The Kenyon Review

Micro-Conversations – EXCERPTS

interview QUESTION Contributions for 2021 blog

In response to Janika Oza’s “Fish Stories” – https://kenyonreview.org/piece/janika-oza/

“From the first line to the final image of this piece, the intangibility of death and memory is counterbalanced by habitual acts of cooking and eating. Can you talk a bit about the emotional response evoked by food in this story and how you see it to relate to grief?”

In response to Winona León’s “Collapsible” – https://kenyonreview.org/piece/winona-leon/

“Storytelling acts as a driving force behind characters’ decision making in this piece. Do you relate to Conseulo’s way of finding solace and direction through ‘the power of words,’ and if so, was that something you experienced when writing this story?”

In response to Maureen Langloss’s “Sexy Motherfucker’s Mom” – https://kenyonreview.org/piece/maureen-langloss/

“I see from your bio that you’re a mother of three; how did your own experience as a parent influence the way you shaped this narrative? Was personal reflection an intended part of the project – or were you hoping to generate a more removed, experimental perspective on motherhood?”

In response to Miriam Grossman’s “2004” – https://kenyonreview.org/piece/miriam-grossman/

“Although the mother’s presence is almost obsessively observed throughout the piece, readers never hear her speak, and the final paragraph illustrates her voice as unmemorable. How do you see the imbalance between visibility and verbalization to connect to the story’s theme of body image? Do you think silence increases these bodily anxieties?”

In response to Rachel Heng’s “Coffins Patch” – https://kenyonreview.org/piece/rachel-heng/

“Ei Mun’s irresistible desire to embrace life beneath the surface stands in stark contrast to her lack of satisfaction and enthusiasm navigating the world above. Do you think the character’s relationship with diving works to fill these emotional divides by the end of the story?”

In response to Kelsey Norris’s “Sentries” – https://kenyonreview.org/piece/kelsey-norris/

“This story is steeped in sensory details that could only be achieved by a child’s point of view, so the moments of mature reflection disrupt the narrator's assumed naïveté–such as, “...(W)e’d delayed growing older for the sake of the adults around us, so that they might find their shape in our care, instead of the other way around.” Was subverting a sense of ‘childishness’ important for you when writing on youth? 

analytical essay – sample

     In 1926, shortly after suffering a nervous breakdown, Virginia Woolf published On Being Ill to explore pain within the bounds of written expression. Woolf presents the scope of human suffering with sweeping imprecision in her essay, arguing that articulation is paradoxical to painful experiences, since suffering disturbs our recourses for reason and responsibility for composure. Compared to the “cautious respectability” and “long campaigns” writers may exact in health, in illness, she describes, “words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other…which the poet, knowing words to be meager in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke…a state of mind which neither words can express nor reason explain” (Woolf, 41-2). Rather than surrendering to illness’s incomprehensibility, Woolf finds great opportunity to arise from engaging with pain’s “mystic quality” in literature, meeting its logical defiance with an air of experimental freedom. Unencumbered by expectation for catharsis, suffering’s subversive literary atmosphere allows writers and readers to step “beyond the surface meaning” of written expression and into more “instinctive” narrative dimensions that are just as – if not more – salient than those of traditional scripts. Equally honoring what can and cannot be told, both words and the spaces in between them, pain narratives emerge as a powerful experimental framework in which to explore the limits of perception and interact with the most unanswerable questions of the human experience.

     Following anything but a traditional script, Anne Carson’s 2010 Nox is a testament to the insight that arises from engaging with suffering’s incomprehensibility in storytelling. A self-proclaimed epitaph, written in the wake of Carson’s brother Michael’s death, Nox functions as a sort of multimedia memorial site; it is compiled with xeroxed copies of family letters, photographs, sketches, receipts, paintings, poems and translations, all collaged together with indeterminate chronology. Encapsulated in a hardcover box, with pages that unfold like an accordion, Carson’s piece requires a literal dissection of form in order to perceive – and derive meaning from – the complex emotional processing underlaying the story. Revealed in Carson’s layering of photographs, drawings, and text, as well as her visual omissions and additions – Nox ultimately presents three separate and unique dimensions for readers to interpret the pain narrative: individually within each page’s frame and collectively across both the adjacent and reversed pages of those frames. In a multidimensional reading experience that promotes an ever-evolving interpretation of human suffering, the author’s expressions transform across surfaces and alter according to readers’ subjective gazes. In effect, Carson’s story rejects notions of right or wrong when conceptualizing death in literature, mimicking grief’s “mystic quality” to create space for interacting with its many shapes over time. …

… The layering of textual and visual, literal and theoretical, physical and psychological elements in Carson’s work makes it impossible to derive singular meaning from the story, and it permits emotional multiplicity when processing loss. The author never pursues omniscience or positions her work as a fully-formed product. Instead, she employs the literary space to explore the thresholds of articulation and evolve perspectives on life and death without expectation. As a critic succinctly summarized in a 2011 book review, “Nox is a box with two dead brothers and a dead poet and a dead language and a book inside. Nox is a keepsake, record of life, report of death, report to death…non-poem, non-sketch, letter to the self, memo to the muses…Nox’s scale, then, is precisely entirely human, as is its import” (Biespiel, 2011). As the boxed frame closes, Carson’s material “import” exports a narrative that is universally accessible in its encounters with the human spirit. These pages can fold and unfold over a lifetime, and each time their creases may convey a different story, provoke a different feeling, recall a different memory. This endless irregularity, it seems, is precisely what Nox aims to legitimize in its memorial; after all, it is not line-by-line that we process pain but pulse-by-pulse.

close reading – sample

from Middlemarch by George Eliot – book 5, chapter 49, page 461: 

“Dorothea by this time had turned cold again, and now threw herself back helplessly in her chair. She might have compared her experience at that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was taking on a new form, that she was undergoing a metamorphosis in which memory would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs. Everything was changing its aspect: her husband’s conduct, her own duteous feeling toward him, every struggle between them–and yet more, her whole relation to Will Ladislaw. Her world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew. One change terrified her as if it had been a sin; it was a violent shock of repulsion from her departed husband, who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did. Then again she was conscious of another change which also made her tremulous; it was a sudden strange yearning of heart toward Will Ladisalw. It had never before entered her mind that he could, under any circumstances, be her lover; conceive the effect of the sudden revelation that another had thought of him in that light–that perhaps he himself had been conscious of such a possibility,–that this with the hurrying, crowding vision of unfitting conditions, and questions not soon to be solved."

     Opening with a bleak illustration of Dorothea’s body turning “cold” after discovering Casaubon's spiteful clause in his will – forbidding her to marry Mr. Ladislaw – we encounter the main character here as she viscerally absorbs the death before her in sudden solitude. Soon launching into accelerated self-reflection, however, this embodied reckoning with Casaubon's attempted jurisdiction over her free will seems to have a reflexive rather than a stiffening effect – physically throwing the character with “violent shock” and “sudden...yearning.” At this moment, Dorothea becomes not only liberated from Casaubon's looming imposition but awakened to the value of her own autonomy: a belated realization previously stifling the character’s development. As Eliot continues on to address Dorothea’s “alarmed consciousness,” there is an overpowering sense of multitudinous change driving the narrative – noticing corporeal and cognitive, immediate and prospective shifts. In undergoing “metamorphosis” in this scene, there is simultaneously a literal stripping away of Casaubon from Dorothea in the novel – shredding the skin of his influence – and a more theoretical emergence of the character’s reborn sense of self.

     The phrasing “the stirring of new organs” additionally points readers’ attention to the recurring motif of societal reform in Middlemarch and the importance of adopting an ever-changing interpretation of the human condition. A direct parallel in Eliot’s phrasing is evident in earlier descriptions of Lydgate’s medical hero, Bichat – as she notes, “This great seer did not go beyond consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in the living organism…; but it was open to another mind to say, have not these structures some common basis from which they have all started, as your sarsnet, gauze...velvet from the raw cocoon?” (138-9). Noticing the analogous illustration of “cocoon,” this secondary passage similarly proposes that fundamental reform leads to a heightened power of perception (identifying “this great seer”). That is, just as Lydgate rejects individual facts to welcome more collective observations of primitive tissue in medicine, Dorothea refutes her most primal impressions to recognize the larger romantic web surrounding her in Casaubon's wake. The insight offered in metamorphosis, Eliot suggests, is not contingent upon an insurgence of new stimuli but simply a reconceptualization of what is already in front of us – narrowing the scope only to then find it widened.

     Accepting that Dorothea “must wait and think anew” and that her realized yearning for Will cannot be met with immediate resolution, this passage finally introduces a requisite sense of patience for subjects undergoing even the most “convulsive” change. Dorothea’s transcendence from naive myopia into more abundant self awareness still does not protect her from the unpredictable future; it simply enables her to discern the presence and potential of self-governed desire in the present. Such inherent helplessness in grappling with overarching significance, however, seems to be the very attribute Eliot celebrates within her characters’ textual awakenings – for the inability to predict what will emerge from the cocoon is exactly what makes metamorphosis worth examining. 

ENGLISH SENIOR THESIS

( coming soon )