A Constant Act of Becoming: An Interview with Emily Woodworth by Maureen Langloss

Emily Woodworth’s dog Ivy

This week’s tenth anniversary interview is with memoir reader Emily Woodworth. Emily has an incredible eye as a reader; we all look forward to hearing her perspective on our memoir queue. She has also done tons of archival work for Split Lip Magazine, helping us migrate content from our legacy site to our new one—a project that ended up being a bit of a beast.

Emily grew up in Sisters, Oregon, where she developed a love for nature and the psychological pathologies that permeate small towns. She’s been an Oregon Literary Fellow, a Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing Fellow, and been nominated for/won some cool prizes, including being longlisted on the Wigleaf Top 50 and a notable mention in Best American Essays. She is a descendant of the Karuk Tribe and is working to learn her ancestral language. Her dog’s name is Ivy, but her nickname is Nupnúpanach (which in Karuk means “fawn” or, literally, “little spotted one”).

We spoke over Slack about micro tensions and dramatic contrasts, screenwriting versus prose writing, and what Emily most loves and doubts about her own work.

Maureen Langloss: Tell us what you see out your window right now.

Emily Woodworth: The midsections and tops of some Ponderosa pine trees and the roof of our detached garage (I am on the second floor). Also, overcast skies. I feel a cold spell coming on.

ML: Ooooh I see a poem brewing about Ponderosa midsections now! One of my hobbies is photographing trees, so I would be very distracted looking out your window. Do you have any hobbies, and can you tell us about one? Does your hobby impact your writing?

EW: I’ve played the piano since I was four years old. I’m pretty good at it. It is my artistic, non-writing outlet for the times when a story, chapter, paragraph, sentence, or word is driving me up a wall. The focus of playing Claire de Lune or Linus & Lucy banishes the frustration of writing and helps me look at things anew when I return to the work.

ML: I can see the influence music has had on your work in one of my favorite stories of yours, “The Heavens Beneath.” I love the use of sound in this story: the church bell, the vibrating spoons, the reverberation of the shovel digging. It’s an incredibly dark, almost gothic story, hugely imaginative, with a fascinating look at religion. The story is told from the point of view of a pastor on her first days at a church that has quite literally fallen into descent. Can you tell us about the inspiration for the story? Was it hard to write from the perspective of a pastor?

EW: This story was part of one of the coolest projects I’ve been involved with, “Los Suelos.” It is an interactive anthology with a computer game that readers can play to collect the stories, even as they solve a mystery going on in the town. This also means the actual larger world of “The Heavens Beneath” was shaped by a few elements that all of Los Suelos contributors shared in common (a baseball stadium, a drive-in theater, a motel, the lack of cell signals, characters who like to dig…!). The piece began as a “pitch” to the editors. As I was considering how to enter this strange, isolated town they were developing, I thought of one of the most consistent institutions that most towns have: a local church.

I grew up attending a rural local church, so writing from a pastor’s perspective was fairly intuitive. I wanted to capture someone who was genuinely devoted to their faith and portray their beliefs with sincerity, while capturing the human element of this person. Maybe that is why, early on, I struggled with voicing the character, Carolyn. I’d already thought of the “plot” of the piece when I pitched it initially, and I knew the sort of pastor she’d be, but because “The Heavens Beneath” is in the form of a journal Carolyn’s voice is pivotal. I realized I hadn’t actually developed her voice in the pitch itself, so this was left to be filled in. 

Eventually, I turned to irony and humor to find Carolyn: I tried to consciously give her dramatic contrasts in her feelings from entry to entry, from euphoria to despair in a matter of sentences. Eventually, this micro tension between entries helped me discover her as a human being, and built into a macro tension that could include one of the key elements of Los Suelos: a mysterious illness (!), and simultaneously show Carolyn’s revelatory experiences both through this lens, and as a part of her personal spiritual journey. Tying it all to the church bells—and other vibrations—felt natural from there!

ML: You are also an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker. “The Heavens Beneath” is a very visual story; the setting is so vivid and full of interesting images. I could imagine the story working as a horror film. Do you think about stories as films when you write them? Or do you keep the two genres distinct in your mind?

EW: A little of both! The main tiebreaker for me (because often I am torn over this!) is usually the voice. If something in the voice of a piece feels irreducible, or, put another way, if the way an image is described is as important as the image itself, then I know it is probably going to be a prose piece. If the images feel more primal and essential, and would be robbed of something by being put into words, then I lean toward a filmic mode. It is, admittedly, pretty blurry, but that is as close to an explanation as I can get.

ML: I’m fascinated by the role that voice plays in the film/prose divide for you. No wonder you work at Split Lip Magazine, where we pride ourselves on publishing voice-driven writing. When did you know you were a writer?

EW: I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was eighteen and took my first fiction workshop in college. Whether I am a writer—statement of fact—is a harder thing to pin down for me. Some days I know this to be true. On others, I have doubts. Mostly because on those other days I am not writing! Maybe being a writer is a constant act of becoming.

ML: I love this—a constant act of becoming. What do you doubt most about your own writing? And what do you love most about it?

EW: My writing is absurd and weird and darkly whimsical. Is it magic realism? Is it sci-fi? Is it just strange? Those are all things that I most doubt and most love about it. Those are the only things that come out when I sit down to do some writing, so I have no recourse. I guess I sometimes doubt whether these aspects will be “taken seriously” by the writing world. Then I think “screw it, I’ve gotta write what I love.”

ML: Yes, screw it! Finally, one of our most important SLM FAM questions! What is your favorite snack food and why?

EW: Cashews. Because they’re cashews! Delicious, filling, crunchy goodness. I’m getting hungry…

To read more of Emily’s work, find her at emilywoodworth.org and on twitter @emilywoodwow