INTERVIEW: Elizabeth Geoghegan by Lauren C. Johnson
The Marco Chronicles
Elizabeth Geoghegan
Santa Fe Writer’s Project
Interview by
Lauren C. Johnson
Elizabeth Geoghegan writes about people who feel out of place, whether they’re hitchhiking from Riva del Garda to Verona or pursuing lovers in Seattle grunge-era bars, like some of the characters in her short story collection, eightball (Santa Fe Writers Project, May 2019). In The Marco Chronicles (Santa Fe Writers Project, November 2023), Geoghegan portrays herself as an outsider character. This hilarious flash memoir, best described as Eat, Pray, Love’s dark sister, is about dating in Rome while running from grief.
I was privileged to take Geoghegan’s “Reading Like a Writer” creative writing course at John Cabot University in Rome in 2016. Geoghegan brought the influence of her late mentor, Lucia Berlin, into the classroom and taught from Berlin’s collection, A Manuel For Cleaning Women. We studied and discussed stories written with razor-sharp precision and hyper-specific details—yet also written with a certain kind of rawness despite the polish. That’s to say, beautiful stories about messy people, places, and emotions.
And if students were to write about Rome, Geoghegan encouraged us to do so with an honest, unflinching eye rather than fall back on vague descriptions of “la dolce vita.”
In 2016, Geoghegan had recently published The Marco Chronicles through ebook publisher Shebooks, and I interviewed her for the now-defunct Ragazine Magazine. When I heard that the Santa Fe Writers Project would re-publish Marco, I jumped at the chance to continue the conversation Geoghegan and I started nearly eight years ago.
We caught up over Google Meets and discussed finding and trusting one’s authorial voice, capturing the essence of setting, the lasting influence of Lucia Berlin, and so much more. Here are the best parts from our conversation, edited for brevity.
Lauren C. Johnson: When I interviewed you in 2016, you offered some craft guidance I’ve been carrying with me ever since. You shared how your mentor, Lucia Berlin, taught you the importance of voice and said, “If you get the voice right, you can do anything you please in a story.”
To that point, the voice in The Marco Chronicles pulls me right into the narrative flow. The voice shifts from humorous and sarcastic to earnest and awe-struck. What does voice mean to you? And how has your approach to landing the right voice for a story evolved in the years since our interview?
Elizabeth Geoghegan: Lucia Berlin was a master—not only of autofiction and the short story—but voice-driven work. One of the many things she instilled in me was to trust my own voice rather than trying to emulate someone else’s. If the voice doesn’t feel natural, it is nearly impossible to sustain a narrative anyway.
When I write, I read the work out loud, over and over, so I can hear whether it flows. Voice demands flexibility, a kind of ventriloquism that allows us to inhabit a range of voices. If the voice doesn’t fit the story you are writing, it will slip from your grasp and disintegrate. The sentences won’t scan or they will feel insincere. For me, voice and style are inextricable.
Lucia once recommended transcribing passages by an admired author—writing a scene out long-hand into a notebook. Not only do you feel the rhythm or cadence of the lines as you write, but the pitch, the way voice dictates style and vice versa. To transcribe a paragraph by, say, Virginia Woolf, is to understand her punctuation, where she chose to elongate or to pause, to be verbose or restrained. This allows you to enter the writer’s voice, to better understand it from the inside out. It also can tell you a lot about your own voice as you do it.
The encounters that inspired The Marco Chronicles dictated the voice. At the time when I wrote it, I was very deep into a long work of fiction. I needed a break and wanted to do something playful. To be honest, I never thought I’d show it to anyone, and for the most part, I didn’t for many years.
After so much time steeped in a novel, short vignettes felt right, and I wanted the tone to move from irreverent to nostalgic to melancholy and back again. To capture or mimic the ups and downs and misapprehensions I experienced, the voice needed to contain different registers, but still feel consistent.
LCJ: I’d love to stay on the topic of voice for a bit since that’s a writing element you do so well. You’ve been teaching creative writing at universities across Rome for many years. If a student struggles to find their voice for a particular story or as a writer in general, what kind of guidance do you give them?
EG: These days, all my students want to write like Sally Rooney. And I get it, I get why they're drawn to her style. Why it feels both fresh and accessible. But they're not Sally Rooney. They need to find their own way into the voice. So, I always ask them, “Who are you telling this story to and why?”
In a sense, we are already practiced in the art of modulating our voice depending on who our “audience” is. We just need to transfer it to the page. Oftentimes, I suggest that students write as if they were writing a letter to a particular person – for example, if it is humor you are going for, then write it to the friend you know will laugh with you, as opposed to telling it to the one who makes you feel judged.
I don’t start a piece until I have the first line or so in my head and if I am struggling with the opening, I take a step back and think about who I want to tell the story to. I don’t mean the reader (not yet anyway), but the friend or family member who brings out different aspects of our personality, whether funny, brainy, serious, or cynical, or what have you.
In another lifetime, my friends and I would meet for coffee and “party autopsy”—our term for dissecting whatever events went on the night before. The Marco Chronicles embodies this concept, channeling that type of intimate voice, but turning the volume way up.
LCJ: The Marco Chronicles is certainly about men, but I would argue that the narrator’s leading love interest is the city of Rome. This is still one of my favorite lines in your book:
Rome has always been, and remains, a labyrinth of complex social mores, indiscriminate etiquette, street-side histrionics, and daily indignities set against the backdrop of the city’s enduring ancient relics, all a timeless testament to her magnificence.
Looking at your work as a whole, establishing place is something else you do so well—whether you’re writing about Rome, Seattle, Florida, or Bali. Can you speak to your process for capturing the essence of a place?
EG: For me, setting is always the first character and, in some ways, the protagonist, whether the story takes place in the tropics or a claustrophobic kitchen. In my writing, the characters are often destabilized in some way, they are usually characters who don't belong wherever they find themselves. I didn’t set out with the intention of writing about displaced people, but it has become a kind of thread in my writing. As a result, setting has become important for me. A kind of anchor.
Henry James said (and I am surely misquoting here, but you get the sense) that “to write [a work of fiction] you need to plant a stout stake at the beginning for the action to swirl around.” This makes so much sense to me, and where else to we plant that stake, but in the very earth of the setting?
When building the setting, I look at photographs, listen to music, and make playlists for the places I'm trying to write about—it helps take me back, to recall what I was listening to when I traveled there. Or, perhaps more importantly, what my character would be listening to if she were traveling through, say, Bangkok in a particular decade or year.
But yes, in The Marco Chronicles, the real love story is with the city of Rome!
LCJ: In a Rumpus interview about your short story collection, eightball you said something poignant that I think ties in with The Marco Chronicles:
Are the boys in my stories props? Maybe. I grew up reading the usual suspects—white male writers like John Cheever, John Updike—stories where women are often portrayed as, well, set decoration, as brilliant as many of their stories are. But why can’t a woman writer do the same thing in reverse? You know, diminish the male character, place him in a role where he’s rarely anything more than a fuck or a disappointment.
How would you say The Marco Chronicles is in conversation with eightball or other works?
EG: I began writing shorter pieces, in search of a reprieve from the novel I was writing. So, the male characters in both books are under the same sort of microscope. In part, this is because I wrote a couple of the stories in eightball and The Marco Chronicles contemporaneously.
I’d say TMC offers a fleeting glimpse into eightball, which are mainly stories of women alone in the world. But the stories are often quite long and complex with a lot more character development than the Marco’s. Certain tropes and images reoccur throughout the collection creating a narrative arc which some say makes it feel like a novel in stories.
Basically, Marco is a weekend fling; eightball is a holiday or a journey that doesn’t go as expected.
And even though I wrote a few of the stories, like "Tree Boy," "Cricket Boy," and "Mother's Day," about the same time I was writing the Marco’s, they feel different to me. Perhaps this is more of a reflection of what different genres demand, the subtle yet palpable differences between autofiction and memoir? Either way, all these pieces sat in the drawer for so long.
LCJ: Why did they sit in the drawer?
EG: I didn't really show them to anybody. Well, I did show The Marco Chronicles to an agent, and then I didn't show it to anybody else after she rejected it, which was silly. And for the fiction, I didn't think I was a short story writer, so I didn't take them seriously, but every once in a while I would bust out a story. But then, I’d hide it away somewhere. Especially after Lucia was gone. She had always been my reader.
LCJ: To segue, at the beginning The Marco Chronicles you write, “Staggered by the recent death of my brother, I landed in Italy and proceeded to ignore the place along with everything I was feeling.”
When I first read The Marco Chronicles, I didn’t read it as a grief story because I was taken by the hilarious encounters with men and your technicolor descriptions of Italy. Now, in some ways, I do read it as a grief story—or at least partially. Can you speak to the role grief plays in this memoir?
EG: Loss is a pervasive theme in my work, whether I like it or not. I was blindsided by the loss of one of my brothers during my twenties. My life was already messy and complicated, but that event changed everything. It was as if I needed to learn how to breathe all over again in a world without him in it.
A few months later, my friends thought a trip to Italy would be the distraction, but it only made the loss feel more acute. While I was there everything was a blur but later it resonated. If I hadn’t made that trip, I would never have ended up living in Italy a decade later.
So, when I began The Marco Chronicles, I was somewhat divided about how much of that grief and that first trip to Italy to include, but it felt important to include it. I think readers expect a certain complicity when reading memoir. They want to trust that the narrator is willing to expose more than a funny anecdote about a one-night stand. Equally, there is nothing like humor for combatting grief.
LCJ: On the subject of processing loss and grief, what role do you think travel writing plays today in a world reckoning with colonialism, climate change, and war?
EG: I see travel writing or place-based writing (as opposed to writing aimed at generating tourism) as an opportunity to share the human experience. Now, more than ever, it is a writer’s job to try to bring the lived experience to the page. The impulse to make art may feel radical, but we all need to lean into it. As much trauma as there is in the world, from environmental to political to personal, I believe there’s always room for beauty.
If you have a political calling that you want to fold into your work, that’s great. But for the rest of us, in the face of so much trauma, it’s almost like, what’s the point of making art? But writing is a gift that you can give to the world. The impulse to create is such a vital part of human nature. That’s why I think it feels radical to say, “I’m going to keep writing or painting, or making art.” Because the world will always tell you that you should get a real job.
You never know what’s going to speak to people. You never know which story you’ll write that will be the one readers respond to. But if a book helps just one person, if it brings someone joy, or immerses them in beauty, or offers them a way to recognize themself in the text—that’s worth something.
LCJ: In The Marco Chronicles, you write, “Sometimes I dream of Rome. Deep in the darkest moments of a fitful, Should I stay, or should I go? kind of night, as I toss and turn on my Italian linen sheets, Rome comes to me and sits at the foot of my bed.”
Does Rome still visit you? Do you still ask yourself, should I stay, or should I go?
EG: She does, and I do … but for the moment, I’ll take Italy over just about anywhere.
