Angela Palm is the author of the new book Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere But Here. She edited the anthology Please Do Not Remove, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Ecotone and Midwestern Gothic. She has taught creative writing at Champlain College, among other places, and she lives in Vermont.
Q: Why did you decide to write this memoir, and how did
writing it affect the way you thought about your life and about your childhood
neighbor Corey, who is serving a life sentence for murder?
A: I spent my 20s thinking nothing significant had ever
really happened to me—nothing that was worth writing about. I also mistakenly
believed, at that time, that young people’s stories didn’t much matter in the
literary world.
When I began talking to people about my upbringing in rural
Indiana, revisiting the memories of Corey and of our riverside neighborhood, I
realized it was different than most people’s experiences. I began to write
about the land itself—using the backdrop of place to inform the memories of
that place and vice versa, seeing what epiphanies came from those marriages.
Corey—his life, our relationship, his crime—kept coming to
the fore no matter how I tried to minimize it. I had never really dealt with
the event in a way that put it to rest.
As I pulled together disparate essays to form a book, I did
two things. I went to see Corey in prison—the first time I’d seen him since I
was a teenager. I also made a list. An honest list noting every life decision I
had made that was somehow connected to him.
The list was longer than I wanted to admit to myself. I let
it guide me and embraced the haunting truth of the matter: I had loved a
convicted murderer.
With that new truth, I looked back over the memories of us,
and tried to balance my own sentimentality toward him with the more difficult
realities of his crime and my own past. Only then did the memoir really arrive
at its point.
Visiting him gave me much insight, a fuller picture of both
my life and his. Writing about it gave me clarity, but also confirmed something
else: humans, the best and worst of us, are quite complicated.
In most cases, I think, people are not purely bad or good.
Life is more like one large gray area. And I think that’s a great realization
because it affords all of us the opportunity to foster greater compassion for
one another.
Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify
for you?
A: The river is the center of the book in many ways, as it
was the center of my own childhood. It becomes a metaphor, a guiding force, a
magnet that pulls me back.
I fell in love with the word riverine because of its
meaning: living or situated on the banks of the river. A literal truth for this
book, but more than that. I recast myself, all the river rats—those neighbors
who shaped my early life—as riverine.
I loved the feel of the word in my mouth, its tactility. And
the way it made me feel drenched in river water. I once was, after all. What
could be more apt than that?
Q: Did you plan the structure of the book before you started
writing, or did it develop more organically as you wrote?
A: When I began assembling essays, I knew I wanted to look
at this very particular place in rural Indiana as a kind of sociological
archaeologist would.
I decided to examine the individual layers and try to
determine what they meant, later, when taken together. I would, thus, break the
place down into its parts like a scientist in order to understand their
individual, and then, later, collective influence over me. It was the only way
I could process it all.
I looked at the physical location, the history of the land
which became more complicated the farther back I looked, the agriculture, the
area’s demographics, its religion, its social habitats, all separate from one
another.
Further organization came later, and that was a fruitful way
for me to work. The thematic linkages between the essays became more apparent
toward the end, and I used those, along with chronology, to decide on a final
shape for the material.
Q: In the book, you write about various people in your life,
including Corey and your husband. Have they seen the book, and what do they
think of it?
A: They have both read the book, and they have been very
supportive. They love the writing itself. Corey loves reading about the happier
memories of our childhood.
That said, they’ve each indicated they’d be “fine” with me
never writing about them again. I think that’s a very normal and understandable
reaction. They never asked to be bound to a writer in this way, to be the
subject of anything, but they did give their blessing for this particular story
and I’m grateful for that.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A couple of different things. First, a novel about the
way the internet interrupts the grieving process. Second, a book-length essay
that’s in part related to the character Estella from Great Expectations.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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