Conversation with Elisa Gabbert

#Scurf197: The poet-essayist on rereading, her writing practice and the joys of writerly companionship

Aug 30, 2024

For this edition of Conversations I speak with one of my favourite essayists Elisa Gabbert. Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: Any Person Is the Only Self (FSG, 2024); Normal Distance (Soft Skull, 2022); The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays (FSG, 2020); The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018); L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016); The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013); and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). Any Person Is the Only Self, The Unreality of Memory and The Word Pretty were each named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She writes the “On Poetry” column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Believer, the New York Review of Books, A Public Space, The Yale Review, and many other venues.

Recent work:

A Place for Fire for The Paris Review
Second Selves for The Paris Review
Fear as a Game for The Believer Magazine
Elisa Gabbert.

Over the years you’ve gathered a large Twitter following solely on the basis of your literary posts. I wouldn’t call them hot takes as that would be underselling their sheer literary and intellectual appeal and resonance. Last year, for instance, you tweeted about Vermeer’s The Music Lesson: “I love when paintings exclude me, the viewer. I have nothing to do with them.” I mean it could pass off as a plain observation about the painting’s appeal, but something about this made me think not only about the painting but also about your tweet, and the way you share these observations so simply. Almost as if you’re saying that there’s meaning to be mined in the simplest of places. Your tweets, for me, have that elusive je ne sais quoi which makes for a kind of perfect literary/intellectual twitter account.

How would you say you approach social media, especially Twitter?

That’s beautifully put, “there’s meaning to be mined in the simplest of places.” That’s a philosophy! I think it’s actually my strength as a critic—I’m not the most well-read critic by a long shot, but I’m good at close reading, I think, because I’m so interested in details, the small places in a poem or any work of art. I like to think that even rather short poems could keep revealing new meaning with more reads and more time. There’s a kind of infinity in art that way. And when it comes to Twitter, my rules for myself are basically: Just try to be interesting. Don’t try to be right.

Do you reread books? What about this exercise helps you?

I rarely reread whole books, but recently I made a point of rereading a few specifically so I could write about the experience. I chose books that I first read many years ago, in high school, so I couldn’t be sure I remembered them well. It was really enlightening. I found that my overall impression was much the same—I still loved the books, and some of the same scenes and lines struck me—but the books felt more complex to me now, because, I suppose, I’ve read more; I’m wiser. It’s like my getting older made the books even better.

I frankly want to ask you how you sustain your writing practise along with a heavy-duty, demanding full-time job. With regular columns, interviews, a steady stream of essays in prestigious publications and also books releasing over time, how do you keep the balance between these two worlds?

I have to be honest that it’s gotten more difficult. I’ve been working full time since I got out of graduate school, so I’ve always had to find space for my writing in the cracks between work days and weeks. It’s probably the reason I’ve tended to write shorter pieces (poems and essays) that accrue into short collections, rather than more extended narrative nonfiction, or novels. But my job is harder than it used to be, so it’s more tiring, and I just don’t have the same fiery energy and ambition that I had in my twenties and thirties. But, but—writing is the love of my life! So I just have to keep finding ways to make it work.

I like writing to the sound of a movie or TV show playing like white noise in the background. It helps me find myself more strongly. Do you write to a specific sound or music?

Never. I’m very distractible. I don’t mind a little background noise in the form of nature sounds or light traffic, but anything with semantic content makes it harder to focus on my own thoughts. I can’t work in a café either. If I bring a book to a café it’ll take me about an hour to read two pages.

This is a selfish question: Any tips for first time writers — those too lazy, or daunted by the whole hog? How do they gather the confidence to just write that book?

If it’s daunting, start small. Write a story or an essay or a chunk of a book. Keep writing parts and eventually you’ll have enough parts for a book. I also think it helps so much to talk to other writers, to make friends with writers, so you have some companions in the journey, since careers are long journeys. At the least, read books that offer writerly companionship—I love to read writers’ journals because they’re often full of doubt and frustration. Every life has its own struggles and failures!

What role does writing play in your routine life? For me, if I’m able to write even a page of journaling a day I’m instantly in a better mood. I feel incomplete and slightly unmoored on days when I don’t read or write. The day I do both, I’m close to my best self. Does it work similarly or a different way for you?

It’s more important to me to read most days than write most days. I love to read in the morning while drinking coffee, and if I get an hour or so with a book on the couch before I have to start my work day, that feels really good. Because I write so much about books, I think of reading as basically continuous with writing; the reading feeds the writing. If I really want to write, my preference is to have a full day to do it, so I mostly write on weekends. I might only spend one day a month that way, in concentrated work mode, but it’s always a really satisfying day.

Recently there has been buzz around how straight men don’t read novels. As a straight woman, I feel I lean towards reading nonfiction and fiction in equal measures. Poetry maybe not so much. While putting together your to-be-read list are you picky about the genre?

I am usually reading a novel, some kind of nonfiction, and a poetry book at the same time. Occasionally I have a couple of NF or poetry books going at once, but never more than one novel—I like to stay in immersed in one fictive world at a time. I don’t plan out what I’m reading too far in advance. I like to let one book lead me to another—I’ve read several books lately that mention Dostoyevsky, so it feels like the universe is wanting me to read some Dostoyevsky.

How important is physical exercise to your writing practise?

Walks are really necessary for my well-being—writing thoughts do come to me while I’m walking, but there’s also a kind of not-thinking thinking I can do while walking that feels restorative. Like I’m conscious, but not too conscious. Something about the pace of a walk, the rate of change of sensory input, puts me in an almost passive state that allows for flashes of insight, which can feel strangely effortless.

I loved reading your Paris Review essay this year: Second Selves. Can you share the genesis of this piece? How did this idea come about, its journey, and finally publishing it in the Paris Review?

I sold my most recent book on proposal, and in developing the outline I knew I wanted to write a piece about writers’ journals and diaries, the more private kind of writing that happens in those para-texts. The material about Jill Price and other hyperthymesiacs—people with perfect recall for all the details of their own lives—came into it by accident. I just got obsessed with their stories for a while, and I was struck by how many of the people with this rare condition keep diaries. I wanted to explore what a journal is for. What kind of self making, or reality creation, does journaling make possible? Who are we when we’re doing this writing that’s ostensibly only for ourselves? Is it a kind of performance? Why is it necessary to write the thoughts down, and not enough just to think them? So I spent a couple of months really immersed in all these journals—Sontag, Plath, Woolf, Gide, Kafka. And because I was writing the piece for my book, rather than trying to publish it in a magazine or something first, I let myself write this long rangy piece you can get a little lost in. Then when the book was done and almost out, the Paris Review offered to publish this piece as an excerpt. I was really happy that they wanted to run the full essay, rather than just one of the sections, which had seemed more likely to me. I like how long essays can feel kind of symphonic, with room for different “movements” and quite different moods.

Are there any writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, poets, screenwriters — working today whose work you look forward to?

Yes, but I’m almost never rushing out to buy a book the first day it’s available. I never feel I have any shortage of stuff to read, and I really like to come to a book at my own time, outside the hype cycle if there is one. Also, once I love an author, my impulse is to save their work, parts of their work, for my future self, to not go through it too quickly.

Other than literature, what are the other forms of art you can’t live without?

I love going to museums, especially looking at paintings. I love architecture deeply, deeply—giant manmade objects help me access the sublime. I couldn’t live without music and movies, but who could? I also love perfume and do think it can be counted as an artform, in its best incarnations.

As much as I want this conversation to not end, I’d like to bring this to a close with a hopeful little question: What’s next on the horizon?

At the moment I’m consciously trying to slow down, and not think too much about the next book. I’m doing some writing, some poems and other things here and there, but I’m not working bookward exactly. I’m taking a musical rest.

Recco corner:

Recently read and loved titles: About Looking by John Berger, Written Lives by Javier Marias, Alone by Richard Byrd, Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, The Selected Shepherd by Reginald Shepherd
All-time classics: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Howards End, A High Wind in Jamaica, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The Bell Jar
Criminally underrated: I have a weird relationship with the term underrated. Acclaim and recognition are so random and not usually lasting, so even once-beloved classics can fall into a kind of obscurity and seem underrated. I feel like Updike is now on the verge of being underrated. Is Women Talking, by Miriam Toews, “underrated”? I don’t know, but I do want more people to read it. And more people should read Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, by Claudia Rankine—I think it’s better than Citizen.
Poetry collections: Averno by Louise Gluck, The Door in the Mountain by Jean Valentine

Read older editions of Conversations here.

Scurf