If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
Virginia Woolf because I know she appreciated fine dining, and I’d want to show off a little because I love cooking. She’d get behind some good charcuterie. If you’ve read my essay “Making Headcheese,” then you know I can make Hog’s Headcheese from a whole pig’s head. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? As a memoirist, it’s difficult when you write about real people in your life, and they react badly to it. It’s hard to tell what might upset someone. For What Will Outlast Me?, my family was supportive. I had my mom and my mother-in-law vet the chapters about them before the book went to publication. My mom suggested changes that made the essay stronger, and portrayed her experience with having cancer more accurately. I changed some names real people to protect their privacy. What books are on your nightstand? Under My Bed by Jody Keisner, Smile: the story of face by Sarah Ruhl, Ordinary Insanity: fear and the silent crisis of motherhood in America by Sarah Menkedick, and Plums for Months by Zaji Cox. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? I love the em dash because it mirrors my thought process. Often a rogue idea appears–and demands to be inserted into my original train of thought–before I can finish the sentence. (I hate semicolons; they’re just a pretension; they try too hard to string together ideas; they want too much attention.) What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Augustine’s Confessions. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? B5-Size Composition Notebooks made by Zen Art (I use them for my morning pages journal, my drafts in progress, and my Bullet Journal). Lamy Safari fountain pens filled with Noodler’s Black, Bulletproof ink. Wide-brimmed straw sun hats I wear when I go on “thinking-walks” to take writing breaks,. Diet Coke, but when drinking too much Diet Coke gives me an IBS flare, then I have to switch to unsweetened iced tea. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Exhausts, but in a good way. I like to balance the headiness of writing with physical activities. After several hours of writing, I’ll clear my head with swimming laps or long walks. I spent a lot of time going on walks on the trash-strewn public beach that I wrote about in the essay, “From Birth to Bone,” when I was finishing up the last essays in What Will Outlast Me? What is your writing Kryptonite? Grading Freshman Composition Papers. I really enjoy being an English professor, and I admire and respect my students. My students often write about interesting things, but there’s no way around it, grading a batch of 100+ research essays takes a lot of energy. I can’t write when I’m in paper-grading mode. A grading cycle takes about 4 or 5 days, 4 times a semester, so there are in-between times when I can write more. I’m incredibly lucky to be tenured on a 9-month teaching contract, so I get a lot of writing done in the summers, especially when the heat index in south Texas is 100-110 degrees in July and I never want to go outside. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Reader’s block for me looks like promiscuous reading. I’ll have dozens of one-night stands in a row, in which I sit down and read for an hour–get 50 or 75 pages in–and then completely lose interest (you know, and sneak out before they wake up and want breakfast.) I have phases of being totally unable to commit to reading a whole book. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Yes, but a pretty sophisticated level of emotional intelligence is necessary. Just the other day I was at a pool party with a good mix of parents all with kids and a friend asked: Do you think adults are capable of feeling emotions as strongly as kids do? He’d noticed his daughter, who’s 6-years-old, like my son, has ghastly emotional outbursts and concluded he’d never felt that strongly as an adult. I argued that we all feel the same intensity of emotion (and how would you even measure objectively?). It’s just that as adults we have experience and logic and a set of well-honed coping mechanisms so it doesn’t look like the emotions are as strong from the outside, even though inside they are. I think that’s the thing that writing does better than any other art form: it gets into the character’s inner emotional life, and when you're a memoirist, that character is a past version of yourself. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark. It’s just as good as O Pioneers!, but even better than My Antonia, but it never gets any love. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? Two. One’s a drawer novel I started during the pandemic. I wrote it in long-hand in B5 notebooks with cats on the covers, and I have no inclination to ever finish it. The other unfinished book is a memoir manuscript I’m working on now, which is about how diet culture, and generational trauma related to eating disorders, screwed up many of my relationships. What does literary success look like to you? To keep writing the best books I can and to have readers who connect with my work. What did you edit out of this book? At one point, I cut half this book manuscript. The essays that got cut just weren’t working thematically. They were mostly about sex (the story of how I lost my virginity/dating someone with different turn-ons, stuff like that.) In this case, sex did not sell. Lol. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? My day job is teaching writing as a college professor, and I love teaching. It allows me to follow my curiosity and practice the writing process, which makes my writing better. Currently, I’m designing a literature course devoted to the contemporary essay and the reading list is all my favorite modern nonfiction writers: Eula Biss, Amy Fusselman, Ross Gay, Maggie Nelson. Comments are closed.
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