An Inquiry of Place
Jen Soriano is a Filipinx-American writer whose work blurs the boundaries between nonfiction, poetry and speculative fiction. Her chapbook “Making the Tongue Dry” was a finalist for the Newfound Prose Prize. Her lyric essay “A Brief History of her Pain” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her essays have appeared in a number of journals including Waxwing, Pleiades and TAYO Literary Magazine. Jen is an MFA candidate in nonfiction and fiction at the Rainier Writing Workship, and lives in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, WA with her two favorite boys in the world.
I’m learning to kick that controlling brain to the backseat and just let instinct allow words to tumble onto the page. – Jen Soriano
Eppinger: My first question is about genre. What do you consider the genre of “Making the Tongue Dry” to be? Elliptical prose? Creative Nonfiction? Something else? Also—does genre matter to you?
Soriano: Genre definitely matters to me, but not in the conventional sense. I care about the ways genre descriptions can work to help readers understand what they are reading. But I don’t care about genre as a rigid container that writers must fit our writing within.
So, to help readers understand my chapbook I guess I’d describe it as lyric essay and hybrid nonfiction. It’s important to me to name that it’s nonfiction because I’m deliberately trying to capture actuality on the page. Each essay in the chapbook grapples with an aspect of reality as I see it.
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?