Tag: race

Being a writing ally

For a variety of reasons, I’m thinking a lot lately about oppression, privilege, conscious and unconscious bias.

I’m a white bisexual hearing currently-mostly-physically-able woman. I am in a relationship of nearly 20 years with another woman. I am a class-jumper, currently living well above the economic level I was born into. I am over-educated for my birth class. I am under-educated for the class in which I currently live. I am an artist, and I have also been a corporate executive. I have what most folks consider “professional” artistic accomplishments, but in some parts of the writing community I lack professional credibility because I don’t publish “enough.”

That’s just a list off the top of my head, and I offer it because although there are many ways to discriminate against me, and many ways in which I experience bias or oppression, I know that being white, well-educated and hearing are the things that will always save my ass. They are my mobility. They are my access to opportunity, to choice, and to the culture itself.

The benefits of being white are obvious. And if they aren’t, please go get educated about it, okay? Start here and here. And order a copy of Uprooting Racism by Paul Kivel.

It helps that I’m smart, but it’s the education that showed me that there were other layers of the world beyond the ones I knew, and gave me the tools to get there. I absolutely got the first part of that education because my parents and I are white — my mom took a job as librarian at a private grammar school and stuck it out for 12 years so I could get an education we couldn’t otherwise have afforded. I am certain she would not have been given that job if she were black. I got the second part of that education — on scholarship at an exclusive prep school — as a direct result of the first.

And none of us who are hearing should underestimate the power of that: there are still way too many deaf kids in America who are denied access to native language as babies, who don’t get the same chance I did to pattern and process language in infancy. Language is the door to participation in our culture — not having the brain’s language system fully primed in infancy makes English harder to learn and is a huge obstacle to participating in the culture.

I’ve been the different one. I’ve been one of only two white kids in a black church. I’ve been the kid who would have killed for a pair of LL Bean boots like the ones the kids in my prep school wore in the snow, when I was wearing plastic shoes because I was too ashamed to tell anyone that I couldn’t afford anything better. I’ve been the only hearing person in a room of Deaf people. But I didn’t have to have those experiences — even the class experience at prep school — unless I chose to, and I don’t have to have them every day. That’s privilege, baby.

I learned the concept of being an ally pretty young, because my parents were allies to black activists in the 60’s. I didn’t always understand why people were angry about a particular experience, but it was pretty clear they were angry — and my most valuable lesson from that was being told that assuming that other people’s experiences were true for them was almost always a pretty good starting point if I actually wanted to have a conversation.

The lesson was hugely reinforced for me when I studied American Sign Language and Deaf culture, and my Deaf and hearing teachers made it very clear to me the myriad ways in which I benefit from being a hearing person in a hearing culture. Because I could “experience” that for myself if I wished. If I went out for lunch with a Deaf friend, I could allow the hearing server to believe I was deaf too simply by refusing to use spoken English with him. And I had to be slapped around the first time I did it without permission from my Deaf friend: she had to point out to me that “playing deaf” was a privilege that she didn’t really appreciate my exercising in her company, any more than she appreciated my using voice without including her by also signing what I was saying.

Okay, so where am I going with all this? To writing.

Because this week I read this story, and the firestorm of conversation (132 comments as of this writing) it sparked. Go read it, see what you think.

Are you back? (I’ll bet it took a while…)

Same old thing, no? People refusing to believe that other people’s experiences are true for them. People (on all sides of the issues) stating opinions as if they were universal facts, and presenting experiences as if being true for one person means they must be true for everyone. People trying to listen. People not listening at all. People getting defensive. People speaking their own truth as best they can.

These conversations are hard for me because there is no way to be seamlessly rational and perfectly non-racist. I’m used to thinking of “being right” as something I can achieve if I work hard enough (that’s another privilege). But there is no way I can be “right” in these conversations — because if I start from the place that people’s experience is true for them, then, well, it’s true for them. It’s hard not to get defensive. To just listen. But what am I going to do, argue with someone about her own experience? After all the things I’ve seen for myself about denial of experience?

Denial of experience is one of the most effective techniques humans use against one another. Oh, they didn’t really mean that (and so it didn’t really happen and aren’t you a jerk for making them feel so guilty!). Oh, you’re overreacting (and so it didn’t really happen and aren’t you just being a big baby and making your feelings so important!). Oh, you probably heard / saw / took it wrong (and so it didn’t really happen and aren’t you stupid for making such a fuss?) And so on.

And there are other ways to fuck up these conversations. Here is a very good list that I learned a lot from.

Because the thing about personal truth is that it’s not all equal. Of course your experience is as real as mine, of course it’s as “valid” in the fuzzy way we so often use that term. But some truths are bigger than personal. Racism is real in the world. It’s a systemic abuse that happens to entire groups of human beings (as do other kinds of oppression). It’s not just “your perspective” versus mine. It’s not strictly a matter of opinion. Racism, sexism, heterosexism and the thousand other ways we have of “othering” people reduce us all to walking cliches, and that’s how we end up treating each other, and that just makes the conversation harder.

How does this fit into writing? Well, as a white writer, I have the privilege of writing about characters of my race without having to explain how their experience of race affects them. I can describe a character strictly by hair and eye color if she’s white — everyone will “get it.” If she’s not white, then I can find a lovely food- or nature-based metaphor (coffee, candy and trees are favorite choices) to describe her skin color, which I must do immediately upon introducing her so that everyone knows she is not white…

/irony off/

Okay, so here is my sole piece of advice to white writers. Do not ever ever ever accept a “human” cliche in your own work (you shouldn’t accept cliche of any kind, but you’ll have to figure out the non-harmful applications of this principle for yourself). Unexamined cliches about any “kind of people” are the worst kind of bad writing. They hurt people directly (it can feel like a slap in the face to read it), and indirectly (you have just reinforced the stereotype, and contributed your drop of thoughtlessness to the ocean that other people have to swim in).

If you are going to write about characters who are not white, then please make these characters as particular, as emotionally complex, and as real as your white characters. Please do not make them white people in non-white skin. Please use your relationship skills to seek out people of color and listen to their experiences. This will help you in your work (and I’m not trying to suggest you should be treating people as if they were simply research projects… but if you ask people respectfully for their help, many times you will get it). Please use your reading skills to read stories by people of color about people of color. This will help you in your work. Please use your imagination to apply your experiences of being stereotyped or mistreated because of class or sexual orientation or just because some other white person was being an asshole. These experiences will help you in your work.

Does this mean you can never write about a black inner city drug-dealing kid? Well, no. You can write whatever you want. You just have to be prepared for people to respond to what you write — not to your intentions or your personal history of working for social reform. You have to accept that you may never “get it right.” But honestly, there are lots of other things about being human that you probably aren’t going to get right either, in your fiction or in your life. If that stops any of us from trying, then we are all the poorer for it.

A lot of white writers throw up their hands at some point and decide to just write about white people all the time, because it’s not such a minefield. And that’s true. And that’s your privilege.

But if you choose to, you can be an ally to writers of color and readers of color by being the best writer you can. By making the black inner-city drug-dealing kid so real, so true, that she becomes a living, breathing human on the page. Make her human, and make sure that her humanity reflects to the best of your ability her experience of being a black inner-city drug-dealing kid in a white world. Don’t apologize for her. Don’t condescend. Get inside her as much as you can and show us who she is. You can do this, if you choose, with any character who isn’t part of the dominant culture.

It’s harder when characters aren’t like you. You’re a lot more likely to get it wrong. The internet will sometimes fall on you (as I expect it will fall on me if I have screwed up in my part of this ongoing conversation). Dust yourself off and keep going.

Here’s a story that I tell in an essay that Nicola and I wrote together, forthcoming in Queer Universes. It’s about one of the most important writing lessons I ever learned, at the Clarion Writer’s Workshop.

Samuel R. Delany was one of our teachers. He was fairly impatient with us — a bunch of wide-eyed, white, mostly middle-class not-exactly-kids, many of whom who saw writing as the necessary process to the goal of getting published. One day he went off on us for having worldviews the size of grapes, for imagining everyone in our futures as white, middle-class and polite (except for the dangerous characters, who were allowed to be gay or black as long as they died or were otherwise redeemed). Seriously, this is what many of us were writing. I remember one student in the workshop who wrote a lesbian character that looked and talked exactly like Nicola, because she was the only out lesbian he had ever met. And he didn’™t understand why she might be offended. But Delany did, and he challenged us to do better. To take (although he did not put it this way) some fucking risks.
 
Red flag to a bull. I offered one of my stories up for dissection. Tell me what assumptions I’™m making, I said, and he gave me an impassive look and answered, Are you sure you want me to do that?
 
An hour later I was in tears, mortified by my assumptions and even more so by my utter lack of awareness of them. Here I was, with all my liberal childhood credentials, my race and class consciousness, my experiences of poverty and powerlessness, my carefully-forged autonomous identity, my hip new still-emerging bisexuality, revealed as fatuous — I may have been some of those things as a person, but as a writer I was straight, white, resolutely privileged, protective of the cultural status quo, and embarrassingly safe.
 
It’™s one of the most miserable experiences I’™ve had as a writer, and I’™ll always be grateful for it. I have no idea if Chip would approve of my work now, but he would certainly find it different.
 
— from “War Machine, Time Machine” by Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge

Do I think that writers have a responsibility to write about race or queerness or disability? Nope. To me, writing “about issues” is the kiss of death to most fiction — as opposed to writing about human beings and what happens to them, how they live and love and hope and fear and die. To me, a writer’s responsibility is to create those human beings as truly as possible. To avoid the lazy and sometimes harmful choices of cliche.

Because it’s never “just fiction,” you know? If we have any skill at all as writers, then our words get into other people’s minds and hearts. We touch each other with our words. We create, even if only for a second, a real experience for other people (and here we go back to mirror neurons). And that matters to them, and I think it’s better for everyone if it matters to the writers too.

And if you’re interested in more about this, here are some conversations with readers of Solitaire about race (resurrected from Virtual Pint):

(in chronological order):
Stereotyping and writing questions — Don’t exoticize characters.
Not just a white world — Don’t hang “race tags” on characters.
Multicultural writing — Why I don’t get a cookie.

Multicultural writing

I was amazed at your answer to the last question. I knew that Solitaire is a multicultural book from the moment I read that it took place in Asia and that the protagonist’s surname was Segura , but I missed most of the racial inferences. Most writers use epithets when they have minority characters (which I dislike), and I’m glad that you don’t. Now –” after reading all the details of the characters’ ethnicities –” I think I’m going to go back through Solitaire and try to find the clues I must have missed. I knew that Jackal was Spanish, but I missed the Italian part (but now I realize Donatella is an Italian name). I knew Tiger was Asian from the way you described him and from his last name, although I thought he was Japanese or Southeast Asian. I must say, you’re open-minded for portraying an Asian male so sexually (and attractively). And I knew Snow was Scandinavian, also from the description.

I do have a few questions. How did you become so open-minded about things? Were you raised that way, or did you become more accepting over time?

Anyway, I hope your week is going well. Thanks again.

Sirene

I find it challenging to write multiculturally, and am not overly impressed by my own skills in this regard. I believe that most white writers can and should do better. When writers of a dominant culture start patting themselves on the back for getting a few non-dominant characters in the mix, it’s just a bit too close to straight married men who want the world to call them heroes because they routinely do 50% of the housework. No one would ever praise a woman for doing her 50% of the housework, or tell her husband that he must feel “so lucky that your wife helps out so much!” Same theory applies here. I should recognize in my work, as in all other parts of my life, that not everyone looks, feels, thinks, believes, behaves, dreams, fears, loves, or experiences their everyday world like me. Not because I’m a hero, just because it’s my 50% of this work. I appreciate your approval, and I’m not trying to imply that you shouldn’t like this aspect of my work (or me, grin)–”quite the contrary! But I don’t want to start falling in love with myself about it either.

Part of the challenge of writing multiculturally is my own hang-up as a writer: I dislike reading character descriptions that are so obviously only there to satisfy the “rule” that the reader has to know what everyone looks like. (“Oh, no,” she said, brushing her golden hair back from her forehead…) Ick. And we’ve talked before about white writers describing white characters in particular terms without any reference to skin color, while characters who are not white are described first and foremost as whatever sort of not-white they are. I don’t have enough experience with a spectrum of literature by African-American writers, or writers from other countries, to make the same generalization, although I’ve understood from my African-American friends and teachers that skin color is an important (although not always openly-discussed) differentiation in African-American culture. Maybe someone here knows more about this than I do?

Sometimes the kind of obvious description I mention above is necessary: sometimes the most important thing about a character is skin color (for example, in the movie Beverly Hills Cop, when Eddie Murphy walks into the redneck bar, the point is that it’s full of white people). But that’s context. If hanging a race/culture/ethnicity tag on someone isn’t right for the context, then it’s just a lazy choice.

But since physical character description is necessary sometimes, that’s where skill comes in. I wanted to make the point in Solitaire that not everyone was white, but I also didn’t want it to be a big deal (from Jackal’s perspective) that she lived in a diverse society. I thought some of my choices were pretty clumsy, and some were okay. And you caught one of my mistakes. Tiger is indeed supposed to be Chinese, but I couldn’t find a family name for him that I liked (character names are important to me, and I sometimes really struggle with them). So I plugged in “Amomato” and promised myself I’d come back and fix it…and never did. Oops (laughing). Maybe he was an orphan adopted by a forward-thinking Filipino family, or something.

Anyway, you probably didn’t miss that many clues, because there aren’t that many, because I was trying hard not to make too many lame choices (grin). And I’m still trying in the new book.

I don’t know how open-minded I am: like everything else, it depends. I’ve done a fair amount of work to overcome the effects of being raised in a racist culture, and I was blessed with parents who fought against racism in all kinds of ways during my childhood. They were civil rights activists in the 60’s, and were part of an “underground railroad” of sorts that helped Black activists get out of town (sometimes the country) when things were getting too hot. There were still race riots in the streets of Tampa in 1968 and 1969, the police force was actively and aggressively racist, and things were terribly hard for people who weren’t white.

In 1970, one of the leaders of a Black youth movement in Tampa was arrested on a marijuana charge. He and his wife, who was white, lived with us for a few months during their trial (five people in a 700-square foot house, with the two of them sleeping on the living room floor, so as you might imagine we all got to know each other better). He spoke several languages, and taught me to play chess, and let me figure out for myself whether what was happening to them was right or not.

I went with my parents to court during the trial, and watched the police officer at the courtroom door “search” my mother’s purse by dumping it out on the table, or the floor, every time she went in or out; all the Black women were searched this way, and no other white woman was. Our phone was tapped. Uniformed officers showed up at our house for no particular reason. We were followed by patrol cars and unmarked cars (I was even followed as I walked to school one day, dangerous 10-year-old that I was). It was a little taste of what Black and Hispanic folks in Tampa lived through every day in a thousand different ways. It sucks that it happened, and is still happening to people everywhere, everyday; and it also taught me that racism is real, which was a very good thing for me to learn. I remember going to boarding school and describing some of this to my peers, many of whom flatly asserted that I was lying, that those kinds of things couldn’t happen in America. Go figure.

Because I was an only child, I spent a lot of time in adult company. My parents rarely excluded me from adult events as long as I was respectful and didn’t act up. Our parties were full of people of all colors, all ages, poor and wealthy, people who drank and those who used drugs, gay and lesbian people as well as straight people. I met bikers, Viet Nam veterans, low-level Mafia soldiers, lawyers, priests, artists, people with illness or disability. There was a lot of difference in the room when I was growing up. Along with loving me unconditionally and making sure I got an education way above my class expectations, it is the most powerful thing my parents did for me. Those three things built my foundations in ways that I’m still only just figuring out.

And does this make me Wonder White Woman? Absolutely not. I still struggle with racist assumptions and fears. I find it frustrating and shaming, but there you go, this is where we live and this is what it does to all of us.

I am learning these lessons again, in different context, in my study of American Sign Language and Deaf culture: much of our learning centers on the assumptions that hearing people make about deaf people, and the ways that deaf people can be oppressed by those assumptions. As part of that study, last year we read a book called Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, by Paul Kivel; I highly recommend it. It’s not a book that beats up white folks about individual racism; rather, it looks at how racism manifests in America’s legal, educational, social, economic and cultural systems, and how any of us can take individual steps to push back against the various ways that this oppression has been institutionalized. It’s about ways in which white people can become allies to people of color. Some of the students in my class wondered why we were reading a book on racism to learn more about the experience of deaf people in America; by the end, it was pretty clear.

Uprooting Racism put me strongly in mind of another excellent book that explores systemic oppression from a different perspective: How To Suppress Women’s Writing, by Joanna Russ. Both great books.

And I’m sorry as hell that there’s any need for them. Sometimes I wonder why we’re all so damn hard on each other all the time. Socialization, enculturation, the slow accretion of assumption that congeals into Truth About The World and Everyone In It…. and whether we embrace it or fight against it, it still happens. Creating a worldview is a human thing, it’s what we do and I wouldn’t change it. I just wonder why so many people feel that there can be only one?

Yeeks, if we were drinking real beer instead of virtual pints, no doubt people would be propping me up and making go-home noises about now. And so I will. Cheers.

Not just a white world

Hello Kelley,

I wanted to let you know that I have read your novel Solitaire and loved it. I also wanted to let you know that I never would have, if Nicola had not been so effusive in her praise of it…I absolutely had to purchase it and am thoroughly pleased that I did so…it was an EXCELLENT read! It was vivid, alive, intriguing, captivating. I loved the concept, the depiction of the characters, I loved the flow of dialogue, the description of all that was tangible and not…absolutely lovely.

I have a question though, and I hope you don’t think it narrow-minded; it is not meant that way at all, I am truly curious. And perhaps someone has already asked this question, forgive me if that is the case…but: In light of the fact that Hong Kong is, shall we say, a major background, in the story, are Jackal, Snow (who sounds stunning) and the other characters Asian? I ask this because I don’t wish to fall into the trap of assuming all characters, in any book, are Caucasian.

Thanks so much for this. 🙂

Ciao.

~Rebecca~

Well, neither do I (smile), which is why I tried not to make whiteness the default value in the book. I visualize Ko as a true multinational corporation, a mix of people of many backgrounds bound together by the corporate metaculture. I think if you look again, you’ll find that Jackal is half Italian and half Spanish; Turtle and Jane are Hispanic; Bear, Crichton and Khofi Andabe are Black (I think of Bear as Afro-Caribbean and Andabe as African, but there are no specific clues to that). Tiger and Chao are Chinese. Estar is her deliberately indefinable self. Snow is as purely Norwegian as someone growing up in Asia can be. Scully is pretty generic Anglo-mutt. Neill is Australian, although you’d never know it from the book.

It doesn’t seem narrow-minded to me to question whether a white writer has considered that not everyone (and especially not everyone of importance) in her story is white. Quite the opposite. I think it’s good to read beyond majority-culture assumptions (all characters are white, straight, middle-class, Christian, physically unlimited, etc. unless otherwise labeled to identify their “difference from the norm”). And it’s good to write beyond these assumptions. But it’s not enough for a writer to go through her manuscript and hang a race tag on everyone. How stupid it would be to write a paragraph in the opening of Solitaire about Jackal looking for her web, “a racially diverse group of peers with a variety of cultural perspectives,” or some such crap. Especially if hanging the race tag is all the writer does. Creating characters who are essentially mainstream white folks in terms of worldview, experience, cultural assumptions and behavior, and then painting their skin a different color, does nothing to recognize diversity. It’s just bad writing. It takes more work to make people actually different from one another, particular in ways that reflect something about where they came from as well as who they are individually.

I’m not completely happy with the job I did in Solitaire in this regard, but the errors are those of execution, not imagination. And one reason I chose Hong Kong as the background for Ko, and Al Iskandariyah ( Alexandria) as the seat of world government, is that the world is edging toward a rebalance of power, in my opinion. If the people of the world will get off our asses and do something to help Africa, and if China builds a few more cultural and long-term economic bridges with other nations, then I think in thirty years it’s not going to be only white western superpowers driving the global cultural and political agenda. I think that will be a very scary time for many white westerners.

I’m glad you enjoyed the book and were willing to take a chance on it. But honestly, what would you expect Nicola to say (grin)–””My sweetie wrote a book and it sucks, don’t buy it”?

Cheers.

Stereotyping and writing questions

Honestly, I’ve wanted to write to you since I finished Solitaire several months ago, back in August of 2003. My only excuses for not sending in a Virtual Pint comment immediately upon finishing your novel are procrastination…and a lack of anything worthwhile and meaningful to say.

Solitaire is definitely one of my top ten favorite books of all time. You created a believable world that seemed beautiful and peaceful, despite all of Jackal’s unfortunate circumstances.

I especially liked how you didn’t revert to stereotypes when describing and introducing your characters. As a female, and a racial minority, I admire writers that can look beyond differences in race, language, and sexuality to create characters that are actually realistic. Although the protagonist was a woman, she wasn’t a pushover and she wasn’t “masculine,” as some media characterizes women that have relationships with other women. Frankly, I’m quite sick of popular media that exoticizes people who aren’t straight, white, American, and Catholic. Even Snow, who seemed to be a very sweet, reticent young woman at first, didn’t turn out to be a typical female ditz. I admit that I was surprised when I realized that Jackal and Snow were actually lovers. I thought it provided an interesting twist to the book, because the two women were very different and yet compatible.

The male characters in the book showed how large the spectrum of human personality is –” Carlos was the comforting father, Neill was the businessman with a soft side, and Scully was immediately likable…like an older brother. And I can’t forget Tiger, who was, surprisingly, my favorite character in the book. You were able to build his character in a very short amount of time, which I thought was amazing. I mean, when I started reading the book, I could tell that he actually cared about Jackal and was a nice guy with a lot of weaknesses underneath all of the smirks and perversion. But I didn’t mind that you killed him off early –” because, in many books I enjoy, my favorite character dies.

Overall, I loved Solitaire and will be looking for your next book. I’m glad you aren’t doing a sequel, though, because you provided a good closure to the story. I’m also glad that I bought the hardcover edition, because I find its cover much more appealing than the paperback edition’s. The new cover is edgy, and certainly interesting, but I prefer the abstract beauty of the first.

Anyway, I’ve noticed that a lot of writers with websites don’t like to communicate with their readers (sadly). That’s why I was pleased when I discovered the Virtual Pint Index. There are a number of questions I’ve always wanted to ask a successful, published writer…so please, forgive me for the numerous questions that follow. I am quite young and naive, though I rarely admit it.

* When did you start writing, and when did you decide it would be your career (that is, if you even did ‘decide’ to become a professional writer)?

* How does it feel being a published writer, with a book that has sold well and received outstanding reviews?

* Do you have any advice for aspiring writers (such as myself) on finding a decent literary agent and publisher…or just writing in general?

* How long did it take you to finish Solitaire, and when and how did you get the idea for it?

* Do you write daily?

Well, thanks for reading this. It means a lot to me…and I wish you luck on everything you’re working on right now.

Sirene

Fasten your seat belt, because I’m going to answer all these questions….

But first, thanks for sharing your observations about the book. I particularly appreciate that you found the male characters varied and human. I’ve had some criticism that they’re weak, which perplexes me and makes me wonder if I’m revealing some wacky unconscious prejudice. That’s disturbing –” I prefer to be aware of my biases and express them with intention. But I didn’t think they were weak when I wrote them, and I still don’t. They’re just doing their best, like the rest of us. I wonder sometimes if what bothers some people is that, with the exception of Tiger, none of the men are overtly sexual, and with the exception of Neill, none of them are overtly powerful.

I’m also glad that you didn’t find the characters stereotypical or exoticized. I put conscious work into that; it’s way too easy for writers who are (even partial) members of a majority culture to forget that our assumptions about skin color, sexuality, etc. aren’t the default setting of humanity. I’ve seen so many books and stories by white writers in which all the white characters are just “people with blue eyes” while characters of color are “coffee-colored, slender African-American women” or “graceful Latino men with bedroom eyes.” Really, ick. I’ve done it myself (big ick). I’m working on improving. As a sociological aside, you know what’s really interesting? Being a white person in a group of white people and describing someone across the room by saying, “That white woman in the green dress.” People raise their eyebrows or look puzzled, and some become downright uncomfortable.

I began to learn this lesson as a human from my parents and their friends, but I didn’t begin to learn it as a writer until Samuel R. Delany taught me at Clarion. I disliked the experience, but it was worth it. Nicola also helps me pay attention to this aspect of my work, along with so many others (she’s expressed her thoughts on stereotyping in this essay).

There is nothing wrong with being naïve. It’s my experience that I learn a lot more when I cop to not knowing. I don’t understand why our culture values “knowing” over learning and teaching, but there you go, just one more thing that I don’t know (smile). Besides, knowing is the easy part: doing, now, that’s where the game gets interesting.

When did you start writing, and when did you decide it would be your career (that is, if you even did ‘decide’ to become a professional writer)?

I started writing poetry when I was about eight. A few years later I was fortunate to have teacher who was passionate about classic poetry forms, and taught me the structure, rhythms and rhymes of sonnets, haiku, cinquain, sijo, ballad… there may have even been villanelle in there, I don’t remember. She was the first person besides my parents who actively encouraged me.

And I read everything. My parents did without to buy me all the books I wanted, even trashy comic books, and I read them until they fell apart. The only book they ever withheld from me was a thriller about an incestuous, sadistic, psychotic, serial-killing family with torture and/or sex on just about every page. (I know this because I climbed a nine-foot bookshelf to pull it from its hiding place one afternoon, and was thoroughly grossed out for days afterward).

I wrote a couple of stories as a child, mostly imitations of whatever I was reading at the time. But I didn’t write prose with any serious commitment until I was in my mid-twenties. I went to Clarion at age 28, and published professionally for the first time at age 30.

I think it’s possible to be a professional writer without having, or even wanting, a writing career. To me, “professional” means a) being capable of work that professional markets will publish, and b) producing regularly, even if slowly. To me, “career” means not just that writing is my primary job, but also, and just as importantly, that I have a vision for my work, long-term goals, a definition of success that extends beyond “please god, let someone buy this story.” I was a professional when I wrote Solitaire, but writing wasn’t my career. It took me longer than I expected to decide that it should be, and to make that commitment.

How does it feel being a published writer, with a book that has sold well and received outstanding reviews?

I’m proud of all my short fiction, and of Solitaire. After more than 15 years of writing seriously, I see myself as an expert short story writer, and believe that I can become an expert novelist if I choose to do the work. Expert doesn’t mean the product is perfect, only that the results are conscious and shaped, rather than a splatter of hope, energy, desire held together by fledgling skills and a prayer, which is how I used to approach my work (and is to some extent how I approached Solitaire, at least the first few years that I worked on it). The hope, energy, desire are still there, but now the skills are driving the train. I like this way better. It’s exhilarating to sit down and know how to work. Some days are not so much fun, but I no longer have that creeping, acid fear at the back of my heart that I will never really be a writer. Working on the new novel is a little more fraught than writing stories, because I have so much more to learn about the structure and rhythms of novels; but I’m confident of my ability to learn these things consciously, to develop skill and craft so that I don’t just have to rely on talent. Talent’s not enough, nor is its baby sister, inspiration. In fact, part of the “career” choice I made is to stop caring about inspiration.

There are ways of being published that wouldn’t feel good to me at all. I won’t be specific, because some writers choose to take those paths and that’s fine –” it’s their choice, and I don’t see it as my place to be critical. I don’t think there’s “one true way” to be a published writer, but there are ways that are right for me. I think that developing one’s own definition of “career” includes making some of these decisions. I’m feeling good about my choices right now.

I’m delighted with the good reviews of Solitaire, and not nearly as gutted by the bad ones as I’d expected to be. The good review in the New York Times and the New York Times Notable Book nod are very good for the new edition and for the next phase of my career, as is the Borders Original Voices designation. The negative Publishers Weekly and Kirkus reviews probably hurt my sales, and certainly didn’t give my reputation as a novelist the glowing start I’d hoped for with booksellers and reviewers. Hardcover sales aren’t as good as I had hoped, and that could also be an obstacle for my next book if the major chains perceive that I don’t sell well. We’ll have to see how the trade paperback does.

Maybe you were just expecting me to say, “It feels great” (grin). And it does. But the reality of Solitaire is a mixed bag. That’s okay. It still feels great. There’s a big piece of my heart in the book, and all the skill I had at the time, and a huge amount of hope. Seeing it out in the world, knowing that it’s connecting with people, makes me feel like someone just plucked a cello string in my stomach, a deep, happy hum.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers (such as myself) on finding a decent literary agent and publisher…or just writing in general?

If you’ve read this far, then you know I probably do (laughing). One of the things I enjoy about the virtual pub is getting to be expansive in the way of that second or third round, when the day’s rough edges are smoothing and it’s fine to settle back in my chair and say Well, I might have a couple of ideas.

I’ve answered this question enough in other circumstances that I actually have something already written about it. I don’t know if it’s the kind of information you’re looking for, but start here. If this doesn’t do it, write me again with more specific questions and I will do my best to give you my opinion.

Please bear in mind that my opinions on writing and publishing work really well for me, but your mileage may vary.

How long did it take you to finish Solitaire, and when and how did you get the idea for it?

It took eight years, in fits and starts. Ideas came from all over the place. It was influenced by two stories I wrote at Clarion, Somewhere Down the Diamondback Road and an unpublished novella called Distance about a mother and daughter in a post-apocalyptic beach town. It was also influenced by my corporate jobs in Atlanta and Seattle, by music and television and other people’s books, by the things I liked and didn’t like about my life. I once had to throw out an entire year’s writing, somewhere around 15,000 words (if I remember correctly) because I had taken a wrong turn. That wouldn’t happen now; I have more skill. I despaired of ever finishing it, and sometimes I felt small and lazy because I wasn’t working faster, or working at all. But it’s a better book for having taken that time, and maybe if I’d rushed it I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you about all those lovely reviews. Who knows? I hope that for the new book I have enough experience to shorten the curve, that awareness and skill can substitute for just pounding away long enough to get somewhere…..

Do you write daily?

Yes, at the moment. I haven’t always, and I may not always. Some of the work is thinking, and that doesn’t always happen best in front of the computer. But I’m in a phase right now of showing up every day, putting my butt in the chair, and writing. Some days it’s just a job, and some days it’s a very great joy indeed.