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Episode 106—Rebecca Fish Ewan and 'The Forces of Gravity'
126 Plays7 years ago
“I couldn’t, as an adult, get past the story of how her life ended. And I wanted to tell the story of she lived,” says Rebecca Fish Ewan. And away we go, it’s The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to the best artists about telling true stories. For Episode 106, I welcome Rebecca Fish Ewan, author of By the Forces of Gravity (Books by Hippocampus 2018), a love story between friends that ends in tragedy told through free-verse poetry and cartoons. It’s a great reading experience and a wonderfully told story of adolescence in the 1970s Berkley. You can buy the book by visiting books.hippocampusmagazine.com or via Amazon. In this episode we dig into how Rebecca chose to write the story in the way she did The power of community Writing from the POV of her 12-year-old-self And dealing with self doubt Rebecca is @rfishewan on Instagram, her preferred social network and is @rfishewan on Facebook. Go check her out. If you’re not subscribed, be sure to hit up Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, and Stitcher so you get a fresh delivery every Friday. Share this with people you think will dig it. Ad let me know what you think of it, what you got out of it. I’m @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod on Twitter and @CNFPodcast on Facebook. Pick a network, any network and let’s connect. If you dig the show and you have a minute, please leave a review over on Apple Podcasts. If you show me evidence of your review, I will edit a piece of your writing of up to 2,000 word. Also, show notes and the like are at brendanomeara.com. While there you can sign up for my monthly reading list newsletter. Four books and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Once a month. No spam. You can’t beat that.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Message
00:00:00
Speaker
The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by HippoCamp 2018. Now in its fourth year, HippoCamp is a three-day Pennsylvania writing conference that features 50-plus speakers, engaging sessions and four tracks, interactive all-conference panels, author and attendee readings, social activities, networking ops,
00:00:24
Speaker
and optional intimate pre-conference workshops. The conference takes place in lovely Lancaster from August 24th through August 26th. Past keynotes have been Lee Gookind, Mary Carr, Denty W. Moore, and Jane Friedman. All have been past guests on the podcast.
00:00:45
Speaker
This year, Abigail Thomas will be the featured speaker. Visit hippocampusmagazine.com and click the conference tab in the toolbar. And if you enter the keyword CNF pod, at checkout you will receive a $50 discount.
00:01:02
Speaker
This offer is only good through August 10th, or until all those tickets are sold, there are a limited number, so act now, like right now. The registration is $429, otherwise, $379 with the discount, through August 10th, then goes up to $449 on site. So if you sign up through the portal before the conference starts, you're actually saving $70.
00:01:28
Speaker
Hippo Camp 2018, create, share, live. Whoo, you ready? Let's hit it. And away we go. It's a creative nonfiction podcast, people. It's the
Creative Nonfiction Podcast Introduction
00:01:46
Speaker
show where I speak to the best artists about telling true stories. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara, hey. For episode 106,
Introducing Rebecca Fish Ewen and Her Book
00:01:56
Speaker
I welcome Rebecca Fish Ewen, author of By the Forces of Gravity, books by Hippocampus 2018, a love story between friends that ends in tragedy told through free verse poetry and cartoons. It's a great reading experience and a wonderfully told story of adolescence in the 1970s Berkeley scene.
00:02:21
Speaker
You can buy the book by visiting books.hippacampusmagazine.com or via Amazon.
00:02:28
Speaker
In this
Rebecca's Writing Style and Challenges
00:02:29
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episode, we dig into how Rebecca chose to write the story in the way she did, the power of community, writing from the point of view of her 12-year-old self, and dealing with self-doubts. Haven't been there before. Rebecca is at rfishuwin, so that's R-F-I-S-H-E-W-A-N on Instagram, her preferred social network.
00:02:56
Speaker
and is the same handle on Facebook. Go check her out.
00:03:02
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If you're not subscribed to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast of this very show, be sure to hit up Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, and Stitcher so you get a fresh delivery every Friday. Share this with the people you think that'll dig it, and let me know what you think of it, what you got out of it. I'm at Brendan O'Mara, and at CNF Pod on Twitter, and at CNF Podcasts on Facebook, picking up any of it. And let's connect. Now, it's time for the show.
00:03:35
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What's that process like of going back and forth with an editor over Skype to hone a manuscript?
Collaboration with Editor Donna
00:03:46
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It's been pretty interesting. Don is super organized. You probably have noticed this. Yeah, for sure. Which I greatly appreciate. She set up a whole bunch of Google Docs so that
00:04:05
Speaker
Like when I had my drawings done and organized, I just uploaded them into Google, into the Google Doc, and then she could share those with the book designer, and there was the book cover designer as well. So everything was done, all of the transactions, other than the first time I met her, which was at a conference in Reykjavik, which was awesome. Wow.
00:04:35
Speaker
Like that was right when we had the conversation about whether or not I would want to have my book published through hippocampus. And so that was really cool to meet her. And so having Skype was nice to be able to check in every once in a while face to face. Yeah, and we made a book together.
00:05:02
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Yeah, when you guys were at that conference in Iceland, what was the conversations you were having? This is your their first book. Oh, Donna's first book through her imprint. So
Finding a Publisher for an Unusual Book Format
00:05:15
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how did the conversation come about? And what were those early visions and discussions like? I had actually the very first time I saw her or heard her speak, I was looking for someone that I could send a small press that I could send my book to, or
00:05:32
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Send a query letter to to get a published. It's really it's a very kind of odd form because it's it's a story told in cartoons and poetry. Yeah, and Kind of unusual and so a lot of the small presses would say, you know, they just have on their website No poetry, you know because they just take those submissions and so or Publishers of graphic like
00:06:02
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comic graphic novels are pretty exclusive to graphic novels, and mine is a hybrid. And I found one night, I was like midnight, you know, searching the internet, I found a YouTube video of her announcing that they're going to start, hippocampus was going to start a book imprint. And it's all based, and hippocampus is all based on memory, writing from memory. And so I was like, wow, they'll be open minded. That's what I was
00:06:31
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that was the feeling I got one from just listening to her talk is that they'll be open to a really odd little form that I had created to tell the story. And so, you know, when we finally met and it was just sort of a coincidence, I was going to nonfiction now in Reykjavik and she had also registered to go and I was on a panel there and we didn't know each other was going until right before we
00:07:01
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We laughed and we arranged to meet for the first time at the conference. And the form of the book, as you're saying, it's half prose poem and half cartoons. And so how did you come to the form? How did you come to want to tell this particular story this particular way?
Writing from a 12-Year-Old's Perspective
00:07:21
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Through struggle. I tried to do it in the, what I kind of consider the sort of straight
00:07:31
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narrative form of memoir where you're an adult remembering a period of your life and you're crafting it through your retrospect that you you craft the story and you tell the story that way and that works with some with some stories but it just was not working for me because of it's 1970s I was 12 years old it was in Berkeley and it was just a
00:07:58
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a time that's hard to reflect on without focusing on the copious amounts of drugs. People were using this whole free love sex that was fairly rampant and without it sounding judgmental or almost caricature-ish. If you see TV or movies about the 70s, everything seems almost cartoonish in the way that it's described.
00:08:27
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And it just wasn't working. And so then I tried to fictionalize it. And I made these stories, which I love this little book series that I came up with. I wrote all these manuscripts that are yet to be published, but I learned a lot about storytelling, about the use of dialogue, about just crafting a story through this. But it didn't end up telling the story, because what I discovered about
00:08:56
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fiction is you create characters and then the characters have a mind of their own and they go and do stuff. You know, they just do other things. And so I created all these characters that told a different story. They told the story about what they were doing. And I know there's, I just read about this genre called, it's like auto fiction or something that's supposed to be basically
00:09:26
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I don't know, it feels like kind of like hidden memoir where you fictionalize memoir. But I mean, I think maybe all fiction is kind of that way somewhat from your human experience. So some of the emotional parts of the story were there, but it was just so different that it wasn't telling the story. And so I remember my son was about 12 at the time, which was the age I was when this story begins.
00:09:54
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And he was sitting on the couch and he was very tiny when he was 12. He's big, gangly, almost 17-year-old teenager now, but he was really small. And I realized that that was the person who needed to tell the story, this 12-year-old, this tiny kind of waif-like hippie girl who was living in, you know, who moved into a commune that was just for kids and had this experience and had this friend and made this friendship
00:10:25
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that was like no other friendship I've ever had. And she doesn't know her best friend is going to die. She doesn't know that. How can I know that? And that was the important thing because as a grownup, I couldn't forget that fact. I mean, it's a devastating fact to have your best friend die. And so I couldn't, as an adult, get past the story of how her life ended.
00:10:53
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And I wanted to tell the story of how her life was lived. And so I realized I have to tell it in first person, present. And that's where the poetry came in because I was 12. I didn't know anything about grammar. I dropped out of elementary school. And so it just came out. So I don't actually call it prose poetry as much. It's narrative poetry.
00:11:20
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In prose, they have sentences and paragraphs and pamas. I don't have any of those things. And so free verse is more how I think about it. It allowed for a very quick pace. It allowed for a lot of the fun things that happened with language in poetry that I think is closer to spoken word that was much truer to her voice.
00:11:46
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The poetry, the way you're able to digest that allows you to then enjoy the images as well. Like you don't get exhausted reading the poetry part so much so that you're not able to ingest and digest the accompanying cartoon part as well.
Integrating Drawings into the Narrative
00:12:06
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If it were just prose, it might get exhausting to have to read that and then see the picture. Too many words. Yeah. That's exactly.
00:12:15
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Then that was exactly what happened. And so I, I had these poems and once I found that voice, the poems were just like, I had scraps of paper. They were just kind of spilling out of me. And the story just, uh, it came much easier, but not until I had struggled trying to make it in fiction, trying to tell, even years of trying to tell the story in a way that wasn't working before. Once it was working, it came very quickly.
00:12:43
Speaker
And I printed all of those and I had them in a binder and I was, I started drawing on them because I was trying to revise the words. I was trying to create sort of the context and the images. I was trying to see the scenes and I just started drawing on the drafts and eventually
00:13:08
Speaker
they became an important part of the actual storytelling. I was like, well, this is a way I can show things to people that maybe I don't even know. So sometimes there's a couple of places where the drawings reveal things that I can't see as the character. But they also, sometimes they do offer kind of a different perspective, and sometimes they're just
00:13:37
Speaker
to add a little levity when things are particularly not funny. Like in the chapter on dark matter, a lot of the things that were happening to me, it's not funny, it's not being sexually abused as a child, it's not funny. But it wasn't 100% just this dark and terrible moment.
00:14:05
Speaker
And so I tried to – and plus when someone's reading about it, that's a hard thing to read about. And I wanted to kind of have the – sometimes I think the cartoons offer a way to buoy people up as they're moving through some of the moments. And what was it in your earliest recollection about Luna that you were so drawn to?
00:14:31
Speaker
I mean, I think it really was like the second I met her, she was just this shining light of a person, which is so different from me. I think she was so opposite who I was, but she wanted to talk to me. She hung out with me. We became like inseparable best friends and it was so, it was just to be near her and she was always positive about everything.
00:15:01
Speaker
And she always had this like really profound explanation for everything. It was like making reality magical. I've said that before that like, in terms of the book, sometimes it's a little bit like magical realism, but it was like just realism for her. Just everything had the potential to be magic. And it was kind of intoxicating to be around her intimidating, you know, and complex. And I wasn't really
00:15:30
Speaker
you know, that good at it. I don't know that I was the best friend, but she was awesome. It was a wonderful time for me, but then it ended so darkly that I just packed it up in a box and stuck it into the dark recesses of my mind and, you know, my heart. And I think I needed a lot of time to pass before I could turn it into something that I could share with people.
00:15:59
Speaker
Because that's a question that comes up a lot with memoirs, like, why do you have to tell that story? That's a terrible story. But I don't see it that way. I see it as an opportunity to tell a different story. If you Google her name and you look for any information about her, it's usually just a couple of sentences. And most of them say she was the 15-year-old
00:16:28
Speaker
daughter of Robert Anton Wilson who was murdered. And that's a terrible legacy to leave when you were an amazing person, when you were alive. And that was the main reason that I wanted to share the story. I mean, I wanted to tell the story and kind of work it through for myself, but I wanted to share the story because I think people should be remembered how they lived their lives and not how they left it.
00:16:56
Speaker
And given that this took place decades ago, was this always something that you wanted to process through a story of this nature? Or how long did you feel like you had to wait in order for you to be able to process it and tell the story adequately?
00:17:19
Speaker
I think sometimes you don't really know when the good time is. You just keep trying and you're like, well, that's not working or it's, I'm not ready. I mean, in my twenties, it would have been a terrible story because I would have just focused on the end and it would have been dark. And it was also going to be about this terrible thing that happened to me. And it's like the terrible thing didn't happen to me. The terrible thing happened to Luna. And I was, you know, witness to that moment and it was devastating, but I'm alive being able to get
00:17:49
Speaker
past that. And then I also think I hung on to a lot of stuff. I still have the poetry book I made for her. I have my high school notes. Some of the poems actually are verbatim taken from my high school notes. And so I squirreled that stuff away, not really knowing why, but it was sort of like remnants of a memory of a time in the person that was no longer there.
00:18:18
Speaker
And so I kept that stuff. And so I had it to refer to. Most of the drawings are, a lot of the drawings are of actual things I'm looking at, like the last gift she gave me, those kinds of things are all things I have in my closet, in my writing room. And so I had those things for a reason, but I just really didn't know exactly what it was. And then the other thing is, is technology. I could Google.
00:18:48
Speaker
all of these things that were really important, like the weather on any day in Berkeley. I don't know if people know this, but all you have to do is Google weather history, and you can find out what the visibility was on any given day. When it snowed, who was playing at Winterland, what songs they played, every single concert. There's people out there that put this stuff on the internet.
00:19:14
Speaker
I don't know why they do, but I love them for it and it was really helpful because I would have memories of, I know I listened to this song and then I could just find out when it was released and then I would write that down on my calendar. I would know I went to a certain concert or a certain place or that I played in the snow and then I could find that information, those facts of those things I found on the internet and I would put them in a calendar and I kind of
00:19:44
Speaker
Created anchors for the story that were based on Reality so yeah And do you recall a particular? moment that crystallized in you that you were ready to take on the story and and and tell it in the way that you wanted to one of the things I still have the query letter that I wrote to Donna and I think it's just
00:20:12
Speaker
I mean, that's one of those kind of perfect storm moments. I mean, there was a lot of preparation and thinking and planning that went into her deciding to start publishing books, years of preparation for that. And there was also years of me writing really terrible query letters and not really know what I was doing. In preparation,
00:20:40
Speaker
for writing the letter to her because I've kept that and that's a pretty good query letter. I finally figured out how to say exactly what I wanted to say about why this is an important story and it's worthy of publication. So there was sort of that moment when I could finally craft the query letter right. I think that
00:21:07
Speaker
In terms of thinking of it as like seriously thinking of it as a book, I mean, I, I workshopped it through, um, uh, literary kitchen with Ariel Gore. And she has a summer manuscript workshop and I workshopped the manuscript after I had a full draft with the cartoons and the, I had the form figured out. And,
The Importance of Literary Community
00:21:28
Speaker
and so that was, I mean, I was really thinking of it as something that I definitely wanted to publish.
00:21:35
Speaker
Another moment I had gone to a poets and writers conference. They had poets and writers live and they would go to a city and they went to San Francisco and they had this one day conference and the theme was inspiration. And one of the, actually most of the speakers, there was sort of this mantra that, I mean, I don't think they like got together and said, hey, let's tell them,
00:22:04
Speaker
You need to be a part of an active part of a literary community. Hey, let's tell them, you know, these things. It's just a truth that they all, I heard that day that, you know, you don't go to a conference because you want to find an agent and get your thing published that it's not all about you and your book. It's about building a community and being a part of that community.
00:22:26
Speaker
And if you open yourself up, and this is exactly the kind of stuff when it used to tell me all the time about, you know, karma and good vibes and all of this stuff that if you, if you, you know, it's like improv, you know, if you just always walk in and say, yes, yeah, that, that good things will happen. And that is precisely what happened. It was after that conference I was, I started, um, I was getting more, I started making zines and,
00:22:54
Speaker
getting more involved with the zine community in Phoenix and just trying to be a contribution to the literary community rather than being me alone in my room writing my book and wondering why nobody appreciates it. Yeah, that's, that's so important what you're saying right now. And it really worked. I mean, it's like that whole positive karma thing and then, you know, and then Donna wanted to
00:23:23
Speaker
published the book. I was like over the moon. It was fantastic. And it's been perfect because it's a new thing. They had the anthology so that she could kind of, in a controlled way, figure out how to make books and how are books different than an online magazine. But like working through, working with an author and the contract and all of these things, it was, there's so much transparency for me. It was really, it was really awesome because I,
00:23:52
Speaker
I like that I had, um, she made the book precisely as I imagined it and then better. And what was the difficulty in telling the story through your 12, you know, to 14 ish year, you know, 12 year old eyes and not imbue it with the decades of experience that came after? Like, how did you stay really grounded in that time?
00:24:21
Speaker
Well, there's probably the previous struggle of having tried it and knowing that that voice wasn't going to work. And I think the form, the maturity and experience that I have, because I've been through an MFA program in creative writing and poetry. I have a lot of training in, in, in writing. So I was able to, uh,
00:24:50
Speaker
tinker, I guess, as a grown up with the words, with the language so that I wouldn't interfere so much with the action, I guess. So I could be there thinking about, oh, well, should this word be here? Where's the line break going to go? And what's the flow of all of this? These are all things that a mature mind
00:25:17
Speaker
likes to think about and do. So I wouldn't interfere so much in the action of the story. In that way, I tried to just tell it as I remembered it. Except the part is that I was relatively quiet. And so a lot of the story is what was going on in my head while these things are happening. And that's part of
00:25:44
Speaker
probably the newer part that anybody that went through that with me didn't see as much. And I tried not to be too smart about the personal interactions that I was having.
00:26:00
Speaker
As you were crafting this book and you found the way you wanted to tell it, that finally crystallized. It's going to be free verse with these cartoons and you've got the playbook with you. What was your routine around that and how were you setting up your days and checking in with yourself so you could have a very productive day with the generative phase of this book?
00:26:29
Speaker
That's also a very good question because there's that sort of idea that, you know, to be a, to be a real writer, you have to have, you have to have a six hour chunk of time, or you have to do three hours of writing every day, um, at the same time or some kind of structure. But, um, I'm a mom, I have a full time job as a professor. Um, I have a house and, you know, I have stuff going on and I had,
00:26:59
Speaker
cobbled together, especially when my kids were young, when they're really little, you know, they just have needs and they're immediate and you need, you know, your, their parent, you can't just go, no, I'm having my literary hours now go feed your, I can't do that. Um, and so I, I was already practiced at, I keep my notebook with me wherever I go. And I always have something to write with.
00:27:27
Speaker
And that if a poem came to me while I was driving or parked at the Safeway or whatever, wherever it came, I would write it down. And so I had already cultivated, and maybe that's why I chose poetry rather than prose, because a poem can sometimes, in its rough draft form, spill out very quickly. But I don't know if a lot of people, if you don't write poetry,
00:27:57
Speaker
think that that's it. That's all you do. There's a lot, a lot of poems are multiple, multiple revisions for the really, you know, hard, harder work of poetry, I think is in the, in the revisions. And so I had a print copy of it that I would just constantly, I read it out loud. I don't know how many times, many, many times I read everything I write pretty much out loud before just
00:28:25
Speaker
to get the cadence of it, to get the voice right, to get the words right. If I'm stumbling over words, maybe those aren't the right words. That just became part of my routine that I would, whenever I had moments alone. And then I did finally, we bought a bigger house and I got a writing room. And I have a drawing table. So that was part of the ability to be able to draw those cartoons.
00:28:54
Speaker
is that I had a light table. I had a space to do that. And are you moving between the two with a predictability, like you would have the have your poem and like, all right, now it's time to draw? Or would you sometimes go from you would draw the cartoon and then draw the write the poem to reflect it? Well, by the time I had a fairly complete first draft of all of the poems, I had
00:29:24
Speaker
maybe a third of the cartoons that I had just sort of scribbled on the work or started drawing in my notebook. And so then once I cobbled it together and I realized it needs to be a paired relationship, there'd be gaps in the drawings. And so then once it gets near to the final revisions, I can have kind of a to-do list of I need
00:29:53
Speaker
And it was the same way with my first book, The Land Between. I had the same thing where I just, you know, once I had a draft, I would realize, oh, there's a gap of information. I gotta go get that information. Oh, I need to, now when I go to the Owens Valley, I need to go and take a photograph of this barn. You know, I had kind of very specific instructions and it was very much that way near the end.
00:30:21
Speaker
I would realize I need this kind of drawing to go with these until I had one for every page.
00:30:33
Speaker
Yeah, and crafting any kind of memoir oftentimes is a big, is a big challenge, especially when there's, you know, a significant loss in the book. And I wonder how you how did you work yourself through the, you know, the drafts of this book, you know, given how, given how it ends, and how was that for you? And how did you work your way through it? That was probably the
00:31:01
Speaker
The hardest part are the part I call the dark pages. And it's the last few chapters, which are really fast. There's not that many words to them. For those dark pages, I actually did those with both hands. And I had to just remember how horrible. I mean, it was really hard and just scribbled. And then the controlled
00:31:31
Speaker
part of me as an adult creating something would be I would stop and I would scan what I had scribbled and then I would go back and keep scribbling it because it was getting darker and darker and I wanted it to I wanted to present it in the opposite so which is how it kind of felt where it was like my whole entire world went black and dark and slowly over time
00:31:59
Speaker
light starts to kind of creep in. I don't think you get over really, really intense loss, but I do think you have the capacity to let light back into your life. And so that's what those pages are doing. They're getting a little bit lighter as time goes on. And then the other thing that I did is that's the area where I rely the most on poems constructed from my notebooks in high school.
00:32:30
Speaker
because I wanted to offer to people precisely how I was kind of seeing the world, and they're really fragmented, which I think is how you also experience really traumatic, when your whole body is traumatized, your mind is traumatized, your brain is not remembering things in the same way that it does just in a normal day, where it's kind of squirreling away all this information. And so it's very fragmented, and I wanted to offer it that way.
00:32:58
Speaker
And I had to kind of slow down the pace in some of the places. So I have these little drawings of just things that I'm seeing, kind of object focused. So there's a lot of controlled construction in those last few pages because I was thinking about the reader and how to, you know, you can't just throw that at someone and not kind of try and carry them through it in a gentler way.
00:33:28
Speaker
In thinking about the reader, how do you create in the face of an end product or an end user and not be stifled by that? I think that that aha moment where I was thinking about not so much focused on, it's me and my story, me and my book, but a literary community or just even an artistic community, a community of people that
00:33:59
Speaker
loved creative work that I thought of them and tried to think of how to tell this story in a way that was as true to the experience. I mean, that's the idea of it. I think in fiction, it's like that. I think any storytelling is like that. You're trying to craft something so that while someone is sitting in their room alone or they're sitting outside on the deck or wherever they are reading your book,
00:34:29
Speaker
they're experiencing your life for a moment, how you experienced it. That's what you're going for. And however you can do that, you know, with the skills that you have, I can draw and I can write poetry. Part of why it ended up that way, because that's where I have some, some skill. I'm hoping that when someone reads it,
00:34:54
Speaker
Clearly, it's a sad story. It has some dark moments in it, but it also was an adventure. Being Luna's friend was an amazing adventure. Being in the 70s in Berkeley was an adventure. It was always fun, but we got to go on road trips. We drove to Fresno to become fruit pickers during the fruit grape strike, which is just a ridiculous thing to do.
00:35:21
Speaker
My dad would have never approved of that because he wouldn't let me eat grapes during the strike. It was just this silly thing, but we did it. And I have the memory of it and I wanted to share that with people. Um, and so it kind of actually wasn't stifling. It was, it was the enjoyable part of it is sort of trying to imagine, okay, then they're going to go, you know, have this part. Oh, it's going to get dark here. Let's have some levity or, you know,
00:35:48
Speaker
Who did you turn to for models and inspiration in terms of your drawing and even in your writing? Who were some of those key influences for you? Definitely for writing, Ariel Gore is a huge influence. For me, I've taken workshops with her. I've read probably all of her books, and she is a fantastic storyteller. And she tells, you know, she writes memoir, but she has a pretty broad spectrum of things she writes about.
00:36:19
Speaker
and, you know, directly because she workshopped the book with me. And in drawing, a lot of the people that I acknowledge in the acknowledgments, Murray Sendak was a huge influence growing up. I grew up with, you know, reading his books and his artwork is phenomenal. And there's a number of artists, you know, Art Crumb, I mean, the content of his comics,
00:36:48
Speaker
Oh, it was pretty hard to take, but his, his abilities with the ink pen are amazing. He's just really, really good. And, and so I kind of grew up with those comic books laying around the house. That's what happens when you're raised by a single dad, I guess. And so it was kind of a combination of just looking at a lot of the artwork and then the zine world and the
00:37:14
Speaker
what people are able to create and find on the internet or you can follow them on Instagram. They're just these amazing artists that have just wonderful skills. Um, and so that's a lot of, a lot of influence and seeing, I think probably part of it, um, maybe a timing thing that I think there's a community based on the, you know, people who, uh, support and make zines, uh, and
00:37:43
Speaker
internet comics and comic artists and comics poetry and all of these kind of DIY world that exists today kind of made it a good time for a book like mine to come out, I think. Because I can, I don't know, there's a receptive audience, I think. Yeah.
00:38:05
Speaker
Yeah, making zines is pretty fun. I just started one for the podcast, just for the hell of it. And it's just like I take little snippets, I'll print out tweets from the guests and I paste them in there and make the copies and draw thought bubbles coming out of them from quotes from their episode and all this. It is just a lot of fun and it's better than a business card, if you ask me. Yeah, it's very, I love zines. They're very liberating.
00:38:33
Speaker
And it's just very positive and people are just sharing stuff, their personal experiences or what they know about growing organic carrots. It doesn't matter. In Phoenix, there's a zine distro wasted ink. And so I go to their, they have a bench and they have just, it's a tiny little space filled with zines.
00:39:01
Speaker
And they get zines from all over. And then they also have all of these sort of community events. So it's this world that is very community oriented and open and positive and receptive. It's just really nice. I mean, it's sort of like a world that's kind of got Luna's vibe. And the part about the 70s that was really wonderful that this kind of, well, I can do that.
00:39:31
Speaker
I can do that myself. Oh, let's make this. Yeah. I mean, we used to make, my dad, uh, was really into community stuff and communal communal living. That's why he let us live at a commune because I think he just thought that was a cool idea as a concept. Probably if he investigated it further, he might've had issues with some of the things that were going on there. But, but the idea, uh, we,
00:39:57
Speaker
We were members of a food co-op, and I went and made tons of loaves of bread, and we would go and deliver them in a big school bus. That part of it, I think, is kind of having a renaissance, but in a really kind of cool, sophisticated way. So that's been a really neat part of the zine community and kind of the DIY and the maker
00:40:28
Speaker
community that's happening. And when you get struck by feelings of self-doubt, as most writers and artists do, how do you approach that? What kind of self-talk do you use to pull yourself back out of it so you can get back to work and actually make something worthwhile? That's probably one where time has
00:40:57
Speaker
There's a lot of things about getting older that's not so great. Gravity, constantly pulling on you and your body starts giving out. But patience is something that I didn't really ever have as a young person. I was very impatient and would get frustrated if I couldn't figure something out right away. And if I couldn't do a math problem, I'd hurled my book across the room.
00:41:25
Speaker
But now I'm like, I've done this. I've done this kind of drawing. I know there's going to be a moment when I'm trying to draw this thing and it looks like crap and it doesn't look like it's ever going to look anything better than crap. But I know because I've done it so many times that there's this sort of moment when it actually starts to look like the thing I'm trying to draw and become something. And so that gives me some patience.
00:41:52
Speaker
Um, and the same thing with writing is just, I have faith that even if I don't know where I'm going, if an idea pop, if words pop into my head, I write them down because one, I'm going to forget them pretty quickly these days, but also because I have faith. It's happened that many times. I'm like, something's going to come out of this. I'm just going to write it down and they'll put it away. And you know, my brain is just constantly sort of turning over and finding connections and looking at things.
00:42:21
Speaker
around the world and, you know, seeing patterns in things. And if something occurs to it, to the point where I hear words in my head, I write them down. Doodling, too, is really helpful because if words aren't coming, then I can draw. Well, and it doesn't have to be anything. It can just be, you know, whatever. To have kind of an arsenal of things that you can do when you're not sure what to do,
00:42:50
Speaker
I also, because now I'm kind of feeling like, okay, I've worked, this book has been this focus of mine for a long time. And now it's a book. You know, it's a thing. I can't revise it anymore. And so I've been preparing kind of for that precipice of what now. And so every time I hear of a workshop,
00:43:17
Speaker
And it sounds interesting. I sign up. I take online workshops. I'm just finishing one with Chelsea Glamour, who is Ariel Gore. I was in her book club for, we had a book coven for a little while. And it was one of the books that we read. And I love circadian. And I just love the writing. And so she teaches workshops. And so I started taking some of her workshops. I
00:43:44
Speaker
sign up for quite a number of workshops in the literary kitchen with Ariel Gore. I do writing workshops down at Wasted Ink. They offer one called Off the Page, which has an open mics part of it, which is not really what I do normally, but I like the writing part of it. So anything that, and I'm just scrolling all of this stuff away and drawing and just trying to draw and read as much as possible.
00:44:14
Speaker
to be ready for that not really knowing what the story is, but just so I don't have a blank slate in front of me. Yeah, and I'm not a super organized person, but I do have my notebook with me all the time, and I try and write the date down, and then if it's a book idea or a story idea, I just write, or a zine idea. I do a zine called Tiny Joys,
00:44:44
Speaker
and which I love making those. And so if I have ideas for the next Tiny Joys, I'll write that down and then I, so it's all in one place, but it's really easy for me to lose them, you know, and to know like, where was that? I'm not super organized, but at least it's there in my notebook that, you know, if I'm trying to figure out ideas for a book, I've got tons of them inside that notebook.
00:45:14
Speaker
Well, and lastly, Rebecca, where can people find out, find you online and find out more about the book and maybe engage with you online if they want to? Well, I have my website, rebeccafishyewen.com. Fantastic. And are you on like Twitter or Instagram? Yes, I love Instagram because it's photo oriented.
00:45:43
Speaker
So I'm on that as our fish Ewan, like that are fish Ewan. And that's the same for Twitter, which I'm not as consistent or as comfortable with, with Twitter.
00:45:58
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Rebecca, thank you so much for carving out some time to do this, and thank you for the book. It's wonderful. It's a great, it's really, to me, it's a love story between friends, and I enjoyed it immensely, and I wish you continued success with it. Thank you so much. Thank you, and I'm really glad that you see it that way, because that's exactly what I wanted it, how I wanted it to be perceived, you know, that you could kind of feel the love I had for Luna.
00:46:28
Speaker
just the love she had for life.
00:46:50
Speaker
podcast. If you show me evidence of your review, I will edit a piece of your writing of up to 2,000 words. Also, show notes and the like are at brendanomerra.com. While there, you can sign up for my monthly reading list newsletter. Four books on what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Once a month, no spam can't beat that.
00:47:17
Speaker
Again, let's connect on social. I'm at Brendan O'Mara and at CNF pod on Twitter and at CNF podcast on Facebook. Let me know what's up. If I can help, I'll help. Thanks for listening. Have a CNF and great 4th of July. I'll see you right back here next week.