Schneider Bowering Delisle

Aaron Schneider Interviews Jennifer Bowering Delisle

(Gordon Hill Press, 2023)

Jennifer Bowering Delisle

As Jennifer Bowering Delisle was on her path through infertility towards motherhood, she was simultaneously losing her own mother to a rare degenerative neurological disease and an approaching medically-assisted death. The lyric essays in Micrographia explore how losses can collide and reverberate both within our own lives and in our relationships with the rest of the world.

Aaron Schneider: Where did this book begin? Did it start as individual essays that you then gathered into a book or did you have a sense early on that it was going to be a book?

Jennifer Bowering Delisle: The answer is somewhere in between. Most of the pieces about infertility and new motherhood started as individual essays, and I wrote them over a period of several years. When I began writing about my mother’s terminal illness, I had the sense fairly early on that there was a book there, and began to realize that the other pieces I’d been writing were part of that project—they all fit together as a book about family, with common themes of fear, healthcare, and connection. But it still took several more years for the book to come together, in part because the story I was telling hadn’t all happened yet.

AS: What writers or books influenced this book? When you are working on creative nonfiction, do you look to other writers of creative nonfiction for inspiration or do read in other genres?

JBD: In general, I read in and am influenced by all genres when I’m working on creative nonfiction. I look to poetry for inspiration in rhythm, metaphor, and precision. I look to fiction for inspiration in building scenes and crafting a narrative arc.

My style of creative nonfiction tends toward the lyrical or hybrid, and it took me a long time to find my way to that form. My first book, The Bosun Chair, was another project that had a very long gestation, in part because I wasn’t able to fit the book neatly into the boxes of poetry or historical family memoir. Reading other writers who blurred the boundaries between creative nonfiction and poetry—Michael Ondaatje, Lia Purpura, Judith Kitchen—helped me to lean into that hybrid form and find my voice.

For this book, I think I was most influenced by the other writers in my community, the friends with whom I exchanged work or had conversations about craft or from whom I received editing and mentorship. There are many women writers in Canada now who are doing exciting things with creative nonfiction—Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Susan Olding, Jenna Butler, Lisa Martin—I could go on and on!

AS: The pieces in this book range from short pieces that are a page long and read like flash creative nonfiction to much longer personal essays that weave together multiple strands. How do you think about the personal essay? Do you see the shorter and longer pieces as being different from each other or do you see them on a continuum? And are there any difference in how you approach writing them?

JBD: I think of the pieces as being similar in the sense that almost all have some kind of formal constraint. Many of the longer pieces are “braided essays”—a form that weaves together strands, as you put it, of personal narrative with strands of history or art or medicine, creating meaning through juxtaposition and fragmentation. The shorter essays have the constraint of that compressed form, and I approached those similarly to a poem. Once I started getting into the material, it would usually tell me what that form needed to be, and how much space was needed.

The title “micrographia”—literally tiny writing—has multiple meanings in this book. One of them is the medical term for when certain neurological diseases cause the patient’s handwriting to get smaller. But it’s also a reference to those very short pieces that you mentioned. Something that I wanted to convey with this book was how much of our interactions with each other are fragments—brief conversations, social media posts. I’m interested in how much we can know of each other’s lives and share of our own in a small format. So that interweaving of short pieces with longer ones was very much part of my vision for the book as a whole.

AS: These essays cover a fairly large span of time, but they are not ordered chronologically. How did you decide on the order of the essays?

JBD: With great difficulty! There were quite a few different iterations of the order while I was finishing this book. At one point I had the titles of all the pieces written on little pieces of paper spread out across my floor. Because this is a collection of essays, not a full-length memoir, most of the pieces were written to stand on their own, with their own complete and distinct narrative structure. This meant that I couldn’t just put them chronologically if I wanted to, because they overlapped in time. Instead, I was looking for the way that the pieces resonated against each other, while still creating an overarching narrative. Some pieces are beside each other because together they move a story forward chronologically, but others are beside each other because I see them as being in conversation—about fear, or grief, or how we connect with strangers.

AS: You open with a note about the expansion of MAID in 2021 because your mother accessed MAID in 2016, well before this expansion, and you write about her. What is the experience like of having the context around a piece of writing shift like this? Has it changed your relationship to the piece and/or altered how you imagine readers engaging with it?

JBD: It changed my relationship to the piece dramatically—and to other pieces in the collection as well. The expansion and the resulting outcry from the disability community opened my eyes to the complexity of the issue—not just of the legislation itself but the way that our governments, healthcare systems, and society at large regard and treat people with disabilities. It was critical for me to listen very carefully to those voices and I did a lot of revision to ensure that my account was limited to my own experience. I could not speak for my mother—her experience of progressive disability and terminal illness, or the choice that she made—only for myself as a family member. Having a loved one choose MAiD is profoundly disorienting—as a culture we don’t tend to be very good at grief to begin with, and this form of loss makes the experience more complex. The controversy has made this even more difficult to talk about, which made me feel that it was urgent for these stories to be told.

AS: This book contains intimate details of the lives of the people around you. How did you decide what to share? Was there material that was out of bounds? And, more broadly, how do you navigate those inevitable moments when telling your story involves telling someone else’s?

JBD: I constantly asked myself a number of questions—do I need to tell this story, or include this detail? Is it mine to tell? Will sharing this hurt my relationships with those still alive? Am I taking other perspectives into consideration? I also got input and consent from loved ones, particularly for the pieces about people who have died.

I also thought a lot about power dynamics and vulnerability. There are many pieces featuring my children, but in those they are toddlers or preschoolers, and I did not feel that those essays included their particular identities—instead, they are about my experience of new motherhood. As with writing about MAiD, I always made sure that I was only writing from my own viewpoint and not speaking for anyone else. Now that my children are getting older, I’m very careful about what I choose to write about and have started asking for their consent as well.

What I think is most important—and I’ve written about this elsewhere—is to never stop asking those questions, of yourself and those around you. It’s impossible to write about our lives without also including the people we share our lives with. But I feel we have to do our due diligence to minimize hurt. It’s when we are confident in what we are doing that we are most at risk of doing harm.

AS: I’m interested in the granular details of craft and this is often quite a lyrical book? Can you pick a passage, either a favorite one or one that you have had to fight for, and explain the process of composing it? Where did it start? What did you change? And how do you see the final version working?

JBD: One of the oldest passages in the book is from the essay “Spectre,” which is about pregnancy following multiple miscarriages:

This time, the thickening has become a heart, a head. The picture hangs above my desk: grey face, each vertebra clear, stacked along the bottom of my womb. Still, I am suspicious of my body, the gold flecks of colostrum, the deep purple strokes above my hips. My belly squirms, like a bag of kittens weighed with stones.

On the whole, this essay is quite dense, framing the miscarriage experiences with the story of Mary Tudor or “Bloody Mary,” who was unable to conceive and had several false pregnancies in the 16th century, and the old children’s game where you say “Bloody Mary” three times in the mirror to make her face appear. The shocking simile of the pregnant belly being like a bag of kittens to be drowned adds to the atmosphere of horror of the whole piece. Even the ultrasound photo is described with uncanny details—the face is grey, the bones are clear and stacked. These are the details of craft that I’m really proud of—but they also almost doomed the piece.

Before the book was published, this piece was rejected by literary magazines many times over many years. At one point I got great feedback from an editor that the piece needed more exposition. It was simply too poetic, too compressed, to the point that it was difficult to follow what was happening or to connect with the speaker. It was a great learning for me about the craft of the lyric nonfiction form. This passage stayed more or less the same through many revisions, but the paragraphs and sections around it did more grunt work to make sure that the craft choices here conveyed meaning and not just mood.

AS: What question do you wish you had been asked about this book, and can you answer it?

JBD: When telling people what my book is about, a common response I get is, “that must have been really hard to write.” But nobody ever phrases that as a question!

The answer to that question would be no, it didn’t feel hard but rather urgent and necessary. I feel tremendously grateful to be an artist and to have an outlet for the feelings and experiences—which are the hard things—and a means of working through them.

I mentioned that I don’t think we’re good at talking about or managing grief as a culture—and this is particularly true when it is the grief of pregnancy loss or the grief of losing someone who has medical assistance in dying. It’s particularly true when it comes to teaching children how to grieve. Writing has been a critical part of my own way of processing grief, both emotionally and intellectually.

Jennifer Bowering Delisle is the author of three books of lyric nonfiction and poetry: Micrographia (2023), Deriving (2021), and The Bosun Chair (2017). A new collection of poetry, Stock, is forthcoming in 2025. She is also on the board of NeWest Press. She lives in Edmonton in Treaty 6 territory.

Aaron Schneider is a queer settler living in London, Ontario. He is the founding Editor at The /tƐmz/ Review, the publisher at the chapbook press 845 Press, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing Studies at Western University. His stories have appeared in The Danforth Review, Filling Station, The Ex-Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Pro-Lit, The Chattahoochee Review, BULL, Long Con, The Malahat Review and The Windsor Review. His stories have been nominated for The Journey Prize and The Pushcart Prize. His novella, Grass-Fed (Quattro Books), was published in Fall 2018. His collection of experimental short fiction, What We Think We Know (Gordon Hill Press), was published in Fall 2021. The Supply Chain (Crowsnest Books) is his first novel.