“Writing fiction that’s generous means getting real about what you’re giving the reader"
A convo with Sarah Elaine Smith, author of Marilou is Everywhere, on decentralizing knowledge from institutions, writing whiteness, and the many ways we can look at character consciousness.
Sarah Elaine Smith is a poet, writer, teacher, incredible thinker, and gold-star sticker enthusiast, among many other things. Her excellent novel Marilou is Everywhere, a coming-of-age mystery the deals with mental health, the delusional lens of whiteness, many cute-named goats, and the elastic definitions of family, was released in 2019 to many accolades. It was one of NPR’s favorite books of the year, nominated for the LA Times Book Prize For First Fiction, and a selection for Belletrist Book Club which is, imo, the best-curated book club of all the celeb-led book clubs. The paperback edition came out this past July. Sarah is also an accomplished poet whose collection I Live in a Hut is available from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. She has an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers and an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which I mention mostly because there is a lot about the academy as a power center and the ways in which power and knowledge can be decentralized from institutions in our chat.
I met Sarah as her student in her point of view workshop at Catapult—essentially the nexus place of my DIY/ersatz-MFA—back in the spring. It was very intriguing to me that POV could go deeper than the standard definitions I’d been taught since grade school. When I learned about point of telling in a workshop in 2018, it fundamentally changed the way I read and write fiction. Having a more nuanced paradigm for narrative voice has been super helpful and also satisfies the part of my brain that is desperate to know the entire pathway that got someone to a thought or idea.
Point of telling, as I was taught, is the circumstances from where the narrator is relaying the story. For example, the novel Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh is about the week in Eileen’s (pretty miserable) life that led her to leave her circumstances. There are many ways that story can be told: it can unfold in real-time, she can tell it on the road out of town, a week down the line, a month down the line, or, in the case of the actual book, many decades later. As humans, we grow and learn and reflect on our experiences. Events in the world and in our lives change the way we see things that have happened to and around us. Point of telling gives the writer a framework what the narrator does and does not know, think, feel, remember, see, and so on.
Sarah’s class gave me a schema for, essentially, fact-checking my work so it’s true to the character and not elementally wonky, as well as a space to think deeply about the malleability of language. She is also the purveyor of a truly supportive workshop environment—she is insistent on everyone flanking each other with praise, which was easy to do with the brilliant crew I was workshopping with, and felt great to receive—and lets people work through weird thoughts and ask super nerdy questions. (You can check out her online, asynchronous courses on writing and creativity here; we talk about her novel generator Here Be Monsters below.)
Here, Sarah talks about her interest in POV, what was surprising about writing and publishing Marilou, and many, many kinds of power. I’m very inspired by what she says about a writer’s generosity to the reader and so grateful to have her as Read You, Wrote You’s first interviewee. Thank you, Sarah!
How does being a poet inform your fiction? How does being a fiction writer inform your poetry?
Poetry workshops are amazing; you’ll become an incredible reader of any text when you spend an hour talking about what the presence of the definite article in a poem’s title does to script its meaning. I love that. I love the conversations that are possible when a group of people gets very serious about putting words to the mechanisms of language in a poem.
I suspect that the actual discipline at work in writing poetry isn’t linguistic so much as the occupation of a space of radical presence—the poem is like a transcript of the poet existing in that space. So, we’re talking about language but really, in order to write, you have to cultivate the capacity to stand in this nowhere-ness and everything-ness field of flux. Which explains why children are perfect at it. I think that’s given me a laser focus on sensing the wrongness of generic words—although I’ve only recently become aware that I might lean too much into interestingness with my word choices. It feels cloying, and I’m starting to see ways that the shape outside the word alone can be as fruitful. It seems like poets get how to write voice-y fiction innately and so it’s given me that strength.
For some time, I thought that writing fiction had poisoned my ability to write poetry. And it’s true that the two are so different. I have to let things fly a lot more in order to write fiction and I also have to be more deliberate about the mechanics of causality and plot. It’s a different state of mind to compose from, and I thought of poetry as the finest skill, with fiction being this clunkier, more pedestrian thing. But now I actually think that I lost my facility with poetry toward the end of my drinking and my early sobriety because my ability to access that radical presence was just fucked all the way up, and I no longer blame fiction for that. I think that writing fiction that’s generous means getting real about what you’re giving the reader and not taking it for granted that they want to be there. It's making me reevaluate how generous I've been in all of my work, I guess, and I think that’s been challenging and satisfying, just like growing up.
In your point-of-view workshop, you take something that people treat as perceived as very rigid and very rote—first is I, second is you, third is she/he/they—and give it a framework for deeper consideration. How did you become interested in POV and are there other elements of fiction or poetry that you have strong theoretical relationships with?
I have to credit Ethan Canin for changing the way I saw POV. In his workshop at Iowa, he gave these miniature lectures at the beginning of every class, a series of axioms he had arrived at after reading and studying fiction. He welcomed you to disagree with them, but he was basically presenting his framework for how fiction works, and it was extremely helpful. One of his theories, definitely the most scandalous one, was that everything is first person: the integrity of the consciousness that told the story had to be consistent no matter what pronouns were used. He would point out POV breaks in workshop stories by addressing the moments where a character’s consciousness wouldn’t editorialize, when they wouldn’t be able to see the inside of the house they were describing, etc., and addressing those inconsistencies was such an elegant, clear way of fixing narrative muddle. I have to say, I’ve taken SO many workshops and classes, I’m probably an obnoxiously over-schooled writer and yet I had never been given such a pragmatic view.
Since then, I’ve applied my own findings about how consciousness works. That sounds fancy but what it really means is: I have a rowdy brain, and I’ve had to learn a great deal about its thoughts and perceptive mechanisms in order to live a happy life. I have bipolar II and I'm also a recovering alcoholic; without any interventions, its main dialogue is kill yourself, kill yourself, you don't deserve to breathe air. Seriously. I’ve found that on top of all the other things I do to stay well (medication, therapy, 12-step programs, meditation, sleep, good food, etc!), I also have to work very closely with my brain’s perceptive machinery to avoid spinning out over incredibly minor things. This has changed the way I think about fiction because it’s made clear to me that my mental state is essentially producing a fiction about what’s happening in the world around me. That’s why we talk in my POV class about selective attention and language as a shadow from a character’s past; the way a character sees and describes their world is as particular as a fingerprint.
Right now, I’m working on scenes. As we discussed frequently in the workshop, I have the hardest fucking time writing scenes. I will write pages and pages of interiority, but when it’s time to get the character to do something in the world, I think, “Ah, but this is impossible.” It’s really something! And I know I’m not the only one who has this disposition—I’ve read a number of books over the last few months where I recognized the same reluctance to inhabit the scene. Something is going on here, and I’m the process of figuring it out. Right now, I’m finding that non-literary craft books are proving much more helpful.
In general, I think I’m actually developing an anti-theoretical relationship to these craft topics in the sense that I’m examining how these representational conventions attach to the way that I experience my life. Writing a fiction really isn’t that different from being a regular human being. We’re still selecting details and drawing conclusions from our very particular vantage points. The intersection of craft and human emotional life is weirdly a taboo in academic creative writing spaces. I suspect it’s a trade-off we’ve undergone in order to fit writing into the academy.
We’ve talked before about our own tendencies toward writing mostly interiority. In Marilou is Everywhere, we see the world through Cindy’s eyes. She has a lot of emotional and philosophical perceptions of the world around but she also notices a lot of its physical details. With Cindy, so much of what she describes is singular to her—she calls the dusty cans in a gas station a “private soup museum”; she describes her movements in one scene as like a pattern on wallpaper. How do you strike the balance between interior and documenting the exterior? How much are you thinking about characterization when you’re writing physical details?
I do think that everything characterizes. It’s the logical extension of that POV model. Not only is everything first person but everything observed is first person, evidence of who the character is. This means that being true to what someone would notice and how they would describe it is crucial to characterization and everything in the text has this consistency. The consistency is what makes the character believable. And I guess the way I do that is by dissociating into the character, getting into the experience of being them so much that I’m recording where their attention would go and what physical sensations they would register in a particular situation or setting. I try to do this with a radical trust, i.e. write it down even if some rational part of me is like, “uh what??” and then later evaluate those details to see if they contribute enough to the fiction without drawing too much attention to themselves. So it would be accurate to say I try at first to think as little as possible, because my editorial picture of who a character is is less interesting to me than discovering and trusting nudges from a subconscious place. But I do find it important later to evaluate how efficiently those details convey the character vs. how much patience they ask of the reader.
What was something surprising about writing Marilou? Something surprising about publishing it?
In the later stages of revision, I was surprised how hard it was to write in the tone of the rest of the book. I sort of thought that the book was just Sarah style but something about my ear had changed and Cindy’s voice didn't feel exactly natural to me anymore. It was a little sad. And the surprising thing about publishing it—to me, anyway—has been how seldom race comes up in discussions around it. To me, that’s a huge element of the book! But I should have known that people (myself very much included) would take the opportunity to talk about anything else rather than examine the ways whiteness and complicity hide behind legitimate trauma responses in this story. I got to realize how much naming and addressing race, just the fact of it, felt in my guts like I was breaking a very important social rule, which is true enough. That increased awareness is partially what encouraged me to seek a teacher-led container specifically for doing anti-racist work.
Was there a process for modulating the tone or to how you included such factual, non-sensationalist racism? Can you talk a little bit about how you engaged with conscientiously writing whiteness? Do you have advice or craft ideas for other writers (hello!) who are trying to include a visible whiteness or write a strongly visible whiteness in their work?
The most important thing is: I pay Black educators to teach me about these things. I’m currently in a decolonizing course/container and that has been a super important part of the picture for me. The class is called The Crash Course and it’s taught by Louiza Doran, who also co-hosts the podcast That’s Not How That Works. I buy books and workshops by Black teachers because I see that the solution to my lifelong marination in white supremacy warps perception such that I need to learn from BIPOC people and compensate them. As Doran says, the mind that creates the problem can’t create the solution.
Because of that, this is a tough question to answer because I do not want to make myself seem like an expert on self-decolonizing and giving advice positions me that way—so I'll just stick to my experience and say that I thought long and hard about how to represent racism in the book, and I got a lot of help from trusted readers. I think whiteness is hard to notice because its ability to camouflage itself to those who have grown up inside that identity is key to its continuance but I’ve been making that a practice in my life, unrelated to writing, for as long as I’ve been actively working on making myself a less harmful white person to have in the room. And for me that means just observing, without making meaning out of the observations, things like: Who is in this room? Who is on this bus? Who is talking right now? Who isn’t talking? What are the front-page stories in the New Pittsburgh Courier (a Black newspaper), what’s on the front page of the Post-Gazette? What happens in my body when I am made aware of a violent act against a Black person? How many police do I see in this neighborhood vs. that one? How do my white neighbors describe the Black children walking home from school? And a million other questions. I think that observing those things and treating them as information is crucial to being able to see them at all and it seems like white supremacy is constantly coaching me to rationalize them away or have a keyed-up emotional reaction, especially whenever I catch the whiff of my responsibility and complicity in a particular scenario.
I also started to ask myself, when I was reading novels by white writers, is this story aware that Black people exist? Not just whether BIPOC are represented in a story but whether their existence registers in the consciousness telling the story. I think a lot of fiction by white people (including my own) takes the centering of whiteness for granted. It’s a subtle difference. I started thinking about it during all of that Lionel Shriver fuckery. I think the whole project of defining cultural appropriation in fiction is sort of beside the point if you're also letting whiteness continue to be seen as an invisible default.
You are someone who cares a lot about the formation and safekeeping of writing communities that aren’t entrenched in location and special access. What has the work you’ve been doing to foster new ways of thinking about how writers can build new, non-traditional, so to speak, writing communities/relationships with other writers been like?
Universities exist primarily to confer power, not knowledge. Creative writing had to make some concessions to belong in the academy: it had to find ways to quantify itself so it could be graded. The thinking goes, you can’t just go giving power to everyone, can you? Some people have to come out the other side with a credential to document their capacity to hold an official power. Everything in universities unfolds out of their initial purpose: to teach the law. So it makes sense that a discipline like writing would have to shape-shift to fit into a credentialing institution.
As an extension of my efforts to decolonize myself and develop a stronger perceptive lens, I’ve been thinking a lot about the hierarchies created by this shape-shift and the ways they filter out into everything else about publishing and reading. I’m starting to think that credentialed knowledge functions because of scarcity, whereas practical knowledge gets stronger and more beautiful the more people have and use it. It’s a subtle but crucial difference. This is why I’ve utterly given up on the idea of teaching in a university (not like I could get one of those rare as hell jobs anyway) and, instead, I’m looking for opportunities to teach knowledge which is uncredentialed. Or rather, your credential is that you use it.
Whether they know it or not, universities just lost a huge amount of their presumptive power during the pandemic because they basically conceded that whatever experiential/environmental je ne sais quoi they always held up as crucial to the education was optional, and you can get the same thing with online classes. There’s no extra magic. Harvard is a name brand and they’ll take your money whether you’re having your liberal arts education kaffeeklatsch on the quad or logging into Zoom. Knowledge that hypothetically makes up the credential can come from anywhere. (Which has always been true!) I know that a shift or outright collapse of the university system has the potential to seriously fuck with the lives and livelihoods of many people I love, and I don't relish that. But I am excited by the possibility that teaching outside of that model might let the practical knowledge circulate more and it might allow us to stop accepting scarcity as a prerequisite to success or connection or joy.
How did you created Here Be Monsters and your other writing and creativity courses?
It comes out of my weariness of the academy, as a matter of fact! Not to bite the hand or whatever because those spaces were absolutely essential and seriously privilege-conferring. But I think the writing world has been academic-ized beyond the actual settings of universities; “colonized” might be another way to say this. Professionalized, boundaried, descriptive, prescriptive. After I left grad school, I became more and more aware of how much the discipline of creative writing actually involved faith, surrender, uncertainty. How do you keep going when everything in your safety-seeking brain is screaming “don't write this, it will get us banished from the village”?
I first had the idea in 2017 when I was teaching a summer novel-writing institute for high school students through Interlochen. The program was a week long and I thought, even if we do a perfect job of gassing these kids up and getting them excited about what they're capable of, the whole process is so long and lonely and discouraging at times, it would be nice to send them on their way with something to keep them company. I considered physically mailing 90 postcards to each student after the seminar ended, and I started writing the entries. Once I got into it, I realized that the scale of this idea was too big for me to execute in the two or three weeks before the program started. And, of course, it ended up being an enormous undertaking, which is why I charge money for it. (However! Here Be Monsters is free for BIPOC folks, in perpetuity—contact me if you're interested and I'll send you the coupon code to accomplish this.)
In an interview with NPR you said, “I've experienced that pain can be the source of tremendous changes and the things that we learn that way can really make our lives beautiful.” This resonated with me profoundly. Can you get a little deeper into it?
When I quit drinking almost seven years ago, I didn’t think there was anything good about my life or the miserable things I did. If someone went back in time to the days I came-to with a mysterious black eye or a broken nose or had almost set the house on fire while drunk cooking and said, “Sarah, one day you will be so glad this happened,” I would have called that cruel and impossible. But I needed those experiences in order to quit drinking, and the good stuff on the other side of that decision is so bountiful and technicolor, it was basically unimaginable to me. If you’re used to living in a small and painful way, you can’t even begin to envision how things could be otherwise and having the comfort of your dreadful habits taken away seems like a loss. Like the very end of the world. I always used to feel sorry for people who quit smoking because I thought, what's better than smoking? You poor fool, taking away one of life's great pleasures. Now that I've quit smoking I can tell you: My singing voice came back! I can sing along with Loretta Lynn and Kate Bush and Nina Simone. (When I was a smoker, I was like Lou Reed but with less range.) I couldn't even imagine the joy of discovering I could sing “Fist City.” I didn't even know that joy was on the menu.
I hope that America is bottoming out right now. I think we are. And so we are on the verge of tremendous changes, many which we probably wouldn't choose if we still had the live-normal/boring-life-even-though-it-barely-conceals-an-oubliette-of-late-capitalist-torture option. I have been challenging myself to leave open the possibility that the changes that come from this time might be so beautiful we can’t even conceive of them now. That has been my experience. For me, change isn’t hard. Looking at what’s really there is the hard part. Once I see what’s really there, what the consequences really are, making the change is actually pretty easy.
If you feel you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. It is a free, 24-hour hotline, at 1.800.273.TALK (8255).
If you are concerned you or a loved one may have a problem with alcohol, call (212) 870-3400.
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