12 or 20 (second series) questions with Melora Wolff

Melora Wolff’s workhas appeared in publications such as Brick,the New York Times, the Normal School Best American Fantasy, SpeculativeNonfiction, the Southern Review, and EveryFather’s Daughter: 24 Women Writers Remember Their Fathers. Her work hasreceived multiple Notable Essay of the Year citations from Best American Essays and SpecialMentions in Nonfiction in the Pushcart Prizes. She is director creativewriting at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

How does your most recentwork compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My newbook Bequeath is a memoir in essays,a collection of personal pieces I’ve published over many years. So, there are variations in theessays’ styles and forms, but together, they tell a sustained story about myfamily’s past and about the vanished city of Manhattan in the 1970s, my coming-of-ageyears. The book explores family bequests of myths and artifacts that get passedalong from one generation to another. People die, leave ideas, objects, and footprintsbehind in the snow or sand, and all those ghost-prints mean something—but what?The narrator—the persona of me, at various points—uses both imagination andmemory to sort it all out. In essays, I’m always reckoning with the effects ofmemory and imagination in truth-telling. My previous short book, The Parting, published by the now shutteredShires Press, is a collection of published prose poems, a similar bookthematically, but with many more dreamscapes and fantasies. And both booksdepict moments of transformation, when realities start to morph into somethingelse, something “other.” I love how certain styles can deliver solid facts inways that feel mysterious, eccentric, even magical, so I hope that the bookshave that approach in common.   

How did you come tonon-fiction first, as opposed to, say, fiction or poetry?

When Ifirst started writing seriously, I was a university sophomore enrolled inFiction workshops, led by the late poetic postmodern novelist John Hawkes. Histeaching was an intense, festive inspiration for a lot of young writers. Thanksto his mentoring, I continued as a fiction writer, and yet I also loved andwrote first-person narratives, and my short stories always leaned obviously—yearningly,really-- toward personal writing, memoirish tales. I discovered my personalessays by writing autofiction in graduate school. Now my essays—all of them factual—douse some techniques of fiction. People have told me that reading Bequeath feels like reading essays andshort stories simultaneously. I’m glad the book lives in some happy maritalspace between fiction and nonfiction. And two great poets also influenced medeeply as teachers and as writers, Agha Shahid Ali and Galway Kinnell. Mybiggest love is language, really, not genre, so I continue to write and readfiction, nonfiction, poetry, prose poems, hybrid works.

How long does it take tostart any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly,or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their finalshape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It takesme a long time to commit myself to an idea, but when I do, work comes veryquickly. Suddenly I’ll just see a pattern or a connection that makes an essaycomplete in my mind and I usually draft a full essay in one sitting, re-writingsentences as I go. Then I work the sentences over and over obsessively, so thattakes a while! 

Where does a work of proseusually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combininginto a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the verybeginning?

For me, writingoften begins with a sudden image or with a connection that happens in my headin a nearly audible flash. And then I have to start writing. The title essay ofBequeath, for instance, came to mesuddenly at an exhibit in El Museo del Barrio in New York while I was lookingat the artworks of Raphael Montaňez Ortiz. I saw the shape of the whole essay,for some reason. It’s an alchemy that can happen when you look at fascinating artsometimes—images beget more images. Another essay came to me entirely on a trainin the instant a certain stranger passed by me in the aisle and I drafted thewhole thing before the train arrived at the destination. Of course, some piecestake much longer, even years, like the essay “Fall of the Winter Palace,” whichwent through many versions.  Gradually,work accumulates into a book with one voice.

Are public readings part ofor counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoysdoing readings? 

Yes, Ienjoy giving and attending readings. I like seeing everyone all out togetherfor a word concert. Story-telling, poetry—it’s all born of oral traditions, soreadings continue that history.

Do you have any theoreticalconcerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answerwith your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I don’tsit down to write with any theoretical concerns in mind, but I discoverconcerns while I write. Many of my essays explore power struggles between menand women, the legacies of expected gender roles, different forms of violenceand vulnerability. I’m always exploring the implications of truth, lies, and memoryin inherited stories. I’m interested by all those intimate, urgent questions thatkeep you up at night, especially, what’sgoing to happen next? Hidden questions that you hear in the dark are reallyuseful because it’s the intimate, unanswerable ones that make you want to keepreading and revising your own inscrutable life, learning its story a littlebetter by letting it burn on the pages, even if it hurts, which it often does.

Do you find the process ofworking with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential.Editors can talk you through an idea and a paragraph, they can see a biggerpicture very well and reflect it back.  Goodeditors feel the rhythm and heart of a sentence and a story and a sensibility,and can help writers to feel them more completely too.  Good editors know how to stir the waters for dislodgingeven deeper, clearer words. Most writers have very rude inner-editors—sometimesthey’re too harsh, or too lazy, or too noisy—and professional editors canintervene in the scuffles that sometimes break out between a writer and theirinner-editor.

What is the best piece ofadvice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

At thispoint—and I’m hoping to have another couple of decades to decide—three thingscome to mind. Never say ‘I told you so.’ Shake off despair. Love your ownspace.

What kind of writingroutine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day(for you) begin?

My daysbegin with coffee and a drive to my office on the college campus where I teach.I don’t keep a daily writing routine, and I admire those that do.  I write when I can and keep notebooks on handall the time for ideas that come to me during the busy days. Sometimes my creativeself really wants all my attention at an impossible moment, and notes are oneway I can notice thoughts that become essays later on. For me, there’s usually atleast one long walk in the woods—preferably through snow drifts--literally, beforeI write a final draft.  

When your writing getsstalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)inspiration?

I re-readmy favorite authors, re-read their language, some in translation, that I know thrillsme—like the prose of Polish author Bruno Schulz. Just reading a paragraph or afew sentences by Schulz in his collections Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of The Hourglass, his ecstatic flights of mythic imagination, and I knowI’m back in touch with the physical, swooning feeling of a meaningful relationshipwith language. I need to push myself to fall back in love with words. Andwalking through an art gallery, seeing thefabulous ways that visual artists speak through images can get creative energymoving again too, light some spark.  

What was your lastHallowe'en costume?

I think Iwas a mouse with big furry ears. Or maybe I was a Frosted Flakes Cereal box. AndI was a child, I should add. In actuality, not in costume.

If you could pick any otheroccupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think youwould have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

If I hadn’tbecome a writer, I would have been a singer. I grew up in a family of musiciansand singers, and music was usually playing or being played--Broadway scores,jazz, Gilbert and Sullivan, cabaret tunes, pop and folk hits. There’s been an operasinger in my family, and a sax player, and two light opera singers, and twopianists. Someone was always in rehearsal or dashing for a show or a gig or a concertor a lesson. Growing up, I loved listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone,Judy Garland, Blossom Dearie--all those fantastic female voices. Singing isemotional and physical, a full body workout in a way that writing—in myexperience—isn’t, so I hope singing is my life and career in the multi-verse.

What made you write, asopposed to doing something else? 

Words arenatural companions and I love them all for it.

What was the last greatbook you read? What was the last great film?

I’ve reada lot of wonderful books in the past months—The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk, TheThird Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Michael Ondaatje’s new poetry volume, A Year of Last Things, Carol Mavor’s book of essays about objectsand art, Serendipity. I finally read The Invention of Morel by Alfred Bioy Casares and was amazed by its imaginative structure and pathos. I think EdwardBerger’s 2022 version of All Quiet on theWestern Front is a great film.

What would you like to dothat you haven't yet done?

Swim witha dolphin. Play fiddle in an Irish pub. See the stained-glass windows of NotreDame. Hug a collie puppy. Sip champagne in a Prague café. Meet Edgar Allan Poeand have a long chat with him about hypnagogic visions. Learn how to throw apot, blow glass, play the cello, speak Gaelic, sing harmony without effort,grow roses, climb an apple tree, waltz with someone who really knows how towaltz, live near a country church, see the Northern Lights from a fjord, andgrow old happily.

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