There is No Center to a Story: A Conversation With Noam Dorr on Form, Fragmentation, and Writing the Political While Staying Personal

Noam Dorr’s first book of essays, Love Drones, is out now. His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Seneca Review, Passages North, and other places. His essay, "Love Drones," won the Gulf Coast Essay Prize and was a notable essay in the Best American Essays 2016. Born and raised in Kibbutz Givat Haim Ichud, Israel, he is a former Fulbright scholar, and received his BA from Brown University, his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, and his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. This fall he will be joining the creative writing faculty at Texas Tech University. 

On May 11th, 2020, Noam Dorr talked with Interlochen Review editors Maia Siegel, Lane Devers, and Raleigh Walter via Zoom. They discussed fragmentation in lyric essays, the link between the personal and the political, and how you can treat a book like a poem. 

Lane Devers: Your writing seems to be especially interested in fragmentation and associative logic. Your titles seem to do much of the work to tie together otherwise disjointed or separate ideas. Can you speak a little to the writing process? How does that usually go in terms of order? Do you usually begin with a title or an idea and then move outwards in terms of scope, or does your focus usually tighten as you go?

Noam Dorr: One of the advantages of writing in fragmentation is that it allows you that associative logic--say you’re really interested in the surveillance technologies that are used by the Israeli intelligence services, but then you suddenly become obsessed with how drones are like bees. I’m able to jump from one thread to another and this switching really helps me sustain an interest in the project. Sometimes you feel like you're banging your head against the wall if you're only interested in one topic and you feel obligated to write about it. The ability to jump around from fragment to fragment is something that I find very liberating. 

In terms of the process for writing essays like the ones in Love Drones, what usually happens is that I'll start writing about a topic and the fragments will accumulate. At some point there'll be this critical mass of fragments and they begin to speak their form to me. Then it's like surgery, where you figure out the content each particular fragment needs in order to conform to the form in new ways. At that point it becomes far more interesting because it's not just general thoughts or recollections--it starts to have a lyrical logic that has to conform to the form of the essay. That opens up all these new possibilities of play. 

What this process does require is an intense amount of revision. “Love Drones,” the title essay, is a really short essay, right? It's only four sections, maybe six pages. The original essay and the draft that was published might have one line that is shared across the two, they are in no way similar. I think I went through eighty or ninety drafts of that one six-page piece, because by the end it had such density that every word really had to count. And it took awhile for it to figure out what it was trying to do. I had to return to the piece over and over in order to do that. Part of the real shift happened, when, for example, “Love Drones” realized that it was really about sonics and sonic play, and then that pushed me to think, okay, what happens when we introduce anaphora? Or homonyms? How do we play with that in a way that's not just gimmicky, but actually useful for what the piece is trying to do? That's when everything started to click. But it took many drafts for that to happen. The first draft of “Love Drones” was called “Predator.” I had some of the basic ideas in there, but it in no way resembles the end revision.

Maia Siegel: I have a question about “A Study in Three Oranges.” You start this piece with a quote by Gertrude Stein, that “there's no use in a center.” This quote feels connected to the formal choices you make in the piece, the fragmentation and the decentralization. Could you speak to why you chose that Stein quote as your epigraph? What does acting without a center mean in your writing?

ND: I think that writing without a center means that you have the freedom to abandon one version of the essay: we're familiar with the essay as the college essay or the programmatic analytical essay where we have to tackle one subject and really break it down relentlessly. That is one version of thinking through things essayistically. But by having that kind of narrow focus it also means that we are devaluing and not allowing into the conversation a lot of voices that could inform the subject were we to let them in. I think the Stein quote was a good reminder for me that it is entirely possible to circle around a topic, to circle around the core magnet of the thing, which is the orange, without ever really having to fully create a thesis statement.

There might be twenty or thirty thesis statements in that essay, that are allowed to build and revolve and be in conversation with one another without having to have a central idea, and I think that there are two aspects of that decision: one is political and one is creative. On the political side it's pretty simple to say Here's why we don't want the center: if we have one narrative, one political narrative, one national narrative, that makes it an act of exclusion by virtue of being singular. So anything that fits into that narrative, great--if you conform to those ideals and that version of history, then you're fine for a while. But that excludes so many other perspectives, so many other histories. Acting as though there is no center means that you create a space for alternative versions of those narratives, alternative ideas of what it means to be part of a larger community, and what it means to experience history in a different way. 

And then I think on the aesthetic level there is also no center in terms of how we tell a story. In Love Drones a lot of the fragmentation and the lack of singularity of one narrative was an invitation for readers to bring their own mind into a conversation with the essays. No, I can't actually hear the reader’s mind at work, but I'm creating spaces for that mind to be present. And for me, “act so that there is no center” also means that I, as the speaker, might arrange certain pieces around in an essay but my own subjective experience as the memoir portion of the essay, is not the center. There might be a thread running through, but it creates a space in which the reader can insert themselves and be in conversation with each of these fragments. A lot of it was decentralizing in terms of the aesthetics and the way that we might experience a singular story.

Raleigh Walter: In your essay “Wouldn't It,” you start each section with Wouldn't it be lovely and terrible to live in a world of _____, and I wanted to discuss the items that you list, such as matches. They got me really interested in what was the motivation behind these items and I was hoping you can speak to that.

ND: “Wouldn't It” is an exceptional essay for me as a writer, because it's the one essay that I wrote in one go. That never happened to me before and hasn’t happened since. So, unlike “Love Drones,” “Wouldn’t It” had almost no revisions--it happened in one session in a library. I was in college and I said to my roommate Ali, I have nothing to write about, what should I write about? And she said, Why don't you write about how you grew up in Israel? Why don't you write about your experience with guns? So then I started to write these fragmented memories of personal experiences growing up with guns. Suddenly, I was like, something's missing here. And a line: Wouldn't it be lovely and terrible to live in a world made of ____, just came to me. This line created a space where the essay got to be playful, and so I got to be playful. 

So I started creating these lists of different types of worlds. A lot of the versions are there because they allow for a metaphoric reflection on the subject of guns, and creating alternatives to the actual narratives we see: What would it be like to be in a world made of glass? Would we actually be more cautious with our actions because we would realize how fragile everything is? What would it be like to be part of a world made out of leaves? Would that make us more aware of our collective responsibility? Or the way that that time moves? Reflecting on these different kinds of worlds allowed me to ask what the world that we actually live in is like. 

But then some of the worlds that came up were totally for my own amusement, like, what does it mean to live in a world made of cork? Okay, well, I guess we should enjoy it once, because it's like opening a bottle of champagne. What does it look like to live in a world made of yarn? Well, at that point, we definitely should be fearing the galactic space cat, because that would totally undo the world. It was a way to bring some levity into a subject that would otherwise be entirely serious.

MS: Yehuda Amichai said “I'm politically engaged because everyone in Israel, on the right or left, exists under political pressures and existential tensions.” Do you feel like your identity as an Israeli has forced you to be politically engaged in your writing?

ND: I think everyone is in some ways political, even if they're not expressing political views, because that's a kind of politics too. But in Israel, because it's a small, compressed country,  political realities are in your face all the time. Being political in some way is inescapable; you have to face it, and deal with it, because politics infuses everyday life in such an ever-present way. The fact that I was drafted and did my mandatory military service has shaped a lot of the way I think about the world, the way I think about ethical responsibility, the way I ask these questions that I keep asking in my work. They're now inescapable to me because of my own personal history. 

You think about life in Israel and, whether you choose to ignore it or not, the presence of soldiers is everywhere every day, because either you’re a soldier, or you were a soldier, or your family members are soldiers. That's part of what happens when you have national service. Also, Israel's a small country so you can't just hide all the soldiers off in the Nevada desert. They're everywhere all the time, so you have that reminder constantly. And there’s also the nature of the national narrative that life is very precarious. There's this constant sense of existential threat. That does require you to think politically, whether you choose to analyze your position or not. 

And yet I also think that a lot of what was important for me in writing this book was for it to not just be a political statement. It was engaged in politics, it was interested in politics and political questions and political life, but I think it can't be reduced to just a political statement. My friend Liat Berdugo, an Israeli-American artist, made an incredible video essay about documentation and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. I remember her telling me that when it premiered in Israel there was this polarized response to it: On the left side of the political spectrum people responded with, “It's not critical of Israel enough. It's not critical of the military enough.” On the right side of the political spectrum, people said, “It's too critical of Israel. It brings up all these things that makes us look bad.” So there was a sense of both political sides deeming the project a failure politically. To me, that makes it a success in terms of its artistic achievement because it's trying to move past propaganda. If you're annoying both sides of the political spectrum in Israel, that means you're doing an interesting job, at the very least.

LD: You already touched on this a little bit earlier when we're talking about “Love Drones,” but in that essay, we spend quite some time returning to the star imagery, only to have the darker implications behind them be revealed later on. Do you typically move into an essay with these kinds of turns pre-planned so that you're able to track your readers' digestion of your work? Or is that something that develops more organically as you write it?

ND: Yeah, it's like what I described with “Wouldn’t It:” Those images came organically from working through the subject. As I said before, if you're focused on a singular topic and you try to write through it, you often find yourself banging your head against the wall. I like to think of the essay more like the way that Emerson wrote, as moving in circles. I think of the essay as wanting to move like water. You don't want to be the battering ram against the wall, although some essays are really good at that. And there's room for that too. But for my interest it has to do with what happens if, instead of going straight through the subject, we go sideways. That opens up a lot of possibilities, including imagistic moments like the lyric gesture of the star, that wouldn't be possible if we just moved in a straight linear fashion. The progression as I work through the essay is about how to create those moments where these images rise up organically. Oftentimes I'll admit, I don't really know what I'm doing. Something about an image troubles me or interests me, and then I play with it. Not all of it stays, but it does make it possible for the essay to move in unexpected ways and bring the reader into the conversation as well. For the star imagery, I could probably go back and look through ninety drafts of the essay and see where it first started. I don't know when the star first showed up, but when it came up and began reoccuring I realized it was a really important image for the essay. 

MS: So much of writing today is based in the personal, and not the political or the communal experience. It was refreshing to read your personal approach to large geopolitical issues, such as those surrounding Israel, especially in “Fragment/Fragment.” Your writing approaches many hot button issues in our news today: surveillance, military action, state violence. How do you write effectively about large political issues and questions, while still making them feel personal?

ND: In some ways the personal part is easier. I think as writers we know how something felt in our life in terms of its emotional valence. The personal moments in some ways are easy to write, which is why beginning writers of nonfiction start with memoir, or the personal essay in a way that really focuses heavily on the “I.”. That moment when your mom or dad took away your favorite toy is something that you feel physically in your body, that's something that we can easily bring to the page in visceral ways because we have an emotional connection to it. The question then becomes not so much how to bring the personal into the writing, but how to bring the rest of the world in. For me that is achieved through deep immersion and extensive research so I can be informed by as many perspectives as possible as I explore a topic. 

One thing that the personal does allow in terms of its connection to the political is that it creates a space where you get to express your ideas rooted in a personal experience. These ideas might be questioned politically, but it's harder to question whether the events happened or not because you were there. You can say: This is my experience. This is the perspective that I can bring into the conversation. 

Before the book came out, I had a lot of anxiety about people in my community, people that I served with in the military or family members, reading the book and saying This is wrong, this is not how it happened, this is not what reality in Israel feels like or felt like. Not so much in the specific details, but in the actual atmosphere or the emotional value of different moments. 

For a while I was carrying around this fear of being exposed as a fraud. But over time I realized that I wrote my experiences as best I could. Every essay is so heavily revised that the book really is a refinement of my thinking. I did the best that I could in this book in terms of each section. The work that I did, people can critique it as having political shortcomings or personal inaccuracies, and that's fine, but for me, this book symbolizes the furthest my mind could go, the furthest that I wanted it to go at the time. 

I think one aspect of the essay, and especially the lyric essay, when it comes to the personal and the political, is that it allows us to create a far more interesting space of asking questions rather than a political treatise or an essay that has a thesis which works towards articulating one point of view. The lyric essay allows for a space of continual questioning that might not arrive at an answer. I think most of my essays don't provide answers. That's not really my objective. My goal is to bring up a question and to continue exploring it, and, ideally, for the reader to then pick up the question and explore it herself.

That is a way in which the personal and the political, when you bring them together, can be a really powerful artistic tool. They create that space, an invitation for the reader to engage and not just say that they agree or disagree, but rather to think about this question now, for the question to become a part of the reader. And to me, that is far more interesting in terms of what creative writing can do, and what the essay can do.

RW: Do you have any new work coming up or any projects that you could share with us?

ND: I'm working on a long form project right now, that's more of a novel/essay hybrid. It's looking at three generations of Jewish refugees and their descendants who are living in a kibbutz. A kibbutz is a collective community in Israel, usually between a couple hundred to a thousand people, based on socialist and communist values. The members work collectively to create a community. In theory there's no money and all decisions are arrived at together. It's a community entirely based on deep utopian values. 

A lot of what this book is trying to do is to think about what it means to live with utopian ideals on a daily basis. What does it mean to take these values and try and actually live them on a day-to-day basis, and how does it shift from generation to generation? What's the difference between the founding generation that created this kibbutz (my grandparents’ generation) and the second generation (my parents) who were born into the utopian experiment but didn't choose it, to the generation (my generation) that saw the end of that project, the dissolution of collectivity and collective values? 

The other project I'm working on are these three dimensional essays: a book arts project that's a box containing all these essays, where each essay is a container. So, for example in the box we have the hollow orange that was the basis for the essay “A Study in Three Oranges,” and a pinhole camera that was the basis for “Light Text,” which interweaves throughout Love Drones. Each essay takes on this question of what it means to be contained and how containers work, while actually physically enacting them in 3D.

LD: Going off what you were just speaking to, with “Light Text”  interweaving throughout the book, how did you go about ordering the collection or the general structure of Love Drones? Was there ever a particular piece you intended to begin or end with? Or is that something that just sort of naturally happened?

ND: People in the industry always say that it's really difficult to get a collection of essays picked up for publication because nobody wants to read them. So if you can make your project look like it's a book-length essay it's far easier to get publishers interested. In a lot of ways, when I was writing this book I always had the aim for it to be possibly viewed as a book-length essay, and I used that term when I talked to people about it. The truth is that Love Drones is a collection, and ordering it was one of the hardest things I had to do in the process of getting it ready. 

The obvious answer when it comes to ordering is to go chronologically. So you say, okay, each one of these texts kind of looks at a different moment in time, some of them go back and forth, but a lot of them are mainly childhood, mainly military, or mainly post-military. You could arrange them chronologically, and in a lot of ways it's the most boring arrangement, and probably the least useful. 

So instead there were two paradigms I used for arranging the book. One was thinking of the whole book as one long poem. This comes from a lecture in Mary Ruefle’s book Madness, Rack, and Honey where she talks about how poems begin. We can think of a poem as a journey between the first line and the last line. That's one way I think about the book: what is the first line of the book? What is the last line of the book? How is that journey arcing across the space in-between the first and last lines? Having the last line of one essay feed into the first line of the following essay is thinking about the collection as an extended poem down to the line level, and that was really helpful for figuring out the order. 

The other thing I thought about was the reader, and how this book teaches the reader to read it. There was one initial ordering that had “Fragment | Fragment,” in many ways the hardest section of the book, as the second essay. Chronologically, it made sense. But in terms of difficulty it really didn’t. So I talked to my editor and we said, let's put it as the second-to-last in the book. When you think about it that way, it actually makes far more sense, because then you have “Love Drones,” the title essay, announcing what the book is trying to do. It's a difficult piece , but it's short. And then you can move into “A Study in Three Oranges,” which is actually the very last essay that I wrote for the book. But placing it second made a lot of sense--even though there are a lot of different threads in the essay, each section is not difficult to read. You might have to do a lot of hard work to connect the different pieces, but in terms of textuality, it's not a difficult essay to engage with. In a lot of ways that made far more sense as the second essay. Then we moved “Fragment | Fragment” to be second to last in the book, because by that point the reader should know what they're in for with Love Drones and the kind of work they might be expected to do.  

Those two paradigms, thinking of the book as an extended poem and thinking of the book as what needs to happen in order for the reader to be able to read it--how we teach the reader how to read the formal gestures, the lyric aspects of the text, the historical and biographical information--became the the scaffolding for figuring out the order. But I will say it was one of the hardest things for me about the whole publication process. 

Joe Sacksteder: How did you go about submitting the book to Sarabande Press? 

ND: It was actually  very straightforward. They have an open period in September for essay collections, so I turned in the manuscript. They were one of the first presses I sent to. They called back very quickly, which I was very surprised about. I think a former teacher of mine, who had a book published with them, put in a word to be on the lookout--that I submitted the manuscript and he would highly recommend checking it out. I'm sure that speeded things up, so it wasn't sitting in the slush pile for a long time. They emailed me asking if the book’s still available, and I wrote back that it was. Then they called and said they were interested, so it was really fast. I know that this is a very unusual experience. You usually have to go through a long submission process, especially for small presses where you're submitting to competitions and contests. This is especially true for poetry. You might be runner-up in a ton of different contests and never be the winner, so you never get published, even though your book is deemed really interesting. So I know that in many ways I was extraordinarily lucky.