Dessa is a singer, rapper, writer, and proud member of the Doomtree hip-hop crew. She is the author of My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love, which was published by Dutton Books in September 2018. Dessa’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Star Tribune (Minneapolis), Minnesota Monthly, several literary journals, and has been broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio. She has also published two short collections of poetry and essays. Dessa splits her time between Minneapolis, Manhattan, and tour vans across the country.

EB: When I first became familiar with your work five years ago, I knew you as a rapper, a poet, and a songwriter. And now, with the publication of My Own Devices, you’re also an essayist! How did you start writing creative nonfiction? Did you always know a book of essays was in your future?

D: For me, creative nonfiction predates hip-hop. I had taken a class in college and read for the first time all these “true short stories” that were told with a lot of style and humor. And before that I had no idea that “counted” as writing. When I imagined a writer, I imagined a novelist.

EB: Mhm.

D: I had no idea that the type of stories that would traffic well at a bar could also be portaged into literary terrain. I had no idea that was kosher. At first a lot of my favorite writers were all named David: David Sedaris, David Foster Wallace, David Rakoff…

EB: Dave Eggers?

D: Lots of Davids. But I like the short form stuff, both as a consumer and a creator. I like compact art. That can fit into any given day.

EB: So then did you start writing your own stuff in this style during college?

D: Yes. It started with assignments and coursework. But I really loved it, and I started playing with different forms—essays, meditations. Though I have to say that I still lament the fact that creative nonfiction has no branding department. All of our words fucking suck. In fiction, you’ve got short shorts and flash and it all sounds so interesting and sexy. And with nonfiction… it sounds so staid and dry. And it sucks. A “meditation” sounds boring. To me, at least. But then when you actually read them, it’s a really quick mind riffing on a theme, balancing poignancy and wits, and that’s not boring, that’s exciting. That’s a tap dance. That’s a kick-boxing expedition. It’s nothing like the patience and stillness that all of our words seem to imply.

EB: I know! I am obsessed with essays—reading them, writing them—and I love all the different, exciting forms they can take. But I teach a lot of teenagers and when they find out I am a writer and ask what I write, as soon as I say “essays” their eyes just glaze over. They’re thinking of five paragraphs about the use of blood as a metaphor in Macbeth.

D: Yes. When I say I write essays, people are like, so… you write book reports for a living?

EB: [laughter]

D: It’s just so unfortunate. Maybe if all nonfiction writers pitched in a dollar we could hire some fancy New York design firm to rebrand us.

EB: We need that. Also because lately I feel like creative nonfiction has gotten a bad rap. People don’t understand what it is—they think I am being “creative” with things that are true. And I get so upset, because this isn’t some fake news alternative facts situation! I’m not making stuff up! This isn’t historical fiction, I am just writing nonfiction in an interesting and creative way.

D: Ugh. I also have been bummed because what I thought was a trend in creative nonfiction has become a requirement. It’s that highly confessional, often indulgent, tone—it feels like all creative nonfiction has to be writing for therapy. For example, someone saying that they wrote a memoir or essay to solve their dad issues. That may be personally productive, but that alone isn’t enough to give it artistic merit. Like, I’m glad you and your dad are cool, but I hope that craft and master wordsmithery and storytelling are at the forefront.

EB: When I interviewed Jennifer Finney Boylan, she said that “great therapy is not necessarily good writing.”

D: Not that they can’t coincide. But I think our genre is built with this therapeutic connotation that fiction is not.

EB: Which is funny because how many novels were written to help people figure out their dad issues? So many.

D: Right.

EB: I also feel bad for nonfiction because it is defined but what it isn’t. It’s everything that is not fiction. Which is so unwieldy! Sometimes I love that because it can be so many different things, but at the same time it’s weird to define because it’s defined by absence.

D: Yes. Saying I’m “non-Cardi-B” is less exciting than saying I am Dessa. To define oneself by what one isn’t seems like a circuitous way to proceed, but also like you’re living in the shadow of this other form.

EB: Exactly! Which is the whole reason why I do this series! To get nonfiction out of the shadow and show how sexy and awesome it is! But there is all this bizarre baggage with nonfiction. I also feel like there is this shame sometimes that comes with writing nonfiction? Like if you write nonfiction, it’s because you’re not creative enough to make stuff up.

D: Right. Good call. People believe the nonfiction part but not the creative part. They’re like, just tell me normally are you a reporter or not?

EB: So thinking about all these genres within nonfiction, and all the things that nonfiction can be, how would you define the genre of My Own Devices?

D: It depends on whom I am talking to. Talking to you, I would say it is a collection of meditations, personal essays, and original research. I like to ride lines between the subdivisions of our genre. I like to storify highly technical data, and to look at stories with a highly technical lens.

But if I am talking to someone who isn’t already sold on the idea of creative nonfiction, I say that they are true stories told as beautifully as I know how.

EB: I like that.

D: It’s totally ripped off from the Creative Nonfictionmagazine tag line: “true stories, well told.”

Though I don’t think a piece of creative nonfiction has to have a story to be good. Right now, culturally, we are so obsessed with narrative, but I think that not everything needs a narrative. What makes prose interesting isn’t always a story—maybe it’s the voice, maybe it’s the unearthing and presenting of a fact. A lot of what I include in my book is scientific information that I thought was fresh and exciting, and I think that well-positioned facts can make our minds make connections and relationships.

EB: Have you read an essay by Eula Biss called “Time and Distance Overcome”?

D: Is it in her collection Notes from No Man’s Land?

EB: It’s an essay that is basically just a list of really well-positioned facts she learned while researching the history of telephone poles in America.

D: I have read it. It’s so good.

EB: Speaking of research, I wanted to ask you about the last essay in My Own Devices, “Call Off Your Ghost.” In the essay, you undergo an intense scientific investigation on your own brain to try to fall out of love with your ex. Part of what I love about writing nonfiction is I feel like it gives me an excuse to try or do things I might not otherwise just because I tell myself I can write about them later. Had you planned to participate in that investigation before you were writing the book, or was it something you thought to do once you were already working on the essay?

D: It felt like a coalescence of things I am interested in: I like biological science and learning how my body works, I had been in a really trying romantic relationship and was looking for help, and I was writing a book. I think all three factors contributed to designing and executing that case study with The University of Minnesota’s Center for Magnetic Resonance Research. Yes, in some ways I participated in a given activity because I wanted to write about that activity. But I think that a reason someone might want to become a writer is because they want to do and try a lot of shit, and by being a writer, it gives them a way to incorporate all of those adventures into their professional life. Part of what is appealing for me about creative nonfiction is it provides a professional reason to indulge curiosity. It’s really nuts for writers, really for everybody, how rarely we indulge our curiosity. We do the same things over and over, like I always go to the same place for sushi. Even when we are traveling, ostensibly going on an adventure, I always use the same bag, I end up at the same terminal at JFK. We easily fall into routine unless we are forcefully ejected from it. And I like that creative nonfiction allows me to eject myself from what would otherwise be a habit-informed life.

EB: Is that what you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction? I always like to know what writers find the most rewarding about writing nonfiction and what they find the most challenging.

D: I would. I would also say that the feeling of finishing a piece that you feel really good about is an unparalleled electric thrill.

EB: Was it Dorothy Parker who said, “I hate writing, I love having written”?

D: I find it hard to write well. I feel confident at the word and sentence level. I feel less confident at the paragraph level. I feel significantly less confident at the page level, and definitely at the book level. I mean, I don’t want to dog myself too hard, because I did manage to write a book, but, for me, the biggest enticement and appeal of writing has always been the manipulation of language for its own sake and looking for unlikely connections between otherwise disparate events or pieces of information. That stuff I am really good at. Building the scaffolding on which to suspend all that stuff is really challenging. So how do I get myself to a place where I can mention that they sliced a glowworm in a tobacco plant to make a glowing leaf? I want to say it, but what could I write to lead up to me saying that.

EB: Yes! So much of writing is like doing a puzzle, building up the things you want to say.

D: You’re assembling a puzzle of a photograph you cut up yourself. You know what it’s supposed to look like, it’s just trying to get there.

Sometimes it feels like dousing, like you’re a water witch, walking around with your Y-shaped stick and you get that feeling of “Ooh, this is something to write about.” If you’re reading and someone says a brilliant one-liner and it makes you just want to grab your notebook and a pen. Somewhere in you is a list of factors that helps you determine that feeling, but it’s hard to articulate what those things are—you just know it, get an urge. Your stick touches down and then your job is to figure out why the hell you are there.

EB: I agree with that. The more time I write, the more I start to notice that it’s the same topics that always grab me. I had a professor in grad school, Ben Taylor, who said that every writer has one topic that they are always writing about. Even if their books appear to be about different things, if you look under the surface they’re always all about death or aging or parent-child relationships or love. It’s like an itch they keep needing to scratch­­—there’s always just one topic that’s always there.

D: I’m sad you said that, because I feel like it’s true. I don’t want it to be true, but I know it’s right. But as you keep reading and writing, you start to learn what you are attracted to.

EB: Do you find the same topics come up in your work regardless of form? Do you find you wrote essays about topics that you’ve also written poems and songs and raps about?

D: I find myself drawn to a short list of big questions: What parts of my experience are universal? What makes love work? How do people survive big loss? How does human perception work and how free is free will? The emotional questions ring through both poetry and prose, but I think essays are a more natural form for some of the complex intellectual investigations—rapping the phrase mind-body dualism can get unwieldy. (That said, I did try to tackle that topic with the song “Velodrome,” but without the technical language: I don’t believe my will’s quite free/I’m half machine, at least, half steam.)

EB: And how is your experience of writing essays/memoir/prose different than writing poems/raps/songs? You said you feel confident on the sentence-level… does that come from years of working in shorter forms? Was it a difficult transition into a book-length project?

D: I’ve always written essays, but crossing the four- or five-page threshold is a thing for me. What is it called, the energy needed to get a space ship to escape the Earth’s orbit? Escape energy? Like that, for me I need to amass a certain amount of energy to get over that four- or five-page threshold. The length of most of the essays felt comfortable; the challenge was putting them together in a book-length work. I wanted each essay to be able to stand alone, but I had to figure out, for example, how to reintroduce every character in a new way that wasn’t distracting for a reader who was sitting down and going through all the essays in sequence, but that had enough context and orienting information for a reader who was just picking one up on its own.

What about you? Do you write essays, or are you working on a book or longer project?

EB: I am writing a book, but I need to tell myself I am writing essays, because then it feels more manageable. Otherwise I get completely overwhelmed. But one essay at a time feels manageable.

D: Yeah, you can’t keep a whole book in your head in its entirety. You need to warm up to the idea. You don’t start having kids. You start by having a kid.

EB: [laughter] Right. That’s so true.

One more thing I wanted to ask, another thing I find really challenging in nonfiction, is how do you approach writing nonfiction about people you love? Your ex is present in a lot of your essays. How did you handle writing about real people, who are still alive, who may read your book, whom you care about?

D: For me it has been a process of sharing the work with people. You can’t tell your own life story without vacuuming up some of other people’s life stories with it. Unless you’re a pioneer living off the grid. So it’s always a process I talk through with them. For this book, I sent my ex all the essays he was mentioned in. But my question for him wasn’t: “Did I hurt you?” Because I probably did. The essays hurt me. But instead, my questions were: “Did I misremember?” and “Will it drive you nuts to have this be public in the world?” In a way I lucked out, because a lot of the men I’ve dated and people in my life are also artists or people who have decided to live their lives publicly. Not that they share photos of their breakfasts, but that they share their feelings with strangers. So, a) they understand the question, and b) they’re willing to feel uncomfortable in the interest of art they believe in. And in the case of my two exes that I mention in the book, both of them have written songs about me. And I’ve written songs about them. So there is an exchange there, too. And an understanding. I can say, Hey, you know that murder ballad you wrote about me? It has a great hook. But I never want to hear you perform it live.

EB: I like the idea of an exchange. And I admire your approach—it’s what I try to do as well. I mean, I am so impressed by writers like Mary Karr, who approach writing with this you did it to me, so I get to write about it attitude, but I can’t do that.

D: Same. I’m just sensitive and I don’t like it when people are mad at me. I like to avoid that situation if possible. But there has to be some sort of sliding scale, of whom you ask permission and how much. I mean, in that nonfiction class I took in college, one of the pieces of advice my professor gave us was to not write about our parents until they were dead because of lawsuits.

EB: Whoa. Okay. I mean, I have heard some writers say there were certain things they couldn’t write about certain people, like parents, until those people were dead. Like there were things those writers couldn’t get at or say fully until they felt freed after their parents’ deaths.

D: Yeah.

EB: But I like writing things about other people and getting to share them with them. I feel like I am so clunky and awkward about how I try to speak to people sometimes, but if I can write it, I can better articulate something important I want to say to them.

D: Do you ever have a feeling when you have something important to say that you want to write it in a text message? Not because I am afraid to say it to their face, but because I want to write it out so I get it right. I will write it as a text message in your presence. I just know writing it will be better for me than trying to say it.

EB: Yeah!

D: I want to write it because I will fuck it up if I say it.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man writer?

D: A favorite, not the favorite, right? Because I couldn’t never decide on the favorite.

EB: No, no, just a favorite! I would never make you choose the favorite. There is too much good nonfiction to choose from.

D: This is a quote by Annie Dillard, from her collection Teaching a Stone to Talk: 

The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God. The mind’s sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy. The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.

E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Toast, The Butter, xoJane, Ploughshares online, and the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. E.B. has an MFA from Columbia University, and she runs an interview series on Fiction Advocate called “Non-Fiction by Non-Men.” You can visit her website at www.ebbartels.com, see her tweets at @eb_bartels, and read her haikus about strangers’ dogs at ebbartels.wordpress.com.

Author photo by Matthew Levine.