An Interview with Tara DaPra

AprilJo Murphy (AJM): Welcome, Tara, to our humble little webspace at American Literary Review. I was so impressed – dazed even – with your essay “Writing Memoir and Writing for Therapy” in Creative Nonfiction that I quite literally threw the magazine across the room several times during the process of reading it. Your ability to have such a poignant perspective about grief and creation – to not let it overtake your authorial voice and become too painful for a reader – shows a mastery of subject and distance that floors me. Or, literally, astounded me enough to end up on the floor.

Could you tell me a little bit about your writing process? How do let your material breathe? Do you have a routine, or are there authors whose work you read to inspire you?

Tara DaPra (TD): “Writing Memoir and Writing for Therapy” begin as my “thesis essay,” a literary essay I wrote in 2008 to complement my MFA thesis. But I was rushed for time (I was also trying to complete a manuscript!) and knew it wasn’t right or finished. It then sat untouched until the summer of 2011 when I showed it to a few colleagues at UW Green Bay. One described the voice as “Malcolm Gladwell-esque.” That alone may have propelled me into finishing it. So I worked on it that summer, and then put it away again, and I worked on it again the following summer. The essay was originally almost twice as long. I love the braided essay form but it can be really difficult to tie all the pieces together, so I decided to save some of my ideas, a lot which were about Catholicism, for another essay.

I’ve been working as an adjunct since 2009, and there’s a lot of insecurity in that line of work. I spent the first couple of years post-grad school scrapping together a living, so I had zero time or psychic space for writing. There’s a lot of valid criticism these days about tenure, but I’ll tell you, living with zero job security is a real creativity killer. I’ve gained a measure of stability in the last year or so, and I also had a baby in 2011, and those two forces have freed up a lot of time I used to spend worrying. They’ve also brought a routine to my life, so I’ve worked to again make reading and writing part of that routine. I’m not disciplined by nature, but there’s a freedom in structure. For a while I worried I had “forgotten” how to write, but—to borrow the cliché—it’s like riding a bike. During my time away from writing, I was mostly teaching English composition, and a fair bit was online, so I was doing a lot of writing but in a whole other capacity: Writing to instruct, writing to clarify, writing in a much more direct way, and that actually helped my “real” writing when I finally came back to it.

But to get back to your question about whether or not I have a routine—I don’t know that I really do. Even though I preach “Writing is a Process” all day long to students, I still struggle to make a regular, steady process part of my reality. I’m not that writer who wakes up a 5:30 every morning to write for two hours. I wish I were, but I’m not. But I live in perpetual hope. I’m planning to take an online class this winter "Daily work, daily inspiration: Restarting or developing your writing practice" taught by my friend Éireann Lorsung through the Loft Literary Center. She is an absolutely amazing poet who runs a beautiful micro-press called MIEL. If anyone can teach me, she can.

 AJM: You've written a lot of pieces connected to grief and mourning. Your personal essay  the color the brain and the heart – has spoken to me about memory and loss, and ultimately living through it all. I'm curious, what role do you think the writer has when dealing with grief? In what ways can personal loss inform our professional work? Can mourning and creating memory or meaning coincide?

TD: At present, our culture relies heavily on science to understand and explain the world. But before there were scientists, there were philosophers; before there were therapists, there were novelists. Good writers follow the same steps as a scientist; in fact, they did so intuitively long before "scientific method" was so dubbed. 

Writing was my best friend during the grieving process, and some of it was just for me, just venting, and some of it has taken on its own life and become suitable for the world. But it was my driving force. Death and grief force us to re-examine our worldview, to re-assemble our understanding of the world, and that is a very compelling reason to write. 

AJM: We’ve spoken a bit about Irish memoir and notions of memory. Could you please tell me a little bit about what attracts you to this particular section of nonfiction? (I know that Tara is an Irish named meaning “Earth,” so I’m a little curious about your particular pedigree and literary heritage).

TD: In graduate school, I won a Judd Fellowship, which was a great program at the University of Minnesota that allowed me to create my own project, so long as it brought me overseas. So I developed an idea to go to Ireland to visit the Hillof Tara, which was the seat of the High Kings, to write a kind of backwards genealogy essay about my first name. Americans love to trace their roots, and I thought this was a fun way to play with that idea. What does it mean to share your name with an ancient, sacred place, a place that’s so much bigger and more important than one life? It’s another way of looking for belonging, just like tracing the family lineage. And that’s at the heart of everything I write—I’m always looking for a way to belong because I’ve always felt that I don’t fit anywhere.
 
My second night in Dublin, I went to The Palace Bar, which I’d heard was a pub where journalists from The Irish Times hang out. I brought some writing and sat in the corner, and drank a pint of Smithwick’s, and I did meet a journalist, and I married him a year and a half later. I moved to Ireland the year following graduate school, but the world economy had just crashed and with so much uncertainly in Ireland, we did what so many had done before: We settled in America. In the meantime, I’ve learned that even though we both speak English, it’s not the same language. What I call “lies” he calls another version of the truth. I don't mean to say that my husband is a dishonest or immoral person. He’s not. He’s a very kind, generous man, and I married him—in large part—because he makes me feel safe. But we do have this fundamental difference in our perception of truth. So I’m exploring why there are so few Irish memoirs and how I think it has to do with the Irish tradition of story weaving and their flexibility in truth telling.

The last few Irish memoirs I've read - Edna O'Brien's Country Girl, Colm Toibin's A Guest at the Feast, John McGahern’s All Will Be Well. John McGahern died about a year after his book came and and on his death, The Irish Independent interviewed his ex-wife. She claimed the five pages where she appears in the book are pure fantasy. Now fabrications and embellishment in memoir are of course not the domain of any one culture, but I do think there’s something about the colonial legacy that makes memoir, at least in the way that Americans understand it, foreign to the Irish.

AJM: This is an interesting thought, that there is a sense of flexibility in the Irish memory. I’m thinking a little about Irish funeral customs here – how keening and waking are both expressions of mourning but also a very physical expression of love and loss.

Do you feel that Irish memoirs, and by extension perhaps, Irish-American hybridity seeks to take the personal and elevate it to a mythic or a tendency to think of memory as a bit tricky or supernatural in itself?

TD: When I was traveling alone in Ireland, I almost felt like I was taking part in a play. Irish people are friendly to outsiders, almost to a fault. It’s like they want to play these roles that have been—to use your word—mythologized by the culture. Tourism remains one of Ireland’s biggest revenue sources, and the Irish are keenly aware of its importance. I think the writing can fall into that as well. But this may also have something to do with the fact that Irish society has a cohesion, a harmony, that just doesn’t exist in America, which is a patchwork place in comparison.

AJM: When you are running a workshop, what barriers do you set up to keep it from being a “group therapy” session? You've touched upon this in "Writing Memoir and Writing for Therapy." Could you please tell me more? 

TD: One really basic way to address this—which many others have said before me—is to avoid second person pronouns. My husband actually uses these all the time when talking about something “America” or “Americans” are doing (“What are you guys thinking?” [fill in latest American political fiasco]), which drives me crazy. So in workshop, we talk about “the character” or “the narrator” on the page. I also request that when a writer’s work is being discussed by his or her workshop mates, the writer remains quiet. To channel nervous energy in the meantime, I encourage the writer to take notes. This prevents 1.) defensiveness about the actions of the character, and 2.) it really allows the writer to listen to what her peers have to say. Questions can be addressed after all the comments have been made. I also like the idea of hearing a question and the writer not responding immediately, giving it a little time to simmer.

Another great piece of advice came to me via Patricia Fransisco Weaver. She tells her students that if they’re writing about something that’s still very raw, that it’s a really, really good idea to concurrently take part in therapy. I love this advice, because it doesn’t tell the writer that she can’t write about something until it’s fully processed—which I think is the message that’s often given. I mean, the fact that it isn’t processed can create a powerful sense of urgency to write, so why waste that momentum?

AJM: When you are running a workshop, do you have favorite exercises? What are some of your teaching tricks, that you wouldn’t mind sharing? 

TD: Since I’m a nonfiction writer I like to use prompts that involve memory, which is useful for all genres. So I might ask students to write about a favorite photograph, or a recurring dream, or even to write around “things I can’t tell you” or something they don’t fully remember but wish they did. I'm also looking for new writing prompts and recently came across a treasure trove from Poets & Writers. 

I think all writing begins with description, which can be a kind of meditation. Describing a person, a moment, an object allows a story to emerge and creates a flow and an authenticity in writing that can be hard to find if we spend too much time looking for it.

AJM: This has been a lovely conversation - and very informative. Thank you very much for coming to speak with us at American Literary Review. I hope our readers enjoy your perspective as much as I do. 

Tara DaPra has an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Rake, and Sheepshead Review. She teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay and the University of Wisconsin–Marinette and in her "free time" (ha ha!) reads and edits submissions for the online lit + art journal Paper Darts.

An Interview with Catherine Lucille Sharpe

April Murphy: I discovered your writing when "One Thousand Kittens" was a finalist for Cutbank's Montana Nonfiction Prize in 2011, and then went on the hunt for more essays from your unpublished collection Ambition Towards Love. What I found surprised me. 

Some essays of yours, like "Proxy" and "Somewhat Organic" are what I think about as being kind of traditional memoirs, but then there are essays like "Shades of Gray" and "Another Lesbian Space Fantasy" that seem to break out of old ways of thinking about the CNF genre - blending the imagination and a sense of magic without the same authentic and honest (and charming!) voice that characterizes your longer work. Can you talk a little bit about these different forms your writing takes? 

Catherine Lucille Sharpe: I am certain that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is important, for reader and writer alike.  It must be important; people get quite upset when they discover that the writer has cheated--stepping outside the bounds of "literal truth" to copulate with fiction.  But why don't people get upset when nonfiction parades around as fiction? I am guilty of this.

The Ambition Towards Love collection deliberately flows back and forth between fiction and nonfiction.  Whatever the genre, I continue to circle the same ole boring human stuff--love, loss, more love, more loss, lies, less love, gain, a little more loss, joy, heroism, duplicity, frailty, failure, growth, shrinkage, doubt, love again, loss again, truth, etc..  The usual.  

As a writer and self-avowed nutpouch, I've clearly been trying to sort one or two things out on the page--the mere two dimensions of the page seem so much more manageable than the infinite dimensions of my head and heart. 

I know that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is important to me because I take the trouble to know the difference line by line, paragraph by paragraph.  In my nonfiction, I might forsake a perfectly good "real" detail, simply because it does not add to the meaning of the story, or what I want to emphasize in the story.  And guess what!  I might include that same detail in a short fiction because it creates ambiguity--one of the best ways to make fiction seem just as true and confusing and unknowable as real life.  

The decision to approach an idea through fiction or nonfiction profoundly affects my writing process, even when there are thematic congruities.  I've noticed how the struggle to craft readable fiction has improved my nonfiction writing, in both predictable and surprising ways.

Predictably, being forced to dredge up a believable character is good practice for bringing your Great Aunt Susan to life for the nonfiction reader.  She's the one who always sucks the knuckle of her pinky finger so that she can twirl her wedding ring.  It doesn't fit on her ring finger anymore, and anyway Uncle Frank's dead, so it doesn't much matter where she wears it.  There's something pathetic and familial about all that saliva, and now the reader gets Aunt Susan, too.

Unpredictably for me, engaging in fiction demands that I suffer a vulnerability I don't necessarily feel in the process of nonfiction.  In fiction, my judgment must fade way, way back, allowing the story to emerge from its mysterious place, a place I hardly control.  It can be frankly terrifying to tap in to my subconscious--my id whines, my ego hits, and my superego makes me write the same sentence a hundred times on the chalkboard.  The reader, even as she nods her head vigorously, agreeing that she's reading fiction, is still coming to some conclusions about the writer.  She can't help it!  If the writer goes on and on about cup size, the reader is not going to mistake the writer for a leg man.  Or a leg woman.  (Boy, I can't make that sound right.)

When you read my fiction, don't you dare tell me I'm lonely, or wimpy, or flailing, or crazy-in-love with my offspring (thus doomed to suffer), or bitterly angry, or actually quite sad at times. 

When I am writing the truth, or at least my nonfiction version of the truth, it is so much easier to control what the reader thinks about me.  The persona is deliberate, calculated, securely insecure, always ready with a deflective quip.  The reader will certainly mistake my persona for me, and thus I am safe from scrutiny.  I believe that I am in charge.  Which is, of course, a different kind of fiction, but luckily, the kind I reserve for therapy sessions.

To my dismay, all of this precision about fiction and "truth" does not ultimately prove useful to me in the real world.  Some people tell the truth only to discover later that they lied.  Others lie only to discover the truth.  Some don't even bother to lie, they just keep their mouths shut, suddenly go on diets, go to work early, come home late, and wait to be caught.

Your resumé is one big piece of creative non-fiction.

My Amibition Towards Love collection approximates the experience of a whole story--one where the reader swims through truth, both designated and actual, as well as the lies we call fiction.  Nonetheless, like me, the reader still has to figure out what really happened.

But by the time the words hit the page, it’s all true.

AJM: Do you think that queer writers are obligated to write queer nonfiction? I suppose since nonfiction is about personal experience, the subject matter is inevitable is one is queer. The writer, then, gets to figure out how their queer identity is expressed what (if any) resonance it will give to their more 'universal' life story. 

One of the things that's refreshing about your writing is that the central struggle isn't your queerness - the narratives don't get their tension from a 'coming out' plot, nor do they have a political abrasiveness despite the fact that they are about gay marriage/divorce/reproduction - instead your work exists in a world where all of this is secondary to the love you have to give your daughter and yourself. 

CS: As far as I'm concerned, nobody is obligated to write anything. Well, unless contracts are involved. I do, however, this it's Super Nice when people write about stuff they really care about. The form - fiction or nonfiction - is less important than the question at stake for the writer. When I'm reading, I'm engaged in the investigation that the writer is making into the subject matter, so it better be a real question the writer has, with some juice.

I'm totally way flattered that you find my work refreshing in its absence of Queer Identity Conflict, which I'll just call QIC for our purposes. I haven't written much specifically about QUIC because it is not a painful enough question for me - plus I already know the answer. I'm special. 

When I say I'm special, what I really mean is that I'm like everyone else. That makes me special, because not so many people realize that. And I've decided to worry less about being original and worry more about being average. And writing about that instead.

I'm really, really, really, really, really interested in what it is like to be human. More precisely, what it is like for me to be human. My current line of inquiry is how I am like so many others, not how I feel apart from these other creatures.

AJM: It seems like you really have a focus when you're creating your persona. So, how do you navigate your real lesbian identity with your lesbian narrators? 

CS: Poorly. They are all mixed up inside. Therefore, I try not to think about it too much. The idea of a continuum of truth - from lies (fiction) to truth (nonfiction) - is inept at best. Truth is a blob, a DNA strand, a froth of delicate, short-lived moments. I've had perfectly good fiction turn into nonfiction on me more than once. On the page and in real life. Freaky.

AJM: As someone who didn't enter academia after completing your MFA, can you tell us a little bit about what your writing life is like now? 

CS: Oy.  I’m scattered and slow. I’m undisciplined about my creative work. I prefer black pens and write longhand in a college-ruled spiral notebook.  Usually early in the morning. Sometimes my daughter has to borrow my notebook for drawing or math or to teach me something by diagramming.  For now, I let her because she can’t really read cursive (this is de-emphasized in school now, did you know?). Also, I like what she inserts into my ridiculous musings.

For my paid work, I write all day (or at least sit in front of a computer all day as if I’m writing) for a corporate healthcare services entity. Sexy.  Adjectives are discouraged, as are complicated sentences that involve semi-colons; apparently these are too difficult to follow. It is a constant struggle to avoid being sucked into the undertow.  I have to remind myself that writing has saved my life—connecting and re-connecting to that source is an end in itself even when progress on new creative work is slowed down to a drag-drag-crawl-sob-crawl.

Sharpe wrote mostly for live performance in San Francisco before turning her attention to gay marriage, in vitro fertilization, gay divorce, parenting, dating, fiction, and nonfiction.  Her first collection of interlocking essays and fictions Ambition Towards Love hasn't been published, but you can read some excerpts in Opium Magazine, A cappella Zoo, Word Riot and CutBank, among others. A couple of pieces have even been included in anthologies and she almost won several prizes--one from Montana and one from North Carolina. If you would like to know if she actually ever wins a prize or publishes her collection, join her email blast list by sending a note to catherinelucillesharpe@gmail.com. Put "join email blast" in the subject line.

What I'm Looking For: CNF Assistant Editor April Murphy

Hello ALR readers and submitters!

As we're in the thick of our reading season, and as we're working our way through submissions, I'm starting to see some trends in what's making the cut to the second round and what's not. In the spirit of transparency, I thought I'd offer some insight on the selection process (you really don't need to be chewing your nails).

I feel I should also offer a caveat - these insights are by no means the ONLY things we're looking for, nor do they reflect the tastes of Bonnie Friedman, the CNF Editor, nor Ann McCutchan, ALR's steward. You can take them or leave them.

1. Reading submissions takes a LONG time. 

 If you've already submitted to ALR, chances are your submittable status shows you are "in progress." What does this mean? If my story is really "progressing" then why is it taking several weeks, if not longer, for it to complete this process? 

The short answer is that we have several rounds of readers and your story must make it through several different levels to ultimately be accepted. Readers will often be assigned up to 5 essays (even more if it's fiction or poetry) at a time. If they take 2 weeks to read that before passing it along to an assistant editor who may take an additional week or two to read it and they pass it along to a busy professor/editor who may take a few weeks to read it.... you get the idea. It's a hot minute. 

This is long process, while tedious and a bit nerve wracking I'm sure, but it is awesome for you as a writer.  Every set of eyes that lands on your piece sees something different and can call attention to these merits. It allows you to build momentum inside of our office. So even if it feels like your submission is stagnant, I assure you that it's got a life of its own. 

Often, a reader will become invested in something and root for it. "Hey! Have you read that essay about the comic book store? AMAZING. I just sent it along." "Check out the scene on page 5 - delicious." etc. We're all involved with ALR because we love great writing. You guys send a lot of it. Keep sending it!

      2.  Cover letters are important. 

I should just state that this is a bit of a personal preference. I always read the cover letter an author sends along before I read their essay. Why? It shows me how seriously you take yourself as an author. Are you professional and friendly? Are you a goofball who writes a haiku? Do you have any previous publications and where were they? 

Cover letters also show me whether or not you are familiar with ALR and our policies. If you've noted that your essay is a simultaneous submission, I will move it up in my reading list because I don't want to  miss out. If I don't know that you've submitted it elsewhere - I can't do that. 

If you send along an essay without a cover letter - of course I'll still read it and if it's awesome, I'll be blown away by it. But! If you can help yourself with a cover letter, why not just take the extra 3 minutes to write one? 

      3.  Essays should have action AND reflection. 

Creative nonfiction writers may be familiar with Vivian Gornick's ideas about the "situation" and "story." She describes nonfiction as being broken up into the plot/action (situation) - learning how to ride a bike, how you found out that you don't like cheese, shopping for a pen - and the reflection on that experience (story) which explains to readers why shopping for a pen was important in the first place. 

Many of the CNF submissions to ALR are filled with well written situations, essays that read almost like short stories. Compelling characters, good description, etc. But by the end of reading these pieces, I often wonder why the author wanted to write about it. I feel as if they are a puzzle that I don't know how to solve. I've been given all the pieces but there's no picture on the box to follow. What's the story? 

I, of course, don't want to suggest that you should dog your essays down with too much reflection and not enough in-scene development. There is a balance that each essay requires and a little reflection goes a long way in covering/framing action. Both of these things are necessary for CNF to work: action so your readers can share your experiences; reflection so that they can identify with and understand why those experiences  resonate with you. 

Some essays that you may want to check out that do this really well: "The Way We Are" by Thomas Lynch, "Street Haunting" by Virginia Woolf, and "Notes of a Native Son" by James Baldwin. 

Thank you, ALR submitters, for the opportunity to read your work. I hope this blog post was helpful. Keep sending your words! We cannot wait to read them!

Best,

April Murphy

Creative Nonfiction

Assistant Editor


April Murphy is a Doctoral Candidate in UNT's Creative Writing Phd Program. April is the Assistant Nonfiction Editor at American Literary Review. She is currently working on her first book Shrouded: Women Who Work With the Dead. 

An Interview with Sarah McCarry

April Murphy: When you began blogging as The Rejectionist, you were anonymous - and the persona you created was pointedly bombastic and irritable. Eventually, this kind of melted away, evolving into a more reflective and sometimes-even-soft Le R, that suddenly, revealed itself to be you - owning up to your real identity and your past and your (exciting/literary) future. I'm curious, did the anonymity help you find your writing voice? Or, once you revealed your identity, did you suddenly feel the need to start writing about your life? 

Sarah McCarry: The funny thing about that is that the early persona of the blog is really what's uncharacteristic for me as a writer, and the personal stuff is more like what I've been writing all along. I've been writing a personal zine since 1998 or 1999, and although obviously (well, hopefully) my writing has evolved a lot over the years I've always used the lens of my personal experience to examine whatever it is I'm thinking about. Everything I've published up until now has been some form of personal essay. When I moved to New York I thought, very briefly, that I wanted to work in publishing, and the blog started as a lark and a sort of escape valve as I was flailing around in that endeavor. But I realized pretty quickly that that wasn't an industry I wanted to stay in, and I really don't like writing about publishing--or writing, for that matter--and so the blog shifted back to the kind of writing I've always done. 

Although I've never thought of that early persona as particularly constructed--I mean, there's certainly a lot of me in there. I'm a cocky bitch. It's a big advantage, especially if you're a woman writing on the internet about yourself, to come across as terrifying. 

AJM: This reminds me of something Rachel Maddow said recently in an interview with Rolling Stone. Maddow was referring to a confrontation she'd had with Alex Castellanos where he said he liked how passionate she was when she called him out on denying the gender wage gap. In the interview she's quoted "I wanted to say, 'Are you saying I'm cute when I'm angry? But I didn't, because when you're a woman on television, you can't even say the word angry."  I think you could substitute 'woman writer' and Maddow's remark wouldn't ring any less true. 

One of the things that I admire about your writing is that you aren't afraid to let people know when you're angry - and you make no effort to conceal that you have strong opinions about how women are treated both in the publishing world, how they're treated by writers, and how they are treated at large. I understand it's nearly impossible to answer "What advice can you give to women writers, people who talk about women writers, and people who write women?" and you've been tackling these very questions for years, but what can you tell them about anger? 

SM: I think anger is the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me; I think anger can be constructive and instructive and it can make you into a force and it can keep you alive. It has kept me alive, certainly. It's the thing I recognize in other people and it's the thing that tells me how much I'm going to love someone, whether we are angry in the same ways about the same things. It can make you totally fearless. But also I think anger is something you have to learn to live with carefully--for me that's been true, anyway. It's also important to learn how to take care of yourself and give yourself permission to take breaks from it. Anger for me is like a sort of tiring houseguest; sometimes you have to be like, "Dude, take a walk so I can clean my damn apartment and read some trashy books and drink a beer." I don't know what to say about it exactly; if you are a woman your anger will make people scared of you, for sure, but the angrier you are the less you'll care, and the people who understand your anger and make a space for your anger and are angry with you are the people you want around you anyway. 

AJM: When I was in undergrad, one of my professors upon hearing a student say they'd been accepted into a graduate writing program exclaimed that "Dante didn't need a degree to write the Divine Comedy."  This has always bothered me, probably because I fear the truth in it. As someone who escaped the MFA/PHD/BA/etc.circus (for a more exciting and literal circus), what has your experience trying to break into the writing world been like?

SM: The short version is that it was about fifteen years of fucking up and going nowhere and then when everything came together for me at last it came together very quickly; like I woke up one morning and the universe had left me a unicorn, pretty much. I knew when I was very young that I didn't want to do an MFA; I took a couple of writing classes as an undergrad before I dropped out of college and I had no patience for it. I am so bad at workshop, I can't even tell you. I don't mean to disparage MFA programs at all, I think they can be wonderful for people who are suited to them, and they can be amazing spaces to get a lot of work done and hopefully find people who understand what you're trying to do and read your writing well. But I go totally bananas and say hateful things and make people cry, and I think if you're that sort of person it's fine too. Just don't inflict yourself on an MFA program. 

This is going to out me as a total hippie but I think it was hard for me for so long because I wasn't ready; when I started taking myself seriously as a writer and telling people I was a writer, when I started taking my blog seriously and treating the things I was writing as though they were real essays and not just running jokes, that's when things started to happen for me. I think it's absolutely true that, MFA or no MFA, if you are moderately talented and willing to work your ass off and never, ever give up, at some point it will pay off for you. There's no one way to do it. 

AJM: Vivian Gornick, in The Situation and the Story, describes a similar process. She says that sometimes you can't write the right story until you've decided who you must be to tell it. Do you any insight into this process? 

SM: Well, I wish I had something very deep and insightful to say about this process, but honestly it happened to me by accident and I have spent most of my life being terribly impatient and frustrated with myself and ecstatically self-flagellating and all that other awesome stuff that comes from being a human. Things didn't start happening for me until I was ready for them to happen, but that place is so different for everyone. Some people get there when they're 23 and some people get there when they're 63 and either way is fine. I can say for sure that right now is the most amazing place I've ever been in my life but I never would have gotten here without aggressively running my life into the ground for a while. If you can get to self-love and dream achievement without epic mismanagement that's probably a way more advisable route. I've been pretty much the same person since the womb but it took me a long time to figure out how to love myself and have faith in what I'm doing. I've also been really, really lucky, and there are a lot of incredible people in my life who have supported me in so many ways. Anyone who tells stories is telling them as part of a community and I have been tremendously blessed by the community that I have.

AJM: Serious question: preferred whiskey?

SM: Bulleit Rye. 

Sarah McCarry is the author of the novel All Our Pretty Songs, forthcoming from St. Martin's Press in 2013. She has published the zine Glossolalia since 1999 and blogged at www.therejectionist.com since 2009. She is the editor and publisher of Guillotine, a series of chapbooks focused on revolutionary nonfiction (http://souslespaves.bigcartel.com). 

An Interview with Suzanne Paola (Susanne Antonetta)

April Murphy: I recently read the craft book Tell It Slant, which you wrote with Brenda Miller. The book is a warm welcome for an inexperienced writer - and a handy guide for demystifying particulars of nonfiction for experienced writers. Because it reached these different audiences so well, I was wondering if you had any trouble with Tell It Slant, or with your other work, of deciding who your "ideal audience" is?

Suzanna Paola: First of all, thank you for your warm words about Tell It Slant, which is currently out in its second edition. Brenda and I had a lot of fun, and achieved a lot of insights, putting the book together, first in the initial edition, which we undertook when we barely knew each other, and in the second, when we had become—partly through the writing process—very close friends. In many ways the book has mapped our friendship, so it’s very special to me.

I think the question of audience is a tricky one, one that each particular work evolves to answer in its own way. I should mention here that I write a great deal of my prose under the name Susanne Antonetta—it is a family name, of a forgotten great-grandmother in my family; I love trying to bring this lost woman back to life by using her name. When I wrote Tell It Slant—with Brenda—I was writing, however consciously at the time, for my students. I pulled out the questions they had asked me, the discussions that helped them make some kind of sense of their struggles with the literature of reality, the prompts I had used that brought out their best selves as writers, helped them evade those awful internal censors and write strong, breathing, authentic stories.  Many times I would sit down with pages of class notes—I am a fanatical class preparer—and my notes to myself on what I wished I said, and write that book.

My other books are more complicated. I think I partly wrote Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, a book that engages very directly with environmental contamination in several counties in New Jersey, for the people in those communities, though I did not think I would reach them, and that audience was kind of a hazy ideal; I also wrote for the lost women like the woman Antonetta whose name I tried to infuse with life; and for, perhaps more than anything, my son. It was a story of place and family, of a toxicity he has not had to live, yet one that has directed the course of his life. To be honest, when I first worked on that book, I thought no one but myself would ever read it. I was a poet. I came across stories that would not fit into poems anymore—stories of chemicals dumped into the ground, of distorted bodies—but the idea of a memoir told through the environment felt so different  then that I worked on Body Toxic and threw the writing I printed out into a drawer, thinking it would stay there. So I wrote for particular people but I also wrote for that drawer. I wrote more bravely than I would have otherwise, maybe, in my confidence that no one would ever read the book!

I believe as writers grow and evolve their sense of audience collapses, growing smaller and smaller. This may sound odd but I think it’s true. At first you imagine everyone you know reading your books. Your community, everyone you run across in the elevators at the AWP conference! That changes. When I studied with poet Charles Wright, he said he had one ideal reader—a nun he had met at one of his readings—and he wrote for her, and increasingly, for himself. I think I write to make sense of what I have lived and to know what I think; if I don’t write it, my life will be only reactive, unexamined.  In that sense I suppose I write for myself. Increasingly I find myself writing for my son.  There is so much about our lives we cannot tell our children; I feel as if I am leaving him a way of understanding his life, a series of answers to questions he may never otherwise know he needs to ask.

AJM: That's such great advice - that you should let your audience get smaller. I often find myself paralyzed by trying to speak to everybody. Sometimes I think the hardest part about creative nonfiction is being unafraid. You speak about this in Tell It Slant, where you say " The narrating ‘I,’ the persona you create, is the one who has the wherewithal to rescue experience from chaos and turn it into art” (77).  Do you have any other tips for helping the ‘I’ in your writing be more authoritative than your real life self - or overcoming authorial shyness?  

 SP: Yes, overcoming that shyness can be very hard in nonfiction! I find, having very beginning students at times, along with many writer friends who have been writing a long time and whose drafts I read, that it’s the beginning students who tend to say, even during an in-class writing, “But what would my [mother, kid, spouse, etc.] think of this? How could I publish it?” And then they get stymied, just doing that impromptu freewrite. The truth is, we write what needs to be written, what announces itself and pounds on the door and won’t go away or take no for an answer. Beyond attending to that urgency, when the writing is done, we have some choices to make. We can publish now, wait to publish, even choose not to publish or publish in a contained, local way.

First you do the writing you need to do—that pounding on the door is going to give you a terrible headache if you don’t. Tell yourself the other decisions about exposure will come down the road, and you have a variety of strategies for dealing with those questions. I tell writers this when I teach, and I find they often discover, when they have a good working draft, that they’re not so worried about what so-and-so will think. The story has more compassion and nuance to it than they expected it would.

Nonfiction writers pretty much have to, at some point, decide where their own particular lines will be drawn.  I’m very protective of my husband and son, for instance. That’s my decision. But I feel strongly we have only one life we’re given, and we are entitled as writers to make sense of it and have access to it. Yes, it has other people in it, and we need to approach them with an attitude of humility and compassion. As long as we do that, we will tend to perform as ethical writers. Note that ethics does not mean covering up for others, or deciding you accept family guidelines—all families have them—for not “telling.” These participations in cover-ups are things no one has a right to expect you to do.

AJM: Another one of the moments in Tell It Slant that I found most helpful was when you explained:

“Both photography and creative nonfiction operate under the ‘sign of the real’ (a phrase coined by literary theorist Hayden White); both operate as though the medium itself were transparent ... A good photograph will mirror the inner vision of the photographer, just as the good essay will reflect the unique sensibility of the writer, whether or not that writer focuses on material interior to the self" (76).

The analogy of a nonfiction writer as photographer is also used by Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. To paraphrase, Dillard says that one can learn to see in a way that they become a camera, letting the moment leave impressions on them instead of film. I'm curious about what connections you think a nonfiction narrator has with visual artists, if any?

SP: I think we and the photographers and visual artists are all after the same thing. Words are ultimately a descriptive but also a plastic medium; we apprehend them through their appearance on the page, through their rhythms and their hardnesses and softnesses and what they make our palates do. Writing is both a visual medium, a communicative one, and a performance.  The best writing leads us through the experience of the moment, brands us with it, as if it gives us a memory—clear and concrete—that never existed before but takes its place among the mental imagery of our most true experiences. Its sounds should cause scenes to appear. I often cite memory research; if you try to implant a memory with a vague description it won’t work, but if you give enough concrete detail—do you remember being the poor governess at the house with the thorn trees and the cries of despair from the top floor—you achieve a blurring between real memory and the relived literary experience, Jane Eyre, as real as the day you fell off your bicycle in front of your best friend in the second grade. 

AJM: The university you teach at, Western Washington University, publishes Bellingham Review and sponsors the Annie Dillard prize for nonfiction. These things are kind of a big deal in the CNF world, what journals do you recommend creative nonfiction writers read or publish in?

SP: I have my favorites among magazines and journals, but I think what’s most important is to read widely and read a lot, and support literary publishing. We always have subscriptions we rotate among different publications in my household, to help everybody stay afloat.  There are very different things happening with creative nonfiction between say, Image and Orion and Seneca Review, all of which are journals I love. So I say, read, and also support.

AJM: I have a question - though I'm not quite sure how to ask it - but I'm curious to hear your point of view on anyway. There seem to be a lot of CNF writers who are (or were) poets. You, Thomas Lynch, Annie Dillard - even Wistlawa Szymborska published a book of micro-essays - and I have a gut feeling that there's got to be something to that. I don't know what it is, though. So I don't really know how to ask about it. Is it imagery? Something similar in perspective? I don't write poetry, so I can't speak from personal experience, but I'm very curious.

SP: It is true there are quite a few nonfiction writers who began life as poets, but it's equally true that there are a great number who began life as fiction writers: David Shields, Tobias Wolff, Kathryn Harrison, to name just a few. It seems that for many writers of nonfiction, another genre comes first. Of course, creative nonfiction, though it's been done forever in many forms, is experiencing a new explosion of interest along with a spasm of formal experimentation, and many of us coming to it in the past decade--or even two--simply did not have it as an option in our literary education. We neither studied the essay, nor read it, much, and may not have thought of it as a genre until discovering it later on.

That's one piece of the answer, the simpler piece. A more complex response I think has to do with a person's evolution as a writer. If you think about the movements of a human life, it makes sense we would enter the artistic arena relying more heavily on the tool of imagination for the scenes, dialogues, characters we want to inhabit. Our life experience is limited, and it's still raw. I don't know that, to use one example, many of us understand what is unique, tragic, comic, joyful, etc. in our own lives until we start nudging middle age. After a while--whether we're writers or not--we begin the job of mentally processing our own experiences, whether it's our travels, our childhoods, our parenting, whatever. We realize gradually who we are and who we've been in relation to the world. No one's born knowing that; I've had students who failed to see anything interesting in having grown up on a commune, related to one of the Watergate burglars, or, rather breathtakingly, living inside the Statue of Liberty with a park ranger parent.  This isn't to suggest all nonfiction is memoir, simply that the personal lens of nonfiction has to involve a sophisticated understanding of who's doing the looking. This realization, how I am history writ small, a microcosm of larger forces, and I am culturally shaped, is perhaps an older person's insight. Not that some of us don't write great nonfiction out of the starting gate, but I think it's understandable that it might take more time.

AJM: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that's on your mind?

SP: I did a great deal of editing in this past year. I edited a special folio for Drunken Boat, read for the Pushcart prizes, and coedited a special issue of Brevity, along with Barrie Jean Borich and Joy Castro. I am pretty hands-on with material I publish; I like to edit, thinking of it as coaching a piece to that final level of excellence. It’s a lot of work! But I am committed to doing editing work, and to working with VIDA, the grassroots, feminist organization of women in the literary arts. I believe we as artists have an obligation to the larger literary world. I always encourage writers working with me to define themselves in a way that is broader than just “writer”; we are all people of letters, members of the literary community.

Think about ways you can expand the literary world: beyond hoping to be published, what opportunities can you create for other writers? Help found a journal, start a reading series? It is essential that all of us writers think of ourselves as people who also create spaces for others to participate in the world of letters. Otherwise, in a pinched economy with limited room for literature, this little boat is going to run out of room.

Suzanne Paola (Susanne Antonetta)’s most recent book, Inventing Family, a memoir and study of adoption, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Awards for her poetry and prose include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, a Library Journal Best Science book of the year, a Lenore Marshall Award finalist, a Pushcart prize, and others. She is also coauthor of Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Orion, Seneca Review and many anthologies, including Short Takes and Lyric Postmodernisms. She is the chair of the nonfiction Genre Action Committee for VIDA, the feminist organization of women in the literary arts. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her husband and son.