Joyce Rosenfeld approaches creative nonfiction through a lifetime of overlapping practices. She is a writer, psychotherapist, activist, visual artist, and dancer, and each discipline informs how she understands movement, memory, image, and identity.
Her piece “Flight” follows a woman gathering her young daughter and leaving a life governed by fear. The escape unfolds through ordinary objects and sensations: folded baby clothes, canned grapefruit, passing airplanes, a motel room, and personalized matchbooks bearing an assumed name.
Writing from the perspective of someone nearing ninety, Rosenfeld places those details within a much larger, longer search for what she calls one's “true north.”
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Henry Fisher: You are writing from the perspective of someone nearing ninety and looking back across a lifetime. What made you decide this was the story you wanted to tell now?
Joyce Rosenfeld: It appears as if things have changed for women and girls, but I do not think they have. We are still in danger. Just look at what is going on in our own country. We see the ways in which the patriarchal system seeks to repress, dominate, and control the minds and bodies, the very souls, of the vulnerable or the nonconforming. It fears and seeks to suppress the Feminine. Unfortunately, my long-ago story is still too timely.
Fisher: Had you always known “Flight” would become part of your memoir, or did it take years before you felt ready to write it?
Rosenfeld: “Flight” is the final piece in my debut memoir, Enchantments of the Esquire Theater, which is a collection of memories telling the story of leaving, across time, generations, borders, and various varieties of bondage. Of standing at the crossroad and choosing. Once I gathered the pieces I had written and found the arc of the story I was telling, it was the logical last chapter. It comes after a lifetime of seeking, healing, finding perspective, and the long view.
Fisher: You are a psychotherapist, artist, activist, dancer, and writer. How have those different parts of your life influenced the way you approach storytelling?
Rosenfeld: My own work in therapy, and my work as a therapist, have been real instruments in coming to terms with the truths of my life and my being. That gives me insight and depth, especially over these long years, which I, as a writer, can give to my characters.
I am a dancer. I have a sense of space, of movement through space, of patterns, and of gesture.
I also taught movement to actors in a theater department, giving them a technique for bringing specific physicality to the characters they were playing. I think that weaves into my writing and gives dramatic life to the characters. How they move in response to what life brings.
In my visual art-making, I am a storyteller. I make collages using found images that come from magazines, particularly women's magazines. The ongoing collage series I am working on now is called Creative Nonfiction. I think all of my art centers toward creative nonfiction.
Fisher: The opening of “Flight” is unforgettable. Your psychologist eventually tells you, “Someday he'll kill you, you know.” Why did you choose to first establish the character, setting, and period before arriving at that sentence?
Rosenfeld: I do not think people would have continued reading if that had been the first sentence. I do not think I would have, if I were the reader. It wouldn't have been earned.
I wanted first to build trust in the narrator. I wanted, as you say, to develop a little of who this character might be, where she was from, and in what time and place. In acting, it is the “who, what, where, and when.” That sentence spoken by the psychologist sets forth the “why.” The rest of the story, then, is the “how.” How the plight of the narrator is resolved.
Fisher: Throughout “Flight,” ordinary details become incredibly vivid, from the folded baby clothes and grapefruit to the airplanes outside the motel window. How do you decide which details deserve to remain on the page?
Rosenfeld: It comes from memory. Love of detail.
When I write, especially at the beginning, I do not even call it a draft. I call it a spill, when I write without lifting the pen from the paper, the fingers from the keys. Without censorship or editing. One word leads to another and another, one image to another, and an image leads, inevitably, to its description. In my art-making, I also make altars. Objects become sacred symbols and metaphors imbued with magic. This finds its way into my writing. It comes from memory, from seeing, and I do not even care if it is true.
Fisher: Were there details or experiences you deliberately left outside of “Flight”?
Rosenfeld: Yes. Earlier in the memoir, Enchantments of the Esquire Theater, is a piece called “Omissions.”
It is about what the character, when she was a girl, omitted from admitting even to herself. It includes several omissions of specific events, incidents, or episodes from a six-month honeymoon through Europe and North Africa in 1959 that only the woman she has become can tell.
Fisher: Rather than explaining your emotions directly, you frequently allow actions, movement, and surroundings to carry the emotional weight. Was that a conscious craft decision?
Rosenfeld: I think it goes back to the question of how my art enters my writing.
The two things you specifically mentioned are what I address in my art: movement and image. Showing instead of telling. It is a miracle.
Fisher: The ending, with the personalized matchbooks addressed to “Mrs. Jean Carson,” feels both poignant and quietly ironic. Why did you choose to end the piece there?
Rosenfeld: For exactly those reasons. Poignant and quietly ironic, as you note.
It also calls up an era. It calls up a time. Jean Carson was the first name that came into my mind when I gave the motel clerk a false name. She was the former wife of Johnny Carson, the host of The Tonight Show, which some readers might recognize, depending on how close to ninety they are…
Fisher: What does the final image of the matchbooks mean to you now?
Rosenfeld: I wish I still had one.
I look at the matchbooks now as a congratulatory gift for what this character was able to achieve, whether anybody responsible for the gift knew it or not.
A celebration. The character and her baby were witnessing it together on the verge of a new life.
Fisher: Were parts of writing “Flight” especially difficult or emotionally complicated to revisit?
Rosenfeld: No, not after all this time and experience and work. The difficult thing was becoming fearless enough to make the writing public. To tell what had been kept a shameful secret.
There is always the desire to approach certain difficult things in the third person. A few pieces in the manuscript are written in the third person, and that was a specific choice I discussed with my editor for a long time.
There is the present voice of this woman at this age, and there is the voice describing what happened to her when she was a girl. Sometimes that is in the third person, so the manuscript goes back and forth.
But “Flight” itself was not difficult to write. It almost wrote itself. It was such an epic unfolding in this life, and I am very proud of it. That I was able to make the choices I did.
Fisher: What do you hope readers carry with them after reading “Flight”?
Rosenfeld: There is nothing more important than committing one's life, I believe, to finding one's own true north.
Not who we are taught to be. Not who we are supposed to be. Not all of the voices that have defined us, but the true center of our own unique soul that came from the great mystery and is the source of our power.
That is a life's work.
Fisher: You are currently working on a second book, The Architecture of Fire. What themes or questions are drawing you toward that project?
Rosenfeld: It has a subtitle: The Architecture of Fire: An Artist's Extraordinary Ordinary Life.
It explores what happens after “Flight.” It follows this character through her seeking and searching, her discovery of magic and the divine feminine, and her life as an artist.
It goes on from there and, according to the skeleton of the book as it stands now, will end pretty much in the present.
Near the end of the conversation, Rosenfeld revealed that “Flight” had previously been submitted to several magazines without being accepted. Its publication in Navy Pen therefore carried an additional meaning for her.
“Old women are invisible in our culture. We don't value the wisdom of the elders. What is thrilling,” she said, “is that I sent ‘Flight’ to three or four magazines, and no one wanted it. The fact that someone from your generation saw its value, valued the voice of an old woman, is such a positive thing to me. It gives me hope for our future.”
As the concluding piece of a larger memoir, “Flight” is not simply an account of escape. It represents the point at which one life begins to give way to another. The transformation is uncertain and incomplete, witnessed only by a mother, her child, and a set of matchbooks bearing a borrowed name.
Looking back decades later, Rosenfeld understands that moment as a celebration, whether anyone else recognized it at the time or not. It was an early movement toward the work she believes each person must undertake: separating the self from the identities imposed upon it and discovering the “true center” of one's own life.