YOU HAVE TO WRITE IT: Georgia Rain Jackson talks with Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn

Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn is the kind of essayist who takes you dancing, her car issuing a faint but repetitive ding ding ding barely audible above the music—think Florence Welch, of Montreal, Talking Heads—because she never wears her seatbelt. When you run into her on campus the following week, she’ll have made madeleines for the department.

I first met Sawchyn five years ago at a coffee shop on a muggy evening in Tampa, Florida. It was the night before orientation—a week before the start of the fall semester at the University of South Florida, where we had both been accepted into the MFA program. She’d recently shaved her head, and I’d recently returned to the U.S. after spending a year in France. What followed was three years of writing, episodic chain smoking, occasional heartbreak, regular sushi dates, and Thursday nights at Ybor City’s goth club The Castle.

Today, Sawchyn teaches professional writing at the University of Maryland. She is a features editor for The Rumpus, and her essays have appeared in Brevity, Prairie Schooner, Fourth Genre, Catapult, Lumina, and Hobart, among other places. The linked essays collected in A Fish Growing Lungs reflect on Sawchyn’s bipolar I diagnosis and its unraveling. Our interview took place over the phone.

Georgia Rain Jackson: When did you first fall in love with writing?

Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn: When I was a kid, I definitely—this is one of those really annoying precocious writer stories—but, when I was a kid, I wrote stories about board games that I played, like, Candyland. So I wrote lives and backstories, essentially, for all of them.

GRJ: Like Queen Frostine?

ALYS: Yeah. Exactly. Everyone wants to be Queen Frostine when they’re a five-year-old girl, right? This is what it means to be a woman. And you’re the queen. But in fact, I’m really like the gumdrop girl. 

GRJ: Grandma Nut.

ALYS: Yeah! [Laughs.] No, I’m the guy with the lollipop. The little fat green guy with the lollipops. Yeah. That’s me.

GRJ: Okay, so you wrote stories—?

ALYS: We’re already super off track.

GRJ: No, that’s interesting because I didn’t write when I was a kid. I don’t think I wrote anything.

ALYS: Really?

GRJ: I mean, I think when I was, like, very very little—probably before I could even write-write, I would make books. I would put paper together and, like, draw pictures on the pages, and there were probably words that didn’t—that weren’t in English—that were in no language. Just the aesthetic.

ALYS: I did actually—I forgot about this—I don’t remember what the reasoning for this was, but our school district did a poetry contest when I was in third grade or something. And a poem of mine did get picked. It was a book, so it was a bunch of people. I didn’t, like, win any awards or anything. But I have a poem from when I was, like, eight.

GRJ: You should put that on your C.V.

ALYS: I should. I’ve been a published poet since I was— 

GRJ: There’ll be, like, a ten year gap between nineteen-ninety-whatever, and they’ll be, like, “And what were you doing during this time?”

ALYS: [Laughs.]

GRJ: So when did you take your first Creative Writing class? Or were you already writing habitually before that?

ALYS: I think I was writing before that. I went to the Young Writers Workshop at the University of Virginia when I was in high school, but I didn’t take Creative Writing classes in high school. I wrote, “poetry” back then, which just meant that I did a lot of drugs and then, like, would write things when I was really high. And it was high school, so I was like, “It’s poetry. There are line breaks.”

GRJ: You ended up leaving YWW. Had you chosen to go? Or did your parents send you?

ALYS: Well, so, the second time, I really wanted to go. I don’t remember if the first time I wanted to go or if my parents, like, made me go do something during the summer. I know the second time, I wanted to return. But then I ended up leaving because I had a freakout. And then in college, I took my first Creative Writing class… with a guy who has since been accused of sexually harassing his students. Fun fact for the day.

GRJ: Oh.

ALYS: Yeah, that guy.

GRJ: Tell us about the origins of A Fish Growing Lungs. When did you decide to explore—and, ultimately, preserve—this particular period of your life in a book? Did you always know the book would be a collection of essays? Were there alternative iterations of A Fish Growing Lungs either in your mind or on paper before you decided on the essay collection?

ALYS: It was probably the end of the first semester of the MFA. Because I’m a neurotic overachiever—and I was friends with you and [Alexander Cendrowski]—I was really concerned that I did not enter the program with a book in-progress.

GRJ: Yeah, but look at me and Alex! 

ALYS: Well you both were like, “I already have a draft of a novel.” So, I was like, “Oh fuck, this is bad.” And I was just trying to figure out what was, like, a big enough thing that I was interested in talking about. Initially, I’d gone into the MFA talking about a collection of essays centered around food, which is something I’m still interested in doing, but both the ideas were competing at the time. And I did that thing where I ran into [Ira Sukrungruang’s] office and was like, “Ira, Ira, I have an idea for a book, what do you think?” And he’s like, “Yeah, it’s fine.” And I asked, “How do I know if it’s, like, good enough or is big enough for a book?” And he said, “Well you have to write it.” And I was like, “I don’t like that answer, Ira.”

GRJ: So that was in, like 2015? 2016?

ALYS: 2015. It was the end of 2015.

GRJ: What did it look like in the beginning?

ALYS: It’s always been a collection of essays. There were a couple of times when I was revising when I was, like, “No! Fuck it! I’m going to take what I have, and I’m going to rewrite it as a memoir.” Ira actually suggested I try that once. I just never got very far with it. I never wanted it to be a memoir. It’s just not—it’s not a “story,” in part, because I did a ton of drugs and was taking a lot of medication and, just, I don’t remember a lot of stuff. I never wanted it to be, like, this nice little up-down story.

GRJ: What was the first piece you wrote?

ALYS: Technically, the first piece I wrote was “Rice Grain Girl” in John Fleming’s Fiction class. [Laughs.]

GRJ: That’s right!

ALYS: Yeah, I think that’s the first piece I wrote, but I did not originally envision that for the collection. Later on, I was like, “Oh, this fits well.”

GRJ: I remember reading “An Apology” early on. I also remember “Dog Brain.”

ALYS: That might actually be the first piece I wrote. “An Apology” is a revision of an essay I started at Ball State. It’s a really significant revision—that’s the one I showed to Heather [Sellers], and she was like, “These two sentences are gorgeous.” It’s definitely the one I’ve spent the most time on. That essay took five-plus years to write.

GRJ: In “An Apology,” you write about wanting an explanation for the “destructive behavior” you displayed as a teenager and that the diagnosis provided you with a means of relinquishing agency and guilt. Can you speak more to that desire?

ALYS: Being a teenager is really shitty, I think, for everybody. As difficult as I was finding life, it was very apparent to me that I was making life more difficult for people around me whom I cared about. And I couldn’t figure out why I was acting the way I was acting. It wasn’t just, “Oh, I’m unhappy, so I’m acting this way.” There was some element of that, yes, but I also didn’t know how to, like, just stop being the way that I was. So when the doctors said, “You have Bipolar, and this explains all these various terrible things you’ve done.” I was, like, “Oh, cool!” I mean, it’s shitty for obvious reasons, but it felt like something that was a part of me rather than something I was choosing to just do to people.

GRJ: How old were you when you received the diagnosis?

ALYS: It was a month after my eighteenth birthday. Before that, I’d been diagnosed with ADD. I was taking a bunch of psych meds. I don’t know what I was diagnosed with previously, but I was taking Prozac and shit before I ended up in the psych ward. All sorts of other mood stabilizers and/or SSRI-type-of-things. I don’t know what they thought was wrong with me.

GRJ: But there was this ongoing search for—. 

ALYS: Yeah, like, “Why are you like this?” [Laughs.]

GRJ: But it sounds like you were also wondering?

ALYS: Yeah, I honestly thought I was the way that I was because of my home life and moving around so much. That’s really what I thought was the bulk of my problems. And that if everybody just let me do whatever I wanted, I would be fine. Which—obviously not true, because I just wanted to do a lot of drugs. But I didn’t really think my drug use was a problem in high school. Or if I did, it was a problem in the romantic sense, like, I’m going to go on to create a lot of great art from this and it’s not actually going to be a problem-problem. It’s just going to be a cute problem.

GRJ: An episode.

ALYS: That’s a good word for it.

GRJ: I think we all want an answer to that, “Why am I like this?” question. Especially at that age when you’re going through so many changes. You can’t help but wonder, “Why am I turning out to be this thing rather than that thing or something else.” Later you write, “I am the girl who shouted in earnest, The devil made me do it, and then grew up to learn the devil isn’t real.” Can you tell us more about that moment—or, perhaps, moments—of discovery?

ALYS: When I was doing research for the book, I was reading a lot of literature and ended up thinking about The Crucible and the Salem witch trials. I think I was reading about witchcraft and ergot rye poisoning or something. When I found out I didn’t actually have bipolar disorder, it was, like, how theory is just a lens that you look through.

GRJ: Yeah, the framework crumbles all of a sudden.

ALYS: Being diagnosed with a mood disorder meant being attentive to my moods and making sure I wasn’t doing things that would, like, end up in a manic episode or a depressive episode. And I just didn’t need to monitor myself so closely. And so, it was like, okay, I’m happy right now. What if I just continue doing this thing that makes me happy instead of worrying that this happiness is going to be fucking terrible in two weeks time, where I start hallucinating and end up in a psych ward. Which is kind of terrible. In terms of, like, “That’s how I lived my life for seven years.”

GRJ: How would you like readers to respond to or engage with these essays?

ALYS: I organized it with the idea that readers would read it straight through. That’s how I read essay collections. It’s not actually chronological, but it feels that way to me because the later essays are more rooted in the present. I envisioned this book as a kaleidoscope—you’re still looking at the same thing, but the perspective keeps shifting. One thing I don’t want this book to do is be, like, an anti-medication narrative.

GRJ: Did you feel a certain social responsibility in putting your book together?

ALYS: That’s partly why I did not want to write a traditional narrative. I wanted it to be fragmented because it’s fucking confusing. Mental health is really weird and it’s really complicated, and there are a set of best practices in place, put forth by physicians who’ve done their very best, but—that didn’t work for me. And that’s not to say that other people should, by any means, not see doctors or stop taking their meds. But I think it speaks to how everything is less fixed than we’d like it to be—than I’d like it to be. I would love to go to one doctor and for that doctor to just be right about everything. And all the meds they give me are always good.

That’s just not my experience. And it’s not the experience for most people, I think. Especially women or people of color. Especially when it comes to mental health, where it’s like, “Are the circumstances of your life depressing? Are you living in a society that does not value you and you’re constantly demoralized?” And our healthcare system is so shitty, it’s just easier to be like, “Maybe you need some pills because we don’t have the time or the money to put you into counseling that’s not medication-based.”

GRJ: That’s the feeling I get, as a reader, that it’s all very grey. You’re not coming down, really, on either side or on any side of the conversation. But then, in doing that, you are coming down and saying, “It’s complicated.”

ALYS: I mean, I take psych meds now, just not for Bipolar disorder. [Laughs.]

GRJ: It’s funny I’m interviewing you, having grown up the way I did. This sort of, like— 

ALYS: Pray the sad away.

GRJ: Yeah. And I showed you that thing my dad sent me about pandemics circa 1889 or whatever. It’s just so strange. Do you blame your parents at all?

ALYS: No. I think they did the best they could. They sent me to doctors and specialists who were supposed to be able to help me. And I ended up fine, eventually. And it’s hard always to, like, go back and be like, “What if this hadn’t happened?” And getting hospitalized was kind of my own fault. Obviously my parents took me to the E.R. I can’t imagine not taking my kid to the E.R. in that circumstance.

GRJ: The essays collected here defy chronology, and you employ a variety of forms throughout the collection. Did any appear on the page fully formed?

ALYS: That has happened for me once in my whole life, and it was not in any of the essays in this book. It was “Spell For Grief” [published in Indiana Review 38.1]. 

GRJ: That makes sense because that was assigned to us in, like, a week. And everyone else in the class wrote something terrible or secretly recycled something. And you wrote an amazing piece that everyone was like, “This isn’t fiction.”

ALYS: I feel like that’s my thing in fiction classes. It’s like, “Is this really fiction?”

GRJ: Yeah, but nonfiction is a square within the rectangle of fiction. It’s an extra constraint on top of. So you can’t, in nonfiction, write fiction, and be like, “It’s nonfiction.” I think you can go the other way though, and who cares if you want to constrain yourself further.

ALYS: I had lunch with a friend a while ago who asked why I didn’t write novels, and I was like, “All my stuff’s true.” And they were like, “I write novels. All my stuff’s true, too.” And, actually, thinking about my book—Ira would get so mad at me, but I used to joke a lot, like, “I’m just going to fictionalize this and call it a novel.” And he’s like, “Don’t you dare!” 

GRJ: You’re a very clever writer, syntactically and in the way you reconstruct experience on the page. One craft decision that stands out is the composite character at the center of “Three Men.” Can you tell us about your decision to create Jim?

ALYS: I created Jim because, as much as I’m all for telling the truth, in writing about other people, there are some things that are off-limits to me in some sense.

GRJ: For example, personal details about somebody else?

ALYS: Yes. Some of the things were, like, too—. They affected the story and my relationships with the Jims, but I didn’t feel close enough to the events to really point them out and say, “This happened to this person in exactly this way.” To me, that crosses a line. If people already know them and they can figure out who it is, that’s fine, but I didn’t want it to be a thing where you could just open the book and then easily figure out these personal things about other people that weren’t 100% affecting my life in a direct way.

GRJ: You found out that Burrow Press would be publishing your book at the AWP Bookfair in Portland, Oregon. Tell us about that experience.

ALYS: Yeah, I feel like I had the ideal writer’s experience that year when I found out that my manuscript had been accepted while standing at my press’s table. No actually, I was standing by The Rumpus’s table. I saw my now-publisher Ryan [Rivas]. He was talking to Marissa [Siegel]. I’d just started working for her, but I’d never met her in real life. So I was looking for her actually, and then I was like, “Oh, I know you as well.” So I just went up to say, “Hi,” and they stopped when I walked up in this very, like, are-you-talking-about-me sort of way. But AWP is just one big socially awkward fest, so I decided to pretend, “No, no they’re not talking about you.” But Ryan looked at Marissa, and was like, “Should I tell her?” And then I was just, like, “Ah!” And then he told me. And then—Jared [Sylvia] was there—and Jared took a picture of me, like, screaming quietly at the table. But then I had to pretend to be normal at the AWP Bookfair, which is very hard, because I wanted to start loudly screaming.

GRJ: You should’ve. It would’ve been free press. Like a flash mob press release.

ALYS: I went to Powell’s that night and bought myself a little postcard from Portland and wrote on the back of it, like, “Today my book got accepted for publication by Burrow Press.” And I tacked it up in my office. And then I came home from AWP and my life just fell apart in shambles.

GRJ: You’re referring to your wedding, which was called off. Are you going to write about it?

ALYS: Yes. Also my mom getting sick. Yeah. I’d actually already started writing about that relationship two or three years ago in my second book project, the I Have This Thing For Flowers one. It started as a series of micros. It’s using the narrative of a failed marriage to hold together a lot of discussion of sensuality. Not just sex, but obviously flowers and sensory-type-of-stuff. I’ve been doing a lot of research into perfumery and things like that.

GRJ: We talk a lot about the ownership of stories. Who gets to tell a story? Did it really happen and does that even matter? I came across a quote recently that said, “the memoir is the novel of the 21st century.” Do you think that’s true? Or, what does it even mean?

ALYS: I feel like I should say something really smart right now. But, as a writer, the truth has always been really important to me. And when I think about when I started writing fiction in college, all my stories were true, and I started writing because I thought my life was weird and baffling and strange and I wanted to document that somehow. So even if it’s not my life or my strangeness, I think that’s still my impulse. And I think that fiction works to capture the emotional truths that can’t quite be articulated. Like in The Things They Carried, it’s like, “I can’t tell this story because the story is so fucked up that I need to lie to make it true.” I think Katherine Anne Porter said, “I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.”

GRJ: Do you think this conversation surrounding genre and ownership speaks to a lack of literacy?

ALYS: I don’t think people read a lot of nonfiction. Let me rephrase that. I don’t think people read a lot of creative nonfiction. I think the public reads nonfiction in the researched sort of way. And if they’re reading memoirs, it’s usually by a famous person. I think it’s just, like, there’s absolutely a social turn toward ownership of stories and making sure you are not—I don’t want to say “oppressing other people,” but oppressing other people. Like the American Dirt thing! But it’s not just a question of telling stories about people you share an identity with. Alexander Chee, for example, wrote The Queen of the Night, which I love. I fucking love that book. I’ve read it like three times even though it’s, like, 800-pages long. And, I mean, he’s a gay man and he’s biracial and he’s writing from the perspective of a white woman. It’s a beautiful book though, and I don’t think anybody would call his writing of it problematic. But if you read interviews with him, he also talks about his craft process and how he took 10-plus years to write this book and all the work he did for it. 

GRJ: So, other than The Queen of the Night for the third time, have you read or watched anything recently that moved you?

ALYS: I read The Crying Book. 

GRJ: The book with all the tears on the cover! I keep seeing it on lists of beautiful book covers, but I don’t know anything about it.

ALYS: It’s about crying. [Laughs.] It also talks about the moon a lot. And it’s micros— 

GRJ: Micros are hot. [Laughs.]

ALYS: —in the Jenny Offill sense. In that it’s just like short, but they’re also cumulative. 

GRJ: Like a collage.

You can order A Fish Growing Lungs here.