As a young teen, Tyler Mills’s grandfather gifted her mother a box of boring, old World War II memorabilia. He advised her to be careful, that much of the material was still classified. At the time, Mills and her brother heard only the playful banter of a grandfather prone to tall tales. It was not until years later that Mills took a closer look.
The examination inspired a book of poetry, Hawk Parable (University of Akron, 2019), winner of the 2017 Akron Prize for Poetry, and now The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press, 2024), a soul-searching memoir of personal and ecological trauma, of family secrets and national secrets, and all the stories we don’t tell ourselves in order to live.
At the heart of The Bomb Cloud is Mills’s discovery that her grandfather participated in the most classified program ever known, the Manhattan Project, and what’s more, may have actually flown in the mission that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
Mills bravely faces this terrifying history and inheritance, and her book asks that we also not look away. The inclusion of a dozen-plus eerie, full-color collages—all of the author’s own making—assist toward that end. The result is a hybrid memoir, vulnerable and inventive, rife with lyricism and a rare critical nimbleness that refuses to bow to the apocalyptic weight of its subject. I had the pleasure of conversing with Mills over the phone and via email.
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The Rumpus: Can you talk about your title? Beyond an atomic mushroom cloud, which we see depicted in collage form throughout the book, what is the “bomb cloud”?
Tyler Mills: A major concern for me when I started was how to invite a reader into a journey where they feel welcomed into an exploration of what is “clouded” from view. I’ve always been fascinated with how this story is, on the one hand, so widely known, yet on the other hand is selective. So much of it is still secret. So much of it privileges whiteness, as the recent Oppenheimer film so clearly demonstrates.
How do we, in our present moment, both as individuals and as part of a collective, connect with and intersect with place and the stories it holds, especially when so much remains hidden? What kinds of stories do we bring to a place, and what kinds of stories are buried in the sand?
One of the early chapters in my book explores this idea with the metaphor of driving through the mountains and into, essentially, a very low cloud. As I was writing it, I kept thinking about how, as writers, sometimes we can only see the road just ahead of us, but we have to keep going. We are on the path, and we make the best choices we can with the information we have.
Rumpus: I had the feeling while reading of being inside a kind of thought cloud, of having entered this complex, dynamic space charged with electricity, emotion, and immediacy. I think a thought cloud, or any cloud, is, by definition, ephemeral [and] passing. The idea of somehow preserving that ephemeral storm is really powerful to me, and I think something your book does brilliantly.
Mills: That’s a beautiful way of reading my book. Thank you so much! As I was writing it, I really did feel like I needed to document my process—how and when I was exploring what I was exploring—because it felt like it not only helped me understand the subject but that the act of writing also was a way of capturing something impossible, something not understandable, and attempting to share it with others. I have to say, the material in this book truly terrifies me. I’m grateful The Bomb Cloud exists, but the more I know—and the more I realize what I’ll never know—the more I all over again encounter the enormity of the subject.
Rumpus: These are topics you’ve been investigating for many years. What was the path to this book? How did it start?
Mills: The Bomb Cloud originated in unanswered questions I had after I finished the poems in Hawk Parable. I wrote the oldest poem in Hawk Parable early in my MFA program when I was encountering the information I had and did not have about my grandfather’s military history. I saved the poem and didn’t include it in Tongue Lyre,but I found myself writing more about the circumstances, troubles, and science interconnected with his story. Hawk Parable began with his story, and then, as I learned more about nuclear history, the book also became an ecopoetic journey through the colonial mindset that led to the atomic tests that the US conducted in the Pacific, for example. I was wrestling with humanity’s creation of an infinitely destructive weapon. How can a poem encounter, speak truth to, question, that existential horror? Can it?
While I was finishing the book of poems [Hawk Parable], living in New Mexico at the time, I was also working on essays that eventually became some of the chapters of The Bomb Cloud. Living in New Mexico gave me a window into the fingerprints of the Manhattan project on the desert’s communities. I lived near enough to Los Alamos to hear a huge explosion the lab later claimed, for example. As I wrestled with those things, wrote those essays, I finished Hawk Parable,and I realized I had more questions I wanted to try to get to the root of. The Bomb Cloud became a story about touching those roots and following them as far as I could into darkness.
Rumpus: I’m curious about that research, which often seemed physically and emotionally dangerous, such as trips to the Trinity blast site and national war archives. How far does one dig after such buried material? How do you know when to stop?
Mills: As nonfiction writers, I think that we face this question, how deep to dig, no matter the subject. I love how the earth serves as a metaphor for this craft question, where the excavation of information or emotional truths becomes a geological exploration. You dig, and you encounter one layer of material, and dig deeper, and another, and even deeper, and perhaps that is where the historical shift, the radical change, takes place. I think that as a writer, one needs to think about your own comfort and then what’s guiding that comfort. Are you merely uncomfortable, or is there an actual danger? What is it? Naming it for yourself as it relates to the specific details of the subject you’re exploring can help answer this question, which I think is different for each person’s lived experiences and their individual relationship to the subject they’re exploring. Your question taps into larger questions about ethics too. I think if you can speak honestly about the risks you’re taking, it’s likely you’ll forge a deeper bond with your reader and your subject.
As to knowing when my research concluded, that’s something I think about a lot. In my case, I think I realized which of the walls I could best explore, and then, of course, new information came to light, which I won’t share since it’s a bit of a plot spoiler, and so I wrote the final chapter after I had completed the full draft of the book. Which absences tell their own story? Which redactions? I kept thinking about this as it related to my grandfather’s history. In my case, it was when I noticed a kind of pattern around which absences were in the record versus what could be found that I thought, “Aha, so the story lies here.”
Rumpus: Do you consider The Bomb Cloud a memoir, given its hybrid form?
Mills: A memoir is personal, a story of the self, and this book lands loudly in the “this is my story” category, even though it is also firmly a hybrid project, including research, travel writing, lyric essay, and a strong visual component.
An early chapter in the book, “Periphery,” includes my own black and white photographs. I think deciding I wanted those to be part of the writing process led to the idea to create the other visual/hybrid mixed-media pieces that fold into the book. When I knew I wanted to write about driving around the eastern edge of the White Sands Missile Range—an active military weapons testing area that includes the site of the Trinity bomb blast—I kept thinking about what is reproducible about a challenging landscape—a guarded site, a site that is the origin of violence militarily, environmentally, and medically—and what is not. I also found myself fixating on the idea of disposability. Who was considered disposable when that atomic test was conducted in secret? And what does it mean to work with a substance that, as far as the timeline for human beings are concerned, might as well be infinitely destructive? The idea of the disposable led me to choose a black and white disposable camera, which I brought with me on my journey. How much of those images could I control? How much would I not? What does it mean that the camera itself becomes waste? So the visual element became part of the subject, integral to it.
Rumpus: How did you progress from the disposable camera concept, which I love, by the way, to crafting sophisticated, intentional, full-color collages?
Mills: I was fortunate to work on the “Periphery” chapter at Yaddo. They gave me a little cabin in the woods where I was able to lay out the pieces of my collages and leave them there for days. I would spend hours looking at how the parts fit together, moving one small piece, thinking about it while I wrote the essay, and then returning to the table to reconsider it. Apartment living has never afforded me this luxury. The table must be cleared! So this became part of my process also. The “Periphery” essay and the “Afterimage” visual works happened simultaneously. The shape evolved organically as the subject evolved. Originally, I had made twelve of the Afterimage collages, but I decided ten should go in the book. Much later, I worked on the remaining four collages that are part of a later chapter in the book. I kept thinking about the shape of an atomic cloud, how horrifying it is and how it’s become almost kitschy. I wanted to invite a kind of looking that could provoke contemplation. And I also wanted to articulate the privilege that comes with these images: who had access to them versus who did not know what the blast was and was harmed by it.
Rumpus: Was it a battle to get Unbound Edition Press on board with these collages?
Mills: No, quite the opposite. I feel very fortunate that Unbound enthusiastically included them, and in full color! They accepted the project wholeheartedly and always wanted to publish the visual works. I never had to convince them to do it.
Rumpus: Were The Bomb Cloud’s collages your first serious foray into visual art making?
Mills: I’ve worked visually as a way of understanding the world for as long as I can remember, but never thought of myself as an artist. In high school and college, I took lots of art classes: photography, drawing, sculpture, performance theory. There are visual artists in my family, so I’ve been around a lot of art and have listened to art conversations from before I could talk. I wouldn’t say I’m trained in it, but it’s something I do when trying to understand something. My parents are visual artists, and so were my paternal grandparents, so I’ve seen them working through their ideas about the world visually. Maybe because of that, I find myself sketching or thinking about color and shape as another way into understanding multilayered or complex issues. I felt like the subject matter of The Bomb Cloud needed a visual component, not as an artifact or object, but more as a way for the brain to understand the research and the visual residue of the atomic material: photographic representations of the atomic clouds that the human eye could never perceive and then record and communicate.
Rumpus: Where are these collages now? Do you have plans to show them?
Mills: The visual works are in flat files now! They’ve never been shown or sold outside of the book. I’ve never exhibited them, but I’d like to look into it at some point!
Rumpus: Much of this book’s material, including these visual works, relates to the ongoing potential of human beings and natural ecosystems going extinct instantaneously. And yet, so much of the book is also concerned with the evolving self. Were you ever concerned about injecting the personal into such heavy subject matter? I imagine many might shrink from the idea, feel their experience unworthy, unequal to the material.
Mills: I think that the personal can link the individual with the global and invite a reader to really live inside the subject, especially when it might be huge, heavy, scary, or otherwise hard to access. If you’re worried about trivializing the material, finding a reason why you’re bringing the personal into the larger subject is helpful. I do think readers are hungry for the self that is doing the research, the living, the experiencing. Who am I? Why am I writing this? What is at stake for me? How does this all fit together? Those are craft questions that I think can be helpful with what Leigh Stein calls the genre of “memoir plus,” which folds the personal with other things like research. For me, the details of the mundane, the everyday, become part of the larger story since our lives are built by small moments mostly: the errand, the cup of coffee, the walk, the email. The huge things that happen to us in life often occur during small moments. I keep thinking about that, and I think that has informed my approach to craft in this book.
Rumpus: One of the more striking personal details throughout the book is that at different points while working on it, you were either pregnant or a new mother. Did you ever despair while writing or doing the research?
Mills: A couple of my friends told me that they couldn’t sleep after reading my book. They were lying awake, thinking about how close we are to destruction! I had no idea my book would have that effect. But wrestling with this topic was hard on me, yes, and I feel like the subject is behind me now. When I was writing The Bomb Cloud, I was completely immersed in it, though. I don’t know how I wrote the book pregnant and as a new mother. I really don’t. Making art during the early years of motherhood is an act of will, and some days I feel like all I can do is write a handful of sentences. But those do build over time. I was fortunate to receive a grant from the Café Royal Foundation, which helped with expenses and childcare. A requirement of the grant was also that I finish the book. They made me do it! I’m laughing to myself. But truly, I feel so fortunate. I’d never received a grant like that before, and it felt so validating to have their support, especially as a new mother.
Rumpus: How do you feel about making art today, with all the existential threats we face, from nuclear annihilation to climate change to AI, etcetera? More and more, art can start to feel frivolous, no?
Mills: I fundamentally disagree. If you are an artist, you make sense of the world through art. It is what you do. It isn’t a choice. I’m not able to work on clean energy. My brain is not creative in that way. I wish it were, maybe, but it’s not. If you’re hard-wired to make art or to write, then this is your way of contributing to humanity’s project, which is making sense of the self in relationship to the mysterious world in which we live. Why are we humans? Why are we here? Global capitalism has overlaid a set of values onto these questions to such a degree that we can’t even see that it’s happening most of the time. I mean, sure, what is art? Why make art? What’s it contributing? I don’t have the answer other than to say that if you must make art, you must continue. Art is a powerful and ancient way of expressing and connecting with the human spirit and all its challenges.
Rumpus: It reminds me of the cloud you mentioned earlier. We can’t see the road ahead or the territory that surrounds it. But we must keep going.
Mills: Exactly. And art, perhaps more than anything, lights our way.
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Author photograph by Arik Lubkin
