A Conversation with Rebecca Woolf

I am excited to share the thought-provoking conversation I had with Rebecca Woolf, author of All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire. We talked about the return to long-form blogging on Substack, the question of boundaries and secrets and shame when writing memoir, and reinventing story structure through a female lens. This woman needs to do a TEDTalk!

Rebecca will be signing books at the grand opening of Zibby's Bookshop on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica the weekend of February 18th & 19th. Come on down to check it out and meet some other local authors including Leslie Lehr, Terri Cheney, Hope Edelman, Claire Bidwell Smith, Annabelle Gurwitch, among others, including Zibby Owens herself!

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REBECCA WOOLF has worked as a freelance writer since age 16 when she became a leading contributor to the hit 90s book series, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.

Since then, she has contributed to numerous publications, websites and anthologies, most notably her own award-winning personal blog, Girl’s Gone Child, which attracted millions of unique visitors worldwide. 

She has appeared on CNN and NPR and has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine and New York Mag.

She lives in Los Angeles with her son and three daughters.

After years of struggling in a tumultuous marriage, Rebecca Woolf was finally ready to leave her husband. Two weeks after telling him she wanted a divorce, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Four months later, at the age of 44, he died.

In her memoir All of This, she chronicles the months before her husband’s death—and her rebirth after he was gone. With rigorous honesty and incredible awareness, she reflects on the end of her marriage: how her husband’s illness finally gave her the space to make peace with his humanity and her own.

KARIN GUTMAN:  You began writing as a blogger and now you’re on Substack. What do you think of this relatively new platform for writers?
 
REBECCA WOOLF:  I just posted my first post this morning, and I had this feeling of, Oh my God, am I going to do this again? So many mixed feelings. It's a really interesting moment to talk about memoir because I’ve been doing it all my life, obviously, but I'm going back to my roots of blogging.
 
KARIN:  All of the people I’m following on Substack were original bloggers.
 
REBECCA:  I think there's a return. We're seeing the social media platforms implode and realizing that our content doesn't belong to us when it's on other websites. It's different when it's in your own space, and I think it's brilliant.
 
KARIN:  What was it like when you were first starting out?
 
REBECCA:  I started writing memoir in my teens. I wrote for a book series called Chicken Soup for the Soul, which was a very big in the 90s. I wrote for The Teenage Soul. I submitted a story in middle school. It was published and then they had me submit more pieces. I was writing about my personal life, so all my heartbreaks ended up in books. Everything that's ever happened to me that's been painful has been written about and publicly displayed for my whole life.
 
KARIN:  What have you learned about boundaries, if anything?
 
REBECCA:  My job is a litmus test for the people who are and aren't in my life anymore. When your job is to write about your personal life, you are a liability to the people who love you. There are people who have been with me for their whole lives, and my kids are very used to it, but yeah, that's definitely a question. It's like, where are the boundaries?
 
But that's how I started, as a blogger in 2001. I didn't go to college. I went straight to work for The Teenage Soul series at 18. I wrote, edited, and ghost wrote pretty much the entirety of three different books. It was just me under 15 different names.
 
KARIN:  Wow, really?
 
REBECCA:  They needed content and they didn't want it to seem like it was one person writing a whole book. Those books, by the way, make 10s of millions of dollars and contributors made $200. It was my job to go through submissions for years, and basically my boss ended up saying, I like the way you write better. So, I would just write stuff under different names. I had a whole series of a teenage boy and a teenage girl writing back and forth to each other, and I was both of them. I was writing about my personal stories under my name. That was nonfiction. But I was writing under pseudonyms about other issues. And that was fiction.
 
KARIN:  How did your writing career evolve from there?
 
REBECCA:  I started my blog Girl’s Gone Child in 2005, a few months after my son was born. I got pregnant unexpectedly at 23 with a person that I barely knew, married in Vegas, and suddenly went from being this single partying, traveling person to a married mother with a child in Los Angeles. None of my friends were nowhere near having kids.
 
I started my blog as a way of hopefully finding my people, or if not, just talking about my experience. Anytime I feel alone or isolated or like there's nobody who understands me, I write about it, because when you do that you actually find people who do. That's always been my bat signal to the world—writing about my discomfort or loneliness.
 
Shame keeps a lot of people from writing. One of my first stories was called I Kiss Like A Horse, which I wrote for Chicken Soup based on the fact this boy who I had kissed in 10th grade told everyone that I kissed like a horse. Not only did that rumor mortify me as a 14 or 15-year-old, but what I did was, I wrote an entire essay about it that was published in 15 different languages worldwide. So, I took a moment that would have otherwise been mortifying, and I said to myself, This makes me feel like shit, which means it's going to help someone else. That has been the heart of my work my whole life.
 
KARIN:  What a great way to deal with shame. What was your angle?
 
REBECCA:  It lands with this acceptance of having no control over what people say about me. I know who I am. And if I kiss like a horse, I'm going to wear it with pride.
 
KARIN:  What was it like being a blogger in the early 2000s?
 
REBECCA:  The internet was very punk rock at that time. It felt like you were making an online zine. We all did our own HTML. There was no such thing as algorithms. We embedded videos that we took on our digital cameras, that we edited ourselves. It was very DIY, so growing an audience felt really organic.
 
I was fortunate to be one of the first mommy bloggers and amassed a pretty large audience pretty quickly. From there, I got a book deal and launched Babel, which was a big parenting site in the mid to late aughts. They launched with three bloggers, and I was one of them. I was at the forefront of all the parenting writing spaces, so I was doing work for any parenting site that launched. If it wasn't contributing as a columnist or an essayist, it was consulting.
 
The ad guys realized there was a lot of money to be made from the mommy bloggers. I started making really good money.
 
KARIN:  How did that work exactly?
 
REBECCA:  It started with banner ads, and then it went to sponsored posts. You would get, say, a retainer with Target.
 
KARIN:  Were you transparent with your audience?
 
REBECCA:  In those days, everyone was. I don't think people are as transparent as they used to be. It was a big deal. You had to put on top of every post, “This is sponsored by Graco,” or whatever.
 
KARIN:  How did you manage working while raising four kids?
 
REBECCA:  Yeah, I had help. I had a nanny when my twins were little for the first few years. With my other kids, it was basically just me at home with a kid on my lap, figuring it out. I had sitters coming here and there when I needed them. I was super transparent about that, too. I think it was far more transparent those days than it is now. I don't think people talk about that.
 
KARIN:  What was the turning point?
 
REBECCA:  The money dried up, because the money started going to influencers. I'm not going to do Tik Tok videos. No dig on people who do that, it’s just, I was a writer.
 
I don't know a single person who was blogging long-form in the early aughts, who turned into an influencer of any kind. Nobody.
 
That's why Substack is exciting, because it's a return to the original space, which was writers writing and people reading our work because we were good writers. We weren't just writing pithy captions. It was really about storytelling and transparency and being honest about experiences. Not this hyper glossy, super filtered stuff.
 
On Substack I can charge people. It's $7 a month. I will publish some for free, but I'm going to publish anything that's explicit or super personal behind a paywall. You can't comment unless you are subscribed. That feels good to me. I’ve subscribed to a bunch of writers and I pay for all of the ones I subscribed to because I want to support people.
 
The return to these longer-form platforms is exciting because it means the work is going to start to speak for itself, and it's not about where you're publishing or how many followers you have, this bullshit that everyone's trying to sell you.
 
This Twitter thing is so interesting to me. It's like watching this thing fall—the hubris of male mediocrity who somehow became empowered. It's like eating popcorn.
 
KARIN:  Let’s talk about your memoir All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire. I find your voice and writing style so accessible. I really enjoy the way you move back and forth, in time and place, with digestible pieces that are seamlessly woven.
 
REBECCA:  Thank you.
 
KARIN:  How did you figure that out?
 
REBECCA:  The name of my Substack is “The Braid,” which was the way I looked at this book. I didn’t know this, but traditional story structure is based on a male orgasm. The climax and the resolution are huge.
 
It broke open my brain because that’s every story I've ever read. It’s the structure that I've been taught. My whole life is based on that shit, and of course I can't write my book like that. That's not how how I cum. I just kind of fall asleep. 
 
So, I had this epiphany about my own desire, my own body, and storytelling as a woman. How was I going to tell a story as a woman? What would my format look like? There isn't a climax and a resolution. That is not how my life looks. Is that honest? Whenever something happens, we're looking for the resolution. We're looking for the ‘aha’ moment. We're trying to find this device that, by the way, was created by some dude who said, This is is how I orgasm.
 
I remember my editor coming back and saying, I think this is your ending. I said, No, I don't think so. In fact, the first draft had three different endings like Choose Your Own Adventure—this idea that there are multiple climaxes and that just because I have one doesn't mean I'm done. I'm like, Wait, I can have another one, like I can still go, I'm not tired yet. That to me felt accurate to my experience, as a person, as a woman, as a sexual being at this point in my life. I'm not here for one ending. I'm not here for one climax. I'm here for all of them.
 
So, I had this come to Jesus moment about how I was going to format my book. What I kept coming back to was the braid—what the braid looked like and what it represented for me. 
 
The story that I wanted to tell does have three parts—the beginning, middle and end—that's legit. There are three parts, but they overlap with each other. The end is its own thing, too. It's the loose hairs of the braid that fall down the back.
 
It's a memoir. I don't know how you tie up loose ends. There is no end. You're still here, life is still happening. So, this idea of having to punctuate your ending feels really false. I'm really aware of endings and making sure that they're open and loose. That to me feels authentic.
 
KARIN:  I’m a fan of the braided structure and weaving the different story threads.
 
REBECCA:  I don't know if you've read Carmen Maria Machado. If you haven't, she's an incredible writer who wrote the memoir In the Dream House. I highly recommend it because you've never read anything like it. It’s basically told in little vignettes.
 
It feels like you're going through drawers, opening them up and seeing what's inside and closing them. I realized how rare it is to pick up a book and to recognize that its format is something you've never felt before—to be inspired not only by what you're reading but also by the way it's formatted. It's like, Oh my god, I can write a book like this. We get so bogged down by rules, and when you read someone who's breaking them all and killing it, it feels really exciting.
 
KARIN:  What was your writing process like?
 
REBECCA:  My process was super messy. I probably wrote the bulk of this book on my kitchen floor and on my notes app. I don't know what it is about the kitchen floor. I pretty much wrote it all in real time.
 
My book is about when my husband was diagnosed with stage four cancer, right after I told him that I wanted to divorce. He died four months later. So, I spent four months taking care of a man that I wanted to leave, and when he died, I felt a lot of conflicting feelings including relief because I was miserable in my marriage. But as a widow, I felt like I couldn't talk openly about that. I felt guilty for even feeling those things.
 
When I started this book, I basically went through my notes app and emailed myself every single one and put it all in a document. There were a lot of fragments, and I was trying to put together a mosaic based on all these little pieces. It was as if I had written hundreds of short essays.
 
The first draft of this book was twice as long as the published version. When I turned my book in to my editor, it read 800 pages. 110,000 words. She responded with, Your contract is for 65,000 words. I turned in a book that literally needed to be cut in half. I remember talking to her on the phone. I was in the parking lot at Trader Joe's and just burst into tears, because I was like, Oh my god, how the fuck am I going to cut this in half? I did cut half of it. I really stand by what remains, because I basically had to Sophie's Choice my whole book.
 
I'm glad that I didn't read the contract, because I think it made me a better writer. I think that so much of writing is editing.
 
KARIN:  How did people in your life react to your book?
 
REBECCA:  When you have people in your life that love you and support you unconditionally, you can write about anything. If you're writing a memoir, you are going to hurt people, but it is not on you to protect them from your truth.
 
I recently had another epiphany about the locked diary. Who does the locked diary protect? I grew up in the 80s as a small child and every one of my friends was given locked diaries—all the girls. My brother never got a locked diary. At the time it was like, yeah, you lock the diary. Keep your secrets safe.
 
I'm wondering more and more about this idea of secrecy. Who are we protecting? Who are we keeping safe?
 
I don't write to protect people from my truth. If you have a problem with it, if it's upsetting to you, or if you don't agree with me, that's not my problem. I've spent a lot of years protecting people, mainly men, and I don't need to do that anymore.
 
You have to be not only prepared but also welcoming to every feeling, from every person, and validating all of it. I have reached out to everyone in my family—they knew I was writing this book—saying, I understand if this is going to be hard for you. If you don't want to talk to me, if you feel uncomfortable, I validate your feelings. I love you. I have to write this book.
 
Allowing people to react negatively and giving them the space to do that and have those feelings is really important, because they're entitled to their feelings as much as you're entitled to your truth. They're entitled to the reaction to your work as much as you're entitled to doing the work.
 
KARIN:  I noticed that you use the royal “we” in your writing, as if including the reader in your experience. Are you aware of that?
 
REBECCA:  I've been writing for 20 years, and a lot of the people who were with me 20 years ago still are, and we're still having these conversations behind the scenes. The “we” feels inclusive to those who aren't able to articulate their stories or don't feel like they can talk openly about their experiences. I feel like I'm speaking for them.
 
Through writing this book, I found out a huge secret about two very close women in my family. Both of them shared these major, life-changing secrets with me, and I realized, Oh, I carry their stories in my body. I come from these women, they're in my body.
 
So much of my willingness to write about what I wrote about was informed by the fact that I was carrying the secrets of these women in my body and that they trusted me with those secrets. As much as I was writing for me, I was writing for them too. I'm not trying to sound like a martyr hero, it's just that when we are sitting down to write our truth, we're not just writing it for us. Otherwise we would be writing it in our notebook and not sharing it with anybody. There's something in us that recognizes that our story is going to be relatable and helpful. A love letter to somebody else. 
 
So I think the “we” is acknowledging that there are people on the other side of your work who are going to see you and feel seen by what you're saying. So much of memoir writing is this gift to some relationship, like you're sharing yourself with someone and it does feel like a “we” to me.



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To learn more about Rebecca Woolf visit her site.

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A Conversation with Chanel Brenner

It's no surprise that the topic of grief is being written about a lot these days, even as we start to emerge from our year of hibernation. I feel fortunate to have so many seasoned writers around me, with varied perspectives and experience, who are tackling this subject and helping me (us) to make sense of it, to understand this terrain more fully and deeply.

One of these voices is a long-time, treasured member of the Unlocking Your Story workshops. In fact, Chanel Brenner used to host the Santa Monica group at her home before we went online. Her new collection of poetry, Smile, Or Else, is the winner of the 2021 Press 53 Award for Poetry and follows her ongoing grief journey after the death of her son, Riley.

Chanel is fearless on the page, something that I admire. In turn, she gives other people permission in our workshops to be bold and brave, too. Her writing awakens me to parts of myself that I didn't know existed, until her crisp language and piercing insights somehow find their way in.

Below is my interview with Chanel, where she shares how alternative forms of meditation help her to channel her ideas and poems.

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Chanel Brenner's poetry has been widely published. She is the author of Vanilla Milk: A Memoir Told in Poems (Silver Birch Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the 2016 Independent Book Awards and honorable mention in the 2014 Eric Hoffer awards. Through poems and vignettes, her debut commemorates her son’s death. Kirkus called it, “A noteworthy exploration of a parent’s grief.”

Her new collection of poetry, Smile, Or Else, is the winner of the 2021 Press 53 Award for Poetry, and traces her and her family's ongoing journey toward healing.

“Clear and cutting as glass, Chanel Brenner’s poems will challenge everything you think you know about grief.”

—Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies


”Chanel Brenner’s poetry stirs, provokes, elevates with its precision and insight. These poems are expertly crafted and beat with a true poet’s heart.”

—Emily Rapp Black, New York Times best-selling author of The Still Point of a Turning World

KARIN GUTMAN: Congratulations on your new poetry collection! I just got my copy and love the cover image. Are you happy with it?

CHANEL BRENNER: Yeah. I'm thrilled with it.

KARIN: What does this image mean to you, a candle that's extinguished?

CHANEL: I don't necessarily see it as extinguished. I still see the ember there. And, so for me, it's about light and dark and having hope in the darkness. That there's still a spark there. That there's still a little bit of light.

KARIN: I recognized a few of the poems as I was reading.

CHANEL: Some of them have come from your class, or in pieces that I've read in class when I was mixing the poetry with the essays. I know Dead Child World came from one of your prompts.

KARIN: Dead Child World is one of my favorites.

CHANEL: That was my first draft. My first draft was written in my journal in your class.

KARIN: Amazing.

So, both of your poetry collections, Smile, Or Else and Vanilla Milk explore grief after your son Riley died, correct?

CHANEL: Yeah. The main difference is all the poems in Vanilla Milk were written in the first two years after he died. This new collection is everything after year two, for the most part. It's more of the later grief.

KARIN: How has your perspective shifted over time? Do you see it reflected in the second book of poems

CHANEL: I think this new collection is mostly about falling back into that early grief. How it's never really gone. Even though the time has passed, and yes, I'm healing, that really early grief is always there just below the surface. It's about how it gets tapped into.

KARIN: Do you think of poetry as telling a story?

CHANEL: The poems in a collection tell a story, I think. I don't know if there's a story arc like there is in a memoir, but I think that you can tell the story that way. Also, each individual poem has a beginning, middle and end and tells a story of a moment.

KARIN: How do you start a poem? What triggers ideas for you?

CHANEL: Poems have come from something that somebody said to me. Sometimes it's hurtful things after Riley died, that I felt caused me pain. Or something I would see. In our workshop, I was working on a poem about the woman whose daughter drowned. There was something about the interview on The Today Show that haunted me, and I was so obsessed with it. Sometimes it’s news stories, sometimes things that people say to me, sometimes something I'm dealing with like [my son] Desmond, or something that stuns me and really sticks with me, and I just keep going back to it.

In the beginning, I was just writing things that would come to mind in a journal. Sometimes I didn't even feel like I knew how to write a poem.

KARIN: Are there certain tried-and-true principles of poetry?

CHANEL: I always want to be surprised when I write a poem, and I don't want the ending to be forced. I don't want to know the ending ahead of time. I want to feel like it's a journey and when I get to that point where something truly surprises me and I'm just like, “Wow. Where did that come from?” That's when I usually end.

For me to write a poem, it has to be something I want to know more about or work through. So, I follow that curiosity.

Sometimes I will abandon poems if I am forcing an ending. Sometimes I can just cut the bottom of the poem and end it at an earlier point. But to force an ending feels very crafted or just not authentic.

KARIN: How do you take care of yourself when you're writing about painful topics?

CHANEL: I think I've told you before that I feel the writing saved me. It was a lifeline. However, there were some parts that took me a long time to be able to write about, like the night of Riley’s brain bleed, and it wrecks me when I do. I do need to have some self-care afterwards.

KARIN: What is your version of self-care?

CHANEL: Walking away from it and picking it back up when I'm ready; not forcing myself to continue to work on it. Then just doing something fun, like we used to go to Benihana's a lot, drinking some champagne, doing things that make me happy, that kind of stuff. Definitely walking, exercise, and now I even meditate. I started meditating over this stupid break.

KARIN: Why do you roll your eyes when you say that?

CHANEL: Because I never in a million years thought I would be the type of person to meditate, other than the meditating I do when I'm out on a walk. Claire Bidwell Smith has this little grief meditation course. What drew me in was each meditation is six minutes long. Right away, I thought, “My gosh, this really helps me.”

I also started taking a class with my sister with a medium. Her name is Medium Fleur. She has a bunch of very cool meditations, these grounding and centering meditations. They really work. I wanted to figure out how I channel because there have been poems—even Dead Child World to some extent—where I feel something else takes over. I don't feel like I wrote the poem. I feel like I'm pulling from whatever you want to call it—the collective, the universe, whatever term you want to use. I wanted to figure out what I'm doing when I do that. And so I've learned, when I'm on a walk for example, why poems come to me. She was talking about how when you're in a trans-state, when you're doing something repetitive, then you're more open. I've found that very interesting. Kind of out there.

KARIN: That liminal space.

CHANEL: Even when I sit and put on makeup. I get a lot of poetry ideas and ideas that come to me while I put on makeup. So, it's an important part of my day. Not just sitting at your computer or sitting with the pen and paper trying to write. It doesn't come to me that way, at least not usually for a first draft.

I think meditations help you be in your body. You can't channel if you're not in your body. I'm hoping when I go back to writing in the workshop, that I'll be able to shift into that more easily. Get out of my head into my body more.

KARIN: You say that writing saved you. But how can that be when the material, I imagine, can bring up so much pain?

CHANEL: I felt I could go one way or the other. One was very destructive: screaming, pulling my hair out, breaking things, throwing bottles. Many destructive things went through my mind. Or I could listen to the voice that said, sit down and write. I chose the latter and it prevented me from doing other destructive things. I listened to my intuition and learned how to write poetry. For me, it was a new talent, a new thing to work on. So, I think each poem and each thing I wrote created hope.

KARIN: Is hope something that you discovered through the writing process?

CHANEL: Yes, just by writing about Riley, I'm giving life to him. I always feel like the editing process is even more healing than the writing the original draft, because here I am polishing it off and making it into something that is beautiful. And I think there's always some light in the poems, even the darker ones.

In the editing process, too, there's the reframing of it. I try to look at it from an outsider’s perspective, from an unemotional point of view. That's when I'll sometimes make changes. I like that I have the power to change whatever I want about it. It's not big things, not the emotional truth, but a little this or that. To make it flow better, for the sounds of the words, for the image.

That always feels cool to be able to go in there and think, “This can be whatever I want it to be.”

Buy the book!

To learn more about Chanel Brenner, visit her site.

See all interviews

A Conversation with Emily Rapp Black

My 8-year-old daughter recently returned to in-person schooling, and it feels like the sun is shining a little bit brighter. Maybe it's also the spring blossoms reaching their peak bloom.

Or maybe, it was the great opportunity I had to dive into the creative deep with Emily Rapp Black, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir The Still Point of the Turning World about parenting a terminally ill child. Her new memoir, Sanctuary, examines resilience and what has sustained her after the loss. We talk about everything from the pitfalls of memoir to blowing up some longstanding myths about the creative process.

For Emily, writing is an act of service. It seems so obvious, but I've never heard it said quite as simply as that. Our stories are offerings to the world.

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Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir and The Still Point of the Turning World. A former Fulbright scholar, she was educated at Harvard University and has been the recipient of both the James A. Michener and Guggenheim fellowships.

She is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and frequently publishes scholarly work in the fields of disability studies, bioethics, and theological studies. She is currently associate professor of creative writing at the University of California-Riverside, where she also teaches medical narratives in the School of Medicine.

Emily's new memoir, Sanctuary, is an attempt to unpack the various notions of resilience that we carry as a culture. Drawing on contemporary psychology, neurology, etymology, literature, art, and self-help, she shows how we need a more complex understanding of this concept when applied to stories of loss and healing and overcoming the odds, knowing that we may be asked to rebuild and reimagine our lives at any moment, and often when we least expect it.

"A meticulous examination of the aftershocks of the loss of a child.... A searing, uncompromising effort to wrestle with permanent grief." -Kirkus Reviews

KARIN GUTMAN: You write a lot about grief. I think we’re all writing about loss in some way. Story is about change, moving from what we once knew to something new and different, and inherent in that is a kind of loss, right?

EMILY RAPP BLACK: That’s a great way to describe it actually.

KARIN: The kind of loss you’re writing about, child loss, is a particularly painful one. How do you take care of yourself through the writing process?

EMILY: I think for me, actually the writing itself is what helps take care of me. That to me has always been the thing that provides the solace.

When my son was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, all I wanted to do was write. That's always been the engine of comfort. So, I guess I don't feel like I have to protect myself because I feel the writing itself is doing that for me by creating a container, however incomplete or full of holes, for the experience.

KARIN: Are there days when you don't feel like showing up to the page?

EMILY: Sure. I mean, I don't write every day. I think a man came up with that idea.

KARIN: It's a total myth, right?

EMILY: I had a teacher in grad-school, who said, “Write every day from eight to 12,” and I'm like, yeah, because you have a wife who brings you food and takes care of you. Even if you don't have children or don't want children, women are busy, women do more than men, it's the way it is. So, I write in 10-minute blocks. Sometimes I get a bee in my bonnet, as my mom would say, and then I'm kind of on a roll, but I'm a feast or famine writer. I'm not the steady as it goes builder of books. I think I wrote half of Sanctuary in two weeks when I was in a writing colony because I had the time!

KARIN: With Still Point of the Turning World, were you writing it in real-time as the events of your life were happening?

EMILY: Yeah, it was started as a blog, which is something I never thought I would do. It was my friend who said I wasn't answering the phone or responding to text. She said, “We're worried… why don't I set up this public reading space and then your friends can know that you're not leaping off a building somewhere.” I started doing it, and it gave me a concrete thing to do and a place to put it. So that book started as a huge blog that was live time, that I was writing on almost every day. And then I cut it down considerably for the book.

KARIN: How did you go about shaping this mound of clay into an actual book?

EMILY: With help is the answer. First, my agent edits a lot of my stuff. She’ll say “Why is this 3,000 pages?” like “What's wrong with you?” And then she'll send it to my editor, and the editor that I work with, Andrea Walker at Random House, is like my soul-spirit-intellectual-animal person. When I met her, I thought, Oh my God, you are my person.

Editors are vital. I don't write in a linear way, and I like that. I think most people’s memories and lives are not linear in any respect. But I do need help in shaping. I had this whole chapter about action movies, and I was really attached to it. My editor said, “We're not putting this in the book. Stop it.”

When I'm working with an editor at a [traditional publishing] house, I'm willing to make concessions, because they are working with me to put something in the world. I'm not one of those people who's like, “Oh, I'm attached this artistic moment.” If it's not going to work for the majority of readers, then no one's going to read it, and then why am I doing this? So, it's having a team of people that you really trust.

KARIN: You said that every book has its own life, and that it's hard to predict at the beginning. With your most recent book, Sanctuary, what did you know for sure from the start?

EMILY: When you lose anyone, especially when you lose a child, people's platitudes are just offensive. So, I thought: I want to tell the truth about how hard this was. I was adamantly not going to write about Ronan's death in the first book, because I felt he was still alive. And it was important to me that that book ends with him still alive. But then people kept saying to me, “It's great that he had a peaceful death.” I thought: No one gets that. Don't sugarcoat this shit. So, I wrote his death scene, because that sucked. I did tons of preparation for it. Still sucked.

And then also how strange it is to have a child that wouldn't have existed had my other child not died. And how is it to explain that to her. She gets it in some sense, she knows about Ronan. We say the word die. We don't say passed, we don't say gone to a better place. We certainly don't say he went to heaven, because I don't believe that. I don't want her to believe it either.

I really bristle anytime somebody tries to put me in a metaphorical box. And I think: No, actually my truth of this experience is this. It's not something that’s going to fit on a crochet circle or a felt banner. That's not going to work.

KARIN: Is there a discovery process as you’re writing?

EMILY: Yeah. It was like pulling together certain childhood memories that connected to the live-time story that I was telling. Stuff I’d forgotten about. I think writing about life is kind of like that. Memories that you didn't think really had any traction in your current life, do. It's finding the points of connection, the magnetic connection.

KARIN: You say this book is about resilience, and examining what sustained you after Ronan’s death. What did you discover about resilience?

EMILY: It's not at all the way we use it in common vernacular. It's not about strength, or it's a different kind of strength. I think Americans, especially, understand strength as powering through—a lot of bravado, never give up, like push. But resilience is not that, it's about breaking to bend. You can't be resilient if you can't bend and break.

So, to me, it was a real a gift to understand the world is less about this grit, and being synonymous with the aggressive form of strength, and more about allowing and reshaping around it. Without saying, "I've overcome my problems, and now ‘Yay’." That's stupid. People kept telling me, “Oh, now you got your life back.” And I thought: I never didn't have my life. I'm still alive. I was alive when my son was sick.

There's no leaping over the fence into a better life. It doesn't work that way. A lot of memoirs, I think, tend to propagate that myth.

KARIN: You are re-defining and re-framing the language we use that isn't accurate to the experience. I find that incredibly empowering.

EMILY: I always tell students, if you're having trouble thinking about what to write, choose a word that you hear a lot and then look up its roots. So for resilience, the Latin root is resilien, which is the stuff that's in butterfly wings that holds it together, the sticky stuff, these proteins. Butterflies can fly through wind, which is pretty strong, but you could tear its wings. That is resilience. Vulnerability and strength combined. That's why the central image of butterflies is one of the primary images of the book—not because I love butterflies so much, but because they illustrate this combo of strength and vulnerability.

KARIN: How do you work with your students who are writing memoir?

EMILY: Well, I do a lot of prompts. I think a lot of it is just providing structure and saying, “Write about this for five or 10 minutes.” Time under tension. That's really helpful, I think, just to execute one thing within the timeframe. Because otherwise you think: Where do I start? Right?

KARIN: It can be overwhelming.

EMILY: Yeah, it's totally overwhelming. So, I use a lot of generative exercises especially with people who are just starting out. But when people come to me with a full-length manuscript, then it's more of an editorial. Where's the beginning? Where's the end?

KARIN: What common pitfalls do you notice in memoir manuscripts?

EMILY: Memoirs tend to have what I like to call the tyranny of the “and then.” And then this happened, and then this happens… it’s like, oh my God, I don't care. It has to have a beautiful gesture of opening, and it has to take a shape that isn't going to shock your reader—or maybe it will—but it's going to surprise them even if they know what's going to happen. There has to be tension, there has to be a story. There has to be a ‘why’, like why are we writing this? Who is it for?

Also, people think that they must put in everything that's happened to them. And that's a mistake. You don't have to have a terrible life to write a memoir, but you have to artistically construct it so that the reader is engaged with language, propulsion, and the plot. There has to be a plot, the characters have to be well-defined. The place has to be rendered.

People, especially when they write memoir, forget that they have a body. You have to have sensory details, concrete details. Where are you in space and time? Are we on the moon? One of the benefits I've taken from reluctantly teaching fantasy to undergraduates, which is applicable to memoir, is world building. So now I call it world building, rather than setting the stage. The world is your house, your mind, your bedroom, your body, your closet, whatever. You can't just start telling us things about your life without concretizing them in the world.

KARIN: How do you think about your audience?

EMILY: If I hadn't written Still Point, I would have killed myself. There's just no other way to say it. Writing the book is what kept me going with some kind of meaning and purpose that wasn't just dread and sadness and the fucking horrible grief and guilt. It was the only thing that was happy. So, I had no idea who the audience would be and didn't even think there would be one, which was kind of great. I didn't care. I did what I wanted, and it turned out to be something that I was proud of and that felt meaningful to me.

With Sanctuary, I think a lot of people have the experience of rebuilding their life many times throughout their lives. I think there's this myth that once you've got it all settled, then everything's great. That's just not true. So, the audience was intended to be broader, and it's also a more complicated book, so people are going to bring more complicated feelings to the page. With Still Point, it's really hard to quibble with a writer who is writing about their dying child. But Sanctuary has had a different reception, which is satisfying to me, because it means that it's pissing some people off. And I think that's actually good.

KARIN: Do you have a particular reader in mind when you write?

EMILY: No. I definitely am thinking how to shape the story so that it matters to someone apart from me, but when I first do it, I'm just trying to figure it out. But I think a lot of the ‘why’ of writing—who's my audience, why am I writing this—that processing needs to happen off the page. I don't want to process with my reader why I'm writing this.

I really see writing as an act of service. If it's going to serve somebody and help them see their life in a different way, and make them want to live for another day, then I feel that's my job.

KARIN: How much perspective or distance do you think a writer needs to have on what they're writing about?

EMILY: I don't know, it depends. Sometimes people need to wait to write about something if they're villainizing people. That's problematic. But I think you can get perspective by writing about it. And if you're not getting perspective, then you just stop for a bit.

Every quarter I tell my students on the last day: We're leaving class right now, and your task is to go and do nothing for the next two hours. Nothing. Just go walk around. The only stipulation is you can't be on electronics. Just stumble around, see what happens. Because we don't think that's important. We don't give ourselves enough elastic time to go out and sharpen our lenses through which we see the world. That's what memoir is.

KARIN: How do you handle privacy issues, say regarding your daughter? Do you think she might read what you write one day?

EMILY: I'll answer people's questions about anything that happens in the book, but I won't talk about what she's up to now. That's my own private life. But I'm glad that I have [the book] for her because I think it shows her connection to her brother, which is important, and that she has some kind of a documentation of it. Also, really important that she knows she wasn't a replacement child. Not that that even exists, but that she was wanted and loved and planned for and that that is independent from what happened to her brother.

KARIN: I know some writers who are writing about grief and loss feel concerned that their narratives will be “too dark.” What would you say to them?

EMILY: Writing about death is more about writing about life. If you've ever watched someone die you understand how precious life is and you feel like you are more alive than you've ever been. Which was a shock to me. Or, wanting to feel alive when faced with death is a very human reaction.

I don't think it's dark at all. I think it's necessary. I think it's inevitable. Why not write about something that everyone's going to experience?

I've always really gravitated toward stories that have high stakes. I'm not going to write a beach book. I wish I could, but I just can't. I don’t care enough.

So, I think if you're going to write about grief and loss, the main thing I would say is make sure you're concretizing it. Make sure we are in your body. Earn your abstractions. You need to ground us in where we are, who we are. That way you can take anyone anywhere if they feel like they know where they are in the world, they're oriented, and that they feel what you feel. Not just in your heart or in your mind, but on your skin, in the air. People forget about that. The sensory stuff is super important.




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Circe Consulting is a full-service business for writers at every stage of their careers. Circe Founders Emily Rapp Black and Gina Frangello offer classes, retreats and editorial consulting.

Both Gina and Emily are longtime educators at the university level, have published numerous memoirs, novels and short story collections between them, and have fostered dozens of additional books into the world as editors, publishers and ghost-writers.

In addition, both specialize in working with survivors of loss, illness, and grief and have collective experience in facilitating therapeutic groups and in life coaching.

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