Ariel Gore is a force of nature. I first met her about ten years ago when she was teaching at UNM. I was a graduate student, working as a reading series coordinator for the English department, and I helped organize a reading for her. Wow, can she put on a show! A true storyteller, both on the page and in person, she is irreverent, witty, and full of anecdotes you’re not soon to forget (e.g. Trying to find time to write, sometimes she would jot down ideas while at stoplights). Years later I saw her on a panel about how to juggle motherhood and writing (and writing about motherhood) at the AWP conference when it was in Los Angeles. A new mother myself, I had an even deeper appreciation for her approach to wearing numerous important hats in life. We are delighted to have Ariel as our featured writer for March (and it’s no coincidence that our Plume Plus theme is going to be Fierce). We hope you enjoy our interview with her!
Plume: When did you know you were a writer?
Ariel Gore: Like so many of us I wrote books as a kid. I wrote a short story collection at four and put my author picture in there. I wrote a novel in elementary school about a girl with a magical doll. I tried to sell a poetry collection to HarperCollins when I was in fourth or fifth grade and they sent a nice rejection letter. Later, when I was traveling as a teenager, I mostly wrote letters. I’m sure they were very dramatic. When I was in my early twenties I kind of focused in and decided I wanted to be a professional writer, so I studied journalism and did an internship at a feminist newspaper and made my own zine. I still sent things to publishers to see if an outside magazine or journal would publish my stories, but mostly that outside publication came later. So, I started with independent publishing and that was so important and helpful to me as I was learning how to be an author in addition to being a writer. Being published for me is often very stressful—like an extension of social anxiety—so it is something that, from a self-care perspective, was important to really ease into.
P: Where do you get your ideas?
AG: Anyplace. Dreams. News stories. My life. I’ll often just have a glimmer of an idea or even really just a prompt—write a story that begins with an explosion, say—and then it’s when I really start getting into the rhythm of the writing that the story comes.
P: What’s your feeling on fiction vs nonfiction? [I loved The End of Eve, btw, and it has a spot on my Shelf of Grief–memoirs about grief and dying–JS].
AG: I write both. I swing back and forth. There’s kind of a spectrum, right? With journalism on the far end of nonfiction and fantasy at the far end of fiction—or something like that. When I was first writing for publication, I read something Starhawk wrote about it being easier to publish nonfiction, so that was my focus in terms of what I put out there. Now I like to do both–and a lot of hybrid writing as well. The End of Eve is a memoir, and it’s one of my favorite books I’ve done, but I think my very favorite right now is We Were Witches, which is a total hybrid magical feminist novel-memoir. I’m currently working on a novel in interconnected short stories, and that’s almost pure fiction. I was actually starting to work on another memoir, but it was too stressful. I wanted to write something escapist, to get out of my own exclusive psychology, to travel, so that’s what I’m doing now. As a writer and writing teacher I am doing something related to work significantly more than 40 hours a week, so I have to make sure the work is serving my life and my family and my happiness as well as serving my literary life.
P: Where do you write?
AG: I mostly write at home. If the furnace is broken or someone’s really chatty in the house, I might go to a café. I tried having an office once but I work in and around my life and my parenting so that separate office concept just really doesn’t work for me. I started my writing life as a single mom, writing while my daughter slept, so I think I got into that constantly interruptible mode and habitat and that’s just how I write now.
P: I know you’ve lived in New Mexico and California—do your surroundings affect your work in any way? Are you more productive in one place vs. another? [I love California, but don’t think I’m cut out for in anymore–too crazy-busy-expensive. Sigh.–JS].
AG: I grew up in California, then spent the years I was supposed to be in high school traveling in Asia and Europe. Then I lived in California again from when I was 20 to 29, I think. Then I moved up to Portland and lived there for a decade. Then I moved to New Mexico nine years ago I but popped back over to California for three years in the middle. I’m back in New Mexico now. When I was a baby and preschooler we traveled a lot and I used to think maybe that’s what made it hard for me to live on one place as an adult. I mean, I kind of obsess about where to move next. But I think it’s just that writers need changes of scenery. Or this writer does. When my kids are little I try to live in one place for a while so they can have a little school stability. (My kids are 17 years apart so I have two eras of having school age kids.) But other than that I like to move. I read once that in human history, art really takes off with urbanity, and I can see that. Cities are always super inspiring to me. Other people’s art is inspiring to me. But as a writer I’m always looking for a balance of affordability and inspiration. So far in American capitalist real estate reality, that has meant being on the fringes of places that were in the process of gentrifying, so I’m part of that cohort of creatives that is being perpetually displaced. You move someplace quiet and affordable and then you start to make art about it and then it gets cool and the rents go up and the people who lived here before blame you for it, but you have to move, too. So maybe my constant desire of a change of scenery is actually just me evolving to enjoy what I might otherwise consider yet another meanness of capitalism.
P: Do you have any writing rituals?
AG: Well, I make a lot of altars to completion. I would say I complete about half the projects I start, which is a perfect rate for me.
P: How supportive is your local community for writers, and do you find the need for one?
AG: I don’t know. In Santa Fe in my limited experience the writers are pretty introverted and isolated. But it may just be that I am socially isolated for reasons that have nothing to do with Santa Fe. In Portland there was much more of a literary community and scene I was aware of, and that has its benefits and drawbacks. I think when there is a real scenester kind of literary scene, it’s easy to just drink a lot and not write very much. You do notice that some of the most famous “writers” in scenes like that don’t seem to produce much. Because, ultimately, writing is a solitary thing. Back when I lived in California in the 1990s there was a nice balance because there was a real zine scene, and a spoken word scene, and both of those things require that you show up with some work. So there was community but it supported the introversion a writer needs. Part of my own mission as a literary person is to promote the work of other marginalized people who are writing, so that requires a lot of community building and sometimes hosting readings, so to the extent that I can as an introvert, I try to be the writing community.
P: What are some of your self-care practices?
AG: I have not been that great at self care historically. Being a pubic person is at once really fun for me and really emotionally taxing. Being a writer is all about alone time. Being an author is all about putting yourself out there publicly. So there are these extremes in terms of what you’re always pushing yourself to do. You write alone for so long and then you maybe publish something and then you’re maybe invited out to do things publicly or you organize your own tours—I’ve done that back and forth for 20+ years now and it doesn’t get easier. I’m certainly a better public reader than I was 20 years ago, so the performance gets better, but now I am starting to wonder if it would be possible to be more of a recluse without negatively impacting my ability to make a living as a writer. If someone asks me to do something and I think, “Hm, I could do that if I had a Xanax,” then I need to remember that the answer is no. Other than that I try not to drink too much. I try to soak a lot. I go to a lot of movies. I try to listen to my own dread and not push back against that too much.
P: What is your favorite book about writing?
AG: I love them all! I love the idea of Meander, Spiral, Explode—that’s been super inspiring. The actual chapters and examples in the book aren’t particularly queer or experimental, so it’s more the concept of each narrative pattern that has been inspiring me. I loved Patricia Highsmith’s book on writing. She was such a weird and wonderful author! I like books that remind me that if you’re in it for the long haul as a writer you’re going to have a lot of different writing experiences and a lot of different publishing experiences and the publishing life isn’t just something where you break in and then it rises and rises and rises. You’re working in an industry that is complicated and fraught and it’s not personal. You have to adapt and you have to develop a core of confidence that doesn’t depend on the marketplace.
P: Also, if you have any thoughts about the different modes of publishing— I know you’ve done big publishers vs indie publishing. Pros and cons? Or does it depend on the project?
AG: It definitely depends on the project, but overall I like a mid-sized press with the resources to print and publish a book but the internal stability to have the same editor at the helm through the often years-long process that is publishing a book. That’s something that’s quite hard to predict, of course, as small presses go belly-up, mid-sized presses get absorbed into media conglomerates, and big presses have mind-boggling turnover rates in their editorial and publicity departments. For me the most important thing has been to be a publisher myself—a zine publisher, a chapbook publisher, and occasionally a book publisher. I don’t honestly self-publish much of my work, but being a publisher means that I understand the process and business of publishing and that has allowed me to really get what’s going on with each project. I sometimes teach a chapbook publishing class because I think every writer needs to self-publish at least once—be it a zine or a chapbook or what have you. Otherwise the industry just feels mysterious and mean, and that’s somewhat true, but a lot of it is just that we don’t understand typography and margins and ISBNs and print costs and distribution and marketing and publishing schedules. Whenever I edit an anthology, some of the newer writers will be like, when’s it coming out? When’s it coming out? Like a year or two is this bizarre amount of time to wait for a book. But truly when you sell a book to a publisher, it is extremely rare that that book is going to come out sooner than two years.
P: What are you currently working on?
AG: I’m writing short stories and traveling all over because they’re each set in a different foreign country. Mostly at beaches! I’m launching Santa Fe Noir in March—it’s part of the Akashic Books award-winning series of original noir anthologies. So I got to invite 16 other Santa Fe writers to each contribute an original short story. It’s a great collection with stories by Ana Castillo and Jimmy Santiago Baca and Ana June and a graphic-novel short story by Israel Francisco Haros Lopez and a dozen more. I’m also launching Fuck Happiness, which is a book originally published by Farrar Straus and Giroux ten years ago and titled Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness. Fuck Happiness is both updated and restored to my original prose. I also just published a collection of my students’ writing called Places Like Home. It’s a really cool collection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—all written to various prompts in my writing school, The Literary Kitchen, a.k.a. Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers.
Sign up for Plume’s March edition, and you’ll receive a letter of encouragement from Ariel, as well as some of her creative work!
Ariel Gore is a LAMBDA-Award winning editor and author of a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction including the novel-memoir We Were Witches, the memoir The End of Eve, which won a Rainbow Award and a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and the nonfiction books How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead, Hexing the Patriarchy, and Fuck Happiness: How Women are Ditching the Cult of Positivity and Choosing Radical Joy. She edited the Akashic Books anthology Santa Fe Noir and is the founding editor of Hip Mama, the original alternative parenting zine.