In conversation with Evana Bodiker...
By Emma Marttinen
In November, I had the pleasure of speaking with Evana Bodiker, poet, essayist, and creator of the popular confessional substack Arbiter of Distaste. I had been a longtime reader of her blog and when I started end of the world, my most immediate thought was about exploiting its purpose for the pleasure of speaking with writers I admire. Arbiter of Distaste is a semi-regular publication of essays that, as Bodiker describes,
”- attempt to graft together ideas about literature, the theoretical, and my own life. I’m interested in what it means to consume/be consumed—in other words, I mostly write about love.”.
This is Bodiker's most acute talent, her ability to write about love in its many forms with a kind of poetic, yet understandable tone. It is what drew me to her writing in the first place. Her translation of life to the page is made in such earnest, that you [the reader] are oftentimes shocked by Evanas perceptiveness. By the glittering ways in which she traverses and interprets the world, and how relatable it all is.
Evana was one of the first people I ever reached out to on behalf of the magazine. She was kind, enthusiastic, and an illustrious conversationalist. Speaking with her left me with a distant, fuzzy adulation for the rest of the evening afterwards. And yet the more time that passed trying to transcribe and offer up doses of wisdom from our conversation, the more I became disillusioned by its weight. There was so much content to write about. So many quotes, ebbs, pauses. Life got in the way, then went on.
What I have to offer today is just a few snippets of our conversation, in which Evana answers my questions about the writing process, artistic influence, New York, and more. In keeping with the energy of our speech, I wanted to include our pauses, ums, buts, and likes. I wanted the reader to engage with Evana just as I did, with an earnest kind of interest which she so easily reciprocated.
EMMA: Do you find writing to be a difficult process? Are you a writer that finds the act to be really painful or something that comes more naturally to you?
EVANA: Um, no, I don't find it to be painful. There are, there are blockages.
There are like multiple blockages when I think about writing. It's like life gets in the way. Life is a block to writing in some ways, um, work. I work full time. I have a full time job. That's a block too, to being able to write all the time. Emotional blockages, I think I've written about before how I've like sort of, especially with a substack as I've grown the readership, but also my original readership was just like friends and family and so that's a block too like, how to write about my life without alienating the people that I'm writing about. So there are like a lot of different kind of blockages. And I guess in some ways, those are like pain points and it feels like you have to like, work the groove of those blockages and push through them in some ways.
Life is just busy. There's people jumping out of the woodworks every day to be like, I want to see you or I need something from you or just generally, your own life gets in the way. Exercising, feeding yourself all of these things, but finding little pockets of time is crucial. I was talking about this with my friend who is a software engineer and he works 9 hour days every day, whatever. And then it's hard to after that, be like, okay, now I'm going to sit down for 4 to 5 hours and make my art. (He's a musician.)
I have to protect my time in a certain way because writing is naturally blocked by life. But also, there are a lot of processes that are conducive to writing. I know that's cheesy and cliché, but going on long walks, um, Nietzsche talked a lot about how walking is the first step to the creative process. It definitely unlocks. I live in New York and walking around New York is endlessly generative for me, um, to be really attuned to what's happening around me is important
So it is, I think when I think it was said, like, writing is an enduring state. And I do feel like it's because of the fact that life is blocking it that the gift of writing is finding those times to steal back for yourself, um, whether it's on the subway, whether it's like on lunch break, whether it's just writing something down in your notes app, because you're so moved by something you've seen, or you have a little sentence or line knocking around in your head that you're like, I have to, I have to save this at all.
When I actually do get to write it feels like the greatest feeling in the world. I was describing this to my therapist the other day.
It's like, when I was thinking about the nature of love, I was like, it feels like writing.
It feels like you're possessed by something far greater. And if you can articulate it, if you can get over that edge of like, not being able to articulate, something unlocks and the floodgates just open. And to me, it's not like that all the time. But when I'm really locked in, and when I really get to spend a concentrated amount of time, I've said this since I was an undergraduate, that it does feel like being possessed in a certain way, because you just look up and then the world is still going, but you've, you know, somehow created a world unto yourself and we're so lucky that we get to have that as writers.
Um, so yeah, a very long answer. It's not painful. It's painful only in that I think a lot of times nothing worthwhile is really ever that easy.
EMMA: Do you find your observational style to be a kind of stealing? And then kind of on top of that, um, how do your friendships directly influence your writing, and also indirectly influence your creative process?
EVANA: Yeah, I think New York by extension and I'm sure to some extent, like, Toronto being a big city. It's like, you're stimulated all the time and there are things to look at and there are things you're going to miss. I went to Iowa for grad school for my MFA and I was writing too many metaphors. So my thesis advisor then was like, you need to just describe things.
You don't need to get an idea in your head of what you think the theme is or what you think you want to say. You need to just describe what you're looking at. And towards the end of my time at Iowa, I was writing these really long descriptive sentences that I was just pushing myself to write. I would write the longest sentence possible, but also just describe things as plainly as possible.
Friends of mine have said to me that reading my writing sounds a lot like listening to me talk, which is the greatest compliment because I think when I was a younger writer, I thought that I had to have, especially with poetry, had to have this poetic voice. But I was posturing and I was really trying to figure out what I wanted my voice to sound like when in reality, there's only one way for my voice to sound, which is how I would write if I was just writing without self consciousness. My mentor at work would say. You need to just go to a party, go home, write in your journal exactly what you saw. Don't editorialize, just write it down exactly. The observational came from this exercise of trying to not use so many metaphors when I could use the language that I have at my disposal.
I'm not sure what I believe about the truth. That's something we're always negotiating. But yeah, I think my friends are such an important part of my creative process, because I have really intelligent, remarkable friends who are constantly cracking my world open, saying things that I wish that I came up with. Pushing me to think in a direction that maybe I hadn't been thinking in before. And so, I'm often quoting people and I'm trying to trying to fold them into my writing world without hopefully stealing from them, but in some ways I am, of course. I think writing is a constant act of betraying confidences. And unfortunately, if you write in any confessional way, and you're not writing pure fantasy, you're taking from life. There's a really great Wall Stegner quote that Charlotte my friend who I write often about and right alongside with love. The quote is, and I'm paraphrasing;
“It's all fiction and it's all true.”
I'm observing things, but I'm missing things too. My observations are still biased because it's my point of view and so it's [writing] always an act of fiction making, even if you're writing very directly from life, because two people can never share the same reality. That's something that I've been coming up again and again with this year, just feeling like, even if we experience the same thing, we are emotionally experiencing it in different ways.
EMMA: How has New York influenced your writing, your creative process, and your development as a person?
EVANA: I think a lot of things about my life felt unsolved but things that never use to, now make sense to me. I feel that living here [New York], I have stopped waiting for things to happen, or I'm not waiting for the next thing to happen. I think it's also a reflection of my age. I'm 28 and for a long time I was on the academic path. I was like, what's the next move? When am I going to go to grad school? Okay. Now that I'm in grad school, I got to finish my thesis. Then what happens after grad school? Do I go do more school? Do I get a job in academia? Then when I realized I didn't want to be in academia and I thought, what's the next move? What's the next relationship? But all of this stuff has stopped being an obsession for me. I'm here. I'm not waiting anymore and New York is like a city that doesn't wait.
It moves on very quickly and it's your job to keep moving with it. If you don't move with it, it's like, you probably aren't going to be very happy here. And probably similarly with Toronto, like any big city. You move with it or you are not meant to move with it.
New York as a writer, it feels like a very generative space for me. I probably have written here more consistently than I've ever written anywhere and I do think it's the city that, that does that. It's funny to me because I saw an interview with a writer. Who I haven't met here. She lives here. I can't remember, but she was like, somebody gave her the advice that if you want to write a novel, you have to leave New York. And I was like, that's not true. I wrote the novel, I wrote the first draft of my novel in 5 months here.
New York just feels like I'm constantly putting my finger in the electric outlet. Like something is moving me. I love living here. It feels like every day is just saturated with possibility and on even really hard days, I still feel like there's still something worth experiencing and it just, it refuses to let you numb to yourself, I would say, but it also makes you very forgetful of yourself.
That's like the beauty of living in a big city, beauty of living in New York. You never know what party you're going to walk into and meet somebody. You never know who is going to appear in your life. There is just a thousand possibilities.
You can live a thousand lives anywhere, but I think big cities can be beautiful as somebody who is a writer, like, just to know that it's an ever renewing source of material and inspiration and opportunity.
EMMA: You reference music and poetry a lot in your writing. How do other mediums of art influence your own?
EVANA: I've always been somebody who feels very connected to like responding to other art. um it's called ekphrasis. It's like the Greek, it's basically like a form in poetry where you write after some other piece of art. And so, I think I've always been a very like ekphrastic writer from when I first started writing in college, in earnest in college. I think I was writing a lot of ekphrases or I was always like feeling like I wanted to respond to art. So with poetry, it felt like a good exercise. I think I was very uncomfortable even when I wrote about personal things. I was shrouding it in metaphor or I was shrouding it in illusion. The first poem that I ever felt really proud of was about boxing and I've never boxed in my life, so I think there's something about the recognition in a different piece of art that has always been moving to me.
Uh, the poets that I love are very confessional. Sylvia Plath was my first, and my enduring favorite poet, but she is a very metaphorically driven poet, even if she's confessional. But I found this poet named Margaret Ross who went to Iowa. Margaret Ross. She's incredible. She just writes so frankly about her experience, but also in this very clinical and almost haunting way. And I think poets that I love are not playful. They're very serious.
I guess poetry in general just, isn't something I've gravitated towards since I've left school. And I haven't yet articulated why that is. I think I'm so glad I spent eight years studying poetry, writing almost exclusively poetry because I think it was training ground for me, for what I always wanted to do, which was write prose, and even at the end of my time at Iowa, my poems were super prosy. And so none of it is wasted time. All of it was moving me towards the kind of things that I wanted to eventually write. And I look back at the poems that I wrote, and maybe I don't love them, but I have grace in my heart for the person who was writing those because she was beginning to articulate what she wanted to actually do. And that's valuable to me.
In terms of music, I am not musical at all. I don't play any instruments. I'm not somebody who has the language for technical language around music, but lyrics are something that I just obviously gravitate towards. I have always felt, and this is obviously controversial, but poetry does not hold- I have not been moved by a poem in the same way that I've been moved by music.