Eula Biss
Photo courtesy of Eula Biss
Bio
Eula Biss is the author of The Balloonists (Hanging Loose, 2002) and Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays (Graywolf, 2009). She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and teaches nonfiction writing at Northwestern University. Her work has recently been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a 21st-Century Award from the Chicago Public Library, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading and The Best Creative Nonfiction as well as in the Believer, Fourth Genre, and Harper's. Her current work is concerned with metaphor in medicine and explores the intersection of public health and private decisions in the first year of an infant's life.
Author's Statement
As a working mother who both teaches and writes, I lack nothing except time. All three of my pursuits -- mothering, teaching, and writing -- have a tendency to, in Betty Friedan's words, "expand to fill the time available." Three ever-expanding demands pressing against the limits of a day can produce a surprisingly desirable effect something like the checks and balances imagined into our three-part government. But those checks and balances are designed to resist dramatic change, and can prohibit certain kinds of ambition. I initially planned to work on just a handful of short essays for a few years after the birth of my son, but almost immediately a demanding book project emerged out of the new thinking I was doing as a mother. This project did not just fill my spare time at the end of the day, this project required me to learn about epidemiology and epistemology, to interview immunologists and toxicologists, and to become a dramatically different kind of writer. Though the experience of motherhood produced this project, pursuing it threatened my time with my son. By affording me time away from teaching, this generous fellowship has helped solve that conundrum. It will allow me to be both writer and mother. And the first, I am learning, depends very much on the second, just as the second depends on the first.
Excerpt from Notes from No Man's Land
I worked, during my first year in New York, in some of the city's most notorious neighborhoods: in Bed-Stuy, in East New York, in East Harlem, in Washington Heights. That was before I knew the language of the city, and the codes, so I had no sense that these places were considered dangerous. I was hired by the Parks Department to inspect community gardens, and I traveled all over the city, on train and on bus and on foot, wearing khaki shorts and hiking boots, carrying a clip-board and a Polaroid camera.
I did not understand then that city blocks on which most of the lots were empty or full of the rubble of collapsed buildings would be read, by many New Yorkers, as an indication of danger. I understood that these places were poverty stricken, and ripe with ambient desperation, but I did not suspect that they were any more dangerous than anywhere else in the city. I was accustomed to the semi-rural poverty and post-industrial decay of upstate New York. There, by the highways, yards were piled with broken plastic and rusting metal, tarps were tacked on in place of walls, roof beams were slowly rotting through. And in the small cities, in Troy and Watervliet, in Schenectady and Niskayuna, in Amsterdam and in parts of Albany, old brick buildings crumbled, brownstones stood vacant, and factories with huge windows waited to be gutted and razed.
Beyond the rumor that the old hot dog factory was haunted, I don't remember any mythology of danger clinging to the landscape of upstate New York. And the only true horror story I had ever heard about New York City before I moved there was the story of my grandmother's brother, a farm boy who had gone to the city and died of gangrene after cutting his bare foot on some dirty glass. "Please," my grandmother begged me with tears in her eyes before I moved to New York, "always wear your shoes."
And I did. But by the time I learned what I was really supposed to be afraid of in New York, I knew better -- which isn't to say that there was nothing to be afraid of, because, as all of us know, there are always dangers, everywhere.
But danger was an abstraction to me then, not something I felt. In fact, I can recall vividly the first time I made the intellectual deduction that I might be in a dangerous situation -- I was riding the subway in Manhattan well past midnight, and I noticed after just a few minutes on the train that I was the only woman in that car. At the next stop, I walked into the next car, which was also full of men, and so I began traveling the length of the train. I eventually found a car where a woman was sleeping with her head resting on the man next to her, but by then I was unsettled. I looked into other trains as they passed us in the tunnels, and I looked at the people waiting on the platforms. Women did not ride the subway alone very late at night, I realized. And as I made this realization I felt not fear, but fury.
Even now, at a much more wary and guarded age, what I feel when I am told that my neighborhood is dangerous is not fear, but anger at the extent to which so many of us have agreed to live within a delusion -- namely that we will be spared the dangers that others suffer only if we move within certain very restricted spheres, and that insularity is a fair price to pay for safety.
Fear is isolating for those that fear. And I have come to believe that fear is a cruelty to those who are feared. I once met a man of pro-football-sized proportions who saw something in my hesitation when I shook his hand that inspired him to tell me he was pained by the way small women looked at him when he passed them on the street -- pained by the fear in their eyes, pained by the way they drew away -- and as he told me this tears welled up in his eyes.
One evening not long after we moved to Rogers Park, my husband and I met a group of black boys riding their bikes on the sidewalk across the street from our apartment building. The boys were weaving down the sidewalk, yelling for the sake of hearing their own voices and drinking from forty-ounce bottles of beer. As we stepped off the sidewalk and began crossing the street towards our apartment, one boy yelled, "Don't be afraid of us!" I looked back over my shoulder as I stepped into the street and the boy passed on his bike so that I saw him looking back at me also, and then he yelled again, directly at me, "Don't be afraid of us!"
I wanted to yell back, "Don't worry, we aren't!" but I was, in fact, afraid to engage the boys, afraid to draw attention to my husband and myself, afraid of how my claim not to be afraid might be misunderstood as bravado begging a challenge, so I simply let my eyes meet the boy's eyes before I turned, disturbed, towards the tall iron gate in front of my apartment building, a gate that gives the appearance of being locked but is in fact always open.
("No Man's Land" from Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays. Copyright © 2009 by Eula Biss. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN, www.graywolfpress.org.)
Interview by Paulette Beete, August 27, 2014
Eula Biss, a 2012 NEA Literature Fellow, is so much more than a writer. Perhaps calling her a modern-day Cassandra comes closest to evoking the insightfulness of her creative work, except that instead of showing us the future, she spotlights uncomfortable confluences in the present-day, such as the early proliferation of telephone poles used both as a communications tool and as a platform for lynching African Americans. As Marion Wyce noted of Biss's most recent essay collection, Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays, in the Literary Review, "Biss’s undertaking, then, is to lead us into no man’s land by uncovering how we’re already there." Biss herself describes her work as being concerned with "what it means to lead a good life. 'Good' in the sense of rewarding or fulfilling, but also in the moral sense." For her work, Biss has garnered a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her essays have also appeared in The Believer, Gulf Coast, Harper's, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. This weekend, she will appear in the NEA pavilion at the National Book Festival as part of a panel on nonfiction writing with Paul Auster. We spoke with Biss by e-mail to find out how she got her start, who's in her "family tree of writers," and why literature matters.
NEA: What do you remember as your earliest experience of art?
EULA BISS: My mother wrote poetry when I was young--I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter--and my father told me inventive bedtime stories. He also played the banjo, and my mother eventually became a sculptor as well as a writer. Art making was part of my daily life from a very young age and I still love that kind of everyday art making. Right now, for example, my neighbor Arthur is practicing his saxophone and I am listening to him play--that is the music of my afternoon.
NEA: What was your path to becoming a professional writer?
BISS: I had already drafted the manuscript that would become my first book by the time I graduated from college, but I had no idea what to do with it. The next decade--all of my twenties--was spent finding my place as a writer. For all those years I worked just enough to pay my rent and traded everything I could trade--health insurance, financial security, travel and adventure--for the time to write. I found a great community of fellow writers in New York, and then later in Iowa City. The editors at Hanging Loose, who were the first editors to notice my poems, also published my first book. That gave me the encouragement I needed to keep writing, though it would be another ten years before I felt that I had established myself as a writer.
NEA: Who’s in your family tree as a writer?
BISS: I feel a close kinship with James Baldwin and Joan Didion. William Carlos Williams and Adrienne Rich are more distant relatives. Anne Carson, Geoff Dyer, Marilynne Robinson, and Rebecca Solnit are like dear aunts and uncles. And I have a large, far-flung family of contemporaries--Amy Leach, Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Claudia Rankine, Lia Purpura, Leslie Jamison, and so many others.
NEA: How do you define creative nonfiction? How do you describe your art practice?
BISS: I try to avoid defining it, and I’m fairly bad at describing my practice. I would like for the work I’ve produced to be my description, but I know that’s unwieldy. I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that’s awfully vague. Phillip Lopate once wrote that part of the pleasure of reading a personal essay is the pleasure of watching a well-stocked mind grapple with whatever question or problem it encounters. That’s also the best description I can think of for my practice--my essays begin with a problem or a question that I must return to, and they grow as I learn more and think more and the question becomes more complicated.
NEA: Do you see yourself returning to a similar set of questions with each project?
BISS: I think there is a preoccupation, in all three of my books, with what it means to lead a good life. “Good” in the sense of rewarding or fulfilling, but also in the moral sense. My first book was concerned with marriage, my second with race, and this third book is concerned with health, but the question of what constitutes a good life is there in all of them.
NEA: The subtitle of Notes from No Man's Land is "American Essays." What is an American essay? What does it look like or contain? What doesn't it contain?
BISS: Notes from No Man’s Land moves across the American landscape, as I did in my twenties, from the East Coast to the West Coast to the Midwest. The essays are American essays in part because they are drawn from this landscape, and are in conversation with the particular cities and towns and neighborhoods that inspired them. They are also American essays because they are about race and racial identity in this country. The intricacies of racial identity in America are unique to this place and have a unique history.
NEA: What do you wish creative nonfiction writers were talking about more as a field?
BISS: One of the things I appreciate about nonfiction is that the field is so wonderfully wide and various that if you find the conversation lacking in one area, you are likely to be able to find a more interesting conversation elsewhere. I, for one, am quickly bored by conversations about the genre itself. Perhaps we should talk more about what we’re talking about? I am endlessly interested in the subject matter of the writers around me--here is Claudia Rankine writing about what it means to be a citizen, here is Amy Leach on the glories of the natural world, here is Sarah Manguso on the suicide of a friend, here is Maggie Nelson on being free, here is John Bresland on brutalist architecture, here is David Trinidad on Peyton Place, here is Rachel Webster on death, here is Brian Bouldrey on resurrection, here is Suzanne Buffam on pillows. Pillows!
NEA: If you could have five minutes with one writer and ask one question, who would it be, and what would you ask?
BISS: I rarely feel compelled in this direction--I mean putting the question to the writer rather than the work. And I’m not convinced that the questions that have been raised for me by the writing I love the most could be answered by the authors themselves. I once experienced a disconcerting moment when I was teaching a poem by Robyn Schiff, who is a very close friend of mine. As I read the poem aloud to my students I began to cry, not just because I was moved by the incredible artistry of the poem, which I was, but also because I had the sense that no matter how well I knew Robyn I would only ever encounter the part of her that made that poem through the poem itself. I felt, in that moment, very fortunate to have the writing of my friend as a way into her mysteries, not vice versa.
NEA: Fill in the blank: Literature matters because....
BISS: It does.