Form as A Way to Make Content: A Conversation with Sarah Minor
As one of the most formally innovative writers today, Sarah Minor is pushing past page-bound boundaries. Her essay collection, Bright Archive (Rescue Press, October 2020), investigates place and space, asking readers to flip the book upside-down while exploring a commune, travel down a textual river to make meaning through mapping, and nest inside tens of parentheticals to cocoon themselves in the concept of home. Her work reimagines how form can communicate content while exploring themes of identity, place, and connection. As an engaging experimental writer, she asks us to collaborate with her to create greater meaning in a way few other writers are today.
I talked with Sarah about the essay as machine and maze, upending power dynamics through formal work, and what form can do for writers and readers alike.
Maddie Norris: The epigraph to your forthcoming book, Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (2021, winner of the Noemi Press Book Award for Prose), is from Robert Creeley: “Form is never more than extension of content.” What do you see as the connection between form and content?
Sarah Minor: I’m placing that facetiously as an epigraph. Form is more than an extension of content, of course, but it’s more complicated than that. That’s what drove my interest to make these works and drives my interest in continuing to talk about them, because the relationship between form and content seems like an old discussion among writers, but I’m trying to demonstrate how it’s not as shallow a form of inquiry as we’ve been led to believe. Yes, sometimes forms extend or emphasize or draw attention to something in the content, but there are also times when they add something that isn’t present or that you would never have noticed about the content had you not seen the form acting that way.
This book argues that form is an extension of content and is more than an extension of content. Each essay does that differently. Each essay is me sitting down with a complicated math problem and being like, “How can I solve this differently every time?” It became a fun way to keep writing when writing can be so painful, especially as a process of revising. Pretty soon as a writer, someone will tell you: writing is revision. What feels good about writing, that “bleh” of getting it on the page, isn’t actually writing; it’s just producing content you then have to rewrite or remake. Formal play is one way I was able to force myself to get interested in revision again and again and again. So, form is also a way to make content. Or rework content.
MN: The pieces in Bright Archive exist in several different iterations, as physical text in book form and digital texts online and gallery installations elsewhere. Are those different realizations important or does one mode feel primary when conceiving of a piece?
SM: I like different qualities about each iteration. In particular, “Foul Chutes,” is one of my favorite installation pieces. The problem in a gallery space, the math problem I’m trying to solve, is totally different. You’re trying to get people to read in a place they’re used to looking, and to be upright but do an activity they’re used to doing while sitting. Hanging it in a spiral at eye level makes the movement of slowly walking to the side in a gallery into a reading movement. Eventually, reading is immersion. As you read, you’re inside that spiral. You can’t see anyone outside of it. You’re all the way in it, and you have to walk back out at the end.
I also liked the one on the crankie. Someone had to crank it to make it roll vertically. Part of the history of folk objects has to do with the crankie and scrolled panoramas, which feel like very American objects. And the Mississippi is also a very American idea and landscape. Scrolled panoramas used to display long paintings of the Mississippi, as if they could bring you a tour of the Mississippi on a riverboat. I like whenever I can make a physical connection to the text that allows the way it’s presented to relate to the text as an object or the text-subject as an object or space.
What’s funny about “Foul Chutes” as it appears in Bright Archive is that you turn the book to the side and flip to read, and as we were formatting, it looked ridiculous in spreads. It had this huge space in the middle of each page. I was like, “what’s that? It looks so weird. Is something wrong?” They were like, “No, that’s the gutter.” “Oh right, the gutter.” The codex is the gutter. The form of the codex is all about the idea of a gutter. It took me until that moment to realize every essay I had designed was resisting the codex because it resisted the gutter. It taught me a lot about my own work and what it means for a designed piece to have to live in pages: they have to contend with gutters.
MN: There’s a higher buy-in with formal work because you have to reconceive of how to write from the ground up. How long does it take you to write an essay?
SM: A lot of time. The works in this book have taken years and years. I will put them away for a long time and come back to them. Writing is a challenge: you have to sit with yourself, and if you write digitally, there’s no physical remnants of your work at all. So among writers there’s this desire for gratification or affirmation it’s even happening. My impulse to send work out has been, “okay, I made it.” Rejection has helped me spend more time with essays and has meant I’ve gotten things right that were nowhere near right or ready for a long time. Time forces me to rework them and get rid of sections that aren’t necessary but are precious to me for whatever reason. How much time does it take? So much time.
MN: I’m wondering how you see published work as a collaboration with readers.
SM: Now that I’m someone who’s teaching others to make work, to “think on the page” as we say in essays, I want people who are just starting out to consider: When you write something and hand it to someone else, what of you are they able to discern from that writing? How much of you are they able to access that you didn’t intend them to see? How much of you are they accessing that you’re in control of and are allowing them to see? Especially in nonfiction, that awareness of what it means for someone to read what you’ve written from this flipped perspective is what it means to get better at writing. Whatever form you work in, whatever kinds of syntax you’re interested in developing, that’s really it.
Working formally is a collaboration with readers because every time I reiterate a form I’m getting feedback. It’s like experimenting on a new crowd, like, “How does this work? What’s your perspective when I hang it in the gallery? What’s your perspective when I put it on a light table?” I love watching people. Usually they won’t read the whole thing on a light table, but they will read the whole thing when it’s a giant scroll. There’s something about the private space of going inside it that’s important. The collaborative act that influences my writing with readers is often the research I conduct on them by asking them to maneuver these different types of forms.
MN: The work is a machine, and people come through it and experience it in different ways, get spit out and have different effects.
SM: And change the machine after they come out.
MN: In thinking about the machine, Ander Monson used the analogy of needing to put cheese in the maze to keep the rats moving. What do you see as the cheese in Bright Archive?
SM: I love that analogy, but I also realize it’s condescending to a reader who’s an experimented-on rat. I think of it more as a game: The rat is in a maze with cheese, it’s definitely going to survive–it’s just how much cheese can it get, like a Mario Kart race.
What’s the cheese? The cheese is different for different readers, and not that I care about everyone in the world wanting to read my work. Getting a wide readership isn’t what motivates me, but I want to invite a variety of people who have different preparedness-levels with reading into the work. I want people to play the machine. And that means there are different types of rewards. So, for instance, a poet might read this work, someone who’s interested in dense syntax, and get rewards in the soffit sections of “Into the Limen.” Those are a little bit dense, more lyric, more focused on image. The person who isn’t here for that but is drawn by narrative is going to be pulled through the sections on the left that are the interview with Jim. The person who loves information is reading for that top section. Each essay offers those different tracks. Because I care so much about the form, I’m trying to provide many ages of cheese within there so that I’m pulling along different rats.
MN: This book deeply considers power dynamics, most obviously through the lenses of class and gender. How do you think form invokes or topples power dynamics?
SM: It’s so true of this book, and I don’t think that was something I would’ve said was my intention. But form upsets expectations of how the book form or codex works. I was trying to invite the reader to collaborate by decentering myself as the speaker, as the position of power, as the writer. That’s so often how we’re used to seeing writers, like, “I’m just going to be pulled along by the train of your voice and I’m here for the ride,” but instead, here, I think what a lot of readers see as work or effort on their part is me inviting them in. I’m not driving this train; we’re driving it together, and that’s why I’m writing because I really want to reach you, and I really want you to reach back.
All these forms are also jokes to myself. It’s always funny to upset anyone who’s a stickler about certain rules about page format and spacing. I’m very serious about the forms I make–I want them to be artful. I want them to function. I want them to provide an experience. But there’s also a subversive gesture I’m making, not that page format is the utmost example of what power looks, but books are objects of power and knowledge in who and what they contain. This project is internally interested in that through content, and the form demands that that’s a subject within too.
MN: One of the things I was interested in, which fits with this idea of decentering yourself, is the friendship with Meg in “Foul Chutes.” How do you approach writing about others?
SM: She’s the most present character in this book who isn’t a member of my family, other than Jim. I was at this point in my writing life where I wanted it to be true that the narrative draw, the narrative relationship in a personal text, could be a friendship. Often romance is what drives you, but I wanted the role of friendship to be as powerful and as much of a draw. I liked that, and I liked that in the context of the research happening. Meg and I definitely have power dynamics between us, but we’re mostly sharing in and figuring out together the power dynamics of the things around us.
I’m interested, especially now, in writing about others as a way to write about the self, especially if those others have given you permission, and it’s ethically conducted. Writing about someone else automatically conveys who you are via your perspective, but you in a friendship gives a more accurate depiction of who you are, versus trying to depict yourself in a romantic relationship–that's so complicated.
Meg and I have such a funny sisterly-at-odds relationship. It felt right, and she was on board with it. She actually recommended I put her in. Then I felt like I could continue.
MN: How do you know a form is working?
SM: I’m going to start by saying I don’t think the “A Knot, A Lean” form is the right form. I don’t think it ever found itself. Maybe the right form for it isn’t one that can contend with the codex. I want it to be all one concrete knot. I think about Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems, where the whole book can be contained in the weave of the silk pattern and read under a microscope, but it just would take up so much space to be read at scale. I wrote this late in my PhD, and it was a hard essay to write that I had written in my throat for years and years and then was able to barf out all at once, and I didn’t have an installation in mind coming up soon. I wasn’t letting it have as much space as the form would’ve needed. So it’s half-formed as a finished or successful version of its former self, even though the text is pretty much there.
When a form is successful, it’s gone through a number of trials with various crowds of readers and has gotten enough feedback and has failed enough times–it has to fail on at least three levels before it figures itself out.
It’s hard because each essay has at least three iterations, so which one is the right one? I don’t know if I know the answer. When is a form right? When it’s achieved a balance of engaging the eye enough to pull a reader into the text, but is still visual enough that it’s challenging that person’s understanding of the power dynamics present in the content.
Sarah Minor (@sarahceniaminor) is a writer and interdisciplinary artist and author of Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi 2021), Bright Archive (Rescue 2020), winner of the 2020 Big Other Nonfiction Book Award, and The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated, a chapbook from Essay Press. Her essays have appeared in several anthologies including Best American Experimental Writing and Advanced Creative Nonfiction and have been selected for an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. Minor serves as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Video Editor at TriQuarterly Review and the Assistant Director of the Cleveland Drafts Literary Festival. Find images of her work at www.sarahceniaminor.com.
Maddie Norris (@Madnor94) earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona and, before that, was the Thomas Wolfe scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her essays have won the Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction from Ninth Letter and been named Notable in Best American Essays 2020. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Territory, and Essay Daily, among others. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about physical and emotional wound care.