An Interview with Corinna Cook
Interviews Editor Esteban Rodríguez speaks with Corinna Cook about her debut essay collection Leavetakings (University of Alaska Press, 2020), an honest and bold book that meditates on home, departure, and the journeys that strengthen our resolve to find meaning in any environment.
Esteban Rodríguez: Tell us about the journey writing these essays in your debut collection, Leavetakings, and how the book as a whole came to be.
Corinna Cook: Leavetakings came to be a collection when I set out to get a bird's eye view of my writing. I looked at essays I'd made over a period of seven or eight years, pulled touchstone themes and places from each, and put these on notecards. My doctoral advisor and I sat on the floor of her office and moved notecards around. A few patterns showed up right away: friendship, for example. Water, especially sea and rain. Lonely travel. We clustered the notecards in different ways and watched how themes rose and fell in emphasis. Outliers ended up at the margins (if it wasn't grounded in Alaska, it didn't belong). And gaps emerged (my narrator tends to be evasive. Who is the "I" inside the voice of these pieces?). Further expansion and arrangement came from this notecard-based line of sight on the book as a whole.
Discrete essays in Leavetakings came out of my notes. For a long time, I took notes on what I heard and saw and read and remembered. When something in my notes got under my skin - an ugliness I glimpsed, often in myself; a loss that wouldn't simmer down; someone's casual, painful remark - I tried to square with it through language. I see my writing self as an oyster, because I write from abrasions and sites of inflammation and try to make things I can live with more coolly.
ER: In the opening essay “A Traverse,” you make an acknowledgment that the land you are traveling is the result of historical events, some of which involve the displacement of people:
My personal lineage on this continent thus includes the displacement of Plains Indians and the linked transformation of open prairie into parceled farmland. History, politics, materiality, and family connect me to the massive agro-industrial complex I’ve had the privilege to largely avoid…
Can you speak more about your awareness of this privilege and why it was essential for you to name it for readers.
CC: I need readers to know up front that the collection's narrator is a white person in North America, and she wrestles with that. This particular passage announces the collection's interest in cross-cultural questions (themes that will come up in essays like "Fluid Places," "The Funeral," "Chenega," "The Cut"...) because the narrator is going to interact with Indigenous people, histories, and literatures in various places throughout the collection.
But in the lines you've selected, the privilege I name is pretty specific. It's a wild gift to grow up in a multiethnic human community that's embedded in a thriving rainforest ecosystem, period. That’s Southeast Alaska, and that’s my bedrock. On one hand, it’s powerful to feel so centered. But on the other hand, it is a limited take on origins. So I've worked hard to get a wider line of sight on the question of "where I come from," and these days, I think about origins both geographically and historically. In other words, I still come from Alaska's fjordlands but I also significantly come from North America's history. And for myself, I started “seeing” that history in the Great Plains before I started learning to see it closer to home. In tracts of industrialized agriculture forces like westward expansion, America's land grab, the present-day grip of monoculture – they lie out in the open right on the surface of the land.
But the truth is probably that history is always lying right out in the open. I'd be gratified if a reader found in this essay some kind of scaffolding they could use to see more of the pasts surrounding them as well.
More personally, my family participated in the US’s westward expansion. There’s a hugely fraught history to consider but embedded in it is the simple fact that my family was able to flee bad politics, find a safe haven, and live well. Clashing responsibilities to people, to narrative, to art, to the land, emerge from this.
ER: Fascinating, Corinna. You definitely grasp the geographical and historical implications of the land that you not only inhabit, but travel. Many writers (regardless of their genre) attempt to achieve this level of awareness, and I wholeheartedly believe you navigate this landscape in a thoughtful and genuine way in the essays in your collection. Not to step out of the text too much, but what would your advice be to writers (as well as readers) who are seeking this connection and consciousness with their surroundings through their writing?
CC: I’ll dodge the question by telling a story. My thinking in the Great Plains passage comes from a friend. He knows my frame of reference (mountains and glaciers and such) but also more psychically, he knows how I shut down. So, he didn't expect me to do so well seeing the Great Plains. I guess he understood I'd get tangled up and miss the whole thing. And he said so. Something like, the monoculture will be hard on you. And then he said one other thing, something much more important but which I don't remember, but it was something like the place is still there, it's all still there, monoculture's just the top layer right now - he didn't say exactly that but he said something that meant for me to think like that.
More conceptually: when a writer wants more expansive knowledge about a past and a place, they do more expansive research. When a writer wants a more expansive awareness, they have to get at their blind spots. Luckily people will tell you - all the time - about the blanks on your map. One option is to work with that. Another option is to be around the watershed with a geologist. They have a funny sense of time and a funny sense of watersheds and it’s a knowledge system that’s good at cracking open pretty much anyone’s sense of history and place.
ER: What’s the most important thing that you have learned about being a writer while composing this book?
CC: An essayist writes in order to think through something. So the essay develops in service of your thinking. But you have to recognize when an essay has taken you as far as it can, and when it has, you have to change the relationship. You have to work in service of the essay. Daryl Farmer told me that. It troubled me and so it stuck. And it is the most important thing I learned about being a writer while composing this book; I learned about keeping my chin up going into and through that specific shift in the writing process when the writer recognizes that her relationship to a piece in progress has to change, makes it so, and goes to work in service of the essay.
ER: Writing is always a balancing act, and often it is a means by which to help the writer. Reading your collection, I was drawn to Gary in the essay "Tending to Bread" and the way making bread gives him peace of mind.
But what intrigues me is that somewhere in the arc of this ongoing relationship, Gary's caring for his food morphs into a sort of caring for himself. He is pulled toward an urgent pace but seeks to live slowly, gently, and perhaps it is that tension that leaves a thin spot in his composure, easily pierced like bubblegum stretched to translucence. It is not the forcefully quit demeanor he cultivates that evens his keel, but rather the ongoing practice of feeding his food, of nurturing the ingredients he will later use to feed himself.
How have you been able to balance writing with your personal life? Is there a distinction between the two? And to what extent do you believe people should be like Gary?
CC: For a human animal to flourish it seems to need food-water-shelter and good ways to live with its unsolvable problems. I'm thinking of the mind and its tendencies toward melancholia. I do not wish Gary's extremes on others, but his commitment to feeding the sourdough is an absolutely good and decent and beautiful way for him to live with existential problems that are persistent/permanent/human. Because full focus on the self can also be a dismally limiting and repetitive arena, I appreciate Gary's commitment to making the day a good one for the microorganisms, or the houseplants, or the dog, or whoever-all's thriving he has a hand in.
How do I balance writing. I do not think that I do. It seems like writing and life are pretty interchangeable descriptions for what's generally going on anyway. I love Mary Ruefle's collected statements that get at what she calls the madness of writing - "it takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing" (Gertrude Stein); "I waste a lot of time... the problem is you can't really use this wasted time. You have to have it wasted” (John Ashbery); "I seek an extended period of time, free from all distraction, so that I might be free to be distracted" (Mary Ruefle). Far niente, in a nutshell. Essential.
ER: You did your PhD at the University of Missouri, and in the last essay “The Cut,” we see you and your friend Rachel traversing the “four thousand miles of national parks and back roads” to arrive at Missouri. I’m reminded, however, of this paragraph in the essay “Chenega”:
To rebuild is to start from the place. Remake what used to be right there, on the very same ground. But to relocate is to depart from the place. To relocate is to start from the idea. Relocation carries the memory of idea to a new place, and the new place hatches that wise, resilient, tenacious idea back into the world. Continuity and discovery share, in relocation, common cause.
What did leaving Alaska reveal about you? What ideas were changed? Reinforced?
CC: Here is the math/my timeline: Eighteen years in Alaska. Four years in southern California. Six years in Alaska. Five years in Missouri. One year in Yukon. Alaska since then. Cumulatively that makes ten years outside the state. But in real life it's only nine years elsewhere because Yukon is a kindred spirit.
What leaving reveals about me: mostly that I am a whiner. I've spent plenty of time feeling homesickness as my primary emotion and I've been vocal about it. I think of the wailing women hired to join in Roman/Greek funeral processions and increase the public display of sorrow to help appease the gods. Except I do my wailing for myself.
Also, I suppose you could say my repeated leaving reveals a core restlessness, but I'd like to assert a rich kind of restlessness as opposed to a troubled one. One vantage point is just not enough. Is it Hemingway? Who tells us if you want to write about Paris go to Ohio? And if you want to write about Ohio go to Paris? Well, to me the kernel of truth there is bigger than writing, it's about thinking/sensing/perceiving. If you want to rigorously perceive a place you have to leave it. And live with the loneliness of that.
Ideas changed from leaving Alaska: my sense of smallness increased, but I don't know how much of an idea that is. The main thing that changed was not an idea so much as translation skills. Or code switching. And an increased ability to anticipate assumptions and blind spots, especially my own but significantly also others'. Actually, I don’t want to call these things skills and abilities. I mean that leaving for me created a more fragmented mind and spirit. Which I value very much. Though this too is lonely.
Ideas reinforced from leaving Alaska: king salmon very likely is the truest of the one true truths. Yes. Fish at the heart of it.
ER: Where do you hope to see Leavetakings in five, 10, 20 years from now? And what relationship do you envision it having with your future work?
CC: One possible perfect future for Leavetakings would have it participating in a set of various conversations: conversations about form and language, conversations about inter-, cross-, and multi- cultural realities, and conversations about philosophies or even poetics of place. It would deeply satisfy me if one day this essay collection had its slot of shelf space in a handful of different areas like that.
Either way, this collection will be a special kind of grandmother to my future work. Everything that I still want to write a book about is probably planted in there. On the concrete end, I'm currently writing an ekphrastic essay collection about the ecologies and histories of Southeast Alaska and southern Yukon. That project uptakes a couple specific elements from Leavetakings: "Fluid Places" hooked me on ekphrasis (dialoguing with art), my formal method in this current Alaska-Yukon project. And thematically, essays from Leavetakings like "Chenega," "The Funeral," and "The Cut" crystallized the society and culture questions I’m writing about in this new project. I expect future nuggets to come up similarly: as returns to what’s cracked open here.
