Charles Yu selected “Stories and Stakes in a Noisy Democracy” by Annie Bartos as the second place finalist in our inaugural Prize for New Narratives. First, read Bartos’s spellbinding essay here, and then check out our interview with the winner below, in which Bartos discusses her relationship with erasure and found prose/poetry, the inspirations for her essay, and what’s next for her.
What an extraordinary, ambitious project this is. I noted in my comments on my first reading, and then in our discussions for the shortlist, how I was just spellbound from start to finish. How long have you been working on this?
Thank you so much for saying that. I was spellbound by the material I found inside the transcripts, as well. I started writing this piece in the spring of 2024, a few months after I submitted my MFA manuscript. I had applied to Tin House (now McCormack Writing Center) that summer and even though I applied with one of the essays from my MFA manuscript, I wanted to workshop something completely different from the personal narrative lyrical essays I spent two years writing. I still had steam from the MFA but I wanted to push the “creative” part of the “creative nonfiction.” When I was accepted into Tin House, SCOTUS was deciding on presidential immunity. I found myself reading the transcripts from the Judiciary Committee because I wanted to know more about these justices who would vote for something that seemed so obviously anti-democratic. I wrote my first draft of “Stories and Stakes in a Noisy Democracy” for my Tin House workshop group. (My workshop instructor, Lars Horn, thought maybe this would turn into a book, which I haven’t ruled out yet.) For months, every time I’d read my draft, I’d go back to the transcripts and find new shiny pieces of gold to add. There are just so many great (and often completely ridiculous) lines! Eventually I decided to stop myself and sent it out to a few places. I was thrilled when I saw that Charles Yu was going to judge The Masters Review Prize for New Narratives. I am so honored he saw the value in my work.
I’m curious what your process was in putting this together. Obviously it required a lot of reading of these hearings, but did you have a sense of who you wanted to put in conversation with one another, or was it more organic discovery?
I kind of became obsessed with reading the transcripts. I would read them like novels, first without taking notes or underlining, and then eventually seeing similarities across the transcripts and organizing them into different files based on themes or topics. When it was time to organize the data, there were certain voices I absolutely wanted in conversation, but I also wanted to allow room for other voices to infiltrate. I wanted to add some buoyancy to the drama. I wanted to highlight the humanness of these political actors. I also wanted to show the contradictory nature of the court and its actors. I wanted to remember historical moments when the court has been asinine, and realistically think about what we’re up against as we envision a more democratic nation. I wanted there to be some mystery in the piece, to keep the reader questioning, curious, and also maybe a little confused. I think the United States’s version of democracy is confusing. I was also deeply committed to the idea of unpredictability, which I think is a close cousin to “hope.” All this to say, I organized my data with these goals in mind, and then found the voices who helped me achieve these goals.
In your cover letter, you cited M. NourbeSe Philips’s Zong! as well as Travis Macdonald’s The O Mission Repo, Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, and Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of as inspirations. I wondered if you could share some of the ways these texts influenced you, here and elsewhere.
Thank you for asking this question. While writing this piece, I always considered it to be in conversation with these authors (swoon!). It started with Diana Khoi Nguyen when she was a guest instructor at one of my last MFA residencies. She read from her manuscript, Ghost Of, which knocked the wind right out of me. It is truly a remarkable piece of art. Listening to her read inspired me to think way beyond whatever I was working on. Her work led me toward works broadly labeled “erasure” or “found prose/poetry” and I designed my MFA graduate seminar on the topic. There were so many fantastic writers who I drew on for my seminar such as Mary Ruefle, Victoria Chang, and Solmaz Sharif. I really connected with Travis Macdonald’s The O Mission Repo in part because I was deeply involved in the anti-war movement after September 11, 2001, and also because I am a scholar, and enjoy working with original texts. When I came across M. NourbeSe Philips’s Zong! I felt like my whole concept of what prose is and can be was once again flipped upside down. The way she was able to take one specific (and very brief) legal transcript, and make the reader feel the sensation of drowning, was hypnotizing, striking. But it was Sheila Heti’s work in Alphabetical Diaries that gave me permission to laugh, which I am grateful for because most of what I read and write is otherwise pretty heavy. I craved levity, especially after writing a memoir, and Heti delivered. I hope you can see the influence of these various artists in my piece, except in reverse order from how I discussed them in this interview—my piece begins with the absurd and comical and concludes with the dire and violent. While my piece is different from Heti, MacDonald and all the others, I wouldn’t have even contemplated creating it if it weren’t for the genius these brilliant artists bring into the world.
You have a PhD in Geography—did your academic background influence or inform your practice with this piece?
In short, yes. I approach my work wearing all my hats. As a geographer, I think a lot about how people, place, and politics are interconnected. Within my niche of feminist political geography, I think about how these interconnections exist within the system of patriarchy. More specifically regarding this piece, it builds on some of my previous academic research that focuses on the interrelationality between care and conflict, especially within American jurisprudence. As a social science researcher, I enjoy asking questions that might not have clear answers or easy ways to find answers; I am much more attracted to questions than answers. In general, I appreciate nuance and complexity. Because I am coming to creative writing after spending most of my entire life as a student or an educator, I approach my practice with the enthusiasm of a novice but with the decades of experience I’ve accumulated as a critical thinker.
Do you incorporate these techniques—erasure, remix, etc.—into your other creative work?
As I was developing my MFA graduate seminar on erasure, I realized that erasure has been important to me since elementary school. I found a copy of a speech by Mother Teresa when accepting her Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. I was in seventh or eighth grade and my assignment was to memorize the speech and deliver it to my class. It turns out, the photocopy of that speech reminds me that I used redaction at an early age—I searched for meaning and truth in complicated texts, decided what did and didn’t belong, moved text around to make it serve a purpose which was different from its original intent, etc. No one taught me how to do this back then. But it had a liberating effect on me as a young person. Over the past few summers, I’ve facilitated a young writers’ group at the public library and I always include a week on erasure. It is fun to play with art that is already on the page, and every year, the students surprise me with what they choose to illuminate or eradicate. I think there is something really powerful about erasure techniques and I am not yet finished exploring the possibilities in my own craft.
What are you working on now?
My MFA manuscript turned into Collisions: A Memoir In Sediments, which will be coming out with the University of Georgia Press in October 2027. Now that it is officially out of my hands, I am excited to get going on a few different projects that have been simmering and see what has momentum to sustain the next book. All of the projects begin with something real, tangible, or otherwise factual, but stretch toward the speculative, fictional, and imagined. I workshopped a short story at Bread Loaf last summer that I think has the potential to turn into a novel, which is incredibly exciting. That piece was inspired by Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X. I have another piece inspired by Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, that started to write itself recently. In the meanwhile, I have been writing short stories, flash fiction, and braided essays to keep myself writing when the “big” project feels too daunting.
Interviewed by Cole Meyer