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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.

The title essay “Making the Tongue Dry” is a reflection on what I see to be the connections between capitalism and climate change. The essay “A Brief History of Her Pain” is an exploration of the centuries-long mistreatment of sick women and women healers.

I’d add “lyric” and “hybrid” to “essay” and “nonfiction” because although the chapbook is nonfiction, it’s not strictly nonfiction in the sense of reportage or even conventional memoir or essay. Judith Kitchen once wrote that for an essay to be lyric, there must be a lyre. I try to aspire to that sense of music in my nonfiction writing. And in terms of hybridity, the chapbook has moments of poetry, echoes of mythology, and quite a bit of speculation on possible new realities to come.

The point in this work is that living with humanity is a choice. Especially at a time like this… – Jen Soriano

Eppinger: The language used throughout this manuscript is fresh and immediate. Are your first drafts this alive? Wondering what your editing process is like, and if you have any advice to share on writing and/or editing.

Soriano: Thank you for saying so! I’m not sure I’d describe my first drafts as alive. More like … unruly.

I’ve worked with three mentors over the past three years—Julie Marie Wade, Kent Meyers and Barrie Jean Borich—who have all encouraged me to surrender to the freewrite of the first draft. That can be hard for me because I have kind of a controlling brain. But I’m learning to kick that controlling brain to the backseat and just let instinct allow words to tumble onto the page. The result is often pages upon pages of content that is less pleasantly meandering than it is a swampy, mucky, overflowing sort of primal goo.

So I guess my advice would be to restrain the thinking brain and allow your gut to exude onto the page. Then let that gut-goo sit for a few days or weeks before you climb back in and embrace it. Editing for me has felt like getting in all the way up to your hips and wading through the goo to fish out the gems.

Then I go to a corner away from the goo and hoard those gems; I start with them on a new blank page and try to follow their shine.

Eppinger: Big social issues come up in this manuscript—domestic violence, the creation of the atom bomb, the crisis in the lack of affordable housing and the drug trade are mentioned in Part 1, “Blow,” alone. Was it your intent to illuminate how implicated we all are in broader issues, or did they surprise you by creeping into your work?

Soriano: That was most definitely my intent, so I’m glad it came through. I’m delighted to hear your reflection on all the issues you saw come up in “Blow.” It’s interesting that you note the issue of domestic violence because that’s an example of an issue I didn’t intend to tackle, but that crept in because I was describing the actuality of what it was like to live below our landlord who also happened to be a druglord. In contrast, I did set out deliberately to juxtapose the creation of the atom bomb with the perpetuation of the drug trade to explore complicity in larger destructive cycles.

I would say I became a writer because of big social issues and so it follows that all of my writing will be about big social issues in some way. We are all shaped by and implicated in larger social issues, whether we realize it or not. And for me writing is a powerful tool to help us look at these issues in new ways.

There is so much wrong with this world that I have a deep desire to change, and writing about the need for change is one of the ways I can manage how painful it can be to be woke and moving through the world as a womxn of color. On the flipside of the same coin, writing on big issues is also one of my favorite ways to celebrate the power and resilience involved with moving through the world as a woke womxn of color.

Eppinger: I sense that this line in Part 2, “Making the Tongue Dry,” is a guidepost through the entire work: “Is this a natural human impulse? To desire bubbles even though they burst?” This project seems haunted by the need to pursue hope and beauty (an infant son is ever-present) even though the harsh world makes this seem futile. … Am I getting this right?

Soriano: Haunted is the perfect word. If there is any one thing that has driven this work, it is the haunting feeling I have as a new mother that I have an important role to play in setting examples for my son that will either encourage him to perpetuate harmful status quos, or encourage him to choose a different path. It’s a frightening sort of accountability.

And you’re right about the work exploring the twin impulses of destructiveness and the pursuit of beauty, and at the heart of this is hope for transformative change.

It’s not just the world that makes this scale of change futile, people make it seem futile. I mean, people often suck. Like what Gandhi supposedly said about how Western Civilization would be a good idea, it seems to me that humanity would be a good idea too.

The point in this work is that living with humanity is a choice. Especially at a time like this, when the government is growing increasingly sadistic, separating babies and toddlers from their parents, banning entire religious populations from entering the country, declaring open season for violent white racists, stripping women of the dignity to control our own bodies, we have to remember that we can still choose to live with integrity and to resist the currents that would have us throw our own humanity and others’ under the bus.

Eppinger: Finally, what are you working on now, and where can we get updates from you?

Soriano: I’m still looking for a publisher for the chapbook and have it circulating through a number of competitions. Speaking of hope, I’m still hopeful that I can land a press and get “Making the Tongue Dry” out there in the world!

I’m also working on turning my MFA thesis into a book manuscript. It’s about the human nervous system and how intergenerational trauma becomes imprinted in our nerves. My father was a neurosurgeon, and ironically I grew up with an altered nervous system which has recently been diagnosed as Central Sensitivity Syndrome, a hypersensitization of the central nervous system. In the book I trace this journey with my neurodivergent system back to impacts of Spanish, Japanese and American colonialism in the Philippines, and explore the ways that the science of neural plasticity and the research of Native American and Black American scholars can teach us lessons about how to reorganize society—toward no less than healing scars as deep as genocide, as deep as enslavement, as deep as cultural annihilation.

So yah, you know, just looking at some of the smaller social issues like that. Lightweight material.

I live for connection with readers so if folks want to connect, they can follow and message me on twitter or instagram @lionswrite or check out my website jensoriano.net.

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

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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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