Third-year Creative Writing Program nonfiction student Scott F. Parker this year won the Monkey Puzzle Press' prose chapbook contest with a slim collection entitled in here--authored, provocatively, by The Synthesis. The book itself declares that its inventive texts may be read as poetry, philosophy, or fiction but seek to be memoir. Chapters include "all criticism is autobiographical," which mashes together quotes from Parker's widely published book reviews, and "unanswered questions?" which features nearly four pages of them (favorite: "Why not . . . accept that it's time that uses you?"). As Patricia Weaver Francisco notes on the back cover, this is an intimate little book that despite (because of) its challenging form effectively communicates aspects of the writer's personality and interests as much if not more than a standard "I was born in XX and did XX" narrative. Parker has also published a runner's memoir (Running After Prefontaine), two musings on musical icons (Revisited: Notes on Bob Dylan and ME | EM: One Listener's Confession), and an edited volume of writings on coffee (Coffee - Philosophy for Everyone: Grounds for Debate). Read more.1. What was your impetus for writing in here?
It started as a rebuttal to the idea that memoir must be the work of an "I" reckoning with the past. I wanted to experiment with writing against genre as a way of questioning the status of that "I" and other assumptions of the form but do so while still writing memoir.
2. When you write at the beginning, "There is memoir. There is not-memoir," how are you defining the latter? It's interesting that even seemingly "not-memoir" writing is quite revealing.
The first thing to say is that the form of the Reader's Note is borrowed from the tetralemma of Buddhist logic that you find in [second century Indian philosopher] Nagarjuna. Any proposition (here, "There is memoir") suggests three more cases: the negation ("There is not-memoir"); the affirmation of the proposition and the negation ("There is memoir and not-memoir"); and the negation of the proposition and negation ("There is neither memoir nor not-memoir"). As soon as you try to write memoir you become attuned to all the ways not-memoir encroaches on the simple reflective "I." The subjectivity of memory is the most obvious example here, but there are others, too, including the logic a text develops (whether narrative or something else) that inevitably shapes the material; any representation of experience is selective and limited--the interesting question for any given work of memoir is how. Typically memoirs begin on the solidest ground they can find and then try to find an artful way of handling the not-memoir they encounter. This book tries to work from the other direction and play around in the space of not-memoir first and end up as memoir only after, insofar as the proposition and its negation are inseparable.
When I write, for example, from the POV of someone who isn't me, it's always the narrative "I" imagining that POV, so even though the form isn't typical of memoir the result is the same. And it would have been so had I interviewed people instead of inventing their testimonies; still I would have selected, edited, framed, etc., and the same question would have been begged: What is the objective self? The book tries to dramatize the possibility that there isn't one even as the urge for one remains (or at least recurs intermittently). But the tension, I hope, isn't academic. As your question points out, it is an intimate and vulnerable-making work; at the same time, it's a somewhat aggressive one. The narrative presence of The Synthesis is relentless and doesn't leave a ton of space for the reader, even as the status of the writer-reader relationship is one of the book's primary concerns.
3. How did you come up with the form of in here? What if any role did your colleagues in the Creative Writing Program play?
One of the things I enjoy is things that are other things. Philosophy as literature, literature as philosophy, questions as answers, basketball as fountain, so the formal play is motivated in part by that. Can I write a list that is not just a list? Facts that are more than facts? Questions that . . . ? The final piece, "Me Too," is an older work. I wrote it when the wound of David Foster Wallace's suicide was still fresh in me, and part of the piece is a struggle to think about what kind of writer I want to be, what my relationship to literature is/will be, following the loss of one of my guiding lights. The rest I wrote about two years ago. There was no plan starting out, but pretty quickly I recognized that the anti-form approach was freeing me up to think about some of my interests in a way I couldn't have if I'd gone straight at them. Every time I finished one of the pieces I wanted to start another. Before long, I had a bunch and showed them to Victoria [Scher], Bridget [Mendel], and Flor [Lauria], who appear in the text reading and commenting on the text. Two or three other Creative Writing people appear in scene and/or in disguise.
4. Would you describe how your next publication, an edited volume of interviews with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey, came about?
Doing research for an essay I was working on about Kesey, I was looking for old interviews of his. This meant spending lots of time in the Anderson and Wilson Libraries going through archives and spinning through rolls of microfiche. This kind of research was new to me, and I enjoyed feeling scholarly, but I got to wondering why the interviews weren't already collected. I knew the University Press of Mississippi does their Literary Conversations series, so I wrote to them about doing a Kesey volume and they were pretty into it from the get-go.
5. What's next? Are the questions/conundrums you're confronting with in here changing how you write/structure the next memoir project?
I just edited a collection of essays about Eminem that should be out this fall. That was a fun project. I got to work with MFA alumnus Aaron Apps and two of my favorite rappers, Talib Kweli and Guante. It might be a stretch to connect that project to in here except that the complicated ways in which Eminem employs persona almost certainly influenced the formation of The Synthesis. But as for another memoir project, I'm working on something that's sort of an outgrowth of in here. It's too soon to know exactly what it is, but I'm having fun with it. Though in here has kind of a serious feel to it, the main thing I'm taking from it is a sense of playfulness, a reminder of how much fun it can be to play with words.
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