I met Martha Grace Duncan and became aware of her work when she made a research trip to Seattle for a personal essay she was writing about her stepmother. When I first learned she’d come to research for a personal essay, I immediately admired her commitment– many people believe only novels and other book length manuscripts deserve research. I started my recent email interview with Martha Grace with a question about that desire to research.

Sheila
I notice and enjoy the many details of place in your essay “So Have I Been a Good Stepmother?”. I feel like I am right there with you in the house, the yard, and at the bus stop. Feeling involved very much helps me identify with the essay’s speaker.

Martha Grace
In the beginning, I just wanted to find out what happened to my father, in particular, what had precipitated his suicide, and what his life was like in those last years. The focus of the essay changed when I found Elaine and discovered what an unusual person she was. I thought no one would believe me if I simply told them in the abstract about Elaine; I had to describe her home, garden, language and so forth to get across what she was like. Also, I really enjoy writing description.

Sheila
How did you learn about Elaine and what an unusual person she is?

Martha Grace
Basically, I learned where she was by making inquiries around her hometown and trying over and over to meet her. As I write in the essay, the first time I tried to meet her, her husband was murdered and she disappeared. I had to forfeit the money I had paid for my plane tickets, and it was two years before I got up the courage to try again.

 You asked how I learned what an unusual person she is. That came about through meeting her — when I first managed to reach her by phone and then when I met her in person, and also from her letters, which I describe in the piece.

Sheila
When we met, I also learned about your writing for law reviews. You gave me a copy of an article you published in the Columbia Law Review entitled, “So Young and So Untender: Remorseless Children and the Expectations of the Law.” I was immediately struck by the personal touches you put into the law article, starting right in the introduction: “The morning after my father’s suicide, I went to my classes at Columbia University as usual, wearing a hot-pink, summery top and a pink and white floral skirt.”

In your book, I see you using another aspect of creative writing craft. You bring your literary experience into your inquiry about how we fashion laws to deal with social problems. I especially enjoyed your thoughts about the indispensability of metaphor in understanding our relationship to criminals: we have a history of viewing criminals with metaphors of filth and the metaphors we choose to identify and label criminals reflect our simultaneous reviling and romanticizing of them. You write, “…virtually all our words are metaphors, or originate in metaphors.” And you quote C. S. Lewis: “Either literalness, or else metaphor understood: one or other of these we must have; the third alternative is nonsense. But literalness we cannot have.”

How do you go about using your interest in and skill at the craft of creative writing to shape your books, articles, and personal essays?

Martha Grace
Since graduate school, I’ve collected books about creative writing. For instance, I think of the Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s essays on inspiration and writing techniques in The Soviet Heretic. Those essays are fabulous, and I drew on them in my academic writing long before I did in creative nonfiction. I particularly love two lines from his essay “Backstage”:

I rarely use individual, chance images; these are only sparks, which live for a brief moment, and then are extinguished, forgotten. . . . If I firmly believe in the image, it will inevitably give rise to an entire system of related images; it will spread its roots through paragraphs and pages.

These lines partially inspired the section on the metaphor of the criminal as slime in Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons. I tried to “firmly believe in the image” and let it take me wherever it would.

Sheila
Yes, In a New York Times review of book from 1/26/97, Perry Meizel writes:

When Ms. Duncan turns to the examination of metaphor in the last portion of her book, she finds ample evidence in literature and history alike to show that we use images of “filth, “slime” and “scum” to describe the criminal because these words express what it is we unconsciously prize about him. To the criminal “filth” and to separate him from us, Ms. Duncan argues, is not only to affirm our own adulthood but also to maintain at the level of linguistic usage the criminal’s particular allure, which is infantile.

He goes on to praise the way you explain England’s sending of criminals to Australia in the late 18th Century by using your metaphor:

Why deal with the “urgent” problem of criminals with the “slow” and “expensive” alternative of transporting them to the other side of the globe? Ms. Duncan readily solves the misery by showing us how Botany Bay’s incoherence as both a policy and a practice can be made sense of once we see it as an “archetypal story re-enacting with real people and real places an epic drama of self-purification through banishment of the filthy.”

Martha Grace
Whenever I write anything, whether it falls near the academic or the personal essay end of the continuum, I spend a great deal of time just learning everything I can about the central word or image. I try to concentrate until I fall in love with the image and practically see the whole world through it. When I was writing about why criminals are often viewed as slime, my seven-year-old niece and I were having our weekly conversation on long-distance telephone and she spontaneously offered me the poem: “Ooshy-Gooshy was a worm, a mighty worm was he; he sat upon the railroad tracks; oops, it was not for me!” The poem and our dialogue about it ended up in my book. So when you really concentrate on an image, ideas and material seem to fall from the sky. Guy de Maupassant says something rather similar to Zamyatin, to the effect that to see something in an original way, you have to stare at it for a very long time. Again, I try to do this whatever the genre I am working in. I don’t regard personal essays and scholarly writing as radically different forms of writing, the way some people do, because in both, I’m primarily interested in images and language; in both, I’m highly conscious of form.

Sheila
How does your life as a law school faculty member affect your writing life?

Martha Grace
That’s an interesting question. Sometimes, I get frustrated because the academic life, with all its rich political intrigue, social life, classes and so on, distracts me from my writing. However, on balance, being a lawyer and law professor has actually fostered my writing. For one thing, I need a lot of structure and support to avoid sliding into depression, and my career give me that. On the most concrete level, the job provides me with a place — an office to keep in order, to decorate, to cultivate plants, and to triage my mail. Above all, the job provides a place where I am expected to be and to work, at least part of the time. And although my colleagues are lawyers, they encourage me in my creative writing as much as in my legal writing. They’re very generous. Often, one of my colleagues is the first to read and comment on a personal essay I have written.

The meetings, committee work, and classes that my job entails also serve to organize my days and weeks in a way I find soothing and pleasurable. My students are extremely nice, appreciative people, who definitely help to boost my spirits. I can be pretty sure that if I’m depressed and I go into a classroom to teach a class, I’ll be in a cheerier mood when I come out. In general, my job provides a lot of social contact that I wouldn’t get if I were writing somewhere all by myself.

Two of my articles have originated in courses I teach: “So Young and So Untender: Remorseless Children and the Expectations of the Law,” originated in Juvenile Law. I would never have had the confidence to write it if I hadn’t mastered juvenile law for my class. Likewise, an essay I’m writing now, “The Beauty and the Humor of Criminal Law,” was inspired by my large lecture course on Criminal Law. I think of it as an occupational memoir.

Sheila
I am not sure I’ve ever heard that term.

Martha Grace
I learned about the genre of an occupational memoir partly from reading the book, On Fire, by Larry Brown, a former fireman who writes about his love for the job. Thomas Lynch’s The Undertaking would be another example. One time, I was thinking about my writing projects and it seemed to me that there are only a few things I know a lot about and have my own “spin” on, as my students put it. One of those things is Criminal Law. It also seemed counterintuitive that my students and I derive so much joy and even amusement from such a dark field. My ideas usually come to me in the form of titles, and I was flying across the country to see my family, in California, writing in my journal, when I had the idea of writing an essay on “The Beauty and the Humor of Criminal Law.”

The essay is in the first person and talks about my favorite crimes (Depraved Heart Murder) and cases (the case of the junk dealer), and defendants (the mathematician who decided to become a bank robber when his wife was away), what makes certain cases and doctrines particularly lovely or mellifluous, and what makes certain defendants intriguing. I talk about some things I think about when teaching — the relationship of a doctrine to my own family or an experience I’ve had with crime. The essay more or less alternates between funny parts and beautiful parts. Some of it also makes an argument against legal experts who want to change the language of Criminal Law from the Common Law poetic terms (heat of passion, depraved heart, malice aforethought, etc.) to more precise, technical terms.

The piece emerged out of my experience lecturing in a large Criminal Law course every year (70 students this year, but I’ve had as many as 97.) In the class, I came to be more and more myself and to understand what I found funny, what I cared about, what I loved about Criminal Law, which characters I identified with, etc.

I would like to place the essay in a literary magazine for the generally educated reader or possibly in a law review. My colleagues would prefer the latter; however, I’ll have to see where it fits best.

Sheila
Do you have any advice for professionals who long to write?

Martha Grace
I love this question! Whenever I meet someone who’s just starting out as a writer, I always tell them the same thing: go to writers’ conferences! I just can’t say enough in their favor, whether it’s the kind that is the “cast of thousands,” such as the AWP, or the “cast of hundreds,” such as the North Carolina Writers conferences, or the cast of thirty, such as the Blue Hills Writers Institute, you can’t go wrong, in my experience. You make writer friends, learn about the little magazines, listen to terrific panels about esoteric topics like “How to structure your book-length memoir,” and acquire books about writing. Above all, the conferences are inspiring. They make you feel as if you were part of a writing community, even if you don’t have such a community where you live.

Sheila
Is there a question you wish I had asked you?

Martha Grace
I wish you had asked about where I like to write. When I started writing the essay on my stepmother, I had been suffering from a writer’s block, and I noticed that my efforts to write went better in public places. For instance, I was able to compose in Cactus Car Wash, while waiting for my car to be washed. The only problem was that they were too fast! The first time I made real progress on the “Elaine” essay, I was in the laundry room in the building where I live. It was a Sunday morning and I was waiting for some clothes to dry. I didn’t want to leave them because they were so delicate and might get over-dried. So I boosted myself up onto the folding table and started writing the beginning of the essay there.

After that experience, I took to writing more and more in the laundry, where I felt protected in several ways. For one, the white noise of the machines is pleasant and enveloping; for another, I have friends who either live or work in the building. Nearly always, someone comes in and says “Hello,” so I don’t feel as though I’m isolated from the world. Also, I usually get to have a conversation in Spanish with Lenin, the Guatemalan man who mops the floor. I like him, and the sounds of Spanish always make me happy; they are associated with childhood, when I first began to learn the language.

I should mention that our laundry is pretty fancy, too, not ugly or plain. Framed prints of English hunting scenes, silk ficus plants, and a statue of a Chinese dragon adorn the space, which is actually two rooms — the laundry room itself and the foyer of the laundry room, with the T.V. and Coke machine. I’ve actually taken photographs of the laundry to show my family, especially my niece Camile. My mom and sister thought it was a little weird when I pulled the photos out of my suitcase to pass around, but I had told Camile so many funny stories from the laundry that I thought she should see what the place looked like.

Now, as I write my new essay, I’ve moved two rooms down the hall to the Conference Room, where I have a table and fresh brewed coffee for free. The conference room has all the advantages of the laundry except the whirring of the machines and the Chinese dragon. And I’m closer to my muse: Jessica, the concierge with whom I bonded the night I broke my arm. She expects me to work down there every Sunday morning, and though I wouldn’t call her judgmental, she does probe into my reasons if I fail to show up.

Sheila
I am sorry to learn about your arm and hope it has thoroughly healed and doesn’t slow your writing down (it doesn’t sound like it!).

Thank you for this interview and for letting us peek into your writing quarters. I deeply admire the thoroughness, persistence and passion you bring to writing and studying writing as well as your ability to combine genres to create the kind of writing that you most enjoy authoring.