Writing and parenting and juggling

I wrote this essay called Juggle What?, about trying to be a writer and a mom and a human being and how do you juggle it all? I fail a lot. And then I try again and maybe I do better. Maybe. Sometimes. It was first published in Hypertext Magazine as part of a really great series on Writing and Living. I’m super excited to be a part of it (thanks for having me, Chris!).

Juggle What?

What is the rudest question you can ask a woman? “How old are you?” “What do you weigh?” “When you and your twin sister are alone with Mr. Hefner, do you have to pretend to be lesbians?” No, the worst question is “How do you juggle it all?”—Tina Fey

I am often asked how I juggle it all. This can mean many things depending on who’s asking: How do I juggle being a writer and a mom, a teacher and a mom, a working mom, a mom [1]? Submitting my writing, marketing my writing, performing my writing, writing? Teaching students, teaching teachers to teach students, learning from these teachers and students and writers and moms—‘cause, really: what the hell do I know?

*

I am often asked how I juggle it all, and the truth is, I’m lucky. My husband is a total hands-on dad and 100% supportive of my work. He even taught our three-year-old to ask, when I get home at the end of the day, “How’d the writing go, Mommy?”

*

I am often asked how I juggle it all, and the truth is, I’m lucky. My kid is spectacular in a thousand ways that, like any parent, I could go on about forever [2] but what’s pertinent here is that he’s a great sleeper. Eleven hours per night and a two-hour nap. Everything I’ve written since he was born has happened during these two hours. He conks out and I get to work. There are dishes and toys and laundry everywhere; a hundred new emails marked priority; the house is on fire, burning to the ground as I type, and none of it matters. These are my two hours. I am able to exist as an individual independent of my role as a mother because of them. I guard them. They are precious, the last canteen in a barren desert.

Here’s how I used to write: my workspace had to be clean; notes organized; a certain kind of coffee; what music would best suit my mood? I’d read a little, stare at the wall, go to the kitchen for more coffee and—whoa. Look at how gross the oven is, better clean it, and—shit. The fridge is nasty, too, and the floor, and of course the kitchen floor is connected to the rest of floor and by the time the whole apartment is spotless, I’ve given up on writing for the day because I don’t “feel inspired.”

Fuck waiting for it.

Sit down and make it happen.

*

I am often asked how I juggle it all, and what I say is, It’s how you use the time you’ve got.

*

Do I sound like I know what I’m doing? It’s not altogether true. I feel a bit fragile about my writing, actually. Here are some reasons why:

1. Sometimes, I can’t write during those two hours because I have to be at work.
2. Sometimes, I can’t write during those two hours because I have to nap.
3. Sometimes, I can’t write during those two hours because my brain hurts and the only way to fix it is to watch Jack Bauer free-streaming on Netflix.
4. Sometimes, when I can write during those two hours, I don’t know what to work on. A short story? This essay? A blog post or two or five, or that interview that was due last week, or my journal? What I want to work on is my novel, but to tackle something so big with only two little hours… it just  seems impossible.
5. I’m ashamed to admit that. My students might be reading this.
6. What I want to work on is my novel. I walk around thinking about it and sometimes I run into walls or miss my el stop. I’ve written short stories for a decade, but this—there are so many characters! Recently, I was talking through some dialogue to keep them all straight in my mind, and my son looked up from his Legos and said, “Mommy, are you talking to yourself?”
7. I thought of the scene in The Hours when Virginia Wolf is going insane and her niece asks why she’s talking to herself and her sister Vanessa is all, “It’s okay, honey. Aunt Virginia’s a writer.”
8. “Yes,” I said to my three-year-old. “I’m talking to myself.”
9. He hugged me. Have you ever been hugged by a three-year-old? It’s the greatest feeling in the history of the universe.
10. He pulled free of the hug and put both little hands on my cheeks. “You don’t have to talk to yourself, Mommy,” he said. “You can talk to me!”

*

I try to juggle it all. I have a very complex system of color-coded Google calendars: CALEB, CHRISTOPHER, WRITING, TEACHING, CTE, 2nd STORY, and LIFE (for example, Go to the dentist. Buy groceries). In fact, I just added a new one! It’s called SELF-PRESERVATION.

This week, there are three things scheduled under SELF-PRESERVATION: yoga class, Murakami’s IQ84, and have a good cry.

*

Recently, when complaining to my friend Amanda about how I can’t juggle it all, I started to cry. We were driving somewhere, my son in the backseat. I went on and on about the pressure, the exhaustion, the mortgage, how I’d cut off my left arm for an uninterrupted week to write, “ …and to top it all off, fucking Halloween is coming! When am I going to find him a costume!? Let alone fucking make one! Some mothers go to JoAnn Fabric and get the patterns and FUCKING MAKE JIMMY INTO A PENGUIN WHO HAS THAT KIND OF TIME!?”

FYI: I didn’t really swear in front of my son.

That said, I wanted to.

Sometimes, it’s all too much.

Amanda listened to me explode all over the car and then, calmly, she got out her cell phone and turned to the backseat. “Caleb,” she said, dialing. “What do you want to be for Halloween?” “Light-up Batman!” he said, which made me cry harder ‘cause it’s so totally adorable, and while I sat there unable to control my gulpy, gaspy sobs, my sweet little boy asking if I was okay, could he please unbuckle his car seat and come up front to hug me?—my friend Amanda got on the phone and ordered a Batman costume. Size 5T. “And if it could light up somehow, that be great.” Then she hung up, looked at me and said, “What else?”

*

I am often asked how I juggle it all, and the truth is, it takes a village. As I type these words, my son is with his Uncle Jeff. Jeff is a bartender at a fancy French place, and wants his godson to be educated in high-end cuisine. To that end, they take a monthly tour of Chicago’s best gastro pubs. My son comes home stuffed and excited, toddler-talking a mile a minute about riette, cornichons and haricot vert, and I get new pages of my novel; maybe an essay or two.

Jeff is also a writer. He understands my need to get the words out of my head and on to the page. He knows it makes me… calmer.

*

It is rare, if ever, that I feel calm. I drop my son off at school and am floored by all the mothers, so put-together, so sophisticated. I am exhausted from teaching til ten the night before. I have probably, recently, spilled juice on myself. A good day is when we leave the house on time with the necessary stuff: Caleb’s backpack and my backpack and student work and books and computer and keys and the avocado plant for Show’n’Share and coffee and did I walk the dog? Did I make my deadline? Did I write down the idea I had in the middle of the night about how to transition between chapters 3 and 4 of my novel? It was a great fucking idea! WHAT WAS IT!? We get everything in the car, Caleb’s strapped in, I’m strapped in—and then I just sit there. I breathe. It’s 8am. The day hasn’t even started but already, I look around for applause.

*

Recently, when complaining to a friend about how I couldn’t juggle it all, a woman I’d never met leaned over from the next table and said, “Tina Fey has an essay about parenting in this week’s New Yorker. Maybe you should read it.”

I love Tina Fey. I have always loved Tina Fey. She’s on my list, the one my husband and I made, prior to getting married, of people we’d be allowed to cheat with if ever the situation presented itself (Tina Fey, Idris Elba, PJ Harvey from the This is Lovevideo). I admire her humor, the doors she’s opening for women in Hollywood and hopefully this country—life follows art, right?—and, most importantly, I’m grateful for her honesty about how being a working mom is hard even when you have help. See how she does that? Admits having help? So legions of working moms don’t compare ourselves to the impossible model of Tina Fey producing a television show, writing a bestseller, dressing up in designer duds and fighting twenty times a day with a toddler about putting chocolate sauce on the broccoli?

How do I juggle it all? I have help.

*

Dear my cousin Aaron: thank you for helping me take care of my son. Thank for appearing out of the clear blue sky the moment my family and I most needed you. Did you hurt yourself on your fall from heaven?

*

Not gonna lie: when that woman—that stranger—told me that Tina Fey’s essay could help with my parenting, I wanted to stick a fork in her eye. I was eating a very gooey Danish with a fork and I imagined reaching across the table, plucking her eyeball right out of her face, and flinging it across the coffee shop.

Giving unsolicited advice is never a good idea.

Especially when it’s about parenting.

*

I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I feel a bit fragile about my parenting. Here are some reasons why:

1. As a college writing teacher, I read a lot of My Mother Screwed Me Up Good stories.
2. There are so many My Mother Screwed Me Up Good stories, many of which feature women who are artists but stop making art when they have kids and then blame the kids and then the kids go to therapy and grow up and write books likeRunning With Scissors.
3. I didn’t stop making art when I had a kid, nor have I stopped helping others make art, in part because I love my job but also because I need it (Hi, Fannie Mae!), and no matter how fast I run, no matter how much I write, no matter how much permission I have to be a Working Mother in the Twenty-first Century—I still feel guilty. Last week I got an email from school about which parents would help the kids change into their Halloween costumes and which parents would buy juice. I had two meetings, a four-hour workshop, and an annual report due that day, so I bought the juice.
4. I am the mother who buys the juice.
5. I sat on the kitchen floor and cried about being the mother who buys the juice. I vowed to quit work immediately. We’d pay our mortgage somehow, right? And if not, who cares? We’ll mail our house keys to the bank, pack up the dog, and go live in a cabin. Preferably one with a goat. I’ll help my kid change into his Halloween costume every day and we’ll only drink milk. Never juice. Fuck juice.
6. (This cry had not been scheduled on my SELF-PRESERVATION Google calendar).
7. My three-year-old came into the kitchen, wanting to know why I was sad.
8. I told him, “Because I bought juice.”
9. He put both his little hands on my cheeks and said, “Mommy, I love juice!”
10. Then he said, “Can you be done now so we can play?”

*

I am often asked how I juggle it all, and the truth is this: I can sit there crying on the floor, or I can get up and build a super-ramp with my kid. I can worry about what and how and when I’m writing, or I can put my ass in the chair and do it already. It’s how you use the time you’ve got.

*

In the end, there are these calm, lovely, perfect moments. Everything has slowed down. We’re reading bedtime stories. We’re coloring spaceships. We’re making forts out of pillows, figuring out the impossible, puffy architecture. This month, we made enough to cover the bills so, for a few weeks at least, the weight of the world sits elsewhere, and for now it’s just the three of us.

I think about how lucky I am. It’s a big feeling, a thousand times bigger than my novel ever could be. It’s so big that I almost stop breathing.

My whole life, there’ve been two things I’ve known for sure: I want to be a writer and I want to be a mom. And now? People ask how I juggle it all, and what I want to say is, Are you kidding? My life isn’t a juggle.

It’s a fucking gift.

 

footnotes:
[1] I’m using the word Mom here because that’s what I am, but I think this applies to dads, too, and the Aunts and Grandparents and foster parents and significant adults who are raising super-awesome kids that make this world a better place.
[2] When I get mad because somebody parked in my parking spot, he says, “Mommy, you have to share.” He says, “Mommy? My body needs to run now. Can we go somewhere for this?” He says, “My body is full of bones and meat and mus-kulls.” He says, “Mommy-Ramen-aminal” for Mayor Rahm Emmanual. He says, “Will you be my friend? Friends are super cool.” He says, “Can we listen to that M.I.A. song? M.I.A shakes my butt.” He says, “You’re the best Mommy I’ve ever had in my whole life ever,” and a thousand other amazing things, a thousand times a day. For him, I want to be a better human being, a better writer and teacher and wife and friend.  For him, I want the world to be a better place. I think art can help make that happen. And someday—two decades into the future when he’s finding himself as an adult—I want him to read my stories and be proud of me. Which means that now? I need to get to work.

I like to think I’m above revenge. But… well… that’s a lie.

I am interested in how different people define the same word.

In another lifetime, I had a Critical Thinking teacher who tried to explain the difference between denotation and connotation. “This,” she said, pointing at her desk, “is the denotation of the word desk. The connotation of desk is how we all individually feel about desks.” She paused, letting that sink in, and then asked, “How do you all, individually, feel about desks?” There were sixty-some of us in this class, all college freshmen. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that, at the time, desks were not a primary focus of significant emotion response. Sex, maybe. Money. Grades or jobs or fear or art or all sorts of crazy things. Think back to yourself when you were a college freshman. What did you think about? Me?: my folks were splitting up, my boyfriend back in Michigan was seeing another girl, and I shared a 10X10 dorm room with a girl looped on esctasy three nights a week, I’ll tell you what, desks were the last thing on my mind!

sidebar: this all happened over a decade ago. Now, I have very strong feelings about desks, primarily A) I don’t ever want one in a classroom because pedagogically I find that it unecessarily divides my students and I and B) I’m dying to have one in my house so I can have a place to put all my shit. Right now, it’s everywhere, and I can’t ever find what I need, and my poor husband, he’s got to contend with my paperwork all over the place, and also my kid is at that phase where he wants to draw spaceships on everything, which is awesome except that now there are spaceships on my teaching contracts and time sheets and student work and story ideas and lesson plans and tax forms and schedules, and, yes, I know you’re thinking Get the kid some paper, whydon’tcha? and I promise you, he has it! He has every art supply you can possibly imagine! But why would anyone want to draw on paper when they can draw on the bathroom wall? Or Daddy’s web designs? Or mommy’s… everything? Also: last week, at his school, one of the little girls did orgami for show-n-share and now my kid is convinced that paper is for folding, not drawing, so my tax forms are now little birds. Which is actually pretty cool—birds are way more interesting than tax forms. Also: I’ll never again be able to think of taxes without thinking of birds. Which would mean that birds are now my connotation of taxes! Huzzah! Right back to the point!

Anyhow—desks were, at the time, not quite as ripe for connotation as some other words, words like love or race or faith. I remember, years after this whole connotation/denotation thing, reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and thinking about all the different connotations of the word solitude and how all of them were given to a different member of the (fictional) Buendia family:

You’re so brilliant that no one can understand you, so you’re alone.
You’re so beautiful that everyone’s intimidated by you, so you’re alone.
You’re so old that no one even sees you anymore, so you’re alone.
Your penis is so big that women are scared and men are jealous, so you’re alone.
And on and on.

Genius.

sidebar: Dear Marquez I love you.

Anyhow—connotation. It’s mind boggling to think about how many misunderstandings I’ve had over the years because of differing connotations. On the flip-side, I’m in awe of what I learn by listening to the connotations of others; how much I’ve grown as a human being and widened my world view. I’ll listen to how different people—friends, artists, the guy sitting across from me in a class—define words like marriage and protest and illegal and and parent and education and life. Our connotations of these words shape our politics, our values, how we spend our money, how we love—and the thing that creates those connotations are our stories.

A few years ago, there was some big case in the news about parents who were seeking revenge for something that had happened to their teenage daughter—the clincher was, she didn’t want them to. She wanted it to just go away. I remember talking about the ethical implications of this over and over again: what was justice in such a situation? There’s another word with multiple connotations—justice. Justice for whom? For her, or her family? Did her parents have the right to move forward with something she didn’t want? I remember wondering why she didn’t want revenge. Or maybe she didn’t want the kind of revenge they were seeking—the legal kind. Maybe she wanted a different kind?

What exactly is revenge? When I wrote the story Shot to the Lungs and No Breath Left, I was thinking about my connotation to that single word. And—as often happens in writing—the story became about other things, as well: revenge, and the relationship between a parent and a child, and gender roles, and all this other shit that sort of surprised me, but hey—what the hell. This is what came out. It’s here, let’s examine it.

For over a decade, I’ve worked with a Chicago theatre director named Amanda Delheimer Dimond. She’s the Artistic Director of 2nd Story. She’s my friend. She challenges me to look deeper with every project, to really figure out what the hell I am talking about. I knew I wanted to make some sort of video for Shot to the Lungs, so I brought the story to her and the very amazing Kyle Hammon of KBH Media, whom I can’t suggest enough if you want to explore video/audio/multimedia in your own stories, personal or professional. The three of us got to talking about revenge, and we thought it would be intersting to ask some very different people to speak to their own connotations of the word.

I am grateful to Kyle and Amanda for creating a piece that digs into this question of how different people view the same idea, and what might happen if we take a moment to listen to each other. I am grateful to Ada Gray, Lauren Kelly-Jones, Nic Dimond, Aaron Stielstra, Jennifer Shin, and Coya Paz for sharing their time and their stories. I am grateful to a Faculty Development Grant from Columbia College for helping to fund this project, and to all of you for giving it a look and maybe a share.

“To keep my sanity, I breakdance in front of a mirror several times a day.”

After my son was born, it was tough. I don’t mean the super-scary kind of post-partem, this was no Brooke Shields Down Came the Rain, but it definitely was something. I wasn’t… myself. So what I did was I started writing down one thing per day that helped me get by: Today I made the bed. Today I walked to the store. Today I built a super-ramp with my kid. As time went on, the things I wrote down got more and more ridiculous: Today I sold pee. Today I pocketed free sandwiches at a meeting for Organizing for America. Today I caught all these frogs in the creek behind the house and I kissed all of them and dammit none of them turned into a magic guy in tights who would save me from myself. Somewhere during all of this, the recession hit, and every day I’d read things in the news, all these insane things people were up against, and I’d imagine how they were getting by. How do any of us get by? I wrote a story about it called Times Are Tough All Over, and—as will happen when you share stories—people started telling me their own, the sometimes crazy, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes heartbreaking things they were doing to get by in these sometimes crazy, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes heartbreaking times. Hearing these stories had a profound affect on me: I laughed a lot, cried a little, and—most importantly—felt altogether less alone amidst the mess.

I hope that, in some small way, they might do the same for you.

My husband is a very kickass digital artist. I gave him some of the comments folks were kind enough to share with me, and he built a little place on the interwebs called Times Are Tough All Over. Read through them, see what grabs you, and, if you’d like, feel free to share your own.

No, it isn’t a solution to all the craziness that’s out there, but sometimes it’s nice to know you’re not in it alone.

I Asked the Guy Why Are You So Fly?

The very awesome and hilarious Claire Zulkey has my story I Asked the Guy Why Are You So Fly? up at her pop culture blog on WBEZ!

“Thirty is the new Twenty,” Bridget told me on my Thirtieth birthday. We were having brunch at one of those very hip places, with honeydew mimosas and servers who are really fashion models. Makes you wonder, how do they not spill honeydew mimosas all over their expensive designer clothes? Why do they wear expensive designer clothes to serve breakfast? Why do people wear expensive designer clothes to eat breakfast? Even Bridget had on an electric pink Juicy jumpsuit. And a spray tan. Which made her look orange. Pink and orange. Which is maybe the new black, like Thirty being the new Twenty. Bridget turned Thirty a couple months ago since then she’s developed a few—how should I say this?—quirks. The spray tanning, for one. A particular fondness of the word asshat (as in, “Of course we’re having brunch on your birthday, Diane, don’t be an asshat!”). The Valley Girl accent is another. She sounds like Julie in the movie Valley Girl:Encino is, like so bitchin’! Twenty is, like, the new Thirty! which apparently Bridget found comforting, but not me. I was in no hurry to replay my Twenties: the indecision. The self-loathing. The dating.

—Keep reading at Zulkey.com

“My daughter can read just fine.”

I am lucky. There have been many, many people who’ve supported me and my writing over the years, and as this book comes out I’d like to thank them. We’ll start here, with my mom.

When I was in 3rd grade—maybe 4th?—my teacher called my mother in to tell her I was failing reading. My memory of this moment is fits and spurts: I remember mom and I sitting in little-kid desks across from the teacher in her ginormous teacher-desk. I remember being scared I was in trouble; your mom gets called in, that means you screwed up, right? I remember the classroom was on the 2nd floor, with windows overlooking the playground, and there were seesaws shaped like sea animals. My mom has since filled in the blanks for much of what happened: apparently, there were these worksbooks we were supposed to read, with stories about frogs and cats and stuff, and we had to fill out multiple choice worksheets: A. the frog is happy B. the frog is sad C. the frog is thinking, etc. My teacher showed my mother my worksheets; all the multiple choice questions were wrong, big red X’s through the A’s and B’s and C’s.

I do remember this next part: my mother looked at me and smiled. What my teacher didn’t know was that my mom has a Master’s in early childhood education and was then designing a K-5 Gifted and Talented program for Washtenaw County. You want to hear a thing or two about kids and reading? Take my mom out for a beer—but more important than that? I was her kid. You don’t need a Master’s degree to be an expert in your own eight-year-old.  I remember she held up the workbook with the frog story and asked, “Megan. Did you read this?” I shook my head no. Mom tapped the stack of workbooks on the teacher’s desk, a semester’s worth of stories about frogs, and asked, “Did you read any of these?” Again, I shook my head. “What were you reading instead?” she asked, and I went to my desk, got the dogeared copy of Little Women, and brought it back to my mother, who thumbed through its pages—somewhere around 400, depending on your edition—and asked me to tell her about it. I remember my fear of the teacher, the classroom, the workbooks—all of it fell away as I told my mom about how Jo didn’t want to get married, how the girls all helped that family at Christmas, how Beth died (to this day, that scene makes me cry). I loved that book, especially ‘cause it was about sisters, and I wanted sisters—in retrospect the March girls kind of were my sisters. I profoundly believe in the relationships we have with fictional characters; what they teach us, how they help us grow and see the world and see ourselves—anyhow. I remember my mother patting me on the shoulder. Then she turned and, very slowly, very purposefully, gave my teacher a look. I will never forget that look for as long as I live. It held fury and pride and a rapidly brewing thunderstorm of words. Heavy words. Dangerous ones. Over the years, I’ve been grateful that—no matter how much stupid shit I pulled—my mother never looked at me with that look, and it wasn’t until I became a parent myself that I truly understood its magnitude.

Three decades later, as an educator myself, I think about that teacher making such a snap judgement about my reading ability. Her assessment could have changed my life completely; at worst, I could’ve been held back, and at—not best; no, a different kind of worst—I was being labeled: Can’t Read. Granted, labels can be helpful, offering much-needed support for a myrid of challenges kids are up against, but they also have a lasting impact on a kid’s psyche and should be treated with care. Can I tell you how many college students come to my classes with horror stories of What Teachers Told Them? You can’t read, you can’t write, you’re dumb, you’re bad, and then teachers tell parents and sometimes parents believe it because teachers are the experts, right? And the parents, they’re tired, overworked—believe me, I’m a parent, I know tired and overworked, but I’m also a teacher, I know tired and overstuffed classrooms, I know too many students and too much student work, I know too many hours and not enough to pay my mortgage and how do you manage it all? Do you take shortcuts? And what might those shortcuts do to the student in the long run? What I’m trying to say here is that my teacher screwed up, yes, but to say this is entirely her fault is a whole other systematic problem that needs to be addressed. It’s not as easy as “Some teachers are good and some are bad and let’s make these oversimplified judgements by testing students on reading comprehension when maybe, just maybe, kids are filling out those multiple choice questions without even reading about the fucking frog!”

Imagine where my life might have gone had my mother not been the woman she is—my advocate, my watchdog, my parent, and FYI, I’d like to include the idea of “significant adult” into this diatribe here, ‘cause I’ve known many awesome kids raised by aunts or grandparents or foster parents or friends or a million other amazing, selfless people who want to make this world a better place for their kid and everyone’s kids and to all of you, I say Thank You.

To my mom, I say Thank You. I write stories because I love reading, and I love reading because my mother put books in my hands—

(lots of books, many of which are on the banned books list, about which I could write a whole other blog post but this very smart woman, M. Molly Backes, says everything I want to very eloquently here).

—my mother put books in my hands, and read them with me, and asked me what I thought about them, and listened as I told her, and gave me other books to read based on what I told her, for years she did this, she still does this—so imagine, after all of that, being told by some teacher who barely knew me that I couldn’t read? I’m not a religious person, but Lord Almighty! What would you have done, sitting in that little-kid desk as someone told you something untrue about your very own child?

My mom is a dignified lady. I try very hard to follow her example, and more often than not, I fail. I tend to turn red, fly off the handle, let the words out of my mouth before thinking them through. Over the years, I’ve learned that this approach doesn’t do anyone any good, and there’ve been many times when, on the edge of exploding all over the place, I’ve summoned up the memory of my mother that day. She smoothed her skirt over her knees. She smiled. Then she said, “As you can see, my daughter can read just fine.” My teacher must have said something here. Or maybe she just took off her foot and stuck it in her mouth? I don’t remember. What I do remember is my mother calmly explaining, in a voice that offered no room for discussion, a voice not unlike the Book of Genesis, that this teacher would no longer have anything to do with my English education. I would come to class every day and do math and science and social studies with everyone else, but when the rest of the class did their reading and their workbooks, I would be doing assignments that she—my mother—would send to school. Then she—my mother—would grade those assignments and she—my mother—would share that grade with her—the teacher—and if there were any questions about all of this, perhaps they should set up an appointment with the Superintendent of Schools?

My mother is a badass.

For the rest of the year, when everyone else would read about frogs and fill out their multiple choice, I would read the books my mother gave me: Charlotte’s Web; The Great Gilly Hopkins; Bridge to Terabithia; Where the Red Fern Grows; Ramona Quimby; A Wrinkle in Time; Jennifer, Hecate, MacBeth, William McKinely and Me, Elizabeth; The Egypt Game; A Cricket in Times Square; Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIHM; Jacob Two-two and the Hooded Fang; The Pushcart War; Island of the Blue Dolphins; and on and on. I had lots of spiral-bound notebooks full of questions, not multiple choice questions but questions, ones I had to think through and explain, ones that brought me to new questions that I had to think through, explain, and often talk about with my mom and dad and, look at that! Now we’re talking about the world! And suddenly reading means this whole other thing to me: I’m not just watching the characters of Karana and Rontu and Rontu-Aru running around on the island of blue dolphins, I’m imagining myself there with them. I’m seeing it all from their point of view, and for a little girl growing up in  small-town Southeast Michigan, seeing the world through the eyes of a little girl growing up in Ghalas-at on San Nicolas Island was a gift.

What a profound introduction to literature! I remember reading about Karana and wondering why things she does after her father and brother die, things like hunting and fishing , were traditionally only tasks for men. My dad took me hunting and fishing, and I was a girl! I look back and laugh at this childhood outrage, but I’m grateful for it, too. There I am, eight years old, starting to think over some pretty fucking big truths. Here’s another truth: I didn’t know what foster care was, or that some children didn’t have parents, until I read The Great Gilly Hopkins. The kind of kid I was back then lived in a sort of bubble: your own home and neighborhood and school. I remember that book changing the way I thought about gratitude and survival and perseverence and starting a dialogue about privilege that I’m still, to this day, trying to work through and learn about. I’ve had that experience with a lot of books over the past twenty years—through reading, I learn about points of view that are different than my own. It starts the dialogue. It opens my eyes to things I haven’t before seen. It inspires me to share this same gift to others. That’s why I write. That’s why I teach writing. And all of this started back in that 3rd—or was it 4th?—grade classroom.

It all started with my mom.

Interview for Hypertext

I did this super-fun and slightly insane interview about Everyone Remain Calm for Hypertext. I talked for like an hour about artists that influence me. I talked about the fictional characters I’d like to sleep with. I talked and talked and laughed a lot, and figured out some things about myself that I didn’t really know before. The best kind! (thanks, Chris!).

Thank you for writing about a character with the Incredible Hulk under her bed. Why do you think other writers don’t come clean about those kinds of relationships? I mean, no one talks about it. It’s the last frontier. 

There’s this scene in Love in the Time of the Cholera when Florentino Ariza runs into Fermina Daza in the market. He was totally in love with her; she stomped all over his heart; now she’s standing there with her new husband and Florentino looks at him and thinks, This man has to die. I was going through a break-up myself at the time, I’d just bumped into my ex and his new girlfriend, and reading that scene was like, Yes! That’s it exactly! It’s a feeling I’d wager everyone has experienced at some point, but of course, you can’t admit it. You have to move on! You have to be the bigger person!—but in secret? Your imagination is on fire.

So there I was, a twenty-year-old girl in Chicago in 2000, connecting with some Columbian guy in the early 1800′s, all because of the very honest admission of a  secret feeling. I love this about fiction; those moments where I connect with the characters. I’ve seen myself in Florentino Ariza, in Lena Grove, in Ivan Yakovlevich and Jimmy Cross and Alice Kingsleigh and on and on. It’s fucking fascinating, and, I hope, opens me up more to finding connections in my day-to-day life. If I can see myself in these fictional characters, why not the guy next to me on the bus? The woman on TV with the fundamentally different political beliefs? People of different backgrounds and cultures and experiences—and to think someone might read my stuff and find their secrets, somehow, within it? It blows my mind.

Here’s the secret about my Hulk story: for a long time, the relationships I had in my head were more fulfilling than those I had in real life. At the time, I was reading a lot of Kafka, and he does this thing where he gives a concrete, visual image to an abstract feeling or concept. Don’t want to go to work? Okay, now you’re a cockroach. The justice system is fucked up? Okay, here’s this whacked-out machine. I thought, Let’s give this secret of mine a concrete image. Let’s give it the Incredible Hulk.

I have conversations all the time with people about the fictional characters they want to have relationships with (and/or sleep with). Can there be a comment section at the end of this interview and people can write in their list? Everyone’s got a list. Mine goes like this: 1. The Hulk 2. Indiana Jones 3. Seven of Nine 4. Jose Arcadio 5. Luke Duke.

Chicago and Michigan. Alaska. Chicago, Michigan and Alaska. What’s the connection? What’s the attraction to those places besides living there? Why plop your characters in them?  Why not Miami?  Or L.A.?  Somewhere where people eat jicama and are addicted to Botox? What does ‘place’ do for you as a writer?

For me, place is the guts of the whole damn thing. It affects everything: first in a very immediate way dictated by the space; like, I’m thinking of that scene in Kill Bill where the two blondes are kicking the shit out of each other in a trailer. Uma Thurman keeps trying to pull out her samurai sword to behead the chick with the eyepatch, but she can’t get it out of its sheath ’cause the ceiling in the trailer is too low. If that space had a higher ceiling, the scene would have been over in ten seconds. And then there’s the more abstract way of how the characters relate to and act within the place. For example, I act differently in my home than I do in public, in places I know versus places I’ve never been, in different countries, time periods, etc. I’m big into the sci-fi and other-worldy stuff, and the trick is creating the world that the characters inhabit. It’s not any different writing about Chicago, Michigan, and Alaska (all places I’ve lived, by the way). You have to create those worlds. My Chicago is different than yours. My Chicago now is different than it was ten years ago. My Chicago is different than the Chicago of some of my fictional characters.

I could spend my whole life writing about only Chicago and never begin to crack its surface. To really get the complexity of a place, I think, you need to see it through the eyes of lots of different voices/backgrounds/experiences. You also need real specifics, the place within the place within the place; like Leo’s Lunchroom in Wicker Park in Chicago in 1999. The Uptown Theatre in Uptown in Chicago in 1940.  Women and Children First in Andersonville in Chicago in 2010. I’m working on a novel right now—which, incidentally, is set in Chicago, Michigan, Alaska, and Prague—and the magnitude of research I’m swimming through to really understand these characters and their experiences is just crazy. Awesome, but crazy. What did Chicago mean to a Czech immigrant in 1968? What does it mean to a college student from Michigan in 1995? To a new mom in 2008?

Honestly, it feels less like I’m consciously choosing place, and more like the characters I come up with tell me where they’re from; I just listen and try to do them justice. L.A. will show up if one of my characters makes it happen. Or if I get an assignment to write about it, in which case I’ll make it happen. Or maybe at the end of this month, since I’m going to L.A. for a conference. Or, shit—maybe I’ll write about it tomorrow, ’cause now you’ve got me thinking.

These characters, I’m thinking, in particular, about Penny in ‘The Boot’, are desperate in some way.  They’re all seeking something (the Dad in ‘Shot To The Lungs and No Breath Left’, Shelly, Penny, everyone in ‘Times Are Tough All Over’, Eliza).  And, yet, there seems to be this incredible hopefulness in all of the stories.  Amidst all of this emotional or economic desolation there’s an escape.  Can you talk about that a little bit?

I was recently hanging out with my friend Bobby, and somebody asked him if he believed in love at first sight. He said yes and they asked why and he said, “I don’t want to live in a world where it doesn’t exist.” That’s how I feel: I don’t want to live in a world where hope doesn’t exist. I can tell you all sorts of stories about desperation or fear or anger, but for me the most important part is knowing how the characters react under such circumstances. You can either say, This is scary, let’s hide under the bed, or This is scary and here I go.

So, I get to ‘Professional Development’ and I’m along for the ride, in fact you’ve got a hook in my lip and I’m just letting the current take me, and, I’m thinking, ‘What a shift!  This is so realistic.’ (Not that ‘Incredible’ wasn’t) I’m along for the ride, though, as I said, and then things start to shift back again into that world between reality and a very realistic dream-reality (which is where most of these stories hang) and I’m completely buying it. I’m right there with the band. It doesn’t seem fantastic at all. It just seems like the reality you’ve created. Why is that odd reality something that attracts you as a writer?  Why do you feel comfortable there?

The psychology 101 answer is that I was an only child from a very small town, and what saves you is your imagination. Imagination, and the library. I remember spending a lot of time in the creek behind the house, looking for fairies. That scene in Times Are Tough all Over where the girl catches all the frogs and kisses them?—that was me.

I’m really attracted to the phrase What if. What if the marching band follows me home? What if the guy sells pee for a living? What if a tidal wave of hot lava poured down the hall? It’s such a good gateway into storytelling, whether you’re writing the very realistically real or the totally fantastic real. It also makes even the simple acts of walking down the street or grocery shopping—those deadly mundane things—so much more interesting! Seriously, what if there are ninjas in the produce section?

Not to go all crazy with the Kafka, but reading The Metamorphosis was a big lightbulb sort of moment for me. I was on the el, on the way to a job that I hated, thinking Gregor doesn’t want to go to work either, so he turns into a bug. The realization that I could make something magical, dreamlike, or cracked-out happen to someone in response to a very realistic, universal emotion was a huge revelation. And then somebody gave me Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to this day my favorite writer, and that’s when I started really thinking about magical realism and how it might fit into my life—here, now, in Chicago. I also love Murakami, Allende, Vonnegut, Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, Geek Love, my friends Joe Meno and Elizabeth Crane, all sorts of sci-fi and fairy tales, Alice in Wonderland, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Carnival, The Matrix, The Shining, that crazy scene in Magnolia where it starts raining frogs, anything that explores a… let’s say tilted view of reality. I also think magical realism is a really fascinating way to tackle political commentary, which is becoming more and more important to me as I get older and became—how do I want to say this?—a more engaged citizen. I think our world can be better. I think art can help accomplish that.

I like the transition/placement of ‘One One-Thousand, Two One-Thousand, Three’ after ‘Professional Development’.  How much did you think about story placement?  Or is it the way the stories came to you?

I wish I had something really profound to say, like I ordered the stories mathematically or in accordance with the tides, but the truth is: it didn’t cross my mind until a week before the final draft was due. See, like most everyone—I’m busy. I have three jobs and a three-year-old. At this point in my life, writing time is precious, guarded, the last canteen when you’re lost in the desert. I spend it on the actual physical act of writing, the Ass In Chair sort of thing, and at that time I was locked in to rewriting each individual story as opposed to examining the book as a complete movement.

My friend Leif has a farm in Michigan, this stunning, peaceful place with the pond and the land and everything opposite of my life in Chicago. I called him totally panicked, crying about deadlines, about noise—not the noise of the city but the noise of life in general and how can one be reflective, or think critically, or even daydream for that matter with all this go-go-go, at which point he was like, “What the hell are you talking about?” and I said, “I need to come to the farm,” and he said, “Oh, cool. I’ll get wine.” I am eternally grateful to him for that time, that room of one’s own. I spent a desperately needed week just… sitting, rereading the stories and trying to examine how they all fit together. I wrote the story titles on post-it notes, laid them on the floor in the solarium, and moved them back and forth. I’d switch two of them, stare at them for an hour, and then move them back. How did they fit together? Tone, point of view, subject matter, realism to magical stuff, lengthwise? My work as a curator for 2nd Story really came into play here: instead of finding the connections between multiple storytellers, I had to find them in myself.

There’s something interesting happening with time in ‘One One-Thousand, Two One-Thousand, Three.’ In fact, in most of the stories. Can you talk a little bit about how you use time in the structure of your stories? 

I was rereading American Skin, and in the beginning there’s this fight scene that totally kills me: it starts with the narrator getting on the el, and ends when he gets off of it. That’s it. On and off. It seems like writers are always having the whole How do you know when the story is done conversation, and the simplicity of that structure blew my mind. I tried it with One-One Thousand, this thing I’d been working on where a girl is stuck skinny-dipping in a quarry: story starts when she gets in the water and ends when she gets out of it. That’s what determined time: how long can you tread water? How cold does the water get after the sun goes down? What does your skin look like?

It’s helpful for me, when I’m finishing a story, to think about how much time moves within it. Shot to the Lungs covers about a half hour. The Boot happens over several months, however long it takes Penny to walk off the weight. In Logic, the narrator is a waitress, so time moves by her counting coffee refills. It’s about what makes sense to the characters, the worlds they inhabit, and what’s going on in the particular moment. I have a story I perform for 2nd Story about pregnancy tests, and it moves in real time as you wait for the stick to turn blue or pink.

(I ripped that off 24).

(I really like Jack Bauer. Maybe he could live under my bed).

There’s this kind of fascination with the modern world and the hoops through which we’re expected to jump.  It’s like, as an artist, you’re saying, ‘This is all just so complex and weird…when did it get like this?’  Your characters have to negotiate through all the shit (‘I Asked The Guy Why Are You So Fly?’). Do you feel that way or is it limited to the characters on your pages?

I feel that way for sure. There are all sorts of hoops, many of them shitty and unfair and totally irrational, but when I finally get some distance and am able to look back on the moment reflectively (i.e. I’m not pissed off about it anymore), it’s easy to see the profound part of the experience as well.

I originally wrote I Asked the Guy Why Are You So Fly? for this super-awesome performance series called The Dollar Store. The host, Jonathan Messinger, gave a bunch of writers and performers and musicians an item from the dollar store, and we had to come up with something around that item. Mine was a plastic marijuana leaf on a chain. Which made me think of those giant bling necklaces guys used to wear on MTV. Which made me think of the song Funky Comedina by Tone Loc that played on the radio during the Eighties.  It was a funny gimmick, but I didn’t want a gimmick—I wanted a story. At the time, I was in the middle of dating a bunch of people, trying to find The One, that insane all-consuming search. Want to talk about jumping hoops? About complex and weird? Shit, there’s a reason there are so many stories and books and movies and plays and sitcoms and songs and operas and poems about looking for love. Out of all the ridiculous situations we find ourselves in, a date with Tone Loc seemed pretty tame.

You’re an oral storyteller, too.  I hear you very clearly on the page and have heard at least one of these stories told orally.  What’s the connection between oral storytelling and printed work?  What’s different?  How much does live performance – gesture, voice intonation, pauses, etc., – overlap with what’s happening on the page?  How is it different?

I paid for college waiting tables: in the mornings I read Tolstoy and Morrison and Christina Stead, and at night I poured drinks and listened to people of varying levels of intoxication. It really struck me that the books I was reading and the stories I was hearing had all these profound similarities in voice, craft, and intention. People tell stories to connect. To explain, escape, seduce, educate—connect.

For me, the story on the page and the story told aloud are one and the same. I write  for an audience, and I’d like the audience to read my work on the page the same way I’d read it aloud. I’m interested in the craft of that—voice, punctuation, word choice, pacing. Have you read The Tell-Tale Heart? It’s not possible to read that story without yelling at certain moments. HOW DID POE DO THAT? HE MAKES YOU YELL. It’s amazing; it’s craft; and I’m interested in how the craft of performance influences the craft of writing. A lot of this comes from my training in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College, where the oral telling is a large part of the writing process, and also my work with 2nd Story, where we’ve spent the better part of a decade experimenting with this stuff. I get really excited about it, obviously, but I can also get all fancy and scholarly. Give me a sec to put my hair in a bun.

Can you explain the popularity of the Foo Fighters?

I cannot.

I got a bit misty at the end of ‘Greek or Czeck or Japanese’.  Do you think that’s fair to lay on your readers?  I mean, we’ve got a lot on our plates.  Why should a story elicit those emotions? Why put your readers through this?

I watch a lot of bad movies (if my husband were here, he’d be nodding vigorously right now). I love ones that are really, really awful, but also wonderful, preferably with lots of gratuitous explosions. I like a good fight scene, I like drama, I like watching characters react when they’re really challenged in some way. But people are challenged in small ways, too. I tried to think about finding balance between some of those giant, overwhelming things, like in the title story where the girls mom gets squashed by a tornado, and those seemingly small moments that are actually huge, like in One-One Thousand where a 14-year-old girl lets a boy see her naked. All she does is get up, out of the water, but for her, it’s the greatest challenge I could’ve thrown her way. Greek or Czech or Japanese was, for me, another one about challenges. Having a kid in this world? My God. Even getting married, putting your heart in someone else’s hands? What a profound act of bravery.

I think the emotional reactions we have to stories—or any kind of art, for that matter—is more about what’s inside us than necessarily what the artist intended. There’s this scene in the movie Things You Can Tell By Looking At Her where Holly Hunter walks down a street and cries. That’s all that happens. She walks down the street and cries, and every time I see that scene, I lose it. I am a puddle on the floor, the gaspy, gulpy kind of crying where you can’t control the sides of your mouth. Every time I watch it, I think, Okay, here it comes, hold it together—but I can’t. Something just erupts.

It’s kind of beautiful,. I think.

‘Oscar and Veronica’ has the acidity of Tennessee Williams and oaky hints of Woody Allen.  How much are you influenced by other artists? 

Careful. I can talk about this for a really long time.

Bradbury’s got a great line about stuffing yourself with all kinds of stories and art so every morning you can explode like Old Faithful. He says, “I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting.” I love that. It’s a fucking way of life: I read books. I read literary journals and student work and 2nd Story stories. My husband curates an art blog and every day is like, Look at these sculptures,! Look at these photographs! Look at these paintings made from wine and wax and gravity! There’s always art coming in. My challenge is figuring out what I  can learn from it: about craft; about the world; about myself.

I know I’ve been talking a lot about the magical stuff, but I also really get off on art that makes reality seem so fucking real, you have to punch the wall. I’m looking at you, Nina Simone, and you, Adele—have you heard Adele sing Someone Like You? That song makes me die. How can I write a page of text with even a fraction of that emotion? And PJ Harvey!—google PJ Harvey singing Rid of Me in Sydney. She’s seriously going to jump through your computer and cut your arm off, which I totally get; I’ve had days where I want to cut somebody, too—but here’s the thing: I won’t. I’m too nice. PJ Harvey’s probably too nice, too, but in the song she allows me to engage with these feelings I wouldn’t ever act on. It’s amazing, because it’s so totally real.

Yes, yes, I know, we’re all way too sober for the What is Real? conversation, but I learn a lot from artists who really test that water. There’s this scene in the film The Princess and the Warrior where two characters fall in love during an emergency tracheotomy performed under a mack truck with a Big Gulp straw and a Swiss army knife. The girl can’t breath. The guy is sucking blood out of her neck. It’s crazy and implausible and beautiful and real and it kills me. KILLS ME. The scene in Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov takes an axe to that moneylender kills me, too. He’s this kid, trying to get through college. He can’t pay tuition. He’s can’t buy food. He can’t go to the doctor—doesn’t have money—so the hunger and exhaustion and fever make everything fuzzy in his brain and I’ve seen this kid a thousand times in the college students I teach today, here, in 2011. Same with Caleb Trask in East of Eden—everyone tells him he’s bad, so that’s what he thinks of himself. He can’t see the good that’s there, too, and it’s so, so, so REAL. How do you write that? How do you craft it? In the book Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham, he goes on for like a gazillion pages about how obsessed Philip is with Mildred (which is totally crazy ‘cause she makes fun of his clubbed foot and calls him names and steals his money—total bitch, this girl) and finally it’s like, OKAY MAUGHAM. I GET IT. HE’S OBSESSED.WHY ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT THIS. But then my friend Lisa came over for dinner, and she’s dating this girl who doesn’t treat her particularly well, but she won’t break up with her, and this has been going on for months, and it’s all Lisa talks about and suddenly I was like MAUGHAM IS A GENIUS. Because it’s real. Because we do obsess over people who are bad for us. We go on and on, and this gets me thinking as to how much page time I spend on any given thing, and also what point of view do I best tell it from? You want to look at point of view, you look at Faulkner. Reading Light in August made me want to lie down on the floor and give up. I mean, for real, Faulkner. HOW DID YOU DO THAT? It’s third person, but goes off into italicized first person whenever we’re in a character’s head, but there’s this section right in the middle where we’re in those italics but the first person narrator just got knocked unconscious, so these aren’t his conscious thoughts we’re reading, but rather his subconscious mind? WTF, FAULKNER! And while I’m WTF’ing Faulkner (yeah, I just said that), it’s fascinating that he can go for nine pages without a period and it reads super, super, super sloooow, and then you’ve got someone like Hubert Selby Jr. in Last Exit to Brooklyn who’ll go for nine pages and it’s like a lightning bolt, I almost can’t keep up the pacing’s so damn fast. It has something to do with adjectives and adverbs, I think; Selby doesn’t much use them, and Faulkner’s got like twenty in every sentence!—I could go on. I love this shit. I geek out on it, like my sister Mary does with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or my Aunt Phyllis does with Nascar.

Why do life-altering events always happen at the Metro?

There’s such safety at a rock show: the anonymity, the darkness, the booze, the crowd—you can be anyone. You can try on different personalities and see if they work, and, at the same time, you’re not alone, because the music connects everyone. It’s really magical, if you think about it. A sweaty, sloppy, magical mess.

The worst feeling in the world is when the lights come up at the end of the night. Suddenly, everyone has to go back to who they really are.

In many of the stories, there’s this tight link between physical and emotional pain (the Hulk pummeling a lovelorn character under her bed or the Indestructible Lady pierced with knives and sobbing). Can you comment on that connection?

I think that connection is more a part of our day-to-day life than anything I came up with. Listen to what we say: “He hurt me.” “She ripped out my heart.” “I want to punch him in the face.” “You guys, I died. I’m serious, I died.” Our language even assigns the same verb for physical and emotional pain: I feel. It’s a part of our culture, I think, and from a literary standpoint, it’s back to that whole thing with assigning a concrete image to an abstract feeling or concept. Love in the Time of the Cholera, for example, compares lovesickness and cholera.

Also, I’ve had my heart broken once or twice. It fucking sucked, and took way longer to heal than the time I fractured my ankle.

Your characters experience tornado drills, being blockaded in their own bedroom, all kinds of natural and unnatural events.  Which is more difficult:  fiction or life?  Or fictional life.  Or life as fiction?

In fiction, you can edit out the boring parts, or at least make marching bands or tornadoes or tidal waves of lava appear to make things more interesting. I’m trying to apply that same principle to real life: edit out the boring parts. Or add a marching band.