Aldous Huxley once said, “The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.” Both Randon Billings Noble and Amy Long have crafted essay collections that cover subjects as diverse as chronic pain, opioid use and addiction to depression and the longing that memories can elicit. Randon’s full-length collection, Be With Me Always, is available as of March 1, 2019. Amy’s debut essay collection, Codependence, will be released in September 2019. Check out their lively, vulnerable and revealing conversation.

Randon Billings Noble: How did you come to be an essayist?  Are you a “monogamous” essayist or do you write in other genres too? 

Amy Long: Good question. I came to be an essayist because I thought I was a fiction writer, but I took a CNF workshop with Matthew Vollmer (who is the best) when I was in the first year of my MFA program, and on the first day, he assigned us a glossary essay. I’d been trying for six months to write the stories I tell in Codependence as fiction, but the glossary essay just came out so easily, and it was so fun, and I loved it so much that I never wrote any fiction again. I decided that I find myself inherently interesting, and I don’t know why I’d make up stories when I always have a million to tell.

So, I’m monogamous, but I’m polyamorous with my essays. I tend to intend to work on one essay at a time and then cheat on the first essay with a second essay, especially if the first essay is more straightforward formally. If I’m working on an essay that’s shaped like an essay, I’ll usually go behind its back and start a second one that’s shaped like a dictionary definition or a map or motel-key instructions. Rules are generative for me, and they make the writing process feel sort of addictive, so I like working with defined forms, but then I get away from the second essay’s rules, and the “regular” essay feels freeing where before it felt agoraphobic.

AL: Are you monogamous? Do you cheat on your essays only with other essays or also some other genre? And since we’ve already got sex in here (you started it!), how do you handle sex in essays? I hear fiction writers say that they like to let their protagonists shut the bedroom door, to suggest but not depict sex, but that’s harder to do when you are the protagonist. Do you shut any doors in your writing? Or are you an open house? (I might have stretched that metaphor to its breaking point!)

RBN: These are all great questions!

I’m a monogamous essayist. I’ve flirted with some short memoir pieces but when I sit down to write it’s usually to figure something out – not to tell (or create) a good story.

And I, too, often follow a somewhat traditional essay with one that’s more lyric. I love hermit crab essays, but feel that one must be careful with them. It’s easy to get carried away with the playfulness of the form, but it’s important to make sure that the form and content really serve each other.

As for what doors I shut in my writing. . .  if I tell you then they wouldn’t stay shut!  But I rarely write explicitly about sex in my essays.

RBN: Do you in yours?  Do you have subjects that are off-limits?  And how do you handle writing about potentially vulnerable topics?  

AL: I think I’m missing some kind of filter that other people have because I’m pretty sure I don’t keep any doors shut in my writing. (I actually asked you the sex question because I’ve been reviewing copy edits, and the amount of explicit sex in my book surprised me!) At least, there’s no door I’m conscious of shutting; I’m sure I leave out or miss things, but I never come up to the edge of something and say, “I don’t want that out there.” If I didn’t want it out there, I shouldn’t have done it! It’s like the inverse of “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” I’m a writer who writes about her own experience, and, if I’m going to say that, I can’t also say that some experiences are off limits.

I wish I had a better answer to the question of how I approach vulnerable topics than “I don’t know. I just do,” but that’s how it feels (maybe because I’m a sociopath with no filter?). I see scenes like movies in my head; I watch them and describe them and ask them questions and rewind and zoom in, and it becomes more about craft than felt emotion (not that I don’t ever cry at my laptop because I’m writing about something that upsets me—I do, and I try to keep going when that happens because it usually means I’ve hit on something important). But I almost always decide that I’ll write about something while it’s happening, and usually the things I know I’ll write about are things that make me feel intensely, which is also when I’m most vulnerable, and I mostly feel like I need to write about those things because they make me vulnerable. If my writing doesn’t make me vulnerable in some way, I’m not sure it’s worth reading.

AL: Maybe you can give a real answer. How do you handle writing about potentially vulnerable topics? Is it the topic or the exposure of your own vulnerability that most bothers or interests you?

RBN: It can be hard to balance being a rather private person with being a more public essayist – but I try. One thing that helps is that I think we need to have more vulnerable stories, more messy ways of living, and more questioning ways thinking out in the world. I’ve written about volatile relationships, transgressive crushes, pre-partum depression, failures, fumbles – but all of these are real human experiences and not the gloss-over that so much of our culture expects. When readers tell me that my writing has bolstered them, or made them feel less alone, that makes me glad to have shown some of my more vulnerable moments.

For me it’s always the topic – or the question – that interests me. (The exposure is the side-effect.)  What can Dracula teach me about a passionate but turbulent relationship?  What can Robinson Crusoe reveal about depression?  How can Facebook and Virginia Woolf and a high school reunion help me see the ways we’re caught up in – or cast out of – our social networks?  But when I’m asking these questions, the “me” is really a larger “us” – my experience is just an entry point or an example. The answer is not just for me but for whoever reads the essay.

Reading over that last paragraph I realize that I write about a lot of different things. When people ask me, “What do you write about?” it feels flip to say, “Whatever’s on my mind” – but it’s true!  (And that’s one of the pleasures of being an essayist.)

RBN: Do you have a particular subject matter that you write about?  How do you answer the question, “What do you write?”

AL: Codependence is a linked essay collection that juxtaposes my late-teenage opioid use with an addicted boyfriend against my current medicinal opioid use to treat chronic pain (intractable headaches, which is a really awesome problem for a writer to have—like, “No, I don’t need my head to work!”). I’m starting to work on the next book (I think in books, not really in individual essays), which I think centers on loneliness and romantic relationships, but I can’t get through even one essay without at least mentioning pain. Chronic pain is relentless and a huge part of my life, and I can’t pretend it’s not there in my writing. I wish I could say, “Okay, I wrote the pain book. Now I can write about other stuff,” and I can write about other stuff, but the pain from this book will always follow me into the next one and the next one. I guess that’s both my main subject and the reason I write: pain.

I also tend to get a little (or, like, strictly) academic when I move out of my own life. (I’m working on not being a sociopath or a narcissist or whatever!) I just like writing about exactly what I know. (How cliché!) With Codependence, though, I specifically wanted to make the reader feel trapped in my experience—claustrophobic. Because that’s how pain is.

AL: So, to circle back, you’ve said that you write about whatever’s on your mind and that your book covers a lot of territory. Is the ability to jump from thing to thing what drew you to essays? What made you an essayist? 

RBN: In a way I think I’ve always been an essayist. When I was six I wanted to be a witch. When I was eight I wanted to be a spy. When I was maybe ten I wanted to be a writer. Witch + spy + writer = essayist.

I loved writing essays for school, but I was subversive about it. I always included a little story of my own, or an odd metaphor – something to break out of that five-paragraph structure. Later, when I took creative writing classes, I pretended to write fiction, but my characters always seemed to sit around and think about things. (They were really essays-in-disguise.)

I got my MFA from New York University in 2001, when there weren’t many programs in nonfiction (or if there were I didn’t know about them). But I was lucky in two ways: I had teachers who also wrote essays (like Andre Aciman and his collection False Papers) and I got a fellowship to teach first year writing. The way they saw expository writing was also subversive. They valued personal experience as a form of evidence – not just library research. I realized that I had been writing personal essays all along. I had already found my form, but now I could name it. Ever since then I’ve been waving my essayist flag like something out of Les Mis.

RBN: Earlier you said that you don’t think so much in terms of individual essays but in terms of books. I’m starting to make that shift now. Tell me a little bit about how your book came to be.

AL: I also got my MFA in fiction—we’re both essayists with fiction degrees!—and I also had a lot of multi-genre faculty members. But the program offered a Creative Non-Fiction workshop every few semesters, and while I’m sure everyone else who teaches it is also great, I felt so lucky to get to take it with Matthew Vollmer. The book originated in that class. We’d picked “obsessions” at the beginning (themes or questions we’d write about for the whole semester—like, mine was drugs, someone’s was technology and privacy, some people picked specific life events), and for our final projects, we made 3D objects that incorporated writing but weren’t just writing.

I narrated my drug history in a medicine cabinet. It’s still the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I wrote micro essays and rolled them up in pill bottles or bags of baking-soda “coke” or had the library’s design staff put them on motel keycards or in a hospital bracelet or fake heroin packets. I made these super detailed pill-bottle labels with pharmacy logos and refill dates that lined up with whatever essay each bottle had in it. When I finished with it, I wanted to get it into a 2D format—make it a book, basically. I hung it on my wall and used it as an outline (Matthew has it now; he shows it to new MFAs, which I really love). So, most of the essays originated with me walking up to the medicine cabinet and picking up something and deciding how to best present that information. Some of the essays come almost wholly from the medicine cabinet. Other stuff got incorporated into the braided essays or folded into a new glossary essay that catalogs every headache drug I’ve ever taken. Making the medicine cabinet was a really cool exercise in itself, but it worked so well as an outline that I think I might need to make some kind of diorama or something to get my head around the next book!

AL: How did your book come to be? Is there a connecting thread among all the disparate questions you’re asking or the subjects the book covers? What made you think “These essays are a book”? And what would you ultimately want someone to take from it?

RBN: I love the idea of your medicine cabinet!  Do you have a picture you could post?  If so, I’d love to see it!

My book, Be with Me Always, came about much more haphazardly. I was writing essays – lots of essays – and some of them started to talk to each other. A loose theme emerged: hauntedness – not conventional ghost stories, but more personal hauntings, like the way certain people or places from our pasts clings to our imaginations and won’t let us go. I wrote more essays towards that theme and the book started to take shape.

My hope is that readers come away with a sense of the value of hauntedness. Usually, we try to avoid the things that haunt us, but I take a line from Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights as both my title and my aim: “Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”

What happens when we embrace our ghosts?  How can we claim the things that stay with us always – even if we’re not sure we want them to?  That’s what I wonder in the book, and what I hope others will wonder too.

AL: Oh, I love that line. I blame Wuthering Heights for my terrible taste in men, so maybe your book will help me write my next one!

Main image courtesy of: Neven Krcmarek

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Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her full-length essay collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in March 2019 and her lyric essay chapbook Devotional was published by Red Bird in 2017.

Individual essays have appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, The Massachusetts Review, The Georgia Review, Brevity, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. Currently she is the Founding Editor of After the Art; you can read more at randonbillingsnoble.com.

Amy Long’s debut essay collection, Codependence, was chosen by Brian Blanchfield as the winner of Cleveland State University Press’ 2018 Essay Collection Competition and will release September 10, 2019. Amy holds an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Tech and a Master’s degree in women’s studies from the University of Florida. Her work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, including as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2018 and at the drug history bog Points, where she serves as a contributing editor. To learn more, visit: amylorrainelong.com