The Jewish Book Council has announced its next lunchtime book discussion title: Dara Horn’s All Other Nights. The author will participate in the chat, which will take place on Tuesday, April 27, beginning at 1 p.m. (If you’re not yet on Twitter, be sure to sign up soon to give your account time to activate fully.) Details here.
Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood: An Interview with Melissa Hart
Interview by Erika Dreifus
Melissa Hart is the author, most recently, of the memoir Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood (Seal, 2009). She teaches journalism at the University of Oregon and memoir writing for U.C. Berkeley’s online extension program. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Advocate, High Country News, Orion, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Writer’s Digest. She lives in Oregon with her husband, their young daughter, and too many cats and dogs.
Melissa is ALSO, like yours truly, a contributing editor for The Writer magazine. (I always enjoy her “Literary Spotlight” columns profiling individual literary journals.) I am thrilled to present this Q&A with Melissa here.
Please welcome Melissa Hart.
Erika Dreifus (ED): Melissa, Gringa is your second memoir. Can you please describe the connections between the two books, as well as what motivated you to write Gringa specifically?
Melissa Hart (MH): I wrote my first memoir, The Assault of Laughter (Windstorm, 2005) as my Master of Fine Arts thesis at Goddard College. Inspired by teachers Jacqueline Woodson and Mariana Romo-Carmona, I wanted to tell the story of the first year in my life after my mother came out as a lesbian and lost custody of me and my two younger siblings. This was 1979; throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, women who came out routinely lost custody of their children to homophobic court systems. I thought it was critical that my story, as representative of many, come to light.
But . . . I was a young writer, and I felt that I could tell the story more skillfully a decade later. I wanted to explore the idea of growing up Anglo, heterosexual, and seemingly devoid of identity in multicultural Los Angeles with a lesbian mom, a brother with Down syndrome, and a deep desire to be a Latina. I expanded the year in Assault to include all the years of my adolescence, from the day my mother left my father to my post-college graduation trip with her to Spain. I’m indebted to Seal’s senior editor Brooke Warner for helping me to shape the memoir as a coming-of-age story and a history of my mother’s and my relationship, which prevailed in spite of homophobia on the part of both the legal system and my father.
ED: Both of your memoirs reveal a great deal about your family members. How have they reacted to your writing about and publishing your collective stories? How have their reactions affected your writing processes?
MH: My father and I have been estranged for almost two decades. My stepmother and I e-mail occasionally, and she felt that Assault, in particular, gave her insight into our troubled relationship. My mother is a writer, as well, and she’s incredibly supportive of my work. She accompanied me on part of the book tour for Gringa. It’s worth noting that she asked me not to write about a few elements of our story, and I honored that. My sister is also deeply supportive; she’s told all her friends about the book and helped to organize a reading/signing event in her hometown. My brother has Down syndrome, and he doesn’t read, but he does enjoy telling and retelling stories about how my sister and I used to dress him up like a girl.
ED: Food plays an important part in Gringa, and each chapter ends with an unconventionally-presented “recipe.” How did the idea to include these recipes develop?
MH: I fell in love with recipes in the context of prose stories when I discovered Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. I loved how her recipes reflected the characters’ motivations and relationships. Then I came across Ruth Reichl’s books, and then Diana Abu-Jaber’s marvelous The Language of Baklava. Both authors incorporate recipes into their memoir, and I had these wonderful goofy recipes such as Frito Boats and my mother’s Tortilla Flats which were so important to me as a child. I took so much comfort in food as an adolescent–still do, in fact–and I wanted to offer up some of these recipes to readers as one more way to illustrate key themes and plot points in the book. Food also became a symbol of culture, or lack thereof, when I was an adolescent. I adored my boyfriend’s mother’s authentic Mexican dishes, for example, and being able to make a savory salsa or a dozen tamales became my benchmark of acceptance into his culture.
ED: What was the biggest challenge you faced in writing Gringa?
MH: The biggest challenge I faced in writing Gringa was not knowing quite what the book wanted to be. Initially, it looked like a series of linked essays that were all over the place in content and theme. My agent at the time, Michelle Andelman, reined me in and noted with great insight that the memoir format might work better as a method of telling the story. In Gringa‘s next incarnation, I included several chapters between “O Christmas Tree” and “Citizens of the World”–chapters which explored further my problematic relationship with my boyfriend–but my editor felt that they disrupted the coming-of-age trajectory of the story. I cut five chapters and wrote five new ones in a two-month period. I’m a really slow writer, so getting these out and polished on a tight deadline was challenging.
Creating the book trailer for Gringa was also extremely challenging. Last summer, a colleague at the journalism school taught me FinalCut Pro and I became writer, director, food stylist, chef, actress and cat wrangler for this rather goofy trailer.
ED: How did Gringa find its home with Seal Press?
MH: Michelle Andelman shopped the book around to a few publishers, and we felt a particular affinity for Seal and for Brooke, in particular. Seal Press publishes exciting books on unexpected topics related to women, and Brooke enjoyed the humorous social commentary that informs so much of the book. I’m so happy to have worked with Seal; this is a dynamic publishing house with a professional and devoted staff.
ED: What else would you like to tell us?
MH: I teach a memoir writing course for U.C. Berkeley’s online extension program which is open to all. I post my upcoming workshops pretty regularly on both my website and my Facebook fan page. I love teaching and working with other writers; I come away inspired and excited to sit down at my computer.
Thank you so much, Melissa!
A version of this interview appeared in the March 2010 issue of The Practicing Writer.
First, the good news:
The Jewish Book Council’s first Twitter Book Club meeting took place yesterday. Check out the discussion of Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You here. Many thanks to the author for stopping by and answering questions.
Now, the bad news:
I was totally unable to post anything! I do not know what I was doing wrong. But none of my “tweets” showed up (and yes, I did include the hashtag). I kept trying to ask what seemed a perfectly simple question: Given how funny the book is (despite some basically sad subject matter), what advice would the author give writers who want/need to hone their humor-writing skills?
And moving on the the very exciting news:
The Jewish Book Council has also announced the latest slate of winners of the National Jewish Book Awards. Congratulations to all!
A version of this interview also appears in the January 2010 issue of The Practicing Writer.
The Theory of Light and Matter: An Interview with Andrew Porter
by Erika Dreifus
Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and has just been republished in paperback by Vintage/Knopf. His fiction has appeared in One Story, Epoch, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” He currently teaches creative writing at Trinity University in San Antonio. Recently, Andrew responded to a series of questions about his work.
ERIKA DREIFUS (ED): Andrew, the Vintage Contemporaries (Knopf) release of The Theory of Light and Matter signals a reincarnation of sorts, given that the book was originally published by the University of Georgia Press as a winning manuscript within the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction series. Please tell us the story of how the collection has come to be republished and describe any changes that may have been made to the manuscript for the newer version.
ANDREW PORTER (AP): Well, the Vintage/Knopf deal happened fairly quickly, and I was very fortunate it happened at all. At the time, my collection had been out in hardcover for about four months, and because it had done well in terms of sales and reviews, the University of Georgia Press had offered to publish a paperback edition the following fall. Around the same time, I was approached by my current agent, Terra Chalberg, who expressed an interest in trying to sell the paperback rights to a larger house. The University of Georgia Press was open to this idea, but said that they could only give Terra about two weeks to do this, as they were currently making the final decisions for their fall catalogue. I knew that the odds were against us, but I also figured that there was nothing to lose, so I gave Terra the thumbs up and two weeks later she had managed to attract several offers, all of which included the publication of my novel-in-progress as well.
Anyway, I’ve been around the writing world long enough to know that this type of thing doesn’t happen very often, and I still feel extremely grateful to Terra for making it happen. As for changes, I only made a few small ones, and they’re probably so minor that I doubt anyone would even notice.
ED: All 10 stories in The Theory of Light and Matter are told by a first-person narrator. You’re probably asked about this a lot, but could you address your obvious affinity for the first-person point of view? What do you find so appealing and effective about it?
AP: I like a lot of things about the first person. I like the intimacy of it, for one, and also the idea of assuming a persona, but probably my favorite thing about the first person is the fact that it’s an inherently unreliable point of view. This might seem like a disadvantage to some, but I think that the unreliability of it- the fact that every narrator is telling his or her story through a somewhat biased lens-can actually be a great source of complexity and tension.
ED: What do you consider the biggest challenge of the first-person p.o.v., and how do you, as a writer, negotiate it?
AP: For me, the hardest part of working in the first person is dealing with the obvious limitations and constraints of telling a story through just one lens. When I’m working on a short story, this isn’t such a problem, but when I’m working on something longer, like a novel, it becomes increasingly difficult to deal with the constraints and limitations of a single perspective. For example, I’m working on a novel right now, and though I’d initially planned to write this novel in the first person, I soon realized that it was simply too large a story to tell through just one character’s perspective, and so I switched over to the third-person omniscient and this has really freed me up.
ED: Although I found all the stories distinctive–in U.S. regional setting, in variations between male and female narrators, etc.–there is one story that seems sharply different from the rest. I’m thinking of “Skin,” which, at less than two pages, is by far the shortest story in the collection. But it’s not simply this story’s length that seems atypical. The accompanying compression seems combined with a shift in tone that I can’t quite articulate. I’m curious not only about the inclusion of this short-short story, but also about its placement in the sequence as the penultimate piece.
AP: Well, the stories in this collection are largely about memory and the way we reconstruct memory, and so even though “Skin” is by far the shortest story in the collection, I think I liked the fact that it approached this theme of reconstructing memory in a slightly different way. Not only is it much shorter than the others, but it also uses a very different style of narration, beginning as it does in the present tense, then shifting to the future tense, then ending again in the present, all the while reminding the reader that the events of the story have taken place in the past. This isn’t something I really do in any other story in the collection, and so I think that’s one of the reasons I decided to include it. As for why I decided to make it the penultimate story, that’s a good question. I think I was pretty firmly committed to the order of the first eight stories, and since I knew that I didn’t want to end with it, well, there was really only one place left for me to put it.
ED: You’ve mentioned your novel-in-progress. Can you describe that project at all (and tell us when we can expect it to be available)?
AP: I tend to be pretty superstitious when it comes to talking about works-in-progress, but I can tell you that the novel is set in Houston and that it involves a family going through a crisis. I hope to finish the novel at some point in the next year, and so I guess it might be available as soon as 2012.
ED: Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?
AP: I’ll be doing a number of readings in New York, California, and Texas over the next few months. All of the details about these reading can be found at my website: www.andrewporterwriter.com.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, Erika. This has been a lot of fun!
ED: Thanks so much, Andrew!
Last week, the fall issue of Jewish Book World arrived in my mailbox, and I was delighted to see that it included my first review for that publication. Jewish Book World packs in a LOT of reviews each quarter, so most of the pieces are relatively short. Here’s my take, in its entirety, on Norah Labiner’s German for Travelers: A Novel in 95 Lessons (Coffee House Press, 2009):
In ninety-five brief chapters, this novel acquaints us with an extended family and its secrets, past and present. In 2005, a letter from a woman claiming to be their great-aunt prompts Jewish-American cousins Eliza Berlin and Louisa ‘Lemon’ Leopold to travel to Germany. There, at the beginning of the previous centruy, their great-grandfather, Dr. Jozef Apfel, was a prominent psychoanalyst. The novel reveals secrets and traumas within the lives of the cousins as well as the truth behind their great-grandfather’s most mysterious case, that of ‘Elsa Z.’ At various times, the reader will notice what seems to be the sparest of expository prose (the body of one chapter consists of a single twelve-word sentence); occasionally, there is a page-length paragraph; some sections particularly impress with their use of dialogue or detail. Although some readers may initially find it difficult to track all the characters, overall, the novel is extremely engaging, shifting in time and place with artful connections and literary grace. Chronology [included].