1: EC: While the world was so heavily isolated, I like to think we were writing our books together through the conversations we had. I attended a talk that Fred Moten gave a few weeks ago about Nikki Giovanni’s work, specifically on how so much of her work has been about being in conversation, in constant dialogue with others, and that the work we do as artists can be (needs to be?) inseparable from the conversations we’re having with people in our lives. In short, the Black feminist tradition offers us ways of being in the world that refuse the prosperous loneliness of individuation.  

 2: EC: It’s fitting, to me at least, that you remember the name of the park and the memorial associated with it. You’ve always been better with the small and particular while I’m off on some abstract, incoherent tangent 😩

3: EC: You’re right. I’m not giving our books enough credit with that question! My brain must be wanting to plot out a scene in which they become friends, a sort of playground mise-en-scene where they meet, recognize something true and common they share, and a Peter Gabriel song starts to play. Plot is a suffocating lover sometimes.

EC: Well, I appreciate the mentor comment. To be honest, the prospect of me mentoring someone else, especially someone who’s close to me in age, feels a bit laughable given that I can barely make myself dinner most days – which, I hope, is not complete false modesty, and maybe more importantly leads into how hearteningly strange it was/is to see myself appear in your book. Whatever laughs and smiles and nods I had while reading the book were interspersed with: ‘Did I say that?’; ‘What was I even trying to say?’; ‘When did that happen?’’ I guess we’re never ready to see ourselves perceived (4).

Our books are very different, right? Specifically, they have different dispositions of attention, both intense in their own way with varied hues of focuses and momentums. What do I mean? Well, I’ve always struggled to maintain linearity in my writing, both logically and syntactically. The footnotes, the bracketing, the visual stuff is, in a lot of ways, me trying to pay attention to the particular chaos swirling around in my brain, the many conversations I’m having at once. I feel that restlessness comes through a lot in your book as well, but the way you pay attention to it is very different. Maybe what I am saying is that the restlessness of your writing feels concentrated in the syntax (5) where we’re winding through clauses, smoothly and unpredictably – almost improvisationally, I want to say – but the book has a certain fidelity to the sentence form, even if it’s pushing and stretching it, whereas I often feel like I am in throwing my thoughts into a wind tunnel and chasing after it with my writing, frantically trying to bottle up some evidence of the velocity I’m feeling. 

I’m so glad you mentioned the Roth piece, by the way. You know I can’t resist the opportunity to pull up the passage: 

There was no dramatic arc to our life together. It was not like a marriage, still less like a love affair. It was as plotless [my emphasis] as friendship ought to be.

I’m wondering what this passage knocks loose for you? If it resonates with your feelings about friendship, which is pretty crucial to your book, narratively and thematically (6).

MM: I mean, the thing about the passage is that it develops a comparison, I suppose? “[Our life together] was not like a marriage, still less like a love affair,” Roth’s friend, Benjamin Taylor, writes. So a love affair is, here, the most dramatic, a marriage less vulnerable to action that rises and falls, and friendship the closest to something without arc, to something that simply is. I would hope, of course, that a marriage or a love affair could feel the same, could feel this easy and breathable (7). 

 4: MM: This, ironically enough, being something else I remember you talking about: the rarity of being perceived, the gift of seeing and being seen, the difficulty of each.

5: MM: Restlessness concentrated in the syntax: what a beautiful thought. And maybe, for a writer of essays, a wandering form, the syntax both bottles up the energy of the prose and lends contours to that energy, allows it to be present on the page, outside the mind – concentrates it as such.

6: EC: For me, I want to say there’s something queer about Taylor and Roth’s friendship, specifically how it queers time, disrupting the plotting conventions that we so often impose upon the people we meet. I probably spend too much time thinking about this idea of plotless friendship because I spend so much time trying to narrativize everything – writing, family, politics, romance. I’ve been so conditioned to give everything a narrative, a plot – which are things I never chose growing up and never wanted, even if I did want it. Which just means that it's a sort-of addiction that gets developed as you're growing up, but you don't realize it. All you realize is that narratives, stories, plot: all these things make you feel good, and they seem harmless, even though they're not, which I only realized once I started studying creative writing. The point being: this back and forth between being seduced by plot only to scream and kick away from it causes me a lot of psychic torque, and undoubtedly makes me less fun at dinners and parties. To steal and revise Sartre’s famous formulation: My default status is a plotted, nervous condition introduced and maintained with & without my consent. I think plotless friendship, like ours, has been the best way I know how to manage (and sometimes break free, if only momentarily) from this nervous condition. 

7:  MM: I love what you’re saying about plotless friendship “queering time,” stretching its dimensions. My most true friendships aren’t defined by consistent contact, aren’t about talking often. But when I spend time with the folks I know best and who really know me, it does feel like we were just talking yesterday. It could’ve been two years, but that’s almost the same as yesterday.

What if the [political] terms we’ve been given for what we want are imprecise? What if [“identity” and] “recognition” [are] imprecise term[s] and what it is [that] we really want [and need] is friendship?

Though the sun is out and warming the world, almost no one is on this paved path along the creek. It is quiet and James and I sit on the rocks, watch ducks, talk. We have known each other forever and sometimes he says to me: You and me, Matt, a thousand years. I want to connect with him because I’m not sure when we’ll see each other next, so I ask if the parade disquieted him, felt dark. The question feels deep, at least somewhat, and perhaps somewhat deep is most often enough. 

Yeah, so dark, James says, watching the slow water, now and then picking up loose skipping stones. He’s grown a beard, looks older than me somehow.

EC: After finishing your book, I found myself thinking about sports. We both grew up playing sports, and I realize now how much I took the communal parts of sports for granted when I was growing up. When I started to write “seriously” (i.e. started an MFA program), I was kind of shocked at how isolating it was. You weren’t/aren’t really expected/encouraged/required to do creative writing with other people. I sort of accepted this mindlessly, despite how completely alien it was to what I'd spent most of my life doing in sports (8). Sports are this wellspring that’s continually drawn from in your book, where wide-ranging memories of conflict, isolation, politics, family, friendship, love are pulled to the surface. Can you talk about the prevalence of sports throughout the book? And is it right to say that sports were a second education for you?

MM: You know this, but as a kid, I always thought I’d be a sportswriter (9). I wasn’t a voracious reader of books (and I’m a slow reader, was slower then), but I’d read the sports page of The Washington Post every morning. I could name most of the writers on the staff, and I wanted to be like them: to tell stories about and make meaning from games. I see now that I never wanted to live the life of a beat writer (traveling, tight deadlines, late nights), only to try to write something good, again and again (10).

My folks met as D-1 college tennis players, and my mother definitely could’ve gone pro. And I’ve just always made friends through sports. I think about the distinction you make between athletic teams and creative writing cohorts. For me, the difference is there and also not, I suppose. I’ve formed some of my closest bonds with folks who are both writers and athletes. Our friendship is a good example. In those lockdown months, we mostly shot baskets together. But, as you said, we were also thinking together and just being together. I love sports for the way they allow us to just be; we don’t have to talk much, but everything happens in the run of play: we rely on one another, process winning and losing together, and sometimes we do, abruptly and beautifully, start to talk about life, to move past the boundaries of the games we hold dear. Some of my best friends in Tucson after you left (why’d you do that, Emilio?) were my tennis buddies. We’d get out and hit at night in the desert, after we’d moved through the workday and the heat had fallen off some, and a lot of the time we’d just be hitting the ball, moving our feet (my mom’s always told me, “Small steps, small steps”), sprinting short distances, recovering. But we’d also share in ways that often don’t happen in my experience, even between friends. There’s a softness that sports can take us to, which is also the place that writing tries to get to, for me: to a kind of softness, a place of solace or peace or understanding despite difficulty. 

Writers have to support one another the way athletes do. We have to pick each other up and challenge one another to keep going, because continuing isn’t always easy. Your book illustrates that truth better than most on the level of form. You write about your realization that you did not want to write an autobiography, after a few years of trying to and even publishing some pieces, pieces I remember reading. There’s a question here about finding a way to move forward. Like, the way you were writing wasn’t working for you, but you didn’t stop writing; you just changed your approach, placing your voice alongside those of others, merging your voice with the voices of friends and lovers and blood, of writers and filmmakers and musicians (11). 

Can you talk about how writing as part of a chorus has altered the writerly act for you? Does a musical analogy hold here, the book reverberating like a choir or an orchestra or a big band? Can you imagine writing autobiographically in the “traditional” mode again someday, and what would have to happen for that to occur?

EC: I take your point about the distinction between athletes and writers being muddy. I suppose I meant the practices, rituals, habits that both professions bring about; their praxis, in short. I can’t say that CW programs inspire collective creativity, nor do I expect them to. That’s not the mission of the universities that house and support them, or mainstream publishing for that matter (12). I love your point, though, about “the run of play” in sports. Sports, for all its baggage (and there’s a lot), creates these hyper-ritualized spaces of play in which collectivity is possible, even if it’s done in the name of shitty end goals, or what Fred Moten calls “the brutal calculus of wins and losses.” This calculus is definitely present in creative writing culture, though it’s more insidious, harder to quantify, than win-loss records and player stats. What’s my point? Oh, who knows – I think what I’m saying is that part of what made me realize I could never be involved in sports (in any way) as a career is also what makes me want more from creative writing: what I’ve always cared about was/is “the run of play,” that such a thing existed and you could be immersed in it with other people, a way of being with and for others just for the sake of being with/for them beyond any retroactive calculus to justify it. Am I naïve/wrong to want this for creative writing (13)? 

In a roundabout way, I feel this leads into your questions about writing processes—moving forward, changing direction, entering into a chorus. You’re right, the book is very much performing similar to an orchestra. It really all goes back to my desire to be immersed in a collective practice, to unbury myself from the totalizing loneliness of a single authorial voice: “my” voice, or what I call in the book, “the grave.” I realized, very slowly and painfully, that so much of what I wanted to write was literally things that other people had already written. I developed this obsession with copying down things that other people had written. There was something so fun and transgressive about taking other people’s words, writing them down for myself, and just seeing how the words were now charged with a new kind of energy, a voltage that wasn’t there when I first read those words. Eventually, I started to piece them together into these new bodies of texts. Frankenstein texts are what my editor called them (14). Anyway, the short answer to your question is: the orchestra made writing more fun (15). 

I guess that does beg the question about my relationship to voice and how I feel about writing in a single voice, or what you call the "traditional mode." I want to say: yeah, sure, I can/will write in a single voice. I’m not puritanical about the way in which I write. I think it’s Deleuze who talks about how philosophy is really just problem-solving. We create/refashion tools to solve problems. That’s really what I’m trying to do, at the end of the day, in this book (though I’m by no means a philosopher). The traditional mode, as you’re calling it, is relatively inescapable. I still do it all the time/am doing it right now in this conversation with you. I just don’t foresee using it anytime soon w/r/t creative projects (16).

MM: More Franken-texts coming, then: all the better (17) (18).

Are these questions all for me at the expense of you? It's true, I’ve always had a selfish stake in figuring them out. I thought that I had something that I needed to say about who I was. I needed to find safe grounds to stand and speak from. I needed a home for my authorial ambitions. Autobiographyinc. welcomed me, but only the hauntings of you stayed. I feared white skin, resented black skin, protected brown skin. I obsessed over femininity, grieved over masculinity. My obsession with my own voice reduced you, always, to mere antagonism. How could my authorial ambitions not come at the expense of you?

(But, later, a father comes to the court and shoots with his daughter on the other end. You find this pretty, the family together, playing sports. And once when you were pretty young, your then-friend’s father took you to these very athletic fields, the baseball diamond specifically, to hit the two of you grounders. One of the batted balls took a big hop and clocked you in the forehead, but even then it felt good to be beneath the Virginia sun, moving around like that. Once upon a time your very athletic mother would take you to the diamond, here or elsewhere, to hit you grounders, or your athletic father would take you to a tennis court and feed you backhands out of your folks’ rickety yellow hopper, or your mother would take you to a private gym at Georgetown Law School and you’d shoot jumpers, the clean-swept wooden floor empty but for the two of you: loving athlete mother teaching her quiet child. All this once upon a time in Virginia, state of loving, state of the Lovings: as it’s said, “Virginia is for lovers”....)

8:  EC: To clarify this MFA/sports comparison: you practice with others, you compete with others, you hang out before and after the actual playing; I’m not sure if this is true with creative writing MFAs. When retired athletes are asked what they miss most about being an athlete, so often they say: the camaraderie. I don’t mean to say there is no camaraderie in creative writing programs. You talk about your work together (and you find your friend groups) but the act of writing itself was/is (in my experience) weirdly sequestered from other people. You never really talk about your writing practice, much less develop it together. And even when you professionalize, the editorial practice can vary wildly from being an intense collaboration to little-to-no edits at all. The opposite of sports seems to be true in CW programs &, by extension, publishing – you work alone on your writing and then when you are ready (or when a deadline comes), you bring your work to other people for critique in workshop (or in a word doc from your editor). But cultivating a writing practice is hard! Generating is hard. I still don’t fully understand why it’s expected that you write alone, although I have many suspicions and theories as to why. Anyway, I am rambling a bit, and you’ve heard several versions of this rant before.

9:  EC: Ah, yes, you’re right. I did know you wanted to be a sportswriter. There was a short time when I did as well, although I didn’t grow up reading the sports pages like you did (SportsCenter was really the only sports media I consumed, a far cry from what it has become nowadays (a terrifying minstrel show of liberal ideology)), but the multi-textured time you’ve spent with sports – playing, reading, writing – really comes through in your work. There’s a comfort you have with it, a kind of unspoken intimacy and confidence that I think most writers aspire toward with the stuff they’re obsessed with.

10:  MM: Which meant, to me, something that moved other people, because it first moved me or took me somewhere I wasn’t before. That’s still what “good” means to me in writing, I think.

11: EC: It’s funny, I actually used to have this weird running image in my head while I was writing the book where zombified versions of the people I was citing were just walking around reciting the passages I had culled together, almost like an improvised play. This is partly where the whole motif of the graveyard came from, a strangeness born from the obsession I had, the need you could say, to find a way out of that totalizing loneliness of writing from a single authorial voice without giving up on creative writing completely because so many of the writers around me – close friends, mentors, people I admired, people I loved – were really struggling with this crushing feeling to not only produce as individuals but to produce something “uniquely” their own. And look, I’m not saying that my book somehow solves any of those problems. It does not. If anything, the book is an artifact of my failure to solve these problems.

12:  EC: Of course, someone might say: people write books together all the time. People collaborate in MFA programs all the time. Sure, but the point isn’t whether something happens; it’s about the ecology of those happenings, how we’ve created environments that may allow for collectivity, but are ultimately hostile toward it, or it is incomprehensible to its systemic logics, and so collectivity becomes unsustainable in the long term. Each person collects a paycheck separately, files their taxes separately, submits manuscripts separately, achieves a degree separately, has a separate name and body to differentiate themselves. Collectivity is not an embodied practice in CW programs, and I’m not sure that it can be, but there are, of course, plenty of moments of escape, moments of joy within the confines, so to speak.

13:  MM: That’s beautiful. And you’re making another statement here about a plotless life, you know? Wins and losses give dramatic arcs to sport. But just going out and playing pickup at a park, soon forgetting about who got to 21 points first, only remembering the joy of moving your body among other bodies: there’s not much of an “arc” there, and I’m not sure there should be.

14: MM: Cool, and what a gift (something I’m grateful for, too) to collaborate with an editor who understood your intentions, who could provide new language to describe those intentions.

15: EC: The longer, more involved answer is that I needed to develop a practice that stripped away the ambitions of  “my voice” from the work, resisted the urge to surrender to this absurd metaphysics of (authorial) presence (to steal & revise from Derrida) that assumed that, somehow, all I needed to do in order to write, to be a ‘writer,’ was to find and center my voice, despite such a thing being necessarily elusive, impossible to locate. It was this very elusiveness that creative writing, as an institutionalized and professionalized industry, was/is continually exploiting and profiting on, in my opinion. My book analogizes every footnote with a tombstone at the end, but you can also read every footnote as a middle finger and kiss – an F-you to this ongoing ideology of creativity that disowns the collective despite always already being made possible by the collective, and simultaneously, a kiss blown to every person I have known (directly or indirectly) who makes the book possible. At the end of the day, this collage style of writing, this weird Frankenstein writing process, helps me disabuse myself of creative writing’s metaphysics – its insistence on the “purity” of individual creativity, which is propped up through its fearmongering of plagiarism and fetishization of originality, to name a couple things. Of course, one is never fully out from under these things, but maybe what we do is all we can do (to steal and revise from Carl Phillips).

16: EC: And not because the traditional mode is somehow inherently bad – but because its very status as traditional is, as far as I can tell, overdetermined vis-a-vis a continual, dyadic exploitation of everything deemed non-traditional, and as a non-normative body, my nervous condition is made worse by writing in the traditional mode – like it literally was/is bad for my health, even if I get pleasure out of it sometimes, because it feels good to dash off a nice turn of phrase, to sculpt a pleasing syntax of these 26 letters we all use that expresses something beautiful, something that crystallizes as uniquely and unequivocally “me” – how can that not be tempting, pleasurable, cathartic? Again, I don’t see this as a moralistic thing. It’s really a question of costs. Wittgenstein said that we can think of our thoughts as having costs, and how we pay for them is with courage. What if, by impoverishing myself of thinking and writing in certain ways, I can pay out enough to contribute to the collective hoard that non-normative bodies have been collecting for many, many years with the hope of chipping in to new ways of living with and for each other. Very idealistic, I know! Maybe absurdly so. But the truth is that, most days, this writing and thinking is just a rubble of failed experiments. A very dirty, unsexy mess of ambition, sweat, and love. At some point, does the rubble become a sculpture? I hope so.

17:  EC: 💀

18:  MM: And I mean this, by the way: all the better, all the better to listen to yourself on the page, to let yourself move in the directions that feel not only healthy (a baseline criterion for sustaining a creative life, I’d say) but also energizing. There’s that phrase in your book that came from a mutual friend (who I won’t name here) and that I thought had come from me: “I want to be surprised and energized by what I read.” Well, ditto for writing: if we’re not pursuing the lines of thought and vectors of form/line that compel us, why are we bothering? That mutual friend recently turned me on to The Köln Concert, a live album recorded by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett in West Germany in 1975. The whole record is improvised, and Jarrett played that night on a broken piano; the venue had to call in a piano tuner in the hours before the show to make the instrument fundamentally playable. But when I listen to the recording, I don’t hear the restrictions placed upon Jarrett that night. He’s exploring his instrument, feeling out its contours, as others have remarked. I want writing to feel that way as often as it can: like I’m pushing into new space, figuring things out in the moment. If the Franken-text produces that sense of momentum and excitement for you, why not continue to write within the form?

EC: After reading your book, I realize now that my relationship to my mixed-race identity changed dramatically when I started to write “seriously” (19). When I first tried to actually write about being mixed-race, it felt impossibly difficult to write about. I wasn’t sure how to establish “my/self” on the page because I didn’t have a strong connection to any particular identity – Puerto Rican, Black, white, Hispanic. I loved the way you describe it in the book: “A mixed blessing, this constant misrecognition. A mixed blessing, this body dipping briefly down into cliché.” Yeah, totally. And look, I never had much patience for seeing my/self as tragically diasporic, but even my impatience with it was its own cliché, right? A kind of repressed anger I had about my tragic racial ambiguity. It’s a weird and lonely place to be in as a person (20) (21). And this is one of the many things I really appreciate about your book: how unapologetically lonely it is while also being adamant and forceful of its belief in the world (22). I am thinking about the first essay:

“This half-(ghost-)body wants you to just take a good close look and see. See? I’m right here. This half-body isn’t a cliché because this half-body is only a mixed blessing when I count the ways, not when I close my eyes, imagine my folks, just feel the (abiding) love inside the pain, the love (thrumming) inside the pain. This half-(ghost-)body isn’t a cliché because this half-(ghost-)body is only the body of a tragic mulatto half the time – other half I’m just a blood-pumping human-body, you know, heart-beating on this spinning blue-green ball shuttling through blackest space.”

Ugh, that wrecked me/gave me a mild anxiety attack. I’m curious to hear how your thinking about mixed-race identity has changed/evolved while writing and completing this book? 

MM: I’ll say first that I was really struck in my reading of your book by the discussion of post-racialism and Puerto Rico, by how Puerto Rican culture seeks to look past racial demarcations, toward somewhere else. Near the end of your book, you give us this line from a personal letter, a personal letter on which you’ve performed an erasure, a move that happens a few times across this complex, challenging text: “I thought that ignoring the politics of phenotype could give me some measure of peace.” And you quickly connect that impulse to your Puerto Rican identity, or to that aspect of your racialized identity (23). 

I guess, for me, peace has never been about moving past how I look, past the skin, past race. Instead, I’ve always sought peace through the assertion of my mixedness, by saying, “This is me: Black and white, white and Black, even if you don’t see it.” And that’s where most of my writing came from, for a long time, and it’s still part of where my writing comes from: that act of declaration, toward recognition and against invisibility (24) (25).

If anything, I feel more at home with my mixedness than I used to, and that is largely because of writing, and a lot of the thinking I’ve done (always, as you make clear in your book, with others) shows up in these essays. Some of the moments in “Fucked Fable” were ones I’d thought through in earlier pieces; at least one moment in the book (that final lunch out with my father’s mother, when she couldn’t see any other Black folks in the place) appears twice. What I’m trying to say is that I still want others to understand that I am mixed, but that desire doesn’t exert such a damned heavy pull anymore because I understand myself as mixed in ways I never did before. That’s also because of the research I did for these essays: the pieces of art I engaged with, the writers whose stuff I thought about. And it’s because I’m older and more comfortable with myself in all kinds of ways, even if we’re always learning and always will be. I can hold myself more solidly now (26) (27).  

That’s something an early writing mentor told me almost a decade ago. She said that when we write about something hard, we’re able to take some of the internal pressure off that thing, at least for a while; that we’re able to process some of the stuff inside us and find a quietude that might not last forever but can for a time. Which makes me think about a phrase in Autobiography of the [Undead], also near the end: the “unimaginable boon.” This boon is something you write about as the thing we carry with us after sitting with a book for a while (like, as a reader). It’s a gift we don’t see coming because we can’t see it coming, can’t envision it before its arrival. Such a pretty thought, the found thing at the conclusion of the partially found text, or at the end of any text. 

But what about for you, as a writer? What was the “unimaginable boon” for you; what did you get to when you got to the end of these essays and erasures and contrapuntals and struck-through and rearranged and anagrammed scraps of language? Do you feel as though the way you’ve written, in this autobiography-not-autobiography, has seeped into the way you live?

EC: Yeah, I’m still not sure I know what I meant/mean by “unimaginable boon” if I’m being honest! Like I said, I feel that the book is, in the best ways, an artifact of failure (28). The book was supposed to be a memoir and it’s not. What it ultimately became was this strange, radioactive creature of mistakes, errors, ambivalence, loneliness, ambition, noise, fury, and humility. I’m not sure that those pieces, when added up, got me anywhere except where I was at, stubbornly confused and unsatisfied with my ambition to write books. Still, these creatures did wear me down into a practice I couldn’t have imagined, a practice that let me sleep a little easier and made writing exciting again for me. In a way, I started to live on the page again (if you’ll allow me to be dramatic) rather than feeling as if I had to suffocate the messiness of life in order to present some stylized artifact of despair that captured “Emilio Carrero.” So, I guess, to flip your question, I would say the way I live/d, slowly but surely, has seeped into my writing. This is maybe the unimaginable boon? The refusal to separate artmaking from life. 

19: EC: Growing up, my mixed-race identity felt like a privilege/cheat-chode I had. I could be everything and nothing to everyone, especially in school. I could “fit in” easily until I didn’t (normally because some kid grew scared/angry by my racial ambiguity, and needed to express that through some kind of violence), which was fine because I found it easy to just “fit in” somewhere else. I was marked, so to speak, but flexibly marked – my body was open to interpretation, and I think this made me disarming to readers of my body. I was happy to let people see what they wanted to see of me.

20:EC: I am thinking about this line from a Frank Bidart poem that I love: “we mourn not what is not but what never could have been.” Yeah, I was never angry/mournful about not being marked as a single race. I was devastated by the impossibility that it pointed to – our modern conception of race was/is an irredeemably absurd and brutal organ of capitalism that cannot be reconciled, and so I never could have been anything other than overtly many things at once, split-off vis-a-vis my phenotype. It’s funny ‘cause I was reading some post-election articles recently (sorry, tangent incoming) and a big thing that kept coming up was the whole “Demographics is destiny” thing that started with the Obama presidency. And, of course, the trendy thing to say in liberal media is that this election proves that Democrats were wrong and that the “Obama coalition” was not a harbinger of an inevitable progressive future. And in my head, I’m like, yeah, obviously there’s this immense racism behind the “Demographics is destiny” idea, and any racialized person would be the first to tell you that racial groups are not a monolith, and that all these genius Democratic strategists had to do was hang out at my house growing up to know that people of color, queer people of color, are just as susceptible to nationalistic ideology and white supremacist thinking as the “forgotten” rural white constituency that liberal America has fetishized for the past decade. At the same time, I am like: no, those liberal Democrats that kneeled at the feet of Obama were/are right, even if they don’t know why they are right. Demographics is destiny because demographics is one of the most important technologies that the State deploys to organize and separate us from each other in order to continually produce capital. When Obama lectures young climate activists about the intractability of capitalism (like he did at COP 21, I think) or when Biden & Obama both lecture Black people about who they should vote for, there’s something fatalistic about their belief in a broken system of politics, and the lengths they will go to maintain the status quo. And you see it in the literary publishing world all the time, where they talk in these really gross ways about picking books based on demographic groups – “Black women will love this book” or “the Asian-American community will connect with this story” – and it’s all done under the banner of “diversity,” when what we’re really talking about is capital. And capital cares about capital, not Obama’s pragmatic, incremental politics of hope. So yeah, Demographics is destiny. Or perhaps: Demographics is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is very much the prophecy that capitalism has laid out for us to keep us uniquely and unquestionably lonely in our identities. I think I always felt this fatalistic American bind as a mixed-race person on some raw, inarticulable level – that the ambiguity of my body, which wasn’t unique to me at all, pointed to fundamental problems of the society I was growing up in and there was nothing I, my (lonely) self, could do to change that, and that the only shot I really had was to be insistent about my need for others’ to help me avoid the trap of me.

21: MM: Bidart! He had to make an appearance here, as he had to make several in your book. I want to return to the idea that prompted your aside here: that to escape cliché can sometimes seem an impossibility, because society has drummed up a stereotype for every possible response to systemic racism. If you believe in your tragicness, you’re a tragic mulatto; if you’re angry and’ve bottled that anger up, your anger can also be wielded against you (as through the trope of the angry Black individual, who is then made subject to “preemptive” violences, as in the police-murder of Sandra Bland, all of which Bettina Judd writes about in her book Feelin’). I tried in these essays to write my way out of the tragic mulatto, to get to a place where I was just living in my body, a person with parents who don’t look like one another, sure, but not someone defined by that fact, or defined positively much more than negatively: if two people can love one another across the barriers raised by history, and if my body testifies to that love – which it does, and I don’t care if that’s cliché – then I’ve never been tragic. This body then becomes a blessing-entire. (But, then, it can also be easy to forget that truth, which is the truth that resides in love – the truth we should pursue.)

22: MM: Thank you, my friend.

23: EC: Well, I should qualify all this by saying that I am speaking primarily from a diasporic experience of Puerto Rico, which I don’t make clear in the book. I have no direct connection to the island and so the post-racialism the book talks about at the end is by no means a diagnosis of the island itself – something I am unequipped to do and frankly ignorant to (although slowly trying to learn more about) – and is instead talking about my diasporic experience growing up in the South where I was around a lot of Puerto Ricans, and Hispanics in general, and this post-racialism was widespread, especially with the election of Obama.

24: EC: I am intrigued in what you’re saying about peace never being about moving past the skin. You might have just grown up having a healthier relationship to all this. I had so much self-loathing that I wanted nothing more than to forget these things. Or rather, I wanted nothing more than to be invisible, which I don’t think means I didn’t want to have a life. I just wanted to have a life that moved adjacently to the shitty stuff I was dealing with on an everyday basis. I don’t know, maybe this is the Taurus in me – I just wanted to do my own thing and not have to do what society (school, jobs, even family) were telling me to do because it didn’t make any sense. I didn’t want to affirm myself to the world because the world seemed fucked up and so why would I want participate in a thing I despised? I wanted, in a very childish but maybe not naïve way, to have my own world with people who felt the same way as me.

25: MM: Yeah, I don’t consider the desire to live within a world of folks who feel as you feel to be “childish”; in fact, that desire is difficult to sustain in the face of the world and, as such, I respect so much your insistence on the possibility of radical change. We had a long talk just a couple of weeks ago, when we were both in Tucson to read (so good to see you, to share that brief but sustaining run of days), and we talked about this stuff then, too. And I kept saying this and that about the role of the individual in not conforming to systems that damage us; I kept arguing that it is enough for you and me, as people, to give our best to ourselves and those close to us, and even to the folks more glancingly in our lives, like the students we teach in our grad programs. And it’s not that I don’t think I’m right about that; I do think that can be, on some level, enough. But you kept saying that individual action is never enough, that we need to build larger communities with the weight to challenge the system, to make the world – we were speaking of the publishing world – be something other than what it is. You’ve got a gift for seeing the bigger picture, and you act in service of it. I’m always right there with whatever’s in front of me.

26: MM: To borrow a phrase from Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Borealis, which we once read with two friends, remember?

27: EC: Yes! During the pandemic, coincidentally (or not coincidentally, I guess). I love Aisha’s work.

28: MM: For what it’s worth, each time you use this word, “failure,” I remember something you said to me about failure in romantic love: that if a relationship doesn’t last, that doesn’t mean it failed. The love still happened, changed you and the other person. And so maybe your own “failure” to write a memoir is the same? Changed the writing, changed what writing means to you – forever and always.

I nodded and took notes from you. I wrote and revised with you. I lip-synced to you like cheesy pop songs. I ate the rice and beans you cooked. I read the poetry you wrote. I embodied your politics. I shimmied at your house parties, marauded through your metaphysics, walked beside you in the parks, cities, worlds you dragged me into… I (we know) ended with you. Here, I said, was a grave; – and now, we say, our graveyard.

I no longer do circular breathing exercises because my mind, mostly, is settled. I do not carry the rage I carried in college, when I first wrote about my skin, angry as Washington’s Peola or Larsen’s Clare Kendry. (Maybe every passing person must travel through this emotion – the anger at the world – to get somewhere softer.) My heart beats and beats, regular as ocean waves against beach sand. I have been writing about this skin for as long as I have been writing, and maybe longer than this, if writing is indeed another kind of living. Which I suppose it to be, because I’m still writing, still breathing, am here.

EC: Alright, last thing: I was struck (though not surprised) at how intertextual The Tilling is. You’re drawing upon so many different people, texts, sources. The essays feel communal despite the loneliness we talked about. There’s something very moving about this idea of the essays drawing upon so many people to understand this loneliness since that feeling is so often seen as a “personal” thing, as if the essays are asking these sources: why do we feel so alone together (29)? And what’s more, how the essays seem to almost be trying out different ways to chew on this problem. There are lyric and braided essays, film and music criticism, a travel essay, and “Fucked Fable,” which is a kind of nonce, though has a family resemblance to an annotated bibliography? In “Pardo/Ghost Hand” (another one of my favorites), you write: “I like art that shapeshifts, alters. Has two sides, two voices – reconcilable, if surprisingly.” 

Is this shapeshifting something you think the book is doing? And what is trying to be reconciled? And, finally, how did intertextuality inform your writing of this book?

MM: I’ve got your book open next to me, and I’m looking at the section in “On Wanting [Life & Death]” that begins, “There are so many things that I want to do,” which your (voluminous) endnotes tell us comes from the screenplays for the Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (30) (31). After the opening line, we get a crucifix symbol (32) (and this is, I’d contend, a spiritual book) before moving into a long list of wants: to “be close to someone,” “ask you some questions,” “sleep enough to never need sleep again,” “get close to The Old One,” “catch the hand of a child and go, ‘Life! Life! Life!’” I’m thinking about this passage in the context of your questions because, for me, intertextuality is a means of being un-alone. And maybe the most beautiful quality of your book, for me, is how it sets voices side by side, in harmony and in dissonance (33).

So that’s part of it for me, with regard to intertextuality, and then there’s also the effort to contextualize what I mean by “tragic mulatto,” because that’s a phrase that isn’t used very often anymore, not as often as when Nella Larsen wrote Passing, though mixedness remains complicated and aspects of that supposed tragicness remain in the public consciousness, I’d say. “Fucked Fable” is the most intertextual of these essays, and it’s meant to introduce the reader to the tragic mulatto trope, to serve as a “critical context” for what follows; at least, that’s how I thought about the piece at the time of its writing. I’m trying to say to others, “This is what’s at issue in these pages; this is what I’m thinking about, in case you’re not familiar.”

Maybe that gets toward the question of reconciliation, too? Like, for me, to write is to reach across the space between others and myself, to say, “Do you know what I mean?” My mom and I have been joking about language lately, about how “I feel you,” “I hear you,” and “I see you” all mean something akin. I read and write for the chance to be able to say those things to another person and really, really mean it: to be able to feel, hear, see, understand someone else,however different they might (seem to) be from me. Blackness and whiteness, loneliness and love, silence and sound: there are lots of gaps I’m interested in exploring, in life and in writing. And I know that the middle space is the most interesting, that things are rarely divisible into this and that. But the space between you and me is something we’re both interested in navigating. You’re probably still more committed, in a way, to breaking down that binary, because in your book, there almost is no “you” and “I”; there’s mostly an implied “we,” a commingling of voices.

I want to pose a final question here. It’s about “you,” the use of “you” in Autobiography of the [Undead], where who “you” is becomes changeable, inconstant, deliberately so. At moments, of course, “you” is your mother’s father, whose presence hovered over everything you wrote when you began to write your “memoir-of-me.” But “you” doesn’t always mean him; sometimes, “you” is your mother, a lover, a person in your writing life, a friend. I guess the question is a simple one, but it’s one that interests me: how do you want the reader to read that word, “you”? Do you feel as though you’ve found a new grammar with this book, at least with regard to “you” and “I” and “we” (34)? Are the words finally, in a sense, interchangeable? And what (because I know this is something you think about) would it mean for more writers to see “you,” “I,” and “we” as one thing? What possibilities could arise from that orientation?

EC: As you know, I was obsessed with Linklater’s films (specifically Slacker and the Before Sunrise trilogy) and Terrence Malick’s experimental trilogy. The ongoingness of those films, the layering they do with time and space, the blurring of art and reality – it really gave me a lot to think about and work with as I was trying to piece together this book. And I love what you’re saying about intertextuality as a way of being un-alone. Yes, I couldn’t say it better. Again, I don’t think we are ever alone; as Ocean Vuong formulates in one his poems: “time spent alone is still time spent with the world.” For me, it’s really about insisting on ways in which we’re always already never alone. I think this is one of things I didn’t expect to come from using “other peoples’” voices. They really do lodge themselves in my head, and I find it hard to even have normal conversations without their words coming out of my mouth (35) (36).   

This idea of un-aloneness leads nicely into the “you” that you were asking after. You’re right: the “you” in the book is mutable, perhaps manically so at times. And I do think that the pronouns are interchangeable, or they aspire to because I’m trying (and failing) to collapse time and space (although this is just a writerly fantasy that I have that I still can’t really say much about beyond that idea). That being said, I don’t know if I want a reader to read it in any particular way since, as you noted, it’s hard not to see that the “you” is changing throughout (37).

I guess the best I can say is what Rilke says in Letters to a Young Poet: “A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.” I’m happy about the way the book came out, the grammar and syntax it’s using so to speak (which the “you” is a big part of), and the book is good to me and my editor because it all came out of necessity. Of course, there are a hundred things I would change but eventually you have to let the thing go. But I’ll keep saying: the book is a failure. I really and truly failed to write a memoir. I want/ed to make that abundantly clear. And more importantly, I failed because writing a memoir was literally making me sick, hurting my body, wringing me out in unsustainable ways. The book really was written from the necessity I felt to stop hurting myself, to stop drinking myself to death and ruining my relationships with the people close to me. I was trying desperately to find a way to make creative writing exciting and sustainable for me again, playful in the way it was before I started studying the syntax of famous writers, painstakingly re-writing their passages into notebooks, or making plot diagrams of my favorite books. Not that doing that stuff is bad or that I’m nostalgic for creative writing in some sort of personal prelapsarian way, but there definitely was a shift (from undergrad to grad) in the intensity in which I started to pursue creative writing as a career and part of that meant practicing it in a mindless, overdetermined, technocratic way that only made my nervous condition worse, even if it ultimately made my writing “better.” I have a quote from Gordon Lish in the book that says: “What I want when I am in the presence of a writer is that person’s soul. The more solipsistic the better.” I think this is probably the scariest thing about the institutionalization and professionalization of creative writing – it wants nothing short of your soul. And I was very eager to give mine up for the sake of becoming a “writer,” whatever that word means to universities and publishing houses. In a lot of ways, the book is more honest and embarrassing and shameful than any traditional memoir I could have written because it’s underscoring the million little ways in which I failed without any cohesive narrative to romanticize that failure as “self-growth” or with epiphanic closure. It’s really trying to embody eight years of failure, truly incommensurate failure. What possibilities may arise from all that? Maybe, in some small way, it gives other people permission to fail abundantly on the page in whatever ways that looks like for them. Maybe the book poses a question: you, I, we – might we collectively refuse our loneliness? 

29: EC: I’m thinking about Gary Clark Jr’s “Alone Together.” The trumpet is going and going, and he keeps singing the refrain: “Why do we feel so alone together?” And we can understand the word “so” as an intensifier describing the depths of our aloneness—“so [so] alone”—but we can also understand it as pointing to the particular way in which we are alone nowadays, socially, culturally, politically; as in: “why are we so? Alone together.”

30: MM: Films my folks showed me when I was in my teens and that I remember alongside other romances like The Bridges of Madison County.

31: EC: Classic! 🖤

32: EC: Hmm, it does look like a crucifix! I can see how that would work with the book and probably was at a subconscious level. Those crucifixes were actually added by my editor and they're technically daggers; although, it’s interesting to think about the relationship between crucifixes and daggers given their visual similarities.

33: MM: I loved moving through the endnotes, loved seeing therein all the writers and musicians you’ve told me about, realizing that their voices comprise no small part of the book. And maybe an orchestra isn’t exactly right, given the seeming spontaneity of the text: a friend beside a theorist beside a songwriter, all of whom are saying something akin about love or apologies or travel or family, depending on where we are in the book’s archive of wants. More like jazz–a jazz combo? Anyway, when we hear those voices resounding one after the other, we understand that, to the extent that we experience loneliness (and we do experience loneliness; I know I do, though there is a difference between this and solitude, as you highlight in your acknowledgments), we’re never truly alone.

34: EC: I really appreciate what you’re saying, especially that you said “found” rather than “created.” If the book is doing something new, it’s a newness that I found or stumbled upon, and not something I created on my own. The ambitious part of me wants to say: totally, I’m trying (and failing) to find a new grammar for creative writing, something that resists creative writing’s foolish attempts to colonize creativity into a saturable, overdetermined context–what Lyn Hejinian famously called “the rejection of closure”–and yet I know that ambition sounds terribly arrogant and annoying and presumptuous. So, I’ll have to/need to spare myself the fool’s game of originality discourse. Bob Dylan probably says it best in “Ballad of the Thin Man”: “Ah, you've been with the professors and they’ve all liked your looks / With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks / You've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books / You’re very well-read, it’s well-known / But something is happening here and you don't know what it is [!!!]” Something is happening in the book, and I honestly can't say what it is.

35: MM: I came across this Sylvia Plath quote the other day: “How much of my brain is willfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person?” Thought of you.

36: EC: Their words take over me, and what’s more, their tones and rhythms take over. This isn’t me saying anything profound – we’ve all been influenced by other people’s infectious ways of speaking, but what is profound is how consciously aware of it I am, and in doing so, I’m consciously aware of that un-aloneness you mentioned. Right now I’m listening to all these Bob Dylan songs (because the biopic just came out) and I just keep laughing at how odd his vocal patterns are, and I’m sitting around my house imitating the way he talks and thinks, and I’m sure I’m going to meet up with a friend soon and sound like a bad parody of Bob Dylan, semantically and tonally. There’s something very beautiful about this to me, something that underscores that the grammar and syntax that the State tries to confine us to, much less creative writing, is insufficient to our wants. We should insist on a grammar and syntax that nourishes our wants rather than polices them.

37:  EC: Honestly, I’d be surprised to hear someone say they read it as one person given how many different contexts and time periods the “you” shows up in, though if someone did read it as one person, I would be intrigued and honestly think: wow, I would love to meet a “you” who has lived that much life.