Interview by Christine Rice
One Michigan expat to another, Megan Stielstra and I sat down over a can of ginger ale (there’s only one kind) and a Koegel’s to discuss her latest collection of essays, Once I Was Cool, published this spring by Curbside Splendor.
CR: Vernors or Canada Dry?
MS: OMG VERNORS.
CR: One of the things I find so refreshing about your work is the way you write so lovingly (and interestingly) about your parents. They were and continue to be positive, strong influences.
MS: If I can be half the parent mine were, and are, then my kid is a lucky guy. My childhood was really happy. It was awkward and complicated and happy. My dad was my middle school principal. I got locked into lockers a lot. My friend Scotty Karate made me mixed tapes with the Dead Kennedys, Dead Milkmen, Fishbone, and Big Star; I listened to them until the tape unwound inside the cassettes. I skipped class to hang out in the library. I did show choir. I did debate; the topic that year was the environment and I had to argue the status quo: The environment is great! No global warming here! I read Sassy cover-to-cover and Sylvia Plath way before I knew what she was talking about. Most importantly, I wrote obsessively in journals ‘cause of course no one Felt Feelings as immensely as I Felt Feelings. I mean that seriously: I’m in awe of teenagers, of youth, youth artists in particular. Holy hell, the emotion! The love and the frustration and the honesty, all of it so huge, enough fucking force to power a small city. I think back to myself then, and I look at the young writers I work with now, and am blown away by the energy and courage. It scares people, I think. We try to contain it, to teach them to hold back, to temper, to control. My son is six years old and he’s like, Who wants to learn letters? Who wants to learn numbers? I WANT TO FLY.
My parents fed those feelings. My dad would take me hunting, endless fields of knee-high grass. We’d go canoeing every weekend on the Shiawassee River and one time, in November, we went over a waterfall and the boat flipped. It was freezing and terrifying and awesome. I remember coming up for air and seeing my dad swimming towards our dog. He didn’t have to take care of me because he knew I was a good swimmer. He’d taught me. He trusted me. My mom, too. Not with waterfalls—she was pissed about that, I think—but the trust. We’d go to the library every weekend and I could pick out anything, everything. I’d show her the books, and she’d read them, too, and we’d talk about them: what I learned, what confused me, what was still new enough to sound strange. I didn’t know that some kids didn’t have parents until she handed me The Great Gilly Hopkins. I didn’t know that not all girls went hunting and fishing until she handed me Island of the Blue Dolphins. I remember reading the part in Where the Red Fern Grows where the dogs die and sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, and she told me how beautiful that was. It’s okay if this story makes you sad. It’s okay if it makes you angry. Those feelings are real. Let’s live them.
Of course, there were hard parts. I was by myself a lot. Their divorce was no cake walk. I’m not sure if either of them were in the right place: my dad wanted Alaska and my mom wanted Manhattan. But I knew this: they loved me fiercely. I knew it then, and I know it now. I also know what a profound privilege that is: parents who love you, and who demonstrate that love in word and action, through childhood and adulthood.
CR: As a parent now, and as you expose parts of yourself that are often dark and uber-personal, how do you deal with that intellectually? I mean, I wish I didn’t think about it (as a parent) but I do. Like, what’s my kid going to think about this when she’s old enough to get it? It’s a wonderful gift, really. But do you ever think about that shit? Or are you a better person? (Clearly…yes.)
MS: For years, I wrote not for print but performance. Nearly all the essays in Once I Was Cool were written to be told aloud, mostly for 2nd Story, a personal narrative performance series I’ve worked with for over a decade. I shared them onstage—a singular experience with the fifty or a hundred or five hundred people in the room—so the idea of, say, my dad in Alaska, or my ex-boyfriend in New York, or my now six-year-old son somewhere twenty years in the future reading them didn’t cross my mind until I sat down to put the book together. I had conversations with myself like, Okay. This will be out there. My dad and my ex-boyfriend(s) and my son twenty years in the future will read it and I’m so totally terrified, but what the hell. This is scary and here I go.
That said, there were some essays that I didn’t include; ones I wasn’t ready to put out there. Yet.
CR: You have a really intimate connection with your audience (“Put the book down. Listen.”) and I suspect that’s part you (just your personality) and part your training as an oral storyteller. What’s the connection, for you, between an unseen reader and a live person drinking a Bud in the audience? How do the forms feed off each other?
MS: For me, there’s a difference between the act of writing and the choice of if and when and how to share it.
I write every day, mostly on the L to and from work. For example, this week—and I’m flipping back through my journal now—I wrote about how furious and helpless I feel in the wake of Mike Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri; how Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist is giving me parts of myself that I didn’t know were missing; the conversations between my son and my three-year-old nephew; and how I’d love to see The Cosby Show told when the kids were little ‘cause how the hell did Claire balance work and small children? I don’t know if I’ll use any of it. I’m writing it to get it out of my head, like E.M. Forster said, “I don’t know what I think until I see what I say.”
On Saturdays, I have longer stretches of time to work, and that’s when I consider if and how I might share the writing. I’ll think about audience. I’ll think about craft. I’ll think beginning-middle-end. I’ll think, Fiction? Essay? Print? Performance? I’ll think of how the work could mean something to someone beside myself.
When I was making Once I Was Cool, I spent a lot of time adapting the performance work to the page. I studied writers with more informal, conversational tones: “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allan Poe. “Nilda,” by Junot Diaz. “Rape Fantasies,” by Margaret Atwood. Lidia Yuknavitch’s gorgeous memoir The Chronology of Water. Holy hell, her use of direct address blew me away. She reached up through the ink and grabbed me, both fists. How did she do that? HOW DID SHE DO THAT? I teach Kafka classes and I always steal from him, mostly this thing he does when the work is really heavy and thick and dense, you’re all lost in the sentences so you keep tracing back to the beginning to remember how he started this maddening train of thought and just when you’re about to throw the book against the wall, when you find yourself yelling at it, like WTF ARE YOU EVEN DOING KAFKA, a character in the story will say something to the effect of, “Excuse me, but I don’t understand what’s happening,” and you’re like FUCK. HE HEARD ME. HE’S HERE.
You want to talk about the unseen audience? That guy died in 1924 and he still knows when his audience is pissed.
CR: There’s an essay about Kafka in Once I Was Cool [that we’ve excerpted here at Hypertext]. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
MS: I’d given an early draft of Once I Was Cool to a friend to read over, and we had an epic conversation about how readers might not understand when I was where. Like, in one essay I’m in Prague; another, Italy; Michigan and Chicago and Chicago and Chicago and I was like, Fuck. Am I going to have to go back and contextualize all these separate pieces?
Right around that time, some students at the college where I teach got into a conversation about Kafka on Facebook. Another teacher had assigned him, and they didn’t want to read him again. One said something like, Megan likes Kafka! and someone else said, Ask her why, and somebody else tagged me. So I’m like, how the hell am I going to explain my relationship with this writer in a Facebook comment? I’ve been with him for two decades! I’ve hated him and loved him and taught him and thrown his books across the room and yelled at him to get out of my brain and read him on three continents and… that’s when I got the idea. To write about the ongoing relationship between a reader and a single writer. And hopefully, if I did my job right, I answered some of the wider contextual questions of the book as a whole: why I was living in a place at any given time, who I was with, etc. Two birds, one stone.
Credit where it’s due: Thank you, Parker. Thank you, Liz.
CR: “Wake the Goddamn World” terrified me on so many levels. I think about all of the times, when I was much, much younger, those times I didn’t speak up (I’ve made up for that silence lately…) because I simply didn’t know how. I didn’t have life’s institutional knowledge, I guess. The tone in that essay is so different from the others. Can you talk about the genesis and creative process of that essay?
MS: This was a moment where I was ashamed of myself. That’s the genesis—shame. It happened a decade ago and I think about it all the time and remembering it makes my guts hurt and finally I was like, Goddammit, I have to look at this. Head on, no flinching.
The gist:
I was living in Prague.
I saw my landlord hit his teenage daughter.
I didn’t do anything to stop it.
It’s the antithesis of my values as a Feminist. As a human being. I’ve gone over the moment again and again. I’ve given myself a thousand excuses for why I should not have gotten involved, and one day I sat down and listed them, all of them. That list was the basis for the essay. At the beginning, I thought I’d weave it together with a narrative of the night I saw it happen, but once I dug down into the mess of words, I realized it was so much more than that singular event: it was why I was in Prague in the first place; the isolation of language; not knowing the right words in Czech, in English, in love, in loneliness; my identity as an American during the ’04 election—it was huge.
Later, I was asked to perform a two-minute piece for a Chicago performance series at Martyr’s called 20X2, and I knocked the piece down to its barest bones. Then I built it up to a nine-minute piece for another stellar series, Guts & Glory. Then I built it up again, to its current print version, incorporating really smart feedback from the writer and editor Gina Frangello who first published it at The Rumpus.
Looking back, I started it as an apology to the girl, but it ended up being a promise to myself. You will not be silent. You will make so much fucking noise. You’ll wake the goddamn world.
CR: As you know, I struggled with postpartum depression after my first child. Even now, thinking back on it brings me to my knees. You write about your own journey with postpartum in the stellar essay, “Channel B.” How long did it take you to get back to writing after the birth of your son? What would you say to writers who become parents?
MS: I shy away from giving advice to writers and to parents. We have different situations, different processes, different challenges and expectations. That said, here are some things that I believe to be true:
What’s best for a kid is the physical and mental health of his or her mother. [1]
We get to prioritize our physical and mental health.
We get to figure out what that means for us as individuals. Your first year may not look like mine, or your sister’s, or your friend’s, or the woman on the Mommyblog with the shiny hair and perfect eyeliner. Fuck shiny hair. Fuck eyeliner. Unless you like them and they make you feel awesome in which case YAY EYELINER! YAY PANTENE!
Here’s a thing about writing: sometimes it’s staring at the wall, zoning out. Sometimes it’s taking a nap. Sometime it’s watching Buffy free-streaming on Netflix because in order to think about what you want to communicate to the world you have to clear your fucking head. Sometimes it’s writing one sentence a day. That’s what I did—one sentence a day, one foot in front of the next, through the dark and the fog, writing my way back to myself. I never stopped writing, not for one single day. No joke: the writing is what saved me.
What I stopped was the pressure. Submitting, finishing, even… coherency. I wrote to survive, not to communicate. But later, several months later—which might not seem very long but when there’s a baby in your house, everything you knew about the passage of time just goes *^&$$@$%*%&8s—after finally sleeping; after I looked in the mirror and recognized the woman looking back; after so long feeling nothing and suddenly feeling everything, everything, a goddamn flood; after watching that mother on the monitor and knowing I wasn’t alone in the beauty and the mess; after all of that—I made work. It was the best stuff I’d ever done. Probably because, for the first time, I understood what it meant to hold something sacred.
CR: How has parenthood influenced your writing?
MS: Essays stop time. I wrote this thing about my writing process when my son was four years old, and I don’t even recognize us. He’s six now, in school full-time, and I’m working one full-time job instead of four part-time jobs, and we walked away from a mortgage that was eating us alive. I don’t want to jinx myself by saying it’s easier, but OHMYFUCKINGGOD IT’S EASIER.
I used to answer that question insofar as process: when I wrote, and how. Now, it’s more the what. It’s the content. It’s how parenting has shaped my worldview, this new lens I look through, like how you put on sunglasses and everything is purple. The other night, Saving Private Ryan was on, which is a movie I saw like a thousand times before my son was born and every time I was like NO. NO. YOU DO NOT RISK THE LIVES OF SO MANY TO SAVE JUST ONE. But this time, with my kid fast asleep in the next room, it was YOU GO GET THAT BOY AND TAKE HIM TO HIS MOTHER DO YOU HEAR ME TOM HANKS GO GET HIM GO.
I feel story differently; in my heart, in my gut.
How has parenting influenced my writing? Fuck, how has it influenced everything? I want to be better; better mom, better teacher, better human being on this planet. I want to give my time and money to what matters. I want to write about things that matter, chose subjects that make my blood boil, that can contribute to a greater dialogue, that can change the world. Maybe that sounds idealistic, but who gives a shit? Bring on the idealism. Bring it the fuck on.
CR: What’s the tension between the ‘professional you’ and the ‘private, shy you’? Is there tension? I mean, I think of you as the person at the party who feels perfectly comfortable in her skin.
MS: A couple of lifetimes ago, I was seeing this guy and he dumped me. I didn’t want to go home, so I went to a bar where a friend was working, waiting for her to close. She kept refilling my drink, so I’m sitting there drinking and crying and drunk and ridiculous, mascara all over my face, snot everywhere, and I hear, “Megan?” and I turn around and it’s one of my college students. It was so awful. It was so awkward. He didn’t know what to say, poor guy, as if he could’ve said anything in that moment, and in the end he was like, “ … but you’re supposed to have your shit together!” It was really fascinating (in retrospect, of course, after the hangover wore off). To him, I was only his teacher; four hours, once a week, knowledgeable, professional, shit together. And that’s true. I am that person. In classrooms, conferences, festivals, faculty development retreats, workshops, presentations, performances. But I also want to sit on the couch and watch Orphan Black and not think about anything. I want to sit with my husband and a bottle of wine and not have to be… on. I want to sit on the floor with my kid and play Hero Factory. I want to sit at my laptop and read the news and cry because so much is awful and it’s so fucking hard to stay hopeful and on those days, I shouldn’t be your cheerleader. I don’t want to read your manuscript. I don’t care about the carbs in this bagel, I want this fucking bagel, fuck you, gluten, fuck you, thyroid. I say fuck a lot. I say the wrong thing. I say the right thing the wrong way. I don’t want to say anything at all. I’m tired. I’m tired. I’m fucking tired. You know that scene in The Hours where Meryl Streep sits down on the kitchen floor and bursts into tears and she doesn’t know why? I felt that in my pulse. Does it mean my shit isn’t together? That I’ve lost it in some way? If that’s the case, I’ll stay the hell lost.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote that “all human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.” This morning I was really pissed off at work, and I rode the elevator up and down. Whenever I was alone between floors, I sang 80’s rock ballads as loud as I could—Livin’ On A Prayer. Edge Of Seveteen. Can’t Fight This Feeling—and damn, I felt better.
FOOTNOTE
[1]I’m using the word mom here because that’s what I am, but I think this applies to dads, too, and the aunts and grandparents and foster parents and significant adults who are raising super-awesome kids that make this world a better place.
