In these days of shrinking attention spans and dwindling memories, saying that something was “worth the wait” can be a tricky statement. The fickle entertainment-seeking public is increasingly impatient, finding it easier to move on than to wait for the next movie from their favorite filmmaker, the latest song or album from a favorite musical act they enjoy, the new book by a writer they regularly read. But “worth the wait” has rarely been truer than it is in the case of Body Geographic (University of Nebraska, 2013), the third memoir by lesbian writer Barrie Jean Borich. A queer travelogue incorporating personal and historical details that is seamlessly woven into a one-of-a-kind atlas quilt, Body Geographic contains of echoes of Borich’s first two books Restoring The Color of Roses (1993) and My Lesbian Husband (2000). But Body Geographic unfolds differently, spins on its own unique axis and is veined with roads traveled and landscapes claimed and reclaimed.
WATERMARK: Was it intentional or just a coincidence that your third book Body Geographic is being published 20 years after your first book Restoring The Color of Roses?
BARRIE JEAN BORICH: I hadn’t realized this until you pointed it out. Wow, 20 years. It’s a coincidence, yes, but now that you’ve made me aware I’d say it’s a weirdly appropriate coincidence.
Fans are rejoicing that there is finally a new book. What do three full-length books in 20 years say about your creative process?
Well, clearly this turnaround time suggests I’m slow, right? [Laughs] But I’m also deeply meticulous when it comes to form, image, language. I’m as interested in sound and structure as I am in subject, which is work that can take a long time to create. Also, I believe revision is writing and I often don’t know what I’m chasing until I’m several drafts in, and as my work has become more ambitious I’ve layered in a great deal of research. So there are many reasons for the time it’s taken me so far to finish a book. Still though, when I do have the opportunity to write full time I can be quite productive. I just don’t have that opportunity very often, because I teach full time.
Please say something about the structure of your new book Body Geographic.
The book is structured as an atlas. Each chapter was made to imitate the form of the map. The most used map structure I’ve used in the book is the road map with insets of city detail, so for instance in the essays I’ve called “maps” the structure is a main narrative interrupted by other narratives or ruminative and/or lyric insets that in some way move in closer or take another view. Other structures include a legend, a palimpsest map, a panorama view map, and a couple Trip Tiks, all of these forms indirectly mimicking the ways maps reveal and obscure the nature of places. And finally I’ve included actual maps I found in archives and sources.
You mentioned research, so in terms of the maps and historical information, how much research was involved in the book?
A great deal. I read books about maps and early 20th century immigration and the meaning of place and the Columbian exposition. I spent time in immigration archives and city history archives and mining archives. I read oral histories from Eastern European immigrants to Chicago, memoirs by Yugoslavian immigrants, old country newspapers. I poured through digital map archives, went to drag king shows, interviewed my great aunt and my grandmother. I followed my interests and intuitions, which means I was massively inefficient, but then found things I wouldn’t have known to look for. I’m not a scholar but rather treat research as a discovery process.
Keeping with the geography theme, after several years in Minneapolis, you have recently returned to Chicago to reside and teach at DePaul University. What do you think the significance is to your return to Chicago and the writing of this book?
A good number of people who’ve read the book have told me they are glad I’m finally back in Chicago, so I guess Body Geographic accurately renders my long held desire to return. And the greatest significance is, I guess, that I’ve ways said I would come back some day, and now I have. So I don’t have to regret the dream deferred.
But at the same time, that I have returned is a curious postscript to a book that ends deeply grounded in Minneapolis, on my favorite street in Minneapolis, Lake Street, where I kept a writing studio for many years, and where I drove and walked and biked and drank gallons of espresso, and later, where we filmed my book trailer. I didn’t come back to Chicago because of my book. I came back for a good and challenging job that I knew had a good chance of pushing me forward as a teacher and artist, at a point in my life where I was restless and in search of career revitalization. So in terms of Body Geographic my return to Chicago is either a great irony or the completion of a circle.
In what ways would you say being part of the ‘Lost Generation’-not a baby boomer, nor Gen X, shaped you as a person and as a writer?
I hadn’t heard that term “Lost Generation” to describe our age bracket, so thanks for that, as I have been long aware that we are neither Boomers nor Xers. Another queerness I suppose? I’m always at once resentful and grateful for all the ways I’ve fallen through the cracks in my queer lifetime. But how did this form me?
Well, I suppose I’ve always known with absolute certainly that I could map out the life I wanted to live, that there was no center, no sure thing, no one way to be or journey. Remember back in high school, standing in line at the Biograph on Lincoln-a location ironically that’s now just a few blocks from my office at DePaul-when the Rocky Horror Show Picture Show phenomenon was still brand new?
Those are the moments that made our nameless generation. I left home knowing, on some level, that we could make ourselves over in any way we chose. And of course I saw right away, in that line at the Biograph for instance, with all those Frankenfurters and Columbias and all that toast and rice and creative self-identifying, how much the nonfictional world begs to be written about.
You write about attending a poetry reading by your young niece Adria, comparing how different your learning experience was, as exemplified in the line, “We had not poetry-wielding teachers.” As someone who is herself an educator, please say something about the importance of those kinds of teachers on young students.
Clearly, those teachers change kids’ lives absolutely, as do the queer aunties and uncles who love to bring the kids in our worlds closer to what we see as the worthy thrills of living. The niece you mention here is now a serious musical theatre major in college, and another of [my partner] Linnea’s and my nieces graduated from Columbia in Chicago with a degree in photography and her sister is also majoring in theatre. We hope the choices we made in our lives help these kids in our families see that it’s possible to pursue that which makes us feel most alive.
You write about your father’s and your relationship to jazz. Does jazz still play a role in your musical life and, if so, what do you think about openly queer jazz artists such as Patricia Barber, Terri Lyne Carrington, Gary Burton and Lea DeLaria?
Patricia Barber may be my single favorite artist of all time. I listen to her constantly. Do I think it matters that she’s queer? Well, as much as I’ve long loved knowing that fact about her, I don’t suppose her queerness is the reason I love her music. Or is it? Her strangeness and the intense and literary focus of her themes seems to me a kind of queerness. Jazz is not your typical queer genre, and even more so it is a stunningly masculinist enterprise. More than once, at a jazz club, Linnea and I have just shaken our heads as we realize that once again we are present for fine and gorgeous art-making where the men on stage outnumber the women in the audience, which makes the big queer genius of someone like Patricia Barber all the more magnificent to witness.
Your family is a powerful presence in the book. Do you know if any of your family members have read it yet?
My dad read it in manuscript form and pronounced it “A Tale of Two Cities.” My Aunt read it and said she was sorry the book ended and that she’d felt I was telling her story as well as my own (as of course I am, the fancy Gram Rose I write about in the book being her mother.)
Towards the end of the book, you write about Linnea’s brain tumor and subsequent brain surgery. How is her health now?
Linnea’s doing great. Every MRI since the surgery has been clean.
Have you begun to think about your next book?
I’m working on a project tentatively titled “OH” about humans finding joy and sustenance in urban environments. I’m interested in urban biking and reclaimed industrial landscapes and green rooftops and queerly alternative answers to the question “what makes cities livable?” Your Lost Generation question hits this straight on, so thank you again for that key. I’m interested in the ways we find, gather and create joy in those spaces that try to keep us invisible or deny us solid identity, or carry too much old poison to ever revive.
Which will, of course, now have to be some kind of “the native returns” tale.
