John West’s Lessons and Carols is a book of experimental and genre-defying fragments that chronicle the author’s relationship to addiction, beauty, faith, literature and his new daughter. The individual segments which make up the book range in length from a few sentences to over a page. Some narrate moments in the author’s life, while others provide brief images, a description of a moment in an arboretum, a record of a short conversation had just before leaving the room, a few phrases describing Christmas. Their tone is prosaic as well as poetic. This particular fragmented form allows West to move through images of time and space, as if flipping through memories of a life. The work also has a musical quality in terms of weaving in and out of themes and events. In the following interview, I spoke to West his process of arriving at this experimental narrative form of “fragments”, including how he was influenced by music theory and questions around how the self comes together.

— Hua Xi

It’s fascinating that your work moves between genres, and has existed in different genres at different points throughout its process. How would you describe the relationship of this final work to prose?

John West: I’ve described this as a 163 prose poems at some points. Then there was a moment when I had it all in connected prose, in a full narrative.

The final work is broken up into fragments. I think the word fragment is almost like the wrong word, even though it’s the word we have. But the magic of these fragments is that each one has to have its own life. Each one has to exist on its own, to stand alone, but at the same time, they all rub up against each other.

What about to poetry?

West: I drew a lot from poetic practice, a lot of the moves in poetry for describing things. But I am not a poet and I don’t feel like my work… I don’t feel like I write poetry. But I really want to be in conversation with poetry because I read a lot of poetry. Almost every one of the fragments used to be preceded by a line of poetry. [Poetry] was .. a way for me to write against something. That was a really important process to me.

Also, I would occasionally, as a way of defamiliarizing it, I would break the paragraphs up as if it were a poem, as if into enjambed lines. That was a way for me to glimpse the actual stuff I was write.

Did this project move through different genres during your process of working on it?

West: When I was editing, I cut some parts which were straight up analyses of poems. There was an erasure at one point.

Were there elements of writing in fragments that you found difficult?

West: I think I am a bit of a formalist. I think like the problem with fragments is that they can be an excuse to not write more. The problem with fragments is it can be easy to have every last line be a banger. Someone said that to me, having a poetic turn at every end and having it always be set up the same way, after a while, you read it and you get it.

One of the more memorable passages for me is one that begins, “Prayers are an awful narrative device”. What I think works well about that fragment is that the whole passage is then undermining that first sentence, the idea that prayer is not helpful. The fact of the matter is that these fragments work best for me when I present an idea and then immediately undermine it.

There is another short fragment that reads, “ It used to be that in a tragedy, you die, and in a comedy, you get hitched, so I feel the urge to exit the story with the wedding. But this fact remains: I still sometimes want to die.” I’m proud of that fragment and I think it includes levity and also seriousness. Everything about it is undermining itself, hopefully in an interesting way.

How did this book come together, in terms of process?

West: I think some of the images I would write as notes on my phone. A lot of the book involved

stuff I noticed while I was out and about. And then I would take it home and workshop the stuff that didn’t make sense.

Is there an image from the book which is the image of the book for you?

West: I think probably the most important one narratively is the image of birds. In the very opening scene I’m complaining about birds and in the last scene, my daughter is pointing up at these birds and I see what she sees, which is that the birds are not something to complain about but something beautiful and wonderful.

I’m not a birder. I’m an aspirational birder. I don’t know anything about them but I love them. When our daughter came to us and we were very sleep deprived, I would sit on the porch and read a book in the morning and then I would look out and see all these birds. I feel like I noticed them more suddenly, like a switch had been flipped. There were birds all over our yard doing things, a cardinal vogueing and swallows tittering at each other all day long. It was so fun to observe them have their lives in a way that I’d never really noticed before. And I really tie that to the arrival of my daughter.

And what was the process of ordering and arranging the fragments?

West: When I wrote the book I was pretty obsessed with where things were falling in the book. Ordering them was also really generative for me.

Some of the ways I was approaching order in the book was drawn from my experience of understanding the way music operates. I remember in theory class in college studying the way themes progress over the course of a sonata, It’s very similar to what I was doing with this book. I made visualizations of the different themes in the book and studied the way they repeated and progressed. I had these increasingly complicated color-coded spreadsheets where each row was a fragment and the columns tagged the fragments with qualities like themes, or time, or motifs like birds.

What do you see as the perimeters of this book?

West: I view this book as almost a sort of braid which has four components. The first one is the way the arrival of a baby changed my life. Then there is my struggle with mental health and addiction over the course of my entire life. Then there are religious rituals, lesson and carols for example, as a way to better understand faith. The last component is elegies for people to who have since died or disappeared from my life.

I would say the main question is, how does the self transform when its put in relationship to the others? What is the boundary of that self? How can I fit together the person I am not with the person I was when I was drinking actively and using and was really in my mental illness?

What do I do about this baby? In some ways, it is a narrow circle, around me and my identity. But I think and I hope that by interrogating these parts of my identity that are maybe relevant to other people, that there’s something general about these specifics.

You talk about how “fragile the concept of a piece is” referring to music. Do you feel that a book is also a fragile concept?

West: I studied historical performance, which is music written before 1750, and I played the recorder and a little bit of the harpsichord. Before the Baroque Era, many composers were writing different version of the same piece but for different instruments. And these were transcribed by different people, so different versions exist together all as what we think of as “the piece”. the idea that there can be multiple versions of “the piece” flies in he face of the Romantic idea that there is a “one true piece”.

So there is the idea that there are multiple versions of me, all sitting uncomfortably, all working together, sometimes discordantly. sometimes “cordantly.”

I’ve written over 100,000 words and this book is 35,000. There are two senses in which this is a fragile piece: one is the sense that I have written so much and there are so many versions that there are could constitute this book. I think there was a version of the book that was finished before arrival of my daughter, and it’s not exactly this book but it’s sort of this book. The other sense in which this is a fragile piece is that there are infinite ways to read it. It’s true for so many works, especially fragmentary works where so much is in the elision, in the gaps between fragments.

Those multiple readings exist in the same uncomfortable way that Bach’s cantatas exist and maybe make something beautiful and uncomfortable.

—

John West is a writer and technologist, currently reporting the news with code at the Wall Street Journal, where his work has won multiple awards including the 2023 Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting. He holds an MFA in writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and degrees in philosophy and music performance from Oberlin College and Conservatory. Lessons and Carols (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2023) is his first book.

Hua Xi (she/they) is a poet and artist. They are currently a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Their poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily and elsewhere.

Poetic Conversations: Text as Music ~ Interview with John West was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.