CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Dominic Anton

Rappahannock Review Nonfiction Editors: “Gold Chain” is structured in dated fragments, each noting the violence of that year; your own feelings are left largely unvoiced. Can you talk about your choice to leave your own voice in the background of the piece?

Dominic Anton: For this essay I wanted to recline in the background and be an observer. It’s not until later in the timeline after I was born where I start to inject my own personal experiences but even then I stripped my own thoughts and feelings to emphasize a more straightforward tone of voice. Very black and white. I’m working on a new poetry book now where I do explore my own feelings towards certain events now that I’m older and can reflect. So this essay serves as a foundation that I could build off of. 

RR: You juxtapose the unrest in the Middle East with your own experience of growing up; would you say that the violence there influenced your own adolescent feelings at the time?

DA: Being only about ten years old and hearing from my parents and other members of my family their feelings towards what was happening to their home city of Baghdad was a surreal time. I didn’t understand all that was happening during the Iraqi invasion in 2004 and a few years after. All I remember was seeing videos and pictures of Saddam Hussein getting hung and Iraqi civilians being tortured. Those images never left me. It wasn’t until I was older though when I saw a documentary told from the perspectives of Iraqis who had lived through the U.S. invasion and rise of Al-Qaeda when I began to understand the truth through their lens, and not the lens of American media. I couldn’t help but think of my grandfather and if he had never moved his family out of Baghdad, that could have been us living in fear and on the brink of death every day. The essay parallels what was happening in America while hell broke loose in Iraq as well as other parts of the world, which is jarring to read when it’s written in such a straightforward manner. A genocide unfolds in Rwanda while people dance at Woodstock in America. 

RR: The symbol of your grandmother’s gold chain doesn’t make an appearance until the middle of the piece; why hold out the image in the title until then?

DA: I still wanted to follow the chronological order of the essay and that’s the year I was given her gold chain, 2013. I chose that as the title because, of everything that has happened in my past, my grandmother’s gold chain is the only tangible piece I have that brings me back to those moments that felt like lifetimes ago. To me, the medallion of the Virgin Mary symbolizes the love and protection that I felt from my grandparents when I was a child. 

RR: Your most recently published book, Nightmares & Daydreams, also focuses on processing trauma, though through the lens of paranormal fiction. What role do you think writing can play in working through trauma?

DA: Writing is a necessary method of therapy for me that helps me process emotions, including traumatic experiences, in a way that I can look down on the paper and reflect and lay certain feelings and situations to rest. It’s a cathartic release to bring those thoughts from my head and out onto the page and like other artistic mediums, it’s a way to self-express that always felt natural and necessary for me. My last book, Nightmares & Daydreams, was a tool to help me dissect my past and understand why I am the way I am today. My next book though is rooted mostly in the present. 

RR: Do you still have your grandmother’s gold chain, and if so, do you wear it often?

DA: Yes I still wear her chain everyday 🙂