Interview with Joelle Fraser, Author of The Forest House and The Territory of Men
And a prompt and reading from Diane Seuss for Flash Memoir Friday!
I had the great pleasure to interview Joelle Fraser this week. Joelle is a former colleague at Creative Nonfiction, who will now be teaching her popular course The Thirty-Minute Memoir through Muse (starting April 17th!). I found Joelle’s answers truly helpful for me in thinking about memoir (and my own process as I work on my next book). I hope you enjoy the interview.
Joelle Fraser is a MacDowell Fellow and the author of two memoirs: The Territory of Men (Random House 2002) and The Forest House: a Journey into the Landscape of Love, Loss, and Starting Over (Counterpoint 2013). Joelle received her MFA from the University of Iowa, and her award-winning work has appeared in many journals, including Crazyhorse, Fourth Genre, Michigan Quarterly Review, and was recognized in Best American Essays by Christopher Hitchens (2010).
As a teacher and editor, Joelle is highly praised. Her clients have placed work in numerous publications, including the NYT's Modern Love column, The Sun, and Hippocampus Magazine. Joelle will be teaching her popular course The Thirty-Minute Memoir through Muse starting April 17th. You can find more information and register for the class here.
JPC: Joelle, I’m sincerely very excited to have the chance to continue to work with you. We were colleagues at Creative Nonfiction, and I’m so pleased that you took me up on my offer to host your memoir course through Muse. From what I heard from students at CNF and have seen on social media, your students love you and your memoir course!
I’m curious if you could talk a little about what writing community has meant for you over the years. I feel like many of us start out writing on our own and gradually discover the value of connecting with other writers. I’ve had experiences where individual friendships have been profoundly meaningful to my understanding of how writing fits into our lives and how artists can support each other. And my cohort in the MFA program I attended was a supportive community, as well. I feel like it can be a relief to talk to others who are concerned with the “obscure” things writers spend time thinking about … like metaphors. (Ha!) How has that process of finding writing community been for you? And did you have mentors along the way who gave you that “permission” to see yourself as a writer which can be so heartening?
JF: First of all, thank you so much for this opportunity to explore some of my thoughts and also, of course, for hosting my memoir class!
Ok, my experience is similar in that it has layers, which have evolved over time depending on my writing activity and goals. I began my nonfiction MFA in my late 20s and that was a game-changer in that I felt like I’d entered into a tribe I didn’t know existed. Suddenly I wasn’t “the only one” and it was wonderful. I didn’t even mind the competition, which was subtle, thankfully: reading people’s life stories usually generated empathy. And even a little competition helped because it helped me stay motivated. (I wonder if that pressure of competition is different in the fiction and poetry worlds.)
After my MFA stints (I have 2!) and I got a book deal, I found my community with other authors, commiserating and celebrating as the case may be. It’s another “tribe” but we’re not seeing each other in person. That’s where writing groups can be so helpful, even on Zoom.
Right now I’m focused on teaching and editing and it’s a generative exchange–I love the way I learn as much as I teach. I’ve also made connections with students and clients that have already lasted years.
JPC: I was interested to read a piece you wrote for the Brevity blog recently, The Season Finale– What If It’s Anticlimactic?, which is about your current book project. You note that the book doesn’t have an ending yet because the life experience it’s about– your worries and hopes for your elderly parents– doesn't have an ending yet. I’ve been thinking about the idea you mention from literary agent Estelle Laure that “a great memoir ending is one that gives the reader both a feeling of completion and hope.” This idea has come up for me as I work on my current book project, as well, and it makes me think both about the way writing asks us to grow as people– to find some sense of completion and hope around difficult life events– and also about that power to shape our own narratives. It isn’t necessarily hip in academic circles to see writing as therapeutic, either for authors or for readers. But, while I certainly agree that writing and therapy are two different things, I do think of shaping our own story through writing as healing, both for writers and readers, potentially. Can you comment on what it means for us as human beings that as memoirists were asked to find meaning (and narrative arcs!) in our own experiences?
JF: If you really dig deep when you’re writing memoir or personal essay, it is cathartic, full stop. That’s why it’s so hard. (I remember telling folks that my first memoir almost killed me.) The memoirs I feel most moved by are those that don’t pull any punches. But even when the situation(s) or the circumstances aren’t resolved, the author has traveled emotionally so that the reader is hopeful that the author will be able to weather the “next chapter” of life.
In that way I believe the memoirist in particular has an important challenge, if not a duty, to the reader. If you write your story and it ends with no hope, then it’s not something I want to read. And as an author, I’ve learned that sometimes I’m not ready to write the story–I don’t have hope yet. So I wait and work through it (like I’m waiting now for my current story with my parents to unfold).
Fortunately, that hope doesn’t need to be dramatic; even a hint will do. But leave the reader with something to go on…
JPC: I’m also curious, related to your Brevity blog piece, whether you feel you need distance from events to write about them? My friend Jessica Mesman says, about writing, “The only rule is no rule,” meaning that it doesn’t have to work in any one specific way. But what has been your experience in that regard?
JF: That question kind of gets to my point above, which is that I do need some distance so that I can find the “hope” I need to offer to the reader (and I suppose myself) by the book’s end.
But another aspect of this distance question is that it usually takes time–sometimes years–to achieve the reflective distance that enables the insights to arise. I wrote my 2nd memoir in the throes of the events (the first year of my divorce in 2010-11), and a few years later I felt some regret that I wrote it with such immediacy. The emotion was raw and did not allow for the insights I’ve had in the years since. I re-read some passages and thought “Well, that was a lot of fuss–it’s all mostly worked out.”
Now, I’m okay with it. It was true in the moment and I think that high emotion speaks to other people going through the throes of divorce and custody issues. And there’s hope in the end, of course. :)
My final takeaway is that it’s a good idea to really think about whether you’re ready to publish a book when the events are still steaming.
JPC: I’ve been reading your second memoir, The Forest House, and I admire your writing so much. In another piece you wrote for the Brevity blog, you discuss how you decide whether you’ve revealed too much in a piece of writing and the process you went through to come to that understanding. For my part, I’ve found that if I start to think, “This might be too much,” that’s usually where my most compelling writing is, but that if my main feeling is a desire for vindication, without making myself vulnerable at all, then the writing falls flat (and might read as merely petty). Do you have a reliable inner sense about how much you do need to reveal to make the writing compelling and worthwhile? How do you find that place for yourself, that line between enough and truly too much?
JF: The line of what is too much is a moving target for me. Like you said, there can be all sorts of motivations for a phrase or paragraph–vindication, a desire for forgiveness, a subtle dig at someone. Usually the reader is smarter than we think, so these days I go with the adage of “less is more.”
But the final deciding factor for me is a trusted reader, ideally two or three, including a person familiar with the subject/people in the essay or memoir, and a reader who comes to it more objectively. What I’m looking for is someone who will point out where I may need to pull back–or, sometimes, go deeper.
Flash Memoir Friday Prompt: Go Deeper
Diane Seuss writes poems and essays that dive into vulnerability and hard truths like no other. If you haven’t read her Pulitzer Prize winning book, frank: sonnets, I highly recommend it. Read “Six Unrhymed Sonnets” by Seuss, reflecting on how Seuss’s speaker stays closer to her experience, to the heart and the body.
Then pause and take a few deep breaths to ground yourself. Drop into a place of knowing within. What are the most compelling questions for you at this time? What’s going on with your body and soul? Write “the real stuff” for fifteen minutes. You don’t have to write with line breaks (but you can). You don’t have to think about whether you would publish it. Try to ground “the real stuff” in concrete details about your recent and past experience.
Here are our courses coming up in April at Muse:
The 30-Minute Memoir with Joelle Fraser, April 17-June 11
Shapes of Stories with Nancy McCabe, April 17-June 25
(**Early bird price ends on April 1st!**) SELF-GUIDED// Writing Beyond the Known: Exploring the Possible through Speculative Nonfiction, April 17-May 15 (early bird price of $45!)