CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT: INTERVIEW WITH
CHELSEA BIONDOLILLO

The Nonfiction Editors, Rappahannock Review: In your piece, “WIND: a fugue,” the geography of Wyoming plays a prominent role. What do you find inspiring about the plains?
 
Chelsea Biondolillo: The plains both amaze and terrify me. I grew up in the piney, rainy, mountainous climate of the Pacific Northwest. A low cloud line and a tall tree line often obstructed my view of the horizon—except on the Coast. When I look out over certain Wyoming landscapes, I imagine the inland sea that once crested here, and in this way, though I’m as far from the ocean as I can be in the US, I feel some sense of familiarity. The familiarity has bred a lot of introspection about my past. I find that strange and amazing—that the rolling yellow hills can conjure up moments from my green, jagged childhood.
 
But all this space all the time, and the wind screaming across it like a banshee—I’ve never been agoraphobic, but there’s something to the sense of “nowhere to hide” that makes the plains terrifying, too. This landscape doesn’t inspire a survival instinct, it requires it. You confront your limitations pretty quickly out here, and you either overcome them or are sunk. This “life or death” quality that the environment sometimes embodies has lent urgency to my introspection, a quickening of my lazy thoughts, which has been conducive to writing.
 
RR: Wind is a natural elemental force, while a fugue is a very intentional compositional technique in multiple voices. How do you connect these two seemingly disparate things?
 
CB: There are two primary definitions of the word fugue: the first is musical, “a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts;” the second is from the field of psychiatry, “a state or period of loss of awareness of one’s identity, often coupled with flight from one’s usual environment.”
 
Both of these definitions are useful to me in reference to the essay. The wind as a natural element is both destructive and creative, in that it changes the environments in which it occurs. It is this “phrase” or concept, that of changing one’s landscape, that I take up and develop through the different tableaux in the piece. People change landscapes, cows change landscapes, oceans, memories, intention—all change landscapes. But also, this second idea—that we can lose our grasp on our identity, and that this loss can be triggered by the physical or emotional landscape in which we find ourselves, this is an idea that I have wrestled with in my writing. I only hint at it here, in the idea that our internal landscapes are just as constructed as our external, and therefore subject to subjectivity.
 
Like the wind, we move through spaces, and change them, so too does our mind move through our memories and change their meanings. That might be a bit of a stretch—but it’s the idea I was aiming at.
 
RR: What drew you to Rappahannock Review?
 
CB: Initially, rumor. But after the strong showing of the first couple of issues, I decided that the journal was engaging in a dialogue that I wanted to be a part of—the quality and breadth of the pieces were inspiring. I am so pleased for the opportunity to participate in and among its pages.
 
RR: If you had the power to control the wind, what would you do with it?
 
CB: I would make more city music by whistling through eaves and alleys, and echoing around the canyons made by brick and glass buildings. There is no reason that only those who choose to live in the middle of nowhere should know the sound of the wind’s voice so well.
 
I’d also figure out a way for the wind to turn smaller blades with the same efficiency of large ones—so that our turbines could keep generating electricity without risking harm to so many birds.
 
RR: What’s next for you?
 
CB: I’m working on a non-fiction manuscript about vultures that blends science, travel, and memoir into some kind of love song.

“WIND: a fugue” appears in Rappahannock Review Issue 1.3.
 
Chelsea Biondolillo is originally from Portland, Oregon, and currently lives in Wyoming. Her prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, Fourth River, Passages North, River Teeth, Diagram, and others. She has an MFA from the University of Wyoming in creative writing and environmental studies, and is, right now, probably thinking about vultures.