An Interview with Gayle Brandeis about “Drawing Breath” – Chicago Review of Books


How many of us appreciate the miracle that is our breath? Appreciate our bodies—our whole bodies, including our curves, our folds, our very flesh? What do breath, the body, and our feelings about both, have to do with writing anyway? If you were to ask Gayle Brandeis what breath and the body have to do with her own work, I imagine she’d say “everything.”

Brandeis, an award-winning and widely published author of fiction, memoir, and poetry, has a new collection of essays, Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss. Brandeis has organized the collection around various types of breath, each one reflecting a different stage or challenge in her life. With striking language, experimental forms, and unflinching honesty, Brandeis speaks to her traumas, her joys, and her transformations. Several of the essays center around the body. All are physical, visceral. They’re lyric and fluid. Alive. 

Drawing Breath is a memoir of sorts. The essays bear witness to Brandeis’s relationships with people, with her body, and to her writing. Weaving in scientific research, philosophy, and other women’s words, Brandeis takes the reader from her earliest connection to her writing life and her desire to see and be seen, to her mother’s mental health struggles and death by suicide, to the contemplation of her own death, all through the inhales and exhales of life. 

Brandeis, a Chicago native, has recently returned to her beloved city. I had the great pleasure of interviewing Brandeis on Zoom, where we had a rich discussion on breath, bodies, and writing.

Diane Gottlieb

Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss is a collection of essays from your whole writing life. They are often about your writing life too. I know you write in other genres as well, fiction and book-length memoir and poetry. How do you decide when it’s time to write an essay?

Gayle Brandeis 

I don’t know if I decide. I think an essay comes to me, nags at me, sometimes screams to get out. I just have to listen.  

Usually, there’s an idea or image or just something that will not leave me alone. I’ll sit down and see where it takes me. I don’t always know right away that it will be an essay. I’ll think it might be a poem at first, or who knows what, but then at some point I realize, okay, this is an essay.

Diane Gottlieb

Has your writing process changed from when you were that young girl just discovering writing?

Gayle Brandeis

It has and it hasn’t. In some ways, I feel like my writing self is this central, constant part of me that’s been with me since I started writing at four years old and hasn’t changed at all. The part that watches and listens and has weird thoughts. And when I hearken back to my young days as a writer, the impulse felt very similar. This almost kick inside my body that led me to the page. 

Diane Gottlieb

Have you always paid such close attention?

Gayle Brandeis

I think that’s just how I’m wired, to notice the little things around me. And sometimes the big things. I remember as a kid lying on the carpet in my living room and looking at the way the carpet was woven, or the things caught between the strands. I could get lost in that; it became a forest or a fairy land. I’ve had this dual approach to observations since I was a kid, blending into different genres, seeing things as they are but also as what wild thing they could also be, metaphorically, or through story.

Diane Gottlieb

The collection itself is organized around the breath. Can you tell us about that?

Gayle Brandeis

When I learned that the word inspiration literally means to breathe in, that stayed with me. Writing feels like the exchange of breath between self and world to me. That’s really what writing is, taking the world in, breathing it back out in our own way, through the filter of our bodies, through the filter of our perceptions. As an MFA student at Antioch, 20 plus years ago, and it was time to do a critical paper, I decided to write about the connection between breath and writing, which all these years later became the title essay of this collection.

I loved writing that essay, I think because it combined the personal with research. It became a bit of a template for me and my writing as an essayist. I love that combination of personal writing and research as a way of making the piece bigger than myself.

Diane Gottlieb

There’s quite a bit of science about breath and breathing in the book. You also refer to other literature. You pull things from religion. You seem to incorporate the areas that shaped you, that impacted you growing up.

Gayle Brandeis 

I think that’s the case. I’ve always been a voracious learner and reader and have always been fascinated with science as well as spirituality. So my writing takes me in all those directions. And of course, to other literary folks. Drawing those into my work feels very organic.

Diane Gottlieb 

You also experiment with form. Did you always write experimentally?

Gayle Brandeis 

I think I’ve always had a tendency toward it. When my teachers would create an assignment in school, I would always find my own little approach. In fifth grade, I had this wonderful teacher, Mrs. Cohen. 

We had to write a character study of a character in one little story we read. The main character would walk around with a squirrel on her shoulder, and I decided to write it from the perspective of the squirrel. I was the only person in the class who did that. She read it out loud in class, and it was really nice to get some recognition for looking at things differently because a lot of the time I felt like a weirdo. 

Mrs. Cohen helped me see there was something to my odd way of being in the world. That it was okay to approach things in a different way than other people did. I also remember writing epistolary stories and things as a kid, stuff that wasn’t quite the expected form. So that’s something that’s always been with me too.

Diane Gottlieb

 I want to go back to using the breath to organize the collection. How did that come about?

Gayle Brandeis

This book in so many ways feels like a bonus book because it wasn’t one I was consciously working toward. I just wrote essays as they came to me. And at various times, I’ve thought, “I have a lot of essays. Maybe I should pull them together into a collection.” I’ve taken stabs at it before, and then just said, “I’m not ready.” 

During COVID, I was acutely aware of breath. When I got sick early in the pandemic, breathing was very difficult. That reminded me, “Oh, I have this essay about breath.” And somehow when I started looking at my essays again, trying to figure out which ones spoke to each other, they grouped themselves into subject matter pretty naturally.

But then I thought, how do I find an overall structure for them? It occurred to me that the first ones were about my early years and the last one looks toward my own mortality. Our lives are framed by breath. We take our first breath, and then we have our last, and then there’s all the breath in between. I thought that could be a good structure, various types of breathing. It all came together quite easily once I made that decision.

Diane Gottlieb

It feels very organic. You were conscious about breath during COVID because of your own experience with the virus, but there was also a lot going on politically, socially, with breath, with people’s breath literally being cut off, with the death of George Floyd. I know you care a great deal about what happens out in the world. We get to see a glimpse of the activist in you in “Thunder Thighs.” How did that essay come about?

Gayle Brandeis

I had been self-conscious about my thighs for much of my life. I thought, if I dig into this, if I look into the history of thighs, the spirituality of thighs, maybe that would help me let go of my own preoccupation with them. Long before I wrote this essay, I thought I was going to write a book about thighs and created a questionnaire for people to tell about their own relationships with their thighs. The responses were fascinating.

Diane Gottlieb

You include some of those responses in the essay. 

Gayle Brandeis

Yes. Again, I wanted to bring in more voices than my own, to make it bigger than myself. I tried to approach the subject from as many angles as I could. It was so illuminating and helpful to remind oneself that one is not alone in these preoccupations. And then also to think, how awful that our patriarchal capitalist society has encouraged us to be self-conscious about our lovely warm thighs that only want to help us sit and walk and move through the world.

Diane Gottlieb

Did writing the essay feel empowering?

Gayle Brandeis

It was empowering, and it lasted a while but those internalized voices of capitalized patriarchy creep up and are hard to banish. I think it’s easier for me to silence them now, but they still come back, and I just have to dance with them.

Diane Gottlieb

Let’s talk about the body. You share that you struggled. I don’t know anybody who hasn’t struggled with some body part or something about their bodies that feels painful. Several of the essays deal with how hard is living in a woman’s body and the implications and repercussions of that in our society. Does the body just show itself in your writing, pop up on the page? 

Gayle Brandeis

Yeah. It’s pretty rare for me to force something into my work. I create space for whatever wants to be spoken to be spoken. And the body wants to speak a lot through my work. I don’t know if part of that is my history as a dancer. I created my own undergraduate degree in poetry and movement, arts of expression, meditation, and healing. Dance and writing have been my two passions, my two arts, since I was very young. In college, I realized that the body was where those two things intersected. I started writing in a more embodied way then. In high school, I had really divorced myself from my body in some ways, or tried to. I started healing that schism in college and wanted to write in a way that came from my muscles, my blood, and my bones. That has stuck with me. 

Diane Gottlieb

It’s such a gift because so many of us are really separate from our bodies.

Gayle Brandeis

It’s what our culture encourages, the whole Cartesian split of mind and body. “I think, therefore I am,” as if the physical stuff isn’t what we are.

We’re fed all these images of what bodies are supposed to look like. It’s all about image, the surface. We’re not encouraged to have lived embodied experiences. But our body is where we live. It’s where our ancestors live. It’s how we move through the world. 

Of course, people live through the world in different ways in their bodies, whether there’s a disability or illness. Sometimes our experiences of our bodies are very fraught for reasons other than just our culture. In my experience, even through illness, through times when my body has been in a lot of pain, or has not been very mobile, it still is so wise and has so much to say. And maybe even especially then, and I need to listen.

Diane Gottlieb

Your parents show up a lot in these essays. Your mom for sure. But your dad too. The Art of Misdiagnosis is your memoir about your mom’s suicide and how that was for you, and your relationship with her. Can you say something about writing about your parents in short form as opposed to a book-length memoir? 

Gayle Brandeis

Writing essays about my mom gave me courage to write my memoir. Even though I had the sense I would need to write a book about her, I wasn’t ready for a long time.

It felt easier to write things that were more finite, or that were more of a mouthful than a whole meal. So the entryway for me into writing about my mom was writing these shorter pieces, and that slowly gave me courage to dig in deeper.

With my mom, there was so much left unsaid, so much I had to unpack, so much I needed to come to peace with, make sense of. I had such a close, loving relationship with my dad that I wasn’t sure I’d have to write about him. As deeply as I still miss him, there was nothing unsaid between us. I thought, “There’s nothing I’m going to have to grapple with.” Of course, there was. Writing about him after his death was a way of spending more time with him and honoring him and honoring that transition. 

See Also


Diane Gottlieb

Your essay “Self Interview.” I see it as a hard-won love letter to your mother, to yourself, and to writers of memoir.

Gayle Brandeis 

I love that interpretation. Thank you.

Diane Gottlieb 

In the essay you ask yourself one question “How did writing your memoir change you”—and answer it, eleven times. 

Gayle Brandeis

I don’t know if I’m recreating my memory or giving a new twist on what really happened, but right now, my sense is that I felt it would be a good question to ask myself, and once I started answering, I realized I could answer it in many different ways. I thought, “I’ll just ask the same question again and again, and see how many answers I can come up with.”

Diane Gottlieb

Anyone who reads the essay will appreciate your process and all the different feelings. But I think for people who are writing memoir, “Self-Interview” has an added layer to it: this is what you’re going to go through. This is what you’re signing up for, when writing a memoir. But it also provides support. I took courage from it.

That’s why I said it’s partly a love letter to writers of memoir. It’s like, “Okay, let me hold your hand. I’m going to show you. And this is what it was for me.”

You write in different points of view in your essays. You use third person in “Portrait of a Writer as a Young Girl.” There’s distance from the young girl, but you hold her so tenderly and with so much compassion for who she is in the moment and for what she’s going to go through: “The girl wants to understand the backs of things, the unfinished sides of things. She wants to be seen, not just the front of her, the frothy pink, the princess, but behind that. The inside of her notebook. Her soaring caped heart. The part she’s been warned to never show.”

Gayle Brandeis

I think that maybe in some ways that’s what’s changed from when I was young till now. No one’s telling me not to tell certain things about myself anymore. That’s not something I long to do—I can do it. The essay gives redemption to that young girl who was so shy, who had so much inside her she wanted to share but didn’t always feel like she could.

Diane Gottlieb

You’re so brave and honest on the page in each of these essays. Have they all been published before?

Gayle Brandeis

Most of them have. I think there are four that have not.

Diane Gottlieb

How does it feel knowing that they’re going to be out in the world together?

Gayle Brandeis

It’s funny. At first, I felt like I wouldn’t have any anxiety about this book being in the world, because most of the pieces have been published. But at some point, I realized, “Oh wow, this does feel really vulnerable, having all these pieces clumped together, going out into the world as a group.” It doesn’t feel quite as scary as the memoir, which felt so terrifying to put into the world and so raw. But of course, there’s always some insecurity before a book comes out. 

Diane Gottlieb

Each one of these essays feels to me like a lesson in craft. I see this collection as breath, but I also feel waves. The ins and the outs, the tides. 

Gayle Brandeis

I love that interpretation. It wasn’t until after I had put the book together, that I realized Lake Michigan appears in the first and last essay. It appears in the introduction too. The lake frames the book. And now I’ve moved back to Chicago, back to the lake. My friend Laraine Herring said, “You wrote yourself home.” 

It wasn’t a conscious act as I was writing or putting the collection together. I didn’t think “This book’s going to make me move back to Chicago.” But I can see in framing the book with Lake Michigan how much I was longing to be back to that lake.

NONFICTION

Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss

by Gayle Brandeis

Overcup Press

Published on February 7, 2023



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