Contributor Spotlight: Christopher Citro

Christopher Citro’s essay “Licked By Our World We Get Licked By Our World” is part of Issue 83 of Bellingham Review. 

What would you like to share with our readers about the work you contributed to Bellingham Review?

My lyric essay “Licked By Our World We Get Licked By Our World,” which you were kind enough to publish (Thanks again!), is the final essay in a series inspired by the four classical elements of Western antiquity: earth, wind, fire, and water. This is the water one. Previous essays revolve around occasions where I’ve eaten dirt, had a radon reduction tube installed in my house and set myself on fire. For this essay, I started my draft with times when I almost drowned. This led to my obsession with life in the deepest areas of the sea, giant clams, ten-foot tube worms, that sort of thing. A central stream of the finished essay is a tour my brother Joe took me through of his collection of water from around the world. Apparently, I helped inspire this years ago when I sent him a jar of Lake Champlain after a visit to Burlington, Vermont.

Tell us about your writing life.

What keeps me writing? The fame and the money! Tee-hee. But seriously, folks (*coughs and adjusts tie*), I suppose more than anything else, the simple act of sitting down with my notebook in my lap, my Pelikan fountain pen, a mug of Darjeeling tea, a stack of poetry books, and some good music on my headphones. If it’s winter, I’m cross-legged on the floor of my writing studio. If it’s summer, I’m at the patio table or on a folding chair in the yard somewhere or propped up against a tree. I peel open the Moleskine, jot down the date, and start putting one word after another without any idea of what I’m going to write about. No plan, no nothing. I just write, and I discover what I’m writing in the act of writing it.

Which non-writing aspect(s) of your life influence(s) your writing the most?

In my poetry, I’d have to say cooking dinner with my partner Sarah, given how often it appears in my poems. In my essays, it’s my partner, yes, and my friends and family. I like to think of my lyric essays as in some way embodying what happens when I have lively conversations with them. This is one reason why I record some conversations (with permission) and include transcribed snippets. My essays aren’t just these conversations, though. They also sort of replicate what goes on in my brain while I’m chatting. There’s the conversation, yes, but there are also the random scientific and historical facts that pop up—some accurate, some not—plus snatches of past conversations, anecdotes I’d like to relate, stuff from movies and books and songs, passages from poems I’ve been working on, memories that emerge from the mist, plus completely made up stuff that my imagination concocts.

One of the things about the lyric essay form which I love is its freedom and its capaciousness. The way it allows me to include all these bits as bits without having to boil them down into the throughline of a traditional essay. For material that suits a traditional essay’s structure, great. But for other stuff in life, material that would lose its own unique life if it had to be crammed into a unilinear structure, the lyric essay allows a whole other kind of experience to happen. How delightful!

What writing advice has stayed with you?

One thing that has stuck with me is a suggestion Scott Russell Sanders made in a workshop at Indiana University. I can’t do his exact words justice, but it was something to the effect of some essayists, especially newer ones, feel like they have to put their whole lives into every essay they write. And it gets to be too much. It overloads the text. Relax. You’ll live to write more than one essay. Keep what belongs in this specific piece, but save the rest for the next essay you’ll write.

That may not sound all that profound, but 1) it did when he said it in class because he’s awesome, and 2) as someone who generally overwrites, it provided a necessary corrective to my tendency to breathlessly cram everything into each draft. And I also liked its basic positivity, in taking seriously that one could be an essayist—someone who writes multiple essays—who could build up a body of work. It’s a gift to be treated like that by a writer and a teacher whom you admire.

What is your favorite book (or essay, poem, short story)? 

Charles Wright’s poem “Night Journal.” I memorized it years ago and am taken to reciting it while walking in the woods with patient friends. The poem ends: “—Words, like all things, are caught in their finitude. / They start here, they finish here / No matter how high they rise— / my judgment is that I know this / And never love anything hard enough / That would stamp me / and sink me suddenly into bliss.”

What are you reading right now?

(Fiction) Eugene Lim’s Search History, (creative nonfiction) Jessica Lind Peterson’s Sound Like Trapped Thunder, and (poetry) francine j. harris’ here is the sweet hand, Jessica Q. Stark’s Savage Pageant, and (rereading) James Wright’s Above the River: The Complete Poems.

What project(s) are you working on now, or next?

I just finished writing a lyric essay, inspired by the strong force in physics, called “Have You Ever Given Your Sister a Snowman?” and I’ve begun one inspired by the weak force, for which I plan on interviewing friends and family about what superpower they’d most like to have. My buddy Dustin and I have just completed a book-length manuscript of our collaborative prose poems called I Am the Owner of a Small Punctured Tire. I’m knee-deep writing and revising the poems that I hope will form my third poetry book. And my nephew Brian and I have begun collaborating on a series of short poetry + music videos. We’ve posted the first one on my YouTube page: “Smell of Wet Earth Like the Inside of My Hands.”

Anything else our readers might want to know about you?

We just ordered a silly amount of seeds for our vegetable garden this summer. We’ll start them in Dollar Store plastic cups downstairs under grow lights and nurse them from now till Memorial Day when we’ll plant them in our little ten-by-twenty foot plot in the front yard. We have to wait so long to plant because it very often snows right into May here in good ol’ sunny Syracuse.

My partner Sarah and I spend a lot of time in our suburban garden. Last summer, a high point was getting dinner delivered to us while we were weeding one August evening. When the pizzeria car pulled by, we dropped our spades and clippers, turned up The Police’s “Zenyatta Mondatta,” and sat in the center of a ring of pumpkins and sunflowers to chew eggplant parmesan and French fries, washed down by a river of prosecco. As the sun sets, Sarah gives the pumpkins names of Shakespearean heroines. I remember she came up with Desdemona, Ophelia, Portia, and Sycorax, but after that things get a bit blurry.

Where can our readers connect with you online?

Facebook: @christopher.citro

Instagram: @christophercitropoet

Twitter: @CCitroPoet

Featured Image: “The Two-faced Whirlpool Galaxy“ by NASA