On trying everything you can

Your path started in poetry. Could you tell me about the evolution of that path and how poetry has influenced your writing?

I’ve always been a language nerd. My mom was an English teacher and I was that nerdy kid who would spend his spare time in the school library, reading through the unabridged dictionary, those toddler-heavy dictionaries. I was thumbing through it… looking up weird words, and trying to figure out ways to deploy them.

I did my MFA from 2003 to 2006. I spent most of my work life in restaurant kitchens up until that point. I got my very first restaurant job when I was, like, 11 years old… and I just kind of stayed in it for a while. I wormed my way up into the fine dining world, where I was working 14-hour shifts, which were awful, in a very militaristic restaurant kitchen of the 1990s.

And I remember going out with some of the chefs after a particularly rough shift. We went out for a few drinks to try and unwind, and I remember one of the chefs had the forbidden question: “What do you like to do in the very little spare time that you have when you’re actually not in the restaurant kitchen?” And I was like, “Well, I like writing poems.” And it was a fabulous conversation killer. [laughs]

I started asking myself: are there communities out there that wouldn’t pivot away from me when I mention something like that? Are there like-minded folks out there who would enjoy talking about writing with me? And a friend of mine had mentioned the MFA program construct and I didn’t even know they existed at that time. It seemed too good to be true.

So then I applied in poetry [and] took a couple of creative nonfiction classes, even if the concentration wasn’t available. And I just became kind of seduced by the idea of being as annoying as possible in the creative nonfiction class by writing very, very strange, long prose poems. I kind of wanted to see what I could get away with in prose. So I approached creative nonfiction, almost as a prankster.

What’s the relationship between [your day job] and the other writing that you do outside of teaching? Do you feel like it frees up mental space, resources, or time?

I teach mostly in an MFA program, and hanging in that community is a pleasure and a privilege. I mean, not always. Nothing is monolithic, right? But, even if I could have written six more books [and] only just write, I’d give those books up to hang in the classroom and have these consequential conversations that are always changing, because a cohort always changes. I’m always learning from them. It’s just incredibly exciting to me that my students make me want to try. And I get to witness them trying things that I’ve never seen before. I mean, they might be pulling from a few different traditions, but, you know, I haven’t seen those influences married in this particular way before. To behold fresh art that kind of moves a discipline forward is just really exciting. I can’t believe I get to do that for a living. My wife always says I’ve kind of fallen with my ass into the butter. [laughs]

You’ve said that part of how you deal with your own obsessive tendencies is to delve into those of others, and it seems to me that that is kind of the kernel of each of your subjects. How do you know when that takes hold of you?

Sometimes it just begins with mild curiosity. Cursory curiosity often begets rabid obsession for me. The more I hang with something, the more I scratch on it, the deeper my claws get into it, the more difficulty I have retracting them. And so I’m always telling my students, like, you can manipulate yourself into becoming obsessed with anything. It just takes sufficient research, time, and imaginative riffing.

But I’m always aware of myself as a filter, so there is, of course, a degree of self-interest there, in a strange way, because it’s fun filtering the world through the self. And to see what emerges, on the other side, right? If we take something from the world and we filter it through ourselves, that ornament from the world emerges on the page, a little kinked, a little blurred, and a little knocked out of joint, because it took some of the author with it on its passage. And so those are my favorite books to read, where I’m very much aware of the author as a filter.

In Submersed, it almost seemed like you took that kind of obsessive, rabid curiosity to an extreme because there were all these layers. You dove into the extreme of this pastime of people who would go to such lengths to dive deep into the ocean and risk their lives every time. You dove deep into [the story of] a gruesome murder that was at the center of this scene. And also, additionally, put yourself in a position in which you did something that absolutely terrified you, given your deep fear of water. Tell me about the layers of depth of that experience in this book and how you experienced that.

So initially, I really just wanted to write about this niche, eccentric, community of DIY submersible obsessives. I just wanted to burrow in, hang with them, understand their social structure, their hierarchies, you know, witness their interactions, go to their yearly conventions. This group of folks who, oftentimes with no formal engineering training whatsoever, are so obsessed with sinking into the deep sea that they fashion these dream machines in their backyards and garages, and should they submerge, they sometimes do so to their own detriment, or to the detriment of others. I mean, we saw it [in 2023] with the Titan submersible implosion, too.

I also just wanted to write about sea creatures, about bioluminescence and jellyfish. And that compelled me to investigate the history of this kind of compulsion. Early curiosities, with regard to the deep sea, manifested. And so I had to go back to Aristotle [who is considered the father of marine biology] and Alexander the Great [who liked to explore the ocean from within a diving bell] and find weird historical nuggets. And then—I wasn’t intending on this being, like, true crime-y at all. In fact, I dislike most true crime. It’s lurid, it’s sensational, and it deplatforms the victim. But I kept bumping up against the story of this murder during the research process. So many of the folks to whom I spoke in the DIY submersible community were really eager to talk about the murder that took place on that submersible off of the Copenhagen coast. And so, because it was inflaming the community that I was writing about, I felt like I had to reckon with it on the page. And so then I tried to kind of blow up true crime, in a way, too. I wanted the book to slyly interrogate the strictures of the true crime narrative, at least as they’re dispensed popularly among us. I wanted to desensationalize it and to strip whatever luridness I could out of it, and then I wanted to platform Kim Vall’s voice over that of Peter Madsen’s.

The other thing that was running beneath it is that, yes, I can’t swim, I’m afraid of the ocean, I’m a claustrophobe, and I’ve had recurring drowning nightmares since I was, like, four. I wanted to scratch at my own phobia to maybe see what was on the other side of it, to see what its fabric was. I feel like a lot of writers and artists are oftentimes obsessed with the very things that scare the shit out of them. And then we examine those kinds of things, in a way to maybe figure out ourselves, or to contextualize intense feeling or intense formative experience. When I’m in the middle of a project, I’m able to kind of tuck the phobia into the confines of the project, and the project itself kind of dampens the intensity of the phobia.

Some artists swear by running at the very thing that scares them and I was curious if that worked for you. Is the only way out through? In the book, you mentioned the effect that diving deep [underwater] had on you, and I wondered if the dream changed.

The dream is stubborn. The dream is pretty much the same. The phobia is still there, certainly, and I think, quite frankly, it’s a healthy one. You know, I never would have gone down to 2,000 feet in Karl Stanley’s, you know, amateur, unclassed, uninsured, unlicensed submersible, if Titan had happened before. And so, when Titan happened, it really made me interrogate what I had done, and why I had done it.

I don’t think the endurance of a phobia is always linear. You know, it’s not a process of, like, moving through and, like, being done with it. It’s like the grieving process, right? It stubbornly whirls, you know, galactically. And, you know, it surprises us all the time.

Wonder is this thing that feels so crucial to the human impulse, to art, to exploration, and I’m curious what kind of thoughts you landed on on the question of: at what point does wonder turn sour?

I think it’s situation-specific. Wonder can turn sour when we impose the consequences of said wonder onto the body of somebody else. There are boundaries we cross, like, with regard to that kind of wonder, with regard to extremity, like, endangering other people. So, for instance, I think Stockton Rush’s wonder, you know, soured into something more malign when, in spite of all of the alarm bells that were being rung about, you know, his carbon fiber hull not being able to endure that kind of depth [and] of him just ignoring it and wanting to push forward for the sake of exploration, for the sake of wonder, for the sake of being an innovator and things like that. You know, he infamously said regulation is “anathema to innovation,” which is horseshit. When folks, you know, become pathologically innovative, or pathologically stitched to their own wonder, certain blind spots arise that may actually do physical harm to other people. So, I think when other bodies are implicated in somebody else’s pursuit of wonder, things can go sour pretty quickly.

I imagine that when you’re so immersed in a subject, it can feel easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of material that you have amassed, and it seemed to me that you amassed a lot of material for this book. I’m curious about where you start, and if you get stuck, how you get unstuck.

You know those architectural blueprints where you have just a base sketch or a schematic of a building, and then there are those onion skins that you overlay on top of that base? And you overlay one onion skin, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then all of a sudden the room comes together, and you can see that space as navigable, and it makes sense. And then you sometimes lay on one too many onion skins, and it becomes a jumble, and the whole thing collapses, and then you have to peel back a couple of them so it looks like a room again. I kind of write that way. I always overlay too many onion skins. I’m an unrepentant maximalist, especially when I’m drafting. I think this is a compliment, but [Leslie Jamieson, reviewing The Mad Feast] said, “He writes like he’s a baby who wants to put everything into his mouth so he can understand the world.”

And that’s so true, you know? I wanna try everything and see what sticks. And then, of course, I could always comb [things] out later. And even that stuff that’s eventually cut probably haunts the book in ways that clearly it wouldn’t if it wasn’t in there in the first place.

I do get overwhelmed, I do get lost. If I get stuck, oftentimes, I mean, this is silly, like, I’ll go for a walk, I’ll go for a bike ride, things like that. I’ll have my cell phone on me and record voice memos if ideas come to me. When I hit a wall… sometimes I have to go out… and just immerse myself in the space about which I am writing. [It] oftentimes shakes something loose, for me, too.

How do you then know when a project is done?

When I’m exhausted with it, you know, when my obsession with the thing becomes diluted and I want to do something else. [Or] having created a sufficient mess… where I can’t add anymore, I need to peel back. And then, of course I am lucky enough to have an editor, to turn a project loose and then we’ll go from there. It’s different for every project. No book that I have written has taught me how to write the next one. I feel like a baby every time I start a new book. Like I’ve never done this before, and I have to figure it out from scratch each time.