DEPTH CONTROL
Depth Control is an experimental exploration by an essayist, aiming to make sense of and reflect on personal identity, belonging, and the choices that shape us. It captures a rich, sensory understanding of coming of age, experiencing sexuality, contemplating gender, and navigating relationships. While the themes may be timeless—a young woman finding her way, understanding her body, and dealing with the end of one relationship while considering new ones—the narrative itself breaks traditional forms, seamlessly blending different modes of existence. Throughout, the body remains central, serving as the primary means of engaging with and understanding the world.
Experimental Essays
ISBN: 978-1-956692-94-5
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Depth Control is an experimental exploration by an essayist, aiming to make sense of and reflect on personal identity, belonging, and the choices that shape us. It captures a rich, sensory understanding of coming of age, experiencing sexuality, contemplating gender, and navigating relationships. While the themes may be timeless—a young woman finding her way, understanding her body, and dealing with the end of one relationship while considering new ones—the narrative itself breaks traditional forms, seamlessly blending different modes of existence. Throughout, the body remains central, serving as the primary means of engaging with and understanding the world.
Experimental Essays
ISBN: 978-1-956692-94-5
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Depth Control is an experimental exploration by an essayist, aiming to make sense of and reflect on personal identity, belonging, and the choices that shape us. It captures a rich, sensory understanding of coming of age, experiencing sexuality, contemplating gender, and navigating relationships. While the themes may be timeless—a young woman finding her way, understanding her body, and dealing with the end of one relationship while considering new ones—the narrative itself breaks traditional forms, seamlessly blending different modes of existence. Throughout, the body remains central, serving as the primary means of engaging with and understanding the world.
Experimental Essays
ISBN: 978-1-956692-94-5
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Praise for DEPTH CONTROL
“From the onset of this luscious, incandescent collection, Lauren W. Westerfield slips fluidly and organically from line to line, paragraph to paragraph; these essays are isles of archipelagos. Her polaroid-crisp memories unfold in and out of brackets, wrest between em-dashes—here the writer is sylph, wandering “back into again” to wonder at various hungers—of the body, of flesh, of time and place and circumstance—always “observing from the inside out” like the cat of a neighbor/former lover. In these intricate, light-filled islands, Westerfield attempts in true etymological fashion to approach, to try, to get closer to various truths. What unfolds are unforgettable passages that range from bruxism to past relationships, dressing up, growing up, and forming a self somehow apart from all the noise of what surrounds oneself as a child. I’ve never read (semi) autobiographical quite like this, and still feel its glow upon my pores.”
—Diana Khoi Nguyen, Author of Root Fractures and Ghost Of, Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry
“Frank in its imagery, intoxicating in its language, Depth Control is an examination of sublime rupture that is both physical and ephemeral—a vivisection of the self and its desires, injuries, acceptances, and rejections. Westerfield draws us into that hypnotic state between waking and sleep, where terror and joy are separated by the most delicate of membranes. Enthralling, daring, vulnerable, and seductive, these essays push past the boundaries of contemplation and into the realm of sorcery and enchantment.”
—Kim Barnes, Author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
“’I was fourteen, and I was inside the dream, which happened in my brain, inside my body,’ writes Lauren Westerfield at a key moment early on in Depth Control. It is a moment of commentary in a reconsideration of an episode from which the narrator finds herself exterior now, marveling. But nothing externalized stays outside in these dynamic personal essays of striking self-consciousness and swift impact. Even, especially when “inside a busy mind is not an easy place to be,” this collection, this gendered journey toward embodiment, is a great pleasure to read and an achievement to celebrate.”
—Brian Blanchfield, Author of Proxies, Winner of the 2016 Whiting Award in Nonfiction
“I’m obsessed with the ways Lauren Westerfield’s Depth Control plunges inside the body to understand its workings, its confessions, and the history it holds. Through lyric essay-explorations—with lines staggering and darting like confessions, and pocked with bracketed, tooth-like inclusions of self-awareness—Depth Control draws us close while redefining the narrative of approach: “What was important was the letting—the letting and the choosing.” I’m completely immersed.”
—Kristine Langley Mahler, Author of A Calendar Is a Snakeskin and Curing Season: Artifacts.
“Lauren Westerfield’s Depth Control is an intimate love letter to her body, its scrapes and tensions, its frictions with other bodies. Depth Control invites us into these places of contact where something—or someone—gets under the skin, exposing blood, touching a nerve, stirring up one emotion after another.”
—Paige Sweet, Ph.D., Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Playlist for DEPTH CONTROL
About LAUREN W. WESTERFIELD
Lauren W. Westerfield is a writer from Northern California. She teaches at Washington State University, where she serves as Editor-in-chief of Blood Orange Review, and lives in Spokane, Washington.
