67 POETS & WRITERS^Orleans—either-or. But creating such
dichotomy on the page felt like the op-
posite of what I wanted to do. My vi-
sion and point of view were the main
things that shored me up. I could not,
under any circumstances, have them
wrested from me.
In the seven years of writing I
thought less about which nonfiction
genre I was writing into and sought
instead to find an architecture that
could contain several stories: the
autobiography of a house but also a
coming-of-age story within a family
story spanning one hundred years.
Undergirding this were layers of re-
porting about a mythologized city and
the ways in which cities and countries
could, by their design, fail their citi-
zens. I saw the book as another kind
of house. How did I want the reader
to pass through it? What room would
they enter first, and how should
that room feel? Where, in the book,
were the entrances and exits? What
composes the foundation of the book,
and what exists on the surface for the
eye to take pleasure in?
After I turned in the final draft,
I spent weeks trying to understand
that I had, in fact, released the book.
It was, in essence, not mine any more.
The book would now be labeled and
profiled. Now that the book has its
cover and is an object with a price, I
think about the collective of writers I
am joining, many of whose work my
own is in conversation with. I think
about all the disappeared Black women
writers. I want to know, where is Gayl
Jones? I search for Black women writ-
ers of my generation—we are still too
rare—and live inside their work. This
is the context that matters so much to
me, my grounding, how I find footing
for the journey ahead. All the while I
turn and look back for who is com-
ing next, making their own first book,
confronting the terror and silence and
ecstasy of beginning.B
efore I wrote essays, I used
to string together pretty sen-
tences I’d call stories and then
wait around for the world’s
admiration. It was kind of like riding
my bike through a parade in sunny
weather but with a creeping sense that
something wasn’t right. After college I
discovered the essay and found a way
into the real work—the hard work—
I’d always wanted to do. I loved theNONFICTION 2019KRISTA
EASTMAN
The Painted Forest (West Virginia
University Press, October), a debut
collection of essays investigating the
myths we make about who we are and
where we’re from; a lyrical excavation
of rural Wisconsin, tourist towns, and
the “under-imagined and overly carica-
tured” Midwest. Agent: None. Editor:
Derek Krissoff. First lines: “This tubby
steel machine, this 1978 Chevy Malibu
station wagon, careens a large fam-
ily forward, makes tinny the sound
of our quarrels and questions while
highway approaches and then unfurls
behind, approaches and then unfurls.
It is from this wagon that we view the
sculptures, the scrap metal forms
welded at weird angles onto them-
selves, forms that groan at ground inWriting now
about the experience
of making this book
feels like catching
grain through spread
fingers—almost
but not quite like
magic, since we
know the best
writing work is
the hardest labor.
It is still painful
to remember
much of it.
the way of all heavy equipment, but
forms whose slanted reaches sky-
ward warp and mock the object of
industry. Here, out of nowhere, in the
middle of nowhere, stands steel im-
practicality, love or whimsy or thought
made big and embarrassing, mate-
rial and metallic. They are painted.
They are placed, purposively, along
the road. We view and evade them by
continuing at fifty-five miles per hour.”