By Alexa Will •

1867–nonfiction, noun. Prose writing other than fiction, such as history, biography, and reference works, esp. that which is concerned with the narrative depiction of factual events; the genre comprising this. 

—From Oxford English Dictionary

 

This definition makes me think of Michel de Montaigne—dubbed (by so many) the father of the personal essay—tucked away in his tower library, leafing through volumes of Stoic philosophy. I imagine him settling down at a mahogany desk, beneath walls adorned with French Mannerist paintings. A quill in his wrinkled hand, I imagine Montaigne writing essays about true and curious things: cannibals and thumbs, sorrow and smells; and the slow, intimate betrayals of the aging body. 

Of this latter subject, Montaigne writes: “Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes the mind; and I have seen enough who have got a weakness in their brains before either in their legs or stomach; and by how much the more it is a disease of no great pain to the sufferer.” 

And yet, what I most dearly want is to hear about this guy’s body. Not his musings on metaphysical failure, but the flesh-and-blood sag of his stomach. How many wrinkles did he have above and below his navel? How did his aging skin stretch and give? I want a grotesque account of his pre-quinsy death: how his tonsils swelled with pus, the inch-by-inch closing of his throat, and his final breath. I’d even settle for something as simple as a dated entry noting the day his eyesight started to blur and a mundane account of how this affected his writing practice. Anything corporeal, anything real. 

But Montaigne’s writing remains, predictably, in the mind. Detached. Disembodied. A tower dweller entirely uninterested in dragging his flesh onto the page. Reading his prose, I kept asking myself: Where is the tension? Where are his wife and children? Where is the body in pain? Where is the cramped wrist? The swelling throat? 

From this dry definition of nonfiction and this unfitting godfather, one starts to get the impression that nonfiction is a genre defined by its prefix. By this I mean, one starts to get the impression that nonfiction is a category of not’s. Not fiction, not poetry, not personal, but rather, a realm reserved for facts: history, biography, archival reference texts. And again, I ask: Where is the pulse? Is there room here for the intermingling of intersectional elements? For identity and lived experience? For sex and rage, vulnerability and blood, and most importantly, for the body? 

Perhaps we should thank Montaigne for this neutered definition. Maybe Montaigne’s the reason why we’ve had to modulate nonfiction by slapping “creative” on, as a prefix, as if to apologize. As if to say: This isn’t a museum placard. This is a lived-in story, this is sound work in motion, this is broad strokes of color and chaos. 

But even the term creative nonfiction feels like a watered-down non-solution. A polite correction. A compromise. Somewhere between the continuum of memoir and personal essay lives the lyric essay, the craft essay, new journalism, and the uncategorizable hybrid. Why not honor and allow these forms to shape our understanding of nonfiction as wildly expansive in scope?

That is to say: I want to redeem nonfiction’s reputation by naming its true ancestors—Sei Shōnagon, Sappho, Li Shang-yin, Seneca, and other early letter writers and diary keepers. Writers who defied heady writing and instead wrote from the gut, the groin, the heart chakra. 

I want to reclaim nonfiction as a genre hungry enough to hold contradiction. As a form teeming with wit and intellect, emotion and fractured feeling, tight narrative form and lyric wandering. I would like to give nonfiction its body back. 

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1878–hybridity, adj. The combination or mixture of two or more different elements; (now) esp. the intermixing of diverse or disparate cultural elements. 

—The Oxford English Dictionary 

 

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hybridity and nonfiction are practically antonymic—like kale’s hydrophobic underside and a hose jetstream, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that these terms barely touch. I am more willing to get on board with this opposition than with the OED’s static definition of nonfiction. If hybridity implies a deep engagement with generic fusion and the dismantling of boxes and categories, then, yes, this feels true to me. 

Like alchemy, this elemental fusion often arises from the body. A medial body—in a literal and metaphorical sense—this becomes the centering point, the site where forms/genres are not just combined, but remade, or re-alchemized. 

I just learned of Montaigne and his patriarchal cult following this year. But I have known and lived with Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Maggie Nelson, and Saidiya Hartman for much longer. These writers—my hybrid mentors—have made the alchemization of nonfiction and experimentation the gut of their work. For them, to hybridize nonfiction is to undo the boundaries of the genre and to, at times, resist its categories. And in that undoing, I have watched the poetry and magic flood in. I have watched the body stand beside, inside, and in the middle of history, biography, reference, and theory.  

Some have rushed in to define this “middling” of genres, somewhere between hybridity and nonfiction; autotheory is the term that has surfaced. Though the Oxford English Dictionary has yet to saddle this term, Lauren Fournier, who has written both a dissertation and a book on the subject, defines autotheory as a reflexive movement: one that connects thinking, making art, living, and theorizing. 

I suppose in this sense, autotheory becomes a simple kind of equation: 

Montaigne’s theory-bound essaying (+) avant-garde experimentation (+) embodied, interdisciplinary, intercultural, intergenerational living (-) the white male in his ivory tower (-) the solipsism of reclusivity (+) the iconic queer women of color who championed the genre (Lorde, Anzaldúa, hooks, Moraga).

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The origin of the word essay comes from the French assay which means simply “to try.” 

 

1598–essay, verb. An attempt, endeavour.

—From Oxford English Dictionary

1605-181–assay, verb. A trial, testing, proof experiment. The trial of metals. Obsolete. 

—From Oxford English Dictionary

 

I would like to fuse my two love-children, nonfiction and hybridity, to discover my own kind of autotheory. I would like this fusion to be the gut of my work. What better way to make this gut come alive than by assaying? 

 It was only once I started assaying that I began to understand the archive’s centrality in fusing nonfiction and hybridity. Archival research—whether it be into butchfem history, Victorian era orchidelirium, or Montaigne’s writing habits—opens up unique perspectives for understanding the contemporary. And I still believe this to be true (that the archive is my way in). But belief doesn’t make the act of digging any easier. The archive is akin to Hestia’s eternal flame. By this I mean, the archive is anti-ease and anti-closure; the archive can be a writer’s nightmare. 

I am not the first to feel this way. In “The Guilty Pleasures of Working with Archives,” Linda S. Bergmann writes: “And yet the pleasures of that seduction, guilty pleasures or not, keep me returning to archives. I continue to think of new projects that will pull me back into that sense of personal involvement next time but, I always hope, with a more critical stance.” It is so easy to fall in too deep. For the researcher persona’s body to remove the writer’s body. 

Archives demand distance (the metaphorical donning of lace gloves, hard hats, goggles, and gumboots). Archives demand a detachment that allows the body to feel its way into a really good story. When I enter into the research wormhole with my blinders on, I am at high risk of writing my own body out of the story. So I ask myself, like a record on loop, Where does my body belong in this? 

I’ve turned to Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology—the study of how our queer bodies orient in space and of how they might open up new, oblique forms of orientation—for guidance. How does my corporeal self respond to the process of archival gathering? Where does the excitement and desire live? How is my body physically engaged with the books I’m flipping through? Where do I linger too long, devouring letters like a hungry little velociraptor, instead of maintaining necessary distance from the material? 

Melissa Febos, via advice passed down the writer’s grapevine—once said that the personal must be spoon-fed at the start, in order to guide the research’s unfurling. This feels right to me. If the body doesn’t lead, the work slips on black ice and loses its footing. 

I have tried telling stories from the archives—carefully, reverently. I have done this well, many times. And I have failed, countless times. My northstar return is, always, Julia Blackburn’s Old Man Goya. Here, she conjures Goya’s arthritic hands painting darkness onto his living room walls with emotive precision. Here, she imagines Goya’s sick body traveling across war-torn Spanish landscapes to reach his lover, María Cayetana de Silva. Blackburn turns the archive into an invisible corset—the pendulous fabric of the story is what’s on display for the onlooker, who drops their jaw in admiration of the dress.

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There is an art to quoting. Some, like Maggie Nelson, are so adept at pastiche that the quote work feels invisibly chic. Every voice that Nelson brings in is like a sun gleam on water, visible yet seamless in the larger sea of words. 

I read Bluets, Argonauts, On Freedom, Jane: A Murder, and The Red Parts with voracious hunger and rapture. This had both a positive and negative effect: I started to sound just like Nelson. During my last meeting with my writing mentor, JC Lee, I handed them a thank you note and a mason jar full of wildflower seeds, and they told me: “It is so easy to internalize the voices of those we admire. MFA programs need to hear your voice.” 

I am still looking. Still becoming. Still trying to locate my own capricious way of blending theory, archive, and the personal—a node where the lyrical meets the rigorous and still feels (and sounds) like me. This is my way of saying: I am still in search of my own kind of autotheory. 

So I keep reading the masters: Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Camille Dungy, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Saidiya Hartman. And I keep reading widely, looking for new voices in the nonfiction hybrid realm of experimentation. Taking notes, I emulate. I experiment. I fail. I return.

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Beyond reading, I am listening, thanks to the University of South Florida Michael Kuperman Memorial Poetry Library’s hosting of incredible poets.

Listening to Alison Rollins as she describes being enraptured by a nineteenth-century image of an enslaved woman wearing iron horns and bells—a cruel contraption designed to prevent escape. Rollins couldn’t let go of the image, so she spent two semesters metalworking a similar structure, on her campus studio, forging (alchemizing) a physical accompaniment to her collection, Black Bell. She’s since given many readings wearing this contraption’s weight on her back. In this space, poetic performance commingles with the historical archive. 

Listening to Paul Hlava Ceballos as he tells me how for his poetry collection banana [ ], he printed out and scattered three years’ worth of banana archival material—C.I.A. document reports that surveilled Colombian banana workers, banana spider mite fact sheets, and a bio technological and biochemical journal article on banana chlorosis, to name a few—across his living room floor, and didn’t leave the house until a poetic order emerged. And emerge it did, into a masterful debut collection.

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I want to experiment with the material—clothing, photography, performance art, clay, metal. What might this open up? What might be possible in unwinding the archive from its rigid Montaignian origins and remaking it in my own image? Into something embodied, messy, and fully alive.

Because maybe the archive wants to be danced with. 

Because maybe the page cares less about nots and more about hot, steamy seduction. 

Because maybe I am the one meant to do this dancing, even on the days my corporeal body nearly burns the house down because I forget there is a turkey in the oven. 

Even on the days I spend too much on ink just to scatter printed pages around my living room. 

Even on the days I check out twenty-two thick library books without bringing a duffle bag. 

Because even then, especially then, my mind is dancing, dancing, dancing with the page, thanking its external flesh.

 

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ALEXA WILL is a writer and educator hailing from Pittsburgh. Currently residing in the swampy St. Pete, Alexa is pursuing an MFA in Nonfiction at the University of South Florida. Her work has appeared in AURORE and Ouch! Collective.

 

Featured image by Ire Photocreative, courtesy of Unsplash.