Siberian Exile Wins Vine Award in Nonfiction

“Julija Šukys’s Siberian Exile is heroic.” — Jury, Vine Award for Nonfiction

Today, I was thrilled to accept the Vine Award in Canadian Jewish Literature for the category of Nonfiction. Thank you to the jury and to the donors and to Diana for being my date at the luncheon. What’s more, the award comes with a generous monetary prize, which I will put to good use. Photos include pics of my speech, the program, the lovely crystal plaque, two of three jury members announcing the winners, and a photo with jurors and a fellow winner in the History category.

Julija Šukys, accepting the Vine Award in Nonfiction. October 11, 2018. Windsor Arms Hotel, Toronto.
Jury members Joseph Kertes and Beverly Chalmers announcing the winners of the Vine Awards. Oct. 11, 2018. Windsor Arms Hotel, Toronto.
The award plaque. Vine Awards.
Jury members Chalmers and Kertes with History winner, Hugues Théoret and Nonfiction winner, Julija Šukys. Oct. 11, 2018. Windsor Arms Hotel, Toronto.
The Program. Vine Awards, 2018.
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On Packing for a Year-Long Academic Sabbatical

A few weeks ago, when I started packing in earnest for our family’s year at the Institute for Advanced Study, I couldn’t find an academic sabbatical packing list (for either women or men). All I found were tips for short-term trips (like a month) or nomadic year-long family trips across warm continents. So this is my (somewhat feminine, at least in terms of the clothing list) effort. Such lists remove a whole piece of mental work, and goodness knows, there’s enough to think about!

If you have the good fortune of a year away from your usual life, then CONGRATULATIONS. I hope this helps.

Happy research. Happy writing. Happy packing.

Sabbatical Prep: Basic Tips and Principles

Stowing stuff before you leave

  1. Order one or a couple of those inexpensive clothes storage closets (with cover) for items you leave behind. It’s easier for both packing & unpacking and clothes don’t get mangled. Especially good for monstrous Midwestern houses with big, dry storage rooms.
  2. In the event that you don’t have a ginormous storage room and need to store things offsite, those pod containers that come to your house and then get carted away for the year also work beautifully. We used a pod when we went away to Malta for a year and rented out our Montreal house. We had to empty our library completely for the tenants, plus clear closets and drawers. In that case, I rolled the cost of storage into rent.
  3. Take the opportunity to reduce your clutter. Donate or freecycle any clothes you’ve (ahem) outgrown or just don’t wear. Cut up old t-shirts for rags. Take part in your neighborhood’s garage sale and share the proceeds with your kid when he sells old toys. Donate the leftover toys. Honestly, there is nothing like leaving your house for a year to make you take a good hard look at the excesses of North American life…

What to take and how to pack and transport it: first, the broad strokes

  1. When choosing which clothes to bring, I found that an organic solution emerged: a unified color scheme made my decisions easier. In the end, I packed mostly blue and black garments. This means everything will go with everything. Also, there’s less to think about when you’re dealing with reduced clothing options because you have better things to do…like write a book.
  2. Two words: COMPRESSION SACS. They even work on boots rated to -30C that I managed to mush down to a fraction of their usual size! The sacs allowed me to pack our warm jackets, ski pants, gloves, hats, and neck warmers  into a very small space. And since we have our winter essentials, we’ll be able both to ski and walk our dog in the snow comfortably. WHERE TO GET COMPRESSION SACS? I bought some inexpensive sacs online. They are just rectangular plastic envelopes with a ziplock top and one-way valves at the bottom so you can squeeze the air out. You don’t need the hardcore camping ones; just the travel kind.
  3. Related to #2: resist the temptation to “just buy new ones” of everything. Good quality clothes are expensive, and it’s worth bringing staples that will protect you against the elements, like rain gear, waterproof footwear, warm hats, winter coats, gloves. I’ve learned my lesson, having wandered around with wet feet on one too many trips.
  4. Related to #3: it’s equally important to resist the impulse to TAKE everything. Living with less is also a pleasure.
  5. I suggest deciding on how many bags you plan to take and allowing that to determine what you can bring. We took 3 large suitcases, 3 carry-ons + work papers for 2 adults and one kid. Consider sending suitcases by UPS Ground, especially if you’re driving to your sabbatical destination, as we did. UPS shipping was surprisingly affordable and send bulky stuff ahead left room in the car for cat, dog, child, and cooler. You can also ship any musical instruments. We shipped a guitar and saxophone.
  6. Be sure to pack a blue-tooth speaker. You can stream radio and music from phones and laptops and get high quality sound. I packed this almost as an afterthought, but it’s already proven to be essential.
  7. Earphones and earbuds. Enough for all family members to share.
  8. Playing cards. We’ve been playing Gin as a family since we left home.
  9. If you’ve got ’em, then take some Turkish towels. These are compact and work at the pool or beach. They also double as travel blankets on cold airplanes. Plus, towels can be in short supply in rentals. I also tucked 3 dish towels into the car before leaving and I’m glad I did, since we arrived to find none in our new apartment!
  10. Be kind to the kid. Remember that his treasures matter too. Find room in the car for 2000+ Magic the Gathering cards, if need be. The kid barely has any clothes anyway, because he outgrows them so fast. Everyone needs to be allowed something special.

What I Brought: Here’s Where We Get Specific

Work

  • research materials: photocopies from archives, notebooks, a few books
  • a “working copy” of my book for readings
  • draft of an essay-in-progress (hard copy that I didn’t have time to transcribe)
  • laptop
  • phone
  • charging cords
  • wire book holder for desk
  • book light for bedtime reading
  • pens & pencils
  • wrist brace to treat/prevent carpel tunnel syndrome
  • business/book cards
  • pens
  • computer sleeve
  • camera (for work & play…)
  • backpack for conference travel
  • reading glasses

Essential documents

  • passports
  • immunization records (you can’t register your kid in school without them)
  • your child’s last report card (also needed for school registration)
  • birth certificates
  • directions & welcome packet for the new place
  • health insurance cards
  • checks
  • …plus whatever’s in your wallet (make sure your driver’s license won’t expire while you’re on sabbatical, and far away from home)

Kitchen & food

  • pack your road-trip food in your usual tupperware or food storage containers (we brought 4 or 5 in our cooler and I’ll use these for packing my son’s school lunches)
  • thermoses that double as water bottles (also for use during the long road trip)
  • a cooler, ’cause that road food will kill you
  • picnic plates and cutlery
  • dish towels
  • lunch box for the kid (we have a soft one which makes packing easy)
  • fabric shopping totes (we used these to pack shoes, pet stuff, toiletries into the car and now use them shopping)
  • a couple laundry balls
  • laundry bags for washing delicates
  • two large laundry bags for storing dirty clothes and transport to laundry room (across the street)

Pet stuff

  • leashes
  • cat carrier
  • flea & tick meds
  • Prozac for the problematic canine
  • poo bags
  • food bowls
  • a couple toys for the pup; a couple of small balls to chase for kitty
  • pet food (enough for the trip and a few days upon arrival)
  • any skin care meds that the problematic canine might need
  • brushes & shampoo for grooming
  • litter box & scoop, double-bagged for travel
  • “kitty quilts” (made by my husband’s aunt; yes, the cat actually sleeps on them…)
  • immunization record for cross-border travel with dog

Things to do before you leave home

  • set up online billing and bill payment
  • change addresses with the bank, HR, magazine subscriptions, your mother’s nursing home, etc.
  • get your mail forwarded to the new address
  • talk to your home insurance company if you’ll have a tenant or house-sitter and make sure you’re covered under these circumstances
  • suspend or reduce insurance on any vehicles you might be leaving behind
  • change your voicemail message if you’re like us and still live as if it’s 1995
  • hire someone to mow the lawn if you don’t want to ask the house-sitter or tenant to do so
  • write up a set of emergency instructions with contacts for your house-sitter, i.e., what to do if a tree falls or the roof gets blown off
  • register your kid in his new school
  • go see the doctor and dentist and get up to date on tests and cleanings; NB: your kid will need a health form signed by the doctor to register for school
  • put an auto-reply on your email accounts to buy some extra space and time for the book you’re writing

Clothes, etc. *

  • 2 jersey dresses (one black, one blue)
  • 6 long-sleeved jersey shirts (in varying shades of black, purple, teal & blue)
  • 6 short-sleeved jersey shirts (ditto)
  • 1 tunic (blue)
  • 1 long cardigan (black, of course)
  • 4 work-type jackets (in blue and black, of course) that can be dressed up or down, of different weights and styles (this may be excessive, but I allowed myself this folly since I love to layer and a jacket makes me feel immediately polished)
  • 2 winter/fall sweaters (one dove grey one in merino; one navy in cashmere)
  • 1 spring cardigan (black)
  • 1 spring pullover sweater (a departure: red and white stripes!)
  • 1 fleece jacket (grey)
  • 1 stretchy athletic jacket (teal)
  • 1 down jacket (turquoise for variation)
  • 1 medium-weight fall/winter coat (black); with the down jacket underneath, it should see me through the snowy season
  • 1 rain/ski shell (grey)
  • shoes: tall leather boots (no heel), leather ankle boots (slight heel), comfy walking boots, warm winter boots, sneakers, sandals, ankle-height rain boots (good for muddy hikes as well as rainy days)
  • 2 pairs of jeans (blue)
  • 1 pair wide-legged cotton pants that go across seasons (black)
  • 2 winter/fall skirts (one in a dark, very cool denim with distressed edge; one navy pencil skirt)
  • 3 summer skirts (2 navy and one crazy mint green one for fun, in a fabric printed with images of food trucks)
  • 2 light-weight summer pants (airy light blue ones and a pair of beaten up khaki hiking cropped ones)
  • 3 pairs cotton pajamas
  • light-weight dressing gown (silk; it folds down to nothing)
  • 3 pairs of tights (black & grey)
  • black beret & gloves
  • sun hat & sunglasses
  • 2 belts
  • 3 pairs of earrings; 3 necklaces
  • bras & underwear & socks
  • umbrella
  • 5 colorful scarves of varying weights (if you’re packing mostly grey, blue & black, then you need some color somewhere!)
  • 1 leather purse (teal blue), tote-style to carry all the things…
  • athletic gear: yoga pants, yoga mat, running shorts & shirts, runners, running hat, socks, sports bra, sports socks, ski googles, ski pants, ski socks, neck warmers, long johns
  • 2 bathing suits & goggles
  • toiletries (you know what you need…)

*Written out like this, it’s a lot…I admit. But I tried to pack comfortably for 4 seasons, for skiing, yoga, running, hiking & swimming, for conferences & book festivals, for long days in the library, dog walking, cocktail receptions, holidays and parties…

POST-SABBATICAL UPDATE. Or, The Verdict.

The year is now up so I can share how I did with what I brought…

Things I’m glad I packed: #1 Ankle-height rubber boots. I wore these in every season. They were invaluable for the rainy, muddy woods at the IAS. #2 Yoga mat. I did yoga once a week and it made me feel so much better after long writing days. #3 Umbrellas for the whole family and rain gear in general. Invaluable. #4 Ski gear. We went skiing over our son’s holidays and it was totally worth bringing, even for one week of fun.

Things I could have done without: #1 I only needed 1 bathing suit but brought 3!  #2 I didn’t need the super warm winter boots. Lighter boots would’ve been far more useful. #3 I brought 2 dresses but, to be honest, I really only needed one.

Things I wish I’d brought: #1 Linens in general, since the apartment was short on sheets. I would have loved to have brought a comforter or soft blanket (or 2), more towels, and dish towels. #2 Espresso pot or machine. This one was tough. We made do with a drip coffee maker and then broke down and bought a moka pot. #3 Slow cooker. My neighbour brought hers and I was super jealous. #4 Bike rack and bikes for the whole family. We made do in various ways but bringing would’ve have been better.

Best packing list ever? Joan Didion’s.

TO PACK AND WEAR:
2 skirts
2 jerseys or leotards
1 pullover sweater
2 pair shoes
stockings
bra
nightgown, robe, slippers
cigarettes
bourbon
bag with: shampoo
toothbrush and paste
Basis soap, razor
deodorant
aspirin
prescriptions
Tampax
face cream
powder
baby oil

TO CARRY:
mohair throw
typewriter
2 legal pads and pens
files
house key

“This is a list which was taped inside my closet door in Hollywood during those years when I was reporting more or less steadily. The list enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do. Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard, and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture. Notice the mohair throw for trunk-line flights (i.e. no blankets) and for the motel room in which the air conditioning could not be turned off. Notice the bourbon for the same motel room. Notice the typewriter for the airport, coming home: the idea was to turn in the Hertz car, check in, find an empty bench, and start typing the day’s notes.”

—Joan Didion, “The White Album”

[Photo: Thomas Hawk]

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Audio Interview: The Missouri Review

Not too long ago, I had a great conversation with the Missouri Review! Thanks to Sarah Beard for sitting down to talk with me. In “UNBOUND Book Festival Interview: Julija Šukys,” we talk about my book, Siberian Exile, research, digging into family history, archives, and much more. Come have a listen.

[Image: The Missouri Review]

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Siberian Exile Wins 2018 AABS Book Prize

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Teaching in the Archives: Women Writing Lives

Last summer, I spent a few weeks in the State Historical Society of Missouri developing an assignment for a new course called Women Writing Lives. I envisioned brining students into the archives and wanted them to get a sense of how enthralling archival work could be. It was more successful than I ever could have predicted, so I wrote a short piece about it for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Here it is. 

[Photo: Texas State Library and Archives Commission]

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Review Essay: Siberian Exile in Fourth Genre

Thank you to Ned Stuckey-French for his appraisal not only of Siberian Exile (2017) but also of Epistolophilia (2012), and my work in general. His review essay, called “A Mind Thinking” (Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Spring 2018, p. 209-220) concludes like this:

As I was reading Siberian Exile, I began to think about what its predecessor [Epistolophilia] mean to the field of creative nonfiction. We talk often about the essay renaissance that has flowered in the United States since the 1980s. What Julija Šukys’s work reminds me is that this renaissance is, has been, and can be global in its reach. A Canadian who now writes and teaches in the United States but who was born into a family that was cast into the Lithuanian diaspora, Šukys is especially equipped to take the North American essay out into the world, and vice versa. The range of her work is stunning. It stretches across three continents, thousands of miles of travel, scores of interviews in multiple languages, and decades of history — extending from World War II through the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union to the present — but she also stops and looks at moments, boring deep into an exchange on a train or the night of a massacre. Her work is horizontal and vertical. It is historical and personal. She reveals the history of the last century through the lives of individuals, often as they faced the most dramatic moments of their lives, and she tells us the story of her own mind thinking about the history, the moments, and the people she has encountered.

You can also check out Curtis Woodstock’s review of a recent Siberian Exile event here. He calls Siberian Exile “wonderfully written, emotional, and real.”

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Canadian Jewish News Review: Siberian Exile

Thanks to the Canadian Jewish News and Ania Bessonov for this careful reading of my new book, Siberian Exile.

You can read the review here. 

You can buy the book at a 30% discount using this flyer: SukysFlyerSiberianExile

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Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning

NOW AVAILABLE!

“Interweaving coincidences and reversals with historical precision in a narrative that layers, folds, zags and spikes, Julija Šukys wanders the ghost-filled streets of the present, mingling with kin, real and imagined, and corresponding with multiple unspeakable pasts. I can’t recall the last time I read so gripping and so delicate a documentary of atrocity, complicity, dispossession and survival. Siberian Exile is remarkable, daunting, and disarmingly real.” — Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack

“All families harbor secrets. What if, in blithe innocence, you set out to research your family history, only to discover that your grandfather was guilty of the most heinous of crimes? Šukys pursues her tragic family memoir with courage and self-examination, often propelled to her painful discoveries by what she believes is a bizarre synchronicity. This is not a book written at a safe distance.”—Rosemary Sullivan, author of Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“Riveting. . . . Beyond the historical and familial narrative, Julija Šukys ponders her own exile and her own complicity, allowing readers to do the same, comparing versions of selves and asking which version is truest, an impossible question, but one readers will find as enthralling as these pages.”—Patrick Madden, author of Sublime Physick and Quotidiana

BUY Siberian Exile at the University of Nebraska Press. 

BUY Siberian Exile at IndieBound. 

BUY Siberian Exile at Amazon. 

About the Book

When Julija Šukys was a child, her paternal grandfather, Anthony, rarely smiled, and her grandmother, Ona, spoke only in her native Lithuanian. But they still taught Šukys her family’s story: that of a proud people forced from their homeland when the soldiers came. In mid-June 1941, three Red Army soldiers arrested Ona, forced her onto a cattle car, and sent her east to Siberia, where she spent seventeen years separated from her children and husband, working on a collective farm. The family story maintained that it was all a mistake. Anthony, whose name was on Stalin’s list of enemies of the people, was accused of being a known and decorated anti-Bolshevik and Lithuanian nationalist.

Some seventy years after these events, Šukys sat down to write about her grandparents and their survival of a twenty-five-year forced separation and subsequent reunion. Piecing the story together from letters, oral histories, audio recordings, and KGB documents, her research soon revealed a Holocaust-era secret—a family connection to the killing of seven hundred Jews in a small Lithuanian border town. According to KGB documents, the man in charge when those massacres took place was Anthony, Ona’s husband.

In Siberian Exile Šukys weaves together the two narratives: the story of Ona, noble exile and innocent victim, and that of Anthony, accused war criminal. She examines the stories that communities tell themselves and considers what happens when the stories we’ve been told all our lives suddenly and irrevocably change, and how forgiveness or grace operate across generations and across the barriers of life and death.

BUY Siberian Exile at the University of Nebraska Press. 

BUY Siberian Exile at IndieBound. 

BUY Siberian Exile at Amazon. 

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CNF Conversations: An Interview with Mary Cappello

author-mary-cappello

Mary Cappello, Life Breaks In (A Mood Almanack). University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Mary Cappello is the author of five books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour (a Los Angeles Times bestseller); Swallow, based on the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection in Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum; and, most recently, Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon.com, The Huffington Post, on NPR, in guest author blogs for Powells Books, and on six separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, a recipient of The Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination, and the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, Cappello is a former Fulbright Lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow), and currently Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island.

About Life Breaks In:  Some books start at point A, take you by the hand, and carefully walk you to point B, and on and on.

This is not one of those books. This book is about mood, and how it works in and with us as complicated, imperfectly self-knowing beings existing in a world that impinges and infringes on us, but also regularly suffuses us with beauty and joy and wonder. You don’t write that book as a linear progression — you write it as a living, breathing, richly associative, and, crucially, active, investigation. Or at least you do if you’re as smart and inventive as Mary Cappello.

What is a mood? How do we think about and understand and describe moods and their endless shadings? What do they do to and for us, and how can we actively generate or alter them? These are all questions Cappello takes up as she explores mood in all its manifestations: we travel with her from the childhood tables of “arts and crafts” to mood rooms and reading rooms, forgotten natural history museums and 3-D View-Master fairytale tableaux; from the shifting palette of clouds and weather to the music that defines us and the voices that carry us. The result is a book as brilliantly unclassifiable as mood itself, blue and green and bright and beautiful, funny and sympathetic, as powerfully investigative as it is richly contemplative.

“I’m one of those people who mistrusts a really good mood,” Cappello writes early on. If that made you nod in recognition, well, maybe you’re one of Mary Cappello’s people; you owe it to yourself to crack Life Breaks In and see for sure.

“Are we sometimes not astonished by the beautiful futility of encountering some sudden fugitive moment that renders us so vulnerable to ‘unanticipated forms’: of perhaps an inner light or an inner dark? Here, with Mary Cappello’s ravishing prose, lies a vibrating scalpel that intricately parts the belly of little swirling vertigos that we have no name for but know so deeply.”
— The Brothers Quay

life-breaks-in-mary-cappello-300x450 

“Mood is alpha and omega, it is everything and nothing” – Mary Cappello, Life Breaks In

Julija Šukys: Mary, first of all, congratulations on your book. Life Breaks In is learned, rigorous, and, at times, intimate and devastating. On the one hand, the text is incredibly wide-ranging: you take the reader through subjects as varied as Joni Mitchell’s music, mood rings, your father’s darkness, your friend’s death from cancer, taxidermy, and the weird queer history of children’s books. But on the other hand, your book is impressively focused and disciplined as it continually loops back to thinking about mood as sound, as space, as reading, as color. It does so in an almost oblique way and manages to look closely at something that is otherwise almost invisible.

You have written that the challenge of the book was “not to chase mood, track it, or pin it down: neither to explain nor define mood – but to notice it – often enough, to listen for it – and do something like it without killing it in the process” (15). It seems like mood is something that you can only see through the prism of something else, like those ghosts in children’s cartoons that become visible in the dust beaten out of a chalkboard brush. Can you say a little bit about how you came to your subject? And can you talk a bit about the title, Life Breaks In, and the role that rupture plays in a meditation on mood?

Mary Cappello: This question of how we come to our subjects is perpetually intriguing to me. Some subjects for me have been urgent givens (for example, cancer); others, I’ve arrived at through intricately circuitous routes even though, once there, they greeted me with a kind of “ah-ha” or “but-of-course” feeling (e.g., awkwardness); still others were the result of an accidental encounter, what Barthes might call a “lucky find,” almost like a punctum in photography (e.g., the Chevalier Jackson foreign body collection). Mood happened for me in yet another way—in its own way—and it was as though it was always hovering. The subject has played around the edges of my consciousness for many years, and, by the time I brought the book to completion, it felt as though it was the work toward which all of my work had been tending.

Sometimes I’ll be reading a book I’ve read a thousand times, and I’ll find marginalia that I wrote in it dating back twenty years relative to mood. I guess I’m trying to say that mood felt to me like the thing I’ve been writing about all along but that had never announced itself as such—which makes me wonder if this is a sort of experience relevant to all writers. Unlike my other ostensible “subjects,” mood seemed to be following me rather than vice versa.

The title is a phrase lent to me by Virginia Woolf who wrote these wonderfully suggestive lines in one of her diary entries: “How it would interest me if this diary were ever to become a real diary: something in which I could see changes, trace moods developing; but then I should have to speak of the soul, & did I not banish the soul when I began? What happens is, as usual, that I’m going to write about the soul, & life breaks in.”

I’m really interested in the time/space that mood exists in—I mean, moods seem to be a bedrock of our being (we’re never not in a mood of one sort or another), at the same time that moods seem to exist quite apart from our ability to perceive them. Are moods co-terminus with the thing we call “life” or “living”? Does life interrupt mood or do moods interrupt life? This is related to the aesthetic problem that you refer to in your question—I mean, here’s this thing that is ephemeral, amorphous but ever-present and foundational. It will not let you pin it down, and it might only come into view when you aren’t trying to discover it. If you look too directly at it, it may not show itself, or will vanish. And the minute it does materialize, life is sure to break in, and poof, it’s gone.

I hope that readers take pleasure in the unexpected ways in which breaks enter in to the book, and I’d hardly exhaust those ways if I mentioned just a few, like day break and breaks in clouds; breakthroughs and heartbreaks; the breaking of a silence and the breaking into song.

As you know, I read this book very slowly, in fits and starts. At first, my pace embarrassed me (confession: I’m a slow reader at the best of times), but the deeper into the book I got and the more I thought about what you were doing in it, the more I made peace with my meandering methods.

You’ve subtitled the book “A Mood Almanack” and elucidate it like this: “the almanack is a revelatory book and a book of secrets. A book whose tidings we look out for and consult from time to time…. A book to wander in a desert with…. A book whose only requirement is that we float into and out from the streets where we live, pausing long enough to feel the mood beneath us shift.” (16) It occurs to me now that this is a book that values the slow reveal and invites a reader to go off, wander around, and return according to her inclinations (or, indeed, mood).

Can you say a little more about your notion of the book as almanack? (By the way, my autocorrect keeps trying to remove the k at the end of that word!)

All that I can say about the slow reveal is: yes, yes, yes. Meandering methods, both in writing and in reading, yes. I’m so glad that this is how you experienced the book, Julija. I seem to have found my ideal reader!

Mood called for what I describe as “cloud-writing,” which asked for an aesthetic of hover and drift. Like my second book, Awkward: A Detour, this book can be dipped into, read front to back, or not. For the reader interested in moving front to back, the book is structured to allow for various more and more voluble returns (as you note in your opening lines here), and a frame tale relative to voice and mood (most especially, the role of the voices of our earliest caretakers, how we may have come to receive those voices and, if we grew up to be writers, how we later constructed voice-imbued atmospheres in the form of writing).

I had a lot of reasons for calling the book an “almanack,” and with that older spelling, too. I wanted to nod in the direction of those early autobiographical experiments of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, but also the less well-known book by Djuna Barnes, her Ladies Almanack (1928) and its wonderful sub-title, “showing their Signs and their Tides; their Moons and their Changes; the Seasons as it is with them; their Eclipses and Equinoxes; as well as a full Record of diurnal and nocturnal Distempers, written & illustrated by a lady of fashion.”

Formally, though, the “almanack” appealed to me for its generic specificity and range: an almanack (especially a “farmer’s alamanack”) shares a kinship with mood-writing because it’s a place we turn to for chartings of weather patterns and cloud movements, the prospect of a good harvest or a drought, and it’s a space where different types of knowledge on a subject can intermingle, where folk wisdom meets philosophy, aphorism and recipes coincide—more to the point, where a kind of non-knowledge or useless knowledge (à la Gertrude Stein) prevails. I didn’t structure the book like an almanack—this would have felt artificial to me—but when I learned more about the etymology of the word, I couldn’t believe how fitting it was for a mood-book: from classical Arabic, munaā­k, it refers to a place where a camel kneels, a station on a journey or the halt at the end of a day’s travel. Simultaneously, it derives from cognate Arabic words for “calendar,” and “climate.” This blew my mind because it seemed to bring together so many mood-relatives: temporality, charts and unchartability, atmosphere, rest and pause. There is also a warmth to the Farmer’s Almanack that I was hoping to invoke.

Continue reading “CNF Conversations: An Interview with Mary Cappello”

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CNF Conversations: An Interview with Patrick Madden

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Patrick MaddenSublime PhysickUniversity of Nebraska Press, 2016.

Patrick Madden is the author of Sublime Physick (2016) and Quotidiana (2010), winner of Foreword Reviews and Independent Publisher book of the year awards, and finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His personal essays, nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and noted in the Best American Essays six times, have been published widely in such journals as Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, the Iowa Review, McSweeney’s, the Normal School, River Teeth, and Southwest Review, and have been anthologized in the Best Creative Nonfiction and the Best American Spiritual Writing. With David Lazar, he co-edited After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays and now co-edits the 21st Century Essays series at Ohio State University Press. A two-time Fulbright fellow to Uruguay, he teaches at Brigham Young University and Vermont College of Fine Arts, and he curates an online anthology and essay resource at www.quotidiana.org.

About Sublime PhysickA follow-up to Patrick Madden’s award-winning debut, this introspective and exuberant collection of essays is wide-ranging and wild, following bifurcating paths of thought to surprising connections. In Sublime Physick, Madden seeks what is common and ennobling among seemingly disparate, even divisive, subjects, ruminating on midlife, time, family, forgiveness, loss, originality, a Canadian rock band, and much more, discerning the ways in which the natural world (fisica) transcends and joins the realm of ideas (sublime) through the application of a meditative mind.

In twelve essays that straddle the classical and the contemporary, Madden transmutes the ruder world into a finer one, articulating with subtle humor and playfulness how science and experience abut and intersect with spirituality and everyday life.

Watch the book trailer for Sublime Physick here…in which Montaigne and Sebald get drunk together.

For teachers who’d like to adopt this book for their classes, Madden has provided a number of helpful teaching resources, including a 40-minute lecture on his writing process and writing prompts for each of the book’s essays. You can find those here.

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Julija Šukys: First of all, Pat, thank you for this wonderful book. It’s a beautiful, melancholic text, penned, or at least published, at mid-life. We’re almost the same age, you and I, so I connected to the simultaneous gaze backward to childhood, forward to aging and death, and downward to the children at our feet. Tell me a bit about the organizing principle of this book. You write that the “essays all derive, in some way, from the physical world, and all reach, always insufficiently, toward the sublime.” Can you say a little bit more about this?

Patrick Madden: Thanks, Julija. I’m really glad you liked the book. I think that the middle of life (whether “midlife” or not) is a long period of relative stasis (I know I’m oversimplifying), so I hope that these essays can speak to lots of people, in the middle of life. As for the organizing principle of the book: I wanted to collect essays under a general characteristic that holds true not only for my own essays but for essays generally, and I discovered that phrase, sublime physick, while researching Amedeo Avogadro, the 19th-century Italian chemist who theorized that equal volumes of gas contained equal numbers of molecules, no matter the gases. We’ve since named Avogadro’s number (6.02 x 1023, the number of molecules in one mole) after him. Aaanyway, I learned that he held the chair of fisica sublime at the University of Turin. I thought it was a lovely oxymoronic term, because it suggests both the concrete and the abstract, the physical and the sublime. While I realize that this department was the equivalent of our modern-day “theoretical physics” (thinking about the science of the natural world), I played with all sorts of definitions and combinations that give insight into what essays tend to do. So this book collects many essays that have science themes and metaphors (I did my bachelor’s degree in physics), and they all make connections between the world of lived experiences (the concrete) and the world of ideas (the abstract), sometimes with a reach toward the spiritual (or sublime).

As you know, I had a group of students read your essay, “Spit,” and the endeavor was wildly successful – my students are still talking about you. In many ways, “Spit” is a classic essay: it combines scene, research and reflection flawlessly. It’s conversational and intimate yet deeply, deeply intellectual, and it vacillates in the most surprising ways between the big and the small. It appears to be about one thing (saliva!) and turns out to be about something else entirely (redemption, forgiveness, self-forgiveness). Tell me about the writing process of this essay.

I am smiling. They were a great bunch to talk with, and I’m glad the essay had a good effect on them. I hope one thing they can take from that essay is that they can write about anything, even frivolous or unappealing things, and they can write without knowing from the start where they’re going or what it all means. One night as I was putting my daughters to bed. I realized that one of them was learning to whistle, another was learning to snap her fingers, and the third was learning to ride a bike, and I had a flash of memory to when I learned how to spit. I thought this was an odd thing to remember, especially because I don’t usually have a good memory. So I began to write an essay about spit. It was all very superficial at first: I gathered all the memories and associations I could make with the literal act of expectorating. Of course, I knew that this would never work as an essay. I needed something significant, an idea to explore. I soon remembered what is probably the essay’s climactic moment, when I returned home for a weekend during my freshman year of college and I discovered that one of my friends was now hanging out with a different crowd, doing as they did. I got upset, we argued, and in the escalation of emotions, I spat at him. Because my friend had since died, very young, I began thinking about forgiveness. Beyond that, as I was trying to get some DNA research done on my ancestry (by sending a cheek swab for analysis), I met, through email and phone, a distant relative who’d never known anybody he was genetically related to. Even though our common ancestor lived centuries ago, he was pleased to get to know me. As we shared our experiences, I learned that he’d recently gotten into some legal trouble, so that the life he’d worked so hard to build was falling apart. I began to see him as a tragic hero, undone by his fatal flaw and events beyond his control. This was a challenge to the dear notion that people can repent and change. So I wrote toward this uncomfortable question: What is repentance? How can we forgive? And so forth. I felt that this was a substantial idea at the end of an initially inane essay.

Some time ago, I was introduced at a reading as “an essayist,” and immediately felt a sort of revolt inside me that said “No! I’m not an essayist…” A few seconds later, I reversed this and thought, “Hang on, maybe I am an essayist…” It’s been a long road, but for what it’s worth, I increasingly define myself as such. By contrast, you seem to have understood early on exactly what kind of writer you were. In “On Being Recognized,” you quote Arthur Christopher Benson: “The point of the essay is not the subject, for any subject will suffice, but the charm of personality” (117). What is the point of the essay for you, Pat? Can you talk a little about your journey to the essay? Did you flirt with other genres before you settled on this one? Do you ever (as I did recently) get accused of fetishizing the essay?

“Fetishizing the essay”! I like that phrase. I’ve never been accused of that, but only (I suppose) because it’s so obvious that I do it. People feel it’s unnecessary to even make the statement about me. Of course, I deny the premise, as “fetishizing” assumes that the obsession is “excessive or irrational,” and this is obviously false. In any case, I never really had any other literary goals, and though I like reading other genres, I’ve never seriously tried writing in them. Joseph Epstein says that essayists are all failed at other literary and artistic pursuits (e.g., Lamb the failed playwright and poet; Hazlitt the failed painter), but this is not the case for me. Unless I’m a failed physicist, I guess. Yes, maybe that’s it. I came to the essay because it promised a great freedom. I had a physics degree, but already before I had graduated I felt the narrowing constraints of lifelong expertise in a very small subject area. In physics, this smallness is doubly true: each physicist’s field is metaphorically small, but also a cutting-edge physicist will probably be working with subatomic particles, invisible even to microscopes, and the work tends to involve colliding accelerated particles then sifting through the computer data for years in order to get a read on what flashed into and out of existence during a nanosecond of interesting results. Aaanyway, I felt claustrophobic at the prospect of dedicating my life to this. Meanwhile, in the two years after graduation, I served a Mormon mission to Uruguay, which gave me a lot of time to think about my future. Gradually I realized that I loved to think wildly, without restraint, flitting from one subject of interest to the next as the spirit moved me. And eventually I discovered or decided that writing essays could be a way to keep my life open and free, to study what subjects inspired me for as long as they inspired me, and then move on. So I came to the essay knowingly, intentionally, and with great hopes. I think now that I was naïve, but also very lucky, so that my life has worked out to be what I had hoped for.

By the way, I don’t know who introduced you as an essayist, but I feel that the title is a great compliment. Most people who would use it to describe you would do so knowingly, meaning that you’re an experimenter and explorer. Continue reading “CNF Conversations: An Interview with Patrick Madden”

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