This New Precipitate: a Conversation with Maddie Norris
by Matthew Morris
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I first met 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.
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