Welcome, writers and book lovers. The Bleeders is a podcast about book writing and publishing. Make sure you subscribe to the companion Substack: https://thebleeders.substack.com/welcome
Today's guest Alissa Wilkinson wrote her book Salty during the first year of the pandemic, which left its mark on both the process and the content. Alissa tells us about how Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women and her first book came to be and a little bit about her current Joan Didion-related project. We also talked about how book writing fits in amid her daily journalism grind, her unique publishing path from academic to more traditional, and more in today’s episode. Follow Alissa on Instagram @alissawilkinson.
The Bleeders is hosted by Courtney Kocak. Follow her on Instagram @courtneykocak and Bluesky @courtneykocak.bsky.social. For more, check out her website courtneykocak.com.
Courtney is teaching some upcoming workshops you might be interested in:
Today's guest Alissa Wilkinson wrote her book Salty during the first year of the pandemic, which left its mark on both the process and the content. Alissa tells us about how Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women and her first book came to be and a little bit about her current Joan Didion-related project. We also talked about how book writing fits in amid her daily journalism grind, her unique publishing path from academic to more traditional, and more in today’s episode. Follow Alissa on Instagram @alissawilkinson.
The Bleeders is hosted by Courtney Kocak. Follow her on Instagram @courtneykocak and Bluesky @courtneykocak.bsky.social. For more, check out her website courtneykocak.com.
Courtney is teaching some upcoming workshops you might be interested in:
- Land Big Bylines by Writing for Columns: https://writingworkshops.com/products/land-big-bylines-by-writing-for-columns-zoom-seminar
- The Multi-Passionate Writer's Life: https://writingworkshops.com/products/the-multi-passionate-writers-life-zoom-seminar-with-courtney-kocak
- How to Build a “Platform” for Writers Who Shudder at the Thought: https://writingworkshops.com/products/how-to-build-a-platform-for-writers-who-shudder-at-the-thought-zoom-seminar
- Podcasting for Writers: How to Start, Sustain & Grow Your Podcast: https://writingworkshops.com/products/podcasting-for-writers-how-to-start-sustain-grow-your-podcast-4-week-zoom-workshop
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
I mean, I will never call COVID a blessing because
it seems rude, but it did help in the writing
of the book because I basically had nothing to do
for a year. My life is very busy, you know,
in certain chunks, like anyone else's, but because I cover
movies of my evenings and weekends are often very full
of like festivals and things like that, and so I
(00:27):
have very little consistent free time. But because I had
all these empty weekends where the only thing I could
really do is like go walk around in the park
or watch more TV, I had all this time to
read and write.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Alyssa Wilkinson wrote her book Salty during the first year
of the pandemic, and that definitely left its mark on
both the process and the content.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Well, my husband's who helped me edit it quite a bit,
but he would say it's a book about hope in
dark times, which I think is correct. It's also a
book about to gathering and the importance of gathering, especially
around food, which was a very weird thing to be
writing when that was the only thing I definitely wasn't doing.
So there's little bits of myself in there that feel
(01:14):
like a memoir of a hard year. That's not the
focus of the book, but it comes through in certain chapters.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Alyssa tells us all about how Salty and her first
book came into this world, plus a little bit about
her current Joan Diddion related project. We also talk about
how book writing fits in amid her daily journalism, grind,
her unique path from academic to more traditional publishing, and more.
(01:42):
In today's episode, There's nothing to writing.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
All you do is sit down at a typewriter.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
And bleed. Welcome to the Bleeders, a podcast and support
group about book writing and publishing. I'm writer and podcaster
Courtney Coosak, and each week I'll bring you new conversations
with authors, agents and publishers about how to write and
(02:11):
sell books.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Hi. My name is Alissa Wilkinson and I'm the author
of Salty. Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I had such an amazing conversation with Alissa about the
writing process for her books. But before we get into that,
let's get to know her with the five questions, When
did you first identify as a writer? I don't actually
know when I did.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
I was trying to think about this question recently and
I think I was really hesitant to identify as a
writer for a long time. Honestly, sometimes I am still.
I'll often say like I'm a critic or I'm a
journalist or something like that. I think because my idea
of the writing life, you know, big quotes around that
was very much like someone who sits at their desk
(03:05):
all day and you know, works on their book and
like has like toil over their creative life. And that
just wasn't me. But at some point someone said to me, well,
like you write things, so you're a writer. And I
was like, oh, right, yeah, I guess it's your true yes, exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
What's your all time favorite book?
Speaker 1 (03:25):
I really love this book called The Supper of the Lamb,
which is a food book that Ruth Rickle put into
the Modern Food Library series, and it's sort of a
cookbook and it's sort of just this really delightful, meandering,
sort of roving exploration of like why food is so
important and good. It was actually written by an Episcopal
(03:47):
priest who used to, among other things, write about food
for the New York Times. And he tells you at
the outset that he's going to tell you how to
make Lamb six Ways for eight people, but he keeps
getting distracted, like telling hilarious stories. And so I love
this book and every time I tell someone to read it,
they come back to me and they're like, you were right.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
I feel like this sounds familiar, and I've just been
reading your book.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Is it mentioned in the book? I think I mentioned
it once. I actually, way back, way way way way back,
when I was trying to think about the book, thought
I might write something that was more of a homage
to the Supper of the Lamb, But that one's still
on the back burner.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
What's your dream writing routine?
Speaker 1 (04:29):
If I could? And once in a while I can
set up my day perfectly. It's where I like go
out for a walk in the morning. I live near
Prospect Park in Brooklyn, so I like go out and
sort of look at the ducks on the pond and
you know, enjoy people's dogs, and drink my coffee and
sort of think about what I'm doing for the day.
And then I just have like a long expanse of
(04:51):
a day that is free to me to write in
kind of as as it works for me. And sometimes
this works out, but that would involve coffee and then
you know, at some point you like, pour a glass
of wine and read through what you read, and get
out the pen and sort of edit it, and then
I'm able to put it away at a reasonable hour
(05:12):
and go watch a movie or something in the evening.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, live your life. What's the real writing routine?
Speaker 1 (05:18):
So my day job does involve writing, and it often
involves writing to a very tight deadline. I do write
about movies, and so a lot of times it's like
you see the movie and then it's coming out in
two days, so I have to turn it around fast. However,
I have learned one thing about myself, which is that
I do not write well in the mornings. So I
tend to try to reserve my mornings for meetings and
(05:43):
you know, reading other people's work or any research I
might have to do, and then in the afternoon kind
of pick it up. And Luckily, I'm a very fast writer,
so usually I can sort of bang out a draft
in an afternoon, at least a passable draft. And I
like to write at least a portion of something. If
I know I'm not going to be able to get
it done, I try to get at least four to
(06:04):
six hundred words done in one day so that I
can pick it up the next morning. When it comes
to writing a book, I have to fit it in
around my day job, and so I schedule myself reading,
which is a big part of the kinds of books
that I write, just tons and tons of primary and
secondary sources. I schedule that throughout the week or throughout
the month, and then I block out one weekend per
(06:26):
month to write the draft, which is actually a physically
taxing thing to do because a lot of times chapters
are like eight thousand words long. But that way I
can kind of get it all out of my head
at once, which just works better for me. I am
not one of those people who writes like one hundred
and fifty words a day. I'm very happy for people
who can do that, but it completely doesn't work for me.
(06:47):
And then after I write that chapter, I don't look
at it till the next month. And that's that's my
routine at this point.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Oh, that's so interesting how you like divide it up
like that.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Yeah, off like this, like I.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Have to stack all my interviews that I do on
one day, or like my energy.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Is totally shot.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Do things like that to manage your is it to
manage your energy or just to make sure you get
a better draft, or.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Yeah, it's to manage my energy. It's because a lot
of the writing I do sort of sits on the
borderline between historical, reported and critical, and so to do that, well,
you really need to. You know, I don't always know
what the argument or even the thesis is going to
be when I'm going into it, and so doing it
(07:36):
all in a big chunk means that I'm like in
that brain space and all that I feel like, all
those pieces that are swrolling around above my head I
can kind of grab. But one thing I do with
book writing is I tend to retype out everything from
the books that I've been reading that is relevant to
the chapter that I think I'm writing. And so the
(07:58):
act of typing it helps me to see the words
that I read, and that means that they're in my
head and then I can be like, wait, wait, there
was a quote about this, and I can go find
it in my notes.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
It's laborious, like maybe too laborious, certainly not efficient, but
it definitely helps with me being able to kind of
pull all of the pieces together.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Yeah, Oh I love that, Okay, one piece of writing
that makes you jealous you didn't write it.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
There's so many of these, really kind of disturbing, I
guess if I were to just pick one. I'm working
on something about Joan Diddyon right now for my next book,
and so I've been reading everything as she wrote many
many times over, and of course a lot of what
she wrote is really admirable and interesting. But I've actually
(08:48):
been reading her film criticism, and one thing I love
about it is that a lot of people don't know
that she wrote film criticism, which is fun. But also
her film criticism has this sense of like she just
likes movies to be fun. They don't really have to
be very good, but for her, like a movie that
she didn't have fun watching in some way just as
(09:11):
a bad movie. And I kind of admire the way
that she, who is sort of famously an overthinker in
her writing, when it came to film criticism, she was like, Nope,
like we all know this is nonsense at so let's
just treat it that way. And I really admire that attitude.
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Okay, so criticism and food kind of, you know, intersect
with your writing life. So how did those things all
come together.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
So I've been writing criticism for fifteen or sixteen years now,
professionally in sort of more or less professional capacity. I
started do doing it really honestly because I had a
day job in financial technology after college and I was
(10:08):
really bored and kind of miserable, and I was just like,
I can't believe I'm gonna be doing this the rest
of my life, which obviously I didn't end up doing,
and so I just sort of started writing for fun.
I had moved to New York City. I was dating
a guy who I, you know, eventually married, who was
working in films. So we were just like going to
see a lot of movies and I was like, I
(10:30):
don't know, there's like a lot here to talk about.
So I started writing it for various like little web publications,
you know how you sometimes you just like write a
lot of stuff for free, just to get out there
and get your brain working. And the thing is, if
you keep doing it long enough, and if you're like
halfway decent at it, then people tend to take notice,
especially on the Internet. And you know, by about ten
(10:52):
years ago or fifteen years ago, now, I guess I
started sort of hearing from publications like do you want
to write a review of this movie for us or
something like that. I expanded myself to writing about a
little bit about art, books, television of course music once
in a while, and then I just sort of wound
up doing it a lot as a freelancer for big publications.
(11:15):
And then Box, where I currently work, was hiring someone
to cover film six years ago and or a little
over six years ago, and they called me because the
editor at the time had been reading me for a while.
So it was kind of a funky, strange way to
get into the industry. But here I am with like
a staff position where I mostly write about movies and TV.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
That's very cool.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Yeah, And then in the meantime, I and I'm sort
of skipping many steps in between. But I ended up
earning a MFA in creative nonfiction, and my thesis adviser
knew I was like kind of obsessed with food writing.
I just love to cook, and so I love to
read good writers on food, and she said, why don't
you take a quarter to just read food writing and
(11:58):
write about it. So I did that and that kind
of got me thinking about what makes for good food
writing and so all of these things started to come
together when a book editor, the editor who edited my
last book, approached me and said, do you have a book?
And I was like, I don't want to write a book.
Writing books sucks, It's like so much work. And she
was like, well, just think about it. And I remembered
(12:20):
that I'd had a conversation once with a mentor who
said you should write a book called Cocktails with Hannah,
meaning a book about Hannah Arent's famous cocktail party, the
philosopher who had all these cocktail parties in the middle
of the twentieth century. And I was like, I don't, Robert,
I don't think that's like a whole book. But then
when I thought about it, I was like, that's the
seed of a good idea. And so I wound up
(12:41):
picking nine women who I found really interesting from the
twentieth century artists, intellectuals. Some of them are cooks and
chefs and food writers, and a lot of them are not,
and just thinking what can I find in their stories
that is food related that I can hang like a
bigger story about them and who they are and what
they do teach us upon. Yeah, And so that's kind
(13:03):
of how I ended up I was like, this is
the only way I'm going to write a book. I
ended up writing it that way, and it was a
really good way to combine those things. And so when
I came to my next book, which I'm working on now,
I had to kind of find another innovative way into
the story I wanted to tell, which is about Hollywood
American myth making a whole bunch of cultural figures, Joan
(13:26):
Diddon being one of them.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Okay, so all of that is fascinating.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Let's back up just a little bit.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
And go back to when and why you decided to
get your MFA because you were doing this online writing,
and what kind of prompted that.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yeah, so I had already earned one master's degree basically
as a way to get myself out of this financial
technology job, which is what I was trained for in college.
So I went to I got a job at NYU
in the IT department as a writer, so I could
like sort of ease my way out. They have a
whole writing department within the IT departments about tech. Yeah,
(14:02):
it's a very big university, so there's just a lot.
So it was mostly tech writing that there was some
there's an in house magazine that I was editing in
in house sorry, an in house tech magazine, and why
he was very big in house tech magazine that I
edited and wrote a lot of not really knowing how
to write a journalistic article. And I don't know if
(14:22):
I would only call it journalism, but it meant I
would like interview people and write articles, and so I
was getting a little bit of that at work. In
the meantime, I got a master's in the humanities, which
is just sort of an interdisciplinary degree. I really liked it,
and as I was in one of those classes, I
took a class in the English department on like the
modern English novel or something one summer and the professor
(14:45):
said something offhand that I'd never heard of. My parents
didn't go to college or anything. I didn't really grow
up around I guess like intellectuals, but giant air quotes
around that. So I didn't know this, but he said, oh,
if you're if you of a master's in anything in
the liberal arts, then you should try teaching freshman composition
(15:05):
on the college level, because colleges always need adjunct instructors,
and like, if you don't like it after the first
semester you never have to do it again. And I
was like, oh, interesting. So I emailed the one person
I knew who I thought might do some hiring at
like this tiny little liberal arts college, which is where
I currently teach still, and I said, hey, I'm finishing
(15:25):
my masters, like, I don't know if you guys need
anything for the fall, but i'd be interested. And he said, actually, yeah,
we totally do. We need someone to teach a freshman
writing course. And I said, oh, hey, sign me up.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
I was a hot tip.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Uh huh yes, And it was a really good tip,
as it turns out, a great tip for me because
it went really well. I was twenty five when I
did this, and I was teaching college students, you know,
how to write, and I was a little scary, but
I was like, you know, what can I do? So
I sort of flew by the seat of my pants.
Then they hired me to teach the second semester course
(15:59):
the next semester. That went really well, and midway through
they were like, actually, we have a full time position opening.
Do you want it? And I was like, yes, I
would like this full time college teaching position, and so
I took it and then in the meantime, they said,
you know, this is going really well. We really you know,
everyone likes you here, but if you want to keep
(16:20):
doing this full time, you really need to be working
towards a terminal degree. I believe. At the time, I
was like, what is a terminal degree? I googled it
and figured out that I could either get a PhD
or an MFA, and PhD seemed like a lot of work,
and I was like, Ah, I'm a writer, an MFA
will be easy. You know, I already write. How hard
(16:41):
could it be. Well, turns out it's really hard work,
but it was really good work, and I enrolled in
a low residency MFA, so that took two years. It
was like, really good for me in particular. I don't
know that it's good for everyone, but I usually describe
it to people as like I could have learned everything
(17:02):
that I did learn in the MFA on my own,
but I felt like it shoved me through about ten
years of like crap, And then when I was done,
I was definitely substantially better writer than I was at
the beginning of the program, and I had to read
a lot and I had to sort of learn to
articulate what is good and what is not good and
(17:22):
a piece of writing, and that helped me become a
better teacher. And I built a community as well of
people who I think are good readers, which is really
what you need as a writer. And then at the
end they had an MFA, which was nice as well,
and it meant I could be a full time professor totally.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
So did you start a book length project during that MFA.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Or they didn't let us? Really is it was an
unusual program in that they said, we really want the
focus to be on you building a writing life, and
we find that people who focus too much on getting
a book, which often happens in MFAs, tend to become
like very competitive and very networkey and very kind of
(18:08):
climbing the ladder to totally get So we just want
you to forget about a book for two years. And
my creative thesis was like a like a ten essay
collection basically, but they weren't essays that you would publish
together in a book, and I wouldn't publish most of
them at this point, but that you know, back then,
ten years ago, that's what it was. I know some
(18:29):
people have sort of wheedled their way into publishing a
book out of that program, but in general, I think
that was a good focus. And they said, if you
can write good essays and you can write a book,
which is probably true.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
Your first book that I found on the internet was
how to Survive the Apocalypse?
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Is that correct? Yes?
Speaker 2 (18:51):
That is?
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yeah, that was co written.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
So yeah, can you set up that premise and then
we'll get into a little bit about how that worked
and what you learned.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Yeah, so that book is kind of well, it was
a funny thing. So I co wrote it with an
old coworker who is a political science professor, and we
had shared a mutual love of like zombie shows for
a long time. I think that book came out in
twenty sixteen. So in twenty fourteen, we were both still
(19:21):
pretty early career academics and we were writing here and there,
but you kind of need a book to advance in
your career. So we came up with this. He really
came up with the idea and was like, do you
want to write this with me? And I said, sounds fun.
And the idea was to explore a particular philosopher of
modernity that both of us teach to some degree in
(19:43):
our work, but to explore him through apocalyptic TV for
the most part. So it's like Game of Thrones and
Walking Dead, and we found a way to like shoehorn
madmen in there and stuff like that. It's kind of
it's a very like of the early twenty tens book,
I think. And so we split up the chapters and
(20:04):
he would send me his chapters and then I would
kind of rewrite them to sound like I wrote them,
because I'm the better writer of the two of us.
And the goal was always to it is a very
academic topic, but the goal was to make it extremely
accessible and interesting to people who had never read the
underlying theorist. And I would say in twenty sixteen, in
(20:26):
early twenty sixteen, the title How to Survive the Apocalypse
did not feel quite the same way as it does now.
When I look back at it.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Now, it's like, we need a handbook, Jesus.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
I know, right. So, yeah, so the goal was just
to sort of make a very accessible book. It did
kind of end up coming out of the academic side
of our publisher and sort of being treated that way,
I think, But that was fine, and as a as
a process it. You know, again, it was pretty much
for me anyhow, I felt like I was writing criticism
(20:57):
and it didn't feel that far off of what irmally
do because I would rewatch something and then I'd think
about how it fit the idea of the chapter, and
then I would just sort of write my way through it.
And I think at the end of the day, it's
pretty accessible. The first couple chapters are a little dense
in the way that academic texts tend to be, but
people are kind of tickled by the idea of reading
(21:18):
this very complex set of ideas through, you know, something
as uffy as The Walking Dead. Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
So it sounds like the process was pretty smooth, like
you were kind of the ultimate editor. Was there anything
that you learned about writing partnerships that you would not repeat,
or any temps on how to approach that you know?
Speaker 1 (21:43):
In general, the writing part went really easily, in part
because we'd worked together for so long and we had
co written a couple articles together in the past, so
it helps us. Yeah. I think the thing I that
it was reinforced for me, or that was most important,
was you have to re trust your co writer. I mean,
(22:03):
he had to trust me that if I were going
to tweak or substantially kind of rewrite his paragraphs, that
they would have the same meaning at the end that
they did when he sent them to me. But we
had that trust established already over kind of a long
working relationship. I would say the only thing I learned
that I wished I had thought about earlier was I
am a more assertive person than he is. I'm American,
(22:27):
he's Canadian. That might have something to do with it,
And so I wish I had kind of involved myself
more in the negotiation process with the publisher, which I
just think is like a good thing to know generally,
if you don't have an agent, that you have to
be fairly assertive that they want your book. You know,
like if they're talking to you about your book, they
want your book, and so you are in essence hiring
(22:49):
them to publish your book, and it's okay to, you know,
tell them what you want. I sort of learned this
by the end. When we were in the cover process.
I I got very pushy about the cover because I
really hated the cover they'd come up with, and I
was like, no, I'm just not you can take my
name off the book if you're going to use that cover,
and they weren't going to do that, So that was
(23:10):
good that I kind of eventually got there. But that
was the thing that I really I think I learned
most out of that experience. That's smart.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
So what came out of that? Did it kind of
have the impact on your career that you hoped it would.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
So it did help in that. Really the main goal
again was just to kind of help the academic side
of my career, and it was like a main piece
in my promotion packet, and so I got promoted from
assistant to associate professor. That's really what I was going for,
and I think I also gained the confidence that I
could write a book length work, which was really important.
(23:47):
And I actually signed a contract right after that for
another short book that was going to be about kind
of like religion and pop culture, sort of like the
changing shape of religion as shown. I don't know, it
was something like that, but the publisher went under. So
I actually wrote most of the book and then the
publisher went under, and then I just use pieces of
(24:08):
it in my journalism because I wasn't totally confident in
it as a book, but I had the confidence that
it was possible for me to sit down and write
something that long, and I think that was really helpful
for me, you know, career wise. Otherwise it's sort of
like those things follow you around and people mention them,
but especially when you write about pop culture, things get
(24:30):
dated very very fast, you know. And I knew that
going in, and we joked about it, and it wasn't
something that really bugged me, but it was something that
I definitely would have thought about beforehand if I had
like a different set of goals. But yeah, it came
out in twenty sixteen, and I basically was like, I
just don't feel like I want to write another book
(24:51):
anytime soon, because now I know the amount of obsession
with your topic that you need to have, and like
how annoying it is to then talk about it for
years hours if you're not interested in the topic itself.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Okay, well, I hope that wasn't too painful.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Not at all. No, no, no, I haven't even thought
about it very much lately. So it's been funny to
be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that book it's pretty good. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Okay, so Salty came out in June, is that correct?
That is right set up that kind of premise and
the full title and who it's about.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
So the full title is Salty Lessons on Eating, Drinking,
and Living from Revolutionary Women. I started with a list
of nine or ten women, and then somewhere along the way,
as I was sort of developing the idea, I think
I scrapped about half of them and added different women
so they're not obviously related to one another all other
(25:55):
like tiny parts where they might have cross paths, or
you know, there's one place where like they dated the
same guy but it was like twenty years apart or
something like that. But they were selected mainly because I
find them interesting. And I was like, well, I'm the
narrative throughput in this book, so it's me that drives,
you know, the table of contents basically. And as I
said that, you know, the editor of the book approached
(26:17):
me in I want to say probably the summer of
twenty nineteen. I think BA was happening in New York
City and she was in town and called me and
she said, well, just go home and think about a book.
And I kind of went home and I thought about it,
and then she's picking me like six months later and
was like so, and I said, this is the only
way I'm going to write this book, as if it
can be about these nine people, And to her credit,
(26:40):
she was like, Okay, sure, go for it. Now. The
funniest part of the whole thing was that I or
I don't know, it wasn't funny. It was kind of dark. Actually,
I signed the contract like the day that the world
started shutting down in March twenty twenty. Yeah, I saw
in the forward.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I want to know how COVID impacted this whole process.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
I mean, I will ever call COVID a blessing because
it just seems rude. But it did help in the
writing of the book because I basically had nothing to
do for a year. You know, my life is very busy,
you know, in certain chunks like anyone else's, But because
I cover movies, my evenings and weekends are often very
full of like festivals and things like that, and so
(27:20):
I have very little consistent free time. But because I
had all these empty weekends where the only thing I
could really do is like go walk around in the
park or watch more TV, I had all this time
to read and write and that was really really lovely
for me. So yeah, so I signed the contract in
March twenty twenty. Completely separately from that, I got an
(27:42):
email from my now agent, who at the time was
just a random person cold calling me from the internet
that same week, so that happened totally separately. I did
Salty without an agent, and then I started writing it.
I really didn't start writing the book till September, but
because it's basically nine chapters long, I just sort of
(28:02):
worked it out that I would write one per month.
The first two times, I even like rented myself an
airbnb upstate and went up and I wrote it, which
was like really helpful in getting the first couple chapters down.
And then after that I would just write them home
because I felt like I was in a groove and
I kind of had an office space. Yeah, and I
finished it. I turned in the final ish draft, I
(28:25):
mean the final first draft on Memorial Day weekend twenty
twenty one, which was a vastly It felt like I
was living in a completely different world than I had
been obviously in you know, a year earlier. Yeah, no, shit, crazy, Yeah,
I was, you know, I was even like outdoors at
a bar when I finished the last chapter, And that
felt like monumental, right, and it also felt like this
(28:48):
is a book about well my husband who helped me
edit it quite a bit, but he would say it's
a book about hope in dark times, which I think
is correct. It's also a book about just gathering and
the whortance of gathering, especially around food, which was a
very weird thing to be writing when that was the
only thing I definitely wasn't doing. So there's little bits
(29:10):
of myself in there that feel like a memoir of
a hard year. That's not the focus of the book,
but it comes through in certain chapters. Yeah, and then
you know, it took I don't know what six months
or something to get the edits done. They had these
beautiful illustrations. I'm really happy with the final product. And
(29:31):
then it came out in June. So these things take
so much time. That's pretty finast though, isn't it. It
is for a book from start to finish. Yeah, I
mean it helps that it's not a very long book,
so I'm trying to remember exactly how long it is.
I think it's sixty thousand words or seventy thousand. It's
something like that. I knew it was going to be
kind of gift book sized, which is what it came
(29:51):
out to. I'm really happy they put it out in
hardcover for that reason. Each essay in it is, I
believe somewhere between five and six thousand words long. So
for me, that's like a long magazine article, which again
I knew I could write because I'd do it all
the time. So that confidence really translated well. When I
sat down to write, I just thought like, oh, just
(30:12):
write another article. And that was really good, and it
just helped that. The research process for it really didn't
involve anything like interviews or anything like that. I just
would read biographies. I would, you know, if the person
wrote novels, I would read a whole bunch of the novels.
One chapter is on the filmmaker Agnes Varda, and there's
a Criterion collection box set that is the complete works
(30:36):
of Agnes Varda. So I bought it and I spent
one Saturday morning every week for like maybe three months
just watching an entire disc And that was great, you know,
and I felt like I was meeting these people sometimes
for sort of the first time, and really getting to
know them and then trying to share them with the reader.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah, I definitely wanted to talk about the research process.
So it was kind of like gemented because it's definitely
threaded throughout the book and it seems like very thorough.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Yeah, I you know, I'm like a giant academic nerd.
And so I had to sort of almost make a
syllabus for myself every month, where I would sit down
and say, okay, like, here's the ten books I pulled
that I'm going to read, and then I would divide
them up mathematically into how many pages I needed to
(31:25):
read per day from which books. And I would do
that and stuck to it pretty consistently, which again was
much easier because I wasn't doing anything else. So after work,
I would sit down on the couch and read for
a few hours. And I have like little sticky flags,
I mean everyone does. I have a billion of them
just scattered everywhere in my house. Everywhere you look, just
(31:47):
like little sticky flags, and I use them to mark,
you know, bits of interest. And I find that reading
all that stuff in a really compressed timeframe meant that
I was skimming sometimes, but it also meant I was
quickly developing knowledge of what I was looking for, which
was often like trying to find some hook into their
(32:08):
life or sometimes food just because, for instance, there's a
chapter on Octavia Butler, the science fiction novelist. Food was
not an obvious thing with her. I really had to
dig on that one. But as soon as I kind
of ran across it in a novel, I was like, wait,
I see what's going on here. I see what I
can do with this. And then I would sit down
with all those notes and I would type them all out,
(32:30):
and that would help me sort of see a structure
start to emerge in front of me, and then I
would yeah, sit down on a weekend and draft the
draft the chapter.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
So you said you had a list and then you
doubled it of these women and then you.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Paired it back down.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Yeah, so how did you ultimately select who as included?
What was kind of your rubric?
Speaker 1 (32:52):
So one thing I didn't want to do was have
anybody that would be expected in a book about women
and food. I just like I didn't want to put MFK.
Fisher And I love MFK. Fisher, but I didn't felt
like there's a lot of books about MFK. Fisher. We
don't need another chapter on her. Even if you don't
know who she is. She's very easy to find books about.
(33:14):
I didn't want to put Julia Child in the book
for that same reason, right, So I was looking for
a balance of I didn't want it to be all
about like white women writers, you know, and I didn't
want it to be all about chefs or something like that.
So I tried to spread it out a little. At
the same time, I knew that because this is my
(33:34):
preferences and interests coming through, it's very heavily about people
who spent a lot of time either in the US
or in Paris particular, where I've spent a lot of time,
or sometimes both, just because those are the people who
I've kind of bumped into in the past and found
interesting for one reason or another. There were some people
who I was like, I really want the excuse to
read everything they wrote. Yeah. The one that springs to
(33:57):
mind is Patricia high Smith, who wrote the Ripley novels
and other things and I But the thing that it
was like almost an intrusive thought, was the moment in
the movie Carol, which is based on her book The
Price of Salt, where Kate Blanchett shows up at the
restaurant and orders cream spinach with a poached egg and
(34:18):
a martini and cream spinach is like so gross to me,
I have like a real texture version and that I
just can't deal with it. And I was like, oh no,
I can't talk about Patricia Highsmith. She also doesn't seem
to have liked food very much, which felt like it so,
you know, so I and I was like, oh, I
mean I really like her. I'm really interested in her.
(34:38):
And then I was sort of browsing my bookshelves and
landed on the idea of substituting Lori Colewin for her,
which turned out to be a really good idea because
a lot of people don't know Lori Colewan, but everybody should.
So that was the process. And really I think I
landed on nine because that would land me in the
page count that I had been contract. I mean, this
is all very practical and kind of stupid at the
(35:00):
end of the day, but I just wanted to find
people I wanted to spend time with who intrigued me
for one reason or another, even if I couldn't put
my finger on it, and who represented like some kind
of variety of life experience and of occupation and just
of things that I thought they might tell me, and
(35:22):
I wound up framing it as like if I threw
a dinner party, these are the people I would want
to be there together.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, what was that painting that you mentioned in.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
The Yeah, it's actually not a painting. It's an installation piece.
So there's there is a piece called the Dinner Party.
And the artist's name is completely escaping me at the moment.
It's very famous. Anyhow, there's a piece called the Dinner Party.
It is at the Brooklyn Museum, which is very close
to my house, and you enter this room and there's
(35:52):
like this giant three sided table kind of like a triangle,
and there's all these place settings at the table, and
there's place cards and for all these women. And it
turned out accidentally one man, but all these women who
were they just didn't know when because the Judy Chicago
is the artist and when the piece was made in
(36:13):
the seventies, they didn't realize this person was a man.
But there were kind of place cards and they there's
settings for people who are basically being given a seat
at the table that they were denied for one reason
or another in the past, and sort of you know,
making the point of like rewriting history through a feminist lens.
And I wouldn't say that anyone in my book has
(36:34):
necessarily been denied their place at the table, but some
of them have definitely not gotten the full place they deserve.
Edna Lewis, for instance, the chef you know, often is
not included in histories of the farm to table movement,
even though she's as important, if not much more than
Alice Waters or Ella Baker, who is an activist who's
(36:55):
at least as important as Martin Luther King to the
history of the civil rights movement. But she was much
quieter and didn't give speeches, and so people don't really
know about her so or many people, I should say,
don't know about her. So just trying to kind of
bring that, you know, who would you want to meet
at a dinner party. Maybe not people you already know
so much as people that you will be glad you
(37:17):
know at the end of the party.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah, very cool premise. Okay, so you do bang out
those pieces for work, like, were your drafts pretty close?
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Yeah? For a variety of reasons, the editing process was
a bit of a crunch, and so I write the
one draft, set it aside, and then like edited it
the next month before I started writing the new draft
and just kind of put me in that headspace, and
then I really wouldn't look at it again. I think
I gave it a once over, but I'm so used
(37:48):
to editing as I go because that's how I write.
That generally, my drafts are in pretty good shape, and
I knew that just from experience. And then when I
got book edits back, I had a months where we
were in like pretty tight edits and it turned out
my husband actually was I didn't know this. He's not
a writer, but he's a great line editor, as it
(38:09):
turns out, and so he went through kind of the
fine tooth comb and was very helpful with that. So
it didn't change shape substantially from the earliest draft. There's
like one chapter that got a pretty big sort of
did a bunch of open heart surgery on it, but
the other ones, a lot of them stayed pretty much
the same. And I do think the fact that I
(38:29):
have to write so much, just generally for my work
is very helpful here because I do like sort of
trust my voice. I know what's going to come out
of me, and it's pretty consistent across the board.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
And then you already had the publisher set up, so
it wasn't like you had to go look for anyone.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Yeah, And I mean that's the thing about nonfiction is that, well,
I've never written a memoir, but anything like this, you
usually sell it before you write it.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Did you have a book proposal?
Speaker 1 (38:59):
I did not really write a book proposal for this one.
I kind of wrote a table of contents that was explanatory,
but the press was kind of already sold on the idea.
So and I've heard from other friends that this is
something that they sometimes, you know, especially their second book
for the same press is a Lot More Chill, which
reminds me very much of my freelancing days, where you
(39:19):
had to craft a really perfect pitch the first time
you pitched a magazine, and then after that it was
very like, hey, I just think maybe I have some
ideas about the leftovers? Can I write about it? So
it wasn't all that different. So then, yeah, so for
this next one, I did write a proposal, and the
proposal was a long process, so I saw so I was,
(39:41):
you know, I took a meeting over Zoom. Of course,
with this agent, my agent, Laura, and we were just
talking about ideas. I hadn't signed with her yet, and
I had an idea for a book that I still
kind of want to do, and she was like, well,
this is a really good idea. But I've always thought
I wanted to work on a book that was sort
of related to Jon and I was like, oh, yes,
(40:03):
like I've written a lot about Didian over the years,
and I think there's probably something there. I was like, well,
let me just read a lot and then I'll come
back to you with an idea. And I wound up
thinking about Hollywood a lot, reading her biography and realizing
that like not a lot of people had written about
that part of her life. And so that proposal I
(40:23):
started working on, I mean essentially in May twenty twenty,
and I think we didn't even send it out for
a year. It took that long to really refine it,
write the table of contents. You need two chapters in
a nonfiction proposal. I had to write those chapters, you know.
It was just like a lot of work. Yeah, and
(40:44):
then it was out for sale for six months. I
think before it's old.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
I read that you were a writing fellow at Sundance
Institute's Art of Nonfiction Initiative. Did that fit into any
of these things that you were working on or how
did that work?
Speaker 1 (41:06):
So the Art of Nonfiction Initiative was within the documentary
program there, and they were trying out something where they
were bringing in writers and critics to kind of work
alongside their filmmaking fellows. And Art of Nonfiction was about
like innovative documentary, so not so much what you might
see on PBS, but sort of more experimental I guess,
(41:28):
you know, that kind of.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Thing ethically dubious.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Yeah, sometimes sometimes just like you know, like a memoir
is not exactly the kind of documentary you expect to see, right,
and it's the kind of thing people have been making
for a really long time, but often in Europe. So
my job was to well, it was unclear, but the
idea was that we would be around, we went to
(41:52):
some programming, and then we also would work on like
some pieces and I was writing about documentary. In the end,
it was really useful for me because as it helped
me as a film writer solidify some of the bonds
between creative nonfiction filmmaking and creative nonfiction writing, which I
think are there but are under explored at the moment.
(42:12):
So I love writing about nonfiction of course, like there's
so much of it out there that it's only been
a boom since that time. But one thing that can
be hard as a film writer is if you don't
have a great knowledge of how filmmakers think, then you
can kind of draw the wrong conclusions about what they're
trying to do or why they did what they did,
(42:34):
or you might be like, oh, it's a mistake, when
in fact, rarely are there actually mistakes in films. They're
usually very purposeful. And so yeah, so that's a lot
of what that was about. So it's all kinds of
you know, it's like indirectly related. Everything's kind of indirectly related,
but it wasn't specifically part of the book projects.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Okay, cool, you have a lot of cool stuff going on.
Do you have any bucket list writing goals?
Speaker 1 (42:59):
I I mean, I would say my bucket list writing
goal at this point is to like have more time
to write. I feel that, which is really just about money.
But I would also, you know, everyone everyone kind of
has the thing I would love to someday attempt to
write fiction, which is a thing that I find like baffling.
(43:20):
And part of the reason I did nonfiction in grad
school was because I was like, oh, fiction seems so
hard because you have to make stuff up. And then
of course the fiction writers were like, I don't know
how you write nonfiction, Like fiction is so easy because
you just make it really Yeah, but I would love
to do that. And I also there's a lot of
things I've never really been able to do, Like I
(43:41):
would love to have the time to like go to
a writing residency, you know, or like have an extended
period of time to focus on a book. But at
the same time, in reality, most people are writing in
around the edges of their lives, so I can't complain
too much.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Yeah, what piece of writing advice do you wish you
could give your former self?
Speaker 1 (44:05):
I think to do more of it. I mean, I
didn't know that writing was a thing people could do,
like for a job or for like for their life
when I was growing I don't know. I think I've
talked to a lot of writers who grew up sort
of in families where writing wasn't part of in the air,
and who say the same thing. It's like, Oh, I
(44:26):
just thought these books kind of appeared you know, and
it never occurred to me that, like, live people are
currently writing books. So I wish I had given myself
that kind of gift. I think of thinking of writing
as a real thing, real people do. Yeah, it took
a while to really come to terms with that, even subconsciously.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
What's one tip for writers trying to get a book published? Uh?
Speaker 1 (44:50):
I think it's to really define what kind of a
book writer you want to be, Like, why are you
doing this? Is it for fame? Because that is is
not something you're going to get probably unless you're extraordinarily lucky.
Is it for money? Like that can be tricky. You
may or may not get it. Is it because you're
(45:12):
really interested in the topic, then that's probably a good reason.
But the thing to remember, and I do tell younger
writers this sometimes is that the magazine articles you write
or whatever, they're kind of written in pencil, where like
they're out there, but people don't necessarily think of them
as like you're one thing that you've written. But a
book is an ink and it will follow you around
(45:32):
the rest of your life, and so you better make
sure you want your name on that book. And I
definitely know younger writers who kind of got excited because
a publisher approached them about writing a book, often about
their lives, and now they're forty and regretting it because
they that was not a story they wanted to give
up the way that they did. So I think, just
(45:54):
be very careful about that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
That's a good tip. What's your all time My favorite
piece of your own writing could be anything.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
I don't know, but at the moment I was rereading,
I don't usually reread my own writing, but I was
rereading yesterday just because of a tweet. I read a
piece I wrote early this year after I went to
an eight hour Jackass is on, Oh my Goodness easy
im of the moving image in Queen's right before Jackass
Forever came out. And I'm always proud of myself when
(46:29):
I read a piece of writing and I realized, like
I was funny, and I also said something because that
is not necessarily my normal mode of writing, and I
feel like I'd nailed it with this one. And I
reread it and I was like, I think I tweeted
it back out and said, if I ever published a
collection of criticism, I just know this is going to
be the lead essay. And I'm like, I'm not sure
if I should feel embarrassed about that, but yeah, it's
(46:49):
a lot of fun. It's it's I think it's titled
like how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jackass
or something like that. But it was a blast, awesome.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
Thank you so much to Alissa. I had a fantastic
writer chat with her and loved reading Salty and familiarizing
myself with her work. So make sure you find her
on the internet and stay in touch.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
I'm mostly on Twitter. My handsle there is Alyssa Marie
because I got Twitter in two thousand and seven and
never thought that I would need my last name in
my handsl and now somebody has it won't give it back.
So yeah, so Alyssa Marie and all my work, all
my magazine work is on Vox with.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
The v Thank you for joining me for this episode
of The Bleeders. Writing is so much better with friends.
I'm your host Courtney Cosack, and hey, let's connect on
social media. I am at Courtney Kosak last name is
Kocak on Twitter and Instagram, and make sure you're signed
up for The Bleeders companion substack for all kinds of
(47:54):
newsletter exclusives. There's so much good stuff that I send
out to my free list, and I actually just launched
a paid subscription with some extra goodies, where I take
you behind the scenes.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
Of all my best buylines.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
I published a post about my return to stand up
comedy and how I got ready to crush my showcase.
I wrote about MFAs and whether or not I think
it is worth it. I also did one of my
favorite workshops I've ever taught. It's a manifestation workshop that
I did for the New Year, but it's really good
anytime of the year. So there's so much good stuff
(48:27):
for free subscribers and even more for paid subscribers. And
there is a link in the description for that and
join me again next time for another all new episode.
In the meantime, Happy Bleeding
I mean, I will never call COVID a blessing because
it seems rude, but it did help in the writing
of the book because I basically had nothing to do
for a year. My life is very busy, you know,
in certain chunks, like anyone else's, but because I cover
movies of my evenings and weekends are often very full
of like festivals and things like that, and so I
(00:27):
have very little consistent free time. But because I had
all these empty weekends where the only thing I could
really do is like go walk around in the park
or watch more TV, I had all this time to
read and write.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Alyssa Wilkinson wrote her book Salty during the first year
of the pandemic, and that definitely left its mark on
both the process and the content.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Well, my husband's who helped me edit it quite a bit,
but he would say it's a book about hope in
dark times, which I think is correct. It's also a
book about to gathering and the importance of gathering, especially
around food, which was a very weird thing to be
writing when that was the only thing I definitely wasn't doing.
So there's little bits of myself in there that feel
(01:14):
like a memoir of a hard year. That's not the
focus of the book, but it comes through in certain chapters.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Alyssa tells us all about how Salty and her first
book came into this world, plus a little bit about
her current Joan Diddion related project. We also talk about
how book writing fits in amid her daily journalism, grind,
her unique path from academic to more traditional publishing, and more.
(01:42):
In today's episode, There's nothing to writing.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
All you do is sit down at a typewriter.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
And bleed. Welcome to the Bleeders, a podcast and support
group about book writing and publishing. I'm writer and podcaster
Courtney Coosak, and each week I'll bring you new conversations
with authors, agents and publishers about how to write and
(02:11):
sell books.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Hi. My name is Alissa Wilkinson and I'm the author
of Salty. Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I had such an amazing conversation with Alissa about the
writing process for her books. But before we get into that,
let's get to know her with the five questions, When
did you first identify as a writer? I don't actually
know when I did.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
I was trying to think about this question recently and
I think I was really hesitant to identify as a
writer for a long time. Honestly, sometimes I am still.
I'll often say like I'm a critic or I'm a
journalist or something like that. I think because my idea
of the writing life, you know, big quotes around that
was very much like someone who sits at their desk
(03:05):
all day and you know, works on their book and
like has like toil over their creative life. And that
just wasn't me. But at some point someone said to me, well,
like you write things, so you're a writer. And I
was like, oh, right, yeah, I guess it's your true yes, exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
What's your all time favorite book?
Speaker 1 (03:25):
I really love this book called The Supper of the Lamb,
which is a food book that Ruth Rickle put into
the Modern Food Library series, and it's sort of a
cookbook and it's sort of just this really delightful, meandering,
sort of roving exploration of like why food is so
important and good. It was actually written by an Episcopal
(03:47):
priest who used to, among other things, write about food
for the New York Times. And he tells you at
the outset that he's going to tell you how to
make Lamb six Ways for eight people, but he keeps
getting distracted, like telling hilarious stories. And so I love
this book and every time I tell someone to read it,
they come back to me and they're like, you were right.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
I feel like this sounds familiar, and I've just been
reading your book.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Is it mentioned in the book? I think I mentioned
it once. I actually, way back, way way way way back,
when I was trying to think about the book, thought
I might write something that was more of a homage
to the Supper of the Lamb, But that one's still
on the back burner.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
What's your dream writing routine?
Speaker 1 (04:29):
If I could? And once in a while I can
set up my day perfectly. It's where I like go
out for a walk in the morning. I live near
Prospect Park in Brooklyn, so I like go out and
sort of look at the ducks on the pond and
you know, enjoy people's dogs, and drink my coffee and
sort of think about what I'm doing for the day.
And then I just have like a long expanse of
(04:51):
a day that is free to me to write in
kind of as as it works for me. And sometimes
this works out, but that would involve coffee and then
you know, at some point you like, pour a glass
of wine and read through what you read, and get
out the pen and sort of edit it, and then
I'm able to put it away at a reasonable hour
(05:12):
and go watch a movie or something in the evening.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, live your life. What's the real writing routine?
Speaker 1 (05:18):
So my day job does involve writing, and it often
involves writing to a very tight deadline. I do write
about movies, and so a lot of times it's like
you see the movie and then it's coming out in
two days, so I have to turn it around fast. However,
I have learned one thing about myself, which is that
I do not write well in the mornings. So I
tend to try to reserve my mornings for meetings and
(05:43):
you know, reading other people's work or any research I
might have to do, and then in the afternoon kind
of pick it up. And Luckily, I'm a very fast writer,
so usually I can sort of bang out a draft
in an afternoon, at least a passable draft. And I
like to write at least a portion of something. If
I know I'm not going to be able to get
it done, I try to get at least four to
(06:04):
six hundred words done in one day so that I
can pick it up the next morning. When it comes
to writing a book, I have to fit it in
around my day job, and so I schedule myself reading,
which is a big part of the kinds of books
that I write, just tons and tons of primary and
secondary sources. I schedule that throughout the week or throughout
the month, and then I block out one weekend per
(06:26):
month to write the draft, which is actually a physically
taxing thing to do because a lot of times chapters
are like eight thousand words long. But that way I
can kind of get it all out of my head
at once, which just works better for me. I am
not one of those people who writes like one hundred
and fifty words a day. I'm very happy for people
who can do that, but it completely doesn't work for me.
(06:47):
And then after I write that chapter, I don't look
at it till the next month. And that's that's my
routine at this point.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Oh, that's so interesting how you like divide it up
like that.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Yeah, off like this, like I.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Have to stack all my interviews that I do on
one day, or like my energy.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Is totally shot.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Do things like that to manage your is it to
manage your energy or just to make sure you get
a better draft, or.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Yeah, it's to manage my energy. It's because a lot
of the writing I do sort of sits on the
borderline between historical, reported and critical, and so to do that, well,
you really need to. You know, I don't always know
what the argument or even the thesis is going to
be when I'm going into it, and so doing it
(07:36):
all in a big chunk means that I'm like in
that brain space and all that I feel like, all
those pieces that are swrolling around above my head I
can kind of grab. But one thing I do with
book writing is I tend to retype out everything from
the books that I've been reading that is relevant to
the chapter that I think I'm writing. And so the
(07:58):
act of typing it helps me to see the words
that I read, and that means that they're in my
head and then I can be like, wait, wait, there
was a quote about this, and I can go find
it in my notes.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
It's laborious, like maybe too laborious, certainly not efficient, but
it definitely helps with me being able to kind of
pull all of the pieces together.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Yeah, Oh I love that, Okay, one piece of writing
that makes you jealous you didn't write it.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
There's so many of these, really kind of disturbing, I
guess if I were to just pick one. I'm working
on something about Joan Diddyon right now for my next book,
and so I've been reading everything as she wrote many
many times over, and of course a lot of what
she wrote is really admirable and interesting. But I've actually
(08:48):
been reading her film criticism, and one thing I love
about it is that a lot of people don't know
that she wrote film criticism, which is fun. But also
her film criticism has this sense of like she just
likes movies to be fun. They don't really have to
be very good, but for her, like a movie that
she didn't have fun watching in some way just as
(09:11):
a bad movie. And I kind of admire the way
that she, who is sort of famously an overthinker in
her writing, when it came to film criticism, she was like, Nope,
like we all know this is nonsense at so let's
just treat it that way. And I really admire that attitude.
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Okay, so criticism and food kind of, you know, intersect
with your writing life. So how did those things all
come together.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
So I've been writing criticism for fifteen or sixteen years now,
professionally in sort of more or less professional capacity. I
started do doing it really honestly because I had a
day job in financial technology after college and I was
(10:08):
really bored and kind of miserable, and I was just like,
I can't believe I'm gonna be doing this the rest
of my life, which obviously I didn't end up doing,
and so I just sort of started writing for fun.
I had moved to New York City. I was dating
a guy who I, you know, eventually married, who was
working in films. So we were just like going to
see a lot of movies and I was like, I
(10:30):
don't know, there's like a lot here to talk about.
So I started writing it for various like little web publications,
you know how you sometimes you just like write a
lot of stuff for free, just to get out there
and get your brain working. And the thing is, if
you keep doing it long enough, and if you're like
halfway decent at it, then people tend to take notice,
especially on the Internet. And you know, by about ten
(10:52):
years ago or fifteen years ago, now, I guess I
started sort of hearing from publications like do you want
to write a review of this movie for us or
something like that. I expanded myself to writing about a
little bit about art, books, television of course music once
in a while, and then I just sort of wound
up doing it a lot as a freelancer for big publications.
(11:15):
And then Box, where I currently work, was hiring someone
to cover film six years ago and or a little
over six years ago, and they called me because the
editor at the time had been reading me for a while.
So it was kind of a funky, strange way to
get into the industry. But here I am with like
a staff position where I mostly write about movies and TV.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
That's very cool.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Yeah, And then in the meantime, I and I'm sort
of skipping many steps in between. But I ended up
earning a MFA in creative nonfiction, and my thesis adviser
knew I was like kind of obsessed with food writing.
I just love to cook, and so I love to
read good writers on food, and she said, why don't
you take a quarter to just read food writing and
(11:58):
write about it. So I did that and that kind
of got me thinking about what makes for good food
writing and so all of these things started to come
together when a book editor, the editor who edited my
last book, approached me and said, do you have a book?
And I was like, I don't want to write a book.
Writing books sucks, It's like so much work. And she
was like, well, just think about it. And I remembered
(12:20):
that I'd had a conversation once with a mentor who
said you should write a book called Cocktails with Hannah,
meaning a book about Hannah Arent's famous cocktail party, the
philosopher who had all these cocktail parties in the middle
of the twentieth century. And I was like, I don't, Robert,
I don't think that's like a whole book. But then
when I thought about it, I was like, that's the
seed of a good idea. And so I wound up
(12:41):
picking nine women who I found really interesting from the
twentieth century artists, intellectuals. Some of them are cooks and
chefs and food writers, and a lot of them are not,
and just thinking what can I find in their stories
that is food related that I can hang like a
bigger story about them and who they are and what
they do teach us upon. Yeah, And so that's kind
(13:03):
of how I ended up I was like, this is
the only way I'm going to write a book. I
ended up writing it that way, and it was a
really good way to combine those things. And so when
I came to my next book, which I'm working on now,
I had to kind of find another innovative way into
the story I wanted to tell, which is about Hollywood
American myth making a whole bunch of cultural figures, Joan
(13:26):
Diddon being one of them.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Okay, so all of that is fascinating.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Let's back up just a little bit.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
And go back to when and why you decided to
get your MFA because you were doing this online writing,
and what kind of prompted that.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yeah, so I had already earned one master's degree basically
as a way to get myself out of this financial
technology job, which is what I was trained for in college.
So I went to I got a job at NYU
in the IT department as a writer, so I could
like sort of ease my way out. They have a
whole writing department within the IT departments about tech. Yeah,
(14:02):
it's a very big university, so there's just a lot.
So it was mostly tech writing that there was some
there's an in house magazine that I was editing in
in house sorry, an in house tech magazine, and why
he was very big in house tech magazine that I
edited and wrote a lot of not really knowing how
to write a journalistic article. And I don't know if
(14:22):
I would only call it journalism, but it meant I
would like interview people and write articles, and so I
was getting a little bit of that at work. In
the meantime, I got a master's in the humanities, which
is just sort of an interdisciplinary degree. I really liked it,
and as I was in one of those classes, I
took a class in the English department on like the
modern English novel or something one summer and the professor
(14:45):
said something offhand that I'd never heard of. My parents
didn't go to college or anything. I didn't really grow
up around I guess like intellectuals, but giant air quotes
around that. So I didn't know this, but he said, oh,
if you're if you of a master's in anything in
the liberal arts, then you should try teaching freshman composition
(15:05):
on the college level, because colleges always need adjunct instructors,
and like, if you don't like it after the first
semester you never have to do it again. And I
was like, oh, interesting. So I emailed the one person
I knew who I thought might do some hiring at
like this tiny little liberal arts college, which is where
I currently teach still, and I said, hey, I'm finishing
(15:25):
my masters, like, I don't know if you guys need
anything for the fall, but i'd be interested. And he said, actually, yeah,
we totally do. We need someone to teach a freshman
writing course. And I said, oh, hey, sign me up.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
I was a hot tip.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Uh huh yes, And it was a really good tip,
as it turns out, a great tip for me because
it went really well. I was twenty five when I
did this, and I was teaching college students, you know,
how to write, and I was a little scary, but
I was like, you know, what can I do? So
I sort of flew by the seat of my pants.
Then they hired me to teach the second semester course
(15:59):
the next semester. That went really well, and midway through
they were like, actually, we have a full time position opening.
Do you want it? And I was like, yes, I
would like this full time college teaching position, and so
I took it and then in the meantime, they said,
you know, this is going really well. We really you know,
everyone likes you here, but if you want to keep
(16:20):
doing this full time, you really need to be working
towards a terminal degree. I believe. At the time, I
was like, what is a terminal degree? I googled it
and figured out that I could either get a PhD
or an MFA, and PhD seemed like a lot of work,
and I was like, Ah, I'm a writer, an MFA
will be easy. You know, I already write. How hard
(16:41):
could it be. Well, turns out it's really hard work,
but it was really good work, and I enrolled in
a low residency MFA, so that took two years. It
was like, really good for me in particular. I don't
know that it's good for everyone, but I usually describe
it to people as like I could have learned everything
(17:02):
that I did learn in the MFA on my own,
but I felt like it shoved me through about ten
years of like crap, And then when I was done,
I was definitely substantially better writer than I was at
the beginning of the program, and I had to read
a lot and I had to sort of learn to
articulate what is good and what is not good and
(17:22):
a piece of writing, and that helped me become a
better teacher. And I built a community as well of
people who I think are good readers, which is really
what you need as a writer. And then at the
end they had an MFA, which was nice as well,
and it meant I could be a full time professor totally.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
So did you start a book length project during that MFA.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Or they didn't let us? Really is it was an
unusual program in that they said, we really want the
focus to be on you building a writing life, and
we find that people who focus too much on getting
a book, which often happens in MFAs, tend to become
like very competitive and very networkey and very kind of
(18:08):
climbing the ladder to totally get So we just want
you to forget about a book for two years. And
my creative thesis was like a like a ten essay
collection basically, but they weren't essays that you would publish
together in a book, and I wouldn't publish most of
them at this point, but that you know, back then,
ten years ago, that's what it was. I know some
(18:29):
people have sort of wheedled their way into publishing a
book out of that program, but in general, I think
that was a good focus. And they said, if you
can write good essays and you can write a book,
which is probably true.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
Your first book that I found on the internet was
how to Survive the Apocalypse?
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Is that correct? Yes?
Speaker 2 (18:51):
That is?
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yeah, that was co written.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
So yeah, can you set up that premise and then
we'll get into a little bit about how that worked
and what you learned.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Yeah, so that book is kind of well, it was
a funny thing. So I co wrote it with an
old coworker who is a political science professor, and we
had shared a mutual love of like zombie shows for
a long time. I think that book came out in
twenty sixteen. So in twenty fourteen, we were both still
(19:21):
pretty early career academics and we were writing here and there,
but you kind of need a book to advance in
your career. So we came up with this. He really
came up with the idea and was like, do you
want to write this with me? And I said, sounds fun.
And the idea was to explore a particular philosopher of
modernity that both of us teach to some degree in
(19:43):
our work, but to explore him through apocalyptic TV for
the most part. So it's like Game of Thrones and
Walking Dead, and we found a way to like shoehorn
madmen in there and stuff like that. It's kind of
it's a very like of the early twenty tens book,
I think. And so we split up the chapters and
(20:04):
he would send me his chapters and then I would
kind of rewrite them to sound like I wrote them,
because I'm the better writer of the two of us.
And the goal was always to it is a very
academic topic, but the goal was to make it extremely
accessible and interesting to people who had never read the
underlying theorist. And I would say in twenty sixteen, in
(20:26):
early twenty sixteen, the title How to Survive the Apocalypse
did not feel quite the same way as it does now.
When I look back at it.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Now, it's like, we need a handbook, Jesus.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
I know, right. So, yeah, so the goal was just
to sort of make a very accessible book. It did
kind of end up coming out of the academic side
of our publisher and sort of being treated that way,
I think, But that was fine, and as a as
a process it. You know, again, it was pretty much
for me anyhow, I felt like I was writing criticism
(20:57):
and it didn't feel that far off of what irmally
do because I would rewatch something and then I'd think
about how it fit the idea of the chapter, and
then I would just sort of write my way through it.
And I think at the end of the day, it's
pretty accessible. The first couple chapters are a little dense
in the way that academic texts tend to be, but
people are kind of tickled by the idea of reading
(21:18):
this very complex set of ideas through, you know, something
as uffy as The Walking Dead. Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
So it sounds like the process was pretty smooth, like
you were kind of the ultimate editor. Was there anything
that you learned about writing partnerships that you would not repeat,
or any temps on how to approach that you know?
Speaker 1 (21:43):
In general, the writing part went really easily, in part
because we'd worked together for so long and we had
co written a couple articles together in the past, so
it helps us. Yeah. I think the thing I that
it was reinforced for me, or that was most important,
was you have to re trust your co writer. I mean,
(22:03):
he had to trust me that if I were going
to tweak or substantially kind of rewrite his paragraphs, that
they would have the same meaning at the end that
they did when he sent them to me. But we
had that trust established already over kind of a long
working relationship. I would say the only thing I learned
that I wished I had thought about earlier was I
am a more assertive person than he is. I'm American,
(22:27):
he's Canadian. That might have something to do with it,
And so I wish I had kind of involved myself
more in the negotiation process with the publisher, which I
just think is like a good thing to know generally,
if you don't have an agent, that you have to
be fairly assertive that they want your book. You know,
like if they're talking to you about your book, they
want your book, and so you are in essence hiring
(22:49):
them to publish your book, and it's okay to, you know,
tell them what you want. I sort of learned this
by the end. When we were in the cover process.
I I got very pushy about the cover because I
really hated the cover they'd come up with, and I
was like, no, I'm just not you can take my
name off the book if you're going to use that cover,
and they weren't going to do that, So that was
(23:10):
good that I kind of eventually got there. But that
was the thing that I really I think I learned
most out of that experience. That's smart.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
So what came out of that? Did it kind of
have the impact on your career that you hoped it would.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
So it did help in that. Really the main goal
again was just to kind of help the academic side
of my career, and it was like a main piece
in my promotion packet, and so I got promoted from
assistant to associate professor. That's really what I was going for,
and I think I also gained the confidence that I
could write a book length work, which was really important.
(23:47):
And I actually signed a contract right after that for
another short book that was going to be about kind
of like religion and pop culture, sort of like the
changing shape of religion as shown. I don't know, it
was something like that, but the publisher went under. So
I actually wrote most of the book and then the
publisher went under, and then I just use pieces of
(24:08):
it in my journalism because I wasn't totally confident in
it as a book, but I had the confidence that
it was possible for me to sit down and write
something that long, and I think that was really helpful
for me, you know, career wise. Otherwise it's sort of
like those things follow you around and people mention them,
but especially when you write about pop culture, things get
(24:30):
dated very very fast, you know. And I knew that
going in, and we joked about it, and it wasn't
something that really bugged me, but it was something that
I definitely would have thought about beforehand if I had
like a different set of goals. But yeah, it came
out in twenty sixteen, and I basically was like, I
just don't feel like I want to write another book
(24:51):
anytime soon, because now I know the amount of obsession
with your topic that you need to have, and like
how annoying it is to then talk about it for
years hours if you're not interested in the topic itself.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Okay, well, I hope that wasn't too painful.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Not at all. No, no, no, I haven't even thought
about it very much lately. So it's been funny to
be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that book it's pretty good. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Okay, so Salty came out in June, is that correct?
That is right set up that kind of premise and
the full title and who it's about.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
So the full title is Salty Lessons on Eating, Drinking,
and Living from Revolutionary Women. I started with a list
of nine or ten women, and then somewhere along the way,
as I was sort of developing the idea, I think
I scrapped about half of them and added different women
so they're not obviously related to one another all other
(25:55):
like tiny parts where they might have cross paths, or
you know, there's one place where like they dated the
same guy but it was like twenty years apart or
something like that. But they were selected mainly because I
find them interesting. And I was like, well, I'm the
narrative throughput in this book, so it's me that drives,
you know, the table of contents basically. And as I
said that, you know, the editor of the book approached
(26:17):
me in I want to say probably the summer of
twenty nineteen. I think BA was happening in New York
City and she was in town and called me and
she said, well, just go home and think about a book.
And I kind of went home and I thought about it,
and then she's picking me like six months later and
was like so, and I said, this is the only
way I'm going to write this book, as if it
can be about these nine people, And to her credit,
(26:40):
she was like, Okay, sure, go for it. Now. The
funniest part of the whole thing was that I or
I don't know, it wasn't funny. It was kind of dark. Actually,
I signed the contract like the day that the world
started shutting down in March twenty twenty. Yeah, I saw
in the forward.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I want to know how COVID impacted this whole process.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
I mean, I will ever call COVID a blessing because
it just seems rude. But it did help in the
writing of the book because I basically had nothing to
do for a year. You know, my life is very busy,
you know, in certain chunks like anyone else's, But because
I cover movies, my evenings and weekends are often very
full of like festivals and things like that, and so
(27:20):
I have very little consistent free time. But because I
had all these empty weekends where the only thing I
could really do is like go walk around in the
park or watch more TV, I had all this time
to read and write and that was really really lovely
for me. So yeah, so I signed the contract in
March twenty twenty. Completely separately from that, I got an
(27:42):
email from my now agent, who at the time was
just a random person cold calling me from the internet
that same week, so that happened totally separately. I did
Salty without an agent, and then I started writing it.
I really didn't start writing the book till September, but
because it's basically nine chapters long, I just sort of
(28:02):
worked it out that I would write one per month.
The first two times, I even like rented myself an
airbnb upstate and went up and I wrote it, which
was like really helpful in getting the first couple chapters down.
And then after that I would just write them home
because I felt like I was in a groove and
I kind of had an office space. Yeah, and I
finished it. I turned in the final ish draft, I
(28:25):
mean the final first draft on Memorial Day weekend twenty
twenty one, which was a vastly It felt like I
was living in a completely different world than I had
been obviously in you know, a year earlier. Yeah, no, shit, crazy, Yeah,
I was, you know, I was even like outdoors at
a bar when I finished the last chapter, And that
felt like monumental, right, and it also felt like this
(28:48):
is a book about well my husband who helped me
edit it quite a bit, but he would say it's
a book about hope in dark times, which I think
is correct. It's also a book about just gathering and
the whortance of gathering, especially around food, which was a
very weird thing to be writing when that was the
only thing I definitely wasn't doing. So there's little bits
(29:10):
of myself in there that feel like a memoir of
a hard year. That's not the focus of the book,
but it comes through in certain chapters. Yeah, and then
you know, it took I don't know what six months
or something to get the edits done. They had these
beautiful illustrations. I'm really happy with the final product. And
(29:31):
then it came out in June. So these things take
so much time. That's pretty finast though, isn't it. It
is for a book from start to finish. Yeah, I
mean it helps that it's not a very long book,
so I'm trying to remember exactly how long it is.
I think it's sixty thousand words or seventy thousand. It's
something like that. I knew it was going to be
kind of gift book sized, which is what it came
(29:51):
out to. I'm really happy they put it out in
hardcover for that reason. Each essay in it is, I
believe somewhere between five and six thousand words long. So
for me, that's like a long magazine article, which again
I knew I could write because I'd do it all
the time. So that confidence really translated well. When I
sat down to write, I just thought like, oh, just
(30:12):
write another article. And that was really good, and it
just helped that. The research process for it really didn't
involve anything like interviews or anything like that. I just
would read biographies. I would, you know, if the person
wrote novels, I would read a whole bunch of the novels.
One chapter is on the filmmaker Agnes Varda, and there's
a Criterion collection box set that is the complete works
(30:36):
of Agnes Varda. So I bought it and I spent
one Saturday morning every week for like maybe three months
just watching an entire disc And that was great, you know,
and I felt like I was meeting these people sometimes
for sort of the first time, and really getting to
know them and then trying to share them with the reader.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah, I definitely wanted to talk about the research process.
So it was kind of like gemented because it's definitely
threaded throughout the book and it seems like very thorough.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Yeah, I you know, I'm like a giant academic nerd.
And so I had to sort of almost make a
syllabus for myself every month, where I would sit down
and say, okay, like, here's the ten books I pulled
that I'm going to read, and then I would divide
them up mathematically into how many pages I needed to
(31:25):
read per day from which books. And I would do
that and stuck to it pretty consistently, which again was
much easier because I wasn't doing anything else. So after work,
I would sit down on the couch and read for
a few hours. And I have like little sticky flags,
I mean everyone does. I have a billion of them
just scattered everywhere in my house. Everywhere you look, just
(31:47):
like little sticky flags, and I use them to mark,
you know, bits of interest. And I find that reading
all that stuff in a really compressed timeframe meant that
I was skimming sometimes, but it also meant I was
quickly developing knowledge of what I was looking for, which
was often like trying to find some hook into their
(32:08):
life or sometimes food just because, for instance, there's a
chapter on Octavia Butler, the science fiction novelist. Food was
not an obvious thing with her. I really had to
dig on that one. But as soon as I kind
of ran across it in a novel, I was like, wait,
I see what's going on here. I see what I
can do with this. And then I would sit down
with all those notes and I would type them all out,
(32:30):
and that would help me sort of see a structure
start to emerge in front of me, and then I
would yeah, sit down on a weekend and draft the
draft the chapter.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
So you said you had a list and then you
doubled it of these women and then you.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Paired it back down.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Yeah, so how did you ultimately select who as included?
What was kind of your rubric?
Speaker 1 (32:52):
So one thing I didn't want to do was have
anybody that would be expected in a book about women
and food. I just like I didn't want to put MFK.
Fisher And I love MFK. Fisher, but I didn't felt
like there's a lot of books about MFK. Fisher. We
don't need another chapter on her. Even if you don't
know who she is. She's very easy to find books about.
(33:14):
I didn't want to put Julia Child in the book
for that same reason, right, So I was looking for
a balance of I didn't want it to be all
about like white women writers, you know, and I didn't
want it to be all about chefs or something like that.
So I tried to spread it out a little. At
the same time, I knew that because this is my
(33:34):
preferences and interests coming through, it's very heavily about people
who spent a lot of time either in the US
or in Paris particular, where I've spent a lot of time,
or sometimes both, just because those are the people who
I've kind of bumped into in the past and found
interesting for one reason or another. There were some people
who I was like, I really want the excuse to
read everything they wrote. Yeah. The one that springs to
(33:57):
mind is Patricia high Smith, who wrote the Ripley novels
and other things and I But the thing that it
was like almost an intrusive thought, was the moment in
the movie Carol, which is based on her book The
Price of Salt, where Kate Blanchett shows up at the
restaurant and orders cream spinach with a poached egg and
(34:18):
a martini and cream spinach is like so gross to me,
I have like a real texture version and that I
just can't deal with it. And I was like, oh no,
I can't talk about Patricia Highsmith. She also doesn't seem
to have liked food very much, which felt like it so,
you know, so I and I was like, oh, I
mean I really like her. I'm really interested in her.
(34:38):
And then I was sort of browsing my bookshelves and
landed on the idea of substituting Lori Colewin for her,
which turned out to be a really good idea because
a lot of people don't know Lori Colewan, but everybody should.
So that was the process. And really I think I
landed on nine because that would land me in the
page count that I had been contract. I mean, this
is all very practical and kind of stupid at the
(35:00):
end of the day, but I just wanted to find
people I wanted to spend time with who intrigued me
for one reason or another, even if I couldn't put
my finger on it, and who represented like some kind
of variety of life experience and of occupation and just
of things that I thought they might tell me, and
(35:22):
I wound up framing it as like if I threw
a dinner party, these are the people I would want
to be there together.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, what was that painting that you mentioned in.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
The Yeah, it's actually not a painting. It's an installation piece.
So there's there is a piece called the Dinner Party.
And the artist's name is completely escaping me at the moment.
It's very famous. Anyhow, there's a piece called the Dinner Party.
It is at the Brooklyn Museum, which is very close
to my house, and you enter this room and there's
(35:52):
like this giant three sided table kind of like a triangle,
and there's all these place settings at the table, and
there's place cards and for all these women. And it
turned out accidentally one man, but all these women who
were they just didn't know when because the Judy Chicago
is the artist and when the piece was made in
(36:13):
the seventies, they didn't realize this person was a man.
But there were kind of place cards and they there's
settings for people who are basically being given a seat
at the table that they were denied for one reason
or another in the past, and sort of you know,
making the point of like rewriting history through a feminist lens.
And I wouldn't say that anyone in my book has
(36:34):
necessarily been denied their place at the table, but some
of them have definitely not gotten the full place they deserve.
Edna Lewis, for instance, the chef you know, often is
not included in histories of the farm to table movement,
even though she's as important, if not much more than
Alice Waters or Ella Baker, who is an activist who's
(36:55):
at least as important as Martin Luther King to the
history of the civil rights movement. But she was much
quieter and didn't give speeches, and so people don't really
know about her so or many people, I should say,
don't know about her. So just trying to kind of
bring that, you know, who would you want to meet
at a dinner party. Maybe not people you already know
so much as people that you will be glad you
(37:17):
know at the end of the party.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah, very cool premise. Okay, so you do bang out
those pieces for work, like, were your drafts pretty close?
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Yeah? For a variety of reasons, the editing process was
a bit of a crunch, and so I write the
one draft, set it aside, and then like edited it
the next month before I started writing the new draft
and just kind of put me in that headspace, and
then I really wouldn't look at it again. I think
I gave it a once over, but I'm so used
(37:48):
to editing as I go because that's how I write.
That generally, my drafts are in pretty good shape, and
I knew that just from experience. And then when I
got book edits back, I had a months where we
were in like pretty tight edits and it turned out
my husband actually was I didn't know this. He's not
a writer, but he's a great line editor, as it
(38:09):
turns out, and so he went through kind of the
fine tooth comb and was very helpful with that. So
it didn't change shape substantially from the earliest draft. There's
like one chapter that got a pretty big sort of
did a bunch of open heart surgery on it, but
the other ones, a lot of them stayed pretty much
the same. And I do think the fact that I
(38:29):
have to write so much, just generally for my work
is very helpful here because I do like sort of
trust my voice. I know what's going to come out
of me, and it's pretty consistent across the board.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
And then you already had the publisher set up, so
it wasn't like you had to go look for anyone.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Yeah, And I mean that's the thing about nonfiction is that, well,
I've never written a memoir, but anything like this, you
usually sell it before you write it.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Did you have a book proposal?
Speaker 1 (38:59):
I did not really write a book proposal for this one.
I kind of wrote a table of contents that was explanatory,
but the press was kind of already sold on the idea.
So and I've heard from other friends that this is
something that they sometimes, you know, especially their second book
for the same press is a Lot More Chill, which
reminds me very much of my freelancing days, where you
(39:19):
had to craft a really perfect pitch the first time
you pitched a magazine, and then after that it was
very like, hey, I just think maybe I have some
ideas about the leftovers? Can I write about it? So
it wasn't all that different. So then, yeah, so for
this next one, I did write a proposal, and the
proposal was a long process, so I saw so I was,
(39:41):
you know, I took a meeting over Zoom. Of course,
with this agent, my agent, Laura, and we were just
talking about ideas. I hadn't signed with her yet, and
I had an idea for a book that I still
kind of want to do, and she was like, well,
this is a really good idea. But I've always thought
I wanted to work on a book that was sort
of related to Jon and I was like, oh, yes,
(40:03):
like I've written a lot about Didian over the years,
and I think there's probably something there. I was like, well,
let me just read a lot and then I'll come
back to you with an idea. And I wound up
thinking about Hollywood a lot, reading her biography and realizing
that like not a lot of people had written about
that part of her life. And so that proposal I
(40:23):
started working on, I mean essentially in May twenty twenty,
and I think we didn't even send it out for
a year. It took that long to really refine it,
write the table of contents. You need two chapters in
a nonfiction proposal. I had to write those chapters, you know.
It was just like a lot of work. Yeah, and
(40:44):
then it was out for sale for six months. I
think before it's old.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
I read that you were a writing fellow at Sundance
Institute's Art of Nonfiction Initiative. Did that fit into any
of these things that you were working on or how
did that work?
Speaker 1 (41:06):
So the Art of Nonfiction Initiative was within the documentary
program there, and they were trying out something where they
were bringing in writers and critics to kind of work
alongside their filmmaking fellows. And Art of Nonfiction was about
like innovative documentary, so not so much what you might
see on PBS, but sort of more experimental I guess,
(41:28):
you know, that kind of.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Thing ethically dubious.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Yeah, sometimes sometimes just like you know, like a memoir
is not exactly the kind of documentary you expect to see, right,
and it's the kind of thing people have been making
for a really long time, but often in Europe. So
my job was to well, it was unclear, but the
idea was that we would be around, we went to
(41:52):
some programming, and then we also would work on like
some pieces and I was writing about documentary. In the end,
it was really useful for me because as it helped
me as a film writer solidify some of the bonds
between creative nonfiction filmmaking and creative nonfiction writing, which I
think are there but are under explored at the moment.
(42:12):
So I love writing about nonfiction of course, like there's
so much of it out there that it's only been
a boom since that time. But one thing that can
be hard as a film writer is if you don't
have a great knowledge of how filmmakers think, then you
can kind of draw the wrong conclusions about what they're
trying to do or why they did what they did,
(42:34):
or you might be like, oh, it's a mistake, when
in fact, rarely are there actually mistakes in films. They're
usually very purposeful. And so yeah, so that's a lot
of what that was about. So it's all kinds of
you know, it's like indirectly related. Everything's kind of indirectly related,
but it wasn't specifically part of the book projects.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Okay, cool, you have a lot of cool stuff going on.
Do you have any bucket list writing goals?
Speaker 1 (42:59):
I I mean, I would say my bucket list writing
goal at this point is to like have more time
to write. I feel that, which is really just about money.
But I would also, you know, everyone everyone kind of
has the thing I would love to someday attempt to
write fiction, which is a thing that I find like baffling.
(43:20):
And part of the reason I did nonfiction in grad
school was because I was like, oh, fiction seems so
hard because you have to make stuff up. And then
of course the fiction writers were like, I don't know
how you write nonfiction, Like fiction is so easy because
you just make it really Yeah, but I would love
to do that. And I also there's a lot of
things I've never really been able to do, Like I
(43:41):
would love to have the time to like go to
a writing residency, you know, or like have an extended
period of time to focus on a book. But at
the same time, in reality, most people are writing in
around the edges of their lives, so I can't complain
too much.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Yeah, what piece of writing advice do you wish you
could give your former self?
Speaker 1 (44:05):
I think to do more of it. I mean, I
didn't know that writing was a thing people could do,
like for a job or for like for their life
when I was growing I don't know. I think I've
talked to a lot of writers who grew up sort
of in families where writing wasn't part of in the air,
and who say the same thing. It's like, Oh, I
(44:26):
just thought these books kind of appeared you know, and
it never occurred to me that, like, live people are
currently writing books. So I wish I had given myself
that kind of gift. I think of thinking of writing
as a real thing, real people do. Yeah, it took
a while to really come to terms with that, even subconsciously.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
What's one tip for writers trying to get a book published? Uh?
Speaker 1 (44:50):
I think it's to really define what kind of a
book writer you want to be, Like, why are you
doing this? Is it for fame? Because that is is
not something you're going to get probably unless you're extraordinarily lucky.
Is it for money? Like that can be tricky. You
may or may not get it. Is it because you're
(45:12):
really interested in the topic, then that's probably a good reason.
But the thing to remember, and I do tell younger
writers this sometimes is that the magazine articles you write
or whatever, they're kind of written in pencil, where like
they're out there, but people don't necessarily think of them
as like you're one thing that you've written. But a
book is an ink and it will follow you around
(45:32):
the rest of your life, and so you better make
sure you want your name on that book. And I
definitely know younger writers who kind of got excited because
a publisher approached them about writing a book, often about
their lives, and now they're forty and regretting it because
they that was not a story they wanted to give
up the way that they did. So I think, just
(45:54):
be very careful about that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
That's a good tip. What's your all time My favorite
piece of your own writing could be anything.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
I don't know, but at the moment I was rereading,
I don't usually reread my own writing, but I was
rereading yesterday just because of a tweet. I read a
piece I wrote early this year after I went to
an eight hour Jackass is on, Oh my Goodness easy
im of the moving image in Queen's right before Jackass
Forever came out. And I'm always proud of myself when
(46:29):
I read a piece of writing and I realized, like
I was funny, and I also said something because that
is not necessarily my normal mode of writing, and I
feel like I'd nailed it with this one. And I
reread it and I was like, I think I tweeted
it back out and said, if I ever published a
collection of criticism, I just know this is going to
be the lead essay. And I'm like, I'm not sure
if I should feel embarrassed about that, but yeah, it's
(46:49):
a lot of fun. It's it's I think it's titled
like how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jackass
or something like that. But it was a blast, awesome.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
Thank you so much to Alissa. I had a fantastic
writer chat with her and loved reading Salty and familiarizing
myself with her work. So make sure you find her
on the internet and stay in touch.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
I'm mostly on Twitter. My handsle there is Alyssa Marie
because I got Twitter in two thousand and seven and
never thought that I would need my last name in
my handsl and now somebody has it won't give it back.
So yeah, so Alyssa Marie and all my work, all
my magazine work is on Vox with.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
The v Thank you for joining me for this episode
of The Bleeders. Writing is so much better with friends.
I'm your host Courtney Cosack, and hey, let's connect on
social media. I am at Courtney Kosak last name is
Kocak on Twitter and Instagram, and make sure you're signed
up for The Bleeders companion substack for all kinds of
(47:54):
newsletter exclusives. There's so much good stuff that I send
out to my free list, and I actually just launched
a paid subscription with some extra goodies, where I take
you behind the scenes.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
Of all my best buylines.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
I published a post about my return to stand up
comedy and how I got ready to crush my showcase.
I wrote about MFAs and whether or not I think
it is worth it. I also did one of my
favorite workshops I've ever taught. It's a manifestation workshop that
I did for the New Year, but it's really good
anytime of the year. So there's so much good stuff
(48:27):
for free subscribers and even more for paid subscribers. And
there is a link in the description for that and
join me again next time for another all new episode.
In the meantime, Happy Bleeding
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