The Assay Interview Project: Rebecca McClanahan
January 28, 2021

Rebecca McClanahan is the author of eleven books spanning memoir, essays, poetry, and the writing craft. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, The Sun, and in anthologies published by Simon & Schuster, Beacon, Norton, and Bedford/St. Martin, among others. Recipient of two Pushcart prizes, the Glasgow Award in Nonfiction, the Wood Prize from Poetry Magazine, and the Carter Prize for the Essay, McClanahan teaches in the MFA programs of Rainier Writing Workshop and Queens University (Charlotte) and in the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.
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About In the Key of New York City:  In McClanahan’s latest book, In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays, she considers what it means to make a home and find community in a city of strangers.  Throughout the book, as McClanahan navigates her new life circumstances amid difficult events such as 9/11 and a serious cancer diagnosis, she questions everything she thought she knew about being a spouse, a friend, and a writer while still managing to retain her innate curiosity and humor. 



Stacy Murison: Thanks, Rebecca, for talking with me about your memoir-in-essays In the Key of New York City. I’m grateful to have had your words as company these past few months. This memoir concerns the time of your life when you and your husband relocated from North Carolina to New York City in 1998. Given that you were already middle-aged and had no job prospects and few New York connections, this seems like a momentous life decision. What prompted it?
 
Rebecca McClanahan: Donald and I had talked for decades about living in New York someday. He had strong memories of childhood visits to his grandparents and cousins in the city, and he and I visited New York whenever we could. We were walking on 8th Avenue one day--celebrating his 50th birthday—when I surprised myself by saying, “If we’re going to make the move, we better make it now.” That was in May, and by August we had put our house on the market, stored the possessions we did not give away, found a furnished sublet, quit our jobs, and said goodbye to family and friends—and even to our cat! Neither of us is impulsive by nature, but I guess the urge was strong. We didn’t have much of a safety net, but figured that with the sale of the house and our savings, we could make it for two years. We ended up staying for eleven.
 
One of the elements many readers will relate to is the inherent loneliness experienced when we move to a new environment, especially when trying to make new friends. How did you finally find connection?
 
I was a military brat—our family moved often during my childhood—so I was accustomed to being a newcomer and an outsider. Most military kids learn pretty early on how to watch for signals, navigate the lay of the alien land, and connect with the locals. So I guess I used that training when we moved to New York. Still, I was extremely lonely at the beginning, or maybe homesick is a better word for it. We had not been fleeing a bad environment; in fact, we’d been comfortable in our North Carolina lives and I missed that easy comfort, the neighbors and friends and family members in close proximity.
 
Making a community in New York was a tough learning experience, but little by little we made friends—through our new jobs, mostly—or we reconnected with New York area friends that we’d lost track of over the years. But much of the connection came from my constant interaction with strangers. This was due in part to street activity—with walking rather than driving, encountering people close-up and personal, sharing subway seats or park benches, and learning how to give each person you meet their own valuable space. It may sound strange, but I discovered a new form of intimacy in those encounters. I felt part of a world much larger than myself, my neighborhood, or my circle of friends. I hadn’t expected the intensity of this feeling and it both surprised and comforted me.
 
Do you think that the initial loneliness and your newcomer status affected the way you wrote about New York?
 
I often tell my students that the stance of the newcomer, the outsider, or the novice can be a helpful one when writing memoir or personal essays. When you’re an outsider—in a new place, occupation, experience—your feelers are up and you notice details you might not notice if you were comfortable in your surroundings. You are on alert and you don’t assume anything. Each day is potential discovery—risk, perhaps even danger, but also surprise. And what surprises you in life can also surprise you on the page and, if all goes well, can surprise your reader as well.
 
I felt that surprise throughout the book. There was a moment at the end of every essay that made me sit back and reflect and have that "oh, gosh!" moment. Like a strike of lightning. Can you say something more about that element of surprise? How did you discover these endings?
 
I’m honored to hear that, Stacy. Hey, lightning is good, right? Many years ago, I decided to stop calling the last gesture of an essay (or story or poem) an ending. I decided to call it an opening. Or a vibration. A place in which I felt the piece was as alive as it would ever be—and that I’d better take my hand off of it and see if the reader could complete that gesture, catch that vibration. Most of the essays in the book had been previously published, so I had discovered the final gesture for each of them. But when I began reshaping and ordering the essays into what I hoped was a coherent memoir, I sometimes felt that a particular essay needed a different gesture, something that would touch the opening of the following essay, maybe, or vibrate in a similar way. So in some cases I rewrote the ending or the beginning or I stopped an essay at an earlier point than the originally published essay had stopped.
 
Were there other major revisions you made to the essays?
 
Oh, many! I believe in violent revisions whenever necessary and I find these changes exciting—they help me see the material through new eyes. Nothing is set in stone, even some of my previously published works. Three of my favorites did not make it into the book; they just weren’t talking in interesting ways to the other essays. Or they didn’t vibrate on the same musical wave. Some of the essays I did include changed significantly. I cut a large part out of the center of one; I added several paragraphs to others; I cut another one into three parts and sprinkled the parts throughout the manuscript; I changed the verb tense of a few; I dismantled the line breaks in a previously published poem to create a lyric essay; I combined parts of two essays into one. These are just some of the changes I made in my attempt to create a unified memoir-in-essays rather than a collection of essays.
 
You use your powers of questioning to great effect in your work. In the essay “Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy,” these questions seem to serve several purposes: as genuine curiosity, as humorous confidences shared with your readers, and as insight into your own opinions. How does your ongoing curiosity inform they ways that you remember and describe events or circumstances?
 
In Creative Nonfiction, Phil Gerard suggests that a good question is a good subject. I agree. Questions can be the key into the deepest levels of our stories or essays and into our ongoing obsessions, those things that refuse to go away. So I always encourage students to begin with questions and to write into the uncertainty. And then, once they are in the midst of writing, to invite those questions—whatever arises—into the text. (Things like “But wait, is that true? I once thought so, but now I’m not sure.”) This is a way to keep yourself alive on the page and welcome the reader into your experience. In the case of “Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy,” I was narrating from a very uncertain and vulnerable stance—that of being a cancer patient in the midst of a hospital stay—so the unanswered questions were a natural extension of my emotional landscape.
 
And yes, I agree that curiosity is essential for a writer; at least, it propels almost every writer I know. Writers are curious beings—hey, I just realized there are two ways to take that statement and both of them are correct, ha! If writers aren’t curious about the world and all the subjects we approach—or that approach us—why would we need to write? We’d have all the answers already, case closed. Answers aren’t that important to me and never have been. Answers are overrated, especially in memoir. It’s the questions that keep me writing.
 
Questions and musings and speculations. In “Hello Stranger” you consider that “maybe living in a city is like being in a long friendship.” But in “Tomas the Shocker” you find yourself deflated after spending the weekend with friends who share stories of more recent acquaintances. Yet your friends keep a drawer in the guest room filled with your clothes. “Maybe this is enough,” you muse. It seems you are exploring the boundary of “enough” throughout the collection.
 
When you pare your life down to essentials—as we did when we moved to the city—it’s natural to wonder what constitutes “enough” in terms of material possessions. And for me, this extended to emotional material, to decisions about what is essential and not essential, to what can be released: memories, regrets, misconceptions, even previous loyalties or used-up truths.
 
In considering what is “enough” there seems to be another tug in this collection, which is the idea of how much of our identity we can hold and keep for ourselves. In the essay “Our Towns” you write “if we all voiced our deepest selves to one another, what would become of us?” While there’s a desire to relate with and be in the company of others, there’s also the need to keep something for yourself. I wonder if you could talk about this push and pull in terms of memoir writing.
 
I’m sure this push and pull varies from writer to writer. For me, the tug is unavoidable and always has been. In the past few years I’ve begun to realize that in almost all my writing, in every genre and over nearly four decades, I’ve been asking the same question: Where do I leave off and others begin? Seems I’ve always been obsessed with the myriad ways in which lives connect and with the constant push and pull of relationships. In my poetry, those relationships were often siblings or spouses; in The Riddle Song, the nuclear and extended family; in The Tribal Knot, my ancestors. And in In the Key of New York City, the whole world outside my door, even the strangers I meet in passing. What do I owe those whose lives touch mine? And what must I keep to myself? I have no answers for this question, Stacy. Only more questions that continue to this day, questions which I imagine most memoirists face at one time or another.
 
The refrain of the closing essay, “Ginkgo Song”—“let Calgon be Calgon”—invites rest. Both your own and for the reader as well as a pause, not an ending, in music. It feels as though we are all moving toward acknowledging the need for more rest but are unsure how to proceed. In terms of our culture, some people may also be ashamed of time they take to rest. I wonder if you could talk a little about how you imagine rest for both the writer and the reader and how important it is to your process.
 
That’s such an interesting question, Stacy. In that particular essay, I write that “Suddenly I am very sleepy, the best kind of sleepy.” The scene is Central Park while I’m sitting on a park bench watching a man on the lawn sleeping, his artificial legs lying beside him along with his guitar. He seems so at home in his surroundings that I become comfortable as well, so comfortable that I too want to fall asleep in the midst of it all.
 
But your question brings another layer to this essay, something I hadn’t thought about—thank you for that. To everything there is a season, in writing as in life. Times to labor and times to rest, for the work as well as for the writer. Only the writer can sense when those times begin and end. The work usually lets me know when it’s time for me to step away, get some perspective, refill my sails, recharge. Sometimes our unconscious minds are working overtime even when we’re not at the desk. Or, as Henry James wrote, “We learn to swim in the winter and {ice}skate in the summer.” Yes, our culture often pushes us to work, work, work. But play is important as well. And rest.
 
The events around September 11, 2001 inform parts of this collection. You write in the author’s note that this memoir is “an attempt to hold…a time and place that changed my life in ways I have yet to fully understand.” I’m curious how these reflections and experiences from Key may or may not inform your pandemic-era writing. How are the acts of writing and reflection of the immediate past weaving together for you now? Is there any wisdom and/or advice you might share with those who continue to struggle to write during this time? 
 
My Grandma Goldie was fond of saying, “Take my advice. It’s perfectly good—it’s never been used!” So I am always a bit suspicious of advice, especially when I’m the one giving it. I mean, I hardly take my own advice, so how can I expect others to? As to what the experience of writing In the Key of New York City taught me, all I can say is that it always takes me a long time—and a lot of drafting and redrafting—to begin to touch the pattern of meaning that might create a memoir or personal essay. For other writers, this process is very different: they write in the midst of the experience. The director of one of the MFA programs where I teach, Rick Barot, created thirty beautiful pandemic poems and published them a few months ago. I’ve done a lot of writing during the pandemic, but nothing that I imagine will make its way into a memoir. Perhaps the muse has a different take on that; I’ll wait and see. Most of my writing this past year has been devoted to the book’s publication—interviews, craft talks, classes, etc.—or to political letters to state and U.S. representatives, senators, and other officials. Right now, near the end of December 2020, I’m finishing up 100 postcards to Georgia voters, hoping to encourage them to get to the polls in January.
 
I understand the struggle to write during these difficult times. Each writer’s process is different and should be honored. The important thing is to stay as safe and healthy as possible, to do what we can to help, and to make it into 2021 and beyond so that we can continue to thrive as writers and readers. Take care, Stacy, and thank you for your time and interest.
Contributing Editor Stacy Murison ​[she|her|hers] holds an MFA in creative writing from Northern Arizona University (where she teaches composition) and an MA in humanities from Georgetown University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, Hobart, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, River Teeth, and The Rumpus, among others.

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