The Writer's Hot Seat: Joni Tevis on the Lyric Essay

This interview is the first in a new Barnstorm blog column called, “The Writer’s Hot Seat,” in which we pick the brains of writers we admire.

Interview by Alyssa Martino

Last summer, I had the pleasure of meeting Joni Tevis at the Colgate Writer’s Conference, where she attended as one of two nonfiction workshop instructors. Each morning, swarms of poets, fiction writers, and memoirists trekked past Taylor Lake and through the hilly, green campus to a large lecture room to absorb a bit of instructor wisdom. Of these morning talks, Joni’s discussion of the lyric essay—a challenging, sometimes misunderstood form—was the most memorable. Afterward, the room buzzed as attendees turned to one another and remarked, “Damn, that Joni is smart.”

Joni’s debut essay collection, The Wet Collection, was published in 2012 by Milkweed Editions. Her work appears in Orion, Oxford American, Shenandoah, AGNI, The Bellingham Review, and many other impressive journals. In 2006, she was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant. She currently lives in Greenville, South Carolina, teaching literature and creative writing at Furman University.

Here, Joni talks with Barnstorm about the organic nature of lyric essays, obsessive images, and her second collection—about ghost towns, tourist traps, and atomic dread—which will be released from Milkweed in about a year.

Barnstorm: Your first book, The Wet Collection, tackles a range in both content and form—from a personal essay about your grandfather to a Field Guide-style look at memories. Did you always foresee these diverse pieces coming together in a collection?

Joni Tevis: I didn’t really know where the manuscript was going until pretty late in the writing process—several years in. At that point, I saw what the arc was, and could think of ways to fill in the gaps. But until that point, I was kind of in the dark, following an image or detail that was luminous to me.

The new book I am finishing now has followed a similar pattern. Although it can be tough to not know where I’m going, I like the process of it, and watching the book emerge from all the questions and false starts of the earlier days.

B: You wrote on Essay Daily, “For me, a lyric essay works like a poem can, with pressurized language and associative leaps, and although it may contain narrative, story is not the main engine pulling the reader through the material.” What draws you to writing lyric essays? What are the challenges of this particular form?

JT: I wanted to be able to use images and anecdotes and fragments that didn’t necessarily have a strong narrative. But that is one of the main challenges for keeping the reader reading—without a story, you can lose your reader. The lyric essayists I admire most—Amy Leach, Lia Purpura, Joan Didion, Susan Mitchell, Anne Carson—keep me hooked with their crackling details and surprising turns of phrase.

B: Since lyric essays don’t often have a typical narrative arc, I’m curious about structure. Do you ever plot out a lyric essay beforehand? Or is that process more organic?

JT: For me, it’s more organic. I’ll start with an image or fragment that fascinates me, try to explore it as fully as I can, and then explore the threads of research that seem to spread out from it.

For instance, in my new book, one of the essays has to do with a river rafting trip I took with my husband along the Canning River, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in northern Alaska. After the trip, I read other accounts of travelers who had visited the area, as well as books of Native place names, field guides to lichen and mosses, and archeological surveys.

Then I placed seemingly-disparate ideas—in this case, material from The Golden Bough, James Frazer’s groundbreaking survey of belief systems from around the world—up against my primary material and looked for “sparks.”

The essay’s basic shape turned out to be that of the river trip itself, a journey shape that we all know well because it has worked so well for so long. (See The Odyssey, The Lord of the Rings books, etc.) This pattern—experience, research, seemingly-disparate ideas, then shaping—has worked for me lately.

B: In an interview on Terrain.org, you mentioned your obsession with dead things in jars, which later guided the title essay of your collection. Does a  lot of your work begin with one obsessive idea or image?

JT: A lot of it does. The drafting I do ends up being a way for me to investigate images or ideas that fascinate me for some reason, and the work of writing about them helps me figure out what’s at the root of my fascination.

I think of Annie Dillard’s terrific essay, “Total Eclipse,” in which the narrator returns again and again to the moment of the eclipse she witnessed. This repeated scrutiny allows her to get at what the experience means for her. (And makes me yearn to witness a total eclipse in my lifetime, too.)

B: You often do extensive research for your work. You’ve even gone so far as to act as a kind of “immersion essayist,” taking jobs as a park ranger and at a cemetery. How does becoming an “insider” to these worlds better inform your writing?

JT: It allows me to learn from people who know a lot about that place or time or experience. The world is full of experts! In my new book, I shadowed a traveling sharpener of scissors—specifically, cosmetology shears—and I learned so much about different kinds of steel, and whetstones, and patience from him. For another essay, I was able to interview a local historian who knows a tremendous amount about textile mills, upon which my hometown (in South Carolina) economy used to depend. In another essay, I talked to a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. People have been so generous with their time and knowledge. This has been a great help to me.

B: Most of your work is very focused on place and the natural world. Tell us a little about how your next book project will either expand on or diverge from that theme.

JT: This new book, which will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2014, has to do with ghost towns, tourist traps, and atomic dread. It has plenty of the natural world in it—that essay about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge comes to mind—but also a lot about story, and the power our stories hold over us. How do we come to terms with the places we’re from? How can writing help us live in an uncertain, often terrifying world?

The research for this book has taken me to the Salton Sea in California, abandoned railroad towns in North Dakota, the Cave of the Apocalypse in Patmos, Greece, and many points between. It has been a real pleasure to investigate these places in my travels as well as on the page.

B: If you could hop back in time and give yourself one piece of writing advice, what would it be?

JT: Be good to yourself. Stay out of debt. And don’t waste time.

Photos courtesy of Joni Tevis.