Cynthia-Marie Marmo O'Brien

Pleased to share this wide-ranging interview with the thoughtful nonfiction writer, Cynthia-Marie O’Brien. Our subjects include methods of prayer (considering the writing act as a kenotic experience), construction of truth, how to write an essay is “to try” rather than to complete, the ability to ask questions without expecting answers, literary forms, and her new work. Her bio note follows this interview, and includes links to her great essays and articles.

1. "Communing with God," your review of Help, Thanks, Wow by Anne Lamott, is more powerful than the average book response because of the included commentary about your own experiences. In your review, you lament the writer's inability to give more than superficial and anecdotal responses to such tough questions as "Can humans handle honesty in conversation with God? How can we have conversations not answered in language or conducted according to our comprehension of what interaction means?"

Do you see writing as a method of such conversation? What are your expectations of prayer, of that silent language? 

In response to the first question, absolutely, writing can be a method for a conversation with God. Communication with God is obviously mysterious. The models we have from the Bible or the saints aren’t always very practical: we don’t hear voices or have visions that represent him, as Biblical figures like the prophets do and as saints like the mystics write about. I think it’s possible some of these direct encounters do not correspond to what we’d think God “telling” us to do something means. I would definitely say, for example, “I think God’s telling me to focus more on X, Y or Z” but I wouldn’t mean someone had come up to me in the wilderness and announced “I am God, and you should do this.” There is speculation, too, as to whether when God’s voice was supposedly heard by saints that was not a divine experience but a symptom of mental illness. That fascinates me on many levels, particularly because it shows our society has a tendency to conceive of anything outside of our comprehension as a malady, but also because from a modern day perspective some of those descriptions do correspond with what our medicine knows as symptoms of psychosis or schizophrenia. That raises some very complicated questions about the narratives constructed by a mind that’s unwell. But I do not know that these other ‘non-silent’ communications with God didn’t happen or that it is accurate to layer diagnoses on them, to characterize them as illness. Just as God made a new covenant with the people of Israel and God evolves in behavior from Old Testament to New Testament, God certainly worked and manifested messages differently in ancient times. Nobody knows the form God will take in the future, but we say at Mass He will come again.

Writing has worked as a method of conversation with God for me because that’s one of my most comfortable modes of expression.  I write letters to God. I find praying in letter form by hand focuses me on what’s most important to express to God. Like the formal Mass is a ceremony carefully organized, I want the times I plan to communicate explicitly to God - apart from the implicit communication with him that my life is or the urgent prayers like I describe experiencing in the book response - to try to have devotion in form, too. I can’t hold much of a conversation with God in my head, which is how silent prayer with words feels to me: I struggle to not feel as if I’m talking to myself and to express all the intentions I’ve piled up. When I write, I have a structure for prayer, like my own mini-Mass or genre that I can modify. For example, I always want to express thanks before I make an ask. I want to remember the big causes on my mind and the more personal, the specific people to thank or to ask that God help in a certain way.  I’m influenced by the Ignatian tradition of prayer. 

What I expect from prayer has two dimensions. I have an expectation of what I will feel immediately or over time as a result of the act of praying. I know it will also help me sort out the wheat from the chaff in my thinking: the more I force myself to only ‘talk’ to God about what’s important, the more what’s not important falls away from my thoughts in general. Prayer as a form of mindfulness and care for ourselves is important to me.  In response from God I expect what everyone receives: a listener more attentive than any human, a listener who loves me unconditionally no matter what I say, a listener who knows the best answer before I have asked the question. I love that I do not know what to expect from what I pray in that sense, except that there will be a response. It’s a communication of surprise, of revelation, and God’s answer is delivered to me through listening not for one voice, but to the rhythm of the world. Being in silence. Being with another person. Sometimes I will be praying for weeks or months about the same topic, and then one day I’ll have an experience that I recognize as a fulfillment of that prayer. Prayer is an unspooling of the threads of your thoughts, taking them apart, and giving them to God. Take this, God. God does. What God does with it, you have to wait and see.

Prayer without words may be most honest, as I express in the essay, because it’s not filtered or formed as writing is. It’s strictly emotional response. During Mass we are invited to take a few moments for silent prayer, and the silent aspect encourages me not to fill it with sentences in my head. Instead, I focus on a specific emotion whether it’s release of grudges or love for a specific individual or success for a particular cause. So that’s a conversation in silence, a sending up of trying to feel what the desired outcome would be like for whoever or whatever I’m focusing on in my prayer. Trying to embody it in my mind, sending God a signal, can you give so-and-so this feeling of relief or will you help me hold onto this sense of peace all week?

To be honest in prayer is to be honest in a way that you may not be in life: not that you lie, but that you put your best self forward to the world, or emphasize a certain part of yourself depending on the requirements of the situation. Honesty in prayer is the greatest gift and it is incredibly hard. It means trying to grasp your complete self, assess yourself as you really are, express what you feel you truly need but are afraid to ask for from people or do not know how to get, share the fears you have otherwise denied or hidden. While I like my letters to God as a prayer journal, I definitely prefer, more and more, to cast aside words in individual prayer. I find that’s very powerful, too: here I am, God, I know not what to say to you, I am listening to the world around me that you have made. Part of why we may have trouble thinking of prayer as conversation is we forget listening as essential in a conversation. A large part of my work with student writers is about listening, silence, when to break it and how. It’s very powerful.

2. You’ve called Mass "our most comprehensive prayer." In another essay, you lament that while you felt emotionally fulfilled, you also went "to Mass in search of [an intellectual] challenge, and left unsatisfied." Over the years, what has drawn you back to Mass? What particular elements connect with you the most--and which do you wish could be altered?

I started attending church services again because I missed a ritual that had been an integral aspect of my life since I was a child, through some of my twenties. I can remember sitting on the floor in the pews and coloring or read children’s books during Mass. I did pay attention to the words of the service early on, but I became concerned that babies were drowning during baptisms because of that language in Mass about dying in baptism. I thought it must be an epidemic and that was quite disturbing. I asked my parents and learned that no infants were being harmed during baptism. 

As an adult, I tried to get that intellectual aspect I mentioned elsewhere by reading Catholic thinkers. I had a revelatory moment when my parents came to visit me in Budapest, where I lived for a year. My mother wanted to go to Mass, so we went to the cathedral. It’s a gorgeous building, in a city of amazing architecture. We ended up at the Hungarian language service. I had acquired some Hungarian, but not the terms of Mass or to follow along. Yet being at that Mass was a very genuine experience and fulfilling, regardless of not comprehending much said about the day’s texts. My desire for a communal experience of worship was also a driving factor to going back to Mass. There is power in sharing worship, and remembering it is happening all over the world, too, in every language, in the same exact way. The last supper was not a meal of one. I yearned for that shared process.

Now, I connect with the sensory experience of Mass: the music; the emptying myself of my own words, in fact, of losing them in the cadence of the prayers; the simple handshake of good will at the sign of peace. It almost reminds me of the way I remember feeling during an orchestra performance, when each instrument section has its own part, but together they form the comprehensive experience for the audience, led by a conductor. God is the audience, the officiants are the conductors and the worshippers, lectors, choir, we’re all instruments. I do wish that it were less of a hierarchical experience, even at the logistical level. I love God in front and above of me, but perhaps we don’t need the artifice of high, distant pulpits. Some priests eschew them, coming off the altar and that’s nice.

3.  “A Figment of Your Imagination" from Bellevue Literary Review is such a thought-provoking piece!

One of my favorite sections: "I am a figment of your imagination because you cannot know me but through your own veil, which colors me the way oils do the shadows of a painting—always approximating, never exactly capturing the original. Your imagination is bursting with the figments of those created from incomplete renderings you collected when your mind photographed bodies and faces, cataloguing them accordingly in your forever or never scrapbook." 

If this is a true sentiment, then what do you see as potential imperfections of the writing act? As a writer of primarily non-fiction, what is the extent to which truth is possible within your form? Do we need to reconsider what we call moments we label experiential and imagined, real and unreal?

Thank you so much. I’m so gratified that the essay provoked all of these questions, that it’s got that life to it. That essay comes from my MFA thesis collection, and it’s the first one I submitted for publication, a few years after I wrote it. It’s a real time capsule, describing seven years ago.

Your question is great because it’s prompted me to wonder about the writing act. As an educator, I’m always thinking and talking with students and other writing center professionals about the writing process. I also read a lot about how writers develop and how knowledge transfers in various moments that involve writing. So my first reaction was, what moment of the process could be labeled the writing ‘act’? Is it the brainstorming, the research, the drafting, the revision, the publication? Writing is no more imperfect than any other subjective form of perceiving. That’s why we should encourage as many voices and points of view to take part in writing, in scholarship, in creating. We are missing out on a lot if we don’t do so – a variety of scrapbooks, a kaleidoscope of possibilities. In terms of the weakness of a piece of writing, that depends on the purpose it’s trying to serve. We always need to strive for empathy with our subjects, our characters, our topics, and to acknowledge when writing is speculative. That’s what I love about the essay form and about scholarship that incorporates narrative, thus acknowledging it’s a form of storytelling. The essay is very open about its nature; the meaning of to essay is ‘to try.’ Life is all about trying, revising, searching. An essay represents that process. A habit of being comes to mind: Flannery O’Connor. Essays depict habits of thinking, habits of being, in process. They’re walks. I like to say they’re perambulations. W.G. Sebald taught me that; Wallace Stevens wrote while walking. Lap swimming is a wordless space where my writing gets some momentum. 

Of course truth is possible in nonfiction. It’s possible in fiction, too. All of the best fiction is truth; if not, it’s inauthentic and it comes across in an element of the craft. There’s a difference between factual truth and emotional truth. Within the nonfiction writing that I admire the most, both exist. Great biographies have both as do great histories. I think Samantha Power’s Chasing the Flame is a huge achievement for nonfiction, and her nomination for an ambassadorship to the UN was, for me, a validation of writing as an act of diplomacy. That’s what I see writing as capable of being. 

Nonfiction is also a vast category. Creative nonfiction as a term confuses people, but the ‘creative’ aspect is the form of the telling. It’s not like fuzzy math in that it is inaccurate. My professors in Columbia’s nonfiction MFA program were biographers, historians, magazine journalists, memoirists, cultural critics. Many could be described with more than one of these terms. They all tell truth. If you look for the books my workshop peers have published, you’d find them in all different sections of a bookstore. A great example of nonfiction that does the work of imagination as well as research - no lying involved, no ethical dilemmas - is Julia Blackburn’s Daisy Bates in the Desert. It’s a biography but it also imagines what we cannot know about Bates. I’ve also just read a stunning nonfiction book by law professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig, According to Our Hearts:  Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family. She’s a brilliant writer; she uses research to make an argument about our legal system, but also to allow herself to ask questions about emotions and motivations of the historical people in the book’s title case. She’s set a new bar for demonstrating how laws matter, and for what language tells us about ourselves. In this case she uses law as an entry into an insightful, landmark exploration about race in America. I love Charles Siebert’s A Man After His Own Heart. The cover says “A True Story” - and it is a factual study of the heart, but it shows how the self often adds seamlessly, and is essential, in books about other subjects.

Re-considering categories such as experiential and imagined, real and unreal is one of the larger themes of my work, whether I’m writing about collective memory of a historical, documented event or differences in how various stakeholders perceive a contemporary situation. It’s also a timeless process that happens in every academic discipline, and leads to the creation of new disciplines. Any binary is suspicious to me. A question worth asking in extended writing can rarely be answered simply “yes” or “no.”  Such a question couldn’t sustain investigation. The process of moving away from binaries is often the hardest, but most essential, work to do with first-year university students or any beginning writers, to usher them into a place of being comfortable writing into the unknown. That’s something I still have to work on myself in my creative life; I’ll work on that forever, because there will always be another unknown I need to challenge myself to try to meet. We’re always learning, improving, stretching ourselves.  A hallmark of the writing of most advanced writers - those cognitive psychologist Ronald Kellogg would call ‘knowledge creators’ – is that they are inventing categories, combining disciplines, mixing and matching them, providing fresh ways to understand the world. Those are the writers I want to read and whose rhetorical moves I study for clues.

Scientists are also always working with those categories you mentioned: imagining how the universe might function and building tools to measure these in concrete ways, what is more easily understood as real than an equation.  What we ‘imagine’ comes to us through physical processes in our brain - the very mechanisms that we acknowledge as ‘the real.’  My experience of God is both imagined and real. God is ‘real’ because God exists in all living things, in everyone I meet. God exists to me as real. But I have to imagine God also. I have to imagine where my prayers are being heard, imagine this divine absorbing all the concerns of the world. Others would say God is not real. Faith is about believing without seeing. So is my belief unreal? I’d say no.

We’re living in exciting times when we are finding out more than ever before about the ‘real’ of the body and the part that most intrigues me, the brain. But we’re probably always going to be perceiving the brain - and creating the tools to do so - from within that which we want to understand, the brain. Does that mean some of the way the brain works will always be a figment of our imagination? I’m playing with language here, but these are the questions I love for their possibilities and because I genuinely will always only be able to approach them, to perambulate around them.  I may never get to the answer, but I will get somewhere I’ve never been. It’s a bit like how many discoveries happen while the scientist was trying to do something else.

4. Many moments of that same essay feel like a form of confession, though I hesitate to use that particular word (since confession is a private, sacramental act--and you're doing something public, something as intellectual as it is emotional).  Is writing a sacrament (as Andre Dubus considered)? How does your personal Catholicism contribute to these essay narratives?

If writing were a sacrament, then I’d consider this essay a baptism, a form of rebirth, not a confession. Confession can be public, as in the renunciation of sins during Mass, or private, in the formal sacrament or in direct prayer to God.  Confession is about seeking forgiveness for wrongdoing, for sin, for offending God. Certainly, some writing could be a confession in that spirit. Secular confessions to others are also about wrongdoings; on television we constantly see police pursuing the ultimate goal of a suspect’s confession. Confession can also be about exposing secrets.

But this essay is the opposite. I’m inviting the reader to come with me, as much as one can, into the pain of clinical depression. I don’t do anything wrong in the essay; actually, I’m suffering through no fault of any person. I’m suffering because of biology. I’m not writing to tell secrets or to ask for absolution. I’m also doing the work of writing this essay to push back against the idea that it’s shameful or embarrassing to, say, have dreamed about being thrown out of helicopters night after night. That was a symptom of my illness. I’m providing a framework for how to think about what cannot be understood: my answer is to surrender to faith. There’s that line where I say “I admit...”  that, at face value, the title of the essay seems absurd. But that’s not an admission of wrongdoing. There, I’m saying, I’ll concede or I’ll grant you, or I realize this is not our traditional way of thinking about ourselves. And then I twist that around, because I do think we are all experienced as perceptions by others, inevitably, all the time, as that section you quoted describes.

I do believe that writing can be a holy act; my best writing does not come from myself per say but from God; of course, God is within all of us somewhere, and it is that place I tap into for my creativity. But is writing a sacrament? Andre Dubus writes that sacraments contain God’s love and are physical. That makes sense to me. Perhaps I distinguish between appreciating what’s sacred in the everyday and from the language ‘sacrament’ which is used by the Church for very specific experiences of God. If I didn’t, I’d be in danger of labeling everything a sacrament and diluting that word. Receiving the sacraments of the Church is meaningful to me, and I don’t want to confuse the language. These are all questions I’ll be asking myself my entire life, and I might answer differently in a year. That wouldn’t mean either answer wasn’t true. 

5. How has Mary Gordon influenced and interested you as a writer? Any other particular influences in the Catholic tradition of writers and thinkers?

She’s helped me to embrace reading scripture as an act of discovery, the way I read fiction. That sounds blasphemous, but her book Reading Jesus demonstrates how inquiry about the Gospels is in fact a form of deep respect for them. When I read fiction I can return to it another time and think perhaps the scene has a slightly different meaning that I noticed on my previous read. I read that book during a Lenten season when I was not going to church and it renewed my excitement about the Gospels as living texts, the same way I think of other texts, texts that are completed by the reader. That approach doesn’t make them any less holy; it showed me the exploratory work with Gospels that many sermons had not provided me with before. Of course, I have been blessed with some wonderful priests. The priest who confirmed me, Bishop Peter Rosazza, is an incredible man who lives the Gospels. He rides his bicycle, he lives in a small apartment. He’s very much a man of living in solidarity. He was one of the authors of the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter on the U.S. Economy and Catholic Social Teaching.

I’ve been very influenced by Jesuits, thanks to my parents. They were both educated in Catholic schools all their lives and met at Fordham University. The Jesuits have a reverence for learning and a vocation for education, so they’re also a natural fit for me. Oscar Romero exemplifies a process of growing into grace.  My mother first told me about him, and my very first writing prize, endowed by the family of Thornton Wilder because he lived in my hometown, was for a short story set on the steps of the cathedral in San Salvador in the aftermath of his assassination; I spent most of my teenage and college years thinking I’d be a historical novelist. His life sparked an interest in liberation theology that influenced my study of Latin American literature. My own style has been influenced by a lot of those writers, so as a thinker he’s impacted me in many ways.

I also gravitated in my youth towards any saints labeled as writers by the Church, and that was my criteria for which saint name I would take as my confirmation name; I picked Teresa of Avila. Another Teresa whose words, life and ideas were very formative was Mother Teresa. She still astounds me, in the loveliest and encouraging of ways, in her concise sentences. Of course, I loved her idea of being a pencil in God’s hand, but also her humility, her sense of loneliness as poverty, the dignity she wanted to give to the dying, her leadership by example: I think she was a towering figure in all ways except physically. Surely, God spoke through her. She was also incredibly funny, and that’s not always the image we have of her. Do small things with great love is one of her best edicts. She also found beauty in suffering in a way that does not romanticize it.

I’ve read all of Henry Nouwen, another tip from my mother. His books are often about mindfulness, and they are also great gateways to other thinkers. He doesn’t write in isolation; he’s very accessible. Thomas Merton has influenced me, too: reading him is experiencing discernment. He was an example of a Catholic who genuinely sought communion with other traditions. He maintained curiosity in silence. He helps me think about what is ‘noise’ and where the ‘silence’ is.

In terms of fiction writers, there’s nobody like Flannery O’Connor. My godmother gave me Everything That Rises Must Converge and I was hooked. Her work is so engaged with the sacred and the profane; she was someone who loved language and seemed to revel in dialogue to do her dirty work, so to speak. She lets characters hang themselves. I don’t think we’ve begun to fully trace her literary descendants. She has a style that is impossible to mistake for anyone else’s, and which can never be replicated in its total effect. Writers catch my attention most for the way they use form; Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a phenomenal book that rewards and respects the reader by deliberately providing what I call an “expanse of the unexplained” via point of view. There are many Catholic poets who I love, Marie Howe, for example. 

But the Catholic writer who has influenced me most is Patricia Hampl. Her book I Could Tell You Stories is the first book of essays I read that showed me, before I realized it, what combining memoir, history, cultural commentary and literary criticism was. It’s what I want to do, it’s my form, and that was my first encounter with it. My high school English teacher gave it to me when I graduated, as the departmental prize. And looking back at that, what a huge window she opened up for me and how perfect that book was. That’s grace. Hampl is also so articulate about what it means to be a cultural Catholic, why she’ll always be a Catholic even if she’s disgusted by aspects of the Church. She reveres aspects of her faith and considers what she dislikes to be a family quarrel. There’s a good interview with her in the Writer’s Chronicle. She talks about reclaiming religious traditions. She also explains the function of memoir as documentation, as serving a historical purpose or as being written in a social context. That’s the only form of ‘memoir’ I am comfortable with; I don’t think any writing with me in it is actually about me. I’m just a vehicle for a story. For women, her success at being understood in that way is important. She is a role model for writing that bears witness, not to the self or rather for the self, but through the self.

6. "Reading the St. Louis Edicts" is both playful and pointed. In that essay, your godmother, a former nun, posits a "cathedral of the universe", an ecumenical, inclusive, priest-less service. Your godmother left her convent in protest, and your essay hits similar notes---critiquing the male establishment of the Church, and the devaluing of the female voice and identity, particularly within the clerical scope of the Church. Have you found a “personal Catholicism” in the wake of these differences with the institution? Does the ministry-in-progress of Pope Francis inspire optimism in you as a Catholic?

Everyone’s faith is personal. I wouldn’t describe mine as a personal Catholicism. The idea of Catholicism is that it is meant to be universal. I know I have described myself as a Catholic in exile, meaning it’s an identity I won’t relinquish, meaning I don’t feel fully able to participate in my Church as I imagine – there’s that word – Jesus would intend.

Pope Francis inspires me because he’s invited the disenchanted back, he’s asked the priests to walk with us, what I hear him saying is that the Church needs me. It’s an incredible message. He’s showing that he has such a way with language. His rhetoric is very inclusive. There’s a humility to it that is very profound. Of course, there can be a difference between the ‘official’ doctrine of the Church and his words, but he is the representative of the Church. He’s quite a powerful man. I defer to an article by Father James Martin; he always goes to the source for the answer, the source being God. And when he does, it’s a brilliant, comforting thought-provoking move. He’s been writing a lot about this pope, but after the trip to Brazil, he had an article that pointed out what was said at the annunciation to Mary. That nothing is impossible with God. I’ve been thinking about Oscar Romero, actually, who was thought to be very conservative when he was appointed archbishop. Of course, he, too, then surprised with the positions he took. He became an open critic of the Salvadoran regime, but more broadly, a voice giving a message to the poor about their dignity. He became a prophet of change. But he was a martyr - I pray this pope has an unusually long and healthy life to conduct his ministry. The comparison is that this pope is not one conforming to the approach many imagined could emerge from cardinals appointed by the two previous popes. I love his ‘grammar of simplicity’ phrase, but most of all, I plan to obey him when he asked us to be audacious and creative. I’m quite excited to know what he does next, and what Catholics will do under his guidance. He’s a funny man, too, and God is joyful. That’s not a side we saw very much under Benedict. From the perspective of someone who writes about collective memory after traumas and about the lines between personal and collective responsibility – for example, in the Holocaust – I’m very interested in his statement about forgiveness and forgetting. I think it is crucial for our time, too, for social justice, to remember that God forgives.

The cathedral of the universe is a way of thinking of every moment of your life as being in communion with God, because God is in all living things. The pope’s beach mass took place in that cathedral and the Catholic Church is a part of that cathedral; I embrace this pope with gratitude, and a renewed sense of hope about the capacity of my Church to be a force for tolerance, peace, justice, love, good. I think he’s only begun to show us the way to be audacious in returning to the words of the Gospels.

7. You are have written for many of the best review markets (including Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist), and are the editor of a new online magazine, Hypothetical: A Review of Everything Imaginable. What essays and projects are you working on now?

 

The creed I wrote for the magazine - others might call it a mission statement if they didn’t have Catholic genres in their lexicon - is reflective of the direction I push myself in essays and their longer corollaries, books. The notion of “narratives of what is yet to be achieved” connects to the idea of writing as a precursor to social change but also about looking for gaps to be filled in what we know. That second articulation comes from how we think about expressing our contribution to a field in the scholarly community.

I’m writing two essays now for specific publications; these are reported pieces. I consider both under the umbrella of my self-described “biography of place” genre, which is always shape shifting. One is about the overlapping of ethnic, religious and civic identity, and the history of a stained glass window of John F. Kennedy in a Catholic church in an Irish American immigrant community. The other story is about plena, a Puerto Rican musical genre and a community that’s coalesced around it. 

The main writing project I’m working on is a nonfiction book about the construction of narratives. I’m approaching that via narratives about mental illness at the levels of national discourse; within popular culture such as television, movies and songs; and in existing literature such as memoirs by caregivers or patients.  What I am investigating most in the book are the narratives that some of the most serious forms of mental illness foster in a person’s mind when they are sick, and what causes these narratives, what enables them, both biologically but environmentally and socially. How do some narratives lose their credibility and rupture? I want to compare this with what society learns about the experience of these illnesses from ‘outsider’ sources and to what narrative frameworks psychiatry has to explain about the physical process of these illnesses. I am asking, what are the most significant differences between perception and reality about the experience of psychosis, for example. Even by doing this, then, I am demonstrating another puzzle, since psychosis is a mental disconnect from reality. But one can function with it, living out a ‘regular’ narrative while constructing a false narrative in the mind; thus, the psychosis. So I am looking to explore the reality of ‘a disconnect from reality’ - and asking whether there is another form of disconnect from reality in how these illnesses are discussed by many of those completely rooted in sanity. Where is that liminal space between narratives? What about the lines between false narratives that are useful or assumed deliberately, and false narratives of insanity that a person believes to be true? When do parallel narratives diverge? How do two people witness the same experience and build completely different narratives around it? What function do these serve? What narratives are constructed to survive – and what happens when these have a destructive impact?  My book is also very much about parsing the limits of knowledge, the possibilities of language, and discourse analysis. That comes from my time in the academic world, where I also have some projects in the pipeline. I have a proposal under consideration for the MLA conference about neuroplasticity. All my projects seek to be literature that breaks the solitude of the human experience, by forming connections and in examining how language is manipulated to drive people apart or is able to bring us together. Part of this work is to write about experiences that happen in solitude, to witness those for others, to challenge conventional portrayals. That’s another line that’s in my magazine creed.

After I lived in Uruguay, I developed an interest in narratives of captivity. I’ve read many of these by women from different countries, contemporary, historical, but focusing on those that tell the story well. I was riveted by the amazing Even Silence Has An End. The experiences of women during dictatorships is largely unwritten or untold. There is a beautiful memoir, exquisite, simple, surprising, terrible, spirit affirming, that I discovered in the Columbia University library and photocopied. It’s in a purple binder on my bookshelf. I’ve translated part of it, and I want to finish that someday. It’s by a journalist who was a political prisoner in Montevideo. It’s a slow, slow process but I enjoy it deeply, this movement between languages.

I’m on a mission to do my part to change the statistics about women being underrepresented in editing roles and in resubmitting their own work. I’m just a pebble in the lake but every ripple multiples. In addition to original work I am producing now, I’m submitting from MFA essay collection. Some of those pieces are, like the Figment one, timeless, lyric essays. But the title essay from the collection is a blend of memoir and reportage about the history of land use in America, via one neighborhood in my hometown, and how it became the site of the largest environmental remediation in the state’s history. It’s also about coming to terms with the fact that there is no way to know the source of the benign brain tumor that I had. I’m updating that piece because the story - one I began reporting a decade ago, actually, soon after my brain surgery - of that neighborhood and its controversy continues. I’m happy with that piece as it is, structurally, but I want to bring the reporting to now, to revise it and publish it. That’s definitely a piece that has a book in it, too, down the road.

I am also writing a long essay – and this is a good example of speculative and fact – that is the biography of the Bavarian village where my great-grandfather was born; a branch of our family still lives there. It’s a quest narrative, as most of my work tends to be, and it explores cultural inheritance. Between these projects, I read as much as I can, and I generate ideas. I collect words, too, when I am not writing. I got this word harvesting idea from a lecture by Leni Zumas at the Tin House Writers’ Workshop last summer.

I love coming home to find a manila envelope from PW by my door. What books will I read this month? Those are anonymous reviews that I do as part of the freelance crew, so I can’t talk about the books, but I have the pleasure of conducting interviews with authors and I enjoy that very much. When I reviewed for Booklist, those were bylined so I could sing the praises of the books openly. Now, I’m writing longer literary criticism in which I’m also examining reviewers’ reactions to books in a social context, comparing books on the same subjects. These are all just drafts at the moment, seeds to pitch, but the art of criticism is a form I love and want to spend more time in. I like to be able to bring books to reader’s attention and explain why: there’s a magnificent gem of a short story collection, Tamas Dobozy’s Siege 13, that everyone should read and Words Without Borders gave me the forum to review it.

***

Cynthia-Marie Marmo O’Brien is a writer, editor and educator. Her essays, narrative nonfiction and journalism focus on biographies of place, collective memory, concepts of home, narratives of illness, interpretations of exile, and cultural criticism concerning language and knowledge politics. Her writing was chosen as a “notable” selection in Best American Essays 2011. Her nonfiction can be read in America Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Killing the Buddha, Words without Borders and other publications.  She is a freelance literary critic and interviewer for Publishers Weekly, and has also reviewed for Booklist and Kirkus. Among other prizes and fellowships, she was a Women in International Leadership grantee at International House from 2008-2009.  Since 2010, she has been a contributing editor of Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. She founded and edits Hypothetical: A Review of Everything Imaginable, a multilingual literary journal with a global online readership. Currently, she operates Ideas Before Implementation, a consultancy providing editorial and educational services to individuals and organizations. Since 2006, she has taught academic and creative writing to students from the high school to graduate level. Cynthia-Marie is a native of New England whose worldview is shaped by her time living in Hungary, Scotland and Uruguay. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia University School of the Arts and received her BA with High Honors in English Literature & Creative Writing from Dartmouth College, also earning concentrations in International Relations and Latin American Literature. She blogs at Narratives of Home and occasionally Tweets.