Interview: Allyson Roche on “It Wasn’t a Story That Could Be Told”

Allyson Roche’s incredible essay, “‘It Wasn’t a Story That Could Be Told’: The Ocean and Narrative Form,” opened our third issue. In this interview, Mya Oldale speaks to Roche about the mutability, vulnerability, and urgency that define her writing process.

MYA OLDALE

I just wanna say that I really love this essay. I’m excited to talk to you about it.

ALLYSON ROCHE

Oh my god, thank you so much!

MYA OLDALE

This essay argues for the dissolution of the distinction between the creative process and having a final project or final ending. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the context for this essay – what led you to write it, what was your process for research and writing, and what drew you to writing about this in particular?

ALLYSON ROCHE

I was taking a class about the Anthropocene with Professor Elizabeth Deloughrey, whose work draws on the oceanic imaginary. She works a lot with Pacific Island literature, militarism studies, and investigating climate change and colonialism’s impact on–or contribution to—to climate change. This was my final essay for that class.

In my creative work, I’m always diluting the boundaries between genres, so I’m always excited to write about that analytically. I also have an interest in diary writing as both an analytical pursuit and a creative practice. I think that diary writing is the perfect process-as-project or process-towards-project, so it’s always in my mind to include that “preparation-work” or “thinking-work” as part of the final work itself. It seemed natural that I would investigate that in the context of the classroom.

MYA OLDALE

From my view, I see the essay as a much more static literary form than, for example, the poem or the novel, as you discuss in your essay. I was wondering if there are any ways that this dissolving boundaries-and-linear-project-timelines influenced your writing process for this piece in particular, and even for its structure?

ALLYSON ROCHE

This is probably the most structured thing I’ve written, but it talks about pieces with a lack of structure, the importance of diluting structure. I found it difficult at times to put these thoughts in a traditional, academic form. Because it was for the classroom and a grade, I worried about pushing that boundary a little bit. I think if it were just on my own, I would have put more brave, more personal things in there, or made it less “here’s this point, and then here’s another point that follows.” I might have done it a little bit less linear that way, but of course, I’m influenced by the context in which I was writing it.

Even still, I do think there’s a lot of room in academic work to push against the model that is given to us. I wrote a thesis on Virginia Woolf and pushed against that model. It was very much free-flowing, lots of long sentences with commas and commas and commas, not putting a period on it, and written from a place of “I”, an “I” beyond the “I am arguing this” or “I have this standpoint here,” but an “I” that is influenced by my experiences.

I think it’s a political question, too, about how to contribute to a world of academic work without contributing to that line of reason…so much of Western masculine thinking is valued in reason and logic, in bullet points, in making things a certain structure. Emotions and personal life are always associated with women, and they’re always sidelined, so I try to focus on merging those worlds in my work.

MYA OLDALE

This piece leans very heavily into geophilosophical and ecocritical modes of thinking. Why is this type of literary theory important to consider when discussing literature, especially in this age?

ALLYSON ROCHE

Our history is, has always been, inextricable from the land and from the sea and from the natural world. We’re only going to become closer and closer and closer to that with climate change. I think literature helps us situate ourselves in the ecological terms that we’re going to inevitably face in much more dire contexts in the future. In other words, literature allows us to situate ourselves in our bodily vulnerability.

MYA OLDALE

Which artists, especially other writers, influence you the most? What do you consider to be your major touchstones, and how do you see their influence in your work?

ALLYSON ROCHE

Virginia Woolf, for sure. I wrote my senior thesis on her work, and I can never swim away from it. I love reading her diaries and seeing the literary, writerly mind at work, seeing her everyday being influenced by the facets of her life as a writer, and how those two things sort of cohere and are not separate worlds.

Maggie Nelson is a huge influence as well. I love her autotheory, like The Argonauts. Generally, I love how autotheory lets us see the literary mind in the everyday. What I admire about her specifically is that people are like, “How do you know when something’s gonna be a poem or an essay or a novel?” and she’s like, “I don’t. It is what the subject matter wants to be. It surfaces as that.” That’s how I feel. I never set out to write a poem. I just start writing and then evaluate what technical genre I would submit it to later. I also love Katherine Mansfield, Eileen Myles, and Ali Smith.

MYA OLDALE

I’m really glad that you brought up Maggie Nelson, because I also really love her work. I was reminded of the part in The Argonauts where she talks about revision. Her partner, Harry Dodge, is always the first to read her work, and he’ll go in with a pencil, mark things up, change certain details. It’s a very collaborative process. I feel a lot of preciousness and covetousness over my writing, and I’m usually scared to have others read it, so the collaborative process of writing is really interesting to me.

What is your process of revision? Is it communal, is it solitary, is it something else?

ALLYSON ROCHE

I love this question. I am a slow writer. So, I’ve never been the person to type type type type type and then go back and tidy it up. I work sentence by sentence. I can be very precious about my prose. I do a lot of pre-writing in my notebook, trying to diagram a sentence and an argument, which I’ll later transfer to a document. Only then, when I understand exactly what I’m trying to say, do I allow other people to read it. When the moment comes, I love collaboration, I love feedback. I know a lot of people can be very scared of it, but as long as I trust that the person will not try to change the work, that they will do everything they can to make sure that it’s doing what I want it to do, then I’m all for collaboration.

For example, I had everybody read my thesis. I had everybody read everything. I was constantly talking about it. That invisible work is key, the talking and the listening, sharing ideas verbally. It’s so important to my practice, and I’m only just now realizing that.

MYA OLDALE

Where do you find yourself working best? Maybe it’s a state of mind, maybe it’s a physical location…you tell me.

ALLYSON ROCHE

I used to write at my kitchen table. I could put all my books there and sprawl out. I also like working in a coffee shop, surrounded by people. Working to seclude my mind in public can be very helpful. Mentally, I like to journal just before I write to get the annoying, nagging stuff out of my mind.

MYA OLDALE

Do you feel like you need to be cleansed, in a sense, before you can write?

ALLYSON ROCHE

I don’t know if it’s cleansing so much as it is warming up. Getting linked to my pen, connecting my bodily experience to where my mind’s at, situating myself.

MYA OLDALE

Our third issue focuses on themes of heritage, cultural ecology, and art. Where do you see these themes converge in your work?

ALLYSON ROCHE

I think literature offers that space to fill rhetorical gaps in our records of cultural heritage. It lets us answer the “what ifs?”. There are many ways to explore that, but I love River Solomon’s work in particular because it enriches the future and the past through their connectedness.

We can be so logical about our own history. We have to be more attuned to our own animality and our own lack of reason, and the ways that nature is unruly and beyond reason. It’s the only way we can come closer to our past.

MYA OLDALE

To finish: what are you reading right now?

ALLYSON ROCHE

I always have Virginia Woolf’s diaries on my nightstand. I’m also reading Reverse Cowgirl by McKenzie Wark and The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nuñez. Incredible.