Heather Christle: On Poetry, Prose and Vulnerability in Her Latest Work, "The Crying Book"
Heather Christle’s first work of non-fiction, The Crying Book, is a lyrical, poetic and research-intensive exploration of the basic yet phenomenon of crying. She observes the cause and use of tears we shed and weaves it together with her personal experiences with grief and new motherhood, among sociology and science. Her magnetic prose makes us think about the power of tears, where they come from, why they happen and why they matter.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Heather over the phone where we had a lovely conversation discussing the vulnerability of transitioning into new genres, being surprised by our own work, writing poetry and creating the structure of The Crying Book.
Kailey Brennan: I would love to know what inspired The Crying Book and when you knew that that idea was one worth pursuing.
Heather Christle: I talk about this a little bit in an author's note at the start of the book. The first seed of this project was this idea of what would it be like if I had a map of every place I'd ever cried. It's actually a terrible idea and it wouldn't reveal anything interesting at all. It would just show every place that I had lived or spent time in. But what it did is that it let me begin these conversations with friends where we would talk through this idea and they would tell me about some of the interesting places where they had cried and their own sort of experiences with tears. It made me realize that there was some kind of chemistry here, between the subject and myself and being in conversation with people.
So one morning, the way that one does, I started writing. I write every day and I thought I was just writing probably a prose poem or just some notes of some kind. Then I realized that I had more that I was curious about it. I began to do a little bit of research and then I thought, Oh, this is probably an essay. The research kept getting richer and deeper and stranger and I started to find these unexpected recurrences of things like elephants and gravity. And then I realized that this was going to be a book.
KB: I was really interested in how you structured the book. I really enjoyed it as a reader, which lead me to wonder about your research. Were you writing and researching at the same time?
HC: This is the way that I work in my poems as well. I don't want to know where things are going before I go there. I'm curious when I'm writing a poem about where the syntax is going to take me or where an image is going to take me. And in the case of this book, I was curious about where the research was going to take me. So I would read a bit and make note of the images that were surfacing. I would hold them in my mind and when I wrote, I would include some of those images. And then I would go back to researching perhaps from a different angle, but holding those kind of glimmering things in my brain so that when they resurfaced again in another context, I was able to incorporate them into the book as well.
So crying, obviously, is a through-line to the whole project, but then there are these other sort of sub-threads that emerge as well. I think that was very much because of the act of moving back and forth between the spaces of writing and researching and then of course of living one's life. And that's another through-line through the book— the chronology of the time of losing my friends Bill, becoming pregnant and then moving through early motherhood.
KB: Do you feel like motherhood has changed you as a person. Or made a real impact on you as a writer?
HC: At a very practical level, it shifted my schedule for writing. For years and years and years since I was probably 20 or so I wrote every day and at a very specific time of day. I would wake up every morning and drink a lot of coffee and write a poem every day. And that wasn’t possible for me, with a newborn who had sleep patterns that meant there was no morning. (Laughs) All of time blurred together. So yeah, on a practical, material level that shifted things. I don't know that it affected my philosophy of writing. But it certainly provided some content for The Crying Book.
KB: Did you feel vulnerable at all writing this book? Do you think that people are uncomfortable talking about sadness?
HC: I was comfortable talking about sadness. I felt more personally vulnerable in some other moments of the book where the crying stems from something beyond sadness. I felt vulnerable as a poet entering the world of prose. I felt unsure of whether libraries were going to let me into their archives. I was not accustomed to inhabiting those spaces. So there was a lot about the book that was new and uncomfortable and strange. But that's often what I seek out in writing.
KB: Are you drawn to more melancholy literature?
HC: No. (Laughs) I sometimes worry that the book will be seen or expected to be sort of unmitigated celebration of sorrow, especially before it is read. And it really isn't. It's something else. I want to be able to talk about crying with neither pride nor shame, so that we can look through the tears, at all of the other things that are happening around them. The way that they get read in the world, the things that they make happen or stop from happening in the world, the way that they reveal how power operates in the world. I think that there is a great deal of literature that inhabits melancholy moods and does it beautifully, but I'm also a great fan of joy and writing around joy.
KB: Have you always been a writer? Could you speak a little bit about your writing journey thus far?
HC: Yes, I have. And I was even writing poetry from a very young age. Which was very bad poetry. I know plenty of children who are capable of writing immensely strange and exciting work and I was not one of them. But I've always loved writing and I think maybe more significantly, I've always loved reading. Books have always been at the center of my life. So I think that I made a sort of transition when I was in college and in some creative writing courses that helped me understand that my disdain for contemporary literature was ill-informed and that there is a great deal of work out there that I could connect with and be excited by.
KB: Like you said this was kind of new territory for you, publishing this book of prose. Do you think that you'll go back to writing more poetry? Do you have a new project in mind?
HC: Yes to both. There was a time when I finished a draft of this book and was just so ready to not think about it for a good long stretch. So for a couple of months, I went back to just writing poetry, which I hadn't been able to do while I was working on The Crying Book. I was so nervous that poetry would be mad at me and wouldn't want to hang out anymore. But it came back very quickly and I was very grateful for that. I had a great flood of writing poems for a while and now they're coming a little less regularly, but they're still happening. It’s been very busy with being with this book in the world and so there hasn't been much time for writing much of anything. But yes, poems are with me still and I'm glad for that and I imagine that I will be starting to assemble a new collection at some point soon.
I'm also working on a new nonfiction based prose project around Kew gardens, which is the Royal Botanical Gardens, just outside London. My mother grew up next to there. Virginia Woolf lived near there and wrote her a short story, Kew Garden set there and many other scenes in her books that are set there. It was also a hub of the British Empire. And so it has these gorgeous gardens that also have a very violent history in many cases of how they arrived in this place. That's just touching on a few of the main threads of what this project will be. As you can imagine having read The Crying Book, it will go in many, many directions.
KB: Well that’s exciting. As you said before, not knowing where the research or writing will take you.
HC: I love that feeling. Also, you don't know, so it could be disastrous, but I'm okay with that risk. Already the conversations that I have when I speak with people about this project feel incredibly rich and full of so many possibilities. Thinking about indigeneity and borders—there are so many things to think about, right?
KB: How have the conversations at readings been on your book tour?
HC: It's been wild. I'm so accustomed to moving through the world with a book of poems, which causes different conversations to happen. I'm not used to having so many content-driven conversations. I've felt immensely grateful that I've had the opportunity to go and be with the book in the world, in person with people. People have shared many moments of their own vulnerability. They have laughed as I've read and I've been so grateful for that—that people have been able to be with the moments where the absurdity of things is present or the humor because you can't read a book about crying without having moments of humor. They're really necessary. So yeah, it's been a wild thing. The book has been within for so long or circulated amongst a small group of people, and to have it, at last, fully in the world feels exciting and strange and a little unnerving.
KB: As a poet and then moving into the newer space of nonfiction, do you have any advice for writers who want to try something new, or any advice that has helped you that you can share?
HC: For me, it was helpful to know that I was in the process of learning something and that I could feel grateful for the gradual strengthening of my ability as I worked. But then also to know that whatever genre you're coming from, they matter in the new frame that you're in. That may be that you end up having particular strengths that someone has begun in that genre does not necessarily have access to. So trust your instincts on some of those fronts, so as not to feel that you're an utter newcomer to all of writing. To know that what you already know will transition and make something beautiful happen in this new space. Or to hope for it anyway.
KB: That question was a little selfish on my part. (Laughs) I went to school for fiction and now I’m more interested in the personal essay and memoir genre and I want to explore that. As you just said, feeling like a newcomer can feel intimidating.
HC: But you're not. You have all of this training and knowledge and reading. That’s the other part, I think, that it matters —which genre you are moving from into. It's easier to encounter nonfiction and fiction in the world than it is to encounter poetry. People usually have a stronger kind of foundation in it. And so even poets have access to a pretty broad set of readings in fiction and nonfiction. If you're moving into poetry, then my first set of advice is read as widely as you possibly can. And that's true for anything. But I think especially if you're moving into poetry because the world does not always easily provide it.
Heather Christle is author of the poetry collections The Difficult Farm (2009); The Trees The Trees (2011), which won the Believer Poetry Award; What Is Amazing (2012); and Heliopause (2015). Her first work of nonfiction, The Crying Book, will be out in November 2019. A former creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University, Christle’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, and many other journals. She was born in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and earned a BA from Tufts University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has taught at Wittenberg University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Guelph, and other institutions. She lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
