Concetta Principe | Issue 5
Interview
Trigger warning: This interview discusses suicide and suicide ideation in the context of the author’s book of essays Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide.
Micro Interview with Concetta Principe
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Concetta Principe: I remember writing stories based on my dreams. I used to have such vivid, wild dreams, very much like Nolan’s Inception, long before that film was even conceived. Or maybe like Escher’s art, in three dimensions. As I mention in Stars Need Counting, translating dreams into written form was a discouraging process. My teacher spent a lot of time ‘fixing’ what was there. It was very overwhelming to see so much trouble with my ‘voice’ in those formative years.
I remember the first poem I wrote was short, almost a haiku, though I didn’t know it as such at the time. I was in Grade 6 and based on a ‘project’ I did on modern art, I discovered Gertrude Stein. My poem had been inspired by my reading of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. This was the second book I’d read by her. The first book I read by Stein was What are Masterpieces. And how I came to read it at all seems, in retrospect, a complete accident.
I saw What are Masterpieces on the shelf in a bookstore on Bloor Street: a beautiful slim fuchsia paperback. It was the question that grabbed my attention, though. I thought I had a good idea of what a masterpiece was (all that Italian renaissance art my father was teaching me about), but what is a masterpiece in writing? My mother agreed to buy it for me.
One of the most beautiful lines I remember ever reading was in that book: “I am I because my little dog knows me.”
From Masterpieces I moved on to Tender Buttons. I don’t know why I ended up reading Tender Buttons next. I might have asked my father to borrow several books from the library for me and he came home with one. But as with Masterpieces, the title attracted me. I was so disappointed when I started reading.
Anyone who has tried reading Tender Buttons is, by now, laughing as Stein’s work is an almost incomprehensible very long series of prose poems. I was very confused by what I was reading. I knew poetry was difficult, but this was beyond difficult. My confusion with Stein’s poetry was something I accepted as my inability to read well. One day, I will be smart enough to know how to read her, I thought to myself. I remember her pieces on potatoes (in the section titled “Food”). I remember thinking: how can anyone consider a potato worthy of a poem?
So, I wrote a poem about this tree stump I had come across up north one summer, near Whitefish. My mother had taken my sister and me up there for a summer to stay with her friends who had a few houses on some Canadian Shield shore of a lake. Maybe I’m conflating one memory of the stump with a memory of this summer up north. I’m not sure. In any case, the poem was based on this ‘image’ of a tree stump.
When the teacher asked me what the poem was about, I said it was about something that was dead but still there. I also remember not really knowing what I wanted to say with the poem.
The poem was four short lines. In memory, it was quite ‘prosaic’. I read it at the school assembly. I got up to the stage, I took my paper and read the lines and promptly ran off the stage. I barely remember if there had been any applause. I think there hadn’t been applause, probably because no one understood what the poem meant. I remember a few sporadic laughs (do I invent this memory?) which suddenly stopped. The teachers probably shamed them into shutting up. There might have been some applause from my friends and the teachers. I know everyone thought I was pretty brave to get up there and read something that was not funny, that didn’t rhyme, that was so short it didn’t tell a story… I sort of didn’t care what they thought of the poem since all my anxiety was focused on being on stage and reading.
KM: How has the pandemic impacted your writing or creative life? Or what has writing in the pandemic been like for you?
CP: I enjoy spending my days quietly working, puttering around the house, and periodically, interacting with people. I taught courses for three terms from my home as a result of Covid driven lock-downs, and so deeply appreciated the technology that allowed me to do so. I could teach my classes, roam the house, read in the living room, sort laundry, paint a wall, go for long walks, whatever. I was thankful that I didn’t have to travel the four hours it takes to get to and from the campus just to teach one class.
I also appreciated that the streets were empty; that there were hardly any cars around. I felt transported into another time. For me, the quiet of the ‘shut-down’ was a heaven compared to the manic energy of life before the pandemic.
I may not have accomplished a lot — I don’t think I wrote more than usual — but I think what’s changed in my writing is that I have more focus, or I’m feeling more relaxed and so can focus. I assume this is because I’m not running around all the time, trying to catch the bus, subway, train.
KM: Tell me about you new book of essays Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide.
CP: I started writing this book in the fall of 2014: that’s when I had several dreams, all involving suicide, in one way or another. These dreams stood out for me because I had gone through a very difficult spring and summer during which I experienced extreme suicidal ideation. I wrote the dreams down and tinkered with them, but I didn’t write much of value at this time. I read a lot, though. And everywhere I looked, there was another story or book or article on suicide to digest. I watched films, television shows, short online films that were so very touching.
It wasn’t until summer 2015 that I started, putting things together. The first draft was a lyrical essay inspired by Karen Green’s Bough Bend, a book working through the suicide of her partner, David Foster Wallace. I recently read through that first draft and see that what I was doing was assembling a kind of protracted history of famous people’s suicides, with a focus on ‘listening’ to the one who passed. By listening I mean considering their last words (Plath’s “Daddy”) or their last statements. Several famous people died by suicide around this time: Robin Williams, Philip Seymour Hoffman, come to mind.
But even after drafting that first version of this book, The Fall of My Suicide Dreams, I couldn’t stop writing. I started taking a more prosaic approach, until eventually, this project on suicide came to take shape as it is now, a series of personal essays.
KM: The preface for Stars Need Counting is a detailed list of all the things this book is not. Why did you decide to begin with this list?
CP: I had been inside my project for so long that I really had no idea how to ‘give’ it to the world. And every time I brought it to the world, either as a discussion about what I’m working on, or as a draft that needed reading, I became ultra-sensitive to my audience, what they were saying.
My dear friend, Henry, told me “Don’t’ go there”. This was to say that, not only was this a heavy topic for ‘me’ the writer, it would be for the reader, as well. Andrea, another dear friend of mine, who recently died of cancer, had said suicide was selfish. I pretty well digested both responses deeply. I did go there, where Henry told me not to go, and I went there wanting to keep it safe for me and for him. I also wanted to understand the categorical claim Andrea made: isn’t death selfish to begin with? In attempting to understand what she meant, I found myself gravitating to this notion of love. So many deaths by suicide are about love in some sense: David Foster Wallace, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Wolf. In some cases, love is overwhelming, or love is withdrawn, or love is about setting the other free.
Someone who read the whole manuscript questioned who would be interested in this book. I couldn’t answer that, or I felt challenged by that question. It was also a question that was centered around marketing the book. So I thought long and hard for months about who would read this. I knew there are people like me, who want to understand suicide. I also knew there are people who would completely avoid the book, “I just don’t want to go there”, for their own personal reasons. I wanted to give the reader the ground I was working with, so they could choose to proceed or not.
Anna Mehler Paperny in Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in First Person addresses her responsibility in writing on suicide. Her effort to circumscribe what she was doing, to demarcate the boundary of what she would say, inspired me to ‘prepare’ the reader. In that sense, the preface was a ‘trigger warning’ but also, an explanation of what’s inside, so a reader could proceed knowing where she/they/he could step … or they could avoid it, in the event they might feel triggered.
It was my way of showing the reader what will be in the pages ahead, through exclusions but ultimately, letting the reader know I was treating all material with care and love.
The book came from my experiences, yes, but I think what really drove the book were the survivors who talked to me. They. Wanted to talk; they wanted to share; they wanted to mourn or shed the shame of this last act. The silence around suicide and mental health issues has enforced shame, a kind of unconscious policing, which has made it so difficult to mourn those who have passed and to heal survivors of the wounds they live with.
Concetta Principe is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, and scholarship on trauma and literature. Her recent collection, This Real (Pedlar Press 2017) was long-listed for the League of Canadian Poet’s Raymond Souster Award. Her creative non-fiction project, Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide, is forthcoming with Gordon Hill Press March 2021. Her work has been long-listed and short-listed in creative non-fiction awards at The Malahat Review and The New Quarterly, and her poetry has appeared in recently in The Capilano Review, experiment-o, and Hamilton Arts and Literature. She teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Trent University and York University.
Stars Need Counting meditates on questions of suicide in the mode of A. Alvarez, when he says, in A Savage God, that there are no answers to these questions, because suicide is a “closed world” – so closed that it's not our place to judge or cast shame. These essays explore the quality of what is closed about this world, bring it close enough to scrape the shame off the act, and for both those who have passed and those who survive, offer peace.
Purchase from Gordon Hill Press.
Reviewers have said ...
"In Stars Need Counting, Concetta Principe holds a magnifying glass up to the public positions and private contradictions of talking about suicide in contemporary life. Her blend of critical inquiry and personal examination is as intellectually rigorous as it is tender, locating the silence around notions of sacrifice, crime, mental illness, and history in this vital conversation about 21st century pain and ancient forms of audacity. This is a courageous look at how we live and how we die; stars need counting and with this book, Concetta Principe gives us many tender and tough-minded ways to look up." – Tanis MacDonald, author of Mobile
“A lyrical, unflinching exploration of love, mortality and suicide. With Stars Need Counting, Concetta Principe has shed a welcome and necessary ray of light on the mystery and heartbreak of suicide.” — Don Gillmor, author of To the River
"This book catches you unawares even as it withholds a thorough reckoning, forces you to think uncomfortably and ask painful questions whose answers, as Principe writes, are impossible." — Anna Mehler Paperny, athor of Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me
"Principe's incisive empathy for her subject matter resonates throughout this book, evident in the painstaking efforts she takes to de-aestheticize and de-romanticize the subject of suicide. Though the work is about death and dying, there is something in it that feels like a true balm for the present, allowing us to consider the uncanny vagaries of both our subjective and collective humanities." — Ricky Varghese, author of Raw
Issue #5 of Send My Love to Anyone
Micro Interview with Concetta Principe
On Rejection by Kathryn Mockler
Invisible Labour - 보이지 않는 노동 by June Pak
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