The Lightning Room with Suzanne Farrell Smith

 

Interview by Brian Kornell

 

Suzanne Farrell Smith’s essay, “Listing to Love,” which appears in the July 2013 issue, catalogs love and loss with a focus on all the little things we can love.

 

1. Name your own executive staff of PITA.

A. Ann Coulter

B. James Joyce

C. My upstairs neighbor, whose apartment renovation has entered its third year

D. Al Roker

2. The piece is presented in outline form. Some items are expanded upon, such as the elevator being reprogrammed or the mix tape, while others are not. How did you choose which items to expand upon and which ones to leave more ambiguous? Did you decide this as you wrote or were these decisions made in the editing phase?

I made expansion decisions after finishing an unwieldy draft of multiple linked lists. Through revision, I decided which items to expand based on which carried more emotional weight. Revision worked like a flow chart. I asked myself, does this item mean something more significant than can be contained by its spot on the list? If not, I left it as a single item or deleted it. If it did, I pursued the meaning through expansion, which often led to a new sub-list.

3. Did you conceive this piece in this form or did it evolve as you worked on it?

This piece began as a single list of little things I love. I got the bug for listing. When I cleaned out my sundry file, I listed what I found. For fun, I jotted the Clan of the Cave Bear teachings. And I made the list of my windowsill items on a day that I longed for connection to lost loved ones. Once I had four lists, it hit me how much listing is like essaying. By listing in outline form, you descend to smaller and smaller units of thought and emotion. It seemed like a literal way to get below the surface. So I combined the four original lists and drafted the rest in outline form. It freed me to be playful while allowing me to reveal truths slowly and in nuggets.

4. This piece is a love story, which as we all know can be difficult to write without being too saccharine. Essentially my question is, how did you do this? But, seriously, how much do you think the form contributed to this?

Form helped me a lot. The outline limited the number of words used to express an idea, so economy became crucial. Through listing in outline form, connections could be made without having to spell them out. I had no idea how readers would respond to an outline. Would it inspire a reader to make her own list of loved things? Or would someone close the piece after a glance, because it looks like notes from a high-school history class?

A good friend once shared something she learned: sentimental writing is writing that tells readers exactly how they should feel by the end of the piece. I don’t like my feelings to be prescribed when I read, so I always keep this in mind while writing, especially when I’m writing of love and loss.

5. I recently read a piece by Wendy Rawlings about the difficulty of writing about certain topics, such as love and loss. She wonders, “in order to write the memoir, must our feelings toward the experience we want to write about be utterly neutralized, as by some reverse alchemy that changes gold back into workaday metal, “massively in love” into mere material?” Was that true for you in writing this piece? How much distance do you need to be able to write about a subject?

I’m not sure I could quantify distance. What I need is time. But not time to start the writing process—I almost always write of loss as it’s happening. I write from the middle of the muck. Then I return to the piece (notes, draft, or in this case, lists) again and again, often over many years, before I shape the material in a way that feels right. To Rawlings’s point, revision neutralizes not my feelings but the language I’m using to articulate those feelings. There’s usually a moment when I’m no longer writing what happened and my feelings about it—I’m revising the language with a critical eye. Then I know I’ve gotten through something big.

6. What are three books and/or movies you love right now?

With a toddler at home and now pregnant with twins, my reading and watching habits have adjusted. I mostly read short pieces and stream TV shows like Veep and Dr. Who. My last book was Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. I love how she uses so many subjects—including environmentalism and physics—to help tell the story of an uncommonly sharp teenager facing extreme bullying and her father’s depression. As for movies, I haven’t been able to get The Secret Life of Walter Mitty out of my mind. I watched it on an airplane after saying goodbye to my dying father-in-law. He lived by the phrase “you can sleep when you’re dead,” and here he was, sleeping in his final days, while the movie’s daydreaming title character was just learning to live. Finally, I just came across a writer named Andrew Johnson through his essay “Perhaps One Day This Will All Make Sense” in the latest issue of Crazyhorse. I’m eager to read more of Johnson’s work, as well as writing by a few other authors I’m following: Jacob Newberry, Kim Dana Kupperman, Nancy Lord, Dani Bojanski, and Jennifer De Leon. A couple have books that I’ll read once my three little ones allow me the time!

 

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Brian Kornell is the Executive Director of S&Q, an arts non-profit creating performance space in local communities for underrepresented Queer & POC with simultaneous online broadcast & digital archive; he also serves as the fiction editor for The Cossack Review. His writing appears in Ninth Letter, The Philadelphia Review of Books, and elsewhere. More at www.briankornell.com.