Dinah Lenney: On Essay and Image

The story behind Lenney's new ekphrastic anthology 'Snapshots'

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Hi Everyone,

MFA Lore seems to be on a Writers in Conversation roll! Today, I’m thrilled to introduce you to Dinah Lenney, author extraordinaire and editor of the brand new ekphrastic anthology Snapshots: An Album of Essay and Image, featuring flash essays by Aimee Bender, Sven Birkerts, Stuart Dybek, Alex Espinoza, Lynell George, Amy Gerstler, Tod Goldberg, Vanessa Hua, Pico Iyer, Wayne Koestenbaum, Major Jackson, Leslie Jamison, Attica Locke, Dinty W. Moore, Susan Straight, and many others.

Dinah is an actor (you may remember her from ER, Murphy Brown, and Sons of Anarchy) and memoirist (Bigger Than Life), as well as an essayist (Coffee; The Object Parade). She and I met as students in Bennington’s MFA program, where Dinah went on to teach for many years. We also both attended Yale as undergrads, and we live in LA, where we both love to take artish (so much nicer/less snooty than “artistic”) photographs on our walks, so we’ve since become friends and colleagues! I was honored when she invited me to contribute a flash essay for Snapshots, prompted by a black-and-white photograph of my choosing. I picked this one:

You’ll have to read Snapshots to find out what I wrote, but I can tell you I LOVED the process and made several discoveries as I revised and revised and distilled the essay down to just two pages. So I was eager to chat with Dinah about her journey to publication of the book as a whole.

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In case the term is unfamiliar to you, here’s what Merriam-Webster has to say about ekphrasis:

Although "ekphrasis" (also spelled "ecphrasis") is a relatively new entry in our dictionary, the practice of using words to comment on a piece of visual art is an ancient one. One of the earliest and most commonly cited forms of ekphrasis occurs in The Iliad, when Homer provides a long and discursive account of the elaborate scenes embossed on the shield of Achilles. It should be no surprise, then, that the term ekphrasis derives from Greek, where it literally means "description" and was formed by combining the prefix ex- ("out") with the verb "phrazein" ("to point out or explain"). "Ekphrasis" first appeared in English in the early 18th century.

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You’re invited!

Launch Readings for Snapshots: An Album of Essay and Image in SoCal!

If you live in Southern California, please join Dinah and Snapshot contributors (including me!) at any of these readings:

1. Pasadena—Vroman's on February 7th at 7pm, with Alex Espinoza, Lynell George, Susan Straight, and Diana Wagman.

2. Culver City— Village Well on February 23rd at 5pm, with Aimee Bender, Aimee Liu, Tod Goldberg, and Ivy Pochoda.

3. Echo Park— Stories Books and Cafe on March 9th at 6pm, with Emilie Beck, Amy Gerstler, Attica Locke, David Ulin.

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Writers in Conversation: On Essay and Image

Aimee: Dinah, I’m so thrilled to be included in your new anthology, Snapshots! I’d love to know how the idea for this project evolved. What was your initial inspiration?

Dinah: Snapshots is a follow up of sorts to Brief Encounters, an anthology that I worked on with the late Judith Kitchen, and the fourth of her collections of short nonfiction. Judith was the most generous mentor, reader, thinker, colleague. We met when she and her husband Stan Rubin hired me to teach in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program. I learned so much from her about the value of literary conversation and community. I miss her like crazy. She was dying when we worked on our book—knew she wouldn’t live to see it published—and at some point she matter-of-factly informed me I’d be responsible for book number five. Which was equal parts thrilling and terrifying.

The thing is, when the time came round (there’s a decade or so between each book), flash essays were (are) everywhere. I felt I needed some new hook or reason or whatever. And I love photos. And I love photo essays. I loved the idea of asking writers to work with or from an image—to let a picture inspire them in any (nonfictional) direction they pleased.

Aimee: What was the process of getting the project underway? Did you ask the contributors first to help you with a proposal? Or did you already have your agent’s and editor’s blessing because of the earlier book with Judith?

Dinah: I didn’t have anybody’s blessing. I went to our editor at Norton with hope in my heart. But they turned me down, ouch. Trade thought the book was too academic. And the academic people thought the book was for trade. I couldn’t convince them that it could be both—and I was discouraged. But then I took the proposal to Bloomsbury, with whom I’d published COFFEE (in the Object Lessons series), and my editor there forwarded it to a colleague in London. It turned out she was very enthused and eager and before long we had a deal. I’d promised her I could get a bunch of interesting writers—so at that point I went about getting all of you!

Aimee: Wow!!! No agent at all? Just your own editorial contacts? That is SO impressive– and rare!

Dinah: Well, I did have a proposal, and don’t think I didn’t send it to Rizzoli. (They turned me down very nicely.) But no, no agent.

Aimee: What did the proposal look like? Did you have sample photographs and essays?

Dinah: I did provide samples—or more like examples—with the understanding that each of you would be contributing something entirely original—something like this or that photo-essay, perhaps. But I wasn’t looking to acquire rights to anything. I wanted fresh work coming out of the prompt.

Aimee: Got it. But I can’t get over the chutzpah you must have to effectively cold-call these editors… and then some of your contributors were cold calls too, no? Are you always this bold?

Dinah: I’m laughing… I guess I am bold. But, y’know, I was trained as an actor. I learned early on that nobody cared as much about my success as I did. (It has never served me to wait to be served…) Meanwhile, it’s not like the cold-calling worked (with editors); I expected Norton, for whom I’m a known quantity, to buy the book. And they didn’t. And I got to my editor at Bloomsbury through the COFFEE connection. So how bold was I, really?

Aimee: So what about Rizzoli?

Dinah: Rizzoli was a bust. A bold move, and a bust. Ha.

Aimee: OK, I still think your approach as an actor is brilliant– and wildly unusual for a writer! I hide behind my agent, I’m afraid. Probably not good, but nevertheless.

Let’s move on to the contributors. How did you decide whom to invite and how to reach out to them?

Dinah: From the beginning I had writers in mind, colleagues, friends, mentors, mentees. I consulted our old table of contents, of course—I knew some of those writers would honor their relationship with Judith. Or at least I hoped they would. Frankly, though, it was hard to winnow things down. There are 77 contributors in Brief Encounters. I had room for half that many in Snapshots , and I did want to include a bunch of new people. As much as I was standing on Judith’s shoulders, I wanted this book to feel like mine.

Aimee: Did you expect the sorts of responses you ended up receiving from the prompt?

Dinah: Yes and no. Often no. And, as with any good project, I wound up grateful for that, grateful to be surprised (even occasionally flummoxed), to have something to figure out, to discover that the book would be more various and challenging and interesting than I could have imagined.

Aimee: You were a wonderful editor on my little piece! Your comments were insightful, and we sent drafts back and forth. But we were already friends. How did the process work with some of the “luminaries” in the book – writers like Pico Iyer?

Dinah: Aimee, it was a blast to work with you on your essay. There was so much to think about. As for Pico—a writer couldn’t be more gracious or available than he. But I didn’t touch his piece. However—and here’s a big generalization, okay?—the more luminous the contributor (aka experienced and skilled), the more seemingly grateful they are to be edited. It’s the less seasoned people who tend to dig in, I find.

Aimee: Oh, I love that generalization! As both a teacher and workshop participant, I’ve noticed that to be so true! It’s akin to the adage, those who write long don’t have the experience or take the time to write short.

Dinah: Oh that’s good—I’m going to use that. I’ll credit you!

Aimee: Ha! It was a wise colleague who said that to me after my “doorstop” of a second novel was published. Ouch. But I knew instantly that he was right. And so… your project and the challenge to distill my thoughts and emotions down to just a couple of pages was very welcome! But I had very little experience writing in this concentrated form. Did you have any problem with contributors whose first passes were too long or meandery – perhaps because they, too, were new to such concision?

Dinah: It’s not so much that people came in too long—it’s such a privilege, though, to be able to ask the questions that maybe help a writer to realize when the work isn’t clear. In some few cases, I only had to reveal that I’d misunderstood or gotten off track somehow to get a writer to zoom in and make the fix. And we all repeat ourselves, so my job was to catch the repetitions…

Aimee: I can absolutely see that helpful push for clarity. I wonder if the editorial nudge extended to spotting meaning under the surface that the writer had yet to recognize? I often found that to be the case in student work– the latent meaning that wanted to surface even though the writer hadn’t seen it?

Dinah: Mostly, with these submissions, the work was pretty polished. All of you are writers whom I admire—it was initially scary to think that I’d have to accept the essays once I’d solicited them. But I was right to trust my instincts. It was only a delight to read and work with all of you, lucky me.

Aimee: How did you go about structuring the book? And did the structure match what you’d originally envisioned, or did you have to come up with a whole new arrangement?

Dinah: I didn’t begin to think about a structure until I had all the work—at which point I knew I wanted to come up with something very intentional. It seemed obvious to group the essays according to subject and theme. But how to do that in an interesting way? Like, “People, Place, Things,” wasn’t going to cut it. In the end I came up with seven sections; in each case I’m nodding to writerly preoccupations and purposes. The essays—and the photos—speak to each other in so many ways. Many of them might have been perfectly at home under a different umbrella. So the published version is just that; the version that got published. And that’s part of the fun, I hope, part of what might have people reading and rereading (in my dreams anyway), looking for connections and echoes and ripples that hopefully make the experience different for every reader. And worth thinking/talking about.

Aimee: For me, the experience of writing through a photograph – in my case, a picture of my family before I was born– was like telescoping. It felt as if I was shrinking into the picture, then once inside, I expanded into the scene. As an observer, as a future member of the family, I was part of it and not part of it, and that became the tension as I “addressed” my family members pre-me. I sensed a similar kind of telescoping in several of the snapshots, but others were more gestural, as if the picture were merely a prompt or an indication of a larger subject. Did you come out of this project with any general notion of what happens when writers write from pictures? I mean, is there some particular psychological “thing” that happens when we try to put words to pictures?

Dinah: I love this idea—if I’m getting it right—that writing into the photo allowed you to be part of your family in a different way. And see, this is what I mean: Your essay is in the section called “Family Portraits” but it might have also landed in “Before and After,” right? (Those essays are very overtly about what the writer knows now, that they didn’t know then.) But anyhow, yes, yes, yes.

I’m thinking of Patricia Hampl’s book about writing memoir, I Could Tell You Stories. Somewhere in there she advises us to “follow the image.” If we remember a scene, there’s a reason, that’s what she’s saying, something worth writing around and about till we get to the bottom of whatever it is. With pictures, maybe we don’t have to work so hard to remember—so we can maybe get to the meaning/mattering of the moment faster and deeper. The other thing she says somewhere is that this kind of writing—memoir and personal essay—is a chance to live our lives twice, the second time illuminated. So—writing to, from, around and about a photograph is a way of illuminating what’s in and outside the frame. A chance to bring the moment to life all over again—

Aimee: Thanks for the Patricia Hampl lead! That brings me to my final question, related to Snapshots’s publication by Bloomsbury Academic as a resource for writing programs. Is that why there are prompts at the end of the book for writing from pictures? How did you devise those prompts– did the work in the book inspire them, or did they just come from your own writing?

Dinah: I think the press hopes that the book will appeal to readers across the board, but it’s true that they stressed the academic side of things. (They wanted a detailed explanation of ekphrasis in the introduction, for instance.) And I promised them the list of prompts in the original proposal, along with the other appendices. I was definitely inspired by the work in the book, but I’ve been teaching with photos for years—and I kind of fancy myself the Queen of the Prompt. Lately, I’ve been having the best time, by way of calling attention to us, coming up with photos and prompts on social media!

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For you: Two of Dinah’s prompts!