Jarek Steele discusses ‘Nesting,’ featured in the Spring 2024 issue of Colorado Review, with editorial assistant Bel Mercado.
Jarek Steele (he/him) writes creative nonfiction with themes of family, queerness, gender, nature, and whatever else is happening around him. His work has appeared in HuffPost, Fourth Genre, Electric Literature, AWP’s Writer’s Chronicle, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife, Barbara.
Bel Mercado: One of the questions I love to ask about essays is, “Why now?” What was the catalyst for writing “Nesting,” and how did it shape the narrative?
Jarek Steele: The “why now?” changed over the course of the writing process. I started writing an early draft of “Nesting” several years ago, but I couldn’t figure out what it was actually about because I was writing a place, and places aren’t static images. They’re characters. They live independently of us, and they are as complicated and have as much conflict attached to them as human characters. When I started writing about the garage house, I just had the rats and Piranha, the Rottweiler next door. I didn’t know what that place—that character—had to say until later.
The essay began to take shape after my sister’s son, Knighton, died a few years ago. He was an addict and also had a heart defect. When I started to write about him, I had to get back to the beginning of that story. It was complicated—I couldn’t get back to the beginning of Knighton without going back to the beginning of me and my sister, Jo Anna, and our family, and where we came from. At that point, I remembered the unfinished draft about the rats in the garage house. Something changed for me when I looked at that draft; I realized I was trying to get to something else. After a few more drafts, I learned that I was writing about my gender, about not knowing who I was at that time, and about Knighton.
BM: I’m truly sorry to hear about your loss. While I was reading, I felt the narrator’s love for Knighton throughout the entire essay.
JS: He was incredible. He was an incredible human being, absolutely.
BM: I find the ending of “Nesting” particularly compelling because the essay transitions from the scene in the grocery store where Knighton is a few days old to the early stages of the narrator’s labor. This ending is so wonderful because it’s also a beginning. It’s reflecting on a period of transition between the life of pregnancy—both Jo’s and the narrator’s—and the life after Knighton and the narrator’s baby are born. While reading, I was really interested in this decision to end the essay as the narrator is going into labor and moving into a new phase of life.
The conclusion feels very natural to me as a reader, but I wondered if it felt natural as you were in that process of writing. Did you experiment with multiple endings, or did you always know the essay had to end with the narrator’s labor?
JS: Oh, I always knew I had to end it there, because everything changed after that. Our lives–-my family’s lives—flew apart. Labor was the end of that part of the story. There was really no choice there. Of course, realistically, I could have ended the essay anywhere between that moment and the moment I began writing. Years pass, babies are born, mistakes are made. I lose people I love. I find new people to love. The place—both literal and figurative—and perspectives change. Time transforms memory and meaning. It would have taken away from the essay to know what happened after that moment because the story needed to be contained in that liminal space—that one moment, the before and the after, and I was right on the line. I knew I couldn’t go past that memory.
BM: I feel like it’s a universal problem for writers to know whether or not we’re satisfied with a piece of writing. Do you ever have to force yourself away from an essay? Or is your process instinctual and based on feeling?
JS: For me, I need to be alone with a thought, an idea, or a piece of writing for a long time before I can let it go. I love allowing the essay to do its job of essaying naturally, which is, as you know, a time-consuming process. Like most writers, I often don’t know what I’m writing until I’ve written a draft, set it aside, and forgotten about it. I don’t know what it’s about until months or years later because I haven’t discovered the story yet. I haven’t felt my way through, and the essay needs to be private while I figure it out.
I rarely know when I’m done with something. I think in the case of “Nesting,” and in the case of a couple of other things that I’ve written, I knew I was done when I could let the essay go and allow somebody else to feel possession of it. It was still mine; I had power over the essay, but when I sent it out for publication, it wasn’t my secret anymore. I needed to reach a point where, personally, I could allow other people to access these memories and engage with them as art.
BM: Your essay begins with a gorgeous reflection on queerness, the body, and identity, which all culminate in a reflection on truth. The line that really struck me reads, “I had the urge to nest—procuring diapers and wet wipes, obsessively dusting, developing a sudden, unexpected interest in scrapbooking—and became, for a short while, someone I was not. That’s not true. I was that person, just as surely as I am this person, bald and bearded, typing at the dining room table, unless that’s not true either.” I’m wondering how you navigated this space of truth through the lens of changing identity.
JS: I’ve recently been struggling with the idea of truth because, as you know, it’s not possible to tell the truth all of the time. This makes me think back to the question you asked about how I created the ending for “Nesting.” I think these questions about truth and endings have the same answer. A few days ago, I was walking and a wild turkey crossed my path. I raced ahead to see if I could get a picture for my wife because she’s 25 years older than I am and has a lung condition. She hasn’t been able to be outside for months. Her whole idea of herself is built around her love of the natural world, so it’s been a pretty rough summer. I double tapped the photo app and tried to get the exact way the light caught the place where its feathers faded from one color to the next, and just before I snapped the photo it turned its head and looked away from me and toward the thing it was interested in.
In this synchronous collection of movements, my wife is young and can breathe for as long as it takes for me to race to the turkey. I am trying to hold her there as I press my thumb to the phone screen. I am wishing for the turkey to keep looking this way so the light never shifts and the shadow doesn’t change and she is young and walking beside me. She is not, and I am walking away, and I’m trying to reanswer an already-answered question.
So we are every person and every age we’ve ever been, and our payment for this privilege is to mourn the fact that those selves are always turning away and looking at the things they’re interested in. I think a writer’s job is to visit them, keep them company, and not leave them there alone. To not let them get lost both chasing the turkey and being the turkey.
So, the answer is that I included the images in “Nesting” so the light wouldn’t change. I ended where I did because my next self turned toward what it was interested in, and the truth changed.
BM: Out of all the images of nesting—and this might be a little strange, so bear with me—the most memorable image for me was Jo counting to make sure she had 150 Flintstones vitamins in the jar and commenting that there were no Betty Rubble gummies. It’s so absurd and ridiculous, yet it’s very heartfelt. Did Jo ever write the letter to complain about not getting Betty Rubble gummies?
JS: She absolutely did!
BM: That’s amazing! Did she get a response?
JS: I don’t remember if she did or not. I wish I knew. But I remember her sending off the letter, and I felt that it was important for me to include this moment of her nesting processes alongside mine.
BM: I love that! It’s such a funny moment, and it lends some levity that expertly functions in conversation with the visceral images of the narrator’s home and pregnancy. Some of these moments are especially gut-wrenching. The image of the baby’s head splitting into four parts while the narrator tries to clean out the vacuum stuck with me for days. But readers also see images of the rats making a home in the roof of the garage, and Piranha the Rottweiler, who is initially a frightening and aggressive dog, finding peace and comfort with the narrator.
I’m interested in this idea of creating a home, of creating community, safety, and security in a space that is wildly insecure. How did you approach crafting this delicate balance between the beauty and the pain of life throughout labor?
JS: I wanted to draw an image of childhood, a callback to an innocent time where I felt at home. That’s what nesting really reminded me of—playing with my sister and being children together.
When I was writing, I was embodying that period of my life. I remembered exactly where my clothes hung, in between the toilet and the water heater. I remembered the Barbie head and the Flintstones gummies. I recreated the spaces I lived in authentically, because truth grounds a reader in the actual physical place, and that, in turn, grounds them in a story.
And while I was living through these experiences, they weren’t disturbing to me. I didn’t have context to see anything else, and so what I had in front of me was wonderful. At the time, it was enough to have egg sandwiches and a roof over my head and a really cool wood stove. I had the best sister in the world, and this guy who really loved me. I never thought I needed any other kind of fulfillment. I didn’t know that I was poor for a really long time.
It might feel strange for somebody who doesn’t have that kind of history to relate to my memories of this time and place, but it was what we knew. Why wouldn’t we count our Betty Rubbles? Why wouldn’t we get our money’s worth? Why wouldn’t we check it?
Bel Mercado is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Colorado State University, where she is an editorial assistant for the Colorado Review. She enjoys writing strange lyric essays, baking for her friends, and spotting rattlesnakes on the trail up Greyrock Mountain.