The Calculus of Desire and Faith: An Interview with Jessie van Eerden https://ift.tt/ldV0IZY
Jessie van Eerden is one of those rare writers who constructs such beautiful sentences that her prose feels like something I can hold in my hand and turn over as one rubs a river-smoothed pebble. The contour of her storytelling works like what time does to stone — the gentleness of a finger press made grittier in contrast now that the surface is seal-slick. This is shown, I think, in every sentence of Yoke & Feather, even one as mundane as caring for a stray dog, as with this image — one I highlighted and then went back to and penciled in exclamation points:
A chainsaw she hears one hillside over, somebody starting the workday. She fills an empty Cool Whip tub with water for the stray dog who has shown up at her door, fusses with the burrs and takes tick inventory while he gulps. She kneels eye-level with the mutt and wipes pus from his eyes with her hair, limbs storm-blown into the road. In the saw’s hum, she holds her hair and remembers. Kneeling in his pant, his paw thorned but scritching her knee a little, her children, origami birds, not yet unfolding from bed.
Van Eerden’s new collection of essays is about many things: online dating, girlhood, adventuring on various rivers across the country, love and, most of all, a longing for motherhood in the face of mortal-time, aging the consistent current that breaks down the mountain into a worry-stone. This book is a study in faith and desire of destiny unfulfilled.
“It’s true the baby question troubles me with a louder clang on Sundays,” van Eerden writes. Later adding, “My desire to know her is frank and silvered, my body and mind the simplest they’ve been since girlhood.” But instead, motherhood is a ghost-image, reflected back in various human interactions: “yesterday’s pale substitute: my offer to hold an infant, ever sniffing out mothersmell, for the young mother in the checkout line while she rummaged in her purse for her Kroger card.” But what, as van Eerden poses, “if the season is not fitted exactly to our plans?”
Van Eerden is well-versed in the language of parable, and the long arc of storytelling that ties faith to the self-hood born of emotional pain. But there is joy, too. So much of Yoke & Feather concerns itself with self-discovery, with touch and human connection, with river-currents and the hard earth beneath her feet.
Yoke& Feather is prayer, a revelation.
Jessie van Eerden is the author of two essay collections, Yoke & Feather and The Long Weeping, and three novels: Glorybound, My Radio Radio, and Call It Horses which won the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Oxford American, AGNI, Image, New England Review, and other magazines and anthologies. She has been awarded the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, the Milton Fellowship, and a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship. Jessie holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and teaches creative writing at Hollins University.
You write, “I return to the idea: leap without knowing. This requires trust, of course, leap of faith. This is very hard to do. The concepts are related: trust that what is coming next is the right thing. Leaping is like being born, being born unto time with no expectations of time except opening eyes and ears and arms.”
This is beautiful writing about faith and faith, to my mind, is one of the more complex aspects of the human condition. Would you talk about how faith influences your writing, your understanding of the world?
Thank you, first of all, for your beautiful words about the collection. It means the world to have a receptive, thoughtful reader. Faith questions are perhaps the most difficult to answer directly; maybe that’s why I pursue them in wandering essays! Essays seem to me ideal vehicles for exploring faith because they reject packaged language and ideas; are deeply human and messy in their eschewing of doctrinal definites; and bend toward and celebrate uncertainty, longing, and doggedness. I think it was Thomas Merton who said it’s most valuable to pray when prayer is impossible; I agree. Faith and prayer feel impossible which, to my mind, makes them all the more worthwhile to pursue in life and in subject matter.
I was intrigued this week by the trailer Instagram thought fit to feed me, for the Dietrich Bonhoeffer biopic coming out soon, and I thought at first, “What a powerful story for more people to know” — a story about the pacifist clergyman who participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler.
Bonhoeffer is someone who made excruciating choices in the in-betweens and impossibilities that exist in the relationship between faith and reality. And maybe it will be a compelling film, but reviewers’ early takes on it suggest the producers are going predictably more for spy thriller than exploration of faith’s unsettling intersections with history, marshalling his complicated biography into an oversimplified certitude of conviction that can get ugly with Christian Nationalism and religious sanctioning of violence real quick.
But Bonhoeffer and other theological thinkers I admire, like James Alison, Cynthia Bourgeault, and Simone Weil, do their thinking in the unbridgeable gap between faith and reality. Alison writes about the “flexible paradigm” of Jesus, how faith is the groundwork out of which you discern how to live without a template: the nimbleness is the goal, the dexterous push toward otherwise. Weil, who is a kind of patron saint of Yoke & Feather, wrote, “As soon as we have thought something, try to see in what way the contrary is true.” Faith, for her, is a constant tilling of the soil that resists the arrogance and stasis of certitude. Yet there is perhaps a deep consolation in faith (a stillness that is not stasis) that exists alongside that restlessness in uneasy, vibrant companionship. I write in one essay about Bourgeault’s little book Mystical Hope which explores a hope not tied to outcome; that is, instead of “I hope I get this job,” the sentence ends earlier, “I hope.” As in: “I exist in a framework, or posture, of hope.” Having hope, or faith, means living in what Bourgeault calls the capital-M Mercy, exercising a trust in deeper okayness when apparent okayness (goal-achievement, healing from illness, the end of war, etc) is not a reality. And living in the Mercy suggests that Mercy is spatial, physical, like a large bowl that holds all, including emptiness. I love thinking of faith in spatial terms. I’m no theologian, I’m an essayist, and faith for me is an active making, a groping in the dark. So, the main way faith influences me and my work is that it offers a spacious place where that activity can go on.
You create narratives from many characters in the bible: Ruth, Jacob, the sisters of Lazurus — Mary and Martha — Moses, to name a few. Talk about your process narrating, beautifully I might add, these biblical stories.
I grew up with biblical people as truly as I grew up with my siblings and cousins. What I mean is that they are human and vivid and present to me, but they differ from my family members in one important way: in Sunday school, I was presented their futures as decided, and not only decided but also explained. As in: Noah was faithful, thus he and his family were spared God’s flood that wiped out the rest of evil humanity, and here is a rainbow that shows God’s promise to never do such a thing again, and here are the animals two by two, so be faithful to God. But uncoupling these complicated (if skeletal) stories from their moralization gives rise to a whole raft of questions: What did Noah’s wife say to her best friend before she boarded the boat? What kind of God would drown all the puppies except two? What kind of dreams do you dream when at sea on the waters of wrath?
I love to spend time reading practitioners of and thinkers on Midrash, a word that comes from the Hebrew verb “darash” which means “to seek out or to inquire.” It’s a term in Hebrew literature for exegesis often performed by filling in the gaps of biblical narrative. All transpersonal stories hold up for us and keep giving to us so inexhaustibly because they are part of Long Time, that “long arc” you mentioned, ever unfolding afresh in human experience. I am deeply serious in my love and reverence for sacred myths, but I revere them too much to leave them in a package tied with a bow. They beg too much flesh in their skeletal structures; they beg too many questions in their gaps and too much play in their wild contradictions. I love to meditate on them by exploring their undecidability, their facets and murmurs that come to light if you let go of preconceptions. In so doing, I am more likely to read my own life and the lives of others, alongside these tales, the same way: as different than I first thought.
You often imagine throughout Yoke & Feather moments of an imagined child, often a girl, and because I, too, am middle aged and without a child, I find these moments sorrowful, but not without a wistful tenderness:
“How I imagine her sometimes, my one-day daughter: The sudden chill of a spring evening catches her suddenly, when she’s been long playing. She is on her blue bike, having sold the butter to the neighbor and pedaled home past the moss beds frosted and wet, the sun so suddenly nowhere. I can sense her small legs growing cold, the thrill it gives her.“
For me, this seems such a difficult task. Could you talk about your process of imagination?
Sorrow and tenderness need each other. Disappointment and fulfillment commingle; it’s odd how, when we’re young, we think it will be one or the other. I was writing a letter to my friend Cait, who asked whether I wanted to raise a child, and I was thinking about the question “What do I do with this desire?” And the answer seemed to be: everything. I do the laundry, I make supper, I teach my classes, I love my partner, I clean the bathroom, I make essays. We metabolize longing constantly in the space our days if we come bare-faced to the day with all we are, not only with our longing but also with our failures, regrets, contradictions: we make use of all of it, we do not simply seek, or wait for, amelioration.
I love what you said earlier, that “motherhood is a ghost-image,” and it makes me think that often when the narrator imagines a child in these pages, the moment is an homage to my own mother, the silhouette of her in the doorway when I looked back to the house when riding off on the morning school bus as a child. She was (is) so very much there. And where am I exactly? And some of the concoction of mother-longings in this book comes from the push toward comparison with other women and with some nonexistent quintessential Woman. Because the question of a child is such a foundational question for human beings, in this book it’s also a means of rendering personal some abstract notions I wanted to explore about the nature of desire.
Is it okay if we talk sentences? Your line-by-line work brings me a lot of joy. I often read passages out loud just to see what the words felt like in my mouth. How do you think about the line? Who are some writers you turn to when in need a confident running partner? As a teacher, how do you get newer writers to think about and love their sentences?
Kevin Oderman, my first mentor in essay-writing, speaks about the prose writer’s responsibility to music, to a twang of the guitar string, an attentiveness to poetic possibilities. I agree it’s a responsibility. Language is everywhere: debased, transactional, data-driven, demoralized. I’m not talking at all about the live wire of speech, the skibidi bob of the Gen Alpha kids; more than anything, I’m talking about the weird botch that academe makes of language. And I don’t believe prose need always be lush, since there is such music in plainness and leanness, but language in imaginative work needs to create a textured room which readers enter and in which they experience — even co-create — something. I love to take walks in the middle of writing to speak a sentence out loud with a few different structures to try to locate its truest structure that is inevitable, that will help it live long. Our sentences need to be multivalent, need to keep in touch with silence, need to be epistemological tools, as Annie Dillard put it in The Writing Life.
Writers I turn to are many! A few are C.D. Wright, Per Petterson, Marilynne Robinson, Ann Pancake, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Han Kang, Denis Johnson, Juan Rulfo, Arundhati Roy, Michael Ondaatje.
With my students, I try to be practical and hands-on when it comes to attentive sentence-making. We study small passages for a long time and try to emulate syntactical choices. I encourage them to get underneath the leafiness of singular words, to go subterranean with one word, asking something like “What is ____ underneath?” (after a John Berger passage in To the Wedding). Now that I think of it, I tend to have my students devote time and energy to depicting the simpler thing because how terrific if your sentences can discover actual wonder and strangeness in real time—depict a task like pulling out a splinter, or the multifaceted quality of something mundane, like silence, culled from the world of routine (after a wonderful passage on island silence in Roy Jacobsen’s The Unseen).
I give exercises in using multiple registers. Sometimes you need a whole paragraph in monosyllabic Germanic punches, but sometimes your character, or subject, is both lowbrow and high, erudite and crude, brittle and big-boned, and the language must reflect that. I love that wild book by Brenda Ueland from the 1930s, If You Want to Write:
“Therefore when you write, speak with complete self-trust and do not timidly qualify and feel the ice of well authenticated literary usage and critical soundness — so afraid when you have finished writing that they will riddle you full of holes. Let them. Later if you find what you wrote isn’t true, accept the new truth. Consistency is the horror of the world.”
Writing workshop culture can sometimes worship consistency, and students will say to each other, “That word, or that move, doesn’t belong here.” Maybe it doesn’t! But probably the idiosyncratic word or move is getting at something truthful, and you just haven’t pulled it off yet. Even if what you’re doing fails, a messy risk that reaches to the outer orbit is better than a safe, attainable, consistent success. And if we can understand everything we’re up to and can present it on PowerPoint slides fully explained, then we’re probably not allowing the unconscious the space it needs to work some magic in our sentences and have sound guide sense for a while.
NONFICTION Yoke & Feather By Jessie van Eerden
Dzanc Books
Published on November 19, 2024
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