Windmill’s Writers | An Interview with T. Donofrio

Olivia Kuch: You mentioned that you mostly write academic work and that [“Lessons from Holiday Décor”] is your first dip into creative nonfiction. I was wondering what drove you to write this piece, and what drove you to try it out now? 

T. Donofrio: Thank you so much for asking that question. I will say that I have been turning this question over starting in 2020, and I can tell I’m continuing to wrestle with the answer. The thing that comes to me the most though is that I had a mentor in graduate school who I remember had given the answer to a question like “What is your research agenda?” and instead of giving a list of academic key terms, I remember she said something along the lines of “I write about the things that are interesting to me.” I always thought that that felt so true to me. It landed like “Oh, yeah, that is the answer I want to give,” in part because that is what I do. I think I write about the things that get lodged somewhere in my head, and I can’t quite figure them out. You know, I think there is probably something for me to unpack about the context of the last two years and how it altered my speed of life, and really left me the space to say “I’m working this out.” 

I remember that my sabbatical time overlapped with the pandemic, and I had all of these academic projects that I had slated and said that I was going to work on, but all I wanted to do was write about grief. I could feel that I was trying to figure something out, and it kind of circles me back to “I write about the things that are interesting to me.” Interesting is kind of an ill-fitting word for it, but I write about the things that are holding my captivation and attention. Things that had to do with death and dying was all I wanted to put on the page, and I knew I had to run with that. I think, retrospectively, I kept trying to justify. I wanted to have an academic answer for why I was writing this piece. I was looking back through emails that I had sent about the piece to a colleague who works in creative nonfiction, and I kept calling it “genre experimentation” or some other academic label for it, but really, I was writing about what held my interest, and what I could not stop thinking about were things that were related to death and dying. That is actually what I write about in my academic critical work too. I write about memory and mortality. 

OK: That makes a lot of sense then, that this is the type of piece that you would use as your introduction to creative nonfiction. I love that answer, that you write about what holds your attention and what you cannot get out of your head. That the only way to get the thoughts out of your head is putting them on the page. 

Why did you decide to tell this story of your mother’s death through the holidays? What was it about the holidays that made you think that this has to be how this story is told? 

TD: Something I am so appreciative of is the way I always tag all my files with the date, so I just keep saving the same file a million times, or however long it takes me to finish a piece with a slightly different angle. I realized my first file for this piece was in January of 2021, so right after the first holidays after I lost my mom. I could not stop thinking about what that holiday season was like. One of the bigger turning points in the piece where I’m grappling with, and looking at, holiday décor had just happened a couple of months earlier. As I talk about in the piece, I had known that going through that box of décor was going to be very challenging, and doing it around the holiday season was going to be very challenging, but I could 

not explain to anyone what was happening for me. I remember the very first writing on this piece was just anchored around the idea that it didn’t seem uncool anymore, and I felt like I wasn’t actually communicating what I wanted to communicate to people. I kept trying to say that I used to think these things were so uncool and now I don’t think they’re uncool, but it was insufficient language. I knew that something was there, but I couldn’t pin it down yet. I didn’t know how to pin it down, and the language I had was sitting on top of it, but in a way that actually distorted what was going on for me, and I didn’t know what was going on for me either at that point in time. I think sometimes I have this habit where if I can’t say it differently, I just say it more emphatically. “It wasn’t uncool”: I just kept emphasizing that.

Everything about this essay grew out of the holidays. All the other pieces that got layered in came way after the initial trying-to-figure-out-what-was-happening-to-me, because I knew that the holidays were so tethered to my memories of my mom that that was going to have to be the way that I was going to carve out what was happening.

OK: You use a quote by Celeste Ng and a poem by William Stafford. I was wondering what your thought process was in putting those into the story. Did those quotes just come to you as you were writing, or did you always know you wanted to include them? What was your whole idea with putting those in? 

TD: It’s interesting, I could feel my academic writing and the kind of writing that happened in this piece sitting side by side. One of the definitions for the kind of academic writing I do comes from an author named Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, and she talks about critical analysis as a form of "pattern recognition." I’ve always loved that answer for critics to see patterns and write about patterns. I think that that’s what was happening to me. I didn’t know that I wanted to write about Celeste Ng or William Stafford, and they weren’t in initial drafts of this piece at all, but as I was writing and letting the thoughts on the page help me unpack more of what I was trying to put language to, I realized that these thoughts reminded me of Little Fires Everywhere and they also reminded me of the thread imagery in William Stafford’s poem. The second I felt “this reminds me of” it occurred to me that I just needed to tell that. I subscribe to the belief that we are never lone actors, it’s never in our minds uninfluenced by other people's writing. All of the time the thoughts that I have are in part in conversation with the swirl of other discourse I’m immersed in, so that is what I think making those connections meant to me. It was to say “Oh, yes of course I’m thinking about some of these themes because here are some of the other pieces of writing that are also lodged in my brain, that are also part of the ways in which I’m thinking.” I can’t quite put a better explanatory frame around why some of these connections happen, but I do think it’s lodged in that idea of pattern recognition. 

OK: Yeah, sometimes connections cannot always be explained, they just are, and that’s the best way to explain it. 

TD: I have such a vivid memory of writing Celeste Ng’s quote into this thank-you card that I was writing, and I remember that in that moment in time, that quote had such a stickiness to it. I’ve been noticing this about my writing, whenever something has a stickiness to it, that’s usually when I need to write more about it. Something is there and I can’t quite figure it out yet. It actually felt really helpful for me to layer that piece back on as I went through edits and rounds of writing this piece because I was thinking “Oh yes, this is also about letting people go; this is also in conversation here.”  

OK: There is a word that you use in this piece a lot, and you used it when talking about teenagers and how they act. You use the word “pyrotechnics”. I was wondering where you got that from? I loved it! When I read it, I thought that it was perfect. I was wondering how you picked that word to describe teenage outbursts?  

TD:  I was thinking of moments of big drama. As I write about in the piece, I had this conception lodged in my head that the way people sort their identities as teenagers is through moments of big drama. I had no memory of these moments myself. I always thought “This is so interesting, I must have never gone through this phase of life, I’ve never had this happen.” There are two parallel moments for me in this piece of just misrecognizing what’s happening, or just not understanding that the complexity of what one would go though can be so much bigger than the template that one has lodged in their mind. I had this very narrow template of what it meant to negotiate one’s identity vis-à-vis parents. And because it wasn’t big drama, because it wasn’t fireworks, and because it wasn’t explosive, I thought that this must not be that phase of life. Just like when I was thinking about death and dying and trying to remember what are all the things that happen after someone dies, I forgot about all the pieces that I didn’t remember, and those were the pieces that I needed to really process on the page, in my head, in any way that I could kind of work those pieces out. 

OK: That makes a lot of sense. I just loved seeing that word in there, and I thought it fit perfectly. 

You bring it back around at the very end to talk about your own child and this vision that you have where you’re telling them it’s okay to let go, but you’re actually telling yourself. There are immediate tears every time I read it. It’s so powerful and beautiful and vivid. Just walk me through that. Did you always want to end it with your own child as a way to bring it back to yourself, or was this just something you realized as you were going? 

TD: I have a couple of different thoughts about it, so I’ll try to parse them out. The first is that this piece has gone through so many changes, so the original version of this looks very loosely like the version that you’ve seen. It’s interesting now because it was almost entirely about capitalism and economics; it was very heavily leaning into the consumerism part. I want to give a lot of credit to the writer A.D. Carr, who is who I talked to as I was developing this piece, because it was Carr that said “I think there’s something else going on here” and that was almost a year before you saw the piece. This piece started in January of 2021 and there was nothing about my child. There may have been a passing reference, but that entire scene that you’re talking about wasn’t in there at all. Nothing about adolescence was in there; it was all about economics and scarcity and time, and it took me a little bit to really unpack it. I realized I never really intended to write that scene. Everything that starts with the passage where we took the tree and set it up is much newer writing. Sometimes it’s helpful for me to be able to reimagine something with more space if I imagine that I am talking to someone else, and especially if I think about explaining it to my kid. I realized that as I was working all of that out, I had a little bit of space if I thought “Well what would I want to tell this person?” How could I explain death, and loss, and, more than that, my wishes for this person? That moment that I’m writing about was also about what becomes of a relationship between parents and children on the cusp of someone’s departure. What kind of care do we give to one another? How do we say our goodbyes? That helped me put some language around it. And then I just realized, it wasn’t for them. Sure, I would love to be able to have a moment to hopefully share that knowledge, share that perspective, especially for all the reasons that I mention. If there is something greater that can be called into being beyond just fear and clinging, what is the middle ground between those alternative ways of relating to people? The most honest answer I could give you, and the most honest answer I was giving in the piece, is that this is for me. It wasn’t for this toddler. It’s not that it can’t be for them, but I knew the honest move to make in the piece was to admit that I was writing this for myself. I’m writing this for what might help me. 

There is something for me that feels indeterminate about the ending; it’s blurry it’s shapeshifting it’s falling apart, and I think a big piece of it is because I still don’t have a hard and fast answer as to how to imagine the complexities of the ways we are tied to each other, the ways we are connected to each other. It’s both giving people space while acknowledging connection. All of that still feels like a swirl that I am trying to work out, but what animates it is the sense that I know that clinging and severing are polarities or false binaries, and there is something richer in the middle. I guess the intention is to figure out for myself, for anyone else who is also grappling with these issues, what that richer middle terrain looks like. So it kind of ends in a hope that there is something richer than these two themes that I’m trying to untangle in the piece.