Anne McGrath | September 2021

Patrick Madden

Patrick Madden is the author of three essay collections, Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010) and coeditor of After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays (2015). He curates www.quotidiana.org, coedits the journal Fourth Genre with Joey Franklin, and, with David Lazar, coedits the 21st Century Essays series at the Ohio State University Press.

Disparates is an indispensable literary mix-tape, a play between art forms for every essay-lovers’ library, as well as the libraries of the people who appreciate writing that is fresh and absolutely original. Madden essays his own meandering mind, song lyrics, and nostalgia, exploiting personal, borrowed, and invented memories. Essaying in word-finds, proverbial sayings, and pangram haikus, Madden meditates on, and celebrates, life.

Anne McGrath: How are you managing in this period of quasi-quarantine? Have you undertaken any new projects or been able to exercise your curiosity about what’s happening?

Patrick Madden: Everyone is healthy in our family. I’m teaching online. Life is blessedly good. The few things I’ve been writing are short and inspired by Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights (Algonquin, 2019). His project was to notice a delight every day and write about it in sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a couple of pages. The book collects about a hundred such essays.

McGrath: What was a recent delight?

Madden: I was eating a piece of toasted cinnamon bread with butter, and it was delicious, but I realized that the flavor I recognized from my youth was not raisins, as I’d always thought—I grew up having cinnamon raisin bagels—but this bread had no raisins. So, thirty plus years later, I’m realizing that the flavor I was enjoying all that time was cinnamon. Utterly mundane, but it might work for an essay on revised memory or nostalgia.

McGrath: What is your interest in revised memories?

Madden: I suppose it’s the same as most people’s: an amateur’s curiosity about the way the mind works, about how perception and interpretation create reality, or what we experience as reality, how everything is subjective. I recall being fascinated by research demonstrating convincingly that people remembered their experiences of 9/11 quite differently a decade later, and even when confronted with their own statements a week after the attacks, they held to what their minds “remembered.” Mainly, I’m hoping to gain some humility by doubting even my own certainties.

McGrath: What else have you been writing lately?

Madden: The other project that I’m avoiding is a book written not so much about but from my mother’s death five years ago. I’m inspired by Annie Dillard’s book For the Time Being (Vintage Books, 2000), which examines the topic of evil through ten topics: how, if there’s a God, how can there be evil in the world? The format has me thinking about how I could write about my mother’s death using thoughts about patterns and systems we live in and how dimly we perceive them until we’re taken out of them, as well as idiomatic expressions, like the phrase “used to.” We use the phrase to talk about things that happened in the past, things we’re accustomed to that no longer happen, but it’s a weird phrase etymologically; it feels almost inside out. Used to suggests the passive voice but we use it to help active verbs. I’m also thinking about the rosary, do-not-resuscitate orders, the tobacco industry (my mother smoked her entire adult life and died of lung cancer). I’m thinking about how systems create conditions for their perpetuation.

McGrath: That’s certainly relevant right now with our social and economic systems collapsing around us. Everything was driven by money until now, and now our priorities have shifted. We recognize how dependent we are on the people who provide the services.

Madden: I hadn’t really thought of that, so thank you. But some form of this has been on my mind for a long while now. When the system breaks, or pauses, you start to notice the things you take for granted. The way broken systems are reconfigured out of this pandemic will probably continue the patterns of the past. I suspect that people with power will not give it up, so corporations will just lay off the people who do the work that’s paused; the people who suffer the most are the people at the metaphorical bottom of the system. As things reshape, will the result be an even tighter consolidation of power and money? I can conceive such a thing as evil, but it’s also amoral. Not in the sense that it doesn’t care about morals, but in the sense that it doesn’t even fit in the system of morals. I don’t mean to excuse anybody’s selfish behaviors, but I wonder, what else is the system going to do?

McGrath: Are you referring to the way our lives are intertwined with societal systems more than with the natural world?

Madden: I have to recognize that I too am complicit in the systems. I’m probably seen by those in power as a largely innocuous writer and professor. I’m not particularly powerful, but I have a certain kind of power. We tend to think of a professor’s power as being largely good, helping to shape minds, teach students to think critically, and experience deeper enjoyments in life. Especially because I teach literature. Very rarely do these pursuits contribute to the capitalist machine. The values demonstrated by literature tend to be anti-capitalist in favor of the pursuit of beauty and truth. But, my perspective is confined to my own time and community.

  I think a lot of us live as if we’re apart from nature. We see nature as something to be used, sometimes converted to raw materials to improve our lives. We have a short-sighted way of interacting with nature, content to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. It’s a difficult work of imagination to picture the future and consider how our actions will impact others. Even most people sympathetic to global concerns do not act in ways that have significant impact on the outcomes.

McGrath: As we age, many of us find that more and more things compromise our creative energies. In “Memorizing Lyrics,” you write that somewhere along the way you got too busy to pay full attention to music, that listening to it had become something in the background that you do while you’re engaged in more marketable activities. How do you triage your scarce time—between parenting six children, teaching at two colleges, editing a major literary journal, being a good literary citizen, writing, editing, etc.—and find space to slow down and contemplate life in the way I imagine a good essayist must?

Madden: I haven’t solved anything on that front. I admire writers who can write every day, and there are times I feel guilty that I don’t. But I want to be okay with not writing every day. I tend to write at night when my children are asleep because I feel like I’m not taking any time from them. But it’s complicated because if I write too much and don’t sleep enough, I’m not a good father and husband the next day. I need long stretches of time to write. I’m not in writing mode naturally; it takes me a while to get there. Sitting down to write is a rare event for me. To put things in balance: there are things that are more important to me, things that require more of my attention.

McGrath: How do your kids feel about your writing?

Madden: In the long view, they’re very pleased and proud. They love holding a book in their hands. Sometimes in the short view, though, there are moments in which it’s very clear to me that now is not the time to ignore these important people so I can do some writing.

McGrath: You began your gorgeous essay, “Poetry”:

The other day as we left the doctor’s office, my seven-year-old daughter Adriana, brushed past me, pronouncing to the air: “I’ve never seen the top of my head.” She kept on her way to the car, without pause, without a sidelong glance to find an answer or a response. I smiled and caught the essay she had given me.

How do you incubate your ideas once you catch them?

Madden: Sometimes I don’t write things down, but a memory lingers, which typically means I can’t regain the particulars, and this can feel frustrating, but I have to think more broadly. I do keep a lot of notes on my phone and I have little notebooks filled with brief words or sentences that could become essays. The vast majority never do, primarily because I don’t have the time to give to all of them.

  Once I do start to write an essay, it’s thankfully rare that things don’t pan out. I suppose that’s part luck, but part training. I remember some years ago I took a group of students on a study abroad trip to the UK. In Scotland we visited Chris Arthur, an essayist I deeply admire. Someone asked him how much of his work ends up in the trash, and he said that one of the graces of writing for so many years is that he can recognize early on which things will succeed and turn his attention to those. I’ve gotten more like that myself. Maybe that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the thing you turn away from never quite gets the chance to fail.

  Sometimes ideas incubate for a really long time! Some twenty years ago, I was sitting waiting in the car and the song “Fell on Black Days” by Soundgarden came on the radio. I heard the line:

Whomsoever I’ve cured, I’ve sickened now

And whomsoever I’ve cradled, I’ve put you down.

and thought whomsoever! In a rock song! What a fascinating word, and so rare! Rock is overwhelmingly more likely to get things grammatically wrong. This is a case of being hypercorrect, using a word that’s not in common use. I got thinking: that would be a great theme for an essay. It could be called “Rock & Roll High School,” after the Ramones song, and it could dance around all sort of grammatical infelicities. It could be humorous because nobody is looking to rock & roll for grammar lessons; I could adopt the persona of a stuffy person (perhaps not much of a stretch). Yet I’ve never written that essay. But it returns to my memory a lot. That indicates to me that I should write it.

McGrath: In another interview you talk about receiving serendipitous gifts from the universe that align with your essays in theme and in tone, from songs that you hear or words you read in books or hear in conversations.

Madden: One example from this new book is in “Unpredictable Essays.” I was scrolling through Facebook and saw a post about a hilarious new Harry Potter chapter written by computer.

  I decided I would feed the machine—Botnik’s Predictive Writer—my prior two books, and click through suggested words to make new essays. That felt like kind of a gift. At that stage, maybe each word is a gift. I’ve got this matrix of words from my own past work, and I’m just selecting one, and based on what I select, the machine gives me a whole new array to select for my next word. It’s me, the machine, and my past self all writing the piece.

  I brought ten paragraphs of the predictive text-generated work to my friend Joey Franklin, whose opinion I trust. He read it and said it was kind of cool, but also confusing. He suggested footnoting each paragraph. That, too, was a gift. Without that conversation, I would have had just a lot of drivel.

  Because of Joey’s suggestion to write footnotes, now the main takeaway of that essay is the idea of a participatory universe, a philosophical idea, kind of Cartesian. Does anything exist without my perception of that thing? I just had a ball writing the essay from concept to completion so I hope it’s also a ball to read.

McGrath: Your collaborative view is in contrast to the myth of the lonely artist. You’ve said that you and the essay you are writing are symbiotic, that you both write and read it into meaning.

Madden: That’s a Montaignean idea: “I have no more made my book than my book has made me.” It’s a humbling experience, to discover that someone else had my cool idea long before I had it. This happens all the time. It’s an inherent, inevitable kind of collaboration. You feel like you’re joining in a conversation with a lot of other interesting people. Thankfully, readers are very tolerant of repetition! As Alexander Smith says, “The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.”

McGrath: A reminder of our profound connection to each other. The intellectual and emotional link between your essays and essayists, some contemporary and featured in your book, and some who came centuries earlier—Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Michel de Montaigne—is evocative of this ongoing conversation. It’s particularly engaging when you bring long-dead essayists into the present through mock interviews, retranslations, subtle ventriloquisms, death-bed assessments, good-natured discussions. Their reactions shed new light on our cultural systems.

Madden: Those three writers, especially, I return to often in my thinking, so they show up in my writing as well. Hazlitt, for instance, has twice visited me, almost as an audible ghostly apparition (“audition?”), to speak the words I’ve needed for my essays. In this book, as usual, they’re omnipresent, conferring wise perspectives on the human condition, which, despite superficial changes over the centuries, hasn’t really changed much at the core.

McGrath: What was your motivation for collaborating and featuring other contemporary writers, and the charming illustrations by your wife and children?

Madden: I wanted the book to enact the fact that all writing is always collaborative. The paradigm of the stark individualist (here I’m not referring to writers, but to the business-model American kind of individualist) is a lie. It’s not just an innocuous lie, it’s a pernicious lie. It’s a lie that crumbles at the first little prick of investigation. If you want to believe in the myth of the individualist, you have to ignore so much of the reality of your own life. We are so interdependent, in both positive and marketed ways. I think writers recognize this. Still, there is a single name on the cover of a book. I thought that by making the collaborations explicit, by indicating “featuring___” alongside the essay titles, I could speak theoretically to that communal aspect of even writing, which we still think of as a solitary activity. I also wanted to suggest that the reader is a participant as well.

McGrath: You succeed in that. You bring us into your thoughts and perceptions so that we see and feel what you do. I became curious about things I never thought I’d be interested in—someone’s leftover water, for instance. You have a way of dissolving the distance between us so that I inhabit your world.

Madden: Thank you, I’m so glad because that’s one of my main goals—to interest people in the thing they didn’t know they’d be interested in. This goal is not unique to me, but I’m glad that I succeeded on that level.

McGrath: When did you start writing? Have you written, or been tempted to write, in other genres?

Madden: I became serious about writing somewhat later in life, after I’d graduated from college with a degree in physics, and had served a mission to Uruguay for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I mean, I wrote things when I was a kid, and I published a lightly fictionalized story (on reconsideration, perhaps it was an essay) and a short comic (written and drawn with my friend Vincent Augelli) in my high school literary journal, but I did not pursue writing as a vocation or a career until I was in my mid-twenties and had decided to change course from the seeming exactitude of science to the fruitful ambiguities of essaying. I was very lucky to be accepted to BYU’s master’s program and then Ohio University’s PhD program. As for other genres: I’ve not tried them seriously. I took one poetry workshop, which was challenging and enlightening, and I have published a trio of poems, but that was decades ago. And as for fiction: I’ve never really tried! Mostly I feel deluged with essay ideas, so I can’t imagine leaving them behind so I can write a story.

McGrath: You seamlessly blend the personal and the universal in your work. The “I” in your essays seems to resist veering into sentimental territory and I never feel like you are trying to persuade me towards any one way of looking at something. Your work feels timeless. I could imagine someone reading your essays far into the future.

Madden: I’m lucky that I don’t rely on money from my books. I’m paid to teach, not to write. So, I do ask myself, why do I expend effort writing and promoting my books? What I love to hear is how people like the book. I got a note from my friend Mary Cappello, a writer I greatly admire and whose opinion means a lot to me, in which she said that her partner, Jean, was reading my book in the other room and every so often would chuckle out loud. This made my day. That’s the kind of thing I’m hoping for, or aiming for, with my essays. I suppose I do actually have points I’m sometimes trying to make, but I don’t think it’s effective rhetorically to aim straight at those points, or to speak as if from a position of authority, which places readers in an inferior position, which often feels offputting (to me, it does, at least). And I typically don’t launch an essay from a conclusive assumption; instead, I begin from a question or curiosity, so that the process of essaying clarifies but does not ultimately decide any issues. I’m reminded (again) of Alexander Smith, who said that “It is not the essayist’s duty to inform, to build pathways through metaphysical morasses, to cancel abuses.” I feel that it’s obvious when a writer is trying to push me to a certain conclusion, and I resist this, so I try not to do it in my own writing.

McGrath: Are there themes that you find resurfacing in your work?

Madden: Surely, though I don’t think I’m aware of all of them. A few that come to mind: mortality; mutability; the inescapability of systems, especially the system of the self; the hubris of human forms of knowledge and the limits thereof, or the many things that resist knowing when observed from specific sets of assumptions (for instance, while I love and respect science, I cannot believe that it accurately describes everything we experience); “essaying as a mode of thinking and being” (one of Phillip Lopate’s subheadings in the introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay), which I largely see as a mode of humble engagement with the world; attentiveness and/as prayer; the need for kindness; the universality of suffering and the futility of ranking or comparing such things; the paradoxical challenges issued by Jesus, especially of the “turn the other cheek” variety; the action of faith upon the realities we experience; the subjectivity or relativity of literally everything, or the way “reality” can be nothing more than our interpretations, our attempts at making meaning, of the external stimuli we experience, and the ways those interpretations can change, whether organically, over time, or through conscious action (our own, others’). I’m also always interested in the connectedness of everything, and the viability of different systems of value; lately the ones that resist commodification and commercialization.

McGrath: In “Timing,” when you are blocked from entering Montaigne’s library on a family pilgrimage to his tower in a region east of Bordeaux, you write:

…There’s something appropriate about being stymied in an essayistic quest, because essays were never about completing things; they distrust the very notion of tidy endings.

Can you talk about the value of getting sidetracked?

Madden: I suspect that if we’d been successful in getting into Montaigne’s tower I’d have taken some pictures, talked about how cool it was, how I left infused with the spirit of Montaigne, or something like that. The pilgrimage would have resulted in a form I’ve already encountered a lot. If I’d made it into the tower, the thing that happened would have been like so many things that we’re awash in, through sitcoms and movies and so forth. My writing motivation is to find a different way there.

McGrath: In the essay “Alfonsina y el Mar” you quote Andres Calamaro:

No me gustan las canciones porque mienten
Porque todo se resuelve en tres minutos

I don’t like songs because they lie
    Because everything’s resolved in three minutes.

Madden: The beauty here is Madden: The beauty here is that the quote is from within a song. The song itself subverts the genre of the song by pointing out how false things are in the world of the song. Similarly, it is a joy to begin an essay unsure of where it will go. In some essays the language itself suggests a particular path.io9

McGrath: You have a way of subverting expectations in your work so that ah ha moments come to us, your readers, before you write them on the page. In your essay “Expectations,” you write that the best endings work their way backwards so that they are a surprise that makes sense.

Madden: Years ago, I discerned this pattern in a lot of the things I was reading. Then I learned that Aristotle had said the same thing a couple of thousand years before I figured it out. The ah-ha moments you’re talking about speak to the difference between revelation and randomness. Early on, I believed that such moves were haphazard and tangents were tangential. I didn’t perceive the way the moves were controlled by the writer. I thought I could just jump topics with no prior indication, make the reader do the work to figure it out. And maybe that is how the mind accurately works sometimes, but the essay version of tracking a mind has to make the connections clear. One of my favorite quotes is from (one of the muses in this interview, it seems) Alexander Smith again: “The essayist gives you his thoughts, and lets you know, in addition, how he came by them” (Dreamthorpe, 1863).

  As I figured out more about writing, I started to see how the writers I admired didn’t simply move randomly. Whether through some linguistic connection, the same or similar phrase, or through topical continuity, or sometimes a very direct explicit association, they would transition from one idea to the next. They always seeded the move they were about to make.

McGrath: The process of doing this looks like, what?

Madden: Very often, it goes like this: I come to the end of an essay and discover something significant, and then work my way backwards. The catalyst for “Alfonsina y el Mar,” is that every time I get in my car I plug in my phone and it starts to play the first song alphabetically in my library, and one day I realized that I’d never listened to the whole song. For the purposes of the essay, I decided to listen to it all the way through. I realized that I know who Alfonsina is: she is Alfonsina Storni, an Argentine poet who took her own life after she was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. I started thinking how the legend of her death is the song. The way biographers describe it is very different, emotionally different, but what you hear about in the song is poeticized, and has become the comonly known version of how she died. In that essay, the honest beginning was that I just had a few haunting piano notes and I thought, I wonder what that is, and I went to find out.

  The ending of that piece is something like what do we really know about anyone? This becomes a question about writing itself. How effective is writing at making connections between people? About seeing another’s soul? I want to tie that to the legend of Alfonsina Storni, the way the song distorts, but maybe makes more palatable, the end of her life. The way poetry attempts to bridge between people. The ways these attempts can be both successes and failures.

McGrath: I’m curious about the way you work—where you write, do you use notebooks, how many drafts do you generally go through and how much of your work do you eventually throw away?

Madden: It’s hard to identify drafts numerically because I write in binges, and I spend a lot of time tweaking sentences. I care deeply about sentences, so I’m not able to brainstorm or rush write, other than for a list of possible directions an essay might take with whatever themes it might be exploring. I often set essays aside before they’re finished. Sometimes for years. When I go back, I read from the beginning. The process feels like kneading dough, except it’s dough that you leave to sit for much longer than you’d ever leave dough. If it had yeast in it, it would be huge, and probably stale or spoiled before you could eat it. It’s a bad method of making bread. And, as I mentioned, I do have lots of notebooks, and notes in my phone, but they’re mostly one-line ideas for essays, or a few jotted details that I want to remember.

McGrath: Lightning Round: Last show you binge watched.

Madden: The Stranger, an eight-episode British mystery/suspense series.

McGrath: Last song you turned up loud on the car radio.

Madden: “Rare Bird” by Toad the Wet Sprocket. My kids were in the car and we turned it up really loud, and we all sang it together in three-part harmony.

McGrath: Last time you read something that made you jealous, that you wished you’d written.

Madden: We talked about it already: The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. I’m extra-jealous because he’s primarily a poet. The other one I’m reading simultaneously is Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil. It’s like Pascal’s Pensées. She didn’t intend it as a book. It’s a collection of her statements about grace, God, goodness in the world. It shakes up your brain, in a good way.

McGrath: What would be the name of your band if you started one today?

Madden: The World’s Whisper (see Alexander Smith). But the only “band” I was ever in was called The Tords, after a vandalized sign on the Kamikaze water slide at Action Park in Vernon, NJ. Someone had removed letters from the ride’s restrictions so that it said YO MUST BE A TORD. My friend Joe Ziolkowski and I loved its message and decided that, yes, we must.

McGrath: Last time your children rolled their eyes at you for something you said or did.

Madden: I have a habit of singing the mundanities of the moment into the verses of Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia.” You know how he kind of mumbles, and the rhythms are haphazard, and it feels like he could be saying any old thing, and then suddenly you can decipher “streets of Philadelphia?” Well. Karina had wanted to make a cheesecake, but we didn’t have any cream cheese, so she sent me out to find some, and stores were already closed, so I stopped by a gas station convenience store, and the clerk, who was outside on her smoke break, stopped me before I got to the door, asked me what I wanted, then told me they didn’t have any, but her friend, who was smoking with her, offered to give me some from her nearby home, but discovered when she called her husband that they had already given theirs to a neighbor… So when I got home, I mumble-sang this story into the verses of Springsteen’s song, ending each line with “cream cheese of Philadelphia.” So, yeah. Obvious eye-rolling moment for the family.

McGrath: Last terrible idea you had for an experimental form.that the quote is from within a song. The song itself subverts the genre of the song by pointing out how false things are in the world of the song. Similarly, it is a joy to begin an essay unsure of where it will go. In some essays the language itself suggests a particular path.

Madden: Inspired by Laurie Easter’s “Solving for Grandma,” I tried to write a crossword puzzle essay that failed pretty quickly. But it turned itself into the word-search essay “Repast,” about the gathering after my mother’s funeral. It was way easier to write than a crossword puzzle.

McGrath: “Repast,” an elegantly wrought meditation on remembering using a word-search format, is one of my favorite essays in the book.

  Thank you for this interview and for Disparates, a thought-provoking reminder of how much possibility, tenderness, and joy there is in the quietest moments.

Madden: And thank you, Anne. I really enjoyed our conversation, and I’m glad that you enjoyed the book.

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Anne McGrath was noted in the 2020 Best American Essay series. Her work has been published in River Teeth, Ruminate, Entropy, Columbia Journal, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Excerpt

from Disparates: Essays

 

  Repast

Excerpted from Disparates: Essays by Patrick Madden. Reprinted with permission by the University of Nebraska Press. ©2020 Patrick Madden.