Matthew James Babcock Q & A with Eastern Iowa Review
Chila: Hi, Matt. Your essay, "Prospect Farm, Indiana: Transcription of a Dream," is probably the most lyrical, experimental, and interesting we've received so far. Tell me how you derive your ideas for essays in general, and how long it takes you to edit to perfection a piece like this one, which, I feel, has been written and edited to perfection.
Matt: "Prospect Farm" is a unique case. The essay's lyrical nature is most likely due to the fact that it was literally a transcription of one of the most sustained, vivid dreams I've had. The morning after, I actually Googled "Prospect Farm, Indiana" to see if it was a real place and was disappointed to find I would not be making a pilgrimage to this mythical Mecca of the American Midwest, after all. I think the deep surreal dream state I was in is what gave this essay its otherworldly magic. I had not written anything like it before, and I haven't written anything like it since. There might be a publishing project out there for some enterprising anthologist looking to lasso together a unique collection of lyrical essays: "Dreamscape: Essays about Places that Don't Exist." The editing, the rewriting, the revising. In this case it was uncharacteristically easy for me to edit and polish. Usually it takes me eons to scrub a piece until it shines, but since this piece derived from such a striking dream sequence, it came to me mostly ready made, and all I had to do was take dictation from my subconscious. What's the lesson? Shut your brain down if you want to write your best prose.
Chila: Well, I'm glad we were lucky enough to be the recipient of this one. Some of my favorite lines from the essay - and they're all pretty much favorites, but if I had to pick a few - are: "He gestures at random points in the cosmos, forearm balanced on his knee, like Michelangelo’s Adam. The landscape is God about to touch his finger," and "sweeping away from the pursuit until only a frail vortex of orange dust remains in the shot, spiraling miles into the sky from the razor spine of a dune, kicked up by a fleeing antelope." Now, no matter how you saw it a dream, you still had to formulate these beautiful words from what you saw; that is, this tells me you're a writer, you think like a writer, always scrambling to interpret what you see, hear, etc., in fresh new ways. Tell me about your writing journey.
Matt: Yes, you're exactly right. I do feel like I'm "scrambling" as a writer, always wrestling with language, and trying to find the right words to match the vision, or, rather, trying to marshal the words that will bring to the reader the vision as I saw it in my head, with that same immediacy and freshness. The "fresh, new ways" is the tough part. It's the old writer's saw: write, revise, rinse, repeat. I'm not sure I believe in talent, or inspiration, as much as I believe in work, in trying over and over and over again to get the vision right. I don't feel I'm a writer who is incredibly talented or special or gifted. I think I just keep cutting up the sentences and refining them until they make something that makes people stop and look. When I stop and look at my own work I know I'm finished, and it's time to move on to the next thing. But I'm always revising.
My writer's journey: started reading and writing in kindergarten. Was always lost in books, loved words, the way they thumped in my ears and rolled like rock candy in my mouth. I've never ceased to be amazed at language, how people will take the time to read the words that others have written. I shouldn't be amazed because I'm a compulsive reader myself, but the exchange between reader and writer has never ceased to amaze me. That people, sometimes in completely different centuries, can connect so forcefully through words--it's a brand of immortality, really. My writer's journey has been an arduous life in the mill, a daily push to keep going. Through marriage, children, family, an academic career, and the wandering muddle of life, I've always packed my books and pencil and pad with me. The thing I like about writing is you can always find more words to work with, considering today's electronic resources. I like Gertrude Stein: "In the midst of writing there is merriment." Writing at its best is that kind of playful, kind of like chemistry for me; it's fooling around with different elements, just to see what explosions you can cause. In many ways, I feel, even after twenty-five years of writing, that I'm just beginning the experiment.
Then there are those times when words are your only refuge. So where am I in the journey? Halfway maybe? Let's be optimistic and say a third of the way through.
Chila: Which authors - name 3 or 4 - have you "connected forcefully with through words," and what sparked those connection points?
Matt: Let's try through the ages on this one: Rex Parkin, the rollicking rhythms and sounds; Taro Yashima, the brooding rainy sadness; Thomas Rockwell, The Portmanteau Book saved my life in 7th grade; Steinbeck, in high school, how the fatalistic and tragic could be right; then Joyce and Virginia Woolf and George Eliot and Nabokov and Bernard Malamud, then Tim O'Brien, Anthony Doerr, Tony Hoagland, Amy Newman, Brian Doyle.
I think all these authors, and many others, have shown me that language can always do more than you think it can. Every great reading experience has been special for me in this sense, that the language suddenly supersedes my capacity to take it in, and I find myself stretched. As a writer, you try to give vent to that same capacity for writing something that will walk large on the stage of the everyday and make people stop what they're doing and take a long look. That's the hope.
Chila: What are your 2016 personal writing goals?
Matt: Keep going. Keep up with all the essay ideas that keep crowding into the room whenever I sit down to rest. I'd like to finally get a book of mine in print, and it looks like I'm going to be able to. Jessi Graustein at Folded Word in New Hampshire is going to publish my first poetry collection, Points of Reference (March 2016). And Erin McKnight at Queen's Ferry Press is going to bring out my first fiction collection, Future Perfect, in October 2016. I'd love to pull off the trifecta with a book of essays, but we'll have to hope on that one. And what else . . . write that novel . . . keep going.
Chila: What else would you like us to know about either you or your writing or the writing life in general?
Matt: It's glamorous and grunt work. It's transformation and trial and error. There's not much to know about me, really, a guy from a tiny Idaho town who wandered around in the world and returned to Idaho, writing as much as he could along the way. I will say that reading and writing continue to save my life, in a sense. I value books and language so much more now in the digital age; I see them as a protection, a stay against what New England writer Robert Francis called "mere flux and fragmentation." I've probably lived about half of my writing life, and so I'm interested in discovering what the second half--the later half--of my writing life has to offer.
____________________
Many thanks to Matt for his "honest answers eschewing puffery" and this insightful glimpse into who he is and why he does this thing called writing. - Chila
Matthew James Babcock teaches composition, creative writing, and literature at BYU-Idaho. He earned his PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and his scholarly work on New England writer Robert Francis can be found in the Journal of Ecocriticism and Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis.
Chila: Hi, Matt. Your essay, "Prospect Farm, Indiana: Transcription of a Dream," is probably the most lyrical, experimental, and interesting we've received so far. Tell me how you derive your ideas for essays in general, and how long it takes you to edit to perfection a piece like this one, which, I feel, has been written and edited to perfection.
Matt: "Prospect Farm" is a unique case. The essay's lyrical nature is most likely due to the fact that it was literally a transcription of one of the most sustained, vivid dreams I've had. The morning after, I actually Googled "Prospect Farm, Indiana" to see if it was a real place and was disappointed to find I would not be making a pilgrimage to this mythical Mecca of the American Midwest, after all. I think the deep surreal dream state I was in is what gave this essay its otherworldly magic. I had not written anything like it before, and I haven't written anything like it since. There might be a publishing project out there for some enterprising anthologist looking to lasso together a unique collection of lyrical essays: "Dreamscape: Essays about Places that Don't Exist." The editing, the rewriting, the revising. In this case it was uncharacteristically easy for me to edit and polish. Usually it takes me eons to scrub a piece until it shines, but since this piece derived from such a striking dream sequence, it came to me mostly ready made, and all I had to do was take dictation from my subconscious. What's the lesson? Shut your brain down if you want to write your best prose.
Chila: Well, I'm glad we were lucky enough to be the recipient of this one. Some of my favorite lines from the essay - and they're all pretty much favorites, but if I had to pick a few - are: "He gestures at random points in the cosmos, forearm balanced on his knee, like Michelangelo’s Adam. The landscape is God about to touch his finger," and "sweeping away from the pursuit until only a frail vortex of orange dust remains in the shot, spiraling miles into the sky from the razor spine of a dune, kicked up by a fleeing antelope." Now, no matter how you saw it a dream, you still had to formulate these beautiful words from what you saw; that is, this tells me you're a writer, you think like a writer, always scrambling to interpret what you see, hear, etc., in fresh new ways. Tell me about your writing journey.
Matt: Yes, you're exactly right. I do feel like I'm "scrambling" as a writer, always wrestling with language, and trying to find the right words to match the vision, or, rather, trying to marshal the words that will bring to the reader the vision as I saw it in my head, with that same immediacy and freshness. The "fresh, new ways" is the tough part. It's the old writer's saw: write, revise, rinse, repeat. I'm not sure I believe in talent, or inspiration, as much as I believe in work, in trying over and over and over again to get the vision right. I don't feel I'm a writer who is incredibly talented or special or gifted. I think I just keep cutting up the sentences and refining them until they make something that makes people stop and look. When I stop and look at my own work I know I'm finished, and it's time to move on to the next thing. But I'm always revising.
My writer's journey: started reading and writing in kindergarten. Was always lost in books, loved words, the way they thumped in my ears and rolled like rock candy in my mouth. I've never ceased to be amazed at language, how people will take the time to read the words that others have written. I shouldn't be amazed because I'm a compulsive reader myself, but the exchange between reader and writer has never ceased to amaze me. That people, sometimes in completely different centuries, can connect so forcefully through words--it's a brand of immortality, really. My writer's journey has been an arduous life in the mill, a daily push to keep going. Through marriage, children, family, an academic career, and the wandering muddle of life, I've always packed my books and pencil and pad with me. The thing I like about writing is you can always find more words to work with, considering today's electronic resources. I like Gertrude Stein: "In the midst of writing there is merriment." Writing at its best is that kind of playful, kind of like chemistry for me; it's fooling around with different elements, just to see what explosions you can cause. In many ways, I feel, even after twenty-five years of writing, that I'm just beginning the experiment.
Then there are those times when words are your only refuge. So where am I in the journey? Halfway maybe? Let's be optimistic and say a third of the way through.
Chila: Which authors - name 3 or 4 - have you "connected forcefully with through words," and what sparked those connection points?
Matt: Let's try through the ages on this one: Rex Parkin, the rollicking rhythms and sounds; Taro Yashima, the brooding rainy sadness; Thomas Rockwell, The Portmanteau Book saved my life in 7th grade; Steinbeck, in high school, how the fatalistic and tragic could be right; then Joyce and Virginia Woolf and George Eliot and Nabokov and Bernard Malamud, then Tim O'Brien, Anthony Doerr, Tony Hoagland, Amy Newman, Brian Doyle.
I think all these authors, and many others, have shown me that language can always do more than you think it can. Every great reading experience has been special for me in this sense, that the language suddenly supersedes my capacity to take it in, and I find myself stretched. As a writer, you try to give vent to that same capacity for writing something that will walk large on the stage of the everyday and make people stop what they're doing and take a long look. That's the hope.
Chila: What are your 2016 personal writing goals?
Matt: Keep going. Keep up with all the essay ideas that keep crowding into the room whenever I sit down to rest. I'd like to finally get a book of mine in print, and it looks like I'm going to be able to. Jessi Graustein at Folded Word in New Hampshire is going to publish my first poetry collection, Points of Reference (March 2016). And Erin McKnight at Queen's Ferry Press is going to bring out my first fiction collection, Future Perfect, in October 2016. I'd love to pull off the trifecta with a book of essays, but we'll have to hope on that one. And what else . . . write that novel . . . keep going.
Chila: What else would you like us to know about either you or your writing or the writing life in general?
Matt: It's glamorous and grunt work. It's transformation and trial and error. There's not much to know about me, really, a guy from a tiny Idaho town who wandered around in the world and returned to Idaho, writing as much as he could along the way. I will say that reading and writing continue to save my life, in a sense. I value books and language so much more now in the digital age; I see them as a protection, a stay against what New England writer Robert Francis called "mere flux and fragmentation." I've probably lived about half of my writing life, and so I'm interested in discovering what the second half--the later half--of my writing life has to offer.
____________________
Many thanks to Matt for his "honest answers eschewing puffery" and this insightful glimpse into who he is and why he does this thing called writing. - Chila
Matthew James Babcock teaches composition, creative writing, and literature at BYU-Idaho. He earned his PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and his scholarly work on New England writer Robert Francis can be found in the Journal of Ecocriticism and Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis.
