Departing from the Standard Solo: On Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade’s “Telephone”

Brenda Miller & Julie Marie Wade | Telephone: Essays in Two Voices | Cleveland State University Poetry Center | 2021 | 168 Pages

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The life of a writer is largely viewed as solitary and siloed. Visions of secluded literary giants come to mind, pouring onto the page in a room of their own. In Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade tackle the challenging feat of co-authorship and offer an exciting counterexample to the lone artist. This book, then, is a challenge to the status quo, and its lyrical diptychs prove the collaborative enterprise to be a success.

Miller, veteran essayist and six-time Pushcart Prize recipient, joined with Wade, a poet, memoirist and Lambda Literary Award winner. Though each writer’s career and style is distinct, their voices blend in Telephone. The authors elect not to denote whose prose belongs to whom, a decision which aids in fortifying their communal approach. This anonymity creates mystery, each section an invitation to play detective: whose lines belong to whom? One realizes it matters not: each essay constitutes a double helix, the two voices twisting together and building on each other into a sinuous shape. Granted, there are references to identity that allow for simple biographical sleuthing: Jewishness, queerness, the naming of certain places, for example. Nevertheless, part of the book's charm lies in the difficulty of deducing whose story is being told. In this way the book is a testament to what form makes possible, to what can spring from departing not only from the standard solo, but also from concretized structures and themes.

Each section of the book has a brief heading, often a single word, and a number of sub-headings (denoted with italics, occasionally Roman numerals) over content that ranges in length from a single paragraph to several pages. These subsections often appear disparate in relation to one another, but all eventually connect to their main headings. The labeled sections are, for example, scientific, religious, sexual, culinary, musical and cinematic in nature. The reading experience is akin to watching a talented improv duo play off of each other, one building on what the other says as each disparate idea is pulled out of a hat. Robert de Niro. Earthquake. Velcro. Hot sauce. Yoga. Mr. Potato Head—these all appear in the text, and all for justifiable reasons. One cannot help but to think of the famed Stein salon, and in the free exchange of ideas about all sorts of topics, attendees finding depth and nexus at every turn. 

Three subsections of “Heat Index” (Boiling Point, White, Exhaustion) move from the chemistry classroom (“I'd rather describe the sound the tea kettle makes when she reaches that heat than work the numbers to explain her whistle-song.”) to Emily Dickinson (the author cites the couplet “Dare you see a Soul / at the White Heat” to muse on creative and spiritual expansion), to pushing the boundaries of the body at a jogathon (“I wouldn't stop, even when Sister Rosemary suggested I was ‘dangerously red.’ Every year I missed the award ceremony. Home in bed–an ice pack on my head and feet, the mercury relentless in its rise.”) These and other subsections tether to heat in thoughtful and surprising ways—a challenge to the literary gestalt. The writers’ flirtations with the hazards of heat in order to achieve even this soupçon also gives us glimpses into underlying character(s). Here and elsewhere, the text traffics in self-awareness and a degree of frankness one would typically find in memoir, while seeming to challenge memoir as a form.

This candor engenders intimacy with the reader. Miller and Wade reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings, their fears and failures, describing former selves and past experiences. As their own truths are hewn, introspection and reflection help to establish readerly trust. Rich, often sensory detail and the use of present tense transport us directly into their memories, nearing vicarious experience: 

Take off your clothes slowly, or quickly, depending on the mood, the lighting, how scared you are, what color panties you're wearing, what shape your bra is in, and have you recently shaved your legs, your pits, trimmed your bush, sculpted yourself into something smooth—a thing that has no rough patches—oil up the elbows, exfoliate the face, pluck every hair from your chinny chin chin–you are slick, you are warm, you are good… Your biology teacher told you once that the best approximation of an orgasm was a sneeze: that pent-up feeling, persistent tickling, rapid breathing, accelerated heartrate, followed by a satisfying release. But if that was true, why did sex for you feel like cleaning your ears—or more precisely, having them cleaned: the pressure, the probing, a sense of a tunnel with no end and no light. But if you could just get through it, you could have pancakes.

One is invited not only into these caches of the mind, but also into their time periods. Specific pop culture references and nods to the relics of youth—David Gray, phone booths and calling cards, the Kodaks we used before our cameras could fit in our pockets—offer a nostalgia that transcends mere recounting. Memories are not simply recalled, but reinhabited. There is a timelessness to which any generation can connect and from which they might draw meaning: 

...It felt like a surprise: those packets of prints, and the sleeves of cut negatives (that always fell out first, in danger of being lost). Often we looked at the prints right there in the drugstore, under the fluorescent lights, shuffling them like cards to find "a good one." ...There was still great room for human error: a thumb in the way, blinding sunlight, accidental double exposures, some prints mysteriously all black. Often the error lay with the subjects: eyes closed, or pulling a funny face, or flashing devil's horns over an angelic sibling… No one really cared about the negatives, so I squirreled them away, holding up the strips to to the light: faces with stark eyes, round and white as thumbtacks. Cheshire smiles, floating. All our bodies reversed.

Although for many of us our photo albums are online, the mood of family photo-taking, of subsequently squinting over them in analysis, of compiling and saving our favorites, and above all remembering loved ones, rings irrespective of one's birth year.

What is omitted from Telephone is sometimes as powerful as what appears. Restrained uses of white space give voice to the unsaid in these essays; it is topiary of sorts, a cutting away in order to reveal something beautiful. For every published work, there is of course a negotiation of length, pacing, and tone, but also of what one is allowed to stay—so much more when there are two voices working together in conversation. Unanswered questions and unresolved conflicts (whether internal or external) can leave one narratively dissatisfied, but these do not detract from the quality of the writing, and certain turns of phrase are simply exquisite. Take for example these lines that hint at childhood trauma:

As a child learning about the sun, you called it ‘ultraviolent’… 'Ultraviolent' made sense to you the way something big and warm and nurturing could harbor a secret rage, could burn with surprising force, could continue to sting in the quiet aftermath for days. The sun was like a mother that way, capable of all kinds of things.

Baited but not sated, the reader is urged us to probe deeper.

The critic Thomas Larson once referred to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009) as a “nomadic mosaic.” As I read Telephone, I was reminded of that text. Bluets is a work of over two hundred fragments of distinct tones and disparate topics, united by a connection to the color blue. Consuming its pages like studying each piece of a broken vase as you put it back together. Like Bluets, Telephone can likewise be considered a work where the sum of its parts may in fact be greater than the whole. In one sitting, a reader can be confronted with the expository and the existential; the next section may offer levity or it might be lachrymose. But that is part of its beauty as blended art. 

Readers who prefer more traditional narrative styles and find comfort in the linear may find Telephone off-putting. But this disjointedness and even randomness is refreshing. The book’s multifaceted connection-making speaks to the complexities of our lived lives.

I reach back to everything I know about my life, griefs as inexpressible as joys, language necessary and futile at once, and then to those first words nested inside each other. I submit:

Grammar

Here, on the Atlantic, sunrise 

the reversed syntax of my Seattle youth:

I marvel, still young, at what 

it means to have been younger;

to see at last the parent 

in parenthesis;

to read–for the first time–

whole chapters of my life

as an aside. 

The text's epilogue, “The In-Between: Letters from Isolation” is an epistolary exchange, letters sent back and forth during pandemic lockdown. It is only in this part of the book that the author of each letter is identified, yet as a reader I barely notice this adjustment, having grown accustomed to anonymity. This final portion extends seamlessly from the main text, and gives additional insight into the authors’ lives in the present. In one letter, Wade writes to Miller:

This weekend I learned there's a word for the space between the attic and the roof, or the top of a kitchen cabinet and where it meets the wall. Soffit… I want to be a soffit too, to place myself in the in-between and fill a longing, ease a grief. Maybe the mask I wear becomes a soffit, preventing an exchange of air with strangers? Maybe the blood I give becomes a soffit, too, as it enters the veins of strangers? Or maybe this is only wishful thinking. Still, I hope this letter might be a kind of soffit, too, closing the long distance between us, an envelope in your inbox that flickers as if to say Open me! I've arrived.

Just so, Telephone is itself a liaison, Miller and Wade's words lying under the eaves that connect reader to revelation.