CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Regina Landor

Rappahannock Review Nonfiction Editors: The title of “Goodbye to Clocks Ticking” comes from a line in the play Our Town; of all the anecdotes the narrator travels through with Lenny, why pick that line of the play for the title?

Regina Landor: It’s an honor to be interviewed about this piece and to be asked such thoughtful questions, so thank you! 

The title stood out for me as being one of the more beautiful of Thornton Wilder’s lines from the play. It also reflects a theme in the piece of saying goodbye. There are many goodbyes—to my childhood, to my hometown, and of course to Lenny. 

RR: The piece deals with growing up and the passage of time; what was your intention in structuring the narrative in vignettes? Did you have a process for choosing the moments you included?

RL: My process was to write down everything I could remember about Lenny, things he said, and things we did together. I needed to eliminate some of the sections because the piece was too long. The ones which remain are those which I felt revealed the most about him. For example, I kept the vignette about his building a snow fort with my sister. The image felt metaphorical, his popping up, then back down again. He was afraid of being exposed and left out in the cold. He had to hide his true nature for years, especially to his family. I then put the vignettes in chronological order.  

RR: The piece also deals with grief and loss; did you find it difficult to parse back through your memories of Lenny? Did you find it difficult to put any of it into words?

RL: It was not an easy piece to write, not only because of the sadness. I wanted readers to be drawn to Lenny, to care about him, and also show how he was alienated from his family. I wasn’t sure at first what I was trying to say with all the little stories and memories. When I figured out that I was also saying goodbye to my childhood, that a gulf grew between us because of the families we came from, when I knew I had my title, and when I wrote the paragraph about never wanting to say goodbye to him, I had a good, long cry.  

RR: Your other writing focuses mostly on travel, yet this piece is largely static in terms of place; was the intention to step outside of your usual scope, or was it something that just happened naturally?

RL: My intention was to conjure a place of home and how it felt in that specific time period with a friend who helped me grow up. I struggled for a while figuring out how to tell it so it didn’t happen naturally, even though I’ve carried this story around with me most of my life and I’ve always wanted to write about it.

RR: If you could say something to Lenny now, what would it be?

RL: I would thank him for being my playmate, for being such a good friend, and for believing in me. And I’d probably ask him if he wanted to go get some ice cream, my treat.