{"id":4031,"date":"2014-09-04T12:55:52","date_gmt":"2014-09-04T16:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=4031"},"modified":"2014-09-04T18:51:06","modified_gmt":"2014-09-04T22:51:06","slug":"cnf-conversations-an-interview-with-kim-dana-kupperman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=4031","title":{"rendered":"CNF Conversations: An Interview with Kim Dana Kupperman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Unknown-1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You. An Anthology of Essays Devoted to the Second Person<\/em>, edited by Kim Dana Kupperman, with Heather G. Simons & James M. Chesbro. Welcome Table Press, 2013.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Kim Dana Kupperman<\/strong><\/a> is the author of the award-winning I Just Lately Started Buying Wings. Missives from the Other Side of Silence<\/em> (2010) and the lead editor of You. An Anthology of Essays Devoted to the Second Person<\/em> (2013). She is the founding editor of Welcome Table Press, an independent nonprofit devoted to publishing and celebrating the essay, and the editor of the press\u2019s periodical pamphlet series Occasional Papers on Practice & Form<\/em>. She has received many awards and honors, including fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the New York Center for Book Arts. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Essays<\/em>; Blurring the Boundaries. Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction<\/em>; and An Ethical Compass. Coming of Age in the 21st Century <\/em>and appears regularly in literary periodicals. She teaches in Fairfield University\u2019s low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing.<\/p>\n

About You<\/em>:<\/strong> Up close and personal,\u00a0this first-of-its-kind collection showcases contemporary essays that explore failure, planetary movement, and love, among a variety of topics. The candor of these\u00a0autobiographical, lyric, personal, and segmented narratives is tempered by the distance, intimacy, humor, and unsentimental tenderness that the second person point of view affords both writer and reader.<\/p>\n

Buy the book here.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Unknown\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Julija \u0160ukys: Kim, thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview. The subject of the second-person voice came up a number of times during my seminars this year \u2013 especially my graduate seminars. I, for one, really like the second-person voice and have used it at least twice, in two different essays and I\u2019m always interested to see what others do with it. It\u2019s a tricky thing to pull off, and it turns out to be a little bit controversial. Some readers\/writers see the use of the second-person voice as contrived or too cute. Some find it distancing. I\u2019m so interested to hear what you have to say about all of this!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kim Dana Kupperman:\u00a0<\/strong>I’d like to make a distinction before we begin: when I say \u201csecond-person point of view,\u201d I’m mostly referring to the grammatical pronoun you; this somehow feels different to me than \u201csecond-person voice,\u201d though I think I know what you mean, or, at least I interpret what you mean as \u201ctone,\u201d or \u201ceffect,\u201d or, even, \u201cmood,\u201d all of which can be evoked by using a second-person point of view.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a really helpful distinction: point of view vs. voice. I like the precision of the former.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tell me what drew you to the idea of pulling together this anthology of essays devoted to the second person. Were most of these pieces commissioned for this collection, or did you draw from the world of literary journals?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a reader, I\u2019ve been very interested in the second-person point of view, from its obvious and historic epistolary use, to the briefer asides to the reader in prose (nonfiction and fiction), to longer works such as the stories in Lorrie Moore\u2019s Self Help<\/em> and Junot Diaz\u2019s This Is How You Lose Her<\/em>, to Stewart O\u2019Nan\u2019s novel A Prayer for the Dying<\/em>, to name three examples. There was no anthology\u2014at least not one in print that I knew of\u2014that collected essays devoted to the second person, written by contemporary writers. In fact, I\u2019m not sure there are any anthologies that have collected such essays by writers in any century. As an editor and publisher, I sought to fill that gap; most of the pieces were solicited in a call for submissions as well as direct requests to writers and editors whose work the three of us\u2014Heather Simons, James Chesbro, and myself\u2014admired.<\/p>\n

I was interested to find that in many of these pieces, the \u201cyou\u201d appears to stand in for the \u201cI.\u201d By this I mean that the \u201cyou\u201d is really (and often quite clearly) the narrator. I\u2019d say this is the case with pieces by Natashia D\u00e9on, Susan Grier, Brenda Miller, and others. What is to be gained by switching from \u201cI\u201d to \u201cyou\u201d? How does the second-person point of view change the way that we read these otherwise first-person narratives? Or am I being too simplistic and mischaracterizing them?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u201d often stands in for the \u201cI,\u201d but sometimes, \u201cyou\u201d masks the \u201cI.\u201d I like to think of this particular usage of the second person as one in which the narrator is writing to a self who no longer exists, which is the case with all three of the examples you mention: Natashia D\u00e9on\u2019s here-and-now narrator is addressing her adolescent self at moments of great reckoning; Susan Grier\u2019s narrator is standing on a threshold of understanding her role as the mother of a child who will become transgendered; and Brenda Miller\u2019s speaker is in the midst of undertaking a transformation. So in some ways, it\u2019s as if these particular narrators are recording messages to be placed in a time capsule: \u201cSee who I was,\u201d the you says in these instances, of a specific instance or time. Perhaps that\u2019s why we might call this usage \u201cdiaristic\u201d: just think of those moments when you examine a diary in which what you wrote was written by another iteration of yourself: it is a kind of first person removed. As Joan Connor puts it, \u201cThe I creates a you; the you creates an I, in a Mobius strip of recursive identity.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are, of course, a number of pieces here that play with the question of who exactly \u201cyou\u201d is. For example, Michelle Auerbach wonderfully satirizes how-to books and advice columns in \u201cHow to Screw Up a First Date.\u201d Becca Lee Jensen Ogden\u2019s \u201cNothing Good Happens after Forty-One Weeks\u201d plays with the form of online pregnancy journals digests (It starts: \u201cHello Becca! You are now thirty-eight weeks! Your baby is now considered full-term\u201d). I found Ogden\u2019s piece particularly moving. It\u2019s a very effective use of the second person in part because the target or referent of the \u201cyou\u201d shifts subtly partway through the piece. Her \u201cyou\u201d is both a voice addressing the narrator from outside as well as from inside. Among other things, it\u2019s a wonderful metaphor for the experience of pregnancy. Do you see the \u201cyou\u201d working in other ways that I\u2019ve perhaps overlooked?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the introduction to the anthology, I mention specific uses of the second person: first, the you as I (i.e., the \u201cdiaristic\u201d); second, the epistolary, in which the writer creates a rhetorical apostrophe, or an address to someone who is absent (or who cannot\u2014yet, and for whatever reasons\u2014read what is being written, as in Brian Hoover\u2019s \u201cA Rock Snob to His Infant Daughter\u201d); and third, the note-to-self or how-to manual. We\u2019ve included essays in this collection that feature the more traditional use of the second person, a direct aside, or invitation, to the reader, though the essays are unconventional in their approaches (for example, Amy Leach\u2019s \u201cYou Be the Moon\u201d and Sarah Stromeyer\u2019s \u201cMerce on the Page\u201d).<\/p>\n

As I mentioned above, some of my students have commented on the distancing effect of \u201cyou\u201d \u2013 especially when the \u201cyou\u201d stands in for \u201cI.\u201d For me, intimacy returns (? I\u2019m not sure this is the right word\u2026) when the \u201cyou\u201d addresses someone as one might do in a letter. This is how I\u2019ve used the second person, and it\u2019s how a small number of your contributors have used it. For example, Elizabeth Stone addresses her late father in \u201cThirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackguard\u201d (another piece I found to be very strong). I wonder if you have any thoughts on narrative distance and intimacy and the use of the second person. Do you see it as potentially (if perhaps productively) distancing? Do you see ways of creating intimacy using this pronoun, as I do?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second-person point of view has the ability to distance and create intimacy at the same time. Intimacy, as you so accurately point out, is created especially in the epistolary usage, in which a reader may feel addressed directly by the narrator, even though the narrator is writing to a specific person (e.g., Kim Adrian, Marsha McGregor, Elizabeth Stone); distance is achieved when the you stands in for I; or, perhaps, a certain remoteness is created, which takes the I out of the equation and allows the writer to scrutinize, perhaps more closely, the subject at hand.<\/p>\n

Next: a question on form. I was very interested and intrigued by the brevity of some of most of these pieces. Amongst my favorites is Eduardo Galeano\u2019s \u201cDreams.\u201d It\u2019s a tiny jewel of a text, only two paragraphs long, with a \u201cyou\u201d that refers not to the narrator himself but out to an unnamed interlocutor. The text itself is dreamlike and imagistic. Another text that struck me was one you’ve mentioned, Sarah Stromeyer\u2019s \u201cMerce on the Page.\u201d It is a tiny text about text: about the effects of layout and font choices and the physicality of letters on a reader. (The \u201cyou\u201d here seems to address me, the reader, in perhaps the most direct sense of all the pieces.) What do you think is it about the use of the second person that cultivates brevity?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a terrific question. Perhaps part of the answer has to do with the seemingly experimental nature of the second person\u2014readers will tolerate the schism between distance and intimacy only to a degree (although Stewart O\u2019Nan manages to sustain the second person for the duration of an entire novel). Think about reading Gertrude Stein, and the kind of suspension\u2014not only of disbelief, but of narrative expectation\u2014required to enter into some of her texts; the effort is well worth it, but it requires a certain readerly stamina.<\/p>\n

What is the greatest hazard of using the second person?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When you use it to be clever. Cleverness is not a hallmark of the second-person point of view. Or, at least, it shouldn\u2019t be.<\/p>\n

And conversely, what can it achieve that a simple first-person (or third-person) point of view can\u2019t?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As we\u2019ve noted, the second-person point of view distances the writer from what might be painful to write. In a way, the you becomes the ultimate persona\u2014or, if it doesn\u2019t, it serves as a process that might help developing writers better understand persona. This speaks to, perhaps, what you have called the \u201csecond-person voice\u201d: voice is an element that is part of persona, the disguise adopted by a narrator to tell a story. And by using the second-person point of view, the narrator assumes a mask\u2014distance, in this case\u2014that infuses how s\/he sounds with a kind of remote quality that cannot be achieved with first person (but certainly can be realized, without the dual edge of intimacy offered by second person, using third-person omniscient).<\/p>\n

Which texts in this collection surprised you most in terms of what they were able to achieve through the use of the second person?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a tough question\u2026 I think I was more surprised, in the acquisition process, by writers and editors we encountered who felt that the second-person point of view was too trendy, misused, or, simply, not their cup of tea. Certainly, there are instances of misuse with every experimental form. Some of the work in this anthology may have been better rendered in first person. But the writer stuck to the second-person point of view and had reasons to stick to it. In some ways, that stubbornness surprised me. In other ways, I find it charming.<\/p>\n

Kim Dana Kupperman, thanks so much for doing this and for putting together the anthology. I know this conversation will find a place in future seminar rooms and in readers’ hands.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

September 4, 2014<\/p>\n

\"Share<\/a>