Melissa Ferrone lives in Morgantown West Virginia, where she teaches Composition and Rhetoric at West Virginia University. Her nonfiction has been published in Brevity, The Baltimore Review, The Pinch, The Fourth River, and The Normal School, among others. She also has an essay forthcoming in The Colorado Review. This August, she will be attending the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in Vermont.
Her essay, "Recipes," appeared in Issue Sixty-Seven of The Collagist.
Here, Melissa Ferrone talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about brevity, chronology, and rediscovering the self.
What can you tell us about the origins of this essay? How did the idea for “Recipes” come to you?
“Recipes” came from a desire to track the changes in my habits, and the changes in my inclinations toward comfort, after being raped. Comfort and security were the two things that I profoundly lacked for a very long time after the assault. The essay is an attempt to retrieve them, to find a sense of completion in the things I gravitated toward when I was most lost.
A part of it, too, is a spin on the idea of “comfort food,” and the idea of the “perfect cocktail” of medications. But most of the essay is the reflection on what I drifted toward in my moments of pain, and how those things (food, or chapstick, or a photograph, or otherwise) cured my sense of loss, if only temporarily.
For instance, in the essay, part of the remedy for my first public flashback is the sleeve of Ritz crackers my roommate bought. It is less about the food itself, and more about the fact that they belonged to someone else—that my roommate bought them, successfully, the way I couldn’t buy the pears earlier in the paragraph; that she existed as a whole person, when I could not. Eating the crackers is an attempt to mirror her normality, a moment where I tried to feed off her sense of comfort.
I first noticed that this piece was moving through time in a non-linear manner when the narrator went from “the hearing, the guilty verdict” to “that day, your freshman year of college.” What made you decide to present events in this essay out of chronological order? What are the advantages or effects of this decision?
The order of the essay came very naturally. I wanted to begin in a present moment to establish the stakes, and then move backward, so the reader could experience the unraveling of the self as well as the unraveling of the narrative and the unraveling of the structure. A big part of this essay is exploring the idea of being unhinged, the idea of losing the self. I wanted to show that by stripping away the most grounding aspect of a narrative: chronology…leaving the reader with uneven footing and a warped sense of time to mimic the struggle of rediscovering direction and identity.
Three paragraphs from the end, the essay shifts focus toward a photograph from your childhood and the moment it was taken, and the final two paragraphs abandon the conceit of a “recipe” seen in all of the others. Why did the piece’s repetition need to be disrupted in order for the essay to reach its conclusion?
I wanted the photograph to serve as that final creation, the thing that I was striving toward all along. Throughout the essay, these lists of recipes serve as both remedies and reminders of these crucial moments. If we’re sticking with the cooking metaphor, the photograph is that finished product, or at least the idea of the finished product, that you’re striving toward. All these moments, these recipes, are illustrations of the struggle of redefining who you are after you’ve been raped. For me, I had to go far back, to a moment of innocence, of missing home, of family and comfort, to begin to find myself again. I had to break the cycle of grief to remember that intimacy, and so the repetition of the essay broke, shifting into this saccharine memory to show the first glimmer of healing.
Your essay relies on a remarkable level of concision and selectivity of experience. I also see that your first publication was in Brevity, and Kelly Sundberg included your writing in a list of eight flash nonfiction writers. What draws you to such brief forms of essay writing? Does it require a lot of revision to achieve such an economy of language?
I write in two opposite spectrums: very long essays that range upwards of 7,000 words, and very short essays that cap at 750 words. Each form draws on a different part of me, and in that way my writing addresses two different selves.
I come to the brief essay for moments that feel potent, and intimate. In larger essays I find myself reaching outward, pulling things together to enhance the experience and to propel discovery. In the brief essays, everything is already there in that moment, or that realization, or that pattern. And a lot of the work is done by looking closer and stripping away all the excess to get to that core.
It takes a lot of revision and a great deal of patience to craft brief essays. I can be pretty verbose, and go on and on and on, so it is nice to have that word limit challenge me. It forces me to say, “Okay, that sounds pretty and all, but are you really saying what you want to? Is this it?” And in that way it keeps me in check, and helps me stay loyal to what the essay needs, rather than what it can accommodate.
What writing projects are you working on now?
I recently finished an essay that reflects on the darkness between girlhood and womanhood, and womanhood and motherhood. Right now, I’m working on a very lyric, collage-style essay that focuses on beginnings, rebirth, and longing… A kind of exercise on what drives me to write, a declaration of what I’m searching for in my own work.
What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend?
I read a lot of poetry. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with Charles Wright’s Caribou. Though it isn’t new, Robert Hass’s The Apple Trees at Olema is always on my list of “Things I’ve Read,” and “Things I Can’t Stop Reading,” along with Terrance Hayes’s Wind in a Box.