“How to Tell The Story” by Wren Burton appeared in Issue 31 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this essay.
This essay is about memory, narrative, embodiment, and the relationships between form and experience. It exists in a form that is itself a combination of forms, which I think is appropriate. After all, a body is a combination of organs, each with their own shape and function, that come together symbiotically. It’s about things that happened in my life, but more so, it’s about the folding in of each experience as we continue forth. I also write poetry and I sing, so the rhythm and music of sentences are important to me. In poetry, we speak about establishing a pattern of expectation and then breaking it in order to control tension and to draw emphasis to particular hits or words. This essay is well read aloud to capture its rolling start-and-stop. That’s always how I revise: reading aloud so I can feel how the air parts and when the audience’s energy is pulled taut to the piece like a kite to its flier’s hand.
What was the most difficult part in writing this essay?
In a way, this piece is already about the difficulty of writing it, or of writing at all, or of embodying and narrating the self: you could say I’d been writing it for over 20 years, but it was never right. I was either trying too hard or being too invested in presenting a version of myself that I thought I’d signed off on, so to speak. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more free, more and more full. It’s that freeness and fullness that has allowed me to follow the language here and to dive into (and then emerge from) the memory storm the preceded the drafting. The thing that’s really hard is living.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
One book?! I am a huge reader: I am constantly digesting books. So I am going to cheat. We Play Ourselves by Jen Silverman was ridiculously fun and funny and the best kind of painful for me to read, and it hit my center so fully that I have been recommending it all over the place. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong I loved so much that I kept having to pause in reading to shriek or moan or throw it gaspingly across the room and then get up to pick it up and start reading again; Appropriate: A Provocation by Paisley Rekdal is thoughtful and incisive epistolary criticism that I am salivating to teach next semester; Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo is a gorgeous Gordian book that makes its own language into an ocean that carries you on its waves; Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo is the kind of perfectly tricky that respects it audience; The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend by Sarah Manguso contains among so many other gem-punches the line “I am no longer moved to write poetry, but I traded poetry for a longer life,” which has been pulsing in me since 2012; and if I don’t stop here I won’t stop.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Look, in my experience, living authors already do more than enough drinking together, and I hate AWP (please read beloved and brilliant poet Kay Ryan’s immortal “I Go to AWP”). Perhaps that means my answer should be Kay Ryan.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
Less content, more meaning. I am working on not writing unless it seems truly joyful, truly urgent, or both. So far, the experiment is going well.
Our thanks to Wren for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this essay. Read “How to Tell The Story” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/nonfiction-how-to-tell-the-story.
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