Confab with a Contributor: Susannah Mintz

1) For anyone who picks up the Vol. 24, no. 1 issue of Five Points and flips to your essay, “The Approach,” they will be met with a thought-provokingly layered essay tackling the inescapable reality of our mortality. How did you manage to pick the title for your essay?

The novelist Mark Mayer (my new colleague at Skidmore) says that a good title should “deepen but not solve the mystery” of a piece, and be beautiful language in its own right. This is such a helpful explanation, and since I’ve always found titles very challenging, I hope I can now get better at devising effective ones! In this case the title did come easily because the essay began with such a precise sensation of approaching a difficult event, which then led to all the other related approaches: a plane upon landing, our inexorable advance through time, how we approach strangers, what it means to wish for something, and so on. Once this concept emerged as an organizing principle, the title was obvious, and I could build the essay by connecting its disparate segments as instances of carefully, curiously, or boldly getting closer to what we both long for and fear.

2) You wrote the essay in second person point of view, which is something I haven’t typically seen in personal essays. I think it works really well, since you are narrating your story, but you still come across as a spectator in it. What made you decide to write in this way?

Since reading Mary Karr’s memoir Cherry, written entirely in second person, I’ve been fascinated by the effect of that “you.” It can amplify the distance between narrating and narrated versions of the author, as in Karr’s book, or it can address an important other, like the mothers in Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy or Ocean Vuong’s autobiographical On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It can also implicate readers; I’ve had students actively resist the feeling of being accused by a text written in second person. For me in this essay, that little bit of distance afforded by you worked as a shield of sorts, to suggest the ways we hold what we’re afraid of at bay—sorrow, pain, loss, mortality—while at the same time creating an intimacy between narrator and “you,” a kind of reassurance. To read “you” in this way, I think, is to feel known by the narrative voice, which can be tremendously comforting, especially when the subject matter is inherently somber.

3) As I mentioned earlier, your essay is extremely layered, taking the idea of the approach across many different ideas. You convey the straightforward and tangible nature of death via mentions of the funeral and illness, but then you mix in the more intangible (but still heavy) concepts like anticipation, nearness, and “waiting as having.” You manage to take all these concepts and weave them together to amplify the central theme. How did you find your cadence here?

These three are related questions, so I’ll address them all as having to do with process. The first answer is that no essay ever arrives in my mind as a whole, even if the originating impulse is clear and succinct. I knew I wanted to explore what it means to be confronted by a sudden loss as well as aware of the inevitability of future ones, but after that very first scene of approaching the memorial service, I had to write my way into the subject, discovering its layers as I went along. My process here was associative and I explicitly tried to understand “approach” as a psychological style: how we might think about our nearness to those aspects of mortal life that complicate our desire for control, and certainly for youthfulness or defiance of death. I think I’ve been writing about “how to live” in one way or another for a long time, using the space and process of writing to figure out what kinds of practices or belief structures can help us navigate the challenges of our existence. But writing itself also is that mode: it is in writing that I have most successfully aligned my experience with a deep understanding. I’ve often noticed while working on a piece that relevant material just seems to pop up: I’ll read a quote that fits perfectly, overhear a stray comment, remember an episode from the past. Such correspondences are happening all the time, I think, but the writing process makes them available to our imaginations if we’re alert to the possibilities. Wasn’t it the poet Cynthia Macdonald who said that inspiration just means we’re well-prepared? If we ready ourselves for whatever might suit what we’re writing, I find that it tends to arrive.

4) You’re a widely published author, poet, and a noted scholar of Milton; do you have a favorite work by him?

I read Paradise Lost in college, and then returned to it in a Milton course my first semester as a PhD student. There I had a teacher who read Milton as a poet, rather than a “religious” writer, and the excitement of bringing a writerly sensibility to philosophically complex work changed the course of my career. Milton is both a close-reader’s puzzle and a theorist’s dream. Line breaks in the epic are ethical dilemmas, unfinished possibilities that plunge into blank space with all the world before us where to choose. Syntax wreaks havoc on causal sequence, disrupting a reader’s comfortable surety about where we’re headed, what has priority, who’s in control. Imagistic repetitions and parallels set versions of the same against each other to insist on alternatives. Nature explodes into life that exults in variation, repudiates commandment; mountains upheave and rivers wander and deviate to get exactly where they’re going. Adam takes punishment and rewrites it as home. Eve, who bucks the system from her first moments of speech, gets the last spoken word. The poem warps time, queers its angels, forecasts but never delivers on traditional family. All of it in impossible sentences that, grammatically and miraculously, do eventually resolve, except not a miracle at all, because there’s no magical intervention in Milton’s human world of catastrophic bad behavior, if also a world that celebrates love as an act of hard work and conversation between embodied, thinking equals. Of course I would write books about Milton! I return to him again and again—in writing, in classes not even about him, in my thinking—because he offers us such an approach to life that is at once lush and urgent, transgressive and responsible, rooted in historical specificity and yet transportable across time. He’s a voluminous author, obviously, and yet I feel like there’s a pocket version of Milton we can carry with us, always, to feel inspired, challenged, transformed.

5) In addition to Milton, I see that one of your primary areas of are on pain and disability. You’ve written “Hurt and Pain” and “Unruly Bodies” to name a few. What would you say is the significance of representing pain in bodies of work? Do you think there is adequate representation in the current book climate?

My work with pain begins from the belief that pain can find meaningful expression in literary form, and that the shape pain takes—whether a lyric cry of hurt or fictional detectives sleuthing their way through gunshot wounds or war injury—reveals something important about what physical pain means to cognition as well as to ideas about intimacy, community, personhood, even social justice. It was long held in philosophical circles, after the work of Elaine Scarry, that pain obliterated language and so constituted a profoundly uncreative state of being. Virginia Woolf famously wrote that while we have an almost infinite variety of names for our emotional suffering, physical unwellness somehow eludes verbal dexterity. For Scarry, physical pain is an intensively private experience whose sensations are unavailable to language and so eradicate one’s capacity to perceive anything other than pain itself; pain is totalizing, in this formulation: it damages imaginative potential and both constricts and pacifies the sufferer. But researchers know that pain is thought as much as felt. And there’s a very extensive archive of literary works to disprove the idea that pain cannot be written—that it can’t be uttered or shared. If our vernacular expressions of pain insist on it as a malevolent affliction that invades and tyrannizes, we find in literature that it’s possible to imagine a less adversarial and frightened relationship to it. Literary pain is more often integrated into a sense of viable, productive, communal, even joyous selfhood than we might expect, given pervasive cultural images of pain as pure suffering. We can, through reading pain, broaden our conception of what pain means both for our bodies and our identities.

6) What would you say is the importance of literary journals?

In a historical moment of such powerful resistance to the artistic life, and when literary and academic presses are experiencing extreme financial constraints, the important role of literary journals is ever more crucial to remember. Jim Shepard published a brilliant defense in Literary Hub back in 2019*, where he argued that “literary magazines model critical thinking and arrange an exposure to the unorthodox,” a characteristic he promoted as vital to preserving intellectual culture, offering community, and supporting us as a collective in the project of “making sense of the world.” It’s in lit mags that we encounter the “weird,” “disruptive,” and “non-mainstream,” Shepard argued, to which I’d add more generally that without journals, where do we meet writers (and especially new writers) at all? We need to give our support to small and independent publishers, too, but the journal is where we have the broad, eclectic conversations that expand our sense of what’s possible: to imagine, to write, to know of each other, and so to send back into a world we’re responsible in our individual ways for protecting.

Photo is credited to the Author.

Read Shepard’s article here!

Susannah Mintz is an esteemed author, her scholarly work spans across several areas including: disability studies, life writing, and early modern literature. In addition to her scholarly works, she also has published creative personal and literary essays. She has been a professor of English at Skidmore College since 2002.

Aniya Anderson is a senior intern for Five Points. She is currently majoring in journalism with a minor in Editing and Publishing.