A Conversation with A. Kendra Greene
BY JOE MILAZZO
A. Kendra Greene is the author and illustrator of The Museum of Whales You Will Never See. She has an MFA in nonfiction and a graduate certificate in book arts from the University of Iowa, where she was both a Jacob K. Javits fellow and costumer to a giant ground sloth. She’s been the writer in residence at the Dallas Museum of Art and longtime guest artist at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, the American Library in Paris, and Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab.
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I’ve known A. Kendra Greene for the better part of a decade. In that time, we’ve talked (and swapped) books, gone to each other’s readings, sat at the same kitchen table assembling zines no bigger than a wax pack of baseball cards, and even appeared on the same masthead (as Associate Editors for the Southwest Review). More importantly, we’ve accompanied each other on a late-night “owl prowl” at the Trinity River Audubon Center, sought out the most eccentric frozen novelties in Dallas, hung out at the pool, and otherwise formed a friendship whose Venn diagram embraces much more than a professional commitment to doing interesting things with words.
And what fascinating things Kendra does by making marks and raising her voice! Her second essay collection, No Less Strange Or Wonderful (Tin House), hardly needs an endorsement from me but few books combine discipline and ecstasy quite like this one. Some of these essays operate like microscopes; others, telescopes or periscopes; others still, sextants. But the net effect is kaleidoscopic. Forms and themes combine and recombine in this chamber, reflecting and refracting until one’s vision overflows with a dizzying metaphysics. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Catholicism couldn’t help but point him in the direction of a Prime Mover animating “All things counter, original, spare, strange; / whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) / with swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.” But, as Kendra shows us in No Less Strange or Wonderful, genius is to be discovered in the imaginative capacity of anyone willing to immerse themselves in the overlapping dappling, piecing, and plotting of all things.
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Joe Milazzo: At what point in the making of this book did the bestiary enter your consciousness? And, now that the book is a made thing, how do you understand its relationship to the bestiary?
- Kendra Greene: Once I illustrated The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, I had a lot of questions about text and image, specifically in relation to nonfiction. I got really into the Japanese fish print tradition gyotaku as a metaphor of the essay itself, how it requires that you encounter the world, but the record of that encounter also captures all sorts of decisions about the rendering. And while I started looking into bestiaries for just the pleasure of it, that earnest weirdness of trying to show a thing you’d never actually seen, I was struck that if you got past the religious agenda, the effort to attend to something from the world was very essayistic, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the irresistible urge to gather up all that research and want it to have some metaphoric meaning, too.
When I first outlined this book, imagined the things I was thinking about held together and embodied as a book, I thought about it as a bestiary. It’s the name of the project folder and is still my shorthand for it. It gave such license to be wild and motley and experimental, even fragmentary, works of collage stitched together from all sorts of kinds of knowing. I delighted in the parallels: how every essay has an animal, if not many, except for the ones that have rocks or trees—but even those subjects were fair bestiary game! It felt like a sign when the number of essays caught up at least to the briefest medieval bestiary we know. It’s very much a work about how we make sense of the things we can’t see through the things we can. But if I had been swept up in the structure, this bookish version of a cabinet of curiosities, what strikes me now is what it contains. Now I understand it as an echo, as a reverberation, as a descendant of the bestiary but maybe also a new species. I hadn’t realized that it might hold not just variety but variousness so ranging and expansive it would break me open as it stretched out toward everything.
JM: Not a few of the essays in No Less Strange or Wonderful are no more than a page or two long. What, to your way of thinking, makes a very short essay (a flash essay? a micro essay?) unique among other varieties of essay?
AKG: I’m fascinated by forms you can take in entire. Most essays can be read in one sitting, and I imagine they usually are, though a writer friend once reported that it took her a month to read my first chapbook, all 26 pages of it. That same text a painter friend said she devoured all at once on her doorstep, having made it only that far from the mailbox before she set in. But the writer savored a page at a time, after coming home each day, pouring herself a glass of wine, and sitting down to read on the porch. But a short enough essay is just inescapable. It’s not only read as a complete experience temporally, but spatially scanned as a whole and visually taken in all at once, approached already mapped like that, expectations and limits set. In this regard, I like the term “postcard essay,” whether you read the essay in the singular image or as the epistolary text. I like how it navigates both the intimacy and possibility of chance encounter, the broad accessibility of it. I like how it suggests focus and compression, a minimum hard won or so much edited out to reach a few key lines, that you can feel the negative space of the essay, the weight of all the things that went unsaid.
JM: I’m glad you mentioned postcards. Would you consider yourself a correspondent? If so, how does that writing support the work that goes into your essays? Another way to ask this question: are you the kind of writer who tends to conserve their energies or the kind of writer who believes in the value of “doing your reps”?
AKG: Just the word correspondent should stop us for a moment, rooted as it is in closeness and matching up—togetherness—and also one of those places, like journalist, where the word for a reporter has a more intimate, everyday practice. Certainly: I am, or would like to be, a togetherist, an intimacist, a connecter and pairer and matcher, a bringer together and a clicker into place.
I found the essay in the first place while I was writing letters home from Korea. Which is to say, I was a correspondent first, since I was a kid. I wouldn’t have had this language then, but I believe in doing the things that let you come into yourself. I experience that in essaying, very much like I do in running or traveling or making, or writing letters, these places of expression and exploration of what my capacities are and what all I am capable of. I’m certainly conscious that there are limits of time, of energy, but I’m a lot more aware of expansion, of how some investments of energy return energy, how some time is spent suspending time. The writing, maybe more than other media, can stand for you to be away. You won’t lose your calluses to play, but you have to keep feeding it, keep tending whatever is its source.
JM: The book’s final essay, “People Lie To Giraffe,” feels like it simultaneously pulls back and closes the curtain on the essayist who has been speaking to us—sometimes even cajoling us—throughout. That is, even though I don’t see the essayist as clearly as I do in, say, “By Degrees” and “Until It Pops,” I feel their intentions most at work here. (I also understand every encounter that Giraffe invites to be a kind of essay: a personal essay in disguise, in fact.) If this book were a mirror, what does it show you that you hope it might show other readers?
AKG: Astonishment? I want to say that with myriad punctuation—Astonishment. Astonishment! Astonishment . . . I remarked to a composer friend that I couldn’t believe someone let me publish this essay, and this most beautiful reader of my work said, “I can’t believe it exists. Let me rephrase that: I can’t believe you exist.” It’s a book that has shown me as clearly as I’ve ever known: some facts and stories and ideas will change your life, just flip you upside down never to be the same because they reshape what you conceive of as possible. I’d wish for readers to see just how urgently we must seek them out—and share as many as we possibly can.
JM: No Less Strange or Wonderful is packed with meditations and riffs on the power of naming. Particularly how naming can both ground us in our personal experience and open that experience to a stranger’s understanding. To take but three examples:
- “It seems worth noting that there exists a unit of measure employed to describe the relative size of both poodles and balls of ice.”
- “It’s hard to pick a tense for something so almost certainly lost, but maybe only slipped beyond the pale of our accounting.”
- “My godson at two and a half surely does not remember me, having not been in a room together since he turned one, back when his single word for everything was light.”
As you think back over the work that went into this book, was there a moment when your writing named something that you’d never been able to name before? If so, can you tell us more?
AKG: I didn’t used to have the word “everythingness.” My editor uses it to talk about the concerns of this book, and I find it useful for thinking about openness and expansiveness, how curiosity will write you into joy and delight and shock and surprise and death and grief and just all of it, that trying to see how it is will ask that you see all of it. One of my favorite things is finding out my writing has made a reader cry. Or damaged their ribs, again, laughing. I never know what’s going to do it, and that’s part of the joy—this deep connection I don’t see coming. This is the first book where the writing, specifically when I returned to edit it in its final order, just made me weep: this ode to so many bits of language from so very many people I love, and so many of them, for all the usual reasons, distant from me now.
JM: Speaking of words: “ether.” This word reappears several times in these essays. On each occasion, I felt reminded (gently) that, no matter how infatuated these essays can get with the stuff they love, they’re also concerned with things numinous. What relationship do you see between description and philosophy?
AKG: Aren’t these the central concerns: how it is and what it means and how we would ever know? Johanna Kramer was just telling me about a medieval annotator she’s researching, how you have to remember that in the fall from grace, Adam loses his memory. This suggests maybe all collecting is trying to return to paradise, that what we are gathering up in our cabinets of curiosity are the shards of a perfect knowledge.
JM: One of the many pleasures this book offers is its prosody. That cajoling I mentioned earlier is part of that. For example, “Imagine a magnificent dog, the head and body as if rendered by one artist, the limbs by another. Imagine a claw-foot tub. Imagine a dog as if on cinder blocks, her proper legs stolen. Louise first saw her on the other side of a little rise of grass in someone’s backyard. Louise called to the dog and assumed the creature would stand up and run over, and the dog did come—but had already been standing.” What role does reading your work aloud—to yourself, to others*—play in your practice?
* From the book’s Acknowledgements/Credit/Credo: “Most of these essays first met the world in readings.”
AKG: It used to be I couldn’t start an essay until I could hear the first line. That held so much about what it was and where it wanted to go. Still, here I only noted at a very late stage what a sizeable chunk of these essays center on something I heard—“I can feel your human fingers,” “Ted Cruz is a sentient bag of wasps,” “When Winston became a speck”—some phrase delicious just sonically, at face value, even before the buzz of what it actually captured. Some essays are plucked from stories I find I keep telling, have already begun to live out loud when I realize there is something more to work out on the page. When my nieces discovered they showed up in an essay, they started asking for them as bedtime stories when I visited, hoping to find more cameos, I suspect. There is nothing like the real-time reaction of children to make you think about what connects, about where scene and story give way to rumination. I think it’s a remarkable windfall that literature sits at the feet of both the oral tradition and the whole practice of symbolic mark-making. Certainly, you can pick a team and prioritize one, but they’re kind of inseparable.
JM: You are the narrator of the audio version of both The Museum of Whales You Will Never See and this book. How unusual is it for an essayist to narrate their own audio books? How did you come to take on that role? And how has reading your book aloud under those circumstances (In a studio? With your own voice Nancy Holt-ing back at you?) changed your relationship to the (more than) text?
AKG: When I recorded Whales in March of 2020, I was the first writer I knew who got to narrate their own book. The engineer said when it happens, it almost always happens in nonfiction. He pinned it to authenticity, but I wonder if it’s something more. Audiobook publishers warn you that it’s harder than you think, athletic, that no one talks for six hours straight, days in a row. They don’t mention what it is to have professionals listening for days at a time, minutely, for any stray sound your body can make—it’s like the way skydivers have to acknowledge the primary risk of falling through the air, but say nothing about what it is to be strapped to another human being while doing it. Since then, maybe most of the nonfiction writers I know have gotten to read their own books. Like story collections, essay collections can be perceived as having smaller markets, and a consequence of that is that within nonfiction, essayists are perhaps less likely to have books or audiobooks at all than, say, memoirists or journalists.
I think of my work sort of like an instrument I’ve built, and I imagine I know it like a luthier knows their strings. This new book is so much about embodiment. It is not so much a book about me as a book that is me, and I was committed to being its narrator. In every other arena, I am so delighted to have another artist interpret the work—how exciting to collaborate with an illustrator or an editor or a book designer!—but as much as I’m intrigued by how another voice might perform it, I know its grooves because I’ve worn them in. That said, for all the reading out loud, all the priority on sound and rhythm and cadence while making the text, the audiobook makes me realize how much I’m working with the page. All these terms from French, all these words I’ve read and written but never said out loud. Nonfiction dialogue feels like a very different thing on the page than it does reading aloud, where issues of age and pitch and accent and gender become unavoidable. With the first book, I had been at pains to keep Icelandic in the text; it’s just the natural way to honor a culture and history of people so deeply invested in storytelling, that make so much with language. I was very clear on that, in principle, but I encountered those decisions in a very different way when I was responsible for voicing it all.
JM: This attentiveness to rhythm also encompasses the visual character of the book, which is not reducible to its use of illustrations. (Paying close attention to the section dividers with any given essay only enriches one’s reading experience.) I might not call these illustrations conventional illustrations so much as rhymes. Sometimes, they rhyme perfectly with the text, sometimes, the rhyme is as slant as can be. Often, they rhyme with each other. Can you talk a bit more about the work that went into the book’s design—and, if you’ll humor me, collaboration as a form of rhyme?
AKG: I’m tempted to talk about the collaboration of text and image, about how research collaborates with the past, and the ways the artist collaborates with the archive. But let me tell you, I lived for months in fear and awe of Beth Steidle, the poet and book artist who designed this book. I figured I was either going to be an ideal partner because we shared a common language, or I was going to know just enough to be maddening. I couldn’t put the image callouts in because I didn’t know how the text would fall on the page. I couldn’t make new images at all until I understood the page dimensions. I said things like, “This essay should swarm as it goes along,” and then waited to hear how many wasps I should draw. I would send notes like “Every essay should have different section break conventions,” and then try to tell her the gesture I was making with a doubtlessly more limited ornament drawer. And I couldn’t have asked for a more savvy, sensitive, supremely game person to interpret. The asterisk that was not what I wanted but enough like a pop that I was using it, disappeared from that essay and showed up as a typographic convention, like cross stitch patterns or the matrix of old computer printers, only with all the freight of how an asterisk means special or more or both here and not here until it became a micro-symbol of the book’s concerns.
Rhyme is such a good word for this, the recognition and the extension of it, the like this but also a move that sets the next bell ringing. Now, I just live in awe.
JM: Children appear more than once in these essays. On several occasions, these children are given stories nested within the broader narratives the essay unfolds. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, the best storytellers were once listeners themselves. “For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.” What are the earliest stories you remember hearing that still resonate with you when you set out to tell your readers something?
AKG: Well, I can’t not talk about The Elephant Who Liked Small Cars, a collaboration of text and image with a little song that for decades I didn’t know my family was singing not quite like the notes on the page suggest. And I remember sitting outside my brother’s room, not allowed in, listening to my parents read him The Hobbit, perhaps loud enough I would hear. I think about the recordings my mother made of the Frances the Badger books so I’d have her storytelling at my fingertips. I know exactly the pleasure, the glee, of my father voicing the contrary grasshopper in James and the Giant Peach: “I’m a pessssst!” It strikes me how easy it is to remember the books, the rhymes and the songs, the family sayings even, how much harder it is to pin down the family stories, even when I know we were aware of their telling at the time. My mother came from storytellers. Those were our people, at least on her line, a fact my father sometimes reduced to the provocation: “People from Utah lie.” The earliest story of hers I remember is about a family picnic in the mountains, about the boys sweet on my teenage aunts who followed them up there, tried to impress them by stealing their horses, rode off before the homemade root beer could be put in the snowmelt creek to cool. My grandfather went after them. The boys rode harder and faster to get away, jostling the bottles of root beer in the saddle bags, shaking them hard, and when they burst, the bang loud and the saddlebags wet against their legs, the boys thought they had been shot. They did not necessarily know any better as they then stopped short, came immediately to a halt, tried to explain to my grandfather they were sorry, they shouldn’t have, they meant no harm. The line that comes down from my grandfather never changes: “Let that be a lesson to you,” he said. The story, too, leaves it at that.
JM: Association! It’s everywhere in No Less Strange or Wonderful. The result is a deliciously porous book. By this, I mean that it contains countless ways in, ways out, and branching paths in between. Would you recommend that readers read the collection straight through, as if each essay were a chapter in a novel, or in a less linear fashion, as if each essay were a poem in an anthology? Or would you propose some other reading?
AKG: When I lived in Chicago, I really appreciated that the Art Institute was a pay-what-you-wish institution, functionally free. It meant you could afford to figure out how you wanted to approach it, sort out when you craved discovery and what you needed to return to. Of course you can do that to any collection, but maybe it’s especially relevant to the expansive ones reaching towards the encyclopedic. There’s a lot of doubling and mirroring in the book, of language and subjects and ideas, and it makes sense to me it wouldn’t matter the order you find them in. I only just learned that poets can’t expect readers to move linearly, and I think all sorts of texts could be treated like devotionals. Certainly, the book is built for the first essay to do the things first essays get to do, the last essay full of waiting locks for all the keys you’ve been picking up throughout the book, and in between spots cleared to rest and absorb and periodically catch your breath. But I would never deny readers like my friend River the pleasure of what they call biblio-dipping. I love the assemblage of fragments too much to suggest someone else abstain.
JM: What’s grabbing and holding on to your curiosity these days?
AKG: What a beautiful question. I’m thinking a lot about love, about what might only be possible at mid-life. I’m thinking about the interplay between prim and primer and prime. I’ve been thinking about questions we should ask more often: What is your grief ritual? Do you have an appetite? Where does it hurt? I’m discovering a new town, where the university’s tiger mascot is so ubiquitous it feels rather pleasantly like hanging out with a five-year-old obsessed with a favorite animal. Then I run past a local high school that roots for the Kewpie, that naked baby of a cherub that was invented as illustration but we remember most as a doll—Can you imagine a world where more institutions could be named after female artists, and we cheer on their iconic works?
