At the Arts Research Center on October 29, Pushcart Prize, winning essayist Christina Rivera brought the ocean to Berkeley. Reading from her debut collection My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women, Rivera invited the audience to submerge into her world of vulnerability, ecological kinship, and the fluid shapes of motherhood.
The evening began with Rivera sharing how the book’s form, layered, fragmented, and tidal, mirrors her own life. “At the last minute, my publisher put the word memoir on the back of this book,” she said, laughing. “I didn’t realize how vulnerable that would make me. Of course I’m sharing embodied stories, my own body is on the line here.” She projected two images: one of a manta ray unfolding its wings, another of herself nursing her first child. “When you layer these images,” she explained, “I think these two images sitting next to each other say a lot about what I was doing with this project”
Rivera read from several essays, including Four Circles and Quiseeds, both central to My Oceans’ wave-like structure. Editors had asked her to arrange the book chronologically, but she resisted. “There is no beginning and end,” she reflected. “All these fragments orbit the ‘Four Circles’ essay.
She drew connections to her years teaching young writers, many of whom gravitated toward experimental “hermit crab essays”, works that find a home within borrowed forms. “I see it especially in younger demographics,” she noted. “This fragmented shape makes more sense to them. But I also feel that a lot of women identify with the fragmented kind of experience.”
In conversation with Shannon Jackson, Professor of the Arts & Humanities and Director of the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative, Rivera explored the gendered and ecological dimensions of her work. Jackson noted that Rivera’s writing connects “gender, anxiety, and insight” in ways that challenge pathologizing women’s emotions. Rivera responded:
“I couldn’t have written an honest book without giving an honest account of my gendered experience in the world. But to labor something into the world, to birth something into the world, isn’t exclusive to female bodies. Its entirely inclusive to labor, gardens, and everything in the world.”
Rivera recounted visiting a UC Berkeley art class earlier that day, where a young man told her he fully identified with the “mother” figure in her work. “That made me so happy,” she said.
“It reminded me that caretaking and creation are inclusive experiences. To caretake is to bring something you love into the world and tend to it. I was one of the take-home messages of this book: to switch from a culture, which I think is focused very much right now on control, to a culture that is focused on consent and care. I think those are, like, entirely inclusive principles.
