Kristina Moriconi’s What Becomes of a Body is a lyrical and fragmented exploration of how we recover after a serious physical trauma—hers specifically is about a car accident that took years to recover from and that still, in fragmented ways, can haunt her at times. The text is about reckoning with what was and accepting what is. It’s about the ways in which trauma can rule our lives, yet we can find our own path towards healing as we gain voice for our experience. I was nervous to write about this book—its composition is so stellar that I was intimidated to write for a while. Moriconi’s language is lush with poetic phrases and fragments of thought. I had a conversation with Moriconi about her book, and her answers prove that What Becomes of a Body digs deeper than our traumas and discovers how we navigate our way towards not just surviving but thriving—and how writing can become a way in which we see ourselves through the trauma.
Chelsey Clammer: When people ask you what your book is about, what are the few words you provide to describe it?
Kristina Moriconi: Silence, first. Then, finding a voice.
CC: Ooh, that’s a stellar description. I think the book is both full of silence and, by the end, a strong voice for your experience. Trauma is such a hard situation to write about. So, what initially made you want to write this book?
KM: When I finally spoke of the things that happened to me, I heard myself for the first time, and I knew staying silent was no longer possible.
CC: That’s super powerful and I imagine hard to do. How did you approach writing it?
KM: Initially, I wrote it as individual essays—long, narrative pieces that become my MFA thesis. While they held together cohesively, I found so much to be lacking as I reread them years later, especially regarding sound. Revision consumed me and I lost count, at some point, of how many times I’d drafted and redrafted the original work. Honestly, in frustration, I began turning some of the essays into poems. This helped me to dissect the language, to consider what felt necessary. But the poem eventually felt too restrictive a form for the content. So I began searching for some other structure, one I ended up building along the way, one to hold both the music and the magnitude of everything I had to say.
CC: That is quite the process. I love how when we write, we find different ways to approach a story. But sometimes stories can be super overwhelming to write. What was difficult when writing about trauma and what felt easy or natural to you?
KM: By the time I reached the point of writing a series of final revisions, I’d worked through the trauma and done the work of healing with a therapist. So, by then, writing about trauma had become more of an examination for me, focused closely on how to craft lightness into what felt unbearably heavy.
CC: I totally know that feeling! For me, writing about trauma is a process of first working through it, then turning that pain into art. But when we’re writing specifically about the body, it can be difficult because we might start getting physical sensations about the trauma. After all, our bodies remember that trauma. How do you think our brains work through writing about the body?
KM: To inhabit again a body that had experienced physical, emotional, and psychological trauma, somewhere in the process, my brain switched from creative to almost clinical. Or analytical. Reportage, perhaps, a kind of chance for me to finally give testimony: this is what happened and this is how I survived.
CC: That makes a ton of sense to me. One of the themes of your book is that you’re looking at how after a physical trauma, the body switches from a subjective experience to an objective one. The body becomes something we measure instead of something we live in and that creates a part of our identities. That must have really created a sense of dissonance both when experiencing how the body is being perceived as an objective entity and how we write about it creatively. Now, the book is in a super fragmented structure—some pages have blocks of texts, some just a few words per page, and that’s to mention the visuals and white space used in the layout. I’m curious about what made you take the fragmented approach to writing about trauma. Why write in that structure?
KM: As I mentioned before, I began focusing on ways to craft lightness into what felt unbearably heavy, both to me and what I imagined would overwhelm a reader. There was a period in my life when trauma became frequent, stitching itself into my days and weeks and months and years—knots so tangled I could not free myself, for a long while. To write the relentlessness of that on the page with the same raw intensity, the same density and weight, seemed untenable for me and a reader. As I worked through the long process of revision, I found white space increasingly necessary for brief rest. For breath. To open a life that had closed in on me. To see silence in a new way—sustaining, rather than disconnecting and isolating.
CC: White space really does change the reader’s (and writer’s) experience. It’s like in those spaces we do get a rest—a chance to breath and digest. Now, you added some great visuals to the book as well. How do you think mixed media changes the reader’s experience of your writing?
KM: I think I started to add visuals throughout the text for a similar reason. A kind of expansion, an invitation to the reader to walk through rooms of a museum I’d built to house my pain. As both a writer and a visual artist, this kind of gathering and assemblage happened organically. It began as a series of photographs I had taken over the years. Then I noticed how often many of the themes I was writing about existed, too, in visual pieces I’d kept and created—diagrams, newspaper clippings, found poetry in the form of blackout and erasure poems. I saw it then as a collected work, a carefully curated retrospective.
CC: It’s like the visuals became as much of the story and your process through it as the text. I’ve seen other books where images are included to strengthen the narrative. What literary influences did you have when you were writing this book or considering writing it?
KM: I am drawn to/inspired by many of the writers/artists published by Siglio Press. The three in particular that sat on my desk for most of the time I was working on this book were Memory by Bernadette Mayer, The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words by Madeline Gins, and Frail Sister by Karen Green. It is the hybrid form I am obsessed with, endlessly intrigued by the juxtapositions and overlaps, the places of intersection. I make of this a study, ongoing, weaving my curiosity and research into my daily practice and that continues to inform my process as I work on two different hybrid projects now, both currently in the excavating/gathering stage.
CC: That’s absolutely fascinating and I can’t wait to see what comes of it! I think What Becomes of a Body is exemplary in its hybrid form and lyrical writing. I truly honor the process you went through to get this story on the page. It’s so difficult to write about our traumas, but you’ve done it so effectively here. Thank you for all that you have contributed to the world.
More About Kristina Moriconi
- Visit KristinaMoriconi.com.
- Purchase What Becomes of a Body at Bookshop.org. (We may receive a small commission.)
- Follow Kristina Moriconi on Instagram.
