Category: Interviews

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

February’s featured author is Julia Scheeres, author of Jesus Land — a searing memoir that tells the story of Julia and her adopted black brother David, both of who were not only taunted by racist peers at school but abused and neglected by their religious, punitive parents at home.

As I mentioned before, the book takes a fascinating and disturbingly close look at key social issues that still plague us today: racism, sexual assault, and child abuse carried out in the name of god, both in the quiet secrecy of family homes and the formalized settings of religious institutions.

Julia more recently wrote A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown — another page-turner that tells the story of why close to a thousand people followed a religious leader — despite his descent into alcohol and drug abuse and psychosis — to end up committing “revolutionary suicide” in the 70 (my microreview here).

In this interview, Julia talks about why she decided at long last to tell her story, how both nonfiction and fiction can address life’s great questions, and what we must do to fight bigotry and injustice, especially in today’s political climate.

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Siel: Having been brought up by very religious and punitive parents myself, reading your memoir Jesus Land was an extremely personal and visceral — even cathartic — experience for me. I was awestruck by your decision to write about your experiences with such candor and detail — especially because I have the opposite inclinations as a writer. I tend to resist writing about my formative years altogether, and even when I write about my experiences, I’m driven to heavily fictionalize them.

Are we just wired differently, or did your willingness / desire to write about these experiences change as you gained more time and distance from them? To put my question more briefly: What compelled you to write this memoir? Because I’m very glad you did.

Julia: That’s a sorry coincidence – as in, I’m sorry. I bet a whole rash of writers emerge from such circumstances. What better childhood than one lived in constant fear of supernatural forces and one’s paddle-swinging parents to foment a writer? Most writers spend their lifetimes obsessing over and reshaping the traumas of their youth. For many, it’s the strife of our formative years that compels us to become writers.

Had I lived my experiences alone, I probably would have been content writing thinly veiled autobiographical fiction. But because I witnessed my brother David – who was, as you know, adopted and black – suffer greatly at the hands of these Bible verse-belching believers, I wanted to create a record of his life. A testament of sorts. What drove me was a need to “set the record straight,” so to speak. Thus I did not change the names of the adults in Jesus Land because I thought that the adults abusing children in the name of God – in my home and at the “Christian therapeutic boarding school” we were sent to – should be held accountable for their actions.

I’m guessing that after the publication of Jesus Land, you were inundated with emotional, sometimes even desperate emails and letters from people who’d gone through similar experiences. Some of my friends who’ve written memoirs that deal with heavy topics (e.g. childhood sexual abuse) have mentioned the difficulty of responding to these readers with kindness while simultaneously managing their own time and emotional needs by keeping a professional distance. Do you have any advice or strategies for other memoir writers who are seeking to find this balance?

Indeed, the amount of reader mail was overwhelming at the beginning! LONGGG emails detailing years of the writer’s personal problems and challenges. I didn’t expect that. At first I tried to respond to each one, but then got into an endless back-and-forths with readers and answering email became a full-time job. Finally I put a note on my website’s homepage thanking readers for reading Jesus Land and letting them know that, as a full-time writer and mom to two young kids -– I simply don’t have time to respond to every message, although I do read them all. That seems to have done the trick.

But I do still get several messages about Jesus Land a week, 12 years after publication. It humbles me that my book touched such a deep nerve with some readers. One reader told me she finished the book and had a “tremendous urge” to embrace my brother David – that really moved me. That’s why I wrote the book – so there’d be a record of his life and struggles. I felt vindicated when I read that.

After Jesus Land, you wrote A Thousand Lives, which tells the story of the Jonestown massacre — another riveting true tale that explores issues of religion, race, and abuse. Which was easier for you to write, your own memoir or the third-person story?

Emotionally, my memoir was MUCH harder to write. Although the Jonestown story had tough elements – such as the fact that 1/3 of the murdered residents were minors – it wasn’t my life I was writing about. It was more of a journalistic challenge than a personal one. It took me a full year to read through the 50,000 pages of FBI files and figure out how to structure the book.

In your introduction to A Thousand Lives, you write this: “I believe that true stories are more powerful, in a meaningful, existential way, than made up ones.” As a fiction writer myself, I have to ask: Do you still believe this statement, six years after its publication? Also, what happened to the novel you were working on before you took up A Thousand Lives?

Ha ha. You caught me. Okay. Funny thing: I’ve gone back to writing fiction now, although a different book than on the one I was working on when I started “A Thousand Lives.” I needed to take a break from sad stories and write a book that ended on an upbeat note. It’s hella fun to make shit up. I do think nonfiction has that “wow-this-really-happened” element that fiction lacks. But I think fiction can address life’s great questions just as eloquently, and in certain situations, perhaps more so, than creative nonfiction.

Reading A Thousand Lives — with its focus on Jim Jones, a monomaniacal, uncontrollable, and erratic leader who led hundreds of people to their untimely demise through lies and psychological warfare — was quite the scary experience, post Trump’s election to the presidency. You’re an author who has looked deeply at the factors that allow someone like Jim Jones rise to power. I realize this is a big question, but what suggestions do you have for exposing deception, fighting tyrants, and retaining our grip on reality?

That’s a YUGE question. A lot of what went wrong in Jones’ church, Peoples Temple, happened because people ignored that gut feeling that something wasn’t right and didn’t speak out. And once he had them trapped in the middle of jungle, it was too late. They were doomed.

I live in the bubble that is Berkeley, CA, where everyone I know is a progressive liberal like I am. I’m glad to see the push-back after Trump’s election — the marches and protests against his parade of bigotry and untruths. I think we need to continue to raise our voices and be LOUD and unyielding. I’m raising my two daughters to be outspoken advocates for justice – in fact they marched in a Black Lives Matter march when the older was 4 and the younger still an infant. The beauty of social media is that we can find like-minded people and organize and keep resisting. And as writers, to use our talent to expose bigotry and injustice wherever we find it.

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

January’s featured author is Clancy Martin, author of two novels including How to Sell, a fast-paced, entertaining tale of deception — both of others and of the self — peppered with philosophical ideas that’ll make you think about life and desire and ambition.

Clancy more recently wrote a novel called Bad Sex — also a fantastic read (an excerpt is in Vice). As a professor of philosophy, he’s also authored a number of philosophical books. Unrelatedly, he’s been to jail seven times, once for rolling through a stop sign!

In this interview, Clancy talks about how he turned memoir into fiction, how his writing changed after getting sober, and what books of philosophy he recommends for aspiring novelists.

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Siel: One of the things I love most about How to Sell is the deadpan, flat feel of the dialogue. It’s so unique — How did you arrive at this tone? Are there other books and authors that informed or influenced your voice in this book?

The tone was certainly influenced, I hope, by my attempt to write like some of my heroes at the time: Camus, Carver, Dostoevsky, Renata Adler. I love clean, unembellished prose. It started out much more flowery, and then I cut, cut, cut it down, with the help of Diane Williams and some other friends.

At a reading at Book Soup, you mentioned that you initially wrote Bad Sex as a memoir — then decided to fictionalize it, changing the protagonist from a man to a woman. Considering that the book is about an extramarital affair — Did the rewriting process bring you any interesting revelations about the similarities or differences between men and women’s psychologies and desires?

I think I may have learned, through reflecting for a long time on the psychology of one of the heroes in that book (Edouard), that a love relationship that is built on a lot of lying probably includes lying going on in both directions. That is, Brett, my female hero, thinks she tells all the lies and Edouard really doesn’t lie to her nearly as much—and for a long time, writing and rewriting the book, I had the same view of Edouard. But then I realized that no, he was lying just as much as she was, but she really needed to believe his lies. Brett is one of those very honest liars. She believes in the importance of truth and knows she’s betraying it and herself. Edouard doesn’t care about truth. It’s at best an instrumental good for him.

In addition to a lot of sex, there’s a lot of drinking in Bad Sex. I think, though, that you wrote this book after quitting drinking yourself. I’m guessing that going alcohol-free probably changed your day-to-day lifestyle — but I’m wondering, has it changed your writing? Do you see a stylistic difference between your pre and post sobriety writing?

I do, yes: it is much harder for me to write now that I don’t drink. I didn’t write while drinking—well, I did, but none of it was ever any good. But there was something about a hangover that made me very fluent and creative, in the old fashioned sense of the word creative, inspired I suppose. Now, sober, I have to work harder. Writing is harder when I’m sober; but life, I’m grateful to say, is a bit easier.

On top of writing great novels, you also teach philosophy — and write books of essays (Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love) and edit anthologies (The Philosophy of Deception) in that capacity. The topics of those nonfiction books, though, seem related to the themes you explore in your novels. How would you say the two inform each other?

For me, good writing always addresses philosophical worries. So if I’m struggling with some philosophical problem—like deception, in the past, or love, or more recently the role of emotion in everyday life, and the notion of duty—it naturally comes through in my fiction. I don’t think you “solve” philosophical problems in fiction, but then I’m not sure one can solve most philosophical problems in the rational way that we hope to solve them. Fiction is very good at exploring the nuances of many philosophical problems. Everything is more complicated than it appears. Fiction is good at showing that.

What work of philosophy would you most recommend to an aspiring fiction writer?

What an interesting question. It would very much depend on the writer, I think. For me, when I hadn’t published much or anything yet, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were very helpful, as was Kant’s Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics, as were the essays of Camus and De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. But if you have to pick one book of philosophy that really might help, I think Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard. Also, more importantly, read Basho’s . I also think Renata Adler’s work can’t be recommended enough, and if you want a great book of short stories about serious Buddhist philosophy, read Amie Barrodale’s (2016) You Are Having a Good Time (full disclosure: I am married to Amie).

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

December’s featured author is Aimee Bender, author of five books including The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, a short story collection stories unafraid to meld the real with the impossible, the grotesque with the funny, the sacred with the profane.

Aimee’s other books are An Invisible Sign of My Own, Willful Creatures, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and The Color Master. She teaches creative writing at University of Southern California, my grad school alma mater.

In this interview Aimee talks about writing without a plan, giving writerly advice, and eating cake on book tour.

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Siel: At a writing conference speech five or so years back, I remember you saying you’d decided to shelve a novel a few hundred pages long because it simply wasn’t working. For those of us who have also shelved writing projects — and may shelve more in the future — Do you have any tips or rituals or practices for setting a work aside and moving on to something new? I guess I’m asking about ways writers can come to some sense of closure for works that won’t go out into the larger world —

Aimee: What’s kind of reassuring is that the next novel I wrote ended up using a lot of that material— not directly, but in new ways. The work is like matter, it cannot be wasted. It just pushes you forward to the next thing. So, just write what you feel like writing. We are not so linear— the work resurfaces and resurfaces and so the drawer is really only a waystation.

How do you move between working on short stories and novels? Do you write both simultaneously, or work more on a project basis?

Simultaneously! I’m all about jumping around. Why not?

You’ve said in the past you tend to write without a plan. I’m envious and in admiration of this ability of yours — and also find that free-and-loose sounding writing process difficult to wrap my head around, because my own writing tends not to “go anywhere” without a plan. Is there any point in your writing process where you do sit down specifically to outline a story arc or create deliberate structure — or does all of that happen automatically for you in the process of writing the draft?

Thanks— it’s kind of painful as it happens but it also is the only way that works for me. It means A LOT of stuff never gets used. A lot of wandering. If you return to those pages that ‘go nowhere’ and you reread them, I would bet some cash that there are inroads to other parts in there that need slowing down and development and would begin to nudge you toward story. Jay Gummerman said it such a great way; “There is structure in nature”— meaning, there is structure inherent in your mind if you give it the room to explore. I really believe it.

As a professor at USC, what pieces of advice do you find yourself give most frequently to students? Do you adhere to them yourself?

Play around. Try stuff out. Don’t think too much. I very much try to do these things myself but I also believe we teach what we most need to hear and rehear.

Since my own forthcoming book is cakey, I have to ask: How much lemon cake did you eat during the launch of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake?

Cakey! Great. I ate a lot. And, I heard a lot about how you’re actually not supposed to put chocolate with lemon. Who knew? Not me. It tastes good to me.
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Every month, I interview an author I admire on his literary firsts.

November’s featured author is Elizabeth Ellen, author of Fast Machine (Short Flight/Long Drive), a riveting short story collection that takes a hard, unapologetic look at the complexities of womanhood.

Elizabeth is also the author of the chapbook Before You She Was a Pit Bull (Future Tense) and the poetry collection Bridget Fonda (Dostoyevsky Wannabe). She co-edits the lit zine Hobart and oversees Hobart’s book division, Short Flight/Long Drive Books.

In this interview Elizabeth talks about writing about life while it’s happening, publishing through her own indie press, dealing with the brutalities of internet culture, and much more.

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Siel: What I love most about your stories in Fast Machine is their sense of immediacy — the feeling of going through a visceral, intense, real-life experience. Do you think some of that immediacy comes from the fact that many of your stories hinge on experiences you’ve personally been through? How long do you wait (if at all) before writing about a real-life experience?

Elizabeth: Funny you should ask, I’ve been going through a pretty traumatic experience the last few days and I’ve found myself writing about it as it’s happening.

I used to hate Arthur Miller because there was the rumor, maybe confirmed, that he took notes on Marilyn while married to her (she allegedly found them) and I hated him for that because I loved Marilyn unconditionally and I imagined that finding those notes written about her must have been so painful for her. She must have felt so betrayed.

But as a writer, the habit of writing has become so therapeutic for me, it’s hard to deal with trauma without writing about it. And/or/also the habit of writing stuff down is just that: habitual, an addiction of sorts. Even when concerning the more mundane. But it’s definitely helped me the last few days. If only in that it is an activity, something to do other than simply worry. As well as a tool to try to make sense of life, and of oneself.

You’ve been dubbed an Alt Lit author, on Wikipedia on elsewhere. Is it a description you embrace?

I neither embrace nor reject the ‘alt lit’ label, though I think it’s a bit outdated as well as maybe irrelevant and just plain meaningless as a descriptor.

I’m curious about your decision to remain unagented, opting instead to publish your books with either your own press or with other small presses. Why have you made — and continue to make — this choice?

To be honest, it is a choice I feel I have both made and been forced into. I think on the one hand, I love being independent and publishing my writing through SF/LD because it means absolute creative freedom. On the other hand, absolute creative freedom can be scary. An editor can be a good thing. A good tool. Since I don’t have an editor I have to rely on myself. And it can be hard to separate yourself as a writer and then as an editor or to be objective. As a consequence, I know my writing is much messier, not as tight, more raw, and I tend to like messier, raw writing to read myself, but I also could probably stand to be reigned in a bit. I don’t know. We’ll see!

A couple years ago, you found yourself at the center of a controversy in the literary world. These types of controversies seem to be getting more and more common in the age of Twitter — There’s a growing list of writers who’ve been suddenly, publicly, and repeatedly castigated on the internet for (often private, long-ago) things they’ve said or done. Do you have any ideas for how we might make the internet a less punitive space for writers with a public profile? And do you have any advice for other writers who might one day unwittingly find themselves in the middle of a sudden controversy?

Well, I think what’s happening with writers on the internet is indicative of what’s happening in the culture in general. There seems to be little to no room for debate or conversation, particularly about the ‘grey areas’ of topics, and an addiction to deciding a villain and a victim in every dispute or disagreement, rather than in seeing every individual as a complex person, or rather than in viewing the subject being discussed for what it is instead of viewing the person speaking as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ There is the ‘one voice’ mentality, the ‘you’re either with us or against us,’ and questions of any sort are viewed as “against us.”

I was raised in the hippie days of ‘question everything’, which isn’t so popular or welcomed currently. But hey, I was watching a Bob Dylan documentary (the Scorsese one) last night and in it he says something like, “I was like an outsider, Anyway. I came to town an outsider. and in a lot of ways I was still more outsider than I ever was, really. They were trying to make me an insider to some kind of trip they were on. I don’t think so.” And that pretty much sums up how I feel about the current culture and the internet and the writing world; all of it.

How does your work as an editor and publisher for both Hobart and Short Flight/Long Drive Books affect your work as a writer?

My work as an editor has saved me in that I sometimes think, particularly in these last two trying years, to be ultra-DRAMATIC, if it wasn’t for my friendships and editorial relationships with Chelsea Martin and Chloe Caldwell and Mira Gonzalez, I don’t know that I’d have the determination to keep writing. Or to keep publishing my own work.

That’s ultra-dramatic, as I acknowledged, but they do inspire me, their friendships and their writing, to keep chugging along myself. I don’t think that’s really what you were asking, but it’s what’s most important to me, and so that’s my answer. Thank you, Siel.
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