Elizabeth Kirschner
Oyster River Pages: We often think of ourselves as writing or making art, but the process often changes or makes us as well. How do you feel like your writing or art makes you?
Elizabeth Kirschner: Like Kierkegaard, I believe that life can only be understood backwards; but must be lived forwards. As a writer, I backbend into the past, trying to heal the wound which will never heal. Therein lies an incurable strangeness and, I must add, a passionate curiosity.
Since my earliest childhood, a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays, I’m alive, if it is pulled out, I’ll die. My work has to do with the barb, for it is the story’s kernel. The narratives, of course, vary, but the kernel does not.
The survivor’s questions about violence: how could I have been that close and not be destroyed by it? Why was I spared? are the questions that propel my need to make meaning and purpose out of extremity. Writing both propels and fuels this quest.
“But the quest born out of trauma doesn’t simply lead the survivor forward,” writes Gregory Orr, “first it leads him or her backward, back to the scene of the trauma where the struggle must take place with the demon or angel who incarnates the mystery of violence and the mystery of rebirth or transformation.”
The word incarnate seems key to me. If violence renders us invisible, and it does, then when putting flesh on the word, isn’t this akin to putting flesh on the wound?
Isn’t the power of metaphor the precursor for transformation?
ORP: What do you hope readers or viewers of your piece take from it?
EK: On the first page of EVERYONE NEEDS A PLACE, the narrator says to her lover, You’re dying, so why not do something?
George, of course, can’t stop dying, none of us can, so this then becomes a penultimate question. No, we can’t eschew the fact of mortality, but what can we do in the face of it? This, I believe, matters greatly.
The story also maintains that everyone needs a place; and it shouldn’t be inside someone else. Place is a platform, the position from which we operate in order to determine where we are in what I call the human catastrophe. Which is spectacular.
In other words, we all go back to where we started, to where we were born before we were born. To origins, both destitute and glorious.
We’re alone in this endeavor, yet stand in intimate relation to, well, everything: each other, the atrocious beauty of the landscape, the ever-pervasive presence of violence, all of which gives us a sense of scale, as do the dead, which provide an even greater sense of scale.
ORP: How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed your relationship to art and writing, either in the creation of it or the consumption of it?
EK: All artists and writers work in isolation and the pandemic has heightened and magnified that sense of isolation until it almost feels as absolute as a god.
Who among us, artist or not, doesn’t fundamentally feel the utter fragility of human experience in a way that’s almost lacerating? Mortality has become more tangible, like a mouthful of salt water.
These feelings, when pervasive, kindle a need to cherish, in both ourselves and others, that which is fleeting, beautiful and essential.
Art has always been a means to celebrate, abhor, order and digest experience. I believe it has become more central during the pandemic, a crucial pivot. Because our ability to actually be with other human beings has greatly diminished, the need for art, literature, music is accelerating. It is a place to encounter our humanity.
I know I’m utterly in need of books, in particular. Last night, I finished Natasha Tretheway’s beautifully scripted memoir, MEMORIAL DRIVE. I wept for her, for myself, imagining that the success of this book, which is a triumph, might actually be searing for her. A presumption, yes, but art does allow us to trespass in this manner, that is, we’re allowed to enter another world, an other sensibility in order to reimagine and reconstruct our own.
So, yes, I’ve been writing more, reading more, and my gardens have profited immensely. Gardens, of course, are lessons in the particular graces of the ephemeral, of impermanence, and art, a probe into the infinite.
ORP: Do you believe that hope is a luxury, a responsibility, a danger, or something else? Why?
EK: I think hope is all of these things—a luxury, a responsibility, and a danger. It is what conditions and exercises the human spirit, but it is also volatile and as explosive as violence.
If we are driven by desire, and we are, then it’s essential to respect the potency of hope, which can both inflate and deflate. For years I’ve tried to follow Isak Dineson’s dictum, write a little everyday, without hope, without despair. Sometimes successfully, other times not.
Hope, then, is about keeping a little fire burning; however small, however hidden. It understands we need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken. It turns writing into an act of redemption and reparation.
ORP: If you could choose one writer or artist, living or dead, as a best friend or mentor, who would it be? Why?
EK: Flannery O’Connor. Early on, and I mean decades ago, she instilled in me a firm belief in the habit of art. This meant putting the writing life, at times, before other essential needs. I took utterly deplorable jobs, endured poverty, moved frequently, in order to keep the pen moving across the page, to get “black on white.”
She taught me that our beliefs will be the light by which we see, but not what we see, nor a substitute for seeing.
How clearly O’Connor understood that the serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature for his or her starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable character. Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not.
Of course, one can substitute the word “error”, or “wronged” in lieu of sin. What matters is the notion of what proceeds when one’s character feels deeply wronged.
Any character in a serious work is supposed to carry a burden of a meaning larger than himself. The writer doesn't write about people in a vacuum; he or she writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the writer tries to give you, within the form of the book, the total experience of human nature at any given time. For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama.
Soul, then, and the drama that is often enacted upon the crucible of violence. A forge, a metaphor for the utter gorgeousness of imperfection and impermanence.
ORP: What do you think is the most essential advice that most writers and artists ignore?
EK: I’m not convinced there is any essential advice. Except practice, practice, practice. And read widely, deeply, with an ardent heart and discerning mind.
Writing is an obsession, one that consumes inordinate amounts of time. To subject oneself to this kind of calling is a kind of sentence. Of penance or grace, I’m not sure.
It means cultivating a sensibility, then protecting it and entails a subordination to the work itself. It’s a rigor one must absolutely love, or it simply isn’t worth it.
I’ve been told that I’m very disciplined, but for me, attending to the work at hand is essential, spiritual work. It’s not a discipline, paying attention to other areas of my life is.
I might caution against being overly eager for what looks like the rewards of writing: publication. Better, I think, to work long, hard, deep, to revise and revise, then revise again, which is exquisite work.
Of course, one must be able to not exactly ignore rejection, for there will be countless amounts of it, but to accept it without dejection. This takes a kind of ferocity.
Writing is often dark and lonely, but it’s important to remember no one has to do it, no one has asked us to.
Yes, it can be complicated, exhausting, isolating, abstracting, boring, dulling; it can be grueling and demoralizing. And occasionally, it can be exhilarating.
Best to be passionate about the work itself, to let it have dominion in one’s life, to remain in a state of deep curiosity, while writing word after word which creates the power that enables us to live, love, and say it well in good sentences.
