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Episode 213: Tornados, BDSM Potlucks? Welcome to Tomboyland with Melissa Faliveno
123 Plays4 years ago
Melissa Faliveno, author of Tomboyland: Essays (Topple Books, 2020) joins me on the show to talk about softball, vegetarianism, tornados, and why she wrote essays instead of a memoir.
Keep the conversation going on social media @CNFPod.
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Transcript
Introduction and Writing Coaching Services
00:00:01
Speaker
ACNFers, the creative non-fiction podcast brought to you by this guy. That's right. You've heard me say it that if you want to get into better shape, you hire a personal trainer, am I right? Yeah, she knows the basics. You can watch that deadlift form. I spent some time under the bar today and it was not pleasant.
00:00:22
Speaker
I don't have a personal trainer, but anyway, the trainer's mainly there to tell you where to put the tired and to hold yourself accountable on your journey. If I had had the trainer there, I might've been able to squat 250 pounds more than three reps, but instead I kinda
00:00:37
Speaker
Eh, I probably could have got to five or six, but if I had a trainer, you get the point. That's where I come into objectively read your work, find ways to make it stronger and coach you along. Get a few extra reps out of you so you don't feel so shitty.
00:00:53
Speaker
Ear muffs, by the way. Sessions include a personalized questionnaire, several reads with detailed notes, an in-depth critique as well as Skype calls with me, and transcripts of our conversations so you can refer to those at your leisure. Pretty cool, right? So if you're ready to level up, I'd be honored to serve you and your world.
00:01:20
Speaker
Well, all right. How are you? What's going on? This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. You know that. The show where I talk to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara.
Guest Introduction: Melissa Falavino
00:01:32
Speaker
Welcome. Today's guest. Oh, you got to love it. Melissa Falavino, author of the incredible essay collection Tomboy Land. It's published by Topple Books. You're going to want to throw this one on the turntable and turn it up, man.
00:01:48
Speaker
You're gonna want it, you're gonna spin this, you're gonna spin that hot wax. Audio mag update, I'm in the heavy late edits of the essays. Some of the writers are getting back to me, others are not.
00:02:02
Speaker
Yeah, you. What will happen first? The publication of the audio mag as it relates to isolation and social distancing? Or a COVID-19 vaccine? Vegas would say pick them. Who knows? Keep the conversation going on social media at CNF Pod across the mall. The big three.
00:02:20
Speaker
It's a great place to chat and hang, ping me questions, link up to the show. If you're feeling kind, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you do, screenshot it, and I'll coach up a piece of your writing of up to, eh, let's just say 1,500 words, roughly an hour of my time.
00:02:36
Speaker
And we'll get it done. I'll reach out. Sounds good. Also, head over to BrendanOmaro.com for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly newsletter. It's a growing list. It's really fun. Good community. I've been doing it for like six or seven years, by the way. Book recommendations, cool articles, and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. I raffle off the books I get to people who are on the list. Priority to people who open it and read it. And I can tell, thanks to Mailchimp's analytics,
00:03:06
Speaker
free plug. First of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, you can't beat that.
00:03:13
Speaker
So this week, my jealousy and envy hackles were triggered, real, no, we're real triggered, triggered, triggered. Yeah. Like, yeah, I'm stumbling over words. Last week I did it and I was just irritated and I said, this could be the end, the end. And I just said, triggered instead of triggered. Any, this is it. You can't get the words out. What's the, yeah. Anyway.
00:03:42
Speaker
I even googled how to deal with jealousy and envy and Marriott articles came up. Seems like a pretty hot topic. Pretty helpful friend, but I'll leave it at that. Between you and me, I had a lot more I wanted to tell you about jealousy and the two times are really stuck in my craw this week, but I'm not here to bore you with all that. It's the same drama I beat over and over again.
00:04:08
Speaker
I'm tempted to tell you to get it off my chest. I mean, you're the only person I really talk to in a given week. You're the only one who gets it. But I'll spare you this week. Maybe I'll tell you next week. Maybe.
Insights and Anecdotes in Writing
00:04:21
Speaker
That's not really a tease. It comes across as kind of a tease, but I just haven't made up my mind whether I want to share it with you yet.
00:04:29
Speaker
Is that okay? Okay. A few years ago, I heard Jason Siegel, the actor, big, tall, goofy guy, played David Foster Wallace in that movie. He's pretty good in that. Anyway, he was told pretty early in his career that if he wanted to star in movies, he'd have to write his own.
00:04:50
Speaker
Nobody's knocking on somebody of that physical composition, if you will, and saying, I'm going to write movies for you. Brad Pitt, he is not. So that feeling was pretty relevant to me. My writing and my writing style and my writing ability is not in the Brad Pitt vein, if you will, no matter my ideas. People just aren't impressed with what I'm doing or how I'm selling it. How do I know this? Because I get no reply.
00:05:19
Speaker
the greatest rejection of them all. So I'm thinking I've gotta essentially write my own movies, my own script. Ugly people like me have to make their own luck and engender a sense of community and our own little corner of the internet. Am I right? Maybe Melissa Falavino will cheer me on. She's on a rocket ship. And...
00:05:41
Speaker
Think you're really gonna dig our time talking about tornadoes BDSM potlucks. Yeah softball and Finding the groove man. So here we go. Three four Well, so maybe you can speak to the groove and how you get into the flow so you can really you know mine the depths of what you're looking do to get onto the page and
00:06:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think I've ever actually thought about that connection, but it's totally true that when I get into a groove, it's like hitting a groove when you're in the rehearsal space with your band and you're messing around or you're working on a song. Whatever, you're playing music, you're playing your instruments.
00:06:34
Speaker
and then you like hit this groove and something locks and you're like in step with one another it's this magical moment of like I don't know collaboration and and feel and and sense but also like
00:06:51
Speaker
It's like there's something magical happening that I can articulate. And that definitely happens when I write too. And sometimes so much so that I feel myself moving, like I'll move a little bit to the rhythm of my typing. So there's like a physical groove that I get into sometimes. And so that's interesting to me. But for me, getting into that space is,
00:07:20
Speaker
mostly about having access to quiet and ideally being somewhere where there are like a lot of trees around me and a lot of nature. The most productive I've ever been was outside of New York where I've lived for like 11 years.
00:07:41
Speaker
But in the woods of Wisconsin, where I went for six weeks to finish the book, or I've spent a couple winters, you know, just a few days at a time up at the Malay Colony for the Arts, which is just north of New York City, and it's like acres and acres of land.
00:07:59
Speaker
something about like being in that natural space and you know all that quiet allows me to really get into the groove of writing and I can sit down and just like enter a void and lose six hours and then look up and be like whoa
00:08:17
Speaker
What just happened, and that never happens here, if I get an hour in at a time, that's good, or maybe two hours tops, but it's really short bursts, whereas when I have those kinds of spaces, I can really enter.
00:08:35
Speaker
space and not emerge for a while, which is very cool and very rare. Yeah, so how do you tap into that? Like what's the maybe the ritual by which you approach those mornings so you can get into that groove we're talking about?
00:08:53
Speaker
Um, yeah, it's like, you know, when I'm here, when I'm in New York, it's very different from when I'm in, you know, like a quiet natural space. But when I'm here, which is most of the time, um, what I've figured out works for me is to, I have, I'm like such a creature of habit and ritual makes me very happy. And without it, I feel kind of lost. And, um, so I get up, you know, relatively early and I make coffee. I take care of the animals. I've got a cat and a dog. And, um,
Melissa's Writing Routine and Inspiration
00:09:23
Speaker
you know, then I take my first cup of coffee to this chair by the window in my apartment and it's like the one tree that's left outside my apartment is right outside this window and so I sit there and drink my first cup of coffee and read and I'll spend like
00:09:41
Speaker
anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on how, when I get up and what I have to do that day, reading. And it's just, you know, whatever novel I'm reading, whatever essay collection I'm reading or memoir, you know, whatever I happen to be reading, or maybe I'm in between books, I'll just pick up kind of one of those
00:09:59
Speaker
the kinds of books that I return to all the time to sort of get inspiration from. And just spending time with other people's words in that space of quiet and while I'm letting the caffeine do its magic.
00:10:15
Speaker
gets me into a headspace and on the best days it like really compels me to go sit down sooner at my computer and start working. Most days I'm able to do that so that first kind of like piece of mourning to reading and then and then to writing and even if I can only
00:10:34
Speaker
only have time to get an hour in that day, I'm usually able to get into that space. And when I'm anywhere else where I have access to nature, I usually go for a walk. So I'll do the coffee ritual and read, and then I'll go for some sort of walk or hike or something and just sort of
00:10:53
Speaker
pay attention to the trees and pay attention to the wind and try to breathe and walk around and then things start to shake loose in my brain. And by the time I'm done with my walk, I'm ready to face the page.
00:11:06
Speaker
When you're reading those books in the morning and filling the tank with other people's words, how do you keep those words from, or how do you keep yourself from essentially being like a carbon copy of that person? How do your words break through that? Well, you know, that's like a really, it's an interesting question because I think for a long time, like
00:11:31
Speaker
Maybe this was a product of going to an MFA program or something, but I definitely, when I was a younger writer, felt like I was trying to sort of mimic other writers. I've been able to shake loose of that habit
00:11:46
Speaker
Maybe because I read primarily novels and I write primarily nonfiction. Yeah. You know, I read a lot of essay collections, but it's a different kind of reading practice where when I'm reading essays, it's like I'm studying. And when I'm reading novels, I'm escaping into literature, you know. And and so it's like, there's some there's some decompartmentalizing that goes on, I think.
00:12:12
Speaker
So when I read like a novel in the morning, I'm just sort of like enjoying the language and enjoying the story. And if I'm reading essays, I'm paying attention to form and structure and like interesting experimental things that the writer is doing. And it might be the case that like once in a while it'll spark an idea, whatever I'm reading will spark an idea. But I'll just try to sort of write into that idea from a new place, I think.
00:12:42
Speaker
Yeah, I imagine it's a lot like, you know, a comedian will watch a lot of comedy specials, but they're not going to, you know, rip off jokes or even rip off delivery of jokes, but they're gonna be like, oh, okay, there. I see what they're doing there. I'm deconstructing what's going on here. Now I just need to kind of take that inspiration and put it through my filter and see what happens from there.
00:13:07
Speaker
for sure. And I think that I often will respond to a piece of writing. So there's an essay in my book called, Of a Moth, which was written as a response to Virginia Woolf's essay, The Death of a Moth. So I read that and was just fascinated by it and obsessed with it. And I
00:13:28
Speaker
had just happened to be experiencing a moth infestation at the time and so I was kind of obsessed with the ideas the idea of moths and like the sort of connotations of death and darkness that they carry with them and so I read this essay and
00:13:46
Speaker
It informed what I was thinking about, but I actually was able to kind of use that in the essay, like, you know, imagining Virginia Woolf sitting at her desk, like watching a moth die. And that sort of imagining worked its way into my essay too. And then I drew these parallels having watched a moth die. And I was able to sort of make these connections between her experience as she wrote it and mine.
00:14:11
Speaker
I had those moths too growing up. I remember dumping out the honey nut Cheerios and seeing a dried up dead moth in there or a casing of some egg. I was like, ugh, I'm like, oh boy. It's so gross. It's really gross and it's really amazing what they can get into, these sealed thick plastic packaging.
00:14:36
Speaker
How did they get inside? It's a mystery. You mentioned earlier that there are books that you return to, and I always love that idea. I love getting people's their greatest hits of books that they turn to, just like a song you want to play over and over again to just get the beat in. It's just like, okay. What are some of those books that you find yourself returning to to remind yourself how it's done?
00:15:05
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. There are so many, but the ones that I keep on my desk, like on my writing desk, I have just a little stack, which I think of as kind of my inspiration library. Those include, they change sometimes, but right now, always, Rebecca Soldnitz, a field guide to getting lost, is on that stack.
00:15:31
Speaker
Joanne Beards, The Boys of My Youth. Usually some Joan Didion, always some Virginia Woolf. It kind of rotates. Always some James Baldwin. Let's see. These are all so good. Oh. For the past few years, it's been Hany Fabure-Keebs, If They Can't Kill Us, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, which is just like a perfect book to dip into because his pieces are all really short.
00:16:00
Speaker
So you can just like flip it open to any page and read, you know, a short kind of like crystalline what I think of as perfect essay about pop culture that's also told through the lens of the personal and he is just he's a poet and his work is so poetic and so lyrical but
00:16:19
Speaker
I just love it. And it's just one of those books that has been with me for the last, since it came out. I just kind of haven't gotten too far from it wherever I've been. I've taken it with me several places. And then usually there's a book of poetry that I'm, you know, kind of circling around. So Ada Lamone's The Carrying has been really important to me.
00:16:44
Speaker
Oh, Annie Dillard. Annie Dillard, of course. Holy the Firm is a big one for me. Amazing little meditation on the natural world and God. It's just stunning. I've read that a billion times. Nice.
00:17:04
Speaker
I like this idea that you have a pile of inspiration library on your desk. Do you have a workstation that you return to all the time? And if so, what does that look like?
00:17:16
Speaker
I do. I'm lucky enough to have an apartment that I have a railroad apartment in Brooklyn that I share with my partner and it's like, so the railroad, right? It's like four rooms that are all connected. So there are no hallways, no actual like private spaces, but each room has a door. So one of the interior rooms is my office. It's kind of like a mini library slash office.
00:17:45
Speaker
and that's tucked right between the bedroom and the living room and I've got a desk it's right below a tiny window and there are like four bookshelves in there it's a really idyllic little space like it's super cute and small and the the walls are painted this dark red we painted it when we moved in it's got this kind of intense redness to it
00:18:06
Speaker
On first glance, it looks like the most idyllic room. But what makes it super Brooklyn is that my desk is nestled between our dog's crate, which always smells a little like dog, and the cat's litter box, which always smells like cat shit. So we found this box on Etsy that looks like an end table.
00:18:31
Speaker
You know, but it's got a litter box beneath it. So you, you can like kind of hide the fact that it's a litter box and I've got books stacked on it. But like, you know, it's, it is what it is. That's great.
00:18:45
Speaker
Yeah, someday I'll have a desk that is not next to the litter box. I can't wait. Yeah, that'll be, yeah, life goals, right? Yeah, exactly. Too high. Yeah, so at what point do you, are stories and reading and words important to you? And, you know, growing up and then how do you start considering parlaying that into, you know, the art you do on the page?
Melissa's Early Influences and Journey into Essay Writing
00:19:09
Speaker
I think I've been writing and reading for as long as I can remember. I'm sure so many writers say this, but I was a voracious little reader starting at a really young age and I remember like, I don't know, did you have the Book It program?
00:19:25
Speaker
I think so. I think so, yeah. It was like a program that got kids to read books by bribing them with Pizza Hut certificates. Oh, yeah. And I was always at the top of that game. They kept little scores on the classroom wall. You got so many stars for every book you read. And I was just like, I'm going to win this. I want that pizza. So I think that was pretty foundational.
00:19:54
Speaker
So I was always reading and I started writing stories when I was really young too. And actually, interestingly, my mom just found a huge box of journals and stuff that were in the closet of my childhood bedroom and she shipped them to me.
00:20:12
Speaker
And in it, yeah, it was horrifying because I actually started reading the journals and I was like, this is a terrible idea. But then, like buried in this huge stack of journals and diaries were these books that I apparently wrote.
00:20:27
Speaker
when I was really young and um like maybe like five or six and like bound them and there was one that was um basically Ghostbusters fan fiction um
00:20:43
Speaker
It was called Slimer Saves the Day. And then I used to make little, I drew and wrote comic books with a friend of mine and I had this series of stories. Everything I wrote was about an anthropomorphized animal. That was very much my jam when I was a kid.
00:21:01
Speaker
I wrote these stories about a farm cat, like a farm cat hero who solved mysteries or something. And so I don't know. It just like, it was in there. I don't know where it started. I come from a pretty creative family. My mom is, you know, draws and she likes to write too. And a lot of like visual artists on my dad's side of the family. And so there was some creative bug in there.
00:21:30
Speaker
And it started early and then it just kind of followed the path. I, you know, wrote a lot in high school and studied English and creative writing in college. And while I was still in college, I started writing for the Alt Weekly in Madison, Wisconsin. It was a publication called Isthmus, which is still kind of exists online.
00:21:52
Speaker
But I was writing like feature stories about subcultures in Madison. And that was kind of how I started building my life as an essayist. Because I was interested in telling stories about other people, but kind of telling it through the lens of my own, using myself as sort of a narrative vehicle to explore other subcultures and communities. And I think I'm still interested in that kind of work.
00:22:17
Speaker
Yeah, for sure that you can just hearing you say that like that's how you know tomboy land is structured all the essays You're really stem there. They're like you're this conduit who's gonna bring you bring you along Sometimes it's kind of journalistic other times. It's just deeply personal, but it's like you are the vessel for this story
00:22:36
Speaker
Yeah, and that's how I like to look at it. A lot of these essays are deeply personal and a lot of what I write is deeply personal, but I'm much more interested in the stories of other people than I am in my own. And the most fun I have when I write is when I interview other people and then figure out how those people's stories fit into a certain question that I have or a story that I'm trying to tell.
00:23:00
Speaker
and how their experiences interact with or complicate mine and make me think or make me see something differently or maybe help me try to suss out a question or an answer to a question, although this is not a book that offers any answers. Mostly just writing into questions.
00:23:19
Speaker
Coming out with more questions And you know speaking of of soul net you know you pull out an epigraph for the For the beginning of tomboy land that says leave the door open for the unknown the door into the dark That's where the most important things come from where you yourself come came from and where you will go So why did that strike such a chord with you?
00:23:42
Speaker
Well that, well a funny story too, I actually had to change that epigraph for the final version because we couldn't get the rights to it. Oh, okay. Which is a real bummer because that was like my guiding mantra.
00:23:55
Speaker
in writing this book. But I changed it to a Virginia Woolf epigraph, which I also really like, which is not dissimilar in theme. But that's the only quote is from Field Guide to Getting Lost. And the whole premise of that book, which a creative writing teacher gave to me or suggested to me when I was in my graduate program,
00:24:20
Speaker
is all about just like inhabiting, she talks about inhabiting a space of mystery and allowing yourself to be sort of bewildered in a state of mystery. And that, I remember when I read that, it just like blew my whole head open. I was like, writing essays, the whole point is to like write into a question and you know,
00:24:45
Speaker
try something and attempt something, right? And you don't have to, it doesn't have to be a manifesto or you don't have to come out with some sort of argument. But the best essays I read personally are those that the author is allowing themselves to inhabit this mysterious space.
00:25:04
Speaker
And so this idea of like keeping your eyes open to the dark and just sort of being alive in this state of mystery is really what pulled me along. And I had that quote written on a note card that I kept on my desk just to kind of remind myself to
00:25:24
Speaker
to just be present in that state of mystery throughout the writing process and embrace it and not try to fight against it, which I think is our want because we're taught to write an argument
00:25:39
Speaker
like write an argument or have a point or you know like have a plot and I think that it's more like meditation maybe I'm not I don't actually meditate but um I I've tried and failed many times but um but I think that that's the closest I get right like that's the closest I get is like being in that writing zone in that groove and like thinking about a question and just sort of like trying to inhabit that
00:26:07
Speaker
mystery space. And is that how you always start an essay? There's with a question that's kind of just, you know, snap crackle and popping in your brain and delay and do you keep a log of certain questions or you're like, I kind of feel like exploring this. Yeah, sometimes I think that is usually the way that I start. It'll either be like a specific question or actually like a kind of a nebulous question.
00:26:34
Speaker
or more often it'll be like, I feel like several seemingly disparate things are connected and I want to try to find the connection between them. So I'll just like circle around these things and try to pull out the connective tissues. And sometimes I can't, but when I do make those connections, it's like the most thrilling part of the process. Like, yes, this is,
00:27:00
Speaker
This is why these two things live in my brain together. And this is the kind of sense that I'm trying to make of it. And I do keep a little notebook of ideas and questions for sure.
Exploring Themes in Essays: A Discussion
00:27:11
Speaker
And sometimes I just enter them into my little notes app on my phone too, if I don't have a journal nearby.
00:27:16
Speaker
Yeah, speaking of things that on the surface don't really feel like they're together, but clearly you found connective tissue in an exciting way with like, let's just take like meat and potatoes for example, which is just like the BDSM subculture and nourishment and food and food.
00:27:35
Speaker
family on the other side and you're braiding these two things that if we look at them separately like there's no way these two fit together and yet it's one of the best essays in the whole collection and long and you were able to just tie it all together like great stitching. So what were the threads that you were pulling on there and how did you stitch them together? Well first thank you. I think that might be
00:28:02
Speaker
I don't know, I can't really pick a favorite, but I had the most fun writing that essay, I think. But it had an interesting trajectory in that the first draft of that essay, which I wrote many years ago, was all about like my conflicted relationship with eating meat and trying to be a vegetarian.
00:28:23
Speaker
as an adult growing up eating nothing but meat and trying to be a vegetarian as an adult and like succeeding for a while and failing and then like having just like this constant cycle of you know ethically wanting to be one thing and just not being it you know purely
00:28:42
Speaker
And so it was all about the ethics of eating meat. And I brought in a bunch of different texts about vegetarianism and ethical eating. And it was much more research-based. But it was also about class. Growing up in the Midwest, farm family, where we only ate meat and potatoes. And that's what the food I learned to cook. And that's the food I learned to eat.
00:29:08
Speaker
trying to extricate myself from that practice and then constantly, you know, running up against the desire for a burger or like a steak or whatever and just being like having this like very deep visceral craving that I could not ignore and then like eventually buckling and going out to this restaurant in my neighborhood and eating a $15 burger and just being like in Nirvana.
00:29:34
Speaker
And I wrote like a three page, like, it was like mildly pornographic description of a burger. And I brought it to my right this this burger, which is like the best burger I'd ever had. And I brought it to my writing group and they're like their feedback was like,
00:29:51
Speaker
This is so sexual. Like what you're describing is so like bodily and so visceral and it's very like we're like weirdly turned on by it. And so that like opened up this kernel where I was like thinking about food and sex and like the the
00:30:12
Speaker
what we're trying to accomplish when we eat or cook or share a meal with someone and what we're trying to accomplish when we like have sex with people. And then also then from there, there was like this very clear connective thread of violence. So like the meat industry is very violent and eating meat is violent. And you know, my grandparents who grew up on farms slaughtering cows is violent.
00:30:40
Speaker
My mom tells the story of like watching a chicken get its head chopped off and like seeing the body run around and she still eats meat. So that was like this juxtaposition that I was looking at.
00:30:51
Speaker
And anyway, it just all like, so then it was a piece about eating and family and like eating as a way to connect to family and feel like you're home and finding community and finding a sense of belonging. Then it just sort of became clear to me that
00:31:11
Speaker
I found this sense of community and belonging when I was in my early 20s in the BDSM community in Madison and that's where I met a lot of people who had gone to become really good friends. We often did a lot of cooking together and then there was this like crystalline scene where I remember going to a party out in like the country and it was like
00:31:33
Speaker
a play party hosted by like older BDSM practitioners who were like closer to my parents age than my age just like older folks and it was like a play party you know like there's a lot of shit going on and um and but it was also potluck and like we would like get done doing all sorts of you know kind of crazy stuff and then we would gather in the kitchen and like eat
00:32:01
Speaker
meatballs and casseroles and like chocolate chip cookies on sagging paper plates and I just like had that scene in my head and I was like this is perfect like it's just a perfect representation of what this scene was like there you know which is very different from what a BDSM scene might be like in New York for example just like semi-rural Midwesterners
00:32:26
Speaker
eating like having a potluck in a kitchen, you know, and so Yeah, it kind of it had several different stages, but it was pretty thrilling when I was able to make those connections
00:32:38
Speaker
Yeah, and there's a part, too, when you confront your mother about the ethics of eating meat, too. And you were surprised that she said, if I think about it, then I have to look at my whole life. And that's such a poignant thing, because my wife and I are vegan. So we actually have to, when people eat around us, namely her family, it's just like,
00:33:01
Speaker
they're constantly confronted with it because we're, you know, we're there representing something and we don't impose it. It's just the way we jam. But it's just like it forces everyone else to confront that burger isn't just some meat product. That was actually a part of a living, breathing creature. So you do have to, you're confronted with these questions. Right.
00:33:23
Speaker
Yeah, and that moment was like, I think that that's actually when the piece Meat and Potatoes as it exists now started really coming together for me when that actual interaction happened and I was home from New York visiting my parents and my community in Madison and my hometown and we were standing in the kitchen and I was in a period of, you know, much more
00:33:53
Speaker
successful vegetarianism. And I was kind of trying to broach that conversation with my mom.
00:34:01
Speaker
without being judgmental or like making her feel bad or trying to guilt her, but she was making dinner. And I just kind of wanted to try to have this conversation about like, yeah, we grew up eating meat, but we also grew up in this family where like people pay more attention to the wellbeing of animals than they do to the other humans in the family. And like, that's not an exaggeration. Like it's a family that is obsessed with animals and like,
00:34:28
Speaker
loves animals and my mom was like a PETA member for a while and and like volunteers at the Humane Society and like shelters stray cats and feeds birds and like helps out with the trapping neutering program in in their part of the state and and I was just like it's weird that this is true and it's also true that you eat meat and this is just like this
00:34:59
Speaker
juxtaposition that exists in a lot of people, I think. And so I just kind of like was trying to bring that up and say like, you know, how do you reconcile that? And I think I asked her something along those lines and she
00:35:18
Speaker
her knife stopped from whatever she was chopping and she said that. If I have to look at it, I have to look at my whole life. And I was just so struck by the honesty of that statement of admitting that it's easier to not look at things and it's easier not to confront things, especially when you spend your whole life practicing something or it's not even like a thought, it's just that's what you do, you eat meat.
00:35:44
Speaker
And it was just I wanted to really get into that space of conflict and the potential of never reconciling something, you know, like this having this sort of warring, these warring feelings inside of you. And then this like long and storied process of just ignoring the harder thing to look at.
00:36:09
Speaker
And something that struck me about the book, too, is that it's so rooted in your Midwestern upbringing. And that's kind of like this continuity through the whole thing that you're always reflecting back on where you grew up and what those values are like. So how important was it for you, and how were you processing just your upbringing and the Midwestern-ness of these essays?
00:36:37
Speaker
In a sense, I talk about this book, sometimes I refer to it as like my love song to Wisconsin. It's something of an ode, but it's an ode that like carries with it the knowledge of
00:36:53
Speaker
those harder things that we generally don't want to look at and so some of that is like You know the ways that we're taught to not talk about our problems or the ways that we learn to for instance like drink to solve our problems instead of you know going to therapy or whatever and sort of those inconsistencies and and so I carried with me both like
00:37:22
Speaker
my love of this place because i love it and i i still think of it as home and i i miss it all the time and i i've had this very like homesick feeling a lot of the time but when i return to it i can see it more clearly than i could when i lived there the midwest is such a you know it's like this political battleground and it's such a contentious space and its borders are murky and
00:37:48
Speaker
and people talk about it people outside of the midwest talk about it as if it's just this like big amorphous blanket you know um and the people who live inside it aren't real and um and so you know i just i carried all of that with me as i was writing this book and um a lot of it i hope came through as like a deep and lasting love of a place but also
00:38:16
Speaker
the knowledge that the places we come from can really complicate ourselves and our sense of identity and we can be at odds with the place that we come from and love it at the same time.
00:38:32
Speaker
So when you write an essay, let's just take the tornado one, that's batting lead off in this collection. What made you want to write about tornadoes there and how it relates to where you grew up and then of course, slotting it in that spot and to, as we say, to kind of bat lead off in this collection.
00:38:56
Speaker
Yeah, well, what's interesting is when I handed in the final manuscript, it wasn't first. What is now the last essay in the book was first, Driftless. And I sort of conceived of Driftless as being this kind of like scene setter. It's a lot more lyrical than some of the more narrative stuff in the book. So I kind of thought of it as like this introduction.
00:39:20
Speaker
And my editor was like, I think we should start with the finger of God. And I wrote, I resisted that for a long time. I was like, no, no, no, I had this vision of like what, you know, what the order had to be.
00:39:31
Speaker
And she was pushing it and she was basically like, this is your origin story. And it makes so much sense to start here and I realized that she was right. And also that Driftless could serve as this kind of like epilogue, this kind of like lyrical epilogue to the book. It definitely feels like a denouement kind of thing with this little, a very lyrical capstone after reading everything else, yeah.
00:39:58
Speaker
Thanks. Yeah, that's what I was hoping for. But yeah, I mean, I really do think that she was right about this being my origin story because this tornado, this F5 tornado that destroyed this town, eight miles west of my hometown, like defined my childhood. It was this story that loomed so large in our little community. My hometown was about less than 3,000 people when I was growing up.
00:40:27
Speaker
The town that was destroyed was even smaller, it was like 600 people.
Significance of the Tornado Essay
00:40:32
Speaker
And it was just part of our local mythology and we honored the anniversary every year and we knew people who had survived it and people who had lived there and they were people who were involved in our community as well, because they were really sister towns. So we shared co-ops and churches and our high school football team was combined. And I was just sort of obsessed with this idea
00:41:02
Speaker
of an F5 tornado, which was something I had never seen, just this hugely incomprehensibly destructive natural act that could appear out of nowhere, destroy everything, and then go away again. There was very little warning, and there was very little you could do.
00:41:27
Speaker
I knew I wanted to write about the tornado because I wanted to write about the ways that storytelling and mythology can define a town and a community.
00:41:41
Speaker
But I also realized that I wanted to write about religion and faith and God and these things that I grew up with and that I felt like protected me. And so then when I lost that religion, left the church and identify as an atheist now, I was like,
00:42:07
Speaker
what happens when the things that we believe in and that we're counting on to sort of save us and protect us are no longer there. So I wanted to write about faith and myth and the intersection of faith and myth. And so I wrote that essay and the first iteration of it was published in Prairie Schooner in 2018.
00:42:33
Speaker
in a totally different format because then when this book became a thing and I realized I wanted the finger of God to be in it, I realized that I had been telling this story all from like second and third hand accounts. My mom, who told that she wasn't, she sort of saw it in the dark of night, but wasn't there in the town that was destroyed. And so I realized that I wanted to talk to the people who actually had
00:43:04
Speaker
survived the storm. And so I went back to Wisconsin. It was the 35th anniversary of the tornado. And I tracked down a few people who had lived there and had experienced the tornado and survived it. And in one case, who's a woman whose young son had died, you know, I wanted them to tell their stories and again, see how like their stories aligned with the ones that I had been told or how they didn't or how they diverged.
00:43:31
Speaker
So, you know, I hope that it works as a sort of origin story piece. It also kind of, I think, sets the scene for this town where I grew up, the landscape, this sort of rural part of Wisconsin, the farmlands, this like rare geological terrain that I talk about in drift lists.
00:43:54
Speaker
Yeah, and regarding the religious aspect of it and then of course your subsequent departure from the church too, I suspect that the ethos of what I'm about to read kind of stemmed from that and what must be like a really, you know, created a lot of tension just at least internally. You know, you wrote that it turns out that when you spend your life surrounded by homophobia and biphobia, it's pretty easy to turn it on yourself.
00:44:21
Speaker
Question your body your identity your very existence in the world So like what was the the tension in in that that you just they they feel to you know to so eloquently, you know, you know verbalize that
00:44:35
Speaker
Well, it's a total treat to hear that you think it's eloquent because when I was writing it, I was like, I don't know what I'm saying. I don't know. I mean, I was really interested throughout of the things that we internalize.
00:44:55
Speaker
whether that's homophobia or misogyny, this like Midwestern ethos of work and like you know Protestant kind of silence, all of these things that are internalized when you grow up in a place like this
00:45:15
Speaker
You know, because I didn't start confronting that until I was much older and was like, you know, in years of therapy and my therapist was like, you've got some internalized homophobia going on or like you've got a lot of internalized misogyny going on. And I was like, what? But of course I do. And and.
00:45:34
Speaker
So I just wanted to like interrogate that and think about the ways that we internalize those things like misogyny and masculinity and homophobia and what those things mean when you grow up in a place like that and what they can mean later in life and how to reconcile.
00:46:25
Speaker
I dunno if I came up with an answer or not.
00:46:30
Speaker
You know your identity too so it's this constant tension that you're gonna it's just you're living with it every single day. Right yeah and you don't realize it when you're in it mean yeah I think maybe there are some lucky few who are raised in the kinds of household for like.
00:46:49
Speaker
you know, they've got like highly educated intellectual parents who know how to name things like misogyny and patriarchy and can be like, this is what that looks like. But we didn't have that, you know, and like, we never talked about it. And so I didn't even realize that it was happening, even when I was partaking very actively in it.
00:47:11
Speaker
I didn't realize what I was partaking in and it then becomes really complicated when you look at it and you're like oh so much of the way that so much of what informed me was based in these systems
Confronting Internalized Issues and Finding Community
00:47:26
Speaker
Um, and so much of what I still fight to like struggle to to like fight against internally, you know, um And for me that's so much of that is misogyny definitely um You know like growing up as a tomboy, you know, I really idolized boys and I wanted to be a boy and I um, and then later in life, you know, I was
00:47:55
Speaker
doing the thing that girls do which is try to get the attentions of boys and try to be an object of desire because you think that that's that means love or acceptance or goodness that is so totally at odds with how I live my life now but even so there are still these like very deep
00:48:14
Speaker
roots that stay in you and you have to actively fight to rip them up all the time. It's a continual process. Absolutely. And in your essay, Switch Hitter, I enjoyed that quite a bit. As you explain your relationship to specifically softball and how you
00:48:36
Speaker
how you were able to, you know, very competitive. You had the, you know, a really good sort of pre-tryout for University of Wisconsin. And then when you got to the real big one, you choked. And take me to that moment.
00:48:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it was devastating. It was, you know, I trained for many years when I was in high school to play softball. And my plan all along was to play softball at the University of Wisconsin, this D1 program. And I was good, but, you know, not good enough.
00:49:11
Speaker
And, you know, made it to this, this walk-on tryout and really was at the top of my game. You know, as I write in that essay, like I had been doing two day workouts. I was training with the football team. I was on the powerlifting team. I was in the batting cages every day. You know, I lived and breathed fast pitch softball. It was my whole life.
00:49:33
Speaker
And then I got to that tryout and it was just like my body failed me. Like everything just shut down.
00:49:41
Speaker
And it took me a really long time to look at that and think about what happened and why it happened. And was I grateful that it happened or was I still sad that it happened? Did I still think about what life would have been like had I played college sports? And the truth is, the answer is no. I don't feel regret because
00:50:07
Speaker
I stayed at that school and I got a great education and I became a writer, which I think is what I wanted to do. And you can only go so far as a female softball player. You don't feel any regret at all for maybe not transferring and going somewhere else to at least fulfill that part of that was such a big part of you.
00:50:32
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think it's regret at all. I think that I wonder sometimes what my life would have looked like, but I think the reason that I say pretty firmly that I don't feel regret is that had I gone to one of these smaller schools, these D3 schools where I could have played,
00:50:49
Speaker
It's like out in the middle of nowhere. I mean, it's a small city, places like Eau Claire or La Crosse in Wisconsin. But they're really big towns, basically. And they're sports towns. And I think that life would have been an extension of my life in high school and growing up in my small town. Whereas what I had instead was an experience in Madison, which is like this,
00:51:19
Speaker
bastion of of art and culture and creativity and intellectual pursuits and like you know world-class scientific research and I was just surrounded by
00:51:32
Speaker
education and educational resources and thinking people and deeply, deeply creative and deeply brilliant people in a way that I never had been. And those are the people that encouraged me to write and who I still, who are thanked in this book as making this journey possible for me.
00:51:56
Speaker
And I had that sort of, you know, when I was thinking about going to those programs, I think part of the reason I decided to stay at, in Madison was because I knew that it was a better school and that I would get a better education. And, and that I think ultimately is what I wanted more than playing softball. But I definitely think about it. Like what would that have been like, you know?
00:52:21
Speaker
i totally get that i was the kind of the same way like i was i had made actually made my division one team as a kind of recruited walk on uh... i had a bad knee at a torn pcl i've so i'm did the tryout on a torn ligament and i was able to hit and throw and field really wise couldn't run uh... but then i was redshirt and then cut my sophomore year and i could have like i had i could add my choices of division two and three schools also yeah uh... but i didn't transfer to do that i'd
00:52:49
Speaker
And I was just I was kind of burnt out and like really burnt out on it and then like a line that you had written to you said at some point along the way I forgot that I had once loved the game and that that struck me too because I was like at some point I think getting cut was a way of of having permit permission to stop.
00:53:09
Speaker
was like, you don't have to go anymore. They made the decision for you. You don't have to keep going up this ladder or on this treadmill. Permission to quit is kind of how I think about it. And I was like, when you wrote that line too, it's just like, did you get so swept up in constantly trying to get to that higher level that you did forget that this is a game that you once loved? Yeah, totally.
00:53:38
Speaker
Totally, like it became work, you know, it was something that I was working really, really hard to do and I'm sure you had exactly the same experience. It was like, you know, I had to be perfect. It wasn't like I had to be good. I had to be the absolute best and it became, I think problematic and, you know, from everything from like, I don't know, just like,
00:54:06
Speaker
not paying attention to anything else in my life and not eating well, you know, really this like...
00:54:13
Speaker
I was defining my own sense of achievement and accomplishment through the sport. And it just like, yeah, I don't think it had been fun for a while. There were fun aspects, but it certainly, I wasn't playing it for fun, you know? A lot of people play sports for fun. I was playing it because I thought of it as my job, you know? Not that I would have gotten paid to do it, but. Right. But no, I like that idea of like permission.
00:54:43
Speaker
permission to quit or permission to walk away from it. And I think that there's a lot of value in that because what I found in its place was feminism and writing and books and art and people who talked about these things and who taught me how to talk about these things and ask questions about life and creativity and
00:55:13
Speaker
And I also found a community that I don't think I would have had had I gone and played D3 softball at one of these colleges. I would have continued to be a townie, which is what I was. And for the first year, I didn't include this in my essay, but for the first
00:55:32
Speaker
all of my freshman year of college I instead of playing softball because I didn't make it I took a job as like the assistant varsity coach at my high school and I drove back to my hometown every day during softball season which is like a 45 minute drive one way
00:55:52
Speaker
to coach my high school team. And I was just like hanging out at the high school as a freshman in college. And at a certain point, I was like, I got to get out of my hometown, man. I was like walking through the gym one day and strutting around like I would have in high school. And then I was like, wait a minute. I am in college. I left this place and I need to go away now. So that job only lasted a year. I see that.
00:56:21
Speaker
With these essays, they're so personal and of a certain geography also.
Choosing Essays Over Memoir
00:56:31
Speaker
What I wrote down was maybe what was the choice that you made to make it a collection of essays that feel connected, but not a memoir beginning to end, if that makes any sense. What made you want to maybe go the one route versus the other?
00:56:51
Speaker
Um, that's a great question. And I think it's, you know, I don't, I don't think I ever really was interested in writing a memoir because I, like I said before, I'm more interested in other people's stories than I am in mine. I used to write essays that were far less personal. Like this is the most personal stuff I've ever written. And, um, I was always focused on a subject or a person or a community, you know, and, and I was a character, but not the focus. And
00:57:22
Speaker
So while I felt like I had these personal narratives to write, I really wanted to dig into sort of cultural questions and tell the stories of these other people and incorporate reportage and interview and research. And that to me just made sense with the essay form. And really the essay form is the only form I've ever really been passionate about.
00:57:49
Speaker
since I was in college. I just love the essay. I love the possibilities of it. I love the experimentation that's possible, the various forms of reportage and journalism you can bring in. And so I think that's just what I wanted to do. I had these like, you know, pieces that were kind of
00:58:10
Speaker
all sort of connected through a few threads, you know, had a few threads of connection, but we're exploring this like vast spread of topics. So it made sense, and I think that the collection allowed me to go off on tangents and kind of explore these other subjects and veer away from myself and then come back to it and then veer away again.
00:58:35
Speaker
Yeah, the essay collection to me is something that's really growing on me in a way. I've always liked them, but I'm really digging them now and picturing them a whole lot like just a record, like an album from beginning to end. You can listen to any track you want or you can read it beginning to end.
00:58:58
Speaker
mess around with time signatures and style. It can all be bound by a single theme, but each of those tracks or each of those songs can have a different feel, even though it might have a cohesive thing of power or manipulation, but it's still different. You can play whatever track you want. I'm just viewing it like that. It's really cool. It's a great form in and of itself.
00:59:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great way to think about it and like each each piece exists sort of autonomously but like you said you can read it together and it creates an arc you know or they can stand alone and maybe there's one that you return to all the time or maybe there's you know you listen to it front to back maybe it's here the kind of album that you always listen to front to back those rare
00:59:48
Speaker
uh masterpieces that we hold on to you know yeah exactly because there are always those records like i everyone who listens to this show knows i'm just a Metallica junkie and it's just like those those early records you know whether you know the title track is like track two on those things so like when tomboy land was the number two essay on this i'm like oh that's like that rings true like injustice raw master of puppets ride the lightning
01:00:11
Speaker
And it's just like, wow, that's cool. But you also have your table setters that, you know, a lot of bands who want to come out, you know, guns blazing first essay, kind of set the tone. And then, yeah, then there's just a journey you go on. And that's what I really loved about your book, too. It felt like that to me.
01:00:29
Speaker
Thanks. That's awesome. As a musician, I love to hear it. Awesome. Well, I want to be mindful of your time, Melissa. You know, where can people find you online and get more familiar with your work? Yeah, I am online. My website is www.melissafalavino.com.
01:00:50
Speaker
I'm on Twitter at Melissa Falevino and I'm on Instagram at ML Falevino. Fantastic. The book's incredible. I loved it. Aided up. I wish you the best of success with it, Melissa. Thanks for coming on the show and best of luck with the book. Thank you so much for having me. This has been my total pleasure. Thank you so much for reading.
01:01:19
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this podcast, my fellow CNF-er. Always nice to talk to you and have this time together every CNF Friday or whenever you listen to this podcast. It's an on-demand thing, whether it's over coffee or walking the dog or drinking beers. Thanks to Melissa for the time and the work. Grab on tight. That's a superstar, bruh.
01:01:43
Speaker
Tomboy Land is the book. You must be this tall to enter Tomboy Land. Go get it. You might not be able to see my lips move behind my mask, but if you could read my lips, they'd be saying, if you can't do interviews, see ya!
01:02:12
Speaker
you