January 17, 2024
Off the Record, edited by John Metcalf
I’ve written before about my aversion to self-mythologizing male writers, how much space such hot air takes up in so many rooms, a logical counter, of course, being more women encouraged to see themselves as subjects of grand narratives, to tell their own stories in their own voices, and so enter Off the Record, an anthology of essay-interviews with six writers who’ve worked with editor John Metcalf over the years. Metcalf continuing the editor’s work of self-effacement in this volume, his questions removed from the interviews so just the writers’ voices remain, each interview telling the story of one writer’s becoming, followed by a short story by the writer in question, the fiction as a kind of arrival.
Keep your pencil handy, for this is an underlining, notes (and hearts) in the margins kind of book, with highlights like this from Kristyn Dunnion: “Good writing often embodies a numinous quality, sifting through echoes of other lives lived, connecting clues in an attempt to find meaning: ghost hunting.” Dunnion, along with Elise Levine, two of the writers included here whose work I’m not familiar with, but I appreciated their pieces just as much as those by Caroline Adderson, Cynthia Flood, Shaena Lambert, and Kathy Page, all of whom have written books I’ve loved. The ways in which each of their journeys have been different, but the commonalities too (quite a few backgrounds in activism informing the imagining of fictional worlds). Complicated relationships with parents, publishing journeys that affirm something my friend Marissa Stapley shared not long ago, about a writing career as a marathon, not a sprint, rife with as many downs as ups. The publishing business has always been fraught, and a book deal has never been the end of the story, but maybe we’d be sorry if it was.
From Shena Lambert: “Showing makes our worlds more believable. But this is a secular way of understanding what is actually more like a magical question. In fiction, anytime you press into the five senses, you will write something specific, something, precisely because of its singularity, which will begin the strange work of making meaning. Things of the earth want to be doors into something greater.”
THINGS OF THE EARTH WANT TO BE DOORS INTO SOMETHING GREATER. I don’t know a better explanation of fiction-making, which is to say meaning making, than that.
