As one of the finale features of my residency here, I’ve decided to spotlight a young writer of particular interest to me, Vanessa Carlisle, whose short fiction Other Voices Books will soon be publishing in an exciting new anthology of women writers depicting sexual experiences from the point of view of male characters. The anthology, Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience, features many well-known authors from Aimee Bender to Susan Minot to Jennifer Egan, and one of the most fun aspects of a project like this is to be able to link together the work of already acclaimed writers with that of newcomers like Carlisle. For more information on Vanessa Carlisle, check out her website… meanwhile, here’s our dialogue on her debut novel, feminism, violence, the sex work industry, and many other things…
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GF: What made you decide to self-publish your debut book?
VC: I sent queries out to a few agents through recommendations from professors and other contacts and received very enthusiastic responses—requests for chapters, one request for the whole MS, etc. One agent was even talking about picking it up, and then she suddenly quit her job. I didn’t yet have many contacts in the small press community, and I knew enough from working at two literary magazines that slush really doesn’t have much of a chance there. I realized after about a year that I wasn’t doing anything with the manuscript, that it might be another two years before it appeared in print form even if it got picked up immediately, and that was unacceptable to me for two reasons. One is that the book is rather timely—it deals with the sex ed system in California as it is RIGHT NOW and I knew that I’d have to do a total rewrite if and when the laws change, which might have been a problem for the narrative. The other reason was emotional: after six years and many drafts, I was done with the book. I was working on new stuff, and really felt it was time to give A Crack in Everything a physical form, so I could let it go. I knew it may not sell much as a self-published book, and I knew it was going to suffer under the prejudice of being outside the traditional system, but I wanted to learn more about book marketing and both my dad, who’s been in nonfiction publishing for 35 years, and my godmother SARK, a bestselling author/artist, were supportive of me doing something kind of risky and strange with this book. It’s not the first time I have done something that seems, on the surface, to be self-defeating, when in fact I’m feeling extremely free. I have so many thoughts about self-publishing! I do think it works better for nonfiction than fiction, now that I’ve gone through the process. I’m incredibly grateful for the education this experience has offered me. But I also look forward to working with a team, be it a small house, a hybrid house, or a traditional, in the future.
GF: A Crack in Everything features a young woman, Tam, who’s a sex educator and advocate, and the novel focuses a fair amount on her work, which is at times intensely comic and at other times extremely sad. Was it your aim in this novel to combine an exciting plot with actual sex education and an attempt to debunk certain myths about sexuality and also the sex work industry? (In other words, what role does advocacy play in your fiction writing?)
VC: It’s my experience that in the culture of the MFA writer, there is a very strong prejudice against doing anything overtly political or “didactic.” I could talk all day about where this belief might have come from, and what purpose it originally might have served. For brevity’s sake, I’ll just say I think it’s bunk. In fact I think it’s dangerous, because it masks the fact that divorcing politics from literature is a quick way to drain literature of its power. I don’t think that great fiction is ever truly “apolitical,” because all activity in our so-called public and private lives inevitably is part of a larger interconnected web. Stories that capture something poignant or real capture it in a particular economic, historical, cultural context. With this in mind, I do not sit down with an intention like “Ok, I’m going to write a story that teaches people sex ed.” I sit down with a character idea, or a great line, or a feeling, I write in a state of desire and discovery, and the fact that I am a writer who is passionate about certain issues, and devoted to doing good research, always comes through because I let it. I do believe in literature as a force for social change, precisely because it has the power to invite emotional investment. I take great comfort in books like Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which has an evocative narrative, fascinating characters, great explication of some important Nietzschean concepts, and deft treatment of the political situation in 1968 Prague, all at once!
Another great feature of self-publishing was that I got to keep a few of the diatribes that Tam delivers on issues like Sex Ed., prejudice against sex workers, the lack of resources for teenage boys, and so on. I definitely had an editor who read the MS and recommended that I cut those sections down, if not completely out. I didn’t do it, and I’ve heard some fascinating response to those ideas. So I suppose if I had to stop blathering I’d say the answer is that it is always my aim, when I am writing, to go for the story that most fascinates me, and over the years I have trained myself, through reading philosophy, literary criticism, political theory, and so on, to be most fascinated by stories that blur the lines between “public” and “private,” that are deeply engaged not just with the inner emotional worlds of characters, but with the material world those characters are functioning in. I love allegory, I love magic realism, and I love science fiction for the way they are always making real statements about how people act, and how they should act, in the midst of all the feelings the characters have and the gorgeously weird material world of the fiction.
GF: I used to work in a battered women’s agency, and we frequently received menacing calls from husbands and boyfriends ranging from the, “I know what that bitch’s car looks like and I’m going to kill her” variety all the way to bomb threats. In your novel, Tam has been physically assaulted as a result of helping a client schedule an appointment to get an abortion. It strikes me that experiences like these stand in really stark opposition to many young women’s beliefs that they no longer need to identify as “feminist” because the women’s movement is passe. Can you talk a little about the continued reality of violence in the lives of women, and what feminism means in the lives of the younger generation?
VC: As an educator I’ve been stunned to encounter a phenomenon of post-feminist apathy about issues of gender and social justice in my students. Current-day feminists are seen as anti-sex, anti-men, anti-anything fun. Yet the same college students who say those things don’t know any of the staggering statistics on sexual and domestic violence. Let’s say my classroom has sixty women in it—I know that about fifteen of them have been victims of attempted or completed rape. Even more than that have been in situations of non-sexual violence. (These are numbers from the CDC, on the experience of college-age women.) Men are at more risk for non-sexual violence than they ever have been. At the same time, the dialogue about sex roles, gender, and the importance of “equality” all seems rather boring to undergraduates. It makes me feel like a crazy person. And that’s part of what I was dealing with in A Crack in Everything—the crazy-making cacophony of cultural messages we’re receiving all the time about the importance of fulfilling gender roles vs. the importance of not being victimized by gender roles. Recently a friend of mine was out with her boyfriend and a few other male friends. One of the friends she was with tried to kiss her, and when she said no, he bit her on the cheek. Bit her. The fact is that sexual violence is so common it is difficult for people to mobilize themselves against it. And that is unacceptable, especially to sex-positive activists like me who want to see arenas opened up where everyone of any orientation, gender, and proclivity is welcomed to be expressive of their sexuality, without fear of repercussion or violence.
GF: Where did you get the idea for Tam’s anxieties around the use of color (matching, clashing, etc.)? It’s such an amazing motif in the book, but I’d never heard of this particular disorder.
VC: I based the color sensitivity on something that I noticed in my little sister! She used to stop our mother from leaving the house if she thought Mom’s outfit didn’t match correctly. She had a very strict sense of matching that was discernable only to her, and when she was younger, she was pretty vocal about it. Of course, for the novel, I exaggerated this into more of a syndrome, made it more unbearable, had some fun with it. Then I got curious one day about whether another writer had had the same idea, did some research, and found out that some people with OCD report a symptom very much like Tamina’s. So it’s fanciful, in a way, but it’s also a real expression of what it can feel like to have anxieties functioning just under the surface all the time. It’s out there in the world, but I haven’t seen it before in fiction.
GF: You’re also pursuing a PhD. Tell us about your areas of interest as an academic, and what you plan to do after leaving school.
VC: I am working on interdisciplinary, hybridized research into first person narratives from the sex industry. What the hell does that mean? I’m not entirely sure yet! But I have a bachelor’s in psychology, an MFA in creative writing, and a very strong suspicion that the “truth” of the experience of most sex workers lies outside of the statistics gathered by social scientists AND outside the fictionalized depictions of strippers and prostitutes in the media. So my area right now is a field of not-quite fiction, not-quite nonfiction, in which I’m reading both theory and first-person narratives (memoir, fiction, autobiography, bio pic, documentary, etc.) and formulating a theory about how the combination of sexuality and labor carves a new narrative space that can’t quite be measured in the culturally validated, quantitative ways. I have worked in the sex industry for twelve years and have a very rare insider-outsider position here, where I can work with my own experience but also have the tools to do really solid research. Check back with me in a few years on this. : )
I entered the PhD with dual goals for writing and teaching. I’m not actually trying to run the hamster wheel of a purely academic career. I’m a writer. I need to make books. But the feeling I had after A Crack in Everything was that I want to write fiction that had an even deeper philosophical depth, and I needed time to read people like Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes. The PhD is putting me in a situation where I get to do that in a community of scholars, which is a thrill. I love teaching, but I’m not married to the idea of being a university professor. I will write, no matter what, and so we’ll see what happens next.
GF: What’s your favorite LA neighborhood and why?
VC: Such a hard question! While I feel most “at home” in places like Venice or Echo Park because I’m from Berkeley and they remind me of home, I have to say that if I had to live forever in Los Angeles I’d probably live in Hollywood. The ironic and the authentic, the commercial and the underground, the invented and the natural, all crashing together on every block. A lot of LA is racially and culturally divided, and Hollywood is less so. I love the 1950s apartment buildings, I love the little bungalows, I love the rock and roll history, I love the movie history, I love the literary history. I lived very close to Bukowski’s old place, and Fitzgerald’s old place, and while the hills are gorgeous, the Hollywood I love is south and east, where the El Salvadorean food and the Armenian markets are. It’s funny—what I like about it is that I don’t actually have to do any work to romanticize it, because the neighborhood itself is in a constant project of re-romanticizing itself.
GF: What are you working on now in your fiction?
VC: I’m working on a book, a fragmented narrative about a few artists-turned-high end-prostitutes in LA. They’re in an open polyamorous triad—two women, one man all in love—and the women have many more lovers, some clients, some not, than the man. It’s a totally insane project, and I vacillate between utter despair (no one will ever read/publish/understand this) and absolute ecstasy (this is the most creative, brave stuff I’ve ever tried). I’m also always doing short fiction, submitting to lit mags, playing that little game we all like to play to test our ego strength. I moved recently, so there are about twenty rejection slips that will float around in the postal system long after I should have received them. Thankfully, I do a lot of yoga. The martinis help too. Kidding. But not really.