ANITA FELICELLI’S SHORT STORIES have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Midnight Breakfast, Air/Light, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She’s contributed essays and criticism to The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Alta Journal, Slate, and elsewhere. She published a Modern Love column in The New York Times and her short stories and poems have been anthologized. In 2023, one of her short stories was performed as part of Symphony Spaces Selected Shorts. Her books include Chimerica, a novel, the award-winning Love Songs for a Lost Continent, and her new short story collection, How We Know Our Time Travelers, published by WTAW Press. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write in the epistolary form, and so much more.
Powered by RedCircle
Marion: It’s my honor to welcome Anita to the Qwerty podcast. Welcome. How are you?
Anita: I’m great. It’s so nice to be here, Marion.
Marion: Well, it’s wonderful to have you here. You have a remarkable list of publications, as I mentioned, from a modern love column to essays, criticism, book reviews for the Los Angeles Times, a novel, and this just-published collection of short stories, How We Know Our Time Travelers. In other words, you have a writing life that allows you to move across fiction and nonfiction, short and long forms, criticism and more. Many writers are told to stick to one form or just prefer to stick to one genre or form. So is there a benefit to being a writer who can write across forms?
Anita: Oh, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know that there’s a benefit because I, you know, I had wanted to be a fiction writer from the age of five, but my models growing up were also book critics and professors and, you know, had other aspects of the writing life incorporated into, you know, their daily routine.
So, I think the benefit is just being able to see things from different points of view and being able to use different lenses onto life and the imagination.
I think when a writer is confined to one genre, it can be really easy to only focus on what that genre demands, but other genres allow you to take a new perspective and sort of shape that form with an eye towards readers more broadly.
Marion: Yeah, that’s a great point. And I’m fascinated by the idea that you wanted to be a fiction writer since you were five. So, you know, all forms are new forms at some point to a writer and you’ve got all these forms and all of them require some skills. So, can you talk to us, take us back a little bit to what did you do starting at whatever age, five perhaps, to train as a writer?
Anita: Yes. So, I think like most writers, I trained as a writer by writing in the form that I was most interested in, which is fiction. I did that for the entirety of elementary school, middle school. I was an editor of literary journals all throughout my education.
I also, you know, when I was around, I don’t know, maybe 14, I started reading Writer’s Digest and taking tips from the authors that wrote their essays in there. And they came from a broad range of genres as well. Typically, I was looking at the fiction, but you know, because I love to read, I was reading all of them. And from that, I also found literary magazines, which I, you know, learned what they were through Writer’s Digest. And I began submitting, I think my first literary magazine submission was when I was 16 to Zyzzyva, which is a publication based in San Francisco. And they didn’t take it, but I was, you know, very determined. I submitted to Seventeen, and I got a nice rejection back. And I just kept going from there.
Marion: I love this. And I get it. I think that the reading of the trade magazines, for lack of a better phrase for them, is such a great education. I read the Paris Review. I’ve been reading The Paris Review since I was a kid. I love those interviews. I haven’t heard of many of those authors, even though I’ve been reading all my life. And I think that any tips, anything that you can get the benefit of their knowledge is just so, so welcome.
And what about your daily writing habits and process? People always want to know what and how you work. Do you work every day? Do you work five days a week? Do you write three pages a day? Do you have anything to say about the schedule before we get into what you have written?
Anita: Sure. So, on weekdays, I’m an editor at a magazine called Alta Journal, where I edit a book club section, where I’m looking at other people’s work all day. So, I have to focus my fiction efforts to before the day begins, which is something like 5 or 6am. Or if I miss that window, because you know, my kids are being noisy or whatever, I have to shift over to the evening window, which is probably 7 to 10 or 7 to 11. And so that’s what my typical weekday looks like. And then the weekends are variable, but I have much longer blocks of time to just work on my projects.
Marion: Good. I’m glad that you call them “blocks of time.” I talk about living on a grid. I think these are exceptionally important details for people to understand that we need to grid it block it, look at the week that way.
I was reading a collection of Mary Lavin short stories recently, a new re-released edition of that remarkable Irish writer, and it has an introduction by Colm Toibin, in which he reminds us that Lavin called the short story “an arrow in flight.”
And I get it. I had never heard that before.
And you’ve just published this wondrous collection of short stories that is called How We Know Our Time Travelers. And I wonder if you have a definition or an image like that of short stories. Does that quote resonate with you or can you add or take away from it? What is the short story is what I’m asking you, but kind of riffing on what Lavin says.
Anita: I mean, I love that image. The short story is an arrow.
Yeah. And I think that goes towards its brevity and the way it’s supposed to make you feel in terms of like a piercing feeling or a reveal. I guess I think of it in more conventional terms in the sense that I think of it as the moment when everything changes and nothing is the same for the characters, or more often the protagonist of the story.
But I think, you know, I think Joy Williams has some amazing quotes, which I can’t remember off the top of my head, but they have to do with the pressure of time and death and that sort of thing, which also goes towards the compression aspect of writing short stories.
Marion: The compression aspect. Yes. That’s a lovely thing to think about. It’s fascinating to me how to define this. I went and I read up, you know, and I read some really lousy definitions.
And then of course, there were some really great definitions that were more informative, but I like the pressure. I like the arrow in flight a lot. I like that the motion, you know.
I teach writing. I’m constantly talking to people about looking at a piece, looking at the Modern Love column, for instance, and watching how it moves. And I frequently see the blank looks on their faces or get the questions like, what do you mean “moves?” And I think that that arrow in flight captures that, you know, it’s transcendence. There’s something’s changing, as you said. Yeah.
So, we have the great opportunity as writers to try things and you try things. I’m really astonished is the best word for the breadth of what you’ve written. I will send everyone to your website. They can go be astonished too. And the length of your career at such a young age, but we try things.
And in your lovely new collection, How We Know Our Time Travelers, your final story, Amrita, is written in the epistolary style, meaning correspondence exchanged back and forth. In this case, it’s letters. One after the other between correspondents, one of whom is in a psychiatric facility for most of the correspondence. And for me, the story examines the value of the ordinary and the letter and brings intimacy that we can almost palpate.
But, you know, that’s me. That’s what it did for me. So, talk to me a little bit about the letter format, the epistolary format and what you intended for it to bring to the topic you sought to explore.
Anita: That’s a lovely question. I think I was really fascinated by the epistolary form. Also from a young age, because I was really interested in the book, Daddy Long Legs, where a young woman is exchanging letters with her benefactor. And, you know, I’ll just give a spoiler, which is that she ends up falling in love with her benefactor at the end of it.
So I always loved this idea of, you know, two people finding their relationship through the written word, I think, because the written word is so important to me. I see it as something that could generate sparks that might not be there in the physical presence of someone else right away. And it’s a way of seeing into someone, you know, who might otherwise be shy about revealing their feelings.
And then I think also, when I was an English major, we read Clarissa. I focused on like early novels as my area of study. And I was thinking a lot about, can you really make the epistolary form stretch out over a whole novel? And I have tried to do that and did not succeed in sustaining my interest. But I thought that the short story was sort of a perfect form for exploring how a connection might be pursued through these two people sharing their real selves that they don’t necessarily share to the world.
Marion: There’s extraordinary intimacy in that story. And I did love it. And I felt them draw closer. No spoilers on my end. I want everyone to buy the book and read those. But I was most taken by that because we’ve all seen it done. And I agree with you, it might get exhausting. I have recently read a, I think it was a young adult novel that was done entirely in the form. And I got a little tired, but I was still delighted by the exchange of ideas between the people corresponding, but it’s a tough one.
Yeah. So we touched on in the previous question, a little bit about what things are about, what that was about to me, that story. And we all know there’s what this is about. And then there’s what this is really about, as we say, or so it was stated to me recently, in one of these interviews with an essayist who talked about his process of getting to the universal, what is illustrated in his deeply personal tales. He did a series of memoir essays in a book, and he really drilled into what it’s really about. What is this about? Maybe the second most loathed question writers get after, how are you going to structure it? Which really makes us just get off the phone with our agent or whoever, and go drink gin straight out of the bottle is my vision.
So how do you determine what you want to write about? Can you chicken and egg this for the people who are listening?
Oh, right now, the truth seems to be on the table in America. And you want to explore that, or do your characters come to you and you move them around for a while? Or is it some of one and some of the other? But really, how do you get to what I want to write about and then what I want this piece to really be about?
Anita: I think I start with characters and images. So, some sort of image will take hold of me, but it usually comes with a character and with a theme. I think with that last story that we were talking about, it came to me as an image of a young woman in a psychiatric facility, and the question of, why is she there, and sort of the loneliness of that experience. But it depends on the book too, because my last book, Chimerica, was a novel that was pretty well thought out intellectually.
I wanted to write about sort of my understandings developed through working at law firms, many different law firms for a decade or so. And I wanted to critique the law. So I did start there with a concept, but the character that I drew from had been a character I had worked up in an earlier novel. So she was actually kind of an antagonist in this earlier novel. And so she kind of came to me as someone who would fit this critique, and that all kind of bound together.
And so while it was a much more conscious effort to sort of say something, it still did start with, you know, my impressions of this character and how the theme of ambition gone awry in the law firm context would unfold.
Marion: That’s interesting. The law firm context is just such an unexpected answer to writing from someplace, right? And I know because I certainly know the book, but I love the fact that that’s the way you describe it.
And I wonder about then identity, about you in the writing process. It’s not something we talk about a lot, or maybe we do, or maybe it’s just understood about how much of who we are, or specifically how you identify, are you exploring when you write?
You just told us you wanted to identify this law firm aspect, but, you know, several forms lend themselves more than not to self-exploration, of course, memoir being one of them. But I wonder if you can speak a little bit about choosing, even like with your interviews, or what, you know, do you, are you thinking about yourself? And are you trying to go from the inside out or the outside in?
You know, in other words, are you saying, I really want to interview that writer because I don’t understand this about myself? Or like, where are you in this process of your own creative spirit?
Anita: I am definitely one of the writers that is working from the inside out. So, I am sort of interested in the complexity of people, including myself, and sort of the different selves that we have on the table and the different lenses those selves bring to whatever stimuli that the world throws at us. So I am interested in the stimuli, of course, and like the events happening in the world. But I always regard them as being processed through at least one of these different selves that are inside me.
Marion: So I think, You know, I have a closet that about six women live in, if you know what I’m saying. So that’s a rueful laugh. And we’ll just talk about that offline. But yes, you just hit a nerve.
Anita: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I started with a lot of self exploration as a teenager, I had sort of a difficult identity in the sense that there were no sort of models for me. We lived below the poverty line when I was a little kid. And then, you know, then we moved to Silicon Valley, where, you know, our fortunes kind of changed, and I became, you know, a more privileged person.
And I think, you know, living in these different sort of class atmospheres and being at the start of my life in America being like such an outsider, you know, there were not that many Indian immigrants, you know, back then as there are now. And, you know, I just felt very alone.
A lot of the time, my parents worked a lot, I read a lot, I was a somewhat introverted kid. So, you know, when you spend a lot of time with yourself, you have a lot of room to explore, you know, your internal visions. And, you know, I was learning things about politics at the time, I remember, you know, watching the news with my dad and him sort of explaining things about American politics that he also was sort of uncovering while we were, you know, in this new experience of this country.
But as I got older, you know, especially when I got pulled into the law, which was somewhat accidental, I was forced to be more confronted with the outside world, I became really immersed in things like human rights and civil rights and litigation and all those things. And they sort of took away from those internal visions somewhat or they skewed them so that they were skewed towards the outside world, even if the consciousness through which they were filtered was very elaborately interested in fantasy life and dreams and symbols and what do things really mean under the surface and that sort of question.
Marion: Do you remember the first time you saw someone on a library shelf or read a story on a library shelf that resonated with your interior self?
Anita: Yeah, I think, you know, I was really interested in the surrealists when I was a teenager. And so I was really interested in Anais Nin, Baudelaire, later Sylvia Plath. And I think the uniting feature was sort of this emphasis on dream life and metaphor and sometimes even esoteric metaphor, but nonetheless, not necessarily domestic realism or sort of an outlook that was very attached to a shared collective sense of what reality is.
Marion: Oh, Anis Nin, I remember stumbling on her in a used bookstore when I was maybe 15. And then the next thing I remember, I was sitting on the floor, and it was about two hours later. You know, that reaching into your soul and speaking to you and thinking, can other people hear this? Because this is so deeply personal and I’m riding a magic carpet right now that I’ve never been allowed to ride before. That was a journey out or in, I’m not even sure, but it was a journey.
Anita: Yes, I love that, the magic carpet. It did feel like that, absolutely.
Marion: Yeah, yeah, yeah. People don’t talk about her enough. I actually have a book on Persian cats that she owned that I found at a used book dealer and I treasure it because of its provenance, of course. And I really do, I sort of hold it to myself.
And say, this was hers, this was hers. That’s so wonderful. And why Persian cats, I have no idea, but you know, I’ve got it.
Alison: I own a book that’s a novel by, well, it’s kind of an autobiographical piece by Anna Kavan, who’s kind of this obscure fiction writer. And it was owned by Anais Nin, which is why I bought it. And all it has is like her little address label and, you know, please return to Anais Nin.
Marion: There is some kind of mystique around this object for me. Oh, I love that we have that, that’s so wonderful.
And I get it, The New Yorker just did a piece recently on a book dealer who talks all about, you know, when you story a book, when you say this was owned by such and such or given to such and such, it just, you know, it increases the value by some crazy amount. Well, you know, you’re gonna have to pry this book out of my cold, dead hands, trust me when I say that.
I’m not selling, but I just, I love that, I get it. And I get the value, she read it, and then I read her. And this is better than any, you know, nesting Russian doll could ever be. It’s just filled with gratitude, yeah.
Huh. Well, your publisher fascinates me. It’s WTAW Press, which is a 501C3 nonprofit. And their mission reads that they invest “in the artistic development of writers to foster the thriving literary community, inspire a passion for literature through publishing books, producing author readings and providing online workshops and manuscript consultations.”
And they say that they have the agility to select “outstanding manuscripts likely to be overlooked in the mainstream corporate publishing industry that focuses on the bottom line.” Wow, I love that.
So can you talk to me a little bit about WTAW and the value of the independent press, like what you got there, what you found there, why this is of such value? Because it seems to be.
Anita: Yes, absolutely. I think it, you know, I’m a huge proponent of independent publishing as a kind of publishing that of course, you know, it’s important that books sell, but there’s also this importance placed on artistry and allowing an artist to have their own vision for the book.
And so I had worked with WTAW on Chimerica as well. And, you know, they have a list that’s very unusual in terms of these are very aesthetically interesting books, sometimes form-breaking and about, you know, sort of intriguing topics.
There’s a willingness to play with things like surrealism that’s, you know, I think primarily due to sort of the visionary nature of Peg Alford Pursell, who’s the founder of the press, but they do have a, you know, they’re a nonprofit. And so they are focused a lot on, you know, sort of this mission of bringing underrepresented or unique viewpoints to publishing and to bookstores.
So I think that they exemplify sort of the importance of literary culture as not just a place that’s interested in what the masses want necessarily or what the majority wants or what the consensus wants, but they’re interested in the private relationship between reader and author that can only really happen when it’s one-to-one. You know, it’s not about, you know, I think a lot of publishing is about sort of group activities.
You know, you workshop a novel, you workshop fiction, that’s shorter. And I think there’s, you know, value to that.
The editors, you know, need to come together to make a decision at a large publishing house, but there’s also a value to sort of the soulfulness of these two minds meeting and one mind recognizing the other’s unusual vision.
I think that’s something that drew me to fiction. I wasn’t necessarily looking for what is everyone talking about, but rather what is this relationship I’m having with this other person’s mind?
And so it was important to me, not necessarily to find mirrors, but to find things that were interesting, that were different, that would pull me into unusual directions.
And I think what’s special about WTAW is that it fosters that kind of outlook on literary arts.
Marion: Such a good answer. So often what we hear in questions about indie publishing is about, “I get to keep my control. I get to have all the control,” which is great. And I get it. I’ve published four books with the big four. I understand what control they have. I think indie publishing is gorgeous and I’m so admiring of it these days, but I haven’t heard much in that mission way about “agility” and “overlooked” and online workshops and manuscript consultations.
And they just sound like they’re doing it right. And clearly they are if they’re publishing you. So there you go. But it’s very encouraging to see the hard work that’s going into doing, I hate to say “the right thing,” because we get into no end of trouble with those phrases, but it’s a lovely, lovely place. I’ve spent a lot of time on the website now and I’m gonna send people there to buy if not to submit.
And you write for Alta Journal, a quarterly publication that covers California and the West. So specifically you’re their California book club editor, which means you witness a lot of conversations between writers, most recently writing up a lovely exchange between Carol Edgerian, who I’ve interviewed here on QWERTY, and the great Tobias Wolf. In other words, you spend a lot of time covering writers and writing.
And I wonder if you can say something to the writers listening here about being in the world of writing and how to do so, because it’s hard for young writers. This is solitary work. Everybody gets that part, but the prep for it I think is not a bit solitary, not entirely solitary.
You spoke about reading Writer’s Journal, you spoke about reading other things, but I always encourage people to go to readings, go to talks and don’t just go hoping you can get someone to read your work, go and have questions, go and ask, “how do you write dialogue?” So I’d like you to comment on that about living in the world of writers.
I remember being 21, living in New York and kind of thinking, well, they don’t want me there, whatever that means, at the 92nd Street Y, they definitely want me there. I’m called audience, right? But I didn’t. Talk about just crossing the threshold into the more public experience of learning to be a writer.
Anita: I started going to book events when I was in high school and they really transformed the reading experience for me because then I started to realize, oh, there’s a real person behind this book that I was just communicating with their mind through. And one of them was Margaret Atwood, for instance, and she was so brilliant and she was so interesting and she had come to this local bookstore that I loved and I’m just like was rapt the whole time.
And similarly, I went to see Audrey and Rich and Anne LaMott and they were also, they were these vibrant personalities and I could kind of see how certain aspects of their personalities came out on the page, certain aspects I wouldn’t have guessed through just reading their book.
But in all cases, they cared about books as much as I did. And that was sort of the tipping point for me where I thought, oh, I want to be part of this conversation too.
I wanna be part of a public conversation about the thing that matters the most to me, or at least at that time it mattered the most to me, which was books.
And I wanted to have my mind changed by listening to these brilliant people and their opinions about their work.
And I knew that listening to those conversations would make me sharper in the lenses that I brought to bear when I read a book, because I could figure out authorial intention more readily, obviously with them speaking, but just paying attention to even the concept of authorial intention, which is what you get when you go to a panel, a conversation or a panel, allowed me to pay a different kind of attention to the text and sort of to think about what can text do all on its own and what do we need to see a person speaking about the text to understand about the text.
And as I got older, I now belong to a coworking space for writers. I also am constantly going to events. And of course, with Alta Journal’s California Book Club, I get to listen to a really tremendous host, John Freeman, who’s an editor at Knopf, interview these luminaries, essentially, like you mentioned, Tobias Wolfe and Carol Edgarian, but we’ve had so many others on the show as well. Nancy Suna, Charles Yu, Percival Everett.
In one instance, Percival Everett, I got to interview him myself.
That was really exciting.
Marion: So fun.
Anita: Yes. But in all those cases, I’m seeing the work differently by going to that event and writing about it and seeing what kind of wisdom comes to bear on a book that I might not immediately see on my own. And I also get to be part of this public conversation around something that has the capacity to change people’s lives and on the newspaper level, with newspaper book reviews, has the capacity to inform a citizenry about not only facts in the world, but also how it feels to be different kinds of people and be exposed to all of that.
And I think joining the public conversation is a little difficult. I happen to do it through book criticism, but I think there are many different ways to be part of that conversation.
And one is definitely going to events and asking questions of the authors and getting involved in that way.
Marion: It’s a wonderful answer and a wonderful interview. Thank you so much. What a joy it is to talk with you. I so enjoyed reading your work and it’s at least as much fun, if not more fun to talk with you in person. Thank you so much.
Anita: Thank you so much, Marion. This was a beautiful conversation.
Marion: The author is Anita Felicelli. Her new book is, How We Know Our Time Travelers, just out from WTAW Press. See more on her and the book at anita felicelli 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 Jacqueline Mignot. 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 in 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.
Want more help? Join me in live, online memoir classes
Start here, with The Memoir Project System Page, to understand the breadth of all the classes we teach.
Want to jump right in? Here’s a sampling of our classes.
Memoirama: Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know.
Memoirama 2. Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book.
How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary: Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world.
And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the next Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. Live, once a month. Limited to seven writers. Get a first draft of your memoir finished in six months.
(Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)
Leave a Reply