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?