Lee Zacharias: Neither of us started out as essayists, though we’ve each published books of essays before. I came to nonfiction from fiction, and though I know you’ve written fiction, you come to nonfiction primarily from poetry. My first book was a collection of short stories, yours the marvelous volume of poetry Green Stars. For me, there is never a question about genre. Like every writer, I have borrowed small details from my life for fiction—a linoleum rug, whoosh of weather stripping, or broken pipe—but my fiction is not autobiographical, and so when I want to write about a particular person or memory, I automatically turn to nonfiction. I’m not interested in what happens next—I already know—but in the why and what it means. I’m interested in experience not as plot but as metaphor, and even though I don’t write poetry, can’t imagine achieving that kind of compression, I consider writing an essay closer to the process of writing poetry than fiction. As a poet, how do you know or decide whether your material is going to take the form of a poem or an essay?
Charlotte Matthews: I use metaphorical dowsing rods and find if the well to be drilled is shallow or deep, if it needs room to expand and widen (essay) or if it can be contained on a single page (poem), For example, my friend, who is a surgeon, told me yesterday that the hardest part is knowing when not to cut. For me, that is a poem. It has a clear metaphor and will flourish if contained. However, when I was eight I waited a long time to see King Tut when he came to DC. That is an essay, the waiting in line, all the mummified objects, all the gold. And how little of it I understood at the time. And still do now.
LZ: How much of that decision is instinct and how much conscious choice?
CM: I think it’s subconscious.
LZ: Do you try one form then switch to the other with a particular experience or subject?
CM: Yes. Sometimes I write about the same topic in both genres and see which one floats.
LZ: When I think about the distinction between poetry and essay, I recall Gertrude Stein’s essay “On Poetry and Grammar.” Stein asserts that poetry has everything to do with the noun and prose with the verb. Obviously her distinction doesn’t strictly hold up; yet something at its core speaks to me. Do you think essays, even longer ones like those in Remember Me, all of which are narrative, though the narrative in the last is buried, have a nominative quality in common with poetry? That is, does something in the essay and the poem summon the nominative, the naming, the defining of a person, place, or experience, in a way that novels, short stories, and the narrative arc of a book-length memoir do not?
CM: I do think so. I am reminded of Plath’s assertion: “If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand.” In that closed, concentrated fist we hold something exacting, something fastidious, that cannot be let meander the pages of novel or story.
LZ: A novelist is confined to the world her novel creates for however long it takes to finish, and I’m a slow writer. I think that’s why I found the form of the essay so liberating. You can go here or there—nothing is out of reach. But then when I try to put a collection together, I discover I’ve gone too many places for a book to cohere. Assembling Remember Me was a matter of subtraction—of removing every essay that wasn’t driven by the memory of one character, and I took out more than I left in. Our books are so different, mine with four longer pieces, yours with many short ones, and I love your title! I love the notion of being able to write about everything, especially in its brilliance, and I’m awed by the way you set up a theme of “everything” in your earlier memoir in essays, Comes with Furniture and Children, in the memory that opens and closes that book: sitting in a loveseat wedged against your mother, who is reading to you from your great-aunt Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder: “If I had influence over the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to all children in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last through life, as an unfailing antidote against the alienation from the sources of our strength.” It almost seems as if hearing those words gave you the freedom that allows for “everything”; that sense of wonder and attention holds the book together. It’s very much an “eye” book, a book of marveling observation. Do you think one could assemble a collection of longer essays that attempted to encompass that span of attention? Or does “everything” require brevity?
CM: What a compelling question. I do think it possible for longer essays to encompass that kind of attention. What comes to mind is the work of novelist William Maxwell, who pays such fine attention to detail particularly in They Came Like Swallows. With stunning observations like “Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love,” he gives texture and smell and transports us through time and space.
LZ: I love Maxwell’s novels—They Came Like Swallows, The Folded Leaf, and So Long, See You Tomorrow–which are sometimes described as memoirs. Again and again he returns to the loss of his mother in the flu pandemic of 1918, each time with such evocative precision we are indeed transported. But there is that unifying memory, and perhaps as the time he calls us back to grows more distant for the reader, even time and place offer a thematic coherence. Or maybe it’s the longing that is made so intense by his observations. He says it right.
CM: How do you feel after you have written something you feel says it right?
LZ: Since I usually manage to say something right only after first having said it wrong in more ways than I can count, I suppose one thing I feel is relief. It’s like slipping through a doorway just before the door slams shut—whew! You made it! For a moment the world seems brighter, as if I’ve been looking through a pair of smudgy glasses and only now wiped the lenses clean. How do you feel when that happens?
CM: It feels like I do after a long run like have given it my all, every ounce of effort and it’s time to stretch and have a tall glass of water, like all is right with the world.
LZ: Oh yes, the stretch, though for me maybe the stretch comes first. There’s a feeling of peace flooding through my body, akin to the sensation one has after practicing yoga.
CM: Do you have a topic, or three, that you keep returning to? A particular moment or person who peoples your work a great deal?
LZ: I think less in terms of topic than in terms of the driving force, the engine for my work, if you will. I’m a photographer as well as a writer, and all my life I’ve been torn between the visual and the verbal. You can see the influence of photography in my writing in that I am always hyper-aware of the light. But only recently have I been able to verbalize the deeper source of that conflict. A photograph stops time, freezes the moment, bestows a kind of eternity on it; whereas the sine qua non of prose is that time passes. Time may be fractured, rearranged, or a moment parsed at an exquisitely slow pace—I think of Virginia Woolf in that regard—nevertheless writer and reader are aware that time moves. Even in memory the direction is ultimately forward, and we all have a shuddering knowledge of the final destination time holds for us. I suspect I am drawn to the essay not just because of the sense of freedom it allows but also because its nominative quality has a way of soothing that innermost war.
How you would answer the same question? Are there topics you return to? A person who reappears in your work?
CM: Yes, it is my mother. In the most important ways she is immutable, still on the couch in what she would call her “sitting room” with the paisley couch. That is where all important decisions were made. With magnetic pull, I am drawn to include her in my work. Her no-nonsense manner, her affinity for reading and language, her open mind accompanies me. Even though she died 26 years ago, she’s still very much alive to me.
LZ: I’m struck by your connection of the couch to important decisions, for if that couch is the same loveseat where she read to you those words by Rachel Carson, it would seem as if the decision for you to become a writer was subconsciously made there. And I too would name my mother; I feel her presence in all my work, though it’s not always a positive one. Not only does she often appear in my nonfiction, she influences my fiction. The greatest sorrow of her life was that her mother died when mine was still too young to have formed a memory of her. The narrator of my novel Across the Great Lake, whose story is not mine or my mother’s, cannot remember her mother, who died when she was five. That was not the spark for the novel, but it’s there, and it’s there because my subconscious put it there. My mother was a narcissist, and that’s one example of the way she manages to insert herself even when the story isn’t about her.
CM: Share your writing practice. Where do you write? When do you write? Do you keep a journal?
LZ: My practice is haphazard. I don’t keep a journal, though I do keep a meticulous engagement calendar on which I record what I did each day, even the weather, and those calendars have been an invaluable resource for my nonfiction. Oddly, I will sometimes come across a name from long ago and have no clue who that person was, no memory of event; other times no more than a word will bring back an experience so acutely that I am catapulted over decades, again standing in a warm slant of slight in the kitchen of an apartment, address unknown, peeler in my hand, making potatoes au gratin. I don’t write every day, though I’m far more disciplined when I’ve really got a book going or a deadline—I’m good at meeting deadlines, and so I find them very useful. But I’ve never been that person who gets up before dawn to squeeze an hour of writing in before life takes over. I write best in the afternoons—I put it off; I have to work my way in, and of course what that means is that life often takes over before I reach my desk. I can jot notes anywhere, but because I write prose and began at a typewriter, I compose even my first fumbling paragraphs at a keyboard. I’m not one of those writers who treasures the handwritten draft. To me, there is nothing inherently more holy about a word or phrase that began in pencil on the pages of a beautiful notebook than one that first saw light by way of a 12 point Times-Roman font. Nature photographers like to say no one cares how many mountains you climbed or alligators you wrestled to get the picture; the only thing that matters is the picture. I feel that way about writing, but I’m married to someone who writes every morning, and the practice is so important to him I sometimes feel like a slacker and have to remind myself that it doesn’t matter when I do it or how I do it; the only thing that matters is whether I do it. The text of the manuscript I’m working on now, a memoir that, yes, involves my mother, includes a lot of old family photographs and letters penned by my father in 1941. They were not composed with the bed of an 8.5 x 11 scanner in mind, which means I’ve spent a lot of time photoshopping and formatting instead of writing. Not all writing is actually writing. Some of it is thinking or observing or even unconsciously absorbing, what Grace Paley liked to call “sitting in a chair and staring like a dope” time. So in that sense maybe I do write every day. We all do if we’re writers, whether a word actually makes to paper on any given day or not.
I once wrote an essay titled “Geography for Writers” about the places where various writers have written—the most intense memories I have of working on my books are not of inspirations or internal struggles but visceral, the grain of the wood on a desk, the braille-like bumps on the backing sheet with its thick black line for the bottom margin from the days of the typewriter, the ding of the carriage return, a hoop of light from a dented gooseneck lamp. The physical process is a subject of enormous interest to me, the rooms we occupy in order to go somewhere else. Can you share your writing practice? Where do you write? And do you keep a journal?
CM: I set an old-fashioned kitchen timer, turn off all electronics, and write in my journal for a half hour every day. And some days that’s all I do. However, on the ones I have time, I go to one of my files (I categorize my drafts: A file: Raw. B file: ready to go in the oven. C file: Baking. D file: Ready to share with a reader for feedback. E file: ready to send out) and, depending on my mood, I work on a raw piece and graduate it to ready to bake or a baking piece and graduate it to ready to share with a reader.
I write most anywhere: waiting in line at the DMV is a particularly good place because you never know when your number will be called and there’s so much to eavesdrop on. I write as a passenger in the car. Because I don’t trust I’ll remember a gem when it comes to me, I make sure to write it down.
LZ: Oh, I can see that timer and hear it tick. And now I’m sorry I renewed my driver’s license online. Life seems to demand more and more business, and so much of it is online it seems as if opportunities for writers to eavesdrop are shrinking. Over the years a lot of lines I’ve overhead have found their way into my novels. I need to start sitting in coffee shops with a notepad.
Thank you so much for sharing your practice and your thoughts about writing in general and the essay and poetry in particular.
