Lilly Dancyger: Editor of "Burn It Down" Discusses Getting In Touch with Women's Anger and Allowing It To Exist
It’s no secret that women are angry. In fact, they are furious. As the conversation around female rage continues to light up, there is a need to make sense of it all, to know what to do with it. But Lilly Dancyger, writer and editor extraordinaire, is approaching this fiery topic from a different perspective —in order to understand women’s anger we need to allow it to exist first.
As the editor of Burn It Down, Dancyger invited twenty two diverse writers, such as Melissa Febos, Leslie Jamison, Marisa Siegel, Minda Honey, Nina St.Pierre and Evette Dionne, to explore how anger has shaped their lives. This timely and fierce anthology is just one of Dancyger’s editing projects as she is also a contributing editor and teacher for Catapult, assistant book editor for Barrelhouse and co-curator for Memoir Monday, a monthly reading series by Narratively, The Rumpus, Tin House, Guernica, Granta, Longreads, and Catapult. In addition, her writing has appeared in a number of notable publications such as The Guardian, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Playboy, The Rumpus, Longreads, Catapult, Psychology Today, and The Atlantic, and she is now wrapping up edits on a memoir.
With so much to learn from such an accomplished woman, I was incredibly excited to speak with Lilly about her full-time writing career, the process of putting together Burn It Down, getting in touch with women’s anger and the details on her forthcoming memoir, Negative Space.
Kailey Brennan: Could you walk me through the creation of Burn It Down? What was the initial spark for you to pursue this and as the editor, how did you proceed to make it happen?
Lilly Dancyger: I got very lucky in this case. The initial idea was something that Seal Press approached me with. They do a lot of really great anthologies. So they had an idea in house that they wanted to do an anthology about women's anger. I had recently worked with them contributing to a different anthology and I had a great rapport with the editor. So when they came up with that, they approached me for it. And of course, I said yes, absolutely. From the beginning, I was really excited about the concept and also really excited about the idea of doing an anthology and having this opportunity to work with all these amazing writers who I admire and whose work I had been following.
I edit for publications but sometimes it's harder to solicit for a publication because it's more open-ended. Like send me something if you ever want to work together and sometimes that comes to fruition and sometimes it doesn't. An anthology is much more tangible. You can reach out to people and say, I'm putting this together, I need to work by this time, are you interested?
KB: So you specifically sought out some of these writers?
LD: It was almost entirely by solicitation, so I reached out to them directly. In the end, I did one open call when there were a couple of topics that felt important that hadn't come up yet. When reaching out to writers, I was very careful not to be prescriptive about what I wanted them to write about. It was very open-ended—are you angry about anything? Anything you want to write about? As people started saying yes and started sending me their ideas, I was also keeping track of certain topics that I knew it would be important to hit. So then when I got near the end and there were a couple of those that hadn't been covered yet, I did an open call on Twitter.
KB: There's a line in your introduction where you say that anger doesn't have to be useful to deserve a voice. I've been trying to write about my own anger for a long time, so that was one of the reasons why this book drew me in. This line resonated with me because I feel like so often as writers, we feel like we need to explain or defend our emotions and feelings and instead of just acknowledging them or even just exploring them. As you say, a means to an end. I could tell you that was particularly important to you when compiling these essays.
LD: Yeah. That was partly because there've been several really great books that have come out in the last couple of years about women's anger, like Rage Becomes Her, Good and Mad, and Eloquent Rage. As I started to put the anthology together, I was also thinking a lot about what was going to set it apart. What was it going to add to this conversation that was already ongoing and that these brilliant women had already written whole books about? What stood out to me is that these books that had come out so far were examining women's anger in the context of how it functions in society and what it can do and its potential as a political tool. All of that is really important. But it occurred to me that before we can even get there and see the full potential of how we can use our anger, we have to be able to get in touch with it and just feel it and let it exist and get comfortable expressing it. That was important to me.
KB: Did you feel a sense of urgency to get this book out into the world?
LD: Yeah. This is my first time working on the book publishing schedule which is very different from the online media schedule. There was a point, early in the process, where it felt like women's anger was very much in the zeitgeist. Everybody was talking about it. The New York Times did a group review of a few of the other books I mentioned. And I had a moment where I was like, Oh no, I'm gonna miss this wave. It's going to be over by the time the book comes out. But I realized pretty quickly that it is still very relevant and very important. I think the MeToo Movement that started this particular wave of talking about women's anger, breaking that silence, is not going to be something that is just then resolved and tucked back away after a year or two. This is something that's gonna take us a long time to fully explore and unpack.
KB: Besides this being a space to observe and talk about anger, is there anything else that you hope that readers take away from these essays and this book?
LD: So many of the essays talked about not even realizing that they're angry, for so long. We're so good at denying and repressing emotions that are not socially acceptable, anger being one of the biggest ones, if not the biggest one. We convince even ourselves that we're not angry. And so I hope that in reading these essays, women especially, will realize and get a deeper understanding of the anger that they're dealing with in their own life and hopefully give themselves a little bit of permission to just feel it and let it be what it is and stop trying to deny it. That was another thing that came up over and over and over again in these pieces —it sounds cliche— but the only way out is through and you can only be free of the anger if you let yourself feel it.
KB: I would love to learn a little bit about your writing journey. Did you always want to be a writer from a kid or did it evolve as you grew up? Were you always drawn to nonfiction writing?
LD: As a kid, I was raised by two artists, so I always wanted to do all kinds of creative things. I did a lot of drawing and painting and sculpting and I was a dancer. I did ballet until my early twenties. I also always wrote. I remember dictating stories to my father before I knew the alphabet. He would write them down for me and then I would illustrate them. I wrote a lot of really bad kid poetry too. I didn't discover nonfiction really as a possibility for creative expression until I was a teenager. It was actually the diaries of Anaïs Nin that made me realize I could write about my own life and my own experience in a way that was not just recording but was something beautiful and expressive. That’s when I started trying to write what I didn't really understand at the time to be the beginnings of personal essays and then they kind of evolved over time into personal essays and memoir writing.
KB: Can you tell us anything about your forthcoming memoir?
LD: Yeah. It's coming on in 2021 from Santa Fe writers project. It's called “Negative Space”. It's a project I've been working on for 10 years. When I started writing it, I didn't know that it was a memoir. It's about my father who is an artist and a heroin addict and he died when I was 12. And so when I started writing it, I thought I was writing like his artist monograph, writing about his artwork and his life and kind of trying to piece together a timeline of his work and what was going on behind the scenes in his life during the different arrows in his artwork. And it eventually, very slowly over time, morphed into also being a memoir about that process of researching his life and his artwork and coming to understand him better as a person through his art.
KB: Wow. That's exciting. Is it already finished?
LD: I have a complete draft. I'm waiting on an edit right now and so I'm not sure. I don't know if the edit is going to be extensive rewrites or more just kind of polishing. But I mean it's been “done” for years and I've just been rewriting it and rewriting it and rewriting it.
KB: Since you write so much for your work, how did you carve out time to also write this memoir? Did you have a routine of some sort?
LD: Kind of. I have a lot of different freelance gigs that the timelines for are always changing. I was also bartending full time until about three years ago. My schedule is always packed and shifting, so I had to be really rigid about setting aside time that was mine. Setting aside time to work on my own writing and treating that with as much respect and urgency as the deadline for work that I had to do for other people. If Friday is my writing day, then sorry, no, I can't come. I can't report the story that day. I can't edit your piece that day. I can't take a call that day. I'm writing that day.
KB: That can be hard to do.
LD: It is hard! It might have been a different day every week or shift with my teaching schedule. But once you get it in your head that that day is non-negotiable, it's just like I can't plan anything else during that time when I'm supposed to be teaching. It takes a little bit of time getting used to— being able to protect that time without apology.
KB: Yeah. I like that you said to view it with respect. I mean, things that bring in money, we have no problem setting aside time to do.
LD: Right. It's hard too because you're not accountable to anybody about yourself. If you blow off the deadline for work you’re getting paid for, there's somebody who's going to email you and be like, what the hell? (Laughs) If you blow off your writing time, nobody knows except for you. So you have to become your own taskmaster in that way and be accountable to yourself in the same way that you're accountable to other people.
KB: Do you have any advice that's helped you through your writing journey as a full-time writer and freelancer? Is there anything that's helped you particularly?
LD: Make it your business to be an expert on the field and the genre and your peers. Do your homework and be aware of who's publishing the kind of work that you want to be doing. Who are the people you want to be your writing peers? What are they doing? What are they talking about and writing about and where are they publishing?
Twitter is really great for that because it allows you a behind the scenes look of not just what people are publishing but also what they're paying attention to and what they're interested in and what the debates are, what the points of contention are, what people's opinions are of different publications and different writers and different styles and different topics. Read more than you write. Read people's work, but also find ways to be plugged into the conversation.
If you can go to events, that's great, but you don't have to be in New York or San Francisco or Portland or whatever. You don't have to be in one of these big literary hub cities to do it. Just do your homework and pay attention.
KB: Do you ever feel overwhelmed?
LD: Oh yeah, all the time. (Laughs)
KB: I like what you said about looking up to someone. I know for myself, that makes me feel more focused.
LD: Yeah, and it feels like you're part of an era of writers. It's not just like one individual floating outside of time and creating work in a vacuum. You're part of a movement, part of a time. I think it's important to be aware of that and to see that.
Lilly Dancyger is a Contributing Editor and writing teacher at Catapult, Assistant Books Editor at Barrelhouse, and the former Memoir Editor of Narratively. Lilly is the editor of Burn It Down, an anthology of essays on women's personal and collective anger, forthcoming from Seal Press October 8, 2019. She is the host of Memoir Monday, a monthly reading series co-curated by Narratively, The Rumpus, Tin House, Guernica, Granta, Longreads, and Catapult, featuring the best memoir writers of today.
She is currently working on a memoir about her father, Joe Schactman, who was an artist in the 1980s East Village gallery scene, and who died when Lilly was 12. The memoir explores his life and his heroin addiction through the lens of his artwork, and the imagery that Lilly inherited from him. It is also the story of the decade spent piecing his story together. Lilly has a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University, and has continued her writing education in workshops at Catapult, Corporeal Writing, and Tin House.
Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Playboy, The Rumpus, Longreads, Catapult, Psychology Today, The Atlantic, and many other publications. She lives in New York City.
