It is a body, wrecked and then stitched together with words. Feel free to disassemble it, rearrange it, make it yours. – “Portrait of a Body in Wreckages”
“Portrait of a Body in Wreckages” is much more than a silhouette of it’s author, more than the form and parts of a human specimen. It’s a graceful dissection of the experience of a body in the world. Winner of Newfound’s 2017 Prose Prize, Meghan McClure’s fragmented essay is a collection of autobiographical vignettes that offers readers intimate rumination, allowing us to feel our own bodily landmarks and signposts through its careful illumination of how the physical intertwines with the rest.
It’s a well-balanced piece; the meta sections are visceral and grounded in the sensory, but the anecdotal sections are especially powerful. It’s a chapbook in which you can easily be absorbed.
I had the honor of probing deeper into the chapbook and it’s author:
Delaney Kochan: “Portrait of a Body in Wreckages” is broken into four sections that appeared to me as two relationships between seemingly opposite ideas: place and white space or potential; communion and isolation in the body. How did the manuscript divide into these sections?
Meghan McClure: After a couple years of collecting the fragments and research that make up this book I started to see some threads running through, so I sort of teased them apart and grouped them to find the commonalities. Of course, these things are at the ends of a continuum and can overlap, but it was a way of sorting what felt chaotic to me. I find comfort in organizing things and writing is no different – it helped the enormity of writing about the body feel a little more manageable. Isn’t that what we do when we write? Try to boil it down?
Kochan: My first experience with fragmented essay was reading “The Balloonist” by Eula Bliss. Reading it was like exploring the thread-web of a detective map. Following the thread with my finger, I could only see the next piece when I had arrived at it, only finding the map readable at the end. It created a way for me to view the many surfaces of a topic. It allowed the mundane to tell it’s ordinary story with sufficient weight. What is it about the fragmented essay that made it the right medium for your portrait?
McClure: Oh what a great book and what a beautiful description of reading it! Everyone should go read that book! I think what leads me to the fragmented form is the same thing that makes me watch an intense movie with my hands by my face. I want to be prepared to look away or to only partially watch through my fingers or to plug my ears when things get to be too much.
After a particularly big surgery a few years ago I knew that the scar was going to be big and grotesque for a while and when they first took off the bandages I couldn’t look at it. I would try and would instead pull the hospital blankets up higher or glance at the nearby skin that hadn’t been cut or I’d look at it with my eyes barely open so I saw it as a blur, not the actual thing, but what I could manage of it. Writing this book was much like that. Everything in slow pieces. And it would have been dishonest to write it as anything other than fragments.
Kochan: Abuse, miscarriage, and disease are all things you reveal in your body’s history. Could you address the violence and rejection that occurs in the body and why this portrait was done from view of wreckages? Does it have to do with the way you discuss pain? You write, “Pain reminds me of the space I take up. Without pain, the body becomes invisible.”
McClure: As long as I can remember, and even before I can remember, my relationship with my body has been one of distrust. I was born with medical issues and spent a long childhood sick, in out of doctor’s offices and hospitals, comparing my body to those of friends and classmates, and so I don’t know another way of viewing the body.
This book became a sort of reckoning with that. Of trying to find the ways that has influenced how I interact with the world. It also feels like my way of trying to forgive my body. Of trying to write through finding a more whole view of a body that up to this point I’ve only looked at in pieces. That is a complicated and tense assignment, one that only happens in bits here and there.
It would be dishonest for me not to include the fact that I wrote this when my daughter was a toddler and the only time I had was very pieced together and much of this was written in a few minutes during naps, after she was in bed for the night and I wasn’t too exhausted, when I could get her occupied with Play-Doh for a few minutes. So, emotionally and practically this was set up to be in fragments.
Kochan: As I read, I began to think of the body as a communication tool. Does the body’s existence indicate we are meant to be in relationship to others?
McClure: I absolutely believe that we are meant to be in relationship to others. Even in all its failings and pain and awkwardness, I’ve always been grateful that my body allows me to be in communication with so many other wonderful bodies. Even if it isn’t physical touch, our bodies convey so much. The way a friend pulls on her shirt when she is overwhelmed, the smell of a newborn’s head, the way a child chews their fingernails when they are sorting through new emotions, the way I dodge eye contact at all costs, the sound of a stranger humming a happy little off-key tune. It is all our bodies interacting. And isn’t that beautiful?
Kochan: In the text I found an interesting dichotomy of bodies not being singular, but also belonging to self. Can you share more about the body’s relationship to others? I was particularly caught by of the powerful image of you holding your daughter, wishing to “never divide like cells.”
McClure: Becoming a parent taught me, more than anything else, how the body can come to belong to so many others. I became a place of rest and comfort and a playground and a safe zone. My daughter used playing with my hair as a way of calming herself. My other daughter rubs my earlobes. In so many ways we became one, but I am profoundly aware of how that oneness will end, yet be held in their bodies forever. It made me consider all the bodies that make up my body: my parents, my brothers, lovers, doctors, dear friends, etc
Of course these things all look different. Some are safe, comfortable places and some were my introduction to violence and the way bodies can harm each other, but all of them make up the way I interact with my own body and the world around me.
Kochan: Do you view the body as inheritance? As our right as humans? Some of the facts you shared about the body are incredible: how many scents your nose can remember, how many blood cells exist and perish in the body. Tell me about the kind of research you conducted to complete this piece and where your desire to study it emerged from.
McClure: One beautiful side-effect of spending so much time in hospitals or in bed sick as a child is that I had access to all this wonderful information about the body, experts to answer my questions, and plenty of time to read. I’ve always used facts as a way to find my place in this world, finding a way to be okay with things that seem too big. So, I’ve been researching this book forever. But I did a lot of re-researching to make sure I wasn’t just storing lies in my head. And sometimes I was! I had to recalibrate some things I thought about the world because I’d misremembered facts.
I don’t know if these bodies are our right as humans, but it is most certainly a gift to live in a body that replaces its stomach lining every three days and can withstand acid that can break down aluminum foil!
Kochan: The piece opens: “The body is the first landscape. The first place one knows. The first place one leaves, returns to again, leaves” And later you write, “‘My wound is geography.’ And this is my way of saying, I am a place. Come visit, stay, inhabit.” When did you start seeing the body as geography? How did that language alter your thinking of body?
McClure: I love this question! I hadn’t looked at this way but I think you are spot on. By putting myself at the head of this exploration I gave myself a freedom to explore areas I hadn’t before. It gave me a power that I didn’t have alone in my head.
It was easier to parse through all of the information on the page because it felt official, in a way, to map, as you say. And mapping is important. Before I sat down to write this book this sort of thinking about my own body felt self-indulgent, but in giving myself the task of pinning down the boundaries and barriers and landscapes that make up who I am, I was able to name more clearly which felt less self-indulgent and more human.
I think I’ve seen the body as geography from the moment I was 12 and in the library and found books that explained to me trauma and the body and the stories we all carry. This is my shout-out to libraries and the way they save lives.
Kochan: In the Spaces section you write, “To believe your body doesn’t matter is a form of suicide. A form I’ve attempted time and again.” Can you tell me more about the conflict of living in a body and the trauma it causes?
McClure: Our bodies fail constantly. And sometimes I want nothing more than to quit the body and live as an unencumbered mind.
When I was younger I wasn’t quite aware enough of it to say it that way so I would just not eat or I would drink too much or do the things so many of us do to escape. Every day is a reckoning to live in the body. To truly inhabit it and not just tolerate it.
I think as someone who lives with a chronic illness and other medical issues I am acutely aware of my body and have to work hard to stay present with it, to not forsake it when I feel cut off from it. In “Detailing Trauma: A Poetic Anatomy,” Arianne Zwartjes writes something that has stayed with me for a very long time and answers this question better than I ever could:
“I think it’s the persistence that captivates us. The way a heart will actually restart itself if stopped. Sinoatrial node flashing bright little codes, sparks of imperturbable hope, electrical impulses to beat and live and keep on.
The ability to keep generating fresh hope amidst the din. Amidst a landscape that overwhelms. Hospitals & ambulances. Car window shatter & crumpled metal. Breakups, divorces. Thinning skin and the gradual erosion of memory.
To keep on inexplicably and despite the pressing weight, the dread. Stubborn, refusing defeat: if only I had half the determination my heart has. Half the grit, little round bundle of feist and fearless.”
Kochan: One of my favorite lines in the piece: “The body, all of it, an instrument of empathy—” This is such a gentle way of viewing the body, especially in comparison to the violence you discuss. How did you come to this conclusion?
McClure: My first memories are made of this. I remember my mother with me through every illness, every painful procedure. Her body would reflect my pain. She would grimace with me, she would cry with me, she would stand up to rough doctors for me. She held space for my suffering. Her willing presence in the face of so much pain taught me that the body can and should hold space for others. We store our memories in our body and my memories of pain are intricately knit together with my mother’s empathy. All of this fills with me with so much gratitude it tips the scale away from despair. I want everyone to have that feeling.
Kochan: Accompanying the book, you’ve created a companion website. What are the collages meant to impress upon readers? What experience or understanding do you hope to create by offering these readings and visuals?
McClure: As a parent, sort of anxious, and crowd-averse person I don’t get to readings often. And I know there are a million reasons people can’t get to them, even when they want to. I was hoping to make an open and accessible place for readers to interact with the book and hear short readings from it.
I’ve also always been interested in the process of other writers and tend to be a very visual person, so I wanted to share the way I worked through writing this book which was kind of a visual smorgasbord of old records, science books, art, quotes, and these old anatomy flashcards I’ve had since high school. And I really wanted to compile literature about the body and the ways it fails us – that was very important to me. This is something I wish I had years and years ago and I hope that it helps someone else along the way.
Kochan: What do you mean by the concluding line: “To be touched and not know: that is the meaning of the body”?
McClure: The body is a mystery. Add other bodies to the equation and it goes deeper than mystery. There is so much we don’t know, will never know. There are so many ways we are touched and don’t realize how it effects us. There are so many ways we touch and never know how far the tremors go in another. No matter how close any two people are, there is always space between them.
No matter how well your body works, it will die. That’s where the mystery is. The beauty. We contain so much unknown. The body is a container for the unknown.
“Portrait of a Body in Wreckages” is available now at Newfound.
Delaney Kochan is a poet and essayist published in Under the Gum Tree, Ruminate, Red Clay, and other literary magazines. She served as Managing Editor of The Forager, a lifestyle magazine, and now writes for the online city guide, My Colorado Springs and various online publications in addition to Newfound. Find her work at www.delaneykochan.com
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