The Dead Dads Club (with Maddie Norris)

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Intro – 0:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes. The podcast where we explore the stories and ideas that shape who we are and connect us with each other so we can build a better world.

I'm journalist Blair Hodges, and our guide in this episode is author Maddie Norris.

MADDIE NORRIS: In my day-to-day life now, I think the shadow thought will always be there. My dad is dead. It's always going to be devastating that he died. And also he still brings me joy in my daily life.

BLAIR HODGES: People who experience the death of a loved one come to understand that grief isn’t something you get over—it's something you try to learn how to live with.

That's what author Maddie Norris discovered after losing her dad at seventeen. Instead of looking away from the pain, she studied it—through the lens of her father's own work as a medical researcher on the science of wounds. What she discovered wasn’t closure, but a new way of thinking about and living with grief.

Maddie joins us to talk about her debut book "The Wet Wound: An Elegy In Essays," weaving together the history of wound care, the science of skin grafts, and the rituals of mourning. Maddie challenges the idea that healing means letting go. Instead, she asks: what if grief is more like tending an open wound—something tender, and ongoing, and sometimes even joyful? Having lost my own dad at a similar age, this one hit close to home.

 

An Elegy in Essays – 2:02

 

BLAIR HODGES: Maddie Norris, welcome to Relationscapes.

MADDIE NORRIS: Thanks for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm excited to talk about your book. It's a bit heavier than some of the books we cover. It's about grief and about the death of your father. The subtitle is An Elegy in Essays. How would you describe an elegy for non-nerds? [laughs] What is an elegy?

MADDIE NORRIS: I mean, an elegy is really a poetic kind of eulogy. And I chose elegy because I was really interested in different kinds of writing, in different forms. I wanted that to be apparent in the subtitle. So elegy captures the poetics of it, and it also captures the subject matter, which is really deeply about grief.
And then essays kind of adds to that idea.

BLAIR HODGES: A lot of the books I cover on the show take me to unfamiliar places. This book was different—when I read the description, I saw myself in it. Cancer killed your father when you were 17, and my father died from cancer when I was 15. So we were both teenagers.
Approaching the book was kind of difficult for that reason, but also really cathartic to read. I wondered if writing it felt similar for you—did you have those same kinds of conflicted feelings?

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people say writing is therapy, and I think it can be. But I also think writing can require therapy, and I think it leaned more heavily toward that. For me, it was really hard to write, and I was really thinking about it as an art object.
So it was a lot of personal excavation, coupled with thinking about craft pretty deeply. But I think what's been more cathartic for me has been the publication process—having it out in the world and being able to connect with people. Being able to connect with you.

It's really special for me whenever I meet someone who says, “Oh, this spoke to me,” or “This was someone I lost. Let me tell you about them.”
That feels—yeah, in a way, pretty joyful, actually, to connect with people through that.

It reminds me a lot of Ross Gay and Anna Tsing. He kind of mentions Anna Tsing—this idea of entanglement. She talks about it in a very mycelial way, through mushrooms—the way that we're all deeply entangled with each other.
And I think Ross Gay takes that and thinks about it through grief and the way grief deeply connects us all. That joy is carrying that grief together.

So that’s where I think it comes from for me—really, the publication process and being able to connect with other people feels really special.
And I think having a book object makes that a lot easier than, you know, going up to random people and saying, “Here’s my story.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah. And I imagine the writing process didn’t necessarily feel like that.
Although you were doing excavation work—you were looking through your dad’s files, looking at historical examples—writing can be really solitary and isolating. But it seems like you were connecting in that process as well.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. And I think part of it was a way to connect to my dad. When I was going through his things, that was a very direct connection.
But even with the other research, that felt incredibly personal to me. Each bit of research, even if it wasn't directly from his life, connected me to him further.
So it felt really personal in that way.

 

EXCERPT: Connecting with Others Through Grief – 05:31

 

BLAIR HODGES: When I wanted to cover this book, I got a review copy from your press. I set it aside and would look at it sometimes and think, okay, I need to get to this, I need to get to this.
But I think that hesitation was—well, you put it into words for me.

In one of your pieces, you wrote: “Loss both repelled and attracted me.” I had the book there. I could see it. I looked forward to reading it—but I also waited.
I was hoping you could read that piece for us about loss repelling and attracting you. This is on page 127.

MADDIE NORRIS: Loss both repelled and attracted me. Others’ wounds made me scratch at my own scabs, curdled skin caught beneath prying fingernails, a painful reopening I wanted to avoid, especially this summer, when I’d been happy for the first time in a year, when I went to the movies again and made skillet-burst tomato pasta and read books about women pioneers in STEM fields. But I also knew that a wet wound, an open wound, was best for healing.

In graduate school, I bonded with someone whose dad died a few years before mine. We could talk about our fathers in ways we couldn’t with anyone else. We could talk about loss as part of our lives. That was my dad’s favorite flavor of ice cream. He was the one who taught me about birds. We used to love swimming together. There’s an undeniable attraction between those whose parents die early. We find each other without effort, pulled into one another by the emptiness within us.

It happens almost immediately. When my dad died, Caitlin—a childhood friend—was there for me. She was there when your dad was diagnosed, and she was there when he went into the hospital. And she was there when he didn’t come out. “Welcome to the club,” she said, as she hugged me. Our bones dug into each other’s bodies. She was taller than me, and I buried my head in her shoulder. She held me steady as I wept. To this day, she holds me steady. Her mom died when we were in third grade—from the same cancer that killed my dad.
If loss subtracted from a person, we’d be slivers of waning humans, waiting for the next death to carve us new.

BLAIR HODGES: I’ve said that exact phrase—“Welcome to the club.” And depending on who I’m talking to, and depending on the vibe, sometimes I’ve straight-up said, “Welcome to the Dead Dads Club.” Like, that’s the club, right?

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. It’s not a great club to be a part of, but it also is.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah. Like how you talk about these wonderful people you’ve connected with. What is it like to relate to people who’ve lost a parent, compared to talking about it with people who haven’t?

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, I mean, a lot of this book is about the ways I connect to people through grief.

In the beginning—both of the book and my processing—I would try to talk about him, and people would kind of shut down. They felt really uncomfortable talking about grief when they hadn’t experienced it themselves. They didn’t know what to say.
They were focused on trying to say the right thing—or they didn’t want to hold it. They didn’t want to touch it.

So I stopped talking about it. And I shut down.
That was really painful for me, because it was a kind of disconnection from my dad.

So I started trying to talk about him more, and not really monitor others’ responses—just say what I wanted to say and let them have their own emotional experience.

But it always feels really natural and easy when you meet someone who’s had a similar experience. Because they feel kind of the same way—that it’s painful, but it’s also really loving and caring to be able to talk about the people we’ve lost.

It’s a way to connect with them and have them in our lives as we move throughout it.
That type of connection feels really special. You don’t have to explain yourself. You don’t have to say, “I know this is still really hard,” or whatever.

We can laugh about funny things that happened when he was alive—or funny things that are happening now and say, “Oh, he would think this was funny too.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you’re talking about ice cream. And that’s totally fine to do—you can do that.

And also, I’ve found sometimes people had different relationships with their parent than I did. Some had more toxic relationships. Others—I feel jealous. Jealous of the closer bond they had.

Even with those differences, there’s still a connection.
And I’ve started to feel more open to that—like, someone who had an abusive dad who died. To feel a kind of natural catharsis with them, to be like, “Gosh, that would be a different situation.”
Even though we have so much to connect about, it can still be pretty different.

MADDIE NORRIS: For sure. Yeah. I think every loss and every type of grief is very different—but it also lives in the same universe.

So I do think there’s a way we can really listen to one another and try to understand different relationships, just as we would when people were alive. Like, there are relationships, and there are many different varieties of relationships. And so understanding that and really listening to people, I feel like, is really important.

 

EXCERPT: Collecting Postcards – 10:58

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the physical artifacts we mentioned a minute ago—these remnants from your dad's life. They play a pretty big part in your book. You say that physical objects—like postcards, for example—are like time machines. They can collapse distance between past and present, between the living and the dead.

There’s this piece on page 22 about that, and I wanted to hear it in your voice. It’s different hearing it than reading it. You really get more, I think, from hearing the author.

MADDIE NORRIS: There’s no question: I take after my dad. We laughed at the same jokes, loved the same books, were fascinated by the same things. We could spend hours walking around the neighborhood in the early evening, talking about nothing in particular: old Green Day, Fulham FC, what I learned in school that day. We chatted as we wandered beneath blooming dogwoods and big oak trees, often stopping for ice cream on the way home. Once the sun sank below the horizon, we filled our days with each other’s company. We just liked spending time together.

Someone suggested, in edits, that I show my dad’s faults to make him more real to readers. But I don’t know that he had any, other than the ones all humans do: that we are fragile creatures who love well and die.

Perhaps I was too young to recognize his faults. But he was, to me, even at the time, a faultless father. He loved me well. He did his best. He saw me as I was and loved me for that. I don’t know what more I could have asked for—except time.

When he died, time broke into before and after. Before, I collected postcards, but I never wrote on them. I’d never been separated from someone I wanted to share my life with. He’d been there for these moments. We ate shrimp burgers at that beach and rode our bikes past those red tulips and paddled down that rushing river—helmets and life vests. These images constellated our collective memories. There was no need to caption them for one another because we’d lived them together.

After, it was like I’d stepped into a house of mirrors. Everywhere I turned—whether I was in North Carolina, Arizona, or Prague—there was only me. Alone. I stopped collecting postcards. Everywhere was the same—forests, deserts, beaches. Cold, hot, sunny, rainy. Everything was the same. Empty. I was unanchored. Unmoored. Time passed through me. I left the place where I grew up because it felt wrong to be there without him. Of course, it felt wrong to be anywhere without him. I went to college and graduate school in cities where no one else knew my dad. No one wanted to hear about my grief. The only thing that stopped the spinning, that collapsed the distance, was his box of letters. To cut open the days, I would take out a single postcard, read the words he wrote when he was my age, and rub the paper to remind myself that these memories were real. That I couldn’t touch him—but I could touch what remained. It wasn’t enough. But it’s what I had.

 

Writing versus Reading the Book – 14:14

 

BLAIR HODGES: Hearing you read that—it’s, like I said, it’s different. And I imagine it can feel different depending on when you’re reading it. So I’m wondering, today, what is it like to read that one?

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, it definitely does change. And it’s changed more as I’ve gotten further from the project, too. When I was really in it, I was thinking a lot about the craft of it—how to write it, how to organize it, structure, syntax, things like that. Now that it’s really its own thing, it feels like I can experience it more as a reader rather than a writer. Thinking about it today—I just got back from a trip with my boyfriend and we bought a bunch of postcards along the way. That really made me think of my dad. It felt really special. And it’s something I don’t think I would have done if I hadn’t written the book. It was really helpful for me to process and sift through these things. Right now, it makes me miss him, obviously—but it also makes me want to have these reminders to bring him into my daily life more.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Sometimes when you're missing them, they feel as close as they ever can. It’s kind of this double-edged sword: the closest you can feel to them is, weirdly, the missing of them. And that’s hard.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s what grief is like. From a distance, people think it’s just this heavy, sad thing. And it is. But it’s also that love. And that really is the closest you can get—being in that space.

BLAIR HODGES: What’s that quote from WandaVision? Hang on, I’m gonna Google it.

MADDIE NORRIS: Oh yeah—I think it’s “Grief is love persevering.”

BLAIR HODGES: “What is grief, if not love persevering?” So good.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: So true.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. I absolutely agree. And again, part of why I wrote this book was to dig into that—and to hopefully help other people feel seen, and help people who don’t have the same experience understand it a little more.

BLAIR HODGES: Let’s talk professionally and technically—you're a writer. This is your craft. Your dad was a doctor. You're a writer. So in remembering him, you’re also practicing your work. And that work gets commodified. It’s for sale. You want to promote it, all that. So I wonder about that relationship—talking about something so personal and visceral and tragic and loving and beautiful... and also knowing it’s part of your job.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. I mean, the thing about being a writer is you kind of don’t turn it off. Everything you do—especially for creative nonfiction—it’s like, “Oh, this is research.” Living my life becomes part of the research. So it is a little complicated. It is a job that I get paid for, but it’s also deeply a part of my life. Being a teacher has helped me a bit—I have specific hours where I’m doing that part of the job. Then outside of that, I can work on my own. Also, I didn’t get an advance for this book. It wasn’t like I was paid and then had to write it. It was more: I wanted to write this, and then someone wanted to give me some money for it.

BLAIR HODGES: You’re like, “Okay, I’ll take that.”

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, exactly. That’s a bonus. So I think the process of writing felt really separate from the publication process. And I know people have a variety of publication experiences, but mine was pretty smooth and really nice.

BLAIR HODGES: This was with Georgia Press?

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. University of Georgia Press.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

MADDIE NORRIS: They were great to work with. One reason I really liked working with them is that they wanted to honor the artistic vision. There are images in the book, and images are more expensive to print—

BLAIR HODGES: Even in black and white.

MADDIE NORRIS: Exactly. But they felt really integral to the work. It was important to work with a press that saw that, rather than one that said, “This is too expensive. Can you write around it?” Because, as you were saying, going through those archives and research—that’s part of the writing process. That’s part of the grieving process. That’s how I connect with my dad. So I wanted the images to replicate that process. To have these medical diagrams in the book, so people could experience a little bit of what I experienced. Even though these are more artistic, it still echoes that. And it was important to me to bring the science and the art together.

 

The Wet Wound – 19:39

 

BLAIR HODGES: And you bring us into the room with you. We’re looking at these things. We get to hold the artifacts—at a distance, right? Not the exact ones. But you put us in that place.

I think my favorite illustration is the cover. It’s so visceral—rich, beautiful color, that bright red. It’s like a heart, but with all the ventricles. The actual meat of the heart isn’t there—just the blood vessels all around it. And then in the center, you see the wet wound, which is the title of the book.

Tell me about your decision to use such a bold title—and such a striking cover. I imagine that word—wound—might trigger a kind of disgust reflex in some people. Tell me about your decision to keep that bold title.

MADDIE NORRIS: I mean, first of all, I am generally bad at titles, so I did have some help in that. Ander Monson, another writer who was my thesis advisor, saw it in the book—it was really the central metaphor—and he suggested I call it that. And I thought it really fit

I think disgust, too, is part of what I wanted. I want people to know what they're getting into, and that I'm not going to shy away from the kind of literally bloody details of certain medical procedures, of grief. So you know what you're getting into when you read the title.

And it is really a central metaphor. My dad specifically was the director of the Wound Healing Center in Columbia, South Carolina. He worked a lot with wounds. One of the things I learned going through this research and these archives is that the best way to care for a wound—physically, but also emotionally—is to keep it open and wet.

BLAIR HODGES: And so these are usually, like, large wounds?

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. But even smaller wounds—you want to keep them wet. It’s one of the reasons we put Vaseline over wounds, to keep them wet. You don’t want it to scab over because that actually delays true healing. And if the scab pulls off, you can actually pull off some of the healthy skin. So you want to keep it open—not scabbed over.

BLAIR HODGES: Just moisturized? You’re not saying pull it open—

MADDIE NORRIS: No, no, no. That would be bad. But yeah, you don’t want it to scab. The scab really delays true healing. Keeping it open and wet is the best way to care for any type of wound, though it can be harder with larger wounds. I wanted to use that as a metaphor throughout the book for grief—thinking about how it's important to enter that space continually and to care for it and tend to it as you would any other part of your life. So it felt important to have that as the title as well.

BLAIR HODGES: I feel like it connects up with how some people react to grief that another person’s experiencing, which is to try to get past it or get through it, or to tell someone it'll be okay, or to hold the belief that comfort means putting it in the past.

Some people might even be confused by ongoing grief, like, “Why isn't she over it yet? Why haven't you got through this?” And this metaphor helps us understand that—if you just try to cover it up and put it away and let it dry out, then it's just festering. You're not letting it heal.

MADDIE NORRIS: Right. And I think that's something people do—because of their discomfort, they’re like, “Whoa, we want to stop talking about this. It’s been thirteen years. Why are you still talking about this?” But that feels way more unhealthy than being able to talk about my dad. I did a reading, and this woman came up to me after and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear about what you were dealing with. I hope you’re doing better.” And I wanted to be like, “Yeah, he's alive again. He came back.”

BLAIR HODGES: Like, “Yeah, it’s all good.”

MADDIE NORRIS: Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: But I also know what she means, right? We hope people will be okay. But I feel like sometimes, when I’ve said something like that and reflected back on it, what I was really doing was trying to manage my own discomfort. It hurts to see people hurt.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. And it's hard to sit in that with people. It definitely is.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

MADDIE NORRIS: But I do think it's important.

BLAIR HODGES: Like a wet wound. Who wants to sit there and be with this bloody-looking thing? That’s not great. But it’s real.

MADDIE NORRIS: But it’s real.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

MADDIE NORRIS: I think the more that people have experienced it, the more comfortable they are. When I was in grad school, another student told me my writing was a “maudlin plea.” And I was just like, okay, well—

BLAIR HODGES: That’s also a very pretentious way to say it.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Who says “maudlin”? [laughter]

MADDIE NORRIS: You can imagine!

BLAIR HODGES: “That’s a very maudlin plea, Maddie.”

MADDIE NORRIS: “Exactly! How droll.” So I was like, okay, my writing just isn’t for him. He’s not my reader. Let him think what he thinks, and I’ll keep doing what I want to do. But then a year later, his dad died, and he came to a reading I was doing. Afterwards, he was like, “That was so beautiful and moving. I really felt seen.”

So I also think it teaches you—people’s reactions tell you more about them than they do about you or the situation. He felt uncomfortable and hadn’t experienced anything like that, so he didn’t know what to do with that discomfort.

BLAIR HODGES: I try to pause at my gut reactions to things and interrogate myself. Like, is there something behind a critique of your writing? It could be flippant, but it could also have something deeper behind it. And it sounds like... I hate for anyone to have to learn that lesson, but your writing was there for him when he needed it.

MADDIE NORRIS: I think so. Susan Sontag talks about looking at war photographs, and she says there’s pleasure in flinching. I think that’s part of it—there’s this pleasure in flinching, but then still looking. There’s something interesting about that that I felt called to interrogate.

BLAIR HODGES: I love that Susan Sontag quote. You’ve got it in the book, and it reminded me of the cover—this visceral image. There’s definitely pleasure in looking at it, but there's a flinch to it too. It’s such a powerful cover. The book is called The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays by Maddie Norris. Maddie is Visiting Assistant Professor at Davidson College in North Carolina, and her award-winning work has also been named as notable in Best American Essays.

 

Dear Hilda – 26:43

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, let’s switch gears, Maddie, and talk about a chapter called “Dear Hilda.” This is actually a letter you wrote to a woman who came to your dad’s funeral—a woman your dad once loved before he met your mother. So tell us a little bit about Hilda.

MADDIE NORRIS: So Hilda, like you said, is this woman who came to my dad’s funeral. But she didn’t introduce herself—I’ve never met her. I still haven’t. My dad dated her for six years before he met my mom. Part of writing to her was trying to understand a different part of my dad’s life that I don’t have access to. A lot of this book is investigating different parts of his life to continue learning things about him, and to grow our relationship in the ways I can. Finding out new things about him—Hilda is one key to that. It’s a part of his life that I obviously wasn’t around for and don’t have access to.

It also had me thinking about how they did love each other, but that wasn’t enough for them. And in a similar way, I loved my dad, and that wasn’t enough to keep him alive. I felt this emotional connection to her that way.

BLAIR HODGES: And the fact that she came to his funeral means he made a pretty big impact on her. I think he dated her from like age 17 to 24ish, so it’s a pretty formative time in life. It seems like the relationship was enough that she wanted to pay her last respects.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, it was as he finished high school, through college, and into the start of medical school. So it was a really formative time. And they weren’t in contact in any way before he died.

BLAIR HODGES: So how did you find out about her?

MADDIE NORRIS: She knew my dad’s siblings, and one of them told us, “Oh, that was Hilda.” That’s the only reason I knew. I only found out afterwards. I had no idea she was there at the time—nor would I probably have registered it. But yeah, that’s the only way I found out. She didn’t contact me. I haven’t reached out to her.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: And I imagine Hilda’s probably a pseudonym, so... I guess the odds of her having seen the letter in your book aren’t large.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, I mean, that is her real name, but I think it's unlikely that... Yeah, that's bold. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't mind talking to her, but I also obviously haven't sent the letter. So it was very much a way for me to kind of reach out and think about my dad, less about connecting with this woman who I have no relationship with and probably wouldn't even if we did connect.

But more thinking through these different parts of his life, and writing to her was a vehicle for me to think through that. And I also think that writing a letter felt important to me partially because of the postcards.
So I write about postcards in the book and this collection. Obviously, I just read some of it, but I think writing is inherently about connection and relationships.
And this book, at its core, I feel like, is really about connecting through grief. So that form felt really important to me as well.

BLAIR HODGES: You also learn—you’re learning about their relationship. That was... It was a strong and important relationship in both of their lives. And you reflect with Hilda your own kind of feelings and beliefs about connection. And you say to Hilda, “To be honest with you, I've worked hard to cut myself free from connection’s net. I prickle when someone gets too close. Everything's new and wrong. Whenever I begin to wonder what a man is doing while I'm writing in a library or walking up a cholla-studded trail”—what is that word?

MADDIE NORRIS: Cholla?

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, gee, I don't know what a cholla is.

MADDIE NORRIS: Oh, you should look them up. They’re a desert plant.

BLAIR HODGES: “Or sipping chamomile in bed. I sigh. I make every beginning into an end. Hilda, I'm scared of love because I lost it.”

You mentioned you have a boyfriend now, so the connection thing has perhaps changed a bit. 

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, I think that writing this book was really important for me in that way, in thinking through and processing. So again, a lot of it felt like, in the beginning, I would try to talk about my dad, and people would shut down. And so I was like, okay, well, I'll just shut down too.
And that made getting close to anyone really hard because it felt like I was holding back this really important, essential part of me. And I was pretty scared to be vulnerable with that because I had been shut down so many times.
And I think I—As I was writing this book, I became more and more comfortable talking about him and telling other people and sharing that part of my life.
And that was really... I don't know that that would have happened had I not written this book.

 

Writing Without an Ending – 32:04

 

MADDIE NORRIS: So writing was a way for me to start thinking about him and writing about him. But then I would share these essays with people, and that was a way for me to open up this talking space, and then I would do it outside of essays.
And so I think the book is a discovery for myself as well. As I was writing it, I didn't know where it was going to take me. I just felt compelled to write it. And I do think that it deeply changed me as a person.

BLAIR HODGES: I think this is a really important point, Maddie, because with a book like this and other memoirs and things, a lot of authors—like you—we don’t start with the lessons already learned that they’re going to convey to readers. We go along with you in a process of learning and discovery, and you don’t necessarily have the end in mind.

And to know that that's what we’re getting in a book, I think it’s important to pick a book up that way instead of, like, this author has all the wisdom, and now they’re going to convey it to me. Like, we’re witnessing you learning.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. And that's one of the things I love about creative nonfiction, is that it really is all about the discovery process. I wouldn’t write if I knew what I was going to say. Joan Didion says, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.” And I think that’s true. I would be pretty bored to write something that I already knew.

So I enjoy writing because I learn something. And I hope that the reader is in a sidecar as we go along learning this together. But I do think that that is specific to creative nonfiction. I was even talking to a fiction writer, Sherry Flick, who had written a nonfiction book as well, and she said it was really scary because she didn’t know what was going to happen, like, what she was going to write.

And I was like, oh, that’s so interesting. I hadn’t realized that impulse wasn’t the same in fiction—that it’s very unique to creative nonfiction.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. I interviewed Marilynn Robinson years ago, and she described it as, like, she was always interested to find out what her characters would do and come up with. But it was a real revelation to be like, oh, you’re discovering along with what your characters are doing. That seems the opposite of what I expected.

Like, you’ve got the story figured out, and now you’re writing it down. She’s like, no, I’m kind of letting them tell the story.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. And I think, yeah, even in fiction, there are all these possibilities and ways it could go. You can imagine different ones. And in nonfiction, there are still all of these possibilities, but they’re all grounded in truth and reality in some way. Even if you’re imagining, you have to say, “I imagine so.”

Even though there are all these possibilities, it’s like there is a pool you’re pulling from. It’s not just infinite.

BLAIR HODGES: And your pool can change over time. Here, you’re talking about how hard it is for you to have close connections. Later in the book, you say, “I enjoy weddings.” And you say, “I can even envision a future wedding day for myself. I can see a beautiful dress, but I don’t really see a partner there.”

And you say you’ve never told someone, “I love you.” So this is when you’re writing it. And it sounds like at least some of those things have probably changed by now.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, they definitely have. Yeah. You know, I’m in love.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

MADDIE NORRIS: But yeah. Again, I think that writing the book was really essential in changing me and allowing myself the space to change. And so I think that writing through it changed me as a person—not just as a writer or a reader, but fundamentally who I am—in a way that, again, I hope that the process of reading allows people to change and open in some way.

Because, yeah, I don’t think I would be in this relationship if I hadn’t written the book.

BLAIR HODGES: When did you meet?

MADDIE NORRIS: We met about five months ago now. Okay. Yeah. So I’ve been in one serious relationship before, which also I think I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t written the book. But I do think writing the book has allowed me to be more open and vulnerable, and it’s allowed for real connection. It’s allowed me to really explore who I am as a person so that I can share that with someone else.

BLAIR HODGES: Does he know the stakes of dating a writer?

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, he does. And currently, he’s almost done reading the book.

BLAIR HODGES: Does he know he could become a future subject? That’s the thing. I’d be like, what are you—what might you write about this? Oh no.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. I mean, that is the danger. [laughter] You should always know anytime you’re having a conversation, even just in passing with a creative nonfiction writer, you could end up on the page.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah!

MADDIE NORRIS: So yeah, he does know the stakes, but he is wonderful and very kind, so I would only write good things about him.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, for now anyway! Stay tuned! [laughter]

 

EXCERPT: Maddie's Mom – 37:10

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, you talk about other family members. You also introduce us a bit to your mom. There’s a piece I wanted you to read on page 40 that introduces us to her a little bit.

MADDIE NORRIS: There’s a long list of toxic mothers in literature. Gertrude from Hamlet, Charlotte from Lolita, Mrs. Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, Medea from Greek mythology. Watch a Disney movie—The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid, The Fox and the Hound. Watch Aladdin, Tarzan, Beauty and the Beast, Bambi. The mothers are absent or dead. Without them, their children can go on journeys of growth and adventure. The mothers birth the children, and their job is done. The child’s story starts at birth after separation from the mother. This all means that mothers don’t get stories of their own. But I want my mom to have her own story. I want to give her a peace of mine.

I think of how different I would be if my mom weren’t here, if I had grown up without her. She taught me what it means to care. This week, she called me, upset that she had the dog spayed. “How silly,” she said. “But I’m taking motherhood away from her.” She comes home from work, sits down on an empty couch and closes her eyes while the dog flops beside her, then places her paw on her breastbone, pining to be seen. My mom is annoyed by this. The fact that she has no downtime. The fact that she comes home from work and cannot close her eyes without another needy body needling her. But mostly, truthfully, she loves this. She comes home from work to a dog who loves her, not just an empty house. She’s a child psychologist, and she sits on the floor with kids every weekday, watching them build with Legos, helping them imagine worlds larger than their homes. Impossible worlds, worlds where love exists without loss.

BLAIR HODGES: That’s Maddie Norris reading From the Wet Wound, an elegy in essays. So, from what I can tell, Maddie, your mom hasn’t remarried. Is that still true?

MADDIE NORRIS: Yes, that’s correct.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. That can raise concerns for kids who have lost parents. There are a few times in the book where you kind of reflect on what the life of your mom will look like going into the future now that your dad’s gone.

MADDIE NORRIS: Part of it is that my parents had an amazing love and still do. My mom still loves my dad. She still keeps it with her. And she doesn’t—you know, she misses him. She misses having someone to do things with too. But she’s not going to remarry because she’s not going to find that love again.

And that’s, you know, that’s for her. I think everyone has their own experience and their own way of moving forward. But yeah, I think that for a while, I was really, really preoccupied with my mom and thinking about her. I worried constantly. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and imagining it.

And I think, again, part of it is that I rely on her so much.

And I think that finding these connections with other people has been helpful, and that, you know, I don’t love my mom any less. I don’t care for her any less. But those other connections allow me to confront the fact that, you know, some days she will die. And that’s heartbreaking for both of us.

But it also means that we can appreciate the time that we have and have so much fun together now and experience together. And it all means that I don’t take for granted the time that she’s here. Yeah, I spend a lot of time with my mom. We go to basketball games.

We know we don’t have infinite time, and we want to enjoy the time that we have.

BLAIR HODGES: And even when you’re enjoying it, I also like that you point out you can be lonely together too, and there’s a difference between solitary loneliness versus being lonely with someone else. And she’s someone that you can not only just enjoy the moment with, but also who you can be lonely with sometimes.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. And someone that I don’t feel like I have to put on a happy face and move through things. It’s okay if we’re both missing him. Sometimes we just need to miss him. I mean, always we miss him, but sometimes we feel it more acutely than other times, and we don’t have to hide that.

BLAIR HODGES: How did she feel about the book?

MADDIE NORRIS: I mean, she was super supportive. I know that, again, people have a variety of experiences with publication and writing about people in their lives. I was really lucky in that almost everyone I talked to was incredibly supportive and excited about the book.

The thing that’s been a little bit surprising is she, after publication, said, “I didn’t realize how much I was in it.” And she read it before, but now that some of her friends are reading it, she said, “They talk to me about things, and I guess I am in it quite a lot, and there is a lot of me in this.”

So, you know, she has been really excited to see it come out. And I think it would be incomplete without having her in it because really, my family was a family unit. And so it feels essential that I have that close family represented here because when my dad died, it affected all of us both separately and as a collective.

And so, you know, our relationship obviously has... has altered because of that. And I wanted, again, this book to be really about grief and the way that we move through grief and those connections that come through it. So I think a lot of our relationship has grown through that, particularly because it happened when I was young.

And so we’ve had all these years to continue our relationship, but that really still touches all of it.

 

Maddie's Brother – 43:11

 

BLAIR HODGES: And the death seems to have impacted your brother, Will, differently than you as well. You have some stories in here about him, and he seems like a pretty stoic kind of guy, really focused on practical stuff. He cares about you, but the way he manifests that is by asking you if you’re keeping your car washed enough to keep it in good shape and stuff. So he’s processing the loss quite differently.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, he’s an engineer, so his communication skills are not always excellent. And I also think that my dad died when he was going into college, so he had moved away from all the people who had known my dad and from all the connections that had supported him, that he had grown up with.

He was really in a new environment. And I also think that being a male in the South, he was not encouraged to express himself or to talk to people about these things. So I think he kept a lot of it inside, which made it really hard for him.

I think he is also starting more to excavate and move through that. And I think that, as both of us do, that’s been helpful for our relationship. But I do think, again, the book is a place. It’s like this object that we both can have as a touchstone to talk about these things or to connect over them when he sometimes feels uncomfortable talking about them.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. These masculinity norms and the social pressures that channel how we process grief differ. Has he read the book yet? Has he checked it out?

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. So he’s read all the parts he’s in. I sent them to him before, and he is... He is a slow reader, so he’s making his way through it, but he’s not, to my knowledge, finished it. And again, I know he is a slower reader, so that’s part of it.

But it’s also, I mean, his life too.

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.

MADDIE NORRIS: So I think that it is pretty emotional as well for him. And as you were saying, even you, when you got the book, there was this hesitation. I have friends who are really excited to read it, but they also haven't done it yet because they've had a parent who died. They're like, I just don't know that I'm ready yet. So it is hard emotionally as well for him.

 

Blair’s Dad – 45:47

 

BLAIR HODGES: And there are a lot of times in the book where you reflect on people's inability to sit in the pain, or at least their confusion about knowing what to do with it. There's a quote on page 48 where you say, grief doesn't end, but at some point, people outside the loss stop looking. Only those within it remain vigilant to absence. I wondered what more you would have to say to people who are wondering how to be better grievers with people, how to be present with people in their pain. Because there's a lot of dumb things we can say to someone when they're grieving.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. I think just listening is so important. I don't even know that you need to say anything. But I love when my friends ask me about my dad. There are people who knew him that bring him up and talk to me about, "Oh, I thought of him when I saw this today," which is really wonderful to have that shared experience with people.

But he died when I was pretty young. Similar with you, there’s going to be a whole chunk of people in our lives who have never known him and never will. So it's really just giving space to that and trying to. I appreciate when people try to learn more about him. And it's something I really like to talk to other people about, too—to hear about their parents. I’m wondering if you would tell me about your dad. What was he like?

BLAIR HODGES: My dad?

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: I think—

Well, you know, there’s that part where you said to tell more about your dad's faults because then people can relate more. Some of my dad’s faults probably come more readily to mind for me. I love my dad deeply, but he was also pretty serious, stern even when he was joking. It was fun because it was sort of unusual. He had a good sense of humor, but that wasn’t his default position.

I think he was really stressed out. He had five kids, worked full time, and my mom stayed at home. We were kind of a conservative family, so it was important to him that she be at home with the kids while he worked. So I just put a lot on his shoulders.

It was interesting to spend time with you and your dad’s relationship and triangulate a little because not everybody who’s lost a parent has this clear-cut kind of love. But that doesn’t mean the pain is any less. It’s just different, because you also grieve the dad that maybe he could have been, or the dad he could have become and probably would have become. I wonder what he would think about me today. There’s just so much.

Anytime a milestone hits, you think, what would Dad be up to? Or if you wanted to ask for advice, or all those times you see other people enjoying their relationships with their dads. So yeah, that’s my dad. He was a really good man. He was imperfect, but he was a good man. And it was nice to see him refracted through the lens of your dad, too.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. What did y’all like to do together?

BLAIR HODGES: He was really big into Boy Scouts, so I was into Boy Scouts because that was really when I could get my dad’s attention and just be with him. I feel like I could make him proud there—I got my Eagle Scout when I was like 14 years old, I think.

MADDIE NORRIS: Oh, wow.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. I was motivated to be in it. That was a big part of our relationship. When we went camping together, he’d play basketball with us sometimes. We had a basketball hoop in our backyard. I have a lot of memories of that. But my biggest memories, which is sad, are that I really remember him working a lot. I really remember him being gone a lot. So yeah, yeah, yeah.

MADDIE NORRIS: It’s hard. It’s complicated.

BLAIR HODGES: I could envision a reader who reads this and feels more pain because they’re jealous—like, man, what a loving and incredible relationship you had with him. But it also opened up doors for me. Sometimes it’s hard to remember everything. I was only 15 years old, so how well could I really have gotten to know the man before he died? Is it a self-absorbed teenager, or a teenager trying to figure out what the world’s about? I don’t know. I think I’ve actually felt closer to him in some ways after becoming a parent, especially having a kid who’s kind of like me. Then I can relate to him a little bit more and be like, oh, I see why he was mad at me sometimes.

MADDIE NORRIS: Ah, yes.

BLAIR HODGES: He would love witnessing what’s happening here. I’m sure this would be very cathartic for him.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yes. He’s like, yeah, you’re just like that.

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly. Thank you for asking, by the way. That’s sweet.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. No, like I said, it’s nice to hear about other people’s.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah. Because even when we have differences, there’s a pretty easy connection that can happen when you can talk about it. My partner’s mom died about 10 years ago. She lived with us as she was dying. She was only 62 when she died. Being able to witness that and be part of it could have divided us in a lot of ways, but it opened some doors between us. It brought intimacy to our relationship that we wouldn’t have had if we had not both lost parents.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah.

 

EXCERPT: Carve Us New – 51:07

 

BLAIR HODGES: It speaks to a recurring theme in the book—this vulnerability that love requires. Love often entails some pain. I want to dig into that a little more with you. I picked a few other excerpts to have you read, and the first one’s actually a little history report, so these pop up throughout the book. This is how your book works—you give personal reflections and memories and you put them next to things like the history of postcards or the history of human dissection. This one’s about the history of skin grafts. It was fascinating. I didn’t know this history at all. So not only to learn the science and history of it, but to think about it in terms of grief was really interesting. Let’s check this one out. It’s called Carve Us New.

MADDIE NORRIS: In 1817, another skin graft was performed. A thumb smeared with disease, a body in need of division. A hurt healed and swaddled in stories. At 16, Sir Astley Cooper moved to London to study surgery, though his interest was minimal—until one day his teacher, tired of his pupil’s laziness, sawed the arm off a corpse, took it home, where Astley lodged with him, and dropped it in front of his student.

BLAIR HODGES: Can you believe this?

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah!

The boy looked up. The skin was pale, the blood still, muscles stiff and spilling out. The arm smelled rank. As decomposition took hold, the teacher told Astley, “Dissect it.” After that, Sir Astley considered every day without dissection a failure. He felt drawn to this surgical work, pulled to expose the interior of the body in order to heal the whole of it. Day after day, he watched the glint of a scalpel push through skin and into blood. The metallic smell never left him. He was brutal, taking on jobs others wouldn’t—gruesome surgeries—because he knew inflicting temporary pain was sometimes the most compassionate thing to do. Four years into Cooper’s tenure as anatomy professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, an unnamed observer recorded in the surgeon’s notebook an account of a graft onto an amputated thumb.

First week to July 25: Union seems to have taken place.

Second week to August 1: Mr. Cooper proved the vascularity of the newly attached portion by pricking it very slightly with the point of a lancet, which produced fluid blood as readily as from any other part of the joint. Sensibility had not returned.

Third week from operation: In the course of this week, sensation returned. At the end of the stump, a field of skin was pulled up and placed in a sea of blood. It attached when pierced. It bled when pricked. It hurt.

The graft was declared a success when the skin could feel again. When pain came back to it.

 

EXCERPT: Phantom Longing – 54:38

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, the connections are so perfect. Let’s put that next to another reading. This one’s on page 74, where you talk about emotional pain. Seeing the doctor’s journal, where he’s writing down his feelings—you could see someone keeping an emotional diary, the same way: saw ice cream, felt terrible; saw ice cream, wanted to eat some, felt melancholy; saw ice cream, thought of this time I ate it with my dad, felt amazing and sad. You can kind of trace it. I’ll have you read this piece from page 74, from a chapter called Phantom Longing.

MADDIE NORRIS: Maleaguer, a poet from the first century BCE, writes: Pain has begun to touch my heart for hot love as he strayed, scratched it with the tips of his nails and smiling, said again, “O unhappy lover, thou shalt have the sweet wound burnt by biting honey.” Love claws open your heart and leaves behind desire, that “sweet wound.”

I consider my wounds. At a bar, when I mentioned financial inheritance and someone said, “That must be nice, some distant relative, huh?” In the kitchen, chilaquiles frying, when someone rolled their eyes at the ultra-white tennis shoes their dad wore. In another country, when I asked a sweaty guitarist his name and he answered back, “My dad’s.” His absence is everywhere. And it hurts. Of course it hurts. But it tastes sweet, too. Walking by a stone church, I remember in the pews how he would elbow me and sing “All Things Dull and Ugly, all creatures short and squat.” Checking the shower temperature, I remember how he flung water at me, tricked me into thinking it was from the toilet. Spreading a restaurant’s napkin across my lap, I remember our placemats at home. They were wooden rods woven together and dyed bright colors. After a few years of use, they became faded from summer suppers on the porch. So Dad and I went to the store to buy new ones. But we didn’t tell Mom. At home, we threw away the old ones and left the new ones soaking in the sink for Mom to see. “Oh my goodness,” she said. “How did you get these clean? I scrubbed and scrubbed, but they never came clean.” “Windex,” I said, and Dad smiled. “This one’s even a different color, but it looks so clean,” she said. We let her praise Windex for a few hours before we told her the truth. Years later, at the restaurant, unfolding my napkin, I smile.

Absence is an opening, a hole you can drop through. The 13th-century poet Rumi says, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” When I talk about my wounds, the spots scraped empty inside me, I’m not just talking about pain. No, I’m also saying, look. Look how much I can hold.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, look how much I can hold. Oh, you should have let her believe it was the Windex. Forever.

MADDIE NORRIS: Forever. Yeah! [laughter]

 

EXCERPT: On the Love of Hills – 57:19

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let’s do one more. Can we do one more?

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: This one's on page 163 from a chapter called On the Love of Hills. I felt like these three really went together, really beautifully.

MADDIE NORRIS: When I feel the thin soles of Converse sneakers, taste the coolness of mint chip ice cream, smell the sea salt air, I hurt. I'm always hurting. He wore them to his wedding; it was his favorite flavor; we scattered his ashes in the ocean. The shadow thought to everything is this: My dad is dead. It's why the scuffed voice of David Byrne pinches me behind the nose, why the bite of Blue Moon beer kicks at the backs of my knees. Why the smell of blueberry muffins crumples me. I keep hurting, not because I'm masochistic, but because not hurting feels worse. Because forgetting hurts more than loss. I'm trying to explain that every pain is a resurrection.

But the pain in my body isn't a neat metaphor. It's real. I take a step and my sesamoid pokes into soft tissue—the small dagger of self stabbing self. Imagine walking everywhere with a nail pushed through the bottom of your shoe, sharp metal digging into pink muscle and knifing against bone. Blood loose like quarters dropped into a purse. How can anyone understand anyone else's pain? My pain is not an image, an allegory, a literary symbol. My pain is neurons screaming. It is shouting in every step. It is constant, everyday pain living in my body. Feel it.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Maddie Norris reading from The Wet Wound: An Elegy and Essays.

Maddie, it would have been tempting for me to pick a really happy piece to conclude with, but I didn't. I chose this one on purpose because I wondered about that ongoing pain in the shadow thought. You talk about the shadow thought.
It's kind of like this. It's like a footnote to everything that happens in your life. And for me, it kind of comes and goes, and it's stronger sometimes than at other times. I wondered again, where you're at today with the shadow thought and when you're thinking about that ongoing pain of having lost someone.

MADDIE NORRIS: I'm glad you picked those excerpts because I do think they go really well together and get at this central idea of pain in a couple of ways. I think each of them takes it quite literally, saying these facts are real. So when I'm writing about the pain in my foot, that's not just a metaphor. It is literal—I do have pain in my foot—but it is also metaphorical. I wanted to have both of those lenses coupled together.
I feel like in my day-to-day life now, the shadow thought will always be there. In Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger, he talks about the Jesus prayer, which is a prayer you say over and over again until your body picks it up and then says it, even when you're not consciously saying it.
I really feel like that is kind of my Jesus prayer—that it is constantly running through my body that my dad is dead. And that is always going to be true. But also, I think that’s a way for me to continue my relationship with him—to keep thinking about him, talking about him, moving through that absence rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.
So both things are true. It’s always going to be devastating that he died, and also he still brings me joy in my daily life.

BLAIR HODGES: I don't know his name.

MADDIE NORRIS: His name is Tom.

BLAIR HODGES: Tom. Okay.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, Tom Norris.

BLAIR HODGES: Tom Norris. All right.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 1:01:34

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, Maddie, I always like to close with regrets, challenges, and surprises. This is a time for you to reflect on the process of making the book itself. If there's anything you regret now that it's been published—maybe regret isn’t a negative thing; it can be like, “I wish I included this” or “I wish I hadn’t included that.” Whatever—something you’d change, or what was the most challenging part of creating the book, or a surprise. We’ve talked about surprise a bit—the whole process was a surprise since you were processing stuff. So maybe we covered that, but what would you like to speak to for regrets, challenges, and surprises?

MADDIE NORRIS: Mmm. I think part of the challenge of writing the book is the surprise element—you have no idea what you’re doing until you’ve done it, which is a little challenging and pretty scary.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. You didn’t map out an outline and say, “Okay, I’m gonna hit these notes,” right?

MADDIE NORRIS: No. I didn’t even know I was writing a book until I had several essays thinking about the same thing, and then realized they were in conversation with each other. So yeah, it was a process of discovery from beginning to end. I think it’s challenging not knowing where you’re going and just trusting the process. I suppose that’s part of life too—just not knowing what you’re doing until you’ve done it.
Yeah, so I think the surprise is really the challenge for me. There were many surprises through the writing and publication process. Another one we didn’t necessarily talk about: when I was physically writing it, I didn’t feel emotional. I never cried while writing. It wasn’t until I got the proofs of the book that I cried reading it.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, wow.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, partially because of the distance—me being in it as a writer, an artist crafting things, versus understanding this is a finished thing going out into the world. I don’t have to look at it as something needing revision; I can just read it as it is. That was surprising to me—that was the moment it became emotional.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you get emotional during readings ever?

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, definitely. I’ve had to prepare for that a lot. It’s important for me to be vulnerable and real in readings, which means sometimes I do tear up. I have to prepare myself and know if there’s someone in the audience who’s a home base I can have after the reading. I also avoid scheduling things right after readings because I’m emotionally drained. It’s a learning process. But it’s really vulnerable and emotional, and I think that’s important for me and for the audience—to see me honestly engaging with the material.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, there’s a bit of stoicism from you then. Your brother might be the main stoic in the family, but you try to hold it together—be vulnerable but also centered for people. It sounds like even this interview is kind of a negotiation of emotions.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. It is a negotiation of being open and vulnerable but also getting through the material. I want to make sure I don’t collapse on stage and not finish the reading.

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly. You’re there—you want to finish the job.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah. I want it to be an experience for the audience, so I think of myself as a vessel for the work, wanting to do the best job so the audience can experience it fully.

BLAIR HODGES: I’m really grateful, Maddie. By the time I had the wherewithal to sit down and read it, what a difference it made for me. There’s a lot of differences between our stories but so much overlap in the emotional afterlife of losing someone like that. Thank you for being vulnerable and sharing that, and for having the talent and tools to do it—because not everybody does. I couldn’t write this, and I’m so glad you could.

MADDIE NORRIS: Oh, thank you. I know we talked about your dad, but is there anything that made you think of him recently that you’d be comfortable sharing?

BLAIR HODGES: When I was a kid, many summers we went to Bear Lake, on the Utah-Idaho border. It’s a big, beautiful blue lake. We camped there for a week. This year, I finally got the gumption to schedule that trip for my family. I said, “We’ve got to go back to Bear Lake.” Camping is when I really connect with my dad. We had this Springbar tent—these nice canvas ones. I’m obsessed with them; they take me right back to camping with him. We went to Bear Lake, and I definitely connected with him this summer in that place. That’s been on my mind.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, it’s really special how landscapes can hold those memories, and going back to them can bring that back.

BLAIR HODGES: 100%. Landscapes, music, smell, different foods—they put you right back with them.

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, absolutely. I was listening to Talking Heads the other day and immediately thought of my dad.

BLAIR HODGES: I was surprised he was listening to Green Day with you—that has bad language! That’s definitely one my dad wouldn’t have approved of. If my dad had a conversation about Green Day, it’d be like, “You can’t listen to this.” [laughs]

MADDIE NORRIS: Yeah, he was a big punk fan, so we had limited choices.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, cool. Well, Maddie, thanks so much again. The book is The Wet Wound: An Elegy and Essays by Maddie Norris, a visiting assistant professor at Davidson College in North Carolina. Maddie, it’s been a great conversation.

MADDIE NORRIS: Thanks so much for having me and for being open to talking about things a lot of people don’t want to talk about. It feels really nice and special.

 

Outro – 1:08:37

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to Relationscapes. If you're joining us for the first time, welcome! Check out some other episodes, there is a lot to choose from. We're actually approaching the 50th episode! I can’t believe it. You can help me celebrate by reviewing the show in Apple Podcasts or rating it in Spotify. Like TRhick1 did. They said they love the diversity of perspectives on the show, and it's a great podcast for anyone looking for good books to read. Thanks, TRhick1!

Mates of State provided our theme song. Relationscapes is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and I'll see you again soon.