DEVI LASKAR knows about writing through the darkness. Not that long ago, the Georgia State Police mistakenly raided her home at gunpoint and, after a series of decisions that reveal what a writer can do, she turned the experience into a first novel that The Washington Post called a “best book of the year.” Read along as you listen to our powerful interview.
Marion: It’s a joy to have you here. So, our listeners are writers and reading your work, reading interviews with you and watching you read online, I had a deep sense of how helpful you are to others, particularly on the topic of writing from a place of darkness. So let’s set this up a little bit for people, if you don’t mind and tell us how the novel, The Atlas of Reds and Blues came to be, please.
Devi: Sure. It’s a bit of an open-ended question. So I will try and compress a bit. Otherwise, I could keep you for hours. So, I wrote a different novel back in grad school, way back in the nineties. And then I was sort of back in the journalism world and I was a reporter for a while. And then when my kiddos came along, I sort of went back to my poems and stepped away from my books. So in 2004, I had finally been accepted to a writer’s workshop in California and truth be told, I was going to dust off my old short story about arranged marriage and slide that puppy in and be on my merry way. And my graduate school roommate, the novelist, Elizabeth Stark, she got wind that I was going to be turning in old work. And so she called me up and said, “Absolutely not. You must write something new.” And I said, “Well, all I’m doing right now is taking care of the kids and the dog.” And she’s like, “Great write about that.”
So my book that I sort of drafted off that I loved is The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. The reason why I love it of course is because it’s short, but it’s written by a poet who wrote a novel. So, if you take all the little pieces and you put them together, you have this beautiful compressed book. And if you take all the pieces apart, you’ll notice that she’s heavily anthologized in poetry anthologies. So, I wanted to write a book like that. So I did. I wrote a 5,000 word short story that was the basis of what would later become The Atlas of Reds and Blues. And it was well-received.
And then I came home and I made it much bigger. So it became really big and long, and it was crowded with voices. And then I set that book aside to write something else for NaNoWriMo in 2009, and then unfortunately in May of 2010, six weeks before I was going to finish that book, the Georgia State police raided my home at gunpoint. And among the things that they took was my laptop. So, I lost the bulk of my work. So as you can imagine, that was a little difficult. And it took a year for me to sort of corral my family, where I wasn’t really writing much. And then in June of 2011, I decided that I should try and write. I’m a writer I should try and get back into it and I found that I could not.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Devi: So I have a really good friend in Atlanta and what she did was she made me go watch Julie and Julia. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that film-
Marion: Oh, yes.
Devi: … but if you… Yes. And one of the really great things about that movie, it’s based on the true life story of Julie Powell, who was a food writer who gave herself a constraint, right? She said-
Marion: Yep.
Devi: “… I’m going to do this thing. I’m going to cook all of the recipes out of Julia child’s cookbook, but I’m going to do it within a calendar year.” And so my friend said, “Look, you’re a photographer, and if you do the same thing, if you take a photo, a new photo every day and you caption it or title it or do something, I bet you, your words will come back.” And she was right.
Marion: I love this friend. I love this friend.
Devi: Yes. I love this friend too, a very good friend. And so I started on June 23rd, 2011. And I do it to this day and I take a photograph every day and I caption it. And within a year, my poetry came back, which was such a relief. And then three years later, my prose came back. And so then I sat down to rewrite the story of this family that I portrayed in 2004, but this time I wanted to have that family intersect with what was happening in the United States, with the four-way stop sign of racism, misogyny being other in America and invisibility. And so that’s how this book was born, took me two years to write every day for two years. And then it took me about a year to find a home for it.
Marion: Oh, we’re so grateful that you did and the four-way stop sign and the story of the friendship and the remarkable experience of reading Sandra Cisneros and informing you is such a good story for other writers to hear about writing through the darkness, asking for help and being inspired originally by another writer. I love that. It’s fascinating. And it’s also very applicable to so many people. How do we find order out of just remarkable chaos? Why didn’t you write memoir? Why didn’t you write it as a first-person story?
Devi: That’s such a good question. So, although I gave my main character and my narrator aspects of me, that’s not me. And I don’t know that I’m ever going to be able to write a full-fledged memoir because I don’t know that I’ll ever get over it enough to gather some distance and write a true account. What I did do is I gave my narrator a couple of things. Grace Paley once said that you’re not actually supposed to write what you know, you’re actually supposed to write what you don’t know about what you know. And so I really took that to heart and I really wanted the platform to write my story as I saw fit. And I gave that narrator me in terms of, I gave her my former job. I gave her my kids, I gave her my dog. The only thing that’s really real in this book is my dog. My dog’s name was Greta and she was a Shepherd. But the rest of it is it’s not really me. It’s a composite. And it gave me the freedom to actually tell the story.
One of the things that I realized when I came back to the story, that it was no longer a family story, because it really intersected with these hard questions. And one of the things that happened to me on May 17th, 2010, is that one of the state agents pointed his assault rifle at me. It wasn’t for very long, but it was long enough for me to take very quick stock of my life. And it forced me to remember all the things that were really important very quickly. And I also heard my city editor’s voice from a couple of jobs before. And I will remember his voice in my head saying, “If you want an answer to this, you’ll have to outwait him and you’ll have to be quiet.” And so, I was silent the time and I complied, but I wanted to give that feeling to the reader. Everybody goes through something really hard in their lives, whether or not it rises to the occasion of the evening news.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Devi: And everyone has an opportunity by reading this book maybe, or writing their own book. She kind of work out their thoughts and their hopes, and to perhaps start a conversation because racism isn’t going to go away unless we have a really hard discussion and continue to have really hard discussions. Yeah.
Marion: Absolutely. And it’s worth noting that the supposed reason that they burst in was all vacated ultimately, just to relieve the pressure from that story. But I read a quote from you that stated that you don’t believe in catharsis. You said, “I don’t write to feel better and I didn’t feel better writing this.” And that in the process of writing it, you say, “It falls short of catharsis.” And I completely get that, having written from places of my own darkness. Why is that okay? Why is it all right to not have it all work out with the writing and yet be a really substantial process, a worth doing in one’s life? I think a lot of people think that writing is therapeutic and it’s all going to be fine if you get it on the page. It’s not all going to be fine.
Devi: No, no. You know, I don’t think it’s going to be fine at all. I think if you want it to be fine, you’re going to have to do some other work, right?
Marion: You know your girl. Yeah.
Devi: Right. So, I studied… I was so lucky, I studied with Lucille Clifton, the poet when I was in graduate school and she was so great. She was a great teacher, good friend. And she really believed in not answering those questions, but posing questions, right? Posing questions, posing hard questions, writing from a sense of wonder. One of the things she taught us one time was… Stanley Kunitz was in town, and so she had us watch an interview of him. And then she had us go to his talk that evening. And he talked all about making yourself a myth. And he said, “There’s no place for truth in your stories, in your poems. You have to sort of transcend that and just make yourself a myth, because a myth or a fairytale is something that everyone can read and relate to and put in their own content.”
And that’s our obligation as writers. It’s not to tell our personal story, but to tell a story that people can relate to and read and get something out of, right? And yeah.
Marion: Yeah.
Devi: And so, I tried to do that because I don’t think the actual details of… When I first started this story in 2004, I was newly not a reporter anymore. So when I was basing a scene on one of my kids, if she was wearing a pink dress and it was Wednesday at two o’clock, you knew I was going to put all three of those details into the story, right? Because I was taught to do that. I was trained as a reporter and I was also trained as a poet. So keeping things short, keeping things as accurate as possible. But when I went back in 2014, I let all of that go because now it just didn’t matter what the color of her dress was or what time of day it was, right? I wanted really to explore the heart of the story that I was trying to tell.
And so, although the book was much longer, I took every single thing out that wasn’t directly coming from the narrator and I did that because of Lucille, because she was a big believer of oral tradition. And one of the things she always had us do in class was to read our work aloud. And she said, “If you read your work aloud to yourself and you notice that you are tripping over something and you’re stumbling, your tongue is doing weird things, that is an indication of poor word choice, and there’s your opportunity to make it better.” And so I read this book out loud-
Marion: Yeah.
Devi: … two times to myself, and a couple of things happened. I fixed a couple of the bad word choices, but also I noticed that there were a few passages that were in the wrong place. And I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t have read it out loud to myself. I wouldn’t have known that, “Oh, she couldn’t have possibly have thought of this at this point.” It has to come later, right? So there were a couple of things that got flipped. And I credit Lucille for that because I wouldn’t have done that change had I not been instructed way back when…
Marion: Right. Oh, it’s great writing advice. My very first editor and who’s still, I think the greatest editor in American, Nan Talese, had me come in when I was a young writer and sit with her knee to knee and read every word aloud once a month in the course of writing my first book. And it’s something that I do to this day. I read every… While she touched each word with a pencil, as she read it silently to herself. This was an extraordinary experience. Of course, I mistakenly thought that all editing would be like that going forward, which was insane. But what a lucky young writer, I was 26 at the time-
Devi: Absolutely.
Marion: … and I learned that reading aloud. So I love that. And the other piece of writing advice that you were given or that you give to people that I was also given early on was to carry a notebook and I do. And there are notebooks everywhere in my life. There’s one tied to the gear shift of my car. And you… There’s one next to the bed. There’s one in my purse, there is one in my pocket, but what is your history here with that notebook? And what does that notebook do for you, do you think that you carry with you?
Devi: Oh, that’s a great question. So, it’s a combination of a lot of different teachers over the years, Writing Down the Bones which I think is such a wonderful book. And so, I love the notebook idea there. And then I read this wonderful book called A Writer’s Time by Kenneth Atchity. And so that book to really whittle it down, he believed in the practice of writing, but he also believed in vacations. But they had to be a strategic vacations and that’s what I really liked. And so over the years, and then I did study with Ellen Bass briefly and with Elizabeth Rosner and they’ve all talked over the years and then with Lucille about the importance of getting it down on the page.
And so I developed this thing over the years, just gathering all the wall from everyone as I went along about… Medical doctors, they practice, it’s called a medical practice because they do it every day and writers, it’s not called medical perfect, it’s called medical practice. And so writers, writers should be in the habit of writing, and I know especially this year, it’s been so hard. My advice is what we’re really, really trying to do is just keep our fingers on it, on the little pulse that makes us writers. And so, we’re just really obligated to write for a few minutes a day, if you can’t even manage that, write a sentence and then be on your merry way. And obviously, most people, once they get to the sentence, they write another one or possibly even a paragraph, but if you’re-
Yes. But if you’re really into it, you’ll do it. But if you’re really having a bad day, then just write your one sentence. Some sentences are three words long. I love you. And then you’re all done and you can go on. And I think that’s the obligation we have to ourselves as writers is to do something, even if it’s really small every day. And what I’ve told a lot of writing students over the years is that my advice as we start out is the advice that I got. And the advice that I give is that you should keep a spiral notebook. It should be the cheapest ugliest thing you can find. You should keep a really cheap pen. And the reason why is because you don’t want to use something that was a gift, or that costs a lot of money, because then you’re just putting this burden on yourself. You want something ugly and cheap. So it’s just a tool.
And then you want to set the timer on your phone or your microwave or whatever, for 10 minutes, 10 minutes a day for a month. Your notebook will fill up. I promise. And then the strategic vacation comes in, take a week to 10 days off, and then come back to your notebook with your highlighter pen and read every word that you wrote aloud to yourself. What sounds good you highlight and I promise you when you’re done, you will have your own personal book of wonders with the start of short stories and poems and essays, or even a novel if you just give your subconscious the chance to work. And here’s the one tiny little helpful hints that I have learned over the years is that not to take your pen off the page for those 10 minutes. So even if, for example, you’re having a writer’s block moment and you don’t know what to write then write I don’t know what to write.
And I actually taught this group of high school students this past year, and they were so great. And it was this advanced English class. And we were talking about using poetry like poets.org is a free site. And you can use a line of poetry as your kicking off point, that’s what I do. And this young man raised his hand. He goes, “What if I want to curse?” And I’m like, “That’s brilliant. I think you should write down every bad word you know. And then when you get tired of that, I promise you that the first sentence that comes after that will be pure gold and you will get to use it in something else.” And so, it got a laugh, but I think he did it and those 10 minutes I gave them-
Marion: I bet he did.
Devi: Yeah. And I just really think that if you can give yourself the gift of those 10 minutes, where it’s just you and the paper and the pen, and you do it every day for a month, and then you give yourself the break, I promise that when you come back to it with fresh eyes, it will achieve something for you.
Marion: It’s lovely and very generous. So when we talk about writing out of the darkness, we’ve got these skills now. We’ve got Lucille Clifton’s tip, we’ve got this notebook tip, and I want to get back to how you did this. You’re building your way out of this, from the photographs to the poems. I know you consider yourself first and foremost, a poet, and you’ve published two collections of poetry, Anastasia Maps, and Gas & Food, No Lodging, both of which are wonderful. I’m a huge believer in poetry and writing poetry, studying poetry. In my twenties, I went through a very long and very disciplined period of writing sonnets. And I studied the form and I chose the Shakespeare sonnet on which to build a body of work and discipline and eye development. And it was a very crucial period for me. I was very young. I was still in college actually. And I read that you particularly loved the form of the pantoum.
Devi: I do.
Marion: And I have to say it’s not a quote I read before from any writer and like all form of poetry, all forms of poetry has some rules. This is what I loved about studying the sonnet. It has these rules, this structure. And in the case of the pantoum, it’s a poem of any length, it’s composed of four lines stanzas in which the second and fourth of each serve as the first and third of the next. And so go on, pitch me the upside of the pantoum.
Devi: Okay. So I will tell you The Atlas of Reds and Blues is a pantoum, because at the beginning is the end-
Marion: Yeah, I wondered.
Devi: … Yes. And I didn’t quite realize that until I got to the end. And then I was like, “Look at that, it’s the beginning again.”
Marion: That’s hilarious.
Devi: “Okay. I can go back.”
Marion: Yeah.
Devi: I will tell you why I love the pantoum so much. Because we’re not really asked as poets to repeat a line unless it’s really important. And so when we do repeat a word or a line, it has meaning. There’s a special reason. And so that’s one of the reasons why I really love the pantoum. It’s because it takes a line and you can reinterpret it. It gives you the opportunity to give it a different meaning and to make it go sideways. And I just love that. I just thought, “This is the best thing since sliced bread, and I’m going to do that too.” And I’m in a long…
Marion: It’s great. No, I was just going to say it fascinated me. I wondered about the novel and its form. And this quote, when I read the quote about the hint, where I was like, “No, do you think she wrote this novel as a pantoum?” And in the novel, we have this discussion of race and identity and the dark behavior of others. You make a very good point in a lot of your work and in the novel that hateful, violent behavior can begin anywhere. But even just that repeated question of where are you from? Where are you originally from? Is a really dark and terrible thing to sort of compound and that your character hears this, that you heard this as a child over and over and over, and it gets reinterpreted as it gets compounded.
And I found this repetition idea to be very much something that your work benefits from. This idea that if you keep asking me where I’m from, I’m going to fill in the blank. I might write a novel about it, but I might do something else. I might erupt. I might stand on a street corner and recite this poem. I might… So there’s a really interesting message in this repetition of the line and re-interpretation, I think, so-
Devi: Thank you.
Marion: … is that right or am I just reading way too much into this?
Devi: No, I think you are right. And I remember this guy, I don’t remember his name. I just remember what happened. So, I was in graduate school. So I’m in New York, I’m in the city of the world and this young man who was one of my classmates, he asked me, I don’t think he meant anything by it, but he asked me. He was like, “So where are you from?” And I must say that the people around me were aghast. And I was like, “Oh, okay, I’m going to play.” I said, “North Carolina.” And then he goes, “Right, right. And where are your parents from?” And I was like, “North Carolina.” And then I know what he was doing, but I don’t think he realized what he was actually doing. And so then he was like, “But where are they really from?” And I’m like, “North Carolina.” And he’s like, “Oh, oh, so they still live there?” And I’m like, “Yep.”
And it just went on for like 10 minutes. I know what he was trying to ask, but I wasn’t going to give him the benefit of that. I just wasn’t. Because at that point, I think he was my millionth customer and I was done. And so now I’m not angry. I’m like, “Okay, if you’re going to do that, then I get to have some fun.” Because I wouldn’t go around asking you that. I just wouldn’t. It doesn’t matter.
Marion: Right. No.
Devi: And so.
Marion: So do you think that in writing about this, do you think that in taking on the topics, we’re going to be able to write our way to a place of equity and inclusion? Do you think that at the core of this there’s this advocacy piece that you’re after, as we tell these stories? Are we moving this needle with stories like yours? Is that the hope?
Devi: That’s my hope. Well, I just feel like… I think the number is still 86%. So 86% of publishing is still white, right? And then a lot of that is still men so I want to do my part to get more people who look like me and don’t look like me at the table. And because the conversation, once again, isn’t going to change unless the people at the table change and we just have to have it reflect our society. There’re so many stories out there. So many really great stories that we haven’t heard, and we need as many new voices and as many diverse voices as possible. And that’s my hope. Yes. I just really, really want more people at the table having a really great conversation about what it’s going to look like for us all in the future.
Marion: Well, I just don’t see how it can’t with writing this good. I’m so grateful to you for coming along today and talking to us about this. And thank you, Devi. It’s a joy to talk to you.
Devi: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. It was my pleasure.
Marion: The writer is Devi Laskar, The Atlas of Reds and Blues is out from Counterpoint Press. Reach Devi at Devi Laskar dot com. Give her books wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith, 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. Want more on the art and work of writing, visit marionroach.com and take a class with me. And thanks for listening.
