To kick off the podcast interviews at AWP, we were thrilled to talk to Lilly Dancyger. Her new memoir, Negative Space, comes out May 2021 with Santa Fe Writers Project. She’s the editor of the essay collection, Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, and a contributing editor at Catapult. Among the other fantastic things with which she’s involved, she founded and co-hosts a reading series and newsletter (which you should subscribe to) called Memoir Monday. Honorable mentions: Artist Joe Schactman, Dancyger’s father whose story her memoir pieces together Writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water Memoir Monday’s partner publications Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Narratively, The Rumpus, and Literary Hub

Published Date: February 1, 2023

Transcription

Phuc:

This is a special episode of Effing Shakespeare recorded in collaboration with the 2021 AWP Conference & Bookfair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a second year and have invited a gallery of guests that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Jessica:

I'm Jessica Cole.

Phuc:

I'm Phuc Luu.

Kate:

I'm Kate Martin Williams.

Jessica:

And this is Effing Shakespeare. By writers-

Kate:

For writers. We're thrilled to talk to Lily Dancyger. Her new memoir Negative Space, which I nearly devoured in one sitting, comes out May 2021 with Santa Fe Writer's Project. She's the editor of the essay collection, Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, and a contributing editor at Catapult. Among other fantastic things with which she's involved, she founded and co-host a reading series/newsletter, which you all should subscribe to called Memoir Monday. We're so happy to have you. Welcome, Lily.

Lily:

Thank you so much for having me. Glad to be here.

Kate:

I wanted to get us started today by talking for a second about the progress from your first book, which was a book of 22 essays from women writers who were writing about anger. Did the experience of working on that book and collecting those essays and obviously spending time thinking about women writing candidly about their experiences with anger, how did it shape and contribute to the ideas that you talk about in Negative Space?

Lily:

Yeah. Well, because publishing is weird and timelines are unpredictable, I was actually pretty much done with Negative Space already when I started working on Burn It Down, even though Burn It Down came out in 2019, and Negative Space coming out later this year. So I think maybe, if anything, it was kind of the other way around. A lot of the process of writing Negative Space was finding anger that I had that I didn't realize I had, and also finding what was underneath the anger that I didn't know I had. And so, having been through that process myself with the memoir, I kind of was primed to help other writers do that as well in their Burn It Down essays, and a lot of the essays in the anthology ended up being about other emotions that are hiding underneath anger and also anger that's hiding underneath other emotions.

Kate:

Yeah, so rarely just the one, right, especially for women, it doesn't always display that way. Do you mind reading some of Negative Space for us? So maybe setting it up a little bit for us?

Lily:

Yeah, I'd be happy to. Let's see. I have a short passage here. This is from early on in the book. I think the only thing we need to know at this point is that Father mailed me a letter right before he died, and it arrived a few days after his death when I was 12 years old. And so, of course that letter became very significant object in my life, and I referenced that in this section.

"They say all the cells in your body regenerate every seven years. When I turned 20, my father had been dead for eight. So if that theory is true, no cell in my body had ever been on the planet at the same time as him. I'd changed cell by cell into a person he never knew. I was in college learning new things that I couldn't debate with him or get his opinion on, but I had to decide the value of for myself. I had an apartment in the East Village with a roommate I loved, like a sister whom he'd never met. I was bartending part of my neighborhood community, not as the daughter of local artists, but as myself. I had a whole life and my father wasn't in it. With every step forward, I was acutely aware that I was moving further and further from the version of me that had known him or even a version of me that he would recognize.

I was entering the world as a fatherless woman after years as a fatherless girl, and I didn't know how to move forward without leaving my father behind. For all of my adolescence, I'd stayed rooted in my grief, because that was where I'd felt most connected to him. It was where he had left me when I was little, and my parents warned that if we ever got separated on the subway, I was to get out at the next stop and wait for them. If I stayed in my grief, my father would know where to find me. But if I just went ahead and enjoyed college and started planning for a career and becoming my own full person in the world, leaving the heaviness of grief behind, I feared then my father would be truly gone somehow even more than he already was.

The only way to stop that from happening I thought, was to find a new way to grieve for him. I needed my relationship with my father to change and grow, like every parent-child relationship changes when the child becomes an adult, even if that just meant my relationship with his absence. I realized then that I'd been saving his notebooks that subconsciously, I'd always thought of them as one more letter from him, the one that arrived days after he died. I'd been keeping this last little bit of him for a future when I would really need it, and I needed it now. A little bit of him that could be new to me, that I could discover with wonder, a way to bring my relationship with him into the present of my life, learning to see him in a new way so that I could mourn him in a new way. That last letter he wrote on the bus was the fatherly advice that I rationed through my adolescence. I stretched it out and applied it to everything, telling myself over and over to stand up and be proud, trying to hear it in his voice.

Now, I was on another precipice looking toward adulthood, and I needed a new pearl of wisdom, just one more, one more letter from him that magically made it across the border of death, and I'd be able to step forward into the rest of my life."

Kate:

Thanks. So moving. It's such a good cover. I love the integration of all of your father's art within the book, and I think I love this book for a number of reasons, but one, because it exists as something that can only be a book, you really do have to hold this book in your hands, and the integration of the art with the book was really moving to me and it almost didn't happen that way, right? Can you talk a little bit about your journey, finding the right publisher who was willing to work with the art as well?

Lily:

Yeah, it was definitely a sticking point. One thing that made it challenging, it was rejected a lot. It revised a lot over many, many years, and some of the rejections were just because it wasn't right for the publication, because I had submitted it too early, whatever. Some were also definitely, because a lot of publishers just didn't know what to do with the artwork, and it is a logistical challenge, and my current publisher and I were both pulling our hair out, trying to get the layout right, going back and forth a million times, editing the images to make sure they printed well, and all of this, it adds a whole other layer of difficulty to the already painstaking process of proofreading. And so, I think a lot of publishers just didn't want to deal with that, which is understandable, but I was willing to wait. It was never an option for me to take the images out. So it's just a matter of finding somebody who's willing to go through that long, difficult processes.

Kate:

Yeah. And thank God for Santa Fe Writers Project, so cool.

Jessica:

As publishers ourselves, the thingy-ness of books is still so the artifact of them, the relic of them even is still so important to us. And it was amazing to read a book that was like, yes, this needs to be that. And not ideas, but of things, situation.

Kate:

Right. We've talked a lot on the show with other memoirs about, some people call it the sort of the therapeutic aspect of writing a memoir and the spectrum of writing this to, as Natalie Goldberg says, "Write down the bones." So it becomes a process for you as a writer and as a person, but the other end of that spectrum being a way to connect with readers who may have had similar experiences or it is the process of coming from you out into the world instead of just the regenerative process for the individual. So I'm wondering which end of the spectrum you fall on as a person who's written something that's such a personal narrative, but also a part of the world?

Lily:

I mean, I think I felt pretty much everywhere on that spectrum at various points of the process. I think I had to do a lot of that cathartic mining, how I actually feel about things, putting the emotions down on the page stuff in order to get to the story that would actually resonate with other people. And then there was a lot of figuring out how I feel on the page and having to take time away from the book to figure out how I felt before I could write the next section and all of that stuff. And then in revision is where I paired back everything that was just for me and my own processing and not necessarily relevant to a reader.

Kate:

And some of it was written, am I right as a part of your graduate thesis?

Lily:

Undergraduate, yeah.

Kate:

Undergrad thesis. Yeah. So there was probably some green stuff in there that had to get worked out. I mean, I can't imagine how the drafts changed. Do you recall any one thing that sticks out about what really had to change as you moved forward?

Lily:

I mean, everything about it changed and it took 11 years, which anybody will change a lot as a person in 11 years, but especially when those 11 years contain all of your twenties. So I was sure 20 years old when I started this book. I was a completely different person than I am now. And I also originally envisioned it as an artist monograph, like a big hardcover coffee table book. It was just the story of my father's life and his artwork. And in the first draft, I referred to myself as his daughter Lily. I was going at it very fully on the reportage art historian mode.

Kate:

Yeah. Wow.

Lily:

And thankfully, Wendy Walters, who was my thesis advisor at the new school, is like, "What are you doing? You can't do that. This is not working. Put yourself on the page." It's like, okay. She was the first of many people to tell me, to nudge me further in the direction of memoir before it finally became this kind of hybrid thing than it is.

Kate:

Yeah. Oh, wow.

Jessica:

That's so interesting to hear about that process and to find out that it was all of your twenties, because well, first of all, I am now a fatherless woman, because my dad died two and a half years ago, and this is actually the first memoir that I've been able to read that included a father's death that I didn't feel like was some sort of sticking pins in myself situation. So thank you for that. But I think there's something so trustworthy about your memoir that I haven't found in others on any subject. And I think it's because you're so honest about the artifice, not only the toil and the changing and the transformations, but the artifice involved, which calls to mind your father's own art and his notes on it. When did those connections start being made? Were those connections there from the beginning about your father crafting art and the project that you were embarking on?

Lily:

That came out later. It wasn't until several iterations into the project that I started to realize that I was kind of doing a version of what he did, and that all of his artwork is autobiographical in a way, even though it's not a direct self-portrait. He uses dogs and rabbits and deer and all this other imagery. But it all was very personal and very directly reflective of his own life. And I didn't realize until I had already done it that I was also doing that and creating a continuation of some of his work, but shifting the medium of it. So yeah, that last external layer of the narrative where I'm kind of looking in at the story that I'm telling while I'm telling it arrived later.

Jessica:

That comes through a lot in the funeral scene and the character of you, you mentioned, talked to [inaudible 00:13:34] sometimes, not knowing what to say and realizing that it would be manufactured if you had said something.

Lily:

Yeah. In a previous draft that was much more heavy-handed and I was very directly like-

Kate:

And it wasn't until many years later that I was able to say.

Jessica:

I think that's so powerful that I don't feel like you're starting out knowing all the answers. And even though you went through this 11-year process, you could have started at the 11 years and just put in a little from earlier, but it really feels like we as readers are learning along with you. It's incredibly inviting and just more trustworthy.

Lily:

Thank you. That's great to hear, because it also made it way more of a pain in the ass to write, continually revising and adding new layers of what I was figuring out. I'm never going to be done with this thing.

Jessica:

It's worth it.

Kate:

So for anyone who's tuning in to find out that it's really easy and you can see all the hard parts, that's a different show.

Jessica:

And nothing worked.

Kate:

I love this scene. We keep saying scene, but I love the moment in the book where you write about the weekend workshop you took with-

Lily:

Lidia Yuknavitch.

Kate:

Yes. Lidia Yuknavitch. Yeah. That we writers have central metaphors. And I wonder if you could talk about and maybe tell anybody who's listening about that sort of realization about your father's central metaphors and then yours.

Lily:

Yeah. That was one of those moments when I was adding that kind of other layer, and I was like, is this too meta? If I talk about a workshop I was in that helped me realize what I wanted to write in this book that I'm writing, is that too... It was maybe too much, but it really was such a key moment in me making those connections. And I read Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir, the Chronology of Water. And I just loved it so much, and it blew my mind that I immediately started Googling her to see if she taught workshops and learned that she actually has this great writing center in Portland called Corporeal Writing. So I flew there to take this workshop, and she was talking about this kind of theory she has, I guess about... Sorry about that siren in the background calling in from New York City. Just that writers have these core metaphors that we can return to. And she was talking about it in terms of writers feeling like they had already told their stories and feeling like they've run out of new things to say.

And she was saying, these central experiences and central metaphors of your life, you can come back to forever and ever and ever, and keep mining them for new material. And then she gives a prompt to write our own metaphors. And I was stuck. And then the metaphors that I could think of in the terms that she had been using were all imagery of my father's work. And I was kind of having this little existential crisis sitting there in this writing workshop. Do I not have any of my own metaphors with I only using my father's? Have I let his work totally take over my creative life?

Kate:

Meanwhile, everyone is out there scribbling their own-

Lily:

And they were writing, and I was just like, "Oh my God!" Yeah. Freaking out, having this panicked moment about my identity as a creative person and then realized while sitting there that no, that's actually the point is that that I've now spent enough time with his metaphors that they're now mine also, and I am allowed to engage with them and bring them further on my own, which unlocked a lot, because I had been afraid to assign meaning to any of his work externally. I didn't want to speak for him, I didn't want to say that something meant something unless I had him writing in a notebook that it means this. But that kind of finally gave me permission to do some interpreting of my own and add my own layer to his work while talking about it rather than only viewing it as a lens.

Kate:

That's amazing. I love that moment. I'd love to give you a second to talk about Memoir Monday, if you don't mind, and that we really love collaborations here at Bloomsday Literary. We talk about them all the time, and it seems that writers always have communities that they're involved in, and so we love to hear about those exchanges. Yeah. Could you talk about that with, I guess, Catapult and Got Narratively and Granta, who am I missing?

Lily:

Then Guernica and The Rumpus and Jericho. Six partner publications. So it started out as a newsletter, and I started it when I was the memoir editor at Narratively. We had been talking about starting a new newsletter for just the memoir section. And I was thinking, I wouldn't subscribe to that personally just because there are so many newsletters. I don't want multiple newsletters from individual publications. It's just too much. So I was thinking, what would make me want to subscribe to that newsletter and decided to kind of go bigger and try and make it a destination for memoir writing online in general rather than just at one publication. And so, I reached out to editors at places that publish personal essays that I love the most often, and just asks if they would want to collaborate on this newsletter and send me pieces every week to include. And I didn't know what the reception was going to be, but everybody was excited about it. It was like, "Yeah, sure. That sounds great." It's like, "All you have to do is share the link on social media and it'll get more eyeballs on your stuff."

And then it kind of evolved, and I was like, "What if it was a reading series too?" And it was another thing where I was like, "I don't know if people are going to be into that." But then people were, and so now it's a newsletter and a reading series, and it's been really great. It's kind of just my excuse to reach out to memoirs that I like and invite them to read and get to talk to them, and yeah, it's been really fun.

Kate:

It sounds kind of like our podcast.

Lily:

It does.

Kate:

That's really great.

Jessica:

Has it changed since last year, that much? How has it changed?

Lily:

Yeah. I mean, it's been all over Zoom through the Pandemic, which at first I was unsure about. Usually the readings are at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn, and it's really nice to actually have some FaceTime. That was part of the impetus for it originally, was that we all are behind our screens all the time, and wouldn't it be nice to go hang out in person and drink some cheap wine out of plastic cups and do that whole thing? So the Zoom version is different, but it's also been cool, because it means that I'm no longer restricted to writers who live in New York or are passing through. There's no funding of any kind for it. So I'm not in a position to pay for people to fly to New York and stay in a hotel. That would all be coming out of my pocket, and that's not something I can afford. So being able to have writers come from everywhere and being able to have people tune in to listen from everywhere has been really cool.

So yeah, it's working fine. I'm still looking forward to when we can go back to doing it in-person, or at least maybe some in-person and some Zoom. I don't really know how that's going to work.

Kate:

Yeah, I think we're all ready. Some governors more than others.

Lily:

Yes.

Kate:

Anyway. What's next for you, Lily? What's on the docket?

Lily:

Well, I have a bunch of stuff planned for the next couple months. I'm in full book promo mode, trying not to annoy the hell out of myself and everybody who knows me by just being on social media, constantly promoting stuff. But that's the game. You just have to bite the bullet and do it. And I also am working on a book proposal that I'm hoping to send out later this year, so we'll see.

Kate:

Yay.

Lily:

Got to keep it moving. Having something else to generate is helping me kind of balance out the feeling like the publicity aspect has taken over my life. Get to still feel like I'm creating something and not just becoming a sales person flogging my wares on the corner.

Kate:

What has been kind giving you hope this last year? This to close things up. That's a shortlist Lily.

Phuc:

She's not a hopeful person. She's a writer.

Lily:

Yeah. I think not particularly hopeful. I'm more just I know this has to end eventually, and I just am surviving it in the meantime. And I'm very good at compartmentalizing and working through upheaval, and I've done it in my life before and I'm doing it now, and I've managed to just still be working and writing and talking to my friends and cooking food and watching good TV, and just waiting until I can see people in-person again.

Jessica:

That's a good list.

Kate:

That is good. Yeah. Well, it was really great to get to meet you. Thank you so much for your time.

Lily:

Thank you so much for having me.

Jessica:

And your book. Thank you.

Kate:

All right. Bye.

Phuc:

Thank you, Lily. Bye-bye.

This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2021 AWP Conference & Bookfair. Effing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary in association with Houston Creative Space, hosted by Kate Martin Williams and Jessica Cole, and produced by me, Phuc Luu. Our trustee and hardworking intern is [inaudible 00:23:53]. Please subscribe, read and review wherever podcasts are found.