The Rebecca Bengal Interview

By Connor Harrison

To read Rebecca Bengal, I think, is to fall into a different time. By different time, I don’t mean nostalgia. I don’t mean the false images of America we all, to some extent, carry around like polaroids. In her essays and fiction for the likes of The Paris Review, The Guardian, Pitchfork, and Aperture — who recently published Strange Hours, her first collection — there is a tangible sense of time and place; the grained or metallic or organic surfaces and interiors of this moment. Here we are, look around. “Dark stars inked on the palm of a raised hand. A tiny blackbird alone in the gaping, giant world of a street curb. Someone crouching in asphalt-baked sun in a position of prayer or pain or ecstasy, or perhaps all of the above. A guy kneeling to cut open a watermelon as two mothers perch on the edge of a gas station parking lot, their kids swarming close.” Often where we are is a photograph, a medium built for slicing time, turning it strange, as much a part of the past as it is the present. Bengal’s writing returns to us a fantastic glimpse, of an artist or an image, one seen from a car window in the early morning of Texas. For the length of an essay or a story, you fall up to your neck in that present, a skill Bengal shares with Chauncey Hare, who she writes on in Strange Hours, and Joan Didion. “The past and present fuse together,” Bengal writes, “as if in one extended day, one extended century, and coursing into our own.”

I talked with Bengal over email about place, writing, and celebrity.

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I wanted to ask you first about place, and being raised in North Carolina. Place being so important to your writing and work, I wondered if you could describe your time growing up in the state a little? 
This is perhaps the hardest question to answer, because it resurfaces in almost everything I write and shows no sign of stopping. I have a love-hate-escape-drawn-back-to relationship with the place where I’m from (rural western North Carolina), and with any place where I’ve lived (so many, and I stay attached to them), for short stretches or years since.

I’m most interested in language, particularly in the sound of language, even in the sound of the way language looks on the page — and I do think a look has a sound. But language inevitably arrives at place. And I mean place in the physical, immersive sense; in the metaphorical sense (to throw in an example outside of books, for instance), how Donald Glover’s series Atlanta both is completely of but then transcends its physical setting over the course of its seasons and becomes an idea, a feeling, a sensibility); and crucially for me, the imaginative sense.

I wrote about this most recently in an essay for LitHub, ‘Self Portrait in Other Peoples’ Pictures’, specifically many of my own favorite artists who I belatedly discovered had photographed either in or very close to where I grew up. In ‘Cataloging a Dream House: The Past Lives of Interior Spaces’, I write about how my sister, cousin, and I would do this “catalog conjuring” (unbeknownst to us then of course, in the same way Harry Crews describes enacting his first writerly instincts in his excellent memoir A Childhood: Biography of a Place) — mapping out fictional lives via the Sears Wish Book on our grandparents farm — and then racing up the red dirt bank across the road where we’d make elaborate imaginary houses and invisible rooms by the hotwire fence.

That same dirt bank shows up in something I wrote last year for Aperture, about an exhibition of RaMell Ross and William Christenberry’s separate bodies of work in Hale County, Alabama. The way that dirt appears in RaMell’s sculptures and photographs struck me in such an emotional way — I end that piece talking about Typeface, a photograph of a red dirt bank whose surface is engraved by construction vehicles, resembling keystrikes. There was another layer too: RaMell’s photograph reminded me of the grooves in our dirt, made by rain and by animals and by us. I wrote: “The dirt was where you came from. The dirt was the past you held and the present you walked through. You sift it in your hands, you make your stamp. The dirt is imagination. The dirt is the future.” For me, place activates and roots the imagination.

There is always that space between the place itself (in this case North Carolina), whatever “the place itself” means physically, and the words on the page used to evoke that place, so that the latter must stand in for the former. And I think like you say, it becomes more a case of sound. Which, especially since we’re in the South, brings Agee to mind, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book that feels like it’s left an important impression on you. You write of Agee and Evans in Strange Hours as “Like a vaudeville duo—in which Agee strayed wild and eccentric and rhapsodic in his portrayal of a few tenant farming families in Depression-era Alabama—Evans essentially played the straight man, making photographs in the classic, declarative mode that is his legacy.” Thinking of your own writing and approach to place, and photography, do you find yourself leaning to either side of that duo; between the rhapsodist in the house and the reporter across the street?
Definitely “a case of sound.” Language is laid out on everything, in notes and beats. The sound of memory, the sound of time: that’s actually what I’m working with in something I’m writing now. But the process is never quite the same, because place is keyed so specifically to a multitude of minute things: the particular character, the story, the situation, the memory cued up, the present action, whatever it is springing from. You have to lean in to different voices, different rhythms. You lean everywhere.

In an ideal writing situation, you have as much freedom to do whatever you want and to take things wherever they need to go, in terms of voice, whatever. In real life, even if it’s a seemingly straightforward magazine assignment (say, about photography, since you asked specifically about that), with a predetermined word count or whatever, the piece probably needs a little bit of both those modes. But it’s never even just those two modes of course. You want things to be grounded, yet (as rhapsodist as this may sound!) attuned to all the other elements too, especially when you’re encountering the ordinary. A little fire, water, air, ambiguity/mystery. And the cosmic: Humor can be cosmic. And it is totally underrated or at least misunderstood.

But also, for people who haven’t read Strange Hours, I should clarify: In that piece, I’m referencing only specifically Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. When you think about Evans’ entire body of work, even Walker Evans veers away from classic Walker Evans. He’s not “the rhapsodist in the house” in his collaboration with Agee, but in other books, for instance, Message from the Interior, he is “inside” the house—that one is very brief but composed of astonishingly lyrical, intimate images.

Your writing returns regularly to figures such as Prince, Lucia Berlin, Willie Nelson, and you are able to conjure that unique kind of wonder these evoke. Which after reading your memories of Denis Johnson for Longreads, reminded me of the moment in Train Dreams when Robert Grainier recounts almost seeing a young Elvis aboard a train in Montana, which ends with the line “He'd started his life story on a train ride he couldn't remember, and ended up standing around outside a train with Elvis Presley in it.” Is it that celebrity holds a fascination for you, as a writer, or is it only as a side-effect of artists who are also ‘popular’ in some sense? 
I wish Denis were still here so we could ask him this question. Elvis is all over his books, actually, at the end of Angels (“a town that was always quiet except for the sounds of winds coming across the desert and ropes banging against flagpoles—where every evening the iridescent-on-velvet face of Elvis Presley climbed the twilight to address all the bankrupt cafes”) and the very last words of The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (“Elvisly Yours”) —

And if only Lucia Berlin was alive to see the massive and extraordinary response to her writing! She didn’t get her due in her lifetime. A Manual for Cleaning Women, the posthumous collection that her friend Stephen Emerson edited in 2015, was my belated introduction to her as it was for so many other readers. I loved those stories so much that I wanted to find out more about the way she wrote them, and of course she was long gone, but I did write with Steve, who very generously responded and I eventually wrote a little about her work, which was a way of talking to her, I guess. She was so adventurous and risk-taking in her life and in her work, so totally original — and part of me just thought she’d have been a fun person to know. The danger of course with Lucia is the same for any artist — in assuming that she and her characters are the same.

Still, with Lucia, as with certain writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, their work hits me in such a way that I’m compelled to learn from them, and to talk to them, if they’ll let me. Even if (often if!) their work is totally different than anything I might make or write or do — there’s always something that carries over. This is the main reason I started doing interviews.

Celebrity, that’s a different thing. As a kid, sure, I idolized certain stars (there was definitely a Madonna wannabe phase in my life) and had crushes on them (I wish I had pictures of my River Phoenix bedroom wall). Celebrities are amplified people in a sense, amplified by our response to them — they’re performances, they’re characters; celebrity is a projection, it’s a way of identifying with a protagonist. I think I absorbed this growing up, reading these trashy American gossip tabloids that my grandparents and my dad subscribed to every week. We are mourning the death of local and major newspapers and literary journals and beloved magazines, and yet these rags are still around somehow, still pumping out these wild invented stories about the same dead celebrities they were writing about when I was a kid, Elvis being one of the main characters. So celebrities are interesting to me in that way, too, almost as fictional characters.

In terms of this idea of writers and their characters merging, and people confusing one with the other – is this an important distinction for you when it comes to photography? You write that “We know that a photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling, the time of its subsequent rediscovery. Lazy language has us reaching for the trope of ‘capturing’ ‘a moment.’” But when it comes to a profile of an artist, would you say they are an attempt to “capture” something in language? Or is the hope for something less definitive?
In that quote, I wanted to call out the word capturing because it’s part of a colonial, predatory vocabulary that’s unconsciously (or consciously?) embedded in photography and writing and filmmaking and art — and I have to say I feel a little similarly icked-out by the word profile. To be clear, I do mean the terminology, not the thing itself — so many writers who I admire enormously and aspire to equal are doing brilliant work in that form, just truly exploding it and challenging it terms of structure and perspective and dialogue.

If I’m asked to write a piece about an artist, it’s actually probably less a true profile in the expansive, authoritative sense, but something more compressed: a story focused on them almost as a character — or maybe call it a portrait, an encounter with that artist. I might not have the space to attempt something vast and definitive, so my approach tends to be more subversive, snaking along the edges: I want to paint in some things, but not everything, to leave enough space in the story so that the reader can participate in the encounter too, enough to hopefully produce their own sense of discovery and revelation.

In the opening to your piece on Judith Joy Ross, which I think is the best example of your skill entering into an artist's essence, you use these very clean, almost reflective sentences: “Judith Joy Ross wants to show me her garden. As she throws open the back door to her home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a large brown rabbit flashes across the yard, a comet trail vanishing into a maze of plants vivid and green against the gray sky. Ross turns to me, her face bright with excitement, ‘Did you see that?’” Every syllable/beat here is considered as much as it might be in poetry, while gathering Ross's need to capture something of the fleeting moment. So you manage to capture Ross in prose as Ross captures images with her camera. How far along in preparing for and writing the profile does this become possible? Or to ask it a little differently, do you begin writing, even internally, when introduced to the art, or to the artist? 
In this particular case, I remember sensing instantly that it was a moment that would stay in the story, but I didn’t know right away that it would begin the story. I had never met Judith until that day (and that backyard scene was probably about five minutes after I showed up on her doorstep), but there were several moments like that with her — and they really did feel almost feel like photographs, they just naturally crystallized. That isn’t always the way it works, of course — don’t I wish. But I did feel that I was experiencing with Judith something like what she encounters when she photographs a person, and it was intense and overpowering and incredibly vulnerable.

Once I realized that was where the story needed to start, I had to write it so it would set the cadence for the entire piece, so I’m really pleased that you felt that in the syllables and beats. Since this was originally published in Aperture’s print edition, I had to be very economical; there was a word count and we wanted to leave plenty of room, of course, for Judith’s photographs and again, I hoped that it would somehow feel as whole and encompassing as a photograph, or at least as much as a string of words can feel. As in a short story, what’s left out is just as (if not sometimes more) important as what’s left in.

And I will also say that even though I did find the beginning fairly early on in the writing, discovering the story’s ending came much later.

You mention short stories here, and I’m curious whether you see writing fiction and essays as separate creative acts? In your work in Strange Hours, you have a fantastic eye for openings, I think; for almost painting us into a scene, something you do in both your essays and in the concluding story, ‘The Jeremys’. But before any words are down, are you coming to the page with a different head, if that makes sense? A different idea of your own voice?
They have such different powers, the short story and the essay. For me writing fiction and essays are similar only in the sense that each story or piece of writing is completely different too. You have to find the voice for each thing, its own voice, and that’s true of both fiction and essays. Nailing the beginning is in part, finding the place where the voice announces itself. And from there comes everything else.

I always think about what Joy Williams told me once: “I think the beauty of the short story is that it finds the moment in the character’s life where the past and future combine, usually in a terrible instance in the present that illuminates everything and yet shuts everything off, too.”

The main distinction, I think, in terms of form and approach, comes down to this: If I’m writing fiction, I’m out of my own head, I’m trying to find the character’s voice. In nonfiction, you’re searching for the piece’s voice, which is slightly outside of your own, and there it does have to do with a different idea of your own voice. Even for this interview, I’m a version of myself.