A few years ago, I read Chelsea Biondolillo’s essay, “Back to the Land,” in the 2016 Best American Nature and Science Writing. I was taken by its atmosphere and voice, and I immediately sought out everything else Biondolillo had written. I found essays that surprised me lyrically and made me see the world anew. That only continued when I read her 2019 essay collection, The Skinned Bird. Nicole Walker says of the collection, “Birds fill this book, but this book is also full of music, silence, rain, deserts and desertion.” The Skinned Bird is constant in how its particular obsessions drive its structures and forms. Each essay’s form alters and transfigures its subjects in ways that caught me off guard and adapted my expectations. While reading The Skinned Bird, I was reminded of the possibilities of form, the possibilities of exploration, the possibilities of language, and the possibilities of the essay.
Brock Allen: Did you start with the structure of the book in mind from the beginning?
Chelsea Biondolillo: These essays took seven years to write, and no, I definitely did not have the finished structure in mind. But I like talking about structure with the book because that took so long to arrive at. I never had a book in mind for the first few years I was writing these. It changed a lot over the years and over a lot of different rejections, many of them kind, which is why I kept going, but after a certain point I stopped. I put it in a drawer and that was it. I was done with the book. I wasn't going to try to publish it. I don't think I thought back then that it was too weird, because “The Story You Never Tell” wasn't even in there. It was that I didn't think it would hang together in a cohesive structure. It felt like disparate elements, and I just didn't have a key to organize them. Almost everything at that point had been published somewhere and I thought, “That's fine. That can be considered done,” and I tried to write a different book, but I couldn't. I tried to do that for about three years, and I kept not writing that second book and in the back of my mind I was like, “Is this because the first book feels like it never got finished? Or is that just an excuse I'm using to not write this second book?”
BA: In your interview with Erica Trabold you detail the long revision for your essay, “Phrenology.” It went through workshops with Maggie Nelson, John D’Agata, and Colson Whitehead, and you said that at one point you put it into the drawer and abandoned it. It wasn’t until you needed more pages for your thesis that you took it back out to rework it. How have you seen these external constraints work as catalysts for your creative process and how have they pushed you through obstacles you might not have if they weren’t there?
CB: I really need external constraints, and those come up all over the place in my work. In terms of a deadline, often. In terms of my publisher, for example, who said, “The last essay right now doesn't feel like the last essay, so we need one more to be the last essay.” And that was the first essay I had written in probably a year. I assign myself constraints sometimes. “Phrenology,” for example. Once that was finished, I set myself the constraint of duplicating the form for “Pyrology.” I did that because I thought “Phrenology” was just too singular in the text and too weird. “Pyrology” is very different, but I wanted to play with the idea of floating text boxes, footnotes, and lists. It was that constraint of structure that helped make “Pyrology” happen.
I don't know why it is that I need constraints. I could hypothesize psychologically. There's a songwriter, who has a song with the line, “Just like water, I need something to hold me, or I might spill all over everything,” and I think about that a lot, because the way I think and the way I write tends to be really disorganized, and I am easily distracted in terms of my writing process and my writing practice. I'm constantly just amassing these fragments and ideas for essays and I get overwhelmed with the abundance of possibility. A constraint requires that I pick from all of the millions of things. I was just talking to a student who said they are a person who just has too many ideas, and they don't know which one to write. I told them, “This is not going to be welcome advice, but pick one at random and just tell yourself you have to do it.” It might feel really awkward and uncomfortable at first, but I personally think part of that is the brain’s desire to keep as many options open as possible. It’s easy to go back to all those 20 other options and see, but I think, “No, I'm going to stick with this one constraint, and see where it goes.”
BA: You’ve said earlier you felt like you couldn't write the vulture book, or couldn't finish it, because you had this other book that you felt like you needed to finish first. Was that an instinctual, gravitational pull?
CB: It could easily have been a trick my brain was playing like, “Oh, yeah, you could be sitting in your chair and writing this book about vultures, but this other thing isn’t done, so go to that.” Not that it felt easier, but it was closer to done and the vulture book felt very hard. Obviously, since it remains unwritten. I'm a finisher. I mean, I like to finish what I start at all costs, so I think part of it was that I couldn't accept the fact that I had written a whole book and it wasn't ever going to be a book.
I did wonder, “Maybe it's been rejected 20 times or whatever with good reason.” The process of revision was when I reorganized everything into four parts. I actually fell more in love with it, and thought, “I think this is a good book. This is good, and it isn't some consolation prize because I couldn't write the vulture book.” By the time I finished with revisions, I hoped people read it because I liked it and I wanted it to succeed.
BA: Everything you write about, from insects to birds, feels so deeply researched, but it’s presented in such an engaging, lyrical way. How does this distillation of information come, and how is your revision process tied into this?
CB: I really like to research, and I still have these thick files filled with peer-reviewed papers or notes or whatever I’ve amassed for certain essays. At the beginning, I read as much as I can and highlight sentences that jump out at me or ideas that jump out at me. Then I start writing in fragments. So I'm pulling these things out as I go and eventually I have enough fragments that I think, “What do we even have here?” A lot of times it's a sort of physical process of taking these notes and putting them next to each other and seeing if they are so disparate that it’s going to be a braided essay or something weird like “Phrenology?” I just look at what I've got.
In the case of the essay about migration, I had a stack of notes on migration patterns or navigation patterns. I had a stack of notes on all the places I’ve lived. I just started writing with all of this evidence in mind and it became more of a cohesive document than say “Phrenology” where I said, “I'm just going to lay these fragments out and bump them up against one another in as many different ways as possible and see how long it takes for a shape to cohere.” Sometimes you just have to keep writing until the essay tells you what it wants to be about, and it is kind of an unpredictable process. Sometimes that takes a page or two and you suddenly know right where you are going, and sometimes it takes ten pages.
BA: In your essay, “Not Travel Writing,” you talk about trying to write about vultures. In it, you quote Maggie Nelson in Bluets, where she says that “She’s been saying she’s writing a book about the color blue for years, even going so far as to include its progress on her CV, ‘without writing a word.’” You relate to this in that you’d been telling everyone you’re writing a book about vultures, and you feel like you are still progressing. Why is the research phase so intoxicating? Is it the constraints that help break you out of that?
CB: An assignment will break me out of that. Being asked to contribute to something will certainly galvanize some action. But really, I think constraints do it more than anything, because it requires selection, and it requires a decision be made, instead of just endlessly researching. The vultures are a great example. I never wrote that book. I tried to write it for three years, and it still isn’t written. It did feel like Maggie's book, like “a sleeve of ash” smoking itself in this ashtray. The reason that book didn't work out wasn't because I didn't have a lack of constraint, but I think it keeps me in a perpetual state of amassing possibility rather than amassing actuality. Constraints are galvanizing. They’re galvanizing in their requirements and without them I don't tend to produce much, besides lots of notes.
BA: I think it's in an older interview that you say the revision process is the art-making process that comes after all the work of gathering raw material.
CB: Yeah, when I was a visual artist, I used a lot of disparate elements in my work and so my studio was always a complete mess. I just had stacks of images and pages torn out of magazines everywhere. I think a number of people have said in a number of different ways this idea that you're always writing the same essay over and over again. I think if I had to describe the essay I write over and over again it has to do with how I process all of this information. I am like some kind of filter and all of this stuff comes in and what comes out is an idea of one particular way to interact with the world. So I'm constantly gathering stuff and eventually that stuff rolls around in my brain long enough to find an outlet.
BA: How intuitive is this process when you are compiling these things, and deciding to use the information as a strand in a braided or mixed-media essay? I’m thinking about the similar forms of “Phrenology” and “Pyrology,” but how different their content is. How intuitive is deciding how these disparate elements prop each other up for the whole of the essay?
CB: The whole process tends to be fairly intuitive, but I do give myself assignments. With “Pyrology,” that was a mega act of brainstorming in matching “Phrenology.” The floating text boxes are all taken from a Fanny Bernie letter. Those are all Fanny Bernie's, and the quotes at the bottom are from all over the place. The footnotes in “Pyrology” are tweets, as is the text at the top of each page. For a long time I wrote micro-essays on Twitter using the CNF tweet hashtag. A lot of those were like little darlings, and I just wanted to do something with them because they were very good, incredibly small essays, and a bunch of them were published in Creative Nonfiction magazine. I considered the essay done, but it didn't feel all the way done. In the case of “Pyrology,” I was sort of digging through the mental and physical file cabinets to see what I had because the “Phrenology” essay changed wildly from its original intention. Originally that essay was going to be a sort of socio-political statement about women in science. It originally had personal anecdotes and a whole bunch of weird stuff about the Harvard computers, the women that calculated the stars, the first woman to die in the electric chair, the first woman to go into space—women's interactions with science. An early reviewer said the stuff that I was writing about with my experience with science was way more interesting.
So, I just kept a super open mind about what “Pyrology” was going to be. I looked at all my stuff and said, “Maybe this can be a home for some of those tweets.” I had this list of volcanic eruptions, and I was thinking of temperature. I was thinking of a lot of dumb stuff at first, then eventually it had far fewer things in it. So it's not it's not an idea that came out of nowhere, but it's an idea that came out of a very exploratory process.
BA: One of the essays I really love in the book, in terms of form, is “Meteorology.” I especially loved the last line, “And then we let out a long held breath,” and how that line matches the white space of the page. It stands out as one of my favorite moments of the book.
CB: I hate to do it, but that wasn’t intentional.
BA: Oh, really? That’s maybe even better, but I was going to ask about the white space you use throughout the book.
CB: I do use white space very intentionally, and white space matters to me. And again, I think that has a lot to do with being a visual artist first. I really struggled with it in grad school. It was a problem that I kept working to solve—both white space and my use of asterisks. Every time I turned something in with asterisks for a workshop in grad school, somebody would ask if they were where they should be, and if I had earned the asterisks. White space, the use of formal elements like asterisks, bold text, or dropping a line off the middle; I think a lot about those. I didn't plan for that line to live all by itself like that, but I did love it once I saw it on the page. I was like, “Oh, that's fantastic.”
I owe a lot to Andy Fitch, who was my thesis advisor. He showed us things like Jenny Boully’s, “The Body: An Essay” when I was a student, and the essay, if you haven't seen it, is only footnotes. There's no text. Seeing things like that helped. And there's a lot of correlations to this idea of negative space or taking up space in fine art. I felt really confident in my desire to use those things deliberately. What I'm still working on is the actual craft of doing it effectively in ways that mediate the reading experience and challenge readers and make the act of reading consider other possibilities than just one word following the next.
BA: That brings up one of the questions with how the form changes from being on the internet to being in the book. Do you see themes change or crystallize based on the different forms they appear in?
CB: That's a good question. In the case of “How to Skin a Bird” there was one that did change the essay. Originally, the way I envisioned “How to Skin a Bird” was that there would be a section of taxidermy, an asterisk, a section of my relationship with my father, and then a large amount of white space, and then another couplet, because I saw two elements spinning around this point and people didn't get that. Now it is: A piece of taxidermy, a piece of relationship, an asterisk, then another set, and a little bit of white space between. Conceptually, as far as the elements go, it brought the two disparate braids in closer relationship and it created an essay where there is, rather than these diptychs floating around in space, paired ideas that almost come like vignettes one after the other and it feels more chronological to readers. So it totally changed. I think it's stronger than my original idea. I think my original idea was just a little bit too wacky, and one of the things I have talked to other writers about is that it's so much easier to see in the writing of other people than it is in one's own writing.
I have had constraints that did not ultimately result in publishable material, but I have never encountered a constraint that felt like a waste of my time. One of my favorite living poets is Camille Dungy. I heard her give a talk in northern Arizona, and she said that she had been interested in performing art early, but what she did not enjoy was practicing, and writing was something where the practice of it, which is playing with words, was something she enjoyed, and that's how she knew writing is the thing she was meant to do. Amassing research and playing with it and seeing what it might turn into is very much a practice I enjoy. I would do that even if I didn't write essays. The last year of not writing any essays is a testament to that.
BA: This one is a bit brown-nosy, but I read “Back to the Land” in the Best American Science and Nature Writing a few years ago, and I remember reading it and thinking, “That's how I want to write. That's it.” With the more experimental essays you write, which writers did you discover who made you think, “This is how I want to write?”
CB: Bluets, for sure. Maggie Nelson totally blew my mind when I read that book. I read it and thought, “Holy shit, you can do this?” I thought, “This is way more than just an essay.” That's how it felt to me at the time. That one kind of cracked my brain open. Lydia Yuknavitch’s “Chronology of Water.” I read that in the first few weeks before grad school, while I was living in Laramie. I read it, and I had never read anything with this resistance of the redemptive ending. One thing that I talk a lot about when I teach is how to subvert narratives, because I think it's easier to follow very prescriptive, expected narratives. What's more interesting is finding ways to break those, and the writers who do that are the ones I am most drawn to. Those were, of course, some of the writers that I reached out to, begging and pleading to blurb my book. Kristen Hersh, in her memoir, Rat Girl, does that. I had read memoirs before and they hadn't done to me what those two did. In Kristen’s book—she's a well-known musician in very specific circles—and this book was not a tell-all about how the band formed or broke up. It wasn't the sex, drug, and rock and roll. It wasn't, “Here's the meanings behind all my weird lyrics.” She resisted all of that and still wrote this incredibly arresting and rich memoir about being diagnosed as bipolar in her teens while her band was getting signed to a major label. And Lydia's book does the same thing where as you're reading that book you think, “It's all going to be fine, right? I mean, at some point it's all going to be fine, right? When do we get to the point where everything is fine? How much horribleness can happen?” And she says, “As much as needed to shape us into the people we are.”
BA: How did it feel having Lydia Yuknavitch’s blurb on the front of your book?
CB: That was great, and it was great to get a quote from Kristen Hersh. It was great to get a quote from Nicole Walker, who is another person who I think writes in unexpected ways about the natural world. Lydia, especially, and the thing is, it wasn't just the blurb either. She bought a case of books and gave them to all the writing students for a couple of months. That's the thing with being in a program and then later as the Colgate fellow, I got to meet a lot of big deal living writers, and I learned there's a way to be a literary citizen, and there's a way to not be a literary citizen. I am continually grateful for the good examples that are around me, especially in this town. Lydia is a champion of writers, and that means she fosters their actual writing practice. She promotes and supports them and she doesn’t look at other writers as competition. We are part of an ongoing conversation about why literature matters, and having more voices to lend to that choir can only help us all. I mean, obviously I love the fact that she loved the book, and I was over the moon, but more than anything, she's just been an amazing literary citizen to get to know. Plus, it's a good blurb.
BA: One of the things I loved so much about “Back to the Land,” and with The Skinned Bird, is the restraint that is felt in the writing. Maybe that's not the right word for it, but your writing always feels very controlled in the best way with very specific details, and maybe that's a point of concision, but it always feels like just the right amount of information.
CB: Yeah, so in the case of “Back to the Land,” much like Carver owes to Gordon Lish, I had an incredible editor. Originally, there was a whole bunch of gory stuff in there that the editor said, “Maybe a little less about the punctured eye socket bones and the tendons, and is there any way to have a little bit more about butterflies?” A great editor helps, because it is hard to see in your own work. Sometimes I tend to start with everything in and then I get as ruthless as possible. Sometimes I get too ruthless and that's where it's important to have good readers who can look at something. I had a really great reader for that last migration piece and she asked some good questions. It’s a process. It's an art like anything else. I start with everything because I think it is easier to take away then to add after, generally speaking. Dinty W. Moore has a great piece on the magnetic river. Somewhere in there is what you call the invisible magnetic river, or “the thing and the other thing.” Once you get a sense of that underlying direction, it becomes a matter of taking everything else out.
BA: So now that you've written The Skinned Bird, are you going to go back to the vulture book?
CB: No, that book is weird. I don't know what the deal is with that book. I don't know what I'm doing next. There's an agent who would like to know what I'm going to be doing next so we can talk about whether or not she wants to represent it. But I don't have a clear idea. I've been writing a little bit about the place where I am now, so the process of buying and cleaning up this house which was my grandparent’s house. I mentioned that at the very end of The Skinned Bird, that it has really been a physically and emotionally and financially and mentally all-consuming thing, and I feel like there's something potentially there, so I've started writing about blackberries and thinking about the Giant House Spiders, which is their actual name.
Also thinking about ideas of conservation versus preservation, and what is worth preserving not just of a house and a life, but of the landscape too, because this is two acres that has been neglected for at least 45 years if not more. Those are the kinds of things I've been thinking about which has nothing at all to do with vultures. I really at some point need to just write the stupid vulture essays that are in my brain, but that was one of those things where I had two different agents, and I had five different book proposals. There were too many cooks in the soup, and I lost any sense of what that book was about, or I began to doubt all of my instincts about what that book was about. Maybe it's not a book. Maybe it's just some disparate essays. I mean, “Back to the Land” did remarkably well. I can tell really engaging stories about vultures but what I cannot tell is one engaging story about vultures and that's why it's not a book. They're all just rolling around, waiting for a sense of direction.
BA: Well, good luck! And thank you so much for taking the time to visit with me.
CB: Thank you so much.
Chelsea Biondolillo is the author of The Skinned Bird: Essays, and two prose chapbooks, Ologies and #Lovesong. She is a former Olive B O’Connor fellow and Oregon Literary Arts fellow in nonfiction, and her work has been collected in Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2016, How We Speak to One Another: an Essay Daily Reader, and others. She lives and works outside of Portland, Oregon.
Brock Allen is an assistant editor at The Normal School, and a Creative Nonfiction student in Fresno State's MFA Creative Writing Program.