“Alpha Bet”: An interview with Jacqueline Kirkpatrick

“Alpha Bet,” a finalist for the 2018 Newfound Prose Prize and chapbook contest, is a memoir told in vignettes and peppered with cross-references like an index of pain in the narrator’s life. It is an intimate work, offering a reader much to process as they piece together a story. 

Author Jacqueline Kirkpatrick took the time to share a bit more with us about her process in creating “Alpha Bet”.

Delaney Kochan: One thing I love about how you wrote this piece is how clearly it teaches the power of sharing emotion by showing scene. When it appears easy, you know you’re reading a talented writer who’s crafted each sentence to be unencumbered with internal narration. What was your editing process like?

Jacqueline Kirkpatrick: It’s probably a terrible thing to admit, however, the most honest response I can offer is that I don’t edit much. One of the first writers I fell for was Jack Kerouac and not long after I started reading him I found the “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” I’ve been writing based on that method since. Most of my work is stream of conscious. I pop on headphones, queue up the tunes that bring back certain memories and I close my eyes. I’ve been lucky that it makes sense most of the time but I run the risk that it sounds absolutely bonkers. Those pieces stay safe and in the dark in the filing cabinet.

I almost never edit content.

“How to be Extraordinary in America”: An interview with Ploi Pirapokin

You know those moments when you’ve realized that even in your effort to be well-versed in something and deeply probe at it, you’ve been asking it the wrong questions the whole time? This is the effect reading Ploi Pirapokin’s essay, “How to be Extraordinary in America,” has.

A finalist for the 2018 Newfound Prose Prize chapbook contest, this piece details her experience of obtaining a “Genius Visa” so she could continue to live and write in the United States. She was gracious enough to chat with me more about her process and underlying beliefs on immigration and belonging.

Delaney Kochan: Tell me about the structure of the essay. Is there something significant about the number 82 or the way you chose to structure your piece?

Ploi Pirapokin: The essay is numbered to reflect the eligibility criteria to qualify for an O-1 visa, as though it were a checklist that needed to be ticked off once completed. I wanted the seemingly never-ending numbers to mimic the arduous process of waiting, and of constantly proving my worth as though it were easy as arithmetic—if I only did X, then I would get my visa; what do I lose when I do Y; what risks do I take if I do Z. 

“Portrait of a Body in Wreckages”: An Interview with Meghan McClure

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?