Episode #313: Unclassifiable and Uncontainable: In Celebration of Art That Can’t Be Pinned Down
Featuring Brontez Purnell
Hello writers and authors, quantifiable and unquantifiable, classifiable and impossible to classify, pin-down-able and decidedly not!
This week’s guest, Brontez Purnell, is the kind of writer who’s either hard to pin down, or just won’t be. As such, he’s inspired an episode about who gets to draw outside the lines and why in the realm of book publishing. Whether you love your lane, feel confined by your lane, or insist on busting out of your lane, we invite you to consider what it means to be classifiable and contained, and whether or not it suits you to be so—or to refuse the categories and labels publishing loves to put on authors. An existential episode inspired by an author who’s blowing up the boxes and having fun doing it.
This week’s Substackin’ is based on Brooke’s post, “Why You Can’t Equate Your Substack Posts to a Book: On the Staying Power of the Book.” Grant and Brooke are drawing from their own Substacks and others for these features, and we invite you to find us at grantfaulkner.substack.com and brookewarner.substack.com.
A non-comprehensive list of genre-busting memoir:
Heart Berries by Teresa Marie Mailhot
Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Also A Poet by Ada Calhoun
Slow Noodles by Chantha Nguon
How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences by Sue William Silverman
World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Partial transcript from the show
Brooke: I’m Brooke Warner, here as always with Grant Faulkner, my ally and conspirator in uncovering inspiration, and Grant—today’s guest is Brontez Purnell, who is gregarious, funny, a big personality. I saw him on stage at the Bay Area Book Festival in June and he’s the kind of person that as soon as he starts talking, he just draws you in. I bought his book, of course with designs of having him on the podcast. That book is called Ten Bridges I’ve Burned, and it’s called a memoir in verse, but. . . it didn’t feel like a memoir to me. In the second poem he’s talking about graduating from Cal in 1988, and he was born in 1982, and there were other things that felt possibly not autobiographical. I noted these things, but didn’t really care because the prose is amazing. And then I listened to his collection of stories called 100 Boyfriends, and I realized that he’s one of these writers who is blowing up boxes. We’re going to get to this in the interview with him, but it got me thinking about why some people are allowed to blow up boxes and others can’t. Why so many writers get hemmed in, and feel really pigeonholed, and others are defying all that and refusing to be classified. Do you have a take on this—do you think the ones who do get pigeonholed are doing something wrong?
Grant: It’s a good question. I used to joke that I couldn’t write stories like Lydia Davis because Lydia Davis is the only one who gets to be Lydia Davis. Meaning that many of her stories are odd, and many people don’t see them as stories, they see them as random sentences sometimes, and I’ve read some the same way—as in, just because Lydia Davis is a big figure in the writing world and the flash writing world, the same rules don’t apply to her. I think that’s true to an extent, but there’s more. She’s shaped her aesthetic to the degree that her work is a kind of sub-genre unto itself. And she’s shaped that sub genre through a lifetime of making her own rules. So part of being pigeonholed is pigeonholing yourself. It is a decision. And if you feel your story and the way you want to tell it breaking the rules, then that requires a bravery to break the rules and live with the consequences of taking that risk.
Brooke: You know, the industry tries to tell writers what they can and can’t do all the time, and I know it’s a massive frustration to authors, and it sometimes results in people changing their work in ways that they’re not pleased with. Sometimes it causes people to opt out of traditional publishing because they don’t feel like they can write the books they want to write. I remember when Kiese Laymon told us that he felt pushed to write for an audience that wasn’t his audience, in the early days anyway. In fact, he reverted the rights to one of his books because he wasn’t happy with the way his publisher had pushed that book to be something that he didn’t want. So once he was in a position to rectify that, he did. Just based on who Brontez is, I can see that he’s got a kind of “it” factor that publishers like. His writing is fearless. And I feel like maybe that fearlessness you see on the page is how he is as an artist. This is projecting, but it kind of feels like he’s a “take me as I am” kind of artist. Like or you don’t—I’m not doing this for you. I know I admire that, and people generally admire that. But not everyone can get away with that.
Grant: Yeah, definitely not. And it’s an interesting phenomenon that some people can and some can’t. Brontez has a couple of novels that are billed semi-autobiographical, and it does feel like he doesn’t hew too closely to the confines of a given genre. You made your earlier point about the memoir maybe having some timelines and facts that don’t totally line up. In an NPR interview he said, “I called it a memoir, where even in some parts, it's still a pack of lies.” That reminds me of the documentarian Werner Herzog’s notion of what he called the “ecstatic truth”—that there’s a truth that matters more than the facts, so sometimes you take liberties with the facts to convey that higher truth. I don’t know if that’s what Brontez was trying to do, but he was saying this on the heels of saying that marginalized people don’t get taken seriously unless they write first-hand accounts. I think a lot of people would say this and people would be pissed off, but somehow Brontez’s irreverence makes it feel like an act of rebellion and something you can get behind on his behalf. Do you have feelings about this comment, Brooke, given how you champion memoir, and given its “rules”?
Brooke: I mean, yes and no. I think sometimes there are people who speak truth and you’re kind of like—okay, yeah. I think in memoir people are writing their creative truth. I also don’t know if Brontez was kind of joking—he could have been. But generally, yes, I would object to someone outright saying they were lying in their memoirs. And I believe it’s Mary Karr who took Vivian Gornick to task a bit because Gornick is kind of famous for believing that the truth is just the barest sketch when it comes to memoir writing. In a 2003 Salon essay, Gornick wrote: “A memoir is a tale taken from life — that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences — related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements, it has the same responsibility as the novel or the short story — to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader. What actually happened is only raw material; what the writer makes of what happened is all that matters.” I agree with this take, though I think some people take this as total license to bend the truth in memoir. I feel like we’re getting more and more blurry on the boundaries of fiction and memoir honestly, and so maybe I’m less upset about someone saying there are lies in their memoir than there used to be. I would still never advocate for that, and I also feel like what the lies are matter. Like are you mischaracterizing yourself or someone else, or inventing something that didn’t happen? Not okay. Or are you making up certain details or drawing certain conclusions to service the story. Okay in my opinion. It’s complicated, Grant—truly. I sort of envy someone who can just say, “screw it”. But I’m not there. Not yet.
Grant: It’s definitely blurry, and getting blurrier with the rise of autofiction. I’ll put the spotlight on your phrase of “serving the story”. I think everything we do as writers has to be in service of the truth of the story, and that’s the end criteria. Are you serving the truth of your story? Brontez’s 2017 book, Since I Laid My Burden Down, is a chronicle of growing up gay and Black in the American South and it is, according to reviews, autobiographical. I was interested to see that Michelle Tea called it “an important American story rarely, if ever, told.” And of course we had Michelle Tea on this podcast talking about autofiction. She’s another one of those push-the-envelope people who is a memoirist and novelist who also wrote a book called Against Memoir.
Brooke: They’re kind of cut from the same cloth, for sure—that sort of punk, urban, singular, edgy, street-smart. Michelle Tea has this essay I found online that starts: “I get asked sometimes to defend the way I write. To explain how it’s um writing I guess. Because I'm not making stuff up so why do I think that anyone wants to hear about my crappy life. Well then don’t read it, punk! It’s all I can think about, my own life and your life too. I mean, what’s everybody doing? I really want to know.” Michelle’s fans love this kind of pushback, irreverence, don’t-give-a-shit attitude. I’m doing my art—what are you doing? You gotta love people like that. I mean, I do. . . .
Grant: Me, too. I think that’s our job as artists—to push boundaries, take the risks and be vulnerable in ways that others generally aren’t—and by taking those risks and making ourselves vulnerable, we’re crashing down gates that open the world up to greater belonging. You know I recently gave a reading to a somewhat staid, conservative crowd. Before the reading, I’d struggled with what to read, and I wanted to read something new instead of my usual stories—for myself as much as for the crowd. So I read a new piece that was somewhat risque. Or it was risque. I felt vulnerable as hell. To the point that I knew I’d have a “vulnerability hangover” afterward, to quote Brene Brown. But a couple of people walked up to me afterward to tell me how much the piece meant to them. I’ve actually been struggling with this dilemma throughout my writing life, because the way I feel a story generally doesn’t adhere to the conventions publishers look for. So I’ve willingly chosen to write things that are more experimental, in either form or content or both. My teen punk rock spirit has never left me, I guess. I feel like the world needs to hear a yell, although that yell can take many different forms. Which is another interesting part of this conversation for me. When I was younger, my rebellion, my truth, took a more muscular, energetic, in-your-face form. Now, it’s quieter. I search for intimacy, connection, not to alienate or disturb. Or to disturb in a different way. What about you, Brooke? Do you feel like you’re classifiable and contained?
Brooke: I definitely do, and I don’t feel badly about it. I love that we have artists like Brontez who are just so out there with their art. Miranda July is another artist like that, also doing multimedia with her writing and her performance. For my part, I am making my way in on a prescribed path that feels authentic to who I am. I am about staying in my lane, and I like my lane. So I’m lucky, I guess, because I do not feel confined even though I’m classifiable. And there are a lot of us that are trying to be classifiable, right, because we’re tending to our expertise. Then there are others who get sick of their lanes. Like okay, I’ve been doing sci-fi but now I want to write romance. These people get into trouble for prior success because the common wisdom is: Don’t mess with your audience. Stay in your lane. But we’re all different, you know. Some people are happy with their lanes and will stay there their whole careers, and other people need variety. They want to be in all the lanes. And I think it’s both a mindset and a kind of internal need or passion or calling that sometimes can’t be ignored. Like Brontez is who he is because he’s uncontainable—and that’s not necessarily something other people can emulate. In part because being an artist or an author or a writer is really about being who you are.
Grant: Well said, Brooke—and that is the end goal: to be who we are. I always tell my students when I’m putting my aesthetic biases out there because I don’t expect or want people to write like me. I want them to define their own aesthetic, their own “ecstatic truth.” We need different models of being who we are, which is one reason Brontez is so important, so I look forward to talking more after this short break.
This week’s Substackin’:
This week’s Substackin’ is based on one of my more popular reads from August: “Why You Can't Equate Your Substack Posts to a Book: On the Staying Power of the Book.” I had been seeing leverage being gained behind the idea that the book was becoming obsolete because readers are so much more engaged in online platforms like Substack. And I just felt that I wanted to poke holes in those assertions I’d seen—to remind people that Substack and the book are really in fact un-equatable. And to talk about the ways that the book has stood the test of time and will continue to do so. One of the points that I made that had a lot of resonance with readers of my post had to do with the book as a heart object. How a particular book can connects us to a time and a place. The way books stay with us is powerful—and that’s why I wanted to write about their staying power. As opposed to these online platforms, which, no matter how much I’m into Substack right now, it won’t be forever.
Read the full post here!
ABOUT BRONTEZ PURNELL
Brontez Purnell is the author of several books, most recently Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, a memoir in essays, and 100 Boyfriends, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction. Brontez was named one of the 32 Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018 and is the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers and a renowned dancer, performance artist, and zine-maker.