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I N T E R V I E W S
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Inverted Syntax’s Editorial Assistant Allissa Hertz continues her talk with Kathryn Winograd in part two of this interview. They do a deeper dive into Katheryn's new book, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, which is releasing today, March 16th. Get your copy at https://kathrynwinograd.com/books/
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"This book was about, not just the environment, which I'm so passionate about, but my mother coming here. It was harder because, I worry, did I tread on my mother's privacy? We're trying to find that balance. I wanted to show my mother, and the journey she was going through, and how we were going through it together."
Listen to Part 2 of the interview:
Transcript of the Interview : |
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A: Your last collection of essays was centered around your own perspective. Your new collection of essays is often centered around your mother’s perspective. How does that change the stories?
K: Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation- I'd been raped when I was 13 years old. I had never written about it. I had been hurt by it. And there was something in The Denver Post a number of years ago, they used to have a section where readers could submit a piece. And I did. I had seen this prompt in a craft book called Write Something You're Afraid Of. So, I wrote about the rape and it was published in The Denver Post. As I started learning more about creative nonfiction, I wrote a new piece. We had the cabin and we had just moved in there. We got this beautiful bathtub. This will show you a strand, a beautiful clawfoot bathtub. We had it in our cabin. And I remember I was taking a bath and I had the window open. It was kind of cold outside. And if I lifted my leg up, there was steam that would come off my leg. I thought that it looked like milk. I ended up writing this draft of an essay about bathing. It was just how beautiful it was to bathe up here. We had a well and I knew that the water came from the well. We had to dig so deep, 460 feet down. It was awful expensive. So this water is coming up from the center of the earth. I just loved it. Then, my husband read it. He's a writer. And he goes, “Gah. You're not writing about bathing?” And I'm like, “Yeah, I’m writing about the bathing. I love my bathtub.” He says, “No. You're writing about having been raped.” I ended up writing that piece. It became a seminal piece in that book, because it was me recognizing that as a woman, I had come to terms with it. That book was really about me and my trying to understand what had happened to me. This book was about, not just the environment, which I'm so passionate about, but my mother coming here. It was harder because, I worry, did I tread on my mother's privacy? We're trying to find that balance. I wanted to show my mother, and the journey she was going through, and how we were going through it together. The book really ended up with an arc for me. But I didn't want to hurt my mother. I didn't want to overexpose her for what she is going through, which has been very difficult. My father's been dead since 1999. My mom thought she would die in her 70s. She wanted to die in her 70s. She's going to be 91 in April. She is not a happy camper. And then, here she comes to me and I suddenly have power of attorney. I feel all this responsibility. I think it was really trying to find a way to tell her story in these essays and the stories that were important to me, because I made important discoveries in this book that were honorable to my mother, but also true. I think that was the hard part. I remember as coming to Ashland to teach as a poet, hearing those creative nonfiction people talking about truth. I'm like, “what?” When did you ever worry about truth in a poem? I mean, you can lie. You can be metaphoric. It was so important. I never really understood what that meant. And then Regis asked me for the winter to do a seminar about the ethics of creative nonfiction and I did all this research for. And wow, that was a stunner for me to see all the facets of that. You know, I don't want to hurt anyone. Even if things were hurtful to me I hope that I can approach what happened to me, what I'm writing about, what my mother's going through, our relationship, trying to reconcile things that had happened between us, that had happened with my father in a place of wisdom, and empathy, and understanding. And I think that was the challenge, to make sure that I was there. And that there was nothing there that was out of anger, but out of understanding.
A: That’s a really amazing thing to be able to do.
K: You just have to be there spiritually and emotionally in that place to do it. So many off with students that I've worked with will try to approach something that has happened to them too early and they are still angry. They're still sad. They're still grieving. They still need to work it out. I think you need to take that space because I, myself, don't like writing is a place to attack people. It's a place to try to understand them and to understand my relationship with them, their relationship with the world. And that takes some time, a little bit of distance.
A: So you mentioned your husband, Leonard Winograd.
K: Yes.
A: He recently had an essay featured in River Teeth Journal Issue 21.1 called “The Physics of Sorrow.” You wrote a post on your blog about helping him revise this piece. You talk a little bit in that post about hot spots. And I always wonder whenever I hear that two writers are in a relationship together, how that goes. And you explore that a little bit in that essay. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. Do you step on each other's toes?
K: Well, this was a great experience. My husband's a playwright. I met him at Iowa 35 years ago. We ended up getting married. It's difficult in the playwriting world, because it's hard to get a play done. He has had some done. And I said, “why don’t you write an essay?” because he's very good at it. He never would do it. And then finally, I got him to do it. And I was able to teach him a little bit about the braided essay, because I said, “this is what you need to do.” And then it was fascinating to sit back and watch him just take over and just kind of explode this essay. Our daughter had, had some seizures at the beginning of last year that just totally, completely rocked our world. And my husband wrote about that. He ended up using black holes as a metaphoric frame for that. So he got that in River Teeth, which I was excited about. And then I went to Essay Daily, which is an online journal where people write essays about other essays. And I said, “look, my husband did this. I want to write about this 'cause I did a seminar for Regis last summer about Leonard's process of writing this, the process of revision.” And I said, “it got such great response. I feel like some people could learn from it.” And they said, “yes, let's do it.” So it was very cool. Leonard published that in River Teeth. Then Essay Daily published my essay about his essay. River Teeth then advertised that it was there. Everybody’s linked up. The internet is incredible. So that was really fun. Being married to another writer can be really wonderful. I mean, he is the person I can go to with my work and say, “read this. What do you what do you think?” And then he will give me an honest opinion. And he's very good. I will get mad at him sometimes because I'm like, “no.” But then I'll more often than not I’ll see what he’s saying. I understand what he’s saying. We can talk about writers. We can talk about what we read. I mean, it's a rich life. It's a rich life together, because we have that whole dimension, this whole thing that we're both very passionate about. It’s a good thing if you can be with another writer. If I was a playwright and we were competing against each other, maybe it'd be hard, but we’re doing such different stuff that it was kind of in sync, basically.
A: That's awesome. We talked a little bit about your book coming out. And we're gonna have a link on the site so that everyone can go and pre-order that.
K: Yes, they can pre-order the book!
A: If it's after March 2020 and you're listening to this, you can buy the book.
K: Yes. You can do that. And I'm doing a book celebration on March 29th at the book bar. People are invited to have food and drink and I'll read from it and celebrate. And then I’m reading at a few other places. But yes. Yes, the book. Get the book. That’d be great.
K: Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation- I'd been raped when I was 13 years old. I had never written about it. I had been hurt by it. And there was something in The Denver Post a number of years ago, they used to have a section where readers could submit a piece. And I did. I had seen this prompt in a craft book called Write Something You're Afraid Of. So, I wrote about the rape and it was published in The Denver Post. As I started learning more about creative nonfiction, I wrote a new piece. We had the cabin and we had just moved in there. We got this beautiful bathtub. This will show you a strand, a beautiful clawfoot bathtub. We had it in our cabin. And I remember I was taking a bath and I had the window open. It was kind of cold outside. And if I lifted my leg up, there was steam that would come off my leg. I thought that it looked like milk. I ended up writing this draft of an essay about bathing. It was just how beautiful it was to bathe up here. We had a well and I knew that the water came from the well. We had to dig so deep, 460 feet down. It was awful expensive. So this water is coming up from the center of the earth. I just loved it. Then, my husband read it. He's a writer. And he goes, “Gah. You're not writing about bathing?” And I'm like, “Yeah, I’m writing about the bathing. I love my bathtub.” He says, “No. You're writing about having been raped.” I ended up writing that piece. It became a seminal piece in that book, because it was me recognizing that as a woman, I had come to terms with it. That book was really about me and my trying to understand what had happened to me. This book was about, not just the environment, which I'm so passionate about, but my mother coming here. It was harder because, I worry, did I tread on my mother's privacy? We're trying to find that balance. I wanted to show my mother, and the journey she was going through, and how we were going through it together. The book really ended up with an arc for me. But I didn't want to hurt my mother. I didn't want to overexpose her for what she is going through, which has been very difficult. My father's been dead since 1999. My mom thought she would die in her 70s. She wanted to die in her 70s. She's going to be 91 in April. She is not a happy camper. And then, here she comes to me and I suddenly have power of attorney. I feel all this responsibility. I think it was really trying to find a way to tell her story in these essays and the stories that were important to me, because I made important discoveries in this book that were honorable to my mother, but also true. I think that was the hard part. I remember as coming to Ashland to teach as a poet, hearing those creative nonfiction people talking about truth. I'm like, “what?” When did you ever worry about truth in a poem? I mean, you can lie. You can be metaphoric. It was so important. I never really understood what that meant. And then Regis asked me for the winter to do a seminar about the ethics of creative nonfiction and I did all this research for. And wow, that was a stunner for me to see all the facets of that. You know, I don't want to hurt anyone. Even if things were hurtful to me I hope that I can approach what happened to me, what I'm writing about, what my mother's going through, our relationship, trying to reconcile things that had happened between us, that had happened with my father in a place of wisdom, and empathy, and understanding. And I think that was the challenge, to make sure that I was there. And that there was nothing there that was out of anger, but out of understanding.
A: That’s a really amazing thing to be able to do.
K: You just have to be there spiritually and emotionally in that place to do it. So many off with students that I've worked with will try to approach something that has happened to them too early and they are still angry. They're still sad. They're still grieving. They still need to work it out. I think you need to take that space because I, myself, don't like writing is a place to attack people. It's a place to try to understand them and to understand my relationship with them, their relationship with the world. And that takes some time, a little bit of distance.
A: So you mentioned your husband, Leonard Winograd.
K: Yes.
A: He recently had an essay featured in River Teeth Journal Issue 21.1 called “The Physics of Sorrow.” You wrote a post on your blog about helping him revise this piece. You talk a little bit in that post about hot spots. And I always wonder whenever I hear that two writers are in a relationship together, how that goes. And you explore that a little bit in that essay. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. Do you step on each other's toes?
K: Well, this was a great experience. My husband's a playwright. I met him at Iowa 35 years ago. We ended up getting married. It's difficult in the playwriting world, because it's hard to get a play done. He has had some done. And I said, “why don’t you write an essay?” because he's very good at it. He never would do it. And then finally, I got him to do it. And I was able to teach him a little bit about the braided essay, because I said, “this is what you need to do.” And then it was fascinating to sit back and watch him just take over and just kind of explode this essay. Our daughter had, had some seizures at the beginning of last year that just totally, completely rocked our world. And my husband wrote about that. He ended up using black holes as a metaphoric frame for that. So he got that in River Teeth, which I was excited about. And then I went to Essay Daily, which is an online journal where people write essays about other essays. And I said, “look, my husband did this. I want to write about this 'cause I did a seminar for Regis last summer about Leonard's process of writing this, the process of revision.” And I said, “it got such great response. I feel like some people could learn from it.” And they said, “yes, let's do it.” So it was very cool. Leonard published that in River Teeth. Then Essay Daily published my essay about his essay. River Teeth then advertised that it was there. Everybody’s linked up. The internet is incredible. So that was really fun. Being married to another writer can be really wonderful. I mean, he is the person I can go to with my work and say, “read this. What do you what do you think?” And then he will give me an honest opinion. And he's very good. I will get mad at him sometimes because I'm like, “no.” But then I'll more often than not I’ll see what he’s saying. I understand what he’s saying. We can talk about writers. We can talk about what we read. I mean, it's a rich life. It's a rich life together, because we have that whole dimension, this whole thing that we're both very passionate about. It’s a good thing if you can be with another writer. If I was a playwright and we were competing against each other, maybe it'd be hard, but we’re doing such different stuff that it was kind of in sync, basically.
A: That's awesome. We talked a little bit about your book coming out. And we're gonna have a link on the site so that everyone can go and pre-order that.
K: Yes, they can pre-order the book!
A: If it's after March 2020 and you're listening to this, you can buy the book.
K: Yes. You can do that. And I'm doing a book celebration on March 29th at the book bar. People are invited to have food and drink and I'll read from it and celebrate. And then I’m reading at a few other places. But yes. Yes, the book. Get the book. That’d be great.
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A: Awesome. And I know you're really gonna be working on promoting the book and that takes a lot of your time. Are you already thinking about what you're gonna be writing next?
K: Well, I'm already involved in another project. There is something called the Pink Progression Movement. And I found out about it because a friend of mine, Trine Bumiller, who's a wonderful painter here in Denver, shows everywhere. It's with the Arvada Center. She asked me if I would collaborate with her. She is doing a series of paintings. And I'm doing a series of poems. And they will be exhibited at the Arvada Center with a whole bunch of other people, other artists who are collaborating. It's a big collaboration called the Pink Progression Collaborations. The opening reception is at the Arvada Center and that is on June 4th from 6 to 9 PM. And we'll be doing a reading from that. And then as part of that, then they came back, the pink people– we call them the pink people– came back to me and asked me if I would be interested in being part of a book that they're putting together with artists and writers who are involved in this Pink Progression. I asked a dear friend of mine, Carol Guerroro-Murphy who's a poet and activist here in Denver, if she would want to do a collaboration. And we are finishing that up. We've done a series of letter poems back and forth to each other. They will be in a book. We will send that to them before the 8th, because it's due. So that's been really fun. And then there will be a reading for that. And that is going to be on March 14th at the McNichols Civic Center. From 1 to 3 PM is when the book people are going to read. And then the painters/writers thing is going to be on June 4th. So that's been fun. It's nice to have done the creative nonfiction and now come back full circle to poetry. My poetry has changed, I think, because I've done creative nonfiction. We'll see how it goes. But it's been great to do this collaboration. It's been a really cool thing with both Trine and with Carol.
A: Yeah. That sounds really amazing.
K: It is, yeah.
A: The last question that I like to ask is just anything that you would like to add that you'd like to say to your readers? Anything extra that's going on with you.
K: I'm going to ask them to go to my website. I do a blog now. We were just talking about blogs and snickering about blogs. But, you know, I think I'm practicing, because I actually want to start doing some freelance writing. I think I'm practicing doing this. I think what I would say to the readers out there is keep writing. Go to classes. Go to workshops and share your adventures with other people. This has been a pretty amazing last few months for me. I read something, and I cannot remember. I think it’s in Poets & Writers or something. I wish I could find it now. Some writer– and I think this is bigger than this, because I think some actress did this. But this writer wrote about the year of saying yes. And so the year of saying yes, you say yes to everything. And then you send out the things you never expected to have happen. And I thought, I am going to do the year of saying yes. I retired in May from Arapahoe Community College, which was really very nice, but very busy and time consuming. I just said, OK, yes, I'm going to finish this collection of essays. Because it had taken me so long. And then I got done. And I felt like I'm finally done. And just to finally put the period at the end of it. I thought, OK, this is going to take me forever to try to publish these, because I’m going to try to find an agent. I'm going to try to find an editor. But I'm just going to go to Poets & Writers. And I'm just going to see if there's any publishers out there that are looking for a book now. I found The Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. And then there was the Saddle Road Press, they were having an open reading. I thought, all right, I'm going to send this there just because this is going to be my way of telling myself I'm done with this book. I'm going to move on to something else. And then seven days later, I got an e-mail from them. They loved the book. They wanted to publish it. And at first, I thought, oh, my gosh, no, because this can't be possible, because it was so quick. And I was planning on doing all this stuff. But then I thought, you know, if I say no to this, there goes the year saying, yes. I thought, this would be kind of cool to retire, say yes to this, to the book, and work on the book, and that's been actually a wonderful experience working with this press. They've been really so supportive and did just a wonderful job on the book design. And then I said yes to the Pink Progressions. And then I said yes to various other things that I'm doing. I guess what I want to say to people is have a year of saying yes. I mean, just say yes. And just go with it. This woman in Poets & Writers said she had more rejection than she'd ever had because she said yes. And she would also submit to things where she would always say, oh, no, I couldn't possibly get in there. But she said she got things that she never expected to get. And that's been pretty wonderful for her. And it's been pretty wonderful for me. I would say keep reading. Keep writing. Don't give up. Say yes. And, you know, there's so many different ways to become published, to just go for it
About
Kathryn Winograd, writer@9600ft, is the author of Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation, an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award Finalist, and Air Into Breath, a Colorado Book Award winner in Poetry and Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, a collection of essays forthcoming from Saddle Road Press (March 2020.) Her essays have been notable in The Best American Essays and her poetry has received three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Special Pushcart Prize Mention as well as won the Chautauqua Literary Journal’s Poetry contest on War and Peace and the Writers Digest Annual Writing Competition for non-rhyming poetry. Winograd’s essays and poems have published widely in journals such as Fourth Genre, River Teeth, and Hotel Amerika and Cricket magazine and The New Yorker. She currently teaches poetry and creative nonfiction for Regis University’s Mile-High MFA program.
Kathryn Winograd, writer@9600ft, is the author of Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation, an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award Finalist, and Air Into Breath, a Colorado Book Award winner in Poetry and Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, a collection of essays forthcoming from Saddle Road Press (March 2020.) Her essays have been notable in The Best American Essays and her poetry has received three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Special Pushcart Prize Mention as well as won the Chautauqua Literary Journal’s Poetry contest on War and Peace and the Writers Digest Annual Writing Competition for non-rhyming poetry. Winograd’s essays and poems have published widely in journals such as Fourth Genre, River Teeth, and Hotel Amerika and Cricket magazine and The New Yorker. She currently teaches poetry and creative nonfiction for Regis University’s Mile-High MFA program.
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