In 2011, Heather Christle was about to release her second poetry book, The Trees The Trees. I saw online that she was doing a “Dial-A-Poem” promotion where people could call a Google voice number and Heather would answer and read to them.

This coincided, conveniently, with a period where I was waiting tables at a now-folded posh brunch spot in central Indianapolis. We had dinner service a few nights a week and as I helped set up the front of the house before open, I called Heather’s Dial-A-Poem number and, as it rang, plugged my phone into the restaurant’s speakers. My fellow waiters smirked at me. Mostly they weren’t regular readers of poetry, but I think my excitement charmed—or at least amused—them.

Heather answered. I told her my name, that I loved her work, and that she was talking to seven or eight of us in a restaurant as we polished silverware and made table settings. Would she please read some poems for fifteen minutes while we worked? She laughed and happily obliged. I was 23. I loved poetry with a monomaniacal fervor that sometimes literally made me dizzy, made me forget to breathe. One of my favorite poets was reading to me and my friends! I spent my whole shift hovering an inch off the ground.

Since then, Christle has remained among the small handful of authors whose books I reflexively, half-consciously reach toward whenever I need inspiration, consolation, delight. Nobody thinks like her, nobody sees the tiny hooks that attach words to words as clearly, or as imaginatively. Her new book, In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf, is as elegant, searching a book of prose as I’ve read in years. I still don’t really know how to describe it: an ecstatic whirl around a central radical axis of motherhood (or perhaps memory? obsession? grace?). Like other titans of the ferociously granular observation— Nicholson Baker, Terrance Hayes, Anne Carson leap to mind—Christle has the chops to render flinting eccentric curiosity in delicious, propulsive prose. There’s almost no praise I wouldn’t extend to In the Rhododendrons. It was my luck to talk to her about it for Electric Lit.

Kaveh Akbar: There’s a moment in the book’s epilogue when you’re speaking to the nurse who is helping you undress after a surgery and you’re trying to explain to her that you’re working on this book and what it’s about, and you’re like, I have trouble talking about that even without even a single IV in my arm. So how do you describe the book now that you’ve had a few more tries?

Heather Christle: The easiest way to talk about it is how I did when I first spoke to my editor about it long, long ago. She asked, so what do you think this book is really about? And I lied and said, well, I think it’s really about three women. It’s about Virginia Woolf, my mother, and me. It looks at our relationships as well as our relationships with England: the land, the nation, its histories. I pretty quickly realized that that wasn’t me just making something up for the sake of making the book make sense to her. It was actually true. Although, because I can’t help but take my mind and body in eighteen different directions as I move through life, the book covers a lot of other material as well. But on the whole, everything is coming back to those people and relationships.

Some things I’ve learned about the book only very recently, only since publishing it, despite having worked on it since 2018. So for instance, in much of the third part of the book, I’m longing to move outside of language, feeling that somehow if I could get outside language into a wordless place, I would be able to resolve these experiences and memories, I would be able to experience a kind of cathartic release and forgiveness. And then getting towards the very end of the book, the character of me starts to realize that language is what I’ve got, and that whatever change is going to happen in me is going to begin in language. That’s just the nature of the work. Were I working in some other medium, it would be different, but I’m a writer. It’s all words all the way down.

KA: You just referred to “the character of myself,” which is a way of saying, here are the dolls that I’m making talk. Even though it is you, right?

HC: It is, but/and my imagination is also an enormous part of me, so that’s on the page too. I have been thinking about this in relationship to narrative demands that are placed on people who have experienced sexual assault. There’s this relentless push to tell the precise truth, the factual truth, and if you deviate from that in any degree, it calls your whole story into question, your whole idea of yourself into question. And I think that it was really important for me in writing In the Rhododendrons to make the book be a real place where things could happen that maybe would not be able to be directly reported by other people inhabiting the physical world. Imagination matters, and everyone deserves space for imagination regardless of what demands the world might want to place on them around how they tell their story.

KA: And we see you, the character, struggling with that in the book too, trying to reconcile your own memories with other people’s recollections as they perhaps diverge. There’s the beat in the end where you’re talking about Scott, the character Scott and whether or not your mom told him of the specific need to take care of you when she sent you to stay with him. And Scott said, I would’ve remembered her saying that. And you’re like, I bet I could imagine a way where they’re both telling the truth, where the language was soft enough that they’re both telling the truth. That kind of impulse towards allowing all characters grace is deeply compelling to me. A different kind of writer who had created a different kind of environment might’ve said they both failed me. You’re documenting not the arrival at a point where you have decided that they were both telling the truth, but documenting your consideration of the possibility. 

HC: Yes, and it is an environment that I’m trying to build in the book, but also I think in the world. I don’t want to inhabit a world where to tell a story like this is to mean that I’m seeking some kind of punishment or carceral solution to violence against young women. That’s just not the world that I want. But I do want a world where we can tell our stories and be heard. Where maybe the story gets to change. I would love, oh God, I would so love to be part of making a world where these stories change.

KA: This book is going to find its way into the hands of people who you’ll never meet and you’ll never hear from who recognize the possibility that it affords in stepping towards the horizon of such a world. They might not even clock it as possibility-expanding until a decade later or more or whatever. But that kind of quiet, slow, horizon-clarifying work of literature feels like a profound privilege to get to be a part of. 

HC: Oh, completely. There were so many moments in researching this book where I was finding these little examples of something like that occurring. I’m thinking back to learning about these seeds that were extracted from China during an 18th century diplomatic expedition. They were put into an envelope and brought to George III, and he stuffed them in a book in his library, and then his collection formed the base of the British Museum’s library. And then 150 years went by and the museum was bombed by the Nazis, and firefighters put out the flames. When people went back to find what could be saved from the wreckage, they saw that these seeds—who had spent over a century in the dark—had responded to the devastation of the fire and the rescue of the water with germination. They decided, Hey, now we’re going to grow.

KA: The thrill of reading the book is feeling the centripetal momentum, the angular velocity of these kinds of sparking, effervescent curiosities to which you attend. It’s like those rides at the carnival where you’re fastened into the wall and you’re spinning around and then the floor drops out and you’re held up only by the force of your own spinning.

HC: I completely loved that ride. I have such a strong memory of that ride and just being like, I can’t believe this is really happening and possible, which is a feeling that I had very frequently when writing as well. 

KA: You’re also curating those stories…a favorite is Dante Gabriel Rosetti changing his mind about the poems that he had buried with Elizabeth Siddal, and deciding to exhume her so that he could retrieve his poems, which is simultaneously horrifying and just the most relatable poet gesture. Unfortunately, I find myself relating to that impulse, exhuming your love to get back some old drafts you buried with her, in a way that is utterly unconscionable.

HC: No, I love that. I also had so much fun writing that part because I got to talk about this legend of Elizabeth Siddal’s hair continuing to grow, as if she understood how important her hair was to Rosetti. And so when he dug her up to retrieve the poems, he was also like, oh, thank you so much for continuing to grow your hair. Good job. Your hair was important to me.

KA: And these sort of magpie bits of curious history or consciousness or experience are a way of calibrating the angular velocity in the book so as to keep a reader in it. But you also speak about watching an eclipse through a pinhole viewer so the sun doesn’t burn your eyes. And in your Lit Hub essay [“The Body Made Metaphoric”] you quote a sentence from a poem by Tony Tost: “I don’t know how to talk about my biological father, so I’m going to describe the lake.”

HC: Yes, I quoted that in The Crying Book too. It’s a line that I find incredibly useful.

KA: And that’s how this book often feels, here’s a glance of that, and now I’m going to catch my breath. It’s an advance / retreat, which feels like real intimacy. That’s how intimacy, when you’re sitting across from a person at a funeral, a beloved of the deceased, they’re not like, here’re all my big feelings about the deceased, presented for inspection in a tidy array. It’s an advance in intimacy, vulnerability, then a retreat, this whole choreography.

HC: Oh, I’m so glad that it has that effect. I want In the Rhododendrons to feel quite intimate. There’s some things that I write and think this wants to meet a crowd—and of course I would love for this book to meet a whole bunch of people—I just think that it probably wants to meet them one at a time. But to come back to what you were saying, the trick of writing when you are employing both disclosure and avoidance is to ensure that the avoidance is not only a looking away from the sun that could burn your eyes, but it also toward some other dimension with the work of the book. It matters which pinhole you choose.

KA: Well, and that’s the endless calibration of metaphor too, you want to get the tenor and vehicle as far apart as possible without it becoming utter non sequitur. Right? We’ve spoken about the Kuleshov Effect before. Lev Kuleshov made all these studies about how the first image that you see influences the way that you read the next image. 

I think in both poetry and in a book like this, each image that you show us, like of Rosetti digging up Elizabeth Siddal, forms a sort of aura around that image as it moves into the next thing. And now the next thing, the images are sort of superimposed on each other in your superimposition way. And so we suddenly have, I don’t know, a blue and a yellow making a green sound instead of just the constituent components of blue and yellow. Does this make sense?

HC: Yes, and the book is super interested in, well, in superimposition, like you said. I’m fascinated by how placing a yellow image and a blue image next to one another in this case might not make green. It might make some green, but then it also might instigate that phenomenon of binocular rivalry where the left eye is looking at yellow, the right eye is looking at blue. And what happens in your consciousness is not that you see green, but that you see a kind of patchwork image that is yellow in some places and blue in others. When you’re actually looking through a stereoscope (which is something that I do a lot in the book) at two different images, it’s not just a static patchwork of yellow and blue. It’s dynamic. And so as you look, a patch that once was yellow will become blue and a patch that once was blue will become yellow, and then perhaps there is some green in there. 

That’s another way that I want to think about looking at history. This book is very interested in looking at history in a way that allows it to continue to be dynamic. It is our job to continue to look to it and see what emerges, what surfaces that we might desperately need. 

KA: What do you want to say about the life of the book in the world, both in your micro world, in the family members who have encountered it? Because in The Crying Book, you were writing predominantly about yourself with little appearances of [your husband and child] Chris and Hattie, whereas this one is much more peopled with real people with real names.

HC: So specifically, In the Rhododendrons covers the difficulties of my early adolescence, which involved intense psychological distress, suicidal ideation, and sexual assault. Those stories are from my own life, but they are also social. In order to tell them, it requires bringing in these other people. You can’t write about them in a vacuum, even though that would be easier to manage in one’s present life. The pages that tell those stories are probably the hardest I’ve ever written.

But I was talking with my dad yesterday about the recognition of my parents’ mortality. I am really thankful to have had the incredibly difficult conversations that this book required before my parents died. I don’t know what it will be like to lose my mom. I think it’s going to hurt a lot. And I know that it hurt also to have these conversations. But I hope that the overall hurt of everything is lessened by the fact that we’ve talked these things through together. I think that we understand each other more truly and deeply than we did before. And I’m just incredibly grateful for her courage in that.

KA: How do you conceive of this book living, or how do you hope for this book to live?

HC: It always brings me great joy when another writer reads something that I’ve written and says, well, I had to put it down. I wanted to go write. I love it when that happens, but I think that it just so happens that I talk with a lot of writers, and so that’s the response that I hear. My actual hope for it is not that it necessarily causes people to go write, but that when they put the book down they might have an impulse towards perception and imagination and regard for the past that makes space for seeing something new, and to allow that to shape the present and perhaps future differently, whether personally or collectively. And that could be through art, that could be through friendship and or a difficult conversation. That could be through direct action, that could be through…it could be through so many modes! I hope that they’re all available.

KA: It models a posture of grace towards oneself and the people for whom grace might be required to continue to be in relation with.

HC: Including oneself.

KA: Including oneself. Yeah, absolutely. And when I say grace, I mean something that can’t be earned and something that isn’t beholden to ideas of commerce or deserve or owe. I mean grace that is contingent only on recognition of another person’s vital and complex interiority.

HC: There’s so many forces that are working right now to prevent us from seeing that in one another or within certain groups of people. I know that so much more is required, but I believe that recognition is required too.

KA: Absolutely. Just the irrevocability of the condition of humanity from anyone, you know what I mean? The idea that there is nothing that a person can be, say, or do that will forfeit their claim to humanity. 

HC: I’m always so thankful for you Kaveh, to know that you are there on the other side of the page sometimes. It really is a joy.