Charles D’Ambrosio’s readings never disappoint. This is an incredibly rare thing for a writer, and just one reason it’s very sad that D’Ambrosio has left Portland for the Midwest, where he’s been hired by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Not so fast, though—D’Ambrosio still has a new book out from Portland’s/New York’s Tin House Books, an essay collection called Loitering, and it didn’t get its Portland release party until last night, when a big writerly crowd showed up to Disjecta for a reading and Q&A hosted by Tin House.
In the past, D’Ambrosio has been called “a writer’s writer” (we’ve even done it). But as Michael Schaub pointed out in the fall Agenda, he’s also a not-writer’s writer. If you get fidgety during readings, Charles D’Ambrosio is your dude. He fidgets too. He prefaces his readings with lengthy, very funny explanations of their origins. If you’re looking for some mystique-loaded discussion of how writing just magically happens and you’re a conduit for the muse—well, you’ve come to see the wrong writer.
Instead, D’Ambrosio is disarming and forthright. “I feel really exposed reading nonfiction,” he said before reading, explaining that unlike fiction, he can’t claim to have made it up. Instead, he writes honestly about his schizophrenic brother and discovering the personal essay while reading in the rain at the loneliest bus stop in Seattle, and cites gloomy Pacific Northwest weather when asked where he prefers to write (there’s no reason to go outside).
One of the earliest publishers of his essays was our sister paper, the Stranger, and D’Ambrosio was quick to claim at last night’s reading that he wouldn’t have started writing essays if not for the existence of alt-weeklies, which for him were critical in “the granting of space or just the offer of an open hand,” that he used to explore “the nothing beat”—which is exactly what it sounds like. The title essay in D’Ambrosio’s collection is one such dispatch from the nothing beat, which finds D’Ambrosio cradling notecards outside a crime scene as the rain smudges his notes, and the story becomes more about the artifice of television news reporting than about the crime he’s ostensibly covering.
But then, D’Ambrosio doesn’t identify as a reporter. Nor does he consider his highly personal work to be confessional—”they’re facts, not confessions,” he says. Instead, he is interested in something that seems to fall between hard news reporting and narrative nonfiction, something he describes as “seeking faith with doubt”—not in any religious sense, but in setting aside the idea of a story for what really shows up (think of the shift in “Loitering”), of using doubt as a vehicle for discoveries that are genuine rather than predetermined. It’s a kind of curiosity that excellent reporting and personal essays seem to share.