How to Write from Counterphobia, with Alice Lichtenstein

Alice Lichtenstein knows how to write about tough topics. We met because she was afraid to send in something to a live reading I was curating, and the result was a spectacular piece of work. So, too, is her recent novel, The Crime of Being, in which she chose to take on race. The book is receiving excellent reviews and getting a lot of attention, so I asked her to come along on QWERTY and talk to us about how to write from counterphobia and the burden of carrying a story that scares you. How, exactly, do you live with a hard tale while working on it? Let’s go ask Alice.

Read along as you listen to this episode of QWERTY. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher. (The following transcript has been edited from the original recording).

Marion: Today I will be speaking with writer Alice Lichtenstein, author of several novels including her new one, The Crime of Being. Alice and I met when she participated in a reading I produce and curate every year. It’s called a Brava! and it gathers together writers to read pieces about the roles of bras in our lives. The event raises brand new bras for people who don’t have them. Last year at the event, Alice brought her new novel for me as a gift. I went home, opened it, and was hooked from the opening page. The book is, as I said, The Crime of Being, was published by the marvelous indie Upper Hand Press. Her previous novels, The Genius of the World and Lost are both the recipients of several awards and terrific reviews. Her short stories have appeared in Narrative magazine, Post Road and Short Story. Alice lives in Oneonta, New York where she teaches fiction writing at Hartwick College. Welcome Alice. It’s a joy to be back together.

Alice: And it’s thrilling to be here.

Marion: Delighted to have you. As I said in the intro, we met through Brava!, a curated reading I produce each year and you read a poem in last year’s Brava!, it was called Boob Song and it was a marvel. Yeah, just a marvel.

Alice: If only you knew how hard it was for me to actually say that word out loud, you’d be surprised.

Marion: The word “song?” I don’t get it.

Alice: No, no, no, the word “boob.” I was the prude of prudes as a girl and a young woman, so I’ve evolved.

Marion: That’s funny.

Alice: Yes.

Marion: That’s funny. Well, let’s just talk about that kind of performance because how important is it for writers to be diverse? You write short stories and novels, but you were willing to travel from Oneonta, New York to where I was to be part of that experience. And I really want to encourage writers to think about what part of the life requires the courage. And so to write poems like that, what goes into that process? And why did you show up?

Alice: What a wonderful question. Well, it goes back a little bit. The first time I heard about Brava!, I was listening to you on WAMC and as you were discussing the call for submissions for this absolutely amazing project, I was sitting there going, I could never ever, ever write about the most traumatic experience of my life, which has to do with bras. I was just literally like, I could never. And of course as a writer, whenever you come across that experience of I can’t do this, I’m too scared. If you’re honest or something, I don’t know what, you go, okay, oh dear. That means I actually have to write about this, so I did. I wrote, the first time I appeared at Brava, I actually wrote a personal essay, which is something I’m terrified of writing, let alone writing about bras.

It was writing an essay. I’m a dyed in the wool fiction writer. And so when the next call for submissions came along, I went, oh, I guess I’ve said everything I’ve ever needed to say about bras. I can’t submit to this again. And then all of a sudden it popped into my head, this what I would call a prose poem. I would be really, I have many poet friends and I’m sure they’re cringing if I call my work poetry. But anyway, to my absolute delight, you accepted it. And what you don’t know is that you’ve gone on and inspired another prose poem. And I’ve just done a collaboration with a wonderful photographer, Andrea Modica. You might know her work. And she has a photograph, a platinum print of a bra. And she asked me to write an acrastic response and I have, and that’s now going off to a gallery.

Marion: Oh great.

Alice: I’m like, wow.

Marion: This is fabulous. The how to write from counterphobia thing is very real. We talk about it and I talk to my students all the time about writing from counter phobia. It’s the greatest place to write from I would say. But when I say that, I’m met with mixed responses, but yours is a great response right there, which is that as soon as you feel that terror, you know you’re going there.

Alice: Exactly.

Marion: And it’s not just braggadocio, it’s that I can’t resist it. It should be gone. It’s something about, it’s an invitation to write from a place of what terror?

Alice: Well, another way I look at it is, well I teach fiction at Hartwick College as you mentioned. And I also, try to open my students minds to the idea that where it scares you, you need to explore.

Marion: There we go.

Alice: And that’s often where the red hot center of the work is. And I don’t know, I imagine you probably do some pre-writing with your students as I do. And I ask them to circle at one point the two or three sentences that they would keep if everything else had to be scrapped. And that’s what I called the clunk. It’s where the center of energy is and by and large, people find it. And if it isn’t there, then I say, “Okay, write it. Just what is it that you’re writing around? Just what scares you?” I had to. I had to face that myself. In fact, I actually thought about that going, okay, I tell my students to do this, I better do it myself.

Marion: Well, I think it’s evident in this new novel, there’s a lot of courage because you stepped into one of the hottest hotspots of our time when choosing to write your most recent novel. And I’ve read in interviews with you that it came out of this hate crime that occurred in all places of all places in Cooperstown, New York, which is one of the quietest, loveliest towns in America. It’s home of the Baseball Hall of Fame and the summer opera, the Glimmerglass Opera, not the kind of place one expects for racial violence to erupt, but in 2010 it did. And so this happens every day to writers. We read about something and we have this response, we want to do something about it. Tell us a little bit about the crime and then we’ll talk about the idea of responding.

Alice: Okay. A couple of things I’d like to say. Though, the initial incident, the hate crime did take place in Cooperstown, it’s very important to me, and this is one of the things that I’ve said a lot in my introductions to readings. There’s a huge difference for fiction writers, of course, between fiction and nonfiction but I’m finding that my audiences often are much fuzzier on what the difference is. What I like to explain is that for a fiction writer, for a novelist, while I research some of the actual facts of what happened, I for one thing decided only to use what was public record. And that was because as a fiction writer, I’m interested in the interiority of characters. I want to step in to a character’s head. And from that point on it is complete fiction.

Alice: I also give myself permission just to invent. And so many, just about everything in this novel is invented other than a certain sort of scaffolding of, yes, there was a white on black hate crime in a small town that would otherwise, as you say, just idyllic, picturesque town. And the fact that that came out of the blue. What seemed to be completely out of a context. As a novelist, many, many things struck me, but one was a fascination, interest in the aftermath of a crime and how a community is affected and then inventing all the characters in that community and they are invented. In the actual crime, there was a white teenager who went after, pursued the only black teenager in the high school, pursued him one afternoon with a gun and shot him. Fortunately did not kill him. And then attempted to kill himself. And that’s the basic outline of what actually happened.

Marion: You read about this?

Alice: Yes, I read about this.

Marion: Right. Absolutely. You read this, you have a response. Did you know immediately that it was a book length piece? That it was not a short story or a poem or an essay? Let’s talk about that response you had. Did you say, “Oh, there’s a novel there,” what did you say to yourself?

Alice: That’s just a wonderful question. First of all, I am very aware of, and horrified by the rise in hate crimes in this country. And though this event happened eight years ago and I felt that because I also live in Upstate New York and have an understanding of what a small community in Upstate New York is like, having lived in Upstate New York now for almost 30 years, that I had some I wanted to have more insight into this experience. And I did feel it was a sort of a microcosm of what’s happening across the country.

I also though, and this is I think important for the novelists listening, I sometimes tell the story of if I was Jon Krakauer, well one, I’d be extremely wealthy, but moving along, I would have gone about this interviewing every single actual person, anchoring every detail. And writing the story in beautiful prose, but it would be reporting. It would be nonfiction and journalism. Fiction writer, I have no interest in that kind of record. And one of the reasons is that as a fiction writer, we’re talking about looking at sort of universal human experience. And as I said before, the interior life of the characters and that you are not given permission to do when you’re a journalist because that’s made up. You don’t know that. I like to point that out that this is a novelist’s response to an incident, not a journalist or even a nonfiction writer’s response.

Marion: And was it that, I want that? It’s one of the things that we didn’t talk about is that in the case and in your book, we get this majority opinion shift that the national news media cast Cooperstown as racist and but what happens in the story, in both the story, in both stories, there’s public opinion that goes in various directions that are surprising. And it makes a great story.

Alice: Thank you.

Marion: But it’s also a burden to carry that around all the time as a writer. And so when you decide to write about it, does that burden shift a bit? Are you able to say, “Well, I’m going to get control of the story. I’m going to fictionalize it, I’m going to deal with it.” Because in its reality, it’s a horrible tale of racism. But as you get your hands on it does the burden of it become different?

Alice: That’s such an interesting term, the burden of it. I certainly appreciate it. I do also want to go back to another choice though. It’s not fictionalizing what happened. It’s much more of a removed than that. Fictionalizing what happened in my mind would have meant that I knew the actual people or I knew, and these characters are invented. That’s very important to me as it sounds subtle, but it’s I think very important.

Marion: No, I think, and I appreciate the distinction and I think other people will as well. Good. Thank you.

Alice: You’re welcome. In terms of the burden of it, I feel the burden of it, so to speak, as being the burden of trying to understand the kind of hate that’s happening in this country. And I’ve also someone having lived as again in Upstate for a long time, I would say I’ve had the privilege of getting to know a lot of different people from all kinds of economic classes in Upstate New York and so on. And so I’ve been well aware of what I think is an interesting irony. That irony that the quote from one point of view, the bad people have actually depths of goodness and the good people actually have areas of complete blindness and cruelty. And that the more we look at people and their universality in terms of we’re all suffering, we all have the capacity to love, that looking at that level of how people exist in the world is what’s really, really important to me.

And that’s when you read the book, you’ll come across so many, it’s not a polemic. You will come across so many different levels of irony in the characters and the situations in what people are faced with. To me that’s in a way relieving the burden of having to be someone who only lives in a certain bubble of truth and a certain bubble of reality and so on. I’m as a writer, I want to see as much as possible and I want to understand as much as possible about the human experience.

Marion: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s hard I find in this life to get real support when you make choices like that. It’s hard to, at dinner parties, everybody wants to talk to the writer. But then when you start to actually ask for support for writing a story, and you pitch the ideas to colleagues’ family, you get a lot of blank looks or they don’t really know how to help you. It’s very difficult to support someone else’s idea. And does anyone understand when you start this process? And what kind of help can you really expect from someone else when you yourself are taking on the burden of this idea and its fictional life?

Alice: Wow. Marion, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that question. It’s such a, obviously of course you’re a writer so you can ask a question like that. I was actually, I have to say, immensely secretive about the novel and the topic of the novel for the last eight years. And I had to protect myself. I said also something that I tell my writing students all the time, that you continually have to give yourself permission. I, in this case, really had to keep giving myself permission to think about some of the mentors I’ve had. One of them being the late Nobel prize winning poet, Derek Walcott, who was one of my teachers in graduate school who always said…

Marion: How wonderful.

Alice: “Write what scares you.”  And you just do it. You need to learn how to wrote from counterphobia. And so that, those kinds of voices helped. And then I had two friends who were not writers who were reading draft, after draft, after draft and really deeply supportive of the work. And I do think it would have been almost impossible to write the book if they hadn’t been so generous in their reading time. And frankly, as a writer there’s certain stages where all you actually want to hear is, “Oh, it’s great,” even if it’s crap. And then and another, at least that’s me and I actually, I’m so obvious about it.

Marion: I’m sorry. Yeah. When does that stage end exactly? I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that was a stage.

Alice: Yeah, no, it’s a stage. Well from me, and I should only speak for myself. It’s a stage where I actually hand the thing to someone I go, “No matter how bad it is, please tell me you really liked it.” And they kind of look at me like, “Really? Okay, do I even have to read it?”

Marion: That’s great.

Alice: Well, pretend to read it. And then there’s a certain point for me that’s sometimes years down the road where I say, “I’m ready, rip it to shreds, kill it. I want to know every single thing you see.” And that’s when I’m ready for that stage. But yeah, I’m like a baby. I need to be like sort of, “Oh yes, Alice. It’s a really interesting characters. It’s great voice.” Okay, thank you. And then I rewrite, completely I’d say, “No, it’s crap.”

Marion: That’s great.

Alice: Okay, I’m weird. I appreciate.

Marion: I’m a more, I’m sort of a cannibal. I’m sort of a cannibal during all periods of writing and feeding on myself because no one understands what you’re setting out to do. And while I have a husband of many years who has create, he has created, worked on an almost perfected a face that looks almost interested. I totally know it’s a facade. How can it not be a facade? I’m throwing down words that are enthusiastic over an idea that is yet to be written. It’s not like I put up an ashtray that I made in pottery down on the table. It totally comes down to me and I go to the gym, I read, I talk to the dog, but it’s just, it’s this cannibalizing my own enthusiasms all the time. It’s the only way I can describe it. Nobody gets it. All my friends are writers. I’m very lucky, but still when it comes down to it, you’ve got to, you got to love that fear I think. I think you have to love like a friend.

Alice: Yeah. I must say I’ve always wished I had tough skin and that I could just say, “I have a tough skin.” It’s just not ever quite tough enough. What can I say? Except in the end when I’m ready.

Marion: I don’t know. Yeah. I don’t know. The upside to being so super sensitive and seeing and hearing things in the world that you can respond to on a level that’s commensurate with writing has a downside, which is that you don’t have a tough skin. If you had a tough skin and I don’t believe that any writer actually has a tough skin or else it wouldn’t permeate. And our job is to react.

Alice: Yeah. That’s a good point.

Marion: Our job is to react. Let’s talk about some of the technical complexities of all this. As you’ve made very clear, that you didn’t fictionalize this thing, the actual incident was just an initial inspiration, let’s say.

Alice: Exactly.

Marion: And then you’ve got to invent the characters and their backstories and imagine living from their points of view and their truths. In other words, you had to set out into the unknown. And writing a novel based on an event that happened, you have this visceral response as we talked about. And some people might say that’s a crazy thing to do. It is, when you think about in terms of it being a product that you’re making. You’re actually making something that will someday be a physical product, but the production experience is damn strange, isn’t it?

Alice: Well, gosh, I wish there had been someone to tell me that it was crazy to do in the beginning. I could have written a different novel all these years. Yeah. Right. Well, there are a couple things in terms of, I’m going to, because this is a novel I feel I can talk about structure and some choices that I made that I’m like my other novels I would say, a few things, and this may sound crass, but I’m going to put it out there for your writing audience. I had become a fan of some of the really great television such as Breaking Bad and Homeland and some of these sort of, I would say particularly with Breaking Bad, television that has actually changed television for me into an art form. And I was interested in why people are so hooked on these, this kind of show, including myself.

Of course one of the things that was lovely to discover of course, is they’re very interesting characters. You’re hooked by the characters. But the other thing that I thought was really important was the pacing. And I thought to myself, there’s no reason why a literary fiction novel cannot be paced in that same gripping way that a limited HBO series or a wonderful series like Breaking Bad. Why not? And the other thing I was thinking about is I looked at my own reading habits, and I see, okay, I am one of those people who unless I’m on some idyllic vacation and I’m not sure when that happens, read 15 minutes before I go to bed. I thought, I want to write something that is so compelling that people really don’t want to put it down.

In fact, my ideal reader thinks that they’re reading 15 minutes before going to bed and then goes, oh hell, I can’t put this down. I’m going to call in sick tomorrow. Or I’m just going to be sleep deprived. Whatever it takes. I have to finish this book. I’m happy to report, there have been a few people like that. More people say, “No, I just like reading the 15 minutes before bed.” But whatever. Anyway, so the short chapters, the pacing of the chapters were actually conscious, which in generally speaking, I’m not someone who would even give myself that kind of criteria to work on. I just put that out there because there must have also been something when I think about it, about the real life aspects of it that made me feel as though it could be cinematic or move in that kind of, with that kind of pacing. Have a structure that is not what I typically think of as my narrative structure.

Marion: I love that because I found it, and this is just true, almost impossible to put down because I found the rush of it to be very real. And now that you explain it, it is like a binge watch in its invitation. It feels like, I have to keep going.

Alice: That’s great.

Marion: I did have a fairly quick but completely sturdy experience with it. I don’t want you to think it was like potato chips. It wasn’t. Yeah. That’s so interesting. I love that when people tell me that they learned something from watching contemporary television or I once re-did an entire book after I saw the movie Any Given Sunday, which is a movie about football, ostensibly. Oliver, what’s his name? And it was shot in this really interesting way that made me repositioned an entire book. I completely get that.

Alice: That’s wonderful. I love that. I love that. Yeah.

Marion: Yeah. It needed to be shot from the field as opposed to shot from above. And I didn’t know it till I was sitting through the movie and I thought, I get it. I know exactly. It was a book. I got to spend two years behind the scenes in the world of forensic science.

Alice: Oh fascinating.

Marion: And if you did it from the pulpit, it was going to be like every other book. But I wanted you to go with me into the body bag.

Alice: That’s awesome.

Marion: I didn’t know that until I watched the movie. There you go.

Alice: I’m going to use that with my students unless you know a podcast on it.

Marion: You can use that with your students anytime.

Alice: Love that.

Marion: I take all the help I can get. I’m a great believer in having my heart open all the time to lessons because this is not an easy thing to do.

Alice: Me too.

Marion: And speaking of them, you, I read in an interview with you that you learned a really big lesson. You had the great, good fortune to attend the MacDowell Colony twice in Peterborough, New Hampshire. And for those people who don’t know about this experience, you get your own cottage, they cook the meals for you, you get to work. But you introduced this idea in this one interview I read with you that after this you reenter the real world and you crash.

Alice: Oh I’m so glad you read it.

Marion: And so after the second time you went, oh yeah. And after the second time you went, you said you had to rethink your creative process. What did you do when you rethought your creative process?

Alice: Of course, shout out to MacDowell. It is a place that makes you feel like you are God’s gift to your creative art. And if you can get six weeks of that, you get a lot of work done, there’s no doubt about it. It’s an amazing place. However, I experienced and everyone I know who’s been to MacDowell, several people, have the after MacDowell blues. And you go into a deep depression because when you do get back to your studio apartment in Brooklyn, you discover that actually you’re not God’s gifted. No one else thinks you’re God’s gift to your creative field and except for the MacDowell staff, and I decided I was not going to be someone who was dependent on an arts colony to get my work done.

And I analyzed, what was it about MacDowell aside from the picnic basket on your back doorstep that made it possible for me to get so much work done? Yeah, that’s nice. Hey.

Marion: Wow.

Alice: But now the days with GrubHub or something, I think you could still have that arranged if you’re, you know. Anyhow, so I looked at it and what it came down to was, sounds really simple turning off the phone and really turning off the phone. Power off everything. And the other thing I decided was that I couldn’t afford to allow, to sort of futzy around until the muse struck and then flutter over to the keys and sort of write something. Just wasn’t working. And so I said, “Okay, it’s a discipline.” And I put it in my, again, this all sounds like suddenly I become a time management person, but I wrote down in my calendar, it’s I happen to write usually 10:00 to 2:00, for four hours. I think that’s four hours I’m not very good at counting. Five days a week, I don’t write on the weekends. It’s what I do.

At the same time, and I want to make this very clear because I think that writing should never feel like a prison. There’ve also been times in my life where I was so disciplined that I was in hell and I didn’t get anything done that way. What I ultimately did is created a much more disciplined way of writing. At the same time, I think the more you write, the more you start to trust that writing is a process. It really is. And for instance, this past year, I’m alarmed to think that I actually haven’t really, I haven’t written except for my little prose poems for the last year. It doesn’t feel like a year, but I am writing because I now am someone who so thoroughly trusts my unconscious that I know that it’s working, working, working. There are two novels I’m already planning to sit down and write.

But I’m not in a state of panic. I’m not blocked. I’m just, this is giving yourself total permission to be in a creative process. And it really is that. But I think that again, unless you’ve laid that foundation, unless you trust, you get to a point where you really do trust that you are a writer and that you’re always writing, then that might not be as easy to do. I would start with getting a really nice discipline and then ultimately always give yourself permission. The times you’re not writing, you’re writing. Once you’re doing, once you have that. Does that make any sense?

Marion: Such good advice. It makes a great deal of sense and I’m so grateful to have it. I think it’s so helpful to people. Thank you Alice and thank you so much for the book, for the books. And I can’t wait to see your next bra experience on Brava.

Alice: Oh, I can’t wait to show it to you. I’m really excited.

Marion: Good. Well thank you. And thanks for listening. The author is Alice Lichtenstein. Her novels are found wherever books are sold. See all the stories from the five years (to date) of Brava! here, in a book we just published. I’m Marion and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Subscribe wherever podcasts are available. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to Qwerty and listen to it wherever you go. Want more on the art and craft of writing? Come visit me at marionroach.com and take a class.