Lauren W. Westerfield is the author of Depth Control, a collection of genre-bending essays forthcoming in 2025 from Unsolicited Press. Her second book, Woman House: Essays and Assemblages, was awarded the 2025 Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction and will be published in 2026 by the University of Massachusetts Press. Westerfield’s essays and poetry have most recently appeared in FENCE, Seneca Review, Willow Springs, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, and Ninth Letter. She teaches in the English department at Washington State University, where she serves as the editor-in-chief of Blood Orange Review. Westerfield is currently at work on a third book—part memoir, part autoethnography, part millennial reckoning—about the history and culture of her Northern California hometown. She lives in Spokane, Washington, with her husband and their cat, Lou.
1. Beginnings: What prompted this book? What were you thinking about, how is it the same or different from previous work? How long did you work on it, how did the pandemic affect the process of writing it?
Depth Control began as a series of essays and poems and genre-crossing experiments for my MFA thesis in creative nonfiction, which I completed between 2015-2018. The essays I’d written and published prior to starting the MFA tended to skirt the edges of experimentation—mostly straightforward narrative, but with that urge to bend convention under the surface. I found considerable freedom in the overlapping nature of graduate studies and genre workshops, the way my mind and work and reading and thinking sparked against one another in poems and braided essays and critical analyses. At the time, this was new to me—not the overlapping interests so much as their manifestation on the page in creative forms—and it felt at once different and truly native to my way of thinking. I knew I wanted these pieces to take the shape of a book, and for that book to be at once a thesis and a record of all that thinking and living and exploratory making. The actual book came later, of course, and took years thereafter to find a home...but aside from the removal of some poem-esque sketches from the middle of the manuscript, what I started with nearly ten years ago is pretty similar to what appears in the final printed book.
2. What was your favorite thing about writing it? What gave you the most satisfaction, what was energizing or enlivening about it?
I have a distinct memory from the second summer of my MFA—this would have been the summer of 2017—when I realized I could write prose in little imagistic fragments, and that those fragments could cement themselves into proper paragraphs or not, could be squeezed down to the bone and fit into a cube of a prose poem or something else even smaller, or could sprawl any way I wanted them to as they unfurled, and that any and all of these options were available to me and to my understanding of language and image and feeling as I wrote. It was a very hot summer, and I was living in a small, hot studio apartment with no AC and a big floor-to-ceiling window looking down on the town square. There was something claustrophobic about the space, and yet it was also where I discovered electricity in the breaking up and reconstituting of ideas that ultimately changed the way I gave myself permission to write. One of my teachers, Robert Wrigley, has a writing studio in a small shed on his property that he calls “Stanza.” I look back on that studio apartment as a stanza of sorts—very much a writing room. I remember I’d been reading Sarah Vap and Bhanu Kapil and Maggie Nelson and was blown away by the propulsion those writers derived from white space coupled with intense, rich language and potent ideas. The power of combining lyric and critical thinking and giving it all lots of room to breathe on the page, amounting to a very physical experience of speed—like breaking into a run—and all the pleasures of that suddenness set free.
3. Was there a section or poem or part of the book that you felt doubtful about including? What made it so? How did you come to the decision you did?
I wrote the essay “On Shame” during that hot summer of fragmentary revelations, and it came out all at once, very fast and insistent, like it knew what it was doing (the essay) and my mind and fingers at the keyboard were together helplessly in service to this piece of writing like a planchette across a Ouija board. It was an experience, this insistence. I’ve only had it several times with specific pieces of writing, more so with poetry, where a form and idea have seemingly been through several rounds of revision and shaping and aestheticizing within my subconscious before they reach the page. Maybe “On Shame” feels a bit like a poem because of this, despite its very traditionally essayistic title. Or maybe it is the confessional mode of the essay...anyway, it was at once a deeply vulnerable and deeply urgent thing to write and when I was finished with it, I realized (somewhat to my horror) that it belonged in the thesis/the book, that it would need to be shared. That the sharing was the point—the necessity of it.
Sometimes I write an essay to understand what it is I’m thinking (a la Didion), but sometimes the writing is an offering—here is mine, to paraphrase, I think, Maggie Nelson*. An essay that confesses, does so bluntly, can feel gratuitous at times, can BE gratuitous if not done well. I think that is one of the challenges and ongoing projects of a writer of autobiographical detail: to perpetually consider the weight of a revelation, to the work and to the reader. I was nervous about “On Shame” being too much. Then I met a few of the young women who worked for the literary journal that published the essay at AWP in Portland, and they told me how important the piece had been to them—that they’d felt its necessity, felt seen and given a kind of permission from reading it.
And so, the essay stayed. And (to quote Nelson again), I’ve since made peace with the “frisson” that comes from pulling back the curtain on autobiographical detail in a work of creative nonfiction or autofiction. It is part of the point—the pact with the reader—to create a sense, now and then, that you are letting them see or hear a sliver more than they should. In reality, of course, even these slivers are edited and shaped, chosen with care. But I recognize the power in leaving a bit of rawness around the edges of the prose in the process.
*I’ve looked everywhere I can think of for this quote and can’t find it to confirm the attribution.
4. What are some lines, phrases or images from the book that stay with you, either because they capture something that feels very true, or they came to you in a way that felt whole and generative, or some other reason?
I come back to lines from “Madonna of the Master Bath” frequently— “the inside of the inside of my mind,” “whole and gorgeous at my breast,” “the fact and curl of it” (this last line was the title of my thesis). The dream fragments and certain reflections in that essay came, as you say, in a whole and generative manner, much like “On Shame” but via a very different writing process. I wrote “Madonna” as an ongoing daybook in response to one of Brian Blanchfield’s brilliant writing prompts: to write daily in observation of something, anything, that could be regularly observed and see where the writing and observations might take you. Some mornings the daybook was a dream journal, others, a lyric weather report. The dailiness also fed, I think, those lines about the sensation of thinking itself. The process was immersive in that way—perpetually present with me on my desktop, an open Google document. Speaking of which, that is another line I hear in my head quite often: forgotten in our dailiness, from the opening piece, “Indentations.” The feminist implications of remembering, paying attention to, and honoring that dailiness—the little details of domestic and physical experience—are important to me, and to this book. Dailiness, after all, is what makes up so many of the hours of our lives.
5. Can you share a few other art forms / works / books / experiences that influenced you in the writing of this book? Do you think these influences will be visible to your readers? Would you like them to be?
There are so many! Some, I suspect, more obvious—like Nelson (Bluets and The Argonauts, but also many of her interviews and a few lectures), Didion (“Dark Storage” borrows syntactical moves from “Goodbye to All That” and, despite the differences in structure and content, is one essay I hope is transparent in its homage to Didion’s art of the farewell), and Roland Barthes (“Cramping at the Bone” owes much to The Pleasure of the Text, not to mention Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay). Others, like Sarah Vap’s End of the Sentimental Journey and Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, may be more opaque in their contributions—but both of these were key texts for me when it came to unlocking some of the ideas and formal elements in Depth Control. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention all my colleagues and teachers throughout the MFA program, as well. Some were my best readers and/or critics, others characters in the narrative itself, and all of us, I think, contributed to the creative energy that made an experiment in prose forms like this one possible.