Karl Zuehlke (KZ): When I read your poems in Tongue Lyre, I find myself constantly intrigued in the most enjoyable way by how you negotiate your subject matter. Greek myth, classical music, writers and visual artists often offer you the opportunity to write from a persona or to create a poetic conceit to express an emotion. To begin I would like to ask how you begin? How do you arrive at your moments of combined self-reflection and myth? Do you begin with language and evolve allusions and mythic capacities, or do you begin with a concept and work toward language, or perhaps you employ a process more masterful than I have yet to imagine?

Tyler Mills (TM): When I was working on the poems of Tongue Lyre, I was interested in the interaction between the mythic story—what is “outside” the poem—and the lyric material of the poems themselves, which are inspired by a love of language (such as sound, metaphor, citation, visible texture, and connotative meaning). I remember wanting to resist the idea that there would be an immediate one-to-one correspondence between what the myth already brings to the poem and each poem’s individual lyric arc. Allegories really become dynamic when one thread, the prior story, unwinds from the second thread, the materials of the imagination. What keeps bringing me back to writing poems that are, as you said, “moments of combined self-reflection and myth” (a phrase I love) is this dynamism, the tension between that unresolved space between both things: self-reflection (or, imagination, to draw from Stevens) and myth.

KZ: So perhaps then, you began these poems with play? Whether it is playing with language or finding play in myths? Your poem “Circe's Notes” is rich with both elements. I want to read the form (the conceit of note-taking) as subverting the Homeric narrative that domesticated and disenfranchised Circe. I also want to read your play with language as aligning cliché and myth, and re-appropriating them both to reveal a cannibalistic masculinity. Is your poem a palinode in Hilda Doolittle's or Anne Carson's sense?

TM: I do begin my poems with play, perhaps in the sense of playing a musical instrument. I like to think of the way a poem begins similarly to the way I think of the start of a good practice session when I’m practicing the violin. If I know I want to work on something in a particular key, I’ll just have fun playing around in scales and chords in that key so I’m ready to work on the piece. Perhaps in this analogy, the myth functions as the possibilities within a score (Levi-Strauss compared myth to a musical score). Language itself is the delight I find in meditating on words, experience, and memory in order to open up the possibility within a prior text or narrative.

“Circe’s Notes” certainly began with this kind of play—as creative and destructive force. It begins, “Socrates decided to be executed. / And the execution of art?” (30). I kept thinking of how Circe typically functions as a symbol of power—she transformed Odysseus’s men into pigs—and then of the function of symbols in general:

In a public garden, a tree
wears a skirt
                          of hard green apples

with a white crescent bite
out of each skin (30).

One could say that I collected this image from my life. Once, I found myself in a city park, where I noticed a tree that seemed to promise the most delicious apples. They looked full and sweet. However, I quickly realized that many people had also been tricked: the grass was covered with discarded apples, each with one bitter bite ripped out. I could see the teeth marks; it was almost like the moment of realization—of the bitterness within the ripe appearance—was marked in each one. Of course, I couldn’t help but think of an allusion to the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. But I also kept thinking about the image as a concept, as image itself. How are appearances deceptive? What is a symbol? In the case of “Circe’s Notes,” the image of the apples came to me as I prepared myself to work with the prior text of the Circe myth. I suppose I found this particular image to be one of the essential notes (as in musical note, though it does pun with the poem’s title) that I could play with in the goal of working with the myth.

However, I’d like to say that how I begin isn’t always like this, so tidy to explain. In reality, much of the time, I am not sure where the materials of the poem come from, other than from that well of internal quiet where the most vulnerable and raw part of the self can be found (or, more like, glimpsed). And, the material also comes from reading as many different kinds of texts as I can, and being open to what they can teach me.

Your question about the palinode is an interesting one. A conservative reading of the definition from the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics would lead me to think that the answer is no, my poem is not a palinode, because my poem does not explicitly retract a prior statement about Circe or another statement made about her. But I’d like to look at the way H.D. and Anne Carson both investigate Stesichoros’s palinode for Helen of Troy, which absolves her of the blame of the war. I’d like to quote Carson’s translation of Stesichoros’s fragment (from Autobiography of Red):

No it is not the true story.
No you never went on the benched ships.
No you never came to the towers of Troy (17).

What interests me about Carson’s treatment of the palinode is that the recantation, in its negation, seems to even more fully realize the fictional narrative than had the statement been issued as that of a truth. In saying Helen is a fiction—that she “never went on the benched ships”—the speaker appears to fortify the assumed falsehood with the kind of believability that can only come from a place of inalienable truth. Perhaps this is what the rhetorical gesture of the palinode is supposed to achieve.

What interests me about H.D.’s treatment of the palinode is how Helen functions as a figure, if she is retracted. In the prose passage before the second section of “Palinode” in Helen of Egypt, Helen of Troy is said to be “a phantom, substituted for the real Helen, by jealous deities,” the result being that “[t]he Greeks and Trojans alike fought for an illusion” (174). For H. D., the palinode instantiates a duality between memory and forgetting. Also, the prose section before the second part of “Palinode,” reads “But Helen, mysteriously transported to Egypt, does not want to forget. She is both phantom and reality” (175). I suppose, if one looks at Tongue Lyre as a whole, one could say that the figure of Philomela functions this way, as a figure that is “both phantom and reality,” as she does and does not forget the violence.

The critic Allen Grossman has said that the mythic archetype of the song of Philomela emerges from the bird pressing her throat against a thorn; the thorn at the throat is a way back to that glimmer of memory that the song marks, the cause of the violence that she forgets. In other words, the song, the lyric, is caused by violence, yet it itself exists out of forgetting the violence. Memory is willed. In my poems, what is retracted? Is it this forgetting? Tongue Lyre ends with an insistence on memory. But is it redemptive? Or is it another kind of entrapment? I’m not sure I have the answer to these questions.

But to return to “Circe’s Notes,” inasmuch as the poem interacts with the myth as a kind of prior story, or prior text (what we might think of when we hear an allusion to Circe), I suppose one could say that it could function as a palinode: the Circe of “Circe’s Notes” chooses symbol as a choice—so that the transformation of men into swine, or the “cannibalistic masculinity,” as you so adeptly put it, becomes a symbol of something entirely different. It absolves Circe from the cultural blame of taking a power assumed to be male; perhaps she even dismantles what this assumption about power might even symbolize. 

KZ: I very much like the idea that “ Circe’s Notes” is not a palinode, yet accomplishes the work of one. As I read it, the end of the poem exemplifies a sense of play so powerful that it can transform cliché; the cliché that “men are pigs,” which the poem conflates with myth and ergo transforms. The facts of Circe's story are not recanted, but they are given new insight. Made new, if you can stand to be in contact with Pound's phrase. The emotional tenor of your poem's end:

O my potbellied pig,

                                  I'll eat you.
And when I cook pig,

one pig cries and cries
                                       for another pig (30).

Such a mix of empathy and justice. The poem's line breaks become more severe, as the intensity of emotion escalates. Circe as she was, not dependent on masculinity for any power. And clever in the way most poets envy. I read this as the payoff to all your well-wrought images. Contradictory signs clash and meld. The bitter apple tree, the quarter glued to the floor that fools people who try to pry it up. Socrates, who preferred death over exile, works as a foil character to Circe, who found power in herself and outside centralized power structures.

I think “Circe's Notes” is the counterpoint to your book's book-endings of Philomela’s myth, by which I mean it expresses a moment of contrast, contradistinction, the ugly note that makes the sweet note that much sweeter. Or, the other way round.

Perhaps part of the story you take into mind when thinking about myths is that of Anne Carson and H.D.? And I do not mean to imply imitation on your part in the least. Yet both are such muscular women writers: I feel daunted and envious when I read either. You mentioned The Autobiography of Red, as well as, Helen in Egypt, both of which are canonical in anybody's reading-list worth anything, and which I did introduce to the conversation. Before we return to Philomela, I have a two-part question: in what way and which writers have influenced you? And, in what ways and which musicians and composers have influenced your writing or your own musicianship? Is one stronger than the other?

TM: The idea of “influence” makes me think of Lethem’s“Ecstasy of Influence” essay from Harper’s a while back. Sometimes influence calls to mind the idea of citation, though I find that backtracking through my thought process can quickly become impossible. When I think about the question of influence, I always think about the rotating stacks of books next to my bed (right now there is Ashbery’s Houseboat Days, Carson’s Nox, and Lerner’s Leaving Atocha Station). I pick them up and read them until my eyes begin closing and I turn the light off. I think about phrases I remember from conversation or the radio, or random magazines (Vogue, usually) I bought three months ago and should have thrown away by now, but I find myself looking at. These texts enter my brain: what do they do there?

When I was writing the poems of Tongue Lyre, I was deeply influenced by Joyce’sUlysses. “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” I wanted to make language do that. I wanted to try thinking about how a mythic subtext could allow a field of language to enact an emotion (in poetry) rather than a narrative—though I am often interested in subverting narrative in my work. I wanted, and needed, to work through the material of these poems, and I found that Joyce was a guide for doing that somehow. I was also deeply influenced by my teachers (particularly our shared teacher, Stanley Plumly and his Marriage in the Trees, which I read over and over). And, I read and re-read Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Bishop’s Complete Poems. And Plath’s Ariel. And Levis’s Elegy (“Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope” knocks the wind out of me every time.) And I read street signs. And newspapers (the Washington Post, theOnion, the New York Times). And the labels of works of art in the Smithsonian and the Hirshorn.  And I read different pieces of music I would work through when I picked up my violin. And the little notes I wrote to myself in the sheet music to help myself through difficult passages. And I read emails. And student papers. And my student loan deferment letters… The list of texts that might have influenced me is difficult, if not impossible, to track.

Playing the violin gives me such pleasure, but it is tinged with a kind of sadness—one that I have learned to welcome. I have to forgive myself every time I pick it up for not being as good as I used to be. I liked too many things to ever really become fantastic at the violin, but I did become serious enough about it that my senior year of high school I’d skip class to get an extra hour of practice in so I could prepare for my music school auditions. I was in music school for a year, but the violin taught me lasting lessons, the most important of which is how to work: how to break something down that seems impossible into manageable pieces. How to figure out why something seems impossible and approach it like a puzzle. It has also taught me to trust myself—the muscles of the body, the thought that is too quick to become truly legible. Sometimes the most difficult things to do with an instrument seem to just happen. Writing poems can be like that. The poem arrives, and it seems like it’s not even part of yourself. But, then you have to remind yourself that it is the result of reading, writing, discipline, revision, etc.

As for composers that have influenced me, I could ramble endlessly. I like a huge range of composers and bands, and I like finding new things and going to hear live music when I can. (I got to hear Neko Case live in Chicago recently and was really excited about it!) And I like making crazy play lists that I listen to when I go running so I feel like I’m dancing. I can say, though, that I’m obsessed with Jascha Heifetz’s recording of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto (Fritz Reiner, Chicago Symphony). When I was trying to train as a violinist, I would listen to it endlessly. I can’t listen to any other recording of it. I heard Sarah Chang do it once, and the whole time I was checking it against that one version in my mind. I could ramble about Heifetz’s recording endlessly (and probably not very intelligently).

KZ: Thank you for sharing so much of your writing process and what you were reading. I think you are really on to something when you compare muscle-memory built playing a violin to the process of writing a poem; likewise, the irreducible moment of spontaneity and clarity – the act of creativity – from which a lyric poem or piece of music springs. That moment cannot be reduced.

I like your attention to the “execution” of art. Vivaldi was introduced to me as a “one hit wonder” and yet I judge every recording against an out-of-print Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra’s performance of “The Four Seasons” in which the limited orchestra draws a heightened attention and resonance to each note. Everything is audible, in contrast to a huge number of musicians that can drown out the subtleties. In that state Vivaldi becomes transcendent for me.  As I experience classical music, some of it presents itself to me as myth simply because I heard the piece so often as a child (only later did I understand the instances in which the composer was evoking myth). Wagner, Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Grieg: certain pieces snap me back to an almost pre-verbal state, expressing an emotion I was not complex enough to grasp with words at the time. How were you introduced to classical music, and does it have anything to do with your attention to myth?

The craft of your book is such that, I think also, we have been talking about Philomela all this while. Her myth works as a framework, a backdrop of backdrops against which your poems riff so successfully. “Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence by T.C. Mills” is where I would like to nest my argument here. 
 
To start with I would like to just step back and say “wow!” On its own this poem is worth attention, and yet set against Philamela's myth, the referent in the title directs and redirects in such an enjoyable way. Dovetailing perhaps. I read an intent need to understand and think about innocence, where it starts and ends, in both this poem and your attention to and use of Philomela's myth. How do you experience that boundary? Could you perhaps talk about how juxtaposition helped you create this poem?

TM: When I was writing “Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence by T.C. Mills,” I kept thinking about the opera: how in Wharton’s Age of Innocence, the opera is its own theatre of sex and desire. I kept meditating on desire and the body, identity and gender. Juxtaposition happened when I started working in couplets: how could I distill a series of images into their most vivid and visceral form in a way that still moved? As I was working on the other poems in Tongue Lyre, I was also reading Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. The Philomela myth joined the poems of the book after the arc was starting to take shape. The silenced woman, the violated woman: how could I in different ways think about the relationship between the nightingale and memory, the victim and artist? The myth was meant to give form to the sequence of poems where the psyche returns to a home that is both the female body—and the will that returns us to memory. 

KZ: Your poem sets up its scene, “New Years Eve in Central Park” and evolves to a moment of juxtaposition. Just the beginning and the end leaves out the entire narrative in between, and this creates an operatic tension. I focus on the moment, where, after the poem has introduced where innocence begins and ends. It breaks into repetition:

Or the age of innocence begins with my cousin
holding a green razor between her legs (4).

These lines activate about ten narratives in my brain, because the poem has established some expectations that this is a narrative. The first narrative I think of is a young girl who is about to start shaving her legs: a token of femininity. But this narrative seems too easy. The razor is stationary, held. Indecisive perhaps? Then I begin asking what kind of razor is it? There are straight razors that are green. But with all of this thinking I think I am wrong. This fascinates me because it is symbolic. Narratives cannot undo its power. It is a way of returning to safety in remembering. Narratives are, in one sense, an end to innocence if they attempt to situate a subject within a larger context. Innocence is the inability to recognize the culturally specific narrative one is situated in.

Your poem lulls me back to a moment before I could fluently read events, as a child. I remember in parts. I am convinced that the form accomplishes this, by introducing a narrative and then collapsing it. In this way, I think your poem enacts tension. Or as William Meredith writes in “About Opera,” from Partial Accounts that our words are mundane, but in opera, “they yearn to take the risk these noises take”(85).

I think “Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence by T.C. Mills” is emblematic of the dialectic your poems explore and synthesize. On the one hand your poems in Tongue Lyrefollow closely some narrative techniques in James Joyce's Ulysses, while on the other, your poems stake out new territory. There is a fulcrum or a balance in your work that produces a tension between narrative and narratives undone. Unfortunately my interview we must miss some of the complexity of the arc of your book, but it blends and re-appropriates personal narrative and myth; it varies in form from cohesive narratives to an erasure poem (if that is what “Ithaca” is). Another node is your understated poem, “Cleaning Out the Lyre” that was featured on Poetry Daily. You also mentioned Blake, who shows up in an epigraph for your seven page meditation, “Rose.” I find an elaborate complexity I want to dwell upon. At what point in your process did some of this congeal?

Tongue Lyre is asymmetrically bookended by Philomela. “Tongue” and “The Myth of Philomela” offer two takes on blending narrative and myth. In “Tongue” personal narrative is set ominously against myth, whereas in “The Myth of Philomela” a third-person narrative inflects the mythological. Both poems create a somewhat cohesive narrative, in counterpoint to moments where a narrative comes undone. We have spent a great deal of time considering moments of fracture in your work. And while these poems are fractured to a degree, the unity the narrative offers is powerful. What do narrative and form offer these poems, as others in your collection, from your perspective as the poet?


TM: I would like to begin my answer with your statement, “Narratives are, in one sense, an end to innocence if they attempt to situate a subject within a larger context. Innocence is the inability to recognize the culturally specific narrative one is situated in.” I am fascinated by context and citation: to a certain extent, my use of Joyce and prior myth is, at times, one of re-contextualizing a prior narrative. The poem “Ithaca” is an erasure of a passage from the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses:

Ever you will wander,

selfcompelled,

to the extreme limit of cometary orbit,

beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets,

astronomical waifs and strays,

to the extreme boundary of space (56).


One could argue that we are endlessly situated and re-situated within a larger context. A favorite passage of mine from Barthes’s S/Z comes to mind:  

“The text, in its mass, is comparable to a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks; like the soothsayer drawing on it with the tip of his staff an imaginary rectangle wherein to consult, according to certain principles, the flight of birds, the commentator traces through the text certain zones of reading, in order to observe therein the migration of meanings, the outcropping of codes, the passage of citations” (14). 

Of course, this is one very specific theoretical view of narrative; I just wanted to complicate the question about narrative a bit. I mean, from a Barthian lens, how can we ever gain perspective over one’s narrative—within such an infinite textual cosmos? But conversely, one must ask the other question. If one is to think about innocence as a lack of knowledge of the myth in which one is situated, who is the observer “reading” the narrative? Whose reading is producing the narrative and therefore concluding the framework in which a perspective is situated? In what way, then, does narrative structure itself become a kind of wingman for hegemonic values? For, one cannot ignore that narrative itself fixes language within a particular kind of arc. I suppose all of this is to say that I have a healthy skepticism about how narratives—historical, cultural—are used, and by whom.  I enjoy working with myth, but myth itself is a difficult mode of language; throughout history, it has been implemented by nations in need of a hero, or in the aims of claiming land as a territory (and therefore the cultural and historical narratives of others). Myth itself is a powerful cultural force. As narrative, it is often read innocently—as something that represents what we want to see, or what values we hold (I am thinking of Bruce Lincoln here)—but at the same time, it wields its power via playing a key cultural function.

In narratives about sexual violence, often the victim is powerless: what that means is that the victim’s perspective is effaced, or even rendered unreliable. The myth of Philomela is a rape narrative. The woman in the story has her tongue cut out. And Philomela becomes a nightingale. In using this myth, I wanted to try to activate this voice—albeit via fragmentation. I suppose I was trying to overturn the narrative itself. Philomela of the original myth does end up weaving a cloth to communicate what happened to her. In a culture that silences victim’s narratives, and within a psychology of trauma where often the narrative—as in, memory—can never quite become whole, I wanted to explore an archetypal rape narrative through the masculine myth of Odysseus so that I could turn it on its head. I wanted the female psyche to find a homecoming in the body: the female body. And I wanted to use the poems to engage with memory as an act of will: one that can overturn the trope of forgetting that exists in the nightingale imagery of the myth itself (here, I am drawing from a recording of Allen Grossman’s lecture on Keats). In Tongue Lyre, perhaps the Odyssey poems themselves become this cloth. As a poet, as a person, it is difficult for me to speak more directly about this other than aesthetically. When I was writing these poems, writing them was my lifeblood. I couldn’t not write these poems. 

KZ: Thank you for unpacking the complexities of your approach to narrative. I feel that sense of urgency: that your poems have to be said. While other poets have used tactics similar to your own, your poems are set apart for me as a reader by the sense of presence and urgency they convey. As you put it, that the female psyche finds, “a homecoming in the body: the female body.” I feel that sense of presence. In spite of the effaced and unreliable representations of women, in your work I find a counter-force. Often, as you note, narratives about sexual violence against women, or violence in general, silence and efface the victim. The victim's tongue is cut out. Yet your poems navigate and activate other possibilities; narratives break apart and become multiple, or are reconstructed in a new way. The power to rearrange and remake myths is equally as powerful as the nefarious uses of myth. Well, at least I'd like to think that. Your poems find life in the ruins of one hegemonic culture, laid over today's hegemonic structures. The image of the tongue, your tongue as the poet and the amputated tongue of Philomela, takes on a meaning of “will-to-speech.” These poems are vital. I mean they have a pulse. I mean they need to be said aloud.

In “Tinsel Halo,” the sounds of your poem are so intricately crafted. Your passage, “The tidewater / as warm as the twist / from the tap you wash your hands with” (65) is unmistakably music. It does not seem to conform to traditionally received poetic meters, however, the words have a particular cadence along with the consonance of w, t, and h. Your entire book is rich with sound, but this poem seems a superabundance. I read it as a kind of “Tinsel Halo,” a false halo of sorts. Or overly glamorous, perhaps. Or perhaps the texture of your language has to do with the meta-poetic gesture towards Picasso's women lying naked and exposed for the male artist to appropriate. The texture of your phrases are almost cubist, in that they draw attention to the surface of the poem. We get fragmented glimpses of scenes, but the words force me to pay attention to them and how they are shaped sonically after a particular aesthetic tactic. The sounds are the surface of this poem, and I feel forced to confront it. Throughout your book, it is clear that the sounds of words are important to you. What insights can you offer about your approach to the sounds of a poem? I listen and listen continually for new words and new music between old words, but perhaps that is not true of you?

TM: Thank you for the beautiful reading of my poem, Karl. I find myself turning to Stevens’s essay, “The Noble Rider” (The Necessary Angel) in order to answer your question. Stevens writes, “above everything else, poetry is words” and that “words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds” (32). When I was writing “Tinsel Halo,” I was thinking about the theatricality of holiness (in painting). I was also thinking about representations of the body and even the sexuality of aesthetics. I wanted the poem to enact a different kind of lyric; I wanted to push the fragment to the limit. I thought about achieving unity through sound, but also letting sound carry me “off the subject,” so to speak. When I wrote the lines you quoted—“The tidewater / as warm as the twist / from the tap you wash your hands with”—I thought about how the body feels in water, pushed by the waves. I didn’t want to force that kind of rhythm on the poem, but I also wanted to see if the poem could enact it somehow. Stevens writes,  “A poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words” (32). In a way, “Tinsel Halo” especially functions as a kind of thing made of words, the words being the shapes (or, images) and sounds.

KZ: Tyler, thank you again for all of your poems in Tongue Lyre. I have truly enjoyed reading them and thank you also for sharing so much of your knowledge about how they were crafted. Would you share a little about what your new poems are doing, or might do?

TM: I have a difficult time talking about my work when it’s in progress…I’m revising a new manuscript right now, and it keeps growing and developing in new ways as I write more poems and revise older ones. I love this part of the writing process. Since I tend to be obsessive about revisions, it can also be pretty challenging for me to just let things go when it is time. All I can say right now is that the project deals with the themes of flight, history, document, landscape, memory, governmental violence, and art. My poems are always about art in one way or another, it seems. My new poems yearn for the “what could have been” and the mystery in what the past reluctantly gives the present: as a record of history that is also a fiction of history. 

Tyler Mills is the author of Tongue Lyre (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), which won the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have received awards from the Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and Third Coast and have appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets, The Antioch Review, Georgia Review, TriQuarterly Online, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Maryland (MFA, poetry), Tyler Mills is currently a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

AprilJo Murphy (AJM): Welcome, Tara, to our humble little webspace at American Literary Review. I was so impressed – dazed even – with your essay “Writing Memoir and Writing for Therapy” in Creative Nonfiction that I quite literally threw the magazine across the room several times during the process of reading it. Your ability to have such a poignant perspective about grief and creation – to not let it overtake your authorial voice and become too painful for a reader – shows a mastery of subject and distance that floors me. Or, literally, astounded me enough to end up on the floor.

Could you tell me a little bit about your writing process? How do let your material breathe? Do you have a routine, or are there authors whose work you read to inspire you? 

Tara DaPra (TD): “Writing Memoir and Writing for Therapy” begin as my “thesis essay,” a literary essay I wrote in 2008 to complement my MFA thesis. But I was rushed for time (I was also trying to complete a manuscript!) and knew it wasn’t right or finished. It then sat untouched until the summer of 2011 when I showed it to a few colleagues at UW Green Bay. One described the voice as “Malcolm Gladwell-esque.” That alone may have propelled me into finishing it. So I worked on it that summer, and then put it away again, and I worked on it again the following summer. The essay was originally almost twice as long. I love the braided essay form but it can be really difficult to tie all the pieces together, so I decided to save some of my ideas, a lot which were about Catholicism, for another essay. 

I’ve been working as an adjunct since 2009, and there’s a lot of insecurity in that line of work. I spent the first couple of years post-grad school scrapping together a living, so I had zero time or psychic space for writing. There’s a lot of valid criticism these days about tenure, but I’ll tell you, living with zero job security is a real creativity killer. I’ve gained a measure of stability in the last year or so, and I also had a baby in 2011, and those two forces have freed up a lot of time I used to spend worrying. They’ve also brought a routine to my life, so I’ve worked to again make reading and writing part of that routine. I’m not disciplined by nature, but there’s a freedom in structure. For a while I worried I had “forgotten” how to write, but—to borrow the cliché—it’s like riding a bike. During my time away from writing, I was mostly teaching English composition, and a fair bit was online, so I was doing a lot of writing but in a whole other capacity: Writing to instruct, writing to clarify, writing in a much more direct way, and that actually helped my “real” writing when I finally came back to it.

But to get back to your question about whether or not I have a routine—I don’t know that I really do. Even though I preach “Writing is a Process” all day long to students, I still struggle to make a regular, steady process part of my reality. I’m not that writer who wakes up a 5:30 every morning to write for two hours. I wish I were, but I’m not. But I live in perpetual hope. I’m planning to take an online class this winter "Daily work, daily inspiration: Restarting or developing your writing practice" taught by my friend Éireann Lorsung through the Loft Literary Center. She is an absolutely amazing poet who runs a beautiful micro-press called MIEL. If anyone can teach me, she can.

 AJM: You've written a lot of pieces connected to grief and mourning. Your personal essay  the color the brain and the heart – has spoken to me about memory and loss, and ultimately living through it all. I'm curious, what role do you think the writer has when dealing with grief? In what ways can personal loss inform our professional work? Can mourning and creating memory or meaning coincide? 

TD: At present, our culture relies heavily on science to understand and explain the world. But before there were scientists, there were philosophers; before there were therapists, there were novelists. Good writers follow the same steps as a scientist; in fact, they did so intuitively long before "scientific method" was so dubbed. 

Writing was my best friend during the grieving process, and some of it was just for me, just venting, and some of it has taken on its own life and become suitable for the world. But it was my driving force. Death and grief force us to re-examine our worldview, to re-assemble our understanding of the world, and that is a very compelling reason to write. 

AJM: We’ve spoken a bit about Irish memoir and notions of memory. Could you please tell me a little bit about what attracts you to this particular section of nonfiction? (I know that Tara is an Irish named meaning “Earth,” so I’m a little curious about your particular pedigree and literary heritage). 

TD: In graduate school, I won a Judd Fellowship, which was a great program at the University of Minnesota that allowed me to create my own project, so long as it brought me overseas. So I developed an idea to go to Ireland to visit the Hillof Tara, which was the seat of the High Kings, to write a kind of backwards genealogy essay about my first name. Americans love to trace their roots, and I thought this was a fun way to play with that idea. What does it mean to share your name with an ancient, sacred place, a place that’s so much bigger and more important than one life? It’s another way of looking for belonging, just like tracing the family lineage. And that’s at the heart of everything I write—I’m always looking for a way to belong because I’ve always felt that I don’t fit anywhere.
 
My second night in Dublin, I went to The Palace Bar, which I’d heard was a pub where journalists from The Irish Times hang out. I brought some writing and sat in the corner, and drank a pint of Smithwick’s, and I did meet a journalist, and I married him a year and a half later. I moved to Ireland the year following graduate school, but the world economy had just crashed and with so much uncertainly in Ireland, we did what so many had done before: We settled in America. In the meantime, I’ve learned that even though we both speak English, it’s not the same language. What I call “lies” he calls another version of the truth. I don't mean to say that my husband is a dishonest or immoral person. He’s not. He’s a very kind, generous man, and I married him—in large part—because he makes me feel safe. But we do have this fundamental difference in our perception of truth. So I’m exploring why there are so few Irish memoirs and how I think it has to do with the Irish tradition of story weaving and their flexibility in truth telling.

The last few Irish memoirs I've read - Edna O'Brien's Country Girl, Colm Toibin's A Guest at the Feast, John McGahern’s All Will Be Well. John McGahern died about a year after his book came and and on his death, The Irish Independent interviewed his ex-wife. She claimed the five pages where she appears in the book are pure fantasy. Now fabrications and embellishment in memoir are of course not the domain of any one culture, but I do think there’s something about the colonial legacy that makes memoir, at least in the way that Americans understand it, foreign to the Irish.

AJM: This is an interesting thought, that there is a sense of flexibility in the Irish memory. I’m thinking a little about Irish funeral customs here – how keening and waking are both expressions of mourning but also a very physical expression of love and loss.

Do you feel that Irish memoirs, and by extension perhaps, Irish-American hybridity seeks to take the personal and elevate it to a mythic or a tendency to think of memory as a bit tricky or supernatural in itself?

TD: When I was traveling alone in Ireland, I almost felt like I was taking part in a play. Irish people are friendly to outsiders, almost to a fault. It’s like they want to play these roles that have been—to use your word—mythologized by the culture. Tourism remains one of Ireland’s biggest revenue sources, and the Irish are keenly aware of its importance. I think the writing can fall into that as well. But this may also have something to do with the fact that Irish society has a cohesion, a harmony, that just doesn’t exist in America, which is a patchwork place in comparison.

AJM: When you are running a workshop, what barriers do you set up to keep it from being a “group therapy” session? You've touched upon this in "Writing Memoir and Writing for Therapy." Could you please tell me more?  

TD: One really basic way to address this—which many others have said before me—is to avoid second person pronouns. My husband actually uses these all the time when talking about something “America” or “Americans” are doing (“What are you guys thinking?” [fill in latest American political fiasco]), which drives me crazy. So in workshop, we talk about “the character” or “the narrator” on the page. I also request that when a writer’s work is being discussed by his or her workshop mates, the writer remains quiet. To channel nervous energy in the meantime, I encourage the writer to take notes. This prevents 1.) defensiveness about the actions of the character, and 2.) it really allows the writer to listen to what her peers have to say. Questions can be addressed after all the comments have been made. I also like the idea of hearing a question and the writer not responding immediately, giving it a little time to simmer.

Another great piece of advice came to me via Patricia Fransisco Weaver. She tells her students that if they’re writing about something that’s still very raw, that it’s a really, really good idea to concurrently take part in therapy. I love this advice, because it doesn’t tell the writer that shecan’t write about something until it’s fully processed—which I think is the message that’s often given. I mean, the fact that it isn’t processed can create a powerful sense of urgency to write, so why waste that momentum?

AJM: When you are running a workshop, do you have favorite exercises? What are some of your teaching tricks, that you wouldn’t mind sharing? 


TD: Since I’m a nonfiction writer I like to use prompts that involve memory, which is useful for all genres. So I might ask students to write about a favorite photograph, or a recurring dream, or even to write around “things I can’t tell you” or something they don’t fully remember but wish they did. I'm also looking for new writing prompts and recently came across a treasure trove from Poets & Writers. 

I think all writing begins with description, which can be a kind of meditation. Describing a person, a moment, an object allows a story to emerge and creates a flow and an authenticity in writing that can be hard to find if we spend too much time looking for it.

AJM: This has been a lovely conversation - and very informative. Thank you very much for coming to speak with us at American Literary Review. I hope our readers enjoy your perspective as much as I do. 

Tara DaPra has an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Rake, and Sheepshead Review. She teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay and the University of Wisconsin–Marinette and in her "free time" (ha ha!) reads and edits submissions for the online lit + art journal Paper Darts.

April Murphy: I discovered your writing when "One Thousand Kittens" was a finalist for Cutbank's Montana Nonfiction Prize in 2011, and then went on the hunt for more essays from your unpublished collection Ambition Towards Love. What I found surprised me. 

Some essays of yours, like "Proxy" and "Somewhat Organic" are what I think about as being kind of traditional memoirs, but then there are essays like "Shades of Gray" and "Another Lesbian Space Fantasy" that seem to break out of old ways of thinking about the CNF genre - blending the imagination and a sense of magic without the same authentic and honest (and charming!) voice that characterizes your longer work. Can you talk a little bit about these different forms your writing takes? 

Catherine Lucille Sharpe: I am certain that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is important, for reader and writer alike.  It must be important; people get quite upset when they discover that the writer has cheated--stepping outside the bounds of "literal truth" to copulate with fiction.  But why don't people get upset when nonfiction parades around as fiction? I am guilty of this.

The Ambition Towards Love collection deliberately flows back and forth between fiction and nonfiction.  Whatever the genre, I continue to circle the same ole boring human stuff--love, loss, more love, more loss, lies, less love, gain, a little more loss, joy, heroism, duplicity, frailty, failure, growth, shrinkage, doubt, love again, loss again, truth, etc..  The usual.  

As a writer and self-avowed nutpouch, I've clearly been trying to sort one or two things out on the page--the mere two dimensions of the page seem so much more manageable than the infinite dimensions of my head and heart. 

I know that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is important to me because I take the trouble to know the difference line by line, paragraph by paragraph.  In my nonfiction, I might forsake a perfectly good "real" detail, simply because it does not add to the meaning of the story, or what I want to emphasize in the story.  And guess what!  I might include that same detail in a short fiction because it creates ambiguity--one of the best ways to make fiction seem just as true and confusing and unknowable as real life.  

The decision to approach an idea through fiction or nonfiction profoundly affects my writing process, even when there are thematic congruities.  I've noticed how the struggle to craft readable fiction has improved my nonfiction writing, in both predictable and surprising ways.

Predictably, being forced to dredge up a believable character is good practice for bringing your Great Aunt Susan to life for the nonfiction reader.  She's the one who always sucks the knuckle of her pinky finger so that she can twirl her wedding ring.  It doesn't fit on her ring finger anymore, and anyway Uncle Frank's dead, so it doesn't much matter where she wears it.  There's something pathetic and familial about all that saliva, and now the reader gets Aunt Susan, too.

Unpredictably for me, engaging in fiction demands that I suffer a vulnerability I don't necessarily feel in the process of nonfiction.  In fiction, my judgment must fade way, way back, allowing the story to emerge from its mysterious place, a place I hardly control.  It can be frankly terrifying to tap in to my subconscious--my id whines, my ego hits, and my superego makes me write the same sentence a hundred times on the chalkboard.  The reader, even as she nods her head vigorously, agreeing that she's reading fiction, is still coming to some conclusions about the writer.  She can't help it!  If the writer goes on and on about cup size, the reader is not going to mistake the writer for a leg man.  Or a leg woman.  (Boy, I can't make that sound right.)

When you read my fiction, don't you dare tell me I'm lonely, or wimpy, or flailing, or crazy-in-love with my offspring (thus doomed to suffer), or bitterly angry, or actually quite sad at times. 
When I am writing the truth, or at least my nonfiction version of the truth, it is so much easier to control what the reader thinks about me.  The persona is deliberate, calculated, securely insecure, always ready with a deflective quip.  The reader will certainly mistake my persona for me, and thus I am safe from scrutiny.  I believe that I am in charge.  Which is, of course, a different kind of fiction, but luckily, the kind I reserve for therapy sessions.

To my dismay, all of this precision about fiction and "truth" does not ultimately prove useful to me in the real world.  Some people tell the truth only to discover later that they lied.  Others lie only to discover the truth.  Some don't even bother to lie, they just keep their mouths shut, suddenly go on diets, go to work early, come home late, and wait to be caught.
Your resumé is one big piece of creative non-fiction.

My Amibition Towards Love collection approximates the experience of a whole story--one where the reader swims through truth, both designated and actual, as well as the lies we call fiction.  Nonetheless, like me, the reader still has to figure out what really happened.

But by the time the words hit the page, it’s all true.

AJM: Do you think that queer writers are obligated to write queer nonfiction? I suppose since nonfiction is about personal experience, the subject matter is inevitable is one is queer. The writer, then, gets to figure out how their queer identity is expressed what (if any) resonance it will give to their more 'universal' life story. 

One of the things that's refreshing about your writing is that the central struggle isn't your queerness - the narratives don't get their tension from a 'coming out' plot, nor do they have a political abrasiveness despite the fact that they are about gay marriage/divorce/reproduction - instead your work exists in a world where all of this is secondary to the love you have to give your daughter and yourself. 

CS: As far as I'm concerned, nobody is obligated to write anything. Well, unless contracts are involved. I do, however, this it's Super Nice when people write about stuff they really care about. The form - fiction or nonfiction - is less important than the question at stake for the writer. When I'm reading, I'm engaged in the investigation that the writer is making into the subject matter, so it better be a real question the writer has, with some juice.

I'm totally way flattered that you find my work refreshing in its absence of Queer Identity Conflict, which I'll just call QIC for our purposes. I haven't written much specifically about QUIC because it is not a painful enough question for me - plus I already know the answer. I'm special. 

When I say I'm special, what I really mean is that I'm like everyone else. That makes me special, because not so many people realize that. And I've decided to worry less about being original and worry more about being average. And writing about that instead.

I'm really, really, really, really, really interested in what it is like to be human. More precisely, what it is like for me to be human. My current line of inquiry is how I am like so many others, not how I feel apart from these other creatures.

AJM: It seems like you really have a focus when you're creating your persona. So, how do you navigate your real lesbian identity with your lesbian narrators? 

CS: Poorly. They are all mixed up inside. Therefore, I try not to think about it too much. The idea of a continuum of truth - from lies (fiction) to truth (nonfiction) - is inept at best. Truth is a blob, a DNA strand, a froth of delicate, short-lived moments. I've had perfectly good fiction turn into nonfiction on me more than once. On the page and in real life. Freaky.

AJM: As someone who didn't enter academia after completing your MFA, can you tell us a little bit about what your writing life is like now? 

CS: Oy.  I’m scattered and slow. I’m undisciplined about my creative work. I prefer black pens and write longhand in a college-ruled spiral notebook.  Usually early in the morning. Sometimes my daughter has to borrow my notebook for drawing or math or to teach me something by diagramming.  For now, I let her because she can’t really read cursive (this is de-emphasized in school now, did you know?). Also, I like what she inserts into my ridiculous musings.

For my paid work, I write all day (or at least sit in front of a computer all day as if I’m writing) for a corporate healthcare services entity. Sexy.  Adjectives are discouraged, as are complicated sentences that involve semi-colons; apparently these are too difficult to follow. It is a constant struggle to avoid being sucked into the undertow.  I have to remind myself that writing has saved my life—connecting and re-connecting to that source is an end in itself even when progress on new creative work is slowed down to a drag-drag-crawl-sob-crawl.

Catherine Lucille Sharpe wrote mostly for live performance in San Francisco before turning her attention to gay marriage, in vitro fertilization, gay divorce, parenting, dating, fiction, and nonfiction.  Her first collection of interlocking essays and fictions, Ambition Towards Love, hasn't been published, but you can read some excerpts in Opium Magazine, Acappella Zoo, Word Riot and CutBank, among others. A few of her pieces have been included in anthologies and she has almost won several prizes, one from Montana and one from North Carolina. If you would like to know if she actually ever wins a prize or publishes her collection, join her email blast list by sending a note to catherinelucillesharpe@gmail.com. Put "join email blast" in the subject line.

April Murphy: When you began blogging as The Rejectionist, you were anonymous - and the persona you created was pointedly bombastic and irritable. Eventually, this kind of melted away, evolving into a more reflective and sometimes-even-soft Le R, that suddenly, revealed itself to be you - owning up to your real identity and your past and your (exciting/literary) future. I'm curious, did the anonymity help you find your writing voice? Or, once you revealed your identity, did you suddenly feel the need to start writing about your life? 

Sarah McCarry: The funny thing about that is that the early persona of the blog is really what's uncharacteristic for me as a writer, and the personal stuff is more like what I've been writing all along. I've been writing a personal zine since 1998 or 1999, and although obviously (well, hopefully) my writing has evolved a lot over the years I've always used the lens of my personal experience to examine whatever it is I'm thinking about. Everything I've published up until now has been some form of personal essay. When I moved to New York I thought, very briefly, that I wanted to work in publishing, and the blog started as a lark and a sort of escape valve as I was flailing around in that endeavor. But I realized pretty quickly that that wasn't an industry I wanted to stay in, and I really don't like writing about publishing--or writing, for that matter--and so the blog shifted back to the kind of writing I've always done. 

Although I've never thought of that early persona as particularly constructed--I mean, there's certainly a lot of me in there. I'm a cocky bitch. It's a big advantage, especially if you're a woman writing on the internet about yourself, to come across as terrifying. 

AJM: This reminds me of something Rachel Maddow said recently in an interview with Rolling Stone. Maddow was referring to a confrontation she'd had with Alex Castellanos where he said he liked how passionate she was when she called him out on denying the gender wage gap. In the interview she's quoted "I wanted to say, 'Are you saying I'm cute when I'm angry? But I didn't, because when you're a woman on television, you can't even say the word angry."  I think you could substitute 'woman writer' and Maddow's remark wouldn't ring any less true. 

One of the things that I admire about your writing is that you aren't afraid to let people know when you're angry - and you make no effort to conceal that you have strong opinions about how women are treated both in the publishing world, how they're treated by writers, and how they are treated at large. I understand it's nearly impossible to answer "What advice can you give to women writers, people who talk about women writers, and people who write women?" and you've been tackling these very questions for years, but what can you tell them about anger? 

SM: I think anger is the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me; I think anger can be constructive and instructive and it can make you into a force and it can keep you alive. It has kept me alive, certainly. It's the thing I recognize in other people and it's the thing that tells me how much I'm going to love someone, whether we are angry in the same ways about the same things. It can make you totally fearless. But also I think anger is something you have to learn to live with carefully--for me that's been true, anyway. It's also important to learn how to take care of yourself and give yourself permission to take breaks from it. Anger for me is like a sort of tiring houseguest; sometimes you have to be like, "Dude, take a walk so I can clean my damn apartment and read some trashy books and drink a beer." I don't know what to say about it exactly; if you are a woman your anger will make people scared of you, for sure, but the angrier you are the less you'll care, and the people who understand your anger and make a space for your anger and are angry with you are the people you want around you anyway. 

AJM: When I was in undergrad, one of my professors upon hearing a student say they'd been accepted into a graduate writing program exclaimed that "Dante didn't need a degree to write the Divine Comedy."  This has always bothered me, probably because I fear the truth in it. As someone who escaped the MFA/PHD/BA/etc.circus (for a more exciting and literal circus), what has your experience trying to break into the writing world been like?

SM: The short version is that it was about fifteen years of fucking up and going nowhere and then when everything came together for me at last it came together very quickly; like I woke up one morning and the universe had left me a unicorn, pretty much. I knew when I was very young that I didn't want to do an MFA; I took a couple of writing classes as an undergrad before I dropped out of college and I had no patience for it. I am so bad at workshop, I can't even tell you. I don't mean to disparage MFA programs at all, I think they can be wonderful for people who are suited to them, and they can be amazing spaces to get a lot of work done and hopefully find people who understand what you're trying to do and read your writing well. But I go totally bananas and say hateful things and make people cry, and I think if you're that sort of person it's fine too. Just don't inflict yourself on an MFA program. 

This is going to out me as a total hippie but I think it was hard for me for so long because I wasn't ready; when I started taking myself seriously as a writer and telling people I was a writer, when I started taking my blog seriously and treating the things I was writing as though they were real essays and not just running jokes, that's when things started to happen for me. I think it's absolutely true that, MFA or no MFA, if you are moderately talented and willing to work your ass off and never, ever give up, at some point it will pay off for you. There's no one way to do it. 

AJM: Vivian Gornick, in The Situation and the Story, describes a similar process. She says that sometimes you can't write the right story until you've decided who you must be to tell it. Do you any insight into this process? 

SM: Well, I wish I had something very deep and insightful to say about this process, but honestly it happened to me by accident and I have spent most of my life being terribly impatient and frustrated with myself and ecstatically self-flagellating and all that other awesome stuff that comes from being a human. Things didn't start happening for me until I was ready for them to happen, but that place is so different for everyone. Some people get there when they're 23 and some people get there when they're 63 and either way is fine. I can say for sure that right now is the most amazing place I've ever been in my life but I never would have gotten here without aggressively running my life into the ground for a while. If you can get to self-love and dream achievement without epic mismanagement that's probably a way more advisable route. I've been pretty much the same person since the womb but it took me a long time to figure out how to love myself and have faith in what I'm doing. I've also been really, really lucky, and there are a lot of incredible people in my life who have supported me in so many ways. Anyone who tells stories is telling them as part of a community and I have been tremendously blessed by the community that I have.

AJM: Serious question: preferred whiskey?

SM: Bulleit Rye. 

Sarah McCarry is the author of the novel All Our Pretty Songs, forthcoming from St. Martin's Press in 2013. She has published the zine Glossolalia since 1999 and blogged at www.therejectionist.com since 2009. She is the editor and publisher of Guillotine, a series of chapbooks focused on revolutionary nonfiction (http://souslespaves.bigcartel.com). 

April Murphy: I recently read the craft book Tell It Slant, which you wrote with Brenda Miller. The book is a warm welcome for an inexperienced writer - and a handy guide for demystifying particulars of nonfiction for experienced writers. Because it reached these different audiences so well, I was wondering if you had any trouble with Tell It Slant, or with your other work, of deciding who your "ideal audience" is?

Suzanna Paola: First of all, thank you for your warm words about Tell It Slant, which is currently out in its second edition. Brenda and I had a lot of fun, and achieved a lot of insights, putting the book together, first in the initial edition, which we undertook when we barely knew each other, and in the second, when we had become—partly through the writing process—very close friends. In many ways the book has mapped our friendship, so it’s very special to me.

I think the question of audience is a tricky one, one that each particular work evolves to answer in its own way. I should mention here that I write a great deal of my prose under the name Susanne Antonetta—it is a family name, of a forgotten great-grandmother in my family; I love trying to bring this lost woman back to life by using her name. When I wrote Tell It Slant—with Brenda—I was writing, however consciously at the time, for my students. I pulled out the questions they had asked me, the discussions that helped them make some kind of sense of their struggles with the literature of reality, the prompts I had used that brought out their best selves as writers, helped them evade those awful internal censors and write strong, breathing, authentic stories.  Many times I would sit down with pages of class notes—I am a fanatical class preparer—and my notes to myself on what I wished I said, and write that book.

My other books are more complicated. I think I partly wrote Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, a book that engages very directly with environmental contamination in several counties in New Jersey, for the people in those communities, though I did not think I would reach them, and that audience was kind of a hazy ideal; I also wrote for the lost women like the woman Antonetta whose name I tried to infuse with life; and for, perhaps more than anything, my son. It was a story of place and family, of a toxicity he has not had to live, yet one that has directed the course of his life. To be honest, when I first worked on that book, I thought no one but myself would ever read it. I was a poet. I came across stories that would not fit into poems anymore—stories of chemicals dumped into the ground, of distorted bodies—but the idea of a memoir told through the environment felt so different  then that I worked on Body Toxic and threw the writing I printed out into a drawer, thinking it would stay there. So I wrote for particular people but I also wrote for that drawer. I wrote more bravely than I would have otherwise, maybe, in my confidence that no one would ever read the book!

I believe as writers grow and evolve their sense of audience collapses, growing smaller and smaller. This may sound odd but I think it’s true. At first you imagine everyone you know reading your books. Your community, everyone you run across in the elevators at the AWP conference! That changes. When I studied with poet Charles Wright, he said he had one ideal reader—a nun he had met at one of his readings—and he wrote for her, and increasingly, for himself. I think I write to make sense of what I have lived and to know what I think; if I don’t write it, my life will be only reactive, unexamined.  In that sense I suppose I write for myself. Increasingly I find myself writing for my son.  There is so much about our lives we cannot tell our children; I feel as if I am leaving him a way of understanding his life, a series of answers to questions he may never otherwise know he needs to ask.

AJM: That's such great advice - that you should let your audience get smaller. I often find myself paralyzed by trying to speak to everybody. Sometimes I think the hardest part about creative nonfiction is being unafraid. You speak about this in Tell It Slant, where you say " The narrating ‘I,’ the persona you create, is the one who has the wherewithal to rescue experience from chaos and turn it into art” (77).  Do you have any other tips for helping the ‘I’ in your writing be more authoritative than your real life self - or overcoming authorial shyness?  

 SP: Yes, overcoming that shyness can be very hard in nonfiction! I find, having very beginning students at times, along with many writer friends who have been writing a long time and whose drafts I read, that it’s the beginning students who tend to say, even during an in-class writing, “But what would my [mother, kid, spouse, etc.] think of this? How could I publish it?” And then they get stymied, just doing that impromptu freewrite. The truth is, we write what needs to be written, what announces itself and pounds on the door and won’t go away or take no for an answer. Beyond attending to that urgency, when the writing is done, we have some choices to make. We can publish now, wait to publish, even choose not to publish or publish in a contained, local way.
First you do the writing you need to do—that pounding on the door is going to give you a terrible headache if you don’t. Tell yourself the other decisions about exposure will come down the road, and you have a variety of strategies for dealing with those questions. I tell writers this when I teach, and I find they often discover, when they have a good working draft, that they’re not so worried about what so-and-so will think. The story has more compassion and nuance to it than they expected it would.

Nonfiction writers pretty much have to, at some point, decide where their own particular lines will be drawn.  I’m very protective of my husband and son, for instance. That’s my decision. But I feel strongly we have only one life we’re given, and we are entitled as writers to make sense of it and have access to it. Yes, it has other people in it, and we need to approach them with an attitude of humility and compassion. As long as we do that, we will tend to perform as ethical writers. Note that ethics does not mean covering up for others, or deciding you accept family guidelines—all families have them—for not “telling.” These participations in cover-ups are things no one has a right to expect you to do.

AJM: Another one of the moments in Tell It Slant that I found most helpful was when you explained:
“Both photography and creative nonfiction operate under the ‘sign of the real’ (a phrase coined by literary theorist Hayden White); both operate as though the medium itself were transparent ... A good photograph will mirror the inner vision of the photographer, just as the good essay will reflect the unique sensibility of the writer, whether or not that writer focuses on material interior to the self" (76).

The analogy of a nonfiction writer as photographer is also used by Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. To paraphrase, Dillard says that one can learn to see in a way that they become a camera, letting the moment leave impressions on them instead of film. I'm curious about what connections you think a nonfiction narrator has with visual artists, if any? 

SP: I think we and the photographers and visual artists are all after the same thing. Words are ultimately a descriptive but also a plastic medium; we apprehend them through their appearance on the page, through their rhythms and their hardnesses and softnesses and what they make our palates do. Writing is both a visual medium, a communicative one, and a performance.  The best writing leads us through the experience of the moment, brands us with it, as if it gives us a memory—clear and concrete—that never existed before but takes its place among the mental imagery of our most true experiences. Its sounds should cause scenes to appear. I often cite memory research; if you try to implant a memory with a vague description it won’t work, but if you give enough concrete detail--do you remember being the poor governess at the house with the thorn trees and the cries of despair from the top floor—you achieve a blurring between real memory and the relived literary experience, Jane Eyre, as real as the day you fell off your bicycle in front of your best friend in the second grade. 

AJM: The university you teach at, Western Washington University, publishes Bellingham Reviewand sponsors the Annie Dillard prize for nonfiction. These things are kind of a big deal in the CNF world, what journals do you recommend creative nonfiction writers read or publish in? 

SP: I have my favorites among magazines and journals, but I think what’s most important is to read widely and read a lot, and support literary publishing. We always have subscriptions we rotate among different publications in my household, to help everybody stay afloat.  There are very different things happening with creative nonfiction between say, Image and Orion and Seneca Review, all of which are journals I love. So I say, read, and also support.

AJM: I have a question - though I'm not quite sure how to ask it - but I'm curious to hear your point of view on anyway. There seem to be a lot of CNF writers who are (or were) poets. You, Thomas Lynch, Annie Dillard - even Wistlawa Szymborska published a book of micro-essays - and I have a gut feeling that there's got to be something to that. I don't know what it is, though. So I don't really know how to ask about it. Is it imagery? Something similar in perspective? I don't write poetry, so I can't speak from personal experience, but I'm very curious.

SP: It is true there are quite a few nonfiction writers who began life as poets, but it's equally true that there are a great number who began life as fiction writers: David Shields, Tobias Wolff, Kathryn Harrison, to name just a few. It seems that for many writers of nonfiction, another genre comes first. Of course, creative nonfiction, though it's been done forever in many forms, is experiencing a new explosion of interest along with a spasm of formal experimentation, and many of us coming to it in the past decade--or even two--simply did not have it as an option in our literary education. We neither studied the essay, nor read it, much, and may not have thought of it as a genre until discovering it later on.

That's one piece of the answer, the simpler piece. A more complex response I think has to do with a person's evolution as a writer. If you think about the movements of a human life, it makes sense we would enter the artistic arena relying more heavily on the tool of imagination for the scenes, dialogues, characters we want to inhabit. Our life experience is limited, and it's still raw. I don't know that, to use one example, many of us understand what is unique, tragic, comic, joyful, etc. in our own lives until we start nudging middle age. After a while--whether we're writers or not--we begin the job of mentally processing our own experiences, whether it's our travels, our childhoods, our parenting, whatever. We realize gradually who we are and who we've been in relation to the world. No one's born knowing that; I've had students who failed to see anything interesting in having grown up on a commune, related to one of the Watergate burglars, or, rather breathtakingly, living inside the Statue of Liberty with a park ranger parent.  This isn't to suggest all nonfiction is memoir, simply that the personal lens of nonfiction has to involve a sophisticated understanding of who's doing the looking. This realization, how I am history writ small, a microcosm of larger forces, and I am culturally shaped, is perhaps an older person's insight. Not that some of us don't write great nonfiction out of the starting gate, but I think it's understandable that it might take more time.

AJM: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that's on your mind? 

SP: I did a great deal of editing in this past year. I edited a special folio for Drunken Boat, read for the Pushcart prizes, and coedited a special issue of Brevity, along with Barrie Jean Borich and Joy Castro. I am pretty hands-on with material I publish; I like to edit, thinking of it as coaching a piece to that final level of excellence. It’s a lot of work! But I am committed to doing editing work, and to working with VIDA, the grassroots, feminist organization of women in the literary arts. I believe we as artists have an obligation to the larger literary world. I always encourage writers working with me to define themselves in a way that is broader than just “writer”; we are all people of letters, members of the literary community. 

Think about ways you can expand the literary world: beyond hoping to be published, what opportunities can you create for other writers? Help found a journal, start a reading series? It is essential that all of us writers think of ourselves as people who also create spaces for others to participate in the world of letters. Otherwise, in a pinched economy with limited room for literature, this little boat is going to run out of room.

Suzanne Paola (Susanne Antonetta)’s most recent book, Inventing Family, a memoir and study of adoption, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Awards for her poetry and prose include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, a Library Journal Best Science book of the year, a Lenore Marshall Award finalist, a Pushcart prize, and others. She is also coauthor of Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Orion, Seneca Review and many anthologies, including Short Takes and Lyric Postmodernisms. She is the chair of the nonfiction Genre Action Committee for VIDA, the feminist organization of women in the literary arts. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her husband and son.