Showing posts with label Essay Press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Essay Press. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Julie Carr and Lisa Olstein, Climate

 

Some of it I’ve touched on already, some of it we’ve been circling since our first exchange, some of it this particular twelve days I’ve been feeling all over, messy and vivid and focused and vague: precarity, jeopardy, fear of loss. You felt some breeze of it, I think, that made you worry your letters were somehow insufficient or ill’ received which wasn’t the case in any way. I’ve felt a version of this worry, from time to time, too: what if in a letter or in a real-life scenario I’m stupid or insensitive or one of us realizes, meh, not so much, less than I thought.

I see from my earlier note to myself that I wondered also how much wish infuses this connection, this relationship sprung up between us, its listening and avenues for thinking through. But I don’t feel worried or even really wonder about that today, right now, as I actually write to you. Right now, I feel that this, our collaboration, which is a certain kind of companionship, is exactly as you wrote: an exactment of searching together with, to, through our microclimates, these presents, these I’s and you’s. (Lisa Olstein, July 19, 2018)

I’m very much enjoying the epistolary essays that make up Julie Carr and Lisa Olstein’s collaborative call-and-response, the non-fiction Climate (Essay Press, 2022). Writing to each other in a sequence of letters, Carr and Olstein write out their anxieties, fears and stories around #Metoo, climate change, parenting, school shootings, sexual abuse, Trump’s election crimes, a friend’s suicide, the Paris Climate Accord, and other events, documenting their experiences and fears as two women, two poets, writing directly to each other in an intimate space. “I have no stomach for violence.” Olstein writes, as part of “July 19, 2018.” “I stick on it—snag, catch, fray, fall apart. I think it’s normal, to a point. It’s something, it seems, that varies quite a bit person to person. Kindly, in an email, E. called it a form of empathy, my inability to stop imagining into the violence of Ian’s death, a way of trying to understand—both to literally register and to fathom.” Opening with Carr’s January 7, 2018 “Dear Lisa,” and ending on April 17, 2019, they write the space of sixteen months across American culture through a prose that at turns is breathtakingly beautiful, anxious, grief-stricken, supportive and deeply intimate, weaving in thoughts around literature, politics, culture and their daily lives. As Olstein writes as part of her entry for October 25, 2018, referencing the televised hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee to confirm Brett Kavanaugh:

The wound of that testimony. The wound that is Facebook right now, that is my email queue, that is the steady stream of often nuanced and searing think pieces by women. The wound of hearing the cordoned-off voices of the pro-Kavanaugh women they keep digging up to interview. In my “bubble” it’s women split open, all wound. That Rukeyser quote has been going around again—what would happen if one woman told the truth about her life / the world would split open—but the problem is it doesn’t, the world doesn’t split, the woman does.

There is something of the call-and-response, two different voices responding and reacting, that is reminiscent of San Diego poets Sandra Doller and Ben Doller’s collaborative prose-work The Yesterday Project (Sidebrow Books, 2016), both writing in collaboration (albeit blindly) in the shadow of a life-threatening diagnosis [see my review of the book here]. Writing the multitude that “climate” suggests, the Carr and Olstein work through the events and news cycles that permeate their daily lives, writing a climate that would allow for someone such as Brett Kavanaugh to succeed, a climate of gun culture and repeated incidents of mass shootings, and the environmental damage that continues to be perpetrated upon the landscape, and every species set upon the earth. The book is also broken into sections that suggest thematic breaks, offering each section the same list upon each title page, but with different elements highlit, from “Bomb cyclone (Boston, MA),” “#Metoo (accrual)” and “Mass shooting (Santa Fe High School, Houston TX)” to “Package bombs (Austin, TX),” “Trial for sexual abuse, Larry Nassar” and “Women’s March (2nd annual).” This is a politics lived on the ground, as both are aware of how deeply affected either of them could be through any of this, whether the close proximity to a particular shooting, or witnessing the Special Senate hearings with Christine Blasey Ford through the lens of their own experiences. These events don’t live beyond their experiences or their immediate worlds, but are deeply connected across culture, in a way perhaps more deeply felt, and far better understood, by Carr and Olstein than by generations prior. As Carr writes as part of “November 2, 2018”: “If this were a letter in the mail and not over email, I’d send you a piece of tree bark. My poets all write sad songs, but they also keep believing in poetry’s ‘viewless wings.’ I never really understood why ‘viewless.’ Because poetry doesn’t see the suffering that it speaks of? Because you can’t see poetry’s power, though it’s there?” This is a book that documents grief and trauma across American culture in the immediate moments, existing within a conversation between two friends who are both poets, thinkers, critics and mothers, and articulating a deep connection between living and thinking with poetry and political culture. As much as anything, this book examines how deeply connected these seemingly-disconnected threads of politics, literature and daily life truly are and can be, in a lived sense; their lives propelled by the pure vulnerability of their open, thinking hearts. And that, by itself, is stunning.

You were writing about collectivity: how the work at NASA is no one person’s work, and that even failure adds to the whole. The other day, I was reading something a friend wrote about breath: how we breathe in common. He rejects the notion of the self, the notion of the human, is seeking something more radically in-common to define us. Breath. Earth. Soil. Every version of self is painful to us, he says.

My fingers stopped there, because I don’t know if he’s right.

But still, I would say that the collaborative nature of the Lab reflects something we do want, always, which is to fade away into the project and feel, if nothing else, our sentences as they move in a landscape.

Love,
Julie.


Saturday, March 26, 2022

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Abby Hagler

Abby Hagler lives in Chicago. Previous work has appeared in Entropy, FANZINE, Ghost Proposal, and Deluge among others. There Was Nothing Left But Gold was selected the winner of the 2020 Essay Press chapbook contest and appeared in summer 2021. With Julia Cohen, she runs Original Obsessions, an interview column at Tarpaulin Sky magazine about writers’ childhood obsessions manifesting in their current work.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I learned the value of traveling as research for writing. And of letting whatever happens on the trip be inspiration. There Was Nothing Left But Gold takes place on a road trip to experience the settings of ghost tales and folklore. However, that trip got totally waylaid by grief over losing the relationship with my mom. The essays that came out take place in a single location, an unintended stop. I didn’t come away with any material centered on what I was originally looking for. Once back home, that outcome felt okay about that after realizing I wanted to write into the reasons why I stopped driving instead. And I suppose that’s a little bit how deep-dives into research work. You find yourself somewhere totally different than where you began whether or not you physically end up elsewhere. It’s a necessary excess, something you just have to give yourself to. It is funny that I now know way too much about skunk bites and rabies, which is not in the chapbook. But, without that trip, I may not have read anything about hauntology or looked into Willa Cather as a person, which is the backbone of the writing itself.  

2 - How did you come to essays first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

The material for this chapbook started out as prose poems three or four years ago. When they were finished, I just felt like there was more to say. There were conclusions they were reaching for that poetry might not reveal or solidify without the narrative arc an essay uses.

John Keene’s Annotations and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life also inspired me. All those lush, teeming sentences shooting off new ideas, reveling in descriptions, adding up to the arc of a personal evolution reminded me of what it feels like walking through grass. I was fortunate enough to read them back-to-back, and that’s when a sort of theory about sentences and grass first occurred to me. I was thinking about how poetic prose works, variating off of Susan Sontag’s notion of it from her essay “A Poet’s Prose.” For her, poet’s prose is elegiac and it discusses the journey of becoming a writer. For me, this means poetic prose can be resistant to nostalgia but also tender to past selves. It embraces the contradictions and complexities of an identity in its excess, its racing through line breaks. Poetic prose makes room for the simple fact that the story of an identity is not straightforward. Gertrude Stein talks about this too. A portrait can be composed of many details, emotions, and perspectives that are not in competition. And I see this as the way that grass, or even a protest, works as well.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It could take forever for me to realize a writing project is happening. Anything I write now has roots that go back ten or so years. There are lots of connections between the pieces I put away and pick up again, which is definitely my process.  

The time it takes to finish an individual piece depends on how much material I have in notes and whether or not the structure of the piece is clear. I work at 9-5 job, so I’m a pretty slow writer in that it takes a month or probably more to get to what I would consider a first draft. I think I’ve only ever written one essay that came out in one sitting and was published with few changes. Beginning is easy as far as getting words on the page. The time-consuming part for me is finding what the piece is really talking about. Journaling helps with that. When I find what a piece is talking about, it’s much easier to organize. All that takes a while.

4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

The beginning of an essay, to me, is often an ask: Tell me about… I think of it like an invitation to excavate textures and smells and colors. Capturing details within memories is important because everything but the feeling I was left with/ conclusion I reached fades so quickly. Maybe all this is a practice in improving my memory. Sometimes it’s just a small revelation coming from understanding why I do/ have done certain things that have altered my life or relationships in the past – the kind of therapy stuff I think about on walks. Broad topics are also generative: A favorite kind of light; why grass could be considered monster; a superstition to own up to; the most terrifying thing about water.

This chapbook began as lists of instances of gold and types of grass mentioned in Cather’s novels. Then I got to wondering what I have to say about the grassland where I grew up. And what gold means to me after all this collecting.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I was a very serious competitive speech (ahem, forensics) kid in high school, so I’m always okay with giving readings. Even back then I knew that there really is something electrifying about hearing someone read aloud. It’s different than reading aloud to myself, which I do often. To sit and listen to someone read their work gives me this energy toward writing. Recently I was a part of a reading where we discussed how the pandemic opened up really helpful new avenues for readings using web conferencing services. I’m interested to see how online readings and in-person readings are determined in the future because they both have strengths. Overall, no matter the form of the reading, it’s a particularly good experience when the content the readers choose feels curated, like they are all in conversation.  I absolutely love when people read new works in progress. I perk up when a reader makes that introduction. Those have consistently been at the top of my most memorable readings list.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

A primary concern behind writing these essays was the notion of possession – especially as I realized I was writing about land as much as I was writing about kinship. I kept thinking: What narrative of return can I construct that isn’t centered on claim? Wrestling with (dis)possession became a way to see myself in relation to values rather than as someone who is helpless to them or unaware of them all together. Deciding to write a different kind of return narrative helped me to identify evolution of self within the text, which, for me, is its own narrative arc.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Every job I’ve ever worked has necessitated a writer. Most writing does not look like writing. Keeping logs, taking minutes, composing emails, organizing meetings, talking to people, creating to do lists, saving meeting notes. I’ve been a writer working at Wendy’s, in a homeless shelter, as an executive assistant, shelving books in a library, or even scrapbooking with my mom. Writing is the work of gathering, of finding an order for things. Sometimes it makes it on paper. I think a lot of people are writers and they don’t really know it – especially working people. Writing is more often than not something a person volunteers to do. But it happens everywhere. Someone has to be willing. I guess the job of a writer is to keep doing that work, to keep recording for the benefit of the group, to keep giving people new visions of reality to think about, to keep reminding people of what happened.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I don’t have a ton of experience with this but I have found it to be very positive. I’m always appreciative of anyone who has taken time with my work, and it’s really helpful to have conversations about what’s going on in a piece of writing. It always broadens my own writing and editing process.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Several years ago, when I was thinking about starting to write after a long hiatus, I asked a possibly unfair question to a friend, What do people need from me, as a writer, right now? She really surprised me by saying, People need the same things you need. They need to know how you healed.  And I think that’s an interesting place to start from.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I work in smaller chunks of time: Saturday mornings, for an hour after work, on a slightly extended lunch break, for 30 minutes before work when the coffee finally hits. It’s always this process of reading over the piece and then taking random notes as I mull it over while going about the day. Then I come back to the computer with my notes and keep writing. Editing takes hours, so it’s best to have at least one morning totally free to do that.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

My phone is full of random little notes taken on walks or while commuting that I can later scroll through. There’s always old work in dropbox. Carole Maso’s writing is something I consistently return to for immediate inspiration.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Pennies. A storm brewing. Fermented foods at the deli counter in Polish corner groceries. Sweaty t-shirts. Dust in the air during a heatwave.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Performance art about relationships or work centered around everyday living is most influential to me. I have for years and years been a big fan of Miranda July’s many conceptions of togetherness through projects like Learning to Love You More or It Chooses You. I don’t think I want to do without owning Dario Robleto’s Alloy of Love. Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit and Acorn are treasures. I also like to read about artists who are living in performance spaces, depriving themselves of some form of interaction, making clothes, testing their bodies, or even testing the audience. There are also comedians doing great stuff like this such as Nathan Fielder.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

For several years, I have read over and over “The Silver World” by Carole Maso, which, to my knowledge, is only published in an issue of Conjunctions. I keep that issue close by wherever I live. And also: It Is Daylight by Arda Collins, Anne Boyer, Roland Barthes, Anne Carson’s Plainwater, Mary Ruefle, old issues of Lucky Peach and Cabinet magazines, installation pieces at galleries or art museums, history podcasts, playing Criterion Collection roulette, random dissertations I find at the library, ghost tours.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I have an idea for a novel. It will probably never make it to paper. I’ll just keep regaling friends with the story while on long hikes.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I like to think I would have tried my hand at becoming a reality dating show contestant.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Writing just makes a lot of sense to me and I would honestly be sad if I stopped. I’m a diaries person, I suppose. Writing essays or poetry is not my full-time job but it’s a necessity that I’ve learned to put on the priority list whether or not I’m making something intended for others to see.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Elizabeth Robinson’s On Ghosts

Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a full-length essay collection about working night shifts in a housing first project in the early 2000s.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Sunday, July 18, 2021

Yanara Friedland, Groundswell

 

The shuffling will promote a kind of agitation from which everything will need to be suddenly contemplated: the courthouse in Tucson, where the previous week I had watched the “ceremony” of detaining between fifty and sixty people through the fast-track system known as “Operation Streamline.” Those men and one woman also shuffled, but within the actual constraint of chains. They sat on benches, watching and watched, listening to the judge who did not listen.

And though the protocol maintained an automation, the judge was confused, mixed up one man’s name with one who turned out not to be the man in question. Later another man, whose first language was not Spanish and whose native language did not match the languages spoken by court interpreters in the room, was dismissed. So, despite the ceremony’s attempted rigorousness, a slight air of the unexpected and impalpable moved through the courtroom that Monday.

Ideas don’t scare me, but their bodies, gravities, and actions do. The monastic gardens will bloom like hallucinations. We will rest and watch a water fountain with four lion heads spewing infinite streams. Thoughts such as these will pass by: Are we monotone, restless, spiteful and the woods and trees and light corridors of this planet are not? Have we descended like an alien force on a beatific countenance only to become its ultimate poison? Inside one of the chapels, light will play with walls. It will be quiet. I will be alone for a brief moment, in front of a large altar. A sheet of memory will peel off. I will sit in one of the wooden chairs and focus on the saints whose names I don’t know. Another thought will pass: You will not always be able to do this. Then an image of myself, a smear, will pull through the air. A portrait against a green background and several doubling heads slowly dissipating. (“ORACLE ROAD”)

I was first introduced to the work of German-American writer, translator and teacher Yanara Friedland through her debut, the 2015 winner of the Noemi Press Fiction Award, Uncountry, a mythology (La Cruces NM: Noemi Press, 2016) [see my review of such here]. Her latest title is the evocative Groundswell (Essay Press, 2021). Groundswell is self-described as an essay collection, although the division of genre through these two books seems rather arbitrary, as both could be considered echoes, structurally, of each other: one book, as a thought continued, and furthered, leading directly to the next. Both, for example, are assemblages of short prose, accumulating into the structure of the larger collection, speaking to and about borders, identity and belonging through a blend of research and memoir, the author/narrator works through a consideration of such. The seeming arbitrariness of genre-designation reminds of Vancouver writer Michael Turner, who submitted the manuscript of his Hard Core Logo (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993) sans genre, for it to be originally produced as a collection of poetry, and then, once the film adaptation appeared in 1996, was reissued as “fiction.” Even as Friedland, herself, suggests early on in Groundswell: “Everything is biography and sentences.” Currently an assistant professor at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies Bellingham, Washington, her online biography begins:

I am a writer and translator born in Berlin, whose research interest include border poetics, autofiction, critical and creative insurgencies in archives, and experiments with documentary forms. My first book Uncountry: A Mythology (2016) selected for the 2015 Noemi Fiction Award, narrates the gaps between official history and the more unreliable spaces of private memory and unspoken unofficial history. My second book Groundswell (Essay Press, 2021), a collection of border narratives, interviews, testimonies and biographies investigates the living archive of ruins, walls, and borders. The essays include lived experiences of borderers, walks along the geopolitical line, as well as my own confrontation with spatial and temporal bordering processes.

Groundswell is structured as a suite of lyric essays on borders, crossings, occupations and conflicts, opening with histories surrounding Germany, including around Nazi occupation and the German-Polish border, before moving her thoughts into and around the American-Mexican border. She writes of returning to Berlin as an adult and exploring her childhood geographies, providing linkages to how borders are considered in other fraught geographies, including Arizona, where she lived and taught for a time. Friedland works through archives, research and interviews, as well as her own commentary, working through identity as much as the arbitrariness and the, at times, cruelty of borders. She writes a documentary poetics that weaves through Berlin and Arizona; she writes of Palmyra, and the erasure of Jewish cemeteries in Poland. She speaks of how she carries her geography of origin inside her, exploring the implications of carrying as much of the dark histories of that space as any other. She studies actions and reactions, and the stories of displacement, trauma and horror. As she writes to end “STATELESS,” writing:

I imagine taking this country, cutting it out of my body, drowning it in the sea. What would it be like in here? Would it precede absence or nostalgia, a primordial crime? Instead, I buy a light bulb that will last one thousand hours and listen to Saskia Sassen speak to a half-empty room. “The Guantanamo hunger strike was inspired by the IRA hunger strike. In other words,” she adds, “meaning circulates.”

And I this raven with a piece of hot coal in my beak.

Given her commentary around occupation, and even colonization, it does seem curious her relative silence on aboriginal communities, whether in Canada or the United States: colonized peoples that have historically and systematically been brutalized for centuries, even continuing to the present-day, although that could easily be seen as too vast a potentially related but entirely separate conversation to include here (and the conversation isn’t not-there in Friedland’s work, but the shadow of such dark and unacknowledged histories have grown long, especially in recent months). There are structural echoes in Friedland’s work to a number of other non-fiction works over the years, writers that have blended the personal with research, weaving in and around their own articulations of archive and experience, including Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s non-fiction trilogy on living beyond her familiar geographies: Crossing the Snow Line (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1989), The Only Snow in Havana (Dunvegan ON: Cormorant Books, 1992) and Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1993). Other echoes of prose that blur the boundaries of genre could be seen through Anik See’s Sausade: The Possibilities of Place (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008) [see my review of such here], Monica Kidd’s any other woman: an uncommon biography (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2008) [see my review of such here] and, more recently, Johannes Göransson’s Poetry Against All: a diary (Saxtons River VT: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020) [see my review of such here]. It is curious to consider how simultaneously Friedland’s travel might have originally prompted her research as much as her interest in researching borders and countries might have led her to explore travel. Simultaneously managing a prose both lyric and narratively straightforward, her research connects the past to the contemporary, writing of the refugee and the displaced, of traumas not purely historical, flowing through and across geographies, ideas and thoughts like water. As the piece “CROSSINGS” begins: “What do we take into the future?” Further in the same essay, she writes:

Hannah Arendt wrote “We Refugees” in the early 1940s while in exile, laying out a fundamental and brilliant analysis of the modern German-Jewish condition, a protracted migratory identity that then threatened statehood and nationalism. The eternal and yet failed attempts of Jews to assimilate (“You can hardly realize how serious we were about it”) went beyond adjusting to the country they were born into and to the people whose language they happened to speak (“We adjust in principle to everything and everybody”). Despite 150 years of Jewry proving their non-Jewishness, they “succeeded in remaining Jews all the same.” Arendt equates the Jew to the refugee, not protected by citizenship and whose stateless identity bears an ongoing political threat. “If we should start telling the truth that we are nothing but Jews, it would mean that we expose ourselves to the fate of human beings who, unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human beings. I can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous, since we actually live in a world in which human beings as such have ceased to exist for quite a while; since society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without bloodshed; since passports or birth certificates, and sometimes even income tax receipts, are no longer formal papers but matters of social distinction.”