Being With What Is: An Interview with Marco Wilkinson

Marco Wilkinson is a horticulturist, farmer, and the author of Madder: A Memoir in Weeds, published in 2021 by Coffee House Press. His essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, Seneca Review, Terrain.org, Bennington Review, Taproot, and elsewhere. He is the nonfiction editor at the Los Angeles Review. He has taught literature and creative writing at Oberlin College, University of California San Diego, James Madison University, and Antioch University’s MFA program, as well as having taught horticulture and sustainable agriculture. He was the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Award for Individual Excellence and received fellowships from the Hemera Foundation, Craigardan, and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. He received a BA in English from New York University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Stonecoast Program at University of Southern Maine. We met over zoom in March to discuss his recent book Madder and his ideas about writing and ecology.

Ashlee Laielli: In Madder you made striking choices with white space and aesthetic elements, with organization and repetition. I’d love to hear about your process and the intentions behind those choices.

Marco Wilkinson: A lot of it was intuitive at first. A lot of it was writing and trauma, writing about difficult subjects. It feels possible to do that by writing in fragments, to take bits and pieces and then try to assemble them into some sort of holistic body after the fact, as opposed to just telling a nice, unified narrative. I think the fragmentary nature of the book comes from trying to write about something that, in many ways, I’d rather not write about. Once I started pulling them together and trying to imagine what form this narrative might take, I will confess to using nature to some degree, in as much as there are three major chapters that deal with my life, each defined by a different weed—burdock, madder, and shepherd’s purse. Within each of those essays, or chapters, everything kind of runs through that weed as an organizing metaphor.

I vacillate between these words “essay” and “chapter” because, in some ways, they do function as chapters, and in other ways they are kind of disparate—and don’t always directly connect with each other. Recently, there was a book review that included my book in a list that this writer was putting under the umbrella of a new term she created called the “messay,” the messy memoir essay. The way she saw this genre was that the messiness is part of the project. I definitely think that’s very true for my book. I think that while a chapter might adhere to one plant and look at my life through the prism of that plant, on the other hand, the essays, when you put them together, are much more anarchic and weedy.

One of the projects of the book is to imagine a life not as a cultivated garden, not as a space that is aesthetically ordered and whole, where the prized is cared for and the unprized is edited out, but rather to allow things to, like a weed, grow in the earth and see what form they take—and let them brush up against each other and coexist with each other.

One of the projects of the book is to imagine a life not as a cultivated garden, not as a space that is aesthetically ordered and whole, where the prized is cared for and the unprized is edited out, but rather to allow things to, like a weed, grow in the earth and see what form they take—and let them brush up against each other and coexist with each other.

It’s not an accident that two of the pieces in the book explicitly focus on the practice of foraging. There’s “This Plain-Sight Treasure: Some Rules for Foraging in Waste Spaces” and then there’s “A House of Swinging Doors.” That too feels like a kind of ethical stance in the book—to imagine a world where we accept what appears rather than cultivating privileged spaces. The idea of foraging for me has everything to do with seeing what intrinsic multiplicity is worth, making use of what’s there, rather than cultivating and valuing only some parts of the landscape.

AL: Could you talk about the questions and interests that fueled your pursuit of farming, horticulture, and writing, and propelled you along that trajectory?

MW: There were great insights that I was exposed to in the midst of my academic studies, but what felt missing from them was some sort of ethical underpinning of how to act in the world. My gut instinct has always been that what’s fundamental to an ethical life in the world is its simplicity. Going to the farm was really about trying to embody those insights of interconnection and simplicity as a way of being ethical. After my time farming I ended up going back to New York City and training and working at Brooklyn Botanic Garden as a horticulturist where I had a few formative moments. The first one was in a botany class where the teachers explained to us that, while animals are regenerative beings whose bodies evolve into an adult form, plants are generative beings that endlessly spread and get bigger and bigger, until a giant tree might, through the evolution of its growth upward and outward, eventually just rend itself in two from its own growing. That idea immediately captured me. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot ever since.

Another idea I was exposed to back in 2002 was fungi, not as only pathogenic, but as collaborative, ecological agents in the landscape. I think now that’s an idea that has entered a mainstream eco consciousness, but back then, this was the only place I’d heard people talking about this. It seemed revolutionary to me—that fungi might connect plants to other plants, and that there’s hidden networks of speech and expression across the landscape.

When I was at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I got the chance to see and hear Stanley Kunitz read his poem Snakes of September at a dedication for a grouping of new trees that were being planted in commemoration of September 11th—replacing old trees that had outgrown themselves and started to fall apart. They were planted to commemorate the Armistice of World War One. In that moment, all of time collapsed between one moment at the beginning of the 20th century to another moment at the beginning of the 21st century into the body of Stanley Kunitz, who at that point was probably ninety-nine years old. All was condensed into this little, itty bitty frame of the human. Here was this guy reading his poem, and somehow everything about generative bodies and regenerative bodies collapsed into that moment.

That same year I met a botanist named Peter Nelson, who was in his late eighties at that point. He would come into the Brooklyn Botanic Garden every day to the science lab and study mosses. He was working on identifying mosses of the New York City area. What was amazing was he had been a botanist his whole life; he taught botany at Brooklyn College for many years, but mosses weren’t his field. He took up mosses as an eighty year old as an entirely new endeavor. That always really struck me; that even in your eighties, you might take on something new as a way of contributing to the world. I think about him a lot as someone who came to creative writing kind of later in life. There’s always an opportunity to venture forth into some new realm.

In terms of writing and gardening, I just kept finding myself having these moments of wonder in my work as a gardener. It just seemed like a natural thing to express that in words, rather than just feeling it out in the garden.

AL: Could you share more about your journey into your conceptualization of nature?

MW: Nature is a useful shorthand, but it has many pitfalls to it, too. I think that, in general, to speak of nature renders it into a thing that is separate from us. Then, because it’s separate from us, one is able to manipulate it and turn it to one’s own uses. Since forever, that’s been the conceptualization of nature. For me, I would prefer to try to think of it as the sum total of interrelations of provisionally existing things, contingently existing beings. That feels very nebulous, but it feels important to say, if we’re going to talk about things at all, to recognize their provisionality. I mentioned at one point in Madder, in the essay, “A House of Swinging Doors,” there’s estimated something like 37 trillion cells in our bodies, but only one out of ten of them are human. So how do we even talk about being anything when 90% of us is something else? I once had a chance to speak with Sandor Katz, who wrote a book on wild fermentation called The Art of Fermentation. I got to ask him, “Are humans just giant kefir grains that are moving around through the world with our colonies of yeast and bacteria? Are we just going around fermenting the world?” I still think about that. For me, that’s nature.

I’m much more interested in thinking about interrelationships. One way to frame it is to imagine a kind of a progression. There are three terms: nature, which is about discrete things that are separate and categorizable—taxonomically sort of stable; then the idea of the environment, which is about space and place, and necessarily involves thinking about multiple things in that space. And as soon as you think about multiple things, you are thinking about how they interact with each other. That naturally leads to the idea of ecology as less interested in the things and more interested in the processes and interrelationships that happen through those interactions. The idea in “A House of Swinging Doors” is to think: If each cell is a house made of nothing but swinging doors, of things moving back and forth, then what are you looking at? It doesn’t make any sense to look at the houses, but to foreground those kinds of movements instead.

AL: You write in Madder about your Catholic upbringing, and you write in other work about your current Buddhist practice. How did that path play in the development of things that you are writing and thinking about?

MW: My interest in my undergraduate time in post-structuralism and deconstruction led me to farming. I think there’s something radically ethical in the deconstructive act. It’s about not wanting to take anything for granted as a ground on which to stand because of the violence that can come out of reliance on a central tenet. Doing the work with farming and with plants led me to see, very directly, a world of interconnections. That groundlessness, coupled with a real world life of interconnection, feels like a pretty good working definition for the Zen Buddhist practice that I have been participating in for the last twenty plus years. In terms of trying to write, I feel like my writing is suffused with that. Although I don’t often explicitly bring that out, it’s there— that concern with not separating from the world around you and figuring out how you live a life, if you take that as a place to start from. I have a collection of essays that I’m working on that are probably going to be an intersection of natural observation, foraging practice, and Buddhist practice.

AL: I love how you wrote about your family history, the repetition of, “you’ve got it all wrong, this is not how it happened,” as well as the line that morphed to end on, “between oblivion and fantasy, memory.” Could you talk about how you approach writing memoir and truth that way?

MW: It was a process. This book is really rooted in the trauma of not knowing, which also feels central to my Buddhist practice, as I understand it, and so trying to fall deep into that not knowing. How do you write nonfiction when you don’t know? That felt like a great conundrum for me and an obstacle. So early on, I gave myself permission to write everything and anything that felt true without worrying about whether it was factual, and, even more importantly, not worrying about how other people might feel about what I was writing. I just kept writing and writing. As things started to coalesce into a book, I did have to wonder about this and that. Those two refrains that you point to came very late in the writing process. It felt like those were my answers to this conundrum.

Two insights happened that made me feel okay about this book as nonfiction. Number one, I realized I might be writing fantasies. I might be writing misconstrued family histories. I might be writing rumors or conjectures, but that’s what I’ve lived with my whole life Those are my truths. If I were to go out and do lots of research and pin down the real facts, in a way, that would be a betrayal of the truth that I was trying to convey in the book—the truth of my experience, as a child and growing up. Even fantasy and imagination are true in as much as they exist in our heads. The second thing was realizing that I didn’t have to shut out those other voices. I had to shut them out in order to do the writing, but then I didn’t have to shut them out completely. They could enter into the narrative, too. It felt like that was a way of me acknowledging, to them and to the reader, that this book is not about facts. This is occupying a space in nonfiction that is different from a factual sort of memoir.

AL: I love that. I feel like there’s more of that going on, considering speculative nonfiction. I also see a lot of people who resist these labels, who don’t want to put a genre on their work in order to have that sort of freedom. Was there a reason that it was important for you to call this a memoir, to claim that?

MW: I feel like part of it is the most mundane answer, which is that in my MFA program, where this book started, I was a creative nonfiction writer. I went into that MFA program thinking that I was going to write farming essays like Wendell Berry, or advocacy essays like Michael Pollan. The Vivian Gornick book The Situation and The Story talks about how there is a situation, which is the superficial plot lines and events of life, then there’s the story, the thing that puts on the situation so that it can move through the world—the thing the writer is really trying to say. I found that as soon as I started writing about the situation of farming, I remembered that the very first farm I worked on was nine hours away from where I grew up, and my mother, desperate to see me (even though I was on this farm explicitly to get away from my family), made that drive in one go only to arrive at the driveway of the farm and park and refuse to set foot on it because it represented the very thing she had spent her whole life escaping. Her son betrayed everything she worked for by going to this farm. I started writing about farming and then that showed up, and suddenly there’s a story that is deeper than the situation. So that’s where my writing ended up going.

The truth of experiencing my life through those various false narratives or shadowy narratives, that’s the real truth of my life—not whatever the real facts are. How do we remember our life? How do we put our life together into one body? Through our memories. And maybe it is through fantasies and through lies.

The truth of experiencing my life through those various false narratives or shadowy narratives, that’s the real truth of my life—not whatever the real facts are. How do we remember our life? How do we put our life together into one body? Through our memories. And maybe it is through fantasies and through lies.

In terms of current projects, I’m writing about space, a sense of place. As a child of immigrants in the United States, I am interested in writing about a sense of exile from this place that my family is from. I have visited many times, but I had planned as a follow up to Madder, which was all about not researching, to go to Uruguay and do research to actually try to pin some facts down. COVID has kept me for two years now from engaging with that. I’m interested in the idea of exile and displacement.

AL: I’m curious about what you said about thinking you would write in the style of Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry. They’re writing those essays with a goal to inform and effect some sort of change. How do you think about that? Is that still part of your intention with writing?

MW: I guess I’m interested in puzzling out for myself, and for the reader on the page, new ways of seeing the world—in order to drive a shift in seeing the world, to shift action in the world, not in as direct or policy oriented ways as Berry or Pollan or others, but in a more poetic sphere. I think it has to do with metaphor. You can read Madder as a writer using a natural object, like a particular weed, as a metaphor through which to better understand their life. There’s a long history of that, of nature being used as a mirror that humans use to understand themselves. All too often nature ends up being erased in the process; it becomes merely an object that gets polished to the point of reflecting. On the other hand, I hope the book also works in the other direction, such that my life, as it’s expressed in the book, becomes a metaphor for the nonhuman world, the ecological. I hope someone might come to this book to read it as a memoir, but also walk away, not only with specific knowledge about certain plants, but more importantly, able to see that nothing is illegitimate—to see the world with a new set of eyes and a new way of making use of, or being with, what is, as opposed to feeling like there are things that should be and things that shouldn’t be. Rather to just be with what is.