Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: Alissa Hattman in conversation with Lucie Bonvalet
Spring 2023I met Alissa in the spring of 2018, during AWP in Portland, Oregon, in a coffeehouse called The Stacks. We were celebrating a new issue of Shirley. We had both contributed to the journal and that evening we both read extracts from our works, so I knew Alissa’s writings before I knew anything else about her. I had come unaccompanied to the event, but for a book: Today I Wrote Nothing, by Daniil Kharms. It was that book I had left on my table that prompted her to talk to me: We are both currently reading the same book.
In December of last year, when Alissa invited me to celebrate the coming of Sift, her first novel, into the world, we realized in the course of our conversation that for the second time we were reading by accident the same book at the same time: Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, by Hélène Cixous. That delighted and puzzled me, and as we started to share, as we had done since we first met, about our joy of reading, it occurred to me that this book offered us the perfect scaffolding, the perfect structure, to talk about Sift.
In the first part, we discuss our love of the epistolary form, how to write letters to the dead, how a letter can be a territory of repair, an umbilical cord. The trickiness and importance of naming. And through naming, the power to transform and heal. We also start to explore the importance of fragments, and how to listen to the silence between them.
In the second part, we explore the oneiric dimension in Sift, from the paragraph to the phoneme: dream scenes, characters made of dreams, syntax ruled by dream logic, words chosen for their oneiric potency, such as glochid. Also: gardening, weeding and moss structure.
Finally, just like the Narrator and the Driver in Sift, we journey underground and talk about solitude(s). The first books in our lives that did not shield us from danger. Possible ways to create an altar to moss, and different pathways to becoming moss.
—Lucie Bonvalet
Part I: The School of the Dead
Bonvalet
So the very first question I thought to ask you was connected with the origin story of Sift. I was wondering whether it had always been in the shape of a letter to a dead mother, or whether it went through transformations throughout the drafts? I remember reading a draft—so it was August, 2021—and in my memory there were fragments of letters. In the new text I read recently, it seemed that it had morphed into a long letter. How did this evolve? This importance of the letter shape, the epistolary shape?
Hattman
Yeah, it was there at the beginning. But, like you said, in a fragmented way. It evolved over time, when I was doing the revisions. I decided to have it sort-of woven throughout. So instead of these discrete passages of letters to Mother, I wrote it into the narration itself as a direct address. There are some moments where it kind-of goes away. But it is more threaded throughout with this final version than it was in the beginning. I think that the epistolary quality added a certain layer of intimacy to the overall narrative. I was thinking about how grief can be generative. How mourning people, or the land, or the past, changes us. I wanted to think about this in terms of a relationship. So, a person who has passed on, and the ways we keep them present in our lives. In writing Sift, I was thinking about our relationship with the dead—how that might look or sound. To me, this seems like a very personal conversation to have. I wanted Sift to sound familiar and close. Friendly, even when the environment is not. It just sort-of naturally came as a letter.
Bonvalet
I love this idea that, at the beginning, there is a need to write a letter, but without knowing for sure who it’s going to be sent to and then discovering that later. And so I wanted to know a bit more about this discovery. When did it come to you?
Hattman
I’m not sure if there was a specific moment when I realized: Oh, this is a mother who I’m writing to. And oh, this is a dead mother! I remember it, you know, as a series of moments that surfaced organically in the process of writing. It did feel a little bit like a surprise to me at the time, but it also made sense. Or it makes sense now, thinking back on it. At that time, I was writing from a place of fear. It was at the very beginning of the pandemic, and I was very afraid of losing loved ones. And so I think it was on my mind. I was thinking of what I wanted to say to everyone who was close to me, so I think that aspect worked itself into the telling of Sift, but I wasn’t conscious of it early on. I just gradually started to realize it was an address to a mother who had died, but before I knew this I was just trying to trust that the addressee would reveal themselves eventually.
There might be several categories of letters to the dead—one could be a letter to someone you’ve known intimately, another could be a letter to memory itself, and also, potentially a letter to a past self. But there is another category of letter to the dead. It’s writing to someone you don’t know. It was in my mind because I just finished reading Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem by Hélène Cixous—and we’ve talked about how Cixous’s writing is important to us—in this project she writes to a dead mother as well who used to live in Osnabrück and she ends up writing to other members of her family, people she never met—they died in the Holocaust, or they died in different lands—she was never able to speak to them. So this is a type of letter to memory, but then the question is: how do you shape a letter to a dead person who has remained unknown, which is almost like a double impossibility. And then I was thinking about Sift and I was thinking that clearly Sift is in the first category, but then the more I was thinking about it, the more I was thinking about how it was much more complex. So, is Sift a letter to memory, or is it a letter to someone known, or is it more complicated?
Right. I think there are layers. Early in the story, the address to her dead mother is almost like a coping mechanism for the narrator. She has to survive major social and environmental collapse, and things are happening really fast, and she has to sort-of talk herself through it. One way of doing that for her is to bring Mother in, so she doesn’t have to go through it all alone. She’s coaching herself through these tumultuous times. So, it’s an address to Mother, but also an address to self, or maybe even a past self. But as she grows and changes, and the story grows and changes, her relationship with Mother changes, and so I think the address to Mother does become like an address to memory itself. Memories start to surface in the narrative, some include Mother and some don’t. I think it blurs the category of the unknown too, because I think there are moments in the text that use the second person “you” where it could be an address to a reader or to something else, something larger, a Mother-concept.
Bonvalet
I have another question that came up listening to you. It’s about the power of naming and the importance of naming. In this idea of using the second pronoun and using the letter form, there is something very particular and striking in Sift: the narrator is named only once, and very late in the text, and the name is uttered by The Driver. How or when did you learn the name of your narrator?
I learned both characters names during the research process of drafting. I was reading Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer and she talks about Tortula Ruralis. How it was described reminded me of the narrator for Sift. As I was reading and researching, I wrote down every word that was evocative or somehow sounded like the story in some way. Tortula was one that stuck.
Bonvalet
Can you tell me what it is? Is it a type of moss or a type of plant?
Yes, it’s a type of moss that, if you look closely, looks like tiny green stars. You’ve probably seen them on your walks. All moss is resilient, but this type of moss particularly so.
So, in that case, would I be correct that the narrator becomes Tortula, but she was potentially not Tortula at the beginning of the story, but she morphs or transforms into Tortula?
Hattman
Yes, she changes as her relationship with the environment changes. And those relationships—with Lamellae, with the land—help her evolve into who we know as Tortula. Lamellae, the other character’s name, was a word that came up when I was researching leaves. When I looked up the word, I discovered that it’s used to describe body, or layers of bone, but it’s also a way to describe plate-like layers in plants. The word resonated because the character, too, is many-layered.
That’s interesting because, in French, there is the word lamelle, and it’s used to describe what’s underneath a mushroom. Often you can recognize a toxic mushroom if it has lamelle underneath.
That’s exactly right. Sometimes it’s used to describe layers, but it’s also used to describe—I don’t know—ridges or gills.
Also indentations.
It took a little while to find the right words, the right voice for Sift—to discover the lexicon that felt right for that world—but once I had that voice and vocabulary the writing became more fluid.
We talked about the ending in Sift as a type of birth or rebirth or beginning of a new cycle or coming back to light. So among the different types of transformations of the narrator, is it also a shift or transformation to mother as well? Because there is also a mothering quality between the driver and the narrator. But it’s not static; it’s fluid.
Right. The question about how to support another person who’s going through a difficult time and often that has to do with caretaking. It ends up being a type of parental role, especially when, as in this story, both people have lost their parents somewhat early in their lives. I think you’re right to say that there’s some mothering of each other, and I do think that Tortula is learning how to mother herself as well. And, yeah, I think it’s really interesting because she’s trying to maintain her relationship with her mother, to stay in communication with her, but she is also learning how to care for herself and others in the process of that conversation.
Bonvalet
What comes up for me as well, that I didn’t think about before, is that part of the grief and trauma and pain of the narrator is having failed to be a mother for her mother. It seems like there was a reversal of roles here. This fear of having failed entangled with the resentment of being put in that position as a very young human being having to mother the mother.
Right.
Bonvalet
So I guess the letter form helps to really feel the complexity of this entanglement. And, this idea that as a young survivor, we are left with this conundrum of having to mourn for a mother we have failed to mother and looking for another way to be mothered because we need protection. But then the letter is the territory of repair. To repair the relationship or to find other options of dialogue. Sometimes I think of a letter as being like an umbilical cord with nourishment. And you keep nourishing that person even after life. And you keep being nourished also. And as the reader you also feel this nourishment. But then, with this narrator, the process of repair and nourishment means shifting form. We need to shift or change realms in order to repair. This rings true to me. If I’m going to heal, I’m going to have to become a plant, and not hold onto what I think a human being is or the construct or idea we have inherited of what a human being is. Does it make sense?
It makes so much sense. I love imagining a letter as an umbilical cord, and it being a sense of nourishment and repair and a space for transformation. In Sift, there is a line “this becoming has made me less animal and more vegetal” and I think that’s something that the narrator is trying to learn throughout the story, how she’s not separate from her environment, how she is connected and in relationship with it at all times. How the moss is part of her and it has its own way of communicating and how they are in conversation. But you’re very right to say that the letter can repair a rupture. It made me think about an assignment I gave to students in a college composition class, which was to write a letter to a significant individual. That individual could be a friend or relative, it could be a past self, or someone who has died, or someone you’ve never met but who inspires you. Sometimes people write letters in gratitude, but often they are letters of apology or regret. There’s such bitter sweetness in these letters. There’s the feeling that the person was finally able to say the thing they couldn’t say. Of course it doesn’t always repair the past relationship, but I think there is potential for personal repair.
Bonvalet
Yeah. I remember when my grandfather died in 2002, my brother telling me that when someone close dies, part of you dies. It seems obvious, but I’d never thought of it that way. So, for instance, when my grandfather Charles died, the 5-year-old Lucie he remembered also died with him. This was in my mind when reading Sift: how a letter to memory is also a letter to a part of the self. But this is also connected to this idea that the self is very divided, very broken, and very fragmented. It’s a fragile construction that’s always under attack or under siege whenever we are confronted with death. This act of writing is an act of repair, but also an acknowledgement of this precarity and vulnerability of a person. There is a fear of metamorphosis, so I think we need to acknowledge this process of breaking down, repairing, and morphing.
Hattman
I agree. There’s so much resistance to mortality, but it’s happening all around us all the time and in many different types of ways. I think it’s very important to learn to be expansive and open to death in the same way we are open to life. But it’s a scary thing to do. I’m thinking now of Kafka’s letters to Milena where he says that “writing letters means exposing oneself to ghosts”—which is also an epigraph I used in Post—but I think about that in terms of never knowing what might happen to a letter and also thinking about a book like a letter to an unknown recipient. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was reading a lot of published accounts of correspondence between writers—I also read the correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy—and every once in a while a letter would get lost in the mail or there would be a gap in correspondence that had to be accounted for. I think this was another aspect that contributed to the structure and form of Sift, both with the letter and the short, fragmented chapters. I’m curious—since we both write in this short, fragmented form—when you’re drafting, are there moments when you know to stop and include a new fragment, like a letter, or a quote, or some etymology, or do you draft short sections separately and then at some point bring them together and start to notice how there is energy between them?
Bonvalet
It’s the second. It’s extremely fragmented and extremely long. Then, I reach a point, when I try to juxtapose those fragments with others and try to listen. Like with letters to the dead, it’s also thinking about how to construct silence, the organization or scaffolding of silence and absence. So it’s hard to position yourself around this territory of silence and the territory of silence is anything but static. It moves, it shifts, it breaks. Just like what Kafka says, it’s scary.
In writing Sift and other projects that have been assemblages, so much of the process has been developing a theory around absence and silence and paying attention to where it lives in the piece. That’s something I’ve only been able to learn through a lot of experimentation and moving sections around. Do you do this a lot? This modular type of revising?
Yes, so the person who taught me how to work with juxtaposition was Janice Lee. She also encouraged me to break pieces that were traditionally constructed and to sit with the new fragments and to listen to new potential configurations, like building some sort of chimera or new monster made of pieces of different projects. That was very freeing. It’s helped me to not be too attached to one specific shape. And sometimes going back and giving more importance to the white space between two things and noticing how they resonate. Which is true in Sift as well, giving the reader a lot of space to move. But what is striking also, because, as I mentioned, I read the 2021 version, and in the 2022 version I loved how you incorporated those short pieces about the pond, the cloud debris, the tadpoles, and I was very sensitive to this new incorporation because I read them first separately and then I read them together and it struck me as they have a power of healing and repair. They become one with the letter, but there is a healing or soothing quality to them, like a balm. Tell me more about the process of choosing the fragments and how you placed them.
I think that initial round of placement was intuitive, but it became clearer that some operate like you say, as a balm. I think of it also as a moment to pause and reflect on all the narratives going on just outside of the frame or the perspective of our narrator. In some cases the fragment adds a quality of feeling that I couldn’t quite get at in the letter narration. Some emotional quality I wanted to underscore. So I sent the new placement to The 3rd Thing editors and then I met with Anne one day in Olympia to work on placement. “Tilework,” she called it. She had printed out all the pages and spread them out on the floor and together we spent the day breaking it apart and putting it back together again. So, it’s like you were saying about what you learned from Janice.
Cixous talks about this idea that the book will dictate to you what the book needs. And you just need to surrender, or listen and be at the book’s disposal.
It is a type of surrender.
Yeah, but as the reader, the new fragments really serve the process of Tortula’s metamorphosis. They are like landmarks in the process of repairing and changing. But also this idea that—the cloud debris, they have a voice; the tadpole, they have a voice; the Pepto bottle, they have a voice. And so once you’ve given those different fragments a voice then the metamorphosis can take place seamlessly and, as a result, also a new birth. A new cycle. And one specific voice that stayed with me was where the word repair was repeated and there was a subtle ambiguity between imperative or indicative, between noun and verb. And because of this shifting in the syntax, where “repair” could be both noun or verb, there is a fluidity in the syntax that reflects the fluidity of the narrator. The reader and the narrator are allowed through that syntax, and through that word, to flow and morph. And it’s very freeing. So, by contrast, the moments of grief within the letters they—I want to say magically—shift because of that other voice. Maybe it’s an example of what I mentioned about juxtaposition. You do not change a fragment, but simply by positioning a different fragment next to it, the reading changes. It’s this idea of fragmentation and fusion. You make a break, and there is a chemical process of fusion, and then the other is going to absorb the essence of the one next to it.
Yes. I experienced this when doing the “tilework.” And later in revision, there were still moments when a fragment needs to be repositioned. It is really interesting how juxtaposition can work in this way. You haven’t rewritten anything, you’ve just moved some sections around, and suddenly that breathes new life into the piece.
Bonvalet
What comes up for me, talking with you, is this connection with painting, because when you work with colors, the colors are going to change, depending on what color you put next to it, or sometimes they start blurring into each other. And, then again, this question of syntax, it’s also about the nature of self, because depending on who you are talking to, or depending on your position next to another person, you’re going to be changed from inside.
Part II: The School of Dreams
Who are some of your favorite oneiric writers?
Sabrina Orah Mark. Her book Wild Milk is really wonderful. Other writers that I think of who sort-of operate in a dream logic type way are Clarice Lispector or Leonora Carrington. Also, a number of writers from NOON—Diane Williams and Lucie Elven and Souvankham Thammavongsa.
Hattman
Yeah, I think Sabrina in a direct way, because I started working on Sift in her Escape and Captivity workshop. Some of what I learned in her class had to do with specificity of language and developing a type of lexicon for your world. And, also, she talked about this idea of “pushpins” as significant details that help ground the reader, which are especially important in a more surreal world. So I was thinking about those two things when writing Sift—developing a language particular to the story and thinking about details like pushpins that stay pinned in a reader’s mind.
Bonvalet
We were also discussing all the complex ways the oneiric comes into play in Sift, the most obvious being the use of dream scenes. Tell me a little about the choice of incorporating a dream scene inside the text.
Hattman
There are two dream sequences in the book. One is a nightmare and another is a sex dream. When I was drafting, I didn’t think of these as dreams. But, when I was revising, they stood out to me as being inside the mind of only one character. They were passages that felt like they might be part of Tortula’s subconscious.
Bonvalet
And would you say that there is one possible way of reading Sift as one long dream sequence? Or would you say it’s made of composite material?
HattmanHmm.
Bonvalet
Would you say it’s 100% oneiric? Like a sweater is 100% wool?
Hattman
It’s an interesting question. When I started writing I was following a type of dream logic. I was following a voice that didn’t always make a lot of sense. And so, I don’t know. It is oneiric. I think it’s true that Tortula’s narrative is dream-like, but I hesitate to answer because I think that it is also part of the waking world.
Bonvalet
I agree, but what is interesting is there is a paradox as well. For example, as someone who has experienced the fires here in the Pacific Northwest, there are glimpses or fragments of the very basic daily life, that are paradoxically very much in the waking life, very much down to earth—you know, checking the air quality—but because they are presented in such a matter-of-fact way, then they strike as nightmarish. Like underlining the nightmarish quality of what we’ve been living in the waking world. That was something I thought was very powerful in Sift and very subtle.
Hattman
I think Sift does move in and out of the waking life and the dream life, and sometimes it blurs. You know, like experiencing the fires, it did feel surreal or maybe hyperreal. There was a certain vigilance, a constant heightened state that makes sense because it’s something that happens when we’re trying to survive, but it’s also super surreal. And so, yeah, I think it’s trying to kind of get at that quality. I’m thinking of films that have done this—like Pan’s Labyrinth or Tideland. There’s a blurring—because of the trauma—there’s a blurring of imagination and reality, and you can’t quite tell if you’re in a nightmare or if this is really happening or what. But there’s an emotional truth to it. So, when experiencing trauma, this is part of what the brain might do to cope. In both those movies, for example, we are lodged in the mind of a young girl who is experiencing the trauma, and there is this kind of horror that happens when you, the viewer, cannot tell what is really happening. And so, I think there is some quality of that in Sift. Where it’s kind-of going back and forth and sometimes it’s maybe hyperreal or exaggerated because it’s a heightened state.
Bonvalet
Yes, and the other thing we had started to discuss was building dreamlike characters. Even the fact that Lamellae’s name is plural seems to partake in the oneiric nature of this character. So tell me a little bit more about the creation of these characters. Was it different than your other projects?
Hattman
Most of what I’ve written has been short stories. Sift is my first novel and, even though it’s a short novel, I was able to follow characters forward and backward and develop them in ways I wasn’t able to fully do in the short story form. I also think that there was freedom in allowing the story to be more dreamlike. Lamellae’s development was a surprise to me, but it came pretty early in the drafting process. I realized that after the crash happens, and after the realizations that happen in the helicopter with The Driver and The Narrator, that there was not really any way to go back. I think, on the writing level, it felt like the character of The Driver became less of a character or a human and more of an idea, or a mix of sensibilities. She became many. Tortula’s development was not as easy. Her transformation has to do with being open to and merging with her environment and I think I resisted it because, I don’t know, it seemed silly to me. It didn’t make sense. How could moss grow on a person? I mean I’ve seen moss grow in strange places, like on the back of a snail, but how could it grow on a person? But I decided that it was a potent image and tried to allow myself to stay with it to see how it would evolve.
Bonvalet
It seems to me that what happens to the bodies of the two characters mirrors what happens to the body of the text. So, fragmentation, or a type of chimera, part moss and part human, and being with the plurality of voices, and the bioluminescence. I liked that fluidity between the making of the character and the making of the book. And the transformation of both happens in harmony. So, maybe we could talk a little more about fragments and dreams. It seems directly connected with the oneiric, but it also connected with trauma in some respects. Tell me more about your relationship with fragments.
Hattman
I love what you have to say about the character development in relation to the text and the ways in which it fractures and fuses. Yeah, I think I’ve always been drawn to the fragmented form and especially when the writing is interested in memory or trauma it makes sense that it wouldn’t be single-voiced and it wouldn’t be linear. I think about that within the personal but also in the cultural and social as well. Early on with this piece I knew for it to work there would need to be a lot of air, a lot of space. Right now I’m thinking about all the writers who have written beautifully in fragmented forms, but I’m also thinking about moss itself and how it was a guiding structure or a guiding organism for the book. Moss is nonvascular, so there is no root structure and moss receives nourishment from the water in the air. It might seem like a strange comparison, but I think of each small section as patches of moss and the empty space as the air moves through the patches. So, when writing Sift, I was thinking about how I could be inspired by moss in this formal way. And I think this also goes with what you were saying about the fragmented form and trauma. At one point the moss on Tortula’s head is described as repairing a wound. And moss has been used for healing purposes. Even just in ways that the earth is trying to mend and heal—like when you’re walking through the neighborhood and you see the moss growing between cracks in the pavement.
Bonvalet
Would you say that it’s true at the sentence level as well? That you were inspired by the same type of principles when you were crafting your sentences. It struck me the most with the added fragments—like pond and tadpole and cloud debris—where there is a very distinct rhythm. An absence of subject in sentences, a blurring between imperative, infinitive, indicative, an ambiguity between verbs and nouns. And sometimes an echo or repetition that feels like a growth, like something softly growing. There might be a desire to dismantle the typical sentence hierarchy and give extra importance to words with functions that might be underrepresented, like adverbs. It’s not structured as a question. [laughs] So, well, what do you think?
Hattman
[laughs] Yes, so, with the fragments, I was trying to pay attention to the sound of the language and part of that was a process of elimination. So, as you said, removing the subject or any pronouns. There was also a particular sound that’s hard for me to describe, but I was thinking of them more like poetry. I read each fragment aloud while drafting and removed all words that weren’t absolutely necessary without disrupting the sound or the flow.
Bonvalet
I love this idea of uprooting and removing and how this allows for growth. It’s like gardening. It could be counterintuitive, like the more you remove the more it proliferates. Listening to you, it became obvious that there was an attention to each of the words in your sentence, like a gardener who is going to remove some weeds and protect others to grow. And then it’s true that for a reader that it gives a sense of space and expansion and propensity for blooming. I hadn’t thought about it before, but it does feel like moss growing and covering and also unexpected plants peeking.
Hattman
I like the gardening metaphor. That feels right to me, especially during the editing process. Cutting back, but being careful to not remove too much. Some of it was also trying to find the language for the subject of the piece. Not speaking for the barrel cactus, but finding a sound in the words that reminds me of barrel cactus. I think part of it too was just allowing it to be strange and to play with the grammar in ways that felt uncomfortable, but I was surprised at the resiliency of some of the words.
BonvaletHm. Remember a week ago when I came to you with the list of my favorite words in Sift? I was thinking of them like beautiful rare flowers, but now that I’m talking to you I realized that there were another type of list of favorite words that are just as striking. It’s the words that we think we’ve seen or we think we’ve heard but because of the protection or the space they’re given they bloom differently. Like one word that comes to mind is repair. In my memory there were also a list of adverbs that I liked. I have a complicated relationship with adverbs because, in my native language, it’s more common to use adverbs because the vocabulary in French is poor with verbs. But, in English, I was told that the way I use adverbs is clunky. In Sift, sometimes the adverbs are used without a verb. They are alone. They have independence. And they are used very much for their fluidity, their softness. I like this idea of shifting the hierarchy of a sentence, where an adverb can be completely independent. Like a rebellion.
I, too, have a complicated relationship with adverbs. I was taught in creative writing classes to not use many adverbs. That you just need to find a strong verb and that will be enough. You don’t want to overpopulate your prose with too many adverbs. Yeah, it has to do with the quality of Sift and these moments that to me are like whispers or not the strong verb. I think you’re right that some of it has to do with the fluid sound quality of -ly words.
Bonvalet
I love this idea of a type of rebellion against the strongest verbs. And it’s a little far-fetched, but I was thinking about my lessons in Tai Chi. It’s about a shifting and balancing of weight and you are always taught “where the force is not, there is the force.” So when you shift all the weight to the other part, then you have the fluidity to access the chi. So it’s about being fluid and empty. This came to mind and also that there is power in vulnerability, there’s power in softness, there’s power in the fact that there is no center. That plus the absence of subject are two important aspects of the healing process, I think. And this is also connected to dreams! For example, when I dream, I can use “I” but when I use “I” it’s going to be plural. It’s going to shift and it’s going to melt and it’s going to be messy. When I use a verb, it’s going to disintegrate and become a noun and sometimes I’m going to decide not to use one or maybe I’m going to use an adjective at the core of the sentence. I’m going to do all of those things that can free us.
It is freeing! I remember struggling a bit with the voice of the fragments, with what I should eliminate, and then it came clearly into my head that I needed to reread Tender Buttons. I knew Gertrude Stein would help. I thought “This is the writer who will free me.” I love that you named those two things—the absence of subject and the vulnerable power of not having a static center. And that we don’t always need the active sentence. You know, working with a number of college students across disciplines, I’ve read papers where a well-worded passive sentence works best. In the humanities, we favor active voice, but in other disciplines—often in the sciences, when methods and data are involved—the passive voice makes the most sense because it deemphasizes the subject, focusing less on the researchers and more on the research. Each discipline has its own writing conventions, and it’s about understanding what needs emphasis, and then constructing a sentence that supports it. I think this involves risk and trying scary things even with sentences. It sounds strange, maybe, but there were a number of moments when writing Sift when I felt physically scared to mess with a sentence. Like without this load-bearing sentence, everything would fall apart. But breaking sentences apart did help create growth in the spaces that maybe wouldn’t have grown otherwise.
Bonvalet
Sometimes it just takes time not looking at the text and going back a few months later and reading it again. Sometimes, then, it’s easier to know what to uproot. And when it comes to words in Sift, there are certain words that have oneiric power—inside one word, there are many different clusters of words hidden within. What were some of your favorite oneiric words?
Yeah, the words that Lamellae teaches Tortula were fun for me to include. So, these are scientific words that Lamellae who, as a person deeply connected to the land, teaches Tortula. Words like chiroptera and orogenic and glochid that even if you don’t know what they mean they have a sound quality, a resonance. And there are certain words like echolocation that return in a different form. So there are those scientific words which I think of having clusters of words within a single word. There are also the words that are repeated in a type of incantatory way which also feels dreamlike to me. Like the word river, which is repeated and is the type of accessway into the past. Sift is definitely one of those words as well and I do think that once I decided on this title that the voice started to come more clearly. It was one of those magical words that provide passageway. The sound, the memories it brought up in me, the quality of it seemed right for a piece that has all the fragments that we’re sifting through.
I discovered that Hélène Cixous has conversations with a character she calls “the book.” And the book tells her secrets. So, for instance, in Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem she mentions something that her mother told her, but her mother asked her not to write, but then on the next page, the book says I don’t have any type of promise with your mother and I can tell you the secret. So, the book has needs or desires that are different and that always prevail. And too often the book knows things you don’t know. For me, I have not had this experience with projects. Where all of a sudden the book is giving me instructions, but I imagine the more you practice the more there is this capacity of really serving the book in such a way that at some point it has this power over you and it’s going to start telling you secrets.
Hattman
It’s a relationship that you’re building with the book and I think it takes a deep kind of listening. You know, I do think it’s true that the book knows more than you do and I love how Cixous talks about this as a partnership. I’ve had moments when it’s felt that way, for sure. Sometimes I do a parallel writing exercise that is an interview with the book, where I ask the book what it wants to say. I’ll ask it: What can’t you say? What is most important to you? What am I missing? Often, when I do this type of parallel writing exercise, things have been revealed. In some cases, on special days, there is something about the voice or the language that takes me somewhere surprising. It’s interesting, you know, even though I’ve been writing for a very long time I still feel like I’m early in my development when it comes to the secrets of the book.
Sometimes, when I do the math, I think maybe, by the time I’m 150 years old, some kind of switch will happen.
Part III: The School of Roots
In my notes from last time I wrote down “fear of the forest” in brackets, so do you want to start with this?
Yes. So Cixous says, “Perhaps dreaming and writing do have to do with traversing the forest, journeying through the world, using all the available means of transport, using your own body as a form of transport.” Then she goes on to say that “one must walk as far as the night. One’s own night. Walking through the self toward the dark.” And I think the reason these quotes stood out to me was because there is so much of Sift that is journeying to this world under the world—through the burnt forest and through the mountain—and how that is also a journey within the self and self in relationship with another. And of course it is also the journey that I took as a writer as well. So, I’m wondering if that resonates with you? Is that something you saw in Sift? And is this type of digging something you do in your writing as well?
When I read an early draft of Sift, it was in parallel to listening to a theater adaptation of a short story by Kafka that takes place underground. I was wondering, in your first draft, is there a journey through the caves and towards the light, or is there an ending that remains at the core of the earth? I’m trying to remember—because, in “The Burrow,” I think the creature remains underground in the labyrinth that they have created. But what struck me, when I was rereading Sift, was that there was a piercing. A piercing through to the other side. So, I think in my stories, there is a desire to go underground or a craving for transformation, but I have never been able to pierce to the other side. I’m more like the creature from the burrow. I dig and I dig and I stay inside the labyrinth either because I lose my way, or because the transformation happens underground, or because the craving to be underground is so potent. I have not been able to find my way back to light, you know, this idea of rebirth. But with Le Guin’s Dragonfly, for example, the craving is different because it’s about leaving the earth with no turning back.
Right. Dragonfly is so expansive compared to the claustrophobic space of “The Burrow.” In Dragonfly, it’s important to go beyond, beyond. To transcend. It’s interesting because the tunneling through the mountain section was very long in the early draft of Sift. I added so much more, even after the early draft you saw, and I think it was because there was a desire to stay in the dark as long as needed until something surfaced. When I was writing it, I remember thinking: maybe this is where they die. But the story kept going and going and I didn’t want to force an ending, so I followed them through the mountain for so many chapters. I kind-of had to build up a capacity for the dark, to let the quality of it seep in. You know, I’m thinking of when Cixous says that the writers she loves are the writers that “dwell in the nether realms” and go to the country that is in the unconscious and that you have to break through the back door of thought to get there. When I read that sentence, I thought: yes! That’s what I’m trying to do with writing every time and there is something about the oneiric and allowing that dream space that helps me get through that back door of thought.
I think it was enriching for me to be exposed to the Kafka story at the same time, because in “The Burrow” the creature is completely alone and must master the labyrinth and then he senses another presence and that other presence becomes an enemy. But at the same time, there is a lot of ambiguity because it’s the enemy but it’s also a mind that thinks the same way as his mind. It has the same strategy and approach. It’s also a story about survival and territory. But with The Narrator and The Driver, at the beginning they are allies, but then we go through a phase where we think they could be enemies. But, they are so close in so many ways, almost like they could be two aspects of the same psyche. Also, I was thinking about Montaigne’s essay on solitude where you can fail in solitude in the same way as you can fail in company. You can be a bad companion to yourself. This idea of practicing solitude. So—like with The Narrator and The Driver, when we are in situations of survival or crisis—first we fail to be alone with ourselves, and then by extent we fail to be present for another person.
Hattman
I’m glad you mentioned failure and ways we might fail at solitude and how sometimes we fail when being in company with others. The thing about failure that I love, though, is that we learn so much in the attempt.
Yes, and with The Narrator and The Driver, the bond is stronger once they’ve gone through these layers of fear.
I think that’s true that they learn from each other and that does come into full bloom in the end, in part because of how they fail each other. They learn what they can hold and what they need to let go. And the deep appreciation of just being in the company of another caring person who is trying their best. And also what they are able to do for one another in those moments. That there are certain things that they can’t help each other with, that they can’t hold. Lamellae can’t always be there for Tortula.
Also, before we end, I wrote down for us to return to moss. I have this book from the seventeenth century—it was David’s at the time when he was studying naturopathy—and it’s a bit like a dictionary. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, by Nicholas Culpeper. It provides a description of a plant, where you can find it, and it also gives you the planets it’s connected to and why you would use it for medicine. So, with moss, it’s connected to Saturn and here’s the description: “This grows in barren ground, and at the roots of trees. It spreads on the ground with numerous slender flagella. Having small triangular leaves set close to the stalks, among which spring reddish stalks an inch long, almost as fine as hairs, bearing on the tops little hollow dusty cups of a whitish color.” So, I was thinking about this and our discussion about the healing properties of moss and this idea of being part woman, part moss. I like this idea of the connection between planets, plants, and absorbing the plant and healing. Right now I’ve been using rosemary, because I have it in my garden. It’s a solar plant, that is supposed to help with memory. So, I was thinking about this with altars, and I wondered what altar Tortula might make for herself.
Hm. I love that idea. Yeah, I think items on her altar would be a lot of what is populating Sift. So probably a stone. A dandelion that’s gone to seed. Moss, a snail shell.
Bonvalet
Maybe a bowl of the river water as well? Maybe some sand? There is a beautiful scene where the pattern of the sand is described.
Hattman
Yes, definitely. That scene in the desert—where Tortula makes a home for herself in her mind—she goes into a greenhouse. I think that space is populated with things that comfort her. So there is a stone with moss on it and lots of windows and it’s warm and damp and there is a lizard there as well. This is kind of like an altar she makes in her mind.
Bonvalet
I like this idea of a book in itself being an altar. Or like a space of protection.
Hattman
This was something I talked about with Anne, actually. Creating a safe haven within the text. A place that one of the characters or the book itself might need. This also echoes some of what Cixous says at the end of Three Steps in “The School of Roots” section. She says, “The journey is spiritual because it is not enough to put one’s foot on the ground to come back to earth. It is an extremely difficult spiritual exercise, reintegrating the earthly, the earth, and the earth’s composition in one’s body, imagination, and thought.” I had the feeling, when writing Sift, and really listening to the voice of Tortula that emerged, that I was writing a type of prayer. It had a reverent, incantatory feel—the repetitions, the loops. It is a spiritual experience, returning to the earth, and so much of Sift is about the demise of humanity, but there is still new life that comes. Through the roots, there is a flowering. You know, I’m thinking about your story “Plants Dream,” and that story goes through all of Cixous’s schools—there’s so much about death and dreams and roots in that very short piece.
Bonvalet
One moment. I want to show you something. So I’m not sure if I ever told you the origin story of “Plants Dream,” but originally the text came from just staying with this image [holds up a postcard of Ana Mendieta’s photo Imágen de Yágul]. So this was another exercise in Leni Zumas’s constraints class. I had just received this postcard because there was some kind of retrospective of Mendieta’s work in Paris. It was from 1973. It was great being inside. You know, it’s this idea of going inside a territory where you’re going to feel safe or guided.
Hattman
Hm. I also find the ekphrastic form comforting. When you have an image to guide you . . . is that what you mean?
Bonvalet
Yes. It’s also about projecting, journeying inside the image, or where you project yourself inside. And I also think about being exposed to an image at a specific moment when you are capable of seeing it. This happens with books, too.
Hattman
I think that is also interesting, what stays. Sometimes, I read a book and I love it, but then years go by and I’ve forgotten it completely. Why is that? Maybe it’s just my memory. The books I return to are mysterious. They aren’t always the books that helped me to understand love or grief, but the books that made me feel something sharply that I struggle to put into words. They are books that resist interpretation.
Bonvalet
Yeah, but some books early on really structure how we read the world, for better or for worse. There are some books that I still try to distance myself from. Even books I love. You know, becoming aware at a later age that I was doing this type of mental gymnastics when I was reading texts that were written from a man’s perspective. I would go back and forth between projecting myself into the man’s psyche and trying to project myself into a woman character and completely failing to inhabit that character. I felt like one of those creatures that choose their houses. In French they are called bernard-l’ermite.
Hattman
Oh, hermit crab.
Bonvalet
Yeah. Like a hermit crab who cannot fit inside their new house. I was trying to fit inside these books and it would never work, but I never questioned that there might be something wrong with the book. There was just this discomfort that I needed to fix.
Hattman
Right, right. That is damaging. I give this assignment, in one of the college composition classes I teach, to write a literacy narrative. Any significant story about your relationship with reading or writing or language. And I always emphasize that it doesn’t have to be a positive experience. It kind-of goes back to our conversation about failure. It doesn’t have to be this positive lesson. It can be—like what you described—the mental gymnastics of trying to project yourself into a character and a life and failing. There are so many of those stories. So many people who have just decided that novels aren’t for them. That poetry isn’t for them. And of course it’s not just the text, it’s that you are in school, and there is a teacher who is telling you what the story is about, and how to interpret the story, and that if you don’t understand then you’re a failure. I mean, it cannot be emphasized enough, how damaging this is. So, right, it’s not just about the text, it’s the curriculum and the corrupt power dynamics at play. There are many students I work with who have never considered how literature or school failed them. I mean, they may have talked to people about it, but often they haven’t reflected on it in writing.
Bonvalet
Before I forget, I wanted to ask you about the epigraph to Sift, the one from Gathering Moss.
Hattman
Bonvalet
Hattman
Bonvalet
Yes, this is actually a wonderful transition because we were just talking about learning and, in this quote from Robin Wall Kimmerer, she’s also talking about learning as being something very different than what is taught in schools. Learning through patient observation and through storytelling. I started writing about moss after moving to my new home in Oregon. There is so much moss, just outside my window. On the trees, the fences, on the roof. When I started Sift, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was starting to get to know my immediate environment better. What I love about Kimmerer’s book is that she provides so much about bryology, but told through story. I like this epigraph because it has to do with allowing the moss to tell the story and writing Sift was an exercise in slowness and patience, to just write and allow the story to surface, to trust that it will come.
Bonvalet
This is very connected to Dragonfly as well. Remember, when Dragonfly is in the immense grove and it’s part of her training as a powerful wizard. She needs to just sit in the grove and listen to the trees and the river. And, to me, it’s connected to that quote as well. This idea that you’re going to become porous to those elements and learn from them but you can’t extract or demand or uproot.
Right. You have to be open and listen. And that’s when your true name reveals itself!
Yes, but also the power of silence. The power of being still and present. It’s a beautiful lesson. And then you become moss!
Hattman
Yes! That’s right.
Bonvalet
Which is the deepest knowledge you can receive.
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