Q&A with Miriam Webster
“In the bathroom at my father’s house, which is unfinished and blue, I look at my reflection in the mirror. My gums are spongy and swollen, the colour of the sacrament.”
~ ‘A hole is a gap is a lack is a virtue’ by Miriam Webster
In your creative nonfiction piece ‘A hole is a gap is a lack is a virtue’ you write about the experience of losing a tooth and how it allowed you to find your voice through writing. Can you tell us more about your "Medusa moment" and the inspiration behind your work?
I had my Medusa moment just before my 27th birthday. I was pretty hysterical then, flailing about after having dropped out of a Masters degree in English and dealing with some heavy personal issues surrounding my Dad’s illness and my own feelings of aimlessness and inadequacy. I was completely freaked out about having my tooth removed, thinking it was proof of some terrible failure – to be beautiful or clever or put-together, something like that.
So my birthday was coming up and everyone was banging on about my Saturn Return and how it was going to be a really big year for me, but I couldn’t see anything changing or any good coming my way. About a week before my birthday I had a feeling that I needed to read Cixous’ ‘Laugh of the Medusa’, and I got to the part where Cixous talks about how she didn’t write until the age of 27 because she didn’t believe herself worthy, or clever, or important enough for writing. And I was like, I’m 27!! And then she goes ‘Why don’t you write? Writing is for you!’, and I just had this ecstatic moment when I realised writing was the thing I’d never dared to but always wanted to do. And of course Cixous’ reading of the Medusa myth and her theory of an écriture feminine is that Medusa is not actually monstrous but ‘beautiful and laughing’, which reinscribes so-called monstrous femininity with great creative/erotic power. A couple of days later I had the dream I describe in the piece, no doubt inspired by having just read Cixous, and I woke up feeling a bit feral and powerful, and certain that losing my tooth wasn’t going to mark me as a failure but was going to create a new space through which self-knowledge and language could flow in and out of me. So I started writing it all down.
You cover a range of topics throughout your piece, from scurvy to psychoanalysis to feminist theory. Is research an important part of your writing process?
I don’t know if I’d call it research (perhaps to the chagrin of my writing teachers) so much as a process of symbiosis. I read a lot, and mostly I find that the things I read pop up in my work and in my dreams in unexpected ways, which I’ll then build on and obsess over. My background is in politics, English literature and critical theory, which can be very rigid, but I love the freedom you have when writing creatively to read something ‘serious’ – like a critical text – and transform it into something cheeky or fluid or wild. That’s my favourite way to write.
I love that you say you write about "the sometimes unbearable torment of living." What other writing projects do you have in the works?
I actually borrowed that line from my friend Clare, so she deserves the credit! I was wondering what to write in my bio and Clare was like “oh, that’s easy, you write about the unbearable torment of living,” which is very true. It’s like the psychoanalytic assumption that everyone is miserable because living is mostly strange and torturous, and the point is not to worry about being happy but to do what you need to do – write, make art, grow your own veggies, work, have relationships, talk, get drunk, whatever – to make it all bearable. That doesn’t feel negative or defeating to me, it feels like an immense relief. There is so much humour, vitality and warmth in the ways we try to negotiate this unbearability, and that’s what I’m interested in trying to convey in my writing.
As for writing projects, I’m currently at the beginning of a Masters thesis which I think I will turn into a novella. It’s a piece of autofiction about my sisters and I and our relationship with our Dad, who died in March. I suppose I am trying to do the grief-work through writing, which may or may not work; but I have a feeling it’s the best place for me to start.
You also mention some fantastic books in your piece. What's currently at the top of your reading list?
Aha, my favourite question! I’m reading so many wonderful things. The madness that is ‘Nox’ by Anne Carson, whom I absolutely adore. ‘In the Dream House’ by Carmen Maria Machado breathed a bit of life into my thinking and writing recently. ‘Luster,’ the debut novel by Raven Leilani (who has been mentored by Zadie Smith!) has to be the best novel I’ve read in a while. It’s funny and dark and totally in the zone of unbearable living, and if there’s one novel anyone should read this year I reckon that’s it. I’m about to start ‘Friends and Dark Shapes’ by Sydney author Kavita Bedford, which I think is going to be good.
Miriam Webster is a student of creative writing living and working in Melbourne/Naarm. She writes what she knows: women, relationships, the places we inhabit, and the sometimes unbearable torment of living.