Interview: Elisa Gonzalez

Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind: I guess I’ll start with the obvious: you went to Yale. How has your undergraduate education, literary or otherwise, inflected the work you do today?

Elisa Gonzalez: Simply through the people that it exposed me to, Yale was enormously influential in my becoming a writer: I was a student of Louise Glück’s starting in my first semester of freshman year, and she was an important mentor and friend until she died a couple of weeks ago. You obviously can’t narrate your life in counterfactuals, but I do really credit her encouragement (and insistence that I was a writer) with putting me on a path toward imagining that for myself.

XB: As someone who has taken some creative writing courses, I wonder what relationship you see between your experiences in workshop settings and the writing you do today. In what ways does being a writing student differ from being a writer? Or is that a false distinction?

EG: To me, the defining difference would be the seriousness with which you take what you’re doing. The distinction otherwise doesn’t seem that useful to me, except as a description of where you are in time. I feel that if you were to think of yourself as having suddenly arrived in the magical territory of being a writer — meaning there was no longer learning — that would be very bad for your writing.

On the question of workshop: for instance, really trying to understand what something is doing, being able to describe it richly, is something that I was taught to do. And that is maybe the most useful thing that I’ve retained, both in terms of being able to respond to other people’s work as a critic or an editor, and also getting a necessary distance from my own work. Another thing that seems important, which is related to describing well, is trying to take things on their own terms. Very often in the classroom, as in the world, you get a lot of competing aesthetics and goals and works that you might not necessarily like or really respond to. But the worst kind of criticism, in or out of the classroom, is the kind that responds as if there is one single good aesthetic or goal that we’re all working toward. And it is an interesting and productive imaginative exercise to try to understand what someone is doing, even if I don’t like it. Learning how to do that in the classroom has been useful to me in the rest of my life.

XB: I first encountered your poetry as a sophomore in college. “Essay,” which appeared in Issue 5 of The Drift, stuck with me. In the final stanza, you write: “It’s too easy to keep asking questions. / Addictive, like the high dive: / another repetition / that pretends to be daring.” I’m curious whether you have thoughts about the place of questions — in poetry, in society. Are they useful as openings, as avenues for new thought? Or do they define those avenues before we have a chance to build them for ourselves?

EG: Well, let me start by saying that I hate rhetorical questions. I hate any questions that I feel are not actually questioning. This is not to say that questions can’t be useful. However, I think that sometimes, in poems and essays and conversation, people are afraid to risk answers because they don’t want to be wrong. But doubt, flexibility and a willingness to push the thought toward a conclusion is crucial in life and in writing. But I do often feel that people stop short. There’s often either a social-media-type certainty about everything — there’s no possibility of a question — or too great an openness to seeing the world as indeterminate. To me a question is most interesting if it is genuine and really trying to advance or open, you know, a real aperture. By which I mean a question that does not just reiterate an idea that’s already a kind of answer, or, you know, perform on the page the equivalent of throwing up your hands and saying, “Well, who knows?” or “How could anyone know?” That I find very boring. And those questions, I think, do foreclose further possibilities. They’re too certain in their own uncertainty. I should say that I am not immune to the addiction of questions, too. Like many people who are drawn to writing, I’m interested in seeing from multiple angles. At the same time, I do think it’s important for me as a person and a writer to pressure my questions, to try to move beyond obvious questions and sometimes risk conclusions. I often ask myself, when working on a poem or a story or an essay, is this where it should end? Have you settled somewhere that’s too easy for you to reach? What is the next question that can be asked? And then the next? Where does that take you?

XB: I’m reminded, too, of your poem “Visitation,” in which the speaker, attempting to bring her ailing grandmother to the hospital, is intercepted by missionaries, who ask: “Do you have a source of happiness in your life?” The next question is the speaker’s: “What was my answer, what is it now?” It strikes me that these are two different sorts of questions: one prodding, the other reflective. At the risk of asking a question more prodding than reflective: to what extent is writing, for you, a source of happiness? What drives you to put words on a page — to keep putting words on a page? Is it “[a]ddictive, like the high dive?” Is it something you need to push yourself to do? Is it something else?

EG: Happiness is such a funny word, I think. The answer is yes and no, probably. Writing is a misery and one of the purest pleasures I can imagine. Although when the pleasure overtakes me, I usually only realize it afterwards, as if I’ve gone into a fugue state. When it ends I think, “Oh, what a wonderful experience that was, that was like playing, and now it’s gone, done with that, back to trudging.” I also wonder how much of being a writer is desire versus compulsion. For me it oscillates back and forth. Sometimes I very much want to write, but it’s also true that for, I don’t know, fifteen years at this point, I’ve been writing. The translation happening between the experience of living and the writing — the writing through it — is such a habit at this point. I don’t think that I could deliberately stop. I do feel like if you were to ask me, “What is the one thing that you want to do on earth,” I would say, “Write.” So I suppose it must make me happy.

XB: Your first collection, Grand Tour, is out this fall (congratulations, by the way!), and you’ve been doing a lot of interviews, including this one (thank you, by the way!). Do you come into these interviews expecting to articulate (and to be asked) new things about your work — or, to return to the last verses of “Essay,” preparing for “another repetition / that pretends to be daring”? How have you found this whole process of question-asking and question-answering?

EG: I might be a better interviewee if I prepared more repetitions, but I find the interviews more interesting when people help me arrive at new thoughts or new perspectives on the work (the work, broadly, being writing). It’s been interesting to me how even some very basic questions, like, “How long did it take you to write this book,” or, “What made you write it,” I couldn’t immediately answer, because those are the kinds of questions that come from outside. I would never ask myself those questions. But then I had to figure out the most honest version of an answer. I have also noticed, having been to many a “Conversation With” event, that often writers are not at their best in an interview. And I think perhaps that’s because writing involves some amount of intuition, and sometimes the questions posed are not answerable, because someone will say, you know, “what did you mean by this line?” or “why did you write this in this way?” And the writer may have no idea. There is some mystery.

XB: You also have a novel and a book of nonfiction coming soon. How do you wrangle with the distinction between poetry and prose? How possible is it to separate the two? On a subjective level, does writing poetry feel different, to you, from writing fictional or nonfictional prose? 

EG: Experientially, yes. There’s obviously a lot of revision required in every genre, but I feel that a lot more of the experience of writing poetry, for me, is revision, and often making relatively small changes — although that definitely inflects my experience of writing prose as well. I’m often quite obsessive about small changes and sentences. When I started writing fiction seriously several years ago, trying to teach myself it, I had to learn that it was okay for not every sentence to be a jewel, and that, in fact, sometimes the jewel is entirely the wrong thing.

I genuinely love being able to switch genres — that being a part of my writing life makes me feel lucky. I had kind of an excess of ideas, or things that I thought were interesting and wished to explore, and they didn’t all fit in poetry. So I had to find the container that would fit them. But turning to fiction and nonfiction was terrible at the beginning, because I felt seventeen again. Although I had written some short essays, and some short stories in college — I did take one fiction workshop at Yale — I had not been writing prose seriously for years. So I wrote a lot that was bad. It was terrible to practice so much and know, even so, that what I made was bad! For a while I thought maybe I just wasn’t ever going to be any good. But I remembered that I continue to write bad poems, and I don’t straightaway despair about my ability to write poetry. I still often feel like a clumsy novice in all genres.

I’m curious how you’ve heard that distinction between writing poetry and prose articulated before.

XB: I think the most basic distinction that often gets presented — and then kind of undone — is this idea of the paragraph and the stanza, or of the sentence and the verse. I’ve been in a lot of classes where the professor is like, “Here’s what people say. Here are all of the cases in which this doesn’t hold water. How might we account for that?” I took a course on lyric last year, and there was a lot of discussion of different definitions that have been proposed. I think the one we talked about on the first day was poetry as “feeling confessing itself to itself” (John Stuart Mill). But, I mean, I’m inclined to think that any line you draw is imperfect, that you can always find a contradiction. I don’t know.

EG: The forms seem infinitely collapsible, although the experience of working in them, I think, is different from looking at them. There’s that Mill quote that’s quite famous — “eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard.”  And that’s obviously a distinction which is quite basic. But reading poetry as a kind of eavesdropping has often seemed true to me, because I think poetry is where I most often need to pretend that no one else will ever see what I am putting on the page in order for the words to emerge. It’s as if it’s myself overhearing myself. A space of secrecy, perhaps, or privacy, even if what’s being thought about could be eminently social. And even if I know from the beginning that the poem is going to be in the world, I still need to have the fantasy for myself. But I agree with you. The definitions can all be knocked down.

XB: A final question — it is “too easy to keep asking questions”! — and one that has been on my mind. I’ve had the experience, lately, of seeing something I’ve written on a website, or on a page, and feeling a strange kind of distance from it. In a recent interview with The Adroit Journal, you say, “A story presents itself to me as a story, an essay as an essay, a poem as a poem — it’s more intuitive than considered.” I’m intrigued by this notion of intuition and consideration, but also by the idea of a piece of literature “present[ing] itself” to the writer. Do you feel like you find your work? Like you create it? And, once it’s out there, does it feel like it’s yours, like it’s of you? Or like it presented itself to you, and you proceeded to present it to the world? How close or distant do the words seem, when they’re there, on the page, in front of you?

EG: As soon as things are published, something like what you describe sets in, which I think is a self-protective device for me, because the work is now in the world, because it can’t be changed. It doesn’t really matter how many people are ultimately going to read it. It’s still a thing that seems not to belong to me anymore, after I’ve cradled it for so long. Publishing a book has estranged the poems even further than I expected. It has also made me feel regarded in a way that’s uncomfortable. It’s as if I didn’t know that I was going to publish it, which is so stupid, because obviously I did know. That was something I wanted. In January of this year, I was talking to Louise about my real dread over the prospect of publication — and, yes, my happiness, my gratitude, but also at times a genuine horror. She said, “Yes, it will not be easy for you” (because of my personality, I believe was the implication). She went on to liken publishing a book to being “dragged from the dark hole in which you’ve been living into the cold light of the exam table.” Even if people don’t have their scalpels out — they are in fact generally kind — I certainly see the fluorescence and the glint of blades. And I want to crawl back into the dark.

To answer the first part of your question, about things “presenting” themselves, I always worry about sounding too mystical about writing, because I do feel that it requires work, analytical attention, and will. The earthly mind. But, once again, there is also mystery! So maybe I’m a mystical skeptic, or a skeptical mystic — I’m not sure which arrangement of adjective and noun is better. Because it does feel to me that I just know that what is emerging will be a story. Or that a phrase is part of a poem.

Elisa M. Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her work appears in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review and elsewhere. A graduate of Yale University and the New York University M.F.A. program, she has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Rolex Foundation, and the U.S. Fulbright Program. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her debut poetry collection, Grand Tour (FSG), will be published on September 19, 2023. Her debut novel, The Awakenings, and her first nonfiction book, Strangers on Earth, are also forthcoming from FSG.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER | Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind is the Editor-in-Chief of The Yale Literary Magazine.