Author T Kira Madden on making art a place of safety

Recently I was thinking about the difference between a long book and a short book, and whether there are writers or periods in a writer’s life when they’re more sensitive to silence versus feeling more of a sensitivity or desire for abundance? Do you have thoughts on that, having written two expansive books, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls and Whidbey?

I can’t say that I can speak to the writing of a short book. It’s something I admire so much. I recently read Quiara Alegria Hudes’ The White Hot, which is maybe 150 pages, and just wonderful. I love the fever burn of a short book that one might be able to read in a single sitting. That said, I’m not sure I could ever write it. It’s interesting, I guess, because I went from short fiction, specifically an interest in “flash” fiction, wanting to achieve some sort of arc or emotional impact in as little space as possible. In grad school I was obsessed with Grace Paley and Lydia Davis and Daniil Kharms, Calvino, wondering, “How can that be achieved in 100 words, 500 words?”

After writing for many years, my mind started changing from, “How do I shut the door,” to, “How do I build something with 1,000 doors opening?” Both Long Live and Whidbey are longish books, over 350 pages, but they were much longer before the editorial process. Whidbey was a monster of a book. It was, in some iterations, 800 pages, a giant. And with Long Live, there were maybe hundreds, if not thousands of vignettes that were cut. I like writing into, in your words, the feeling of abundance or boundlessness, and then only through the editorial process can I trim down and see what’s needed. Sometimes it’s a logistical need, and sometimes it’s a nonsense one… a scene or image or darling that simply must remain, beyond narrative sense. I believe in trusting those.

I haven’t yet had that idea or distinct voice or clear through line to write a shorter, full-length project. That’s usually where my stories live, where there’s that single door I want to walk through. But in terms of the full-length book, it has to feel like building a whole house around myself. I’m also a really slow writer and I have to investigate this hallway and that hallway and this voice and that possibility. The process of discovery and exploration is a long, important part of the process for me.

When you say you’re a slow writer, would you say that’s because you allow yourself to venture off and write into this abundance or because you’re careful with every sentence?

It’s all the above, I think. My process is I write the first draft of anything on a typewriter, and I then transcribe page by page, scene by scene, onto a computer. The typewriter draft goes relatively quickly… I can’t get so caught up in a sentence. I can’t get caught up in editing or correcting because I have no ability to do so, so I just have to keep moving forward. If I have to write the sentence five different ways, I’ll do that one after the other, riffing with lower stakes. But then I go back and transcribe line by line. When I see those five sentences that I wrote in different ways, I have to then make decisions. “What’s the best, truest version of the line? What’s the most sonically pleasing? Is this line good enough to transcribe? Is this whole scene or stack of pages, are they good enough to transcribe?” Then, after years, I have my first draft on the computer.

The process itself takes a long time and I’m very purposeful about that. I want every line on my computer to be one that I’ve already rewritten, edited, worked through.

I was recently listening to an interview with writer Emily LaBarge who said, of writing her book on living with and writing about trauma, that she was “allergic to the idea of there being one single narrative about it.” And in your first ever newsletter you said, “I’ve always wanted every book I ever try to write to be the most difficult project I can imagine. […] with Whidbey, I hope I’ve been able to capture that essence of impossibility.” I love the idea that a writer’s grit comes through in the text. Can you say more about that essence of impossibility and how it lives in the novel?

However one feels about this book or this story, I think it would be difficult for a reader to say that this is not a very ambitious book in its form alone. It’s three sections, it’s polyphonic, there are many characters—over 100, actually—and it spans a great deal of time.

The first and second parts are [told] in first person and third person, free indirect discourse, the third part is an omniscient narrator. It’s not me narrating, but omniscience in the old school way… like a Russian novel narrated omnisciently by the town gossip or unknown godly voice, but one with personality, attitude. There’s also mixed media within the book. There are emails, podcast transcripts, intake medical forms, and an advertisement appears in the middle of the book. So I think looking at it, I related to Emily LaBarge’s quote. Whidbey is a book with almost too many narrators and narratives as a central concept.

I wanted to take that concept and drive it into a place of absurdity; there are so many ways of consuming a story. So I wanted to challenge a reader with, “What voice do you believe? What version of a story through this game of telephone becomes reliable or good enough for you?” I think the sheer number of perspectives and points of view and storylines is what I was getting at with that essence of impossibility, the impossibility of ever getting a story right. I suppose all my work is concerned with that.

This book feels like that game of telephone where stories are told and then distorted, transfigured, malformed. I think it’s a challenging book and it might be an uncomfortable one for that reason. I really wanted a reader to feel invited into these questions of complicity and witness. There’s a way in which, without giving too much away, I want a reader to make certain judgments and have a certain experience before having the rug pulled out from beneath them over and over again, because that’s what it feels like for me to have moved through the criminal justice system as both someone who works inside correctional facilities and also someone who has moved through it as a survivor up to a federal trial in a case like this. There’s a way in which the stories continue to shift based on agenda, timing, or who’s telling them.

That is beautiful. It’s the paradox of a book. A book existing while being impossible, the impossible book.

I love a book where I feel like I’m being told a story. That can be so rewarding and comforting, to be told a straightforward story or to have a really good time, to feel situated and trusting of the narrator or author who’s moving you through the dream of it. But with this particular book, I didn’t want that. I wanted it to be an experience* *rather than something one could comfortably sit outside of.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a revelation I had when I was in college. I was reading a story by the great, great writer, Nicholas Montemarano. It was called “Shift” and it was about this unrelenting, difficult shift, double shift?, of a caretaker.

It’s a long story and I remember it being exhausting and nauseating and dizzying, and I remember throwing the book down after reading it. I came to class like a smart ass in college, like, “This was exhausting, this was so unenjoyable. Where’s the pleasure?” And I can’t remember if it was the instructor or another student who said, “But isn’t that a reflection of the experience of caretaking, that feeling of total stupefying exhaustion?” I had this revelation, realizing that a book or a story wasn’t necessarily written for my enjoyment or pleasure. A book’s success for me, ever since, has been: is the story meeting the ambition of feeling, the experience that’s trying to be conveyed? Do I feel that anxiety, discomfort, pleasure, pain, or desire in my body? I mean, that’s transcendent.

How did you organize the work? How do you hold all of that in your head?

I always only have a few things that I hold loosely, because otherwise I’ll just spin out into oblivion. With this book, I knew I wanted three parts, and I knew I wanted to play with perspective. That was kind of the main structural goal. I wanted it to be a book that explored aftermath of trauma, not leading up to a climactic traumatic event being the harm of young girls, because we have those stories everywhere. That is the structure of true crime. I didn’t want that.

I knew I wanted the two parts moving between characters. And I knew in the third part, I wanted to explore the whodunnit at the core (who killed the abuser in the story), but I also wanted to problematize that conceit. So those basic ideas had been outlined since the very beginning. But that’s really all I knew. Then it was just writing and writing and writing. Again, cutting scenes that felt like they weren’t serving the central questions or concerns of the book. And then honestly, just other readers, great editors, great friends who have been patient enough to read this book over many years.

I can’t say I’m good at doing that work alone. Other people help me see it, refine it, identify the shapes behind all the noise.

I want to ask you about genre. You’ve said you have a relative indifference to it. But I was intrigued by what you said in an interview with Jonathan Fields a few years ago: “From a craft perspective, saying for instance, I am committing to memoir is important because it opens a completely different dialogue and interaction with the world.” Can you talk about how you create a relationship to genre that is open and generative rather than limiting?

Often when I talk about a dismissal of genre, it’s because I believe fiercely that we should be working from the same toolbox. I really resent when people assume that nonfiction, for example, doesn’t require the same crafting as fiction in terms of building character or scenes. Nonfiction requires great imagining, recreating to the best of our abilities, transcribing a dream, which is the same as fiction. You have to immerse a reader in that dream and you have to have the same care for craft and sentences.

We should, I hope, also have the same care for our lines as the poet. You know what I can’t stand, is when a work of prose that’s beautifully composed is called “prose poetry.” No, it’s just prose the way it should be, that is, writing that cares about writing.

I learn by reading across genres. I learn from screenplays as well. How do I just get through a scene? Specifically, I think plays and screenplays teach me so much about transitions. Sequencing. How do scenes and images bleed into each other, inform each other?

We should all be learning across genres, but I do think there is power in naming what you’ve created, at least for me. I always try to honor what someone calls their work. Even if a text shares many autobiographical details with the author, I will never, ever call something auto-fiction or memoiristic, unless that writer has said on record, “This is based on my life. It is auto-fiction or memoir.”

It was important for me with Long Live to call it nonfiction. And in fact, it was important for me to do so because I wanted to challenge the assumptions of nonfiction. With Whidbey, it’s important for me to call it what it is, fiction, to have the work regarded and maybe respected as a work of fiction. Already I’ve seen it called auto-fiction, “mined from the writer’s life” or a hidden memoir, and I find that a little lazy. It’s based on my life to the degree that any person who’s writing a novel about the place they grew up, or a job they once had, is based on their life.

I’ve had the experience of being a survivor of child sex abuse, so that is a central concern. The opening scene of the novel depicts a scene and question that was really posed to me. But the story departs from there. New ambitions take over. It’s a different project to dream outside of one’s own psyche, to acknowledge our own narrative limitations.

No matter what genre, to commit words to a page is difficult. It’s a weird criticism.

And [auto-fiction] is its own entirely unique, beautiful pursuit. As both a reader and a writer I like regarding genre as its own challenge or question, a constraint that we might explode or reimagine. If someone calls a work a speculative memoir or a nonfiction novel I’m not here to figure out why that’s ill-fitting, I’m interested in learning about what’s possible within that form, that name you’ve given it; probably something I’ve never seen before.

The preface to your memoir begins: “For instance: the women.” There is a sense of eruption, to me, when I read that line, and I can’t help connect this to what you’ve said about starting to write it. You were at a residency to develop a novel, and in the process, resisting and resisting it, you finally allowed yourself to write what needed to be written rather than what you wanted to be written. With Whidbey being your “impossible book”—how did you think about the difficulty of writing it? How do you tell when resistance is pointing you away from what is necessary, versus when it’s simply the difficulty of the subject or project?

The first thing I’ll say to your great question is, it sounds so basic, but you have to simply be obsessed with something. The thing keeps gnawing at you or it doesn’t. I’m very much a believer in the voice in your head when you’re taking a long drive or taking a shower, or doing whatever menial tasks. That voice is the thing to follow, even if you have a plan to write something else that day. Go for the voice that you can’t get out of your head. Go for the heat. Once I’m obsessed, once I can’t stop hearing the mysterious thing, I follow it. Importantly, I have to not understand what it is, not have an answer or hypothesis or a political agenda. If it’s too neat and tidy and I already know the answer, that can’t be the project.

I guess the next question for myself is, would working on this make me feel unwell or sick to the degree where it wouldn’t be good for the living? There’s the writing and the living, and there have definitely been cases in which I’ve been obsessed and drawn to a project that I thought, “This would make a great book, but it would make the living feel impossible. I have to become the person I need to be to write this in a healthy way, and that’s not today.”

Another major consideration is this: I know I’m a slow writer. And there’s the writing, then the possibility of publication, the runway to publication, and, if one is lucky, the ability to continue talking about the project after publication through events or readings or jobs. So a big question to me is, “Do I want to spend the next 5 to 10 to 15 years thinking about this topic? Learning about this, maintaining the obsession?”

Over the 8 years it took to write the novel, you gathered new information, did research, conducted interviews. Was there a point at which you decided you had everything you needed to finish? I imagine you could continue endlessly.

There’s something really comforting to me in at least attempting to intellectualize something that holds so much emotional charge or heat, or something that radiates pain. There’s comfort in identifying a function for that pain, trying to organize it or sequence it or research my way through it. The way, for me, when my father died, I was comforted by planning his funeral—it was something to control. And in fact, that was a theme that I wrote into Whidbey; the mother of the abuser becomes obsessed with planning his funeral. Because then you don’t have to stare at the thing that happened… someone has died and you’re suffering because of it.

However bleak the subject matter or how hot that center is, the practice of creating and art making is a place of safety for me. Like I said earlier, writing a book is like slowly building a house or shelter around myself, it slowly becomes a place I can live. A place to which I can return. I live there over my winter breaks, summer breaks, late at night, in difficult times, on my long drives. The project becomes a place of safety no matter what’s going on in the world, no matter how dark the material. I’m always totally stunned at how vulnerable and depressed I feel when I finish a book because I don’t have that psychic landing place anymore, I don’t have that shelter. I have to go out and gather sticks to build a new one.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jancie Creaney.