Matthew J. C. Clark's "Bjarki, Not Bjarki"

Matthew J. C. Clark received his BA in religious studies from Middlebury College in 2004 and his MFA in Nonfiction Writing from The University of Iowa in 2009. He is a MacDowell Fellow and has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and The Maine Arts Commission. His writing has appeared in The Morning News, Ecotone, The Antioch Review, The Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, The Seneca Review, and True Story, among other places.

Clark applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Bjarki, Not Bjarki: On Floorboards, Love, and Irreconcilable Differences, and reported the following:

From page 99 of Bjarki, Not Bjarki:

…The wonton soup was like nothing I had ever tasted. This awareness arose in me, it seemed, nondualistically, and with it came the feeling that I was imitating something. A book maybe. But, I said, what I want to make clear is that I am not saying that I do or do not like eggplants. It’s just that now (some of the time) I can accept the diversity of my feelings for them. In fact, I’ll admit, I like their decorative potential. Metaphorically and phonetically, they’re stupendous. Baba ghanoush, ratatouille, etc., etc.

And Bjarki—god bless him, he was nodding along like he had no idea what I was talking about.

He said, How long is The Book going to be?

I swear, Tourette’s appeals to me. It has its own perfections. I love chopsticks and Tootsie Rolls and dragonflies. I love sunshine and whiskey and the way blue sky leaks into a daytime moon, flooding its craters so that the satellite appears transparent. I love purple too and smelling and your enjoying face. I have never been as cool as I wanted to be…

Page 99 of Bjarki, Not Bjarki passes the Page 99 Test! (I love passing tests.) You know, this project started as a magazine style essay about a young man in Maine (Bjarki) who manufactures the world’s widest, purest, most metaphorical pine floorboards you can buy. Only now do I see that The Book turned into a book about me figuring out (or failing to figure out) (or trying to figure out) how to love the world. In this scene, on page 99, Bjarki and I are at a Thai restaurant in central Maine. I am feeling frustrated by my inability to connect with him. And then, suddenly, despite all of my judgements about his political views and his blustering bravado, when Bjarki asks me how long The Book is going to be, I find myself loving him. It happens without me even trying to love him. We might even wonder if maybe I have loved him all along and that it was this dinner and his question that revealed that love to me?

Of course, there’s all kinds of double entendre going on with the eggplant, except that in someways (most ways) the eggplant is a red herring (a redplant?). I sort of want the reader to be disoriented by the eggplant (Did you know that an eggplant, like a banana, is classified as a berry (But what is a berry)?), unsure of why she’s reading about eggplants in a book (ostensibly) about floors. We make so many assumptions and judgements in our lives, have so many strong feelings about each other, about Politics—whatever they are—about the nature of an eggplant, etc. What if we were able to put aside those assumptions and judgements and feelings and were actually able to see the eggplant as an eggplant?

Visit Matthew J. C. Clark's website.

--Marshal Zeringue