Hard Questions at the Heart of Writing
Running through both of this issue’s author features are narratives of memory—and within those narratives, tremendous loss—that two exceptional writers have worried down to diamond-sharp works of art that transcend the personal and particular and lay bare hard questions at the heart of writing. Diane Seuss’s father died when she was seven and, as Bianca Stone writes in the introduction to her interview with the poet, “Cobbled Genius: Diane Seuss and the Strange Education of Poetry,” “All her books are streaked through with the battered beauty of rural Michigan, where she lived through her childhood and still remains, and that formative grief. Yet to read Seuss is to revisit the very idea of memory.” The Pulitzer Prize winner, whose new book, Modern Poetry, is forthcoming in March from Graywolf Press, has never been satisfied driving along those same narrow roads of experience to explore her poetic subject. “You first have to establish a baseline of where you’ve been, what matters to you, what you can’t shake. But at a certain point those things aren’t enough anymore, for you or for the poems. You can’t keep writing to the same concerns in the same way over and over again,” she tells Stone. “The narrative of memory is crucial. But something needs to transform that narrative, form and music, and urge oneself into the hard questions.”
Sloane Crosley, who over the past decade and a half has emerged as one of the funniest writers of her generation, explores multiple kinds of loss in her new book, Grief Is for People, out now from FSG, while upending notions of a “grief memoir,” including a tidy conclusion that might provide closure following an event as traumatic as the death of a dear friend and confidant. As Kate Tuttle writes in her profile, “Laughter, Then Loss,” Crosley “listened to interviews with the authors of some of her most-loved books about grieving in which they talk about feeling catharsis and moving on. It makes her feel crazy, she says. ‘I don’t know what these people are talking about.’ In the book, as she pivots toward the end to directly address her deceased friend, she writes: ‘My grief for you will always remain unruly.’”
This spring, as we march forward, ready or not, into a year like no other, let us worry the narratives of memory. Let us, in our writing—in our grief, our obsessions, our hopes, our dreams, our demands—remain unruly in the service of truth.
