CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Amelia Clare Wright

Rappahannock Review Nonfiction Editors: You play with format a lot in “In Which My Mom Asks Me How I Was Told of Her Diagnosis”; working in short vignettes of false memory, was your goal with the formatting to convey your own emotional state during the narrative?

Amelia Clare Wright: Yes, in part! Lidia Yuknavitch gave an interview once where she said that in her memoir, when the moments of heightened emotion show up, the language “becomes strange.” I tend to lean towards fragmented and more abstracted language when emotions become extreme, and especially when I’m working with memory. The memoir I’m currently working on relies primarily on my disjointed memories of my experience with pain, particularly following the thread of mental illness. The primary goal with this piece (which does appear in and mimic the style of my larger work) was to create that strangeness of language that leaves the reader feeling something, even if they can’t quite name what that something is.

RR: Many of the vignettes begin with a simple ‘no’ and explore a fabricated version in which the narrator learns of the diagnosis; why explore alternative versions of getting the news instead of focusing on the one that happened?

ACW: The simple answer is this: I really didn’t remember. I wrote this piece initially because my mom is also writing a book currently, and she asked me to write a short section for her about how I found out she had cancer (this one was a little too wacky, so I get to keep it just for me now). She had asked me the same question before, just out of curiosity, about how I found out, and I never was able to tell her. The true story was one I had to dig up from my journals; without this evidence, it would all still be speculation. The exploration of each fabricated instance was also another representation of my exaggerated emotional state at the time; it did and still does feel like a fever dream. I wanted the reader to be brought into that sense of the-world-is-caving-in-underneath-me, that unsteadiness born from traumatic news and that sense of uncertainty, the kind that makes everything you thought you knew seem like an illusion.

RR: This is a very emotionally driven piece; did you find it hard while writing to accurately capture those feelings? What did the process of turning that raw emotion into a creative work look like?

ACW: I think the difficult part of writing this piece was not exactly channeling the emotion, but rather making sure that there was enough context to warrant that emotion. While writing, I viewed the piece as having three parts that needed to be balanced: the abstract imagination; the bolded interjections; and the paragraphs providing context. I tried to infuse each of these components with the emotions I was feeling, but I also tried to do this organically. This involved allowing myself to feel emotion instead of intellectualizing emotion. I have been told by probably a dozen therapists that I’m too good at compartmentalizing; in other words, I like to put my feelings into little boxes that get packed away in the back of my brain and “forgotten” about. Writing this piece required me to unpack some boxes and let myself feel that fear and that grief and that unsteadiness. And from that place of acceptance and permission to feel, I knew what I needed to say.

RR: The title of the piece is very straightforward, what led you to that instead of something more flowery or metaphorical?

ACW: I definitely tend to lean towards more explanatory titles in general, but for this one I did feel very strongly that the title would need to lay out the context in order for the piece to be effective. I wanted the reader to know exactly what was happening so that I could take advantage of the opportunity that gave me when working with the prose within the piece. As we’ve talked about already, the prose was written to feel more disjointed, abstract, and largely fabricated. There was the danger that these choices I made within the piece would become simply confusing rather than abstract if I had used a more metaphorical title or if I had mirrored the more embellished language that the piece is made up of. The goal was to use the title as an anchor, to provide the reader with something to grasp onto while reading a story that encounters a lot of crashing waves.

RR: Are there any books or authors that have had influence over your writing?

ACW: I mentioned Lidia Yuknavitch before, and I do think that her memoir The Chronology of Water has had the biggest influence on my writing. I read it first at a time in my life where I was just realizing I wanted to write nonfiction, and while reading this book, I was in awe of the style of writing. It was everything I was hoping to be. I also hold a huge amount of gratitude for Leslie Jamison, whose book of essays The Empathy Exams was the first creative nonfiction book I’d ever read, and therefore the one that opened up my world to memoirs in the first place. I was lucky enough to study under her while getting my MFA at Columbia, and she really demonstrated and encouraged us to be as specific as possible. I think both of these women have influenced me and my writing in a way that I may not even fully understand yet.