Congratulations on winning the Grand Prize for our Creative Nonfiction contest! Can you please tell us a little bit about the process of writing the piece? How long ago did you start writing it? Did the piece require many drafts before it was finished or did it come to you quickly?
I began writing Fetters in January 2009. I’m the kind of writer who writes very slowly, usually one or two paragraphs every four or five hours. I edit as I go along. I need to have the words close to perfect before I can move on. In the past, I’ve tried “free-writing”—but this approach just doesn’t work for me. I don’t see writing and editing as two completely separate functions. For me, the words as you lay them down, do as much to create the story as the memories and details you’re trying to capture. When I finished writing the piece, I went over it again and again, pruning and weeding and transplanting, but most of this was minor.
Were there any technical difficulties you encountered as you wrote the piece?
Yes, there were some technical difficulties… there always are. I find often, with non-fiction essays, the difficulties exist in attempting to cut a small chunk out of a much larger story. The difficulties usually revolve around what details to leave out. In this piece, I exclude many details about my own family. It’s hard to do… it’s difficult to untangle the roots of one story from another.
Were there any discoveries that you made as you wrote the piece?
Yes. There are always discoveries too. In fact, it’s safe to say that I write because of the discoveries. In this piece, one of my discoveries was just what low self-esteem I had when I was 14 years old…also, I guess that this isn’t just a phenomenon that affected me… I think this is rather a collective thing for young women to experience who have internalized the cultural message that they’re nothing without a male to possess them. I didn’t realize that I’d ever internalized that message, but this story showed me that, at some point, I actually had.
It must have been quite an experience to revisit your adolescence in this intimate story. Can you please comment on that process?
I often revisit my childhood and teen-age years in my non-fiction because there’s still so much about those years that I need to get a different perspective on. When I write about something painful as truthfully as I possibly can, I find that shifts occur in my perception that allow me greater possibilities of experience and a wider range of emotional response. While writers don’t like to dwell on the fact that writing is therapeutic, there’s no doubt that it is—it can do exactly the same kinds of things that good therapy can do. For the writer, of course, there’s the added bonus that the kind of psychological evolution it promotes actually allows for a deeper emotional engagement with one’s material. This, in turn, offers the reader an opportunity to reach those very deep places as well.
Was it a difficult or easy piece to write?
Pretty well everything I write I would say is difficult. In non-fiction, there’s always a struggle to be honest—and by honest, I mean to honour the fact that the way you’ve come to see a particular event isn’t the only truth of that event. You need to be really clean about your biases, and really alert to those moments when your biases want to start shaping the piece. If you let your biases and opinions shape a piece, generally you’ll end up with something very narrow that won’t give you or your readers a chance to glean any new insight or advance consciousness in any way.
What effect did the span of time between the events and writing about the events have on the story?
Time tends to allow more of a capacity for objectivity, I think. The emotional inflammation has subsided and you can look at the wound with an artist’s dispassionate gaze.
What was it that compelled you to explore this story at this particular period of your life?
I’ve been writing a series of essays for a memoir collection. As I’m convinced I’m writing the last in the collection, inevitably, another memory emerges that I know needs to be brought into the book. That’s what happened here. The essays I had been writing beforehand were specifically investigating my father, trying to understand the sort of person he’d been, the kind of relationship we shared, and how his death impacted me. I don’t think any essay in the collection says more about the impact of his death than this one.
Had you tried to write the story before at any point in your writing career?
Yes. I tried to write it about 10 years ago, but from a different angle. I wasn’t able to do it. I gave up. I put it into my “too hot to touch right now” box. That said, now that I’ve written the story completely once, I believe I’ll probably be able to write it again and again from a variety of different angles. Eventually, the energy for it will dissipate; by then I might be able to touch some other event—maybe something cooling right now that occurred in my 20s or early 30s.
Creative non-fiction seems to be growing in popularity with young writers who feel that it is a genre that still has lots of room to grow and experiment. Can you comment generally on the state of creative non-fiction as a genre?
I think Creative non-fiction is a wonderfully malleable genre. There are all sorts of literary techniques you can apply to facts…and by applying particular techniques, you actually change the story. It’s fascinating, and in this post-modern age, when we’re really questioning these old Enlightenment notions of intellectual objectivity leading to some sort of single reified truth, Creative non-fiction is that mischievous, Hermes-like, literary genre that tosses it all on its head. We’re left with having to approach truth in a different, more holistic way—perhaps in a way more realistic for our time—in a way that, as the physicist David Bohm has pointed out, isn’t absolute or static but is functional and evolving.
Have you noticed any innovations/evolutions of the genre in recent years?
I’ve recently read “Renovating Heaven,” by Andreas Schroeder, which although it’s called “a novel in triptych” seems to be extending the Creative non-fiction genre directly (not only by literary technique) into fiction. I was struck by the great emotional range of this work that emerges in the autobiographical and factual content as well as the technical brilliance of the story telling. I’ve also recently read “The Midnight Disease,” by Alice Flaherty. She’s a neurologist who, after the death of her twin sons, developed hypergraphia (a compulsion to write). In this very interesting work, she intertwines her scientific research with autobiography to discuss the drive to write and writer’s block. I really enjoy these kinds of works that naturally seep over genre boundaries.
Who are some Creative Nonfiction writers that you have admired of late and why?
Besides the two I‘ve already mentioned, I’m also a fan of M.A.C. Farrant, who’s an incredibly perceptive and witty writer. I’m reading Patrick Lane’s “There is a Season” right now and am blown away by his honesty. Susan Olding’s “Pathologies” is an exceptional memoir collection that ingeniously plays with form and is bold in content. Alice Sebold’s memoir, “Lucky,” which deals with her experience of being raped and then trying to bring the rapist to justice, is the kind of work that takes you out of your comfort zone and really makes you contemplate the inevitability of violence and the failure of North American justice systems. Jung Chang’s autobiography/biography “Wild Swans” is amazing in its ability to show the macrocosm in the microcosm. She paints an entire social history of China by presenting the lives of her grandmother, her mother, and herself. I also really admire nonfiction stylists like Annie Dillard and Barbara Kingsolver.
Fetters is part of a larger collection. Would you like to tell us about your new book?
Yes. “Fetters” is one of the pieces that will be included in my memoir collection which currently has the working title A Soul Made Up of Wants. This collection deals with my young life, from conception to age 16. I was conceived in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on The Queen Mary, and I actually begin the work with an essay on how I imagine this voyage. By self-consciously imagining, when I don’t have (and can’t get) the facts, I move close to fiction, but because there’s always a “what if…” attached, I’m able to sidestep that genre quicksand and use this technique to open up a breadth of possibilities and perspectives.
Another technique that I’ve used throughout the collection is one of setting specific and detailed historical facts next to autobiographical reminiscence… in a way, locating my young self and the stories of my youth within a historical context that, as a child, I was mostly oblivious to. Other characters in the work are, of course, oblivious to the future. The emotional effect is quite interesting—and in many ways mimics the experience I had when I first began researching newspaper articles from the 1920s for an essay about my immigrant grandparents. When you look at these old papers and read stories about Charles Lindbergh, for example, who was receiving a lot of press then, and whose life seemed completely charmed, you know that no one reading these papers at the time could ever have imagined the tragedies that would befall him. No one could have imagined there would be a Second World War, either. There’s a kind of personal innocence, a kind of blindness and vulnerability that comes through that’s very sobering. It strikes right at the heart of our most cherished assumptions about our ability to control our environments and destinies. External things happen that we could never anticipate… and, in many instances, these things occur without our knowledge… yet they shape our lives and our world in the most profound ways.
Madeline Sonik is the winner of PRISM’s 2010 Literary Nonfiction Contest. Outgoing Fiction Editor Rachel Knudson interviewed her about her winning piece, “Fetters,” and her memoir collection, A Soul Made Up of Wants.