Create a Memoir-in-Essays with Morgan Parker

Q&A with Morgan Parker

• Can you talk a little more about your MFA? 
• You know, when I started, I was very particular about what I wanted to get out of it. I didn’t want to put too many expectations on it. So my plan was just to, I was like, if I get two things out of it, that’s great: If I get a draft of a manuscript or, you know, almost there, you know, enough poems to create a draft. And if I get some folks who are like lifelong readers, if I get some folks who are like lifelong readers, some folks who, you know, in 20 years, I can email them and be like, “Would you look at this poem?” Those are my goals. Those are big goals. But that’s only two things, you know?  So I really went into it in a very kind of pointed, pointed way of, I know that I can’t get everything out of this, you know? It’s wild to think, like, a Masters of Fine Arts, but, you know, no one’s going to teach you how to write a poem. But it was important for me to learn how to prioritize writing and prioritize, again, living like a writer and making time for my writing. It’s something that I didn’t think that I would be able to do without the support of a program at that time. But I also don’t believe that getting an MFA is essential to becoming a writer, to publishing, any of that. But yeah, I think for me it was something that- I really needed that community support. Obviously, there’s so many other ways one could get that, but yeah, that was kind of the most important and driving reason for me to get my MFA.
•   Who are some poets that you love and recommend?
• Oh my God, I don’t even know where to start. My pals, Angel Nafis and Danez Smith are some of my favorites, Charif Shanahan, Hanif, who else is really good? Some of my, you know, poet aunts and uncles and folks that I get a lot of inspiration from: Langston Hughes, Zora also. June Jordan is maybe my all time fave, she has written poetry as well as essays. Anne Sexton, as far as white ladies go, she’s my favorite one, but I do like Plath as well. I love Frank O’Hara. I like the beats. I like Allen Ginsberg a lot. Yeah, I’m a little bit all over the place. I like to read poetry that isn’t like mine, but I also enjoy being in conversation with other poets. So that’s something that has been really fun about being friends with other poets and me being able to write in my lane and they’re able to write in their lanes and we know that together we’re kind of like building something. You know, especially with other Black poets. It’s, you know, something that we talk about as none of us have to be the one to give the whole story. But if you read all of ours, you might get a better story of, you know, contemporary Black life.
• Did you publish your essays in journals first?
• So this book I did, some of the essays were originally in magazines. A couple of them were like assignments that I did for anthologies, things like that. But part of the impetus of writing this book was wanting to get away from word counts. You know, there’s something about if I’m writing an article for—there’s an essay in here that was in an ESPN—something else that was in a couple of different online places, but they always had word counts and page counts. So for me, writing this book was the opportunity to be a little bit of a nerd, as I am, and do more research and take more time and really expand all the essays. So even the ones that I had written before I worked on the book, even the essays that came from other assignments and were previously published are very, very different now. I expanded them quite a bit. So for me, yeah, that was part of it, that I wanted the opportunity. I liked writing, writing prose, I enjoyed writing essays, I enjoyed the lyric part of it and stretching the sentence and being able to work in different genres really opened something up for me in terms of, yeah, freedom to be able to privilege the idea that I’m having rather than I have to figure out how to make this idea a poem, you know? It could be like, “Is this idea a poem or is it an essay or is it a piece of dialogue in my novel?” That really helped me. 
  
• How did you pace yourself?
• Not well, not well. I did not. I’m getting better at that. But this book took a really, really long time. And even the fact of having some of them previously published didn’t even really help because I wanted to, like, overhaul them. So it was a long process. I think I worked on this book for I mean, five years minimum. Max would be eight years, because I’ve looked back at my journals and I’ve seen inklings of this book way earlier than five years ago. So I think I have been working on it for longer than I know, you know? 
• What is the difficult part of writing essays after working in poetry?
• Yeah, I think that need to step everything out and be very specific I think because I’m talking a lot about the same things, I kind of felt like, “I already said this!” You know, like, “I put this image next to this image and that’s it, I told you.” But to kind of go back to those things and say, “All right, now let me explain what that image in that poem was.” You know, it was more of  pulling it out like taffy and really taking every idea that maybe in a poem was more of a metaphorical idea or an image and really kind of connecting all the dots. So it was a little bit laborious because I think my mind tends toward the poetic. I think all minds tend toward poetry because it’s not linear and it’s a little bit, you know, sensory overload. I think that’s a little bit more accurate to how we experience the world. So to take all of those emotions and then really try to articulate them using sentences and using more traditional techniques of an essay such as argument was a really different way of engaging with the content than presenting the images. I resisted a little bit the telling versus showing, so I had to learn what that showing would look like using the essay form. That’s a little bit of a rambly answer, but I’m still kind of learning the differences.
• How do you structure and form a narrative arc?
• Yeah, so one of the one of the original seeds of this book was an essay that I wrote for The New York Times in, like, 2014 about how we should have free therapy as reparations. And in that essay, there’s some mention of me with a particular therapist, and I wanted— as I was working on this book, that became a central argument to the book. And so it became a way of working up to that. And now pieces of that essay are throughout the book. And I always say that it’s not really a memoir of me, it’s more a memoir of my psychology and my mind. And the most “memoir-y” essays are those where I’m like, physically there, are those when I’m in a therapist office. So you get my first therapist, my college therapist, my therapist in 2014, my therapist in 2016, you know, so it becomes this— I guess that’s one of the narrative arcs there is my psychological journey and my journey with my own mental health as a mirror to our cultural journey as Americans, what has happened in that time. So it kind of becomes taking a personal and, like, a wider look of, all right, here’s me in therapy, talking to my doctor about how I just really want to get a date. But I’m also having to talk to this doctor about how many people with mental illness are being killed by police, you know? So really putting everything on the same plane and really distinguishing how my journey is.
  
  Yes, it’s separate, but it’s also not totally separate from what’s happening in the world. A big part of the original essay was just me coming to the conclusion that my mental health was related to race relations in America, which is something that I did not have a conception of when I was first diagnosed with depression and began therapy. I say in the book I thought that was the least Black thing about me, and I was into indie rock, so I really was like, “These two things are not connected.” So for me, when I started noticing now in therapy, I was able to see a lot of things that I thought were kind of just on me that were in reality white supremacy in my head and that just like really clicked a light that made me feel like there’s possibility for us as a culture to do some healing and know ourselves more and be more at ease with ourselves if we can engage with psychotherapy for that purpose, you know, so that I guess, yeah, that’s kind of that’s kind of one of the through lines in the book and the essay about having therapy as reparations is the last essay in the book. So the book then became the argument, I’m kind of like, I’m the evidence to the argument, you know. So that was a little bit of how I thought about structuring the book as you know, here’s my argument, and I’m going to use myself and my experiences as evidence as well as here are some facts about history and here are some facts about kind of cultural moments, putting all those things together as evidence for the argument, I guess. Which, to me, was a much easier way to go about it than to just be like, “Let me just talk about myself!” You know, like it’s not as easy.