In Sick, Porochista Khakpour explores the entanglements of immigration and illness, addiction and ability, in a memoir that spans her early childhood to the near present. Only a toddler when she immigrated from Iran with her parents amidst the Iran-Iraq War, she settled in California before moving to New York, New Mexico, Illinois, and Germany during her adulthood; Khakpour’s first book of nonfiction covers expansive terrain in terms of physical landscape, but also turns inward as she recounts how she navigated and suffered (or, rather, navigates and suffers, in the present tense) from a wide spectrum of symptoms, health conditions and healthcare politics until, after years of misdiagnoses, she tested positive for late-stage Lyme disease. In prose that’s wrapped close to the body, Khakpour describes this complicated disease—how it is spread through tick bites and how it affects each individual differently, thereby making it difficult to research and treat—and vividly illustrates how it impacted her relationships with her parents, friends, partners and writing projects
While Khakpour does not shy away from detailing how Lyme disease is oftentimes a lived and agonizing reality, Sick employs Lyme disease—and chronic illness, more broadly—as a metaphor representing immigration and diaspora. Consequently, an ongoing theme of the book is interrogating the connection between not feeling a full sense of belonging to a home (whether this home is an individual identity or an entire nation) with the experience of illness. During one particularly bad bout of sickness, when her diagnosis was continually characterized as solely psychological as opposed to physical or infectious, Khakpour returns to her parents’ home in California and thinks: “Every part of my body felt like its wiring was all wrong, I felt like a foreigner in a hostile country, never adjusting or accepting […] I couldn’t quite fight it, but I could not be at peace with it either.” Continue Reading
Paula Carter is the author of No Relation, a collection of flash essays that details her experiences helping to care for, and then leaving, two boys from her partner’s previous marriage. Incorporating prose poems, fairy tales, metaphors, and vignettes, Carter creates a mosaic of love and loss, longing and belonging, as she searches for the true meaning of family.
While No Relation is Carter’s first book, she also has essays published in The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is also a company member with 2nd Story, one of Chicago’s most prominent live lit events.
The interview with Carter was conducted over cups of coffee in her charming apartment in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood on an August afternoon.
SF: Nonfiction is a genre that is not so easily defined—especially when we consider the multiple subgenres that challenge its boundaries. Because No Relation is characterized as a collection of flash essays, I was wondering how you would define a “flash essay” in your own words?
PC: I think for me a flash essay is something that walks the line between prose and poetry in a way where the writer takes one significant moment—no matter how small it may be—and uses it to make larger connections to more universal themes. In this way, a certain theme is explored within a very short space and the subject matter becomes more immediate and crystallized for the reader.
SF: I really like that you used the term “crystallize” because it evokes the experience of how I read your emotions. In the book, you don’t overtly describe your emotions; instead, we catch these “glints” of an underlying emotional depth growing beneath the pressure of your prose. How did you write these crystallizing moments despite the extremely personal and emotional nature of the subject matter?
PC: When I began writing the book, I had written some standalone flash essays so I felt that I understood the tools of the form or, rather, the parts of the form. I had also read Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas which is written in these flash nonfiction moments and is also an amazing, beautiful piece of writing. I had all these feelings I wanted to express and when I read her book, I thought “This is the way I can do this,” because it allows me to share moments and construct scenes without a lot of explaining or exposition, which are great things in a regular essay, but, with this form, readers are asked to make certain connections themselves. I feel it leaves more space for reflection and interrogation. Also, without having too much exposition, I was also able to explore the power within my different relationships—with my ex-partner and with his two sons—in a more discrete way.
SF: What motivated you to take this dual experience of falling in and out of love with a romantic partner while also parenting his two children and turning it into a book of essays?
PC: The first impetus was that I had so many thoughts and feelings I wanted to express. I was so deeply affected by building my relationship with the boys and then having to leave them after my partner and I broke up. However, the second impetus was that I noticed there were not many books written from the perspective of a non-biological parent, or from someone who was in my position. When I was grieving the end of my relationship with my partner and his two sons, I was looking for books to help me cope and all I could really find were books in the self-help genre or books on how to create a successful blended family. I was frustrated that I couldn’t find many things written in a more creative genre or from the step-parent’s point of view, which led me to write my own essays about the experience.
I clasp the sleeve of my father’s coat tightly as we weave our way around the small, round tables on my first day of kindergarten. At a table towards the back, there’s a name tag with block letters I am beginning to recognize, S-A-D-A-F. My dad tells me to sit here and he leaves. I watch all the other kids file in and sit by their own name tags so I don’t have to watch my dad walk away. After every little chair has been filled, our teacher asks us one by one to say our names. Saa-daf, I say, easing into the first “a,” pronouncing it the way you would a smile. Sodoff, she says, brief, staccato. Sadaf, I say again, emphasizing the long “a.” Yes, Sodoff, she repeats incorrectly and ticks something off on her paper with her pencil. I become Sadaf at home, Sodoff in school. It is easier to be split into two people instead of insisting on being one.
I am eight.
I help my mom study for her citizenship test. I cut index cards into two halves. I number one side of each card 1 to 27 and on the other side, I write out the corresponding amendment, not understanding all the words, but carefully copying them all the same. Some amendments, like the one about guns and the one about cruel and unusual punishment and the one about states having power, are a sentence long and fit easily on their notecards. For the longer ones, I stop writing when I run out of the room. It feels impossible trying to make all the words fit in the small, white square.
I am ten.
I ask my dad to tell me the truth. Did someone in our family crash a plane into the Twin Towers? He looks ashamed of me and says no. Part of me knew that this suspicion could not be true, but I had been so overwhelmed by all the fear and paranoia around me that I had to make sure. Flooded by relief at his answer, I do not dwell too long on the look on his face. It is in this instance that I feel an inner battle rise in me. I am caught between two evils and only one may be the victor. One evil is sacrificing the integral part of me that feels attached to another country, to its cultures and customs and most importantly the family I have there. However, I feel a crushing sense of national duty that I ought to suppress my love for this forbidden country because my home country had become afraid of them. But then again, another part of me feels another sense of duty to the misjudged country, to my beloved family members who continue to be misunderstood there solely for the fact that unfounded fears radiated everywhere. I subject anyone who will listen to long-winded explanations about the importance of not conflating Iranians and Muslims, Islam and terror. I find it’s no use. I only end up embarrassing myself or getting confused by my own words. It feels like an unending battle and I surrender. I pick the evil that lets me negotiate less.
The anthology Bodies of Truth, edited by Dinty W. Moore, Erin Murphy, and Renée K. Nicholson, contains twenty-five nonfiction works that range from flash memoir to meditation, lyric essay and epistolary, that interrogate and explore the writers’ experiences with illness, disability, and medicine in the contemporary healthcare system in the United States.
The essays in this anthology contribute to the discourse of narrative medicine, a movement in medical education that aims to balance the clinical side of medical practice with the very human aspect of storytelling, bringing the voices of patients and physicians to the forefront of understanding the subjective experiences of illness. As mentioned in the Foreword, by Jacek L. Mostwin, and the Preface, this book serves as an accessible resource for medical professionals as they engage with and learn more about narrative medicine.
However, this anthology can also serve as a resource for nonfiction writers to expand their own practice on narrative, more broadly. Each piece in the collection, which the editors call “personal narratives,” provides strategies on how to tell a powerful story briefly and how to find language for what feels impossible to describe.
This interview was conducted with editors Erin Murphy and Renée K. Nicholson by S. Ferdowsi via email and has been edited for length and clarity.
Punctuate.:In your Preface, you mention you all live and work in Appalachia where you engage with rural medical communities and I was wondering how that led to this anthology?
Erin Murphy:From 2010-12, I led a medical humanities discussion group at what is now UPMC Hospital in Altoona, Pennsylvania. The group was a mix of resident and longtime physicians, and we read texts that were 300-500 pages long. I found that most of the doctors were so busy that they would only have time to read the first few pages. Even so, we could spend an hour talking about a single issue or detail from a book. It occurred to me that there was a need for a collection of short works that could be read in a single sitting, even during a coffee break. So I contacted Renée and Dinty, both of whom had experience and interest in narrative medicine, and asked them to work on this anthology project with me.
Renée K. Nicholson:My first inspiration is my brother, Nate, who is a metastatic cancer patient. I wanted a book to be out there that could help him feel not so alone. As well, I’d been writing with patients with conditions as different as ALS and Cancer, and started working with professionals from West Virginia University’s Health Sciences Center with a variety of projects with patients, students, professors and clinicians. The book allows me to have a resource for this very wide variety of people interested in or connected by illness, disability, and medicine. So, when Erin invited me to work with her and Dinty, it was a natural fit for me. I also think that working with patients in West Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia, reminds me how much story is a part of this culture. And that reminds me that story is part of just about all cultures. By creating this anthology, in some way I think we honor our storytelling impulse.
Punctuate.:Can you describe your experience putting together an anthology?
RKN:Because I’d never put together an anthology before, I felt that Erin and Dinty really guided me and mentored me through the process. What I learned just from this was that you want co-editors you like, trust, and respect, because you’re all working closely together. If you’re new, like me, try to learn as much as you can while also contributing.
We solicited essays from people we knew or knew of first, and because together we found the breadth and depth we needed, we didn’t put out a call. We kept good records of what we got in terms of essays, and then we each read and commented. Often, we’d have an email chain of thoughts—not just on the essays themselves, but also on issues like making sure we had diversity in both subjects and authors, looking at the balance of patients, caregivers, clinical professionals, and so on. We wanted diverse voices in terms of race and ethnicity as well. I suppose a good anthology is like a good diet—very balanced.
Also, not all of our selections were from those who consider themselves professional writers, and we saw this as one of the collection’s strengths. Sometimes, though, we’d have to walk through some edits, and so usually the editor closest to the writer would take the lead there. I think the process built a lot of trust, between the three editors as well as between us as editors and the writers in the anthology.
Punctuate.:If any of our readers are working on their own anthologies, what advice would you give to them?
EM:This is the third anthology that I’ve edited. What my co-editors and I have done with each book is to put together a dozen or so chapters to send to prospective presses with our proposal. Then once we receive a preliminary contract, we solicit the remaining works. All told, it typically takes about three years from start to finish.
RKN:If you are a first time anthology editor, I would say be prepared to put in the time to do a thorough job. Work with experienced editors if you can. I learned so much from Erin and Dinty as a part of the process of putting this one together.
Punctuate.:Many of the essays detail heavy subject material—the pain that comes from chronic illness and drug addiction; the stress that comes with expensive medical treatments; witnessing your children or fellow patients living with mental, physical, or intellectual disabilities and feeling unable to help—and I found myself feeling veryemotional as I read the anthology. I’m wondering if you had a similar experience from an editor’s vantage point and if you employed any strategies to make it through this process? How does handling tough subject material look like for an editor?
RKN:Any time you are dealing with serious illness, it can be important to have those things that give you a break or release. At the time I was working on the anthology, I was actively working with patients in clinics at WVU Medicine, and supporting my family as my brother went through treatments for cancer. So, for me, there were layers of things going on at the same time.
On the one hand, the book and the essays within it helped me feel as if I was not alone—the work itself made for connections and community. Sometimes, however, I would need to clear my mind to allow it to process everything. For me personally, one of the best “breaks” would be to take my golden retriever for a walk. The physical exercise and my dog’s friendly, sweet disposition allowed me those moments of release. I’d say that honoring the stories includes stepping back when you need to clear your mind and let the emotions settle. I will also say that it helps me understand issues in medicine like burnout and compassion fatigue. Health professionals often confront the tough situations, and I can see where they would need, just as I needed, times of calm, comfort, and joy.
Punctuate.:Despite the heavy subject material, I also noticed that some essays do inspire hope. I’m specifically thinking of “A Measure of Acceptance” that shows the unexpected resourcefulness and creativity Floyd Skloot gains when learning how to live with his neurological illness and “Overtones” where Meredith Davies Hadaway transforms her own grief from losing her husband into supporting others through music therapy. Did you intentionally look for essays with “happy-ish” endings, or did those emerge organically through your search?
EM:We deliberately sought a range of subject matter and tones, partly because it makes for a richer reading experience and partly because the range reflects the highs and lows of the medical experience. You can be in your darkest hour and sometimes in spite of—or maybe even because of—the stress, you can find yourself laughing at the ridiculousness of a situation. We wanted the book to mirror these peaks and valleys to some extent.
RKN:The range that Erin spoke about is very important. Illness, disability, and medicine includes things like hope, like joy, even humor. Medicine encompasses the whole range of human emotion, and capturing many of them, especially surprising ones, were part of the process of finding and choosing work.
Punctuate.:I’m very intrigued by how “narrative” works in the anthology. In the Foreword, Jacek L. Mostwin writes that “narrative medicine” is a movement that restores the patient’s and physician’s voices back into medicine, and then links this to the oral tradition of the Ancient Greeks. How do you see “narrative” as a literary device working through and across all the essays?
RKN:Currently, I’m finishing up a Professional Certificate in Narrative Medicine through Columbia University. The program was created by a general internist and PhD in Literature named Dr. Rita Charon, who wrote, “The care of the sick unfolds in stories.” One of the things we explore in the coursework and in the anthology is the idea that the stories that come out of medical situations are often multi-vocal. The anthology emerges from this idea of the multi-voiced experience of illness or disability. Giving voice or narrative structure to experiences within medicine allows us to feel less passive in the process. By reading these accounts, we gain the opportunity to recognize, absorb, interpret and be moved by the stories of others. Perhaps those who read these will be moved to write or express their own narratives. Sure, that can be for publication, but it can also just be for a single person to have a better understanding of him or herself, or to share with others in many ways. I see narrative approaches as a way to enhance the medical encounter, to help the patients feel heard and understood, and help clinicians connect with those they serve. I don’t know that we can teach empathy, but we can give people the opportunity to use the empathy within them, and to practice empathy. Narratives like the ones we’ve collected in the anthology offer those opportunities to use and practice empathetic skills. It gives us the occasion to reflect.
Punctuate.:At the end of “Two Hearts,” an essay about his son’s heart defect, Brian Doyle writes “this is where our conversation always ends…” and I’m wondering if you see a relationship between a “narrative” and a “conversation.” For example, in the news, people are always talking about having a “conversation” on gun violence, or race, or sexual assault, but then it never feels like we actually go into that conversation. So, I’m wondering what you think a narrative can accomplish that a conversation can’t and vice versa.
EM:That’s an interesting question. I suspect the media has twisted the meaning of conversation to meet its needs, much as Facebook has co-opted the word “friend.” In one sense, the narrative is a one-sided conversation. We hope, though, that by engaging with each narrative that readers will continue the conversation, either in their own lives, their classrooms, or their practices.
RKN:To echo what Erin says, I believe these stories encourage a continuation of the conversation. Maybe that conversation is with others, and sometimes that’s a conversation with the self. I’ll go back to the idea of reflection. These narratives invite us into someone else’s experiences, and when we read them, we’re implicitly invited to reflect on our own experiences, thoughts, and feelings. In turn, this reflection allows us to better navigate ambiguities.
Punctuate.:University of Nebraska is gaining a reputation of publishing really innovative, experimental and unconventional collections. How was it like working with a university press?
EM:We were thrilled that the University of Nebraska Press accepted this anthology because, like you say, they are publishing innovative collections. Some of my favorite books are from their list. They have a terrific team of editors and marketing staff who not only support you in producing a high-quality book but also do their best to promote it once its published. Every time I turn around, there’s an ad for Bodies of Truthin a major publication, a conference program, or a catalog.
RKN:Like Erin, many of my favorite books are from the University of Nebraska Press list. Erin said it well—just a terrific team that provides great support and promotion.
Punctuate.:How did your own personal backgrounds in poetry, nonfiction, and dance shape your understanding of illness and the process of putting this anthology together?
EM:I wrote both poetry and creative nonfiction, and I find that there is a lot of overlap between the two. In narrative medicine—as with poetry—you are looking for the precise image or detail to bring a large experience down to a small size for the reader. An author isn’t writing about everyone with cancer—she’s writing about her experience, and maybe even just a single day or moment of that experience. What’s left out is just as important as what’s included, and this applies both to the writing and the editing process. While my creative writing influenced my work on the anthology, I should add that my interest in narrative medicine has also carried over to my creative work. For example, my most recent poetry collection, Assisted Living(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2018), focuses on caregiving and end-of-life issues.
RKN:I trained in classical ballet, and when that career was sidelined by rheumatoid arthritis, I turned to writing. In many ways working on the anthology feels like a natural extension of that. Illness can be a burden, and yet one that can offer opportunities, especially for expression. One of our essays spoke to me because I recognized it as being about rheumatoid arthritis specifically. There was the “I knowthis” feeling reading it. And even though each person experiences illness in his or her own way, there can be a strong feeling of connection. All the pieces invited us into unique experiences and also allowed for touchpoints where we feel connected.
Punctuate.:Tell me a little bit about your title, Bodies of Truth.I am fascinated by how the essays all come together and demonstrate this tricky thing between the subjective experience of being in a body and this concept of “Truth” that is an absolute.
RKN:The word “bodies” conjures up many interpretations. There is the somatic sense of the body, this vessel separate from the mind. There is the idea of a body as a group with a common purpose or goal. Body can also be the central part of something, like a text. I love all these interpretive layers of body when thinking of the title Bodies of Truth. In each body of each essay, there’s a truth. In this body of essays about bodies, there are truths. Like many truths, the ones shared in these pieces are hard earned and yet often elusive. And there, hopefully, are new truths found and explored as people read the book.
Interview by S. Ferdowsi
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Bio: S. Ferdowsi is a writer based in Chicago working on her first manuscript.
It seems fitting that our issue is being released this week because this Thursday is Persian New Year. For Iranians, Noruz is celebrated on the first day of spring, which is something I have always loved. If the new year that began in January isn’t really turning out so good, if all those promises I had hoped to keep for myself end up dropping one by one like rotting fruit on trees, then that protracted year was ending (in some sense) and I could get a do-over, a whole other New Year to try again. In March, on the first day of spring no less, I was given a second chance to reinstate the resolutions I couldn’t conquer before: quit biting my nails, write more, eat healthier, write more, spend less money, write more (you know how this goes).
Springtime also represents renewal and change, a reminder from the entire Earth to celebrate growth. Punctuate.has also been growing, and changing, and we eagerly look for what summers will follow our springs. But first, we’d like to thank T. Clutch Fleischmann for being a critical resource and dedicated reader as our Book Reviews Editor from 2015-2018. We’d also like to thank Ian Morris for his tireless work as Managing Editor and congratulate him on his new position as a writer at Coalition Technologies.
Since 2019, Cora Jacobs has handled Punctuate.as our Managing Editor and continues to manage Columbia Poetry Reviewand Hair Trigger, which are some of our sister publications. This year we also have Juliana Ravelli (Assistant Managing Editor) and Andrew Krzak (Editorial Assistant).
To celebrate Noruz, Iranians lay out a sofre. On the sofre, which is usually an elaborately embroidered cloth, my family sets out seven items such as apples to represent health and beauty; eggs (which we also decorated for Easter) to represent fertility; and a small green plant called a sabzi for rebirth. Taken together, all the items represent some aspect of spring and the wishes we hope will come true in the new year.
In this issue, our sofre is laid out with different prose to convey how expansive and ever-evolving the nonfiction genre can be.
We are privileged to be publishing Elizabeth Kadestsky’s first nonfiction comics, which is accompanied by a Q&A with Juliana discussing how Kadetsky rediscovered visual, semi-textual modes of storytelling. Jane Babson’s “Lost and Re-Found” maps the terrain of memory alongside a meditation on her son’s Chromosome 7. In “Birth Story,” Kirsten Voris juxtaposes her birth with a disjunctive timeline of her mother’s life. Our last feature “For Sale: Death and Coyote Jaws,” by Laura Manardo, is poignant and powerful as she recounts the time her therapist advised her to do something that scared her.
“Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air” are the last lines to Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” and Columbia College Chicago alum Negesti Kaudo interviews Piper J. Daniels (also a CCC alum) on Ladies Lazarus, her award-winning collection of essays from Tarpaulin Sky. They discuss Daniels’ relationship to Plath and how her collection of essays, too, went through several rebirths — from suicide note to monograph to hybrid work.
If you come back on April 1, we’ll also be publishing two book reviews: Gretchen Lida reviews Randon Billings Noble’s Be with Me Always(University of Nebraska Press) and Kelsey Hoff covers The Collected Schizophrenias (Graywolf Press) by Esme Weijun Wang.
Another thing I love about celebrating the Persian New Year is that it conveys a certain looseness to time. Although it is 2019 in the Gregorian calendar, one can also follow the official calendar in Iran, the Solar Hijri, where it’s 1397 (that is, until March 21, 2019, when the year turns to 1398). Additionally, the new year is never fixed on one day, but rather, the new year changes because the first day of spring always changes. More specifically, the new year oscillates between the March 19-22 range. In this sense, time (or Time) is not an absolute; instead, it embodies and is embodied across a spectrum where one can shift through different modes and interpretations.
Genre, I believe, works similarly to time. Although the concept of “genre” can be used as a totalizing force, as yet another method to create, retain, and even reify the salience of categories, nonfiction reveals again and again that its variation cannot be contained.
In conjunction with our book reviews, interviews and blog posts, we want to work with our writers and readers to cultivate this endlessly growing field of nonfiction. We hope you join us.
In Idiophone, Amy Fusselman’s fourth book of nonfiction, performances of The Nutcracker morph into magicians performing magic tricks which transform into the performative acts of being a mother and being mothered. It’s a slim book comprised of one book-length essay and yet it’s jam-packed with research and poetry; analysis and anecdotes; memory, critique, queer theory, and motif. Fusselman’s previous books include Savage Park: A Meditation on Play, Space and Risk for Americans Who are Nervous, Distracted and Afraid to Die; The Pharmacist’s Mate; and 8.
Fusselman is currently touring and Idiophone can be purchased here. The interview was conducted by S. Ferdowsi via email and was edited for length and clarity.
Photo Credit: Frank Snider
Punctuate: An “idiophone” is defined as an instrument that is struck or shaken, such as a triangle or a cowbell. What attracted you to the idiophone—in particular the Slit Gong at the Met?
Amy Fusselman: The rhythmic, staccato sound of the piece immediately announced itself as a major factor, and the idiophone of the title, the artwork at the Met, came to mind as an instrument that would make that sound.
P: How would you describe the form? When was it born?
AF: It’s an essay, a poem-ish essay. It had a long gestation period. It’s hard for me to say when it was born because it was brewing for so long
P: The book uses a lot of these quick, quick phrases that play with repetition, but it’s also infused with tons of research especially on The Nutcracker. What did your research process entail?
AF: I have been thinking about The Nutcracker for years. It was a pretty organic process of following my interests and going down little rabbit holes of information. I was also very grateful to find Jennifer Fisher’s book Nutcracker Nation, which is a very engaging history of the ballet and which I highly recommend.
P: How did you balance the brevity of the form with all the exhaustive data about the ballet’s history? How did you keep track of all the threads?
AF: I didn’t try to tell the entire story of the ballet or to offer the essay as a piece of scholarship. A lot of it was discerning what was relevant to the piece. In terms of keeping track of the threads, I didn’t write the book by thinking it. I wrote it by letting go of thinking, and that was very freeing.
P: I love that! I find it’s really hard to turn off the compulsion to always be thinking while I’m writing. How were you able to let that go and access this freeing space? Did you have any rituals?
AF: I probably could have used some rituals. I didn’t have any except for the enthusiasm about the material as it was unfolding.
P: Was the revision process similar? Did you revise after writing?
AF: Yes, many revisions. But they were mostly micro revisions.
P: Along with The Nutcracker, the concepts and lived experiences of gender, sexuality, and queerness are also investigated, and your overall body of work also seems interested in exploring these themes as well. Do your ideas on gender, sexuality, and/or feminism change after each writing project? If so, how?
AF: I have a few subjects that are so far always interesting to me: creativity, womanhood, children, motherhood, art-making, process, consciousness and sex. Maybe there will come a time when I’m no longer interested in one or all of these but I’m not there yet.
P: Do you remember when you first became interested in gender and womanhood? For me, it was when I was in middle school and addicted to this Young Adult series about a young woman going to boarding school in Victorian England. It’s silly, but it was the first time I had opened my eyes to see how patriarchy operates.
AF: I don’t think that’s silly at all. And I’m struck that you were alone in that discovery. I would love to see parents take that on. Maybe we can reframe “The Talk” to mean the discussion you have with your children about the patriarchy. Although the patriarchy talk would surely have to come earlier than the sex talk. For myself, those interests are rooted in the childhood experience of being raped and then discovering later that my mother had also been raped.
P: This reminds me of your McSweeney’s piece “How to Make Rape Lemonade.” I was struck by how the essay’s dual modes of being light-hearted and tackling heavy subject matter really cracked open another way of dealing with trauma for me. Did the discovery of your mother’s experience alongside your own lead to this essay?
AF: That piece actually grew out of my trying to write a rape joke. I think the primary thing it does well is not dramatize rape, and not apologize for not dramatizing it. I think the drama can be a way of other-ing it, and I wanted to push back at that.
P: I like your take on the death of the Mouse King: “He is no longer dead, he is “dead,” and in this meta move, he reminds the audience that he is alive and that this is a performance. In the same vein, I feel that the queerness in your book serves as a reminder that heteronormativity is performative.
AF: Absolutely, yes. I was also interested to discover that Tchaikovsky himself may have been struggling with revealing his sexual identity. The Nutcracker as well as its sibling piece, the opera Iolanta, are so much about the longing to fully see and be seen.
P: Do you think the relationship between writer and reader operates in a similar way? Does a writer long to fully see and be seen?
AF: I think it depends on the type of writer. All humans feel the need to be mirrored and understood. But I find that a lot of writing operates, in a way, like advertising. It aims to get your attention and hold your attention and sell itself. I like a good ad as much as anyone but I want to make art that resists that as a mode of construction. I believe in the reader; I think the reader is brilliant. I want to give them more.
P: You mentioned art-making earlier and, in Idiophone, you included an interview with Annie-B Parson about the art of dance. Do you think there are parallels between writing and dancing?
AF: Certainly in this piece. Dance isn’t usually associated with writing because it’s nonverbal but I feel a lot of kinship with what dance is doing. And I loved Annie-B’s quote about dance’s relationship to “the word,” and how dance, as a province of women and of bodies, has been relegated to a lesser status in theater. I felt that had a connection with what I was thinking about in relation to writing as a handcraft, and to “women’s work.”
P: Motherhood is also a major topic in Idiophone and you include some really cool anecdotes with your children, like taking a boxing class together—do you tell them whenever they’ve made a cameo?
AF: I tell my kids about their appearances in any work before it’s published, and I do ask for their approval but it’s tricky because they aren’t old enough yet to really be capable of consent. My daughter and one of my sons—my sketches of them—appear briefly in Idiophone. My kids are aware of my renderings and they’re OK with them but we’ll see what happens. Parenting is a long game. Like writing is.
P: Can you elaborate on that?
AF: It’s hard to tell if something is going to be successful in the short term. That’s true for human beings and it’s true, I think, for art. It also depends on what your definition of “success” is. I think children are here to complicate matters for parents, not to make things easier. Children are here to challenge us and survive us. And I think good art—or at least the art I like—does that, too. And that type of art doesn’t always get a warm reception immediately.
P: I think we’re living in a broader cultural moment that is bogged down by information and misinformation. And as a result, media outlets and online sources tend to explain major ideas in simple terms, or in lists, or even as memes. But in your book, readers really have to do the work themselves of seeing the connections and seeing how their meanings emerge and evolve as the book progresses. I loved that. I found it really challenging but also delightful. Do you think your book can be considered as a resistance to our current information-heavy moment?
AF: I didn’t think of that but I like it. And I’m glad you found that aspect rewarding. I generally don’t like art that explains itself too much. I like it when I feel like a piece of art has just appeared like it’s from outer space: somehow it got here, and it’s a miracle, and you’re just standing there with your mouth open, like what the fuck. “What the fuck?!” is actually my favorite response to have to a work of art. I am always so grateful to the artist when I see a piece like that.
P: Finally, the book-length essay seems to be gaining more popularity. I’m thinking about Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony and God, and Etel Adnan’s Paris, When It’s Naked. These books are all written by authors who identify as women; do you think there is something there that connects women to book-length essays in particular or it’s just a coincidence?
AF: That’s an interesting observation. I think women, already operating at a disadvantage, have less to lose by trying new forms, whereas men have to think about the 300-page-novel father. And killing him.
S. Ferdowsi is Punctuate‘s reviews editor. She is also a contributor to New City and Rumpus.
The Chicago Writers’ Association Book of the Year for 2018 was awarded to Nadine Kenney Johnstone for her book Of This Much I’m Sure. In this memoir, Kenney Johnstone reflects on her Chicago upbringing, the first years of her marriage, and the challenges she faced while undergoing in-vitro fertilization (IVF). Her other work has been featured in The Moth, PANK, The Magic of Memoir, among others.
Kenney Johnstone earned her MFA from Columbia College Chicago and currently teaches at Loyola University. She also serves as a writing coach and can be emailed at nkenneyjohnstone@gmail.com for more information.
The interview was conducted with Sadaf Ferdowsi for the one-year anniversary of the memoir’s publication. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Punctuate: When was the moment you decided your first book would be a memoir recounting your experiences undergoing in-vitro fertilization (IVF)?
Nadine Kenney Johnstone: Back in 2012, I went to a writing retreat in Guatemala, and the instructor encouraged me to write about my nine frozen embryos. This inspired my essay “Nine Babies on Ice,” which got published in the parenting issue of PANK that year. Writing it felt so scary and freeing that I knew I had a lot more to say on the topic.
Punctuate: While it is very much about the journey of pregnancy and birth, Of This Much I’m Sure is also driven by the relationships between you and your mother, you and your sister, and you and your husband. What challenges existed to incorporate these (sometimes-complicated) relationships into your narrative and how did you overcome them?
Kenney Johnstone: When I started writing about our journey to conceive, I realized that it affected all of my important relationships. I also realized that when I moved to Massachusetts to be with Jamie, I neglected the people who were most important to me back in Chicago. I had to write about it all because it was so intertwined. And in order to do that, I had to write like no one would ever read the manuscript, otherwise, I’d have censored myself based on what I thought everyone’s responses would be.
Secondly, I thought of this as the opportunity to really expose all of the roles I had played in the demolition and rebuilding of the most important relationships in my life. Any time I wrote about a tension I had with someone, I asked myself how I had contributed to it, and that helped me write what I hope is a fair depiction of those experiences. My mom, sister, and husband all read the final manuscript before it was published and we had some really deep, connecting conversations about the struggles we had been through. Continue Reading
In Sick, Porochista Khakpour explores the entanglements of immigration and illness, addiction and ability, in a memoir that spans her early childhood to the near present. Only a toddler when she immigrated from Iran with her parents amidst the Iran-Iraq War, she settled in California before moving to New York, New Mexico, Illinois, and Germany during her adulthood; Khakpour’s first book of nonfiction covers expansive terrain in terms of physical landscape, but also turns inward as she recounts how she navigated and suffered (or, rather, navigates and suffers, in the present tense) from a wide spectrum of symptoms, health conditions and healthcare politics until, after years of misdiagnoses, she tested positive for late-stage Lyme disease. In prose that’s wrapped close to the body, Khakpour describes this complicated disease—how it is spread through tick bites and how it affects each individual differently, thereby making it difficult to research and treat—and vividly illustrates how it impacted her relationships with her parents, friends, partners and writing projects
