I was busy preparing for my June MFA residency when Kori, Lunch Ticket’s Editor-in-Chief, reached out and asked me if I wanted to interview Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich for the upcoming Lunch Ticket Issue 14. Groggy from a marathon reading session that lasted until 3 a.m. that morning, I rubbed my eyes with my fists and squinted at Kori’s email. The book I’d stayed up all night and early morning reading was, in fact, Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir. “Yes!” I scream-typed back. “I would love to interview Alexandria! The book is SOOOOO good!” It was truly kismet, since I planned on attending Marzano-Lesnevich’s Antioch seminar anyway at residency.

Marzano-Lesnevich’s writing grapples with questions of ethical ambiguity and moral judgment. Their cross-genre nonfiction book, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, intertwines childhood memories of sexual abuse at the hands of their grandfather and the death of a sibling they never met with their exploration of a Louisiana murder committed by a known pedophile. The Fact of a Body, winner of both the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and the 2018 Chautauqua Prize, is a page-turner, and Marzano-Lesnevich’s elegant but simple diction makes for compelling reading. Each chapter ends with an impetus to read more, but never in a hokey way. This naturally phrased whodunit momentum is no small feat, considering they confirm the identities of both the murderer and their sexual abuser early in the book. What keeps us reading is their commitment to nosing out why they feel so conflicted about the murderer and how his case and background parallel events in their own life.

As they stated in a seminar at Antioch University Los Angeles in June 2018, the book teaches the reader how to read it. It allows the reader into the risk at the heart of the story. Citing Joanne Beard, Jesmyn Ward’s writing, and Vivian Gormick’s The Situation and The Story as influences on their writing and editing processes, Marzano-Lesnevich committed to an information-packed, whirlwind two-hour seminar on structure, risk, and meaning, emphasizing the need for writers to recognize twin obligations of structure. First, they noted, the writer must acknowledge the interior logic of a book—the chapter and scene organization. Second, the writer must consider the layer of meaning that must run throughout the story, an interior emotional logic that might make the entire story collapse if the author said it outright. Mostly, they emphasized, the structure a writer starts with is probably not the same structure the finished work will inhabit. I came away from this seminar feeling armed with lifelong advice on how to structure any writing work I complete, fiction included.

The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich lives in Portland, Maine, where they are an assistant professor at Bowdoin College. They most recently taught at Harvard.

After their astoundingly organized, insightful seminar, and learning about all their other accolades, I grew nervous that my interview questions would be lacking. Marzano-Lesnevich had a busy schedule during their time at Antioch, and I didn’t want to pressure them into an in-person interview without adequate time to unwind and prepare. Foreseeing a more relaxed interview at another time, I delayed calling them until July, when the chaos of the summer calmed. Their warm, generous, precise, and intensely intelligent responses to my questions, which I necessarily agonized over, are what follow below. I interviewed Marzano-Lesnevich on July 10, 2018, via telephone, after they gave the aforementioned seminar at Antioch University Los Angeles’s June 2018 MFA residency.

E.P. Floyd: First, a big thank you for speaking with me and for supporting Lunch Ticket. In The Fact of a Body, you cover intensely emotional issues and trauma, as well as social justice topics—sexual abuse of children, your own sexual orientation, poverty, substance abuse, and lots more. As a widely published creative nonfiction writer, how much distance did you feel you needed from your own life events before you wrote about them?

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich: Moving a bit beyond just that book, I find that that notion of “distance needed” from certain topics is constantly fluctuating for me. I have written and published some essays I was writing very much in the thick of things, particularly in an essay I had published in Hotel Amerika—“The Taste of Sardines.” I wrote it right after my dog died. That was because that was all I could bear to write about. What I had to do in that case, was build what the essayist Brenda Miller calls a hermit crab shell around it—I used certain narrative structures to provide almost a hard shell for the material, to protect the emotional core within it. Structure in that way was something that could give me distance. So, in The Fact of A Body, even though there was a lot of temporal distance, I discovered when I was writing it that I didn’t have a lot of emotional distance. Some of the first draft pages were really raw, and they really needed to be. I had to figure out when the narrator would include some of those snippets of raw emotion, and when the narrator would need more distance. As writers, as we work, we become more aware that we are telling a story, that we’re not just recounting what happened to us.

I used certain narrative structures to provide almost a hard shell for the material, to protect the emotional core within it. Structure in that way was something that could give me distance.

EPF: It’s so interesting that you refer to the “narrator” as being distinctly separate from the “author”—you. How and why do you distinguish between the two as a writing
construct?

AML: I think, like a lot of people, I was influenced by Vivian Gormick’s The Situation and the Story. I like to think of the narrator as being a construct of raw material—it’s both me and not wholly representative. We can see that approach (a narrator as a distinct speaker separate from the author) by looking at multiple books by the same writer. They all have different narrators. As a person who lived through these events, there were so many things that I wanted to put on the page. We, as people, serve our lives and our loved ones, but the narrator of the book only serves the story, so they have to leave some things out and put things in. Of course, when it comes to publishing, we then have to think of how our friends and families and loved ones will feel about the things we’ve written. But I use that linguistic construct to enforce that the person and the narrator have different roles. I also say it a lot because I teach a lot, so I’m used to reinforcing the concepts.

EPF: You mentioned publishing and how we as writers need to consider how our friends and families will feel about the published autobiographical details. You went through a lot at a young age. How did you decide which details to include, both pertaining to yourself and your family members?

AML: I tried to include only what served the story. For example, you never see my sister being abused, even though the narrative acknowledges that she was. The fact of how widespread the abuse was in our family felt crucial, but actually depicting it would have felt like a violation. And my narrator thinks about that decision on the page. I decided that my narrator would tell a story and at the same time sort of wrestle with the story. It was important to me to not pretend that my story was not the only story, not the only way it could be seen or told—but also for human reasons. If I was capturing a multiplicity of perspectives in Ricky Langley’s story, I couldn’t pretend that there wasn’t a multiplicity in my own story.

EPF: Speaking of multiple perspectives, The Fact of a Body is a cross-genre hybrid that seamlessly weaves your own life with the homicide case of a six-year-old boy who was killed by an adult man—Ricky Langley, a known pedophile and sex offender. Why did you choose that parallel structure?

AML: I would start writing about one side of the story and the other side would creep in; my subconscious appeared to be linking the stories. I think a lot of writing is getting out of your own way. For me, there was no way to write this where the two stories weren’t linked. Once I accepted that, the parallel structure was obvious. I will say that the realization that the strands had to collide in the third (and final) section of the book took longer. Life influences us in ways that we don’t realize until much later. When I was in law school, I read a novel called The Archivist by Martha Cooley. She wrote, “With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.” I felt a jolt of recognition when I read that in law school: this spark that resonated with how I saw the world. I hadn’t thought about that novel for years, and then when I was writing a talk [on why they chose the parallel structure for The Fact of a Body], I sort of meditated on where inspiration came from for me, and that line came back to me. Only then did I realize how much it influenced me, as a person and as a writer constantly seeking out connections between disparate things.

We, as people, serve our lives and our loved ones, but the narrator of the book only serves the story, so she has to leave some things out and put things in.

EPF: There is a lot of moral ambiguity in The Fact of a Body. You grapple on the page with your staunchly anti-death penalty stance in a number of ways. At the end, the ethical uncertainty is just that—decisively uncertain. Was this a conscious choice you made when you set out to write the book, or did you come to this ambiguous ending in the writing process?

AML: It was a conscious choice. It was really important to me to write something that was honest about complexity. The ending wasn’t uncertainty so much as the ending was duality—duality is not uncertainty, it is an acceptance of complexity. Ricky Langley will always be both a man and a murderer. My grandfather will always be both a man and a pedophile. The journey was in accepting that that was the ending, and that that was okay. There was a reason my subconscious wasn’t leading me to a neater, clearer place. What I had to think about as a writer, was, “How do you induce satisfaction in the reader when you decide to acknowledge both the murderer’s guilt and the abuse fairly early in the book—and when the end will be complicated?”

EPF: Ah, yes. Let’s talk about chapter endings and suspense. Even though I already knew who the murderer was and who your abuser was, I kept on reading. How did you keep the emotional stakes high at the end of each chapter?

AML: Yay! Thank you. I thought a lot about that, because I knew I was going to ask the reader to process some difficult weaving of the two stories, and I felt like I really needed to earn some buy-in and create their hunger. I thought about it with this idea of negative suspense versus positive suspense. Negative suspense is when you know what’s going to happen, and you’re reading with that dread. Positive suspense is when you don’t know what’s going to happen, and you’re reading to discover what will happen next. I didn’t have any positive suspense in the big things, because the reader knew about them from the start. For example, I didn’t want to use Jeremy’s death as a source of positive suspense. I didn’t want to pretend that we didn’t already know that was going to happen, so I used negative suspense instead. But I built in mini questions of positive suspense on other events in the book. The other very concrete thing I thought about was, “How does a chapter ending induce a question?” Michael Blanding’s book The Map Thief gave me this same experience of suspense, and the map trade is not something I have a preexisting interest in. What happened is that I read it pretty much in one sitting, and there was no reason for this except that I could not stop reading. I looked at the end of each chapter and realized that he was very good at completing a mini-arc at the end of each chapter, and at the same time, flinging us forward with a question. I also looked at other works, like the short story, “The Ceiling,” by Kevin Brockmeier. It was a braided narrative, like my story was, and in his short story, the avoidance of discussing the “big bad thing” creates emotional tension. As a writer, I’m constantly trying to figure out what it is I need to do, and how can I look at what other people have done, to address the story before me. For me, it’s all about reading widely.

I thought about it with this idea of negative suspense versus positive suspense. Negative suspense is when you know what’s going to happen, and you’re reading with that dread. Positive suspense is when you already know what’s happened, and you’re reading with the expectation of things working out well for the protagonist—for the emotional arc.

EPF: Speaking of reading widely, the research that went into The Fact of a Body was extensive, as you note both in the book and on your website—roughly 30,000 pages of records. Can you talk a little about the research process? How did you sit and process that amount of documentation?

AML: I didn’t organize it into some sort of neat, didactic thing. I did sort of belly flop myself into it like somebody into a pool. I got the first few thousand pages, spent a couple years avoiding them, and then spent about six months, where I wasn’t really writing, but went from coffee shop to coffee shop—and then to bars when the records got too intense—and I would just spend the day describing in these notebooks what was on every single page and my emotional response. I wasn’t at that point ready to index them, because I had such a strong emotional response to them. I thought I was putting down my strong emotional response to the records because of my own life, and that it was separate from the writing. I tried indexing for a little bit. What I realized pretty quickly is that it felt horrible—the indexing. It felt like it was collapsing the story in exactly the wrong way, creating what Sven Birkerts calls, ‘the coma-inducing effect of “and then.”’ At first, I was really ashamed that I didn’t have a very specific index—having each character on each page for each record used. I thought, “This must just be laziness.” Now, looking back, I wish that I had had the self-kindness to say, “Hey, Self, this isn’t laziness, you’ve just put in an untold number of hours reading these documents. Pay attention to this resistance.” As they say in software development, what I thought had been a bug turned out to be a feature. The resistance was telling me something. I couldn’t put it in an index, because that organized, methodical approach wasn’t the kind of story it was. What I needed instead was to be surprised by the emotional resonances that I never saw coming. It was vital to find the detail I was looking for, and then be punched in the stomach by the stuff around it that I hadn’t been thinking about.

That was not an efficient process. And it was only possible because I didn’t have an index and couldn’t just look up what I needed. It was very much not an efficient process, but it produced a kind of all-over-the-place draft that slowly, slowly, slowly let me get to know the material. Some things became big in my mind and some became small. During that note-taking time, the events of the case felt as vivid to me as my own memories. And that response, I feel, was crucial. It just took time—hours and hours and hours and days and months and years. Just kind of living with those records inside me. What’s funny is, I now cannot remember anything in the records. My subconscious is like, “Cool, we’re done, let’s make space for something else now.” I think that’s the difference between how research usually is conducted for academic nonfiction, and how it needs to be conducted for creative nonfiction. Creative nonfiction research requires a lot of trust, a lot of believing, “This is all going somewhere.”

EPF: Based on your experience writing and publishing The Fact of a Body, what do you think emerging writers working in multiple genres should know or try in their drafting process?

AML: Just revise, revise, revise, revise, revise. Also, it’s important to know that doubt is not fatal. This is advice for those of us who have a tendency to really doubt or critique the work before it’s even found its fledgling voice on the page. You can do the work even through doubt. Even while feeling the doubt. It’s important to acknowledge that the doubt might be a reflection of your own fear and not a reflection of the quality of the work. Some days are awesome, and you feel all the strength and power, and think, “I can totally write this story!” And other days are not like that at all. But that’s what I would recommend: Don’t allow the doubt to prevent you from writing.

E.P. Floyd is lead editor of flash prose, an interviewer, a blogger, and an assistant blog editor for Lunch Ticket and an MFA candidate in fiction at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her writing is published or forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, Litbreak Magazine, Reservoir, and BusinessWeek. She is at work on a novel and short story collection, and lives in rural Wisconsin. Find her online at epfloyd.com.

As my mother grew older she became more confused and unhappy and mean. When she was most difficult, I would soften my response by beginning to write her eulogy; two lines in I would start to forgive her a little and, toward the end, completely. Once, during her very last days, in a rare lucid moment she turned to me and said: “The heart is the first thing to go.” Before now, I would have only shared this story with my sisters. And then I came across this line in Victoria Chang’s new book of poetry, Barbie Chang, about a father who also suffers from dementia: “…is it possible to write an / elegy for someone who / isn’t dead …”.  Reading Victoria Chang’s poetry is to listen to the music of language as it circles through exquisite personal and more universal laments about human anguish in its many forms.

Barbie Chang, recently published by Copper Canyon Press, is Victoria Chang’s fourth book of poems. Her previous book, The Boss (McSweeney’s), won the PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Her other books include Salvinia Molesta and Circle. Her poems have been published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New England Review, New Republic, and many other places; and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. She has also published a picture book, Is Mommy?, illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Simon & Schuster, that was named a New York Times Notable Book.

Victoria lives in Southern California with her family and teaches at Chapman University and Orange County School of the Arts, and has recently joined the MFA faculty at Antioch University Los Angeles. On the morning of August 14, 2017, I had the opportunity to interview Victoria for an hour by Skype about her work and her life.

In preparation for the interview, Victoria generously shared a copy of her then forthcoming collection, Barbie Chang. Many of the poems in this collection are written in a persona that allowed her to be, as she puts it in the interview below, “kind of funny and sarcastic and ironic and paradoxical and… political,” though many of the poems are deeply personal and immediate as well. Throughout the collection are brief stories of a mother’s illness and a father’s dementia as well as portrayals of the numerous micro-aggressions of a divided cultural landscape. These small stories weave and flow into each other across sections, and all of these encounters are deeply empathetic to human flaws of all sorts. Sentiment skirmishes with humor and poignancy and, at times, darkness. The result is a narrative journey that is both intimate and ironic. The opening poem of the collection follows Barbie Chang as she leaves the corporate world (which we remember from Chang’s earlier collection, The Boss), to begin a different life. We hear the similar incantatory internal rhyming and rhythmic wordplay of that earlier work, as in: “once she sprinkled her yard with / timed water once // she wore lanyards in large rooms…”.

In Part One we enter world of children and a school, and the “Circle” of mothers, “the beautiful thin mothers at school / form a perfect circle // the Circle will school her if she lets / them…”. The poems yield to an increasing alienation from this circle, interspersed with a chronicling of Barbie’s relationships with men (called “Mr. Darcy”), with her mother who is sick, and with her father who is losing his grip on the world: “Barbie Chang’s father paid her tuition / by intuition his brain // now shuns all logic…”.

These small stories weave and flow into each other across sections, and all of these encounters are deeply empathetic to human flaws of all sorts. Sentiment skirmishes with humor and poignancy and, at times, darkness. The result is a narrative journey that is both intimate and ironic.

In our conversation, Victoria spoke about her books as “projects”—each one a kind of obsession for her, and she writes them in the bursts of time that she salvages from the crannies of her busy life. She talks about writing in the unbroken lines that were later turned into quatrains (in The Boss) or staggered couplets (Barbie Chang), and that explore the endless repetitions and spirals of lives and events.

Part Two of Barbie Chang is an interlude of epistolary poems addressed to “P,” which have the feel of unbroken writing formed into fourteen-line stanzas about birth, a tormented love for a child, and the struggle with the language to express it. The second stanza begins, “I want to change the ending before this / begins…” and later continues with these sibilant lines, “something wept seeps / down my arm through my fingers and comes / out as speech a soft speech sponge speech…”.

Part Three follows the stories that began in Part One, and Barbie Chang speaks about her mother’s death and its aftermath. “Barbie Chang Pokes Through” invokes a startling last image of grief: “…now she is left with / small images of her // mother that come and hover and leave / whenever they please // little hummingbirds of death.”

Throughout the collection are scattered musings on language and form, and on the purpose of poetry in the world: “…if a heart doesn’t beckon // forever why does it matter if we ever / reach language why does // it matter which form is better or whether / anyone ever wins an // award for anything”; and later,“…does anyone know the author’s original / intent does it matter // that no one knows exactly what it means,” and “…what if there are no verbs just nouns / what if saying something // makes it true…”.

The last section returns to addressing “P” in a new form: the lines are airy and double spaced with breaks—forming a kind of poetic counsel, and closing the book with this last line: “every woman // begins and ends with another woman.” Throughout this stunning and varied collection, Chang’s poems are circular and open and, as she put it in our interview, leave you “hanging like fog, or like dangling earrings” in their resistance to closure.

Interviewing Victoria Chang was like talking to a friend who is sensitive and candid; she is fierce about the important things, with hints of an old soul lingering underneath. She is a poet who has unique and searing perspectives on the world we currently inhabit. In this interview, Victoria shared her struggle to find time to write, talked about trauma and obsession, about process, and offered clues as to how an accomplished poet navigates the publishing world. What follows are excerpts from our conversation.

Theresa Rogers: You have a professional career and a family and still find time and space for your writing. How have you managed that? 

Victoria Chang: Yeah, it’s been really hard. I actually quit my regular full-time day job last March, but I still do a lot of consulting because they keep asking me to do stuff. I just look for those moments where I feel really driven—and passionate—about something. And if I don’t have time to work on something at that moment because my mind’s on something entirely different, like a paying day job, I just wait until I have no choice, and then I find really weird times to write. That’s always been the case, and that’s why I think a lot of my post-children writing has been like an outburst. I just finished a draft of what, hopefully, will become my next book of poems. I wrote the whole draft—and I think it’s about sixty pages—in two weeks.

TR: Wow.

VC: Feverishly. And then I spent the next four months editing, religiously, and it’s every second, every moment. The kids are off in the summer, they’re in and out of camps and they’re older now, so right now they’re left to their own devices. Do you have children?

TR: I do. I have grown children and a grandchild.

VC: So, you know exactly what that’s like. When they were younger—I used to sit in cars a lot and even now, all last year I would wait in the pick-up line and pretty much either read or work on something that was really bothering me, and I would purposely go early since I don’t have to go into an office every day. So, I chose to spend one hundred percent of my time writing. I didn’t write a ton of reviews or do a ton of reading or engaging in the community. I was selfishly using every spare moment on my own stuff. I think that kind of held me through. I think of it as “well, I’m just like, a person with a different background and therefore I hope I have different things to say,” and that’s kind of how I’ve viewed it.

TR: I read an interview where you talked about how that gave you more material to work with.

VC: I think that’s true. It’s the material, but it’s also how your brain thinks about the material because, and this is not to criticize people who go straight into academia and all that—but for me at that point in my life, it would have been a little bit too narrow. I tend to like very broad thinking. Working in different areas has shaped the way I think about my poems. Even if they’re just about the elegies that don’t have anything to do with anything in the workplace, I like to think that my experiences have shaped my writing in some ways.

TR: In terms of your process, in a recent interview with Lunch Ticket, Dana Gioia talked about being at the mercy of the muse. Are you at the mercy of the muse? What inspires you?

VC: Without the muse I don’t see the point because there are so many other easier things to do, so inspiration for me is that passion that you must write this down. And I think writers intend—other people do other things, but we make sense of ourselves, the world around us, and our feelings through words, and we do that with the hope of sharing our words.

…we make sense of ourselves, the world around us, and our feelings through words, and we do that with the hope of sharing our words.

So, the muse is what we do—that’s all we can do! Other people work out or go start companies or make music. I think writers just have this desire, this natural desire or trained desire—I don’t know where it comes from—to write things down, and I think that it’s almost like we can’t not do it. People have said that before but I feel the same way, unfortunately or fortunately. It’s sort of who I am and what I do and that’s all I can do, and if I don’t write, I feel very unhappy.

TR:  That reminds me, I wondered if the “P” that you write to in your most recent collection (Barbie Chang)—I could be dead wrong on this—but I read it as speaking to poetry?

VC: Oh yeah, I think it could be. It’s sort of like speaking to anyone but it started out literally as speaking to my eldest daughter whose name is Penny. I think it evolved beyond that but I just kept the “P” as this open thing—a body or spirit that I’m speaking to. It’s kind of like an everyone, and a no one. But it did start off as an epistolary poem to that eldest daughter. I wrote the last ones at the end of the book that are more broken up and staggered just recently, maybe early last year, as an afterword to try to make the book stronger. I had in my mind as the future I guess. I think they end up being really to anyone.

TR:  I like that—“to an everyone or no one.” I want to go back to your first book, Circle, which I loved. In that collection you vividly and unreservedly describe the perspectives of abused, desperate, and haunted women. You include voices of a concubine in the 600s, a wife in the Shang Dynasty whose husband is cheating, and Lady Jane Grey watching her husband’s skull rolling down the flagstones. And I noticed that your second collection, Salvinia Molesta, has poems about Mao’s fourth wife, and Iris Chang [the author of Rape of Nanking] who I didn’t know had taken her life. So many of these poems read like incantations. What is the genesis of these poems—or what inspired you to write them?

VC:  I was an East Asian studies and history major in college, and I also have a Master’s in East Asian studies. I’ve always been really interested in history and how we repeat history. It kind of refracts and changes a bit, but our essential human experiences feel or felt very similar to me when I was writing those poems. And I think I was probably in my twenties and thirties when writing those poems, and at that time I was grappling and struggling with my own personal relationships with men, relationships I had before I was married, and I didn’t really know how to do that in an interesting way. Just naturally I must have, without consciously thinking about it, gravitated towards these other women in history who probably had similar yet different experiences. I felt like I could relate to all these women in so many ways. And having grown up in a strong female, feminist kind of family, I wanted to look to all these women for help and embody their voices in some ways to make sense of my own experiences. And I hadn’t really thought about it before, but I imagine that’s probably what I was doing subconsciously. I do a lot of things; I just write them and don’t really think about it. I never really map out, “This is what I’m going to do.” I just start doing it and it’s only later I can reflect on what I was doing. And then other people always do a much better job reflecting on what I was doing. Even though the work that comes out seems organized, I tend to be very organic in the process of writing.

TR: We often make sense of our experiences and, I guess, our writing much later. At Antioch [University Los Angeles] in June, you led a workshop about endings to poems. You talked about moving past the temptation for closure and instead to let poems suggest a future beyond the story of the poem, referencing Baruch. And you gave us some great examples, including Glück’s “Purple Bathing Suit” and Haas’s “A Story about the Body.” Could you say a little bit more about how you resist closure in your own work?

VC: I think it’s so easy to say what you’re thinking or what you’re feeling and you could make successful poems by doing that all day long if you’re a good writer; but for me, there’s something else when I’m reading a poem that’s really stunning that takes me beyond, and that beyond is sort of like that mysterious unspoken, kind of lasting feeling. It’s like this lingering taste in your mouth. When I’m working on my own writing, I’m always trying to not state the obvious—whether it’s through an image or even ending a poem or, even beginning a poem. Everybody’s already said this this way before, so how do I say something in a way that leaves you kind of hanging, you know, like fog or like dangling earrings or… When I am writing, I try very hard subconsciously to not close things. Something kind of mysterious—if I’m not exactly clear what I even wrote and what it means, that’s when I like things more and I keep it that way because sometimes that ghostly feeling of multiple directions is a good thing. It could be interpreted many different ways and there’s a difference between that and purposeful mystery that is just confusing, you know? So, I do think you have to be careful when you’re writing that way not to be so opaque that it makes no sense and just agitates the reader. There’s a good agitation and there’s a bad agitation. And that comes through the editing process. You have to figure that out for yourself, what you can get away with and what you can’t get away with.

TR: That’s one of the things I love about reading your work—it’s not too opaque. It’s open in terms of meaning, but as a reader I can pick up resonances in places where you don’t say exactly what you’re talking about.  This was the case in reading The Boss, which is so beautifully rhythmic. And you address—maybe not, as you say, overtly or directly—but you do address difficult truths about contemporary culture, our contemporary culture, and the power structures and so forth.  Can you tell us how that book came about as a kind of extended meditation on these issues?

VC: Usually when something happens or there’s some kind of trauma in my life, [I need] time to process it. I had a really mean boss, just like awful passive-aggressive human who I’ve learned has since terrorized other people, really good, nice people, like myself, and you spend a lot of time thinking: “Well, what did I do wrong, is it me? What should I have done better?” And then my dad had a stroke, maybe nine years ago, and then he had another brain bleed, so he suffers from aphasia and frontal lobe dementia, and then my mom had a really bad—she passed—lung disease. I wrote about that too, pulmonary fibrosis. I had young kids, too, which was a different form of trauma and joy, but lots of trauma for me because I don’t do as well with younger kids. It was very challenging for me to raise babies and toddlers so the time was so difficult and not enjoyable on so many levels, so that it was just all trauma.

I do think you have to be careful when you’re writing that way not to be so opaque that it makes no sense and just agitates the reader. There’s a good agitation and there’s a bad agitation.

One day I had a little bit of time waiting for one of my kids to finish a language class and I just sat in my car instead of driving home—it was too far to drive and repeat. I had three hours, and she had six more classes, so out of boredom I picked up some scrap paper and started writing all these feelings—we were talking about this before—I finally had time to sit and stare at this tree and all these people coming in and out of the parking lot and I started writing these long-lined no-punctuation things. Eventually the McSweeney’s editors made them into quatrains of staggered lines because they felt like it was hard to read. So, I just kept on writing more of them. I had a whole notebook and I realized maybe these are poems! And I worked on editing them for a year. Then what I do is start sending them out to journals to test them and see if these are poems: “Is anyone interested in reading these?” Because you never know.

Sometimes you wonder, are you writing for yourself or are you writing for other people? I think it varies for different people but I never know if anyone’s going to like anything that I write until I start sending them to journals, and the editors either take them or they don’t, and that’s a good measure for me as a writer. So that’s how those poems formed. But I do remember, so as not to glorify it, my manuscripts going through quite a few editors who said “no” before someone said “yes.” The Boss was very difficult. A lot of people didn’t like it as a book, and I think that one was more difficult than Barbie Chang to get published.

TR: That will be interesting also to new writers to know that some books take their time to find their way to an audience.

VC: Oh definitely! I don’t know how other people’s minds work, but I tend to think that I have crazy ideas and this is not just with writing. And some of the ideas are really weird and way too far ahead or beyond what’s happening today, so I never know if something I’m writing is just way out of touch or out of whack or just not relevant. Sometimes I reflect on The Boss and think: “Well gosh, what a weird thing to write.” Especially for people in the poetry community at that time. With all the gatekeepers and editors who’ve never worked at a company before, for the most part, and don’t know what it’s like to work in the corporate environment, there’s a deadening and a spirit killing about that whole process, especially if you don’t like your job. I was worried that nobody would think it was relevant, and to some extent I was right. But then it came out and I think some people really liked it and found it relevant, so that was nice to see.

TR: Yeah, it feels almost historically cyclical because there was a time when Williams and Stephens and some of our older American poets were very much in that workaday world.

VC: Yeah! And I think that it’s a reflection of the macro literary world. Over the last twenty years most of my writer friends, almost all of them actually, have tenure-track jobs in poetry or in fiction. I’m forty-six, so I’m a GenX and almost everybody I know that’s had some success publishing is getting tenure now. There’s very few of us [who] are actually actively publishing books and in really good journals who don’t work in academia. I think this next generation will be different and I think prior generations were also not quite as much that way, and it started with the boomer generation before us. I hadn’t thought about this—it just reflects our greater job market really. And how literature has really worked itself into academia over the last maybe two generations.

TR: Much of what we’ve been talking about seems to resurface in Barbie Chang, which was just a pleasure to read. I want to go back again to June when you talked about deciding to write from a kind of persona in much of that book, and in a recent interview in Poetry Magazine you talk about how the volume came together as a hybrid space between the personal and the universal. Did that offer you a kind of freedom in what you wrote and how you wrote it?

VC: We’re all writing in a vacuum and sometimes I wonder, why would my own experiences mean anything to anyone? I have that natural fear that my personal experiences are too personal and how do we transcend that? Especially in an age where there’s so much noise and so many people are writing in this solipsistic way in this narcissistic time that we live in and I grew up in. I just find that to be so tedious. I didn’t want to be that kind of writer. I just intuitively thought it would be fun, and it is fun [to write in persona]. At the end of the day I think of writing as play, I really do, and so I thought, let me just play and change this first-person I to a third-person character and the name Barbie Chang popped into my head. I thought it would be kind of funny and sarcastic and ironic and paradoxical, and also it’s political, you know? And I think it makes a statement. This character became a way for me to write more than about my own experiences as a person of color living in a community that is not always welcoming to people of color, even today in California.

I was telling my husband that I’d just witnessed a kid make fun of Asian people—eleven years old and he pulled his eyes wide and made them all squinty—and I thought, I’m in California, I grew up in Michigan, the last time that someone did that to me was probably when I was nine years old. And it’s still happening today and he did it in front of my kids, which really, really, infuriated me. I don’t live in Los Angeles proper, but I’m really close to Long Beach and it’s a diverse community. Everywhere I go I see people of color, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, but I just feel like the people in the community [who] are not people of color, to be frank, are really racist—not all of them, but some of them; and I just wanted to write about that, and didn’t know how, so I started with the “I” and changed it to a third person, and once I changed it, it felt like, okay, now I’m really able to open it up and make it more than about myself, because I know other people experience this all the time, every day. Not only Asian American people but all people who are different, and I think that I just got tired of it and I just couldn’t believe that it still exists and that adult women were behaving the way they were behaving and I wanted to write about it. So that’s how that third person character came about.

TR: The book is so rich—some poems are surreal, some are elegiac and some are philosophical. And having gone through a similar loss of my mother, I found the poems about your mother particularly affecting. There’s one where you talk about likening your mother’s diseased lungs to honeycombs and: “there’s nothing scarier than something that won’t stop fooling you with its beauty.” I just thought that poem was stunning. But what I also want to talk about—it is the day after Charlottesville [two days after Heather Heyer was murdered during the white supremacist rally], and we were just talking about race. Your political poems in this book have a kind of openness that you were talking earlier about, but are so resonant. In one poem, a small moment about your daughter and this group that you were just referring to that you name “the Circle,” are the lines: “[The party] was a hit little girls going in figure / eights their breath / coming out in clouds shaped like / little white hearts.” And it stopped my own breath in a way just reading it. Can you talk about writing these poems at this moment in our culture?

VC:  I’m glad you found things in the collection that resonated with you, and that particular poem, the ice-skating one, was actually a story that someone else had told me. Being a parent is… It’s like a war zone out there sometimes. And at this particular school (we no longer go there, thank goodness) there’s this group of women who all kind of look alike, dress alike, and they’re all very attractive, and none of them are people of color obviously—

TR: I was going to ask, are they all white? They read as white but I didn’t know.

VC: Some are half Latino or something, but you know it’s like the white majority mentality that they’re going after. There’s a sort of personal erasure, I think, with the ones who weren’t fully white, but perhaps looked white. I call them aspirational. Towards what, I have no idea, but they mistreated a lot of people in the community. And that one story about the ice skating was horrific to me. Someone had sent out an e-vite to another parent for a birthday party. But they had accidentally sent it to the wrong person, because the mother had the same name as someone else. So instead of just saying “come, just come,” this person took the time and effort to email this mother to tell her: “Sorry, I didn’t mean to invite you.” Most people would think that’s totally fine—it’s that person’s prerogative to disinvite. To me, though, it’s not. It wasn’t as simple as that. It’s a social statement, a political statement. It’s like this person wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t just “my child’s not friends with this person.” No, this other woman was very exclusive, only hung out with certain people, and for me the pain is when parents behave that way and your children get hurt in the end. Your children learn how to mistreat people; your children learn how to—on our side—only hang out with people who may be like them. And it was just a proxy for all the bad behavior at that school by these particular people, and I wrote it as if it happened to Barbie Chang. You have that freedom to do things like that.

I started with the “I” and changed it to a third person, and once I changed it, it felt like, okay, now I’m really able to open it up and make it more than about myself, because I know other people experience this all the time, every day. Not only Asian American people but all people who are different…

It’s just the ignorance, the stupidity, the entitlement, the arrogance, the idea that they’re better than [other] people, the fact that that still exists in this day and age is absurd and watching all these events happen, not just in Charlottesville but daily in this environment, I can’t even believe that people think that’s okay, that somehow because they’re of a certain ethnicity or gender they’re somehow better than everyone else. It just makes my blood boil, honestly just even thinking about all this. It starts with the parents. I’m not saying any of these parents are raising neo-Nazis or anything like that, but I’m telling you, their children will not ever have friends of color, who might be different than them, unless those friends of color are just like them; and I see this perpetuation of stereotypes of racism, of a lack of flexibility in the parents, and exclusivity, and I think, Uh, so I could pretty much tell you what those neo-Nazis parents are like,” because these kids didn’t just grow up that way; and there are aberrations where kids just become something because they’re inherently evil, but I think for the most part I blame it on the parents and I blame it on our culture—it’s all connected. It’s like your responsibility as a parent is so much bigger than just making sure a kid eats and does well in school and all these other things. You’ve got to make sure that they’re open, and again, to see that eleven-year-old pull his eyes and make them really small, it just made me think: “Who’s teaching these other kids? Whom did he pick that up from? And what parent allowed their kid to think that’s okay?” The fact that it could get generationally passed down since I was a kid is just astounding to me, and it just shows you the long-lasting effects of racism.

TR: True. And finally, before we go, can you talk at all about your next project that you mentioned in the beginning? Or is it something you’d rather not talk about?

VC: I read some of the poems from the next project at the reading. They are called “Obit.” They’re actually these prose pieces and prose poems and they’re shaped like an obituary so they’re thin and narrow, as if they would appear in a newspaper… It’s like a fragmentation of grief and the dying. I noticed that when someone dies [whom] you’re close to, it’s not just that person who dies, it’s everything else [that] dies around it, like optimism… Let me pull it out, I haven’t looked at it in a while. So, doctors died, money died, control died, form died, appetite died, secrets died. So like all of these other things are dying too. It was a way to distill grief. And there are some narrative stories in there, and I want it to be more philosophical. I just finished a draft of them a while ago and started the same process of sending them out, so a couple of them are actually out in the world. Agni took a bunch and 32 Poems took a bunch. And there’s more coming out in New England Review in September. I can absolutely talk about them because I feel like most of the work is complete. There will probably be tinkering and things like that going forward, and who knows if I’ll add any more. When poems get rejected I revisit and work on them, so I’ll definitely keep working on it over time.

We closed our conversation by sharing our experiences about being women in academia and in the corporate world. Victoria talked about her fascination with the Ellen Pao trial on gender discrimination in Silicon Valley (which she writes about in Barbie Chang), and in the corporate finance world more generally. As she said in our conversation: “I had written some of those poems while that was happening, so it was interesting to think about those issues and how women are always subservient in our culture.” Victoria seems to have her finger on the cultural pulse of our society in her work, which is so deftly intertwined with her everyday lived experiences. In reading her poetry, we are privy to the mind of a philosopher of contemporary corporate life, everyday racism inherited by children, gender discrimination, fraught relationships, aging and death, and of language. ~TR

Theresa Rogers currently divides her time between Vancouver, Canada, and Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and is completing her MFA in poetry at Antioch LA.  She has published poems in the Cape Cod Poetry Review and The San Diego Reader as well as various local publications. She also teaches at the University of British Columbia. Learn more at tessrogerspoetry.com.

In early July, my editor-in-chief emailed me with the good news that Maggie Nelson had agreed to be interviewed for Lunch Ticket. I accepted the task of interviewing her with some degree of trepidation, in part due to her vast accomplishments. She is the author of nine books, including the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Argonauts, the cult classic Bluets, the New York Times bestselling The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, and The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial, as well as five books of poetry. She directs the MFA writing program at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles with her partner, interdisciplinary artist Harry Dodge. Nelson has also received a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, a NEA Fellowship in Poetry, an Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant, and, most recently, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

But I was also unsettled because within the canon of books that I would need to read or re-read for this interview were Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial, both concerning the murder of her aunt in the early 1960s in Michigan by a serial killer. Unfortunately, like Maggie Nelson, I understand “the murder mind,” an appellation she uses to describe the headspace we inhabit each time we seek to comprehend incomprehensible acts, thereby imprinting on our minds the behaviors of violence. To delve into Maggie Nelson’s work, I would be reopening certain wounds within my own history.

In July of 2014, my forty-eight-year-old cousin was found dead from a single gunshot wound to her left temple in her home in Santa Cruz, Galapagos, Ecuador. The cause of death was officially a suicide, though it was not long before inconsistencies emerged. There was no gunshot powder on her left hand, there was evidence of a robbery, but most obvious, there was the phone call she made to her mother the day before her death, expressing how she was afraid—she had said something she shouldn’t have—and she needed to fly home. What began for my family as a tragedy became the uneven practice of grief, a maddening search for answers, and the honest, yet naïve, desire for justice. We barely succeeded at the first task.

In 2005, Maggie Nelson published Jane: A Murder about her aunt’s murder, a cold case, which had remained unsolved for thirty-five years. The work combines essay, poetry, and Jane’s own diary entries. In her exploration of Jane’s death, the search for the truth reads more like an ellipsis, delineating, perhaps by omission, this young woman whom Maggie Nelson never met but who held so much space within her family history. Missing persons, dead or disappeared, create vacuums that shadow us and redefine us in the process. Our “murder mind” flitters around the absence, the empty space left behind by so many unanswered questions.

There’s something very difficult about writing autobiographical books in which one’s goal is to speak for oneself only, while at the same time wanting to make a text porous enough that other people’s experiences feel invited in rather than consciously or unconsciously excluded.

For Nelson, growing up under the specter of a violent crime, she dissects how it followed her family wherever they went: how she would check the closets upon returning home from school, knife in hand, or how she and her mother had to leave movies that featured the kidnapping, murder, or rape of women (a trope repeated all too often in Hollywood), or how her mother remains startled by her own body, dreaming perhaps “of a body that cannot be injured, violated, or sickened unless it chooses to be.”

Maggie Nelson does not have the answers, but she asks all the right questions, at least the ones we ask quietly, never aloud. She writes, “Conventional wisdom has it that we dredge up family stories to find out more about ourselves, to pursue that all-important goal of ‘self-knowledge,’ to catapult ourselves, like Oedipus, down the track that leads to the revelation of some original crime, some original truth…” But the reality is far more complicated. She says, “Fewer people talk about what happens when this track begins to dissolve, when the path starts to become indistinguishable from the forest.” And so what happens when we get what we desire, this truth? What are we left with? To whom does the truth even belong?

One month after reading the galleys of Jane: A Murder, Nelson’s mother received a call from a detective. New DNA evidence had re-opened the cold case. Gary Leiterman, a sixty-two-year-old nurse, overweight and in poor health, would be prosecuted for the murder of Jane Mixer. Nelson’s family inevitably would relive the gruesome details of Jane’s death in the courtroom, presented with autopsy photographs, visual evidence, and testimony. And for her part, Nelson chose to re-enter the “murder mind” and write an account of the trial. The result, The Red Parts, was first published in 2007 by Simon & Schuster and reprinted by Graywolf Press in the spring of 2016.

It begins with two epigraphs: “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known” (Luke 12:2) and “In all desire to know there is already a drop of cruelty” (Nietzsche). Later in the book, Nelson seeks a Christian friend’s advice and the woman instructs her to “just read the red parts,” which at first she does not understand. Though the significance of the title is never explained, the literal meaning refers to those Bibles which have Jesus Christ’s direct quotations highlighted in red. The quote from the gospel of Luke, its own “red part,” sets up the counterbalance to Nietzsche. In the kingdom of God there is justice, just don’t expect it to look like anything you might recognize.

The Red Parts goes where Jane: A Murder could not. Out of nothingness, there is now Leiterman and a body of evidence no longer dormant in cardboard boxes. And yet, to Nelson, these heavy facts sometimes make even less sense than the unanswered questions. She is fascinated by the way in which murder transforms the mundane items of a crime scene into “talismans that threatened at every turn to take on allegorical proportions.” Referring to a bloody towel presented as evidence, Nelson says, “… I watched Schroeder snap on a latex glove at the January hearing and pull this towel out of its cardboard evidence box, as if retrieving a piece of flotsam floated in from the far, dark banks of the River Styx. The fabric of reality had to tear a little to allow it into it.” The fabric of our reality must tear a little as well to let this book in: to feel what it’s like on the other side of violence. There is an image I cannot shake either: my cousin wore a short strand of black pearls around her neck the night she was killed. Afterwards, the pearls were found shot across the floor like marbles. I return to this: the pool of blood, the black marbles, the curled body, as if from those mental snapshots I can somehow process my loss.

In The Red Parts, Nelson broaches a theme to be continued in The Art of Cruelty, about how the female body is a site of consumable violence. It is not theoretical: she watched its consumption through the body of her aunt, the autopsy photos disseminated at the trial, republished, and consumed by a specific audience. A television show, 48 Hours Mystery, will feature an episode on Jane, whether or not the family participates. Nelson and her mother agree to be interviewed for the show, but Nelson is keenly aware of the inherent contradictions within their publicized grief. She wonders about the public’s concern over the damaged bodies of young white girls, from middle to upper class backgrounds, and poses the question: “Girls whose lives and deaths, judging by airtime, apparently matter more than all murdered, missing, and suffering brown people combined?” Nelson never shies from to putting her finger right in the throbbing wound, even if it implies that she participates in that wound.

I remember coming home from the hospital after giving birth and looking completely differently at all birth mothers on the street for a few weeks, feeling simply astonished that they’d all been through this experience, which remains mostly removed from us, like some giant secret, separated from daily life by a cordon sanitaire.

What makes The Red Parts so accessible is Maggie Nelson’s sense of detachment, a calm analysis that manages both the horror and untranslatable magnitudes of life. In The Argonauts, it is her pregnancy and childbirth, her mother-in-law’s death, and her partner’s decision to transition with testosterone supplements and surgery. In Bluets, it’s her friend’s car accident and paralysis. Woven throughout The Red Parts are numerous personal tragedies: the sudden death of her father from a heart attack, the period of heartbreak she experiences at the beginning of the trial, her heroin addict ex-boyfriend, her sister’s troubled youth. Yet the text never feels laden with sensationalism or sentimentality.

At various times reading her work, I have felt as if we were sitting together on a couch, giggling (perhaps inappropriately) at dismal things. I have also felt that we may have lived parallel lives. This is obviously far from the truth—no one lives parallel lives. But it is a testament to her uncanny ability to connect with her readers. In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson argues against binaries as a reductive system of thought. Instead, she refers to identities that flicker in and out, over spectrums, over time, shape-shifting. And perhaps this is why we are able to see so much of ourselves in her writing. She presents a multiplicity of perspectives. Within her work, contradictory emotions can exist simultaneously. In the interview below, she refers to her work as “porous,” so that within these juxtapositions, we have the space to incorporate our own interpretation, creating a positionality and sense of belonging to the text. But underneath it all, Nelson remains committed to revealing our most damaging societal paradigms: racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, or any system of thought that creates unequal power dynamics.

This past August 2016, I contacted Maggie Nelson and we exchanged emails with questions regarding her body of work.

Diana Odasso:  You address a number of binaries in The Argonauts, not just in gender and sexual preference, but also in academic disciplines and how these relate to the materiality of the body. With regard to gender and identity, you mention the identity as something that “flickers” or “becomes” rather than existing on a linear spectrum from A to B.

Yet in the “outside” world, the demand for labels remains high. The government defines. Society defines. Passports, social security cards, mortgages and health care, etc… The humiliations of daily life are particularly hard on the LGBTQ community. I’m not sure if this is your job as an artist to answer, but how can we move from a personal framework of fluidity to a societal framework?

Maggie Nelson: Well put. I think there are many others who could answer your questions better, activists working to remove gender designations from identifying documents, for example, and so on; some countries are already way ahead of the U.S. on this account, so there are some promising models out there.

My critique of the value of video testimonials still stands, which is to say that in an age of “truthiness,” the idea that a condemning video would guarantee, say, convictions of police officers in the wrong, remains a fantasy.

I definitely think that the rush to define and grant rights to a “transgender subject” will be faulty if there isn’t room for the spectrum you describe; otherwise the definition/ recognition/ construction of one subject can become a means of neglecting those whose desires and identifications don’t fit the new box (a perennial problem with defining subjects). You’re right, though—I address these issues most often as an artist more than an activist or advocate per se. I’ve seen first-hand, however, in the eager and grateful reception of The Argonauts, how large the appetite is out there for an insistence on our capacity to make community and commons without basing such in calcified or over-determined identities—something a lot of folks insist can’t be done, but the thing is, it’s already happening, it’s already been done, it’s ongoing.

DO: On the issue of binaries, you challenge the rigidity of both mainstream and radical ideas in your work. This questioning seems to be a useful tool as we redevelop our language surrounding gender and sexuality. How’s the new dialogue being created? Who’s defining it? When the world seems obsessed with the clinical definitions of who gets to pee where and in what receptacle, how do you suggest a nuanced discussion of gender in mainstream society? What space does art have in influencing long-term changes in this dialogue?

MN: I read the New York Times every day and assorted other media sources, but generally speaking, I don’t venture into mainstream Op-Ed modalities because I just don’t think the available forms allow for the nuanced discussions I value most. That isn’t to say there aren’t excellent think pieces or provocations in those forums, or that mainstream visibility performs no function. It’s more to say that the mainstream is often just waking up to issues, or to people, that have existed for some time, but it has the habit of treating them as “new trends,” which is annoying. For example, I’ve heard a lot of people lightly mock this “transdy” moment, when trans and queer issues are suddenly very visible in mainstream venues, but sometimes their scorn slips into focusing on the people who are coming into view, rather than on the venues whose stock in trade is creating the feeling of trendiness. That’s a trap I think we need to watch out for, as it discounts history, it discounts the people who’ve been living and fighting along these lines for a long time without many headlines or fashion shoots.

DO: The Argonauts addresses motherhood full frontal. You write, “Phrases like colostrum, letdown, and hindmilk arrive in one’s life like hieroglyphs from the land of the lost.” Many American women, myself included, enter pregnancy, labor, and early motherhood largely unaware of its physiological demands. Other than doctor’s advice, Good Housekeeping magazines at the ob/gyn’s office, and online mommy wars, childbearing and -rearing remain somewhat of a black hole in our society. Why the erasure of what you term “biological maternity,” both in literature and cultural narratives?

MN: You know, misogyny, matrophobia, etc. The usual suspects. The fact that most things associated with caretaking are feminized and our culture has a long history of despising the feminized. I’ve never in my life received more shocked gasps at a reading than when I’ve read my very simple attempt to describe what my placenta looked like; I naively had no idea beforehand that I was going to provoke such a response. Similarly, so many people have expressed pity for me for my “hard birth experience,” whereas I thought I was narrating a triumphant birth experience. But because there’s pain in it, and fear and blood and mortality, people think it’s a trauma, when really it’s just life. (As one nurse hilariously said to me during my labor, “This isn’t for sissies.”) I remember coming home from the hospital after giving birth and looking completely differently at all birth mothers on the street for a few weeks, feeling simply astonished that they’d all been through this experience, which remains mostly removed from us, like some giant secret, separated from daily life by a cordon sanitaire. Anyway, I don’t know that childbearing and rearing is a black hole—I think the fuzzy, mystified version (what some might call reproductive futurism) is just about everywhere. Needless to say, my interest lies elsewhere.

DO: In The Art of Cruelty, published in 2011, you discuss theories of represented violence. Since then, we’ve seen a proliferation of iPhone videos depicting police brutality, sniper shootings, terrorism—acts perhaps not vastly different from violence we’ve seen before but now occurring “live” with more frequency. (I remain most marked by the policeman shot during the Charlie Hebdo attack and recently, the Philando Castile video. They haunt me not for the killing, but for the subtle moments of humanity, for the dying.) If you were to append The Art of Cruelty in any way, what could be learned of our increased consumption of “real” violence?

The fact that most things associated with caretaking are feminized and our culture has a long history of despising the feminized.

MN: I don’t think I would need to append it. It reminds me of the re-release of The Red Parts, when people have asked me, “What would you add now that true crime is such a huge industry?” It was a huge industry when I wrote those books, too, and it was huge when my aunt was murdered in 1969. I think my critique of the value of video testimonials still stands, which is to say that in an age of “truthiness,” the idea that a condemning video would guarantee, say, convictions of police officers in the wrong, remains a fantasy. (Rodney King, anyone?) Which isn’t to say I’m not pro body cameras or websites to which videotaped incidents can quickly be uploaded, etc. It just means it’s important to remember that such things alone won’t solve the problem of white supremacy and an unjust criminal justice system. But your other point is really interesting—your point about witnessing the subtle moments of humanity, about being haunted by the dying, rather than riveted by the injustice or the violence. Personally I can’t watch the violent videos; the pregnant pause between the cop’s demand that Sandra Bland put out her cigarette and her decision to say, “It’s my car, I’ll smoke in it if I want to,” contains enough agony for me.

DO: You have often brought up issues of intersectionality, moments when you acknowledge the additional burdens placed upon brown bodies.  

When the attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando occurred, it became clear that our media had limited ways of addressing intersectional issues—with the majority of victims black and Hispanic, members of the LGBTQ community, but Americans nonetheless, on American soil. Similarly, the murderer was Muslim, also an American citizen, a lone wolf killer, a man who had a history of domestic violence and psychological problems and also documented conflicts about his sexuality. He fit and did not fit several narratives at once. How would you begin to articulate the complexities of these acts of violence?

MN: You just articulate them, I guess. Life is messy, identities are messy, motivations are messy. The public silence from the terrorist-obsessed right wing over the targeting of LGBTQ people of color speaks for itself, but it’s not really surprising. (Remember when the Twin Towers fell because of the gays and feminists?) Anyway, I recommend a book by Ken Corbett called A Murder Over a Girl, about the killing of a high school student Letitia/Larry King by a fellow classmate, Brandon McInerney, as it documents the difficulty of prosecuting a hate crime when various “hates” at issue are all swirled together, or certain hates remain unspoken (transphobia, in this case); or when a human being is full of aggression and just shopping the available avenues of hatred for an outlet. It’s much more pragmatic, in my estimation, to go all-in for gun control rather than trying to parse out which impulse most prevailed in someone’s psychotic decision to kill people.

DO: The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial was just re-released by Graywolf Press. This book challenged me. In 2014, my cousin was murdered in the Galapagos. In a recent LitUp podcast, Angela Ledgerwood also mentions how she trembled while reading The Red Parts because her co-worker had been murdered.

There are a variety of angles from which your readers can enter your “world,” as I did with The Red Parts, as many others may have done with Bluets or The Argonauts. I wonder how you position yourself in regards to the relatability of your work.

MN: I’m so sorry to hear about your cousin. Really sorry. It doesn’t bring me any pleasure to have people “relate” to the book’s material, especially as that relating just underscores the widespread nature of violence against women. But if the book offers a kind of rumination or positionality that feels worthwhile or companionable, I’d be very glad. I’ve heard from people who have felt this way, and it pleases me. There’s something very difficult about writing autobiographical books in which one’s goal is to speak for oneself only, while at the same time wanting to make a text porous enough that other people’s experiences feel invited in rather than consciously or unconsciously excluded. These questions are fascinating and mysterious to me, especially as they have both aesthetic and political dimensions.

DO: I was struck by your Nietzsche quote at the beginning of The Red Parts: “In all desire to know there is already a drop of cruelty.” Has writing these books at times been a self-afflicted cruelty? 

MN: Oh yes, it’s felt that way. That’s partly why I chose that epigraph. There are different types of the “desire to know,” of course—there’s the Enlightenment type, the psychoanalytic type, the more spiritual type, and so on. That epigraph was meant to dance with the quotation from Luke, which appears next to it, and ask questions about the Biblical structure of revelation. But I digress.

It’s much more pragmatic, in my estimation, to go all-in for gun control rather than trying to parse out which impulse most prevailed in someone’s psychotic decision to kill people.

DO: Could you say a bit more about the title of the book, The Red Parts? I went to a Baptist middle school, in which the bibles had red writing for all the words spoken by Jesus Christ. The quote from Luke you just mentioned is literally “a red part.” How do “the red parts” function thematically, or perhaps theologically, in the text?

MN: At the risk of sounding tautological or close-mouthed, I would say that the thematic or theological function of the “red parts” in the text is up to the reader. As Nietzsche is famous for presenting (allegorically) the death of God, and for complicating notions of good and evil, it’s obviously meant to be charged, placing his words next to the text from Luke. It’s an undecided relation, as is most else in the text.

DO: In The Art of Cruelty, you write, “Writing, especially autobiographical writing, can be a hothouse of self-deceptions, but it also has the uncanny ability to expose self-deception with the formidable exactitude of surgery.” As you have written these personal texts, have you found yourself in this position of confronting your own self-deceptions?

MN: Oh yes, once again. That’s kind of the whole game. Every draft is slathered with self-deceptions. Or if that puts it too harshly, every draft is full of layers—usually I start off pissed off, blaming others, the way we all tend to do, and I have to burn through those very human habits before getting anywhere interesting. Again, one’s writing reflects where you are in life; you can’t hide. If you’re full of blaming rage toward your folks, and you haven’t yet worked through it, that’s what is going to come out. You can’t just jump over it to forgiveness (if that’s even where you want to go). You have to go through it, as they say. But the amazing thing is, writing freely and then looking honestly at what you’ve put down on the page is, in my experience, a really good way of moving through things. This is why teaching autobiography can be so hard—if you’re a shrink, you know that you can’t tell someone something they aren’t ready to hear and expect them to take it in, rather than freak out in defensiveness. But if you’re a writing teacher, you might have to deliver the news before someone’s ready to hear it, because you only have one workshop, or one semester. I can’t tell you how many students have told me that they finally understood what I or their classmates were trying to tell them about five years after they’ve graduated. I’m still catching up to things people have told me along the way. It’s painful and embarrassing that we’re often so clear to others and so muddled to ourselves. But so it is.

DO: Harry has spoken about being a character in The Argonauts, stating that being with you, “Is like an epileptic with a pacemaker being married to a strobe-light artist.” You address the dangers of writing about loved ones and, even, the temporal dissonance between the time period you write about and the book release, which is a reliving of the past. I wonder if you could speak to that process with the release of The Argonauts.     

MN: Well, we made it through a long year of a lot of publicity, so that’s something! The book garnered way more attention than I ever imagined it would, which was amazing, but presented a tough learning curve for me at times, especially in the face of media people who really, really wanted me to tell them more about Harry (or about his gender, to be exact) or even speak for him, when I had already said what I had to say about him (and what he authorized me to say) in the book, and I wasn’t aiming to travel around as an emissary to explain him or any other genderqueer person to the world.

There’s something very difficult about writing autobiographical books in which one’s goal is to speak for oneself only, while at the same time wanting to make a text porous enough that other people’s experiences feel invited in rather than consciously or unconsciously excluded.

Also, while I usually have a pretty thick skin re: reviews that get things wrong, it wasn’t as easy to ignore misrepresentations of the book if they involved Harry as well as me—for example, a line that recurred quite often was that the book was about my undergoing “arduous IVF treatments” while my partner “transitioned from female to male,” which isn’t true on either account. So in some visible cases, like the New York Times, I asked for a correction, which they issued. Anyway, I’m glad the rush of it is over, and also grateful for the ride.

DO: In a Rumpus interview, you say, “[Annie Dillard] once wrote, ‘You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You’ll have fish left over.’” And you also say in first pages of The Argonauts, “You can’t fuck up the space for God.”

On one hand, your books are tightly constructed, but on the other, there is a space for reflection, for disagreement, and for the interplay of opposing ideas. How is the notion of space formally used in the construction of your texts?

MN: Space is really important. “Pluralize and specify,” as Sedgwick had it. I wrote a lot about space in the Cruelty book, so I’d direct interested parties there for more cogitation on the subject. But you’re right, space between paragraphs is the only formal device in The Argonauts—there’s either one or two. That’s it. Space in Bluets was marshaled numerically; in The Red Parts, the logic of space was the chapter.

DO: In a video interview with Olivia Laing at the London Review Bookshop, you challenge the idea that your works are collage, which implies simultaneity. You also mention that you have moved away from poetry in your recent books, because the narrative form “does more work.” Does the subject matter dictate form or are you open to new manners of experimenting? What are you working on now?

MN: Subject matter dictates form. Given that, I can’t really talk about what I’m working on until I’ve found its true subject and consequent form. But I’ll keep you posted!

Diana Odasso is currently finishing her MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch University Los Angeles and is managing editor of Lunch Ticket. She has translated French texts (published in Jim Harrison’s The Raw and the Cooked), ghostwritten for an autobiography, and written for the Huffington Post. She has work published in Lunch Ticket, Waypoints Magazine, Burrow Press, and upcoming on The Thought Erotic. She recently attended the Disquiet International Program in Lisbon on scholarship. She lives in South Florida with her two young boys and Boston Terrier.

Photo: Andrew Kovalev

The story in Lidia Yuknavitch’s national bestseller, The Small Backs of Children, is centered around a picture taken by a photographer on assignment in a war zone. The picture is of a young girl caught midair at the moment an explosion kills her entire family. The novel is a combination of sexual fairy tale, anti-cautionary tale, art manifesto, and the story of the birth of art. The plot unfolds around that picture, and although the story is told in a straightforward manner, it’s anything but. This is a novel in the classical philosophical tradition, long belonging to male writers, more recently shared by Cixous, Aker, and Sontag. Themes of art, violence, feminism, war, sexuality, addiction, loss, and motherhood are expertly braided with a riveting plot and parallel narratives. But unlike the tomes some other modern writers produce—Jonathan Franzen, or David Foster Wallace, for example—Yuknavitch writes compact prose, layered and dense with meaning. And everything that occurs comes through the body, unapologetically.

Anyone who has read The Chronology of Water, Yuknavitch’s brilliant anti-memoir (she calls it anti-memoir because there is no linear narrative arc, a varied tone, and no resolution; I call it brilliant), will recognize the story of the loss of her daughter in The Small Backs of Children. “Inside everything I have ever written, there is a girl,” says the writer, a character known only by her profession. The rest of the cast, too, is known only by a simple description: the widow, the filmmaker, the girl, the poet, the playwright, and the photographer. “This, reader, is a mother-daughter story,” says the writer, the only character to speak in the first person. We wonder who is speaking: the writer character, the author, or both. From that character’s point of view, the story is about the loss of her baby and her obsession to save a child she’s seen only in a photograph. Somehow, the inclusion of nonfiction makes the fantastic story believable. Yuknavitch’s muddling of roles, of fiction and nonfiction, personal and political, is used effectively, with authority. Interpretation is left to the reader.

Like all of Yuknavitch’s writing, The Small Backs of Children is a physical experience. It’s one reaction after another of breath and tears and muscle and heart. We are never in a scene where the bodies are not doing the work; the physicality of the violent imagery is powerful, as is the beautiful prose. The book starts off asking the reader to imagine Eastern Europe in winter, “However it came to you. Winter. That white….” The scene is of the girl observing a wolf caught in a trap, about to lose its leg, its blood red against the white of the snow. The girl goes over and “pisses and pisses where the crime happened.” A bit later, “This is how the sexuality of a girl is formed—an image at a time—against white; taboo, thoughtless, corporeal.” It’s how Yuknavitch makes art in the story, too, one image at a time, from pain, from the body. The unflinching violence of her story feels real in a way the news cannot.

The Small Backs of Children answers the question of what to do with all of the pain and suffering we endure as a result of violence. The answer is that we feel it in our bodies, and then make art.

Some of us admire movie stars, some sports stars, but people like me have writer stars. Lidia Yuknavitch is my writer star. I am lucky enough to live close to where she lives, writes, and teaches. I’ve taken several of her workshops and I attend every reading of hers that I can. I first became aware of the Cult of Yuknavitch (I am a member!), when The Chronology of Water came out. I saw people with pain-dazed eyes wanting to be near her, to tell her their stories, to touch her. It made me vow never to ask her for anything. I held to that until this interview, which took place in September 2015, at Papa Hydns in Southeast Portland, Oregon.

*     *     *

The week or so before our formal interview, I heard her read and give a Q&A at Imprint Books in Port Townsend, WA. She said the Small Backs of Children didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of years of war photographs, which she had gotten from her aunt. When her father became ill her aunt gave her a box of war photographs her uncle had taken illegally in Lithuania, along with redacted stories from the war. Yuknavitch wanted to know two things: what happened to the stories of those people in the photos, and what about the war zones doesn’t make the news? What happens to the people who live in those cultures daily? Those photographs, along with daily grief over the death of her daughter, were the genesis of The Small Backs of Children. She “put the stories in pieces across the bodies of women and girls.”

Someone at the Imprint Books Q&A (okay, it was me), asked about the frank sex scenes in The Small Backs of Children. Lidia said that we experience sexuality from birth, and she wanted bodily reality in novels. She wanted to liberate sexuality for women from what we’ve inherited. It was important to her that the girl in the book not flinch sexually, even though she was a victim.

All of this was rolling in my thoughts when I met Yuknavitch for this interview a week later. I tried to act normal but, like I said, I might as well have been sitting down with a rock star. She bought me a sandwich (!); we split a piece of cake (although I am sure I ate more); and then I started off by telling her that I was a reluctant interviewer. I told her how I was hesitant to take from her, but she was so approachable and intelligent that we started talking and didn’t quit, even with food in our mouths.

[blockquote align=left]Join the revolution. Don’t sit and watch. Make art, challenge, help. We’re killing our daughters. It’s perpetuated by TV, books. It’s my job to agitate.

I have heard Lidia talk about how much she doesn’t care for the question, “What’s the difference between fiction and nonfiction?” so I opened with this question. She laughed, but then talked about it. I told her the one thing that bothers me about all MFA programs is that you have to pick a genre and stick with it, and how much I admired that The Small Backs of Children straddled the line.

Lidia Yuknavitch: Gak! So many people ask me that question. Why? Fiction and non-fiction are mirrors of each other. One does not exist without the other and each contains elements of the other. I’m interested in how they play off of each other.

Kirsten Larson: The great reviews and attention coming from first The Chronology of Water and now The Small Backs of Children might make it seem that you’ve had rapid success, but you’ve been successfully publishing for quite a while. How have your recent successes been different from previous books, which have also received excellent reviews? Is it more than media exposure?

LY: Yes. I had two different experiences with The Chronology of Water, which almost killed me emotionally, and The Small Backs of Children. I didn’t know that opening up my story would make it so that others could open up theirs. I was really overwhelmed by it and wanted to take care of people. I’ve since learned to have healthy boundaries and how to make them without hurting people.

With The Small Backs of Children I know who I am, I know my limits. I recharge with family and copious amounts of time alone. Literally double what the exertion was. With Chronology of Water I needed two years of alone time in pillow forts. My family has learned to tell.

Lidia is married to Andy Mingo, a filmmaker. Lidia is also a painter. They have a son Miles, also a deep thinker and artist. I asked what it’s like with a house full of artists.

LY: [Talking about when she met Andy] Right away, we had a conversation about image systems and image syntax. (I had to Google these concepts later. – KL) I love that we can talk. He understands me. Oh, and he’s in charge, I like that. (She said something like, “he’s hot, too. Even our lesbian friends agree to that.” – KL)

KL: The poetry of your writing, your unique music, is stunning. When reading your words I’ve often had physical reactions and have had to stop and linger over sentences. I hold the book to my chest until I can calm my racing heart and breath. I don’t know what my question is. Um. In the narrative of The Small Backs of Children, art seems to be born of pain, from the body. On your website you write, “In 1986 my daughter died the day she was born. From her I became a writer.” I read this and my body sinks in, there’s a lifetime and more in those two sentences. Can you talk to me about the body / pain / art connection?

LY: I secretly hoped people still had bodies. I wondered, is anyone willing to meet me there? Despair is fear and hopelessness and violence. I want people to have a physical experience when they read my book.

KL: Do you get tired of the media?

LY: It’s both heaven and something else. Important things are happening, though, like “Black Lives Matter.” The movement is bringing bodies back through the very media that erases the body. It’s so important.

KL: I always wonder, why do you think women’s sexuality is shamed by religions?

LY: Anthropologists say major religions need to establish taboos because taboos regulate behavior. Those in charge are those who control procreation. It’s like property to be owned and passed down. Subordinating the feminine is a social regulation tool—keep the wealth. In ancient matriarchal societies they shared labor and wealth. Only in a very few is sex taboo. Although, if you make that argument you are an essentialist, which is very threatening to patriarchal social groups.

KL: You’ve inspired me to radical body acceptance. We’re both 52. What are your thoughts on aging in a society that fetishizes youth, and demoralizes women’s bodies through every available channel?

LY: Join the revolution. Don’t sit and watch. Make art, challenge, help. We’re killing our daughters. It’s perpetuated by TV, books. It’s my job to agitate. I’m starting teen workshops that give a different message. Every facet works to agitate against messages. We don’t even know, we haven’t figured out what women are or should be. We can’t take a day off. The day we really do wake up as a group will be a revolutionary moment. We could change the world in a week.

KL: I know you have another book coming out next year, but you don’t necessarily want to talk about specifics. I heard it was about Joan of Arc. I’m excited to read it.

LY: I think I am on the final edits. I hope they are waiting for me when I get home.

KL: Your generosity toward other writers is something that I love. Who has influenced you in the past?

LY: Who is next? Who has the most fire? Work needs to be alive, on the cusp. I am excited about fissures opening to different styles of writing. We have to turn things over continuously, or it deadens. We have a market problem, and literature is a product of the market. It’s a living organism. I’m very excited about Maggie Nelson, Rebecca Solnit, Claudia Rankine, Sarah Gerard.

KL: I am excited to hear you are starting workshops based around the seasons. What’s the significance of seasons?

LY: It’s a chance to remind everyone that change is happening all of the time. It’s important. Transformational. There is movement in writing, life is omnipresent. We get stuck. Making art is change—all the different ways we make art. Also, I might be a dork, but I really like the change in weather and the ritual around it. There is pleasure to me in changing color, the experience of the seasons. Winter is cooler and darker. For introverts, it’s an amazing time.

Lidia Yuknavitch is author of The Small Backs of Children (Harper, 2015); Dora: A Headcase (Hawthorne Books, 2012) which has been optioned for film by Katherine Brooks; The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books, 2011), which won the Oregon Book Award Reader’s Choice 2012, the PNBA Award 2012, and was a finalist for the 2012 PEN Center USA creative nonfiction award; Real to Reel (Fiction Collective 2, 2003), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Allegories of Violence (Routledge, 2000); Liberty’s Excess: Fictions (Fiction Collective 2, 2000); Her Other Mouths (House of Bones Press, 1997); and Caverns (Penguin Books, 1990). Her essays and short stories have appeared in Guernica, Ms., The Iowa Review, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, Fiction International, Zyzzyva, and in several anthologies. She earned her PhD in English Literature from the University of Oregon, and teaches writing, literature, film, and women’s studies at Mt. Hood Community College.

What Lidia is known for, besides all of her accomplishments, is being an extremely generous teacher. She is genuinely free with advice and gives of herself in a way I’ve rarely experienced. She wants to start a revolution and bring a bunch of artists along.

Kirsten Larson lives in Portland, Oregon. She is a contributing editor at NAILED Magazine and an instructor at Portland State University. Her essays and stories can be found in the Huffington Post, NAILED Magazine, Manifest-Station, and several small literary journals. She has a short story in the anthology, City of Weird, forthcoming in October of 2016. She is currently working toward her MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles.

Antonia Crane’s Spent is a memoir for readers who enjoy gritty, surreal narratives and stories that eschew easy conclusions. In Crane’s world, vicious cycles can’t be broken, self-reflection doesn’t lead to happiness, and lessons aren’t always learned. There’s a weariness to Spent that emphasizes the title, an undercurrent of longing for a job that doesn’t come with such high physical and emotional demands. But this isn’t a memoir that goes easy on its author: Crane owns her mistakes as well as her choices, without attempting to explain or apologize for either. If this sounds contradictory—well, Crane owns her contradictions, too.

Spent deals with a variety of events in Crane’s life—her relationship with her mother, her education, her bisexuality, and her sobriety are all woven into the narrative—but the memoir’s main focus is on her series of jobs as a stripper and sex worker in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. The premise’s potential shock value wears off quickly: the day-to-day work is portrayed as routine to the point of dull, with money as the primary reward. During a typical day as a dancer, “time moves like peanut butter;” she describes one customer’s loneliness as an emotion that both “[makes] her sick” and “[feels] like the best thing in the world.” Although Crane claims stripping holds an undeniable, addictive allure for her, it’s easy to believe her when she states that “dancers always want to quit, but we never do. We’re ghosts, dragging our chains from club to club.” At best, Crane depicts dancing as occasionally fun and immensely lucrative; the economics of this work are always at the forefront. At worst, stripping renders her nameless and invisible and trapped.

Crane isn’t always as straightforward about the non-stripping aspects of her life. While there are some standout scenes—the decisions she must make about her mother’s end-of-life care are particularly resonant—some of her choices seem propelled by indistinct motivations and result in few resolutions. These non sequitur aspects of Crane’s writing may frustrate readers who appreciate clear cause-and-effect narratives. Yet although its stream-of-consciousness tendencies sometimes muddy the storyline’s waters, there’s no question that Spent’s style makes a statement. Crane’s still living the life about which she writes; she’s not examining a part of her life that’s already passed, but focusing on experiences that continue to shape her present. If the events of twenty years ago still feel incomplete, it’s because the objects in her rear view mirror are much closer than they first appear.

It’s obvious that Crane has a personal relationship with her work, and not just because, as she says, “without [stripping], I felt ugly, useless, and numb.” During her years in San Francisco, she protests the unfair practices at local dance clubs and helps form the first-ever strippers’ union, a vital need in an industry that exploits women from underprivileged backgrounds. And in some ways, writing a memoir about sex work in unstinting detail is also an act of social justice: Spent isn’t exactly a third-wave feminist cri de coeur, but rather a portrait of a trade in which many of the workers struggle with addiction, abuse, and poverty. It puts a face on at least one of society’s “ghosts.”

Beyond her fight for unionization, Crane doesn’t take much of an outright political stance on the issues facing sex workers; the memoir doesn’t explicitly advocate for legalization, for example, or dwell on the overarching institutional injustices that contribute to an unfair system. But through Spent’s series of anecdotes, Crane makes it clear that for herself and for many of her colleagues, sex work is an unending cycle of survival and punishment. Nothing pays as well or as quickly—a must for women struggling to pay rent, support a family, feed or overcome an addiction, or pay for school without other financial help—but as a result, Crane is harassed, recorded without her consent, and arrested, all for a job that has significantly narrowed her other possible career choices and that will turn its back on her as she ages. “I have no clue how to leave this industry and enter the work force,” Crane says in the book’s final pages. “This is the work force.”

Yet for all the ending’s brutal honesty, Crane also offers a glimmer of hope, although it’s weighed with reality. “This is where I am: I’m still doing this,” she says. “I will climb out, the window is open a crack, but I don’t know when.”

Antonia Crane is a writer, adjunct professor, and performer based in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of Antioch University Los Angeles’ MFA program. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including The Rumpus, Slake, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, Salon, and Black Clock. She is the founder and senior editor of The Citron Review. Crane’s memoir, Spent, was published in 2014 by Barnacle Books. Cheryl Strayed praised Crane’s work as “bold and beautiful and glimmering with light,” and Kirkus Reviews called Spent “a raw, searing self-portrait.”

Rachael Warecki interviewed Antonia Crane via email.

Photo: Sheila Rose

RW: In your memoir, Spent, you touch on the fact that words have always been an important part of your life, especially in your childhood. Spent focuses more on words’ importance in your adult life, but I’d love to hear more about how books influenced you while you were growing up. Looking back, were there any books that held a particular resonance for you?

AC: There was not much to do in my small town except climb redwoods, so one of the things my mother and I used to do together was go to the public library. I escaped to my Alice and Wonderland and my Frankenstein with Judy Bloom, V.C. Andrews, and Beverly Cleary, and later I found J.D. Salinger and Jane Austen. I loved stories about heartbreak and families, unrequited love and betrayal.

RW: Your relationship with your mother—an accomplished, fearless, dignified woman as portrayed in your memoir—has clearly been another strong influence in your life, even after her passing. In what ways do you hope your life resembles hers? In what ways are you glad you’ve chosen a somewhat different life path?

AC: I don’t think my life resembles my mother’s at all. My mother went from one long-term marriage to another, kept horses, and belonged to half a dozen women’s organizations. She had kids and was miraculous in the kitchen. However, I am exactly like my mother in other ways—certain facial expressions and gestures are exactly like her, especially in the eyes and mouth. I have followed her lead in the way that she mentored young women and I invest a lot of time helping others, whenever and however possible. I think my path worried my mother some and in other ways, she admired my independence.

RW: You mention that you mentor young women—correct me if I’m wrong, but I heard you volunteer with WriteGirl here in Los Angeles. How long have you been involved with the program? What support do you give young writers as they’re moving toward adulthood? What resources does the program provide that you wish you’d had at that age, and if you could mentor your younger self, what advice would you give her?

AC: I have been a volunteer for WriteGirl’s in-schools program since 2011. I volunteered to teach creative writing to incarcerated teenage girls at Camp Scudder/Camp Scott, where the girls obtained art and English credits towards their GED for participation in our class every Thursday. Our writing exercises approached the personal essay in a lyrical way that offered girls a chance to express themselves and articulate their struggles and obstacles in a meaningful, artistic way. It seemed as if many of the teenage girls had never been told they were smart and creative. When they were acknowledged by reading their work to the class, performing it live, they were elated.

On a pragmatic scale, WriteGirl has a 100% success rate getting girls into four-year universities. We help girls write their college essays in order to springboard them into educational settings, which can change their lives dramatically. In this way, getting involved with WriteGirl and other after-school programs where I’ve worked, such as Woodcraft Rangers, Arc, and Living Histories, embodies social justice.

RW: In Spent, you make several strong economic arguments for why stripping and other types of sex work should be unionized and, in some cases, legalized. In what ways do you see this as a form of social justice? In what ways do you hope to continue this social justice work moving forward?

AC: A group of young women and I unionized a strip club in the ‘90s and it was a powerful time, but it didn’t solve all of our problems by any stretch. Acknowledging strippers (sex workers, dancers) as a work force deserving of basic rights is a good start. Legalizing sex work alone will not keep sex workers safe from domestic violence and exploitation, but it’s a step in a good direction. The goal is toward decriminalization of sex workers in a way that protects some of the most vulnerable members of society from harm and exploitation. It’s a complex issue that deserves attention, time, and change, and every change made won’t be perfect, much like universal health care.

RW: What other steps do you think would make concrete, positive differences in the lives of sex workers?

AC: I think a program that helps women segue into the mainstream would be helpful. Years ago, Sharon Mitchell tried to launch a program for people retiring from the porn industry called “Life After Porn,” but her grant was denied. Sex work is the most difficult job to leave, and it’s difficult to fill in résumé gaps and not be shamed in society for spending a decade (or more) in the adult industry. Going back to school is not enough by itself. I have done that several times. It takes community support to help a person dive back into the mainstream and adjust. It would be helpful to get advice, résumé help, and jobs from folks who are already established in positions to help a sex worker get a steady job.

RW: Your memoir presents a layered and sometimes contradictory portrait of your own role as a sex worker. You mention several times that “every dancer you know wishes she could quit,” but that you personally are drawn back to stripping for the thrill of it, even when presented with other job opportunities. That said, in the scenes depicting your work as a stripper, you often present it as dull, unrewarding work. Can you talk a little more about your relationship with your work, and what aspects of it you find personally rewarding?

I was neither lost nor found. I am just a woman with a couple of cats who needs to write in order to breathe.

AC: All work is rewarding whether I am cleaning houses, waiting tables, or teaching a writing class. If work is a place to be of love and service, which I believe it is, then stripping is the perfect place to demonstrate that kindness. Stripping is physically and emotionally taxing, as well as particularly lucrative. Performing and receiving sexual validation from strangers can be intoxicating. Fast money is a drug. As a job, sex work has been the most difficult to segue out of into the mainstream for the reasons listed above. Other than providing men with a warm body to confide in, there’s a common loneliness that tugs at us when we long to connect to our families, friends, and coworkers in a meaningful way, but fail to do so. I think men search for genuine human connection in a strip club, and that women provide that in a way that can be temporarily satisfying for them [men] and lucrative for us [women]. It’s also a great place to mine for stories.

RW: In your depictions of stripping and sex work, there are many workers and customers who engage in drug use. Has your sobriety ever affected your relationships with clientele or other workers, either positively or negatively (e.g., a client who’s a little too insistent that you drink or get high with him/her, or a fellow sober coworker with whom you form a stronger trust or friendship)?

AC: Drugs are rampant in every workplace. People like to party and tune out. When I worked in a law firm, one of the paralegals was dealing coke throughout the office. People in the medical profession do drugs. As a bartender, obviously it affected my interaction with the customers because I had to cut people off or call them a cab. I have a lot of compassion for anyone struggling with a substance abuse problem/alcohol, and I try to help them get home safely, if possible. Sex workers have a reputation for doing drugs and drinking because it’s expected of us. Personally, I think being sober makes me a better employee in that environment and a more productive person, so I try to be a positive influence.

RW: You mention the difficulty of grad school—of living a life so different from many of your classmates—and yet based on your acknowledgements section, Antioch University Los Angeles clearly provided a strong community for you. How did you learn and grow as a writer during your MFA program years?

AC: The decision to do sex work while in grad school was my own solution to creating as much time to write as possible. Antioch provided an incredibly rich community of mentors and peers, many of whom I still have close relationships with. My graduating cohort, The Citrons, has been checking in every Sunday since 2009. When I attended Antioch, it was like I could finally give myself permission to write and to have access to writers I admired, like Rob Roberge, Emily Rapp, Cheryl Strayed, Leonard Chang, and Steve Almond.

RW: At the end of Spent, you acknowledge that you have not yet achieved your ideal vision of happiness—no partner, no agent, no publishing deal. Obviously, with the publication of Spent, some of that has changed. How have you come closer to achieving your personal and professional goals? What’s next for you?

AC: Every day, I work towards my goals and aspirations regardless of my circumstances. The end of Spent was more of a comment that sex work itself can be its own happy ending. I didn’t need to be rehabilitated or killed or saved, imprisoned or forgiven; I wasn’t married off or carried off on a magic carpet ride. I was neither lost nor found. I am just a woman with a couple of cats who needs to write in order to breathe. So, I’m going to keep doing that and see what happens next.

Rachael Warecki holds an MFA in Fiction from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her work has received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train’s New Writers Contest and a 2014 Best of the Net nomination from Spry Literary Journal. Her fiction has appeared in the Masters Review, the Los Angeles Review, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. You can follow her writing adventures on her website, Facebook, and Twitter

Book I: The Warrior’s Path

It’s not often that I write a book review and start it with a food suggestion, but I’m doing it here: begin the When Women Were Warriors trilogy with a mug of the best tea you can find in your city or the thickest stew to be had, something like what Wilson’s young warrior Tamras would have enjoyed after a long day in the fields. Wrap yourself in the warmest blanket you can find and settle in to your armchair or bed. Get comfortable; you’re going away with Catherine M. Wilson for a while, as long as you want. I promise—you’ll want to go (and you’ll be in good company: Grammy Award winner Janis Ian is also a fan, and she’ll soon be narrating the first book, The Warrior’s Path).

When Women Were Warriors is an epic trilogy set in Bronze Age Britain. Young Tamras leaves behind the loving shelter of her warrior mother’s house to become an apprentice in the house of Lady Merin. Tamras is put in service to the mysterious warrior Maara and a careful friendship eventually grows into love. There’s Sparrow, the slave turned apprentice, who knows the pain of loss, and the wise woman Namet who has watched, and been partially responsible, for war in the name of love.

While love is a main theme in the books and the developing relationship between Tamras and Maara is at the core of the novels, the When Women Were Warriors series is not, at its heart, a romance. Make no mistake, this is an epic tale of a hero’s journey, dividing Tamras’ quest to become a warrior into three books: The Warrior’s Path, A Journey of the Heart, and A Hero’s Tale. No, these books aren’t exactly romances, but in Wilson’s world, the true warrior’s heart is one that is able to feel and experience love—of lover and friends, of self, and of the world itself: “The survival of love in the world is entirely our responsibility,” and it makes perfect sense that the warrior Tamras, who fights to be true to her heart, speaks those lines in the final book A Hero’s Tale, reminding us that all is connected.

Book II: A Journey of the Heart

Catherine M. Wilson’s writing is both epic and elegant. She spins a tale that I would have devoured as an adventure-starved teenager longing for stories of complex and philosophical female warriors. For example, in the second book, A Journey of the Heart, Lady Merin’s warriors defend their land from the northern tribes. Tamras, new to battle and trained, not with a sword, but in the use of a bow and arrow, saves Maara by shooting and killing an enemy chieftain. Of course, in any hero’s tale, the first kill is a chance for greater knowledge about the enemy and about oneself, but in Wilson’s capable hands, the knowledge gained by Tamras comes through the awareness of personal power. “He will come to you in dreams,” Maara tells Tamras of the man she killed, “and when you meet him face to face, don’t be afraid to speak to him. Tell him that though you are young and strong, your spirit is large and powerful. Tell him it was no disgrace to be defeated by someone so powerful. Then, tell him to leave you in peace.” Tamras’ lesson is in personal power, in trusting her connection to her own honest self and inner wisdom. Again and again in the books, she struggles to hear herself clearly and to do what her inner self dictates.

Tamras is a clearly written character, often utterly self-aware, innocent yet brave, and we’re treated to her growth; with apologies to James Joyce, this is Portrait of the Warrior as a Young Woman. Wilson gives us intense battle scenes and heartbreaking betrayal, but she also treats us to what any avid reader longs for: experiencing everyday life with a trusted character. Through Tamras, we learn the rhythms of days in Lady Merin’s house and, we can see the fine details, like needlework running through this brilliant tapestry of story: the smell of freshly baked bread from the kitchen, the green of the willow tree under which one can make love, the heft of a carved bow and arrow against one’s back.

Book III: A Hero’s Tale

The women, as the title of the series suggests, are entirely front and center in Wilson’s gorgeous, well-constructed series. They are queens, warriors, apprentices, wise women and mothers. Above all, they are fully human—complex and flawed and philosophical. Set in a matrilineal society, the women in the books move in a world made up almost entirely of female power and female relationships: Tamras’ mother was a warrior, as was her mother before her; at several times in The Warrior’s Path, Tamras retells her mother’s tales to Maara and, as readers, we’re treated to what would have been an oral tradition within the narrative; the myths and legends in the first book begin with, not, once upon a time, but instead an opening that hints at change: when women were warriors. The language suggests that there will one day come a time when that power will shift and women will no longer be warriors in a matrilineal society.

Wonderfully feminist, unabashedly lesbian, and beautifully epic, the When Women Were Warriors books are precious gems that should be on the bookshelves of every thinking woman. They remind us of our strength, power, and courage—and of course, the depths of our honest hearts. 

– Marissa Cohen, author of CancerLand

Lise Quintana, Editor in Chief of Lunch Ticket, spoke to Catherine at her home deep in the woods of Northern California.

Catherine M. Wilson  photo by Carolyn Donaldson

Lise Quintana: First, run down your list of professional careers for me.

Catherine M. Wilson: I was a professional student for many years, although, not managing to complete a degree until I was almost fifty.

LQ: What did you take your degree in?

CMW: Computer science. Smartest thing I ever did. Before that I was an anti-war protester, a civil-rights-movement person, women’s movement, gay pride, of course. My first career, I was a broadcast engineer—I was the third woman hired by a major market in San Francisco. That was in the 1970s. I did that because I wanted a job where they would have to pay me and promote me according to my job title and seniority. That was the only thing that mattered in a union job.

After three years of that, I quit to go into the motorcycle business with a partner, and then my partner and I split up. So then I got another broadcast engineering job in Monterey, during which time I started buying and rehabbing old houses. And I had a mobile detail business myself, and I got to be in my 40s and realized that my body was not going to hold up working three jobs doing heavy construction, so I went back to college at UC Santa Cruz. Got a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in computer science.

I was recruited right out of school by a startup in Scotts Valley called NetCarta in 1996, the very early days of the Internet. The guy who had founded the company was working on viral networking, on spiders: he was Google before Google existed. But the crazy venture capitalists wanted their money and they sold it after two years for $1 million.

But I had already started writing my book. So I thought that I would just take six months or a year off and finish the book, then go back to work. Ten years later, I finished the book.

LQ: Did you always want to be an author?

CMW: Absolutely. I knew I was going to be an author, because of my mother. My mother was a book person. Writers were the most important people in the world. That was the most important job in the world. You can keep your doctors and your lawyers. Writers, that was where it was at.

Writers were the most important people in the world. That was the most important job in the world.

LQ: Who were your favorite writers growing up?

CMW: I liked the classics, I liked the Brontës, I liked Jane Austen. When my mother died, I couldn’t count the number of books in her house. I had access to a very large library. One book that I read when I was a teenager that profoundly influenced me was Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain, a British writer who lived through World War I and lost most of the men in her family, including her fiancé. So that’s what I was reading when I was a kid.

LQ: What sparked the story of When Women Were Warriors? 

CMW: My mother was a Greek major. I was not brought up on fairy tales; I was brought up on the Greek myths. My mother’s family was from Maryland, and her father’s best friend had a wife who was the daughter of a plantation owner in Virginia. And this woman had been given a slave when they were both five years old. The slave girl, whose name was Margaret Gibson, sat next to her mistress while she was being tutored. She was privately tutored, given a classical education. As a result, this Ms. Gibson was fluent in classical Greek, Latin, French and English, because she sat next to this woman. When my mother and her family would go and visit, children and servants sat in the kitchen, so my mother sat in the kitchen with Ms. Gibson and she was told the story of the Iliad and the Odyssey and all the myths from a servant, who was able to read it to her in the original Greek. Needless to say, I grew up hearing the story of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

As I grew up in the 1950s, I kept looking for the story that said, “Once upon a time, a woman went out to seek her fortune” and there weren’t any. I always knew that the first book I ever wrote was going to be about that.

LQ: How long did it take you to get from the first germ of the story to when you started writing?

CMW: I started writing first. Oddly enough, I started writing fan fiction. It’s a wonderful way to find out if you have any talent whatsoever, because in fan fiction, you already have characters, you have your setting, and you can work with that and see if you have a story in you. I started posting Xena fan fiction. Two people were attracted by it: one was a woman who had been traditionally published and who thought that I showed promise, and another would later become my friend and editor, who also thought my writing was quite good. I wrote it from the point of view of the Xena characters. And then I started to think that they would go on from there and something would happen. But I realized that they were two different people. And I had to go back and start from the beginning because I had started in the middle. So I joined a writers’ group, and I took about 20 to 25 runs at it. Once I had done that—once I actually got the story started—then things seemed to go of themselves.

LQ: You chose to self-publish the books and to make them a trilogy rather then one very long book. Tell me about that choice and what led up to it.

CMW: I thought I was going to take six months to finish the book and it kept getting longer and longer. I was starting to get worried because I have studied traditional publishing. The ideal book by a new author is something that is a hot topic right now, is under 200 pages, and has some kind of platform. I had none of those things.

Several of the people in the writers’ group said, “You could make a trilogy out of it.” I could, except that I didn’t have three separate arcs. This is a classic hero’s journey, and you don’t rip a story like that into three pieces. But then I remembered Lord of the Rings. However, I was not about to publish the first book by itself, because you just piss people off. They come to the end of the book, and they go, “Where’s the rest of the story?” In fact, if you read the reviews of Book I (The Warrior’s Path), that’s what people complain of. Ripping it into three pieces was completely a marketing decision. I just received Hild by Nicola Griffith who’s been a published author for 20 years. She could get away with a 600-page novel.

When I was about five or six years into the process, I started to get worried because, for one thing, I was financing this myself; I wasn’t working a day job. I had retirement money saved up and I had money left over from my inheritance. I could envision myself at the end of this process having an unpublishable book and no visible means of support. I had been subscribing to a blog by a woman who used to review for The Chronicle. I sent her the first 100 pages, and her response was, “Take the sex out of the first part and market it to 10-year-olds.” She also told me that no editor, publisher or agent would ask to see a manuscript like this. Well, it was true. I queried 88 agents, and no one asked for the manuscript. I was honest with them. I wasn’t going to sell them the first book and then say, “Oh, by the way, you have to publish the next two as well.” When I got that bit of news about no agent or publisher wanting to see it, I was pretty much blown into the weeds by it, but this is useful information.

This woman’s business was to give the author an idea of what sort of things they should put in their query. She wasn’t a book doctor. Well, needless to say, what I got back was not very helpful, and it stopped me dead for two years. But during that time, I came to the conclusion that it was the work that was important and that if no one ever saw it—if I simply printed it out and threw it down the bit bucket—it was worth doing. And that gave me a kind of freedom that I don’t think you get any other way. The world isn’t ready for this? I’m going to make it anyway. So I did a lot of things in the second half of that book that I wouldn’t have done if I’d been thinking about traditional publishing. I lived for that last four years or so with the reality that I was making something that nobody would ever see. That was tremendously freeing. I still hate that woman for what she did, but she did me a favor by delaying me until self-publishing was as easy as it is now. So I went back and finished the book in 2006. And then I thought that I would take a year and query agents. I did all the things you’re supposed to do: I went and found a book that was similar to mine, found the agent and said, “This is like so and so’s book.” There were agents who would let you send them 50 pages and I would send them the 50 pages. I followed all the rules absolutely. And I gave up counting at 88. After that I just started blasting stuff to whomever I could find. But the whole time that I was doing that, I was studying up on self publishing. I started with the Dan Poynter books, and his paradigm was: “you find a printer, you get plates made, you print 5,000 copies offset, you warehouse them somewhere, you find someone to distribute them somehow,” but there was no distribution, there was no system to do this.

But in 2006, the latest edition said there was this place called Lightning Source and they did this digital printing, and then you could get your book listed on Amazon. I took the next year to learn the skills I needed. I learned InDesign to do the typesetting, Photoshop to do the covers. I learned Dreamweaver to do the websites. I got the paperback out on October 1, 2008. I had my books on Kindle in December 2008 and that’s when I started to see sales. If I had had Lightning Source print it as a single book, it would have run to probably 1,000 pages. It would have cost $50 or more to make a decent profit and give Amazon their cut. How do I get someone to take a chance on that? So I ripped the thing into three pieces and that way I could have normal-size books with a normal-size price, and, since ebooks don’t cost me anything to produce, I could give them away. I started out emailing Book I to people. And then somebody said why don’t you just have it as a download from your website?

When you’re self-published, you don’t have anybody beating the drum for you.

When you’re self-published, you don’t have anybody beating the drum for you. When your wife does it, or your publisher does it, it’s different. So I started just by going onto forums with people who are into ebooks, and I said, “Hey, I’ve got a free ebook.” Now if you go into a forum of readers and say, “Buy my book,” they’ll go, “spam, spam, spam.” But if you go in and “Free book,” they’ll go, “Where?” So that turned out to be the key to marketing this thing. And as it happens, I also subscribe to many, many, many Yahoo groups, listservs, about self publishing, indie publishing, traditional publishing, pod publishing, epub publishing and I found out that Amazon would price match any other price they found. So I set the book up on Smashwords, set the price for The Warrior’s Path to zero, and Amazon price matched it and we were off and running.

And about ten minutes after it went free on Amazon, Janis Ian found it and wrote and asked me for my autograph, and wrote a five-star review of it on Amazon (!!!). So when I saw her in concert last March, I brought her signed copies of the books. As I handed her the books, she said, “Are you going to do an audio book?” I said, “Well, as a matter of fact, I just signed with a company that produces audio books.” And she says, “I’d love to narrate it.” And we were off and running. So that’s going to be out in late November.

LQ: That soon?

CMW: That soon. We indies are speedy. We need those Christmas sales, man. No screwing around.

LQ: You’re really involved with your fan base. You respond frequently on Goodreads and Amazon, etc. What is the most common criticism that you receive about your trilogy?

CMW: I don’t receive criticism from my fans. But what I get is bad reviews, and generally, they are complaining about two things: One of them is that there’s lesbians in it. The other is that they have to pay ten dollars each for books two and three. So, they’re either bigots or cheapskates, that’s kind of how I look at it.

LQ: Well, all-righty then. That’s great though. That’s great that you’ve never had anyone tell you that you’re a terrible writer.

CMW: Oh, I get those. I just ignore it because it’s not true.

LQ: Good for you! Talk about the process of Janis recording your audio book. 

Photo: Lise Quintana

CMW: The company producing the book is called Dog Ear Audio. It’s owned and run by Karen Wolfer, and she’s from Guffey, Colorado, and she has a studio, but Janis has allergies, so we went to Nashville. You know, Nashville is just like San Jose. They have the same mini malls, the same Targets, the same Lowe’s. We were right at home. So Janis has a friend Randy Leago who’s an engineer and utility musician. He has a recording studio, and rents himself out as the engineer.

Janis would come in around 10 in the morning. There was a little closet all hung up with quilts, and Randy, bless his heart, bought a brand new $1,000 microphone. She would go in there and she would get started. Randy was sitting monitoring levels and stuff, Karen was watching the script and listening—she’s got better hearing than a dog—she could hear airplanes that were in the next state, motorcycles, cars idling at the stop sign outside; she’d stop everything until the noise was gone. And Janis would just go in to read until she got tired, and then she’d take a break. We funded this thing through Kickstarter, and on Wednesday our big money supporters came, and they got to sit in. They were supposed to get a morning session, and then we would all have lunch with Janis and Randy and everybody, but they were so polite and good and so well behaved that Janis invited them for the rest of the day. And they were just over the moon. After that, Karen and I took them all out to dinner.

Here you have fans of Janis, fans of the book, who get to participate. Even if I could have afforded to finance the entire thing—basically, the Kickstarter campaign paid Janis and Randy, and Karen and I had to cover all our own travel expenses—the marketing potential of Kickstarter is phenomenal. You get all the people who are the most enthusiastic about your work, and about Janis’s work and all of a sudden, you’ve got them shouting to everybody they know, “Go, come support this great project.”

LQ: Have you gotten more people because of the Kickstarter campaign? Have a lot of Janis Ian’s fans now discovered your book?

CMW: Janis sends me emails that she gets from these people. A lot of them know she’s gay, but they don’t think they would find anything interesting in a gay book. Well, it’s not a gay book. It’s a book that has gay people in it, but it’s not a “gay” book. I think it was Janis’s publicist who said “I wasn’t going to read this because I’m not gay and I didn’t think there’d be anything in it for me, but it was fabulous!” Janis has a large mainstream audience, a non-gay audience, who are reading this book. So we’re just getting into the mainstream thing where people are talking about it.

LQ: I have heard that if you write genre fiction well enough, it is no longer genre fiction. It becomes mainstream fiction, literary fiction. So do you see yourself more as a literary fiction person?

CMW: I would call myself literary fiction if it wasn’t for the way people think about literary fiction.

LQ: Which is how?

CMW: I think of genre fiction as fiction that has a certain premise and you know what you’re going to get. You know you’re going to have a certain experience when you read this book. You are not looking for great insights into the meaning of life. You want to see a problem solved, or a puzzle unraveled, or something. However, there are people who write those genres literarily. I think of literary fiction as simply writing that has achieved a level of perfection, a level of polish. But genre fiction adheres to a standard. There’s a way these things are written and that’s how people expect to have them read. But people are thinking “I just want to really pull some of this genre into my mystery, but my editor wouldn’t let me because they wouldn’t know where to put it. They don’t know where to shelve it or how to market it or how to deal with it.” Well, now we’ve got these indies that were just doing it how they please where you can have a love story in a mystery or you can have a mystery in a love story or you can have people go to the moon and have a mystery. You don’t have to adhere to all these strict conventions. And this is the stuff I threw out of my head when I realized I was not going to be traditionally published.

And this is the stuff I threw out of my head when I realized I was not going to be traditionally published.

LQ: So do you think the publishing industry has changed radically since you started writing?

CMW: I think the publishing industry has had its pants scared off it, frankly. I just went to a conference in which Amanda Kyle Williams was the keynote speaker. She’s traditionally published, she’s a lesbian, she had a lesbian small press series in the ’90s and now she’s published by Random House. Her third book is coming out next year in which she’s got an adopted Chinese-American woman raised in Georgia who was an FBI profiler, an alcoholic who lost her job and becomes a private investigator and who lives in a very quirky area of Atlanta with a lot of very strange people. Now this is a lesbian author who has taken a lot of crap from the lesbian community for not making her hero a lesbian. But as she said at the conference, if her hero were lesbian, she would not have a contract with Random House. So what are you going to do with that? But her books are perfect for traditional publishing. She is perfect for traditional publishing. I’m not. They can’t publish people like me. One of the things that the woman who suggested that I take the sex out of the first part and market it to 10-year-olds said was, “You need to have a bestseller about something else.” And I thought, “I’m fifty-something. Am I going to live long enough to write the bestseller that gets me the open door?” There are a lot of people now who are selling millions of books as indies who are turning down traditional publishing.

LQ: So what did your sales look like? The first year, how many books did you sell, and how many are you selling now?

CMW: I think in terms of dollars. I don’t think in terms of numbers because first of all, Book I is free. There are millions of them out there. The copyright page says if you have a friend out there who would like to read this, send it to them. It’s free for everybody—come and get it. So numbers is pretty meaningless for that. The first year, I was only out three months for paperback sales, and I think I only made $300. The second year, I made a couple thousand of dollars. Kind of nice. I did a total of $20,000 for 2011. In 2012, I did $53,000.

LQ: That’s amazing.

CMW: That’s from having the book free and the fact that every day, I market.

LQ: Talk about your marketing efforts. What does marketing look like for you? 

CMW: I have so many marketing ideas. I have a towering pile of marketing ideas. The thing that I started with first was that I found people who were looking for ebooks and I gave the first book out free. If you read it and like it then books two and three—I don’t have to force them down your throat, do I? Then, I found places where I could let people know about Book I. There are three or four Yahoo groups that are all about lesbian fiction. When you go back to the bad old days of the 1990s, every lesbian I knew owned every book and every movie that had lesbians in it because there weren’t that many. Now you can’t begin to scratch the surface on it. There’s one particular group where they hated ebooks because they were elitist because you have to buy the reader. Well, you have to buy a DVD player too, but are DVDs elitist? Are records elitist because I had to buy a record player? But they soon got over that because, once you spent your $79 on your Kindle, there are all kinds of free ebooks. But then they started in on quality, and every indie book was a piece of crap. They were just into the books published by the niche publishers who were probably running a little bit scared of the indies.

I found a website called AwesomeIndies.net that will vet your independently published book. First you have to have a certain number of five-star reviews on Amazon, then you have be reviewed by one of their approved reviewers. And if their reviewer gives you four or five stars, you’re in. Because of that, I was able to advertise then on BookBub.com because BookBub is very picky. Then the Historical Novel Society, which wouldn’t review anything independently published, finally figured out that since historical fiction is the ugly stepchild of the publishing industry, publishers do not promote historical fiction. It’s why the Society exists in the first place: because no one was reviewing it. They finally figured out that there were a lot of independents who were publishing historical fiction, and so they just opened up to indies, and because I had received the vetting from AwesomeIndies, they were willing to look at this book. A reviewer emailed me back and said, “Ordinarily I would balk at reviewing a work that’s five years old. But I took the liberty of actually reading it and now there’s no way I’d turn it away.” So I’ve got a stunning five-star review from the Historical Novel Society. But every one of these things is scratch and claw, scratch and claw. I finally got onto BookBub, and the first time—this is the thing about having a free book—the first ad got me 23,000 downloads of book one. 23,000 books. How many books do most people hope to sell a year? 5,000? 10,000? That is an astonishing number and it boosted my sales that month by two or three thousand dollars.

LQ: Impressive. And you won an award for your trilogy.

CMW: I did. I won the Epic Ebook award in the mainstream category. My friend said, “You have to win an award because when you do your blurb, it has to say ‘award-winning.’” So I entered just about anything I could enter, I got my award and I quit entering.

LQ: So, do you plan on continuing writing this story? 

CMW: Not this story. Something that writers are doing that I might actually do—it depends on if there’s a story to tell there—my editor thinks that I should write a Thanksgiving dinner story, because of the very convoluted relationships. I mean, they say that in the lesbian community, there’s like two degrees of separation. You either slept with her or you slept with someone who has. There’s a lot of that going on in this story. It’s everybody and their exes sitting around the Thanksgiving dinner table.

LQ: Isn’t this 3^rd-century Ireland?

CMW: Actually, it’s more like 1000 BCE. I know that people want to read another book, but there isn’t more to say about it. Plus, I have another story telling itself in my head and it’s set in the ’70s. That’ll be the thing I sit down to write, if I write anything.

LQ: What advice do you have for writers who are trying to self-publish?

CMW: I would say first write a good book. That’s the hard part. I’ve gone through all the stages of writer. The part where you’d just die to see your name on the front of a book. You would pay a million dollars to see that. Well, now you can, and pay much less than that. But once you get there, you’ve gotten over wanting to be there. My friend asked, “But wasn’t it a real charge the first time you saw your book?” And it was good for about 10 minutes of “Oooh, wow.”

Second of all, have somebody edit it who knows what the hell they’re doing. I had it edited by a professional copyeditor who introduced more errors than there were in the first place. I was one of those kids who marked the errors in printed books.

LQ: I was too.

CMW: I knew you’d relate to that. I fell back on my own knowledge of the English language, and my ability to peruse the Chicago Manual of Style. But edit the shit out of your book. Have somebody who knows what they’re doing typeset it. I learned InDesign. I just had someone email me who was a friend of someone I’ve actually done typesetting for and she showed me her .pdf that had no top margin in the first six pages, and it was rejected by CreateSpace. And I told her, “Well, you’re going to have to adjust the margin down.” And she said, “Can you do that?” and I go, “No.” “Can you just do a little quick fix?” “No. I’ll typeset it for you in InDesign at $1 a page.”

LQ: Which is cheap, actually.

CMW: That’s very cheap. Book designers are $5 a page. I will do a basic typeset, properly kerned, properly set up, proper copyright page for a buck a page. And then with that, you get a properly produced .pdf file to upload to CreateSpace or Lightning Source. But how many years do you spend writing a piece of work? Do you really want to scrawl it on a piece of bark and throw it out the door? I mean, come on, make a professional product. Put together $1,000—you can make a beautiful print and ebook for $1,000. Most of my clients pay me $500 or $600.

LQ: I didn’t realize how really inexpensive it is to make something really professional.

CMW: Well, you don’t have to go back and forth with me a million times on it. That’s what designers do. That’s why they charge $5 a page. I come up with a basic setup, put a couple of chapters in, and send them the sample. If there’s anything you totally don’t like, I’ll fix it. Generally speaking, they’re happy to get a professionally produced product. And the same thing with covers. Have an artist do the artwork, and I’ll stick it on. I’ll get a template from CreateSpace of LightningSource and I’ll stick all the blurb shit on there for $200. $200 bucks gets you a Kindle or an epub. So a 300-page book, $600. And it’s a professional job. And it’s going to work and it’s not going to get kicked back to you and it’s going to look good. So if your work’s not worth spending $600, then you deserve to be laughed out of the publishing business.

LQ: You are not the first person from whom I’ve heard, “Spend a little money. Make sure that your work looks good.”

You can find Catherine M. Wilson’s trilogy, and get a free download of Book I, The Warrior’s Path, from Shield Maiden Press.

The late poet laureate of Florida called Marissa Cohen’s (www.marissacohen.com) work “powerful.” Her writing has appeared in countless publications, including The Cancer Poetry Project 2 (as featured in The New York Times), Gather Kindling, and Wilde Magazine. She’s twice been interviewed on CBS Radio and also works in higher education and publishing.

Lise Quintana is the Editor-in-Chief of Lunch Ticket. Her fiction has appeared in such places as The Weekenders and Willow Review. She is within spitting distance of receiving her MFA from Antioch University, LA, and lives in the woods in Northern California.