Architectures of Memory
A Conversation with Nicole McCarthy
During my last year at college, the house I grew up in entered foreclosure. For a variety of financial reasons, my parents weren’t able to keep up with the mortgage, and they moved back to the house we had lived in previously. It was a difficult time, especially when I returned to a place I had not lived in for almost fifteen years. With no real job lined up and with very little motivation to start a “career,” I had to adjust to this old house as best as I could, relearn the nuances of the creaky linoleum, the squeaky doors, the low ceiling, the consistently cold water from the shower, and the unevenness of a floor that was built by my grandfather more than half a century earlier. The fragments of happy memories I had didn’t provide enough comfort for me to feel as though I truly belonged. Reading Nicole McCarthy’s debut book, A Summoning (Heavy Feather Review, 2022) , I felt a strong connection to the ways in which McCarthy navigates not only the confinements and liberties of living in an arrangement we call home, but the memories we attached to those physical spaces and how meaningful or traumatic they become long after we leave them.
Nicole McCarthy is an experimental writer|poet|artist from the pacific northwest. Her written & visual pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in: PANK, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Offing, Redivider, The Shallow Ends, Punctuate. a Nonfiction Magazine, The Fem Lit Journal, Ghost Proposal, Civil Coping Mechanism's A Shadow Map anthology, the 2018 Best American Experimental Writing anthology from Wesleyan University Press, and more. I had the privilege of discussing A Summoning with Nicole, the writing process, and so much more.
Esteban Rodriguez: Nicole, it is a pleasure. A Summoning is quite the book. Part nonfiction, part poetry, part visual labyrinth that engages readers with competing voices, statements, and phrases that ultimately speak about memory, relationships, and the complexity that goes into making life-changing choices, A Summoning is nothing short of a moving book. Where did the idea for this book first come from, and how did you go about incorporating these different yet relevant elements into your work?
Nicole McCarthy: Wow, thank you! I had been blending text and visuals for some time before this project grew into a book, but it really hit me in grad school when I was working with Renee Gladman, who eventually became my thesis advisor for the manuscript. She had been encouraging me to explore more of the concepts of memory I was approaching in my work, and I kept thinking about the houses throughout my life that contained some of my best and worst moments, and I thought: what would happen if I showed people how those memories ‘look’ in my mind? Once I finished the first series of blueprint pieces, it was like I had touched a live wire - I knew I had started something significant.
From there I just started writing piece after piece, thinking about what I wanted to do with the book. I knew from a large scale I wanted a conceptual nonfiction book about how tricky memory can be as it lives in our bodies, and then I thought about how I wish I could change some of my memories: painful ones from an abusive past relationship, fresh ones that I wanted to protect, even memories I didn’t have but wished I did. That’s when the heart of the book emerged: I would experiment with my own memories through exercises in the book and through the process of frequent recall and reading of this collection, with the idea that overtime my memories will have adapted to some of the changes. The scientific and historical micro essays peppered throughout the book serve as the foundation to support my theory that memories can be permanently altered.
ER: That’s quite amazing, the fact that the writing led to you solidifying your theory about memories. As you thought about the houses that you’ve occupied throughout your life, how did your ideas of home change? Are they the same now as they were when you began writing A Summoning?
NM: I realized that we never really have a home that stays, if that makes sense. I feel that the idea of home only exists in memory, which almost makes it more heartbreaking because of how easily it is to lose it. I think about our attachment to place and how it almost serves as a character when we recollect our memories. But oftentimes it's a character that you can no longer visit - I can’t walk around the house that appears in the book anymore, feeling how the sunlight used to filter through my writing room window; it belongs to another family now. I can still visit my childhood home, where my mom still lives, but it’s 30 years of memories competing for brain space. We tie so much of our memories and ourselves to significant homes throughout our lives, and what happens when those structures are restricted from us? Or torn down completely? It can feel gutting, like the moments didn’t really happen.
Right now I’m packing up an apartment that I have loved to move somewhere 70 miles away, and although I know I’m going to build more memories in the new house, I’m still so torn to leave this place knowing I won’t be able to access it anymore. After writing this book, I started taking more day to day photos and videos of the places I inhabit, just to keep record in a different way.
ER: Photographs and videos are definitely a way in which we can keep in touch with the past and the memories that live there. And your book does exactly that on a visual level, with blueprints and photos providing both a pause in the text and a momentum that builds upon already layered memories. Toward the beginning of the collection, we see floorplans of a house, and toward the end, we seeing a home through an aerial, Google Maps-like view (both of which are punctuated by short texts):
If we examine our home (as both a physical place and emotional state) through all points of view, we might find that we gain perspectives that we would not have otherwise seen. Can you speak more about the visual aspects of your book and how you decided which to include and where in the narrative?
NM: These visual pieces were moments that occurred in my life that are taking up space in my body. They were things I have been ruminating on for awhile in the back of my mind that I knew needed to be communicated, adding new layers to the overall concept of the book. Just like the section in the book where the narrator has muscle knots being worked out of her body, that’s how I felt about certain moments in my life and they came to be expressed in these blueprints. And as the science shows, in moments of trauma or fear, the amygdala captures quick visuals as opposed to concrete memories.
This body of work together is meant to be fluid, so we’re moving from one concept or style before quickly shifting to another and eventually swinging back to something we touched on previously. The visuals throughout the book tie ideas together, but also encourage the reader to stop for a moment and consider their own memories and how they live in their body.
So if the historical and scientific essays form the firm foundation of the book, the lyrical pieces are the rooms and the visual pieces are the incorporeal beings that bring life into the house. That’s what I was going for.
ER: Were there images that were left out? Are you working on something currently that is being written in the same manner?
NM: All the visuals I created for the book are included, and I created additional ones through the final review process with my publisher. I had finished this book in 2017, so diving back into the material in 2021, after a divorce and the passing of my grandma, brought new layers to the manuscript that it really needed. I did create a video essay that opens the book, a summoning of the memory goddess Mnemosyne, but it’s online only.
I’m working on my second nonfiction collection focusing on marriage and divorce and there will be a layer of visuals to it, as well as a series of video pieces that accompany the book.
I’m also nearly done with the first draft of a horror novel, which was a surprise result of the pandemic.
ER: As you mentioned above, you had finished your book in 2017, but returned to it four years later. I’ve often found myself returning to work I wrote five years ago, even ten. When you came back to your work, did it surprise or excite you in any way? Did it still feel fresh?
NM: There was a certain element of surprise when I revisited it because I hadn’t opened it in so long. I was able to take the four years that had passed and look at the existing pieces from a new lens. In that time I had also become obsessed with the micro essay, so I went through existing passages and tightened the prose, leaving only what needed to be there to be most impactful. Through that process I also saw how much I had changed as a writer from 2017 to 2021, which I wasn’t expecting but was delighted to discover.
If people can take the time to let written work sit, even for just a year, it’s remarkable to see the new life you can bring to a piece. We very much live in an industry that values only selling a product, and needing to turn a product as quickly as possible, but I feel it’s a massive detriment to the creative process. Live with your art, let it breathe, come back to it, then listen to the piece and let it tell you where it needs to go.
ER: What does your writing process look like? What are a few things (objects, people) that are with you during your creative endeavors?
NM: My writing process is all over the board right now, but I’m hoping in the new year to work on my creative discipline. Currently though, I try to write, even for just an hour, on a weeknight or two, then I devote several hours to writing on Sunday. My husband is also a writer, so we have coffee shop writing dates frequently, especially when we’re working on book-length projects. Something that also helps me significantly is our walk and talks in the spring and summer—we’ll find a local walking trail and over the course of 3 - 4 miles, we’ll talk about our writing projects, what we’re stuck on, what we’d like to try, etc. We bounce creative ideas off of each other, which has helped me more times than I can recall. It’s one of my favorite creative processes because although I’m not actually writing, I’m getting outside of my head enough to brainstorm and dream up what’s possible.
ER: I want to go back to the text a bit and discuss the section where various bodily systems are explained in the form of past scenes. You detail the circulatory system, the muscular, the reproductive, and the endocrine, the last of which is written with so much insight and tension:
ENDOCRINE: My menstrual blood set you off, knowing it bewitched me; replenished the power to my senses—a natural repellent to your good ol’ country boy.
I’d let it run wild between thick thighs, savor in the space it created apart from you—
But I lived & breathed by the Ten Commandments of you because you told me to. If you’d raised your hand high, to strike or condemn, ruling menstruation a sin I would have plugged it up & prayed god to take the power from my undeserving ovaries.
How did this section come about? And how did you approach writing about the body?
NM: I’ve always been fascinated and terrified by the human body, so a lot of my work in the past has focused on our relationships to them and society’s interpretation of them. When I set out to write about memory, I knew there was no way I could do it without it being a bodily experience.
I believe when people think about memory, they think about the brain being the only processor, but it’s a visceral entire body process. Every system in our body plays a part in collecting and retaining memories, especially moments of trauma. Our muscles remember tension, our skin can break out in sweat, and our nerves are live wires in our bodies when in the moment or reflecting back on a moment.
More specifically, this whole piece came about from an awful time of my life. When faced with any form of abuse or gaslighting or someone who is an unashamed alcoholic, the body is constantly in a state of alert, which runs your body ragged. You find you would do any level of pacification of your partner just for a bit of calm, and that manipulation is so strong it can force you to sacrifice your own values. Not only did I research what happens to the body under extreme amounts of stress, but I went through meditations that reviewed these harmful memories and I wrote down how my body reacted. I even went so far as driving out to the country town I lived in and documented how I was feeling. This piece was written to shed light on the whole body process that memory is and how our bodies can feel polluted by certain memories.
ER: You mention that you went driving out into the country to document your feelings. Writing no doubt prompts us to do things we didn’t necessarily see ourselves doing (going down rabbit holes on random subjects on the internet; traveling to places we have never been before; putting ourselves in the shoes of others). What else has writing prompted you to do? Either for the benefit of your writing or for yourself?
NM: My writing has, at times, put me in the strangest places. I’ve done in-person performances in which the text is composed right at that moment; I’ve found myself out in farmlands or forests or coffee shops open all night. I can’t say my writing has led me anywhere wild yet, but certainly places I don’t feel safe. I would love to envelope myself in a new style of writing that leads me to unpredictable situations that push on my boundaries.
ER: Now that the book is living and breathing in the world, how has the experience been? What have you learned about yourself throughout the process?
NM: It’s been wild. I’m so proud of the whole body of work and how it’s come together, but what has impacted me the most are the individuals who reach out to me – in person or on social media – to let me know how the book has touched them. I wrote this book, in large part, to work through my trauma and to try and understand our bodies better, but also so people who have been in similar situations themselves can feel less alone. We’re a community of disconnected people, carrying these memories in our muscles, but this helps form a crucial connection. I’ve had fascinating / heartbreaking conversations with people after my readings about their own experiences with memory, and it’s been a fulfilling experience I did not expect.
Regarding the book and the concept at its center, I think it’ll take more time for my memories to shift. I try to alternate what I’m reading at events, calling upon and editing certain memories, and it does make me feel like I’m taking more power back from the past.
