The Geography of Introspection: A Conversation with Dantiel W. Moniz
Florida sings. From Zora Neale Hurston and the Highwaymen, to Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney, to debut Black women fiction writers Dawnie Walton, Deesha Philyaw, and Dantiel W. Moniz, I continue to listen. As a Black American from the Midwest whose lineage extends to the South, my heart enlarges at art residing there. Who are the ghosts we’re enticed to bear?
Long after reading, Moniz’s Milk Blood Heat (Grove, February 2021) remains tart and smooth in my mouth. Sliding between sand, soil, concrete, wildlife, and conservation areas, these stories morph in their shape. This spring I sprouted from a wintering—climbing out of myself, observing, reading her collection—and I later had the pleasure of sending questions to Moniz and following up over Zoom. Debuts excite me, especially short story collections. There’s an ephemeral quality to the short story form, a what can’t it contain? When reading Milk Blood Heat, I pictured a map of the human body: the movement of parts, oral insides, measurements of weight and climate. Depending on your interaction with the collection, what reaction sprouts or oozes out? Gratitude to Moniz for this emotional range.
There’s this quote from Luca Guadagnino’s television series We Are Who We Are: “There’s a revolution going on inside of you.” I’d like to think this is the case for all of us, for everything, always.
Ashley Lee: I’m curious about an author’s relationship with time and their process of creation. How this crosses with an author’s various emotional states. I’d love it if you could reflect on your emotional process of writing Milk Blood Heat. What were your moods when creating different parts of the collection, and how does this compare to the moods the stories currently elicit? As you circled back when drafting and editing, how did your moods change?
Dantiel W. Moniz: It’s interesting because I definitely intended for these stories to be felt in the physical body as much as to be engaged with intellectually, but you’d think that might mean me feeling these emotions so I can capture them on the page and transfer them to a reader. But that’s not the case. I often felt a coolness, a distance, while writing, which I think is necessary when trying to capture the full scope of any situation or relationship. It’s not exactly objectivity—I have thoughts and feelings about the characters—but it’s not letting those feelings get in the way of the story. I’m never sure if I’ve pulled off the emotional atmosphere I’m intending until someone else reads it. For me, I can basically only count on that feeling of satisfaction after I’m sure I’ve written a good sentence.
AL: I like to think an artist is a set of selves when creating something and another set when interacting with the finished product. Does this resonate, and if so, what do you make of the gap between these selves? Is there a story or section that consistently surprises you? How so? What was watching and steering the collection’s development like?
DWM: I’m very drawn to your way of thinking about this—separate selves. I think you may be right. In the last question I talked about my emotional distance in the work, but definitely yes, being a reader of my own work when there’s nothing left to change, that’s a different thing. When I finally got my hardcovers and I read my book from first story to last, I was actually amazed by it. I don’t mean this is an arrogant way, but I thought it was good, and I liked it. It felt pretty close to what I had intended it to be, and that’s as much as most of us can ask for. I wonder if the change in format allowed me to approach the work the way I approach other writers’ work—for the enjoyment of it. Maybe that’s the gap? There’s a relinquishing of control? I don’t know. I think what surprises (or amazes, really) me most is just how deeply my brain was making connections throughout all of these stories without me first realizing it. So much of ourselves—our habits and processes—is unconscious. Exploring oneself and others can be endless. I think that’s exciting.
AL: I listened to your Center for Fiction conversation with Jamel Brinkley. You mentioned something fascinating: holding the fullness of a short story in your head as you go, and the feature of a flash forward. At the offset of the collection, what did you not want to do? If this resonates: how did that constraint change your relationship with form?
DWM: At the offset of the collection, I didn’t know it was a collection, so at first I was just writing stories. But once I realized they were connected, I was worried about them all feeling too similar, since I do think of them as linked, as turning over the same questions and exploring them on different points of the spectrum. I didn’t want to center whiteness in the work or avoid acknowledging the realities of living in a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist system. So it was just really about taking whatever curiosity that started the story and making sure it was explored fully from the point of character, which is something that Danielle Evans taught me. Everything is character.
AL: I think about the way creating art can frustrate the artist. What it means to wrestle with the work, to allow it to emerge the way it needs, on its own time, maybe forcing it to be a certain way. That balance, satisfaction, and disappointment. If this resonates, are you willing to describe how you worked through these moments?
DWM: The writing process can be frustrating, absolutely. But I think for me personally, a lot of that frustration is actually me having internalized something external to myself and the work—for instance, whether someone else would find value in what I’m writing. In those moments, I have to lean into my own instincts and trust myself. It’s hard to look back on those moments of struggle and think of exactly how I got myself out, but one way is taking distance from the work. Allowing myself to depressurize the situation so that solutions can find their way in. This can look like working on something else or watching TV or whatever. Relatedly, I think, there was also a story I had to cut from my collection because it had been workshopped and edited by so many other people that my own intentions for the work became convoluted. Stepping back from that story was hard, I even felt like a failure, but I know it was the right decision. That the story is still there, waiting for me whenever I’m ready, is comforting though.
AL: I’d love to hear about your relationship with horror, grief, and hauntings, and how characters live on in their/our minds. Recently I’ve been into FLOWERS for VASES / descansos by Hayley Williams. My brain brought this album to Milk Blood Heat. Are there any characters or scenes that haunt you in your work—and if so, how?
DWM: I think it’s understandable that anyone would want to focus only on the positives in their lives and in the world, but I don’t think that’s realistic. There are so many horrors happening in people’s everyday lives. In the world at large. We only have to jump on Twitter to see it in our country. Admitting to and accepting the fullness of the human experience, our joy and our grief, our capacities to nourish or destroy in every aspect of the living world—that’s so important. Starting with the self is hard, but it’s also the most effective way to measure and enact change. I hope these stories serve as even the briefest moment for a reader to reflect on what’s uncomfortable to acknowledge in themselves.
AL: Fun hypotheticals: your stories are at dinner with any piece of art and two future projects of yours. What’s the conversation like? At the Center for Fiction talk, you mentioned meeting up with Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Brinkley. What do you ask all three?
DWM: Ok, I said inviting Jamel was a cop out, but that’s actually not the case, and I’ve been thinking about this ever since our conversation that night (in true anxiety fashion). I think one of the best things about having all three of them to dinner would be obviously the brilliance, but also the absolute shade. The best rundowns of any and everything ever. Can you imagine how nourishing that time would be on all the levels?
AL: What is the role of play in your process?
DWM: I tell my students this often, though it can be hard to apply to myself, but it’s important to remember that we like writing. That there’s something about it we’re called to. If we think of the work as play, we’re less likely to chase perfection.
AL: I know sentences and sounds are important to you. Building a story from the line up and starting at the smallest point. Talk to me about how geography and the sentence lives and acts in the collection. What were some of the guiding questions or impulses to engage Florida and the South? Iterations of these stories were penned during your time at UW-Madison, so what can you share on the relationship between living, writing, and speaking inside one region and regarding another? Even how this relates to geography as the body?
DWM: Yes! I’m resonating with this last part in particular—geography as the body. I think many writers are like this, but I often think of myself as more in my head than anywhere else, which is why I use a GPS to navigate even in my hometown. I know that’s terrible, but whenever I’m not driving, I use the time to daydream and think my thoughts instead of paying attention to where I am. So I started thinking of a character’s internal space as a landscape as much as the actual land around them. The geography of introspection. That makes inner space seem as vast as I feel it is. Even though a large part of my intention is to tell these Floridian stories, rooted and shaped by the South and all its particularities, I think I’m more interested in creating the mood of a place rather than being accurate about landmarks, if that makes sense. It might not, but right now, that’s how I think of it. That’s why heat or the absence of it played such a large part in how I wrote about place in this book. I think my time in Madison, living in true seasons for the first time, made me more aware of my home state, and that it has changes and moods too; they’re just not what most people expect.
Dantiel W. Moniz (@dantielwmoniz) is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminar, a Tin House Scholarship, and has been named a “Writer to Watch” by Publishers Weekly and Apple Books. Her debut collection, Milk Blood Heat, is an Indie Next Pick, an Amazon “Best Book of the Month” selection, a Roxane Gay Audacious Book Club pick, and has been hailed as “must-read” by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzefeed, Elle, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, One Story, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. Moniz is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ashley Lee is an artist from the Midwest.