Rebecca Nison is the author and illustrator of a graphic poetry collection, If We’d Never Seen the Sea, and her work has appeared in Catapult, F(r)iction, Pank, Weave, Bushwick Review, and others. She teaches writing at Parsons The New School for Design and holds an MFA from the New School. She is currently at work on a novel, a collection of short stories, and a memoir. An excerpt from her story “The Unwilding” can be found here. It appears in the Mar/Apr 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “The Unwilding”?
The major underlying question that drove this story for me was: How can we best love what and whom we haven’t yet come to fully comprehend?
At the time I wrote this, I was thinking about chimps exploited for experimentation and entertainment; the ways domestic landscapes and comforts have shifted (and continue to shift) the evolution of our species; how far we’ve diverged from our unwritten histories as beings within the larger animal kingdom; humanity’s exploitation of the planet and non-human species; and how we often try to reconstruct the natural landscapes we demolish in the service of our own comfort.
I was also thinking about what it feels like to grow up with a sibling whose needs supersede our own; the drive to “escape” the ordinary. Maybe the only true liberation is not in liberating oneself, but in liberating others.
In workshops, my fellow writers have compared some of this story’s themes with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave; those stories have lived in me for a long time, and I wonder if they came out—however subconsciously—in the text.
Why did you settle on a Sahelanthropus tchadensis for Penn’s present stage of evolutionary development? Did you try writing this story with Penn in different ways? Is there anything about the ape ancestor you wanted to include in this story, but eventually cut?
In my research, Sahelanthropus tchadensis is the common ancestor of chimps and humans (at least as far as we can estimate now). Penn’s now at the point that Flora believes—naively—he’s human “enough” to safely enter the world made for and by man.
I’m curious about the influence of humanocentrism on our empathy. Empathy, compassion, and definitions of intelligence are usually reserved for creatures who most closely resemble us. And so, Flora feels mounting guilt about Penn’s situation as he evolves closer and closer to human; this guilt is a major determination of her choice to liberate him.
There were many things I wanted to include in this story—so many, in fact, that I’ve written a first draft of a novel based on this story. There are countless details about Penn’s current—and future—state that I’ve explored beyond this tale.
How did you decide to include Flora and Penn’s father in this story? Did you know you wanted to include that moment of confrontation with Flora, or did it arrive unexpectedly in revision?
I rarely outline stories, so almost every event arrives unexpectedly, either in my first drafts or in the countless revisions that follow. Revision is as much a form of discovery for me as early drafts are.
When I wrote this story, I was reading a lot of traditional fairy tales in which female parent figures play threatening roles and male parent figures are depicted as benevolent, even if absent or sometimes “weak.” To be completely honest, if I’d written this now, I think I would have been more nuanced and more challenging of these traditions—but at this point, the point at which I completed this story, it is Flora who believes her mother’s the “tyrant” and her father the “coward.”
I knew Flora needed to confront the pain she might cause through the actions she perceived as righteous. There’s no such thing as a clean escape. The truth is, she’s as devoted to her vision of herself as a heroine and her own liberation as she is devoted to liberating her brother. No action is as pure as many tales of good and evil, of heroines and villains, would like us to believe. Flora needed to confront the truth that her family cared for her, even loved her, and that fleeing would be a source of great loss for them all.
Without the moment she shares with her father, she wouldn’t have confronted the truth of her sacrifice.
How has your writing changed since you started out?
When I began writing “seriously,” I mostly wrote poetry. I still do sometimes. After many years of considering myself a poet, I became curious about storytelling. I wanted to sculpt ideas with different forms, and the form I found was fiction. Writing stories felt architectural; I needed to learn completely separate skills. I was hungry to understand dialogue, plot, tension, and characters to build fictional narrative worlds—all with the same materials I adored: words, letters, the page.
A few years ago, I also started writing nonfiction. And that brought me back to something I’d left behind when I diverted from poetry. It’s hard to say what that thing is, exactly—maybe some sweet, terrifying relative of vulnerability.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
My physical and mental health and dis-ease; being a woman; my encounters with the natural world; injustice; painting, drawing, and visual art (which allow me to create with freedom from language); listening; the hunger to bring questions to life; empathy; dreams and my relationship to the invisible world; and teaching.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
I read this long ago in Beat Not the Poor Desk, a book about teaching writing by Rosemary Deen and Marie Ponsot. I pass it on to my writing students in the first class of every semester:
I [could] give you a skill, a power over yourself. You will have authority over it. No one will ever be able to take it away from you. It’s an ordinary thing, a human thing, like learning to talk, and you already know most of what you need to do it. You learn it in the company of others. And at every step of the way to learning it, the power of it will be there as part of the pleasure of learning it.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
Right now I’m primarily focused on empathizing, connecting, finding ways to volunteer, maintaining sanity, adapting, and supporting my students and loved ones in this time of uncertainty.
But I’m also focusing on a few projects:
- A workshop on excavating resilience through creative practice during times of uncertainty and crisis
- A book of narrative nonfiction about the history of women’s medicine, which includes my experiences and violations as a mastectomy patient
- A book of graphic erasure poems created from my medical records
- A reflective guide to convalescence, tentatively titled Light for the Journey: A Guide to Active Healing
- The Light Series: a photo/video series on social media (@beckoclock) which documents my experiences of convalescence/enforced stillness and centers on the belief that sometimes light forming shapes and shadows on a wall can be, must be, a vista.