CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with B.J. Wilson

Rappahannock Review Nonfiction Editors: We’re drawn into the discussion of revisiting memories from the past after a loved one has died in “Jupiter’s Moons.” How was the process of writing and sharing such a personal part of your life?

B.J. Wilson: First, thank you to the editors at Rappahannock Review for publishing “Jupiter’s Moons” and for the opportunity to talk a little about the piece and the larger project in which it appears. This essay is part of a chapbook of lyric prose and memoir, nearly finished, called Night Drives. The book explores loss related to addiction. I have had several friends pass away in this fashion, when they were quite young and also in midlife. While revisiting the past through different people, I have been able to chronicle my own life too, which was not necessarily the goal at first. With Jim, it has been especially rough since he died by himself.

RR: You open your piece with the line “(for Jim).” Did you create this work with the intent of honoring him, or was it more for therapeutic purposes? 

BW: This is a good segue. I was teaching high school English when I found out about Jim’s death. I remember sharing the shock with my students, how awful it was for them to hear something like this. To a teenager, it might have resonated as: This could happen to you too. The essay and the book explore high school years, as well as right after—that aimlessness—and this was when I had the most difficulty with my own chemical dependency. If I had to choose between the two, I think “Jupiter’s Moons” might be more cathartic than elegiac because it is so sad, and elegies usually offer some way of moving forward.

RR: Out of all the symbols to mention and attach to the story, you chose Jupiter’s moons. Can you talk about why that stuck out to you out of all other choices?

BW: I describe this dream at the beginning of the piece: Jupiter is quite real but exaggerated, the way dreams can be. I knew that Jupiter had a lot of moons, and so early on it came to me that I could structure with fragments, which was the way I was writing nonfiction prose in general. I ended up stopping it at thirteen sections: unlucky. But in addition to writing in sections, I had also been using breaks within the sections in addition to paragraph breaks. In the end, I didn’t realize that I’d cut all these from “Jupiter’s Moons.” In the other pieces that go along with this one, there is an even more jagged, fragmented style. This might be part of transitioning from poetry to prose. But, in short, the symbol became a way of organizing. In terms of signification, the symbol was a way to reach into the past, to moments and events pretty far away. I do “perhaps” a lot, how something could have happened or what might have been said.

RR: For anyone who may be reading this having recently lost a loved one, do you have any advice for anyone going through a similar experience to yours?

BW: This is a tough one. I think people deal with grief in different ways. I have heard it said that this is one of the hardest things to write about. In “Jupiter’s Moons,” the loss is due to drug and alcohol addiction, and this is also the primary subject of Night Drives because, as I have said, I have lost a lot of friends to this, some when I was young, some when I was older. While I want to say that “art” is the answer, or an answer, sticking around is too. Music is what bound Jim and I the most, more than drugs. I wanted this to be evident, hence the opening epigraph from David Berman, and ending with the Beastie Boys, other types of music in between. As my writing for this project has developed, music helps with “inventory” for the characters, including myself, and in this piece, you can see rap and grunge (and alternative and indie) providing a kind of tension. One way of remembering Jim is asking what new music he would be listening to if he were here. He really liked Queens of the Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures. The last band he played for me was Chevelle. Right now, I’m listening to Shadowlands (with S. Carey of Bon Iver), which might be too soft for Jim, lol.

RR: Since you still live in Louisville, do you find yourself revisiting the places that you and Jim used to call your own?

BW: All the time, especially since he died when I was away. The essay addresses this when I go driving to find his old house, and it’s gone. The magnolia is still there, that’s how I could tell. I tried to reiterate this with imagery—replicating the colors of the first image with the last, that is, a pink and blue “up-close” Jupiter with a pink sunset and a blue moon. The poet in me wants to go to image over narrative. I’m working on this though.