Conversation With Brooke Champagne

        

Cindy Bradley, Editor

        

Brooke Champage

Cindy Bradley: Brooke, I’ve been eagerly waiting to read your collection since you announced it, and I must tell you, I devoured and adored it. There’s so much I want to talk about, including characters, landscape, craft, and publication.

Let’s start with Lala. We’re introduced to your Ecuadorian grandmother in “Cielito Lindo,” where we learn that Lala viewed your love of reading and books as a betrayal of the Spanish language you shared. You stay true to Lala by writing as much of her dialogue as possible in Spanish and express regret when you write her in English. It feels like a betrayal, but becomes necessary to translate her speech into English, a language she adamantly refused to learn. Later, in “Lying in Translation,” you talk about double and triple translation, which I found so textured and fascinating. This conflict between dualism and tension in language is both present throughout the book and presents so many layers in your and Lala’s relationship. Can you talk a bit about this?

Brooke Champagne: Oh Cindy, first of all, I’m so honored to have this conversation with you, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the care (and love!) you’ve shown my work. Thank you.

Much of Nola Face, and much of my life, centers on the generalized anxiety of not-knowing, with the deeper fear of not knowing who I am or who I’m supposed to be. It’s through language we acquire knowledge, and early in my childhood, I worried my bilingualism meant half-measures in learning both about the world and about myself within both languages. It didn’t help that Lala’s attitude was, essentially, “Chose a lane. Come be with me in the world of Spanish and be the Ecuadorian you are or go off with those gringos and their chirping caca ingles.” See, even right there, I feel it: the guilt of having to translate her attitude for you when hearing her voice in all its warmth and ferocity was part of that slippery truth of my past I can’t quite capture.

The other thing about my relationship with Lala, and Lala herself, is she is the most unintentionally funny person I’ve ever met. She could be so severe: a person (namely, me) had to be a single thing. Of course, no one is, and she was particularly layered and complex. But that’s where humor comes in too. How hilarious is it for a grown woman suggest that a child pledge their undying fealty to one ethnicity, one language, one heart (namely, hers)? Some might call that emotional abuse, and yeah, at the time it was troubling. But when I learned to translate my own childhood to myself as an adult, whoa, I just laugh at her wild contradictions. That wildness continues to feed me creatively, and as a human. In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor famously said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough experience to last their entire creative life. That bit of wisdom, as applied to my childhood spent with Lala, feels especially true.

CB: Oh, the Flannery O’Connor line is a great one! The search for identity permeates so much of creative nonfiction, and your experiences, with Lala wanting you to basically pick a side or else you betray her, had to have felt so overwhelming.

“Lying in Translation” is such a transformative essay for you and for Lala. When speaking of Lala early in the essay, you state that “the truth of how I understood her bobs and slips around facts and bloats them unrecognizably.” What a great line. Later in the essay you say that Lala called you “a writer for the first time. Escritora.” You write that this was a “hard won gift, one she didn’t have to steal for, one I didn’t have to lie for—this gift was the opposite because it required the truth. It was the best gift she’d ever given me.” We learn that there was a time in your childhood when you and Lala were “partners in crime”: Lala would pocket small toys for you, and you’d lie to store employees. So again, there are these intricate, multi-faceted layers of truths and lies, from Lala’s small thefts in TG&Y to Lala later acknowledging your English: “You’re so eloquent in Spanish. I can’t imagine how beautifully you’re able to express yourself in English,” the language she denied and never learned. That must have been such a profound moment for you, and, as Lala suspected, you express the experiences, the textures, so beautifully. Did it feel like Lala calling you a writer was what you needed to fully devote yourself to writing, and to telling Lala’s story?

BC: That’s true—the escritora moment was profound. Elsewhere in the book I mention my lifelong need for the women in my life, my mother and Lala, to name who and what I was before I could believe it for myself. The fact that Lala not only sanctioned my writing, but almost demanded it in that Lala-way of hers, made me stop questioning whether I was one. She said it, I felt it. Not only that, but she said it in Spanish, so in a way, that forced me to translate it for myself in English. A writer. Yes. Sounds right.

A friend recently asked me what it was that propelled me to write with more urgency after the cough-cough amount of years since I’d received my MFA, which, once conferred, I was presumably ready to write and publish. (Lol.) My automatic answer has always been that when I became a mother eight years ago, I felt the immediate need to give my daughter some tangible gift, besides her life, of course. But Lala died soon after that, and that was another major impetus to finally write her stories or to finish writing them. Often in her last years, Lala reminded me that I needed to write the book of her stories. As if I could forget. I’d like to think her knowledge that she’d continue to be a creative subject and focus of mine beyond her death made that inevitability a little less terrible. And then there was her vanity. I’m quite confident the prospect of living on in the minds of readers would have been very satisfying to her.

CB: I love that Lala reminded you to write a book of her stories! And how proud she’d be. Your essay “McCleaning with the Dustbuster” is a fun throwback to the 80s that explores marriage and also touches on class. One of my favorite passages is “My eighties were filled with Mc-food (frozen or fast), Mc-parents (stepfathers), and Mc-neighborhoods (subdivisions built up in a few weeks with the same three house plans multiplied endlessly down the block). Mcs were shoddy replacements for the real thing.” You talk about ghost parents floating around the house, the emotional cleanup that followed your mother and stepfather’s fights, and the broken rules you made for yourself when you were young. Using a Dustbuster as a literary prop in writing about emotional messes is such a unique choice. I’m curious to hear more about that.

BC: This was one of the first essays I wrote for the book, and it was inspired by a moment lots of writers can probably relate to: I scheduled time to write and instead began cleaning my office. While polishing my writing desk, I knocked over a plant into a small corner I had no idea how I’d reach. Then it occurred to me, yeah, there IS a cleaning object that will help with this, a damn Dustbuster, and I don’t have one! Which was a strange realization given that the Dustbuster really was one of those prominent objects from my childhood, along with the transparent Unisonic phones used by Claudia Kishi in The Babysitter’s Club. With the inability to clean up that plant soil, I just sat at my desk and thought about how I currently needed a Dustbuster and what my reasons were for not having one. That led me to start a list of Dustbuster memories. Which eventually led to questioning what else that portable cleaner might metaphorically represent from my childhood. Namely, taking the easy way out. Doing things half-assedly, which is sort of what a Dustbuster was invented to do. I thought about how cleaning and divvying up household chores is such a big part of marriage that we don’t face until we’re in it. And how the ways in which we clean, or how we notice what needs cleaning, are reflected in the ways we love our partners and fight with them and clean up after our fights. Anyway, as readers will note in my later addendum to this essay, once my husband and I had children, there are indeed uses for a Dustbuster and for cleaning half-assedly when the occasion permits.

CB: This is such a great example of how a writer’s mind works, how one incident or thought leads us down the proverbial rabbit hole of thoughts! And imagine, had you not knocked over the planter, we might not have had this great essay!

Nola Face is a love letter not only to Lala but also to the city of New Orleans. I’m a huge fan of essays that really delve into place, and you do a wonderful job describing the sights, sounds, and smells of New Orleans and South Louisiana: the French Quarter, Decatur, Michoud, Westbank, Crescent City Connection, Baton Rouge, beignets, jambalaya, muffuletta, muggy days and humid nights: “Summer nights like this one, the air moves in tandem with the Mississippi River, not a breeze, more like un soplo de Dios. God’s breath.” Your descriptions and attention to detail in capturing landscape is remarkable, and you do a superb job in placing the reader smack dab at the north end of the Quarter or on the middle of the floor in the TG&Y off Michoud Boulevard in New Orleans East with you. I’m interested to hear more about your process in writing setting and how important it is to you to get it right.

BC: I first began to write about Lala and growing up in New Orleans years ago in grad school, and when I submitted my thesis, my sage advisor made a comment, not unkindly, that I’ve never forgotten. He said, “I don’t know what city this takes place in.” I wanted to crawl under the fine oak table in the Robert Penn Warren Room in embarrassment over how completely I’d overlooked setting. My writing had relied so heavily on the zany character of Lala to propel the narrative, and I’d totally ignored the place where she performed all this zaniness. In my thesis, I’d provided a few place-names throughout, but there was no essence of what New Orleans looked, felt, smelled like. And there’s a lot to smell in any city, especially in the soup-bowl-bottom that is Nola.

As far as getting it right, gah, I don’t know if I can or ever will. I write about this self-doubt, well, in most essays, but most prominently in “Nola Face.” The thing about New Orleans is that I’ve never felt like it was mine enough to write about it. It’s an iconic city, so how could my tiny slice of experience ever do justice to it? Leave that to the historical/intellectual/cultural experts. Eventually I let that anxiety go when I realized I’m not here to tell the whole story of New Orleans, only my own. Because the truth is, the city really is so many things to so many different types of people, and my growing up in many vastly different neighborhoods is a testament to that. Take the Raisin’ Cane’s billboard on the I-10 to the Westbank that read “Westbank on it!” People don’t travel from all over the world to see sights like this, but that billboard was ten minutes from downtown. Small details matter because they’re the backdrops to our lives. When I acknowledged how the oft-overlooked or ignored is what gives a place its flavor, that allowed the prose to finally start having a taste.

CB: That’s a great story, and you certainly remedied place and setting nicely! Let’s talk craft. Nola Face is divided into three sections: The first two sections are titled “Two Truths and a Lie,” and the final section is titled “Two Lies and a Truth.” I find this such an interesting choice. The first “Two Truths and a Lie” section is an introduction where you set out to give the readers two truths and a lie. This is a clever framing technique, especially when writing creative nonfiction and especially as we learn more about your family and your upbringing. What was your process in framing your collection this way?

BC: Well, the framing essays—both versions of “Two Truths and a Lie” and the final “Two Lies and a Truth”—were the last pieces I wrote for the book. Essentially, I had almost twenty other discrete essays I felt were pretty complete, only when I read through them, I had no idea how they held together. So I created a connective framework by asking myself a few questions: 1) why did you write all of these essays (not just one, but all of them), 2) what kind of writer are you, and 3) what do you want your reader to get out of all this? These prompted further questions about how teaching informs my writing, and how I really am a forever-student in how much I read and re-read theories of narrative, memoir, essay, and how much of all that reading I actually retain (am I, as Lala would say, an Enriquita?). These inquiries led me to consider my teaching, likely because I began both teaching and writing (semi) seriously at the same time. Something students have said about my instruction on course evaluations—forms I loathe and give no credence to, unless they are complimentary—is that they feel close to me, they find me relatable. That’s a kind thing to say, but why is that so? One reason that might be: I play games with them. Not just icebreakers, like “Two Truths and a Lie,” but throughout the semester I incorporate play and collaboration into class to remind them not to take all this stuff (their writing, their futures, not even me) too seriously. As you know, the idea of people playing games with each other holds an enormous role in my imagination, particularly in an essay like “Don’t You Forget About Me.” I feel like the trick I try pulling off as a writer is the same trick I try pulling off every semester as a teacher: I learn names on the first day of class. I know your name right away, thus something fundamental about you, the first ever symbol of you. I’d like my reader to feel similarly, that while I don’t know who they might be, I would like to know them, and I am talking directly to them. They (you) are my friends. So, friend-whose-name-I-don’t-know-but-would-like-to, please forgive me for all the insane shit I’m about to tell you. And also, you’re welcome.

CB: Oh yes, you really do befriend the reader. And we thank you. “Don’t You Forget About Me” is another one of those essays that take me back to my childhood. My mother liked playing games, too.

In the second section, “Essayist or Memoirist,” we also have two truths and a lie. Nola Face clearly shows you inhabit both roles/positions/personas equally well. Brava for resisting categorization. . . or do you? You reference Vivian Gornick and her Situation of the Story as your essayist role model, and Patricia Hampl as the “ideal memoirist.” Brilliant writers to learn from and aspire toward. You’ve also written about Gornick and her “situation and the story” for Essay Daily’s Advent 2022 series. I’d love to hear more about your approach to the situation and story in your writing.

BC: Situation versus story is something I obsess over pretty much constantly when I’m drafting essays, teaching them, but most of all while revising them. When one of my essays isn’t working—and look, every single essay in this collection has gone through a phase or twenty of “not working”—I’ll go to a blank page on the computer, or sometimes handwrite it, with a question at the top of the page: “why are you writing this?” Why, why, why is the pulse inside of me as I’m focusing on any piece of writing. Why am I so consumed by this when there are a million other (easier! better! funner!) things I could be doing. Sometimes there’s an ostensible answer to the “why” that I’ll incorporate into the essay, and that still feels wrong. So, then I go deeper, asking the question again and again, exploring all the possible answers I’m capable of conjuring, until the truest, most deeply felt answer possible reveals itself. And, by the way, there’s no shortcut to this. For me, the only way to go deeper and get those realer answers to the why is to let time go by. That’s the only route, to bulldoze through the layers of inevitable self-delusion that obfuscate the gold nuggets of truth far below. Only writing requires a gentler tool than a bulldozer. I toss one spoonful of dirt at a time over my shoulder.

CB: This is both great advice and a great reminder. It can be so frustrating to allow the time necessary to really reach the why, but so imperative. What really stands out to me in the second section is your stunning use of craft. In “Exercises,” you recall a night when you and your husband returned home early from a night out during a time when your dad was staying with you, homeless after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. “Exercises” was awarded the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay, and deservedly so. I’m curious about your thought process in crafting your essay this way, and wonder if writing about difficult experiences becomes easier when crafted in different ways? Do you think the mind is more preoccupied with thinking about “how do I want to write about this” than thinking about what is being written about?

BC: In short, a big yes to this. It’s decidedly easier for me to tackle difficult subjects once I’ve found the right form. The “Exercises” essay probably went through more iterations than any other in this book. Once I found the form, though, whoa, I could actually play with different voices, and at a healthy remove from the experience. From there it was easier to discern which aspects of the narrative needed to be included and which didn’t. “Exercises” is a version of the hermit crab essay, whereby I basically steal the form of Raymond Queneau’s delightful book Exercises in Style. The essay ultimately works for me because the source text was one that I was legitimately attached to during the time the events in the essay take place. So, to more directly answer your question: the “how do I want to write about this” (the form) is something that comes much later for me than the what/content, and that struggle to match up the two sometimes feels like it takes forever. It’s in that struggle, though, where the essay is born.

FYI, I wrote dozens of different versions of “Exercises,” including many failed attempts to tell a straightforward, chronological narrative. Once I glommed onto Queneau as a form, I became fixated with his O and wrote about 100 different forms, or modes, or exercises. Ultimately, I had to narrow them down to the ones that served the larger story I was trying to tell and make sure I wasn’t repeating myself and continuously advancing the story. In a way, I felt like I wanted this essay to be like a really great SNL sketch (yes, those do still exist). Even if brilliantly conceived, that kind of thing can’t go on too long. So I had to be merciless in the cutting: only fourteen of my original dozens of exercises wound up in the book version of “Exercises.”

CB: One hundred different forms. That’s incredible! What an interesting process. We also have to talk about “Nice Lady.” We published “Nice Lady” in 2021, and from the moment I read it, I was amazed at what you were doing. In this essay you take the truth and stretch it, revealing layers of the truth little by little. Readers think they know what happened, only to find out, nope, we really don’t! The craft, the nuance, the restraint you achieve in this piece is phenomenal. Oh, and it’s also about race. Was this essay hard to write, and how did you decide to write it this way?

BC: Oh god, yes, was this essay ever hard to write. While I was so grateful to Under the Sun for publishing and championing it, I remember clearly the day the essay went live and thinking, “Welp, time to puke now.” Discussions of race and ethnicity are all over Nola Face, but in the first third it’s mostly led by Lala. She could be racist and wrong, while I was just an innocent child. “Nice Lady” was new racial territory, and the mistakes, big and small, were mine to contend with. Also, it was both a terrifying experience we went through, and an embarrassing one (as those who know the essay will understand). I was not particularly excited to recall that event.

I wrote the essay this way because for years I’d told aloud the story of the carjacking but could not imagine writing it—that would be too difficult. And the carjacking had become a barometer for how I’d judge others (me, who was in no position to judge). If my listener brought up race, I’d become immediately suspicious. Then again, I had my own racial hang-ups I hadn’t been willing to face, and writing this essay forced me to have some tough conversations with myself. As I say elsewhere in the book, I don’t believe in the tidy bow of villain-versus-victim narratives and, again, constructing this piece challenged all I thought about that. All of that said, as with any piece I find difficult, inserting moments of levity, often at my own expense, makes the writing process much easier.

CB: Your collection is equal parts heartbreaking and hilarious. I don’t think I’ve ever found French fries funny until I read “Bugginess.” Reading these essays, it’s easy to imagine both yours and your family’s sense of humor, from games your mother would play, to you and your sister conversing in Westbankese. You capture your unique voice and tone as well as inject some much-needed humor as you write about some of the tough times.

BC: Humor is my A-one survival skill. Like my father, I am physically handy in zero ways, and to get anything actually done, I rely on the kindness of strangers and my family, who’ve often had enough of my uselessness only, thankfully, they always forgive me. Because when shit gets super hard, I will find a way to make the best with a joke. When that joke doesn’t work, I will try another, and if it fails, another. And you’re right to point out that it really is a family affair, this humor. When my husband Brock moved to Louisiana for graduate school, he became an adopted son of New Orleans because of his own dry, layered sense of humor. From the time I met him, there’s almost nothing that brings me more joy than making him laugh. While writing many of these pieces, particularly the funny scenes, my guiding principle was “if this makes Brock laugh, it’s working.” Cindy, I’m happy to report: he laughed.

CB: Oh, I’m happy to hear it, and what a great gauge! And as excellently as you write humor, you also write disappointment and despair. “Nola Face” crushed me, then lifted me right back up. What a beautiful essay in and of itself and a brilliant close to the collection. Nola was a pit-boxer mix your husband Brock rescued after Hurricane Katrina, and “Nola Face” was the ugly face she made when in the presence of prettier, purebred females, which led to you admitting to your “blonde problem” which led down paths in the essay I didn’t see coming. This essay really resonated with me, touched on all the regrets I’ve had with pets, and my own “blonde problems” (growing up perpetually overweight and brunette in Southern California) of which there were many. I had to hold back the tears that threatened my “Toca Face” (Thousand Oaks, California) from emerging. This essay brings the collection full circle in a surprising, yet hard-to-imagine any other way. I’d love to hear anything you can share about this essay, the close of the collection, and how important is it to land that perfect last line?

BC: “Toca Face,” aw, I love that! My sister from another city/mother. I’m so pleased to hear of your reaction to this essay, perhaps the biggest beating heart of the book. I can credit several editors and trusted readers (shoutouts to Brock, my Supreme Cunt writing group, and Ann Beman at Tahoma Literary Review, where the essay was first published) for help with the piece in general, but particularly the very end. Initially, the essay ended with Nola’s death, and what I imagined happily went through her mind only moments before her demise. Several readers were like, um, no honey, you can’t end the essay, much less your book, on the image of your dog’s death. Another reader at UGA Press suggested shifting the reflection about what the Nola Face grew to mean to me from the penultimate page of the essay to the very end. Just another example that all of the elements of the essay can be there, but tinkering with the order can make it more powerful.

CB: Can you fill us in on Nola Face’s publication journey, and any current projects that you’re working on?

BC: Serendipitous is the best word to describe it. On the same afternoon I first had the thought “hmmm…maybe this collection is done, question mark” writer and editor extraordinaire Nicole Walker announced that she would be the new general editor of the Crux Series in Literary Nonfiction at UGA Press. From reading her work and the essays she’s edited over the years, I knew we had similar aesthetic sensibilities, and that she was kind of the best editor/reader for this collection. I submitted to Crux immediately, though I also simultaneously submitted to a few other independent publishers, some wonderful ones, but only as a matter of course. I knew they weren’t really a fit for this book. Crux and its wide diversity of subjects and writers felt perfect, and with Nicole at the helm, I crossed every finger and toe hoping this would be it. And it was.

I’m currently working on a memoir-in-profiles entitled Lives of the Aints, which serves as both a minor history of the New Orleans Saints and a study of the lives and deaths of many of my beloveds born and raised in the city. It’s modeled off Butler’s Lives of the Saints, and obviously it’s about death, but like all my writing I’m hoping to make it both heavy and light, both deeply felt and funny. With this subject, it’s a big ask. But it’s been a wonderful challenge to incorporate the personal with research, and really to write so much less about myself, yet still make it memoir. I also keep a couple of side-bitch projects in my back pocket when this one gets too tough. But Lives of the Aints is my main squeeze.

CB: What a serendipitous publishing journey indeed! Lives of the Aints sounds incredible! Thanks so much, Brooke. Reading Nola Face and speaking with you is such a pleasure. And now I’d like to end with something light and fun, so here are a few quick-fire questions:

1. Where is your happy place?
This’ll be the most earnest of all my answers. It’s warm and gooey and absolutely true: when my family of four—Brock, Brooke, Mina, Manny—are all lying in bed together, watching movies, tickling, teasing each other or talking about tomorrow, I could die on the spot knowing I’ve led a great life.
2. Let’s visit Greek mythology. Complete the following, “Brooke, muse of ____________?”
Traumedy
3. What is the buggiest thing about you? (Note to readers: Read “Bugginess”)
My willingness to be the butt of your joke.
4. What is your current obsession? Could be anything: word, song, food, drink, anything at all!
Book: Demon Copperhead
Song: Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me”
Word/Phrase: the title and contents of Taylor Swift’s forthcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department
Drink: vermouth + prosecco

5. Because I don’t ever want to be accused of having missed an opportunity: two truths a lie?
• I’ve broken every finger on both my hands.
• I’ve kept a collection of dilated pores of Winer (essentially, embedded blackheads) I’ve extracted with tweezers from Lala’s back.
• Years ago, when we lived in a cabin out in the woods, my dogs King and Nola ate the extra-large Mellowterranean pizza from Mellow Mushroom Brock and I had left on the counter while we took out the trash. When we came inside to Nola happily licking her lips, and King bowing his head in humiliation, I totally did not lose my ever-loving mind.

                                                                

Bio: Brooke Champagne is the author of Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy.  She was awarded the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay, and her work has been selected as Notable in several editions of the Best American Essays anthology series. She is the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellowship in Prose.  She lives in Tuscaloosa, where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA Program at the University of Alabama.