Fueled by the Grappling
By Alex Marzano-LesnevichWriting is notoriously hard. And writing about, as author Melissa Faliveno calls them, “spaces of uncertainty,” makes it even more so.
In this conversation, Faliveno talks with ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ professor and writer Alex Marzano-Lesnevich about the struggle—and the satisfaction—that comes from the process of interrogating our obsessions and each other, and of writing our way in the world through stories.
IN FALL 2020, as the country was gripped by a series of unprecedented reckonings, ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ students took a creative writing class designed to have them commingle their thinking about the political questions raging through the country and the personal changes in their own lives. Taught by Assistant Professor of English Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, the class—The Personal (Essay) Is Political—took its name from the canonical 1970 Carol Hamisch essay, “The Personal Is Political,” and featured works by classic and contemporary writers, including James Baldwin, June Jordan, Jennine Cápo Crucet, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Melissa Faliveno, author of the essay collection Tomboyland, who visited the class electronically.
Tomboyland was the first book from writer and filmmaker Joey Soloway’s publishing imprint, and was named a best book of 2020 by NPR; the New York Public Library; O, the Oprah Magazine; and Electric Literature. Announcing plans for their imprint in February 2018, Soloway said, “We live in a complicated, messy world where every day we have to proactively re-center our own experiences by challenging privilege.” Like Soloway’s production company, the imprint would be directly named for its political aspirations: Topple. At the time, Soloway’s words were seen as a response to #MeToo, #TimesUp, and the global reckoning with gender inequality. But of course, by the time the imprint actually began publishing, far more reckoning was happening, with structural racism and with inequality laid bare by the pandemic. Tomboyland entered the world during that upheaval.
In January 2021, at a turning point in presidential administrations and as the global pandemic raged on at ever-escalating levels, Faliveno and Marzano-Lesnevich shared the following exchange.
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Assistant professor of English
Melissa Faliveno
Author of Tomboyland
ALEX: How did Tomboyland begin? Did you know you were writing a collection?
MELISSA: I worked on this book for ten years. I always knew it would be a collection; it started when I was in the graduate program at Sarah Lawrence College, where I was studying the essay and working with my writerly magnetic north, Jo Ann Beard. It wasn’t really a book then, but a mashing together of very disparate essays—I knew it was at least in part a collection about the Midwest, but I didn’t know much else.
Two of the oldest pieces in the book—“Of a Moth” and an early version of “The Finger of God,” without any of the interviews or research, which was eventually published in Prairie Schooner—were part of my thesis. Jo Ann helped me see a little more clearly what I was writing about back then—the Midwest, girlhood, destruction, loss—and helped me believe that I could actually do this. As I continued writing over the years, after graduate school, eking out writing time whenever I could, I slowly started to think more about gender, and these questions of it. I started to write into that too, and into questions of class, and identity, and all these questions about selfhood that I was very much grappling with at the time. I began to realize it was also about the ways those questions intersect with this idea of “The Midwest,” and what it means to be “Midwestern”—about how place can create and complicate our identity, what it means to be “of” a place and then to leave it. When I got an agent, the brilliant Adriann Ranta Zurhellen, she helped me understand that the book was really centered around gender, and everything else— class, violence, the body, the land, guns, sex, isolation, tornadoes, moths—was all connected.
ALEX: You’re working in the personal essay form—a form that, of course, places the emphasis right away on the personal. What did it mean to you to have the book come out with an imprint whose focus is so explicitly political? How do you think about the relationship between the personal and the political in your work?
MELISSA: I really chose to work with Topple because of its mission. For years, as I worked on this book, I never really thought of it as a “queer” book. I’ve identified as queer for a long time now, but quietly; I think (and this is definitely some of my “Midwesternness” at play) I tried to keep my identity out of my writing. Which is ridiculous. Regardless of what form or genre you write, you’re bringing yourself to it—your experiences and questions and fascinations and fears, the things that keep you up at night. And the personal, it turns out, is always political, whether you want it to be or not.
After the 2016 election, I just felt something break open in me. I was furious, and scared—for my friends and my community and myself—and I started grappling with questions I’d never really taken a hard look at before: at the way I exist in the world, at how I’m perceived because of how my body moves through space. Of being pretty far left and coming from gun people in the working-class Midwest. Of the relationship between gender, class, and violence. When Topple was introduced, I remember being really excited by its mission—that it was helmed by Joey Soloway, that it was specifically dedicated not just to queer voices, but that it put trans and nonbinary writers of color at the very top of that mission statement. My editor, Hafizah Geter, is a queer Black woman who grew up in the Midwest, and as soon as we had a conversation about the book, I knew I wanted to work with her. She just got it, in a way so many other editors di