Melody S. Gee’s debut essay collection We Carry Smoke and Paper(University of Iowa Press, 2024) is a wondrous exploration of family, faith, and heritage. I come to this collection by way of Gee’s poetry, which I have long admired. Her previous three collections—Each Crumbling House (Perugia Press, 2010), The Dead in Daylight (Copper Dillon Books, 2016), The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat (Driftwood Press, 2022)—explores questions of language, identity, faith, and healing in ways that are further deepened and complicated in this new work. I had the opportunity to interview Gee about her latest book and learn more about the making of it.
Wendy Chen: What was the spark for this text? Which was the first essay you wrote? At what point did you realize you had a collection on your hands?
Melody S. Gee: I published a chapbook in 2022 called The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat. It ended up being a chapbook instead of a full-length collection because I realized in the midst of writing it that I needed to shift into writing prose. It was just the way this story needed to be told. I started with three short essays for Commonweal Magazine about my conversion, the first one about why I came to the church, and then about language acquisition and adoption. In a way, I was trying to make sense of my own conversion, which took me by surprise. I wrote these essays as an explanation to myself as much as anyone else. And then I went back to some older essays I had written about my grandparents’ restaurant or selling my inherited jewelry, and found connections to my conversion. When I realized that older pieces were speaking to this topic, I thought a book could come together.
WC: I’m curious about the ways you think about time in this collection. Often, within an essay, you jump deftly back and forth between time periods—sometimes making large leaps across decades from modern-day America to the early 1900s China. As a reader, this felt seamless and quite natural; the writer and editor in me know how much goes into bringing these time periods and places together in one piece. Can you speak about your approach toward time?
MSG: Thank you! It helped that the essays were thematic—I felt like I could do almost anything as long as I stuck to the topic. I actually appreciated that in writing about liturgical hunger, for example, I came to understand my own experience by writing about my mom, my grandparents, my daughters, and a wider immigrant experience of loss and disconnection. It made me feel connected to my family and others. It made me feel less alone. If I have an approach to time, maybe I would say it’s holding a central question in each essay. Why did the liturgy of the Mass settle me? Why do I have a hunger for liturgy? Why am I hesitant to undergo initiation? Why does the language of adoption into the church make me feel shame and fear? A guiding question helped me pull together the stories and reflections I needed to work toward an answer, and they sometimes came from different periods of my life or from a different generation of my family.
WC: One of my favorite qualities about this work is its intertextuality, and the ways that you incorporate different voices like Pádraig Ó Tuama, James K. A. Smith, Christian Wiman, among others. Why was it important that these voices—and the sense of community and conversation these voices evoke—be a part of the collection? Were there other texts you didn’t explicitly mention that greatly influenced the writing of We Carry Smoke and Paper?
MSG: These writers were a life raft for me as I wrestled with my faith. Before I received my first sacraments, I spent three years going to Mass, participating in the life of my parish, reading scripture, and reading the authors I cite in the book. I was a person of faith before I became a member of the church. During that time, I looked for writers who could help me with seeking and discernment—figuring out why certain areas of my life or my identity felt like something I needed to reconcile. (Eventually, each of these areas—language acquisition, adoption, initiation, liturgy, etc.—became an essay topic.) Each of these authors named and untangled something for me, that helped me understand my conversion experience. They were lenses into my own experience.
WC: The collection opens with the line: “I say I grew up bilingual, but the truth is more about loss than duality.” In this first essay “Idiolect,” you consider the ways we gain and lose language, and how that affects our relationship with the world and others around us. This essay was such a beautiful opening for this collection, and provides a foundation on questions of language, faith, and the complexities of family that deepen and evolve over the course of the text. How did this essay come about? Was this always the opening for the collection?
MSG: I struggled mightily with the language of religion and the language of faith, which is why I found Kathleen Norris’ book, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, deeply consoling. I still struggle, but when I was a new seeker, I felt like there was a code I couldn’t crack, a way of talking about God and faith that I couldn’t see into. Some of the code was just cliché—“Jesus is my redeemer”; “have faith like a child.” Some of it was the lyrical and mysterious language of Jesus’ parables. But some words and phrases that felt inaccessible to me were just used over and over in homilies, books, and conversations. Things like, “Come, Holy Spirit,” “the path to eternal life,” or “being led by the spirit.” Of course, I know that these are meaningful and they come from scripture. But the phrases had become a shorthand, an inside language. Seeking came to feel like learning a new language, complete with cultural and historical references, humor, irony, and sometimes mistranslation. I wondered what it really meant to know more than one language. And then I suddenly felt very tender about my mom learning English in America and I started writing this essay.
WC: What did the revision process look like for We Carry Smoke and Paper? Were there essays you cut out of this collection? Which essay was the most difficult to revise?
MSG: No essays were cut. I am not an over-writer. I write like a scrappy cook who is dead set on making use of every piece of food. To finish the book, I revised my 3 short essays from Commonweal, I re-worked older essays to fit the collection, and I filled in gaps and created transitions. My revision was relentlessly focused on the two questions I thought a reader would hold: Why did she convert? and What changed? Even when I had an essay that had a solid beginning, middle, and end, focusing on those questions helped me write more expansively, with time jumps, and with connective tissues that helped hold the book together.
WC: There were so many scenes that moved me greatly in this collection—from the image of your grandfather in the backyard to the decision to sell your family jewelry. What were the hardest scenes to write? And how did you manage to write them?
MSG: Thank you, that feedback means a lot to me. The most emotional scenes for me are the ones that show the painful side of love—sacrifices, separation, assimilation, adoption, remembering the dead. As a reader, I’m most moved by moments when love asks us to do something terrifying, when there is a tension between what we want and what’s best, and a deep knowledge that we wouldn’t make a different, or less heartbreaking decision even if we could. There’s a scene in “Redemption Story” where I disrupt my mom’s storytelling loop—something she gets caught in, maybe due to trauma or language loss. When it happened in real life, I watched myself interrupting her, like I was on film. Writing it out, revealing that I had done this on purpose because I felt wounded, was vulnerable and painful. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I also couldn’t sit still as this story unwound out of her without eye contact, engagement, or connection. Even after writing about how challenging our relationship can be, this scene felt like a deeper betrayal.
WC: As someone who has published three poetry collections, how does your approach to or writing process for essays differ from poetry?
MSG: I had to give myself a sabbatical to write and revise these essays, the first time I had ever taken time off work to write. With poetry, I could always write in the margins of work and parenthood. I always had just enough focus for a stanza or a volta or stepping back to see a whole poem. I tried to write essays in that kind of time and space, but it didn’t work for me. I couldn’t gather any momentum. I couldn’t remember what I was trying to say or where I was trying to go on any given page. Ultimately, I had to save up and give myself a seven-month sabbatical to write the book. I had never needed that kind of open, spacious time before, but I suddenly did.
WC: What advice would you give writers who are also working on or submitting their first essay collection for publication?
MSG: To my point about time and space above, I would say that if you’re working in a new genre, let yourself rediscover what you need to write and even uncover a new writing process if you need one. I let myself have whole days just to think and take notes. I spent a few days here and there on mini retreats so I could be completely without the distractions of home. I also read a lot on my sabbatical—memoirs by Beth Nguyen and Nicole Chung, a beautiful book called Permission to Come Home about mental health in Asian American communities, an essay collection by Carl Phillips. I would also say that poetry belongs in prose. Your novel, Wendy, is an example of how lyricism can so beautifully drive a narrative forward or create suspense. I love prose books that are infused with language that bends into poetry.
WC: What are you working on next?
MSG: Nothing formally. It feels good to say that. I have many drafted poems for another collection, but I am in a busy season of work (I’m a communications and marketing professional) and my daughters are 10 and 13, so am giving myself the space to read, think, grow at work, drive my daughters everywhere, volunteer in my parish, and trust that a new project will emerge in its own time.