Interviews — The Rupture

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren't: A Memoir and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in journals such as Brevity, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, The Paris Review Daily, Passages North, The Normal School, Slice Magazine and has been listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2014, 2015, and 2016. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas.

Her essay, "Lonely Things—A Series," appeared in Issue Eighty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Jill Talbot talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about lyric essays, organizing lists, and thrumming chords.

What can you tell us about the origins of your essay “Lonely Things—A Series”? What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

Okay, so I’m going to embarrass myself and show you the original list I jotted down while sitting in that Chicago café in 2013.

Lonely things: suitcases, postcards, the ghost-like outline of paintings that have been removed from walls, shadows in photographs, fill-in-the-blank lines, the last page, the sound of coins dropping into a newspaper stand, empty chairs on front porches, folded maps, words scribbled on napkins, a piece of paper from last season in a coat pocket, the ignored ring of a payphone, a lamp on a nightstand, a closed store, shirts hanging in a closet, a sign so distant you can’t make it out, a kitchen at night, train tracks. My brother’s baseball cap.

I saved the document as Lonely Things, but I didn’t do anything with it. I’d open it now and again, thinking how the things might be a segment in a larger conversation about loneliness. Three years later, I decided that those lonely things didn’t have to do anything but just be a list, a catalog. Here’s an excerpt from the next phase:

Water towers, the hazy outline of paintings that have been removed from walls, shadows in photographs, the clinks of coins in a soda machine, creases in maps, added numbers on a napkin with a carried one, a movie stub from last winter in a coat pocket, shirts hanging in a closet, a row of newspaper stands, the final paragraph, empty downtown buildings, train tracks, Highway 84 to Lubbock, a kitchen in the middle of the night, the snap of a stop button on a mix tape, shoes in thrift stores, an Out of Service bus, a curtainless shower on moving day, school buses lined up before the bell rings, scotch tape on the edge of an envelope’s seal, a symphony conductor’s extended bow, a stranger’s arm out a car window giving the go around signal.

I submitted this version (288 words) to a journal, but the editors wanted “a specificity of an ‘I,’ even if ‘I’ is never used.” In other words, they wanted a voice connected to the things. So the next version employed 2^nd person here and there, as in “the blue sweatshirt in your closet, the one you can’t bring yourself to wear.” Yet something felt uninteresting about the block paragraph, so one day I started stretching lines and phrases this way and that like Silly Putty, sifting and sorting until I had what I considered a hybrid flash, something between an essay and a poem. Another rejection from another journal mentioned the essay’s power came from the “(apparent) autobiography,” so in the next draft I added parentheticals “(flannel-sleeved shoulder)” to push that autobiographical impulse more.

This essay is divided into six sections, the first of which is written in verse, while the rest take the form of prose. How did you decide that the piece should make this switch from a lyrical mode to a more narrative one?

I wish I could take credit for this, but a writer I’ve been exchanging drafts with for years suggested I create a collage, pairing the verse-version “with several other short lyric flash nonfictions to create a suite of impressions.” And that’s when I added the subsequent five sections of prose to create a lyric suite. I like to think of those five sections as a legend, the keys to some of the locations on the map of the first section.

There is a character in this essay, a “him,” who is mentioned a few times without ever being named, and the reader is left to make assumptions about the nature of his role in your life, having very few specific details to go on. How do you know how much information is too much or too little when you’re keeping a pivotal part of the essay like this person mostly out of view?

I like the idea of the “mere mention” of the lyric essay, how Deborah Tall and John D’Agata describe it:

“Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically - its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole. The stories it tells may be no more than metaphors. Or, storyless, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme. The lyric essay stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess. It elucidates through the dance of its own delving.”

I’ve written two memoirs about “him,” and lately I’m more interested how the chords of his presence thrum in my work without being the melody. As years (fourteen) have passed since the morning I saw him getting on that elevator, my memories fragment, moments flash, so this form allows me to explore those mere mentions of memory.

Your essay’s first section contains so many images that resonated with me, one after another, many of them familiar and yet cast in a new light. I’m curious about how you compile a list of things on a theme. Do you seek them out, or do they come to you, or both? And once you have collected them, how do you arrange them? Do you have escalation in mind, or perhaps a more associative logic?

I remember writing the initial draft as a list, simply things or images that came to me, but as I continued and expanded the list and the form, I wanted associations or extensions, bridges between one and the other, and of course the sound of the thing was most important. And once I added those prose sections, I had to go in and add a couple of things to the first section, such as “the stillness of an empty swimming lane” and “a library elevator” for cohesion.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I just finished a flash hybrid, a blend of nonfiction and fiction, and I’m intrigued by that tension, how I’m engaging with memory while embedding fiction (it’s another essay with “him,” as chord rather than melody), and I’d like to do more of those, because how can I say moments from all those years ago are now anything but a mélange of story and essay?

I’m finishing up a hybrid collaborative manuscript with Justin Lawrence Daugherty that we’ve been working on for four years.

And I’m also working on a memoir that weaves my daily morning visits to the 7-11 for a Diet Dr. Pepper with the eight years I (ab)used anti-depressants, something I’ve never written about before. It’s a very unsettling project (because of the stories and people I encounter at 7-11 and my past), but I need that to write, I need to be unsettled.

What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend?

I’m incredibly fascinated by the meta-memoir, and I recently read and admired Mark Slouka’s Nobody’s Son: A Memoir, published in October, and Joshua Mohr’s Sirens, which will be published by Two Dollar Radio in January.

Susan Neville won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Richard Sullivan Prize for her collections of short fiction. She is the author of four books of creative nonfiction, including Fabrication and Sailing the Inland Sea, and she teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis and the Warren Wilson MFA for Writers.

Her story, "Game Night," appeared in Issue of The Collagist.

Here, Susan Neville talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about parenting, switching between genres, and needle exchange programs.

What can you tell us about the origins of your story “Game Night”? What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

Several years ago I was reading the Indianapolis Star and came across an article about the HIV epidemic in Scotts County, Indiana, an epidemic triggered by the problem of opioids and cheap heroin. At the time the story seemed so impossible, almost uncanny. Meth? Oxycontin? Sure. You’ve watched Justified, right? There are similarities. But heroin in the rural Midwest was a new story, and the sheer number of addictions and the sudden rapid spread of the virus seemed from another time. It defamiliarized this place for me, a place I’ve lived in all my life. It felt like the first time I read Angels in America, like the 80s felt somehow. Anyway, while the CDC was tracking the epidemic and sounding an alarm and in most of the world alarms have been sounding for decades, Indiana’s conservative legislature and governor were opposed to needle exchange programs. That was the initial spark.

The article also quoted a long-time resident of Scottsburg who was astounded by the sight of women prostituting themselves for drugs, walking up and down the streets of a town where it’s unusual to see very many people at all. I immediately pictured the women as dolls and started writing a series of stories about the place and the epidemic through that initial uncanny vision. “Game Night” is one of the stories.

Your story’s form has a few unusual qualities that stand out right away: a title for each section, use of the second person, and the conceit that the whole text is a set of instructions for playing a game. What made you decide that this story had to be presented in this unconventional way?

Probably the story that influenced my writing more than any other is William Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” so a pastiche with titles seems more like a story to me than a straight narrative. I go back to that story over and over.

I began thinking about images of needles and the game metaphor came later in the process. I think it grew out of a sentence in fact, though I’m not sure which one. I pictured the town and a mother terrified for her child, wanting the child to simply stay alive. Perhaps, she thinks, if she approaches it ironically and makes it like a normal family thing, a game night, she won’t push the child away. I remember when my kids were young joking with other mothers about teaching kids to drive while drunk. If you imagine the worst thing that can happen maybe you can helicopter your way in as a parent and teach them how to safely do the thing you’re terrified they’re going to do no matter what you say. Please don’t do it! you’re saying to them, but if you do do it, don’t share needles and please use this condom, and do it so it doesn’t hurt you or anyone else, etc. etc. It’s perhaps not the best parenting method in the world, but this mother has seen her friend’s children die and feels out of options and angry and a bit sarcastic.

I found the section “How to Play” particularly difficult to read, as it seems like you did not pull any punches in your descriptions of needles, veins, blood, etc. Was it difficult for you to write about the gruesome details, and did you consider holding anything back? Were you ever afraid that the subject matter and your treatment of it might turn away some readers (or, conversely, that your story might give readers some pointers that they could actually put to use)? For that matter, who is your intended audience for this story?

Hmm, good question. Weirdly enough, it wasn’t hard to write this. I did some research, but in that section I was just trying really hard to imagine what it would feel like to inject heroin and all I could think of was getting blood drawn and how some phlebotomists are so much better at it than others.

The only intended audience I thought of consciously was the daughter this mother is speaking to. I was trying to channel her. I don’t know if my recipe for injecting could be followed, though. I’ve never baked that particular cake. I assume that anyone who has the drugs wouldn’t need the directions and that directions wouldn’t make you look for the drugs. I don’t know. It’s what the mother thinks, anyway, and she just wants her daughter to know where she can find needles, for instance, instead of sharing them. She wants to teach her to make the stick correctly so she won’t try doing it a second time and overdose.

If I think about it, though, the audience is people who are against needle exchanges or vote for politicians who are. I wanted to make the argument that we shouldn’t criminalize the victim. So maybe Mike Pence is my intended audience?

You are an author of both fiction and nonfiction. What lessons have you learned from one genre that you’ve been able to apply to the other?

I write a lot of short stories that work like essays written by a fictional character and a lot of essays that read like short stories. I’ve learned that the form and techniques are almost interchangeable. It’s the intent that’s usually different. The biggest thing I’ve learned from doing both, though, is that when you get stuck in one genre you can move to the other and get unstuck. I think you surprise your controlling inner editor when you do that. The nonfiction that interests me are pieces by Susan Orlean and Tom Wolfe and David Foster Wallace and John McPhee and Indiana writers like Michael Martone and Scott Sanders, writers who combine journalism and poetry into a nonfiction stew. Nonfiction has been the thing that gets me out of my office and classroom and house, out into places I wouldn’t normally go. It lets me try out ideas. It’s a press pass to interesting things. Fiction lets me try out being other people. One feeds the other.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m still working on the collection of stories that “Game Night” is part of. I’ve never written a collection this intentionally. I like thinking "oh I need more dolls" so I’ve got to shift the lens in the next story or in the case of this story, "I need the actual experience of the needles." It’s like knowing a painting needs a little more red or that you’ve not paid enough attention to one angle of a sculpture.

What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend?

So much. I read Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account a year ago and am still thinking about it. The same with Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove. As is true of so many, I was obsessed with Elena Ferrante’s books last spring and Hanya Nagitahara’s People in the Trees. And I’m always re-reading Willa Cather and Iris Murdoch, endless sources of wisdom and joy.