Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: The Right Mind is a podcast hosted by the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College, featuring discussions about craft, creativity and what it means to be a writer.
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts and opinions of Austin Community College. The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only. The Austin Community College name and all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product or service.
Today's episode of the Right Mind we are so graciously joined by Madeline Vosch, who writes and teaches fiction and nonfiction. Her first book, A Memoir, has come out from Beacon Press.
An excerpt of Undead was selected as the winner of the Plowshares Emerging writers contest in 2021. Her work has appeared in Plowshares, the Washington, Washington Post, and the Rumpus, among others. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant and was an Aspen Awards Emerging writer fellow in 2021. Madeline, I'm so glad you're here.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm psyched to be here.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: There we go. That's a little more balanced. Real quick note this conversation contains references to self, harm and suicide, and relevant resources will be included in this episode's show. Notes and let's get cracking.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Hi Madeline, what's up? How are you?
[00:01:32] Speaker A: I do well most days coming to this episode at the beginning of the summer term after having just half an hour ago released a class of students into the wild. Hopefully I do see some of them here in the chat. I appreciate that.
And as we talk, I'd like to remind everybody in the chat that we'd love your questions in the chat. Later on we will have a Q and A and I will try if we can organically sneak these questions into the conversation as we go, I will do that. So as you come up with questions, please throw them in the chat.
We'll knock them out.
Let's get going. The first thing, Madeline, I'd love to hear about your writing background, educational background, where writing started for you, where you studied, and how you came to be the memoirist that you are.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: Yeah, so I've been writing for quite a long time.
I actually talk a little bit about this in the book of starting to write. When I was in middle school, high school, and when I very first started out, I was actually writing fan fiction, which turned out to be very important to me because I don't know if it's still like this, but at that point in time there was a really supportive and critical Community. So I would write something, post something, and get a lot of critical feedback of being like, this person is out of character in this section. You need to edit this part. Your word choice here is a little funny. So having thoughtful responses was pretty amazing.
[00:03:06] Speaker A: I have to know, like, fanfic of what?
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Oh, I can't tell. Okay, that first secret.
And then when I went to college, I thought I was going to be a creative writing major, but ended up switching to Russian.
So I was a Russian major in undergrad and then ended up living in Russia for a while. Lived in Azerbaijan for a while, then went to grad school for religious studies and then ended up in grad school. I came all the way back around and was like, if I don't actually fully try it as a writer, I'm gonna regret it forever. So came around back to do an mfa and that's what like fully brought me back to writing.
[00:03:45] Speaker A: I want to talk about the move to Russian.
What inspired the interest in. Because I know you do translation work too. What inspired the interest in studying Russian and Russian literature and everything that comes along with that?
[00:04:02] Speaker B: So, I mean, I've loved. I was really into the Russian authors forever, like in high school, got really into Dostoevsky and then the place I went to college to be an English major, you had to take like literature in a foreign language, not in translation. So I was like, cool, I'll study Russian and do that eventually. And then I just loved it so much and I was like, what am I doing? None of my favorite books are actually English books. Like, I don't care about Moby Dick,
[00:04:28] Speaker A: does anyone?
[00:04:30] Speaker B: So right then I was like, cool, we're just to go all in and do Russian.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: Right on. So then moving to Russia, was there anything that. Was there anything there? Anything in your experience there that then inspired the religious studies?
[00:04:42] Speaker B: For sure, yeah. I mean, so being there and then being in. It was really being in Azerbaijan that made me want to go, like, pursue more religious studies, higher education. Because it was just so interesting, like the way Islam was practiced and the way that you could see how like state forced atheism changed how people practiced it and changed how people approach religion. And it was just so fascinating to me.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: Wow. So seeing the effects of.
I'm going to say this gingerly. Seeing the effects of state controlled practice of thought.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Inspired you to.
To dig deeper.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: Feels. It feels apropos.
So then from there, coming back around to creative writing, which we're all fortunate for. If you haven't read the book, coming back to creative Writing.
What was the ramp there? What was the launch from religious studies into creative writing?
[00:05:45] Speaker B: So it was actually in grad school, I had a couple of professors who were encouraging of turning in creative finals instead of final papers.
And so I was in a gender studies class and wrote a really kind of bizarre personal essay about gender and Judith Butler. And, like, it was really fun and strange. And my professor was like, this is so weird.
Don't, like, go with it, do it. And then I just really leaned into that because it was a lot more fun than writing academic papers.
[00:06:18] Speaker A: Right, right. This is so weird. You have to do more of this. Yeah. I think if we all kind of followed the this is so weird. Let's have more of this, There would be so much. A lot of great work in the world.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: So then that leads to some experiences in grad school that the book covers, which we won't spoil. That which then I think leads to necessarily writing to process, to share. I mean, there's a lot of generosity in the book about I didn't see myself or you didn't see yourself.
So there's now a story that happens after the bell jar. Right, right.
So I'm curious about taking all of those experiences and turning them into a practice that generates an entire book. What does that look like?
[00:07:17] Speaker B: Oh, man.
So, right. I mean, I write about this a little bit in the introduction, but when I first started, I was envisioning this as like a long narrative poem.
So, like, are you familiar with Anne Carson?
[00:07:29] Speaker A: No.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: She is like a classicist and also a poet. And she has this long work called the Autobiography of Red, which is like a novel in verse. And I was like, cool, I want to do something like that.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: The Autobiography of Red.
[00:07:42] Speaker B: Red. Yeah.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: It's super good.
I wanted to do something like that, but as I was.
I don't know, I like no shade to poetry. But as I was writing poetry, I was getting more and more frustrated with it because I was like, I'm just writing in circles about the thing instead of actually writing about the.
Right. So that's when I was just like, I just need to do this head on. But I don't know if that actually answers your question about practice.
Yeah, I'm not sure if that.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: Well, I mean, it gets us there. It gets us to the decision to move from narrative poem to poetry to memoir. But then the practical side of it, like, what is finishing grad school? And then, I mean, you've worked a lot of places and you work for acc doing several different things.
Where does writing fit into that? What does the writing practice look like in general for you?
[00:08:38] Speaker B: Oh man. Like generally today?
[00:08:40] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: I mean, I am a fairly scattered writer. Like, I'm not a person who can do like, write an hour a day at the same time.
I've tried sometimes and it never really works for me.
I feel like generally I just have to like randomly find a time, carve out some random times, and then I just sort of go and like, for me, part of it is also reading. Right. Like, reading always informs my writing. So I just started something that I hope will turn into a short story. And as I was writing it, I was like, okay, this kind of reminds me of like fabulism. And I was like, oh, there's this book that I read years ago that I bet if I read it, it'll help me think about these things. So I am going back and finding the Morphology of the Folk tale, which is this very cool book. Right. So it's a lot of reading, a lot of responding to that.
But yeah, again, like, I don't have a set schedule. I don't really, like, my writing process is really messy. I don't write things in order. If I'm working on a short piece, like short fiction, I write it in order.
But like, my memoir was all over the place. I'm working on a novel now that is also like completely out of order.
I don't know why, I just can't. I can't write things in a linear way.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: Well, it's interesting because if you're hearing this in audio, you're not going to see this, but those of you on the zoom and watching the video saw a little bit of a circular thing. Right. And this is something I noticed while reading Undead, that there's a lot of like, I can feel the non linearity in the process showing up in the writing because there's a lot of. We're going to take an arc, but then we're going to loop back at a point and there's a lot of nonlinear. And at the time I was taking that as a, as a demonstration of how healing and grieving and all of these processes that we go through are never linear and they're never, they're never in a straight line and they're never.
And they're never. I mean, they're always messy, they're never clean.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: Right.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: And you can see some of that manifesting in the, in the novel or in the memoir as well. Right.
So then, so then if you're working on longer stuff, like the novel, like the memoir, you're.
Is it like productively chaotic? Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:55] Speaker B: And. Right. Like the memoir is going to be linear or. I'm sorry, the novel is going to be linear. Right, right. But so, like, I think exactly what you're talking about is what I was trying to get at with the memoir of sort of the recursiveness of everything and. Yeah, just what you were talking about, the circularity of things, the non linear aspect of healing, which again, in the novel is gonna be very. A lot more straightforward. It's just. Right. The writing is just chaos. Yeah.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: There's another writer that has been on this before named Megan Jregi Echols, who I went to grad school with her. And she always talked about those of us who conceive of an idea and then build that idea from beginning to end. She's. What are you doing? Write the scene you're thinking about and then figure the rest out later. And I could never bring myself to do that.
So I admire the things I don't know how to do.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: Well, I don't know if it makes my life easier though. Right. Because it also then will entail, like, I'll write a scene or I'll write a section and then it'll end up like, cool. I can't use this at all.
[00:11:55] Speaker A: There's also a story from grad school. There's a writer named Matt Bell came out to do a lecture and he.
He told us this story about how he was stuck in some novel of his. He didn't know what a character was going to do, and everything he came up with seemed manufactured and it seemed inauthentic. So he wrote 20,000 words of the character going home for a reunion of some kind. Wrote those 20,000 words. And at the end of it, he was like, all right, I know what the character's gonna do now. And then ditched all of that.
And I think about that and I'm like, wow, that's a lot of words to just figure things out. But then that's the way it works sometimes. Right.
And I ask about practice and process because being sponsored by a creative writing department in an educational institution, we're always looking for the avenue where a student can take something to their practice. And I think what I'm hearing is that it's totally okay to not be rigid.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean. Right. And this is something I tell my students too, is like, you have to figure out the practice that works for you. Like, I know some people who love doing an hour a day. I know like have y' all talked about like the morning pages?
[00:13:04] Speaker A: I have not, no.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: Okay. So. Right. There's a book called the Artist's Way, which some people love, I think is just fine.
But one of the main thing that the main things they talk about there is this idea of the morning pages. So they say every morning the first thing you do when you wake up, you handwrite three pages.
You never have to go back and reread them. It doesn't have to be linear. You can even just say, I'm tired, I have nothing to say for three pages.
But it is the practice of putting pen to paper that will get you started. Some people swear by that. I tried it a little bit. I wasn't into it.
I think it really is just finding what works for you. And yeah, again, some people will say, I write for half an hour in the morning and half an hour before. I don't know.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: But whatever the structure is. And I think it's important to note too, I tried them morning pages too. I tried to do. It's a 12 week program. And what. There's a lot of language in there, in it that I resist just because of who I am.
But I, you know, I made it. I think I made it three weeks into the three pages a day. And I got to the point where I was like, I don't know why I'm doing this anymore.
And it's refreshing to hear that somebody else had that kind of the same experience. I think it's important to note that finding the process is a lot of trial and error. And the error is the most important part of it. Right. Once you figure out what doesn't work for you, you've made some progress.
If it's all easy, then we're not growing at all.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: Absolutely right.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: I want to get into the work you're doing now and I know a little bit about what you do, but tell us what your current professional work is like.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: My teaching here at ACC and anything
[00:14:44] Speaker A: else that you're doing. Yeah.
[00:14:45] Speaker B: Okay, cool. So I teach here at acc.
I teach in a couple different departments. Obviously. I teach in creative writing, also teach in the humanities, philosophy and religion department.
I also am now going to teach a little bit in the English department, but mostly just like subbing. So I'm sort of just all over the place.
I am also an instructional associate for the division, which means right now I basically work on websites. I build websites for people.
Yeah. So it's kind of a lot. I'm kind of all over the place. And then in Terms of writing. So the book came out a little bit over a month ago and I've been doing a little bit of book touring and trying to figure that out because it turns out the publishing of a book is so, so different from the writing of a book.
And it's a world that I am not so good at, it turns out, like the marketing and the publicity and all of that.
So after that, I've been trying to figure out what comes next.
And I don't know if you are like, you might know about this, you might have talked about this, but there's that idea of the sophomore slump where after your first book comes out, then the second book you're like, what the
[00:15:56] Speaker A: hell am I doing now?
[00:15:57] Speaker B: Yeah, because right in the first book you're like, okay, this is the story that I absolutely need to tell. There's the urgency, there's the, like, this is what needs to be done. And then in the second book you're like, well, I want to keep writing, I want to do this. But yeah, like now what?
[00:16:14] Speaker A: Yeah, there's something about.
I'm more familiar with it with music circles. I was in those circles for a long time. And the idea is you have your entire life to write the first book, right? But then once that's done, that's the need, that's the urgency. This is the thing that's been clawing to get out for years and years and years. Now the second one is, okay, now what do I want to write? And that becomes a much different thing. And I think it comes back to, it comes back to having in your practice, like the, having the reason that you're trying to produce something, being, being front and center at, at all points and curating your life to know that that's the thing, and curating life around it, which is tough because one of the other questions I wanted to ask with all of the things that, that you're doing, you know, the. There's some, there's some built in angst. I'm of gen. I'm of the angst generation. I'm Gen X.
And that's never going to go away. But there's also some built in ang.
Responding to a world that is increasingly more difficult to survive just based on the systems, right. And then in order to do that, being in three or four different academic departments and having different responsibilities, kind of thinning out the thought energy, right? So how does writing fit into that? How do you protect the writing time?
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Again, like for me, it sort of comes down to finding small things. Bursts of time to do it in. And part of that does come from, like, I feel like forever. I've always worked a lot of different jobs. So, like, even when I was in college, I worked at the campus bookstore, and when it was chill, I could bring out my laptop and do work.
And so. Right. It's just like, finding little bits of time here and there. But I also. Teaching in so many different departments, I think is actually really productive for my writing because it means I'm working with a lot of different ideas, looking at a lot of different texts. Like, even if it. You know, even if it is a lot and exhausting, there's all sorts of different pieces of inspiration.
Like, man. So I teach. So I teach Introduction to Comparative Religion, which is super fun. And if y' all are at acc, you should come take it, because it's great.
And I teach. When I'm doing the unit on Christianity, I like to teach Christian Apocrypha. So, like, early texts that were not included in the canon because they're, like, bizarre and strange. And there's one called Thunder Perfect Mind, which is, like, arguably Christian. Some people would say it's not, but it's this series of, like, contradictory statements, and some of the lines are just, like, so cool, man. I wish I had it pulled up in front of me because then I could share, like, some of my favorite lines.
But something like that, you look at and you're just like, this is amazing. I like. It's inspiring. There's something that you take from that. So I think working in so many different departments is actually super helpful for my writing.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: I've struggled with it because I teach in the creative writing department. I still do teach in cls, too, and my struggle ends up being kind of shifting modes of reading and shifting modes of writing.
So, again, I'm constantly trying to learn from the people who are doing it better than I am.
So when you find these little pieces of inspiration, you say, so how you're writing a novel now. How does the disparate work responsibility kind of translate to the novel? How is it feeding the novel?
[00:19:50] Speaker B: That one is a tough question. Partly because I'm in that sophomore slump right now, and I'm like, I've been struggling with the novel a little bit.
So right now, honestly, I would just say the teaching has been more of a productive distraction than actual hope with the novel, because that's been a.
It's been stuck for a little bit.
[00:20:13] Speaker A: Okay.
Do you have unstuck strategies?
[00:20:18] Speaker B: I mean, there are some sort of part of the book Involves a road trip. And so just the other week, I was like, you know what? I just need to go drive somewhere and remember what this feels like.
So just, like, drove, ended up in a random town, like, got a hotel room for the night and just was like, cool. I'm gonna. Yeah. Try to remember what this is like so I can write about it better. Just, like, doing that sort of thing, reliving the experience.
[00:20:45] Speaker A: That makes sense.
I appreciate that. I'd like.
Can we talk a little bit about Undead?
[00:20:51] Speaker B: For sure.
[00:20:52] Speaker A: So I want to. You've kind of hinted at that the writing and the selling are.
You know, writing and publishing are different. I want to get into the writing, and I think given the content, like, the idea that something's clawing to get out, really, it feels really appropriate. Right.
So the writing that went from narrative poem to memoir.
Once you landed on memoir, what was the timeline? Like? What was the process like for the book?
[00:21:29] Speaker B: So it took about two years to actually write the book. And then, of course, there was a lot of editing, but, yeah, it took two years to write. And in the beginning, the middle section where. So the way the book is structured, the very first section of the book is the immediate aftermath of a suicide attempt. And then it jumps. The second section jumps back in time to tell the story of how we got there. So, you know, the story of childhood and graduate school and all of that. And then the third section jumps ahead in time to actually, when I moved to Austin.
And originally, the second section of the book was much longer. And I sort of hated that because I really wanted the focus of the book to be more on the living afterwards instead of what led up to it. So, I mean, it was like 50 or 60 pages long that I cut from that part. So I just, like, was like, there's just too much. There's too much. And, like, that story maybe belongs in a different book, but that's not really necessary here now.
And then the very, very ending of the book took me a really long time to figure out when I originally, like, when I first got an agent, when we first sold the book, the ending, like, it was there, but I knew it wasn't what I wanted to be. And it actually took, honestly, like, a couple years to figure it out.
[00:22:50] Speaker A: Wow. Okay.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: And there'd be. Because, Right. The publishing process is super long, so it took, like, three years to publish, to actually publish the book.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: And it was in that time that I would, like, you know, I'd be waiting for edits, and I would be waiting for, like, Three months at a time. And it would be, you know, so I'd take three months off and just like, not. Not look at it at all. And then when I went back to it, I could. I would be like, okay, what if I try this thing? What if we do this thing instead?
And, yeah, it wasn't until, like, it took a couple years to figure out exactly how to end it, because I felt like, I don't know, I really wanted to stick the landing.
[00:23:26] Speaker A: Right.
I mean, I think with anything, we want to make sure it's exactly what we intended it for it to be. But with something that's as. As viscerally vulnerable as undead is like, not sticking the landing feels like a personal affront.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:45] Speaker A: But this brings me to also talking about the publishing process being long, it sounds like, which is something that happens with memoir. It doesn't happen with fiction unless your name ends with Sanderson or King or something like that, where the book is sold before it's finished. So this is pitch, so.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: Well, sort of. So I actually had the full manuscript written before we sold it, or. Yeah. So basically my.
It would have been smarter and quicker if I had done this differently, but I had the whole manuscript written and then I found an agent, and then we had to go back and write a book proposal. So then we had to go back and act as if the book had not been written, and then we sold the proposal.
And then part of what took so long was because the publishing house has a timeline and they sort of assumed that the book had not been written yet. So built into that was like a year where they were assuming that that was when I was going to actually write the book, but it had already been written. So that was a lot of back and forths with my agent doing just extra rounds of edits.
But, yeah, it was a lot of waiting.
And the other thing I was going to. So on the one hand, I think it would have been quicker if I had done the proposal first and then sold it and then written everything else. But I have read some memoirs lately. I'm not going to name names, but I've read some books lately where you can tell at the end this person was on a deadline and that last part did not get edited as much as it should have, and it feels rushed and the book doesn't come together at the.
So in some ways, I think, you know, I think it was good that it took so much time because it did take so long to figure out exactly how I wanted to end it.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: Right. But I think there's something to like, kind of celebrating the benefits of not doing it the right way. The quote unquote right way. Right.
Because as you said, had you done that, you might have been in that rush state too. And how unsatisfying that would have been.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:53] Speaker A: You know, and.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Cause, right. Like, once it's out, that's it. You can't change it. Like, that's that.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: I mean, you could 10 years later, do an unabridged the stand, you know, the way some people do. But this doesn't feel like the kind of thing to re. To revisit. It feels like the kind of thing to let people, you know, plant in their own gardens to grow a little bit. Right.
And then.
And now, now that it's out, we had a very fun launch.
Karaoke was sung.
So what's next for Undead? And are you the novel or is your agent going to represent the novel too?
[00:26:35] Speaker B: So in a couple weeks is the Writers League of Texas Agents and Editors Conference. So I'm going to be doing a couple panels there and then we're setting up. We're in the process of setting up some more events for the rest of the summer and fall, but things are a little bit up in the air in terms of events and book tour for Undead.
And then, yeah, we're trying to set up like, book festivals and stuff for the fall, but we'll see, you know, we'll see what happens. And then as far as the novel goes, right now, my agent is gonna represent it, but I'm gonna. I need to sort of finish it all first, show it to her and then see what she thinks. And if she's like, no, this is not it, then we will figure it out from there. And that, you know, we'll see.
There was a time. I mean, I've been working on this book for a while, and there was a time actually a couple years ago where I showed her a first draft and she was like, this ain't it. And like, she was right. She was totally right. But I had to. I actually ended up.
I think I had like 150 pages and then ended up trashing all of it.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: And a lot of it, like, it's like in a lot of ways the same story, but the perspective is really different.
And so, yeah, I think sort of going back to what you were saying, sometimes you just write something and you're like, this is not it. But it being not it is helping me get closer to the it.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: Right. The error being the point of trial and error.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: Right.
Quick reminder as we're going, we're approaching the Q and A. Make sure you got questions in the chat for Madeline. I only have two more, and they're kind of related. What's the best piece of writing advice you've ever gotten? Ooh.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: Oh, man, that's really hard.
The first thing that comes to mind.
So do you know Dorothy Allison?
[00:28:36] Speaker A: I'm familiar because. Because you've made me familiar.
[00:28:40] Speaker B: So Dorothy Allison is a really, really important writer for just, like, my writing career and how I think about things. She is, you know, a queer writer from the south who writes a lot about growing up in poverty, and she writes a lot about, like, really hard things that happen to her. And she writes about it really directly. Like, she does not pull any punches.
And it's just like, she is just an incredible author. And if y' all haven't read her, would really recommend. She has a short story collection called Trash, which is amazing, and then a book called Bastard out of Carolina, which is also amazing.
And I realized, is it okay if I curse on this? Yes. Okay, cool.
So there's a lecture of hers that sometimes when I am feeling discouraged, I will go on YouTube and find this lecture, and if it ever gets taken down, I'll be so bummed.
But part of what she talks about is how after she published the book, she got a lot of especially women coming up to her and looking to her for inspiration and wanting to write hard books the way she wrote hard books.
And so, in part, the line that she says is something like, and so I go through the world leaving behind a trail of girls who want to write nasty books.
And I tell them as an ancestor.
Write nasty books. Tell the truth as you know it.
And I was just like, man, yeah, I love that. And then a little bit later in the talk, she's again talking about girls who come to her for inspiration. And she's like, again, I don't remember the context in which she says this, but she's talking. She's telling a story about someone, and she says, you know, and so I slap her on the ass and say, bitch, go write me a book.
And I'm like, sometimes you just need to hear that.
[00:30:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
The. The bluntness, the.
Yeah, the directness. Love it. Love it. That leads me to my last question.
So given. Given the audience of.
Of writers at the very beginning of their education, what piece of advice would you give to those who are just starting to find their voice or their genre or. Or the joy in this stuff?
[00:31:09] Speaker B: Just that, right? Like, it takes time. Nobody is a great writer when they start. And even. Right. Like. Like I was saying. Right. So I've been working on this novel for years, and it's hard, right? Like, I think in some ways, writing never gets easier, which is both, I think, the joy of it and the struggle of it. Right. Like, every piece of writing that you do is gonna need something else from you, and it's always gonna be hard. And so I would like. You have to embrace the struggle and the difficulty and find joy in the difficulty. Right. There's a. So in my introductory classes, I teach an essay. I teach some essays by Anne Lamont, of course. Yeah. And in one of the essays, I don't remember, she has an essay called Shitty First Drafts, which is excellent. And then she has an essay called Perfectionism. And in one of them, she uses a quote by Kurt Vonnegut, who's obviously a very successful author.
And the quote is something like, it's Kurt Vonnegut saying, whenever I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in my mouth.
So. Right. Just like, yeah, it's hard for everybody. And, you know, it just. It takes time to develop your voice. It takes time to figure out how you're gonna approach things and to just give yourself time. Let yourself make mistakes.
Let yourself figure it out and know, like, yeah, it might take.
It might take years. And that's okay. That's just, like, the nature of writing.
[00:32:33] Speaker A: And it's gonna be messy.
[00:32:34] Speaker B: And it's gonna be messy, and it's gonn.
[00:32:37] Speaker A: I think that's. That. That's a great place to move to. Questions. Thank you for that so much.
I love the. There was a line in there that you. That. That you said that I'm going to try to remember on the fly, because I had it, and then I. You know, it's got to be messy, kind of replace. I think that was the gist. Gotta be messy. Love it. All right, so we have a couple of questions from the chat.
Ryan asks, is this your first book?
[00:33:00] Speaker B: Yes, this is my first book. I've written a couple other things, so I've done some translations that were published in a book, but this is my first.
My own book.
[00:33:13] Speaker A: And then Michael asks, how do you decide when a story is worth turning into a full project?
[00:33:20] Speaker B: That is a really tough question.
That's a really hard question. I think a lot of this comes down sometimes when people ask me for writing advice. I think I'm actually not super helpful because a lot of people of my Advice is just like, I don't know, like, it depends.
Like, even the novel I'm writing, you could probably distill it down to a single story. Right, like, or like a short story. I think it just comes down to how, like, the art that you want to make, if you think that it is a longer project, then you, like, can make it that.
But it's, you know, it's. Again, I'm like, not very helpful with this.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: I think, you know, there's a couple of things that I want to throw in. Meaning. First, let's not assume a short story is not a project.
[00:34:14] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:34:15] Speaker A: That's a full project.
But I think the other thing is the word worth there. I want to play with that. Like, if you've got an idea, then it's worth playing with.
Any idea that occurs to us more than once is something that wants to be expressed in some way. And I'm a notebook keeper.
I have a journal I carry with me. But I know there are also some writers who don't like them. They say that once you write an idea down in a notebook, then you've written the idea down and we're not there. And I don't know if I agree with that, but I do agree that if you. Whatever ideas occur to you more than once, so they keep coming back to you, or you keep seeing the shape of the idea somewhere, then that becomes worth exploring into whatever it's going to be.
And again, short stories are projects unto themselves.
[00:35:07] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely.
[00:35:09] Speaker A: In that they might be shorter, but I think they're more difficult in the compression and the subtext that you have to play with.
But then the other side of that, the marketing side of that is a short story you sell to one place and then you still have a book out.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I was going to say some of the very first creative writing class ever took in undergrad was fiction. And the rule was no piece. Like, it had to be a full thing. And no piece could be longer than two pages, double spaced, which was exceptionally difficult. Right. Like, to fit a full story in that space meant every word had to be doing a lot of work. Like, there was no filler. Which is why. Right. Like, short story is a full project itself because it's so short, every sentence has to be doing more work than in a novel. Whereas in a novel you get a lot more space for a lot more. Like.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: Like clearing your throat. You get to clear your throat in a novel.
[00:36:08] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Whereas in a short story you gotta be. Yeah, you gotta be saying it All.
[00:36:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's the, the, the way a short story. And I like, I, I love a novel. I also love a short story. I have no, like, not one over the other. But the art of a short story is creating the novel sized world in a single scene or a single conflict.
[00:36:31] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:36:33] Speaker A: And there's beauty in that challenge, for sure.
Jesse, this is kind of a beautiful statement. So I'm gonna give you the whole thing. Reading a book helped open the door to Jesse leaving a cult that she was raised in, that they were raised in. What is a book or piece of writing that still affects you today?
[00:36:53] Speaker B: I mean anything by Dorothy Allison, really and truly, like, she is incredible.
I also this, I think in certain circles this is now cliche, but Maggie Nelson has a book called Bluets, which is short and beautiful and I've read it a million times and it's still like, oh my God, it still makes me cry.
So that one is absolutely amazing.
I would also say, I don't know what this says about me, maybe this is just being a professor here, but. Right. So we have a class where we read the Odyssey for one of the classes. And now I read that book so many times and I actually still find that book really emotionally affecting.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: Really?
[00:37:39] Speaker B: Yeah, there are a couple scenes, there are a couple lines that just like really hit.
Like there's part where one of the characters is talking to Odysseus and she says, are you so foolish as to give up and take pleasure in your pain?
Which is just like dang, like man. Right? Like. Yeah, I don't know. Some of those, some of those classics really hit, right?
[00:38:04] Speaker A: Yeah, they do. They do.
Clearly not Moby Dick though.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: No.
[00:38:08] Speaker A: Considering.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: Well, not for me.
Some people love it.
[00:38:11] Speaker A: Yeah, some people do.
[00:38:12] Speaker B: Not me.
[00:38:13] Speaker A: I had one of my. My into my undergrad with my B.A. one of one of the two English professors I worked with was a Melvillian champion.
We read Moby Dick for one entire 10 quarter class. That was it. That was all.
[00:38:26] Speaker B: Yikes.
[00:38:27] Speaker A: Sarah says, hello, Madeline. She actually says, hi, Madal. I'm misquoting. Hi, Madeline. I'm curious about your relationship to poetry. Now after walking away from it for this project. The tension between honesty and lyric can be so real. And I appreciate how you described that.
[00:38:42] Speaker B: I think I've gotten a lot more generous towards poetry. Honestly, the further I've gotten away from it. Part of why I distanced myself from it, I was in a poetry workshop in graduate school where the other poets were some of the pettiest and cruelest people I've ever met, and they were just so at odds with the work that they were making that I was just like, what is this?
And, yeah, I think the further I've gotten away from sort of that world, the more I've been able to appreciate poetry by itself.
And I also think, for me, there are some poet, like, specific poets that I really love whose work I just sort of implicitly trust, like Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson.
And then I also really, generally, I really like books in translation.
And so, like, Russian poetry is a thing I come back to. There's this woman, Anna Akhmatova. She's also like one of my big inspirations.
And so, yeah, her poetry is incredible. And so, yeah, for me, it is just a matter of finding the poets that I sort of trust and then going with their work.
[00:39:52] Speaker A: Sarah also says that she loves Maggie Nelson and is not ashamed, I think. I mean, it's interesting to think about how one experience in a poetry workshop that is more about the people, the community of the workshop than it is the actual work can change a trajectory even.
[00:40:11] Speaker B: Oh, for sure.
[00:40:12] Speaker A: It kind of highlights how important community is, which, I mean, I typically ask this question, and I know that I kind of expended my question allotment, but I've been curious about the community that you found or that you wanted while writing Undead.
What was that like?
[00:40:32] Speaker B: So I. So I did my MFA at University of Alabama, which. One of the things that drew me to the program was that they're really encouraging of experimental work and cross genre work. So when I was there, they actually didn't have a memoir class, but I took a novel class. And I was like, do y' all care if I workshop a memoir? And everybody was like, no, go for it. This.
So I had a really cool community there. And that was where I did the bulk of the writing was during that MFA program.
And then afterwards, I just sort of randomly met people. Like, I randomly met somebody who works for Writers League of Texas who's also a memoirist.
And then I attended the Tin House summer workshop, but I also did that for the novel that I'm working on. And so everybody else there was also a novelist list.
And yet they have become a really important community, both in writing the memoir and just.
Just in general.
[00:41:28] Speaker A: Right.
[00:41:29] Speaker B: Like, that workshop was two years ago now. And we still, you know, we've got a group chat going, we have a monthly zoom check in where we like, say, how's your writing going? What are your goals for the next month? That sort of thing. So I don't know. I think it can be really difficult to find writing community. And so I think when you find someone or a group that you connect with, it is just a matter of, like, being really intentional, fostering that and, like, sort of not taking that for granted.
[00:41:58] Speaker A: Yeah, that's one of the reasons we work so hard to build some kind of community here, too, with everything we're doing.
That's it for today. Madeline, I'm so glad that. I'm so glad you're here. So glad you hung out with us.
[00:42:14] Speaker B: Right back at ya.
[00:42:15] Speaker A: Well, thanks, and I hope you all enjoyed. Have a fabulous day. We'll see you next time.
[00:42:20] Speaker B: Thanks. Bye, all.
[00:42:21] Speaker A: Bye.
