Deb Gwartney with Norma Sax

  Debra Gwartney, who teaches in the Pacific University MFA program, has published three award winning books:    Live Through This, I Am a Stranger Here Myself, and Home Ground, as well as stories and essays in Granta, Tin   House, Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction, Salon, and the New York Times “Modern Love” column. Her   recently published essay, “Suffer Me to Pass,” published in VQR, was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Dwartney, who   lives in Western Oregon, is the 2018 winner of the Real Simple essay contest; a contributing editor at Poets and   Writers magazine, and in 2015 won the Crab Orchard Review prize for non-fiction. http://www.debragwartney.com. First published July 2021



1.  Please tell us about your background and formative years. What was your training to become a writer?  

  Many years ago, when I was a young woman stumbling toward some kind of writing life (I wasn’t sure what that   meant or what it was, exactly, only a keen desire to write), I asked an acclaimed writer at a conference—I can’t    recall who that was—if he thought an MFA or a masters degree in journalism was the right path. He didn’t know me at all, nor did I know him, but he said without hesitation, “Journalism. It will teach you economy of language.” I also needed a job after graduate school so I opted for a journalism program at the University of Arizona, though for two years I gazed longingly across campus at the creative writing department. I convinced instructors over there that I should be allowed to enroll in a few fiction workshops and those were good for me, but then I signed up for one class, and then another, with that year’s visiting writer who happened to be Vivian Gornick. I had not heard of her or the subject she taught, memoir writing, but after the first course I was certain I’d found my genre. The books she assigned were firecrackers going off in me—this is what I wanted to write, and her ability to penetrate the intricacies of the genre was both daunting and exciting. Though of course I was far from capable then and barely capable now of pulling off a memoir narrative. It’s tremendously challenging to write about one’s own life and experience. And yet memoir writing still draws me like nothing else, as a reader and a writer. I go to it with humility and trembling respect and fail (in writing my own memoir pieces) more often than I succeed.
 

How do you face the challenge of a lack of motivation to write? Are there other writers whom you find especially inspiring?

When actively working on my respective books, and when I’m writing stand-alone pieces that are particularly hard to shoulder into, I tend to keep a pile of poetry books on my desk. When I’m stuck, or unmotivated, I read poetry and in particular first-person narrative poetry. Sharon Olds, Ellen Bass, Naomi Shihab-Nye, Dorianne Laux, to name a few. This takes me back to the “economy of language” comment above. Poems remind me of how much can happen in a small space. They remind me that language is music, and that it matters how every syllable feels on the tongue. They remind that the relationship with the reader is bound in credibility, authority, trust. Sometimes I’ll type out a poem so I can experience it in my fingers and arms. Sometimes I make a list of the words that ring the loudest in me and then I try to write a paragraph or two of my own work using those same words.
Also I have—I guess this is obvious—a set of book-length memoirs on my shelf that I reread often for inspiration. Those include The Sisters Antipodes, by Jane Allison; Borrowed Finery, by Paula Fox; Bereft, by Jane Bernstein; Fierce Attachments, by Vivian Gornick; My Mother’s House, by Colette; Half a Life, by Darrin Strauss; Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel; Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn, Speak, Memory by Nabokov and probably a dozen others.
Speaking of the music of language, of syntax and that resounding bell of beauty and meaning, I’m re-reading my husband’s (*Barry Lopez-ECM) book Horizon right now, and am learning again what it means to open the portal and allow the reader to enter fully into the experience of an engaging narrative.
 What have been the biggest barriers you’ve faced as a writer?

  Oh, goodness, a plethora of barriers. Similar to, I’m guessing, most other writers, I’ve rammed up against a lot of them. Too little time, not     enough space, too many children, not enough children (turns out I was remarkably productive as a young, broke single mom. I can’t even     explain that even to myself). I’m often stopped by the fear of rejection, and also the fear of disappointing or infuriating my loved ones. I     walk into a bookstore and think, Does the world really need another book? By Me? But the barrier that has been in the way the most is my own lack of confidence. As I’ve grown older I realize how essential it is to believe in yourself—that sounds simple, but it is not—and to fiercely, profoundly believe in your work. I often return to Patricia Hampl’s incredible essay, “Memory and Imagination,” because she reminds me that my story of this time and this place matters, and that I have a fundamental right to express what’s inside of me, aching to get out. I also reread Bernard Cooper’s lovely “Marketing Memory,” where he says, “good memoir does more than dredge up secrets from the writer’s past. A good memoir filters a life through resonant narrative, and in doing so must achieve a balance between language and candor. It was not the subject matter of my memoirs that I hoped would be startling, but rather language’s capacity to name what was once nameless, to define what had once been vague and chaotic. The chief privilege of writing a memoir, it seems to me, is the opportunity to go back and make sense of events that left you dumbstruck, mired in confusion, unarmed with the luminous power of words.”
 

Your book Live Through This is deeply personal story about a difficult time in your life as a mother. How did you decide to write about this troubling experience? How has writing about your daughters helped or challenged your relationship with them now?

Live Through This was a long time ago, almost another lifetime. Sometimes it seems that a different woman/mother wrote that book, related to me but not me. I know for certain that if I was to recount those troubled years now, the book would bear little resemblance to the one published because I’ve changed and my perspective on that time has changed. But back to those early 2000s: I decided to write about the difficulty of our family relationships because, I think I remember, it was the only way I was going to sort it out. It took many (many) drafts to get the voice and the approach right, but ever-so-slowly, through revision, I came to accept my own role in our mother-daughter dynamic. I gave up the idea that somehow those daughters had done bad things to good me: that was a big release on my part. We did things to each other, out of our own gnarly and lifelong dynamic. That was the most profound moment for me in writing the book—when I finally gave up trying to write their story, when I stopped attempting to explain their motivations, which, by the way, felt like the easier route. That is, figuring out the daughters instead of myself. But what did I know, truly, about their interiors? I had one job and that was to face my own story. I didn’t much like the ouch of it, but if I failed to excavate the self, as Vivian Gornick so wisely suggests in The Situation and The Story, then I would be writing, in her words, a “litany of complaint.” That was not interesting to me, to simply whine and complain and beg for the reader’s sympathy. Vivian Gornick is the one who advised me (after she read a particularly poor-me version of a chapter) to go home and tape a single sentence on the wall above my desk, and that sentence was, “Who is the mother whose children would leave her?” Again, not a question I relished or that I even wanted in the same room with me breathing the same air, but it became my guiding light and I followed it down some tight and muddy tunnels with the ultimate aim of self-awareness. Vivian Gornick was hugely helpful to me, obviously, though after four-five drafts of the book I realized I needed even more help, so I did, years after journalism school, enroll in an MFA program and was blessed to work with Phillip Lopate and Sven Birkerts, writers/instructors who intensified and complicated my relationship with the genre of memoir (another teacher was Bob Shacochis, who taught me a whole lot about telling a good tale).
My daughters were supportive of my choice to write the book. I could honestly assure them that the book was about me. That is, the primary conflict of the narrative was between the two halves of myself, my self-delusion v the woman/mother seeking self-awareness, and not the battle between one mother v two daughters (that conflict is in the book, but it is not the primary conflict that fuels the narrative). We had many discussions and I made some changes the daughters asked me to make, but not many. I was determined to be true to my own memory while respecting theirs. I would say the publicity around the book was more wrenching than the book itself—none of us fared well through that experience, but that’s another story.  
 

Your focus has been on writing memoirs. You write about your own life in Life Through This and you interweave your own story with that of Narcissa Whitman in I Am a Stranger Here Myself. How did you decide to concentrate on that genre and to become a teacher of memoir and nonfiction writing?

 
I believe I answered this one earlier, but I can add that I continue to value memoir for its authenticity and its ability to connect to the reader in its own potent way.
 
It’s been a particular joy and satisfaction to facilitate workshops in personal narrative these past couple of decades. We are all living in an information glut, with too much coming at us and a dissemination of that information that can be troubling or vexxing. I worry that people believe it’s already too noisy, too cacophonous, out there in the bewildering world: why should I add my story to all that confusion? Shutting down your own voice, burying your experience, leads, I suspect, to profound loneliness. Writing is not a universal path out of loneliness, of course, but for some it is. At least it helps. If you’re called to write, it’s essential to find others who’ll support and promote that desire. I find a sense of community in writing workshops that I’ve not experienced in other facets of my life—a trust, a slow and calm unfolding when so much around us is frantic. As I said earlier, to write about one’s own life is scary, and it’s risky, so try to find others who want to do the same, and who will hold you in a safe place while you give try. That is a gift.I definitely hit a wall with both of my books—that squirrel cage anxiety got swirling and twirling: I’m not smart enough to find my way through, I don’t have the chops for this ambitious project. My husband would advise me to, okay, give up, be done. Put the manuscript away where it wasn’t easily retrievable. Stop researching and reading. Stop writing notes. Then, down the road, he said, if the book called to me, beckoned me back so that I couldn’t ignore it, I would know for certain that I needed to forge on. That happened to me with both projects, and so no wonder they each took years and years (!) to write. We needed breaks from each other, so we could come back together with a common cause.
  
         
What is the advice you give to your students that you can pass on to our subscribers who are aspiring writers?

I’ll start with the most predictable advice, the same delivered by, I’m guessing, by about every working writer: read. Read every day and broadly and with keen curiosity about technique and style and craft. Make notes—even if those notes are simply single words that popped for you somehow. Let yourself swim in the music, the cadence of language.
Also, this is also a good time in the interview to return to my comment above about believing fiercely in one’s own work. I do advocate for that, fully. But that doesn’t mean to close the self off to constructive criticism. The truly confident writer is open to input, hungry for it. I’ve found that “constructive criticism” is best after the writer has put herself through several drafts—say, four or five—and has fundamentally grasped what the story is about. Sharing too soon is cause for frustration on both sides, writer and reader. It’s essential, I think, to find a trusted reader. I have long suggested to my students (and practiced this myself) that this trusted reader isn’t someone you live with or love, and in fact perhaps is someone who doesn’t know much about your personal life. For me, this is why writers’ groups run out of steam after a few years. You all get to know each other too well. A trusted reader is particularly deft at pointing out the places in the narrative that aren’t working, and that’s enough as far as input goes: I stumbled here. I was confused here. If a solution is suggested then writer must, I think, remember that someone else’s “fix” is not her fix. Only the writer can authentically address whatever bump or clunk has occurred in that spot.
I’ll end by saying that perhaps my best writerly companions have been the ones who simply hold me accountable. We’ll call each other on a Sunday, say, and will each plot out a loose plan for the week: “I’ll draft chapter three on Monday and Tuesday, and start in on chapter four on Friday.” Something like that. No exchange of pages, but instead just a stay on task friendly reminder. It’s worked beautifully for me.
Thank you so much, Debra, for sharing your inspiring and helpful path. http://www.debragwartney.com/