To Make Our Little Worlds Fall Apart
A Conversation between Emilio Carrero & Thomas Dai
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As longtime friends, we were delighted to see that our debut nonfiction books were slated to come out around the same time. Though each wildly different in form, our books—Autobiography of the [Undead] and Take My Name but Say It Slow—were the occasion for this conversation. We talk about the obsessive overlaps in our work—the intrigue of citation, queerness and racial identity, and growing up in the South—as well the stories behind the making of the books. What are the radical possibilities of writing about the self, but in concert with others? How is the South a story (of stories)? To what extent does writing autobiographical essays or memoir demand transparency from the author? And how can we make room in these forms for experimentation, play, and intellectual inquiry?
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Emilio Carrero: So, I’m thinking about our time together at the University of Arizona, specifically Ander Monson’s class on collections. Do you remember, Ander forced us to put together a full manuscript(!)—which I was terrified by because I had just started grad school. But it was a really instructive and illuminating assignment because it made me think about my work on a scale that I’ve never done before, made me think about how the stuff I wrote fit next to each other, horizontally rather than vertically. I can't help but think about that process we went through now that I’ve finished reading your book. Many years after that class—ta-da!—we both have collections. Anyway, I offer that preamble as a way into my first question: I want to hear you talk about how you see the pieces in the book fitting together? I mean, if these pieces were hung in a gallery next to each other, what would the exhibit be called? Also, I know many of the essays were first standalone pieces, so what was the process like of assembling them into a book?
Thomas Dai: I remember that class so well. It felt like this moment when “collection” as opposed to “book” or “essay” or even “writing a good sentence” was suddenly the only writerly goal that mattered to me. And being asked by Ander to think “horizontally,” as you say, about how all the pieces I was writing fit together really did affect me as a writer… That is: I discovered I liked building collections. Maybe this is true for everyone, but the scaling up part just wasn’t/isn’t terrifying for me. In fact, it can feel much more natural and pleasurable than the writing itself, which obviously, as a writer, I like to avoid. I do think it’s possible to get a little lost in the sauce, though. I wound up equivocating more than I (or certainly, a reader) needed me to about this collection’s arrangement, its internal resonances and echoes, the vague meta-architecture of the thing. Ultimately, this is a book about being young and adrift and down to converse with the self; it didn’t need some overly complex container (here I’m thinking of the Rube Goldberg machine inside the Port Authority bus station I was so taken by the first time I schlepped to New York for the sole purpose of making out with a boy). And yet I found it creatively energizing to keep casting about for new patterning schemes. There was a version of this book built like a memory palace, with one photograph pinning down each essay, and there was another where I tried tying each piece to a different stroke used in Chinese writing, so that the whole collection accumulated into an exotic-looking character (self-orientalization, for sure, but at the time, it seemed more fun than misguided). Where I eventually landed was somewhere in between a chronological memoir-in-essays and an imaginary, imperfect map of who I’d been in my twenties.
I’ve probably overshot your question, but talking about how collections do or don’t come together is way up my alley. I have a pretty taxonomic mindset. I always want to name things and then allocate that thing to a category, an order. It’s a tic that helps me organize my thoughts for the hell that is writing but that I try and get away from in life, where categories rarely feel so fixed. As I read your book, I also found myself trying to describe it from on high. I produced a lot of possible labels: anti-memoir of a “sad, brown Puerto Rican life”; disemboweled contents of a failed autobiography; epistolary-essay-cum-erasure-poem-cum-annotated-critical-theory-text. All felt satisfactory, but only just. This is true of so much genre-promiscuous work, of course, but your book’s very composition seems to defeat my drive toward a clarifying wholeness. I want, as a reader, to see the book come together as something, and yet that something is maybe best described as a process: you, Emilio Carrero, the book’s named writer and reader, writing and reading. Another way of saying this is that your book reveals its own revisionary process, or rather, it performs that revision constantly—upon the self’s texts as well as those of others—in order to create a disordered, appropriated w/hole. Does that sound pretentious? Probably. Maybe that’s what I want to ask you about, then: literary “pretension,” our fear of it, our indulgence in it, what it is or isn't and what does or doesn't justify it?
EC: I have to confess: I get perverse joy from knowing that I defeated your drive toward a clarifying wholeness. I really love this question though. And I partly love it because I know deep down that I can be very pretentious. As our mutual friend Miranda used to tell me, I can be a real literary brat sometimes (and she didn’t mean it in the cool, sexy way that Charli XCX means; she meant it in the Angelica from the Rugrats way). I’d probably need you to pin down literary pretension a bit more. I am guessing you mean writing in obtuse, difficult, challenging ways?
TD: Oh yes, I mean “pretension” as a strawman, a blanket statement that something has no substance because it’s avoiding a more standard, straightforward reading experience.
EC: You know, it’s funny because I was primarily trained as a creative writer from undergrad all the way to PhD, and intelligibility has always been one of the primary concerns that comes up in workshops. And I think pretension was always hanging over those concerns of intelligibility (like: “Are you sure what you’re doing is really necessary?”; “How could you make this less confusing”; etc.). Students are always trying stuff with their writing in grad school—experimenting, exploring, indulging in whatever flights of fancy they’re riding at the moment. Uninspired teachers will simply diagnose these manuscripts as clear or unclear, confusing or unconfusing, promising or unpromising. More self-aware teachers will ask whether the work is “teaching you how to read it” or some variation of that. I don’t love either of those responses because they assume a monolithic, “straightforward” reading experience, as you say. That being said, I haven’t met too many teachers who are openly delighted by work that’s inscrutable. Which isn’t me taking shots at anyone, truly, because I still do these aforementioned things as a teacher all the time (I live in the glass house of academia like most writers I know), and teaching a creative writing workshop is difficult, to say the least. Still, I do wonder if what we’re really saying when we talk about intelligibility and pretension is: is this book capable of capital? Has it cleared a certain threshold of intelligibility (and likeability and “straightness”) for market consumption, whether that be niche literary consumption or large-scale popular consumption? I’m not saying anything super new here. What I’ve realized, after doing this for a while now is: we (writers and readers) want to know what the book is and we want to understand what it's saying—and there’s something maddeningly seductive about these desires. We want the book to undress for us—and not in intimate, consenting, sensuous, loving ways; but in coercive, shitty, exploitative ways. And I just say all that because I know, or at least I feel in my body, that the institutional protocols of creative writing run deep in our psyches, and often there’s this presumption, which I am guilty of as well, that the work needs to come together into an intelligible whole or even needs to surrender, implicitly or explicitly, a coda for the reader so that they can have a “straightforward” reading experience; otherwise, the book has failed. And so I wonder to what degree the question of literary pretension is tied up in those norms? I’m probably more sensitive about this than most because a lot of the feedback I’ve gotten consistently throughout my writing career is that I ask a lot of readers. I ask a lot, sure, but I think I give a lot. And so, truthfully, I think my writing is very indulgent. What I hope is that it’s not self-indulgent. I’m really not trying to do the “look, mom, no hands” thing when I write. At the end of the day, I really believe that what I’m making when I’m writing is a poethical wager, to borrow Joan Retallack’s term, on me and the reader to create and/or discover something that makes us imagine the world differently, unimaginably so. If that makes me indulgent in literary pretension, then fine. I’m fine with wanting us, writer and reader, to indulge in wild fantasies; experimenting and exploding boundaries. That’s the whole Walter Benjamin thing, right? All great works of art either dissolve a genre or create a new one. I’m not saying I’m doing that but I’m trying, I really am.
Your question about pretension is making me think about how we greet readers on the page. In yours, the opening chapters feel almost like literary methodology, a writer thinking through the ideas, questions, events the book is concerned with, but also a meta-reflection on “how to” think through these questions. The opening two sentences of the book underscore this for me: “I am trying to envision a map. It is maybe the map of my life.” When I read this, I was immediately thrust back into our time in workshop together, and I’m like: oh, yeah, these are such Thomas sentences—lucid, desirous, cartographic, ambitious yet uncertain. I never told you this but when we were in grad school, I was always so flummoxed by the way you embraced uncertainty in your work. Reading your work, I’d throw my hands up in the air, wishing you’d come out and say the thing you’ve decided on, pick a position to hold. I mention it now because I admire the way you’re able to surf along so many currents of thought, emotions, histories without allowing yourself to be sucked into them completely, perhaps a healthy level of skepticism you maintain although that word doesn’t quite feel adequate to what I want to say. The point is, I felt my brain slowly building a muscle memory for moving through the essays, learning to stand up on the board, so to speak; or maybe what it is that I felt certain doors have been opened to welcome me into the narrator’s ways of thinking and perceiving and feeling, like intellectual hospitality has been offered. By the end of the book, rather than bringing us toward cliche affects of home and togetherness, we’re primed, almost physically, wet-bodied and toned really to tumble through these ideas in complex ways that resist resolution, that juggle multiple things at once.
I’m curious if you saw the essays as requiring readerly acclimation? And do you see your writing style as welcoming the reader into certain ways of thinking and perceiving and feeling?
TD: Wow, I hope this doesn’t come across as glib, but your diagnosis of what’s going on in the book’s opening gestures—plus just my overall tenor as this writer who likes a lot of indecision—is much nicer than anything you could’ve said about, I don’t know, the beauty of a particular sentence. I will take full responsibility for any and all flummox, though I also can’t say my “writing style” is all that intentional. I don’t set out to “embrace” uncertainty so much as I discover, through writing, that uncertain is how I feel. You generously call this a “healthy level of skepticism,” but in my mind, most skeptics eventually show their cards, and on those cards are usually the bullet points to their own theory-of-absolutely-everything, or else glossy white blanks without any image, an empty house of nihilism to which the skeptic gratefully, if also suicidally, retreats. I’m always trying to write my way out of this double bind, to find middle ground not in the centrist, political sense but in some transitional phase that exists in between the solidcore knowledge that you feel or think one way and will feel and think that way forever and the gaseous absence of any and all such beliefs, identities, or attachments. Earlier, you answered my question about literary pretension by saying that creative writing classrooms and publishers tend to demand legibility from the author—legibility here also meaning salability—which is in large part why your book refuses to settle into any one form, one tone, or even one human being’s set of words if those words are to be rendered as property. I really admire how relentlessly you challenge the reader—“[This graveyard] is very hard to read”—because why should it be easy? This exchange of confidences among strangers? In contrast, I think I was more than happy to bring most of these pieces into the world as personal essays, to work within that familiar form, but if there was one thing I didn’t want to compromise on, it was the book’s air of uncertainty; I didn’t want to pick a position or produce a clear thesis or say exactly and indubitably what I had come to the page to say. I wanted to float down a river, which of course means occupying multiple positions in succession. Maybe that’s why there’s so much liquidity in this book (watery stool, for one, but also watery characters) and maybe you’re right in pointing out that this takes some getting used to, some acclimation, before a reader can feel included in the mental journey of these essays. Inclusivity is such a vacuous word for so many of us—included in what exactly?—but I did want this book to be welcoming, inclusive. I just didn’t know how to make a pathway into it that wasn’t also circuitous, because that’s how the experiences and thought patterns I’m writing about felt to me: routes without destinations.
On the topic of inclusion and bringing not just the reader but other voices into one’s work, I want to ask you about the literary technique of citation. Autobiography of the [Undead] is highly referential, but not deferential, which gives its citations a different, dare-I-say transgressive, quality. This isn’t always true, but oftentimes your citations feel like acts of graverobbing and (loving?) desecration to me as much as they are a borrowing of some fancy person’s idea. (I should say, for context, that this book is composed entirely of text scavenged from other sources, including a memoir you were writing but then later abandoned.) For instance, you take an entire passage from Sebald’s The Emigrants, preserve most of the syntax while changing all of the proper nouns, so that the story—Sebald’s story—of an emigre moving to Manchester is also the story—yours—of moving to Tucson to become a writer:
But when the time came[:] I did not want to be reminded of my origins by anything or anyone, so instead of going to New York, into the care of my
uncle[best friend], I decided to move toManchester[Tucson] on my own. Inexperienced as I was, I imagined I could begin a new life inManchester[Tucson], from scratch; but instead,Manchester[Tucson] reminded me of everything I was trying to forget.
Can you talk about that a bit—how even in the shared act of using other writers’ language, those who cite often achieve radically different effects?
EC: I’m smiling at your citation of the Sebald passage. Maybe because Sebald has meant a lot to me (as he has for many writers). To your questions about citations, it’s strange because I have used citations since I was in grade school. I mean, we all have, right? We all had to do the whole 5-paragraph essay thing with secondary sources, and even in college, that changes only moderately. Those formative experiences with citation turned me off from it because of how rote and insipid and uninspired citations felt in those contexts. Even during my MFA, I was sort of ideologically against using citations because I worried that it disrupted whatever “pure” experience I thought “my writing” was supposed to be creating for readers (it’s actually kind of embarrassing to admit now because of how blatantly myopic and narcissistic it was/is) wherein intertextuality and meta-moves and a critical consciousness of poetics all threatened the “vivid and continuous dream” that post-war whiteness had/has conceived of, institutionalized, and disseminated through American creative writing. In short, my disgust for citations pointed to an artistic solipsism I was mired inside of, a praxis that had no room for the embrace of other’s voices. That’s a long (though I hope helpful) prologue to my answer: citations carry a charge with them. Or maybe my encounter with them creates a charge that I then insert into whatever I’m writing. The transgression, the “graverobbing” as you call it, is a gesture that I cannot fully predict and therein, I hope, lies its creative potential, its surprise and intrigue for the reader—what José Esteban Muñoz might call “an anticipatory illumination” of the not-yet conscious, an otherwise queer world-making that, again I hope, resists saturation into neocolonial frameworks of possession, property, assimilation, and intelligibility.
I guess the less nerdy answer is that I realized, early on, that the book couldn’t be deferential to the citations. There’s no fun in that! The fun came from embracing the strange, inappropriate, desecrating, and loving effects that can be created by citing others. My editor calls it “parrotphrasing,” which I love for all its silly, cartoonish, interspecies connotations. I guess another way to think about the effects of citation is to think about them as offering an invitation. Like when you invite someone into your home, a relative stranger so to speak—be it an acquaintance, someone you’re dating, even an estranged family member—you’re opening yourself up to so many different possibilities, and the quickest way to narrow and ruin those possibilities is to impose a bunch of rules on them, to police them into certainty. So, you can call it graverobbing, which I love, but you can also call it invitations to the graveyard, a creaking gate swung open to this fucked-up home of self that I never wanted and yet cannot let go of. The best I can do is give away this home, constantly, to steal from Fred Moten.
All this thinking about citation is making me think about reading habits. Your book is so intellectually abundant, polymathic in the way it strides and turns through discourses. I am curious about your reading process in general—like are you one of those people who are reading a bunch of different books at the same time? Or, do you go on certain intellectual binges before switching to something else? Is reading idiosyncratic for you or guided by projects you’re working on?
TD: I’m pretty scattered with my reading habits, like some kind of biblio-tourist. I will poke around a field or genre, or maybe one specific author’s corpus, for a while, and then I’ll leave. (Relatedly, I don’t always finish books that I start, especially novels and memoirs—anything where the fuse has to burn a long time; I think that’s why essays stole my heart from the jump, because they just held my attention more than the more capacious forms.) But also like any tourist, I do collect souvenirs, or maybe landmarks is the better metaphor, these texts or authors I like returning to whenever I circle back to a region of inquiry. Kandice Chuh and Anne A. Cheng for Asian American Studies; Lauren Berlant and Eve Sedgwick for queer theory… so on and so forth. The thing about this book’s archive of references that’s maybe different from other creative nonfiction books about race, migration, and identity is that I try and dip into that stuff—the “theory” stuff—but then I also want to write alongside scientists and poets and classic American Lit writers like Mark Twain and Robert Frost. This doesn’t always make for a coherent read, but I personally just enjoy a big tent. There’s no inherent claim I’m trying to make by putting Nabokov and Tseng Kwong Chi into the same essay, but there’s also no inherent tension to them sharing that space.
I should also mention that I wrote most of these essays as I was working on my PhD in American Studies. A lot of the reading I did back then was for class or my qualifying exams, and a lot of that reading heavily influenced this book. It wasn’t just that I wanted to cite these academics I was reading, it was that they created this ecology of ideas I wanted to spend time moving through, and to bring the reader along with me. Now that I’m out of that context, I think my writing and the extent to which citationality enters my work are both going to change.
Before we leave this topic behind, I do want to ask if there was any specific book, figure, or image you encountered that was germinal for this project? Obviously, the figure/image of the grave repeats throughout, mostly in reference to writing and its publication. What’s the metaphorical resonance of graves for you? Why and how did that figure capture you as you were writing? This project certainly feels haunted by death, but it’s maybe not the kind of death (i.e., bodily expiration) I expect in nonfiction. To me, it felt like you were more interested in the annihilation or abdication of selfhood and also the letting go of a written kind self-making project, what you call your “mem-me.” So abstract deaths, perhaps, but enacted with such force on the page.
EC: The figure of the grave came from my letter correspondence with the writer Brandon Shimoda during the pandemic. I had read his book The Grave on the Wall at a time in my life when I really needed to read it. His book helped me more than I can say. He was the first one to talk to me about the grave as a kind of archive that we’re constantly adding to. I became enamored, transfixed you could say, by this idea of the grave, and by extension, the graveyard as an infinitely, deathly storage space for our lived experiences. So, yes, you’re totally right that the grave is a way for me to think about death in the abstract, as a cultural concept that felt/feels abundantly present in my life in a multitude of ways.
Maybe what I want to add to that is that although the grave/yard is very much a metaphor for me to think about self-making and self-abdication, it also has concrete purchase in the book insofar as many of the people in the book have passed away. They quite literally have graves of their own and I am writing about them from a place of grief. And a lot of that grief stems from the fact that the dead actually didn’t haunt me in the ways I expected or wanted them to, which is why I wanted—needed—to write about them. They were gone and they didn’t reach out to me, visit me, talk with me like they used to when they were alive. I missed them and this book was a way of being with them again. I am thinking about the opening to Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend” where he writes: “I have my dead, and I have let them go, / and was amazed to see them so contented, / so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful, / so unlike their reputation.” As usual, he said it better than I could.
You mention that the book feels haunted by death. I think that’s right. I still struggle to fully articulate the texture of the haunting. Maybe the most succinct way to parse it out is via juxtaposition. If Joan Didion proclaimed that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” then my experience, as a writer and Puerto Rican, had been the opposite: stories cleared pathways to die. I mean this abstractly and literally. The stories my family had told themselves (and had been told to them) as colonizers and colonized Puerto Ricans had led them, on no uncertain terms, to die; and I was very much in danger of following that trajectory, albeit in different ways. And in the abstract, I realized, all too painfully, that many of the protocols of creative writing, this institutionalized field of storytelling that I’ve worked in for almost eight years now, hinged on these little social deaths you had to enact, to go through, for the sake of producing singular works for public consumption that adhered to neocolonial notions of originality, property, and cultural cache.. If “social deaths” feels like too much, though, we can also call them “heartbreaks” as Kiese Laymon alluded to after he published Heavy:
There’s a way to write a book like my last book that doesn’t leave you ashamed and scared and alone…Artfully tearing your heart open and selling that heartful rendering to the highest corporate bidder has consequences [deathly consequences I want to argue]. Please, please tend to your heart when creating the art our heart needs, the art that helps your family eat.
Creative writing is heart work and yet so many of its protocols deny the heart, render it ashamed, sacred, alone, and broken. I say that and I also want to say that I’m not equating my little social deaths, my heartbreaks as a poor POC writer with the social deaths and heartbreaks that Blacks, Palestinians, and/or my Caribbean ancestors have historically lived through. They’re not the same thing; however, I believe that there is a conceptual relationship between us, a varied yet commonplace familiarity with death, in all its creative grief and joy, that I continue to try to understand and explore in my writing.
This Kiese Laymon stuff actually reminds me of something I’ve been dying to ask you about: the South. When we were at U of A, I think you were the only other writer I knew, besides myself, who was writing about the South. And it sounds terribly cliche, but it really is hard to explain what growing up in the South is like if you didn’t experience it. You write in “Southings”:
So, yes, what Asians there were in Farragut did stick out, and there were times when I thought of us, me and all the Asians I knew, as propertied squatters with no valid claim to this non-Asian place—a place I had the misfortune of loving as much as I did.
I began to think about how irreconcilable and beautiful and tragic this ongoing experiment called the South really is. It really is a peculiar kind of insanity that it inculcates in you where, as you say in the essay, you feel you “owe” these people who are prideful of a place but scarce in everything else. While reading “Southings”, I couldn’t help but think about this thing Audre Lorde writes, which I chew on in my book, in which she asks: what do we owe each other after we have told our stories? I don’t honestly know since so much of these conversations around home and identity are focused on our stories. The South, too, is a story. And of course the lives of racialized bodies in the South is a story of stories, fragmented and disjointed. And I’m going to venture to say you and I grew up similarly vexed and harassed and guilty and passionate about our very presence in the South, this place we had the “misfortune of loving”? And now, as creative nonfiction writers, we tell these stories and also, as you say, try to understand/empathize with the opposition. I’m uneasy about the word “opposition”. I want to say I try to understand whiteness’s hostility and anxiety, which I carry inside me as a mixed-race person. But basically what I’m saying is: Am I wrong to want an affirmative answer to Lorde’s question? Am I wrong to want more for creative nonfiction than the mutual sharing and understanding of our stories? Am I asking for too much to want more than that without knowing what “that” is? Sorry, I need to bring this back to you and your book. I am wondering to what degree are the stories of the South something that you are invested in sharing and understanding?
TD: No, I don’t think you’re wrong to want more from creative nonfiction (or from me, for that matter) than the olive branches of mutual-ish “understanding,” empathy, imagined common cause, bonhomie, etc. I don’t even know if literature has successfully facilitated those things in my life, let alone the higher order consciousness-raising or material change I think you’re interested in making our shared horizon. I don’t think it’s bad to be a utopian, maybe especially when you’re stuck writing about intractable, venomous things like racism, queerphobia, or gentrification. At the same time, I just didn’t feel like it was my place to point the way to any such horizon, or to sweepingly comment on these “issues.” Insofar as I have a story of racialized subjugation to tell here, it’s a story of scary but fleeting moments—a pattern and an atmosphere, definitely, but one I’ve often been able to move past or ignore. To be clear, Asian Americans are subject to systemic and historically-entrenched racism in this country. I write about that in bits of this book, but I also write about the anodyne, totally commonplace ways in which some of us (myself the primary example) have leveraged our relative wealth and social mobility to gain access to educational and cultural institutions, creative outlets and “opportunities”—affirmation, for lack of a better word. I want to be honest about the experiences that I’m reflecting on, honest about how racialization ≠ marginalization, not always at least. One of these essays is about going on a year-long trip around China courtesy of an endowed fellowship I got from Harvard. Sure, that experience had its moments of despair and spurred a lot of tortured thinking about my “heritage,” but it was also just a gigantic fucking privilege. So no, I didn’t think too much about the discourse on anti-Asian racism as I wrote this, mostly because I wasn’t equipped to write that kind of book.
To tie this into your very perceptive questions about the South as a “story of stories,” I’ll just say that the South—or really my little part of it, the part that I know, intimately—is the site in this book where these questions of race and belonging are clearest to me, and so I feel myself writing a bit more assertively in that essay, which doesn’t mean I stake out a position on anything (I don’t), but that the map I present to the reader has less fuzziness on it. And yet, as you also point out, there’s something so “irreconcilable and beautiful and tragic” about Southern identity and that mystery and opacity attracts me as well. I started writing Southings not long after we saw each other at Sewanee, the writing conference in Tennessee, and though that was years ago, I still remember standing around with you under all those trees, talking about all of these things we’ve been talking about here, just in the presence of the South and its varying light. There was a graveyard there, a watering hole, a church we bust into one night. There was this ill-defined rawness—raw like syrup and sex, not the exposed rawness I identify with the West—that entered every conversation and interaction I had in those weeks, and that rawness carried forward into the writing of this essay, which of course quickly tamped the wound, covering it in thought. But still, that essay was the fastest to write in the entire collection, and also the one that needed the least retouching.
In your book, you are a lot more up front about the “opposition.” You know what you don’t like and you find this novel and disorienting way to write against that enemy, without abandoning—here I’m thinking of the redacted, but still piercing, personal letters you include in this book—the emotive qualities of art. The enemy, for you, is so often the self. I want to ask about that… To put it bluntly, it seems like trying to write a specific kind of autobiography ruined your life, and that it had this physical effect on you and your relationships. You call this the “torque” of autobiography. Can you expand on that? What kind of affective space did trying to write autobiographically put you in and did writing this book differently, writing it with the words of others, eventually liberate you from that space?
EC: I really want to take time to sit with your observation that in my work: the self is the enemy. You’re right to say that, and yet it’s still a sobering and scary thing to hear. I still haven’t quite thought through the gravity (and consequences) of staking out that position against the self. I think the short answer to your questions is that writing exacerbated my lifelong depression as well as a family tradition of alcoholism. Of course, it’s not as simple as: writing a memoir caused A, B, and C to happen. The word .doc wasn’t possessed in a Tom Riddle’s diary kind of way. The memoir was a locus for so many converging histories and ongoing systemic brutalities, which are far from unique to me, and are things that so many artists labor under, especially racialized artists. Many of these brutalities are psychic, and so it can feel a bit woo-woo or overly metaphorical to talk about them (even if what I’m ultimately talking about is addiction and mental health) as if the costs of writing literary stuff is the same as being a migrant worker. It is not, full stop. The point isn’t to play oppression Olympics, as one of my students said once in class. The point, for me, is/was to think about the torque of autobiography, and the institution of creative writing by extension, as a part of a larger matrix of ongoing systemic brutality. Only by doing that could I give myself permission to write with the words of others, to reimagine Hortense Spillers’ words or Norman Mailer’s words in the context of a “sad, brown, Puerto Rican life.” The little liberation that’s achieved, if it’s even appropriate to use that word, was from the loneliness of autobiography and all its brutal protocols to a coalition of the undead that is constantly undoing, revising, reimagining, whether we like it or not; a constant wanting by refusing what’s been refused and refusing what we’ve been allowed to have, to steal and revise from Jack Halberstam. Does that coalition of the undead amount to just another version of writing with/through/about the self? Maddeningly back where we started? I don’t know. Can we write our way out of this trap? Who knows, but I’m trying.
I feel like we’re drawing closer to the end of this so I want to circle back to the hospitality I mentioned earlier. Another way that I feel this neighborly, familial embrace coming through in your book is via the phrases and metaphors you offer up—“little semantic handles”; “silly cantering into the light”; “this voyeur come from the future”; “rendering you a charming bit of terroir”; “a geography ill at ease with itself.” They sneak up on you in a playful way. I would find myself following a line of thought, parsing the complexities of family, or love, or cultural identity, and then a string of these aforementioned words would snap me into a different rhythm. Not necessarily a jolt; a squeeze feels like a better word. Which is me saying, I think there’s a lot of playfulness and tenderness and vulnerability in the book amidst its formidable intellectual lines of inquiry about queerness and Asianness as well as its deeply emotional excavations of family history. It’s not quite winking at me but it’s squeezing my hand under the table if that makes sense? For all my reservations and complaining about autobiography and creative nonfiction, I am endlessly in love with how textured and variably intimate it is as a genre. Also, tangentially, the book has a penchant, perhaps even a love, for aphorism (e.g., “We wrote the city, and the city wrote us free”; “What are you? the man asks, but what I am is gone.”)
I suppose my question is: what appeals to you about these varying modes of delivery? And the broader question might be: in what ways did you want readers to feel close to the book and/or you?
TD: I like how you put it—like I’m “squeezing [your] hand under the table.” Many of the lines you’re highlighting are definitely ones I wanted to stick out for the reader, possibly because they operated on this separate emotional and even semantic register for me. I don’t really know what I’m saying when I say my lover and I “wrote the city,” but it feels daring to make that claim, and to do so without providing reams and reams of evidence. Aphorisms and adages have always attracted me as a writer because they squish a monumental tone onto a rather compressed surface, and yes, I too feel like such lines change the rhythm or sound of a piece. You almost need to read them aloud because they’re formulated as “sayings,” the lines of a text that feel most repeatable, most “intoned.” I’m a very unmusical (i.e., tone deaf) person in most ways, but when it comes to writing, I always revise by reading and rereading a piece aloud to myself until it finally sounds like it’s written in my voice. The aphoristic sentences are, for me, the points in the essay when I want my voice to slow down, to tremble, to punch through the reading experience in some way.
To go now from sound to sight, I’d love to ask you about the striking visuality of this book. You use parts of the keyboard here that I don't think I've ever touched. Brackets, clefs, triangles, blacked out blocks. I want to ask you about the process of making this book. Was it a lot of copy and pasting and then reworking? Retyping as you held open all the tabs and book spines? Did you lay everything down first before coming in with the redacting marks and brackets? Or was it something more chaotically and personally intuitive than that? I'm just interested in the procedure you used to create this textual object, to sculpt a thing from words.
EC: I really appreciate you saying all this. The unusual keyboard strikings are the thing I am most heartened by in the book, or maybe just most attached to? The naked truth of it all was that I was just so, so tired of letters and punctuation, of the usual syntactic formations of sentences and paragraphs and chapters, and it’s so weird to say but my hands felt almost autonomously happy, relieved, energized to be landing on unfamiliar places on the keyboard. I just needed it for my own sanity. When you spend many years writing about the self, you begin to become painfully aware of its costs, both as a writer and as a family member, partner, teacher, etc. Rilke says this thing about how the only way to judge whether a work of art is good is if it has arisen out of necessity. The necessity for me was born of how exhausted and disheartened I felt about creative writing after studying it for years and trying to write a memoir. And while the content stuff of the memoir was unpleasant—the whole corralling me and my family’s suffering into a consumable narrative—it was the process of writing itself that I hated. I really hated sitting down to write, to face the blank page as writers say, this stupid keyboard and screen I felt confined to, and even when I did have a “good” day of writing, I felt relief more than excitement. I felt the need to do something else with my artwork. I didn’t want to write; I wanted to break shit. Honestly, I’m still not sure if I’ve “written” a book, which I’m fine with and probably a bit happy about. I think you capture this feeling so beautifully in your book when you talk about “negative creation”—a way of making “our little world fall apart, of turning ruination into an activity and a feat.” I wanted to make the “little world” of my memoir “fall apart.” And the question always was how do I make something of that ruination? How do I make the rubble into a sculpture? You could say that all the visual components of the book are me frantically trying to sculpt the rubble into something before it collapses on top of me.
I guess that brings me to your questions about the actual process. I’d say the process was a lot of chaos and intuition in the beginning. Like, there’s really no immediate logical reason to put the words of, say, Kid Cudi next to Mary Karr. But it’s funny and surprising. That improvisation eventually yields something akin to clarity and cohesiveness though never wholeness. I think I was also trying to figure out a writing process for writing with others’ voices. It’s very different from just sitting down to write something off the top of your head because you’re doing a lot of reading while writing, and you’re doing a lot of copying and pasting as you mentioned, and you’re doing a lot of visual work where you’re thinking about how the voices can be layered together, which sounds maybe more like music composition though I won’t pretend to know anything about that. In a way, there is something AI-generated about the process insofar as I am drawing upon many different sources in order to form a sentence, or paragraph, or poem. Again, I think we’re doing this when we write normally and we just call it writing from our own perspective or “my own voice”, which I think is imprecise and ideological, but I was just trying to be way more explicit and transparent about all this as I was making the book. The footnotes are a reminder of that, right? Each one is basically saying: no, I’m not going to sink comfortably into the illusion of a single authorial voice. No, I don't want you, the reader, to either. There are no solos, only a cacophonous orchestra.
Slowly, patterns, themes (family, love, sex, artmaking, apologies, etc.) emerge, and I had to acknowledge these things even if I was suspicious of them, or rather suspicious of my desire to organize, taxonomize in general. I realized that I couldn’t write a book that destroys the self completely, that dispossesses “me” and the “you” I’m writing to indefinitely. What I could do is be transparent about the ways in which the book was primed to collapse. These things (the strikethroughs, brackets, redactions, playing with citations) are all divots in the seemingly monolithic structure of the book that I want to continually hack at as a writer because I want something more than “wholeness.” This desire is bound to fail, because I’m still making a book at the end of the day. My book wants to be something it can’t be. For me, this feels eerily true to how it feels to be a person most of the time.
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Emilio Carrero is the editor of Southeast Review. Their work appears in SleepingFish, Ocean State Review, and Black Warrior Review. Autobiography of the [Undead] is their first book. They believe the truth is out there.
Thomas Dai teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho. His essays have appeared in Guernica, The Georgia Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. Take My Name but Say It Slow is his first book.
