MARY

JOHN D'AGATA

John D'Agata is not a pioneer. Don't get me wrong—his collection of essays, Halls of Fame (Graywolf, 2001), is an innovative blend of prose and poetry, both informed and lyrical; however, D'Agata would be the first to tell you that his work does not chart new territory between nonfiction and poetry, but rather carries on a widely unrecognized literary tradition of lyric essaying.

In one of the collection's essays, "Flat Earth Map: An Essay," D'Agata writes in the footnote to a footnote:

There is, no doubt, a gap between what I am thinking at this moment and the moment that you are thinking of. Between me, writer, and you, reader, and the brink across which knowledge and we stare. But you know all this. Know that the spot which we essay together is seldom marked with an X. And yet we are always mapping the invisible, the unattainable, the erasable, the future or the past, the whatever-is-not-here—to ever futile ends. And yet, and yet his bold face. And yet his caps. Yet italics. Ellipses. Dash.

D'Agata is interested in the brink, in the space for shared essaying, in mapping the invisible. As editor of lyric essays at Seneca Review, D'Agata gives print space to genre-straddling authors whose work might fall through the crack between poetry and nonfiction at other journals. As editor of the anthology The Next American Essay (Graywolf, 2003), D'Agata sought to compile a recent history of the lyric essay, recognizing writers from the past thirty years, such as John McPhee, Jamaica Kincaid, and David Foster Wallace, who have worked within this nebulous realm of both nonfiction and poetry, but whose work has existed subsumed by other genres. At the University of Iowa, where he completed his MFAs in nonfiction and poetry, D'Agata now teaches the history of the genre as well as nonfiction workshops.

Alicia J. Bleuer
January 2007
Iowa City, Iowa

"The essay isn't journalism and the essay isn't story . . . I think now there are more of us who understand that and who are writing in ways that reflect a different kind of essaying."

MARY Magazine: In The Next American Essay, you introduce Didion's "The White Album" by quoting the familiar opening sentence, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," as well as the last phrase of that piece, ". . . but writing has not helped me to see what it means." If meaning isn't what the lyric essay engenders, how does the lyric essayist benefit from the experience of writing? What do you as a writer take from the process of writing?

John D'Agata: For me, it's getting an experience—the experience of the text. Other people will give you many other answers to this, but the definition of the lyric essay for me comes from the history of the lyric, and what lyric activity meant to the earliest lyric writers, people like Sappho and Archilochus. For them, lyric activity was about giving the reader an experience that is so detailed, so concrete, and so real that we feel we are not so much overhearing what they're saying—not a "whisper," in other words, as some would interpret it—but rather that we ourselves are speaking what they are saying, that we are sharing the experience with them. Not just hearing what they're saying, but feeling it too, assuming the position of the speaker in those poems. Why has someone like Sappho lasted so long? Partly it has to do with the fragmentation of those poems of course, which allows us to read whatever we want into them. But more importantly, she's lasted because she allows us to share her experience, though not of course because we are all seventh-century Greek lesbian poets and can therefore see our selves in her experiences. Rather, it's because she writes with a clarity of experience, with a sense of detail and sense data that is so rich that we can literally walk into that experience. Helen Vendler, arguably the best critic of the lyric in English literature, says we walk into the shoes of a good lyric writer, we become that speaker. They speak through us.
    That's where the idea of the vatic in Greek poetry comes from. Plato lived about three hundred years after Sappho, and he mentions her in two different dialogues. If you remember, there's a moment in The Republic while Plato is constructing his city during which he tells us who will and will not be allowed to live there. And poets are some of the folks he proposes banning from the city because he thinks they're so dangerous. Why? Because they don't speak with the kind of rationality that we, or at least Plato, would appreciate in human communication. The very thing that makes us human, after all, is our ability to make rational distinctions in the world. Poets, instead, are speaking out of a different part of human experience. It's imagistic, it's associative, and it sometimes pushes on the limits of sense. It sounds sometimes as if they're possessed by something else. And that's what a vatic is—someone who has literally become possessed by a spirit, and it is that spirit that some Greeks thought was speaking out of them. In Latin, that's where the definition of inspiration comes from; it means someone—the muses—breathing something into us. And it's this contact with a different kind of human experience that was intimidating for some Greeks.
    These days, obviously, we're more appreciative of that kind of experience, although not necessarily so much in nonfiction yet. Personally, I love participating in a text like that. I love it when there's a certain amount of interpretive work that's required of me. I don't tend to have that experience in traditional forms of nonfiction, though. Cicero, who I love—and who, embarrassingly, is one of my favorite writers—is really not the greatest of.well, he's not a lyric writer. He's about presenting a point, telling you right up front what he's talking about, and then spending two hours explaining his point. That's where we get the conventional five-paragraph form in the essay. There's never a moment in reading those texts when you're not aware of what you're supposed to be thinking. That isn't experiential reading. That's more like information coming at you. And there's a difference between information and experience. For a very large portion of the recent history of nonfiction, we've defined ourselves as writers of information rather than writers who can give the reader the same kind of experience as poets or playwrights or fiction writers.

MM: Your statement on recent nonfiction is much more polite than mine.

JD: What would yours be?

MM: Well, I'm a third-semester MFA student so it's hard to say. I entered into a program planning to write memoir only to find out that such work wasn't important to me. I had to shed a certain amount of arrogance to understand that my story wasn't all that compelling.

JD: Well, partly I think that's because yours might be the first generation of MFA students who're being exposed to types of essays that aren't exclusively personal. When I was in school, the memoir craze was happening, so that was our primary model: personal stories rendered with dramatic arcs and take home messages. Things are changing now, though. We've loosened up what we believe can count as "essay", and that's good. It'll take a little while for us to work through these growing pains though.

MM: In an interview a few years ago, when asked what you look for at the Seneca Review, you said you're interested in essays that are informed by poetry, that are imagistic rather than purely informational, those that are not solely concerned with argument but more the articulation of the problem. Can you talk a little bit about what you see at Seneca in terms of the traps writers fall into trying to write arguments and how other writers succeed in articulating questions in the lyric essay?

JD: I don't think I've ever published an essay in Seneca Review that has begun the way ninety-nine percent of the essays in this genre begin, which is something like "When I was nine-years old . . . " blah, blah, blah, blah. That's what I will probably never publish, not because that kind of essay isn't important to write, but rather because that sort of essay is what primarily gets published in our literary journals. My coeditor and I, from the very beginning, wanted to give space to a different kind of essay. That "other" kind of essay could be anything, as far as we were concerned, but it wasn't going to be a personal essay whose argument wasn't able to open up to the rest of the world. To be honest, in some way I think every essay we've published has been personal essay, because they've been private essays. But there's a difference between the private and the personal. It's possible for a nonfiction text to be very intimate and yet still be engaged with an issue that affects readers as much as it does the writer.

MM: I wanted to talk about that too. In the same interview, you discussed Halls of Fame as a collection of private, but not personal, essays.

JD: Yeah, I don't consider them personal essays. I mean, there's a lot of personal stuff in there that I suppose a reader could hunt down if they wanted to, but that's not what engendered those essays. It's the difference between, "I have had an experience and now I want to explore it in an essay, relating it to something else in the world in order to legitimize it," or the kind of impulse that says, "Here's something really fascinating out in the world. I have no idea why it fascinates me, but I'm going to go research the dang out of it, and then, when I'm back home surrounded by boxes of research, I'm going to ask myself"—because you have to ask yourself this—"okay, what were those several months of research for? What was the point of that? Why am I so fascinated by this?" And that's where the personal stuff can creep in. I think approaching subjects in that way can change your relationship to them. I can't really answer that very clearly though because, thankfully, I'm not very conscious of it while I'm doing it. I just approach projects that seem interesting somewhere out in the world, but never really ask myself why I think they're interesting until I'm done researching them. Eventually though there is a very specific moment when I say, "Okay, why do I care about this?" I think it's after you get to know a subject as a subject rather than something that might inform personal experience, that allows you to propel a text into genuinely significant terrain. You can tell tonally in an essay what engendered it, whether it was a personal experience that the writer wanted to attach to something bigger in the world, or something in the world that the writer wanted to the sieve down to something more manageable, something private and intimate that could have some impact on the story of a life. I look for that kind of essay. I also look for essays that make me jealous. I think that's my rule of thumb: If I see an essay that I'm pissed somebody else wrote, I'll publish it immediately.

MM: In another introduction in The Next American Essay, you wrote, "Or: Maybe every essay automatically is in some way experimental—less an outline traveling toward a foregone conclusion than an unmapped quest that has sprung from the world question." This got me to thinking about the ways in which essays should be considered as maps. In terms of this idea of the essay as an articulation of the question instead of a force pushing the reader toward an answer, are there ways we can consider the essay as a map?

JD: I think of an essay as a way of figuring something out, which I suppose is map-like. I guess I approach subjects the same way, once all of the research is done, I approach the composition of the subject the way I imagine any reader would. I just assume that if I find this thing interesting, so will x number of people. Even though I've already gone through the process of research, I try to make the essay replicate my own experience of learning about the subject. These days, we like to use Montaigne's definition of the genre—"to test, to try, to experiment"—to define what we do in nonfiction, and I think we like this because that's the most exciting kind of reading experience we can have in an essay: When we feel while reading that we're discovering something in tandem with the writer
    When we're in workshop, I ask my students to read for the journeying in an essay, wondering where we started in an essay, where we ended up, and what's gone on along the way. In other words, do you end up some place different? Are you changed by the end of the essay? You, meaning reader; you, meaning writer. Because there should be some sort of change. There should be a change in tone, there should be a change in argument, there should be a change in form. If you experience something in an essay, you should therefore be altered in some way by it. So, are you? Because if we're reading in class and we can't see any of these changes, it's important to ask whether anything emotionally or intellectually or experientially has occurred, if anything has been altered, and therefore what's been experienced. Because if nothing's been changed, what was the point of making this journey? We really can't call that a journey if we start right here and end up at exactly the same place. That's more of a vacation than a journey. And there are far too many vacation essays in the world right now. We don't need any more of them.
    Not everyone would agree with this, obviously. I have lots of colleagues who say this is irresponsible, who say you need to give the readers a kind of lifeline to help them maintain their sanity while they're exploring.

MM: Do you mean "lifeline" as a kind of architecture?

JD: Yeah, sure. Because without one, then . . . what? The house would fall or something. I don't know. I'm not sure what metaphor they'd use. But I'm not here to make their arguments. See, though, this is the difference between those two big traditions in the essay: the Ciceronian, rhetorical thing, in which he knows exactly where he's going to end up yet still insist on taking two hours to get there; and that which we've inherited from Montaigne, who'll also take two hours to get someplace, but who'll loop around the world about eighteen different times and make several journeys that are completely tangential along the way in order to get someplace that's still within the same thematic realm, but a little more surprising. We're always a little shocked in his essays, and that's why Montaigne has lasted, because he's kind of evocative—not only in what he's willing to reveal to us, but also in his movements, in the associative leaps he's able to make. And Cicero.well, we're never shocked by Cicero. He's lasted for different reasons. Partly because he was the world's greatest egomaniac and he made sure his work would last. But he also lasts because he's a great stylist, and sentence-by-sentence we can learn a lot from him.

MM: In the first section of your essay "Flat Earth Map," you offer an example and definition of a legend: "A symbolization of information in a map; it gives, in abbreviated form, most of the facts that are needed to decode a map and enable its readers to plot trips into heretofore unknown terrains." How does your work in the classics and the cannon help inform your writing? Do these texts operate as a sort of legend? As a reader of your work, it helps me to understand the question when you, for example, allude to Chaucer in "Halls of Fame," to lend stability to the architecture of the piece. How does this occur to you? Has it become second nature by now?

JD: It might be, but can I ask how it helps you?

MM: It feels like a different entrance point for me. I was rereading "Halls of Fame" this week, and I kept referring back to Chaucer. The question that piece is asking makes more sense to me when I have Chaucer as an additional point of reference, almost like a restatement of the theme. And so my question is how, as a writer, do you put these things together? How does Chaucer function in "Halls of Fame"?

JD: That's probably not something I would want to explicate. How do these old guys come in? They're just with me. I can tell you one goofy thing that people like to hear, because it reveals that I'm a very legitimate nerd. I studied Latin forever, basically starting around the same time I began reading English. So when you're eight-years old and you're reading Latin after school, and no one else you know is reading Latin—I mean, not your parents, none of your friends, your teachers, no one but you and your own private tutor—it can seem to you like you're being let in on a secret. Not that it is, of course. Latin is the most widely studied of the so-called "dead" languages. But when I was a kid I thought I was being taught a secret language. I thought it was this private thing that I was one of the few people in the world experiencing. So when you grow up that way, you grow up thinking that these old writers are your friends. And because of that, I really do still think of these folks, like Cicero—Cicero especially—as always being with me. I feel like I've grown up with him. And that's how he and those other folks have influenced me. They're just there.
    I'll tell you an embarrassing story. When I was really young, I used to have nightmares that the world invented a time machine that was only able to travel back to republican Rome, around second and first century B.C.E. So a call went out for someone who could understand Latin, which is how, in this nightmare, I found myself traveling back in time to go hang out with the Romans in order to learn what their lives were like. The nightmare part was that I was always worried that I wouldn't know Latin well enough and that the time machine inventors would send me back to pick up all of this information, yet I wouldn't be able to understand it. And so I'd ruin the experiment or something. That's how dorky I was. A nightmare about not being able to translate effectively.

MM: Can I print that anecdote?

JD: We'll see.

MM: "Flat Earth Map" is a collage essay, and in your "Collage History of Art" you wrote, "Collage is the slowest route between two points." I don't mean to ask you how to read this line, but, as a writer, what are these two points for you? And what's the value in taking the slowest route?

JD: I guess the two points are experience and understanding, or experience and meaning, or knowledge and understanding. But, what's the benefit? The benefit is that, I think, you put the reader in the position of being forced to figure out how to get from A to Z. To use your term, it's not so much a map as it is a series of points of interest along the way. It helps keep the reader active, and an active reader is the kind you want, the kind who's going to engage more intimately with the text then someone following a previously established route. Collage is one of the formal strategies that can help the reader achieve an experience.

MM: Okay, I'm going to throw your Anne Carson question back at you now and ask why you think people are responding to your work the way they are now. Specifically, I'm wondering how you respond to reviewers who're hoping you'll settle down one of these days and write old-fashioned stories with traditional plot and character.

JD: At some point you have to say, well, of course. It's an important thing to learn as a writer: that you're not writing for everybody, that you can't write for everybody. Obviously, there are some people who write for everybody and they're best-seller type writers and there's absolutely nothing wrong with them. But, I do think there's a point at which the text loses something when it tries to appeal to a couple hundred thousand people at once. I think it's impossible to maintain a personality when you're appealing to that many people. But beyond that, I don't know how reviewers are responding now. I don't pay much attention. I wasn't the first to make these kinds of essays by any means, and I definitely know there are more of us now loosening up the essay, so I certainly look like more people than I did when Halls of Fame was published. This doesn't mean I was a trailblazer, it just means I was writing when we were in a memoir craze. It was Frank McCourt-time and Mary Karr-time and that guy who slept with his dog-time, whatever his name is.
    The point is, there are more of us now, and we're not using fiction as a model for our essaying, as we were when nonfiction first entered the academy, which is partly why we were inundated with all those personal stories a decade or so ago. We were being taught character and plot and the importance of denouement, and the essay isn't that. The essay isn't journalism and the essay isn't story. The essay can have story in it, of course, but essaying is not storying. I think now there are more of us who understand that and who are writing in ways that reflect a different kind of essaying, and there are more of us who are teaching a different kind of essaying. The more we propagate in that way, the more readers and writers of essays there will be who are open to a different kind of essay.

MM: In your Boston Review piece on Carson's translation of Sappho, you commend her for giving the reader space—applauding her generosity with sacristy so that readers can imagine their own versions of the poet. How is this need for space met by the lyric essay? What I'm getting at, I suppose, is how do you understand the relationship between you and your reader? What sort of responsibility do you imagine the reader to have? And is there a point when it's too much?

JD: When I'm reading, when I'm workshopping, if we're in a moment when something feels a little impenetrable or the narrative is loosening up a little too much for us, if we pause there and put some pressure on that image, or put some pressure on that leap being made, put some pressure on whatever that moment is that is upsetting us as readers, I always like to ask if it yields anything. Do you know what I mean by "put some pressure on it"? To just sort of linger there and figure it out. If we engage it a little more deeply than we're engaging other parts of the text, does it ferment for us, does it become something? If it does, then that justifies the extra work I'm doing as a reader. If it doesn't—if it just feels willy-nilly weird or willy-nilly obscure—then I guess it's hard for me to justify.

MM: A couple of years ago, in an interview with Emic-zine, you were asked a question of how you viewed the direction American literature seemed to be moving in during this period of history in which the notion of nationalism is obscured. You responded with, "I guess I can't answer that. Partly because I don't know what [direction] we're 'moving' in and partly, to be blunt, I'm not loving the art we're producing—as a generation that's positioned to inherit 'American writing' [as you put it.], we've somehow managed to turn the long aesthetic history of irony in American literature into mere cynicism, and this scares me, because it's dangerous for a whole generation of artists to think this way." Has your response to this question changed? How do you respond now to reader and writer cynicism? Why does this make the lyric essay important now in American literary history?

JD: Has anything changed? I think so, a little bit. There was a moment in my generation during which that kind of ironic posturing was happening. I recall a writer in my generation—whom I won't name—saying in an interview that the hyper-irony we were reading from the generation at one point was revealing the deep vulnerability of our generation. The more ironic, in other words, the more desperate and heartbroken our generation was to be perceived. This is the generation that came of age during AIDS, after all. So just as we were reaching puberty it was discovered that we could explode if we had sex with the wrong person. Then we watched the Challenger shuttle blow up on TV. And then the first president we ever elected was impeached. All of these arguments were given to suggest that it was the culture that made us this way and that really it's the culture that betrayed us and that this is why we're heartbroken, and so the only way we can respond is by giving that back, by saying, "Look what you've done to us," and by using the language of irony itself to illustrate the heartbreak of inexpressive and inauthentic language. That was the argument. And it's a beautiful argument. And I desperately would love to believe it. But I never bought it. I don't know—I never went to my high school prom, so maybe that's when I missed drinking the irony punch.
    There's been a change recently though. That same writer recently came out with a very serious book that is dealing with an important international issue, so the book isn't just peopled with goofy characters. There's something that the book is trying to accomplish rather than just mirroring the silliness or the absurdity of the world. It actually is trying to do something. And if the poster child for ironic posturing in our generation is now doing something like this, then I guess we're on the right track.
    What was the second part of that question?

MM: How the lyric essay fits into this intersection of irony and seriousness.

JD: Oh, yeah. That's a good question.

MM: Because of its form, the lyric essay demands being taken seriously.

JD: You know, it does, but I'll be honest with you, if I see any trend these days in nonfiction I'd have to say it's one that I think is as dangerous as the ironic posturing. It's this kind of lyric stance in an essay that's assumed because the writer doesn't seem to have anything to actually say. In terms of Seneca Review's submissions, I get a lot of these "Here is my lyric essay" essays, the kind that seem to be going through the motions that they think a lyric essay should go through. But, when I pause to put pressure on some of those images or I try to follow a gesture to see where it might end up, I find myself following these gestures into dead air. It's not gesturing toward any kind of idea; it's just gesturing.
    This isn't answering your question about how the lyric essay fits into the irony thing, but I think it's an issue that's just as dangerous. The lyric essay is being used a lot these days as an easy way to get an essay when you don't have any real ideas. It's been used by writers who seem to be compiling a bunch of discrete paragraphs with a bunch of white space around them, indicating typographically that there's something significant going on—because obviously you wouldn't be using so much white space if there wasn't a hell of a lot of significance happening between the lines—yet they so often feel insubstantial.
    It's important to remember that the lyric essay is just a strategy; it's not a solution.
    I guess the link between this and literary cynicism is that they're the same kind of ironic gesture. It's not taking form seriously. There's a well-known letter from Robert Frost in which he says we engage in forms in our writing in order to put ourselves into legitimate danger so that we might be legitimately saved. In other words, form can't just be this cool thing that you want to try out, that you saw in a magazine and thought looked really whiz-bang fun. It can't just be a fad. I might be romanticizing it, but in order for this form to mean anything, it needs to be pertinent. It needs to profound to the experience of the essay. There needs to be a reason why that form is being employed in the essay.
    I get essays at Seneca, from my students, and even from my colleagues sometimes that fall into the same trap. They stumble—as we all do sometimes—onto a form that works brilliantly in one essay, and so it's used indiscriminately in everything else. In that interview you referenced earlier with Anne Carson she said something really excellent. She said, "Every fact has its own form." A lake has its own shape, its own form, in other words. You're going to write about it differently from how you write about this bottle or that love affair. You need to find a form that is pertinent to your subject matter and your experience of it. So that single-sentence discrete paragraph thing that is flying around in nonfiction journals these days is absolutely sometimes pertinent and necessary and the perfect form to use, but when you lay it across every subject like a template it starts blunting all the subsequent arguments underneath it, because if nothing is revealed through the form, if it's never clear to the reader why it's being used, pretty soon not only do you lose legitimacy as a writer, but the form loses legitimacy.

MM: In "Hall of Fame," you wrote: "It's so much like you to find action in things. You must excuse me, though, if I don't make a move. I tend to love foremost the thing." This, to my reading, provides a legend to the reading of the lyric essay—the work as meditation rather than argument. The title of your upcoming book, "The Lifespan of a Fact," as we know from The Next American Essay, comes from a concern developed in high school. Why have you chosen the Yucca Mountain Project? What should we expect from this book? Is it an argument or a meditation? Also, you've discussed the journalistic impulse that compels your work and I'm wondering what the journalistic impulse was with this project.

JD: I'm sure I'll eventually regret having said this, but I very, very consciously wanted a book project I could mature with as a writer. And, initially, Yucca, wasn't that maturing project. What first interested me in Yucca was the absurdity of the project. Yucca, as most people know, is a mountain in southwest Nevada, ninety miles north of Vegas where we are planning to send all of the nation's commercial nuclear waste. As a mountain range, it's kind of undistinguished, kind of ugly actually, maybe 6,000 feet high, and very, very barren. The idea there is to carve ninety-three miles of tunnels inside and then ship all of the country's nuclear waste in canisters to the site, eventually sealing the mountain shut and leaving the waste there for 10,000 years. That itself seems interestingly silly enough, but I was particularly interested in writing about a committee that was formed by the government to design a warning marker for the Yucca Mountain site that could remain physically intact for 10,000 years, but also whose meaning would remain coherent for 10,000 years. That is what fascinated me about the project: its stupidness.
    But, a couple of things happened while I was researching Yucca. One is that my mom ended up moving to Las Vegas. So immediately the Yucca issue became a personal one. My mom became a little bit of an activist against Yucca. So, at the same time that I was getting to know the Yucca Mountain Project as a technical issue, I was also getting to know the politics behind it, and then eventually started questioning the validity of that science and the honesty of those politics. And then, at the same time, during one of the summers I was in Las Vegas, a boy I didn't know killed himself. At the time though I thought I did have a connection to him. I was working for the local suicide hotline in Las Vegas and the night that this boy killed himself I'd gotten a call from a boy who was upset about something. We only chatted a few minutes, and he eventually hung up on me, so I kind of forgot about the call for a bit. But then later I'm sitting in the den with my mom and an hour or so after his call the news comes on, and there's this report about a boy jumping off this very tall building called the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. Immediately I freak out, thinking I had actually talked to this kid. It later became clear that I hadn't talked to that specific boy, but for months before I could confirm this I though that I was one of the last people to talk to him.
    So all of these things started happening that made the Yucca Project a lot more personal and urgent for me. And so gradually the project started to look less like the kind of book I thought I was going to write—which I had expected would be as playful as Halls—and started to look, at least to my mind, a lot more conventional.
    At first, I was pissed off. I was pissed off that my mom moved to Vegas. I was pissed that this boy killed himself and that I knew about it and that I felt connected to his death. I was pissed that I had done so much research that I couldn't ignore, that I felt I couldn't not write about what I was learning. And that's what I mean by it starting to feel like a maturing project. Friends tell me the book is far less conservative than I think it is, but they're wrong. It's a very direct book. It's the kind of book I tell friends I've always planned on not writing, in fact. But, on the other hand, it does what it has to do. We were just talking about using a form that's legitimate, that's profound to the experience of the subject. And indeed, as I got to know this subject, after this boy committed suicide, after I watched my mom screaming in protest at Yucca rallies, it became clear that it just wasn't going to be appropriate to use a form that would employ a lot of fancy dancing on the page. I just couldn't imagine performing in the same formally playful way in this book as I had in Halls while telling the story of a boy killing himself. The moment you do something like that formally, the moment you start experimenting with form, you immediately draw attention away from subject, and focus it on you. And this book is clearly about its subjects—this boy, Yucca, the city in the shadow of both. That's how I got myself through the crisis of feeling that I was writing the kind of nonfiction book that I never would have wanted to write. I realized that this was my subject and that I liked my subject and that this was the form it needed to take
    But what was your question?

MM: Well, I'm thinking about the issue of meditation versus fact—so this has become more of an argumentative book?

JD: Again, to me it feels more argumentative, but other people are telling me it's not. In fact, a lot of people are telling me it's kind of difficult to find the argument in the book, because much of the text tracks through the process of learning about Yucca and learning about this boy. At no point does it actually say, "God damn it, we need to stop Yucca!" or "I feel so sad that this boy killed himself!" In some ways, the book at the end starts turning against its own form, turning against the conventions it's employed, because other things are discovered in the course of the book that I, at least, as a writer, felt I needed to start questioning and start subverting. So, it becomes meditative at the end. It starts questioning the legitimacy of its facts.

MM: It's not a collection of essays then.

JD: No, it's one long essay.

MM: Have you given it a name? Are we talking about a lyrical nonfiction novel?

JD: God, no, let's never call anything that. No, it's not a nonfiction novel. At this moment I'm just calling it an essay. I'm not sure I'll be allowed to keep the title, but right now I'm calling it An Essay About a Mountain. No one likes the title, but for years people have been asking me what it's about and since I seldom enjoy talking about what I'm working on I've just taken to saying, "It's an essay about a mountain." Hopefully that will suffice, and it won't require a subtitle. I don't like subtitles. They're another of those expository gestures that kill the interpretive experience for the reader. We don't have subtitles on poetry collections or novels, but for some reason we feel the necessity to put subtitles on nonfiction books. Unless they're subtitles like, "A Memoir" or "Based on Actual Events," they're usually subtitles that explain what it is you're going to encounter in the book. And I find that so offensive as a reader, but I find it even more offensive as a writer, because it treats the work that's in the book as less about the experience that the reader is going to have—less about giving the reader the experience of discovering that theme for him or herself—than about marketing a particular theme. "A Memoir About Family Trauma and Trust" is one subtitle I just encountered in the store. That kind of gesture feels like it undercuts the purpose of essaying. In some ways, after "Family," "Trust," and "Trauma," I don't feel like I need to take any kind of journey with that writer. I feel like that book pretty much has already told me everything that it was planning on revealing. I would be slightly more interested to discover on my own the presence of those themes in the book. You know, like somewhere on page seventy I could exclaim, "Oh gee! Now I realize that I am in the presence of family, trust, and trauma." That's a bad example, but you know what I mean. I would love some cocky publicist somewhere to insist on slapping a subtitle on the next John Ashbery book and see what kind of uproar we hear from the poetry community. And then we can nah-nah-nah our noses at them and say, "See! You don't like it either! It ruins the book!" I don't think it'll happen, though.