Interview with Lia Purpura

One way of sorting out the varying strands and subgenres of creative nonfiction is to think of the fourth genre as a convergence of impulses within journalism, composition/rhetoric, and creative writing that produce works of varying emphases, which nonetheless are all some mixture of the aesthetic and the actual—nonfiction as literature. Narrative approaches to nonfiction, including the often problematic novelistic approach to memoir, are sufficiently commonplace to almost automatically seem like underlying assumptions of the genre; yet, as a number of essayists keep reminding us, narrative and nonfiction are not necessarily equivalent. Essays have been showing up in a wide variety of forms in the past few decades, and essayists have been applying a host of experimental and alternative strategies to their compositions. Lyrical approaches to nonfiction earned particular attention in the first rush of enthusiasm about the genre, and as the field has expanded, a growing number of writers have been pushing at the boundaries between nonfiction and poetry in much the same way that earlier essayists blurred the distinctions between nonfiction and fiction. This can produce frustration in fans of genre definition—is this brief essay a prose poem, a poetic paragraph, or a lyric essay?—but it also offers an exciting range of possibilities for expanding the horizons of the genre in general, and in loosening genre restraints and liberating the potential of an essayist’s work.

Lia Purpura is prominent among those whose essays are most organically lyrical, perhaps not surprising considering her status as both an award-winning poet and an award-winning essayist. She is the author of three books of poetry. The Brighter the Veil (Orchises Press, 1996) won the Towson University Award in Literature; Stone Sky Lifting (Ohio State University Press, 2000) won the OSU/The Journal Award; and King Baby (Alice James Books, 2008) won the Beatrice Hawley Award. Her first book of essays, Increase (University of Georgia Press, 2000), which won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction, earned praise from several poets, Carol Muske citing its “precise, beautiful writing,” Eaven Boland calling it “a true and eloquent addition to the literature of self-knowledge,” and Stephen Dunn declaring, “I love the way her sentences move, and how they nimbly bear the weight of the complex intelligence behind them.” Her second collection, On Looking (Sarabande Books, 2006), won the Towson University Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The essayist Albert Goldbarth called her “the real deal” and praised her combination of “a cornucopaic vocabulary” and “a strict economy of expression,” and the critic Sven Birkerts wrote, “These essays, keyed to a rare precision, model the movement of the inner life, but they open in wide surprise to the sensuous outer world.” Her third and most recent collection is Rough Likeness (Sarabande, 2012). She has won Pushcart Prizes for her essays “Glaciology,” “Two Experiments and a Coda,” and “On Coming Back as a Buzzard,” and her essay “There Are Things Awry Here” will be included in Best American Essays 2011. She also translated Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash (Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1998). She lives in Baltimore with her husband, conductor Jed Gaylin, and their son, Joseph, whose birth and first year were the occasion for Increase. A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the writer-in-residence at Loyola University and also teaches in the Rainer Writing Workshop low-residency MFA Program. The interview was conducted in September 2010.

root:

When did you decide it would be a good idea to chronicle your pregnancy and your child’s first year? Do you regularly keep a journal? If so, what was the relationship of the journal to the eventual book? What in terms of writing was the starting point of Increase?

purpura:

The starting point of Increase was desperation and a sense of failure as a poet. As a newly pregnant woman (now nearly 13 years ago!) I felt a real pressure to write about that state of being, but the externally imposed subject or lens—pregnancy—was looming. And the...