Part 1: The Personal On the Page
An Interview with Sandra Beasley
On Thursday, October 6th, 2016, Sandra Beasley came to perform her poetry and nonfiction as part of Central Michigan University’s Visiting Writers Series. Earlier that day, Zachary Riddle and Regan Schaeffer had the opportunity to meet with Sandra to talk about her writing. Sandra has authored three full-length books of poetry, including Theories of Falling, I Was the Jukebox, and Count the Waves. Sandra’s poetry has also appeared in several anthologies, including the forthcoming anthology The Golden Shovel (University of Arkansas Press).
Photo: Kennen White |
Regan: It seems from my experience, and also in reading others’ work, that memoirists need to balance our own personal expression with our implicit bid for reader empathy and understanding. That is, there's some self-discipline required to reach for and structure a more universal story out of our own personal experience and our need to present that personal experience. In Don’t Kill The Birthday Girl, you research and advocate for the community of people who experience life-threatening anaphylactic reaction, allergies. What writing decisions did you make, using your own life history as a structure, to communicate the emotional enormity of that experience without tipping into self-pity or melodrama?
Sandra: Well, one reality about bringing a book like Don't Kill The Birthday Girl to market is that you have conversations about marketing. I definitely had to think about how to invite a broad base of readers in. Even though there are millions of people who self-identify as having food allergy, those who I really needed to reach were the many millions more people who, regardless of their own physical issues, could identify with me. That could be a person who feel left out of something that, for everyone else, was a universal community-building experience. And I think we all have “things,” whether it is a physical disability that keeps one from being as mobile as everyone else around them, or a personality trait that means you feel left out of a conversation over and over…so, locating the central human vulnerability in the personal story is part of what you have to do to tap into that big market.
In terms of bringing my own material into a book, my initial view when talking to publishers was that this would be a cultural history of allergy, with my personal history being an entry point but not a focal point. But what they said was, no, we want a memoir. So, I was essentially striking a balance between my own impulses.
This is going to sound very pragmatic, but it's true. As a poet turned nonfiction writer, the literal length of the project I’d signed up for intimidated me—60,000 words is a lot of words when you’re used to writing a one-page poem. So, to make that manageable, I thought, okay: I'm going to define 10 chapters of 5-6000 words each, and, within that, each chapter is going to have three sections, and within that, I’m going to alternate between two sections of personal to one section of research, or two sections of research and one section of personal, so fourteen total sections depending on, theme by theme, how much material I had to bring to the table. And then, each of those 1,500 or 2,000 word sections would be anchored by an 800-word memory—a sort of vignette with scene and character. So, in other words, just as a function of needing to get the book written on a one-year deadline, I had to systematically figure out how and where to thread my personal experience in.
One of the takeaways, based on talking to people who have read it, is that it feels like my personal experience is really integrated into a much bigger world. So that worked out well for me.
Regan: Well, the book clearly presents an emotional perspective—it sounds as though, from your answer, the impetus from the book was more to communicate this broader understanding and experience, rather than as a therapeutic tool that many of us need, to express our life in memoir form.
Sandra: This was not the first time I’d written about food allergies. If you look at Theories of Falling, my first collection, there’s a series of poems with the title “Allergy Girl.” Those were initiated in the final semester of my graduate school experience. You don’t really see them in my MFA thesis, but they provided a lot of outgoing energy to keep writing post-MFA. And, if you look at those poems, some incidents you see in both the memoir and the poems. Some incidents or relationship dynamics are only in the poems, and those tend to be more of a cathartic, or maybe therapeutic, impulse. …So, just to add a third category, there are some incidents that are in the poems, but certain details are different. Because at the end of the day, poems don’t have a stipulated truth value—you can change things for impact, right? But, not so with memoir.
While I was writing those poems, one of the things I realized was that there was so much back-story. There was a so-much-larger context of scientific, factual, and historical information that I needed that I just couldn’t cram into the poems. That was part of what made me want to write about it in creative nonfiction. In the respect that you’re describing, that kind of emotional impulse, if you really want to understand my experience of allergy, you have to read both.
In addition, for the nonfiction project that I’m working on now, I have another essay on allergies that is specifically on EpiPen carrying and usage. There’s a lot of politics surrounding the EpiPens, so it’s been really interesting to watch the recent controversies in the news with the rise in price of the Mylan brand epinephrine injector. That essay will hopefully be part of a book that will be out in the future, which Dinty Moore is editing. Again: same life material, but different tone, different purpose, different creative project.
Regan: I'm thrilled that you segued neatly into my next question: Your daily physical life has required a minutia of care and attention. How has this imposed structure influenced your approach to your work, as seen in your extensive research and referencing, structure and form, juxtaposed to the power and almost defiance of care and fussiness that we can feel in your poetry?
I'm also trying to ask about a defiance to always having to be this structured. I read your memoir first, and then read the two books of poetry. There is so much power there, not of denial, but of the feeling, “let’s break through the boundaries.” If that makes sense as a question, can you describe how you use that in your work?
Sandra: Well, there's going to be a heightened sense of mortality. If you look at the history of a lot of poets, in their biographies, there’s some reason—whether it be their own physicality or the physicality of someone close to them—where they have, from the get-go, a kind of organic and heightened sense of their mortality. Poetry, at the end of the day, is about sex and death, you know? We find our ways to feel particularly urgent in our approach to that material.
I've said this before, but the nature of my allergies means I am hyper-aware of the physical moments in the world around me. I’m really attentive to detail; even last night when I was making dinner, little moments like someone setting a cutting board down and it coming into contact with a unwashed dish that might have had milk on it—I have to be paying attention, not only to what I'm doing, but to what everyone else is doing and scout that out. So I think that vigilance trained, ultimately, what became my sensibility as a writer and of what would become my life’s work.
I also think that when you’re trying, as a child, to come to understand a fairly sophisticated medical condition—a lot of times we use metaphors to explain it, right? So one thing that I've noted is that poets are almost maddeningly good when they cross over to creative nonfiction. As a teacher, I often find that in a creative nonfiction workshop, where many writers come from a different first genre, the poets do better at it than the fiction writers. Which really annoys the fiction writers, because they’re like: we’re the ones who spend time with prose, so why is this so much harder for us? Poets are always looking for the framing metaphor. So for me, as a child, before I was a writer, I was looking for metaphor.
I'm interested in that secondary tension that you mentioned, just that sense of rebellion or defiance; being aware of one's mortality and sort of choosing to disregard that awareness at times. That’s at the core of what I'm writing about in this new essay. Nuance like that gets lost in the controversy around the rising price of EpiPens. It's not like an AIDS medication or cancer treatment, where the idea is to purchase it and use it. The weird thing about EpiPens is that we buy them, and hope to never use them. We carry them around for year, and then they have to be replaced. There's a whole culture of people, particularly in my generation, who have never used their EpiPen, even though they've spent a lifetime carrying it around.
Regan: You mentioned in your memoir that you've never used [an EpiPen], and people that you spoke with had never actually used it.
Sandra: I have had exposure to epinephrine in-hospital situations, but I've never self-administered.
Regan: So, what is that about? I mean, I have a Xanax prescription that I've been carrying around for 10 years because of extreme anxiety being in the passenger seat of a car, and I never take them! [Sandra laughs] I'm trying to find a common ground, because, clearly, there's a difference between can I handle this anxiety? And can I handle my throat closing? So, what is it that keeps people from ever using one?
Sandra: Well, frankly, that's a bigger question than I can answer for purposes of an interview, which is why I'm trying to write about it. But I do think that it’s a self-articulated boundary that somehow feels meaningful to cross, and I do think—I don't know—if I had been raised with the current generation of kids, I don't know that I would be at this age and still have never self-administered my EpiPen. Attitudes are changing organically, based on how it's approached.
My parents, my doctors, when I was six and seven and having these reactions— they wouldn't have used the EpiPen, either. It's not just that I was rebellious, it's that the whole culture resisted it. The definition of anaphylaxis was different. So, we’re just talking about a collision, or a push-and-pull between very different medicalized cultures. And that does have a corollary to Xanax, because I think that 30 years ago, you would only have prescribed a mood-altering medication like lLithium in what were deemed “severe, extreme” situations, with the risk of psychological break otherwise. But that has changed. Medication is now viewed by many as an appropriate, almost a preemptive measure. So that’s a gulf that someone who is twenty and had that same Xanax prescription wouldn't feel like they were crossing, in some severe way.
Regan: I appreciate your delving into this, and I understand that this is a larger topic than what we can get into in this setting, but I think you have begun to answer my question, so I'll look forward to reading your essay about it.
Sandra: The only thing that I would add is—and this is in the essay, so hold tight—but there's a writer who is unfortunately no longer with us: his name is Tom Andrews. He began as a poet and wrote a collection called The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle. He had hemophilia and he wrote a memoir before his death that, among other things, interrogated the notion that people with disabilities are often expected to hold themselves to some type of “higher” code of behavior, and the unfairness of that. So, if you have cerebral palsy, you're not allowed to get drunk, because it’s especially unsafe if you fall. We’re allowed to make mistakes, and we're allowed to take risks. We’re “allowed” to do anything, and, yet, there is heightened expectation about taking responsibility for ourselves.
Regan: I think you’re also speaking to part of my earlier question. We’re not talking about denial, or rebellion, because it's not necessarily extreme behavior. But it's a push against the limits that we all have—some of us, more than others.
Sandra: Well, one reality about bringing a book like Don't Kill The Birthday Girl to market is that you have conversations about marketing. I definitely had to think about how to invite a broad base of readers in. Even though there are millions of people who self-identify as having food allergy, those who I really needed to reach were the many millions more people who, regardless of their own physical issues, could identify with me. That could be a person who feel left out of something that, for everyone else, was a universal community-building experience. And I think we all have “things,” whether it is a physical disability that keeps one from being as mobile as everyone else around them, or a personality trait that means you feel left out of a conversation over and over…so, locating the central human vulnerability in the personal story is part of what you have to do to tap into that big market.
In terms of bringing my own material into a book, my initial view when talking to publishers was that this would be a cultural history of allergy, with my personal history being an entry point but not a focal point. But what they said was, no, we want a memoir. So, I was essentially striking a balance between my own impulses.
This is going to sound very pragmatic, but it's true. As a poet turned nonfiction writer, the literal length of the project I’d signed up for intimidated me—60,000 words is a lot of words when you’re used to writing a one-page poem. So, to make that manageable, I thought, okay: I'm going to define 10 chapters of 5-6000 words each, and, within that, each chapter is going to have three sections, and within that, I’m going to alternate between two sections of personal to one section of research, or two sections of research and one section of personal, so fourteen total sections depending on, theme by theme, how much material I had to bring to the table. And then, each of those 1,500 or 2,000 word sections would be anchored by an 800-word memory—a sort of vignette with scene and character. So, in other words, just as a function of needing to get the book written on a one-year deadline, I had to systematically figure out how and where to thread my personal experience in.
One of the takeaways, based on talking to people who have read it, is that it feels like my personal experience is really integrated into a much bigger world. So that worked out well for me.
Regan: Well, the book clearly presents an emotional perspective—it sounds as though, from your answer, the impetus from the book was more to communicate this broader understanding and experience, rather than as a therapeutic tool that many of us need, to express our life in memoir form.
Sandra: This was not the first time I’d written about food allergies. If you look at Theories of Falling, my first collection, there’s a series of poems with the title “Allergy Girl.” Those were initiated in the final semester of my graduate school experience. You don’t really see them in my MFA thesis, but they provided a lot of outgoing energy to keep writing post-MFA. And, if you look at those poems, some incidents you see in both the memoir and the poems. Some incidents or relationship dynamics are only in the poems, and those tend to be more of a cathartic, or maybe therapeutic, impulse. …So, just to add a third category, there are some incidents that are in the poems, but certain details are different. Because at the end of the day, poems don’t have a stipulated truth value—you can change things for impact, right? But, not so with memoir.
While I was writing those poems, one of the things I realized was that there was so much back-story. There was a so-much-larger context of scientific, factual, and historical information that I needed that I just couldn’t cram into the poems. That was part of what made me want to write about it in creative nonfiction. In the respect that you’re describing, that kind of emotional impulse, if you really want to understand my experience of allergy, you have to read both.
In addition, for the nonfiction project that I’m working on now, I have another essay on allergies that is specifically on EpiPen carrying and usage. There’s a lot of politics surrounding the EpiPens, so it’s been really interesting to watch the recent controversies in the news with the rise in price of the Mylan brand epinephrine injector. That essay will hopefully be part of a book that will be out in the future, which Dinty Moore is editing. Again: same life material, but different tone, different purpose, different creative project.
Regan: I'm thrilled that you segued neatly into my next question: Your daily physical life has required a minutia of care and attention. How has this imposed structure influenced your approach to your work, as seen in your extensive research and referencing, structure and form, juxtaposed to the power and almost defiance of care and fussiness that we can feel in your poetry?
I'm also trying to ask about a defiance to always having to be this structured. I read your memoir first, and then read the two books of poetry. There is so much power there, not of denial, but of the feeling, “let’s break through the boundaries.” If that makes sense as a question, can you describe how you use that in your work?
Sandra: Well, there's going to be a heightened sense of mortality. If you look at the history of a lot of poets, in their biographies, there’s some reason—whether it be their own physicality or the physicality of someone close to them—where they have, from the get-go, a kind of organic and heightened sense of their mortality. Poetry, at the end of the day, is about sex and death, you know? We find our ways to feel particularly urgent in our approach to that material.
I've said this before, but the nature of my allergies means I am hyper-aware of the physical moments in the world around me. I’m really attentive to detail; even last night when I was making dinner, little moments like someone setting a cutting board down and it coming into contact with a unwashed dish that might have had milk on it—I have to be paying attention, not only to what I'm doing, but to what everyone else is doing and scout that out. So I think that vigilance trained, ultimately, what became my sensibility as a writer and of what would become my life’s work.
I also think that when you’re trying, as a child, to come to understand a fairly sophisticated medical condition—a lot of times we use metaphors to explain it, right? So one thing that I've noted is that poets are almost maddeningly good when they cross over to creative nonfiction. As a teacher, I often find that in a creative nonfiction workshop, where many writers come from a different first genre, the poets do better at it than the fiction writers. Which really annoys the fiction writers, because they’re like: we’re the ones who spend time with prose, so why is this so much harder for us? Poets are always looking for the framing metaphor. So for me, as a child, before I was a writer, I was looking for metaphor.
I'm interested in that secondary tension that you mentioned, just that sense of rebellion or defiance; being aware of one's mortality and sort of choosing to disregard that awareness at times. That’s at the core of what I'm writing about in this new essay. Nuance like that gets lost in the controversy around the rising price of EpiPens. It's not like an AIDS medication or cancer treatment, where the idea is to purchase it and use it. The weird thing about EpiPens is that we buy them, and hope to never use them. We carry them around for year, and then they have to be replaced. There's a whole culture of people, particularly in my generation, who have never used their EpiPen, even though they've spent a lifetime carrying it around.
Regan: You mentioned in your memoir that you've never used [an EpiPen], and people that you spoke with had never actually used it.
Sandra: I have had exposure to epinephrine in-hospital situations, but I've never self-administered.
Regan: So, what is that about? I mean, I have a Xanax prescription that I've been carrying around for 10 years because of extreme anxiety being in the passenger seat of a car, and I never take them! [Sandra laughs] I'm trying to find a common ground, because, clearly, there's a difference between can I handle this anxiety? And can I handle my throat closing? So, what is it that keeps people from ever using one?
Sandra: Well, frankly, that's a bigger question than I can answer for purposes of an interview, which is why I'm trying to write about it. But I do think that it’s a self-articulated boundary that somehow feels meaningful to cross, and I do think—I don't know—if I had been raised with the current generation of kids, I don't know that I would be at this age and still have never self-administered my EpiPen. Attitudes are changing organically, based on how it's approached.
My parents, my doctors, when I was six and seven and having these reactions— they wouldn't have used the EpiPen, either. It's not just that I was rebellious, it's that the whole culture resisted it. The definition of anaphylaxis was different. So, we’re just talking about a collision, or a push-and-pull between very different medicalized cultures. And that does have a corollary to Xanax, because I think that 30 years ago, you would only have prescribed a mood-altering medication like lLithium in what were deemed “severe, extreme” situations, with the risk of psychological break otherwise. But that has changed. Medication is now viewed by many as an appropriate, almost a preemptive measure. So that’s a gulf that someone who is twenty and had that same Xanax prescription wouldn't feel like they were crossing, in some severe way.
Regan: I appreciate your delving into this, and I understand that this is a larger topic than what we can get into in this setting, but I think you have begun to answer my question, so I'll look forward to reading your essay about it.
Sandra: The only thing that I would add is—and this is in the essay, so hold tight—but there's a writer who is unfortunately no longer with us: his name is Tom Andrews. He began as a poet and wrote a collection called The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle. He had hemophilia and he wrote a memoir before his death that, among other things, interrogated the notion that people with disabilities are often expected to hold themselves to some type of “higher” code of behavior, and the unfairness of that. So, if you have cerebral palsy, you're not allowed to get drunk, because it’s especially unsafe if you fall. We’re allowed to make mistakes, and we're allowed to take risks. We’re “allowed” to do anything, and, yet, there is heightened expectation about taking responsibility for ourselves.
Regan: I think you’re also speaking to part of my earlier question. We’re not talking about denial, or rebellion, because it's not necessarily extreme behavior. But it's a push against the limits that we all have—some of us, more than others.