From fond farm memories to how essays can connect people.
Paper Concert by Amy Wright. Sarabande Books. pp.188. $16.95.
Konstantin Rega: Where in Virginia did you grow up?
Amy Wright: I was born in Wytheville on a dairy farm that has been in my family for a century—at the base of the Jefferson National Forest. And it had orchards the generations before my grandparents. I remember getting off the school bus and walking down the long driveway with about 50 cows on either side of the fields just staring at me. They’d all turn to look in a synchronized way—a bit unnerving for a seven-year-old.
Did you always want to be a writer?
I started writing in high school. It was my ninth-grade English teacher who organized the literary magazine and made writing feel real and possible. Now I’m a professor at Austin Peay State University and teach creative nonfiction and essays and I’ve always been inclined to share and build a literary community. It’s the place I’ve always felt welcome and at home. Books, after all, are the ways you can travel as a kid, other than the usual family vacation.
How did your latest work, Paper Concerts, come into creation?
Returning to classic texts and putting them with contemporary ones is fascinating, seeing how the conversations are changing. That was one of the reasons I enjoyed creating Paper Concerts because it brings so many different voices across different disciplines.
The book started by interviewing for Zone 3 and other journals—conversing with musicians, writers, and filmmakers. I conducted these for years and they were in conversation in my head. It was until this book that I got to put these interviewees into direct conversation.
You really think of essays as having more of an outline and driving path. But I learned that essays (“to try or to attempt”) are much freer. They are opportunities for discovery, not just making an argument that you think you know already. They have an explorative quality.
And what do you want readers to get out of your work?
I want to engage the reader’s mind, to get them interested. I try to find touchstones and common ground on larger human issues that we can explore more specific personal narratives that will illuminate that larger human issue in new ways, expanding our perspective. There are so many life experiences that I don’t have but still want access to. I want to offer something that they may not have experienced or have experienced but in a new way. Everyone is an expert in the choices they make and what they do. And we can then learn from this.
The two basic things I write about are nature and culture. Appalachian culture since I grew up there. But having a ground from which can be used to compare and examine other cultures is useful. Having been on a farm, I had access to farmland and wilderness. So I got to explore both of those worlds—insects and flora. It’s about offering something I’ve seen and can share with others.
Any current projects?
Right now I’m translating (from poetry to prose) Emily Dickinson. It’s a way of bringing forward her language. Also teasing out the mystery of that language to increase my own understanding and hopefully others’. In general, I always recommend reading multiple translations because one translator might know more in this area and someone else another. In the beginning, I was much more literal and scholarly, but now I’ve started trending away from that. I felt that those weren’t exactly true to the project, but I privileged the brevity and music of the language over the direct information. It would be dishonest to say that you can present something entirely objective. I want to create a dialogue that adds to the original.
I often tell students and readers that talking to others—putting ourselves in conversation (whether through an interview or book review)—can open our own right to speak. Talking to other people made me feel that my voice had a place in the conversation as well. We need all the voices and perspectives to illuminate the world, young writers, old writers, suburbs, or rural areas.
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