Facing the Self (and Beyond): An Interview with Dr. Susanna Childress

Written by Anna Stowe, Hope College Creative Writing Major, and Student Managing Editor for the English Department

What follows is an interview with Dr. Childress. 

What is the best advice you have received as a writer? What advice would you share with aspiring writers?

I’m so bad at superlatives! As a recovering perfectionist and someone frightfully indecisive (thanks, anxiety–), trying to land on the best advice feels akin to picking a favorite book: is it possible? But okay–I’ll offer here advice I’ve traveled with for a long time and newer insight that gives me guidance (if not solace). 

The first is the oft-misattributed “Murder your darlings,” which apparently originates from an Oxford don known as Q (not Orwell or Faulkner or Sharon Olds, as I believed until I looked it up just now) and arrived via my favorite undergraduate professor and writing mentor, Dr. Mary M. Brown; she wisely knew some twenty years ago the importance of my being less attached to the clever metaphor, minor character, decorative language, sassy dialogue, or pithy aside I’d labored over. And she was right. It’s truly painful to cut a line–or a paragraph, or whole pages–you’ve worked hard on and feel proud of, but it’s also momentous and liberating when you can tell what needs to go and then–with a click–be rid of it! By the way, that click is Command C because of course you’re going to tab over to a blank page and Command V. Your darlings need not be murdered so much as copied and pasted into a new document. No lie, I fashioned an entire essay in Extremely Yours out of what I cut from another essay that was far too bulky. It took a long time for me to let go of those pages as I’d originally written them, but once I did, a whole new piece took shape. (Huzzah!)

More recent advice comes from Leslie Jamison: “Write towards shame.” When I first heard this, something in me knew to hold onto it, to listen, and for the last five or so years, I’ve been guided by the possibility that the things I’d rather hide away need to be aired, admitted to, and worked through instead; though my writing is not therapy (my therapy is therapy, which I write about as well), I’ve found that paying attention to shame, to the place it’s pointing (out in) me, is both worthwhile and meaningful. Jamison says more about this in an interview in the journal Image, Issue 101: 

Shame can be such a toxic emotion. But I also think about shame as a heat signal that can take you somewhere important. If you let it have the final say, or give it too much power, then it can curdle you from the inside. I remember talking once with an artist at a residency in Wyoming. We were walking where there was geothermal activity, little pockets of steam coming up out of the ground, and…that felt like a useful visual image for shame….shame is that little bit of steam coming up off the land…you know there’s something with real heat underneath. It can sometimes be a barometer: there’s some experience here that I’m not done reckoning with yet. There’s something to write into here.

This makes so much sense to me; it also hearkens back to the lines Jesus spoke to his disciples warning them about the Pharisees: “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs” (Luke 12:2-4). Scripture like this was used to instill fear in me as a child, and it worked–I worried constantly that I was a hypocrite. Now that I have a healthier relationship with my weaknesses as a person, the abiding instinct towards examination–of the self and beyond–makes me wonder if memoir specifically and creative nonfiction more generally may be a robust (and artful) mode of practicing humility, not by way of confession alone but also, as Jamison puts it, reckoning–what it takes to truly face the self and beyond. 

What do you see as the intersection between poetry and creative nonfiction? What draws you to these forms or dictates the language that you use?

This is a query both interesting and confounding! I wrote an essay in Extremely Yours that works to address this, among other things: “Let Me Never Be Graduated: A Stuttering.” One element I don’t directly address in this piece but which it showcases is the lyric essay (because it is one, maybe even the lyric-iest of the lyric essays in the book). That term is a hybridization of “lyric poem” and “essay,” coined back in 1997–the same year I graduated high school, as it happens–by two editors of the Seneca Review; they introduced it to readers in this delightfully precise way (for something so capricious):

…These “poetic essays” or “essayistic poems” give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information. They forsake narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation. The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form….

So I suppose you could contend that, as a hybridization, I’m not not writing poetry in my creative nonfiction–ha! But seriously, though the lyric essay draws on poetic style and sensibility, it’s its own thing: a rather vertiginous mode of investigation and/or realization, replete with fragments and gaps, associations and connotations. As much as I dig poetry and traditional essays, I’m even more smitten by how weird and playful and wooly and intense the lyric essay is: it marries the best, most brazen aspects of both. 

What were the differences (and/or difficulties) between writing memoir and writing poetry?

At the risk of stating the obvious, the two biggest differences for me are a) transparency–there’s no hiding in memoir, whereas in poetry no social contract of adhering to autobiographical truth exists and b) what I’ve been calling canvas size, by which I mean space or scope: memoir has so much more room! That also means holding more in mind and being able to see the bigger picture–subject matter but also momentum–while working just as intently on images and phrases. That’s actually another element to contend with: if the lyricism of a full-length essay is too dense, it’s not sustainable for the reader; I’ll admit that I read a lot of creative nonfiction to help me with pacing. Finally, in memoir, I make use of scenes (good ol’ TYPOA: time, yearning, place, obstacle, action!) as well as incorporate and contend with secondary source material (nerdy Nerdom!), both of which were almost wholly outside my experience(s) writing poetry. 

What inspired you to write the essays in Extremely Yours? Did they come together all at once or did the writing span years before a connective line was formed? 

So I drafted one of the first essays in 2012, after my second child was born (early) and my husband realized he was experiencing Paternal Postnatal Depression–something neither of us knew existed until we were in the middle of it. I wanted to dive into the psychological, physiological, and socio-cultural elements of PPND, and I rather naïvely thought, Oh, I’ll write an essay! That piece was the earliest to be drafted but one of the last to be published–it took roughly a decade to get it right (read: rejection after rejection after rejection). In the interim, of course, I was writing about other topics and experiences, many of which dealt with these odd diagnoses or unusual medical issues. Even then, it was hard to intuit what held the essays together–similarity isn’t necessarily connection. It took years to rearrange, resee, write and revise the pieces that comprise the memoir, and at one point I had to “end” the book’s timeline as time marched on. When Covid hit in 2020–a worldwide medical crisis!–I was still trying to get to/through 2017 in the book. 

One imperative of creative nonfiction is that it be timely while also timeless, so I’m still wrestling a bit with how that works in the book. Though the span of years allowed me to recognize new things about myself/others, make connections in the writing, and incorporate new research (which changed the ending of one essay entirely) other elements strike me now as a hair outdated, and that’s a hard lesson to learn. I’m glad individual essays were published in a more timely manner than the book, but the long lag has consequences that rankle me a little. Did I mention I’m a recovering perfectionist? Don’t worry–I’ll forgive myself (one reason to do so is that the circumstances which contributed to the delays are the subject of my next creative nonfiction project…!).

Were there seasons in which you didn’t touch the project? If so, how did you find your way back to the work of this memoir?

It may have sounded in the previous question as though I worked nonstop on the writing for over a decade, but yes, I had to step away at pretty regular intervals to get perspective and recharge. I’d never thought of myself as a slow writer before, but with full-time work and young children, and maybe also CNF’s canvas size, I’ll cop to it: I’m slooooow. Happily, the nature of these twenty-five essays, some flash and some full-length, meant I could dip into one piece and if I got stuck or stymied, hop elsewhere. Some of the essays deal with intense personal material, so I needed to move between “lighter” essays and those with, for example, trauma. But after a while, during Covid especially, I felt the pressure of how long it was taking, and I had to (you guessed it!) murder the darling I’d envisioned–a radically different book than the one I ended up writing. My very patient editor at Awst Press would check in on me at intervals and encourage me to apply to fellowships and residencies. In 2021, a two-week residency I’d been awarded really shifted my re-envisioning into place, and within a year, I completed the manuscript. That to say, both the intrigue and verve of the material and the desire to just be done with it drew me back into the work. 

By nature, memoir is highly personal and involves very real relationships. How did you handle the complexity of these relationships–accurately representing people, places, memories, and ideas while also staying consistent with what you knew to be true?

The person I cared most about feeling accurately represented in the essays was my husband, who is almost always my first reader (the hazard and gift, I guess, of being married to me!). Gladly, he never balked at what I’d written; I hope this is because I’d work hard to offer texture to and angles for the characters, events, and subjects. I also took a cue from my favorite CNF/memoir writers whose authorial stance is semi-permeable: they use phrases like “maybe” or “it could be” or “I wonder if.” I’m aware my perspective is but one way to see things; it is also my best sense-making tool. Here’s how Alison Green says it in an essay titled, “The Accidental Essayist”: “I liken [creative nonfiction] to form poetry; the truth as I remember it constrains the writing in the same way the sonnet form [does]. Unexpectedly, that constraint fosters innovation and surprise. It frees rather than limits.” Much of what I’m doing in these essays is questioning or seeking to understand (myself and beyond), not positioning myself as a font of answers, the spiller of secrets, or an argument’s victor. I must be consistent in examining, as it were, rather than valorizing or justifying myself, and it is paramount in the portrayal of anyone else that they be both clear and complex. On good days, this can provide structure and focus for a piece, too. I hope my portrayal of others and our shared circumstances is not only true but also generous, because honesty with myself is, crucially, each essay’s raison d’etre. 

One of the themes of the memoir is the relationship between writing and grief. How do you see these topics communing with each other? 

I discovered through several life experiences, which I specify in the book, that grief can both isolate and dislocate (one’s sense of purpose, security, intimacy, community, faith–on and on). Writing about loss was, for me, a sort of reclaiming: it provided agency in shaping the stories where so much was out of my control; in the middle of stasis, it nudged me; it connected me to others; and when at certain points I felt gravitationally pulled toward immateriality, the writing was, itself, material. I’ll say again that writing for me is not therapy, but in these ways it did and does continue to change me (thanks be to God).