In December 2019, I pulled my car away from the little yellow house with intermittent heat on a wide street in Missoula, Montana. Joe and I had been living there for a semester while I taught at the University of Montana’s School of Journalism.
It was both very difficult and very easy for me to leave. The easy part? I don’t like snow, and I didn’t have heat. The hard part: I never expected to come to Montana and feel like I found a piece of my heart there — a part I hadn’t even known I’d lost. I forged amazing friendships and found new journalist colleagues amongst the faculty. I was inspired by my young students — so eager to please, so wide-eyed about the profession, but also so committed to learning it at a time when it seemed crazy to become a journalist. I watched lazy deer grazing in my yard in the morning, and hiked trails within five minutes of my front door.
But Oregon’s not that far away. So I promised all my new people that I’d be back in just a few months, in spring, after the snow, when the J-School throws its famed Dean Stone night: a big scholarship dinner and celebration.
Then — pandemic. I kept telling my students I would come back, and then it wouldn’t work. I did that, like, three times, and I started to see that they didn’t believe what I’d promised.
Finally, two years gone by, I got to come back to Montana, my other home, last week. By the end of the Dean Stone festivities, my face hurt from smiling so much. The school handed out $300,000 in scholarships, and with every award, the students cheered louder and louder for their friends and colleagues. They’d jump out of their seats screaming. They gave standing ovations. They raised glasses. They congratulated each other, and they meant it.
It made me tear up, and I think that’s because I know journalism is not always a nice profession. It can be a field addled by competition, and cronyism, and good old boy bullshit. It is a profession that says it will change old ways, but rarely does. But here were young journalists screaming themselves hoarse over each others’ accomplishments. A little of that feeling I had in 2019 came back: the feeling that the future will be good.
And just like that: I found another piece of my heart in Montana.
I’m hanging around for a little longer, and teaching a creative writing workshop in Butte next weekend. Sign up here for just $20 if that’s of interest.
Intermission/Quick Updates:
In case you missed last month’s newsletter, I wrote a book. What a crazy thing to do! It is called When the Moon Turns to Blood. It dives deeply into the strange, tragic story of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell, and discusses belief, believing and believers. If you pre-order it, you’ll get it right away when it comes out on Summer Solstice: June 21. Pre-ordering has a BIG influence on a book, and how it performs… so please consider it.
Consider a paid subscription to this newsletter! I am planning to keep beefing this baby up in the next few months, and any support you give goes directly back into this project. Thank you!
And because I talk about Joe so much here, but he never gets a voice of his own: perhaps you’d like to see a little of his brilliance? He’s a woodworker, among many other amazing things, and he’s started selling his creations.
Last! But hardly least! The newest “Good Talk” is with a writer I admire so very much: the novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher and bookseller Sharma Shields.
I’ve talked about Sharma’s book, The Cassandra, here before, and please be aware — this interview does have some spoilers.
Sharma is one of my favorite writers from the immense Spokane, Washington writing scene, and someone I had the pleasure of learning from in a writing group there. I’m proud to call her my friend and a fellow writer of the grotesque.
About that: the reason I wanted to talk to her this month was because I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a writer write about grotesque things? Why do I write about what I write about? What does it say about me that I am, often, drawn to writing about the darkest parts of the human experience? I’ve written about fight clubs, death hags and more tragedies than I can even recall.
It was something I wanted to hear about from Sharma. In her fiction, she explores a lot of darkness. And I wondered if maybe she had the same questions I do. It turns out, she does. And, together, it felt like we found a little clarity and … some humor in all of the dark.
Leah Sottile: For so many reasons I wanted to do a Q&A with you, but I thought we could start by talking about this idea of writing about grotesque things. Scary things, scary subjects, unkind things. That's a thing that I think about a lot in the work that I do. And I wanted to talk to you about that. I was thinking of a short story you wrote forever ago. It was about a mother explaining something about her son that lived in the basement. Do you remember that short story?
Sharma Shields: It’s… um. It’s about their son who is fucking their dog, right?
LS: Yes! Right, I remember the son had … something up with him.
SS: The mother is kind of obsessed with her friend whose son seems to be like a really upstanding citizen. He's been accepted to Harvard, but he's decided to forego Harvard and go to the local college instead to save his family money. And her friend is really nice and really positive and really kind of optimistic about life. And this mother is sort of the opposite, the narrator.
LS: They were sitting at the kitchen table, two mothers talking.
SS: Sharing a beer.
LS: When I was thinking about this idea of the grotesque, that story popped up in my head and I know you, too, are drawn to writing about dark things. What do you think inspires you to go in those kinds of directions?
SS: I've been thinking about this a lot lately because—and I’ll talk about all of this stuff really frankly, as I do—I’ve been going to therapy for a while and trying to figure out this darker perspective I think I've always had. I think it takes people by surprise because I look like a pretty smiley, friendly person—I don't know if gloomy would be used to describe my physical appearance, or the face I show to the world. But I think my insights are all twisted up with things I've seen throughout my whole life: Ways that people talk to one another, ways that people treat one another that are terrible. Whether it's these kind of small slights that happen, or it can be even the ways that we talk to our self.
I’ve wondered about quitting therapy for a time because I think I get really down on myself for being such a depressed. anxious person and wondering if there is a way I can make myself have a kinder perspective on life that isn’t a tunneling in or a reevaluation of all of the stories I tell myself over and over again. As a therapist pointed out, I don’t even trust my own stories. What I've realized is I don't know that my gloominess is something I want to change about myself. I think it is something that I like about myself and it does define my writing in a lot of ways.
Just yesterday I was reading this really great New York Times piece about this artist. And she said, I don't want to tell a happy story. I don't want to tell a dark story. I want to tell a complex story. And I think that's how I ultimately feel about my writing. I think when we deny darkness in our work, we do deny complexity in it as well.
When I wrote that short story, I was thinking about the ways that I could potentially feel shame as a mother. So I was imagining sort of a deeper shame than say, ‘Oh, your child, hasn't learned to read yet, but my child has.’ These conversations you have with other parents when your children are young. I was imagining this mother having her child do something utterly disgusting. Like he is not only fucking the family dog, but he's not making a secret of it. She is a mom trying to figure out, like, ‘how do I love my son unconditionally through something like this?’
LS: So you went to the most hilariously dark thing you could think of. And then you find compassion. I think that’s what has always hypnotized me about your writing is that it's dark, but there is this a very realistic compassion. It isn’t all darkness. Recently you had tweeted about ending a novel you were working on and the end you wrote was super, super dark. And your editor was like ‘you can’t.'
SS: That was such a great edit. So that was from Caroline Zancan, my editor at Henry Holt. I had ended The Cassandra with the scene — and this is a little bit of a spoiler alert — where the character kind of fully silences herself by cutting out her own tongue. And it ended with all of this blood and like stuff pouring out of her mouth and essentially like rushing into the Columbia River. I think at the time I was like ‘badass ending, self. Way to go. You’re really gonna fuck ‘em up with this one’ My editor was like, ‘yeah, Sharma you can’t end it here.' You need some sort of upswing at the end of a novel. It doesn't need to be like fully light-infused, hope-infused, but you need to leave readers with more of a sense of wonderment so that they're kind of wandering more into an afterlife of the story. You can't just like shut down their belief systems and leave them too shuttered in this lightless room at the end — it just leaves readers feeling utterly defeated. Probably the most fun I had in the editorial process was going in and writing that last scene.
I really got to see my character continue living even after she has hurt herself and been hurt by others and kind of finding a way forward through that. She reconnects with her mom and her sister who she's had extremely troubled relations with the whole story. Everybody gains complexity that way. I'm so glad for the edit she gave me.
I based my earliest draft on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which I thought ended at the climactic scene of the main character doing something horrible to herself. But I went back after she gave me that edit and looked at the book again. And there is an extra chapter after that, that talks about life continuing maybe not for that character, but for the other characters in the story. It made me realize that it's very rare when a writer can pull off ending a story in an exceptionally harsh manner. A story is made more complex by letting it continue for another breath.
I wonder if you ever think about that with journalism? What people will wonder about those characters moving forward and what happens when something is just utterly cut short by a final scene?
LS: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I'm not a beat reporter that has a specific thing that they cover and that's the job. I can choose what I work on. But that also means I can’t necessarily follow up on something I write about someone. My time with their story is just a snapshot. But I do think a lot about how if I choose to write about really dark topics, what does that say about me? But then again, I don't know anybody that I feel is an interesting artist that's writing like, only hopeful things. I wouldn't want to be that kind of writer.
SS: I talked about this with my students at Fishtrap last night. I’m teaching this year-long novel writing workshop. I have one student who has been asking ‘how do I, as a writer, avoid too much darkness?’ I told her about this beautiful novel, Washington Black by a writer named Esi Edugyan. She has some just brutal, brutal scenes. But one thing I noticed that she does is she contrasts it really beautifully with like an awareness of light within a setting. I mean like literal light: light streaming through windows, firelight, candlelight. She always seems to be aware of where light is coming from . It made me realize there are these other ways, even when you're telling a very brutal story, to bring light into the piece that might contrast the darkness
One writer who I am just so wowed by regarding the uplift in all of her short stories is Beth Piatote, who's a Nez Perce writer. She has this absolutely incredible story collection called Beadworkers. She has talked about how she was a little wary of how her optimism and hope would be received at the end of her stories. But it becomes an act of resilience and irreverence within a society that has been exceptionally harmful and tried to rid entire nations of people of that optimism and happiness.
LS: I just finished that Lisa Taddeo book Animal.
SS: Oh, I’ve heard about that, but I haven't read it.
LS: I'd be really curious what you think because there is one scene in there that left my head spinning. In some ways the main character — you just couldn't like her. There's this one scene where every bad thing that you could possibly think that could happen, happens. And there is an uplift at the end, but … it’s almost not enough.
SS: I love reading new contemporary fiction from women, and I especially like seeing women as unreliable narrators. I like seeing them as unlikeable people. I feel like when writers get women wrong, it's almost always when they're too good.
LS: Maybe you're drawn to that because of what you were saying: that maybe you don't present as the person you feel you truly are inside. To an extent, I feel that way sometimes about myself. I feel a great need to show people my darkness, like ‘you should know I’m fucked up.’
SS: It might be a sort of honesty with yourself that I have not yet uncovered. I think one of the things that drives me nuts about myself and always has, is the way I spread myself really thin and try to be very people-pleasing to a wide variety of people. I think some of that started extremely young and has been a dishonest way of me trying to stay safe in a world that I always have found inherently dangerous. I’m trying to feel less hard on myself.
I got so hard on myself after The Cassandra came out. I did start really taking to heart some of what people were saying about this book being too dark. I went to a couple of book clubs where people were quite honest with their opinions of the book and were just like ‘it seems very cruel that you put your narrator through so much harm.’ And I felt both like, okay, I mean, this is absolutely your opinion as a reader. But it did also make me wonder, yeah, this is kind of messed up that I have this weird, almost masochistic, sadistic relationship with my characters. Because I think I also have that with myself. I'm really, really hard on my characters in a similar way that I am to myself. But I'm also trying to reflect the actual research I did of Hanford and how violent it was toward women, and just how violent militarism is altogether and the weapons of mass destruction theme of the whole novel. Like it's intentionally brutal. But I even had people saying things like, ‘did the bombs have to drop in this? Like, couldn’t you have really like wielded your imagination and just…’ And I'm like, ‘no, because ultimately, as weird and fantastical as this book is, bombs were dropped. Civilians were killed.’
LS: Yeah. That fucking happened.
SS: At least 180,000 of them were killed in these two towns. I mean with all of the flexing that's happening in the world right now with these major nuclear powers, this is scary stuff. And I wanted the book to be really scary, but I also wanted it to be a story about complicity. My own complicity, my character's complicity. And also the harm that I think a lot of us have survived as women being hurt by men, you know?
I feel like I'm coming out of a long tunnel that I was in with The Cassandra. I also wrote about rape in The New York Times and I got a lot of wonderful, wonderful responses. But I also had people who said they hated it, that I dumbed down my book by too much feminism.
LS: That's a hard thing to hear.
SS: It was a strange journey with that book. But I think one thing I need to learn about my whole body of work is the same thing I need to learn with memories of self. Chelsea Martin in her really great memoir, Caca Dolce says, ‘I've learned to look at my past selves as if they are my daughters. And I want them know that they are loved, even if it's by no one but their future self.’ Which is one of the most beautiful things I've read in a book.
LS: I think that my inclination as a writer is that I hear all these great things about the work that I've done, but the things that people don't like about it I hear at a higher volume. I just hear the criticism. I have to eventually just let it go.
SS: I think that's what I need to do, too. And somehow trust more in the positive things people say to me. I don't know why I distrust so quickly when someone's like, ‘oh, I loved your book.’ It's almost like, I believe if I accept a compliment it's bad luck or something,
LS: Oh yeah. I get that. It's funny — a friend of mine was cross-stitching the worst comments other journalists had gotten online. So I had her cross stitch this comment I had gotten that read “you are nothing but a dark media whore.” I had that hanging on my wall for years. I was feeling particularly terrible about myself one day and I came into my office and I saw that. And I'm like, ‘why would I literally frame something that speaks my own inadequacy?’ I took it down and threw it in a drawer.
SS: Maybe it's a testament to us having like a sense of humor about this and that there is a confidence to be found in laughing at ourselves.
On Twitter I can be such a Debbie Downer. Like ‘guys I'm feeling really, really insecure about my writing today.' I don't literally write that, but I write things of that tone sometimes. And my agent will write me and she'll be like, ‘Sharma, I just want you to know: I think you're such a brilliant writer and I don't want you to give up.’ And then I'm like, I'm just amused with myself and my thinking. I’m not quitting writing.
LS: I've tweeted things like that before and people have been like ‘are you gonna quit journalism?’ And I'm like, oh no, no, no, no, no — no, never!
SS: I’m roped to this bitch for life. I'm never giving up. I will always write because it's hardwired into who I am. Whether I have an audience or not, I know I'll be storytelling and writing. It is really what I love.
As a teacher I'm always reminding my students to really feel joy with writing because I think there's so many different ways to not feel joy with it, to feel insecure, to feel someone else's vitriol about a piece. … I feel like I've experienced the biggest highs and the biggest lows in a lot of ways. You always can recover from it and regain that joy with the work. And what's weird — and I'm curious if you feel this way, too — I do feel joy, even, writing about the grotesque.
Like in Evergreen. Writing about what's grim, what's gloomy in life, what’s scary. I really do like to examine my fears fully and bring them to life on the page. It's fun to get weird with it. And I know you do this too. I mean, I think that's the reason I love your writing because even as a journalist you’ll have those glittering moments of imagination come in, and it translates to the reader.
LS: I feel like my journalism is a long exploration of whatever I'm concerned with or thinking about at that point. I mean, I just spent the last two years working on a book about murder and the end of the world, and I was so happy working on it? But then when I'd have a moment of anxiety about it, it was because I couldn't figure out what the silver lining of the story was. I think I had to come around to being like, well, sometimes there's no silver lining in things. That’s just life. I can't imagine that people in Ukraine were right now would be like, ‘well, there's a silver lining!’
SS: Silver lining is a privileged place. There are children at the school where my husband taught junior high, there were kids there that had never once been told ‘I love you.’ You think of the children in the Ukraine dealing with being bombed. In our country, everywhere, there's people dealing with so much pain and so much suffering. I don't know how those things can be ignored and not written about.
LS: I remember I had an editor once that was — on the note of what we were talking about earlier — that was like ‘stories should end on a high note.’ And I remember really arguing that that's a really male perspective — wanting to put like a nice bow on things. I feel like the female perspective is one of reckoning the world being dark toward you in ways that you can't understand. I see a need for it, but I do still reject that idea of like, well, ‘let's tie this up nicely!’ It's just not how the world is.
SS: I think women, like a lot of people really versed in powerlessness, have a more honest perspective that we want to share. I did appreciate when my editor gave me that advice, her saying it doesn't have to be hopeful, your ending.
LS: That makes sense.
SS: But then again, no one critiques Hemingway for A Farewell to Arms.
LS: I was literally going to bring up Hemingway earlier!
SS: Or Cormac McCarthy. If Cormac McCarthy were to go to a book club, would people there be like, ‘wow, I really feel like you went way too dark, Cormac. Like, I mean, come on. Blood Meridian, man? Super downer.’ But for women?
LS: Even as a female writer, you're supposed to be a nurturer maybe in some way.
I’m curious how being a bookseller influences or affects your writing? I've always thought it was so cool that you worked at libraries, you write, you teach writing, you work at a bookstore.
SS: I'm involved in the whole process from creating the books and publishing them to writing my own, to selling them, working with the public at the libraries. I loved when I worked for the county libraries and realized how small literary fiction really is in the public mindset. That was very liberating. The most popular books are the ones that are really based in formula where readers can predict what the ending is going to be. Books by Debbie Macomber and Danielle Steele, Nora Roberts, James Patterson. Harlan Coben. Those are the huge best-selling writers. That had this really kind of wonderful effect on me as a writer to realize my audience is not the general public. And that's okay.
No two people have the same reading taste. Every taste is wildly different from one another, even people who like similar books have different opinions about similar books. It’s just interesting to me how liberating all of that is — that there's readership for everybody. There's someone out there that's going to connect with the book in some way. The quality of writing doesn't necessarily dictate who's wildly popular.
My whole life has been a love affair with the physical object of a book. Like I just, I love them. I love holding them. I love stories in all forms. I love audio books. I love to read on my e-reader. But books—even being around them, being in rooms filled with them—is like a weird peace for me. And I feel like the more stories there are around us, the safer we are. It’s just such a beautiful way of people communicating with one another. I find it so heartening and gorgeous. I work at Wishing Tree Books in Spokane, and I feel lucky to be there. I make minimum wage. I clean the toilets and mop the floors and I'm so happy there.
LS: Let’s talk a little more about Evergreen. That book feels like an extension of this conversation of darkness.
SS: I think this may have started a little bit as a response to some of the conversations I was having with readers about The Cassandra. Like I want to really celebrate the grim and the gloomy because that's really one thing I've always been attracted to in writing. As a kid I loved Greek myths. I felt like they were more aware of the hubris of characters, the mistakes that characters make…I loved Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales, too, many of which don’t end with happy endings.
There was just something always so beautiful in these stories that spoke to the characters’ resilience, and their handling of the extreme evils of the world and the monsters of the world. I've continued to love them as I've aged. So I just wanted to have this big Northwest collection in Evergreen. In my mind growing up in the Inland Northwest and hanging out in the forest. I’ve always connected these gloomy fairytale woods with storytelling. So I wanted to marry those in this collection. And Maya has a similar outlook. too. And so we opened up submissions. This was years ago.
This project ended up taking a lot longer than I thought it would for a lot of different reasons: the pandemic, my own illness stuff, getting overwhelmed with The Cassandra coming out right at the time when I was having this MS relapse and a new treatment and all of that. Sometimes I think I don't give that enough credit, fighting this chronic illness. Sometimes I'm like, ‘Why am I so slowed down?’
LS: It's serious, what you're dealing with.
SS: MS is a big presence in [Evergreen] because right at the beginning, it starts with a quote from one of my very favorite poets, Lucia Perillo, who had MS. It starts with the interviewer saying, ‘How do you manage to stay in the moment, not fall into despair?’ And she says, 'I've already fallen. This is the voice from the swamp.’ This was in response to her winning a MacArthur genius grant. She ended up dying so young. The way she writes about MS and mortality in general, and also just the harshness of life and human beings is filled with gravity and humor. Yesterday I was walking around the house—and this happens to me sometimes, I'll get like a line from literature stuck in my head and it'll rattle around—repeating to myself the line from the poem, “Shrike Tree,” which is both in her collection Luck is Luck and is the last poem in Evergreen. “It is ferocious, life, but it must eat, then leaves us with the artifact.”
I've been thinking so much about different friends of mine who are going through major difficulties. It’s just so much that people are dealing with. Evergreen a way to celebrate those stories.
Another compelling and fascinating read from top to bottom. I think I left this in a previous comment, but both you and Sharma ARE the 'light' in your stories because by writing about them you bring these uncomfortable truths 'to light' (whether factual / physical truths through journalism or emotional truths through fiction). It takes a very strong heart to write about things that most people find uncomfortable - so uncomfortable, in fact, that some would rather believe 'crisis actors' have been hired than that a horrific event really happened. I admire that both of you are neither the highway accident gawkers or the people who hide their faces and rush away when you encounter a dark and difficult subject, but instead reach out your hand and say, 'let me tell your story.' On some level it must offer a kind of comfort to those who face their darkest nights alone, that at some point it might come to light in a way that helps them feel seen through a loving and compassionate lens.
I write about Spirituality which I find - mostly - to be an uplifting and life-enriching experience, but there is much darkness in spirituality too. In my book about the Spiritual Path I write that the number one risk of spiritual work is delusion. I feel like this too often goes unsaid... (unless in a book that's critical of spirituality). Dark things can happen to anyone - and often we are at our most vulnerable when we think we're at our least. We ignore the dark side of life, spirituality, and everything at our peril.
Also - I just ordered your book and I am SO excited for it. I've been thinking for so long you should write a book - and you did! so Yay! How did you find the experience of writing a book? I found one of the more challenging things to be dealing with other people's expectations of what 'success' meant for my book. :) I'll go back and read in case I missed this in one of your previous installments, but I'm definitely interested in any thoughts you have / had on how working on a book was different (or not) from your other writing work. Much much love as always :) I look forward to all your posts as a window into your world. Best of luck to Joe with the woodworking business as well!