Blue Moon

[susanstinson]

I'm taking questions. If anyone's got any, ask away.

Comments

[beccawrites.livejournal.com]

what did you first want to be when you grew up?

[stillwell.livejournal.com]

What inspired you to write this most recent book?

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

When I was about seven, I had a list that I would give anyone who asked.

I wanted to be

• a teacher


• a gardener (because I had grown morning glories, seen them shut at night and open in the morning, and found them to be very wonderful)


• a ballerina

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/42382643@N00/357131998/)



• and a writer.

I never let go of wanting to be a writer.

[beccawrites.livejournal.com]

yay. :) cool picture!!!

and what inspired you to take questions?

that's neat. i never wanted to be a ballerina, i think i knew very young that i was too fat for that (it's just hitting me now what this puerto rican guy meant when he said that kids know early if they're going to college or not).... but anyway, i did love dancing.

i wanted to be a chemist because i had a chemistry set and it was fun to play with. but i keep coming up with new answers to that question.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

I'm in the middle of reading it for the first time -- I've written this draft over year(s), but I've never read the whole thing at once -- and one thing that I'm seeing that I've never really acknowledged before is that it really is, at least in part, a story of spiritual struggle. So, there's that.

There are a lot of other things, too, though. My first three novels are set mostly in the west -- or, in the case of Venus of Chalk, in a bus on its way west -- and, although I was born in Texas and grew up and went to college in Colorado, I've lived in Massachusetts since 1983. My brother, the landscape painter, suggested to me that I might want to set my next book in New England. So I was looking around at the things and land around me, including in the cemetery across the street from my apartment, where I was going to write a lot, and found the graves of many people in the life of Jonathan Edwards -- his daughter, David Brainerd, his grandparents -- as well as markers about him and Sarah, as well. I heard a presentation about his life at First Churches, the site of his congregation, and I really loved the story of it -- it's very dramatic to me. Also, I felt urgently moved by political events to examine fundamentalism, especially from within Protestant Christianity, which is the tradition I was raised in and understand best. Also -- this isn't very explicit in the book, I think, but it was one of the paths for me -- my explorations of cultural attitudes towards the body made me want to really try to get inside Calvinism to see how it works (how it worked in the eighteenth century, and how it still works inside me and, I think, in much of our culture). When I started to read the writing of Jonathan Edwards, he got a fierce hold on me and shook me in all sorts of directions.

And, at the very beginning, the raptures and upheavals in Northampton in the 1730s and 40s had striking parallels for me with some of the raptures and upheavals that I'd witnessed and been a part of a lesbian feminist community in the very same place, and I started out writing mirror stories that ran in different centuries. That structure didn't work, but it still provides some of the juice for me. I sometimes talk about that as tension between ideology and human messiness.

The more I learned about the history, theology and complexity within this story, the more fascinated and compelled by it I became.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

I think I'm taking questions because I'm in this pretty brief moment between working on drafts when I'm looking up and looking around and checking in in general. Also, because of some of the conversations you and I have had about this new book and making sure that I bring fat queers -- um, in addition to myself -- (and, also, everybody else who's been interested to this point) along with me for the adventure of it and its mysterious and various possible fates, so I thought I'd see if anybody had anything they wanted to ask me about it.

Or anything. I just feel willing to engage if there's something somebody's always kind of wanted to ask. I know I won't have the energy for long, but thought I'd offer.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

I didn't know enough about ballerinas to know that I was too fat. Also, I was good at backbends, and very proud of it. But a chemistry set? Very cool!

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Also, it's been really fun and freeing to be writing about things and people who are not -- and just could not possibly be -- me.

I have a question!

[rev-hank.livejournal.com]

how do you get an agent?

Re: I have a question!

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

I don't have an agent, and have only ever had one briefly. So, one answer to that question is that for publication with many excellent small presses, you don't need one. You can work directly with editors and publishers.

You definitely do need an agent to be published by a mainstream press. The best way to find an agent is to be referred by someone you know (and that usually means someone you have a close working relationship with or someone who has explictly offered to do it -- it's not considered polite to ask writers you don't know well if they'll refer you to their agent -- the answer is usually no.). So, it may seem indirect, but I think one of the strongest things to do towards finding an agent is to cultivate and stick with productive and respectful writing relationships with your peers -- form a writers' group, critique each other's work, hold readings together, support each other in whatever ways you can come up with -- so that you can continue to support each other as your careers develop.

Something else that agents say that they look for is what they call "a platform." Do you write for a magazine that has a recognizable market? Do you have a following that be identified in some other way that can be expected to by your book?

Other things to do are to read the acknowledgment pages of people whose books you love and note who their agents are if they thank them -- agents who might be responsive to your work might be representing writers you love. You can also sometimes meet agents at writers conferences, or try to find one with interests related to your work in directories like Literary Marketplace -- many libraries carry it. Also, there are plenty of agents now who have blogs or good websites -- reading them for a while might give you a sense of the realities.

The process is highly competitive and it can be very difficult just to get your work read, so I think that it's profoundly important not to rest your sense of identity as a writer or your assessment of the value of your work on whether or not you have the attention of an agent. Even a very seasoned judgment on whether or not a particular book might sell is very different from a judgment on its gifts to a reader.

I wrote up a description of my experience the first time I went to New York to meet the agent I had briefly. If I can find it easily, I'll post it.

Re: I have a question!

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Here is the story of my meeting with an agent who had taken on Venus of Chalk before it was published -- it happened years and years ago now. Years before I posted it. (http://susanstinson.livejournal.com/18183.html)

[stillwell.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for such a thoughtful answering of the question! It makes me even more excited to one day read the book, particularly the aspect of religion and spirituality's connection to the body. I imagine that's a pretty rich landscape *

Re: I have a question!

[rev-hank.livejournal.com]

Thank You!!
Amazing feedback. I appreciate it. I am not a writer...yet. I have delusions of grander...but I was asking for a friend of mine who just sent me a copy of his first novel.
Its so great I want to help him find an agent. I think its hard for artists to push their own work sometimes.
Harder for them to toot their own horns.
He sent me a copy of it and I absolutely love it. Reminds me of a mix of Charles Bukowski and Jeannette Winterson.

I will pass this along to him.
Thank You!

[oneroom.livejournal.com]

1. What's your favorite comfort food for quelling anxiety? :)

2. Do you garden? If so, why?

3. What are you listening to, music-wise, lately?

4. Do you like the public parts of being a writer? How do you handle them?

5. Where will you go next on your trike?

Re: I have a question!

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

It's really great for your friend that you love his work so much and are trying to help him advocate for it. There's nothing on earth better than that.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

1. What's your favorite comfort food for quelling anxiety? :)

Here is the true, strange, secret answer. It's not a recommendation for anybody else!: I like to put blue cheese dressing on bread.

2. Do you garden? If so, why?

You know, I don't garden. I love some gardeners in a deep, long, solid way, and so I get to eat garden food and enjoy gardens, but I don't do the work. One of my all time favorite diletante gardening experiences is to lay down in order to reach across a good big bed of really rich, warm, dirt and dig for potatoes -- buried treasure! just buried there in the dirt, for the digging! -- with my hands.

3. What are you listening to, music-wise, lately?

I'm just now back from a Laurie Anderson lecture that AMAZED me, so I'm about to be listening to more of her! What an powerful sense of play and experiment, what a productive artist is so many media. She was the artist in residence for NASA for a while! She was in the room when the rovers landed on Mars! She said such great things.

Also, Crooked Still. And the Duhks. And Bernadette Peters.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

4. Do you like the public parts of being a writer? How do you handle them?

Ah. This is complicated, and makes me think a moment about how to answer truly and well.

I love to read. I love the live exchange of that, and it also often feels like a ritual that puts me in a kind of altered state, able, for the course of the reading, to see the people listening with a kind of -- what? -- heightened clarity and generosity, to feel their listening and their essential generosity in attending to my work, and also to revisit the work (and the emotions, thoughts and observations within it) in a way that's very concentrated, cool and warm, both. It's a pleasure.

Although, there are certain settings, particularly ones in which coolness or a particular aesthetic that I don't share is dominant, in which reading can feel painful to me, especially if it feels as if the work hasn't truly been heard.

I like the way my work sometimes brings wonderful experiences and people towards me, that I get to do things that I never would have imagined or experienced if I weren't a writer.

I don't like the competitiveness and hierarchy and the feeling of scrabbling over crumbs that is so often a part of public life as a writer. I understand why it happens that way, the pressures we're under, but that part is not fun. I don't like it if it feels like people want me to keep saying the same thing over and over (although some of my poems are designed to say the same things over and over, and that's actually pretty fun), or only talk about things that I've already talked about without taking risks.

I don't like how some writers take up a stance of expertise that diminishes everybody else's knowledge and experience, and how often that kind of an act is bought as wisdom. I don't like it when I'm tempted to do that myself.

But there's a thing I really, really love, that actually comes out of all of the repetition, when I get asked to speak or write about something that I really do know a lot about, or care a lot about, and then suddenly, something I've been struggling to say becomes distilled and clear, and I say it, and can feel it being understood and responded to.

There are things that I keep private and off the table, or approach only in the work itself. I'm pretty protective of the people I love, especially since they haven't signed up for some kinds of public scrutiny in the way I do by being a writer. Sometimes, I'm not clear about where those lines are, and that worries me.

And, you know, it's also true that I have a very fierce hunger for my work to get more recognition, because that would create the income I need to be able to keep doing it and to keep getting better. And, if I'm honest, because I just want it. I don't know if that's liking the public parts of being a writer, but it's one of the forces that can suddenly, unexpectedly overwhelm me so that I find myself acting in ways that I barely recognize. I think I know more about that ghostly romanticizing fierce desire than I ever have before, and I have beloved people around me who help me recognize it and counterbalance it. Sometimes I think that I've confused it with my urge to create, but it's not the same thing.


5. Where will you go next on your trike?

That is a very, very good question. Maybe I will go to the pool, to swim.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

So rich!