A Woman Reflected by Barbara Tomash

Mar 27

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How did you come to write A Woman Reflected?

A few years ago I had a great time with my students reading and discussing Srikanth Reddy’s, Voyager, an incredibly elaborate and original erasure project. Reddy enacted three different complete erasures of one source book, a memoir by Kurt Waldheim. The stunning diversity of poetic styles and forms he found inside the erasure process—from extended prose sequences to lyrical fragments—really inspired me. I wanted to try something with that kind of large canvas and involving compositional variations. My first thought was that I would try to erase an entire novel. A Woman Reflected is one iteration of my erasure of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Another longer, more layered and complex iteration is a book-length manuscript titled Her Scant State. With the brevity of a chapbook in mind, I wanted A Woman Reflected to be a more cohesive version, formally, and in terms of voice.

Even during the years I was immersed in making visual art, I had a desire to connect my work more directly with novel writing. To this day I am somewhat surprised I write poetry and not fiction (as I started out to do). As a child uncomfortable in my own skin, in my own family, I read and read— reading was an alternative skin, an alternative body I could become whole inside of. I found intimacy and truth in the reader and writer exchange, so, for me the writer has a deeply human, even primal role. I think one of the ways erasure appeals to me is that it allows me to plumb the mystery and potency of the reader and writer connection in an unabashed and imaginatively assertive way.

When I went to my book shelf to look for a novel to try out for erasure I instinctively pulled down the yellowed, spine-broken, falling-apart paperback novels I had loved as a very young woman: Middlemarch by Geoge Eliot, The Waiting Years by Fumiko Enchi, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, and The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. In these books I had discovered an aesthetic of emotional and psychological precison and of social critique that seemed life-and-death crucial to me as a girl coming into womanhood. I was curious to see what these books continued to fire in me so many years later. My first try at erasure was with the exquiste The Waiting Years, but nothing really sparked. So, I moved on to The Portrait of a Lady and it pulled me in and kept me stitched into its pages, day after day. I remember when I read The Portrait of a Lady for the first time it made me want to scream (in a good way, mostly)—and now, as an older woman when I again opened its pages I still wanted to scream. And so, the work began.

You mention in your acknowledgments that you’ve been engaged with The Portrait of a Lady for a long time. Could you talk about your relationship with the book?

Now that I think about it, every twenty years or so I try to do something about/with Henry James. It’s not a conscious thing, not an agenda. It’s as if his books are there unnoticed in the shadows until they creep up on me. In my early twenties, when I was in art school, I made a video performance piece (this was in the earliest days of video art) in which I recited passages from James’s Daisy Miller to the accompaniment of the jazz saxaphonist Sidney Bechet. What was I getting at with the juxtaposition of two such startlingly different artists and art forms? I’m not sure. But, the James passages I collaged together and chanted all had to do with a sort of ironic, yet lyrically voiced critique of American exceptionalism. Bechet’s music with its dramatic tonal shifts and brilliant syncopation seemed to offset the sound and shape of James’s sentences—one highlighting the beauty (and revealing the pathos) of the other. As a Black musician in racist America Bechet was one of the orginators of a great American art form. James is from an earlier generation, but, whether or not he was homosexual as has often been suggested, he clearly didn’t fit the late Victorian paradigm of masculinity and his art helped to define modernism. For different reasons, both men found living as expatriates in Europe necessary to their survival as artists. I remember being quite elated when I performed this piece—I have always loved the art of assemblage, the jagged, improvisational excitement at the edge or seam where two things have been brought together to create something new.

When I turned to writing, almost two decades after art school, I attempted my first short story—with no idea how to go about it. I began writing from the point of view of an older woman who years before had been the real-life model for James’s heroine Isabel Archer. My imagined character had been James’s intimate friend and she had believed there was something undefined, allusive, yet akin to love between them. The motivating impulse for the story and the thrust of its voice was the betrayal and anger my first person narrator felt toward this “great author,” this friend, who had resolutely shut her out from the heart of art-making by using her (merely) as his subject. Did I feel that James, as a vaunted male of the canon, shut me, a woman, out from becoming a writer? The story, which was a mess, got me into the graduate creative writing program at San Francisco State—a miracle—and changed my life.

Two or three decades after that—who’s counting?—I wrote Her Scant State and A Woman Reflected.

Could you speak about your process of erasure?

I went through the novel page by page underlining words that stood out to me as interesting, or useful, or thematically significant, words that appealed to me for their sound, or for their emotional and psychological suggestiveness. After I had done this for a group of pages, I would start composing a page of writing using only the underlined words. The process involved keeping strictly to the novel’s word order, but I allowed myself free rein with punctuation and with form on the page. While writing, I sometimes needed more, or different words, than those I had initially underlined, so I would go back into the novel mining for a specific kind of word, or sound, or part of speech, still keeping word order intact.

For some reason, I tackled the second half of the novel first. My erasure of these pages took the form of an extended sequence of prose blocks. In contrast, erasing the first half of the book, I worked with language fragments, line breaks and ceasuras. A Woman Reflected is made up of a twenty-three-page selection of the prose episodes. When I was shaping the chapbook I shuffled a couple of pages out of their orginal sequence in order to create a satisfying sense of movement, finally breaking my rule about word order.

As I worked, I found myself stripping away the layers of James’s narrative with the urgency of my political distress (this project started in the midst of the Trump years) and my ongoing preoccupation with the lives of women. I found money, money, money on every page. Isabel Archer, intelligent, determinedly independent, and thoroughly mistaken, suffers the cruel joke of a blisteringly transactional marriage. The novel is set in Europe, but it is hardly free from American capitalism—then, as now, aspiring, hopeful, and often violent.

How does a project get started for you? And when do you feel that a project is complete?

Of course, different projects start different ways. Each of my projects has called forth a different logic, even a different writer in me. I write slowly, find my way slowly. I may write a single poem, perhaps following a prompt or an experiment I give myself. But, one poem never seems to get anywhere interesting enough. So, I write another poem and then another that relates in some way to first—usually sharing a process, mode of writing, or a preoccupation—and if it is possible to keep going, if there is enough substance there, then a sequence of poems emerges. The manuscript I am working on now, provisionally titled Of Residue, started out in this way—all the poems in the manuscript share the same same narrow rectangular form on the page. And all the poems share a preoccupation with climate change, the environment, “nature writing,” and the reframing of human/other-than-human relationships. In writing the poems, I have evolved a process of researching various questions about the ancient and ongoing intersections between our human species and other species on earth and joining this with my writings about my daily life and with excerpts from the things I have been reading.

My most recently published book, PRE-, is an example of a project that felt like a book from the very beginning. I worked with English prefixes and found language from the dictionary and as soon as I wrote the first poem, I felt compelled to follow through and wrote until I was “done”—until it had the weight and depth of a book. My project erasing The Portrait of a Lady, had a similar arc. Once I began, I knew I wouldn’t stop until I had erased the entire novel, and it was immediately evident that it would take a book-length work to achieve this.

You have a background as a visual artist. How do you notice the effects of this on your writing?

I continue to be particularly moved and excited by the visual arts, by their revelations about the world through the act of framing and re-framing things, changing angles of perception Their recording of variations, shifts, and movements holds for me the essence of reality.

When I was nine years old I was taken to an exhibition of paintings by the Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky. I was an obsessive drawer and held long conversations with my crayon colors. Standing in front of the paintings, I felt both awkward and at home—as if I were hearing a new language I understood perfectly without being able (or asked) to translate a word. This was a beauty I really wanted. And it sent me on the path of becoming a visual artist. When, in my late thirties, I turned to writing, it took a very long time, really until I started reading and writing poetry as well as fiction, that I was able to use language to report on and shape perception.

Out of curiosity, I took a poetry class—I had never written a poem—and I fell for poetry hard, even obsessively. I remember the tactile sense I had with the very first poem I attempted, transfixed by the endless options and permutations possible in “breaking” lines. That sharp focus and concentration on form was a continuation of what I had been doing as a visual artist—the experimentation, the sense that a poem was an object, made out of language patterns and play, yet full of ideas, of thinking on the page that wasn’t necessarily struggling to tell anything. I hadn’t felt that thrill of the malleability and physicality of language when I was writing short stories.

A group of poems at the heart of my book The Secret of White was inspired by the paintings of Pierre Bonnard. In his works “the subjects”—the people, the objects—are often at the periphery, as if they are about to fall out of the frame; the center may be empty. And I wanted to find a way to write this same movement or spin, to find in language a center replete with absence.

You’ve taught creative writing for many years. What do you feel is most important for people when they’re at the beginning of writing seriously?

I think time is the most important thing—an understanding that if you give yourself time, if you keep experimenting and practicing, if you keep reading as a writer, if you don’t quit on yourself, that your writing, no matter how impossible it seems at first, will get closer and closer to what you are aiming for. It’s okay to not know what you are doing, to be lost, to let the writing find its own way, to let the writing make its own demands of you and to respond to those demands the best you can, and to continue.