Megan Culhane Galbraith and I belong to a loose coven of writers and artists gathering semi-regularly to talk shit near Shirley Jackson's old house in Vermont. Galbraith is my friend, yet I did not hear much about her book, The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child's Memory Book (Mad Creek Books), while she was writing it. Now that I've read it, I see why she didn't talk much about it. It's an ornery, idiosyncratic book, an unruly collage sprung from a singular mind, defying description. Magpie-ing across several found forms, Galbraith troubles the idea of an adopted child's memory book, not to mention memory itself. Her potent, often deadpan bursts of intimate prose weave towards material culture (those creepy dolls!) and away from the received, redemptive adoption narrative. I was delighted to ask her a few questions about how she made this nimble and chimeric book.
—Claire Vaye Watkins
Claire Vaye Watkins Congratulations on this strange and beautiful book, The Guild of the Infant Savior. Your author's note calls it a "hybrid work of creative nonfiction... essays, prose poems, collage, photographs and other experimental forms... part memoir, part social history, part bedtime story." How did you know which approach to use given you're so genre-fluid? What is the relationship, for you, between form and subject?
Megan Culhane Galbraith Thank you, Claire. I love that term, genre-fluid. In fact, I was talking with my friend David Fratkin about being a writer who also makes art-he made the wonderful short film for my book-and he said, “Oh, so you’re aesthetically bisexual” which is a phrase I will now print on a goddamn T-shirt. I’ll go even further to say I’m “genre polyamorous.” I don’t think there’s any reason to hem ourselves in by genre. I struggle to write a straight-up linear narrative. My brain just thinks differently.
In these essays, the form usually asserted itself out of the subject matter but only after multiple failures at trying to write it straight. I struggled so much on the page thinking I had to write a certain way or be “literary.” I finally learned to listen hard enough to what I was trying to say and get curious about it. Once there, the structure formed itself around the words. Truly listening to myself and to my work is what guides me. It’s about being open and honest with myself no matter how hard that is.
As for form and subject, sometimes the images came first and the words tumbled in around them, as was the case with the essay about the Domecon “practice” babies at Cornell. That started with the images I made for a show in an art gallery. “Other Names for Home” began as a straight essay exploring the idea of home. I made a list of orphan, foundling, and homes for unwed others in New York City that I’d found from my research and then realized the piece worked best as a stripped-down blocky prose poem. This is what I love about nonfiction. The truth is so extra that you don’t need extra words.
Back in my science writing days, I read that our brains compensate for gaps using the perceptual phenomenon of “filling in.” It’s basic Gestalt psychology that the whole of anything is greater than the sum of its parts. Telling my story in words and images allows space for the reader to connect those dots too. Readers are smart. Brains are cool.
Being genre-fluid implies a sense of movement that I really like. Playing with form and subject lets the work have a melody and harmony. Both voices blend together. I’m very genre-curious. I’ve been known to try things just because I want to learn how to do them. I once made a multimedia essay so I could learn how to make a short film. Staying curious is a very childlike approach to art-making. Beginner’s mind is much more playful because adults sort of ruin everything, don’t you think?
