Each week we will be connecting with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.
Name: Patrick Madden
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: “Aborted Essay on Plums”
Issues: 9.2
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These days you can find Patrick at home trying to direct his children’s schoolwork or finding fun educational/exercise activities or making family day trips around Utah (recently to the Salt Flats and Dugway Geode Beds). Check out his website for more!
What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?
I’ve just published my third book, Disparates, a collection of essays, including the plums essay originally published in Sweet. It’s also got a lot of hermit-crab essays (eBay auction, dictionary definition, Parade-magazine profile, word search puzzle, predictive-text generated, Elements of Style entry, more) and a number of featured guest collaborators.
I’ve also been coediting (with David Lazar) the 21st Century Essays book series at Ohio State University Press and just recently began coediting (with Joey Franklin) the journal Fourth Genre.
Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?
I’ve been trying to write brief essays derived from and spiraling wildly outward from immediate sensory experiences (they all begin “I have just …” which phrase/idea I borrow from Montaigne’s “Of a Monstrous Child”). Main inspirations for this project are Renee Gladman’s “Calamities,” Ross Gay’s “Book of Delights,” and Brian Blanchfield’s “Proxies.” I’ve also been making slow progress toward a book-length essay from my mother’s death a few years ago.
Who is your favorite author?
Impossible! but I’m forever indebted to Brian Doyle, one of my earliest and biggest influences and a dear friend gone too soon from this world. I’d add to my list of favorites Mary Cappello, Eduardo Galeano, José Saramago, Louise Imogen Guiney, Charles Lamb, Joni Tevis, W. G. Sebald, Michel de Montaigne… and since Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I’m going to go ahead and add Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist for Rush, another major influence who recently, unexpectedly died.
What is your favorite poem/essay/book?
Today I’ll say “The Book of Embraces” by Eduardo Galeano. This is a book every writer should read and love.
What inspires you to write?
I’m usually caught by a strange association or a question I’ve never considered before, and once I start writing, I find momentum in the artful connections between words and ideas. The twists and turns an essay takes are usually driven primarily by language itself and secondarily by the frictions between thoughts. For instance, I’ve recently felt inspired by questions of relative behaviors, for instance, how my dog responded aggressively to joggers who proactively flinched as they ran by vs. how she ignored other people who ignored or regarded her with a friendly gesture. This has led my mind to several other similar examples that seem to indicate that people (or dogs) are not a certain way always, but that “being” is dynamic and variable, relative. Inspirations come to me often, too often, and I actually write those that stick around and accumulate other ideas to themselves.
What are you reading right now?
Ander Monson’s “I Will Take the Answer,” Sue William Silverman’s “How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences,” book five of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” Julie Marie Wade’s “Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing,” Clifford Thompson’s “What It Is,” Terese Mailhot’s “Heart Berries,” Elias Canetti’s “Secret Heart of the Clock,” E. M. Cioran’s “Anathemas and Admirations.”
What is your favorite sweet?
I love homemade alfajores de maizena, a Uruguayan treat. We made a batch not long into our quarantine, and they came out wonderful. Here’s a good-looking recipe (video links to written recipe, too).
That looks so pretty! Almost too pretty to eat….almost.
Thank you, Patrick, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!
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