(Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine) New nonfiction and the essay are reaching new aesthetic heights and receiving unprecedented readership in the next generations after Didion and Sontag. These four award-winning writers are at the forefront of new nonfiction writing. They will discuss the role of the first-person point of view, lyric innovation, and the essayist as citizen, as well as their own recent works confronting queer identity, race, empathy, and vaccination. Introduced by Fiona McCrae, publisher of Graywolf Press.

Published Date: May 20, 2015

Transcription

Voice:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event was recorded at the 2015 AWP Conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Claudia Rankine, Eula Bliss, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson. You will now hear Fiona McCrae, publisher at Graywolf Press, provide introductions.

 

McCrae:

Welcome! Thank you very much indeed for coming. I want to apologize to anybody if I’ve been distracted over the last six months because I’ve been thinking about this and nothing else. And judging from the crowds, I think you’re with me on that. It’s very exciting to be at Graywolf Press at this time when there’s so much good energy going on around the press, and there’s many people to thank. And I thanked some people earlier, and right now I’d like to thank all the staff at Graywolf for their incredibly committed and passionate hard work. They know who they are. And I wanted to just mention that Ethan Nosowsky and Jeff Shotts—Ethan edited Maggie Nelson, and Jeff Shotts edited the other three. So, I am not quite sure why I get to stand up other than I think it was my idea. (laughter) The whole thing—all these books were my idea.

 

My idea about nonfiction actually is if it’s the proof that there’s some way in, I’m sure that there’s a physical, physiological explanation. It’s that the truth cannot be told head on; you cannot just say, “Get your injections.” Or “Be nice to people.” You have to tell the truth “slant,” to quote Emily Dickinson. And I feel as if, at Graywolf, we’ve been building a list, perhaps going back to John D’Agata and boosted by our nonfiction prize, where we’ve been really trying to attract nonfiction writers who tell the truth slant. And the whole thing has taken off in the last thirteen months with these incredible four writers and their books, which have changed not only the conversation about the topics that they’re writing about, but I think they’ve changed the conversation about what nonfiction can do. So that’s some of the things that we’re going to talk about today.

 

So, in proverbial alphabetical order we have Eula Biss, whose book On Immunity: An Inoculation has... (applause) Tell you what. Put your hand up if you need an introduction to any of these people. Then Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams. (applause) Maggie Nelson’s just published The Argonauts, which is already showing the signs of an early build that the other three did. (applause) It’s nearly sold out! We had hundreds and hundreds of copies and it’s nearly sold out, so if you want one, you have to be there very early tomorrow morning, I think. And then, of course, last, but in absolutely no way least, Claudia Rankine, Citizen. (applause) Thanks for doing my job for me.

 

So I thought we would start with the title of the panel, which is “The New Nonfiction.” And over the last six months, what I’ve been thinking about is all the ways these books are similar to each other and all the interesting ways in which, despite their similarities, they are still different from each other. One thing they all do is they quarry their subject and they come at it from this point of view and go away and come back at another point of view. The one thing that they, in their different ways, all seem to be, and you all seem to be circling around: ideas of the body. With Eula Biss, we have the idea that the self doesn’t end with your own physical body, that your own health is dependent on another and you have the health of the one against the health of the herd. Very interesting way that she writes about that. Leslie Jamison is trying to enter the body of someone else, trying to imagine the pain of other people, and the difficulty of that. Maggie Nelson, the gendered body and the erotics of connecting with another, as well as the geometry of it, and the actual physical movements. She writes about that in a way that I’ve not read about. And then in Citizen, the black body against the white background, or the black body and the white imagination, or the stereotyped body that gives someone else an idea about the self.

 

So I don’t think that’s the question, but I’m hoping that maybe you can just dive in and go in alphabetical order to start or just weigh in, whoever just feels moved to discuss. Is there something new about the way the four of you are addressing the body in your nonfiction?

 

Rankine:

I was thinking as well about the ways in which these four books overlap, and the thing that I felt rereading was that each book seemed to want to negotiate what it feels like to be overwhelmed in a certain way. Whether it’s overwhelmed from the position of redefining family, and having to forge what that definition could look like and feel like in the world. Or if it’s about in-dwelling in terms of the empathy, you know, what that feels like, how do you step inside a moment and interrogate it. For me, in Eula’s case, that sense of public trust around the body, like how much can one trust, and being overwhelmed by the acquisition of information and the distrust/trust dynamic around that. And I think in my case also that sense of trust/distrust in terms of how does one read what is happening to the actual body.

 

Biss:

Claudia just sent my mind spinning in a different direction, but when you asked the question, I was thinking about, I think what I enjoy in the work of all these authors is the body being claimed as an intellectual space or a space where you jump from that space into an intellectual problem, and the body is a problem in different ways in these different works. But I feel like in all these works there is a resistance to this old dichotomy between the body and the mind, or the female and male. And we’ve got all these sets of polarities, and I write about that a little bit around the science, around vaccination. But yeah, I guess that’s what’s exciting, is seeing the body entered as a place to think. And maybe I’ll throw out something more so we can spin in another direction. The question also made me think of this line from The Argonauts, where Maggie’s riffing on the phrase “same-sex marriage.” And she says something along the lines of “This phrase, same-sex, when it’s repeated over and over again really puts the emphasis on sameness.” And there is this insinuation that that’s what the attraction is about, right? The sameness. And she said something like, “The sameness isn’t what feels meaningful to me here.” And I guess that’s the other thing—I understand similarities between all our work, but I guess what’s thrilling to me is the places where I feel like—for instance, I see Maggie using a form that looks like a form that I’ve used, but in a totally different way, or I see Claudia in a moment, posing a question that I feel like I would have liked to have posed but never found a way to do it. And you know, in Citizen, one of the questions that really grabbed me the most was this question about rage. And if rage isn’t the appropriate reaction to injustice, then what is? And that question really got me. And felt like both something that I had asked and something that I had failed to ask. And seeing something like that voiced in a space that was so different from my own writerly space was really exciting and also like a challenge.

 

Nelson:

This is so fun. I just, I...the fun is about to unfold. I guess when you were talking, Fiona, I thought, not so much about—even though I think all of our books, yes, there’s a topical commitment to writing about body in a certain way, but I guess what I just wanted to throw into the conversation is that for me, I don’t really understand the idea of writing on bodies unless the writing itself, in an aesthetic sense, it doesn’t have to be about the body; it enacts something in the body in the person reading or the person writing. And Eileen, who is sitting right here, I’m thinking of as one of my super great teachers on this account because I guess I don’t think so much like “I’m writing about bodies” as much as, like, “Is this moving fast? Does this feel hot? Does this feel cold? Does this feel...” You know, what’s the aesthetics in the writing? And I think you were saying you like the differences in our writing; to me it’s in part the bodies that are being written about, but it’s also about the affective range or universe that are being created via the aesthetics of the writing, you know, around, so when you read, you’re going to have—like in the first part of Citizen, there are different sensations that might have to do with claustrophobia or a sickness or a kind of need to regurgitate that which the world has proffered to you. Or this kind of dialectic about what you’re internalizing, and I think that whereas that, say, in Eula’s work, there might be summoned feelings of duty or of felt relation that is often denied or disavowed between people or something or so. So I think I just wanted to throw in that it’s not just the topic; it’s also what you do with it aesthetically to make it an embodied experience for the person reading it.

 

Jamison:

Yeah, I guess my mind is spinning, too, in a lot of ways. That makes a lot of sense to me, what Maggie was talking about: this idea of drawing some kind of distinction or two different ways of looking at this subject, like writing about bodies as one thing; but sort of writing that feels processed somehow through the body is also sort of a way of thinking about the experience that that writing creates in its readers. And certainly, I mean, sometimes I think it’s strange to me when people pull out the body as one of my subjects because it’s always felt so much stranger to me, the idea that you wouldn’t write about the body or that the body somehow wouldn’t be present in the work. I think that’s a harder thing for me to imagine, just because, as you were saying, that distinction between the mind and body has never felt... That’s just never resonated with my sense of what it means to be or be in the world. So I think it just never has felt like a conscious choice; it just felt like the only way to access truth was somehow to treat that boundary as porous.

 

One thing—that idea of overwhelm—I think it’s so beautiful thinking about how it plays out into firm ways, and to me it summons sort of its opposite, which is the idea of edges, both kind of edges between bodies, which I think On Immunity does so much to interrogate, this notion of kind of our default setting being that we all live in separate bodies and thinking about actually what if the default setting was thinking about the interconnectedness between those bodies. And I think in a sort of way, Maggie, your work sort of interrogates the category we put bodies into and what it might mean to rethink some of those. I feel like that’s also a kind of drawing of an edge, and that idea of overwhelm seems like...Overwhelm is one way that we talk about the violation of certain edges, either the violation of certain categorical edges, and that creates a kind of intellectual or emotional overwhelm. I think empathy is also very much, at least to me, about respecting edges and limits, but also thinking about the ways in which our edges get overcome by other people, or the experiences of other people, or we somehow seek that. So that tension of edges or overwhelm I feel is somehow an emotional through line between our work. Although also it is kind of interesting to think about how it plays out in different ways, so...

 

McCrae:

Maggie or Eula, do you want to maybe talk about the notion of being overwhelmed and how that applies to your work or not?

 

Biss:

Maggie’s got a thinking face, so I’ll talk. Yeah, a huge part of On Immunity was about trying to write about and make some sense out of being overwhelmed by information, and kind of struggling toward knowledge, while being overwhelmed by information and the kind of ways that information can actually stand in the way of the acquisition of knowledge, and so I was both trying to evoke that and show it, and show what it feels like, but also drive through it. And I wanted to try to break through what I felt like was kind of hazy thinking that came from being overwhelmed with information to a place of clarity and a place where the information was being made into knowledge and was becoming—I guess becoming something that could be used or acted on, rather than just noise. Especially around something like vaccination, where there’s tons of information, but also tons of outlets for information and many different kinds, and there’s the word of mouth and there’s internet and there’s textbooks, and there’s immunology classes. There’s just so many roots to information, and I think it can very easily just become a loud buzz. The project for me was taking that buzz and trying to find a way through it. Where maybe yes, by the end I’m still overwhelmed, but I feel like I know something.

 

Nelson:

Yeah, you know, I guess maybe I’ll pass. Well, I won’t really pass because now I’m talking, but “overwhelm” is not a term that resonates quickly with me in terms of a genesis of writing. I guess maybe I’m too controlling or something and I’m in the
“I got this” boat, but I think it’s more like—I think it’s more—I feel kind of gnashier about a subject than overwhelmed by it, kind of like continually agitated by it. And often when I finish a book I don’t feel as agitated by whatever it was that I set out that was bothering me so much. So like, in this book, The Argonauts, it’s very much kind of about homonormativity and heteronormativity and these dichotomies about transgression and normativity. And you know, it was really driving me crazy at the start of the project. And I don’t think of it as resolve; I just think of it as burned out. I just burned it out. So I don’t think of it as much like overwhelm; it’s more just to me like I gnash around until I’m done.

 

From panel:

Yeah.

 

Rankine:

I mean my obvious limited ability to enter into the sort of process of the work and… but, in reading The Argonauts, I had this feeling there were mechanisms set up in the text to pull one back from the edge, so that the role of the partner as kind of normalizing the overwhelming sensation—the affect—of feeling hounded in some way. Or by pain or by being pursued, and there were mechanisms in the text to bring you back, or bring the speaker back to a place where one could negotiate. And I felt that in Eula’s book there was also that sense of the doctor or the partner always being utilized in the text as being utilized in the text as a modulating, rationalizing mechanism within the text when the moment felt overwhelming—when the information and the absorption of the information and the application of fear up against the information allowed you to feel like “I might drown in this.” So it’s in that way that I’m thinking. It’s different in the empathy part because you are moving from discrete sections to discrete sections, but when I bring up overwhelm, that was the sensation as a reader I was getting. So it might be different in terms of the process of working.

 

McCrae:

So Claudia, when you were writing your book, what brought you back from being overwhelmed? What was your journey through what’s potentially a very overwhelming subject?

 

Rankine:

Well, now I’ll agree with Maggie, I don’t know about that... (laughter)

 

I think formally, the form of Citizen, where one is working within discrete segments and because it is, in a sense, a community document, where one was taking stories from other people—the inability for me to enter into the psychic life of the person who told me that story often stopped me at the story, so that if I was distressed or in a moment of affect around the details of the story, I wasn’t going to pretend to supply the psychic life of people inside the dynamic. And so that would stop the investigation there.

 

McCrae:

There’s arguably a calmness in your language all the way through that’s very noticeable when you read as well. In your readings there’s a calmness that’s kind of breathtaking when you think about the material. So, I think that’s very striking. It’s interesting thinking about these books because you sometimes get there’s three of the books that have got something in common and there’s one that’s different. And it changes which one that is. And so the body was one thing that fit all four, and then to go back to Leslie’s point, I did find myself thinking, “Well, is everyone always writing about the body?” Then I thought, “No, you could be talking about memory or pollution.” You know, there was something unique in that. I thought it was interesting to throw out there. And then another thing that is interesting about all four of your books is that there is this, well, it’s so fascinating for all of us who’ve read these books, and for those of us who are going to read them, it’s a journey you go on. Each of you take us through. We’re changed by the end of these books, and to what your thinking, which your doing with your heads obviously, is, I mean it’s wonderful listening to you talk, but watching you write, the hills and valleys you go through, and you go from personal and philosophical, from specific to general in fascinating ways. So, all four of you picking on big topics, and I’m getting a sense that—Maggie, you’re a little bit—because it’s so recent—haven’t seen it coming. But people are asking you to come and speak on the topic of your books, which is very divorced from the aesthetics of the book. I would like to hear more about the aesthetic choices that you all made, and how you fit the aesthetic to the big subject, and the decisions you’ve made. You’ve all worked in different genres in nonfiction. And Claudia, you have fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and visuals in one book, so maybe you could start with the forms and, you know, how you addressed form or how it came to you.

 

Rankine:

(Hesitatingly) Okay... (Audience laughter) Well, you know, I’m really... For a long time I’ve been interested in this notion of intertextuality, and the ways that different pathways of thought disallowed the text from settling. So how do you disturb the sentence, disturb the page, disturb the reading experience? How many different pathways do you allow the text to contain? So on the level of writing that’s always happening because of word choice and the juxtapositioning of one word up against another. But then in Lonely and in Citizen, there’s also the use of images. One of the things I love about images is that I cannot control, not that I can control where the reading experience takes someone, but I have no idea what the associative idealities will be around someone’s looking at an image. I don’t know where they encountered that image first, whether it’s in the book or it’s somewhere else. I don’t know what pathway even the creator, the visual artist, meant for that image. And so taking the image and putting it with the text and creating a dialogue that’s not my mimic—you know, that’s nowhere really interested in reflecting anything—but continuing a discourse and a dialogue that then creates alternate pathways so that you can move out and come back, but that is overlapped just enough, at least in my own imagination, so that it doesn’t seem random—those are the kinds of things that I think about in the making of my work.

 

Jamison:

I guess kind of working off that idea of disruption, which feels resonant for me both on the level of process or genesis, kind of like how I move my way into a subject or into something that has driven me towards inquiry, like that idea of kind of disrupting. Either if it’s something more journalistic and I’m encountering another person in the world, sort of that process of my notions about them being constantly disrupted by the self that they are presenting me with, or in writing that’s something more like memoir. Kind of re-encountering my own life and that process of sort of disrupting the stories that have become familiar to me about what happened. The version, the kind of grooves of memory that I’ve fallen into and then figuring out what’s underneath them, is also a kind of process of disruption. But, I think in terms of form, a lot of how, I mean, Claudia, what you said earlier, about form being the way that you sort of move through or respond to some sense of overwhelm, I think, has been very true for me. Like the way that—I guess certain things I’ve written about, there’s almost a kind of formal play that can help me get closer to what I feel blocked or mystified by, and often I like that idea of being stopped by something, because I think it works in a few different ways. Like being stopped by something doesn’t actually mean withdrawal; it can mean a pause and a moving deeper into it—that’s a way of being stopped by something, too. But I think when I’m approaching something that I feel has lodged under my skin in some way and I’m drawn to saying more about it, but I don’t know what that something more will necessarily look like, I think form is the way in, or one of my pieces about getting hit—I’m playing around with the work about this early twentieth-century Russian theorist who divides folktales into sections, and I’m picking up his folktale pieces as a way to try to tell my own story, but ultimately what happens there is not the application of the pieces but the transcription of the ways they break down. So in a way it’s like form is a way in, or some sort of formal structure is the way in, but the piece actually comes alive in sort of noticing, “Okay, here’s where form is somehow refused.” Right? I’ve picked this form up, but it’s failing me in this way, and a kind of confession of that failure is where the particularity of the story kind of comes into focus for me.

 

Biss:

I think for me I feel like in almost all my work, I find form, and I have to write my way into it. And I know writers who write form first, and my friend David Trinidad will, you know, he’ll decide, “I’m going to write a sonnet.” But he doesn’t know what’s going to be in it, but he knows he’s writing a sonnet. And I’ve never written that way. I don’t know what shape it’s going to take. And I usually know what the question or the problem is, but I don’t know what shape that question or problem will bring me to. In this work, once I realized the dimensions of the problem and of the question and that the problem and question were huge, I assumed, “Oh, this is not an essay. This is actually a book. I’m in something big.” And I kind of just assumed that since it was big, and I was writing an essay, it would just be one long, continuous essay, and it’s not! It’s an essay in thirty small parts. And I remember a conversation, kind of late in the writing process, where I had been waiting and waiting for these thirty parts to just merge and become one, and it was becoming clearer and clearer that that was not gonna happen. And they weren’t mooshing together, and for a while I’d been talking to my editor, Jeff Shotts, about this and Jeff had been saying, “Well, maybe some of them will stick together and maybe there will be chapters.” And I thought kind of hopefully about that possibility, too, and that wasn’t happening either. They weren’t clustering or sticking. And Jeff was really generous around giving me long phone conversations, and part of what was happening in those conversations is I was just trying to articulate what is happening, figure out why—what is going on in the book. And at some point we started a conversation talking about the structure of the book and talking about all the possibilities. Will these thirty sections become one? Should we title them?  Should we number them? What’s going to happen here? And if it remains in thirty short sections, why? You know, that was part of the question we were talking about. In the same conversation, we just meandered away from that. And at some point we said something about the book that now I think is abundantly obvious but at the time felt like a real new piece of information that I’d discovered, where I said, “Well, this book is about how bodies are dependent and independent and how our bodies, meaning us as members of the community, are both independent organisms and totally dependent on each other.” And when I said that, it was...I felt like a kind of epiphanous moment about the form, where I realized, “Oh, these thirty short pieces can’t merge because they are actual bodies, and they are dependent on each other in the way bodies in the community are. But they also have their own edges. They have their own kind of skin, and I have to respect that skin.” And the sections are different. There are some that are very personal. There are some that are historical. There are some that are very information laden and there are some that are much more committed to exploring an emotional experience. But once I understood the relationship between form and content, then I felt like I knew how to nurture the form, and I also felt I knew what the form was doing for the content and could move on with that knowledge. And in this conversation with Jeff, we came to the end of this conversation and had realized, “Oh, yeah we can’t title these sections. We can’t number them. We can moosh them together. This form that’s emerging is the way the book has to be.”

 

Nelson:

Sure, yeah. I love everything you just said you love because I just, I don’t know, it really—I mean I feel like there’s some writers who, like you say, form first, or whatever. But I feel like, that I’m...what you’re describing, which I never know, if it’s kind of, what’s the phrase, Monday morning quarterbacking, when you look back and are like, “Oh, the form and the content, of course they’re married in this perfect way!” You know? But I do think that when you’re working on it—like if you do work like I work, like you work, where I have no clue what form the book is gonna take, it can be a very agitating and murky time before you realize that, but then I think I always have had usually a moment, like there was a moment when I was writing my book Bluets, where I was just was standing in a bookstore, looking at a book in numbered sections, and I was like, “Oh duh! That’s it! That’s the way.” And I just went home and put everything I’d written into that form and then… And I think, but of course, it makes a lot of sense because the book is about the way that kind of heavy emotion or overwhelmed experience interacts with the kind of disciplinary tone of philosophy or something, and work on juxtaposition but also work on pause or something. It made a lot of sense that that was going to be the form, but I think with this book, The Argonauts, you’re describing... I don’t think I’ve ever written anything called an essay, so when people are like, “Will you be on a panel about the lyric essay?”, I’m like, “Sure, I don’t have a clue what that is. But I’m happy to be there if it’ll be fun.” But I did have a minute with this book where I did, actually, well, I read your and manuscript, Eula, so maybe you were like seeping into me, but I...like the kind of content, if I even, I don’t even know what the content is when I’m writing, but if the content were something I was calling “sodomitical maternity,” which is a phrase from a feminist critic named Susan Fraiman—and then kind of on the other hand, these questions about queerness, like, if the problem was, “Can they be in the same book?” because I’ve written kind of a bunch on one and a bunch on the other, at a certain point it became clear to me that the political or aesthetic action of making them part of the same long essay was going to answer the question of “Can they be in the same book?” Yes, they can; they’ll be smooshed! One long essay together without any kind of formal breaks like numbers or something like that, so I do think—and then later you think, “They’re smooshed! That’s perfect!” You know? But it takes a long time to figure that out for me, and there’s a lot of working in the dark.

 

McCrae:

I could listen all day to how your books arrived at their final. In a way it’s sort of interesting not being the editor because you just get served up this thing that looks like this beautifully crafted pie and then you realize there were moments in the kitchen when it wasn’t always going to be like that.

 

Claudia, I noticed you writing something down. I’ve got a question, but if you... I wanted to talk a little about this idea of the lyric essay, and the thinking about the new nonfiction and the self. Maggie, I think you and Eula put the most of yourselves in, and Leslie you used quite a lot of yourself, and you used some of yourself, but Claudia and Leslie also give other examples. But all four of you are generous in the way that you share. But none of you are writing what I’d call personal essays. And Claudia, you call yours a ‘lyric.’  But just your thoughts about the self and how much you draw on the self and what it is you’re doing when you’re sharing and whether you feel like there is some new territory that you all, in your different ways, have entered in terms of what and how you are sharing autobiographical material.

 

Nelson:

I was thinking today...I was talking with someone this morning. And I don’t know, maybe we could take a vote later, but I’d like to come up with a new spectrum that was not the spectrum—you didn’t lay this out, Fiona—but just between the way we talk about autobiography with the spectrum of revelation and concealment because I just...when I’m writing, it’s just not on my mind. That’s like within something that would be called kind of like a logic of confession. And if you’re not really writing on that spectrum, then the questions are really just like, “What is this need? What is this need of myself to talk about these things and the culture I want to talk about?” Which is why in this book, The Argonauts, I was calling it, kind of jokingly, in an homage to this recent book by Beatriz, now Paul, Preciado called Testo Junkie. But she/he calls that book autotheory, which I thought was a great phrase because it’s just kind of like—in a brief introduction to Testo Junkie, Preciado talks about using yourself and the body as a guinea pig, a kind of auto-subject on which these theories can be tried, and I think to me it’s like that’s why I would use that name for this particular book. It’s like offering up your body as a guinea pig for trying out these things, and what it can tell you about the culture, not necessarily a kind of refracting back to life, what have I exposed about the self, because I guess I feel kind of post-shame in that regard.

 

Rankine:

I completely agree with what you just said; I mean, I think in a sense when one sits down, at least when I sit down to write, it is by any means possible, or by any means necessary, to get at something that has absolutely everything and nothing to do with me, in a sense. And so the mode is actually mode of interrogation, and in that position, I will take from anything; if it’s Sex and the City, I’ll take it, if it’s gonna help me. If it’s Derrida, I’ll take it. If it’s the Bible, if it’s Maggie.... (laughter) And if it’s my own life, all right. Whatever. I never think of it in any form as memoir. I don’t know this person beyond the fact that the person of me was out there. I’m collecting stuff, and thinking about it, and interrogating it towards a positioning on a certain subject.

 

Biss:

Yeah, I love that way of putting it, by any means necessary. I feel like that’s very much the kind of urgency that I feel when I’m writing, and yeah, I’m drawing on whatever resource or source material that’s going to best help me access the idea that I’m trying to express, and sometimes that involves pulling information out of some source of information. Sometimes it involves drawing on memory. Sometimes it involves drawing on observation. And I think that I’ve maybe been asked the question “Why do you put the personal next to the historical?” so many times that I’ve gotten a little prickly about that. And I feel like there’s a part of me that feels like, “I just don’t think that way! Haven’t I lived history, and don’t I live in history, and doesn’t history live in me?” And I just don’t see the divide there. And all this historical material feels personal to me, and the material that I think reads as personal to me feels very political, and seems to be speaking towards historical trends, in ways that I think are significant. Yeah, and I guess I, too, am post-shame in that I feel like if this is the best way to say it, and that if it involves talking about my uterus turning inside out, then that’s what has to be done. And to me, yeah, it doesn’t feel like I’m revealing something. For me the project is not, yeah, “reveal or conceal”; the project is “get at this thing I’m trying to say.” Though maybe, you know, in the moment right before publication, then I get a little squeamish, and, you know, will say, “Oh, I actually don’t want mean-spirited people to know stuff about my kid, but, oh well.” I guess I’ve come to think that everyone has their cross to bear, and if your parents are two economists, there’s probably going to be fallout from that. My son happens to have two nonfiction writers as his parents and there is, you know, discomfort, that comes with that, I think.

 

Jamison:

Yeah, it’s incredible to be up here and listen to these beautiful articulations that ring really true for me. I mean, one thing I’ve been thinking about, is how many of these issues are embedded in the actual language people use to talk about the writing that gets called personal, and the word “revelation” is a really interesting one to me, and the word “vulnerability” is an interesting one to me. I think revelation doesn’t feel quite right to me as well because it implies this sort of act of writing is a parting of the veil or an opening of the curtain and then the self is behind that curtain. But that to me is never what putting the “I” on the page in any form feels like. It is often motivated in the ways that you guys have been speaking to so wonderfully; like, it feels often motivated by purpose and inquiry. And so it’s sort of like, if my own life is useful in the service of inquiry, then great, and I’ll bring it onto the page because it’s available to me, although that availability always feels so important, (inaudible) so vexed and fraught, because the ways in which I am available to myself are mysterious, and have obstacles, too. The parts of my life that I’m most interested in are the parts that are somehow still mysterious to me. There’s something left for me to learn.

 

But I think the idea of revelation also threatens to forget (inaudible) in the way it’s not a revealed thing because the eye is always like a crafted thing there—a made thing. Like we’re only ever going to reveal ourselves or make ourselves on the page partially. It would be like the Borges (inaudible) map that is as big as the whole world that it is mapping. A life is always going to be so much more than whatever shows up. So the self that is there is made up of the pieces you choose. For me, I choose those pieces because they help me get somehow closer to this thing that I am perplexed or troubled by or wondering about, and I guess, yeah, the last thing I would do is kind of echo that sense of...it feels less like the choice to you also includes the self in any given transcription and more like the idea the self could be separated from any of these things is very foreign to me. And I think about that too, how it plays out, not just in terms of sort of cultural history or criticism, or those modes of writing, but the projects that I’ve done that involve reporting. I think sometimes I...well I certainly feel questions about sort of, “Why do you show up so much in your reported pieces?” And it’s sort of like I show up because I showed up to that reporting. I show up because I was there. Like, so, which is not to say, I love lots of journalism that doesn’t have a lot of ‘I” in it, but it’s always to me like everything that was happening in that encounter was being wired through my circuitry, so that’s the story I’m interested in writing. So it feels less like the choice to put it there and more like how sort of partial it would feel to extract the self from.

 

Rankine:

You know, I had a thought. This is a kind of quick thought. I wondered if the self is being seen as a gendered self? I wonder if we were all Baldwin, for example…

 

From panel: 

If only, Claudia!

 

Rankine:

…if then we would be so concerned with the “I” showing up in the body, and because Baldwin doesn’t really fit into sort of heteronormativity, and issues of transcendent text, et cetera, et cetera, maybe bald men’s not the best example, but that’s something also I think—that the mode of the inquiry towards questioning the presence of the self in the text might have to do with the gendered self in that text.

 

Biss:

It just now—it surprises me that this idea is still around that a text is truer or more objective or something, if the self isn’t present or isn’t visible to the reader. And in grad school I took an ethnography course; that was just one of the offerings for people who were studying nonfiction. And you know, in ethnography and in anthropology, this is kind of an old idea now—that the observer changes the observation, and you’re supposed to now, as an ethnographer, or anthropologist, you’re supposed to triangulate, so your audience understands what you’re looking through, when you’re looking at your subject. And so you are supposed to reveal: “Oh, yeah. I’m a thirty-eight-year-old white woman who grew up in the Northeast. So you might want to take what I’m saying about this tribe of hunter gatherers with a grain of salt.” And I actually think that when people fail to do that, there is a kind of a lie that is built into the text, and it is the lie of the invisible or transparent narrator, right? The narrator who has not affected what she’s looked at by looking at it or being who she is. But still there seems to be this idea just in the air that, “Oh, that’s real serious work. Or that’s real reporting”—if the reporter isn’t there on the page and clearly being a player in the drama of the gathering of information.

 

McCrae:

I’m hoping the tide is turning on some of that. I think it’s a mixture of sort of honest and generous, the sharing of the self, and you know, the wrong kind of sharing of the self could arguably be selfish, but I think the way you four do it, it’s in the service of something larger. And in terms of being unselfish, I thought maybe I should open up question time to some of you, and I might end it just a little bit early because I imagine we can’t retire to Booth 800 because the bookfair’s closed, but some of you might want to come down and get books signed, and we might leave a little bit of time for that. But if you want to have questions—and we’re being taped so I’ll have to repeat the questions. On your marks; get set; go!

 

Yes, you there.

 

(Audience member speaks inaudibly)

 

She’s asking for Claudia to amplify and anybody else to chime in about Claudia’s comment about the gendered body and whether that meant that there was a presence of another, whether it was a woman or a black body or something minority, did you say?  Something like that, so...

 

Rankine:

Well, I think I’m interested in thinking about it because of the categories that are created around the work, as queer work or African-American work, you know, so that a text that is transcendent, what does that transcendence really equal? It’s equal to white; it’s equal to male; it’s equal to an appearance of uninvested existence in the world that is not polluted by politics. Or privilege, or the lack of privilege. You know that sense...so it’s only interesting to me on those terms. In terms of reading the text, I’m very interested, actually, in what terms are being set up for the narrator—what the investment is in terms of the journey of the text, which might be actually separate from that of the writer.

 

Nelson:

On that subject, I don’t know, I guess, you know, when I heard your question, I just thought about what Claudia was talking about earlier when you brought up the gender body question. I mean...and kind of to link it on to the shame or post-shame thing, I think you learn a lot when you go around the world, presenting work about when people say something’s personal, then it’s not everything they think is personal. Like, if you said, “I grew up in Minneapolis.” No one is like, “Oh, my God. She said she grew up in Minneapolis!” Right? But you know, it’s about kind of what Eula was saying it’s like you notice a lot, like: “Oh, my God. You talked about wanting to get fucked.”  Or: “Oh, my God. You’re talking about your uterus turning inside out.” Like it’s usually like it’s those things you get—the “You’re so brave” kind of a comment. And we were just talking about that earlier, like you learn a lot from the “You’re so brave” thing because its predicate tells you a lot about who’s talking to you—what they think is the brave thing that shouldn’t be said that you just said. But you don’t know because if you’re happily ensconced in a subculture where those things are norms, then you just gotta, like, go around to find those things out. But they’re, like, a bummer because they’re kind of like lowest-common-denominator things, like what you were saying—you wish we were beyond them, but we’re not, so you still gotta go around and face that. You know?

 

(Applause)

 

(Audience member speaks inaudibly)

 

McCrae:

I think I have to say, even though I think most of you heard, but for the sake of the tape, he was saying, is it healthy actually that the “I” and different kinds of “I” are entering the text so you don’t have the privileged white male “I,” such as Truman Capote—In Cold Blood was able to not have an “I”; that’s something he was proud of but actually was a privilege. I think you were addressing Leslie.

 

Audience member: 

I was addressing everybody.

 

McCrae:

Everybody! You brought it up, so...

 

Jamison:

Yeah. I mean I love that idea and I think it gets back to Eula and what you were saying about sort of taking from the tradition of ethnography, sort of a way to give your reader more information about what they are about to read. Sort of own your perspective. And I think what you were saying about creating a different kind of social contract by having “I” present in the text and in a different way feels very connected to that for me. And I guess one way I can respond to that is to say that I am always surprised by the idea of—or the narrowness of the idea that writing that has a lot of “I” in it is inherently solipsistic or narcissistic or that including the “I” in the text somehow narrows the fields of the text to just applying to or speaking to that “I.” Because it’s always been my experience, for many years as a reader before I ever wrote, but also, hearing from readers who have read something I’ve written, it’s often that the inclusion of the “I” can open the text in a certain way to readers as opposed to bringing everything back to the gravitational field of this “I” who is speaking, and it’s actually sort of—it’s that sense of, like, going deep enough in is actually what—I mean it goes back to Emerson, and probably before, but this idea of sort of going deep enough in, you reach this place that extends outward so much. So there can be something so connective about the “I” being confessed or opened up or explored in that way—which to me resonates with kind of the spirit of the possibility you were thinking about in your question.

 

Biss:

I’m just going to build off of what you just said, and I think that Capote is a really interesting example in True Blood. I get confused; my vampires are crossing with my nonfiction. (audience laughter) In Cold Blood. In Cold Blood is an interesting example because there might not be a first person. But I feel like just because you don’t use the first person on the page doesn’t mean you’re not there as an author. Capote’s all over that book; you really feel him and you’re only allowed to look at something because Capote’s looking at it, and you have to be interested in what Capote’s interested in, and you have to feel what he’s telling you to feel. And he’s really there and he’s palpable, and I think a sophisticated reader knows that. And the absence or presence of the first person, and in some ways I kind of feel it’s moot, like it’s, yeah, the author is always there and the author is always mediating your experience.

 

McCrae:

Question from higher up.

 

(Audience member speaks inaudibly)

 

He’s saying he heard Maggie recant some of the stuff she was saying she had previously written in Bluets.

 

Nelson:

No. What?

 

(audience laughter)

 

McCrae:

He’s asking about autotheory and vulnerability and the tension between the two.

 

Nelson:

I can’t answer well without knowing...I don’t even want to know...because this is like the recorded universe we live in, but what was recanted...but I certainly would never recant...I mean this book is way more theoretically based than Bluets, for sure. I mean Bluets had the register in which, you know, skulking around was really philosophy, but this book is really more specifically with feminist theory; that’s why I would not call it Bluets, like autotheory, that was kind of like self-help, philosophy, and other things, but like this...and I don’t...I think that I’m always...I feel like this book, my new book, it’s actually the first kind of a love letter to, like, the theory of my youth, you know, like the early nineties theory, like the high theory moment, and psychoanalytic theory, which was kind of going on the down low or something. Yeah, so I don’t know; I don’t think I’ve recanted any of that. I think on every project there’s a reason why, given the subject matter of this book, say psychoanalytic theory would be the register when (inaudible) in particular and other people that would be the main, kind of, correspondence that I was using, whereas like Wittgenstein would be more difficult than Bluets or something or like Artaud and The Art of Cruelty or what-have-you. But I think that for me the interest of any of this project is once you know who the field of interlocutors are that you’re talking to, then you have to figure out how to make the form of the book be like a party for them, to all be there, and that’s like a formal question. How do you invite all these people to the party and then talk? I think Claudia’s work does this; I see that happening in your work very much as well. So I’ve never given up that project, and I don’t think I ever will.

 

McCrae:

Anything else? Top right. Yeah. Speak.

 

(Audience member speaks inaudibly)

 

So what distinction this esteemed panel has made between the mind and the body, and how to get out of the mind and into the body or how to get out of the body and into the mind. One or the other or both.

 

The thing Eula’s gonna tell you is a false dichotomy. She’s exploding at dichotomies today.

 

Biss:

Yeah. I feel like maybe I can say again what I already said, but you know, you don’t get to have a mind without a body. This was very apparent to me when I was, like, bleeding to death on the delivery table. The body goes; the mind goes. That’s so...to me I don’t feel like it’s fair to pull those things apart. You need one for the other.

What’s that?

Audience member:

They’re friends!

 

Biss:

Yeah, and they’re not even just friends; I mean, they’re like the same thing. You know, like maybe this comes up at, you know, I was writing a lot, or reading a lot about all the organisms that live within us, and all the bacteria and viruses and fungi, and all of the stuff that lives in there, and this question of like...immunologists talk of “What is the self? What is us?” And the reality is we are way more them than we are us. Just in sheer number of cells, you’ve got more cells of others inside you than you have cells of you. And it doesn’t even make sense at a certain point to separate out. Immunology has a long history of separating self and other. Actually they call it non-self—it’s this funny little science terminology. But the more you learn about the subject, the more ridiculous it seems to try to separate the self from non-self. We’re both. And if you strip all the non-self out, you’re not going to be self anymore either. So I think of the mind/body thing similarly.

 

Rankine:

You know, I’m sort of reminded of something from The Argonauts, where there is a conversation between two theorists and one of them shows the film (inaudible), right, in Maggie’s book, and one theorist dismisses the other because she’s shown pictures of her body in a talk, and that sense of dirtying up the intellectual space with the body. And I wonder where that came from. You know? I mean, this is a rhetorical wonder. (laughs)

 

McCrae:

I think we’ve got time for one more quick question. You did get your hand up first.

 

(Audience member speaks)

 

Post-shame.

 

Biss:

First you have to just be shameless. That’s the...

 

McCrae:

That was...okay, one more.

 

(Audience laughter)

 

That was a very quick question.

 

(Audience member speaks inaudibly)

 

So (inaudible) this fugitive form that everyone is so excited about clearly by being here and that the antecedents for it aren’t literary but film and so on, and whether you four were conscious of that.

 

Jamison:

One thing I can say about how...something about...I’m not an expert in the history of photography. I’m really interested in photography and I’m interested in the way that photography as a form has illuminated some of the same kinds of tensions that come up in nonfiction, and especially sometimes personal nonfiction about recognizing something and when it comes back to recognizing something not as revelation but as construction and thinking about, I don’t know the date, but in the late nineteenth century, the first time a photograph was understood as something copyrightable was this moment where it was seen not just as taking reality and duplicating it, because how could you put a copyright on reality? But actually understanding the photograph as a made thing, was a sort of singular creation of a reality instead. And I feel like so much of the—like, I’m really interested in thinking of civil war photography and the sort of scandal of arranged photographs or bodies that have been moved on the battlefield, and the scandal of that was the idea that photographer and artist and craftsman and shaper and manipulator being very present when there was a deep desire, or hunger, or fantasy to believe in the transparent photographer, the sort of, the maker who wasn’t present, they were just the kind of medium through which you got the unchanged thing. And I feel like sort of thinking about what that hunger is, like what is the fantasy for the “I” or the maker or the shaper who’s somehow not there because it seems like so much of what our writing in different ways is all doing, exploring what can happen when you own that mediating self.

 

Biss:

I guess I love this question coming from Eileen because I feel like I came to the essay through poetry, and I always new when I was in poetry that in some ways what I was doing was different, and I loved that I had all these poets around me, being supportive, and allowing me to be part of the community, and I was writing like 3,000-word unlineated prose poems. It didn’t look a lot like poetry. But nobody was, like, I never had anyone say “This is not a poem” to me, and I felt like that was really important to my development as a writer. And part of what draws me to the essay and to nonfiction is maybe that it’s so, I feel like it’s so loosely defined, and that there’s so much room in terms of what you can do, and you can do what the work asks you to do. And I feel so unattached to, you know, being called an essayist or a nonfiction writer or any of the terms that go around. I feel like, yeah, my community started out being poets and I just feel like artists in general. And so yeah, I draw on film and I draw on—for a while, when I was in San Diego, before (inaudible) arrived, I hadn’t found any writers, so I was with experimental musicians. So that’s what was feeding my work, then, was these experimental composers at UCSD. And for me there’s lots of tributaries; there’s lots of stuff feeding the work that has nothing to do with genre or even medium. For me I guess really it feels like the important conversation is with other artists.

 

Rankine:

I just wanted to have the self as a constructed self. I think cultural studies, media studies, one of the reasons that those disciplines are on the rise is that we have an aggressive understanding of ourselves behind ourselves concealed, as Emily Dickinson said. That self back there really is made by that which comes in. Meaning what we—the music we listen to, Rihanna (laughter). But the music, the books we watch, the films that create and reflect our culture—you know, what happens in film also has to do with who is the enemy in films now—Arabs, right? So all of the politics of the time get reflected in the culture. The culture helps position our fears. Our fears are combatted in our interrogations and all those things create who we are. We are not these, like, things that arrive and then go to the movies. (laughter) You know? As you were talking, Eileen, I was thinking about you as JFK. But that’s partly it; there is no self beyond the constructed self. So when you talk about the body and the mind, the mind is constantly involved in shaping how we think about the body that we carry around, and who that body can stand next to, and who that body should run from.

 

McCrae:

So we are or we aren’t these things that walk into AWP and get to hear great panels.

 

(Audience applause and cheers)

 

Voice:

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