Tag Archives: essays

Interview with Marianne Jay Erhardt

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com


Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Lucky Bodies is a collection of essays on motherhood, imagination, and care. The essays range from the personal to the political and include subjects such as Aesop’s Fables, 90s television, mythology, family lore, fairy tales, religion, and Busby Berekly chorus girls. These essays take inventory of what we demand and withhold from mothers. Together, they imagine how we might make and inhabit stories that cultivate an ethic of care.

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

“Blueberry Hill” was the first essay I wrote for this book. I was reading Richard McClosky’s Blueberries for Sal with my son — 5 or so at the time — and he asked me why the mother in the book didn’t have a name. We then turned to other storybooks on his shelf and saw that those mothers, too, were nameless. I wrote “Blueberry Hill” as a letter to Sal’s mother. It was the first time I’d written creative nonfiction in years. And I felt a whole world of possibilities open up…how I might explore personal questions through some of the stories that have made me.

I struggled with writing “Relentless Healing.” This essay has been many things, including a deep dive into a 1990’s TV show (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman). I struggled with allowing it to be as odd and focused as it is. The essay itself is interested in what is worth remembering / saving / writing about. In one episode I discuss, the town gets ready for its Founder’s Day celebration and prepares a time capsule. There is a debate about what to include. A bottle of whiskey? A newspaper? Hair clippings from the barber shop? The characters argue. Are these things artifacts or symptoms? As I wrote this section, I realized that this is a question that lives in me every time I sit down to write. Why this? Why this? At present, I think what’s important is the attention, and not the object or subject of that attention. Put anything in the time capsule. It will tell the story.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I pitched this book to a number of agents, some of whom loved it but said they couldn’t sell an essay collection. I submitted to different presses and contests and was a finalist for a number of prizes. Along the way, I published many of the essays individually. Last year, I made peace with the fact that this book might never be published as a book, and I was happy enough that a number of the essays had found a home. Soon after, I learned that I won the Iron Horse Prize!

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

At a Tin House Winter Workshop lecture a couple of years ago, Paul Tran said something that I now think of every time I sit down to write: “Write the thing that will set you free and then give it a body.”

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I was surprised at how winning the Iron Horse Prize brought me a clearer vision of the book. I knew what I needed to revise (and I revised a lot!) More importantly, I knew when the book was done. I was shocked to find myself at the end of it!

How did you find the title of your book?

The word “luck” shows up more than 25 times in the book. At one point in the essay “Luck Now,” there is a 20-year gap in time between a formative teenage experience and my marriage. I wake up next to my husband “many lucky bodies later.” The bodies here are mostly mine — the versions of me that have had good fortune, or narrow misses, or bad experiences that could have been much worse, and also the things I have worked for and earned but have been dismissed as mere “luck.” The bodies are also the essays themselves. Lucky to be written, published, gathered in a book. (Maybe they don’t feel lucky; I will never know.) For a while, the book was called Lucky Bodies Later but eventually I settled on Lucky Bodies.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

In the essay “Relentless Healing,” we spend some time in a 1996 television commercial for Kellogg’s Rice Krispy Treats. If you were to make them as they appear in the ad, simply use the standard recipe. Once they are cut and cooled, stay in your kitchen reading and eating them alone. Call out to your family, “These things take time!” When you have had your fill, smudge your face with flour. Sprinkle yourself with water from your kids’ fishtank. Make it look like these treats were a lot of work. Carry the plate into the next room, where you family waits, perpetually hungry.

Interview with Brandel France de Bravo

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repreinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

Locomotive Cathedral is a collection of poems and short essays that explore resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all the while celebrating breath as “baptism on repeat.” Whether inspired by 12th century Buddhist mind training slogans or the one-footed crow, René, who visits me daily, the poems grapple with the tension between the speaker’s resistance to change and her acceptance of it as transformation.

Which poem/s did you most enjoy writing? Why?

Looking for prompts in a 12th century Buddhist text comprised of 59 “slogans” or aphorisms was a challenge and source of joy. These slogans which aim to help us cultivate mindfulness and compassion, and diminish “self-grasping,” can be wise, funny, and without commentary from scholars, rather puzzling. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed using them as a starting line for poems, not knowing where the finish might be. I’ve linked to the audio of one of them, published in print-only in Conduit magazine: “Slogan 38, Don’t Seek Others’ Pain as the Limbs of Your Own Happiness.” The slogan, which has a slightly surreal title, is simply cautioning against schadenfreude. I decided to seize on the title as an opportunity to talk about the ways in which we/I take pleasure in others’ difficulty or failings, while taking the limbs of the title literally. “Just / look at my backstroke! I’m a water wheel / catching your fall, grinding you into bread.” This poem is one of several in Locomotive Cathedral in which the “I” of the speaker is at a remove from Brandel-the-author (or is it?). It’s a persona poem but the person speaking is unknown to the reader or has never been previously introduced.

And which poem/s gave you the most trouble, and why?

Locomotive Cathedral contains a number of poems where the “I” of the speaker and the writer are the same, poems replete with autobiography. In these poems, I had to decide what level of honesty and detail was necessary to elevate the writing above storytelling, journaling, sentimentality, or confession which serves to unburden the writer but may be of little benefit to the reader.

How did you find the title of your book?  

With difficulty! I submitted the book to contests, including the Backwaters Press contest (an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press), where I was awarded “honorable mention” and publication, under various titles. Early on, my manuscript’s title was Take and Give, which alludes to a Tibetan Buddhist practice (tonglen) of breathing in someone’s suffering and using the exhale to send out the antidote to that suffering. Later on, I started submitting the manuscript as either Locomotive Cathedral, or Regard Yourself as a Verb. The latter was the title my manuscript bore when judge Hilda Raz selected it in the Backwaters contest. Raz and/or the readers mentioned in their comments that they didn’t think the title was the best fit for the collection. The University of Nebraska Press was happy to have me swap out Regard Yourself as a Verb for Locomotive Cathedral, which they felt was going to be easier to develop cover art for.

The title Locomotive Cathedral comes from an essay in the collection called “Now You Don’t See It, Now You Do,” which is loosely about my distrust of narrative and linearity:

Take a tragedy, a system, a movement, a moment and give it an ending. Give it a terminus in history. Build a station around it. Let it be a locomotive cathedral of steel and glass. Let it be a monument to meaning with marble statuary, a fountain, and geraniums.

My friend, the wonderful poet Jennifer Martelli, is the person who suggested Locomotive Cathedral as a title, and I immediately realized that this combination of words in many ways captures the tension the book seeks to mine: between the very human desire for stasis and eternity as symbolized by the “cathedral” (and in some ways, by poetry), and the perpetual motion of transformation. The “locomotive” of the title stands in for the wondrous churn of change and exchange that defines companionship, marriage, and ceding our place on earth. Locomotive Cathedral opens with a quote from the founder of modern chemistry, Antoine Lavoiser that says: “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.” The book closes with a poem about my one-footed crow, the last line of which is: “Not dying, but molting.”

Interview with Andrew Bertaina

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Reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

It’s a bit of a roundabout memoir in essays. The essays take place over about eight years of my life when I went through a lot of upheaval. Elevator pitch, it’s a mid-life crisis novel about parenting, divorce, identity and faith or lack thereof.

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

I had the most fun writing my essay “On Trains.” [See below for link.]  I think it was the first essay where I hit on the idea of just riffing on a subject matter. Thus, it’s about wedding trains, how Einstein used trains to prove his special theory of relativity, a guide to trying to make love on a train etc, all mixed with intersections with trains from my own life. It felt very freeing. At the same time, it was a kind of challenge to scour my memories for train related content. 

As for the hardest, I’d probably say the essay “On Baths.” I was closing in on the nadir of my mid-life crisis, deeply floundering, and I think that essay deals directly with the beginning of that fallout. I honestly don’t like to say any essay is too hard to write. It feels disingenuous when I’ve written the damn thing. Technically then, I’d say the essay “A Field of White,” because I had to find an internal structure to make it work. Otherwise, it was just too scattered. I like digressions; they mirror thought. However, internal structure is still useful, and I borrowed my structural device from John McPhee’s essay, “The Search for Marvin Gardens.”  In my essay, the mooring point is a tea party I’m having with my three-year-old and her stuffed bear.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Risking honesty, I wound up as notable in Best American Essays three out of the last four years. I know notable isn’t in the book, but I thought it might mean people would be clamoring for a collection. As always, my inbox was empty, so I had to figure out how I wanted to proceed.

My editor at Autofocus, Michael Wheaton, is an absolute gem, and he worked with me on finding a cohesive collection of essays. He was generous with his time and editing, and I’m deeply thankful to have worked with him. It ended up all right, but, as always in writing, I discovered the appetite for reading just isn’t that wide. But I have a beautiful book and a great set of essays that I’m proud of. They hold up.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I don’t own a single craft book volitionally. However, I think consistent writing is useful. Once you have a basic set of skills, it’s getting your butt in the chair. I often don’t, but I tend to feel better when I do. I tell my students who are struggling with it to just set a timer and do thirty minutes a day. That’s it. You can up it to four hours or whatever, but you should start small and build up. My paraphrase is, editing is writing, but you can’t edit nothing.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I think I was surprised, mostly on a reread, with how much I was mentally suffering during the writing of these essays. In a way, it’s almost painful to go back and see so much wild energy and confusion without much purpose. I think it certainly captures something, and it’s not as though I have things figured it out now, but I was surprised at the kind of desperation I was giving off during those years, this mad desire to figure out life.

How did you find the title of your book?

The title of my book came to me in a dream. Okay. That’s a lie. But I like that lie. The title just seemed right. I meditate a bit. I don’t think the self is particularly real, and I think it’s even less solid for some of us, myself included. I have a hard time projecting myself into the future or feeling connected to my past. I have an essay that talks about it. Also, I think about death a bit. That life is temporary can be terrifying or beautiful. Choose wisely.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

I have an essay called “Eating Animals” in the book, but it includes several things that no reader would actually want to cook, including one’s spouse.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://andrewbertaina.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:  https://www.autofocuslit.com/store/p/the-body-is-a?fbclid=IwAR0xmIb08R6M7sXuZAAeNVv8P9rOpO5nR4sLpVtUpSZcyUy3v2QyF_KiZQ0_aem_Afb-FrxmnqNxojEQPW9ZOlCiA2xorxK8ktsNmdS3FV4yg7FMRBCbueRuRTeTxq-6oCTAJHaNvutOLKDJk0TjjZYr

LINK TO AN ESSAY FROM THIS BOOK, “On Trains”:  https://greenmountainsreview.com/on-trains/