What Joy We Would Find: Amy Rossi interviews Davon Loeb
In January 2018, Split Lip Magazine had the privilege of publishing Davon Loeb’s memoir, “My Mother’s Mother”, which eventually became one of our Best of the Net nominees. Since then, he has published a memoir, The In-Betweens, from Everytime Press. The book explores the spaces Davon has occupied throughout his life as the child of a Black mother and White father, as a stepson and son, as a person with roots in Alabama and New Jersey, as a Black man in a world where “you fit the description” is offered as a sufficient enough reason to pull a driver over.
The In-Betweens has been described as “lyrical” and “ultimately redemptive” and “bodily, materially sensitive,” while employing “disarming and demonstrative self-critique.”
I recently caught up with Davon over email to discuss The In-Betweens, fatherhood, the intersection of poetry and memoir, and more.
Amy Rossi: Let’s start by talking about what it has been like publishing some of the chapters in this memoir.
Davon Loeb: Literary journals and magazines have no responsibility to continue working with writers after publication—but what if they did? What if we, as editors, could give what little time we have to promoting writers? I’ve been very fortunate, and Split Lip Magazine as well as many other magazines and journals have not only provided a first home for many of the chapters in my memoir, but also have supported my writing and developed a relationship with me months and even years after publication. I want to thank those people—most I’ve only “met” on a computer screen—but without them, this memoir would have never come to fruition. The literary world can be scary, frustrating, and emotionally dangerous, especially when we are in constant comparison. And yet, it can also be the railroads to our success, the places with our biggest cheerleaders, and where strangers might say, “Your story moved me.” So I wanted to thank you, Amy, and the whole Split Lip team for sharing this space, exchanging dialogue, and making this platform available to our literary community.
AR: Thank you for being such a dedicated member of the Split Lip family! It was so exciting to see the memoir we published online living within the pages of The In-Betweens.
While there are some longer pieces in the memoir, much of it is composed of shorter, flash-length essays taking place in your childhood. It seems to me that it mirrors memory: short, potent bursts. How did you arrive at this form? How do you view the relationship between form and content?
DL: The first part: In regards to form, it was sort of accidental. Initially, many of these pieces, especially the chapters in the beginning of the book, started as poems. I am a narrative poet by heart, but somehow writing memoir offered me a larger canvas. In regards to actual structure, the initial poems were written in block form. And not to be simplistic, but block form translated well into paragraphs. So I started there, and I give a lot of credit to my MFA professors at Rutgers-Camden: Patrick Rosal, Lisa Zeidner, and Paul Lisicky, each of whom helped me develop these stories in equally different ways—Rosal with the lyric, Zeidner with the prose, and Lisicky with the memoir. I’m grateful, and this book would not be here without them.
The second part: Memories, as you noticed, work a lot like flash—the things people said, how that felt, what lingered, what felt good, what hurt. And I think the emotions of memories are somewhat constant, a thing that is always flickering, like when you see a picture or hear a song and experience instant nostalgia. However, to write this book, I had to stay there, stay in the past, in my childhood. And parts of it, I loved, and other parts, I didn’t. But that’s writing, and it’s writing at a cost.
To be more specific though, form and content were inseparable when writing this book. As the narrative started to grow, I realized I needed to structure it with intention, considering what chapters needed more page time, which did not. How could I describe a story about two minority teachers experiencing the successes and failures of education in only a page? In comparison, how could I not describe the moment a boy is confronted with the dangers of masculinity when choosing a Barbie over a football? That was a big challenge—not deciding which stories to tell, but deciding how much to tell you.
AR: The work you put in there is evident throughout. There were a number of times while reading that I was so surprised—productively surprised!—by where you chose to stop the piece, and I would have to go back and look again and think about readerly expectation, such as with “Colt-45” and “O.J. and the Wax Museum.” In another book, the latter could have been entirely about your mother’s reaction (which I am sure would be compelling).
How did you decide what to share with the reader? Are there moments that you ended up pulling back? How much did your background as a poet influence what you left unsaid?
DL: I think being a poet that is writing memoir gave me a lot of freedom—more control on how I told the story. Sure, I was confined to the same rules of prose, but I also wasn’t; I wanted to convince readers that metaphor, cadence, or the image I was trying to create was more important than even a plot—that maybe I could convince them they were actually reading a poem sometimes five pages long.
Throughout the book, there were many moments I “should” have finished the story: gave the reader what they might want, what happened next. But in chapters like “O.J. and the Wax Museum,” the mother’s reaction, for example, was not important—what was important should be the boy who lost his voice, not the mother who gained hers. Although, I think it’s natural to expect an ending, and I had to build real trust with my readers that not having an ending was okay—that they could still believe in these stories.
Writing a lyrical narrative from start to finish was incredibly difficult, and probably what I struggled with the most was keeping that poetic voice consistent, especially in the longer chapters. But I committed to it, and even in “When Quitting Meant Back to Babysitting,” the longest chapter in the book, I still stopped and flexed my poetic muscle for readers to see how poetry can be prose even in an essay form.
AR: The imagery in that essay is gorgeous, especially that closing image. It is truly one of those trust-building moments that you mention, when as a reader I felt not just like you were sharing something but also showing something, as you do throughout.
From the beginning, it’s clear you are inviting the reader into something special. Three early essays in particular—”Writing My Parents’ Love Story,” “A Reconstruction of Great Great Grandfather,” and “My Mother’s Mother”—which appeared in Split Lip Magazine—subvert traditional memoir expectations through both their poetic roots and the way you inhabit stories about people who lived before you were born. Of course it makes sense that to tell your own story of the in-between, we have to start at the very beginning. What was this process like for you? What kind of challenges, expected or otherwise, did you encounter?
DL: Ironically, “My Mother’s Mother” was one of the first chapters in the book that was also originally a poem. It included the line, “...her shackled wrists could earn only enough change for the backseat ride on the bus back home.” I learned that writing someone’s else’s story could be very dangerous, especially if what I told you was somehow gratuitous or manipulated in a way to make my book “work” better. And through “My Mother’s Mother” specifically, I admit to readers that to tell her narrative, I can’t just tell you part of it, but I had to tell all of it in order to show the real portrait of the woman. And I think that honesty, confronting readers directly, was frightening but necessary.
There were many challenges when writing about my history, which I imagine all memoirists experience. This was particularly true when writing chapters about events before my life. For example, I relied heavily on my mother when writing about my father and his family. It was her myth-making. But as we move through the book, I experienced my father myself, and even the language changes—from uncertain to eventually conclusive.
But I am also writing about real people, real stories—and they are members of my book really without choice. So it was difficult to explore some of those subjects knowing people might be hurt. But wholeheartedly, I believe those characters, those people, my family, were depicted truthfully and multidimensionally. To tell you my story—who I am, where I came from, and the people that shaped me, I needed to write about my mother and father’s relationship, cathartically and thematically, as much as writing about my broken heritage—about what it was like searching for my identity in a world where there is sometimes no box for Black and White—that where I grew up could be both beautiful and ugly—that there is universality in what makes me me and what makes you you—and that if we all told our stories, what joy we would find.
AR: One of the essential craft choices that develops the theme of the in-between over the course of the book is multidimensionality. We see this through chapters like “Being a Man,” “Weekend Weather,” “Fighting for the Tree,” and “Something About Love” as you explore your relationships with both your stepfather and your father. It feels like one of the ways you come to reconcile and make meaning of the in-betweens you occupy in the world is to see the emotional in-betweens in others, and through careful juxtaposition of chapters, you bring the reader on that journey too.
DL: People are multidimensional, so writing about them needed to be just as layered. I think the best example or most multidimensional character in the memoir besides the narrator is my dad (stepfather). The first time I seriously wrote about him was the chapter “Patricide and Boot Shines,” which was initially a poem. When reading it in front of my MFA professors and cohort for the first time (as a poem), I literally sobbed. So I knew that emotion, that visceral thing that lived inside of me, would translate well in the book. And that being said, writing about my dad has changed my life—changed me as a husband, a father, and a man. When finishing The In-Betweens, I married, bought a home, and became a father, so my writing about him evolved, as did my life.
A step-parent is constantly occupying the in-between, and I wanted to show that through multiple stories—show my dad’s body, his heart and marriage, his responsibility to his home, while also juxtaposing my real father—the things I wanted from him, what he could give me, what he couldn’t. And even though I longed for a part of him—my biological father—I had everything I ever needed in the man that raised me. But even that understanding of fatherhood is something we arrive at together—through the journey, the narrative—from resentment and frustration—to understanding and eventually love—love for both men.
AR: Okay, this answer has me in tears. Thank you. That love and vulnerability is such a powerful aspect of The In-Betweens. And now that you are a father yourself, what would you like your daughter to take away from your book as she gets older and perhaps undertakes her own process of considering her identity?
DL: I want her to know that the most human thing she can ever do is to get to know someone else—tell each other their stories, build connections. That her story means something, regardless of if she ever writes it down. That through writing this memoir, I’ve learned just how our lives and our memories are what binds us. And maybe because I’m a teacher I believe this, but I often consider how many students I’ve taught and will teach, and how if I happened to inspire just one life, by what I’ve said, what I’ve done—imagine those possibilities, and how powerful that is. I want her to believe that she can change something, by listening, by speaking, by searching for the beauty in her identity as much as she searches for the beauty in others. And that maybe she’d admire me; that she’d be proud of what her dad tried to do.
Davon Loeb (@LoebDavon) is the author of the lyric memoir The In-Betweens. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Camden, and he is a poetry editor at Bending Genres and Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. Davon writes creative nonfiction and poetry. His work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and one Best of the Net, and is featured in Apiary Magazine, Split Lip Magazine, Harpoon Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Portland Review, and elsewhere. Besides writing, Davon is a high school English teacher, husband, and father in New Jersey. His work can be found at www.davonloeb.com.
Amy Rossi lives and writes in North Carolina. Links to her fiction and music essays can be found at amyrossi.com.