To Make Our Little Worlds Fall Apart: a Conversation between Emilio Carrero & Thomas Dai

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 to Manchester [Tucson] on my own. Inexperienced as I was, I imagined I could begin a new life in Manchester [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.

*

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. 

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

 This New Precipitate: a Conversation with Maddie Norris

by Matthew Morris

*

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

*

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.