Tyrese Coleman is a writer, wife, mother, and lawyer. She is the author of How to Sit: A Memoir in Stories and Essays, published by Mason Jar Press in fall 2018. Coleman is the reviews editor for SmokeLong Quarterly, an online journal of flash fiction, and an instructor at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, Washingtonian Magazine, The Rumpus, Upstreet Literary Magazine, Buzzfeed, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She received her masters in writing from Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Maryland in College Park. A member of the Maryland State Bar, she received her J.D. from the University of Baltimore. Coleman lives in the Washington D.C. metro area, but grew up in Ashland, Virginia and is a country girl at heart.

EB: How did you start writing in general and nonfiction in particular?

TC: That’s a good question. I always kept a journal.

EB: Me too! I love journals.

TC: I wrote all kinds of different things in my journal—I started that around when I was ten or eleven, and I kept it up all the way through my twenties. Not consistently, but enough where I was used to writing down my own thoughts and my own observations and desires and feelings and things. But besides that, I had never really thought about writing nonfiction when I first started taking writing seriously. I just wanted to write fiction. Not so much because of a specific desire just to write fiction, but because I wasn’t familiar with what was out there in terms of writing nonfiction.

EB: That makes sense. Nonfiction is a vague and confusing form. How did you eventually become acquainted with it?

TC: I went to law school and, even though I had been an English major, I left that world behind. In undergrad, I had a really discouraging creative writing professor, and I swore off writing for years and years and years. And when I finished law school and realized I wanted to start writing again, I just vaulted into fiction. Only once I started [my Master’s] program at Hopkins in fiction, I realized I had a knack for nonfiction. It felt really natural in a way. A lot of what I was reading in undergrad and in my Master’s program, writers like Maya Angelou and Jean Toomer, really influenced my voice.

EB: That’s interesting, how you moved from fiction into nonfiction. Your book How to Sit is described as “a memoir in stories and essays” but you open the book with a note challenging the hard line between fiction and nonfiction. Can you talk a little bit about how you understand the division between fiction and nonfiction, as someone who has written both?

TC: The line is more blurry when it comes to fiction than nonfiction. I write a lot of fiction that comes from real life. It ends up as fiction because maybe I don’t want to cover everything that happened, or maybe I want to add a made up element to it that makes the narrative work better or the characterization work better. With a lot of the fiction that is in my book, it’s not that it is truly a made up story, but it is probably something that actually happened but with an element I wanted to add. When you are reading nonfiction, you have a contract with the reader that everything is true. You have to put in notes to the reader about when things might not be true, you have to put in those signals.

EB: Right. I talk about that a lot in my writing classes. How, in nonfiction, you can have elements of speculation and imagination, but you always have to couch it in, “I wasn’t there but I imagine that…” or “What I wished had happened was…” But those signals can be a little clunky sometimes.

TC: Right. And I don’t feel comfortable calling something nonfiction if it isn’t 100% true. So my fiction may be based pretty closely on real life but I call it fiction when I just want to go with the flow of the story.

EB: So where am I going to find your book in a bookstore or a library—with the memoirs or with the novels?

TC: That’s a really good question, and I have no idea. [laughter]

EB: [laughter]

TC: Really, I don’t know if I have an answer to that. But the reason why I am saying “memoir” is because everything in the book is based on my life and my memories, even if I may have, as I mentioned before, changed the story a bit to make the plot or characters or narrative work better. But generally the originating concept of each of the stories goes back to my life. So I like saying it’s a “memoir in stories and essays” because they both tell elements of my life, but in different ways.

EB: How do you define a “story” versus an “essay”? Is an essay just a 100% true story?

TC: Well, no. A lot of my essays include speculative aspects. If you look at my essay “Thoughts on my Ancestry.com DNA Results,” there are parts in there where I am imagining my ancestors. But, look, I am a black American. I don’t know anything about my ancestors. I don’t know who they are, I don’t know really where they come from, I am just looking at a screen with a pie chart of percentages that say Benin/Togo or Cameroon or Ireland, and they’re not actually people, because there are not any names. So I cannot say for certain that my ancestor was on the slave ship that arrived in Jamestown, but I know there was a slave ship that arrived in Jamestown, I know that these things happened, that this is kind of what this world looked like. So, as long as the reader knows that I am speculating about what may or may not have happened to my ancestors, that’s okay. And the parts that are in the essay that relate to my specific experience, the parts of the essay about my mom picking me up from school and meeting my grandfather for the first time, those things are 100% true. I like to weave in my own personal narrative that is based in reality, along with these speculative aspects that are based in history, but not in a reality that can be proven, if that makes any sense.

EB: That makes a lot of sense. I loved that essay, by the way, and how you put in those imaginative elements. So, would you say then that, for you, an essay is more idea-based and story is more narrative-based?

TC: Yeah. I’d say that’s true. Sometimes I want to tell a story when I write an essay. You’ll see that in a few of my essays that I’ve written. For example, I have a piece that is coming out in an anthology about Caesarean sections, My Caesarean, and it is idea-based, but there is a story woven in there as well. I also have an essay in Black Warrior Review that is also speculative slash historical fiction slash my own personal narrative, all woven together. I feel hesitant to use the word “essay” sometimes because I like to put so many different elements in those pieces.

EB: Though my impression is that essays can be so many different things.

TC: True. But do I want to call it lyric essay? I don’t know. You’ve got me thinking a lot about this now!

EB: [laughter]

TC: Over all, though, a story to me is much more narrative. In my book, the piece “Sacrifice” is a short story. It has a beginning, middle, and end, and it is narrative-driven. It has a plot. If you compare that to the flash piece about my aunt and her passing, they’re totally different in the ways that they are written and the voice and the description used. A story for me is more narrative and an essay is more idea-driven, or even, an essay is more experimental. I feel like I have a lot more freedom when I write essays than when I write stories, which to me is probably the opposite of what people would say.

EB: That’s so true, I feel like essays can be really experimental. And, you know, all the categories in nonfiction, and in writing in general, are so arbitrary.

TC: Yeah!

EB: In general, what do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction?

TC: Knowing when you’ve gone too far. I’m the type of person who wants to say what I want to say and not worry about the consequences. At some point, though, you have to think about the people in your work and whether or not they have a say in the way they are being portrayed.

EB: Thank you for bringing this up! This is something I always think about when writing nonfiction about real people, who I know, who are in my life, who I care about.

TC: It’s something I struggle with. And I don’t know if it is something that I will ever feel completely comfortable with. The things I write are tremendously personal, but they also always involve other people. I’m still working on that.

EB: And what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

TC: Getting those feelings out there and getting a story put together.

EB: Yeah. It can be cathartic.

TC: Also I enjoy finding different ways to approach a subject that maybe someone else—or even myself—hadn’t thought about looking at it. I spend a lot of time working on my voice and the way the story goes down and the way I am putting it together, which I think is why I am drawn to those speculative elements.

I took the Tin House workshop with Renee Gladman, and, in that workshop, I felt like I was finally in a space where everyone in the room wanted to incorporate some sort of poetic or lyrical or fictional or avant garde element to their nonfiction. Everyone was working on nonfiction, but everyone wanted to create more than just an essay. They wanted to create something that felt like art.

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

TC: This is hard. I am always resistant to declare something as my “favorite” anything. Instead, I will give you a piece of writing that really touched me that I read recently, if that is all right. I’ve been rereading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou for a little while now in between assignments and other work, when I can get to it. I love these few paragraphs after hearing the song/poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

We were on top again. As always, again. We survived. The depths had been icy and dark, but now, a bright sun spoke to our souls. I was no longer simply a member of the proud graduating class of 1940; I was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race.

And I think a fearful writer would stop here thinking that it is the end of the narrative, the story itself. But not Maya, because the story she’s telling isn’t about just herself. She goes on…

Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or the empty pots made less tragic by your tales?

If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness. It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets…

And I think about how this foreshadows everything about who she is and what she represents to our culture. How someone could—me, how I am saying this exact sentiment about her. Right now. It is amazing.

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.