Luke Rolfes: We are here today with Andrew Bertaina, a fiction writer and essayist, who is out with a new book of essays from Autofocus Books entitled The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place. In this collection, Bertaina explores fatherhood, mortality, human connection, the passage of time, and a variety of other topics in careful, lyrical prose. It’s a wonderful and immersive reading experience. Thanks for sharing some thoughts with us today, Andrew!
A couple years ago, you won the Moon City Press Fiction Prize for your book One Away From You. Tell us a little bit about how this second project came to be. Did you consciously decide to switch genres for your second book?
Andrew Bertaina: First off, thank you so much for including me in the series, Luke. I really appreciate it. It’s a wonderful thing to give back to the reading and writing community. As for the essays, I’ve actually always been writing essays. I entered my MFA program with very little experience in writing, and I immediately gravitated toward essays. I loved the way I didn’t have to solve the problem of voice or arc like I did in fiction. I could write without resolution or toward an idea, which I think I find pretty freeing.
That said, I don’t write essays as often, so I’ve always been producing more fiction than non-fiction. I finally realized I had enough for a collection about three years ago and started entering them into contests before finally ending up at Autofocus.
LR: Do you consider yourself more of a nonfiction writer who sometimes writes fiction or a fiction writer who sometimes writes essays? Or maybe you simply think of yourself as a prose writer?
AB: I think essays come more naturally to me, as I said above, but I also think fiction offers more opportunities for play and more examples. I’ve also written poems. I think of myself as a writer. But I’m probably also a writer who has always found it impossible to stick with a longer project. Thus, I just morph between whatever form is suiting me at that particular moment. For me, I’d probably stop writing if I wasn’t writing something I’m interested in. I’m not getting rich from this, so I need to be getting my pleasure somewhere.
LR: Your CNF voice is unique and lyrical. How would you describe this voice? Does it match the way you have everyday conversations? Is it your “letter writing” voice? Your meditative voice? Your thinking voice or inner monologue?
AB: Here’s a tidbit, my daughter, now thirteen, was reading the essays and said, “Dad! I didn’t realize you were this smart. How come you don’t talk to us like this all the time?” To answer her, because it would be really obnoxious to be quoting from research or Borges when your kid is asking what’s for dinner. Secondarily, I think writing is just attunement.
My CNF voice captures a portrait of myself, not the whole thing. I hope that over the course of the collection it also becomes clear that I love sports, puns, and a good laugh. I think the essays sort of highlight what my daughter said though, it’s a self I keep somewhat hidden. I was a self-conscious kid, terrifyingly so, and I sort of learned that to interact with other people some aspects of self needed to be doled out piecemeal.
The essays are a celebration of the unfettered self. But they are also what it’s like to sit with me at a bar. I love long and intense conversations that cover childhood, identity, religion, things that move us. It’s essential to who I am at my core, and I get fewer and fewer chances to have those conversations as I age, so I guess it’s time to put them all into my essays.
LR: These essays are self-aware, and you sometimes speak directly to the reader or talk explicitly about writing an essay. Put simply, sometimes these essays become about writing essays. Can you walk us through your thoughts on this “self-awareness.” What made you choose to get “meta” in some of these pieces by writing about writing?
AB: I think a lot of writing is borrowing from what we’ve seen elsewhere. I loved the self-conscious style of Geoff Dyer, Montaigne, and Zadie Smith. I think it was a real breakthrough for me when I realized that breaking the fourth wall was a great technique to break up the sort of lyric flow of some of my essays.
I actually feel like an essay starts to live and breathe when it becomes self-aware on the page. Without that, I sort of feel like the essay is missing a beating heart for the reader. I also use that voice to problematize my thinking, doubling back, which is something Montaigne did, questioning the veracity of my own story. Again, it’s just a technique, but I found it really suits my thinking.
My best friends can tell you that’s authentic! I don’t mind changing my mind over the course of a conversation or suddenly realizing what I’ve been saying is bullshit.
LR: You write a lot about trying to balance fatherhood with being a writer. Sometimes the two worlds seem like night and day. When I became a parent, people told me that life before children will feel hard to remember---almost as if it is a separate life. How do you think having children shaped and changed you as a writer? And do you think of your writing life as two separate lives, as well---one pre-children and one post-children?
AB: I think your relationship to time is radically altered by children, particularly when they are young. I think I was a more focused writer before I had kids. But I was also way less efficient! I’d get 8 hours to write, and I’d use maybe 1.5 of them. That’s actually still the case for me. I’m horrid with wasting time. However, when my kids were young, I’d only get forty-five minute scraps here and there, so I learned to write and edit quickly or I wasn’t getting anything done.
As for the writing, having children has deepened my life immeasurably. And before I set off a Twitter war, it’s also quite fine to not have children, and I’m certain all those lives are deep as well! For me, having children was intense, joyful, difficult, heart-breaking etc. My dad wasn’t around when I was a kid, so I’ve always felt a kind of responsibility to show up for things, take care of them at all meal times. At the same time, I’m pretty damn selfish about my time and kids kind of don’t give a shit about your writing life or reading, so it’s a new way of relating to the world. It’s made me less selfish.
LR: I was struck by the line, “The difference between breathing and not breathing feels so slim when children are young.” The longer that I am a parent the more I realize how clueless I was early on as a parent. I feel like parents (and their perceptions of parenthood) evolve alongside their growing children. I’m curious: How have your essays changed, if at all, as your children age? Does the passage of time feel like it gives more clarity to these moments in your life?
AB: I think it’s nice to pretend that I can look backward and glean insight that wasn’t available in the moment. It’s a technique I often teach in my courses. I’m not sure it’s true though. Most of us change so much that I think we just reshape the past to the needs of the present. It doesn’t mean it’s not a neat trick to pull in an essay, but I have my doubts about its veracity, which I try to foreground in my essays.
My kids appear way less in my essays these days. Those early days are so physical, so involved, that it felt impossible not to write about them, to wrestle with this invasion on selfhood. But now that they’ve gotten a bit older the necessity doesn’t feel as great, and they are becoming their own autonomous selves that I don’t want to interfere with or construct on the page.
LR: The book is broken into three sections. Section 2 is presented as “after Montaigne.” Can you tell us a little about this section and the influence of Montaigne on it?
AB: In a basic way, he just felt like writing essays on things. "Of Cannibals," and then he also feels fine just completely departing from his intended topic and going on a ramble. Isn’t that what our minds do anyway? Isn’t that what a great conversation with a friend feels like? I want to mimic that in the essays and Montaigne is just such an incredible model of not giving two shits about your title but letting the mind unfurl.
LR: Let’s look at a couple pieces. One of my favorites in here is “Home Burial.” In this essay you ruminate on how other people and cultures have taken care of bodies that have passed on. You contemplate what it means to die and be gone, but also how you try to explain this concept to your own kids. In this essay, there is a scene between you and your daughter: “In the car, while my daughter spoke calmly about where she’d like her ashes spread, I wanted to cry. She is so new to this bright and terrible world.” This conversation/feeling is quite familiar to me. (It’s probably one that all parents share.) I’ve heard that parenting is, in some ways, like re-living your own life through a different perspective. Is the thing that makes it tough the worry that our children will experience the existential dread that we face, or is it also in some way a mourning of our own lost innocence?
AB: I think almost every parent I’ve talked to has a period of time when their kiddo goes through some deep existential dread. It’s obviously a developmental milestone or we wouldn’t all have these stories. I think a lot of parenting is worrying over our own pasts, perhaps missing the present in the process. Like, I really hated how shy I was, so I’ve encouraged my kids to be more outgoing, to push themselves etc. It’s like I want to save them from things I hated about myself or my childhood, but I’m sure I’m overlooking other things in their lives. Parenting is such bullshit because we are all just winging it no matter how many books we’ve read.
And so much of parenting isn’t just mourning the lost innocence, but it’s becoming acutely aware of the passage of time. Every time I see a picture of my children when they were very young I feel overwhelmed with it. I, in annoying fashion, say I wish they were babies again and that I could hold them. My heart swells. At the same time, I already mourn the time when they’ll be out of the house. But when they’re in the house, sometimes I wish they’d leave me alone. It’s all absurd. I hope you have it figured out more than I have.
LR: I know exactly what you mean. But I have no answers! Let's take a look at another one. The theme of time is most explicitly explored in the essay “Time Passes: On Unfinished Things.” The essay jumps from basketball to singing spiders to the Bible, and a hundred things in between. In the end, you wish you could compress time---that you could have more of it, perhaps---or that time didn’t matter, and things could all be present on the same plane. Another essay later in the book, “This Essay is about Everything,” argues that essays simply can’t be about one thing. To my reading, both essays seem to worry about how myopic we’ve become as people---how we don’t see things in larger contexts because the immediate space before us is so captivating. If you would, tell us a little about these two pieces. Do you see these essays as similar, companion essays?
AB: I think both essays are my sort of argument against what I see as a reductive way of thinking about essay writing. I think the traditional model is really restrictive. It tells people they can only write about that one hard summer or bad parent or bad thing that happened to them. They are supposed to evoke scenes, use dialogue, reflect etc. All fine. Whatever. My argument is that it doesn't come close to capturing what it feels like to be in our brains, to be a conscious living and thoughtful or sex-crazed or whatever human being. I like it when an essay begins to overflow with self, not to cordon it off into a tight parameter of things that happened to you that are bad. It’s poor pedagogy, and it doesn’t actually make for essays that excite me. I want to see/feel a mind moving across the page. I think it's really wonderful to write personal essays, attach significance to our lives and reflect, but I think it can be a restrictive way of thinking about essay writing because it can really narrow the idea of what an essay or collection can be. I think essays might proliferate a bit more if we taught them more effectively. Anyhow, that’s a long and somewhat crotchety answer as to why I write essays like I do, but I stand by it.
LR: Was one of these essays harder to write than the others? Was one the easiest?
AB: I think the essay, "On Trains," probably took the longest to write. But I might have just forgotten about it for a couple of years. I don’t think I was laboring over it. I draft a bit more quickly than most other writers I know. I think my mind works very quickly, and it’s actually better to capture something of that quicksilver nature as opposed to laboring over the right word. I’d probably get the word wrong anyway and lose the flow of thought in the process.
As for easiest, I’d say the essay, “On Showering and Mortality.” It’s under 1,000 words, and I wrote a pretty complete draft in one sitting, so it didn’t take me all that long to draft it.
To answer the question another way, "This Essay Is About Everything" was definitely the hardest because my life was so chaotic when I was writing it, which sort of bleeds through into the essay. The essay is chaotic as was my life, and I wanted to capture the feeling of my life at that particular moment in the essay.
LR: What direction will you head next? Fiction or nonfiction? Do you have any new projects in mind?
AB: I am working on edits for two longer projects, one CNF and one short-stories. I’ll probably always be working in both genres and writing the occasional poem. I wrote a short novel, I refuse to call it a novella, that blends together some of the fiction and non-fiction in a satisfying way. I think it’s maybe my favorite thing I’ve written, so I’d kind of like to try and capture that voice again and see where it takes me. Hopefully to an agent who loves my writing :)
LR: Congrats on your recent success, Andrew. The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place is a beautiful book. Check out the links below for more info: