CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Melissa Leigh Gibson

Rappahannock Review Nonfiction Editors: “Surviving Paris, Evermore” shifts back and forth between the present day and the past, and greatly shifts in emotion with each change; did you find it difficult to transition between each section?

Melissa Leigh Gibson: Yes, it was difficult—which is why I also chose to shift between verb tenses; that helped me navigate the shifts emotionally and temporally. I found that I couldn’t say what I wanted when I tried to write it all in a traditional past tense, and so the verb tense along with a “chunkier” approach to a braided essay allowed each time frame and emotion to stand on its own, without feeling like I had to necessarily resolve the tension or emotional dissonance.

RR: Taylor Swift’s tour makes up a good portion of the narrative, yet you mention that you yourself don’t care all too much about her music; was it hard, writing about something you had little knowledge about for such an important portion of the story? Also, why pick Evermore for the title?

MLG: While it’s true that just a short while ago, I did not care much for Taylor Swift’s music (dear god, I’m not sure I could have taken another round of “Look What You Made Me Do” from my daughter’s room), I have since developed a deep knowledge of Taylor Swift lore. This is mostly due to my daughter who, for months before the trip, rattled off facts and information on the daily, filling every car ride to and from school with a new song or a new tidbit or even a new call to Grandma to share the exact same information. Plus, the music itself—what you hear on first pass is deceptively simple. The concert, with its theatrics and intentional sequencing of songs and her between-song narrations, makes clear the layers of feeling and meaning that go into each of these songs. So I think it would have been much harder to write about Taylor Swift had I not developed a love of Taylor Swift, via my daughter—and I honestly probably wouldn’t have included her in the narrative had I not developed that connection to her music.

But on the first night of the concert, I literally had to sit down multiple times, crying and writing, because of the way the lyrics were bouncing off my daughter and me to reflect us back to ourselves.

As for Evermore—the chorus of the song ends with, “I had a feeling so peculiar / that this pain would be for / evermore,” but the last chorus shifts: “this pain wouldn’t be for / evermore.” The song is so achingly sad…until it’s not. And the shift happens after this haunting bridge with Bon Iver (whose duets with Swift were part of what started to hook me, as he is a favorite of mine). In his voice and the lyrics, you hear heartbreak and loss and, also, that sense of the pain easing up after its most crushing. That progression within the song resonated both with my experience of depression and the arc of the essay. And even just that word—evermore—gets at how enduring the struggle between the depths of sadness and the climbing out of it is. It’s never resolved. Paris, too, is complicated for me, and that complication persists. It never is the perfect place I want it to be or some magical cure to life. It is just itself, forever and always.

RR: Your love of Paris is evident in the way you describe the city; did you do any of the writing while there, or is your description mostly informed by memory?

MLG: I started writing this essay while I was in Paris with my daughter in May 2024. Some of it I scribbled in my journal when we would return to our apartment between whirlwind sightseeing excursions, some of it I wrote right when we arrived, and some of it I wrote during the Eras Tour, sitting down in the middle of a set to jot down notes in my phone. But much of it is also informed by memory—and the collision between those twenty-eight-year-old memories and a city I was encountering again, but through new eyes, with my daughter.

RR: How much would you say the time you spent in Paris in your youth has informed your writing overall?

MLG: My time in Paris fundamentally shaped me as a person, so it has certainly shaped my writing. What brought me to Paris—the seeking, the loneliness, the sense that something beautiful had magical powers—is still there in my writing (and life) today.

RR: Has your opinion of Taylor Swift changed at all since the Paris trip with your daughter?

MLG: I am now a proud Swiftie. My daughter got me liking her songs, then TTPD came out and I was smitten, and then I saw her show live: her vulnerability and joy, her work and performance, and the power of tens of thousands of (mostly) women and girls singing and dancing and crying together. It took the concert for me to really get it, but I am for sure a Swiftie now.