Hypertext Magazine asked Christine Hume, author of The Saturation Project, “What do the three long essays in Saturation Project do together that they do not do on their own?”
By Christine Hume
The essays are a triptych, a triple focus, a three-way mirror, expanding and shifting subjectives with each iteration. Together, they create a 3-D saturation that core samples the intensities of girlhood, mine and others, mythic and all real. I wanted to give girlhood back to the feral state that I remembered it to be and that I saw in my daughter, not the pink “girl-power” affair capitalism has pre-packaged or the gurlesque fantasies of the white bourgeoisie. The book’s three perspectives run around inside the felt-experience of girlhood. But what is girlhood? How was my imagination conditioned there? In what ways do I carry the girl I was with me, even if I couldn’t wait to be done with her? The ancient word most likely to have originated “girl,” (grъ(d)lo) also means throat or larynx and it was a word also used for animals. And so, what does a girl sound like? And what does she say to herself when she’s trapped in conceptual categories? I had to return to the subject three times, each time using a different organizing element, to capture the complexity of it. These resonant structures—red, humming, wind—are porous enough to leak into the other essays, in much the same way that fantasy and memory cross-contaminate one another.
That makes it sound like a plan from the beginning, which it was not. I wrote the essays separately and let them saturate one another over several years. This book tracks my transition between writing poetry and prose, when, after building my life around it, I suddenly couldn’t fathom writing poetry anymore and also didn’t quite know how to write prose. In that way the book also mirrors the many transitions of girlhood, the rejecting and striving, the awkward launches into “identity,” “self,” “woman,” whatever’s going to get you out of or more deeply into “now.” I wanted to layer affect and information into the same sentences, fragment by phrase. I wanted both facts and feeling because I could no longer tell the difference between the two. The essays gather density, texture, and mood rather than staging events. This girlhood is not a line of memory, but flashes, stutterings, retracings, blindspots; it is hacking at a word trapped in my mouth until it becomes a door: to the humming, windy, red world.
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Christine Hume is the author of an experimental memoir in the form of three interlinked essays, Saturation Project (Solid Objects, 2021), as well as three books of poetry and six chapbooks, most recently a collaboration with Jeff Clark, Question Like a Face (Image Text Ithaca), a Brooklyn Rail Best Nonfiction Book of 2017, and A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story (PANK Books). She curated and introduced two special issues the American Book Review: on #MeToo and on Girlhood. Find her prose in Harper’s, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Architecture and Culture, Journal of Narrative Theory and many other journals. Since 2001, she has been faculty in the interdisciplinary Creative Writing program at Eastern Michigan University.
