how to publish a personal essay collection

ELIZABETH RAU IS the writer to ask about how to publish a personal essay collection. She is also the writer to ask about how to write the personal essay. Listen in, and read along as we discuss those topics, and so much more.

Marion: Welcome to Qwerty, the podcast for writers on how to live the writing life. I’m Marion Roach Smith. Each episode I talk to writers from all genres to discover what makes a good read. Along the way, we discuss their writing process, discover their tips, and talk about what matters most to writers. So, step away from the computer or typewriter for a bit and join us. Today my guest is writer Elizabeth Rau. She’s an award-winning writer and former newspaper reporter whose work has appeared in publications such as The Providence Journal, The Boston Globe, and The Providence Phoenix. Her new book is entitled The Good Slope, and is a collection of essays written from everyday life just out from Apprentice House Press. Welcome, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Oh, thank you.

Marion: I’m delighted that you’re here and I’m delighted to read this book. The personal essay is my absolute favorite form, so this was a joy for me and also a joy because of their writing, which I found a reference in the promo copy that really explained to me what I was feeling, a lovely note that states that the collection is quote, “engaging, yet never indulgent.” It goes on to say, “This collection elevates moments we take for granted into luminous stories about the experience of home.” There are a couple of things in that lovely sentence I want to explore, but my audience is writers, so they want to do this. So let’s start with that word indulgent, as in that quote that you’re writing is, quote, “engaging, but never indulgent.” Boy, oh boy, am I going to use that as a directive for writers with whom I work. So, can you explain the difference between engaging and indulgent and just spend a little time on the trap of indulgence, if you would please?

Elizabeth: Well, I like to write about everyday things, and I’ve always liked to do that, and I’ve always been really attracted to that kind of writing. I haven’t been keen on writing that is full of embellishment and purple prose and convoluted sentences and a lot of explanatory paragraphs, long quotes. I like writing that is spare, that uses detail judiciously. I’m not really keen on writing that is overly sentimental, and that’s very difficult to do when you’re writing about yourself, and you’re writing about your children or your family or something painful that has happened to you. So I like understated writing, and I think that’s what the indulgent phrase means. You don’t want to pour your heart out because then it becomes too saccharin, it becomes too sentimental. Some readers like that, but that’s not my style and never really has been.

It’s easy to fall into that trap, I think, but I always fight against it. During my many, many revisions, I always take out stuff that seems, frankly, that just doesn’t seem true. It doesn’t seem true to me, and it doesn’t seem like a true thing that could have happened to another human being. I look back at some of my early writing, not just essay writing, but journalism writing because I do have a background in journalism. In the beginning I probably was over indulgent in many ways. The more you do it, the more you write, the more you see that it’s actually the spare writing with just the perfect detail is so powerful, it’s almost lyrical. It’s almost like a long poem. So that’s what I always strive to do, and I think it’s so important to learn to do as a writer.

Marion: The other aspect of that line of promo copy I want to get under a little bit is about elevating the quotidian, those moments in life. I’m a huge believer in that ethic, but I know the confidence, I talent and work ethic to do so is not an easy combo to develop. You just talked about developing that you just have a wonderful light touch, and you don’t indulge. You don’t drill in, you don’t preach, you don’t waggle your finger at us. So let’s take apart those requirements, a bit of the writing and talk a little bit about I. I know that people listening to this want to do this. So when you spot something in your own life, in every day of your own life, what’s the first thing you do?

Elizabeth: You mean as a topic for an essay?

Marion: Yeah, a topic or a moment. You have such a fabulous combination of topics here, but there are also these moments you come around the corner and there’s EMT people in front of your house. Did you stop and make notes or do you just walk away with that, even you have some fantastic moments in this? I just wonder about when you spot a moment in your own life and you say, “I’m going to write about that. I’m going to grab that?” Or what-

Elizabeth: Well, sometimes, sometimes I do. I am very lucky, I have a great memory, and I have a very good visual memory. I can also remember very short quotes and which are significant. A lot of these pieces were written for a paper in my neighborhood. So I wrote one every month, and so I knew I was under a deadline. I always knew I had another essay that I had to write, so I was always looking around for topics all the time. So they emerged to me just in maybe one phrase or one event, like my husband cutting himself with the oyster knife. Then I would build a whole essay around that. My mind has to be active. If I know I have a deadline, if I know I have an assignment and I know I have something due, then I’m in this hyper state of, “Oh, that might make a great essay.”

My son’s yo-yoing, or I wrote a whole essay about a little boy sitting on a playground making finger shadow puppets, and it was seemingly about nothing. But then I realized after I had this long conversation with him, and I was tired and none in the best mood, I thought, “Wow, this’ll make a great essay because it’s just this innocence and wonder about life.” As a parent, I almost missed it, what he was talking about and then I came to appreciate it as he talked more. So I think it’s just being alive, being very observant that’s really important, and looking for the beauty, the joy and the humor. The humor’s really important too.

Marion: Absolutely. Do you carry a notebook with you everywhere you go? Do you jot things down? Do you speak in your phone? Do you write on the inside of your palm? What do you do when you witness one of those moments?

Elizabeth: Well, sometimes I would write on my palm and-

Marion: How did I know that?

Elizabeth: Sometimes, I have a checkbook, and I would write on the check receipt. So, I have check receipts with all sorts of doodles and everything on them. Sometimes I would read something beautiful, and I would scribble it down on the check receipt or a quote I might hear. Yeah, I’m always constantly doing something like that.

Marion: It’s such a lovely thing to tell people because I think they think that real writers retain everything, know everything. The muse visits them. It goes from their head right through their fingers. No, no, no, no, no. My checkbook absolutely has been the recipient of many, many, many notes. But my palm, the inside of my wrist, I’ve written on the inside of a skirt hem once because I was like, “Well, that’s all I’ve got. I’m sitting here in church, I’m using it.” Sometimes people give me weird looks, but I don’t really care. So I love that you snatch it, you grab it and it works. So let’s talk about the spotting of things as we did a little bit.

But are there moments of life that move us most and work best in essays, or is it the gamut? I think there’s another misunderstanding of among younger writers that, “Oh, there’s just certain kinds of things that don’t happen to me.” You just make the best argument with this collection that it’s the quotidian, that it’s your husband cutting himself with the shucking knife and with the oyster knife. It’s that your kid on the playground, that people and their things that they say and do just require that momentary observation and that warmth that starts to grow in our chests as writers where we say, “There’s something here.” So can you just go on a little bit more about that and give some people some confidence that they too are having these moments in life?

Elizabeth: Well, a lot of it is a process. Because of my journalism background, I like to work on deadlines. So I like to put that kind of pressure on me, and I start looking around the world and observing. I could be in the grocery store and see something that is really remarkable, or I could overhear a conversation on the train or a bus and that can evolve into an essay, but I’ve always been drawn to the every day. That’s really where so many beautiful things and wondrous things happen. The challenge is to really drill down and don’t just skim over it, really intensely, report it, again, my journalism background. Then it becomes just this beautiful, vivid piece.

For instance, I wrote an essay about gardening, and I was a novice gardener, and I had no idea what I was doing. It was a long essay, maybe 1200 words. I intensely reported that because first of all, I tried to make fun of myself because I didn’t know what I was doing. I would drive around to different people’s houses and leave notes and ask, “What plant is in front of your house?” I thought, “Okay, well, that’s part of this essay,” or I’d drive around with my kids and look at this beautiful tree for the millionth time, and they couldn’t stand it. “Oh, not the tree again, mom, or the bush,” so that’s great dialogue-

Marion: Right.

Elizabeth: … if you just get those three little words, “Oh, mom, not the tree again.”

Marion: Right.

Elizabeth: When I was doing it, for instance, it wasn’t enough to say I bought three shrubs at this nursery. I had to know what the shrubs were. I had to know what they looked like. That was for all the plants, and that’s how the essay becomes very personal. It becomes very vivid. It’s just around us all the time.

Marion: Yes.

Elizabeth: I’m thinking of writing an essay about my love for lap swimming, and it wouldn’t just be about physically why I do it, the exercise. I’ve been thinking about it as I’m lap swimming, and I thought, “Well, there’s a great lead,” I’m thinking. It would be about the various suits I’ve gone through and people I’ve met and how I pushing the water away from me and why I do it and some sad moments I’ve had in the water, teary-eyed under my goggles. So you just have to sit down and think about not just a superficial aspect of the event or the person, but really, really drill down and try and get to those details because they really carry the story. Also, as I said before, humor is wonderful. Try and be a little self-deprecating because-

Marion: Yeah, you’re good at that.

Elizabeth: … it’s very appealing.

Marion: It is appealing. I used to hate the early iteration of mommy bloggers where everybody was perfect. I’m 100% sure that for the first five years of my daughter’s life, I didn’t go anywhere without a booger on me, and there was the time I looked down at a board meeting and I had on mismatched shoes. I wrote about those things because I think they’re human, but perfection, it seems so inhuman to me. Those perfect mommy bloggers that did everything perfectly and their cookies always came out perfect, and it’s like, oh, no, no. The good is in the failure. The good is in the trial, I think. So I just love the stuff you chose to look at. Right from the start, the book frames and shelters these pieces under the roof of home-

Elizabeth: Right.

Marion: … or it’s the lens perhaps that you put on the nose of the reader. So let’s talk about that. Do collections of essays benefit from the writer giving us some direction? You give us this beautiful introduction that tells us this. I found it incredibly gracious of you, but also I had no doubt the territory of this book from that moment forward. So talk a little bit about framing a collection, ’cause I think everybody thinks they would like to write a collection, but I believe that they’re best written under a single roof.

Elizabeth: Well, what happened is I had written probably 150 essays, and I started rereading them, and I did discover that they did all have this theme. Not all of them, but most of them, this theme of home. It’s been a really powerful theme all my life. I grew up in St. Louis in a big family, and there was a lot of chaos and fun, and then I left and never went back. It was always very difficult for me to cut out on my own, and I wrote about it in the early day. Then I started to create my own home and wrote about that. Then now that home is disappearing, and now I’m trying to recreate another home.

So, it’s occurred to me that this is what we do. Whether it’s people, a thing, a place, we’re constantly recreating the happiness in our lives and trying to find happiness in those moments, finding happiness in those moments, and then having the courage to move on with grace and gratitude. So a lot of these essays, there’s a little bit of melancholy because life is very transitory and especially if you have children in a family and really for anyone from all backgrounds. That’s something I discovered as when I had a lot to read over. It didn’t emerge consciously for me, but because it’s been such an emotional aspect of my life, I think it emerges in my essays in different ways.

Marion: It’s such a good topic, home. It’s such an elusive one. It’s a fundamental one. I know that this is a collection of pieces that you had written over a long period of time because they’re dated, which is very helpful. But I wonder as you were reading them or you were selecting them or you were rewriting them, what did you learn about home while you were having a look at these pieces? Did it move you along your own education of your definition of home?

Elizabeth: Well, again, I really look at it as we’re constantly recreating home, and that doesn’t mean a home with six kids, and then you leave that home and you get five more. What I mean is we’re just always recreating a feeling of a nurturing place to live, and a place where we can feel comfortable and calm and safe. That’s what we do, I think, throughout our lives. Of course, you start with your first home and then you leave it and then you miss that home. Then you create your own home, and then that home changes, and then now you’re on a journey to create a new home. So it’s this never ending quest, and it’s almost a cliche, but it’s a very, very powerful, and I think it’ll be with me until I take my very last breath. I noticed when I was writing my essays, the ones that are about my kids, I started weaving in a lot of my childhood in those essays.

Marion: Yes, I loved that.

Elizabeth: They came back in such a vivid way. I loved putting them in the essays because it was a way to meander around, which I love to do in personal essay. I love to meander and get not quite off-topic, but not take the reader on an entirely linear route.

Marion: They were layered. I found that your backstory layered in really gave me a great deal to consider about this definition of home and how it changes and how we move on. So let’s talk a little bit about the actual writing. Let’s talk about leads, how we open these pieces. In this wonderful collection, The Good Slope, that’s just out, you have a number of essays. I laughed and cried my way through it, but there was one lead that I thought, “Okay, I have to ask her about this one.” You write, quote, this is the opening sentence of the piece, “Everything President Nixon demanded of me I could do except the softball throw,” and I just loved that.

There’s no way the reader’s not going to read on. I know how to write a straight news lead, a feature lead, an anecdote lead, all of those things, but not everybody does. So give us a little insight on how you wrote this and what you thought when you saw it on the page. Sometimes these things can be a little shocking to the writer, and we go, “Can I really say that?” in the pursuit of this essay as you wrote it, is that what you literally wrote first or did it come-

Elizabeth: No.

Marion: … after? Right.

Elizabeth: No.

Marion: So, give the writers here the confidence that that great first line may not be the first line you write.

Elizabeth: No. No. That was a while ago, but as I recalled, I had a more anecdotal lead. In fact, the lead might have been the second paragraph. “I could leap across a pile of sand, speed down the blacktop, raise my scrawny body from the gym floor dozens of times, but my arms were as thin as broomsticks.”

Marion: Yes.

Elizabeth: This was a hard one for me to write. It was revised many times, and I had friends take a look at it for me and go over it. But putting Nixon in there at the top, it just gave it a little bit of humor and thought that was important For this particular one.

Marion: It’s bracing. We go, “Oh,” and then it’s softball. There’s that juxtaposition of Dick Nixon and softball that doesn’t make any sense, except we know that we have to go find it. That essay is titled, Fit, is a fine piece of characterization as well, and self-characterization, may be the hardest of all. We don’t want height, weight, and eye color, though we do want a little color around the person. We want to know who the person is and the characterization we choose must also be on brand for the piece we’re writing.

So, here’s the line that comes later on, and I’d love you to react. You write about yourself, you write, quote, “Standing before hundreds of people in my white party dress with bell sleeves, I remember hoping everyone would notice my scabby knees, the mark of a true tomboy.” So talk to me about that self characterization a bit, please, and how you settled into that line, because the scabby knees is absolutely, or the party dress is I totally got it as a tomboy of my own youth, but you’re showing us yourself. How did you settle on that one? There’s a million ways you could have described yourself, but that’s on brand for the piece. So can you talk a little bit about that process?

Elizabeth: Well, for me, honestly, there really isn’t a process. I write what I’m thinking in my head, and I’ve been doing it for such a long time. I think that my background in journalism helped so much writing these personal essays. I was a tomboy, and I was standing up there with this beautiful party dress with bell-shaped sleeves. I liked all the scars on my legs because that showed that I was climbing trees and falling and playing soccer, and the essay is about sports. So I can’t remember exactly why I put that in, but it wasn’t forced. This is why I think it’s so important to write and write and write and write, because the more you write, the more you know yourself, especially in the personal essay, and the more you remember about your life and these kinds of paragraphs come quite easily.

Marion: The personal essay, I think, is the greatest place to learn how to write. For those people who don’t have the benefit of journalism, I started in journalism, you started in journalism, but for those people who don’t have the benefit of journalism, it’s okay. They can still do this. So the essay allows us to have a little look at something, small moments of life that illuminate the larger themes of life.

Elizabeth: Right.

Marion: I think it’s the most appealing of forms to have a little look at something, well, it is illuminative of the big stuff. So is it your favorite form of writing? Do you prefer it over journalism? Do you like it? How did you think about doing a long narrative piece and instead decide to use these because you had them? Just give me a little idea about just your preference here and why the personal essay.

Elizabeth: Well, as I said, I’m a former journalist, and I’ve covered lots of news stories. I had an opportunity to write my first personal essay for the magazine at The Providence Journal where I worked for many years. I just found the writing, it was hard at first for me, the first few essays I wrote, but it was so freeing. When you’re writing a news story, you’re under the tremendous pressure to get everything right and to make it flow and to make it logical, but the essay is so freeing. The writing is just, it was a different kind of writing, and I loved it. I loved hearing my voice in the writing, and I also liked it allowed me to pursue my obsessions.

It was challenging creatively and intellectually, so it really is my favorite form. I like doing it in a very cocoon environment. I usually think up what I’m going to write about in my head when I’m swimming or lying in bed and I can’t sleep or driving, I might think, “Ah, there’s the lead.” Then once I get that in my head, I can sit down and play around with it and meander all over the place, and it’s just pure joy for me. So I feel very lucky that I had this opportunity to write these for 10 years for our local paper and also for the other magazines, The Providence Journal and the other magazines.

Marion: You spoke about when the lead comes. I always find that if I’m doing something tremendously dangerous, so driving a car, which is a dangerous thing to do, or chopping vegetables with my sharpest chef’s knife that I tend to, because I think my brain is so engaged in not cutting my fingers off or not having a car accident, that the rest of my brain is just flying around looking for things to consider. I don’t think the bulk of the work is done here at the desk, although there’s-

Elizabeth: Right.

Marion: … you absolutely have to write every day. I’m a huge believer in the writing practice, but I think you’ve just been very kind and generous to say that you can be doing any number of things. What I always tell people is to have a notebook on you have something.

Elizabeth: Right, I agree.

Marion: We covered that.

Elizabeth: Right. I do think you need to scribble. If you’ve got a great idea for a lead, just scribble it down somewhere as fast as you can-

Marion: Absolutely.

Elizabeth: … ’cause it’s so easy to forget that.

Marion: Oh, you figure you’re never going to forget it, “This is the best lead I ever wrote,” and 10 minutes later, the school bus has pulled up or the dog has showed up muddy or whatever, and it’s gone, and it’s gone.

Elizabeth: Right.

Marion: That’s what’s tragic. I’ve always got a notebook on me. I teach memoir, and I coach writers, and I edit writers all day long and every day have writing conversations with writers. Every day I hear, “Oh, I should really just do this as a book of essays. It’d be so much easier,” and I don’t think so. I think the narrative piece versus the essay book is like talking about apples versus pineapples. They’re two different forms, though they’re both fruit. I don’t think it’s easier. I think it’s just a very different way of considering the world. So when you think about the form itself, do you think it’s harder, easier for people to get a book of essays published? I guess I need your advice on this for people who are considering that it might be the thing for them to do.

Elizabeth: Well, actually, I’ve been told it’s more difficult by my publisher, and I was surprised about that because I love reading essays. I will track those down in bookstores and on my Kindle, and I just love them, and they are difficult to find. I guess they don’t sell that well according to a publisher. So that’s probably why we don’t see as many.

Marion: I think it’s too bad. Yeah.

Elizabeth: I just read Patchett’s These Precious Things, or This-

Marion: Oh, Ann Patchett, yes.

Elizabeth: Ann Patchett’s what was the title of that? These Precious Days? I love her essays. I like them, and they’re long. A lot of them ran in The New Yorker, but that’s rare to find that kind of collection these days. You don’t really see that that much, and a lot of the essays that are out there are running in literary magazines or The New Yorker. They always run wonderful, long, long-form essays.

Marion: But for someone who wants to do this, and you are doing this this year, this time, I wonder what advice you might give to somebody about where to look for submissions. You have a very good history in your local newspaper, in your area. So what about for other writers? What do you suggest if somebody says, “All right, I’m going to start doing this? I’m going to write these essays? Now, how do I go about finding a publication place?”

Elizabeth: Well, of course, there are all sorts of literary journals, but they’re looking for probably more literary type essays, but there are newspapers are still taking essays. There are magazines taking essays. If someone is really intent on that, they could just start writing a collection and do a Substack or something like that and just start. They’d have to be really driven because you don’t really see an audience yet, and then maybe you have a collection of 50 or so and then submit it to a publisher.

Marion: I love Substack, and I think that a lot of people are benefiting from having that publication vehicle available to them so they can get out in the world. It seems to me to be a wonderful way, especially if you’ve got the idea of a volume of things that you could find readers for.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Marion: Yeah. So, there’s a curious note, and as we wrap this up there, I’m thinking about the last page of your book and the acknowledgements where you thank your editor and copy editor and family, and where you specifically call out your husband who, quote, “dared me to pick up the pen again.” Had you put it down?

Elizabeth: I did for a while. I have two sons and they’re 13 months apart. So after they were born, I was exhausted.

Marion: Yeah, I bet.

Elizabeth: So I didn’t do a lot of writing for a few years, and when they got a little older, I started doing freelance and started doing writing again. But there really was a period there I was absolutely exhausted and not terribly frustrated about not writing, but knew I had to do it again. Then what did I do? I wrote about what was in front of me. So write about what you know, and that’s what I did.

Marion: Well, we’re very grateful that you did, and I thank you for staying at it and for picking up the pen again and for indulging me without indulging on the page. I just love that, no indulgence. I think that the reader for this book benefits enormously by you having picked up that pen again. Thank you so much, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Marion: I so appreciate it. The writer is Elizabeth Rau. Her new book is The Good Slope: A Collection of Essays just out from Apprentice House Press. See More on her on LinkedIn, and more on the book wherever books are sold. 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 Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach 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. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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