New England Review

Behind the Byline

Ada Limón

In conversation with Sabrina Islam, Ada Limón talks about her poem “Open Water” (NER 42.2), the genesis of her poems’ images, and how “what we pay attention to is how we show our love.”

Sabrina Islam: In “Open Water” you write: “It does no good to trick and weave and lose / the other ghosts, to shove the buried deeper / into the sandy loam, the riverine silt, still you come, / my faithful one, the sound of a body so persistent / in water I cannot tell if it is a wave or you / moving through waves.” What is your process of navigating grief through poetry?

Ada Limón: I was just thinking of that recently. I don’t know if I have a process for navigating grief in my own work, instead it just comes when it comes. I often find myself sitting down to write and then my ghosts arrive. They are moving through me or they are with me always, and then when I allow myself to be tender to the world, to be open to the page, the ghosts come. It always feels like a gift to be able to receive them. To be able to open the door and say, “Oh I’ve been waiting for you!”

SI: Later in the poem we see, “That enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fish.” Kaveh Akbar once pointed out how in your poetry there is a preoccupation with animal life—sharks, fish, horses, birds. What role do animals and the natural world play in your thinking process?

AL: It’s true I’m obsessed with animals, but not just the nonhuman animal, but how we are animals too. A sense of interconnectedness on the planet is what encourages me to try to live each day with some sort of grace, some sort of enoughness. Animals are always reminding me that I am not the center of the story. That there is life all around me and that life will continue on without me. I am not the fulcrum or the arrow on the map. There’s a comfort in that. A spaciousness.

SI: “Open Water” ends, “But I keep thinking how something saw you, something / was bearing witness to you out there in the ocean / where you were no one’s mother, and no one’s wife, / but you in your original skin, right before you died, / you were beheld.” Elsewhere, in your poem “A Name,” we see Eve walking among animals, naming them, and the speaker wonders if Eve also wishes for the animals to speak back and name her. I am fascinated by the amount of openness and vulnerability necessary for the desire to be witnessed so closely. What does it mean to be seen?

AL: I feel increasingly fascinated about the idea that we often don’t think of the animal witnessing us, but rather we are always the seer. Humans are the ones with the albatross around our necks. We tell the story. We have the language-laden tongue and the opposable thumbs. But that still doesn’t mean we are at the center. In my work, and more so in the new book that I’m working on, I’m interested in what it is to not always be the one witnessing, but also what it feels like to be seen, to be witnessed by someone, something else. I’m intrigued by the idea that to be witnessed is as essential as to witness. I’m also intrigued with the idea that when an animal sees the human animal, it sees the animal us, the body, the skin, the movement, the threat, the safety, without all the chaos that’s steaming in our minds.

SI: In an interview with Diana Delgado for Guernica you talk about feeling things largely, “There is so much feeling that is moving through me almost all the time, and probably many people have this happening to them, but for me, I feel it. It can be a little intimidating and overwhelming sometimes, and the poem feels like a place where I can put all of that.” Your poem “How to Triumph Like a Girl” has an invincible quality, where the speaker feels things deeply and invites readers to see her “8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood.” I’d love to hear the inspiration behind that incredible poem.

AL: Thank you, thank you. That poem, like many of my poems, came out of a curiosity. A question. I wanted to know what it was that made me feel connected to the female horses. Why was it that I wanted to see them win? I started out with that question and let the interrogation lead me to the idea of having that heart inside me, that courageous and powerful heart. The poem was written when I didn’t feel courageous or powerful, but I was allowing myself to imagine what that might feel like to hold that enormous heart inside me, to believe in my own strength and power. Perhaps it’s a spell? I know I needed it.

SI: You’ve said Aretha Franklin has had a huge influence on your poetry. While searching for “the faint music under things,” how do you think about sound and composition? Do you have other favorite writers/artists/musicians who inspire sound in your poetry?

AL: I love Aretha Franklin. I grew up listening to her albums over and over again. (A fact my older brother can attest to.) I can’t actually listen to music while I write though. I am too much of a mimic. When I listen to music it’s with my whole body and my mouth. I sing and dance and it requires all of my attention. I can barely listen to music while I’m driving because it absorbs me so completely. A few of my favorite artists that I return to again and again are: Joan Armatrading, Sade, Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Stevie Nicks, Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, oh I could just go on and on.

SI: Joan Didion writes how certain images shimmer for her: “Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there.” In “Open Water” you recall your stepmother recount her swim, “That night, I heard more / about that fish and that eye than anything else. / I don’t know why it has come to me this morning. / Warm rain and landlocked, I don’t deserve the image.” How do you recognize if a certain image could become a poem?

AL: I love the way images come to us. The mind making paintings all the time. Recalling and recalling. I’m not sure which images are going to make poems when they come to me, but I can tell you that if something strikes me, moves me, changes my body, then I know it’s at least worth exploring in a poem. That morning, the morning of the poem, it really felt like she came to me, was swimming, and that it wasn’t about her final days, but about how she was witnessed in the wild. That was what mattered. I don’t know why, but that’s what the image told me, it was about the EYE, and I was so moved that by the time I was finished with the dishes, I was nearly weeping. That doesn’t mean that the image was going to make a good poem, but it does mean that it moved me enough to sit down and explore it fully.

SI: What obsessions you are entertaining now? What ideas are you exploring?

AL: Lately, my work has been leaning on the idea of ancestors, connections, how a life is not just singular, how a life is made up of our surroundings, our chosen families, our beloveds, our bloodlines, our stories, our possibilities. I’m interested in the mess, the unknowing, the mystery of our world. It’s interesting to try to write a poem that has no certainty or can breathe in the in-between spaces. I’m fascinated by what it means to be an artist that has no answers and how that can translate on the page.

SI: For fellow writers, how do you foster the tenacity to keep going?

AL: It is so hard to keep going, isn’t it? I laugh that I’m always telling friends that we should just give up, just lie down for a bit, just stop and surrender to the spin of the world. And then of course, I nap, and read, and then something in me wants to make poems again. I think of living, of making a living, that can require a bit of tenacity. We must have tenacity to live, to continue, to pay the rent, and get groceries, and grieve, and work through illness and pain, and continue on when all we really want to do is rest for awhile, is to have things be easy. Life is rough. But for me, writing is not about tenacity. I’m not saying it’s not work. I work at it, I edit for months, years sometimes, I throw away hundreds of drafts poems that just don’t seem to want to come to life yet, but at the core of me, making poems, writing poems is not hard. Writing poems is the good part, it’s the gift, it’s the part that doesn’t require tenacity. Poems come when I am not gritting my teeth; they come when I make myself available. So if there was one thing I could offer about how to keep going is to follow your joys when you can, follow the bright edges, let yourself be drawn to what you love and then make poems from that place. What we pay attention to is how we show our love. If it feels too hard to write, don’t write for awhile, take time off, take a nap, call a friend, work at something else, weep. Poems will come. Time will pass. If you love poetry and making poems, you’ll find a way to make them no matter what. They’ll be knocking on your chest to get out, and when you’re ready, when you’ve cried enough, and slept enough, you’ll open your mouth and those poems will come flying out.

SI: Thank you so much for your time, Ada.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. She has received scholarships from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the minnesota review. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Behind the Byline

Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan, photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Sabrina Islam talks to Charif Shanahan about opening up conversations around trauma, poetry as a kind of spirituality, and his poem “Worthiness,” published in NER 42.1.

Sabrina Islam: In your incredible poem “Your foot, your root,” you write, “My mother says I am not African American, I am an Arab. / My friend Solmaz writes It matters what you call a thing.” Elsewhere, you talk about the psychic trauma of multiple colonializations and the complexity around identity in North Africa. Do you find that poetry provides any kind of framework that might help you reclaim your heritage and identity?

Charif Shanahan: My heritage and my identities are my own, whether I write poems about them or not. I think of my work less as a reclamation of my heritage and identity, and more as an articulation of the complexities around my cultural inheritance and subject position/s. The act of speaking within a given social context seems to require that one occupy a position within that social world—and so how does that problematize speaking, in poems or otherwise, for someone who challenges the integrity of those positions simply by existing? I try to take up this question in a poem recently published by the Yale Review.

SI: In “Worthiness,” you write, “On a cellular level trauma is inscribed into the body of the person who survives it, scientists confirm. / Some say the word “trauma” is overused these days to the extent its meaning is diminished. / The intention of the chokehold is to induce an unconscious state.” In your writing practice, how do you grapple with the heaviness of trauma? How do you show yourself generosity?

CS: I show myself generosity precisely by grappling with forces that would otherwise render me silent. It can be an act of generosity (to one’s self and to others) to speak at all.

SI: Then there is also the task of bringing this heaviness to your readers, students, and family: “You’ll have to forgive me for being heavy. / Speaking to you here, like this, is the most difficult thing I can do. / The presence it requires is agonizing, feels fatal.” How do you make room for these discussions in poetry and in the classroom?

CS: I make room for these discussions in my poetry by centering them at times, by being willing to have them at all. What’s the point of making art that risks nothing? That is silent about the aspects of human life most in need of our reckoning? As an educator, I try to make room not just for the “difficult,” but for everything—poems that exist across the full spectrum of human emotion and experience—because that is the truth of what we live. Without a sense of safety, I don’t think it’s possible to discuss meaningfully a poem whose stakes feel very high, and so it’s a priority for me to ensure that each student feels safe, seen and heard.

SI: In a review of your poetry collection in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Margaret Stawowy recognizes an uncompromising sense of the dignity of others in your poetry. In your poem “Single File,” you write, “I don’t mean who we are to each other; I mean / who we are to ourselves.” How do you think about identity and worthiness?

CS: Well, it’s clear that some identities have been rendered less worthy by the terms of the world. That’s a lie, of course. The first and only conferrer of worthiness is yourself.

SI: What does belonging to a physical place mean to you?

CS: I don’t know. I tend to think of “belonging” metaphysically, spiritually. And I don’t know that we can separate physical spaces from their ghosts. If I belong—am at home—anywhere, it’s in my body. But that body, naturally, carries histories, both personal and collective, and has different meanings based on where I bring it, some of which challenge my inhabitation of it.

SI: The line from your earlier collection, “I want to enter my life like a room,” is echoed in “Worthiness.” You once said that the poem is something we can experience in our body and that, although one’s analytical intelligence is often emphasized, our body can also be a guide to understanding and appreciating the poem without the need to articulate what that is. In your experience, does the ritual of encountering and repeating familiar lines of poetry help develop such emotional intelligence?

CS: Yes. The more we encounter an individual poem, the more sophisticated a reader of that poem we become, naturally, though what that means, for me, often has little to do with “the mind.” There is great pleasure for me in close reading and analysis, in breaking the poem down to its constituent parts to see how they come together to make meaning. At once, I think of poetry as a kind of prayer, and the space that poetry occupies in my life is akin to a kind of spirituality. In this way, I try to practice a fullness of reading, rather than a compartmentalization of it; to read—and experience—the poem not just with my mind, but with my entire being.

SI: Are you working on a new writing project?

CS: Yes, I recently completed my second poetry collection. I’ve also been working on a third—a book-length epistolary poem to Whiteness—as well as a collection of essays about mixed-race identity in the US; Blackness in the Maghreb; and the transnational dimensions of racial experience.

SI: Thank you so much for your time, Charif.

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright grant to Morocco, among other awards and recognitions. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA programs.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, holds an MFA in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. She has received scholarships from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the minnesota review. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Behind the Byline

Victoria Chang

Sometimes I want to shake the paper and scream at it because whatever I’m working on is giving me the silent treatment. What I’ve learned is to lean into that silence.

Photo credit: Margaret Molloy

Victoria Chang, author of the “Marfa, Texas” (NER 41.4) and “Obit” series (NER 38.3) talks to NER reader Sabrina Islam about meditations on loss and grief, and on finally writing her truth: “I can never be white or American. I’m actually writing about these things now.”

Sabrina Islam: Your meditation on loss and grief in Obit is incredible. In “Grief” you write, “A picture of / oblivion is not the same as oblivion. / My grief is not the same as my pain. My / mother was a mathematician so I tried / to calculate my grief. My father was an / engineer so I tried to build a box around / my grief, along with a small wooden / bed that grief could lie down on. The / texts kept interrupting my grief, forcing / me to speak about nothing.” How has grief become an obsession for you and what particular value is present in thinking and writing about the subject of grief?

Victoria Chang: I think why write about anything really? Why write at all? I don’t think we can choose to be writers. I also don’t think we can choose what we write about, at least for some things. Obviously, you can be given assignments or prompts, but even then, our own obsessions seem to creep out. Grief just is. We can’t choose when someone dies (or when we die ourselves), but those left behind grieve. As a writer, I write from deep wells of thinking and feeling, like most writers probably.

SI: Grief continues. In the newer series, “Marfa, Texas,” you write, “Is it // possible to stop loving / everything? The owl. The / hawk. Every person I meet. To / see everyone as my mother. To / have a heart // like this is to be made of / midnight.” You’ve poured your grief into Obit, then into “Marfa, Texas.” Do the poems ever speak back to you? How is your grief evolving and changing you?

VC: Poems always speak to us! Most of the time, we don’t listen very well. Writing, but mostly revising feels a lot like listening to the poems. Sometimes I want to shake the paper and scream at it because sometimes whatever I’m working on is giving me the silent treatment. What I’ve learned is to lean into that silence. It’s ignoring me for a reason. Usually that means to let it sit or go read something else in a different genre or something entirely different. But given my stubborn personality, I usually just keep reading a manuscript again and again and even if I change one word, I think of it as a miracle and thank my manuscript. Right now, I’m reading academic articles. Sometimes I read philosophy. I actually enjoy reading literary criticism textbooks. I don’t watch movies but I love reading movie criticism.

SI: Your words become increasingly charged and powerful in the sequence “Marfa, Texas.” The last poem in the series ends, “To love so much is to live / within birds. // I have been waiting for / this heart to fade or at / least to kneel. Maybe the / heart is not inside me but I / am inside it.” You frequently write sequences: why are you drawn to this form?

VC: I think the obsessive person can be drawn into sequences. It’s the form of relentless pursuit. The trouble is that there’s always a gap so the obsessive person is running on a treadmill within that gap. I like to call that gap the gap of estrangement. That’s where I reside. That’s my address. I used to make apologies for being so obsessive, but now I just embrace that disposition and personality. My father was/is a lot like this. It feels chemical in the brain actually. I also think obsessiveness has something to do with immigration, estrangement from a country and white supremacist institutions. The chasing is a part of obsession because the gap of estrangement can never be filled. I can never be white or American. I’m actually writing about these things now.

SI: Circles often appear in your poetry collections. In his essay “Circles” Emerson writes, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” How does the form of a circle stimulate your thinking process?

VC: As sloppy a person as I am, I am always surprised at how I can make patterns, see patterns, or think in patterns. My brain often feels like a pinball machine. But then I can be exceptionally organized and linear when necessary. I love how malleable and unfixed the brain is/can be. It’s important (to me at least) not to stereotype myself, if that makes sense. We’re all multitudinous. We are exceptionally flexible. My attitude has always been “why not?” and this has gotten me into all sorts of trouble in the past, but in art-making at least, I would say it is my governing principle (if I even have one consciously). Experimentation is very important to me as a person, trying new things, the new, the fresh.

SI: Your new book Love, Love is a semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse about a girl who slowly solves the mystery of her sister’s strange illness, which we learn is trichotillomania. The protagonist, Frances, is also dealing with bullying and grappling with her developing identity. Growing up in an immigrant Chinese American family, why was it important for you to write this story?

VC: I’ve tried to write that story so many times (and just wrote another essay on this material). Sometimes we are at the center of our own narratives. Other times, we are not main characters. In my sister’s struggles, I was not the protagonist but a side character. I have begun to recognize that this doesn’t mean I wasn’t impacted (or implicated) by our family’s trauma surrounding this mysterious illness. There are a lot of unspoken traumas in our family, mostly centered around my mother, that only now, after she has passed, can I even properly or adequately reflect on. I have a whole book exploring these things that I am working hard on at this very moment. As an immigrant’s child, there’s also a reckoning with my parents’ trauma and my mother’s trauma and I am writing about all of this now.

SI: Realist painter Edward Hopper’s work prominently features in your earlier collection The Boss, which explores, among other things, American corporate life and power structures. How does visual art inspire poetry for you?

VC: I am very interested in visual art, the visual, aesthetics. How things look matters to me a lot. I am very interested in design, architecture, sculpture. I think this is pretty common amongst poets who spend a lot of time “seeing” things in their minds and in real life. I am working on some visual elements for a new book right now as well. If I could be any other kind of artist, I would be a visual artist. I took a lot of art classes growing up, but then somewhere along the way, switched over more to writing.

SI: Which poets and writers have shaped your understanding of language and poetry?

VC: So many! Too many to name here. Virginia Woolf. Elizabeth Bishop. Tranströmer, Glück, Graham, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Larry Levis, Plath of course, Eliot, Stevens, Lee. So many contemporary poets and writers I admire too. I could list them here, but I fear I would leave too many people out. We are in a rich time of poetry.

SI: In your poem “Instinct” you ask, “What if the ducks are right in fearing everything, / even their own?” Writing about war and genocide, your work often wrestles with the truly vile parts of human history. In “Ode to Iris Chang” you consider, “How // to trust humans. // How to trust the earth / when all that is there is a // derivative of mud.” What motivates you as a writer to continually return to the page and still explore humanity?

VC: As a writer, I’ve always tried to honor my own truth, whether that truth went against the grain or with the grain. I can’t and won’t be anyone else. I used to feel a lot of shame for not being like other people, but now I try harder to write what feels true to me. I used to think I was supposed to sound like other writers, but I think perhaps starting with my third book, I gave up on that. I just began to write what rang true to me instead of trying to be like everyone else. This wasn’t a conscious decision, it just happened. I think I grew up a little bit (finally). This doesn’t mean I don’t listen to feedback, though. I listen really closely to feedback from close friends who are kind enough to read my work. Sometimes, depending on what I’m working on, I need more feedback than other times. I think a writer needs many things, but persistence and a doggedness are two qualities that can be important. If I didn’t have these qualities, I don’t think I would have been able to survive the brutal literary world. I also think a writer needs to simply love writing. I do and always have. If I have nothing else, I know that I really like writing. As I get older and older, I am less afraid of writing about those harder things. The fear, though, is usually how others will perceive the writing or me. At some point, I have just accepted that poets in particular can be very harsh and judgmental. They won’t like hardly anything anyone writes anyway, so why bother trying to please them? I am more interested in pleasing myself.

SI: Thank you so much for your time, Victoria.

Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT (Copper Canyon, 2020), Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon, 2017), The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013), Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Circle (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Her children’s books include Is Mommy? (Simon & Schuster, 2015), illustrated by Marla Frazee, and Love, Love (Sterling, 2020), a middle grade novel. She lives in Los Angeles.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, is from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She spent her early childhood in New York, Connecticut, and Florida. She holds an MFA in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the Minnesota Review.

 

Behind the Byline

Maud Casey

NER staff reader Sabrina Islam talks to Maud Casey, longtime NER contributor and author of “The City Itself” (NER 41.1, 2020), about hysteria, incurability, and turning to fiction in a pandemic. 

Sabrina Islam: I’ve read the opening paragraph of “The City Itself” over and over again. It’s haunting. You ask, “Who leaves this world gently?” You keep probing, “Who are you who am I where are we going what is this feeling inside of me why why why what does it all mean, etc.” Reading this I find myself in that land of un you speak of in The Art of Mystery—uncertainty, unfathomability, unknowing. This story too is unsatisfied with finding the point. As a writer, why mystery?

Maud Casey: First of all, thank you. You are the dream reader! Is this the part where we reveal you were my student and, so, I yours? I know you to be rigorous, thoughtful, imaginative as a reader/writer/thinker. In your story, “Nakshi Kanthas,” which was published by Prairie Schooner not so long ago, you write “There is a story in the space between the stitches.” It’s one answer to the question why mystery. Mystery has always been the draw for me, from the very beginning, before I could even name it. The seduction of the in-between, what isn’t visible, the world behind the world—that’s where it’s at for me. Who are you who am I where are we going what is this feeling inside of me why why why what does it all mean? I wonder this all day long. Writing, reading, don’t answer these questions, but they allow me to ask them, and offer the company of other minds asking them.

SI: Thank you, Maud—it’s such a delight to have you as a mentor! Next, I am curious to hear: who are the incurable women in your story?

MC: In the words of the recently departed Daniel Johnston, some things last a long time. I first came across Georges Didi-Huberman’s The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière in a class I took in college. The class was called something like Victorian Women, and there was a section on Jean Martin Charcot, the neurologist who invented the diagnosis of hysteria at the Salpêtrière Hospital. Didi-Huberman’s book (I still have my copy from 1989!), about the intersection of nineteenth-century French psychiatry and the beginning of photography, is a mash-up of cultural criticism, archival photographs, psychiatric history, philosophy. It occasionally veers into pretentiousness, but those photographs of the women and girls diagnosed with hysteria! And Didi-Huberman’s nimble way of capturing the era and laying bare its attitudes (drenched in fake science) about women. In that book, he describes the Salpêtrière as “the city of incurable women.” In many of the hospital’s documents, women diagnosed with hysteria were often referred to as “incurables.” I loved this idea of a city of incurable women. The Salpêtrière was an enormous compound, a city unto itself inside of the city of Paris. So, a physical space that was also a psychic space—like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The city of incurable women suggests something right as much as something wrong. Of what, exactly, did they need to be cured? It echoes outward—the women diagnosed with hysteria, but then all of us, if we think in terms of desire, yearning, being alive. These are incurable conditions, aren’t they? We are all the incurable women!

SI: “The City Itself” is part of an ongoing collaboration with photographer Laura Larson. In The Art of Mystery you quote Chris Abani who writes, “This is what the art I make requires of me: that in order to have an honest conversation with a reader, I must reveal myself in all my vulnerability. Reveal myself, not in the sense of my autobiography, but in the sense of the deeper self, the one we keep too often hidden even from ourselves.” Writing is often a lonely process. How does a shared imagination work for you and your partner during a collaborative project? Are you protective of your creative space or do you find it easy to welcome others as you reveal yourself in the writing process?

MC: Writing can be so lonely (and maybe even more so because we do this to ourselves?). It was that loneliness, in part, that led to my reaching out to Laura. I was envious of poets who seem to forever be collaborating with people. Why can’t fiction writers? Also, hysteria was an endlessly photographed condition (the illness was assumed to be visible then, the way criminality was). I wrote Laura a fan letter in 2013, and she wrote back; that was the beginning of an ongoing conversation. We became a book group of two. Sometimes we sent work back and forth. She’d send a photograph, and I’d write something, or vice versa. Other times, we worked alone. At the center of everything were the nineteenth-century archival photographs from the Salpêtrière. At one point, Laura and I went together to Harvard’s Countway Medical Library—there’s a big cache of photographs from the Salpêtrière there. We put on gloves and spent a day handling crumbling glass photographic plates. It was terrifying—I was sure I was going to break them—and unexpectedly moving. Those photographic plates were made of light from the nineteenth century, light that had touched the women in the photographs, light that had traveled through time and space. Collaboration requires a different kind of vulnerability. You feel your limits, your habits, and you push against them. I’m not sure I can articulate it just yet, but I’ve learned a ton.

SI: You’ve shown interest in photography in your previous works. As a fiction writer, why are you drawn to photographs?

MC: I’m going to do that annoying thing where I whip out a quote (or open a book to find the quote). From John Berger’s Uses of Photography: “Memory is not unilinear at all. Memory works radially, that is to say with an enormous number of associations all leading to the same event. The diagram is like this: [here you’ll have to imagine a diagram that looks like a kid’s, or my own, drawing of a sun]. If we want to put a photograph back into the context of experience, social experience, social memory, we have to respect the laws of memory.” Along with the archival photographs, this quote has haunted the work Laura and I have done together. Photographs contain time and memory; they are haunted. I love that. I also love the way a photograph does what life can’t, capture a moment—and all that goes into that moment, including mystery—and make it still but not static.

SI: The way you are describing time, memory, and the power of photographs reminds me of Paisley Rekdal’s Intimate. She writes, “I look and look at the photographs. The photos look back at me.” (I read this book for the first time in your class! It’s one that stayed with me.)

Let’s talk about the form of this project. You’ve written short stories, novels, and essays. How is this project formally different from anything you have done before? What shape is this collaborative project taking?

MC: An excellent question! I think the best way for me to answer is to point to the sort of work that thrills me these days, which tends to be uncharacterizable. These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy, which is ostensibly three short pieces about Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. Mini-essays, prose poems? Who cares? The portrait of Keats begins, “In 1803, the guillotine was a common children’s toy.” Jaeggy’s mind—her attention—at work. Where is she looking? It’s surprising and thrilling where her mind goes. Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil, which begins with the author throwing the manuscript into the garden and starting over. I’ve kind of lost the plot of plot. I’m more interested these days in a mind finding its way, which doesn’t mean there isn’t a shape. The collaborative project is two minds finding their way as they consider, address, imagine, and otherwise turn their twenty-first-century attention to the lives of the nineteenth-century girls and women who were patients in the Salpêtrière. More simply put, it’s a book called The City of Incurable Women, which includes linked narrative pieces inspired by the lives of those girls and women, archival photographs, and other documentary material, and Laura’s contemporary photographs (which include photographs of the archival photographs). It’s not meant to be a corrective; its aim is more impressionistic and atmospheric.

SI: If writing is an ongoing discussion with literature, what is this project responding to?

MC: Some of the books that were especially important as Laura and I began to think about this project: Nicholas Muellner’s Amnesia Pavillions, Theresa Cha’s Dictée, W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, John Berger’s Selected Essays, Paisley Rekdal’s Intimate. Then, for me, there’s the project C. D. Wright and the photographer Deborah Luster did, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, and Molly McCully Brown’s poetry collection, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Nathalie Leger’s Suite for Barbara Loden. Jessie van Eerden’s collection of portrait essays, The Long Weeping. I’m sure I’m leaving things out. I’ve been thinking, too, about the other things that influence me—movies (currently haunted by Nothing No Better, a documentary about Rosedale, Mississippi), art (most recently, the Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future exhibit), music (a John K. Samson show in the Before Time). And also, whatever else was going on in my life during the writing of a particular book—learning to swim (I’m an adult-onset swimmer), the conversations I’ve had (with my boyfriend, my friends, family, students, strangers), the weather (meteorological, political, cultural, etc.), that walk I took, that thing I saw on Instagram, that thing I saw out my window.

SI: How does teaching inform your writing life?

MC: I want to ask you this question because I know you teach. It’s always a balance, a dance, right? If someone had come to me when I was a shy, nervous kid and said, you will spend a large part of your adult life as a teacher, I might have refused to grow up. But when I began to teach, I figured out there are many ways to teach, and then figured out how lucky I was to be teaching. All to say, it’s a big part of my life, and so a big part of my writing life. They are part of the same conversation. The conversations I have with students about their work, about books, about art, about the vocation of writing, all teach me, and I bring them with me in some form or another into the deep-space solitude of my writing life.

SI: In The Art of Mystery you write, “We don’t turn to fiction for the facts. Fiction offers relief from the facts and from that terrible word—closure . . . Fiction, after all, is a democratic art, reliant on the participation of its citizen readers, and in best circumstances, readers are contemporaneously sent back into themselves and out into the larger universe.” In the times we are living through—in the middle of a global pandemic—what do you have to say to citizen readers? Why should they turn to fiction?

MC: In the times we’re living through—when the brutal inequities that existed all along are being laid bare, when people are dying and losing their jobs, when so much remains uncertain—I’m not sure I, with my health and my job, feel right telling anyone they should turn to fiction. Whatever gets you through the day, and doesn’t hurt you or anyone else, do that. I’m not trying to dodge the question. It’s a tough question! Maybe I’m wary of making pronouncements—it feels too much like closure. Or maybe it’s that these times don’t change fiction’s value, which is related to the value of art in general, the value of the imagination. The mind at play: what a strange and beautiful thing.  The fiction, the art, I feel most passionately about, asks me to attend to the world differently, to listen, to pay attention to a mind finding its way. It reminds me of all of the minds finding their way in this world, which is overwhelming, but still useful when the world is at its worst. The writing and the art I love most cultivates the sort of patience and attention that surprises and delights, and so allows us to surprise and delight ourselves. I think I’ve just used many sentences to try to convey what William Carlos Williams said in one line about the news and poetry! What he said, but fiction, and all the arts, too.

SI: I deeply admire your sensibility. Thank you so much for your time, Maud.

Maud Casey is the author of four works of fiction, most recently The Man Who Walked Away (Bloomsbury, 2014), and a nonfiction book, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions (Graywolf, 2018). “The City Itself” is part of an ongoing collaboration with the photographer Laura Larson called The City of Incurable Women.

Sabrina Islam is from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She spent her early childhood in New York, Connecticut, and Florida. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the Minnesota Review.

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