Dec 2: Chelsea Biondolillo's Fourteen Introductions

I am remembering this time just before I knew you, and then I knew you, and then you died. It makes the parentheses within which I lived most of my life. Not knowing you, knowing you, and then you died. —Abigail Thomas, Safekeeping

Before diving into a discussion of how Abigail Thomas uses fragments and vignettes to exalt an “ordinary life” in her memoir, Safekeeping, it is worth examining how she introduces the reader to both her structure and her content on the first page of the book.

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Figure 1: Doors, from Ideal-Combi, Danish window manufacturer

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The first time I saw the house, in its final form as my grandparent’s house, I was struck initially by the grass. Waist-high in spots, but mostly fallen over in great locks. The lawn had languished during a year or two’s worth of neglect into a cow-licked pelt that I knew to be full of mice, snakes, and spiders. The roof had not yet been replaced, so walking up to the door, I next noticed the moss dripping over the gutterless-eaves, the weeds growing in the shingles, the sagging porch overhang, added on hastily at least fifteen un-maintained years ago. Just to the right of the porch, the double garage doors, both skewed in their frames, the furthest right barely connecting with the cracked and heaving concrete threshold. Inside the house, the smell hit you first. It was a complex bouquet made up of piss (human, dog, and cat) and a deeply-ground in earthy odor—not exactly dirt, but nowhere near as noble as “soil”—plus the ghosts of millions of cigarettes, wet and dry dog hair (both ghostly and corporeal), mildew and wood rot—the ceiling beams were sagged and black in spots from the composting processes of the vegetation on the roof—and something I would later learn to recognize as the noxious yet soft smell of mouse-nests. It caused a certain expression to rise on the faces of even the kindest folks who came over in those first few days: concern, mostly, but also disgust, quickly masked by compassionate awe.

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and/or

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Openings are everything. In graduate school, I heard over and over from my professors and writing mentors that essays—especially those pushing boundaries of form or content—needed to inform readers, from the start, how they should be read. I did not understand what this meant at the time and became easily frustrated with attempts to explain it. I would nod that I understood and then go to my office and cry over my inability to get it.
     Now, I repeat the advice to people working with borrowed forms, mixed media, non-narrative texts. In the first few pages, you’ve got to teach your reader how to read this, I say. Give them first a hand-hold, then a toe-hold, then a small ledge on which they can stand and catch their breath.

     This can be a formal element, as Elissa Washuta’s “Rules for Eating” from her chapbook, Starvation Mode. The rules are presented as a collection of fragments following a short introduction. Each fragment has a numbered heading, written in declarative, rule-making syntax, such as “Rule 1. Don’t eat the cat” and “Rule 7. Bread is a filler. Eat as much bread as you want.” We see lists of rules everywhere: on the wall at the pool, in a handout for a field trip, on bottles of aspirin, and so the convention gives us a hand-hold on the presumed authority and organization of the headings, while the body of text below each of the first few rules describes the narrator’s first rules and earliest eating proclivities, which is a toe-hold on the concerns of the rest of the text.

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Lily Hoang’s Bestiary begins with an introduction one sentence long: “Once upon a time—shh, shh—this is only a fairy tale.” It is an instruction housed in a consolation.

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Several times, I have met someone for the first time and have done or said something that fills me with embarrassment and shame. This can be a small thing, like a laugh at the wrong moment or a too-long pause, but it can also be an actual gaffe, like asking how their husband is when they are in the middle of a divorce. I get so nervous when meeting people, all the synapses fire at once and I’m flooded with adrenaline. My cheeks get two-glasses-of-wine-pink. Sometimes this works to my advantage: I am engaged and charged. Sometimes I stop speaking right before I should have found a graceful exit, and I just stand there, nodding like one of those plastic solar flowers until the other person sees someone they know across the room.
     Once, I got up the nerve to tell a writer I admire that the first time I met her I was so awkward that I hadn’t wanted to say hello again. She didn’t remember meeting me the first time—which didn’t exactly help.

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1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity.

Maggie Nelson begins Bluets by telling us how she has considered beginning. It is an intimate and sensual introduction. She pulls the reader close with the word confession, fast on the heels of we. But the numbers resist the intimacy created by the secret she’s sharing. Numbered lists are like rules or questionnaires—it feels formal, and at the same time the fragments in the list each feel like pieces of a larger conversation, pinned to the page by a number, possibly (as yet) at random. And then, between each list item, a single blank line’s worth of space. In the first few pages, some of the fragments flow into the next. One through four maintain the conversation between narrator/I and reader/you, and then five diverges to the year 1867 and a correspondence between a French poet and his friend. Six sweeps the reader out to a literal turquoise sea, and then,

7. But what kind of love is it really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire.

Here the you shifts from an address to the reader to the narrator herself, an internalized monologue. It shifts back to the reader, when Nelson implores, “9. So please do not write to tell me about any more beautiful blue things.” Nelson is teaching us to read each fragment as a dispatch from an obsessed mind, seesawing from first to third to second person, from narrative to theory, from a story about taking care of a friend after an accident to a love story. The numbers then become a restraint, as much as a constraint.

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“I’m buying this,” I would say, shrugging a bit as I gestured toward the mess of a house that had belonged to my grandparents. I would say it was to “keep it in the family,” but I knew my motivations were more selfish than that. Some of the most wonderful people on earth would come over, and they would see all the potential the place had and they would hear my panic and fear, the quaver in my voice, and they would say, “This place is amazing. There’s so much here to love!”
     I wanted to believe them. But mostly, I was comforted that by the idea that what I wanted to believe wasn’t so nuts.
     I’d seen the house hundreds of times before, beginning, I believe, at just a few weeks old (before I had any depth perceptions at all), but this was the first time I was seeing it as a thing that might be mine. The idea was dizzying: it would take a lot of work to make the place inviting and it would never again be my grandparent’s house.

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When writing in fragments, it is often helpful to over-produce. Until you know the final shape of the essay, it will be tough to know what is pertinent and what, superfluous.
     For this prompt, we will look back at the first essay (after the introduction) in Lily Hoang’s Bestiary. The fragments in “on the Rat Race” incorporate nearly all the characters and themes that recur throughout the collection, including her family members, the nature of several of her relationships, and in this essay’s case, the rat—your task will be to write a minimum of three and a maximum of six new fragments related to fairy tales, mythology, or rats.

     When composing your fragments, consider the ideas that Bestiary grapples with: addiction, reconciliation, friendship, racial identity, loyalty, among them. Also, consider the way those ideas are already introduced in “on the Rat Race.” Your goal is not to re-write fragments from the essay, but to write new fragments that could be added.
     For Friday, bring a printout of your fragments, and a copy of “on the Rat Race” with the insertion points marked. You will be working in groups to assess which pieces work best in the framework of Bestiary and which to discard, and why.

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My first word was, “No.” My mother tells this story as though it were all the proof needed that I was a difficult child.

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Figure 2: from Germanà, Maria Luisa & Vattano, Starlight & Tavolante, Alessia. (2017). Air movement representation as a tool for urban and architectural environmental quality.

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In this essay, I will discuss how the fragments in four different books work to introduce and then produce cohesive narrative structures. Abigail Thomas’ Safekeeping, Lily Hoang’s Bestiary, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and Elissa Washuta’s Starvation Mode are composed of short pieces of text separated by whitespace, page breaks, or text ornaments. The fragments in each stand alone, even as they also flow through and accrete into complex narratives. Rather than being interruptive, the fragments allow the reader to be an active part of the storytelling, by filling in the gaps between pieces with their own contextual closure.

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A little over a year ago, I bought my grandparent’s house, and when I did, it was in rough shape. I can sometimes catch glimpses of the place I imagine it will one day be, among the newly scrubbed, sanded, sealed, painted, dressed walls, among the tulips, when tulips are blooming, or among the dahlias, later in summer. The old smells are almost all gone. And yet, still, when I walk up the driveway, I see rotten deck-joists and ugly brambles, the crooked garage door that still doesn’t close all the way. I see the alternative to overgrown grass, which is apparently barren mud slips and dandelion crowns. It’s true that I can also see the new roof and responsible gutters and a front door with a window in it—something my grandmother might have avoided, as it would have offered strangers a view into her house out of order—but it still feels disheveled.
     If you were walking up to my front door for the first time today, you could easily see how much still needs fixing, what still needs attention. It would be a poor introduction.

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Chelsea Biondolillo is the author of The Skinned Bird (forthcoming from Kernpunkt Press, June 2019) and the chapbooks Ologies and #Lovesong (Etchings Press) Her work has been published online and in print. She lives about 30 miles outside of Portland, Oregon, working for a human tissue bank by day and teaching writing workshops on the side. www.roamingcowgirl.com