How to Write Your Truth, with Author and Spoken Word Poet Megan Falley

WRITER MEGAN FALLEY’S pronouns are she/her. She is a queer author of three full length poetry collections, most recently Drive Here and Devastate Me. Falley co-wrote, How Poetry Can Change Your Life with poet Andrea Gibson, as part of the Chronicle books acclaimed how-to series. Her chapbook, Bad Girls, Honey, won the 2015 Tired Hearts prize. A woman of the world, a National Poetry Slam finalist, as well as a Pushcart Prize nominee. She’s an essayist and writer of creative nonfiction and is working on a memoir. Her work recently won her first place at the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction and Essay Contest in 2021 for a whopper of a personal essay we’ll discuss. Listen in and read along as we talk.

Megan: Hi.

Marion: I’m so thrilled to have you here. We were chatting before we started, and it’s just, it really is, I want to say on the record, what a joy it is to welcome you. I first experienced your writing because it was given to me by my child and I watched you in a spoken word performance and live and online. And I knew the phrase, “Spoken word poetry,” but it might be a term that’s foreign to some people. So it’s live performance, and in my experience, it seems to distinguish itself in its dedication to themes of social justice, identity, race. So how would you describe it? And tell us a little bit about your history with this wonderful form.

Megan: I have had so much fun and creativity describing it over the years when people ask what I do and have no idea, and I’m not quite sure how to describe it. I think at the base level, what I would call it is performance poetry. It’s often memorized. It’s not something that you would do a golf clap for, or not many pearl-wearing people put in the audience, not your grandmother’s poetry perhaps. I’ve also called it like rap, but not as cool.

Marion: Yeah. That’s good. I like that it’s mostly memorized. I’ve never seen it done with anything, but without notes. And so for me it feels like a piece of performance memoir and, well, what does it do to the work knowing that it’s going to be a performance piece as you’re writing that piece?

Megan: So this is interesting. When I was a sophomore in high school, we had this assignment to write a letter to ourselves and it would be mailed to us 10 years in the future. And I actually, I received this a few years ago and in the letter I begged my future self to not become a writer because it was, you might even be a writer right now, I hope not. And the reason was because I was told that I was good at writing and pushed in that direction, but I loved performing, I loved to be on stage, to dance, to sing, to act. I didn’t have much gifts in any of those places, except for what my mom would call a Sarah Heartburn and then correct herself, Sarah Bernhardt quality of loving to belt things out. But in my freshman year of college, I discovered spoken word, which was this perfect marriage of what I was good at, writing, and then what I just love to do, spoken word.

And so I would say it’s just so natural to me, even as I’m working in prose, when I often edit it by reading it out loud, I just, I always envision it read to someone or performed in some way.

Marion: Fascinating. And your topics astonish me. These days we talk a lot about the gaze, the female gaze, the male gaze, and their offenses and their differences, but for better or worse, we’re no longer supposed to speak about one another in terms of how we look. It’s not that we don’t, of course, it’s just that we’re asking, I hope, for some progress and not dehumanizing one another via the mere physical. And you reverse engineered this whole thing and make us look at you. You write about your red lipstick, you write about how you look, and it forces us to look hard at our own gaze. So how in the world did you make this decision in this tricky and cautionary time that we live in?

Megan: I love that you’re calling it a decision. I feel like my earliest wound that defined a trajectory of my life was being looked at and being criticized. And it almost feels like my origin story in a way just where everything spouted from. And I think that the unhealed wound in us will always intersect with the decisions we make, who we’re with, what we wear, what jobs we take, whatever that might be. And I do think even my love for performance has been a demand to be seen and to be loved. And so, yeah, I think that my awareness has just been so attuned to how am I being perceived from a young age that it just, I just think that all came about naturally, especially as I write now from a young narrator, and that was how I saw the world. It wouldn’t be honest really to write it in any other way.

Marion: Oh, that’s so deeply honest. The unhealed wound. Yes, I agree with you. So, that unhealed wound is where you go when you write this, I just think perfect nonfiction piece that won you this recent award. And congratulations again. That’s what I said to you first when I reached out to ask you to come on here, the essay is called “The Act of Vanishing,” and I’ll put a link in the transcript I run on my website because I want everyone to read it. And it’s as good a piece of nonfiction as I know, it’s really a remarkable essay. So I want you to help me pull it apart a little bit. The thing that I think having read it now a bunch of times and studied it, is how you dole out details only when we need them. You’re a writing teacher, I’m a writing teacher. You can tell people till you’re blue in the face, do not load the reader up with details in the opener, but they do all the time, but you don’t.

And so help me teach this to the people who are listening. We find out early that we are at fat camp, a phrase that’s galling enough, and you let us have a few sentences to metabolize it literally. But if I had to choose as a teacher, only three details that sear themselves into our psyches, there are three phrases I would choose from the piece as we work through it. So I thought maybe we could just teach this essay together. How about that? Why don’t we try this? So these phrases are well spaced out in the piece. The first one that is the mile marker, or the thing the reader has to round for me is the phrase, “87 pounds.” Can you contextualize that a little bit, and why you put that where it is, and as people read it they can see why we’re doing this exercise?

Megan: Sure. I think that I establish we’re at fat camp first and that’s the setting and you’re thrown in there. And then the 87 pounds comes in a bit later to talk about my fat camp best friend who’s age 11 and 87 pounds, and she’s small. And so I think that we have this image of what fat camp would look like and who would be there that I hope to subvert, because any place like that is really just looking to capitalize on our hatred of our bodies. And a lot of my friends were tiny girls with eating disorders. And at the end of my years, I went there for five years, and at the end I would count myself amongst them. So, yeah, I think one of the most important elements in writing that keeps people reading is surprise. So that might be why I hold cards to my chest as long as I can.

Marion: Yes, you sure do. And I teach that all the time. I say to people, pretend you’ve got a deck of cards in your hands and lay them out one at a time, giving us the time to take in the action of your very wrist as it comes down and the card when it’s there on the table. And that’s why I’m asking you to do this because this is a deck of cards and it is laid out with such wisdom. The second one that I would choose is you have this line when you’re explaining about parental visiting and there’s two different days. And you say in this phrase, you act as “tour guide for whoever won less of you in the custody battle.” So tell us about introducing the idea of divorced parents and how you decided to use this language.

Megan: I often look for words that hold a big meaning, or a big stigma, and we place them into narrative asking the reader to just assume they know the weight of it. So divorce would be a great one. Trauma, I think is an often-used one, assault or abuse or anything like that, cancer even. And I try to pick apart those words into images, most often, or ideas to really have the re-experience of it, to not have the word go on autopilot for the reader. And that was my experience. I felt my mom won more of me. I lived with her and I saw my father once a week.

Marion: Oh, to not have the word go on autopilot for the reader is something maybe we should, I don’t know, get crocheted onto something, get the woman who does Badass Cross Stitch. I don’t know if you know her, but I follow her on Twitter, on Instagram. I love her. That’s one for her, yeah, that’s a great, great piece of instruction. And the last phrase that I found as the, if we’re skimming a stone across the top of this remarkable piece to teach you foreshadowed for us a minute ago, but this one is when you say, “I’m not even 12.” You wait a while to tell us this. And in that it knocked my head back like the first time I took a drag on a cigarette and really knocked my head back. And even though we know your friend is 11, when you say, “I’m not even 12,” it was the end of something for me. So why did you play that card when you did?

Megan: When I look back at that time, and I have a friend whose daughter just turned 12 and I spend some time with her, and it breaks my heart to be around her because I feel my 11, 12 year old self so present, since writing about her, I feel her as a tangible capacity walking around in my life. And that to me is a heartbreaking detail and things are more heartbreaking dulled out slow because, how do I say this? You are messing with the expectation. I think that’s what it is. So the delivery of 87 pounds messes with your expectation. And then the age I think would mess with your expectation as well. And there were girls as young as six at that camp, which is a detail I reveal in other chapters as well.

Marion: Yeah. It’s worth noting that this essay ends with the word “safe.” So let’s talk about safe. In one of your more remarkable poems, and they’re all pretty remarkable, but one of my favorites, if I can have a favorite, your poem, “Coming Out (And Being Pushed Back In),” you say, when you pass for straight, you feel like you failed something else. What keeps you invisible often keeps you safe. So let’s talk about safe. As writers do we have to wait until we feel safe? Until we know everything on some topic, or are we writing to a place of establishing some kind of safe assurance on how we feel?

Megan: I love that you linked those two pieces of writing together because I wouldn’t have, and that’s so interesting to me. I would not be writing right now what I’ve been writing for the last couple of years, if I felt like I needed to be totally healed from it, or have my head wrapped around it completely because I absolutely don’t. I have more of the awareness now to know that I don’t have it all figured out and, but I definitely don’t have it all figured out. As a writer, I’m more often do mine the past for material rather than really write what’s present and up for me, I need that space and distance to have any wisdom around it, but I definitely don’t feel safer in the clear from the things I struggled with when I was 12 or younger.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. And I suspect as a writing teacher you’ve had this question as many times as I’ve had this question is, do we have to wait till we have it all figured out to write it? And I would say, “Please go read the work of Megan Falley and learn that you write, admit it, you write when you’re up to your neck in it, you write about it and you come some place.” So is that what you think these days?

Megan: Yes. Yes, I do. The process of writing for me is such a process of figuring out and understanding myself. And it’s been that since I was a kid, my mom will talk about this, but if I had a hard day at school or something, I’d come home, she could tell, she’d ask if I wanted to talk about it, and I would tell her I was going to write about it at first, at least. And there’s something about my communication that has always been more clear to me through the written word than anything else.

Marion: Yeah. You referenced childhood and it makes me wonder about training. You write like you’ve been training since you were five. So you just answered that question like you took notes, but, of course, we don’t take notes when we’re five, but you have this exquisite eye. So let’s talk about what we’re doing when we look at the past. How do you disable the eye of now and screw back in the eye of then, for instance? I’m specifically thinking of about a particular poem of yours, “Going to the Basement,” and how you re-inhabit this child whose mother needs some comforting in the basement. You state in this, even though you’re five years old, “I was fluent, I was woman.” And you have this line where you acknowledge that she is asking you into the basement to, “Come down here and sweep up the mess of me.” So, wow. What in the world did you do to go back to that eye to write that line?

Megan: I don’t know that I had left the eye of that time. A lot of my work has often been something that maybe has come up in therapy or something, because I have that same quality of my mother, and that I’ve been working on, but it’s like, I’m in an argument, or I want attention, so I shut down. And whether that’s physically going into a basement or just metaphorically and I watched her. And so it’s like, I’m waiting for somebody to come to me and I still do that, or I’ve historically done that and really had to work hard to not anymore. And so I think that I could understand what my mother was asking of me at that age, because I now understand myself in that way.

Marion: It’s a lovely answer and fascinating, because I now understand myself in that way. I want to stick with your eye for a minute and go in a wild case of whiplash to you looking at something else, because we’re going to keep the gaze in mind, but there’s a nonfiction piece of yours that just, I actually snorted reading it. It’s “The Long Island Medium,” and you open the piece with these words, I’m going to quote you, “Theresa Caputo is exactly like every other woman on Long Island. Her body is made up of hairspray and Splenda. Even her bones are French manicured.” And so you go on to say, “You can spot her power walking to any one of the 10,000 frozen yogurt franchises they have there. The only difference between every woman on Long Island and Theresa Caputo is this, Theresa Caputo can talk to dead people.” Well, you had me at hairspray and Splenda.

Megan: I haven’t thought of that piece in a really long. And I was just laughing. So it’s pretty good.

Marion: Yeah, it’ll do. Yeah, it’ll do. So tell me, do you remember what happened to you when you wrote that phrase? Did you laugh out loud? Did you run down the hall and read it to someone? My hope is you just thoroughly enjoyed yourself, but that’s not necessarily true, we’re pretty hard on ourselves, but just for a second, can you remember being delighted by that?

Megan: I don’t remember that specifically, but I can tell you that I often delight myself while writing. I have so much fun with it and I am so in love with language and words, I’ve got a notebook of just, I feel like it’s a word collection, just things I pick up, but my little tip to that, and I think it goes back to surprise. I often will tell my writing students when they’re making a list, or a litany of any kind, usually that’s three things, but to have one of the things be surprising. So, hairspray and Splenda don’t necessarily go together. If I had said she was made up of hairspray and French manicures and Prada bags, it’s not that exciting but, so that’s often just a little trick that I lean on that I think surprise delights people. So that will often be my case maybe to put something tangible in an intangible list, or the other way around to just hijack that surprise quality.

Marion: That surprise quality is wonderful. And keeping that surprise quality firmly in mind, I am a huge believer in poetry being the very best training ground for all writers, no matter the genre. When reading it, the appreciation of the individual word is so much more possible than when we’ve got paragraphs out there rolled out before us like lawns. And so we tend to just slow down and look, but when writing it, the demand to go word by word is simply the best training in the world, but that’s me. So what is your feeling on the training ground of poetry? You write nonfiction and poetry. What do you bring from the poetic training to the nonfiction?

Megan: I’ve been thinking about this recently in terms of somebody asked me of former “Poems that Don’t Suck” student, that’s the class I teach, asked me if I would consider teaching a course in memoir, and I don’t feel equipped to do that because it’s really something I’ve just started teaching myself in the last two years and something I’m very much avidly and eagerly learning. I took two of your Memoirama classes actually, which is so cool than when you emailed me to be on the podcast, I was super psyched.

Marion: Oh, lovely.

Megan: What I’ve actually been doing is studying fiction. And because that’s what I don’t know how to do, or have no training on. So plot and character development and setting and all of those juicy, wonderful landmines of knowledge and potential. And the poetry part is just natural to me, but I felt like if I could nail down the elements of fiction and then just bring my natural inclination of metaphor and words and simile and imagery that I could get to nonfiction, because poetry it’s very rare I think nowadays to write fictional poetry. So that core that you need to get to in nonfiction of vulnerability and self exploration, I’ve already gone there. And I felt like if I learned fiction, I could get closer into memoir. I don’t know if that’s the question you asked me.

Marion: But that’s a wonderful one. It talks about the training ground and now you’re telling us that you’re training for memoir by reading fiction and you train all the time by writing poetry. And I think people don’t understand this necessarily, I certainly meet as many people who think that writing falls from the gods and into your head and comes out your fingers. For me, it’s practically tying myself into the chair, drinking just as much caffeine as I can drink short of having a serious coronary event, eating half a bar of dark chocolate, and then ripping the phone out of the wall for some prescribed amount of time. In other words, it’s hard chair work. To me it’s not woo-woo at all. There is a process of annotation that’s mystical and fascinating from which we draw what we know, what we’ve heard, what we’ve tasted, what we’ve read, but it’s still a hard chair activity.

So I love the fact that you’re reading fiction to train yourself. You’ve done a lot to be in this world, in this life. I read about your early life when you were touring the US and Canada for a hundred days, doing readings and signing books. That’s a handmade life. It’s do-it-yourself, however you want to put it. I wonder what else you might be able to share with the writers listening here about that toolbox? Now we’ve talked about language, we’ve talked about poetry, we’ve talked about reading fiction, but what other internal and external maybe tools might you put in someone’s toolbox if you could?

Megan: I love that a question. I think the best writers are the best noticers, and that’s why I love being in community with other writers because of the different ways somebody might point my head to look at something that I might not have looked at. And I’d say the best thing you can do when you’re not actually writing is to notice more, to look up more, look around more, keep, if somebody says a phrase, or a word, or you see something, and it just prickles in you, to trust that. I’ve had the word “wet-nurse” written down in my notebook for so long, because it is such a, it’s just a beautiful and grotesque, and I don’t know, Victorian era in a way to me. And I’ve had that word written down for a long time. I still feel like it’s little birds in me. And I know I will use it one day and come back to it.

Marion: I can’t wait.

Megan: So yeah, noticing and trusting the impulses of what you love because often you can, those are, or even what repels you, because I think those things will often make the best art.

Marion: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, years ago somebody told me that you write from the best place when you write from counterphobia. And I learned that in my experience, I wrote a book about forensic science and I’m so squeamish that I have to be lying down when I get a blood test, but I went to autopsies and it produced some of my best writing, because I was completely terrified, terrified on a level that I couldn’t really function, couldn’t process it fast enough. So it allowed for some writing that was different. So I think there’s, yeah, these skills, these tools we have sometimes curiosity and counterphobia, and writing down the word wet nurse, being able, willing and able to write these words down and then worry them like a worry beat and work with them. I wonder, which makes me think about your poem, “A Student Asks Me How to Make It as a Writer and I Remind Myself,” you capture this idea of what success is for everyone who writes. So how do you define, for you, what is, or what will be success?

Megan: For me, I think the completion of something, even if it sucks is such a success to stay with it, probably because that can often be hard for me. So that’s why it feels like a success to me, but to carry it through to the end, I’ll finish books that I am not really enjoying as I’m reading them, just to even know, okay, why didn’t I like this? Okay. So, don’t want to do the out in my future writing. I believe finishing something to the end is the greatest scaffolding for learning more. Yeah.

Marion: Yep. I agree with that. Just getting to it, getting to the end of it. Absolutely, positively. I’ve noticed in listening back to some of my podcasts that I’ve been doing, I keep asking the same question whenever I have a memoir writer here. So I’d really like to ask you this. And I think what I’m asking about is strategies. What are we doing when we ask a writer to go back into a traumatic experience? Are we asking them to re-inhabit the piece, the past, reanimate it, survive it all over again? What’s your strategy when you go back to a place of trauma to write?

Megan: It’s been such an interesting process because it’s the first time that I’ve written, as I can remember at least from that age. So I’ve been writing first person present tense. And so really having to inhabit who I was then. And as I said earlier, that result has felt like I have that person with me. And, of course, we contain all the ages we’ve ever been, but even more so I feel her in how she would see the world because I’m in a steady practice, and ritual of writing from that age. And for me the important part is that I’m there with her as a 33-year-old writer walking my 11, 12 year old self through that experience. And even though I am writing in first person, of course, in present tense, I’m bringing in the wisdom that I have now to collect and take care of her in that process.

So I think allowing for yourself to be every age you’ve ever been as you write can not just go into a trauma place, but a caretaking place at the same time. I didn’t know when I was 11 or 12 that fat camp was a fucked-up place. And, of course, it’s more complex than that, because it was also the place that I felt safe and place where I felt like I could be a child in other ways. But I know I have this other knowledge now. And so when I write from that age, I can, it’s not really shield, but it’s just a little sheen or something over that past experience of, well, you’ve made it, you survived. You’re writing that now. How did we get from there to here?

Marion: That’s so lovely. It chokes me up actually, the idea of bringing her with you and it makes me think of, to stick with this subject of trauma for a moment, it makes me think of your poem “Pulse” written after the murders at the Pulse dance club in Orlando in 2016. I’ve seen you do it as a spoken word piece, and I’ve read it in your collection, it devastates me. And you do in this poem, what we do as artists, you react to something, in journalism we call it the news peg, the provocation for the piece, but you react to this terrible murder, this mass murder at the disco. And then you go to your very most, I guess, stubborn of your own beliefs, asking how anyone would want you to die for being as in love as you are with your partner.

And when you just said that, what you said about pulling in your 11 year old as your 33-year-old, you pull in your partner into this poem in a way that makes us feel, even though you’re saying, how could anyone want us to die for this kind of love, you fold this theme of such love into this arena of hate that I found myself more fully informed about both. So just tell me a little bit, I want people to go read the poem, I’ll put the link in, tell me a little bit about bringing the one topic into that news provoking experience of writing “Pulse.”

Megan: I always tell people that I am not the news. I am not here to inform people in terms of the details and the statistics, or everything that happens in the world. And I think sometimes if you have an online platform in this day and age and you’re in any way a political artist, sometimes folks expect you to be the news and comment on everything and have an opinion on everything, and make sure you’ve covered it all. And that is just not going to be me, a newscaster will just do that far better than I will. But as a poet, I have an obligation to translate to the heart. And so I think one of the best entry points into talking about something that’s politicized, which is so ridiculous to think about love being politicized, but it is, is the entry point of, of course, the personal is political as they say, but even more so love and the people you love around you because that is, hopefully universal, and I don’t trust necessarily the news and statistics and details to change somebody’s mind or heart as much as the personal human stories.

I think it, not to quote Joseph Stalin, but to quote Joseph Stalin, I think he said “a million deaths is statistic and one is a tragedy.” And that has resonated with me in terms of just the power of storytelling.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Oh, well you are a very powerful storyteller and I’m, as we wrap this up, I really, and I would actually just prefer to just keep talking to you for the rest of the day, which would be just fine with me, but…

Megan: …I don’t have much to do.

Marion: … I know you you got things to do, got writing to do. Yeah. Just a full time life as a writer, that’s all. You’re writing a memoir, so we’re fascinated and waiting by the bookshop door, me and a million other people. Can you tell me a little bit, tell us a little bit about out how that’s going and how these skills are informing a long form piece? I think this is your first long form piece. So just a little bit of encouragement and a little bit of an update on how that’s going, please.

Megan: I think that the idea of palimpsest is one that I want to bring up when talking about what this process has been for me, because my first draft of this memoir was a young adult novel inverse. I read The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, and I felt like I could tell this story by this 11, 12-year-old’s poems and stories through fat camp in poetry, and it felt its achievable. And as I kept going with that, I really started to long for that adult wisdom that I could bring into the work and not just have to stay 11 or 12, which it felt like it needed to do to remain in that form. And so then I started writing out in pros and it was like taking my bra off. It felt so good.

And I wrote probably 60 or 70,000 words of prose, writing in a reflective nature of looking back I remember. And while there were good sentences and good ideas, as I read the whole thing back to myself I got a little bit bored, and then I started teaching myself, okay, how can I make this feel as propulsive as fiction? How can this become a page turner? And then I sought out mentors and books to teach me in that direction. So I’m on my fourth draft of it now. I just did NaNoWriMo. So I wrote 50,000 words toward it in the month of November. And I am overwhelmed by what a cumbersome project it is to write a long form book. I have no idea how people finish it, but I’m excited for when I finish it. And I can tell you how I did it, but I love it. I’m having more fun than I ever have as a writer.

Marion: That’s wonderful and you deserve it. And as I said, we are literally waiting by the bookshop door. Thank you so much for this conversation. I’m very much in your debt. I learned a lot and I deeply appreciate it. Thank you very much, Megan.

Megan: Marion, this was the highlight of my everything. So thank you for having me really.

Marion: Oh. The writer is Megan Falley. She can be reached at Megan Falley dot com where you can watch her performances as a spoken word poet, read her essays and read more on who she is and what she does. I’m 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. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit Marion Roach dot com, where I teach online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a starred review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the upcoming Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. It’s live, once a month, and limited to seven writers who are determined to get a first draft of their book-length memoir finished in six months.