The Challenge of the Neat Box

An Interview with Morgan Parker

#1000wordsofsummer starts on June 1.

Register for the NYPL launch event on June 1 at Hudson Park Library (also via zoom) here.

In New Orleans, we’ll be doing a write-along on June 8. Details to come.

Have you gotten your copy of the book yet?

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Hi friends.

Next week, we bury ourselves deep in #1000wordsofsummer prep. Which I find sort of entertaining? Like I just bought a bunch of new notebooks in bulk because I got influenced by Rachel Khong’s Strategist interview. If anyone I see on a regular basis needs one, hit me up.

But before that I wanted to share a quick interview I did with my pal/1000 Words contributor Morgan Parker. Morgan is one of our great American poets, and the author of several books of poetry, including There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Morgan is also a wonderful young adult novelist (Who Put This Song On?) and a revolutionary essayist. So basically this lady can write anything.

She has a new collection of essays out which I loved madly and of which Saeed Jones said, “In You Get What You Pay For, Morgan Parker interrogates the project of self-making while illuminating all the forces at work trying to warp reality and mangle the self. This is the kind of book that saves lives.” I highly recommend it. I had some questions for her about the writing of this special book, and she generously answered them.

What kind of boundaries—if any—did you establish for yourself while working on this project? Do they differ from the ones you use when writing poetry or fiction or anything else you might work on? How do you create the sense of safety you need in order to make your art?

At first, I didn't. That came from the poet in me. It's important for me to start a project with openness toward what I'll discover in the writing process. I like to start with a question, rather than an answer. And I wanted this book of essays to be a gift to myself—the gift of unlimited word count and infinite research, a place where, unlike essay assignments from media outlets, I could follow every thread to its light bulb.

But over time (and I'm pretty sure I texted you about this more than once), I had to learn to reel myself in. Focus on shaping what I already had. Finally get around to saying what I'd been trying to say. Which turned out to be pretty devastating stuff, so the writing process really became about personal boundaries. Which, duh—you can't spend 3 hours of a random Wednesday afternoon watching dashcam footage of police shooting unarmed Black people, for example, without deciding to spend Thursday thrifting, or have movie Fridays, or not write again until Tuesday. I had to realize it wasn't healthy to work on this project every day, and I had to remind myself that taking breaks not only made me better; it also made the writing better, clearer, and more effective.

How much do you rely on having first readers for this particular project? And did you feel an obligation to share this with anyone in your life for their approval? I was interested in the essays in particular because the material was so personal and there's something about writing in prose that I think makes things feel so permanent and real in a specific kind of way. (Is poetry more slippery? Perhaps.) 

This one was hard to get early feedback on, because my writing process felt so unfamiliar and disheveled. I delayed sending it to my editor, even. Maybe that was a boundary. Most documents languished in the "notes" stage forever before becoming share-able drafts. Maybe that was a boundary, too. A way of making sure my thoughts were good and collected before putting them down, giving them up to the public for petty nitpicking. Because yeah, although I wasn't really saying anything I haven't said in my work before, or being any more vulnerable than usual in terms of content, there's something about that nonfiction "I" that feels really naked.

Mostly, I was worried about passive readers disagreeing with my more political assertions, so I tried to put my ideas in conversation with other thinkers. And I tried to re-ground the work in my particular perspective.  Anyway, I didn't get any approval on anything. I did warn a few people about their appearances. It actually led to some cool conversations. 

I remember when I started writing my memoir I was like, “Oh I've written a ton of essays and been extremely online for a long time. I got this. I can totally tell the story of my life, no problem.” But I ended up feeling challenged in figuring out how to make all these shorter stories into A Book. I also tussled with my desire to pack a story into a neat box, chapter by chapter, when real life is messier than just a simple beginning, middle and end. What did you find most challenging about committing fully to this genre and in writing the entire book?

Well, I think from the beginning I was ambitious (though, as implied above, unspecific) about what I wanted the book to be, how I wanted it to straddle genre and topic and tone. I never wanted to write a straight memoir here, but I also didn't want it to simply be a collection of disparate essays I'd published online. I wanted it to be essays rather than chapters, but I wanted the essays to have an arc, running themes. I did want it to be the story of my life, but insomuch as it's a story of all of our lives. And I wanted both macro and micro to be legible, pointed, and vivid.

The challenge for me, as it was with my novel, was that neat box. Our writer brains are opposite this way—mine is often so attuned to the messy that it's hard to see the contours of a story. I sometimes struggle to grasp the logistics of beginning, middle, and end; even once I know the "spirit" of a book, its emotional arc. With this one, I found I kept coming back to the idea of the essay as argument—both as something to push against and something to lean into. 

A good takeaway from this chat: as we approach the summer project, I remind us to welcome the messiness. Revel in the experiment, the playfulness, the hands-getting-dirty process of it all. The neat box usually shows up eventually in one way or another. Enjoy the messy journey to get there.

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on twitter and instagram.