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Episode 286: Jen Winston on Essay Collection as Memoir
230 Plays3 years ago
Jen Winston is the author behind Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much (Atria).
She's @jenerous on the socials, and you can keep the conversation going @creativenonfictionpodcast on IG and @CNFPod on Twitter.
Sponsor love: West Virg. Wesleyan College's MFA in Creative Writing
Patreon love: patreon.com/cnfpod
Up-to-11 Newsletter and show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Deadline Extension for Audio Magazine
00:00:01
Speaker
Before we dive into this interview, I want to remind you that the submission deadline for issue 3 of the audio magazine has been extended to December 31st. Didn't get nearly enough submissions. And by not nearly enough, I mean I got one.
00:00:23
Speaker
And this call for submissions was out for something like six months, and I got one so anyway theme is heroes Maybe it's just a crappy theme. I don't know Essays must be no more than 2,000 words bear in mind this is an audio essay so pay attention now the words roll out of your mouth
00:00:43
Speaker
Email submission with heroes in the subject line to creative nonfiction podcast at gmail.com and I pay writers too. I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed. Dig it. Was, oh, there's my dog pitter pattering across the floor. Um, but, uh,
Introducing Jen Winston
00:01:09
Speaker
Well, this is the Creative Nonfiction Ponk. It's a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. How's it going? Jen Winston is my guest today. She's the author of greedy notes from a bisexual who wants too much. It's published by Atria. And here's a little ditty from the back of the book.
00:01:32
Speaker
Jen Winston, she they is a writer and creative director living in Brooklyn. Her work bridges the intersection of sex and politics and has been featured by CNN, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and more. Follow Jen on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Please. She's begging you at generous. That is generous with a J. Get it? Who doesn't love a word play?
00:01:58
Speaker
Support for the Creative Nonfiction Podcast is brought to you by West Virginia Wesleyan College's low residency MFA in creative writing. Now in its 10th year, this affordable program boasts a low student to faculty ratio and a strong sense of community. Recent faculty from the CNF division include Brandon Billings Noble, Jeremy Jones, and Sarah Einstein. There's also fiction and poetry tracks with
00:02:23
Speaker
Recent faculty there being Ashley Bryant Phillips and Jacinda Townsend as well as Diane Gilliam and Savannah Sipple. No matter your discipline, if you're looking to up your craft or learn a new one, consider West Virginia Wesleyan right in the heart of Appalachia. How many times have I read this? 20 times? You think I'd be good at it by now? Visit MFA.wvwc.edu for more information and dates of enrollment.
Challenges in Writing 'Greedy'
00:02:53
Speaker
Okay. Jen and I talk about some of the hidden costs that go into writing a book. Some of the costs that she had the shoulder to make sure the thing was what she really wanted. And isn't that what we all want? Even if you have a book deal from a prominent publisher like she does, she had the shoulder, a lot of things that you might not think a writer might have to shoulder.
00:03:13
Speaker
memoir as a radical medium using the pronoun you as an immersive experience using different narrative techniques and forms and getting around the grammar of the grammar confusion of they then pronouns and how she wrote this book with a full-time job great stuff I think you're really gonna love it
00:03:33
Speaker
Oh, and one more thing. On Saturday, November 13th, 7 p.m. Eastern, I'll be interviewing debut author Ricky Tucker about his new book in the category is as part of a CNF pod live event. First ever live event virtual, but live nevertheless.
00:03:56
Speaker
It's for a virtual conference called The Nonfiction Sessions. It's put on by my MFA alma mater, Goucher College. Tickets are 20 bucks and there's going to be a few great items on the docket. There's a conversation taking place with Brian Broome and you can check him out in the C&F Pod Archive. We spoke to him this year about his book Punch. What is it?
00:04:21
Speaker
punch me up to the gods, that's right. My favorite memoir of the year. If you want to be in the audience for this CNF Pod live event with me and Ricky Tucker, the Eventbrite link will be in the show notes and it'll be across my various social media accounts, my favorite. Notably at Creative Nonfiction podcast on Instagram and at CNF Pod on Twitter.
00:04:46
Speaker
Feel good? Feel good about where this is heading? Okay. Here's my conversation with Jen Winston. She, they.
00:05:04
Speaker
that I read that you know you essentially wrote this book in three months so I wanted to maybe you can take us to the to that fury of writing to generate something like this at least in rough draft form in such a fast amount of time
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I would not wish that timeline on my worst enemy. It wasn't really hard.
Manuscript Overhaul
00:05:28
Speaker
But what happened is I got the book deal. I sold my book off of proposal in October of 2020, October 15th. It was the day after my birthday. Great birthday, president.
00:05:40
Speaker
And we were discussing timeline and we were trying to... We decided the book should probably come out around Buy Visibility Day, which is in September. And we discussed whether it should come out in September 2021 or September 2022. Those seemed to be the only options because we weren't sure that
00:06:02
Speaker
people would really care about like there wouldn't be a media moment around bisexuality as much for the rest of the year which is like unfortunately like a sad truth that we were kind of discussing and then we were like these this issue has so much momentum behind it and my editor was like do you think you could do it in like do you think you could get it done by September and I didn't realize
00:06:28
Speaker
Like that that would mean I only had three months to do a first draft. Like I didn't realize the whole work back schedule of the production timeline and I agreed to it. And that was a very rookie debut writer mistake. Um, but I, I was really just w what it meant is that I was like a nightmare throughout the process to my publisher because like they sent back the copy edited manuscript. And that was the first time I'd really gotten like a nice break from like my.
00:06:58
Speaker
Uh, I don't know whatever you would call the second draft. I'm sure that was like my like
00:07:03
Speaker
40th draft really, but when they sent back the copy edit manuscript, I started reading it and I was like, oh my God, this is terrible. And so I just basically rewrote the whole thing. Like I think I looked at track changes during that time and I made 18,000 changes after it had been copy edited. So like that's not recommended to do to your publisher, but I'm so grateful that they were agreed that the
00:07:29
Speaker
changes made it better and made it stronger. Even after first pass, after the advanced reader copy, I made so many changes still. I sent a bunch of changes the day it went to the printer. I was that person, but I'm somehow really happy with the final product. I did not think I would get there for a very long time, but I'm really proud of it.
00:07:57
Speaker
Now, how did you not get too demoralized when you see all those track changes, all the red ink, essentially, that is on your manuscript? When you see that, what's going through your mind and how do you work in the face of that?
00:08:12
Speaker
I mean, well, it was like literally difficult because I had so many track changes that it kept crashing. So that was terrible. But I actually ended up turning it off, like turning off so you could see the couldn't see the red ink. And I think if I had had a longer timeline, I would have done it like I would have printed it out and made my edits that way because it's
00:08:39
Speaker
so much different to engage with your text that way. But I did I did print it out like a few times and it was like $200 each time because I had to go to Kinko's so I mean that's like a cost they don't there are so many costs they don't tell you about you know I I definitely like
00:08:57
Speaker
spent a bunch of money on this on making this book what I wanted it to be. But I think at the end of the day, it just comes down to making sure you're telling your story the way you want to. And so I kind of found that some of that red ink empowering, it's like, oh, good, I righted this wrong. And I would I would rather have done that than not.
Financial Burdens of Publishing
00:09:20
Speaker
Talk a little bit about those costs, given that I think a lot of people, especially when we see a pretty major publisher in Atria, you would think that, at least the layman would probably be like, oh, they've got everything covered. It's all bankrolled by the publisher. But you're paying some things out of pocket, whether that's from Advance or not. But it's still coming out of your bank account. So talk a little bit about those costs.
00:09:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the most major ones were I hired my own publicist because I talked to several authors who had done that in the past and or who had not done that. And they all said they wish they had. And I didn't want to have any regrets. And so I mean, I have a day job that's not writing like I work in marketing by day and I had the day job during the three months that I wrote this book, by the way.
00:10:15
Speaker
It was really hard. But my publicist is like the reason I'm on this podcast. Like my publicist has done a lot. And so I'm really glad I made that decision because even though it was the largest line item I've ever paid for anything, I was like, this book is more important to me than pretty much anything I've ever done. So I want to make sure I'm investing in myself. And I'm glad I did that even though it was
00:10:45
Speaker
really difficult to pull the trigger on that. And then the other cost that was quite expensive that I thought that we would have been able to
00:10:57
Speaker
handle with the publisher is that I got my own cover designer. And that was a choice that I made, honestly, not even knowing that my publisher would allow me to do that. But after I saw the first round of covers, I just wanted to make sure that
00:11:18
Speaker
For me, the cover is so important, especially for a book that talks about bisexuality, which there aren't a lot of comps that talk about it openly that aren't like textbooks. When there is bi representation in books, it's often not called out directly and it's not held up as a bisexual piece of
00:11:42
Speaker
writing. So I think one of the only places that actually like honors that overtly is like the Lambda Literary Awards. They have like a bisexual fiction and nonfiction category. But even a lot of LGBTQ plus
00:11:57
Speaker
organizations don't like, uh, highlight bisexual writing specifically. Um, and so when I was looking for comps, there wasn't really anything and like, I didn't know what it should look like. And I, I, because I've worked in marketing as a creative, so I work with designers all the time, I was like, this is a really complex design challenge to speak about bisexuality, but not do it overtly because the title is so like on the nose and.
00:12:25
Speaker
i ended up like i went down like an instagram spiral of book covers and i started favoriting the ones i liked and i realized that pretty much all of them were designed by rodrigo corral who's like
00:12:41
Speaker
an incredibly talented cover designer and I was like maybe if I DM him he'll respond to me and like give me his rates and he did and we had just a great we had such a great time talking through the subject matter and he asked to read like what I had of the manuscript thus far which was a great I would say a green flag for me I was like oh that's awesome that like he wants to know
00:13:09
Speaker
the book that he's designing for. It seems quite obvious, but the Adria designers had only had the proposal, so they hadn't seen the manuscript yet. I really loved his interpretation of it. He almost made
00:13:27
Speaker
He almost made the cover based around this shirt I was wearing during our zoom call because he said it was very like, like, it just screams my energy for him. And so he said he he wanted to make it match my energy, which I took to be like an incredible compliment. So yeah.
00:13:46
Speaker
And I love that you speak openly about having a full-time day job as you wrote this book and still have that. And a lot of people who listen to this show and there are a lot of writers who are fairly visible out there who it would appear that their books or essays are what's putting food on the table. But the truth is many people are subsidizing their writing habit.
00:14:11
Speaker
even if they're very good at it with a day job and so it's a matter of finding the time in the cracks of your schedule. So maybe you can speak to that and how you are able to do it even if it was an incredibly frenetic experience for you on this first book. Yeah, I mean well part of the reason when I heard the three-month timeline I was like,
00:14:32
Speaker
Okay,
Pressure of Writing Under Deadline
00:14:33
Speaker
I can make that work because realistically, if I had had a year and three months, I probably would have put a lot of it off because that's who I am. And a friend of mine was like, if you don't need a ridiculous deadline to get something done, then maybe you're not a writer.
00:14:50
Speaker
Which I loved that vote of encouragement, but I mean that's obviously if you can get things done on like without deadlines You're a great writer. I think I watched I watched some session like some conversation with Dan Brown and Dan Brown was saying that the difference between
00:15:10
Speaker
like good writers and like not good writers is just writing. And I found that really motivating to be like you have to get it done or else what are you doing? You're talking about it. And so it really did like I have never written as much like as quickly in my life. And I'm the best part about writing a book is how much better of a writer you get at the end because you've put in like
00:15:39
Speaker
However many hours so like every draft I read I was like, oh like I know this now I know this now like in the beginning I worked with an early editor who was was talking with me about building strong characters and like and also like she noticed that a lot of my writing was in passive voice and I was which a lot of it still is because like That's just a habit. I have a really hard time breaking But yeah
00:16:08
Speaker
I mean, don't we all, but it made so much of my writing stronger. So much less of it is in passive voice because of something I learned early in the writing process of this book. That actually weirdly wasn't a critique I'd gotten in a lot of writing workshops or writing classes, but it was something I learned the first month of writing my book, and so I was like, oh shit.
00:16:33
Speaker
So I did like a find and replace for the word is and like I did a, you know, had to end up rewriting a bunch of stuff because of that. And I took out a bunch of adverbs, like all of that stuff. I am definitely not even answering your original question, but here we are. Well, there, you know, there's that that's that is all part of it, which is really
00:16:59
Speaker
What's really great or what the trap can be and what actually was beneficial about you having such a tight deadline is because you go through it and you do get better and you go back and reread and you're like okay I got a little bit better so let me refine a little more and by the time you get to the end of that
00:17:14
Speaker
you get a little bit better and along the way, you might be reading something else and you're like, oh, I kind of want to try that on for size. And all of a sudden you get into this spiral of revision where you just keep going and going and going. Whereas like with that hard deadline that you had is just like, okay, at some point, I just got to submit this and be done with it.
00:17:35
Speaker
Yeah, that I mean, it was helpful to have a pencils down moment. I also something that I did that I don't even know how I made time for this, but I took like, I took a workshop with the shipment company about like experimental structure.
00:17:53
Speaker
And I loved the workshop, like it gave me so many ideas. And so my book uses a lot of different formats in across the essays. And that's one of the reasons because that class really inspired me.
00:18:07
Speaker
Yeah, and books, I like to say are of course made of books and they all have kind of a family tree behind it. So what would you identify as greedy's ancestral lineage? Oh my God, that's such a cool way of thinking of it. I love it. I would say how to write an autobiographical novel by Alexander Chee was like the book that I like.
00:18:31
Speaker
Cradled in my hands like I think I literally slept with it beside me most of the writing process Just because I was so like even it's just a beautiful physical object as well So like it's like two hundred and seventy pages or something. So I was like, that's my goal page count Like I want the French flaps, which I wasn't able to get as a debut other but next time but I
00:18:58
Speaker
just, I don't know, I just held it with me a lot because I think it was a little like a book parent. And then In the Dreamhouse by Carmen Maria Machado really inspired me in terms of like, how to queer the genre of memoir, just because it's the most experimental
00:19:20
Speaker
memoir that I've read and really resonated with, written in a bunch of short vignettes as metaphors that overall and together tell this beautiful story about queer relationships and emotional abuse within those queer relationships.
00:19:38
Speaker
And then I'm looking up at my bookshelf trying to see I have like a bisexual shelf right above me. Oh, of course. The book that like really meant has meant so much to me throughout this process. And in my life is
Hopes for Bisexual Representation
00:19:52
Speaker
it's called by notes for a bisexual revolution by Shiri Eisner. And it's really just a queer theory text. But reading it was the first time I really felt proud to be bisexual. And that was
00:20:08
Speaker
Oh, there's my dog, pitter-pattering across the floor. But yeah, reading Shiri's book is the first time I felt proud to be bisexual. And that was such an amazing experience for me to actually feel proud of this identity that is so often seen as something you can't celebrate for one reason or another.
00:20:31
Speaker
And I just really hope that my book gives other bi people any semblance of that feeling because it was a really magical thing for me. So that those are probably the that's the village that raised greedy.
00:20:48
Speaker
In scrolling your Twitter timeline, it seems very apparent that the book is really hitting the bullseye for a lot of people and speaking for a lot of people who have the same insecurities and feelings that you so wonderfully illustrate in the book and articulate for them. So what does that meant for you that this is actually hitting that nexus of your experience and theirs?
00:21:13
Speaker
I mean, it's so validating when someone tells me that it resonated with them because it tells me that my experiences were worth telling or that these stories were worth telling, which is something that a lot of bi people
00:21:29
Speaker
deal with is because of this idea that there's this pervasive idea that everyone is bisexual. Really when we say that, which a lot of people have said that to me throughout the process of writing this book,
00:21:44
Speaker
what we're saying is that no one is bisexual and that bisexual stories aren't worth talking about and bisexual experience doesn't matter. And so I think that's a big source of my imposter syndrome around like is, am I queer enough? Does this book need to exist? And so whenever anyone like resonates with the book, it just like makes me feel like I did
00:22:07
Speaker
the right thing by telling the story and so that really means so much. But actually, I've gotten a lot of messages from people who it's resonated with and a friend of mine asked if that made me think that maybe everyone was bisexual. And I said, actually, no, it's making me think it's a very unique experience.
00:22:30
Speaker
because it's resonating so specifically with people. I think non-bisexual people enjoy the book, but it's not like saying things that they didn't know they could say out loud kind of thing. Another part of that is the fact that it's so rarely overtly discussed with the bisexual title. If it is, it's like,
00:22:52
Speaker
tucked aside as a chapter or something. But Shiri's work really helped me realize that I could use bisexuality as a lens to look at all these issues I wanted to look at. Because I've had a bunch of these essays starts to them or earlier drafts of them for quite a while. And I haven't really known how they fit together aside from a dating memoir or a political memoir. But I was never really able to fully
00:23:21
Speaker
like marry the two, pun intended, I guess. But, but with bisexuality, I like thinking of it as a lens for really just betraying binaries and like social norms as they have been set for us. It's it's really been it really worked out like I somebody asked me if
00:23:48
Speaker
I was worried that I wouldn't be able to write a whole book about it. And I was like, yeah, I was worried. And then it ended up being so fruitful. Because really, as an idea, it's about questioning everything and checking in with yourself and making sure that you're making the right decisions for yourself, which is, it took me a lot of personal growth to get to that point.
00:24:09
Speaker
Now, as a matter of craft and structure, you know, you could have made a decision to do more of a classic memoir that is, you know, kind of reads like a novel, it's kind of beginning to end, and here's the personal growth, or a more sort of episodic, more linked essay collection, which of course you went with the latter. So what was that decision like, and how did that reinforce the story you wanted to tell?
00:24:33
Speaker
I mean, I love the personal essay as form. So I was, that was definitely what I wanted to do. But I've learned that if you market something as an essay collection, or you tell people it's an essay collection, that they skip around, which is not something that I do when I'm reading essay collections. But my book is really meant to be read in a linear format. Like I reference the character in one chapter, and then I'll reference the character
00:25:00
Speaker
again later, like with less context. So if you read it, if you skip around and read parts of it out of order, you're going to miss things like that. And you're going to miss like character development. That's something I would have done differently because I guess it is a memoir. A memoir in essays is probably the right term. But I really love
00:25:27
Speaker
a standalone personal essay. And so my hope was to have a few of those in there. And I also don't love when memoirs like focus so much on childhood. Most of the time there are obviously exceptions, but
00:25:43
Speaker
My childhood, I had a few formative stories I wanted to tell that related to my queerness and gender roles. I wanted to have those, but I didn't want them to be the first chapter of the book. I felt like there were so many things about
00:26:00
Speaker
bisexuality that was it was necessary to like debunk first. In fact, the thing I changed at that at the copy editing phase was there was a 22 page FAQ about bisexuality that had all the like it had answers to all these different questions of like, including the question of isn't everyone bisexual like it had that answer. But
00:26:22
Speaker
it was so it was reading as like a textbook and not as a memoir and essays. So that was my biggest change I did at that phase was I like worked that information in throughout. And I think that was actually probably the biggest challenge was trying to structure it with all of the social justice related information that I wanted, but also
00:26:48
Speaker
tell a good story. My early editor kept saying, it's like you want to give the broccoli with the cookies type of thing. Yeah. Yeah. In a way, I was just thinking the metaphor of like having to mix the wet and dry ingredients together. It's like, oh,
Enhancing 'Girl Crush' with Medical Motif
00:27:05
Speaker
okay. And this is how we're going to make a good batter. Yes. Spoken like a pet owner. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
00:27:13
Speaker
one of my favorite favorite essays in the collection was the girl crush clinical observations and I loved I loved it it was to me it was kind of heartbreaking and confusing and I just loved the the headspace of it I love middle school as a place to write from and I
00:27:33
Speaker
I just love that essay so much, and I was wondering maybe if you could just talk about the form of that essay, too, which has a clinical detachment embedded into it. So maybe you can speak to how you approach that as a means to tell that particular vignette.
00:27:49
Speaker
I'm really glad you asked about that one because that's another thing I changed at the copy editing phase. It was not in that form whatsoever when it was copy edited. And so I sent it back and my editor was like, I'm sorry, what's this? Like you made this like a medical motif. And I was like, yeah, I don't know. I think it's better. And really I did that because the original form was, I forget what it was even called.
00:28:14
Speaker
But it had basically like paragraphs that were numbered. I think it was sort of like ingredients or there was something there but it wasn't, the concept wasn't like fully developed. And so then when I was looking at the overarching text after I got rid of the FAQ and stuff,
00:28:32
Speaker
The Girl Crush essay was originally written in the second person, in the you format, which is a format that I love because it's so immersive, especially when combined with present tense. I feel like there's nothing that gets me to turn a page faster, and that's another thing that's underscored by Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dreamhouse.
00:28:53
Speaker
I realized that the first chapter, which is basically about a bad interaction with a man, or like a lackluster interaction, that makes me question my queerness. And then the essay where I meet my now partner, Brinley, both of those essays were in the second person. And I wanted the parallel between those two to be more apparent.
00:29:20
Speaker
which meant I needed to get rid of the second person in this girl crush essay. And I was thinking about that experimental form workshop that I had been to, and I realized the core of the essay was about diagnosing whether something is a girl crush or a romantic crush.
00:29:43
Speaker
And that's something that's really hard for all queer people to do, but especially when you're bisexual, you don't have lack of attraction to another gender or the gender that would make you straight, I guess. You don't have that lack of attraction to just inform that, yes, this is in fact romantic on this side of things. And so I really didn't know. Even in hindsight, I'm not really sure.
00:30:13
Speaker
And I mean, I kind of have a gut instinct, but now I do. But it took me a really long time to kind of look back on that and be like, oh, I'm pretty sure that like I was in love with her.
00:30:27
Speaker
Um, but I didn't, because I didn't really register it as that at the time. And so I think it really came from taking that idea of like diagnosis literally, because so much of like coming out is about diagnosing yourself and, uh, naming your identity. And so much of this book is, is about like that practice of engaging with language and language as, as a gatekeeper at times.
00:30:56
Speaker
Have you read or not read or seen the cartoon by Emma Hunsinger how to draw a horse? Oh, it sounds so familiar
00:31:06
Speaker
Yeah, it was a New Yorker cartoon from a year or two ago. And it's a... Oh, yes. Yeah. Right. And I got such how to draw a horse vibes from the Girl Crush essay. Oh, my God. Thank you. Yeah. It just had that really sort of long, that middle school longing of just the confusion that's going on. You're trying to get your footing. You don't know how to
00:31:31
Speaker
say what it is you're feeling or describe how you're feeling. And it was just a swirl of hormones and emotion that I just found really relatable. I'm grateful for you saying that because also my editor didn't love the switch from the you tense to this sort of more detached format. So I'm glad that all of that emotional challenge, I guess, came through.
00:31:59
Speaker
Yeah, and when you brought up the second person as a narrative device, I have that written down too with the Brinley James Ford essay, which is of course your partner. And you've already alluded to it a little bit, but maybe you can speak to it a bit more on a granular level about why
00:32:20
Speaker
you and the second person is such a great device to deploy for a particular essay, depending on whatever your goal is for that piece. Yeah, I mean, I just really, I really just love to read the second person. It feels so immersive to me. It just like puts you in the POV scene. In fact, the first essay I had started it, it was like when the TikTok trend of like
00:32:46
Speaker
POV, you're doing this. You know that meme? POV, you're on a podcast about creative nonfiction. And then you have an image that indicates it. I had originally started the first essay with the words POV. And then I was like, wait, that's not necessary at all. And yeah, so I just really love that format. And it felt very topical at the time. But with the Brinley James Ford essay,
00:33:15
Speaker
I wanted to make it in that format specifically because I think a lot of people don't know what it's like to love
00:33:25
Speaker
and fall in love with a trans non-binary person. I think I feel very privileged that I have had that experience because this relationship has been so rewarding for me in so many ways beyond just gender. But also, I wanted to use the book itself to educate around
00:33:48
Speaker
using they them pronouns and I just I wanted to put the reader in the position of using those falling in love with someone who uses those pronouns as almost like just a subconscious thing just so that it's like you this could happen to you, you know, and this is what it feels like and like it was very important to me to be able to use they them pronouns in a singular sense.
00:34:18
Speaker
throughout the book in some capacity. That was the place to do it, was in this chapter about my partner who exclusively uses those pronouns. My partner looked at the chapter and was very involved in that chapter. They signed a legal release. Oh, wow. All the people whose names I didn't change had to.
00:34:41
Speaker
Um, and that's it. Yeah. Pretty much anyone who's talked about like favorably, I didn't change their name. Um, but yeah.
00:34:52
Speaker
There's a moment in that essay too where you and Brindley are at the pharmacist and they're expected to give their name like birth name and that was such a such a really touching and gutting moment in in that essay that I think is really illustrative of Titanic struggle that must must happen on a daily basis.
00:35:18
Speaker
Yeah, I'm glad that came through because it was really awful and it does happen so much. I mean, literally like just this morning, they were dealing with something related to it.
00:35:30
Speaker
Yeah, I actually like, even when logging onto this podcast program, I tried to type my pronouns and it told me I couldn't use special characters. So, I mean, it's like, it's interesting how often it, that happens. Like I couldn't do a slash or parentheses. So I was like, I'll just tell you. Yeah. I use she, her, they, them pronouns. I don't think I did say it, but yeah, I think you, you know, but.
00:35:58
Speaker
Yeah, I know just from the book, even on the back jacket of the book. It's tricky from a grammar perspective, and I'm glad you talk about it so well, and you even have people quoted talking about it. It's just like, well, as long as you're trying, just try it. The more and more we try and get used to that repetition,
00:36:21
Speaker
the grammar of it will slowly subside and maybe that's only an issue for people who are like kind of grammar people who are writing it just... I identify as a grammar person for sure and so it was difficult for me at first but I think like I was kind of trying to fit the arc of the book so that
00:36:43
Speaker
It was true to my personal story, which is basically that in learning and understanding my bisexuality, it helped me see beyond the boxes that are set out for us to choose from.
00:37:04
Speaker
it made it so much easier for me to have that conversation with myself about gender. Like now, I identify as non-binary and which I try not to like take up too much space with that identity because I have a lot of privilege and I use she her pronouns. Like, you know, that's fine for me just as they them pronouns are also fine for me. But I wanted I wanted to
00:37:32
Speaker
make sure that that I had a piece of writing that just treated they then pronouns as singular like without causing a ruckus of it. I mean, of course, it was like about that a bit. But I wanted to just just do that because I think like it's so important that there are young adult books and other books that use they then pronouns in just treat them as you would like
00:38:02
Speaker
him or her pronouns. It's so critical.
00:38:06
Speaker
There's a moment in the book also which I really loved and related to in the sense that when a relationship turns from, you know, you've got your friend and then they're with a relationship and then all of a sudden it becomes a we thing. And that in essence is like a dagger in that friendship. And I feel that especially because my wife and I, you know, we don't have kids and don't want kids. And so when we've had friends that choose to have children,
00:38:34
Speaker
that with every successive child it becomes further and further distance the relationship and it's just like it really sucks. So when you wrote about that it really spoke to me because that in a way when those things start to happen it becomes just another signifier that this friendship will no longer be what it used to be.
00:38:55
Speaker
Yeah, I wanted to encapsulate like, I was reading a book at the time, which is another book that I recommend called Life Isn't Binary. It's by Meg John Barker and Alex Ian Toffee. And it's kind of a more like social sciences book.
00:39:16
Speaker
But they talk about, first it talks about how bisexuality isn't binary and sexuality itself isn't binary. And there are a lot of non-binary sexualities. But then it also talks about other things that aren't binary, which another one they mentioned is our idea of love. And they talk about how like the ancient Greeks had all these different types of love that they had names for, like
00:39:43
Speaker
I'm not going to, I don't remember them. So it was like eros and amos and all these different words that we see showing up. And some of them referred to more platonic love, which also obviously that's another
00:40:00
Speaker
the thing that came from that time period but some of them referred to more romantic lover or how we now see it and so i want to kind of also go in on the idea that love itself is not binary and highlight this really like powerful friendship that i have had
00:40:15
Speaker
which for queer people often aligns with the idea of chosen family. And so that was another thread I wanted to kind of weave through because for so long, because I was uncertain to claim my own queerness, I was uncertain to claim the title of chosen family for my friends. And also I have a very strong biological family. We have a very good relationship, which is why they're barely in the book.
00:40:45
Speaker
It just didn't occur to me that I had a chosen family as well, but in so many ways I did and do. I wanted to capture that shift because I do think it's super relatable. But also, I was a little shocked at how much of my emotional unavailability
00:41:08
Speaker
was likely due to these very strong relationships I had as friendships. And so I wanted to kind of capture that arc as well. Yeah. And you're very candid about acknowledging your privilege throughout the book. And even in this conversation, you've brought it up a few times. And how did you get to a point in writing this book where you felt like you that you had permission to write it, if that makes any sense?
00:41:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it definitely makes sense.
Acknowledging Privilege and Intersectionality
00:41:38
Speaker
I had written five proposals for different books before this. And I'm glad I didn't publish any of those because they weren't the truest to my experience. And most of them ended with bisexuality. Like most of them were like, guess what? I guess I'm bi. So I don't have to deal with all this nonsense anymore.
00:42:00
Speaker
And or some of them were like more political and about like unlearning almost in like a textbook style. But then I kind of realized that that wasn't my story to tell. And so I think part of what bisexuality did here was it helped me reclaim my own story.
00:42:16
Speaker
And I did a ton of research because I wanted to make sure I spoke to intersectional experiences of bisexuality across race and disability and gender even because there are so few non-binary bisexual people are often overlooked within the queer community, which is already overlooking
00:42:43
Speaker
bisexual people in general. Ultimately, what I found is that there's not very much data about black bisexuals, Asian bisexuals, indigenous bisexuals. There's not a lot of data about any type of intersectional subgroup because there's already a lack of data and information about
00:43:06
Speaker
bisexual people as a larger community. And so I wanted to highlight my privilege just to make sure that it was clear that I was talking from a very privileged perspective because there are so many, or because there are so few accounts of bisexuality across these different intersections of identity. So in the beginning, I also had a prologue that I ended up throwing out that was like,
00:43:35
Speaker
It was basically 10 pages on my whiteness. And my early editor was like, this is really apologizing for you writing the book at all. Not that it's not important to say, but it also is not really what the book itself is about. And so I was like, OK, this makes sense. And I tried to kind of integrate that information throughout.
00:44:02
Speaker
even with like I have a chapter about smoking weed as a child the first time I smoked weed because it felt like a formative gender experience for me and I like realized upon like my third read I was like oh my god I can't just write this chapter and not like
00:44:20
Speaker
acknowledge that weed is like a very racialized topic like oh my god so I like ended up adding in some reflection about like how I absolutely did not realize that as a middle schooler um but I think it's just
00:44:40
Speaker
I was trying to make sure that my book knew its role in the conversation because the worst thing for me would have been if this book was held up somehow as the only bisexual, like, oh, we have this book, this bisexual book, we don't need more. Because I hope that it paves the way for more bisexual stories.
00:45:06
Speaker
And based on the messages I've been getting from people who it resonates with, I think that it might. So that's exciting.
00:45:14
Speaker
well that's great that that uh... there's this there's this idea that i think as as writers in general and certainly you writing on on this topic given that there isn't a whole lot of literature on the topic itself it's that it's incumbent upon us to open open doors for those who are coming behind us and maybe even take the door off the hinges so it's that much easier for people to kind of pass through and it sounds like what you're doing with this book is all you're giving
00:45:42
Speaker
You're lighting the path so other people can have their permission to follow you and then tell their stories and show their truth. I mean, I really hope that that's true because I'm really interested in reading other bisexual experiences. There's no way that mine is the only one, you know?
00:46:07
Speaker
So yeah, I really hope that that's what happens. And for me, it's so important that I've said this a few times, but it's so important that bisexuality is named in those stories. Because for me, I really needed that word to have something to like cling to, that I was like, this is who I am. And there's so much stigma around that word and misconception. And so
00:46:35
Speaker
I really wanted to like destigmatize that word and share everything I'd learned about it so that more stories that use that word could be told.
00:46:45
Speaker
And you write early in the book, too, that when you're kind of looking in the mirror sort of as an anti-peptoc, you're like, and how can you even dream of talking to your parents when you can barely talk to your friends? They know you haven't had many, any queer experiences, which must mean that they think you're a fraud. On second thought, why are you even considering this? You're obviously straight.
00:47:08
Speaker
So yeah, how did you get past this kind of anxiety spiral as you write in that section? It took me so long to get over that. And I think really it was when I formally came out that I was like, I did it as a way to hold myself accountable. Like I posted an Instagram about it and that meant I told my parents and I came out and my coworkers then knew.
00:47:37
Speaker
And with that, I feel like I was really able to step into bisexuality as an identity rather than like a behavior, even in an excerpt that you just read it.
00:47:51
Speaker
I really was concerned that because I hadn't had like this quote unquote proof of my bisexuality, like I hadn't had the queer experiences, that I was not actually bisexual. And so then you're in this like catch 22 of like, how do you get those experiences if you're not actually queer? Or if you don't think that you're queer, how do you get queer sex experiences?
00:48:16
Speaker
Yeah, that was very much a long journey. I was really still thinking about bisexuality as a behavior and I thought that meant I had to behave it in order to
00:48:33
Speaker
be it. And that's part of the reason it's so important for representation of bisexuality to use the word because often in TV and movies we'll see bisexual characters, but we'll only know that they're bisexual because they're hooking up with people of multiple genders. And that reinforces the idea that bisexuality is something you do, not something that you are.
00:49:00
Speaker
I figured because I hadn't done it yet that I wasn't it. And I've read an interview where you said memoir is a radical medium. So in what way is memoir radical to you?
00:49:15
Speaker
Oh, I like that quote. I don't remember saying it, but I like it because I think that it's, I look down upon memoir for quite a while, even though I love to write it and I loved to read it. Like in college, I was friends with a bunch of creative writing English majors and I was
00:49:37
Speaker
like super ashamed that that was my genre because it wasn't you know it wasn't like high tier literary fiction and I don't know it just didn't feel like it was canon for me in college but
00:49:55
Speaker
of course those creative writing majors were like largely white guys and straight white guys and they I I later realized that and I learned through like the work of Gia Tolentino and other people who write nonfiction essays and personal essays that
00:50:16
Speaker
It's really like, it's kind of the tool of oppressed people in a way, the memoir as a genre because sharing those personal experiences is so valuable, especially when those stories aren't the primary stories that are told.
00:50:34
Speaker
in our world. And so it's really been like even like Exo Jane days of I it happened to me, I blank. There were so many essays that like dealt with sex work and dealt with race and dealt with these other issues that aren't often talked about through fiction that I mean, are getting more prominent in fiction, but
00:51:04
Speaker
for a very long time were kept out of the mainstream. And so even just like speaking from experience validates those truths, that's why it's radical. And in Memoir 2, you alluded to this with the recurring characters and how you certainly want people to read this cover to cover instead of jumping around. What became the challenge for you in developing characters throughout the course of this, throughout the course of the linked essays?
00:51:35
Speaker
Hmm. I mean, well, part of the hardest part about writing characters from people in real life is that you either sometimes you describe them too much.
00:51:51
Speaker
It's very easy to lean on physical description, which I had done in a lot of early drafts. But as I learned that readers don't really need too much of that. It's almost better to describe them in other ways and then let your reader fill in the physical picture almost with someone that they know in that sense.
00:52:14
Speaker
I definitely did a lot of that in the beginning. The other thing that's challenging is the fact that there are real people who might read it. So far, I got one call from the woman who's written about in the Bad at Sex essay whose name has changed.
00:52:35
Speaker
she apologized for the way that it was handled, even though she really did nothing wrong. And I was like, honestly, there are a lot of men who should probably apologize to me, but I don't think I'll ever get those calls. But I think that was probably the biggest challenge, was knowing that people might read this. I changed the names of everyone in high school, and I know that
00:53:03
Speaker
Sloan, which is the name of the girl in the girl crush chapter, has had explicitly told me that she wouldn't read the book long before. So I have no idea if she knows what that's about. But I know the other friends in the book
00:53:23
Speaker
Have definitely read it and none of them have reached out to me. So I'm like, oh god, what do you guys think? Um, but yeah, it's it's definitely weird memoir so weird But oh one one funny story is in the chapter. It's called knots With the character Elias. That's a that's a changed name but the
00:53:47
Speaker
the guy who that's actually about like I guess his ears were burning because he like reached out to me randomly while I was writing and He must have known that he was in the book and I was like you're in it Do you want to read it because his essay is obviously like pretty favorable to him? And so then he read it and I let him choose his fake name so that's that's how that worked out but Yeah, it it's been
00:54:15
Speaker
It was dicey like the whole time. Nice. Let me just ask you one more question, Jen. I know you got to get out of here very soon. You write too early on that as it turns out, I'm not straight. I'm not gay. The only thing I am is a threat because now I understand that bisexuality isn't just an identity. It's a lens through which to reimagine our world.
00:54:37
Speaker
So
Bisexuality and Societal Norms
00:54:38
Speaker
in what way has that changed the lens and allowed you to and us really to reimagine our world. Yeah, I think I mean for me realizing that what bisexuality means is.
00:54:56
Speaker
When I realized that bisexuality basically means questioning patriarchy, it means questioning gender norms and gender roles, it means questioning systems of monogamy and just anything that's taken for granted in
00:55:15
Speaker
social systems. That's when I was like, oh wow, this identity is super empowering because in order to get comfortable in your bisexuality, it's not about saying bisexuals aren't confused, which is often said. I don't think we are confused about the fact that we're bi. Most of us realize that, but the idea of being confused refers to
00:55:41
Speaker
do we want to be with men or do we want to be with women? We can't make up our minds. But what Shiri Eisner's work helped me realize is that confusion is actually a superpower because it forces us to question those existing options and be like, is this enough?
00:56:02
Speaker
I think that really helped me tap into bisexuality as a powerful idea. And that's what made it so easy to write a book about.
00:56:16
Speaker
Well, it's an illuminating book and a great book and entertaining, informative. It really checks all the boxes. Thank you. Sure. I just have to thank you for the work, Jen. And of course, thanks for taking the time to talk shop and come on the podcast. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you.
00:56:37
Speaker
Alright, ACNFers, thank you for listening. Thanks to Jen for making the time. Thanks to West Virginia Wesleyan Colleges, MFA, and Creative Writing for the support.
00:56:50
Speaker
always helps.
00:57:11
Speaker
not cheap. Keeps the backlog from getting absorbed and deleted and your dollars go into the pockets of writers as well. Patreon.com slash cnfpod shop around and help support the community and I'm gonna keep trying to come up with some creative ways to make it all the more worthwhile to be a member of that. It's hard to pony up even if two bucks a month when something is
00:57:39
Speaker
Free and will always be free and so it's it's hard to make that sell I get it Lots of podcasts I listen to if they're there if they add patreon things I'd be like, oh do I really want to pay two bucks a month? Should I so I so I understand but if you do I'm trying to come up with ways to where you'd be like, okay, this is I'm paying two bucks a month and I'm getting 20 bucks in value a month. So I
00:58:02
Speaker
Maybe more, who knows? Anyway, this week a hundred pound stray, a female Rottweiler, showed up at my neighbor's house right across the street from somewhere. She had a pink collar and a leash. She got loose or something.
00:58:22
Speaker
He doesn't have dog infrastructure like we do he's got two cats a roommate, you know wife and two little kids, so We had the infrastructure so we took on the beast for a night My neighbor and his eight-year-old daughter got real attached to her in a matter of hours So when we took her for the night is his daughter was like crying her eyes out like we were stealing the dog from her so I was like I
00:58:49
Speaker
Kinda said, it's like, all right, well fine, you'll be able to see her, no don't worry. We're just taking her on, we're not stealing her, we're just taking her to give her some shelter for the night. I should mention that when my neighbor and his daughter got home, well when she got home from school, we were all outside and my neighbor handed this 100 pound dog and leash to his daughter who weighs about 50 pounds.
00:59:19
Speaker
So the dog weighs 100% more than her. Bus pulls away. Apparently this dog likes to chase cars and takes off after the bus. Daughter drops the leash and the dog runs headstrong, headlong toward the back tires of this bus.
00:59:35
Speaker
My heart drops into my stomach and I'm just like, oh shit. The bus slammed on the brakes and disaster was averted. The big girl then dropped in number two on a nearby lawn. At this point, I took stewardship of the beast. She promptly peed twice in the house, once on a rug, once in the hallway without a rug.
00:59:56
Speaker
She was so itchy from stress and no doubt had a skin condition that her owner, wherever this person was, didn't address with the veterinary care she clearly needs. She had no chip, no tags. Thankfully, my neighbor, he has a pretty robust local social media following, so he put it all over social media and called the dog pound and everything.
01:00:24
Speaker
a dog pound of the shelter and a couple of the shelters anyway. So we had her. We took her in. We set up a vet appointment to get her looked at because she definitely needs some allergy meds to the poor thing that's miserable. We were thinking, all right, well, this is just step one of possibly having to adopt this monster.
01:00:47
Speaker
even though she was gaining confidence by the hour and was like in a good way but she was also starting to beat the living shit out of Hank and soon enough thankfully the owner reached out to my neighbor on Wednesday night and within 30 minutes or so she was taken away
01:01:06
Speaker
My neighbor and his daughter were pretty broken up about it. They kind of thought the dog was going to be theirs, I think. Or if my wife and I had to adopt her that they would have visitation rights or something. Daughter broke down crying. Father was really bummed. And in the end, my wife and I were actually relieved. We've been wanting to get Hank a sibling, but not this dog. It wouldn't have worked out.
01:01:32
Speaker
We had a nightmare the night before trying to sleep, and this is stressful for the dog. The dog was so stressed out, panting, snarfing at her skin and her butthole. It was awful. Turns out her name ended up being Lola. Didn't respond to it, but apparently that was her name. She was really sweet, but too much dog. She probably needs to be in a single dog home. Anyway, so that happened this week.
01:02:01
Speaker
Like I said, we're eager to get Hank a sibling at some point because I think it'll be good for him. But if Lolo was that sibling, I think Hank would have been miserable. This was one of the biggest dogs I've ever been around. Sweet. But she was built like, you know, in Dominican Sioux, the defensive lineman for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. If that means anything to you, it just means this girl's thick. All right.
01:02:29
Speaker
But anyway, time to go seeing Evers. Not a whole lot of insight shared there. It was just something that happened in the last few nights. Anyway, stay wild, seeing Evers. And if you can't do, interview, see ya.
01:03:03
Speaker
you