An Interview with Chris Wiewiora, Author of The Distance Is More Than an Ocean

The Distance Is More Than an Ocean is a recounting of Chris Wiewiora’s experience coming to America from Poland, his father’s home country, as a child and then returning as an adult, forcing him to reconsider the homeland that framed his childhood and wrestle with the tenuousness of memory. The moments of The Distance Is More Than an Ocean are situated distinctly in place, but also in places: from a Polish elementary school classroom to an imagined Mississippi River, from Florida’s Coco Beach to the gray, rainy streets of Warsaw. Set against varied landscapes, these reflections on travel, memory, and childhood show the complex ways in which our environments both shape us and are reshaped by our recollections of the people we were in those places—and by the people we became when we left them.

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You chose specifically to subtitle/categorize The Distance Is More Than an Ocean as a “travelogue memoir.” Where do you see the line drawn between those two genres? Why was it important to you to have readers consider this as both?

I wanted to label my chapbook with the genre of nonfiction, since the publisher Finishing Line Press’s books and most chapbooks are poetry. I wanted to make sure that readers knew that my chapbook, while lyrical, isn’t poetry. Still, nonfiction contains so many sub-genres.

Nonfiction is the only genre defined by what it isn’t: not-fiction. Who knows why it isn’t labeled non-drama or non-poetry; perhaps since it contains both? Anyway, I wanted to define my chapbook by what nonfiction it is—not just that I didn’t make it up like fiction—and so I used the subtitle of travelogue and memoir.

Both a travelogue and a memoir follow records. A travelogue is a record of travels, while a memoir is a record of memories. I wanted readers to know where I was going in my writing: traveling from the United States to Poland, but also traveling from my adulthood to my childhood.

In The Distance Is More Than an Ocean, I switched between present tense for my travels back to Poland and past tense for my travels back to my memories of Poland. I used tense as a line between the two sub-genres. I saw the line between them as what happened (travelogue) and what I remembered (memoir), but the chapbook walks that line between the sub-genres like when I returned to my family’s Warsaw neighborhood and I was confronted with mis-remembering our duplex, which could serve as a metaphor for the sub-genres under nonfiction: a house split in half with two entrances but under the same roof.

There is also a relationship here between prose and poetry. A poem by James Seay serves as an epigraph to the book, and these pieces reflect the way poetry thrives on compressing, fragmenting, and extending beyond singular moments. What roles do the processes of compressing and fragmenting memory play in writing about the past?

Ten years ago I began The Distance Is More Than an Ocean as a poetry collection titled Side by Side. The poems explored my mother’s West Virginian family as well as my father’s Polish family. My poetry sprawled and swelled and contained multitudes. Side by Side contained much too much!

Seay’s poem “Patching Up the Past with Water” gave me a colander to strain through the flood of my writing. I wanted to sift through my past. I wanted to find the quicksilver. I needed to find a way to contain what mattered, but it felt so slippery.

Six years ago, I began to write the poems into essays that became The Distance Is More Than an Ocean. First, I wrote an essay titled “Welcome Back”—where I visited my family’s old duplex on a beautiful summer day in Warsaw, while I remembered the cold and gray and cramped other seasons there. The walk through the neighborhood made me confront what I had remembered with what I then experienced.

I felt like my memory was being rewritten. My memory was fragmented and so my writing needed to reflect that. About three years ago, I began to distill those essays. I compressed them from my mother and father’s family to only my father’s family, and then from the United States to only in Poland, and then within Poland to only Warsaw, and I continued to compress my travels and my memories until I could contain them in a chapbook.

When we write about a place from our past, I think we’re not evoking so much as recreating what we remember of that place. How did you negotiate Poland as both a historical space and a personal one?

If the past is prologue, then place is the past’s foundation for the present. I read some Polish history and travel books, but I didn’t use any of that in my chapbook. I wasn’t writing about the historical past and place of Poland, but rather I was rewriting the personal.

I started the chapbook with flying back to Poland—to the same airport, but renamed—and I finished it with my walk through our Warsaw neighborhood. At the end of the chapbook, I considered how the Nazis destroyed the capital’s Old Town area but after the war the Poles rebuilt it from preserved paintings. I had written a personal way from my own history: I had my poems from ten years ago and I had my memories from decades before that—both served as foundations for me to rebuild Warsaw from my return trip and from my childhood.

As a child you viewed yourself not as Polish, but as an American growing up in Poland, longing for the country you considered your real home. But your father was a Polish immigrant, making Poland, to an extent, your family’s homeland. How has writing about these places allowed you to explore the personal/internal tension of being pulled between them?

I used to only say, my last name is Polish. Now, after writing about my past, I say I’m half-Polish.

I want to specifically thank an editor, Tina Schumann, who anthologized my essay, “M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I,” in Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents. That essay served as the undercurrent through my childhood in The Distance Is More Than an Ocean, where I had moved from a Polish kindergarten to the American School of Warsaw and when I had refused to learn more Polish while also not fully knowing English. Tina welcomed me to claim both places.

However, both places don’t exist anymore. The United States that welcomed my father’s family after the war doesn’t philosophically exist anymore, but also the Poland of my family’s homeland doesn’t literally exist anymore. When my grandmother was dying, my father showed her Google Maps and she traced a river back to the valley where her father had been a sort of border patrol agent. However, their village is now in Ukraine.

More recently, my father found out from his cousin that his grandfather’s wife’s family name might be Ukrainian! Some of my father’s family refuses to accept that. However, my first thought was, what Ukrainian writers do I know?

Language itself is a part of this tension as well, as the child version of Chris Wiewiora rejects the language that makes him less American. In one vignette, you’ve returned to Poland as an adult and, as you observe your father and a family friend converse in Polish, narrate that you “don’t remember enough of the language to follow their conversation.” “Remember” is a conspicuous, telling word to apply to language.

Could you talk about how lacking (or losing from memory) a language creates a barrier between a person and a place in which that language is spoken? In what ways would knowing that language allow one to access that place differently?

Language makes us human and allows us to connect to other humans. Language accesses history and thoughts and dreams. Language allows us to remember.

We tell ourselves stories. As Joan Didion would add, “In order to live.” We retell those stories so we continue to live on. But if you don’t know a language—can’t speak it, can’t hear it—then you can’t tell stories and those stories die.

During my return visit, the way I “heard” Polish was my Dad translating it into English for me. At the same time, I had been immersed in the language of Polish while growing up in Poland. I had grown up hearing it and speaking some of it, but thinking I forgot most of it. However, when tapped memory seeps and then trickles and then flows. By the end of our return visit to Poland, I found myself babbling small phrases and then the concepts of what people said formed like shapes in clouds, readying to rain understanding.

Winter Hours Working Life

“What is autobiography but a story rich and impossible of completion—an intense, careful, expressive, self-interested failure? What can I say to you, therefore, that will be true, and will cast its shadow or its light over the whole body of my telling, of my being here, or who I am?”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Essays and Poems:

Snow drifted like sand across the road in front of me. Our car felt lighter without the backseat weighed down by all the books my wife and I had culled from our shelves to prepare for our move. I wasn’t concerned that the rear tires would lose traction because I had driven in the Midwest for a half dozen winters.

Lauren had moved with me from our families in Florida to Iowa where I attended grad school and she got a job working at a nonprofit. After earning my MFA and marrying each other, we stayed. I struggled to find work beyond odd jobs. I feared the security of an office job that would cause me to not want to sit and write before or after work. I couldn’t live on my writing, or at least I couldn’t afford to write for an economic living. And I didn’t want to teach writing because I feared losing what I loved to do.

I had been frozen.

The car’s trunk was filled with a tarp, a ground pad, a sleeping bag, boots, and an external framed bright blue pack that I hadn’t used since crossing over from Cub to Boy Scouts by earning my Arrow of Light and then quitting in sixth grade. I was driving, alone, south to Missouri for a Wilderness First Responder course. I was about to begin a new path toward a non-seasonal job; it seemed like I was always getting a job that didn’t work out. The WFR course would complete my training for an environmental educator job out in Moab, Utah. The only thing I knew about the place was Edward Abbey’s cranky national park memoir Desert Solitaire where he wasn’t really alone; he just wrote his wife and child out of the book.

Underneath the road atlas on the empty passenger seat was a book I couldn’t help buying when I sold our books at a used store. It was a book that I read when I first started writing. A book by a living writer who was a poet but wrote prose in beautiful, quiet sentences that I would come to learn as lyrical. It was a book that began my writing life. A teal upper half of sky, between a navy sailboat cutting along the horizon on top of a turquoise half of sea.

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The dust jacket was replaced by forest green vinyl. White Arial font stamped on the spine to read Oliver. The book sat on the poetry shelves back by the bathrooms in the University of Central Florida’s library. I probably picked the book because it was thin and our undergrad workshop class was reading Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook. We had to read several collections during the spring semester and then write a report after each one.

I still have a digital copy of my assignment on Oliver’s self analysis of her poem “The Swan.” I must have skipped Oliver’s first essay “Building a House”—a hard working piece about constructing a tiny shed from locally found scrap: a metaphor for writing a poem—and I doubt that I read the entire book, which is why I wanted to re-read my first encounter with Oliver, or rather, completely read Oliver and write back to that time in my life.

In my paper, I wrote that Oliver “held characteristics of a significant poem” with three musts—or as Oliver actually wrote, “rules”—for herself: 1.) genuine body, 2.) sincere energy, and 3.) spiritual purpose.

I didn’t consider that Oliver also wanted “the poem to ask something, and at its best moments, [she] want[s] the question to remain unanswered.” Oliver believes that a reader must answer the question.

I wrote that “The Swan” included concrete images (genuine body), its shape matched the motion of the animal (sincere energy), and that Oliver suggested heaven incarnate as imagination on earth (spiritual purpose). I don’t know if I knew what I was writing about.

When I read “The Swan” again in a basement apartment before my week-long WFR sessions I could see that Oliver had shaped her zigzagging enjambment like the floating little boat of a swan, or perhaps Shelley’s sailboat that Oliver laments capsizing in a final storm, drifting toward shore and the revelation of its hopeful landing as a joy of survival and the poem itself as an answer to what to do: live, and then write.

Rescue

What is forgiveness anyway but a terrifying and true opening—a dangerous, purposeful, affective, selfless vulnerability? What could Jakob say to us, right there, that would uncloak the shadow of death he had seen as he served in the oven of the continual Gulf war and took with him on the freezer of Antarctica, as we shared stories already dead and stories yet to live?

When the bloated body bobbed on the ocean, the face tight and white, and the helicopter’s rotors chopping the salty air, he knew the only thing he could do: plop down next to it, or hate. And he plopped, a gloop of a body made of water into a body of water, next to a body soggy with more water. He grasped that slick skin, so they both bobbed on the surface as a rope was flung out of the chopper. But the body did not know it was saved, or if it did its capacity to know was gone with whatever selfish will was gone, the body did not gasp like any living mammal hurled into water and only wanting air, that time was gone, and the body floundered in the ocean.

Years later, Jakob did not see the person in the water. In spite of the winch that hauled them both up where they had plunged in, the body wasn’t a person with a job, or hobbies, or family; it was a bag of meat and bones.

And I thought: I will need to remember that in the wilderness. The bobbing, the plopping, the grasping, and the hauling. Then the surrender of saving, of soul. Then the clear dryness of sanitizer. And the ocean: the depth and the apathy.

The Betrayer

From the beginning she had doubted. By from the beginning I mean as soon as we dated. It was terrible. At first I wondered, What is it? I would be driving, and she would be the passenger. As from the cold of space and unfathomable distance, not retuning but meteoring, the feeling rushed and entered and struck and embedded and settled and stayed.

Always, I wondered, How is she feeling about everything? What’s going on? She would write, I don’t know. I don’t want to hurt him. I gave my heart away before him. And line after line she wrote in her diary, betraying.

Do I know her? I think. I thought. Bangs and pubes. Hangry and frisky. Sadness and giddiness. Disappointment, too. And the commitment. And for all that, does she know me? Who is this person I married less than a year ago?

This dense, opaque, scared betrayer.

“You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Four Poets:

The circle of desk-chairs all faced inward. Every class we workshopped a couple of poems. We said what we thought the poem was about. We said whether we liked the poem or not, and why. We said how the student could improve the poem by breaking lines, swapping out words, or creating rhyme. We said we didn’t know if it was poem. We said, “This image is cliché.” We said, “This image is killer.” We agreed with each other. We disagreed with our instructor. We considered whether or not the poem needed to be confessional, lyrical, narrative, etc.

I turned in sentimental writing. I wrote a sonnet about leaving love notes under the windshield of an ex-girlfriend’s car. I wrote an elegy to my dead grandparents. I wrote a prose-poem about the poor infrastructure and daily grind of a city. I wrote a found poem with lines about God holding the world in His hands.

I remember four undergrads who wrote stellar poems, people who were poets—who inspired me to work at my writing—because they could work their imagination into funny, loving, nostalgic, and urgent writing: Matt Harrison—this sly, lip-pierced, too tight T-shirted, and jeaned guy—who satirically wrote “The One That Got Away” from the point-of-view of an old Ash Ketchum reminiscing about the battle that he lost to capture a Pokèmon. Christina Johnson—this small, quiet gal with sepia blouses that matched her Polaroid photos she took, and corduroy pants like a couch’s slipcover that I wanted to lie my head on—with her “Floral Prints” about a husband who reupholsters a yard sale armchair for his wife who ends up dying before he does and leaving her shape in the cushions. Keri Smith—this strong, but shy gal with a canvas of tattoos, before everyone inked up, down on her skin including beta fish swimming in the fish bowl of her clavicle, a horse skull on her bicep, a pizza slice melting on her shin, and a percolator on the other leg that spilled out the word bubble, “Death before decaf!”—who wove Lorca’s verse Ni hay nadie que, al tocar un recien nacido, olvide las inmoviles calaveras de caballo into her poem “A Death Full of Light” where she walked through her parents’ barn while remembering her little girl self who loved to ride. Curtis Meyer—this functioning Asperger’s guy with slick button ups and slacks, whose voice boomed like an oracle that he raised as a slam poet—and his poem “Value” that tallied all the lives of cells in our bodies that we are responsible for, and that to live isn’t, but actually really is, “no pressure.”

Four poets’ obsessions captivated Oliver and she, too, was inspired to write by their work: Poe’s uncertainty caused by the continual deaths of dark-curled, high-foreheaded, large-eyed, ill women so much like his mother, including his surrogate mother Frances Allan and later his wife (and cousin!) Virginia Clemm who revisited him in “The Haunted Palace.” Frost’s bittersweet control with meter, and fame, as he was put on a pedestal as a Popular Poet (capital Ps!) for being a pastoral poet with a vulnerability written in “My November Guest.” Hopkins’ release from the rigorous Jesuit order with joyful language (rejoice!) on the page where he was constantly “Hurrahing in Harvest.” Whitman (oh, Whitman! her Whitman!) who after caring for the dying as a nurse in the Civil War replicated a miracle of resurrection with his life long rewriting of Leaves of Grass.

“Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready?”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Intermission:

Sand Dabs Seven*

Danger comes from above and around you.

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Don’t do CPR if there is chest trauma, the person is dead, the person is speaking to you, if a body is rotting, if a heart is outside the body, if a head is not attached to the body, if the scene is unsafe.

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You won’t know when your judgment fails you.

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In the documentary “A Dozen More Turns,” a group of Alaskan grad school skiers gets caught in an avalanche on Mt. Nemesis. One of them snaps his leg and another dies.

“They should have known better,” an urban EMT in the WFR course says.

Would we have known any better?

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The best container for water is your body.

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Lightning spreads like a stream. The electrical charge flows along the ground gathering ions and then bolts up into the clouds. The safest place to be in a field, during a thunderstorm, is not down, but on a buoy of earth.

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We have killed so many rattlesnakes that rattlesnakes now self-select to not grow rattles.

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Six “Sand Dabs” are spread throughout three of Oliver’s books: Winter Hours, Blue Pastures, and West Wind. The sand dab is a small, bony, significant but well-put-together fish.

“I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _____. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope.”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Winter Hours:

What is failure except the lack of achieving a goal? A gulf, chasm, gulch, arroyo, valley—separation of place. You compete but you are defeated. You try but you don’t make it—somewhere. You don’t land. You drift. You carry the fault that didn’t enable you to succeed. You are the cause of your own let down.

What is mercy except underserved leniency, relief, and release?

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Because the sessions began at 8:30AM I woke in darkness to journal my WFR training experience and to jot down the curious and inspiring bits of Winter Hours.

The ground-level studio was warm, almost damp since I ran a space heater all night long. The coils glowed as orange as coals and a fan spun, blowing beneath the bed and rising up to me tucked under a comforter. Double doors lead into the one room with a kitchenette and bathroom stall. The studio fit snug under the deck of a social worker’s house. She rented out the space cheaper than a hotel room.

I woke alone in the navy room. The walls were painted light blue and the trim and floorboard and doors were painted a darker blue, but it all looked nearly black like a bruise until I turned on a light.

I worked at a table quadranted off with four stools that tucked underneath, by the legs. Rarely did I experience being alone in the quiet. I did, and didn’t, like it. I liked turning over my thoughts without distraction, except for the distraction that there wasn’t any distraction—that there wasn’t my cat or Lauren or anybody I really knew in the entire state.

I have known loneliness even with being with someone. Or perhaps not loneliness, but despair.

After my journaling and a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal, I suited up in wool socks, long underwear, a turtleneck, synthetic T-shirt, Carhartt pants, a fleece pull-over, an insulated canvas jacket, a scarf, hat with ear flaps, mittens, and waterproof ankle boots. I felt in uniform—that I had a purpose, a duty, to save lives; myself included.

The winter morning air crackled and I steamed, walking up the frosty hill to my car parked at a lesser angle. I turned over the ignition, warming up the oil and the engine. Exhaust plumed from the tailpipe, escaping into the brightening sky.

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I had pulled up and shut our garage door. I didn’t like the work I did even though it more than paid the bills. I drove a bus at odd hours of the day, on-calls, and Saturday nights since I was ranked 101 out of 120 drivers. I would sit all day and pay close attention to the road around town and the mall and the university and downtown and everywhere else in between. It wasn’t mindless, it was mindful; exhausting.

Ironically, I had to drive the direct 5 minutes to and from work because I couldn’t regularly catch the bus in time before my shifts. I would have had to ride for 20 minutes and then wait at least another 10 minutes adding an unpaid extra hour to each day.

I felt strapped into my position. I couldn’t just quit. What would I do in Ames that would pay as much? How would I afford to live? How could I go on riding the wheel and feeling unchallenged, but also depleted?

My vision clouded. I switched the fog lights on. Their orange beams cast caution in the filling garage.

I thought about staying. Lauren and I had had a confrontation. I don’t know what to call it. A non-physical fight? An empty debate? An emotional conversation?

We had been married for less than one year. Winter’s coldness still froze the nights of early spring and the tulip bulbs hadn’t sprouted. She didn’t know. I didn’t know. The commitment felt like too much, something we weren’t prepared for. Would this—the unrest, the doubt, the nausea—ever end?

The intoxicating exhaust settled in. It was a thicker smell than the sweetness at the gas pump. Should I get out? I thought about driving off, to not even consider the next thing with work, with Lauren, with my life. It would be even easier to just let the engine run motionless in the garage and floor the pedal so the carburetor would open for gas to flow and burn and take me away.

I turned the key and took it out. I huffed out a toxic breath and opened the car door and waded through the gray haze. I exited all that.

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I have never planned to live in the west. I’d been to Colorado as a youth. Once, Lauren and I had visited friends in New Mexico for Albuquerque’s hot air balloon festival. Then, we had honeymooned in Portland, Oregon for a food festival, but spent most of our time at Powell’s Books. We came to know the upper Midwest almost as well as the East Coast and the South where we thought we would return.

I have not forgotten how it feels to be a stranger in a strange land. I still felt strange even after living five years in Iowa. I came to enjoy the corn and casseroles as much as the sand and sweet tea of Florida. I could spot a bur oak better than a magnolia, but I never saw prairie rose while my parents’ neighborhood had multiple orange trees, their blossoms zesting with the acidic hint of future citrus. I loved spotting an Eastern goldfinch darting in a flash above hostas while I detested the hidden repeating and annoying mockingbird mimicking a car alarm from a scrub pine.

I love to figure out the layout of a town, where the roads, trails, stores, houses, and restaurants unfortunately cut down the trees and plants and land. I like the sense of structure, or order, while also wanting those green spaces to wildly push up through the concrete and plywood and rebar. I go to all of the same places a few times to find out what they have and at what cost and how they serve or neglect people. I decide between one or two places and then continue going there. I settle.

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From one of the three needs—dwelling—came work in Iowa, occasionally by willingness, or skill. One morning I shoveled dirt from a truck bed into a wheelbarrow and rolled the loads to the backyard of a retired special ed teacher. When I dumped the load, my forearms strained and flexed and released with the tip of dense soil.

I worked with a guy I knew. Work always came from some guy, some project, for some person’s home. Where they already lived. I had cut out windows and sealed flashing under new ones; scraped off paint from Craftsman roofs’ peaks and shellacked on fresh coats; and yanked out pink insulation from rim joists in basements—that would be replaced with sawed foam board, its blue staticky minuscule debris clinging to my jeans—the fiberglass speckled my skin but only cleared in a cold shower so my heated skin’s pores wouldn’t relax and open and accept the shards.

I raked the loads of dirt along a rectangle of 2x4s that would become a cement patio. The rectangle that contained the slurry of concrete was called “the form.” Not a frame, because a frame held a wall before sheets of plywood and then drywall were hammered and hung in place. I loved the language of construction, how the words worked.

Inside the form we crosshatched rebar to support the slurry so the soon-to-seal cement wouldn’t crack. Cement traps water. In basements cement will moisten, feel damp, and then sweat.

We walk on water every day. This is no blind path of faith. This is the road of work.

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For years, in the afternoons, I walked down Clark Avenue. Down as in south. Down as in the slope of Ames toward downtown. Down as in whatever to call the spiral and drain and loss of purpose.

On the east sidewalk I treaded hundreds of times. For several seasons I walked to get the sun, even though my home office had a south-facing reading chair. I would follow the shine before the rays filtered through the tree line and then dipped behind the tree line and well before the sun slipped off the edge of the Midwest. Walking out the door was the most difficult step; to go without a need to get anywhere else, but away. I was getting away from loneliness, from a distancing muteness close to neglect. Sometimes in winters between odd jobs and indoor work I wouldn’t talk to anyone except for Lauren the whole gray day.

I didn’t know I would encounter people on my walks, but I did. These were neighbors without names. I guessed they had come to town for the university, or perhaps the railroad. Most likely to get away from farming. They retired and got old and then they were there in their front windows or lawns or gardens. The sweatpantsed man standing on his couch who I wondered if he was tantruming over the cable news or screwing in an overhead light bulb. The lady who shuffled down her driveway to shout, “Stop!” at the rampant Solomon’s seal. The deaf woman who smiled when I gestured at her lilies. The stay-at-home dad raking leaves into piles or shoveling snow or mowing the lawn or seeding the lawn and then giving me the manly nod and, depending on the season, the brim-of-hat tap.

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The seasons change. Now an ice storm threatens the end of the WFR weeklong course since the University of Missouri will close the next day. So, tonight, this Thursday, we test out. Answering a multiple-choice test and then splint a leg with a book, pad, jacket, and p-chord. I use Southwestern Homelands, my North Face, a classroom pad, and borrowed rope. I’m in the odd group, the only pair with a plus one. The geography master’s student researching digital terrorism and the undergrad athletic trainer. I forget to include a trucker’s knot in my simple loop and so my half-hitches come loose from femur to shin and the instructor doesn’t like that we’re last. At last, I re-do the entire splint and then we lose the personal trainer to another pair for the final assessment of clearing a spine after a positive mechanism of injury (read: someone fell from a height).

Of course, I support the geography student’s neck and I know where to look for any bruising behind his ears and how to dab his earlobe to check for any cranial fluid leaking and palpate his back and test the feeling in his palm and pinch his fingerpads for capillary refill and take his pulse and cover his eyes to see if the pupils equally and reactively respond to light and create a c-brace with his fleece jacket and ask him his name, where he is, and what month it is. Pain is the answer I don’t want to receive from any question; I ask as he moves his head on his neck left then right and then up and finally down like the cardinal directions, east and west, and north and south. Finally, Dan, at Mizzou, during January, is cleared.

There is a place on the road home where my eyes droop while listening to the Black-Eyed Blonde on CD. I roll the windows down when the exhumed Philip Marlowe isn’t enough to keep me awake. How the chill snaps my eyes fully open! I stagger the stops I make for coffee so I don’t crash with the lack of caffeine or the jittery blur of happiness, returning to Lauren.

During the WFR course, Lauren and I texted and talked to continue to dwell together even as we were apart and were readying to leave. Overnight, I drive to our garage, to our place, to our door that we continue to open for each other.

*

Darkness is the best time to write. I mean my emotional and woken and environmental state. Perhaps something wrong or just rising or shadowed, the thing that needs lightening, lightning, light, is what I like to work with.

In the act of writing an essay, I am loyal, and wandering. As much as I can I neglect the rest of the day—hunger, work, communication—and attempt to submerge in my mind both memory and how I recall. I think, What do I know? What I consider is a tangle to undo and then weave into something useable. Oliver writes of hearing a song, a whisper, a voice. I am no Oliver yet, but I know of that language inside myself. Every essayist attempts to listen to it. You can learn the rules for the dance, but not the feel. You can hope for talent, but not style. Hope for ability. It is real and spiritual. It is a possession, and ephemeral. Perhaps it’s why I jot on scrapes of paper and then scribble them together on lined notebooks. My laptop only helps me get the supplies in order, ready to construct.

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I could not be an essayist without work. Someone else could. But not me. For me, the experiences pile up. During a driving shift, in a garden plot, or on a ladder I work toward a physical exhaustion that fills a mental reserve—a tap to pour out with writing. I learn, and then write, how doing something affects me.

Perhaps I’m a working writer. But there’s always a tension between needing to work and wanting to write but not wanting to write for work. I also don’t want to be a communist or union organizer or whatever would be a writer writing for workers. I document my own labor: pay, hours, and skill and treatment and interpersonal relationships and lack of lunch breaks. What I write begins with the shifts and doesn’t end after work. Maybe I would become an activist if I got comfortable. But I haven’t. I don’t consider the gross domestic product, international trade agreements, or inflation rates. I am just going to work and riding the wheel, digging with a trowel, slinging a brush and then coming home with an experience. This is an unfortunately usual way to live—non-mystical, scraping by.

The world makes a distinction between work: digging ditches or going to meetings. There is a false divide between the same sort of taxing menial, repetitive tasks. You strain your back or you widen your ass. What’s the difference between physical and mental jobs? Education, opportunity, nepotism? There are carpenters torquing nails out of siding who spend nights reading Cormac McCarthy. There are English professors writing mysteries who cut cedars with a chainsaw. There are research scientists advocating for rye as cover crop who fill their freezers with hunted waterfowl. There are bakers punching down swollen sourdough who practice transcendental meditation. There are vegetable farmers spot weeding brussel sprouts who attend racial equality town halls. The world is made up of fiber optic cables, ballpoint pens, and screws. A diesel is alive. The screen of the phone and the screen inset on a hinged door that lets in the flow, but not the bugs, is circulatory. There is breath in all work.

What I want to emanate in my essays is the feeling—both physical and emotional—of knowing the job, the trajectory toward mastery that occurs on a no set-up turn, the pluck of a taproot, or the slide of a primer coat.

There is something special in this, I believe. It creates something. Writing work is a way of clocking-in with a subject. You become what it is. With your muscle—brain or brawn—you live as you work. The muse is the planned, the effortful, the constructed—not the flighty, the sporadic. You work, and you notice. You are purposeful in order to be fulfilled. You consider how to do a job by doing it, and then telling it. Each evening, you come home and your beloved says—always—How was work? The answer comes as a narrative reconstructed.

*

Lauren and I met when we were in our early twenties. For myself it was so adult—a shared bed and split bills. Coupling. We have lived together for a half-dozen years, without an end. I have told lots about it. Confession, the over-share in our selfish world, has been a catharsis of youth. We are forgiven, and we try again. We are both yoked, and maturing, together. Repeat: we are forgiven, and we try again. We work with sincerity, goofiness, kindness, and forgiveness. Whenever I write something angry it lacks my life with Lauren. Whenever I write something hopeful it is my heart yearning to live it with Lauren. This is my life’s work.

An Interview with Chris Wiewiora

I first met Chris Wiewiora in 2008 when he was still an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida. I was the managing editor at The Florida Review. Chris came on as our assistant editor on work-study and quickly proved that he was one of our hardest working staff members. His work ethic and editorial chops were one thing, but soon I got to see some of his stellar early writing and we started exchanging comments on each other’s fiction and non-fiction essays.

In the years since, we’ve grown in different directions. I’ve gone on to pursue a career in information security, and Chris has ventured onward bravely to see his non-fiction anthologized in Best Food Writing and The Norton Reader, and non-fiction essays about things like marriage, bus driving, killer whales, good pizza, and the water supply published in all sorts of excellent places.

So it’s a pleasure to get the opportunity to revisit this interview I did with Chris regarding “Riding Solo,” one of my favorite essays that I’ve had the opportunity to help Chris work on.

*

EB: “Riding Solo,” your essay just published by Thought Catalog, brings together a lot of disparate themes: motorcycle riding, recovering from an injury, a failed relationship, pornography, casual sex encounters. How did you start writing it?

CW: There was an epigraph from another creative piece I was using as a diving board, a jumping off point, about motorcycling. The epigraph was from “Novorapid” by Tyler Enfield, from The Florida Review issue with the underwater woman’s face on the cover.

“… death is sexy when you are twenty-one, when you are invincible, when your skin is electric with the glory of youth and you are clueless, vital, assured.”

I have a folder an inch thick of all the drafts. I outlined the essay too, which was weird, because I don’t think I had done that before. Originally this started as a story, I think it was first called “Riding Solo,” and then it changed to “Now,” and finally it went back to “Riding Solo.” It was first written as a mid-length essay that primarily had to do with the relationship and motorcycling. Then it brought in more of the casual encounter and the pornography and those different worlds. And as those sub-worlds expanded the narrative world, that made the essay longer. At one point it was nine thousand, ten thousand words. Then at one point I cut it down to fifteen hundred words, when it was just about monikers of casual encounters. At another point I cut out all the Kisha stuff, all the motorcycling stuff, which was very weird. So it’s gone through a lot.

EB: You described stories to me as pearls before, where there’s a grit at the center. What do you mean by that?

CW: The grit is the little piece of sand that an oyster creates this nacre around, and that’s called mother-of-pearl, and it hardens. I’ve thought of that as the origin story of essays. There’s always a little piece that rubs against you, like a pebble in your shoe, and then you’re creating this protective layer, and out of that comes this pearl.

EB: So after you had said that to me so long ago I went and read about pearls.

CW: Oh, am I way off?

EB: No, no. The story we tell, of course, is that they are grits of sand that turn into a beautiful pearl. But I read that it’s most often a harmful parasite, or an infection, and the oyster creates the pearl to quarantine itself against it. It’s an immune system response.

CW: I like hearing that it’s not sand, that it’s a parasite the oyster makes a pearl around. The best writing that I’ve written is when I feel uncomfortable. I’m getting at those things that need to be discussed.

It’s uncomfortable and it takes work, but it’s necessary because at the core of it there is this thing fucking feeding off of me. And I think that’s many times what essaying is about. It’s cathartic, like recovery.

EB: So what was the thing at the center of this essay that set it off?

CW: Well, the story isn’t the traditional inverted checkmark of rising action, climax, resolution. It’s this mirrored, opposite checkmark. More like a plummet. Everything gone bad: My relationship with my girlfriend Kisha, gone bad. Addiction, gone bad. Using people, gone bad. Motorcycling, gone bad. The despair of this empty situation, everything is being destroyed and then just at the end it’s maybe redlining, topping out on the motorcycle. No recovery, it’s just survival.

I remember driving with my buddy DJ a few months before I wrote this essay. I think it was when Kisha and I were sleeping together, fucking each other. DJ and I were stuck in traffic, and he said, “Sometimes I can’t wait for a relationship to be over so I can write about it.”

And it was just such a fucked-up thing, where you can steer your life to be able to make that into a story that later on you’re going to write about. For him, it was fiction. For me, I was a nonfiction person, and I could say, “Wow, I could change the way I interact with somebody because later on I could write about it and it would be better.”

So later I asked myself, “Did I end the relationship so I could write a story about it?” And the answer is no. But those are the grits that rubbed me a little wrong.

EB: I remember in an earlier draft we talked about the difference in the diction in the sex scenes, between “sex” and “fucking,” the words themselves.

CW: Yeah. That was an eye opener for me. I think I was just writing whatever, put “breasts” there, put “sex” there, put “fucking” there. And then I realized through the drafting process that the language is defining the action, and this is seeping in. Why not just say what it is? Fucking each other.

The draft changed, then. You know, Kisha and the narrator fucking each other, they’re not having sex. When sex changes to fucking, and “I love you” means “Thanks for doing that.” What’s spoken is not true to the actions in the way that language has to be accurate to portray what’s going on truthfully.

EB: The story begins with the search for a casual sex encounter, one you eventually find with the character Ashley. What was it that pushed you toward seeking out casual sex, and how was it that you came to use Craigslist to search?

CW: Right. There’s a plummet from porn and the relationship to the casual sex. From the beginning there’s an awareness that there’s another world out there. I don’t believe the theory of evangelical groups, like Focus On The Family, when they said that Jeffrey Dahmer had used porn when he was younger or maybe even as an adult and that that had led to tendencies that then led to the murders.

I don’t know if porn leads to behavior. It does affect people, for sure. It’s something that people do when they’re wanting to find something, but it’s not a substitute.

I remember the relationship was over and then being a young American male—it’s very accessible. You can just search “casual encounters” and see the photos and the possible thrill. I thought, being in a college town in a big city, that maybe I could do this activity without anybody knowing and find somebody else, maybe not like me, but in the sense that they want the same thing. It’s inherently wild and dangerous.

The question is when you cross that line: When is it that you transition from looking at the photos to setting up an e-mail account and trying to find somebody? And then when you do find somebody, how do you react?

In the essay there are four responses: There’s “Zorro Couple,” there’s “Barb,” there’s “College Girl” with the black bar over her eyes, and there’s “Ashley.” And then there’s a lot of fake ones and spam. There was even one that I thought was funny, a posting that turned out to be a suicide hotline number. And at the time Craigslist was having trouble with prostitutes. They’d be vague, and you have to call to set up like it was a dentist’s appointment. Instead of your annual teeth cleaning, call for your blowjob. And sometimes I got responses that were women saying how much it costs, and I would say that I’m not going to pay for sex, and they cursed me out, saying I wasn’t going to find sex for free. It’s almost a challenge.

It’s way more difficult for a man to find a woman. Let’s say you do a post, in about a day your post is cemented down by a hundred other posts by other people. So you have to constantly repost. And you want to have a catchy post, you don’t want to be like everybody else. So you’ll look at the others and say, “Okay, everyone’s just putting up a picture of their dick.” It’s like marketing yourself.

One of the eeriest things was, and I didn’t write about this in the essay, I actually saw some guys I knew on the men looking for women list.

EB: Wow.

CW: Yeah. I was like, “Holy crap, I don’t want to put a picture of my face on there.” Still, there is a certain security in place. You’re not going to talk about somebody who’s on it because if you say that, then they know you’re also on it. It’s like, “You don’t talk about Fight Club.” Well…not quite.

EB: You mentioned that when you do something like a casual sex encounter, it’s because you’re looking for something.

CW: You’re looking for something that you think is there and that you can’t get elsewise. There’s a cost to that.

EB: What’s the cost?

CW: The cost is that it’s not real. You’re putting on a mask and you’re protecting yourself. Think about the names, the usernames. You’re not Chris Wiewiora. You’re verbChrisverb. You’re not Ashley. You’re “Black BBW.”

EB: The black boxes over College Girl’s eyes.

CW: Yeah, you’re hiding yourself. Not only are you not showing yourself truly to somebody else, you’re also deconstructing yourself to a certain degree. Breaking yourself down to “I am this: ____.”

EB: Sounds a little like writing nonfiction, doesn’t it?

CW: Right. It’s like, “I am this, this physical characteristic, and that’s it, that’s all I have to offer. That’s all you want. That’s all I’m going to give you in this moment. If I give you more than that, then this moment is not what it’s supposed to be.”

EB: What do you think Ashley was looking for?

CW: You know, there was a certain sweetness, I guess, to the moment. I think everybody wants to be found this way, be accepted, even despite their faults or perceived faults. And what happened was that moment changed from being an encounter, a desire, to being more. Ashley asked if I wanted to make it a regular thing. And I said, “I don’t ever do this more than once.”

I think for her she wanted to find some kind of acceptance of who she was. But that’s not the way to it, that’s not a moment of love.

EB: One of the most striking things about “Riding Solo” is its uncompromising honesty and intimacy. For example, the sections on your relationship to pornography might have been glossed over by a more timid author. What is the impulse behind being so honest with the reader, sharing things that are not so sterile or flattering?

CW: Writing in this kind of shockingly honest way, it’s not confessionalism. Even though I talked about it being cathartic, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have to write this.

I write about these explicit things because it’s what happened. People won’t necessarily be in those situations. Not everybody rides a motorcycle or has an interracial relationship that fails or goes online to find casual sex. So you write it as is, because you want it to be like they were there. Writing is constructed. It’s like a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional object. I know it’s three-dimensional. And I’m saying, “Hey there’s things creating this image on the wall with fire behind it and there’s shadows, I swear to you it’s three-dimensional.” That’s my contract with the reader. This is the best way that I can tell you how it was and what happened. That’s what I’m doing.

EB: So you’re recently engaged, soon to be married. Has Lauren, your fiancé, read the essay?

CW: She has read this essay as part of a larger collection. And we’ve talked about it, just briefly, to say that this is something wild that I’ve done before, and it doesn’t perturb her that much. It’s just kind of one of those passes you get for being younger.

One of the reasons I wanted to marry Lauren is that I love her for who she is but also that I love that she allows me to be who I am and I don’t have to hide that. She respects me. She’s the first person I’ve been in a relationship with that has read my stuff and is also just fine about being written about. I wouldn’t be. I’d be pissed. I’d be like, “Don’t put me in that, I didn’t say that, I didn’t think that, this isn’t written well.” I’m the worst person to turn the tables on. I’m a pushy editor, and I push back against editing.

EB: “Riding Solo” occupies an interesting place in your overall body of work. This essay is about struggle and so it takes us to some darker places. We get that plummet and then it ends on disconnection. But many of your other works, on The Good Men Project and in literary magazines, show a return to a connected life—stories that talk about love, Lauren, spirituality, and family. How does “Riding Solo” fit into that?

CW: A lot of what I write now is about being younger. It’s not as much about who I am immediately now. I rarely have written about things that have happened in the past two years. This essay “Riding Solo” is from a collection called Toro! which is about failed relationships, masculinity, illness, faith, all things that happened to me when I was younger.

There are other stories in Toro! that are moments of failed or failing relationships where the narrator recognizes the start of that plummet, and that recognition stops him from going down again. It’s a reminder to myself of making it through. It’s a survival story, and that needs to be told. Constantly saving yourself, getting out.