Literary Women: The Long Beach Festival of Authors

Conversations from the Archive
March 2015
Long Beach, California

How to Cook a Moose, Kate Christensen
The Book of the Unknown Americans, Cristina Henriquez
The Clasp, Sloane Crosley
Prayers for the Stolen, Jennifer Clement
The Color Master, Aimee Bender

Excerpts:

Kate Christensen: A women’s conference is a real treat.

I feel I have to prove myself as a female writer. It’s a tremendous challenge. Being a female artist, you have a complicated relationship with your ego. I had to be everyone’s voice growing up as a writer.

Sloane Crosley: Women’s creative work has to be so much better than men’s. It’s difficult to know your story is valuable. When a woman writes about men and dating, the result is automatically labeled “chick lit.”

The male equivalent is “they’re so sensitive.” I would like all genders to read [my books], especially women who don’t like “women’s stuff.”

Jennifer Clement: Is it still relevant to have a festival with only women? Yes.

Aimee Bender: [This particular conference is] the bullseye of the dartboard for spinoffs.

Christensen: I grew up in a house with a lot of books. I was intimidated, except for the books about sex. I was fascinated with sex as a kid.

[Writing protected me] like a magic shield. I was a born writer. [The writer’s personality includes] the inclination to like being alone and pushing [herself]. Writers like to stare at people. The innate quality writers possess is they are riveted with people. [It’s] the bread and butter of the writer. If you see a kid staring, they’re probably going to grow up to be a writer or a psychopath.

Public speaking is not so much part of a writer’s personality, [but a writer is] curious and never judgmental. [Writers] want to know what people are feeling—the subtext—which is helpful when you’re writing novels.

[Harriet the Spy] is a good lesson at spying on people. She wrote the truth. She was ostracized. Then she became the editor of the school newspaper. What I learned was you can write the truth and write what you see, but then you need to be implicated. I am implicated.

Early writing was comforting myself. Writing is the opposite of therapy. It roughs you up. It doesn’t solve anything.

[The Iowa Writers’ Workshop] was a sexist, cold, terrifying place. I barely survived. Frank Conroy walked into the first workshop and made a woman cry. He tore her down. It set the tone. I left Iowa feeling I’d lost my way there.

[In my twenties,] I didn’t know who I was as a writer for the first time in my life. [After Iowa, in New York] my writing wasn’t going well. I was still getting over Iowa. Suddenly, I started writing in my own voice again—the one I had when I was thirteen. I found my way writing again. It wasn’t Faulknerian. It was the way I wrote in eighth grade.

Cristina Henriquez: I didn’t always know I wanted to be a writer, but I was always a reader. My parents were not big readers. [In high school, a boy I was] soul-crushingly in love with gave me a blank journal and said, “Write down everything you want to say to me for a year and then give it back to me.”

I could be whom I wanted to be and have the freedom to say what I wanted to say. I gave him the journal back after a year. He gave it back to me a few years ago. It’s really, really cringeworthy.

After I finished the journal, I bought another one and filled that up. And then another one. I never looked back. I fell out of love with boys and fell in love with writing.

[I attended Northwestern and then was] rejected to all five top creative writing schools.

[For two years, I wrote stories] and had the good fortune to receive notes on them [from an old college professor at Northwestern]. Then I applied to grad school again. My first response was from Iowa. I had a very positive experience there. I discovered The House on Mango Street. Sandra [Cisneros] was writing characters a lot like me, not like I’d seen before. I walked through the door that Sandra opened. It opened up the whole world.

[I previously learned from books that my] white American experience was the only one of value. [After Iowa,] I finally showed my Panama stories to an editor who told me, “You’re sitting on a goldmine. These are the stories.

Ordinary stories are worth telling.

Crosley: I didn’t grow up in a writing house. I got in trouble for reading Misery under the table. I could have been doing drugs. I always used stories to express myself. I captured thoughts by writing them down.

[One of my first childhood stories] was a message to my parents to quit crowding me. It was a story about bunnies. The parent bunnies got shot, and the little bunny hadn’t learned to get by on her own.

[In college,] I thought real writing was not what I can do naturally. If I wrote in my own voice, that was cheating. [When a professor asked me to stay after class,] I thought I would get praised for my suburban bloodbath story. [Instead, the professor said,] “Somebody up there gave you something. You don’t know what to do with it. This isn’t it.”

[After eleven years at Random House representing fiction authors, one day] I locked myself out of two different apartments in the same day. [I was moving between New York apartments. When the same locksmith showed up to get me out of the second bind,] he looked down and saw my doormat: “déjà vu.” He said, “That’s a funny doormat.” I knew I had to write about this moment.

Essays start with one line you hang your hat on. I wrote the locksmith story. The Voice said, “If you clean this up and not make it stupid, we’ll publish it.”

Christensen: Failure has been my topic. We’re sort of together in this. We all fail. I wanted to explore the idea of not succeeding. [I first wrote a book in the genre I labeled] “loser lit.” It was hailed as “chick lit.” I read awful Amazon reviews [after its release].

[Then I wrote two novels in male voices that were] received very differently. I could get away with saying things in a male voice. Bad thoughts. Sexual. It felt very powerful.

Writing a novel is a tremendous act of will. It’s the lifeline to sanity. My writing has changed. I’m sick of writing about myself. It’s an interesting place to be. [How to Cook a Moose] is about other people. [I am now] writing for pleasure. [It’s a] sense of new territory.

[My next book will most likely be] a hundred pages of false start, [but it’s a] new kind of story, not about me. What a relief.

Henriquez: [Literature is] to see yourself and to see beyond yourself. That’s how compassion grows. Empathy. Kindness. [It’s about] getting rid of the fear that divides us.

[The process for my latest novel was twenty drafts, saved separately]: Novel One, Novel Two, Novel Come on Already.

I used to write from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Now I write from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. [I have children. Most of my latest book was] written in the library. I have been writing a lot by hand lately. On the computer, I have been writing with my eyes closed and translating as purely as possible from my head to the page.

[For The Book of the Unknown Americans,] my process started from a single sentence that I built into a story. I sat on it for a few months. I go into a project knowing as little as I can. [It’s a] sentence by sentence process. It comes from somewhere else. I’m not in control.

Immigration is a huge, overwhelming topic. I wanted to make the characters universal. They are worried about losing jobs. They want a happy marriage. They are worried about putting their kids on the bus.

[After the first draft,] I boiled the theme down to home. Where is home? Where exactly do I belong?

The novel is the power of invention. We can change the stories we tell about each other. Rejection is not there to stop you. It’s there to test you for how much harder you’ll work to get what you want.

Crosley: [When I started writing essays,] I didn’t think of myself as a nonfiction writer. I thought, “This is on the side.” You have to put on a different hat when you write about yourself. I forget what I write [regarding my life]. Someone will say, “I had a Siamese cat,” and I’ll say, “Me too!”

I was writing a novel when I discovered I was an essayist. [The novel was] When Harry Meets Sally meets Little Shop of Horrors. [It] will never be published. I was able to salvage one line after four years of work.

[I realized] observations and details worked so well in nonfiction. [As a burgeoning essayist, I read David Rakoff and thought,] “I hope I can write nonfiction like this.”

When I published my first collection, I was told, “Essays don’t sell.” That was true at the time, but I was lucky. It found its footing.

The ideal [is the essay] you don’t know or don’t think you’ll write about. [I volunteered in a butterfly exhibit while working at a museum.] I didn’t expect to write about volunteering. The essay came quite naturally.

[A kid asked me,] “Why are the butterflies crushed on the floor?”

“Where are your parents?” [I asked.]

[The second type of essay is the one] you think you might write about, but you’re not sure. You’re waiting.

[I attended a wedding in Alaska.] My friend said, “Either it will be a good experience, or you’ll write about it.”

[The third type of essay is the one you] know you’re going to write about. This is the most difficult. “Where do I start? There are too many angles?”

Mashing stuff up that doesn’t belong together is my sweet spot.

[The hardest essay I ever had to write:] I was dating a guy who had a second family. I was that girl: the girl who gave birth at the prom. “How did you not know?”

[In the same essay, I discussed my part in a furniture scam.] It was the shadiest thing I was part of. Again, it was not drugs.

[I tied the furniture story to the story about my deceptive boyfriend.] They were mashups because they were both borrowed. I was borrowing this guy who wasn’t mine and taking furniture that wasn’t mine.

[My novel,] a Goonies-esque adventure, [was another process entirely]. I had to tend to it so much more. [With essays, a writer needs to] observe the world a little more. [With my novel, I] needed it to be quieter.

[While writing the novel,] I had to ask my male friends for advice about my male characters. “Are they thinking about their penises enough?”

[A fourth grader once asked me,] “Does it hurt to be a writer?”

Actually, my back hurts all the time.

Clement: The birth of the book [came when I asked an interviewee in a Mexican prison], “What are you doing about the girls being stolen?”

“We’re digging holes in fields.”

You can sell a bag of drugs once. You can sell a girl many times. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

[I write fiction because], historically, we don’t remember journalism of the time, but we remember the novels of the time. Most important to me are craft and form, more so than the subject. [I wrote Widow Basquiat as if it was] a silent movie, a scene with two voices.

[My second novel was in] three voices: the first voice, the inner voice, and the objective voice.

[My third novel was] written like a Greek tragedy. At the end of every story is a chorus.

[A theme I’m most interested in is] how do the weak exercise their power? How do we get knowledge and exercise the knowledge we have?

I can write in Spanish, but I mostly write in English. In my English, the words have a gender, like Spanish. [I call it] unconscious intertextuality. One language affects another.

Fiction/literature can make changes in the world.

Journalists are very dangerous people.

Bender: The process is the core of the writing experience. There is something unknowable about it. We can orbit it. The creative process is everywhere.

[My process starts with] boredom. A study showed if you do a boring activity first, you’re more creative afterward.

The first question people ask me is, “Do you write on a computer or with a pen?” The second question people ask me is, “Where do you get your ideas from?”

Boredom.

[In Adam Phillips’ essay On Being Bored, he says,] boredom is a kind of waystation. You’re waiting for yourself. Boredom has to be cultivated. You have to make space for it. Put your phone aside for daydreaming space. Boredom needs to be structured around empty space.

[In 1995, when I was working on an MFA in creative writing at UC Irvine, I thought,] “I should write every day.”

[While living in a kitchen-less house on Balboa Island,] I would sit for an hour and a half each day doing nothing. I would just sit there. [At the time, I only had] two friends to email, [but it was still] really painful.

[I actually tied my leg to a chair with a scarf to] see what would bubble up. [It was a] gesture toward imagination. [I also started] floating files on my computer. I created font files for character names and origins. (Helvetica!) I got quite a lot of work done. Funnier, stranger, magical storytelling came from it.

[At UCI,] I wrote six days a week. On Sundays, I earned a vacation. I didn’t think about writing at all.

I don’t know where the material is going to come from. I’m really desperate to find something that has life in it. Most [of the files I created] are dead, flat files.

[I stop writing] after a time limit [I set for myself]. I’ll stop at 9:45, even if I stop at important sentences. In a way, I have replicated a therapy session. Even if it is going well, time’s up, and then I have something to begin with the next day.

For seventeen years, my schedule was two hours of writing a day. I have twins now. It shook things up.

[During my children’s naptime, I do the following:] (1) nap; (2) fifteen minutes of writing; (3) shower.

I created a little microcosm. Even fifteen minutes a day felt like work was happening.

The most useful writing advice I received was, “If you write every day—or every moment—what you want to write, the writing will not be dutiful.” [This gives] enormous permission [to the writer].

You want to get to the end of the story earning the ending. Find the story you want to finish if you have seven beginnings. The joy with writing is no one has to see it. You can try stuff in solitude.

In some ways, “everyone has a story to tell” is reductive. We have an incredible wealth of stories to tell.

[Zadie Smith said,] “The reader is the musician. The writer is the composer. The reader plays the book. The writer and reader make the book together. You need the reader to activate the book.”

Meaning to me isn’t a checklist. It’s more about experience. The dance between the writer and reader is a mystery or an unconscious or the imagination or the iceberg that’s under the surface.

Crosley (to me): This whole “platform” thing is freaking me out. I wouldn’t worry about it. The more personal the writing, the more universal it is.