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An Interview with Amy Benson
Tom Fleischmann conducted this interview over email with Amy Benson from Dec. 2005 to Feb. 2006.
Amy Benson is the author of The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, a memoir published in 2004 by Mariner Books, and the winner of the Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction. [website]
Tom Fleischmann is a recent graduate of Grand Valley State University. He writes for Between the Lines newspaper and plans to attend graduate school next year.
UpInMichigan.org: One of my favorite things about The Sparkling-Eyed Boy is the way it defies and challenges genre. It is sold as creative nonfiction, the author's note stresses the fictionality of some passages, other passages read as poetry, and at times it becomes epistolary (among other things). Could you share how you formed a book so varied? That is, did you plan on writing a novel, or a memoir, or a book of poetry? Or was genre simply never a consideration?
Amy Benson: The form of the SEB emerged organically. It began when I wrote a short piece of prose about this boy I'd known in the Upper Peninsula (i.e., the sparkling-eyed boy). When I finished it, I thought that was the end of the subject, that I had gotten my curiosity and, frankly, nostalgia for the time and place out of my system. But then another piece "appeared," and then another. I kept writing pieces about aspects of my life in the Upper Peninsula until I realized that they were starting to add up to a "project," a set of inter-related snapshots of a moment, a feeling, an idea, a fantasy. When I began to think of it as a project, something that might eventually look like a book, I realized I was dealing with a mystery: why, despite all that we've learned about the bankruptcy of notions like nostalgia and innocence and nature and sentimentality, do we still feel their pull? I had to figure out why I was so drawn by this part of my past, and a mystery can't be investigated linearly. To investigate a mystery, you have to try different approaches and collect pieces and turn them around and around. I never felt as if I had a story to tell. If anything, I felt compelled by a sense of experience: how do we live ethically within our experience given our current philosophies—and a sense of place—both attachment to and separation from place.
Genre was never a consideration until after the fact. And then my concession to genre was to group the six fictional chapters in two "units." I think this actually works well for the book because it's easier to see the progression from one fictional chapter to the next when they're side by side. In terms of the chapters that might have something in common with poetry, I knew that I wanted to have at least some chapters that made intuitive sense. I wanted some of the chapters to give a greater sense of what it's like to be inside of an experience or an idea rather than being told about it or led narratively through it. I've always felt that poetry has more in common with a certain kind of creative nonfiction than fiction does. In some ways a poem can be a tiny, strange and beautiful argument; and an essay can be full of leaps and ellipses and compressions.
I have a word that is always somewhere close by when I'm writing, and that word is "capacious." I want to be able to write a capacious book—a book that has room for many modes, many voices, perhaps even many genres. I don't feel like I've even scratched the surface on this, of course, so I'm still working on it.
UIM: Another concern of genre-blending that was exciting to read was the mixture of fiction and hard fact. Several of the chapters focus partially or entirely on made up events that at the same time manage to further the "truth" of the book. How do you respond to people who think including fiction in creative nonfiction is unethical?
AB: Oy! This is a real minefield, isn't it? First, I'll describe why I made that choice. One of the things TSEB is about is the enormous sense of possibility that is open to us before we've made any real choices. Once we've begun to choose this and not that, her and not him, we narrow the kind of person and the kind of life we can have. Having chosen to leave the Upper Peninsula, I lost meaningful contact with the boy in question, but the book takes a few chapters to imagine what it would be like if we reunited in some way. But the book is clear what chapters are fiction. While writing it (in the privacy of my own room), the chapters were much more ambiguous about what really happened, but in preparing the manuscript for publication, I knew I could never let it out in the world without firmly classifying those chapters as imagined and not real.
On the subject in general, I could never say that including fiction in a work of nonfiction is unethical—it all depends on how you handle it. Nick Flynn and Sebastian Matthews, to name just a few memoirists in the last few years, both use to lovely effect imagined scenes and information that they couldn't possibly know (interestingly, both in books about their fathers). But are they not allowed to show us how they imagine a scene might have gone? Surely we can all tell that an author, when he suddenly enters his father's mind in a scene he didn't witness, is supposing and not reporting. This can be a beautiful and revealing tool in literary nonfiction. That is, so much is shown to us when we have actual occurrence placed next to imagined occurrence. This is a very different thing than making up elements of your own life and passing them off as truth, when you know very well they're fiction. Mary McCarthy does this to some extent but intricately examines the way that desire might be behind the content and shape of her memories.
I can't say that I'm bothered by admissions like Vivian Gornick's that she has used composite characters for bit players in her personal nonfiction. But I do like to suggest to students of literary nonfiction that if they find themselves tempted to slip into a falsehood for any reason, then they should stop and look more closely at at that moment. Usually there is something more interesting that they're trying to avoid. Usually the knowing falsehood makes the piece less interesting than it would be if they stopped to ask themselves why they wanted to change it there. So, there is a difference, I think, between lazy or self-aggrandizing or dramatizing fictionalizing; and fiction that's used for a clear purpose, to give a larger sense of the truth than with strictly what is known.
UIM: Since writing The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, have you approached your fiction, poetry, and nonfiction differently than you did before writing the book?
AB: If anything, I guess I'm a little more comfortable now proceeding with projects that look like a mess for a long time, or that I have a hard time describing to others.
UIM: Many of the fragmented and lyrical novels I've read don't always manage to keep my attention throughout, yet my attention was held steady while reading your memoir. How aware were you while writing and revising the book of creating tension and conflict that would drive your reader? Were there any other texts that you read that helped you achieve this?
AB: I'm really surprised by this. A few other people have told me that they read the book straight through, and I'm always surprised. I didn't think a great deal about creating tension and conflict that would speed the momentum. In fact, I thought of the opposite. I always want to slow things down. I get very suspicious when I'm reading something and find myself flying through the pages. I feel like the narrative engine is taking over and drowning out the other forces at work. I wanted to write something with a lot of pauses; I imagined people reading the book in short bits, maybe a chapter at a time. And I wrote most of the chapters as close to being able to stand alone. I have this quote by Anne Carson above my desk: "It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough." Someday I want to be able to say that I've tried that. So the authors I looked to for this were: poets like Louise Gluck and Brigit Pegeen Kelly; the book Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje; and Body Toxic: an Environmental Memoir by Suzanne Antonetta.
UIM: Much of the Boy's sexuality is based more in femininity than in masculinity (although there are aspects of both). How important do you consider this gender play to be to the novel and your relationship with the Boy?
AB: This is an interesting question, and something no one has mentioned before. I'll just say that I think it was very important to me when I was a teenager to have some sense of power. And most of the time with the sparkling-eyed boy I felt like I was the one in control of the situation rather than the other way around. Later, as I was growing into adulthood, I had to realize that control is illusory and to need it is limiting.
UIM: How have the geographies and landscapes of Detroit and the Upper Penninsula affected your stories? Can you notice their different influences when you're writing?
AB: You mean besides in TSEB, right? The lasting effect of the landscape of Michigan, I suppose, is a fascination with edges. Michigan is full of edges—shoreline everywhere. You can always feel perched next to something larger than yourself—and something that adds a feeling of movement and freedom visually, but also literally (with the boat traffic, the freighters, the clouds over the water, etc). I think this translates to a larger fascination with the edges of genre, working my way to the edge of where something might fall apart, where solid ground starts to give way.
UIM: Along those lines, how important do you consider your identity as a Michigan writer to be? Is that a label that you would give yourself, or do you see your connection to Michigan as something you'd like to transcend (especially since moving to New York)?
AB: No, no, no! I would never think of "transcending" my roots. That would feel like a ridiculous and pretentious betrayal—and just because I live in New York? No, I would be pleased to be thought of as a Michigan writer, but I don't feel like I can rightfully claim that title, having not lived in Michigan full time since I was 17. But I return for a few weeks every summer and consider it home in an important way.
UIM: Are there any Michigan (or Midwestern) writers that particularly influenced the way you approached geography and the sense of place in The Sparkling-Eyed Boy? Or in your writing in general?
AB: Catie Rosemurgy. She's the author of a book of poetry called My Favorite Apocalypse. She's also a long-time friend who is from the Upper Peninsula. I've learned a great deal from her about seeing place and feeling it in the body. Another book I discovered late in the writing of TSEB was a book by Suzanne Antonetta called Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir. Though she's writing about growing up in New Jersey, her sense of how deeply the landscape we're surrounded by grows into ourselves rhymes perfectly with my own experience of this. It's a beautiful and scary book by a writer who is also a poet.
UIM: What new projects are you working on? I hear that your next major piece is pretty exciting and in some ways untraditional. Could you share a bit about that?
AB: It's a manuscript that combines fiction and essays about a the US occupation in Germany after WWII. My uncle was an occupation soldier who fathered a child with a German fiancee and then died there. I became interested in seeing what I could find out about his fiancee and their child, but also about this period of time (Germans call the time just after the war the Zero Hour) about which there is relatively little documentation. I became interested in the idea that, as we use story to record history, we also follow narrative archs. And after great climaxes, such as WWII, there is a lull during which we pay very little attention. So this is a book about personal histories, but also about how fiction and history might be understood together. I have a collection of information and interviews, but I also make up characters' interior lives where I don't have enough information.
UIM: You recently presented at the Iowa NonfictioNow Conference on the unique considerations in publishing a memoir as a first book. Is this something you'd suggest more young writers try to tackle? Or do you think there is still too much of a prejudice against young people reflecting on life experiences they haven't always had time to digest?
AB: I would never suggest a genre to a young writer, especially in terms of market considerations. That's a losing battle, trying to gauge the market for memoir or a certain kind of fiction, etc. It's also a way to kill what you're writing, I think. Write what you write because you have to, because it seems like the best form for what you're most interested in, because the form brings opportunities and levels of meaning to the project that other forms can't provide. If memoir happens to be the form something comes out in, I would only say that the author could prepare him or herself for certain kinds of criticism that a novel or collection or short stories perhaps wouldn't face. But this isn't a reason to avoid what seems most compelling, if that's the case.
UIM: Finally, the question that everyone I know who's read The Sparkling-Eyed Boy wants to ask you: To your knowledge, does the Boy know about the book yet? Is it something you're terrified of or something you somewhat want to happen?
AB: To my knowledge, he does not. And I'll leave it at that.
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