A Conversation with Hope Edelman

Over the years, I have developed a favorite tradition in the Unlocking Your Story workshops by inviting guest authors to visit the groups. I love cheerleading writers and their new books as they make their way into the world, and it's also a way to cultivate community, as I enjoy inviting back workshop alums for these events.

This fall we have two incredible women visiting the groups, both of whom have written books on the topic of grief and loss—a theme for the times, to be sure.

Hope Edelman, author eight nonfiction books including the #1 New York Times bestseller Motherless Daughters, is also a certified Martha Beck Life Coach specializing in grief, early loss, and creativity. She runs workshops and retreats to help motherless women revisit and reassess their early losses. Hope's new book, The Aftergrief, launches next week and explores what loss looks like 10, 20 or 30 years later.

Hope and I spoke at length about how to think about grief, especially against the backdrop of Covid-19. She shared her thoughts on how shifting our perspectives about our losses can help us grow, and how writing can be a great tool for this.

Barbara Abercrombie, also visiting this fall, is a longtime, beloved teacher at UCLA Extension Writers' Program, whose book The Language of Loss is coming out in November. Stay tuned for an interview with her next month!

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Photo: Hannah Kozak.

Hope Edelman is the author of eight nonfiction books, including the bestsellers Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers, and the memoir The Possibility of Everything. Her work has received a New York Times notable book of the year designation and a Pushcart Prize for creative nonfiction. She is also certified as a Martha Beck Certified Life Coach, and facilitates Motherless Daughters retreats and workshops all over the world. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Iowa City.

Her new book, The AfterGrief, explains that the death of a loved one isn’t something most of us get over, get past, put down, or move beyond. With guidance for reframing a story of loss, finding equilibrium within it, and even experiencing renewed growth and purpose in its wake, Hope demonstrates that though grief is a lifelong process, it doesn’t have to be a lifelong struggle.

KARIN: Congratulations, Hope! I know your new book took a while to birth.

HOPE: Thank you. It was four years in the making, which is a very long time, but it took me that long to do all the research I felt thoroughly conceptualized and articulated this way of thinking about grief. It just took that long to really know what I wanted to say. It takes as long as it takes.

KARIN: So, is the book much different than the way you originally pitched it?

HOPE: Yeah, very different.

KARIN: What did you know at the beginning, and what did you discover as you went along

HOPE: The book went through several iterations.

When I first started working on it, I was going to write kind of an all-purpose book about grief. I look back now at that proposal, and I was emphasizing post traumatic growth—looking at the positive outcomes of grief once we allow ourselves to grieve and the reasons why we may not have been able to grieve, especially if we were young when a loss occurred.

As I started doing interviews and talking with more people, I became so intrigued and dismayed by how many adults who were bereaved as children, who lost a parent or a sibling or a close friend, and didn't get support and all the ways that that was showing up in their lives later. So, the second iteration of the book was very much about adults bereaved as children.

Also, the 2016 election happened a few months after I sold my proposal. I started thinking about cultural responses to grief in a different way because half the country, as far as I could see, was in mourning, and portions of the other half were just saying, “You lost, get over it.” There was a sense of just get on with things, let go and move on, deal with it. That was so reminiscent of how many of these adults were told to cope with their grief when they were younger. It was an old school message, but it was pervasive in the culture for a couple of months. I mean, I saw it everywhere on social media and it really made me rethink what I wanted to write about and what was important to write about, and did the world really need another book about grief that talks about the long-term positive outcomes? There's so much already written about posttraumatic growth.

Then I started studying narrative therapy and doing more research and leading retreats. I saw that a lot of the long-term lingering effects were similar, regardless of what the age was at time of loss. As I got deeper into that research, I realized that what I was discovering was applicable to a much wider portion of the population, which was anyone who had a major loss in the past. What does that long arc of loss look like?

So, the third iteration of the book really became looking at the long arc of loss and what a major loss is bound to look like 5, 10, 20, 30 years later, and how it will recur. Grief will recur, but I didn't want to call it grief because it isn't the same thing that you feel in the first year or two after someone dies, when you're making all the adjustments and adaptations simultaneously with trying to figure out how to live in the world without this person and missing them and having the physical absence. What shows up 10, 20 years later, is really something very different, but I didn't know what to call it.

I was thinking what comes after grief? Then I realized, we're just going to call it The Aftergrief, because that is, I think, the phase of it. We've all been conditioned to think about five stages of grief. The bereavement world doesn't think in those terms anymore, but the general public very much does. Kübler-Ross's stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I think Kubler-Ross was a brilliant mind, but her work got co-opted in the direction that I don't think she ever intended for it to go in. She did a lot of good in the culture by getting people talking about death and loss, but when those five stages started being applied to bereavement, things really went awry culturally, I believe.

KARIN: Didn’t Kübler-Ross intend for her work to be applied to someone who is dying?

HOPE: Yeah, that's exactly right. Terminally ill patients. Those were the stages that she observed people going through as they came to terms with the imminent end of their own lives. Then it got applied to bereavement.

In my experience—and I've been doing this work now for more than 25 years primarily with women who've lost their mothers, but also with any adults who were bereaved as children, and also having the experience of having lost family members and close friends as an adult, and helping others navigate their losses as a grief coach—I believe that people really only care about two stages of grief: the stage where you feel really bad and the stage where you start feeling better.

I think of that as grief and the after grief. Grief is that stage where you feel really bad. You're dealing with sorrow and distress and despair and all of the physical symptoms of grief. Then the after grief is when you start feeling better and feeling that you've got the inner resolve and resilience and fortitude to move forward in your life. You'll miss that person and hopefully you'll find ways to carry them forward with you, but you can do it. For everyone, that transition is different. There's no morning where you wake up and say, “I'm in the after grief.” That doesn't happen.

KARIN: Is it common to transition back and forth between the two?

HOPE: Oh yeah, you can. In fact, there is a name for that. It's called the dual process model of bereavement. It was developed by two Dutch psychologists who observed in widows that it would move back and forth between focusing on the loss and focusing on the practicalities of life. They called it an oscillation.

Some people make that transition in a very discreet way. Some just feel it coming on gradually. Some can pinpoint the morning that they wake up and feel that this is the first morning I've woken up and feel a sense of hope about the future. For others it's a slower process. 

We phase into it a year after the loss, two years after the loss, six months after the loss. It depends on so many factors, including the relationship you had with that person, how dependent you were on your interactions with them, your temperament, your prior losses that you may or may not have had. And then I think it extends to the rest of your life. Because aspects of that loss may recur or bubble up for you. I think that the cultural message has been that if, 10 years after your mom or your dad or your sibling died, you reach a life transition and you powerfully miss them, that your grief was somehow incomplete. In fact, that was the belief in the psychoanalytic literature well into the '70s and '80s. I think the word that was used was unresolved or incomplete grief.

KARIN: Wow, that's amazing.

HOPE: Right. Whereas the number of people that I've encountered who say, “20 years after the loss, my first child was born and I found myself missing my mom or my dad all over again. Or 10 years after the loss, on my wedding day, I couldn't stop crying because I missed my sibling so much and wished that they were there.” I don't think that should be pathologized. I think it's actually a normative response. I don't like using the word normal because who's normal? What's normal, right? We're all so complex. But if I just look at it in terms of inductive reasoning, given how many people that have told me this story, I think it is on the scale of normative responses.

Now, if you're so crippled that you don't feel like you need to cancel your wedding because you can't show up, that's different.

KARIN: Right.

HOPE: That's an extreme response. But I have plenty of friends who say, “I had a big response as I approached and reached the age my parents were when they died.” That's a huge transition. I find that to be actually a really normative response, and so I'm looking to put this book out in the world so we start a conversation that validates and normalizes those responses.

KARIN: Is this relationship to grief unique to Western culture? Did you look at other cultures?

HOPE: I did. There's a whole chapter on that. It's that important, because grief is culturally relative. And this is something that we weren't really talking about much in the '90s when I first wrote Motherless Daughters. At that time, I was really focusing very much on, “Let’s look at all the common denominators because women feel so isolated; they want to know that others out there feel the same way. So, I'm going to look at the parts of this experience that transcends culture, race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic background.” But now there's a lot more appreciation for how all of those factors can determine a grief response.

I went deep into looking at how other cultures respond to grief and death because their belief systems tend to infuse death rituals and mourning practices, including, how long will you commemorate your dead? We look at Asian cultures that do ancestor worship or Latino cultures that come together every year for the Day of the Dead.

But yes, Western culture has done a particularly crappy job in helping us adjust to the loss of a loved one. It didn't used to be that way. What's remarkable, Karin, is that it's been just the past hundred years. One of the things that changed mourning practices in Western culture was the flu pandemic of 1918-19. And the fact that we are 100 years later experiencing something so similar is really serendipitous. I won't say coincidental, I think serendipitous.

KARIN: What happened 100 years ago?

HOPE: Three things happened in quick succession.

1914 to 1918 was World War I, which was the first technological warfare where lots of people died at once. For the first time, lots of people were dying far from home, so you couldn't bury your dead. They often had to be buried where they died.

So people didn't have graves to visit or funerals. That really was difficult because Victorian mourning practices tended to be elaborate, particularly in the UK and the Commonwealth, but also somewhat in the United States. We had very elaborately prescribed rituals for what to do after someone died and how long it lasts and mourning dress and how you decorated your house and there were social rules and what the women wore and for how long depended on who died. This all was also an effect of Queen Victoria, but mourning was a very social activity. 

And then in 1917, Sigmund Freud published the paper Mourning and Melancholia, and the psychoanalysts began thinking and researching grief as an individual internal process. We were also shifting from romanticism to modernism as a cultural movement and that was really important, too.

The third thing that happened was the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, right on the heels of World War I. So many people died between the war and the flu pandemic that the culture just couldn't keep up with those mourning rituals, because we were mourning two and three people at once. Sometimes a whole family would die from the pandemic and we couldn't gather for big funerals, and mourning periods would have overlapped, and people just started thinking of mourning as something now you do privately or alone, which I think really screwed us up because we're a tribal species. I don't think we were meant to have these intense, really painful emotions by ourselves and have to figure out how to get through them on our own and be told that if we didn't do it properly, that we were unresolved or incomplete. I mean, that really messed up the way we think about grief.

So now, 100 years later, we have not just the opportunity to hold onto what we have, which is minimal by comparison, but to improve upon it. I see some hopeful glimpses into that, that people aren't willing to just let go of funerals. That they're trying to create virtual memorials and the internet is a place where we can share our stories.

KARIN: I just recently attended an online memorial for a friend and was reminded of how important funerals are, even in this virtual form.

HOPE: Absolutely. Funerals, memorial services and particularly eulogies are some of the last social experiences that we have connected to losing someone where a community of mourners will come together and share their stories and comfort each other. Because think about it… after the funeral, or the wake if you're Catholic, or the Shiva if you're Jewish, what do we have? Then the families just have to do it themselves from that point forward. So if we lose that, then we're losing any kind of social interaction around our grief and any opportunity for culturally prescribed social support. It's critically important that we hold onto that somehow, and the internet, fortunately, has allowed us to do that.

KARIN: When you say, “I see hopeful glimpses?” is that what you're referring to?

HOPE: Yes. I'm part of a taskforce—a virtual funeral taskforce—which is made up of about 90 bereavement professionals. It's authors, activists and academics and people in the field who were meeting online through the first month of the COVID epidemic to share our different initiatives and try to cross pollinate and help each other, help the culture adapt to this new reality, be it temporary or parts of it permanent.

These virtual memorials allow people from out of state to attend. It used to be, if you couldn't get on an airplane on short notice, you couldn't take part in the service. But now people can and I think that's something we may not want to let go of. In the future, I hope we will see hybrids where we can gather socially again and people can come together and have the comfort of hugs and handshakes, but we can also livestream these events so that people from out of town who can't travel for physical or financial reasons can still be part of the day.

KARIN: Just to extend the COVID conversation, it is my understanding that the grief we're experiencing now is re-triggering old losses for many people.

HOPE: Yeah, that's exactly right.

I write about what I call new grief, old grief, and new old grief, and I'll just briefly explain what each of them is.

‘New grief’ is when you've just lost somebody and a lot of the response that you're having is related to that person's suffering and the loss of that relationship in the physical world—any sadness, anger, guilt, whatever emotions you're feeling around that loss. I call that new grief, the freshly acute phase. The shock, the numbness, the despair, the sleeplessness, all of that new grief.

‘Old grief’ is what I call a loss from the past that resurfaces in the present. That's what's getting re-triggered for a lot of people with COVID, and it's getting retriggered for all different reasons. It might be that you didn't get to say goodbye to a loved one who died in the past and now you're reading about all these families that can't be with their loved one when they die. It may be that you lost someone very suddenly and the fear of COVID coming on and taking a life very quickly is triggering some of those emotions.

Old grief may be triggered by a loss in the present, too. If you've lost someone freshly to COVID—or any other cause—and you're feeling new grief around that, it may re-trigger old grief from the past that you weren't able to process at the time because you either developmentally weren't mature enough or there was too much else going on or you didn't have support, didn't feel safe.

What I call ‘new old grief’ is when you experience your old loss in a new way, and that typically happens when you reach a milestone in your life that requires you to revisit that loss and see it differently—like a wedding or parenthood or divorce, for example. It also can be an age correspondence event where you turn the age someone was when they died or your child turns the age you were when somebody died. You're experiencing that old loss in a new way.

KARIN: Is that new way typically positive or could it go either way?

HOPE: It can go either way, but it typically has elements of both in my experience. There may be a renewed sadness; let's say for example, my mom was 42 when she died. So when I turned 42, I felt powerfully sad because I realized how young it was and how much she had missed out on. But I also felt this renewed gratitude for being here and being alive and getting to be 43 and 44 and 45. So you can have both of those experiences at once. They don't have to cancel each other out.

KARIN: Your book is described as showing us how shifting perspectives of grief can help us grow. How can we shift our perspective and can writing be a tool?

HOPE: Yeah, absolutely. I think of those shifts happening when we are willing to revisit and revise our stories. By revisit, I mean go back and look at the same set of facts. They probably don't look the same way they did when you experienced the loss, right?

I mean, I was 17 when my mom died. While I was writing this book, I unearthed a box of interviews and notes from Motherless Daughters, which I wrote in the early 1990s. In there I found a typed version of my story of my mother's death—five or six pages that I'd typed up when I was in my late 20s. I read this and I thought, “Wow, this is an artifact. This is an example of my story in motion because that's not the way I was telling the story at 17, and it's definitely not the way I'm telling the story now. This is a whole different version.”

So I could see the evolution of my relationship to the same set of facts, and that's what we're doing in the memoir workshop. We are encouraging people to go back. When you write the story of your life, you're revisiting the events and you're creating an artistic representation of them. But then your workshop cohorts are asking questions, and they're challenging you to really think about your interpretation of those events and articulate them in a way that offers something to your readers. So, I think of the memoir workshop as almost the best and purest example of revisiting and revising our stories. I think that's why we see such remarkable change in some of the students or some of the writers in the workshop because we're watching them develop new relationships with their stories, and that's how I think growth occurs.

I think what we're also seeing, and I was just thinking about this the other day, Karin, is that because of the cultural messages we have about grief and because there's such a cultural imperative to let go and move on and get over it, we're not always good at finding ways of maintaining relationships with our loved ones who died and finding ways for them to walk forward with us.

When we're writing a memoir about a loss, about someone we loved who has died, we are spending time with them again. If you're writing the book, you might be spending a couple of years with them again, and that often feels good to have them back, right? To have their presence surrounding us, which is why sometimes it's hard to finish those books. We have to be prepared that we're not letting go of them. I think there needs to be rituals for us, honestly, to let go of the shaping of that story and figure out how now we're going to carry these people forward differently.

You, like I do, I'm sure, have students who have been working on their books forever. Sometimes I wonder, is it because it feels so good to be in the presence of that person that they're writing about? How can we help them as instructors to find new and different ways to maintain that connection, but be able to bring the book to its conclusion and put it out into the world?

KARIN: Wow, I've never thought about that.

HOPE: No, me neither. That's the first time I've really articulated it that way.

KARIN: What about the students who are writing about loss and the painful parts?

HOPE: Well, that's hard, because it can reactivate trauma in their lives or in the classroom. Then we have to know when to gently encourage them to also have professional support while they're writing the book, because that's out of our wheelhouse and we shouldn't try to be their therapist in addition to their writing coach.

KARIN: Right.

HOPE: They may come with the impulse because they know that they need to start externalizing this. They can't keep it private and in silence anymore, but they may not be prepared for what starting to tell that story is going to involve. I mean, they might have flashbacks and recover memories that they haven't had before, and we want to make sure that they are emotionally protected and not in any danger, right?

Do you know the work of James Pennebaker?

KARIN: Yes, I have his books.

HOPE: Yeah, he's great. I figured you would.

Sometimes we have to assess, are you stable enough to tell this story now? I've actually had in the past a student or two where I've suggested that it might be really good for you to process this with a professional first, instead of trying to process it initially on the page. If you have extreme abuse in the past, for example, and memories are being recovered, I don't think it's advisable to try to heal yourself through just writing the story. I think you really need some professional assistance in order to cope with what might be coming up.

But what we do know, and from Pennebaker's work, is that expressive writing is the combination of writing about your thoughts and your feelings. If you're just venting your emotions on the page, it doesn't seem to have a beneficial effect. In fact, sometimes it makes you feel worse. If you're just writing at the surface, what you think about what happened and the episodic events, it's not really that beneficial either.

But it's that marriage of narration and reflection that makes a memoir really work, that also helps the writer heal. So, if we're seeing someone just venting their emotions on the page, we can guide them toward putting more of the episodic narrative through line in there so that they can work with both, and learn how to interpolate one with the other.

If we see somebody just writing the episodic version of events, which I find is more common in my workshop, the difficult first draft—this happened, that happened, this happened, that happened—then you start asking them questions about, “well, how were you feeling when this happened? What do you think about this?” Get them to integrate their thoughts and their feelings. Then I think we're really helping them heal in a way that writing becomes the catalyst, maybe not the end product.

KARIN: Thank you so much, Hope! This has been such a fascinating and enlightening conversation.

To get a sneak peek of The AfterGrief, to be released in October 2020, click here!




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To learn more about Hope Edelman, visit her site.

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A Conversation with Caroline Leavitt

I'm thrilled to introduce you to Caroline Leavitt, a bestselling novelist whose 12th book With Or Without You is coming out through Algonquin in August. Caroline and I had a chance to talk about everything from Story Structure (which she teaches at Stanford and UCLA), to how she comes up with her story ideas, to how to stay the course as a career writer.

Caroline will be visiting the Unlocking Your Story summer workshop next week, zooming in from Hoboken, New Jersey!

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CAROLINE LEAVITT is the award-winning author of twelve novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Pictures of Youand Is This Tomorrow. Her essays and stories have been included in New York magazine, Psychology Today, More, Parenting, Redbook, and Salon. She is a book critic for People, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and she teaches writing online at Stanford and UCLA.

Her forthcoming novel, With Or Without You(Algonquin, August 2020), is a contemporary story of what happens to relationships as the people in them change, whether slowly or in one cataclysmic swoop.

“What if Snow White woke up and decided she didn’t much like Prince Charming? Something like that happens in Leavitt's latest novel... One character’s coma is only the first surprise in this satisfying story of middle-aged love.”STARRED Kirkus Review.

Also, Caroline's novel Pictures of You is being re-issued for its tenth anniversary edition. The story features two women running away from their marriages who collide on a foggy highway, killing one of them. The survivor, Isabelle, is left to pick up the pieces, not only of her own life, but of the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman, April, has left behind. Together, they try to solve the mystery of where April was running to, and why.

KARIN GUTMAN: What first strikes me is how prolific you are. Would you describe yourself this way?

CAROLINE LEAVITT: It's so funny to hear that because everybody says that I'm always working. I was brought up in a household where I was told I was lazy all the time. So I always think that I'm not working hard enough and I'm not doing enough and I need to do more and there's not enough time. So I guess the answer is, yes, I am prolific but, no, I don't think of myself as prolific.

KARIN: Can you tell us the story behind publishing your first novel Meeting Rozzie Halfway?

CAROLINE: Sure, absolutely. Listen, I had a really difficult childhood. I was asthmatic and bullied and I spent a lot of time in the library reading and writing stories and I always wanted to be a writer. I was always told, “No, that's really not a profession.” I had very traditional parents. “You can be a school teacher or you can be a nurse and, best of all, you can be a wife and mother.” I didn't listen and kept writing and writing and writing, and when I got out of college, I started sending out short stories and they always came back, rejection, rejection, rejection.

And then in my early 20s, I entered this contest called A Young Writers contest and the prize was that they would fly you to New York and you would get your piece published in Redbook Magazine. I figured, “Oh, I don't have a chance. I don't think I write Redbook stories,” which at the time was very traditional. So I sent in a story about two sisters growing up in Boston, one was mentally ill, and I won the first prize. I was so surprised. Not only did I win, but all of a sudden the story created all this buzz and within weeks I had an agent, and then I had an editor who wanted the story to be a novel and that's what started my publishing career.

I had never thought it was going to happen so soon, I just thought I was going to be publishing short stories for a while and paying my dues. But it didn't make my career run smoothly, which is one thing that I think is important for all writers to know, that a writing career is not up, up, up. It's always up and down and up and down. I had a big success with my first book. My second book was a lesser success, and then books three to eight just didn't sell. It got to the point where nobody knew who I was and I felt like a failure and my ninth book on submission was rejected as “books to be rejected.” They just didn't want it.

I thought that, well, after nine books if nobody who knows who you are, and you haven't built an audience, then your career is over. So, as I was trying to think of what to do, a friend of mine had an editor at Algonquin who was looking for material and she sent the book to them and they bought it. They turned it into a New York Times Bestseller its second week out and got it in six printings. So, I've learned that a writing career can go up and down all the time and you just have to persist and keep writing and remember that it's the writing that's important, not the publication.

KARIN: Was that Pictures of You?

CAROLINE: Pictures of You was the one that gave me my career.

KARIN: When you say that it “gave you your career,” what do you mean?

CAROLINE: To me it meant that I could continue writing and I would have readers, because when it became the Bestseller, I had zillions of readers and people reaching out to me and that was really gratifying that people were reading my work and responding to it. I knew that it didn't necessarily mean that the next book would do the same level or that they could not vanish just like my second novel did, but it gave me an understanding that what was important was telling the truth on the page and not worrying so much about what else was going on. Now I'm established—people know who I am—but I can still fail and to me that's okay, because I also know I can still succeed. I'm thinking about the business very differently now than I did when I started out.

KARIN: Do you think that Pictures of You is better than the other novels you’d written?

CAROLINE: That's a great question, and it's one that I really thought about. No, it's not that Pictures of You was suddenly different from every other book I had ever done, and I wouldn't necessarily say that Pictures of You was better than any of the books that I wrote before that. I think it was the publisher; I watched what Algonquin did and they do things that no other publisher has done before. I saw them physically reach out to people who were book reviewers and say, “Listen, you have to read this book,” and the person would say, “Yeah,” and they'd say, “No, no, no, listen, really, you really have to read this book.”

They really put their careers on the line for this particular book; whereas before, I never even had a publicist assigned to me for some of my books. So, I would say it was definitely the publishing company.

KARIN: Do you now feel partial to Algonquin?

CAROLINE: Oh, yeah. Algonquin is my home now. I already sold my fifth book with them, and I don't want to go any place else, because they've been fabulous to me and everybody knows everybody. I can call up the publisher, the head of the whole thing and say, “Let's have lunch,” and we'll go have lunch. All the editors know each other and they all know the authors and all the authors know each other, so it's really more of a family feeling.

I was at Grand Central and Saint Martin's, and it was a very different experience. I couldn't ask questions and I was not part of any of the marketing. There was no marketing. Also editorial wasn't as intense as it is with Algonquin where my editor and I slave over every page. There's a lot of collaboration going on and a lot of conversation going on and trust and it just feels like they truly care about the work that the writers are doing. To me, that makes so much difference.

KARIN: Looking back, would you have done anything differently during that period after your first book came out?

CAROLINE: Well, let's see, it was a period of 16 years of trying to make it and slogging around.

I didn't know anything. I was a different person than I am now. I was painfully shy. I was in a very unhappy first marriage. I would never think of asking anybody for help because I was afraid. If I was back in that period, I would reach out more to people. First of all, I had a different agent during those years, so I probably would have gotten a different agent sooner. I stayed with my first agent because I was afraid that I wouldn't get any other agent who would take me. So, I definitely would have been bolder about it.

KARIN: It’s hard to imagine you as shy, because I feel like you've such a generous, open-hearted spirit.

CAROLINE: Well, I had to learn to be that way. A lot of it was Algonquin, too, because I had all these books and nobody had ever sent me out on a tour and Algonquin did, and all of a sudden, I was in front of 200 to 900 people and I had to be personable. A friend of mine was a media coach and I said, “How do I do this? I'm so afraid,” and she worked with me and then I discovered that the more personable I got and the more relaxed I was, the better they liked me. They would laugh and afterwards people would come up and say, “I'm so glad you told that story about being bullied as a little girl because that happened to me, too, and now I feel less alone.”

I began to realize, “Oh, this is what it's about.” It's not about standing up there and saying, “This is what my book is and you should buy it.” It's more about saying, “I'm a human being, like you're a human being and this is what I've gone through, and I tried to put it into art by making this novel and I hope it's something you'll respond to.” And the more I did it, the easier it became and I turned myself into a non-shy person, which is kind of remarkable.

KARIN: That is amazing.

So Pictures of You was your first experience with Algonquin?

CAROLINE: Yes. I had heard of them, of course, but at that time, I just thought, “Well, they're a small prestigious literary publisher, they'd never want me,” and to my surprise, they did. I learned not to depend on anybody else to give me my self-worth as a writer. I always tell writers you have to find it in yourself. You have to really dig deep and find it in yourself and then other people will respond to that.

KARIN: And now you’ve got a new book coming out with them…

CAROLINE: Yeah, With or Without You, it's coming in August, and then I sold another one called Days of Wonder, which I have to write. They do this wonderful thing where you can send them the first 70 pages and if they like it, then they'll buy it. And then you have a year to write the book, so that's what I'm doing now.

KARIN: So, you sent the 70 pages and they liked it?

CAROLINE: Thank goodness, but that doesn't mean it's getting easier to write the rest, especially now during a pandemic. It's really hard.

KARIN: You're finding it harder to write?

CAROLINE: Yes, it's much, much harder to write because everything feels so surreal. Nobody's on the street. I usually would go out and see my friends; my husband and I would always go out into the city and do things. There's a kind of stasis feeling and every once in a while, I realize again what's going on in the world is so terrifying on so many counts, that I can't work, because I keep thinking, “What can I possibly write that's going to help anybody or help me?” Most of my writer friends say, “Well, the business of writing is to create empathy and that's something that people need and that they could use more of, so you should just put your head down and try to do your work,” but it's difficult. It's a difficult time now for everyone.

KARIN: Can you share what the new book is about?

CAROLINE: Yeah, I can actually. It's about this young woman in her 20s whose early release from prison for an attempted murder that she and boyfriend may or may not have done when they were 15 years old. Because her boyfriend was very wealthy and came from a prestigious family, he did not get sent to prison, but she did. So the book is about her struggling to rebuild her life, to try to find this guy, and find out what really happened that night, because she doesn't remember it. Also when she was sent to prison, she was pregnant with their child and the child was given away, so she's looking for that child also. That's all I know about it. I'm going to find out the rest as I write about it.

KARIN: How do your ideas come to be… how do you find your story? I know you often use your personal life experiences as springboards for your novels.

CAROLINE: Yes, usually it's about something that's been haunting me for a long time and I really don't know the answer to some question about it. For me a lot of it had to do with my family. I have an adored older sister and we were really close for 17 years of our life, and then her personality changed and she's become estranged from me, which is really painful. I've been writing about it and writing about it and I realized that the question for me was, “What did I do and how do I get to be forgiven?” because she's not giving me the answer. She's just telling me she doesn't want to speak to me.

I thought, “You know, I should write something about this,” and then I happened to be talking to a good friend of mine and she was telling me about this wonderful woman who has all these friends and everybody loves her. So, I met this woman and I did love her and I said, “Oh, she's such a great person.” That was when my friend told me, “You know, I didn't tell you this because I didn't want you to have any pre-judgment, but she went to prison when she was 15 for a murder she committed, and she spent her whole life trying to become a good person because of it and she succeeded.”

Those two ideas struck with me and I thought, “Oh, now I know what the novel is about. It's about this constant yearning feeling of when do I get to be forgiven, what do I have to do, mixed with that feeling of what did I do?” To me, being 15 is so interesting, because most of the time kids that age are runaway cars. Your emotions are all over the place. You're not thinking things out. I guess I'm writing it to find out how this woman is going to be forgiven—and how is she going to end up feeling that yes, she now deserves a place in the world and should she have been imprisoned at all. So that's how it all came about.

KARIN: Will you do research?

CAROLINE: I have actually. I have a friend who runs a prison program for women in Massachusetts where as part of their parole they have to read books and have discussions, and she asked if I would like to come to one of their meetings. I absolutely wanted to go. There were about 20 women there and they were not very friendly at first. They were very suspicious and they wanted to know why I was there and what I was doing and I was really honest with them. The interesting thing is they started to warm up when I told them that I had never learned how to drive a car and I told them, “I'm nervous being here with you, because I want to do you justice.”

And then they started opening up. I asked if I could interview them about their experiences in prison and one woman burst into tears and said, “I have to think about it.” Two other women said, “Yes, you can talk to me.” I had long conversations with them. What was so interesting to me was that some of them formed their first real steady friendships in prison. They felt they were protecting each other and there was a kind of community and I liked that. So there were a lot of those details that I used.

KARIN: What is your writing practice like?

CAROLINE:  Well, I have a deadline, which is really good, because it forces me to write. And also for my mental health, it's important for me to write.

For the next book I have the 70 pages I wrote a really detailed 30-page synopsis of what I thought might happen, which changes as I write. Every day I sit down at the desk around nine or ten and circle one part of the synopsis that I'm going to work on, just for the day. Maybe it's one or two scenes and that way it makes it seem more manageable to me. I don't feel so overwhelmed. I feel like, “Okay, I'm just going to do this part,” and it doesn't have to be chronological. Usually I can work for four hours and then I'm exhausted and I can't do it anymore. It's like the spark isn't there anymore.

Every day I try to do a little bit, even a paragraph and I used to be very consistent about this. Now with the pandemic, I'm not so consistent. Some days I wake up and I just feel depleted. I can't do it, and so I'll spend the day watching movies on my computer or I'll just take a walk with my husband or I'll read, or I'll teach my classes and do whatever else I need to do with the writers that I work with. It’s definitely not as consistent but I'm really trying. I'm struggling to get back to that because I need to, both because I have a deadline and because I know it feeds me. It's going to make me feel better.

KARIN: Do you adjust the synopsis as you’re writing?

CAROLINE: Yes, what happens with the synopsis is I'll write it out so I can convince myself I know how to tell a story—that I have beginning, a middle and a satisfying end—and then as I'm writing, of course, I'm making new discoveries so I have to throw things out and then I have to add things and everything changes. I re-jigger the synopsis all the time. I will go back and say, “No, now this particular thing can't happen. It doesn't make sense.” So, I'm going to have this other thing happen and it will usually change anywhere from 10 to 20 times as I'm working on the book.

KARIN: Interesting.

You teach story structure, right?

CAROLINE: I do. I teach story structure online, at both Stanford and UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. I have anywhere from 12 to 20 students in each class and it's 10 weeks and it's really intensive and most of it is online but every week we have a Zoom class so we can all see each other and talk and know each other. It's really, really fun.

KARIN: How do you go about teaching structure?

CAROLINE: I didn't learn about it myself until about eight years ago when one of my students actually said, “Do you know about John Truby's story structure?” At that time, I was the kind of person who felt, “No, I believe in creativity and the muse and I don't believe in any kind of formulas.” And she said, “This isn't a formula. Just listen to this.” She gave me these tapes and I listened and I was amazed. I was amazed because he doesn't give you a formula as much as he gives you an idea of the bones that every story should have.

Like every story should have a character who desperately wants something and out of that want comes action. So that's always a first step that I tell my students. You have to have a character who wants something and you have to know that there are stakes to it—like if he doesn't get this, what is going to happen that he won't like? And what does he have to give up to get what he wants? I also tell them that you can't always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes you get what you need.

I tell people that at the end, in terms of structure, you want the character ideally to have some kind of self-revelation where they realize, “Ah, I've spent my whole life trying to be rich and have a trophy partner and I struggled and I got those things, and then I realized, I'm not happy and now I realize that what I really need to do is quit that stupid job and go to the woods and be a gardener,” and then they do. It's that kind of change and realization that makes for a satisfying story.

So I give them beats of things that they should have, and every week we split it up and we'll talk about it. Like what's the moral choice? How could we make it deeper? What does a character want? Does it have big enough stakes and if not, how can we make it bigger? There's all kinds of toolbox stuff and I tell the writers, “Look, this is just a toolbox, and you can pick and choose the tools you want and you may find that you are the kind of writer who can't use any of these tools. That you just like riding on the seat of your pants and if that's you, that's fabulous, that's fine.”

KARIN: Everything you’re saying really resonates with me.

CAROLINE: Oh, I'm so glad.

KARIN: So, you give John Truby a lot of credit…

CAROLINE: Yeah, he changed my writing life. I don't agree with everything that he says, but I think he's on the money about the seven beats that you need.

KARIN: Did his approach to structure really change how you write?

CAROLINE: Yup. I used to write novels that would come out to be 800 pages, and I'd turn them into my agent and she'd say, “I can't send this out." She'd read it and say, "Let's try to figure out what the real story is and pare it down.” We'd do it that way.

There was much more hysteria in the process for me, because I never really knew what I was doing and I would go off on all these tangents and nothing would happen and characters wouldn't change. As soon as I learned story structure, it became so much easier because then I figured, “Oh, of course, this character has to do this and this should happen and we can go deeper here.” I just feel more in control. I tell my students, “It's like if you can think of a human being, every person on the planet looks different, feels different, acts differently, but we all have basically the same skeleton and that holds us up.”

Story structure is like your skeleton. Get the skeleton down and then you can add whatever kind of flesh and clothing and personality that you want, but it's the skeleton that's so important.

KARIN: Yes, I love how you talk about it.

You used the term “moral choice.” I've never heard of that. What does it mean?

CAROLINE: Oh, this is great, you'll love this. A moral choice is not about morality as much as what kind of person you are. It's putting your character between two terrible choices and what the character does tells you what kind of person he is—like say there's a guy, and his wife is dying of this terrible rare disease. There is a cure, and it's owned by one pharmacist. So the guy goes to the pharmacist and says, “I really need to buy this medicine,” and the pharmacist says, “Well, the medicine is going to cost $10,000,” and the guy says, “I don't have the money, please give it to me. It's the only thing that'll save her.” And the pharmacist says, “No, I'm sorry, it's $10,000.”

So the moral choice is… the guy can either say, “Well, I have to find another way, because I'm not going to get this drug from this pharmacist. He won't let me and the stakes are really high, and my wife might die.” Or he can say to the pharmacist, “You are inhumane,” and kill the pharmacist and steal the drug and save his wife. But in saving his wife, then he's going to jail, because he killed the pharmacist. So, when you have those two highly dramatic things, you put people reading in a position saying, “Oh, my God, what would I do?”

I always tell them about Jaws. You have the Sheriff. Is he going to close the beach and protect all the people and the town will ruin and he'll lose his job? Or is he going to keep the beach open and he'll keep his job and hope for the best? But meanwhile people could be eaten by the shark. The more of those kinds of choices you can give your character, the better.

KARIN: Meanwhile, tell us about your new book!

CAROLINE: With or Without You.

KARIN: I was fascinated by your recent essay in the Daily Beast that describes how you wrote TWO novels related to your real-life experience of being in a coma.

CAROLINE: Right, I got critically ill after the birth of my son with a mystery illness, so I was put into a medical coma for two weeks and I was sick for a year. The problem was that they gave me memory blockers so I wouldn't remember the pain and procedures, so my mind didn't remember any of this but my body did and I had all these post-traumatic triggers. So I was talking to a friend of mine who was a psychiatrist and he said, “You know, when you hypnotize a person and you tell them that they're burning, their skin can flame up. They can get blisters. The brain doesn't know the difference.” And he said, “You do that in your writings… why don't you just write about it and you'll heal yourself that way.”

So I wrote this book right after my coma that was called Coming Back to Me, which was about a woman like me who had been in a coma after she had a baby and she didn't remember anything. I thought it was going to make me lose these triggers and it didn't. I still kept having them. I was afraid to go to sleep and certain smells and certain colors would really upset me and none of the people who had been around me when I was in a coma wanted to talk about it, because it had been so traumatizing for them, too. So, I began to think, “Well, what if I wrote a book about a woman whose experience was different from mine? What if I wrote about a woman who remembered everything? Maybe then I could heal.”

So I created the character of Stella, who is aware of everything in her coma and outside of her coma. In fact, I made her better when she got out of her coma because she has a different personality, which does happen. She also has this extraordinarily miraculous new talent where she can paint really well and she can paint the inner lives of her subject. I did a lot of research and actually that's something that does happen in coma. People do awake with these astonishing new abilities.

KARIN: Wow.

CAROLINE: Suddenly they can speak a foreign language or suddenly they can be a virtuoso on the violin. I found that so fascinating and I wanted to write about that. So, the book is a lot about how we can re-make ourselves and what this does to the people who love us when we change, and what it does to our feelings towards the people we love.

KARIN: Have you noticed any shifts as a result of writing this second novel?

CAROLINE: Yeah, I have. I'm not bothered by colors or sounds or smells anymore. I still get unnerved when it's time to go to sleep, but I definitely feel free of the whole issue of coma. I think I will never have to write about it again, which is a nice thing to realize.

KARIN: Are there any promotional book events coming up that we can attend?

CAROLINE: Well, you can go to my website, www.carolineleavitt.com. There's a list of 30 different virtual events—some of them are with wonderful other authors that I'll be in conversation with. I know money is tight in the pandemic, but just calling your local library and asking them to order the book is a very big deal.

KARIN: Thank you, I will do that!

Caroline Leavitt is hosting the weekly Reedsy Prompts contest on July 24th! Each Friday, Reedsy posts five new writing prompts, and then challenges writers to submit a short story inspired by one of those prompts. A weekly winner receives $50 and is featured on the Reedsy site.

Caroline will be doing a “Reversals” theme. Here's a sneak preview of one of her writing prompts: “Every year one person is chosen to go to the moon, and this year, though you hid in terror, it is your turn to enter the rocket.”

To learn more about Caroline Leavitt, visit her website.

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A Conversation with Lisa Dale Norton

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.

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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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