Clouds of Knowledge with Their Ears Open

Ari Braverman interviews Claire Donato about “Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts.”

By Ari BravermanAugust 9, 2024

• Fiction

CLAIRE DONATO’S recent collection of stories, Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (2023), is a book as spacious and unpredictable as thought. It’s impossible to summarize, and listing its attributes and referents—Simone Weil, Daisies (1966), bee sex, M. F. K. Fisher, sexting, psychoanalysis, and Twin Peaks (1990–91), among others—provides a paltry glimpse into the depth and breadth of the author’s preoccupations. Still, I’ve done my best to gesture toward the book’s shape and feel.

As the cadence of its title suggests, the volume is made of two halves. The first is a collection of short stories that are pared down and associative and hallucinatory, laced with humor and a wry, wraithlike tenderness. “Colour Green” tells the story of the titular album by Sibylle Baier, the narrator slipping between text and lust, self and interlocutor, flesh and plant life. Another piece, “Empathy,” meditates on the letter forms of the English alphabet, San Diego and Tijuana’s Friendship Park, and the vagaries of text-crushing on a man with a dying wife. The book’s second half, titled Gravity and Grace, The Chicken and the Egg, or: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, is a novella composed of cooking vignettes. Each indicates the simultaneous luxury and vulnerability that accompanies cooking your own food, a single serving at a time, during the isolation of COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. The pandemic hangs like a pall over the whole book and places it in the precarious now—isolation and rumination are interrupted only when narrator-Claire FaceTimes a friend on the opposite coast.

Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts is also a trove of form-busting play. Donato includes video stills, art images, concrete poems, and emoji drawings made only of punctuation marks. The combination of Donato’s near-ruthless intelligence and her gymnastic ability with language runs beneath everything like a spine. She invites the reader to gaze into the incandescence of experience, even as it’s mediated by the mechanisms of English and the internet.

A few months ago, Donato and I met at her apartment in Bed-Stuy to talk about the book over pad thai and sparkling cider. It was the perfect context and the perfect assortment of tastes for the moment.

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ARI BRAVERMAN: The stories in this book have the veneer of autobiography. The narrator we’re fastened to, for example, is called Claire, and she bears many resemblances to you. But you’re very clear that you consider them fictions—and you don’t say “autofictions.” How come?

CLAIRE DONATO: I have some resistance to autofiction that has to do with gender. When women write autofiction, it can get written off as “just making confessional work.” And marketing in the United States has divorced autofiction from its French roots. If anything, I feel identified with the French origins of autofiction, and I’m teaching a course in fall 2024 on autofiction at Pratt Institute that will further explore its French origins. I recently read in an article by Hywel Dix that autofiction is basically the “black sheep” of French critical theory, and part of a constellation that also includes feminism, intertextuality, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and structuralism. Which blew my mind—that autofiction is a lens for reading rather than a form or genre. The term autofiction burgeoned in 1973, when writer and theorist Serge Doubrovsky first jotted it down in a personal notebook he was keeping adjacent to his psychoanalytic treatment. Slowly, over time, Doubrovsky developed tenets of what autofiction is (which, Dix argues, is why the term is the black sheep of French critical theory—because it was slow and imprecisely defined). For example, autofiction is different from autobiography because autofiction presents facts of a narrator’s life that need to be called into question by the reader precisely because the narrator is the person relaying her life’s facts. This is the opposite of what’s referred to as “the autobiographical pact” in confessional writing, in which personal facts are assumed to be true because the autobiographer lived these facts and is relaying them. Autofiction, too, is almost a self-deprecating moniker; it’s not self-reverential enough to be an autobiography.

Along these lines, I think of my use of the Claire narrator in Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts as a kind of clown avatar or form of self-flagellation. I somewhat identify with my understanding of this French mode of autofiction, but I hesitate to publicly call the book autofiction, though that’s what I’m doing by talking about it here, because there is so much fiction that is not in any way a fictionalized autobiography in the collection.

You’ve already started to answer my next question—about which writers and artists have been touchstones for you. Do you see yourself writing in any kind of lineage?

I see my writing as coming out of a lot of different lineages. My mom is French. I was born here; she emigrated when she was 23, so French writing in English translation has always been important to my practice. Like the character Claire in “Colour Green,” I’m not fluent in French anymore—my first language is fragmented. I spoke it as a child, started school, and then began to speak English at home. But French literature became important to me as soon as I became serious about writing. I love Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Sophie Calle, Marie Redonnet, Édouard Levé—that feels like one point in the constellation of influences.

Then there are peers whose writing is important to me. Amina Cain’s short story collection Creature (2013) is my favorite book on earth. I bring it on airplanes so that if I die in a plane crash, at least that book is with me—even if Real Housewives of New York City is on the screen in front of my face. I also love Patrick Cottrell’s work; I think Anna Moschovakis is one of the most amazing living novelist-poet-translators. I love my friend Alexis Almeida’s work. I love Christopher Rey Pérez’s work. I love Sarah Bernstein’s new novel Study for Obedience (2023)—I feel an unusual kinship with the sense she makes with sound. Blake Butler’s work is important to me. Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book (2015) is one of my favorite books on earth. Megan Boyle’s Liveblog (2018) is great. I could recite books all day! When I was younger, I was virtually involved in an alt-lit–adjacent world. Recently, I described this as being at the pool party, sitting at the edge of the pool while everybody else was in the pool.

Beyond all of this, I formally studied poetry from age 16 until the end of grad school, and I’m still deeply involved in poetry communities in New York. I sometimes teach senior thesis in poetry at Pratt, and I’ve done a number of events at the Poetry Project. There are many poets who are important to my work, some of whom are concrete poets: bpNichol, Aram Saroyan, N. H. Pritchard, and others. In graduate school at Brown University, I studied with C. D. Wright and Keith Waldrop, both of whom were extraordinary writers. I love Lyn Hejinian’s work too, and Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004) was a book I read early that cracked the possibilities of literary art open for me. This isn’t a complete genealogy at all; it’s just to say, I’m coming from many different pockets.

This confirms what I was thinking about reading your new book, that you write outside of genre. If I had to, I’d say you were a hybrid writer. Is that a term you think is appropriate?

I don’t think about the question of genre very much anymore, but I did a lot in my twenties. At that time I was applying for a lot of academic work, so I needed to frame what I was doing, and I didn’t know how to do that. I write across forms and media, and in my applications I’d say I was “genre-fluid,” and the response from interviewers would be “but genre means romance or mystery,” and I thought, “Well, fuck.”

I started teaching senior thesis at Pratt Institute a number of years ago and the students in that class were making poetry books and works in multidimensional forms—hybrid books and mutant texts; these terms come via Tarpaulin Sky Press, an early publisher of my first novella, Burial—and those monikers felt appropriate. I’m drawn toward a fluidity of form.

In 2008, I went to Brown for my MFA in literary arts. It was the first place where I began to explore “cross-genre” writing—I think it was called that at the time. That moment was formative in my life, moving from poetry—the genre into which I was admitted as a graduate student—to fiction, while also studying electronic literature and text-based visual art. That made me feel like a “cross-genre” writer, so that’s the term I used. That was also around the time when the American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (2009), edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John, came out.

Will you define electronic literature for our readers?

For our readers, electronic writing, also known as “writing digital media” or “digital language art,” is writing that engages digital tools within the computer, or that is produced for a digital medium. A poem might be coded using JavaScript; somebody might write a text in the URL web browser entry field; someone might write a novel on Twitter—which is not called Twitter anymore!—or, more contentiously, using AI. People do digitally augmented performances. VR goggles have been used to make digitally augmented work. One of my favorite works of digital poetry is Allison Knowles’s 1967 change-derived computer poem “The House of Dust.”

Did you include video stills in your book as a gesture towards electronic writing?

Maybe unconsciously! I’m interested in how the digital can be translated into analog forms. How can a meme exist on paper? How can a screenshot of one millisecond of live-stream footage via the Aquarium of the Pacific suddenly become part of an archive that exists not online but in a physical book? Including the screen capture in a book memorializes it in a particular way. The image circulates in a print run of 1,500, if not more; it becomes replicated and replicated and replicated in a way that wouldn’t otherwise happen if the screenshot hadn’t been taken, if the choice hadn’t been made. My friend Amalia Soto (a.k.a. Molly Soda) helped me think about this. The bee sex images in my book, which I culled from Google and converted into screen-captured images, are not just copy-pastes; the specter of human decision-making haunts these screenshots. The stills from Daisies with the YouTube framing around them in the book are also self-captured.

It felt very pointed that these were stills captured from watching a movie or a clip on your computer.

In my mind, taking a screenshot is a mode of ekphrasis, a form of transdisciplinary writing. There’s a translation of the film or the clip, and writing happens in conversation with starting and stopping and screen-capturing and studying, which prolongs the film and chops it up, navigating collage as a theme too.

It’s clear you’ve amassed quite a body of knowledge. To me, “erudition” is easy to associate with a kind of locked-up structural rigor. But one of the exciting things about this book is that its learnedness and its gesturality braid together, touch each other, playfully. This seems like the opposite of being a control freak with your writing.

Maybe it’s an instinct question—setting it free. I don’t work with preformatted structures or outlines. I’m interested in the associations that emerge when one is thinking on the page and how the unconscious reveals itself through that process. I would say the writing burgeoned from trust in free association, serious play, and ways I learned to engage with language via my personal psychoanalytic treatment.

There’s an internal structure to my book insofar as I do consider it a diptych: short stories in part one, then the novella that serves as a coda, or part two. Some stories are flash prose fictions, almost prose poem length; some stories (as well as the novella) are imbued with images as text. I methodically thought about those architectural choices as I was making the book.

The book’s playfulness also has to do with deep curiosity and hunger for writing across many words—I don’t want to say across genres. The book is voracious—and I’m a voracious reader of all texts, across forms and media, letting all that into the poetry of my practice. I don’t know that I know any of the texts that I engage in the book, but I listen to them. Knowledge to me is a scary word. Jamieson Webster has a quote where she says (I think), “knowledge clouds listening.” I used to have that on a Post-it over my desk. If I’m misremembering it, that is a lovely parapraxis. To think of knowledge obfuscating listening, and also clouds of knowledge with their ears open …

How does psychoanalysis inform your writing?

I feel like I don’t know anything about psychoanalysis, even though I’ve been in psychoanalysis since April 2017, and have been part of a psychoanalytic training institute, ostensibly to become an analyst, or … this term is cringey, but people in the field say “psychoanalyst-in-formation.” I guess that technically is what I’ve been for the past year and a half.

I’m in psychoanalysis a few days a week, and it’s helped loosen up my thoughts over time. I’m historically not that comfortable talking aloud—I can be clumsy. I tend to think in images, and often when I’m trying to articulate something in an image, it becomes opaque and whoever I’m with can’t follow what I’m saying. But, whether it’s from lying on a couch and looking at a blank ceiling and saying whatever comes into my mind or associating face-to-face with someone, I’ve become more comfortable with talking thanks to the consulting room. As I mentioned, I trust free association on the page as part of my writing process. The page is a field. And, while editing this book, I spent a lot of time going back and looking at sentences to figure out if they were saying what I (or they) wanted to say. As an editor of my own work, I can help a sentence say what I didn’t quite know I (or they) wanted to say but did want to. I like finding the unknown.

Freud thought about psychoanalysis as an art and a science, so it occupies a strange terrain. Most analysts write about being analysts. I’ve written a lot about being an analysand, about transference, and about the existential mirrors one encounters in a psychoanalytic consulting room, particularly in relation to one’s analyst. All of this is exciting to me, and all of this also contributes to my deep ambivalence about being a “psychoanalyst-in-formation.” I’m attached to being an analysand—maybe it’s a way to remain a child. Yet about psychoanalysts, as I recently read in Janet Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981):

If the full experience of termination [in analysis] is a kind of existential rite of passage—a sojourn in the desert, a final stoical acceptance of the uncertainties of adulthood and the inevitability of death—then analysts never grow up and never have to die. The people who instruct others on serious and final things themselves remain Peter Pans, indefinitely staving off adulthood and extinction in the Never-Never Land of analytic practice and institutional politics.

So the jury’s out on who’s avoiding growing up.

I recently completed a new essay called “Kind Windows, Ugly Psychoanalysis,” which I read at Poetry and Psychoanalysis, an event at the Poetry Project curated by Ethan Philbrick that also featured Nuar Alsadir. In that essay, I think about psychoanalysis in terms of hauntings, and in terms of a particular theatricality in which a consulting room is a stage where a haunting is replayed.

Ghosts factor into your book in a serious way. Tell me more about ghosts and hauntings.

If you look up my address online, you’ll see that I live in a building that’s also a psychic medium’s business. I’ve lived in this apartment for almost a decade, and I’ve experienced numerous hauntings here, interactions with different ghosts over time. Ghosts haunt. When I’m haunted, I want to know what the haunting means—but, as I’ve said, I have trouble with what it means to know. There’s something vast and unknowable about a haunting. It breaks the dimension of the reality we’re in, because we don’t know what a ghost is. Maybe a ghost is an enactment of “I don’t know.”

I can also think of haunting as an intergenerational transmission. In France, my grandfather carved gravestones, and my grandmother sold flowers to people visiting the cemetery where those gravestones were placed. So, there’s death-work in my family. Maybe that’s been transmitted, and ghosts are also a way to be connected to this ancestry and this language that feels fragmented inside me.

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Claire Donato is the author of Burial (2013), a novella, and The Second Body (2016), a full-length collection of poems. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, and recent writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Chicago Review, Forever, BOMB, The Elephants, DIAGRAM, and GoldFlakePaint. Currently, she works as acting chairperson of writing at Pratt Institute, where she received the 2020–2021 Distinguished Teacher Award. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat Woebegone.