A Conversation with Lisa Erspamer

Lisa Erspamer is a creative force, expert at identifying and transforming great stories into moving visual spectacle. She is a three time Emmy-nominated producer, New York Times best-selling author and Co-Founder of Happy Street Productions, a television, film, digital production and entertainment consulting company focused on creating emotionally connective scripted and non-scripted content. She’s known for her influential 19-year collaboration with Harpo Productions, as Chief Creative Officer and Executive Vice President of Programming and Development for The Oprah Winfrey Network, and Co-Executive Producer of the Oprah Winfrey show, where she produced some of the show’s most memorable episodes, including the biggest flash mob in history, Oprah’s After Oscar Specials and Whitney Houston’s final interview.

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Lisa is the creator of the A Letter To My ... book series. In A Letter To My Mom, the third installment (following A Letter To My Dog and A Letter To My Cat), contributors share letters of love, gratitude, connection and even conflict to the women whom they call mom.

Each letter -- whether written by celebrities, including Suze Orman, Mariel Hemingway, Shania Twain, will.i.am and Christy Turlington Burns, or everyday daughters and sons -- speaks to the extraordinary bond between mother and child.

These are moms who made sure their children would never feel held back by disability; became roommates or business partners; put their own lives at risk to keep their kids out of harm's way; inspired their children to start families of their own; or simply made the best cookies of all time.

A Letter To My Mom is a tribute to the women who shape us into the people we become.

Karin: How did the idea for the “Letter” brand series of books come about?

Lisa: Actually, we had sold one book to a publisher, and while we were celebrating that publishing deal - we were having dinner with them and drinking wine - I said, we should really do a “dog book” because my friend Robyn had photographed my dogs for my birthday as a surprise, and the pictures were unbelievable. And I said we should call it “A Letter to My Dog” and have everybody write letters to their dogs. And the publisher said, “I want that, I'll buy that right now.” We said, “Okay, now we have a two-book deal!” And my co-author, Kimi Culp, and I started putting that book together right away.

As the letters started coming in, I realized how powerful the art of writing a letter is. We actually used it over the course of my career at the Oprah show. It was sort of a technique to get people to the heart of their story.

What was the technique you used? In what way?

Say if they were surprising somebody like their mother on the show or a friend, and we wanted them to say something to the person, and they were like, “I don't know what to say,” we would ask them to write a letter. And that would help them get their thoughts together about what they would want to say to that person. What we realized is that writing a letter is something that people can do really easily. It's hard for somebody to write their story if you say, “Hey, write your story.” That's really daunting and hard, as you know. It makes people crazy. But when you ask people to write a letter, it's really easy for them to do. Not easy, but much easier. People can wrap their brains around the concept. Nobody asked us, “What should we write the letter about?” People just did it.

Like the dog letters that came in, they were funny or really heartwarming. But they all made you feel something, which is what I really loved about the idea. And so then I built it out into an anthology, and we have 17 titles.

Can you share what the next title might be?

I think our next two would probably be “Baby” and “Dad.” I'm obsessed with “A Letter to My Baby” even though I don't have one. I think about that relationship and how, when you're a parent, your baby - regardless of age - is always your baby.

For the “Dog” and “Cat,” those two books celebrate the relationship that people have with their pets. And we hope that people will see how special it is and maybe adopt a pet that needs a home. But I think with “Mom,” “Baby” and “Dad,” we hope that it inspires people to write letters for the people in their own lives.

What have you learned about publishing?

I think of television. Neither one of them are businesses you should go into if you're hoping to get rich. I'm not saying that you can't get rich. They're things you have to do because you're really passionate about them. And I feel like publishing is the same. It's really personal, it's really not business. You care about it like you're giving birth to it. It's probably not healthy.

You do it because you really care what you're putting out there, and you want people to love it, and you want to make them feel something. You want them to laugh, or be touched and moved. I'm definitely not in it for the money. It's costing me more money than I'm making. But I really believe in what we're doing. I love the concept of writing a letter. I think it is the best gift we can give somebody, and the best gift to get.

What kind of 'letters to Mom' are you looking for?

We're not looking for, “I hate my mother” letters for sure. I think the tone is really about the love, and you know, the fact that this person put you on the planet. And that it is a complicated relationship. But that we all still have some gratitude for that relationship. And I think as we grow up, we sort of come full circle.

Check out the first two books in the A Letter To My... series:

'A Letter To My Dog' is now being sold in seven countries; read an excerpt from the book.

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A Conversation with Ann Randolph

This month I had the opportunity to chat with Ann Randolph, an award-winning solo performer, about her approach to helping writers explore their personal stories by getting out of the head and into the body. She will be performing her show Loveland in Washington, DC starting March 18th for a five-week run, so spread the word to your friends and family who are out that way. Also, if you're interested in working with Ann, she has a couple upcoming workshops at Esalen and in Kauai!

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Ann Randolph is an award-winning writer, performer, and educator. Her Off-Broadway hit, Squeezebox, was produced by Mel Brooks, and her current show, Loveland, received Best Solo Show awards in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her personal essays have aired on NPR, BBC, and the Moth. She teaches and tours at Esalen, Kripalu and theaters throughout the country.

Karin: Tell me about your writing workshops. What is your approach to working with writers and to developing their personal stories?

Ann: Well, they're different than normal writing workshops, I can tell you that! Because we're moving for a little bit of time every day. We're on our feet and we're improvising. And most of the people who come to my workshops are not performers or actors. It's not intended for that. They're writers who are in their head, and I want them in their body. Because when they drop into their body, then these stories kind of come at them by surprise. Or something that's very deep doesn't have time to hide out when you're improvising. It's incredible to watch.

How do you connect the 'physical movement' with the actual 'writing on the page'?

We'll do some improvs, and then I'll give a writing prompt. But a lot of times I'll ask, “What was triggered in the improv? Was there a line that was triggered in the improv?” Stuff moves the minute you move your body, and when they go to write, they've already been out of their head. Not that that inner critic doesn't come up when you're improvising, even in a group, but there's a lot more freedom, so there's a loosening. And when they go to write, they usually share that it was effortless, it just wrote itself. 

To me it's about finding the emotional charge in the body. Where do you feel turned up or great passion or great loss? Or there's a lump in the throat. For me, it's like crying, where's your sadness? And then writing about that even though I'm writing comedy. I mean, there's a lot of pathos in there, it's a lot of sadness. So just allowing, giving permission for all those feelings. And setting that early on in the class, permission to speak about anything, or say anything, or have any feeling, and holding space for that.

What is the goal in your workshops? Is there a specific place you're looking to land, or a particular take-away, by the end?

In the workshop we are not going towards a goal, but discoveries. I've worked with too many students that try to push a structure before it's ready, and it just collapses. So what I think they walk away with is, “Okay, here are ways that I can drive the narrative.” They can walk away with, “How can I use my body to tap into story, how can I use my body to write on my feet?” Creating dialogue on your feet is much better than being in front of a computer. If I'm going to do my mother, I'm going to walk around as my mother and be her. And the dialogue will come much more easily. Just ways to create spontaneously without this huge mind saying to you “arrrgghh.”

I know you're on your way to Washington, DC to perform Loveland, your fifth solo show. Can you describe what it's about?

Just imagine sitting next to an oddball, misfit on an airplane who is totally inappropriate, with no impulse control, acting out, and you have to go the whole duration of the ride with her. Loveland is about this character, Frannie Potts, who is unable to deal with her mother's death, and she's going back on this plane to go to the funeral, and she comes undone in the middle of the flight. And as we're going cross-country, there are several flashback scenes so you understand the relationship between her and her mother.

Can you share a bit about the creative process of bringing Loveland to life?

Well, this is what was really interesting. It came out rather quickly, and then I shelved it. I mean, the idea came out, and then I thought, “No this is a short story... no this is a novel... no this is a screenplay.” And because it wasn't coming out any way that I was used to - I'd written five solo shows - I thought, “Okay, I'm going to put this away, because I don't know how to do it. It's not telling me what it is.” And now I've learned, it doesn't matter... let it come out in all forms. I always tell my students, “Let it come out in every form in the first draft.” Maybe one page is a song, and then it switches over to a novel, to whatever.

Finally, in a writing workshop at Esalen, I was taking a poetry workshop with Ellen Bass. Something possessed me to take it out again and do it. It was in her writing workshop that said, “Okay Ann, you cannot not do this.” And I went back to it. And I got up to 30 minutes of it, and it was kicking ass. So I performed it around town at 30 minutes. I did not know what my ending was at all, but I knew the first 30 minutes was working. And then finally the ending made its way to me. 

What was the biggest challenge along the way?

It was going from writer to performer. When I was in previews in San Francisco, I had students and others not even be able to look at me after the show. I had one student who had no impulse control say, “It was so cool to see my teacher fail. I learned from watching my teacher fail.” So night after night in previews I sucked, because I was still in writer mode. I couldn't switch, I was still not living it. I mean - that's why you have previews. So the shame was tremendous. And thank God for the director. The director said, “The writing is there, you just haven't landed it in your body.” I'm stealing a line from Heather Woodbury, who says, “My suck level gets less and less.” And each night, my suck level got less and less. And then Tavis Smiley has a book out called “Fail Up.” Another thing, I literally failed up, every night, until by the time the show opened, I was kicking ass. But I wanted to go back to re-writing the whole thing until after the first few nights of previews. And that's why it's so important to have an editor or a director or somebody who can say, “No, it is there, you just haven't landed yet.” It's horrible to bomb in front of people, and know you're going to do it, because you don't have the chops yet. I didn't have the chops yet.

You mentioned that you're going to do a writing workshop with the audience after each performance in DC, and that this component has evolved with the show. How did that come about?

What happened was, when I was doing the show in San Francisco people would wait in the lobby to tell me their own stories - something about the character Frannie Potts, which is the lead character, is so outrageous and over the top and so “tell-it-like-it-is” regarding grief and loss. The way she deals with loss is inappropriate, like acting out anger toward other passengers, but also sees sexual fantasies and masturbates and what-not while she's trying to meditate, all sorts of things. And something about that raw honesty brings people to wait in the lobby and then tell me their own stories. They often say, “I've never shared this with anybody,” I've gotten that over and over, “I've never told anybody this, I've never talked about it.” And I thought, well, why not just do a writing workshop right there in the theater afterward with audience members around loss. And it's been amazing. So I just have them do a little visualization or think about what happened in the show - like a line that triggered them or an experience in their own life - and then we write for ten minutes. And then they oftentimes will share their writing. It's been quite beautiful to watch what happens.

To learn more about Ann Randolph, visit annrandolph.com

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A Conversation with Daniel Jones

How timely that the February 4th release of Daniel Jones's book Love Illuminated not only coincides with the 10-year anniversary of his renowned New York Times's “Modern Love” column, but also with the fêted Valentine's holiday. The book is a search to find the connections - the themes and trends - among the 50,000 stories that have crossed his desk over the years, and will no doubt offer some enlightening insights.

I had the pleasure of speaking with him last week about his new book, as well as his experience editing the ML column over the years. It was a treat to hear his perspective on everything from the rise of the personal essay to his own editing and creative writing process. You can read my full conversation with him below.

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Daniel Jones has edited the Modern Love column in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times since its inception in October 2004. His books include two essay anthologies, Modern Love and The Bastard on the Couch, and a novel, After Lucy, which was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. His writing has appeared in several publications, including the New York Times, Elle, Parade, Real Simple, and Redbook. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his wife, writer Cathi Hanauer, and their two children.

Karin: Tell me about your new book, Love Illuminated, and how it came to be.

Daniel Jones: This book was really a search for me to figure out what I knew, because I felt like I'd been doing this [Modern Love] column for years and years, and every once in a while I would sort of stand up and look around at what I'd done and what I'd read. I'd write, on an annual basis, an editor's observations column on Valentine's Day. I did that about five or six times. And I'd try to make sense in very few words - I think those columns were 1500 to 1700 words - of trends, and you know, entertaining asides. And I felt like I wanted to do that in a bigger way, and really try to understand what I'd learned about what people are doing and what's different. I didn't feel like I could do that unless I wrote a book. Because people would always ask me about it, and they would say, “You must be in a position where you ought to know something about this.” I felt like I was in that position, and I didn't know. So yeah, this book was to answer that.

It was a great experience, actually being able to see themes and how technology was changing relationships, what online dating was doing and how people who were having affairs were rationalizing them according to certain lines of argument. Those sorts of themes and trends started to emerge from the material, and that was a satisfying process.

How has the Modern Love column changed and evolved over ten years?

I think it has evolved in several ways. In the beginning we didn't quite know what the content of the column would be, other than it would be broadly about relationships. I remember we discussed what the name would be, and I was actually the one who suggested “Modern Love” and part of the intent was for it to be broad enough that we wouldn't be hemmed in just to romantic stories that were just about romantic love. I just worried about its longevity. How is this thing going to last if you limit the focus of what you're running essays on? So I interpreted that pretty broadly. At the beginning there was an eagerness about covering certain topics, and having a representative sample of experiences. It seemed wide open, but we wanted the column to represent a bunch of different things and get experiences out there that we thought people would want to read about and that would be eye-opening in one way or another. I wanted to shape readers' perceptions of what this column could be.

That has completely changed. I feel like so many different kinds of stories have run, there is a real freedom now in not feeling like I have to define the column anymore. People know what the range is now, and I feel that I can run things that are offbeat in one way or another or that barely fit under the umbrella of Modern Love, or as far as that umbrella can extend. If you have 12 essays and you're starting a column, those 12 essays are really important in terms of what you're saying. But if you have 500 essays, each one becomes less important in terms of how it's going to shift the perception of what you're doing. So that's a freedom. I feel I can just go after strong, varied material wherever it goes. And so many topics have been covered way beyond what I ever expected I could dream about getting.

Do you have a philosophy or opinion about why the personal essay and personal narrative in general has become so popular? It seems to be more than just a trend.

It's enduring, isn't it?

Young people are writing - people who are in college or in their 20s - with social media and blogging and all these phases that we've gone through. So much of it is about writing about yourself with a sense of audience. I don't think anyone my age or within 15 years of my age - I'm 51 - had that sense growing up, that you had an audience for your experiences. And my own kids who are high school age, wherever they go... or whatever trip they go on... or whatever they're thinking, they can post it and have an audience for it. And, I think, it's not fictional. It's not a fictional mindset. It's a “I've-done-this-and-now-you-guys-can-respond-to-it” kind of mindset. I don't know if that's the main influence, but I think it can't help but be an influence. People are experiencing things, and as they're experiencing them, they want to know what the response is. And it seems to me that that leads into personal essay writing. It's a much more difficult form than posting on Facebook, but I think a lot of the impulse might be the same.

Also, people had timed the rise of the memoir to pre-911 and post-911. I don't feel like I've figured that one out, but there was a lot of talk that that kind of jolt of reality somehow gave a boost to non-fiction, because you're facing things that are difficult. And people assumed that fiction wasn't as urgent enough in that way. I don't know, but that was another influence back then.

What do you look for in an essay submission? What for you are the key ingredients of a compelling story or personal essay?

It's very hard to answer. But a lot of it has to do with, not enough people writing personal essay realize that it can't just be a summarized story from your life. It has to employ the tools of drama that a reader needs - have scenes and dialogue - and the narrator needs to be transported from one place to a new understanding by the end. And hopefully some of that will be shown through scene and dialogue, instead of just told. People consider nonfiction writing or essay writing similar to journal writing, but journal writing is often just that summary style where you're getting it down. So much of what I get that doesn't work, even if it's good writing, is the 'this happened, then this happened, and then this happened' kind of storytelling where you're really just telling a summary of whatever you've just been through, and you're not really shaping into something that has a sense of plot or drama about it.

Beyond that, I think a tone - or a voice - that expresses curiosity rather than judgment or intelligence that you're trying to get down to the page. It's usually a curious but smart voice that works in these essays, someone who has been humbled by experience and is generously sharing that. A lot of material I get that doesn't work can be show-offy, in sort of a trying to be funny. Oh, a typical essay I get is “the long list of losers that I've gone out with.” That has to be really well done to work and not many people do it that well. It's a stance of “I'm better than all these people” and “these people are all nuts!” You don't want to hear people rant on about stuff like that.

You mentioned that you've become a better editor over the years. In what way?

In the early days, these could be difficult essays to edit - very personal stories where you're asking very personal questions and changing peoples' words in ways that cause conflict. That I almost never have anymore. Most of it is that I've gotten better at being able to talk through an essay and probe for more material, or whatever, in ways that are just professional. I don't feel like it is a fraught process anymore, and maybe that comes across to the writer. It's just like, “This is what we need to do,” and it's just a smooth, smooth process. I've learned what's missing in an essay and how to ask for it. I've learned how to write in material based on an interview with a writer, and have them massage it into their style. So that editorial process is probably the most easy and fun part of the job at this point. The hardest is saying “no” all day long and having to write an explanation to someone I would owe an explanation to about why a piece doesn't work. There's an art to that that I don't think one ever quite masters.

How do you work with the writers? Are most essays you accept pretty much “there” when they're submitted?

It's certainly nice to get a piece that is close, and that just requires cutting. The piece I'm working on right now, which is for mid-February is a piece that was 1800 words, really perfectly written from start to finish, and it's just trying to find 300 words to take out. It's just not very hard. It doesn't require a lot of back and forth.

But the essays that I've worked on in the past year - and I work on a lot - were really good stories or powerful perspectives that I wanted to run, but they needed work. And it wasn't that I felt I was doing a person a favor, it was just that, “This is a really good story and I want to get it in, and we're going to go back and forth on this enough times that it gets into that shape.”

But it is true that in the first years of doing the column, when I didn't have this sort of glut of material, I would do a ton of work on something. There was a piece that I ran that someone recommended - a writer that he'd been teaching in a workshop and she was working on this 5,000 word essay. And I had to take a 5,000 word essay and cut it down to a 1,700 word essay. And that was a lot of work. It was worth it and I learned from it, but I would never do that these days. If something comes in over 1,800 words, I just say, “You didn't read the guidelines.” It would really have to be good and close for me to take it on.

As far as your own book, Love Illuminated, can you describe what your writing process was like? How did you find the structure for it?

This is the first nonfiction book I've written from start to finish. I had a novel that came out in 2000, and the process of writing that was like the famous quote, that writing a novel is like driving a car at night where you can only see as far as your headlights shine, but you can make the whole trip that way. I didn't know what was more than 30 feet ahead of me and I just kept writing that way forward and I didn't jump ahead, I just kept writing forward.

Love Illuminated, I felt, needed a structure. The real challenge with this book for me was, “What can I say about this that hasn't been said a million times?” and “What can I bring to it that another writer on this subject matter couldn't?” It seemed to me I had all these stories - both published and unpublished - that I could draw upon and I had my own experience, my own marriage and all of that as material, to the point where I ought to be able to see trends in it and how was I going to compile that into a book? 

I made several attempts. I have a very blunt agent who is not afraid to say, “What were you thinking?” and I had a couple of stabs at book ideas that just were not right and mostly based on what I thought a book like this needed to be, based on what I'd read and gone to the shelves in Barnes and Noble and saw what people were writing about. And my agent, she was very good at saying, “This has to be a book that you would want to write, put the other models out of your mind.”

It didn't really come to me until I wrote what became the first words of the introduction to the book, which was: “Let's start with a quiz.” You know, so many of these books start with quizzes, and they're serious. They have a quiz, and if you answer a quiz in a certain way, then you get a score and it means something. It just seemed sort of ridiculous to me. But I thought, if I were to start with a quiz... and I'd write that sentence in a wry way instead of an earnest way... what would that quiz be? And what were the questions? Everything that I get - all these essays I get - are not answers, but they're all questions that are like, “How do I figure this out?” and “What am I supposed to do about this?” So I thought, what would be the 10 questions that would be most representative of all the stories I read? And I came up with those 10 questions really pretty quickly. And those 10 questions were the themes that were sort of the progression of love in someone's life from start to finish. And within each of those themes were stories that represented situations, trends and all of that; and it was just a matter of going to chapter to chapter and stitching all of that together, and trying to say things that were smart and funny about them, and use examples so that people would have stories to latch onto that would demonstrate what I was talking about. It was really hard for the first few chapters, and then it got easier and easier and easier, and by the end it felt very natural. I had to go back to the earlier chapters and try to get that easier style back into the material that had been over-worked.

How did you juggle your job as the Editor of Modern Love with writing your book? Did you write at night and off hours?

No, I couldn't. I could only do it in several days in a row. And that was different than my novel. I had a full-time job when I wrote my novel, a 9 to 5 job and a little kid. And that I did at night, like 9 to 1 in the morning, or something, and I just had momentum.

With this book, I had to take days off. It was excruciating because, you know, my in-box doesn't stop and my weekly deadlines don't stop and all the busy work associated with the column doesn't stop. And you have to write badly in order to write well; you have to turn out all this crap. And I'd just keep saying to myself, “I don't have time to go through this phase of the book. I don't have time to write badly. I just have to write well.” Of course, that was ridiculous. But those days were horrible. I would just spend day after day after day falling further behind at work, but not really making progress. I was making progress on the book, but it didn't feel like progress. I felt like I was just spinning my wheels and further behind at the same time. The good thing about the column is it's not timely, and if I get a good amount of material - it takes some doing, but - I can get ahead and get some breathing room. And I just had to keep doing that, I had to keep pushing that ahead, getting the submission's pile down as far as I could get it to feel comfortable, and then taking time off. A friend of mine loaned me their farmhouse in New Hampshire for a full week once and that was really important, to be off the internet and to really have time where I wasn't responsible for anything else.

Yeah, but writing books is so hard. I don't know how people do it.

Buy Love Illuminated

Link to Modern Love

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