The Brooklyn Rail

I can’t tell you the immense pleasure I got from reading The Dry Season alone in a hotel room. It was late March when AWP brought me to Los Angeles, and I was done socializing for the day. The new Lucy Dacus album had just come out, and it played softly while I turned page after page, wearing nothing but the white hotel robe. Delicious. When your favorite artists are in conversation with each other, you can find hints of the divine in every image, every metaphor. You can see the connective sinew flexing. In my body, I felt part of the conversation. Over email, I had the chance to make that conversation external. As a spiritual writer that turns to Melissa Febos’s work for clarity and revelation, it was nothing short of a miracle. Writing within the mystic tradition, Febos’s The Dry Season is a stunning translation of her faith in art and in the self.

Hannah Burns (Rail): In The Dry Season you say, “I was wary of acting like an evangelist for celibacy, though in truth I would have liked to prescribe it to many.” Do you consider your books to have an instructive quality?

Melissa Febos: I wouldn’t say instructive, more like demonstrative. Most of what I have learned in life has been through my own and others’ lived experience, both demonstrated and shared, and not through prescription. So, I don’t have a lot of faith in prescription. If I ever speak in the imperative or the second person in my work, it’s reflexive. I am interested in showing that certain things are possible, but I want to show myself first, and then invite the reader to witness my process.

Rail: During your celibate period, you decided that flirting had to be part of the temporary ban. In The Dry Season, you talk about turning on a certain charm, tapping into that self-possessed magnetism in order to draw people to you. I wonder if you tap into that feeling at all when you write. Your work has a distinct charisma, the voice is magnetic. Is writing like flirting, then? Trying to win the reader’s attention, and perhaps affection?

Febos: [Laughs] No, it really isn’t. But thanks, I think. Perhaps in my early drafts, or in my work as a much younger writer there was a bit of flirting, the enactment of that kind of charisma. But the goal of my work is different from the goal of flirting. I don’t write in order to draw people to me. I write in order to get closer to truth. To open my heart and progress my thinking. If seduction is a kind of glamour or spell, then memoir is a spell-breaker. I want to wake up through writing, not enter a fantasy. I believe that truth has its own charisma, as does confidence, as does beauty. I don’t usually begin in truth, confidence, and beauty, but my goal is to get there—they are contingent on each other, and loosely in that order. My hope is that the magnetism of my work, insofar as it exists, exists as a combination of those elements. That’s what compels me as a reader.

Rail: Between figures like Hildegard of Bingen and Virginia Woolf, looking at examples of radical women living toward their higher purpose was inspiring. Seeing that connection between feminism, love, divinity, and the act of creation seems like a fruitful place to find hope and meaning under this administration. In The Dry Season you say, “there was no more injustice today than there had been in the Middle Ages, and still those women found ways to manifest a consecrated life.” It is hard to have faith right now, and to trust the future. How do you respond when your faith is shaken?

Febos: Well, my faith is not in the state, a political system, a church, or any individual humans, so it is less vulnerable to being shaken by the disruptions or failures of those things. I believe in art, nature, in the power of communities, in my communities, concerted work toward a life based in justice and love, and that all of those are much higher powers than me. What I experience, rather than shaken faith, is grief, fear, and anger. Those are emotional experiences, and my first instinct is usually to try and avoid them, but I have a lot of practice not responding from my first instinct. Feelings want and need to be felt, and if they aren’t, they can create a lot of harm and misdirection. So, I try to just feel it all. Then, I can think more clearly about if there’s an action for me to take, and if there is, it’s usually something to do with that list of things I have faith in.

Rail: You study female mystics and write in the lineage of “the truly faithful, who live in recognition of the infinite divine.” The Beguines, Audre Lorde, Margery Kempe. Scenes come to me fully formed at times, and I wonder if they are visions. Like Agnes Martin obeying her vision of the grid. You are translating your humanity, your “sense of the divine,” in everything you write. Do you have visions? Do you identify as a mystic or simply in the mystic tradition?

Febos: I feel really flattered by the suggestion, but no, I don’t identify as a mystic. But I suppose I do identify as practicing within a mystic tradition, in the sense that I seek awareness of my spiritual oneness with something bigger than myself. I seek conscious contact with higher powers. I’m generally a pretty spiritual person and always have been (which I write about in The Dry Season), and I do think of art as a partially mystical practice. I wrote in Body Work about the connections, both analogical and direct, between artmaking (especially memoir), direct spiritual communion, and therapeutic methods.

I spent a lot of time with mystics while writing this book and while living the time that the book describes because I craved the companionship and guidance of women who were also seeking kinds of truth that are not limited to intellectual comprehension, that are beyond the intellect. I wanted to get around my thoughts, to the sticky core of me, where I understand things like love in a more sublime sense. I like a brainy revelation, don’t get me wrong, but in art I am after something bigger than that, something that engages the heart and conscience, and draws upon an intelligence that is distinct from the one that quotes Michel Foucault or whatever, you know? I suspect it’s the same one that Hildegard and Agnes and Hadewijch were after.

I’ve received a lot of surprising wisdom from my own art. Maybe visions are just what we call the transmissions from that other, more mysterious intelligence. The muse or God or the unconscious or Self or the shadow—people have come up with a lot of models for explaining it across human history.

Rail: Writing can be incredibly vulnerable, so it is hard to write when you are trying to avoid feeling embarrassed. I often feel acute embarrassment anytime I share something I have written. Is it just a matter of choosing to accept that embarrassment, as part of the human condition, instead of avoiding it? Or does the blushed feeling just recede over time? Are you still able to frame your writing as a “private exercise” or do you no longer need that illusion of privacy?

Febos: Your question makes me think about what embarrassment really is. Like, it’s distinct from humiliation. I guess it’s just fear of being seen. Exposing something that could be weaponized against me, maybe? Some part of me that doesn’t fit into the story I want to tell about myself. It’s an interesting thought. And yeah, it does recede over time. Or rather, it recedes over the length of writing a thing. One way of describing my writing process is that I face the embarrassing thing until it no longer embarrasses me. Until it becomes not dangerous or shameful or weak, but beautiful, a kind of strength. And that final form is its true form.

I do still promise myself at the beginning of everything I write that I don’t have to ever show it to anyone. And the privacy that promise affords me is not an illusion; it is real. I mean it every time. I write alone. And I only invite readers in when I am no longer embarrassed, but love the thing I’ve seen and made.

Rail: You say “the trick of shame is that it only becomes visible once you set it down.” Does this mean externalizing shame, through the act of writing?

Febos: For me it does. Writing is not the only mechanism that helps me recognize and set down shame—therapy, meditation, and maybe most of all intimate conversations with friends and my partner are all instrumental as well—but writing is often the starting point for me. I think it often is for memoir, because one of the tasks of the memoirist is to shear away the false stories that surround their own experience, and that’s one way to describe shame: as a very compelling, but ultimately false story about oneself.

Rail: If writing is a spiritual practice for you, what are you worshipping with the act of it? You call art “that most reliable higher power.” What shape does the infinite divine ultimately take for you?

Febos: I guess I think worship is just another word for devotion or communion. A kind of opening to a connection that pre-exists. I do see writing as an act of devotion or communion. I’ve heard people describe prayer as talking to God, and meditation as listening. I like that, though I don’t really experience my own prayer and meditation that way. Writing, however, is a space for both talking and listening. It is one of the places where I get closest to myself, where I am most inside my own lived experience, and where I most easily access my feeling of connectedness with something greater. That, and faced with the ocean, or otherwise in nature. And through intimacy with other people, and their art. But I think writing is the beginning of all of it for me. It’s the place where I am always waking up, even when the rest of life makes me want to shut down.

Rail: How is it to share your time and space with another writer? Do you alternate tending to each other, taking turns being “art monsters” and giving yourself fully to your writing? Has your writing practice changed since Donika came into your life?

Febos: It’s the best! I mean, it can be challenging sometimes, but I am always grateful to share a home and so much of my time with someone who understands my relationship to art, and who has an equally deep, and quite similar, relationship to her own practice. We have very different habits in terms of what we need to get our work done, but for both of us it means a meaningful amount of time apart, and alone. We are good at making that space for each other. And I love that we can talk about it all the time—that we talk about our processes, our projects, our challenges, what we’re reading, how it filters into our teaching—it’s such a gift to share these aspects of our lives and get to deepen and support each other around them. Before we met I thought it would be much harder, too hard, really—but it works quite well. Every long term relationship is a lot of consistent work, but our relationship as artists is pretty simple and lovely.