Brenda Rankin is a graduate of the MFA program at CSU Fresno, where she was editorial assistant and webmaster for The Normal School. She teaches English in California's Central Valley, and her work has appeared in Knee-Jerk Magazine, COBALT, The Writing Disorder, fwriction : review, and Puerto Del Sol.
Her essay, "A Sweeping Presentation of the Main Theme," appeared in Issue Fifty-Three of The Collagist.
Here, Brenda Rankin talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about epigraphs, research, and writing about her fixations.
Tell us about the genesis of this essay (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea).
As the essay’s fixation on the predicament woman in the row in front of me suggests, from the moment the incident occurred, I couldn’t get it, or her, out of my mind. I knew I’d have to write about it, even if it only turned into rambling free-writey philosophizing no one would ever see.
The essay begins with an epigraph from the film Before Sunrise. What made you decide to include this quote? How do you want it to influence the audience’s reading of the piece?
I love to love those movies, and not just because admitting a liking for them seems to be such a terrible idea in most circles. To be honest, those films have always seemed cringe-worthy to me, but in a sweet, charming way—the way it would feel, I imagine, to read back on notebooks I kept when I was seventeen (if I had kept notebooks when I was seventeen, which I did not, and wish I did). They’re a bit too earnest, maybe, a tad too concerned with their own quality of emotion and progression of thought. The actors/characters are too young to even understand what they’re saying, but decide to say it anyway, because it’s what’s on their mind. The movie, and Julie Delpy’s quote, in particular, in its likely-un-self-aware-but-sincere attempts to process life seemed like just the right white flag to put up at the start of an essay like this. Because, really, what early twenty-something has any business essaying on her preoccupations with her own lack of time left on earth? I felt deliciously self-conscious, taking that essay in to my graduate workshop, and got responses that ranged from the expected “It’s brave, alright,” shrugs, to the classmate pounding her flattened palm down on her copy of my draft in excitement, saying, “Heck yes, you’re a twenty-something feeling all panicky about how you’re running out of time—that IS insane. Own it!” And since all epigraphs are horrible risks as it is, and my entire workshop encouraged me to lose it, I figured a stubborn refusal to eliminate Ms. Delpy from my pre-essay space was a decent start at owning my thoughts.
Interwoven throughout your personal narrative taking place in 2010 are brief sections labeled “Early November, 1893,” which describe Tchaikovsky’s declining health resulting in his death. How much research did you have to do in order to write these parts? How has the research process changed your writing of this and other essays?
I miss being a university student so much as fall approaches each year, and this question has pulled that nostalgia even closer to me. A lot of research went into this essay; once I decided that, close as my emotional connection to his music was, I couldn’t feel comfortable writing about it without spending time reading on Tchaikovsky himself, the structure and pacing of the essay seemed clearer to me. I checked out every single book on the composer and his music in my university’s library, lugged them home, and went from there. I miss access to that library, because yes, I’m a researcher by nature, whether for essays or for my own personal nerdery. I value essays for their constant glorification of research and our personal connections to what we research, and what we discover. The space between researcher and research is a magical one, and I’m thankful essays exist as a means to explore it.
On the subject of feeling the inevitability of death, you wrote about Tchaikovsky and yourself: “He sought catharsis by formatting his morose preoccupations onto sheet music, elevating them from mere mental turmoil to art to be played and shared with audiences for centuries to come. In my case, it works merely as a paralysis, this fixation of the lack of life ahead of me or the ones I love, often rendering me motionless, with nothing to do but leak its impact out my eyeballs.” Do you feel that your writing of this piece helped to counteract that paralysis? Was the essay at all cathartic for you?
I do think it helped, perhaps primarily by the act of admitting and taking ownership of these preoccupations, and allowing many who’ve read the piece to contact me saying, “Yep, me too—I thought I was alone in these ridiculous fixations.” I’ve always been one of those sad souls who seek approval from others for everything, from my clothing choices to my thoughts on death. This is easily my least attractive mental quality, but I suppose choosing to write and submit creative nonfiction for publication means learning to either eliminate those tendencies or embrace them and use them as fuel for essaying. This essay was a positive move in the direction of the latter.
What writing projects are you working on now?
Well, this interview, for starters. And this question has been a fantastic kick-in-the-pants for me, so thank you. Beyond that, I’ve been bird-by-birding it every day, which is an awesome development for me—a consistent writing practice will be my eternal white whale. I’ve been attempting to turn my essay collection (read: MFA thesis) into a decent manuscript. I also have a couple of drafts I’ve been making slow progress on—one stemming from the shattering of the Daisy Buchanan-as-feminine-model fantasy I formed in high school, and another attempting to make sense of the disturbing obsession I’ve had with following Sirius since New Year’s Eve this year. Of course, once the reincarnation of Cosmos took off, I realized that, as much as I love (and re-watch ad nauseam, much to my fiancé’s bewilderment) each episode, it also, inevitably, alters the space around the Sirius essay, and I still need to deal with that.
What have you read recently that you would like to recommend?
I have a couple of weeks off between the end of spring semester and the start of summer school, so I’ve been making bold (and not always successful) strides in the kitchen. Mark Bittman’s latest, Cooked, has been a fantastic partner-in-crime for me as I’ve worked at learning to cook each day.
I can’t answer this question without giving a tremendous shout-out to the recently-published The Shape of Blue: Notes on Love, Language, Motherhood, and Fear, by my friend and MFA program colleague, Liz Scheid. It taught me so much, got my gears turning, and alternately broke and rebuilt my heart.