Crystal: What is your writing origin story? How did you come to writing, or how did it come to you?

Philip: I came hard to writing, and I feel I have a long history of being somewhat poor at it. I harbored a strong desire to be good at writing ever since I could read. I became a child that was known for loving books, but the reading kind of hurt. The words meandered on the page. Part of the reading difficulty showed up for me in school once the images from books disappeared and the books became stacks of words. But I still held tight to books, as objects — I wanted all the books — and I wanted to see all the words. I loved to look at words. I read the bible almost every day even though it was horrifying. I became a spelling “champion” without having to study much for the bees. I could see the words in my head and spell them without pouring over the newsprint paper printed lists of words from Scripps that came every year. And while reading books was difficult, the act of writing I enjoyed. So, I always wrote. I have papers and journals and notebooks from almost every age.

My journals as a child were serialized comic strips. I devoured my brother’s superhero and war hero and monster comic books and the Christian comics my father brought home. I was a bad artist, but I still wrote and drew about aliens with conical-shaped, hairy heads, like a yeti I had seen in the TIME/LIFE monster books that were so popular at the time. I also mapped my surroundings: trees, rocks, ponds, barns, ditches, abandoned tractors and cars, the cows and pigs and mules that wandered around against the fence lines. The farm animals were under assault by the yeti aliens and the animals would band together to defend themselves in ever more strategic ways. It got quite elaborate.

In high school, my life experience turned my journals toward reportage of details and lists rather than stories or literal recreations of my life. When I moved to Seattle in 1989, I met poets. I’d never known a person who called themselves a poet before. I tried to write anything other than lists, tomes of horrible things I knew were not good. Despite the difficulty for me, I became a more adventurous and intentional reader, and I paid attention to the people I admired as I apprenticed and worked in my field. The artists I knew personally were primarily writers. They all knew me for my visual work, so I didn’t really share my writing much. Then, in 2010, my wife sent me to Centrum’s Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, as a gift. That experience changed our lives and eventually lead us to move [to Port Townsend] after I’d lived in the city for three decades. So, it has been about thirteen years that I’ve worked on my writing with a more specific attention, with more continuity from colleagues and mentors. I have a couple handfuls of publications to show for it, an unfinished novel I worked on for ten years, and the book this piece is from.

Crystal: What you said about your visual relationship to words and reading is so fascinating. It makes me think, too, about where stories come from. Where did this story originate from? Did it start with an image/visual? A word? A memory? An emotion? What was your process in making it come to life (figuratively and literally–this piece is absolutely brimming with animation)?

Philip: Definitely memory — and in the case of this work, I came to meditate on memory under the term of recollection. To be very clear, this piece is autobiographical, or whatever new titles are being placed on writing from the self. But it’s also a very broken recollection, smashed together, loosely adherent to an unmediated life experience. This piece is part of a manuscript titled prepositions for elijah, which is twenty pieces of prose crafted in response to paintings I made.

Late in 2019, there was an upheaval in my life and my writing stopped. Then a few months later, everyone’s world was upheaved, and I still wasn’t writing, but I had begun painting for the first time in twenty-five years. Over the course of the next year, I proceeded to make hundreds of paintings, all representing the same motif — that of a chair, a lot of chairs. The metaphor being the chair we set for the prophet Elijah to accompany significant events in our lives: weddings, funerals, circumcisions, etc. For me, the chairs I set were for all the saints. Painting them was helping me out. Then in February of 2021, the paintings stopped. I couldn’t do any more. I have ideas and sketches for dozens more, but I couldn’t get myself to sit and paint them. That’s when I began writing to them.

For me, the process by which the narratives began to be constructed originated from the poet Gary Lilley. He told me he calls this form of recollection chiming. I was lost and so I started chiming to get some writing going and then I began hanging my recollection — metaphorically — onto elements in the paintings as I looked at them. And then I’d look at how the gravity — or lack thereof — at play in the paintings led me to take a different movement in the narrative, a generation of more words, or a recall of images from my life.

Then I moved the recollections around, smashed them into one another, followed one out a window and around a corner only to lose sight of it but catch another one by the collar as it ran by. I’d drag [the recollection] back and throw it through a wall or door and the writing resembled more on the page how I have come to see my mind working in relation to memory. And of course, it looked like gibberish, read like gibberish. Some say it still does. For me, I found a place between. A place where words I’d ordered that only my mind could decipher met a place where I could craft an arrangement to allow others to follow a narrative. That’s the hope. 

Crystal: I love how this piece challenges how we engage with words; it lets us revel in disobeying grammatical rules and structures, especially since it omits punctuation, capitalization, and paragraph breaks. It bursts out as this energetic force (not entirely unlike lonny tackling the second-person narrator in a game of red rover). We, as the readers, are breathless and immersed. I’m thinking about this moment from the story: 

you’d been no athlete ever your upper body only good for lifting and pulling behind your useless legs in every gladiator challenge of children you’d fall on your ass with a gust of your asthmatic lungs kept you to only bursts of effort followed by inhalers and hours sitting under a tree focused on your breath no one showed you how to when you drowned in your own lungs if you went too hard when the grass seeds were in bloom or in harvest or in fallow for weeks at a time you taught yourself to breathe…

How do you understand this story’s breathless, frantic energy in terms of writing about memory? In this sense, are you also guiding the reader into an alternative form of breathing?

Philip: I love this observation about breath. With the choices I made in rendering the narrative thread and momentum it becomes very much about breath and, yes, perhaps an alternative form of breathing. Just as reading this work isn’t a typical reading experience since I have eschewed many tools of writing that allow for moderation of pace. Poets think a lot about music of language and even though I am not a poet, when I write, how I write, is rhythmic. For all the writing I did in 2021, I listened to the same three compositions of music over and over and that brought breath to the work. It’s not for everyone, this breathing I’m doing on the page. It negatively impacts comprehension of the narrative for many readers. I do understand that. However, this is to the point of your question about how I relate the breathless energy of the work to the task of writing about memory.

For me, this is how the recollection unfolded as breathless, unexpected, often unwelcome, misunderstood, incomplete; it’s a frustrating and slippery flood. Then came the act of my own cognition. And then the act, as a writer for a reader other than myself: to provide comprehension. I had committed to a lack of punctuation, capitalization, sentence and paragraph structure, all because it resembled the experience I was having in both recollection and the representation of it. So, breath became an important tool for comprehension. I had to build it in for a reader. Especially the lack of it.

When I read the work aloud — and as I read it aloud in the making of it — breath is almost all I think about. My final deep edits focused on each line break—usually a tool of the poet — as they are the only noticeable visual cue or toehold left for a reader to determine pace or even just a place to take a fucking breath. I like to believe there are other factors at play: word choice, alliteration, scene halts and pivots, which I crafted to help a generous reader. It’d be a great gift to know how these pieces make a reader breathe or not, as they work through reading it on the page. I probably won’t ever stop thinking about your question. Thank you.

Crystal: Wow, and I so love that answer! I’m thrilled by how this longer prose piece uses the rhythmic techniques of the poetic line, but it’s also unique — it refuses to be pinned into genre. 

Shifting gears a bit, but as we’re talking about breath, I’m also thinking of how this story is interested in modes of action and physicality as the narrator runs through memories of boyhood. Meanwhile, the narrator’s mother is absent, leaving them in a “studio apartment with a rent-a-center television and couch” with their father. This narrator’s relationship to their parents is complicated and emotionally fraught. How do you conceptualize what it means to learn gender behaviors in this story? How does an excess of masculinity or a lack of femininity impact the narrator? How do you see them trying to understand themself outside of these binary terms?

Philip: As the narrator is myself, I can say the story — and the entire book — struggles with the states of lack and excess. To the point of learned binary gender behaviors, I was raised in a small, rural, bigoted community where divorce was uncommon to me. Then it wasn’t, and my father and I went to live in a much different environment where divorce was common, but a child with a single father was not. A lack of feminine energy and oversight had already existed in my life, but all of it disappeared completely overnight.

I believe the adult constructs and presentations of femininity and masculinity I was experiencing at the time were unhealthy for everyone. My models were all fucked up. Our majority of models still are. A seventh grader in a body they don’t understand, with access to pornography, drugs, vice and crimes of all kinds, and lack of adult supervision. I was confused as hell, and scared, and ugly, and awkward. When someone acted like they cared about me, I’d sink into it, if even for a moment, then try to make sense of it after the fact. Just as I am still doing by writing this work. For me, the person at the time of this story, was trying to understand care and find any connection, while all the shitty masculine and feminine stereotypes were being both reinforced and tossed into a blender.

In this new place we moved to, I managed to make friends living a variety of socioeconomic realities. Despite how alien I felt, I came to know people so different than any of what I had experienced before. They were saints, really. These people. My oldest living friend who I call Patrick in the story, he’s a saint. A bit of a bull-in-a-China-shop-saint, but a saint, nonetheless. His mother, too. I was so lonely when we arrived that I regarded attention to me as a validation of being okay with my not being okay. The people I met who were not my parents, some barely adults, other children my age, who befriended me in this new place, offered me a patchwork family of sorts.

So, the character in this story is experiencing “norms” related to gender in different ways at the end of the story than how he was experiencing them at the beginning. I believe it’s also representing the time in my life where binary ideas exploded for me. I wasn’t cognizant of gender in those terms, but in retrospect it was a beginning of difference for me. 

Crystal: Where do you place this story in terms of your much larger body of work? Are you still working on something related to this project, or are you branching out into another avenue? Where are you right now in terms of writing? Where are you right now in terms of understanding yourself as a writer? 

This story is part of a manuscript I began submitting in early 2022 but hasn’t found a publisher. With this publication, that’ll be seven of the twenty pieces in the book that have been published thus far by journals I adore. That means a lot to me. This award! Meant so much to me. I cried reading Jenny Boully’s comments to my wife. Her work I greatly admire and find very influential, so that was incredible. The paintings that accompanied the process of the writing will have a place in the world on their own and I haven’t quite made the commitment for their showing but have had cool conversations about where and how.

Right now, I am in chest deep of a novel I began last summer. It is more traditional in narrative form than past work of mine. Easier to read. You know, with punctuation and paragraph breaks and sentences, and a plot, and character development, all that stuff. It’s also about recollection. And certainty. I’m just over forty thousand words into it and I’m uncertain where it is going, which is new for me in writing fiction. Before, I always had an ending I wrote towards. But in my previous attempt at a novel, I never finished the middle parts. Maybe I will finish this book. I am practicing discipline in the work, so fingers crossed I come up with a worthy ending. 

As for understanding myself as a writer, I feel like I am just beginning to. It feels late in life, in some ways. In other ways, I feel like I am in a place where all before is converging. Before I thought in terms of wanting to write or be a Writer. Now I’m doing the writing and the hustle. I hope the next part of understanding myself as a writer is knowing more about how readers understand my work or don’t. That’ll take time and publication and luck and hope and faith and saints like you all.

Crystal: Is there anything that you want to communicate to the reader that you feel like you haven’t already about this piece that feels pertinent?

Philip: Mostly, gratitude. How these works are constructed by me — the writer — need a generous and thoughtful reader. It feels a true gift to be considered in that way, for someone to take the time and make the effort to consider this work and stay in it. I’d end by saying I hope the reader is left with a sense that the effort was worth it, that they felt something. I guess that’s what I’d say. That these are written to relay how I felt, and I hope they make those who make the effort connected to a feeling in themselves, which is a way to remember.