Heidi Durrow / photo (via author website) by Timothi Jane Graham

About Heidi Durrow

Heidi Durrow and her debut novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, seemed to have been just about everywhere last winter, from the New York Times and Publishers Weekly to NPR’s All Things Considered and The Daily Beast. And the phrases reviewers have used to describe Durrow’s novel represent a kind of wish list for any fiction writer, first-time or otherwise: in The New York Times, Louisa Thomas praised its “vividly realized characters”; in the Dallas Morning News, Karen Thomas wrote of its “hauntingly beautiful prose”; and in the Washington Post, Lisa Page called it “not just a tale of racial ambiguity but a human tragedy.”

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I. and the sole survivor of a family tragedy. The book’s warm reception makes it easy to forget that the novel, which won the 2008 Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice, was twelve years in the making—a story Durrow had a hard time writing and a hard time publishing. “The writing, editors and agents would say, was great, but there was no market,” admitted Durrow, who, like her protagonist, is biracial:

“No one could relate to a half-black and half-Danish girl. I had a couple of teachers along the way who encouraged me to abandon the project and realize it would never be published. I didn’t listen.”

Then again, Durrow has never been the type to sit back and wait for good fortune to find her. The middle child and only daughter of an African-American enlisted Air Force man and a white Danish woman, she is a graduate of Stanford University, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Yale Law School. In 2007, she launched Mixed Chicks Chat, a weekly podcast on race and society, with Fanshen Cox, an actor, producer and friend. In 2008, the duo created their annual Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival in Los Angeles, an event that has featured artists such as Angela Nissel, Kip Fulbeck, and Kim Wayans.

Durrow is currently promoting The Girl Who Fell from the Sky around the country, and that tour has provided her with an opportunity to meet up with listeners and festival attendees, as well as readers, who have their own mixed race stories to share. “It is an absolute dream to be able to share this story with a wide audience,” she said. “It’s even more amazing to hear from some readers that it has changed them in some small way. That’s what I’ve always wished to do with my writing.”

This interview took place via a series of e-mails, while Durrow was crisscrossing the country.

Interview

MARY WESTBROOK: I was so moved by the idea of language in the book. Both Rachel and her Danish mother, Nella, struggle to communicate in their adopted cities (Chicago and Portland), and Rachel seems keenly aware of the loss of Danish from her life once she moves to her grandma’s house. There’s also a heart-breaking scene in which Nella uses a slur to refer to her children, and a friend, Laronne, corrects her. Can you talk about the novel’s treatment of language?

HEIDI DURROW: Language is a central part of Rachel’s identity. She has a whole language of words, her mother’s language that is trapped inside her… because there is no one around to speak Danish with any longer. Like Rachel, I grew up speaking Danish. There are simply some words that don’t translate well—which means the story is mistranslated.

Nella struggles with language in a different way. She’s learning new words and doesn’t know how to assign meaning to them. When she unknowingly uses a racial slur to refer to her children, she’s devastated. She knows the powers of language and words. Words—labels specifically—are what we all either embrace or struggle against as we attempt to identify ourselves.

The point of view revolves between several characters. Did you always envision the story told in this way, with this particular group of characters telling the story?

The book began as a third-person recounting—told from Rachel’s perspective—Rachel all grown-up. The problem was I couldn’t figure out what had happened to her beyond her adolescence. I didn’t have a take on what her perspective would be about the fateful day on the rooftop after having gone to college, for instance, or marrying, or falling in love. I knew that the story of the novel would be her growing consciousness of what that accident meant to her. I realized I needed to tell it from her perspective—first-person present tense. Her character warranted an immediacy. The other characters slowly developed when I realized how unreliable Rachel was. She had to be. She was only slowly coming to understand her place in the world.

Heidi Durrow / photo by Frank Stewart

Were certain characters easier to access?

I created Laronne to give Nella an advocate. It was imperative that Nella be humanized in the way a friend could. I created Jamie/Brick because I think every tragedy needs a witness. In life, really, when something bad happens, you need to have someone who says, “Yes, a bad thing has happened.” Roger grew out of a similar need—I wanted the father figure to explain his absence. There are so many missing fathers out there; I can’t explain [why they’re gone]. I gave Roger a chance to explain. And Nella had to have a chance to speak for herself. It was important for the reader to hear about her despair in her own words so that they could—if not forgive—understand what she was trying to do.

While I was reading The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, I couldn’t help but think about the importance of pacing in this novel, of spooling out the right information at the right time. Another writer might have decided to lead up to Rachel’s accident, for instance, but this story seems far more invested in the aftermath of the tragedy.

I originally started the book with the accident, but it didn’t work. The reader needed to care about the characters before there was a tragedy. Because the book is told from different perspectives, I spaced out the information [through the chapters]. This is really how we come to “know” things [in real life]: we put stories together from different sources. Maybe that [impulse] was also a function of being a journalist. You have to back up your story with different sources.

You’ve said that the book took twelve years to write. Can you talk about that process, from the initial inspiration, to the hard work of writing the book?

I started the book in 1997 after reading a newspaper article about a terrible tragedy in which a family perished, but the girl survived. I was haunted by this. I wanted to know—“What would the girl’s survival look like?” I wanted to give her a voice, and a future.

How does a story usually start for you—with a character, with a place?

I start a story with a question. One for which I don’t have an answer. [Even if I don’t] come up with an answer by the end of the story, at least I’ve engaged with the question in a new way. The questions that started The Girl were, “What would the girl’s survival look like?” “How does a girl who loses her family in that way go on to fashion a life for herself?” “How does she learn to love again?” “How does she learn that she is lovable?”

photo by lowjumpingfrog (via flickr cc)

What was the most challenging part of the process for you? The most invigorating?

The most invigorating part of the process was striking upon Rachel’s voice, and finding a way to keep “growing up” her voice. I kept writing and re-writing until it sounded right to me. The most challenging part really was believing in the project. I didn’t listen to the no’s. I took them as information. Kept sending out the writing. Kept revising. And kept true to the vision I had for the book. There were many years where there was just my dogged belief that kept me going. Sometimes that belief waned.

Were you ever tempted to put the book away entirely? What kept you going?

It was the story I had to tell. Beyond the rejections, and also writer’s block that I suffered for a couple of years, I kept going by putting myself on a “regimen.” I sent out my work to everyone. The Poets & Writers’ deadline section was my bible. I posted all the deadlines on my calendar and submitted excerpts from the book to contests, and literary journals, and grants. For every rejection I received for a story, I sent the story out to two more journals. I spent a lot of money on postage, but finally, exponentially, I got some good news.

You share certain biographical details with your protagonist, Rachel. Are you fielding a lot of “Are you Rachel” questions? Do you think readers react differently to you or to the book if they assume the story is based on your life?

I make sure to tell audiences at readings that the accident part of the story is not my story, but inspired by a real story. I can see them all breathe a collective sigh of relief because they’ve been worried about me and want to handle me with kid gloves. I get the “Are you Rachel?” question a lot. And, “Is Grandma your grandma?” “Is Roger your dad?” On and on. I think people ask those questions because 1) they’ve read the book; and 2) they are rooting for Rachel to have grown up okay—maybe even like I did.

When you were interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered, you were asked whether Rachel’s story reinforced the idea of the “tragic mulatto.” You answered that, for Rachel…

The question of the “tragic mulatto” was also the topic of the March 3 episode of your Mixed Chicks Chat podcast. The two conversations got me thinking: how did you prepare yourself for interviewers who want to talk about the issues addressed in the story, versus the story? For that matter, do you see the two things—the social issues and the story—as separate? Do you ever feel as if you’re being asked to speak as “the” representative for biracial women?

I won the Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change. Of all the awards I could receive, this is the most meaningful, because it means that the book speaks to issues of import to our citizenry. In that way, I don’t mind that when I’m interviewed I am speaking as a representative of biracial women. I’m heartened that people are interested. I do wonder, though, when the book is critiqued as being not enough about the biracial experience. To that criticism I say, “Well, okay, but it’s not a position paper. It’s a story.” As a story it doesn’t provide answers but new questions or new ways of looking at the old ones.

As you’ve promoted the book, what questions have surprised you?

I am most surprised by the generosity of people who share their stories. I have had a number of people “come out” to me, for lack of a better word, about their blended families, or about their grief, or about simply being a young person struggling against the labels, like geek or nerd, that they’d been assigned by peers. I love that they have connected with Rachel despite differences in age, race or culture. They’ve connected their own stories to the stories I’ve told and suddenly feel empowered to talk about it.

poet Remica Bingham

I’ve heard the poet Remica Bingham talk before about the difference between poetry and the “poe-biz”—the difference between writing poetry and getting poetry out into the world. I think most writers have a fantasy about what that the experience of a first book will be like—how did your expectations line up with reality?

There is much you, as a writer, can’t control about your first book, but there were certain things I did to help my book reach the largest possible audience. First, I wrote the best book I possibly could. That seems facile, but I remember the moment I read the final draft on a cross-country flight. At the end I thought, “This is a book.” It was the first time my manuscript felt like a book. I am not bashful about telling everyone about what I have written… whether they can identify with the mixed-race themes, or a coming-of-age story, or whether they even read fiction. Recently I told one guy seated next to me on a flight about the book, and he ordered it that very moment (love in-flight Internet!). That was pretty cool.

You’ve also worked as a journalist and a lawyer. What drew you to those fields, and what draws you to fiction? Do the fields, which seem so different on paper, ever overlap?

I always wanted to be a writer, but I also wanted to be financially secure because I grew up poor. I chose professions that allowed me to write but also would provide me a good, steady paycheck. I was the first person in my family on either side to graduate from a four-year college, and I was driven to make the most of the opportunity. I did practice law, but ultimately, I knew that what I would do best at would be what I loved most, and then I worked to fashion a life as a fiction writer… I am still certain I don’t know how to write a book. I know how to write the book I wrote, but the book I’m writing now is a whole new game. I’m writing and revising and trying to figure it out.

You write across genres. Do you feel more at home in fiction or nonfiction? Do you move back and forth between essays and stories pretty easily?

Fiction is a bit easier. There is more possibility to be poetic. I like lyrical language. I like beautiful sentences. I like the sounds of words next to each other—all of those things are important in fiction in a way that is more heightened, I think, than in nonfiction.

You have embraced technology in a way not all writers have. Can you talk about how or why media like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and podcasts have made a difference in your writing life?

Writers today are supposed to have a “platform.” You have to have some peeps behind you. Technology has been a great way to connect with people and get some peeps who could support me—and buck me up when my spirits were flagging. I started my blog in 2006 when I was so frustrated by all the rejections that I had received for the manuscript. My blog readers became a great community—and they supported me. It was so reassuring that someone out there cared what I wrote about. Facebook, Twitter, a blog, a Web site—they are all ways to connect with readers—a real genuine connection that isn’t about selling something.

When you are not promoting a new novel, what is your daily life like?

Book tours are not conducive to writing, at least not for me. It’s frustrating because I am inspired by so many of the stories that people share with me and I am desperate to get back to the page. I am a binge writer, although I do write religiously first thing in the morning—three pages written longhand and a sentence of affirmation written ten times in a row. I keep that practice going now on the road, too. It grounds me. Some really wild, raw, good stuff gets written during those times. Other than that I have become a seasonal writer. I write in the fall a great deal, and in January and February. The rest of the year is almost exclusively dedicated to the festival.

Panel from the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival / photo from http://www.mxroots.org/

Let’s talk about that festival—Mixed Roots, which you and Fanshen Cox created in 2008. How is the festival financed? What makes it different from other festivals?

We have a few festival sponsors: the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), Zerflin Graphic Design. This year Target has stepped in for our Family Event, and we will have a Target Free Family Day at JANM with lots of activities for kids and families centered around issues of identity. We received a generous grant from the Aaronson Fund: Social Justice Works!, and then the rest is donated by family, friends, and podcast listeners. The festival is a fiscally sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts and donations are tax-deductible. Our operation is extremely lean. We have traded on our relationships and done everything we could on our own. I was our website designer until this fall (it’s amazing what you can learn from a library book). Now Grassroots.org has provided us with a volunteer web designer. We staff the festival for the two days with volunteers—friends and family. Festivalgoers know almost my whole family: they are the people ushering, and welcoming people in.

What has been the most surprising aspect of the Mixed Chicks podcast? Do you have a favorite episode? Is there a topic you haven’t addressed yet that you’d like to?

It’s surprising that we constantly have new ideas for the show. You’d think that the whole “mixed thing” could run dry of topics or guests, but we have a backlog of requested shows and guests who we’re trying to fit in. There are so many things we’d still like to address. The best ideas come from our listeners.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky begins with an epigraph from Nella Larsen’s Passing. You named Rachel’s mother after Larsen, and I’ve heard you call Larsen your muse. What other writers do you turn to for inspiration?

Toni Morrison / photo by Angela Radulescu, via Entheta (Wikimedia Commons)

I love Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid. I love Barbara Kingsolver, and Alice McDermott, and John Edgar Wideman, Russell Banks, Dorothy Allison. And I also turn to poetry when I’m looking for inspiration: William Stafford, Audre Lorde, Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich. I wish I were a poet.

Do you have any advice for young writers?

Be careful about sharing your writing. I found it was so easy to be shut down by “critiques” in workshops. I read a writer say somewhere that the workshop is “an inherent fault-finding machine.” As a beginning writer, young or old, what you need is someone who can ask you good questions about your work so that you keep writing. My editor, Kathy Pories, did that for me. That’s the main thing. You’ve got to keep writing. Whatever helps you do that—do that.

Extras

• Visit Heidi Durrow’s website and read her blog.
• Hear Heidi and Michele Norris discuss “Reimagining ‘The Tragic Mulatto’” on NPR’s All Things Considered.
• Read an excerpt of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky or hear audio excerpts from the novel.
• See Durrow read in a city near you, or check out this footage from her book tour:

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky: Book Tour from Heidi Durrow on Vimeo.

• Order your copy of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky from Powell’s.
• Read Durrow’s short story “Ethnic Lego Girls Carry Spears” in Smokelong Quarterly.
• Subscribe to Poets & Writers magazine at a special discounted rate for Fiction Writers Review readers.

“Good Old Neon” offers in heartbreaking detail a first-person account of the psychological suffering that leads the apparent narrator, Neal, to suicide. The story begins, “My whole life I’ve been a fraud,” and goes on to unpack the causes and consequences of that statement for Neal. For Neal, I write, because these causes and consequences are very much Neal’s private concerns. That is, objectively Neal’s life is not exceptionally fraudulent, except possibly insofar as he is troubled by the existence of fraudulence and still unable to remedy the situation. It is for Neal the very gap between his own subjective experience of fraudulence and some idealized guileless state, which his self-consciousness necessarily precludes, that defines his troubles. By holding himself to the non-existent and impossible standard of purified intentions he makes the perfect the enemy of the good and undermines the possibility that any of his actions might ever feel sincere. Think about how sad this is. Everything he does comes with a sick Kantian guilt that even when he acts in the right way he does so for the wrong (narcissistic) reasons, and can never not do right without impure motives. It’s a hellish way to live.

The question the text seems to be asking is, Does Neal have options? Is there an escape from the torturous self-reflexivity of self-consciousness? Neal dies of course, but the story itself ends with optimism for the chances of making it in the world. Another character, David Wallace, former classmate of Neal, it turns out, is imagining (it’s hard not to say projecting) what Neal must have gone through in his suicide. Along the way the Wallace character confesses that he has survived “years of literally indescribable war against himself,” and the reader is left hopeful that others who suffer similarly might also survive. What complicates all this of course is that the author of “Good Old Neon” is David Foster Wallace, who in September ’08 took his own life.

So what do readers on the train make of this story? What do I hope to find in their faces?

The context for “Good Old Neon,” the extra-textual frame of an already framed story (which I’ll summarize, Russian-doll style, in a footnote¹) raises certain questions about the relationship (in this case mediated by characters) between the author and his readers. Fair or not, it’s irresistible now, when reading “Good Old Neon,” to read it onto David Foster Wallace himself. Neal says we

go around trying to use English … to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at a given instant…

And we can argue with him that we do in fact feel him, or we can take up the same argument with the author. The existence of “Good Old Neon” (and what it does to the reader, to this reader) is indisputable anecdotal evidence that the above quote is strictly speaking true in letter but altogether banal and beside the point in spirit. There might always be an epistemological gap between me and Neal, or between me and Wallace the author, but the character Wallace is right when he calls this fact “hoary and insipid.” Recognizing this insipidness is what separates the Wallace character from Neal and what allows him to go on to say that he is “at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere.”

Wallace the author puts Wallace the character’s antidote to Neal’s solipsism into practice by writing a story that communicates Neal’s incommunicables—his solipsism, his fraudulence, his subjective experience of being himself, his I—so fully. To this reader at least, the experience of reading “Good Old Neon” takes the ground out from under Neal’s fears (not from their existence—who am I to say?—but from under the urgency they should have had). Did Wallace the author agree with me? Did he think the antidote was effective? The temptation to read Neal’s fears of fraudulence onto David Foster Wallace remains. Whether his suffering was of the same variety as Neal’s, or just analogously similar in that both were stuck in perspectives that given a larger viewpoint they may have seen out of, or totally distinct in kind, I don’t know. Life and death are complicated, and this kind of speculative biography is dangerous. All I can deal with are the facts. And the facts are the words in the story and the people in trains all over Portland (and all over the world, I hope) reading them.

The real question is not what the story tells us about its author but what it tells us about us. David Foster Wallace may have written “Good Old Neon” for any of the kinds of reasons suggested by Neal (because he wanted to manipulate the reader into feeling something; because he wanted the reader to think he was smart, talented, a good writer) or for the kinds of reasons suggested by the Wallace character (because he thought them true or at least useful; because he wanted to out-contextualize Neal to give himself hope), but none of the reasons matter. What matters are the story we’re left with and what we make of it.

So here’s what I think I’m looking for on the faces of everyone riding the yellow line, reading Oblivion. I’m looking for them to get to that line where Neal denounces the capacity of language, I’m looking for them to pause and reread it, and maybe reread it again, and work up the courage, whether by abstract inference or heartfelt empathy—or both— to say, “I don’t think that’s right.”

What I want is to find on their faces the confirmation that however inexact our language (because Neal’s right that the gap exists), ultimately it works (it spans the gap when we care); we get it. And if we get it maybe we can get one another, and if we can get one another maybe we can accept one another, and if we can accept one another maybe we can even accept our own flawed selves. And maybe honest, generous, rattle-you-to-your-fucking-bones art can help with that.

Note
1. David Foster Wallace (who wrote about David Wallace, a character who (imagines himself into the conscious experience of an acquaintance who killed himself and) resolves not kill himself despite years of his own personal torment) killed himself.

For Further Reading

- Read more about Wallace’s life, work, and life-long struggle with depression in this Rolling Stone profile.

- Wallace’s wonderful — yet undeniably dark — commencement address to Kenyon College students in 2005 was widely forwarded, written about, anthologized, and excerpted in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; eventually it was published as a stand-alone book called This is Water.

- All of the stories and essays David Foster Wallace contributed to Harper’s between 1989 and 2008 are available online.

- Here’s his story “Good People” in the New Yorker.

- If you’re looking for a copy of Oblivion, consider ordering from your local independent bookstore.

About the Author

Scott F. Parker has a Master’s in writing from Portland State University. He is working on a memoir about running, chapters of which have appeared in Epiphany, WritersDojo, and The Ink-Filled Page. He has written chapters for several popular philosophy books, and he is a regular contributor to Rain Taxi Review of Books.

The painter Agnes Martin said to Susan York, a sculptor who’d sought out Martin as a mentor: “Never have children. Do not live the middle-class life. Never do anything that will take away from your work.” York wrote about it in 2005 (the conversation happened in 1983). I was 32 in 2005, I still “had time.” And yet the words burned on my brain even then.

In my thesis workshop at my MFA program, our director, Eileen Pollack, said to us one night, you know, if you want to go do something else, or be something else besides a writer, that’s fine. My first reaction was to be insulted by this idea—I had wanted to be (assumed) I would be a writer since I was a child; I wasn’t, at the cusp of my career, going to get sucked into something else. I was vehement in my belief that there was no something else. I realize now that the wounded feeling was mostly fear: fear that I’d fail and need to invent a something else, and fear that my desire to have a family would swallow me whole: that I would indeed choose a life of parenting because it would be harder to fail at that than at being a writer.

And now, a few years out of the program, I’m no longer insulted. Outside of the bubble where I had to be, intensely, a writer, I understand that Eileen’s comment was permission to live a life with room for other identities, even if those identities take us away from our work. Work can be your life, but your life can (and I’d argue, should be) bigger than your work. As writers, sometimes we stumble into things that fulfill us that aren’t writing—the most discussed being parenthood, but also other professions, and occupations—and that to shut them out because we are so intent on being writers with a capital W is to perhaps miss out on these other things in life that often make us better writers–because they deepen the range of our experience and emotions, because they show us a new perspective, or simply because they give us money or time or some other sort of permission we need to write. Or, as the case may be, not to write.

I am still a little afraid. I’ve already made my choice to be both a mother and a writer, and so far it’s as “bizarre, and confusing, and stressful” as Chung anticipates. Yet it’s also wonderful, enlightening, and, so far, good for my identity as a writer.

I’m curious to hear how others answer these questions in their own lives. The comments on Chung’s essay are a good place to start:

Is your work your life, or do you need or desire a life beyond writing?

Is it true, as Chung says, that “making art is selfish”?

Kathryn Ma - photo by RayKo Photo Center/Michael Shindler

I met Kathryn Ma, winner of the 2009 Iowa Short Fiction Prize for All That Work and Still No Boys, for coffee at a café in San Francisco’s wired South Beach neighborhood, just a few blocks from the famed Writers Grotto where Ma is “an inhabitant,” as resident writers there are known. Ma, 53, was at once elegant and unassuming, with a wry sense of humor and a bold, infectious laugh.

I had read Ma’s slim collection of ten stories in one sitting; throughout, I was impressed by her complex portrayal of Asian American characters from all generations. Here were fierce, elderly Chinese American women wreaking havoc in the lives of their children; adults struggling (hopelessly) to control the tenacious traditions of their hired help; and children feeling helpless in the face of their parents’ racism. The subtlety and humor of Ma’s work feels new in the world of Asian American fiction, which I find often overwrought with ethnic detail. Yet her collection also affords that rare, warm feeling of familiarity that happens when a piece of art makes me feel more visible in the world.

A former lawyer, Ma answered my questions with thoughtful, measured responses that gave insight into her process. We discussed her nontraditional path to writing, her fascination with rage, and why the publishing world wasn’t ready for her book ten years ago.

The third of four children, Ma was raised in a suburban community outside of Philadelphia. Her parents – an engineer and a scientist who met in graduate school in Ohio – emigrated from China. Ma’s family moved to Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley, which she says was at that time a lonely place for a Chinese family, when she was in high school. Ma went to Stanford and studied history as an undergraduate and a Master’s student, completing a thesis on 19th-century women’s social history.

“I was interested in writing, but I didn’t have any vision; maybe I didn’t have the courage to think of myself as a writer,” Ma said. “Mostly, I was a reader. Books were incredibly important to me as a child, a teenager, in my 20s.”

She considered doing a PhD in history, but realized that wasn’t her path. She found herself in law school, because she “didn’t have any better ideas,” she joked. Soon, she was practicing civil litigation law in San Francisco. This isn’t one of those stories about Ma hating a career that she was forced into. In fact, she explained that she enjoyed practicing law and was quite good at it. “But,” she said, “there was a tiny person inside of a person – a tiny voice – that kept speaking to me in some way about trying to write.”

Five or six years into practicing law, Ma was sitting in a library and, not very interested in the brief she was working on, she began writing a short story. She wrote it in one go and later shared it in a one-day workshop. This story got the attention of an editor at the New Yorker, who gave her good feedback but said they didn’t want to publish it.

“So, I thought, okay – end of story,” Ma said. “I went back to practicing law.”

After some time, the same the same New Yorker editor called Ma back and says they want to consider the story again, providing that Ma had done some revising.

“So, that panicked me!” Ma said. “I was in the middle of doing some enormous piece of litigation. I didn’t have any time to really work on it. I didn’t know what I was doing, I’d never taken a creative writing classes, I had no mentors. So, I fiddled around with it and sent it back. Then they wrote back again, after holding it for some time, and said: ‘Never mind!’” Again, Ma went back to practicing law.

“But it was just enough to tell me: I may have a narrative voice that I haven’t let out of the box,” Ma says. “I read a wonderful anonymous quote recently. It said: ‘The small voice inside of us makes up in accuracy what it lacks in volume.’ I thought, that is sort of what happened to me. I finally listened to some imperative in me to sit down and try to become a fiction writer.”

Ma admitted that the cultural expectations of her family probably played some part in why she hadn’t taken writing as seriously before, but “everyone has barriers,” she said, shrugging. “You either climb them or knock them down or let them stop us, and eventually I guess I was old enough. I had a family of my own – I began to understand that the choice was mine.”

Also, Ma said that she lost two very good friends within the space of a year – two young friends. “At that point, I said to myself: ‘What are you waiting for?’”

Having the discipline of working a 9-5 office job helped Ma transition into the life of a writer. After nearly 10 years of higher education and multiple degrees, she couldn’t bring herself to go into another classroom, so she eschewed the MFA path. Instead, she got a writing studio outside of her home and continued to leave the house in the morning to go “to work.”

“[My kids] had no idea that going to work meant going to this little dusty studio, sitting with my feet wrapped in a blanket and staring at my computer screen all day,” Ma said. “Having learned how to work in that kind of structure gave me enough discipline to beat my head against the desk.”

Ten years later, Ma had the ten stories of All that Work and Still No Boys.

Along the way, she found the most support through conferences like the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and Breadloaf. “I was very wary of doing workshops or joining a writing group, because as a lawyer I had learned that writing by committee is always a mistake,” Ma said. “I wanted to learn my own narrative voice in my own ear.”

And what a gripping narrative voice that is. Ma’s title story contains many characters, but it focuses mainly on a triangle of three family members: Barbara, the eldest of five adult siblings; her mother, who needs a kidney transplant to survive; and Barbara’s youngest brother Lawrence, the only son of the family and the only match for his mother’s kidney. Ma manages, without judgment, to equally inhabit Barbara’s frustration with her mother for refusing Lawrence’s kidney and the mother’s own stubborn position.

“I wanted to find some dramatic, credible way that a modern Chinese mother who has brought her children up in a very westernized world – in an extreme moment – would finally show that deep bias toward her son,” Ma explained. “Because I think we carry these ancient cultural biases that we have with us and then generations that follow carry them with us, even though we work very hard to overcome them.”

The plight of Chinese American women isn’t itself a novel concept. Amy Tan’s work has tread almost solely in this arena, but Ma’s cadre of elderly Chinese women live ferociously in the present. Her book refuses to explain their stories with flashbacks to the Cultural Revolution–but these characters’ histories undeniably influence their actions. Ma said:

In our society, the elderly – and particularly elderly women – are invisible to us. They fascinate me. I think they have tremendous rage and tremendous pride. In many cases, a sort of fierce dignity that allows them to think of themselves as … as whole people. The rage interests me, because in many ways they are powerless but of course within an immediate family they are incredibly powerful.

Not all of Ma’s rage-filled characters are elderly. In her story “Second Child,” the main character, Daisy, is a young Chinese national who works as a tour guide for families who have adopted children from China and have returned to show their children their origins – specifically the orphanage where they were adopted from. Daisy’s rage comes from her own story: her sister was taken to one of these orphanages as a baby. Ma explained:

In some ways it is hard to write about anger. If you have a character that is full of simmering resentment, that character might come across on the page as just sort of sour or irritable. If you have a character who is constantly in a state of rage or heightened anger, that character is equally boring. In the title story and in “Second Child,” it is really about who the character is when anger has left them. Once anger lifts, evaporates – what does the writer create for the reader to see? That’s when the learning takes place for the reader and for the character.

Yet for all the rage that charges Ma’s stories, there is also an amazing sense of lightness that comes with an easy humor interspersed through the work. “Humor is the only antidote to anger. No one can tell an angry person to be unangry. Anger is like love. Anger doesn’t listen to any kind of rational explanation,” Ma said. “Humor is the first, best and last antidote to rage. It helps us survive a baffling world. I gravitate towards giving my poor angry characters something to lighten the psychological violence of their lives.”

When asked about the process for writing humor, Ma said it is all about soaking in the comedy of her friends and family – who she claims are hilarious. “I don’t strive for it. Striving just does nothing for the art. If you strive for anything on the page, it just falls apart in your hands.”

Ma’s book, with its unapologetically Asian American characters – who don’t do any cooking or talking to ghosts – was the first by an Asian American to win the Iowa Prize in the contest’s 40-year history.

“It’s not a surprise to me that it has taken me this long to get the collection published,” Ma admitted. “I think the kind of writing I do is more nuanced and more subtle than people were quite ready to grapple with twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, maybe even ten years ago. I wasn’t interesting in writing my parents stories, though I am always dealing with the echoes of that generation.”

Further Resources

Peter Ho Davies is one of the writers who inspires Ma

- Read an excerpt from “The Long Way Home” in All That Work and Still No Boys.

- On December 8 at 7 PM, Ma is giving a reading and talk at the El Cerrito Public Library (6510 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito, CA). Learn more about the event here.

- Listen to an interview with Ma (conducted by Sandip Roy) on New America Now. And check out Ma’s essay on 1st Books: Stories of How Writers Get Started.

- Neelanjana Banerjee also reviewed this collection for Hyphen magazine (September 2009 issue).

- If you’re shopping for a copy of Ma’s collection, consider ordering it from your local indie bookseller, or purchase it from Iowa UP as an e-book.

And are you behind in your reading? (That’s me. Again.)

photo by takomabibelot (flickr cc)

Krystal suggests:

[M]aybe it’s just that the flow of thought alters when we write, which, in turn, releases sentences hidden along the banks of consciousness. There seems to be a rhythm to writing that catches notes that ordinarily stay out of earshot. At some point between formulating a thought and writing it down falls a nanosecond when the thought becomes a sentence that would, in all likelihood, have a different shape if we were to speak it. This rhythm, not so much heard as felt, occurs only when one is composing; it can’t be simulated in speech, since speaking takes place in real time and depends in part on the person or persons we’re speaking to. Wonderful writers might therefore turn out to be only so-so conversationalists, and people capable of telling great stories waddle like ducks out of water when they attempt to write.

Me, I find that the better I know someone, or the more fascinating I find him or her, the better conversationalist I become–and I’ve observed that many of my writer friends also flourish in such circumstances. The more that we understand (or feel inclined to explore) the world we’re communicating within– where tensions lie, who we know in common, what one of us has read or experienced that the other hasn’t — the more potential there is for humor, for questions, for characterizing and analyzing those other people, for plotting, for wordplay and drawing connections, for pushing boundaries and comfort levels, for letting it all hang out. For thinking out loud in that half-artful, half-natural, largely-mysterious way that makes dialogue happen.

Maybe the art of conversing isn’t so different from the process of writing. In the beginning, there is stammering and confusion. There are long moments of silence. And then — a sudden burst of energetic verbal brilliance, followed by (just as sudden) a splat of overconfident, off-putting inappropriateness. **Crickets.** A number of false starts. Emotional eating: the apocryphal procrastination muffin.

photo by norwichnuts (flickr cc)

Yet once you begin to get a handle on where you are and who you’re with, and you realize how much you don’t even know yet, it starts to get exciting. You listen better, talk better.

Unless the talk is small talk. I have met precious few writers who excel at it. What we talk about when we talk about small talk is keeping conversation purposefully and purely in the shallow end of the pool. It’s about staying in a very safe place, about keeping all options open, about steering clear of the specific, because specific is controversial. Small talk might be the language of making connections, but it’s not about connecting. I’d argue that small talk is staring at a blinking cursor, trying to decide if typing a cliché is better than typing nothing at all. And it stands to reason that many good writers would be terrible at it.

How (and to what extent) does your writer self engage with your conversationalist persona?

“Every book I publish is an opportunity for me to reinvent myself as a writer.”–Steve Katz

If you look for this quote in any print or electronic source about Steve Katz, you’re not likely to find it…unless someone was spying on our conversation at the French restaurant Le Central in Denver about a year and a half ago. Steve Katz has been publishing fiction for as long as I’ve been alive—he has been widely acknowledged for decades as a grand wizard of innovative form, though he is so much more than that—and I sought him out because on the eve of my first book’s publication, I was panicking. The voice that told me This is your big break and you have to capitalize on it! competed with the one that said Now you can write what you really want to write! and the one that said Now you can get a better teaching gig! There were a lot of voices, all telling me what to write about and think about next, and I felt paralyzed. I couldn’t write a line without thinking about where I could publish it and how it would best serve my careerist interests. I felt like a fraud, like a non-writer who had just happened to cobble a book together and con a few people into liking it.

Le Central / photo by timbrauhn (flickr cc)

The easy thing to do when we finish one writing project, the default thing, is to simply think about what we’re going to write next. Katz’s words, however, call us to engage in a deeper kind of reconsideration of ourselves, because what we write and who we are as writers are two crucially different things. It’s convenient to not pry open the Pandora’s Box of the who we are question, since it’s sticky and can potentially derail us from all we hope to accomplish. But if we simply move from one project to the next, tacitly assuming a static writerly identity that we do not question, then we may miss out on our best chances to set new challenges for ourselves and grow. This principle can apply not only when we publish books, but when we move from project to project.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t think about what to write next, because that’s completely natural. We all have our books-in-planning, and many of us have projects that we rotate through like crops in a field. The momentum that brings us from one project to another is more likely to move us forward as writers than merely stopping and thinking about the who am I question, which does very little in a vacuum. (I can imagine few things more frustrating than being forced to contemplate my writerly identity in the absence of any real work.) But without taking the time to step back and ask myself why I’m embarking on my next project, I feel like I’m taking the same approach to my material that I’ve always taken before, and in some way writing the same thing over and over again. The material alone does not determine how our fiction turns out; it’s also affected by our relationships to the material, to our readers, to our habits of mind as we work. Beyond our subject matter itself, we have quite a few other things to consider when we take a step back and re-invent ourselves as writers.

photo by jefield (flickr cc)

Our work habits and how we feel about them.
Transitional points are great times to think about the nuts and bolts of what we do. Sometimes we put more pressure on ourselves to produce, and other times we forget about producing and try for a greater sense of freedom. Both impulses can alter our work habits, sometimes simultaneously. After Wifeshopping I took a break from short stories and threw myself into a novel, pressuring myself to work through my drafts more quickly so that I wouldn’t have to hang so long in the limbo of incompleteness. But I also started doing my re-writes from scratch, which I had typically avoided. This combination of habit changes gave me much more control and flexibility with the narrator’s voice than I’d ever had before. A small change in approach allowed me to find a way to write this book at this particular time, and I know that my old work habits would not have done the trick.

Our relationship with our readers.
We have readers, real or imagined, and between projects or publications is a great time to re-evaluate how we interact with them. Real readers can tell us a lot about the habits and themes that we don’t know about (such as the one who pointed out my deep interest in secondhand clothing and bric-a-brac) and bring them to the surface so that other subterranean interests can emerge. Simply having people who don’t know us respond to our work can—especially if it’s a new experience—put the reader/writer dynamic into sharper relief. After I toured around a bit I had a new appreciate for how willing readers were to invest in the emotional uncertainty of fictional characters, and knowing that gave me permission to dig down into new layers of uncertainty that I’d never been sure readers would be able to appreciate. This reader dynamic also includes support networks and how we use them. Do we show work to our first readers earlier in the process? Later? Do we add to or distill our group of early readers? For those who are coming out of workshop situations where readers are built into the program, this can be a particularly useful private conversation to have.

photo by moriza (flickr cc)

Our relationship to our traditions.
We all come from somewhere, and typically we learn more about where we come from the longer we stick to our writing path. It’s up to us to decide whether and how we interact with our traditions on the page, as well as which traditions we’re going to engage in our next phase. No writer is a product of a single tradition, and no tradition can be taken on without some degree of self-knowledge, so we have plenty of choices to make: challenge our old traditions, embrace new ones, engage in conscious homage, etc. We may have some traditions that we haven’t explored fully, and some that we have temporarily tapped out. If “we are what we eat” in the creative sense, then some thought to what we take in as readers is central to our writerly identities.

Our relationship to the publishing world.
Unless we lead a purely literary life, unpolluted by thoughts of the market, considerations of where we publish and how we pitch ourselves to the world are going to enter our psyches. Since they can affect our sense of who we are as writers much more than what we do on the page—tapping, as they do so well, into our sense of self-worth, success, and failure—acknowledging them, rather than letting them creep stealthily into our decisions, is a good idea. We want to make sure that we consider such things at appropriate times, though. Transforming a literary homage to La Traviata into a “more commercial” metafictional detective novel in mid-draft might crash the project forever, but there’s nothing wrong with doing that when the work isn’t actually under construction. Similarly, we decide whether it’s a good time to hold our work back from periodical venues, try only for those we most want to be part of, or publish whatever we can, wherever we can. All of those approaches will probably have their seasons for us, and how we choose to move between them will tell us as much about our writerly identity—whichever incarnation we happen to be in at the moment—as what we do at the privacy of our own desks.

It’s worthy to note that Steve Katz, who spoke the words I now extrapolate from, is in his early seventies. That’s a lot of years of re-invention, and it argues for a Trotskyite approach to one’s literary identity: perpetual revolution and continued openness to flux. Each project demands different things from us as writers, and it’s easier to meet those demands if we keep changing the writers we are. We’ll never write the same book twice, because we’ll never be the same writer twice—unless of course we don’t open up that Pandora’s Box and think about it, in which case we may end up being the same writers for a lot longer than we want to.

photo by extranoise (flickr cc)

Further Resources

Read excerpts from Katz’s work; even these brief tastes reveal the perpetual self-reinvention this column was inspired by:

- from Katz’s acclaimed 1970 collection of stories, Creamy and Delicious (Random House)

- from his 1972 novel, Saw, (Knopf; republished in 1998 by FC2)

- from his most recent collection, Kissssssssssss (FC2, 2007)

And if you’re shopping for any of Steve Katz’s books, consider doing so at your local indie bookstore.

Amazon, to Probst:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

For the record, I object to this whole notion of censoring search and sales results and the hypocrisy behind profiting from something secretly while condemning it openly. But most of all, it’s how Amazon chooses to define adult that cements my decision to stop buying books (and I buy a LOT of them) from their site until they overturn this policy.

This Care2 survey (now more than 10,000 signatures strong) questions the policy and the way “adult” is used; here is an excerpt with some examples:

We would like to hear the rationalisation for allowing sales ratings for explicit books with a heterosexual focus such as:

–Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds by Chronicle Books (pictures of over 600 naked women)
–Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love (explicit heterosexual romance);
–Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Wolf and the Dove (explicit heterosexual romance);
–Bertrice Smal’s Skye o’Malley which are all explicit heterosexual romances
–and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls (which is a very explicit sexual graphic novel)

Yet the following books, which have a gay or lesbian focus, have been classed as “adult books” and stripped of their sales ratings:

–Radclyffe Hill’s classic novel about lesbians in Victorian times, The Well of Loneliness, and which contains not one sentence of sexual description;
–Mark R Probst’s YA novel The Filly about a young man in the wild West discovering that he’s gay (gay romance, no sex);
–Charlie Cochrane’s Lessons in Love (gay romance with no sex);
–The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience, edited by Louis-George Tin (non-fiction, history and social issues);
–and Homophobia: A History by Bryan Fone (non-fiction, focus on history and the forms prejudice against homosexuality has taken over the years).

Please tell us, Amazon, why the explicit books with a heterosexual focus are allowed to keep their sales ratings while the non-explicit romances, the histories and the biographies that deal with LGBTQ issues are not.

For easy reference, here is a list of books whose sales ranks were removed.

And here is an Open Letter to Jeff Bezos, which also addresses the larger issue of censorship, from Publishing Talk’s John Reed. Some excerpts:

The idea of protecting us from ‘adult’ material seems unnecessary, when your own Conditions of Use (USA / UK) restrict Amazon purchases to adults. But my concern – and that of the many people tweeting with the #amazonfail tag – is how you define ‘adult material’.

In my country, a few years before you were born, a book was published following a notorious obscenity trial. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor asked if it was the kind of book “you would wish your wife or servants to read”. Publication went ahead, 32 years after the book was written, and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” has since become regarded as a classic work of English literature.

Overnight, you appear to have overturned that hard-won decision and reclassified it as filth that we should be protected from.

[...]

This approach to what is deemed obscene and what is not takes publishing on a backward step that makes you seem as out of touch with modern social norms as Mervyn Griffith-Jones. As Kasia Krozier points out, we can freely find “Mein Kampf”, books on training fighting dogs, and other offensive material. But the works of E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence appear not to be the kind of books you would wish us to read.

EDIT 4/13/09 – 8 AM: According to this short piece in the NY Times, someone at Amazon is now calling this a “glitch.” Stay tuned…

I was planning to link to some Passover-themed short stories or poems, but it turns out they’re in short supply, at least in free textual online form. My own favorite ode to the holiday is William Finn’s song “Passover” from his heartbreaking song cycle Elegies. Like many of Finn’s songs, it packs the emotional punch and narrative depth of a short story into three minutes.

Instead of a story or song, I offer this excerpt from Rabbi Stephen Julius Stein’s 2008 essay “Truth in Storytelling”, from JewishJournal.com. This follows a discussion of some contradicting stories — and mixed messages — in Exodus 12:22 and 12:24 (and Stein’s choice use of the phrase “priomordial Darth Vader”). His question — “Is a fact more meaningful than a story?” seems relevant for fiction writers of any faith or lack thereof:

Here we engage the power, as well as the problem, of the question I’m often asked, “But rabbi, did it happen?” My response: “Is a fact more meaningful than a story?” For example, is a table more eloquent than the story of its genesis, from a seed in a forest to the person who harvested (and hopefully did not cut down) the tree, to the artistry of the carpenter who constructed it to the family who took possession of it — and to the myriad life experiences that took place around that carved wood?

Each time I confront my Introduction to Judaism classes with the story of the creation of Passover and of the challenge of deriving meaning from what is “true” vs. “truth,” I become more inspired by that very tale, whose so-called inconsistencies I bring to life. Just like us, our ancient forbearers lived in a messy, unkempt, imperfect world; just like us, they, too, struggled against overwhelming religious forces; just like us, they too were deeply concerned with existential identity and future.

So what did they do? They created a story, imbued with human drama and divine providence, weaving a timeless tapestry that in showing its seams, offers us — or perhaps, implores us — to be the next generation of weavers, creating a haggadah of meaning and truth for our time. It is surely no accident that the same Hebrew root forms both the words emunah (faith) and omanut (art). With a flick of the pen, Mitzrayim becomes m’tzorim: instead of Egypt the place, we can be in “narrow spaces,” “troubled places.” The resultant darkness, challenge and redemption can be drawn out in countless ways for many peoples, over dozens of generations.

I think this is an issue that writers of any minority group–-religious, ethnic, and so on–-face: must we write about our “own” group? Do we have a responsibility to write about our own group? And, on the flip side, if we write only about our own group, do we limit ourselves unnecessarily? Do we risk being dismissed by a larger audience?

Thoughts?

Shivani Manghnani

Celeste Ng

Among the finalists is FWR contributor Celeste Ng, for her story “Girls, At Play.” Congrats to Shivani, and to Celeste and the other finalists!

The AAWW is currently selling raffle tickets ($20 apiece) to raise money for the Workshop and support Asian American literature. The prize, should you wish to enter, is this rather fetching Vespa.