The Wayward Writer: Summon Your Power to Take Back Your Story, Liberate Yourself from Capitalism, and Publish Like a Superstar: Summon Your Power to ... from Capitalism, and Publish Like a Superstar 9781648411847, 1648411843

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THE

WAYWARD WRITER Summon Your Power to Take Back Your Story, Liberate Yourself from Capitalism, and Publish Like a Superstar

ARIEL GORE

Author of How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead

WAYWARD THE

WRITER

Summon Your Power To Take Back Your Story, Liberate Yourself from Capitalism, and Publish Like a Superstar

ARIEL GORE MICROCOSM PUBLISHING Portland, Ore

WAYWARD WRITER

Summon Your Power to Take Back Your Story, Liberate Yourself from Capitalism, and Publish Like a Superstar © 2022 Ariel Gore © This edition Microcosm Publishing 2022 First edition - 5,000 copies - October 22, 2022 ISBN 9781648411847 This is Microcosm #606

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All interviews were conducted in 2021 and 2022, except for the interview with Ursula K. LeGuin, which was done in 2006. Did you know that you can buy our books directly f rom us at sliding scale rates? Support a small, independent publisher and pay less than Amazon’s price at www.Microcosm.Pub

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gore, Ariel, 1970- author. Title: The wayward writer : summon your power to take back your story, liberate yourself from capitalism, and publish like a superstar / by Ariel Gore. Description: Portland : Microcosm Publishing, [2022] | Summary: “When your dream and creative passion is to write, how do you succeed without selling out or selling yourself short? Ariel Gore has spent her life trying to solve this puzzle, writing and organizing her way towards a creative utopian vision, where storytelling is a form of resistance and writing is an outsider art. In this follow-up to her national bestseller How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead, Gore offers a lyrical call to literary revolution paired with practical exercises. Through her own experiences and interviews with other authors, publishers, and agents, she shows you how to chart your own creative education, vanquish shame and imposter syndrome, cast off oppression, cast a spell on your readers, step into your unique powers, and build your own literary community where respect and honesty reign-and where you can be a writer and survive. Gore presents an alternative narrative structure to the patriarchal hero’s journey, with a focus on tapping into myths and hidden places. She urges us to not be precious about where or when we write, or to apologize for who and what we are, or to stop short of telling the truth about our lives. The result is an impossible to ignore rallying cry for writing dangerously to create a liberatory literary utopia-and a helpful guide through the thorny landscape of publishing your work”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022017592 | ISBN 9781648411847 (trade paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Authorship--Marketing. | Authorship. Classification: LCC PN161 .G633 2022 | DDC 808/.02--dc23/eng/20220524 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017592

MICROCOSM PUBLISHING is Portland’s most diversified publishing house and distributor with a focus on the colorful, authentic, and empowering. Our books and zines have put your power in your hands since 1996, equipping readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and bookettes about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice. What was once a distro and record label was started by Joe Biel in his bedroom and has become among the oldest independent publishing houses in Portland, OR. We are a politically moderate, centrist publisher in a world that has inched to the right for the past 80 years. Global labor conditions are bad, and our roots in industrial Cleveland in the 70s and 80s made us appreciate the need to treat workers right. Therefore, our books are MADE IN THE USA.

Introduction

CONTENTS

How to Use this Book as a School • 8 Introduction: Desire & Resistance • 9 Part 1: Doors • 11 Outsiders Welcome • 12 Welcome Packet • 16 Gather Sparkly Supplies • 20 Dear Ariel (Packing up in Podunk) • 22 Don’t Worry about a Fancy Writing Space • 23 Invoke Psychic Protection • 25 If You Want to Be Like Audre Lorde (interview with Alexis Pauline Gumbs) • 27 Be a Part of What Happens Next • 32 Support Reverse Gentrification (Interview with Johnny Temple) • 34 Steal This Door • 37 Transform Chaos Into Something You Can Hold • 43 Visit the Stranger’s Plot • 46 Dear Ariel (Mama in Maine) • 51 Parents, Caregivers, and Other Workers Unite! • 52 Relieve Your Babysitter • 57 Talking Trash about the Living and the Dead • 59 Dear Ariel (Earnest in El Paso) • 65 You Don’t Have to be Good (But You Can’t Be Half-Assed) • 66 Start Short • 68 Part 2: Other Building Materials, Mostly Salvaged • 71 Let us Leave “Pre-Door Tragedy” behind • 72 Remember Your Strength • 75 Portal Through Time • 78 Bring Honor Where There Has Been Shame • 81 Stand Up for Who & What You Love • 84 6

Meet Your Real Mother • 86 I (Heart) Apples-Oranges • 88 One Has to Apply (Interview with Darryl Lorenzo Wellington) • 97 Transgress Genre • 102 Take the Noir Descent • 104 Make Room for Your Character’s Own Shady Agenda • 106 Write from the Body • 108 Accept Dented Characters • 110 Put Your Enemies in Hell • 113 What? Our Lives Have Themes? (Interview with Reyna Grande) • 115 Hand-Piece Your Memoir • 121 Build Altars and Scaffolding • 123 Dear Ariel (Conflicted in Cleveland) •126 Part 3: Structure and Gardens • 127 Cast the Hero as a Pregnant Single Mom • 128 Ask How Things Can Get Worse • 135 Believe in the Fairy-Tale Ending (Interview with Michelle Ruiz Keil) • 139 Go See Baba Yaga • 145 Design Magic Gardens • 149 Charge an Object with Narrative Magic • 152 Unload Kingston’s Gun • 154 Dear Ariel (Plotless in Pittsburgh) • 157 Cave Theory • 158 Gore’s Grotto • 160 Try the Dramatic Spinning Green Chile Apple Pie Plot Theory • 173 Ask the Tarot for an Insta-Plot • 177 Create a Unified Experience • 179 Make it Look Intentional • 182 Part 4: Remodeling • 185 Do Your Project Math • 186 Set the Work Aside • 189 7



Dear Ariel (Overwhelmed in Oklahoma) • 190 The Sonic Edit • 191 Set Up an Editing Parcourse • 193 Get Outside Input • 196 The Only Difference Between Me & Alice Munro • 201 Dear Ariel (Graceless in Grand Rapids) • 202 A Door Can Be a Table • 203 Show and Tell • 205 Borrowing and Stealing • 208 Part 5: Solitude and Scene, Home and Away • 211 Bold as You Can Stand • 212 Create the Community You Wish to Be Part Of • 215 Draft an Artist Statement • 218 Metamorphosize Into a Fire-Breathing Dragon and Apply for All the Residencies • 220 Plan a DIY Writing Retreat • 226 Dear Ariel (People Pleaser in Poughkeepsie) • 227 Invent Your Own Promotion Formula • 228 Go to a Writing Conference • 231 Have a Clear-Headed Understanding of Your Audience (Interview with Jisu Kim) • 239 Dear Ariel (Doubting in Decatur) • 241 Are You a Real Imposter? • 242 All About Imposters • 244 In the Walled City • 249 Writer as Worker (Interview with Adrian Shirk) • 253 Eating Artists • 261 The Hustle is the Destination • 265 Travelers’ Notes (Interview with Mai’a Williams) • 267 Part 6: Entertaining Friends and Strangers • 273 Make Your Stories Public • 274 8

Submit • 278 Don’t Give Up (interview with Ursula K. LeGuin) • 280 You Can Touch the Page You Wrote • 282 Dear Ariel (Dreaming in Davis) • 284 Take a Manuscript and See it Become a Book with a Traditional Publisher • 285 Get an Agent if You Need One (Interview with Laura Mazer) • 290 Think About Your Book Project the Way Your Publisher Will • 293 Dear Ariel (Agent-Shy in Ogunquit) • 302 The Future is Decentralized • 303 We Really Need to Do Something About Publishing • 309 Conclusion: Wayward Forever • 312 A Wayward Writer Reading List • 315 Acknowledgements • 317 About the Author • 318

9

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK AS A SCHOOL

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elcome to the School for Wayward Writers. Think of this place as a lab to explore what it takes to make writing your life and make a life from writing. There are no prerequisites.

Feel free to work through the curriculum alone or with a group of writer-pals in a formal or informal setting. You’ll need pens and a soft notebook you like to hold, or a device that’s easy for you to write on. I like to use lined and unlined Moleskine books, and fine-tipped black ink Pitt Artist Pens. I also use index cards and a laptop. It’s also nice to have an oldfashioned kitchen timer. In this book, you’ll find 78 “try this” assignments. Some of the assignments include a specific time allotment, but I also recommend using the timer for any assignment that doesn’t immediately inspire you. In the spirit of trying three bites of green beans in the reform school cafeteria before deciding you don’t care for them, set your timer for 10 minutes and write whatever comes to mind after reading the assignment even if that’s, Yada yada, headmistress Ariel irritates me to no end and my head is full of blue-green glass liquefying into ocean. You’re welcome to keep writing after your timer dings, but just those ten minutes will fulfill the requirement for the assignment. If you complete one assignment each week, you can work the whole program in 18 months—or two academic years if you take the summer off. After you finish all 78 assignments, you can fill in your diploma. You can put a rainbow unicorn sticker on it if you like. (Extra credit can be redeemed for more unicorn stickers.) You’re one of us now.

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INTRODUCTION: DESIRE & RESISTANCE

I

wanted to be myself and survive. I never felt like I could deal with having a normal job where I had to wear heels and smile at all the right times. Not for any longer than necessary, anyway. I did want a career—something I could nerd out on, an outlet more than a hobby. I wanted to be myself and survive. I wanted to be a writer in the sense that I wanted to do every kind of writing—from novels to news reports to plays to whatever the lit star of the future would do—and I wanted to push feminist and anti-capitalist agendas and travel the world by train, smoking cigarettes and wearing a tie when I felt like it, but mostly just wearing what was next to my bed when I woke up. I wanted to be myself and survive. I knew I wanted to publish, but independent publishing appealed to me just as much as collaborative and commercial publishing, so the markets felt secondary. I wanted to be a writer and survive. I wanted to be the architect of my own survival.  (Do you see what I’m doing here? I keep reaching back into a previous sentence and cutting a clipping from it and planting that clipping to grow the next sentence forward. I keep planting it forward. That’s all I’m doing.) When I dropped out of high school in Northern California and headed to China in the mid-1980s, I put “writer” as my occupation on the visa form. A fellow traveler in the consulate in then-British Hong Kong nudged me and whispered, “Put student. Governments don’t like writers.” I changed it. I wanted to be a writer and survive. But I already knew I also wanted to be a writer in the sense that I wanted governments not to like me. I wanted to be a writer in the sense that I wanted liberation for myself and all people.  11

I wanted to be myself and survive. I wanted bay windows and a fireplace.  I soon learned that one must be strategic and diligent to achieve the bohemian lifestyle. Even then, capitalism puts up a fight. No matter; I was in this for the long haul. I would be myself and survive. (If we think of a story as a series of tensions between desire and resistance, a series of scenes animating that tension in an everescalating or ever-deepening pattern, then reaching back to clip and replant becomes a way to allow the pattern of the language itself to imitate the central pattern of the desire and resistance.)

TRY THIS: Start with the words “I wanted . . . ” and tell the story from there. What does the narrator want and who or what tells them or shows them they can’t or shouldn’t have it? Let the story become a forward-moving pendulum that swings between “yes, maybe you can have what you want” and “no, probably you can’t have that.” Whenever you get stuck, re-read your previous sentences and clip from them to regenerate. Replant to grow the next sentence. 

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Part One: Doors Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from. —Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

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OUTSIDERS WELCOME We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

M

—Ursula K. Le Guin

y writing utopia supports both introversion and community. It’s urban, but also oceanic. We heal our shameful histories with honesty and reparations. Everyone has a guaranteed minimum income. In my writing utopia, we center creativity and joy. We don’t bend to the needs of capitalism.  We know that imperialistic story structures will never destroy the empire. Conventions in drama and literature get presented to us as if they’re more than human inventions and therefore inescapable, like the divine right of kings, but many of the ways in which we tell our stories are cultural and subcultural constructions, bound up in economies and systems our writing will surely outlive.  We seek new forms. When I became a writer, I understood that writing meant a life and profession open to feminists and antiracists and queers and single moms—open to people who didn’t care if governments didn’t like them. The writers I admired were committed to their craft, to the poetry, and to the transcendence of language, but also to personal and universal liberation. Writing—the kind I meant to do—was an outsider art.

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Storytelling surely lives in our human DNA. We evolved to send each other words via simple warnings, cautionary tales, allegory, and the Blues. At the same time, it’s clear that some of the narrative traditions we’ve come to understand as inescapable are actually quite easy to escape. That’s because humans have also evolved as storytellers to communicate social norms, to encourage compliance or resistance. We can disobey. If we don’t like the myths we’ve been handed, we can re-author them. Some literary traditions we take for granted, as if their aesthetics are necessary to make our creations “good” or even acceptable, come to us from conscious post-WWII efforts to encourage compliance, strip the arts of politics, and re-imagine the writer as a “professional” in a world of elbow patches and superior smiles—to make the literary establishment very “insider” indeed. I reject this insider/outsider binary. I reject compliance, except when it’s freely chosen. I reject elbow patches (but I do like sewing patches on my backpack.) Certainly what we think of as the traditional “canon” of literature has everything to do with what governments and anti-creative parents wanted and still want on those lists. That doesn’t make the books in any particular canon bad, it just means that there’s a whole lot of rad literature from virtually every era, region, aesthetic school, and subculture that can teach us as much as anything we’ve ever been told is canonical. What would it look like to completely decentralize the literary world? Post-WWII American narratives emphasize the individual, overcoming hardships, and achieving against the odds. There’s nothing wrong with these stories. Anyone who survives amid global capitalism has had to do some achieving. That’s for sure. We all know real-life individual personalities who’ve changed communities—and the world. But what we’ve 15

come to think of as the necessary arc of a story, one that traces the change this individual goes through as they conquer, is just one of many possible arcs. What if we could tell the story of a society that changed, allowing the individual to survive as they are? What if we began to see whole communities as protagonists? Would we structure a story differently if we wanted to show that the powerful could change in the face of a movement? What if we wanted to do that without centering the powerful? If we think about collective changes that have actually taken place in recent history, many were inspired by images, not individual personalities. Nick Ut’s photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc called “The Terror of War” or “Napalm Girl” is widely credited with ending the Vietnam war, also known as the Resistance War Against America. The first images of the earth seen from space and the mushroom cloud images of detonated bombs catalyzed the environmental and anti-war movements more than any individual. The images of the murder of George Floyd continue to change America.  “Less than a lifetime ago, reputable American writers would occasionally start fistfights, sleep in ditches, and even espouse Communist doctrines,” Timothy Aubry wrote in The New York Times in 2015, “Such were the prerogatives and exigencies of the artist’s existence until MFA programs arrived to impose discipline and provide livelihoods.” I’ve got nothing against MFA programs, discipline, and livelihoods. I’m actually a big fan of making a living. But now the publishing industry and academia have been vacated as sites of financial wealth, the Writer’s Guild and The American Association of University Professors report everdwindling median incomes, and late-stage capitalism has left writers with zero incentive to keep on pretending to be wellbehaved. Whether we’re currently surviving inside or outside of academia and institutions of commercial publishing, it’s a grand time to experiment with the poetry of resistance, to sleep 16

in hammocks, to hold power accountable, and to espouse anticapitalist doctrines whenever we please.  The opposite of compliant is wayward. In my literary utopia, we all get to be ourselves and survive. In the meantime, in this world, we can create workarounds. If there are only two options and neither is ideal—selling out or selling ourselves short, for example—let’s figure out our third option as soon as possible.

TRY THIS: Write a story—fiction, nonfiction, or some hybrid—that traces a collective change in a family, community, culture, subculture, or society. (Extra credit if that change is inspired by an image.) While a community is of course made up of individuals, resist the urge to have a “leader” make the majority of the decisions that move your story forward. Include something shiny in the beginning of your story that reappears toward the end.

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WELCOME PACKET: HANDY TIPS FOR THE WAYWARD WRITER 1. Call yourself a writer. You’re a writer if you write things down. Spit sour lemonade at anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. 2. Don’t be an arrogant jerk. Just because you’re a writer doesn’t mean you get to tell other writers what’s important to write down. I mean, seriously—What do you know? You know everything and nothing. Your arrogance will never heal that inner void where you’re actually terrified you know nothing. That inner void was probably installed by capitalism or some traumatized ancestor, anyway. Only excellent salted chocolate caramels can heal that void. In the meantime, assume that everyone you meet—just like you—knows everything and nothing.  3. Read and write the kinds of things you want to read and write and not the kinds of things anyone has made you feel like you ought to read and write. Love comics? Read and write comics. Get dreamy-eyed about travel blogs? Read and write dreamy travel blogs. Like scathing political radio commentaries? Read and write scathing political radio commentaries. Prefer high-brow poetry? Read and write high-brow poetry. Dig hard-boiled queer alien noir romance? Read and write hard-boiled queer alien noir romance. If you find yourself overly concerned with status, read and write in each of these traditions while wearing a soft pink onesie and a glittery orange cape and soon enough you’ll learn to take yourself less seriously and you’ll notice that all writing is uniquely challenging and requires a crazy 18

level of self-acceptance and can still be a gas—or at least dissatisfying in a supremely satisfying way that keeps you coming back. 4. Don’t use so many exclamation points! Women have been taught to use exclamation points so we sound nice! So stop using them to act more feminist! But do we have to pick between feminism and exclamation points? Who cares what Cormac McCarthy thinks about punctuation, anyway? Do your own thing! Experiment with capturing tone and expression by breaking all the writing “rules.” Maybe you like exclamation points. I know I do! 5. Don’t be a voice for the voiceless. When I studied journalism in the early 1990s, my professors extolled the virtues of becoming “a voice for the voiceless.” I thought this sounded good—at first—but the more I let it sink in, the more it stunk. No one is voiceless. Some have their voices oppressed and ignored. It’s more inclusive, inspiring, egalitarian, and organic to publish zines and anthologies in which we can feature everyone’s work. Writers want to tell their own stories whenever possible. Ditto for people who aren’t writers. Voice your own vulnerability. And pass the goddamned mic. 6. Don’t be a gatekeeper. Support other writers. If you’re able to open a door in the literary world—even if cracking it took a lot of effort and cost you anxious tears that you’d like to get some credit for—don’t lock that door behind you. Refer other people to your agent. I mean, unless they’re real clowns. If you find yourself wondering about another writer, Who do they think they are?, try writing a short story about a character much like yourself who has had to work too hard in this shitty, gate-kept world. A character who’s terrified that there isn’t enough literary love to go around and who feels 19

like they have to keep gates and hearts and everything in between locked and system-supporting. And don’t even try to make that story end all happy rainbows, because it doesn’t. 7. Read outside your genre and your subculture. Historians of creativity trace an excellent connection between urbanity and explosions of culture-progressive art. This is because people from all over gather to make unlikely communities in cities, and when we start communicating with people not like us, we start blowing each other’s minds. Reading across genres and literary schools of thought and works in translation turns our imaginations urban. Let other people’s creative output engage and ignite your own visions, then make something yourself. 8. Don’t worry if your path as a writer isn’t linear. A lot of folks imagine toiling in unseen story-writing brilliance until one magical day we “break into” publishing and everything’s honey and money from there, and sure, that happens in some people’s lives, but for most of us the path meanders. We scribble poems on bar napkins, then we write a couple of novels that end up kind of gooey and unfinished in the middle. We get a rad commercial publication on some topic we never thought would be “our topic,” then maybe we have our 15 minutes of fame and we waste it getting super drunk because we don’t know what else to do with the attention. We start self-publishing cool pink-covered novellas, then get a job in academia we think will give us the health insurance we need, then get in a fight with the dean and seethe and feel trapped, then maybe have a baby or get into a relationship with someone who acts like a baby and lament how anyone who ever had a baby wrote anything, only to discover there’s a centurieslong literary tradition grappling with this very question 20

and we immerse ourselves in it, then we figure out how to go on a road trip by ourselves, then we write a play that meets with grand community success, and then we keep writing. 9. Buy from booksellers and publishers and writers you’d like to see thrive. Support small presses that publish interesting experiments. Bring your dollars to the brick and mortar bookstores with their hardwood floors that smell of tobacco. Amazon isn’t going to smash itself. 10. Develop a real practice with your writing—showing up for it with all your fear and joy. It doesn’t matter if you show up at the same time every day. You don’t have to be a member of the leisure class. Writing invites you to be yourself and survive, but it’s always going to be like Borges said, “If I don’t write, I feel, well, a kind of remorse, no?”

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GATHER SPARKLY SUPPLIES

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s a kid, whenever I got ready to start a new writing project, I’d empty out a binder and fill it with clean paper. I’d gather colored pens, a few pieces of orange construction paper, a little project-specific good luck charm, and my puffy, googly-eye stickers, and then I’d get to work. Even if you’re grown, you can get yourself a binder and some bright gel pens and maybe some orange or purple paper and watercolors and tape with flowers printed into it and a big pack of pale green notecards and feathers—bright blue feathers, I hope—all the inexpensive book-making tools of childhood. Remember: It’s easier to practice taking ourselves lightly when we’re working with a pink glitter pen. When the tools of your craft bring you feelings of calm and curiosity, the process becomes the destination. You’re probably going to write on a computer or whatever your preferred device, too. I get that. But in your binder and notebooks, you can collage mood boards, map the territory of your stories, jot notes, organize and rearrange print-outs with rainbow dividers, highlight emerging themes, compose secret letters to your characters—one of whom might be yourself at some other age—and generally begin to establish a tactile relationship with your project.  The writer of the future reinvents the creative environment, each to our own liking. Ever since I read Brenda Ueland’s classic, If You Want to Write, when I was maybe 19 years old, she’s been standing here next to me in spirit, whispering in my ear, “I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain

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top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten—happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.” Most days I can’t ask for much more than to feel happy and absorbed, stringing words like beads. Not all of us wrote as kids or had access to binders and gel pens or puffy, googly-eye stickers, but it’s never too late to be the kindergartener who did—happily crafting her first book, her only book, never wondering “who cares,” or “is it good enough?”—never questioning her right to tell the truth, magical or stark. Put a unicorn sticker on your notebook. Or, you know, some excellent band patch.

TRY THIS: Write a scene you’ve tried to write before without great success and, this time, write it by hand with a green felt pen. (If you haven’t tried to write any scene before, just write the story of what happened the last time you talked to a stranger.) If you get stalled, draw a little monster sticking its tongue out. Then go back to your writing.

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Dear Ariel, Do I have to move to the cool new city to write? Sincerely,  Packing Up in Podunk

Dear Packing Up, You don’t have to live in a cool or expensive or literary place. Every place has the potential to hold the art of words. Sometimes, the more unlikely the better. Some areas do feel stifling to me. I try to leave those places. Cool new cities excite and inspire. But mostly I make home where I find myself, where I can afford to stay a while. I create small havens of community and avoid overly taxing social situations. I create strategies to share my work. Every community, every valley, every city has the potential to cradle a writer.  And here’s the secret: As creatives, we are the cool new city—wherever we go. We’re the cool new place to be. See you on the road, Ariel

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DON’T WORRY ABOUT A FANCY WRITING SPACE

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aya Angelou famously used to rent herself a motel room to get started on a book. She didn’t want the household distractions. I used to think that sounded so extravagant. Now I like to do it sometimes, too—leave town for a week and check into a pink motel in some dusty town and see what comes of it. This is the kind of thing we get to do as writers. All of our eccentricities and dysregulated flight responses can become part of “the process.” Then we just have to figure out how to build lives that work around our own needs, peculiar as they may be. Joan Didion wrote in a basement at UCLA. I’m writing in the dark on a couch right now. My spouse and kid have gone to sleep. The poet Marcy Sheiner writes in laundromats. I favor writing in a particular laundromat on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland. There’s a good coffee shop on the same block. Also, sushi. I once wrote the better part of a book sitting at a redpainted coffee table surrounded by red-painted books inside an all-red installation at one of the art colleges in Portland. My daughter was taking glass sculpting classes upstairs and it was quieter in the installation than at the corner café. So, that red room became my office. I made a point of wearing red, so as not to interrupt the aesthetic.  My stepdad used to write his sermons in his head while he rode his bicycle home from his day job at Printer’s Ink Bookstore, then he sat in his claw-foot chair in our living 25

room and expanded on his memory-notes. I still have that chair, but one of the kids busted the springs so it’s not quite the comfortable writing throne it once was. Gertrude Stein preferred to write in her Model-T Ford. Your writing space doesn’t have to be the same every day—writing is one of the creative practices quite open to travelers. Langston Hughes circled the globe for a year in the 1930s, hauling his typewriter and his victrola and his jazz records on trains and ships. I write wherever I find myself—in hospital waiting rooms, on airplanes. Your space needn’t cost much or take time to put together. You can sit or stand. Near a window if possible, with some daisies growing outside. There. That’s all. A laundromat or a red art installation or a desk in a basement near a window and some daisies. Beautiful.

TRY THIS: Go someplace you’ve never written before—a different corner in your home or a park bench or small-town library or train station—anywhere unfamiliar. Set your timer for ten minutes and write an instant beginning of a new story or script or song featuring a character with a secret life.

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INVOKE PSYCHIC PROTECTION  Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me.

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—Anaïs Nin

dreamed I visited Anaïs Nin, the mid-century diarist, in the garden of her mid-century home in Silver Lake. She floated in her pool, waved at me. She took her time getting out. She put on a black robe and tucked a stray lock of hair into her bun. She didn’t speak to me out loud, but she grabbed my hand like an old friend. She wanted to give me a tour of her gardens. She led me along curved dirt paths, past rose bushes planted in labyrinthian patterns, past stone benches and fountains. This is where I write, she told me in silent gestures, but more importantly, she wanted to introduce me to something. She flourished her arm like I might meet her muse, and here was . . . a skunk? Yes, dream-Anaïs had a pet skunk—cute and shy with its big skunky tail, patrolling the back fence of her mid-century digs. She explained—again, kind of telepathically without spoken words—that we all need a skunk guarding our writing space, a stinky little buddy to keep us safe.  I thought that sounded like a fine idea. As writers in every genre, we bring forth vulnerable parts of ourselves. We tell our secret stories or share awkward new ways of describing the moon that other people will mock. We strive to be generous with our dreams, but we live in a mean world that loves to critique and ridicule. We live among thoughtless friends, sometimes. We live connected to complicated relatives who may not be able to support our creativity. I work to change my worlds, but I also like to think 27

about my dream-Anaïs in her pool sometimes, focused on taking care of herself, relying on a magical smelly pal to protect her from all the meanness and all that feels complicated and silencing. 

TRY THIS: Draw a picture of the metaphysical force that protects you—or will from now on. If the force seems to have something to say, listen, and write it down as a caption.

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IF YOU WANT TO BE LIKE AUDRE LORDE, DO WHAT YOU ARE AFRAID TO DO  Interview with Audre Lorde Biographer Alexis Pauline Gumbs

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pen an Alexis Pauline Gumbs book and prepare to be captivated. In Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals, she writes, “What does it take to go deep, below the surface of current events and social media reactions? What would allow you to look at what is under your actions, and under that, and under that? Sperm whales dive a mile deep. Maybe they can give us some advice. And the ocean itself has so many depth lessons, when you think you’ve reached the bottom, there is sometimes deeper to go. Take a breath.” The North-Carolina-based author was the first scholar to research the papers of Audre Lorde at Spelman College, June Jordan at Harvard University, and Lucille Clifton at Emory University during her doctoral work.  I cheered when I read she was writing a biography of Audre Lorde. Fiction, poetry, nonfiction, Afro-futurism, biography, editing, teaching . . . you seem to do it all. How do you pick what you’re going to work on next? Is there a guiding principle to all of your literary work? I love this question, because I used to not have a guiding principle to my work. I’m a workaholic in recovery and it used to be that I would say yes to every invitation to work just to avoid my fear of the silence, the empty space, and most importantly the messiness of being available to the people in my actual life. (By the way, it turns out that the messiness of not being available to the people in my actual life is worse.) And so for a month, after saving up for most of a year, I said “no” to every invitation. 29

(Actually I committed to say no, and then I said yes a lot and then I had to go back and say no, it was really hard.) It happened to be the month of No-vember. At the end of that month I could feel the difference between the “yes” that came from love and a sincere opening to my purpose on this planet and the more common yes that came from either a need to prove that I could do what was being asked of me, or the simple use of work to fill up the scary gaps of time in every day. Now my guiding principle comes from a studied examination of my yeses. Why am I saying yes? What is my body saying yes to? What is my spirit saying yes to? Or is it only my frantic mind saying yes? That last yes, is a no.  What I found during that “Month of No” is that what I said yes to with my spirit every day was writing poetry. I have been writing poetry every day since. In some ways, everything I say a sincere yes to, regardless of the form, feels like a poem to me.  How can Audre Lorde inspire us as writers and publishers? One of the things that is most inspiring to me about Audre Lorde is that she was deeply in touch with her fear. Deeply. She had consistent nightmares that started when she was a child and she learned to turn her deepest fears into forms of guidance. Her nightmares are the sources of some of her best poems. Many of the things she wrote and said out loud that we quote today, were things she was afraid to say out loud or to write down. I find that inspiring because fear shows up to sit on my shoulder every day, but as Audre Lorde teaches by example, that doesn’t mean I can’t write or speak up about what frightens me. In fact, it is a form of clarity that focuses my care. If you want to be like Audre Lorde, do what you are afraid to do. And even more than that, examine what that fear is teaching you. The “meta” aspect of this is that I am terrified to write a biography of Audre Lorde, but that’s what I’m doing every day. 

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Do you have a consistent daily practice? Yes! I have a meditation practice every morning, supported by oracle cards from one of my favorite writers, the great Sharon Bridgforth. I use music and mirrors and go on ancestral journeys during that time and that’s the first thing I do every morning, no matter what. And then I make myself vanilla coconut milk oatmeal and I sit down and write a poem. My partner, Sangodare, and I also have a daily ritual of coming together to share about our health and our dreams and our plans for the day and we dance. And every day I call my mom and read oracle cards from Sharon to her, and I also call my sister and nieces (same house, different video calls) to play and listen. I am very big on daily practice. One of the reasons for that is that when Sangodare and I traveled the US interviewing Black feminist LGBTQ elders we found out that was how they developed their superpowers. Every one of them uses daily practice.  You’ve worked with several different mid-sized indie presses. How do you go about deciding which publishers you’ll work with? In my case it has felt pretty organic and has evolved through relationships. I haven’t ever done a traditional pitch process, it has more flowed through who I am in community with and who I share about my writing with and how they decide to share it or collaborate. But I do think about what the purpose is behind sharing a particular piece of writing and if that collaboration honors that purpose. In the case of my triptych poetically engaging Black women theorists, an academic press that publishes a lot of theory made sense, because the work made sense to them, but also because I was excited about the validity it could offer to other people who may be writing about theory “differently.” For Revolutionary Mothering, which you contributed to, the precedent of our loved ones who were writing about activism and the importance of parents, made it make sense. For Undrowned, which started as social media posts I wanted to share with other emergent strategists, adrienne 31

maree brown’s emergent strategy series made obvious sense to me.  Another way of saying that is that all the work is in relationships, so where are its relatives? I am a daughter and granddaughter of immigrants, immigrants move where they have supportive relationships. That’s what my work does too, sometimes without me even realizing it.  I imagine an altar to Audre Lorde right in the middle of this book. What would you put on an altar to Audre Lorde? I love that. In fact, I have an altar to Audre Lorde right in this room, looking over my shoulder as I write this. If I had the chance to add to an altar to Audre Lorde, I would add one of the stones I picked up on the beach near her house in St. Croix. She loved stones. I think she is part of the earth in the same way as a precious stone. Refracting light. The evidence of generations of pressure.  What do you mean when you say, “Freedom is not a secret. It’s a practice”? It’s kind of what I said above. Everything is practice. Practice is really what I believe in. I once tweeted, “there are many names for God. The name I use is ‘every day.’” Or something like that. If I believe in freedom, I have to practice it. And practicing it means I know that I’m not perfect at it, or that it exists for me to just have and keep, practice means it’s possible, but also contingent on a certain form of presence. The context of that quote is a scene in my book M Archive where the spies who are observing the practitioners of freedom keep getting seduced into and incorporated into the practice. Freedom, if we experience it, is not something we can hide within the illusion of individual personality, it is infinitely shareable. It exists more and more powerfully if we practice it together.

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What would a literary utopia look like for you? We are almost there. There are so many people with amazing literary practices. So many ideas. So many beautiful things to read. So many possible things to write.  There is a true abundance in the literary world already. The only thing I would change is capitalism. Capitalism puts a fake scarcity on the natural literary biodiversity that emerges anyway. It unnecessarily limits our access to each other. And it creates this scarcity in the forms we are familiar with: racism, sexism, etc.  So a literary utopia would look just like this. But those of us who are writing and reading abundantly for reasons that don’t have anything to do with money, have everything we need to be able to do that and to access each other’s creations. Just like this. Minus capitalism. What else should aspiring lit stars know about the lit star life? Audre Lorde wrote a poem for her children where she said:  “Remember our sun is not the most noteworthy star only nearest.” As “lit stars” it matters where we are, it matters who we impact. It is not so much about our brilliance, or being the brightest and out shining the other stars. It is about being close. Close to a shareable heat. It is about whether or not our communities can utilize the solar power in our writing to grow something that nourishes them for real.

TRY THIS: Write a story in which you do something you’re afraid to do— whether or not you’ve yet done this thing in real life. Somewhere in your story, include an image from a nightmare.

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BE A PART OF WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

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t’s a grand time to love writing and become a lit star because the opportunities to share our work are boundless. We don’t need highfalutin pedigrees or accolades. We can push through our nervousness and learn to perform readings, publish zines and chapbooks, and share them with our friends and affinity groups. We can connect in person or virtually, via podcasts and secret psychic portals. We can organize camps and meet up in the desert. We can post flyers on concrete walls in the city. If something doesn’t exist in our neighborhood or psychographic community, we can start it. If any part of engaging in the literary community causes us to descend into unhappiness, we can stop engaging with that part of it. We have options. We can write exclusively for ourselves and our friends and grandchildren. We can broaden that audience as we wish. Publishing simply means making public—for free or for sale. It’s the part of literary life that shifts us from being writers to also being public writers—authors and entrepreneurs. It’s a whole new level of engagement with our work and with other people. It’s good to start small, especially if we feel nervous, but it’s okay to start big. What goes on in literary communities and publishing models morphs from year to year and decade to decade. Rather than trying to follow the trends, be a part of what happens next. I can’t tell you which cats to collaborate with or which ones to avoid, because they’ll shift and find themselves replaced by some other cats in the time it takes for me to get this book to you, which is a very long time by insta-culture standards. I can tell you that the literary world, from the open mic at your mountain-town café to the big-windowed publishing offices in New York City, is full of people. Some of them are going to be pretentious blowhards and some of them are going to be your people—people you never would have met if you didn’t get into 34

this whole writing thing—and some of them aren’t going to be either and some of them are going to be both. You gotta find a way to not be a jerk and not to get bulldozed. Just like with everything. When in doubt, err on the side of being your own soft and weird self.

TRY THIS: Write a story set in the most awkward year of your youth and make it exactly three minutes long when read out loud. Practice reading it out loud and see if you can exaggerate a little and make it funny. Now you have a little piece to read as a performance someplace should the opportunity arise.

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SUPPORT REVERSE GENTRIFICATION Interview with Akashic Books Publisher Johnny Temple

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hey say if you’ve heard one bass line, you’ve heard ‘em all. I beg to differ.

You might know American bassist Johnny Temple for his work in the post-hardcore bands Soulside and Girls Against Boys, but he’s also the publisher and editor in chief at Akashic Books, an award-winning Brooklyn-based independent company dedicated to putting out urban literary fiction and political nonfiction. Temple won the 2013 Ellery Queen Award, the American Association of Publishers’ 2005 Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing, and the 2010 Jay and Deen Kogan Award for Excellence in Noir Literature. He has contributed articles and political essays to the Nation, Publishers Weekly, AlterNet, Poets & Writers, and  BookForum. He’s also the chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council, which works with Brooklyn’s borough president to plan the annual Brooklyn Book Festival in September. Akashic’s tagline is “reverse gentrification of the literary world.” I can go in for that. What do you mean by reverse gentrification of the literary world? While Akashic’s use of the motto “reverse-gentrification of the literary world” has a good dose of tongue-in-cheek, there is a serious side as well, which refers to the ivory-tower nature of the book publishing industry. Sometimes it seems like the book business (I’m not talking about the writers here) is populated by overly educated people publishing books for other overly educated people. There is a good deal of bitching and moaning about “readers are disappearing” even as the industry ignores huge swaths of the population. 36

So many publishers I talk to today are kind of freaking out, saying things like: From Now On I Will Only Publish Nonfiction by Celebrities With Giant Platforms! Are you feeling this way? Not at all. Akashic has never been a trend-chaser and never will be. We do have some celebrities on our roster, but they are celebrities who fit our list snugly and embody our ethos. I wish words like platform and brand would magically disappear. What do you wish more writers knew going into publishing? I don’t really have an answer for this question. Writers tend to be smart and observant, and I’m in awe of them.  In terms of marketing—from social media to DIY tours to literary festivals to Amazon—how do you see real numbers of books actually being sold? I don’t think there’s a formula, or if there is, we haven’t been able to discern it. I believe reviews used to be more influential than they are now. Basically, a book needs a bunch of things happening at once to create a snowball effect. The days of a single review or TV appearance launching a book onto the best-seller lists seem to be over, for the most part. The most important thing is, and always has been, word-of-mouth. The whole point of any promotion, including advertising, is to get people talking about a book, and I think word-of-mouth still reigns. But how to get the snowball rolling is never clear. And this is actually a great thing: this is art. If there were a formula, the corporate publishers would have a lock on all popular books. The truly unpredictable nature of the commerce of art allows for independents to stay afloat and sometimes thrive. What would a literary utopia look like for you? My brain can’t go there. I’m an optimist (sometimes) but not a dreamer. Then what’s the optimistic (sometimes) future of publishing? For the publishing business to stay afloat and thrive, it needs to become less homogenous (including, but not limited to, 37

less white) at every level. What some in the book business don’t yet realize is that beyond issues of social justice and fairness, increasing ethnic/cultural/sexual diversity will make it a stronger and flat-out BETTER industry.  Better books, better writing, better storytelling, more relevant to the world we live in.  I’m cautiously optimistic that we are moving in the right direction, though the surface has barely been scratched.

TRY THIS: Write a two-page vision of your own literary utopia. If it helps, remember that Ursula K. Le Guin noted that utopia isn’t static perfection—it’s a process.

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STEAL THIS DOOR

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’ll tell you a story about a door that changed my life twice. By the time I could talk, I’d decided not to.

I had a blue passport and a blue Samsonite suitcase and we’d lived in more hotel rooms and hostels and basements than my parents could count, my father wild-eyed, insisting my mother worked against us as an international spy as he orbited in a loop of schizophasial rhyming strings of words— mint, hint, squint, imprint—and my mother drinking coffee and painting into the night until she crashed, clutching her back in pain and crying out, a bit dramatically, “now the artist must die—”  By the time I’d decided not to talk and my mother started calling me “tiniest owl child” because of it, she and my sister and I washed up on the shores of my grandmother’s softcarpeted house in Southern California. I wanted to stay. I didn’t mind sleeping on a pull-out couch. Bright pink bougainvillea vined and bloomed outside the window next my couch bed and sunrise smelled like bacon. I dislocated my shoulder in a way that I used to do sometimes back when I was a kid, pulling the bone out of the socket so I looked like one of the old-fashioned circus freaks in one of my old-fashioned circus freaks books. I bloodied my nose, whispered a plea to my grandmother. “See? I’m hurt. I have to stay.” My grandmother kissed the top of my head, breathed, “I’m sorry, baby.” I slipped my bone back into its socket.

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We continued, adrift. Apartments, communes, a converted garage, a VW Van painted pale blue with white clouds. I loved the smell of the ocean outside our ever-shifting windows. A little rental cottage in a college town called Palo Alto. My mom wore a bandana and gold hoop earrings and the other mothers in our new neighborhood clucked at her, and the other kids in our new neighborhood stuck their tongues out at us and called us hobos and various slurs, as was the custom in the 1970s.  We went to church even though we weren’t Catholic. The priest had Black Panthers and United Farmworker posters on his office walls where my mother went for spiritual counseling. She made a collage art book called Little Red Lips and the Three Priests. And then. Something like a miracle. Or like a spell. Her book came true! My sister and I were going to have a new father. Everyone at church called our new father “Father” but we weren’t allowed to call him father. Not yet. It was a secret. He was a priest. He wasn’t allowed to have a wife. He wasn’t allowed to go and see Harold and Maude at the New Varsity Theater with Little Red Lips. I stayed quiet. My bruised shoulders ached for this new father. In his eyes I saw a life where I wouldn’t always feel crazy, wouldn’t always feel like the neighbor kids could see the dirt on me that I’d tried so hard to scrub off in the murky waters of the San Francisquito Creek. 40

I’d never thought much about Jesus before, but now I sat in the wooden pews and I studied the little man who hung on the cross against the back wall and I prayed to him that this new father wouldn’t only speak in rhymes. This new town belonged to my new father. He wasn’t an outsider here. His grandfathers had come from Sacramento and Oakland and Baltimore to work at Stanford. “It was to be the first free university,” my new father said, “Completely egalitarian.” He laughed at that now, but we would move into the house his father built in “Professorville.” I belonged here because my new father said I belonged here. “If anyone asks you where you’re from,” he said, placing his large hand on my healing shoulder, “you say ‘who, me?’ and you point to the tallest, closest mountain you can see and you say, ‘I just hiked down from the top of that mountain this morning. Where you from?’” I unpacked my blue Samsonite in that old house and I settled in. The grand arched mission door kept me safe, meant I belonged. My new father lost his income from the church when they excommunicated him, so he started his own independent church and got a job sorting produce at the Briar Patch Co-op Market and then later as a clerk at Printer’s Ink Bookstore. A bookstore can be a ministry. I grew up strong, tomato plants in the garden and pinewood fires in the brick and tiled hearth. I grew up thinking I was mostly okay even though my mom still shrieked sometimes in the night and my bio-dad still spoke mostly in rhymes. I grew up and I ran away. Home would always be there, strong stucco and mahogany. Because of course it would always be there, wouldn’t it? But of course it wouldn’t always be there. My mother mortgaged the place for French dishes and designer floral sheets. 41

Stanford cost thousands in tuition and gave rise to tech companies. My parents said they couldn’t afford to send my sister and me to college. Even the kids who used to call us slurs had to pack up and move on. My new father had kept up with the property taxes on the house his father built, but now he couldn’t pay the mortgage on his minimum wages from the bookstore. My mother appealed to the historical society, had the Spanish colonial deemed “significant,” then sold it for half the price she might have without the designation. My parents left that town and moved to Oaxaca. And they died the way people do. I was in New Mexico the night I got the call about our old house. Late January and the new owners had won their fight with Palo Alto’s historical board. The bulldozers would arrive in the morning. Stucco and mahogany. I hardly knew anyone in that town anymore.  But I called someone who called someone and “do you remember that guy Mark Hartley? He used to sing in that Van Halen cover band?” And I said, “Oh, sure, I remember that guy. The girls used to shriek for Mark Hartley. My high school boyfriend even played bass in that band for a while.” “Yeah. Mark Hartley. He still lives down there.” “Far out.” So now I’ve got Mark Hartley on the phone and now Mark’s up for the plan and now Mark’s up early, three shots of espresso, and he’s pulling up in front of the house my father’s father built. It’s drizzling, just a little, and the bulldozers are already there, but Mark tosses his empty espresso cup in the passenger’s seat and he’s rushing in. The workers are yelling at him, “Hey.” The new owners of the house my father’s father 42

built are yelling, too. But Mark’s got a hammer and Mark’s got a chisel and now Mark’s got my front door, and it’s huge, and it’s heavy, this old arched Mission door and Mark’s running with it. He’s running with my heavy door and he’s maneuvering it into the back of his truck and the new owners are yelling after him, “we’re calling the police!” Mark’s yelling back, “This is Father Duryea’s house and I’m taking Father Duryea’s door to Father Duryea’s daughter.” Mark rushes in front of those bulldozers and the bulldozers aren’t moving, but they’ve got their engines revving and the workers call out, “Hey, man, you gotta get outta here.” Mark’s got my wooden fireplace mantle now and it’s huge. It’s bigger than Mark remembered. He’s loading it into the back of his truck. He’s running. And all the yelling reminds him of the girls who used to shriek his name when he sang in that Van Halen cover band. He’s got my iron gate, Mark does, he’s got my old wooden pull-out telephone chair, too, and he’s running, the new owner still screaming, and Mark’s time is spinning out. The Palo Alto cops are quick on their feet; they’ve been so bored since The Donnas left town. But Mark’s got an adrenalin rush going now, imagining all the girls reaching up for him. He wants. I promised Mark $100 to go and grab what he could, but it’s about more than that now. It’s about Father Duryea and the way he’s the one who baptized Mark as a newborn. It’s about me, too, about Father Duryea’s daughter. It’s about his youth, Mark’s. And about the town he thought was home before the software companies bubbled up, before people said his band was lame, before his parents died. And Mark wants my fireplace screen. He’s going to get me my fireplace screen. He can hear the sirens and he knows they’re coming for him because what else is going on in Palo Alto on a January morning? The workers shake their heads now. The new owners watch silent, waiting for the cops. And Mark’s light on his feet. He’s got my fireplace screen. He’s running and he’s laughing. 43

He’s still laughing when he calls me from his cell phone, laughing and crying, “you wouldn’t believe the looks on those motherfucker’s faces! I got all the best stuff, Ariel. Just what would fit in the truck but it’s the best stuff. I’m heading up to the East Bay now. I’ll get you a storage unit in Oakland. Oh. My. God. Ariel, this stuff is gonna look great in your house nomatter-what-kind-of-house-you-got-now.” And what I don’t tell Mark is that I don’t have a house. That I mostly don’t feel crazy like my first parents, but I’ve lived in more hotel rooms and hostels and basements than I can count. What I don’t tell Mark is that I can’t explain why I wanted my door so badly even when I’ve got no place to put it, can’t explain what I’m hanging on to, so I just say, “Thanks, Mark. It means a lot to me.”  And Mark just says, “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

TRY THIS: Write a story showing a character attempting to save something from the past. This something they want to save may be physical or metaphysical. Your story may be fiction, nonfiction, or inbetween. But somewhere in your story, include the mention of a door.

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TRANSFORM CHAOS INTO SOMETHING YOU CAN HOLD

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lot of times when we have an emotionally cataclysmic experience, people say, “you should write a book.” A lot of times, we agree with them. But how to approach the project? An experience doesn’t have a plot, per se. A terrible day isn’t a story. Not yet, anyway. Award-winning novelist and memoirist Gayle Brandeis has taught me so much about containers for stories—she’s experimented with varying vessels for her work across the genres. In Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, she uses meditations on the skin and flesh of fruits to create an organic, body-immersive experience. In her novel Self Storage, narrator Flan makes a living by attending auctions at self-storage units and buying the contents of the unpaid lockers after getting just a minute with a flashlight to assess the value of the contents. In Flan, Gayle shows us a character making narrative sense of the clutter of life, just like we all do as writers. In 2009, after Gayle had written these books and more, and just a few days after she’d given birth to her second child, her mother killed herself. Her next book would be Gayle’s masterpiece. Dear Gayle Brandeis, I was blown away by your memoir The Art of Misdiagnosis.  Can you share a little bit about the process of creating that book—from the experience of your mother’s suicide that invited you into the writing, to the form you ultimately found to hold it? Sincerely, Ariel Gore, your old editor at Hip Mama 45

Dear Ariel, I knew I was going to have to write about my mom’s suicide— writing is how I process stuff—but it took me a while to get to it. She died one week after I gave birth, and I was too flooded with grief and new motherhood to face the page for about a year and a half. I did somehow have the presence of mind to take notes during my mom’s disappearance and the early days of loss though, and I’m grateful for that—those notes helped me chronicle that charged time period once I was ready to write about it. I thought that would be the whole book—a first person, present tense accounting of that experience—but then my therapist suggested I write a letter to my mom as a chance to stay in conversation with her, ask her questions, unpack our history, and at some point, I realized I should include this letter as a way of giving the deeper story of our relationship, so that became a second thread in the book. I had stolen the title The Art of Misdiagnosis from the documentary my mom had been producing at the time of her death, about her artwork and how it told the story of the illnesses she thought wracked her family; the title had different layers of meaning for me, including my mom’s never-diagnosed mental illness, and my own history of pretending to be sick for a year as a teenager, but I didn’t think about weaving in the documentary itself until I was invited to a weekend women’s writing retreat, and something in me told me to bring my mom’s documentary, which I hadn’t felt ready to watch since her death. I put the disc in my son’s portable DVD player as soon as I got into my room, and as I watched my mom move around and heard her voice for the first time in several years (all of which made me weep), I realized I needed to transcribe the documentary and weave that into the memoir, too, as a way of letting my mom speak for herself. So that became a third thread. I ended up with a few other smaller threads, too—some research into delusional and factitious disorders, some letters and emails—and then had to figure out how to braid them all together. This entailed 46

printing everything out, laying stacks of pages around the floor, moving scenes around, trying to see which spoke to one another, until everything clicked into place (and then, after I thought I had found the final form, and the book found a fabulous home, I ended up cutting 20k words, which entailed much re-shuffling. None of those words were truly lost, of course—they all carried me where I needed to go.) Finding the right container for my story took a while, but it was all time well spent, time that helped me understand myself and my story in fresh, deep ways, time that helped me shape what felt like chaos into something I could hold, something I could release. Much love, Gayle

TRY THIS: Bring to mind an experience you’ve had or heard about that, in the past, has felt too chaotic to write about—something that defies your ability to easily “make sense” of it. Now, I want you to undertake to transform this chaotic experience into something you can hold in three ways. 1) Write the experience as a series of seven unconnected fragments, like a slide-show of image-memories and thoughts. 2) Script the experience as a television or radio commercial. This might get experimental, but it needn’t get too long—no more than a page, or one minute when read aloud. 3) Tell the experience in the form of field notes from an anthropological discovery made many years in the future.

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VISIT THE STRANGER’S PLOT

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y California is the smell of eucalyptus trees in the ocean air. Even salted essential oils can evoke for me whole swathes of my childhood: My bio dad in his crazy wigs, my grandparents’ conch-shell silences on the Carmel beach, the thick grove where I got lost behind my schoolyard collecting the trees’ bell-shaped silver pods. Imagine my surprise when I learned that eucalyptus is nonnative to California—“invasive” even though they didn’t ask to come. They arrived in the late 1840s and early 1850s with prospectors from Australia—those Gold Rush days brought tens of thousands of immigrants that would triple the state’s population in the space of a few years. Now my local newspaper prints detailed instructions on how to kill the invasive eucalyptus. I am also invasive. My great-grandmother Nellie’s teenage mother died in childbirth in the Midwest and her widower-dad married his dead wife’s sister, making “Aunt Eva” both my Nana’s aunt and her stepmother. Then my Nana’s dad got himself killed in a bar fight or something. So, my Nana and Aunt Eva boarded a train bound for Los Angeles. Like you do. In the 1910 census, they’re both listed as housekeepers in Santa Monica. Within a few more years they both married. My Nana moved to Beverly Hills. Aunt Eva took a job as a saleslady and she and her electrician husband rented an apartment off Wilshire. A hundred years later, that neighborhood is the Mexican part of Koreatown. 48

My daughter lives there, but she’s barely hanging on to her studio apartment.  She’s considering a move to a Midwestern city that we’ve all been through but can’t quite pinpoint on a map. She figures if she goes someplace other people are leaving, no one will mind too much. To kill the eucalyptus, you drill holes into the trunk at a downward 45-degree angle with a power drill. You space the holes about three inches apart around the circumference of the trunk. Each hole should be at least two inches deep so it cuts into the inner tissue of the tree. You can peel off the bark, too. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, sometimes. My neighborhood here is part of the old Sacred Heart Parish in Oakland where my stepdad had his first assignment as a young Catholic priest. When he moved here in 1945, a streetcar line ran down 40th. In his journal, he described the area as poor and residential “with small, one-story houses and the occasional tree. Less barren and less crowded than San Francisco, but rather run down.” More than sixty years later, each one of those small one-story houses sells for a cool million and I’m barely hanging on to my studio condo. All the artists in the neighborhood say they’re losing ground. The new arrivals drive fancy black cars and can be seen running fast back and forth, up and down the street, carrying hand weights. An old musician neighbor of mine yells out her window at them, “You can relax! You’ve already made it to the top!” But they don’t seem to hear her. Across the bay in San Francisco, the cops evict all the homeless people from the Division Street underpass because the tech bros don’t like to look at them. Rents have doubled and if you don’t have first, last, and a security deposit for a $4,000-a-month studio, you can forget it. 49

In an open letter to the mayor just days before the evictions, software developer Justin Keller wrote, “The wealthy working people have earned the right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, worked hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day.” The city gave the people living in their tents 72 hours’ notice to vacate, but within just a few hours the garbage collectors showed up with the police and started putting people’s tents and all their belongings into the crushers. The sounds of those garbage trucks churning almost drowned out the sounds of people weeping. I cried the day the bulldozers came for the house my stepfather’s father built, too. But at least I had somewhere else to sleep. Once you’ve drilled into the eucalyptus trunk, you have to fill the holes with herbicide—a 50 percent dilution of glyphosate or triclopyr works best—and then you just leave it alone. It should only take a few weeks for the herbicide to soak into the tree’s inner tissue and for the tree to die.   “How long have you lived here?” the woman who waxes me asks. “How long do you think you’ll be able to stay?” It’s the only conversation in the changing neighborhood right now. The woman tells me she grew up here. She says she always thought the Midwest meant Lodi, California and that was scary enough if you weren’t white and Christian-passing. She pours hot wax onto my skin, tells me she thinks about moving to Oregon, but she worries about those “No Californians” stickers she’s heard they have on the real estate signs up there and she figures they mean they don’t want brown people. “So, what’s new?” she says as she rips my hair out. 50

It’s not really a question. I have a few sheets of paper made of wildflower seeds. My 8-year-old son wants to draw a picture of the layers of the earth and write what he knows about those layers on one of the sheets of wildflower paper. He wants to soak his illustration and his words overnight. Then he wants to plant the pulped paper. He hasn’t yet bought into the cultural idea that things have to be permanent and archived to be worthy of our creative energy. I know the wildflowers in the paper probably aren’t native to California, but what’s new? I trust at least they’re not invasive. Once the eucalyptus tree is dead, you need to cut it down with a chainsaw and, the newspaper says, “dispose of the trunk as desired.” Near the front entrance of my neighborhood cemetery, there’s a grassy slope where people run their dogs. I think maybe they don’t realize it’s the stranger’s plot—hundreds of mostlyunmarked graves of infants, suicides, drifters, hanged convicts, and Chinese Oaklanders who came here during the Gold Rush and probably got stranded without papers after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. There are no signs on the field. On the graveyard map, the area is just labeled “S.” People buried in the Stranger’s Plot died of gunshot wounds or drowning or there’s no cause of death listed. According to cemetery records, 22 of the bodies belong to Chinese men killed in an 1880 dynamite blast at Fleming Point in Berkeley. Twelve are labeled, “unknown bodies from 14th and Harrison.” One of the only marked graves in the plot is for a sixweek-old baby named Hatsue Nakayama. No one in the office seems to know anything more about Hatsue Nakayama—or why there are so many infants buried in the Stranger’s Plot. 51

No one knows why only Hatsue Nakayama got a marker. Another tombstone in the field memorializes William Holmes Mabien. He killed himself on Christmas Eve in 1871, at age 68. As a suicide, he would have been banned from the main cemetery, but someone put up the stone for him. It says, “Rest in Peace.” Once you’ve cut down the eucalyptus tree and gotten rid of the trunk, you have to grind down the remaining stump and apply a commercial stump remover. “Killing the stump is an essential step in killing a eucalyptus tree,” the newspaper says, “because, like many trees, eucalyptus can sprout from the trunk and create new plants.” At home, I get to thinking that Hatsue Nakayama and all the other infants and suicides and indigents and convicts and immigrants and unknowns at the cemetery should have some flowers, so I write this story on the last of our wildflower paper and I call it “My California” and I submerge its pages in shallow water and let them soak overnight. In the morning, I take the half-pulped story up to the Stranger’s Plot. As I’m packing the dirt over my words, a security truck rolls past on the road at the bottom of the slope, but the guard driving doesn’t slow down to ask me what I’m doing here. I don’t have to explain why I’m burying My California in the Stranger’s Plot.

TRY THIS: Write a braided essay in which you alternate between three threads—one present, one past, and one technical or instructional.

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Dear Ariel, Any tips for a mom with young kids who won’t sit still long enough for her to write—I mean, besides giving up her sleep or dosing them with Benadryl? Mama in Maine

Dear Mama in Maine, The question “can I be a mother and an artist?” has haunted me for decades. The logistics of time combined with the false binary we’ve been handed that tells us we have to choose between art and responsibility boggled my mind. But I’ve finally found the answer! It turns out we do have time to read and write and show up for our kids and other people in our circles of priority and hustle up enough money and sometimes wander around or rest, but we don’t also have time to scroll on social media, have inane conversations with strangers on planes, or spend another five minutes with an emotional or creative vampire. Cancel all uncreative, uninspiring timesucks. Sincerely, Aspiring Grandma Ariel

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PARENTS, CAREGIVERS, AND OTHER WORKERS UNITE! TRANSFORM THE NATURE OF TIME! The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years—response to others, distractibility for daily matters—stay with you, become you. The cost of “discontinuity” (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks, takes me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.

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—Tillie Olsen, Silences

hen my kids were young, most years I just accepted that summers were a wash unless I could afford some serious camp action. School hours held more promise. I had to keep reminding myself that the kids would eventually grow. Eventually they did grow. But I insisted on my creative life even when they were small. Some years are more creatively expansive than others, that’s for sure, but we keep on, keep finding new work-arounds, keep facing our lives as they are and seeing what we can do with what we have to work with. I love the fractured writing I did when my kids were babies. I envisioned a new aesthetic in literature—one in which we could hear the infant babbling right through the middle of 54

it. I did notice something different in my work when I started getting longer stretches of time to myself. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. I thought, It’s almost masculine, the writing. And then I laughed really hard because I realized the only change of circumstance was that I didn’t have a little kid interrupting me all the time. It all felt so either/or. Tomas Moniz, a grandfather and author of Big Familia, suggests reading to the kids as a way to begin to harmonize literature and caregiving. Once upon a time, grandfathers and mothers and other caregivers were intrinsic to the literary world. When I worked commute-jobs and when my kids were school-aged, time divided itself into schedules I couldn’t exert much control over. I learned to write early in the morning and late at night. I found places to write near the chess club meeting or the art class or the martial arts studio where my kids trained. I didn’t chat with the other parents and guardians. I found the quiet corners of the newsroom or college cafeteria and wore big fluffy earphones to silently cue “please leave me alone.” I’ve learned that if I can set aside some time for my own creative writing every day—even 20 minutes, but all the better a couple of hours—miraculous things happen. Still, I don’t do that consistently. I might be supporting my spouse at the cancer center or teaching an intensive or promoting another book. Or , for whatever reason, I’m not working on anything. I’ve learned that it’s all right to have periods of not-so-much writing. The all-the-time doing doing is a capitalist trap. We all know that. But after a week or a season, I wake up on a rainy Thursday morning obsessed with an idea about chicken-cats and underwater libraries in utopia and I write a lot at weird hours. If I have a deadline for a class or a writing group or an editor, that can propel me. I command myself to sit down and do it, inspiration or no. Even if I don’t have a deadline, I can follow a chicken-cat for quite some time. I start a lot of stories I don’t finish. 55

I write whole books I never publish. I get ideas for projects on Sunday evenings and I work madly on their beginnings all week and by Friday I’ve exhausted the whole concept. I like to think the exercise improved the quality of my week. But who knows? Am I soothing my anxiety or exasperating it with all this graphomania? I can never be sure. If I’m in a cabin by myself with nothing on my calendar and subsisting on coffee and fancy granola, I work into the night and press my imagination against the dawn. I like to explore the edges of mental exhaustion and give voice to what I discover. The chicken-cats have taken over the whole utopian island! Where did they come from? I’ve studied writers and asked writers and observed my own work cycles trying to figure out an ideal pattern, but both time and “ideal” whiz past, moving targets. Mostly I think if we want to make more time to write we can just get off social media and not watch TV. Stop answering your texts. It’s a rare bird who doesn’t have responsibilities outside creative work, but in an attention economy it’s more than just family and day jobs—it’s the constant clamor for our glance. Robot algorithms know exactly what will distract us. Social media bombards me with soft loungewear and anti-aging potions. This is the way surveillance capitalism steals our creative lives from us. The institutions of parenthood intensify all the pressures to get further sucked into consumerism. Resistance becomes a way of life. Maybe our kids wouldn’t have picked writer-parents, but that’s what they got and mostly they’ll be all right with chapbooks as their inheritance instead of the newest device. If you can cordon off a few days or more when you have nothing else to do, you can experiment with the quality of your ideas at different times of the day. If it’s more like you just have this one hour at lunch when you have childcare, then 56

you don’t have to worry about your schedule at all. Lunch hour will do just fine. You don’t even have to write. All you have to do is go somewhere by yourself and turn off your phone. Step outside the realm of consumerism. You can decide from there if you want to write or think about flowers or empty your mind of everything but a floating cloud and the piece of Styrofoam stuck to your shoe. Haruki Murakami says, “When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.” You can mesmerize yourself after the sun comes up, too. “I write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a shower,” Maya Angelou told The Paris Review in 1990, “because writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to do a double ablution. Then I go out and shop—I’m a serious cook—and pretend to be normal. I play sane—Good morning! Fine, thank you. And you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I have houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then after all the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning. And more often than not if I’ve done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three. That’s the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn’t work. And to blue pencil it. When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them—fifty acceptable pages—it’s not too bad.” Kurt Vonnegut, in a 1965 letter to his wife, summed up his days like this: “sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. I’m just as glad they haven’t consulted me about the tiresome details. What they have worked out is this: I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks 57

into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach or prepare. When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), and then slip off to sleep at ten. I do pushups and sit-ups all the time, and feel as though I am getting lean and sinewy, but maybe not. Last night, time and my body decided to take me to the movies. I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middleaged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.”

TRY THIS: Wake yourself up at some ungodly hour just to write a story. Somewhere in the piece, include an unstereotypical magical being or alien encounter.

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RELIEVE YOUR BABYSITTER 

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n Recollections of My Life as a Woman, the poet Diane di Prima tells of a night at Allen Ginsberg’s place in New York. She’d gotten a friend to babysit her young daughter and headed over to Ginsberg’s apartment because Jack Kerouac and Philip Whalen were in town for “one of those nights with lots of important intense talk about writing you don’t remember later.” Well, Diane had promised her babysitter that she’d be back at 11:30 that night, and 11:30 starts rolling around, so Diane bids her farewells. “Whereupon, Kerouac raised himself up on one elbow on the linoleum and announced in a stentorian voice: ‘di Prima, unless you forget about your babysitter, you’re never going to be a writer.’” How do you like that? Kerouac just props himself up with one arm and drunkenly slaps us with the great fear we all share. He embodies the archetype of the selfish, self-destructive male artist, and he announces that unless we, too, are willing to be irresponsible with our relationships, we’ll never quite measure up. “I considered this carefully, then and later,” di Prima writes, “and allowed that at least part of me thought he was right. But nevertheless I got up and went home.” Three cheers for di Prima! “I’d given my word to my friend,” she explains, “and I would keep it. Maybe I was never going to be a writer, but I had to risk it. That was the risk that was hidden . . . inside the other risk of: can I be a single mom and be a poet?” A serious question, that one. Serious not only for moms but for all of us. Can we be present in our relationships and still do the work we feel called to do? It’s like my friend Lynn says, “A woman has to make a real effort not to dissolve into everything that needs her.” Our relationships need us, but we don’t want to dissolve. We refuse to dissolve, but we also choose to be responsible to our relationships. We’re tired of the drunk guy on the linoleum telling us we can’t do both. Women 59

have always done both. Looking back, di Prima recognizes what is true: Had she opted to stay that night, “there would be no poems. That is, the person who would have left a friend hanging who had done her a favor, also wouldn’t have stuck through thick and thin to the business of making poems. It is the same discipline throughout.” The same discipline. And discipline, like motherhood, is good for the creative life. Poetry is good for the creative life. Responsibility to all our dysfunctional relationships is good. The archetype of the selfish male artist tells us that we can’t manage all these things at once, that we can’t be simultaneously responsible to children, babysitters, self, and art, that we have to sacrifice, to abandon—but we know that’s a lie. As I rework this chapter, Kerouac has been in his grave for more than 50 years. Diane di Prima died in 2020, living mostly in San Francisco after New York, mother of five children, author of thirty-five books of poetry and several memoirs, powerhouse, and twenty-first-century radical. We don’t need children to be happy, but motherhood and art have both taught me that to experience joy, we have to be able to honestly experience darkness, too. In responsibility to our relationships, we build bodies of memory and life experience that we can be proud of. In Revolutionary Letters, di Prima writes, “Be strong. We have the right to make the universe we dream. No need to fear ‘science’ groveling apology for things as they are, ALL POWER TO JOY, which will remake the world.” Three cheers for di Prima, for motherhood, for the courage to make the universe we dream. That courage can be a door.

TRY THIS: Write a story that highlights the tension between responsibility to writing or art and responsibility to relationships. Somewhere in your story, include the mention of a linoleum floor.

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TALKING TRASH ABOUT THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

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hich dead white man said, “When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished?” a) American novelist Philip Roth b) Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw

Milosz

c) American poet Walt Whitman You can look it up just as easily as I can. But here’s the thing: If you write memoir and you include characters other than yourself in your stories, you’re going to find yourself writing about other people. If you write fiction or a hybrid-genre and you include characters other than ones based very much on yourself, you’re going to find yourself writing versions of other people—some of whom you know and some of whom you have complicated relationships with. If we’re here to take back our stories, to break silences, then—by definition—some people aren’t going to like that. As a writer, you’re comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable and a lot of the comfortable aren’t going to like that. Our job as writers is to get it all out and then worry about publishing considerations. But the time does come to consider all the personal and occasionally legal questions. Should you publish the story of your child’s life-changing trauma? Can you name your father as the mastermind of a money-laundering scheme? Would your answer change based on whether he’s alive or dead? If you know your best friend’s secret cookie recipe, can you share it? Should you expose your mother-in-law in all her poor grammar? Would your answer change if she was a bigot? Does power matter? Can you write about domestic violence if you can’t disguise the perpetrator because you were legally 61

married? If your cousin, an abuse survivor, in turn abused you, and that has impacted your character—can you say so? Should you? These questions are personal and complicated. Libel in US law is very specific: It’s a published, false statement that damages a person’s reputation or ability to make a living. Defamation is the same thing, but it’s spoken. Both are no-nos. On the other hand, if what you write is true, it’s not libel. If what you say doesn’t injure the other person’s community standing or ability to make a living—if you slightly misquote them or say they didn’t like carrots when it was raspberries they hated, well, as long as they don’t make a living on the National Carrot Board, you’re fine. I mean, when in doubt, ask a lawyer. Don’t listen to me. Famous people who have placed themselves in the public light are not as fully-protected by libel laws unless they can prove “actual malice,” (wherein the famous person must prove you knew the statement was false or you showed a “reckless disregard for the truth”). So you can talk a lot of trash about The Rock without getting into trouble, but not about his kids, who remain private citizens until they bust out with their debut operas. The dead are not protected by defamation or libel laws, even if what you say amounts to complete bullshit. Likewise, telling the truth about your living friends, family members, exes, colleagues, and acquaintances isn’t illegal. And I used to feel like, Fuck everyone, it’s not libel! They can’t silence me! I will tell my story! More recently I’ve started to feel like, Well, maybe not every relationship is worth sacrificing for my aaarrrt.  I look at the power dynamics. If I’m writing about my kids, or even my disabled father, I feel a level of protection for their stories. As my daughter has pointed out, they are not writers and may not have realized they were characters while I plotted my memoir. If I’m writing about someone who had 62

power and abused it, I’m not going to worry about their feelings or whether they are writers. I think about the history of my experience with another person, but also the future of that relationship. For better or for worse, what I write, if the source character is recognizable, will become part of the legacy of our relationship. Maybe it will be an awesome part of the legacy! Some people feel hurt being left out of a story. Others will totally egg my house if I mention we once made out under a palm tree in the rain—even if they were super average and I report they were an amazing kisser. If we can’t obscure our characters’ identities, sometimes it might make sense to obscure our own. “I don’t think there’s a single piece I published under Elaine Richardson,” Jamaica Kindcaid, born Elaine Richardson, told The Paris Review in 2022. “I tried out a bunch of combinations, always an island with a Scottish-sounding last name. Jamaica Kincaid seemed like a good one. The way I justified it to myself at the time was that I didn’t want my parents to know I was writing, because I would be a failure and they would laugh at me. Also, I was writing about my mother, and I didn’t want her to know.” That said, if you experience any kind of public success with your writing, your family members and old drug dealers will eventually get wind of it. Kincaid said, “I now see the deeper reason why I changed my name was because Elaine couldn’t write about Elaine, but Jamaica can write about Elaine.” And that’s about the size of it. Writing is a constant code-switching flying scissor kick back and forth between hiding and revealing—hiding from ourselves and each other, exposing the truths we discover, striving for harmreduction in the poetry. Being an artist and being a journalist—the two roles every writer embodies in varying ratios—means being intimately engaged in an ever-morphing balance between hiding and being seen, between revealing and letting those sleeping dogs lie and lie and lie. It’s one thing to expose toxic secrets, but at what point do we betray a confidence? Is someone else’s alcoholism a public spectacle or a private struggle? What would have to happen to 63

push it across that ethical line? Where does hypocrisy fit into the equation? If I want to protect my cousin’s privacy, or protect myself from her Thanksgiving fury, so I recast her as a neighbor in my book, does my book traverse the genre-line into fiction? We each have to make these judgements ourselves, using our own evolving moral compasses. And it’s not just our ethics that evolve. Our standings within various power structures change, too. When we take back our power with our writing, we become more powerful. And so we have to learn to wield that newfound power with elegance. I once did a profile of an elder poet who quoted her age alternately as 87 and 91 and some other ages, too, and I thought it would have been funny to put that in—it was quite charming— but then I thought it might have to do with Alzheimer’s or senility and I didn’t want to make fun of something she wasn’t doing intentionally. So, it’s that edge we’re navigating—how not to let the guilty people off the hook, how to tell the truth about our lives, and yet how to keep ourselves out of legal hot water and more commonly out of interpersonal or ethical hot water. It’s okay to say, You know, I don’t want my writing to hurt someone else, so I’m not going to publish this. It’s also okay to say, You know, I’m sorry if this hurts you, but it’s my truth and it’s important to me to be able to express it. The secrets stop with me. When my mom was alive, I tried to protect myself from her rage by cleaning up her character. I had an entire round of edits on my memoir-novel Atlas of the Human Heart just focused on making sure it wouldn’t upset her—or overly expose her. Still, she blew a toilet gasket when she read that book, spewing psychic sewage through my house. You could say, Good thing you cleaned her up, Ariel! Or you could say, Why did you bother cleaning her up? After my mom died, I published another portrait, The End of Eve, this one set in a harsher light. I actually think she would have liked that book in a wicked noir kind of way, but she was dead, so I figured Who cares, right? Well, apparently some 64

of my mother’s pals were absolutely furious that I would write about a dead person who can’t even defend herself—can’t even threaten to sue her ungrateful child—and What is wrong with you, Ariel? While a subject holds the power, we fear their reaction. After we’re famous writers and they’re unable to speak, we could be accused of exploiting them. Still, I mostly stand by my story. I once wrote about a classic abusive alcoholic I knew back when I hadn’t met enough classic abusive alcoholics to see it as a super common archetype with a lot of red flags and I felt righteous and indignant and Who cares about his feelings, right? I saw it as my responsibility to warn the others! If he wanted to be written about in a positive light, maybe he should have quit drinking and acted better. I wrote my story. I published it. He didn’t read it, as far as I know. He died, the way alcoholics sometimes do. But his children and grandchildren remain very much alive. And despite his grand plans to become a much more famous writer than I’d ever be, he has left no written stories. My story has become the only published record of his character. When he was alive, due to age and physical strength, he did hold the power over me. Now that he’s dead I can see that there’s truth, too, in remembering the things that drew me to him. Now that I’m grown, I know how powerfully addiction can imprison a person. Maybe I should have obscured his identity more than I did. Maybe his kids need to wake up and accept the harm he inflicted. Maybe both truths hold. Maybe neither.  My daughter says, “Maybe it isn’t fair to non-writers who don’t realize you’re always plotting your memoir.” Should the rules change when we’re among writers? It’s one way we become famous and movements make themselves known—from the Paris Modernists to the Harlem Renaissance to the San Francisco Beats—writers wrote about each other and made each other into fabulous and complicated characters. Where would Gertrude Stein be if she didn’t allow herself to be turned into a character? 65

I always think it’s fun to write a “word portrait” of an acquaintance or intimate in tribute to Gertrude Stein—a pioneer of literary community and queer identity, she favored word portraits. I’ve been written about, too, and of course I hate it. I hated it when my stepdad included me in his sermons with some embarrassing anecdote about how I got lost on the way to the outhouse up at his cabin. But I also hated it when he barely included me in his autobiography. I felt left out. Had I not been important to him? I hated it when my ex wrote about me in this really romanticized way like I was some kind of sea-apparition who walked through walls but, you know, it could have been worse. Here’s how to deal: 1) Start publishing short pieces in small publications early—this way you can get used to writing about your complex relationships and other people can get used to being written about and you can experiment and find a sweet spot in the context of publishing these lowerstakes projects. 2) Get yourself written about so you can remember all the ways it smarts and all the ways it makes you feel happy and attended to and continue with your project in the spirit of both truth and compassion. Bonus: You’ll start to make yourself famous and create a lasting mystique! 3) Edit people out of your life who are going to police your writing for no other reason than they’re jealous that you’re doing something creative with your time. 4) When in doubt, call it fiction and hope for the best. 5) Remember, You can’t please everybody.

TRY THIS: Write it both ways. Write a short piece in which you leave out someone or something important. Write it again telling the whole story. Notice the effect. 66

Dear Ariel, In the acknowledgements page of The End of Eve, you wrote, “Many people’s names and a few people’s identifying characteristics have been changed to protect their privacy.” How do you change/fictionalize elements of your story and still maintain the integrity of what actually happened? Sincerely, Earnest in El Paso Dear Earnest, If people feel strongly about not being named, you have to consider that. Is it necessary to identify them? If not, you can find alternatives that allow for the most integrity, and then you have to be honest about what you’ve done—in an author’s note or in the acknowledgements, for example. Often the truth about a character is what makes them compelling to us as writers, but sometimes it doesn’t change the integrity of a story to turn a Jungian psychiatrist into a vegan baker. This can serve to protect their identity from their friends and licensing boards without impacting our stories terribly. We all make mistakes around these issues. The practice is to be thoughtful and transparent, to accept that there are no perfect answers, and to keep on with the effort.  In Writing Solidarity, Ariel

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YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE GOOD (BUT YOU CAN’T BE HALF-ASSED) Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never achieve it.

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—Salvador Dali our writing doesn’t have to be “good.” That’s the thing.

Here’s my first story I still have a copy of. My mother transcribed it for me before I could write the words myself: The ocean shone white and blue while Little Red Riding Hood was watching it. The sun was almost to land on the ground. Run, run, run, run. Then she went home and her mother said, “Take these cookies to your grandma.” Then she met a wolf. But it wasn’t a wolf, it was her Daddy. So, maybe it’s half-plagiarized and a little creepy, but I wrote it when I was four years old, so it exists in a field out past “good” or “bad.” Maybe even out past creepy. We all want our stories to be “good” in that we want to share them with other people and we want to make those other people feel excited or scared or otherwise emotionally engaged.  My old writing teacher at Foothill College in California, a boxer named Floyd Salas, said: “All considerations of language, of ideas, of symbols and metaphors serve only one function: to convey the soul of a living being to the soul of other living beings and in that process break us out of our isolation and loneliness and put us in touch with the universal spirit.” 68

We want to be “good” enough to convey our living beings to the souls of other living beings. We want to get in touch with that universal spirit. We want to control the narrative, for once. But then our other wants start sneaking in like rodents: We want to get an A-plus. We want our parents to love us. We want Reese Witherspoon to notice us. We want social media to light up and call us a Literary Genius and Homecoming Queen while they’re at it. We want the bullies who have harmed us to pay with public shame. We want to make millions in cryptocurrency or real estate—we’ll take either one. We want a midcentury modern house overlooking the beach in Malibu, damnit. Someone has to live in those places. Oh, Little Red, we want the ocean to shine while we’re watching it! We want to change the world with our words. Is all this so much to ask? In 1968, the poet Muriel Rukeyser inquired and promised: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” We’ve been telling the truth, Muriel. Did the world split open? Some days I think it did. Cr-ack. Like some mystical egg. Other days it feels like not so much. Still, I know the truth is more important than “good.” Lavishing your creative life with your precious resource of time is more important than “good.”

TRY THIS: Write a true story you’ve never told before. Somewhere in your story, include an image from a fairy tale or from a story you were told as a child. You don’t have to share what you write with anyone else, but you may. Put your full creative effort into this little story, but let what you come up with exist out past your judgements of “good” or “bad.”

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START SHORT

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ay particular attention to the beginning and the end.

People say to me, “Ariel, I’ve been told I should write a book.” (This is not usually a fantastic reason to write a book.) Or they say to me, “Ariel, I’ve always wanted to write a book.” (This is a much better reason to write a book.) And they ask me, “Ariel, Where do I begin?” I don’t want to be rude, but I wonder, Have you written a short story? Or an essay? Or a blog? A Haiku? Here’s a minimalist poem: I’ve given a lot My spine hurts. Good luck. Books are my preferred medium both as a reader and writer. Books give me a lot of room to look at my obsession from a hundred and eight different angles. Books are the medium most disconnected from the marketplace and as such don’t tend to have pop-up ads or intrusive commercials or pictures of underweight women who’ve just been shipwrecked and now want me to buy clothing made with exploited labor. That said, books aren’t the only spicy taco in town. Books are time-consuming projects—a book usually takes a few years, anyway, and another few years to get out into a reader’s hands. Many books take longer. You wouldn’t learn to play the violin by putting on a symphony unless you were just really zany like that. Likewise, a book project doesn’t provide a great place for the average cat to learn how to write. Start with something shorter. Learn your way around structure, get to know your own voice. See if you enjoy 70

connecting into other characters’ voices. Try your hand at research. Experiment with pantoum, the repetitive poetry form. You don’t need a fancy education, but if you want to write a long-form project, you have to make it your business to learn how to write a sentence. Begin with a sentence. Begin with an attempt at defining what a sentence even is. I was taught that the most powerful placements in a sentence come at the beginning and the end. If you need to employ any boring words, tuck them into the middle. Likewise, the most powerful placements in a paragraph come at the beginning and the end. The most powerful placements in a book come at the beginning and the end. The sentence and the paragraph will teach you everything you need to know. They are the microcosm; they can be the lab. Nerd out on punctuation, so you can be clear. Good punctuation doesn’t have to conform to the Standard Edited English they teach in school. Rather, good punctuation creates and underlines your meaning for your reader. Use it to learn how to manage rhythm, tone, and impression. Read your sentences out loud to yourself. Start reading like a writer. Let writer pals read your works-in-progress out loud to you, too, if they’re willing. Return the favor. Stop being writer pals with anyone who makes you feel badly about your writing. Pay attention to your favorite writers’ sentences. Pay attention to the sentences’ role in pacing. Pay attention to the balance between sentences devoted to building scenes, where the writer is creating a cinematic sequence with sensory details that animate the falling rain, and sentences devoted to stating or “telling” in which the writer has already digested what happened and isn’t going to drag us through the whole horrible dinner just to report back that Uncle Bob is a loud-mouthed bigot. Write a paragraph. Write a fragment.

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Write your whole book concept in the form of a 5-7-5 syllable Haiku. Here’s mine:  Liberate your voice Against gatekeeper culture Wayward and fearless

TRY THIS: Write a haiku about a short-lived crush that you or your character nevertheless did something embarrassing for. Expand your haiku into a short story that comes in under 1,000 words. Pay particular attention to the beginning and the end

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Part Two: Other Building Materials, Mostly Salvaged You have the power to shape worlds and the monsters are afraid of you. —Charlie Jane Anders 73

LET US LEAVE “PRE-DOOR TRAGEDY” BEHIND 

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n dramatic and prose writing, we’re always interested in doors. In the ways doors act as borders. In the ways we might open doors or close them, step through them or destabilize them.

I imagine my old door as the portal to The School for Wayward Writers. The handle feels cool to the grip. I imagine you’re here because you have a story to tell. What is the color of your hesitation? After Mark Hartley rescued my door from the bulldozers of my sense of belonging, my life began to change. Now I had my door. At first, I couldn’t explain why this mattered any more than whether a sheep had eaten a rose, but then I happened upon an essay called “Behind the Screen Door” by Columbia theater prof Arnold Aronson and here’s how he put it: “We do not think of the door as an invention, yet I would suggest that it is the most profound technological and scenographic development in the history of theatre. It is such an obvious device that it is hard to conceive theatre without it. Yet when Greek tragedy emerged at the end of the sixth century BCE, there were no doors on the stage. Of course there were doors in ancient Athens, but in a society that conducted much of its business, both commercial and political, in the open air, the door did not loom so large. And strange as it may seem, it was decades before someone thought of putting a door on the stage. Pre-door tragedy was a very different kind of drama from that which was to follow in the post-door era. There were practical implications in the introduction of doors, changes to the structure and rhythm 74

of the drama; but there were also profound implications on a metaphoric, symbolic, and philosophical level as a result of this seemingly simple and innocuous development.” My mind boggled. Pre-door and post-door eras? And didn’t he mean we were currently in the door era? Wouldn’t post-door suggest the era after doors? Either way—the most profound technological and scenographic development in the history of theatre? My life, like the history of theater, I decided, could be separated into my pre-door, door, and post-door eras. Rescuing my door had morphed it from its role as a simple physical entryway. Now it had become drama, it had become metaphor. Now my door could become art. My unhinged door still has its glass doorknob on the inside. In The Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes, “How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome, and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.” “In the world of sitcoms,” Arnold Aronson writes, “but equally true in drama since ancient times, the door is a barrier: a bulwark against the chaos that lurks just beyond. But it is an easily transgressed border, and the forces of disorder slip in with ease to disrupt the illusory status quo. At the end of each episode, harmony and balance are temporarily and tentatively restored; the door is closed again until next week and the homes and lives of the characters are left in fragile limbo.”

TRY THIS: Tell the story of your life in doors. Make a list of significant doors that come to mind from various eras of your life—literal doors. Picture each door and jot down any notes. When you picture a particular door, which 75

side of it are you on? What is the temperature and the quality of the light on your side of the door? Is there someone on the other side? Does the door have a speakeasy grill? A doorbell? How does it feel to open or close this door? Do you have a key? Does it creak? What has this door meant to you or the other characters who pass through it in terms of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome, and respect? Add a few metaphorical doors to your list if you like— ones you’ve closed and opened. Are there any doors you wish you could re-open? Now, intuitively pick five of these doors from your lists and write the story of your life in these five doors. End each door story with an image of closure if you can. Are harmony and balance at least temporarily restored? Or is there something else going on?

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REMEMBER YOUR STRENGTH 

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y stepdad woke me before sunrise. At the butcher-block table in the kitchen, we ate granola with honey and yogurt.

I showered under scorching water, got dressed in jeans with corduroy patches on the knees. I slung my backpack over my shoulder, headed outside to the curb. My stepdad had already loaded the old green Dodge Dart and we climbed in and drove east from the Bay Area. Sometimes the cops pulled my stepdad over for going too slow and when they realized who he was said, “My goodness. I’m so sorry, Father Duryea.” It was like he had this translucent forcefield of safety around him. My stepdad had baptized a lot of people, forgiven a lot of people, performed their weddings and counseled them about their divorces. We stopped for lunch in Jackson, an old-west saloon town full of antique shops and wooden bear statues. As the afternoon tinted things orange, we took the winding road up into the high country. At the Kit Carson convenience store, I bought Screaming Yellow Zonkers and hid them in my daypack, under the co-op trail mix. We hiked the couple of miles through lodgepole pines, over granite boulders that skinned my knees and made them taste like salt, around the edge of the cold indigo lake to the cabin my stepdad built with his dad and his brother. It made my brain stretch and ripple to think of my stepdad and his family building structures from the ground up. Sitting out on the wooden porch, we ate liverwurst on rye, tossed scraps of crust 77

onto a rounded rock to lure the chipmunks. We gazed across the blue water to the giant volcanic peak. I said, “How about if we canoe across and climb Thunder Mountain?” And my stepdad said, “That sounds like a fine idea, Chickadee.”  It’s easy to get stuck writing only about the times in our lives when we didn’t feel strong or secure—the experiences that shook us or embarrassed us or traumatized us or broke our hearts. These are the moments we’re still trying to make sense of. Writing can help us with sense-making. But it’s swell to carry stories of strength and support, too. Real characters like us are complicated.  I wore my red crewneck T-shirt, paddled in front of the canoe as my stepdad and I careened through the cold water faster than the motorboats. “Fooey on the motorboats,” my stepdad said. And I rested my paddle on my lap for a while and let him do the work. 

TRY THIS: Make a quick list of five images that come to mind from early in your life when you felt strong or resilient—perhaps a moment in nature or a time when you made something, alone or with someone you could trust. After you’ve got the short list of images, write down a tree that also comes to you from early in your life. Now, look over your list of strong moments and your tree. Set a timer for eight minutes. Pick a moment on your list that brings to mind a vivid image and write the scene, animating the memory. It’s okay to invent the details surrounding the moment—even to the point that it becomes total fiction.  When your time is up, quickly add a sentence about your tree. It’s okay if the piece feels random or nonsensical. 78

My tree is an oak with a secret house nestled in its broad trunk. A tree can be a door. A door can be salvaged.

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PORTAL THROUGH TIME

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couple of years ago I got a reading from a psychic at HausWitch, a magical modern metaphysical shop in Salem, Mass. The young reader in her bright red shirt smiled, excited on my Zoom screen. She said, “Your ancestors were newspaperwomen of the Wild West! They want you to write about them!” I laughed. Newspaperwomen of the Wild West? I knew who she was talking about. I’d just never thought of them that way. They did the kind of work a lot of women writers of their class and era did. My great grandmother Georgia was the society editor of The Billings Gazette until she got married in 1911. My great grandmother Rosalba wrote travel stories for the Sunday magazine section of The Anaconda Standard. She collected her dispatches from a trip to Europe between the World Wars and published them as a limited-edition Impressions of Europe, designed by her brother and published by the same company they all worked for in their company town. In an author’s note, she wrote, “The following impressions of Europe appeared in serial form in the magazine sections of the Sunday editions of The Anaconda Standard during the autumn of 1927. They were written in the same spirit in which this little book is published, that my friends may share with me the impressions that remain after a delightful and interesting journey.” I like to think I write for the same reason my greatgrandmother Rosalba did, so that my friends may share with me the impressions that remain after a delightful and interesting journey. I try to read my great-grandmother’s book once every decade or so, just to see if she’s left me any important 80

hidden messages. Usually she has. For example: The traveler need not a critical peevishness, but a cheerful attitude and an optimistic adaptability—and a raincoat. Leaving messages and small reminders for an as-yetunborn great-granddaughter strikes me as an excellent reason to write.  I might take a page from her book. A page can be a door. An ancestor can be salvaged. In 1927, my great-grandmother Rosalba was impressed by how fast the transatlantic boats had gotten, and psyched to make “as reverent a pilgrimage as I have ever made” to Shakespeare’s birthplace and breathe the air of “this man who had talked to me, and a thousand years could not make him less real.” My great-grandmother worried about “the cureall of communism” and lamented that lasting peace “was only a hope—only a chimera.” My great grandmother doesn’t mention that her husband, my great grandfather, a Germanspeaking Californian and then the chief metallurgist of the Anaconda Copper Company, was also Ashkenazi. That’s what I imagine I’d worry about—cruising Jewish through Germany and Italy. But I guess that’s how it was in ’27. Virginia Woolf and her Jewish husband, Leonard, brushed off the idea that they shouldn’t be traveling in Germany as late as 1935. Wealth and passports provide a level of protection. Leonard also carried a kitten-sized monkey on his shoulder. Still, shit can change fast.

TRY THIS: Write a short piece of fiction or embellished nonfiction centering a real or imagined ancestor of yours. Somewhere in your story, travel through time to talk to them or allow a message they have sent to reach you in the present. This time-travel may have 81

a mystical or sci-fi quality to it, or you could stick to a realist historical fiction aesthetic. Maybe the “you” character in the story will be represented by someone who would have been around back then—a passing newspaper boy, say. Perhaps your old ancestor is creating a message they hope you’ll find.

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BRING HONOR WHERE THERE HAS BEEN SHAME 

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very day for 100 days, I gave myself the same prompt: Write the shamed. Write what felt shameful.

I wrote vignettes from life, some exaggerated into emotional truths that probably never “happened.” I wrote imagined biographies of other femmes. I wrote fairy tales. I wrote the truth. I wanted to get to know shame on a sensory level.  What did it smell like? It smells like sour breast milk leaking through my bra. What did it taste like? It tastes like the sediment at the bottom of a bottle of cheap Barefoot merlot. What did it sound like? It’s shrill, a dying bird—I try to block out that sound. What did it feel like? All my skin and the walls of my fastbeating heart wrapped in hot tin foil. What was the color of shame? Red. Always red. I wanted to understand shame in a biological and ethical framework, too. Where did it come from? Did it have a real psychological utility? Did families and subcultures evolve to push people out who we thought made the rest of the group unsafe? What personal divergence could be horrible enough— or minor enough—to make a person’s own family members pretend they didn’t exist? I collected my daily writing fragments and called my work-in-progress Shame Theory. As I worked with the sentences and paragraphs and chapters, it turned into a novel/memoir, a story about a queer teen mom named Ariel Gore. 83

I didn’t realize when I started working with the shame prompts that so many of the stories would come from my early 20s. When I noticed that they did, I started consciously structuring the book around my four years of college. Shame went to college. I liked that as an organizing principle.  I began noticing the difference between shame that springs from our own self-betrayal and the shame that’s put on us from the outside. Queerness, people used to tell me, could actually kill old people—just to hear it mentioned would kill them. They’d say, you know, “You can tell me, but it would kill your grandmother.” Like a bullet? I wondered. Or more like slow poison? Would she suffer? As if this basic personal thing about me constituted a lethal violence against my beautiful tipsy grandmother. Shame can be a door. Doors are supposed to protect us, but sometimes they only protect other people. Sometimes when we open the door, a story pours out. In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes, “You showed me an essay about butches and femmes that contained the line, ‘to be femme is to give honor where there has been shame.’ . . . I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty. You said I misunderstood what you meant by honor. We haven’t yet stopped trying to explain to each other what these words mean to us; perhaps we never will.”

TRY THIS: Make a list of once-shamed things you would like to bring honor and/or honesty to in your writing. Set your timer for eight minutes. Shame can become a building material. (I’m still here with you if you feel afraid.

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All the writers of now and through history are right here with you. It’s okay to keep some parts of yourself hidden until you feel stronger. It’s okay to get stronger.)

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STAND UP FOR WHO & WHAT YOU LOVE 

H

anging out with my old artist-friend Joe Zirker when he was in his early 90s, we got talking about fathers. My son had recently brought it to our attention that he’d always thought Joe was my dad. Joe sat in a white T-shirt under a fan.

I told him about the way my biological father used to embarrass me when he showed up at my elementary school dressed in the paint-splattered suit pants and tattered yellow raincoat he’d been wearing all month, muttering rhyming nonsense and chain smoking Kool menthols. All the normal girls at Addison Elementary bugged their normal-girl eyes and gawked, “What’s wrong with your daaad?” My old friend Joe nodded.  “I can understand that.” He looked down at the hardwood floor. “You know, my dad was the only sign maker in Merced, California, a small town in those days—maybe 10,000 people in the 1930s. He was deaf-mute, like my mom, so when the kids ran by while he was hanging a sign, they’d yell at him, they’d yell, ‘Dummy!’ And of course he couldn’t hear them but he knew. He knew what they were saying. I’d defend my father, I’d yell at those kids, ‘He’s no dummy! He’s a very smart man!’ But you know, as I grew up, when I found my little set of boys at school, I stopped defending my dad. I didn’t want the other kids to think I was different from them. I didn’t want them to call me a dummy. So I didn’t say anything at all.” My old friend looked out the window. He wiped his hands on his slouch pants, scooted back in his chair. “That’s the kind of thing kids have to do.”

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I think that’s one of the reasons I love my old friend Joe: He can feel compassion for his father, who he may have hurt back then, and compassion for his little-kid-self at the same time. Artists and writers do well to sit with their own divergent compassions.  

TRY THIS: Write a quick scene or vignette—fiction or memoir—that shows the conflict between standing up for who and what you love and feeling ashamed by it.  Remember that it’s always okay to set your timer for 10 minutes and write whatever comes to mind after you read the assignments.

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MEET YOUR REAL MOTHER

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ou sometimes hear literary types refer to Saint Augustine as “the father of memoir,” what with his endless Confessions to God written more than 1500 years ago. Well, if Saint Augustine was the father of memoir, I think he was a pretty absent father.  I don’t relate to the connection, anyway.

I think it’s obvious that contemporary memoir— contemporary American memoir in particular—can trace a direct lineage from the enslavement and freedom narratives of the late-1700s to early 1900s. Back when white memoirists were mostly still structuring their books as diaries or, you know, pulling a Thoreau out by the pond, enslavement and freedom narratives took a more literary and socially engaged approach. The narratives were autobiographical, and included eyewitness accounts of the experience of enslavement, but authors used the tools of the novelist—allegory and symbolism, recurring themes and character arc—to tell their stories. Just like with contemporary memoirs, some lean more into fiction than others, but they share an implicit purpose: To expose the nightmare of slavery, to show and tell as an argument for abolition, to map a path to liberation, and to unpack the meaning of freedom. They often end with the narrator taking on a new name; a name they choose themselves. Enslavement and freedom narratives were precursors to the styles of mid-century war memoirs that came later and exposed other true things about experience. Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred flowed consciously from the freedom narrative’s influences. By the time the memoir genre exploded into a big crazy dance party in the 1990s, literary tradition had so completely absorbed this narrative pattern—and the habit 88

of systematically not crediting Black people—that it promptly forgot where it came from.  I’m not saying all memoirs must recount harrowing experiences and liberation. I’m saying is you’ll learn a lot more about the literary tradition of memoir by reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup than you will reading all thirteen volumes of St. Augustine’s confessions. Whatever the genre you want to write in, dig around in the marginalized histories. Your true predecessors may not be the ones who get the credit.

TRY THIS: Tell a story about yourself that ends with you taking on a new name, nickname, handle, or identity in an act of independence. Feel free to fictionalize your story, but make it believable.

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I (HEART) APPLE-ORANGES

“I

t’s apples and oranges,” my undergrad journalism professor said. She wore John Lennon glasses, parted her long black hair in the middle.

I bit my scarred lip, trying to decide between staying on at Mills for an MFA. in fiction or going to journalism school at UC Berkeley. I’d gotten used to surviving as a single mom in academia and I didn’t think I could make ends meet without the student loans that subsidized my welfare checks before my daughter started kindergarten. I leaned toward the MFA program. Journalism school appealed to me as a place where I could write more about politics and economics, but I worried they’d start hassling me about “objectivity.” My favorite writers were the feminist poets and essayists who wrote across genres—Tillie Olsen had written “I Stand Here Ironing,” which I considered the best short story ever penned and the nonfiction book Silences, a culture-changing interrogation of race, class, and gender in literature and publishing. She wrote about our inner lives and our outer lives. But now I felt like my own educational path asked me to choose between the “creative” and the “fact-based.” In the end my choice was financial: The oranges were cheaper than the apples. I went to J-School for in-state tuition. I’d started my zine Hip Mama senior year at Mills College and published a few issues. I saw that publication as part literary journal, part feminist rag—a parenting magazine where instead of “experts” telling mothers what to do, writer-mamas could tell their own stories. I figured I could make journalism my thing. So, I walked toward the old wood-shingled building on the north gate of the UC Berkeley campus and the air smelled of eucalyptus and the sky held pale summer blue.

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J-School started out the way you’d expect: A semester of hardcore daily newspaper journalism set up in a kind of bootcamp atmosphere run by a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee. I found myself pressing into a police station questioning the chief about why he still had a cop on the force who’d been convicted of taking a bribe in another state. I tried to expose a pay-off to a school board member who voted to close the elementary in the flats and not the one in the hills. We all worked in the newsroom late into the night and no one minded that my daughter slept under the table in her Barney the Dinosaur costume and we put out this paper that was only for us—no one really got their news from it. It was a laboratory. We wrote the who, what, where, when, and the most dramatic details in the beginning—that’s the lede—and then we worked down through the less important facts and into the boring. The style was called “the inverted pyramid” which is funny to think about now because I’ve used that term very differently in my fiction theory, which we’ll talk about later, but this inverted pyramid had been developed so that when people were laying out physical newspapers in columns using paste, they could just cut from the bottom of a story to make it fit. Likewise, the reader could get the most important information before the next train stop. Newspaper style imagined limited space for type and a busy reader. Motherhood had already taught me how to function without sleep. Now I learned to write to a late-night deadline. I learned to write in a way that could be cut from the bottom. I seriously recommend putting out a community newspaper or newsletter for six months just to give yourself that schooling. But even as I trained in the daily news, I understood that I would probably never work in it. My colleagues would go off to summer internships. I was still a single mom with custody restrictions. In what felt like an even clearer deal-breaker, my political reporting professor suggested I leave Hip Mama off my resume in an attempt to obscure my politics. But Hip Mama was my pride and joy! In Hip Mama, I published first-time teen poets alongside established bestselling authors and everyone lifted each other up. 91

Why would I leave it off? Of course I knew why. But I still wanted to be myself and survive.  I bit my lip harder, tried to put the dilemma out of my mind. When the rains started, I signed up for magazine journalism. I saw myself powering through this master’s degree whether or not I’d ever use it. I’d been a star writer in my undergrad program at Mills and plenty good enough here, so I volunteered to pre-submit my first assignment for day-one critique. My wiser classmates filed in, closing their black umbrellas, and took their seats. Then the old man sauntered through the doorway in a loose tie and fedora like some kind of private detective. His jaw jutted awkwardly to one side. His eyes sparkled like someone accustomed to getting a lot of attention. “Who’s Gore?” I raised my hand, shy and hopeful. He tossed my paper on the table, shook his head. “Terrible.”  I bit right through my lip, tasted the salt. I could hear my heartbeat loud in my chest. A bird hit the glass and everyone at the table jerked their head to look at the gridded window, then looked back at me as if no bird had hit the glass. This old dickweed of a professor opened his palms, held them up to the fluorescents. “You got your colorful lede, you got your nut-graph with the details, and it’s downhill from there.” I didn’t say anything. He took off his hat, set it next to him on the black table. “What’s your point of view, Gore?” Who was this guy? 92

Turned out he was Clay Felker, founding editor of New York Magazine who’d also funded and distributed the first issue of Ms. Magazine. Former editor of Esquire and The Village Voice, too. He’d come to Berkeley to launch The Clay Felker Magazine Center and I’d walked right into his humiliation trap. I mean, this old man ripped into my work. He called it dry as Saltines, then quipped that he’d only funded Ms. Magazine because “Glo Glo Steinem” had nice legs. My tongue felt hot in my mouth. My unhappiness tasted like iodine. Glo Glo Steinem? I seethed through the rest of that class, silent. I wondered if the bird outside had died. I cursed all old white men in this crotchety creep’s name. I had a kindergartener at home and a zine to work on and I didn’t have time to completely rewrite my assignment, for god’s sake. Not for this asshole, anyway. Clay pounded the newsroom table: “You need the scene-setting and the characterization, you need the passion. You need the tools of the novelist to tell this story!” The tools of the novelist? I thought I’d left fiction writing behind when I decided to come to J-School. But Clay Felker had other visions. He championed “the nonfiction novel” a la Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. He encouraged invented details.  The covers of Hip Mama that I’d thought of as cute would now be viewed through the lens of my “cover policy,” and my writing would have to start sounding, well, not more like Felker, but more like Gore. Elizabeth Crow, then editor of Mademoiselle, said, “his voice, his personality, his superhuman animation were horrifying, of course, but they were also the best part of working with him.” 93

When he founded New York Magazine, Clay envisioned “New Journalism” in direct response to the rise of television. As the culture became more visual, writing would have to become more visual. If television held people’s attention, writing would have to hold it for longer. Clay was interested in audiences, in competing with movies, in creating publications by and for subcultures and affinity groups, in inventing and adapting new styles of writing to meet whatever moment we find ourselves in. And so it was that an old white man with his Midwesternertakes-New-York honk and his smirking sexist banter ushered me into the world of fiction/journalism hybridity and promised me that yes, I could be myself and survive. I can see Clay Felker in my mind’s eye now, a merman in the pale green San Francisco Bay. With his fedora and his booming tenor and that great chin, he’s calling out, “Gore! Don’t make me sound like a saint!” And I’m calling back, “Don’t worry! If you were alive, what I’ve written would get you fired!” And for whatever damaged reasons of our own we both laugh at that. Clay lived in the Berkeley hills with his wife, the writer Gail Sheehy. You had to plead your case on the intercom just to get in the front gate. A couple of other students and I would be sitting there in the living room with Clay, gawking at their view of the Golden Gate Bridge, and Gail would sashay in, wearing a white tennis dress. I didn’t know what to make of it all. I just thought, Far Out. Sometimes I’d go up to their place with my 5-yearold daughter dragging a big yellow toy truck behind her and we’d sit down at the live-edge modern coffee table and gaze out that picture window and out across the bay and we’d eat three pounds of stilton between the two of us. Clay and Gail had the best cheese. They must have thought we were so weird.

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Gail asked me if I was from California and I nodded. She’d interviewed my mother and godmother for her 1976 book, Passages, actually. “Ah, yes,” Gail kind of tossed back her auburn feathered hair and sighed when I told her their names. “I remember them well.” And then she disappeared, maybe to procure more cheese. Clay picked up his drink, let the ice cubes clink for drama. I wondered if he’d had part of his jaw removed or if that’s just how it angled. I didn’t know then that Clay had cancer, that he saw this magazine center as his legacy project. He said, “Gore, you’ve got an attitude. You’re not fooling anyone with this even-handed reporting. Your audience already knows what’s going on—they read the news faster than you can get there. Your job is to interpret the news in the ways only you can. You gotta ask yourself, What does it mean? What does it mean for the subcultures I care about? What’s the symbolism? You gotta ask yourself, What am I interested in? And you gotta write about that. It sounds selfish, but that’s what you gotta do.” He set down his drink, held up one finger, then pointed it at me. He said, “No one’s gonna invest in your career but you, Gore—the time, the money—your writing better damn well be something you’re passionate about.” I’d never met a guy who talked like that. I thought he sounded straight out of some noir film. Better damn well was right. He said, “You just hang on, Gore. I’m bringing Milton out here.” Well, I’d certainly never heard of any Milton, but nodded like I had, and the very next week in walks Milton Glaser with his bird face and his striped sweater—a kind of queer-looking Mister Rogers—I mean, these cats were so New York. And as far as Clay and Milton were concerned, Chez Panisse was the only restaurant in the entire city of Berkeley. Like it would have been screwball to even consider going anyplace else. So, here we were now with our lettuce-wrapped baked goat cheese, and bird-faced Milton says, “The I (Heart) New York slogan I did for 95

New York Magazine was the most banal thing I’ve ever done and honestly it’s the thing I’ll always be remembered for.” He shook his head as if he could never run away from it, as if he were not the one bringing it up. I felt stoned. I thought, Someone invented the “I (Heart) New York” slogan? But of course someone had invented it. And I liked that word, banal. I mean, obviously Milton Glaser was super proud of his I (Heart) New York slogan or he wouldn’t be bragging about it over mushroom crostini at this grand table at Chez Panisse, but somehow it all worked when he tossed in the word banal. And somehow it made me feel safe to know that even Milton Glaser had low self-esteem. Milton said he got paid to design grocery stores and he designed the contemporary stores after Roman piazzas because “human beings could no longer endure the tyranny of the aisles.” I almost spat out my chilled cucumber soup. The tyranny of aisles? Now that I thought about it, grocery stores did use to just have these long, endless aisles. Contemporary grocery stores had olive stations and florists and bakery kiosks. Had this same person who invented I (heart) New York also invented grocery store kiosks? He gestured toward a four-column magazine page on the table between us and he quivered his hands in the air and he said, “Again with the tyranny of the aisles!”  It had not crossed my mind that magazines might need olive stations and bakery kiosks and florists, but now I could never unsee that truth. Writing isn’t just sound and rhythm and ink on a page—writing is shapes and margins and emptiness. Writing is aisles and kiosks. Writing is doors we aren’t afraid to take a chisel to when necessary. I wanted to get that tattooed on my wrist: Again with the tyranny of the aisles! Just as a reminder. Could we structure magazine articles and design their layouts as Italian piazzas? 96

This kind of riddle kept me happily up at night, long after my daughter had drifted into dreamtime and I’d met my deadlines for the day. What could it even mean? To structure writing and design pages like piazzas? This Clay Felker and Milton Glaser dynamic encompassed a whole worldview. What would it look like to put a piazza in a zine? What is the literary equivalent of a kiosk? Clay lifted his drink and said, “Never before in the history of journalism education have design and writing come together.” And he and Milton clinked glasses and their eyes sparkled like glass. There was a lot I didn’t like about those guys, to be honest. But they showed me what it looked like to control your own narrative. They wanted to be the ones to tell the story of New York. They didn’t ask anyone’s permission to be themselves. Neither of them liked to write. But they had a vision, they wanted to change the culture, and they had the confidence to try and do it. That’s how they succeeded. Part of being a writer, I was learning, would always be about stepping into our own authority—whatever that looks like. Remember: It’s OK to learn things f rom people who aren’t like you. Clay pushed a videotape across the table in my direction. “Why don’t you review this one, Gore? Let me know if she’s a hot little number.” He grinned. I rolled my eyes imperceptibly, inside my heart. By now I understood that referring to women as potential “hot little numbers,” was just Clay’s way of teaching me how not to lose my feminist cool in front of The Man. I picked up the video, left the men to pay the bill, and I headed home to make mac and cheese for all the kids who lived 97

in our fourplex in Oakland. After they’d eaten and watched Aladdin and curled into their soft blanket forts, I slipped the video into my cracked VCR and watched Anna Daevere Smith perform Twilight: Los Angeles. A playwright and actor who interviews people, arranges their monologues dramatically, and performs them verbatim, Smith had recorded hundreds of Los Angelinos’ experiences in the aftermath of the 1992 L.A. uprising—and she’d turned them into a one-woman “documentary theater” performance. I sat mesmerized, watching her perform across race and gender and power lines. I made notes for my radiant review, but more than that, sitting there in the flickering dark next to a blanket fort full of sleeping children, I felt great hope. If Anna Daevere Smith could be a journalist and a playwright and a scholar and a performance artist, maybe I could be several things, too. Maybe I could be myself and survive. Because a political documentary can be a one-woman show. A piazza can be a door. An orange can be an apple.

TRY THIS: Pick a current or historical event and find three perspectives on it. These perspectives may come from interviews with people impacted by what happened, news media articles, or other sources. Collage these accounts of the event into a short play.

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ONE HAS TO APPLY Interview with Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, Poet Laureate of Santa Fe

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’d read the excellent journalism of Darryl Lorenzo Wellington and noticed he lived in my town, so when I saw he was giving a reading I headed over to Teatro Paraguas to have a listen. This guy could really command a room. I figured, he can do journalism, he can do poetry, Darryl? Can you write me a noir fiction story for the Santa Fe Noir anthology I’m putting together? He said he’d try. He said nice to meet you. He wrote “The Homeless Detective” set in and out of the Interfaith Community Shelter housed in an old pet store on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe. What’s the ideal education for a poet? An education is just another experience. You’ll get an education somehow, or another. Any education is fine as long as it doesn’t weigh you down with so much baggage that you can’t leave it behind.  Maybe you got an MFA. Maybe you got a really prestigious MFA. What’s most important is that the experience doesn’t weigh you down with rules, structures, biases, resentments, or a crass obsession with literary networking.  I don’t have an MFA. I instead have lots of other kinds of experiences, like working as a parking lot attendant, going broke, near-homelessness, working as a professional journalist, and being employed to cover some very interesting places, like New Orleans right after Katrina. Those are all good and bad experiences that I draw on.  I’m not saying that having a prestigious degree won’t cultivate a higher level of so-called sophistication, or enhance your options. I am saying, however, that no matter what your background has been you have to use it creatively.  99

What’s worse is becoming stuck in a gnarly, obsessive psychological space where you rehash the pitfalls of your education, like a trauma victim. And what you didn’t get, and what didn’t happen have more power over you than an inspiration to do new work. How did you get to be the poet laureate of Santa Fe? You become a poet laureate by writing for a long, long time until you cultivate an aesthetic, a sensitivity, and a way of speaking about one’s art. Finally—and believe it or not people do tend to forget this—one has to apply. Although the position is called an appointment, in Santa Fe, and probably most places, it’s decided in a competitive process, judged by a panel of poets. Regarding outcomes, I fall back on Alice Walker’s advice: “Expect nothing. Live frugally/On surprise”  Do you have a consistent daily practice?  My memory isn’t good enough to know. I have been writing journalism for a living for more than twenty years. I write every day—yes. I still don’t know if the way I go about it constitutes a practice, in the sense of a discipline. I do not have a set time when I begin. I generally have to push myself to begin writing. And even after I begin a lot of daydreaming occupies the time. I pretty much invariably begin writing a journalism piece— something that will help me make a living. I will drift at some point. I can’t help it. I will start a poem. I will have a spontaneous dramatic inspiration, and add a few paragraphs to a story. Hours pass (a lot of hours) till nightfall. I will generally return to the journalism assignment which I must finish because I am on a deadline. So it goes like: 1. Writing for money. 2. Writing for pretty dreams. 3. Writing for visceral entertainment. Then back to 1. Writing for money.

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Professionalism bookends the day. Looked at a certain way, I spend seven hours a day writing. I can’t say I feel boastful about that. I can’t quantify how much time I spent on any individual piece. It feels like my so-called practice is a compromise between discipline and timeless dissipation.  In addition to writing across the genres, you’re a fabulous performer when it comes to reading your work in the world. Do you have any tips for shy writers? I am glad you think I’m a good reader. I have done some acting, and performance art. Maybe that helps. Now that I am Laureate, I’m in the position where I am going to be appearing in front of people a lot more. I hope it will make me a better public speaker. I may use the opportunity to practice in my head for a future Ted Talk, something like that.  No matter how shy you are, if you’re a writer, you have a voice in your head going all the time. You have this voice that’s taking notes, passing judgments, writing secret love letters, making sly, cruel, or coarse remarks, and so forth, and tallying up—with humor, sympathy, or misanthropy—all the consequences of human behavior. All writers have it.  This voice is a monologue. It’s accustomed to talking to itself, with no one else listening. Begin making it less of a monologue. Begin listening to it. All the extraneous material that was cut for the purposes of the page. That extraneous material is often very useful in a public presentation, because it reveals your unrefined, or less refined personality. And in most cases you can make use of your internal voice. Make it less like an echo chamber. Make it more conversational, less judgmental or egocentric. Your internal voice will add color to your public presentation. The better you can tweak that internal voice—however eccentric it may be—and direct it outward, the better you will be at interacting with an audience. 

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What has been the most liberating realization for you as a writer?  There is a thin line between the success or the failure of any poem, or story. There is a thin line between the success or failure of any artistic ambition, or any career move. This is true in whatever terms you conceive success or failure. It may sound like cold advice, because “failure” sounds cold and ungenerous. It’s positive news when you think about it like this. No matter where you are at in the progress of your story, in the development of your poem, or the next step in a career, there is only a thin line that you have to cross.  Can you offer an assignment or prompt for writing about social justice in one’s own community?  I did! See earlier answer. Furthermore:  Writing about social justice in one’s own community generally means beginning with a set of cliches, being the so-called “common sense wisdom” that defines your community. It’s wealthy, spoiled, white. It’s middle class, dull, full of retirees. It’s dangerous, trashy, out of control. You may disagree, or agree. Your description of your personal experience still must unpackage these clichés. And when I can hit on some detail in my personal experience that encapsulates the cliché and my argument with it, my work is almost finished. What would your literary utopia look like or include?  There are no utopias. We are all old enough to know that. Dystopias exist. But even defining dystopia is problematic because you can’t say whether what looks like the worst couldn’t always become coarser and crueler.  I answer like this because I say there is a kind of Utopia/Dystopia quality to the contemporary situation. There are people who say we do live in a literary Utopia. They point to the thousands of publishing opportunities. They sigh, “More books and magazines and contests than ever!” You have a hard

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time believing they don’t realize it doesn’t add up this way. The utopian façade hides a heavily dystopian heart.  I don’t like all the competition, all the contests with 2,000 entries and one lucky winner, all the good work that doesn’t get attention. The downside of the explosion of MFA programs is that there are hundreds of thousands more people applying for every contest and grant. People say the odds are stacked. And the heavy emphasis on competition creates a lot of cynicism. People begin to say literary/academic politics is all that matters. Even if it’s not true it’s questionable. There are too many losers, and too many winners whose careers seem to have hinged on the right lucky breaks.  I say the literary world needs a vast decentralization. It’s already been happening. It needs to keep happening. It began with small presses. Now even many small presses that are extremely powerful have narrow interests. Decentralize the decentralization. Break everything down to a smaller unit. If you’re going into writing today, start an online magazine. Let’s create a zillion online magazines. Stay to your standards. Publish what you believe in. Buy from small presses. Everything will have an online presence. And a coterie of supporters. And then let the critical arguments begin. You teach an intensive, “Writing Fiction and Nonfiction About Racism.” Can you share an exercise from that class? 

TRY THIS: From Darryl Lorenzo Wellington Write about an incident when you were the only person who perceived an injustice. Include details describing your experience when you tried to explain it to others. Negative? Positive? In between? This exercise will introduce you to the complications, considerations, and nuances involved in addressing racism.

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TRANSGRESS GENRE

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enres represent literary traditions and publishing categories. 

Thrillers have words like cold, dead, and justice in their titles. YA novels tend to include words like girl, shadow, bone, and night. Nonfiction titles glimmer with words like new, report, and study. Literary fiction titles commonly include the word home. The primary genre division comes between fiction and nonfiction. Is the story true? It’s a fair question. We need transparent answers. Journalistic writing presents itself as accurate. Memoir allows for re-creation of dialogue and scenes from memory, but presents itself as essentially truthful when it comes to the events. Everything else is fiction. Unless it’s poetry. Poetry isn’t generally policed for fact-accuracy. If you’re writing prose about your life, do you call it a short story or a personal essay? A novel or a memoir? I’ve had a lot of fun with novels and other fiction starring a protagonist named Ariel Gore. It’s clear to the reader that the story has a strong autobiographical component, but I’m not promising not to lie. It’s art. Or it’s a collage. It’s an allegory. Or it’s trick photography. I’m taking elements from real life and I’m charging them with metaphoric enchantment and a particular emotional aesthetic. I’m exaggerating, telling heart-truths, compositing characters, crafting, and still telling a story of my life. Within fiction, there are dozens of genres and subgenres. It makes publishing easier if we stick to the established genres, but any genre can be hybridized or borrowed from. You can write a poem-mystery or a noir-fantasy or a memoir-shoppinglist. You can write the kind of romance you buy in the grocery store and deliver it as a podcast. You can write a true crime graphic novel. 104

Study the history of the genres that appeal to you and see what it feels like to work within and without those traditions. Pay attention to what makes you feel happily challenged and absorbed.

TRY THIS: Make a list of seven things you’d be jazzed to write about. Pick two and put them together. Now pick two genres at random and write a one-page hybrid tale about the two things in the two styles. 

Memoir

Book review

Essay

Product review

Crime

List

College course description

Game

Radio commercial

Speculative

Comic book

Action

Poem

Adventure

Comedy sketch

Ethnographic description

Instructions

Screenplay

Thriller

Musical

Retail catalog copy

Fictional short story

Noir

Podcast

Fantasy

Mystery

Fable

Romance

Drug prescription

Sci-Fi

Satire

Futurist

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TAKE THE NOIR DESCENT What I understand to be noir is the real grittiness that comes out of American realism. It’s the poetry of disillusionment and existentialism. The tragedy that emerges between the haves and the have-nots. And the have-nots are trying to breach their ambition through violence and, ultimately, worshiping a hollow god, which is money. So therefore it’s literally an exploration of the flip-side of the American Dream. —Guillermo del Toro Script notes: Read this chapter aloud, smooth and drawn-out, with a mid-century Hollywood flair and a Mid-Atlantic accent from nowhere.

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sat in the smoky bar on a rainy Portland night, Loretta Lynn on the jukebox. The woman I’d been seeing was trouble, I knew that, but I also knew enough to keep my mouth shut about the whole sordid affair. I tapped my ruby nails on the counter. If you want to learn about plot, come and study noir. It’s got a working class aesthetic with absolutely queer and bitchy overtones—excellently transgressive. Noir affirms our experience that humans aren’t ethical. The good guys don’t win. Violence impacts. Lipstick helps. And people still smoke cigarettes. I lit another one at the bar, ordered a whiskey neat. Noir is bitter. Like punk, it owns the dystopian now and allows nihilism to meet camp. Like Postcolonialism, it speaks to the human consequences of external control and economic exploitation.  My early touchstone for noir was film, not lit, but I fell for its aesthetic easily. It allowed for complicated women. Campy sexism thinly veiled a world in which virtually all the female characters—even the victims—have some kind of agency over 106

their own experiences. More than that, they always seemed to have a strategy underway. Beyond gender, the genre comes to us from German Expressionism and the WWII-era realization that people really aren’t good, but rather easily overcome by their base impulses— or they want to be good, but they’re swamped by outside forces. They’re drawn into bad things, and they can’t figure a way out. People betrayed their own neighbors and lovers to the Nazis—that’s the dystopian reality that gave rise to noir when a generation of Jewish filmmakers fled Europe and brought their penchants for shadowy atmospheres and chiaroscuro lighting with them to Hollywood.

TRY THIS: Write about a time when you stabbed someone in the back. Or should have.

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MAKE ROOM FOR YOUR CHARACTER’S OWN SHADY AGENDA I wish someone would write a book about a plain bad heroine.

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—Mary MacLane, 1901 once wrote three short noir fictions in the space of a decade, tributes to three of my hometowns. Portland

When Kevin Sampsell asked if I could write noir, I said yes because that’s the kind of challenge I like. Plus I think he was standing at the river’s edge, wearing a trench coat. I started writing the short story “Water Under the Bridge” unsure of whodunit. I’d just had a real-life unsettling visit from an old friend, followed by a real-life unsettling visit from a couple of Portland detectives looking for my old friend, and I went with that feeling, with the way the rain dripped from my broken gutter onto one of the cops’ bald heads. When I got stuck in the story, I drove out to Manzanita on the Oregon coast and sat in the rain and looked out over the gray of it all. I went back to my motel room and started reading about noir online. That’s when I had this harshly-shadowed light bulb moment: The narrator in noir has her own agenda. What was my narrator withholding from me? That was the question I needed to answer. Santa Cruz When Susie Bright asked me to write a story for Santa Cruz Noir, I knew I wanted to include the real-life serial killer Ed Kemper who haunted my hitchhiking days in Northern California and who, from prison in some twisted irony became the voice 108

behind a bunch of bestselling audiobooks for blind readers including Flowers in the Attic, The Glass Key, and The Rosary Murders. Anyway, I wanted to work more with this idea of the shady narrator—completely unreliable. I wanted to explore why humans prey on those more vulnerable. It goes against all ethical doctrines, but we can’t seem to stop ourselves. We hate being reminded of our weakness so much that we’ll even murder that which is vulnerable within ourselves. What did my narrator want? She wanted not to take responsibility. I wrote that story. Santa Fe In “Nightshade” for Santa Fe Noir, I wanted to keep digging into this unreliable homicidal lesbian trope. As a white queer cisfemale myself, I felt safe leaning into these lesbian stereotypes. My trope—Was she the same suspect in every story or just a type? It would be hard to know. Either way, my trope had a lot to be angry about. My trope couldn’t seem to process remorse when she acted out. But my trope had the idea that if she started writing, maybe there was hope, even for her. So, that’s what happened to my trope in Santa Fe.  She decided to change her agenda. But could she?

TRY THIS: Write a story in which the narrator has their own agenda— perhaps they’re withholding something important from the reader. Set your story in a town you at some point considered your hometown.

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WRITE FROM THE BODY Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.

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—Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” was traveling, 18 and newly pregnant. I opened the brown padded envelope addressed to me in my mother’s familiar looped handwriting and out tumbled seven tubes of lotion with this note:

Tiniest,

John tells me you’re pregnant and keeping the baby. I went straight to the Clarins counter at Macy’s. The saleswoman told me that youthful teenage skin is THE MOST PRONE TO STRETCH MARKS because it isn’t yet elastic. I hope I am not too late, Tiniest. I am begging you. At least salvage your skin. I’ve enclosed: Stretch Mark Minimizer Stretch Mark Control Body Lift Cellulite Control Body Contour Treatment Oil Bust Beauty Lotion Bust Beauty Firming Lotion Bust Beauty Extra-Lift Gel Slather it on, Tiniest. I’m begging you. At least salvage your skin! Love, Mom Outside the post office, I lit a cigarette. I took a few drags, then crushed the burning cherry of it into the exposed skin of my chest. 110

Tom Spanbauer back in Portland used to talk about “going on the body” to give the reader a sympathetic, visceral reaction. The idea is that a story can be a series of sensory details, the way the coffee smells in the morning when it bubbles over and burns on the hot plate, the way a lover’s skin tastes, and, importantly, the way every emotion, before we name it as anger or jealousy or infatuation, begins as a sensation on the body—the bile rising, the heat that flares across the chest, that tingling of the skin before we singe a cigarette into it. 1970s French feminist theory, particularly  Écriture féminine, or “women’s writing,” a term coined by literary theorist Hélène Cixous, frames the idea more intimately, asking us to write from our own flesh and muscles and bones to empower the silenced energy of the marginalized body. When I came of age in American feminist subcultures, some people in those subcultures championed body positivity and sex positivity and childbirth positivity, and some shook their heads, like, “No, if we talk about these things then that’s going to expose our vulnerability in a man’s world, so we’ve got to shut it down, don’t talk about breastfeeding. Like, My Goddess, you’ll give them an excuse not to employ you!” Both feminist perspectives had their point. I write about breastfeeding and childbirth and queer female sexuality and that’s why some cats love me, but it’s also a reason my work is sometimes marginalized.  What would it look like in literature to affirm our actual bodies—and the ways we’ve turned on them? 

TRY THIS: Write from the point of view of a part of your body you have insulted or intentionally injured. This body part is not required to acknowledge the insult or injury, but may.

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ACCEPT DENTED CHARACTERS

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n Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster tells us that stories need both round and flat characters. He defines a round character as any character capable of surprising us in a believable way. I like thinking about characters in those terms. I remember an unexpected bravery, that split-second moment on a Northern California beach when my most self-centered cousin jumped into the freezing water to save a dog.  I wonder: Am I capable of surprising myself in a believable way? Are my beloveds? Which friends and acquaintances have surprised me? Only round characters, Forster tells us, “are fit to perform tragically for any length of time” in a narrative. Flat characters are best when they’re comic—or in a supporting role. The goofy New Age trustafarian who always brings the conversation back around to the way we each create our own realities and how #blessed he is can remain flat and comic. But some characters inhabit a shape in-between. The driver’s side door of my pale blue Dodge Colt looked like a meteor hit it. I stood in the parking lot, the baby on my hip, shaking my head at the new damage. I walked around to the other side, opened the passenger door, and lifted my daughter into her car seat in the back, snapped the safety buckle shut with a click. That Dodge had a lot of issues, honestly, and most of them because I didn’t realize you had to change the oil every few trips up and down the coast highway. My Gammie Gore thought I needed a car, what with the baby, so she gave me

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$3,000, but I needed money for an apartment, too, so I only spent part of the $3,000 on the car—and it showed. At 19, I didn’t have insurance, and only vaguely understood insurance claims, so when my psychology and literature professor sidled up to me in the cafeteria carrying his tray of goulash and confessed to me that he’d smashed my car in the parking lot, I waved his paperwork away. “The door still basically opens and closes.” The college was this hippie place where they used narrative transcripts instead of grades and I did think it pretty strange at the end of that semester when my psychology and literature professor wrote, “Ariel is hard to know” on my transcript. He practiced psychology along with being my professor, so I took his comment sort of personally, like a diagnosis. Hard to know. What did it mean? Was he anti-feminist for putting this on my permanent record? Was I already starting to irritate everyone muttering about feminism and the backlash? I hadn’t even tattled on him to his insurance company. But I shrugged. I figured there was a lot I didn’t know about the world and the people in it and I hoped that being “hard to know” wasn’t the worst thing. Sometimes, at that school, just like at every school, I had the impression that the professors were all hitting on the hotter girls and just basically found me hard to hit on. I felt glad he hadn’t etched “hard to hit on” into my permanent record. Years later, I heard that professor got run over by a car in Oregon and died. I tell my students not to jump ahead like that and update the reader on what happened to one of their characters. It takes us out of the story. But that’s where my memory jumps when a character dies tragically—to the way things ended for them. I’ll never think of my first car without remembering the big dent, and then I immediately think of my old professor’s

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dead body and the way he wrote on my transcript that I was hard to know. When I read about my old professor’s accident on social media, another professor from that hippie college commented, “A tragic end to a tragic life.” I squished up my forehead into its usual creases, wondering what else about that psychology and literature professor’s life seemed tragic. I really knew nothing about him, I realized. I remembered we read I Never Promised You a Rose Garden in his class and I pretended I didn’t know anything about schizophrenia. I wondered if my old professor, too, was kind of hard to know. Maybe I didn’t understand that teachers and students were supposed to get to know each other. Is my old professor round or flat in my narrative rendition of him? I got the quick urge to search my old professor online to finish this chapter, but I couldn’t remember his last name. He was just a meteor who indented himself into my first car, but the door still basically opened and closed.

TRY THIS: Write a story or vignette about someone who had an impact on your life but who you didn’t really know well enough to render them a fleshed-out character. Include a mention of something blue in your story.

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PUT YOUR ENEMIES IN HELL I had been in Paris, man, wearing my fake glasses and talking about existentialism, even though I was mispronouncing the word. When I came back to Buffalo, I dropped out of school. I was seventeen. My plan was to stay home and read plays but my mother said, You’ve got to get a job, so I worked at a library and that’s where I first read James Baldwin. I think it was Notes of a Native Son. It stopped me cold. I had never seen a black guy that could do this. When I was a child, I thought literature was written by lords and knights and stuff. You know, these people living in these great estates wearing beautiful clothes. Baldwin showed me something different. Then I discovered Dante, man. That really turned me on. My parents thought I had lost my mind. I would go up to the attic of our house in Buffalo and play a recording of John Ciardi’s Inferno while I followed along with the book. I read Dante and realized how much power a writer could have. A writer could put people in hell who weren’t even dead yet. — Ishmael Reed, The Paris Review No. 218

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ake a list of your actual human enemies. You don’t have to show the list to anyone, but these are exactly the kind of shitbags you need as the villains in your prose. Exaggerate them if you have to. Give them big tobacco-colored teeth. Write your low-grade evil uncle into an actual serial killer. You might not even have to embellish that much. Make a list of your emotional and societal enemies. What do you keep fighting against? What about the enemies within? What do you struggle against wherever you go? You can write pure fiction and still excellently burn through your remembered rage for your real-life enemy. 115

A lot of times in a story, if we really sit back and think about it, there’s a single enemy. The villain can be internal. Something like “conformity” can be the enemy. You don’t need to know going in who the enemy is, but it’s good to figure it out before your final draft. In fairy tales and murder mysteries, the enemy gets personified—like the evil stepmother or The Beast. In literary fiction and memoir, we often decentralize “the villain” from a particular character. The enemy might be paternalism. In this book, I envision the enemies as the four little demons of narrative exclusivity, literary exclusivity, arrogance, and gatekeeping. Maybe I could narrow it down further: My villain is the myth that writers have to be knights and lords and stuff. I didn’t see that I could sum up the enemy in The End of Eve as “abuse culture” until my friend and editor Inga Muscio read a draft and told me so. I had assumed the enemy in that book would come down to cancer or my mother or Steely Dan. But Inga put her finger on “abuse culture” and with that I wrote the ending and did a final edit, making the remaining connections suggested by that new frame.

TRY THIS: Write about a human enemy—perhaps a real-life human, perhaps a larger societal enemy personified in a fictional human. Begin with something striking about this character. Think about the color scheme of your story. Is there a particular smell you associate with this villain? At some point in this story, put your enemy in some kind of hell.

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WHAT? OUR LIVES HAVE THEMES? An Interview with Bestselling Author Reyna Grande

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eyna Grande’s prose pulses at the US-Mexican border. Like a lot of my favorite authors, she explores her themes in multiple genres. Whether she’s working in contemporary fiction, memoir, or historical fiction, she gives voice to the hidden experiences of the vulnerable and asks us to consider: On stolen and occupied land, who is the outsider? With her most recent project, the anthology Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings, co-edited with Sonia Guinansaca, she passes the mic. Much of your writing explores characters’ experience of Mexican-US immigration, something that is often written about from the gaze of the US American media or by writers without direct experience. When you were starting out, did you think, “I am going to learn to write like a dream so that I can take back my story and direct the narrative for once.” Or was your path more wayward? When I first started writing, I didn’t think of writing as an act of activism or a tool for social change. With my first novel, I was mostly writing it for me, to explore my own pain and history and make sense of my traumatic immigrant experiences. I wanted to write about child immigrants in particular because there were very few stories out there about that. I didn’t begin to really “own” my voice or actively get political with my writing until I published. When my book came out, I started getting messages from readers, especially immigrant readers or children of immigrants, about how much my story had resonated with them and inspired them and how I was speaking for them. Then I heard from “non-immigrant” readers about how my book had opened their eyes about immigration. Then I began to be 117

invited to speak at conferences about my experiences as a child immigrant and in this way I began to advocate for this vulnerable group. It wasn’t until this happened to me that I realized how I could use my words to build bridges and tear down walls and use my voice to advocate for my community. This inspired me to keep writing and speaking more about immigration. Did you feel any pushback in the publishing world in terms of, “Oh, this doesn’t jive with US American stereotypes, so it’s not going to work?” Well, I got some of that with Across a Hundred Mountains. When we were approaching editors, I was being rejected because they felt that a story about a Mexican girl looking for her missing father wasn’t going to sell. At the time, Chica Lit was hot and what publishers were looking for was the Latina Waiting to Exhale, not immigrant stories but stories of US-born Latinas. They thought my character was too Mexican. Luckily for me, I found an editor of color who understood and liked the stories I was writing, and she published them. That first book, Across a Hundred Mountains, draws on some autobiographical experience. Your memoir, The Distance Between Us, came out a half dozen years later. Was that the order in which you wrote the books? Are there things you find you can do more easily in fiction versus memoir—and vice versa? I started to write the memoir in 1997, when I was a junior at UC Santa Cruz. By then, I had discovered that writing could be very healing. I wanted to exorcize the demons that haunted me. I wanted to unload the burden I carried—the memories that left me scarred. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bear the thought of having to go back there and live through everything all over again. So, I turned my story into a novel, and that is how Across a Hundred Mountains was born. By fictionalizing my story, I was able to put some distance between myself and my emotions. But I never gave up the idea of someday writing my real story.     When I graduated from UC Santa Cruz, I became a middle school teacher. I taught ESL to immigrant children. 118

Most of them had gone through a similar experience as I had. Before, I hadn’t given much thought to my experience with family separation in a larger context. (I thought it’d just happened to me!) Later I learned that 80 percent of immigrant children in US schools have been separated from their parents in the process of migration. I realized that it was an experience that was all too common, yet it wasn’t part of the conversation about immigration. Immigrant children’s voices were not being heard. So, I began to write about my personal experience as a child left behind, as a border crosser and undocumented youth. Then when the Dream Act failed to pass, that gave me more encouragement to finish the memoir. I wanted people to see the immigrant experience through a child’s eyes. I also wanted to give all those young people I have met at my presentations a story that would inspire them to fight for their own dreams.   At first, it was extremely difficult to write the memoir. It was too personal. Too raw. Too painful. But when I put on my writer’s hat, I was able to turn all of those emotions into art. Instead of letting my trauma transform me, I transformed it into something positive and beautiful that I could share to inspire others like me. When it comes to plotting your novels—particularly a novel with multiple point-of-view characters—do you plan the whole novel in advance? Memoir takes a “plotting” of its own. What is your process for organization? Has each book been different, or do you have a jam? I am actually very thankful that I was first a novelist before I was a memoirist. When I made the transition, it was difficult for me to get a “handle” on writing nonfiction. (I never took a nonfiction class!) I felt limited by the parameters of the genre. But then I discovered that it really isn’t that much different to write a memoir than to write a novel. Both novels and memoirs need the same thing—developed characters, a narrative arc, conflict, themes, setting, dialogue, etc. Writing a novel is easier in that you aren’t limited to your own experiences—you can 119

use your imagination to bring in things you read or hear about, but that could be a challenge too because you have to build the world and create the characters who inhabit it. In that sense, memoir is easier in that you don’t have to start from scratch. All the “footage” and characters are there. You just have to figure out what to put in and what to leave out. That is easier said than done, of course.  When writing The Distance Between Us, and then A Dream Called Home, the challenge for me was how to look at the material (my life) and select the events that would tell a concise story with a narrative arc. When I write novels, I know that I have to come up with the plot points right away. But because I was writing about my own life, I had a hard time because we don’t think of our lives in terms of plot points! But we do have those defining moments, the moments that shaped us, so I was able to look at my life and identify those. Another challenge was identifying the themes in the memoir. (What? Our lives have themes?) I ended up approaching both memoirs as a novelist, and this is why when you read both of these books they are very “novelistic” in style. Your characters are so complex and distinct. In Across a Hundred Mountains, I feel like I know and am rooting for each of them from their first tragic scenes. I can feel how hard they try, and in that feel your compassion for them, too. How do you find those soft spots for each of the characters you write about? Do you map out their “character arcs” ahead of time or feel more like they are telling you their stories as you go? I pay very close attention to the three-dimensions of character: the physiological, sociological, and psychological. The more I know about them the more alive they become for me. Understanding their psychological wounds, their traumas, their unique way of seeing the world makes them more human. I create my characters in layers. I only know a little about them when I start and then I get to know them the more I write. I 120

am always asking questions: Who are you? Why are you the way you are? What do you want and why do you want it? What haunts you? It takes me a long time to find their voice, but I usually do find it eventually, and then it all falls into place. You’ve won an American Book Award, been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, even been on Oprah! Do you ever get imposter’s syndrome? Do you have any advice for writers who do suffer from an internalized sense of “I don’t belong here?” I actually wrote an essay on impostor syndrome that was published in The Lily. It was about an experience I had at an author event where I was mistaken for a waiter. I felt so out of place at that event (at the fancy Library of Congress, no less) and then when that happened, I felt even worse—that is until dinner was served and it was tacos! I told myself that if tacos belong at the Library of Congress, so do I. So yes, I do suffer from imposter syndrome a lot, and it gets exhausting having to give myself pep talks to help me believe that I do belong, that I am supposed to be there, that I have earned my right to have a seat at the table (or to be up on that stage or for my books to be read.) I can’t wait to read your historical novel, A Ballad of Love and Glory. How did the project stretch you as a writer? Oh, man, did it STRETCH me! I had never written historical fiction before or outside of my culture or my gender. I’d never written about war, or battle scenes or heavy political scenes, about soldiers and battlefields and generals. I was so intrigued about the Mexican-American War, especially because in the US this war of conquest has been erased from our history and thus, from our collective consciousness. The-powers-that-be decided we should forget about the land-grab of 1848 when half of Mexico’s territory became part of the US by an act of aggression and American expansionism.  There were many times during the seven years of writing this book when I thought I had taken on more than 121

I was capable of. “I can’t do this,” was a constant thought in my head. But I persevered. And one day, there was a different thought in my head—“I am doing it!” and later, “I did it!” I’m so proud of this book. It took my writing to a whole new level. It also empowered me because it helped me to reframe the way I see myself as a Mexican living in this country. For too many years I’ve let others make me feel that I don’t belong here and I should “go back to where I come from.” But learning about this history I realized that as a Mexican living in California, a state which was once a part of Mexico, I am not the foreigner or the outsider.  What would your literary utopia look like or include?      My literary utopia would be a place where Latino writers are published in numbers that reflect the Latino population in the US and where we get seven-figure advances. 

TRY THIS: Pick a character you’ve been writing about or intending to write about and draw a little picture of them. Jot down something important about each of their three dimensions. What about their physiology makes them who they are? What about their sociology makes them who they are? What about their psychology makes them who they are? Ask your character, Why are you the way you are? What haunts you? Write a letter from this character to you, the writer, answering the questions.

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HAND-PIECE YOUR MEMOIR

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ometimes when I can’t sleep I draw patterns made of squares and triangles. Lately I’ve been hand-piecing a quilt. I like looking at patterns, but I don’t use them. I like doing the math and trying to make the patterns come together myself. Writer and fabric artist Sailor Holladay says, of beginning a quilt, “It’s time to cut your life in pieces on purpose and stitch it back together. This time in your image.” I talked to another friend over miso soup the other day about the beauty of piecing a memoir together out of fragments and scraps. The same pile of material might become a four-patch or a “friendship star” or a “rocky road to California” quilt. When I’m making a quilt I’m not thinking about whether I can get an agent for it. I’m just sewing and hoping it will come out looking cohesive and feeling cozy. Consciously working with fragments is particularly useful in memoir—because memory itself tends to fragment and the work of the writer is to find and create patterns from the scraps. But I use scissors in every genre. I notice that stitching red, pink, and orange next to each other makes me happy. Play with writing and piecing fragments.  Cut and rearrange.

TRY THIS: Pick one of these themes (or come up with a theme of your own if you’re feeling sassy.) Pick the one that presents at least one vivid image to your mind’s eye:

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Secrets Hospitals Not being believed Beaches First moments of future friendships Museums Bugs Feet

Now, as quickly as you can, write six fragments from memory on your theme—let’s say anywhere from a few lines to a half page each. The fragments don’t have to be of equal length or intensity. If you’re writing by hand, great. If you’re writing on the computer, go ahead and print your fragments out if possible. Now, arrange your six fragments in various ways. What does it look like to arrange them chronologically? How about by ascending or descending dramatic intensity? Try arranging them for maximum contrast between fragments. What if you went back and forth in time in the arrangement? There are literally hundreds of ways to arrange just six fragments—720 ways if my insomnia math serves—but you’re going to find the order you like after just a few arrangements. Now read your arranged fragments out loud. Do you want any sashing— meaning borders or transitions—between your fragments? Add a repeating line between each fragment and notice the effect. Nix it if you don’t like it. It’s done when you can let it be. Or, like a quilt, when the person you’re making it for is born.

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BUILD ALTARS AND SCAFFOLDING

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was starting to stress out. I felt like my 100 days of writings on shame wanted to become a book manuscript, but it was still an unbound pile I called different things on different days: “Shame Theory,” say, or “Female Problems.” Shame, I kept turning it over. A theme is not a plot, I had often been told as a writing student. A theme is not a plot, I would often tell my writing students. Because that’s true. A theme is not a plot.  A theme is “longing” or “home.” A plot is a series of events, likely escalating in their intensity, that show how various characters and communities grapple with their longings and their sense of home. Things that a plot has that a theme doesn’t: •

Causality.

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Rising stakes.

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As the writer Liz Henry says in the beginning of  We Were Witches, “Some folks climb a mountain to get where they’re going, and the rest of us, well, we’re clawing to get the fuck out of a hole we didn’t dig.” (So, climbing or clawing.) When I handed my thematically-linked pile of fragments to author and editor Megan Kruse to read, she put it this way: “You need some scaffolding.”

But she didn’t limit her idea for scaffolding to just causality or rising stakes or climbing or clawing. She said something like: What about building little altars throughout the book—to these fairytale characters and historical figures and your grandmothers? 125

She said something like, If you do that at regular intervals, that may create enough scaffolding. I hadn’t really thought of my little tributes to the Female Problems that had come before me as altars, but now that Megan mentioned it, that’s just what they were. And I could arrange them like I would on top of a dresser, add herbs and rocks, sticks and candles, old pictures and fortunes from cookies. More importantly, I had to let this sink in: Altars could be a kind of scaffolding? Enough to hold up a book? This possibility filled me with strawberry-scented joy. The architecture of literature can include altars. I added “altars” to my list, but then I questioned it. An altar isn’t usually an event per se. But an altar might create an internal shift in a character that contributes to her consideration of her next bold move. Some altars do play their part in causality, it’s just that their part is a little more subtle than, say, a pipe bomb exploding. Altars are more like the piazzas and olive kiosks my old teacher Milton Glaser talked about. Altars aren’t plots, exactly, but they can make up for lack of plot. In any case, if you forget what you’re shopping for, an olive-break never hurts.

TRY THIS: Write a short story that contains three altars. Some ideas for altars might include: •

A short tribute to someone—preferably one that feels thematically connected to your storyline.

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A little fairytale or myth or parable—invented or recalled or retold from a traditional story—that resonates with your theme.

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A sidebar that tells the story of an ancestor or historical figure who resonates with you.

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A description of an actual altar to a person, place, deity, or hope that you or another character builds or comes across.

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Any place where we might encounter spirit, including both human-created spaces and places in the natural or supernatural world.

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Any kind of narrative interlude that takes us out of chronological time but is filled (perhaps cluttered) with thematically meaningful talismans and/or ideas.

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Dear Ariel, Should I give my protagonist in my interconnected short stories a conflict at the beginning so she works through it in every story? For instance, I’ve considered that she is going on this journey with her cat because her parents are getting a divorce or because her mother has cancer.  Sincerely, Conflicted in Cleveland Dear Conflicted, I like the idea of your protagonist having a problem or conflict at the beginning, but pick something you know a lot about or feel excited to do a lot of research into—pick something you’re obsessed to learn about. I look forward to reading what you come up with. In praise of writerly obsessions, Ariel

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Part Three: Structures and Gardens We have wiggling meanders in our hair, brains, and intestines; branching patterns in capillaries, neurons, and lungs; explosive patterns in areolae and irises; spirals in ears, fingertips, DNA, fists. Our brains  want  patterns. We follow them instinctively: coiling a garden hose, stacking boxes, creating a wavering path when walking along the shore. And we even invoke these patterns to describe motions in our minds: someone spirals into despair or compartmentalizes emotions, thoughts meander, rage can be so great we feel we’ll explode. There are, in other words, recurring ways that we order and make things. Those natural patterns have inspired visual artists and architects for centuries. Why wouldn’t they form our narratives, too? —Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode

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CAST THE HERO AS A PREGNANT SINGLE MOM Artists are magical helpers. Evoking symbols and motifs that connect us to our deeper selves, they can help us along the heroic journey of our own lives.

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—Joseph Campbell

t’s easy to knock “The Hero’s Journey,” the 17-stage mythic pattern outlined by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book, A Hero with A Thousand Faces, and popularized by George Lucas and Bill Moyers in the 1970s and 1980s. Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood development executive and screenwriter, distilled the 17 steps down to 12 with his Disney company memo “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” which he later developed into the book The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structures for Storytellers and Screenwriters. Virtually all Hollywood films since Star Wars have used some version of the map: A hero ventures forth from his home and enters a new, foreign, or supernatural world full of fabulous forces. There’s a battle for some type of treasure and a decisive victory. The hero returns from this wild adventure with some excellent prize to fix his life and maybe even leave a legacy. One reason a lot of us get fed up with this particular journey, besides the gendered language, is that it’s so easy to graft structures of conquest onto it: Our hero achieves. Our hero arrives in a strange land, kicks things around he doesn’t understand, discovers a magic bullet that will save his own people back home, steals it, and runs off, the rightful owners sometimes in hot pursuit but we know—we knew going in— that our hero will prevail. Our hero will get away with it. 130

This Hero’s Journey also rings super-American, focusing as it does on the individual rather than the community.  That said, if we resist the colonial and individualistic spirit of these summaries, The Hero’s Journey is actually a reasonable map that can get a writer through her first book. I know it got me through mine, a parenting guide for single moms and other marginalized folks living through the “Family Values” campaigns of the late 1990s.  I appreciated that The Hero’s Journey plot tended to be drawn as a circular story and I found that drawing a circle

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helped me plot and organize better than a down-the-page column outline. The stages of The Hero’s Journey are adaptable to virtually any story in any genre, but let’s look at it first from a fictional perspective, where we might create the events based on Campbell’s seventeen stages. 1. The Call to Adventure. The protagonist is summoned or motivated to venture into the unknown. In the middle of an otherwise normal episode of your favorite telenovela, your grandmother calls from a jail in the next state over and wants you to pick her up. 2. Refusal of the Call. Here the protagonist resists the summons. Maybe you feel judgey about your derelict grandma and you’ve been working on your boundaries, so you say “no.” You go back to your TV and your tater tot world, but you start to feel restless and bored. Should you rethink your hardline with grandma? 3. Supernatural Aid. Mystical help or some kind of mentor appears as soon as the protagonist commits to the proposed project. Here we meet a benign character or force who shows up to represent the “protecting power of destiny.” Maybe your dead mother appears to you as a sort of mother-Yoda hybrid being and gives you a new tattoo to protect you on your journey. Or the guy at the corner convenience store sells you cigarettes and says, “You’ve got this. Good luck.” 4. Crossing the First Threshold. Now the protagonist leaves their known world—their house or neighborhood or planet. They enter a “special world” where the transformational story will take place between this stage and stage twelve. You get on your sparkly blue electric bike and start pedaling through the neon-lit night and across the state line.

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5. Belly of the Whale. The protagonist has been swallowed up by the world of the unknown. Maybe in this state where grandma got busted, everyone suffers from environmentalist phobia and electric bikes have been outlawed and you end up thrown in jail, too. 6. The Road of Trials. Now the protagonist undergoes a series of tests. Maybe you have to bust yourself out of jail, sweet-talk the sheriff into telling you where your grandma has been transferred, and keep yourself from falling for a certain brown-eyed bartender. 7. The Meeting with the Goddess. The protagonist meets some kind of a mother figure or even their own morefemme side. Maybe the bar manager is actually the immortal aspect of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and you’re her biggest fan and you throw yourself at her and she gives you the legal secret you need to get grandma sprung. 8. Falling for the Temptress. The 1949 version of The Hero’s Journey actually calls this phase “Woman as Temptress,” but I’m sure Joe Campbell wouldn’t mind my fix. You fall for the bartender and wake up in your own puke, perhaps having missed your court date. 9. Atonement with the Authority Figure. Atonement with the Authority Figure, or Campbell’s “Atonement with the Father,” is the point in the story when the protagonist has to deal with The Man, regardless of The Man’s gender, father or cop. This is the court date you’re late to, and you can’t screw it up. 10. Apotheosis. Don’t worry, no one uses the word “apotheosis” in any other context, but in the Hero’s Journey it refers to the climactic moment. You score grandma’s release! 11. The Ultimate Boon. The protagonist has it all. You and grandma go out for bubblegum ice cream sundaes with Pop Rocks sprinkles! 133

12. Refusal of the Return. Stages 12, 13, and 14 have a kind of multiple-choice, choose your own adventure aspect to them and can be easily adapted or swapped out. In the Refusal of the Return, the protagonist decides to stay in the special world. Maybe you decide to get an apartment with grandma in the weird little town and the two of you are going to eat pink sundaes forever. 13. The Magical Flight. This is an escape with the “boon.” This stage can be a lot of fun. Maybe the protagonist has the wind at their back but, as Campbell says, “if the trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if the hero’s wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becomes a lively, often comical, pursuit.” Maybe there’s another warrant out for you or your grandmother’s arrest and it’s a madcap adventure to flee this weird little town and their obsession with throwing every hoodlum in jail. 14. Rescue from Without. Sometimes the protagonist needs someone from outside the special world to come and fetch them. Maybe you crash the electric bike trying to give grandma a ride on the handlebars and grandma’s sister, old chain-smoking Aunt Biddy with the actual motor vehicle in the family, needs to come pick up you and your grandma’s sorry drunk asses, but the sheriff is onto your family’s shenanigans and follows in hot pursuit. 15. The Crossing of the Return Threshold. Here the protagonist returns home to the known world, somehow changed. You, Grandma, and Biddy shake the sheriff and take the road trip back, listening to Dolly Parton through the neon-lit dawn. 16. Master of the Two Worlds. Here we revisit the dynamic of the beginning of the story, when the protagonist felt a conflict between their life as it was and the adventure calling their name. How can the protagonist live in 134

both worlds? You reconcile with your crazy hoodlum family and make peace with your inner outlaw. 17. Freedom to Live. And there we have it—a protagonist now able to live in the moment. Grandma and Biddy have their own place, so you get to have your boundaries, but they come over on Sundays after Thrift Store Bingo, so you get to have your well-loved crazy family, too. If we think of each stage of the journey as a guidepost, that allows us to meander in our storytelling without getting too lost. If we know we want to cross a threshold between two worlds by page 50, for example, that’s a legit way to stay on track. Our hoodlum grandma story represents a fictional plot option for The Hero’s Journey, but here’s a cool thing: We can mold nonfiction—from memoir to journalism to self-help— into this basic pattern as we morph experience into art.  As readers, we don’t always think about the fact that nonfiction has a structure that functions exactly like a plot, but as writers we learn to use all the tools of the fiction writer in our prose. So, let’s look at the way we might use The Hero’s Journey for a “how to” or “self help” book. The Hip Mama Survival Guide falls under those general categories, so we think of the reader as the protagonist—or the hero.  With this in mind, I organized my survival guide manuscript to lead the reader-hero from their previously childless world into a strange land where the medical establishment would try to exploit them, the culture would deny their individual personhood outside their role as a parent, their own baby would torture them by forcing them to stay awake for days on end, politicians would feel entitled to trash their parenting efforts on national TV, and brightly-printed pink and orange food stamps would become their most valuable currency.  I thought about the many ways a reader might become a parent as their “call to adventure.” I proceeded chronologically 135

to bring the reader into motherhood, then shifted to “The Chaos Theory of Parenting” where I could explore some of the more general political and cultural issues not tied to a child’s age but very much in the “special world” or parenting. I understood from “The Hero’s Journey” that readers were accustomed to hearing about the most difficult period in the protagonist’s experience shortly after the midpoint of the manuscript, so that’s where I placed the crisis management chapters. The mythic ending has the mama-hero walking off into the sunset with the “boon,” which is self-acceptance. That’s my hero’s journey.

TRY THIS: Write a very short story—just a few pages—that follows an unlikely hero through at least 12 stages of a Joseph Campbelltype hero’s journey. Somewhere in your story, also include an unlikely treasure or prize.

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ASK HOW THINGS CAN GET WORSE

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thought my friend Pilar planned to pick me up at the Albuquerque airport, but she was nowhere along the arrivals curb. I figured we’d miscommunicated. Not a huge deal. I’d texted when I landed, but now that I thought about it, we hadn’t messaged in over a week. I checked my phone. Nothing back from her.  I got a shuttle to the station in downtown Albuquerque, took the Railrunner train up to Santa Fe. The wind blew dust and tumbleweeds across the high desert flats as the train rolled through the pueblos. I’d come to New Mexico from Portland because Pilar said she had a paying gig for me. We’d met back at Mills College, kept in touch all these years about teaching and the writing life. She taught at the Institute for American Indian Art now and they needed help with a script for a documentary highlighting several Indigenous jewelry artists. The pay wasn’t bad, and I was already late on my mortgage. Pilar even booked my ticket on Southwest.  As I stepped off the train in Santa Fe, the air smelled of green chile and charcoal. I checked the address of Pilar’s little gallery near the rail yard, adjusted my pack on my back, and easily made my way a couple of blocks through the afternoon heat. A woman stood outside, taping a note to the glass door as I approached. “Oh hey,” I started. “Hi,” she said, somber. “Sorry. We’re closing early.” “I’m supposed to meet Pilar—” I glanced at my phone again. “I’ve been trying to text her.” The woman shook her head. “She’s,” she hesitated, kind of looking me up and down. “Were you a friend of Pilar’s?” 137

The air felt thin as I tried to breathe. “Yes, I’m a friend of hers . . .” I wrapped my fingers around the nylon backpack straps, nervous. I noticed the woman’s eyes were swollen and ringed in red. She exhaled. “Pilar died last week. There was an accident.” She gestured to the street. “She got hit by a delivery truck. Cops think the driver was drunk.” The woman glanced at my pack. “You traveling?” She kept talking before I could answer. “I’m actually headed up to the burial right now. That’s why we’re closing. Or,” she shook her head. “I don’t even know what we’re going to do with the gallery. Do you want to come up to the cemetery?” If you’ve seen that movie The Third Man, you might know where I’m going with this. It’s a great movie in part because we can borrow the plot to excellent effect. The whole rest of this chapter is a spoiler, so watch the movie first if you like. Here’s the basic plot: You’re an out of work writer and you travel to meet a friend who said they had work for you. How can things get worse? Your friend isn’t at the train station to pick you up. How can things get worse? No! Your friend has been killed in an accident. How can things get worse? This weird events coordinator in town finds out you’re a writer and ropes you into giving a talk at some literary club. How can things get worse? Maybe your friend’s death was no accident . . . dun dun dun!  How can things get worse? You friend was murdered! 138

How can things get worse? The only witness has been murdered, too. How can things get worse? They think you killed the witness. (At this delightful pre-midpoint of the film version, we get a weird kid dancechase scene. A good time to show off your writerly skills with some unexpected monkey business.) How can things get worse? You have to go give a talk on writing to the awkward literary club. (At the statistical center of the movie, the guy who roped you into this talk asks you about writing and style, “Do you believe in the stream of consciousness?”) How can things get worse? You realize your old friend was actually involved in perpetuating injustice and you’re glad your friend is dead. How can things get worse? Your immoral friend isn’t really dead. Dun dun dun!  How can things get worse? Your old friend is so bad you have to pursue your old friend with violence on the mind! (Here’s another great moment to show off your writing skills with the spiraling underground chase scene of your choosing.) How can things get worse? You do kill your old friend. How can things get worse? Your old friend’s lover, who by now you’ve fallen for, doesn’t want you. Not at all. (Sad violins as your old friend’s lover walks away. Now you still have no job. You have no friend. You have no friend’s lover. Womp womp.) I thought it would be fun to write a story called “The Third Woman” and set it in contemporary Santa Fe. 139

TRY THIS: Cast yourself as the out-of-work writer and tell me a story in which you show up in a new town because an old friend has offered you work, but your friend is dead when you get there. Following the plot of The Third Man as closely or loosely as you like, tell the story as things just keep going from bad to worse. Set the story in a place you know well or are excited to learn all about, and set it within a subculture that’s familiar to you.

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BELIEVE IN THE FAIRY-TALE ENDING Interview with novelist Michelle Ruiz Keil ichelle Ruiz Keil came to prose writing by way of Tarot-card reading and playwriting—an excellent path for any wayward cat, if you ask me. Her critically acclaimed, San Francisco-set, debut novel, All of Us With Wings, called “…a transcendent journey” by The New York Times and “…a fantastical ode to the Golden City’s post-punk era” by Entertainment Weekly, was released by Soho Teen in 2019. Her second novel, inspired by the Greek myth of Iphigenia and the Grimm fairy tale “Brother and Sister,” follows two siblings struggling to find each other in early ’90s Portland. Though fans may be fooled by Michelle’s ever-youthful appearance, she likes to remind other working writers that she didn’t publish her first book until she was 50.

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When you’re writing fiction, does the character or the storyline come to mind first?  I always seem to start with place and time period. Then comes a sort of idea—a combination of situation and person. For All of Us With Wings, the thing I knew first was that I was writing about late ‘80s San Francisco, and second, that I was writing about a girl who was a sort of a punk Jane Eyre governess to a precocious child. For  Summer In The City of Roses, I knew I wanted to write a story about Portland in the early ‘90s and had an idea about coming of age and neuro-difference—about what might happen if intrinsic differences were allowed to fully blossom and become whatever they needed to be. And about how a family who is bonded by trauma grows up and grows apart and heals. The characters and plot reveal themselves as I begin to write. 141

They say novelists tend to work in one of two ways: “planners” develop their plots before they get started with the writing and “pantsers” work without synopses. When it comes to plot, are you a planner or a pantser, or some combination? With my first book, it was all about discovery. The story told itself to me as I wrote. When it came time to revise, I used what I think of as mythic overlays to wrangle the story into a book. I’m a tarot reader and an amateur Jungian, so I started revision by asking myself what myth or fairytale the story reminded me of.  Once I identified that All of Us With Wings was a Maiden Without Hands sort of story (one of the grimmer Grimm’s fairy tales), I checked the plot for the main points in that tale and adjusted the draft to include a few important missing steps. Then I read stories about the Aztec goddess Xochiquetzal, who inspired  my main character’s name, and used aspects of her story as well.  Although Xochi is the clear protagonist, there are many chapters from secondary characters’ points of view. To make that work, they each needed a full arc. Most of the character’s names popped up on the page at random as I wrote. Luckily, as a tarot reader, I believe in the power of a random pull. When I researched name meanings after the fact, I found the clues I needed to round out their stories. My second book, Summer In The City of Roses, worked much the same way, but the two-part process was integrated from the first draft since I knew I was working from a Greek myth and a specific fairytale. Drafting was a trust exercise even with this mythic scaffolding. I was able to lean into the mystery, trusting the stories about Iphigenia and Orestes and Grimm’s Brother and Sister to catch me if I fell.  This process was surprisingly fast and effective for me. I found a looseness in the combination of structure and discovery that allowed me to experiment. One chapter describes several 142

characters’ dreams and is built purely from divination—a combination of cartomancy, bibliomancy, and automatic writing. That chapter is one of my favorites and was edited only for typos in the final draft of the book. So, I guess my takeaway on pants vs planning is that both are useful as long as you are open to surprise on either path and use these methods for what they are—tools that give you the support and freedom to hear the voice of the story and let it lead you where it wants to go. Once you finished your first beautiful manuscript, what was the path to publication? All of Us With Wings  started as a dare to a bunch of NANOWRIMO-curious teenagers—basically: I’ll write a book if you will. Once I started, I never wanted to stop.  The story glowed like a secret gem in my pocket as I went about my nonwriterly business. When the book finished, my best friend, the writer MK Chavez, encouraged me to apply to a few juried writing workshops. I was sure I wouldn’t get in. But I did. To all of them! I met agents and editors for the first time and began learning about the business of publishing. I sent a few query letters, but it wasn’t until 2016 that I began to query in earnest. Part of my process was expensive—even though I won a few scholarships, I did have to pay some tuition and travel expenses for the workshops I attended. I also paid for a developmental editor before calling my book ready to query. Even after trading critiques with other novelist friends, I didn’t have a full understanding of what makes something as vast as a novel work. I also lacked confidence. I had little formal creative writing education and was entering the publishing world in my forties. When a workshop instructor, who is also one of my favorite authors, recommended the developmental editor she uses, I jumped at the chance even though it was a big financial commitment.  After I had a polished manuscript, I made a goal, wrote a sigil, and did a ritual. I’d have a book deal by the time I turned fifty. 143

I developed my strategy. I wanted to be traditionally published. I don’t have the skill or temperament to handle the detailed complexity of self-publishing. I used the site  querytracker.com  and made a list of agents who repped literary fiction and magical realism and worked with both YA and adult titles. All of Us With Wings straddled both categories; I wasn’t sure where it would end up. I decided to start with YA. I crafted a query and sent it to ten agents. I waited. In the meantime, I attended conferences where you could pitch agents, something that helped me refine my query letter and taught me how to talk about my work. I entered pitch contests on Twitter where you tweet a pitch and if an agent likes your tweet, it’s an invitation to query them and potentially move to the front of their slush pile. After querying about 30 agents, I got a few requests for full manuscripts. I was on pins and needles for . . . months. Months! A few helpful agents told me they thought my book was not YA at all, but adult. I retooled my query and began again, focusing on agents who repped adult literary fiction. This time, things moved more quickly. I got several full manuscript requests—ten in all. On Twitter, I learned that an agent, Hannah Fergesen, was offering two-day turnaround for queries from marginalized writers. She was on my list, so I queried immediately and heard back as fast as promised. She requested a full manuscript. Then, she emailed that she would like to talk. The call! It was all happening. And it was . . . sort of. Hannah loved the book but felt it needed some editing. She wanted to be sure we’d work well together and proposed working together on a full revision—a process called a revise and resubmit. Because that’s a lot of work, she asked that I withdraw the manuscripts that other agents were reading. But that didn’t feel right to me. I’d worked so hard to get my full book in their hands! Luckily, an experienced writer friend advised me to find a compromise.

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We agreed that I would revise the first few chapters based on our phone call and then see how she felt. It was October 2016, eight years since I’d first tossed around the idea that became All of Us With Wings.  Then the unthinkable happened in the 2016 election. In the post-election malaise, publishing ground to a halt. I asked myself if writing even mattered. If anything did. Then Hannah got back to me with an offer of representation. As is customary, I informed the other agents who had full manuscripts that I had an offer, but it was clear that Hannah really got what I was trying to do. After several months of revision, in March of 2017, Hannah sent the super-polished novel out on submission. In December, I had an offer from a young BIPOC editor at Soho Press, a mid-sized independent press with a great reputation for innovative, quality books. Importantly, they also have a distribution partnership with Penguin Random House—which meant I’d have the best of both worlds, with a small non-corporate team at the publisher along with the retail, school, and library selling power of PRH. The only downside was the size of my advance—$5,000—which was much smaller than even a midlist book at a Big Five house. But my agent assured me that Soho would do an amazing job marketing the book and I’d earn the rest in royalties. All was amazing! It was happening! For real! Except—a curveball. The publisher wanted to release my book as a young adult title after all. I’d still have the editor who originally championed my book and Soho would not ask me to change the content to meet YA norms. But instead of entering the adult literary fiction world, I was suddenly a debut YA author. Young Adult books, especially those with brown girls on the cover, were getting a lot of attention in 2019, the year All of Us With Wings  was published. I enjoyed some AMAZING debut year milestones—great reviews, including one in The New York Times, a Book of the Month Club edition, a book tour, 145

and lead title status at my publisher—which meant they put maximum resources in support of the book. All this happened just like I’d hoped—the year I turned fifty.

TRY THIS: Write the story of your writing career or writing life as a fairytale with some fabulous ending in the future. What might it look like to succeed on your own terms? What might this success feel like on the body? Somewhere in your story, include a mention of a tarot card.

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GO SEE BABA YAGA

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lot of smart people will tell you to wait to turn experiences—particularly traumatic experiences—into stories. Give the memories time to heal, they say. Cool down, they say. Get some perspective. Hang on until the doctor takes off the pink cast, at least. This usually works for me. I quite like putting things off. I wrote Atlas of the Human Heart sixteen years after the adventure. I waited twenty-five years to write We Were Witches. But sometimes I need to put a project in between myself and how I’m feeling. It’s a way to make peace with my experience. And here’s the thing: Some stories don’t want to wait. When my mother died, I stared out into the blue and wondered if time would honey-coat my memories. I wanted to write now, while I remembered the bitter parts. My mother always complained that eulogies glossed over “the shadow,” and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to write that story so I could move on. I wanted to honor my mother’s ugliness as well as her beauty. Maybe I wanted to put a book between myself and everything that had happened, like a layer of architectural protection, stucco and mahogany. Maybe I wanted to build a door I could close. A book can be a door. My first working title, Lung Cancer Noir, didn’t survive my writing pals who thought it sounded “too dark,” but seeing my storyline as a noir helped me impose a plot and a structure onto the trajectory my family’s life took after my mom’s stage-4 lung cancer diagnosis. Whenever I got stuck in the writing, I’d just watch a noir movie and ask myself, What would happen next if Bette Davis played my mother? And then I’d go to a memory scene to illustrate or animate that. The drama of the book covered a couple of years and a lifetime of memory-anecdotes, 147

so I had plenty of real-life scenes to pick and choose from as I pieced together the memoir’s arc. I endeavored to trace the descent as things got worse with noir-based timing. Reading through my noir draft, I noticed I’d mentioned my personal devotion to Baba Yaga a couple of times, and I remembered the way my mother used to tease me with her child-snatching fantasies when I was a kid. “I’m a witch,” she insisted. She did have a large mole on her nose that cast a strange shadow across her cheek. “I kidnapped you,” she cackled, and she rubbed her palms together. I imagined my real mother as gentle, with long soft hair.  When I was maybe 35 years old, I visited my mom in Mexico, and over mescal shots I asked why she’d told me that twisted tale. “Oh, Ariel,” she sighed. “Everyone has to let the toogood mother die.” I knocked back another shot and we laughed. Sometimes I thought my mother treated me more like a Jungian experiment than an actual parenting project. In the version of the Russian folktale “Vasilisa the Wise,” which I first read in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves, Baba Yaga isn’t so much a child-snatching witch as an intense and sometimes terrifying teacher. The story goes like this: on her deathbed, Vasilisa’s original mother gifts her daughter a little doll and says, “Do as I tell you, my child. Take good care of this little doll and never show it to anyone. If ever anything bad happens to you, give the doll something to eat and ask its advice. It will help you out in all your troubles.” So, that’s the setup—or part one. Vasilisa’s idealized “too good” mother dies, and she has this internal mother, represented by the doll, going forward. Vasilisa lives with her kind but powerless father and her screech harpy stepmother and stepsisters who are constantly admiring themselves and trying to destroy Vasilisa, but V’s little doll helps her survive. 148

In part two of the story, Vasilisa’s father goes away on business and the stepmother moves them all into a hut in the woods where the step-family of narcissists squander their fire, and then send Vasilisa out to see the great witch, Baba Yaga. The step-family likely see this as a suicide mission, but they tell Vasilisa she’s got to get a light from Baba Yaga. Part three finds Vasilisa making her way through the forest, meeting various men on horses along the way, and finally arriving at Baba Yaga’s place—the house on chicken legs. In Part four of our story, with the help of the little doll, Vasilisa is able to perform near-impossible tasks of discernment for Baba Yaga, who finally gives her a skull containing the fire she needs. We come to part five and Vasilisa heads home, back through the dark forest, and when she arrives at her step-family’s hut she burns it, and them, to ash. A folklorist and Jungian psychologist, Estes breaks down the rites of the story into these nine tasks, which she sees as a re-initiation into a character’s innate power. 1. Allow the too-good mother to die 2. Expose the shadow 3. Learn to navigate in the dark 4. Face the wild hag 5. Serve the non-rational 6. Separate this from that 7. Ask the mysteries for assistance 8. Stand on all fours 9. Recast the shadow When my mother was dying, I went into the forest of my relationship with her, I sorted poppy seeds from grains of soil to earn the fire, and when I got hold of that fire, I burned up abuse

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culture like a loaf of forgotten banana bread, and I vowed, That kind of violence ends with me. Baba Yaga would be my new mother. And maybe I would be free. In any case, in all these ways, I began to feel my plot structures morphing from conquest toward psychic freedom.

TRY THIS: Write a fairy-tale style story about an unusual teacher. If you can, base this unusual teacher character on a real person who taught you some interesting things, even if the process felt unconventional or harsh.

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DESIGN MAGIC GARDENS

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always had a fantasy of drafting a book in Lan Su Chinese Garden in downtown Portland, a city block size replica of a 16th-century Suzhou estate. I thought The Scholar’s Study would make the best office. The stones and the water would set the mood for my story. If stories could have piazzas and kiosks, why not pavilions and tea houses? If we could structure a story like a house—maybe a wayward house that walks around on chicken legs like Baba Yaga’s—who would that house shelter? And if we could structure a story like a house, why not also like a garden? I want my book to feel like a magical garden. I asked my friend Rebecca Fish Ewan if she’d ever thought about these things. She wrote and drew the graphic memoir The Forces of Gravity and the nonfiction guide Doodling for Writers, plus she’s a landscape design professor at Arizona State University, so I figured she’d at least dig my question. We were drinking non-alcoholic beer at a writing retreat in the desert. By the time I got home, I’d forgotten exactly what she said, but I knew it interested me. Dear Rebecca, What were you telling me in the desert about the theory of garden design where you can see a point of interest or a cool thing from the last cool thing—and the way that leads you through? Can I quote you about that in my new book, The Wayward Writer? Yours, Ariel 151

Hi Ariel, I think I mentioned these examples, or meant to: In the 18th-century English Landscape Gardens, large estate garden designs included eye-catchers, elements placed in the landscape strategically to draw the eye from one portion of the garden to the next. This period of garden design loved surprise, so these features, such as obelisks, bridges, or small buildings, were often peeking from behind clumps of trees, hinting at more beyond the woods. The intent was to intrigue those strolling in the gardens. What’s interesting about this is that it enabled a visitor to feel like they were making wandering discoveries, while also giving them a lure to venture further.  Gardens with these design features include Stowe and Stourhead. In Japanese gardens, specifically the larger Pond Gardens used for strolling, the designs apply Hide-andReveal (miegakure) in the path layout. A feature, such as a hillock, stones, or vegetation, will be placed to intentionally mask what’s up ahead (the hide), so when a stroller walks beyond the obstruction they are delighted by the unexpected (the reveal). All the while staying on the path. Katsura and Kinkaku-ji are examples of Pond Gardens. I also think the designs of Japanese Tea Gardens have a kind of literary equivalency, in the sense that there is a final destination (the tea house for the tea ceremony) and the garden is designed to prepare the visitor for this moment. I’m thinking of how a story is crafted to prepare a reader for a particular moment, so they are ready for it. I did this, though I wasn’t consciously thinking of Japanese Tea Garden design at the time, in By the Forces of Gravity. Chinese gardens, particularly those commissioned by scholars, were often designed with literary references, so 152

walking through them was akin to reading a book for anyone familiar with the story being told. The gardens might also include inscriptions on stones and lintels of structures in the gardens. The book Dream of the Red Chamber includes scenes of scholars selecting inscriptions for a garden. As with hermit crab writing, the new (the garden) is made more familiar through framing it in a known container (the literary references), and this helps a reader feel at home in unexplored territory. Now I’m thinking about it more, the rambles that Frederick Law Olmsted designed into urban parks, such as Central Park, could be thought of as landscape parallels to world-building fiction, in that they were designed to allow for the walker to lose themselves in what seemed like a real patch of nature, but was in fact a completely constructed place. The replication of nature made people feel as though they were elsewhere rather than where they actually were, in the heart of one of the most bustling cities in the world. I suppose all fiction aspires to give readers this experience. You are welcome to quote any of this! Looking forward to this book! :) Rebecca

TRY THIS: Write a vignette or story set in a garden, but also in some way design it like a garden. For example, experiment what it might mean to include elements of hide-and-reveals, surprises, or alternate worlds in your story. Feel free to invent what this means as you organize and write your piece.

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CHARGE AN OBJECT WITH NARRATIVE MAGIC

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n “The Furnace Guy,” a short story Tom Spanbauer wrote for my collection Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, long silences full of anxious narration come whenever a paper invoice passes between the narrator and the furnace repairman. Within the story, Spanbauer notes something he tells his students: That when an object changes hands in prose, “to make sure and slow the writing down because the object is not only an object but an embodiment of energy flowing from one person to another.” Italo Calvino took the idea further, saying, “the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force that becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.” A door is magic. An altar is magic. An invoice is magic. A quilt Sailor Halliday made that I won in a raffle she organized to help a friend’s mother has become one of my prized possessions. There’s something about a hand-stitched quilt made outside the time frames of capitalism—a knot in the network of invisible relationships. In “Labor Made Visible,” an invitation to quilting included in my spell collection, Hexing the Patriarchy, Sailor wrote, “The stitching will take a long time. The hours it takes to make these hexagons are the months it takes to make this quilt. The months it takes to make this quilt are an acknowledgement of the beauty you find in your invisible labor. This quilt is your labor made visible.” 154

Labor made visible is magic. Sailor says that making a quilt represents “your willingness to fall apart, your desire for change, and your ability to make your world in a way that pleases you.” A quilt is magic.

TRY THIS: Write a story in which an object appears and then becomes “charged with a special force that becomes like the pole of a magnetic field.” Play with the moment in the story when the object first appears, the moment when it reappears, and the moment when it changes hands. Let the object be something simple—a door or a quilt or a cup or a trashy magazine. Begin your story on an ordinary day when the sky looks just how it looks today.

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UNLOAD KINGSTON’S GUN We cannot create what we can’t imagine.

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—Lucille Clifton

ooner or later, all creative writing students must learn about Chekhov’s gun. The nineteenth century Russian playwright said, “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter there’s a rifle hanging on the wall, well, in the second or third chapter it absolutely has to go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” Sounds fair enough. But I remember a Bill Moyers interview with Maxine Hong Kingston on PBS way back around 1990. I sat on the carpeted floor of my apartment, my daughter asleep on my shoulder, and I watched our old box of a TV. In the interview, Bill Moyers and Maxine Hong Kingston talked about finding another way to unload that gun. Maxine said, “that’s right, that’s right. I need to figure that out.” Bill Moyers asked, “Do you think it’s your job as a writer to imagine a healthy world?”  And Maxine said, “Yeah, yeah. I have to imagine it, because how are we going to build it if we don’t imagine it? And writers and artists, we have to—we free ourselves in order to imagine it. And we need to imagine the humane being so we can put that archetype out there, so that we can become it.” That stuck with me, that phrase, “the humane being,” and the idea that writers and artists free themselves in order to imagine a healthy world. I thought about what it meant to “put that archetype out there, so that we can become it” and I wondered what it might feel like to “free ourselves.” 156

I still wonder about all that sometimes. Is there another way to unload Checkov’s gun? In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the poet-novelist Ocean Vuong asks, “But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came into that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience is a target audience. ‘Good for you, man,’ a man once said to me at a party, ‘you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ em dead.’” It begs the question Bill Moyer asked all those years ago: Is there another way to unload the gun? The wayward writer hopes to make a living, not a killing. And I bet Chekhov would rather be remembered for the less famous tips for fiction he wrote in an 1886 letter to his brother, anyway: 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of political-socialeconomic nature 2. Total objectivity 3. Truthful description of persons and objects 4. Extreme brevity 5. Audacity and originality: flee the stereotype 6. Compassion Let’s leave Chekov’s gun behind. Kingston’s gun is the one we imagine new ways to unload.

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TRY THIS: Write a story in which there’s a gun or rifle mentioned in the beginning, and then find a new—humane—way to unload that weapon. If you get stuck, remind yourself—Audacity and originality: flee the stereotype. If you get stuck, reread your previous sentences and clip from them to replant and regenerate.

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Dear Ariel, Does my story really need a plot? Yours, Plotless in Pittsburgh

Dear Plotless, Depends on what kind of story you’ve got. You might need a plot. When in doubt, plot. But here’s a secret: You can often make up for lack of plot with a durable and interesting structure. Think of the structure as the house and gardens of a story and the plot as what happened in that house one fateful night when a bright moon held heavy on the horizon. Your plot can have tangents, just like a house can have unexpected stairways and meandering paths surrounding it. Just keep us curious about what’s going to happen next—make us feel like we’re making our own discoveries in your story or in your style, in your house or in your gardens. Sending interestingly arranged dramatics from here, Ariel

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CAVE THEORY

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t might have started with Haruki Murakami’s wells. I knew about the “innermost cave,” where the midpoint battle takes place in Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, but I preferred this idea of going into a well and just sitting there at the bottom of it. I never could relate to a metaphoric duel in the middle of my story. I didn’t want to steal anybody’s treasure. What I needed was something more like a contemplative cave with a silver shard of light that cuts through at certain hours. That’s the kind of a place I seek out when shit gets real and my next move is going to show me who I am and if I’m capable of changing. So, I got in the habit of putting caves in the middle of my books, but without the dragon-slaying battles going on inside. It’s more like I go into a church or a cave or a museum and I don’t have my phone with me.  When I put a cave in the middle of my traveling teenage memoir/novel, Atlas of the Human Heart, it helped me see the story symmetrically, anchored in the middle. A few years later, I wanted to write a book for my Catholic priest dad, so I wrote a novel about a contemporary stigmatic who performs with a traveling road show and talks to the Catholic saints. I drafted that book, The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show, on a DIY writing retreat near Assisi in Italy, and I visited Saint Frances’ and Saint Clare’s tombs a couple of times to check in and make myself uncomfortable, which seemed to help my writing. I built prose-altars to saints and placed them like shrines in piazzas positioned throughout the book. In the middle, there’s an altar to Saint Anthony of Egypt who left society to clear his head. He gave away all his belongings and made his way out into the Libyan desert to take up residence in an abandoned tomb. He spent his days in prayer, ate only 160

after sunset, and slept on the bare ground, welcoming angels and psychic demons as he offered himself up to illumination. A tomb can be a cave.

TRY THIS: Imagine that inside a cave, you build an altar to your creative life, including offerings to one or a few of the writers and artists who have come before you and inspired you. Describe the altar and what’s on it.

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GORE’S GROTTO

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or the Western story of overcoming, they teach Freytag’s Pyramid. I teach Gore’s Grotto.

Freytag’s Pyramid, developed by the nineteenth-century German playwright Gustav Freytag, traces the trajectory of a story going up one side of a pyramid and down the other. Sourced from Greek dramatic storytelling systems that were revived by Shakespeare, the diagram wasn’t so much an invention as a distillation of the way Freytag understood what storytellers had been doing for centuries. You’ve got your opening exposition at ground level on the left, then you climb with rising action toward a singular climax in the middle, then you’ve got your falling action coming down from your climax, and finally you’ve got your resolution or catastrophe—your literal or metaphoric wedding or birth—back on the ground level at the right side of your finished pyramid.  I once had a professor who drew the pyramid just like a penis. But you don’t have to see it as phallic. Pyramids maybe just aren’t my thing. Either way, the shape had been presented to me as inevitable.  Working with my fragmented writing on shame that would become We Were Witches—I wouldn’t even call it a “draft” yet—I knew I wanted to piece together a novel/memoir that rebelled against the narrative of overcoming, but the only structure I knew besides the “happy ending” was the tragic “all is lost.” Comedy or tragedy?

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I thought, What happens when lived experience is neither? What if even failure isn’t framed as tragic but just, you know, as life? I sat with the question: What did my characters—in this case me and my kids—do if we didn’t overcome anything? I thought about swimming in the ocean near my grandma’s house in Southern California when I was a kid. I’d spend hours every day practically breathing the salty water. I lived for that space just out past the breakers. When a wave headed toward me, I didn’t have a choice about how intense it would be or what it carried, but I could decide whether to go over it or under it. A lot went into that split-second decision: How tall was the wave? How much depth did it seem to have underneath? Had it already crested? Was my hair already wet? The ocean is chaos theory, through and through, but I learned to play the odds in it. I learned to survive. When I conceptualized the story of We Were Witches as a shame wave, I could see now that we didn’t overcome anything. We dove under it.  I drew the shape of my story as an inverted pyramid beginning with “invocations” on the left, descending into “deepening action” and continuing downward, reaching its full depth with “potential space,” and then rising on the right through “resistance” to psychic freedom. 163

The focus here isn’t on conquering, but on deepening, discerning, and surviving with a version of ourselves that can relax. We go inside and we discover the inner resources we need. We duck. We lay low. Something is coming at us, and we take the plunge. We begin a story with invocations. Consciously or unconsciously, the protagonist calls in experience. This is a character with agency, if not a ton of experience. How does she summon the next part of her life? Does she seek it out or is she tricked? Is she compelled to face something? At the beginning of We Were Witches, I wanted to set everything in motion—the teen pregnancy, the family-of-origin dynamics, my character’s introversion. 

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From invocation, we move into deepening action. This part of the characters’ life is causing her to get to know herself better than she did before and, by extension, allows the reader to get to know the character and her circumstances in deepening ways. My characters lived in the American suburbs. In the absence of friends or supportive family, the young mother named Ariel engages with the unseen. In the middle of the narrative we find the structure’s namesake—Gore’s Grotto—not so much a culminating climax as potential space. A real or metaphoric cave. A well works. All the better if you can put a vagina right in the middle. I started to obsess about the exact center of a book. Would I measure it by word count or page count or chapter count? Maybe the center would be more stylistic or psycho-spiritual than mathematical. Would I include the front matter, like the table of contents, and back matter, like the acknowledgements, in my calculations? Where would my singular “climax” go? Then I realized/remembered that in lived experience, climaxes aren’t always singular, are they? Any experience—any project—can have multiple centers. I envisioned Gore’s Grotto progressing in a circle, a shape I appreciated in the traditional drawing of The Hero’s Journey. It wasn’t until the first time I taught the new structure in a workshop that a student pointed out to me that I’d arranged it counterclockwise. “Why?” they wanted to know. Why, indeed? I realized that in imagining this structure as a way to go under instead of “overcome”—while still conceptualizing the story as going from left to right because I write in English—it felt more natural to move downward while also moving across the page. If you want to use Gore’s Grotto, here’s a handy list of the buoys. Each section needn’t be the same length, but if you’re trying it out for the first time or need support with pacing, see if you can touch on each buoy at balanced intervals. As for me, I 165

like the anchoring effect of aiming to get the seventh buoy—or phase, or step, or beat—to land pretty close to the midpoint of my project, while allowing for multiple centers.

1. Invocations: We begin with invocations, setting in motion our story’s unique rhythm of desire and resistance. The “protagonist” may be an individual, group, or community of living or otherwise animated beings. The precise desire may or may not be clear, but we set the mood for our character’s or community’s relationship to desire and resistance. Here, too, we introduce at least a hint of the quality of our characters’ or this worlds’ particular magic—or strength. Note that 166

“invocations” is used in the plural here. Likewise, the beginning of your story may invoke multiple or layered intentions. In a later draft, you may want to narrow your focus, or you may not. Let’s say, for example, a story might open with three separate humans in three separate cities or towns each doing a little ritual in their own way—one is praying, one is painting, one is dancing—each one is wishing for adventure—something wild!—and that’s when they each realize that little snakes are starting to grow out of their heads. 2. Societal Options: Here we learn a little bit more about what we’re up against. I think of this phase of the story as “the bummers of the status quo.” What options are available to your character or community? What circumstances will no longer work for them? What stands in the way of liberation? Let’s get the lay of the land. Here we might introduce the communities these three characters live in and all the bigotry and mocking anyone with snakes for hair would have to deal with in these places. 3. Casting the Spell: Consciously or unconsciously, our protagonist or community names their intention. In We Were Witches, this appears at the very end of “book one” when a red-winged blackbird alights on a back fence and wishes away the protagonists’ fears, whistling, “Grow strong, grow bound up with amazement, grow fat!” Maybe in our story about the snake-headed humans, each of the centered characters looks into a mirror, each in their own way beginning to admire their new look, and one whispers, “what if?” as the next whispers “I could . . .” and the third whispers, “rock the snakes?” 167

4. Breaking the Old Spells: It may seem counterintuitive to have cast a new spell before we’ve broken the old spells, and you may want to swap the ordering of buoys three and four here—fine by me—but I like the realism of casting the new spell before we realize, Wait, maybe we first need to break the old spells still holding us. One snake-headed character draws a boundary with their discouraging parent. Another snake-head notices and decides to try and break their habit of hoarding combs. The third lights a black and red candle. 5. Deepening Action: Here we want to see deep colors and rich textures. Here we’ve been in the story through these first four phases and we can begin to ask, What’s under that? What’s under that? What would it mean at this point in your story to go deeper? Maybe one of our snake-headed characters works in a bar draped with maroon and dark pink velvets. Another paints cool nightscapes. The third explores their own history of depression and feeling outcast. All three realize independently that they actually went to the same summer camp when they were kids and they all got bitten by a crazy snake. 6. Eating/Strengthening: All living beings must eat! A protagonist or community engaged in liberation must stay strong. In The End of Eve, the eating and strengthening doesn’t come until well after the midpoint of the book, but I’m finding these days I prefer to get our characters or community nourished before they go into the well. In We Were Witches, the Ariel character’s relationship with the poet Mary TallMountain—and their sharing food—prepares them all to go into the grotto. Maybe our three little Medusas set out and find each other, share food, and catch up on their lives since Camp Snakebite. 168

7. Potential Space: In anatomy, “potential space” refers to any space between two adjacent structures that are normally pressed together—like the middle of a physical book. I first heard the term when I studied feminist theory in the early 1990s, so my use of it is a reference to feminist thought about vaginas and their symbolism. In her paper, “Naming the Woman, Naming the Vagina,” psychologist Jill Gentile says, “the vagina is the quintessential representation of and symbol for space—the space for generation, the space for intercourse, the space for discourse.” That said, you may or may not want to put a literal vagina in the middle of your project and you, as the author, are certainly not required to have a vagina. Saint Anthony’s tomb in my novel The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show serves as potential space in the total absence of vaginas. So, another way to think of Gore’s Grotto is as a place of safety and shelter. The pediatrician and psychiatrist Donald Winnicott used the term “potential space” to refer to any area of experience that lies between fantasy and reality—the space in which children’s make-believe and pretend play can take place. Maybe there’s an improvised kids’ performance in the middle of your story. The centers of We Were Witches appear over the course of about 20 pages in the statistical and stylistic midpoints of the book. In the middle of the story, Ariel goes underground, receives magical advice, and sits with it. At this point in the story-building, I also think of the Pema Chödrön line, “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.” In potential space, we find that which is indestructible in us—even if we have to step into a half-fantasy world to do that. What is the potential space in your project? Where can the reader herself go to daydream in your story? 169

If this were a staged performance, the intermission might come right about now. Are you creating a unified experience a viewer or reader will feel compelled to come back to? Or are you going to lose them to the theater bar? It’s okay if you’re going to lose some people. But as you get more experienced as a writer, you’ll become more and more aware of how you did it and why. The snake-headed humans meet in a dreamy underground nightclub and they do snake dances and their snake hair grows all the wilder. 8. Moving Through Resistance: Stepping into the second half of the narrative, our storyline has renewed energy to take no shit. By the middle of a traditional play, it should be clear what the community or characters desire and unclear if they’re going to get what they desire. That’s why the audience comes back. To find out. Likewise, in a prose project, the desire and resistance pattern set forth early on reaches a point of clarity. Our characters divest from anything not leading toward liberation. There is resistance, and our characters or communities push back against, dive under, or shimmy through that resistance as needed. In the morning, these three look in their mirrors and know there’s no hiding their snake-head status anymore. Now, they have no choice but to rock the snakes and anyone who gives them any shit—well, they’ll deal with them when the time comes. 9. Ancestor Nod: The ancestor nod might appear as a communication from a dead blood ancestor, a sign from a spiritual ancestor, an insight from a poetic/literary ancestor, or really any guidance from the unseen world that will embolden the forces of liberation. The advice from beyond might appear without obvious magic— in the form of a meme or coincidence. Or it may be 170

magical but not clearly ancestral. For example, in We Were Witches, a mermaid who lives in a sewer drain leads our characters to graffiti that warns, “We are afraid you are learning empowerment without self-protection.” What would a loving ancestor come to whisper to your protagonist or community at this turn in your story? Maybe one of the snake-humans’ grandparents lets them in on a family secret—that they’re descended from snake-people who always had to hide their snakiness! The ancestors are very pleased with the new snake-rocking, but also have an important message. 10. Remembering When We Defied Gravity: Who were you before you were a gender? What did your community look like before capitalism? This section doesn’t have to be a memory—it might be a vision. What we’re interested in here is psychic potentiality. I like to draw a line between this phase and “societal options.” If we are limited by societal options, when— in memory, present experience, daydream, or fantasy— do we feel safe, free, and undefined? In our Medusas story—let’s call it “The Legacy of Camp Snakebite,” we might at this point get the backstory of what really went down at that camp. 11. Accelerating Through Toxicity: At this point in the story, we can see through all the oppressive structures and microaggressions and other elements of the world we wish to liberate ourselves from, but that doesn’t mean they’ve vanished. We learn to move through challenges with a focus on self-preservation and harm reduction. Sometimes fleeing is involved. The three snake-heads put on a multimedia arts spectacle! But an anti-snake-head contingent pickets the event and the critics hate it, but the snake-heads are having fun. 171

12. Releasing Expectations/Accepting Failure: In the end, things aren’t perfect. They might be a complete failure. At a minimum, there’s a worm in the apple. Our characters eat the apple anyway. Delicious. You could totally end the story here. Our Medusas realize their art-world failure, and they’re total outcasts, but they have each other. 13. Psychic Freedom: For me, a satisfying conclusion includes self-acceptance. It may also include catharsis. Maybe our characters or community got what they desired and maybe they didn’t. That’s not the point. As we close the book, our characters, our communities, and—we hope—our readers have a sense of liberation from that initial tension between desire and resistance that we cast our spell to move through, a sense of liberation or potential liberation from all the bummers of the old status quo. Yes, we see now: Another way is possible. What would happen at this stage for the snakeheads? You imagine it. While working on this book, holed up in the back room of my house in the desert, I reread my great-grandmother Rosalba’s limited-edition book, Impressions of Europe. What would my writer-ancestor place at the statistical center of her book? I found multiple centers, all in the “Italy” section, where “The Mediterranean, whose waters caress the shores of Naples, is the most wonderful blue, not the deep indigo of the Caribbean, but more like the rich azure of a Montana sky in its most benign aspect.” I began to imagine azure water as the floor of Gore’s Grotto. Our family of travelers—my great-grandmother Rosalba, my great-grandfather “Mr. Laist,” and their teenage son, Jim—tour the ruins of Pompei. My great-grandmother writes, “in a cellar of one house I beheld the petrified skeleton of a woman, with her head buried on a man’s breast, I realized the universality of romance; the tragic romance of this man and 172

woman who centuries ago had sought shelter from the horrors of the flame-belching mountain.” From Pompei, my ancestors headed south along the Amalfi coast, and I kind of gasped when I read my great-grandmother’s next note: “I would like to meet face to face the press agent for Capri and the much-heralded Blue Grotto.” I mean, Wait, what? All these years I’d spent creating what I thought was a unique—not inherited—plot structure and my great-grandmother had a grotto smack in the middle of her 1920s book all along? I read on. The family heads out toward the grotto “in a little lopsided steamer with great expectations.” But, alas, “When famed Capri appeared to view most of the passengers were hanging over the rail, oblivious to the view, and deathly seasick. I was still seaworthy and felt somewhat scornful of the prevailing epidemic of mal-de-mere. But after our diminutive craft had bounced about the waves for about an hour, while we awaited our turn to embark in rowboats (which accommodated only two at a time and plied the Blue Grotto) I began to feel queer.” I always do like it when my great-grandmother uses the word “queer.” In this case, her queerness would prove a problem. She writes, “When my name was finally called, I was so seasick I would not have looked on a closeup view of the planet Mars, let alone the Blue Grotto.” In fact, “I had a superb indifference for all grottos, blue, pink, or saffron, with that complete detachment, aversion and hostility which comes only with seasickness.” Her husband and son go on without her in one of the rowboats, underlining the ableism of all heroic journeys in which some of us are just too sick to make the final descent. I like to think that my great-grandmother started to feel a little better while they were gone—a little queerer or a little less queer—that she got to chill and take refuge in her own meditative solitude 173

on that steamer. She doesn’t say. When her son and husband get back, they try to reassure her that she didn’t miss much. Her son, Jim, calls it a “washout.” “Mr. Laist,” as she refers to her husband, describes it with the rationality of the metallurgist he is—“merely a limestone cave, the roof of which appears to be stained by copper sulfate, and the light coming through the small entrance causes a certain efflorescence which makes the water and walls appear blue.” So it is, my great-grandmother ends the center of her book advising, “When you are abroad, save your money on Capri and the Blue Grotto, or if you do succumb to the lure of its press agent, take a box of Mother Sills’ Seasick Remedy along with you.” I like to think my great-grandmother Rosalba is advising us, too, that the symbolic grottoes of our stories aren’t always the ones we plan. As individual characters traveling in these times between wars—always between wars—there will be places we can’t go. My grandmother would have been 13 that summer of ’27. She didn’t get to go on the trip at all. They left her back in Montana with her little sister. Sometimes we have to stay home, have to stay on the steamboat. Still, by way of our projects, printed and archived, our own great-grandchildren may feel invited in someday, and may come to envision an everbluer grotto.

TRY THIS: Outline a piece you want to write—anything from a 13-paragraph essay or short story to a feature-length script or book—according to these 13 buoys. 

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TRY THE DRAMATIC SPINNING GREEN CHILE APPLE PIE PLOT THEORY

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he plot pie is the most classical story template I use these days. You can apply it to short pieces as well as book-length works. It’s not going to give you the dramatic situations and events so much as a way to arrange and pace a basic story you already have in mind. When I wrote my first real narrative “I” book, Atlas of the Human Heart, I found that I needed a structure to keep myself organized. I wanted to write what I saw as a book-length book—about 250 or 300 pages with 250 or 300 words on each page, give or take, so I decided to divide my book up into five 50- or 60-page segments, right? A whole book felt too big. But I could wrap my mind around 50- or 60-page segments. I’d heard Caroline Casey talking about a 5-act structure on her Visionary Activist radio show. It’s basically the same structure delineated in Freytag’s Pyramid. Caroline Casey broke it down this way: Act One is the character in their current life. Act two is “away,” when they set off on their adventure. Act three is “oops,” or the complication. In act four “all is lost”— tragedies end here. Then act five is the sudden turn of events that brings us to the happy conclusion, preferably a wedding or a birth, echoing a classic Shakespearean story arc. I knew going into writing Atlas of the Human Heart that I wanted to start with high school and dropping out and running away to China, so after a lot of writing around those basic experiences I decided that “part one” would start with the “beginning of the end” of my high school experience and culminate with me dropping out and flying away. That gave me a rough estimate of how many pages I wanted to spend in high 175

school. I pinpointed and dramatized some “inciting incidents”— things that very much made me want to run away—because I knew I wanted to work with causality. I wanted my memoir to read like a novel. (Unless you’re a wickedly famous person with paparazzi capturing your every booty twerk for the sake of it, your memoir has to hold its own as a story.) So, I opened the book with a narrative diagram of my high school and that map defined the space as a trap anyone would feel compelled to escape. I also sometimes thought of that book as a classic voyage-and-return story. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with telling a classic story. I didn’t yet know where the book would end, but with Caroline Casey’s insight that a birth is a good ending, I envisioned my daughter’s birth happening at the end of that narrative. In hindsight, that seems like such a natural—even inevitable—conclusion, but it didn’t occur to me until I was well into the writing and it came from Shakespeare via Caroline Casey.  For more guidance with pacing and rhythm, I turned to Jo-ha-kyū, a concept of modulation and movement you’ll see played out in lots of Japanese arts, including theater. Roughly translated as “beginning, break, rapid,” it means that all actions should begin slowly, speed up, and then end swiftly. I found I could think in terms of Jo-ha-kyū whenever I got stuck in an individual scene or chapter, or I could use it to conceptualize the whole book. When we use Jo-ha-kyū in a five-part drama like a Japanese Noh play, we begin slowly and auspiciously in act one, building up the drama and tension in acts two, three, and four—and we conclude rapidly with a return to peace and auspiciousness in act five. The puppet theater narrator Takemoto Gidayū described the Noh’s first act as “Love,” where gentle themes and pleasant music draw the audience in, but the first act also embodies a sense of longing. The second act is “Warriors and Battles,” where we see a heightened tempo and the plot 176

intensifies. The third act, the climax, is all pathos and tragedy. The fourth act is described as a “michiyuki,” or “journey,” as we ease out of the intense drama of the climactic soul-battle. The fifth act is the rapid conclusion: Loose ends get tied up, and we return to an auspicious setting having changed—or maybe just having made it through.  The message of this and other non-tragic story structures centers survival and growth. We show our readers or our audience that, yes, like them we once knew love and auspicious times. Then we entered a harsh and enchanted land where our very survival—or the survival of love and our strength of spirit—were never guaranteed. But we emerged, sure as a circle is unbroken, stronger, and maybe less burdened, into a place of love and to newfound freedom. Instead of outlining my 5-act structure as a down-thepage list, I drew it as a circle and it became Ariel’s Dramatic Spinning Green Chile Apple Pie Plot Theory.

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Reading through these pie slices—or story stages— you’ll notice some echoes from The Hero’s Journey as well as Jo-ha-kyū. Slice 1: Love, But Also Longing: We begin in an ordinary life or on an ordinary day and receive the call we resist, because even needed change can feel scary. Slice 2: Warriors and Excitement: We’re off! We cross the threshold into the unknown world. Slice 3: Pathos: Oops. We lose our way in our beautiful adventure. Where are we? This is a loss of the initial clarity or footing, but also the heart of the story. Slice 4: Journey: Here we may have a literal journey or road trip, but mostly it seems like we’re not going to succeed in our endeavor. We set out on this brave adventure and we may never make it back. Slice 5: Accelerate through Danger to Peace: Let the maddash dramatic escape with the elixir of liberation ensue. Maybe we’ll even have a wedding or a birth. Remember: It’s okay to be vague or to pencil things in as you plan a story. More focused themes will emerge as you write.  With plot pie theory, your slices—or your acts—don’t have to be of equal size or length. Act one might be a page, act two might be 100 pages, act three might whiz past in 10 pages, act four might be where the really deep stuff happens and it might be 125 pages, and act five may be 3 pages. That said, I find it helps with pacing if they’re roughly the same length. Each act may be exactly 50 pages long. Works for me.

TRY THIS: Write a 5-paragraph story or 5-part outline for a longer story based on the five slices of the Dramatic Spinning Green Chile Apple Pie Plot Theory. Somewhere in your story or outline, include a mention of baking an actual pie.

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ASK THE TAROT FOR AN INSTA-PLOT The life I wanted, one with healthy relationships and less regret, a healthy body and less sickness, a stronger career and less floundering, would only ever be mine if I passed through this time of darkness.

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—Michelle Tea, Modern Tarot once drew a whole tarot deck. You can download them from my Etsy shop for $21 and print them out and even color them in. I like using the cards to create plots.

The minor arcana evoke specific character types and emotional situations. The major arcana tend to represent bigger themes and archetypes. Tarot cards and their interpretations evolved in European occult circles since the late 18th century as a way to make narrative sense of the chaos of our lives, so it follows that the cards are helpful in making sense of the chaos of our story narratives. When I’m starting a project or when I get stuck, I draw a single card for guidance. If I need a full plot, I might lay out a full Celtic Cross where 10 random cards will take me from the opening situation to its outcome. Likewise, when I’m trying to figure out what makes a given character tick, I give them a tarot reading—not likely something that I’m going to use in my storyline, but important for my own insight.

TRY THIS: Get a set of tarot cards or find a free online card generator and create a simple 4-card spread. The first three cards you pull 179

represent your character’s past, present, and future. The fourth card—and for this one I like to turn over cards until I get a major arcana—represents the lesson or theme your character is going to integrate over the course of your story. If you’re not super familiar with the tarot, it’s fine to look up the interpretations. Go with your quick take and don’t worry about over-researching. Write your story. Four paragraphs would make an excellent first draft. Past, present, future, and lesson—now you know how to write a plot.

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CREATE A UNIFIED EXPERIENCE

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ne of the first novels I read as a teenager that made me think, Oh! I want to make novels!, was Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo by Ntozake Shange. That book uses letters, poetry, prose, magic spells, recipes, multiple points of view, and various Englishes to portray female models of resistance. I thought, We can do all that? It’s allowed? Of course we can. Everything is allowed. “I keep telling people that the meaning of the word “novel” is new,” Shange told Brenda Lyons in a 1987 interview, “but for some reason people still seem to think that they should know how to read this or they should feel at ease immediately with this. That’s crazy, because when you meet new people you can’t do that.”  When a reader meets your writing, they’re meeting a new person, they’re entering a new home with its own vibe and rules and aesthetic décor. If you thought of your writing as a whole new entity, how would you want to introduce it to new people? If your book were a home—a house or an apartment or a vintage pink travel trailer—What would it contain? What would the wallpaper look like? Who would your story—this house—shelter? In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. LeGuin writes, “we’ve all heard about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.” The wayward writer’s story can be at once a container and the thing contained.

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LeGuin writes, “If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again—if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.” Remember: We can put something into our story just because we think it’s useful, edible, or beautiful. After I read Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo and The Journey Is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon, a collage memoir, I started taping all kinds of things into a notebook— letters, postcards, descriptions jotted on airplane barf bags, journal entries, quotes from travel books, train tickets, menus. Yes, I thought. I can. It is allowed! And that’s true. But then comes the matter of making it all work together. Marci Easterbrook, my book arts teacher in Santa Fe, says that as artists it’s our job to create a unified experience for our viewer—or for our reader. A book-arts book, she says, is a kind of theater. It’s our job to build a world a reader can enter without getting distracted. We talk about “world building” in sci-fi and fantasy, but every story is a world and our purpose is to propel the reader ever deeper into the work—to unify and synchronize all the elements we want to include, and to create a rhythm of forward motion or satisfying meandering. The unity in a single-author work begins with the simple fact that everything comes from one person’s brain or their travelog. I’ve heard visitors call my home décor style “eclectic,” and that’s fair enough, but everything goes together. A guest can enter and have a unified—if eclectic—experience here. If the work 182

is collaborative, even more care has to be taken in editing and curating to create the unified experience, but that’s our job. That’s the work of the writer and the writer-editor. If you’re just getting started with a big project, start anywhere. You know you want X and Y and Z in your book— start there. Everything is going to be connected at least in that it came from your author-brain. Everybody’s first draft is a jumbled notebook of postcards and scribbled-on barf bags. Then we start going through the rubble and sorting and scrapping and we see what holds our interest and soon enough it all begins to feel more unified. And we keep working. About a third of the way into Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, Shange writes, “Mitch had convinced Sassafrass that everything was an art, so nothing in life could be approached lightly. Creation was inherent in everything anybody ever did right; that was one of the mottos of the house.” Sassafrass makes herself an applique banner that reads: CREATION IS/EVERYTHING YOU DO/MAKE SOMETHING Reading that made me want to learn applique, just so that I could make such a banner and stitch it into my carrier bag.

TRY THIS: Imagine you’ve been invited to contribute to a concept art show at a new gallery with pale gray walls. Your instructions: Create an interactive handbag installation. The art-handbag must contain at least three items, but may contain many more. Describe your submission. 

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MAKE IT LOOK INTENTIONAL

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nce this drunk lady in Oakland cut my hair and accidentally chopped out a big chunk—that’s when I realized the whole salon smelled like rum and syrupy cola. The drunk lady shrieked and jumped back like she’d touched something hot. “Oh no. No no no!” But then she started cutting other big random chunks and crying, “We just have to make it look intentional!” I looked like a Frillback pigeon when I left that place, but I had a new creative life hack: If something doesn’t work—or if you screw it up—just figure out how to make it look intentional. In the 2012 comedy “The Play That Goes Wrong” by Henry Lewis, Henry Shields, and Jonathan Sayer, every livetheater debacle you can think of happens—forgotten lines, set fails, slapstick onstage injuries. Alone, each mistake would be glaring, but as the staged murder mystery becomes a comedy of theatrical errors, the viewer adjusts to the fact that we’re tracking the performance disaster at least as closely as we’re tracking whodunnit. It’s like what my book arts teacher Marci Easterbrook says about it being the artist’s job to create a unified experience for the viewer—when the mistakes are clearly intentional, they stop being distractions and become part of the cohesive whole.  Case in point: I originally conceptualized my novel/ memoir We Were Witches in opposition to advice I’d gotten from a mainstream editor about another work in progress. She said, “Change your author-name to something that passes for male and make the protagonist male and we can sell some books.” I thought about this. I could make a killing with a name like “Jack Gore.” I’ve always known that. But the editor’s advice got me thinking about something else. My mother had actually tried to name me something that could help me “pass” for male on 184

paper—in the early 1970s, twenty years before Disney’s little mermaid permanently feminized my name, “Ariel” was just a common Hebrew boy’s name. I got to thinking about being born into a world where even our own mothers think it’s a mistake to be female. That gave me another organizing theme: I could arrange my memoir around the bummers of being female in the world as it is. If that editor thought my gender was the problem, I would positively flaunt my femme. I would make it look intentional. After I had about 100 pages of fragmented material toward that book, I sent the manuscript out to a couple of reader-pals who said they’d look at it and try to think about the project as a whole. At the end of that early draft—minor spoiler alert—my protagonist, Ariel, meets a talking deer. This startled two out of three of my readers. But I didn’t want to give up my talking deer. I had a creative problem. Solution? I added a talking possum earlier in the book. So, that’s another way of thinking about the “Make it Look Intentional” precept: If there’s a problem, exaggerate it. If your talking deer isn’t working, add a talking possum.

TRY THIS: Think about something you’ve felt or been told that’s “wrong” with you or your writing style and experiment with exaggerating the problem. If you sound a little bit like a beatnik in real life, dig what happens when you lay it on thick, man. If people criticize your work for using too many metaphors, see what happens if you double the number. If someone tells you your voice is too femme to be marketable, feminize it beyond all marketability. Write for three pages.

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Part Four: Remodeling Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don’t see them. —Elie Wiesel

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DO YOUR PROJECT MATH Art is fire plus algebra. —Jorge Luis Borges

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solid-length book is about 50,000 to 150,000 words.

If you end up with way fewer than 50,000 words—say 20,000 to 40,000—what you’ve got is more like a novella, also a fine thing. A good-length chapbook, something that can be read in one sitting, usually comes in around 10,000 words. A short story might be closer to 2,000 to 7,000. Flash fiction or blog posts usually come in under 1,000 words. For reference, this book is about 82,000 words. This chapter is under 1,000. If you end up around 100,000 words, that would be about a 10-hour audio book. With script-writing and standard journalism, you’ve got to be especially careful with your lengths. With scripts, you can keep a very rough estimate in mind if you figure it’s one minute on stage or screen for every page of your script. Probably you don’t want to write a six-hour movie. Pick a book off your shelf that you imagine your book sort of looking like and figure out roughly how many words are in it by counting the words on a sample page and multiplying. Read the script of a film or play you’re into and get a sense of how long these writers are taking to tell a story. All these numbers will help you conceptualize the final project you’re going for.

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If you write 1,000 words a day for two or three months, you’ll have a draft of 60,000 to 90,000 words. You’ll also pass out from exhaustion and your family members might start complaining about the smell, but you’ll have that draft. Anne Lammott told me it takes two to ten years to write a book and if it doesn’t take that long it’s probably not finished. I’ve written a book in less than two years—twice. Those books were finished. But usually, a book takes two or three years. Ten years is not an unreasonably long time. Twenty years happens. It’s nothing to panic about. If I set my font to Times or Times New Roman and I double-space, I end up with roughly 250 words per page in my software. The average print book has about 250 words on a page, too. In this way, I keep a good handle on the length of my printed book-to-be.  Organizing a book before you start it is fine. It can be done. It’s a good option. It won’t hurt you. And it won’t hurt the book. But you don’t really need to know where you’re going with a project—or what form it will take or in what order your scenes and ideas will ultimately pile—until you’ve got 50 pages. This isn’t a completely arbitrary number. For me, 50 pages is what I can read in one sitting and at least vaguely keep in my brain. You might be able to read more and keep it in your brain, but I would be surprised if you could keep track of more than 100 pages. So, once you’ve got 50 or 100 pages, you’d be wise to get at least provisionally organized. Book math can help with plotting, too. A book doesn’t have to have exact plot-timing the way a commercial Hollywood film does, but it may. For both The End of Eve and Atlas of the Human Heart, I endeavored to use a 5-part structure where each part would be roughly the same length. I found that the first and last parts wanted to be shorter than the middle three, but not by much. I found that endeavoring to write 50 pages double-spaced 189

for each of the five parts was an excellent and workable strategy, even if in the end the numbers weren’t exact.

TRY THIS: Take a current project and calculate your word-count. Create an equation or a series of equations that will bring this envisioned project to completion.

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SET THE WORK ASIDE

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o, you’ve got a draft of your story or your script or your article or your book. It’s time to set it aside. If it’s a short piece, a couple of hours may suffice. With a book, I like to leave it to rest for a few weeks. I need to step away for long enough to see it anew when I come back. Revision means to re-vision, to see again. Reimagine means re-image, to image again. Remodel means to re-model, to model again. We set the work aside and come back in the spirit of “What do we have here?” and “How can we use all our senses to resculpt this into something more excellently itself ?” I knew this book would be a writing guide, for example, but I didn’t realize until I’d re-read a few drafts how Cancerian it would feel to me, how focused on my own femme-artist’s tension between nesting and rambling. I started thinking more about that bulldozer that came for my childhood home back in California and the metaphor of rebuilding from rubble, from the salvage. I thought about the way people and events and addictions and mental breaks and divorce and death and economics bulldoze our lives and the way we’re always salvaging what we can, rebuilding or moving on; the way we make art from the ruins, again and again. Fix it with chicken wire. Stitch it up.

TRY THIS: Print out something you’ve been working on that you can’t see your way through anymore and put it in a manila envelope. If it’s shorter than 50 pages, put a date one week in the future on the envelope. If it’s longer than 50 pages, make it two weeks. Now set it aside and go do something else for the week or two. Don’t concern yourself with the project. Forget about it. When you come back to it, bring scissors, tape, and colored markers. 191

Dear Ariel, My first draft will be humongous and even now I fear wading through the morass of what to keep and what to chuck.  I envision hanging all the manuscript pages from clotheslines in the attic so I can SEE the whole thing from a distance and not drown in the multitude of words.  Overwhelmed in Oklahoma

Dear Overwhelmed, I love your image of the clothesline. I like to spread pages across the floor and tape them all over the walls and mark them up with pink felt-tips. Sometimes I’ll rent a cabin for a couple of days if I don’t have the space where I’m living. I hope you can make the clothesline concept work. Let the bleaching sun highlight the domestic metaphoric undertones. From my laundry room to yours, Ariel

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THE SONIC EDIT

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egendary New York writing teacher Gordon Lish—arch enemy of my old writing teacher Clay Felker, if these things interest you—called the first sentence of a story the “attack sentence.” Sometimes I try to think of storytelling in less aggressive terms, but sometimes I’m in the mood for attack. A first sentence is an invocation, even when it’s not an attack—like the first line of a spell. This invocation may also be a provocation. I like to pay attention to the way the acoustics of the story build on that first invocation, clearing a well-paced path through my memories and my feminisms and my imagination to my point—if I have one. If you see me writing and I don’t know you’re watching, you might also see me talking to myself. When we read our work out loud to ourselves—doing a sonic or acoustic edit—we’re listening for the rhythm of it, for the honesty of the voice (do we trust this narrator? It’s OK if we don’t—but we as the authors should be in control of whether or not the voice feels trustworthy.) I always try to use a sonic edit for fine-tuning. It’s a drag and a half to notice something I want to fix while I’m recording the audiobook. But it’s also boss when I’m developing a piece or having creative problems with it. I’ve been working with a short chapter this week that’s been giving me a lot of trouble—my memories of the events I’m chronicling feel shaky, I can’t find a consistent tone, I’m worried it’s going to land wrong for some feminists, and I can’t quite put my purple-manicured index finger on my point.  Sonic editing to the rescue.

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TRY THIS: Pick a short piece that’s been giving you trouble. Give it some love by reading it aloud—fairly quickly—and listening for the rhythm of the words and language. How are you working with repetition? Are you creating ripples? Or just redundancy? Is the pace quickening and slowing as events progress? Do you hear any borrowed phrases that you can rephrase to be more unique? Listen to the writing like you’d listen to a song and identify and remedy where you need an added beat, an added pause, a word that slips off the tongue more easily than the one you first jotted down.

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SET UP AN EDITING PARCOURSE

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signed up for a workshop taught by Susan Ito, coeditor of the anthology  A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption, and creative non-fiction editor at  Literary Mama. I’d known Susan back at Mills College, she’d written for Hip Mama, and all her essays and short stories make me cry in a good way, but I’d never been her student. Who knew she was about to revolutionize the way I’d approach my revision process? I’d often made a practice of going through my manuscripts and editing for very specific things—a particular character arc, say, or looking at all the doors I’d mentioned—but Susan’s editorial parcourse took it all to a new level. In a large room, she’d set up various stations with instructions, some with highlighter pens or tape and scissors or other supplies, and she invited us to circle the room with our printed-out drafts and, at each station, to engage with our stories through a different specific lens. Dear Susan Ito, I took a revision workshop from you at The Writers Grotto in San Francisco. Would you be so generous as to share your editing “stations” with the wayward writers and aspiring lit stars studying in my reform school? I remember one station dedicated to scrubbing out excessive uses of the verb “to be” and another where we used colored markers to rainbow-code each sensory detail. I want to transform my whole house into an assembly line of editing steps. Your fan and student, Ariel

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Dear Ariel, I’ve been collecting revision exercises for decades and then putting them together into—yes, a parcourse of sorts, and what used to be called “circuit training” for one’s manuscript. Many of these come from various books, specifically What If ? by Pamela Painter & Anne Bernays. I’d want to give them credit for the basis of many of my stations. The highlighters, pens, and scissors exercises all come from What If? The Writers Grotto had dozens of little cubbies and nooks for writing, and into each one I tucked away instructions and whatever materials were needed to complete the activity at each station. Here are some of the stations I put together, and you can set them up for yourself ! The key is to just do one at a time—either in 15 minute chunks, or even one per day, but to try to only focus on one aspect of revising at a time. Here are some of the most popular stations: 1. Mapping Your Story: Just like in Winnie the Pooh and the map of the Hundred Acre Wood, use colored pencils or pens to draw a map of the world in which your story takes place. If it’s indoors, it could look like an architect’s blueprint. Or a neighborhood map, or even encompassing entire countries or galaxies. Are the characters on a journey or quest? Seeing a visual representation of the story’s setting can be illuminating when translating it to the page. 2. Five Senses, Five Colors:  Designate one color per sense (smell, sight, touch, hearing, taste) and go through your piece, underlining each time your character experiences one of these senses. You’ll see very quickly if your characters have a barely-mentioned sense of smell. You can also mark where their senses could be heightened, and add that in later. For example, if your characters are driving past a pig farm or a cookie factory, and there is no smell involved, you know that’s a missed opportunity! It’s also good for describing the very unique and particular scents and sounds of people, rooms, places. 196

3. To Be or Not to Be: Highlight all uses of “to be” (are, is, was, etc.) and see if they might be strengthened by an active verb. 4. Writing Outside the Story: Using a sheet of paper and envelope, have one character in your story write a letter to a trusted friend or confidante about what is happening in the story. This can often open up a perspective that is previously unconscious or unseen. They can also do this as a diary entry. 5. Cut and Tape:  This is an opportunity to see a piece of writing in a wholly different way than what a small laptop computer will allow (generally not even a whole page). Print out your piece on one-sided paper. Go through it and mark distinct scenes and sections, flashbacks, anywhere there is a natural break or division. Cut these up and play with arranging them on a table or floor, then tape them together and see what is revealed. What happens if the story is told in a purely chronological manner? What if a key scene opens up the story, or ends it? Changing the order of revealing scenes can change a whole story, and open it up in surprising ways. These are just some of the possibilities in a station-organized revision. You can go through any number of books on writing and revision, pull out intriguing or useful looking exercises, and make your own stations. Have fun! Revisingly yours, Susan

TRY THIS: Take a manuscript of any length through Susan’s stations—one station a day for five days or straight through, 15 minutes at each stop.

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GET OUTSIDE INPUT “No artist is ever pleased.” “But then there is no satisfaction?” “No satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unreast that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” —Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille

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y old teacher Clay Felker liked to say, “you can’t edit by committee,” meaning that writing everyone agrees on usually amounts to boring writing that’s been scrubbed clean of any personality. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get a bunch of input from different sources and act on what resonates and ignore what would dumb down our style. You really don’t have to “kill your darlings” just because one reader doesn’t like them—I mean, unless they suck. Who even said that about “killing your darlings??” William Faulkner? Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch? Do we even know which dead white man we’re still crossing things out for? Writing can feel intimidating when all we read are finished, published books that only have a few typos and loose ends. That’s because a great author and editor aren’t going to reveal the hidden labor of drafting and redrafting that coalesced to produce their seamless final piece. Lucky for you, I’m not a great author, so I can reveal to you how writing and editing conspired to create this very book. Here’s how it went down: I was in the middle of writing a bisexual mermaid spy novel when COVID wrecked my timeline. I tried to shift the narrative into alternate surrealist underwater settings that existed outside of time, but ultimately I had to 198

put the project aside or risk going kind of surrealist bonkers. I decided to switch gears and put together the writing book one of my publishers, Microcosm, had been asking me to do. I figured it’d be easy. I’d been sending out Saturday Morning Writing Prompts for a decade, so if I could just find them all I would have 520 prompts, right? I’d been teaching for another decade, so I had twenty years worth of assignments from in-person classes at The Attic in Portland and online workshops in The Literary Kitchen. I could probably find most of them, right? Years ago someone had started calling my classes “Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers,” and due to my affinity for pregnant teenagers and other drop-outs and delinquent superheroes, it stuck. Anyway, I went through all my School for Wayward Writers files and I started compiling it and when I had about 800 pages, I started reading through them, intending to throw away 500 pages and turn the rest in to the publisher, but around page 90, the naivete of my scheme revealed itself to me in the form of a small green psychic monster who sat down across the table from me, folded his arms across a slimy chest and silently shook his weird green head. He was right. Seriously no arrangement of this material was going to work. The prompts, out of context from The School for Wayward Writers, a place where so many writers had chatted and joked and gotten drunk and gotten sober and tried to support each other, read like random bossy missives some high headmistress had left behind on refrigerator magnets in the kitchen. In order for it all to make any sense to anyone but my old students, I needed to add all that world-building and backstory. Basically, I needed to build the whole School for Wayward Writers as a book. I took a deep breath. Yes, I could do that. I already had my door. 199

Maybe not the easiest book I ever wrote, but something that might work. I nixed 795 of the 800 pages, wrote another 100 pages, and sent the whole new concept to the author Jenny Forrester, who I met when she took one of the first workshops I ever taught at Portland’s Attic Institute—back when it met in an actual attic. Now twenty years later, Jenny line-edited the few polished chapters I’d managed to put together, but more than that she did what’s called a “developmental edit” where she helped me make connections between ideas and places. At this stage we weren’t worried about every dotted “i,” but rather how and if we could make it all come together into a cohesive experience for the reader. As I worked, I brought new individual essays to my usually-monthly online writing group, and my writing pals tried to help me make those chapters sound more like Gore. I had the good luck to be already connected with my Microcosm editor, Lydia Rogue, someone I’d worked with before, so I sent them a very early draft, and they worked with me on another developmental edit from the perspective of a writer and editor who had never been my student. Then I went back to my door-table and got to work with all the input. My colleague Megan Moodie, an anthropology and women’s studies professor at UC Santa Cruz, happened to be working on a manuscript at the same time, so she proposed a book-buddy system where we’d read and edit each other’s pages every month and scheme about our books and feminist praxis and how to achieve the bohemian lifestyle. The buddy-deadlines kept me editing and reworking like my future bay windows depended on it. I’m honestly the slowest writer and I just want to eat red-chile chocolate and honey ice cream, so I need these kinds of accountability appointments. 200

I sent the whole manuscript back to Jenny Forrester again and we went back and forth until we were sure it was absolutely 100% perfect, and then I sent it back to Lydia, who did not think it was absolutely 100% perfect. Lydia liked the ways things were coming together, but they thought the flow was all wrong. In their Portland office that I’ve never visited but I imagine lantern-lit and magical, smelling like bergamot and bicycle oil, Lydia wrote each chapter name on an index card and shuffled and rearranged and thought-through and trusted a few random pulls and sent a new table of contents back to me and I had one month to do the edits. Now, no one in book publishing flips out when an author doesn’t meet her deadline— this isn’t news reporting—but the sport of a deadline has always appealed to me. I stared at the screen for a few hours, trying to figure out how I could prove Lydia wrong so I could keep it the way I had it, but by nightfall I had to admit I liked their arrangement better. So, my spouse went out and bought me a box of redchile chocolate so I could get to work. If we were going to reorder all the chapters, I had to completely rework the through-line, adding connecting chapters and tracking each metaphoric arc. I added this whole chapter. I gave the manuscript back to my spouse to go through for continuity. Finally, I booked a room at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s old estate in Taos, New Mexico, and I brought tea and coffee and a kettle and all the food I’d need for four days—like I planned to camp—and I drove up there and parked on D.H. Lawrence’s ashes, said to rest in that dusty parking lot, and I read the whole manuscript one more time—though probably not the last time, because copyediting—and the ghost of Mabel Dodge Luhan made me cup after cup of coffee and she helped me stay awake, 201

sitting in the red armchair at the foot of the bed, promising to show me the portal on her property that would take me to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s place in 1920s Paris when I was finally done, and at dawn the morning of my deadline, I uploaded this book and hit “share.”

TRY THIS: Get a writer-buddy to read and offer you feedback on a storyin-progress and return the favor. Feel free to use something you’ve come up with for a previous assignment in this book. Tell each other what images stay with you from the story, and what you liked. Ask any questions about things that confused you in each other’s writing. The best editors will help you build on your strengths and reimagine elements of your piece that you knew weren’t working but hoped you could get away with. Take other people’s feedback with a grain of salt. Sometimes they don’t get what you’re trying to do and it’s good to learn to ignore advice that doesn’t resonate. But rework your piece based on your conversation with this writer-buddy and your subsequent thinking about your story-in-progress.

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THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ME & ALICE MUNRO

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’m all for publishing before you’re ready, but you don’t have to publish everything you write and you certainly don’t have to publish early drafts of everything you write.

You’re going to have to learn discernment. It’s okay if this takes time. Listening to NPR a few years back, they interviewed Alice Munro, you know, the Nobel Prize winner, and they asked her how many drafts she did and she said 80 or 100. I thought about that and I figured I do about 40 or 50 drafts of everything I write if you count all the different ways I draft. And that made me feel good, like maybe the only difference between me and Alice Munro was another 40 or 50 drafts.

TRY THIS: Take a piece you’ve written for one of the exercises in this book and redraft it ten times, keeping copies of each of the previous versions but only looking at the most recent draft when you redraft. When you’re done, compare the tenth draft to the first. Notice the effect.

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Dear Ariel, I have big dreams for my poems and stories and I know I’m meant to be a writer, but I haven’t written anywhere except in my journal for seven years and not even there for three months now and every story I try to start feels clunky and awkward. What to do? Graceless in Grand Rapids

Dear Graceless, You don’t have to love and nurture everything you start—or everything you finish for that matter. Visual artists tend to be better at accepting “sketching” as a goal-free practice than most writers I know, but writers need to sketch, too. Walk around with a notebook or a bunch of notecards and pens. Jot down lines that come to you. Make up stories about people on the subway. Challenge yourself to write a haiku every time you eat a meal alone or every time you wake up, but before you get out of bed. Let your sketches go. Then, the next time you sit down to start a story, announce out loud that this story is allowed to be as clunky and awkward as it pleases, and your only job is to stay still and write. Here’s to Gracefully Letting Go, Ariel

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A DOOR CAN BE A TABLE

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fter Mike Hartley rescued my door from my childhood home, it waited in a dark storage unit, silent and regal. My door waited several years.

I missed my door, and I worried that my door would feel abandoned, and then I worried I was getting weirder and more codependent in my middle age, worrying about a door’s feelings. I had the sense I had nowhere to put my door. But then it came to me in an early-morning dream as the sun slanted in through my yellow curtains: My door had already been liberated from my new father’s old house. Perhaps my door awaited further liberation. Maybe my problem was that I’d imagined my old door needed a new house—would always remain a door in the sense I‘d always thought of doors. I’d been on the move every few months of my early childhood, then on the move every five or ten years as an adult—priced out of the latest neighborhood or in need of a change of scenery. I thought, Why not accept my life on the move and make a table out of my door? I ordered legs from a studio called “Iron Maiden.” My wife did the drilling. A door can always become a table if it isn’t quite ready to settle down. That’s where I’m writing this chapter for you now— from the giant table made from the door of my now-demolished childhood home. I have a standing desk, too, because sitting for more than a few hours makes my spine hurt. I wear arm braces sometimes, as well, to help manage the repetitive strain. But 205

mostly I write from this door—from Father Duryea’s door—at once a symbol of my family history and a symbol of my escape. I feel like nothing can really get to me, now that I have my door.

TRY THIS: Write a story about an object repurposed to adapt to a character’s new life or new vision of life. What was it before, literally? What was it allegorically? What weight does it carry presently? Somewhere in your story, include a mention of the quality of the light.

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SHOW AND TELL

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ecause showing is a vivid and dynamic way of sharing experience and because silencing the telling is a Western colonial narrative tradition, teachers often chorus, “show don’t tell.” Chekhov said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” But trauma-informed writers and teachers know that sometimes telling is the first step to transforming life into art. Truth is, the most sophisticated writers show and tell. They demonstrate and comment. They paint the scene in all its blood red and slimy detail, and they underline what they hope the reader takes from the series of scenes by telling us—or allowing a character’s thoughts to articulate—their point. In journalism school, I learned to write short—no time for cinematic storytelling. One workaround when we didn’t have space to show a whole story in scenes: Create the illusion of a scene by simply mentioning the smell of a steak charring on a grill in a grassy park, the sound of the cicadas. By infusing the telling with a glimpse of showing, we instruct our visualand sensory-minded readers what to do with that part of their brains. So, you don’t have to write scenes if scenes aren’t your thing. Stepping into your power as a storyteller means finding a balance and a rhythm that grooves with your vibe and your intentions and the effect you’re going for. Absorb influences. How would your favorite writer put it? How would your least favorite writer handle it? How would you tell me the story if we met for coffee at the end of some dusty road where the neon lights buzz and flicker and the night tastes like honey? Not every story needs to be written the way you’d tell it to me in a diner, but in experimentation we begin 207

to tap into our own voice as separate from the way our various forms of training and education may have taught us to write. Remember: We’re looking for how you see the story, and what specific images course through your mind as you reimagine it for us. Tom Spanbauer back in Portland used to talk about “writing with a burnt tongue,” by which he meant saying something in an awkward or interesting way in an effort to slow the reader down and make them pay attention. He would never say, “that’s cliché,” but if someone wrote “it was a dark and stormy night,” he might say, “I’ve heard that before. It’s received text. Can you rework it to be more unique?” And maybe the writer would come back with “The rain hit my skin like a thousand tiny severed fingers ready to strangle.” And he’d nod and say, “that’s coming along.” Gertrude Stein wrote “a rose is a rose is a rose,” which sounds like telling to me, but she explained the power of that line: “Can’t you see that when the language was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of the thing and the thing was really there? He could say ‘O moon,’ ‘O sea,’ ‘O love,’ and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can’t you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just worn-out literary words . . . We all know that it’s hard to write poetry at a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, something unexpected, into the structure of the sentence in order to bring back vitality to the noun . . . Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t say, ‘is a . . . is a . . . is a . . .’ Yes, I’m no fool, but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.” That’s why we can’t have any enduring “rules” in writing, because as poets in this late age, we’re constantly having to make the language new—make it new in order to be 208

heard, make it new in order to make the moon and the sea and love really here.

TRY THIS: Write your story telling the reader what happened—don’t show them anything. Now rewrite it, showing them everything without telling them anything. Notice the effect.

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BORROWING AND STEALING

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hen we write in community, we can begin to sound alike.

A few months after I moved from the Bay Area to Portland, Oregon in the early 2000s, Sister Spit, a San Francisco-based all-girl traveling poetry road show with whom I’d only performed once, came through town. At the bar afterwards, I heard someone say, “Why did all those writers sound like Ariel Gore?” Well, they didn’t really sound like me so much as I sounded like them. I just happened to have gotten to Portland first. We were from the same queer subculture in the same geographic area and we were mostly under 35 and probably had a lot of the same influences from Kathy Acker to Eileen Myles. My first girlfriend was in a writing group with a few of them. I’d published their poems and gone to their open mics. We all built altars to Djuna Barnes. There was no real literary theft going on, that I know of. Sometimes, things can get sketchier. A couple of years ago, I thought I’d come up with a great line—really too good to be true—I did an online search for it and, not finding it, used it as my own. An old pal messaged right away, saying it had been her personal motto, which once she mentioned it I totally remembered, so I went back into the work and attributed the line to her in all mentions. Writing We Were Witches, I took inspiration from my student and friend Dot Hearn. She’d penned “The Shotgun and the Peacock Feather,” and I’d published it at literarykitchen.net in 2013. In Dot’s memoir-story, the poet Adrienne Rich appears to the narrator as an apparition to comfort and embolden her during a terrifying domestic violence experience. I started playing 210

with the idea that writers do appear to us as visions in our most desperate moments and I even included a visit from Adrienne Rich in my own book. I sat there in front of my computer, well aware of the Hearn-influence, and I fully intended to run the whole thing by Dot and include the acknowledgement in the back of the book and then, well . . . I forgot. All about it. When I got my author copies and noticed the omission, I messaged Dot. I took comfort in the fact that we’d published her story and clearly dated it 2013—before my book. Still, I felt like a cad. Dot responded with characteristic Dot-graciousness and said something to the effect of, “I think Adrienne Rich visited a lot of us that year.” But I’d screwed up. Recently, a student messaged and asked me if I’d given permission for another former student to crib my entire class curriculum, offering all my writing prompts verbatim as if she’d written them herself. I wrote back that, no, I hadn’t. I didn’t confront the teacher who’d copied my class because I’m no saint. But here’s a fact: The writing world is small and when you replicate a teacher’s class that gets back to her and the next time you want her to blurb your book she’s going to have a grumpy gnome on her shoulder who whispers, “We don’t have time for that.” All this to say that for every writer who has had something snagged from them, someone among us has been a snagger. Maybe it’s been perimenopause-memory related or maybe it’s been more intense and insecurity-driven shitty behavior. Be honest with yourself. Apologize when you screw up. Remedy. Resolve to do better. It’s uncool to show up and take credit for another person’s project or idea. Sure, lines can blur in community and tired-inspiration can get messy and memory fails, but that doesn’t mean we can’t recognize our own bad behavior and cut it out.  If you want to borrow an idea or a writing prompt or assignment or a line from another writer, that’s usually going to be fine. If it’s something small and previously published, a simple 211

acknowledgment and attribution works. If you want to borrow something more substantial, or something another writer has shared with you but not published, always ask. If there’s a power deferential or exposure differential that might cause readers to think they got the idea from you instead of the other way around, double check. When in doubt, talk to the other writer about it. Often we’re happy to share ideas and resources. We’re never happy, however, to be plagiarized or appropriated from. And we’re never happy to meet up with someone who wants to “pick your brain” for the price of a cheap beer.

TRY THIS: Write a short scene four times, each in the style of a different writer you admire. How would Gertrude Stein write the scene? How would Octavia Butler write the scene? How would Haruki Murakami write the scene? Feel free to choose other authors to emulate. Any four. When you’re done with your drafts, go through them and make sure you’re not doing any unattributed line-stealing. If you were to publish one of these stories, would you acknowledge the voice-inspiration? Why or why not?

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Part Five: Solitude and Scene, Home and Away Hell is other people. —Jean-Paul Sartre But other people are also utopia.

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BOLD AS YOU CAN STAND A letter from Jenny Forrester

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here are so many excellent ways you may have crossed paths with the work of Western writer and literary organizer Jenny Forrester. She’s the author of memoirs Narrow River, Wide Sky, and Soft-Hearted Stories: Seeking Saviors, Cowboy Stylists, and Other Fallacies of Authoritarianism, a Colorado Book Award Finalist. She co-founded the legendary Unchaste Readers Series which started as an in-person monthly event in Portland, Oregon, showcasing non-cis-male writers and morphed into an online variety show and anthology publishing project. Now a parttime hermit and editor of the literary journal Mountain Bluebird, Jenny still manages to elevate performance and create community wherever she goes, so I asked her if she could share advice for writers who want to perform work publicly. She wrote back with this whole cheat-sheet of “evergreen” advice to get us started in our performing arts life.

Evergreen From Jenny Forrester 1. If your writing community has people in it who organize events, I’d start there. Do lots of research on their events before asking them questions. They’ll love that you did your research first. Plus, they’re already your people, they’re already in love with you, and they’re doing the experiments too.  2. If your writing community doesn’t have organizer types, open mics that showcase the kind of writing you do could work nicely. Search for open mics, and see if you think it’d be a good fit for you. Attend events before you try to participate in them.  3. Check out the arts section in the local paper, look at power pole flyers (we do still do those sometimes), calls for submissions to events, calls for readers.  214

4. Social media. You know how. Friend/follow other writers who perform so you can see what’s happening and ask around. It’s scary to ask, but it’s a lot less scary than not making your performing dreams come true. 5. Online event venues like Crowdcast, Eventbrite, etc.  6. Local literary arts organizations might have events, but they’re usually highly curated for people with MFAs (but you never know, speaking from experience here). 7. Be bold, as bold as you can stand. You can do this. When you do take part in community events, be a super good guest: •

Probably don’t trash people because someone said something about them. Just saying. Organizers are people too, and they’re making spaces in a world of rapid change full of big demands and massive fears.

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Abide by the guidelines. If you get five minutes to perform, time yourself and come in at or below five minutes. Always leave ’em wanting more is a truism because it’s true.

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Don’t demand payment unless that’s understood up front. If that’s important to you, only perform for payment that suits your goals.

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Be polite and grateful and promote the event if you’re invited to perform. If you can’t be polite and/or grateful because you don’t really like the organizer or you resent having to perform or you resent having to be grateful or you feel cranky about the whole thing, and so don’t want to promote the event, don’t participate. Maybe you can find another way to perform and get that experiment/performance experience using social media video tech. The painful thing about art is that we all want to be treated with the dignity and kindness we deserve, but the world doesn’t really work that way so find out who’ll treat you well and treat them well and you’re all set. Be super brave. You’re not alone or the first, even if it seems that way. I read a piece of writing one time in a dark basement bar, bright light overhead. The laughs didn’t come in the spaces where I thought they would come, so I acted like 215

that was exactly where I put them, and I enveloped myself in a little bubble of protection (which at the time meant I drank quite a lot of tequila), then went home and worked on it so I knew why the laughs landed where they did and not where they didn’t and were supposed to. A decade later, I was invited to this podcast type shindig, and the host said to me, “I didn’t think I could write poetry until I read yours, and I thought to myself I could write poetry like that.” So, it’s the experimenting that teaches us, it’s the evolution that transforms us and our art. No one has to know what you intended the thing to do—that thing you’re reading when you’re starting out. Remember: Nobody knows everything, and here’s a secret about learning that I learned in teacher school. People of all ages learn on their own. Teachers put concepts and theories into words, images, and exercises in order to guide you or kickstart your subconscious. They attempt to give structure to your ongoing, personal learning experiment, but you’re the one who has to do the work of the experiment. Which is very cool. Empowering. Potentially evolutionary, really. So, the thing about formal education is that the whole “we approve of you, here’s your scroll with a shiny stamp” thing isn’t the thing that creates art. In the Literary Kitchen, we write a lot, we make art at a very fast pace, we work and work. We’re encouraging, which some people say isn’t critique, but it is because we find what works, we find what we’re good at, what we’re best at, it’s about the writing-likeyou, not the writing like “The Program.” It’s nice to know the names of things, the names of tools and devices, to get labels so we can slam dunk the mansplainers and the like. It’s good to study the structures of things, and we do every time we read or listen to each other’s works.

TRY THIS:

Practice reading a piece you wrote, out loud, timing yourself so that it comes in at five minutes or less. Practice again, this time recording yourself. Share the recording with some pals if you like. 216

CREATE THE COMMUNITY YOU WISH TO BE PART OF

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ometimes people who aren’t writers are going to think you’re weird. That’s all right. Probably you are weird.

Sometimes other writers are going to think you’re weird. That’s okay, too. Again, probably you’re weird. When I’d been writing for a while and wanted to start sharing my work, I didn’t quite know where to turn. A local café held a poetry open mic, but I’d never written many poems and an ex I wanted to avoid read there. Some queer writers I knew organized events at bars, but I didn’t have a babysitter and I didn’t see my work as “queer enough,” so I felt shy. I submitted to feminist publications, but my parenting focus alienated some editors. I submitted to parenting magazines, but those editors said nothing or said my politics would turn off their advertisers. I needed a senior thesis project at Mills College, anyway, so I decided to start my own zine. I started Hip Mama to publish work by me and my pals. I made flyers to attract other writers I didn’t know and posted them around Mills and at Marcus Books, a Black community space, and Mama Bears Bookstore, a women’s space, both in Oakland. This was in the early 1990s, when politicians and radio hate-personalities constantly railed on poor and single moms, pushing government policies to have our children taken away and institutionalized for no other reasons than our ages, incomes, marital statuses, genders, or sexual identities. The racist, classist family values campaign and anti-teen mother campaigns targeted us with an overt mission to shame us as a 217

“deterrent” to future would-be parents. In other words, a lot of people with no lived experience of marginalized parenting were telling stories about us. I wanted to create a venue where we could share essays and poetry and support and humor among ourselves. I liked the look of The Sun magazine—offset printed with a black and white interior—so I emulated that. Because of the economics of offset printing in those days, I went with 500 copies of the first issue. Now it would be equally economical to print fewer copies, or to publish digitally, but 500 printed copies felt like a reasonable, ambitious number in that time and place. Mama Bears Bookstore carried a bunch of underground and small press publications, and they had a small stage and café, so I showed them the zine and asked if we could set up a launch there. They said yes!  I sent press releases to local media positioning Hip Mama as part feminist rag, part literary journal—a place where single, queer, BIPOC, and welfare mothers could tell our own stories. As I may have mentioned, I’m not naturally outgoing. I often shake with social anxiety. I almost never have a quick come-back. I read that Anaïs Nin didn’t learn to talk until she was thirty years old and that gave me some hope that I could still learn, but those first launch events were performance disasters. The attention of large audiences made it hard to breathe. The humiliation of small turn-outs caused me to stutter. On two occasions, I ran off stage mid-reading. I had to learn to prepare. I had to learn to practice. I had to learn to laugh when things still went wrong. I started wearing a pink tutu in an effort to create an alter ego who wasn’t so afraid of other people. I could accept that public presentations might never be my strong suit, but I had to keep trying. I had 500 zines to sell, after all. I’d put my rent money on the line to get these things printed and damn it all if I wasn’t going to at least break even. 218

Punk philosophy had taught me that it’s okay to do things we’re not good at and I leaned into that philosophy and pressed on, doing all kinds of things I sucked at until I got better or accepted myself. Remember: It’s okay to do things you’re not good at. The popular parenting magazines were full of “experts” telling mothers what to do in an effort to round up an audience to sell minivans to. Hip Mama would be reader-written. At first I imagined that the audience would look a lot like me and my pals: Urban, single, low-income, maybe students, maybe queer. But what I discovered immediately with the submissions that came in after that first issue was that when you tell the truth about your life you don’t just attract people like yourself, you attract other people who want to tell the truth about their own lives. Hip Mama’s audience was generally feminist, but beyond that we were all over the place—young and older, high school drop-outs and PhDs and both, married and single and everything in between, Black and Brown and white, fashionable and spit-up covered straight and bi and queer and cis and trans and really not thinking about our sexuality or identities right now because we were trying to pay for groceries—basically all the awkward misfits I could gather around. And that became my first writing community.

TRY THIS: Write a short story beginning with a character deciding that it’s okay to do something they’re not good at or not comfortable with. What happens next?

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DRAFT AN ARTIST STATEMENT

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n artist statement is a brief, first-person or thirdperson declaration of our vision or purpose— and maybe a glimpse into our process. Why do you write? How do you write? What motivates you to write? Be specific. Visual artists write artist statements, too. It’s just a narrative summing up that allows grant-givers and other patrons of the arts to wrap their minds around what we’re up to. Yayoi Kusama, queen of polka dots, says, “My artwork is an expression of my life, particularly of my mental disease.” That’s a good, succinct artist statement. If I wanted to create a short statement like that for my own work, I might go with, “I write because I want to be myself and survive.” Not currently being the most expensive artist in the world, I’d have to expand from there. How do you translate your mental disease or your particular quirks, joys, and experiences into art? If I wanted to add my goals to my statement, I might say, “I go all out to make the literary world accessible to everyone— from dime-store novel fans to the real high-brow tomatoes.” Here’s what Judy Chicago said about her installation The Dinner Party: “Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other’s shoulders and building upon each other’s hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel. The goal of ‘The Dinner Party’ is to break this cycle.”  If I wanted to add the status quo I’m pushing against, I might say: 220

“Because so much of literary culture is built on mystique and gatekeeping, new and marginalized writers are denied the maps and travel notes of wayward writers who’ve come before. I seek to create a map I can share.” If I wanted to add my process to my statement, I might say, “I string one word after the other as a kind of meditative act that helps me to mitigate my own anxiety and sense of impending doom. On my best writing days, I feel like I’m back in kindergarten, making a daisy chain. I hope a daisy chain can be a map.” So there we have it. An artist’s statement. If I wanted to shift my 128-word statement into the third person, it would sound like this: Ariel Gore writes because she wants to be herself and survive. While she’s at it, she goes all out to make the literary world accessible to everyone who loves stories—from trashy dime-store novels to the real high-brow tomatoes. Because so much of literary culture is built on mystique and gatekeeping, new and marginalized writers are denied the maps and travel notes of the wayward writers who’ve come before. Ariel seeks to create a map she can share. She strings one word after the other as a kind of meditative act that helps her to mitigate her own anxiety and sense of pending doom. On her best writing days, she feels like she’s back in kindergarten, making a daisy chain. She hopes a daisy chain can be a map.

TRY THIS: Write an Artist Statement. Aim for 50 to 300 words. You can write your artist statement focused on a specific project, or make it a general statement about you and your process and dreams and body of work. Draft your statement in the first person. Shift it into the third person. Read each aloud. Save them both.

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METAMORPHOSIZE INTO A FIREBREATHING DRAGON AND APPLY FOR ALL THE RESIDENCIES

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tarting out as a young writer, I didn’t apply for residencies because I needed childcare more than I needed a cabin in the woods, but these days, literary community-makers have created all kinds of retreats and residencies for single folks and mamas, for people who can pay and for people who can’t. A residency is basically a place to go and write. Some of them are quite organized, some are communal. They offer a chance to get away from our day-today lives or just to get a change of scenery. I’d been writing for decades when I finally applied for—and got—my first residency, a little room in the back of The Future, a magical witch shop in Minneapolis. There I drafted Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells, and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance. At a reading for that book, I asked the poet MK Chavez where they were living these days. “Living residency to residency,” they said. Residency to residency? I felt intrigued. If you don’t already know the magical, fire-breathing MK Chavez, she’s the author of Mothermorphosis and Dear Animal, both from Nomadic Press. She’s a recipient of a 2017 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award and her poem, “The New Whitehouse, Finding Myself Among the Ruins,” was selected by Eileen Myles for the Cosmonauts Avenue 2017 Poetry Award. She’s a co-founder/curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges and co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival, a fellow with CantoMundo, and guest curator of the reading series at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in the Fall of 222

2018. I figured she could give us some advice about getting all the residencies. What would you create if you had a little spot away from your other responsibilities for a week or a month? Daydream it. Dear MK Chavez, You’re the queen of writing awards and fellowships and residencies. Can you offer rising lit stars and wayward writers of the future any pointers on researching and applying for prizes and retreats and residencies and such? Do we need an “Artist Statement?” Where do we even begin? Yours, Ariel Hi Brujita, Outside, the rain is making everything muddy and bright green. Inside my cabin in the woods, my toes are being warmed by heat that rises from the floor. I’ve only experienced radiant floor heating once before but I swear it makes writing easier.  I am writing from Sitka Center for Arts & Ecology. It’s January, 2022 and it’s my first residency of the year. Before you asked, I hadn’t really thought of myself as someone who gets residencies and it’s been fun, funny, and illuminating to reflect on my process.  My first application process was successful. I applied for five residencies and got into four of them. I believe that my applications were wildly successful because I had just gone through a breakup and had metamorphosed into a firebreathing dragon. I was angry, mostly at myself, for staying with someone who kept an altar to their ex in their bedroom . . . but that’s another story.  Bad relationships and their transformational opportunities aside, I can say that beastly will power, the 223

kind that breaks through fear, is very useful as you enter the residency application process. So, nurture the slaying creature that lives inside you, and I hope some of the strategies that I use can be helpful to you.  Before my transformative moment, I wanted to apply to residencies but would unknowingly dive into the pool of self-doubt and too late realize that it was quicksand. I started many applications that were never completed.  TRY THIS MANTRA: I deserve all the residencies. Or create your own mantra. Have something to anchor you to the fact that you’re entitled to space to write and create.  •

But What Does it Mean to Write a Good Application? Write in your own voice. 

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Trying to write the perfect (by whose standard?) residency application can take us down a rabbit hole of weirdness. 

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If you don’t sound like yourself, it’s a sign. You’re the one they want. Let them know why. 

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Oh, did I mention good applications get rejected? Yeah, they do because it’s a fickle process. I had to apply to Hedgebrook three times to get in. I was part of a cohort that included someone who applied six times before she got in and someone else who got in her first time. 

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A good application is a good representation of you, your work, and the passion you feel.  All About the Fit There is such a thing as a good fit, but that’s for you to determine. It’s also amorphous territory. A residency in the woods might be a good fit for you while you are writing a book about how plants transform into people at night. It could also be a terrible fit if you’ve watched too many horror films that are set in the woods. 

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Residencies do sometimes cater to specific kinds of writers and artists. Sadly, residencies are not heaven, and all the social ills can and will show up in the process and sometimes at the residency itself.  The good news is that residencies are changing their ways and new residencies that center inclusivity and belonging are born all the time. Shout out to the writing residency that is connected to a witch store.  Ask a Writer Ask other writers that you respect for opinions, advice, and recommendations about how and where to apply.  Two of my favorite pieces of advice came from Norma Liliana Valdez who said to me, “Those folks really want to know who you are. Go deep. Write from the heart.” Until that point it really didn’t occur to me that reviewers really wanted to know about me. Most of us are fascinating— why hide it? Another good thing about asking a writer for advice is that it prepares you for asking for references. Another potential place of stalling. Think of folks you admire but also of folks who you have made literary magic with and who you know want to sing your praises. Proof of superpowers in collaboration can be good as can proof that you can thrive on your own in the middle of the woods with minimal contact.  The second piece of advice wasn’t so much advice as much as it was a moment of transparency. Raina Leon is an amazing writer and one of the most active literary community members that I know. What Raina did for me was to demystify the residency realm. She was completely open about the process and shared ideas, tips, and basically opened a gate that made me feel less like I was on the outside.  YOU ARE NOT AN OUTSIDER. YOU ARE A WRITER AND THEREFORE A PERFECT FIT FOR A WRITING RESIDENCY. 225

But Are They a Perfect Fit For You? There are many types of residencies out there. I make a distinction between writing retreats and residencies. Not everyone does but in my experience retreats often charge for the stay whereas residencies mostly don’t and some even come with stipends to support travel or food, some residencies provide meals (food can be amazing at residencies).  Measure Twice Cut Once Decide what kind of residency you want. Are you a nature lover? Do you want complete isolation? Do you want to be untethered from technology? Do you want to share a big house and get to know other writers? Does the idea of sharing a bathroom make you cry? Do you want a super long residency? Do you want a residency on a boat? Do you want to bring your kids? Well, there’s a place for you!  It can get expensive to apply for residencies, so it’s best to know exactly what you want. I keep a list of residencies and work my way down the list. PRO TIP: Retreats or residencies that charge will sometimes offer scholarships or waive fees. Some residences will also waive submission fees. Something I learned long ago from How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead is that it’s always worth asking if a submission fee can be waived.  The Basics Prepare boiler plate language that you can adapt for each application. Here’s a list of info you should keep in a folder ready for adaptation:  • Proposal language: the nitty gritty of what you will use the

time for. Even though some residencies say they don’t expect you to work on anything specific, they almost always want to know some details of how you approach work and what you’re currently working on. 

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• Writing sample: Keep a few versions. Always share your best

work (best meaning the work you are most excited about). Some residencies want a true sample, in that case, share published and in-progress work or most recently completed work.  • Artist statement.

The beauty of having some basics ready is that it makes the process go a little faster.  Future Tripping I am a Gemini and I’m always looking forward to the next thing. Applying for residencies is one place where I can use my superpowers! Many residency applications must be submitted way in advance, so if getting into residencies is a priority, plan to research way ahead of time.  Finally, but most importantly, visualize yourself at your top residency choice. Imagine how it will feel, look, smell, and taste. If you can imagine it, you can make it real.  —MK Chavez

TRY THIS: Research writing residencies and make a list of three you could reasonably apply to.

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PLAN A DIY WRITING RETREAT

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hile you’re waiting to hear back about all the fabulous and prestigious writing residencies you’ve applied to, plan your own DIY get-away.

Pick someplace close and cheap, preferably with strange scenery. Pack like you’re camping so you won’t have to leave your room, not even for coffee. I mean, you can leave your room, but you want the option to hermit up completely. Bring your writing tools and any works in progress you might want to engage with, and visual art supplies for crosstraining—collage images or a sketchbook, say. Only bring the devices you’ll absolutely need. If you must travel with another writer, get separate rooms. You don’t have to do anything in particular on your writing retreat. Just make yourself exclusively available to your own art brain. Go. Got it? Pick, Pack, Bring, Just Go.

TRY THIS: Make a list of what you’d pack for a three-day writing retreat. Look at a map and scheme.

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Dear Ariel, How do you know your writing is “good,” that other people will enjoy reading it?  Sincerely, People Pleaser in Poughkeepsie

Dear People Pleaser, You don’t know. That’s where the faith dive comes in—followed by the never-ending process of bobbing around and letting go of “good.” I like reading and performing in small supportive settings, often of my own making. Start your own monthly salon. Try things out. Have everyone come dressed as an historical literary figure. You can learn to tell whether your audience is engaged. Live readings differ from the printed page mostly in that people prefer to laugh in public settings and cry in private settings. So, it’s like the karaoke tenet: When in doubt, go for funny. That said, any version of fully-present you is “good” enough. Eventually you’ll get better or you’ll accept yourself as you are or you’ll meet yourself somewhere in between. See you at the salon, Ariel

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INVENT YOUR OWN PROMOTION FORMULA

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gave a guest lecture at a snowy writing center in the woods out East a few years back, the smell of burning firewood and hot cocoa. It all felt so cozy until one of the teachers started telling young writers that they needed 100,000 followers on social media and the other gave them formulas for what percentage of their posts needed to be personal in order to seem “authentic,” what percentage needed to be promotional, and so on. The teachers, who had never self-published, also insisted that self-publishing or indie publishing would ruin any writers’ career.  Outside the picture windows, the weight of the snow cracked an evergreen branch. I tried to pipe up, respectfully disagreeing but mindful of my guest status, but one of the instructors immediately shot me down, saying maybe I was different. Like because I’m some kind of freak, different rules applied to me. Well, I didn’t go in for that. I’m sure I’ve ruined my career a hundred times by being myself. That’s how you get to be yourself. We all need to find ways to engage with the larger world. If it’s fear that’s holding us, we can push through that. However! If we’re spending all our time trying to figure out how to seem “authentic” and make ourselves popular on platforms that make us feel like wilted carnations stuck in jars of shit, well, when will we ever have time to break each other out of our isolation and put each other in touch with the universal spirit? We haven’t got time to spend in places—physical or digital—that colonize our brains and make us feel badly about our bodies and complacent about endless war. 230

A lot of people will tell you that you need a massive social media presence if you hope to get anywhere as a writer. Here’s what I think: Treat your writing and all your creative projects like your shy and beautiful little show dogs who you want to give all the opportunities, but who you also want to protect. You don’t want to overextend your show dogs or make them feel exploited. If you don’t care for social media, don’t hang out there. Social media is a bad neighborhood. We all know that. Might you sell some chapbooks there? Sure. Do your readers live on social media? Is that a legitimate place to reach them? Yes? Can you psych yourself up to create that presence? Then, great. Writers who have big social media presence often know their readers a lot better. You’re allowed to take up space. Remember: You’re allowed to take up space You could edit and produce an online magazine that features short pieces by yourself and other writers that suit your aesthetics and interests. You can be a part of the public literary world with or without your own projects to promote. It’s about community-building and how you prefer to do that. You might have a media account of some kind where you post photos and draw pictures of things you think are cool and post them every day or whenever you please, thus creating a thread of your humor and artistic tastes without ever sharing your words. You might start a podcast. Maybe you’ll post updates about projects you’re working on, sharing the artist’s everyday life. If you’ve got a zine or a book out, it’s not a sin to shamelessly plug it. Your friends and acquaintances want to know what you’ve been up to. They want to support your creative weirdness. That said, it’s also no sin to let a reader figure out how to buy it all by themselves. Accept that some people won’t. But keep in mind that a lot of the people who buy books aren’t on social media that much anyway because they’re sitting out in a grassy park somewhere that smells of gardenia and they’re reading an old-fashioned printed book and they’re

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wearing a rose in their hair. Where will they hear about their next book? Experiment with ways to engage with society and promote yourself and your projects that don’t devastate you. Remind yourself of your worth. Learn how to say no, even if the learning curve takes years. Therein, you can never fail, because the journey becomes the more and more excellent destination: Your self-nurturing rose-scented writer’s life.

TRY THIS: Promote someone else’s project. Read a book with the intention of writing a review. The book doesn’t have to be new, but it may be. Write the review. Publish it or post it online.

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GO TO A WRITING CONFERENCE What is the dream? To write something fine, that would be better than I am, and would justify my trials and indiscretions. —Patti Smith

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went to the writing conference with one goal: That I not make anyone else feel like they didn’t belong there.

I’d often squirmed in my jeans, feeling out of place at this annual gathering—it’s an academic conference, really, and I’m on the margins of academia. But Katherine Arnoldi, author of the graphic novel The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom, asked me to participate in a Tillie Olsen tribute, and that seemed reason enough to fly across the country. It felt like coming full circle as a writer who believes in proletarian literature, a writer who hopes to model and prioritize inclusion—to pay tribute to this working-class mother who inspired me with her published books when I was a new mom, who mentored Katherine Arnoldi who in turn always inspired and encouraged my work. A bunch of writers who had at one time or another taken a class from me, or published with me, planned an offsite Wayward Writer reading to kick off the conference at Giovanni’s Room, the oldest queer bookstore in the country, and we had a table reserved where we could all sell our books at the conference. How could I not go? I read Patti Smith’s Devotion on the plane. The trajectory of that book models the way fiction works as a kind of a dream, a sensory tapestry of a writer’s collected fragments of emotion

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and images repurposed into a new story. At times my journey felt like a dream. I walked through a light rain. The streets of Philadelphia: a community refrigerator painted with bright fruits sat right on the sidewalk, offering FREE FOOD. Posters outside a church reminded Catholics not to be afraid of critical race theory. At Giovanni’s Room, a quote taped to the door of the out-of-order bathroom reminded me the importance of it all: You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. —James Baldwin The bookstore workers set out folding chairs under a giant chandelier made of sea glass and plastic mermaids. What makes for a good reading? Make us laugh or make us hold our breaths. Wear something fabulous, or just excellently yourself. And rehearse. That night, I dreamed the old dream I used to dream when I first published The End of Eve, a memoir about my mother’s last years, and in the dream she never died—she’d been close to death and I’d finished the book and in my haste to be done, we’d published it, figuring she would be dead by the time it came out, but she’d made a miraculous recovery. In the early versions of that dream, my mother raged about the book, waving her manicured hands in the air, but in this new version she didn’t seem to have read it, my subcultural obscurity providing a mystique of safety even from my mother. I ambled toward the Wayward Writers table at the conference book fair, sat with Dusty. I asked her if she ever dreamed her son was alive, the way I do my mother, but she said 234

no. When her son visits her in her dreams, he communicates from the other side. He’s never alive in this world. Downstairs in the conference center, I slipped in to listen to a panel talk on myth and monsters in memoir. The panelists discussed using fairy tales when there were things they couldn’t talk about directly—for legal or personal reasons. I liked considering the idea that fairy tales have always been a kind of code to communicate secret truths. Back at the Wayward Writer table, Elisa Sinnett pushed The End of Eve to the wandering conference-goers, saying, “Ariel reads this on the audio book. I’ve listened to it four times. If you have mommy issues, this will cure them.” China Martens, modeling Wayward Writer fashion in a fabulous lime-green suit with a mushroom-printed button-up shirt, said that she knew people enjoyed it, but the people she knew who’d listened to it still had mommy issues. Tabling with China, we got talking about quilting. I mentioned that I’ve set up an iron in my office as a tribute to Tillie Olsen and I ironed quilting squares when I wanted to stop typing and think about my book. I knew China quilted. She said, “Quilting is my original story telling language. My great-grandmother was my first babysitter and she mended clothes for a dry cleaner as I played underfoot. She sewed a crazy patchwork quilt that was on my parents king sized bed that took up the whole trailer bedroom in my first home. I played on her quilt. Later my mother would tell me stories from it. My great-grandmother sewed her own clothes, and clothes for her daughter and three granddaughters. So all the fabric had memories and stories with it, on the quilt, all these scraps. My great-grandmother sewed me funky little stuffed animals, a fabric book even—I love how children’s first books are made soft and durable.” I liked thinking about different arts as storytelling languages. 235

One of my publishers was holding a reading and mixer at a local brewery that night and it all sounded grand and literary, but I’d already had so much inspiring input that my brain felt like a pulsing planet, so I rounded the corner and stepped into the bath bomb shop that smelled like patchouli and jasmine. A young person of expansive gender approached me, “What brings you in?” I said, “I’m in town four more nights and my hotel has a bathtub.” And the young person clasped their hands together. “Wonderful. What are you looking for in your bathing experience?” I felt like surely I’d tele-transported into an excellent parallel universe and if I looked down, I’d see a floor made of pink clouds. I said, “I’m looking for an experience that smells like happiness and soothes my muscles.” My young salesperson said, “So you want to feel uplifted,yet grounded.” I said, “Yes. That’s exactly how I wish to feel.” And I joyfully spent a quarter of the money I’d made at the book fair that day on uplifting and grounding bath additives and I felt expansive, the way I used to feel in big cities when I was a kid, like humanity exploded with creativity and might after all be worth salvaging. Back in my little hotel-apartment, I took two baths and admired the tall ceilings. I do like to go to writing conferences, but the long schedule of panels and long nights of readings and networking events are lost on me. I wander away. I try to envision a perfect balance of social time and writing time. Maybe someday I’ll make a practice of visiting towns where I know people, renting an apartment for a month and just working and immersing myself in the novelty of the 236

place, but still having a friend to go out to lunch with once or twice during the visit. At the table on Saturday, a woman with blue-green hair—like a fairy tale mermaid—approached. “There was someone here yesterday,” she started, “She had hearts on her mask and I wanted to tell her thank you.” I nodded. “I know who you mean. I can tell them.” The mermaid woman beamed. “I had to go and do a reading and I was crying and the person here with hearts on their mask told me to ask my inner child what she needed in order to feel safe at the reading. My inner child said she needed this special ring.” The mermaid flashed something sparkly and pink. “I had to go back to my hotel to get it, but it was just what I needed. Tell them thank you! My reading went well.” What makes for a great reading? An inner child who feels safe. I felt nervous about my panel, too. I was the only presenter who hadn’t known Tillie Olsen personally. What did my inner child need to remind me that I belonged? Just as I considered the question, a burly janitor sauntered up, grabbed the little trash can next to our table, and pointed right at me. “I have a question for you.” “Yes?” I wondered if he didn’t like the way we’d collected our garbage. But that wasn’t it. He said, “Do you know the Reading Rainbow song?” I searched my dark memory-brain with a small psychic flashlight, but couldn’t come up with the beginning. I sanghummed the last bar of the song with a question in my throat. The janitor shook his head. “And you call yourself a bookseller?” “Do you know the song?”

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He smiled full-faced so I could see it behind his mask and he put down the little trash can and he leaned his broom against the table and he started singing, “Butterfly in the sky—” A passing writer joined him immediately, spreading their arms. “I can go twice as high!” And it all came back to me and I sang with them, “Take a look . . . It’s in a book . . .” And the whole crowd around us belted out together, “A reading rainbow!” Yes, that was exactly what my inner child needed. I thought of my youth, when Tillie Olsen’s writing first found me. I was 19 or 20, had just had the baby, and of course we watched Reading Rainbow. I’d read Maya Angelou, so I already knew I could be a teen mother and a writer; I named the baby Maia as a reminder. I went to college because I didn’t think I could make it just on welfare, and college would give me the student loans I’d never be able to pay back—but I didn’t yet know that part about never being able to pay them back. Anyway, I felt so out of place when I got there, to that college, the same way I used to feel at this writing conference, like everyone else belonged to a social class I’d long since abandoned and could never find the key to reenter.  But then this small writerly miracle happened: Two of the first books assigned in my first English class—both by Tillie Olsen—were the nonfiction book  Silences  and the short story collection Tell Me a Riddle, which begins with the story “I Stand Here Ironing.” And so it was—beyond understanding that, yes, I could be a mother and writer—beyond the trust that I could carve out the time and the psychic space, beyond the faith that I had artistic ancestors to back me up in this endeavor—Tillie Olsen gave me this new bloom of an understanding that the writing itself could hold all the ambivalence about femaleness and  motherhood, these burdens I would never trade for wealth and ease—my 238

own ambivalence and the ancestral ambivalence—all of it— that motherhood itself, rich with story, would actually become intrinsic to my writing. In the end of my novel-memoir We Were Witches, I’m ironing my graduation gown when Tillie Olsen appears to me in a waking dream, and we begin to read that story together, and here now, in this conference center more than three decades later, one of Tillie Olsen’s granddaughters and Katherine Arnoldi and I read that story together, and I thought about all the ways that, as writers, we speak to each other—through our writing, and at book fair tables, through the years and the generations. I told the small audience, “Pay tribute to Tillie Olsen by pushing back against capitalism, by pushing back against gatekeeper culture. If you’re on the inside, open the gates. If you’re on the outside and you can’t get in, set up an encampment in the margins and make chapbooks and zines and share literature with your pals.” Tillie’s granddaughter shared slides and memories of her grandmother, and tells us the values Tillie Olsen taught her as a kid: Books Food Adventure Justice I wrote these on the title page of my old copy of Tell Me a Riddle. She said that when she and her grandmother used to walk in San Francisco, her grandmother always carried some one-dollar bills so she could give them to the people who panhandled and when they thanked her, saying, “Bless you,” Tillie Olsen always said, “Don’t bless me. Damn the system!” Back at the bookfair table when it was all said and done, I picked up the rest of my cash from book sales. I pocketed the 239

roll of mostly-ones and I headed out into the gray Philadelphia afternoon, handing out dollars to everyone who asked me—in tribute to Tillie Olsen—and when finally an old man thanked me, saying, “Bless you,” I got to answer, “Don’t bless me. Damn the system!”

TRY THIS: Make a list of 3-5 topics for talks, skillshares, or panels on writing that you would like to attend. Make another list of 3-5 topics you yourself might be able to present on. Now, pick one topic from your second list and write a proposal to a real or imaginary conference describing your idea for your skillshare, talk, or panel.

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HAVE A CLEAR-HEADED UNDERSTANDING OF YOUR AUDIENCE An Interview with Jisu Kim, marketing director at The Feminist Press

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aunching a book can put me way outside my comfort zone, so it’s a relief to walk into a publishing office full of supportive feminists of all genders who care what’s important to me, want me to love my book cover, and basically treat me like the center of the whole project. The Feminist Press at the City University of New York is just that kind of publishing office. I’d written We Were Witches in a reactionary mood—I’d spent a couple of years on a book I thought was marketable, and then heard from someone in the industry that it would only be marketable if I used a pen name to make it seem like a man had written it. So I endeavored to write the most female, least marketable book I could. When I sold it to The Feminist Press, it became Jisu Kim’s job to market my effort at unmarketability. I’m still getting royalty checks for that book. The questions I get most often from aspiring authors are: Do I Need a Platform? Or . . . Do I need a million Instagram followers? Or . . . Is there any way to market my book outside social media?  A better way to frame this question might be: Do I need a community? And the answer is yes. The conversations, questions, and speculations happening within a community setting are invaluable in guiding the writing process; dialogue keeps writing grounded with the intention that it’s meant to be shared, which is often the first step in recognizing your book’s specific audience. It’s impossible to ignore the impact of social media and digital marketing when it comes to publishing books today. That being said, it doesn’t mean the author needs to be the 241

person with a strong social media presence—and unless this is something that you already have and want to have, it might not be the best use of your time and energy when it comes to marketing the book. A book’s publisher will come up with an appropriate digital marketing strategy that incorporates social media in some way, whether it be content from the publisher’s own account or digital partners. A lot of information is shared via social media, but that word-of-mouth buzz doesn’t have to be the sole responsibility of the author.  As a marketer of books, is there anything an author can do or have that makes your job easier, in addition to writing a great manuscript? It’s important for an author to have a thorough, clear-headed understanding of their audience. That helps in creating a solid marketing plan—a key part of a strong proposal. Having an awareness of fellow writers working in the same space, and of the kinds of conversations currently ongoing about your book’s topics or themes, are essential in crafting a point of view that helps a book stand out in a society hyper-saturated with information.  You don’t need an expert understanding of “the industry” or “markets” to achieve this. I often like to imagine how book buzz works on an intimate, interpersonal level. If you were to recommend a book to a friend, and wanted to really sell them on it, you wouldn’t say something like, “it’s a great book that will appeal to everyone.” You would be specific and maybe even anecdotal. If your friend had an ongoing interest in the book’s topic, you might compare it to similar books but highlight how this one was different; if the friend had no previous understanding of the topic, you’d explain why they should give it a shot. 

TRY THIS: Write a description of your project as if you were a reader—not the author—recommending it to a dear friend. 242

Dear Ariel, I’m in search of the secret key for self-doubting imposter-syndrome-afflicted introverts to feel like real writers and believe anyone wants to read a word of what they wrote.  Sincerely, Doubting in Decatur Dear Doubting, We removed the door! You don’t need a key! Run through! Self-doubting and imposter syndrome are the ways capitalism has trained us so that we’ll buy things we don’t need instead of creating stories and other cool things to inspire radical joy and communal liberation.  Healing from capitalism takes time and slow effort. For now, just try and make something with words that will engage you—maybe write a local feature story about a cool lady who makes pottery, a poem about what a piece of shit your ex was, a western novel staring a non-binary cowperson, or a musical about your own obsessive-compulsive disorder. Make a zine, organize a reading, write and put your writing out there even if you’re still learning. It’s like when you go to a potluck—you bring something even if it turns out a little funny. It doesn’t make you an imposter. It just makes you the person who once brought that weird tuna pickle casserole to the potluck. —Ariel 243

ARE YOU A REAL IMPOSTER?

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ere’s a quiz to find out!

I feel like an imposter because . . . A. I was brought up to understand that “writers” belonged to an exclusive class of elite cis white males who wear elbow patches and smoke pipes and even when my more relatable pals and acquaintances have a little success with their writing, I know they’re a lot smarter and luckier than I’ll ever be. B. I’m really not showing up for my writing in the ways I want to. C. I don’t feel like an imposter! What kind of a loser identifies as an imposter? Bring ‘em to me! I bet I can exploit them. (Rubbing hands together.)

Do you write things down? A. Yes. Sometimes quite productively, sometimes much less so. B. Not very often, but I want to. I certainly think about it. C. Never! Writing things down is for assistants.

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How might you finish the sentence “I want to be a writer because . . .” A. It’s a way to make sense of the world or express myself that keeps me in a satisfying state of creative dissatisfaction. B. I want people to see me and understand me and love me. C. I think being a writer will give me status and an excuse to shit on other people, which will make me feel better about myself. Any tendencies toward introversion notwithstanding, I might like to meet and hang out with other writers because . . .  A. It might be inspiring and interesting and make the writing world feel less intimidating. B. I want to be famous and famous people need fans and famous friends. C. Because I want to identify the most vulnerable people among those writers—the real suckers—and I want to latch onto them and make them pick up my dry cleaning and do my writing for me while I go around with my chest puffed out telling people about all my brilliant projects.

Mostly As: Real writer! Mostly Bs: Real writer who could probably also use some self-esteem shots. Mostly Cs: Congratulations, you’re the real imposter.

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ALL ABOUT IMPOSTERS

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nce upon a time, a colleague came to my side in my hour of need and offered to help me with my overwhelming inbox of emails, and she did help me. 

She stayed by my side for a couple of years, helping me with all things techie. This red-lipped colleague, who did steal my color along with my brand, seemed compelling to me in so many ways—including the way in which part of me knew exactly what she was up to the whole time. I told myself I must be wrong: I mean, Who would want to impersonate me? Then after those first couple of years it felt too late to wake up because by then she had all my passwords and knew all my personal and professional pals and intercepted media requests and doctored quotes about my books to say they were quotes about her books and she published these things online before I did so it looked like I might be the thief, after all. A perfect noir, really. If any of this rings a bell, watch All About Eve with Bette Davis—that’s another story of an imposter. All this to say, it took me a long time to identify with the phrase “imposter syndrome” because to me, my old colleague who intercepted my emails—and Eve in that Bette Davis movie—were the only imposters in town.  But it turns out that people with “imposter syndrome” are hardly ever the real imposters. When I asked a group of wayward writers to share their experience with the clusterfuck of symptoms known broadly as “imposter syndrome,” the scope of it all hit me hard. Symptoms may include panic, feeling flush when trying to talk to a “real writer” or even some random Diamondbacks fan who asks “what do you do?” on the plane, intrusive thoughts that say “I don’t belong here,” or “I don’t 246

have the right education,” or “I don’t have the right to write,” or “I’m not good enough,” or “Who cares about my stories?” I’m certainly no stranger to these feelings. I constantly imagine that other writers and artists have better pedigree, have read more of the classics, have read all the underground cult titles, can read a lot faster than I can, know the names of all the verb tenses, don’t have to avoid using “lay” and “lie” because they can figure out that weird grammar rule, and just basically have shinier hair. I dread most interpersonal interactions even when we’re not talking about writing. I grew up in a counterculture that taught me I was different from other people and I went to public schools in a broader culture that told me that my difference made me unacceptable. We didn’t have a television, so I just kind of nodded and tried to pretend I knew who anyone was talking about when they said “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia,” or insisted they were going to marry Scott Baio. As a low-income teen mom, I didn’t fit in with the older, mini-van-driving parents at the park or at the preschools. I was constantly mistaken for the nanny. Only when my own mother showed up did anyone seem to believe my daughter had a parent. I didn’t fit in with the nannies, either, who had nights off. I certainly didn’t fit in with my childless peers, queer or straight. As a high school dropout, I mostly felt like I was faking my way through the first couple of years of college—like other people had read all the books people read junior and senior year, whatever those books were. But you know what? After all these years of walking that razor’s edge between not belonging and being an outcast, I’m doing just fine because I found out the secret: Basically everyone who’s not a dick feels this way. I started publishing zines and other zinesters took me in. I learned that hardly anyone read anything junior or senior year in high school because they were obsessed with, you know, Where am I going to get a knife to defend myself at prom? And a lot of them felt like they were faking their way through things, too. Scott Baio turned out to be a weird Trumpy. Totally unmarriageable. And all those people who cared one way or another about my maternal age or marital status probably would have just talked my ear 247

off with their inane chatter and then how would I have found time to write all my books? We don’t have to talk to everyone. I have psychic astral conversations with dead writers—Tillie Olson? Do you think it sounds like I’m tooting my own horn? Diane DiPrima? Is this a coward’s version of what I’m trying to say? I have embodied friends, too. Even when I was first starting out writing and adulting, unfashionable feminists took me in. Old poets who needed help with their grocery shopping took me in. Unpretentious aging punks took me in. Used bookstore cat ladies took me in. They had dish towels in their cluttered kitchens imprinted with that Max Ehrmann quote, “You are a child of the universe, no less than the moon and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the Universe is unfolding as it should.” That poem tasted like literary Xanax. For years, I avoided talking to people who I thought were older or straighter or wealthier or more successful than me, but when I started doing public events for my zine Hip Mama, just as many people showed up in minivans as on bikes. Just as many mamas wore white capris as Doc Martens. And it made me laugh to realize that I’d started acting snooty toward people I saw as square for fear they’d act snooty toward me if I didn’t beat them to it, but now they had a story they wanted to submit to my zine and I appreciated that. I started publishing work by a lot of people who didn’t look or sound anything like me and their voices—their very different voices—are what made my zine so badass. When I started publishing books, I sometimes felt like I was back on the playground with my daughter, other authors and non-authors belittling my efforts as not-quite-real—like maybe I was just a wild-haired weirdo who got lucky. That’s because when we publish books, the voices of gatekeeping start up again: Who do you think you are? If the voices in our heads aren’t bad enough, other people are happy to say things out loud: Is it self published? How big is the press? Can I buy it from

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an awful billionaire’s exploitative online bookstore? If not, what’s it worth? Maybe I was—maybe I am—just a wild-haired weirdo, but that works for me more and more. Sometimes I go to book award ceremonies now and people give me the cold shoulder until they realize I’m up for the same prize they’re up for. If I win it, I sometimes hear them remark after a few cocktails that I’ve won it because I’m female or gay (in reality you have to be pretty thick not to know that my whiteness and writing in English has opened a lot more doors for me than my marginalization). If they win it, they give me two very frozen shoulders because Who does that awkward woman think she is, anyway? This is a terrible expression of social anxiety or arrogance (or both) on their part and I’m not into it. It’s the kind of bullshit that drives shy writers to drink—or worse, not to write or create anything at all. Here’s another secret—and it’s one I’m not proud of— but I’ve sometimes come across as rude and arrogant, too, and it’s just because I’m so bad at talking to people I haven’t met before. Every one of us in the literary world who has ever enforced an insider/outsider dichotomy is partly responsible for the fact that most writers—and probably all writers from marginalized communities—will feel at least a low-level bad vibe when we want to tell our stories, call ourselves writers, and publish. To make matters worse, for so many of us, nothing in our backgrounds will have taught us how to shrug this bullshit off. If we weren’t raised with a high level of entitlement, the vulnerability of the writing life combined with the pretentiousness of much of literary culture can be too much for our hearts to handle. The antidote is to start taking each other in—like the unfashionable feminists and the aging punks and the used bookstore cat ladies and the zinesters always have. We have to start cutting through our complicated feelings about belonging 249

and success. The antidote is a demystification of the literary world. The antidote is an end to world arrogance and global capitalism. In the meantime, we can unplug ourselves from those value-scales if they’re not serving us. If we can’t embody confidence, we can make up for it with self-esteem. If we haven’t yet developed the self-esteem, we can get by with determination. Tom Spanbauer used to say, “writers write because they weren’t invited to the party.” It’s true. Most of us live in the liminal spaces between belonging and alienation, between experiencing life and observing it, between feeling left out and feeling safe in our solitude. That’s the writer’s human condition. The antidote is to stay home from the party and read Walt Whitman—read “Leaves of Grass” out loud—For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Write on your bathroom mirror in lipstick: No less than the moon and the stars you have a right to be here.

TRY THIS: Write about a character—could be you, could be someone else, real or imagined—who finds themself in a place where they feel they don’t belong. Start your story in a very realistic way, with your character intimidated or insecure or confused or feeling however they feel when they don’t belong, and then find a way for your character to take their power back in the story, even if they’ll need a lot of surrealist magic to do that. Maybe your character really doesn’t belong because, as it turns out, it’s a zombie robot from hell convention. And then maybe your character’s mother texts a confession that their real father actually is a zombie robot from hell and now everything’s really awkward. What happens next?

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IN THE WALLED CITY

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ou approach the walled city in the still-dark morning. The pale promise of a sunrise hovers just over the east hills. You adjust your daypack.

You remember the town where you lived when you first met your stepfather, the way the other kids called you slurs, but your new father said you belonged. He said, “If anyone asks you where you’re from, you say ‘who, me?’ and you point to the tallest, closest mountain you can see and you say, ‘I just hiked down from the top of that mountain this morning. Where you from?’” You remember Reyna Grande and the way she came to California “undocumented” but soon learned the history they tried to hide from her: That California had been a part of Mexico until just before the gold rush. She asked, On stolen and occupied land, who is the foreigner? You ask, Whose world is the world of words printed on paper, words glowing on screens, words spoken into microphones, words read aloud to children and grandchildren or recorded and broadcast? Who belongs? A hawk glides across the dawn sky. In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks writes, “To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body.” Wind gusts through the arched openings where the doors used to keep us out. “Living as we did—on the edge—” bell hooks writes, “we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a

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whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center.” You search the bluing sky, stars beginning to fade. You approach a threshold, cautious at first, then a smile begins to creep across your face. You break into a sprint, you run— “Wait up!” someone calls from behind and the voice holds a softness you trust. You slow. A street sweeper winks at you. In “Why Writing Second Person POV Appeals to Marginalized Writers,” sci-fi author Valerie Valdes says that many of us actually find the much-maligned “you” point-ofview quite natural in storytelling, maybe because we’re already accustomed to a lack of intimacy with mainstream characters and institutions. “We’re familiar with feeling alienated in both social and literary settings,” she writes. “While first and third person are functionally tourist approaches, in which the distance between reader and character narrator is maintained to a greater extent, second person dissolves the barrier or renders it as transparent as possible.” You know that you’ve come here to dissolve barriers, to render them as transparent as possible. A silhouette steps out from a grand building, hesitates as if confused about where the door has gone. Orange light trails from the figure, connecting it back to the building even as it emerges. As an outsider, you have learned to see power as it flows, to track the ways it pulses between people, places, and events. The silhouette seems to look in your direction. You nod, feeling your own quiet confidence pulse. The silhouette is the Man.

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In Letters to a Young Artist, Anna Deavere Smith writes, “It is crucial for you to know who the Man is in any situation in which you find yourself.” Your margin-colleague catches up to you, and the two of you link arms. “The Man is whoever has the money or whoever has the power to work out the money needed and the venue needed to expose your art”—the publisher or the editor or the reviewer or the events organizer at the bookstore. “The Man can be a man or a woman,” Anna writes. The Man can be nonbinary. “The Man can be older than you or younger than you. The Man can be any color.” The silhouette nods back in your direction. “The Man has the power,” Anna writes. “But so do you.” You can smell fresh bread baking somewhere, green chile roasting on charcoal. You jingle the coins in your pocket, hoping your currency is of value here. But you may not stay long. In “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” bell hooks reminds us that the margin is not a place one wishes “to give up or surrender as part of moving into the center—but rather [. . .] a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.” Even as you get comfortable on the inside, in the center, you see no need to abandon the margins as your home. Perhaps you’re not an imposter so much as a wayfarer. The wayward writer learns to move unbothered through all the worlds. Anna Deveare Smith says, “Put this on your wall wherever you put things that mean something to you: The Man has the power, but so do I.”

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TRY THIS: Tell a story about a trip you or an imagined character took to a place where they didn’t know anyone—and write it in the second person. Somewhere in your story, include a silhouette.

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WRITER AS WORKER An interview with utopian author Adrian Shirk I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich. —Gertrude Stein

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first met Adrian Shirk when she was maybe 16 years old and she reached out to me to ask about the writing life. She’d read Atlas of the Human Heart and the way she remembers it, “I aggressively pen-palled you.” A decade and a half later, she’s an adjunct professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the author of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, an NPR book of the year, and Heaven is a Place on Earth, a compilation of “utopianotes.” I like to think of the writing she does as a kind of bio-cartography—part memoir, part field work. You Teach “Writer as Worker” at Pratt Institute. Are you some kind of a communist? I went with “Worker” because it evoked a sufficiently Marxist shorthand. It is a class, above all, about labor and our material realities as artists, and about considering the space between what we want, what we need, what (or who) we live for, and what we can live with. Though, a lot of my students call it the “internship” class, which I think is funny in contrast to my lofty description just now and also because I could give a shit about internships. I actually have very little interest in the idea of career-building on its own. I am more interested in the business of building writing lives. There are two components to the course: one is that the students dialogue with guests every week, all of whom are writers who are also workers—authors, freelancers, editors, publishers, agents, podcast makers, staff writers, arts administrators, teachers, etc., but also bartenders, labor 255

organizers, mothers, community leaders, after school program coordinators, etc. The other component of the course is more skill-based: the class guides students through the process of applying for internships, apprenticeships, mentorships, or some other kind of experiential learning project that they design, and in so doing they learn how to mine their young lives to create resumes and cover letters, as well as strategically research opportunities, reach out to people they’d like to meet or informational interview, develop habits around writing thank you’s, follow-ups, and “cold-contacts.” More importantly, we cover how to find and apply for forms of support, like residencies, fellowships, and grants, and we practice things like artist statements, statements of purpose, query letters, project descriptions, pitches, and how to put together and format a submission of creative work.  The hope is to become writers who do not live in a scarcity and imposter mindset, but who receive help and learn how to give it, and who are not afraid of applying for things when they want to, and who ask themselves questions like: What kind of life do I want? What kinds of things resonate when I listen to other writers who are workers talk about their lives? Can career or labor be something that augments the life I want, rather than constructing a life around a job as the centerpiece of my existence— unless that is actually what I want?  The idea is to get students out of the course with a richer, deeper sense of what might be possible on the other side, equipped with some tools and a bit of agency. If they walk away feeling any nascent clarity on what they actually care about, versus what they think they care about coming in (i.e. moving from “I want to work at X company,” or “I want to write for X TV show” to “I think I might like working with young people” or “I enjoy writing when there are no external expectations on what I write” ), then it’s a success.  It’s also a class that asks them to consider what they already know about themselves as writers, what they are 256

already interested in, how they already spend their free time, what communities they already live in and care about, and to get them into a habit of building a writing life from that place, rather than from an abstract desire based on a movie they once saw about a writer.  I never got a class like that. The knowledge base that the course offers is not typically transmitted in school, or really anywhere—because there’s such a deep gnarly culture of gate-keeping and concealing the mechanics of artists’ lives, because why? Why is there such a lack of transparency? Patriarchy and white supremacy and capitalism benefit when we continue to think of artists in the ancient “genius” tradition, the fantasy that the (what the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin calls) “golden nugget” of genius will rocket you into fame and financial solvency in a mystical system of production. But it’s not mystical. There are tools and forms and processes and resources we can all be equally literate in, and which we should all be responsible for passing along to others.  What have you learned about the way writers actually make a living? Oh god—I’ve learned so much. They make a living by . . . well, by everything. All writers are workers, and they do every kind of work. They often make some amount of money from writing, but they are also waitresses, scientists, sex workers, warehouse managers; they are editors for micropresses and for commercial publishers; running after-school education programs; teaching public school or college; working for arts organizations or community nonprofits, or making their own; working as executive assistants and legal aides and scuba instructors; touring as slam poets and making radio; freelancing and consulting. They have developed practices to help maintain their writing lives, no matter what their jobs are. In a minority of cases, I’ve met writers who make a living through writing books. The writers I’ve met who make their living through writing books do so in almost the same way, no matter how 257

different their work is from one another: they publish a lot, no less than every other year; they write a lot; they are very strategic and pragmatic about finding the right publisher for the particular project; they are clear-eyed about which ones will make money and which ones won’t, and to find a way to do both anyway; they have a keen sense of opportunities to collaborate with others and build community; they become very literate in the processes related to publishing, like writing query letters and putting together proposals; and they are tenacious selfpromoters. They support and participate in the development of other writers. They are savvy in their own advocacy and the advocacy of others. They do not work on a book for ten years in hopes that it will be so spectacularly received because it is so amazing (which it very well may be) thus letting them live on their laurels and royalties forever, because they know that the modes by which that happens are largely unpredictable and not merit-based. What’s been your experience as a writer dealing with the marketplace and the financial realities of life under capitalism? I’ve always written a lot, and made sure I had a lot of time to do so, often at great cost. It has helped to be basically ambivalent about the idea of a “career” other than the prioritizing of writing time. I did a lot of low-wage service industry work. I cleaned houses. I hawked vintage furniture and clothing for a while. I started my own press with my friends, and we put out a literary journal and chapbooks and went on DIY tours. We ran a reading series. Then I used a fully-funded MFA Writing program to buy time to finish a book project and get teaching experience. Then I made radio for a while, and thought I would do that, but realized at a certain point that the competitiveness and all-thetimeness of that professional sphere meant I probably wouldn’t be able to write books as much as I wanted to, and in realizing that I also became clear that I was still “in it” for book writing. I had always been writing books and book-length things. When 258

I assessed my life from fifteen years old onward, the book form was the biggest, most constant throughline. I was never not writing books. So I built from that. I became an adjunct college instructor, which gave me a certain amount of freedom in terms of time, but required that my overhead be kept pretty low. I had to get a lot of advice from elder artists and writers. I had to keep my desires clear but my expectations adjusted, or . . . not adjusted, just open, nimble. I had to take on extra classes sometimes in order to reduce the number of classes at a later date when I would be closer to a deadline. I had to pick up freelance work and opportunities as they came up. I had to scrimp and cut back while finishing a big project. I published shorter pieces here and there in journals and on websites for very little money, but it helped to have a public platform, especially as I got closer to wanting to publish a book. You helped me write my book proposal one summer, and another friend introduced me to someone who had just started working as an agent, and I sold the proposal to an independent publisher, and just learned a lot about the mechanics of publishing through that process. And I developed a good relationship with my mid-sized indie publisher, and I sold a second proposal to them a couple of years later. And I’ve made a little bit of money off of books, or the life of those books, but by no means is it my main livelihood. I write too slowly. One of my main takeaways was: Write about things you actually want to write about, and write in the forms you actually like writing in. My friend Dianca London Potts has said so many times to me, and my students—something a mentor once said to her—that the thing that makes you a weirdo as a writer is your power, is the thing other people will connect with. It seems obvious but: Do not get well known or rewarded for doing things you don’t like, for writing about things or writing in a way you’re not interested in, because it has a tendency to trap you. 

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I accepted from a pretty young age that I was not going to make a living off my writing alone, so I also spent years trying to figure out a way to live that would be cheaper in a sustainable way through some cooperative or collective buy-in, and was eventually able to buy some property in the Catskills where I now invite people to do residencies and retreats, and my overhead is lower than it ever was in New York City.  How do you present this reality to the newer writer? I present it as—it’s not anything like what you fantasize it is, but it’s actually a lot better than that, if you can let go of the fantasy.  The fantasy that’s been passed down to 21st century writers of an author’s life was fabricated somewhere in the midtwentieth century when publishing was white male-dominated, when it was a site of power and wealth accumulation for white male writers, editors, and publishers, and so, yes, there was a time when people really did survive off of writing literature alone, some combination of books and a couple of essays or stories each year. When publishing was no longer a sphere that unilaterally benefitted white men, writing labor saw a profound financial devaluation (same thing happened to academia) that continues to this day. So, if you’re trying to be a writer based off the old fantasy, you’re going to be bitter, disappointed, and depressed. But if you let go of the fantasy, and you recognize that it was built on rotten ground anyway, and if you can get clear about what a writing life will require, and get creative about your approach, then life can be interesting and fun and surprising and probably full of hustle.  A lot of students come bursting into the room and are like, I want to do X—like, I want to just write books for a living or I want to work at a magazine or I want to write for TV, and so I go, OK, let’s find out what that requires, and see if you’re into it. So we talk to people who do these things, and we hear about the choices and steps they made, and their daily lives, and we see if it resonates. So often when students start with, “I 260

want to write books for a living,” or “I want to write for TV,” they sometimes find that they’re not actually interested in what it requires. A TV writer comes in and describes her life doing stand-up for ten years, devoting her social life to a community like Upright Citizens Brigade, working as a production assistant, etc., and the student is like, hmm, that’s not the life for me. And then they hear from like, a really cool poet who works in fundraising at a museum to make a living, and the student’s like, that actually sounds great. I didn’t know you could do that. Or they hear from an author who makes her money off of books primarily, and the author talks about how disciplined and constant her output is, how much of her life is about the independent promotion of her work, and how her finances are a little unpredictable, and the student thinks, hmm, I actually like to write really slowly and I am not comfortable with that level of financial uncertainty. Then they hear from a literary agent who spends her days reading and supporting the work of other writers, pumping up debut authors to publishers, and working on her own novel on the side, all while having health insurance, and they think, wow, that actually sounds more up my alley and really apt to my unique skill set. I just remember being twenty or so and hearing so many elder writers lament “the end of publishing,” the end of books, and how “no one in this room” would ever get published or ever make money off of books, and how it’s so demoralizing and honestly, don’t even try. That came up a lot! And I get it—they were lamenting what was the real death knell of the old-guard, the total collapse of the old fantasy as they became adults in the 1990s—and so like, no one gets to write the “Great American Novel” anymore and then sit on their plinth and be famous, so I’m taking my ball and going home. But from this stage of life, I’m like—um, yeah, yes, everything is different now, but if you want to publish books, it is actually totally possible. There are many ways to do it, and to think about it. But no one gets to like smoke their pipe and wear jackets with leather elbow patches 261

while they do it now. I mean, you could still do that, if that’s your thing.  Capitalism does not currently value this kind of labor, but capitalism is terrible, so let’s build our own infrastructure and systems in which we can make books. Learn to be ok with probably never being rich and never being famous, and learn to be excited about a life devoted to the production of beauty and the readers of your books with whom you will build infinitely wonderful worlds. 

TRY THIS: Set your timer for 20 minutes and write a meditation on what success would look like for you.

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EATING ARTISTS

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elfare taught me to hide my resources so they wouldn’t dock my food stamps. The government didn’t give us enough to survive at the beginning of the month, so if we were alive at the end of the month, we’d certainly lied. They taught us dishonesty. They taught us we didn’t deserve to survive. Even off welfare, a lot of us were brought up with some version of this kind of thinking—where we feel like we’ve got to have nothing—and that’s fine if you like it for as long as it works, but we can also commit to our creative careers and build wealth over time—we just have to unlearn the more useless and selfsabotaging lessons of poverty, and maneuver accordingly. We need strategy to go along with our magical thinking. Writing incomes often amount to feast or famine—and I like to eat. Here’s a basic practice I came up with when I was poor: I decided, okay I’m going to split any money I get in three—it’s the rule of past/present/future. Any income I get, I allocate one third for my past, like paying off debt, one third for my present life, and then I have to save one third for the future. Of course, this wasn’t always possible, but it was the ideal. I’d have a savings account at a separate bank from the one I usually used so that I’d really have to go out of my way to liquidate it. I still try to apply the rule. If I get a $100,000 check, I’m going to be very careful with that because, well, I’ve lived and learned. No less than $33,333 needs to go into savings or real estate. More often the checks are for closer to $300, but if I always apply the same rule I build a little wealth with each check—$100 at a time—and each year I’m better able to thrive within the economics of my writer’s life.

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I recently added up all my book advance and royalty numbers and discovered that over a quarter century of prolific publishing, I’ve averaged just under $16,000 a year in author income, not including ghost writing. When I published my zine, Hip Mama, I made another $10,000 to $20,000 a year. These numbers represent commercial success. A few years ago, the Author’s Guild conducted a massive survey of authors and found the median incomes for all published authors—including part-time, full-time, traditionally published, self-published, and hybrid-published authors—for all writing-related activities was $6,080 a year—down 3% from four years prior, which was down from four years prior.  All this to say that if we’re making any money to speak of as writers, we deserve a big swirl chocolate cake with dulce de leche filling and rainbow sprinkles. Thousands of books come out every day. The average publisher-backed book sells a few thousand copies. The average self-published title sells about 250. Different outfits will curate their top picks—The New York Times or Buzzfeed or your local librarian in his leopard-print framed glasses—and usually those lists only include titles that are a part of the commercial distribution system. You can absolutely make writing your life and you can author books and get them out there, but I want you to come into the literary marketplace with your eyes open and psyched about the central hustle and the side hustles as well. Maybe your writing career is going to lead you to a kind of writing you never expected. I really enjoy ghost writing for interesting and smart people because I get to become an expert in some random field for six months and I never have to do a public reading. Floyd Salas, one of my first writing teachers back at Foothill College in California, explained how writers make a living to me this way: “I got an NEA grant and I used it to put a

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down payment on a three-plex, and the rent has kept me going ever since.” That’s making a living as a writer.  I know people who’ll insist that the only reason writers and artists don’t make more is that we’re steeped in negative beliefs about “the starving artist” and a poverty mentality— that we don’t believe so we don’t achieve. But telling artists and writers living under capitalism that their poverty is just another failure of optimism amounts to gaslighting.  Still, we can be strategic about how we’re going to write and keep ourselves in cashmere sweaters. If you want to make a living, I support that. If you intend to become a millionaire, I completely support that. I think you’ll succeed. I’m all for weirdos creating affluence. We deserve resources to support our eccentric needs and desires. My advice remains steady: Be creative and strategic and see your literary career and your life as a complex, big picture that you get to author over time. You’re the author. You get to author it.

TRY THIS: From Adrian Shirk This is a free-write exercise, but to prepare you, I want to say something about free writing first. I find that free writing, by hand on paper, in limitedtime sessions (i.e. with an actual timer) provides the right amount of pressure to really let the hand “do the thinking.” The timer promises our ego that we will return soon and tend it, and in a way it then allows us to separate from it briefly. It lets us go (but it wants us back eventually). Once that happens, the hand can really reveal some true things for us. But we have to write fast, without thinking about it, and without thinking of it as “writing.” (Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron both influence this perspective for me). So keep your hand moving! 265

Get a pen or pencil, and a notebook or a piece of paper (it doesn’t have to be precious). Get a timepiece of some kind (phone, egg-timer, watch, oven clock, whatever). Set the timepiece for seven minutes and answer this question: Describe an ideal day for you five years from now, in granular detail. It doesn’t matter if it’s “realistic” or totally fantastical. Where do you live? Who are you around? What are you doing? What are you making/writing? How are you making/writing? What is your morning, afternoon, and evening like? When the seven minutes is up, re-set it and answer this question: Describe an ideal day for you one year from now, in granular detail. When the seven minutes is up, re-set it and answer this question: Describe a really good day recently, a day that actually happened, in granular detail. When the seven minutes is up, take stock of what you wrote in response to all three prompts. What, if any, repeating details or themes came up? What remained true about your “ideal” for your present as well as your speculative future? Our lives, and what we value, will of course see change and shift over time, but for now, the things that repeat in the prompt are the things that deserve serious attention, the things that call to be protected, in as much as they can be—not a week from now or a year from now, but today, right now. And tomorrow. And so on. And I think it is from that place—from tending to what (and who, and how) we value most about our lives right now—that gives us a life that we will value in the future. It’s a simple line of inquiry, but it’s markedly different from the capitalist model which is to invest in an imaginary future, and to let the “right now” be damned. 266

THE HUSTLE IS THE DESTINATION Most of my life from childhood on has been spent moving, traveling, changing places, knowing people in one school, in one town or in one group, or on one ship a little while, but soon never seeing most of them again.

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—Langston Hughes

n I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes’ memoir about surviving as a Black writer during the depression and traveling after he lost his patron, he reminds us of the long history of the things writers still do to keep on without patrons or salaries: We scare up paid readings, peddle our own chapbooks, score paid publications, hassle publishers for royalty checks, send money to our parents. Langston got the idea to tour southern Black colleges reading his poetry. His traveling companion and “manager” wrote ahead saying Langston would be in the area and come give a reading at the college for $100. If the colleges pleaded poverty, they went anyway and sold books directly to the students, his audience. He took paid writing gigs when he could, applied for prize money and grants, signed on to act in a Russian movie about American race relations and labor struggles.  “There was one other dilemma—how to make a living from the kind of writing I wanted to do . . . I wanted to write seriously and as well as I knew how about the Negro people, and make that kind of writing earn for me a living.” That was a puzzle as a Black writer through the Depression of the 1930s and it’s a puzzle for every writer earning a living now. It’s a puzzle we each solve in our own ways. We can release archetypes of the starving artist, but we can also take refuge in what our literary ancestors went through. We can study their lives. 

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TRY THIS: Research a writer you’ve admired and find out what they did to promote their career and sell their writer-wares. Write a little anecdote about their experience, draw a picture of them, and save both for the lovely zine you might make some day.

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TRAVELERS’ NOTES An interview with poet and memoirist Mai’a Williams

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very time I’ve met Mai’a Williams we’ve been in a bookstore with a café attached to it—Baltimore, Minneapolis, Berkeley. In bookstores and traveling, she appears at home. She’s worked as a journalist, writer, and editor in Quito, Berlin, and Cairo. She’s lived and worked with Palestinian, Congolese, and Central American indigenous mothers in resistance communities. She’s published two poetry chapbooks, No God but Ghosts and Monsters and Other Silent Creatures, with Dinah Press, co-edited the anthology Revolutionary Mothering, and published the memoir This is How We Survive: Revolutionary Mothering, War, and Exile in the 21st Century, both with PM Press.  As a working writer, is there anything you wish you’d known sooner? Yes: •

A lot of people will tell you they want to be a writer. Very few are willing to do the lonely work of writing for years with little to no external positive feedback. There is no use in taking advice from them. I knew so many people ten years ago who claimed they were writers. Almost none of them stuck with it. They gave me a lot of advice and feedback, most of it was useless at best, and harmful at worst. 

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A lot of people think that being a writer/artist is just a “hobby.” They will scoff at you when you say this is what you want to do professionally. Do not listen to them either, even if they are family and they care about you. Especially if they are family and they care about you. 

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Let your house be disorganized. Let the dishes pile in the sink. If people come in and act or say something 269

disparagingly because your house is not well-kept, stop letting them into your house. Find friends who like messiness.  •

If you can afford a housekeeper, even just twice a month, do it! Please! Even if you think it’s weird and creepy that strangers are going through your things. Make your boundaries clear and then let your house be cleaned by professionals. They are well-trained to do it. Tip them generously. 

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If you can afford childcare, so that you can sit in your room and write, do it! If people want to shame you for this, stop being around them. 

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If you can’t afford childcare and you are with your child all day, write when she goes to sleep at night, or early in the morning. It’s okay if she is on the ipad too much and that her room is a mess. She likes it messy! 

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Find a way to go on retreats. Apply for retreats. Design your own retreats. House-sit for a friend for a week and write. Go to the beach and stay in a cheap room and live off black tea and fruit and nuts and rice and beans and whatever else you love. 

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When you are on retreats, you don’t have to write. You don’t have to be productive. Let your mind luxuriate in the silence. Find a bar or cafe and talk with the locals. Take weird pictures. Take your journal with you and write while sitting in a park or on a roof or watching traffic. 

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Make other writer/artist friends. Drink wine and tea and water and talk about everything and nothing. Encourage each other. Go to their showings. Read their poems. Have art dates. 

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A lot of people will see that you are home all day, and tell you that you are lazy and a bad partner and a bad parent and and and and. Ignore them. I know it sucks, but really you just have to have faith in your

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writing, in your submitting, in your rejections, in your resubmitting. Do not bother to justify yourself or explain. They don’t want you to explain. They want you to be someone else. Reject this. Rebel.  •

If you want to write a short story or essay, sit down for 10 minutes every day and write on it. By the end of a month you have a solid draft. 

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When you finally start to get published, a lot of people will be happy for you. A lot of people will be jealous and intimidated. 

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When you are deep diving into the writing of a manuscript, you will most likely lose friends and lovers. They will complain that you think that that manuscript is more important than they are. In a way it is more important. If they really loved you, then they would wait for you to finish and to come back to the surface. 

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Be good to the people who are good to you. The ones who love you through the hard times. The ones who listen to you complain about the writing and bring you tea and buy you a beer and buy your books and send you weird memes to make you laugh. Love them the way they need to be loved. 

Do you feel like there’s any separation between your life and your career at this point? I am immersed in the writer/artist life. In large part because I write about my life and I’ve insisted that my life revolve around my creative work.  I don’t write about my daughter as much as I used to because she is older and deserves to be able to create her own public face.  I really want to say yes, there is a separation between my life and my writing, but honestly—not really. Art is one of my first loves. I mean, I hate to admit it, but sometimes really horrible things will happen or people will even treat me in 271

deeply unethical ways, and one of my first thoughts is—well, at least it made a good story.  I used to feel kind of odd about myself, that I move too much and need to travel a lot. But then I was reading a Patricia Highsmith book and she mentioned, I think in passing, “writers need changes of scenery,” and that made me happy. Like maybe I didn’t have a “dysregulated flight response” after all! Or maybe I did and that’s something special or at least common about writers. I get the impression that you also need changes of scenery . . .  I do! Obviously! And yes, I used to think there was something wrong about me for wanting to move and travel and see so much. But frankly for millions of years, humans were nomadic creatures and so it seems to make sense that some of us still are.  When I was a kid, I daydreamed that I would travel to interesting places and write. No one around me seemed to think that was a realistic career choice. But ha! I did it.  I think I have a higher need for novelty than most of the people I’ve been around. And I like traveling, the sense of adventure, newness of place, overcoming weird obstacles, seeing new people, and I love doing it by myself as well as with others. But I have no problem traveling alone to most places/ countries/scenes. I feel like an intrepid explorer, taking notes in my head, observing the new environments, meeting new people. I mean sometimes I have a dysregulated flight response. But sometimes I think I am simply following the human mammalian need to discover new worlds and make connections and learn about humanity and the natural world. In tribal life (as far as I’ve seen) there are always a few people who are awake at night later than most, or who need to wander into the woods or the desert alone to bring back new dreams and stories and strategies and prayers or who set sail to find other peoples. Human resilience comes through diversity—diversity of people, species, experiences. 272

What would your literary utopia look like? The first thing that comes to mind is roses—vases of cut roses in every room. And by some miracle, these roses are ethically sourced, cut by hand by people who love their work and are well-compensated for gardening and making the world a little more beautiful. And the rooms are full of soft plush chairs and piles of watercolor paper and fountain pens where the ink never smudges on the paper. And I can just walk from room to room, curl up in a plush chair and write by hand surrounded by the smell of roses and the afternoon sunlight coming in the windows. And outside in the distance is punk and darkwave music and every once in a while the shout of excitement and elation.  I have a hard time imagining a literary utopia, perhaps because I believe every utopia becomes a dystopia. The most I can imagine is sweet moments when people come together to tell stories around tea and bonfires, moments when someone passes along their zine or book or crumpled lined pages from a notebook or vlog channel or a handwritten recipe on a Post-it Note—to another enthusiastic person who also loves words and stories and nourishment. Maybe a world where our communities take care of one another and we have the freedom and time and childcare and clean air to think deeply and write and create joyfully what we and others need and desire.  

TRY THIS: From Mai’a Williams Tell me about a time that you tried to break a generational curse. How did you know if you were successful or not? Where did the curse come from?  Include in the piece: a song, a memory from childhood, and the color yellow.

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Part Six: Entertaining Friends and Strangers The entire reason I’m a writer is because I didn’t see myself in the space. Books are my culture—I mean I started selling books when I was fifteen years old at West Side Books in Denver. I remember somebody once at the bookstore said something like,  How audacious do you have to be to think that you can have your voice on all these shelves? And they did that gesture where they like spun their hand around at the books. And I was like, but I need to because my people aren’t here. —Kali Fajardo-Anstine

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MAKE YOUR STORIES PUBLIC

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f we want to publish, that means sharing our stories—for free or for sale. In the shift from private to public, our writing becomes not only an artifact of our creative experience, but also an object to reveal, words glowing on a stranger’s screen, a product in the marketplace.  You were already a writer. Now you’re also an author. When we begin publishing, it’s important as authors to be very protective of our writing’s feelings and not insult it, but rather put on a brave face for it and shield it from any outside negativity the way we would our most prized and sensitive pet iguana on its first neighborhood walk. My step dad worked as a bookstore clerk when I was growing up, until he retired in his mid-eighties, so I got comfortable in the marketplace of stories. I wandered the aisles after school, trying to imagine which sections and shelves would hold my future books. I tried to notice what kinds of books were published by big presses and what kinds of books were put out by small presses and what kinds of writing each magazine and literary journal liked to run. I thought about how some books got featured on the central tables—How were they chosen? My stepdad said some special placements were paid for by the publishers and others were left to the booksellers’ discretion. As a clerk, if he liked a book or had met the author, he could sell more copies of it by displaying it and recommending it. My stepdad’s bookstore had a big independent magazine section in the front, delineated by a few fat shelves, and I kind of camped out there and read. I wanted to find my place in the ecosystem of the published word.

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Sometimes my students ask me where they should publish, and mostly I say I don’t know. I say, What are you reading? Who’s publishing that? As for me, when I started thinking more seriously about my own publishing options, I was mostly reading whatever caught my interest at my local used bookstore, a downtown storefront run by old lesbians with cats. I supplemented my welfare check in those days by scouting neighborhood garage sales for not-too-tattered paperbacks to sell to that store. I used to sit on a bean bag chair near the back, my daughter curled next to me, and I read through the “Writing How-To” section. That’s where I came across a 1973 copy of The Publish-It-YourselfHandbook: Literary Tradition & How-To, edited by Pushcart Press founder Bill Henderson. That book was almost 20 years old when I found it, and right then it transformed my concept of my career. The book’s almost 50 years old now, and it’s still right here on my shelf next to my door-table-desk—how many moves and how many moons later? Bill Henderson wrote, “If writers and their friends hadn’t decided throughout history to bypass the moneymakers, form “small presses,” and publish their own works, the manuscripts of many classics—and best-sellers—would have rotted away in basements, attics, and desk drawers.” Rotted away? Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass. I let that sink in. He even set his own type. Bill’s “handbook” was really more of an anthology of a couple dozen self-publishing stories—Anaïs Nin wrote about her printing press; Leonard Woolf told the story of Hogarth Press; Larry Rottman, a Vietnam War veteran, contributed a piece on 1st Casualty Press. There were stories of publishing from prison, of kitchen-counter publishing. There were even tips in the back with the caveat, “Having read this far, you realize that in publishing nothing is true or false. Most is uncertain. Some of 277

the following tips may be contradicted or supplemented by the preceding articles. Make up your own mind.” I was in. Bill wrote, “the tradition of self-publishing is ignored mainly because writers imagine that they must be commercially published in order to be proud of their work. ‘If my manuscript is worth-while, why didn’t a commercial house accept it?’ The myth persists.” It still persists. And it bums me out. I mean, that’s a real number capitalism has played on us, don’t you think? That we can’t even be proud of our work unless and until Daddy Capitalism deems us worthy? I don’t self-publish most of my own writing these days, but I decided back then to learn how to publish because I wanted to empower myself with the tools of production. Capitalism had taken enough from me. I wasn’t going to let it take my writing career and my love of storytelling. Even if my work was amateurish or only interesting to a few dozen people who also like the smell of tobacco and roses together, I didn’t want my work to rot. Now here’s a secret: The best way to learn to publish is to start with something small and low-stakes. Make a chapbook with a few of your stories or musings or dreams. Edit a zine or literary journal with a couple of pals. Add art or photos if you like. Learn about margins. Figure out which font size will work best for your imagined readership. Make peace with the fact that you can proofread a fairly short chapbook or zine so many times you’ve memorized the text and still there’s going to be some embarrassing typo that glows out from the page like a newly-arrived alien spacecraft only after you’ve spent your last $300 printing a hundred copies. Get creative with smallscale distribution. Discover the answers to all those questions you have about the interpersonal impact of publishing—What will my mother think? Will my spouse lose their shit and take all the cigarettes and leave me on the side of the road in my high heels, ten 278

miles from 7-11? Will my first boss at the oil change shop recognize herself in my memoir? Will she sue me? If you practice with lowstakes, low-budget projects, at least if they sue you it isn’t going to be for that much. But by low-stakes and low-budget, I don’t mean that I want you to make some janky thing. I want you to make something elegant. I want you to make something you love the feel of when you hold it in your hands. I want you to make something that radiates your personal style. I want you to make a vessel for your words so you can share them with friends and strangers.

TRY THIS:

Create a concept for a chapbook.1 What kind of writing or

images will your little booklet hold? What will make it feel thematically cohesive? About how many pages? Do you like square or rectangular publications? Check out chapbooks by other writers and design yours based on what format and design you prefer. Measure margins. When you notice a page that makes you feel good in someone else’s book, count how many words are on that page and measure the open spaces. Imitate and experiment. Look up “booklet printing” online and find out how much it would cost to print 10 or 100 copies of your chapbook. Consider the copy shop. There’s no shame in starting small. You can always reprint if you need to. Hold the book you made in your hands. Now you’re a published author.

1 Chapbooks and zines differ mostly in the fact that the words come from different traditions. The word “chapbook” originally referred to the cheap little books traveling salespeople brought around in England. They often contained funny stories or tales from folklore. The word has since developed a long tradition in poetry circles. The word “zine” comes from “fanzine.” Fanzines first appeared in the 1930s among sci-fi fans and bloomed into a whole world of informal, underground publications in the 1960s and 1970s, often focused on social and political activism and punk band fandom. These days, chapbooks are more often single-author stand-alone publications. Zines are more often Xeroxed and stapled and can be serial publications. Call your little publication whatever you like. 279

SUBMIT

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y first publication for strangers came in the form of a poetry and prose newsletter put out by Copperfield’s, my then-local bookstore. I think they accepted everything. Next, I got an internship at Sonoma County Women’s Voices, a little feminist newspaper where I wrote brief profiles about people doing cool things around the county— running community gardens and recycling programs, marching for political change, or making art. Then I started submitting to national journals I found in bookstores. I got a lot of rejection letters—nothing but, for a number of months. I gave up and went back to local publications where I seemed to have more luck. When I’d gathered a few more credits to mention in a cover letter, I started submitting nationally again, and again was met with rejection. This went on for some time, this teetering back and forth between finding success where I could and reaching beyond. This is still how I work, now that I think about it. With each reach and each success, each rejection and each affirmation, I expand my little empire. It’s never too early to start submitting things to friends and strangers that they might consider for publication. Pay attention to calls for submissions in your writing circles. Follow guidelines. Offer your work beyond your own circles, too. Don’t put too much stock in rejections. They come. When you submit a piece of writing or art to an outside publisher, you’re asking them to pay the printer to put your work out there or take up space in their online platform. They may or may not want to do this. They may or may not even read what you send them. If they do, and they send a nice rejection 280

letter asking you to consider sending them something else, do it. Online submissions portals like Submittable have made it easier for writers from all over the world to get their work into editors’ inboxes. Even small-time editors like me cannot possibly read everything in their inboxes. Simultaneous submissions are usually considered all right these days, but once a piece is accepted for publication, you’re expected to withdraw it from consideration elsewhere. Editors don’t like feeling like they have a shiny new piece they’re going to debut in their lit journal and then seeing it all over the internet or in The New Yorker before they have a chance to go to press. On the other hand, be careful not to sign over the foreverrights to your work unless the publication is paying you enough or is prestigious enough for this to make sense for you longterm. When you do have a piece published, show it off. Promote the journal in your circles. Know that agents and other publishers troll journals, too. Every time you get your name and your art out there, you’re expanding your reach. Every time you get nasty feedback, you’re getting used to the negative muck you’ll learn to ignore. When you hear from someone who felt like you were speaking to them, you’ll feel a little freer from your sense of soul-isolation.

TRY THIS: Starting with publications you are familiar with and using research to expand your reach, identify three journals you could reasonably submit something you’ve written to. Now, go for it! Expect crickets or rejection. Revel in surprise acceptance when it comes.

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DON’T GIVE UP Interview with Ursula K. LeGuin

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ere’s a copy of a rejection letter Ursula K. LeGuin’s agent, Virginia Kidd, got for Ursula’s first book, The Left Hand of Darkness. Because Ursula was a very kind person, she omitted the name of the editor and his publishing house when she shared it, saying, “This is included to cheer up anybody who just got a rejection letter. Hang in there!” Dear Miss Kidd,  Ursula K. Le Guin writes extremely well, but I’m sorry to have to say that on the basis of that one highly distinguishing quality alone I cannot make you an offer for the novel. The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable. The whole is so dry and airless, so lacking in pace, that whatever drama and excitement the novel might have had is entirely dissipated by what does seem, a great deal of the time, to be extraneous material. My thanks nonetheless for having thought of us. The manuscript of The Left Hand of Darkness is returned herewith. Yours sincerely,  The Editor  21 June, 1968 I interviewed Ursula about rejection before she died, and here’s what she wanted us to remember:

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That letter is gorgeously ridiculous! But what do you do with something like that when you’re early in your publishing career? I wrote The Left Hand of Darkness when I was twenty eight or twenty nine. I had been sending out fiction for years, and getting some of it published for about three years. It was my first “big” novel—the three before it had been fairly short and much more conventional. I sold it myself to Terry Carr at Ace Books as a paperback, but I thought it ought really be a hardcover, so I sent it to the agent Virginia Kidd. She jumped at it, took me on, and soon sold it to Walker. The letter actually came to her, not to me, and being a very smart agent, she didn’t show it to me for years—till we could laugh at it. But if I had received it myself, it wouldn’t have stopped me from sending the book to another publisher. I had taken quite a lot of rejection by then—nothing but for about seven years. Experience in rejection doesn’t stop it from hurting, but it helps you just dig in and keep on trying. Any more advice on how to become a famous writer before you’re dead? Or at least make a living? Write your heart out. Go for broke. Submit your work for publication, methodically. And don’t quit. Ever.

TRY THIS: Take a rejection letter you have received and rewrite it, making it completely over-the-top. Somewhere in your embellished letter, insert the words “airless” and “unreadable.” Keep this letter handy for a laugh whenever you’re feeling dissed, dogged, or underappreciated. Extra Credit: Resubmit a piece that was rejected once. If you’ve never submitted anything that was rejected, submit something today.

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YOU CAN TOUCH THE PAGE YOU WROTE

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fter a writing workshop I taught at China Martens’ place in Baltimore, she made a zine of the group’s writing and some little tales about what we’d seen and done that weekend and she made five copies, one for each of the people in the workshop. It filled me with sparkling happiness, this scale of five. China curated, assembled, and wrote an introduction for the zine, she designed it, she deemed the audience precisely five, and that’s how many she printed. She distributed the zines by US mail shortly after the event. This is the publishing process. We can do almost everything ourselves—as long as we like all the steps involved and usually with a little help from a printer or copy shop and the postal service—or we can seek collaboration with publishers or individual editors, proofreaders, designers, marketing people, distributors, and booksellers. It’s good to make a zine or a chapbook once or twice in life even if it’s just to familiarize yourself with the process. When Anaïs Nin left Paris and landed in New York in 1942, she couldn’t find an American publisher for her literary books, so she bought a printing press with one of her lovers and set up shop in Greenwich Village. She wrote, The relationship to handcraft is a beautiful one . . . You pit your faculties against concrete problems. The victories are concrete, definable, touchable. A page of perfect printing. You can touch the page you wrote. We exult in what we master and discover. Instead of using one’s energy in a void, against frustrations, in anger against publishers, I use it on the press, type, paper, a source of energy. Solving 284

problems, technical, mechanical problems.  Which can be solved. If I pay no attention, then I do not lock the tray properly, and when I start printing, the whole tray of letters falls into the machine. The words which first appeared in my head, out of the air, take body. Each letter has a weight. I can weigh each word again, to see if it is the right one . . . The press mobilized our energies, and is a delight. At the end of the day you can see your work, weigh it. It is done. It exists. That’s the satisfaction of publishing: It is done. It exists.

TRY THIS: Make a single-sheet printed work of a very short piece of your writing—a paragraph or a single poem or a couple of haikus, say. If you have access to letterpress, print it with letterpress. Otherwise, you might try using rubber stamps for each letter, or simply use a contemporary copy machine but print it on cool or interesting paper. Make five copies. Make it look good. Touch the page you wrote. Give a few of your printed-word creations away.

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Dear Ariel, I really want to finish and publish a book. And for it to be read. And well-received. And to be paid well for writing it. Language is my deepest love and I want into this world but the barriers feel very mysterious. Would you break down the process for us in terms of how to get from here to there? Write the manuscript . . . edit the manuscript . . . cough, blow into the air three times, spin around, light a candle, tell a joke, leave a drink for the ancestors and then wait for the checks and the reviews to come in? How am I this old and still haven’t figured this out? Love, Dreaming in Davis

Dear Dreaming, You’ve got it!  Ariel

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TAKE A MANUSCRIPT AND SEE IT BECOME A BOOK WITH A TRADITIONAL PUBLISHER

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f you have a book manuscript you’d like to see traditionally published and the process seems daunting, you’re not alone. Most authors only publish one to maybe 20 books across an entire career, so we all come to the marketplace as newbies or feeling rusty if not crusty. But I’ll tell you how it works. If your book is a novel, a fiction collection, or a literary memoir, you’ll complete the whole manuscript before you query agents or acquisitions editors. If your book is a journalistic or how-to nonfiction work, you’ll write a proposal—whether or not you’ve already written the whole manuscript. Let’s start with fiction and literary memoir. You’ve drafted your book. You may have engaged a developmental editor to help you in the process, but either way, now you’ll want to get several beta readers to give the book a read-through. If you have writer pals or a literary community, you’ll have some ideas for whom you might approach. You don’t need professional editing, but rather someone accustomed to reading books who will tell you the strengths they see in your project and let you know where the story dragged or where they got confused. For a non-fiction book proposal, you’re also going to want a few beta readers, but what you’ll have is more of a summary and pitch. The longest book proposal I ever created came in just under 80 pages double-spaced. The shortest were closer to eight pages of project summary followed by a couple of sample chapters.

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I like to have a lot of white space in a proposal, letting the reader imagine their dream final project. Sometimes I include quotes on each page from experts or members of the community I expect the book to reach. If your book is going to have illustrations, you may want to include some samples in the proposal, but know that most publishers want to have the option to have your book illustrated in-house, so you would be limiting your publishing options if you insisted on, or employed a specific illustrator at this stage. Here’s what your nonfiction book proposal should include: Proposal Contents: This is important for longer proposals, but can be skipped with a shorter proposal. Up to you. Project Description: This is your jazzy extended elevator pitch that will leave your reader excited about this much-needed new title. It can often also eventually serve as the introduction to your book. We’re looking for one to three pages showing off your excellent idea and making it obvious why you’re the perfect writer to pull it off. I like to think about the why of my project at this point. I use about half the space to describe the project itself and the other half to lead into and highlight the marketing perspective that I’ll fill in a few pages deeper into the proposal. Here’s how I used this section to pitch my anthology, Santa Fe Noir, to Akashic Books. Because it would be part of a fiction series that included Brooklyn Noir and Mexico City Noir, I didn’t have to sell this publisher the idea of a noir collection, but rather on Why little Santa Fe? A city older than the United States, founded long before the pilgrims washed up at Plymouth Rock, Santa Fe has its secrets—its revolts and its hangings, its witch trials and its hauntings, its Indian school of forced assimilation and its Japanese internment camp. Santa Fe is a transient city for a lot of folks: Your peyote trip ends here, or your last espionage assignment. You were an anchor baby 288

born in a sanctuary city, or your car broke down here. Your ancestral land was sold out from under you. You’re broke. You just hope your bad luck has saved you from worse. You’re a noir story embodied. An old tourism slogan branded New Mexico “The Land of Enchantment,” but locals call it “The Land of Entrapment.” You try to leave and you end up back here anyway. “Pity poor New Mexico,” another unofficial motto says, “So far from God, so close to Texas.” . . . Then I went into some specifics of the literary scene in town at that time. Book Table of Contents with Chapter Summaries: If you haven’t finished your manuscript, or if it’s an anthology and you haven’t collected the submissions, this is going to be your reasonable fantasy version of your table of contents. Don’t say you’ll have something from A Giant Superstar if there’s little chance you can make that happen, but do mention it if you’ve reached out to her and gotten a solid “maybe.” Editors understand that your project may change between the time you make a deal and the time you submit what you’ve pulled together, but no one wants to feel bamboozled. For my imagined table of contents, I like to include engaging chapter titles and two- to six-line summaries written in the style of the book itself. If your book is going to be funny, the proposal should already have your readers in stitches. If your story is meant to be useful or inspirational, you want your reader reaching for their notebook and jotting down some reminders as they start imagining the great life they’re going to build based on your project. Audience: Here you’ll describe your target audience from demographics to values and identities. If you’re writing for conservative vegans, for example, you might say, “This book will appeal to young, health-conscious Republicans who are tired of lib-flakes having a monopoly on quinoa.” And then you’d go on to list the various cohorts of your market from evangelical 289

foodies to weight-conscious political trophy wives. This needn’t go on for more than about half a page and may even share a page with your marketing plan and social media reach. Marketing Plan: Now, how are you going to reach said audience? What publications do they read? What conferences do they attend? Where do they hear about the next beach read they’re going to buy for themselves and pretty much everyone they’ve ever met? Mention if you have connections with any of these marketing outlets. Social Media Reach: Note your current social media numbers, focusing on platforms where you have more than 250 followers. Comparative and Competitive Titles: What other books are out there for this audience? Mention a few titles that have done well and whose buyers would buy your book alongside them. “Judging from the success of the lyrical memoir Motel Trasher,” for example, “I think my memoir, Rental Car Crasher, will find a ready audience.” Mention a few other titles that your book would replace on the shelf, and comment on why. If you’re writing a guide to amusement parks and the usual books cater exclusively to a monied, able-bodied audience, show how yours will be more inclusive. Author Bio: Your author bio can be anywhere from 100500 words, but I like to see it fill a single page, coming in around 250 words or so. It’s generally written in the third person, just the way it might appear on the inside back cover of your published book. Some people prefer the first person. Neither choice will make you look like a goof ball. Focus on the aspects of your background that lead you to write this book. If you’re proposing a guide to cheap world travel, lead with the fact that you circled the globe six times while collecting unemployment. 290

Format and Timeline: This section can be very brief, such as, “What I have in mind is an 80,000-word trade paperback with six illustrations. The project is sixty percent finished and will take one year to complete.” Sample Chapters: Include your first three chapters, showing your reader how you translate a chapter summary into a chapter. Once you have your full manuscript or nonfiction book proposal finished, beta-read, and fine-tuned, it’s time to send it out to potential acquisitions editors at small and mid-sized publishing houses or to agents who might represent you to a large publishing house. In either case, you’ll want to include a one-page cover letter that includes a brief how-do-you-do noting why you’ve selected this particular publisher or agent to pitch to, a brief summary of your manuscript as it might appear on the back cover of your published book, and a one- or twoline bio. Basically, Hey, here’s this, and here’s why I think you in particular should read it. If one of the agents or publishers you pitch your book to is interested in working with you, you’ll be expected to talk with them seriously and not be like, “well, give me a few more months to see if I hear from Better Than You Press,” so stagger your submissions based on your own top choices for representation and publication. Once you’ve got a deal, the editing, design, and prepublication process will usually take another two years, so remember to consider the shelf life of a book. Don’t mention who’s president.

TRY THIS: Read the back-cover copy of three books you like in your general genre and then write the back-cover copy for your own future published book. You’ll be able to adapt this nugget for your cover letters, pitches, and proposal, expanding it and tightening it up as needed, but for this assignment, see if you can keep it around one page double spaced—or 250 words. 291

GET AN AGENT IF YOU NEED ONE Interview with Laura Mazer

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ou don’t need an agent for a small or indie house. An agent might not even want to get involved in that. The practical and financial issue for the agent is that a small publisher isn’t going to give you much of an advance—let’s say $1,000 or so—and that would only be $150 for the agent. If this agent wants to really invest in your career, that might be worth their while, but I think we mostly don’t live in that kind of world anymore. If you’re selling your book to a bigger house, the agent has some money at stake, but more importantly you as the author need a babysitter and an advocate in that big system. The agent strategizes and sells your book. They know the editors and they know what’s going on in town so that you don’t have to. Even after they sell your book, they remain your babysitter and your advocate. If you’re publishing with an outfit whose employees you can’t count on your honey-dipped fingers, then you’ll probably need an agent as your voice in that changing atmosphere. If I had a contract issue at Random House, I wouldn’t know who to call. I’d call my agent. If I had a contract issue with a smaller press— presuming they haven’t sold the rights to my book to the bigger company they’ve just merged with—I’d just call my acquiring editor who is also probably the publisher and I’d say, “c’mon, Man, I personally witnessed my book selling out at the witch conference. Where’s the check?” And they’d say, “What are you talking about, Ariel? Of course it sold out. I sent the money to your address in Oakland.” And I’d say, “Oh, right. I haven’t been in Oakland for a while.” So, get an agent if you need one. How? Let’s ask Laura Mazer. I know Laura because she was the brilliant editor at Seal Press when they were in Berkeley. When Hachette gobbled up

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Seal, Laura decided to take her brains and her experience to working as an agent. Hey Laura! I hope you & the fam are doing great or at least hanging in there. I’m wondering if I could interview you a little bit for a book, The Wayward Writer. It’s a follow up of sorts to my hit How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead. For starters, at what point in the manuscript-writing process does one query an agent? Memoir and Fiction: After the entire book is written. Nonfiction: After a book proposal and a handful of chapters are written. Do you have any tips for picking who to query? Query agents who’ve represented books similar to yours; you can check those books’ acknowledgment pages to see who represented them, or spend $25 for a month subscription to Publishers Marketplace, where not all but many of the book deals are posted, and you can easily search by agent/author/ publisher to find the category matches you’re looking for. If you’re writing a biography of an ecologist, for example, you can search keywords like “biography” or “science” or “ecology” and see which agents represented the books in those arenas. And then how on earth do you write a query? Do you have a sample you could share? Short answer! ​1. First paragraph is a greeting that includes length, title, subtitle, category: “Dear Agent . . . I’m writing to you with my 80,000-word social history,  Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male Power, and I hope you’ll consider representing me . . . “ “Dear Agent, I’m reaching out to you to ask for representation for my 80,000-word contemporary novel, The Sea of Stones . . .”

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​2. Then, insert a description of the book that reads like jacket copy. ​3. At the end, include a bit of a bio about you—who you are, and if the book is nonfiction; how you know what you know. Do agents even read unsolicited queries? How else do they find their clients? They do, especially younger/newer agents and agents who have current authors all nicely situated and are ready to rep more books. They also find clients through referrals, by reaching out to writers they admire, and by contacting thought leaders/ influencers to propose a book project and partnership. I sold a book for Ms. magazine because I noticed they had a 50-year anniversary coming up—I wrote to the editor in chief and suggested we create a book together along the lines of “50 years of feminism through the pages of Ms.” and she agreed. What do agents wish more writers knew going in? The publishing industry is absurdly competitive, subjective, and fickle. Don’t take passes personally—there are a thousand reasons why an agent or editor might pass on your book that have nothing to do with you, your ideas, or your words. What’s your vision of a literary utopia? A world in which authors have far more agency over and compensation for their work. Big hug, Ariel!

TRY THIS: Research to find an agent you might query and write a sample query to them pitching a project you’re working on or an imagined project you might work on in the future.

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THINK ABOUT YOUR BOOK PROJECT THE WAY YOUR PUBLISHER WILL

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ere’s the author questionnaire Microcosm asks all their authors to fill out, with some sample answers. 

General Questions

If anything in this section changes, please let us know ASAP so we can stay in touch and ensure nothing is delayed because we had an old address. Author name (as it should appear in the book and marketing materials): Ariel Gore How do you pronounce your name? First name starts with “air,” not “are.” Last name rhymes with whore—and door. Legal name (if different): n/a Pronouns: she/her Mailing address (let us know if you expect this to change in the next year): 2752 N Williams Ave, Portland, OR 97227 Phone number: (503) 232-3666 Birthdate: Optional, we only use this when submitting your book to the Library of Congress 06/25/1970

Marketing Questions Title: The Wayward Writer Subtitle: Summon Your Power to Take Back Your Story, Liberate Yourself From Capitalism, and Publish Like a Superstar. Biography: Ariel Gore is a LAMBDA-Award-winning editor and author of a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction including We Were Witches and How to Become a Famous Writer before You’re Dead. She founded Hip Mama, the American 295

Press Award-winning zine covering the culture and politics of parenting and serves as the strict headmistress at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers at the Literary Kitchen: literarykitchen.net Book Description (100-200 words):  The Wayward Writer is a guide to everything writers need to know about storycrafting and publishing amid late-stage capitalism. Writers of every experience-level—from the excited and aspiring to the crusty and alienated—will find solace and inspiration in the 78 incisive chapters, each with a short writing assignment.  In Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers, storytelling is a form of resistance and writing is an outsider art. In this follow-up to her national bestseller How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead, Gore offers a lyrical call to literary revolution paired with practical exercises. Through her own experiences and interviews with other authors, publishers, and agents, she shows other writers how to chart their own creative education, vanquish shame and imposter syndrome, cast off oppression, cast a spell on readers, step into their unique powers, and build their own literary community where respect and honesty reign—everyone can be a writer and survive. Gore also introduces “Gore’s Grotto,” an alternative narrative structure to the patriarchal hero’s journey, with a focus on tapping into myths and hidden places.   What makes this book special and different compared to similar books on similar subjects? Set apart by its positive emphasis on the lifestyle and culture of the literary world outside the gates of the elite, The Wayward Writer shows that a writing life can be something joyous and subversive—a practical lifestyle. Unlike other books about how to write, this one assumes that the reader is a weirdo who wants to be themselves and survive, who knows art can heal the heart and change the world. 296

Three or four specific benefits to the reader of this book: 1. Practical instructions for supercharging a writing practice. 2. Publishing how-to for aspiring, seasoned, and jaded storytellers alike. 3. Eighteen-month writing program at .02% of the cost of an MFA. 4. Entertainment is provided with personal anecdotes and tales of astounding feats performed by everyday writers. Any information pertaining to this title that will help it sell, such as statistics on trends, interesting factoids, trivia, etc. According to a 2002 survey reported in The New York Times, 81 percent of Americans think they have a book in them—and that they should write it.  As of 2021, roughly a quarter of Americans say they had not read a book in the past 12 months.  One third of adults still sleep with a comfort item. Maybe we can make the cover super soft and cuddly. Who will buy this book? Describe the types of potential buyers, their levels of expertise, their typical job positions, conferences and shows they would attend, publications they would read, etc. Specific information on the size of the audience is also useful. Buyers of this book will be adults in the United States and Canada. The audience could be as large as the 81% of the population who say they think they have a book in them—and it could be even larger if we invite in the remaining 19% who are too shy to admit they want to play with the typewriter, too! These buyers may live in cities or suburbs or rural sweet spots and be students, creative class professionals, civil servants, waitresses, teachers, psychologists, bartenders, lawyers, city council members, cooks, Etsy moguls, rock stars, body workers, homemakers, retirees, street artists, painters, people on SSI or SSDI, and/or people who work from home. They likely read 297

blogs and magazines about creativity, contemporary literature, unsolved crimes, napping, travel, cheap run-down houses for sale in random states, and discount performing arts tickets. They listen to The Moth and podcasts like The Shit No One Tells You About Writing. These readers are already concerned about societal ills such as capitalism, arrogance, lonely nose-picking, and climate change. They want to be more engaged in their writing lives and change the world with their creative energy—or maybe just make beautiful little chapbooks of their poetry. Types of buyers:  •

Fans and students of Ariel Gore who know she has Wonder Woman stars tattooed on her wrists or know her from Hip Mama or We Were Witches or her School for Wayward Writers in the Literary Kitchen.

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Foxy bookworms interested in taking back their story, liberating themselves from capitalism, and publishing like superstars.

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Tired and bitter creatives who’ve been at this writing thing a long time and need a little encouragement from a superstar writer not currently depressed.

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Anyone who wants to hide the smaller publication or device they’re actually reading within these pages.

Potential shows and conferences buyers would attend: AWP Bread Loaf Writers Conference Tin House Saints and Sinners Howard Zinn Book Fair Roller Derby NYC Feminist Zinefest Underearners Anonymous 298

Comparable/competitive titles. Please list three to six books that were published in the last three years that would be on the same shelves in the bookstore as you would expect to find your book and that would be of interest to the same readers. (Please steer clear of self-published books—we don’t actually compete with them! One way to determine the publisher of a book is to create a free account with Edelweiss.plus and look up the book—if it does not appear in Edelweiss, it cannot be a comp)  - Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, by Melissa Febos. 9781646220854 Catapult, 2022. $16.95.  - Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison. 9781948226134 Catapult, 2019. $16.95.  - The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez. 9781642592672 Haymarket Books, 2021. $24.95.  - Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto by Ayun Halliday. 9781648410598  Microcosm, 2022. $14.95.   - Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories by Charlie Jane Anders 9781250800015 Tordotcom, 2021. $26.99. - Making Comics by Lynda Barry. 9781770463691 Drawn and Quarterly, 2019. $22.95. 

Publicity Questions Do you have public social media accounts we can tag in posts about your book? Please list any Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram accounts you want to be associated with this project. Also note if you have over a thousand followers on any of the accounts or if you have a different social media account, such as a Tumblr, with a strong following. https://www.facebook.com/arielgore - 6.5k friends and followers Instagram @arielfionagore - 2.5k followers 299

Do you have contacts or friends who are reporters or have relationships or connections to people who work in the media? Please list: If you’re comfortable providing email/phone for these contacts, that is helpful, but it’s enough to know generally that, for instance, you know the arts editor at your local paper, or went to high school with a journalist for a national platform. I know the editor of The Santa Fe Reporter on social media. What schools, if any, have you graduated from? What is your hometown, if different from where you live? These are so we can promote your book in local arts papers and alumni magazines. If you’re not comfortable with that, you can skip this question. Mills College UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Palo Alto, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, Santa Fe Author tour? Dates and cities. March, 2023: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland or Berkeley, Santa Fe, and New York.  If a newspaper, radio, or TV station wanted to get a hold of you, what is the best phone number and email address to reach you at?  (503) 232-3666 Do you have any related events planned that are separate from the book tour but are related to the topic you’re writing about? For example, if you’re scheduled to talk at a bike summit and are writing a book about bikes, or if you’re traveling with a band and writing a book about scene history in the area.  No. What are your local bookstores that sell new books that we should be sure to reach out to (either for events or to sell your books to them)? Powell’s Books, Portland 300

Belmont Books, Portland Revolution Books, Portland Diesel Books, Oakland Pegasus, Berkeley Collected Works, Santa Fe

Past work questions. If this is your first publication, skip the next two questions! What previous books or zines have you written? How many copies has each sold? If they have ISBNs, what are they? See “Also by Ariel Gore” at the end of the enclosed manuscript. Please share links to reviews of past publications, and any blurbs from experts, peers, and/or contemporaries:  Praise for How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead: “The best thing about this writers’ guide is that it doesn’t sound like any other writers’ guide. Gore tells you to do a lot of things that other authors say are either wrong or irrelevant. Sure, you can waste time making yourself a lovely little space to write in, but how’s that going to get your name on a published book? What you need to do, Gore says, is just be a writer. If you have a story to tell, tell it, and once you’ve told it, promote the hell out of it. Publish it yourself, if you have to, and then sell it. Check the local papers, find a spoken-word open-mike night, and go read your material in front of an audience. Send out press releases; publish your own magazine. And, most important, learn real fast that nobody out there will give a damn about what you have got to say until you make them pay attention to you. One of the snappiest, most useful books a writer for hire is likely to read.” —David Pitt, Booklist 

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Praise for The End of Eve: “By turns tender and heartbreaking, Gore’s book is a brave, thoroughly authentic journey to the center of the human heart. Wickedly sharp reading filled to bursting with compassion, rage, pain, and wit.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “The depth of insight of The End of Eve often took my breath away. Not to mention its drop-dead humor, the sadness, and the rage. Ariel Gore’s memoir is in its essence a how to book. In the face of death, our grief, how to breathe, how to be brave, how to be funny, how to be authentic. How to make it through. But most of all: tenderness—how Ariel puts human tenderness on the page is an act of poetry damn close to sublime.” —Tom Spanbauer, author of In The City of Shy Hunters Praise for We Were Witches: “Gore tells her story with such verve and wit I missed my train stop reading it.” —Lambda Literary Review “A re-writing of every helpless princess fairy tale and a reclamation of every Scarlet Letter . . .We Were Witches is an absolute must read.” —Ms. magazine blog “Ariel Gore’s  We Were Witches  is one woman’s body refusing to become property, refusing to be overwritten by law or traditions, one woman’s body cutting open a hole in culture so that actual bodies might emerge. A triumphant body story. A singularly spectacular siren song.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children

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“We Were Witches seizes the shame and hurt internalized by young women and turns it into magic art and poetry. Ariel Gore’s writing is a diamond pentacle carved into a living heart,  transforming singular experience into universal knowledge.” —Susie Bright, author of Big Sex Little Death “Forget Freytag’s Pyramid (of Predictable Male Prose)—behold Gore’s Upside Down Triangle (of Fierce Feminist Narrative)! Drawing from myth, fairy tale, the wisdom of third wave literary icons, and the singular experiences of a queer single mama artist trying to survive the nineties, We Were Witches is its own genre, in its own canon. It moves with punk rock grace and confidence, and I totally loved it.” —Kate Schatz, author of Rad American Women A-Z

TRY THIS: Fill out this author questionnaire for a project you’re working on or for an imagined project of the future.

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Dear Ariel, What if a writer envisions their book with an indie press or a small press—do they still need an agent? Agent-shy in Ogunquit

Dear Agent-shy, In a word, no. Ariel

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THE FUTURE IS DECENTRALIZED Being an artist is very hard work. Not only do you have to constantly develop your discipline, but if you have a desire to make a living, you have to be a good businessperson. Agents, business managers, etc., etc., are not the authors of your career. They make suggestions. They are part of your research team. You are the author. You are the center of your career. You have to run the show. I hope your show is about more than gold digging. I hope your show is about becoming the most engaging, enchanting, magical person that you can be—through your art. Art is ultimately transcendent. That’s a fact.

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—Anna Deavere Smith, Letters to a Young Artist f you’ve got your sweet gooey heart set on publishing your first book with a big press, I have no problem with that. If a project is best served with a big press, I’m in. But big presses aren’t the only jelly doughnut. 

The future of publishing is decentralized. I’ll tell you a story.

When I finished journalism school and most of my classmates applied for jobs at newspapers and magazines and radio stations, I set my sights on getting a book deal with a big house. I mean, why not? I’d been getting a lot of niche and subculture attention for Hip Mama. I’d heard Starhawk quoted somewhere saying it was easier to sell non-fiction than fiction or memoir, so I wrote a book proposal for The Hip Mama Survival Guide. I figured I could write that book and I figured people would buy it. I’d been publishing my zine for a couple of years, and it had a small, devoted audience. What I’m saying is that I had a strategy—I proposed the book I thought I could sell. 305

Parenting books were big at the time, and I could write a distinctly different one. I had a hard time communicating with agents and New York editors—I felt very nervous with older adults and professionals in general—but eventually I learned to deal at a passable level. I learned to develop different force fields around myself for different occasions. I sent my proposal to a couple of agents, and signed with the first one who got back to me. Writing The Hip Mama Survival Guide was such fun! I had issues with authority and I saw everyone at my big publishing house as The Man, but I mostly felt happy. I went on a book tour. There were so many states in the country I had never visited. I went to Santa Fe and I thought, I could live here. I went to New York and I thought, I could live here. I went to Portland and thought, I could live here. My publisher contracted with me to write a follow-up to The Hip Mama Survival Guide, and via my agent I signed on the dotted line, but my editor ended up leaving the company before I finished that book, giving me the opening I needed to change publishing houses. I went with Seal Press, then an independent in Seattle where I felt less hostile to everyone because I didn’t see them as The Man. The advance was three percent of what the big press had offered me, but these were people I felt less anxiety around. They wanted me to up the feminism in my work, rather than further obscure it. What I’m saying is that I developed a self-care strategy in addition to my business strategy. I made a choice in service to my work and my mental issues. The Mother Trip became a national bestseller. So, even though the advance was smaller, I made at least as much money from that book—I just got paid quarterly over a longer period of time. I was beginning to understand that different writing projects with different audiences needed different publishing 306

strategies. It seems obvious when I type it out, but this was a shift in my understanding. I stayed with Seal Press to write Whatever, Mom in collaboration with my then-teenager daughter, and because of my good-enough track record with the parenting books, Seal agreed to take a chance on my next project, a novel-like traveling memoir called Atlas of the Human Heart.  That memoir stretched me as a writer and when it was published, positioned me as a more serious literary voice with an Oregon Book Award nomination. It meant a wild rambling book tour with a grand shadow puppet show, but that book also got me in hot water with my mother, who thought it was all about her, and thought it reflected badly on her. She, in her own words, “forbade” my beloved stepfather from reading it. So, I decided to write my stepfather a novel. He wasn’t getting any younger, and I wanted to show him all the things I’d learned since our days back at Printer’s Ink Bookstore. I wrote The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show, but Seal Press wasn’t doing fiction anymore and I’d been working with them long enough that I’d let my agent go, too. I started emailing everyone I knew who’d published a book, asking for agent referrals, and I made my way to Faye Bender, a newer feminist-identified agent in New York. She sold The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show to HarperSanFrancisco, and proceeded to help me sell a string of nonfiction books including How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead to Penguin and Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Those book deals allowed me to buy my first little house in Portland and send my daughter to college, two of my financial goals. My editors at the big presses tended to be great, but they changed jobs often, and the pattern became all too familiar: I’d sign with an acquisitions editor who was a fan of my work and excited about the project, I’d finish writing the book, we’d go into editing and production, and somewhere along the line my editor would take a new job, 307

leaving my project to the next editor, who was significantly less excited about it. I missed the stability of Seal Press.  I had stopped publishing Hip Mama, so I started publishing books. I put out Portland Queer because there were so many great queer writers in town who weren’t getting published enough for my tastes and that book won a LAMBDA Literary Award. I did a crowd-funding campaign and gathered a bunch of flash memoir stories in a novella-length book and I got my favorite illustrator, Summer Pierre, to draw pictures for it. The crowdfunding process meant I could gather up the audience before I had to pay the printer. These were projects with audiences I knew how to reach, and they were small enough scale for me to handle, so they worked. Around this time, an old colleague, Susie Bright, who I knew because she’s been a founding editor of On Our Backs, a precursor to Hip Mama, reached out about making some audio books. She was an acquisitions editor at Audible now and wanted to know who had the rights to Atlas of the Human Heart. She talked to my editors at Seal and pretty soon she produced an audio book. What I’m saying is that old colleagues from DIY days sometimes get fancy new jobs. After my mom died, I figured the coast was clear to write another memoir, this time one that really was all about her. For The End of Eve, I sought out Hawthorne Books in Portland because Rhonda Hughes was a legend who’d been talked up by Portland writers and she was putting out beautiful books on silky paper with that luscious “French flap” cover fold. Working with Rhonda proved dreamy—she’s an old-fashioned editor with a classical design aesthetic who put her everything into her titles. We made a book.  Then I went back into hermit/writer mode. Because that’s where I’m comfortable.

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I wrote fragments toward We Were Witches with the help and accountability of my monthly Oakland writing group. It was my anti-marketable book, but I did a spell to make something cool happen for it, and then I read Black Wave by Michelle Tea, a completely weird hybrid memoir-novel and I noticed on the back cover that it was part of a series she was curating with the Feminist Press and I kind of lost my mind and I sent her a proposal and I begged her to publish my book and really got hustling to finish it.  What I’m saying is that I jumped on a time-bound opportunity when I recognized it. My old colleagues at Microcosm, who had been distributing Hip Mama and Portland Queer and All the Pretty People and some of my other self-published projects reached out and asked me if Farrar, Straus, and Giroux had ever released a paperback edition of Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness, and they hadn’t, so I hit up my agent, Faye Bender, to get the rights back and I worked with Microcosm to put out a paperback 10th-anniversary edition retitled F*ck Happiness. What I’m saying is that I’m in this for the long haul. Sometimes I feel like I’m Goldilocks in Goldilocks and The Three Presses. I’m always looking for just right and I’m sometimes finding it and I’m sometimes feeling savvy, like I’m really a player now, and I’m sometimes just signing questionable contracts out of poverty, panic, and misplaced faith. During the pandemic, I published coloring books, a tarot deck, and my spouse’s zine, Kittens, Blunts, and Metastatic Breast Cancer. Then my publishers at Microcosm asked me to write a follow up to How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead and I got to work on this book you’re reading now. I mean, why not? Have all these projects gotten me attention from the people I wanted them to get me attention from? Mostly not. 309

Tom Spanbauer says, “I’ve come to define a writer as one who continues on writing and keeps his or her self-respect despite being ignored by the very people he or she most wants to notice them.” I do continue.

TRY THIS: Go to a bookstore or library or book fair or zine fest and find three independent presses (i.e. not owned by Penguin Random House, Hachette Livre, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, or Macmillan) that are putting out books similar to the ones you want to read and write. Read a few recent titles. Write a book review and publish it someplace.

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WE REALLY NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT PUBLISHING When I realized that all you had to do was put paper in a printing press and have it come out and fold it and call it something . . . if you did that for eight pieces of paper, folded them, and called them something, it was a book. —Shameless Hussy Press founder Alta Gerrey

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hen my great-grandmother Rosalba started writing in the early 1900s, her town, Butte, Montana, supported a Black newspaper called “The New Age,” a politicized Chinese community several thousand strong, a labor rights movement, a thriving sex work economy, independent female clairvoyants, and a casual attitude about marriage and divorce. They named their local baseball team after the out lesbian and literary superstar Mary MacLane, author of I Await the Devil’s Coming. I’ve read MacLane’s first book a few times and I understand “the Devil” to mean experience, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that she just meant sex. When Chicago newspapers blamed MacLane for their own local bad girls stealing horses, Butte newspapers defended, “Our Mary.” I’m not saying Butte wasn’t also a tough place to live, but if anyone ever tries to tell you that yours’ or mine is the first generation to read and celebrate once-and-again-marginalized voices, they’re just enabling the historical erasure.  When Rosalba wanted to collect her writings in the late 1920s, her brother designed the book and they printed 350 hardcover copies.  311

We have always written and published and celebrated. We have always been met with resistance. Let’s make some new newspapers. In the 1950s and 1960s in San Francisco, beat writers took their prose onto the streets and did their poetry bongodrum stuff. Pop-up readings at cafes and miniature book series showcased the rhythmic revolution in writing, but mostly it was writing by white cis men. But across the Bay in Oakland, out of her urban commune that served as a refuge for women escaping abusive marriages, a single mom named Alta founded the first feminist press of the second wave. She ran that press for twenty years, publishing future legends, pals who couldn’t get published at the time—Pat Parker, Mitsuye Yamada, Susan Griffin, Ntozake Shange. She said, “I called the press Shameless Hussy because my mother used that term for women she didn’t approve of, and no one approved of what I was doing.” A couple of years ago in my Oakland neighborhood— which is Alta’s neighborhood, too—I found an original Shameless Hussy edition of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, and I have it right here on my bookshelf next to a few of my other most-prized belongings. “We really need to do something about publishing,” Audre Lorde said to Barbara Smith in an October call.  So they did something. On a waning crescent moon night at the end of that month in 1980 in Boston, they gathered a group of interested women and got to work. They started Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press “because of our need for autonomy, our need to determine independently both the content and the conditions of our work and to control the words and images that were produced about us.”

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“Starting a press for women of color in 1980 may have defied logic,” Barbra Smith later wrote, “but it was one of those acts of courage that characterize Third World women’s lives.” The women’s description of their press at the time called it, “the only publisher in North America committed to publishing and distributing the writing of Third World women of all racial/cultural heritages, sexualities, and classes.” In 1984 they added, “Our work is both cultural and political, connected to the struggles for freedom for all of our peoples. We hope to serve as a communication network for women of color in the US and around the world.” Kitchen Table released titles including the second edition of Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, and Audre Lorde’s I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities. By the early 1990s, they were distributing more than a hundred titles by women of color published by other presses as well. It was within this publishing context of the early 90s that I started Hip Mama, my reader-written feminist parenting rag. The women of my great-grandmother Rosalba’s generation, of Alta’s generation, of Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith’s generation, had taught me that the free press belongs to those who own the presses. I knew that owning a press wasn’t a financially viable endeavor. I thought of it more like a community pantry, something to scrounge and hustle for, something to offer.

TRY THIS: Research a small press or self-publishing endeavor of the past. Write a short article about it and put it in a little zine you’re going to make.

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CONCLUSION: WAYWARD FOREVER

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ow to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead, my 2007 guide, starts out like this: Everybody knows it because Virginia Woolf said it: You need money and a room of your own if you’re going to write. But I’ve written five books, edited three anthologies, published hundreds of articles and short stories, and put out 35 issues of my zine without either one. If I’d have waited for money and room, I’d still be an unpublished welfare mom—except they would have cut off my welfare by now. It might be nice to have money and a room (or it might be suicidally depressing—who knows?), but all you really need is a blank page, a pen, and a little bit of time. I stand by all that. But the world and my life have gotten to a point where I do crave that little room sometimes. Yayoi Kusama, famous for her polka dots and mirrored infinity rooms and considered the most successful living female artist, voluntarily checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo more than 40 years ago. That’s where she’s lived ever since. I don’t know what Yayoi’s life is like in the asylum, but I dream of it sometimes—like a convent without all the religion—a place where she’s taken care of, where she can have her solitude, worrying about nothing more than giant magic pumpkins and breathing life into her polka-dot hallucinations. As for me, I think I’d like a solitary treehouse somewhere on the grounds of a convent/asylum. Or the back room of a crematorium, like the place the protagonist in Dorothy Bryant’s The Confessions of Madame Psyche found. With meal delivery, ideally. And access to a library. Optional art classes. If I’m being honest, I’d also like pink and red wallpaper and a view of the sea. Rose-scented bath salts. I’d surely have lots of bookshelves and comfy places to read. Until such time as I build my tree house or find that secret squat on the grounds of a mental institution, I’m making myself a quilt I’ll use to stay warm when I get there. 314

I set up an ironing board in my laundry room/office to iron each square, but also as an altar to Tillie Olsen, who wrote “I Stand Here Ironing”—pretty much the greatest short story ever published. The quilt is mostly pink and red and white and turquoise. Some squares have red and white polka-dots, my fabric altars to Yayoi. My book-writing accountability buddy sent me a handkerchief with a typewriter on it and I’m adding that as a square, too. I’m finally learning applique so that I can stitch that Ntozake Shange line: CREATION IS/EVERYTHING YOU DO/MAKE SOMETHING My quilt grows bigger and wilder with each new row. Inspiration + math + stitching together = art. I stitch and measure, eyeball and approximate, do my best and hope it’s all close-enough to create a unified experience. When it’s done, I toss my giant quilt over my doortable and I crawl in with my notebook and sparkly pens. It took writing this whole book for me to see it: The School for Wayward Writers is a cozy grotto, at once homey and movable. I close my eyes and I can almost feel it—the road beneath me as we bump along. I’m in the back of the old VW van my biological father painted pale blue with white clouds. From the smell of eucalyptus, I imagine we’re headed down the Pacific Coast Highway. Inside my fort, quilted walls lined with books keep me safe. An arched portal opens to a universe I dream. I watch the darkness. I have my little notebook for doodles and notes. Because this time, I get to tell the story of what happened on our trip.  And this time, I get a say in where we’re going next. 315

The world I write has everything I need—I can be myself and survive. Try all this. I can’t wait to read and hear and see your stories.

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A WAYWARD WRITER READING LIST Works Mentioned Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders The Heart of a Woman by Maya Angelou This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin The Confessions of Madame Psyche by Dorothy Bryant Kindred by Octavia E. Butler  The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez The Hélène Cixous Reader by Hélène Cixous The Inferno by Dante Recollections of My Life as a Woman by Diane Di Prima Revolutionary Letters by Diane Di Prima The Journey is the Destination by Dan Eldon Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster The Third Man by Graham Green The Publish-It-Yourself-Handbook: Literary Tradition & How-To edited by Bill Henderson  Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks The Virgin’s Promise by Kim Hudson I Wonder as I Wander by Langston Hughes Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” by Ursula K. LeGuin Steering the Craft by Ursula K. LeGuin I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities by Audre Lorde Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup Silences by Tillie Olsen “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen The Life of Poetry by Muriel Rukeyser For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide by Ntozake Shange Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo by Ntozake Shange Letters to a Young Artist by Anna Deavere Smith 317

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology edited by Barbara Smith If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong Black Boy by Richard Wright The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X Also by Ariel Gore The Hip Mama Survival Guide The Mother Trip Atlas of the Human Heart Whatever, Mom The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness All the Pretty People The End of Eve We Were Witches F*ck Happiness, the 10-year anniversary edition of Bluebird Hexing the Patriarchy As editor How to Leave a Place The People’s Apocalypse, with Jenny Forrester Portland Queer Places Like Home Santa Fe Noir Zines Hip Mama On the Mend Magical Writing Deck Lucky Fool Tarot Coloring Books The Art Life Coloring Book Advice from Hybrid Beings Home is Where the Freaks Are

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to Elly Blue and Joe Biel and everyone at Microcosm for encouraging me to write this book. Thanks to Lydia Rogue, Jenny Forrester, and Megan Moodie, who helped me shape it from the beginning and sent cards and quilt squares along the way. Thanks to my little writing coven—Karin Spirn, Michelle Gonzales, and Tomas Moniz—for your friendship and for offering feedback on individual chapters and reading and supporting all my other writing, published and unpublished. Thanks to the hosts of the Wayward Writer Weekly Write-In—Elisa Sinnett, Christa Orth, Suzanne Westhues, MJ Jahntz, Dusty Bryndal, and Lasara Firefox Allen—for turning an informal Zoom meet-up into an excellently inclusive institution. Thanks to the other teachers in The Literary Kitchen. Thanks to the amazing Nora Sinnett for the last-minute editing magic and all the pep talk in service of making this book more excellently itself. Thanks to my spouse, Deena Chafetz, for the chocolates, chile, beta-reading, and belly laughs. Thanks to all the students and writers who’ve come through Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers and the Literary Kitchen for teaching me so much. See you on the road.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ariel Gore is a journalist, memoirist, novelist, nonfiction author, and teacher. She is the author of 10 books, including F*ck Happiness, and the creator of the zine Hip Mama, a winner of the American Alternative Press award. Her anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City won the LAMBDA Literary Award in 2010 and her own writing has been called eloquent, sensitive, and revolutionary. She also keeps a website, www. arielgore.com and teaches online workshops at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers. She lives and works in Portland, OR, and Santa Fe, NM.

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[ USE THIS BOOK AS A SCHOOL ] When your dream and creative passion is to write, how do you succeed without selling out or selling yourself short? Ariel Gore has spent her life solving this puzzle, writing and organizing her way towards a creative utopian vision, where storytelling is a form of resistance and writing is an outsider art. In this follow-up to her national bestseller How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead, Gore offers a lyrical call to literary revolution paired with practical exercises. Through her own experiences and interviews with other authors, publishers, and agents—including Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Johnny Temple, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, Reyna Grande, Michelle Ruiz Keil, Jisu Kim, Adrian Shirk, Mai’a Williams, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Laura Mazer—she shows you how to chart your own creative education, vanquish shame and imposter syndrome, cast off oppression, cast a spell on your readers, step into your unique powers, and build your own literary community where respect and honesty reign—and where you can be a writer and survive. $19.95 U.S. / $26.99 CANADA