Monica, congratulations! You’re one of the recipients of this year’s Alumni Award. What does this award mean to me?
This award is such a show of support and faith, at a crucial time for me. It’s an invitation to meet a community and most of all, to keep going as a writer. I appreciate it to no end.
How did you know about Iceland Writers Retreat?
A dear friend of mine attended last year, and came back eager to tell me about it. I applied at her suggestion, her enthusiasm.
Tell me about any of the faculty members you’re excited to meet at the retreat. And why do you want to take their workshops?
Most of all, I look forward to learning about the work and ideas of writers I’m not yet familiar with, and I’d love to take all of their workshops. The roster of authors looks amazing. Of course I’m a longtime fan of Jeanette Walls, Meg Wolitzer and Nicole Krauss. Stellar. Literary rockstars. It’s all really an exciting group.
What’s your favorite book and what does it mean to you and your craft as a writer?
I’m not sure I have a single favorite, though I have a number of books I turn to when I’m talking with students and others about the writing craft. One is The Vet’s Daughter, by Barbara Comyns. It’s a short novel that makes great use of the heartbreak embodied in objects left behind by a deceased mother, and it hints at a kind of interpersonal violence larger than anything directly on the page, in the heartbreak of a fragile kind of love and exploration of the world. Reading Barbara Comyns taught me about compression and depth. Other books I love are Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn, for the variety of delivery, the range of experimental chapters, illuminating creativity in memoir as a form, and anything by Octavia Butler, as well as most of Philip K Dick.
You mentioned how your friend told you about IWR and encouraged you to apply. In your opinion, what do you think is the relevance of building community and how, in your experience, has it sustained you through your writing, especially in seeking and receiving opportunities and feedback?
Writing is a communicative art. It’s about writing to somebody, real or imagined, out in the world or in our own mind, and it’s also about reading the work of others. Fostering a community is crucial and sustaining. We’re talking to each other, influencing each other, learning from each other, all the time. Everyone engaged in the practice of writing can cheer each other on and support each other in our humanity. Writing is much more of a team sport, and honestly, there may not be an opposing team. We’re in it together.
How did you come to write stories? And what does writing mean to you?
I started in the smallest way possible: with moments, words, an image. I was studying painting, and writing was another way of looking at very low-key things like light and ideas, interactions. I started with short, narrative poems and journal pages. It wasn’t until I met the author Tom Spanbauer, when I was in my mid-twenties, that my stories started to kick into gear. He’d moved from New York to Portland, Oregon, where he started teaching writing in the evenings at his kitchen table. I was among his first students, and the first to stick with it. He told us all that he was HIV positive. It was about 1990 and people weren’t living long, with HIV. He said he wanted to write the stories he needed to tell before he died. By being so honest and frank in his mortal struggle, his ideas and his values, he made the act of writing fiction become very real, important and urgent. That’s when I started writing. I’m grateful to say Tom Spanbauer is still with us, a survivor so far.
Let’s discuss your essay, What Happened to___? on Longreads. I was struck with shame by the violence meted on you and your career. But the way you handled it and became “the heroine of [your] own story” is utterly inspiring. At what point did you decide to tell this story and what inspired you to?
I wrote the essay because I felt compelled to tell others how the courts do or don’t function. So much that we know about parenting, gender and economics (in the US, and other places) is ignored by the court system in favor of rather nightmarish decisions. We know better. The world knows better, but we continue to operate with strange and gendered biases and cliches. I was trapped in court for years, in a way I’d categorize as “abusive litigation,” which is one way abusive people weaponize the court system to stay engaged with an estranged partner. It’s a way of dominating time and draining all available finances. There’s much more I could say about it, more than is in the essay. I’ve drafted additional essays, as I gain distance from the emotional weight of the entire process. It may be something I’ll work on for some time. I’ve heard from others though that my essay kicked off a new area of discussion, among some writers.
Looking at the words from the “men’s rights” lawyer who bemoaned you and the verdict of the judge —a woman—to give one hundred percent of your marital fund to your ex-husband, I begin to think of how patriarchy wishes to stymie women’s freedom. It’s disproportionately appalling that many people, even women like that judge, don’t grasp the meaning of feminism, and would utterly sit with patriarchy to embarrass the concept of feminism because—those enablers are unaware—patriarchy hates rivalry but likes oppressive dominance!
Patriarchy sees itself as a giant because someone else has to be dwarfed.
I agree.
What do you think is the role of nostalgia and optimism in writing, especially in literature that centers women today? And how can literature be a revolutionary tool to tumble down the bricks of patriarchy?
We need to really look at the stories we tell, paying attention to when they reach toward something like an emotional or human truth–even in the most and when they only reproduce the stories we’ve been told for generations about gender, power, behaviors, all of it. We are the stories we tell. Some stories are mired in cliches and that’s damaging to real lives. What does it mean to be a person, anywhere on the continuum of gender, race, age, or other markers too often used to create dehumanizing hierarchies? Literature is the counterbalance to those systems.
Many thanks for speaking with me, Monica. Enjoy your retreat in Reykjavik.
Thank you so much!
Monica Drake is the author of two novels, including Clown Girl (Hawthorne Books) and The Stud Book (Hogarth) and a collection of linked short stories, The Folly of Loving Life (Future Tense Books). Her essays and stories have appeared in the Paris Review, the New York Times (Modern Love), Oregon Humanities Magazine, The Sun and many other publications online and in print.
This interview was conducted by Okechi Okeke, a 2020 recipient of Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award.
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