Photo credit: Alijah Heser

Interview by Malavika Praseed

In November 2024, Malavika Praseed spoke with Lauren W. Westerfield regarding her collection Depth Control: Essays and Autofictions, forthcoming in April 2025 from Unsolicited Press. Below this interview is an excerpt from this book titled, “Cramping at the Bone.” The excerpt first appeared in print in Denver Quarterly (January 2020).

Malavika: I’d like to start with your subtitle, “essays and autofictions.” To me, those are categories that by nature have a considerable amount of overlap, but also some pretty distinct differences. Do you find genre boundaries to be a hindrance, a necessary constraint?

Lauren: When it comes to genre boundaries, I don’t have a particularly firm philosophy on it, but I’ve always discovered a lot as a writer when I’m encouraged to jump across boundaries and explore hybridity. I love reading within that space, so I think the essays and autofictions are a kind of “both and.” The statement of the subtitle works for me because my writing does hop around in those spaces, and not to mention some poetry as well. Autofiction and poetry work well together, since the speaker is an ‘I’ that is also not the ‘I’ and it’s not the poet, but sometimes it is the poet. I was a creative nonfiction grad student who took a lot of poetry classes, and I used to talk with my poet friends about the freedom of being the speaker, while nonfiction writers have this responsibility to own the ‘I.’ So I love the in-between where there’s room to work from lived experience, writing an essay that’s truly essaying and attempting to seek truth and understanding, but also knowing there’s the creative opportunity to verge away from stark reality or journalistic accuracy. Letting the reader know, especially in the subtitle of the book, that I’m going to play with some imaginative and literal spaces. I’ll also say that the subtitle originally was Essays and Studies, with more things that looked like poems, and the idea of ‘studies’ were sketches, like visual art studies before a finished painting. I ended up moving away from some of those poet-y pieces and more toward the realm of autofiction. But it could’ve been a lot of things depending on the day and the mood.

Malavika: You basically touched on my next question, and that was referring to the poet-y pieces of this. I wondered, Why not include poetry or poems in that subtitle? What makes this not poetry? Obviously that gets very abstract. I’m thinking specifically of “Indentations” and some of the other essays with verse-like elements.

Lauren: To address some carryover, I did feel like I was writing some of this poetry-esque content. I published a few of the poems as poems on their own, but at the end of the day I looked at the manuscript with the poems and felt they weren’t super strong on their own as poems. Having worked with so many brilliant poets who were clearly poets, and also wonderful prose writers, it felt almost appropriative to call some of my poetry ‘poetry’ in a book. I feel funny to say this on the record here. I was studying poetry, experimenting, reading, analyzing, but I kept talking about the relationship about nonfiction and poetry and having that conversation about the speaker and the self and, well, irritating my friends in workshop. “That’s just not how it is in poetry; it’s not the self, it’s the speaker.” And I said, “Well, what if it is?” And they said, “OK, go back to nonfiction.” Also, the book felt tighter and stronger without many of the poems. The rest felt more like these changeling things and fit in with the experimentations of language.

Malavika: I’m also curious about some of the subject matter. Of course it’s difficult to sum up this body of work because it spans not only genres but topics. I’m always eager to look at an author’s epigraphs to get the gist of what they’re writing into, and I think your epigraphs do such a service, focusing on mind-body duality and the visceral with the metaphysical. Some of the braided essays have these highly visceral topics juxtaposed with musings on language and grammar. Did you come to this collection with that ethos in mind first, or is it something you found while writing, coming back to over and over?

Lauren: I’ve had conversations with folks about, “OK, brass tacks, what is this book about?” I’d say a coming-of-age-slash-relationship story. The actual narrative isn’t weird or experimental at all, but within it there’s this mind-body dualism, differentiation, melding, the desire and struggle to integrate those things within the context of emotional, visceral, erotic scenarios. It’s part of the investigation. I don’t have the quote handy, but I’ll paraphrase Maggie Nelson: She’s talking in an interview, and they ask if she really uses big theoretical terms after lovemaking or in the shower, and she was like, “Well, yeah, I do. If I’m reading Judith Butler and then I’m shaving my legs, that’s what I’m thinking about.” That’s not the quote, but it’s something along those lines. If you’re steeped in these philosophical questions as a reader, thinker, student, and you’re also existing in a body doing bodily normal human things, those things overlap in a very normal way. It can pop up while you’re at the gym, not just listening in a lecture. That was something I knew about myself but never explored in writing, and I enjoyed playing with that idea in this collection. What is the speaker/self trying to get at or embody in connection with language, since language is so integral to the self?

Malavika: I found myself thinking a lot of this too, especially in some of the more personal pieces. For example, in “Cramping at the Bone,” the way you braid that piece with a very immediate emotional section beginning with the ‘you’ and it narrows that narrative distance, then we have sections that take a step back and we’re analyzing the word ‘subject,’ what it means, different ways to look at the word and how to pronounce it. It made me wonder: Do we use these forays or this extending of narrative distance to protect ourselves—a necessary step back—or does that distance give us the perspective we need?

Lauren: There’s a genuine ‘figuring it out’ here in this piece, trying to figure out how I’m feeling, and maybe some of those braided elements serve as scaffolding, and then in revision there’s some smoothing out of that and more intentionality brought in. But I know some of these pieces have a very real immediacy, kind of Didionesque. I’m writing to understand what I think. So, some of it maybe is self-protective sure, but also journalistic, analyzing the sources to see what I have to work with. Finding the thesis in real time on the page. Some of the white space, the experimental formal work, and some of the braided approaches do allow for some protection for the vulnerabilities, but there’s also something important about the reality that thinking and feeling are not discrete from one another. It’s not in a vacuum. I’m always trying to have it both ways in the writing. In graduate school it was a necessary hybrid writing, thinking, existing experience, very much steeped in that academic time, which was also an intense personal time. You know as an MFA student, I’m sure you can relate to that. There’s a residency, but you’re also a new mom—there’s all kinds of living and thinking happening at once.

Malavika: Talk about duality: I turned in my thesis two days after my daughter was born. Thankfully it was done ahead of time! Anyway, the last topic I wanted to bring up is the editing process. For example, “Dark Storage”—that’s a piece built on musing and wandering from topic to topic. How and when do you rein yourself in, and how do you maintain focus when there can be this impulse to wander and maybe to drift off-topic to ramble? My first braided essay juxtaposed my ethnic identity with my experiences watching and following baseball with my father. And so there were all these sections of baseball trivia and you know, little minutiae here and there, and everywhere I go I was adding and adding and adding, and the hardest part for me was paring it down and finding what I needed to say. So, I’m always interested in how other writers approach that.

Lauren: What you described is what happens to me with almost all these pieces. These essays were much longer and had to be pared down, less true with the most diffuse, across the page pieces, like “On Shame” and “Indentations,” although the latter originally took a completely different form and was also kind of scattered across the page. And then I played around with different ways to shape it until it took the form that it does here. And that was the editing process. It’s sort of a visual line break compression experiment that was echoed later with an essay like “Cramping at the Bone.” But everything else for the most part—most of these were just so much longer—were completely different essays until I was able to kind of distill the aboutness here. It just takes time. I think time and some good readers. I’m getting nostalgic about my MFA. It was quite a number of years ago now, but it’s hard not to just get very nostalgic about it, thinking about how wonderful it was to have so many good readers surrounding me at the time that I was working through approaches to the essays. Even the ones that were written relatively quickly often were long first and compressed down. It’s funny you mentioned “Dark Storage.” I think I had a bit more of a sense of what I was trying to do with it, a bit less of an editing monster than with some of the others. I was thinking about the mapping of place, the photography terminology, tagging back to Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” essay. There are some direct if not exact syntactical choices from that essay. All of these were touch points that did rein in the essay as I was going along. Didion’s essay isn’t very long, yet it captures that hinge-point of leaving New York for Los Angeles, and so I was leaving Los Angeles for Idaho and playing with that idea. Having a particular work as inspiration is one way to get a bit more of a framework rather than digressing all over the page. Maggie Nelson was a huge influence on my work; she has used the phrase of having a ‘ghost book’ for her books, a book that in some form or another is inspiring the shape or structure of the work in progress.

Malavika: It’s like we planned these questions ahead of time! You mentioned Joan Didion and Maggie Nelson—are there other writers you consider yourself to be in conversation with?

Lauren: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers [by Bhanu Kapil] sort of stumbled upon me. I found it at a crucial juncture, and I was so excited. It definitely influenced the autofictions idea, the way that book is written with a chorus of voices and a single ‘I’ at the same time, and the repetition of questions and interrogation of the self. I would say, you know, Jenny Boully’s work, especially in The Body: An Essay. Looking at something like “Cramping at the Bone” is a very overt reference to her work with the footnotes. Also, I haven’t mentioned Brian Blanchfield, a professor of mine during my graduate studies. What you mentioned about the philosophical or language-oriented musings in connection with the vulnerable, that’s something he does really brilliantly in Proxies. I forget the quote, but he states that his only source is himself, he doesn’t look anything up, he goes off of understood or observed or recollected knowledge about certain cultural or sociological facts, places, dates, names, then discusses them. Highly personal and intimate topics at times with these critical analyses of culture woven in, then looking it all up and correcting himself in the end. Checking to see if his reality is in fact accurate. I love that idea. I wasn’t trying to do it in this book, but it definitely influenced my thinking around genre. It’s important to acknowledge that truth and other people’s experiences are part of that experimenting with genre. Playing with genre is a way to maintain creative freedom and personal vulnerability while also maintaining an ethical standard when you’re publishing work that engages with real-life stories involving other people. Not just a transcript of memory.

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Interviewer Malavika Praseed is Lead Fiction Editor at Revolute and a 2025 graduate of the Randolph College MFA Low-Residency Program.