Marion Winik Interview

Marion Winik will be the nonfiction teacher at the 2014 Nightsun Writers' Conference. She teaches creative writing and publishing arts at the University of Baltimore. Growing up, Winik wrote mostly poetry. She has published numerous nonfiction books, including Telling (1994), The Lunchbox Chronicles: Notes from the Parenting Underground (1998), Highs in the Low Fifties (2013), and First Comes Love (1996) which was written based on her first husband's fatal battle with AIDS. She also writes a bi-weekly column for BaltimoreFishbowl.com called "Bohemian Rhapsody."



Was it difficult to make a transition from poetry to working on nonfiction? Do you still work on poetry?
  
When I began writing at the age of nine or so, my form of choice was poetry. Poetry gave me the freedom to examine my experiences and to speak directly from my heart, to figure out who I was and it explain it to everyone else. This urge carried me all the way through the first year of an MFA program, when a couple of poetry professors were a little mean to me and I got discouraged. Well, I thought, I’ll show you. I’ll write prose. Since it was the early 1980s – more than a decade before the first graduate program in non-fiction would open at the University of Pittsburgh – what awaited me on the other side of the line-break divide was fiction. 

Since I was still more interested in excavating my own personality and experiences than in making things up, I wrote a few autobiographical short stories, got my degree, and sputtered to a halt.

Nearly five years later, in 1987, I woke up with an idea for a piece of writing. It was called “How To Get Pregnant in the Modern World,” and it dealt with my adventures doing just that. It wasn’t a short story, it wasn’t a poem, it was a new kind of work for me and I didn’t know what to call it. I settled on the phrase “humor piece” because I had never heard the term personal essay. This turned out to be the start of a trend – for me and everybody else. Soon the personal essays of Rene Montaigne, Sei Shonagon, Virginia Woolf and E.B. White would come marching out of the library and into the pages of anthologies tracing the roots of the hot new genre. So while I had to accept that I hadn’t actually invented the personal essay after all, I did have the fun of being part of a movement.

What liberation I experienced in finding the essay form. I had always wanted to write in my own voice, an internal voice closely related to how I think and speak, rather than the more orchestrated and decorated voice I tended to use in poetry and in my autobiographical fiction. Also, I had always been more interested in writing about real life, about the narratives unfolding around me every day, than in the world of the imagination (or at least the world of my imagination – as a reader, I am a passionate fiction lover.) In discovering personal essay, the vehicle for both of these goals, I gained access to a huge, pent-up store of ideas.  The day I wrote “How To Get Pregnant,” I also wrote a list of potential themes for pieces, and it lasted me about a decade.

But yes, I still write poetry once in a while, and some of my essays are lyric essays -- writing them feels like writing poems.

Writing nonfiction differs from writing fiction, but what similarities do you find?

Writing scenes - description - setting - dialogue - from a craft perspective, these are similar in nonfiction and fiction. One has its source mostly in memory, the other mostly in imagination, but it's far from totally distinct. The blue dress a writer gives the mother in a fictional story could be the very same blue dress her real mother wears in a personal essay.

Is writing nonfiction pieces more personal, since they are rooted directly in your own life? 

Yes and no. I think people reveal themselves in fiction, but not as specifically or as inescapably as in memoir. With fiction, the writer can always say, hey, that's not me, that's a short story. Or -- that's a short story and therefore any factual basis is none of your business. But you do wonder sometimes. For example, in Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, the protagonist's addiction to oxycontin, and his attempts to control it, are described in almost obsessive detail. Of course this doesn't mean Donna Tartt is writing from experience. But at least we know it's an issue she's thought a lot about.  

Do you ever have any reservations about sharing certain life experiences in your nonfiction? If so, how do you handle those reservations? Do you write about the experiences anyway or choose to keep them private? 

I have my limits, but I'm always trying to push them because I believe the material that's scariest to write about is usually the best. That said, I have to respect the boundaries of family and friends, too. As experience has taught me, when you talk very frankly about mistakes you've made or scrapes you've gotten into, you risk being judged. It's more likely that the work will be judged ad hominem than as a piece of writing. For some readers,  confessions or revelations will be TMI, too much information. But for others they are just what is needed, the story they needed to hear most. Memoir is an underground railroad of information about what people do, how they really live their lives. It is an antidote to shame and spiritual loneliness. Sometimes it takes courage to share the darker, more complicated stuff. But far from being all narcissism and navel-gazing, it is something that can actually help other people.

With my book First Comes Love, there were people who said -- ick! I don't want to read about these nasty people and their icky lives. Others said - thank you for writing about love between a woman and a gay man. Thank you for writing about what it's like to have a partner who's an addict. Or who is dying. Plus even though these experiences are far in the past for me, they are still out there, fresh and new for the reader who opens that book for the first time, and possibly finds something she really needs to hear.




Your most recent book, Highs in the Low Fifties, is a #1 Kindle Bestseller. Have you already started working on your next book? If so, do you know what the main focus of it will be?

I've written an essay every two or three weeks for years now, posted on BaltimoreFishbowl.com, and the best have been collected into three short e-books from a new publisher called Shebooks. The collections are called Guesswork: essays on remembering and forgetting, The End of the World as We Know It: essays on parenting, and August in Paris: essays on travel; you can check them out at Shebooks.net. Also for the past few months I've been working on a comic novel about a memoirist.