Ashley Butler was born and raised in Virginia. She has a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Creative Nonfiction, and POOL. She lives in Texas.
This was Ashley's first visit to Columbia College.
Many of us are interested, especially as graduate students, in the process of piecing together a collection of nonfiction. I was wondering if you could tell us how you personally pieced everything together—how you took the work that you started in undergrad and carried it throughout your entire graduate career and basically put it into a book.
I wrote a few personal essays before going to grad school and I thought that if I wrote a book it might look just like that—just very straightforward personal essays. And that expectation made it difficult for me to really get at some of the other subjects that I think I really wanted to get at that were important. And when I went to grad school, fortunately, you know, John D’Agata was there and he helped a lot of us think of the essay in broader terms and really challenged our idea of what an essay is. And that complicated my idea of what the project would be—I just started experimenting and things started going in a different direction, so I stopped thinking about what it would look like and tried to follow the inquiry.
And then later I started talking with Sarah Gorham at Sarabande, and she helped me structure the overall piece and said “You need more essays like this.”
You started talking to her during your program, or after you graduated?
Yeah, it was my final year at Iowa, and I started talking more with her. And she helped.
So you were already working with an editor during your third year?
Mm-hmm.
How did that happen?
She came to Iowa for a conference, I think it was the NonfictioNow conference, and there was an opportunity to meet with her one-on-one and we just really got along. And she said, you know, to stay in touch, and it just sort of evolved from there.
How did you reach a point where you thought that each of the essays in Dear Sound of Footstep would be relevant enough to each other to piece together?
Relevant enough to each other?
Yeah. I know that a lot of editors talk about writing a book of essays that share the same theme or share the same place or characters or things like that. And I know that that’s not really applicable in 100% of situations, but I keep hearing that advice: to have work that ties together if you’re going to put together a collection.
Well, the argument for the book became how to embody and complicate absence in order to come to terms with this other issue. More specific, loss of the mother and dealing with grief. So in that respect, the essays do cover a lot of the same ground, but they’re using different subjects—there’s [that] the narrator is in sort of a different mode in some of them…I think that they are different enough in and of themselves, but they do cover the same ground.
You’ve written pretty consistently in your book about place and space. Why are you so interested in each of those?
Well, I think for this project space is this vertical between Earth and Space, as a metaphor for the grief that the narrator is experiencing and that relationship with the dead. So that is part of the obsession, and it’s a way to think about death and the afterlife, you know, for someone who really loves science. I think that’s probably where that comes from.
And the place part? Is that specifically honing in on Outer Space and Earth? Do you pre-determine your settings when you go to write about spaces?
When you talk about place is there a specific essay you’re thinking? Like the Richmond, Virginia essay?
Yes! That, for example.
I guess that was important because it’s where I grew up. Landscapes, I mean, being in a particular place—your surroundings—you can become aware of how your attention moves and it reveals a little bit about your belief systems, too: what’s important to you, where your eye lands.
Belief systems regarding what?
I think what you value is reflected in how you interact with an environment and where your attention goes.
A little bit of a technical question: how much of Dear Sound of Footstep appeared elsewhere before you published it all as a book?
I don’t even remember how many essays are in there, but probably a quarter of it. Maybe less; I’m not sure.
So could you talk to us a little bit about the process of taking work that’s already published and putting it together with work that hasn’t? You said that a quarter of the book had previously appeared in journals or whatnot, so what about the other three-quarters of it?
Haha. They were rejected.
Was there any particular process to putting together the rejected work and the published work? When you started working with Sarabande, what was it like having to dialogue with them about the fact that this work had already been published so maybe you didn’t want to edit further because it had already been published. The other three-quarters of the book were completely open to all the editing that went into changing the manuscript for publication.
I think publication is . . . maybe it’s an instance of the essay that exists for, you know, a particular reader of that magazine. And so I don’t think it’s necessarily the end state of that essay. So if changes need to be made, then. . . .
A few of us are taking a course, currently, called “Form and Theory of Nonfiction.” So I’m interested to hear whether or not you have your own theory on form. Basically, how you justify your own form when you’re writing an essay, or any of the essays that came out in Dear Sound of Footstep. How you decide you want to manipulate space on the page.
“Theory” sounds so formal, and I just try to see, you know, where the essay goes, what it wants to do. I don’t try to force page breaks or a certain mode of writing on a piece, but sometimes there are certain ways, like, in which the essay “Dear Sound of Footstep, Move Me or Tread,” that was really different for me when I wrote it because I just started off writing lines, sentences, and thinking about the Aphorism and what it would mean to. . . . It was a very different process for me. I try not to force anything; just see what comes out.
How did you feel at the time you were writing the essays, as far as "this essay is about this, but it might actually be about this"? I guess that’s something we’re sort of learning how to do right now in our program.
I guess in, uh, the lifting bodies essay (“Karman Vortex”) it just felt intuitive, so I guess maybe that’s hard to talk about; and I tried not to think too much about what those metaphors were doing.
Lastly: do you have any advice for students in MFA programs now about what they should be experimenting with, how they should be preparing to put together a thesis, or anything like that?
I would say, you know, stay open. And just keep pushing outside of the tendencies that you find yourself going towards.
