Category Archives: Interviews with Nonfiction Writers

A Conversation with Ann de Forest Editor of the Anthology WAYS OF WALKING by Amy Beth Sisson

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

A Conversation with Ann de Forest
Editor of the Anthology WAYS OF WALKING
New Door Press, 258 pages
Interview by Amy Beth Sisson

I met writer Ann de Forest many years ago, but during the pandemic we formed a new connection around poetry. We became critique partners and attended Claire Oleson’s Poetic Anatomies class. Ann is an accomplished writer in multiple genres who often focuses on the resonance of place. When she mentioned she was editing an anthology of essays about walking, I knew it was something that I, as a walker, reader, and writer, wanted to get my hands on. After reading the advance reader copy, I was impressed not only by the excellent essays but by the thoughtful structure of the collection. I was delighted to have this conversation with Ann about the project. (The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.) —ABS, April 2021

Amy Beth: Tell me how you came to edit this compelling collection of essays about walking.

Ann: In 2016, I was involved in Swim Pony’s Cross Pollination artists residency with Adrienne Mackey, JJ Tiziou, and Sam Wend. Together we decided our collaborative project would be to walk around the perimeter of Philadelphia. That experience, which I wrote about in an article for “Hidden City”, changed my perspective on many things: the city, my writing, and especially walking. After, whenever I told people about that project, I was amazed by how many wanted to tell me their own stories about walking. People like to talk about where they’ve walked and how they’ve walked. It struck me that there were all these possibilities for writing about walking.

Amy Beth: It’s funny that you mention people wanting to tell you their stories because after I read the collection, I wanted to tell you one of my walking stories. When my youngest was in sixth grade, we lived in Silicon Valley. He walked a mile to school. He was one of the few students from our neighborhood who did this. Some parents expressed their concern for his safety. I felt like they were worrying about the wrong risk. They were worrying about stranger danger which is rare, rather than the slow dangers of obesity or of climate change.

Ann: I love the idea that we focus on the wrong danger. On the first day of our walk around Philadelphia we encountered that. People at a driving range on City Line Avenue were saying, oh, you better be careful when you get up to X part of the city. These where white guys, and their fear of other parts of the city is fundamentally racist. It’s all the same city, but we mentally create these danger zones in our heads. And of course, that wasn’t the experience for us at all. The most dangerous places on our walk were the many places not designed for pedestrians.

When you walk you see how connected everything is. That one thing flows into the other. The other thing your story makes me think of is how the automobile dominates and controls our environment. So the “wrong danger” is not just the slow dangers like climate change. Cars themselves are lethal. Think how many car accidents there are. Yet we’ve built this society and infrastructure around the automobile and label that mode of transportation “safe.”

Amy Beth: This makes me think of the essay in the collection by Tom Zoellner, “Nobody Walks to LAX” about airports. They’re not created with walking in mind. That was one of the most surprising stories for me.

Ann: One of Tom’s great insights is how hard it is to walk in or out of airports but you walk so much once you get inside. Inside the airport walking is demanded of you. And it’s not the most pleasant walking.

Amy Beth: Several stories explore how identity influences walking. In your essay “Aberrant Angeleno,” you talk of your vulnerability as a woman walking alone. There is that striking moment in Lena Popkin’s essay “Tread Lightly” where men ogle her while on a walk with her oblivious father and brother and her struggle to get the men who love her to understand. Dwight Sterling Dunston’s essay “A Walk with Hawk” tells a compelling story of his father’s peril while walking in a white neighborhood as a Black man. Can you talk a little bit about that contradiction of things being both safer than we think they are and for some more dangerous?

Ann: Who you are influences how you walk. For some people, walking is not as easy as for others. Walking while Black is perilous. We see the tragedy of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder and other stories about people who are unsafe in certain places or neighborhoods. Places anybody who’s white doesn’t have to think about being in. It was important to me to get that perspective.

Victoria Farmer, who has cerebral palsy, wrote about her experience walking in London. She wanted to walk through London like Virginia Woolf, but she had to come to terms with her differences. She couldn’t walk as freely and unencumbered as Woolf. There’s this moment where she and her husband are waiting for a bus on a day that she is using her wheelchair. The bus passes her by because there is room for only one wheelchair. Disability is another identity that influences one’s way of walking in the world.

Amy Beth: In those diverse ways, the anthology takes the reader through history, time, and necessity.

Ann: Necessity is an important consideration. There’s a story in the anthology where the walk was a necessity. Yasser Allaham in “Crossing to Jordan” wrote of having to leave Syria in 2013 during the war. His city and his university were bombed. His family got out but he, because of various technicalities, was not able to go with them across the border. He spends a month in a no-man’s land between Syria and Jordan, trying to figure out how to get there. It reminds us that not all walks are leisurely or planned. And this same forced movement is happening right now. I’ve heard two million people have left Ukraine, many on foot. [Note: as of our conversation on 3/14/2022. The number is now much higher.]

Amy Beth: In the preface you say walking is subversive. Tell me more about that.

Ann: Walking is counter to the things our culture values. We live in a society that values speed, efficiency, and the arrival more than the journey. Walking contradicts all those things.

Nancy Brokaw’s essay, “The Hiker and the Flâneur” opens the collection with a history of walking and the ways writers and thinkers have looked at walking. Both the idea of a hike and the idea of being a flaneur, or someone who ambles through the city, are inventions of the modern era going back to the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. They arise from the anxiety that’s attached to living in a fast-paced civilization. Walking is an antidote. Our culture tells us we have to have all this stuff to get through daily life. To walk is to say, I have my own body and my two legs, and I don’t really need any more than that.

Kalela Williams, at the end of her essay, “The Three Century Walk” talks about marching in protest after the killing of George Floyd, and the power of bodies walking together demanding justice. The protest marches of the summer of 2020 belong to a long legacy of walking alongside others in solidarity and protest to effect change. That’s another form of subversive walking.

Amy Beth: That brings me to Mark Geanuleas, whose subversive act is to walk absolutely everywhere.

Ann: Mark made a decision that he wasn’t going to use any other form of transportation. He lives in Lancaster and his parents live in Elkins Park. If he wants to visit them, he must decide to walk about seventy-five miles to Philadelphia. He also does a very long walk every year. For him it’s a philosophical choice about how to live. For Mark, to live fully in the present, walking is the only option.

Amy Beth: Which shows in another way the different ways people with different bodies experience walking. I was also struck by the idea that walking allows us to connect more deeply with history.

Ann: Kalela Williams writes about giving tours of Black history in Philadelphia so that people will see things that they might not notice otherwise because not all of it is acknowledged or commemorated. Walking in her case is a kind of commemoration and a way to be a witness to the past. When you walk you’re so much in the present tense, but I think you’re also more attuned to the fact that others have walked before you.

Jeeyeun Lee is a visual artist who has done amazing walking projects. For her the walk itself has a performative aspect as well as an aspect of discovery and witness, it’s almost like a form of moving land acknowledgment. In her essay “100 Miles in Chicagoland” she explores how Chicago got to be what it is today, with buildings and highways constructed on what were once native paths and native lands. She is walking with the heightened consciousness of what was there before, exposing the theft and displacement that underlies American expansion and settlement.

In a similar vein, Nathaniel Popkin’s essay “Finding Purchase: Walks of Witness on Stolen Land” is about tracing the steps of the Walking Purchase, the theft of Delaware Indian lands in 1735. He conceives his walk as an act of penance, and so it’s very ritualistic. He’s experiencing the river he loves and grew up alongside, but that he also realizes is part of stolen land. He links this to a walk along another river, in Chile, also wrested from the Indigenous inhabitants to build a hydroelectric dam.

Amy Beth: I noticed the strong connections between walking and writing. Kathryn Hellerstein in her essay “Walking on Shabbes” drafts poems while walking.

Ann: Yes, and Rahul Mehta in his essay “Tunnels” writes that he is tapping the essay we are reading on his phone while walking in Carpenter’s Woods.

Christine Nelson’s essay “Five Thousand Walks Toward Thoreau’s Journal” is about the relationship for Thoreau between walking and writing. In his diaries, he’s “keeping track” of the things that happen to him. I love that image because the idea of keeping track is related to the tracks you make while you’re walking. And that idea that the marks you make on a page look like tracks on a page. For Thoreau, it’s not just about walking; it’s about walking in order to be a writer, to be a thinker, to experience the world in a sauntering way. It’s not that there’s one or the other, but that those things become part of a holistic creative life.

Amy Beth: What are some of the other themes or surprises that emerged?

 Ann: I was surprised so many writers wrote about their fathers. There are a few beautiful essays about walking with fathers but only one essay about a mother: Mickey Herr’s essay, “A Walker’s Paradise.” It explores how her recovery from leukemia and getting stronger intersects with her mother’s getting weaker and more immobile. I was also surprised that given the power of nocturnal walks in literature there were only a few on the topic. Justin Coffin’s “The Way Home” is about walking through suburban subdivisions at night; it’s a walk he doesn’t want to be taking. When he arrives he experiences a revelation about home.

It was a delight to discover how the essays speak to each other. The anthology feels like this great conversation. Read all the essays and you may end up with an expanded view about what walking is and maybe it will encourage you to go out for a walk yourself.

Amy Beth Sisson lives in a small town outside of Philadelphia. Her day job is in software development. She tells programmers what business people want and tells business people why they can’t quite have it. She recently completed the University of Pennsylvania’s online Modern Poetry course, ModPo. Her fiction has appeared in Enchanted Conversation and Sweet Tree Review. Her non-fiction for children has appeared in Highlight’s High Five and Fun for Kidz magazines.

 

Ann de Forest’s work often centers on the resonance of place. Her short stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in Coal Hill Review, Unbroken, Noctua Review, Cleaver Magazine, Found Poetry Review, The Journal, Hotel Amerika, Timber Creek Review, Open City, and PIF, and in Hidden City Philadelphia, where she is a contributing writer. Her anthology WAYS OF WALKING WAS inspired by having twice walked the entire perimeter of Philadelphia, the city she’s called home for three decades.

An Interview with Kathleen Courtenay Stone, author of the collective biography, THEY CALLED US GIRLS

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

A Conversation with Kathleen Courtenay Stone, author of the collective biography, THEY CALLED US GIRLS: STORIES OF FEMALE AMBITION FROM SUFFRAGE TO MAD MEN
Cynren Press, 222 pages
Interview by Jean Hey

I met Kathleen Stone during a residency at Bennington College while we were working toward our MFA degrees. We were both from Boston, and Kathleen invited me to attend BookLab, a vibrant literary salon that she runs. But our friendship really took off in coffee shops. Once a month we met — and would still, if it weren’t for Covid — to discuss our projects, share writing advice and cheer each other on. Kathleen was working on a collective biography about women in male-oriented jobs in the mid-twentieth century, when prejudice and gender discrimination were the order of the day. She told me she was struggling with certain aspects of it, such as whether or not to insert herself into the narrative. She didn’t ask me to read any of it, and it seemed simpler to us both not to share work. As her project neared publication, though, I welcomed the chance to interview her about it. After reading an advance copy, I was struck by how skillfully she’d woven her own story into the biographies, and how it offered echoes and contrast to the women’s experiences from a generation older.
—Jean Hey, March 2022

Jean Hey: Tell us how you decided on the title for the book, which contains a diverse collection of oral histories that span several decades.

Kathleen Stone: The title comes from something one of the women featured in the book told me. When Rya Zobel graduated from law school in 1956, she couldn’t get a job with a law firm. Firms were not hiring women and, as she said, “We were not called women; we were called girls.” This turned out to be pretty typical of the era. Women, no matter how talented and accomplished, were thought of as ‘girls,’ and incapable of succeeding in certain fields where men were dominant. As it turned out, Rya Zobel was the first woman to serve on the federal court in Massachusetts. She has been a judge for forty years, proving just how wrong men were to underestimate her. 

Similar to Judge Zobel, the other women I write about were successful in their own fields, including medicine, science and executive leadership, to give a few examples. The women are pretty much contemporaries – all born before 1935 – and they came of age in the middle of the 20th century when women were expected to stay home, or at least not to take “men’s” jobs.  But these women had ambitions that exceeded such expectations. My goal in writing the book was to find out where their ambition came from and how it flowered despite an adverse environment.

JH: Female ambition is the most obvious theme in this biography, and many of the women in this book are remarkably single-minded in their pursuit of their career. Did you enter Bennington’s MFA program with the same focused determination, in your case to write this book?

KS: Yes, I arrived at Bennington with my book project in hand. I had already interviewed some of the women who appear in the book and written a few early drafts of chapters, but things were in a very preliminary state. I had doubts whether this could really turn into a book. The slogan of the MFA program was “Read 100 Books, Write One.” As I struggled to figure out what I might accomplish, that became my holy grail.

JH: What made you want to write this particular book and to focus on female ambition?

KS: When I was young, I fantasized about women of my parents’ generation who had what were then considered “men’s” jobs. After working for almost 30 years as a lawyer, I found myself still wondering about women like that. Where had their ambition come from and how did they pursue it, particularly when the hurdles they faced were so much higher than those I faced? Being at a stage in my own career when I wanted a new challenge, I decided to find out. From there, the book took shape.

JH: This book took ten years to write. How did your vision for it change along the way?

KS: I should confess that ten years is a modest estimate. In reality, it took longer. The biggest change in my work was how personal my writing became. At the start, I was writing in a very impersonal way, entirely in the third person. Also, I stuck strictly to what was said in the interviews, without even minor edits. That was a product of my legal background: when you quote testimony, you don’t change even a comma. But writing a book is obviously different. I had to become comfortable with editing for clarity. The real breakthrough, though, was putting myself in the book. All my teachers and classmates at Bennington could see this is what I needed to do, but it took me a while to see it for myself. I ended up adding mini-chapters I call intermezzos, where I describe some episodes in my own life. I use them to compare how things were for me, a baby boomer, to what an older generation of women experienced.

Women, no matter how talented and accomplished, were thought of as ‘girls,’ and incapable of succeeding in certain fields where men were dominant.

JH: The seven women here are inspiring, not only because of their achievements but for their humility, drive and continued engagement in the world. Why these women? How did you find them, and how did you decide who would make it into the final book?

KS: To find the women, I relied on a combination of strategy and serendipity. On the strategic side, I started by reading books on women’s history, mostly for general background but also to generate a list of notable women. I added to this list through Internet research, always keeping in mind that I wanted diversity of profession, race and ethnicity. In a few instances, I targeted a “dream” interview, but knew that a personal introduction would help open the door. Friends and colleagues were generous in that regard. Also, when friends heard what I was working on, they sometimes volunteered suggestions. Some terrific interviews came about because of those spontaneous conversations.

In the end, I had more good candidates than I could use, which meant I had to make some tough decisions. I wanted to illustrate what things were like in the 50-year period between 1920 and 1970 when, statistics show, the percentage of women in male-dominated professions did not increase for a full half-century. To make the final cut and decide the sequence of chapters, I thought a lot about the era they lived in and tried to illustrate how opportunities evolved even though, overall, women’s progress was static.

JH: Time has a strong presence in this book. Not only did their careers in some instances span fifty years, but you interviewed these women at the end of their lives. Did you find any common threads in how time played on their memories? Would they have done anything differently, as they looked back on their lives and careers?

KS: You’re right about time having a strong presence in the book. Sometimes when I was talking to a woman, it felt as though we were time-traveling together, all the way back to her childhood. She was my guide, but sometimes a question prompted her to reflect, or bring a heightened intensity to the memory. Mildred Dresselhaus, for instance, achieved tremendous things in science, but clearly had not forgotten her impoverished childhood.

As for doing something differently, I think Cordelia Hood, who had as much experience in intelligence as her husband, probably wished for an honest conversation with him about how both of them could fully realize their professional potential in the CIA, where they worked after the Second World War. But given the era’s narrow conceptions about the work women should do, they never did. Nor did the agency break from its circumscribed thinking and give her the kind of recognition that her husband enjoyed.

JH: One of the things I love about this book is the sense of your growing relationships with each of these women over the course of your interviews. There’s a sweet moment in your interview with the nonprofit activist Frieda Garcia, when she says, “Talking to you…  I now realize, I should have asked my mother a hell of a lot of questions.” I get a sense that these women might have started out reluctant interviewees, but warmed to it with time, and ultimately found it gratifying. Can you comment on the trajectory of the interview process?

KS: Some were reluctant to start, others not at all. You mention Frieda Garcia. She was reluctant but only because she’s so modest. She didn’t think she fit the mold of what I was looking for, because she is not a doctor or a lawyer. But she held leadership positions in social service agencies, was on a boatload of nonprofit boards and spent her life as a community activist. We developed a rapport, which led her to reflect on what she might have asked her mother. That, in turn, triggered my own memories of missed opportunities with my own mother.

JH: I find it curious that at a time when society expected women to be housewives, so many of these women had fathers who encouraged them to seek fulfilling work. I wonder if this is tied to the fact that all but one of the women were from immigrant families.

KS: I do think immigration played a role. Several of the families came to this country with the hope they would find better opportunities than what they had left behind. The fathers of these women felt driven to succeed, and passed that on to their daughters as much as to their sons. That was definitely true for Dr. Muriel Petioni, whose family came to the United States to escape colonial oppression in Trinidad. Her father became a doctor and she followed in his footsteps, attending medical school at Howard University, his alma mater. On the other hand, fathers were not a factor in every woman’s life, at least after a certain point. Frieda Garcia came from the Dominican Republic when she was eight, when her parents’ marriage was on the rocks. Her mother, not her father, was the constant in her life. Rya Zobel, who became a federal judge, lost both parents at the end of World War II in Germany. She arrived in 1946 on one of the first ships to bring refugee children to this country. The best I can say is that lives are complex, and while immigration and fathers are two factors that played a role, neither explains everything.

JH: Each biography stands alone, but together they form a vibrant collage that shows that every path to professional success is a little different from the others. Near the end you write, “In my head is a Venn diagram of the women’s lives, with overlapping circles and clusters of experience.” What would you say were the most significant “overlapping circles”?

KS: Education was key for all the women. Without higher education, these women would not have had the careers they did. The one exception was Dahlov Ipcar. As an artist, she did not need a degree. Still, she had grown up in a house where art was made every day. That gave her an exposure that school learning could never match.

Families were also important in every case. That is how values are passed on, expectations set and encouragement given. It sounds so basic, even old-fashioned, but one way or another, families were the bedrock for these women.

I will add that the prevalence of immigration was, to me, a striking conclusion. Of seven women in the book, three were born outside the country and another three had at least one parent who was an immigrant. I think that probably was a factor in the values and expectations the families passed on.

JH: Racial prejudice was an obstacle that the Black doctor Muriel Petioni faced in addition to sexism. Yet it seems that she, like the other women, wanted to talk more about overcoming barriers than dwell on discrimination she suffered. Do you agree?

KS: You’re right about Dr. Muriel Petioni. She experienced not only discrimination but actual Jim Crow segregation in the South. In our conversation, she wanted to share how she used her perch as a Black woman doctor to affect change in the Harlem community and through national organizations. In the racial dimension of her life, she stood apart from other women in the book, but was similar in having a positive outlook, despite having faced steep barriers.

JH: You say at one point that you came to an interview with certain of your own perceptions and misperceptions. What assumptions did you have to rid yourself of during the course of all these interviews?

KS: My experience of the world is colored by having grown up in an affluent, predominately white suburb with good public schools. Given who my parents were, I had a clear path to college and encouragement to find interesting work after that. I also assumed, and my parents never contradicted me, that I would be financially self-sufficient. Not everyone grew up in similar circumstances, not by a long shot. I had to make sure that my assumptions about how life unfolds did not overtake the stories I was actually hearing, because these women came from a variety of backgrounds, and a different historical era.

Interview edited by Andrea Caswell

Kathleen Stone knows something about female ambition. As a lawyer, she was a law clerk to a federal judge, a litigation partner in a law firm, and senior counsel at a financial institution. She also taught seminars on American law in six foreign countries, including as a Fulbright Senior Specialist. Kathleen’s work has been published in Ploughshares, Arts Fuse, Los Angeles Review of Books, Timberline Review, and The Writer’s Chronicle. She holds graduate degrees from Boston University School of Law and the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in Boston. To learn more about the author or They Called Us Girls, visit her website kathleencstone.com

 

Jean Hey’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Plain Dealer, The Chicago Tribune, Solstice Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, The MacGuffin and Arrowsmith Journal. She holds a dual-genre MFA in fiction and nonfiction from Bennington College, where she won the Sven Birkerts Award for nonfiction. She is at work on a collection of memoiristic essays about immigration and identity.

 

 

 

A MEMOIR CONVERSATION with David Marchino and Beth Kephart

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

A MEMOIR CONVERSATION
with David Marchino and Beth Kephart

A former student (now a writer and a teacher) finds himself in his once-teacher’s memoir. A conversation ensues about mirrors, facsimiles, and blankness.

Hello, friend. Before we get into the thick of this, I’d like to thank you for having this conversation with me. I’d been anticipating Wife | Daughter | Self for a while now. I must admit though that one of the reasons I was excited was that in a few places throughout the book I show up and rear my head. Just last night, I read one of these sections—“The Four Times I Became a Teacher”, which originally appeared in LitHub—to my partner just before bed.

My reading started as a joke, some faux bravado: I’m in a book. But that section so moves me, and it did last night. I hear your voice in those words, and, boy, does your writing insist on being read aloud. It became an intervention almost, my reading: That’s who I was then, and that’s where I came into now. Reading it aloud, then, closed a distance for me.

I know you’ve recorded yourself reading the book, a days-long marathon session. What was that experience like for you?

—David

Dear Mr. Marchino—

Remember all the different ways you would sign your emails to me, and to others—your great talent at the sign-off? May your jawn be pristine, you’d write. Keep Warm and See You Tuesday. Or: Walk. Don’t Run. I am thinking about that now as we have this email conversation—how to address you, what to say, how we will begin (now that we’ve begun) and how we will sign off. 

But what I want to say first is that having you read WDS and having a conversation about it with you is, to me, a big thing. WDS is a memoir about relationships, of course—who we are in relationship to others and who we are in relationship to ourselves. But it is also a meta creation, a reflection on memoir as genre and craft woven into the memoir that is being made and unmade. I learned memoir by reading, writing, and teaching it, by walking into a classroom with students such as yourself and realizing all I didn’t know and had better find out soon. You are in the book because you’d have to be in the book. And what a privilege it has been to watch you emerge as a teacher in your own right—you teaching memoir to communities of those who grieve, teaching memoir to the young, writing memoir as you teach memoir. Teachers open the door, make room for the next. The next lives inside WDS, which is to say, you do

To answer your question: Reading this book aloud for the Blackstone audio version was tremendously challenging. There were the technical bits—the cold room, the Covid era, the fact that I was a child lisper and still have trouble saying some words. But mostly it was deeply emotional. It was like reading one long prose poem and not trying to cry when confronted with the hard stuff again. I actually got very emotional reading the pages you reference here. Because, gosh, being a teacher is really beautiful and exceptionally hard. I was thinking how I almost blew it with you, while trying to advise you on your honors thesis. How I pushed you to the brink—and yet you didn’t fall.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is Charles D’Ambrosio and his book of essays, Loitering. Do you remember how you’d go to the Penn bookstore and read the volume, sitting on the floor? Well, there’s an essay in there called “Any Resemblance to Anyone Living,” where D’Ambrosio is talking about what it’s like to find himself in the pages of an ex-lover’s novel. WDS is memoir, of course, but doesn’t the D’Ambrosio essay echo for us—this experience of being in another’s book, this experience of writing another into your book? 

Loitering–yes! That was my escape text back in college. When I was overwhelmed by class readings, I’d drift into the bookstore and hide somewhere with that book. Thinking about the essay you mention, I’m drawn to D’Ambrosio’s use of the word “redecorated”. He’s portrayed in a work by an ex-lover but finds that this representation is redecorated: his rough edges are smoothed out. His character is neutered, he says, less interesting. I read this and think shag carpet over hardwood, a bathroom tile wallpapered over. Not bad necessarily but absent something. Robbed of a certain, well, character.

When I’ve taught memoir, I’ve always stressed that writers should take care of their characters, but that language is reductive, too, not far from D’Ambrosio’s redecorating. Really, I should have said, “Show your characters from all sides. Give us the good and the bad.” That’s the trick, I think. Just as no one wants to be made out as the antagonist–and I wonder if such a thing can even exist in a memoir–nobody wants to be sanctified. Our nostrils burn should the writer blow too much smoke. Honest, I think the greatest kindness a memoirist can do for the folks they write about is show them as richly complex as they are. Nobody really wants to be damned or revered, only seen. And seen completely.

I think that’s why reading myself in that section of WDS impacted me. It was clear you had seen me, and you were sharing that in this book. You did push me with that thesis, but, also, I was a bit of a jerk. You were my writing coach, and I was skipping practice.

On the subject of being written, you’re the main character of this book, but what I find interesting is how much time you spend looking to others. Even the title is telling, you define yourself by what you call “the apostrophes”: someone’s wife, someone’s daughter. Your exploration of self–your reflection–came through the lens of so many others. Could you talk about this decision, or why you decided to structure the book this way?

A Mirror,
—David

Dear A Mirror: One of the best parts of (still) learning how to teach is trying to imagine the right books for the right writers at the right time. Loitering was, at that time, the perfect book for you. D’Ambrosio is, actually, always current, always pressing, and this notion of his, of redecorating—which you beautifully articulate (hey, did you ever think about teaching D’Ambrosio yourself?)—holds great currency with me. So do your words about burning nostrils and anti-antagonists and wanting to be seen.

(Also, I don’t think I’ll ever quite be able to think of you as a jerk, A Mirror. Just as a student writing the hardest story of his life. A story with consequences.)

WDS is, in many ways, a recursive book. I return to themes, reexamine assertions, untie the conclusions, start again. I wanted the book to mirror life in that way. We never really do know, do we, about others. Nor do we ever truly know about ourselves. We are endlessly compromising and negotiating our path toward and away from the family we were born into, the people we have chosen, and all of those in between. We want to please them or we want to extract ourselves from them, we want to know them, we want them to know us (or we don’t). We hold parts of ourselves in check, eternally. But what parts of ourselves? Who are we when in the company of a lover or a father—a version of ourselves, or our actual selves? Who are we when we are alone, in the company of memories that haunt us precisely because we cannot—we never will—fully establish these memories as true or truly interpreted.

Did my father love me? Did I love him in the best possible way? Was I less of me because I gave so much time and care to him? Or is caring who I naturally am? Is caring me at my finest?

I wrote to find out. That is part (but only part) of what memoir is for.

I remember you and I once having a conversation about these sorts of things. One of your lines from that conversation is also floated through the book. Have you found it yet?

Dear Beth,

I can’t pin down my line, which actually feels appropriate for this conversation. I think we’re circling around the idea that it’s exceedingly difficult to truly “see” yourself. Whatever line of mine you included, held some essential quality of me for you. For me, it was just noise to fill the air, a passing thought. That you’ve held on to it and included it is more evidence of your keen eye, but, for me, it proves it’s near impossible to observe your own life while you’re still in the thick of it.

I asked you about reflections earlier and about finding the right lens so to speak. But, even a perfect reflection transforms its viewer. All these recent hours spent on Zoom have taught me this. We can examine ourselves but only obliquely. We catch glimpses from the periphery. This has me thinking about WDS as a search for a more perfect mirror: the person or relationship in your life that will fully reveal you to yourself. You keep returning to themes because you never get that perfect view. The search continues.

This search, this attempt to find out, you say is part of what memoir is for, and this brings me to my last (and most unfair) question. Throughout the book, you make brief gestures to current events or the news, and your characters try to find ways to withdraw from all of it. In the course of the pandemic, at one point or another, everyone I know has wished for an escape. As a writer, myself, I thought my writing would be the way out, but I’ve been frozen by all that’s happening. Frequently, I’ve asked myself what room is there right now for one person’s story? And so, I ask you (unfairly) what can memoir do for us who feel immobilized by the world around us? I ask you, who teaches memoir at the University of Pennsylvania and through your own Juncture Workshops. I ask you, who has written extensively and profoundly on the memoir genre in Handling the Truth and, again, in your memoir workbook Tell the Truth. Make It Matter. I ask you only because I can think of no one more equipped to answer.

Good Luck, My Friend,
—David

Friend:

And yet. Look at this question. Look at all the interludes that are yours, in this conversation of ours. You are writing. You have written. Your words (beautiful as always) are here.

To answer your perfectly fair and considered question: A blankness settled in with this pandemic. Suddenly, we were all turning off pieces of our lives—taking long, masked walks on the opposite sides of the street from other masked walkers, standing far apart in grocery stores trying to express ourselves through the slivers of our faces still available to others, closing our doors, watching doors close on us, sending cards and tiny handmade things in lieu of — so many things. Our lives became in-lieu-of lives, and yet we memoirists, or many of us, felt that, with words, we could at least persist. We were alone. We had time. We didn’t need to travel anywhere but into the contours of our own minds.

But how hard that writing became. How hard it was to believe that our struggles, our sadness, our loneliness, our losses, our stories meant anything at all in the face of Covid news. How hard it was to stop feeling anonymous, just one of many millions waiting, fearing, hoping for hope. Some of my dearest friends took notes on their days, so that they would have these notes later, for when they were ready to write truly again. Some stopped writing altogether. I began to make blank books, a symbol for the vast wordlessness I was so often feeling.

But slowly, very slowly, I began to write essays again. Small pieces. No big book in mind. I found that I had begun to pay attention to different things—the sound of silence, say; the artifacts we might leave behind; the intensity of the love we’ve felt but hadn’t taken the time to fully language. I found that, in the stark surrounds of the pandemic, within the blankness, I was feeling, seeing, hearing the world in new ways, in ways that challenged me, in ways that changed my relationship to the world and to myself.

This, then, is the answer to your question. We must allow ourselves to experience the paralysis. We must not force the words. We must sit with ourselves until the world is made new to us, and when we have the words for that newness—of observation, of reckoning, of emotion—we write those words down. We write them so that others might be awakened with us, so that their paralysis might quietly shift, so that we might, quietly, leave a trail away from blankness.

I hate leaving a trail away from this conversation, but we are more than 2,000 words in. I wondered, when we started, how I would sign off, but I’ve decided. I’m not signing off.

David Marchino is a Philadelphia-based creative nonfiction writer and educator whose work has appeared in The Penn Review, RKVRY Quarterly, Cleaver, and elsewhere. His essay “No Goodbyes” won the 2016 Penn PubCo Award for Best First-Person Narrative, and his personal narrative “Going Places” was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart. In the past, he served as a citizen-artist on behalf of ArtistYear, teaching a creative writing curriculum at Alexander Adaire Elementary in Philadelphia. Currently, he is assistant director of the Summer Workshop for Young Writers at the Kelly Writers House and the administrative assistant at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of three-dozen books in multiple genres, a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a widely published essayist. Her memoir-in-essays, Wife | Daughter | Self, is due out from Forest Avenue Press on March 2. More at bethkephartbooks.com

 

 

A Conversation with Greg Sestero Author of THE DISASTER ARTIST: MY LIFE INSIDE THE ROOM, THE GREATEST BAD MOVIE EVER MADE

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

A Conversation with Greg Sestero
Author of THE DISASTER ARTIST: MY LIFE INSIDE THE ROOM, THE GREATEST BAD MOVIE EVER MADE
Simon & Schuster, 288 pages

Interview by Brian Burmeister

The Disaster Artist.jpgPerhaps no other film has so improbably risen from obscurity to cultural significance than 2003’s The Room. Grossing just $1800 in its original theatrical run, the film now famously dubbed “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” went on to connect with audiences through years of midnight screenings and an insightful, entertaining, and sometimes heartbreaking book about its making.

Greg Sestero, star of The Room, wrote this book in 2013, titling it The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made. The memoir was hailed by Patton Oswalt as “A surprising, hilarious, and compelling account of the making of the modern Plan 9 from Outer Space” and by Rob Lowe as “Hilarious, delusional, and weirdly inspirational.” In 2017, Sestero’s book was adapted into the critically acclaimed film The Disaster Artist, starring James Franco, Alison Brie, and Dave Franco (who portrayed Sestero).

Through his twenty-year career, Sestero has acted in a wide range of movies, including the cult horror films Retro Puppet Master and Dude Bro Party Massacre III. More recently, he wrote and starred in the Best F(r)iends films alongside The Room’s enigmatic Tommy Wiseau.

In this interview, Brian Burmeister asks Sestero about his experiences on set, his current projects, and advice he has for fellow writers and actors.

Brian Burmeister: While The Room had slowly built a following in the years following its release, your book The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made deserves a lot of credit for introducing the film to much of the world. Going back to 2003, could you have envisioned the amount of love that would eventually outpour for The Room and yourself?

Greg Sestero: Nooo. I thought it was just a movie that was going to be made by Tommy—and it was sort of his accomplishment, and that was going to be it.

Best Friends coverBB: There are a lot of inherent challenges for any writer working on an autobiography or memoir. In writing such a personal story, were there parts of your life and your experience that were hard for you to write about? Or concerned you because of what people might think—including those you wrote about?

GS: Yeah, I mean, I made sure to interview everybody from the story. And I thought it was very important to be as honest as possible and as respectful as possible because the story doesn’t work unless you share what you’re also not proud of. I think that’s what sets a lot of the events in motion. And I wanted to make sure to tell as much of the story as needed—and just be honest. I wrote it from the heart, and I think when you do that, you’re probably going to be okay.

BB: There were 15 years between when you worked with Tommy Wiseau on The Room [which he wrote, directed, produced, and starred in] and when you worked together on the Best F(r)iends films. In your book, you obviously wrote a lot about your experiences working on The Room. With Best F(r)iends, you took on different roles—this time you wrote the script, and Tommy was no longer in the director’s chair. By contrast to The Room, what was the experience of working on the two volumes of Best F(r)iends like?

GS: I definitely had more experience. I’d grown up a lot. And I knew Tommy could be very captivating in an acting role if it was composed properly. The goal was for us to try to make something new and have him be able to focus as an actor—and not have to burden all the pressure of producing. I really enjoyed making Best F(r)iends. I tried to take everything I’d learned and pour it into it.

BB: Earlier this year, a hilarious, jaw-dropping trailer for Big Shark was released. Any updates on the film’s progress?

GS: I know it’s something Tommy is really passionate to make. He’s on that, and hopefully it’s something special.

BB: What’s next for you? Are you planning to write more films? Focus on acting?

GS: I’m working on a horror film that I’m writing and putting together. So hopefully next year we’ll bring some interesting entertainment.

BB: Is the horror genre where you see yourself focused moving forward long-term?

GS: Yeah, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I think The Room is great and everything that’s come from it has been fascinating. But I hope to go in a kind of different direction and make some new things.

BB: One of the true highlights of the entire internet last year was the recreation of an iconic scene from The Dark Knight starring you as Batman and Tommy Wiseau as the Joker. Where did that idea come from? And what was it like filming that scene?

Greg Sestero headshot

Greg Sestero

GS: We were fortunate to get Lionsgate to release Best F(r)iends, so we did a promotion with the Batman scene. And it was a director at Nerdist who made the Batman/Joker audition tape who said, “Let’s go make a scene.” So for me, being a big fan of The Dark Knight, it was one of those things that was an experience you couldn’t pass up.

BB: On behalf of everyone who has seen it, thank you for not passing it up. As of right now, you’re on a mini-tour of the country with live readings of The Room’s script. Having just attended one of these readings myself, I can definitively say these events are pure fun and a great opportunity to pick your brain in the Q&A. Can fans expect more opportunities like these to see you in person?

GS: Yeah, I’ve done it a couple times. I think it’s something that’s very interactive and gives people a chance to be part of the film. So, we’ll see. I’ve got these other projects to make, but it’s always fun to get out there, meet fans, and interact.

BB: Final question. One of the major themes in The Disaster Artist is Tommy Wiseau’s one-in-a-million, limitless belief in his own dreams. That’s one of the many qualities that really separates him from most of us. If you were to offer one piece of advice to all the struggling writers and actors out there, what would it be?

GS: Follow the fun. If you’re not having fun, you need to figure out why that is. Creating should be fun. We sometimes put pressure on ourselves—which can be a good thing—but at the end of the day, as creators in that process, there needs to be some enjoyment. So try to drown out the negative voices. Just focus on your story or your music and follow the fun.

◊ ◊ ◊ 

The author wishes to thank Mr. Sestero for generously taking the time to sit down for this interview following his live reading of The Room in Des Moines on 10/25/19.

Brian BurmeisterBrian Burmeister is an author, cat cuddler, and educator living in Iowa. He can be followed on Twitter: @bdburmeister.

 

 

 

A Conversation with Elizabeth Mosier, author of EXCAVATING MEMORY: ARCHAEOLOGY AND HOME. Interview by Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

A Conversation with Elizabeth Mosier
Author of EXCAVATING MEMORY: ARCHAEOLOGY AND HOME
from New Rivers Press, 96 Pages
Interview by Nathaniel Popkin

Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home book jacket (vintage road map)

Elizabeth Mosier logged one thousand volunteer hours processing colonial-era artifacts at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park Archeology Laboratory to write EXCAVATING MEMORY: ARCHAEOLOGY AND HOME, which uses archaeology as a framework to explore personal material, including her mother’s memory loss, the layering of shared experience in creating family or community narratives, and the role that artifacts play in historical memory. The essay titled “Believers”, a 2015 Best American Essays Notable pick, first appeared in Cleaver.

Novelist and essayist Elizabeth Mosier has twice been named a discipline winner/fellowship finalist by the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, and has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Millay Colony for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her nonfiction has been selected as notable in Best American Essays, and appears most recently in Cleaver, Creative Nonfiction, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She writes the “Intersections” column on alumnae lives for the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin. More information at www.ElizabethMosier.com.

Nathaniel Popkin: You write, early in the collection, in regard to your work processing objects from an archeological dig near Independence Hall in Philadelphia, that “digging and processing of primary sources creates a record of life that is both detailed and fragmented, much like memory.” Excavating Memory is a stirring exploration of this idea. Would you say then the book is less a search for truth (about your life) and more a complication, perhaps of what you had perceived to be real?

Elizabeth Mosier: I’m fascinated by how artifacts that form the archaeological record constitute and, in some cases, correct the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we live. Like archaeologists, writers are always looking for artifacts that support or subvert what we think is true.

Headshot of Elizabeth Mosier

Elizabeth Mosier

As a volunteer technician at the Independence National Historical Park Archeology Laboratory, I got to practice looking closely at small things, and looking beneath the surface of the city I knew mostly by its buildings, monuments, and celebrated citizens. Washing, labeling, mending, and cataloguing a colonial neighborhood’s glass fragments and ceramic sherds trained me to see broken, discarded things as material evidence—of social class, consumer patterns, cultural practices, politics, and relationships. I became more conscious of how we construct reality, create history, from pieces we’ve saved by choice or accident.

The most important thing I learned from the archaeologists is that the real treasure isn’t the artifact, but the information gleaned from it. And after 1,000 hours in the lab, I viewed my own material through this new lens. I realized that writing is like repairing a broken bottle from the base up, then taking it apart again to fashion a story from what you’ve found.

NP: This book ought to have an analog map or maps—you’re tracing paths as you go. These are maps that extend from Philadelphia to Phoenix to Indiana. And there are maps within maps and some that only exist in your head or others’ (I’m thinking of your mother’s floor plan map of her farmhouse growing up and E.B. White’s, too). Maps, whether in our heads or on paper or computer, are objects. “I don’t question objects,” your mother says in the essay “Once More to the Barn.” What do you think of this—is there a way in which all the maps are right, even when they obscure, or get details wrong, or leave key things out?

EM: Maps that obscure, obliterate, distort, or falsify details aren’t accurate but, in their inaccuracies, they can reveal what the cartographer values or wants to hide or doesn’t (want to) acknowledge. Despite my mother’s protest, which she made not from a lack of curiosity but from midwestern pragmatism, drawing a floorplan of her childhood home in “Once More to the Barn,” mentally walking through that physical space, prompted a traumatic memory. In “From Scratch,” my father’s hand-drawn map of Lynn, Indiana, circa 1950, accurately depicts the location of the railroad tracks that no longer run through his hometown. But I am able to find him in that landscape because he keyed the map with personal details like his mother’s flower garden and the “X” that marks the spot where he found and pocketed a bat on his way to school.

I agree with memoirist Patricia Hampl, who says we write not about what we know, but to find out what we know. Writing is a way of mapping reality. But if we want to write truthfully, we have to “question objects” and fact-check the maps we’ve plotted against other evidence.

NP: I once was enamored of the idea of the “poetry of history” and I wrote about it in Song of the City—“I walk the same streets as Franklin, Capone, Whitman, and Baldwin…” But reading your essays makes me think this is the opposite of what is really interesting about a street, or a corner, or a building, or a life. Those other people are ghosts, after all, and we are real. What seems to matter to you about a place is the personal, the material (like the bark of the Big Tree), the tracings of your own life. The rest is accidental. Why do these personal tracings matter to you?

EM: The “poetry of history” is what drew me to The President’s House dig, after I heard the head archaeologist, Jed Levin, speak about its stone foundation being “a tangible link to the people who lived in this house, and a link between the enslaved and the free.” I wanted to help memorialize the nine enslaved Africans: Oney Judge, Moll, Austin, Hercules, Richmond, Giles, Paris, Christopher Sheels, and Joe Richardson. But the dig became meaningful to me in other ways, too.

My time at the archaeology lab coincided with my mother’s mental decline, due to Alzheimer’s disease. Her memory loss haunted me, warning me to make something tangible to account for my life. And yet I was too distracted and distraught to write. This book began to take shape as I recorded details and observations about the lab in my journal and in short blog posts. Four years in, I put these brief pieces together in a narrative essay, “The Pit and the Page.”

But also, during that seven-year period, I had to empty four houses full of objects collected by my declining parents and deceased parents-in-law, and so I thought a lot about why we keep what we keep while we let other things go. This “grief cleaning,” as I call it, is an emotional process. For me, the decision is guided by a familiar visceral feeling that serves me in writing, too: this is something I can use.

NP: You began writing these essays about ten years ago, I think, and they piled onto each other like markings on the map. How different is this collection in its final form from what you might have intended? At what point did you realize you were searching for fragments of your own life—or rather trying to piece them together? Is the composition of the fragments—that is, both the essay collection and the memories redrawn on a map—a satisfying picture or are you still searching and tracing lines?

EM: I actually didn’t intend to write about my volunteer work at the lab, but I’m a curious person and a compulsive notetaker. My supervisor, Deborah Miller, generously shared her expertise, teaching me lab procedures and answering my many questions. And as I took notes, I began to find connections between the work archaeologists do and the work writers do: digging, processing, and repairing the artifacts of experience in order to find meaning. This insight suggested a methodology I could adopt, a lens I could apply to a collection of personal artifacts in order to process my personal loss.

As I went on, my literary interest in archaeology expanded to include contemporary objects and their owners, including the college diaries of classical archaeologist Dorothy Burr Thompson, to explore a larger question: What do salvaged or sacrificed objects reveal about how people form identity, or how a community creates its history? That’s a vein I’m still pursuing.

NP: The chapter “From Scratch,” with its repeated invocation, “let there be…” reads and feels different from the rest of the collection. It is prayerful rather than observational, a search for moral courage of some sort. How important was that invocation to you as you set out to excavate these personal, sometimes beautiful and sometimes painful memories? Did you have to say, please, “let there be words for all of this…”?

EM: Mourning, like writing, is labor—putting severed parts together, restoring order from chaos—but its process is internal and its product often invisible. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve coped with sadness by making things. And so I “processed” my grief over my father’s death by making his favorite rhubarb pie, using a recipe from my grandmother’s 1927 Farmer’s Guide Cook Book that I had already studied as an artifact. I was curious: how much of my ancestors’ knowledge had passed down to me? The pie-making was part ritual, part writing prompt.

I’d read all these scholarly articles by anthropologists on recipes as a form of rhetoric—social narratives that encourage and enact dialogue between the giver and the receiver. Intellectually, I was interested in the idea of a recipe as an “unauthorized” text—communal, reproduced, improvised, revised—that requires creative interpretation including modifications, deletions, substitutions, and experiments that enable the cook to reproduce the text in her own way and thereby claim her creative authority.

But really, I just wanted my father back. And so I ditched the narrative essay I’d drafted, and wrote this raw expression of scorched-earth despair. I wanted the invocation to echo its source in Genesis 1:3, and to sound like a daughter naming and grasping for concrete detail, imagining altered pasts and alternative futures to reorient herself as she writes her way out of the void.

In other words, I honored the emotional component in archaeology. This book of essays is an artifact, forming the record of my midlife reconstitution in the wake of loss.

Headshot of Nathaniel PopkinCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

A Conversation with Ayelet Waldman, author of A REALLY GOOD DAY. Interview by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

A Conversation with Ayelet Waldman
author of A REALLY GOOD DAY
Interview by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Over the past five years, rigorously-designed clinical research trials of the drug psilocybin, published in top tier journals such as Neuropsychopharmacology and elsewhere, have steadily pointed the way to the therapeutic potential of hallucinogens in psychiatry—along with National Institute for Mental Health-funded ketamine trials leading to standard outpatient clinics now offering “ketamine infusion” for patients whose depression has not responded to multiple other drugs, and in many cases, not responded to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) or even deep brain stimulation (DBS) where electrodes are placed into brain regions in an awake subject resulting in relief from crippling, often suicidal depression.

What could compel someone to be desperate enough to try such treatments? The alternative: the urge to commit suicide. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention estimates that nearly 45,000 Americans die from suicide each year; suicide is ranked as the tenth most common cause of death in the U.S. Yet relatively few popular and critically acclaimed novelists have been generous and brave enough to write about their personal struggles with suicidal ideation and ongoing contemplation of the act. Ayelet Waldman, a prolific and visible author whose novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits was made into a searing film directed by Don Roos and starring Natalie Portman, and whose memoir Bad Mother was a New York Times bestseller, is one of these few. Notably, more male novelists (e.g., William Styron, Augusten Burroughs) have ventured into the territory, though Alice Sebold’s stark narrative of her psychological symptoms following her rape also made a significant step forward for disclosure and destigmatization. The particular courage of Waldman’s admission of intense suicidality, however, reflects the profound stigma attached to women with children disclosing any form of mental health issues. In support of the courage of her disclosure, I interviewed her one evening in January over the phone, with follow-ups by email. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.—CB

 

Chaya Bhuvaneswar: In many essays, as well as the recent memoir, A Really Good Day, in which you describe the symptoms that led to your exploration of micro-doses of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), you are so frank and raw in your discussion of your bipolar II diagnosis. I’m interested in the connection between bipolarity and confidence in one’s own judgment—can you speak about having that confidence, any processes involved in building it? What can you say to people with mental health diagnoses who are seeking to build that confidence in themselves that is durable through episodes of being told their “judgment is off,” that they shouldn’t trust themselves?

Ayelet Waldman: That’s really, really—this applies to so many things. If you suffer from a mental illness, there are times when your judgment can be wrong, times when you are acting from a place of emotion mind rather than a place of wise mind, and you’re so emotionally dysregulating, that you’re not making choices that even you yourself would make under different circumstances. But it’s also true that nobody knows the inside of your head as well as you do. So, there are other times you are the best judge of what works for you. It’s all of life being dialectic. Balancing back and forth on that’s bipolarity. Somewhere in the middle between trusting your own intuition and the feeling that you are acting in wise mind and balancing emotional truth vs. hyperrational truth.

If you suffer from a mental illness, there are times when your judgment can be wrong, times when you are acting from a place of emotion mind rather than a place of wise mind, and you’re so emotionally dysregulating, that you’re not making choices that even you yourself would make under different circumstances. But it’s also true that nobody knows the inside of your head as well as you do. So, there are other times you are the best judge of what works for you. It’s all of life being dialectic. 

CB: What was it like incorporating a kind of ‘mood diary’ into the book, where you had to in large part be judging whether the micro-dosing was helping you stay stable or not?

AW: What every single patient does—you have to have self-respect— everybody’s medication changes all the time. So it’s good to have a tool that you could use to evaluate the utility of the medication beyond the kind of retrospective necessity that doesn’t take into account all the things you forgot over the course of the month, i.e. there was an earthquake and I woke up, and I had a really shitty night, and understand and evaluate your reactions in a way you can’t if you’re not tracking. One of the ways I assessed whether [the micro-dosing] was working was how many words did I write—how productive was I. How many words I wrote every day. And that was a really effective tool for me. My feeling of mastery of my work life, productivity, sense of usefulness in the word. Was it 96 or 96,000? Flow—if I hadn’t been paying attention to one of the tools I wouldn’t have appreciated that I was in a place of flow so often, astonishing and wonderful place in there. The place of flow is the positive part of bipolarity.

Flow—if I hadn’t been paying attention to one of the tools I wouldn’t have appreciated that I was in a place of flow so often, astonishing and wonderful place in there. The place of flow is the positive part of bipolarity.

CB: Can you also speak to how Love and Other Impossible Pursuits addressed the stigma of postpartum depression, like the character of Emilia, a character I really loved, was suffering from?

AW: I really wrote it to give myself a search for a kind of community. [It illustrated how writing can be put to work] to find your friend, confessor, therapist, to work through issues.

CB: I also thought the character of William, Emilia’s foster son, is an equally important, incredible character. William’s precociousness and vulnerability really come through. When you were writing the book, how did you feel about William? Can you talk about how the character evolved?

AW: I kind of—I saw the book as a love story. Always. Always seemed to me to be a love story. A love story about maternal love. Think Katherine Hepburn—Spencer Tracy. They hate each other and love each other in the end. And I really saw the book in that way. About these two people, stepmother, and stepson and ultimately made for each other, beshert. I always knew that was happening.

CB: You synthesize scientific information so beautifully. Had you read and done that for postpartum depression scientific literature before writing the book? Did you do research for Emilia’s character?

AW: I think it was mostly from just myself and in my dead baby group, a support group for people who had terminated a pregnancy for genetic reasons like I did. It was terrific.

CB: The character of Carolyn is a revelation.

AW: It’s always you and not you. She was way more than an imaginary me. That was how I would react if my husband left me, but then I’m not like a caricature. I based her on a real person. That scene in the classroom where she tore up the picture? That really happened to a friend of mine with the mother of her stepson. But that isn’t the complete story. She is ultimately is a human being. She is also a physician has skills and the sense of a vocation.

CB: Did you worry about Emilia being likable vs. unlikable?

AW:  They always say that. People say that she’s an unlikeable character. There was a narrative that she was an unlikable character but that was sort of the point. But I was sort of disappointed by it, it wasn’t that I was surprised by that reaction to her. Women’s characters are expected to be likable.

CB: Can you speak more about the concept of “destined”—beshert as this certainty.

AW: The only thing that matters is the work you do. It’s nice to have a narrative of beshert. It’s useful to have as a model in a long marriage. That kind of can float you through difficult times. Times when you could give in. It is irrelevant to the strengths of your marriage. The only thing that matters is how much you’re willing to prioritize your partner. That is what marriage—all the wonderful ties. Even when you don’t feel like it. The only thing that matters is the work.

The only thing that matters is the work you do. It’s nice to have a narrative of beshert. It’s useful to have as a model in a long marriage. That kind of can float you through difficult times.

CB: What are you working on next??

AW: I have another novel that I’m struggling with. And other television and film projects that haven’t been announced yet.

 

Ayelet Waldman is the author of A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, the novels Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Daughter’s Keeper, as well as of the essay collection Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace and the Mommy-Track Mystery series. She is the editor of Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons and of the forthcoming Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation. She was a Federal public defender and an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley law school where she developed and taught a course on the legal implications of the War on Drugs. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, Michael Chabon, and their four children.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in Narrative Magazine, The Awl, Narrative Northeast, aaduna, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Asian American Literary Review, Compose, Redux, The Write Launch, Del Sol Review, Bangalore Review, Blue Lake Review, Nimrod, jellyfish review, and Santa Fe Writers Project. Her fiction has been anthologized in Her Mother’s Ashes 2: Stories by South Asian Women in the US and Canada, and she is a blog contributor to aaduna, as well as Michigan Quarterly Review. Follow her on Twitter @chayab77.

A Conversation with Sonya Huber, author of PAIN WOMAN TAKES YOUR KEYS AND OTHER ESSAYS FROM A NERVOUS SYSTEM, by Lisa Romeo

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

A Conversation with Sonya Huber
Author of PAIN WOMAN TAKES YOUR KEYS AND OTHER ESSAYS FROM A NERVOUS SYSTEM
by Lisa Romeo

I was first introduced to Sonya Huber’s writing through her prescient 2010 book, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, about the elusive hunt for affordable care, which I was assigned to review. This writer stayed on my radar, and her newest nonfiction book is a satisfying reward. In Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System (University of Nebraska Press 2017), Huber takes her readers inside for a multifaceted view of her experiences with chronic pain, and how that changes a 30-something woman.

LR:  I’ll ask the chicken-or-egg question first: what came first, writing and publishing several essays on the topic, then realizing it might make a collection? Or did you set out to produce an essay collection about pain?

SH: I started writing these essays as a kind of journaling, and for a long time I was not optimistic about even making one essay out of my phrases and sentences. The opportunity to publish one essay on the topic gradually emboldened me to try another, and then whenever I was in particularly bad pain, I would shift from my other writing project into writing pain. It was sort of like an escape hatch or relief, a way to use my bad present experience as research.

When I was starting to accumulate essays, I noticed that the finished essays were much easier to place than anything else I’d written. That was a singular experience, and then the comments from readers and editors was another clue that I needed to continue, and emboldened me to go further. Only then did I think about shaping a book. I saw what topics I had covered and asked myself, “What other hard things are missing?” and then gave myself assignments to start gradually shaping those missing essays. So this book feels very crowd-sourced and shaped with the help of a writing, reading, and disability/illness community.

LR:  What about ordering the pieces? Writing bridge pieces? That whole process of turning individual essays into a book flummoxes many nonfiction writers.

SH: It is interesting that a few readers have commented that this reads like a memoir, because I didn’t arrange the essays that way on a conscious level. I can see how it would read that way, though. My most important concern in was variation in tone, style, and subject matter.

Since the topic is pain—often an entrapping and suffocating experience—I did not want to make readers experience that element of pain. Other writers have done that work very well, but I didn’t think I could do it. My priority was to allow for as many breaths and entry and exit points as possible. It’s an intense subject, so I wanted readers to feel they could pick it up and put it down, and some pieces are definitely meant as lighter “breathers.”

I chose an experimental piece for the beginning to let people know that some weird stuff would follow in the book, and that the rule for reading was that there would be few rules, and as a signal to be open-minded. Then came two “overview” pieces as a kind of introduction. Then I grouped the pieces by theme, another layer of internal organization.

After grouping by theme, I had the question of how to order these thematic chunks. There’s some warmer or easier stuff—about love and cooking and sex and relationships—and I decided that should go at the heart of the book, because that’s a reward, I think, to continue reading. (Also I would simply not get through this without my husband, my family, and friends.) Pain is a community problem that has social solutions. I wanted to push back against the stereotype of illness as being an isolated and self-centered subject, because I don’t think it ever is. Finally, because the ending pieces are a point of stress, a lens through which a reader looks back and sees the whole work, I wanted pieces in that spot that I saw as strong and complicated, with the final note as the possibility of seeing and understanding pain, as a kind of hope.

As far as advice, I think I would say that form follows function. I know there are many principles for putting together an essay collection, but I think your subject matter, voice, and tone have to inform the ordering. Ultimately the ordering is a kind of story itself.

LR:  You write that you are “…not going to talk about the physical sensation” of pain. I thought, yes, because it’s too easy to go on about what it feels like. I also wondered if you were demanding of yourself—and readers—to think of what’s happening to our bodies as starting point rather than the end. Am I in the ballpark?

SH: Yes, you are so exactly in the ballpark! My own physical experiences meant things to me emotionally and intellectually and socially. I wanted to trace the nerves and implications outward. I think this insight comes partly from the pain community I am a part of; we feel pain on a collective level because some of the pain is influenced by weather. That led me to think of us as embedded in many systems and experiences and common challenges.

Like many people in the United States, I’ve been on a collective healthcare horror show for my entire adult life. Very few people (most of them in Congress) have found respite from the terrible anxiety of finding care; the rest of us have severe healthcare access anxiety. All of the social inequalities are also embedded in our bodies through uneven access to healthcare. African-Americans, for example, die much earlier as a group, and that’s due to individual health conditions but also due to the collective strain of poverty on bodies in all its detailed and sometimes invisible impacts. Healthcare and all its parts really are collective and social issues.

LR:  In “The Alphabet of Pain” you write, “Pain has hardened me into a different version of myself—me as if I were a desert, as if I were a house built by Frank Lloyd Wright.” I love the visual and tactile images conjuring an uncompromising landscape and harsh taskmaster, and yet—both can be beautiful. What was it like to write about something that has so many variations, degrees, and can feel different at different times?

SH: I loved writing about pain! It was a huge release for me to see pain as not the enemy or real cause of my suffering. That might sound terrible or delusional, but the cause of my particular pain is a disease, the inner workings and causes of which are still unknown. Pain is the effect; it’s my response. In a weird way I wanted to honor and humanize myself and everyone else who has pain. We are not aberrations; pain is a universal for humankind. I let myself find any conceivable metaphor for pain, to explore it, to honor the pain experience as normal, as structured according to logical cause and effect, and as intimately human as a thumbprint.

There is massive and crushing stigma about chronic pain and chronic illness, and it is very easy with our judgmental Puritan backgrounds to see aberrant bodies as wrong, as evil. But we are as beautiful, intrinsic, and fantastic as any other manifestation of life in the world. I wanted to proliferate those images because pain experience is not simple. Pain is a mystery, multifaceted and holy as any other element of life; stressing the infinite and proliferating manifestations of it helped me underline the fact that it is complex and that people in pain are worth listening to. We assume we know pain, but I don’t think we do.

LR:  I have (less severe) chronic pain problems too, and like you get sincere but ill-informed advice. In “The Cough Drop and the Puzzle of Modernity,” you consider how challenging it is to be “…someone who will not get well, an unsolvable puzzle,” and that “We must chart new understanding based upon the body’s lived experience, yet we still long for neat, easy solutions.” I admire how you made this essay not about misinformed advice-givers, but about a larger phenomenon—the goal of every essayist: begin with the personal, find the universal. Can you talk about the process of getting to that point, of considering a personal experience, and writing through to what makes it not-only-about-you?

SH: Getting beyond my own resentment was therapeutic for me. I needed to find larger meaning and research to understand my own experience. So I was driven by self-interest to find those universals. I’m pretty much a ranter inside my own head. Every single essay—or many of them—start in rant mode. That’s great for a paragraph, or for fuel to begin writing, but then I would come back to those paragraphs and see how dull they were to read.

On revision I knew I had to unfold those strong emotions to make them real for the reader. I have learned to do that mainly by reading essays by other writers; doing a lot of that gets the “essay mode” inside one’s head. Every time I’m at a dead end of frustration with a personal experience, the essayist voice—which is developed through that repetition and training—asks, “But what else might that mean?” and then takes the topic at hand from a 46 degree angle.

Lee Martin, who I was lucky to study with in graduate school at Ohio State, has a great blog post about the “Felt Sense” of revision, that gut feeling that something might be missing. As Lee advises, I read drafts and then check with my gut, asking whether there’s an emotional range in each piece. Often when I’ve gone on for too long in one vein, something else in me gets agitated and wants to explore the flipside. So it’s a lot of gut-checking and turning things around, and I think that naturally leads one outward.

LR: The essay, “From Inside the Egg” looks like poetry on the page, reads like a lyric essay, and morphs back to prose at the end in appearance and form. Can you take us through how you arrived at the final structure? What went on as this piece began and evolved?

SH: That was one of the last I wrote, and it came from a persistent dilemma. Many disability activists stress that they do not need to be fixed; they are perfectly whole and fine human beings who should be accepted as they are. We are all fighting against this strange idea of “normal,” which easily becomes an ideal, with outliers to be shunned or put to death or, in our present era, to be merely denied care so that they die quietly. Finding the disability activism community was central to my survival, my adaptation, and learning to not be at war with my life. I learn from the writing of disability activists every day.

At the same time, my chronic illness is progressive and not understood, and the talk within my treatment community is the dream of a cure. Other portions of the disability community have wrestled with this, such as the d/Deaf community and the supposed “cure” of deafness in the form of cochlear implants, which many saw as the potential destruction of Deaf culture. This raises the question of how rheumatoid disease is an illness and a disability; but many activists fight to have disabilities not be seen as illnesses in need of cures. It’s complicated.

Although I am getting comfortable with pain, I would also happily have it completely extracted from my life. The medications I take are an attempt to quiet down the disease process and the symptoms. So I was trying to explore these two frameworks—cure versus acceptance—and to make them both true. I can’t pick one framework. Trying to express the two opposing goals was challenging for me, so I reverted to typography and layout to express how disjointed these two frameworks are for me.

LR:  Some of your essays are styled after existing forms. I loved the the list essay “Vital Sign 5” where you cite empirical statistics about pain and pain treatments, comingled with your personal pain stats. What do you like about these borrowed (or so-called “hermit crab”) forms?

SH:  I loved using these forms as essay containers because each form asks a different kind of question and allowed me to interrogate pain in a different way. “Vital Sign 5” allowed me to wedge in some research that wasn’t fitting in elsewhere but that I felt was important to have as part of the book. Also, numbers are the realm of science and empiricism, and it was satisfying to write a form that looked like a lab test. (Ahhhh, a lab test! I should have done one of those as an essay!! Pain Woman returns for more). Also, I think each form has a different voice, and seeing an issue through a new voice and question always unlocks something hidden for me.

LR:  What are you working on now?

SH: I have a memoir finished and am in the early stages of shopping around; that was the book I was writing when the pain essays came together. I would take “recess” when I was stuck on that book and write pain essays. I’m also in the middle of a book about socioeconomic inequality in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where I live, and that feels like it’s going to take a decade.

LR: Might sound like a dumb question given the topic, but: did you enjoy/ have fun writing these essays, assembling them into the book? Was it satisfying in ways beyond creative impulses?

SH:  Oh gosh, yes! As I mentioned, writing this book felt like play. It was a joy to bust out of one narrative voice and try on several different voices like a costume party—and to know there were more and more voices that would help explore a hard topic. I think it will take me a while to understand all the reasons why this book was so fun. I have spent a good part of my life treating myself as a mind that produces things, so it was fun to come back to my own body and ask it questions. And the book comes out of love for the pain and disability communities, which have provided so much support.

Also—this is a tangent but connects: this was my most fun book because a lot changed in my life and I could relax. My material life conditions changed, and even though it’s about pain, the book clearly comes from a position of privilege, as pain can destroy one’s ability to work or function to varying degrees, and I am not in that place now. I have health insurance. I got out of a stressful situation and re-married. I got tenure at the institution where I teach, after a long period of precarious finances, which meant I no longer felt like I had to prove my intelligence or my seriousness. Tenure and other forms of economic security make a huge difference for writers and artists and everyone, and we need to expand those protections and other safety nets. People make amazing things without that security, but I can see the difference in my own work when things got easier for me personally. I guess I have always been wound really tight. The rule I set for myself with this book was to be as weird as possible, and a little bit of life security allowed me to loosen up.

Sonya Huber is an associate professor at Fairfield University, teaching in the English department and in the Fairfield Low-Residency MFA Program. She’s the author of five nonfiction books, and many essays and articles that have appeared in The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Fourth Genre, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Washington Post Magazine, and other places. Her work has been listed under Notables in Best American Essays 2014 and 2015. Connect at her blog, or on Twitter. You can order Pain Woman Takes Your Keys on Indiebound.
.

Lisa Romeo is on the faculty of the Bay Path University MFA Program, and works as an independent editor. Her work has been published in the New York Times, O The Oprah Magazine, Brevity, Hippocampus, Under the Sun, and is listed in Notables in Best American Essays 2016. Her memoir, about reconnecting with her deceased father during the grief journey, is due out in 2018 from University of Nevada Press. Connect via her blog and on Twitter.