Maud Casey the Art of Mystery the Search for Questions

NER staff reader Sabrina Islamtalks to Maud Casey, longtime NER contributor and writer of "The Urban center Itself" (NER 41.i, 2020), near hysteria, incurability, and turning to fiction in a pandemic.

Sabrina Islam: I've read the opening paragraph of "The City Itself" over and over again. Information technology'southward haunting. You lot ask, "Who leaves this globe gently?" You keep probing, "Who are you who am I where are we going what is this feeling inside of me why why why what does it all mean, etc." Reading this I find myself in that land of un you lot speak of in The Art of Mystery—uncertainty, unfathomability, unknowing. This story besides is unsatisfied with finding the bespeak. As a writer, why mystery?

Maud Casey: Kickoff of all, thank you. You are the dream reader! Is this the part where we reveal you were my educatee and, so, I yours? I know you to be rigorous, thoughtful, imaginative equally a reader/writer/thinker. In your story, "Nakshi Kanthas," which was published by Prairie Schooner non and then long agone, you write "There is a story in the infinite between the stitches." It's one reply to the question why mystery. Mystery has always been the draw for me, from the very beginning, before I could even proper noun it. The seduction of the in-between, what isn't visible, the world behind the world—that's where it's at for me. Who are y'all who am I where are we going what is this feeling inside of me why why why what does it all hateful? I wonder this all twenty-four hour period long. Writing, reading, don't answer these questions, but they let me to ask them, and offer the company of other minds asking them.

SI: Thank you, Maud—it's such a delight to have you as a mentor! Next, I am curious to hear: who are the incurable women in your story?

MC: In the words of the recently departed Daniel Johnston, some things last a long time. I first came across Georges Didi-Huberman's The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière in a class I took in college. The class was called something like Victorian Women, and in that location was a section on Jean Martin Charcot, the neurologist who invented the diagnosis of hysteria at the Salpêtrière Hospital. Didi-Huberman's volume (I yet have my copy from 1989!), about the intersection of nineteenth-century French psychiatry and the commencement of photography, is a mash-up of cultural criticism, archival photographs, psychiatric history, philosophy. Information technology occasionally veers into pretentiousness, simply those photographs of the women and girls diagnosed with hysteria! And Didi-Huberman'due south nimble way of capturing the era and laying bare its attitudes (drenched in simulated science) almost women. In that book, he describes the Salpêtrière as "the city of incurable women." In many of the hospital's documents, women diagnosed with hysteria were often referred to as "incurables." I loved this idea of a city of incurable women. The Salpêtrière was an enormous compound, a city unto itself within of the city of Paris. And so, a physical space that was also a psychic infinite—like Italo Calvino'southward Invisible Cities. The city of incurable women suggests something right as much as something wrong. Of what, exactly, did they need to exist cured? It echoes outward—the women diagnosed with hysteria, just and then all of us, if we recall in terms of desire, yearning, being alive. These are incurable weather condition, aren't they? Nosotros are all the incurable women!

SI: "The Metropolis Itself" is office of an ongoing collaboration with photographer Laura Larson. In The Art of Mystery you quote Chris Abani who writes, "This is what the art I make requires of me: that in social club to have an honest chat with a reader, I must reveal myself in all my vulnerability. Reveal myself, not in the sense of my autobiography, but in the sense of the deeper cocky, the i we keep as well frequently hidden even from ourselves." Writing is often a alone process. How does a shared imagination work for you and your partner during a collaborative project? Are y'all protective of your artistic space or practice you lot find it easy to welcome others as you reveal yourself in the writing process?

MC: Writing can exist and then lonely (and perchance fifty-fifty more so because we do this to ourselves?). Information technology was that loneliness, in part, that led to my reaching out to Laura. I was envious of poets who seem to forever be collaborating with people. Why can't fiction writers? Also, hysteria was an incessantly photographed condition (the illness was assumed to be visible then, the way criminality was). I wrote Laura a fan letter in 2013, and she wrote back; that was the offset of an ongoing chat. We became a book grouping of ii. Sometimes we sent piece of work dorsum and forth. She'd transport a photograph, and I'd write something, or vice versa. Other times, we worked lonely. At the middle of everything were the nineteenth-century archival photographs from the Salpêtrière. At one point, Laura and I went together to Harvard's Countway Medical Library—there's a big cache of photographs from the Salpêtrière in that location. Nosotros put on gloves and spent a twenty-four hours treatment crumbling glass photographic plates. It was terrifying—I was certain I was going to break them—and unexpectedly moving. Those photographic plates were made of light from the nineteenth century, light that had touched the women in the photographs, light that had traveled through time and space. Collaboration requires a different kind of vulnerability. You experience your limits, your habits, and you button against them. I'1000 not sure I can articulate information technology simply even so, but I've learned a ton.

SI: You've shown interest in photography in your previous works. As a fiction writer, why are you drawn to photographs?

MC: I'thou going to do that annoying thing where I whip out a quote (or open a book to find the quote). From John Berger'southward Uses of Photography: "Memory is non unilinear at all. Retentivity works radially, that is to say with an enormous number of associations all leading to the aforementioned event. The diagram is similar this: [hither you'll accept to imagine a diagram that looks like a child'due south, or my own, drawing of a lord's day]. If nosotros want to put a photo back into the context of experience, social experience, social retention, nosotros accept to respect the laws of memory." Along with the archival photographs, this quote has haunted the work Laura and I have washed together. Photographs contain time and retention; they are haunted. I love that. I also love the way a photograph does what life tin't, capture a moment—and all that goes into that moment, including mystery—and make it still only non static.

SI: The way yous are describing time, retentivity, and the power of photographs reminds me of Paisley Rekdal's Intimate. She writes, "I look and look at the photographs. The photos look dorsum at me." (I read this book for the get-go time in your class! Information technology's one that stayed with me.)

Let'south talk about the form of this project. You've written brusk stories, novels, and essays. How is this projection formally different from anything y'all accept done earlier? What shape is this collaborative project taking?

MC: An excellent question! I recall the best way for me to answer is to point to the sort of work that thrills me these days, which tends to be uncharacterizable. These Possible Lives past Fleur Jaeggy, which is ostensibly three brusque pieces about Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. Mini-essays, prose poems? Who cares? The portrait of Keats begins, "In 1803, the guillotine was a mutual children's toy." Jaeggy's mind—her attention—at work. Where is she looking? Information technology'due south surprising and thrilling where her mind goes. Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil, which begins with the writer throwing the manuscript into the garden and starting over. I've kind of lost the plot of plot. I'grand more than interested these days in a mind finding its way, which doesn't mean there isn't a shape. The collaborative project is two minds finding their style as they consider, address, imagine, and otherwise plow their 20-first-century attention to the lives of the nineteenth-century girls and women who were patients in the Salpêtrière. More just put, it's a volume called The City of Incurable Women, which includes linked narrative pieces inspired by the lives of those girls and women, archival photographs, and other documentary fabric, and Laura's contemporary photographs (which include photographs of the archival photographs). Information technology'southward not meant to be a cosmetic; its aim is more impressionistic and atmospheric.

SI: If writing is an ongoing discussion with literature, what is this projection responding to?

MC: Some of the books that were particularly important equally Laura and I began to call back about this project: Nicholas Muellner's Amnesia Pavillions, Theresa Cha'south Dictée, Due west. Grand. Sebald'due south The Rings of Saturn, John Berger'due south Selected Essays, Paisley Rekdal's Intimate. And then, for me, at that place'southward the project C. D. Wright and the photographer Deborah Luster did, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, and Molly McCully Brown'south poetry collection, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Nathalie Leger'southward Suite for Barbara Loden. Jessie van Eerden's collection of portrait essays, The Long Weeping. I'm sure I'g leaving things out. I've been thinking, also, about the other things that influence me—movies (currently haunted past Nothing No Ameliorate, a documentary virtually Rosedale, Mississippi), art (almost recently, the Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future exhibit), music (a John Chiliad. Samson evidence in the Before Fourth dimension). And besides, whatever else was going on in my life during the writing of a detail book—learning to swim (I'm an adult-onset swimmer), the conversations I've had (with my swain, my friends, family, students, strangers), the weather (meteorological, political, cultural, etc.), that walk I took, that matter I saw on Instagram, that thing I saw out my window.

SI: How does educational activity inform your writing life?

MC: I want to ask y'all this question because I know you teach. Information technology'due south ever a balance, a dance, correct? If someone had come to me when I was a shy, nervous kid and said, you will spend a large part of your adult life equally a teacher, I might accept refused to abound upwardly. But when I began to teach, I figured out there are many ways to teach, and then figured out how lucky I was to be teaching. All to say, information technology'southward a big part of my life, so a big role of my writing life. They are part of the aforementioned conversation. The conversations I have with students about their work, about books, nearly fine art, about the vocation of writing, all teach me, and I bring them with me in some grade or some other into the deep-space confinement of my writing life.

SI: In The Art of Mystery you write, "We don't turn to fiction for the facts. Fiction offers relief from the facts and from that terrible discussion—closure . . . Fiction, after all, is a democratic art, reliant on the participation of its citizen readers, and in best circumstances, readers are contemporaneously sent dorsum into themselves and out into the larger universe." In the times we are living through—in the center of a global pandemic—what do you accept to say to citizen readers? Why should they turn to fiction?

MC: In the times we're living through—when the vicious inequities that existed all along are being laid bare, when people are dying and losing their jobs, when so much remains uncertain—I'm not sure I, with my health and my job, feel correct telling anyone they should turn to fiction. Any gets you through the day, and doesn't hurt you or anyone else, exercise that. I'one thousand not trying to contrivance the question. Information technology's a tough question! Maybe I'g wary of making pronouncements—it feels too much like closure. Or maybe it'southward that these times don't change fiction'due south value, which is related to the value of art in general, the value of the imagination. The heed at play: what a strange and beautiful affair.  The fiction, the art, I experience most passionately about, asks me to nourish to the world differently, to listen, to pay attention to a mind finding its style. Information technology reminds me of all of the minds finding their style in this world, which is overwhelming, just withal useful when the globe is at its worst. The writing and the fine art I love well-nigh cultivates the sort of patience and attention that surprises and delights, and and then allows u.s. to surprise and delight ourselves. I think I've just used many sentences to effort to convey what William Carlos Williams said in ane line about the news and poesy! What he said, but fiction, and all the arts, also.

SI: I securely admire your sensibility. Thank you so much for your time, Maud.

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Maud Casey is the author of four works of fiction, near recentlyThe Human Who Walked Away (Bloomsbury, 2014), and a nonfiction book,The Fine art of Mystery: The Search for Questions(Graywolf, 2018). "The City Itself" is part of an ongoing collaboration with the photographer Laura Larson calledThe Urban center of Incurable Women.

Sabrina Islam is from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She spent her early childhood in New York, Connecticut, and Florida. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and artistic writing. Her stories can exist found inFlock,Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the Minnesota Review.

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Source: https://www.nereview.com/2020/05/19/maud-casey/

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