Matter of Craft with Melissa Febos
In this edition of Matter of Craft, Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart, Abandon Me and the recently released collection of essays, Girlhood, chats with us about writing essays on girlhood and the liberation that followed, sharing a life with another writer, taking it slow, her forthcoming craft book and treadmill desks.
Kailey Brennan: How did you know that Girlhood needed to be a collection of essays instead of a memoir like you have published previously?
Melissa Febos: I think the book told me that because I didn't set out to write a book about girlhood. I was just following my own interests and questions. I was probably about three or four essays into the collection when I took a look at what I've been writing and what I wanted to be writing. And it was immediately really clear that they all had this subject matter in common, which was honestly a surprise to me because I was not under the impression that I had more to say about my own girlhood. But as it turns out I did.
KB: Was there one essay or one initial spark that caused this thought process?
MF: Yeah. The germination of it began with "Kettle Holes", which is the first full length essay in the collection. I was actually just home visiting my mom and I walked by my old bus stop and I had this memory of being bullied by a neighbor. I hadn't really thought about it since it had happened. I went back and found my old journal from when I was 11 and I had written about that neighbor. But I had completely re-framed the story which had been a series of months where I was really badly bullied and terrified of going to school in the morning. In my journal, I had written that we had been hanging out and it was really fun and completely papered over the reality with this fantasy in which I wasn't a victim. And I was really chilled and impressed by my own instinct to try to psychically survive the experience.
I decided to write that essay to investigate what it had meant. That was an analogous experience for many of the essays in the collection where I had had these experiences that were pretty ordinary, but also profoundly impactful. And because they aren't part of the greater narrative of trauma in our culture, I had thought it wasn't that big of a deal. I don't need to be dramatic about it. It didn't really affect me that much. And I just sort of stuck with that story until I was in my thirties. Starting with "Kettle Holes," I was like, wait a minute, if this is true of this experience, what else am I harboring in my consciousness that is unresolved to a similar extent. So that was the guiding impulse for a lot of the essays that followed.
KB: That’s interesting because that’s how I felt as the reader. You know, naturally, I’m thinking of my own girlhood as I'm reading about yours, and like you said, I'm very fortunate that nothing “traumatic” has happened to me, but then when you bring up certain things, I was like, wait a minute. Maybe I need to be thinking about this differently.
MF: And I think that's something that I came up against, again and again in the collection. The word trauma gets used so often now. I think as girls if we haven't experienced the more violent examples of traumatic experience or victimization, it doesn't feel right to use the same word to describe those kind of everyday experiences that profoundly change our psyche and our behavior and our relationships, for the rest of our lives sometimes. But we don't have the refined language to name those experiences, so we don't really talk about them. And as a result, we don't come to understand how many other girls have those experiences or really get a chance to look at the ways that they've affected us. Therefore to liberate ourselves from them. And by the end, I think that was the mission of the book was to put words to those things so that we can acknowledge their impact and not carry them around with us in the same way.
KB: Do you think that when you finished, you did feel that sense of liberation?
MF: I did. I felt that at the end of every essay. Some of them, it was like doing a kind of psychic surgery on myself while I was writing. I'm thinking in particular of the cuddle party essay, which I had no idea what was going to become what it was, and my own thinking about the nuances of consent and what's happening beneath the surface, even when we're giving consent to certain forms of touch. That was totally unexpected and really forever altered the way that I'll think about, my bodily sovereignty in social situations.
KB: You have already mentioned two essays but was there one that you held dearer to yourself than others?
MF: I would say that I held onto “Wild America.” I wrote the first draft of that essay years ago and really held onto it and rewrote it and held onto it.
I've written about a lot of personal things, but the troubled relationship that I've had with my own body feels maybe more personal and more vulnerable than anything else. It's interesting because I think that's true for a lot of women, but it's probably also the most shared experience we have of everything I've written about. (Laughs) Negotiating our relationships to our body and the ways that we've treated our body and how we measure it against these like ridiculous external standards and how deeply and painfully we internalize those standards and those ideas and that sense of our own worth. It's so universal or at least national. It feels like a horrible secret. It felt like a horrible secret for me for a really long time. And as much I've written about my body and sexuality, I haven't always gotten right to the core of that. And in that essay I did. So it felt really personal. I could have published it a long time ago and I really held onto it for a long time, because it felt so tender.
KB: As a full time writer and a teacher, I’m curious about your writing routine. Can you take us through a day in the life?
MF: Yeah so it hasn't always been the case, but in the last year I've become an almost daily, early morning writer. The morning has always the best time for me to write, but I would block off two or three days a week where I would keep the whole morning and just have those be my writing mornings. In the past year with the pandemic, I moved to the Midwest and I started a new job and then the news cycle is so intense, and I just thought, life is so consuming and so harrowing right now. I need to carve out a more regular space to engage with my work. I also needed to protect it from email.
I find that if I get up at like 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning, I have about three hours where I haven't spoken to another person, I haven't looked at the internet or my phone or my email and it's so quiet. The world is so quiet. My house is so quiet. My head is so quiet and it's just the best place for me to get in touch with my imagination or my intellect or my own curiosity. It feels like a really capacious pace, both physically and metaphysically to be working in.
So I get up and I get my coffee and I just go straight into my home office and I write morning pages- I journal for about half an hour. Then it depends on what I'm working on, but I often will go back and look at what I was working on the day before and read that. Sometimes I'll start with reading because it turns my creative engine over. Reading a little bit of poetry or a certain kind of work that just gets me fired up about the things that are creatively possible. Then I just work for about three hours, before I have breakfast.
And I find that if I start the day that way it sort of doesn't matter what else happens in the day. There's a part of me that feels grounded and anchored. I've connected with something real. Even in whatever chatter or traffic jam that can happen in my head, if I've done that, I feel like I'm inside myself in an important way. I also work at a treadmill desk, so I walk very slowly the whole time that I'm writing, which sounds crazy (laughs), but I've gotten so used to it.
KB: That’s so cool. I’ve never heard of one of those.
MF: I have some back problems and I switched to a standing desk at the advice of my chiropractor. And then I started to get all of this foot pain from standing all the time. So I graduated to a treadmill desk, which was really weird at first, but I’m completely acclimated to it and now I'm addicted to it. I just walk very, very slowly while I'm typing.
KB: I know your partner Donkia Kelly is also a writer. I was curious how sharing your life and your work with the person that you love aids your writing?
MF: Oh my God., it's the absolute best. I was, rightfully I think, wary of the idea of being with another writer. I get the fantasy of it, but I've always suspected that the reality would be really, really challenging. The brief experiences I've had with it in the past were really untenable. But for some reason, for a lot of reasons actually, our relationship just works. I think part of it is that we write in different genres and we have no aspiration to write in each other's genres. That's really key. She just writes poetry and I just write prose and it will always be that way, I think. I also think that, even more importantly, we have a really similar relationship to our work, which is to say that, while we are ambitious to a certain extent, but the thing that keeps us writing and that matters most to us has nothing to do with our professional aspects of writing or publishing. That we both experienced writing and our writing practice as a process of thinking and integrating experience into ourselves and our lives. And it's the way that we make meaning and make sense of, sometimes the most difficult things, that we encounter. So I think that that relationship really keeps it out of the realm in which it might feel like we were competing for space. We both also love teaching. We're also very different kinds of readers, so I think that makes us really good readers of each other's work. I definitely don't think that it's required that writers be with other writers, but I have learned through our relationship that it can work.
KB: I was also curious if you could share one of your favorite craft related pieces of advice to give to your students?
MF: Honestly, I would say that the best piece of advice that I can give other writers or my students is to just take your time. To take it slow. I was always in a hurry as if there was some kind of finish line or a threshold that once I crossed it - I don't know what I imagined what happened on the other side of it - but I'm pretty sure that the only finish line is death and nothing good has been made better by hurrying toward it for me. I've been vastly rewarded by really taking my time, especially with my own work. Writing well just takes a really long time. It takes a really long time to develop an ear for your own work, to develop a voice, and to develop work that is really considered and creatively complete. That's just an incredibly slow, meticulous process. And I think we get desperate for encouragement along the way, and that is entirely natural. But it's been so important for me to learn to discern between when my work is done and ready to meet the world and when I just need encouragement. And sometimes I think it's easy to confuse those things. So I think that's my best piece of advice is to take your time.
KB: I love that. I think too, I know for myself, you can get kind of caught up in what other people are doing or is this hustle culture that we in America love.
MF: Oh yeah. I felt it like 20 years ago. Now, I think it's so much harder because if we're on social media, we're seeing all of these other people's publications and successes and in a way, it creates this warped perception that people are publishing or becoming bestsellers or winning awards way more frequently than they are. I would really love it if we developed a practice on social media where everyone was constantly posting about their rejections and failures and disappointment because it would give a much more accurate sense of the experiences of writers, you know? But what we're seeing is this very rarefied sort of cold curated presentation of success, underneath which is the whole glacier of work and disappointment and rejection and failure.
KB: Speaking of social media, I saw on Instagram that you are publishing a craft book with Catapult. Can you share anything about that now?
MF: The craft book sort of grew organically out of my own observations and conversations about memoir and personal writing and self-censorship and this internalized set of biases against personal writing. That it’s not as legitimate in literary terms. Or that it's self-absorbed or that writing shouldn't be cathartic in any way. And that there's this false binary between serious intellectual literary work and memoir or personal narrative. I wanted to make a case for the intellectual merit of personal writing and the political power that's inherent in it. And also a way to give permission to anyone who needs it. That this a politically and creatively and aesthetically and intellectually powerful form that we really need.
KB: I have to say when I first discovered your writing as an undergrad - I was reading your essay and Chloe Caldwells - I remember being like, wait, you can write about yourself this way? (Laughs) I had never read anything like it before.
MF: I love that. Chloe was a student of mine.
KB: No way!
MF: Yeah, we worked together on some of the essays in her first collection. I think when I was a student, I didn't have a sense of personal writing either. I thought in order to be taken seriously, I had to write like Hemingway or something. I think to some extent that's changed, but in another way, it really hasn't, you know? I think that part of it is just plain old sexism. That we think of personal writing as women's writing or whatever. I just wanted to make a case for it and against the arguments that people make against it. Because it’s some of my favorite writing and I really think it is the writing that has maybe the most power to change our society.
KB: I’m so excited about it.
MF: Thank you.
KB: My last question for you is what was the last book you read that you would want to recommend?
MF: I just read a debut novel that's coming out later this year called The Nice Box by Eve Gleichman and Laura Blackett. It was just a total delight. It's like this very page turning, very queer, satirical, but full of heart novel that I just devoured in a day.
Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart and two essay collections: Abandon Me and Girlhood. The inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and the recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The BAU Institute, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Foundation, and others; her essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Granta, Sewanee Review, Tin House, The Sun, and The New York Times. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.
