Hello evolutionists, revolutionists, and experimenters of all sorts!
For our final summer round up of our favorite shows, Write-minded chose Maggie Smith and Shze-Hui Tjoa, highlighting two bright lights in the Memoirsphere who are elevating the genre and showcasing new ways of thinking about memoir. It’s an exciting time to be a memoirist and a memoir reader, and if you missed these two interviews the first time around—or even if you didn’t—make sure to catch the insights and inspiration of these two groundbreaking writers.
Some forthcoming memoirs we have our eyes on:
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case
All Our Ordinary Stories by Teresa Wong
First in the Family by Jessica Hoppe
Gather Me by Glory Edim
The Gloomy Girl Variety Show by Freda Epum
Frighten the Horses by Oliver Radclyffe
The Flitting by Ben Masters
Partial transcript from the show
Brooke: I’m Brooke Warner—podcast host #1 this week, though for just as many weeks of the year I’m podcast host #2. Here with Grant Faulkner—my #1 and #2 cohost. Grant, today’s final mashup episode of August takes us back to two memoirists who are contributing to the changing face of memoir. If you’ve been listening to us this year, you know we’ve been tracking a memoir revolution, and leading the charge in this movement are the two memoirists we’ve chosen to re-feature this week—Maggie Smith and Shze-Hui Tjoa. This is probably my favorite of the mashups just because I went down a rabbit hole with both these books and both these authors. I’m a fan, a lover of their books, and a champion of their writing. I talk about both of them a lot, have used their books in my teaching. Listeners, if you missed either episode, you really must go back. These are two keepers. And Grant, I know you were moved by Maggie’s interview in particular. What stood out to you?
Grant: I was amazed how similar our writing processes were. You know, that’s one purpose of a podcast like Write-minded, I think. We get to truly travel into a writer’s creative process, and sometimes authors only get to talk about their books, not their processes. With Maggie, it was actually validating to hear that we shared a process of writing vignettes and then stitching together a quilt of a story through all of these little patches. It was interesting also because she’s primarily a poet, and she took a poetic approach to her prose, and I find myself doing more of that as well. But then, as you mention, it’s not just Maggie and me who are doing this, we’re unwittingly part of an aesthetic trend.
Brooke: Alright, well—the interviews speak for themselves and we’re focusing part of these August mashup sessions on things having to do with summer. Grant, this is the final week of August, and so my question for you is what your thoughts are about summer being a down time in general. Is it downtime, has it ever been downtime, and do you find summer relaxing?
Grant: Oh, to live the glorious summers of my past again. They were once a downtime period. I was actually just telling my kids a story, how when I graduated with my MFA when I was 29, I had a summer before I was moving from San Francisco to Tucson, and I branded it my rock n’ roll summer, and I went to the beach nearly every day. I think that was my last truly youthful summer, and I think the thing about adulting is that work demands don’t recognize the seasons. I know there’s still a tradition in New York Publishing to take what they call “summer Fridays” off so people can leave the city for the weekend, and publishing still pretty much shuts down in August I hear. How about you, Brooke?
Brooke: I think once upon of time I might have found summer relaxing, but now I really don’t. I’m not sure if it’s because work is unchanging for me. It’s always busy, pretty much. Or if it’s because I’m a mom. I’m sure that’s part of it. This year was actually the least relaxing of any summer I can remember because James is thirteen. And I’m going to say the obvious for anyone who has a teenager or who’s parented a teenager—summers suck. Because your teen doesn’t want to go to camp. They want freedom and they want to have a chill summer, but they are at the same time in need of structure. James is so much happier on days when he goes outside, plays sports, interacts with other kids. But it’s a real push-pull on that front. This is the first summer that I got conned by my own child to not enroll him in any kind of camp, which backfired in Week 2 of summer when I realized that he was just lying in bed or on the couch all day on his phone. So then I was scrambling to find camps that were still enrolling. So yeah, it’s not been stress-free. Grant, your kids are older now but I’m sure these teen years don’t feel all that far in your past. . . .
Grant: They don’t feel that far in the past, and I’m super glad I don’t have to put schedule kids’ camps on my list because that was logistically challenging with two kids, not to mention being financially challenging. Just to close your story, Brooke, James is in camp now, yes?
Brooke: He is—yes. 6 hours a day with a promise from me that he only has to go four days a week. But yes.
Grant: It’s a strange and beautiful moment when you discover your child is a capable individual with agency who’s starting to assert themselves in various ways, making choices but also in need of boundaries and rules. And speaking of agency and choice, we know that you, our listeners, make a choice every time you hit play on this podcast—so thank you for cruising through this summer with us. And now, Maggie and Shze-Hui.
ABOUT MAGGIE SMITH & SHZE-HUI TJOA
Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, and more. Shze-Hui Tjoa is a writer from Singapore who lives in the UK. She is a nonfiction editor at Sundog Lit, and previously served as fiction editor of Exposition Review. Her work has been published in journals including Colorado Review, Southeast Review, and So to Speak. Her work has received support from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, and AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship Program. Her debut memoir is The Story Game.