Brittany Coppla is a nonfiction student at Sarah Lawrence College pursuing her MFA in writing. She is the online editor of Lumina and has been published in Adroit Journal, Barren Magazine, L'Éphémère Review, and more. You can find her on Twitter: @beecoppla
Brittany’s essay “No Home for Furniture” appears in the Winter 2020 issue of Carve. Order your copy here.
“No Home for Furniture" takes an interesting approach to grappling with the place of furniture in our lives, but it does so with the backing of your relationship. I am very interested to know how you came to the structure of this piece and what the original inspiration for it was—how did drafting come about?
This piece has gone through so many different structures. Initially, the scenes at the museum only occurred at the very beginning and end of the piece, and the story about my relationship unfolded in between. As I continued revising, I realized how important it was for the scenes revealing the relationship to be punctuated with the day at The Art Institute. I wanted the architecture of this story to feel recursive, and I hope that ultimately the meditations in the museum are in conversation with the experiences that happened outside of the museum.
While writing earlier drafts, I tried to map out the narrative step by step. But I had the most success when I trusted my brain to wander and turn into unchartered corridors. I’d like to think it’s an essay whose content is informed by the things inside museums and its form is inspired by the labyrinth when trying to navigate them. Often, when I’m walking around museums, I wind up in an exhibition I have already been but have no idea what path I took to arrive back where I began. Writing this piece was something like that.
You begin with a trip to the Chicago Art Institute, where you and your boyfriend are looking at furniture. What interested me most about this essay was the historical and almost academic implications of the setting, yet it is spliced with a very human interaction, how people journey through museum spaces. Did you ever try opening the piece another way, or did you always know you wanted to begin the piece at the Chicago Art Institute?
Although this piece went through many revisions, it always began with the Art Institute. I think the speculative perspective that is so inevitable in a museum was really important to me while shaping the reader’s experience. Since “No Home for Furniture” isn't a narrative that moves linearly, it felt important to remain grounded in the museum scenes and continually leap further into the relationship’s history after each Art Institute section.
What writers have had a dramatic impact on your writing career, or can you recommend any writers to our readers that you feel they really should be reading?
I started this piece after reading Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body, which completely capsized my understanding of how time functions in narratives. Regardless of what I’m writing, I always try to have authors like T Kira Madden, Heather Christle, Ocean Vuong, and Paul Lisicky within reach.