Elizabeth de Cleyre
When people learn you’re a writer, the first question is usually, “What do you write?” Followed closely by, “What is your favorite book?”
I secretly hate answering this question. How could one possibly choose between so many incredible authors and books?! But within the past week, two people asked me to name my favorite book, and the answer came quickly, easily, and unequivocally: Lost in Summerland by Barrett Swanson. It’s sort of a bad answer though, because the book won’t be published until May of 2021. But it’s so good it’s all I want to talk about for the next eight months.
The essays that comprise Lost in Summerland perfectly encapsulate the urgency and complexity of these strange times. It’s awe-inspiring, if not occasionally disconcerting, to see the world refracted back in pristine prose—especially in a time period which often evokes a funhouse mirror. And yet Swanson’s work feels simultaneously timeless and prophetic too, mining the past to find resonances and reverberations to carry us into the future.
The ability to see the world clearly and express it eloquently is a superpower, and Swanson’s prose doesn’t stop short of simply seeing; it’s obvious in these essays that the narrator also feels things deeply—a refreshing departure from the distant, feigned objectivity projected by most journalists.
In an upcoming craft talk for the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild, Barrett Swanson will discuss the role of personal material in longform narrative journalism, using his recent cover stories in Harper's Magazine to discuss the ways in which the "I" necessarily takes on many guises in creative nonfiction. He'll also share tips on pitching stories to editors and navigating the contemporary magazine world.
Swanson generously answered questions via email in anticipation of his talk on October 15th. You can read more of his writing on his website and preorder Lost in Summerland from Counterpoint, your local indie bookstore, or Bookshop.org.
Elizabeth de Cleyre: Your first essay collection will be published in May 2021 by Counterpoint Press. How did you go about determining which essays would make up Lost in Summerland? What was the process of organizing them like? Did the pieces that were previously published in magazines and literary journals change or evolve from their previous incarnations?
Barrett Swanson: The process of curating the essays for the collection was pretty intuitive, if only because I think I’m a victim of certain thematic preoccupations—narrative breakdown, loss of meaning, communal longing, national myths—and each of the pieces that made their way into the book dealt, in one way or another, with those ideas and arguments. There were a few pieces that were omitted that I still sometimes glance at with a kind of wistful, what-might-have-been resignation, but my editor (the wise Dan Smetanka) was helpful in preventing me from overplanting the garden.
“Above all, it was important to me that the book wouldn’t be read as a miscellany, but that each essay would complicate and refract some of the themes that emerged in the piece that preceded it, that the conceptual undertow of the book would pull the reader along, even as the topics and genres of the pieces shifted pretty dramatically (antiwar veterans to psychics and mediums, waterparks to disaster simulations). ”
Above all, it was important to me that the book wouldn’t be read as a miscellany, but that each essay would complicate and refract some of the themes that emerged in the piece that preceded it, that the conceptual undertow of the book would pull the reader along, even as the topics and genres of the pieces shifted pretty dramatically (antiwar veterans to psychics and mediums, waterparks to disaster simulations). My hope is that the later essays will function to click the themes into clarity and show how some Americans have been reckoning with life in this country from the late Obama era to our democracy’s present unraveling.
Because some magazines have house-styles and because I am pathologically obsessed with cadence and inflection, there were some slight alterations between the book versions and the magazine versions of these pieces. In most cases, though, the differences are so granular that I wonder whether anyone else would even notice them. One of the ways in which my OCD manifests itself is in the sculpting of sentences, and I get so irksomely particular about phrasing that it can be emotionally debilitating.
EDC: In “Political Fictions” for The Paris Review you mention you abandoned “aspirations to be a presidential speechwriter and enrolled in an M.F.A. program for creative writing.” Narrative is a through line with both of those career paths and the importance of story is threaded throughout your essays. What prompted you to focus on creative writing, and how did you get your start?
BS: I started writing seriously in undergrad and was fortunate to have had two tremendous fiction instructors—Laura Krughoff and David Michael Kaplan—both of whom pulled me aside after their respective creative writing classes and told me that I could pursue this as a possible profession. That kind of validation was ventricle-swelling for a young writer and gave me permission to take the idea seriously. At the time, I was interning on a presidential campaign and thought that eventually I would become some sort of hip, leather-jacketed political operative, loitering in the back of the campaign bus with the candidate and concocting little burbles of oratory that would help sway national elections (please know that I cringe to admit this). To the astonishment of my family and friends, I pretty swiftly jettisoned my political ambitions once I got into an MFA program.
During the program, I was writing and publishing short stories mostly, with the occasional foray into poetry, but it wasn’t until I graduated from the MFA that I started writing essays. For whatever reason, I almost never used material from my life for short stories—the vocal conceit of my fiction was almost always character-driven, a kind of dramatic ventriloquism—so once I started digging into my life, a whole little terrain of potential topics bloomed out in front of me. My early essays were memoiristic, and it wasn’t until I went to that utopian community in Florida—called The Venus Project, which I discuss in “Prophet from the Swamp”—that I tried my hand at longform journalism. As a reader, I tended to love that kind of excursion piece, where a writer jaunts off to some odd quadrant of the culture and tries to make heads or tails of a particular community and their place within it. The Venus Project piece was my first attempt at that, and I wrote it entirely on spec. From there, I just started submitting it like crazy until the recently shuttered and deeply mourned Pacific Standard made it a cover story. After that, some other magazines started reaching out and other editors started taking my pitches more seriously.
“People who know me well will tell you that it’s strange that I became so addicted to this kind of work because I essentially have the nervous system of a toddler—(even something as routine as flying on an airplane requires extreme levels of personal courage for me)—so a job where you’re constantly traveling to and spending time in offbeat communities doesn’t seem like the most congenial of arrangements for someone with my temperament.”
People who know me well will tell you that it’s strange that I became so addicted to this kind of work because I essentially have the nervous system of a toddler—(even something as routine as flying on an airplane requires extreme levels of personal courage for me)—so a job where you’re constantly traveling to and spending time in offbeat communities doesn’t seem like the most congenial of arrangements for someone with my temperament. But I think there’s something about that tension that makes me keep doing it, that the occasions for the articles kind of nudge me into the world and force me to scrutinize it more rigorously.
EDC: What’s your writing process like and how has it changed over the years — on a craft level but also as you navigate changes in the publishing industry and your work as a professor?
BS: In the years after the MFA, saddled with student-loan debt, I did the adjunct hustle for seven years, teaching at as many as three different campuses at a single time in order to make ends meet. As a result, I learned to write at odd hours and interstitial moments. During that time, I would get up at 3:30 or 4AM and write until 8 and then head over to the college for a full-day of teaching. Possibly that sounds monastic or extreme, but it was a way of convincing myself that I was going to pursue writing even when no one was waiting for a piece. A few years ago, after several years on the job market, I was lucky enough to procure a tenure-track teaching position, so I’m a little more stable financially, although my writing routines and rhythms haven’t much shifted or varied. For whatever reason, I find that early morning hours tend to be the most generative, maybe because I’m too tired to entertain the Greek chorus of self-lacerating voices that would otherwise colonize my head. So a good day will be four hours or so of scribbling in the morning and then a couple hours in the afternoon for rereading and revision. Within the last year or so, I started writing all my first drafts longhand, which I couldn’t recommend more highly to anyone. There’s something about the kinesthetic labor of writing the words that allows me to better hear their music, whereas the choppy velocity of typing often results in me paying more attention to how the words look on the page (to the detriment of the narrative sensibility). Plus, I don’t like the visual trick of how Word processing platforms make even the filmiest draft seem “finished.” I’m trying to think of other quirks in my process.
“On reporting trips, I record EVERYTHING, so usually I’ll return home with 36 to 72 hours of recordings, and will spend a week or two listening, which allows me to relive the experience, and I will fill two or three notebooks with memories and rough scenes, frequently consulting whatever additional notes I took on the trip (usually on my phone). In those notebooks, I’ll start drafting scenes, and when I’ve written two or three of them, I’ll brandish a fresh legal pad and begin writing the actual piece.”
On reporting trips, I record EVERYTHING, so usually I’ll return home with 36 to 72 hours of recordings, and will spend a week or two listening, which allows me to relive the experience, and I will fill two or three notebooks with memories and rough scenes, frequently consulting whatever additional notes I took on the trip (usually on my phone). In those notebooks, I’ll start drafting scenes, and when I’ve written two or three of them, I’ll brandish a fresh legal pad and begin writing the actual piece. The first draft can take anywhere from a week to a month, depending on the nature of the reporting and the scope of the research, and at some point during that phase, I will switch over to my computer, which is a built-in assurance that I pour over the sentences again and do another version. I always like when writers disclose the peccadilloes of their work habits, so I will tell you that I type my stuff in Microsoft Word, with Times New Roman 12-point font, single-spaced, with the “View” at 115%, which makes the text small enough that I can see almost the whole page and keep track of the meter of the graf in question. I listen to “Brown Noise” or “Pink Noise” when I write, although sometimes I will throw on William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops” or Happy Apple’s “Homage Ritchie Valens,” particularly if I’m feeling autumnal or whatever.
EDC: Your craft talk on October 15th will discuss the role of personal material in longform narrative journalism, and your writing strikes a balance between journalism and essay. Without giving too much of the craft talk away, can you tell us a little more about crafting a persona for these pieces, or the importance of it?
BS: For fear of sounding redundant on the 15th, I will keep my answer brief. I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up, middle-school and high-school teachers tended to talk about personal writing as a matter of “finding your voice,” as if there were some Platonically ideal self that loitered at the rim of your consciousness, as if the act of writing was nothing more than the unearthing of this “real” identity. My own experience is that one’s persona is far more flexible and contingent, one’s voice far more protean, and the emergency of a given essay’s scenario requires that my narrative sensibility chameleon itself to its tone and register. All of us calibrate our social personas this way, but at least when I was an undergrad or an MFA candidate, I didn’t hear professors talk at much length about the “I” in creative nonfiction. A lot of times I think it’s hard for fiction writers to transition into essays because they forget that one of the fundamental tasks in nonfiction is self-characterization, which is something that, if they’re not writing autofiction, they probably don’t have much practice at. One thing I try to remind my students is that any topic they choose to write about is in some way a reflection of their affections, hopes or fears, and so the essay needs them to create an “I” where those resonances between the topic and the writer are immediately apparent. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is an authorial masquerade, but I do think that essays present the writer’s revolving door of self.
EDC: In addition to crafting and presenting a persona on the page, your pieces are incredibly well researched, and your work spans a wide range of topics: historical notions of masculinity in America, the Spiritualism movement in the mid-nineteenth century, school shootings, and the antiwar movement and organic farming, among other subjects. What’s your research process like? How extensive is it, and at what point do you know you have enough for the piece? Or do you ever find yourself with too much research?
BS: Oh, god. It’s different for every piece, but I tend to do gobs of research up front, if only because each of my essays almost always concerns a completely different topic than whatever I wrote about in the last piece. For this reason, I am apt to suffer debilitating cases of imposter syndrome. Grad school was helpful in this regard, because in having to build reading lists for one’s thesis or dissertation, you can’t help but become proficient at curating a list of research materials that will help you passably draw the contours of some historical moment or topic. With every piece, then, it can seem like I’m giving myself an intensive undergraduate degree in the subject. For instance, with an essay like the one in Harper’s about the contemporary men’s movement, I was fairly omnivorous in my research, reading as many as 20 books on masculinity and men’s groups, listening to (oftentimes hair-raising) podcasts on the subject, watching documentaries about body builders and the Proud Boys, and interviewing people in the community—all of which I completed before I went on the trip. Doing this kind of work up front allows me to have an intellectual framework for whatever community I’m entering and allows me to select more deliberately the details and anecdotes that I experience while I’m on the assignment.
The great odium that I’ve noticed about contemporary publishing is that the imperative of timeliness and the velocity of online publishing makes it harder to do the kind of research that will help a writer historicize their subject and allow them to understand that these aren’t new trends but part of a larger pattern, which is crucial if you’re a writer who’s interested in tracking the true etiology of our social problems. For instance, so much of the coverage about contemporary men’s groups—much of which was weirdly laudatory— failed to acknowledge that these sorts of communities were popular in the past and tended to enjoy periods of massive growth only when there were corresponding advancements in feminism (the Iron Johns during Third Wave, the Male Liberationists during the Second), which is an important thing to consider, especially if you’re going to insist that they can be efficacious in addressing things like toxic masculinity. Along these same lines, in advance of going on the trip to Lily Dale, the world’s largest community of psychics and mediums, I read a veritable deluge of trend pieces about how “millennials are going wild for astrology” or “why are CEOs embracing spiritual traditions,” but virtually none of these articles talked about how the birth of Spiritualism in the 1890s and the rise of New Ageism in the 1960s coincided with periods of epistemological confusion and narrative breakdown, which demonstrates the extent to which people will reach for an ideological ballast whenever the center is not holding.
That said, early on in my career, I think I tended to rely too heavily on research, or rather I didn’t know how to integrate it seamlessly into the narrative account of the excursion. As I’ve gotten more experience in the longform genre, I think I’ve become more adept at letting the research merely inform my observations rather than inserting all those factoids into the piece in question.
I don’t think you can do too much research. If anything an essayist like John McPhee, who does titanic, if not Talmudic, amounts of research, provides compelling evidence of the extent to which the real danger is not doing too much research but rather failing to develop a methodology for organizing the info one gathers. In order words, what’s debilitating for writers, I think, isn’t the amount of research, but the inability to successfully wrangle it.
EDC: Though your essays often deal with serious subjects, there’s a fair amount of humor and levity in your essays. In Lost in Summerland, you visit Wisconsin’s famed Noah’s Ark Waterpark to “summer” as a verb, discuss the connection between Kim Kardashian and Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” and attend a West Wing fan convention. In a darkly funny moment in “This is Not a Test,” your press liaison misidentifies you as a writer from Harper’s Bazaar, prompting you to “waste a bunch of time wondering how a fashion organ might cover the events at Disaster City: ‘Containment Couture: How Hazmats Will Overrun Athleisure as Your Work-from-Home Daily Water’ or ‘You Down with PPE? Yeah, You Know Me: How Gloves, Masks, and Protective Eyewear Will Soon Become the New Urban Chic.’” What role does humor play in your writing, and specifically when writing about serious or grave matters?
BS: I can’t remember who said this—it was either a comedian (Gilda Radner?) or a philosopher (Wittgenstein?)—but they once described comedy as the truth told at a higher velocity. Part of me likes to think that whatever humor emerges in my essays is borne of that fact, as is hopefully legible in the example you mentioned, about the press liaison at Disaster City. The fictional headlines that I conjured ended up not being very far afield from the actual scareheads that certain fashion organs were publishing in April and May of this year, when the first wave of COVID-19 was peaking and when Work-From-Home couture became a booming industry. For me, it was grimly disconcerting to see such headlines rubbing shoulders with pieces about the pandemic’s death toll. And so whenever I’m on a reporting assignment, I’ll always bloodhound around for details like that, for those ironic little doodads that vivify not only the weirdness of the situation in which I find myself but also the absurdity of life in America at this tragicomic moment.
On a practical level, though, the humor in my work emerges out of a larger agenda, which is to craft a narrative persona that faithfully reflects my personality. My favorite writing is where the person shows up in their work, and so, for me, every sentence tries to establish a companionship with the reader, something that an artist whom I’m close with describes as becoming “a friend of the reader’s mind,” which is a phrase I rather like.
EDC: Last but certainly not least: favorite books or reading recommendations? And what’s your favorite piece of writing to teach and why?
BS: I’m going to answer a kindred but less stultifying question. The best essay collections I’ve read recently are Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory and Jordan Kisner’s Thin Places. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s essays are invariably exquisite and brilliant, and I’m waiting for her collection, The Explainers and The Explorers, with a kind of bated anticipation. And my god, have you read Elif Batuman’s recent essay in The New Yorker? About Zoom performances of Greek tragedies during the COVID-19 pandemic? I swear, it will ruin and restore you. I also love both Lauren Olyer’s and Patricia Lockwood’s criticism. Also, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism.
Among my favorite things to teach is Zadie Smith’s NW, which a contemporary modernist novel that was, by my lights, insufficiently celebrated when it was first published and that my first year college students start out hating (because the prose isn’t linear) and end up loving (because Smith is an absolute genius, and she renders the sadness of our neoliberal moment in a way that is both energizing and elegiac). I also love teaching “The Hunger Artist” by Kafka (which I wrote an essay about) and “Notes from a Native Son” by James Baldwin. I can read these works again and again, and unfailingly they perform on me an emotional and intellectual resuscitation.
Tune into Barrett’s craft talk on Zoom on October 15 at 7PM. Here is the link. Meeting ID: 886 3826 7523
Passcode: 602055
Co-sponsored with the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library.
Elizabeth de Cleyre is a writer and editor based in Eau Claire, WI. Find her at cedecreative.com