AJ: Your book – and, indeed, I feel, this conversation too, with its spacious ebbs and flows – embodies that liberating idea of time as attuned not only to now but what could be. I keep returning to your thought that ‘so much of communal life is erased on the way to literature’ (p.190). Publishing, ironically, unfortunately, can be quite normative and extractionist (and we can treat our own bodies and selves that way too). What shaped the formation of the book on that level?
ES: In March 2020, my deadline to finish writing was fast approaching. But once the pandemic began, I knew instantly the book wasn’t done; it couldn’t be. I’d have to live through this time and write about it. There was no way I could publish a book on healing approximately a year later and not address the global devastation that was coming, and how it might change me, my writing, and anything I knew about illness, medicine, healing. My editor, Stephen Motika of Nightboat Books, was incredibly supportive of the ways the book changed and expanded during this time.
The pandemic furnished the crucible in which the book finally came together. COVID-19 and rising authoritarianism gave the writing urgency. Yet none of it was really new. Our last formal event of the program series, in 2013, had been on ‘arts of crisis’. COVID clarified the chronic syndrome, the reality that had always been syndemic. Disabled and immunocompromised people sacrificed, as were workers and those in marginalised communities. Hatred of the slow and chronic, hatred of rest and of the un-understood. Hatred of difference. Denialism. Gaslighting.
When the book was in production, I began to think some of my writing on the US in 2020 and on COVID would feel outdated to readers. But I’d forgotten how recursive and regressive things are. Ironically, and sadly, people often tell me how timely Dreaming in the Fault Zone feels to them.
When it takes years to finish writing a book, to gather and weave it together, you can feel shame. We live in a society that valorises production, speed, and prolific publication. But when my previous book, Visceral Poetics, came out, my mentor told me that it was in fact timely, and that coming into the world, it would become part of that moment and help to create it, enabling other people’s work. And that poetry and poetics have their own time. So, I’ve come to accept the mystery of how and when things emerge in their own time. And that’s incubation.
AJ: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure and a balm to connect. Finally, can you tell us a little more about your piece recently published in Cordite, ‘Becalmed’?
ES: It’s been such a pleasure to be in conversation, Andy, a tonic especially at this moment. Thank you. My piece is an excerpt from a poem-essay in progress, begun as a commission for an anthology on insomnia edited by Sam Ladkin. Exploring the confluence of insomnia and writing led me back to 19th century shipwreck narratives, fictions as well as real-life accounts of cannibalism written by survivors of the sinking of the whaleship Essex, a major source for Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville. In a number of these tales insomnia looms large, associated with the terror of approaching and breaching limits. The title borrows that curious term when you’re trapped in a boat with no wind. Its ironic desperation and stasis reminded me of impasse in our time and pessimism about the future. Accelerating climate chaos, when we seemed to pass another limit one fire season waking to a day that appeared night, the sun blotted out by smoke, grim jokes about Mars. The oligarchs who consume our labor and attempt to extract our minds to fuel their transhumanist fantasies. There’s a way in which thinking with Poe is infinitely generative for me, haunted by certain strains in American society: wanting the comeback, or wanting to return to a fictional past. Wanting ‘winners’. Exceptionalism, giving yourself immunity.
