10 Questions for Emmalie Dropkin
- By Edward Clifford
When does a cemetery become a field again?
I stood before the shared gravestone of my great-great-grandparents and knew about them only what I'd learned that day. He was a minister and farmer, she a midwife who delivered babies around the turn of the last century for five dollars per live birth. I imagined not the strangers buried in front of me but their granddaughter Emma, who would have been about eight when Nathaniel died and twenty when Susan passed. Emma must have come here, mourning with the rest of her family, right where I was standing in the high but not unkempt June grass.
—from "The Unraveling of Absence," from Volume 61, Issue 2 (Summer 2020)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I was in elementary school, my school did an annual project where every child wrote a little picture book and parents helped bind them and laminate their covers and such. In first grade, my class was told to write books about birds. I still vividly remember the day parents came for the picture book open house because every parent came over to my desk, and peeked at my book, and laughed and showed the other adults. You can imagine my six-year-old indignation! For the record, the first page of the book (which my mother presented me with upon my MFA graduation) says, “An egg is laid by a hen, but part comes from the rooster. Because if the rooster doesn’t cuddle with the hen, the egg won’t hatch into chicks.” In other news, my sister had been born the summer before and my parents had offered some vague explanations about her origins.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I don’t know that I have an overarching answer, but this essay in particular was influenced by reading Hilary Plum’s memoir Watchfires. She tells a few narratives in interwoven fragments, a structure that inspired some of what I did here.
What other professions have you worked in?
I have taught people at nearly every age level, including elementary school, middle school, high school summer programs, college—I’ve even volunteered in Early Head Start classrooms with infants! For a stretch between teaching middle school and college, I worked in early childhood policy and advocacy at the federal level, in several roles but ultimately as the Director of Policy, Data, and Research for the National Head Start Association. What my brain is essentially good at is taking information and organizing it—which is maybe why I love plotting stories more than anything.
What did you want to be when you were young?
The first thing I ever wanted to be was a librarian. Even writing that sentence, I picture the children’s section of the Bethlehem Public Library in Delmar, NY. I figured, librarians got to spend all day with the books! I did not yet realize that a person could write the books.
What inspired you to write this piece?
As I expect is true for many writers, writing is part of how I process the world and my relationship to it—so I inevitably had to write about the loss that I explore here. This essay took me many years to be ready to write, and is the most personal piece I’ve ever published.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
A lot of my fiction deals with climate change, so I spend a lot of time imagining future landscapes. Right now I’m writing a new novel set against the melting permafrost near the Arctic circle, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to conjure that place. As some point post-pandemic I hope to see it for myself.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I usually write in the mornings, ideally in the Lady Killigrew Café in Montague—where I’m completing this interview! It’s enough of a ritual that the folks here know my usual breakfast order and tease me if I don’t sit in my usual seat. I’ve missed writing here greatly during the pandemic, but they are open for outdoor seating now and I’m looking down at the waterfall as I type this.
Also—more of a habit than a ritual?—I always write down the times that I start and stop writing in the corner of the page in my notebook, to hold myself accountable for taking breaks or playing around on the internet. I made an elaborate infographic with all the data when I turned in my MFA thesis!
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I prefer to write in unlined spiral-bound sketchbooks with their heavy paper, and for many years, I’ve made collages for their covers. I’m not sure whether they’d hold up as capital-A Art!
What are you working on currently?
I’m polishing the (perhaps?) final draft of a novel that explores the realities of daily life fifty years from now if environmental change unfolds in particular, ever-more-likely ways—and the kind of collaborative action that will be required to survive. I also have fragments of a new project literally clothes-pinned around my bedroom, a retelling of Hansel and Gretyl set against the thawing permafrost that’s focused on what it means to get lost when your place itself is changing and how the climate emergency has created a real and justified intergenerational anger that we haven’t come to terms with yet.
What are you reading right now?
I am usually a strictly one-book-at-a-time kind of reader, but one lingering impact of COVID stress is that I keeping starting books without finishing any of them. So I’m currently reading Weather by Jenny Offill, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, The Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin, and Arcadia by Lauren Groff. I tried to trick my brain with the last, which I’ve read before, to no avail. They’re all great in very different ways, my inattentive reading habits are no reflection on the books or their authors!
EMMALIE DROPKIN holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches a course on writing and climate change. Her writing has appeared in Electric Lit, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and the Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, and an anthology of essays she co-edited with Edie Meidav, Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance, was published in 2019 by University of Massachusetts Press. She is a coordinator for the VIDA Count and for Extinction Rebellion Western Massachusetts.
