Abigail Ham is a junior at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, MI, studying writing, political science, philosophy, and economics and dabbling in classics. She manages Calvin’s student newspaper and is Editorial Assistant for the journal Pedagogy. Her essay “Scenes from the Pearly Gates” appears in the Spring 2022 issue of Carve.
In the first paragraph of the essay, there’s a beautiful description of your phone charger extending over you and your luggage like a net, “a pale cord between me and the world.” In a way, this line sets the tone for the entire piece. Did this idea of separation and dislocation influence your decisions regarding the form and language of the piece?
I knew first that I wanted to write about my experience in airports in bad weather and once I had that setting the natural things to try to tackle were distance and connection and between-ness. We were mid-pandemic when I wrote this, too, so those were things I was thinking a lot about.
Because the essay is based on a whole slew of brief memories, just glimpses really, and because I wanted to think about how places like airports give us glimpses into the lives of strangers, the form that emerged — short, separated scenes — just seemed to make sense.
I didn’t want to write a story about something that happened in an airport; I wanted to capture that whole world, and the natural way to do that seemed to be the way in which I actually experienced it — through glimpses. I think that did affect the structure of the essay overall, as well as of my paragraphs, sentences, etc.
There is a quiet, atmospheric sense of observation in your writing. We witness the humming ephemera of the airport, passing snippets of other lives in transit. At one point, the narrator describes the temptation “to make something of them, to rip-and-tear this glimmer of their lives into mine.” What was your process for assembling and connecting all these images and impressions?
When I sit down to write a news or feature story in my journalism work, I start by sorting quotes, notes, and observations into categories and themes. I used that tactic to write this essay. On one side of a page I made a list of things I’d seen in the airports, many salvaged from journaling I’d done there, and on the other side I listed other stories, images, and thoughts that shared a word or feeling with those observations.
The most difficult part was deciding what order all these glimmers belonged in. In the end, I tried to move as chronologically as possible, reconstructing as accurately as memory allowed my hours in the Philadelphia airport.
Once I had everything on the page, I started reading through, looking for threads, and trying to arrange things so that each thread appeared throughout the sections of the essay.
Throughout the essay, there are several mentions of hospitals braided in with the airport scenes. These two liminal spaces seem to be in direct conversation with the "pearly gates" invoked by the title. Can you talk about the use of setting in your work?
When asked if I like to travel, I usually say that I just like to arrive. But there is something magical about airports, train stations, bus stops, etc. … at least for me, these places are unique. They make us think honestly about our between-ness and our aloneness and our inescapable connectedness in a way that I think few other places do. At least, that’s what happens to me.
The thing that connects airports and hospitals, for me, is the way both places connect strangers in passing. When I was hospitalized as a kid, I would look up from a blood draw or from a wheelchair and see another kid going through the same thing and feel like we could have been the same person. I feel that in airports, too, especially when things go wrong. When that third delay is announced and you look up and make eye contact with some other person who’s just trying to get home, there’s this overwhelming sense that you’re on the same team.
In these places I feel more honesty about the fact that we’re all just fragile little bodies with one long life that’s over before we know it, every one of us waiting somewhere between where we came from and home, with no way to make that burden any lighter but by looking up and realizing we’re here with each other in the meantime. I think the world might be a little kinder if we were honest about that all the time.
I was really taken by the fragmented, almost note-like quality of your prose. Do you work in any other genres? Are there any writers who have influenced your style and/or approach?
I write poetry and do a lot of journalistic work; both of those genres influence how I write essays. Both demand concision and precision. My brain is usually in that mode now when I sit down to write anything, and I think that’s why my creative prose also tends to be kind of stripped-down. Through reporting, I’ve learned to take quick, detailed notes and to use those as a foundation on which to later build a story. In creative writing, of course, there’s a lot more freedom in terms of what you build, but for me the rebar of the story is still those details and images recorded in the moment.
I admire writers who don’t mess around with what they’re trying to say: The Road has had a special place on my bookshelf for a few years, and I’m currently reading through everything by Joan Didion I can get my hands on. Writers like Annie Dillard, who make great use of pastiches of images and anecdotes, inspire me as well.