H
e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n
G i n s b e r g
N
a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i v e s E d i t i o n
LESLÉA NEWMAN
A Conversation with Lesléa Newman by
Renée Olander
Renée Olander: As author of nearly sixty
books, including such feisty titles as Heather
Has Two Mommies, Out Of The Closet And Nothing To Wear, The Little Butch Book, and Nobody’s Mother, among others, and
subjects ranging from eating disorders to gay and lesbian issues, you strike me
as a writer of intrepid courage—courage just to stick your neck out, write and
publish for a very long time—what do you think about courage as it relates to
your writing and publishing life?
Lesléa Newman: It’s so interesting that you’d say that, because
about a year ago, I gave a commencement speech for an MFA program and I said if
I could think of only one word to give the graduating students, because as a
writer I’m always looking for that one perfect word, the word would be
“courage.” I don’t think of myself as particularly courageous; I just write
about things that matter to me. And I don’t really think about audience when I
write. I just sit down, and pray that I’ll have something to say, because
that’s a struggle for me. If I don’t feel passionate about it, then it’s not
worth putting down on paper. It never occurred to me to not write about any of
those subjects.
RO: So you
were a teenager when you began publishing poems?
LN: Well, I have been writing poems since I was very young, probably
ten or twelve years old. And I don’t know where this came from, but I have
always been very active in getting work out in the world. I read Seventeen Magazine and saw that there were poems in that magazine, and I thought
well, why not my poems? In hindsight, I think that took a lot of confidence.
But somehow I had it in me to find out the name of the editor, the address, and
what to do. Actually, it’s an interesting story. I got a letter from the poetry
editor, Hilary Cosell, daughter of Howard Cosell, the sportscaster, and she wanted to publish several
of my poems. She invited me to come to her office, which was in midtown
Manhattan, and I still remember what I wore as I wanted to look sophisticated—I
wore a black leotard and a wraparound flowered skirt that I bought in a used
clothing store and at one time was a curtain, it was a kind of nice Scarlet
O’Hara moment. And I wore black cotton flats, those Chinese slippers that look
like MaryJanes, and I rode the train into the city
and took the elevator up to the top of a skyscraper, and she graciously took me
to her desk, to her office cubicle, whatever, and she had a paper shopping bag
she dumped out on the desk, and all these papers went flying, and I could see
some were handwritten, some had drawings on them, and some were typed up, and
she said, “As poetry editor of Seventeen Magazine, this is what I get in the
mail every day, and your poems stood out like a shining star.” So, that was the
beginning of my literary career, and I’ll never forget how kind she was to me.
RO: You were
raised by your parents and your grandmother who lived across the street—did they, or your grandmother in
particular, encourage your writing?
LN: They didn’t encourage or discourage, I’m the proverbial forgotten
middle child—I was left to my own devices in many ways. I don’t think I was taken seriously as a writer by my family
because I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, and it just didn’t seem that important
for a girl to have any kind of career because the assumption was I’d get
married to a man and be taken care of. I did have a wonderful creative writing
teacher in high school named Miss Stern, and in fact, in 1999, when I went back
to be inducted into my high school’s Hall of Fame, she came to the assembly
with a folder where she had kept all of my poems, and that meant so much to me.
So my teachers always encouraged me, up through college—I studied at University
of Vermont with David Huddle, whom I will never forget, because at the bottom
of one of my poems, he wrote two words: “so what?” Of course at the time I was
devastated, but to this day, I put the “so what?” test to my poems.
Then I went to Naropa
Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where I was Allen
Ginsberg’s apprentice. I also studied with Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Larry
Fagin, Dick Gallup, and Peter Orlovsky—they’re my
nurturing mentors. I also studied briefly with Grace Paley. But Naropa was really where I was taken seriously as a poet,
and when I look back at that extraordinary experience, I realize how lucky I
was. I pretty much did everything my teachers asked me to do. Anne Waldman once
said to me, “You should be writing really long poems,” so I tried to write
really long poems. My teachers were good at breaking me out of the habit of
just doing over and over what I did well—they wanted to challenge me, and they
did.
RO: You write
in many different genres and forms within them—so after you have prayed for
something to say, to what degree might you specifically consider whether you’ll
work on a children’s book versus a young adult novel, or a poem versus short
story—does audience come into your writing mind?
LN: The content really dictates the form. So I will start
writing—usually with either an image or a voice, and I follow that to see where
it is going, and at some point this is revealed to me: this is a picture book,
or, this is a poem. And then, this is a poem for adults, or, this is a teen
novel. I’m very process-oriented. I don’t
outline, I don’t plan.
If I’m in the middle of a novel, then I know that day I’m going to work on that
novel. If I start writing poems pretty regularly, then I’ll think, “Oh, I’m
working on a new poetry manuscript, fancy that!” If I’m writing a short story
and then write another short story, I will more consciously direct my writing
to that form, because I want to be working on a book. But at the beginning,
it’s anybody’s guess, least of all mine.
RO: In your recent conversation with Farideh
Goldin, she asked about your use of humor, which is
prevalent in so much of even your heaviest work, and you said humor “took the
sting out” of what’s otherwise painful—is that conscious, your use of humor to
“take the sting out”?
LN: It’s my personality. It’s who I am. I come
from a funny family. It’s also traditionally a Jewish way of looking at the
world—with humor, often self-deprecating. It can be a defense mechanism. I
think as I’ve become older and more mature as a writer, I’ve relied on humor
less, which is not to say my work is now humorless, but it’s more balanced. The
only time I’ve consciously said, “I’m going to write something funny,” and it
was one of the hardest books I’ve written, was while I was working on Out Of
The Closet And Nothing To Wear, and
I think it’s because I was trying to elicit the same emotion continuously,
which was laughter, or amusement. And there wasn’t a break from that—no trying
to get a reader to tear up, or feel enraged. I don’t know how Erma Bombeck did that for forty years or however long she had a
weekly column. It was very difficult, and the experience gave me a lot of
respect for comic writers.
RO: Do you
think writing is always partly autobiographical? After you read “A Letter to
Harvey Milk,” one of my students asked me whether you were the teacher who had
taught Harry Weinberg—
LN: While I have taught writing classes in a senior center, I never
had a student like Harry Weinberg—he is a figment of my imagination based very,
very loosely on my grandmother mainly in two ways: the way he uses language, he
speaks in “Yinglish,” or English with Yiddish phrases and constructions, and the
way he won’t talk about his past. My grandmother would never tell me about her
childhood because she said she did not want to burden me with the pain in her
life. So I felt like I had to make up those stories. Things that are “true” in
that story are the facts about Harvey Milk—that he had big ears, liked
jellybeans, and prophesized his own death, but as far as I know, he never had a
friend like Harry Weinberg.
I think that’s the question asked most frequently of fiction
writers; how much of this is true? I knew a writer who would always say, “17%.”
He’d just give a number. In a way that question is a compliment, because the
reader is saying, “You convinced me this had to have happened,” and in a way,
that question is an insult, because it implies, “You couldn’t have made this
up,” which is a fiction writer’s job—to use our imaginations to make things up
that have some emotional truth about human nature. So it’s an interesting
question, and I wonder, what is the question behind the question? Why is this
important? Why do you need to know? Would the story move you less if you knew
it was or wasn’t “true”? And these days, we live in an Oprah culture, no
offense to Oprah—people are more interested in the writer than the writing.
That’s part of the memoir craze, people aren’t looking at the work as much as
they’re looking at the author. In fact, when I have had more than one book
published in a year, which has been almost every year since I’ve been
publishing, I’ll go back to a bookstore six months later with the second book
of the year to set up a reading and they’ll say, “We don’t want you, you just
came,” and I’ll say, “But this is a completely different book—that was a book
of poetry, this is a novel,” and they’ll say, “But people come to see you. They don’t come because of the book.” So what I really meant was—it’s not an Oprah culture, it’s a People Magazine culture.
RO: Your
Harvey Milk story ends with Harry Weinberg feeling ambivalent about his own
writing before he turns his notebook over to his writing teacher—do you think
there is any responsibility to get stories down?
LN: I have a friend, a playwright named Andrea Hairston, who said, I
have this quotation up over my desk: “If you don’t tell your story you die
twice.” I think that for Harry, he had to cut off his memories because he
needed to survive and get through his day, and it was just too painful. On the
other hand, he doesn’t want to leave this earth and be completely forgotten; I
don’t think anybody does. So he is ambivalent, and I think when he started to—I
know this sounds strange, I mean, he’s a fictitious character—nevertheless,
when he started taking a writing class, as with anyone who writes, you don’t
know what’s going to happen. You don’t know what you’re going to discover. And
it was more than he bargained for. When I used to teach women’s writing
workshops, I can’t tell you the number of women who would uncover unpleasant
childhood memories, and several of them said to me, “I need to stop coming to
your class and go into therapy,” and they did, because there were things buried
that surfaced that were very painful for them, that needed to be handled
carefully. And I always say I’m not a therapist, I’m a writing teacher—I will
take care of you the best I can, but I’m there to talk about the writing, and
so when they need to go elsewhere they go elsewhere. I believe that those
memories surface when the person is emotionally, psychologically, and
spiritually ready to deal with them. And then they have to be treated very
tenderly.
RO: In your
introduction to the poem “Break the Glass,” you referred to “my spouse, Mary,”
so I wonder if readers don’t feel somewhat invited to connect the writer’s
biography and writing—
LN: I need to say something about the word “spouse”—the problem I have
is that it is not a very melodious word, and when I’m writing, particularly
poetry, I come up against it all the time. I have a poem called “Guess Who
Died?” about Grace Paley, and at the end, the narrator’s spouse comes into the
breakfast room, and that particular poem is autobiographical so I
wasn’t going to use the word “husband.” “Lover” implies a lover as opposed to
someone whom the narrator is married to, or an illicit affair. Some lesbian
couples use the word “wife,” to describe each other, but I don’t think of
myself as either being or having a “wife.” So I used the word “beloved,” which
I like the sound of, and also one cannot mistake its meaning. But it’s tricky
because heterosexual couples have this very easy shorthand that they can use and
lesbian couples do not.
So back to the whole notion of being exposed—I don’t write memoir.
Consciously so, because I don’t think my life is that interesting, and even
though I write about a lot of things that I have experienced, it’s always
couched in fiction, and even when I start a story based on something that’s
happened to me, in about the second or third sentence, I throw a lie in; it
just happens, I’m a fiction writer—I lie to make things more tragic, funnier,
more intense, more interesting, more conflicted. Because I’m a storyteller,
it’s impossible for me—not impossible, but it’s difficult to stick to the
“truth” if I have an idea that’s going to make it a better story. And that’s
what I love about fiction; you can explore characters and push them, to see how
far they will go, and what’s up with you as a writer, emotionally, when you go
to a different place. I like to live other people’s lives like in the story,
“Mothers of Invention,” which is about a lesbian couple—one of them wants a
child and the other doesn’t, and what ends up happening is the one who wants
the child can’t get pregnant so the one who doesn’t want to be a parent gets
pregnant. I’ve never been pregnant, so I had to research pregnancy and got to
vicariously experience the pregnancy through this character. Of course, it’s
not the same as experiencing a real pregnancy, but it’s bearing witness to that
character’s pregnancy, and that’s what’s so interesting about writing. And
reading—you can go all over the world and never leave your room.
RO: You are a
full-time writer—how do you approach this “job”? Do you write every day?
LN: I decided early on this was what I wanted to do. And I never came
up with a Plan B, which I learned from Barbra Streisand, who never learned to
type, because she said if “I learn to type I’ll wind up typing,” so I like to
say I never learned to sing because I’d end up singing (that’s a joke because I
can’t sing at all). But my job, I believe, and it might sound very arrogant—I
was put on the planet to write, it’s the only thing I know how to do. Even on
days when I don’t know how to do it particularly well, it’s what makes me
happy, and at this stage in my career I’ve had enough feedback to know that
some of my work touches some people’s lives, and that’s important to me. So you
can call it confidence, maybe that’s a better word than arrogance, that I know this is what I’m supposed to
do. And because I’m a fiction writer, I could lie and say I do it every day,
but other things come up. I try to do it every day; when my beloved goes off to
work at nine o’clock, I go into my office, and, at the very least for an hour,
work on something. The times I procrastinate—and deliver us from e-mail,
please, that’s my biggest procrastinator—is between projects. As soon as I
finish something I think, “Ok, that’s it, I have nothing left to write about.”
If I’m working on something, I’m eager to go to my desk, because I can pester a
line—for instance, whether an “a,” should be “the,” for about seven hours, and
be perfectly happy doing so. Then there’s the point where the poem or the story
or the novel really is finished, and I know it’s finished, but I don’t want to
let it go because as soon as I do, I’m going to have to face a blank page
again. I call it “page-fright.” At some point, I cross a line and start making a piece worse rather than better
and I know I have to stop. So if I don’t know what to write about, I’ll do what
I call kvetching on paper for a while—I have, embarrassingly, notebooks and
notebooks of this, and my archivist will be horrified to learn that I shred
much of it but I have to, because it’s always the same: “I don’t know what to
write about, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know where all the books I’ve
written came from…” It’s boring, and then eventually I’ll come up with an image
and see where it goes. Or I’ll read—I’ll turn to poetry, which is always the
thing that inspires me the most.
But when you say I’m a full-time writer, which I am, I don’t want
to mislead people—it’s not that I just sit for eight hours and write. I feel
like I have two jobs: my day job is being an author—so there’s a lot that goes
into that, whether it’s corresponding with my agent, proofreading a manuscript
that just came back from a copy editor, or calling back someone who wants to
bring me to their school or conference to give a workshop or reading. I also
have MFA and private students whom I mentor, so it also depends on how many of
those manuscripts are sitting in my inbox, if I need to spend the day looking
at someone else’s work instead of my own, since that’s part of what pays the
bills—you know, there’s just stuff. I try to set aside the morning for my own
writing, and if I’m really cooking, the afternoon as well,
but sometimes things just have to happen quickly. One phone call can
change the whole day.
RO: You’ve written more short stories than
novels—in terms of process, for instance, with The Reluctant Daughter—did
it begin as a novel, or when were you aware you were facing the “terrifying
proposition” of a novel giving “birth to itself through you”?
LN: I knew right away. There was just too much going on to contain in
a short story. My main character had issues with her own mother, with not being
a mother herself, with what makes a family in terms of her cousin Jack, and she
also had issues going on in her romantic relationship, that are questions of,
literally, life and death—so I needed the luxury of space and room to tell that
story. Plus, I’ve always wanted to write a great big mother/daughter novel, and
when Lydia Pinkowitz started speaking to me, I knew
that the time had come.
RO: Has that
been the case with other novels where at the beginning you felt, “this is a
novel, not a short story”?
LN: Well, for example, my novel Hachiko Waits is classified as a middle grade novel though it’s really a novel
for dog lovers of all ages, but it’s about 100 pages—a short novel. I’m pretty
lazy, so I actually wanted it to be a picture book, and the first draft was
very short. Then I said, “I need to put in some more details,” and the second
draft was forty pages, and I thought, “Oh my God, you can’t have a picture book
that’s forty pages long”—the average picture book text is about three pages—and
then, of course, the terror descends, because I thought, “Oh my God, I’m
writing a novel, can I do it?” And this book was particularly challenging
because the question was, “Can I write a historical novel that took place in a
different culture, during a different time period in a country where I’ve never
been (to this day)—can I do justice to this story?”
The gestation of that story was that after September 11, I didn’t
write for the longest time. It was the longest ever I had not written—three
months—and of course, everyone was so emotional at that time, but on top of the
emotion that was in the world, I thought, “whatever I write at this point is
useless because I wasn’t in New York when it happened, who cares about anything
else, including me, but how can I write about it, because I wasn’t there.” Then
I thought, what I really want to do is offer the world, and especially
children, a small, quiet book full of hope.
RO: Perhaps
if offering people some hope through writing was something you entertained as
you set out to write Hachiko Waits, a sense of audience is more on your mind as you write than you
realize?
LN: Well, it’s a little different with a children’s book, because I
know, once it “takes” inside me that I’m writing for children, then I’m a
little more conscious of that. But I had no idea I could pull it off, even
though this is the only book I’ve ever written that I knew the plot of before I
started. At that point in my life I was so desperate to write something,
anything—so I started with this idea, rather than the way I usually begin, with
an image. But I don’t know where the idea of this novel came from; it’s a true
story, but I have no idea when I first heard that story.
RO: So you researched to find out more?
LN: I went to the library and asked a librarian,
isn’t there a story about a dog who waited for ten years at a train station
hoping for his master’s return? I didn’t even know the story took place in
Japan—that’s all I knew about it, this tiny little gem inside my brain, which
is something I tell my students, that we are all walking treasure chests. We
have experiences that have happened to us, we have our memories, we have our
imaginations which are limitless, we have our sensory/direct experience, what
we see, hear, et cetera, and we have stories that have been told to us, stories
that we have read in the newspaper—we just have these fleeting things that come
in and out of our consciousness, and some of them lodge in our brain, and the
part that I don’t know how it happens—writing is 33% inspiration, 33%
respiration, 33% perspiration, and 1% magic—so part of it is that at some
point, when you least expect it but need it most, a story that’s in the back of
your head travels to the front of your head, and drops down into your heart.
Once I was at a writing conference, sitting next to Grace Paley,
and I don’t remember who the speaker was, but he was talking about how
important it is to have a daily writing practice, and then he quoted someone
who said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Grace and I looked at each other,
whipped out our notebooks, and wrote that down. So as a writer, if I show up to
the page every day for a day or a week or a month or in this case three months
and nothing is happening and I just am practically in tears every day because I
think I have nothing more to say, and on day ninety-seven, the first sentence
of a novel begins, I needed those ninety-six days, to prepare my mind even
though it didn’t feel like anything was happening. Peter Orlovsky
used to say, “You’re always writing the poem.”
RO: In his
book Write To Learn, Donald Murray said writers don’t ever really procrastinate
because what we call procrastination is useful ripening—
LN: Every writer has his or her own process. As W. Somerset Maugham
said, there are three rules to writing a novel, but unfortunately nobody knows
what they are. The most valuable thing any writer can do is learn your own process. I know I have to go through a
certain amount of kvetching on paper before something breaks loose. I know one
writer who keeps this file of index cards of ideas, and when she doesn’t know
what to write about she just plops down an index card idea—I tried that and it
didn’t work for me, I got too frustrated because I had no ideas to put on the
index cards, so I felt even worse about myself. The most important thing you
can do is look at, “How do I write?” If there was only one way to do it someone would have told us by now
and made a million dollars. That’s why there are so many different books about
how to write. So, without sounding too judgmental, I would dismiss any writing
theory where someone says, “This is how to write.” I would say, “This might be
how you write,” and I can tell you about my process but I’m not going to claim
it’s the best way. I’ve just learned through the years that it’s the best way
for me. It might not work for you at all.
RO: About
children’s picture books—I had assumed that as writer, you would have
relatively close interaction with the books’ illustrators—
LN: No, you never do. The only reason I did with Heather Has Two Mommies is it was a co-publishing venture. What happens with picture
books is that the author sells the text, and it looks just like the typewritten
page—it’s not broken up into the thirty-two pages. The editor takes the text
and says, “Oh, I want this illustrator to do it.” They have what they call a
stable of illustrators, and they look through their file and say, “Oh, this
style really matches this text.” They get in touch with the illustrator’s
agent, and some places ask for samples, some don’t, and it depends on the
illustrator—you’re not going to ask a Caldecott winner for samples (I should be
so lucky as to be working with a Caldecott winner), so then, the editor breaks
up the text into thirty-two pages, the illustrator does sketches, which I often
see, not always—black and white, just to dummy it out. Then the illustrator
goes to work, painting or collage, or whatever, and works primarily with the
editor and art director, and after I see the sketches I pretty much don’t see
anything until the final product—I mean, not when it’s like a book on the
shelf, but the page proofs. And, depending again on the publisher, I may or may
not have much say. People are usually horrified at this, and what I say is a
picture book is like a movie. The scriptwriter thinks, “This is my movie,” the
director thinks, “This is my movie,” the star thinks, “This is my movie,” the
editor thinks, “This is my movie,” everyone thinks, “This is my movie,” or this
is my picture book—whoever’s involved. There’s a huge amount of letting go, a
huge amount of trusting your editor, because you and your editor want the same
thing—you want the best book that can be produced, they want a book that can
sell, so maybe the editor has a little more marketing on the brain than you did
when you wrote the text. But if things were reversed, if someone gave me
thirty-two paintings and said, “Write a story,” I wouldn’t want the creator of
those paintings hovering over my shoulder saying “No, no, that’s not what I
meant.” So especially with a picture-book, more than
with any other form I write in, it’s a collaboration.
RO: Is it
true you sort of stumbled into writing children’s books—that you wrote your
first one for a friend whose daughter wanted a book that showed families like
her own?
LN: I never thought of myself as a children’s book writer. Then, after
Heather Has Two Mommies, I fell in love with the form of picture books, which is much
more difficult to write than one might think. I find it the most challenging
form of all.
RO: Before
you mentioned it I had not thought about the form, though I’ve read lots to
kids and can see they’re a standard size—
LN: They’re printed in signatures of sixteen pages, so it’s two
sixteen-page signatures. Once in a while you’ll get a forty-eight-page picture
book. But the trend is toward much shorter texts, like 300 words, 500 words, so
now a picture book text of, say, 1,000 words is considered long. People might
say, “Oh, that’s hardly any words, I can do that,” like people say about
poetry, and I say, “No, you don’t get it, it’s pretty hard to do.” In a picture
book, you have to develop characters, have a narrative arc, action—there’s got
to be a lot going on that will sustain the interest of a child, and also it’s
the only form where the primary audience is not the primary purchaser. It’s the
parents or grandparents or aunts and uncles, whoever the adults are, buying
these books for the children, and the best picture books are the ones that have
some interest to the adult who is reading as well as the child who is
listening. When I think about it, with my background in poetry and humor,
children’s books are a natural form for me, because many children’s books are
written in verse.
RO: Your
earliest publishing was poetry, you studied poetry at Naropa,
yet you have also published fiction for more than twenty years—at what point
did you feel you should tell stories also?
LN: When I was an undergraduate, I took a class, an introduction to
creative writing—with the great David Huddle—so we wrote fiction and poetry,
and one day he said to me to me, “I like your fiction better than your poetry,”
which again—well, let’s just say he had a habit of devastating me. But one of the
stories I wrote for his class, “Sunday Afternoon,” has survived and is in my
collection A Letter
To Harvey Milk. Then I went to Naropa
and identified as a poet. That was my primary interest and really is still my
first love. But this is what happened: I was working at a daycare center, and
at the end of the year, my contract wasn’t renewed. I needed a job, and I
didn’t know what to do, so I did something very unlike me, because you know I’m
from New York which means I have a kind of baseline of cynicism built in—I went
to a psychic, and I said, “I need a job, I don’t know what to do,” I explained
the whole thing to her, and she said to me simply, “You don’t need to find a
job; you need to go home and get to work.” And I went home that day and wrote
the first twenty pages of my first novel. That’s a true story. Well, I am a
fiction writer so I do lie, but in this case I am telling you an absolutely
true story, and I was terrified. At some point, someone said to me, you’ve been
reading novels your whole life and you’ve absorbed more than you know, you’re
smarter than you think, you know more about this than you think you do, and she
was right because I truly believe the only way to learn how to write a novel,
or poem, or short story, is by writing a novel, a poem, or a short story. I
have written a craft book on writing, so it may sound funny to say this, but
you learn a lot more from reading a good novel than reading a book about how to
write a good novel. Be a sponge,
soak it up! That’s what you
need to do.
RO: You
mentioned Write From The Heart, and you’re a teacher and mentor who’s taught at universities and
privately—could you talk about teaching privately versus in an institutional
program?
LN: What I enjoy best is a long, deep one-on-one
mentoring relationship with a student who wants to learn. I think that is very
satisfying for the student and for the mentor—me—definitely. I have seen a vast
improvement in students when working that way. A private student of mine
recently sold her first novel, which was thrilling for both of us. Literature
is my passion, so if I’m interacting on a regular basis with someone who shares
that passion, whatever level they are on in terms of their own writing and
career, that’s a wonderful thing, and I find it very satisfying. I probably
still would teach even if I didn’t have to, because it also forces me to think
about writing, and to think about being articulate in terms of how one makes
one’s writing better. Of course the question is always, “Can you teach someone
how to write?” I always say, “You can teach someone how to write better.” Whether they’re going to be a writer is
up to them—you can’t teach passion, you can’t teach commitment, so that has to
come from within. I’m a tough teacher, I’ve been told—of course, I think I’m a
pussycat, but if people are paying a lot of money, whether to get an MFA or
study with me privately, they deserve honesty, they deserve respect, which
comes with the honesty, they deserve to be taken seriously, and they deserve
the benefit of my expertise, of having been a professional writer for more
years than I would care to admit. Let’s just say I’ve been in the game for a
very long time.
RO: When you
read the poem, “Viet Nam,” and mentioned it was the first time you had read it,
someone asked whether you felt particularly nervous reading new work, to which
you replied it wasn’t really new because you had
revised it a thousand times. In terms of process—how much do you revise? And do
you revise as much for novels as you do poems?
LN: Everything gets endlessly revised. I enjoy revision probably more
than the act of creating. Facing a blank page and not knowing if there will be
anything on that blank page at the end of the day is so stressful for me, and
then, if something does appear, there’s so much relief that I will just pester
those words to death until I am satisfied, and that is what I love to do. And
so, with a novel, my process has changed over the years—my first couple of
novels I wrote longhand. This was before computers, and then I would type them.
Now I still start everything longhand including novels. I sit on the couch in
my writing room and work with a spiral notebook and a Bic
pen, and those tools have not changed in thirty years, but there will be a
certain point in the process, it’s almost a physical sensation, when I have to
get up and put what I have written in my notebook onto my computer and then go
further. So it’s not clear anymore whether this is a fourth draft or a sixth
draft, because I’ve been rewriting as I’ve been going, and as I’m writing on
the computer, I’ll highlight a paragraph, open a new document, and rewrite that
paragraph four or five times, and then when I’m satisfied I’ll put that back
in. And then I’ll go further, and keep doing that, so it’s not as cut-and-dried
as is this a first draft or a third draft, or a sixtieth draft—because there
will be paragraphs that have been written sixty times, as opposed to another
paragraph that I felt I only needed to rewrite once or twice, so it’s a
different process now.
RO: For The Reluctant Daughter, how much time elapsed from knowing you were tackling a novel to
the whole first draft?
LN: About four months. Once I start something and know it has “taken,”
I get completely obsessed and write very quickly. I take a year or longer to
revise (and revise and revise and revise). From first draft to publication took
about four years.
RO: And
during that time working on the novel, you also wrote poems, and you were named
Poet Laureate of Northampton?
LN: Yes. Well, in the beginning it’s a very intense time getting the
first draft of a novel down on the page. I would say the first three drafts
took about a year and a half. And then there’s kind of a lull period when my
agent is reading it, and after she read it, I got feedback and rewrote it again
for her, before she would send it out, and maybe I’d get feedback from other
people too. So once I get to the third or fourth draft, I’m not working on it
every day like I am in the beginning. Though there are times I’m not working on
it, I’m still thinking about it, but I’m not as actively working on it so I
will be doing something else, like maybe a picture book, or writing poems. And
when I was named Poet Laureate of Northampton, I felt joyfully obligated to work
on poems because I had that title.
RO: How did
you feel when your laureate term came to an end?
LN: Oh, very sad. I knew when I received that honor it was a two-year
term. I did a lot of things during those two years: I edited a poetry column
that appeared in our daily newspaper, I ran a “Lunch with the Laureate” series,
I ran a poetry contest, and I did a “30 Poems in 30 Days” project which worked
like a walkathon, except people pledged a monetary amount like a dollar per
poem to raise money for a family literacy project. More than seventy poets
participated and we raised $13,000! I met so many fabulous poets and lovers of poetry, and people who maybe didn’t think of
themselves as poets but who participated in the “30 Poems in 30 Days” project
because they just thought it would be a
cool thing to do. I did poetry in-services for teachers, I did
all kinds of things—one of my favorite projects was called “Poetry to Wait
By”—Marilyn Nelson told me she did this when she was the Poet Laureate of
Connecticut—I got poets to donate poetry books, and I distributed them to
waiting rooms all over the city of Northampton, so when you go to get your
teeth cleaned you can now read People magazine or poems by Pablo
Neruda, so that was a project I especially liked. It’s always a little sad to
pass the crown, but I’m excited to see what the next Poet Laureate does. And I
got to introduce and read with Richard Wilbur—it doesn’t get better than that.
RO: You have said
“First Death,” is autobiographical—how did this poem, reflecting a painful
early childhood experience, get written so recently?
LN: Well, I think that echoes what I said about how we are all walking
treasure chests, and who knows why that poem on that particular date, or that
memory, moved from the back of my head to the front of my head. I just sat down
to write like I do almost every day, and that poem came out. I didn’t know
where that poem was going when I first started writing it. I remembered this
little girl—well, I think part of what was happening was recently, I have heard
about so many people who are struggling with cancer, it’s just extraordinary,
and so that must on some conscious level have helped me uncover the memory of
this little girl who is the first person I ever knew who had cancer—she was
seven, and I was maybe nine—and she showed up at the bus stop wearing a wig.
And it frightened us, the other children, so much, that of course we had to be
mean to her, and I remember, and I had forgotten, this true part of the poem,
that when I found out she died, I got hysterical, and it came out as laughter,
and I was slapped, and not in a punishing, punitive way, but I think just to
get me literally to snap out of it, so that all just came back into my mind
when I was writing that poem. And so, I have been thinking of this notion of
mob mentality and what makes us join in, when we know what we’re doing is
wrong. I have a friend who said that when she heard me read this poem, it made
her think about the first time she was faced with a moral dilemma as a child,
and I thought, “Wow, then the poem has done its job.”
RO: What are
you working on now?
LN: I’m putting the finishing touches on a new book of poems October Mourning: A Song For
Matthew Shepard. I was
the keynote speaker for coming out week at the University of Wyoming the year
he was murdered, and it’s taken me eleven years to write about being there
during that awful time. The poems are told in many different voices: the fence,
the truck, the road, the moon, the wind… the book is a poetic exploration of an
unbearable tragedy. It was just accepted by Candlewick Press and will be
released in 2012. I’ve just begun a series of triolets
(a French poetic form) about mothers, daughters, and illness.
RO: Mother/daughter
issues are another recurrent theme in your work across genres—does this reflect
autobiography at all?
LN: Probably like most women, I have a complex relationship with my
mother, and I live in a community, meaning the LBGT community, where there’s
this extra dynamic, often, because most women of my parents’ generation didn’t
expect that their child would come out to them as a lesbian, or a bisexual
person, or a transgendered person, so when you are of a certain ethnicity, let’s
say, or religion, more often than not, you have that in common with the people
you are growing up with, but when you are an LBGT person, you are often
surrounded by people who are very different from you in that way, so you are
very alone in your family which can create conflict. And so I have probed that
conflict in many genres, in many forms, because it’s interesting to me.
RO: Well,
your two most recent titles, Nobody’s Mother and The Reluctant Daughter, seem almost like a set!
LN: Along with the picture book Just Like Mama and the board book Mommy, Mommy And Me—you know what I think? I never really thought about this before,
but I think that because I don’t have children, this issue is of prime interest
to me. I have a friend who’s a writer and an only
child, and she’s always creating families with many siblings in her writing, so
again, it’s a way to live somebody else’s life.
RO: Is there
anything else you’d say to fellow writers, or the readers of the Writer’s Chronicle?
LN: I want to get back to the theme of courage—because at the
beginning of this interview I said I don’t really think of myself as a
courageous person, but why I think you need courage as a writer is that at
every step of the way you need the courage to believe you have something to
say, you need the courage to make this a priority in your life, because often
there are the other people saying you need to get a job, or why are you wasting
your time, or whoever’s voice is in your head, so you need courage for that.
You need the courage to show your writing to someone else, whether it’s people
in your writing group, or your spouse, or a potential agent, or a potential
magazine editor. So then, you need the courage to keep going when your writing
is turned down, as it probably will be—I don’t know any writer who hasn’t had
that experience. And then, you need the courage once it’s accepted to put it
out in the world, and hear what people think of it, you’ll need the courage to
live through bad reviews, most likely, or tepid reviews, you’ll need the
courage to stand up to people who disagree with you, you’ll need courage in the
face of offending people—every step of the way, you’ll need the inner core of
strength, or what we say in Hebrew, “koach” to get you through.
[Reprinted from Writer’s Chronicle (May/Summer 2011). Used by permission of
the author and the interviewer.
Originally published in NHS 2012, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs12/.]