“Certainty Is a Daydream”: On Ashley Marie Farmer’s “Dear Damage”

I WAS FAMILIAR with the work of writer Ashley Marie Farmer but had foolishly or only lazily (until now) categorized her prose and poetry as avant-garde, experimental, the elegantly beautiful word collages of a language lover whose narrative constructs seem singularly dependent on the idiom and examination of dreams. I adore that sort of writing. Even when surreal, it’s rooted in the quotidian. Even when sad, it’s funny. Think Donald Barthelme, George Saunders, Stanley Crawford, Aimee Bender, Jim Krusoe, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Giacomo Sartori, the stories in Joy Williams’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God, and on and on, giddily — writing that depends on the convincing construction of imaginary worlds.

A young writer, Farmer has for some time held tentative purchase on a place in that impressive roster via previous small collections — Beside Myself (2014), The Farmacist (2015), The Women (2016) — all of it built on the self-consciousness, wit, and irony of weird fictional micro-worlds, often assembled from the goofy or incomprehensible elements of our own. In The Women, a father digs a hole into which his family sinks, Ronald Reagan is bad precedent [sic], and the “Perfect Christmas Church” suggests a Thomas Kinkade snow globe. In his review of the book, Gabino Iglesias wrote that “Farmer digested the internet’s most ‘popular’ views on women and the result is a book that simultaneously acts like a mirror of our society and a sad, hilarious, and very smart survival guide.” The italics, my own, are a mea culpa, since Iglesias probably anticipated Farmer’s new mirror guide. Early in the often epistolary “novella” The Farmacist (about, and written to, farm towns), Farmer (get it?) acknowledges the trick, both engaging and distancing herself as author-creator, a skeptical mirror-bearing guide and survivor — and citizen, too: “I get the feeling you’re putting me on, that the trees I dream aren’t linked to the truth. I have fourteen friends with birthdays this week. Events to pretend to attend/attend to.”

So, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find her application of that “pretend/attend” prose style — previously used for the fabulist, allegorical, or hyperreal — to what passes for (what surpasses!) real life. Farmer’s new collection, Dear Damage, is ostensibly nonfiction, or perhaps creative nonfiction, a hybrid of essay and memoir. All of that, and why not? And who cares? As in her previous work, it includes collage, cut-ups, multiple voices, documentary elements, as well as a clear through-line, and sometimes reads like the confident voice-over narration of a Terrence Malick film about a Joseph Cornell diorama. It’s both much more of Farmer herself, and yet also more of the same. And that’s a good thing because, in one big breakout book, she serves up variations on the experiments, engagements, work, and play of her earlier offerings, while giving her particular artistic answer to a difficult moment.

The short, connected, associative essays in Dear Damage are by turns ecstatic, stark, poetic, deeply and necessarily sorrowful, and also reportorial. They are as solid an experiment as experimental writing can provide. The personified recipient of the collection’s capacious address is a singular episode — one terrible event — of serious damage. If real life isn’t already problem enough for realist writers, it’s a bigger one for a dream chronicler who has already co-opted, repurposed, and creatively hijacked realist techniques.

Reader, there is a real-life Ashley Farmer. She is smart, charming, and a talented teacher of writing. And now I have read her, too. But time-trip back eight years, before Trump, COVID-19, January 6, and the other catchphrase signifiers of our doom-Republic, before Farmer finally got a tenure-track job and was still writing in her hybrid dreamland. Her elderly grandfather’s botched if otherwise genuine effort at (what was once called) “mercy killing” his beloved bride of six decades was not anticipated by even the most vigorous dreamer. Grandma died, slowly and painfully, and Grandpa was arrested after bravely, pathetically, failing to kill himself with the busted handgun. Documents related to the case make up key elements of Dear Damage, along with photographs and interviews. There’s a lot to tell. But how? “This isn’t a story I often share,” Farmer writes. “I’ve feared others’ judgements, and I become flooded with the temptation to explain — we’re not gun people, and my grandparents are more than just grandparents and, and, and … […] I’ve wondered which parts are mine to tell.”

These events are, you will agree, the unwelcome stuff of headlines, freakish incidents that happen to other people, or so we imagine. In Dear Damage, Farmer shares the painful story in the style her readers know, but also in the less dramatic, slow-motion everyday parlance of a young woman writer named Farmer who already has a compelling all-American coming-of-age story: happy childhood (before her parents’ divorce), fierce friendships, an MFA, the struggles of adjunct teaching, her own divorce and new love, thirtysomething nomadic apartment life, and joy in music. So, when the impossibly “fictional” arrives as reality, what can a writer who has been transcribing the imagined voices that surround us in dream possibly do? As she writes, “Certainty is a daydream: we’re certain only until something upends our reality to prove that we can’t be certain, that we never could be in the first place. […] We exist in the perpetual present, inside seconds, in the aftershocks.”

No one is waiting for, no one is prepared for, the unpredictable. When the sensationally tragic is thrust upon our thoughtful dreamer, she is both sharper and more concise but also more necessarily comprehensive. Smaller, but also bigger, in a multiplicity of responses and formal inventions, culminating in a long letter that is a scrapbook anthology “best of,” if about the worst. A skilled writer, Farmer is both practiced and perhaps desperate enough to embrace difficult new forms, and to succeed with them, including echoes of the eerie poetic voice of her previous work that seems to emanate from elsewhere: “The rain became snow and the snow became women — he held his palm out, their nakedness heavier than he’d thought.” And there are long, rhapsodically frustrated, and elegantly honest passages with an omniscient sidewise perspective. Here’s Farmer the teacher on the writerly challenge of confronting a granddaughter’s doubt, loss, and grief:

And while I believe the words that leave my own mouth, I wouldn’t blame students for calling me a hypocrite. Because the truth is that, while I do trust that reading and writing can change things, in that moment I know I need to change my own life at thirty-three, one in which I’m barely making it, have zero security from one month to the next, zero benefits, zero prospects. Plus, if I participate in this system designed to make education a more lucrative business, aren’t I complicit? As I stand at the board, sun setting beneath the classroom shades, I wonder if it’s wrong to imply that if students work hard in this class, reading and writing and thinking — if they work hard in school, period — that it’ll add up to something.

Of course, the assembled collection answers this question, but in a book whose Library of Congress subject headings include “Family,” “Grandparents,” “Paralytics — Death,” and “Matricide,” what adds up is how richly these main topics are emphasized, highlighted, cross-referenced, and asterisked by what’s happening between the default defining incident and the rest of life. This includes the frustrating career striving and the institutional/administrative death by a thousand cuts anti-career of adjunct teaching, a subject about which I could write a bad essay collection cum cautionary tale (working title: Don’t Get Me Started). Yet Farmer persists, as a sincere and excellent teacher who puts up with the freeway-flyer, part-time, no-future gig, not only disrespected by the system but asked to disrespect — undervalue — her own worth. All while trying to reconcile writing with teaching (and grading, endlessly) remedial composition and literature.

Of course, there’s redemption, humor, joy, and love in Dear Damage too, as offered in this meditation on a teenage adventure that would surely persuade Farmer’s students of the inestimable value of creative writing:

With the same adrenaline we’d used to haul coffee tables and holiday decoration to a new address, we siblings and our mom road-tripped to St. Augustine, Florida, where we walked along freezing, deserted beaches and sat on aluminum seats in a sea park to watch dolphins perform tricks for sardines and where we rented red scooters none of us were qualified to drive in traffic, arriving at the Fountain of Youth, which Ponce de León had bumped into when he claimed to discover Florida even though Florida was never lost, never needed discovering.

Farmer is a curator of the stories of others, stories that are also her selves: writer, family member, and chorus in a Greek tragedy too. This book announces itself as a collection of essays, but it is also autobiography, commentary, legal transcripts, revised memories, and dream scenarios, all told with the vulnerability and intimacy of a writer a few lucky readers already know as a powerful voice talking back to “Damage.”

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Andrew Tonkovich edits The Santa Monica Review and is the founding editor of Citric Acid: An Online Orange County Literary Journal of Imagination and Re-Imagination. His latest collection is Keeping Tahoe Blue and Other Provocations.