by Rebecca Doverspike

Troy Copeland on his parents’ porch in Manchester, GA.

“For the word, according to the hermeneutical and theological traditions of the age, was God become flesh. It was the active pursuit that was to succeed and transcend itself by embracing its own broken and inarticulable striving. It was the agony of bridging the worlds of subject and object and all the punctuated spaces in between. We sometimes call this humanity.”

-From “Echoes to the Senses”

Reading an essay written by Troy is an active experience and thus reminds one that reading is an experience. In “Echoes to the Senses,” for instance, Troy opens the essay by asking readers to imagine a “large young man of twenty-two. He’s of African descent. He’s standing waist-deep in the tide holding a Norton Anthology of Poetry,” and then shifts from third person to second and first, “But you don’t know that, because you see me from a distance as two of my friends claimed to have seen me down the strand, struggling to keep my balance in the surge and roll of the waves. The book is open in my hands and I’m shouting over the symphony of the sea. I’m reading Tennyson’s Ulysses.” After further description of what we can see and what we cannot, as well as what we might be able to imagine, he writes, “And in imagining that, you have entered the gulf with me.” I see that sentence as key to Troy’s work as a whole—his writing illustrates and enacts the interwoven qualities of truth and imagination, dreams and reality, and he calls upon readers to participate in the performance of language and its potential to reveal.

Troy often uses the second person in his essays. As we sat in his apartment with a window overlooking a gorgeous dip of fields to talk about his work, I asked him about this move to directly address the reader and he said, “Performance of self-aware consciousness is that dynamic between the personal and collective—you’re always both at the same time. Part of what it means to be self-aware is to interact with yourself as part of a whole, as part of a collective. If, as a reader, you’re being addressed directly, you become, at least for that moment, you become aware of participating in that dynamic.” The dynamic he’s referring to is between the personal and the collective, and the medium here is words. “By being pulled into identifying with the narrator, you’re totally immersed in the text at that point. If you’re resistant to participating in the words, literally, viscerally, then you’re not going to respond well.” I asked Troy if he participates in the words through writing as well, and he said, “Yes—writing is a means of performing self-awareness.” That sense of performance also speaks to the writing process. When reading one of Troy’s essays, I often have those “ah-ha!” moments when we arrive at particularly insightful points (a kind of “Yes!” marginalia), and it feels to me like Troy the essayist is discovering those things in the act of writing, just as I’m discovering them in the act of reading.

Troy’s been writing narratives since a very young age. Stories were a way to process experience, part of the routine in his day—going to school, homework, hanging out with friends, and then taking time to interpret experiences into “a snippet of a story of some kind.” In “Look Away, Look Away,” Troy describes grade school in Manchester, GA and creating stories in which he spun his friends into characters and took them to different galaxies and dimensions. The world in those stories and the world from which those stories were imagined from affect one another profoundly, of course. When Troy and I sat down to speak about his writing, I asked what draws him to write about childhood. “There’s something special about childhood in that children don’t necessarily see that there is any meaningful contradiction between what they imagine and what they choose to believe and what’s ultimately ‘real.’” He went on to say, “We learn to normalize our performances to the degree that some are esteemed as being more real than others. But until we’ve been socialized to that extent, we can perform and experience multiple realities as being equally viable or equally valid.” Narrative has always been involved in Troy’s “play,” whether casting roles (and, interestingly, he sometimes cast himself as the hero and sometimes as the villain, recognizing in us the capacity for each) and writing various adventures or, in solitude, twirling branches to a blur in which he saw stories and how they would move.

In the same breath, Troy connected play as an acknowledgment of narrative to spirituality: “You know, in the Judea-Christian heritage there’s the idea that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who are like children. I think what the writer is referring to in that is that there’s this other reality you can live in, but only if you can think like a child and hold multiple realities as being valid at the same time.”

Troy learned from an early age how to hold the validity of multiple realities. “When I was 5 or 6 years old, my father told me there were two Laws to be obeyed, the Law of Nature and the Law of God. He said, ‘You can’t obey one and not obey the other, and you’ve got to find a way to obey them both.’” I thought about some of the conflict in Troy’s essays, struggles and fights which did not seemed frowned upon. “Did morality feel complex to you growing up,?” I asked, thinking of how Troy’s father was also a preacher. He said it did, and that his father, too, never kidded himself about “the complexity of what he was asking me to grow up and be, what he was asking me to do.” Troy said his father taught him him that it’s okay to defend himself—taught him not to fight if at all possible, but that if it’s not possible, self-preservation is a Law of Nature (and ultimately, the Law of Nature is also God’s Law). Sometimes, Troy’s father said, “I’m telling you this as your preacher,” and other times, “I’m telling you this as your father.” I wonder if that taught young Troy about the various ways of performing identity and roles that shows up in his writing now. Of such writing, in relation to these two Laws, Troy said: “I try to nod a great deal to both. Visceral life experience and at the same time, all these ideas you’re trying to discuss. You don’t have to really choose one or the other—theory and ideology or visceral life experience—it can be both.”

Troy’s father nodded to both in his conversations with Troy as well. “You see the stars at night, right?” He asked Troy Pre-K, “Well the sun is one of those up-close. The reason why they look so small is ‘cause they’re so far away. But they’re huge. The Earth is barely the size of a speck of dust compared to those stars.” Troy laughed after he told me this, “Imagine having the burden of that when everybody else thinks that the stars are these tiny little things hanging up in the sky. You kind of walk around and want to start talking about this stuff and they say, ‘What are you talking about?’” Now the childhood stories in “Look Away Look Away” make even more sense to me—Troy knew about the existence of other galaxies in which to play, in which to enact different possibilities of identity. Once again, his narratives were not an escape from reality, but a going into, illustrating the ways in which they’re naturally interwoven.

One of the things I most admire about Troy’s essays is how the psychology within them is not reductive. Troy gives the reader such a thought-provoking mixture of personal narrative and hints of analysis, but leaves the interpretation at least partly open. For instance, in a recent essay, Troy writes about making narratives out of the dust “devils” on the playground with his grade school friends. He writes: “One of the improv scripts I conjured when we were still second graders involved us being detectives trying to solve the mystery of the Dirt Devils. I started that one at school, actually—before the start of summer. Several white boys allowed me to convince them that the whirling clouds of dust that sometimes materialized on the playground on windy days were actually demons from another dimension trying to enter our world. If we could only capture one…”. He moves from that to, “And then we actually did see something” —a red light along the elementary school wall. He lets the reader wonder if it’s because there’s a particular narrative in mind that allows that sight (the things we perceive shape into our already-held worldview, while at the same time such perceptions can change that worldview), or if there’s a subtle distinction happening between “made-up” and “real,” (and remember that children can hold them as non-contradictory truths), etc. Troy’s work shows us how imagination and reality do not constitute a binary—he shows us how these realms affect one another and constitute continual inter-play.

When I asked Troy what fuels his writing, he said, poignantly, “Love of conscious existence.” After a slight pause he added, “Which is kind of redundant to say because there’s no awareness or experience of existence that’s not through consciousness,” to which I suggested, “Yes, but maybe writing draws that out more?” and he agreed, “Yes, writing is a way of being aware of that kind of awareness.” Troy then told me how it was through writing his dreams—he has numerous dream journals—that really called him to further pay attention to waking experience and to process that through narrative as well, ”...especially when I’m writing an essay—I’m processing experience as I would a dream when I’m doing dream-work: that’s what writing the essay is to me—critiquing experience as text. That comes from me considering dreams as types of texts.” He first began writing his dreams during college at the University of Georgia. He had a mentor, Howard, who encouraged him to talk about his dreams, and who introduced him to Jung’s Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.

After college, Troy taught for one year at Manchester High School (his Alma Mater) before traveling to Japan with Howard and his wife Elizabeth where they taught English to various age groups. He told me a beautiful story of taking his notebook to a shrine for the Sky God, and writing while sitting on its steps. One day, a dog ran ahead of its owner (who came screaming behind), grabbed the notebook out of Troy’s hands, and took off with it. Troy laughed as he told me he decided not to write at the Sky God’s shrine any longer. This is just another instance in which myth interweaves with life.

When he returned from Japan, Troy taught literature at Cedar Shoals High School in Athens, GA for 13 years. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Troy’s a tremendous teacher. He cares very much about his students. One day, in response to a composition course he’s teaching at WVU, he casually said, “I don’t need to be a hero. I just need to provide opportunities for heroism”.) He also started attending graduate school part time at Sewanee, where he took fiction workshops. At that time, one of his teachers said to him, “You have everything you need to be who you want to be. The problem is that you don’t see yourself as a writer. You only write when you have extra time.” Troy said that was part of the impetus behind quitting his post at the high school and coming to WVU for graduate school full-time. He began this program as an MA student, eager to study with Dr. Earnest who’d also been at Suwanee for a time. Troy speaks of changing from an academic to a Creative Nonfiction track as a meaningful coincidence—he took a Nonfiction workshop with Dr. Kevin Oderman the same Spring semester that Dr. Earnest decided to continue his career elsewhere. Troy spoke so highly of that workshop, of collaboration with his peers and mentor, Kevin—it allowed him to discover his “point” in coming here. “Do you see yourself as a writer now?” I smiled. “Yes,” Troy said with confidence, “I think that’s the biggest gift this place has given me.” It’s hard to imagine a path in which the essays Troy’s written don’t yet exist in the world, and I’m as grateful as a reader that circumstances revealed such a path for him as he is grateful as a writer. I believe many others feel the same way, and will continue to as Troy’s essays circulate out into the world.

When I asked Troy who he likes to read (other than Jung), he mentioned Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Melville (Moby Dick, mostly), Hawthorne’s short stories, and grew particularly excited to exclaim about George Eliot’s Middlemarch. “Here, the narrator steps into the story and becomes a character to express himself or herself. Steps in to be a character, and then steps out to be a narrator.” He added, “Milan Kundera does the same thing. You’ve got this story going on and then he pulls back up out of that story to reflect and pontificate upon that story. He’s becoming a character somehow by reflecting. Writing is a means for voice to characterize itself through self performance. Whether first, second or third person, a speaker is a character that portrays himself as an other.” I can see why this appeals to Troy, as I think his writing as a performance of self-awareness, where part of that awareness includes the collective—where through reflection one can become a character— does something very similar. And perhaps this excites us because it’s so near to our perceptions of the human experience, in which we partly enact and embody our personalities, but in which we simultaneously observe, reflect, and process.

In an a Comparative Religious Ethics course I took in college, we read an article by Wilfred Cantwell Smith that claimed friendship, love, is a prerequisite to any true dialogue, any true exchange of perspectives and worldviews. I asked Troy some questions from that place of friendship, rather than as merely a colleague interviewing him, and I think he responded in kind. I asked him if he felt he had to be “careful” about race in his essays. “When you’re an African American writing about being African American,” he paused, “Well rather, I should say, when you’re an African American writer writing about yourself, you’re going to always be writing about race to some extent, even if you never do so explicitly or intentionally. But I don’t like the idea of allowing the notion of race to overshadow my experiences as a person or my voice as a person.”

He distinguished material conditions and the human spirit. “Spirit, which I associate with consciousness, and material conditions are mutually constructive… it’s not accurate to describe one as emerging from the other so much as they coincide.” Our conversation often came back to that notion of mutually constructive elements—truth, imagination, dream, reality, material, spirit—and the meaningful struggles which result from holding multiple possibilities as valid.

Troy’s writing draws together all those elements and skillfully structures narratives that bring the reader along with his thinking process. He blends that thinking process with powerful storytelling, those visceral life experiences. He does this whilst being aware that he’s working within the medium of language. I return to “Echoes to the Senses,” to the narrator knee-deep in the ocean reading Tennyson aloud, here addressing the reader again:

“Hang in there. I suppose this means that I’ve got more exposure to render, more of an exchange to effect. The words are serving several functions, now. I’m both sharing and hoarding myself in turns of phrase, like a soul re-incarnating itself in turns of conception. I’m creating spaces through which experiences may pass like breath through panpipes. For I endeavor to tell you All…if only by speaking or writing I could tell you much of anything.”

And he does.