Where We Get Writing Inspiration, with Elizabeth Rosner

Elizabeth Rosner’s work spans essays, long form fiction, memoir, short fiction and poetry, and while reading it I started to wonder where we get writing inspiration. Her seems to be from things long-carried. Her most recent book is entitled, Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory. Listen in and read along as we discuss where we get our writing inspiration.

Marion: Elizabeth Rosner’s latest book was chosen as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice. Her novel Electric City was named one of the best books of 2014 by National Public Radio. Rosner’s essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Elle, Hadassah, The Huffington Post and numerous anthologies. She lives on the West Coast and writes book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle. And she’s been teaching writing for more than 30 years. Welcome Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Thanks Marion. It’s great to be with you.

Marion: It’s wonderful to have you here. We’re in upstate New York as we record this and you grew up in upstate New York, specifically in Schenectady, New York, known as “The Electric City.” And on your website, I read an essay you had written that begins with this line: “I come from Electric City.” And you go on to explain that this was the first line of a novel of yours until it wasn’t, when you switched to third person, but that that line has haunted you. And so let’s just start by talking about haunting, those lines that come up and dog or haunt or inform or provoke. Writers know this happens, but I think we’re a little reluctant to talk about it. So what do we do with those lines? And tell us a little bit more about that one.

Elizabeth: That’s a great question. I don’t know that you can go looking for lines like that. I think even the poet friends of mine who are always in search of a line that’s going to launch a poem, a dear friend of mine talks about doing her scales every morning on the piano. And she just writes line after line, after line waiting for one that somehow catches fire. And I have to say that my process is almost entirely the opposite of that. I wait and I don’t wait, I write as if the line is going to come and find me when I least expect it. So lines have come to me while I’ve been swimming, lines come to me when I’m walking through the woods with my dog or just doing anything but writing sometimes. And it’s only when a line like that arrives that you feel that click of, oh, that’s what I’ve been waiting for.

And one of the best pieces of writing advice I ever got from an editor was about the importance of beginnings. I mean, we all know how, how important beginnings are, but he said, a good beginning has to contain the ending, and that word contain I find so compelling. This idea that there’s subtlety in math, there’s power in that, and the idea that you can’t really know your beginning until you know your ending, means that you’re going to keep revisiting that beginning until you get it right. And so that line, I was already working on the book, I already had my characters in mind, but it was that voice that it contained, I come from, that I needed. And as you say, even though I ended up switching point of view, it was that inner voice of that character that I needed to hear in my head.

Marion: Absolutely. That’s lovely. There’s so much in that answer. The idea of doing our scales, the idea of waiting, the idea of when something percolates up. I woke up a couple of weeks ago and saw on the night side table that some crazy woman in the middle of the night had written down, don’t toss her the car keys. And the her, in that phrase, I knew immediately was that proverbial inner child. And that this is no time to toss the car keys of your life, to the scared kid who lives inside you. But, I was like, who wrote that line 4:30 in the morning, somebody wrote, I remember that. And you just hope and you pray and sometimes you do your scales and these lines come to us. But I love also that advice from your editor, that a good beginning has to contain the ending. We talk about that in journalism, that you write the bagel, that you started this one place, and you come back to it. You’ve been given some other writing advice. You got some writing advice from E. L Doctorow.

So I read about that and I thought that was fascinating. The way he talks to you about you treat the people in your stories like you treat all your other characters, and think about being a portrait painter. And it came from a line you had read of his, that writing a novel is like driving in tool fog. All you need is to see a few feet in front of you and you can drive all the way across the country like that. So that groping, that looking, that fog, that searching, it’s part of the process for you, even though you have lines arrive in your head, like I come from Electric city. Is it sort of both then, you think, the definitive line that presents itself and then a lot of groping and searching?

Elizabeth: Agreed. Yeah. And I want to just go back to that E. L Doctorow moment for a second and say that that explanation he gave me or that advice he gave me was specifically about how to work with historical characters. Because I was blending fictional characters and historical people in my novel Electric City, and I was really uncertain, I wasn’t at the time thinking of myself as a historical novelist. And I just wasn’t sure what allegiance you have to have, to the so-called truth of someone’s life when facts are available, but only partial facts. And when he told me that he treated historical figures as if they were his characters, giving himself a lot of permission to invent and fictionalize, that gave me so much permission to shape a historical figure in the way that my imagination wanted to work with him. And I think that also applies to nonfiction it turns out, because we’re working with so-called facts of our own lives or so-called memories, and so-called recollections stories, narratives of a family or generational repeated stories. And so how can you ever get it accurate? How can you ever get it precise?

And so you do what you can, but you also bring all your writerly tools with you. So you might paint a scene in which a conversation took place, where you know you’re not getting the verbatim conversation, but you’re getting as close to the emotional truth of it as possible. And that really, that’s something I struggle with in all of my work, fiction and nonfiction alike.

Marion: I talk with my writers that I work with, about never changing the intent of a transaction. You know if you’re 13 and your parents have just sat you down to tell you that they’re getting divorced, you know who was angry, you know who was sad, and you know who is screaming? You remember that, or who’s crying or who’s quiet. And so if you don’t ever paint yourself as a wittier or funnier or smarter than you were, you’ll remember that you were hushed. You maybe said a word as your parents, maybe you screamed out no, but you remember that the intent of the transaction. And I think that it’s a very important thing to think about as we transport ourselves back and discover what we do. You do so much of that in your work, you say, in writing Electric City, that you transported yourself back to your childhood and discovered that place called home, that we carry inside us. And this seems like a huge theme for you and you take this huge step.

If we think of going way back, you go way back in your most recent book, into what hurdles through our own family inheritances. So let’s talk for a minute about, before we get into the recent book, let’s just talk about that whole laying on of hands book to book. Because you discover your childhood lives inside you when you write a novel called Electric City, but one book leaning to another and that process of choosing topics and what informs what and what provokes what. I think a lot of writers are very embarrassed about how synchronistic all this is and I don’t think you are. So you seem to palpate one to find the other, is that true or is that just my making it sound more synchronistic than it is?

Elizabeth: Well, if you’re asking me to claim that I’m never embarrassed about my writing, you’re never going to hear me say that. But I can say that I don’t feel ashamed of my previous work. And I think that’s actually something to be proud of in a weird way. That even my first novel, which took me 10 years to write and was published, actually it came out on 9/11, the original 9/11. That was the first day of my nationwide book tour for the Speed of Light, my first novel. And-

Marion: I had that happen. Me too, I had a big book come out on 9/11. Oh boy, yep.

Elizabeth: Oh, we are sisters in that way then. So I don’t need to tell you all that, that entailed. But yeah, it was my debut novel and it turns out that a lot of the themes in that book I was digging into and feeling like I was wrestling them to the ground and working with them as thoroughly as I possibly could. Like I said, the book took me 10 years to write. And when I got all the way through it, I thought, okay, well, I’ve worked with that material, next book will be something entirely different. And it turned out that-

So much for that fantasy. But it turns out that, we have a choice about whether to accept what we are given or not and I really feel like my material is what’s given to me. And that, that in itself is a theme. I mean that in the metaphoric sense of my family inheritance is what I’ve been given and to push it away, doesn’t serve me. And it is really unproductive anyway, because that material just pushes back harder. So rather than force myself to go write a book that somebody else might write or might want to write, I write the books that I’m here to write. And it turns out that each time I think I’m finding a slightly new lens or a slightly more oblique angle, or maybe a less oblique angle. I mean, when I went from writing fiction to writing nonfiction in a way, I felt like, oh, okay, now I don’t need to use my characters as my, not puppets exactly. But I don’t need to try and figure out how to make my brain fit into the skull of this character I’ve made up.

I get to just use my brain. I get to just follow my curiosity. I get to dig answer after answer, which of course, as we know, we don’t really find the answers, we just find more questions. And I love questions. So that other old writing advice about write what you know, which it sounds like I’m talking about because I’m talking about what’s my material, but really I’m writing what I want to know. Which is, I’m writing what intrigues me, what feels mystifying and puzzling to me, I’m going after that. So I’m writing what I want to know, not what I already know.

Marion: That’s lovely. I love the distinction and I completely understand it. My curiosity is my greatest driving force. And when I find myself afraid of something, I’m particularly drawn to it. In this most recent book, Survivor Cafe: The Legacy and Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, you reveal that you grew up as a child of Holocaust survivors. Your father was imprisoned in Buchenwald, your mother hid on a farm on the Polish countryside. And you lived in a childhood that set you apart as a result of that, different from other kids. And as you grew, you say, you noticed a web of intersection among groups of people who shared ghosts of experience. I love your language. It’s so informing, it talks to me about what this experience is. So as we get into the book, you do something as an opening device with the alphabet that I’d like to set up for the listeners, because I always tell people, try something and boy, did you try it?

You open this book in the most provocative way with an alphabet, A is for Auschwitz and are by it marked a fray, those infamous words spanning the gates of Auschwitz, work makes you free. And A is for atrocity and atom bomb, B is for Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Birkenau, and so forth. You define each. E is for Eichmann, extermination and my favorite one of all is euphemism. Wow, did that hit me like a two by four. And the gas used to murder millions that begins with a Z, the way the book works us through that lens before we ever get into the text. So how, and when did you devise this device? I almost hate to call this a device because it’s so much richer than that. But talk to me about that decision to take us through that lens before you let us read the story.

Elizabeth: Thanks for asking. I love getting to talk about structure and decisions and when we talk about them after they’ve been made, it all seems so thoughtful and careful and deliberate and of course smart. Yes. Everything in reality is so messy and chaotic for me, that it’s always amazing to me how neat and coherent it seems afterwards. But what happened quite honestly, was I was maybe two thirds of the way into the writing of Survivor Cafe. When I started to feel just increasingly overwhelmed by my task, by the task I’d given myself. Which was not just to write about the Holocaust and not just to write about my inheritance, my legacy of trauma, but to try to work as horizontally as I could to connect all these other dots with other genocides, other atrocities, other ancestral legacies, and without diminishing any of them individually to talk about how they connected. And then also not to sacrifice the verticality of the subjects that I was writing about.

And I just started to feel like, wow, I am inadequate to this. And even my language is inadequate, even my vocabulary is going to keep falling short. Not just because of the words themselves, but because a lot of what I was trying to look at and consider, were things that we often consider to be unspeakable things, like things that defy language, things that words don’t do justice to. So I collapsed in the face of all of that overwhelm, and this alphabet came pouring out of me with that title, the alphabet of inadequate language. And I thought of it as a piece I was writing almost as an exercise, but more like an exorcism. I was just trying to say, here are all the things I don’t know how to talk about. Here are all the things I feel overwhelmed by, here are all the words that seem like I’m failing. And I wrote this thing out and I sent it to a friend of mine who, Susan Griffin, who’s a writer of course, and has been a mentor for me. And I said, what is this thing that I just wrote?

Marion: What is this I just did?

Elizabeth: And then as soon as she responded in this really enthusiastic way, I realized what it was, it was the beginning of the book. And it was an alternative table of contents for the book. And it was this kind of transparent confession that here is what the book is going to cover, and it’s going to do so utterly imperfectly and incompletely. And it’s a map with all these missing pieces and it’s a puzzle. I’ve never really completely figured out what this word means, but it’s the frontes piece of a book too. It’s like when you see a book that shows you the genealogy of the family, that the book is going to be about, or the map of the mysterious Island that the book is set on. And I thought yeah, it’s doing all these things. And I got so excited and I sent it to my editor and he said, “Well, this is a poem, I don’t understand it.” And I said, “You need to read it again and you need to think of it as the alternative table of contents.” And then he goes, “Ah, I see,” yeah.

Marion: Yeah. Well, one these days I’m going to do a clip, I’m going to get go and grab all the comments from all the writers I’ve interviewed about inane things their editors have said to them on first read.

Elizabeth: It’s just that I love my editor, I never want to say anything bad about him, but this particular thing, it didn’t snap into focus for him. And that’s why I’m so grateful that I had Susan who did get it right away. And-

Marion: Oh, I got it right away and it’s beautiful. And you talk about these shared ghosts, you talk about Vietnamese refugees, Cambodians, Japanese descendants of those who were bombed. And those who were imprisoned here in the US, the Armenian genocide, Rwanda, and of course our native Americans. And in the book, you get us to feel the thrumming through all of eternity of the hate driven devastation of people by people. And you ask the hard questions of what telling our tale does for ourselves and repeating it. And you bring in, I mean, this is what I love about this book, it just went and got all this stuff. This newish science called epigenetics, of course, and this whole idea, though of this mysterious mechanism for transmitting trauma to subsequent generations. Everybody who has trauma will tell you it thrums in our bones, in our dreams in our terrors, it travels through families. I talk about this all the time with memoir writers.

And so the question becomes, how much of our inheritance do we have to agree to take on? Who is in control of that decision? And can you refuse it through thrumming through the pulse of your own blood? And this book just dives into that, in this trans generational, epigenetic inheritance. And I loved that you weren’t afraid of the science. So let’s just walk into that for a moment too, because you explain it very simply to us. A couple of times you take on some whopping hard questions, you take on the genetics of breast cancer, and you deal with it in a paragraph. It’s like, boom, boom, this is that, this is this, boom, boom. You do it here with epigenetic inheritance. So were you afraid of the science? Did you say, give me that science? What did you do with that when you first ran into it?

Elizabeth: Well, the funny thing is I have to go back to The Speed of Light again for a second, because first of all, long before I knew there was such a thing as epigenetics, I had one of my characters in The Speed of Light doing two of these things. One was, he said, I am my father’s grief. And there’s a long story about copy editors at Random House who changed that sentence without telling me. They changed it to, it was my father’s grief and published the book, published it with that typo without checking with me. Oh, she must have meant, it was my father’s grief, not I was my father’s grief. We won’t ask her if that’s what she meant. Anyway, but he was saying that my character was saying that, and he also says, if I’d been asked if my father didn’t mean to give this to me, I would still say yes. If he asked me, I would still say yes. And so-

Marion: It’s beautiful and horrible.

Elizabeth: Yeah. So I was already writing about this carrying of things and he was, of course, a stand in for me, he was one of my many alter egos that I’ve written over the years. And then when I started learning about epigenetics, oh, and he was also a scientist, science runs throughout The Speed of Light, it’s literally on almost every page. And so I don’t think of myself as a scientist, but I do love the way science can become a set of metaphors, and that’s the way I used it in The Speed of Light, as a set of metaphors. But science for me can sometimes be this kind of abbreviated version of things that we know to be true, intuitively or in an abstract way, and science gives us something palpable to grab onto. And so when I started learning the research that led to our being able to talk about epigenetics in humans, even though, as you it’s new ish, there’s still all kinds of people who challenge its validity and who say, come on, how can you prove this?

Where in the cells does it live? How can you measure someone’s level of trauma? So there are problems like empirical problems. But if you talk to anyone who has ancestral trauma, collective historical inherited trauma, we all know what it means. We all know how it feels. We all know it’s real. And so science gives us the, well, it’s like what we were saying about the alphabet earlier. It’s a map, it’s a portrait of what we experience in something measurable.

Marion: Sure. We’re not uncomfortable talking about alcoholism hurdling through families, we’re not uncomfortable talking about violence hurdling through families. We say, what did you expect? She was abused as a child. What did you expect? Her father was an alcoholic. And we have these studies where we know that mice subjected to shockwaves while witnessing a certain aroma then will then flinch without the shockwave, when just exposed to the aroma. And that three generations later, their offspring will flinch when exposed to this aroma. We’ve seen it in the lab, we accept it when it’s violent or alcoholic and yet we don’t want to accept it in our own because I think we feel helpless. I think we feel this sense of, well then do I have a right to say no? Can I say no to this? When they deliver this inheritance, can I say no? And how old do I have to be for that no to be real, right?

Elizabeth: Well, yeah. I think-

Marion: And you write about it-

Elizabeth: Sorry.

Marion: Go ahead.

Elizabeth: No, I realized that that whole question of want or fear or helplessness is, it’s all interconnected. This feeling like if you’re telling me that my genetic material is dooming me to carry trauma or dooming me to carry anxiety or hypervigilant, I don’t want to be doomed by my genes. So I’m going to disbelieve the whole agenda. I’m going to challenge the whole science of it, but I don’t think it’s all or nothing. I think what it means is that knowing that there’s a name for this, knowing that there’s some investigations saying, it’s not your fault that you walk around jumping at loud noises, even though you yourself never lived through a bombing raid, your grandparents lived through it. What it means is that you can say, oh, I can work with this now, I know what it is. I can do some therapy around it, or I can do some meditation practice, or I can tell myself in this moment I’m safe. I’m actually safe.

We learn and develop skills and practices to help us manage this stuff. The unconscious version of it is going to run our lives, whether we want it to or not. So the pushback, I think it’s what I said before about, why push back against my material as a writer? Well, why push back at the science and say, I don’t want this to be true rather than say, if I accept that it’s true, then I actually have some agency. I have some ability to do something about it. So resiliency is also available to us. It’s not just trauma, it’s also working with the trauma until we ease it and smooth it so that we can live without it running our lives.

Marion: Well, you talk about it as a paradoxical inheritance, suffering and grace, losses and renewals, and the way you deliver this message I have to say is brilliant. You use memoir, in other words, the old expression says, if you want people to remember something, either make it funny or put it to music. Well, this third thing is to tell it, carrying it through your own story. You open the book with your third visit to Buchenwald with your father. It’s 2015, we enter the story with that astonishing alphabet and we walk in to this completely remarkable experience with you. And you are very honest. You say that your older sister and your younger brother have different memories even of the same hotel or the same place or the same expression of your father. We are so suffused with the family setting that we can’t look away. So talk to me about your decision to use memoir. You could have gone in any direction writing this, including, well, you could have on an introduction, why memoir and how did you feel that carried the story?

Elizabeth: Well, again, in retrospect it feels like this decision I made super consciously. What I knew was that again, I didn’t know there was something called a hybrid yet. Really, I was just feeling like, well, I’m interested in all of these things. I’m interested in my own story. I’m interested in the research. I’m interested in connecting all these dots. I’m interested in retaining my poetic sensibility at the sentence level. I’m interested in writing chapters that are both self contained and interconnected. I’m interested in writing about trees in the same book that I’m writing about atomic bombs. I’m interested in writing about stones and my family. Can I do all of that? And again, not to dismiss the experts-

Marion: Thanks goodness is what I say.

Elizabeth: But I tell you my agent also at first she said, “Well, it seems like this book is kind of everything, but the kitchen sink.” And I go, yeah, I was like, “Isn’t that great?” And she was trying to deliver some sort of warning to me and I was just like, no, that’s what I want. And I think now everybody’s excited by the idea of hybrid, that you don’t have to pick a genre and stay in your lane. I mean, how many times do we have to hear that phrase before we scream? Why? Why stay in a lane?And so using my personal story wasn’t oh, this is going to keep readers hooked. Or this is going to make them feel connected. It’s just, I never liked or bought into the idea that in science you’re never supposed to use first person. I mean, isn’t that how we were raised in school, that when you write papers in a science class or a social studies class, you’re not supposed to use I. And then Joan Didion comes along or the new journalists-

Marion: Lewis Thomas came along.

Elizabeth: Lewis Thomas, who said, I’m the one doing the looking, I’m the one putting my eye to the microscope. I’m the one-

Marion: And I realize the limitations of that. And I know the light I’m bringing to the experiment and it’s this. Not, oh, and you’ve got a discount for my light. It’s no, I know I’m bringing my own light and I show you, I love that.

Elizabeth: And that’s why you talked about my being transparent about my sister has this version, my brother has that version. Transparency to me is not some kind of confessional, doesn’t this make me look bad? It’s more like, doesn’t this inform you as well as me, I’m the writer, you’re the reader, we’re in this together. I’m showing you where the bodies are buried. I remember going to the Pompidou Center in Paris, years and years ago, when it was still pretty new. I can’t remember what year it was built, but have you been there?

Marion: Oh yeah.

Elizabeth: Yeah. So that was radical at the time, right? I’m going to let the insides of this building show on the outside instead of hiding all the pipes and tubes and wires. And no, it’s what the building’s made of, let’s just show it. And so I feel like it’s not to be showoffy, It’s to just say, watch me play this trick and dazzle you with my craft. It’s just, why would I want to hide this? This is part of the form.

Marion: Oh, it’s beautiful. And we’ll have to wrap it up there, but that permission to not take delivery on the memo also of keeping your lane is something I think is very important advice for writers as they start out. I think much more about annotation than I think of limitation when I sit down to write. And I’m grateful that anything shows up, but I’m really grateful if a little bit of physics knocks into a little bit of religion, knocks into a little bit of tree science, knocks into a little bit of what I learned, fighting with my sister. And we think, huh, what’s it all doing here? Let’s figure it out together. So we’re so grateful to you. Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for coming along today, it was a joy to talk with you.

Elizabeth: My great pleasure, Marion. You’re such a great interviewer and it’s such fun to talk to you about all the ins and outs of writing. Thank you.

Marion: I look forward to more.

That’s Elizabeth Rosner, Who’s the author of Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, which was finalist for The National Jewish Book award and named among the best books of 2017 by The San Francisco Chronicle. It can be found along with all her other work wherever books are sold. I am Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. 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. Shout out to Adam for introducing me to Elizabeth, by the way. Thank you, Adam. Want more on the art and work of writing, visit marionroach dot com and take a class with me. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to Qwerty and listen to it wherever you go.