -- similar to how one musician listens to the other improvise, then responds when it’s his turn to play.  So I was soaking in Mark’s way of developing a thought in music, while I was also researching the jazz terms and how they all seemed to be double entendres to ideas I was writing about.   Once I felt it working, it was easy to compose in that mode, just as a jazz musician knows how to jam as long as s/he knows the chords and feels the rhythm.

BW: You write that “you hope this book is more like jazz than like a novel,” and I feel badly for the novel and want to defend it.  What’s wrong with the novel?  And what does jazz offer you, a novelist many times over, that the novel can’t or doesn't or doesn’t anymore? 

CM:  No, nothing is wrong with the novel.  I also said a novel is like classical music.  I don’t mean “classical” in the sense of the classical period, but instrumental music that is written out completely -- scored for orchestra or quartet or chamber group or soloist -- and the musician or ensemble plays all the notes that are written (and rarely adds extra notes), doesn’t change the rhythm, etc.  I realize there are some interactive novels being written today, which would require interplay between reader and writer, so that the experience is vastly different each time it is “read.”  I was talking about the novel as I’ve known it, whether traditional or experimental, the author wrote all the words I read, and I read them (usually) in the order he or she wrote them (I know of at least one book that wasn’t bound, the pages came in a box, so they could be shuffled).  There are always exceptions, so I was making a generalization, and referring to my own novels being more like classical music in that I had no collaborator; the form, once written, was always read in the way I formed it.  Just like with symphonic music, readers (and conductors) can (are invited to) interpret differently, but there’s a bit more inherent control for the author (composer).  Jazz offered me the opportunity, as a memoirist, to not have that kind of control.  The book can never really be like a jazz performance since it has been published, the pages are in a particular order, the words don’t change, etc.  But the writing of it felt more like improvisation than when I write novels.  I don’t mean I outline novels or stick to a formula, but the repetitions, the stopping to cogitate, the speeches made to characters, the lulls in action and digressions … it would take a novel specifically designed to be about those things to tolerate as many of them as this book allowed.

BW: In a Rumpus interview about your previous book, Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, you said the following: “The narrator is completely conscious that she is producing a narrative; so conscious, in fact, that she anticipates how others will quarrel with or dismiss her, frequently questions her own memory and sometimes narrates in questions, wonders if what she’s remembering has been distorted by experiences she’d had or realizations she made since a particular event, digresses in flash-forwards to layer what she knows now over what she knew then. Most importantly, and something I didn’t plan but which might have come out of my own first person motto -- the fact that a character in the story is telling the story has to be part of what the story is about -- a significant catharsis for the narrator occurs as she is writing the culminating scenes -- scenes that, obviously, have already happened, several years before she is narrating. But it is the act of narrating, of wrestling with those questions about memory and compulsion distorting ‘truth,’ that causes her to grasp a new glimmer of insight about herself.”  This is also an accurate description of Something Wrong with Her, save that the character in question is explicitly you.  Could you talk about how you approach these writerly preoccupations differently in fiction versus nonfiction -- or why you don’t? 

CM: Yes, writerly preoccupations, exactly what it (partially) is: I wanted to write a highly self-conscious first-person novel because I was seeing so many first-person books that didn’t seem to understand the layers and complexities of a character-narrator.  But once into a novel, the novel’s thematic intent takes over for writerly preoccupations, and it became the book it needed to be for me at the time -- i.e. other personal preoccupations came to the front to chemically react, if you will, with the social themes having to do with human trafficking and the sexualization of culture.  But, of course, that latter theme (and the personal preoccupations, namely sexual dysfunction) are also all over Something Wrong with Her.
    I said above that “it would take a novel specifically designed to be about those things to tolerate as many of them as this [memoir] allowed.”  Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls was, I suppose, such a book.  It couldn’t tolerate as much cogitation and repetition as the memoir, but the self-conscious narrator and how the act of writing is what leads to her revelation about herself is an analogous process to what happened in the memoir.
    I knew, as soon as I began the memoir, that Something would be a companion book to Various Men, so the interview quote you’ve offered is highly relevant in their relationship to each other.  I had wanted to subtitle Various Men “A 1/3 true novel,” without indicating which part is “true.”  (Without having to account for how much of every novel is, similarly, “true.”)  But the story of the supervisor of my practice-teaching taking me to XXX video booths and showing me certain magazines, encouraging a flirtation that was abruptly ended -- not by me -- was the “inciter,” if you will, of both books, even though it did not stay the central significant event of the memoir. 

BW: Something Wrong with Her incorporates text from nearly all of your previous books.  In this way, it acts like an introduction to the prevailing themes of the Mazza corpus (take note, future biographers).  Imagining a reader who hasn’t encountered your work before, should they start with Something Wrong with Her?  What was at stake for you in cannibalizing so much of your previous work?

CM:  Mostly, at stake for me, was discovering in my cache of work a layer of understanding about myself I hadn’t accessed before.  This is a kind of understanding I wouldn’t expect a reader of any particular novel to be aware of, or even care about.  The novels should have their own relevance regardless of a reader’s awareness of the author’s personal life.  I wasn’t investigating them as a literary critic but as an archeologist with a set of artifacts.  (My lesser reasons for using scenes from books were times I felt it was pretentious to re-dramatize the same scene after I’d already done so in a book.)  I was thinking about why I made certain changes, used certain images, when thirty years later I can see new significance in them.  I guess I was investigating my original act in writing the story, not the stories or novel themselves, as they stand on their own for any reader.  However, it’s possible the memoir would also incite readers of my fiction to have other ideas about those works -- ideas even I have missed, and I always welcome those.  I’m not sure whether Something would be a good introduction to my fiction, but it’s difficult for me to say because I can’t have the experience of reading Something in the context of being ignorant about my fiction.  I would be interested to hear a reader tell me about what kind of introduction it is.

BW:  You also use multiple epigraphs from authors ranging from Grace Paley to Erica Jong.  The hybrid memoir is a popular form right now, with practitioners including Anna Joy Springer and Janice Lee.  This is a two-part-er: how do you see this work in relation to 1) the tradition of the hybrid memoir, and 2) the work of the authors whom you’ve chosen as epigraphs?

CM:  I was completely unaware of the “tradition” of the hybrid memoir when I was writing this book.  For all I know Lee, Springer and I (all ending up with the same publisher) were working on our books at the same time.  This book was essentially finished in 2011 and enjoyed (?) a long production period.  I had been more familiar with Ander Monson’s essays, but I don’t feel I am working in his unique realm.   The format and image-content of Something come from my packrat nature -- the keeping and preserving of symbolic artifacts, not just general hoarding.   I had all those journals, I had all those letters, cartoons, poems, photos, notes, etc.  I had kept them because of who I am/was, so that’s also why the book is constructed of them, not because I’d presupposed thirty years ago that I would join a hybrid memoir movement.
    I don’t think I have an Erica Jong epigraph, but she’s definitely quoted in here.  Fear of Flying changed the type of writer I would become, and also treated sexuality and sexualization so differently than my own experience, that it represents both a door-opening (as far as my creative work) and door-closing (as far as my personal sexual life) for me.  Something deals with both sides.
    The other quotes are not so much because I want to believe my work resides in the same sphere as theirs, but because something they said has seemed particularly apt to my relationship with my work, not to theirs.  Grace Paley was one of the judges when my first novel won a national award for fiction still in-manuscript (How to Leave a Country).  Having her as one of the judges was an incredible honor, and pretty much guaranteed that the prize-winning book would not be taken by a commercial publisher, and so in a way Paley help set the course for my career trajectory.

BW: Reviewers have referred to your earlier work as postfeminist; a recent interview noted that you coined the term chick-lit, but with a “postfeminist sneer.”  In Something Wrong with Her, you lay blame at the feet of feminism -- not for your anorgasmia, precisely, but certainly for some of your feelings of shame about it.  The narrator-you in the book appears to have gotten her ideas about sex and relationships from the ideals held by 1970s era feminists.  This seems odd to me, someone who came of age decades later and after the backlash -- I only wish I’d gotten my ideals about sex from feminism, instead of pop culture at large.  To state the obvious, you seem to feel like feminism has not been a helpful framework for understanding your own life experiences.  And yet, memoir as a genre has attracted a fair amount of feminist scholarship, as has the subject of anorgasmia. Could you talk a bit about how you understand your current relationship to feminism?  In this book, what new offensive are you launching?

CM:  Wow, I hope I’m not trying to start a war where there aren’t even two sides in conflict.  Postfeminism, as I saw it, did have some issues with second-wave feminism: that is, the “blame” could not wholly be piled on men anymore.  By the 90s we had some control (admittedly only some) over how we react to a society that values us most for our sexiness.  When I was recently advised to use an author photo where I’m smiling instead of serious, it was not a man who advised this.  In my view, women should not be taking up these kinds of sexist double-standards. 
    In Something, I didn’t think I was blaming feminism, per se, for my attitudes and perspectives about sex.  Certainly feminism had nothing to do with my unnatural fear of the whole deal.  On the contrary, feminist novels showed me women who were quite comfortable with their sexuality, pursued sexual contact for the sakes of their own needs, and seemed more accepting of their erogenous zones.  All these things were the opposite of my experience, and I couldn’t (then or now) figure out why.  Yes, in that way, it incited some of my shame.  But 1970s and 80s feminism tried to help us -- me included, if I’d known where to look.  If, for example, I’d gone to Our Bodies Ourselves instead of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). 
    I see why you’re suggesting I blame contemporary feminism for my “shame” about anorgasmia, but it wasn’t feminism I was thinking about, but culture in general’s continued amping up of the sexualization of everything, and that (many) women do buy into it as a way to gain whatever status or attention they’re not gaining with their work.  So, yes, if there’s an offensive, it’s toward the way girls and young women have been inundated with ideas about sex from pop culture instead of messages about identity from feminism.  A more healthy way to learn about sexuality was available to me, through feminism, I just didn’t access it, or was already so screwed up with fear I chose not to.

BW: You teach at the University of Illinois at Chicago -- what are we calling that mix of graduate and undergraduate students these days?  Young writers?  Early-career writers?  Anyway.  What advice would you offer would-be writers hoping to construct their own experimental memoirs?

CM:  It is indeed an unusual mix at UIC.  While the undergrads would still be in the “inexperienced writer” camp, our  PhD program brings us writers who are already beginning to be accomplished.  This week I’ve been reading admissions writing-samples for our PhD program.  These are samples from post MFA students, sometimes many years post MFA, some with books already published.  We would have to think of these as early career writers, which has not always been the case with our graduate students.  This is a change that’s been rolling in for the past 5 years or so. 
    I haven’t had more than a handful of students working on nontraditional memoirs.  Many of them say they have a particular experience suited to a memoir, but after that they want to write fiction.  I came to memoir the other way, believing until the ‘90s (after nine books of fiction) that I had no experiences worthy of a nonfiction treatment.  So it’s challenging for me as well to work with students who are not necessarily struggling with the me-now, me-then self divided by a time-expanse of a decade or more.  But I’m interested in ways of accessing the personal through impersonal observations and observed events, through discussions of nature or place or pets or relatives or even politics, through flash pieces that might be used as a Facebook post (and surely are wasted as comments tossed into the blizzard of social media).  I start my undergrads with flash pieces, and have thought that a few of them could do a whole book with pieces no longer than a page each, yet have it add up to something that could be called a memoir.  I’m figuring this out as I go, with each new batch of students bringing me something I didn’t have before.

BW: The book is coming out on independent press, Jaded Ibis, and your previous works have been published by many of the best independent presses, from FC2 to Soft Skull.  Jaded Ibis in particular has an innovative publishing model featuring fine-art versions of books and printing on demand.  What’s your take on the evolution of independent presses?  Any predictions you’d care to make about the future of publishing, independent or otherwise? 

CM:  Certain aspects of publishing, even indie publishing, are being dragged kicking and screaming into the new era of digital-everything. Don’t get me wrong, I like hard-copy books, although the last time I moved I wondered why.  But I’ve been having to learn that the old model of having a physical bound galley six months before pub date -- the old model of even having a set pub-date -- is being replaced by a more fluid and digital system. We may have seen this coming, but never the extent of what the additional dimension of social media has done to reading-in-general.  Forget the old surfing-the-web, just scrolling through social media a person might feel he or she has read all s/he needs about a book or play or concert, no need to get the book or hear the concert.  Surveys keep telling us there are fewer readers, and yet there always seem to be more and new independent publishers … who then disappear in an average of five years.  Print-on-demand is no longer considered an inferior way to publish, just as digital magazines are no longer considered so.  Everything is moving in that direction, some for the better, and some not, or we’re still waiting to see.  Everyone -- writers, publishers, publicists, editors -- has to be flexible, able to adapt.  If independent presses (lighter on their feet) can continue to adjust, to offer more reading experiences -- like Jaded Ibis and the original music “soundtracks” for the books, the art versions, the interactive books, etc -- it might be the way that literature survives.

Brooke Wonders is from the snowy part of Arizona.  She is a PhD candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is at work on an experimental memoir about suicide.  Her prose can be found at or is forthcoming from Brevity, The Collagist, and DIAGRAM, among other places, and she blogs at girlwonders.wordpress.com.

Brooke Wonders on Cris Mazza's "Something Wrong with Her" and Women Writing Sex

    Recently, a fellow teacher and academic — a man, of course — joked to me that there are too many twenty-something white women writing about sex.  He perhaps has a point:  Lorraine Berry, in “Dear Female Students: Stop Writing about Men,” argues that her female students only want to write about their relationships, to the point that Berry “…want(s) to tell these students that there is more to life than guys. That I wasted too much of my time thinking about men, and it was only the creation of a life that was my own…that made it possible for me to let go of the obsessive thinking.”  This obsessive thinking brings essayist Anna Davies to the point of calling it quits; her essay, “I’m done writing about my sex life,” puts a period at the end of the run-on sentence that has been her sex-writing life to date.  The performativity gets in the way of reality, she claims; she wants to live her sex life without the pressure to use its luridness to feed her career.
    Yet years after Davies’ and Berry’s polemics, Claire Dederer, in a recent piece for The Atlantic, discusses how it remains difficult for women to write about sex. She reviews a crop of recent memoirs, noting that the challenge for these writers is “to get at what feels true, which is that the endless internal oscillation that happens during sex needn’t sabotage our sexual experience, much less our autonomy. If questioning can’t be part of expressing female desire, that is a diminishment.”  This is a more nuanced argument than the usual handwringing over the confessional and the limits of female sexual self-expression, whether the essayist is arguing that there’s too much sex or not enough.
    A confession: I went on the academic job market this year, for creative nonfiction.  Many of you probably know this, having done it yourselves, but this involves sending dozens of strangers a small sampling of your work.  As I read through the essays comprising my dissertation, I reached the conclusion that I am in fact a handwringing thirty-something white woman who writes too much about sex.  My strongest pieces throbbed, bulged, and panted; they were passionately alive, yes, but also decidedly risky work to present to stodgy academic committees.
    At least I’m in good company: Obsessive thinking isn’t an inaccurate way to describe the genre of essay writing.  Which brings me to Cris Mazza, whose work I’ve followed for years, and who was (full disclosure) my mentor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Mine is not the first review to point out that Mazza’s most recent book, Something Wrong with Her, is “all in her head,” “cerebral,” obsessively of the mind rather than the body.  This makes sense: it’s a memoir in anaorgasmia.  Which would seem to be a limit case for women writing about sex: women writing about how they don’t, or can’t, have any.
    Something Wrong with Her is a memoir told in linked essays, with each chapter a kind of formal experiment.  Essay titles include “I Write as a Charlatan,” “Interlude: Subtone: I Say Scared, You Say Scary,” and “Riffing: Girls with Long Dark Hair”; these titles point both to a jazz term (interludes, subtones, riffing) and the overarching theme of writing one’s sexual history. These experiments attempt to replicate the feeling and form of jazz via language. Too, each essay-chapter is comprised of literal traces of previous selves: fiction taken from Mazza's other published works, emails, fragments from her diary, photos and marginalia. 
    Jazz is a cerebral form, yes, but it’s also an embodied one — aficionados discuss its coolness, its soulfulness, its heart.  What powers this hybrid, fragmented text is the existential tension between mind and body.  Mazza struggles to wrap her head around what seems to come so intuitively to others: how to live sensually in a body.  Her language resists the sensory, a neat trick when done in the mode of creative nonfiction.  Contemporary essays and memoirs both are often saturated with details of body and place.  Consider the rough-hewn descriptions of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: the backpack that digs into shoulders and hips, sloughing off flesh; the narrator pausing on her trek to have sizzling sex with a stranger.  Mazza’s form resembles jazz, yes, in its precision and improvisation on a theme.  But it also resembles the mental control executed by the jazz musician as she riffs on but never loses her melody: every word chosen points back to its maker’s struggle to access the world by way of the body.
    This cerebral focus is the book’s great strength.  Mazza’s intellect is incisive — at times bordering on cruelty toward her former self — as she burrows deep into her psyche to uncover what in other memoirs might be referred to as the originary trauma: a failed sexual encounter with the man she retroactively anoints the love of her life.  Mazza refuses to read this moment as being a site of origin, or of being irrevocably traumatic, however.  She seeks out this man years later, then rewrites the lost years they might have shared as an obsessive wrestling with their relationship’s dissolution.  Something Wrong with Her leaves unconfessed whether Mazza ultimately reuinites with her former lover, or if the string of heartfelt emails they exchange is all there is or ever will be.  Its subtitle, a memoir in real time, necessitates this final opacity — a happy ending would resolve on a major chord, and this book, rightly, ends on a minor seventh.  In this choice, I hear Dederer’s plaint, that “if questioning can’t be part of expressing female desire, that is a diminishment.”  Mazza’s work, via form and content, occupies a space of existential doubt: how do we write through both the mind and the body?  How does the act of writing and compiling our past selves influence who we get to be in the present?  And how does women’s writing about sex especially foreground these difficulties?


Brooke Wonders is from the snowy part of Arizona.  She is a PhD candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is at work on an experimental memoir about suicide.  Her prose can be found at or is forthcoming from Brevity, The Collagist, and DIAGRAM, among other places, and she blogs at girlwonders.wordpress.com.

From Essay to Book: On “Mirrorings”

In the early nineties, a twenty-nine year old poet named Lucy Grealy published her first piece of nonfiction in Harper’s magazine. That slim essay, “Mirrorings” – just over 5500 words in all – went on to win a National Magazine Award and would serve as the blueprint for the best-selling book that followed a year and a half later. 

For most writers, expanding an essay into a book involves a series of uncomfortable compromises. In his post, “The Barking Cat: Converting an Essay Collection to Memoir,” David McGlynn writes of all the hazards that come with “breaking apart a finished essay and scattering the pieces across a larger canvas.” Chief among them are the memoir’s insistence on narrative unity and its frequent adherence to a linear (and often moralistic) arc. 

McGlynn’s initial reluctance to move from the digressive world of essayistic observations to a more unified narrative form will be familiar to most nonfiction writers. As Cynthia Ozick writes in her classic essay on the essay, “No one is freer than the essayist – free to leap out in any direction, to hop from thought to thought, to begin with the finish and finish with the middle, or to eschew beginning and end and keep only a middle.” In contrast, book-length essays and memoirs too often seem to smooth out the edges and fill in the elisions that give short essays so much power.

If the most vivid essays manufacture meaning out of unexpected digressions and juxtapositions, then the most tedious book-length memoirs adhere to an overly linear arc that leaves little for the reader to discover on her own. But fortunately, expanding an essay into a book doesn’t always have to mean sacrificing the energy that’s native to the essay. As we can see through a study of “Mirrorings,” sometimes the book-length form opens up a whole range of possibilities for essaying. 

*

Twenty years after its publication, Lucy Grealy’s bestselling memoir Autobiography of a Face has become a staple of composition and literature classrooms. The plot of the essay and the book will be familiar to most readers. Diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma at the age of nine, Lucy Grealy had a third of her jaw removed in a surgeon’s attempt to keep the cancer from spreading. In the years that followed, Grealy endured over a dozen operations, each of which failed to correct the damage done to her jawline.

In the first paragraph of “Mirrorings,” Grealy sets up the central conceit of the essay: the narrator’s inability to face herself in the mirror and the multitude of “tricks and wiles” she uses to avoid her reflected image. In the second paragraph, we find the narrator alone in Scotland, living on welfare while undergoing a painful procedure designed to “fix” her appearance once and for all. 

At that point, beginning with the third paragraph, and stretching for nearly four thousand words (more than three-quarters of the essay), Grealy gives us a hurried history of her face. As she moves through her story, we see glimpses of the powerful, evocative images that will later make up whole chapters of Autobiography – Grealy’s father “going to get the car” so he doesn’t have to witness her injections, the much-loathed wigs that Hasidic women press on Grealy’s mother, and the way Halloween becomes a blessed annual respite from Grealy’s daily efforts to hide her face from the rest of the world. 

Grealy’s stunning capacity for language and the raw power of her story make “Mirrorings” a powerful reflection on the difficulty of being able to truly know oneself after a lifetime of pain and shame over one’s appearance. And yet Grealy breezes through much of the most powerful material in “Mirrorings,” sketching her past with broad brushstrokes, as an artist might do when capturing a quick study that exists largely to serve as the template for a more expansive work. It’s only when she returns to the subject matter in book-length form that we see Grealy’s prose take off. 

In the case of “Mirrorings,” it was the essay, rather than the memoir, that took on a narrower and more linear quality. Whereas “Mirrorings” revolves around one singular theme, Autobiography of a Face dips and pivots in efforts to build a fully realized narrative world. For example, in “Mirrorings,” Grealy breezes past her childhood love for horses, writing, “I also became interested in horses and got a job at a run-down local stable. Having those horses to go to each day after school saved my life; I spent all of my time either with them or thinking about them.”

But in writing Autobiography, Grealy takes full advantage of her time at Diamond D Stables, choosing to begin the book with the line, “My friend Stephen and I used to do pony parties together.” From there, Grealy goes on to capture the look and feel of the suburban landscape, “dotted with oversize Tudors,” each house containing carbon-copy patriarchs reclining in chairs and wives in coordinated outfits chatting on the phone. Grealy muses about the dogs that chase the horse trailer, the bliss of being lost with her friend Stephen, Diamond D's evolution into a “surreal, muddy, and orphaned state of anarchy,” and even the digestive habits of the ponies themselves. It’s only then, in the midst of the pony party, that Grealy reveals why she dreads the day’s events. “As soon as [the children] got over the thrill of being near the ponies, they’d notice me. Half of my jaw was missing, which gave my face a strange triangular shape, accentuated by the fact that I was unable to keep my mouth completely closed.” 

Embedded in that brief ten-page prologue are all the themes that make Autobiography of a Face so powerful, even after twenty years of countless summary and response papers by college freshmen – Grealy’s heightened sense of shame over her appearance, her feeling of being an outsider, and her continual struggle to recognize herself. But unlike the essay, which led with Grealy’s disfigurement, the book builds a far more realized narrative world. 

In the Harper’s essay, Grealy breezes by the origin of her lifelong battle, writing, “Twenty years ago, when I was nine and living in America, I came home from school one day with a toothache.” Those twenty-six words end up taking the entire first chapter of Autobiography, beginning with the lines, “Ker-pow! I was knocked into the present, the unmistakable now, by Joni Friedman’s head as it collided with the right side of my jaw.” In the chapter, the reader not only confronts that supposed toothache in all of its deep, sonic pain, but also sees the lively tomboy that will later be struck down by chemotherapy. Along the way Grealy builds a world of lying dentists, uneasy parents, and mysterious operations, a world in which a random collision between the heads of two children serves as the haunting prelude to a lifetime of pain. 

For all the strengths in that original essay, Grealy fell just short of creating a true “cosmogony” in “Mirrorings.” Her story is just too long and full of ellipses and tangents to be compressed in such a short frame, and with the exception of her final passage, the scenes contained in that original essay are more thresholds than fully rendered worlds. But when given a larger canvas, Grealy has the room to do the work that essaying requires. She can eschew transitions between chapters and allow herself all kinds of digressions, none of which made an appearance in the original essay. Without the pressure caused from the need to “get to the point” in the short form, Grealy is free to adopt an innovative structure that allows her to tell her story in pieces through a set of interlocking essays. 

*

It’s fitting that Autobiography of a Face ends with a short chapter entitled “Mirrors,” an alternate version of the original Harper’s essay. It turned out that all the material so hurriedly summarized in the middle section of “Mirrorings” was the story – and Grealy succeeded in unpacking that material in the first eleven chapters of the book. In the last chapter, she’s free to focus at last on the experience of being alone in Scotland, where she’s forced to “live and move about in the outside world with a giant balloon” inside the tissue of her face. The book ends with the same devastating four-hundred word scene that closes the original Harper’s essay, in which Grealy sits with an attractive man in a café and finds herself wondering what he is seeing. 

In the end, it was the book-length memoir that gave Grealy the freedom to tell a far fuller and more discursive story, and yet her original blueprint served her well. “Mirrorings” turned out to contain within its slim form the entire arc of her book, chapter by chapter, as well its ending, which Grealy pasted from the original essay virtually unchanged. By the time we encounter that material, we’ve been looking through Grealy’s eyes for two hundred and fifty pages. Since we firmly believe in the cosmogony she’s created for her readers, the final scene becomes all the more powerful as a meditation on Grealy’s lifelong efforts to come to terms with the image she presented to the world – and her tentative willingness to try to see herself for the woman she had become. 


Jessica Wilbanks (@creativenonfic) received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Houston, where she served as nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast. Her nonfiction has received a Pushcart Prize as well as creative nonfiction awards from Ruminate and Ninth Letter, and she’s currently at work on her first book, a memoir entitled Bigger than Any Single One. Visit her online at http://jessicawilbanks.com.

Steve Davenport: What's cutting edge about good writing?

It’s 4:44 in the morning. My head’s hammered with allergies and I have a deadline. I need to write this essay about the nine semesters I spent editing Nonfiction for Ninth Letter, or maybe I should be making a point about something specific via one of the essays I edited (which one? pick me, pick me), except that I didn’t edit so much as, with the help of a new assistant editor each issue, I co-managed revolving bodies of MFA students who, because human, had different tastes, interests, personalities, affiliations, and exhibited varying degrees of preparedness and investment in the genre. In short, we were a team, except that we were a different team each time, except when we weren’t. And what we produced as an editorial body of many minds was not predictable. Maybe the best example of that came in the last issue.

In “When My Muse was Young,” Nicholas Delbanco delivers a long, rich lecture that runs from W. B. Yeats and Franz Liszt through Georgia O’Keeffe. Here’s a snippet, the last two sentences, to give you an idea:

She was still at work in her nineties, but the years did take their toll, and the blind lame visionary who scrawled her signature on codicils leaving more and more to Hamilton was no longer self-sufficient. Black Rock with Blue Sky and White Clouds, painted in 1972 before she lost her eyesight, is one of the last completed oils and rife with the old mystery--yet what it portends is unclear.

On the opposing, similarly and wildly colored page (wild for publishing anyway) sits the opening of Brian Oliu’s captivating and enigmatic “siren(1).exe”:

C:\run thelxiope.exe

This program cannot be run until SCOPULI.EXE is installed. Install now? (Y/N) N

byebye

C:\

C:\run molpe.exe

This program cannot be run until SCOPULI.EXE is installed. Install now? (Y/N) Y

byebye

Initializing SCOPULI.EXE...

CAUTION!! RUNNING THIS PROGRAM MAY CAUSE SYSTEM TO BECOME UNSTABLE. CONTINUE? (Y/N) Y

Installing...

Say what? Will the real Ninth Letter please stand up? (Psst. There is no real Ninth Letter.) I served as Nonfiction Editor for Volumes 2-5 (or Issues 3-10) and stepped off the editing platform with 6.1 (or Issue 11), co-edited with Audrey Petty, in the bag. I’m now back at it for what will become Issue 22 (or 11.2, AKA Fall/Winter 2014). I’m not here, though, to yak about what will be (who knows?) in this next issue or the ten issues (6.2-11.1) I had nothing to do with. I’m here to say the sun’s doing its dawn thing out on the Atlantic and my face is right here in central Illinois clenching like a fist against allergies as I’m doing well to remember most of the sixty or so essays we must have published during my first shift. And it was, for me, a great run. While I missed the birthing and bottle-feeding of Ninth Letter in that first volume year as well as the planning that preceded and produced it, I got to be there for its formative years. I sat in the meetings that brought together in one room professors from Creative Writing and Art & Design, who insured its investment in interdisciplinarity. I remember a meeting or two in which we were anxious parents who didn’t agree. And in the editorial meetings that featured the Delbanco and Oliu pieces, we didn’t agree.

But that’s the way, or should be, that things get done. No one needs to feel passionately in favor of every piece, but every piece should enjoy passionate support. That said, I heard in a meeting yesterday that people still walk up to the Ninth Letter table at AWP and explain their reluctance to submit as a reaction to our interest in, or preoccupation with, cutting-edge texts. I imagine what they’re responding to is not text but design. And what does cutting-edge mean anyway? Consistent deliverance of new technique? Fresh content areas served on shape-shifting plates visible only under special lamps or old content made fresh by hiply bringing its naughtiness or unspeakability into the light? Shit so new it will reinvent stink? I find the cutting-edge remark bothersome because I don’t believe it’s true. I believe that while we published on my shift an occasional nonfiction piece that pushed one or both of the envelopes, content and form, to the far edge of the table, there were four or five Delbancos for every Oliu or Elena Passarello (see “Kareninas” in 4.1), by which I mean essays like Nicole Walker’s “Where the Wild Things Are” (available just after the Passarello in 4.1) that gradually and often gorgeously reveal their meaning in fairly traditional ways. I believe we published the best essays, by which I mean the ones that managed to make their way through slush and into the many minds that filled the editing room, found sufficient passion and admiration, even if no one of us would have selected the final line-ups. I believe that’s as good a way as any, by which I mean a sure-fire way to publish pieces that will resonate and find a home with the right readers.

By which I mean, as the sun starts to hit the window and coffee is distracting me from my allergies, I don’t see what’s cutting-edge about that.

Steve Davenport is the author of two poetry collections: Overpass (2012) and Uncontainable Noise (2006). His poems, stories, and essays have been anthologized, reprinted, and published in scores of literary magazines both on-line and in print. A story in The Southern Review received a 2011 Pushcart Prize Special Mention. His Murder on Gasoline Lake, published in Black Warrior Review and later as a chapbook, is listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2007. His day job is Associate Director of Creative Writing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and he is temporarily back in his old job as Creative Nonfiction Editor of Ninth Letter. He keeps a website/blog at http://gasolinelake.com/.