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An Upward Spiral: Juls Macdonell interviews Kevin MacDonell

“Middle-aged me is not in need, but the child does not feel quite forgiven,” stuck with me after reading “Tug of War.” The intangible yet intrinsic connection to our inner child is haunting, but can be deeply informative. Can you speak to what sort of relationship you have to your child self with regards to your writing?

Certain childhood memories assert themselves while I’m writing about something else. A lot of these memories seem to deal with mistaken or flawed perception, as if I’m still learning to grasp reality. For example, I remember one of my books which had a picture of a cow. I used to think the cow stayed perfectly still while I was looking at it, but then resumed grazing or whatever when the book was closed. I would close the book with my thumb on that page and then spring it open, hoping to surprise the cow in the act of living. And that’s what I have been trying to do ever since, in writing: catch life in the act.

I have many such remembered misperceptions and instead of laughing them away, I try to stay open to them and apply the language of an adult to what comes through the eyes of that child. I keep the child-self around to remind me that life is still essentially mysterious.

In “Tug of War,” my childish misapprehension relates to my guilt over causing the incident that could have gotten my younger brother killed. When members of my family read my piece, they assured me the incident was always considered an accident. That’s probably the case, but my child self doesn’t buy it. Whatever the facts are, the truth is that the child’s feeling of guilt remains completely intact. I, myself, today do not carry that guilt, so the child-me must still be alive, outside of time.

The mildew on the film is particularly interesting: organic rot occurring on inorganic tech, implying a lifespan for both our memories and what captures them. “Preservation does seem a tricky thing” seems to be talking about more than just the tape. I loved the mention of being able to hear your father’s voice in the video without any audio; it reminded me, like much of “Tug of War” did, of little details in slumbering memories suddenly awoken. While writing this story, did you find yourself remembering more in the process?

When I found this long-lost movie reel, it was in the original envelope with the slogan, “Remember the Day in Pictures.” I’m very skeptical about the way we relate images to memory, as if they’re closely linked or even equivalent. They’re not. I have to say, the movie itself was not very evocative of memory. If anything, it emphasized how completely lost the past can be. Which is part of what I love about it.

The reel wasn’t stored properly, so it faded and mildewed, which is like how our memory fades. And the movie wasn’t shot well to begin with, which might correspond to the poor quality of attention we bring to experience most of the time. The digital lab at the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative bumped up certain colours such as the blue of the men’s jeans. They did great work, but still, it’s a bit of artifice. The very idea of preservation is suspect.

I’m glad the film didn’t have a soundtrack, because that might have pushed aside my very clear memory of my father’s yells while coaching the team, which is the version of the past I prefer to keep. Memory is rarely accurate, but it’s more real than what we call preservation.

What was evocative for me was finding and holding the reel itself, that physical object. That’s when I remembered the little sensory details—the irises in the practice field, the smell of the rope. Those details were always there, just unavailable until I held the reel, like Proust tasting the madeleine. A lot of my writing is sparked by objects in relation to the people with whom they share a story. The object has an aura of memory around it. Images, almost never.

Speaking of details: does “Tug of War” feel like a full-circle moment, fulfilling your father’s red pen marking asking for “the minute details . . . permanently registered?” Did his note on your essay end up informing your work?

I’m not sure whether “Tug of War” is itself a response to his comment, but now that you say it, I almost wish it were, because I love the idea. My essays do tend to circle back on themselves, not always to end at the beginning—maybe above the beginning, as in an upward spiral. The fact is, I dug up the high school essay after I was already deep into drafting “Tug of War.” I was delighted to see his note because it reinforced my sense of the meaning of the piece.

There’s another, more indirect way his note informed the work. The distinctive physical appearance of his handwritten scrawl revived a little of the persona of my father as the classroom English teacher, who was a different character from my father at home. The teacher-father’s comment written on my paper still sounds, not cold exactly, but distant. I’d given him a kind of personal confession, but I was just another of his students. That tension set the tone.

I’m drawn to exploring the unsaid, especially the unsaid that will never get to be said. My father died in 2019. Our relationship was loving, but was also characterized by a certain reserve, on both sides, which is common between fathers and sons, especially of a certain age, and maybe in the culture I grew up in as well. There’s no life lesson intended here, such as “tell your loved ones how you feel while they’re still alive.” We’re all perfectly aware that time is running out and this knowledge doesn’t make a bit of difference. But I would be very pleased if a reader were caused to reflect on their own relationships and the meaning of the silences that surround them.

Your bio on the University of King’s College website describes you as a “lifelong compulsive diarist” and “late-blooming creative writer.” How do memoir and personal essays compare to keeping a diary, and do you find that one informs the other?

One does inform the other, although I see them as strictly separate forms. A diary is not memoir-in-draft. I admire Sarah Manguso’s “Ongoingness: The End of a Diary.” Written in fragments, it’s about her relationship to her diary and the practice of journaling, but she doesn’t quote from her massive diary at all. A person’s diary contains thin slices of a soul—one mood, one point of view at a time. A memoir or personal essay layers multiple selves—successive moods and perspectives—atop each other in a way that transcends the limited self that we are at any one time. Before I can share a piece of writing, it must evolve to where it’s no longer about me.

I’ve kept a journal fairly faithfully for almost forty years. I started because I wanted to not lose everything. It was about preservation, that impossible thing again. Later, it became about creating a new world each time I reread it. And then, in the last few years, it has become a support for personal essays. I never planned it that way, but I am grateful to my younger selves for keeping up what sometimes felt like a weird habit.

When I’m in the grip of a new project, I will write a few thousand words and let myself run out of steam before I delve into my old notebooks. Then I discover I’ve misremembered key things, and so the meaning I thought I had wrung from that memory feels bogus, and I have to remove it. On the other hand, I might find that the misremembering itself is meaningful and it becomes part of the narrative.

Diaries provide a sort of artistic constraint. The facts as I set them down long ago are often duller than I’d hoped, but I don’t make stuff up for a better story. I readjust. I believe all experience is meaningful, but meaning is not obvious. It takes a lot of work moving up and down the layers, from present to past and back again, and it’s not always successful. But I am wary of taking shortcuts and fabricating meaning where it doesn’t exist. I will draft various different guesses at the meaning, and I’ll keep rejecting them until I hit on one that rings true. The process is one of uncovering, not making, and it’s very slow.

With regards to writing a diary, as a fellow—but fickle—keeper of a journal, I have to ask: do you follow a particular system or structure, or have any advice to share?

The form is so completely personal, each writer must do what works for them. I have come to believe some things, which are true for me and maybe no one else. First, if you write with a reader other than yourself in mind, either published or not, then it’s not a diary or journal. I love May Sarton’s “Journal of a Solitude,” but she wrote it with intent to publish, so I think of it as arranged or presented as a journal, but that’s not what it fundamentally is. I write only for myself, and every reading is a conversation among multiple selves. When the diarist dies, so does the diary.

I also believe that, even though it’s private, it’s worth doing well. Hidden art is still art. What I commit to the notebook is almost always a second or third draft. It’s not overworked, but it’s not blather, either. A private form is hard to study, so I learn primarily from the good and bad—mostly bad—that I find in my own work. The critic or critical reviewer has no role to play in judging diaries, although I’ve noticed that does not stop them. One reviewer in a certain national newspaper wrote that Kafka in his Diaries was “self-absorbed.” I read that a long time ago, when a new translation came out in the 1990s, and it still makes me angry.

Less is more. One day some years ago, I experienced the shock of reading a trivial but well-observed detail I had recorded thirty years earlier, which recreated a whole scene in memory. I try to do that more deliberately now. Proust’s “involuntary memory” is just that—involuntary and a matter of chance. So whether I can do it reliably, I don’t know. Time will tell. My only consistent rule over the decades has been to get it on paper. Digital is too ephemeral. Paper is also ephemeral, but it only has to last as long as I do. Then all into the fire.

Do you read a lot of memoir and personal essays, or are there other genres you find yourself drawn to?

Yes, especially a lot of collected essays. The essay is such a flexible, capacious form. I’ve read maybe half of Montaigne—still working on that. E.B. White (as essayist) is always in the background, and Annie Dillard. More recently, I’ve enjoyed Emily Urquhart (Ordinary Wonder Tales), Jeanette Winterson (Art Objects), Mary Oliver (Upstream), and André Aciman (Alibis). And many others.

Naturally, I’m drawn to reading diaries, but true diaries, those never intended for publication, are troublesome for me. I found Kafka’s disturbing, because I was aware of being inside a mind where I wasn’t invited. It was like wearing a dead man’s prosthetic leg. If I were new to Woolf, I wouldn’t start with her diaries. On the other hand, Emerson’s journals are lively and direct and well worth it.

Then there’s the Catalan author, Josep Pla, who seems in a category of his own. The Gray Notebook was a diary, but he rewrote it extensively over many years. Some passages are confusing because it isn’t clear who’s speaking, the young or older Pla. Which reminds me of Montaigne.

I’m re-reading the Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation of Proust, but I read more nonfiction than fiction overall. I’m drawn to books on quantum or theoretical physics written for the layperson, most recently Carlo Rovelli (Reality Is Not What It Seems), which I highly recommend. I doubt this influences my writing directly. I tend to stick to how we experience time, as nonlinear and elastic, and I’m not so much concerned about the objective nature of time itself, if it even exists. The theories are so strange. I think it would be a huge asset for a theoretical physicist to have a child’s naïve view of reality.

 

 

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