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.

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First posted in the Arts section of Hothouse Magazine.

Brooklyn's Jamel Brinkley

Photo Credit – Keisha Green

“Claudius Van Clyde and I both preferred girls of a certain plumpness—in part, I

think, because that’s what black guys are supposed to like, because liking it confirmed

something about us—but he had gotten to Sybil first. So for the moment I was left to

deal with the prophet of the bubble. I was fine with that. I needed a good distraction, and

a good thing about hanging with Claudius Van Clyde was that you never failed to get

noticed. He had come to Columbia from West Oakland with certain notions regarding

life in New York, that the city’s summer heat and dust, its soot-caked winter ice, were

those of the cultural comet, which he ached to witness if not ride. Because of these

notions—which were optimistic, American—he manipulated gestures, surfaces, and

disguises, seemed to push the very core of himself outward so that you could see in his

face, in the flare of his broad nostrils, the hard radiance of the soul-stuff that some people

go on and on about. Though not quite handsome, he could fool you with his pretensions

and he was gorgeously insincere. Among his implements were a collection of Eastern style

conical hats and two-, three-, and four-finger rings. His pick for that night: a fez,

which was tilted forward on his head so that we, both of us, were emboldened by the

obscene probing swing of the tassel.”

- from “No More Than a Bubble”

by Jamel Brinkley

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Jamel Brinkley and I met at the Kenyon Writers Workshop in 2012, where each day Lee K. Abbott assigned a writing prompt, and the next morning we responded with story beginnings. The prompts were more than good, and the stories we came back with were more than surprising. Out of those surprises came really great complications, enormous wads of southern-style levity, racy descriptions of girls rolling in paint, Pacific coast road trips, Flatbush house parties, and god-like archetypes. A range of work that blew us all away. 

Jamel went on to other workshops and blew away a few more writers and teachers with his windswept street writing, inclusive of junkmen, Jamaican-African-American-Dominican girls, wild dogs, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, fez tassels, and near disappointment. His hard work and words have landed him a place at the Iowa Writers Workshop. No telling what the future will bring, but thankfully, it will include more stories and eventual volumes that bear Jamel Brinkley’s name.

Photo credit – Gya Watson

Jamel, you write short stories and are working on a novel. Could you compare the experience of creating short form vs. writing long?

The first thing I should do is confess that up until about two years ago, I was deathly afraid of writing short stories. The gaps in my knowledge of short stories, which are still significant, were then enormous.  I was all about novels, and in a drawer somewhere I have a 600-page dung heap of a novel that is probably still steaming and stinking things up.  I workshopped part of that novel at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop a few years ago, and I found much to my dismay that I had absolutely no understanding of structure.  What I had written was an incoherent mess.

The novel I’m working on now might more accurately be called a novella, or at least I envision it that way.  I’m trying to be way more modest about the scope and the pages, trying to be more mindful about structure, to exert more control so that it doesn’t turn into a “loose baggy monster” of the worst kind.  I’ve been working more on stories than the novel recently, and my sense is that both forms are difficult as hell.  Stories call for an extraordinary amount of control and efficiency, and in those miniaturized spaces, I find it particularly challenging to maintain the feeling and soul and voice I want while making things happen satisfactorily on the emotional and action plot levels.  I’ve had a hard time ramping up the tension.  I get caught up in sentences, a fact that is bad enough in a story, but imagine 600 pages of that nonsense!

The level of description and depth in your writing is phenomenal. Have you come to this from the foundation of years and years of reading and writing, or as this always been your inclination? Either way, who out in the world are your greatest influences?

Well, thank you, first of all.  I do think I’ve always been drawn to vivid writing, to details and images, the possibilities of rhythm in a sentence and a poetic line.  In high school and college, I fancied myself a poet, and I was devastated when I discovered that there was an unflattering name for what I had been writing: purple prose.  One of my challenges is to avoid layering on images, adjectives, and details in such a way that my writing becomes obscure, muddled.  So while I used to love Nabokov at his most florid, now I try to pay attention to writers who have a firm handle on what sentences can do, who know when to tighten and release the reins.  This wishful list of influences will be necessarily incomplete, but here goes:  James Baldwin (his essays and short stories), the James Joyce of Dubliners, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, J.D. Salinger, Marilynne Robinson (especially Housekeeping), Junot Díaz (especially Drown and Oscar Wao), Charles D’Ambrosio, Barry Hannah, Lee K. Abbott, Toni Morrison, Denis Johnson, Edward P. Jones, Amy Hempel, Nathaniel Mackey, Tobias Wolff, Gayl Jones, William Trevor, Alice Munro, John Edgar Wideman, Jhumpa Lahiri.  I’ll stop here, with guilty feelings about leaving off so many of the fiction writers I admire, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Q-Tip, Black Thought, Lauryn Hill, Mos Def, Ghostface Killah, and MF Doom as folks who inspire and perhaps influence me.  And don’t get me started on jazz!

Lions, tigers, or bears?

Lions, without question.  I spent many years as an employee, undergraduate and graduate student at Columbia, whose mascot is the lion.  I’ve also been called a lion because of my hair, here and there by friends who are adherents of Rastafari, and more significantly by former students who thought I looked like Simba from The Lion King.  There’s not much that’s lion-like about me beyond that; I’m a November baby, and I’m definitely more Scorpio than Leo.

The character, Claudius Van Clyde, in your story, “No More than a Bubble,” comes across as an archetype, a kind of jester, large and laughing, in love with life; yet through the narrator’s eyes, Claudius is truly flesh-and-blood with vulnerabilities and a demeanor that lead him and the narrator to near disgrace. Is this larger archetypal view something you intended, or a natural direction that the story took? Are there Claudius Van Clydes in your life, the kind of magnanimous personalities that beg for story?

I did intend it.  Claudius strikes me a particularly “New York” kind of character, in both the literary and life senses.  There are many versions of Claudius Van Clyde where I live, in Brooklyn.  These are folks who strike me as needing or wanting to match the grandiosity of New York City.  In a place teeming with stimuli, they make elaborate efforts to draw attention to themselves, to make things swirl around them, and I think that they often have fascinating reasons for doing so.  I’ve written about a couple of these character types.  I think they draw my attention because they are so unlike me and because I have such strong and complicated feelings about them.  I guess I’m happy to play Nick to their Gatsby.

How has teaching high school English had an effect on your writing, from managing time to influencing the subject and slant of your writing? The twist and swerve of language in your stories are completely new, utterly unique. Are you inspired by your students’ vocabulary and by the street-speak and sounds of the boroughs?

For me, teaching high school English pulls from the same well of time, energy, and mind that I need to write.  So during the school year, I get very little work done.  If I’m lucky, if there aren’t piles of student essays waiting to be read and graded, I get some work done on weekends.  Otherwise I rely on holidays and seasonal breaks.  Right now I teach in a very traditional independent school, so if anything my work with these students pulls me towards writing that is canonical.  The qualities in my language that you very kindly describe, the vocabulary and the urban rhythm and vernacular, probably come from the way my upbringing, musical influences, more “experimental” reading, and earlier teaching experiences dance with the more traditional and canonical work I’ve been immersed in over the last four to five years.

Exciting times ahead! You’ll be leaving New York, as the Iowa Writers Workshop awaits you, and you begin in the fall, yes? A quotation you gave me from Ellison’s Invisible Man seems quite fitting: “The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.” What are your expectations, goals, and dreams as you approach the next two years? And beyond?

Yes, this is the first time in my conscious existence that I’ll be living someplace other than in New York City.  I’m nervous and thrilled.  I’m thrilled to have the gift of time, which is something that Lan Samantha Chang, the director of the Iowa program, emphasized to me in her typically generous and clear-headed way.  It seems like such an obvious thing, but when you reach a certain age and have established routines, relationships, a career, realizing how enormous and precious a gift time might require someone like Sam to believe in you and your work enough to force-feed you a healthy dose of clarity and plain good sense.  I’m thrilled to have the time and the opportunity to say “yes” to everything, which was Lee K. Abbott’s advice to me: study with everyone, take poetry classes, read read read.  Despite the suspicion and criticism the Workshop sometimes engenders, it seems like it can’t possibly be a bad thing to spend two years reading and writing in a high-quality program where the very town takes you seriously as a writer.  I want to finish my short novel and build a short story collection, but my real goal is to say “yes” to everything, to throw myself fully into this two-year conversation with brilliant teachers and peers, and into what Charlie D’Ambrosio described as a conversation with yourself “in the solitary struggle of writing sentences.”  Of course, I want to be published someday—what writer doesn’t?—but I can wait for that to happen.  “I want to be an honest man and a good writer,” as Baldwin said, and I think my experience at Iowa will help with at least one of those goals.

Jamel Brinkley is a writer from Brooklyn, New York.  He has degrees from Columbia University and teaches high school English in New York City.  This fall he will begin study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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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.