Interview: Donald Quist
The editors at CRAFT are thrilled to welcome Donald Quist as our guest judge for this year’s Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest, which is open to memoir excerpts, personal essays, narrative nonfiction, lyric essays, and other forms of literary creative nonfiction.
In an interview in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Donald Quist observes, “I believe that creative nonfiction as a genre is best suited for examining the unanswerable.” Quist addresses the challenges of life as a Black man in America in his essay collections, Harbors and To Those Bounded, scrutinizing his family and personal relationships, violence and systemic racism, his responsibilities as a citizen, and the nation’s responsibilities to its citizens. “Writing helps me think through these questions,” he says in the Assay interview. “This practice doesn’t necessarily offer me reconciliation or resolution, but it provides me opportunities to offer my own questions and interrogate injustices I witness and experience.” He generously agreed to an interview via email with our creative nonfiction associate editors, Jacqueline Doyle and Shara Kronmal, about his work and teaching, and the craft of creative nonfiction. —CRAFT
Shara Kronmal: I’m impressed by the number of different styles and forms you use in your essay collections, Harbors and To Those Bounded. In Harbors, you include hermit crab essays, a lesson plan, and a list of figures, among other structures. In To Those Bounded, you use lists as well, plus chapters of varying length, quotations, historic documents, and even a short skit. In the interview for Assay, you say: “Form should follow function. Throughout To Those Bounded, I employ a variety of tenses, structures, and points of view in service of the narrative intention.” How do you choose specific structures and literary devices for your work? Could you elaborate on how form follows function in your writing?
Donald Quist: First of all, thank you very much for the kind words, Shara. Yes, form follows function. I think this design principle is true across mediums, genres, and disciplines. I spend a lot of time thinking through what is the best container for the message that I want to convey to the reader. My writing is very purpose driven. By this I mean, I feel like anything that I am putting out should have an aboutness to it, a raison d’être. And so, once I know that reason for being—once I know what it is that I’m trying to share with my reader and invite them to consider with me—then I have to try on different structures for the best way to carry the feeling and meaning. It’s all an act of estrangement. I try to choose a form based on what structure/shape might best defamiliarize a subject or a topic, giving the reader enough distance to have a sense of experiencing it in a new or interesting way. I choose the form based on how well it holds the wild fluidity of the subject and the prose it has inspired. Additionally, I’m trusting the right form will enliven and reveal some aspect of the narrative that I might not have seen myself. I’m interested in trying new forms and trying new shapes. My narratives have to go through a lot of different drafts. I try them in a lot of different forms before settling on what feels right.
Jacqueline Doyle: You’ve published a wide range of writing: two collections of personal essays (the first something of a memoir-in-essays), a collection of short stories, and an anthology on popular culture. You’re also contracted to release a study of popular culture that incorporates personal experience. You’ve posted playlists for two of your books on Largehearted Boy. In interviews you discuss your interest in music and the visual arts, particularly assemblages and collages, and describe poetry as the “backbone” of To Those Bounded. How have these different genres cross-fertilized your nonfiction and your teaching of nonfiction?
DQ: I aspire to be a poet. I don’t write much poetry, but I want to be a poet. I mean this in the truest, etymological sense: poiētēs, from poiein, to make. I’m trying to be a maker. I will employ the genre, technique, methodology, or aesthetic that best articulates the goals of the project. I’m prone to digression so please pardon this incoming tangent: I try to look at everything I do as different parts/pieces of the larger creative scholarship in which I’m engaged. There is a driving question behind everything I do. What I’m most interested in, concerned about, and preoccupied with, is who is invited into citizenship and who isn’t. Who is allowed to be called a member, allowed to belong, and who isn’t? I am obsessed with ideas of belonging. I’m obsessed with how we determine and categorize and ultimately define who is us and who is them. In all of the work (whether fiction or nonfiction) I’m wrestling with that question again and again.
So, it’s all an assemblage. A mix of mediums, creative forms, and artifacts. It’s a collage, a mosaic of all the stuff that I am most concerned about. I’m inspired by visual artists like Betye Saar and the African-American tradition of assemblage, remixes, and adaptation. I think I’m trying to tap into that same source. I’m never going to teach a creative nonfiction course that doesn’t pull in the other genres. I feel like creative nonfiction itself is very closely tied to poetry. The vulnerability, the type of intimacy that poetry asks for, creative nonfiction asks for too. Creative nonfiction also asks for the type of invention and distance that is natural in fiction. I love how creative nonfiction is an attempt to pull together a bunch of things and try to make meaning. So, it felt natural to draw poetry into To Those Bounded. Couplets throughout the book punctuate the larger essays, reinforcing the themes, and when read together they form a ghazal. The poem makes a kind of spine for the book.
JD: Is there advice you give to aspiring writers in your creative writing classes at the University of Missouri that you can share with our readers? Is there conventional advice that you tell your students to ignore?
DQ: I try hard not to be prescriptive in courses I teach. For every presumed rule for creative writing, we can find an example of an artist breaking that convention with great effect—you are not about to say Toni Morrison should have done more showing than telling. That’s not it. But the one piece of advice that I feel very strongly about in creative nonfiction is that you’re going to have to be open and vulnerable. Vulnerability is the engine of creative nonfiction. Even if it’s a more research-based piece, even if you are writing about a subject that is not you, we’re going to want the “you” to do some contextualizing for us. We’re going to want to see you, the author, because we want to know why you care. It’s just a natural human instinct. We’re wired for this type of connection. If you explain to us your stakes, if you explain why you care, why it’s important to you, we’re way more likely to be sympathetic to the subject. I see a lot of great writing fail to resonate because people think they themselves are not interesting enough to be present in the text. They say, “But it’s not about me!” Nah, fam. It is about you. They keep trying to do these narratives where it’s like, “Look over there! Ignore me.” Even if you’re talking about a huge subject, we’re going to need to know why you are here. You are our guide through this narrative, through this world, we need to be tied to you.
The approach is just more effective that way, and it is the difference, I think, between creative nonfiction and conventional nonfiction. I think the “you” is what makes the personal essay, memoir, and even the best journalism, more effective. It’s also a powerful move. It rejects centuries of this presumed objective “I,” which doesn’t exist. Like, for centuries of straight-white-male canon, the idea was that one wouldn’t put “I” in serious nonfiction, because, presumably, all the “I’s” were the same. The idea was that these men were identifying and making fact. I’m less interested in fact. I’m way more interested in truth, and truth is multifaceted. Truth is multilayered, multidimensional, and intersectional. For me to get to know the story and for its writer not to feel like some detached, anthropological, outside observer, and for the piece not to feel colonial in a sense, I need the “I” or the “you” in the story. You got to share your truth with them. Present and interrogate the self, because that’s the humanity that we’ll connect to.
SK: You frequently address popular culture in your writing, from TV shows to comic books. As Jacqueline mentioned, you have a book about Mister Miracle and self-emancipation in marginalized communities under contract at the University Press of Mississippi. You also host a podcast about Seinfeld. In your interview with X-R-A-Y, you suggest that you learned about “poetic movement, and/or MacGuffins as a narrative technique” from Seinfeld, which provides an “education in plot development.” Can you say more about the importance of popular culture for you, and what you’ve learned from popular culture as a writer? Does popular culture come up frequently in the classes you teach?
DQ: Yes, popular culture is the bedrock of what I do. I talk about assemblages and collage approaches to creative writing, and pop culture kind of reflects those techniques back to me. If my great question is belonging and citizenship and who is in, who is out, the us versus them, pop culture is one of the best signifiers for that work. Pop culture presents cultural touchstones that help define and narrativize who we are. I’ve started working on a memoir-in-essays called Bruh: On Media & Millennial Masculinity. I’m looking at popular culture that has helped shape an entire generation told they never had to grow up. I ask, How does the Nickelodeon generation age gracefully when it was kind of promised an institutionalized Peter Pan syndrome? A few of the essays that are going to make up this book have been published. An essay on Jackass and the idea of the sacred and the profane was published last spring at The Hopkins Review. Popular culture is future history, and I’m serious about that. I’m serious about pop culture as a scholarly exploration. I got to coedit an anthology called Who Makes the Franchise? with a friend and mentor, Dr. Rhonda Knight, in which we gathered reflections on the effects of transmedia storytelling and how large sci-fi/fantasy universes have changed the way we consume narratives.
I geek about finding intersections between Seinfeld and Dostoyevsky, because I’m not sure these things are all that different. Like, you know, if you think about classical literature, Dickens wrote serialized work that the common people were reading. Shakespeare wasn’t as much for the nobility as the groundlings. And these narratives endure. It was popular culture. It stands to reason, current pop culture is going to be the stuff that fuels future historical studies and fields. Why wouldn’t I spend my time looking at the deeper implications of stuff that we think might be unserious? These texts are reflecting something back to us, and that’s why they succeed. So, yeah, let’s have a discourse about The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and #momtok. And you know, let’s look at how this might reflect many of the exigencies affecting our current time. I’m interested in unconventional intersections, because they are just as valuable a scholarly pursuit as any. This discussion reminds me I’m teaching a literature course in the spring at the University of Missouri called Besties, in which we look at literary duos. We’ll start with Don Quixote, and we’re probably going to end with Rick and Morty. It’s all connected. I love taking students on that journey to figure out how popular culture is Culture (capital C), and how it is cultured.
JD: In an interview for your publisher Awst Press, you say: “With everything I write I have one purpose and that is to try to evoke empathy for others. I’m writing to tell the reader something I think I’ve learned about the spaces we share and trying to get them to briefly inhabit another’s point of view.” You develop original approaches in your essays to access other points of view—alternating your consciousness with your first wife’s in one essay, fostering emotional intimacy through the epistolary form in another, balancing the experience of young criminals with the experience of police officers in others. You show how living in Thailand gave you a different perspective on the United States. Could you say more about your efforts to inhabit other points of view and evoke empathy through your writing?
DQ: My short story collection, For Other Ghosts, was entirely an exercise in empathy. Each story was approached with the intention of writing from the perspective of folx vastly different from myself. However, my views on the role of empathy in creative writing are shifting a bit. I am wrestling with the concept of empathy again. I guess I used to feel like creative writing’s greatest purpose was to serve as a kind of empathy machine. Part of me still believes in that purpose, to an extent. But I find myself continually frustrated with the idea that creative writing, specifically by those from marginalized communities, must be created in an effort to get others to empathize. In my workshops I have some rules. I have a ban on the words like (as in, “I like this piece because…”) and relatable. I don’t care if it’s relatable. It doesn’t need to be relatable. A speaker shouldn’t have to be relatable for you to care whether they live or die. A person and/or speaker shouldn’t have to be likable or relatable for the reader to accept the author’s truth and recognize that they are deserving of inalienable freedoms. So, I’m struggling with empathy now. Like, yes, I think writing is one of the greatest tools of empathy. I want writing that generates in me a kind of empathy and understanding. I don’t have to empathize with all of it, but I need something I can glean from it that can make me a better human.
I don’t know.… My answer to this question might be frustrating. It’s kind of like I’m figuring it out?
JD: Like Harbors, which is structured chronologically, To Those Bounded begins when you are in the fourth grade. The numbered sections in To Those Bounded suggest a sequence, but the arrangement is not simply chronological: your structure is complex, with ideas in conversation with one another, themes intersecting and recurring, and ample use of white space. Did you envision your frame and narrative arc from the outset? Is there advice you can give to other writers about how to assemble an essay collection?
DQ: I did not envision the frame of To Those Bounded before I started. Yes, form follows function, and sometimes I think we worry so much about form that we don’t get started. My advice is just get started—get messy, just start writing. I did not know the shape To Those Bounded was going to take. The text informed me, as I was moving forward. It’s that cliché about building the plane while you’re flying it. At the start of the project, I was in a fretful state. I had just returned to the United States after living abroad for more than five years. Trump had just been elected president. My mother was sick. I was going through a divorce. But I kept writing, most of it vague ideas of what I thought a new book would look like. I had to find the form that best fit the message: the myth of Black male criminality is reflective of how often people from marginalized communities feel trapped in these bounded functions of social positioning. It all came to me as a series of thoughts. Some of these pieces were less than a page. Some were couplets, skits, or archive reports. I was like, “What the hell am I even doing?” I was like, “Oh no. I’ve got this contracted book and I don’t know if this is gonna happen.”
This line of thinking leads into another best practice. I stand by this advice. You should be reading more than you’re writing. Every writer, read more than you’re writing, seriously. You end up finding ways of doing what you are trying to accomplish. You start to recognize who you are in conversation with. We are in the twenty-first century. A lot of ground, creatively, has been covered. Why not be in conversation with other authors? Why this idea of trying to outwrite others, or “win” writing, by trying to be the first to ever do something? Sometimes, I think this mindset results in projects that kind of have no soul, because they are all about style and not substance, because they are more about making something that looks inventive.
That was a bit of a digression.… Anyway, I was reading widely and I found Pensées by Blaise Pascal—a series of numbered reflections by this mathematician philosopher. And I was like, “Holy crap. There it is.” I can make a series of numbered reflections about the myth of Black male criminality, about what I’m feeling, and I can enter into meaning-making with the reader—we can build the narrative together. It’ll be a mosaic, an assemblage, and I am leaving meaningful gaps for the reader to fill. I thought of Georges Seurat a lot and pointillism. I’m going to make these dots. I’m going to make these fragments. But when the viewer takes a step back to look at them all together, they’re going to make a larger image. So that is how I settled on that form. But that realization came about over the course of a year or more of fiddling with the form and reading a lot to figure out the best way to shape the book. I was reading as widely as I could, engaging with critical race theory. I started to ask, How does Saidiya Hartman’s work reflect something that I’ve experienced? And how do those intersections then give me language to explain why I’m laughing at a particular joke by Chris Rock? It’s all about finding where these seemingly disparate narratives connect.
SK: What do you hope that readers will take away from To Those Bounded?
DQ: What I hope readers take away from To Those Bounded is a sense of hope. Like, I know things are hard and people are suffering every day, everywhere. But I’ve got to hold onto my faith in us, that we can make this better. I’ve got to believe it. And so, if the stuff I write can get even one person to reconsider our world, then it’s worth it.
JD: You are the founding editor for PAST TEN, a series in which writers look back at their lives ten years ago. When Bailey Gaylin Moore asked me to contribute an essay, I found it more difficult than I expected to reconstruct what I was doing on January 25, 2014! You now have a PAST TEN anthology under contract with Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin, and a reading slated at AWP 2025. In your statement on the editors’ page, you explain that the project began “during a period of acute anxiety and existential crisis” for you, and suggest that “there is value in reflecting on the differences between who you are and who you were.” Can you say more about the project’s beginnings in your own experience, the element of reflection in your own writing, and, more generally, the importance of reflection in creative nonfiction?
DQ: PAST TEN was an effort to save my own life. I have struggled with depression most of my life. This project came at a time when I really needed to reflect on the value of my own life. I came up with this idea because of a question a friend asked me when I was really down. He asked, “Where were you on this day ten years ago?” And it helped tremendously. Afterward I thought, if I could offer other people that opportunity to reflect on their lives, maybe it could provide them a chance at saving themselves, you know, or at least get them to make it another day. The idea ended up connecting with people, and it ended up growing beyond me.
It was just a small blog, and now it’s an upcoming book. The Past Ten, an anthology, is coming out in the spring of 2025. I’m proud of all the work that folks have put into it, all the love. I’m proud of my wife and Editor-in-Chief Bailey Gaylin Moore, who continued the website when I had to step away to finish my doctorate and work on some other projects. I’m so grateful for our managing editor, Kali White VanBaale, for continuing to solicit writers, for seeing the value of the project, what it could mean to people, and doggedly pursuing a book deal for it. Yeah, I’m proud of PAST TEN, and I hope people continue to find it. And, I hope that question “Where were you on this day ten years ago?” continues to encourage people to self-investigate/interrogate and see how change is the only constant. I want it to continue inspiring people to reflect.
This goes back to what I was saying a bit earlier about vulnerability being the engine of nonfiction. We get to that vulnerability through reflection. We need that reflection because it invites the reader into introspection too.
SK: In a recent interview, you say that you just completed a draft of a novel and have returned to the personal essay after several years away from the form. Can you tell us more about those projects and what you’re writing now?
DQ: I finished a draft of a novel called The Waters Rose to Meet Them, which I’m super excited about. Basically, it contemporizes events from the American Civil War. It brings Union General William T. Sherman to an imagined near future in which he is marching across Atlanta and heading to Savannah. Meanwhile, an ESL teacher is attending their estranged sister’s wedding in Savannah. The two stories ultimately collide. I have another novel called The Freedoms of B. Kumasi that is currently on submission—send good vibes, please. It’s about a teenage West African immigrant who’s obsessed with Norman Rockwell and is trying to reconcile this idealized vision of America with what he’s seeing in the United States in the months following 9/11.
I told you about Bruh, the memoir-in-essays on media and millennial masculinity. You all mentioned the book I have under contract with the University Press of Mississippi about the DC Comics hero Mister Miracle. I’m exploring how that character is a signifier for self-emancipation.
You mentioned my podcast, Seinfeld Book Report. I finished up the first season of that this summer and I’m hoping to start recording the second season soon. So, that’s some of what I’ve got going on.
Thank you so much, Jacqueline and Shara. This has been great!
JD & SK: Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions, and for agreeing to judge the CRAFT 2024 Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest!
DONALD QUIST is author of two essay collections, Harbors, a Foreword INDIES Bronze winner and International Book Awards finalist, and To Those Bounded. He has a linked story collection, For Other Ghosts. His writing has appeared in AGNI, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, and was Notable in Best American Essays. He is the creator of the online nonfiction series PAST TEN. Donald has received fellowships from Sundress Academy for the Arts and Kimbilio for Black Fiction. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at University of Missouri. Find him on Instagram @donaldewquist.
JACQUELINE DOYLE’s essays have appeared in EPOCH, The Gettysburg Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Electric Literature, PINCH, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. Her work has been featured in Creative Nonfiction’s Sunday Short Reads and has earned numerous Pushcart nominations and nine Notable citations in Best American Essays. She is a professor emerita at California State University, East Bay, and the associate editor for flash creative nonfiction at CRAFT. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her on Twitter @doylejacq.
SHARA KRONMAL’s essays have appeared in PLEASE SEE ME and in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Her literary translations can be found in Hunger Mountain Review and MAYDAY, and she has written reviews for Necessary Fiction, Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the associate editor for longform creative nonfiction at CRAFT and is a retired physician. She lives in Chicago. Find her on Instagram @skron11.
