Susanne Paola Antonetta, Amy Benson, Sabrina Orah Mark, & Elissa Washuta | April 2020

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Susanne Paola Antonetta, Amy Benson, Sabrina Orah Mark, & Elissa Washuta

We’re interested in exploring the power of speculation—that invented territory above and below and all around the solid-ish ground of nonfiction. We’re using “speculative nonfiction” here as a catch-all for gestures that bridge what we know or think to be true with all of the other places our minds hang out: supposition, dream, fantasy, future invention, historical revision, cultural, political, and spiritual wish-fulfillment or prophesying. We speculate essayistically when we fill in what we don’t know but can guess, when we use invention to highlight or extend a truth the facts suggest, when we mythologize, when we insist on impossibilities, by which we mean that-which-human-tools-of-measurement-can’t-measure. A small moment of “what if” or a deep excursion into invention. Please, fill in all the permutations you can imagine. The mind boggles. That’s the point. Layers of boggling life on the margins of what is verifiable, layers that, if written with care, either do not violate the nonfiction agreement with the reader or make such an agreement obsolete.

The following essays by Suzanne Antonetta, Amy Benson, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Elissa Washuta, delineate writing practices that do not concede empathic invention, mythologizing, futurism, and the unseen aspects of perception and consciousness to fiction. They pull into time—the real time of reading the essay—the weight of meditating on the unverifiable. Metaphor, myth, speculation, they are heavy, immeasurably so. In the passages that follow, four writers explore a range of speculative nonfiction, noticing the liveliness and urgency that invention brings when it arises from or feels tangibly entwined with a nonfiction context.

Susanne Paola Antonetta

Poet Bruce Beasley speaks of the “dream paradox.” The paradox is that we can be most ourselves when we dream, when we spin the stuff of our days into confabulations that tell us more about ourselves than we consciously know. A turn towards snow in the air, secret fears about a child, missing a dead parent—and we trip through shagged caves in our sleep, hear a being we cannot find whimper, encounter our mother again. Only in narrating dreams back to ourselves do we fully grasp the obsessions behind them, and even then, their logic may elude. One aspect of the paradox is that, like Homer’s lice, what we find we can dispose of; what we fail to see rides along.           

A standard definition of speculative writing is that its end game is to do just that—make guesses about things that haven’t happened. But this would be a ludicrous way to judge such work, implying, as the assumption does, accuracy as a goal. The future depends on a trillion unguessable things, or we would be having vacations on the moon right now, as everyone predicted in the 1960s. Speculative writing, if set in the future, puts the present under a microscope, as Wendy S. Walters does race in America in her brilliant “Norway,” and it says, “If I take this and blow it up a little further—well, then it looks like that. Now do you see?” It’s a heuristic, like a dream, though here the heuristic act is collective.

Creative nonfiction has always occupied an uneasy place in the literary arts. One sign of this lies in the way people periodically try to rename it: literature of fact, literature of reality, even faction. Creative nonfiction is indeed a misnomer: literally, it means the created uncreated, the created unfabricated, literature. Somehow the word “fact” often gets muscled in to these newer genre terms. But facts have consequences built into them: “unrealized” still occurs under the sign of the real.

There are of course different ways of speculating within nonfiction, and speculation can occur in all times and contexts. There is the perhapsing way, where the author says some version of “I imagine this could have been the case,” as in this, from Judith Kitchen’s Half in Shade. Kitchen looks at a sketch drawn in Paris by a woman named Rosa: “Rosa, given the nature of her work, will likely become a collaborator. Or—and this we like to imagine—she will join the underground.” Or the rug-pulling speculation of books like John D’Agata’s Lifespan of a Fact, a Quaker Oats box of fabrication, in which an author and fact-checker’s argument about truth versus the invented turns out to be itself ginned-up.

Lately, what interests me is what I’ll call the transparent speculation or even the stealth speculation. Like most interests, mine is personal. I began doing this kind of speculation in a book I’m currently finishing, The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, a book that is largely about the life of my grandmother. It’s in some ways a bookend to an earlier book of mine, Body Toxic. But where that book tended more toward what could be known, or proven, this one seemed to want something different.

As a young nurse in England during the First World War, my grandmother married one of her patients, who was from Barbados. She moved with him to the United States. She was deeply interested in spiritualism, though she also practiced Christian Science. Her life, for a woman of her day, was surprising and transgressive.

I only knew the outlines of that life. And the reality that she was a woman, sexual, with a body that menstruated, bore children, enabled her to travel in the way that she did, had never really occurred to me viscerally before.

So, in this book, I found myself moving without transition from my memory-based material and research to straight, declarative scenes of my grandmother in her younger life. She nurses men brought in gassed and wounded from the front, hides her menstrual cloths in bloody bandages, marries my grandfather at his hospital bedside. It is clearly speculation, but without the bow-in provided by cuing information. My hope is that it will work like that nightly plunge from the darkened bedroom to the dream world, in which we do Tom O’Bedlam’s mad shake to the jar of loose experience, shaking out new images, new narratives.

To return to the genre name, I think the issue encapsulates a real precipice we’re teetering on whenever we write reality—our subjectivity and our objectivity are forced to meet up and hold hands at the edge of it, each offering the other both support and pressure. My grandmother did marry my grandfather; she did menstruate. But when I put those facts together with what comes out of research for the book (on nursing, on spiritualism and its weird meet-ups with modern physics) it’s my hand that shakes the jar. It is clear in my book that I am speculating. At the same time, it’s clear that the imagined narrative springs from the qualities of a woman I knew intimately. It tells something of my grandmother, and something of who I am in relation to her, my dream her. At all times in nonfiction, readers must list, too, on that perch where the subjective and objective pull together. And choose which way it is safest to lean.

I don’t believe that my subjectivity has any special interest among all of the bright consciousnesses in this world. I do think, though, that subjectivity itself, well accessed, is intensely interesting. It’s the reason most of us can’t keep ourselves away even from someone else’s stray grocery list, or a note in an old book, thinking who was this? Imagination spins our narratives, making free use of sense information, and what objective information we can gather: today is a Monday, and it is warm, and the house where I’m staying looks out at one house with solar panels, another where a man shoots a rifle from time to time out of an upstairs window. These things are true. Perhaps when I shut my eyes I can explain them to myself.

Amy Benson

At the heart of many speculative nonfiction gestures is the idea that the verifiable is a woefully incomplete account of existence. And that, just as the mind does not compartmentalize its wandering, so the prose that explores existence need not sequester fictional gestures from contemplation. There is very little difference, for me at least, between the personal essay mode of representing ideas and representing the mind fictionalizing. Mixing nonfiction elements or context with the strictly imagined creates an implicit claim to the substance of the abstract. Thoughts take on weight. Dreams, fantasies, projections shape our actual lives. Where you go in your conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious mind counts. Writers might give a fuller account of reality—and alter it—by giving the imagined its proper heft.

A satisfyingly obscure definition from the 16^th century suggests the potential power of speculative nonfiction: to speculate is “To view as from a watchtower.” We might speculate to see a long way off, to give warning. And, for the purposes of extending the range of the essay, I think of this watchtower view as capable of moving spatially up and out of our immediate local context, into a national or global context; and backward and forward in time.

Up in the watchtower, you’ll find work like Wendy S. Walters’s “Norway,” which appears in her uncanny collection Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal and begins like this: “When I and whoever else was left of Black America finally got out of there, we met up in Norway. The war had taken years off our memory of each other.” The narrator is speculating into the future from a very real present context—a moment post-Obama election in which she’s anticipating the racist backlash to come.

In speculative nonfiction, unlike fiction, speculative or otherwise, the watchtower remains grounded—in a place, a context, a set of actualities—and the watcher is a person, or at least the pressed oil of a person. There’s rarely a fourth wall to be broken. In fact, the suspension of disbelief is disallowed. The act of invention within nonfiction is transformed by the continual presence of the narrator and the nonfiction I or we or you. So that even while you might turn the ordinary fantastically absurd or invent alternate histories or futures, if you keep a few tethers in the actual, you get both worlds at once, a double exposure.

I see this double exposure at work in Lily Huang’s “The Story of the Mosquito”: “[…]This is a story like all other magic stories. Don’t be fooled. Just because our characters have different names does not make them fundamentally any different from the archetypal characters you’ve come to know and love. ...We understand: things that are different can be frightening, but this is not a ghost story. This is a magic story, and although it ends with sadness, those who are good will be rewarded and those who are bad will be punished. We are just people, even though we look different and speak a different language and our people have different names. We, too, believe in justice.”

Even as she moves, then, into full-blown myth-making, the reader must negotiate the myth as an invention that rises out of an overt address of orientalism. The “we” does not disappear as it has historically in western literature; the “you” must remember.

A number of speculative questions undergirded my recent book, Seven Years to Zero: what if we gave ourselves over to perceptual and conceptual rearrangement that art suggests; what if we followed theories (like hive mind and the sixth extinction) to their logical and illogical conclusions; what if we constructed from predictions a temporary shelter in the present? The collection of essays is riddled with fiction that dives into visual art as a way to think through a range of environmental changes framed as disaster. I moved explicitly away from documentation as a model and toward generation and a wide-open fabrication. Nostalgia and despair as response to change—the environmentalist default—feel both limiting and tied to the preservation of neo-colonial and species domination. Nostalgia and despair are not facts about the past; they are only treated as such. And one can smuggle a lot of power (or yearning for power) under the cover of soft-focus, delicious melancholy. Why give fantasies about the past so much credence and fantasies about the future so little? Little credence to the unknown, the absurd, the playfully exaggerated? Might we enter speculative territory in order to explore what change for the species and the planet might look like rather than insisting on the sense of loss? I turned to the loose and ranging wild-minds that create some visual art to haul my thinking first into the present reality and then into a forged future where no one can simply sit around heartbroken.

I also didn’t aim to use nonfiction to preserve the art I included. Art might be frozen in place through description or other forms of documentation, but it’s also what our minds make of it, how it changes and becomes changed by the viewer. In my experience, much art becomes generative and launches invention in kind. Some of the pieces are essays that turn into implausible fairy tales, as in the case of an essay about actual artists who fabricated a forest in an L.A. gallery. By the end of the essay, the forest has taken root and resists being disassembled, and the gallerists give up and move on. Some pieces exaggerate-to-the-point-of-fiction the effect of an experience of art: in one essay, the narrator visits an enormous sculpture park and feels so disoriented by the work that she ends up spending the night in the woods nearby, crossing the border from “culture” into “nature,” the categories dissolving.

In an essay entitled, “Lamarkian Evolution,” I consider an art installation in the context of that once-disgraced/now-re-emergent evolutionary theory that an organism can pass on characteristics acquired in its lifetime to offspring.

Once upon a time, a long time from now, there are monkeys who feed at ancient landfills. They swallow the parts they need to wire or pad or decorate their bodies—foam fill, plastic baby bottles, spiral phone cords (the kind that, for a brief time, teenage girls would wrap obsessively around their fingers), sequined upholstery fabric, pumps to fill and pumps to empty. They lap at the silicone they need to coat their sockets and cavities. …One pauses, considers a string of plastic beads, adds it to his haunch. Their babies, they are pleased to note, are born part flesh, part rubber, wire, and watchworks.

This is what we saw when we walked into the gallery: tableau of these monkeys…. They have loped back through time on their composite limbs to hold very still for us.

In biology class, we laughed along with our teacher at Lamarkian Theory—absurd, impossible! The theory is now resurgent as we examine organisms’ rapid responses to our rapidly changing planet. I’m interested in statements that seem impossible. In the shift from “might” to “is” and “would” to “when.” And the ability of a writer and reader of nonfiction to partake simultaneously in the present (already thick with the past) and the fictional gesture, the future mind.

Sabrina Orah Mark

My son wakes up crying. He had a nightmare I was tearing a dragonfly to shreds. “Why did you do that, Mama?” All day he is distant. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t, I did, I don’t know.” My younger son, a few months later, all morning gives me side eye. “Come give me a hug,” I say. “No, he says. “Why?” I ask. “Because you shot the moon. Why did you do that, Mama? Why did you shoot the moon?” “But I didn’t shoot the moon,” I say. “Yes,” he says. “You did,” he says. “I dreamed it.”

Poor dead moon. Poor shredded dragonfly.

“Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.”—Flannery O’ Connor

In my forthcoming collection of stories, Wild Milk, there are a lot of names. A baby is accidentally referred to as SHREDS, there is a husband named Louis C.K., a cleaning woman named Hillary Clinton, a man named Ferguson, a President named Huh, there is Emily Dickinson, and Samuel Beckett, and a mother who is not a mother named John Berryman, and a place called Aleppo. There was a man named King (G is silent) but he was cut from the manuscript. 

“This is so nice,” writes Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons, “and sweet and yet there comes the change, there comes the time to press more air. This does not mean the same as disappearance.” In a torn up world, Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914)—her biography of objects, food, and rooms—tears the sentence up and makes out of word-assemblages a kind of nonsense that stages the word as a thing infused with fingers that points the word away from itself. Stein cracks open the shell that has kept the word, but does not abandon the cracked-up word. Wrench does not dissolve it. Nor does it vanish when its keeper (or shell, or name) vanishes. Instead, Stein sweeps up the offspring of its shatter (its deadness, its paralysis) and through a syntactical bartering returns the word to a world saturated in its own exile.

Stein, for example, defines Asparagus as “Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet wet weather we weather wet …” or Rhubarb as “Rhubarb is susan not susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places not in neglect and vegetable not in fold coal age not please.” Once, many years ago, I caught a flash of Gertrude S. in the vegetable aisle. Pathmark, I think it was. Some things in her shopping cart were beaming with possibility and forgetfulness, but the rest were desperately trying to climb out.   

I am very fascinated by names, and how they infuse the atmosphere, and morph. My husband, for example, is not really named Louis C.K. And the child named Eli in one of my stories is not my child named Eli. And Hillary Clinton never cleaned my stove. When I write, “my mother,” it is not my real mother. When I write “my father” it is not my real father. While Stein cracks open the word shell and spills out its meaning, and replaces it with strange contents, I string the name up, and like a lightbulb on a wire I watch it sway back and forth to see, I think, how much the story changes the wattage of the name, and how much the name sends a kind of glare across the story.

And when we use the names of the living, like Hillary Clinton or Louis C.K. or Francine Prose, the hope is that the story is strong enough, the fiction of it, to bear the thump of their heartbeat. So, for example, I wrote the Louis C.K. story before the other Louis C.K. story. My publisher agreed the story still works. But differently now, like a town after a flood. Same with Hillary Clinton. I wrote the story in 2012. Before the election. Before the doom. This puts, of course, the story at the risk of being a living object. One susceptible to change, and triumph, and endless failure. 

I once hurt someone because she saw her name in a story. The story is about a dying mother, and snails, and a broken friendship. Her person hadn’t even occurred to me when I wrote the story until the friendship—in real life—actually broke because of the story. I used her name because her name means “enclosure,” and because of its sound which fell against the words “mother” and “snails” like a soft hand. I changed the name in the story. I changed the name that means enclosure. But not before it was too late. Not before fiction sunk its teeth into reality.

Why did you shoot the moon, Mama. Why did you tear the dragonfly to shreds? Poor dead moon. Poor shredded dragonfly.

Originally, the story was named “We Once Were Everything.” It’s no longer named that either.

Donald Barthelme reminds me: “Words have halos, patinas, overhangs, echoes.” Donald reminds me I should’ve known better. I made a mistake.

Names are very powerful. We know this from the Bible. When Adam (whose name in Hebrew—ADAMA—means earth because he was made from the earth) names the animals, one gets the sense the animals, if they existed at all before they were named, existed as fog. Names are like spells, like prophecies. Among the Wolof (in West Africa), a mother who loses a child and has another will name the child Kene, which means stay.

When we enter into fiction, as we enter into the world, we see what we want to see. If we expect everything to smell like mildew things will eventually smell like mildew, and yet the job of the good story is to take a scrub brush to our preconceptions, our prejudices, to the story we keep telling ourselves over and over again. The good story helps us find what’s underneath. It helps us find the parts of ourselves that keep going missing.

We add this to works of fiction: “This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.” We need to write this because part of us knows it isn’t entirely true.

Elissa Washuta

When I began hearing the term “speculative nonfiction,” I thought, Oh, yes, that is exactly what I do: I write personal essays about magic and ghosts. I was operating under the assumption that if speculative fiction is fiction that deals with the supernatural, speculative nonfiction must be nonfiction that deals with the supernatural. My current manuscript-in-progress is a lyric nonfiction book that concerns magic, witchcraft, telepathy, ghosts, spirits, and synchronicity. The supernatural, according to Merriam-Webster, would encompass these things, because supernatural is defined as “of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe; departing from what is usual or normal especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature”; or “attributed to an invisible agent (such as a ghost or spirit).”

This brought me to Merriam-Webster’s definition for law of nature:

a generalized statement of natural processes; specifically : one of the chief generalizations of science variously conceived as imposed upon nature by the Creator, as representing an intrinsic orderliness of nature or the necessary conformity of phenomena to reason and understanding, or as the observed regular coincidences of phenomena which are ultimate data for our knowledge.

Here, I began to grasp the core of my quandary regarding speculative nonfiction, as I wanted to understand it: I don’t know which creator the definition refers to or whose knowledge is our knowledge, but as a Cowlitz woman living in a settler nation, I can guess. I do know that Indigenous knowledges are often characterized as “myths” or “superstitions” and embodied intuition can be discounted as “hysteria.” The existence of telepathy is dismissed because of confirmation bias.

For many of us, subscribing to a variety of belief systems, the supernatural is, in fact, natural. We speak to the dead. We receive cures from spiritual sickness and protection from harm through developing relationships with non-human beings.

To speculate is take something to be true on the basis of insufficient evidence. In my new nonfiction, I am attempting to use moments, images, research connections, and the interconnected resonances of the lyric essay to prove that “magic” is real, that the otherworldly is accessible in this world, and that the essay itself is something of a prayer or a spell in its ability to use words to bring change. This book, I hope, will be a dossier.

While most definitions of speculative nonfiction focus on the act of speculating or imagining, the inclusion of fantastical elements has entered the conversation. In an Electric Literature discussion about speculative memoir and the inclusion of monsters and other supernatural elements, Sofia Samatar writes,

What’s interesting to me is what happens when memoir?—?which is already strange and tricky and fraught in its relationship to memory?—?meets the deliberately imagined, the blatantly non-factual, the impossible. As if you’re taking a memory that’s already decayed and then tearing it up, or sewing a bunch of feathers onto it. It becomes a bit monstrous. And this?—?all of us seem to agree?—?is when it’s finally recognizable as yours.

Such twining of verifiable fact and imagined impossibility has enriched the nonfiction genre in ways that have been discussed elsewhere in this article. Here, I turn my attention to the many Native writers continuing in the tradition of Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, and other literary predecessors by presenting traditional stories (for which the laws of nature are unlike those in our current world) within the context of the real and the verifiable: we know they are true because we trust the tellers who carry them and we trust the enduring systems through which oral stories are maintained. Byron Aspaas, in opening his 2017 essay on the fear of living among those who might harm him because he is a gay Diné man, writes, “We used to have monsters roaming our lands.” This is no metaphor: it is a fact whose introduction establishes a pre-colonization history of conflict in Aspaas’s homeland.

In my own work, I am concerned with the monsters we call dangerous beings, such as the a’yahos (a serpent spirit that once lived in what is now Seattle) and the girl who turned into a shark after devouring everyone who loved her. I turn to stories that reach me from across the moment of rupture when Transformer changed the world into the one I know, and in doing so, I reject the pitting of factuality against fantasy and question who defines the terms. All nonfiction is a fantasy of some kind, because according to Google Dictionary, fantasy is the faculty or activity of imagining things, especially things that are impossible or improbable, and what is nonfiction but the fantasy that we can represent reality through compression, selection, and subjective retelling? Only some of us are told that our imaginings are impossible. I choose to believe that my imaginings are not impossibilities—they’re foundations.

Susanne Paola Antonetta is the author of Make Me a Mother, a digital chapbook, Curious Atoms: A History with Physics, Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World, the novella Stolen Moments, and four books of poetry. Awards for her poetry and prose include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, a Library Journal Best Science Book of the Year, a Lenore Marshall Award finalist, an Oprah Bookshelf pick, a Pushcart prize, and others. Her essays and poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. Her work has been translated into Korean, Dutch, and Italian and distributed internationally. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Bellingham Review.

Amy Benson is the author of Seven Years to Zero, winner of the Dzanc Books Nonfiction Prize, and The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, winner of the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize in creative nonfiction. Recent work has appeared in many literary journals. Cofounder of the First Person Plural Reading Series in Harlem, she currently teaches creative writing at Rhodes College in Memphis.

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections The Babies and Tsim Tsum. Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. For The Paris Review she writes a monthly column on fairytales and motherhood entitled HAPPILY.