I have been reading Thalia Field’s book Bird Lovers, Backyard and find its form most compelling. I appreciate how in this interview with the Seneca Review Thalia Field describes the role of, and her approach to, questions\/questioning, form and thinking. For a long while I’ve thought about how new forms might emerge for non-fiction, essay and memoir. It’s exciting to see this happen in Field’s approach. I like the idea of essay through fragments. And how Field arranges the individual fragments or pieces and allows them to speak to each other rather than insisting they\u00a0trenchantly\u00a0 follow each other. Accumulation is the approach I suppose, a kind of folding in and out, and even within a fragment she has this technique of folding something in\u00a0subtly, that as you catch its ding … you marvel at.<\/p>\n
Thalia Field: “I would say that I am among those writers who say
\n\u201cI think through writing\u201d and in the practice of keeping an open
\nmind, the writing comprises an essai. Sometimes the thinking is<\/strong>
\n more argumentative than other times, sometimes more playful and<\/strong>
\n without purpose. Sometimes the questions I\u2019m thinking through<\/strong>
\n require a lot of outside voices, languages, testimony imported from<\/strong>
\n other ways of asking. Sometimes I think through a question simply<\/strong>
\n to explore it, lose myself around it. When a question is particularly<\/strong>
\n full of \u201cactors\u201d, the polyvocality can feel unresolvable but offers fresh<\/strong>
\n hearing. Thinking through things can require a lot of approaches to<\/strong>
\n form<\/strong>, a lot of associative logic, and that\u2019s where genres come and
\ngo. To me, theater, fiction, essay, it\u2019s all essentially a matter of what
\nhelps watch the question, play with the contradictions, wonder at
\nconnections and dissolutions. I\u2019m interested in how minds change,
\nbut not necessarily in changing them. I think that\u2019s the essence
\nof essai, as Montaigne saw it, to find connections and wander in
\nquestions, to watch thinking as it works.”<\/p>\n