The essay is part of a collection-in-progress, tentatively titled, Foood: 50 States, 50 Essays, 50 Recipes. (Yes: 3 Os). I’m trying to cobble together this weird, lyrical, avant-garde cookbook of sorts. Each essay begins with the same line of questioning, based on the state, and the choosing of a particular food typically associated with that state: What does the blue crab mean? What does Maryland mean? What ancillary subjects will I have to engage in order to answer these questions? What sorts of people will I have to find as interview subjects in order to get at these answers, or at least a little closer to them? When I sit down to write a first draft of these, I, of course, have no idea where they’ll go. I have no idea what the fulcrum of the essay will be, outside of state and food—the springboards. It’s so exciting when these ancillary subjects begin attaching themselves, like burrs onto pant cuffs, to the springboards. The Louisiana essay, for instance, is about Crawfish Etouffee and autoerotic asphyxiation. The Rhode Island one deals with Clear Clam Chowder and the Cognitive Psychology of Transparency—how we think and react differently to things we can look through rather than look at. Maine deals with Whoopie Pie and James Earl Jones.
2. What made you decide to write this essay from the second person point of view? What is its intended effect on the reader who learns about “your aunt” instead of “my aunt,” for example?
Well, it’s a boring answer, really. It’s because it’s not my uncle, not my aunt. As I was writing this essay, as I’m doing with the other essays in the Foood book, I interviewed a bunch of folks in the state at hand. Invariably, certain personal connections of mine wouldn’t be able to answer some of the focused questions I had, so they would direct me to friends of friends of friends, and eventually, someone would say, Oh, yeah! My uncle’s a lobsterman who lost a finger! Or, Oh, yeah! My uncle used to work in a bowling ball factory and is now getting through his forced retirement by obsessing on racehorse injuries! And sometimes, I’ve been getting lucky enough to talk to the aunts and uncles themselves, and invariably, I’d be looking for connections between their lives—be it a manner of speech or another aspect of their personalities—and the lives of my own uncles, aunts. And I’d be looking for odd connections between other nephews across the country and me. Looking for communion. So the uncle and aunt in The Dawning... are composite characters, of course; are UNCLE and AUNT, collective archetypes embedded within other archetypes—like MARYLAND and CRAB and JELLYFISH and ORCHID.
3. I admire the way that this essay juxtaposes historical facts and memoiristic scenes. Can you please talk about how researched information can effectively frame our memories and life experiences (or vice versa)?
As a fourth generation OCDer, I’ve long been obsessed with finding the odd connections between my life, and the lives of others, or trying to situate my life within some larger socio-cultural context. It’s a way to avoid omphaloskepsis, of course, but it’s also a way to find out more about myself—to self-interrogate in very focused ways. What does my belly-button have to do with all the other belly-buttons? How would they relate when placed side-by-side? When forced to collide? Are there clear patterns? If not, what sort of heavy lifting is required in order to divine a pattern? I want to find out, for instance, what my first kiss has to do with Charles Lindbergh and grasshoppers. That’s the wonderful thing: as writers, we have the power to manipulate connections between just about anything, no matter how seemingly dissimilar. It just takes research, contemplation, alchemy, voodoo, the P.I.-style discovery of that perfect “bridge” ingredient. It’s witch’s spell and police procedural; bureaucratic and incantatory, ephemeral, ponderous. Other adjectives, even. In a way, I had no idea what my first kiss meant until I learned that Charles Lindbergh was a grasshopper fetishist, and used to, in the Army, as a practical joke, trap scores of grasshoppers beneath the tightly-tucked bed-sheets of his fellows, restricting their, however brief, flight. Perfect! I thought to myself. That’s exactly how I felt after kissing Dawn Seckler in the Aptakisic Junior High School parking lot after graduation, our stupid tassled hats getting in the way—like some odd brew of Lindbergh hatching a plan, trapped grasshopper, and a guy who discovers locusts on his mattress. And what does that mean? By the way, did you know that grasshopper infants are called nymphs?
4. How have lessons learned from reading/writing poetry informed your work in creative nonfiction?
It’s that bridge ingredient thing. Lately, I’ve been seeing the segmented essay as a series of stanzas. Also, there is a time for restraint in poetry, and a time when restraint should not be part of the poem’s language. I’ve been trying to find that balance in these essays: which segment should be a bouillon cube, and which should just unfurl and unfurl.
5. What writing projects are you working on now?
Besides Foood, I’m putting some final edits on my forthcoming book, PREPARING THE GHOST: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and the Man Who First Photographed It (forthcoming 2014 from W.W. Norton: Liveright). In 1874 St. John’s Newfoundland, this mad reverend and amateur naturalist, Moses Harvey, took the first-ever photograph of the giant squid, rescuing the beast from mythology and finally proving its existence, changing the ways in which we engaged the construct of the sea monster. To take the photo, Harvey transported the squid from one bay to another, and then finally to his home where he proceeded to drape it over his bathtub's curtain rack so its full size could be displayed. It’s a book-length segmented essay rife with those ancillary burrs—what I like to think of as essential, contextual digressions—like the various reasons we need to mythologize and then kill our myths, for instance; and ice cream.
6. What have you read recently that you want to recommend?
Elena Passarello’s essay collection, Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande Books), is a dazzler—so endlessly curious, voracious, informative, and just so entertaining. Passarello and I went back and forth on the Essay Daily website with an Answerless Interview/Questionless Interview. Check ‘em out. We totally think we’re cooler than we likely are.