Writing can be lonely work; WMFA counters that with conversation. It’s a show about creativity and craft, where writer and host Courtney Balestier talks shop with some of today’s best writers and examines the issues we face when we do creative work. The mission of WMFA is to explore why we writers do what we do, so that we can do it with more intention, and how we do what we do, so that we can do it better.

In this episode, Courtney Balestier talks to Heather Clark about adding context to the shorthand of Sylvia Plath with her new biography, Red Comet, the years-long work of such a massive project—including permissions, archives, and organizing research—and charting Plath’s growth as a person and a creative.

From the episode:

Heather Clark: I really wanted to try to rewrite that script. I did not want her name to be synonymous with madness and tragedy. I wanted her name to be synonymous with an amazingly prolific, ambitious, talented writer.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of WMFA, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

Heather Clark is the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist now out in paperback from Knopf. She and Courtney discuss how biography is like archeology, the “hysterical woman writer” stereotype, and the “profound and bottomless optimism” needed to undertake a large writing project.

Writing can be lonely work; WMFA counters that with conversation. It’s a show about creativity and craft, where writer and host Courtney Balestier talks shop with some of today’s best writers and examines the issues we face when we do creative work. The mission of WMFA is to explore why we writers do what we do, so that we can do it with more intention, and how we do what we do, so that we can do it better.

In this episode, Courtney Balestier talks to Elissa Washuta, author of White Magic, about the lines of inquiry that drive her book, the unreliability of memory, Twin Peaks, and so much more.

From the episode:

Courtney Balesiter: What does creative satisfaction look like for you?

Elissa Washuta: Oh, that’s a good question. I like feeling like my work is sort of overstuffed and maximalist. I like feeling like I’ve created a little cabinet of curiosities of all my things I’m interested in. Like I was talking about earlier, with that big vision that I start out with, I don’t think I’ll pull off—I really recognize when I have pulled it off, and I impress myself, you know? I always doubt myself a little bit at the beginning, with my terrible memory and my scattered attention and my fatigue. I always think, I’ll never do this. This is never going to get finished. I’m going to run out of time, I’m going to run out of interest, and this all just fail. And when it doesn’t, that feels great.

This book, I think, was the first thing I’d ever created that really made me feel that even if it never got published, I will still be actually really satisfied with what I’ve done, and found a way to collect all of these things that are not just in one constellation of the things I care about, but all these different constellations to make this universe that was my world during the time I wrote it and during a lot of my life. I feel really, really satisfied with that.

But there’s also these phases of satisfaction. I’m really pleased that people are liking the book. It makes me super happy to know that it’s meaningful to other people. I got the hardcover copies over the weekend, and it is so satisfying to hold a hardcover book that I wrote! That’s new. And it’s shiny, has a gold spine. I love objects. And to have the book as an object—especially such a beautiful object—that’s really satisfying.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of WMFA, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of White Magic, Starvation Mode, and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.

Writing can be lonely work; WMFA counters that with conversation. It’s a show about creativity and craft, where writer and host Courtney Balestier talks shop with some of today’s best writers and examines the issues we face when we do creative work. The mission of WMFA is to explore why we writers do what we do, so that we can do it with more intention, and how we do what we do, so that we can do it better.

In this episode, Courtney Balestier talks to Dantiel W. Moniz, author of Milk Blood Heat, about not protecting your characters, the inextricableness of place and identity, and deciding to take your writing seriously.

From the episode:

Dantiel W. Moniz: I used to use that exact phrasing—write the moment after which nothing could be the same; that’s what you’re leading up to. That’s what I would tell my students. I think why I love the short form so much is the same reason a lot of people hate the short form—where they’re like, I felt like I was just getting into this character’s world and getting attached to them and now it’s over. But I feel like a good short story writer will leave you enough in the text to understand where this character’s life goes off the page. That’s what I’m always trying to do. This question came up recently and I put it like, I see endings as more windows into the next thing rather than as pure exits. If I’ve done my job correctly, you can understand what the next choice for that character would be.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of WMFA, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

Dantiel W. Moniz is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminar, and a Tin House Scholarship. Her debut collection, Milk Blood Heat, is an Indie Next Pick, an Amazon “Best Book of the Month” selection, a Roxane Gay Audacious Book Club pick, as well as a Belletrist Book Club pick, and has been hailed as “must-read” by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, Elle, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar,Tin House, One Story, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and elsewhere. She lives in Northeast Florida and currently teaches fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Writing can be lonely work; WMFA counters that with conversation. It’s a show about creativity and craft, where writer and host Courtney Balestier talks shop with some of today’s best writers and examines the issues we face when we do creative work. The mission of WMFA is to explore why we writers do what we do, so that we can do it with more intention, and how we do what we do, so that we can do it better.

In this episode, Courtney Balestier talks to Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts, about the concept of autofiction, real versus fake vulnerability, and how the artifice of the novel form is part of its power.

From the episode:

Lauren Oyler: I think of autofiction now as any fictional work that creates explicit confusion or conflation between one of the characters, probably the main character and the author. And something that I think is interesting about it is that a lot of writers who definitely do it, based on this definition, reject it. There’s this very funny video of Knausgård doing an interview and he says, “Nobody thinks about autofiction less than me.” But if you want to understand what it is, you should read those books, because those books in the end are about the writing of those books and the reception of Karl Ove Knausgård and the books that he wrote.

There’s a heightened desire to understand what’s behind the thing that we’re reading. And ostensibly, it’s easier than ever before to learn about the author. So it’s harder to justify pretending doing this sort of classic fictional thing where you’re like, I’ve sat down to write some characters. I use this Rachel Cusk quote all the time in all sorts of things, but she’s always saying that fiction is fake and embarrassing. And I think Sheila Heti says this as well. And I understand where they’re coming from. But maybe we’ll get over that.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of WMFA, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

Lauren Oyler’s essays on books and culture have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, London Review of Books, The Guardian, New York magazine’s The Cut, The New Republic, Bookforum, and elsewhere. Born and raised in West Virginia, she now divides her time between New York and Berlin.

Writing can be lonely work; WMFA counters that with conversation. It’s a show about creativity and craft, where writer and host Courtney Balestier talks shop with some of today’s best writers and examines the issues we face when we do creative work. The mission of WMFA is to explore why we writers do what we do, so that we can do it with more intention, and how we do what we do, so that we can do it better.

In this episode, Courtney Balestier talks to Matthew Salesses, author of Craft in the Real World, about how we might workshop differently, the most ill-used terms in craft discussions, and the words that Matthew has banned from his own workshops.

From the episode:

Matthew Salesses: If you think of the ways that we’ve talked about craft, they really do fit the individualist person who has a lot of privilege and agency and drives all of the action. It’s all based on one person’s decision-making power. That model is very well represented within the workshop. And I do think in some ways, you’re right, the problem with the workshop is that it’s designed for people who maybe needed, at that time, to have their voices be silenced for a little while so they could hear other people. It was made for people who had all the privilege in the world and believed that they could do anything with writing and maybe needed to hear from their peers things that they wouldn’t otherwise have heard.

We’ve just moved so far from that. If I think about what the workshop can do, I actually think the original model kind of cuts off the two main things that the workshop can do best, which is talk about a work in progress, talk about the author’s process, which you can’t do if the author can’t talk, and access the diversity of writers in the room and their diverse experiences and literary histories and proclivities. And that is not something that really the workshop is designed to allow for or maximize.

Courtney Balestier: Right. Not only that, but it’s this kind of standardization of what your colleague pointed out that had that real lightbulb moment for you, as a thing that can’t be standardized.

Matthew Salesses: I think it was actually pretty successful in standardizing it. Going back to the idea of fighting communism with workshops, there is a kind of strategy of standardizing a certain white, western, American, democratic norm. And if you can standardize that in the craft forum where you’re prioritizing style and form and surface level techniques, instead of thinking about what the content is, who you’re writing for, why you would even write a story in the first place—those things are much easier to standardize and can go out into the world, and also have the advantage of the great American ideology of pretending not to have an ideology.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of WMFA, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

Matthew Salesses is the author of three novels, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, The Hundred-Year Flood, and I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying, and a forthcoming essay collection. He has taught at Coe College, the Ashland MFA program, the Tin House and Kundiman summer workshops, and writing centers like Grub Street and Inprint, among others. He has edited fiction for Gulf Coast, Redivider, and The Good Men Project and has written about craft and creative writing workshops for venues like NPR’s Code Switch, The Millions, Electric Literature, and Pleiades. He was adopted from Korea and currently lives in Iowa.

Writing can be lonely work; WMFA counters that with conversation. It’s a show about creativity and craft, where writer and host Courtney Balestier talks shop with some of today’s best writers and examines the issues we face when we do creative work. The mission of WMFA is to explore why we writers do what we do, so that we can do it with more intention, and how we do what we do, so that we can do it better.

In this episode, Courtney Balestier talks to Mateo Askaripour, author of Black Buck, about writing from personal experience while also leaving room for invention, managing plausibility, and what we learn from the novels we don’t sell.

From the episode:

Courtney Balestier: I wanted to talk to you about working within this framework of satire. Because I think what the book does really well, and what’s so tricky—and I was thinking about it afterward: when did I ever consciously sign on? And I don’t think I ever needed to. The voice is so strong and the world is so well-built—as you say, multiple climaxes; things ratchet up and ratchet up and ratchet up. I know the book gets compared a lot to Sorry to Bother You, and I see why. Sorry to Bother You goes more absurd maybe. Well, not maybe. Love that movie; very different thing. But as the reader, you just keep buying into it again and again and again. And I wondered if that was something that you had to recalibrate, maybe even as you were having conversations with readers and editors. Was there ever a sort of credibility or believability hurdle that you had to smooth out as these crazier and crazier events happen?

Mateo Askaripour: I’m so happy that you asked that question. That for me was important because I wanted there to be like in a video game, new bosses at the end of every part, new stages or a new hurdle. Because in some of the movies—especially mob movies, like Goodfellas—there’s always a next challenge. There’s always a bigger heist. They want to rob an airline, you know what I’m saying? There’s always something bigger. And for me as the reader, I was like, that’s what would keep me engaged—if things get crazier and crazier.

However, there is the question of plausibility, right? Because if you go too far, then you could lose readers who thought this book was really sincere and earnest and rooted in reality. And then you can have readers say, hey, yeah, I thought most of this was good, but this feels more fantastic. It’s just not as real. It’s pretty absurd. I can’t believe it.

And to that, I say, listen, what’s absurd comes down to who you are and the experiences that you’ve had. Because for me, everything in this book, while it does get really crazy and goes to crazy lengths and people take it to crazy places, I could actually see all of this happening. And there are crazier things that have happened this year, that have happened over the past couple of years. You know, an example I use is what if ten years ago, you tell the American public there’s going to be this reality TV guy who’s on your small screen and then he’s going to one day become president? You’d say that’s fiction, that can’t happen. And then look what happened.

But to go back to the original question, I didn’t want to stray way too far from what was plausible in the world that I created. And I don’t think I did. Because just from the beginning, when Darren enters Sumwun, it’s a crazy place. And I’ve worked at a place that was way crazier than what I even put in this book, that was way more intense, and there’s a lot of wild stuff going on. So I think that within the confines of the world that I created, everything is plausible. But some people won’t agree. It’ll be so outside the scope of what they could even believe pertaining to reality, even Darren’s reality, that they’re going to think it’s absurd. And that’s okay, too. That’s fine. Read it how you want. Just read it.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of WMFA, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

Mateo Askaripour was a 2018 Rhode Island Writers Colony writer-in-residence, and his writing has appeared in Entrepreneur, Lit Hub, Catapult, The Rumpus, Medium, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, and his favorite pastimes include bingeing music videos and movie trailers, drinking yerba mate, and dancing in his apartment. Black Buck is his debut novel. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @AskMateo.

Writing can be lonely work; WMFA counters that with conversation. It’s a show about creativity and craft, where writer and host Courtney Balestier talks shop with some of today’s best writers and examines the issues we face when we do creative work. The mission of WMFA is to explore why we writers do what we do, so that we can do it with more intention, and how we do what we do, so that we can do it better.

This week, Courtney talks with Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections, about flipping received narratives, reckoning with the past, and the relationship between a work’s active and emotional plots.

From the episode:

Courtney Balestier: Is that something that comes up while you’re writing, this idea of the subterranean story? I know from my own writing too, like you say, you only really after the fact are seeing, oh, that’s what this is about. But at a certain point, I think, in the writing process, you are kind of harnessing that recognition and putting a foundation of it in there.

Danielle Evans: Yeah, once I get to the second draft of a story, I have to have an answer for what the story is actually about before I can continue revising. I think there are lots of different ways that that relationship can work. Part of what was interesting in this collection is that the emotional space of the story was more of a surprise to me than it was in my first book. I talk sometimes about active plot versus emotional plot, and sometimes it makes sense to think about the threads of a story that way. Sometimes there’s more than two, and so it’s not always a neat way to capture everything a story is doing. But I do try to ask myself at the end of a first draft, what are the active plot questions, and did I resolve them in some way? And what are the emotional or thematic questions, and did I leave enough room for the reader to engage those?

In this collection, often the emotional plot was doing something completely different than the active plot. My first book was largely coming-of age-stories, so the emotional arc of the story and the plot arc of the story were often in the same place. Sometimes that was complicated by having a retrospective narrator who was looking back on something, so you were getting another layer there. But usually there was an event or a decision in the story, and the emotional response was to that event or decision and the way that it changed a person’s future, changed a person’s sense of who they were.

And here, because I’m writing about characters who are a little bit older, I’m writing sometimes about grief or crisis or things that are beyond the scope of characters’ agency, or about people who are not so much making choices as realizing they’ve already made choices. And so, sometimes the emotional plot is just a flat line. It’s like, here’s the thing that hurts or matters or that shapes everything, and here is the plot of things this person can control, which often have nothing to do with the things that matter most but is just putting one foot in front of the other to get through the day, or creating new drama to evade the underlying grief of the story.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of WMFA, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, winner of the PEN America PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Paterson Prize, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Writing can be lonely work; WMFA counters that with conversation. It’s a show about creativity and craft, where writer and host Courtney Balestier talks shop with some of today’s best writers and examines the issues we face when we do creative work. The mission of WMFA is to explore why we writers do what we do, so that we can do it with more intention, and how we do what we do, so that we can do it better.

This week, Courtney talks with Simon Han, author of Nights When Nothing Happened, about the tricky label of universality, his favorite character to write, and why, for all our derision of suburbs, they have something important to say about American life.

From the episode:

Courtney Balestier: Not to give away what happens in the book, but there is this allegation of impropriety on the part of the father, and potentially to Annabel, potentially to a neighbor girl in front of Annabel. And that’s the sort of plot bomb that could become this black hole for the narrative and take it into this very different direction. But you weave it in in a way that—I was really fascinated by the way that it existed within the larger context of the story and didn’t overwhelm the story that was already being told, if that makes any sense.

Simon Han: Yeah, yeah. My editor helped me so much with that because she helped me to see that that event, which occurs sort of in the middle of the novel, initially I had pushed it much earlier. And again, that put the pressure on me to keep escalating. But she was like, there’s so much interesting stuff in the middle that you have yet to explore. If you were to stretch it out and take more time delicately setting up the domino pieces, we would know these characters better and what they’re carrying up until that scene. So pacing was part of it, but it was also just allowing myself to be okay spending more time in those quiet moments that I think really are more where the heart of the novel is.

Courtney Balestier: Absolutely. I think that’s one thing to the title. It is a lot of—despite having just explained this kind of big, capital-D dramatic turn—it is a very quiet book in a lot of ways, which tend to be my favorite to read. The sort of character studies where there’s enough plot to move forward, but you’re not like, oh my god, I have to skip to the end and make sure this person survives. That’s part of what makes it such a visceral reading experience when that comes is because you really are feeling for everybody who’s involved, even though your sympathies are going in like 18 different directions. But you get why everybody is responding the way that they are.

Simon Han: I mean, that’s the space in fiction that I’m most interested in exploring. There’re certainly villains in our world, but I’d rather not waste my time on trolls. I like spending time with flawed characters and spending time with characters who care about things but also just have different ideas about how to get there.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of WMFA, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

Simon Han was born in Tianjin, China, and raised in various cities in Texas. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Texas Observer, Guernica, The Iowa Review, Electric Literature, and LitHub. The recipient of several fiction awards and arts fellowships, he lives in Carrollton, Texas.

Writing can be lonely work; WMFA counters that with conversation. It’s a show about creativity and craft, where writer and host Courtney Balestier talks shop with some of today’s best writers and examines the issues we face when we do creative work. The mission of WMFA is to explore why we writers do what we do, so that we can do it with more intention, and how we do what we do, so that we can do it better.

This week, Courtney talks with Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. They discuss Anne’s process of synthesizing her research and analysis into prose, contextualizing a topic horizontally and vertically, and what a freelance career looks like now.

From the episode:

Anne Helen Petersen: When you’re not worried about making rent for the month, your mind can go to a lot of other places.  I know writers who do feel a little bit of shame about that. I know someone who works as a clerk in the county auditor’s office, like a very straightforward 9 to 5 job. But the stability of that and the boundaries of that job allow her to make so much other space in her life to do the things that creatively nourish her and to work on her book. And because she’s not within that über-competitive, on Twitter all the time, must be producing, you’re only as good as your last post—I think her book is going to be really marvelous. Because it’s operating outside of that economy.

Courtney Balestier: Right. Speaking from my own experience, when I first went freelance, I spent the first few years wanting to—I feel so mid-twenties as I’m about to say it out loud—wanting to make all my money from journalism. And I did. And I did okay. But I didn’t care about, and outright hated, a lot of what I was writing because you just have to churn out so much stuff. And so, I reached this point where I was like, well, I’m not creatively satisfied and I’m not financially satisfied, so what am I doing?

That’s something I was struck by reading the book and thinking about my relationship with social media and other millennials on social media is you do feel a sense of—because we as a country are putting so much pressure on the individual. You’ve got this great line: “It’s the millennial way. If the system is rigged against you, just try harder.” It’s like, it’s your problem. It’s your problem. It’s your problem. And so you see people broadcasting these filtered experiences of their own lives and you think, well, they figured it out. Why haven’t I figured it out?

Anne Helen Petersen: And we’re telling ourselves a story with each Instagram post of “I figured it out!” Right? Like if you say it enough times, if you post enough pictures of seemingly figured it out, maybe you’ll convince yourself that you figured it out. But no, it’s throwing yourself against a wall. Each time you get a little bit more bruised. We cannot do it on our own.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of WMFA, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

A former senior culture writer for BuzzFeed, Anne Helen Petersen now writes her newsletter, Culture Study, as a full-time venture on Substack. Petersen received her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, where she focused on the history of celebrity gossip. Her previous books, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud and Scandals of Classic Hollywood, were featured in NPR, Elle, and the Atlantic. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

Writing can be lonely work; WMFA counters that with conversation. It’s a show about creativity and craft, where writer and host Courtney Balestier talks shop with some of today’s best writers and examines the issues we face when we do creative work. The mission of WMFA is to explore why we writers do what we do, so that we can do it with more intention, and how we do what we do, so that we can do it better.

Deesha Philyaw’s fiction debut, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, is a National Book Award finalist. She and Courtney talk about creating complex characters, writing Black women, and staying true to your vision even in the face of rejection.

From the episode:

Courtney Balestier: I want to talk about your writing life in general, but I would love to do that via “Peach Cobbler” because I read you talking about how many times it had been rejected, and I was really struck by your commitment to your vision as you were getting this feedback. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that experience of getting this feedback that you just know doesn’t speak to the story, and how you sort of soldier on through that and are able to say, no, this is how it should be, and I’m going to stick with that until somebody agrees with me.

Deesha Philyaw: That’s one of the great things about writing a collection, is you have lots of stories and so you have less chance of becoming obsessed with getting one published. It’s like, I must get this story published—okay, it didn’t get published, I’m gonna keep working on these other things. I try to think about it in terms of fit. Not that I’m going to keep writing and rewriting to try and make this story fit this particular place, but if an entity comes back and tells me we didn’t think it was a good fit for us because of this or that or whatever, it could be useful information. Toni Morrison said that’s how we should take critique and revision—you’re just getting information. It’s not personal.

I think to the extent that you can not take the feedback personally—and it’s easier to do that if you don’t have so much at stake writing one story or even one book. Anne Lamott, I read her years ago, and she was like, listen, when you publish your book, nothing’s going to change. Your mental illness is still going to be there. If you hate your thighs, you’re still going to hate your thighs when that book comes out. And so, I think you can say on a smaller level, it’s the same for stories. Getting the story published is not going to be the thing that fixes your life. And if you’re waiting to be happy once you publish a story, that’s not really happiness. If your happiness and your sense of self-worth and your sense of your value as a writer is tied up in whether somebody at a publication wants your story or not, you’re really giving people way too much power over you. And so, it’s a matter of fit. Everything’s not for everybody. That’s what I took away from “Peach Cobbler,” is that it wasn’t a good fit for these publications. They know what they want. They know what their readers want, or they believe they do. And they decided that it wasn’t my story.

Obviously, people, never ever argue with an editor. I’m also an editor so I’m on both sides of it. If somebody tells you that, say thank you and just keep going. Don’t rewrite it and try and send it back. None of that. But what I did that was helpful was, I have other people read my work before I send it out and as I’m sending it out, so when I do get feedback—when I get a good rejection, where they tell me why and give me some feedback that I could find useful—then I go back to good writer friends of mine and share it. I also have people who read my writing who are not writers; they’re readers, but they’re good readers. They give me a a different perspective than my writer friends do.

And then my agent was an editor before she was an agent, so she’s got a great eye. There are stories I’ve sent to her before I sent out. And “Peach Cobbler” is one where one time I got feedback that it was just too long, and I looked at it, read through it again with that in mind, thinking of places that possibly could be cut out or that I was being a little indulgent or something, and I just couldn’t figure out where to cut. And so, I went to my agent and I said, this is the feedback I got. I can’t figure out where to cut. She read it again, and she’s like, I can’t think of anywhere to cut. At that point, then, it’s a matter of finding a good home for that story. I’ve done all I can do, and also I don’t want to keep working on the same story over and over again. At a certain point, I’m like, that’s it. That’s what it’s gonna be. It’s going to make it into this book or it’s not, or it will find publication somewhere or not. And that’s okay, too. We don’t have to publish everything we write.

I think just having a little bit of distance and working out stuff about self-worth and self-esteem and your purpose and all of that. It can’t be dictated by whether or not you’re publishing, because publishing is fickle, publishing is biased, publishing has a lot of shit going on with it. That’s not the thing you want driving your well-being.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of WMFA, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

Deesha Philyaw’s writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, McSweeney’s, the Rumpus, Brevity, TueNight, and elsewhere. Originally from Jacksonville, Florida, she currently lives in Pittsburgh with her daughters.