3 Questions with Sean Enfield

Sean Enfield is a writer living in the Golden Heart City of Alaska where he received his MFA from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. He now serves as an Assistant Nonfiction Editor at Terrain.org. His own work has been published in Hayden’s Ferry, Witness Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, and The Rumpus, among others, and he was the 2020 recipient of Fourth Genre’s Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize. Recently, his manuscript, Holy American Burnout!, was named as the first runner-up for Red Hen Press' Ann Petry Award. His portfolio can be found at seanenfield.com, and you can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @seanseanclan.

Associate Editor Winslow Schmelling chats with Sean about his essay, “God is a Moshpit” from Issue 68.

The narrative structure of "God is a Moshpit" feels a bit like a kaleidoscope that slides us through a lens, shifts a little, then slides further. Themes like testimony, movement, falling, and the collective and singular body shift across the piece and through layers of experience. I find myself often striving to write this way, but not always pulling it off, not always keeping the threads tethered enough. Is this structure natural to you? Do you have the layers in mind from the start, or do you have to move your way through a piece? Is there a rhythm? What kind of writing process does that result in?

First off, I love that comparison to the kaleidoscope. That motion of "sliding and shifting," as you put it, definitely resonates with how I felt drafting this piece. It was an act of searching for an answer to a question I knew had no definitive answer. With this piece, the movement had to be the substance itself, so I started with nothing but that opening image of my own volatile birth and the thesis of the title, “God Is a Moshpit.” Then, I followed one memory to the next. I often write to music, and so music is always infiltrating my writing. The song “Street Pulse Beat” by Special Interest was one I kept returning to while working on this piece. I love songs like that one which have a steady, pounding rhythm, but are so sonically overloaded that they feel like they could fall apart at any moment. I wanted to emulate that feeling in this essay—like a long form punk song. "Street Pulse Beat" has a few different slippery refrains which change slightly with each return, and I knew with all the moving parts in this piece that I needed a similar sly repetition to keep everything rooted around the central pursuit.

It emerged very very messy, I’ll say, but I needed to write it that way. The experiences, particularly my relationship with religion, is all stuff I hadn’t really articulated for myself before putting it in writing. Revising, I was able to add in those refrains regarding testimony, mosh pits, balance, bodies, and see how each new alternation of the refrain added to the overall conceit about God. From there, I was able to make sense of a belief system with which I had grown up but that no longer matched my worldview. While this piece somewhat charts my path away from Christianity as doctrine, there are still aspects of spirituality and fellowship that I wanted to reclaim for myself. And so I stole the Christian testimony and broke it for my own secular devices. I kicked on the distortion pedal, if you will.

I love the idea of testimony. I love the idea that any individual's experience could be used to prove the existence of a whole ass God. And so as I moved through the more rigid, doctrinal experiences, I highlighted what felt oppressive while trying to salvage what was still transcendent. Eventually, I had reclaimed enough to validate my notion that God is other people… or community or dancing with folks who have a general love for how bodies like yours occupy a space or some culmination of all that and more.

Honestly, most of my essays begin big and messy and loaded with way too much. Then, I have to let the messiness go, and I get a little obsessive, trying to tighten up the rhythm. A lot of ‘em never find their groove, and so I find myself stealing from shelved essays where I had tried to shove a piece that better fits the current puzzle. There are a couple of those moments here, and some that were removed—maybe for later use, maybe to get lost in the shuffle. I’m always grateful that any reader is able to find their way through the messes I make. I credit my workshop group at University of Alaska-Fairbanks, my professors, Daryl and Sara, and HFR’s editorial staff for further guiding me in shaping the “kaleidoscope” so that it functioned for more eyes than my own.

Starting with the title, "God is a Moshpit," we know we are in for an unexpected comparison, but one proven ripe with powerful intersections. Was there anything that surprised you when writing within and exploring the overlaps of these spaces familiar to you?

I set out without direction when I started “God Is a Moshpit,” but I suspected my brief experiences with the Christian hardcore scenes would wiggle their way into the narrative. Being black or brown and living in southern suburbs, you have learn how to maneuver through spaces that aren’t designed for you. And it forces you to overthink and overanalyze everything. You start to find meaning in every moment and every gesture, and you carry those connections with you everywhere you go. Those early Christian hardcore concerts don’t come off as generously on the page as the PoC-fronted punk shows, but they were formative to my relationship with live music. Sure, Christian hardcore is certainly a bit silly—and I say that with love!—but there’s something to the earnestness with which Christian hardcore attempts to bend the religion for the weirdo believers. You could call it pandering, which it certainly can be, but even if you’re just going to live music for a good time, you’re looking for that escape from yourself in communion with kindred spirits. Christian hardcore makes that search literal, and it gave me the language for what I would come to love about playing in punk bands and attending punk shows. Even if I could never really immerse myself in that scene. 

But a strange thing happened since I wrote this piece in this strange time. I wrote the first draft prior to the pandemic, but edited it substantially during various stages of lockdown. I’ve only been to one live event since, and that was after I had let this piece go. When I first started, in some ways I was memorializing the spaces I had kind of left behind, spaces like church and those Christian hardcore shows, but then, it also became a bit of a memorial for mosh pits, too. So, there’s maybe a kind of wistfulness to the way I’m writing about live music here. I tried not to sentimentalize it too much, but I’m chock-full of sentiment lately. I haven’t been to church in quite some time, and so concerts and poetry readings had really become my new church. Now, I just commune with my dog and cat who are good, cuddly company, but that’s a much more give than a give-and-take relationship. I hadn’t expected this essay to be as cathartic as it ended up being. Maybe I’m just getting older. Mostly, I just miss all my friends! 

On the page, this piece structurally alternates between clinging to one side of the margins or the other. Sometimes single lines are justified to the right before swinging our eyes back to the left. The back and forth sway feels natural to several layers of the piece, including pondering one's place in the world, described in your words as "my own restless need to position myself." But I think there is more to the choice to create this swaying, pendulum movement on the page: could you tell us more about this decision?

My partner and my sister and many of my friends are talented visual artists, and whenever I watch them work, I get incredibly envious. Because I can’t do that! As a kid, pre-teen years, I really wanted to be a cartoonist. I would watch cartoons for hours and would watch the credits to see who drew everything. But I’ve never been able to manifest an image from my brain in any artful way. Sometimes, I would trace stuff and lie and say I drew it, but that was as close as I ever got besides being a habitual doodler. So, I’m always looking for a way to bring some cartoon energy to a piece. If for no other reason than to make my 10-year-old self proud.

From the beginning, I wanted to attempt something counter to linear salvation narratives. I love that you call it a pendulum. I wanted to avoid the conclusiveness of salvation. Like Saul, I get knocked down, but I don't get the new name or the heavenly makeover. Instead, I just fall back down. Making the text move on the page was really just to see what would come out if I wrote the sermon, so to speak, that was more like “Sinners in the Hands of a Playful God.” I’m not a preacher though; I’m not promising anybody anything, and so instead, I was playing a game of chase with the conceit. I kept fiddling with the margins and breaks until it flowed in a way that felt less like a body being forced around the mosh pit and more like a hand guiding you through the gaps. You look down at the end and there should be many footprints on the warehouse floor and most of them are Doc Martens. I wanted it to feel like we’re all stumbling together, so we’d all be alright. That the ground could shift again and what seemed resolved would suddenly be turbulent again, but that there was no need or desire to be saved from the restlessness.

I’ll add that the form was finicky. Every minor change meant I had to go back and reshape the whole thing. Finding the balance was always precarious, and so I’m glad that it eventually worked. I was trying to put people in my body which is a very jittery ride. I’m biracial, overweight, clumsy, riddled with anxiety, and I used to have a big ol’ fro, but I grew up in the suburbs with mostly white folks, so I’ve always occupied this paradoxical space of standing out while still being invisible. Punk is all about reclaiming and widening those margins, and so ultimately, I just let the anxious movement drive the pursuit.