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The Converse-Station: Emma Hudelson interviews Erin Khar

February 20, 2020
recovery, drugs

A note from Angela: Jen and I have been fans of Erin Khar for years, and we were thrilled when we were asked if we could share this interview. Erin’s book, Strung Out, is being published on February 25th and Emma Hedelson provides us with a window into Erin’s remarkable story. Enjoy this introduction to both Erin and Emma and after you finish reading, you can order the book here

Introduction by Emma Hudelson: 

At thirteen, I took my first gulp of liquor, kept gulping, and woke up in the hospital. If you’d asked me then, I would have told you it was just a little fun that had gotten out of control. But really, the escape of booze had seduced me completely. It promised disappearance, and eventually, it made me turn my back on a strong education and a promising career as a junior exhibitor equestrienne with a high-performing horse. By the end of high school, my list of disappearing acts included running away from home, getting blackout drunk every weekend, smoking pot daily, developing a cocaine addiction, and attempting suicide.

Therapists and psychiatrists couldn’t reach me. My mom, a single mom, tried her best, but she couldn’t contain me. She read guides like Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, which is a great book, but with only one chapter devoted to substance abuse. What my mom needed—what I needed—was a book like Erin Khar’s Strung Out, a memoir of addiction and recovery, written by a woman who had once been a girl like me—a girl who wanted to disappear.

I survived my adolescence, entered recovery, and went on to find a career as a writer and teacher. Eventually, even horses found me again. Today, I’m ten years sober and in graduate school. Most young women whose teen years look like mine aren’t so fortunate, and most don’t have a good model of successful recovery. Strung Out could be that missing model. None of the existing addiction memoirs address the intersection of girlhood, trauma, mental health, and substance abuse the way it does.

Like most of her fans, I found Erin Khar online. She runs “Ask Erin,” the popular advice column at Ravishly.com with the tagline “She’s made all the mistakes, so you don’t have to.” Erin is compassionate with her advice, whether the issue is as serious as “I think the guy I’m dating raped me” or as less-serious as “An update on a one-night stand with my coworker.” She always provides suggestions to seek professional help when needed and links readers to available resources. She’s the cool big sister most women never had: smart and savvy, with a strong lipstick game. In the midst of writing about my own addiction and recovery, I found out Erin had written an addiction memoir. To my delight, I also discovered she had a history with horses, too. Naturally, I decided she was my long-lost, much-cooler, way-better-with-lipstick big sister, and requested an advanced copy of her forthcoming book.

In its pages, I saw myself. I’d discovered a role model, one generous enough to share her story with the world. Luckily, Erin was also generous enough to spend an hour chatting with me about recovery, community, and of course, horses.

Emma Hudelson: Why did you decide to tell your story in memoir form?

Erin Khar: I wanted to write the book that I had needed when I was younger, to give people who were struggling a voice, and to open up conversations about addiction that will contribute to reducing stigma and shame.

EH: I definitely could have used this book when I was younger! It sounds like you’ve thought a lot about your readers. How do you view your relationship with them?

EK: My goal is to make anyone, whether they’re experienced with addiction or not, more comfortable with talking about it. Shame and letting go of it is another big theme of the book, which is something that someone who hasn’t struggled with addiction can relate to. We all have ghosts that we’re afraid to face, and the trick is facing them so we can move on. I hope I connect with readers in a personal way, so that it feels like an intimate conversation. Hopefully, something productive comes out of that writer-reader relationship.

EH: I love how you don’t shy away from talking about things like shame, trauma, and mental illness. That’s something the recovery community doesn’t always handle well. So many of us in recovery, myself included, have a dual diagnosis of substance abuse disorder and a mental health disorder. To stay sober and stable, I have to work on both my mental health and my recovery. Were you conscious of that as you were writing?

EK: Yes. My foundation for recovery was in twelve-step programs. At that time, there was a lot of stigma about psychiatric medications. I thought there was only one path of recovery and I thought that if I couldn’t fit into that path, I wasn’t going to make it. I hope people walk away from this book understanding that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to addiction, because in my experience, particularly with opiate addiction, there’s often another component. It could be an actual mental health diagnosis or have a trauma-related origin. You can do all the recovery work in the world, but if you’re not addressing those deeper psychiatric issues, I think it’s difficult to maintain any sort of recovery.

EH: I’ve been sober ten years, and I’m still involved with twelve-step programs. When I first came in, I heard a lot of, “if you take a mood- or mind-altering drug, you’re not sober.” That included antidepressants. That’s bullshit. There are multiple roads to recovery. Twelve-step programs work for some people. Others need something else. I know twelve-step wound up not working for you, but it seems like you don’t have any bitterness towards it.

EK: No, not at all. I think I would have died trying to get sober if I didn’t have twelve-step programs. The work that I did there gave me enough of a foundation to get the help that I needed. I don’t know that they’re for everyone, but I’ve seen them help a whole lot of people. The sense of community there is super important. I don’t ever want anyone to feel that there’s only one way to achieve recovery. I achieved long term recovery after I realized that I could have recovery without being restricted to a twelve-step model. It’s been almost seventeen years since my last drug.

EH: That’s so cool!

EK: Yeah, it’s a big deal! I’m also a proponent of harm reduction. I would much rather have someone be on suboxone for ten years than constantly relapsing and detoxing. That wouldn’t necessarily be the answer for me, but if suboxone is improving someone’s quality of life, then I’m 100% for it. I look at addiction as a public health issue. We have a responsibility as a society to ensure that people who are suffering have the opportunity to get help. That help might not come all at once. Often, harm reduction is a path to recovery. I think people are starting to see that model works better than this all-or-nothing from the beginning model.

EH: There are multiple pathways. It’s not just the twelve-step model, SMART recovery, or moderation management.

EK: Whatever works, works. It shouldn’t matter how somebody gets there. You’d tackle any other medical problem the same way. There are several approaches to treating cancer, so if one doesn’t work, then try another. The same should be true for recovery.

EH: With cancer, you would try multiple treatments. You wouldn’t just try radiation. I think that really makes sense. You said the sense of community that can be found in twelve-step programs is something you see as a foundation of recovery. What can women in recovery do better to stay connected and form that community?

EK: As much as everyone has criticisms of social media and the internet in general, it does connect us in ways that were never possible before. So even if you’re in a physically isolated place, you can find online recovery groups. There’s a whole world of help of there. I have formed some of my closest relationships with people I’ve met online. When it comes to supporting each other in recovery, the best way people can support each other is to avoid judgment of how recovery unfolds. That includes relapsing. When you’re in recovery, it’s scary to see someone close to you relapse because that can feel threatening to your own recovery. It’s very easy to jump into a judgmental place. Remembering the old adage that’s used a lot in twelve-step—“there but for the grace of god go I”—I always remind myself that the person in relapse could so easily me be. Even if we’re outwardly in a very different place, we’re both humans. That’s a human being having a human experience. Obviously, in early recovery, you might have to distance yourself to protect your own sobriety. But as the years go by, it becomes a lot easier to be there for people in jeopardy.

EH: In the book, we see you relapse, but we see people who are close to you relapse. It’s a struggle for all memoirists to write about other people. You write about your parents and ex-husband, too. Did you have any self-checks that you used to make sure that you were staying in your story and not moving to into someone else’s story?

EK: I would look at myself as a character in the book. As in, “Erin is the protagonist. Is this told from Erin’s perspective?” I can’t fill in the blanks for anyone else. I’m the camera, so I can only see it from my point of view. I can say, “she told me she felt this way,” but I can’t assume anything. It’s challenging! Even now, I’m sure I could go back into the book and realize I didn’t always do it perfectly.

EH: Speaking of turning yourself into a character—I love how you portrayed all the horrible, heartbreaking negative self-talk throughout the book. While you were writing, how did you navigate these moments where you were in conversation with this really dark part of yourself?

EK: It helped that I have so much distance from the events. I probably couldn’t have written this book ten years ago. When reconstructing moments, I tried to focus first on things I knew were concrete. Yet still—facts that I recorded in my journal are only facts according to what I observed in that moment. As I moved through the different parts of my life in the book, I tried to write each chapter with the voice of me at that age but with the added commentary of me at this age, right now, looking back. By working chronologically and trying to focus on concrete details, I was able to separate myself enough to keep the narrative arc without being swallowed by it.

Especially in edits, I had to make sure that I was doing things to take care of myself. I went back to therapy and made sure that I have everything in place for this whole journey. Not just the writing, but the publishing, and talking about the book once it’s out in the world. As comfortable as I am talking about it, it’s certainly emotional, even in my body.

EH: Speaking as a writer, it’s a gift to be able to recreate memories and write about them, but it’s definitely not comfortable. People will ask me if writing about addiction, trauma, and recovery is cathartic or healing. Sometimes, maybe, but it’s also—no. Not at all. What’s your experience?

EK: You have to do the healing before you sit down to write the memoir. Maybe that’s not true for everyone, but for me, I had to do the work beforehand. Without it, I couldn’t have written as honest a memoir. I couldn’t have confronted the things that I confront in the book. Putting all my ugly truth out there is very freeing, because I don’t feel like I have anything left to hide. For victims of trauma, that can be very satisfying. It’s like getting the last word on your own story.

EH: Your pub date is coming up soon.

EK: February 25.

EH: Do you feel like you’re prepared for the barrage of emails and messages that you’re probably going to get?

EK: Because of the advice column, I already get 50-75 emails a week from people—and obviously, I can’t answer them all. I’m sure that will increase, but I’m trying to remember that the book is only one part of my life. Obviously, it’s a very big part of my life, but even though my story is out there I’m still allowed to have personal boundaries.

EH: In the book, you address that. You explain isn’t all of you on those pages. I think that’s really important to understand. It’s easy for someone to pick up a memoir and think they know the author intimately.

EK: In some ways, they do! They will know parts of me—more than what I showed people in the past, back when I was hiding from everybody. But they’re only seeing me through one lens.

EH: I have to ask you about one more thing. When I was younger, I was really into horses, like, going-to-the-world-championships into horses. When I got away from riding, my addiction took hold of me and didn’t let go. In your pre-addict days and days of early addiction, you were a very serious rider, too. When it comes to addiction and young women, is there something about the horse that’s special?

EK: There is a special relationship that happens between a human and a horse. It’s difficult to put it into words that make sense to people who haven’t experienced it. When a horse and rider are really connected, it’s symbiosis. The best riders in the world don’t have to utilize a lot of aids. They have really light hands and legs because everything is done through this symbiotic connection. It’s not just a shift in physical weight, but energy, too. I could hop on one of my horse’s back—maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea—bareback, without a bridle, just a halter on, and ride. There was so much trust between us. For young women growing up in this world, it’s difficult to trust people. We’re given conflicting messages. Our bodies become both super sexualized, but then we’re shamed for that. That makes us not trust people. I’m speaking generally here, not just about my own experience. With a horse, there’s this love story because of the trust. The horse doesn’t want anything but to be in the moment with you. The horse becomes a place where we can put our trust.

Emma Faesi Hudelson is a teaching fellow and PhD candidate studying literary nonfiction at the University of Cincinnati. She writes on addiction, recovery, and mental health. Horses, too. Her work appears or is forthcoming in BUST, the Chattahoochee Review, the Fix, the Manifest-Station, the Rumpus, and other publications. Her essays have been selected as finalists in the 2017 International Literary Awards and Creative Nonfiction’s Spring 2018 Contest.

 

Erin Khar is known for her writing on addiction, recovery, mental health, relationships, parenting, infertility, and self-care. Her weekly advice column, Ask Erin, is published on Ravishly. Her personal essays have appeared in SELF, Marie ClaireEsquireCosmopolitanGood Housekeeping, Redbook, and others. She’s the recipient of the Eric Hoffer Editor’s Choice Prize and lives in New York City with her husband and two kids. Order Strung Out here

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Converse-Station, Guest Posts, Interview, writing, Yoga

THE CONVERSE-STATION: Novelist Stephen Policoff Interviews Poet, Short Story Writer & New York Literary Lion Tim Tomlinson

December 26, 2015

Welcome to The Converse-Station: A dialogue between writers. With the site getting so much traffic (my Facebook page is reaching over 18 million people) I can think of no better way to utilize that traffic than to introduce the readers to writers I love. The dialogues created within this series have stayed with me long after I’ve read them on the page. Enjoy. xo Jen Pastiloff

 

Turnabout is fair play, or so they tell us.  Last November, my friend and colleague Tim Tomlinson interviewed me on the eve of the publication of my 2nd novel, Come Away (Dzanc Books, 2014).  And now, I am returning the favor, letting Tim discourse on his amazing and inspiring work. ~ Stephen Policoff 

 

SP: I have read and loved some of your poems and short stories—which, by the way, always seem to be published in cool and interesting magazines.  Do you have a preference for one form or the other?  Are there certain subjects which evoke one form rather than the other?  Do you work in—or plan to work in—other forms as well? Novel? Memoir? Screenplay?

TT: Many thanks, and yes, I’ve been fortunate to have my work appear in some pretty cool venues: Pank, and Heroin Love Songs, and Down and Dirty Word.  Not quite the same register as The New Yorker, or The Atlantic.  But sometimes the unwashed of today wear tomorrow’s tuxedos (or we know some people who will).

I go back and forth between poems and fiction. If I’m supposed to be doing one, I do the other. This way I get an illicit thrill and simultaneously court disaster—story of my life.  All my subjects—from the pleasures and perils of various forms of inebriation, to the pleasures and perils of the coral reef—appear in both forms.  Sometimes the poems begin as notes toward something. Blueprints, or maps.

There’s “B.A.R.” the poem (Soundings Review), then “B.A.R.” the story (Blue Lyra Review). I wrote the poem first, it got published second, but both uncoil from the same trigger event.  Writing the poem gave me the story.  The story opened up the incident, I built backwards. In an old interview, Denis Johnson talks about the stories that became Jesus’ Son—how they grew out of drafts of poems that, he felt, didn’t fully work.  The first story in that collection, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” opens with the lines of the poem from which it springs.

Many of my stories are linked—the ones featuring the protagonist Clifford Foote.  When I reach “the end,” I’ll call the collection a novel-in-stories, with the title Work Until Failure.  At least a dozen of its “chapters” have already been published, and you’ve probably seen one or two.

And in between the poems and the stories, I’ve done something entirely new for me: Yolanda:  An Oral History in Verse, will appear in October, 2015 with Finishing Line Press. It’s a collection of accounts I gathered from survivors of Super Typhoon Yolanda, then reconfigured into poems.  (In November 2013, the islands of Leyte and Samar in the Philippines were devastated by Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda; well over 10,000 died—the official number is lower, but there’s a cynical motivation for that.)

 

SP: I know that you teach writing about music and assume that music has been a tremendous influence in your life.  Could you tell us a little bit about the ways in which music influences/is a presence in your work?   Bonus Question: If you could be a piece of music which would you be?

TT: I take heart from music, and from the stories of musicians. Bob Dylan’s Chronicles I opens with his encounter with prize fighter Jack Dempsey. Obviously, the suggestion is that a career in music (or writing, or painting, any of the arts) is analogous to getting in the ring. You will be hit, you will be knocked down, you will lose. But you have to keep fighting. Chronicles I is structured around a series of walls that Dylan hits, and his accounts of how the walls affected him, and then how he got over or around them. As Tom Waits says, any way’s the only way. With writing, you can get hung up on—I do get hung up on—rules and templates and the way things are supposed to be. But often the thing you need to do is the thing you’re not supposed to do, the thing that breaks the rules. Dylan’s work teaches that, over and over again.  Blood on the Tracks is a great example—the non-linearity of the narratives, the multiple points of view, and the asynchronous events happening simultaneously.

At the moment, I’m reading interviews with Joni Mitchell. She says that she dipped her toes in the lake of jazz, and then Mingus came along and shoved her in all the way. That’s how I feel with poetry. I always wrote it (despite Philip Levine begging me not to), but I was much more committed to fiction. Teaching—the needs of my students—is what pushed me into poetry’s lake (which I should probably call Innisfree). I couldn’t teach without doing, and I couldn’t do without sending out, and suddenly I was having more success placing poems than placing stories. And I thrive on encouragement.

In reference to music itself: I love how certain music induces moods, and I love to write out of moods. Yearning, melancholy, abstract rumination. One morning while we were living in London, I was listening to Erik Satie’s “Gnossiennes” (Pascal Rogé, piano), and two poems emerged, damn near fully-formed.  They were  “Broken Things” (https://www.mandala.uga.edu/recon/poet-broken-recon.php) and “Mescaline”(https://saxifragepress.com/tag/tim-tomlinson/).

SP: Bonus Question: If you could be a piece of music which would you be?

TT: “In a Sentimental Mood,” the Sarah Vaughan version, the Nancy Wilson version, and/or the Ellington/Coltrane version, not all at once.

SP: Travel, too, seems to be a huge factor in your life, especially travel through Asia (?).  Could you tell us a little about how travel/living and working in other countries has affected your life—and your writing especially?

TT: Even as a kid, I wanted to be the boy who ran away and never went back. (I have a story called “Runaway”; it appears in the current issue of Tomas, the literary journal of the University of Santo Tomas, in Manila.) William O. Steele’s Flaming Arrows and Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain planted the seeds. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn cultivated them. On the Road and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—these led to first, and probably premature, harvests. When I was eighteen, I wound up living on a research vessel in the Bahamas. I say wound up because there was never any plan except to be available for opportunity, the wilder the better. Now I think of my time in the Bahamas as analogous to Percival in the Grail Castle: there I was, in the midst of all that splendor—the islands themselves, the people, the water, the coral reefs. But I was too dazzled to ask the right question. In The Story of the Grail (Chretien’s), Percival flubs his visit to the Grail Castle, and if I remember correctly, he winds up back on his horse staring at drops of blood in the snow. I didn’t have a horse, so I went to college (in some respects, an exchange of one wasteland for another).

Asia came much later. My wife is from the Philippines. We started visiting the Philippines for extended periods pretty much every year since 2003.  I started teaching summers in Thailand.  Then we had two glorious years in China with NYU Shanghai’s Liberal Studies program—the original NYU program in China.  We did a lot of travel in China, and throughout the region—Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and up and down the Philippines. We made our first visit to Tacloban, on Leyte, during that period, and then of course the typhoon struck. That wiped out the place where we’d stayed, and we felt we had to give something back to a place that had made us feel so welcome. Out of that comes Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse.

Flannery O’Connor says that a writer has all the experience she needs by the age of seven. That’s true for some work. But all the time I’ve spent in Asia has opened up new material for me. Raymond Carver divided his life into the Bad Raymond years, and the Good Raymond years. And he often took Bad Raymond behaviors into Good Raymond settings. “Cathedral” is an example. I have Pre-Asia Tim, and Asia Tim. I’m putting the one into the other and having fun with the collisions. Pre-Asia Tim isn’t exactly a bull in a China shop, but he is a worm, and a weasel, and a dog, and a monkey.

SP: What about yoga and your relationship to it and how does that connect to your work (if it does)?…that one is a serious question.

TT: Yoga provides a foundation for my life. Without it, I don’t think I’d be doing the writing. Regular practice results in incremental improvements, and not just in executing the asanas. But because the asanas get better (easier to achieve, to hold, to transition in and out of), a more general sense of well-being occurs. I think it’s a lot like learning an instrument, except it’s the body, and the mind, and the life, that’s the instrument.

When I began a regular practice, thirteen years ago, almost everything beyond the simplest basics seemed way beyond my ability. A lot of what seemed impossible then is a part of my daily practice now. Headstand, for example, or some of the binds. The lessons you learn from the practice translate into your everyday life. And when you encounter a yoga problem—and you always do; as one of my teachers used to say, yogis seek discomfort—you find a solution, eventually, through the breath, which can mean the breath literally, or, more figuratively, daily sustained effort (although yoga teachers tend to scold too much effort).

You can see how all of this applies to writing. You fail, you fail better. You don’t nail the headstand, and you don’t nail the sestina, the first time out. But you come back to the problem and you give it your breath—it is your breath—and you don’t experience it as a failure, you experience it as another day in the practice. Then, one day, you’re in headstand in the middle of the room. And the next day, you have a book.  NB: my collection of poems, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, will appear late in 2016, with Winter Goose Publishing.  To me, a collection seemed much more impossible than a headstand in the center of the room.

SP: Tell us a little about New York Writers Workshop, and your role there.  Can you tell us about how The Portable MFA came to be?

TT: New York Writers Workshop is a collective of writers who teach. We’re based primarily in New York City.  We formed in 2000, incorporated in 2001.  Our first slogan was Think Outside the Yellow Box—Gotham was our local “competition.” Now it’s Coming Soon to a Continent Near You—in July 2015, I bring New York Writers Workshop’s Pitch Conference to Australia. We’ve been in China, the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico, and in many locations in the US, including Kansas and Alabama.

The Portable MFA in Creative Writing is our craft book. It covers fiction (the chapter I wrote), poetry, drama, and a few different forms of non-fiction. It’s enormously flexible—it’s on high school creative writing syllabi, college syllabi, and grad school/MFA syllabi—and it’s moderately successful—4th printing, over 20,000 copies. We’re very proud of it. I’m a co-founder of the organization, and I’ve been the president since day one, basically because I’m the only one who read Robert’s Rules of Order. Our mission is to help writers, at whatever stage of their game.  So we do community outreach in programs for inner city youth in trouble with the law, and we do pitch conferences for writers with manuscripts but without publishers.

We have a phenomenal staff—poets Loren Kleinman, Hermine Meinhard, Mary Stewart Hammond, writers in dramatic forms such as Emma Goldman-Sherman, Ross Klavan, Neal Rowland, novelists Yvonne Cassidy, Sally Koslow, Manreet Sodhi Someshwar, graphic novelists Laurence Klavan and Alissa Torres, multi-genre writers like Charles Salzberg who’s got almost as many books as Joyce Carol Oates, and Jacqueline Bishop, who paints, quilts, and photographs in her spare time away from novels, short stories, poems, and oral histories. If you can’t tell, I’m very proud of this group. We’re the little not-for-profit that could.  Ah, and I should mention our two other divisions:  Greenpoint Press, run by Charles Salzberg, publisher of fine fiction and non-fiction, and recently featured in PW, and Ducts, the literary webzine of New York Writers Workshop, with an archive that’s starting to rival the Paris Review.

Stephen Policoff

Stephen Policoff

 

*Featured image is author Tim Tomlinson

Guest Posts, Interview, Jen Pastiloff, Jen's Musings

This Podcast Will Change Your Life.

September 1, 2015

So, as I mentioned in my last blog called “Shitty Advice” (still waiting for some of you to post your shittiest advice, by the way) I did a podcast while I was in Chicago with THE Ben Tanzer. Was all kinds of amazing. Here we are, looking all Bennifer-ish on a Chicago street.

Bennifer!!

Bennifer!!

In this podcast I discuss:

what risk means

depression

What the f*ck my workshop is

Wayne Dyer (which is crazy because he just passed away on Sunday. Rest in peace, my beloved teacher.)

Emily Rapp, Lidia Yuknavitch and other kick ass women

writing

being disorganized

manifesting

telling the truth

having a baby.. or not

my new book

Girl Power: You Are Enough

and more.

Lots more.

So much more.

It would mean the world to me and I will buy you a glass of wine or an ice cream cone if you listened to it and shared it. Thank you Ben. It truly was an honor. I have done love. Listen here. 

Click to listen to podcast

Click to listen to podcast

Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Interview, Video, Young Voices

Internet Superstar Amymarie Gaertner Talks (& Dances) For Jen Pastiloff

April 23, 2015

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Jen Pastiloff here. I had the honor of meeting 20 year old Amymarie Gaertner last week when I was having a little vino with my friend Rachel (Yoga_girl on instagram.) Turns out Amymarie has MILLIONS of followers on Youtube and Vine and Instagram for her amazing freestyle dancing. She is a self-taught choreographer and dancer from Ohio. I found her to be charming, inspiring and talented as all get out. Enjoy!! I am so excited about the Girl Power: You Are Enough project.

Check out her do a little dance for me with my LOVE sign on below. Come join me on instagram at @jenpastiloff. Post your instagram name in the comments. xo, jp

Amymarie Gaertner Takes The BE LOVE Challenge with Jen Pastiloff

Amymarie Gaertner Talks To Jen Pastiloff

Continue Reading…

Converse-Station, Guest Posts, Interview, writing

The Converse-Station: Elissa Wald Interviews Author Rene Denfeld.

December 9, 2014

beauty-hunting-jen-logo-black

Welcome to The Converse-Station: A dialogue between writers. With the site getting so much traffic (my Facebook page is reaching over 18 million people) I can think of no better way to utilize that traffic than to introduce the readers to writers I love. The dialogues created within this series have stayed with me long after I’ve read them on the page. Enjoy. xo Jen Pastiloff

The Convere-Station: Elissa Wald Interviews Author Rene Denfeld.

He talks about the confused mess inside of him. He says everyone thinks sociopaths are super-smart criminals, but he is just a messed-up guy who doesn’t know why he does what he does. Except there is like a switch in him, and when the switch flips on, he cannot stop.

“If it made sense, I would tell you,” he says. “When you kill people, it is supposed to make sense. But it doesn’t. It never does.”

The lady nods. She understands.

With each secret he tells her, her eyes get darker and more satisfied. York can see from the precious slot of window that the rain clouds have lifted and the sky itself is dark. He has been speaking forever; he has told her secrets he has been afraid to tell anyone, secrets he suspects she knew all the time.

The look in her eyes is of a person who drank from the end of a gun barrel and found it delicious. Her eyes are filled with a strange sort of wondrous sadness, as if marveling at all the beauty and pain in the world. Continue Reading…

Converse-Station, Interview, writing

The Converse-Station: Angela Giles Patel Interviews Chloe Caldwell.

September 7, 2014

The Converse-Station.

Jen Pastiloff here. I’m the founder of The Manifest-Station. Welcome to The Converse-Station: A place where writers interview writers. With the site getting so much traffic, I can think of no better way to utilize that traffic than to introduce the readers to writers I love. The dialogues created within this series have stayed with me long after I’ve read them on the page. Today’s is no different. It’s between Angela Giles Patel (who happens to be one of my best friends and one of the 2 editors of this site) and the incomparable Chloe Caldwell, who is just an astounding writer, teacher, truth-teller.

By Angela Giles.

My first introduction to Chloe Caldwell was via her Letter in the Mail from The Rumpus. In the letter she admitted “I’ve never known how to write a letter, or a postcard, (or an email…?) without just going into the dumb shit in my brain.” And it continued on for nine glorious pages filled with all sorts of wonderful. By the end, I was smitten by her and immediately read everything I could get my hands, or cursor, on. Then I learned she was teaching an online course at LitReactor. I signed up, paid attention, and the rest is history. Continue Reading…

Converse-Station, Guest Posts, Interview, Jen Pastiloff

Best-Selling Author Caroline Leavitt Interviews Jen Pastiloff.

August 27, 2014

By Caroline Leavitt.

This is an excerpt from interview I did on the incredible Caroline Leavitt’s site. I am still giddy about it. Pinch me! Here’s a teaser…

I first heard of Jennifer Pastiloff because everyone on Facebook was talking about her essay on dealing with her hearing loss. It was so brave, so beautifully written, that I wanted to talk to her. Jennifer also is the creator of Manifestation Yoga and Karaoke Yoga (how fun does that sound?) and she runs writing and yoga retreats. I’m so thrilled to have her here. Thank you, Jennifer!

CL: What sparked you to write such a brave essay now?

 Continue Reading…

Interview, The Converse-Station

The Converse-Station on The Manifest-Station: Elissa Wald Interviews Gina Frangello.

May 21, 2014

Welcome to the newest installment on The Manifest-Station! The Converse-Station: A place where writers interview writers. (Thanks Elissa Wald for coming up with that name.) I am so excited by the idea of this series. The readership on the site is so high that I figured it was time for something like this. Today’s interview is between authors Elissa Wald and Gina Frangello, two women I adore. Elissa can be found here and her latest book, The Secret Lives of Married Women, can be ordered here. This is a huge honor and I can think of no better way to launch this series. Now, go enjoy Seven Questions With Gina Frangello and buy her book! (It’s really, really good.)

Elissa Wald

Elissa Wald

Gina Frangello

Gina Frangello

By Elissa Wald:

I loved Gina Frangello’s first two books. I was deeply intrigued by the exploration of dominance and submission in her debut novel, My Sister’s Continent. I admired the smart, assured and fascinating stories in her collection of short fiction, Slut Lullabies.

And yet. Her most recent novel, A Life In Men, is something else again. Simply put, it is an astonishing feat: of story and structure and characterization and cultural commentary and worldly detail and setting and relentless tension. It takes place over more than a decade, in at least half a dozen countries, and it renders a tangled web of intimacies and liaisons and betrayals and loyalties without ever leaving a loose thread. It’s about the immediate and long-term repercussions of sexual violence. It’s also about marriage and female friendship and terminal illness and the many forms of familial intimacy and the fraught relationship of the American traveler to other cultures. It’s about self-destruction and entitlement and privilege. It’s about terrorism and death and redemption. You would think it could not possibly be about all of these things without meandering, becoming muddled, spreading itself too thin and/or succumbing to an identity crisis. But you would be mistaken. You would be underestimating Gina Frangello.

Gina’s schedule is especially hectic these days: besides being an acclaimed author and devoted mom, she is the Sunday Editor for The Rumpus and the Fiction Editor for The Nervous Breakdown. So I was very grateful that she made time to talk with me about her novel’s evolution as well as its formidable and fully realized ambitions.

order the book by clicking the book.

order the book by clicking the “BUY NOW” on the cover.

Elissa Wald: A Life In Men is such a structural, logistical and emotional feat. There are so many characters, jumps in time, and layers of revelation. How long did it take you to write, and can you say something about how that structure emerged?

Gina Frangello: Well, my official answer is that the novel took three and a half years to write. But the behind the scenes answer is that the earliest kernels of what made it into A Life in Men come from work I had started between 1989-1991, when I was living in London and then had just returned to the States, and I began trying to write short fiction about very autobiographical experiences I’d had there, such as living in Arthog House in London in 1990, the same house that appears in the novel’s second chapter, “The House of Reinvention,” and about traveling in Greece with my friend Amy in 1989 and being quasi-kidnapped (I talk about that on BuzzFeed, here) by a couple of psycho pilots. These were two separate stories and both were abandoned long before I ever “decided to be a writer” and began grad school in 1994, and they were forgotten for many years. But later, in 2007 or so, I was playing with the London short story hoping to turn it into something I could send out for publication, and I suddenly broke from the autobiographical mode the piece had been in and gave my protagonist cystic fibrosis, and the story cracked wide open for me—so wide that I fell so far into it I knew I wouldn’t be able to climb out without a novel. Then, in 2010, after the entire novel was written and my then-agent was beginning to shop it, I spent a month in Kenya and came home and rewrote the entire 400+ page monster in a couple of months, changing almost everything about the structure. I broke up what had been one long Greece chapter into an episodic parallel narrative. I added Kenya to the early parts of the novel and then changed everything that came after it. I think the only real answer to your question is that it took a damn long time to write and the structure emerged…slowly.
 
Elissa Wald: Something I thought the novel illuminated beautifully: I think for people who are very conscious of life’s brevity and their own mortality, there’s a tension between the drive to experience as much adventure and pleasure as possible, and the desire to make some kind of serious contribution, leave a mark. Often these impulses are in direct opposition to each other: to get great at something, execute a vision, usually requires a huge sacrifice of time, something in short supply for Mary and others in her situation. At one point in the book, she runs through a dazzling checklist of all she’s experienced, and at another point she says: “I should have done something… I haven’t made any impact. I drink mint tea and buy carpets. It’s all been meaningless and now it’s all going to be over.” I was trying to understand what drew her to Kenneth and thought part of it might be this shared pursuit of instant gratification at the expense of any long-term investments. Do you think there’s anything to that?

Gina Frangello: I do think there’s something to it, though I also think Mary has a lot more traditional long-term investments than she gives herself credit for. Not everyone can go launch a school for girls in Afghanistan, but Mary isn’t…well, she isn’t really the way she describes herself, either—she isn’t always a reliable reporter of her own identity, which I think is true for so many people. In truth, she is a character who manages to get a graduate degree in education despite having a time-consuming and very serious illness, and she has a teaching career from her mid-20s through her early 30s, at both the university and high school level. She writes and receives a grant to aid her Somali students; she teaches high school English for years; she also has a marriage that, while not 100% honest, lasts until her death. Her life is extremely different from Kenneth’s, and that’s as much a part of what draws her to him as anything else. She also longs, for much of the novel, to have a child, but is prevented by various obstacles, initially not to do with her CF but then later because of her worsening condition, and in this way she is also denied an opportunity to…well, perhaps to have the most common “long term investment” sought by human beings, which is the investment in that continuing cycle of life through family. So I think the answer is yes and no. Mary is very drawn to living as large a life as humanly possible within her constraints of both physical ability and time…and that desire, to cram an entire lifetime of experience in to essentially just over ten years of adulthood…is at odds, yes, with the idea of long term investment and the nurturing of time and energy and focus it takes to leave a mark outside oneself. She behaves in ways that can be selfish and dishonest in the pursuit of her own large canvas, and she uses her illness and limited time as an “excuse” at times for not having to heed the feelings of others or the standards others might set for their own integrity. And I think Kenneth understands this, and sees and recognizes it, and doesn’t judge it and isn’t repelled by it, and she is able to show him that face. She’s able to find honesty even when she’s unpalatable, and she is trusted to make her own decisions even when they aren’t according to conventional wisdom or safety. There is something deeply unconditional in their bond that can be truly hard for adults—even ones who lead much more “typical” lives than Mary and Kenneth—to find. But I think Mary is wrong that she doesn’t make a mark. She leaves a mark on many people, such as Leo and Sandor, and while that’s on a smaller scale I don’t hold that to be remotely without value. Most of us do not choose to “save the world.” Even if we aren’t dying young or we aren’t junkies. For most of us, our human relationships are what will ultimately define our mark, and in that way I think Mary ultimately realizes her life has been richer than she gave it credit for being.

EW: Mary’s final emails to Geoff seemed to me a kind of parallel to the ones Nix sent to Mary after Mykonos: insistently superficial, evasive, generic, maddening. There’s this love for the recipient but a secret so huge (in Mary’s case: Kenneth and her intention to die away from home) it completely removes the possibility of intimacy. Was this a deliberate reprise?
GF: Not exactly—I mean—wow, I love this. You’re right! It was intentional in the sense that yes, Mary’s emails were supposed to be…evasive and superficial and fundamentally dishonest, yes! But I had never realized until this moment that she was writing these letters leading up to her death, full of lies, just the same way Nix had been to her. I can’t believe I didn’t see that, but it’s true. The parallel was wholly unintentional. God—I love hearing something new about my own novel this way! Thank you.

EW: Another theme I thought A Life explored very poignantly is this notion that your relationship with another person doesn’t end with their death. In the above-mentioned missives, there’s something so bittersweet about the writers’ desire to protect their loved ones. This impulse forecloses the possibility of real intimacy in the moment, but the luxury of life’s continuous unfolding can (and does, for Mary at least) ultimately yield a sense of deferred and deepened intimacy, experienced by the survivor. Can this one-sided evolution rightly be called a relationship?

GF: Yes…I mean…one of the things I was most intent on exploring in the novel is the ways in which “protection” precludes real intimacy. I’m fascinated by that. I’m fascinated by the way that the most altruistic kinds of love often distance us from the beloved, and prohibit us from being truly known and understood. I think for example that this is the case in many parent/child relationships, where the parent’s desire to protect the child also makes the parent in some way a fundamentally unknowable shell, loving and protective but artificial and somehow distant. And many kids—and adult children—have a lifelong journey of “discovering” who their parents “really were,” including after their parents’ deaths, that isn’t in some ways different from what happens with Mary and Nix, even though they’re peers and their situation—the necessity of protection and dishonesty—is more dramatic and rare than a more typical parent/child dynamic. But I think this dynamic can carry over into many types of relationships, between siblings or friends or lovers. There is a ruthlessness implicit in really hardcore intimacy. There is almost an unwillingness to protect, or a sacrifice of protection for the sake of being fully seen and known. How do we walk that line, you know? How can we be fully known and yet still protective? Where is the balance? For some people, such as Mary, that has to involve two different men. For Nix, it has to involve lying to Mary about their largest shared experience. But yes, I think relationships quite often continue beyond the death of one party. I don’t have any sort of faith in life after death, so I suppose “relationship” may not be the exact word, as only one party can continue to grow and understand and change…yet maybe a relationship itself continues to evolve, as long as either party is there to perceive it and rework it.

EW: Part of what made Mary brilliant as a character is that she is both survivor and someone who is survived. To me, she’s a reflection of all of us: while we’re living, we’re dying, and even those among us who are the most visibly dying are also living. Mary survives Nix and she is survived by her loved ones. Was this pretty-much-universal duality a conscious theme for you as you were writing the book?

GF: Yes. It was extremely important to me that Mary not be somehow a cipher for Tragedy in the novel, if that makes sense. Tragedy is cheap, even as it is unspeakably potent in individual lives. Dying young women still outlive millions of other people on the planet, who die in acts of violence, natural disasters, starvation, you name it. A Life in Men isn’t an overtly political novel—Mary and Nix are not political characters—but I didn’t want a sense of insularity to Mary’s looming expiration date, or a sense of her somehow being singularly tragic and important or something. I wanted her to survive and be survived by, and for a sense of that cycle—interpersonally and globally—to exist. People are not either Tragic or Normal, and we don’t either Live or Die. We are all dying, of course. We all also are (or most of us are—most people who are buying and reading a novel, let’s say) lucky compared to someone else. It’s all a chaotic continuum. Partially that can be measured in time/years, but it’s also about various ways we quantify the impact of a life, which is partially quantified in terms of what we experience, and partially quantified in terms of how others experience us. I wanted Mary to be part of a system, absolutely, not some focal point…you know…like, get the tissues, here is the tragic damsel who has it so much worse than everyone else, or to buy into the concept that some bad dose of luck makes a character noble, either.

EW: Yet another aspect of the novel I deeply appreciated was this thread of American exploitation that seemed to run through the book: American entitlement, American appropriation of other cultures, the foreign experience as a trophy on the American mantle. And something I saw as incredibly brave of you as the author was the juxtaposition of this attitude on the part of Nix with the assault she suffers as a direct result. She enters the bar with the explicit intent to use these men for Mary’s benefit. If it weren’t these two men, it would have been another pair or yet another: there’s the implication that they’re interchangeable. She ponders whether she’ll “take” the hotter of the two men and decides to “give” him to Mary. She thinks nothing of stringing the sidekick along; she holds up her glass peremptorily in the expectation that he’ll pay for her ongoing drinks; she seems to have no doubt that she’s in control of the situation. When it backfires so terribly, there’s this feeling that it’s a kind of cautionary tale, and to me that felt risky. Did it feel risky to you?

GF: I think it’s always risky to depict violence against women in any situation wherein it has been acknowledged that the woman was not a “saint,” because our culture (by which I mean human culture) has a deeply ingrained desire to believe that somehow only certain “types” of women will be targets of violence and that, if we can suppose this is true, those women also somehow court or deserve it, as though violence is the natural outcome of being stupid or being adventurous or being careless or being promiscuous (whatever that means in a given slice of our human culture) or even being an asshole. We tell ourselves stories in which people earn violence. In which violence is the logical outcome, which I think is fundamentally a false paradigm that always favors the violent, and somehow casts them in the role of the oppressed. So that’s one thing. And yet I think most writers—certainly of books I want to read—are also not interested in portraying saints or hapless victims, even if that person is raped or abused or something. Agency is important to a character and to the complexity of a story and to the reader being able to contribute to a story and interpret it, rather than just being hammered over the head with a message or a point. So I think the answer to this exists in a couple of parts for me. The first is that yes, like many people who have traveled, I am in fact quite interested in American entitlement, exploitation and appropriation, of which I am very much—as an American and a traveler and someone who has spent money in cultures where most people have far less money—a part, while also being creeped out by that, which is of course not mutually exclusive and often feels…icky and hopeless, because—well, there is no clean answer or way to extricate oneself. American privilege is such a deep thing that even sometimes those people who selflessly try to “do good” can never fully understand the culture they seek to “help” and are presuming some level of superiority or some greater wisdom or preferable lifestyle to impart, and may do more harm than good, so even the most generous and selfless among us are on sticky, shifting ground—nobody knows what the fuck to think or do. If we scream about how wrong it is to cut off the clits of nine year old girls in some village on another continent, we will be accused of one thing, and if we excuse such things in the name of culture or religion, we will be accused of yet another thing, and if we simply ignore the whole damn thing and go on safari and take pictures of animals, we are of course guilty of some whole other thing entirely. And Nix is part of that. She wants pleasure and experience and thinks very much that it is all hers for the taking. Yet I do want to back up. Because while I don’t disagree with you on any of that, I think Nix’s entitlement is also about youth and the culture of female beauty and sexuality that has been shoved down her throat. Zorg and Titus aren’t exactly some underprivileged victims of American entitlement in any clean way either. They are older than Nix; they are educated and have access to cars and beautiful villas and are presumably employed as airline pilots and go all over the world. So while those topics all interest me, I absolutely did not in any way intend for Nix to represent American decadence and for Zorg and Titus to be the cautionary tale of what it reaps when you cross those you oppress or something. Western entitlement and the entitlement of affluence also play complex roles that aren’t mutually exclusive from American exploitation. Gender is also our first and primal binary. I intended Nix to have greatly misread her power, yes. To have mistaken a global obsession with female beauty, with youth, and perhaps even with Americanism, with the dubious fact that because one individual is in possession of those things, it makes that person powerful, and means she holds any cards. Almost every young woman on the planet who lives in a culture where young women are let out of the house without chaperones has, in some manner, played with the fire of the myth of female power at some point or other, and most—luckily and because most men are not in fact violent or sociopathic—escape this experimentation relatively unscathed. Some don’t. This is not just true for American women, clearly, nor is it only true for American women hoping to “use” foreign men. Men and women who live in and hail from the same cities, towns, nations, attempt to use one another everyday and try to jockey with one another for power. So while I think the issue of American entitlement is a deeply fascinating one and one I sought to explore in some ways in the novel, I did not intend Nix to in any way embody that entire system, especially as if she did, she would simultaneously also embody so many other systems of power and exploitation that are about more than the United States.

EW: Thank you so much for talking with me in such depth about A Life In Men. I hope any readers who haven’t yet read it will not deprive themselves any longer. In the meantime, is anything new in the works? What’s ahead for you?

GF: I’m currently most of the way through a draft of a new novel, called Every Kind of Wanting, which explores the dynamics, relationships and unexpected dramas surrounding longtime couple, Chad and Miguel’s, efforts to have a baby through a gestational surrogacy. Though the novel is framed by the nine months of the pregnancy, it also reaches back 30 years, to Miguel’s childhood in Venezuela and the unsolved murder of his father and mysteries surrounding the birth of his younger sister. I’m hoping to be completely ready to turn this thing over to my agent by September, but in the meanwhile I still have a lot of travel on my plate this summer, including Queretaro, Mexico, which as you know figures in A Life in Men, and which happens to be the location of an intimate, spectacular little writing program I run every year (www.othervoicesqueretaro.com). We kick off June 27, so if you want to come, hurry up!

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Jennifer Pastiloff is a writer living on an airplane and the founder of The Manifest-Station. Her work has been featured on The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, Jezebel, Salon, among others. She’s currently finishing her first book Beauty Hunting. Jen’s leading a long weekend retreat to Ojai, Calif over Labor and another writing retreat to Vermont with bestselling author Emily Rapp. Check out her site jenniferpastiloff.com for all retreat listings and workshops to attend one in a city near you. Next up: Los AngelesSeattleLondon, Atlanta, South Dakota, Dallas. Find her on twitter at @jenpastiloff.