Close Encounters of the Literary Kind

Rachel Cohen on process, divining a book idea, and how to keep up your confidence as a new writer.

Something new—a Ghost Stories conversation!

After graduating from college, Rachel Cohen decided to spend a year driving around America. While visiting the Battlefield at Vicksburg, she wandered into the bookstore and noticed the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, first published by Mark Twain. “I was so surprised by that,” she told me. “These two worlds had been completely separate in my mind: the world of the Civil War and presidents, and the life of literature and Mark Twain. It just fascinated me that those two people knew each other.”

This chance encounter formed the seed for A Chance Meeting, Cohen’s first book, which takes a bravura tour through the lives of major American writers and artists—among them Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and James Baldwin—via the stories of their encounters with one another, augmented with moments of speculation that reach beyond the historical record. This fascinating and innovative approach opened the doors for further experiments in biography. In honor of its 20^th anniversary, the book has just been reissued in a beautiful new edition by New York Review Books.

Everything Rachel writes feels entirely sui generis, as if it sprang only from her intellectual interests and the workings of her mind rather than being influenced by others’ expectations or commercial pressure. For this reason, she’s one of the writers I most admire, and I was thrilled when she agreed to speak with me for this newsletter. Our conversation—of which this is a condensed and edited version—ranged from her approach to biography and her writing process to how she sustained her confidence during the ten years she spent writing A Chance Meeting.

How did you come to the idea of writing biography in a speculative mode? The idea of interweaving fiction and nonfiction can be so frowned upon—twenty years ago even more so than now.

It helped that I wasn’t in the academy. I didn’t do a Ph.D. in history or English. I wasn’t instructed in any methodology. Although that meant that I had to do a lot of self-education, it also meant that I wasn’t as aware of those kinds of expectations. I was concerned about whether the book would read well to other people, and whether the movement from imagination to more grounded material would make sense.

My mother was a professor of English and a theater professor and director. Our household was a combination of academic and creative, and the idea of narrative as a space of imagination was very present. That supported and encouraged me in feeling that I was trying to develop an artistic practice, more than a biographical practice.

I didn’t think of myself as a biographer, and still don’t, even though my second book was just a plain old biography. I think of myself more as someone who works with the lives of people as my artistic material.

As I reread A Chance Meeting, I was reminded of the Instagram account “Art but make it sports.” It’s by a guy who juxtaposes still photographs from sporting events with works of art that contain a similar image or shape or color, in a brilliant and beautiful way. Your book does something comparable with the affinities and overlappings in the lives of these figures. How did you start to notice them?

Sometimes the pairings drove the writing; sometimes I was looking for a pairing. Later in the process, when I was developing the book and I had some of the relationships set up but not others, then I thought more about lines of influence, or balancing the different characters. I loved David Kalstone’s book Becoming a Poet, about Elizabeth Bishop. He looks at her with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, which seemed very right to me. You could see the whole Bishop if you looked at her first turning toward Moore and then toward Lowell. So I used those two pairings.

But in the case of Marianne Moore, I liked her very much as a mentor for Elizabeth Bishop, but there were also other aspects of her character that weren’t completely captured in that role. She had a lot of zest, she had a lot of strangeness, she had a kind of romantic way of approaching the world. Bishop wanted a mother figure, and Moore offered many things in that regard, but the whole of Moore would not be present there. I liked the fact that she and Joseph Cornell sent each other valentines in a delayed and slow way. That gave an opening into Moore’s connections to surrealism and other art forms that were important to her.

James Baldwin was always a central presence for me in thinking about this project. But at first I didn’t have enough antecedents for him, enough things that would lead forward to Baldwin. I really wanted to have W.E.B. Du Bois in the book for different reasons, but I also knew it would support some things that I wanted to say about Baldwin later to have Du Bois in the earlier part of the book.

That must have been a fascinating process, to do all this reading and have a map of connections developing in your mind.

It’s a wonderful view of the world, I think. But it involves spending a lot of time in the indexes of books.

There’s a long strange period at the beginning of working on a project where you think there is a book here or a story or an essay, but you’d be hard put to say what it is. You couldn’t possibly explain it in a few sentences. Yet there’s a pull, there’s something. It’s almost like a divining rod. You’re walking around like, Is there water somewhere? That feeling is very disorienting and troubling. You don’t even know what it is, but you’re convinced that you’re looking for something. For me, it’s often about a tone and style. I catch a tone. It feels like this is the thing I was looking for, that tone. And then things start to follow from that.

You’ve said that the book’s structure and content grew together. Aside from spending time in the indexes, can you give a glimpse of exactly how that worked? What did it look like when you sat down at your desk?

I’m at once a fast writer and a slow writer. I am able to produce quite a lot of written language speedily, but then I do it over and over in many iterations and many layers. I’m more inclined to write the whole thing again than to tinker with little bits, although I do that too. Some people can only move forward once they have worked everything out. I don’t write like that. I make a lot of messes and make them over and over again and gradually a thing accumulates.

There were fits and starts. I would get an idea of some way that I wanted it to be—something about the pairings, something about the tone. I would produce some material and then I would have structural problems and things to work out and there would be a pause.

I knew I was looking for a way to just begin with characters. To have the figures in motion, thinking, alive. When I started to get some first sentences that felt like the right kind of thing, that was a big moment for me in moving it forward. It started to have the kind of dramatic action I was looking for.

Rachel Cohen’s hand-drawn map of the structure of A Chance Meeting.

Why did you feel that you could find that more easily through the fictional mode, the speculative mode, rather than in more conventional nonfiction?

I don’t think I’m alone in that. Many biographies start with a scene that has a quality of showing the person in motion. Profiles will often put you in a scene, give you the feeling of the figure talking and moving, and then drop back to give background information. There’s research that says you can recognize someone at a distance by the way they walk or stand. You have an impression of someone when they walk into a room, before they’ve said a word. We’re able to get so much of the dimensions of a person from these sensory imaginative perceptions that are hard to nail down. What I wanted to do was very condensed and swift. I wasn’t going to spend a whole book talking about Elizabeth Bishop; I was going to have ten pages. I needed to have her in motion so a reader could take her fully in. The more fictional tone allowed me to do that.

You’ve said it took ten years to write this book. You were working at the time at various nonprofits. That must also have contributed to your fits-and-starts method.

I was fortunate that you could live in New York on a lot less than you can now live in New York on. This was the mid-90s, and I could share an apartment and pay $300 a month to live in Brooklyn. So I was able to work part time raising money for nonprofits. I’d come in at noon and work till 7. I had the whole morning to write. But it definitely took a lot of concentration and effort and discipline.

How did you sustain yourself creatively? As a young writer, how were you able to keep up the confidence in yourself to keep going, to create this thing that didn’t look like anything else?

Working at Bang on a Can, which I did for many of those years, I was in a collegial relationship with wonderful composers who were working at the top of their field. It was very interesting and helpful just to see their creative process: how they worked, what they thought about, how they approached their work. I also had some wonderful friends who were good to talk with about what I was doing. But it was a slow process, especially for the first five years, when I hadn’t published very much and wasn’t sure of what I was doing. It takes a lot of effort to keep going when you’re not sure if the thing you’re doing is going to make sense to other people. Once I started to publish individual pieces, then I had a little bit of a feeling that there was a readership and some editors who liked what I was doing.

You teach creative writing at the University of Chicago. What have you learned about writing from your students?

One thing I’ve learned is just how hard it is to do the thing. To make it through each of the stages where people get discouraged or have bad luck, something doesn’t go well, the project they think they’re doing falls apart. I’ve seen many students who I thought were unbelievable writers not quite make it through to the next stage of a career. I’m more aware of how much luck and circumstance and other things play into it.

I use some of your “Frederick Project” when I teach criticism to help my students think about ways to write about art and about different approaches to criticism. How did you come up with that form?

I started doing it because I started having a website. It wasn’t exactly like a blog, but I wanted to do something that was more occasional and just try to write things that felt fluid, like sketching in public. I was spending a lot of time looking at art for my book about Bernard Berenson, and I wanted something to do with all that art-looking. It was more public than a diary, but not much.

It became a central practice during the pandemic, when I missed museums so much. I had all these photographs of art that I’d been taking for a decade. I was looking at them and remembering different art experiences. I thought that was something I could offer. I wrote a hundred and some entries. I would still do it if I had time. I did switch over to doing some of that on Instagram. You can put up a lot of images and have a little text with them. And it’s a quick way to say, I spent some time with this painting and here’s what I’m thinking about it.

What are you currently working on?

I’ve been working on a novel for a long time. It was originally going to be the book after A Chance Meeting. But it turned out to be a very hard novel to write, or hard for me. I’ve worked on it in many different versions and it’s lived in many iterations. I’ve gone away from it and come back to it. But I’ve been pretty immersed in it for the last several years now. I’m hopeful that it’s going to arrive at something. All my projects have been very different. Everything has a different form, different tone, different material. This is again quite different.

Thank you, Rachel!

Israeli/Palestinian Reading Group

The thread for David Grossman’s To the End of the Land is open, but so far no one has commented! I know from your private messages that some of you are reading it. Someone needs to be the first to step up! Be brave!

As ever,

Ruth