After reflecting on her origins in ingenious ways in her own work, Lise Funderburg has now edited the book, Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents. In this project, she curates the musings of 25 writers on inheritance. In particular, the writers meditate on a given characteristic they’ve inherited from dear old Mom or Dad. Each entry goes deep, reflecting on not only what the writer carries on from a parent, but also on how this inherited trait shapes the very lives they live.
Caroline Hagood: You write, “In some way of another, most of us come to realize that we are, more or less and for better for worse, chips off the parental block. That fact alone is not what prompted me to commission the essays that fill this book. Instead, I was intrigued by what came after the sidewalk-borne shock of recognition: the curiosity and amusement and compassion and insight, palpable evidence that relationships continue to evolve as we make our way through life, even if one party (in my case, my father) is dead and gone. As the years go by, these discoveries pass through a different filter—one that’s less reactive, more gentle.” Can you talk more about that “filter” that these discoveries move through? That’s an intriguing image.
Lise Funderburg: We’re always looking at the world through some kind of filter, aren’t we? You can say it’s informed by experience or baggage or nurture or nature, but how and what we see when we do that looking is singular, specific to each one of us. And on top of that, the perspective changes with time, informed by the accumulation of slings and arrows, joys and triumphs.
For Apple, Tree contributors Lolis Elie and Shukree Tilghman, having their own children casts a fresh light on their parents’ actions and choices, now that Lolis and Shu are walking the same paths. Kyoko Mori looks at her father’s devastating arrogance, which ravaged her childhood, and sees not just the pain it caused her, but also the resilience she learned from it, a survival skill for the rejection-filled writer’s life.
In my case, my own “aha” moment on that sidewalk came a good 12 years after my father’s death. I’d grieved him and missed him for all that time, which surely made me more inclined to savor any wisp of him that came along. And my filter had been tempered by all the additional life experiences I’d had, all that living. You need to live through some shit to understand that shit can be lived through. To grasp the resilience and adaptations that people like my father enlisted in order to survive. To grasp it and appreciate it, rather than responding with the child’s myopia, where all they can see is what’s happening to them in the moment.
CH: You’ve written about this process of thinking on the parent through that very filter yourself. What sort of state of mind do you think it requires? How can a writer get there? What sort of writing and thinking practices are necessary?
LF: More and more, I’m coming to believe that curiosity is THE most essential item in the writer’s toolbox. What else will propel you to stick with a generally unremunerative and often ego-crushing career? William Zinsser, a terrific writing teacher (whose book, On Writing Well, is completely relevant and ageless, even after 43 years in print) said that, at base, all writing is about solving a problem. Not a problem in the negative sense of the word, but meaning that all writing involves engaging with a puzzle, and the work that results tries to solve the puzzle, to satisfy the curiosity, to untie the knot that has been gnawing at the writer for some time. If you’re driven to explore in this way, and to then articulate the exploration and its outcome, you’ll figure out the more mechanical issues of finding time to write, learning how to revise, figuring out how to make a living, and so on.
So, in answer to your questions, I’d say that nurturing and engaging with one’s curiosity might be the best advice I could pass along. It’s helpful on every level of craft, whether it’s to ask oneself, “Is this the right word for this particular sentence?” or to ask “Why does X topic bother/captivate/enrage/thrill me so deeply?”
CH: You decided you wanted to ask other writers about this space, and you did just that, inviting such writers as Laura van den Berg, Ann Patchett, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Laura Miller to hold forth on this fascinating topic. In terms of how you approached writers for this book, you write, “I decided to ask people—interesting people, people who think deeply and write beautifully and come at life from multiple directions—to consider that space between the apple and the tree, to make meaning of it.” Besides thinking deeply, what particular characteristics were you looking for in writers who could best tackle this subject?
LF: I could write a book about the thoughts and deliberations that went into my contributor list, so I appreciate that you’re asking about a relatively invisible part of the anthology’s back story. I’d never put together an anthology before, but I knew I wanted a book that people could enjoy cover to cover — not necessarily in one sitting or from front to back — but a collection with enough variation in style, content, and perspective that readers wouldn’t feel like they were reading the same thing over and over.
In considering whom to include, I kept thinking about that experience you have from time to time, where you encounter a stranger who tells you a story from their life. You might be seated next to each other at a dinner party or on a train, and the story they tell is resonant and interesting, funny and/or sad and/or disturbing, and after it’s over and you walk away, you realize some piece of their tale has permanently lodged itself in your psyche.
I also kept thinking about diversity, how I wanted the book to be a prismatic meditation, with each facet of the prism casting a distinct light on the topic. My version of diversity came to mean writers who come from different realms (novelists, critics, poets, essayist, radio people, TV people, food writers, scholars, etc.) and from different demographic groups. I only asked writers whose work I greatly admired, and I also cast a net that would include a range of gender identities, sexual orientations, races, ethnicities, and geographic regions. I didn’t end up with every slice of pie, in part because of writers who had signed on and then encountered conflicts (babies, new jobs, book deals, etc.) and had to drop out
Even though there was this intentional diversification in my assigning, I required no one to write about or acknowledge their demographic distinction; I didn’t want to push anyone to “perform a burlesque of their identity,” as the writer (and Apple, Tree contributor) John Freeman once put it. In the end, some did and some didn’t speak to that aspect of their experience; this actually strikes me as one of the book’s achievements.
CH: How do you conceptualize that space between the apple and the tree? What kind of interstitial imaginative characteristics does it have?
LF: As a friend said when I told him the idea for the book and that “Apple, Tree” would be its title: “It’s all about the comma.”
That interstitial space is where meaning is made, and in order for that to happen there has to be a sense of multi-directionality, that the writer can use the likeness to look both backward and forward in time, to recast their sense of their parent or of their own history as well as to let the likeness inform how they behave and interact with the world going forward.
CH: If you were going to assign one essay in this book to a class, which one would it be, and what would you want the students to get out of it?
LF: Impossible question, of course. All have so much to offer. Still, a few possibilities might be:
- For students exploring form, a wonderful example of a braided essay would be Lizzie Skurnick’s “Just Say the Word.” One strand addresses her young son, who’s acquiring language, and the other addresses her mother, whose dementia is stealing language away. Within each strand Skurnick assumes multiple narrative positionalities, including first, second, and third person, and the choice to have the strands speak to each other implicitly rather than explicitly builds the reader’s emotional investment and identification with the material.
- Many, if not all, of the essays render the parents as dimensional characters, a Herculean challenge given our innately narrow perspective as their children. For students aiming to write about family, these pieces serve as models of the writer having pushed past the blinders of their direct experiences as the child: John Freeman’s “This Truth about Chaos,” Leland Cheuk’s “Self-Made Men,” and Sallie Tisdale’s “Curtains” show us parents who are dimensional human beings, rich and distinctive people with intriguingly paradoxical personalities.
- And to be honest, any one of these 25 essays would show students how to inhabit the narrative voice fully and specifically, to great effect.
