by Michael Cuervo
Ryan Van Meter is an author whose work grabs the reader and never lets go. His essay collection, If You Knew Then What I Know Now (Sarabande Books), is a stirring journey of identity, one that bends form and genre to navigate the vulnerability of exploring and discovering the self. His work has been featured in numerous journals such as Brevity, River Teeth, and Fourth Genre, and has appeared in anthologies including Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin), Little Boxes: Twelve Writers on Television (Coffee House Press), and Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (Kendall Hunt Publishing Company). He is the Associate Director of the Program in Creative Writing at The University of Chicago. He recently talked to Gulf Stream’s Assistant Managing Editor Michael Cuervo about his work.
Michael Cuervo: So, your essay collection “If You Knew Then What I Know Now” was published in 2011. I assume that the three essays you emailed me were written well after the collection. It was so interesting to see how they work in conversation with one another. It’s my belief that the one from Brevity, “Anyone He Pleased,” serves as a partner piece to this book. It feels like the lessons learned in IYKTWIKN were then put into action in “Anyone He Pleased.” And then lessons learned about grief in terms of relationships in IYKTWIKN were then applied in “An essay about coyotes,” and then even in the end of “The Hourglass.” I think a lot of the themes that I see are grief, passage of time, and loss of time.
My first question is about how you put this book together. This very wonderful book. I’m not sure what order the essays were written, and I have questions about the final three essays, but for now, when you were putting this book together, I’m curious about how you chose which order to put them in so that we get this progression of self. Did you know the final three essays in the collection needed to be paired together, and that “To Bear, To Carry” would come right before them, and the relationship with your family before that, so that we progress through your life in this way?
Ryan Van Meter: So, order was really important. It’s tricky in any collection. A lot of these I had written while I was in graduate school. There were two essays in particular, the title essay and “Practice,” the fishing trip essay, I’ve previously described them as locking eyes in a crowded room and they were like “we go together.” Seeing that relationship and seeing their connections allowed me to see what else belonged with them. Then I knew, “Okay, here are the essays that belong to this collection.” And then there were other essays that I was writing that very clearly did not belong and I didn’t want to try to sort of shoehorn anything in there. I wanted it to be a memoir in essays, to operate in that way. I didn’t want anything that felt too far flung, theme wise or subject wise. Then my thesis director in graduate school, Susan Lohafer, booked a conference room and we had what she called “the big table meeting,” and I had to bring a printout of every single essay that was going to go in the thesis. I had to lay them on the table in the order that they would appear and I had to tell her why this one has to be first and this one has to be second, and on and on and on through the whole book. And it was just such an amazing, useful exercise. I probably wouldn’t have arrived at this order if I hadn’t been filled with so much anxiety over coming up with a justification for every single piece. I pulled a couple of essays out because I couldn’t figure out where they went and I took that as a sign that they didn’t belong. But, “First” felt like it had to go first because one, it’s called “First,” and two, it felt like it was this essay that was chronologically first, but also it’s the ideas of the book at their most inchoate, their most prototypical. And then as you progress through the book until you hit the title essay, all of those essays are sort of linear, first person. The word “gay” is not in there. The concept of there being heterosexuality and homosexuality is not named. And then when you hit the title essay it is named and then thereafter those essays, that awareness is there. So that was an important turning point in the book.
Then “You Can’t Turn Off the Snake Light” was the only essay that I wrote knowing its position in the book before I wrote it. I knew that I had to write a last essay and knew when I was writing it that this was going to be the last essay. But I also knew that it had work to do in terms of tying up loose ends from other pieces. I intentionally wanted different characters who had walked through a lot of the other essays to kind of have a glimpse in that one as a final gesture. I would say it’s the one that’s most forward looking. It tries to close off the book and finish the book, but it’s also looking to the future in a way that I think many of the other essays aren’t. Then knowing that it was going to be the last essay allowed me to do my clever Easter egg kind of thing, which is that I could write, “that’s it,” at the end of the essay and have that be the last bit of the book. So, the very first word of the book is “first” and then the very last words are “that’s it.” Those are the kinds of things that I need to do to make myself feel clever.
MC: That is the most clever thing a person could do. I literally just put that together. I knew the ending had a big punch on me when I read, “Now pull your knees into me. There. That’s it,” I was like, game over. But I did not realize, “first” then “that’s it.” You should feel very clever. Definitely.
RVM: It’s very embarrassing to share. But, yeah, that was sort of how it all clicked into place, I would say. The snake light essay is the only essay in the book that didn’t appear on its own in a journal somewhere. I don’t think I ever actually sent it out to be honest.
MC: So it has its very special place as the period of this book. I love that. You said something about how you pulled out pieces that you couldn’t justify. And this isn’t me thinking that this doesn’t belong in here because it is one of my favorite essays I have read, but, “The Men from Town,” does read for me, not incredibly different, but a bit different from the rest of the essays in the collection. I think it’s really interesting how some of these essays, like you said in the first half before we get to the title essay, you don’t explicitly say “gay,” “queer,” or anything about coming out of any kind of closet. I think “Discovery” is in that first half, right? Where you’re with your grandmother and queerness is only implied, never stated, and then you go through this journey of growth. So it’s really interesting that in “The Men from Town” it’s more of a reflection of you being in one room with the women, while your brother is there with the men. And you have all of this love for him. I think that you just do a really great job at capturing different relationships, familial relationships, friendships, fallouts of friendships, romantic relationships. I think the inclusion of this piece feels different because it kind of strays away from anything about sexuality. It’s an interesting inclusion, one that I’m so happy is there, and it does make sense in the grand scheme of the book, but I wonder what the intention behind including that essay was?
RVM: I think one of the things that I was writing about when I was writing about queer identity were images of manhood and what it means to be a man and how do I see myself or not see myself as a man. How did I come to that understanding and acceptance? I wasn’t trying to strictly write only about sexual identity, but also gender identity. That one felt important to include precisely because of what you’re identifying, it was writing about images of manhood, but not writing about sexual identity. I wanted to enlarge that topic a bit. It also felt important to not depict the brother character as only this childhood rival, but to show them—the narrator and his brother—as adults and how they’ve learned to be with each other. That was important to me to include. In a collection like this, where you have all these different pieces, there can be a way in which you’re thinking about the other shoe dropping, in a good way. I showed him doing this one thing earlier, now I can show him doing this and that creates a more complicated character. It’s also the same set of grandparents in the same house where “Discovery” takes place and so it was important for me to—I have a really annoying big dog who’s going to come downstairs and bark in a second.
MC: Perfect.
RVM: It was important—sorry. He, my dog, has this rival in the neighborhood who, speaking of rivals, this guy sings on his way to work loudly. This happens every day.
MC: Can I break your train of thought and ask a question, is this the dog—the puppy from essay about coyotes?
RVM: Yes, absolutely.
MC: I’m starstruck.
RVM: He’s still a big pain. Anyway, it was important to show that setting and that grandmother and those people in that farm again. I see “The Men from Town” as a sibling or a cousin of “Discovery,” because they take place in the same place. It’s really small and nearly claustrophobic. They’re both very short essays, very contained, so that was also part of why I felt like that was important to include.
MC: I completely see it as a brother/sister essay to “Discovery,” especially because of the ruminations on gender identity, where in “Discovery” you’re wearing that blue dress.
RVM: It’s like wearing our gender costumes, dresses versus the new coats in “The Men from Town.”
MC: You said something about how you didn’t want to just paint your relationship with your brother as a sibling rivalry. They teach us that writing is an act of empathy, or should be an act of empathy. This is a question that Travis Cohen, our managing editor, and I asked Julie Marie Wade in our interview with her for “The Mary Years,” but I think it warrants being asked here as well. You do such a great job at capturing empathy in a very vulnerable way, even in expressing forgiveness. For example, in the title essay you go to the reunion and you come face to face with someone that had pulled a traumatizing prank on you. You see that they are affected by it as well, and you write that on the page instead of holding that grudge. And then you include “The Men from Town” to show this other side of your brother. Even in the final three essays where you’re dealing with this breakup, you still have a mutual relationship with your ex and you don’t ever put him down. You’re more so introspective about it. I wonder how—and this is a very grand, maybe impossible question to answer—but I wonder how your relationship with empathy has evolved so that you can come to the page and write out forgiveness?
RVM: I think that I have some kind of built in mechanism that doesn’t allow me to write about a subject matter until I’m in that place where I can write about it with that kind of emotional complexity. It’s like experiences have a time release on them or something where it just doesn’t occur to me. There’s no, I tried to write it and I wasn’t ready, which can happen to some people. I don’t ever try to write about something until I know I can see my own part of it, and I can see that there is emotional complexity present that I can write toward and write into. I am always in pursuit of emotional complexity, intellectual complexity, the complexity of truth, I’m always trying to not award myself, as the narrator, all of the empathy. I’m not trying to automatically award myself all of the grace, but more to see myself in connection to any other characters and how are we all part of some larger unit or pattern that I can try to understand.
At the high school reunion, that was a revelation that I had in the writing: homophobia hurts everybody. People who practice homophobia, people who are the targets of homophobia, everyone is in some way injured, whether they acknowledge it or not. That was a really powerful idea that only came forward because that guy apologized at the reunion. It was stunning to find out that he had remembered it, held onto it, that there was something that he couldn’t let go of for so long. That’s essentially my experience of it, too, in a totally different way. Locating the power of depicting that empathy on the page was an important part of seeing this whole book as a project. Then knowing that if I was writing about that girl I dated in “Cherry Bars,” or if I’m writing about my ex-boyfriend, that it was my job not to play the victim, and it was my job to allow all of my other characters to step into the roles.
When I teach students about this, I put on the board—and this is very reductive—but the idea that there’s the hero, the victim, and then there’s the villain. I always use those early films of the guy with the mustache tying the woman to the train tracks, the lumberjack coming in at the last second before she gets run over. All of those roles are ones that we step through, but also all of our characters step through moment to moment. I’m always looking for a moment in an essay where I can ask, in what way were you being the villain? In what way was someone else being the hero? Even if it’s for a minute, even if it’s for just one piece of the narrative. That’s how I think you represent empathy and are fair to all the other characters in your work and fair to yourself. Don’t present a narrative that’s either strongly in favor of yourself, or the opposite hazard where you can overcorrect and it can become self-pitying or self-deprecating in a way that doesn’t sit well with the reader either. That’s always the effect that I’m going for.
MC: I really like what you said about capturing a certain emotional complexity and not awarding yourself all of the grace. I feel like I will cut this out, but I recently struggled with writing a piece for a memoir workshop where I’m so recently removed from a relationship that I was guilty of awarding myself all of the grace. I didn’t paint any of the emotional complexity of what the relationship was before it was bad. I only painted the bad.
RVM: That happens to a lot of us. When I’ve had students who are trying to write a similar essay, I always say you have to make the reader fall in love with that person. As much in love with that person as you ever felt in love with that person. That’s hard to do, especially if you’re still hurting as a human being. It’s hard to do that as a writer. Maybe it means you work on it in a year. But if you want to work on it now, that’s what’s important to do. You have to be honest about your strongest positive feelings for that person. It’s not fair for you to only depict your strongest negative feelings about that person.
MC: You know what, this is not going to be cut out because that was a great response.
RVM: I had classes with Jo Ann Beard, who’s a really important writer to me, and I remember she advised us to always look in our essays for a moment when you can describe yourself from the point of view of another character in the story. What do you look like to them in their eyes? That can be a really useful exercise. I see that as where the door opens for this work that you’re talking about. Where you can then not automatically award anybody the grace, but divvy up and have them share it.
MC: I want to talk about “To Bear, To Carry.” It’s so smart and witty, but also very complex and harsh. Everyone in the workshop room loved it, the straight people, the gay people. Travis said that there should be an anthology of etymology essays, maybe about queer etymology, and that essay “To Bear, To Carry” could serve as the spine of that anthology. I haven’t read anything like it. It becomes this turning point in your life and you’re grappling with this word that all queer people have heard at some point or another. I think it’s incredibly relevant to this collection. I know I wrote a question about it that was more specific but right now I’m kind of just praising it and maybe it was all just praise.
RVM: I’m fine with that.
MC: I feel like we have, as gay people, a very nuanced relationship with that word. I’m assuming that’s where your want for writing this essay came from, is exploring that nuance. I’m so happy you wrote this, and the question is, in simpler terms, what made you write it?
RVM: A lot of it came out of the fact that I was being really inspired in graduate school by the things I was reading. I had my notion of what an essay looked like, which is mostly what populates this book. Then when I was at graduate school and I was reading the work of my peers and contemporary and classic examples of writers that I hadn’t come across yet, I realized that there’s all of this other stuff that the essay can do that I’m not doing yet because I’m writing these really intimate, impressionistic essays. Essays often describing something that happened in a very short amount of time, and blowing those moments up and enlarging them and living in them for more pages than they’re probably worth. A teacher of mine, Lia Purpura, said that I tended to gravitate toward “enormous, small moments.”
“To Bear, To Carry” came out of a history of the essay class where we had to write an essay that was in some way inspired by our study of the history of the essay. Looking at etymology and investigating and scrutinizing and observing and going deeper and deeper and deeper was something that I picked up from James Baldwin and the way that he would sit in a contradiction, or sit in a paradox, comfortably. It was something I wanted to give a try. The form is inspired by the collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion. There’s an essay in the back called “Los Angeles Notebook.” I thought of it as all the stuff that’s sitting on the writer’s desk and, now, they are going to go write this essay about this word. I was writing at the intersection of those two influences. It was also an opportunity to do things that I hadn’t done before. In a lot of the essay, I’m living as a writer and depicting that life as a thinking active mind in the essay itself. I’m going to the library with the intention that I’m going to look up this word and we’re just going to see what happens. I had never, and I probably haven’t done much of it since, known I was going to write about something and then performed an action that would hopefully go into the essay. There was a whole thrilling other way to think about essaying and my subject matter and my relationship to subject matter. I really did, for this essay, go to the library and pull those big old books off the shelf. Just being open and completely attuned to synchronicity and pattern and asking myself, where will this lead me? Then I went to the reference desk and asked this librarian, do you have this? That moment when he is able to say that he knows the same word that I’m getting at without me having to say it, I was just like, this is perfect. This is exactly what writers who go out in the world and report or investigate hope will happen. They hope to get that kind of immediate gratification. He was able to get that word without me supplying it. That was so clarifying and gratifying. As complicated and dark as that material is, that essay was thrilling to write on a writerly level because I was using a whole new skill set and trying out all new techniques and strategies that I had never asked myself to try before. Talk about trying to find an order, that was an essay that I had scissors and tape and hung it up on the wall and lived with it. I would move pieces around and stand there and keep looking at it. I’d start in one place that I hadn’t started before and go through all the fragments because I wanted to find exactly the right way to tell that story. It was the first time I was writing an essay that wasn’t a story.
MC: I really love to hear that it was thrilling and exciting from a writerly level because that comes off from a readerly level as well, not just as a student of writing or a writer myself, I think just in general. You said it’s the first time you wrote an essay that was not a story. But, still, it fits. The stories that are told in this are braided in very, very smoothly. And you do start off with, “My dear friend Tom,” like you were telling a story while focusing on this word. So, I think it’s such an exciting piece to read. There are parts that make you kind of wanna laugh out of like, am I supposed to laugh? Am I not? And I think that is, assuming, the intention and it was very much achieved.
I want to talk more about the final three essays that are in here, “The Goldfish History,” “Things I Will Want to Tell You on Our First Date but Won’t,” and “You Can’t Turn Off the Snake Light.” Those three essays come right after “To Bear, To Carry.” You use the goldfish as a tool to get us into this story of your friendship, your relationship, the fall of your relationship at the very end of that piece, and then we get into “Things I Will Want to Tell You on Our First Date but Won’t,” which is also one of the star essays of this collection. It’s an incredibly vulnerable piece. You’re grappling with this breakup and grappling with what it means for yourself and how you think about your body, how you are perceived by other people. You do a great job at writing about something so individual, something that feels like it’s only happening to you in the moment, but then it’s out there and it’s read by all these people. I can’t be the first person that has told you that this is something that resonated with me very deeply. Did you know that the conclusion of this collection would be writing through the grief of this relationship? After hiding yourself from others in the first half, then coming out, then getting into this relationship, was this the progression that you had in mind for the collection to take?
RVM: Not originally. I was working on this collection and I knew I had the title, I had all of the childhood pieces done. I had a lot of the teenage/adolescent pieces in progress. Then my ex-boyfriend broke up with me. I didn’t know that was going to happen to me in my life when I originally envisioned this as a collection. As I kept writing, it seemed like it would be dishonest to not write into that loss because it recalibrated a lot of the experiences that I had written about. The idea that I was suddenly flung out of this eight, nine-year relationship made me rethink everything. I think that’s what “The Goldfish History” and “Things I Will Want to Tell You on Our First Date but Won’t” are doing, they’re rethinking everything. They’re rethinking all that’s been explored up to that point in the book. I think I knew at that point that I wanted to write about the goldfish, but I think that essay without the breakup probably would’ve focused solely on the friendship with Kim. It’s only in the last couple of paragraphs that the breakup happens. I don’t think trouble is even hinted at. It just happens. It’s kind of the way it happened in life. Once I was able to write those couple of paragraphs, I was like, okay, I guess I can write about this. I guess this does belong and this does make inevitable sense for the long narrative of the book.
I think you’re right to say that an essay like “Things I Will Want to Tell You on Our First Date but Won’t” is vulnerable. I have this way of giving myself a technical challenge that allows me to forget that I’m revealing incredibly personal information about myself. It allows me to distract myself. The idea that I was writing this huge list of things and that every sentence except one or two starts with the word “that,” and each sentence is referring back to the title every single time, that was such a technical challenge. How do I make that not boring? Especially when every sentence is ostensibly structured very similarly. That distraction allowed me to write things that I probably wouldn’t have been able to write in such a direct manner if I was just writing a straightforward essay without that formal technical challenge. That’s something I’ve noticed that I do. “An essay about coyotes” is a good example of that. That was something that I always said I would never write about. It was an incredibly tender topic, but then I found this way to make it emotionally easier to explore the material in a way that the directness would’ve made impossible. It’s probably the case that all of the essays in this collection that have an explicit formal constraint or some kind of unconventional approach to the essay are the ones that were the most vulnerable to write. The ones that are first person, present tense, linear, there are insights in there that were hard won, but they didn’t have quite the fragility that some of the other ones did.
MC: I think that it’s a feat you accomplished. It works so well because it doesn’t feel like you are detached from it as a reader. Not that you are detached from it as a writer, but it doesn’t feel like you are using this technical space in order to “not feel” so you can write through it. It just feels like the appropriate formatting for this essay. It feels like this is what this has to be.
RVM: I’m always looking for a symbiotic relationship between form and subject. That through the form, the reader and I are able to explore a subject, but also through the subject, some idea of the form comes forward.
MC: I feel like the way you’ve written about certain topics such as grief, loss, the vulnerability of being freshly out of heartbreak, or in heartbreak, it comes to a reader like myself, and it feels like you have taken on this responsibility to bear witness to yourself and to your life. To put it on the page and then someone gets it and can learn something from it, which really did happen for me. It’s part of why I wanted to do this interview, because I feel like I learned a lot about my place in healing from reading this collection.
RVM: That’s beautiful.
MC: I’m going to try to phrase this question in a way that does not sound insane. What can you say about this responsibility that you take on through writing? Or do you not see it as a responsibility? Do you see it more as you yourself working through these things, coming to conclusions in your writing and then it just so happens that maybe you’re doing something good—which you are. It’s a very weird question and it feels God complex-y, but I don’t mean it that way at all. I mean it earnestly.
RVM: I’m not sure that I would use the word “responsibility.” I think if there is responsibility, it’s responsibility to the truth and it’s responsibility to complexity. Especially in the essay, there’s this contradiction or paradox that happens. If write your own story faithfully, and you write yourself toward some kind of discovery, something that you didn’t know before you started, some kind of insight that you are surprised by, it’s been my experience that there will be another reader out there who will also be surprised by that insight and welcome hearing it. I don’t feel like it’s my duty to put work out there. It’s more a hope that it will mean something to someone. I don’t feel like I’m writing for anyone except myself. Like, can I do this? Can I figure out this question? Can I understand why this memory won’t rest in my head? Can I understand why I’m sitting inside this contradiction that I can’t settle? Then doing your work and writing the essay with the hope that you can, and then when it’s done you hope that it finds other people. I know that as a reader I can read all kinds of essays by people who have completely different experiences than mine, from different time periods, from different nations, with all kinds of different identity characteristics, and I read and understand their work. I’m hoping that feeling happens with my work, but I don’t feel like anybody has owed me that essay that touched me. It does feel egotistical to assume that someone else is waiting for my work to do that to them.
It’s a paradox of essay writing. I think the promise that if you write your own story as specifically and precisely as possible, it will have all of these different ways in which other people from many different backgrounds, walks of life, experiences will be able to find, recognize, and connect with. That’s a really strange thing to have faith in.
MC: That was a really solid answer for an out-of-pocket question.
RVM: Thank you.
MC: I do want to get into the other three essays that you sent. Let’s start with “The Hourglass.” Has it been published somewhere?
RVM: It was solicited for an anthology of essays about a writer’s relationship with a television show. It was called Little Boxes. It was put out by Coffee House. It’s a really lovely little book. The stipulation was that it had to be a television show from the pre streaming era. It couldn’t be a show you binge watched, but rather a relationship with a show that you watched when it was on, or you made an intentional decision to tape it with your VCR.
MC: I adore that. You obviously do it with “Days of Our Lives.” You mention how shows like “Dallas” and “Dukes of Hazard,” shows that come on Friday nights and not every day, feel like a show, whereas “Days of our Lives,” because it comes on every day, feels like you’re watching a reality show. When I stream a show that’s bingeable, that’s put out all at once on Netflix, it feels too accessible. Then, for example, during its season run, “The White Lotus” comes on weekly, every Sunday you’re back to this ritual. This is something so far out of reach and I’m going to sit down on a Sunday and I’m going to watch it and then have to wait a week. Then I have to wait a year for a new season. It doesn’t feel like reality, if that makes sense. In terms of genre, you’re clearly a very accomplished essayist and memoirist. I wonder how you feel about that idea of the everyday show, or the streamable show, versus the weekly show and how that translates to your writing. How does that translate to writing in other genres, whether it be fiction, poetry, or anything else? Does one feel more like the everyday show versus the weekly?
RVM: I’ve been working on a novel for many years and it’s taking so long because I’ve had to teach myself to write in a completely different way at the sentence level. Also, thinking of who the narrator is and what the narrator is and what they’re doing is completely different for me. I’m used to the narrator equaling me, but not being me, the person. In nonfiction, the narrator isn’t me, the guy sitting at the computer, it’s a representation of me. There is a very strong connection between the two and my thoughts are the narrator’s thoughts. But, in fiction, it’s been a difficult thing to get my mind around the idea of who thought what. Did the narrator think that? But the narrator’s not me. Did the writer think that? Because it probably shouldn’t be in there if it’s the writer telling the reader something. Did the character think that? Who is also not a version of me. In an essay that I write about my childhood, it might have been a long time since I was a child, but that character version of myself is a version of me. When you invent a character, as I have invented a whole set of characters, it’s been this whole thing to get one’s mind around it.
If you’re looking at “Days of our Lives” and the rhetorical strategies of “Days of our Lives” versus the rhetorical strategies of prestige television, they are completely different. There’s a way in which some people who watch TV think that daytime soap opera is lower quality because of the certain things that they have to do in that show because of their relationship with the audience. I say in the essay, people describe themselves and give all kinds of exposition and context to each other as characters that’s really meant for the viewer because it’s on every day, but there’s an expectation that you haven’t watched every episode. It was a form invented for women who were working in the house and who were in and out of the room. First it was radio, but then it was television. It’s constantly having to explain to the viewer what they might have missed, or to provide the context necessary to understand a scene in a way that you would never do in a show like “The White Lotus,” who can, at the beginning of the hour, do “previously on White Lotus,” which you would never do in fiction. You expect the reader to hold all of these details in their mind. Anytime a character in a novel talks to another character, and it sounds like they’re trying to say something to the reader, it feels that it doesn’t belong. It completely breaks that fictional spell.
MC: I try to stay away from questions about future projects because that’s a stressful thing, but I think this is a fun question. I’ve never seen “Days of Our Lives,” I just know of it. But I understand the tropes of soap operas. I’ve devoured “Desperate Housewives” multiple times, which isn’t exactly a soap opera.
RVM: It’s a prime-time soap.
MC: Exactly. Reading about “Days of our Lives” through your eyes was so fun and I trusted you completely. I wonder if there’s something in you that would one day want to do a collection of essays that is fully ekphrastic, focusing on one show? Multiple shows?
RVM: There was a brief moment where I had this idea that I wanted to write a book length essay about “Days of Our Lives” and go into the weeds about how soap operas deal with the fact that they’re on for so many years. “Days of Our Lives” is in its sixtieth year. There are all kinds of interesting things that they do that are visible to a viewer, but not necessarily part of the story. Such as, not to get into the weeds here, but if an actor steps away from a character, they can be replaced by another actor, right? Then on “Days of Our Lives” that happened and for a long time somebody that we knew as Roman Brady came back and was played by a different actor. Then, I suppose the man who originally played Roman Brady wanted to return to the show. So, they wrote out this whole convoluted storyline where this was in fact not Roman, but it was this imposter. It became this third character named John Black because it had been played by another actor. Are you following me?
MC: One hundred percent, yes.
RVM: Then there was, all of a sudden, a love triangle between the married couple and this third person who the wife had thought was her husband the whole time but wasn’t. That’s super interesting because it’s this thing that happened because of casting, it’s not something that we’re supposed to be aware of as viewers in the story. I was really interested in all of that complication and its implications towards truth and performance and all kinds of other issues. I took about six months of notes, filled notebooks and notebooks about this, and then this opportunity came along to write a single essay. I wrote the essay and then I realized, I think I’m satisfied. I don’t think I have to write a book length essay about that anymore. I think I got to say what I didn’t know I wanted to say about soap opera and probably saved some time.
MC: We must discuss “Anyone He Pleased.” I feel like this is a piece that specifically follows IYKTWIKN. It’s as if IYKTWIKN was a little jumping board at the pool and then now you are able to use those lessons you learned in that collection for this essay, especially for the ending of this. I wonder how you think about all the essays that you have written in the past, such as in this book that was published in 2011, and how those stories that you have already written informed your current writing? Do you still feel like you are using lessons learned from IYKTWIKN as a collection and incorporating those lessons into other pieces? I am saying lessons only because you are now the person that is comfortable in your sexuality and wishing that for someone else. It feels like “Anyone He Pleased” and IYKTWIKN are cousins. I wonder if that was a conscious decision?
RVM: The experience that happened on the train was, I think, the only time where I’ve lived something and I knew, as I was walking back to my car, that I was going to write about that. Talk about an enormous, small moment. That little moment at the table is worthy material. I want to write about that. I want to understand that moment better. It took six years for me to do it, not that I was working on it for six years, but I knew that I was going to do it. I put that scrap of paper on the bulletin board of my mind and knew it would be there when I was ready. When I was done with it, I was aware that it was a culmination of a lot of the ideas that are in IYKTWIKN, especially the ideas in “First.” I see it as almost a call back to “First.” It was also an opportunity to write about a forebearer, about the generation ahead of me and what their experience was like and to think about my position vis-a-vis that. It immediately felt like something that I needed to get down. The reason that I finally wrote it is because I decided to teach a class on the flash essay, and I was writing the course description. I’d always been a big fan of Brevity, but had never been published by them, had tried, but had not succeeded. So, writing the course description, I thought, do I even know how to do this? Do I even know how to write an essay that’s under 750 words? I gave myself the assignment. I thought to myself, you have to finish this piece before that class starts. That’s how I finally, six years later, told myself that you need to do this.
MC: Let’s get into “An essay about coyotes.” In the essay you write, “We write dead dog essays because after we spend a decade or more with an animal that we love and care for, we rightfully feel we have had a singular experience.” I mentioned how there’s things in IYKTWIKN that feel so singular, and I’m sure they feel so singular while you’re writing it. That’s just true of any type of loss, grief, traumatic experience that we have where it feels individual in the moment, but it really resonates with a large group of people. This essay is very meta, and you mentioned earlier how you do that on purpose so that you can write about something that’s difficult to write about. I could not see this piece being anything other than what it is and it’s just so wonderful.
There’s a moment where you say, “I was angry most of all because, I knew if I hadn’t seen that coyote, my dog wouldn’t have died.” This reminded me of Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” when she’s going through the loss of her husband and she says something at one point that implies that if she was in California rather than New York, her husband would still be alive because of the time difference. Using one of those thinking traps, like magical thinking, to rationalize what happened to you works so well in this essay. Then you also use other tools such as framing it as a craft essay, but it’s also not just about the craft, it’s about the dog that you lost and crying and coyotes and all these things, and you point all of this out to poke at the reader. Do you know before sitting down, or standing, or whatever your pre-writing ritual is, that you are going to go into a specific essay using a particular tool? Did you know that you would incorporate the idea of magical thinking or that you would make this a craft-like essay? Did you know when to use a Flathead versus… what are the other screw drivers?
RVM: A Phillips? Sure. As I said before, it was material that I had convinced myself that I would never write about for the reasons that I state in the essay. It’s very familiar, it’s sentimental or prone to be sentimental, and lots of people try it. I was struck later, maybe a year or two after my dog died, by the way in which me being a writer and being a teacher of essay writing had everything to do with the way that I experienced how she died. How I experienced the aftermath of her death and the magical thinking of seeing coyotes. I thought that if I were to ever write about it, I had to write about being an essay writing teacher because it was so connected. That was how I looked at her death, through an essay writing teacher lens, and no other lens was really available to me. Also, on paper, there are all these coincidences in that essay. Such as it was the first day of class, I saw a coyote, I had assigned my students to write about seeing an animal, and then the next day was when she started getting sick. I can remember that particular semester where I followed the same syllabus that I followed year to year when I taught that class. I can remember having to step into the hall and have a conversation with the vet because she had been there all day getting fluid and then stepping back in class and no one knowing. None of my students having any idea that that was happening. Then the day that we euthanized her and the day that we scattered her ashes, all of that happened during the life of that class. I can remember all of those students really vividly. I can remember that classroom really vividly and in a way that I can’t just pick out other particular versions of that class from other years. It had everything to do with being a person who writes essays and who teaches how to write an essay. Speaking about not automatically awarding yourself the empathy, I scrutinize and criticize myself for living that way and for expecting the essay writer lens to be a useful one to look at life experiences. I needle that part of myself and that’s part of the performance of the essay, which is insisting that it’s not doing what it’s doing in a way that the reader thinks, “but you’re doing it.” That was one of those technical challenges that allowed me to distract myself so that I could write vulnerable lines.
Maybe a year after she died, I took a bunch of notes of everything I could remember about those couple of weeks leading up to her death and then after she died. I didn’t know what they were going to be, and I thought for a long time I was going to write a short story about it. I had this whole other concept about dying dogs through the context of a support group, people coming together and talking about their dead or dying dogs. I wrote the first couple of pages of that story, and I just wasn’t finding it. It didn’t have the energy that things usually have when I’m working. It wasn’t something I kept wanting to work on. Then, when I came up with the idea of writing it through the lens of, this is not an essay about this, but it’s an essay about this. After I realized that, it drafted itself in a week.
MC: It’s interesting to hear that you tried to do it a different way but because it wasn’t something that you were excited to be writing, it wasn’t working. Like you said, “To Bear, To Carry” was something that was riveting to write from a writerly perspective. This essay feels the same way, where it’s really difficult material and something that is very individual and very specific to one person, but at the same time it is something that everybody tries to write about at some point, and I think the way that it’s executed makes it so that it becomes refreshing from a writerly and readerly perspective.
RVM: I’m just now hearing myself talk and this is a lesson that I keep having to learn because I did the same thing when I wrote IYTKWIKN, the essay, which is also somewhat meta, but that was an experience that I tried for many years to write as a short story, to scramble enough of it, to make it seem invented enough, and I couldn’t. Then as soon as I said, why don’t you just tell the truth? I was able to write it fairly, not easily, but I was able to get myself through the draft. It was a lesson that I still have to learn. You can’t just transfer it to that other genre. Everything that’s embedded in it is present there because it’s a completely different set of concerns and expectations and conventions.
What’s important about it is not the story. What’s important about it is that it happened. Fiction is better at telling a story. The essay is better at writing about things that happened.
MC: What’s important is that it happened. That’s it. That is perfect. Are you cool with those being your final words?
RVM: I think that sounds good. It feels like we’ve reached an apotheosis or culmination of something.
Ryan Van Meter is the author of the essay collection, If You Knew Then What I Know Now. His work has been selected for anthologies such as Best American Essays and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to Present. He is the Associate Director of the Program in Creative Writing at The University of Chicago.
Michael Cuervo is an essayist, poet, and hybridist. He is currently enrolled in the creative writing MFA at Florida International University, where he serves as the Assistant Managing Editor of Gulf Stream Magazine. His work explores sexuality, pop culture, and all the intersections that arise.
Gulf Stream Magazine 