I have the great pleasure of introducing you to someone whom I've long admired. Lisa Dale Norton is an author and memoir coach who wrote the fantastic guide to writing memoir, Shimmering Images—a book I highly recommend to anyone embarking on this journey of writing personal stories.
She talks about the most important requirement for a memoir to be publishable, and also shares her heartening take on what is being born in this unusual time we're experiencing. She calls it “an opening” available to all of us to step through, provided that we recognize the opportunity.
There is something about what she says that deeply resonates based on what I'm feeling personally and noticing around me. What are you noticing? If you have a moment, I'd love to hear from you.
Lisa Dale Norton is an author, developmental book editor, and a dynamic public speaker. She is passionate about layered writing structures in narrative nonfiction that reflect the complexity of life experience, and about the transformative power of writing a memoir.
For many years she taught in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. Currently, Lisa works privately as a developmental editor with writers completing book manuscripts. She earned degrees from Reed College and the University of Iowa, and lives in Santa Fe.
She is the author of Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir (Griffin/St. Martin’s Press), America’s go-to guide for writing memoir, and Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills (Picador USA/St. Martin’s Press), a book of literary nonfiction—part memoir, part natural history writing—that won comparisons to the work of Annie Dillard. Her new book of literary nonfiction has just been completed.
KARIN GUTMAN: Where did your journey begin as a writer?
LISA DALE NORTON: I've always been a writer of some sort. When I was very little, I loved writing letters. I'm not sure where that came from, but there was this natural interest in expressing myself on the page. I wrote to everybody and anybody and my mother, I loved it so much. She even helped me find pen pals all over the place whom I would write these letters to.
So early on, I loved the written word. I remember one other story that I've never forgotten. I was in grade school, and we were writing book reports. For some reason I chose a very mundane semi-adult book. I have no idea why I chose that book. But I remember while writing the report for school, I had an absolute, clear image inside me of exactly where I was headed with what I was going to say and the point I was going to make.
I never forgot it, because I thought it was kind of cool and weird. And I think that those kinds of little experiences led me forward, always writing. It’s been what I've always done. Eventually there developed, as with most young writers, the obsession and deep desire to write a book and to be published.
We all know that as writers there becomes this moment where you really are committed to this life; for me, it was the only thing that I could see in front of me. I had to have it, it was an obsession. And so, I went off on that journey and it was a long journey, but I actually got there.
KARIN: When you eventually focused your attention on writing a book, did you know what story you wanted to tell?
LISA: I knew there were things that I cared about, and I had written vast quantities of that wandering journal-esque. I suppose in the midst of that, I was defining that which resonated on the deepest level for me. But no, I did not set out to say, "Hmm, I'm going to write a mystery novel or..." No, it wasn't like that. It was very organic. I came to it slowly. I knew what bothered me, so I knew what the problem was, although I couldn't have spoken of it that way then. And I knew what I loved and I just followed that.
KARIN: Was it personal narrative?
LISA: The first book I published was, yes.
KARIN: Was it about a certain period of your life?
LISA: It was, but it was about much more than that. This turned out to be a story set over a certain set of years and based in the Sandhills region of Nebraska—and my relationship with that place, a little cabin that's there and the family history. But it was really in large part about environmental issues of that region, and that involved not only water, but looking at soils and talking to ranchers. So it was deeply journalistic. I traveled and interviewed for many, many months. It was a weaving together of what grew to be my adult concerns about the landscape and my childhood concerns about this story that was in my heart.
I use the word heart. The Ogallala Aquifer is this huge aquifer that fills the porous soils beneath the sands of the Sandhills and is the throbbing heart of that whole region. It's drying up. That was the whole thrust of the environmental concern.
KARIN: How did you end up publishing it?
LISA: I wrote and wrote and wrote and had developed a certain set of chapters that seemed to be getting at something. I was doing the best I could at the time, but I was passionate and young. I also remember that summer getting ready and saying to myself in my young 20-something mode, “I'm going to make something happen.”
I went to a conference at which I was speaking and teaching. At that conference, I met an agent and she was interested, and having zip knowledge about how it all worked, I was thrilled and I gave her my chapters. Before the conference was over, she said, “I'd like to represent you.” This is the little magic story from the sky.
Over the course of months, she helped me craft these chapters and helped me put together a package, which included what I realize now is a cover letter. She went out to 50 agents and 50 editors. No one took it. And so, she came back to me with the feedback she was getting, and we looked at the feedback together. It's hard discerning what they're really saying, because everyone's very careful, but we did decide that they were saying something vaguely similar.
And so, I rewrote the entire book based on what I thought they might be saying to me. And when that product was ready, I sent it back to the agent and she went out again. I did then get two responses, one from Knopf and one from Picador St. Martin's. There was a little bit of a battle, it was all very exciting. And I went with Picador.
KARIN: Nice. Do you remember what you changed when you rewrote it?
LISA: Gosh, it's been so long. I think it was something like ‘more of me’ in it.
KARIN: You eventually became a teacher of writing and a memoir coach. Did you study writing or did teaching simply emerge from your own background as a writer?
LISA: My second degree was in journalism. So that was a form of writing. When I went to the University of Iowa to study journalism, there was no nonfiction program in the writer's workshop. They didn't exist. At that time, there were no nonfiction programs in America. It was a club. There was fiction and poetry.
KARIN: What year was this?
LISA: I was at Iowa in the eighties. If you wanted to study nonfiction writing, you basically had two tracks. You could get a degree in English and focus on the essay. But you couldn't major in that. And then, in the journalism program, there were two people who were innovative and open, and one of them was a writer and she was writing what we would have called narrative nonfiction. That was her field. I gravitated to her. Patricia Westfall was her name. She was willing to be inventive with me. So along with her and John Bennett, another member of the journalism program, I basically invented a creative thesis in the journalism program to write narrative nonfiction.
I wrote my thesis as a narrative nonfiction product. It was not what the program normally did, but I realize now I was really on the beginning of a wave of people who wanted to study that, but there was no path to study that—no official path. So I had studied writing, but in a kind of a nontraditional way.
KARIN: Were you surprised when personal narrative took hold?
LISA: No. I saw it coming.
KARIN: Do you have a sense of why memoir has emerged in the way it has?
LISA: Well, I can give you my experience of that history.
I was interested in it already, but I was approaching it with this journalistic backbone, or reportage. You had the essay voice going on, but you also had reportage, which I think is important. I think it's important also in memoir today, having something more to say than your own personal thing. So I had been reading a lot of essays and environmental essays because I was crazy about the natural world.
Then along came Terry Tempest Williams's book, Refuge. Terry was huge. She was doing exactly what I was already leaning toward. She wrote this very deeply personal story about her mother dying from cancer, which was very related to the land because she grew up in Utah which had been influenced by the nuclear bombs that were being tested. They were downwind and she did die. The book was all about the environment and her mother.
This happened at about exactly the same time I was moving in my own circle of expression. She deeply influenced an entire generation of women writing about a personal experience and that melding with the natural world. So there was a whole movement that happened in the early nineties of women writing about the land, and inside that were these deeply personal, feminine stories.
What then happened was those deeply feminine, personal stories began breaking away from the relationship with natural history issues and they became their own thing.
Then along came Mary Karr and she wrote The Liars Club. I remember when I read about that book and that it was coming out, I said, "That's going to be a huge hit." And indeed, it was. That then signaled women speaking and unhinged from the natural world and in some ways unhinged from really anything else, but the personal story itself. That was the beginning of where the personal story felt no need to attach itself to reportage of any other topic, and the subject itself—me, my life—became the whole thing. If you're a stylist like Mary Karr, you can get away with that. If you're not, here we are today.
KARIN: What do you mean, “If you're not, here we are today”?
LISA: What that means to me is, you have lots and lots of women writing deeply personal intimate stories about their lives, but those stories aren't necessarily attached to any other topic that can add depth for publishing and a good portion of them are not a stylist like Mary Karr. And you have a saturated memoir market, which when Mary Karr came on the scene, you did not have.
KARIN: How do you talk about publishing with a writer?
LISA: Well, I always do clarify because sometimes clients do not have that as their first goal, but I would say 95 to 99% of people say I want to get this published. Or how do I get this published? They may not have actually even written it. So that looms as this myth about what it means and will mean to be a published writer. So right away, I determine whether the writer is interested in that.
Then I have a general conversation about publishing and the various forms available for one to pursue publishing. Then I talk about the kinds of writerly necessities of a story to find a home in the big publishers. And then I let all that rest. And then we try to turn our attention back to producing the best product that that particular writer can produce without ghostwriting.
KARIN: What do you emphasize for a memoir to be publishable?
LISA: I have come to the conclusion that one of the smartest things any memoirist can do is to broaden their story so that it is about more than just their own personal experience. I'm going to give you a simple example. You're writing about a loved one dying with cancer, and half of the story is about cancer or some research or something about science. It's not just about the traumatic journey that the narrator has gone on. It is in part about that, but it's also about this other topic. And when I find memoirists who are willing and able—because it's a different skill when they are willing and able to step up to that and actually produce market-worthy material—they have a hell of a lot better chance of making it in the door.
So that's number one on the list. I would say that 90% or more of people don't want to do that. Beyond that, I basically say, “Your writing has to be stellar, knock my socks off. Wow me,” and 90% of people can't do that. I know I'm sounding horribly jaded and there's nothing wrong with the writing that they are doing, but to get into this elite club, there are certain things that have to be done to play that game.
KARIN: What do you think about the self-publishing and hybrid publishing options that are emerging?
LISA: I think it's great and horrible. It depends on each particular case. It has certainly opened up publishing and that's wonderful. It has also segregated publishing and that's not so wonderful. It has also contributed to the whole redefinition of publishing, at least in our country. And that's sad.
KARIN: Sad because...?
LISA: I used to think of publishing as this well-intentioned marketplace of broad ideas in which many publishers really were committed—deeply, ethically and morally committed—to the dissemination of differing ideas and voices. That is not where we're at right now. I mean, the most recent upsets all rising out of George Floyd and his death point directly at the ongoing and even more deeply embedded inequities in opportunities for publishing and for voices. It's not what it was. One could argue, “Oh, in the good old days, it was just a bunch of old white guys who got published.” Maybe that's a good argument, but still it has narrowed the field and many of those voices are then sent off into the hinterlands of self-publishing, which has a long and potholed-filled journey ahead of it.
KARIN: What has happened?
LISA: Once upon a time, it didn't matter if a publishing house made money, and hence they were more free to publish books they felt were good or important, but which they knew they might lose money on. That was part of what publishing did.
And now it is not like that, or a whole heck of a lot less like that. Because the publishing houses—at least all the imprints at the big 5 in New York—are owned by conglomerates, the bottom line is just exactly what it is for any other arm of a business: It must turn a profit.
When you apply that capitalistic requirement to art, well, you have the situation we now have today, which is: Many books that once upon a time might have made it into a publishing house, will not today, and not because of their merit or worth for society, but rather simply because they will not turn a profit.
KARIN: Now during this time of Covid and George Floyd, I think we’re all experiencing a kind of disorientation. But at the same time, I’m noticing that people are moved to write the stories they haven’t yet voiced. What are you noticing?
LISA: I do think there is a great deal of disorientation that I am picking up on personally and also among colleagues and clients. And yet there's this other thing happening, which I find it very heartening and exciting. It is a place where I have always believed personally that openings come. And one's ability to take advantage of those openings in one's life depends on being aware. Do you see them? Do you recognize them as openings? Are you open to the openings? If we are closed off and tight and inflexible and frightened, we often don't see those openings and they pass us by. The universe delivers them and they dissolve into space-time if we don't grab them.
There's some kind of opening—a black hole, a space-time opening in the universe—and large quantities of people are seeing it. Maybe they're just feeling it; maybe no one can name it. There's nothing we can all call it. I'm calling it an opening. There is this opening for people to step through and what is on the other side we don't know, but what people are coming to the opening with is art and stories and ideas. They're stepping through this opening. They're walking into the unknown, and out of that will come new voices and new stories and new art forms and things we can't even imagine.
It's all very unknown and wonderful and scary. Now there's a lot of people still saying, "I don't know what to do!" And that's okay. That's where they are. But what I'm seeing are all these other people taking the door, walking through the opening and they're making art and they're writing stories and they're doing TED talks or talking to people in their community, on the street corner. They're voicing their stories. And I think there's going to be an incredible blossoming, the likes of which we cannot yet get our hands on.
KARIN: That is so heartening and exciting.
To learn more about Lisa Dale Norton, visit her website.
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