Craft in Conversation
A true interview series in which emerging and established writers discuss the craft of creative nonfiction
Amy Berkowitz asks us what it means to be poetic. In her memoir Tender Points (Nightboat Books, 2019), they take the reader through a series of vignettes; exploring chronic pain, abuse, and the struggle to be believed before and after a fibromyalgia diagnosis. The memoir’s nonlinear narrative examines her experiences through the ambiguous lens of memory. In the second installment of true’s Craft in Conversation series, Amy Berkowitz and contributing editor Melanie Hall discuss approaches to nonlinear storytelling and the politics of prose vs. poem. Amy’s poetry collection Gravitas is available from Total Joy. She is currently working on two novels.
Melanie Hall: Tender Points is a very fragmented, nontraditional memoir. There are pages that look like poetry, though you tend to avoid that “poetic voice.” How did you approach ordering those disconnected scenes? What factors did you consider, especially when choosing those very first or very last scenes?
Amy Berkowitz: It was intuitive in a lot of ways. I had never written a book or anything else like this before, so I didn’t have a specific method of approach for ordering the scenes. I recently tried to find the original manuscript of Tender Points, and I found one Google Doc where I pasted all sorts of random and disorganized thoughts. It was a safe place to accumulate information, because it was this endless scroll of ideas. If I wrote something disturbing, I could just keep scrolling and not dwell on it, which helped get some of those darker moments onto the page. That document was very rough, and doesn’t contain everything that made it into the book.
At the time, I was doing some local readings with more polished pieces from that document, but I wasn’t sure of the next step. Some friends urged me to just print it out and look at it. So I had this rough manuscript, which consisted of fragments I wrote in this Google Doc, and I printed it out. Stephanie Young, who is a poet and teacher, came over and sat with me and looked at the printed manuscript, and we took scissors and tape and started cutting. We wrote in the margins and identified themes; “New York,” “boyfriend,” and grouped them together based on those loose threads. That whole process felt very intuitive.
When I was struck by anything, I wrote it down. I started shaping those fragments, and I had faith that they would all cohere because they were making sense to me.
MH: How did living with chronic illness affect your writing process? Did it affect your timeline? How do you think that struggle informed the final product?
AB: I love thinking about the idea of crip time, how chronically ill and disabled people are on their own timeline. I think it’s a very worthwhile idea. The whole process for Tender Points happened very quickly. One reason it was so intuitive is because I was just trying to figure this shit out for myself. The book was just a record of me doing that. It was guided by the urgency and curiosity that I had.
It’s a very short book, and I’ve written two and a half novels since then, so I know what it’s like to take time and pace yourself. I did write a lot of Tender Points in bed, because it was a safe space to think about some of the scarier things.
MH: How did you decide that those fragmented ideas were part of a bigger project? Did you have an overarching topic you wanted to focus on, or did the smaller pieces of writing come together slowly into the memoir format?
AB: I think I felt compelled by the subject of trauma, and trying to make sense of trauma. I just wanted to tell people that this happened to me. When I was struck by anything, I wrote it down. I started shaping those fragments, and I had faith that they would all cohere because they were all organically making sense to me, and they helped me understand the connection between this chronic pain and recollection of sexual violence.
I felt from day one that I was writing a book, which is something I do when something feels important. My friends had started a press called Timeless, Infinite Light, and they knew I was working on this, and they wanted to see it, which was really encouraging, and they decided to publish it.
MH: There is a lot of research incorporated into the book. I am wondering how much of that was a personal interest that then translated naturally into the memoir, and how much of that was an active desire to include some scholarly research to support the matter-of-fact voice.
AB: The whole project just felt so personal. I have an MFA, but I don’t have an academic background, so I don’t consider myself a professional researcher. I like to go to the main branch of the library near me, which is a really nice big library. For Tender Points, I would find the aisle with books about pain and just sit down and read. I wanted to know what other people have said about pain.
MH: You have a particular frankness in your voice. On pages 25 and 26 of Tender Points you say “poetry fails me because it’s not written plainly” which speaks wonderfully to the tone of the book. Your poetry collection, Gravitas, also lacks that flowy “poetic” voice. How did you approach that voice? Do you think it was entirely intuitive, or were there moments in the editing process where you found yourself removing emotionally charged language? It would be natural with this subject matter to have moments that are more emotional, but you stick very closely to the frank voice.
AB: I wrote that particular statement with some amount of tongue-in-cheek sentiment. I run a poetry reading series and am also a poet in addition to being a novelist and memoirist and whatnot, and I do enjoy some poetry. But I don’t like a lot of poetry, because I would rather have writing just tell me what’s going on. I just want to understand it, and so much poetry sort of hides what it’s about. So in that sense, poetry fails me because it’s not written plainly.
But in the context of those pages of Tender Points, I was speaking to the idea that I have to be in this masculine drag to be taken seriously by doctors, and by the general audience, which includes men. [Amy quotes from page 25 of Tender Points] “Carson observes that the women of classical literature ‘are a species given to disorderly and uncontrolled outflow of sound — to shrieking, wailing, sobbing, shrill lament, loud laughter, screams of pain or pleasure, and eruptions of emotion in general.’”
I’m a passionate advocate for dictating into your Notes app because it’s so fast. Maybe it’s also a chronic pain thing to avoid the repetitive motion of typing.
I feel that the passages in the book that are poetic, with the line breaks, do feel extremely raw and emotional, and in that way, feminine. I took pleasure in going against my earlier proclamation that I can only write in this logical “male” way that would be taken seriously, because all speech can and should be taken seriously.
MH: In those sections that look visually like poems, was that a natural instinct? How did you determine which sections needed to take that form?
AB: Those sections that are in poetry form are ones that felt very emotional to me. Those were the places where I was talking most directly about traumatic experiences. That’s how they appear in my brain; those moments feel almost too intense to write in full sentences.
MH: Was there anything in particular, from a craft or emotional perspective, that you struggled to write about?
AB: I was really lucky to have Stephanie Young help me piece things together. I tried not to put any pressure on myself throughout the accumulation process to try to order the passages at all. It was only after they had accumulated that I invited her over and we sat down with that printed copy and started cutting and pasting.
In terms of what was difficult during that accumulation process, I think the hardest part was writing directly about childhood sexual abuse. I dealt with it by just giving myself permission to say I can always write that part later. It doesn’t have to be today. And then one day it felt right and I wrote about it. It was also hard knowing when to end. I was writing about my life, so how do I know when the story is over? It was helpful to have friends looking at it.
MH: You’ve written in other genres, including a shorter poetry collection and two novels, and you’re working on another novel right now. How is your approach to the novel or poetry different from your approach to Tender Points? Are there parts of that approach that you find are the same?
AB: My approach to the novel and to poetry is very different from Tender Points. Tender Points came out first in 2015, and then Gravitas came out in 2023. For Gravitas, I originally thought it was going to be an essay. I didn’t have Tender Points in mind really when I was working on it; I thought it would be an essay about what happened at my MFA program. And then I started writing it, and the essay was really not good. It felt stodgy. I kept writing, and realized oh, this is poetry. Which is ironic, because it was a book about how grad school made me stop writing poetry.
In terms of process, I think I’m always trying to get ideas down. I write a lot. I had a kid, and she’s three and a half now. I had her a few months before Gravitas came out, actually, and people kept saying, isn’t it so amazing that you did that as a new mom? Looking back, it’s like oh, I was, wasn’t I? I think it’s the parent clichée, but I started using my phone’s Notes app for writing. I’m a passionate advocate for dictating into your Notes app because it’s so fast. Maybe it’s also a chronic pain thing to avoid the repetitive motion of typing.
I will say that it took me a long time to learn that if you want to write something long-form, like a novel, you have to have ass-in-chair discipline. You have to sit down and try to write a thousand words, or a few thousand words, in order for that longer work to take form. So that was a new experience with writing novels.
I surprised myself with being able to write a novel as a new parent. I had lost interest in writing creatively about five or six months into my pregnancy. I think that happens to some people, kind of hormonally, where your body decides that the baby is the main event. And after my kid was born, it took me quite a while to get back into that routine of sitting down and writing. I had a traumatic birth and postpartum depression, and for at least a year after the birth, I stopped writing.
But that wasn’t really true: I looked back on that year when I thought I wasn’t writing my novel, and I have a ton of content in my Notes app. I copied all of it into a Word document and realized that I actually wrote a lot of the novel that way. I can’t imagine not working in that fragmented form. Of course, there are times when you have to sit down and write in long sessions, but if I tried to write only while sitting at my computer, I can’t imagine what I would write.
–Amy Berkowitz (they/she) is the author of Gravitas (Éditions du Noroît / Total Joy, 2023) and Tender Points (Nightboat Books, 2019), which was recently translated into Russian. Other writing has appeared in publications including The Believer, Sick Magazine, and Jewish Currents. Amy lives in San Francisco, where they host the Light Jacket reading series. They’re currently working on two (!) novels.
–Melanie Hall is an undergraduate English student at Towson University. She is Editor-in-Chief of Grub Street literary magazine and has been previously published in Discourse, Towson’s academic journal for literary criticism. She hopes to pursue an MFA in creative writing after graduation.
