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Interview with Ariel Gore Interview by Amy Brozio-Andrews
Ariel Gore is the founder of the progressive parenting magazine Hip Mama. She's also written several books: The Hip Mama Survival Guide, The Mother Trip, Atlas of the Human Heart, and most recently, The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show. Ariel teaches at the Attic Writer's Workshop and lives in Portland, OR.
You've been accompanied by musicians, a puppeteer, and fire-eaters on your book tour for The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show. Has that made it more difficult to get bookings? Have attendees responded differently to this than the traditional book tour? Have there been any surprises, things you'd warn other writers about or things you'd definitely do differently next time?
The vast majority of bookstore and venue events coordinators were like-- YAY! COME HERE! The boring, arrogant side of the lit world endures, but no one LIKES that. When people come out to a reading they are coming as fans of the written word-- they want to hear a story-- but they also want to be entertained. When you're planning your book tour, you don't want to make it so Vaudeville that the focus isn't on the writing any more-- the written word alone is the art form-- but when you're on the road, when you're touring a book, you have to perform. I myself am an introvert, so I bring more extroverted performers to take the heat off me. And together we put on a good show.
This book was published by HarperSanFrancisco, and they've got their established book-tour format which is the way they do things, so, yes, I had to submit a proposal to the publisher and sell them on the idea. When I've been with smaller publishing houses there's never been any question-- I've toured with friends and bands and puppets before-- but I also toured on my own dime with the smaller houses. This time I was asking Harper to foot the bill, so I had to explain why they should feed all these fire eaters, you know? And I had to plan the tour so that we could in fact feed and transport and house all the performers for the same price the average Harper author tours alone. I think my tour was probably cheaper than most of their individual author tours. That part wasn't hard-- we're campers. But there is sometimes a conflict when it comes to the general tone people think should be struck on a book tour. I believe very strongly that the lit world needs to loosen up and not take itself so seriously-- but I don't take anything lightly. It's sort of like a circus-performers' ethic: Circus performing is dead serious. It's dangerous and real lives are risked every night. But there's joy and humor, too.
In 1996 the "family values" campaign was in full swing and I was invited to talk about welfare and motherhood on a New York public radio station. It was early in the morning-- I was on west coast time, in my apartment in Oakland on the phone, talking on this supposedly liberal talk show. I had been a teen mom, single mom, college mom, welfare mom. The host opened the show up for call-ins and suddenly there were all these people yelling at me about their tax-payer money and that my child should be taken away from me and put in an orphanage because I was single and being single and being young was tantamount to child abuse, etc., etc. It was completely traumatic and unbelievable unless you remember that moment in history, when admitting you were a mother outside the middle-class nuclear family model brought the same kind of fear and hatred as, perhaps, claiming now to be a terrorist. Anyway. It was awful. I got back in bed and was sort of whimpering about the whole experience and my phone rang and it was this New York agent with an English accent and she said "I heard you on the radio. You're very controversial. Do you have a book proposal?" I lied, "Yes I do! It's almost ready." And I put one together in two or three weeks and the agent sold it in a day. That was The Hip Mama Survival Guide.
I've always written both nonfiction and fiction. I wish the divide between the genres weren't so distinct. I thought we were getting away from that-- moving toward a merging of the literary memoir and the novel and the advice column and the personal prose-poem-- but as soon as you get close to merging someone reacts to that and draws a firm dark line again. They get scared that if there aren't rules in literature there won't be rules in life-- they worry that we're saying truth doesn't matter-- and I can understand their worry and their fear. I am a journalist by training. As a journalist, the truth matters a great deal. We try to find a level of truth that isn't subjective even if we understand philosophically that that level may or may not exist. In journalism we need the facts. But in poetry and literature, the truth we're after is very different, isn't it? It doesn't depend on the facts at all. Now we're talking about an emotional truth and lies that impart certain realities.
Were there any surprises for you in writing a novel versus nonfiction? Did you draw up an outline first, or sit down with your idea and just write?
I had written the memoir Atlas of the Human Heart, and that book has a novel-like narrative line, so the experience of writing a "real novel" didn't feel super-foreign. I begin with an idea and I write. When I start to feel lost in the material I sit down and make an outline. Then I just write. And when I start to feel lost again and perhaps that it's not going to hold up, I do another outline. That's the way I work on a book-length project in any genre-- two hundred or three hundred pages is a lot of space; easy to get lost in-- but of course the architecture of a novel is different from the architecture of a how-to book. For me a how-to book is easier to put together. The other thing about a novel is that, obviously, you don't know how it's going to end. With a memoir, you don't know where it's going to end, or on what note, but you have a pretty good idea what your options are. That's fun, but also daunting.
Religion seems to be such a loaded subject for many people. Did you have any apprehension about reader response before The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show was published?
No. I've written about motherhood so much-- and frankly that subject seems to be more loaded for people. Religion, well. There was some hate mail right before the book came out-- some people of faith thought I was making fun of a sacred tradition and some of my more politically-oriented readers thought I was getting soft by writing about religion in these times. But now that the book is out there, all the readers I've heard from have really "gotten" it. It's been kind of amazing. And then there has been this huge new audience-- religious people and a good many people who identify as Christians and even as "Jesus freaks" who I've heard from. And most of them want to say, "Yes! There is a Christianity outside religious fundamentalism." And maybe this was naive on my part, but I didn't really think about the fact that so many Christian folks would be interested in my work.
Do you have a favorite type of writing?
I like gut-writing. When I'm sitting here reading and the communication feels more intimate than a lover. That intimacy conveyed on a printed page. That's magic.
New writers are funny-- they think it's all about talent and they may indeed have some-- but it's all about practice. So as a "teacher" my main role is sort of forcing people to practice, or at least creating a structure that nourishes the practice. And the great thing about practice is that people actually get better. On some level I believe it's all about talent, too, that you can't teach writing, so it's amazing and a total delight every time that basic belief is proven wrong! People get better. Talent is great. It's like beauty. But you actually can learn to write and write well.
It's a constant struggle and one that changes so often that every time you think you have it all figured out and can share the secrets, everything changes. I think with children it is not as hard to explain that you are working as it is with partners and other adults. Husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends, man, they can never hear that you are WORKING, even if you are the one paying the rent with your writing. It's even more difficult when you're not making any money. If you go to work and you have some evil boss, folks respect that and they won't call you unless it's a real emergency. If you are just on deadline for your book and your entire year's income depends on it, not to mention your art and your sanity, they will interrupt you to help them find a clean towel. I resist that intensely and bitch about it a whole lot and get really passive-aggressive and somehow all of that together seems to get the message across to folks that they need to leave me alone. Kids will interrupt you some, but they are cuter.
Both. I have written so much about community partly because I have struggled with that in my life. I am an introvert and a hermit, but there are times when I need and seek company and community. It's difficult, because if you need a lot of alone-time-- sometimes whole seasons-- your community will feel abandoned or at least it will grow without you and grow not to depend on you. And then you show up, like "Hey, guys!" and you aren't a part of it anymore. When my daughter was younger it was imperative that I have that constant support and close community-- specifically other mothers who were geographically close to me-- but as my daughter has grown older, I find that I have pulled back into myself a bit. I do have a semblance of a writing community here in Portland, but it is not tight-knit or anything. My closer writing allies are people I know online and through their zines-- people who I have only met a handful of times-- and they aren't as grumpy if I abandon them for a season-- the relationships are more fluid.
Amy Brozio-Andrews is a freelance writer and book reviewer. She brings more than five years' experience as a readers' advisory librarian to her work, which is regularly published by Library Journal, The Imperfect Parent, and Absolute Write. Her reviews have also been published by The Absinthe Literary Review, ForeWord Magazine, January Magazine, and Melt Magazine. Amy is also the managing editor and an international markets columnist for Absolute Write. Visit her online at http://www.amyba.com.
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