Nicole McCarthy: On Summoning Craft and Taking Risks
“Has a moment ever haunted you?”
With broken prose overlaid upon architectural blueprints, text layered on top of text in restless echo, McCarthy’s visually striking debut, A Summoning, excavates the space and time of memory- singular fragments pieced together in an attempt to trace its universal structure or foundation, while reliving and changing them every time they are recalled. Between pieces of pragmatic research and incandescent rumination, McCarthy blurs the lines between nonfiction and fiction, grabbing at versions of the truth, bleeding text into image as she attempts to discern what is actually tangible and real. She asks, “Can we exorcize a memory?” From this, can we purge our trauma and heal from it? It is through unrelenting self-interrogation, literally questioning herself with each recollection, that memory gets deconstructed, repurposed, and manipulated, taking the reader on an archaeological dig through memories, sifting through fragments of loss, pain, regret, and love that could reveal the whole picture.
I have gotten to know Nicole McCarthy over the last few years, piece by piece, in the poetry and experimental activations and readings that she has performed in the Tacoma and Seattle areas. We connected over the common space of nonfiction in graduate school. I have always enjoyed seeing where her craft takes her, and that she commits herself fully to her craft, even if it tests her comfort zone. With her experimental background and body of work, she continues to push boundaries in any form that her work takes— poetry, visual art, micro essay, and novella.
We met for coffee at a cafe that she used to frequent when she lived in the neighborhood. As it has been about a year since coffee shops reopened (post-pandemic-shutdown), we met for coffee in person, cherishing the tangible space of sitting down at a table, holding hot cups of coffee, catching up on life, and contributing to the collective low hum of conversational coffeehouse chatter (not found on Zoom) that I so missed between March 2020-Apr 2022.
Liezel Moraleja Hackett: What I love about this book is that it has a mix of prose and poetry, non-fiction, and beautiful visual work. How do bookstores classify your work? How do you classify your work?
Nicole McCarthy: What's funny is I don't know. I've gone into bookstores looking for it and I'm like, ‘What section is it going to be in?’ I look at it as a non-fiction experimental collection, but the great thing is that there is that blend between what could look like poetry, what could look like non-fiction— more essay or micro essay forms— and then you have the visuals mixed in that changes the shape of the book as well. It is just meant to be this fluid body of work that you move through and kind of receive without really being too concerned about what it is.
LMH: I've experienced a lot of your work live. Some of these pieces were introduced to me as a performative piece at readings. Was it challenging to translate your experimental work into a traditional form or book?
NM: I always knew it was going to be a book and I knew that the visuals within the book would easily be incorporated into the body of work. My grand plan was to have video essays or video poems paired with it, which I did with this one. On my website, I created a video essay that opens the book where I'm summoning the Greek goddess, Mnemosyne, whom people often channeled to access their histories through a process of summoning. My hope is that in the future, my next non-fiction collection will have video essays interspersed and maybe in the print version I can have some kind of a QR code that accesses that particular essay at the time; then there could be a digital version where the reader is just flowing through the book and then it links to a video.
LMH: I love your constant connection to a reader or the audience.
NM: This work wouldn't exist without its readers. For me in my work, the most important thing is the relationship with the reader and having this encounter so that we can share this kind of condensed experience together.
LMH: How did this project begin?
NM: I started working on some pieces in my first year of grad school around memories connected to my family. I was eager to get started. I had a one-on-one sit down with Rebecca Brown, one of our brilliant teachers, and I was telling her what I was thinking and she gave me the best advice: Just chill out. She said that I don't need to be worrying about my thesis project right now. Just play around with the genres and have a good time— ‘It'll come to you,’— and that's exactly what happened.
In my second year, I started playing around with these blueprint memories. So much of our memories are rooted in place and rooted in our homes, and it just kind of built itself from there. It was also the same year my grandma was going through Alzheimer's and Dementia, and I was supposed to be moving. My sense of self was shifting, and it really made me question often: What happens to our memories? What happens if there are places that we must give up that hold so many of our memories? What's the process like of rebuilding these elsewhere? With these questions and everything else happening in my life at that time, I would just start writing, which became this conceptual project. I had sticky notes everywhere of little passages that I wanted to write, and at the core of it was just really wanting to rewrite some of these awful memories from my life. A flurry of ideas that somehow got contained in this little book.
LMH: How did you know when this project was done?
NM: Honestly, I feel like I probably could have kept adding pieces on for this one in particular, just on and on forever. I really could have kept going. It’s cyclical, much like memories and our lives. By the time I was done with grad school, I was already on a fourth draft of the book. I took six months off from it, came back to it, and still felt like it wasn’t finished. So, I just sat on it a little bit longer. I wasn't sure what I was missing. Then my grandma died and I created more pieces from there. It was just a process where I felt like it was at a point where it had said what it needed to say. However, maybe fifteen years from now, I’d love to add on a whole addendum about my particular experience reading this book, doing many readings, being in dialogue with this book about the experience of sharing these memories, and seeing if that concept of rewriting memories is really working.
LMH: So amazing. Do you have a creative space or routine?
NM: My creative routine is not very disciplined, but I'm working on it. It's usually on Saturdays or Friday nights. I'll just drink a whole lot of coffee and I'll work from 6:00 PM until 12:30 AM. I'm definitely an evening writer. If I try to do it in the morning, my brain is like, ‘Why are we doing this?’ I have to ease into the day. I need experiences throughout the day— then I have that evening coffee and that's when it hits.
In terms of writing spaces, it is everywhere. I have a couple of coffee shops that I really love going to. A Summoning was almost entirely written in a coffee shop in Maple Valley. They would be open until 11 o'clock at night and they knew to leave me alone because I was in the corner just writing and they would just bring me water every hour or something— always making sure I was okay or didn't need anything else. They took care of me. They gave me a protected space.
Sometimes I'll go out to specific locations (from my past). I had a lot of memories in this book that are rooted here in Washington State, so I would actually go to the locations of where the memories were and I’d just sit and journal.
LMH: What do you need in that writing space outside of your laptop/pen/notebook?
NM: Coffee. Always. That's it. Just coffee. I've also now noticed that I usually have a particular soundtrack that I've put together for whatever project I'm working on. I had a lot of songs from my teenage years and songs from the last couple of years that inspired A Summoning. When I started working on my nonfiction collection, it was a lot of love songs and a lot of anti-love songs. Same with my horror novel— I have a very particular playlist. Sometimes I will just play certain videos over and over again. As I've been finishing up with it, I actually have to start every single writing session listening to Rihanna's “Bitch, better have my money,” or else I can't write! Each project I'm working on has its own ritual.
LMH: What is among the best advice you've received as a writer?
NM: The best advice I've ever received is from my poetry mentor, Ever Jones. For a while, I’d feel guilty if I wasn't writing every day. There's this weird rumor that all of us writers write every single day, and if you don't, then you're an unsuccessful writer, which is Bullshit. I would feel like I’ve internalized that guilt for not writing every day, and Ever told me many years ago: Don't feel bad about not writing every day. Every day that you're out in the world, you're cultivating experiences, and those experiences could ultimately turn into something— and it’s true! From poems or micro essays— every moment can turn into something. It has helped to remind me that I'm a writer and that I don't need to do it every day.
LMH: You’ve mentioned other projects— your next non-fiction collection, and you're currently working on a horror novel. How do you manage your focus or handle all these great ideas?
NM: I started working on my second non-fiction collection before A Summoning was even signed with the publisher because in the summer of 2017, I was going through a divorce. I was writing so much about it and was fascinated with not only the legal process of getting divorced, but the shame and guilt side of it from a societal perspective, so I was writing a lot and doing a lot of research. Then I got an Artist Trust grant, which helped me continue to write on it and do an experimental performance in the city— I threw a divorce party! I booked a venue and shared some of the work from this collection. It was really cathartic and it showed me that I should keep going with it. Many people came up to me afterwards and also reached out over the next couple of months to share what it meant to them and their own experiences with divorce; their own experiences with weddings. I felt like I was connecting with even more people than I was with the material I had read, so I was working on that, and I had every intention to finish it.
Then the pandemic hit, and I just hit a point where I just needed to take a break from writing, like self-reflection and writing about myself. Early in quarantine, all of us were thinking, ‘What the fuck are we gonna do?’ ‘This is a really depressing time,’ ‘This is a scary time.’ I just wanted to write something fun. I had been getting into horror for a while and I wanted to write a world where I had control since we didn't have any in the pandemic. It was a genre that I don’t really write, so I went into it thinking it’s just going to be fun and nobody's going to see it. But I'm playing around with a genre in a space that was inspired by all the research I had done for the non-fiction collection about ancient Roman wedding traditions— like bridesmaid dresses and walking a lady down the aisle and all these different things. Everything was to ward off these evil spirits that wanted to take the bride, and I just became obsessed with this very specific myth into our traditions. I flew through (writing) this little novel and I've just reached first draft recently and it became a project that really sustained me through the pandemic and fed me creatively, which I think I really needed in that space.
LMH: How would you define success?
NM: For me, I think that if I can just connect with people over what I'm writing, then I feel like it's a success. I've had people come up to me after readings or message me after they've read the book and say things like, ‘I could see myself as this reader/this narrator,’ or, ‘I've been through experiences like this.’ Just that they’re wanting to connect and share, I think is a success for me. Forming those connections and making people feel like they have somebody who has also been there and in this unofficial community with you.
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Nicole McCarthy is an experimental writer and artist based outside of Tacoma, WA. Her work has appeared in [PANK], The Offing, Redivider, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, a Best American Experimental Writing anthology, and others. A Summoning is her first nonfiction collection, published by Heavy Feather Review. Find more of her work at nicolemccarthypoet.com
