Jamie Iredell is the author of, most recently, I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac. His writing appears in many magazines, among them Gigantic, The Literary Review, and Copper Nickel. He lives in Atlanta and is a professor of creative writing.
His essay, "This Essay Cannot Sleep," appeared in Issue Fifty-Four of The Collagist.
Here, Jamie Iredell talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about fragments, essays as attempts, and the freedom in writing nonfiction.
Please tell us about the origins of this essay (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea).
I put this book together, in which this essay’s included, called I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac. The book wasn’t always called that though. My publisher, Kevin Sampsell, came up with that title. When I read that title it sounded absolutely right for the book. It mentioned everything—or almost everything—that the book covers, and puts it in the past tense (i.e., most of those things I’m no longer dealing with). In the original draft of the book, the fact of my insomnia came up in a number of the essays, hence the reason I think why Kevin decided to include it in the title (it’s also a great word). But then Kevin emailed me and said something along the lines of “You know, there’s not really an ‘insomnia’ essay. Think you could write one?” So I did, and that was this essay.
I know I’d been thinking about writing about this for some time and couldn’t quite get the words right, but when I was forced to do it and to do it within a certain time frame it came out right. I drafted it, added to it, cut some things, edited, and it was pretty much done. I think it probably went through three or maybe four drafts before it was finished, which is rather quick for me.
The initial draft I also wrote on a night when I couldn’t sleep, so that seemed fitting. Usually what I do when I have trouble sleeping is read and write, with hope that the former might lull me to sleep, and that failing, why waste time and instead get to the latter?
Throughout your series of vignettes, some sections take on the form of lists, including books that you’ve read throughout sleepless nights and “Things I think about when I’m trying to sleep.” What appealed to you about organizing information with this format in small chunks of your essay?
Honestly, it just kind of came out that way. Like I said above, I wrote this when I was having trouble sleeping, and the way your brain works at times like those is kinda fragmentary. I’d think about something related to not sleeping, or think about specific times when I couldn’t sleep and I’d write about that, then I’d check my email or get on Facebook or something, then eventually I’d meander back to the essay draft. So I think that process had something to do with the broken vignette/list form. And, since what I mostly do when I can’t sleep is read and write it made sense to list the books I’ve read and/or written when I couldn’t sleep. Many of those books I read in single sittings because I couldn’t sleep, like No Country for Old Men.
The essay takes an interesting turn with the small section starting with “I once read that Napoleon Bonaparte was an insomniac,” followed immediately by another that begins, “According to Wikipedia, lights-out baseball refers to…” Then later another list is introduced with “People who claimed to never sleep.” I point out these three sections because they represent the largest departures from writing about your own experiences, which is what the essay had trained me to expect. How did you decide that this piece should include some researched material outside the realm of your own life?
I don’t really know how to answer this question other than to say that it gets boring writing about yourself all the time. Nonfiction’s liberating in the sense that as soon as you get bored writing in one particular style or about one particular thing, it’s fine if you change that up. I mean, I guess you’ve got to maintain the basic gist of what you set out to do—or maybe not. It’s a genre that seems completely open to me. It feels more like poetry than anything. You’re not beholden to narrative like most fiction is (and I truly mean most fiction; some of the best doesn’t rely on narrative at all), or to character development, or an expository style. You can do whatever you want, as long as it stays interesting for the reader. So, I guess that that’s what some of those departures were for me as a writer, and hopefully for readers as well: they were ways to break up the monotony of what I was writing about to keep things interesting. They have the added effect of feeling like the wandering mind of someone who’s suffering from insomnia. One minute you’re thinking about how tired you are, the next you’re thinking about how much more comfortable you’d be if you just rolled over to your right side, then you’re thinking about the class you have to teach the next day and the prep you anticipate for it, then you think about Napoleon.
In the fourth-to-last section, you write, “I’m scared. I feel about doctors the same way that I do about salespeople or auto mechanics. I’m also aware that this is completely irrational. It’s as crazy as my fear of sharks, or heights, or lightning. But I’m a fan of the definition of ‘essay’ as ‘an attempt.’ So I guess what I’m trying to say is that while I might be looking for answers, it’s okay if I don’t find any. What matters is that I tried to.” Are all your essays attempts to look for answers? How do you know when you’re finished writing “an attempt” if you haven’t found the answers yet?
Yeah, I guess they are all attempt at answers, or observations, or inquiries. There may not be an overt question. Maybe they’re all just attempts to uncover what happens in my brain, to lay that bare. Mostly I know when an essay’s done because of a similar feeling I have with poems: they simply feel done. They click closed, like the lid closes on a box for a piece of jewelry. I wish I could claim that idea as my own, but I heard somewhere from someone when I was in school, and that feels like the right way to describe what happens when I’m writing just about anything. There’s a point when the lid comes down and—SNAP—that’s it. And I get this feeling like, that’s done.
What writing projects are you working on now?
I’ve finished up a novel that Spork Press will be publishing. I’m excited about that. I don’t want to say too much about it just cause I’m superstitious. Other than that I’ve worked on a couple essays and recently, after a long time away from them, have gotten back into writing short stories. In particular I’ve been interested in writing speculative fiction—sci fi and horror. These are the kinds of stories I grew up reading, and I’ve always been interested in writing it. I guess I’ve always been writing it. I got that “It’s done” feeling just last week after I completed some revision on a short story that I first drafted more than six years ago.
What have you read recently that you want to recommend?
I’ve been reading a lot of the literary magazines that publish the genres that I mention above. Among the magazines that I think are publishing some of the most interesting of this work are The Dark, Shimmer and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. In particular, I love the stories of Rachel Swirsky and K.M. Ferebee. But I’ve also been impressed with stories by folks who are typically labeled simply “literary” because they published their stories/novels in your typical literary magazines, yet they have a tremendous talent for unveiling the creepy or cool. I’m thinking of Shane Jones (whose novel Crystal Eaters releases from Two Dollar Radio in June), and Aaron Burch (whose new collection Backwing comes out in July from Queen’s Ferry Press). I’m featuring both these writers at Atticus Review in June and July, respectively.