‘Memory Rehearsal’ Is Rooted in Santa Barbara

Queer history meets ancient theater and contemporary poetry in Eleni Sikelianos’s new book, Memory Rehearsal, which she’ll discuss as part of Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Parallel Stories series on May 21 (register at bit.ly/4daBSFx). David Starkey catches up with the Santa Barbara–raised poet and Brown University professor ahead of her visit to town.

You grew up in somewhat less than ideal circumstances in Goleta and Isla Vista, but it turns out that your great-grandfather Angelos was one of the most famous Greek poets of the 20th century, and your great-grandmother Eva was equally extraordinary. Connecting those two worlds makes for quite a story in your new memoir, Memory Rehearsal, but it must have been awfully difficult to weave all those threads together.

Yes, it was. In early drafts of the book, I only accounted for discovering Eva and Angelos’s history on my travels in Greece. But I realized that this collision of realities had to be part of it. I grew up on food stamps in Section 8 housing in Isla Vista, yet my great-grandparents were these illustrious figures! That’s been the process for me in each of these family histories — I’ve had to figure out how to include more of my own experience, as part of the ecosystem and context, to anchor the story.

Memory Rehearsal consists of photographs, multiple genres — nonfiction, fiction, poetry, drama — and a myriad of voices. What are the advantages, and maybe disadvantages, of a hybrid memoir? 

It’s really not possible for me to write these books differently. I don’t experience reality as an overarching narrative, and I have come to think of those narratives as imposed fictions, in fact, as ways to contain and curtail experience. I don’t think it’s wrong to link them to the various ways corporate structures attempt to abstract and extract life — and by life, I mean all living things, which in their various modes of living and interaction are by nature myriad in form. In all my writing, I’m really trying to create a living thing, and the variation in and interaction between forms is part of that. It definitely makes the books hard to categorize: Are they poetry? Nonfiction? Fiction? Picture books? They are all of those things. I’ve used the term “hybrid,” but only because I haven’t yet come up with a better word. The multiple forms are kind of like the way intertidal zones work, with creatures that adapt to overlapping and shifting environments, sometimes submerged in salt water and sometimes baking in the sun. One of my poet friends uses the term “chimeric,” which I like quite a lot, in that it’s an animal made up of different kinds of animals. 

So many useful metaphors! What does your ideal reader take away from the experience of reading your book?

I’m currently reading How Forests Think by Eduardo Kohn, and how he describes form has been helping put something into focus for me. He calls “form-making” a thing all living creatures do, “a strange but nonetheless worldly process of pattern production and propagation.” What I love about that is how it takes form out of the static ways we tend to think about it, especially in relation to art and literature, and puts it into the realm of life processes. My ideal reader will experience this book as a living thing, with all the clear and all the messy parts of communication, all the various ways we signal to and understand or misunderstand each other, sensed and allowed!

Can you give us a preview of your reading at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art on May 21? There’s such a variety of material to draw on, I imagine it will be quite exciting.

I just did the East Coast book launch last night, and it was so much fun! I projected images from the book, and there were even a few performative elements. Because the event is in my hometown, I’ll probably focus on the parts that take place in Santa Barbara, and the sections with my grandfather, who lived in a trailer on Mountain Drive. 

Finally, as an emeritus English professor at Santa Barbara City College, I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about your time there. Any memories you’d like to share?

SBCC was so formative! What would happen without this affordable option for students who don’t necessarily think of themselves as collegebound? Professor John Matsui, who taught biology, was incredibly inspiring. Although I didn’t continue in biology, what I was encouraged to learn is still central to how I write and think. (Professor Matsui’s at Berkeley now, where he founded a program to encourage low-income, first-generation, and students of color in biology.)

City College is really where this story starts, in that I was a student there when I first left for a summer hitchhiking trip to Greece, which stretched into a year of hitchhiking in Europe and Africa. That trip is where I first discovered key elements of this family history.