12 or 20 (second series) questions with Melora Wolff

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;