About My Writing:

Forms that Follow Function

My books have been variously described as “mixed-genre,” “hybrid,” or “collage” novels. These terms mean different things to different people, of course, but in my own case they reflect the fact that each book is an assemblage of individual, more-or-less self-contained pieces, in a wide variety of written genres, which link together in order to articulate an overarching narrative and/or theme. This technique allows me to match each incident or moment with the most appropriate textual format for capturing its particular meaning or resonance, on its own as well as within the overall structure of the book. Free and formal verse, prose poetry, prose narrative, and essay coexist in my work with non-literary forms (letters, lists, notebooks, chronicles, etc.), as well as some updated “closet drama” layouts of my own invention.

My first book, Home Truths, marks the beginning of this experiment with the sequence or collection itself as an artistic medium. As I was working with its family history material, it occurred to me that a series of independent but linked “snapshots” could perhaps get closer to the texture of lived experience than either the focussed plot line of a novel or the inevitable discreteness of the miscellaneous volume of poetry. A linked sequence can demonstrate the ways in which any human life intersects with other lives, stories, and points of view, while at the same time privileging a few of those lives or stories as the center of attention. Thus, Home Truths stands simultaneously in the lines of such books as Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, Marilyn Nelson’s The Homeplace, and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology.

In my second book, Body and Soul (Lummox Press, 2015), the separateness of individual pieces—heightened by abrupt shifts in format and point of view—becomes a means for depicting the profound cognitive and emotional dissonances in the life of an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse, who suffers from gaps and distortions in her memory as well as intermittent episodes of dissociative identity disorder involving the formation of several distinct “alter” personalities. Simultaneously, the echoing of images, events, and specific phrases among the individual pieces reinforces the narrative of my character’s efforts to reintegrate the alters and construct for herself a functional, coherent adult personality. In developing the repertoire of techniques necessary for writing Body and Soul as I conceived it, the hybrid texts of Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony, Storyteller), the kaleidoscopic array of styles and perspectives in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the wide-ranging verse forms of poets Adrienne Rich and Joy Harjo, Truman Capote’s “conversational portraits” in Music for Chameleons, and the experimental plays of Samuel Beckett, all served as models and/or points of departure.

Livings, my current book project (see “Work in Progress”), focusses on a specific period (1845-1850) in the lives of the Brontë family of English writers. This project makes extensive use of an additional technique I’ve been developing over the years: multiple, independent sequences running concurrently through the chronological organization of the book. In each of these “broken” sequences, each with its own title, individual sections share a prominent common element—specific story-lines, relationships, a particular character’s perspective, to name a few—but appear as separate installments within the larger narrative. For example, sermons by Rev. Brontë (written by me, of course) pop up intermittently, as do several late-night conversations between Emily and her brother, Branwell. There’s even a novella-length tale, told by multiple voices which continue for well over a century after the main character’s death. The “broken sequence” technique makes its first appearance in Home Truths, although Body and Soul was the first of my books to employ several at once (four, I believe). By contrast, Livings sports nearly a dozen.