"The Law of Conversation" with Tianli Kilpatrick
Interview w/ Tianli Kilpatrick
Tianli Kilpatrick holds a Master's in Writing with a concentration in Creative Nonfiction from Northern Michigan University where she also served as an Associate Nonfiction Editor for the literary journal Passages North. She received her Bachelor's in English from Allegheny College, with a minor in psychology. Her essays explore the relationships between trauma, truth, and jellyfish. She works as an editor for The Worcester Review, a publication of the Worcester County Poetry Association. Outside of writing, you’ll find her either riding horses or boxing. Tianli lives and writes in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Follow her on Twitter @tqmk211 or Facebook.
Tianli Kilpatrick’s nonfiction piece “The Law of Conversation” was published in Issue 9.2 of TIMBER. With prose editors Cara Lynn Albert and Jennifer London, I contacted Tianli to discuss the piece, her thoughts on it now, her process, and what she’s currently working on.
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Cara Lynn Albert/ Jennifer London: Tianli, thanks so much for taking the time to talk about your work with us. Your creative nonfiction piece “Law of Conversation” is framed through definitions of scientific laws. Using framing devices like these is very common, especially with Creative Nonfiction. What inspired its usage here? Did the scientific laws guide lead you to this story, or did you integrate the scientific frame after-the-fact? Is this a technique you still use in your writing?
Tianli Kilpatrick: I love the lyric essay form. I love picking ideas or narratives that can stand alone but say something new when blended together. This piece started as two separate short pieces. The pantry narrative became the primary focus but was still missing something. The science lines came from a different piece, and those are the only sentences I took from that piece. As a brainstorming exercise/warm up, I’ll pick three random things (usually: natural object, personal narrative, and metaphor object) and try to create connections between them. It’s a good set up that sometimes leads to an essay.
Mackenzie Suess: You also justify the entire piece to read as a single, narrow column. I can’t help but think of this formal choice in relation to aspects of confinement or fear expressed in the piece, or the literal wedge of vision available to the speaker. Can you talk about your decision to format the piece this way? Did you debate this, or did the form feel integral from the start?
TK: My goal for this piece was to be set in one scene where the narrator didn't move. It started as one paragraph centered on the page, but since it's set in a pantry, it made more sense as a narrow column. The narrator is confined physically, cushioned by the items on the shelves. Since she can only see a small amount, she must rely on sounds to figure out what’s happening. I wanted the reader to feel those restrictions as well.
MS: Looking back on this piece now, what strikes you about it? Does it feel representative of your body of work, or what you’re writing now, or do you see it as grounded in a specific period of your writing life?
TK: If I had to ground it in a certain period, I’d say it’s representative of my writing during graduate school where I was still refining my lyric style. I think, like all creative writing students, I was still experimenting with my writing, what I liked, didn’t like, new things to try, revising the old, and so forth. And I love the lyric form; it’s mostly what I write, and even now out of school, I’m still learning, still editing my style.
MS: Creative nonfiction often asks for immense candor in discussing one’s personal thoughts or memories. How do you navigate vulnerability, privacy, and honesty in your work?
TK: This is a tough question because I write about adoption, sexual assault, and abuse. The way I think about my writing is that once the piece is read by someone else, it’s not me in the piece anymore. It simply becomes a narrator. This has made workshop easier and I’m able to take criticism more constructively. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t easy to detach myself from the story I’m writing. The hardest part of keeping this mindset is whenever I have to read my work aloud. I think because there’s a crowd, it becomes harder to remember that it’s just a narrator on the page.
When it comes to vulnerability though, I embrace it. You can’t write about this stuff without allowing yourself to be vulnerable and accepting that it’s a huge part of memoir. I include jellyfish, both physically and metaphorically, often in my writing. They’re beautifully deadly creatures that are also immensely vulnerable. And I really love that.
MS: What have you been working on since “Law of Conversation” was published (winter 2019)?
TK: Mainly writing exercises actually. I’ve been having a lot of fun experimenting with random ideas and playing around with various formats. However, I have been working on two main pieces. One is about the abandonment aspect of adoption and how that impacts one’s connection to what a home should be. The other is a research project I started in graduate school that I’ve blended with a personal narrative. Without saying too much, the research is heavy in court transcripts, affidavits, news articles, and my own wrestling with how both welcoming and critical the writing community can be when a writer is put on a pedestal.
MS: What books/new writers/other fields and topics are informing your work at the moment?
TK: I’m always reading about trauma theory and trauma psychology because I find the variance in neurological responses fascinating. Cathy Caruth and Judith Herman are big influences research wise. My writing influences, and the authors I’ve learned the most from, include Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Eula Biss, and Mark Doty, to name a few.
CLA: During these uncertain times, many writers have found that their writing process has been interrupted. How has it impacted you, or changed how you approach your writing process?
TK: I’ve always struggled to write about current events. I think because a big part of writing memoir for me is the retrospective thinking. I have to have at least started to process my part of the story before I’m able to begin the narrative. With everything going on, emotions are charged and people are reacting because there hasn’t been a chance to pause and evaluate. I’m not on the front lines by any means, but I feel like I haven’t really thought about what’s happening because each day there’s more cases, more instances coming to light, more voices calling for the same attentions. I feel like as writer, I should be saying something. But because I’m not, either by choice or inability, I’m stuck in a certain helplessness of staying quiet and watching these events unfold. I think writers, all types of artists for that matter, primarily work behind the scenes from a reflective perspective, but when we use our voices, I’d like to believe what we have to say is worth listening to.
**This interview has been edited slightly for clarity and cohesion.
Mackenzie Suess is a writer and editor based in Denver, Colorado. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, Sundog Lit, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She has been awarded grants and fellowships to write, teach, and present her work globally, and currently teaches writing workshops at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Cara Lynn Albert writes fiction that tends toward the weird and occasionally creative nonfiction when her personal life assumes a similar absurdity. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Superstition Review, Barnstorm Journal, and Every Day Fiction. She reads fiction and creative nonfiction submissions for TIMBER Journal. Cara is currently working on her debut short story collection.
Jennifer London is a writer and editor. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Spank the Carp, Red Coyote, Postcard Poems and Prose,Flash Fiction Magazine, SpeckLit, and elsewhere. Most recently, her digital choose-your-own-adventure story, “Forgetting Frank Joseph,” was announced as a finalist for the Deanna Tulley Multimedia Contest hosted by Slippery Elm Literary Journal.
Issue 10.2