CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Lis Anna-Langston

Rappahannock Review Nonfiction Editors: Your uncle’s description paints him as a multifaceted figure in your life. What obstacles did you face while trying to authentically depict your uncle? You mention control a lot in this piece. Seeing that, I am curious to know how structured your writing process was. Was there a set outline you made for this story beforehand, or did you allow the piece to control its own direction?

Lis Anna-Langston: I have written extensively about my uncle. He was one of my favorite people and therefore one I return to over and over. The biggest obstacles I always face with him are: first, I write longhand the way he spoke, moved, listened, and behaved. This gives me an authentic draft to work from, but it also gives me a raw draft without a sense of structure. He also wasn’t big on structure in some ways and very regimented in others, so that becomes a challenge of balance for me as the author. How to highlight his contradictory nature so it makes sense to an outsider. Second, my urge to remove anything that shows him in an unfavorable light. Obviously, I love him and want the world to see him favorably. But I realized removing uncomfortable parts was the ultimate injustice. It was me playing God with his story, and that wasn’t fair. It is his story, and I told it, but I had to be true to the pain and the depth and the confusion, even when I didn’t like it. Even when it made me uncomfortable. He had this way of holding complete control over his life or emotions and then losing control with equal force. He was just such a paradox in so many ways. The third obstacle is that my grandmother is a central figure in our lives. Her presence can take over a scene. The challenge was to make sure she only served to tell this specific story.

My writing process for this piece began with the concept of the Influencing Machine. I am finishing my degree, and as a part of doing research through the school’s online library for something totally unrelated, I came across Tausk. I have a deep love/not love relationship with Freud, so I thought it interesting that I’d never heard of Tausk since he was Freud’s student. After searching online, I found Tausk’s article On the Origin of the Influencing Machine in Schizophrenia. The idea of an influencing machine was intriguing. Like, what is that? The opening of the article is very formal, clinical, and sets up the paper. Then it lists the effects of the machine. By pages 186-187 of the journal, Tausk writes, “The machine serves to persecute the patient and is operated by enemies. To the best of my knowledge, the latter are exclusively of the male sex. They are predominantly physicians by whom the patient has been treated. The manipulation of the apparatus is likewise obscure, the patient rarely having a clear idea of its operation. Buttons are pushed, levers set in motion, cranks turned.”

Everything after that read like he was talking about my uncle. Exactly like my uncle. Written more than a hundred years ago. It was one of the most bizarre articles I have ever read because it felt like someone reached across time and space to explain some of my uncle’s behaviors in a way that made sense. For the very first time in my life, he was no longer alone. That meant something to me.

There was no outline, or even an intention to write this piece. But it followed me room to room. I began to understand things that absolutely mystified me as a child. A-ha moments arrived while I was making dinner or trimming herbs. I began to understand that I would never have answers in certain areas. Because this was so different from what I normally write I ended up writing three separate pieces. One piece was about the influencing machine and how it related to my uncle and society at large. This concept of surveillance as control. That part included Jeever and all of the connections I made. The second piece was about my uncle and me. What we did and what was going on in our lives together. The fun we had, the spells he had regularly. The third piece was about me. And by that I mean, how I saw everything as a child and filtered it through my own lens. How later I took him next door to prove Jeever wasn’t there. The challenge of this piece was that I am telling three stories. So, as you can imagine, I had more than fifty pages of material. Then it became a puzzle. What goes where? What needs to be removed?

I started editing down sections. Moving parts around like a literal puzzle. When I had real shape and saw the theme emerge, I began to shape the rest to that thread. It sounds odd, but when I started, I didn’t really know what this piece was about. I think I thought I’d explore my uncle’s life with those case files from the 18th and 19th century. Later, I realized this piece is about us and how much I love him.

RR: There are research elements tucked into this piece. Starting from your research on your uncle and his condition, how much time would you say you’ve spent researching for this story?

LAL: Shockingly, there was very little research. Beyond that 1919 paper written by Tausk, there are case notes that go back to 1797, but it is not a cluttered landscape. I read through the notes because I found most people to be exactly like my uncle, or they perceived the machine as something that projected images. But there is surprisingly little information. 

The stories of him at Boliver and the history of the hospital were well known in our family. After my grandmother died, I found his discharge papers in the garage. These were facts I already knew and didn’t have to research. I knew the effects of shock therapy and prefrontal lobotomies. I spent a few hours researching the hospital and contacted them to find out if his case files were available. Without his consent, those files were not accessible, but more than that, the hospital didn’t even have them in storage anymore. 

The surveillance state has been unfolding for decades. That is not new. I just had to connect the dots between then and now.

RR: It feels like there was a lot of thought and preparation, both literally and emotionally, put into this piece. Was this a story you had always wanted to tell? If so, what made you finally begin to write it?

LAL: Like most things I write, I had no intention of ever taking on this subject in this way. In order to take on a project, I must be wowed. This was so unlike anything I’d done that I really needed to be wowed. After finding the influencing machine, I started making notes and writing out things I remembered. Then I toyed with my opening and settled on the car because it was something we did every week. Then I wrote the conversation my grandmother and I had in the kitchen because it is one of those moments that always stood out. If someone told me to list ten moments in my life I still remember perfectly, like they were happening now, that would definitely be one of them. I walked away from my desk and returned the next day. Then I wrote, “Until that moment, I had never once considered that Jeever wasn’t real. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life. Jeever had to be real. How could someone so central to our lives, someone with a name, a house, his very own X-ray beam, simply not exist? I was stunned. To a kid, there was evidence of him everywhere. And yet there was no evidence at all.

I had never once thought about it like that. I was inside the story. But suddenly I was outside looking in. And I thought, how in the world do I explain this in a way that makes sense? And that became the challenge. This sense of it’s everywhere and nowhere fascinated me. How could such perfectly contradictory points both be true? 

So, this was less about the emotional journey and more about the absolute riddle. I honestly didn’t see the deeply emotional aspect until the very end, when I read it aloud the final time. And if I’d taken the time to prepare to write this, I may not have done it. I dove straight into the center of this riddle and came out on the other side completely changed. 

I read my drafts aloud, so once I’d whittled down to about thirty pages, I read every draft aloud. It really helped me find the rhythm and voice. If a section was too mental health descriptive, it showed. If dialogue went on too long, it was obvious. If I included things about me that didn’t tie back to my uncle, it really stood out. I’ve easily read this piece aloud a hundred times, literally.

RR: What was it like to revisit these moments with your uncle after learning more about his past and condition?

LAL: I’ll be honest. I cried. When I had that final draft, I read it through a few times out loud. But the third time, I knew it was the one. I burst into tears. The challenge of this piece emotionally was always: how do I make the audience love him as I do, or at the very least see why I loved him. Mimi was my key. The opera. We listened to all of them, but that was the one we both loved so much. It was so intense to see him on the page, truthfully represented with his personal issues and problems highlighted with such tenderness. I still marvel over that. How is it possible to even take that much violence and weave in a thread of tenderness that serves to highlight madness and understanding? Did I do it out of love? Out of the genuine desire to tell his story truthfully without removing all the parts I didn’t want to acknowledge? Because I love him and I deeply believe his story matters? Because that is my job? All of the above?

How can two people existing in the center of violence share so much love? I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know this: it is the undeniable truth. 

As artists, we often talk about obsession in flip ways but this was a piece that utterly captured my attention. I originally thought revisiting all of this would be depressing. It is not a happy story. But I found myself loving the moments that were awesome and seeing how his life deeply shaped mine. In the most selfish way I see that without him in my life, I am different in many ways. But the real shocker was me realizing for the first time how much Jeever being in my life was a huge part of who I am. That shocked, and, bothered, and delighted me. That line about me being raised by Jeever, yeah, that one made me pause. My uncle lived an entire imaginary life right in front of me, and even more bizarrely, I lived it with him. Take a moment to reread that and then really consider what you think you know about the nature of reality. I know I did. I went back to the house he said Jeever lived in when I was in high school. The one we sat in front of every Sunday for a decade and a half. I intended to knock on the door and ask who lived there. But as I played the conversation over and over in my mind, I realized I was never going to be able to explain decades of my uncle and left.

I am an ordained Buddhist and lived with my uncle in the year of study required to prepare. As a small child, I believed in reincarnation, long before I had a name for it. It just made sense. My uncle believed he’d been a tsar in a former life and murdered people. It was something he talked openly with me about on many occasions. He believed he was being punished in this life for everything he’d done as a tsar. More along the lives of Ivan the Terrible and less like Tsar Nicholas II. I came to see that my uncle influenced much of my life. My love of Russian literature and plays comes from him. My deep love of opera comes from him. In an effort to even understand what a tsar was, I took on reading lists. I remember being eight years old, trying to work out what he was talking about. Reading a book I found at the library, suddenly it dawned on me that a tsar was like a king. These types of things never made it into the final draft because they don’t align with the three trajectories I set for each of the three separate stories I wrote to intersect. But my uncle was so deeply bizarre and so deeply different that it’s probably a lot of why I chose what I did in life. It was so interesting to see that as an adult. It was also interesting to see that something I’d thought would be depressing simply wasn’t. It was intense and raw and real, but I loved seeing my uncle this way and writing the story of what he means to me. I loved realizing that I brought him happiness. My uncle had no social sense, so I never once saw him do anything for the sake of recognition. It just wasn’t a part of his makeup. But oftentimes he was hilarious and made me howl with laughter. During those moments, a slow smile formed on his face and spread. Then if I laughed long enough and hard enough, eventually he’d laugh with me.

I loved realizing that I truly understood him in ways no one else did. Maybe that was part of our bond. He knew I saw him without judgment, and in a world screaming for you to be like everyone else, maybe that meant something to him. I know it did for me.

My grandmother never had a driver’s license, so my uncle and I did everything together until he was in a wreck and stopped driving. I spent a lot of time with him. In writing this piece, I realized I never saw my uncle do a single random thing. He knew what he liked to eat and why. He knew where he was going and why. From orange sherbet to Taco Bell to the zoo, he had reasons for it all. Randomness freaked him out. I think it is where I get my specificity from in life, and especially my work. There were no clocks in our house. He never set an alarm or had a day planner, and yet he knew exactly when his favorite radio programs came on, knew exactly how much change he had in a drawer, and he had a deep sense of self. I still marvel over how he knew the time without clocks. Light? Neighbors arriving/departing outside the window? Because of the lobotomy, he rejected social norms. His clothes were often wrinkled or too big, and he was never stylish. If you bothered him too much, he would very politely but firmly tell you to go to hell. My point in saying all of that is he had an amazing sense of time, what he liked, excellent boundaries, so the idea that he picked some random house to go and sit in front of every Sunday afternoon in no way fits his pattern of behavior. I believed then and believe now that he knew who lived there. But then the riddle is connecting that person with Boliver, which is impossible.

While I have written about my family and especially my uncle in great detail, this was the first time I isolated his story from the rest. Obviously, my family is full of eccentrics, but my uncle was unique in that rather than exposing him for his misdeeds, I wanted to shine light in the dark places.

All in all, it absolutely mystified me to write about him so truthfully. It reframed what I knew and made me extremely happy to know him. All that pain transformed into a kind gift. I love the complexity, the strangeness, the riddle, but most of all I loved my uncle immensely.

I dreamed about him months after this piece was complete. In the dream, he had a printed copy

in his hand. I asked if he’d read it, and he nodded. He looked exactly as he had in this life. Long black hair falling over his shoulders as he looked down at the pages. “Did I represent you the way you wanted?” He was silent for a moment, and that made me nervous. Then he sighed and said, “You romanticize everything, but that is okay. It softens the blow. You were strong enough to tell it. Thank you for that.” In my dream I inhaled so sharply it woke me up. In the dark hour before dawn, I laid there thinking about him, about his life, our life, the influencing machine, and all of the tiny pieces of a life that are lost without someone to tell it. More than any other piece I’ve written, this one made me uniquely aware of the archivist’s role in history. Without the writers, the artists, the preservationists, people become mere dust on the wind. Stories disintegrate. Lives are forgotten. For someone like me, that is the biggest tragedy of all. Like most great things in life, I learned that from my uncle too.