After reading In Short and In Brief, two anthologies of short personal essays co-edited by author Judith Kitchen, I re-read her collected essays in Only the Dance and Distance and Direction, and then her novel The House on Eccles Road.

As I went to my bookshelf, I plucked Distance and Direction down first and returned to a long two-part essay entitled, “Out of Place: Reading O’Brien and O’Brien I. Past Tense.” In the essay, after an epilogue from contemporary Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, Kitchen remembers a stay at Kate Kearney’s Cottage in Ireland with her husband and her visiting son and his wife:

But in the mornings, fog still rising and a faint breeze coming through open windows reeled out into the coming day, the sound of hooves on pavement is a happy sound. There’s new energy in their steps. If my mind conjures the brown and white spotted horse that’s become my favorite, the horse is smiling slightly as though lost in thoughts of its own. It seems to float up the hill on layers of fog with its empty cart clattering: yes, jaunty. And in the evening, when we’re all walking the half mile up to the pub at the top for a night of song, the horses are coming back down again in moonlight, tired and heavy and more solidly there on the road to remind us what hours they’ve worked, and will work again. In moonlight, they might be coming home with the peat, pensive and utilitarian.

In the essay, she reveals that before she went to Ireland, she knew the country from the pages of Edna O’Brien novels. But now:

Life lifts from the pages of books, becomes full present tense. We’ve already found our favorite bakery. And Ken, the brother-in-law of the man who owns our cottage, has asked us to stop by his new tearoom in Castlemaine–the one he plans to open next Friday, he thinks, if he’s finished painting. He’s still deciding what to call it. Already discarded: The Wild Colonial Boy, Jack Duggan’s Cottage. This morning we’re looking out at Macgillycuddy’s Reeks–the range of mountains lifting out of early-morning fog like black paper cutouts. In sunlight, my son and his wife look as though they belong: fixed in memory farmed by oak and hawthorne or setting off in hiking shoes with a lunch of brown bread and cheese. This the age I would have them forever, if I could write them down and leave them here. Their wedding day was rainy.

The rhythms of Kitchen’s sentences and her images had me forgetting that now I was getting what I was getting from the pages of a book. I felt like I was walking the road, dazzled with the unfamiliar but growing more familiar with the part of the world I had landed in. “And Ken, the brother-in-law of the man who owns our cottage, has asked us to stop by his new tearoom in Castlemaine–the one he plans to open next Friday, he thinks, if he’s finished painting” is one of those places. Reading it, I feel my feet traveling on a road, perhaps slightly downhill. I am “walking along” suddenly realizing that I feel both myself and someone new, someone looking forward to evenings of song and to the repetition of days and nights in an Irish village.

 I read on. Kitchen discusses in more depth her admiration for and interest in the work of Edna O’Brien. Seeing the country where the novelist set her characters has Kitchen realizing that for her, home is quite different than it is to O’Brien. Perhaps she is addressing the novelist when she writes:

But you are not Irish, you say, and you have made the word “home” a fluid state–a state of mind–wedded to feeling but not to lineament or detail, not caught in a change of season, a slant of light, or blackberries ripening at the side of the lane lit like globes of darkness. ….Your history…releases you, sends you spinning out your country’s story westward toward the Pacific.

Later in this first part of the essay, Kitchen leaps from thoughts of the contemporary violence Ireland experienced to the violence in Oklahoma City. She remembers what she witnessed on television, and returns to passages and sentences from O’Brien’s novels that offer the universal experience of writers describing humanity’s grief: “To go right into the heart of the hate and the wrong and to sup from it and be supped.” “It weeps, the land does, and small wonder.”

Kitchen reminds us that we sing and paint our shops and keep our bakeries stocked with goodies, but all of us everywhere have horrific memories. As writers, we preserve both the light and the dark for ourselves and others. “Wasn’t it words that opened in me the gaping windows and sheared walls and smoke of crumbled debris?” Kitchen asks. As I finish part one of the essay, I am invited to think about the power of awful memories and how we try in writing to contain them. How far I’ve come emotionally, I think, from the early-morning jaunt Kitchen set out on. How tired, like the workhorses, I’ve become, carrying the weight of human cruelty.

In “Part II Present Tense,” Kitchen begins with an epilogue from one of contemporary American novelist Tim O’Brien’s novels. As promised by the essay’s subtitle, the essayist has read both O’Briens. I am eager to see what Kitchen makes of this in the second part of her essay. In a moment, I am reading a childhood memory of her brother George in cornfields where another child threatens to cut off George’s ears with a pocketknife. Then I read a meditation on how well she knew or knows George and how nonetheless, she thanks him for making decisions concerning their ailing farther when her son was getting married.

After her journey in thought from the past to the present, Kitchen writes:

Present tense: memory smeared over the surface of the day like oil on water. Something so present it is instantly there at the whim of a song, the smell of tar, the long hard heat of August. Present as the past is always present: warp through which the shuttle moves, like someone pacing. The past performing its miracles of knowing, but the knowing is singular, aimed at the self.

And then, breaking out of her meditation on the nature of time and memory for a moment, she returns to images of George’s past and present before leaping via personal associations to images of the Vietnam war on television and what she knows from reading Tim O’Brien on the war and what she remembers of a high school classmate who served in the army. Kitchen reflects, “If I look back, there is so much we didn’t know as our stories were shaping themselves to fill the present.” She writes about riots in Chicago in 1968 and the images in Tim O’Brien’s books. She decides that, “History turns its back to the mirror and walks away. Even if we sit still, it recedes, and we don’t sit still. We press against the future like so many moths at the screen.”

Still envisioning myself as one of those pressed to the screen, I pick up Kitchen’s earlier essay collection, Only the Dance. The epigraph she uses for “Picnic at Paradise” is from the late William Stafford’s poem “Chicory,” and it catches my eye:

Every night under my pillow the earth ticks
While somewhere in distant country tomorrow
Wanders looking for me…

How perfectly tuned Stafford’s words seem to the way Kitchen investigates past and present. Where will I find the speaker seated now, I wonder, as I begin reading the essay. She is on an airplane observing the title of her seatmate’s book as they travel west. She is flying to visit her sons in their new lives:

How easily we slip from there to here in our thinking. Already, even before we’ve landed, the West Coast has become my reference point. I’ll speak of my home in Upstate New York as there as in contrast to. Because the now creates the here. For three weeks, here will refer to our rented house on a tiny island, joined to the peninsula by a concrete one-lane bridge. Here will mean the gradual flux of tides, the water lapping briefly at the foot of our deck or pulling back revealing a spit off and where gulls line up single file for the sea’s pickings. Here will also mean now…

When she ends her essay, she recognizes herself for a moment unclaimed by time:

…without fixed coordinates, tomorrow wanders. Looking for me, all future tense…Soon in an ordinary moment that is mirrored at gate after gate in airport after airport, I’ll walk through the door and William will wave.

I am free along with her and see glimpses of what we are allowed if we pay attention. I turn to her novel, The House on Eccles Road. Here, like in Joyce’s Ulysses, the narration covers only the hours in one day. How ordinary and non-philosophical this idea of time at first appears. Kitchen’s Molly Bloom is a married woman in Dublin, Ohio, captured during a day’s activities and thoughts concerning her re-connection with a supportive friend and her own desire to do theater work. The backdrop for all of her thoughts is whether her husband Leo, an overly absorbed professor afraid of his mortality, will remember it is their anniversary. Kitchen’s by now to me trademark investigation into the way we experience time appears everywhere in the novel’s prose.

Here is one of my favorite passages. It is composed of Molly’s thoughts as she is stuck in traffic:

The maroon car had made it now to six car lengths ahead of her. It wasn’t fair. Shouldn’t the policeman she imagined at the other end of all this direct things evenly? If he let two or three go, then should stop them and let her lane go, too. And the left lane still hadn’t moved at all, as far as she could tell. If she removed herself and thought of it all as one large organism, it seemed like a powerful animal just waking from sleep. Flexing its muscles, flicking a tail, blinking an eye or two, maybe licking its paws. Tensing as its eyes moved over the savanna. Tensing as it waited for something to come into sight when it might spring into motion, using all of its power and skill, or else settle back for an instant uninterested. Was all of life an either/or? As though every moment divided itself into the happening and not happening, the is and the what might have been. So that a ghost life followed you, branching off at every minute, replicas of the self dividing and dividing like cells, so that somewhere, in the not-so-distance past, a what-might -have-been of a what-might-have-been is going on leading a completely other life, lost in the choices you yourself could not even imagine making, but might have imagined if, at some past turn, you’d opted for or over either.

And then, still waiting in her car, Molly is plunked by her thinking into the divide in her life: “She’d have to get moving soon or her brain would divide, one at Ted’s apartment and one at Leo’s office and who knew if ever the twain should meet again?” Embarrassed about thinking of infidelity, she watches “the maroon car as it neared the bend and was lost in the welter of traffic, swallowed in the silvery sheen of sun on the metallic river of her thoughts.”

When the character entertains metaphors for time, time takes on consistency and vigor. As they do for Judith Kitchen the essayist, concepts of time float in and out of Molly’s mind. These concepts do not seem at all intangible because they spring from the objects and people Molly observes. Feeling the strength of her metaphorical thinking, I am carried away on the “river of her thoughts.” I re-read the passage to see how I became swept away and see that Kitchen has woven throughout her writing what she has told us she admires in other essayists’ endings: retrospection, intrusion of comments and thoughts, meditation, introspection and imagination.

Armed with my observations, I go back into the writing and look more closely. I notice, as with rhythm and images, these techniques aid me in feeling present to experience and to thinking about experience.

For instance, in the House on Eccles Road, Molly thinks:

What was the blood she brought to this marriage? Her father’s heritage so strong, her mother’s so much weaker…Still, her mother’s family had been here for so many years, since the early 1800s when they came as indentured servants, transplanted from the cities of Europe to the farms of North America, ending up in small German-speaking enclaves, Springerle for Christmas, sausage, not much else in the way of tradition. And certainly not the longing for the homeland, the looking back. No, they’d looked so continuously forward that they’d moved west, then farther west, settling in Ohio. Farmers, from a bunch of tailor’s apprentices. From the city’s underclass. But such bright farms, sturdy and dependable, the regular rows of corn and the cows tight in their sheds….

I read the passage over and I think, “retrospection.” Molly is being retrospective, filling me in. How interesting it is that her retrospection includes a “not looking back.” I enjoy the joke, the way Molly (and Kitchen) seem to joke with me as I try to dissect technique. I am eager to continue looking through Kitchen’s writing and label for myself all five techniques wherever I see them, noticing how Kitchen plays with them. I am happy thinking that some trait of writing bravery will transmit itself from Kitchen’s work to my own when next I tackle an essay.

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I am reading and rereading Kitchen’s essays, observing her use of techniques and experimenting with them in my own work. I thought it would be a treat to hear what Kitchen has to say about her writing, so I emailed her to see if she would answer questions for Writing It Real subscribers who might be intrigued about her process and thoughts on essay and fiction writing.

Sheila
I am struck with the expansive quality of your essays, how much ground they cover, geographically as well as interpersonally and imaginatively. For instance, in “Out of Place,” a two-part essay in Distance and Direction, (oh, yes, I see the first word in the title takes note of this quality) the reader travels in your thoughts from a stay in Ireland to memories of Oklahoma City to a mediation on Tim O’Brien’s reports of Vietnam. How long have you been an essayist, and when you write essays, how do you imagine your reader?

Judith
I began writing essays around twenty years ago. I don’t think I even considered an audience at that time because I was so busy experimenting with the form, seeing what I could do in an essay that I could not do in a poem. And my process was exploration–just what did some of the events of my life mean to me? How had I incorporated them into my way of thinking? What had I learned from my experiences? How did that connect to anything larger? Those were my concerns at the time, and to a large extent they have remained so. If I consider an audience today, it’s more in that I’ve learned a lot more about how and when information is processed, so I think a bit more about how to orchestrate an essay in order to keep the reader interested or to force the reader to make certain connections. In other words, I still do not conceive of any particular audience, but if there happens to be one, I want to make the reading experience an interesting one.

Sheila
When you wrote the novel, did you imagine the reader differently? Did you reach into yourself in a different way? Or was writing a novel similar to you to your usual process?

Judith
When I was writing the novel, I think I thought of the audience as being myself. That is, I think I imagined how I would respond if I were the one reading the novel. In many ways, the writing process felt like reading–as though I were watching characters unfold for the first time, and I was. I was often surprised by what my characters did, or rather, surprised by the fact that I understood that I was the one that was making them act. They felt quite apart from me in many ways, and yet many of Molly’s (the central character) experiences were quite similar to my own.

In many ways, the novel was quite like my essays–enough so that I ‘borrowed’ sections from my essays and used them in the novel, just changing from first to third person. In other ways, it was a completely different experience. I felt liberated from needing to explore the ‘truth’ of a situation, and so I realized I was building a whole other kind of truth for the novel. If anything, it convinced me even more that creative nonfiction should have an allegiance to the events as they were rendered (to the best of our subjective ability). A novelist is mining a whole set of experiences in order to create an entirely new one. If the writer does not differentiate between the two, how can the reader understand what it is to be ‘true’ to oneself?

Sheila
What sparks writing essays for you? What sparked the desire for writing the novel?

Judith
For me, essays are often sparked by a convergence of some kind. Usually it’s something happening in the present (often just something I’m reading) that causes me to remember something in the past. The two seem to have some reason to be suddenly in my mind at the same time–either because there are similarities, or because one seems to inform the other, or through differences. So I want to explore the connective tissue, see why my mind felt that the two belonged together. Sometimes I want to explore the ways in which something matters to me, and I do so by allowing my mind to roam rather freely. I trust that the associations will eventually make a kind of elliptical sense, and they often do. I realize that this answer seems somewhat abstract, and that’s probably because the process still feels a bit mysterious to me. I doubt that any two essays came to me in the same way. But I’ll give you an explicit example: one of my longest and most complex essays came from the fact that I had two books with red covers on my shelf, one by Tim O’Brien and one by Edna O’Brien. Whenever I wanted one, I would seem to pull out the other. So I thought to myself that those two books really did have more than their authors’ last names in common–both were about war and complicity and guilt. Well, I realized that although I know very little about war, I know enough about complicity and guilt to make my connections, and thus it became an exploration of violence that included my own experience of working with survivors of the bombing at the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

The novel was written because of an idea I read in an essay. I was reading J.M. Coetzee’s essay entitled ‘What is Realism?’ and there was a fictional character–an Australian novelist named Elizabeth Costello who had written a book from Molly Bloom’s point of view. That was in one paragraph and his essay went on to do other things, but it seemed like too good an idea to let it go. So I thought I’d give it a try, see what would happen. And what happened was that, since I knew little about Dublin and almost nothing about 1904, I decided to set it in contemporary suburban America (about which I knew a fair amount) and my Molly just took off running. I decided not to reread Ulysses, but instead to rely on what I remembered from reading it thirty-five years earlier. I figured that if I still remembered something after all that time, it was probably significant–at least for me–and so it would spark my imagination.

Sheila
You have edited anthologies and selected work for The Georgia Review. Why do you do like putting together collections of others’ work? What do you look for in a piece of work?

Judith
Editing is, for me, an extension of my reading. I like to discover new voices and see what others are doing in the field, so it made a kind of sense to collect examples of short essays. I knew that they might be useful to teachers, but I made selections that interested me for one reason or another rather than simply look for something that might be of interest to what I imagine a student to be like. So it’s simple: I look for something short and interesting. What makes it interesting to me is often what I refer to as the length/depth ratio. That is, for something so short, it goes deep. Or for something that ordinary, it’s been given extraordinary treatment. Something like that.

Sheila
And I know you do a lot of teaching, too. What are your thoughts on teaching writing? What do you think are the most important craft issues for new writers to learn? For more experienced writers to deal with?

Judith
I spent years teaching creative nonfiction and I still don’t know what I think is important. Each piece we looked at seemed to present different problems and have different possibilities. For new writers, I think it’s sometimes difficult to realize just how much readers need to be told; there’s often a tendency to skip the details just because you feel that they won’t be interesting, when interest resides in the details. More experienced writers need to work on structuring and ordering those details, giving information when it is needed so that everything flows smoothly and still retains a bit of the mystery it had for the writer.

Sheila
I agree that as writers, new and more experienced, at first we skip details at important junctures. If it isn’t because we think the details will bore readers or because we feel shy about revealing just how the world looks, feels, tastes, smells and sounds to us, it’s because we feel the experience is hard to capture and we don’t think the details alone will do it or it can be because we don’t want to relive an experience that is painful. I believe that by reading your essays and novel, writers will observe the way you allow association and subtitles as well as first-person and second-person choices to help portray your thought process about writing about your experience as well as living it.

How is your newer work evolving, such as the picture essays, one of which you shared with us last week in Writing It Real’s Gallery?

Judith
My own work is going in too many directions. I’ve completed another novel and am looking for a publisher for it. It’s enough different from my first one that my agent would like to wait for me to write and publish yet another, then issue it as a ‘departure.’ And I am working on a third novel, but I honestly don’t think that anything I’m writing is departing from anything else. I’m also writing some new essays, and these are challenging me in new ways. Because I’ve mined my own life for two books, I don’t think I have that many more personal essays in me at the moment. But I recently moved to the Northwest, and the moving process uncovered my mother’s photograph albums and her scrapbooks and other memorabilia. I began to write a series of essays using some of the photographs–some family members, but mostly ones of people I do not recognize and have no one to ask about. So I spend some time speculating and inventing (employing what I’ve learned from writing fiction). The result is not fiction, however. These are essays in which I use fictional techniques to delve into nonfictional material. The focus is mainly on my mother, as though I could get to know her better through my own imagination and looking at what she left behind than I could ever know her while she was alive. Of course it’s a made-up version, but it may be more true than anything else I could have said about her. The project is still in its beginning stages, so I’ll know a whole lot more about what I did or didn’t discover when I’ve done more.

One thing that is fascinating me is the idea of when to use the photograph as part of the text. I have not yet caught up with the technology, but it’s clear to me that it’s available and that I can insert the photograph in place of the thousand words I’d otherwise need to write. So I can depart from description and indulge in response and speculation and interrogation. How does the essay change if the reader has already seen it? Or what happens if it is introduced part way through? How does the reader revise what has already been ‘seen,’ when a photograph presents its actual image? So you can see that I am far more aware of the reader as an entity that completes the process in this endeavor than I have been before. There’s a kind of riddle–and did you ever try telling a riddle to yourself? It needs an audience. Now my challenge is to figure out what all this means to me, and to keep myself guessing at the same time!

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It is inspiring to listen to an accomplished writer talk about her process and the way she sees what she is doing. As Kitchen says, she doesn’t feel that anything she is “writing is departing from anything else.” Rather, I would think to a writer, writing is always arriving. If it isn’t, we coax it and coax it, seeing it to its destination.

I recommend reading Distance and Direction, Only the Dance and The House on Eccles Road. The author’s voice will transport you as you enjoy its music proclaiming love of literature, of traveling, of people and settings. You will be enriched by Kitchen’s understanding that the quotidian world is the substrate for all our thoughts and for our depth of being.