by Kadattír

Barrie Jean Borich is one of an array of writers who crested out of the realm of poetry in the late 1980s into a genre that has evolved since into Creative Nonfiction, or Literary Nonfiction. Reading her work, the lyrical quality of Borich's sentences clearly brook poetry while experimentally summon novel approaches to essay and memoir.

She has numerous essays published of late which encompass her fascination with personal geography and landscape: in Ecotone, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, South Loop Review, Seneca Review, and Hotel Amerika. She also has a new book coming out next year entitled Body Geographic. She won the Stonewall Book Award in 2000 for My Lesbian Husband: Landscapes of a Marriage. In 2010 she was awarded the Crab Orchard Review Literary nonfiction prize, and the Editor's prize in the Essay in Florida Review. Her first volume of CNF, Restoring the Color of Roses, came out in 1993.

Aside from writing, Barrie is a formidable pedagogue at Hamline University's MFA/BFA Program in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she is the nonfiction editor for Water~Stone Review.

SLEET: With your roots in poetry, I am wondering who you reach to for comfort, for inspiration and how do you see poetry influencing your present writing?

BARRIE JEAN BORICH: I tend to read poetry these days as it comes to me, rather than deliberately. For instance, I've been working recently with a group of women writers nationally. We're an organization called VIDA, (vidaweb.org) seeking to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas, founded by a couple of poets, Cate Marvin and Erin Beliu; these, along with Ann Townsend and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, are a few poets I've read recently. Otherwise, I tend to relate to writers who excavate history in their work — Natasha Trethewey for instance.

Last year, when I was working on a series of lyric essays called Apocalypse, Darling, about the industrial wasteland on the south side of Chicago, near where I grew up, I spent a fair amount of concentrated time on Eliot's The Waste Land. I walked around listening to the poem read over and over again on my iPod, so I had T.S. Eliot's voice in my ears as I was walking my dogs around the city.

I know that a lot of writers talk about reading certain artists over and over for sustenance; I tend to read out of curiosity and in terms of what I'm thinking about at the time. I read a lot of geographers; lately I've been reading lots of urban planners, articles about cities and architecture and space.

Sleet: Yet the lyrical quality is evident in your writing. Every sentence, every paragraph is peppered with the lyricism I attribute to poets. Do you still write poetry?

BJB: Only in so far as I may be thinking of prose as a kind of poetry.

Sleet: Who were some of your early discoveries in creative nonfiction and how did you evolve in this genre?

BJB: Probably one of the first pieces that really caught my attention in terms of what was possible was Annie Dillard's essay, “Expedition to the Pole,” from her book Teaching a Stone to Talk. It's a segmented piece about Arctic explorers and finding her own spiritual path that laced together divergent story, research, and lyric interests. It was the first essay that made me rear me back and think, “oh – so this is what you can do.”

Annie Dillard herself has said what she loves most about this form (and sometimes she calls it an essay, sometimes she calls it memoir, sometimes she calls it literary nonfiction prose) is that you can include anything, from the lyric line to discursive thinking. There's room for all of that.

Sleet: Who else sticks out in your mind as early influences?

BJB: Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Michael Ondaatje (Running in the Family), Scott Russell Sanders, Gretel Ehrlich, Maxine Hong Kingston, Audre Lorde (Zami – her only narrative prose work), Gloria Anzaldua. Albert Goldbarth's essay, “After Yitzl,” had a big impact on me — his mingling of history and imagination and memory and quest for identity and place. Bernard Cooper was (and is) a revelation to me. Also John Edgar Wideman, his experimentation and ability to shift between modes and voices; the various voices of his own experience, as a kid growing up on the streets of Homewood in Pittsburgh to the Rhodes Scholar who studied the history of the novel — all those voices are present in his work.

Sleet: As a professor at Hamline University you are renowned as a wealth of knowledge and known to push your students to experiment and take risks to see how far they can stretch their own limits as writers. I am wondering how working with students affects your writing life: does it compete, augment, cause you anxiety?

BJB: Yes. (laughs) The thing about teaching is it's very compatible to writing if you're the kind of person who doesn't move well between the life realms — and I never have. I am not the kind of person who could work at a bank all day, come home, and switch out and be an artist. I have friends who do and I really envy them because I think that it's probably a superior way to live in terms of keeping the writing about the writing but I've never been able to move across lines that way.

Some amount of teaching can be immensely inspiring — helping me remember the spark. The commercial aspects of writing which are pretty debilitating and don't have much to do with the kinds of things that are talked about in the classroom: at least the kinds of things I talk about in the MFA classroom – experiment and lyric structure and deep subject – the kinds of things that are sellable in a world that most often rewards a straight ahead, uncomplicated story with an easy arc and a fast resolution, right?

So to experience the joy of the student who gets excited by some weird little artist they've found in an obscure magazine is a great reminder and refresher about what the work does in our lives as far as function and meaning. But teaching can also become overwhelming, especially if you're the kind of teacher who absorbs; it can feel at times that other people's voices are drowning out your own.

Sleet: Your book, My Lesbian Husband, has the most lovely cover – it made me want to pick it up, open it the moment I saw it. I don't know what your own feeling is, but to me it was an enjoyable segue into your book which circles the landscape around relationships and marriage, specifically with Linnea, your spouse. When I look at this cover, I see a photograph that has been collaged atop with various colors and images that show the reader who each of you are —

BJB: You know it's not us though, right?

Sleet: No, not at all —

BJB: That's interesting. I did choose the cover, though the image is actually of two of my close friends who are, incidentally, not a couple anymore. The artist's name is Karen Platt. I remember connecting with the collage aspect of Karen Platt's work when I saw it on a friend's walls, thinking her form resembled what I was trying to do in my essays. So I asked Karen if she was willing to come up with something on spec for the cover, as we didn't know if the publisher would go for it. She said yes and happened to have a picture of these mutual friends of ours. I wish you could see the whole work though. I have it up on my wall at home: the background is much larger and she really played around with the subtitle of the book, Landscapes of a Marriage, which is on the title page —

Sleet: I never noticed it —

BJB: Yes, it's there on the title page but not on the cover — this was a fight I had with my publisher. The marketers didn't want the subtitle on the cover because they thought it made the book seem too academic. It's not something I agreed with because the book was never meant to be just about us. It was always meant to be about context and landscape and place and our interactions with the worlds that surround us. In the full image there was even more around us; domestic items, and the stuff of place and life and home and not-home.

It was an argument I had with the book designer. He wanted to come in on a close-up on the couple, and I wanted the opposite. In fact the first design came back with a big ornate Victorian frame blocking a lot of the landscape, just highlighting the couple in the middle. This disturbed me because it fetishized us and set us up as heroes of our own story, which is very opposite of what I'm interested in as a writer.

Sleet: I didn't take that from the book at all — that you were the heroes — in fact I never noticed Landscapes of a Marriage on the title page. I think I would personally have enjoyed seeing that on the cover because that is what the book was about to me: landscapes of relationship…

BJB: It's always what the book was about, so I'm glad you saw that. And I love that my friends are on the cover.

Sleet: You do look alike…

BJB: (Laughs) I had much shorter hair then; it's funny because a journalist who interviewed me right when the book came out was furious to discover that it wasn't us. In fact, she argued with me about it. She said, “no no it is you it is you…” I'd never met her, it was a telephone interview: but she was insistent…

Sleet: I won't insist! hahaha

BJB: … which to me is interesting because it says something about what people do with books that they connect with, you know — the book becomes an object that they hold onto and look at and — if a cover is working as art — it is part of a reader's experience.

Sleet: You've mystified Linnea for me again – I thought I had this image of her…

BJB: Check out my website – there's a picture, and even a recipe of hers there.

Sleet: I am curious as to what Linnea thinks about being so public in your work. In all of your pieces that I have read thus far, she is present, she is the constant with you…

BJB: My Lesbian Husband came out when we had just had our wedding, when we'd been together for 12 years; and now we've been together 24 years! Some of the new work involves more about our trying times. Like any marriage, we've had many ups and downs, many crises, and some of them about health and body, which is what I've written about recently. There's a map of Linnea's brain, a CT scan, that I've focused on in one of the pieces in Body Geographic.

So my new work is not always so rosy and romantic as this earlier stuff. Linnea's never balked at being written about, but I don't publish anything without her seeing it, and she gets to argue with me about it first. And usually I amend things after our conversations; I'll say “X” and she'll say, “oh no no no, it's Y.” And while we disagree, “Z” usually comes out of that which I would not have come to on my own.

She's not one to sit in the front row of readings however, nor does she want to be a spectacle. But she's always been agreeable. I don't know of anyone who could write so openly about a partner — a partner that they're still with that is, hahaha — without them first agreeing to the process.

Sleet: How about some of the other characters in your pieces?

BJB: My brother knew all along when I was writing about him and didn't ask for any approval or anything. He was also very congratulatory after he saw what I wrote. My sister-in-law was fine with things as well. I've even shown things to neighbors who've been mentioned and nobody's really given me any trouble, aside from maybe one ex-lover — we had to have it out — and she is somebody who is also a writer. I think writers are probably more uncomfortable about being written about than anybody else.

There's a piece that's just out in Indiana Review, “Navigating Jazz,” that is very much about my father and my grandmother and explores the relationships we have to our parents, as well as our affinities to place. It's my first piece with my father at center and he is fine with this too.

Sleet: How comfortable are you with being so public about your life?

BJB:  I don't feel like I am that public about my life, actually. I make a lot of choices. If it appears that I am completely and utterly open — then, that's good — that means I am doing something right. But I make all kinds of choices. I think that's the funny kind of trick in any kind of memoir writing — it's all in the construction. A number of people have said My Lesbian Husband reads as if there's no barrier between myself and the reader, but in fact every single piece in that book was meticulously worked over.

I am very much attuned to structure and echoes and sounds and shapes and visuals… so much so that beyond the first exploration of what I'm writing about I probably don't even think much about “wow, am I telling too much or too little here?” It just becomes the clay. It all comes down to materials. And I think that's what any writer wants to get to: that they're really making something. The fact that we use information from our own lives is crucial, basic. It's part of the idea of nonfiction that we want to bring actuality onto the page, but it's a mistake to think that the actual process isn't as prominent as it is in any other form.

Sleet: Your recently published work — I'm thinking specifically of “Geographical Solutions” from Fall 2009 Ecotone as well as “Navigating Jazz” from the Winter 2010 Indiana Review, make use of cartographical language. In the structural body of these pieces, Map Insets, head each subdivision. What informed your choices?

BJB: These are both pieces that belong to a larger manuscript, Body Geographic, which is scheduled to come out next year from the University of Nebraska Press American Lives series.

In the early drafts of the book I knew I was interested in place and migration, and I am always interested in the visual form on the page. One day I walked into my writing group and told them I was thinking of calling my book “Geography” (my first idea for the title), which led us into a lively conversation about maps. This form then evolved out of looking at maps, and then beginning to see narrative as a larger map broken into these digressive, detailed sections I began to call map insets. I don't remember a particular moment of choosing this form — I just know that when I started using the word inset, the language captured what I'd been doing all along.

Sleet: Where are the inceptions points for you when you're working a piece? Do you tend to work several pieces at once?

BJB: My inception points are usually moments… Generally my ideas are circulating up here (points to her head) — I am very much an essayist in that regard — until I find a concrete image or visceral sensation to latch on to and then the process becomes quite associative. I'll follow the associations down a path that usually goes awry and I have to pull it all back on track again. I am a very inefficient writer in that regard – haha – rarely do I know what I'm doing until I do it. I tend to work several pieces at once but then, once a piece takes hold, I work on that and nothing else.

Sleet: Are the structural components of your pieces clear from the start?

BJB: I enjoy structure and forms. My brain is quite architectural and I quite like all the forms of creative nonfiction, from straight-ahead memoir to the erasures and absences of the truly lyric essay. Of late most of my pieces are variants on the lyric essay.

My piece Apocalypse, Darling which was excerpted in the spring 2010 edition of Seneca Review, is an example of a hybrid essay, a cross between a novella and a lyric essay, a form which I've dubbed an essella. What this means is it's a lyric essay series arranged along a narrative arc.

Reading other writers: a form that surprises me usually delights me. I find I can like a piece purely for the form and sometimes I have to remind myself to pay attention to the content too.

[Sleet: There's a great resource book on form in CNF by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, called Tell it Slant: writing and shaping creative nonfiction. A lyric essay is difficult to define outright: it can be the space on the page where poetry and an essay join hands to write in collaboration, it's where a journey meets more questions, where sculptural confines of white space meets text. It's all of this and can be its own hybrid as well. The book is very thorough and covers many of the hybrid lyric forms too: braided essays, hermit crab, collage, as well as the personal essay. Another great resource is Sue Silverman's website. ]

Sleet: I am glad you bring up “Apocalypse, Darling” because there's some interesting themes you explore here using the context of environment and relationships. .

BJB: Apocalypse, Darling has to do with change and recovery and what's actually possible in terms of transition and restoration…of what can actually occur in a life or in the land, in used landscapes, in broken human connections…

The catalyst for this piece is my spouse's father's wedding and going back to the place where I grew up, which is a decimated landscape, to have this experience of a very curious family event. I wanted the exploration of what's really possible here: is forgiveness possible, is it possible to fix what's broken? Isn't one of the things we learn in life is that things don't go away, we just go on?

Sleet: Longing seems to underscore your work — directly and indirectly — the city, your family, past and present, the imagined future — you sweep at the notion and poke at the function of longing in life. How does this resonate with consciousness in your writing?

BJB: I think Body Geographic is about longing. I am not sure that's always what I'm interested in — but in Body Geographic, yes — I want to expose longing so that I'm not hoodwinked by its falsities.

In exploring this I started thinking about how American identity is built on the longing of false things, such as the city of progress that was displayed at the 1893 World Fair in Chicago (explored in “Alabaster City's Gleam,” Hotel Amerika, Spring 2010). Here the notion of a beautiful and clean future was set up as the thing that Americans should strive for when in reality, in the background, outside the confines of the World Fair, was this confusing and dirty inhabited city…

Sleet: “Waterfront Property” (New Ohio Review, Spring 2010) is about a trip taken with Linnea and your parents to post Katrina New Orleans to celebrate your parents' 50th wedding anniversary. Natasha Trethewey has recently published Beyond Katrina, about her hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi. Both your piece and hers function to document tragedy, as witnesses to that tragedy. There are parallels in your work in other aspects as well – Trethewey explores Gulfport as you explore your hometown of Chicago. I also see parallels in explorations of form with essay, poetry, historical photographs and facsimiles of written letters in Beyond Katrina. Have you read her piece? What parallels do you see?

BJB: I haven't read it yet but I hope to see parallels. When I've heard Trethewey speak, I have been taken with how she accords history in her work. I can't think of anyone better in that regard. She is a writer who is definitely in my radar and her poetry collections, Native Guard and Ophelia, are dear to me.

Sleet: You've written a fair amount recently referencing your parents' retirement from Chicago to Florida. What does retirement look like to you?

BJB: I don't think writers retire – it's not in our blood.

Sleet: What does your writerly circadian rhythm look like?

BJB: My writing tends to follow an academic rhythm. I get most of my work done in January and during summers. My parents were both school teachers too, so that semester schedule is quite embedded in me.

I am also a night person — rarely am I able to produce much of anything in the early morning. Mornings are a time of day when I take things in. It would be fun to experiment with circadian writing rhythms, to let go of all commitments and see what would evolve. But alas I don't always have much choice in this and the semester structure is my parameter.

Sleet: I was wondering, based on the leopard skin and its presence in, My Lesbian Husband, if this motif is still a current part of your present life together with Linnea?

BJB: Hmm, I still have leopardprint rooms in my house: a Leopard Library, and mid-20th century campy antiques and my studio still has much of that feel to it as well. It's our humor, our aesthetic; a certain gay, campy aesthetic that won't go away. If drag queens stop wearing leopardprint, then maybe we'd stop having it in our house, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Sleet: I am intrigued with the magic that you as narrator infuse through your transitions in many of these pieces – from daddy's inquisitive (but bad) girl – to the sensual/sexual awakenings in your early adulthood, to the long-term marriage you now share with Linnea. While your pieces are definitely a valuable inclusion in GLBT literature, I don't feel excluded, although I don't share your sexual preferences. I appreciate the opportunity to accompany you as reader, not as a voyeur, but as a compatriot, as you journey after questions and experiences that consider value and meaning in life and the landscape of relationship. I am grateful for this. What can you tell me about your fan mail?

BJB: I have gotten the most fan mail in response to My Lesbian Husband. I used to have a guest book on my website for people to connect with me but I unfortunately had to disable it due to spam. What I got there were lots of stories, people sharing with me how the book completely changed their life. This was, of course, humbling and gratifying for me; it's what every writer yearns for. And people responded from heterosexual marriages as well, because what I was exploring was the whole concept of marriage. I think part of what I write about crosses boundaries.

Sleet: What absorbs your body when you kick back and give your mind a break?

BJB: Most recently, in the summer, my bicycle. I have not taken on the challenge of winter biking, though it certainly has many fans. Our city is not built for it though it would be great to design one that was. I love film: when you read and write for a living there's something to be said for sitting back and absorbing. I am also fond of travel, especially going to cities I haven't been to and trying to navigate them. It intrigues me to figure out their wonders. I also like tea, unusual teas can absorb me: I like Tea Source in St Paul; the owner graduated from the same Catholic high school as my cousins, on the south side of Chicago. And Linnea and I are members of the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis and we love to go out and hear jazz.

Sleet: One of my favorite lines has to do with how you describe your Croatian down-turned mouth in “Navigating Jazz,” where you declare “Sometimes people think I'm sad, or even angry, when I'm nothing, just neutral.” Did you realize how brilliant that was when you wrote it? Have others told you they like it? How did that evolve?

BJB: That piece just came out in print a month or so ago (Indiana Review) so I haven't gotten much feedback on it yet, but thank you…

Sleet: Any new pet writing project looming on your horizon?

BJB: I'm working on a book at this point that I am calling, Oh! It's about finding grace and wonder and other exhalations in urban landscapes. A lot of it is about riding my bike in the city, the repeating moments of grace and awareness inherent in urban biking.

I am thinking about how people choose to live in cities and urban environments and infrastructures. One of the things about riding a bike in the city is that you really notice the foundations, the way the city is constructed. It's taking my interest in cities a step further.

Sleet: Here's my finale firewords-blast — any new tattoos up your sleeve?

BJB: My newest tattoo is on my lower back. It's the merged skyline of Minneapolis and Chicago and is about a year old. Kurt Melancon at Leviticus in Minneapolis did it and I have more planned. He's done Linnea's tattoos as well.

Sleet: — the last book you read?

BJB: Usually it's what I've just read for class: This week it's Sven Birkets' The Art of Time in Memoir. The last book I read for fun was Patti Smith's Just Kids.

Sleet: — your latest favorite image?

BJB: What's captured me recently, in fact, every day really, is a series of images; that's how I get through my days, that stop and bask in something moment. I find at least one nearly every day, something that causes a pause. My last memorable moment occurred a couple days ago, looking out the window at the most recent blizzard which happened on a holiday, so the city was very quiet and no one was out, inviting a quiet enclosure of looking.

Sleet: — song of the day?

BJB: The last song I heard of note was last night on the car radio as I pulled into the garage, Laurie Anderson on the Current (89.3 FM) a piece called, “Only an Expert.”

Sleet: — winter and summer comfort food?

BJB: Linnea's Navy Bean Soup, also homemade macaroni and cheese – the good stuff in winter. In summer – it's all the fresh local stuff from the Minneapolis Farmer's Market.

Sleet: — secret to productivity?

BJB: I don't always sleep a lot. Haha — it's true — I don't seem to need as much sleep as earlier in my life.

Sleet: — other places we can look for upcoming work?

BJB: – My book, Body Geographic, comes out next year. A craft essay is up on the VIDA site (vidaweb.org). I was the first runner up in the Literary Death Match at Aster Cafe in Minneapolis on March 1st, 2011, reports of which are around on the Web. And a new essay “Dogged” came out recently in the online journal Sweet (sweetlit.com).

Sleet: — and you're going to be in Sleet, how sweet!

BJB: (haha)

Sleet: In closing, I want to thank you for sharing your textual art while allowing us to journey with you through these textual landscapes. And congratulations on your recent publications and awards!

Kadattír is nom de plume for Krisanne A Dattir. By shift, she gathers stories as a Registered Nurse at a Minneapolis Birth Center, then assists in the delivery of fresh and future ones. She also tends to the seeds and needs of her garden and cans this poetry in sealed jars…