Conducted by Lucy Shapiro
As a writer, you have had many pursuits: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and translation. What draws you to these forms, and how do they interact and inform each other?
Though my first love is creative nonfiction, I’ve always been pretty omnivorous when it comes to literature and storytelling. What I’m drawn to, in fact, in each of these forms is how they inform the others, and how as a writer, I learn from each of them. Poetry, for instance, has allowed me to think more deeply about time and about ways to move forward in a narrative outside of chronology. Translation helped me think through the idea of “loss” or “gain” as a nonfiction writer, and how, in trying to write something “true,” you are always changing the original “text” (i.e. reality) a little bit. Fiction lets me explore the idea of character and point of view and really think through what it means to write about myself in the present tense or the past (or the future).
In your essay “The Accusation,” published in the New York Times in 2020, you track the events of a nightmarish spring, during which your life was derailed by fabricated accusations of sexual assault against your wife. The piece is a thorough mapping, not only of a series of truly unsettling events, but of how you yourself were affected. In the end, though, it gestures toward a kind of healing, in either the writing of it, or in the act of passing on the story to the reader. Do you believe creative nonfiction has the ability to heal? What other powers does it possess?
“ I think that’s the real power in creative nonfiction: to make meaning out of what is real.”
I don’t know about healing. I think that feels more akin to what we do in therapy. We talk through trauma in therapy as a way of making it less potent, less shame-filled, and thus less powerful in our day-to-day. However, in writing, what we do instead is connect and create new ways of seeing or understanding the world. For instance, in that essay, I was writing not to heal as a person (for that I had an amazing therapist), but to shape the raw material of that experience into a narrative that had a larger meaning, both for readers and me. I think that’s the real power in creative nonfiction: to make meaning out of what is real. Susan Sontag has a great quote I often turn to, both as a writer and as a teacher of writing, and it comes to mind now. “To tell a story is to say: this is the important story,” she writes. “It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.”
In “Rooting,” there is a new clarity brought to your memories of childhood, and to your own relationship to motherhood, but the present seems more difficult to reconcile with. We see the pandemic play out in your household only in small moments, like they are pulled from a mess or fog. What was your experience of writing about this period of time, while in many ways we/you may still be inside of it? In general, do you feel that you need to have a certain amount of distance from an event before you’re able to write about it?
Great question. I did indeed feel “in” the situation about which I was writing—and that’s something I’d normally advise against doing. There’s the famous Wordsworth quote about poetry being the spontaneous overflow of emotions recollected in tranquility, and the translation of that maxim for creative nonfiction writers is usually to wait until an event has finished, or you have enough emotional distance, to be able to write about it “in tranquility.” But the pandemic has changed that for a lot of us, in part because it just won’t end and in part because its effects are both all-consuming and dispersed. When I was writing “Rooting,” what I wanted to convey was more of a mood than a strong conclusion because the latter would both have required more clarity about the present than I have. Allowing myself to write about an experience while I was still in it felt freeing, partly because I knew I was breaking a writing rule I normally obey. We should all should do as writers, in my opinion: soak up all the so-called “rules” about writing, then think through why they exist and how they might help or hinder us, and try to break each of them every once in a while.
Motherhood is a distinct theme of “Rooting,” and it comes up frequently in your writing. For you, is motherhood inspiration? A subject to explore? Does it lend you a new prism through which to view the events of our lives?
“...sometimes, when something is such an integral part of your life, it’s hard to see where the raw material ends, and the inspiration begins.”
I think it’s a subject to explore more so than an inspiration, though sometimes, when something is such an integral part of your life, it’s hard to see where the raw material ends, and the inspiration begins. For me, though, motherhood has been helpful in that it has pulled me outside of myself like nothing else before it, and that distance is what I’m always seeking as a writer. As essayists, we do our strongest work when we can see ourselves almost like objects, like characters. Motherhood has allowed me some of that insight, perhaps because it has also created a sort of doubling of life: I see myself in my mom, but I also see my younger self in my kids.
At the end of “Rooting” you write, “It feels like everything is abandoned unfinished these days.” The pandemic has been a time in which many of us have been suspended, or as you might put it, frozen. How has the pandemic changed your writing process, or impacted your creative life? Do you feel like you’ve thawed, yet?
I do feel like I’m starting to thaw. My kids are back in school. I’m back at work. I have time to write, which is part of what helps me feel normal. But there still is that state of vigilance, that exhaustion that comes from constantly feeling like we have to be on alert, like we are moving toward some sort of apocalypse. So even though life is closer to normal, the anxiety of the pandemic remains for most people I know and for me. When I write, though, I’ve found that I have to forget that state. It was helpful in “Rooting” to write directly into that anxiety, but when I am working on other projects, I need to write as if the stress of the present world has been lifted. Otherwise, I can’t concentrate.
If you can tell us, what are you working on now?
Yes. I’m finishing edits on my second book, a memoir called Autobiography of Shadows that’s also a loose retelling of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.”
Read “Rooting” in Issue 11 of The Arkansas International.
Sarah Viren is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and author of the essay collection, Mine, which won the River Teeth Book Prize. She's assistant professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, where she lives with her wife, daughters, and dog Oki. Her next book, Autobiography of Shadows, that is forthcoming from Scribner.
