{"id":3647,"date":"2012-12-07T20:53:36","date_gmt":"2012-12-08T01:53:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=3647"},"modified":"2013-02-14T11:28:28","modified_gmt":"2013-02-14T16:28:28","slug":"cnf-conversations-an-interview-with-essayist-chris-arthur-part-ii-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=3647","title":{"rendered":"CNF Conversations: An Interview with Essayist Chris Arthur, Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Chris Arthur, On the Shoreline of Knowledge: Irish Wanderings. Iowa City: Shoreline Books, 2012.<\/a><\/p>\n

This is Part II of a two-part interview with Chris Arthur. Click here to access Part I.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Julija \u0160ukys: Like you, I’m obsessed with the writing of ordinary lives. The following passage is marked in pencil and with exclamation marks in my now dog-eared copy of your book: \u201cHistory is determined by the inky regimen of print. But ordinary lives happen more in the key set by a pencil: fainter, less permanent, more tentative, easily erased. [. . .] I prefer to take the back routes, to look at littler events, the stories of the day to day, of families and their places. These, more than any headline, are what make us who we are.\u201d I write ordinary lives in order to create a trace for those I fear will (unjustly) be forgotten. By contrast, though, I get the sense from your work, and the ways in which you reach so far back (to Neanderthal mourning rituals, for example) that you write with the consciousness that this too, this trace of yours, will fade. Am I right about this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chris Arthur: <\/strong>Yes! I think all the traces we leave, all the traces we write, will vanish. According to Buddhist teaching, by which I\u2019ve been more than a little influenced, one of the three marks of existence \u2013 that is, one of the three absolutely fundamental features of our world \u2013 is what\u2019s termed \u201canicca,\u201d or impermanence. That strikes me as highly plausible. I think everything passes. Nothing humans do \u2013 still less who they are \u2013 is permanent, however much we may rail against this unpalatable fact. When I read your question I was reminded of an early essay I wrote entitled \u201cNe Obliviscaris\u201d (= \u201clest we forget\u201d). It emphasizes, more explicitly than the other essays do, the way in which anicca claims us all:<\/p>\n

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If the mind cannot immediately encompass the idea of its own complete annihilation, the fact that soon there will be no one who remembers us, ask what remains \u2013 beyond the dumb inheritance of flesh \u2013 of the people who were our great-great-grandparents. Or, if that is still too close, ask what now remains upon the shifting network of human memory of the ten-year-old Iron Age girl drowned as she helped her mother collect mussels from along some windswept northern shore. Let her act as symbol for the millions of strangers unknown to us, unremembered by anyone, who have vanished without trace in history\u2019s wake and are recoverable only through the imagination.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Loss and transience are, I think, important motifs that recur throughout my five essay collections. This may make them sound rather sombre, if not grim \u2013 but I don\u2019t think they are; I hope they\u2019re not. It\u2019s transience, after all, that underscores a lot of life\u2019s beauty, what helps to make it beautiful.<\/p>\n

In \u201cKyklos\u201d you write about the way your essay has \u201cspiralled away, evolved and developed, meandered unpredictably from its initial point of origin.\u201d A great topic for discussion over the course of my fall workshop has been precisely this aspect of essay writing: the fact that you may not (almost certainly don\u2019t) know where you\u2019re going. Essays wander. They are experiments. They take us off into unexpected territory. And this frustrates beginning writers, because it feels difficult and therefore they begin to believe they\u2019re doing something wrong. I wonder if you could talk about how you write essays. Do they come quickly? Are they hard-fought? Do they come slowly over years? What is the role of rewriting in your work? Do you have faithful friends or editors whom you trust with drafts? Do you have any words of wisdom for those of us stuck inside an unfinished and uncooperative essay (as I am now)?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This reminds me of a piece of wisdom about essays from one of my mentors in the genre, Lydia Fakundiny. She says that if at some point in its composition an essay doesn\u2019t surprise the writer, it probably isn\u2019t worth writing. I agree with that. Of course when I start to write a piece I have some idea of where it\u2019s headed \u2013 but not much. The discovery is in the writing and the pieces that have pleased me most are those where surprise is a key element, where insights and connections happen that I couldn\u2019t have predicted when I set out. Yes, absolutely, essays are experiments \u2013 I sometimes refer to them as wonderings and wanderings in prose. If they don\u2019t take us into unexpected territory they quickly become tedious. This means there\u2019s a strong element of unpredictability about them, which can be frustrating \u2013 because sometimes they don\u2019t work, and because they\u2019re resistant to planning. I think beginning writers are sometimes approaching essays with a one-size-fits-all blueprint in mind for how to structure them. That strikes me as desperately wrong-headed. A useful initial exercise for anyone starting out is to read the Best American Essays<\/em> series and get a sense of just how varied essays can be.<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t like to give the impression, though, from this emphasis I\u2019ve put on unpredictability, surprise and not knowing where a piece is going, that there\u2019s any lack of care or precision in an essay\u2019s composition. Good essays are carefully crafted (and again a reading of Best American Essays<\/em> soon makes this very apparent).<\/p>\n

It takes me weeks to complete an essay and almost every one goes through numerous rewrites as I hone it and fine tune it and try to get it into the shape I want. Very occasionally, a piece will emerge quickly. It seems to fall on the page pretty much in its final form. But that\u2019s rare. Mostly my initial scribbles are crude, tentative, unfinished and miles away from the final version. It takes me a long while to get from inception to completion \u2013 and it can be struggle. Readers are oblivious, of course, to the huge amount of work involved in moving from first draft to final finished form \u2013 in this as in other genres. That\u2019s the part of writing that\u2019s only visible to the author \u2013 and rightly so, I think. I mean, no one wants to look at the rubble of unrefined material and what\u2019s been discarded. Readers want to taste the finished dish, not your raw ingredients. But it can be highly problematic if beginning writers aren\u2019t aware of this dimension and imagine that composition happens in one unrevised burst that\u2019s perfect at the outset. I don\u2019t know anyone who writes like that. Wasn\u2019t it E.B. White who said \u201cThe best writing is rewriting\u201d?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t share work in draft form with anyone, but I\u2019m more than willing to listen to suggestions from a handful of journal editors whose judgment I\u2019ve learned to trust. When they suggest changes to what I\u2019ve presented to them as an essay\u2019s final form I\u2019ll often make the recommended change \u2013 or, prompted by it, come up with some revision of my own. Once an essay has been published, though, I tend to rule a line under it and not look at it again \u2013 otherwise I might want to make yet more changes. Paul Val\u00e9ry\u2019s famous observation that \u201ca poem is never finished, only abandoned\u201d applies to essays too, I think. It\u2019s interesting that Patrick Madden, an essayist whose work I admire, says quite explicitly in one of the essays in his book Quotidiana<\/em> (2010), \u201cThe danger of writing an essay like this: there is nowhere to end.\u201d But for practical purposes you need to draw the line and end things, or abandon things, somewhere \u2013 otherwise what you\u2019re working on will eventually start to get in the way of new ideas, new pieces.<\/p>\n

You ask about words of wisdom for those stuck inside an unfinished and uncooperative essay. Well, the first thing I\u2019d say is I\u2019m glad I\u2019m not there! Because I have been there frequently and I know how frustrating it can be. When I get into this situation with a piece of work I\u2019ll sometimes give up and trash it \u2013 and it\u2019s better to do that before you expend massive amounts of time and energy trying to fix the unfixable. But of course I\u2019m reluctant to abandon something once I\u2019ve started to write it, and it can be well-nigh impossible at some stages to tell if something just needs more revision and refinement or if it\u2019s something that\u2019s terminally flawed. One thing that\u2019s worth considering is whether the recalcitrant piece is two (or three) essays rather than the single one you think you\u2019re operating with. I know I\u2019ve escaped from several tangles by realizing that I was trying to write two essays simultaneously. Separating them and working on them separately solved the problem. It\u2019s also sometimes worth bringing some radical editing to bear. Trying to begin three paragraphs (or pages) in and ditching what goes before that can help to get things moving, or reorganizing the order of the sections. Writing a piece to a strict word limit that\u2019s lower than what you normally work with can occasionally be effective. Sometimes it helps \u2013 if there isn\u2019t a deadline looming \u2013 to put the piece aside for a few weeks or months and look at it again after a break. I also like to have several pieces of work on the go at the same time, at different stages of completion, so as I can switch mental gears between the different demands of initial sketch, rough draft, first draft and final draft (and all the rewritings and revisions in between). So, if I\u2019m stuck with one piece at one phase of its writing, shifting to another piece at another phase can help. It can also be helpful to move between working on single pieces and a collection. Sometimes when things don\u2019t work it\u2019s just a case of being stale and needing to go out for a walk or a swim or a cycle \u2013 a change of scene, getting away from the screen or the page. And of course writers, given what they do, sometimes spend too much time in their own company. Sometimes all an essay that isn\u2019t working needs is some good company and conversation, rather than any kind of further emphasis on the solitary business of trying to get sentences to behave the way you want them to. But sometimes none of these strategies work. I don\u2019t mean to be pessimistic in saying that, I think it\u2019s just being realistic. I\u2019ve certainly experienced the wretched business of a piece of writing that promises to be good, claims lots of time, is something that keeps drawing me back, but in the end I just can\u2019t figure out how to get it into a form I\u2019m happy with. Maybe in order to have success with writing you need to experience a few failures along the way. But here\u2019s hoping your unfinished\/uncooperative essay is one that responds to treatment and ends up being something you\u2019re pleased with.<\/p>\n

Finally, if an essay looks at a question or a thing or a memory from all angles, then perhaps an essay collection can be said to do the same, but on a bigger scale. Having never written a collection myself, I\u2019m intrigued to hear about the process of putting together such a book. What comes first \u2013 the essays or the themes? Do you bring together pieces that seem to interconnect or do you set out to write complementary essays? Or a combination of the two?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The essays come first. Then, as I start to think of them together, themes emerge that make it clear which ones work together. At that point it\u2019s easy enough to decide what to include in a collection and what doesn\u2019t belong there. Likewise the running order of the selected pieces, though it may initially seem hard to call, becomes obvious as I work on the essays together and think of them as a collection, not just as individual pieces. I never set out to write complementary essays. The books evolve out of the essays I write, but I don\u2019t write them with a view to writing a book. When I\u2019m writing an essay, it\u2019s just that particular essay that I\u2019m thinking about.<\/p>\n

Richard Chadbourne says something interesting about essays considered singly and put together as a collection. His comment is included in the course of what I think is a good characterization of the genre as a whole:<\/p>\n

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The essay is a brief, highly polished piece of prose that is often poetic, often marked by an artful disorder in its composition, and that is both fragmentary and complete in itself, capable both of standing on its own and of forming a kind of ‘higher organism’ when assembled with other essays by its author.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019d like to think that my essays are capable of standing on their own \u2013 but that the collections work as \u201chigher organisms\u201d so that reading them together in a book sees them acting in the kind of mutually enriching\/reinforcing way that Chabdourne has in mind. Incidentally, he goes on to say of the essay that:<\/p>\n

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Like most poems or short stories it should be readable at a single sitting; readable but not entirely understandable the first or even second time, and re-readable more or less forever.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And he concludes: \u201cthe essay, in other words, belongs to imaginative literature.\u201d \u00a0I\u2019d agree wholeheartedly with that. (His comments are made in an excellent article, “A Puzzling Literary Genre; Comparative Views of the Essay,\u201d in Comparative Literature Studies<\/em>, Vol. 20 no. 1 (1983), p.149-50.)<\/p>\n

A parallel to thinking about making collections of essays is thinking about the different ways in which a selection of those already published in book form might be arranged. I did this with Words of the Grey Wind<\/em>, of course, but it\u2019s something I\u2019d like to do again. For instance, I\u2019ve several times thought of putting a book together that draws the various \u201cbird essays\u201d I\u2019ve written \u2013 \u201cKingfishers\u201d and the \u201cLast Corncrake\u201d from Irish Nocturnes<\/em>, \u201cSwan Song\u201d and \u201cBeginning by Blackbird\u201d from Irish Haiku<\/em>, \u201cWaxwings\u201d from Words of the Grey Wind<\/em> and three that are in the collection I\u2019m just completing now. That\u2019s the kind of thing that might tempt me to try to write \u201ccomplementary essays.\u201d Of course the birds themselves are not the main subject. It\u2019s more that they offer a way into what I want to write about. I\u2019d also like to explore arranging essays around the theme of different varieties of looking, grouping them according to whether they look at natural objects, manufactured things, paintings, books, photographs, sayings, or memory. I even have a tentative title and subtitle for such a volume: How to See a Horse and Other Lessons for the (Mind\u2019s) Eye<\/em>. But I think it\u2019s highly unlikely that any publisher would want to take on something like this, so I suspect these imagined rationales for selection.<\/p>\n

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