As a fellow essayist, I’m always interested in learning about other writers’ processes. Where did the idea for this essay start, and how did you develop it from there?
It’s taken me a long time to realize this, but I think I build my essays up from connections I see between images. For “Pugilism,” for example, I started off with this image of my father in a boxer’s pose as he was dying. In those last few days I got to spend with him before he passed, I remember how he had his hands in fists and his arms curled up close to his chest, and these moments stayed with me for a long time. I wasn’t able to write about my parents’ deaths for almost four years, but somewhere in there I remembered how my mom told me he’d been a boxer back in the army, and how we’d once searched for those photos while we were going through family albums. A connection between my father dying and that missing image of him as a boxer had been made, and the essay started building itself into fragments from there.
Non-linear storytelling can be difficult for the reader to follow if not done well, but you pull it off beautifully here. What made you choose this format for your essay?
You’re awesome for saying that, and I absolutely appreciate it. So one of my favorite segmented essays is Benjamin Percy’s “Me vs. Animals.” Individually, each of the sections could work as a standalone flash CNF piece, but when they’re combined thematically, they make for a stronger impact on the reader, and Percy outright earns that last image of him staring back at himself in the mirror and seeing himself as a type of wild animal as a result. I took a lot of inspiration from his essay here, and I’m just hoping that the sections in “Pugilism” connect thematically.
Family photos play a significant role in providing a framework in this piece–both the ones you find at your parents’ home and the ones that are missing. How did you decide which photos to reference?
After my mom’s death, my brother and my wife and kids and I spent a long week cleaning out my parents’ house. Growing up, we amassed a lot of photo albums and family pictures. And while it was great reminiscing during the clean-up about the times depicted in those photos, I remember there was a certain disconnect between the photos we were able to dig up and the images I could’ve sworn I’d seen before, but which we ultimately couldn’t track down. The segmented memoir here let me explore those missing spaces between what was real and tangible and what I remembered.
There’s a thread of violence-tinged physicality running through your essay: your father’s mythical past as a boxer, the love of judo you shared with your brother, the time your father slapped you as a teenager, and the scars from various confrontations that still mark your childhood home. Is this a theme you’ve explored elsewhere in writing as well?
That sense of violence is actually the thematic core for an essay collection I’ve been working on, tentatively titled BlackBeltFirstAidKits. Physical violence─on the body, on others, on the self─is this focal point that I can’t seem to stop writing about in my work, and I’m just glad I got to explore it in another way here.
The closing image of your father, curled into a boxer’s stance in death, is haunting and memorable. What made you decide to end the essay there?
This was the first image that I knew I wanted to write about, if I were ever going to be able to write about my parents’ deaths. This was the first summer of the pandemic, too, and it was such a surreal situation that my father was dying from complications due to his stroke instead of Covid, like so many other people his age were. I was so lucky to spend those last few days with him, but I remember how he spent so much of his time then with his fists clenched, his arms pulled in, and his legs pulled up towards his chest. And I couldn’t help but think of the parallel this made with what’s called a “pugilistic attitude” in forensic pathology, the position that so many burn victims make during their own deaths. I know that ending is a hell of a downer, but I think I meant to head towards that direction the entire time.
What’s the best thing that you’ve read recently?
One of my favorite essay collections published in the last few years is Brooke Champagne’s Nola Face: a Latina’s Life in the Big Easy. (It won the University of Georgia’s Crux Prize a couple of years ago, and there’s a really, really good reason for this.) Champagne plays with form and memory and structure in these extremely cool ways that make you think, “Wait, essays can do that?” And I highly recommend it. I kind of want to buy multiple copies of it and pass it out like free condoms to CNF writers and readers.
What are you working on now?
I write both fiction and creative nonfiction, and I’m right now finishing up my first novel, along with building some short stories that are darker than my usual work, and which I’m hoping to turn into the next collection.
