Tag Archives: writing

Today Was a Shining Success; Today Was a Spectacular Failure

I’m contributing to the Write Like Hell blog at Hyptertext, where writers document the process of working on a novel-length project. Here’s my first post:

I write a little every day, without hope, without despair—Isak Dinesen

What’s scary isn’t the writing, it’s living with the writing. I’m afraid that if I say, Today is day one, Today we are beginning the life of Writing This Book, that I’ll fail before I even get started. I’ve failed before. I have many excuses, so many reasons to put it to the side: my kid, my job, my other job, my other other job, sleep, students, other deadlines, readings, mortgage, so tired, so many things to worry about—but fuck it. It’s time. I’m reading Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel—and P.S. where has this book been my whole life? How have I never read it? It’s the journal he kept while writing East of Eden, one of my very favorite books, my child is named after that book and now, at the age of thirty-six, I’m reading it for the very first time?

Maybe it’s because now is when I need it.

Here’s the gist: he wrote a little bit to his editor, every morning, before he worked on the book; he credits these little letters with allowing him to get into the writing, clearing his head enough so he could focus and find his words. I tried that today and it worked—it worked! It worked! 1000 new wonderful, messy, not-yet-right but still there, existing on the page, moving forward words! I’d like to keep that pace up every day, but it’s not realistic. 500 is realistic. I can make 500 happen. Steinbeck keeps talking about taking it slow. He says, “As I go on, my happiness increases,” and I need to remind myself of this, again and again. My happiness will increase. The part of me that’s felt off, crazy, furious all the goddamn time, is because I haven’t been writing this book. It’s because I’ve been working on every other possible thing, the easy stuff—no, not easy, just… the stuff that has an end in sight, essays, mostly, and short stories, things I can finish in one or two or five sittings. Done and done. But in the back of my mind is this story, this book—and it is big.

Last year, when I tried to sit down and make it happen, tried to get myself on a schedule, I kept banging my head against this idea that it had to be about one thing, like with an essay, or the pieces I write for 2nd Story. Then, I was reading Shirer’s bio of the Tolstoys and found this:

Anna Karennina remains one of the great works of the imagination, a moving tale of two very opposite love affairs… But it is much more than that. It is at the same time an ode to life, to human courage and endurance, a pleas for understanding and a tolerance of those who fail and fall, a devastating critique of a cruel and corrupt society, and a deep inquiry into the questions that troubled the author all his life: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning, if any, of life—and death? (Love and Hatred, pg. 79).

It hit me, a brick to the forehead, and God, what a simple, obvious thing: A novel doesn’t have to be about one thing. It can be about twenty, forty, a hundred. I don’t have to chose. At least not before I even get started, and when I say started, I don’t mean out of the clear blue sky, facing down a blank page. I’ve been working on this thing for a while now, chunks and instances and journal entires, like puzzle pieces. I saw a video recently of Anne Rice talking to a group of high school students, and she said each of her novels took years of thinking, of journaling, and then when she finally sat down to write it would come quickly, easily, because she already saw so much of it in her head. And I’m like—okay. That. That’s how this is going to work, right? Those 1000 words I just wrote?—cake. And why wouldn’t they be? I’ve been kicking around this story for years. I can taste it almost, some two hundred some pages of What the Fuck already written.

Now it’s about putting it together, finding what I want to give to an audience, what I want to—as they say—say.

It’s about committing to the life of Writing This Book.

*

Here’s the thing: you set aside time to write and then when you get to that time, you’re exhausted. I swear, I had time today, but I spent yesterday doing an eight hour long workshop on professional documentation, working with thirty faculty members on cv’s, teaching philosophies, portfolios and cover letters, and then my brain felt heavy, like I was carrying concrete up there instead of light, airy tissue, and then—then—I got home and my little boy runs to hug me, Look at this spaceship I built, Mommy, and I have to chose.

Either way I go, there is guilt. There is always, always, always guilt.

This is where the Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel does me a diservice: he had money coming in already from scripts and other projects, so he could wake up in the morning and write, and then hang with his family and rest. I don’t have that luxury. I don’t need his journal. I need Toni Morrison, who’d work all day and then come home at the end to take care of her family and then have to summon the energy to write at night. How did she find that energy? I bow before that woman, for a thousand of reasons, not the least of which is she was a single mom, so not only was she doing it, she was doing it on her own. I am not on my own, I am lucky in a thousand ways: supportive partner; healthy, awesome kid; a job that I love, that I’m good at; and I’ll have the time tomorrow for this novel, right?

Right?

Research in Necessary Fiction

This essay was originally published as part of the Research Notes series at Necessary Fiction. I love, love, love this site, and am thrilled to be included in their work. Thanks for having me, Steve!

The Right Kind of Water

The first hour is great. I’m in the bathtub, submerged to my neck. The water is warm and lovely, I’m more relaxed than I’ve been in months, and the best part?—what I’m doing here is work. It’s rewriting. It’s research.

While finishing up final edits on my story collection, Everyone Remain Calm, I couldn’t shake this nagging feeling that one of the stories, “One One Thousand, Two One Thousand, Three,” wasn’t right. It was missing something. I read it over a thousand times and couldn’t pinpoint what bothered me, which is the fucking worst. If I can name the problem, I can fix it. I can go to my bookshelf, pull down the Marquez, the Tolstoy, the Hubert Selby or James Baldwin or Dorothy Allison and figure out the literary gymnastics necessary to make the damn thing work.

Here’s the gist: a 13-year-old girl, Eliza, is skinny-dipping in a quarry in Southeast Michigan. She thinks she’s alone, but turns out there’s a group of high school guys nearby getting drunk in the woods. They discover her. Threaten her. Trap her in that quarry like a cage and demand she get up so they can look at her. Like a lot of  fiction—mine, at least,—this is based on some assemblance of a true experience, and what interested me the most as I wrote it was the tension. Would she stand or wouldn’t she? How would they react when she did or didn’t? How would she react to their reaction?—and on and on.

I teach creative writing classes, and what finally cracked the issue was a discussion my students and I had around a scene from Don DeGrazia’s American Skin. Alex, the main character, boards the el, all hell breaks loose, and then he gets off. “How much times passes between the on and off?” asked one of my students. “Like five minutes? How does the reader see those minutes passing?” and all of a sudden—I knew. In “One One Thousand,” the story starts when Eliza gets in the water, and ends when she gets out. But how much time passes between the two? I didn’t know. Later, rereading the story, I saw certain clues I’d placed unconsciously: at the beginning, the sun is high, warming the water, and by the end, it’s freezing and the stars are out. So that’s—what? 3pm to 8pm? Five hours? That’s a lot of time for somebody to be naked in the water. What happens to a body when it’s submerged for that long?

This is the point where, historically, I hit the library. I’m the stay up all night/drink too much coffee kinda girl, finding esoteric details in random books. Even now, with the internet, I still stalk libraries, milking electronic reserves for all their worth.

But.

I’d recently published a story set in a greenhouse. I wrote that greenhouse from memory—blah blah plants and trees,—adding in fancy-sounding names pulled from the 25th Anniversary Edition of The Book of Plants. And then, not long after, I stopped by the Gethsemane Garden Center and realized my description had been totally, completely, utterly wrong. I’d forgotten the tropical temperature. The hoses full of pinpricks, spraying everything with a fine, hot mist. The ceiling of green, like a jungle, and I knew then that I needed to up my research game. If I could go there, I’d go. If I could do it, I’d do. If I could live it, I’d live.

So.

With no quarries in the immediate vicinity of Chicago and the late-fall chill already here, I decided on the bathtub. I would sit in the bathtub. For five hours. iPhone alarm set to count down the minutes, journal on the nearby toilet to take notes about my skin, my fingertips and toes, my teeth (chattering?). I had very vague, very naïve, very uninformed ideas of what would happen, and a silly sense of pride in what I was doing.

Research!

I was so totally a writer!

*

In the second hour, my hands and feet are, predictably, wrinkled. The water is cold and draining slowly, down from neck-level to just below my breasts. More than anything, though, I’m bored. Usually, when I take baths to relax, I either read or prop my laptop precariosuly on the toilet to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer free-streaming on Netflix. But this?—here, in the bathtub?—this is not relaxation. This is research! Serious research! I’m experiencing what Eliza experienced, feeling what she felt, living what she lived! That’s what I tell myself, at least. The reality is that I’m safe at home in my bathtub and can get out any time I want. In order to really experience what Eliza experienced, I’d have to enter a situation in which I also feel trapped.

I’m fascinated by writers who engage experientially in research. I admire their commitment and worry for their safety. I think they’re profoundly courageous and batshit crazy. Whenever I bring this up, someone asks if I’m talking about Hunter S. Thompson—the drugs. The Hell’s Angels,—but my personal case-in-point is far less well known. In fact, I have no idea if he ever published anything.

Again, the gist: I was at a techno club—black lights, strobe lights, relentless beat—and some guy asked if he could buy me a drink. I was a first-year Philosophy major (don’t ask) with a newly purchased fake ID. It was my first time in a real, grown-up bar. I ordered an Amaretto Stone Sour and as I took the first sip, he asked if he could be my slave for a week.

I asked him to please repeat the question.

“Can I be your slave?” he said, and, in response to the look on my face: “I’m a writer. I’m writing a collection of essays. In each one I’m someone’s slave for a week and I write about what they make me do.”

“What do they make you do?” I asked—and yes, I know, I was gullible as all hell and probably he was lying through his teeth, but who cared. It was the best, craziest, most awful story my eighteen-year-old self had ever heard. One woman prostituted him to her gay friends and kept the money. Another made him clean her house wearing only a saddle. A suburban couple filmed him setting fire to himself—“They made me pour lighter fluid in my hair,” he said, “like it was shampoo or something.”

“Why do you do all this stuff?” I asked, aghast. “Why not just imagine it?”

“You mean like fiction?” he said, like it was a bad word. “People don’t want fiction. They want the truth—the blood and guts and piss and shit.”

I didn’t have the wherewithall then to tell him how, for me, fiction is truth. I hadn’t yet lived enough, read enough, or dealt with enough writers in bars to be able to explain how a story—when it’s done right—can help you find yourself in others, share realities that can’t possibly be real, show a person or people or world that you never before imagined. Blood and guts and piss and shit?—sure, but joy and courage and hope and understanding, too.

The kicker is the when it’s done right.

Which is why I was sitting in the fucking bathtub.

 *

In the third hour, the water has drained below my hips, my knuckles and the soles of my feet are cracked like spiderwebbed glass. My dad is a fisherman in Alaska now and I think of the dead fish he pulls from the water, bloated and eerie blue. I think of all he taught me about appropriate wilderness behavior back when I was growing up in Michigan, camping and hunter safety and taking the canoe over waterfalls on the Shiawasee River. If he saw me now, sitting in this icy water for no discernable reason, he’d think I’d lost it entirely.

“It’s for a story,” I’d tell him.

He’d try hard to be sensitive. He’s a big reader, although one time he got pissed at Tom Wolfe for making a character go quail hunting with buckshot. “Does it have to be five hours?” he’d ask, rational and reasonable. “Can it maybe happen quicker?”

Could it? I thought of when the Eliza story actually happened to me, some two decades ago around my sixteenth birthday. The day was so beautiful, the water warm, I floated on my back, listening to my own breath underwater, in and out, in and out,—and then suddenly they were there, first just one and then he called for the rest, six, maybe? seven? all standing at the edge of jagged rock, looking down at me trapped in a fishbowl below them. Instincively, I locked myself into a ball and moved towards shallow water, low enough so I could stand by still high enough to shield how naked I was. God, the shame! When you’re sixteen! I’ve had so many relationships with my body—it’s been a source of power, hatred, pride, life—but that day in the quarry is the first time I felt shame.

How much time passed that day? Truly, I don’t remember. It could have been five minutes. It could have been five hours.

“Stand up,” they yelled. “We just want to see!”

“Stand up. We’re not gonna do anything to you!”

“Fucking stand up! Are you fucking deaf?—stand up!”

—but I didn’t. I was frozen. I was terrified. I was ashamed. It was so much bigger than five minutes.

But five hours?

After five hours, I’d surely remember the water growing cold. My feet, split and cracked. My skin blue like fish. Wouldn’t I remember?

*

In the fourth hour, I panic. The tub is nearly drained and my face is puffy, my hands swollen, my body heavy like a wet blanket. I’m remembering bits and pieces of biology lectures, articles from Scientific American, things dad said on the boat, out on the ocean where being smart might mean your life. What had he said about hypothermia? Didn’t I read something about Trench Foot? Muscle Atrophy—what was that?  And didn’t David Blaine do this and his skin like peeled off?

This is stupid, I decide. Even for me, and I’ve done some stupid shit. I did acid one time at the opera. And now I’m counting down the minutes, shivering in an empty bathtub? A bathtub! It’s not even the right kind of water! Eliza’s quarry is full of organisms! Minerals! The setting sun changes the water temperature! She is thirteen-years-old, I am thirty-five, and sixteen, too; all of us were in that quarry, the story changes with every telling, and—like Tim O’Brien being unable to remember the smell of the mud in Vietnam—I can’t for the life of me remember what happened to my skin that day in the quarry.

*

By the fifth hour, I’ve given up. I’m on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. My body is too heavy; my head too light. I feel better after the first hot water and bourbon. Better after the second. And the third.

After a while, I get my laptop and google BEING UNDERWATER FOR LONG PERIODS OF TIME. Then I start my research.

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.

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.

 

“I want to xerox this post and plaster the world with it”

Last week I did the media report for The Paper Machete, a live radio magazine podcasted for WBEZ. I talked about the recent launch of Rookie Magazine, which my thirty-six-year-old self is totally in love with in the same way my fifteen-year-old self was in love with its predecessor, Sassy. Also: kids are the shit and adults should spend more time listening to them.

This week marked the launch of a new online magazine called Rookie. Granted, online magazines are a dime a dozen, but Rookie’s turning out to be a pretty big damn deal, having been covered by countless power-punch publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The LA Times, Time, and on and on, all of them saying that what makes Rookie unqiue is that it’s aimed at an untouched demographic in the current market: the other high school girl. The girl who is not a cheerleader. Who doesn’t shop at Amerbcrombie and Fitch. Who wears excessive eyeliner and reads Sylvia Plath and very well may own a Bikini Kill album on vinyl even now, in 2011, when the typical high schooler looks at vinyl the same way a typical thirty-something looks at Beta Max.

It’s also important to note that nearly all of these articles about Rookie, including this one, are written by women in their mid-thirties. The other kind of women in their mid-thirties. The ones who are not soccer moms. Who don’t shop at Anne Taylor. Who wear excessive eyeliner and read Dorothy Allison and most assuredly still have their Bikini Kill album on vinyl even if they no longer own a record player because, really, you can get whatever you need from Pandora, am I right?—the kind of women who, in the early 90′s, were all reading a magazine called Sassy.

Sassy’s founding editor was then 24-year-old Jane Pratt, who had a staff of three that she referred to as Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll. They were cool. You couldn’t decide if you wanted to hang out with them, or be them.  They wrote about things you weren’t supposed to talk about in high school, like pain, and punk rock, and masturbation. They included limited edition Sonic Youth records in the pages of the magazine.. They had an inhouse band called Chia Pet with lyrics that went like this: I was just walking down the street minding my own business/this construction worker said nice tits/cab driver asked me for a date/guy on the subway grabbed my ass/hey baby hey baby—compared to the Debbie Gibsons and Tiffanys of that time, this stuff was Beethoven.

Sassy was, according to an NPR profile, “less a teenage moment and more of a feminist movement. It was the antithesis of the homecoming queen, please-your-boyfriend culture. It published articles about suicide and STDs while Seventeen was still teaching girls how to get a boy to notice you.” It’s fair to say that thousands of the other high school girl found a voice in those pages, and when you’re fifteen, what are you looking for if not a voice? Take a sec here and think back to your own fifteen-year-old self. Who did you listen to? Watch? Read? Who spoke to the kid that you were? My dad would say Henry David Thoreau. My mom would say Simon and Garfunkel. For me—and 400,000 other other girls in the early 90’s—it was Sassy.

Sidebar: if there are any guys reading this thinking Blahblah girl’s magazines, know that Pratt also gave Sassy a brother publication called Dirt, edited by a very cool pre-Beastie Boys Spike Jonze, so rest assured, this is about you, too. This is about all of us—our crazy, lonely, longing fifteen-year-old selves.

Sadly for me and maybe for us all, Sassy went under/imploded/was destroyed by “The Man” in 1995, but its job had been done: those other types of girls grew up and started Bitch, Bust, Venus, and Jezebel—all publications that other types of women read today. But, for the past decade, the question has remained: What about the girls? The ones still in high school, with all the angst and bullying; fun and freedom; joy and crap that high school entails? Who is their voice?

Here, we jump back a few years to Oak Park Illinois, where a then eleven-year-old girl named Tavi Gevinson started a blog called thestylerookie. Jump forward to today: That blog is read by millions of people. Tavi has met Karl Lagerfield, interviewed John Galliano, and covered Fashion Week for Vogue. In V Magazine, Lady Gaga even gave her a shout-out: “If they’re not careful, the most astute and educated journalists can be reduced to gossipers, while a 14-year-old who doesn’t even have a high school locker yet can master social media engines and, incidentally, generate a specific, well-thought-out, debatable opinion about fashion and music that is then considered by 200 million people on Twitter. Take Tavi Gevinson. I adore her, and her blog is the future of journalism.”

Last year, Tavi gave a talk at Idea City called How We Can Apply What We Learned from the Teen Girls of the ’90s (More Specifically, Those Who Read/Interned at/Worked for Sassy Magazine) to Create a Good Magazine for Teen Girls Today, Also, This Is a Really Long Title.

(awesome).

She got a standing ovation. Then she got backing of, yes, Jane Pratt. And now, as of this week, fifteen-year-old Tavi Gevinson is the CEO of Rookie, where she both hired and presides over, according to the Telegraph: “A team of 37 writers and editors with backgrounds ranging from British Vogue and LA Times to Saturday Night Live and HBO” (including my friend and colleague, the very awesome Stephanie Kuehnert).

Like Jane before her, Tavi is cool. You don’t know if you want to hang out with her, or be her. The fonts on her magazine are copies of her own handwriting. At thirteen, she dyed her hair electric silver. She wears batman capes with couture free-bees. Also: she’s got some profound things to say to teenagers, and, in my opinion, human beings in general. In a recent piece on Rookie about girls hating other girls, she said, “I’m not saying we all have to be sunshine, lollipops and rainbows with each other… a good dose of angst is healthy. But hating people is stressful. Negativity is tiring. Causing drama is dumb. Some people are worth hating, but energy and time and brainpower are too valuable to waste on general shittiness.”

Based on other things happening in our country this week, there are some adults in Washington who could benefit from this advice.

In fact, there are adults everywhere who could benefit. When you read through the hundreds of comments posted to Rookie in the past week since they launched, it’s amazing to see how many adults are finding inspiration in Tavi’s words.

“Hate does not pass with age,” writes Eve. “I still see it at age 40. I want to xerox this post and plaster the world with it.”

And, from caringserene: “I just started law school at age 28 and it’s EXACTLY LIKE being a freshman in high school all over again.”

So take a second here and imagine yourself now; your grown-up, adult self. Who did you listen to? Watch? Read? Who speaks to the adult that you are? Henry David Thoreau? Simon and Garfunkel? Maybe old copies of Sassy or Dirt—they’re going for upwards of $100 these days on eBay—or maybe, just maybe, the greatest advice comes from the least likely place—a kid.

In all those articles in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The LA Times, and Time, they say Tavi is one-of-a-kind. A child prodigy, and while maybe that’s true—the girl is fucking awesome, in my opinion (TEAM TAVI!)—there’s also a profound sense of clarity and common sense in many kids today. What might happen if we took the time to better listen to their point of view?

As another child prodigy, thirteen-year-old Adora Svitak, said during her 2010 Ted Talk What Adults Can Learn From Kids: “When was the last time you were called childish? For kids, it’s a frequent occurrence. Every time we make irrational demands, exhibit irresponsible behavior, or display any other signs of being normal American citizens, we are called childish, which really bothers me. After all, take a look at these events: Imperialism and colonization, world wars, George W. Bush. Ask yourself: Who’s responsible? Adults.”

That kind of time

I teach creative writing, which, for me, has a lot to do with creative reading (thanks for the term, Burroughs): how is this book structured? What’s the point-of-view? How does the writer deal with scene, time, transitions, character, movement, language, pacing—like how come Faulkner can go for nine pages without a period and it reads super slow but Selby can do the same thing and it moves like lightning? It has something to do with adjectives, I think; Selby rarely uses them, and Faulker uses three or four at a time—the rickety, water-soaked, creaking wagon wheel—AND, when he really wants you to slow down, he puts an and between each—the rickety and water-soaked and creaking wagon wheel—I’m thinking specifically of Light in August, but I’m sure there’s other shit going on in his other novels, especially if he’s in the first person … and tense! What about tense! After Tell Tale Heart, I thought I had the whole tense thing figured out, but I’ve since realized that having anything figured out in writing is the most ridiculous statement ever because somebody out there has busted open anything you thought you knew about anything. I just read this great essay by Francine Prose about how whenever she thought she knew what she was doing, she’d read something by Chekov that totally went totally the other way. Fucking Chekov. Rape Fantasies by Margaret Atwood did that to me, too: the whole story’s in past tense and then SHAZAM, on the last page we’re in present sitting in some bar??! And that Edward P. Jones story The First Day, which is in past for one sentence and then present-tense-little-girl until the end? WTF, Edward P. Jones?

Seriously, I LOVE this shit. I get super excited talking about it. I jump up and down in my chair. My students look at me like I’m on crack (until they start jumping up and down, too, which I know is when I’ve done my job right. When we all bounce) but then, then, then, THEN the question is, how can I use all this in my own writing?  Like, what tense is my stuff in? What if I switch it? What if I yank out all the adjectives? What if I try this or that or that or this, and when you know that the solutions to whateverthehell challenge you’re having in your writing is there, in front of your face, sitting on your very own bookshelf! or maybe in a play you saw last week! or a movie! or maybe a TV show if the show is good (Hi, Keifer Sutherland! Hi, Lady Who Played Starbuck on BSG!) and the thing is—I could keep going. And going and going. This is, hands down, the most important thing about my life as a writer: having an understanding of craft. A love of craft. But in my life as a reader? Sometimes I want to turn that part of my brain off. I’m trying to think of it as a sort of control panel on the side of my head, like I’m a cylon or something, and can flip the switch to whatever kind of reading I’d like to focus on, subsequently canceling out the others:

Reading to study the craft.
Reading to learn the content.
Reading to critique the message.
Reading because I love to read.
Reading because I need a good laugh.
Reading because I want to make the world a better place.
Reading to my son.
Reading to escape.
Reading to relax.

So, I’ve been reading I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass, and what I want to talk about is the structure: multiple chronological short movements, each 3 years apart, in the lives of two sisters. I love that idea: to look at two characters through the lens of the most significant moments in their relationship. I love it, and I’m going to use it.

I’ve been reading I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass, and what I want to talk about is voice. It’s a dual 1st person, the narration jumping back and forth between the two sisters. Through my work with 2nd Story’s personal narratives, I spend a lot of time thinking about 1st person. We write our stories to be told aloud, and the language must be 100% authentic to how that storyteller speaks. Sometimes that feels really different from a more literary 1st person narration. There are times when these sisters speak and I’m like, That’s fancypants language, it’s not really her talking! And it’s not … it’s her voice on the page. But somewhere in the back of my head I’m like, Her voice on the page IS her voice speaking, and if it’s not authentic to her speaking voice—character that’s being created for me on the page—then I don’t buy it. But I don’t know if that’s a personal preference thing, or a solid rule (and if it is a solid rule, probably Chekov broke it, right?). Anyhow, it’s something I think about a lot, and look for in every first person narration. So much has to be taken into account: what time period are we in, who is this character, where are they from, what level of education have they had, etc.? How does that come into the voice on the page, and must that be authentic to the character’s speaking voice?

I’ve been reading I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass, and what I want to talk about is this struggle I’m having with how I read. You’re reading just to read, I told myself at page one. NOT to look at craft—but obviously, that’s not working. It’s the first thing I see, and actively shutting that part of my brain takes work (it’s totally like how Sookie in Trueblood is telekinetic and has to put in constant effort not to hear other people’s thoughts ’cause listening to other people’s thoughts all the time’ll drive a girl crazy. Shit, listening to your own thoughts all the time’ll drive you crazy; imagine hearing everyone?—That’s what I’m talking about. Except without the vampires [and while I'm on True blood ...WHY DO I HAVE TO WAIT A WHOLE YEAR TO GET THE NEXT SEASON IN ITUNES?] or awesome opening credits). I remember, back in grad school, and the crazy and necessary process of training myself to study craft, as opposed to metaphor or meaning. Like, instead of reading Moby Dick and arguing about whether or not the whale represented God, or The Man, or organized religion, or whateverthehell, maybe the whale could just be a whale for once and, instead, I look at how Melville dealt with vantage point and structure and model telling, ’cause those are the techniques I can use in my own work. Creative reading, indeed.

In an ideal universe, I’d read the book nine times in all sorts of ways, but who has that kind of time?

In an ideal world, I’d have that kind of time.