“Black Holes”, an essay by Bill Capossere, appeared in Issue 29 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this essay.
This piece was one of those few (way too few) that came out pretty quickly, roughly 5 months and only seven saved drafts. The first “draft” was just my scrawling the idea for the central metaphor: “Black hole = Aunt Mary’s dementia. Info can’t get out, disappears into black hole — my memories, all she holds lost inside her. Black holes/wormholes = travel/time travel — she time travels in her mind.” The rest was research (114 pages of notes) and fine-tuning the language. If only they all happened so smoothly.
What was the most difficult part of writing this essay?
Outside of the still-raw grief over losing the Aunt Mary I’d known for so long, and all that family history, trying to find a balance between drawing the parallels between her dementia and black holes without sledgehammering them home. Readers’ mileage may vary on how successful that was.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Any book by Guy Gavriel Kay this decade will work. For that matter, prior decades as well. But if picking one, I’ll say River of Stars.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
At the risk of being charged with a lack of imagination, I’m going with Kay again. One because we should have had that drink years ago at a convention I had to unfortunately depart unexpectedly. Two, because of the breadth and depth of his knowledge of history and other places in the world; there are a lot of stories there I would guess didn’t make it into the books. I could list others, but perhaps most important of those is if you follow him on Twitter you’ll see the man knows his cocktails.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
A full-length play about portals that take you to other worlds (or maybe not—depends which character you believe). More in a cycle of short stories involving a character visiting a series of fantastical museums (the most complete one so far is the Museum of Fire).
Our thanks to Bill for taking the time to answer a few questions and share his work. Read Capossere’s essay, “Black Holes”, here: https://www.sequestrum.org/nonfiction-black-holes.
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Bill Capossere’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, AQR, Rosebud, and other journals, along with anthologies such as In Short and Brief Encounters. Several pieces have garnered mention in the “notable essays” section of Best American Essays and/or received Pushcart Prize nominations. Bill lives in Rochester NY where he works as an adjunct English instructor at several local colleges. Bill’s education background includes an MFA from the Mt. Rainier Writing Workshop.