Joan Wickersham is the author of The News from Spain and The Suicide Index, the latter of which was a National Book Award finalist. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines including Poetry, Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, New England Review, Plowshares, and Story, and her work has been published in the Best American Short Stories and the Best American Non-Required Reading. She’s had an op-ed column in the Boston Globe, published essays and reviews in The Los Angeles Times and the International Herald Tribune, and has read her work on National Public Radio’s On Point and Morning Edition. Her new book is No Ship Sets Out to be a Shipwreck, just out from Eastover Press. Listen in and read along as she and I discuss how writers figure things out, and so much more.
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Marion: Welcome, Joan.
Joan: Thank you, Marion. Thank you for inviting me.
Marion: Well, I’ve been waiting a long time to talk with you. And if I had to characterize you, I would say you are a writer who tries things. You succeed in them, but it begins with trying things. And it sounds simple, though it’s not. Instead of sticking to one genre, fiction, nonfiction, or one form – prose, poetry, op-eds, memoir, or essays – you deliberately experiment.
And it’s as breathtaking as it is inspiring, especially for the writers I work with, because I work with writers all day long. So for instance, in your book, The News from Spain, Seven Variations on a Love Story, published in 2012 by Knopf, which was named, by the way, one of the year’s best books by Kirkus Reviews, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR, and from which two of the stories were chosen for the Best American Short Stories and the Best American Non-Required Reading, you take the phrase, “the news from Spain,” and repurpose it for each of the seven stories about love, various kinds of love.
And we know in each good story, we know as writers that there is an answer to what this is about, and then there is an answer to what is this really about. So talk to me about what you were after, what you sought to explore, and what came first, the phrase, “the news from Spain,” or what you wanted to probe?
Joan: That is a wonderful question.
Marion: Thank you
Joan: In the case of The News from Spain, the phrase came first. When I started the book, I actually was coming off writing The Suicide Index, which took me 11 years and was a memoir about my father’s suicide. So with that book, I started with the subject matter, this very difficult thing that had happened in our family, and it took me a really long time to figure out the structure for the book.
And we can talk more about that later if you want to.
Marion: Yeah, so I’m going to ask you about that, trust me.
Joan: But with The News from Spain, I think because I had just finished this laborious, painful book, I just decided I’m going to play. And so I had this idea for a story called The News From Spain, and it was one of those things that came to me in the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth, and I thought, oh, this is such a great idea.
And then I went away to a writing residency, and I remembered that I had had an idea for a story called The News from Spain, but I couldn’t remember what the idea was, what was the story. All I had was the title. And I suddenly thought, well, I could do a lot of stories called The News from Spain.
And then I thought, why not just set myself that as an assignment? Just write stories called The News from Spain. I had no idea what they were or what they were going to be about. And I wrote three of them during that residency, and found that they were all these asymmetrical, thwarted love stories about strong, romantic, erotic feelings that we might feel but not act on and maybe not even confess to anyone else.
I didn’t know that that was going to be the subject of the book. But so that book started with structure and found its subject, and it came right on the heels of a book that started with subject and had found its structure very late in the process.
Marion: Oh, I just love that. It’s such a writerly answer that, you know, you’re chopping vegetables, or you’re driving a car too fast, or you’re brushing your teeth, and something pops into your head. It’s kind and generous of you to tell that to all the writers listening, because we struggle with that, taking that seriously, especially if it doesn’t happen when we’re at the desk, right?
So beautiful at brushing your teeth. What a mess, right? To write it down. Do you keep a pad? Well, clearly, you almost forgot about this. But do you keep notepads around? Do you write things down? How do you jot down when something pops into your head?
Joan: I do occasionally jot things down, but then I find that I can’t find them when I want them.
And when I do find them again, they’re very disappointing. You know, these things that feel like they’re these fabulous ideas. And then I find that the little piece of paper, and it just sounds very flat and sort of unpromising. So yes, I don’t find that it helps me to write things down.
Marion: I woke up one morning at, I clearly wrote this in my sleep, and all it said on the piece of paper next to the bed was “menopause made me do it.” But I have absolutely no idea what the it in that sentence is. So I haven’t figured out what that piece is about.
So I get it. It feels like it just sort of ghosting you those ideas. They just go away if you don’t write them down. Yeah. Well, following up on trying things, every single memoir writer listening is hanging on waiting for me to ask you about The Suicide Index, Putting My Father’s Death in Order.
I know I teach memoir. And when I mentioned that I was interviewing you, I literally heard swooning from my students. So first off, publishing has a few rules that you burst right through here. The first of which is that no books about suicide, which of course, there are exceptions.
But young memoirists will be told again and again that nothing on suicide sells. It’s insane, of course, since nearly 50,000 Americans committed suicide last year alone, 49,000 the year before. And each of those people left behind at least a handful of people who may never stop reeling.
So thank you for the book, my best friend committed suicide. And your book helped me enormously to at least order my emotions a bit. But in this remarkable book, The Suicide Index, Putting My Father’s Death in Order, you do just that. You open the book with an actual three-page index that startles us.
You index your story in short phrases and corresponding page numbers right there in the first three pages. So of course, I have to ask you about this device, devising it, believing in it, pitching it to yourself. What in the name of God did Houghton Mifflin say to you when you pitched it to them?
Just give me some ideas about this structure. You mentioned it coming to you, you know, in your first answer, but talk to me about the structure of this book.
Joan: Yeah, thank you. You know, it’s a many-part question, and so I’m going to give you a many-part answer. And the first thing I want to say is I’m very sorry that you lost your friend that way.
It’s a very, you know, terrible thing to go through.
Marion: Thank you.
Joan: I also want to say, for the writers who are told that this is, you know, a taboo subject, I just want to acknowledge the pain of being told that. I was told that also. And the thing that’s really hard about it is, as you say, suicide is a very, unfortunately, much more common than we think.
You know, when someone you love dies that way, you start hearing stories and you realize how many people have been through the experience and don’t talk about it, don’t know how to talk about it. And to be told by publishing that it’s somehow an unacceptable subject is horrifying because it sort of perpetuates the feeling you have that there’s a stigma around suicide.
So, I want to acknowledge that what you said is true. That is what I heard also, but it shouldn’t be that way. So to go now to the sort of more writer-y question about how the structure of this book came about. As I said to you before, the book took about 11 years to write, and I wrote for many of those years without knowing what the structure of this book was going to be.
I originally started it as a novel and I thought that I could write a kind of detached, cool, third-person novel about a family in which the father dies this way. And it was okay, you know, it was an okay book. I finished it and my agent tried to sell it and couldn’t.
And at the time that was quite devastating because this was such an important story to me and I thought, here I am, I’m a writer, I had published a novel before, and so I’m trying to write a novel about this thing, and I can’t sell it. And I look back now and I feel that this was a blessing.
I think some of it was because the subject was difficult, but I think more of it was that it was just a very flat, dull, polite book. And this subject is not a flat, dull, polite subject, honestly. And so, I put away the manuscript for about a year and a half.
I went away to MacDowell and pulled it out again and thought maybe I could look at it again and revise it. And having that distance on it of a year and a half made me able to read the manuscript much more objectively and see what was wrong with it. It just wasn’t, it did not reflect the mess, the chaos of the experience.
So, I threw out most of the manuscript. It was a 400-page manuscript. I threw out 330 pages. I found 70 pages that I thought I could keep and work with. And I just started writing again in a much more urgent, honest way, not worrying about the overall structure at all, not worrying about whether it was fiction or memoir.
You know, I figured I could make the edits that I would need to at the end once I knew what I was doing. And I just started to write in fragments. And then I got to the point where I had all these fragments, but the book felt piecemeal. It just, it did not have a coherence to it.
And a friend of mine who read the manuscript said, the reader needs a place to stand. And there was a chapter I had written called “Numbness and Index,” because the index form seemed to me to be a very numb form. And I thought, what if I were to organize the whole book as an index. Because in a way, one of the things about suicide is you keep spiraling around and around and around. You never solve it. You never figure it out. You never really get to a peaceful point. And the index was a sort of almost ridiculously, ironically, formal, ordered way of trying to put the story together.
And of course, the story has an underlying structure, as well. The first part of the book is about my father’s, what I think led up to his death. The middle part is the sort of biographical essay about him. And then the third part of the book is really about the impact of his death on our family.
So there is a kind of progression, but I really wanted in a way to honor the chaos of the experience because that was the nature of it. And I think, honestly, Marion, if I had begun the process with the index structure, I think it would have been a very gimmicky, inhibited book because I would have been sort of marveling at my own creativity, you know?
Marion: Yes, yes.
Joan: And I think that index structure is honestly earned through the process of really, really wrestling with that material for a long time. I don’t think all books have to take 10 years to write, but I do sometimes feel when I’m working with young writers or students that they want the answer right away of what’s the structure of my book?
Help me figure out the structure. And I feel like the only way to figure out the structure is just to write. And not only to write, but to also put the manuscript away for a time. Because you’ve asked me about The News from Spain and The Suicide Index, what I feel is that the form and the structure has to be exactly right for the material.
And there’s absolutely no way to know that. You know, sometimes you get it right on the first try, but sometimes it takes years.
And I think it’s really important to be patient enough to wait for the material and the form to marry each other in a healthy way.
Marion: I agree with absolutely all of that. That the structure really needs to support the argument. And that you have lots of options.
You can reinforce the argument with how you tell the story as you do so magnificently with this. I’m really, really fascinated by the word polite that you used referring to an earlier iteration of this. And how putting it away apparently vanquished that politeness.
And I think that’s one of the greatest arguments for putting something in a drawer and letting it sit for a while. If we’ve been too polite and we need to go to urgent and honest, which is how you characterized this iteration of the book, we sometimes need to stop mauling the thing and let it sit and grow up a little bit, write something else.
But I will think forever about the transcendent change from polite to urgent and honest. That’s a lovely, lovely timeline to consider.
What fascinates me, so many things about the book fascinate me, is the intimacy of the story told within the cool borders of an index.
And it really is like the outside of the baking pan. The outside of it is cool, but the inside is red hot. It’s just a total reverse of how we think. Because it’s nearly impossible not to flounder amid the story of suicide and its emotional content. So take me please through your thinking.
I don’t think we discussed this yet. After your father committed suicide, what was the decision that I can write about it? There’s something you know that young writers need to know about. I can write about this. I’m not really sure what it’s going to be and all that, but I can write about this.
Is that permission or is that just the life force that you cannot deny?
Joan: I think it’s both. I think the question of permission is a really difficult one, not just for young writers, but for old writers. I’m constantly looking for permission to write, not so much to write about something, but to write about something in the way that I really want to write about it and not in some way that feels acceptable.
And I think that’s one of the problems, I think, with the fact that writing is taught. There are all these books on craft and stuff, and I think that is really, really important and useful in a way to give people permission to write.
But I think nobody can give you permission to write the book that only you can write because nobody’s ever read it before, nobody’s ever written it before.
So there’s a way that you need all that training and you need all that moral support, but then you need to cast off and be on your own. And I think the only permission there is a kind of solidarity with all the writers who are at home in their pajamas struggling to do what’s true.
You know, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, it has to feel true. I have to believe it and I have to care about it. And I think as a writer, it’s very hard to know, am I really getting at that? Is this something that I really believe? Is this something I really care about that someone else is going to really care about? Or am I just scared to death and imitating what I think you’re supposed to be doing?
And that’s what I think I did. That’s what I mean by polite, that if I’m trying to imitate what I’ve already seen and sort of fall into the good girl ranks of books or of writing, there’s no polite way to say it sucks. It’s just lousy writing. And I’m hoping that it’s good, but I know it isn’t. And that permission to strike out on your own is what nobody can really give you. And yet in a weird way, it’s like all writers have to learn to give it to themselves. And I’m constantly still struggling with this in every project I do.
I just feel like I can feel when the horse is alive and galloping and I can feel when it isn’t. And I have to be honest with myself about that. I don’t know if that really answers your question.
Marion: Oh no, it’s an incredibly generous answer. What you’re suggesting is that as writers we live in a liminal or at least a limited space of others understanding.
I mean we’re the ones that have to say “I’m going to go. I’m going.” And I’ve tried explaining it to my in-laws. I’ve tried explaining to a lot of people who don’t write what I do and every once in a while when I get a little fed up I’ll just say it well I have a fully funded curiosity.
That’s the phrase I use and that I can just fund that myself right and that’s what I do I and I don’t mean just financially I mean I have to pour my heart and soul into it.
Joan: That’s wonderful and I think the idea that it’s fueled by curiosity I think that’s ultimately you know it can feel like it’s fueled by anger or it’s fueled by, you know, love or it’s fueled by you know all kinds of emotions that we’re trying to get on the page but I think you’re absolutely right that deep down it has to be fueled by curiosity.
You know it’s interesting I once read a quote from the wonderful short story writer Grace Paley you know the old chestnut of “write what you know.” She said, “write what you don’t know about what you know.”
Marion: Yeah. Which I love. Of course and that’s the place to go and you go there I almost want to say, “You go there, girl,” when you write No Ship Sets Out to be a Shipwreck, whoa, and before we came live I told you I’ve taken to carrying this book around with me because I just dip into it I read it and then I just dip into it and go wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. It was published in 2024 by Eastover Press you combine poetry and essay in a meditation on an object, in this case, a 17th century Swedish warship Vasa which in 1628 only minutes into her maiden voyage sank in Stockholm Harbor and remained forgotten until it was raised 300 years later.
And I mean, talk about something laden with metaphor and you just dive right into it not around it but right into it and I was so taken by this, and it made me remember years ago I had a writing student who basically fell into a painting and came out changed. He’d fell in emotionally and spiritually, and at first look he was transfixed and transferred elsewhere, and his transcendent change was very deeply convincing that a piece of art a book an object can be a navigation marker in our lives. And I believe in this. I believe that and it’s an odd duck thing to think that we can set off an entirely new direction in life based on a play we saw or a sculpture we were taken to see. And my question to you is this: Did you believe in that, or some version of that, before you saw this ship, or was this a spontaneous eruption of something within you that you were not previously aware of when you saw this ship for the first time?
Joan: Well, thank you for the question because you explained to me beautifully what happened to me. I had never had an experience like that, and I certainly wasn’t looking for anything to set off you know a book if I had been looking for something to set off a book it would not have been a 17th century Swedish warship that had been raised from, you know, at the bottom of the harbor.
The Vasa has its own museum in Stockholm and my husband Jay had read about the resurrection of the Vasa the ship was rediscovered in the mid 1950s more than 300 years after it sank as you said and it was raised in 1961 it was a very complicated expensive improbable crazy project really to raise this long-lost ship and they built a museum around it and so Jay had read in National Geographic when he was a little boy about the resurrection of Vasa and so when we went to Stockholm on a vacation in 2013 he really wanted to go see this ship that was in the museum and I had zero interest in going I just wasn’t I wasn’t interested in ships I wasn’t interested in maritime history I just I went to be, you know, a good egg and we walked in and it’s this big dark space the size of a hockey rink and there’s this ghostly beautiful wooden warship massive, massive, a gleaming black wooden warship coming at you out of the darkness and I just was smitten just in the way you talked about with your friend with the painting.
I I just fell madly in love with it and with the paradox that if this ship had done what it was supposed to do it would have had you know a career as a warship and it would have been destroyed in a sea battle or it would have been wrecked in a storm, or it would have you know had a long worthwhile life as a warship and then been broken up for firewood, or whatever happens to these many, many, many, many ships that we don’t know anything about, but because the ship was a kind of folly and it was, you know, badly designed and just top-heavy and kind of grandiose it capsized at the first puff of wind and I was just fascinated that if it had succeeded we wouldn’t know anything about it and we only know it as this beautiful museum object because it was such a catastrophic humiliating failure.
So that was I think the thing that set off something in me was the beauty of the ship, the improbability of seeing it at all. It felt like it really had come back from the dead and then this paradox that I was feeling in my own life of getting older and just realizing that in some way all of us fail in the end because we’re mortal.
Marion: Yeah, yeah. Oh yes wonderful and I just delight in your work and as I said in the opener you try things, and I would not be so foolish or insulting to refer to you as fearless because who could be fearless in the presence of her father’s suicide? And who is ever fearless when confronted by a 17th century shipwreck whose very presence reminds us as you just said of lives gone before about how we’re all destined for our own wreck? But I delight in what you did with it you go at it from all these different points of view. And you go at it from the shipbuilder’s widow. You go at it from the wind itself that caused this capsize and in the last essay in No Ship Sets Out to be a Shipwreck you go to ship worms whose ability to consume wet timber is endless and who provide the perfect exit from this story and it got me thinking about the vast amount of research required for this book nine trips to Stockholm beginning in 2013 the research on shipbuilding as well as that into the worms. So, I guess I just like to ask you if you have a rule of thumb about when do you yank your head out of research and make yourself right, or do you do them simultaneously. It seems to me that shipworms alone can send me down a, well, wormhole forever. What do you do? How do you balance that with this seemingly insatiable curiosity that you have?
Joan: Well, it’s interesting in this book the research and the writing were pretty simultaneous because I started to write almost as soon as I got home from that 2013 trip as you mentioned in your introduction I’ve written for the past 15 years an op-ed column in The Boston Globe, which is the way I handle the op-eds is just to write essays, so I write essays on many topics and I thought I would write an essay about this ship. But what came out instead was a poem and then the next day another poem and I already knew that I was fascinated, but I had no idea that I was going to write these kind of poems that felt like little fireworks, kind of addressed to the ship and the associations that it was sparking in me, and I started to read about the ship almost right away, partly because I was you know going back to the word you use, “curiosity,” it was fueled by curiosity I just wanted to know as much as I could about the ship about the museum about Stockholm, a city that I had fallen in love with, and some of that was wanting to honor if I was going to write about an object I felt that I really needed to honor the object and not just use it for my own purposes I wanted to really deeply understand as much about it as I could.
So during those trips I actually was reading and writing and spending a lot of time in the museum for the first few years just sort of undercover just kind of hanging around with a notebook, but then eventually I I met a photographer who I really loved his work and I asked him if he might want to collaborate on a portion of the project with me. And so, then we had to introduce ourselves to the museum and they were lovely and gracious and invited us in let us go in when it was closed let us take photographs you know for hours and also let us go into the archives so that was sort of a new level of research that I could look at objects that were not on display, I could talk to the curators, I could you know learn about the osteology, that research that was done on the bones that were found in the ship, so the research fueled the writing and the passion in the writing fueled me to do more research.
Marion: Yeah it’s a beautiful answer and as we start to wrap this up I want to get to that form that other form you write in, the op-eds as you mentioned, one of yours in particular sat with me in great quiet contemplation of what’s important to me when you wrote about your clivia a plant you had from your mother and mother-in-law. My clivia sits on my desk. It’s from my grandmother who I have not seen in person since she died in 1973 but there’s the plant gifted to me from my sister who’s a considerable gardener, and garden writer, and who about two years judged that I could finally be trusted not to kill one. It was a huge moment for me, honest to goodness and if I were writing my clivia op-ed, it would be about the when and how of true inheritance. I’d be writing big to small you write big to small as you said you write essays and the readers are so lucky to have them. So talk to me as we start to exit this interview talk to me please about writing big to small.
Joan: That’s so interesting because I think of myself as writing small to big.
Marion: I love the distinction I love it.
Joan: I usually start with something and I don’t really know what I’m trying to get at. I try to write until I surprise myself. That piece about the clivias. I love that you have that story also. You know it’s not just a house plant. It is an ongoing connection to that person who grew it in the first place, or who inherited from someone else in the first place, so I think I just started with the plant. You know, I was just thinking about my mother-in-law who had given my father the plants, and then when he died, my mother sort of took care of it, but it’s a plant that can take a lot of neglect, as you and I both know.
Marion: Yes, thank goodness, thank goodness.
Joan: And then eventually I got it and I then gave one to my son’s partner from this original cutting, so this is a plant that’s been going on for, I don’t know 40 years, yeah, at least, and I just started with the plant and then just saw where it would take me. So, I think there are writers who start with a concept and then have to flesh it out, and then I think there are writers like me. I tend to start with a specific thing and then just watch it open out, hope that it opens out. Sometimes it doesn’t I mean sometimes I can feel how laborious it is and that it’s not gonna work, but that was a piece that did open out as I wrote it
Marion: Oh, it’s so illuminative and such a beautiful job. Thank you, thank you so much for coming along today. Thank you for the writing. I will be waiting at the bookstore for your next book. That’s all there is to that, as well many, many other people. Thank you, Joan. It’s just been a joy to talk to you.
Joan: Thank you, Marion. It’s been a wonderful conversation and I’m really really glad to have met you on this audio thing, this audio place we live. Thank you.
Marion: The author is Joan Wickersham see more on her at Joan Wickersham dot com. Her new book is No Ship Sets Out to be a Shipwreck, just out from Eastover press get it wherever books are sold I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Qwerty is produced by Over It studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at Over It 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 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
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