Interview with 'Twenty Square Feet of Skin' Author Megan Baxter
And another writing prompt for Flash Memoir Friday!
A brand new online class is opening at Muse on March 13th, Memoir in Collage with Megan Baxter. This is a five-week asynchronous class with a live videoconference with Megan in week 2. I’m quite excited to be providing a home for this course at Muse, and there are still a few seats left! Here’s the description:
Are you wondering how you can craft a memoir from life’s twists and turns? Maybe you’ve been overwhelmed with scope and don’t know where to begin. This class will guide you through a new way to write your story. A collaged approach to memoir composes a narrative through fragments and found items, building a story from many smaller pieces.
Recently I was able to interview Megan about her new book Twenty Square Feet of Skin. The book is forthcoming from Mad Creek Books in June (though if you happen to be at the AWP Conference in Seattle right now, it’s available at the book fair— Megan is even signing copies at booth #1026 from 11-11:30 on Friday/today!).
Read the interview below, and then keep reading for a short essay from the book and a writing prompt. And check out all our spring course offerings at Muse.
Megan Baxter is the author of three books of nonfiction including the forthcoming Twenty Square Feet of Skin available in June 2023 from Mad Creek Books. Her essays have won numerous national awards including a Pushcart Prize. With a MFA in Creative Nonfiction and a BFA in Poetry, Megan loves developing cross-genre and innovative approaches to writing instruction. Megan lives in New Hampshire where she teaches and manages her homestead farm.
JPC: Megan, Twenty Square Feet of Skin! I got the chance to read it recently, and I admire it so much. I was struck by how it feels cohesive in its themes, even as you experiment formally. For example, some essays are in a more traditional personal essay style, others are more collage-like or braided. And some are very condensed and lyrical, almost like a prose-poem.
Can you say a little about how the book came together? Did you have a collection with certain themes in mind as you were writing the essays, or did you write what you felt compelled to write, with the connections coming together later? And do you intentionally range across a variety of styles and strategies?
I felt like I was living this dual identity, like Clark Kent, although I don’t know which version was Superman.
MB: Joanna, I am so glad that you enjoyed reading the collection! Thank you for your insightful questions. I didn’t have a book-length collection in mind when I started many of these essays. The majority of them were written during my MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts where I was studying creative nonfiction. More so than the graduate program, these essays reflect my life at the time of their composition. I was working as a fitness instructor and personal trainer while managing my own small farm and serving as the agricultural director of an urban garden. All of which is to say I spent a lot of time being physical when I wasn’t at my desk. I’ve worked in manual trades since I was a teenager, but I was struck by the division between cerebral writing time and physical labor. In some ways, these essays were born out of a desire to celebrate, even validate, my work. I felt like I was living this dual identity, like Clark Kent, although I don’t know which version was Superman. One day I had the opportunity to meet with the author Joni Tevis, who graciously provided a blurb for the book, and she encouraged me to embrace this duality and write about my physicality. Her blessing freed me to begin exploring the themes that appear in ‘Twenty Square Feet of Skin’. The forms and styles evolved partly because I wanted to bring as much creativity and variety to the subject matter as possible.
JPC: One of my favorite essays in the book is “Hunger.” Toward the end you write, “I was thinner, but I wasn’t better,” and you go on to describe “that dream of myself transformed.” That entire paragraph is about an inherited legacy that’s really a mirage—the illusion women internalize that if they just lost a little more weight they (we) would be “light with grace and the authority of a life well lived.” Your narrator then explains, “I could see her perfectly, I could almost reach out and touch this vision of myself, but there was hunger and darkness between us.” I don’t know that I’ve ever read a better description of the relationship to feminine beauty that many of us are burdened with, that space between reality and illusion.
Some of your other essays in the collection describe your experience with tattoos, running, and breast implants. As a reader, I was in awe of your ability to take half a step back from yourself and describe your relationship to your body and physicality as you do. Do you feel that writing about these themes is in itself one way that you claim agency or come to terms with your relationship to your body as a woman?
“I could see her perfectly, I could almost reach out and touch this vision of myself, but there was hunger and darkness between us.”
MB: Yes, I think that’s an accurate statement. I also realized, like many women probably do, that I spent a tremendous amount of time thinking of my body. In some ways it consumed me more than any other topic. And I wanted to honor that fact on the page. I think the tradition of the essay is one of self-exploration and often, as a writer, I felt myself wanting to write about my nobler thoughts, my most creative musings. But for a certain period of time, my body took up more mental space than anything else so I wanted to represent that on the page. And, as you pointed out, it was through my body that I envisioned identity, growth, and fantasy. So it was actually a very interesting and cerebral concept for me.
JPC: I was curious about your process of deciding what non-autobiographical threads to weave into memoir in some of the essays. For example, you have threads about Meriwether Lewis and about Don Johnson, of Miami Vice fame. How did you become interested in those subjects and decide to use them in your work?
MB: I’m a history nerd and love the process of research. There’s always some dense historical text or biography on my bedside table, in fact, I probably read more historical texts than any other genre. My creative and imaginary life is populated with figures I’ve studied, or been drawn to in one way or another. Meriwether Lewis, as I explore in ‘On Running’ was the subject of my sixth-grade history paper and he stuck with me, the idea of this brilliant, troubled man who had seen so much but was still unable to find happiness. Other non-autobiographical threads like Prince, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Bruce Springsteen, are personal favorites that have inspired me, or who represent a specific period of my life. Don Johnson pops up because I was assigned his song through a Twitter essay writing competition called March Badness. I always want to add depth to my work and I’ve found that additional voices and research produce an effect that feels very authentic to my personality.
JPC: You have an essay called “Muse” in the book, which I found so interesting, given that the online school I started—and that you will be teaching for!—is called Muse. When I chose that name, its first incarnation was “Muse Collective,” and my friends Jessica Mesman, Rebecca Bratten Weiss, and I were working together to promote and encourage each other’s writing and teaching, and also to collaborate in various ways. (We also called ourselves the George Sandinistas, a term Rebecca came up with that I find hilarious and love.) We realized that we had become each other’s muses and that this was a good way to upend the model of “male artist/female muse” that has been reinforced for generations. Can you discuss your relationship to the word or concept? There’s a sense in the book of your having to come to terms with how you would work with or build on your admiration for male artists and mentors, as a woman artist.
And, a follow-up question: What have teachers meant for you as a writer? We have a connection in common, the poet Michael Delp, who taught at Interlochen. I’ve sometimes heard that we all need that person who gives us “permission” to write or sees our strengths and mirrors them back to us. I know that you experienced that with Delp, and I did as well, though not at Interlochen. Can you say a bit about what your writing teachers have meant for you?
MB: I’m glad you mention Michael Delp here because my first interaction with the word ‘muse’ was at Interlochen Arts Academy. I was part of the first class that got to use their new Writing House. The space had been designed just for young writers and I suppose it was only natural that metaphors were constructed into the building. There was a huge central pillar made from a single pine which was referred to as “craft” and a fireplace in the Great Room, opposite the pillar, called “the muse”. As a teenager, I found it terribly funny that “the muse” was an electric fireplace that could be turned on and off with a remote control. I’ve also found the term slightly flat, or perhaps inaccurate. Spark, I think, or desire might be a better one, at least for me. The female muse is something that I struggle to understand, and I think I wanted to reckon with that in the collection. I have inspirations, and a partner, Daniel, who I find terribly beautiful, but to me, the idea of any one thing or person being the reason someone creates art doesn’t make sense. Certainly, overcoming the desire to be a muse, or to be valued only by the male gaze, is central to my work. I think writing teachers have given me permission at key points in my career to pursue what fascinates me. Delp, while I was in high school, encouraged me to write about the natural world, and in graduate school, my advisor Patrick Madden allowed me to experiment with structure and add research to my essays. It was Joni Tevis, whose work I deeply admired, who gave me the push to write about the body, as I already mentioned, and from there it was only a short leap to begin exploring the idea of the muse.
JPC: You have a memoir called Farm Girl (Green Writers Press, 2021), and I know from social media that you are relishing this season of ordering seeds and tapping maple trees. (Or maybe by the time I post this we’ll be a few weeks beyond that.) How do you balance the roles of farmer, writer, and writing teacher these days? How do they feed each other?
MB: Yes, in addition to writing and teaching I also own a small organic farm! I’ve always worked on farms but when I purchased a property and built a home last year I was able also to construct a homestead operation. I love the work of farming and have always been drawn to the outdoors. It’s very meditative and I think that all of that quiet time allows me to create space for my art. I would never want to do just one thing, I draw inspiration and joy from a variety of occupations. It’s not always easy to balance everything! Let’s just say that I have a very detailed calendar and many to-do lists.
On Pulling White Hairs from Twenty Square Feet of Skin
In the mirror, my eyes wear from searching silver out from the darkness. When I catch myself in the pupil I see through and past, blurry until focus locks. If I stare long enough one thing becomes another. I am a girl, a child, a photograph’s white eye. It's not a trick of the mind, just exhaustion like any other folding of one memory into another. I have to grab hold of something steady to know myself and then pull back and out again I am a woman, breath fogging the mirror glass, golden tweezers slipping silver hairs from the thick wax of her skull.
The body operates on its own timeline, some seasons draw long and others shorten like a drought year’s wood-ring. The more I focus, the more I find between the roots. There’s nothing essential in the ritual, it’s just a simple outward-facing reward. But recently something other than beauty and its sharp hook have snagged me as I search out the white. When my eyes shift into focus and hold themselves stiff in the mirror I catch her, just past the ghost of myself as a girl.
It's been years since I’ve seen Abby with my own two eyes (as they say) but I’ve held her image in my palm and watched her grow, marry, mother, on the reflective screen of my phone. Her eyes cracked slowing into fine lines, crow’s feet gathering up her freckles, her dark hair spun through with silver after the baby. She sets down the camera phone and takes selfies with her young daughter. In these snapshots her eyes, looking at themselves on the screen, boomerang, matching my eyes in the mirror. Out and in and tumbling toward some kind of togetherness.
Abby, I think, as I shiver to grab a tail of silver, eyes up and then, falling, focusing. I knew myself by her until I lost that map and although we share a birth year our bodies keep different times. As a girl, I could have counted the freckles on her face like we numbered stars in the night sky. She grew tall the summer before seventh grade so that when we went trick-or-treating dressed as a couple from the 1940s, she was a towering pinup in a thrift-store fur coat and I was her small beloved, swimming in her step-father’s naval dress uniform, my lip smudged with a mascara mustache. Abby, my tall Juliet. When a neighbor boy let us into an R-rated screening of Shakespeare in Love we found we had the theater to ourselves and performed in the aisles, bowing, curtsying, reciting sonnets with the huge lips parting onscreen. It was a kind of love that was also mirroring.
One night in elementary school we stayed up to the witching hour and held hands in the dark. We were going to look into the black face of the vanity mirror on her dresser, we were going to confront something but neither of us had the courage. We counted one, two, three, and then stared at each other instead, frightened of what we’d heard of eternity, how it cursed you. There were words we were supposed to recite but we knew that just the eyes mattered so closing them we walked blindly back to our sleeping bags, tripping on pillows, until, lying down we blinked them open at the chemical light of the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling still shining, late in the night.
Without a word, I feel her near to me. I bring her up like some kind of witchcraft, a strand of silver hair and a mirror. I could speak to her through the glass but it’s a trick of fog and reflection, just as deceptive as a camera and a filter. But I want to know how a body ages, how it grows, and the harder I look the more I see my bones rising to the surface. Maybe what we laid down then matters most of all. This rippling distorts even the simplest reflection.
—Megan Baxter
Flash Memoir Friday prompt:
Read “On Pulling White Hairs” by Megan Baxter above. Then write your own piece that explores the intersection of the past and the present. At what point during your everyday activities do you find yourself thinking of someone (formerly?) close to you that you haven’t “seen with your own two eyes” in years?
Put us with you in a present-day scene (writing in present tense) and then describe how/when/why the memory of this person comes up for you. Then shift to a scene or series impressions from the past, placing the reader with you in the memories using concrete details.