Melora Wolff’s work
has appeared in publications such as Brick,
the New York Times, the Normal School Best American Fantasy, Speculative
Nonfiction, the Southern Review, and Every
Father’s Daughter: 24 Women Writers Remember Their Fathers. Her work has
received multiple Notable Essay of the Year citations from Best American Essays and Special
Mentions in Nonfiction in the Pushcart Prizes. She is director creative
writing at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.
How does your most recent
work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My new
book Bequeath is a memoir in essays,
a collection of personal pieces I’ve published over many years. So, there are variations in the
essays’ styles and forms, but together, they tell a sustained story about my
family’s past and about the vanished city of Manhattan in the 1970s, my coming-of-age
years. The book explores family bequests of myths and artifacts that get passed
along from one generation to another. People die, leave ideas, objects, and footprints
behind 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 and
memory to sort it all out. In essays, I’m always reckoning with the effects of
memory and imagination in truth-telling. My previous short book, The Parting, published by the now shuttered
Shires Press, is a collection of published prose poems, a similar book
thematically, but with many more dreamscapes and fantasies. And both books
depict moments of transformation, when realities start to morph into something
else, something “other.” I love how certain styles can deliver solid facts in
ways that feel mysterious, eccentric, even magical, so I hope that the books
have that approach in common.
How did you come to
non-fiction first, as opposed to, say, fiction or poetry?
When I
first started writing seriously, I was a university sophomore enrolled in
Fiction workshops, led by the late poetic postmodern novelist John Hawkes. His
teaching was an intense, festive inspiration for a lot of young writers. Thanks
to his mentoring, I continued as a fiction writer, and yet I also loved and
wrote first-person narratives, and my short stories always leaned obviously—yearningly,
really-- toward personal writing, memoirish tales. I discovered my personal
essays by writing autofiction in graduate school. Now my essays—all of them factual—do
use some techniques of fiction. People have told me that reading Bequeath feels like reading essays and
short stories simultaneously. I’m glad the book lives in some happy marital
space between fiction and nonfiction. And two great poets also influenced me
deeply as teachers and as writers, Agha Shahid Ali and Galway Kinnell. My
biggest love is language, really, not genre, so I continue to write and read
fiction, nonfiction, poetry, prose poems, hybrid works.
How long does it take to
start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly,
or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final
shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It takes
me a long time to commit myself to an idea, but when I do, work comes very
quickly. Suddenly I’ll just see a pattern or a connection that makes an essay
complete in my mind and I usually draft a full essay in one sitting, re-writing
sentences as I go. Then I work the sentences over and over obsessively, so that
takes a while!
Where does a work of prose
usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining
into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very
beginning?
For me, writing
often begins with a sudden image or with a connection that happens in my head
in a nearly audible flash. And then I have to start writing. The title essay of
Bequeath, for instance, came to me
suddenly at an exhibit in El Museo del Barrio in New York while I was looking
at 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 art
sometimes—images beget more images. Another essay came to me entirely on a train
in the instant a certain stranger passed by me in the aisle and I drafted the
whole thing before the train arrived at the destination. Of course, some pieces
take much longer, even years, like the essay “Fall of the Winter Palace,” which
went through many versions. Gradually,
work accumulates into a book with one voice.
Are public readings part of
or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys
doing readings?
Yes, I
enjoy giving and attending readings. I like seeing everyone all out together
for a word concert. Story-telling, poetry—it’s all born of oral traditions, so
readings continue that history.
Do you have any theoretical
concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer
with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I don’t
sit down to write with any theoretical concerns in mind, but I discover
concerns while I write. Many of my essays explore power struggles between men
and women, the legacies of expected gender roles, different forms of violence
and vulnerability. I’m always exploring the implications of truth, lies, and memory
in inherited stories. I’m interested by all those intimate, urgent questions that
keep you up at night, especially, what’s
going to happen next? Hidden questions that you hear in the dark are really
useful because it’s the intimate, unanswerable ones that make you want to keep
reading and revising your own inscrutable life, learning its story a little
better by letting it burn on the pages, even if it hurts, which it often does.
Do you find the process of
working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential.
Editors can talk you through an idea and a paragraph, they can see a bigger
picture very well and reflect it back. Good
editors 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 dislodging
even deeper, clearer words. Most writers have very rude inner-editors—sometimes
they’re too harsh, or too lazy, or too noisy—and professional editors can
intervene in the scuffles that sometimes break out between a writer and their
inner-editor.
What is the best piece of
advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
At this
point—and I’m hoping to have another couple of decades to decide—three things
come to mind. Never say ‘I told you so.’ Shake off despair. Love your own
space.
What kind of writing
routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day
(for you) begin?
My days
begin 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 hand
all the time for ideas that come to me during the busy days. Sometimes my creative
self really wants all my attention at an impossible moment, and notes are one
way I can notice thoughts that become essays later on. For me, there’s usually at
least one long walk in the woods—preferably through snow drifts--literally, before
I write a final draft.
When your writing gets
stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)
inspiration?
I re-read
my favorite authors, re-read their language, some in translation, that I know thrills
me—like the prose of Polish author Bruno Schulz. Just reading a paragraph or a
few sentences by Schulz in his collections Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of The Hourglass, his ecstatic flights of mythic imagination, and I know
I’m back in touch with the physical, swooning feeling of a meaningful relationship
with language. I need to push myself to fall back in love with words. And
walking through an art gallery, seeing the
fabulous ways that visual artists speak through images can get creative energy
moving again too, light some spark.
What was your last
Hallowe'en costume?
I think I
was a mouse with big furry ears. Or maybe I was a Frosted Flakes Cereal box. And
I was a child, I should add. In actuality, not in costume.
If you could pick any other
occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you
would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
If I hadn’t
become a writer, I would have been a singer. I grew up in a family of musicians
and 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 opera
singer in my family, and a sax player, and two light opera singers, and two
pianists. Someone was always in rehearsal or dashing for a show or a gig or a concert
or a lesson. Growing up, I loved listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone,
Judy Garland, Blossom Dearie--all those fantastic female voices. Singing is
emotional and physical, a full body workout in a way that writing—in my
experience—isn’t, so I hope singing is my life and career in the multi-verse.
What made you write, as
opposed to doing something else?
Words are
natural companions and I love them all for it.
What was the last great
book you read? What was the last great film?
I’ve read
a lot of wonderful books in the past months—The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk, The
Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Michael Ondaatje’s new poetry volume, A Year of Last Things, Carol Mavor’s book of essays about objects
and art, Serendipity. I finally read The Invention of Morel by Alfred Bioy Casares and was amazed by its imaginative structure and pathos. I think Edward
Berger’s 2022 version of All Quiet on the
Western Front is a great film.
What would you like to do
that you haven't yet done?
Swim with
a dolphin. Play fiddle in an Irish pub. See the stained-glass windows of Notre
Dame. Hug a collie puppy. Sip champagne in a Prague café. Meet Edgar Allan Poe
and have a long chat with him about hypnagogic visions. Learn how to throw a
pot, blow glass, play the cello, speak Gaelic, sing harmony without effort,
grow roses, climb an apple tree, waltz with someone who really knows how to
waltz, live near a country church, see the Northern Lights from a fjord, and
grow old happily.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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