SmokeLong Quarterly

One of the most interesting things about creative nonfiction is we, as the reader, typically get to witness two selves in conversation—the writer experiencing the event and the writer at the desk. With your use of second-person point of view in this essay, we are actually witnessing three selves: you at nine, you at thirty-nine, and you as the writer. Can you tell us about your decision to write in the second person for this piece?

Second person imparts such a sense of immediacy and intimacy, plunging the reader right into the story. I’m thinking of Naomi Rosenberg’s “How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead.” Most of us will never be in that situation, fortunately, but in that essay, we all are. It’s almost like a contract, asking the reader to step into my world and live it for a few moments. In another way it’s a reclaiming of control. Also, for me, telling deeply personal stories feels more accessible, more possible in the second person because I can write as an observer.

What was your process like for writing and editing this essay? Did it come into being with a flash and a bang, or did it develop slowly over time? Or something in between?

This one poured out of me on a day when I didn’t even really know what I was sitting down to write. It was so different than anything else I was working on. Then I had to figure out what it wanted to be. An essay? A prose poem? Too long for a haiku. I workshopped it and revised many times, tweaking the imagery, adding and removing certain lines, but the bones remained the same. One early reader commented that I left it in a dark place, but other endings I experimented with didn’t feel as true to me. I once had the opportunity to ask Grace Talusan about her essay “My Father’s Noose,” and why she ended it the way she did, with the rope still around his neck. She said it was because in many ways her father was always “still in that noose,” metaphorically speaking. That has stayed with me.

It’s challenging to write an impactful essay in a thousand words and you did it in four hundred words. Why did you choose the inherent brevity of flash nonfiction for this piece?

I love flash nonfiction! Even though it’s often harder to write short rather than long, the form can pack such a punch. I was focusing on a very specific sliver of an experience, and a sliver that carries a lot of heaviness with it. I didn’t want to immerse the reader—or myself during the actual writing of it—in that feeling for too long. I really never considered expanding this piece into something that was fifteen hundred or three thousand words.

Are there any writers or essays that influenced you as you worked on this essay?

One of the first flash nonfiction essays I read that took my breath away is Brenda Miller’s “Swerve.” You can feel that car ride in your bones, the tension, the risk, the fear. Then she seamlessly expands into the landscape of the broader relationship, making our heart ache for the narrator. All that in two paragraphs! It’s stayed in my mind for years. Slightly longer is Ryan Van Meter’s “First,” which beautifully captures a turning point in his life through this one snapshot in time. It sparked my imagination about how single moments can be crafted into something bigger, something universal. And I just realized that essay is centered around a car ride, too, so maybe I just have a thing for cars?

Please tell us about your life as a writer! What are some of your rituals around your writing practice? Do you have a go-to playlist on in the background? Do you typically write at home or somewhere public?

I was working from home long before all the cool kids were doing it. My house these days is usually quiet, and I lost my rescue spaniel muse a couple of years ago. I start the day slowly, thinking over coffee and Wordle before sitting down to write. I don’t function well in silence, so I put on some background music that’s mellow and soothing. Right now, my go-to is Leon Bridges, but we have a great local radio show on weekends called Acoustic Sunrise, which my kids insist ruins every song ever made. I love it, and not just because it annoys them.