Step one: Revisit Part I.
Step two: Slide right into Part II ready to learn about writing the intimate stuff, Emma Bovary, vaginas and the raw writing advice not usually provided in pamphlets or introductory lectures.
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Kaylen & Joanna: In 2012, you wrote an essay for NY Mag about coming to terms with the sexual assault you experienced with a former boyfriend. What is your writing process when approaching a project that is intimate and requires not only good writing (obviously), but also bravery?
Elissa Bassist: I had to write it for me first—not for publication or any other audience. I had some shit to work out, and writing is my way to do that (second to yoga, Namaste).
Part of my process is sitting around for years, thinking What the hell happened?, trying to sort out how and why it happened. Then I read a lot of books with similar themes and copy and recopy passages until I memorize how other writers wrote about intimate experiences that double as societal malaises (in this case, sexual violence).
I wrote seven drafts of the book chapter the NYMag piece is about, over two years, and took many, many dance breaks to get through it (what I’d do is go into my bedroom and close the door. I’d unroll my yoga mat and turn on a Britney Spears song called “Amnesia.” I’d play it at least three times and dance like Madison Square Garden was watching and would jump around, doing headstands and handstands, minor life-threatening poses that distracted me from what I was writing—because it hurt to write about this subject).
Once I got it all down—essentially relived the experience (this had the added component of asking myself, Did it really happen like this? Was I wrong? Am I wrong? What is my life?)—I edited for publication, keeping an eye out for passages that would provoke a crazypants response (someone once told me to “die in a fire”) and ensuring I absolutely meant what I said.
Post-publication, I played the song “Haters Gonna Hate” by Phil Bridges on repeat. And I deactivated Facebook because I didn’t want what I wrote to turn into gossip.
In retrospect, I think bravery truly comes in after it’s all out there—bravery is not reading comments; bravery is, in the face of feedback from people—anonymous strangers—trying to put you in your place, people trying to tell you who you are, you don’t allow them this power. We’re so quick to believe anyone but ourselves, and we must be brave enough to back ourselves.
K/J: You wrote a “Modern Love” column for The New York Times in April 2012 about your Internet boyfriend. Because your relationship with him existed solely online, you had excellent record of your relationship. What advice do you have for writing retrospectively about something when you don’t have that paper trail?
EB: Quick clarification: I knew Dan IRL. I met Dan face-to-face in college; we dated for a few months before he graduated; and then we kept in touch for over five years using the dumb life destroyer called the Internet.
While I have probably 75% of our relationship transcribed in emails and Gchats, everything else is like a movie in my mind that I replayed on a loop for years. Now, when I write about him, I don’t have the same fire within me, so I’ll listen to songs from five years ago that revive my memory instantly (I’ve forgotten thousands of good conversations, but my body seems hardwired to recall how I felt when it was all new between us, when a million little weddings went on inside me) or watch something like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that is my life but isn’t my life. Reading always helps me write—books have every feeling I’ve ever felt preserved in amber.
Sans paper tail, I imitate Emma Bovary: “Henceforth the memory of Léon was the centre of her boredom; it burnt there more brightly than the fire travellers have left on the snow of a Russian steppe. She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything that could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tete-a-tete,–she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.” That says it all, right?
My quick and dirty advice: be obsessed.
Also, when you’re in it, keep a journal.
K/J: When you wrote to Dear Sugar, you told her that your writing often results in making a metaphor of your vagina. We relate. Are there any subjects you could see yourself writing about in which you wouldn’t employ this metaphor (or at least wouldn’t want to?)
EB: I think when I wrote the line, “I write about my lady life experiences, and that usually comes out as unfiltered emotion, unrequited love, and eventual discussion of my vagina as metaphor,” I was being jokey with the last bit. I do write about things only my gynecologist should know—for example, I have an essay about playing “The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy” (“The Moaner” a.k.a.) in The Vagina Monologues when I was in college and yet had never made out with Another Human Being, and another an essay about how reading Ayn Rand at a young age indoctrinated me about a way of thinking and acting that put my body/vagina at risk—but I’m also interested in non-vaginal topics, like Netflix addiction, depression and self-medicating with movies called The Human Centipede, David Foster Wallace, and the book I’m working on is…well, yeah, a lot of it is me making metaphor of my vagina. Sorry parents!
K/J: And finally…
Dear E-Bass,
What is your version of advice to someone who still isn’t sure how to “write like a motherfucker?” Do you have any advice for two women trying to break an entire industry down and even out the gender dynamics? Do you have any advice for two women who are basically trying to change the world one awesome female writer at a time?
Sincerely,
Two Rosies
EB: 1. As Rilke said in Letters to a Young Poet, “No one can advise or help you — no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.” That’s all.
2. You probably break an entire industry down by writing one sentence and then another and another.
3. You even out gender dynamics by starting something called The Riveter.
4. In an interview for The Rumpus, Susie Bright advised me on these questions you’re asking (and this is very long, and I’m sorry about that):
BASSIST: It takes courage to find out what you’ve found out. Writing is often a political act. I recently saw Susan Rosenberg speak in New York. Her memoir, An American Radical, is about being a political prisoner in her own country. I thanked her at the end of her reading—I thanked her for reminding me to fight. She spent 16 years in prison because she believed guerilla movements were just, that the U.S. government was responsible for a lot of violence, that 400 years of racism needed a revolution, and that achieving power demands putting people in motion. She said things like: “The more they fear you, the more they respect you,” and wondered aloud, “How do you change yourself without losing yourself?” Big Sex Little Death is also a book about fighting; at one point you wonder, “Why had people formulated revolution so long ago, yet nothing, nothing had changed?” Why do women still make 75 cents to the man’s dollar? Why are so few women writing for late-night television? How do we save Planned Parenthood? What do we have to do to get everyone to believe that broken bones and bruises do not define rape? What can you tell people who want change? What can you tell me? How do we do what we can with what we have?
BRIGHT: Well—
BASSIST: Believe in ourselves?
BRIGHT: No. No. You look at your material conditions and get Marxist about it. It’s not some ephemeral what if theory—it’s asking Where are you right now? Where do you live? Who do you see everyday? Who is in your neighborhood and in your workplace and in your family. Who do you interact with and what do you deal with? What’s a vulnerable soft spot in that whole mix that also appeals to you that you’re ready to tangle with or subvert or form a response to as a writer? What is your fight?
You never walk into some random restaurant and walk up to the cook and say, So, we have a good idea what’s going on around here, and we need to organize and we’ve got a whole plan for you. Instead, take a fearless inventory [of your own life] and listen to the other people around you and be inspired by other women who are doing what you want to see more of out there—it’ll be inevitable to think to yourself, Do we have the talent and a few hot ideas and just a little bit of extra time where we can publish something online or make a few copies at the Xerox shop? How many of these revolutions have happened because of the Xerox store? Let it out. Try something. What might happen?
BASSIST: Let’s say I’ve Xeroxed my revolution; how do I get people to read it?
BRIGHT: [Follow these instructions] Open your address book that includes everybody you’ve ever known in your whole life. Send them a letter that’s going to bring tears to their eyes and make them howl with laughter—they absolutely have to see it; they have to read it; they have to send you a dime; they have to be part of it.
Look at what’s happening in the subways everyday here [in New York]—those amazing musicians who are busking—I’m a [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] next to them. Why don’t I go down there and read chapters out of my book and see if I have the nerve to deal with the public? Take the Hyde Park Speakers’ approach and get your freaking crate and speak truth and power.
BASSIST: In your early career as a journalist in school, you had renegade ideas about writing news, making news, and then writing about the news you made: “The merry headlines of The Forty-Niner celebrated sports team wins and a new candy machine at the campus bookshop. Everyone on the editorial staff was serious about being a journalist, but their idea of big-time news was covering a fire. My take was that you started your own fire and people covered you. Then you wrote a blistering editorial!” You remind me of that which is easy to forget. When I publish something online, it’s off the main page by the end the next business day. So I think: is it over? Is my revolution over for the week?
BRIGHT: It’s not over. You show it to all your friends. A ripple effect begins. If what you write has something that catches people’s eye and is something they want to talk about or it’s something they have been thinking about but couldn’t articulate, you’re off and running. You have to remember I was doing these kind of things when my name meant nothing to anybody. There will be people at the reading tonight who knew me as “Sue B. Last Name Unknown; byline: none,” because you weren’t allowed to take credit for anything you wrote when I started writing. I’ve found that you can get people to pay attention to you when you don’t have your name on things and when you’re not the least bit legendary just by paying attention to what’s going on around you and stealing moments.
