Elle Nash: On the Writer's Hustle, Finding Empowerment in Rejection, and Her New Novel, "Gag Reflex"
Last summer, I discovered Elle Nash’s stunning writing through one of those online bookseller bots who sagely advised me that if I love Chloe Caldwell’s work, maybe I will love Elle Nash’s work too (I do! I did! – Amazon is not good for much but it is good for some things.) I read her 2018 novel ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER over the course of one late August day. And then I walked around in a haze for the next twenty-four hours, like you do when someone suddenly comes into your life and you know they are going to change it forever. I read a lot, but a book had never made me feel this way. So, I wrote her a fan letter. It’s true. My first one since I was ten years old and I felt moved to write to Debbie Gibson. Debbie never wrote back, but Elle did - right away - and we developed a sort of long-distance mentorship and friendship. And she showed me how willing the tight network of women writers are to support one another, to build each other up.
I once told our mutual friend, Elizabeth Ellen, that Elle’s writing could be so dark and at times deeply uncomfortable, yet she made even the darkest, strangest scenarios seem so relatable, like you were at a sleepover with your best friend in middle school and she was telling you these stories in confidence and with care. And Elizabeth told me Elle would love that description. Luckily for us, Elle is prolific and busy. Her latest novel, the brilliant GAG REFLEX has just dropped and she has another novel we can get excited about, DELIVER ME, coming out in the fall of 2023.
Elle graciously took the time to chat with me about her creative process, the writer’s hustle, and how we can harness the disappointment of rejection and use it as a means of empowerment.
Barrie Miskin: Hi! So, you’re in Scotland now – how is it over there? What made you decide to make the move? You have an EU citizenship, right?
Elle Nash: Yeah, I was born in England, and my mom is English, so all my English family's still over here. When I came over on my book tour in 2019, I was like, this is incredible. Everyone here wears black and like right off, I was thinking, these are my people! (both laugh)
There was a lot of stuff that clicked about my mom's behavior when I came here where I was like, oh, she's not uptight. She's just British! Also, my daughter was just hitting school age, and so I felt like I needed to get her over here by that time.
BM: Oh, you're so lucky you got to do that.
EN: I wish everyone could.
BM: So, I think I might be getting my dates wrong, but in the last year you came out with NUDES and then GAG REFLEX and then you have DELIVER ME coming out in September?
EN: DELIVER ME is next October, 2023.
BM: Ah, okay. But it seems like you’ve had so much work published so quickly and consecutively. What was the timeline like for each book? When did you finish NUDES and then GAG REFLEX and the DELIVER ME? How long did it take for each project?
EN: NUDES is a collection of stuff I've been working on since around 2015 and 2014. So that took a while, but it was in 2019 when Elizabeth (Elizabeth Ellen) was like, I wanna publish something by you. Do you want to put together a collection? 2019 was when I started seriously trying to finish the stories for NUDES.
In December of 2018, I was like, I'm going to write a novel in 90 days. I planned it for two weeks in 2018 and then started in January. And then for the next nine weeks I finished DELIVER ME - that’s the one that comes out in 2023 - just the first draft and then I sent that to my agent. So, it was February of 2019 when I was working on these stories and so I traded back between working on the stories and working on the novel.
Then in January 2020, I moved to my parents' hometown and we ended up accidentally staying there for two years but it was during that year, 2020, when I finished DELIVER ME and it got sent off. It was after I sent off DELIVER ME that I started GAG REFLEX.
I’ve had the idea for GAG REFLEX in my mind for a really, really long time. One of the first manuscripts I pulled together was actually this eating disorder collection, but it was too immature. I think just after going through the process of finally finishing ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER, having a few bad starts on some novels and then sitting down and finishing DELIVER ME and teaching myself to go from, start to finish was when I felt like I have this momentum and now I understand structure a little bit better.
I started GAG REFLEX again when was at my parents' house in 2020, which is like prime for terrible memories about eating disorders. I was already in the environment of my trauma. I was fighting it on a daily basis. I was going through all my old eating disorder journals, my handwritten journals and I was pretty much primed to sit in my nostalgia for however long it took. I don't remember how long it took to write it. God, how long did it take? I just remember pitching the idea to Clash and they were like, this sounds awesome.
BM: With GAG REFLEX, how did you come to the idea of writing it in the style of a Live Journal? That was amazing.
EN: So, in late 2019, I read this book called 1982 JANINE and it's by Alasdair Gray - and interestingly enough, he's Scottish - and the book takes place partly in his mind in Glasgow. Which is weird because I don't think at that time, I was desperate to move to Glasgow. Anyway, that book is so good. It takes place over a single night. This man who's basically considering whether or not to end his life, but it's a lot of internal stuff that he's, it's like in his fantasies, right. It's so linguistically fun and it's perverted and funny at the same time. And then it also has a lot of crazy topography, like different kinds of layout.
In my head I was like, I just want something like this. And I was thinking, what if I wrote a book called GAG REFLEX 2005? I love nu metal and for a while it was uncool to like it, but now it's having this second life. But it’s what I grew up in. I still dress like a go like a mall goth. (laughs) But it’s really who I am as a person. And so, I thought, what if I did that? What if I titled it that way? That was how the concept started. What else is more 2005 than a Live Journal, you know? I wanted to be able to fashion every page to look like that. And I really wanted to recreate my experience of the eating disorder community that did exist at that time. The only way to do that, for me, was through Live Journal.
BM: Yeah. You write about it with such tenderness and care too. I feel like you do that with everything you write. You write about so many difficult things, but it’s coming from such a place of care and non-judgment that it becomes so relatable. I always joke with you and with Elizabeth that I'm just a boring Queens mom. Like I'm literally wearing like head-to-toe Old Navy right now. (both laugh) I mean I’ve struggled with mental health and addiction issues, but I’ve never been in a poly relationship, like in ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER, or struggled with an eating disorder, but everything you write just becomes so incredibly, deeply relatable.
It totally blew my mind that ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER was recognized by Oprah magazine. I was like, go Oprah! (laughs)
EN: I got so lucky. I don't know how that happened. And I'm sad because the editor who picked it, Michelle Hart, she's not there anymore.
BM: It's so crazy. But that just shows how relatable your work is. Like I'm sure a lot of Queens moms read Oprah. (both laugh)
BM: You once gave me the best advice ever, which I think you passed on from Sarah Gerard, which was when I was struggling with trying to find time to write with a full-time job and raising my small daughter – and I know our daughters are the same age and you also have a full-time job - and the advice was to always find a way to put writing first. What’s your routine like right now as far as writing goes, how do you work out the time?
EN: Now that I have a full-time job again, it is a little bit more difficult, but my mindset is just like, even if I just make little steps every day, I'll feel okay about it. My ideal, or I guess you could say current routine is, I'm waking up at six because I can't force myself anymore to wake up at five. Then I'm either doing a little bit of work while I wake up, get coffee, get my daughter up. Or she wakes up on her own and I make her breakfast and when she's all set up with breakfast and hanging out, I do a little bit of work. Then I get ready for work. Then I get her ready and walk her to nursery. Then I walk to the bus and then an hour roughly like 50 minutes to get to my job. Then I work nine to four and then I'll come home and then I will hang out with her and put her to bed at seven. And when she's in bed at seven, then all that time is mine to do whatever I want with. So, I've definitely been doing a lot more. I'm doing a lot more on Witchcraft Magazine.
I'm able to work more on my book now. Like, I can do like 10 to 20 pages of revision a day, if my brain is functioning for it. That’s been a lot nicer. I have a week of annual leave coming up in July and I think what I'm going to do for that is try to plot something really fast, while my daughter is at nursery school from 8:00 until 5:30. I have one idea I've been trying to start since 2021 and maybe I'll just try to plow through it in a whole week. Writers can do it. Jesse Ball can do it. Patrick Cottrell can do it. I can try it. I can just try to do the first draft. So that's kind of how I’m doing it is that I'm just trying to fit it in where I can.
BM: How did you start writing full time? I think I remember seeing that you worked in journalism before?
EN: Yeah. So basically, I was working a day job in 2016 doing proposal and technical writing. And I had been doing that for several years. It’s really intense because your job is to basically to win these multimillion dollar contracts that you are the front line for because you're the proposal writer. But you don't get a commission for it. Like you don't see any money from that kind of win. Sometimes you get a lot and then sometimes you don't get anything. And then there is that dull period where it is just really hard to work in an office when there's just all that free time and nothing to do.
During that time, I was starting to take publishing more seriously. I was trying to apply to grad schools. I was working on my book. I was meeting with Tom Spanbauer every two weeks over Skype to talk about my book and get my pages done and that kind of thing. Also, every six months I was doing this workshop called Scribe Lab. I think I did that for a year or two - it was kind of a low residency style of generative writing - and just meeting more people in the lit world, trying to start my magazine, that kind of thing.
When ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER sold in 2016, it sold for like $1,500. It really wasn’t a huge advance or anything. But I just hit this point with my mental health where I was like, I would open an email at work and feel like I can't do this. I was really wanting to try to find a job back in customer service because I was like I just want to write. And not worry about my mental health so much, you know what I mean?
I remember having a panic attack at work and calling my husband about it and he was like, you should just quit your job because if it's going to make life this miserable, then like we'll just figure it out and I'll just have to pay for things for a while or whatever, you know? And we had been married for two years and still had roommates, you know, so it's not like it was like affordable per se, but we just kind of took the hit. And I have to say that like, it's one of those things where it's like, if you're desperate to get an MFA, you're like, I'm going to spend $40,000 in loans plus interest to take the time to write…You know, I just really think like you are better off taking the financial hit of finding a cheaper way to live and a less stressful job and then doing it that way, because you can always go back.
But no matter what you do, there's always the balance. The only thing you can do is just like cement your boundary for the creative work itself, you know?
BM: Yeah, totally. But that’s hard too. Because once you get out of your writing routine or your routine in general changes, it can be kind of hard to get back into it. What’s really hard right now for me is the rejection. It just makes me feel like, well I just don't want to do it anymore. (laughs)
EN: It's tough. Yeah. Rejection still stings for me too. I've been really trying to focus on how I can transform my like envy into motivation and energy without trying to think about it too much. Like there are people who can write full time. My friend sold a book for so much money and Ron Howard optioned it for like a million dollars. And he did quit his job. And now he lives his New York City writer's lifestyle. Got his personal trainer. Got his nice clear glasses. (laughs) I'm so happy for him, but it has to be that thing where it's like, you can't let that make you feel bad because you don't have it. You have to think about where you want to be and you have to go towards that. Cause I guarantee you; it doesn't matter. Perseverance is the number one predictor of success in anything that you do. The perseverance itself, the resiliency is what's going to carry you through the difficult moment to finally get it. You don't necessarily know when it'll happen. It'll happen. You have your whole life to have a debut come out, even if you feel rushed, but as long as you don't give up on it, then you'll be okay. And that's the thing. That’s the thing that you have to harness.
Elle Nash is the author ff Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc Books) Uk Edition (404 Ink), and Nudes (Sf/Ld Books) Uk Edition (404 Ink) and Deliver Me (Forthcoming 2023, Unnamed Press). Her work has appeared in Bomb Magazine, Guernica, The Nervous Breakdown, Literary Hub, The Fanzine, Volume 1 Brooklyn, New York Tyrant And Elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft magazine where she hosts her annual writing workshop, Textures. Elle lives in Glasgow, Scotland where she draws blood by day and slays with the pen by night.
About the Interviewer
Barrie Miskin is a teacher and writer whose work has appeared in Hobart, Narratively and elsewhere. She recently completed her first book, HELL GATE BRIDGE, a memoir of her journey through maternal mental illness. Barrie lives in Queens, New York with her husband and daughter.
