Author Interview with Jean Harper about her memoir, Still Life with Horses

I devour memoirs and novels about horses—but I’m also a harsh critic when it comes to prose about our equine partners. That’s why I was so thrilled to read the stunning memoir, Still Life with Horses by Jean Harper, recently #9 on the Small Press Distributors’ bestseller list. Like a fangirl, as soon as I read the final sentence, I set out to connect with the author, who graciously agreed to answer my many nosy questions.

Jean teaches literature and writing at Indiana University East, is the author of Rose City: A Memoir of Work, and wrote and directed the documentary film “1:47”. Jean’s essays have appeared in The Florida Review, North American Review, Iowa Review, Harpur Palate, and Yemasee Review. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, has been a Scholar in Residence at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and in residence at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Please welcome Jean Harper.

LR: So you were writing about your horse and how you came to riding as an adult, for a few years, but struggling with shaping those drafts into a coherent memoir—and then had a turning point. What changed?

JH: I was at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and my studio looked out over a field. The first day, I was standing at the window, staring into space, not writing or really thinking anything at all, and then I saw a horse. A large, black, gorgeous horse. I had an apple left over from lunch and went out to see this horse. He came trotting up and leaned his head over the fence; I took bites of the apple and gave him bites. We shared that apple and I felt as though – even though I’m not really a believer in these things – that this horse was some kind of sign. I remember holding my hand out, empty of apple now, and the horse breathing on my palm. I thought of the James Wright poem, “A Blessing,” the last lines, when the poem’s speaker has been nuzzled by a horse:

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

And I knew that moment was how my book would end: with that black horse giving me a blessing, giving me permission to write. I went back into my studio, sat down, and wrote the chapter that would be the hardest to write. The rest unfolded from there.

LR: Your book was published as a result of winning the Howling Bird Press 2017 Nonfiction Prize at Augsburg College. I’d love to hear what that experience was like.

JH: Oh my, it was fantastic. I remember meeting the students at AWP in early 2017, and how interesting I found the idea of a publishing project working with MFA students. I liked the students, and liked the books they had on display, and so I decided I’d submit my manuscript. Their word limit was 40,000, which meant I needed to edit out about 15,000 words. Honestly, it was liberating. Whole chapters got the ax, plus anything that I had even slight doubts about. I was killing a lot of darlings. I highly recommend cutting a manuscript by 25 percent, even as an exercise! It will open up your work in ways you might not imagine.

Then, of course, you submit and you wait. Ironically, about a month before I got the call that told me I had won, I had a very disheartening meeting with a literary agent at a conference. The agent had read a portion of the memoir, and in our meeting, she pushed my pages across the table and said, “So, what’s the story?” I summarized it as best I could, and she shrugged and said, “Well, my horse died too. What’s the story?” The implication being, I suppose, that if I wasn’t famous, or my horse wasn’t famous, then the book was a waste of her time. I left that meeting about as discouraged as I had been in a long time.

Fortunately, the phone call telling me I’d won came soon enough. I’m a writer, but I am also a dedicated teacher, and the notion of working with students sounded just perfect.  The editing process was the best I’ve ever been through. The publisher, and faculty mentor, Jim Cihlar, is a thorough, gentle, wise, and very particular editor, and the main student editor, Katherine Fagen, was exactly the same.

For me, as a writer, the process of being edited by them, and the rest of the student team, was truly enlightening. Through Jim and Kathy’s guidance, I was able to see where things needed to be tightened, expanded, tinkered with even slightly. And then there’s the experience of working with a small, independent press, where you and your book are given close, personal, scrupulous attention. It was kind of like an intense workshop with very skilled practitioners. I only wish I could publish my next book with Howling Bird Press.

LR: You employ a segmented form within each chapter, and – I loved this – in between chapters, short (flash?) pieces, no more than a paragraph or two. These are visually varied on the page and have a different feel/voice, more like prose poetry, rich in imagery. Some draw on the narrator’s girlhood memories, art and mythology, equine psychology or behavior. When and how did these bits come about, and what did they mean to you?

JH: I have always loved playing with form in nonfiction, in service of the story, not simply form for form’s sake. In part, these prose poem pieces came about as an experiment, inspired by the “Entre’acte” pieces Mark Doty used in Dog Years. I found those short pieces between chapters to be very effective and intriguing as counterpoints to his main narrative, and thought I would try something like that. I’d also been playing with poetry and wanted to have the feel of poetry in the book, how through poetry we can come at things in a less direct, perhaps more mysterious and visual, even visceral, way.

So I was thinking about all this, and then when I decided to submit to Howling Bird, and had to cut those 15,000 words, I saved a few slices, images, moments, and re-fashioned them into the prose pieces. It was so interesting how it just clicked into place, and I found myself again thinking that the constraints of form—only 40,000 words—helped put a kind of creative pressure on the manuscript that really worked.

LR: In the book, the narrator begins to take control of a disappointing personal life as she’s learning to become a confident, capable horsewoman. Was that connection evident as you were living it?

JH: Absolutely, yes. When I got interested in horses I was about 40, and a complete and utter novice. I was also, and I think the book alludes to this more than once, terrified of just about everything related to horses: riding, lunging, ground work. All this fear, at the same time that I felt drawn to horses in profound ways, you’d think I would have taken a lesson or two and stopped. But I was also mentoring Mia, the young girl in the book, and I wanted, I think, to be a role model for her,to be that strong, determined, committed woman she could emulate and look up to. So I kept taking lessons, and kept going with Mia to hers, kept playing the role of a confident woman.

Then I got Buddy, and suddenly I was responsible for this beautiful, huge, unpredictable, wise, intuitive horse. That was really the tipping point: once I had Buddy, there was no turning back. I had to not simply play the role, I had to embody confidence and capability because he was a funny horse: brave about so many things, but terrified of others. We could trail ride anywhere, and he never shied once, not even the day we turned a corner on a trail and there was a fully opened bright blue umbrella on the path. He just kind of looked at it, and we kept going. But, he was afraid of very specific things: streams and puddles, wash stalls, horse trailers. So I felt my job was to teach, protect, and be his leader.

And when you learn how to be the trusted leader of a thousand pound animal, whose first instinct at any danger is flight, you learn a deep-seated sense of confidence in yourself. It’s confidence at the body level, the cellular level. You learn how to be calm in the face of fear, how to be centered, grounded. All of that did change me as a person, and did give me a new sense of self, allowing me to imagine a different personal life, both with and beyond horses. It also allowed me to be calm in the face of a somewhat turbulent personal life, and see a way past it, and thus, out of it.

LR: You’re a full-time college writing professor, so presumably much of your personal creative writing is completed on breaks, weekends, and other found hours, like other writers with “day jobs.” With each book, does that balance become any easier? Any advice for writers struggling to produce long works in short bursts of time?

JH: During the school year I have a small mantra I repeat to myself: “Touch the work every day.” Even if I only have ten spare minutes, and I can probably find that in any given day, I make a point of looking at what I am writing. I think about what I’ve got, where I’m going. I write one sentence, a phrase, a word. That’s incremental progress, of course, but it’s still progress.

On breaks between semesters, and in the summer, I work to create a large chunk of writing I can edit during the school year. I was fortunate to have a yearlong sabbatical last academic year and so wrote the first draft of my next book. It’s a bit of a mess, but that’s okay. It’s a draft.

You have to allow yourself to write badly. That’s what revision is all about: turning the bad writing into good writing. Now, back in the trenches of teaching, and committee work, and all the rest, I’m touching that draft every day. I would say that this particular process – create a full rough draft, then edit it over time – is something I have learned to do more fluently now, working on what will become my third book.

My best advice for writers is written on two notecards over my desk. 

The first: "All real writers go through this." The this being anything related to writing: getting stuck, searching for the right word, getting rejected, getting published, fiddling endlessly with a paragraph, getting it right on the first try. If you are writing and going through whatever you are going through, you have company. You are a real writer.

And, from Chuck Close: "A quilt may take a year, but if you just keep doing it, you get a quilt."

LR: It’s easy to get sentimental when writing about the profound relationships between a horse and human being, but sentimentality usually pulls down the prose. Your book is frequently loving, saturated with memory and meaning—but never sentimental or sappy. What was it like to write about an experience that clearly meant so much to you, without getting nostalgic?

JH: When I was first writing about Buddy, it was awful, to be honest. I adored that horse, and right after he died, I was completely wrecked. For months, I wrote in ragged fragments, just flashes of memory, words, images. And then I couldn’t write at all. It was just too difficult. When I finally went to the writing retreat for two weeks, I had the solitude and unbroken time to focus on the chapter about his death. I spent a lot of those two weeks just weeping. But I also was writing. I wanted to get his story right, to honor the life of that brilliant animal. When you love an animal, it's almost a primal thing. Especially with horses, you speak to each other in ways beyond language, through the body; so when I was writing about Buddy, it was as though my whole body was writing. It was exhausting; it was exhilarating.

I also had to give a reading at the end of the residency, and when I finally had a draft chapter, I practiced reading aloud what I had written about 25 times before I could read it without tears streaming down my face. And when I did read it for an audience of my new writer and artist friends, I was not the one weeping. They were. A painter came up to me afterwards and said something like, you know you’ve described the Pieta, don’t you? I hadn’t intended to do that, but I understood what he meant: the death scene I wrote was intimate, raw, a physical manifestation of grief. I think it’s that physicality, the details we can see and touch, that keep us from sentimentality. I know it keeps me from sentimentality.

LR: The artwork on the cover is gorgeous. The horse’s large brown eye, the way it’s mirrored in the sketchy lines, is so hauntingly, achingly lovely—to me it evokes the depth of love between horse and narrator. Is there a story behind how you came to find the artwork or what it means to you?

JH: I have a dear friend who works at an art museum; my friend is also a poet, and she and I were writing back and forth about what we thought the cover ought to look like. This was at the same time that design students working with Howling Bird Press were coming up with their cover ideas. My poet friend found the artist’s website and told me to go look. I don’t remember now if she found this particular painting, or if I did, but it was my poet friend who led me to it.

It took some back and forth between the press as we hashed out what the cover should look like, but I was certain this was the right image and so gently kept putting it before them. I think that’s the beauty of a small press too: they listen to the author, and care about the author’s vision for the cover art. I love this artwork too, and I’ve gotten to know the artist a bit, and she is just a delightful person, who really understands horses on a visceral level.

LR: You describe horse-related activities, behaviors, equipment, and medical issues so that those without horse experience can understand, but without talking down to knowledgeable horse-people. Was that was particularly challenging? Any advice for writers dealing with specialty topics?

JH: It was challenging, yes. I’ve read so many horse books that struggle to do this well, that it became a particular writing goal of mine to write good prose about horse “stuff.” Too often the prose is too technical and dreadfully dull, or overly explained and awkward, or convoluted descriptions of nuanced things that end up killing the nuance.

As a writer, I grew up learning to write by way of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and still keep copies of that thin brilliant book in my office, so I can give it away to students. Strunk (and White) stressed the beauty of plain prose, and that is what I have come to value most. The ability to write plain, luminous sentences comes with practice and patience and more practice. I appreciate well-crafted extravagant prose, but I much prefer plain prose, the kind of writing that becomes almost invisible, allowing meaning to rise from the page without calling attention to the way meaning is made.

I also read widely, looking for this kind of prose, writers like Michael Cunningham, JoAnn Beard, John McPhee, Joan Didion. That, and I read everything that I write aloud, listening for the music of the sentences. If it falls flat on my ear, back to the drawing board. 

LR: You mentioned you have a current work-in-progress. Care to elaborate?

JH: I'm writing about five generations of women in my family, going back to a whaleship captain's wife in Nantucket. I am very interested in how women in this family, probably many families, tell stories about themselves and to themselves. I'm interested in how stories of the past shape our present, how stories get passed down, passed around, altered, the alterations becoming accepted as true, about the power stories have over us, how arguments are embedded in stories, yet in a way we almost don't see them, we just see the story. 

Currently, I have a draft of this book done, and am slowly but surely working on revisions.

Connect with Jean Harper at her website/blog. You can read another interview with her about publishing the memoir at the Howling Bird Press website.

Images: Book cover and headshot, courtesy Jean Harper. Inside book, L. Romeo. Strunk & White: royalty free clip art.

Guest Blogger Stephanie Vanderslice on Rest, Writing, and the Walking Cure

The name Stephanie Vanderslice often comes up when discussing best practices for teaching writing. I’ve happily hosted her here on the blog before, and am pleased to welcome her back. Her latest book, The Geek’s Guide to the Writing Life, is chock full of solid, writer-tested, smart, and innovative tips on living a writing life in the 21^st century. Stephanie holds an MFA in fiction writing from George Mason University and now directs the Arkansas Writer’s MFA Workshop at the University of Central Arkansas.

Please welcome Stephanie Vanderslice

I originally put the book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, on my reading list last summer because the title was so tempting, because I am a victim of the modern culture of “busyness” as much as anyone else, and because I thought I might find in its pages the secret to managing my time.

Instead, what I found more than anything else was a history of artists and the creative life over the last several centuries, a history with a surprisingly common thread: walking.  Walking, or some kind of meditative physical activity undertaken without distraction, without trying to multitask or do anything else but put one foot in front of another. 

I was astonished to learn how important walking had been throughout history, how many of the world’s great writers and artists have been walkers. Jefferson, Kierkegaard, C.S. Lewis. Alice Munro, Barbara McClintock (Geneticist), Lin Manuel Miranda. They all got their best ideas walking.

I am no stranger to physical exercise. I ride for miles each week on a stationary bike while staring at my Kindle or reading a magazine, and I power walk around my neighborhood while listening to podcasts. Anything to keep my mind occupied, because even though I’ve exercised for 30 years, I still find it pretty boring. 

The kind of exercise advocated in Rest was different. The kind of physical movement that inspired the creatives of the past was exercise for its own sake. It was supposed to be boring. That was the point. As Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard reveals, “I have walked myself into my best thoughts.”

After reading Rest, I became so enamored of walking that I first began scheming to make my commute to the university where I teach on foot—a 20-minute prospect each way—but the problem of figuring out what to do with all the stuff I’d need to schlep back and forth persisted. In the end, I decided to start smaller, with a 45-minute neighborhood stroll after my morning writing sessions. The new caveat: headphones not allowed.  I had to give my mind as much freedom to roam as my body. 

The results have been impressive. Each walk has ended with so many writing ideas, especially development ideas for my novel-in-progress, that I quickly had to start a file called, “walking ideas,” to keep track of them. Moreover, I am learning not to pressure myself on these jaunts, telling myself that my mind can go wherever it wants, even if that means perseverating on what I should have said at yesterday’s faculty meeting. Still, I have yet to return home, even on the most stressful of days, without a revelation about something I was writing.

It’s not just Rest that’s onto something. Recently at a reading at my university, a student asked renowned poet Maggie Smith how she generated her ideas. “Put your phone away and take a walk,” she said.

No wonder the Romantics spent so much time wandering the moors. So, while Rest (the book) has not necessarily granted me an extra hour a day or helped me maximize my REM sleep, it has changed my creative life. See for yourself—read Rest and give the “daily constitutional” a try.

Connect with Stephanie on Twitter, Facebook, or at her website.

Images courtesy S. Vanderslice

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- January 12, 2018 Edition

> Charles Simic, at the New York Review of Books, pays homage to "The Poet's Pencil" (and that would be a non-metaphorical pencil).

> The Authors Guild wants writers to know that a Senate floor vote is now assured on a bill to reverse the FCC's recent repeal of Net Neutrality. If you haven't made your voice heard, do so now, before the anticipated vote on Monday, 1/15.

> If you're anything like me, your book buying reach extends way beyond your book reading grasp. And Jessica Stillman, at Inc. (plus a whole bunch of people she interviewed), say that's okay; in fact, it's a good thing.

> Jane Friedman looks back at the book publishing issues that shaped 2017.

> Finally, watching this video/song parody both calmed and worried me, as I'm currently asking bookstores and libraries to host me when my book publishes this spring. Forget that Waldenbooks has been gone for eons; author Parnell Hall nails the angst (and, if you're smart, good humor) that accompanies author appearances. 

Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/CreativeCommons

The Art of Waiting while Writing...Writing while Waiting

Often, writers chat about The Art of Waiting (Waiting, not Writing). Only we don't call it that. We call it, "Why the hell isn't that editor/ agent/publisher/whoever getting back to me?" Or, "It's been X days/weeks/months, so he/she/they must hate my essay/poem/ manuscript/idea." 

Sometimes, the fine Art of Waiting sounds like "F*#k it, I give up."

We have better days, when we act like artists and sensitive souls and try to convince our skeptical selves that all is well.

My father used to say (before cheap long distance, cell phones, and 24-hour news): No news is good news. If he didn't hear from a child who was traveling, on a date, or away at college, he'd assume no planes crashed, the young man was behaving, and no one was flunking out.

I'm rarely that Zen, so I typically wait with nerves jangling, the "dead in a ditch" tape on continuous loop in my head until my kid texts me back.

As a writer, I've learned to wait. And not assume the worst. Usually. Until I decide—based on nothing but a quiet email inbox—that my work, or I, have been found wanting, or forgotten. But then I have an extra busy day myself, notice that I haven't even replied to a text from a close friend, and decide that perhaps the news I'm waiting for is being handled by a similarly busy person. Or that the wait is taking precisely as long as it has should. Still, I worry as I wait.

This past spring, I had to wait for some of the most important news of my writing life, and as the calendar plodded on, I noticed a call for submission on the theme of "Waiting and Motherhood." There's nothing better for a writer who's waiting than to stay busy…writing.

What came to the page—titled, "From Boys to Men," in the lovely online magazine Motherwell—is an essay I love. It traces the most critical wait of a mother's life: those twenty-ish  years while we wait to see if our handiwork yields the desired result: a mature (okay, mostly mature) adult child that, unlike the first pancake, turns out just fine. Great, in fact.

I love writing essays in the second person, which is what I did here; the prose seemed to materialize on the page that way and the POV seemed right from the start. I thought it might be interesting reading at this time of year, as so many parents are sending their almost grown children off to college, again or for the first time.

Here’s an excerpt:

 "… First, you wait to conceive, wait for the fertility tests to reveal what flaws and whose, wait for the drugs to work, wait for that positive pregnancy test. You try to, but can’t describe the fearful waiting through a high risk pregnancy, the anxious waiting of prenatal testing, the watchful waiting for boy number one to blossom. Wait for the right time to have the second baby, wait after the miscarriage to try again, wait for that strangle-throated boy number two to leave the NICU.Wait. Hope. Pray. Wait.Two years later, you wait…"

You can read the whole (shortish) essay at Motherwell. And if you're inclined, you might share it from that page, as a few thousand folks already have. (This has NO affect on my bank account; it's just a nice thing to do if you think it's worthy, and I know the editors would love it. You can also check out the rest of the Motherhood and Waiting series.).

Meanwhile, if you are waiting for something—acceptances, something to get published, an agent requesting pages, a publisher offering a contract, admission into a writing workshop—I hope you are able to borrow Dad's advice. 

And maybe, write something else?

Image - waiting room - Flickr/CreativeCommons-katerha

Guest Blogger Melissa Palmer on How Time is the Line Between Loving and Hating Her Own Book

Sometimes, one is matched up, by the organizers of a book festival, for a panel with other authors unknown to yourself. Usually, those panelists turn out to be rather terrific. That was the case when I was included on a panel at BooksNJ earlier this summer (Women's Perspective on Writing Memoir) and I met Melissa Palmer a few minutes before our panel got underway. A bonus was that she's also a New Jersey author, funny and smart, with books in several genres, including Baking for Dave (young adult novel, published 2016); A Life Less Normal (memoir, 2015); and Twin Oaks (literary fiction, 2014).

Please welcome Melissa Palmer

Last year I started a book I was so excited to write, my first horror novel. I love horror. It’s what I was raised on as a little baby writer. I love horror so much it took me almost thirty years to write my own.

            Why?

            Because I wanted it to be good.

            In fifth grade, I wrote a magnum opus about a bug monster; in sixth, I wrote a ghost story about a man in a mirror (not at all like Michael Jackson’s). Then, I never wrote horror again.

            I’ve continued to be a connoisseur of horror, but I knew that writing good horror is tough. So I waited.

            Then last year when a scary book idea came to me, I all but jumped through my keyboard to get it all down. I felt ready. For the first time I wrote with a daily word count goal. (I’ve never done that before.) Every day I set out to write a minimum of 1,000 words, then upped the ante by setting a personal hard deadline for the project’s completion. My normal “schedule” bounced between one paragraph days and ten page days.

            Normally, I am a stickler about every word, whittling down passages by paragraph as I write. But I was so eager to get Husk out into the world, I approached it like a machine, tapping away mechanically each day to get that first draft done.

            Can you see where this is going?

            Somewhere around my “deadline” I realized something terrible. My book was crap. Like any hopes of horror writing I had in sixth grade, I put Husk aside.

            I focused on my happy stories. My novel, Baking for Dave, was released and I got to go to BookExpo America and show it off. Smiles and warm fuzzy feelings abounded.

            Then something strange happened. It was a dark and stormy night in Transylvania. Actually, it was a gorgeous day in New York City. Walking through the Javits Center during BEA, I noticed an odd thing, and I gasped. NO HORROR! There were thrillers sure, lots of twisty, missing person capers, but there was a distinct absence of good old fashioned scares.  

            I had to step in.

            After a year away, I picked Husk up again. Reading old work can be jarring, like looking at old high school pictures. How much you’ve grown and changed is evident in one glance. All your flaws stick out like giant overbites.

            I’ve spent the summer of 2017 picking through that old manuscript: fussing, reworking, and CUTTING. So. Much. Cutting. In so doing I’ve discovered one thing.

            A good story is told in the things you don’t write.

            Maybe it’s the summer talking, but I took a hint from the film version of Jaws. What makes that shark so chilling is all the time we don’t see it. I cut a lot of exposition, explaining, and so many passages that made me ask myself out loud, “WHY IS THIS EVEN HERE?”

            Reading old work makes you question yourself. It will make you wonder when it was you forgot how to write. But overall, you learn some valuable lessons.

HERE’S MINE

> Choose the approach that works for you.

One look at my Husk manuscript and it was evident. Word counts don’t work. FOR ME. When I was obsessed with hitting word goals, the quality of the words I chose took a hit. Style wise, I’d rather get 100 quality words then 1,000 full of crappy metaphors, repeat phrases, and way too much telling. The word count, FOR ME, made for rushed, shoddy writing. Some people swear by them. Not this gal. As a writer you need to find what works FOR YOU.

> Write the story as if you love words, but edit as if you hate them.

Of course a horror great swears by the age-old writing advice “Kill Your Darlings.” What Stephen King suggests works for all writing. Too many words kill pacing. Too much showing kills suspense. Too many words kill the story. So even though you love your words, sometimes you have to 86 them. 

> Go dumpster diving.

For a year I considered my horror story garbage, but when I picked it up and sifted through the mess I made, there was treasure hidden inside. You may have a story you think is “horrible.” The odds are it isn’t. Sometimes we get so frustrated with what we are doing, or we put so much pressure on ourselves as writers, we don’t see the proverbial diamond in the rough.

> Take time off.

This links with the above sentiment. Time away from a project gave me the mental space I needed. (Think of it like being lost in the middle of woods, then returning later with a Google Maps view of where you are.) When we pull far enough away, the path becomes clear.  

I am so glad that I took up this book project again. Last year it had begun to feel like an onerous task to write. The product, something I hated. Now I’ve found a book I truly love. And…It’s scary!

Note from Lisa: Melissa would like to gift one blog reader with a signed copy of one of her books. Simply leave a comment here on the blog by Saturday, August 26, and specify which book you'd like. (Must have a U.S. postal shipping address.) Melissa will also answer any writing-related questions left in comments during that time.

Visit Melissa at her website or read her articles at Huffington Post. You can also follow her on Instagram @melissapalmerwritesbooks and on Facebook.

Guest Blogger Melanie Brooks on: Writing Your Story, and Crying if you Want (or Need) To

Besides social media connections, and having graduated from the same MFA program, Melanie Brooks and I share a love of reading memoirs that must have cost their authors an emotional toll—those she covers in her forthcoming book, Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art From Trauma. [We're giving away a copy, too!]

Melanie works as a freelance writer and teaches at Northeastern University and Merrimack College in Massachusetts, and at Nashua Community College in New Hampshire, where she lives with her husband, two children and yellow Lab. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Bustle, The Manifest-Station, Hippocampus, Huffington Post, Modern Loss, Solstice Literary Magazine, Recollectors, Stonecoast Review and Word Riot. Melanie's also working on an almost-completed memoir that explores the lasting impact of living with the ten-year secret of her father’s HIV disease before his death in 1995.

Please welcome Melanie Brooks.

The questions were simple: “What are you writing about and what form is it taking?” So, why was I finding it harder and harder to breathe as the seminar leader meandered her way toward me? As she solicited responses from the other students in the crowded room, why was there a sudden tightness in my chest? It wasn’t as if I didn’t know the answers.

I’d started my MFA at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Creative Writing Program with a clear purpose—space and time to finally write into a complex family story I’d carried for over twenty years, a story I recognized was big enough to be a book. But when the leader’s kind gaze finally fell on me, the words caught in my throat. I mumbled something about writing about my dead dad, then a strangled sob hijacked anything else I might say, and a deluge of tears broke through my reserve. I was sitting at the wall-end of a cramped row, with no possibility of discreet escape. For the remainder of the ninety-minute seminar, I struggled to stop my nose from dripping without the benefit of a tissue, and I bit my lip until I tasted blood, to muffle the hiccupping sobs that fought to surface.

Nothing in the introductory materials the program coordinators sent out in the months leading up to that first MFA residency had readied me for this horrifying public moment of absolute composure meltdown. No neon labels were affixed to the pages of the orientation handbook broadcasting: WARNING: Writing about vulnerable material can leave you feeling rawly vulnerable. Be prepared to cry. A lot. At inconvenient times.

So when the inconvenient crying first erupted during that seminar, I thought something was wrong with me. And when it happened again while my workshop group discussed my manuscript, I felt the need to make excuses to put everyone else at ease. “I cry all the time,” I said, even though I don’t. “Just call me The Crier from here on out,” I joked, sidelining my emotions.

The truth was that, during the residency, and in the following months when I sat in front of my computer, mired in the very real anguish of trying to shape my painful memories into words, I felt alone. So alone, I almost quit.

I needed to find someone to tell me what I was feeling was okay. Normal. Expected, even. If someone could tell me those things, then maybe I could marshal up enough courage to keep going.

In what began as a very personal (and totally selfish) quest, I went looking for that someone to guide me back to my laptop, someone to tell me those things I needed to hear about my pain and loneliness and fear. I wrote to authors I admired—those whose memoirs did not shy away from any of the tough stuff— and told them how much I was struggling. I asked them if I could sit down with them and talk about the psychological journeys they had to go on to write their books. 

What I found when I reached out was more than someone. I found eighteen someones. Eighteen acclaimed writers—including Andre Dubus III, Mark Doty, Edwidge Danticat, Abigail Thomas, and Richard Blanco— who all responded to my query and welcomed the opportunity to answer my questions and offer some hard-earned wisdom. Writers who’d been as terrified as I was when they began their memoirs. Who’d written into their own hard stories and made it through. Eighteen writers who’d all experienced, at some point during their processes, the inconvenient crying.

The intimate stories these brilliant and generous memoirists told me about their own struggles to find words for painful and traumatic experiences, their misgivings along the way, their moments of wanting to quit, and their ultimate relief that they did not quit, all encouraged me to keep writing and gave me the steadying I needed.

Instead of keeping these conversations to myself, I wrote Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art From Trauma (forthcoming from Beacon Press on February 7). Each chapter is an in-depth narrative profile of my discussion with one of these authors. I share the circumstances of our meetings – from walking dogs with Mark Doty in the Hamptons; lunch with Marianne Leone and her husband, Oscar winner Chris Cooper at their home on Massachusetts’ South Shore; sipping a cup of tea while sprawled across Kate Bornstein’s bed in her New York City apartment - and the amazing insights I gain.

Since my questions are less about craft and more about survival, I tap into some areas of these authors’ processes that they’ve never shared before. I reflect on how each of these exchanges moved me away from the place where my memories were burying me and toward a completed memoir. I was motivated to turn these experiences into Writing Hard Stories by a realization that others facing the daunting journey to write into their long-carried stories, writers who also felt isolated by their particular circumstances, needed those stories and that steadying, too.

Maybe if I’d had the gift of these conversations sooner, before I started my MFA even, I might not have been so thrown by the emotions that surfaced when writing about my experiences, and when, more often than not, doing so felt like reliving those traumatic experiences. On that day of the streaming tears and hiccupping sobs, when all I wanted to do was hightail it out of that seminar room, I might, instead, have been able to turn to the person sitting next to me, shrug my shoulders, and simply say, “You know, this is what they told me would probably happen.”  

Note from Lisa: Melanie would like to send one blog reader a signed copy of Writing Hard Stories. Simply ask her a question here in the comments (and she'll stop by and answer), and you'll be entered. (U.S. postal address is required.) Post your comment by Sunday, Feb. 12.

You can connect with Melanie via Facebook, Twitter, and her website.

The Short Answer when Writing a Long Essay

Occasionally, when I'm working on what is revealing itself to be a long and involved piece of nonfiction narrative on a complicated topic, I worry I may never finish it. I get lost in revisions and rewrites, buffeted by new thinking or memories, and wonder if all the tangents and digressions and bits of backstory really matter. Sometimes the meandering route to a long piece includes questioning why I am even writing it in the first place.

What helps at a time like that (besides dark chocolate, wine, and whining), is to move away from the developing piece, and to purposely write a much shorter version of the story, to pare away and get at the center, the heart of the piece. To figure out what's driving it in the first place.

Usually, I'll write a micro essay, sometimes in a very different form (second person, a list essay), or a poem. And sometimes I like what I've done in the abbreviated form enough that I work on it a little bit more, shine it up, and send it out.

That's what happened last fall with a 690 word essay, "Gray," which eventually garnered an honorable mention in the Our Past Loves 2015 contest. It's a small capsule, culled from the still-accumulating pages (and pages and pages) of what will someday be a long look at my teenage relationship with a boy of another race.

Here's a short excerpt from "Gray":

…I want to say Brant's color did not matter, but it did. I was drawn to different, trained on years of family travel where my father emphasized befriending people of different cultures, seizing local experiences, seeing not exactly past color, class, and religion, but rather seeing and not pretending not to see. Coming of age in hotels and exotic locales, my early experience of attraction was not just to to the opposite sex, but to opposites. Brown boys. Jewish. Poor. Black boys.

            Home, though, I was expected to date white, Catholic, Italian, middle- or upper-class boys…

If you'd like to read the rest, hop over to the Our Past Loves site, and scroll down.

Meanwhile, I'm curious, does anyone else ever take detours like this? Write the mini-version?

Image: Flickr/Creative Commons - grepsy