Category: Interviews

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Brittany Ackerman on the closurelessness of experience

Every month, I interview an author I admire on her literary firsts.

Do you need distance and perspective to write about an experience honestly, meaningfully? Does writing about an experience provide closure — some sense of finality to memories and ideas you’ve been wrestling with?

Many writers say yes. Brittany Ackerman says no. And her new memoir-in-essays, The Perpetual Motion Machine, has that sometimes exhilaratingly freeing, sometimes out-of-control frightening sense of life continually continuing on — with no tidy lessons or endings. Life hurtles on — will keep hurtling on — so why not write about it now?

Read on for Brittany’s thoughts on living and writing and never being over anything. And don’t miss her book launch at Book Soup on Dec. 7, 7 pm — I’ll be reading with her, as will Nicelle Davis! Hope to see you there.

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Siel: At long last, your book is (almost) out! Has the completion and publication of this book brought some sense of closure — or changed your relationship to or thoughts about your past experiences in any way?

Brittany: Rather than closure, I feel the upcoming pub date has made me rethink the past.  I just recently heard a great quote from Orson Welles, “No story has a happy ending unless you stop telling it before it’s over.”  I think a lot of readers might want more of a “happy ending” to my book, but the truth is that the issues and emotional turmoil are still happening, will probably always be happening, and I will always be trying to make sense of it in my stories and with my words.

Did you have any concerns along the lines of having enough / too much distance from your experiences to write about them as you worked on TPMM?

I started the book as my graduate school thesis project and my family dilemma was still in full swing.  I was highly encouraged and motivated by my thesis chair, Dr. Becka McKay, to write through it, not around it.  Some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten.  It was a lot of me crying at Panera and typing out things I didn’t want to admit, but I think those parts might be what people will relate to, cling to, because they’re real.  I don’t think we need to be “over” something before we write about it.  I think we need to wrestle with it on the page.  The reader is always in the middle of something, so we should be too.

How did you come to the decision to write your memoir in short essays? Is it something that just happened naturally, or was this a more conscious decision on your part?

I contemplated fictionalizing the stories, but at the end of the day all these things happened.  It’s told from my point of view, so it’s fair to say it’s my perspective on the trials and tribulations, but that’s why I tried not to implement too much opinion on my behalf.  Rather, I wanted to make a collection that where you could read any one essay at a time or all of them together.  The center of the book, the heart of it, the troubled siblings, that’s the thread.

What are your favorite memoirs and essay collections? Have they influenced your own work?

Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth was the impetus of my writing life.  Once I read that, I thought, “Oh, this is what I want to do now.”  I tried to emulate her child-voice and her urgency in my own memoir.  Some more: Jeanette Walls “The Glass Castle,” Davy Rothbart “My Heart is an Idiot,” Nick Flynn, “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.”  Also a total fangirl for Sarah Manguso The Guardians.  I’m sort of working on something now that is an epistolary to a friend I had that passed away a few years ago, very much influenced by her.

Will there be a sequel memoir?

I’m hoping to translate TPMM into a screenplay someday.  As for the future, I’m really interested in the town where I spent a lot of time as a young adult, Delray Beach, FL, the recovery capital of the U.S.  I’ve been writing a lot about the city, the people and relationships I encountered over the years.  Hoping to get some time to workshop and continue working on my craft in 2019, building and finding strength in the writing community.

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Enter to win a copy of Brittany Ackerman’s  The Perpetual Motion Machine by signing up for my newsletter. Already joined up? Then you’re already entered. Good luck!

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Anne-Marie Kinney says the valley is teeming with mystery

Every month, I interview an author I admire on her literary firsts.

What comes first, the setting or the plot? I thought this was a good question for Anne-Marie Kinney, who with Sara Finnerty puts together the fantastic Griffith Park Storytelling Series. These readings are held in various beautiful settings in the park ranging from the bat caves to the shade of pretty trees — and  getting to, enjoying, and departing from each of them always makes for a fun plot to recount to friends —

Anne-Marie’s new book, Coldwater Canyon, comes out this Thursday, Oct. 4. Read on to hear Anne-Marie’s thoughts on book trailers, indie presses, and the valley.

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Siel: Why Coldwater Canyon? Did the setting come before the story – or the story determine the setting?

Anne-Marie: The setting came first. The San Fernando Valley of this book is a composite of different valley neighborhoods I’ve lived and hung out in. I was inspired by the valley’s quirks and how it’s a place that feels like a secret right under the nose of Los Angeles. I paid a lot of attention to strip malls and parked vans. The valley is teeming with mystery.

I inserted Coldwater Canyon into the book because I used to walk my dog down it, alongside a section of the L.A. River where you’d really have to lean over the fence to see if there was any water down there at all. It’s a long street that runs from Sun Valley all the way through Beverly Hills, so to me it kind of represented the gamut of Shep’s L.A. experience.

I love how you’re able to capture the voice of Shep, a Gulf War veteran suffering from PTSD. Was writing from a male viewpoint a challenge for you – or something that came pretty naturally?

Characters always start from the outside in for me. An image of someone will pop into my head and I’ll feel compelled to think them into fully realized person. I imagined a sort of grizzled guy walking a little dog down the street on a windy day, and that became the opening scene of the book. Once more details about him started to gel in my mind, I started reading books about Gulf War Syndrome so I’d have some knowledge to base him on.

Writing a male protagonist didn’t feel unusual. It felt natural to inhabit him. My favorite moments in writing are when I can feel a character in my body. It’s a kind of high, where the borders between my self and another self blur.

I really enjoyed the book trailer for your first book, Radio Iris (above). Do you think you’ll create one for Coldwater Canyon? And what advice do you have for writers who are wondering whether or not to make a book trailer?

I wanted to make a book trailer for Radio Iris (conceived and directed by Pete Larsen with a score by Nathan Budde) because it seemed like the thing to do in 2012 and I had talented friends who could make it happen. It was my first book, and it seemed like every other book coming out then had a trailer, so I thought I should have one too.

I liked how it turned out and it was fun, but I don’t plan on doing one for Coldwater Canyon. Are people still doing book trailers? I can’t remember the last time I saw one. I feel like they were in vogue for a while but are no longer considered essential. I think an author should only make one if it’s purely for fun.

You’ve published two novels with two different indie presses, Two Dollar Radio and Civil Coping Mechanisms. Have the experiences been largely similar or largely different?

The experience has been fairly similar. In both cases I was only working with one or two people, who really got the book and seemed to care about it as much as I did. There’s definitely a comfort in having just a couple of people to talk about everything with, from edits all the way to promotion.

What are you working on next?

I’m working on another novel, tentatively titled Sinking Feeling, about a long estranged mother and daughter reunited by a series of catastrophes. It’s a little too messy at this point to go further into what it’s “about,” but I’ve been researching climate change, brain tumors, buried treasure and doomsday preppers.

Photo by Rachael Warecki

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Thanks to Lunch Ticket for interviewing me about Cake Time

The MFA community at Antioch University Los Angeles has its own online literary journal called Lunch Ticket, and the Summer/Fall 2018 issue features an interview with me about Cake Time and the writing life. Here’s an excerpt:

KK: In Cake Time, readers follow an unnamed narrator as she dives into one bad relationship after another. The anonymity of the narrator and her experiences in dating gives her an “everywoman” feeling, like she could be any one of us. What drew you to center the experience of dating?

SJ: I can’t remember which book of Andre Breton’s I’m thinking of here, but in one of them, he pictures all his ex-lovers sitting in a row, across from a row of his former selves. Or at least that’s how I remember what he wrote. In any case I think in many ways our memories of past relationships are really memories of our past selves, selves that did and said things or acted and reacted in ways that can seem bizarre and illogical and confounding to our present selves. And romantic relationships—most of which tend to have a relatively clear beginning and an end (vs. friendships or familial relationships that go on for long periods of time with lots of permutations), and are serial in nature (most people have multiple friends but usually just one romantic partner at a time)—can be an interesting way of looking at the phases of our lives, the ways we and our wants and desires and motivations have changed or haven’t.

That said I’m not sure what I just said is what I was really thinking about when I was writing Cake Time. Even now, I don’t really think of the stories as being about a series of relationships—I think rather of phases of a girl/woman’s life. There are feelings and emotions that are very specific to certain moments in life—the feelings you have as a teenage girl are pretty different from the ones you have as a woman in her thirties, etc.—and I wanted to distill some of those feelings and emotions in discrete moments for Cake Time‘s protagonist.

Read the whole interview over at Lunch Ticket! And thanks to Kori Kessler, co-associate managing editor of Lunch Ticket, for the generous interview. Hope you’re enjoying your travels in Europe!

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Liska Jacobs on writing, breathing, and drinking in hotels

Every month, I interview an author I admire on her literary firsts.

Liska Jacobs used to work as an archivist at The Getty. Now she writes novels — her first one, Catalina, starring a woman who works at MOMA.

Does doing one kind of beautiful work make you miss the other? I asked Liska that and other questions in this interview. Read on to hear her thoughts on the dualities of Los Angeles, the pleasures of anonymous drinking in hotels, and the value of breathing.

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Siel: Why Catalina? What is it about that place that made you decide you must title a novel after it?

Liska: I wanted the meat of the novel to take place on an island so that I could really force everything to a crisis — but Catalina specifically because it’s a perfect compact version of Los Angeles. It has the same duality where on the one side it’s an artificial playground (Hollywood/Avalon), and the other is wild landscape (Santa Monica Mountains/ Los Angeles National Forest/ Two Harbors). Elsa, my heroine, has the same struggle going on within her — actually, her whole group of friends are outwardly feigning certain personas, while inwardly seething from past wounds and insecurities.

I love how a chunk of the story happens at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel. There are so many hotels I’d like to stay in in the LA area — but I don’t because, you know, I live here. What is the hotel stay you’ve enjoyed the most, and did that stay involve writing?

Thank you! I love the anonymity of drinking in hotels. There’s just something about them, maybe it’s the people passing through, or just the pleasure of sitting in a place that’s made to evoke a certain style or time. It’s like being on a set. The Miramar always makes me think of 1920s Santa Monica, of early seaside splendor and the flapper era.

One of my favorite hotels is the Hotel De Russie in Rome. I’ll probably never be able to afford to stay there, but I can sure as hell spend an entire evening drinking in their courtyard. They have a separate cocktail list just for gin and tonics! And at night you can hear the cicadas in the Villa Borghese Gardens.

On the Otherppl podcast, you talked about your former life working as an archivist at The Getty. Elsa was an assistant at the MOMA. Do you ever miss your museum career — being surrounded every day by beautiful objects?

This is such a great question. I do miss it. Not just the vaults, which were brimming with so many interesting things—from early editions of Shakespeare, to Mapplethorpe prints, to Kirchner’s sketchbook and Matisse drawings — but the small things too. I miss having coffee with a group of people I grew to love working with. And I miss seeing the city covered in fog and feeling like we had the sky to ourselves, and the deer that came down or the hawks that nested one year on the roof of the GRI. It’s a sad sort of missing though, the kind that comes with age.

If you were to go through the entire first book process again, from acceptance to publication, is there anything you might do differently?

I’d try to breath a lot more. I know that sounds silly, but there was so much hurry up and wait—that looking back, I feel like I willed a couple years by too quickly. I was so impatient to be here that I didn’t stop to enjoy the process. Mostly because at the time it didn’t feel like one. It felt like a mad sprint and if I let up for a minute, I’d blink, and it would have all been a dream.

What are you working on now?
Currently, I’m agonizing over the second draft of another novel for MCD/ FSG Originals. It’s much darker than Catalina, if you can believe it! This one takes place in Rome and Puglia. I like to think of it as a fever dream about womanhood, death, and sex. Hopefully, it will be out late next year.

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Enter to win a copy of Liska Jacobs’  Catalina by signing up for my newsletter. Already joined up? Then you’re already entered. Good luck!

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Cake Time interview in Muse

Riverside City College has its own print annual literary journal called Muse, and the Spring 2018 issue features an interview with me about Cake Time and the writing life. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: You run a blog where you interview authors each month and do book giveaways. What is the most important piece of advice you would give someone who is looking to start a similar, literary-based blog? How do you offset the hidden costs involved in this work?

A: I would say start small, and be consistent. A daily blog is great in theory, but for most people, that’ll make them lose steam in a week —

Also, I wouldn’t expect to offset the hidden costs — I would just expect to pay them out of pocket. So if you’re limited in funds, use free resources as much as possible. You can grow from there when you’re feeling more flush.

Read the whole thing by picking up a copy at Cellar Door Books in Riverside, Calif., or by emailing muse@rcc.edu.

And thanks to RCC professors James Ducat and Jo Scott-Coe for inviting me to the campus for a reading and arranging for this interview — and to all the great RCC students I got to meet, both in person and through words. Here’s a video featuring the Spring 2018 RCC student staff members!

Earlier: 15 Literary journals for Los Angeles writers

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Chloe Caldwell on indie presses, DIY book tours, and pseudonyms

Every month, I interview an author I admire on her literary firsts.

Give your friends pseudonyms. That’s one piece of simple, concrete, and practical advice Chloe Caldwell gives to budding personal essay writers.

It makes sense, given the intimacy and detail of Chloe’s poignant and hilarious work. I love her collection I’ll Tell You in Person — and got to pick her brain this month about essay writing, teaching, working with indie presses, and a lot more.

Read on for more great essay writing advice —

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Siel: You teach writing workshops with Catapult and other organizations. What advice do you give students who are brand new to personal essay writing?

Chloe: Take your time. Personal essays grow and evolve the longer you sit with them. The time before you publish your work is sacred—enjoy it. Give your friends pseudonyms, and always write with love and compassion, for yourself and those you write about.

Do you find that teaching writing affects your own writing in any way?

I know it affects the way I read books now—looking for things I would edit or advise on, how I would critique the piece if it were workshopped in my class. As for writing, I wish I took more of my own advice that I dish out to students, and I also wish I had the balls to attempt the (sometimes) challenging writing prompts I give my students.

Elizabeth Ellen‘s small indie press Short Flight / Long Drive Books, published your first two books — then this latest collection came out from Emily Books, an imprint of Coffee House Press — which is a bigger indie press. How were the two experiences similar and different? And is your decision to publish with indie presses a deliberate one?

Indie presses were one of my first loves when I started reading and writing nonfiction. I loved finding unique and obscure books; it was inspiring to see other women writers publishing work about their lives. SF/LD and Coffee House were both incredible to work with—I got to have say on the titles, the covers, the publicity outreach. With SF/LD, Elizabeth Ellen (the editor & publisher there), would do DIY book tours—she’d rent a van and we’d tour around with other women writers, which was an incredible experience. I’m sure I will continue to publish with indie publishers as long as I’m writing.

If you had the whole first book experience to do over again, is there anything you’d do differently?

No way! I think my life has played out exactly as it should, and if I changed one thing, I might not be where I am today, and I’m really loving my life lately.

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Enter to win a copy of Chloe Caldwell’s  I’ll Tell You in Person by signing up for my newsletter. Already joined up? Then you’re already entered. Good luck!

Photo by Anna Ty Bergman