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.

A Quick Chat with Abigail Thomas

*Abigail Thomas will give a reading at UNT on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012, at 8 p.m. in the Silver Eagle Suite.

ALR: I loved the brevity of sections in your first memoir, Safekeeping­—the way each section seemed to pop off the page, as well as the poetic feel of the book. The sections in your second memoir, A Three Dog Life, are longer, and your voice feels more resigned. I wonder if you can talk about the trade-offs and benefits of such short sections, and why you chose to write in longer sections in your second memoir. Also, were sections orchestrated to talk to each other?

AT: Safekeeping was written after the fact (if fact is the right word). The pieces came flying out of me after my second husband, Quin, died, and I realized, as I think I wrote, that I now had a past. Something was over, there was no changing or fixing it. I needed to face it. The pieces came willy-nilly, one often spawned the next. I think the first piece might have been apple cake, but I can't remember now. I had originally believed the book, if it were to be a book, would end with the death of my old friend, but realized after a few months that although he had died, my life continued without him, and I was left with the fallout and questions and grief and guilt and rubble I found around me. Plus I was alone with it. Quin was gone. This realization dictated that the thing (whatever it was) fall into three sections and three sections are often a very useful way to look to what I'm doing, to try to order it somehow. I don't know why.

Nothing is really chronological, past and present melt into each other, but when I was done I hoped what I'd made was the portrait, messy though it was, of a girl born in the nineteen-forties, who lived through the changes of her times. It is partly as an explanation to my children, and certainly as an apology to what happened to their lives, but that wasn't all of it either. I needed to make sense of it for myself. I also needed to find a way to begin to forgive myself. The pieces were moments I vividly remembered, and writing them I hoped would finally make some kind of sense. Sort of like a constellation. The book was meant also to be an apology, in the form of an explanation, of what had made me who I was, and who I had failed to be, who I was still becoming.

A Three Dog Life was written as it happened. There was no looking back, it was all happening as I wrote it, although it took six years to write. The experience was so tragic, and so precious, and parts of it so mysterious, I didn't want to lose any of it to imperfect memory. It is far more chronological than Safekeeping, given I was describing, recording, events as they occurred. The business of guilt was huge, I had to face that as I was in the midst of it, very difficult. It was also extremely painful in Safekeeping, especially when I wrote about my son, Ralph.

Also the endings were just gifts. The last bit of A Three Dog Life, when Rich collapses time into a happy year, was a conversation I wrote down verbatim, and realized that was where I wanted to end the book. The last piece I wrote for that book, is the opening chapter. You never know.

As far as orchestrated to talk to each other, that wasn't a conscious thing. If they do, great.

ALR: I am also drawn to the ambiguity, the subtlety, in Safekeeping. Some sections veer off into strangeness or mystery, like a poem. Other sections (I’m thinking of your father swimming with a school of bluefish) ask the reader: What is this? Where does it fit? And I love that you don’t feel the need to answer these questions, or edit out memories for seeming irrelevance. I wonder what the criteria is for what material stays and goes.

AT: There is not much point to memoir if you don't surprise yourself somewhere along the way, often banging up against material you'd rather skirt. No skirting allowed. You can't really fool yourself/ it saps all your energy.  If that's what you're after, a pretty picture with angel wings and fairy dust all over you, or a picture in which you were a victim, go mow the lawn.

Of course I don't mean YOU.

As for what I put in and what I leave out, and don't explain, that is entirely a question of taste. If it interests me, it goes in. If it makes me feel whole, it goes in. Bluefish and Daddy? It was who he was. As good an example as I had.

ALR: Follow-up question: I am curious about the function of seemingly ambiguous or irrelevant details/memories. In what ways do such details help readers experience what you want them to experience? How do they work the reader’s mind? Another way to think about this question: Many sections of your books give us the whole memory, rather than only the logically relevant part (e.g. most of the section “Watching Her Father Eat Cake” details you making cake, and only at the end do we see the brief interaction with your father). Why is this?

AT: Cake. I wanted to write about making cake because it was the high point of my day back then. All that delicious batter! The miracle of cake! Making a cake! It was only after that I realized the pleasure of watching my father eat it that was the end result. (The cakes were terrible.) I don't know about [the effect of such a section] on the reader, nor am I sure, in the process of writing, that I give a shit.

ALR: Safekeeping uses first, second, and third person. Did the sections just come out this way, or was this a calculated move? It seems that the intimacy of second person is balanced out by the distanced third-person sections, and this exchange gives the narrative a different feel than one written only in first person. The variety allows us to distinguish shades that would otherwise be overlaid. I wonder if you might speak to this point—the benefits and trade-offs of using multiple voices, how you see these voices working in your book, etc.

AT: The option of first and third persons wasn't a conscious choice…to write certain things in first person made me sound either saint-like or a victim. I also wanted to see myself from time to time through what I imagined my children’s eyes had been. Some pieces were written over and over both ways to figure out how to get at what I wanted. I chose the voice that seemed to be the most honest. The third person was also necessary when I had no connection anymore to the girl I'd been. I knew who she was, but she was no familiar or part of me. I wish I had [a more] intelligent answer about using first second and third persons. Mostly it just felt right.

My memory is poor for interstitial material, long years went by with only a few vivid memories, but  those were the ones I wrote. The piece that took me longest, almost as long as the whole book, was the last one about my daughter Sarah, and the birth of her daughter Abigail. Once that first bath happened, I knew I wanted to end there, but it took months and months and months to get it right. It's helpful when you discover where you want to end, then all you have to do, besides write it, is earn it.

ALR: How do you see the title “Safekeeping” (and the section by the same name) instructing the reader on how to read the book? How did you decide on this title?

AT: My editor named the book "Safekeeping." I wanted to call it "Short Controlled Bursts" and had a little semi-military paragraph to go with it, which I've since lost. I love the title now.

ALR: On your website, you also describe painting: “I’ve been trying to make an ocean. For some reason it never works. So I make another forest which also doesn’t work, but I don’t give up on forests, so I scrape and add various blues and greens to make more trees, but it’s still not to my liking. Some days are like this. I do a little halfhearted scraping, turn it over, and presto, there is the ocean, beautiful, many colors blue, deep water, no sky. I love the way this crazy shit works. When you’ve given up, when you least expect it there it is.” Does writing (or the pursuit of truth) work like this? Do you know where you’re going when you sit down to write? What happens if when you least expect it, it is not there?

AT: I don't know where I'm going when I sit down to write. I think I know where I'm going, but often end up elsewhere, which is the thrill of it. It's just much easier to see with the paintings.

When you're writing and expect it to be there but it isn't, you take a nap. Naps are key. All kinds of stuff swims to the surface. And if it doesn't, you haven't beaten your head against a wall, although that may come next. What I try to do is make something else. A painting. A cake. A caramel sauce, something humbly creative so your mind can wander (and you can eat it at the end). But too often you have to wait years to find what you're looking for, usually when you've stopped looking.

ALR: “I think that’s what we’re all after, truth, although I’d never have said such a thing when I was young.” You say this on your website. So is this a guiding concept in your writing process? Do you use “truth” in the editing/revising process as a filter of sorts? What does “truth” look like? And why is it that you wouldn’t have said such a thing as a youth?

AT: I never talked about big concepts when I was young. Truth? Who was I to talk about truth? What did I know about anything? And it's truth in terms of honesty, I guess, that I really mean. There's no such thing as Truth, although there's good and evil, but there's scouring your dark places for the honesty you'd perhaps rather avoid. That's personal truth. Not facts, of course, that's a whole different category. We're stuck with the memories we've got, they are stored any which way, but that's what's made us who we are, don't you think? I don't use truth for much, no. When I'm stuck, I use grace as a filter. What awful means is sometimes the deliverer of grace? A little Flannery O'Connor in there, I think.

ALR: Your writing is such a pleasure to be with. Thank you for your contributions, and thank you for your thoughts here.

AT: These are marvelous questions. Thank you. If you need more, please ask me. I wrote this very quickly, as I have hideous asthmatic bronchitis, and I'm flying high on prednisone. But your intelligent questions make me look forward even more to coming down to Texas, despite which way it might go.

About the Author (from www.abigailthomas.net): Abigail Thomas, the daughter of renowned science writer Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell), is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve. Her academic education stopped when, pregnant with her oldest daughter, she was asked to leave Bryn Mawr during her first year. She’s lived most of her life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and was for a time a book editor and for another time a book agent. Then she started writing for publication. Her memoir, A Three Dog Life, was named one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. She is also author of Safekeeping, a memoir, and Thinking About Memoir.