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

 This New Precipitate: a Conversation with Maddie Norris

by Matthew Morris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MN: Good. That’s what I wanted. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MM: Nice, that sounds really healthy. 

MN: Yeah, yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

MM: Oh, “Hyperbaric”? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MM: Just for clarification. [Laughs.]

MN: For the record… 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you miss about Tucson? 

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

MN: Yeah, I miss the running community there. 

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

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

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

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

Dec 25, Will Slattery, Casement's Ghost

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.

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Casement's Ghost

Will Slattery

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For the past 20 years of my life I have been haunted by Roger Casement, a 19th and 20th Century Anglo-Irish diplomat and civil servant who in 1911 received a knighthood from the United Kingdom of Great Britain & (at the time) Ireland for his international humanitarian work and who was then a swift 5 years later executed by the United Kingdom of Great Britain & (at the time) Ireland for high treason.

Quite a few people are haunted by Roger Casement. The British Foreign Office is haunted by Roger Casement, who was once a model civil servant—genteel, broad-minded, polite, hard-working, amenable to British institutions at home and abroad, liberal in a classic sense, willing to forgo marriage family for duty country, suffused with a solid bourgeois morality but charismatic enough for a knighthood & the pseudo-aristocratic legitimacy it could lend to his future work for the empire —before he became a seditious flame-tongued Irish nationalist and a leading participant in the 1916 event known as the Easter Rising, a chaotic rebellion against English rule which marks the first armed conflict of the 20th Century Irish Revolutionary Period and the birth of modern Irish independence.

The Republic of Ireland is also haunted by Roger Casement. A well-known Anglo-Irish administrator renouncing his accumulated imperial-bureaucratic privileges and taking up the Fenian banner was a cause for celebration and a demonstration of the inevitable moral might & triumph of a Free Catholic Ireland—until it came out that Roger Casement was also what might be called an inveterate sodomite who had led a double-life throughout his career in which he worked his way through dozens of younger men’s cocks in alleys and docks and bars and parks and fields and rivers spread across three continents.

You’re also almost certainly haunted by Roger Casement, although you might not know it; if you’ve ever read Heart of Darkness or seen Apocalypse Now or heard the phrase “the horror! the horror!” or see images of mist-and-blood flit through your mind’s eye when you think of colonialism then you’re haunted by Roger Casement, for in 1890, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Roger Casement met Joseph Conrad and became a friend, a fascination, and a specter to him. Casement, seen through a glass darkly, looms out at us via Conrad; altered, refracted, shadowy, at times menacing flashes of Casement show up physically and spiritually in both Marlow and Kurtz.

I think of Roger Casement on average 2 or 3 times a week and yet I feel—strangely, at times achingly—that I’m no closer to fully understanding the man now at 35 then I was when I first learned of him as a teenager.

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I’ll try to give a brief and neutral account of the major episodes and incidents of Casement’s life:

Born into an Anglo-Irish family in Ireland (i.e., of Protestant middle-and-up class background), Casement had a successful career as a civil servant, diplomat and administrator for which he received a good deal of recognition and accolades.

During the early 1900s Casement personally investigated and exposed imperialist violence including torture, rape, mutilation, enslavement, and murder in Western colonies in the Congo. Returning home from Africa, Casement published his findings to great international acclaim--and outrage--but this had little effect on Western imperialism in the region.

Slightly later in the early 1900s Casement personally investigated and exposed imperialist violence including torture, rape, mutilation, enslavement, murder, and attempted ethnic cleansing in Western rubber plantations in the Putumayo region of the Amazon. Returning home from the Amazon, Casement published his findings to great international acclaim--and outrage--but this had little effect on Western imperialism in the region.

During the 1910s Casement abandoned his work for the British Foreign Office, became an advocate for the liberation of Ireland (then still occupied by the United Kingdom), helped organized the 1916 Easter Uprising with the hope that it would lead both to a free Ireland and to the eventual destruction of the entire British Empire, and was subsequently tried for treason and executed by the British government.

During and after his trial for treason Casement's reputation was complicated and sullied by the circulation of what are now known as the Black Diaries, writings in what appears to be Casement's own hand which include both mundane accounts of his daily life and graphically explicit accounts of the secret sexual encounters he had with other men (a minority of scholars argue that the Black Diaries are in fact an anti-Casement forgery generated by the British state to tarnish his image, but the majority of historians and readers believe them to be authentic).

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I first encountered Casement as a "Leader of '16" due to a precocious adolescent interest in both left-wing politics and modern Irish history. I do not find Casement physically attractive, but if I am honest I do feel that I somehow fell in love with him as a teenager and have been in love with him ever since, despite his many complications and flaws as a historical personage. I have felt significant romantic attraction for only 5 or 6 real, present-day people over the course of my life; this number maybe doubles if we include historical personages, so Casement is in a somewhat small group. I can't fully explain my love for the man, but I feel it has something to do with the steady march of his conscience through the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

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Of the persistent mutilation by government soldiers, there can be no shadow of a doubt, should the system maintain forced labor on this scale, I believe the entire population will be extinct in thirty years.

--Casement on Belgian imperialism in the Congo

And the charming Lizardo Arana tells me in Iquitos I shall find "such splendid Indians" here, and he feels sure the result of my journey to the Putumayo will be more capital for the Company! Yes, more capital punishment if I had my way. I swear to God, I'd hang every one of the band of wretches with my own hands if I had the power, and do it with the greatest pleasure. I have never shot game with any pleasure, have indeed abandoned all shooting for that reason, that I dislike the thought of taking life. I have never given life to anyone myself, and my celibacy makes me frugal of human life, but I'd shoot or exterminate these infamous scoundrels more gladly than I should shoot a crocodile or kill a snake.

--Casement on his desire to kill Peruvian rubber barons

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Casement’s diaries do not make for immediately compelling reading—the daily entries are fragmented, terse, sometimes formulaic, often concerned with trivial and quotidian details (weather, letters arriving, if he went out for lunch, distance travelled, billiards scores, etc). Sometimes he goes weeks without a sexual encounter, and sometimes he has several in impressively rapid succession. The details of his sexual forays are usually recorded in a quick, excited manner: age, location, memorable physical attributes of the partner, if he paid for it, ejaculations (both verbal and genital), and dimension(s). Casement generally seems to have preferred men younger than himself with firm, lean torsos, large cocks, and substantial sexual stamina; the primary thing he tends to record about himself in these encounters is his own capacity for being penetrated. A few examples:

 

Casement’s sexual encounters tend to range (in slightly anachronistic terminology) from “anonymous” to “cruising” to “rough trade” to “paying for sex”, sometimes combining and recombining elements of these. Often times there’s a grimy sadness to the image of Casement cruising, especially during his journeys to Africa and South America—a lonely middle-aged foreign service officer trying to get 18-year-olds to top him. Whenever he is back in Europe, we sometimes get encounters that show different, slightly sweeter types of intimacy and longing:

What I find fascinating and elusive about Casement is that through his diaries we have prodigious, almost impossible access to firsthand accounts of his sensations and sentiments about his sexual experiences: joy, exhilaration, 5 dollars here or there, “very, very deep thrusts”, howling, “deep screw”, biggest since wherever, on top or on bottom, “splendid steed”, “huge”, “again”, “Grand”, indoors and outdoors, what time of day and of night, uncertainty, “so deep mutual longing”.

Despite this, we have almost no access to Casement’s sense of his own sexuality; his diaries let us know how all his fucking felt, but rather little about how he felt about the nature and orientation of his fucking. Let’s compare what his personal effects offer to those of other Anglo-Irish homosexual luminaries from the same period, say, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, both slightly older but of the same generation and broadly similar class backgrounds:

If you are the man I take you to be you will like to get this letter. If you are not I don’t care whether you like it or not and only ask that you put it into the fire without reading any farther. But I believe you will like it. I don’t think there is a man living, even you who are above the prejudices of the class of small-minded men, who wouldn’t like to get a letter from a younger man, a stranger, across the world - a man living in an atmosphere prejudiced to the truths you sing and your manner of singing them. The idea that arises in my mind is whether there is a man living who would have the pluck to burn a letter in which he felt the smallest atom of interest without reading it. I believe you would and that you believe you would yourself. You can burn this now and test yourself, and all I will ask for my trouble of writing this letter, which for all I can tell you may light your pipe with or apply to some more ignoble purpose - is that you will in some manner let me know that my words have tested your impatience. Put it in the fire if you like - but if you do you will miss the pleasure of the next sentence which ought to be that you have conquered an unworthy impulse. A man who is certain of his own strength might try to encourage himself a piece of bravo, but a man who can write, as you have written, the most candid words that ever fell from the lips of a mortal man - a man to whose candor Rousseau’s Confessions is reticence - can have no fear for his own strength. If you have gone this far you may read the letter and I feel in writing now that I am talking to you. If I were before your face I would like to shake hands with you, for I feel that I would like you. I would like to call YOU Comrade and to talk to you as men who are not poets do not often talk. I think that at first a man would be ashamed, for a man cannot in a moment break the habit of comparative reticence that has become second nature to him; but I know I would not long be ashamed to be natural before you. You are a true man, and I would like to be one myself, and so I would be towards you as a brother and as a pupil to his master. In this age no man becomes worthy of the name without an effort. You have shaken off the shackles and your wings are free. I have the shackles on my shoulders still - but I have no wings. If you are going to read this letter any further I should tell you that I am not prepared to “give up all else” so far as words go. The only thing I am prepared to give up is prejudice, and before I knew you I had begun to throw overboard my cargo, but it is not all gone yet.

--Bram Stoker in an 1872 letter to Walt Whitman 

Stoker was an oft-unhappy closet case who probably never had sex with another man, but his youthful letters and correspondences give us a window into a kind of homosexual worldview marked by notions of camaraderie and liberty and bravery. On on the other end of the out-and-outré spectrum Wilde (fin du siècle faggot par excellence) ends up almost compulsively disclosing his vision of homosexuality as a superior orientation while on trial for it. But as a historical figure Casement consistently resists this sort of categorizing; we simply don’t know how he felt about his sexuality even if we know so many of his sexual encounters.

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A few months ago a sexual partner of mine rummaged through a stack of papers on my coffee table (he's bright, curious, quick, nimble, always roving) and found a little pamphlet which had pictures of Casement and the other leaders of the 1916 Easter Uprising. With no prior knowledge of Casement, seeing only his face among rows of others, he immediately asked who this man was. Why do you want to know?, I wondered.

Because he's hot, he replied.

I laughed and explained that, coincidentally, he was also the homosexual one. Over a century later Casement still has a draw for many men.

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In The Rings of Saturn--a strange, associative, perambulatory essay-novel which serves as a history of the metaphysics of transformation and destruction--W. G. Sebald gives a long and elliptical account of the chain of horrors which first lead an exiled Conrad to Africa, where he met Casement and where Casement saw the next link in the chain of horrors that would lead him up the Congo and to the Amazon and back to fight for a free Ireland. Sebald gives an effectively concise account of the injustices forced upon the Irish people by the English and how they affected Casement:

The injustice which had been borne by the Irish for centuries increasingly filled his consciousness. He could not rid his thoughts of the fact that almost half the population of Ireland had been murdered by Cromwell's soldiers, that thousands of men and women were later sent as white slaves to the West Indies, that in recent times more than a million Irish had died of starvation, and that the majority of the young generation were still forced to emigrate from their native land.

Sebald suggests that there's a link between the Black Diaries, Casement's homosexuality, and Casement's sense of morality:

The authenticity of this Black Diary, kept until recently under lock and key at the Public Records Office in Kew, was long considered highly debatable, not least because the executive and judicial organs of the state concerned with furnishing the evidence and drawing up the charge against alleged Irish terrorists have repeatedly been guilty, until very recent times, not only of pursuing doubtful suspicions and insinuations but indeed of deliberate falsification of the facts. For the veterans of the Irish freedom movement it was in any case inconceivable that one of their martyrs should have practised the English vice. But since the release to general scrutiny of the diaries in early 1994 there has no longer been any question that they are in Casement's own hand. We may draw from this the conclusion that it was precisely Casement's homosexuality that sensitized him to the continuing oppression, exploitation, enslavement and destruction, across the borders of social class and race, of those who were furthest from the centres of power.

"We may draw from this the conclusion that it was precisely Casement's homosexuality that sensitized him--" is a wry, sly, elusive little move Sebald buries in that paragraph--it's of course the resolution we want to achieve, that Casement being a homosexual and Casement being a revolutionary are wedded somehow, and it's of course a reasonable thought, but it precisely can't be a formal conclusion because we have no direct link or insight from Casement's own hand or mouth--only our intuitions, associations, and hopes. Sebald implicitly acknowledge some of the unknowability here with his last account of Casement, his trial and execution, and the ultimate transformation of his body:

As expected, Casement was found guilty of high treason at the end of his trial at the Old Bailey. The presiding judge, Lord Reading, formerly Rufus Isaacs, pronounced sentence. You will be taken hence, he told Casement, to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution and will be there hanged by the neck until you be dead. Not until 1965 did the British government permit the exhumation of the remains of Roger Casement, presumably scarcely identifiable any more, from the lime pit in the courtyard of Pentonville prison into which his body had been thrown.

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I'll attempt to end with a moral accounting of this elusive Anglo-Irish man I love in a strange way:

Roger Casement was born into an empire which afforded him a position of comfort, security, wealth, & status; Roger Casement saw the link between the empire in which he lived, the systems of economic extraction empire creates, and the horrors of mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide; Roger Casement rejected his position of comfort, security, wealth, & status and did his best to destroy the empire in which he lived, up to the point of death. Have you done better? (I have not). 

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Will Slattery teaches high school in Tucson and helps curate things here at Essay Daily. He tweets on very rare occasion (@wjaslattery) and posts miscellaneous personal content on Instagram rather frequently (@wjasity).

Dec 24: Yvette Saenz, On Going Home

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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On Going Home

Yvette Saenz

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I just got back from a trip to Alice, Texas, where I visited family for the holidays. I’ve forgotten how to be at home. I think what this means is that my home in Alice, Texas is no longer home.  

There are Trump signs everywhere around town, but that’s not the reason why it’s no longer home. It’s something deeper than politics, but politics is also deeper than politics. Politics is indicative of the condition of the human psyche, and politics is much more complex than what it has been reduced to in this era. 

But politics is also quite simple. It’s a conflict over ideas about what the world is and should be.  Home stays the same, and I’ve changed, and the conflict on all sides, everywhere, increases. 

I want to believe in the comforting lie that I’ve grown up, moved on, beyond the place of my birth, beyond the place that defined the first part of my life. The truth is far stranger and more disturbing: as I change, so does Alice, Texas. This place moves the way that glaciers do: slow motion, nearly imperceptible movements that could disrupt the delicate balance of the entire ecosystem. The balance has been disrupted, but in what exact way, I don’t know. Everyone has an answer, and no one has the answer. 

Nothing inspires nostalgic reminiscing like absence. Nothing inspires romantic yearning like distance. I've yearned, I've reminisced, I've idealized, but even home is no longer the same after being away for so long. What is there to yearn for, when the home I longed for cannot be found anywhere? It wasn’t even there when I thought it was there.  

When I return I feel that same desire to be a child again and re-do it all, live every pain, every happiness, but with the awareness and insight that I have as an adult. With the knowledge that I should savor even the suffering, because it meant something. I could save myself and my family from every bad thing that ever happened to them, with my adult insight. That’s the fantasy that home delivers.  

But the reality of returning to Alice frees me from the fantasy that I could’ve done anything to save anyone. Returning home reasserts that I had to save myself first before I could help anyone else.  

Many of the people I spoke with in Alice voted for Trump in the last election. I listened and asked questions because that’s my job here, to listen and learn. I can’t teach anyone here anything about life that they don’t already know, or that isn’t fundamentally irrelevant to them and their lives.  

And mostly all I know is poetry, and no one needs to know about poetry. In my classroom with 20-something-year-old undergraduates, I am the teacher, but in Alice, the roles are reversed. I become the student, and everyone is my teacher.  

When I speak about politics there, I feel like I sound out of touch, so I shut up pretty quickly. In graduate school, I’ve picked up the terrible habit of relying far too much on abstractions. It’s the curse of academia. I don’t consider myself an academic, but I work in a university and I’m a graduate student in the arts, which makes me an academic. 

I become self-conscious because my life is so different from the lives of the people who live in Alice. Many of them work in the difficult and dangerous industries that allow this country to function: agriculture, oil, healthcare. I teach poetry and take graduate classes. My life is the definition of frivolity in comparison with their lives. They are nice, kind, productive, likable people who I feel totally comfortable with in most ways. And many of them voted for Trump.  

I’m not interested in judgment. I’m interested in understanding because I refuse to become what I always feared: irrevocably changed by escaping home, spoiled by life under the protective guardianship of an academic institution, unable to remember the nature of the struggle outside of the bubble. Alice is changing, too. It’s still a rural, Hispanic community that mainly employs people in the oil field, in healthcare, and in the local school district. Since 1912, Jim Wells County, where Alice is the county seat, voted for a Republican in a presidential election only four times (1956, 1972, 2020, and 2024). Alice was a Democratic stronghold. What happened? 

It’s much easier to convey surety when speaking in abstractions. In the world of ideas, how can anything be proven or disproven? It’s just a matter of rhetoric. In writing this, I am in the world of ideas. But people are not ideas. People are living beings, they are real, and we have to listen even if we disagree with them or believe they are wrong. We have to try our best to understand why they believe what they do. And it’s not our job to save anyone. It’s only our task to see and recognize people for who they are. That’s the only way things will change for the better rather than for the worse. 

But much more than an academic or a teacher, I’m a poet. Isn’t poetry located in the concrete, hyper-specific moment? I need to give you a snapshot of Alice to hold, but what was most meaningful to me when I was home had nothing to do with politics. It was sitting in the car with my mom as she read my poetry manuscript, and realizing as she read that for the past three years, I’ve been writing these poems for her.  

It was my niece asking me whether there are cherry blossoms in China, and my being able to tell her: yes, I’ve seen them. It was holding my nephew's hand as we rode the escalator at the mall in Corpus Christi, because he gets nervous when riding an escalator. I had this fear as a child, too. I remember that all I needed was for someone to hold my hand. 

Writing poetry has taught me that, paradoxically, in the realm of the specific and the concrete, nothing is certain. And perhaps certainty about that which we know little is part of the problem. In what I see and experience in real life, not in abstractions, not in the virtual world, I feel my individuality, my separateness from other people, and my closeness with them, my intense uncertainty about where I end and another person begins. I feel the beginnings of an our, an us. 

Alice, Texas always reminds me that I am not alone. 

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Yvette Saenz is a writer from Alice, Texas. She graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Social Studies and has worked in AI, marketing, and education. Currently, she is an MFA student in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona.

Dec 23: Lydia Paar, Plurinity

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Plurinity

Lydia Paar

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Your husband’s best friend, a poet, gave him a postcard. 

     Red background, black pen, and the words: “This machine kills fascists.”

How quaint, you thought, more soundbite wisdom, but your husband framed it and hung it in his office.

At the end of another bad election year, where soundbytes sounded good enough to sway the vote to a spin king, you have begun to wonder how much writing matters. You scoff when you glimpse the framed postcard, passing from the kitchen.

You scoff although you’ve written a lot. Years and years of essays. You obviously have some belief in the value of attempting to articulate things to people beyond your own brain. In fact, the word essay, used as verb, means “to try.”

Try you do.

     The essay you’ve tried hardest to write, one roundly rejected by venue after venue, is on actively seeking peace. It’s awfully “Crunchy Christian” (Hippie Christ, not “Hoorah-Hoorah Guns and Country” Christ), more conversion than the killing of fascists.

The need to seek this, like so many needs, took root through experience, an experience you are reminded of when you walk by a certain building every day on the campus where you work.

It’s the Harshbarger building, connected to the Mining building by a broad, open stairwell.

     The Harshbarger building has a photo taped to its outside signage now: the professor shot to death by his former student there:

Mining is where you taught that same term. And on that day of your colleague’s murder, you had, by some miracle, or by chance, canceled class to hold conferences in your office, far enough away, that day, to be safe.

You think about it constantly now, as you pass en route to class: how you used to dawdle in the halls before teaching, examining wall-mounted ore, fun facts about human consumption. Marvel at the resource we’ve brought up from dirt.

Now, you shy from entering, where the ghost of your own potential alternate reality stalks: the one where you didn’t schedule those stop-gap conferences, where gunshots were in earshot, and you stood frozen in front of a roomful of students only recently released into the world: too young for a legal beer but old enough to join the army. 

In that reality, you stood in the midst of new chaos and thought: Run? Hide? Fight? –The paltry three options your mandated active-shooter training offers annually.

     You thought: is it against my principles to pray? You hate to beg. You’re not into the quid-pro-quo crap (If you save me, I’ll go to church. I won’t watch porn). 

What are the odds you could get your students to turn their cellphones to silent? Could they even hear you over gunfire, giving instructions? You’d be in the center of two radically separate forms of communication colliding, making an ineffectual trinity in this lopsided and now-failing metaphor.

Meta (noun): referring to something’s own genre or structure.

Anyway, you wrote many Op-eds about this scenario you fear, sent it out and said we need to do more than say things about it, and since this is not the first school you’ve worked for where there’s been a fatal shooting, you can say so: offer hastened solutions with hazard-pay pressure. Or mandate some peace practices in classes: more than new locks on the doors. More than our current careerist, profit-focused curriculum: Gandhi's Satyagraha, and/or the removal of social situations that cause inequity/harm/rage to start.

You emailed your thinking into the internet and waited for an answer. 

     Present tense: wait.

The only response you hear is a distant groaning, a giant media machine rising slowly to full height. It grows as if vacuuming smaller entities, drawing them as if by magnet, compressing them into the pulpy pile of itself. The pile purports to know the right answers about damn near every human question. 

Well, you think, as you pause between end-year protein-potato feasts, presents, and shelf-elves to again approach one of your least favorite holidays, you suppose you can concede that writing, or “essaying” does indeed matter: in fact, the whole premise of this supposedly-hallowed consumer holiday, for better or worse, is rooted in and repeated from a massive essay collection…carried forward through each new century in stilted prose through thousands of jagged translations. 

     Ironically, here in the Bible, the idea of a diligently-practiced peace (“turn the other cheek”) is nestled in a swathe of stories of inequity, and how such inequities lead to unholy machines of violence.

It grates on you that now, when you think of Christmas, you think of fascists. Your mind blinds red like the anti-fascist postcard on the wall.

     Hegemony, mired now, you think, in the homogeny of “The Word” (singular).

But you must try.

So you go home and open other books. Any other collection of words that doesn’t claim to be the only important one, and seek to learn of life and death and EJfhalwfb from anyone who might have met divinity here, there, or anywhere, any shape: a glimpse. A moment. Eureka. The quiet in the chaos.

It goes beyond the need to read one text, but to inscribe anew. Articulate or even to rearticulate in fresh language. You don’t like other peoples’ prayer words.

     But you can find reverence in a research paper.

     Prayer in a podcast. Poetry. Maybe even porn.

     Every text, really, an attempt to render reality and utter Sjfhaklj without paring down such mystery into mandate.

Mythologist and religious scholar Catherine Bell describes this phenomenon, where the simple act of writing an idea makes it feel real, gives it authority: staying power on papyrus, now in gigabytes. There’s a physicality to it, creating muscle memory in this ritual: inscribe, read, recite, retain. 

     The third-person voice sheds its shyness and suddenly, seeks intimacy. 

     Singularity slides to plural. 

This essay is due in three days and you’re supposed to be grading portfolios. 

     Words about words. 

     Which is what you’re doing, too, composing or assessing. Rinse, repeat.

     This essay is already reinscribed, since you typed it at 4am two nights ago into your phone in the dark, and now it needs a bigger vehicle to travel.

     Both times you type, every time, you find light, jrskjhrflkh-made, then human-made, the unexpected pleasure of unearthing things once dim, only felt but not observed, now noticed: the ways old pieces fit differently. 

And then the spaces where giant structures start to shudder: the hallowed holes in homogeny, a porous hegemony after all.

     The mega and the meta and the monolithic, readied for disassembly, because you just taught yourself how.

Thank Aelrkjlakurh: the trying cannot end so long as there are people with pens and paper or disc space.

     And after you end your own efforts, whether from exhaustion or being shot to death without hazard pay in a building made for learning, the words will surely go forth and multiply.

Turns out it’s not just one Word that matters after all. 

     Turns out the You is not simply an ashamed “I.”

Nor is it singular.

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Lydia Paar is the author of The Exit is the Entrance, an essay collection about love, divinity, class, and violence, and teaches at the University of Arizona.

Dec 22: Kyoko Mori, The Voice: on Cats and Politics

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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The Voice: on Cats and Politics

Kyoko Mori

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The moment the seatbelt sign blinks off, I retrieve my backpack from the overhead compartment, slide my arms through the straps, and lift the pet carrier from under the seat. People are crowding into the narrow aisle with their suitcases. As I wedge myself into the formation, the only way to hold the pet carrier is to wrap my arms around it and pull it to my chest. Miles, who’s been lying down, scrambles to his feet and meows.

     “Oh, a Siamese,” the woman standing directly behind me says. “My family had one when I was a kid. I know that voice.”  

     There’s barely enough room for me to turn around and nod. The woman looks to be in her forties. Miles meows three times in quick succession, an open sesame for a decades-old memory.

     “He’s a blue point,” I tell the woman. “He travels with me because he doesn’t like anyone else. He hides and refuses to eat.”

     “Of course,” she says. “It’s a Siamese thing.”

     “I’m really allergic,” mutters another passenger from a few places behind the woman. His voice already sounds choked up.

     Before I can apologize or ask if he’s okay, the line starts moving and several people who were ahead of us are suddenly ducking back into their seats to let us pass. I thank them and press forward. Soon, other passengers who were too far away to hear the allergy-sufferer’s comment are getting out of our way, too. Miles and I deplane in record time and head over to the baggage carousel to collect the rest of our things. 

      Miles continues to complain in the cab to the hotel and at the front desk while I check us in. But as soon as we’re in our room and I unzip the carrier, he hops out with his tail up, rolls on the floor purring while I pet him, and checks out our temporary home. During the ten days we spend there, he only meows briefly to greet me when I return from the classes I teach at the Low-Residency writing program that brings us from our home in Washington DC to Boston every six months. 

     When I invite friends over, Miles doesn’t have another room to slink off to, so he sits on my lap, tolerating their company. Ten minutes into the Presidential debate on June 25th, my friends and I turn off the TV, open another bottle of wine, and try to forget what we’ve seen. While the four humans meow in distress, the Siamese closes his eyes and falls asleep. None of us knows that Joe Biden will step down, Kamala Harris will run in his place, and the opposition’s sexist and racist misinformation campaign will feature cats.

Cat owners through centuries have noticed—and more recently, researchers have confirmed—that grown cats do not meow to one another. Kittens make small “mew” sounds to alert their mother when they are cold and hungry, trapped under the mother’s body, or stray from the nest and become lost. The vocalizations are nuanced enough to let the mother know what to do: shift her body to let all her kittens nurse without getting smothered, or leave the nest to look for the missing kitten. But once they’re weaned and can hunt on their own, cats abandon their vocal language except to hiss and growl to warn each other to stay away—unless, of course, they come to live with humans. We feed them, keep them warm, play with them, groom them, and pick them up and move them around just as their mothers used to do, so pet cats continue to behave like kittens no matter how old they are. 

     At home, Miles meows the loudest when I am in the hallway just outside our apartment door, talking to a neighbor. He picks up one of his toys—a plush blue shark about five inches long—and parades around the apartment carrying it in his mouth and meowing at the same time. The toy in his mouth distorts his voice. “He sounds like he’s being strangled,” my friend and neighbor Beth says. The moment I come through the door, he will drop the shark at my feet and sit down. He is not, at all, interested in playing further with it. He flops down on his back, stretches his legs, and waits for me to kneel next to him and rub his stomach. Now that he’s gotten my attention and I am doing exactly what he wants me to do, he has no reason to meow. 

     Siamese cats are notorious for sounding like an extremely unhappy baby, but all pet cats learn to amplify the weak “mew” they’d used with their feline mothers into cries that are closer to the volume and the pitch of a human infant’s. Perhaps during the ten thousand years of domestication, their ancestors evolved to be able to produce the sound most likely to get our attention, and/or our ancestors consciously or unconsciously selected for cats that sounded like their children. An average grown cat weighs 8 to 10 pounds, not unlike a newborn human, and most cats tolerate (and some enjoy) being held in our arms and carried around. There is no doubt that our relationship with cats, dogs, and other pet animals is based on the transference of the human desire to nurture the young of our own species.

     Still, the comment that our now-vice-president-elect made in 2021 and doubled down on in 2024 about childless cat ladies running the Democratic party and spreading their misery is not supported by fact or logic. The majority of Democrats holding public offices in our country are men with children rather than women with or without children. As pointed out by many, the target of his comment, Kamala Harris, is a mother of two children by marriage. More importantly, it’s irrational to assume that only people with children care about our country and are qualified to serve as its leaders, or that humans are motivated to invest in our collective future only if our biological descendants will benefit or suffer from our actions. Besides, even if such pessimistic views about humanity were worth debating, I don’t see how cats would enter into the conversation. People’s decisions to or not to have children, by and large, are not influenced by the presence of cats in their household.

     Long before I met my first cat at 22, I knew I would not become a mother. I have never enjoyed the company of small children. Even when I was a child of seven or eight, I dreaded being left in charge of my cousins when our extended family gathered at my grandparents’ house and the adults sequestered themselves in the dining room for their celebration. Instead of making sure that the dozen toddlers and kindergarteners were playing quietly, I climbed out the window to sit alone in the garden, not caring about the swarm of mosquitoes biting my arms and legs. After two of my cousins got into a fight and one of them broke his arm, I was relieved of my duty as the oldest child of our clan and allowed to sit in my grandfather’s study with a book while my aunts took turns minding their children. Later as an adult, whenever I heard babies wailing or young children having a tantrum in public places, I wondered what kept their mothers from getting in the car and driving away without them. Even though I was married for 13 years in a small town in Wisconsin where marriage was equated with “starting a family,” I didn’t choose to have children because I was afraid of losing my temper around them. A child’s cry of distress still makes me want to run away to protect myself from them, or them from me. Contrary to the claim that “childless cat ladies” are so miserable that we want everyone else to suffer as well, I chose to be childless to spare myself a life of misery. I love being single and childless. Except for the results of the 2024 elections, I don’t have anything to be “miserable” about. 

     J. D. Vance’s comment reveals more about him than about childless women or about human nature in general. The old saying, “Misery loves company,” means that humans who are unhappy usually gravitate toward others who are also unhappy because there is consolation in sharing our stories and being understood immediately, at gut-level. Those who are in the throes of their misery may not be fun to be around, especially if you are feeling euphoric and eager to celebrate your own good fortune, but few of them would go out of their way to wreck other people’s lives. Normal humans, in their low moments, prefer to stay home and be left alone. About all they can manage is a quiet get-together with a few friends who can offer sympathy. Only an extremely mean-spirited person would assume or act otherwise. 

     In fact, it takes a lot of toxic energy to organize public campaigns of negativity and harm and persist through them in spite of their lack of connection to any form of reality. J.D. Vance and Donald Trump did not withdraw their false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating “our pets” even after numerous bomb threats caused the city to close their schools. There is nothing family-oriented or child-friendly about inciting hatred. Poor cats, they had to be portrayed as enablers of female selfishness and then, a mere two months later, typecast as hapless victims of atrocities that never occurred.

 To be precise, I didn’t decide to be childless since I had never considered becoming a parent. Living with a cat—or becoming a cat lady, if you will—on the other hand, was a conscious and unexpected decision. I didn’t have an opinion, positive or negative, about cats until my roommate’s sister left her two cats in our care during my first semester of graduate school. When she finally reclaimed them after nearly three months, I was so stunned and devastated by the quietness of our apartment that I skipped my classes and took an epic bus ride across town to visit a Siamese cat breeder who had placed an ad in the newspaper. My favorite of the two cats who’d stayed with us—the one who kept me awake at night by meowing loudly and jumping all over me and then headbutted my arm in the morning and caused me to spill my coffee—was said to be part Siamese. I didn’t just choose to have a cat; I chose to have a cat who would insist on my attention.

     Since then, I’ve spent my entire adulthood with Siamese cats, all of whom have been devoted to me in an anxious, even neurotic, manner. The cat from the newspaper ad, Dorian, bit all my friends. I, however, could do anything to him: hold him upside down, brush his teeth, clip his nails, throw him over my shoulder and carry him around like a sack of potatoes. Of his successors, Ernest was a one-person cat though he never acted aggressively toward anyone; Algernon loved most of my friends and sat on their laps but took immediate and inexplicable dislike toward a few of them (whom he bit). Ernest and Algernon meowed nonstop in my car on the interstate on our cross-country move from the Midwest to the east coast.

     There is some evidence that people and their pets do in fact resemble each other, especially in their temperament. Most researchers who observed human-pet interactions concluded that humans often gravitate toward animals who are like us, and also, our personality gets imprinted on our pets through daily interactions. Anxious humans are most likely to have anxious pets.  

     I don’t think any of my friends—or my enemies—would say that I am an anxious person, however. I prefer to believe that things are going to turn out okay until proven, undeniably, otherwise. That is how I’m determined to weather the next four years. If our worst fears were to come true, I want to arrive at the crisis with reserves of energy, rather than in a state of exhaustion from having constantly worried about everything. I plan to read, listen to, or watch just enough news to stay informed, not to be assaulted several times every day by every word uttered by our president-elect. I’ll spend my time doing what I love and what I need to do; with luck, there should be some overlap between the two.

     But no one can be easy-going about everything. The one exception to my optimistic approach has always involved my cats’ welfare. Miles and his companion, Jackson, are fourteen. I didn’t take their health for granted even when they were younger, but now, every cough or hair-ball throw-up is a cause for alarm. Recently, when Jackson—the first Burmese of my life, chosen to be Miles’ companion because of the breed’s reputation for being calm —started waking up in the middle of the night to prowl around the apartment meowing, I took him to the vet expecting the worst. I made a list of pros and cons to get a head-start on deciding how aggressively I should treat every possible ailment he might have. 

     After numerous tests, there was nothing wrong with Jackson except age. It’s not unusual for older cats to be restless at night. We don’t (yet) have to worry about dementia, though, because he is not confused about where he is or who I am, like some of my friends’ cats were in their last months. Jackson wants to me to dangle a toy for him to pounce on, and he plays hard, like a much younger cat. So I just get up and play with him until he’s tired, Miles sits around sulking, and we all go back to sleep afterward. 

     Except for these nightly disruptions, Jackson is the mellowest cat imaginable. I don’t hesitate to hand him over to anyone—including my friends’ children—to hold and carry around. Because I can only take one cat on the plane, Jackson must stay home in the care of my neighbors while Miles and I travel. Of course, I feel guilty, but when my neighbors say that it was a pleasure to spend time with Jackson and they would miss him when I return, I know they are not just being nice. 

     I find it ironic, even endearing, that Jackson has finally decided to be demanding. He doesn’t make a racket when he is alone or with my neighbors. He meows and prowls only because he doesn’t like me to be sleeping when he’s not. Miles, a typical Siamese, is bred to plaster himself to me under the covers and sleep through the night. On the rare occasion he wakes up, he trots over to his bowl, meows, and quiets down as soon as I stumble out of bed to serve him a snack. He eats and crawls back to bed. Jackson, on the other hand, has an insatiable desire to play, eat a little, get cuddled and petted, and play again. Sometimes, we’re up for half an hour. 

     When he’s finally ready to sleep again, Jackson presses his head under my chin and purrs. A cat’s purr—which may or may not qualify as language because science is yet to determine whether cats purr by intention—is the greatest mystery and satisfaction. Why a cat’s cry, unlike an infant’s, inspires love instead of fear in me is another mystery. Regardless, my cats give me a chance to be obsessive about at least one thing. They are my safety valve: they channel my potential anxiety in a way that doesn’t harm them, me, or the people around us. 

     Many religious rituals and practices around the world are based on the belief that the essence of who we are—the spirit, soul, or chi—is an unstable entity that is liable to wander away from the body. This is one of the few religious beliefs that make sense to me. Every time I stand on a roof deck of a tall building, I understand why people wear amulets to secure their soul to their body or learn spells and chants to guide their loved ones’ souls back to their bodies. On a roof deck, with the sun slowly going down, it is thrilling to watch the light lingering in the tops of trees and gaze at other buildings, cars, and people reduced to toys or even specks. One minute, I’m enjoying the view, laughing and talking to the friends standing nearby with glasses of wine; the next minute, I’m simultaneously wanting to and not wanting to walk away from them and get closer to the edge, knowing that if I do, the only logical thing to do would be to jump. Although I have never contemplated suicide, the temptation to step forward into the pure nothing suddenly feels overwhelming, even inevitable. How can any of us resist the ultimate curiosity, the desire to understand the truth—the forbidden knowledge—of our own demise? The spirit’s longing to leave the body is powerful, potent, and real: it is existential rather than personal.

     There are many things I call to mind—my own amulets and spells—in order to step back and rejoin the roof deck party, but even more than my friends or my work or my responsibilities as a citizen, my cats are the weight that keeps me from blowing away into nothing. They need me in ways no one else does. They are at once my joy and the burden of my responsibility. The duet of distress on the intestate, the demand for play in the middle of the night, the assertion of dissatisfaction in the crowded aisle of a plane: whatever the occasion, their voices call me back to myself, to the only life I have.    

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Kyoko Mori is the author of four nonfiction books, the latest of which—Cat and Bird: a memoir—was published by Belt Publishing in March 2024. Her essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Harvard Review, the American Scholar, and others. She lives in Washington DC with her cats, Miles and Jackson, and teaches at George Mason University and at the Low-Residency MFA Program at Lesley University. Visit her at www.kyokomori.com.