Liza Stewart
(Readers can find Liza Stewart’s piece “Asylum, MI” in Issue One of No Contact )
Richardson: First things, first, the piece is labeled as nonfiction, is it okay to talk about the main character as you? Or would you prefer I use “narrator”? Or is there another preferred term?
Stewart: We can talk about the narrator as me.
Richardson: Awesome, will do. Liza! What an incredible piece of writing to travel back to in Issue One. There’s so much early pandemic vibage in the work, and yet also this sense of the piece, and place, and time, being a sort of tunnel that occasionally looks back at life before, and also gestures to a future. The present “Asylum” is a kind of contained thing that our narrator is studying (like the ducks) for clues about the future, and the past keeps kind of reaching out to her or finding her in her “Asylum.” I’d love to talk about structure first which is really critical in my mind to the huge success of the piece. The structure is a tight braid or a weaving of sorts, that reminds me a little of a fiction piece called “Black Box” Jennifer Egan actually tweeted out through the New Yorker’s Twitter account a few years ago. The story was in these bite-sized pieces that also were sort of stand-alone stories in and of themselves. The main character in Egan’s work is also kind of in survival mode. The small bits of the narrative are a clue or “black box” for what happened to her. Can you talk a little bit about how you arrived at this wonderful structure? How conscious was it? Did it come in the act of writing, or through a revision process? Is this kind of small telegram text a type of survival mode for you/ our narrator?
Stewart: This is a really good question. I began taking notes as I often do without any clear sense of purpose or intention. As I was taking notes on the things that I was noticing and the emotional experience I was having at the time, everything was so fragmented and disjointed—not just in terms of space, but also in terms of time—I had just left New York, and I was living in this borrowed place, and my relationship was living in this place of borrowed time and because of the landscape created by the pandemic, it felt impossible to write anything. And so taking these notes was a way to transcribe the experience I was having. They didn’t feel like they were for anything, they were just fragments of thought and fragments of memory. And so, when No Contact approached me and asked me to write a piece for the first issue, the first thing I thought about was the loons, and how to write about the loons. And when I went back to my notes to see if I had anything that would be fodder for a fiction story about the loons, I saw that the story was essentially already written.
Richardson: Wow, I love that. Especially what you’re saying about these fragments or narrative blips mirroring both the mental and physical landscape you were in at the time. I think structure really makes this piece highly relatable. I noticed myself struggling to remember much during early pandemic. Small tasks, or small thoughts were the only thing that stuck, and this piece really captures that beautifully. Also, how remarkable to have a piece write itself. I’m going to keep praying one day I open up a document to find something as brilliant as this has written itself. Truly, goals. One of my favorite parts of the piece is the one small sentence about the brother who calls from prison. It’s such a great detail and is so evocative of lockdown without explicitly talking about it. I find that to be true throughout the piece, that you’re able to evoke early lockdown through actions and interactions instead of directly speaking about it. Can you talk about that decision? It certainly creates a piece that still stands up even years later, and maybe more so than a piece that’s more direct?
Stewart: We were inundated with questions and information and facts about the pandemic that were, almost as soon as we became aware of them, immediately undermined. The uncertainty and disorientation was totalizing. It paralleled, in some ways, the process I was engaging with in rethinking my relationship––a dramatic, almost tectonic shift. While this was happening, many of my closest friends were in a period of crisis that seemed both inevitable and like the natural consequence of the pandemic, the way a preexisting condition is exacerbated by environmental conditions. These personal catastrophes––already set in motion––overlapped with the new and urgent crises of the pandemic, and the pandemic brought these things to a crescendo. Because of where I was with my own moment of crisis and loss, at times separate and distinct from my relationship, and these conversations I was having—trying to be supportive and emotionally available to people I love—I was more interested in the personal impact and the personal story of how the pandemic was playing out in people’s lives, not in terms of illness but in terms of the many other losses.
Richardson: I think that focus on the personal really allows us to see the way in which everything was deeply cocooned by the pandemic. There are tendrils of it touching everything in the piece, though personal transformation is at the heart of it. Really well done. One of the personal things going on in the piece is the idea of wanting to leave someone you’re kind of trapped with, and not knowing how or even if it’s a good idea exactly pervades the piece and comes up again at the end you say, “That’s how I know I can’t leave him,” in reference to how you see the light on the lake, “Where would the memories go?” I’ve certainly had this feeling before, that once people are separated or their relationship has irreparably changed it’s a kind of loss, or silent death of an experience, even if it makes room for new experiences. We also know your ex is struggling with alcohol halfway through the piece. There’s been a kind of loss there too. The current relationship may end up like this one that’s calling. I once texted an ex in the middle of the night who was struggling with addiction that I needed him to live, because I couldn’t bear to be the only one carrying our seven-year-long relationship. Like I wasn’t capable of carrying it by myself, and his near-death experiences threatened that all the time. Is this the kind of weight our narrator feels at the end of this piece? That even if things end and need to end, there’s a kind of silence that falls over what’s lost? Or a kind of erasure?
Stewart: Absolutely. I think there’s a way in which people coexist and over the course of their relationship, these experiences that are a fundamental component of their identity become intertwined. And so much of that relationship felt like a container for those memories, and as a container for those memories that relationship also became a container for identity. And I was afraid that, and this has in some real ways borne itself out, that if I left the relationship I would no longer have access to the ongoing, co-created storytelling about my life with this person, about who I was independently. And I think that that also became a trap. Because if you are trapped by a pandemic, and you’re trapped geographically, and you’re emotionally trapped, then there really is no way to escape the confines of a dynamic that you’re in part responsible for creating. And that really complicates the desire to leave. You’re not just leaving a person, you’re not leaving a relationship, you’re abandoning or rejecting the past, and the person you believed that you were, this idea of the person you believed that you were.
As a piece of nonfiction, I was also treading a fine line between exposure and silence. One of the things my (now) ex said that I changed in the final piece was “why do you put so much into relationships that you get so little out of?” I chose to self-censure, to literally erase that from the story, because it would have been too pointed, too vindictive.
Richardson: Yes! The exposure and silence, that is such a freaking complicated line. You put this struggle so beautifully. What you’re saying here is really important. I love that you had to take out something that really happened because it would almost be too real for the piece, almost too perfect, predictive, and then in hindsight unfair to the relationship even though it was said. There’s fully a lesson in that. I do think us nonfiction writers are always trying to understand how much to tell of what really happened. That’s a really important idea for any CNF writer, not to use the writing as a kind of revenge or be careful and aware that writing is a kind of power, and despite what may have occurred, some things really have to be left out. I’ve certainly wrestled with this and actively think about it each time I write something now, especially when emotions are involved. Am I being fair? You’re bringing up something essential which is that being fair to a situation can also be about leaving out the ways in which real life overwrites a moment, or we say things too explicitly to one another. This is a great insight into the piece. Thanks for sharing that. Can we turn to the loons? I love how close you’re monitoring them in this piece. Almost like you’re looking for a sign. Are you a birder in real life? Was this a small phenomenon? Anything else you want to tell us about this central image to the piece?
Stewart: I learned later that the loons are actually Mergansers. And, as a lifelong city dweller, it had never occurred to me to watch or to take interest in birds until I lived at the lakehouse. It was early spring, everything was still stark and bare and dead. There was nothing else to look at. Because I felt so paralyzed, in some very important and very real ways there was nothing else I could do. Sort of like being in a cage and looking out. You see what there is to see and take it in and try to make meaning from it. Out of boredom and despair, the landscape and this natural element with the return of the loons, the mergansers (we’ll call them the “loons”) felt like a reassuring presence. Without knowing what they might represent, the loons became symbolic. I felt like whatever they were doing with their lives, whatever they were doing together, might help me process or understand my own internal landscape and the landscape that the pandemic created. One more thing about the loons: as I was polishing this piece for No Contact, and I was trying to find a title for this piece, I ended up doing a little bit of research about loons and I discovered that a flock of loons is called a water dance, a raft, a cry, and also an asylum. And that felt really accurate.
Initially, I had written other notes and observations about birds. There was this nesting pair of cardinals just outside the office window in the bushes, so we could hear them singing and watch them without disturbing them. The construction of something from nothing felt hopeful. The female laid two eggs and we watched and waited for them to hatch. After a while we didn’t see the red male anymore. He disappeared, leaving the female cardinal to fend for herself. She couldn’t just stay with the eggs. One morning while she was away I noticed that there was one solitary egg instead of two. And after a few days the female abandoned the nest. I was devastated. The loneliness of that one egg was almost unbearable. It became a crucible, representing every loss, small and large, that I had experienced during that time, including a very painful falling out with a friend. The cardinals and the egg felt too expansive, so I ultimately chose to write only the loons.
Richardson: Oh! The loss of the Cardinals! I’m feeling it now. Again, maybe something real that’s too on the nose. Such a good edit. I love that the language of the loons, the names, drew you to understanding how they fit into the piece. I think discovering little parts of language like that can be such a good door to walk through while writing. Can you tell us a little about your writing practice? As in, how do you write? Do you use notebooks? Computer? Do you write during the day? At night? Do you have rituals or superstitions? Things that have to be in place for a session to be successful? How often?
Stewart: I have to write in the morning. Otherwise, I get sort of clogged up or bogged down by chores and tasks and work and emails and phone calls and my brain starts to short circuit a little bit after noon. I take a lot of notes. And often these notes are things someone said to me, or something that happened or a way I felt, or an observation I had. I take notes on my phone, usually, in my notes app. I have a separate note for different projects, some of them are novels, some of them are nothing yet, just waiting to become something. Just a repository to clear it out of my brain and put it somewhere I can reference. I often find that if I haven’t written anything during the day, that doesn’t mean my brain hasn’t been thinking and working and making connections, and sometimes that makes it very hard to sleep. So I’ll roll over, pick up my phone. Take some notes. Try to go back to sleep. Fail. Repeat.
Richardson: I love that you’re a note taker and this is part of your process. I’ve had other friends tell me they’ll wake up in the middle of the night with ideas and write them down. That’s only ever happened to me once. I keep hoping to get more little gifts of inspiration like that. Can you talk about the inspiration for this specific piece? What did that look like?
Stewart: “Weather” by Jenny Offil had just come out. I loved “Department of Speculation,” which is about similar conflict, or a similar anguish or agonizing about whether to leave a partner, and “Weather” is about disaster on a magnitude that is almost incomprehensible. And because I already had these existing notes, the development of the form was pretty organic.
Richardson: Really cool literary inspirations. Offil’s work is good. What about other kinds of inspiration? If you had to create a media watchlist or music playlist to match this piece of writing, what’s on it?
Stewart: I basically only listen to the same playlist when I’m writing. And I’ve been working on this playlist for years, and I’ve never edited it. So it’s full of some really embarrassing old stuff that I always skip, but I’m too lazy to delete. Interpol. Arcade Fire. The XX. Radiohead. Modest Mouse. I think I was listening to a lot of the National. One of the last concerts I went to was seeing the National in Philadelphia, in the summer of 2019. And it was such a perfect outdoor concert, and that album evoked such strong nostalgia for me of a before-time.
Richardson: I love your list! Nothing embarrassing there! I recently listened to Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs on repeat. All the older stuff is so rich. Radiohead really makes me feel things. The National is powerful in concert–even more so in that context of your memory before the pandemic. I love that it’s the same playlist over and over! I do that too, listening sometimes to the same song on repeat nonstop for days. So, music is part of your writing habits, do you have any advice or tips for writers to make more writing time?
Stewart: Put your phone on “do not disturb.” Rethink your relationship to social media - I’m not responsible enough to have the Instagram app on my phone while I’m in the middle of a project. I waste a lot of time, and so when I complain to myself about how I never have time to write, I’m like what are you doing that’s stealing your time. I think the practice of being aware of things that bring you no joy but nevertheless are eating up your creative life can help you find more time for writing.
Richardson: That’s super smart, really good advice to be aware of our time and how we’re maybe not even consciously choosing to spend it, but spending it nonetheless. What kinds of writing and publishing projects are coming up for you that we should be aware of and support?
Stewart: I’m coming to the end of my novel, “Inheritance” which is excerpted in issue 8
Richardson: Incredible. We’ll certainly be watching for it! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us. We really look forward to reading more of your work!
