Di Blasi’s book Selling The Farm released September 15, 2020!
Over the course of this summer, C&R Editor Meredith Antley spent time chatting with Debra about her intentions, process, and whims:
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MA: What do you hope your readers will gain or learn from reading your work?
DDB: Primarily, I hope readers reach a new, expanded or revised perspective on what it means and meant to be Homo sapiens at a certain time in a certain place and how that meaning compares and/or contrasts to their peculiar ontology and epistemology. After all, Nature—from micro to macro—is not outside us; we exist inside Nature, entangled like all else. Anthropocentrism stinks of willful ignorance. The fate of our species is the fate of all species, whether we’re talking about personal extinction (of the individual) or global extinction. Understanding a few existential hypotheses, theories and laws will not save you from dying but they might make your death less rueful and, in the interim, less careless about your relationship to the natural world.
Secondly, relative to language and the writing/reading process, I hope Selling the Farm (and my other books) demonstrate/s that “The Consecrated Page” is a myth. The page exists as a blank canvas to be composed not only via meaning but also syntax, architecture (visual design) and/or music (sound) in ways that suit the writer’s narrative, not preconceptions about what a memoir or story must be.
Finally, since Selling the Farm also explores memory and memory’s failings, I hope readers question the veracity of their remembering, its selectivity, self-delusion and revision, and question how time, distance and often the obsessive need to have one’s viewpoint vindicated can consciously or unconsciously alter “memory bound but mutating from real with each remembrance.”
MA: How did your drafts evolve into the final, published version of your work? What did this process look like?
DDB: The relatively short sections of Selling the Farm were written as self-contained narratives. That is, the majority did not need the book’s overall composition to function.
Two of the sections (“Wallace’s Line” and “Olbers’ Paradox”) were written when my sister died, and I was having a very hard time coming to terms with her hideously painful death from pancreatic cancer. Writing these two sections (with a constraint of riffing off definitions from The Dictionary of Theories) was an attempt to write myself out of a claustrophobic grief—a cathartic endeavor that proved unsuccessful.
Soon after my sister’s death, my aging father’s Parkinson’s disease worsened. I was still living in Hong Kong when my younger sister put my father in a nursing home and sold the family farm without notifying me or my brothers. Suddenly, it was all gone—the farm, my childhood, familial relationships, and my father whose concurrent dementia erased so many of his memories, including those of his children and the livestock and crop farm he worked for fifty years. My grief doubled, tripled. To keep from drowning in sadness, I wrote every day, digging deep into the phenomenon of memory, and I read a lot of poetry and painted.
An earlier, shorter version of Selling the Farm was a finalist and semifinalist in two literary awards. But I was still playing with form and structure, still writing as a way to create a meaningful cartography of the farm whose diverse topography hosted so many more creatures and recollections clustered in spots I and my siblings frequented as wild children. Frankly, I was still trying to answer a question that I used to ask my writing students: What is ‘landscape as character’? Once I brought the farm into the foreground, the manuscript took shape primarily through characteristics that defined the place: sky and earth, seasons, the diurnal and nocturnal, woods and waters, myriad species beyond Homo sapiens. I wrote from inside those categories and threw out completed sections that did not rationally or aesthetically fit. The narrative found its denouement when my father died, prompting the “Epilogue.” The “Elegy” to my sister ends the book, to reflect back on the “In Memoriam,” and thus enclosing the narrative like a caul.
Yet the story of this farm at that time will never be complete, cannot be completed. There is so much more to say and not nearly enough time left in which to say it.
MA: If you could gift your book to any person (dead or alive) who would it be and why?
DDB: I have already done so. I dedicated Selling the Farm to my mother (who is 86 and remarkably ‘intact’) and sent her a box of an early printing. She read the book, was deeply saddened, of course, but also made brightly contemplative as she and I had many times discussed the capricious nature of our recollections.
Those years on the farm were one experience for me, another experience for my mother who was raising five kids in a small house without plumbing, with a strained budget, on an isolated farm in a remote rural region of the Midwest. My life has been so easy, so comfortable by comparison; I do not know how she found the strength to go on, except perhaps by going back to school (nursing) and eventually leaving my father to develop a successful career as administrator of public health departments serving rural communities similar to the one where we had lived. She is my hero, my mentor. Year by year, I understand more acutely just how influential she has been in my life, to my values and my intellectual curiosity.
MA: Where do you find inspiration to write?
DDB: After decades of writing and publishing, and questioning the exigency of both, I no longer actively seek inspiration. Plenty of ideas pop up every day, but most are not ontologically significant enough for me to pursue. Not now. (Were they ever?) I’ve learned to wait until justifiable inspiration finds me. Usually, it knocks at the door with a compelling question—or rather, pounds insistently until I’m ready to hear what it demands I try to answer. If months pass between knocks, I don’t fret; rather, I use the silence to ponder the whole of the universe of which we as a species are an insignificant and likely extremely brief part. For instance: What are the real and metaphorical relationships between the life of a honeybee on a lavender bloom, and the NEOWISE comet that just passed through our solar system and will not return for 6500 years? How might those relationships, both real and figurative, manifest in language? As Adam Phillips writes in his fascinating book, Darwin’s Worms, “one way or another the lowly, [Charles] Darwin insists in [his last] book, are underestimated; whether it be ordinary mortals as compared with a supreme deity, or those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Something, or someone, is not being given sufficient credit.”
Last year, I received an email from poet H. L. Hix, asking me to write the introduction to his constraint-based book of image and text, You Are What is Written (Greta Oto, July 2020). I and my husband had just returned from northern Spain where we spent most of our time studying architecture and art. Harvey’s request was eerily prescient, as his subject matter significantly related to what I’d just explored in Spain. His email was a knock. A loud one. I answered and spent the next few months researching and writing what would become the book’s 50-section chapter, “Glasswing Raptured.”
I’ve become increasingly and remorselessly selfish of my aesthetic choices and of my time—that burning wick. By continually studying the history, science, politics and socio-economics of the arts—the ways and whys multiple species create—I’ve shifted from writing as consumer product to writing as process of thinking about questions heretofore unanswered (by me). I do wish writers would consider asking themselves whether to be active or passive in their literary inspirations, if having to seek may indicate that they are not profoundly enough invested in the expansive complexity of the space and time we call Universe. It’s a question I wish I’d asked myself thirty years ago.