"First Kisses, Real & Imagined"

“In the past few months, my story collection The Geography of First Kisses has allowed a way in for prospective readers to speak of their own first kisses. A First Lady’s first kiss as a young girl under a front porch light. An elderly gentleman’s remembrance of full lips under a full moon. A girl’s memory of butterfly kisses from when she was much younger with her grandmother, their eyelashes fluttering together, and her grandmother laughing and saying,“Honestly? The first one? No idea,” her voice trailing behind her, the memory gone. And while these stories are lovely and spontaneous, it’s the first kisses in literature, rather than in real life, that draw me in.”

- from “First Kisses, Real & Imagined,” a little essay I wrote on first kisses, mostly literary ones, inspired by readers, novels, and the stories of The Geography of First Kisses & featured in the Women’s Writers, Women’s Books’ ON WRITING column

Eva's Christmas Eve

A balmy 85 degrees in West Palm Beach. A sultry kind of Christmas Eve, not typical of winter in Florida, even this far south, even in 1973. Tonight dinner and dancing, but for now, for Eva, a moment in the sun, in that white bikini she’d worn back when she met Will, her eventual husband; back before she’d any thoughts of having children, Rainey, a daughter as beautiful as she; back before she became a war widow.

Figures we picture when writing characters: for Eva, it was Grace Kelly, Faye Dunaway, Bridget Bardot. Look and Life magazine covers. Eventually, though, characters become themselves, more than the reflections that inspired them. They take on lives, which deepen and color and align with surrounding characters, reliable or unreliable in the way they navigate their fictional paths.

As a group they take on meaning, create a reason for being on the page, inform us of what was going on back in the late 60s and early 70s. And in the end, their individuality and relationships to each other stir the moment they were caught up in. In Sybelia Drive, for the women, it was the first glimmer and glance of feminism. One might not see this at first, but within the pages, there it is, billowing, slowly, and in its own way.

Back in October, Women Writers, Women’s Books featured an essay on the men and boys of Sybelia Drive. This December Sybelia Drive’s women and girls are up in lights: Minnie, Eva, Lillian, LuLu, Rainey, Hélène, Vita, An, and Esther. Inspired by a reflection on hope from writer Rebecca Solnit in her book of essays, Hope in the Dark, “The Women and Girls of Sybelia Drive” explores the characters in a way that, even after writing the novel, surprised me. Each of these women is strengthened by each other and by a deep thread of hope which they know won’t allow life to return to the way it was, but allows them to move forward into the kind of lives they’ve created themselves. Eva may be the one who has moved the farthest toward a self-fulfilled life, and so, she sits on the beach, awaiting and aware of the next adventure.

Three Writers & Their Compassionate, Startling Worlds of Poetry, Essay, & Story

Newfound Interviews, Autumn 2018

Hanif Abdurraqib

One Clear and Clean Surface on Which to Dance: An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib

Poet, essayist, and cultural critic, Hanif Abdurraqib has produced two celebrated volumes in recent years—“The Crown Ain’t Worth Much” (Button Poetry, 2016) and “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” (Two Dollar Radio, 2017). Collections, respectively, of poetry and essays, both walk the territory of family, friendship, and community with compassion, depth, and clarity. There is no shying away from the disparity and death that crack open these worlds; instead, there is facing them, staring right through them to what truly is and what could be. Broken bodies, broken glass, mothers’ arms, closed caskets, hunger, jukeboxes, brothers, ghosts, bullets, grieving, missing those gone and those gone missing. And inside of all this is the thought: What would it be like to look up into the stars instead of fleeing “midnight and questions that come with it”?

Nafissa Thompson-Spires

What Is a Sketch but a Chalk Outline Done in Pencil or Words? An Interview with Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut story collection, “Heads of the Colored People,” selected for the 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction, strides into the worlds of black women and men, black girls and boys, upending stereotypes and straining against the limits of the expected through a dark, provocative humor. With a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois, and as a Callaloo fellow, Tin House alum, and Sewanee scholar, Thompson-Spires infuses her writing with scholarly works, 90s pop culture, and contemporary concerns. Black culture and identity in conversation with the tensions and politics of race are angled in ways that refuse definition. Through the unique cast of characters in twelve exquisitely startling, hilarious, and at times poignant stories, questions are asked about connection, collaboration, assimilation, resistance, and vulnerability. 

Jamel Brinkley

Light, Love, and Luck: An Interview with Jamel Brinkley

In the stories of Jamel Brinkley’s expansively beautiful collection, “A Lucky Man” (Graywolf Press/A Public Space Books, 2018), selected for the 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction, fathers and sons of the Bronx and beyond try to make their way, to negotiate and understand their world. The language here is at times lyrical, always honest, revealing the reach and fascination and discomfort of the places—of the city, of the mind—in which the characters dwell. As Robert Hunsberger (Duende) writes: “Told in nine vivid short stories, Jamel Brinkley’s debut collection, “A Lucky Man,” tugs sharply at the tender threads of intimacy, race, and masculinity. Brinkley’s prose, as fierce in its vigilance as it is in its empathy, casts new light on the delicate and heartbreaking truisms of American manhood.”

The Neutral Ground

The Neutral Ground

An Interview with Annie Bleecker

“As a child of New Orleans, wind is a novelty for you. A couple times a year, a bizarre weather phenomenon might stir the still air of our troubled and shallow waterways enough that a spooky remnant airstream, maybe even salt scented, will blow the hair off of our shoulders. When this happens, you say the word you think means “scared” in your girl-baby voice and pull your fists up to your eyes in an exaggerated gesture of fear. But on this train, the rush of wind delights you. It dries our sweat until our skin is stiff and crystalline.”

–      from “THE NEUTRAL GROUND” – by Annie Bleecker

Annie Bleecker’s essay, “THE NEUTRAL GROUND,” reveals a writer who has a keen understanding of place. Her writing is gorgeous, incredibly detailed and textured, full of love and story and sensibility, engaged in all that is sensory. This is the kind of prose that sends a reader straight into the experience. An outing in August in New Orleans becomes a small, but breathtaking adventure. All that heat, then the ride and the wind, mother-daughter moments, the streetcar, the journey, the day.

NOLA Fountain

NOLA Path

Annie, tell us how you came to writing. What is it about creative nonfiction that calls to you? And are there any New Orleans associations that help support your literary life?

I’ve always loved writing, but was too chicken to really devote myself to it. Once upon a time I was a creative writing major—that had always been my intention—but I got tired of being embarrassed about not having an answer to that banal adult question: “And what will you do with that?” So I changed my major.

Writing has been a major focus of most of the jobs I’ve held, but I’ve found the thought process involved in writing advertising copy and copyediting doesn’t feel at all like that of creative writing. I try to look at it positively, as they complement one another, rather than think that one drains the other. I suppose that’s why I went back to school at 32; I felt there was a certain feeling I’d only ever gotten from creative writing that I hadn’t found professionally.

I always assumed I’d write fiction, as that’s what I’ve always preferred to read, and because I didn’t really know what creative nonfiction was. But I’ve found, so far at least, that creative nonfiction is the only thing I’ve been able to write. I tend to take a simple situation and make it complicated, so I really need the boundaries and structure that reality imposes. I get completely overwhelmed by the limitless possibilities of fiction. Also, a lot of writers are experimenting with the genre right now (Elisa Gabbert’s “THE SELF UNSTABLE,”  T. Fleischmann’s “SYZGY,” Katherine Angel’s “UNMASTERED”), so it’s exciting to see how far it can be bent. Collections of personal essays are also becoming more widely read, which seems like a shift. For example, look at how much press there has been around Leslie Jamison’s “THE EMPATHY EXAMS.”  Hilton Als’ “WHITE GIRLS”  also comes to mind. Mary Ruefle’s “MADNESS, RACK, AND HONEY” has been like the bible to me for the past year or so. She calls the book a collection of lectures, but that seems a (likely intentional) misnomer.

Here in New Orleans I subscribe to a few literary groups, and it seems they’re doing great things, but I’m too much of a hermit to venture out most of the time. I’ve enjoyed seeing Room 220 grow. I love the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge (I might be the only nerd who drives from New Orleans to attend), and this year was the first time I’d been to the Tennessee Williams Festival, which was fantastic.

Streetcar Interior

Chile Mining Town

In “THE NEUTRAL GROUND,” the idea of place is examined from all sides of a mid-morning excursion—from the neutral ground, “the airstrip of grass… the place owned by no one,” to the streetcar interior, “a hollowed and spit-shined redwood… bare light bulbs hang[ing] like inverted ideas.” And from the momentum of the journey, “whizzing past street signs at close range,” to the quiet cool of a fountain, “run[ning]… fingers through the lily pads’ ethereal roots.” What draws you to the specific details of place?

When I started writing, it seemed like a place, and most often an odd place, would typically be the impetus for an essay—the small mining town in the very north of Chile where I stayed for over a week in the hospital with my stepdad, who’d been bucked from a horse and broke his ribs, or the small towns in Mississippi I spent a week driving through with my sister, mother, and two-year-old daughter during a hurricane evacuation. Or it’s a place I love, like New Orleans, or the lake near Tahoe we went to every summer for a week when I was a kid. The problem I run into, the difficult part, is that then I have to build a story to go with the place.

Who are among your literary influences?

Zadie Smith (more so for her nonfiction than for her fiction, but I think her most recent book, “NW,” is extraordinary), Eula Biss (anything and everything she writes, but “THE BALLOONISTS” holds a special place in my heart), Mark Twain and Nabokov for humor and irony, Joan Didion for her writing about place and seemingly endless well of vocabulary and sentence structure, Shirley Jackson for her twisted humor, Nadine Gordimer for the way she writes relationships and subtext… I could go on and on.

NOLA Live Oak

NOLA Moment

Motherhood is also a world in which you live and from which you write. The unnamed emotion that rises up in response to your daughter—“you reach up with one hand and grab a rope of my hair—your instinctual response to worry or excitement”—creates “a rare moment of poignancy that comes on fast and fierce.” Though motherhood can be a defining and sometimes restrictive place in terms of time, do you find it an expansive and inspirational part of your life? Are there any anecdotes you’d like to share? And any material you’re gathering that may lead to future projects?

While motherhood has become expansive and inspirational, it hasn’t always felt that way, and I think that is where this story came from. I wanted (and still want) to believe that our relationships with our kids and even babies can be as varied and dynamic as those between adult, but I found pregnancy and early motherhood to be a time of limited collective imagination. When you’re pregnant, that’s all anyone talks to you about. It has become such a prescribed experience that anything but that norm feels wrong. I remember when my daughter was a newborn, I started to notice that women’s sentences had become a sort of hypothetical call-and-response: “Don’t you just think about her every second you’re away from her?” or “Isn’t being a mommy the best?” Statements for which the answer is either yes (good, normal) or no (bad, weird). Things like that.

I found the instruction books and the limited conversation and the fetishizing of early motherhood to be stifling. I guess I just shut down, in a way. So with “THE NEUTRAL GROUND,” I was questioning why I could only experience the feelings I thought I was supposed to feel about being a mother when it was just my daughter and I, on our own time, doing our own thing (though I guess in fairness, I was the one making the plans). I suppose trains are always a form of escape, and especially in August in New Orleans, the streetcar specifically is one of the few forms of non-air conditioning related respite from the heat. The phrase “neutral ground,” I’ve always found curious, and in that instance, it seemed relevant as a “place owned by no one.” It was a place of zero expectation, and that was where I felt comfortable to build a different kind of mother-daughter relationship, though, of course, none of this was intentional or evident to me at the time.

The Aubrey – Dining Room – Santiago, Chile

I understand you’d love to live in a hotel. The Columns in New Orleans, the city you now call home; the Aubrey in Santiago, Chile, a city you once called home; or, like Eloise of the Kay Thompson books and the Hillary Knight drawings, the Plaza in New York City?

Ha, I think this must be common for those of us who were read Eloise. It’s a coincidence that you mentioned The Aubrey, in Santiago, because that is where I had my most Eloise-like experience. My mom and stepdad came to Chile to visit with my husband’s family in Santiago, and then they were supposed to go on to visit the south of Chile. But there was a terrible fire in Patagonia, and all flights were cancelled, so they were “stranded” in Santiago somewhat indefinitely. The hotel gave them a great deal, but it’s small so they had to change rooms every day. As a result, I got to see every room in the hotel, which was a huge treat. The hotel is a renovation of this great old house parked up in a crevice of Cerro San Cristobal, which is this extraordinary park on a hill that rises out of the middle of the city. When I lived in Santiago, I always wondered about that house, which was so lovely but clearly abandoned.

City Park – New Orleans

City Park Lagoon – New Orleans

Has your work toward an MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts added direction and dimension to your writing?

Dimension – yes; direction – not at all. The opposite, probably. My writing is all over the place, but I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing like I once did.

I know getting my MFA has changed a lot because I was completely inexperienced when I started there two years ago. I know I won’t even realize how huge an impact it’s made until I’m out, because I’m still very much in the thick of it. There are the writing aspects and then the psychic aspects, which for me have been just as important because I needed to build confidence and have the faith to follow random ideas wherever they might go. I never would have done that before. It’s hard work during the semester, but then I get to go hang out with my friends and do nothing but talk about writing for ten days. I heard a graduating student describe the experience as an “exquisite hell,” and I think that’s very accurate. I think of it in the way that babies grow teeth—there will be two weeks of pain and complaining as the teeth push through, but then the growth (and associated pain) relent for a few weeks and you can live off of that previous progress.

NOLA – Walking Back Home

“When our feet make contact with the neutral ground, sadness and regret return with the familiarity of our surroundings.” At the end of your journey in “THE NEUTRAL GROUND,” you describe the disappointment of falling back into the habitual, of returning home. But something shifts here. Could you describe this for us?

This goes back to what I wrote before about this odd phenomenon I experienced. It was tied to place for me. In my own home, my role was something else. But on the neutral ground, everything was undefined, and this was a relief. So I suppose the sadness and regret come from stepping off the streetcar and the spell ending. At least that’s what it felt like at the time. I was fascinated by how my perception differed from my daughter’s; how differently we perceived the same block in that moment.

Annie, I’ve learned so much about your writing, from influences and inspiration to perception and process, and how place and relationships play a major role in all of this. Many thanks for the incredible conversation!

Thanks, so much, Karin!

Annie Bleecker

Annie Bleecker lives in New Orleans with her husband, three-year-old-daughter, and overweight pug. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her essay, “THE NEUTRAL GROUND,” is her first publication and appeared in LITERARY MAMA.

All photos permission of Annie Bleecker.

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

*

First posted in the Arts section of Hothouse Magazine.

The Gaze of Emilie Staat

“But tango begins before the dance, with a subtle yet terribly important gaze I haven’t yet

mastered. The cabeceo is an invitation, without words, and involves direct and sustained eye

contact, often from across the room. If a leader catches the eye of a follower and nods to the

dance floor, he is inviting her to dance. If she maintains the eye contact, smiles, or nods, she has

accepted. This is perfectly elegant in theory, but fraught with peril in practice.”

- from Emilie Staat’s memoir-in-progress, Tango Face: How I Became a Dancer and Became Myself

Portrait of Emilie by French artist Gersin

Emilie Staat surprises me. Her gaze is open, and her conversation eager and engaging. I’ve come to know her as an incredible reader and editor, and on a sunny May morning in New Orleans, I listened to her stories and later read a few chapters of her memoir-in-progress. Her written words have taken me by surprise all over again. Here, she reveals her love of tango and how the dance has led her on a journey of self-discovery.

Emilie Staat & Casey Mills perform at the 2012 Words and Music Literary Festival – Photo Credit: Sheri Stauch

Emilie, in your award-winning essay, “Tango Face,” you write of the cabeceo, or unspoken invitation to dance, the difficulty of the gaze, the “initial awkwardness” that comes from “the proximity of the embrace.” As a writer, language is your strength. How is the experience of moving into the world of tango, a world with a completely different vocabulary, nuanced and wordless, a world that you describe with thoughtful, passionate prose, deepening your work as a writer?

Originally, I thought tango would help me better understand the main character of my novel, a circus performer who has a visceral relationship with the world that’s very different from my own. And tango did increase my understanding of her physicality. But it became less about research and reached me personally. I think it has made me more generous and empathetic as a person, because you can feel your partner’s nervousness, or distraction, or happiness in their body as you dance together. It’s hard to dance that closely with someone for ten or twelve minutes without feeling connected to them. I’m also more aware of how wrong I often am about what people are thinking or feeling. My best interpretation still contains a seed of me—my experiences, prejudices, and assumptions filter my interpretations. Knowing that helps me set aside the me more cleanly and think about them—my partners, my characters.

In my work, tango has given me a new set of tools, changed my syntax, made me more mindful of the effect the words I choose will have, maybe like music. Recently, I had the opportunity to take workshops with Silvina Valz and Diego Pedernera while they were in New Orleans, including one focusing on the chacarera, a folkloric dance from Argentina that is vastly different than tango. I was struck by the fact that the whole dance is a working toward an embrace at the end. Instead of the intense embrace of tango, there is eye contact as each dancer performs their part, eye contact that becomes itself an embrace. The chacarera made me reconsider the cabeceo, my struggles with it and how intricate and elegant nonverbal communication can be and by contrast, how purposeful and powerful your words should be.

 Silvina Valz & Diego Pedernera perform in New Orleans at La Milonga Que Fatalba

“How did I end up… surrounded by $800 worth of shoes, both excited… and terrified of them?”

– from “Comme il Faut,” an essay-in-progress by Emilie Staat

Tango, two-step, or tarantella?

I had to look up the tarantella because I had only a vague notion of what it is. Not that I know much more now, but what strikes me most is that it seems like a dance that is much harder than a casual observer would think. Which is true of most dances, that they are easy to do, but difficult to do well. There is an enormous gap between the verb and the noun, so while I love dancing other styles like two-step, salsa and swing, tango is the only dance that has made me a dancer.

Cicely Tyson

Ernest J. Gaines

When you were awarded the gold medal for “Tango Face,” the Faulkner-Wisdom Nonfiction Prize

 winner, the organizers of the Words and Music Literary Festival invited you to perform. Would you tell us about the experience of dancing the tango on the same stage that writer Ernest J. Gaines and actress Cicely Tyson had just shared?

I’d only been learning tango for about a year, and while I was a good beginner, I wasn’t at performance level. When Rosemary James, who organizes the festival, said I should perform, I said no at first. But then, every night for a week, I dreamt about performing. I knew the room, I knew who my partner would be, what dress I would wear and what song we would dance to. Every night, it was such a vivid dream, and I realized how badly I wanted to perform, even if I wasn’t ready. When I asked Rosemary if it was too late, she was utterly gracious and suddenly, everything that seemed like a problem fell away.

The night of the performance, I was humbled by Cicely Tyson’s incredibly intimate and commanding performance and when Ernest Gaines spoke about his career and Faulkner, I was standing just alongside the stage, waiting with my partner to go on, but also just a few feet from what was, and felt like, a very important literary moment. The writer in me, analytical and cerebral, came forward and pushed the dancer back. I got in my head at the worst moment and I was so stiff and terrified. What I like best about the photo of our dance is that Sheri caught the instant, nearly a minute into the performance, that I utterly surrendered to the experience, to the song and to my partner.

Louisiana graffiti 

Emilie Staat, director Steve Herek, & actor Jose Zuniga worked together filming “The Chaperone”

As is typical of most writers, you have a day job and an intriguing one at that—as a script coordinator on films such as Twelve Years a Slave, Oldboy, HBO’s True Detective, Now You See Me, and 21 Jump Street.

 But your work is far from typical in that film projects can last for intense and long periods, and once they are complete, you take off a block of time to write. Would you tell us about your experiences in some of these projects? The highs, the lows, the stamina needed to survive long hours. And is the balance of all film work and then all writing working well for you?

Sometimes, I think my day job is too interesting, too distracting, and it doesn’t allow me a lot of time to write. But it does satisfy something necessary and I’m building toward a future in film that is more creative. I can’t quite give it up because my entire being lights up when I get a film job, or when I watch a movie I worked on. When I’m not working on a film and I pass by a set, I feel a pang. So, as all-consuming as that life is, I have to make space, find balance. I worked two of my biggest, longest shows (Now You See Me and Twelve Years a Slave) back to back in the year I first started to learn tango. I think it was my way of socializing, having something of a life, because it’s easy to lose that while working. But it also sparked my creativity, fueled my imagination in ways I didn’t expect. I’d been seeking balance for a long time, and tango forced me to work on it in a very real way that filtered into every aspect of my life.

Umbrella Tango in Times Square

Favorite place to write/dance.

For the first five years I lived in New Orleans, I wrote almost exclusively at a coffee shop by my house, which closed on New Year’s Eve almost two years ago. We jokingly called this place Cheers and it was a lot like Central Perk on Friends, very central to my life. Several people asked me if I was going to move when it closed (it took me more than a year, but I did move). I have a tendency to get rooted in one place. So these days, I’ve embraced the rootlessness of not having a steady writing home. It makes me more flexible and more focused on what I bring to the table each day, rather than where I write.

The same is true of my dance venues. There are aspects I appreciate about all of them, but I’ve yet to find a spot that is a perfect combination of elements – floor personality, space, temperature, music, crowd, etc. But I enjoy them all and I try to focus on my dance, rather than the limitations or advantages of the particular space.

Favorite writing tool/tango heel.

I’m ambidextrous in my writing tools. Sometimes I write by hand, very often I type. My iPhone is a tool and so are physical journals. Shoes are similar. My first pair of tango shoes were a pair of suede Comme il Fauts, which many consider the top of the line, with steel-reinforced heels. I call these my “old faithfuls” now cause they’re so worn in. My main pair currently are silver and black Darcos heels that are very sexy and go with everything.

Favorite writer/tango dancer.

I appreciate so many writers and dancers for the things they do particularly well, or what they have to say about craft. And, in both writing and dancing, my favorites have changed as I’ve matured and learned more about myself.

My favorites in my dance community are often people I’ve danced with many, many times and we’ve developed a style, almost a language, together. One of my favorite dancers might be a man I danced with only once, when we were both visitors at a Chicago dance event, and who I’ve never seen again. Or maybe that’s just one of my favorite dances.

I’ve been lucky enough to learn from world-class professional dancers who visit New Orleans, couples like Homer and Cristina Ladas, one of the first visiting couples whose workshops I took. They’re coming back to New Orleans in December for a mini tango festival, together with Ney Melo and Jennifer Bratt, and we’re incredibly lucky to have those two couples visit our community.

As for writers, I’m forming my “memoir tribe” now, with fierce writers like Cheryl Strayed, Melissa Febos and Claire Dederer. I just finished reading Rob Sheffield’s Turn Around Bright Eyes, and I’d definitely put him in my tribe. Dean Koontz and Alice Hoffman are both long-standing favorites who I’ve read since I was a teenager aching to be a writer and they have really formed me in immeasurable ways.

At present, you are working on your memoir, Tango Face: How I Became a Dancer and Became Myself, and you also have a novel-in-progress, The Winter Circus, in the wings. What are your dreams—in terms writing time, space, and subject—for the future?

I’d like to get these two books out into the world, of course. The novel’s been in my life since 2004 and now I’ve been working on the memoir for almost two years. There are more projects in the queue that I’d like to get to, including two t.v. shows and a feature script I co-wrote earlier this year. And as much as I love New Orleans, I miss traveling and I’d like to make it a bigger part of my life. A friend and I are discussing taking a road trip to all the major U.S. tango cities next year, maybe even turning it into a blog or film as we go. We’re looking into crowd-funding, so we’ve been working out the budget and which cities we’d visit. It’s starting to feel like a very real possibility.

Emilie’s Banksy tattoo

& Banksy’s original image

Lagniappe question!

I remember your fascination with graffiti artist Banksy, and your story about getting a Banksy tattoo. The image reminds me a little of your view of the world, holding on and letting go, as in dance and writing. Would you share that story? 

I have five tattoos, which I got between the ages of 25 and 30. My tattoos, the project of picking what I would permanently display on my flesh, is about making myself at home in my body, which I struggled to do throughout my teens and twenties. Each of the images is a reminder to myself. Your comment about holding on and letting go is perfect. I’ve never thought about it precisely like that, but I’ve always liked that Banksy’s image is both positive and pessimistic, depending on who is looking at it or where they are in life, or at the moment they see it. It’s about yearning and losing, childhood and hope, love and nostalgia. Contradiction and complexity is what makes it such a fascinating and universal image. It’s the closest to an “off the wall” tattoo I have, since it’s someone’s art exactly and not an image that I designed with the tattoo artist. Yet, you’re right that it does depict my world view.

Emilie Staat

Emilie Staat’s essay Tango Face won the 2012 Faulkner-Wisdom Nonfiction Prize. She is working on a memoir about life and tango under the same title as well as a novel. When she is not working as a script coordinator for film and television, she writes book features for 225 Magazine and blogs at NolaFemmes and her personal blog, Jill of All Genres.

Feature photo: Emilie Staat – in the French Quarter, at the Words and Music Festival, New Orleans   Photo Credit: Che Yeun

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

*

This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.