MELORA WOLFF’s essay collection Bequeath is available from LSU Press. Her work has appeared in publications such as Brick, The Normal School, the New York Times, Salmagundi, the Southern Review, and Best American Fantasy. She hasreceived multiple Notable Essay of the Year citations from Best American Essays and Special Mentions in Nonfiction from The Pushcart Prizes, among other honors and awards. She is director of creative writing at Skidmore College.
What are three things you’d like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?
Thank you, Kristina, for your welcoming words. One response to your question could be a prologue, such as: I’d like you to know Bequeath is an elegy for my family, and recalls my girlhood spent in 1970s Manhattan and the troubling events, family tales, and eccentric relationships that have haunted me; and that New York City then was glamorous and dangerous, a realm of intoxicating feminist ideals and threatening misogyny, where I was muddled by fear and by desire... But that’s all in the book. So, may I invert your question? That is, what do I want my readers not to know before they delve in? I hope that readers come to Bequeath with a lot of unanswered questions–maybe ones about their own losses or about family or about terrible mistakes or just questions they realize for the first time, reflected to them in the book. Maybe readers will wonder who left the ghostly footprints in the snow depicted on the cover of Bequeath or maybe they’ll feel that the book knows them, in some unanticipated way. Not-knowing is so often the reason we read essays, fictions, and poems in the first place, hoping for some answers. Mysteries, family myths, inscrutable objects, un-solvable runes of the past fill the book, so I like to imagine that my readers– strangers filled with their own haunting histories–may recognize in Bequeath some urgent not-knowing shared between us.
What advice do you have for writers who are currently engaged in sequencing essays for a book-length project?
Bequeath is a memoir-in- essays, most of which I wrote over nearly two decades, so I had to select the essays with a design I felt was true to my present view of the past. Obviously, my attitude and understanding and even my style shifted in narrative over the years, so I needed to locate some consistent tone and idea that would balance out other fluctuations. I had to fess up to my personal patterns, you might say, to find the through-line. The book portrays my family across decades, particularly my musician father, but I felt that the developing story was not situational, but instead one of emotional struggle in the narrator—(the “me” of the book)—to reconcile fantasy with reality. I arranged essays with that emphasis. Does a collection move forward because of the events, or the relationships, or the tones, or the narrator’s dilemmas? How can one essay lead plausibly and fluently to the next? Is repetition avoidable? I wrote the title essay intending it to be the final act of the narrator’s psychological conflict and grief—so I was surprised that the book’s actual final essay, “Begin”—which was written many years before Bequeath was even conceived–was the clear epilogue, the inevitable conclusion. Like a final chord. Essays can find their right place in a work, unplanned. I think collections often can be held together by a strong voice and a persistent inquiry, at least that’s true of many works that I’m drawn to personally like Georgi Gospodinov’s The Story Smuggler, Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Carole Mavor’s Black and Blue, Jericho Parms’ Lost Wax, nearly all of Geoff Dyer’s essay collections, or collections in translation like Those Whom I Would Like To Meet Again by Giedra Radvilavičiūtė, or Christian Bobin’s lyric collection, A Little Party Dress. A different kind of collection that’s so instructively designed is George Saunders’ A Swim in A Pond in the Rain, which becomes the unfolding story of his own burgeoning creative mind and spirit within his larger interpretive study of Russian story masters. Following his compassionate guidance through literature really is such a thrilling education in writing, in reacting to stories, and in shaping love into a well-made book.
Relatedly, what can writers working on other genres learn from essayists?
I think essayists, fiction writers, poets, playwrights—we’re all teaching each other, innovating new forms and styles as members of one language-loving, book-loving family. Often essayists work with objective and subjective narrative, argument, cause-effect drama and tension–but so do poets and novelists, in different ways, so maybe there’s more to learn from the fluidity of genres than from their distinctions and conventions. Genre phrases like “autofiction” and “hybrid” and “flash” and “micro” and “prosem” try to corral all the rhetorical freedoms that can’t be harnessed. Poets and fictionists might learn from an essayist some different ways to sustain a problem-solving focus; an essayist might learn precise diction from poets, or dialogue effects from story writers—the gifts and sharing go on and on. I tend to follow author preferences to learn—that is, if an essayist I like recommends a poet, or a novelist, I’ll go to those writers immediately, and if I like them, I’ll go next to their preferences too. You can follow the word-path toward the answers you need. I believe we’re all kind of grazing together in these infinite, burgeoning fields of language. We all head instinctively toward the details that attract us in the fields.
In addition to your achievements as a writer, you are a celebrated educator. What has teaching opened up within your artistic practice?
Over thirty years, give or take a few, my writing students have opened my mind and heart again and again, brought me back to the beauty and value of sentences. They remind me that writing is, above all else, a way toward communication and empathy. My students have almost always been between the ages of 18 and 22, and as I’ve grown older, I find that I value even more their creative playfulness, their solemnity and care for craft, their kindness toward one another, their imagination and candor. Those qualities in students haven’t vanished through the generations I’ve been a teacher. And teaching opens my mind to the present moments I’m sharing with these young writers. I’ll wander back into the past if I’m left to my own devices for too long, and the immediacy of a workshop discussion focuses the present and reminds me of why so many of us decide to write: to reach toward a genuine connection with other people, to listen closely and to be heard, to find the words that will engrave who we really are in life.
Will you share a writing prompt with us?
Zadie Smith published an essay in The Guardian called “Dance Lessons for Writers” that I like to assign to my workshop students. In it, she considers the dance techniques of performers and artists– like Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Nureyev– as rhetorical affects. It’s a great essay about style in performance and in prose. Can you write two paragraphs in a prose style that resembles the dance style of your favorite performer? Can you translate your favorite performer’s physical movements into syntax, tone, rhythm, and structure? The results of this writing exercise are always fantastic, the challenge takes people in completely new directions.
What’s next? What can readers look forward to?
Aside from individual essays, I’m also working on two longer projects–a collection of speculative essays on found photography, and also, a book that combines memoir, history, biography, and archival letters and photos from WWII. That project brought me to Germany and Austria to follow the route of a Special Services entertainment unit that escorted combat soldiers from 1943 to 1945. There’s still a lot of work to do on it and, I hope, a lot still to discover. And then, some project still not known to me—a welcome surprise.