THE WRITER AND AUTHOR Iris Smyles knows how to entertain. A recent semi-finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor, her essays and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Atlantic, Vogue, Paris Review Daily and other publications. The author of Iris Has Free Time, published in 2013, and Dating Tips for the Unemployed, published in 2016, she recently published her third book, entitled Droll Tales and, after reading it, I knew she was the one to talk to on writing to entertain. Listen in and read along.
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Marion: Welcome, Iris.
Iris: Hi Marion. Thank you for having me on.
Marion: I’m just really glad to have you here. You have been responsible for some of the best laughs of my life in the last, oh, I don’t know, seven, eight years. Let’s talk. I loved Droll Tales. It’s your third book, and I read in an interview with you that the process of writing the book began by printing out essays that you had written to “see what you were up to.” And that delighted me. I’ve done that, but I might not have done it the way you did. Can you give us the scene of that, if you would, going back just far enough to cover the decision itself to do that? “Okay. I think I’ll go check in with what I’ve been writing” and what you thought you might find.
Iris: Yeah, I guess I printed out a bunch of stories. I seem to write a lot and sometimes I wonder about how much I’m actually finishing and then I get very dark and I think I’m so lazy, I don’t do anything. And yet it seems like I’m busy all the time. My friend Frederic Tuten, who’s also a writer and my mentor, when I was belly aching about how I don’t do enough, he said, “I think you have a book. Why don’t you just print all this stuff out and see what you have and start from there?” Then I discovered that I had a lot more than I thought, actually, way more than a book.
Also, I started to see some patterns within some of the stories, so I kind of pushed some away and made different piles of things that I thought had something in common, whether it was in the theme or the feel. And some of those were scraps of stories. Some of them were finished to different degrees. Then I, with this new idea, kind of finished some of the stories with this new feeling in mind that I found, this new mood that was developing.
Marion: “The new mood.” I love that because I was going to follow up and say was there a through line, some logic, some similarity? But the new mood, that’s a lovely way to put it. How would you describe that mood that you discovered in the existing copy?
Iris: I think the kind of absurdity and sadness and with a little bit of surreality, I guess. Just some strangeness and some of the stories about, for example, in the last story in the book, “Oh Lost,” which was one of the oldest stories in terms of when I began it. But when I finally finished it, it’s the last story I finished and is completely different than what I started with. And what I started with was a story about a guy who goes to the dentist and then takes the subway home after and thinks about his girlfriend that he just broke up with. I found that nothing was interesting in the second part, but I kind of liked something about the way that he interacted with the dentist, a few lines, really, that’s it. That’s all that remains of the first story.
I kind of continued working on this scene with him talking to his dentist in this kind of strange other way, that was also a bit clearly … I mean, what I liked about this story is that he’s having this conversation with his dentist, but what’s really behind it, what he’s thinking about the whole time, for example, when the dentist tells him he has a cavity, he’s thinking about his relationship and the emptiness in his life, which is in a certain sense over dramatic and absurd, but also true I think, of how we relate to each other in the world that we’re all kind of carrying around our stories, what we’re going through, the last argument we had with our spouse or something. And we go out into the world and we’re kind of half talking to the person we’re talking to, but also speaking to our own personal drama. And our dramas are just kind of pressed up against each other to a degree.
Marion: Oh, yes. I think that’s perfectly put, “half speaking to ourselves.” You’d mentioned the dark, and I’ve read in several interviews with you that this most recent book followed a period of depression, but the book is written in a voice and style as you just said, the absurdity, the surreal sense. There’s a voice and style that suggests that you were having a whopper of a fun time writing it. There’s a voice in here that I was fascinated to find. The derivation of the book itself follows this period of depression. Let’s talk about that connection a little bit more that you just brought up between the person who writes and the voice they deploy, I think voice is perhaps the most misunderstood and yet most longed for tool with the writers listening in and they’re longing to have one, I think. Talk to me about yours and what in you, it’s attached to, where it comes from.
Iris: That’s a big question because I think the voice changes for each piece, but in this book, I mean, speaking to that about being depressed and writing in this way that seems like I’m having a great time. I was. I guess part of it, I think of it as sort of, I don’t know, laughing your way out of the dark, you know? And also, I don’t know, for me sometimes when things get really, really bleak or bad, that’s when you sort of hit a bottom and you either break or bounce and I mean, the bounce is where suddenly just you see how hilarious it is. For example, I always think of when people ask me what’s my favorite comedy, I say Oedipus Rex.
Because yeah, it’s so hilarious, read in a certain way where I mean, it’s irony, right? It’s just all really condensed irony. And of course it’s horrible and it’s a tragedy. And it’s also really ridiculous that he’s basically … I mean, you could imagine staging it when he’s asking Tyrannus like, “Bring me the man who’s responsible for this” and it’s him. There’s a relief in that. I love that moment in my own life. And when I can see the humor in whatever it is that I’m despairing about, thank God, it gives a little bit of perspective and then also a little bit of joy. It sort of releases the pressure and also it gives you a bigger sense of the bigger picture, and you can maybe enjoy your own despair in the same that way that someone might enjoy watching it in a film or reading it in a book. Because now it’s a story and it’s not just your endless painful trials, which you’ll never escape because the moment is forever.
Marion: Absolutely. And I think everyone just plain wonders how the hell to write when fill in the blank: The kids are sick, the partner leaves, COVID benches us for two years, depression makes us view the abyss. And what you’re pointing out here is there is a professional opportunity for a writer when it seems that things simply can’t get any worse. Do you think that’s the bounce? I love that, “the bounce.” It can be a professional opportunity for us.
Iris: Absolutely. That’s one of the things that, the moments that I’m looking … When I’m looking for a work of art or a book or when it resonates the most with me, it’s because I’m in that vulnerable moment where I’m searching for some kind of meaning. And it’s the same thing if you start creating something out of that, yeah, it’s a fertile place, even though it might seem barren. It’s barren in real life maybe, when you’ve sort of hit the end of the road of trying something, but then maybe it can cross over and become something else creatively. That’s where you can turn it into something and that’s exciting and that opens a window.
Marion: I think it is exciting, and I think put that way, you’re going to be liberating an awful lot of people who are listening because we tend not to work then. And I agree with you. I think the bounce is there. I think the professional opportunity is there, and I appreciate that. Some of my favorite writing is that which takes shape differently. I love lists, for instance, and I teach students I work with who study writing memoir the fine art of list making, of telling a tale in the shape other than the standard paragraph after paragraph. And when I talk about this, I always say that anyone in this class should try writing a piece of memoir in the form of a recipe. Recipe for disaster, for instance, where you give the ingredients of what you’ve been looking for in a mate that continues to create the same dreadful results.
And no one’s ever taken me up on it, and I really, really damn, I’m hoping somebody listening will do it because I suspect it’s discomfort that prevents that kind of work that not writing in paragraph form, but you are the writer for this. In your second book, Dating Tips for the Unemployed, it’s written in short, digestible, essay-like stories with these fake ads in between promising to fix your life with various invented products and can be purchased through the mail. Then Droll Tales, your most recent book, you have a story titled “Contemporary Grammar” in which a story, a love story is told entirely through diagram sentences on a fifth grade English test. Go on, talk a little bit about construction and choosing forms that might be, oh, I don’t know, out of the ordinary.
Iris: Aside from the novelty, what I really like about it is it creates a possibility of seeing something in a different way and sort of also breaking down my assumptions as a writer and also the reader’s assumptions. There’s a certain freshness and aliveness to it. I like stories in this way. I guess I see a common structure of mine even in these different structures, is I think of them as sort of inside out stories. With Dating Tips, one of the ads, and this is I think my favorite story that I’ve ever written, is a short six word ad. It says, “Unlicensed chiropractor will cure your anxiety.” There’s just a phone number. A Queens phone number. Okay, so Hemingway is known for his six word novel. I think mine rivals his in sadness.
Marion: I do too. I do too.
Iris: The reason that I love that so much is when I think about it, there’s so much there. There’s the person who is an unlicensed chiropractor who would put the ad out there, and I imagine maybe he’s like, he’s living in his parents’ basement and he’s just like, “I’m going to start a business. I don’t really need to know anything, but I got some ideas. I’ll just pop your shoulder around.” Then there’s the person who would respond to it, who’s anxious. Also the last thing that they would be doing is going to an unlicensed chiropractor who’s going to pop your neck in a weird way, but just maybe they’re desperate enough to do it anyway. I feel like there’s a whole five act play in that. And what I remember doing sentence diagrams when I was a kid in school is the randomness of the sentences and then thinking, “Well, someone had to write these sentences for us to practice on, and so who were they and what were they going through?”
Obviously it’s going whatever they did last night or some … Their life is going to inform the sentences. In this case, there’s the fifth grade teacher who wrote the exam and the unwitting fifth grader who is trying to diagram the sentences and ends up sort of narrating the teacher’s despair. And with the diagrams, what I liked about it is that it suggests that underneath all of the chaos of relationships and heartbreak, there’s an order and you can break it down into parts of speech. And that’s a little, in some ways, comforting and ridiculous, arbitrary.
Marion: And wonderful. The delight that the reader experiences at that realization is fabulous. And also in Droll Tales, in the story, “Philip and Penelope,” in a variety of tenses you open with a note addressed Dear Professor, and then the writer, Penelope, confesses to the professor that she really enjoyed his recent lecture on Heidegger and the Existential Imagination. And that it got her thinking, “Am I really too serious with Philip?” Philip being her boyfriend. And in this series of notes that goes to her professor, she goes on to talk about her weight gain, how she enrolled in a creative writing class at the Y to, “Try to extend my critical faculties toward an aesthetic disregard for the self, and just sort of see where it goes.”
And I think it was the phrase, “Just sort of see where it goes” that got me to spit my tea directly onto the iPad where I was reading these stories, laughing as hard as I was, because she thinks Gilgamesh and other monster myths are just a way to avoid talking about one’s feelings. To make my point along with delighting me, I also got this very sneaky, but very strong feeling that you don’t wrestle with giving yourself permission to do this. And I could be wrong, but a lot of writers talk about, “I’ve got to give myself permission to write about this or that.” What do you think drives the kind of creativity that allows for stories constructed as sentence diagrams and notes to one’s professor about Gilgamesh and one’s boyfriend?
Iris: Well, I guess I kind of thought with this, “What if I just do exactly what I want?” Because I enjoy that in other writing, when I feel like the writer or the artist is playing and enjoying themselves versus when they are communicating a story, then it can become very boring. A friend of mine, she’s a beginning writer, and she was talking about how much fun, how she loves writing certain parts of her book scenes, but the other stuff, the transitions and setting the scene, she finds really boring. And I thought that was interesting and told her, “Well, you shouldn’t be writing anything that’s boring. It doesn’t have to be boring. Maybe skip it or turn it into something else, but there’s nothing that you have to do.” I think there’s this idea these days that a story or a novel has to look a certain way because so many are, so many do look a certain way, and we can get sort of stuck into this idea of writing as craft versus writing as art.
And an artist invents his own or her own form versus a craftsman that says, “This is how the guild has always done it. This is how you weave a basket.” I think it’s important to remember to play and see what you come up with. And also the danger of that is it might be horrible. When you’re in school, you try mixing all the colors together in art class, and sometimes you just end up with a brown mess, right?
Marion: Yeah.
Iris: You try again, throw it out and try again, and maybe you come up with something interesting, but that experimentation is if it’s interesting for the artist and then will be interesting for the reader or the viewer.
Marion: That’s lovely. And I agree. And we can feel you enjoying yourself as we’re reading the pages. Let’s talk about funny, because you really did, and have, been making me laugh for a good long time. Humor writing — funny — is hard, and continually writing funny is maybe really hard. And as I said before, you were a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor and the author of lots of essays and pieces I’ve read that, that are funny, really funny. These days, of course you can Google how to write funny and end up at the website of the founder of The Onion and take a course on being funny. It’s a thing. But what do you think? Can you work on being funny? Do you have to work on being funny to be funny?
Iris: You can get better at being funny, certainly, but also I think it’s kind of a perspective. I mean, I don’t really generally set out to write funny. I try and punch up the humor, but I sort of see things that way. I see the absurdity, but there are definitely ways, and I do that to improve one’s humor. For example, the punchline generally should go last, which seems obvious, but actually people don’t always do that. There’s a sense of rhythm and not taking too long. And I think humor is a lot like, it’s very musical in that the rhythm is important and the pacing. But as far as just humor, I’ve never thought of myself as a humor writer for example, though I do write humorously and enjoy it. But sometimes when I read books that are strictly just billed as a comic novel, like for example, P. G. Wodehouse, the Jeeves books.
I always start off reading them and I think the first page I’m like, “This is amazing. It’s so hilarious. Oh, why don’t I just read this for the rest of my life?” Then by page three, I’m like, “That’s enough. I’ve just had enough.” Because it becomes boring, because its primary goal is humor. For me, that becomes boring and I’m longing for something underneath it, something really at stake, not just to sort of be tickled. I feel with my own writing there’s a lot at stake, and these stories are very serious and my whole heart’s in them. But also I think that a work should entertain and a writer should sort of earn your attention. There’s also that aspect.
Marion: Oh yes, I entertain. For some reason so many writers hate to use that word. I love to use that word. I think it’s a great goal. It’s something I teach in my online memoir classes: Entertain. It’s really a fine thing to do. And you said the key phrase for me, which is what’s at stake? And I think back, I think the first story of yours I read was in the teens, it’s like 2015, 2016 maybe, “Ship of Wonks,” in The Atlantic, that chronicles a woman pushing 35 and pushing back at her mother’s hocking at her saying, “You don’t have forever to find a mate.” And she decides to go on a cruise for science nerds and has some challenging encounters with passengers and decides that ultimately decides that while, correct me if I get this wrong, while electrons travel in pairs, the Higgs boson, a particularly elusive particle, is known to travel alone.
And it’s this swift short piece that delivers what’s at stake, that it’s like the same kind of delight as a great canape. It’s like pop it in your mouth, delicious. But it also is deeply satisfying. Just talk a little bit more about that what’s at stake thing? I’ll put a link into the Ship of Wonks piece and everything else and all the books and all that, but maybe you could just … People then can go read that piece. I love that story, but it’s really super short and it made me feel comfortable about traveling in the world as my very self, and I loved that. Talk about the what’s at stake. I don’t want you to chicken and egg it, I mean, that’s too elemental, which comes first, but talk about that, the meaning of what you mean by what’s at stake and refer to that piece if you would.
Iris: Well, I guess that it begin with an earnest and sincere searching, which begins underneath that is an earnest and sincere little bit of pain, a feeling of being lost and a wanting to find something or find some order or find some answer or find yourself. With that story, yes, I was experiencing wanting to be in a relationship, wanting to meet someone and thinking I’d go on this … The advice is always, well, for single people, invest in your hobbies and maybe you’ll meet someone who also likes the same things you do. I’m interested in quantum physics. I thought, “I’ll go on this science cruise.” Everyone there turned out to be over 70 and coupled off, or in one case there was a widow, but it was a little, let’s say out of my age range. There’s all this disappointment. But then trying to I guess find the … I mean, life is full of disappointments, but does it necessarily mean it’s full of mistakes? I don’t think so.
I think that from out of our experiences, we can find some meaning and pleasure and maybe just enjoy it in a way that we didn’t expect. For that trip, that expedition, I didn’t find the relationship that I was hoping for, but I found a wonderful enriching time where I made interesting friends and explored a little bit of the world and got to go to CERN by the way. It was enriching, even though, let’s say in terms of the mission I started with, like Geraldo, I opened the vault and there was nothing there. But now we’re talking about Geraldo opening the vault, so it has some meaning. I think sometimes we don’t get what we’re looking for, but if we’re open, we maybe see that we found something else. Sorry if that’s very corny.
Marion: No, I love it. I think it’s great. And I love that you can bring in the Higgs boson and you can bring in CERN, which I’ve been to too, and is the coolest thing I ever got to do. I totally get that. But I want to talk a little bit about something you mentioned earlier, and as we wrap this up, I’d love to just get to the idea of how we do this a bit more. And supposedly, and it’s a really big supposedly, Aristotle said that the secret to humor is surprise. And we can certainly make a case for that in your work, which is always surprising. But as we wrap this up, I’d like to talk with you about how you write and about the support, the community. You mentioned a friend, Frederic, earlier you said was your mentor. I’d like to talk about how you work with that with a mentor or a friend or a community because it’s so difficult to pitch a surprising piece.
“Hey honey, what if a college student wrote a bunch of notes to a professor positing that Heidegger makes her think deep thoughts about her level of relationship commitment?” Than it is to pitch a simple non-fiction magazine article and get some support for that idea from one’s partner, lover, friend, spouse, mentor, editor, agent, whatever. It’s hard to pitch the very idiosyncratic or the very deeply personal. It’s hard to get support for that idea. Where do you get your support for your ideas and has that support changed over the years as your publication success has grown?
Iris: Well, I would say never pitch fiction and don’t talk about your fiction before you’ve, when you just have an idea before you’ve tried it out, that’s one thing. Because first of all, the person you’re talking to, there’s what you say and there’s what they’re actually hearing. You might have this whole vision and they’re not picking it up, and so they will discourage you or tell you to change it and go in this way. But meanwhile, you haven’t even started. You’re already starting to change it and revise it, but you haven’t even attempted to do your original vision. I think keep it in the womb for a while. Let it gestate, to a certain point before it’s ready to come out into the world and play with it. And when you think it looks a little bit enough like what you want it to be, that’s a good time to show it to a trusted friend or colleague so that they have the best opportunity to see what it is you’re trying to do, and maybe give you some pointers to moving more in that direction.
Because sometimes if you share something too early, as sometimes my friend Frederic, for example, who’s a wonderful supporter, I’ve showed him things too early where he didn’t see what I was doing and he said, “This isn’t working.” And I believed in it. I stuck with it. Then I showed it to him at a later point. And he loved it, but he didn’t … Some people can’t necessarily, you have some crazy vision, they can’t have it with you until you’ve turned it into something. There’s a little bit of a risk there. But also important is it’s wonderful if you can find one or two people that you could share your work with at a certain point, whose opinion you trust. Not completely, because finally take them as advisors, but sometimes they actually don’t know better and you have to trust yourself.
I think it’s dangerous sometimes with these writing workshops where people go into a class and 15 unqualified people with all their different opinions tell them what they should should do and how they should change it. Then you end up with, what’s that expression? Art by committee.
Marion: Yeah.
Iris: And a camel is a horse drawn by committee. It’s not your vision and it’s not even a singular vision and it becomes sort of averaged out. And also it can be very discouraging because people, you might show your work to someone and they’re just wrong or they just have different taste. It’s important to find someone whom you respect, I think.
Marion: That’s perfect, and I so appreciate it and I so appreciate all the other answers. Thank you, Iris. It’s just been a joy talking with you. It’s been a joy to read your stuff all these years. And I will link like crazy and in the show notes and I put a whole transcript on my website with this so people can read it. And I can’t wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much.
Iris: Thank you, Marion.
Marion: The writer is Iris Smyles. Her new book is Droll Tales from Turtle Point Press. See more on her at Iris Smyles dot com. 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 Overit Studios 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, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
Photo credit: Chris Stein
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