Gina Nutt: On Horror Movies, Ideas That Emerge in Revision and Her Essay Collection, "Night Rooms"
Gina Nutt’s debut collection of essays, Night Rooms, is a beautiful, experimental piece that takes the reader in and out of different rooms as we experience the author’s understanding of childhood, family, relationships, and friends. Blended together with an exploration of horror movies snd pop culture, unpacking how these impact and influence us, this collection is both engaging and dreamy, powerful and bold.
I spoke with Gina Nutt about Night Rooms, why we love horror movies, and unexpected ideas that emerge in revisions.
I’d love to know what sparked the idea to create an entire essay collection that intertwined horror movie tropes into your own life experiences?
Following a death in my family I was writing about loss and grief, thinking a lot about death, so those feelings carried into the earliest essay I wrote. As I began sending out that essay, I was still writing toward the initial premise weaving horror movies and experiences from my life, so I stayed with the idea and it grew from there.
Why do you think people are drawn to the horror genre?
A few possibilities come to mind—horror holds up a frightening mirror to real life, speaks to our anxieties and fear, manifests fear in a contained and safe environment for audiences, conjures a sense of community. All these suggestions seem valid and true to me. The range excites me, the many things the genre can mean to audiences, as well as the ways horror continues to evolve.
You write about writing your own self back from the dead and how “survival is attached to telling.” I also love the line, “I am making a lineage of what lingers. I am trying not to be afraid anymore.” Can you speak a little more about this and what writing this collection has done for you?
Writing this collection was a study in steering beyond an initial idea, in this case, weaving personal experiences and horror films. I learned to feel comfortable letting a draft rest before coming back to it. Both lines you mention emerged after many revisions, time away from the book, reading, and conversations with other writers. Whenever I took this approach, I found myself more willing to push toward ideas that weren’t apparent in earlier drafts. After writing, “I am making a lineage of what lingers,” that line seemed like instructions for myself as I revised and rewrote parts of the book. I thought more deeply about how much information I wanted to share directly and how much I wanted to imply. Revising some essays taught me how I might rework others, so the process involved a lot of circularity.
Since your essays are described as experimental or perhaps non-traditional, I’d love to know what your process looks like for writing them. What does your routine look like for writing an essay? Also, do you have a daily writing practice?
Most my work begins the same way, an image, memory, idea, feeling, or atmosphere steers the earliest writing. The container—essay, poem, or story—emerges as I work. I write every morning, longhand at first, then move onto whatever larger something I’m working on at the moment. Sometimes that’s a computer file or printed draft. Other times, my process is more hands-on, cutting up a draft (by paragraphs, sentences, or lines) and rearranging order is one of my favorite revision strategies.
How do you think your work as a poet has influenced your nonfiction work?
Writing poetry nourished my associative thinking and lyric tendencies. Nonfiction writing can make associative leaps and have strong lyrical pull though, so I hesitate to exclusively connect those qualities to poetry. Structure also spills between poetry and nonfiction for me. Writing poems, and revising them, I go back and forth between prose and breaking the lines. Thinking of these essays as accumulating prose poems helped me push through early drafts, and also guided revision. I liked the idea of some paragraphs feeling like full contained worlds, like they could be their own small things. Organizing poetry collections also influenced how I worked to shape the collection.
What are some of your favorite horror movies? How about a top 3?
Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, and David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows.
What was the last book you read that you would like to recommend?
I recently read and loved Festival Days by Jo Ann Beard.
Gina Nutt is the author of the poetry collection Wilderness Champion. She earned her MFA from Syracuse University. Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Joyland, Ninth Letter, and other publications.
